{"id":6597,"date":"2014-01-03T14:36:06","date_gmt":"2014-01-03T19:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=6597"},"modified":"2014-01-06T11:24:28","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T16:24:28","slug":"life-in-the-emerging-american-police-state-whats-in-store-for-our-freedoms-in-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/life-in-the-emerging-american-police-state-whats-in-store-for-our-freedoms-in-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in the Emerging American Police State: What\u2019s in Store for Our Freedoms in 2014?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PS_585x585\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.\u201d\u2014George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. 1<\/em><\/p>\n

In Harold Ramis\u2019 classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day<\/em>, TV weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) is forced to live the same day over and over again until he not only gains some insight into his life but changes his priorities. Similarly, as I illustrate in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State<\/em>, we in the emerging American police state find ourselves reliving the same set of circumstances over and over again\u2014egregious surveillance, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc.\u2014although with far fewer moments of comic hilarity.<\/p>\n

What remains to be seen is whether 2014 will bring more of the same or whether \u201cwe the people\u201d will wake up from our somnambulant states. Indeed, when it comes to civil liberties and freedom, 2013 was far from a banner year. The following is just a sampling of what we can look forward to repeating if we don\u2019t find some way to push back against the menace of an overreaching, aggressive, invasive, militarized government and restore our freedoms.<\/p>\n

Government spying. <\/strong>It\u2019s hard to understand how anyone could be surprised by the news that the National Security Agency has been systematically collecting information on all telephone calls placed in the United States, and yet the news media have treated it as a complete revelation. Nevertheless, such outlandish government spying been going on domestically since the 1970s, when Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the NSA\u2019s breaches, warned the public against allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers \u201cat any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn\u2019t matter. There would be no place to hide.\u201d Recent reports indicate that the NSA, in conjunction with the CIA and FBI, has actually gone so far as to intercept laptop computers ordered online in order to install spyware on them.<\/p>\n

Militarized police. <\/strong>With almost 13,000 agencies in all 50 states and four U.S. territories participating in a military \u201crecycling\u201d program, community police forces across the country continue to be transformed into outposts of the military, with police agencies acquiring military-grade hardware\u2014tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield\u2014in droves. Keep in mind that once acquired, this military equipment, which is beyond the budget and scope of most communities, finds itself put to all manner of uses by local law enforcement agencies under the rationale that \u201cif we have it, we might as well use it\u201d\u2014the same rationale, by the way, used with deadly results to justify assigning SWAT teams to carry out routine law enforcement work such as delivering a warrant.<\/p>\n

Police shootings of unarmed citizens. <\/strong>Owing in large part to the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, not a week goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by police imbued with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the communities in which they serve. Sadly, it is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, such as the 16-year-old teenager who skipped school only to be shot by police after they mistook him for a fleeing burglar. Then there was the unarmed black man in Texas \u201cwho was pursued and shot in the back of the neck by Austin Police\u2026 after failing to properly identify himself and leaving the scene of an unrelated incident.\u201d And who could forget the 19-year-old Seattle woman who was accidentally shot in the leg by police after she refused to show her hands? The lesson to be learned: this is what happens when you take a young man (or woman), raise him on a diet of violence, hype him up on the power of the gun in his holster and the superiority of his uniform, render him woefully ignorant of how to handle a situation without resorting to violence, train him well in military tactics but allow him to be illiterate about the Constitution, and never stress to him that he is to be a peacemaker and a peacekeeper, respectful of and subservient to the taxpayers, who are in fact his masters and employers.<\/p>\n

The erosion of private property. <\/strong>If the government can tell you what you can and cannot do within the privacy of your home, whether it relates to what you eat or what you smoke, you no longer have any rights whatsoever within your home. If government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you\u2019re no longer the owner of your property. If school officials can punish your children for what they do or say while at home or in your care, your children are not your own\u2014they are the property of the state. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure\u2014it belongs to the government. Likewise, if police can forcefully draw your blood, strip search you, and probe you intimately, your body is no longer your own, either. This is what a world without the Fourth Amendment looks like, where the lines between private and public property have been so blurred that private property is reduced to little more than something the government can use to control, manipulate and harass you to suit its own purposes, and you the homeowner and citizen have been reduced to little more than a tenant or serf in bondage to an inflexible landlord.<\/p>\n

Strip searches and the loss of bodily integrity.<\/strong> The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was intended to protect the citizenry from being subjected to \u201cunreasonable searches and seizures\u201d by government agents. While the literal purpose of the amendment is to protect our property and our bodies from unwarranted government intrusion, the moral intention behind it is to protect our human dignity. Unfortunately, court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, strip search us, and probe us intimately. For example, during a routine traffic stop, Leila Tarantino was allegedly subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain view of passing traffic, while her two children\u2014ages 1 and 4\u2014waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer \u201cforcibly removed\u201d a tampon from Tarantino. No contraband or anything illegal was found.<\/p>\n

Invasion of the drones. <\/strong>As corporations and government agencies alike prepare for their part in the coming drone invasion\u2014it is expected that at least 30,000 drones will occupy U.S. airspace by 2020, ushering in a $30 billion per year industry\u2014it won\u2019t be long before Americans discover first-hand that drones\u2014unmanned aerial vehicles\u2014come in all shapes and sizes, from nano-sized drones as small as a grain of sand that can do everything from conducting surveillance to detonating explosive charges, to middle-sized copter drones that can deliver pizzas to massive \u201chunter\/killer\u201d Predator warships that unleash firepower from on high. Police in California have already begun using Qube drones, which are capable of hovering for 40 minutes at heights of about 400 ft. to conduct surveillance on targets as far as 1 kilometer away. Michael Downing, the LAPD deputy chief for counter-terrorism and special operations, envisions drones being flown over large-scale media events such as the Oscars, using them to surveil political protests, and flying them through buildings to track criminal suspects.<\/p>\n

Criminalizing childish behavior. <\/strong>It wouldn\u2019t be a week in America without another slew of children being punished for childish behavior under the regime of zero tolerance which plagues our nation\u2019s schools. Some of the most egregious: the 9-year-old boy suspended for allegedly pointing a toy at a classmate and saying \u201cbang, bang\u201d; two 6-year-old students in Maryland suspended for using their fingers as imaginary guns in a schoolyard game of cops and robbers; the ten-year-old Pennsylvania boy suspended for shooting an imaginary \u201carrow\u201d at a fellow classmate, using nothing more than his hands and his imagination; the six-year-old Colorado boy suspended and accused of sexual harassment for kissing the hand of a girl in his class whom he had a crush on; and the two seventh graders in Virginia suspended for the rest of the school year for playing with airsoft guns in their own yard before school.<\/p>\n

Common Core. <\/strong>There are several methods for controlling a population. You can intimidate the citizenry into obedience through force, relying on military strength and weaponry such as SWAT team raids, militarized police, and a vast array of lethal and nonlethal weapons. You can manipulate them into marching in lockstep with your dictates through the use of propaganda and carefully timed fear tactics about threats to their safety, whether through the phantom menace of terrorist attacks or shooting sprees by solitary gunmen.\u00a0 Or you can indoctrinate them into compliance from an early age through the schools, discouraging them from thinking for themselves while rewarding them for regurgitating whatever the government, through its so-called educational standards, dictates they should be taught. When viewed in light of the government\u2019s ongoing attempts to amass power at great cost to Americans\u2014in terms of free speech rights, privacy, due process, etc.\u2014the debate over Common Core State Standards, which would transform and nationalize school curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade, becomes that much more critical. These standards, which were developed through a partnership between big government and corporations and are being rolled out in 45 states and the District of Columbia, will create a generation of test-takers capable of little else, molded and shaped by the federal government and its corporate allies into what it considers to be ideal citizens.<\/p>\n

The corporate takeover of America. <\/strong>The corporate buyout of the American political bureaucracy is taking place at every level of government, from the White House all the way to the various governors\u2019 mansions, and even local city councils. With Big Business and Big Government having fused into a corporate state, the president and his state counterparts\u2014the governors, have become little more than CEOs of the Corporate State, which day by day is assuming more government control over our lives. The average American has no access to his or her representatives at any but the lowest level of government, and even then it\u2019s questionable how much really gets through. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives. Yet one of the key ingredients in maintaining democratic government is the right of citizens to freely speak their minds to those who represent them. In fact, it is one of the few effective tools we have left to combat government corruption and demand accountability. But now, even that right is being chipped away by laws and court rulings that weaken our ability to speak freely to the politicians who govern us.<\/p>\n

James Madison, the father of the Constitution, put it best: \u201cTake alarm,\u201d he warned, \u201cat the first experiment with liberties.\u201d Anyone with even a casual knowledge about current events knows that the first experiment on our freedoms happened long ago. Worse, we have not heeded the warnings of Madison and those like him who understood that if you give the government an inch, they will take a mile. Unfortunately, the government has not only taken a mile, they have taken mile after mile after mile after mile with seemingly no end in sight for their power grabs.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re in the business of making New Year\u2019s resolutions, why not resolve that 2014 will be the year we break the cycle of tyranny and get back on the road to freedom. As I\u2019ve said before, it\u2019s time for a second American revolution.<\/p>\n

WC: 2045<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Harold Ramis\u2019 classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, TV weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) is forced to live the same day over and over again until he not only gains some insight into his life but changes his priorities. Similarly, as I illustrate in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we in the emerging American police state find ourselves reliving the same set of circumstances over and over again\u2014egregious surveillance, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc.\u2014although with far fewer moments of comic hilarity.<\/p>\n

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