Is the US Becoming a Police State?
April 25, 2015
I don't associate a police state with the kind of freedom and affluence a majority of Americans still
enjoy. Yet the mainstream and alternate media are turning up the heat by focusing
on police abuses which in proportion to the number of interactions are still pretty rare.
This article by John Whitehead is notable for its total lack of analysis of what is behind the trend he is describing. He seems to have no inkling of the Federal Reserve's agenda to create, in Caroll Quigley's words, "a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole." (Tragedy and Hope, p.324)
Nor is there any suggestion of what can be done about it. It is a lot easier to control people who think they are free than to control people who have been aroused and angered by martial law measures. Yet the purpose of this propaganda seems to be to provoke either resistance or a feeling of helplessness. I invite readers to provide insight into what is happening.
"The malls may be open for business, the baseball stadiums may be packed, and the news anchors may be twittering nonsense about the latest celebrity foofa, but those are just distractions from what is really taking place: the transformation of America into a war zone."
Battlefield America: The War on the American People
By John W. Whitehead
(Abridged by henrymakow.com)
As I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, "we the people" have now come full circle, from being a British colony to being held captive by the American police state.
To our dismay, we now find ourselves scrambling for a foothold as our once rock-solid constitutional foundation crumbles beneath us. And no longer can we rely on the president, Congress, the courts, or the police to protect us from wrongdoing.
Indeed, they have come to embody all that is wrong with America....
There is no end to the government's unmitigated gall in riding roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, whether in matters of excessive police powers, militarized police, domestic training drills, SWAT team raids, surveillance, property rights, overcriminalization, roadside strip searches, profit-driven fines and prison sentences, etc.
The
president can now direct the military to detain, arrest and secretly
execute American citizens. These are the powers of an imperial
dictator, not an elected official bound by the rule of law. For the
time being, Barack Obama wears the executioner's robe, but you can
rest assured that this mantle will be worn by whomever occupies the
Oval Office in the future.
A representative government means nothing when the average citizen has little to no access to their elected officials, while corporate lobbyists enjoy a revolving door relationship with everyone from the President on down.
Indeed, while members of Congress hardly work for the taxpayer, they work hard at being wooed by corporations, which spend more to lobby our elected representatives than we spend on their collective salaries. For that matter, getting elected is no longer the high point it used to be. As one congressman noted, for many elected officials, "Congress is no longer a destination but a journey... [to a] more lucrative job as a K Street lobbyist... It's become routine to see members of Congress drop their seat in Congress like a hot rock when a particularly lush vacancy opens up."
As for the courts, they have long since ceased being courts of justice. Instead, they have become courts of order, largely marching in lockstep with the government's dictates, all the while helping to increase the largesse of government coffers...
As for the rest--the schools, the churches, private businesses, service providers, nonprofits and your fellow citizens--many are also marching in lockstep with the police state. This is what is commonly referred to as community policing.
After all, the police can't be everywhere. So how do you police a nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do you carry out surveillance on a nation when there aren't enough cameras, let alone viewers, to monitor every square inch of the country 24/7? ...You persuade the citizenry to be your eyes and ears.
(John Whitehead, left)
It's a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other, they're incapable of focusing on more definable threats that fall closer to home--namely, the government and its militarized police.
In this way, we're seeing a rise in the incidence of Americans being reported for growing vegetables in their front yard, keeping chickens in their back yard, letting their kids walk to the playground alone, and voicing anti-government sentiments.
Now it may be that we have nothing to worry about. Perhaps the government really does have our best interests at heart. Perhaps covert domestic military training drills such as Jade Helm really are just benign exercises to make sure our military is prepared for any contingency. As the Washington Post describes the operation:
The mission is vast both geographically and strategically: Elite service members from all four branches of the U.S. military will launch an operation this summer in which they will operate covertly among the U.S. public and travel from state to state in military aircraft. Texas, Utah and a section of southern California are labeled as hostile territory, and New Mexico isn't much friendlier.
Whether or not the government plans to impose some form of martial law in the future remains to be seen, but there can be no denying that we're being accustomed to life in a military state. The malls may be open for business, the baseball stadiums may be packed, and the news anchors may be twittering nonsense about the latest celebrity foofa, but those are just distractions from what is really taking place: the transformation of America into a war zone.
Trust
me, if it looks like a battlefield (armored tanks on the streets,
militarized police in metro stations, surveillance cameras
everywhere), sounds like a battlefield (SWAT team raids nightly,
sound cannons to break up large assemblies of citizens), and acts
like a battlefield (police shooting first and asking questions later,
intimidation tactics, and involuntary detentions), it's a
battlefield.
Indeed, what happened in Ocala, Florida, is a good metaphor for what's happening across the country: Sheriff's deputies, dressed in special ops uniforms and riding in an armored tank on a public road, pulled a 23-year-old man over and issued a warning violation to him after he gave them the finger. The man, Lucas Jewell, defended his actions as a free speech expression of his distaste for militarized police.
Translation: "We the people" are being hijacked on the highway by government agents with little knowledge of or regard for the Constitution, who are hyped up on the power of their badge, outfitted for war, eager for combat, and taking a joy ride--on taxpayer time and money--in a military tank that has no business being on American soil.
Rest assured, unless we slam on the brakes, this runaway tank will soon be charting a new course through terrain that bears no resemblance to land of our forefathers, where freedom meant more than just the freedom to exist and consume what the corporate powers dish out.
If
you haven't managed to read the writing on the wall yet, the war
has begun.
Thanks to DM for the tip!
---
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Jade Helm Logo Reveal real Purpose?
First Comment by George:
About the Jade Helm issue, I have my own thoughts. First, there is nothing malevolent about WalMart offering support for disaster relief. Even using their facilities for housing refugees from disaster is not sinister. What concerns me is the persistent howling by Alex Jones and his crowd that the global police state is inevitable and irresistible. There is a name for this propaganda line. It is called FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Even if there are some malevolent links between WalMart, FEMA, and what is left of the USG, they must be viewed as pathetic. The only power the USG has comes from us, the people. We don't have to attack them. All we have to do is refuse to support them. They have generated more than enough external enemies to bring them down.
Dan writes:
I remember when London "bobbies" (police) didn't even carry guns. As a boy growing up in Florida, I rarely saw a police car, because there was no crime in my neighborhood. We left cars unlocked with windows open unattended in store parking lots while shopping.
Police were trained to "serve and protect" law abiding citizens. That policy changed many years ago without announcement from Media and government. A retiring cop told me ten years ago that the policy has changed from "serve and protect" to enforce and keep the peace. Everybody's a suspect.
But America's changed drastically too. US population has increased 50 million since 1995. The Arizona Border Patrol said there were between 15 and 20 million illegal aliens in America, and Washington has no plans to change that. Fifty years ago all the people the police would encounter were documented. Not only that, but people didn't move around so much. The majority of people got married and raised families in same town or State they'd been born in. That meant the police were dealing with a lot of familiar faces. Anything out of the ordinary stuck out like a sore thumb. Such a society tends to be self-enforcing to a greater extent than a world of strangers. Add to that extreme cultural differences, including hostility toward both white and black Americans.
One of the policies of Globalism that goes with discouraging nuclear families is to keep individuals on the move, so they don't get a chance to form the kind of relations people do when they expect to remain in a place or job for many years. The result is a new society in which nobody trusts anyone else, because a lot the people in it can't be trusted. It's natural that police don't feel as safe as they did a few decades ago. As older cops from 'the old days' have been retiring they've been replaced by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations. Urban warfare is what they know. So ironically, the wars Americans rooted for ten years ago are coming home to roost.
Andrew said (April 27, 2015):
You have to remember that John W. Whitehead is a lawyer so he naturally makes his case and couches his argument in legalistic terms which don’t resonate with the majority who are not lawyers but simple minded laymen. I fancy myself a legal eagle so liked not only what he said but also the way you summarized his arguments. There is no doubt in my mind that since 9/11, Americans have been conditioned to accept the obvious American police state of the future. The beauty of Dan’s brief observations is he provided historical context for at least his lifetime.
What is needed is 300 years of American police history. In other words, the narrative should begin in colonial times, because there are rich examples of police state periods during the American Wars of Independence (which would include The War of 1812) and the four-year 1861–65 War Between the States when habeas corpus was suspended in order to suppress all antiwar Patriots who opposed the massive ‘kiltfest’ with over 120,000 needlessly dead as an unconstitutional police operation.