Gil Scott Heron

Burgeoning Police State Exposed

When the right bloviates about "big government" they mean the social safety net, education, business regulation, labor law and environmental protection. They continually attack Medicare and Social Security as wasteful and use the therm "nanny state" to describe everything they hate about civilization. But the fastest growing, most intrusive and expensive sector is never mentioned.

Since the tragedy of 2001, used cynically as a Reichstag Fire to implement preplanned campaigns of invasion and occupation and a police state we have seen the steady growth of domestic spying. Though the occupations show signs of winding down, albeit very slowly, the police state and its apparatus continues to grow into a Kafkaesque nightmare of wiretaps, renditions and secretive NSA organizations too numerous to list.

In a recent article, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) exposes the reality of a metastasizing "Patriot act" saying,"You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens, it’s worse than you’ve heard. "
Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.
“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden tells Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

Read more here.

Imperialism and the Murder of Bin Laden

Chris Hedges breaks it down better than most. I think his final synopsis that we must build self sustaining communities for our own survival is on the mark.


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