Life in the Emerging American Police State: What’s in Store for Our Freedoms in 2014?
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”—George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. 1
In Harold Ramis’ 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—egregious surveillance,
strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying,
the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc.—although
with far fewer moments of comic hilarity.
What remains to be seen is whether 2014 will bring more of the same or
whether “we the people” 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’t find some way to push back against the
menace of an overreaching, aggressive, invasive, militarized government
and restore our freedoms.
Government spying. It’s 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’s breaches, warned the public
against allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of
national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers “at
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’t matter. There
would be no place to hide.” 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.
Militarized police. With almost 13,000 agencies in all
50 states and four U.S. territories participating in a military
“recycling” program, community police forces across the country continue
to be transformed into outposts of the military, with police agencies
acquiring military-grade hardware—tanks, weaponry, and other equipment
designed for the battlefield—in 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 “if we have it, we might
as well use it”—the 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.
Police shootings of unarmed citizens. 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 “who was pursued and shot
in the back of the neck by Austin Police… after failing to properly
identify himself and leaving the scene of an unrelated incident.” 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.
The erosion of private property. 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’re 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—they 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—it 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.
Strip searches and the loss of bodily integrity. The
Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was intended to protect the
citizenry from being subjected to “unreasonable searches and seizures”
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—ages 1 and
4—waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in
an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer “forcibly removed” a
tampon from Tarantino. No contraband or anything illegal was found.
Invasion of the drones. As corporations and government
agencies alike prepare for their part in the coming drone invasion—it
is expected that at least 30,000 drones will occupy U.S. airspace by
2020, ushering in a $30 billion per year industry—it won’t be long
before Americans discover first-hand that drones—unmanned aerial
vehicles—come 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 “hunter/killer” 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.
Criminalizing childish behavior. It wouldn’t 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’s
schools. Some of the most egregious: the 9-year-old boy suspended for
allegedly pointing a toy at a classmate and saying “bang, bang”; 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
“arrow” 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.
Common Core. 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. 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’s ongoing attempts to amass power at great cost
to Americans—in terms of free speech rights, privacy, due process,
etc.—the 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.
The corporate takeover of America. 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’ mansions, and even local city councils. With Big Business and
Big Government having fused into a corporate state, the president and
his state counterparts—the 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’s 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.
James Madison, the father of the Constitution, put it best: “Take
alarm,” he warned, “at the first experiment with liberties.” 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.
If you’re in the business of making New Year’s 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’ve said before, it’s time for a
second American revolution.
