State of Fear - Chris Hedges
Shannon McLeish of Florida is a 45-year-old married mother of two young children. She is a homeowner, a taxpayer and a safe driver. She votes in every election. She attends a Unitarian Universalist church on Sundays. She is also, like nearly all who have a relationship with the Occupy movement in the United States, being monitored by the federal government. She knows this because when she read FBI documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) through the Freedom of Information Act, she was startled to see a redaction that could only be referring to her. McLeishs story is the story of hundreds of thousands of peopleperhaps morewhose lives are being invaded by the state. It is the story of a security and surveillance apparatusoverseen by the executive branch under Barack Obamathat has empowered the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to silence the voices and obstruct the activity of citizens who question corporate power.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, said in a written statement about the released files: This production [of information], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBIs surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protesters organizing with the Occupy movement. These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.
The FBI documents are not only a chilling example of how widespread this surveillance and obstruction has become, they are an explicit warning by the security services to all who consider dissent. Anyone who defies corporate power, even if he or she is nonviolent and acting within constitutional rights, is a suspect. These documents are part of the plan to make us fearful, compliant and disempowered. They mark, I suspect, a government attempt to end peaceful mass protests by responding with repression to the grievances of Americans. When the corporate-financed group FreedomWorks bused in goons to disrupt Democratic candidates town hall meetings about the federal health care legislation in August 2009, Eric Zuesse of the Business Insider notes, there was no FBI surveillance of those corporate-organized disruptions of legitimate democratic processes. There also were no subsequent FreedomWorks applications for Freedom of Information Act releases of FBI files regarding such surveillance being used against thembecause there was no such FBI campaign against them.
The combination of intimidation tactics by right-wing fringe groups, which speak in the language of violence and hate, with the states massive intrusion into the personal affairs of the citizen is corporate fascism. And we are much farther down that road than many of us care to admit.
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/15449-state-of-fear
struggle4progress
(118,332 posts)this article is definitely not one of his best journalistic efforts: it's a jumble, that hints darkly without providing necessary collaborative detail
In the age of the internet, there's really no excuse for not explicitly providing either the documents to which one refers, or at least links to them, or (at minimum) appropriate selections from the documents: that would clarify Hedges' text considerably