Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State

I tend to dismiss this sort of thing, but it's not like we haven't been veering awfully far to the right and it's not like democratic forms of government are guaranteed to last forever and it's not like the 2000 election wasn't stolen and and and etc etc etc. I added a link at the end to the WSWS article about the Hastert affair which has more police state speculation.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/36553/

Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State
By Allan Uthman, Buffalo Beast. Posted May 26, 2006

1. The Internet Clampdown

One saving grace of alternative media in this age of unfettered corporate conglomeration has been the internet. While the masses are spoon-fed predigested news on TV and in mainstream print publications, the truth-seeking individual still has access to a broad array of investigative reporting and political opinion via the world-wide web. Of course, it was only a matter of time before the government moved to patch up this crack in the sky.

Attempts to regulate and filter internet content are intensifying lately, coming both from telecommunications corporations (who are gearing up to pass legislation transferring ownership and regulation of the internet to themselves), and the Pentagon (which issued an "Information Operations Roadmap" in 2003, signed by Donald Rumsfeld, which outlines tactics such as network attacks and acknowledges, without suggesting a remedy, that US propaganda planted in other countries has easily found its way to Americans via the internet). One obvious tactic clearing the way for stifling regulation of internet content is the growing media frenzy over child pornography and "internet predators," which will surely lead to legislation that by far exceeds in its purview what is needed to fight such threats.

2. "The Long War"

This little piece of clumsy marketing died off quickly, but it gave away what many already suspected: the War on Terror will never end, nor is it meant to end. It is designed to be perpetual. As with the War on Drugs, it outlines a goal that can never be fully attained -- as long as there are pissed off people and explosives. The Long War will eternally justify what are ostensibly temporary measures: suspension of civil liberties, military expansion, domestic spying, massive deficit spending and the like. This short-lived moniker told us all, "get used to it. Things aren't going to change any time soon."

3. The USA PATRIOT Act

Did anyone really think this was going to be temporary? Yes, this disgusting power grab gives the government the right to sneak into your house, look through all your stuff and not tell you about it for weeks on a rubber stamp warrant. Yes, they can look at your medical records and library selections. Yes, they can pass along any information they find without probable cause for purposes of prosecution. No, they're not going to take it back, ever.

4. Prison Camps

This last January the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root nearly $400 million to build detention centers in the United States, for the purpose of unspecified "new programs." Of course, the obvious first guess would be that these new programs might involve rounding up Muslims or political dissenters -- I mean, obviously detention facilities are there to hold somebody. I wish I had more to tell you about this, but it's, you know... secret.

5. Touchscreen Voting Machines

more...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/raid-m26.shtml

Constitutional crisis over FBI raid on US congressman

<edit>

Cheney was so alarmed he immediately scheduled a meeting between Hastert, himself and Bush in the president’s living quarters.

“But Hastert’s discontent goes beyond the CIA,” Novak noted. “The GOP mood on Capitol Hill, particularly the House, is poisonous. With pessimism rising over a contemplated loss of their majority in the 2006 elections, Republican lawmakers blame their parlous condition on Bush’s performance.” Novak went on to say that there was “basically non-communication between Bush and his fellow Republicans in Congress.”

Hastert’s assumption that the ABC News report was an act of intimidation and retaliation by the Bush administration—even were it to prove unfounded—says a great deal about the state of American politics. The titular head of the House of Representatives takes as a given that the top figures in the executive branch, and the leaders of his own party, would not hesitate to employ blackmail, character assassination and the threat of criminal prosecution to silence him and anyone else who stood in their way.

It is an open secret in Washington, discussed in private but concealed from the American people, that the US is heading in the direction of a police state, and that those who wield both corporate and political power have no democratic scruples.

end

advertizements on every signpost and car, that not a
thing exists that is not rooted in the corporate meme.
Then the objective is conformity, not freedom or liberty,
acceptance and conformity to the mindrape.

since the early 1970s under the cloak of the drug war: the militarization of local police departments.

The excuse was always that drug dealers were better armed, so our boys in blue needed that military hardware, those Darth Vader suits, the SWAT teams, the gas. The real problem was Posse Comitatus, a doctrine that made it impossible to call the military out against the citizens. So they made the cops into another military. And this sucks.

Plus, they missed the gradual erosion of the fourth amendment by idiotically unconstitutional laws like the forefeiture laws. Our persons and property and papers are no longer protected by our government.

Conservatives in both parties have presided over this horror show. I lay blame more to the GOP because they've been in charge more, but conservatives are the problem in both parties. The GOP couldn't have done this to our country without the enabling of conservative Dems and the spineless "moderate" judges they've approved.

Like in NO. Without an armed populist, the Government can do anything they please.