Thread: Gangster State America– Paul Craig Roberts

Gangster State America– Paul Craig Roberts

May 6, 2014 |


Gangster State America
Where Is America’s Democracy?



Paul Craig Roberts

Anyone who looks carefully behind the veil of words cannot find democracy in America. For years I have been writing that the US government is no longer accountable to law or to the people (see, for example, my book, How America Was Lost). The Constitution has been set aside, and the executive branch is degenerating into Caesarism.


Government is used to impose agendas that result from the symbiotic relationship between the neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony and the economic interests of powerful private interest groups, such as Wall Street, the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and extractive industries (energy, mining, and timber). Dollar imperialism, threats, bribes, and wars are means by which US hegemony is extended. These agendas are pursued without the knowledge or approval of the American people and in spite of their opposition.


Professor Martin Gilens at Princeton University and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University have examined American governance and have concluded that the US is an oligarchy ruled by powerful rich private interest groups and that the US government has only a superficial resemblance to a democracy. Their analysis is forthcoming in publication in the journal, Perspectives on Politics.


Their conclusions are striking:
“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
“When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.”


“In the United States, our findings indicate that the majority does not rule–at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.”
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
A number of factors have contributed to the demise of democracy and accountable government in the US. One factor is the concentration of the US media in a few hands. During the last years of the Clinton regime, a formerly diverse media with significant independence was concentrated in five mega-corporations. The value of these corporations consists largely of their federal broadcast licenses. To insure the renewal of these licenses, the media avoids challenging the government on significant issues.


Another factor is the offshoring of US industrial and manufacturing jobs. This development destroyed the manufacturing and industrial unions, which were the backbone of the Democratic Party’s financial support. Now the Democrats have to appeal to the same interest groups as the Republicans–Wall Street, the military/security complex, and the polluting industries that despoil the environment. As both political parties are now financed by the same private interests, both political parties serve the same masters. There is no longer any countervailing power. The Obama regime is simply a continuation of the George W. Bush regime.


Two recent rulings by the Republican majority on the US Supreme Court are another decisive factor. The court ruled that it is merely an exercise of free speech for oligarchs to purchase the US government (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission). A corrupt Supreme Court has invented a “constitutional right” for corporations and oligarchs to use their vast financial resources to form a government of their choosing.


Private interest groups in the US are so powerful that they can purchase immunity from law. On March 27 a retiring Securities and Exchange Commission prosecutor, James Kidney, said that his prosecutions of financial criminals at Goldman Sachs and other giant US banks were blocked by SEC political appointees who “were focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service.”


In a recent test to ascertain the responsiveness of members of Congress to monied interests in comparison to voters, two letters were sent to congressional offices. One letter asked for the representative to meet with community groups in his district. The other letter asked for the representative to meet with a group of active donors. The latter letter received by far the most responses from members of Congress.
In the US and Europe there is constant propaganda about “gangster state Russia.” According to this propaganda, President Putin is a tool of oligarchs who use Putin to rule Russia and loot the people. In my opinion, this propaganda originates in the Washington-funded NGOs that constitute a US fifth column inside Russia. The purpose of the propaganda is to destroy Putin’s legitimacy and that of his government in hopes of bringing to power a Washington-compliant government in Moscow.


My impression is that the Russian government has curtailed activities of some of the oligarchs who used the privatization era to seize control of resources, but that the government’s actions are consistent with the rule of law. In contrast, in the US oligarchs control the law and use it to acquire immunity from law.


The real gangster state is the US. Every institution is corrupt. Regulators sell protection from law for well-paying jobs in the industries that they are supposed to regulate. The Supreme Court not only permits money to purchase the government but also sells out the Constitution to the police state. The Supreme Court has just refused to hear the case against indefinite detention of US citizens in the absence of due process. This is an unambiguous unconstitutional law, yet the Supreme Court refuses to even hear the case, thus granting unchecked police power to the gangster state. http://rt.com/usa/156172-scotus-ndaa-hedges-obama/

Another defining characteristic of a gangster state is the criminalization of dissent and truth tellers. Washington has done everything in its power to criminalize Julian Assange and Edward Snowden for revealing the US government’s illegal, unconstitutional, and criminal actions. Washington reeks of hypocrisy. On April 26 the State Department announced its third annual Free The Press campaign, a propaganda exercise directed at foreign countries that are not Washington’s puppets. The very same day the Justice Department told the Supreme Court to reject the protection US journalists have under the Constitution against being forced to reveal their confidential sources so that James Risen can be imprisoned for reporting a government misdeed. https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/b...force-reporter
In the 21st century Washington has squandered trillions of dollars on wars that have destroyed countries and killed, maimed, and displaced millions of people in seven or eight countries. Declaring its war crimes to be a “war on terror,” Washington has used the state of war that it created to destroy US civil liberty.


In the 21st century it is difficult to find a significant statement made by Washington that is not a lie. Obamacare is a lie. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction is a lie. Assad’s use of chemical weapons is a lie. Iranian nukes are a lie. Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea is a lie. No fly zones are a lie. Russian aggression against Georgia is a lie. 9/11, the basis for Washington’s destruction of civil liberty and illegal military attacks, is itself a lie. The fantastic story that a few Saudi Arabians without government or intelligence agency backing outwitted the entire national security apparatus of the Western world is unbelievable. It is simply not credible that every institution of the national security state simultaneously failed. That Washington would tell such a fantastic lie shows that Washington has no respect for the intelligence of the American people and no respect for the integrity of the American media. It shows also that Washington has no respect for the intelligence and integrity of its European and Asian allies.
Washington won’t even tell the truth about little things in comparison–jobs, unemployment, inflation, GDP growth, economic recovery. Washington rigs the markets in order to cover up its sacrifice of the economy for the benefit of a few special interests. In the name of “privatization,” Washington hands over public assets and government responsibilities to rapacious private interests.


The conclusion is inescapable that the US is a gangster state. Indeed, the US is worse than a mere gangster state. The US is a shameless exploitative tyranny.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014...aig-roberts-2/


Maybe because we are not a "democracy" as so many continue to say in the media and else where..That goes on and on and is being ignored... We are a "Republic" and they are trying to destroy our Constitution, Bill of Rights and life bit by bit..And as usual the sheeple continue to sleep. We have many traitiors amongst us...Wake Up!!!

10 Examples Of How Big Brother Is Steadily Creeping Into Our Daily Lives

Michael Snyder 3 hours ago

Virtually everything that you do is being watched. Do you drive a car? Do you watch television? Do you use a cell phone? As you do any of those things, information about you is being recorded and tracked. We live at a time when personal privacy is dying. And it is not just governments that are doing this. In fact, sometimes private companies are the biggest offenders. It turns out that gathering information about all of us is very, very profitable. And both government entities and private companies are going to continue to push the envelope when it comes to high tech surveillance until people start objecting to what they are trying to do. If we continue down the path that we are currently on, it is inevitable that we will end up living in an extremely restrictive “Big Brother” police state where basically everything that we do is very closely watched, monitored, tracked and controlled. And such a day may be much closer than you think. The following are 10 examples of how “Big Brother” is steadily creeping into our daily lives…

#1 Our cars are rapidly being transformed into high tech “Big Brother” surveillance devices. In fact, a push is being made to require all new vehicles to include very sophisticated black box recorders…

As if the government wasn’t already able to track our movements on the nation’s highways and byways by way of satellites, GPS devices, and real-time traffic cameras, government officials are now pushing to require that all new vehicles come installed with black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, ostensibly to help prevent crashes.

Yet strip away the glib Orwellian doublespeak, and what you will find is that these black boxes and V2V transmitters, which will not only track a variety of data, including speed, direction, location, the number of miles traveled, and seatbelt use, but will also transmit this data to other drivers, including the police, are little more than Trojan Horses, stealth attacks on our last shreds of privacy, sold to us as safety measures for the sake of the greater good, all the while poised to wreak havoc on our lives.
Black boxes and V2V transmitters are just the tip of the iceberg, though. The 2015 Corvette Stingray will be outfitted with a performance data recorder which “uses a camera mounted on the windshield and a global positioning receiver to record speed, gear selection and brake force,” but also provides a recording of the driver’s point of view as well as recording noises made inside the car. As journalist Jaclyn Trop reports for the New York Times, “Drivers can barely make a left turn, put on their seatbelts or push 80 miles an hour without their actions somehow, somewhere being tracked or recorded.” Indeed, as Jim Farley, Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Ford Motor Company all but admitted, corporations and government officials already have a pretty good sense of where you are at all times: “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.”

#2 A new Michigan law will ban thousands of preppers and small farmers from owning farm animals. What are they going to do next? Ban us from growing our own food?

#3 Have you ever collected anything? If so, the FBI might swoop in and grab your collection someday even if you have not committed a crime. If you think that this sounds crazy, you should consider what happened to a man named Don Miller recently…

FBI agents Wednesday seized “thousands” of cultural artifacts, including American Indian items, from the private collection of a 91-year-old man who had acquired them over the past eight decades.
An FBI command vehicle and several tents were spotted at the property in rural Waldron, about 35 miles southeast of Indianapolis.

The FBI did not have any evidence that a crime had been committed prior to seizing the collection, and Mr. Miller has not been arrested or charged with any crime. The FBI says that it is going to catalog the collection “to determine whether some of the items might be illegal to possess privately”…

The aim of the investigation is to determine what each artifact is, where it came from and how Miller obtained it, Jones said, to determine whether some of the items might be illegal to possess privately.

#4 A father of a 4-year-old girl has been told that he will no longer be allowed to send healthy homemade lunches with his daughter when she attends her pre-kindergarten program because they conflict with federal guidelines.

#5 Do you watch television? Well, if you have a newer television there is a very good chance that your television is watching you as well…

In November, the British tech blogger Doctorbeet discovered that his new LG Smart TV was snooping on him. Every time he changed the channel, his activity was logged and transmitted unencrypted to LG. Doctorbeet checked the TV’s option screen and found that the setting “collection of watching info” was turned on by default. Being a techie, he turned it off, but it didn’t matter. The information continued to flow to the company anyway.

#6 A plan that is being proposed in Fairfax County, Virginia would ban “frequent and large gatherings at neighborhood homes“. This would include parties, scout gatherings and home Bible studies.

#7 At a public school in Florida, a 12-year-old boy has been banned from reading the Bible during “free reading time”…

A Florida schoolteacher humiliated a 12-year-old boy in front of an entire class after she caught him reading the Bible during free reading time.
The teacher at Park Lakes Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale ordered Giovanni Rubeo to pick up the telephone on her desk and call his parents.
As the other students watched, the teacher left a terse message on the family’s answering machine.
“I noticed that he has a book—a religious book—in the classroom,” she said on the recording. “He’s not permitted to read those books in my classroom.”

#8 In the USSA, a young child cannot even build a tree fort with his friends without the threat of being confronted by the police state. Just consider what happened to one little fifth-grade boy down in Georgia a few weeks ago…

A fifth-grader says he was terrified when a police officer pointed a gun at him and his friends while they built a tree fort.

Omari Grant, 11, said he and his friends often play in a wooded area behind his home and were building a fort when a neighbor in the next subdivision called police to complain about what the boys were doing.
But no one anticipated what Omari and his mother say happened next.
“I guess the release of tension was like, ‘Mom, he had a gun in my face, Mommy. Mommy, he had a gun in my face,’” said Janice Baptiste, Omari’s mother.

The officer reportedly used very filthy language as he pointed his gun at the boys, and he forced them to get out of the tree and lay down on the ground…

“I was thinking that I don’t want to be shot today, so I just listened to what they said,” Omari said.
Omari said the officer holding his gun also used foul language and made him and his friends lay down on the ground.
“I learned that they’re supposed to help you not make you feel scared to even come outside,” Omari said.

#9 People like to joke about “the eye in the sky”, but it is no joke. Technology that was originally developed for “blanket surveillance” during the Iraq war is now returning home…

Persistent Surveillance Systems has developed a surveillance camera on steroids. When attached to small aircraft, the 192-megapixel cameras record the patterns of the planetary life they fly over for hours at a time. According to the Washington Post, this will give the police and other customers a “time machine” they can simply rewind when they need it. Placed strategically at the highest points of any town or city, these cameras could provide the sort of blanket surveillance that’s hard to avoid. The inventor of the camera, a retired Air Force officer, helped create a similar system for the city of Fallujah, the site of two of the most violent battles of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It’s just one example of how wartime surveillance technologies are returning home for “civilian use.”

#10 Have you ever purchased storable food? If so, you should know that it is now considered to be “suspicious activity” in some areas of the country. Just check out what is happening in New York state…

1-866 SAFE NYS is part of Safeguard New York, an NY State counterterrorism program that uses promotional material to encourage citizens to report people for engaging in “suspicious activity….which makes them stand out from others”.
An accompanying letter provided by the state trooper listed such “suspicious activity” as the purchase of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), flashlights, weather proof ammunition, night vision equipment, match containers, or gas masks.

For even more examples like this, please see my previous article entitled “19 Signs That America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Giant Surveillance Grid“.

Sadly, most Americans are totally oblivious to all of this.

Most Americans are so addicted to entertainment and to their electronic devices that they have no idea what is going on in the real world.

I came across the following video entitled “Look Up” on YouTube earlier today. I think that it does a great job of showing what our obsession with our electronic devices is doing to us. Watch it for yourself and see what you think…

Source
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NYPD Assault Arrest Musician for Playing a Song Even After Verifying He Hadn’t Broken Any Laws ~ Video: http://goo.gl/navjzS

NYPD Cost Taxpayers Nearly a Half Billion in the Last 5 Years From Civil Rights Violations ~ Read more: http://goo.gl/YhWN16