If it happens to one Citizen, it can happen to me.
The following article should bring all of us to our feet, ready to
defend those citizens who are abused, and ready to take to task those
who are the abusers.
Remember way in our dim past, we said, "United we Stand, Divided, we
Fall"! The Working Class, all of us who are not in the Ruling Class,
must come together and demand our rightful place as Free Americans.
Carl Jarvis
***
The Ongoing War on the American People
“A government which will turn its tanks upon its people, for any
reason, is a government with a taste of blood and a thirst for power
and must either be
smartly rebuked, or blindly obeyed in deadly fear.”—John Salter
Police in a small Georgia town
tasered a 5-foot-2, 87-year-old woman who was using a kitchen knife to
cut dandelions for use in a recipe.
Police claim they had no choice but to taser the old woman, who does
not speak English but was smiling at police to indicate she was
friendly, because
she failed to comply with orders to put down the knife.
Police in California are being sued for using
excessive force against a deaf 76-year-old woman who was allegedly jaywalking
and failed to halt when police yelled at her. According to the
lawsuit, police searched the woman and her grocery bags. She was then
slammed to the ground,
had a foot or knee placed behind her neck or back, handcuffed,
arrested and cited for jaywalking and resisting arrest.
In Alabama, police first tasered then
shot and killed an unarmed man who refused to show his driver’s
license after attempting to turn in a stray dog
he’d found to the local dog shelter. The man’s girlfriend and their
three children, all under the age of 10, witnessed the shooting.
In New York, Customs and Border Protection officers have come under fire for
subjecting female travelers (including minors) to random body searches
that include strip searches while menstruating, genital probing, and
forced pelvic exams, X-rays and intravenous drugs at area hospitals.
At a California gas station,
ICE agents surrounded a man who was taking his pregnant wife to the
hospital to deliver their baby,
demanding that he show identification. Having forgotten his documents
at home in the rush to get to the hospital, the husband offered to go
get them. Refusing
to allow him to do so, ICE agents handcuffed and arrested the man for
not having an ID with him, leaving his wife to find her way alone to
the hospital.
The father of five, including the newborn, has lived and worked in the
U.S. for 12 years with his wife.
These are not isolated incidents.
These cases are legion.
This is what a state of undeclared martial law looks like, when you
can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized and in some cases killed
merely for not
complying with a government agent’s order or not complying fast enough.
This isn’t just happening in crime-ridden inner cities.
It’s happening all across the country.
America has been locked down.
This is what it’s like to be a citizen of the American police state.
This is what it’s like to be an enemy combatant in your own country.
This is what it feels like to be a conquered people.
This is what it feels like to be an occupied nation.
This is what it feels like to live in fear of armed men crashing
through your door in the middle of the night, or to be accused of
doing something you
never even knew was a crime, or to be watched all the time, your
movements tracked, your motives questioned.
This is what it feels like to have your homeland transformed into a battlefield.
Mind you, in a war zone, there are no police—only soldiers. Thus,
there is no more Posse Comitatus prohibiting the government from using
the military in
a law enforcement capacity. Not when the local police have, for all
intents and purposes, already become the military.
In a war zone, the soldiers shoot to kill, as American police have now
been trained to do. Whether the perceived “threat” is armed or unarmed
no longer
matters when police are authorized to shoot first and ask questions later.
In a war zone, even the youngest members of the community learn at an
early age to accept and fear the soldier in their midst. Thanks to
funding from the
government, more schools are hiring armed police officers—some
equipped with semi-automatic AR-15 rifles—to “secure” their campuses.
In a war zone, you have no rights. When you are staring down the end
of a police rifle, there can be no free speech. When you’re being held
at bay by a
militarized, weaponized mine-resistant tank, there can be no freedom
of assembly. When you’re being surveilled with thermal imaging
devices, facial recognition
software and full-body scanners and the like, there can be no privacy.
When you’re charged with disorderly conduct simply for daring to
question or photograph
or document the injustices you see, with the blessing of the courts no
less, there can be no freedom to petition the government for a redress
of grievances.
And when you’re a prisoner in your own town, unable to move freely,
kept off the streets, issued a curfew at night, there can be no
mistaking the prison
walls closing in.
This is happening and will happen anywhere and everywhere else in this
country where law enforcement officials are given carte blanche to do
what they
like, when they like, how they like, with immunity from their
superiors, the legislatures, and the courts.
You see, what Americans have failed to comprehend, living as they do
in a TV-induced, drug-like haze of fabricated realities, narcissistic
denial, and
partisan politics, is that we’ve not only brought the military
equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan home to be used against the
American people.
We’ve also brought the very spirit of the war home.
“We the people” have now come full circle, from being held captive by
the British police state to being held captive by the American police
state.
In between, we have charted a course from revolutionaries fighting for
our independence and a free people establishing a new nation to
pioneers and explorers,
braving the wilderness and expanding into new territories.
Where we went wrong, however, was in allowing ourselves to become
enthralled with and then held hostage by a military empire in bondage
to a corporate
state (the very definition of fascism).
No longer does America hold the moral high ground as a champion of
freedom and human rights. Instead, in the pursuit of profit, our
overlords have transformed
the American landscape into a battlefield, complete with military
personnel, tactics and weaponry.
To our dismay, we now find ourselves scrambling for a foothold as our
once rock-solid constitutional foundation crumbles beneath us. And no
longer can
we rely on the president, Congress, the courts, or the police to
protect us from wrongdoing.
Indeed, the president, Congress, the courts, and the police have come
to embody all that is wrong with America.
For instance, how does a man who is relatively healthy when taken into
custody by police
lapse into a coma and die while under their supervision?
What kind of twisted logic allows a police officer to
use a police car to run down an American citizen
and justifies it in the name of permissible deadly force?
And what country are we living in where the police can beat, shoot,
choke, taser and tackle American citizens, all with the protection of
the courts?
Certainly, the Constitution’s safeguards against police abuse means
nothing when government agents can crash through your door, terrorize
your children,
shoot your dogs,
and jail you on any number of trumped of charges, and you have little
say in the matter. For instance, San Diego police, responding to a
domestic disturbance
call on a Sunday morning, showed up at the wrong address, only to
shoot the homeowner’s 6-year-old service dog
in the head.
Rubbing salt in the wound, it’s often the unlucky victim of excessive
police force who ends up being charged with wrongdoing. Although
16-year-old Thai
Gurule was charged with resisting arrest and strangling and assaulting
police officers, a circuit judge found that it was actually the three
officers who
unlawfully
stopped, tackled, punched, kneed, tasered and yanked his hair
who were at fault. Thankfully, bystander cell phone videos undermined
police accounts, which were described as “works of fiction.”
Not even our children are being
spared
the blowback from a growing police presence.
As one juvenile court judge noted in testimony to Congress, although
having police on public school campuses did not make the schools any
safer, it did
result in large numbers of students being
arrested for misdemeanors
such as school fights and disorderly conduct. One 11-year-old
autistic Virginia student was charged with disorderly conduct and
felony assault after
kicking a trashcan and resisting a police officer’s attempt to handcuff him.
A
14-year-old student was tasered by police,
suspended and charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and
trespassing after he failed to obey a teacher’s order to be the last
student to exit
the classroom.
There is no end to the government’s unmitigated gall in riding
roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, whether in matters of
excessive police powers,
militarized police, domestic training drills, SWAT team raids,
surveillance, property rights, overcriminalization, roadside strip
searches, profit-driven
fines and prison sentences, etc.
The president can now direct the military to detain, arrest and
secretly execute
American citizens. These are the powers of an imperial dictator, not
an elected official bound by the rule of law. This mantle is worn by
whomever occupies
the Oval Office now and in the future.
A representative government means nothing when the average citizen has
little to no access to their elected officials, while corporate
lobbyists enjoy
a revolving door relationship with everyone from the President on
down. Indeed, while members of Congress
hardly work for the taxpayer,
they work hard at being wooed by corporations, which
spend more to lobby our elected representatives
than we spend on their collective salaries. For that matter, getting
elected is no longer the high point it used to be. As one congressman
noted, for
many elected officials, “Congress is no longer a destination but a
journey… [to a]
more lucrative job as a K Street lobbyist
… It’s become routine to see members of Congress drop their seat in
Congress like a hot rock when a particularly lush vacancy opens up.”
As for the courts, they have long since ceased being courts of
justice. Instead, they have become courts of order, largely marching
in lockstep with the
government’s dictates, all the while helping to increase the largesse
of government coffers. It’s called for-profit justice, and it runs the
gamut of all
manner of financial incentives in which the courts become cash cows
for communities looking to make an extra buck. As journalist Chris
Albin-Lackey
details,
“They deploy a crushing array of fines, court costs, and other fees to
harvest revenues from minor offenders that these communities cannot or
do not want
to raise through taxation.” In this way, says Albin-Lackey, “A
resident of Montgomery, Alabama who commits a simple noise violation
faces only a $20 fine—but
also a
whopping $257 in court costs and user fees
should they seek to have their day in court.”
As for the rest—the schools, the churches, private businesses, service
providers, nonprofits and your fellow citizens—many are also marching
in lockstep
with the police state.
This is what is commonly referred to as community policing.
After all, the police can’t be everywhere. So how do you police a
nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do
you carry out surveillance
on a nation when there aren’t enough cameras, let alone viewers, to
monitor every square inch of the country 24/7? How do you not only
track but analyze
the transactions, interactions and movements of every person within
the United States?
The answer is simpler than it seems: You persuade the citizenry to be
your eyes and ears.
It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry
remains focused on and distrustful of each other, they’re incapable of
focusing on
more definable threats that fall closer to home—namely, the government
and its militarized police.
In this way, we’re seeing a rise in the incidence of Americans being
reported for growing vegetables in their front yard, keeping chickens
in their back
yard, letting their kids walk to the playground alone, and voicing
anti-government sentiments. For example, after Shona Banda’s son
defended the use of medical marijuana during a presentation at school,
school officials alerted the police and social services, and the
11-year-old was interrogated, taken into custody by social workers,
had his home raided
by police and his mother arrested.
Now it may be that we have nothing to worry about.
Perhaps the government really does have our best interests at heart.
Perhaps
covert domestic military training drills
really are just benign exercises to make sure our military is
prepared for any contingency.
Then again, while I don’t believe in worrying over nothing, it’s safe
to say that the government has not exactly shown itself to be friendly
in recent
years, nor have its agents shown themselves to be cognizant of the
fact that they are civilians who answer to the citizenry, rather than
the other way
around.
As Aldous Huxley warned in Brave New World Revisited, “
Liberty cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war
footing, or even a near-war footing.
Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and
everything by the agencies of the central government.”
Whether or not the government plans to impose some more overt form of
martial law in the future remains to be seen, but there can be no
denying that we’re
being accustomed to life in a military state.
The malls may be open for business, the baseball stadiums may be
packed, and the news anchors may be twittering nonsense about the
latest celebrity foofa,
but those are just distractions from what is really taking place: the
transformation of America into a war zone.
As I document in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American People,
if it looks like a battlefield (armored tanks on the streets,
militarized police in metro stations, surveillance cameras
everywhere), sounds like a battlefield
(SWAT team raids nightly, sound cannons to break up large assemblies
of citizens), and acts like a battlefield (police shooting first and
asking questions
later, intimidation tactics, and involuntary detentions), it’s a battlefield.
Indeed, what happened in Ocala, Florida, is a good metaphor for what’s
happening across the country: Sheriff’s deputies, dressed in special
ops uniforms
and riding in an armored tank on a public road, pulled a 23-year-old
man over and issued a warning violation to him after
he gave them the finger.
The man, Lucas Jewell, defended his actions as a free speech
expression of his distaste for militarized police.
Translation: “We the people” are being hijacked on the highway by
government agents with little knowledge of or regard for the
Constitution, who are hyped
up on the power of their badge, outfitted for war, eager for combat,
and taking a joy ride—on taxpayer time and money—in a military tank
that has no business
being on American soil.
Rest assured, unless we slam on the brakes, this runaway tank will
soon be charting a new course through terrain that bears no
resemblance to land of our
forefathers, where freedom meant more than just the freedom to exist
and consume what the corporate powers dish out.
Rod Serling, one of my longtime heroes and the creator of The Twilight
Zone, understood all too well the danger of turning a blind eye to
evil in our midst,
the “things that scream for a response.” As Serling warned, “if we
don’t listen to that scream – and if we don’t respond to it – we may
well wind up sitting
amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us – or the bomb
that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that
destroyed the
dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our
own name.”
If you haven’t managed to read the writing on the wall yet, the war has begun.
Delivered by
The Daily Sheeple
