Indeed, the United States has now institutionalized the Stalinist and Gestapo practice of requiring citizens to inform on one another. In American airports, for example, there are constant announcements that people must report any suspicious activity and that everyone is subject to search at any time even after completing airport security. Homeland Security now stops traffic on the country’s highways for searches.
Homeland Security instructs drivers to report “suspicious activity” by other drivers. These intrusive practices and the conditioning of citizens to spy on one another are being carried on despite the fact that there have been no terrorist events in the US since September 11, 2001 (“9/11”), except for those organized and orchestrated by the FBI in order to keep alive the fear that serves so well the growth of the “security” apparatus.*
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* There is suspicion of the official explanation of 9/11 among some scientists, architects, engineers, pilots, and firefighters. Moreover, more than one-third of the US population is perplexed that a handful of stateless terrorists could outwit not only the CIA and FBI, but all 16 US intelligence agencies, the intelligence agencies of America’s allies including Israel’s Mossad, the National Security Council, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, and cause US airport security to fail four times on one morning. It is even more perplexing that such an extraordinary event could happen without the President, Congress, and the media immediately demanding an expert investigation and holding accountable those who so miserably failed in their responsibilities. Instead, the George W. Bush administration resisted for more than one year demands by 9/11 families for an investigation. The “investigation” produced a politically controlled report by the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commission’s co-chairmen and chief legal counsel later wrote books in which they reported that information was withheld from the commission. They described the commission as “set up to fail.”
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On September 11, 2011, one decade after the event that was used to turn America into a police state, three people on a flight to Detroit, Michigan, from Denver, Colorado, which landed safely with no incident, were arrested and pulled off the airliner in handcuffs. ( see, http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=137965 )
What occurred is that a woman passenger on the flight had been made paranoid by the ceaseless propaganda that Muslims, dark-skinned people, are terrorists and a threat to her life. She noticed that two dark-skinned men--who turned out to be from India--were sitting in the same row with a dark-skinned woman--who turned out to be a Jewish/Arab-American housewife in Detroit. The men frequently visited the lavatory. Remembering the “shampoo-bottled-water bomb,” that came between the shoe and underwear bombs, she jumped to the conclusion that the three were terrorists and reported her finding to the airline attendant, who is required to report such “findings” of passengers to the pilots, who duly reported to higher authorities.
Whatever the procedure, when the airliner landed without any incident, because two of the three dark-skinned suspects had used the toilet facilities too often for the paranoid woman to accept as innocent, three passengers were embarrassed, abused, and taken to jail, where they were strip-searched and questioned about their nefarious intentions.
The affair turned out to be pointless. None of the arrested “suspects” had done anything, had any kind of weapon or prohibited item or improper documentation. They sat in a jail while the FBI discovered that all that had happened is that a woman made paranoid by “terrorist” reports from Fox “News” and Homeland Security had concluded that dark-skinned people who used the toilet facilities too often were terrorists.
In the event that you do not realize what this means, it means that anyone, no matter how stupid and brainwashed, can report anyone to be a terrorist. A fully-armed SWAT team will appear to drag the suspect from a plane, a train, a shopping center, or home, and if the latter, shoot the family dog, point automatic weapons at the family, and then justify their actions on the basis of a report from a person about whom they know nothing whatsoever. Every American is now threatened by reports stemming from jealousy, acts of revenge, or fantasy. As the massive police bureaucracy needs terrorist cases to justify its budget, there will be a growing tendency to regard reported people as guilty and to treat them as such.
As many writers who have experienced police states have made clear, once a police state is formed, the bureaucracy itself produces “suspects” and “enemies of the people.” The “street sweeps” of the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union resulted from pressure on the police agency to apprehend “enemies of the people” so that the secret police themselves would not fall under Stalin’s suspicion.
For now, in the early stages of the American Police State, it is still possible for innocent people to be cleared. However, too many clearances undermine the terror threat that is used to justify the abuse of citizens. The time will come when the FBI will cease to do an honest investigation that clears the accused. Everyone suspected and arrested will be declared guilty in order that the police agency proves its worth or survives suspicion from those at the top, who might be paranoid or orchestrating the system for an undeclared agenda.
That time at which accusation prevails over investigation might be close at hand. On New Year’s eve, 2011, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act which contains an amendment passed with majority support of both parties (Democrats and Republicans) of both houses of Congress (House and Senate). The amendment in effect repeals the US Constitution. This Bill of Tyranny gives the power to the US military to detain indefinitely without presenting charges American citizens anywhere in the world, including in the United States.
This Bill of Tyranny also repeals the Posse Comitatus Act, which has been US statutory law since 1878 and which prevents the use of the military in law enforcement against US citizens.
The executive office of the President and heads of the various security agencies wrote to Congress opposing the military detention amendment not on constitutional grounds but on the grounds that the amendment codifies in law the powers that the executive branch has achieved by assertion and with the complicity of Congress and the federal courts. The executive branch did not want its new asserted powers codified in law, because codification would reduce its flexibility and make the executive branch accountable to the law.
The executive branch said that military detention would interfere with its ability to have detainees held by the CIA in prisons that were not military prisons. Also, the Obama regime was disturbed that the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. One of the main sponsors of the military detention amendment, Senator Carl Levin, indicated that one of the purposes of the military detention amendment was to provide some protection to detainees. Senator Levin asked and answered this question: Should somebody determined “to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.”
Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposed the military detention amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. This is what the Obama regime means when it said that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”
The Bush/Cheney and Obama regimes evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs. By classifying its prisoners as something else, the sordid government in Washington could avoid accountability for its mistreatment of detainees.
The November 17, 2011, letter to the US Senate from the Executive Office of the President says that the Obama regime does not want the authority it has under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, Public Law 107-40, to be further codified. Codifica
tion is risky says the regime: “After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect the country.” http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/112/saps1867s_20111117.pdf
In other words, the Obama regime opposed military detention not for any good reason but for a bad reason. The executive branch had achieved total discretion as to who it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, the lack of accountability to any law meant that no one could find out what the executive branch was doing to detainees.
Codification introduces accountability to law, and whether or not this was Congress’ intention, the executive branch does not want accountability.
Obama got rid of the accountability in the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act with signing statements, themselves unconstitutional exercises. In a word, the United States is now a lawless state. The executive branch, as long as the president declares that the country is at war, has the power of a Caesar. Congress, the alleged representatives of the people, no longer has the right to declare war or even the right to be informed when Caesar decides to take the country to war.
The Bush regime declared that the president as commander-in-chief in the “war on terror” has the prerogative to deprive US citizens of their liberty and property without due process of law. During the Obama regime, Congress attempted to codify this power in order to block the executive branch’s self-transformation into a Caesar, but failed. The Obama regime added to the power of the executive the right to deprive US citizens of their lives without due process of law. Today the President of the United States sits in the Oval Office in the White House and draws up lists of people to be murdered. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/05/the-presidents-kill-list.html
The degeneration of American democracy into a police state is subject matter for another book. I have provided a brief account here in order to dispel naive expectations that democracy will restore the economic prospects of citizens.
Economic Dispossession
To turn to economic dispossession, I have documented for a decade that jobs offshoring has moved to China and India and other low wage countries not merely American jobs, but also the consumer income, tax base, GDP, supply chains, and life careers associated with the jobs. (See, for example, the collection of my columns in How The Economy Was Lost.) I have pointed out that the result is a US unemployment rate of between one-fifth and one-fourth of the work force, a high rate that is hidden by the deceptions used in the official statistics. (See John Williams, shadowstats.com)
Until recently economists have refused to acknowledge the facts. In a subsequent section of Part Two, I examine studies of American economists, who purport to find that jobs offshoring benefits the US economy. This conclusion is so problematic that it makes me wonder if economists have been influenced by research grants, speaking fees, consultancies, and corporate board memberships. The beneficiaries of jobs offshoring are shareholders, who receive capital gains, and executives, who achieve managerial performance bonuses from the reduction in labor costs and higher profits achieved by offshoring labor.
As I have made clear in my writings over the past decade, official US statistics prove that the US has been unable for years to produce any jobs in the tradable category, whether manufacturing or professional services. In March 2011, Nobel economist Michael Spence came to the same conclusion in a paper for the Council on Foreign Relations. Spence’s conclusions will be reported in subsequent sections of Part Two. Spence’s analysis of the official US jobs data supports my own. The US economy has only been able to create jobs in non-tradable domestic services such as waitresses and bartenders, ambulatory health care, and retail trade. Before the real estate bubble burst, house construction was a source of jobs.
When I was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan administration, oil imports were the only concern in the balance of payments, and this deficit was covered by the excess of US foreign earnings abroad over payments to foreigners on their investments in the US.
In more recent times, there have been years in which the US trade deficit in manufactured goods, including high-technology goods, exceeded the oil imports. Americans no longer produce their own clothes and shoes. A significant proportion of military components is produced in foreign lands.
The high rate of US unemployment has so far proved to be immune to the stimulus of the largest federal deficits and the most aggressive monetary policy in US history. The current unemployment is unlike the post-World War II unemployment. During the second half of the 20th century, the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates and put the economy into recession in order to cool down the rate of inflation. As inflation dropped and unemployment mounted, the Federal Reserve would reverse course, cut interest rates and supply the economy with renewed growth in the money supply. Stimulative policy worked in those days, because the jobs still existed to which workers could be called back as consumer demand rose.
Today, the jobs have been moved abroad. US economic stimulus benefits China and India, but does little for US employment.
In economic theory, the rationale for the profit motive in capitalism has always been that profits indicate areas for investment and expansion, and losses indicate activities and companies that fail and go out of business. This rule is no longer observed in the US. Financial sector corporations are now “too big to fail.” Consequently, bankrupt financial institutions are bailed out by taxpayer subsidies and debt monetization by the Federal Reserve. Today in America, the bigger the corporation, the less likely it will be permitted to fail regardless of the magnitude of its losses.
This procedure of rescuing failures at the expense of the population is now also the rule in the European Union. With the mega-rich subsidized by the mega-poor, is present day capitalism worse than imagined by Karl Marx?
It has not been possible for US corporations to move all manufacturing and professional service jobs, such as software engineering, offshore. Nevertheless, corporations have found another way to reduce their labor costs. The corporations tell Congress that there is a shortage of labor and that they require more foreign laborers to fill the “skill gap.” The skilled workers brought in on H-1B work visas have no bargaining rights and are paid one-third less than US wages. The difference goes into corporate and shareholder profits. Modern day capitalists are loyal only to money, not to country.
Social Dispossession
Socially, America has become a third world country with a small minority of “haves” and a large majority of “have-nots.” In recent years more than half of university graduates, many burdened with large student loans, are unable to find employment and have had to return to live in their childhood rooms in their parents’ homes. Even many of those who found employment have to live with their parents as their salaries are insufficient to cover the rent on a residence of their own.
Millions of Americans have lost their homes and millions more are unable to make mortgage payments and are awaiting foreclosure. Americans are living in their cars and in tent cities. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/11/economic-woes-lead-to-proliferation-tent-cities-nationwide/ Engineers have jobs as Wal-Mart clerks and sales clerks in department stores. Their incomes and living standards have collapsed.
Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that real as opposed to nominal incomes continue to fall. Deflating median US income with the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers (CPI-U), Williams finds that after a decade US income levels in 2010 have not recovered their pre-2001 recession highs. Moreover, Williams reports, adjusting incomes with the traditional CPI-U measure “shows that the level of 2010 median household income is below where it was in 1969.”
Studies have concluded that the richest 20 per cent of Americans control 84% of the country’s wealth and that the total wealth of America’s richest 400 families equals the total wealt
h of the bottom half of the US population, roughly 150 million people. ( See, for example, this report: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/13/american-middle-class-poverty ) The distribution of income in the US is so heavily biased in favor of the extremely rich that the United States now has the worst distribution of income in the developed world. The US income distribution is actually worse than that of many Third World countries, falling between Uruguay and Cameroon. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (see http://start.csail.mit.edu/mirror/cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html), the US has a worse income distribution than Iran, Nigeria, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Thailand, Kenya, Russia, China, Senegal, Turkmenistan and Jordan.
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