21 Shocking Facts About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/03/2015 13:00 -0500
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-03/21-shocking-facts-about-explosive-growth-poverty-america
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
What you are about to see is more evidence that the growth of poverty in the United States is wildly out of control.  It turns out that there is a tremendous amount of suffering in “the wealthiest nation on the planet”, and it is getting worse with each passing year.  During this election season, politicians of all stripes are running around telling all of us how great we are, but is that really true?
As you will see below, poverty is reaching unprecedented levels in this country, and the middle class is steadily dying.  There aren’t enough good jobs to go around, dependence on the government has never been greater, and it is our children that are being hit the hardest.  If we have this many people living on the edge of despair now, while times are “good”, what are things going to look like when our economy really starts falling apart?  The following are 21 facts about the explosive growth of poverty in America that will blow your mind…

#1 The U.S. Census Bureau says that nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.

#2 Other numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau are also very disturbing.  For example, in 2007 about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps.  Today, that number is one out of every five.

#3 According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, the authors of a new book entitled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America“, there are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day.  That number has doubled since 1996.

#4 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.

#5 The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.

#6 According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.

#7 Police in New York City have identified 80 separate homeless encampments in the city, and the homeless crisis there has gotten so bad that it is being described as an “epidemic”.
#8 If you can believe it, more than half of all students in our public schools are poor enough to qualify for school lunch subsidies.

#9 According to a Census Bureau report that was released a while back, 65 percent of all children in the U.S. are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.

#10 According to a report that was published by UNICEF, almost one-third of all children in this country “live in households with an income below 60 percent of the national median income”.

#11 When it comes to child poverty, the United States ranks 36th out of the 41 “wealthy nations” that UNICEF looked at.

#12 The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high poverty has doubled since the year 2000.

#13 An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.

#14 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are being raised by a single parent are living in poverty.

#15 An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.

#16 There are simply not enough good jobs to go around anymore.  It may be hard to believe, but 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

#17 There are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.7 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”.  When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.

#18 Owning a home has traditionally been a signal that you belong to the middle class.  That is why it is so alarming that the rate of homeownership in the United States has been falling for eight years in a row.

#19 According to a recent Pew survey, approximately 70 percent of all Americans believe that “debt is a necessity in their lives”.

#20 At this point, 25 percent of all Americans have a negative net worth.  That means that the value of what they owe is greater than the value of everything that they own.

#21 The top 0.1 percent of all American families have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all American families combined.

If we truly are “the greatest nation on the planet”, then why can’t we even take care of our own people?
Why are there tens of millions of us living in poverty?
Perhaps we really aren’t so great after all.
It would be one thing if economic conditions were getting better and poverty was in decline.  At least then we could be talking about the improvement we were making.  But despite the fact that we are stealing more than a hundred million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day, poverty just continues to grow like an aggressive form of cancer.
So what is wrong?
Why can’t we get this thing fixed?

HISTORIC NEWS: Finally, EU Breaks Away from U.S.

Posted on September 12, 2015 by Eric Zuesse.    

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/09/historic-news-finally-eu-breaks-away-from-u-s.html

Eric Zuesse

On Saturday, September 12th, United Kingdom’s Labour Party elected as its leader and their candidate to lead the UK, Jeremy Corbyn, who has been the most vocal British critic of the UK’s serving as the lap-dog of an aggressive imperialistic United States of America.

Simultaneously, the leader of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own Christian Social Union Party, Horst Seehofer, a man who, prior to his being appointed to be the Party-chief had been Chancellor Merkel’s Agriculture Minister, has now turned against Chancellor Merkel (who until now was the most powerful leader in all of Europe) and denounced her policy on the refugee crisis, and has now stated publicly that Germany should instead ally with Russia and against NATO on the entire Syrian war. 

This public statement, which is really a sea-change in history, was reported Friday night, 11 September, in Germany’s leading magazine, The Mirror, Der Spiegel, and it represents the breaking-point in Germany’s foreign policy, finally yielding now to the rapidly rising anti-Americanism within Germany that results from America’s prioritizing America’s war against Russia as being a more important goal than the global war against Islamic jihad, which is clearly the most pressing threat to national security not only within Germany, and not only within all Western countries, but even within Pakistan and many other countries that have majority-Islamic populations, as well as in India, China, and other nations around the world.

Seehofer’s statement simply cannot be ignored by the Chancellor, because it comes from the leader of her own Party (“Christian Social Union” is the Party’s name in Munich and throughout Bavaria, but elsewhere in Germany the Party is called instead the “Christian Democratic Union”). She has mainly ignored German public opinion thus far and cooperated with U.S. President Barack Obama’s war against Russia, which Obama is waging via his proxies in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. But Merkel now will have to bend; and this could end up breaking NATO itself, since NATO is the international military alliance that was originally against the Soviet Union and that then became against Russia as soon as the Soviet Union ended communism and broke up into Russia and the other nations of the former Soviet Union. That continuation of the Cold War, now against Russia alone, even without the former ideological excuse of there being communism, was initiated by U.S. President George Herbet Walker Bush himself. It was reluctantly picked up by then West-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose protégée was Angela Merkel. “Bush made his feelings about compromising with Moscow clear to Kohl: ‘To hell with that!’ he said. ‘We prevailed, they didn’t.’”  (This “compromise” was that NATO not expand “one inch eastward”; the promise that Bush’s own Secretary of State had made to the then-Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and on the basis of which Gorbachev allowed the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact to end and East Germany to be taken by West Germany.)

And so, the Cold War never really ended in the West (though Gorbachev was promised that it would); but, now, it might be finally forced to end, without a nuclear war (which continues to be the U.S. threat but becomes far less likely without there being allies for that on America’s side), because the current U.S. President’s intensification of the long-suppressed ongoing U.S. war against Russia is becoming too much for Germany, and for many other countries within the NATO alliance, to continue supporting. A serious international movement to destroy all nuclear weapons might even begin now.

The only NATO member-nations that are still highly supportive of America’s ongoing war against Russia are some former member-nations of the former Soviet Union and of the Soviet Union’s equivalent of NATO, the Warsaw Pact, which broke up in 1991 when the Soviet Union itself did. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, are among the now-NATO, former Soviet and Warsaw Pact, nations that are as anti-Russian as is the American ruling class (which President Obama represents). However, America’s former allies when the United States used to be a democracy, the West-European nations, are now starting to abandon the U.S., and so too are some of the East-European nations that were formerly under the Soviet yoke, such as Czech Republic, and Hungary.

America’s deepest control extended especially into two nations: UK, and Germany. However, the decision that George Herbert Walker Bush made in 1990, and that has been adhered to by his successors, to continue the former Cold War until Russia itself is defeated and becomes added to the America Empire, is now being increasingly abandoned by America’s formerly obedient vassal-nations. The American Empire has reached its zenith, and is now breaking apart.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Noam Chomsky: Why America Is the Gravest Threat to World Peace

What, exactly, is the alleged Iranian threat?

By Noam Chomsky / TomDispatch

August 20, 2015

http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-why-america-not-iran-gravest-threat-world-peace?sc=fb

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Throughout the world there is great relief and optimism about the nuclear deal reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the five veto-holding members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany. Most of the world apparently shares the assessment of the U.S. Arms Control Association that “the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action establishes a strong and effective formula for blocking all of the pathways by which Iran could acquire material for nuclear weapons for more than a generation and a verification system to promptly detect and deter possible efforts by Iran to covertly pursue nuclear weapons that will last indefinitely.”
There are, however, striking exceptions to the general enthusiasm: the United States and its closest regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. One consequence of this is that U.S. corporations, much to their chagrin, are prevented from flocking to Tehran along with their European counterparts. Prominent sectors of U.S. power and opinion share the stand of the two regional allies and so are in a state of virtual hysteria over “the Iranian threat.” Sober commentary in the United States, pretty much across the spectrum, declares that country to be “the gravest threat to world peace.” Even supporters of the agreement here are wary, given the exceptional gravity of that threat.  After all, how can we trust the Iranians with their terrible record of aggression, violence, disruption, and deceit?
Opposition within the political class is so strong that public opinion has shifted quickly from significant support for the deal to an even split. Republicans are almost unanimously opposed to the agreement. The current Republican primaries illustrate the proclaimed reasons. Senator Ted Cruz, considered one of the intellectuals among the crowded field of presidential candidates, warns that Iran may still be able to produce nuclear weapons and could someday use one to set off an Electro Magnetic Pulse that “would take down the electrical grid of the entire eastern seaboard” of the United States, killing “tens of millions of Americans.”
The two most likely winners, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, are battling over whether to bomb Iran immediately after being elected or after the first Cabinet meeting.  The one candidate with some foreign policy experience, Lindsey Graham, describesthe deal as “a death sentence for the state of Israel,” which will certainly come as a surprise to Israeli intelligence and strategic analysts -- and which Graham knows to be utter nonsense, raising immediate questions about actual motives.
Keep in mind that the Republicans long ago abandoned the pretense of functioning as a normal congressional party.  They have, as respected conservative political commentator Norman Ornstein of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute observed, become a “radical insurgency” that scarcely seeks to participate in normal congressional politics.
Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, the party leadership has plunged so far into the pockets of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract votes only by mobilizing parts of the population that have not previously been an organized political force.  Among them are extremist evangelical Christians, now probably a majority of Republican voters; remnants of the former slave-holding states; nativists who are terrified that “they” are taking our white Christian Anglo-Saxon country away from us; and others who turn the Republican primaries into spectacles remote from the mainstream of modern society -- though not from the mainstream of the most powerful country in world history.
The departure from global standards, however, goes far beyond the bounds of the Republican radical insurgency.  Across the spectrum, there is, for instance, general agreement with the “pragmatic” conclusion of General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Vienna deal does not “prevent the United States from striking Iranian facilities if officials decide that it is cheating on the agreement,” even though a unilateral military strike is “far less likely” if Iran behaves.
Former Clinton and Obama Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross typically recommends that “Iran must have no doubts that if we see it moving towards a weapon, that would trigger the use of force” even after the termination of the deal, when Iran is theoretically free to do what it wants.  In fact, the existence of a termination point 15 years hence is, he adds, "the greatest single problem with the agreement." He also suggests that the U.S. provide Israel with specially outfitted B-52 bombers and bunker-busting bombs to protect itself before that terrifying date arrives.
“The Greatest Threat”
Opponents of the nuclear deal charge that it does not go far enough. Some supporters agree, holding that “if the Vienna deal is to mean anything, the whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.” The author of those words, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Javad Zarif, added that “Iran, in its national capacity and as current chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement [the governments of the large majority of the world’s population], is prepared to work with the international community to achieve these goals, knowing full well that, along the way, it will probably run into many hurdles raised by the skeptics of peace and diplomacy.” Iran has signed “a historic nuclear deal,” he continues, and now it is the turn of Israel, “the holdout.”
Israel, of course, is one of the three nuclear powers, along with India and Pakistan, whose weapons programs have been abetted by the United States and that refuse to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
Zarif was referring to the regular five-year NPT review conference, which ended in failure in April when the U.S. (joined by Canada and Great Britain) once again blocked efforts to move toward a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone in the Middle East. Such efforts have been led by Egypt and other Arab states for 20 years.  As Jayantha Dhanapala and Sergio Duarte, leading figures in the promotion of such efforts at the NPT and other U.N. agencies, observe in “Is There a Future for the NPT?,” an article in the journal of the Arms Control Association: “The successful adoption in 1995 of the resolution on the establishment of a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Middle East was the main element of a package that permitted the indefinite extension of the NPT.”  The NPT, in turn, is the most important arms control treaty of all.  If it were adhered to, it could end the scourge of nuclear weapons.
Repeatedly, implementation of the resolution has been blocked by the U.S., most recently by President Obama in 2010 and again in 2015, as Dhanapala and Duarte point out, “on behalf of a state that is not a party to the NPT and is widely believed to be the only one in the region possessing nuclear weapons” -- a polite and understated reference to Israel. This failure, they hope, “will not be the coup de grâce to the two longstanding NPT objectives of accelerated progress on nuclear disarmament and establishing a Middle Eastern WMD-free zone.”
A nuclear-weapons-free Middle East would be a straightforward way to address whatever threat Iran allegedly poses, but a great deal more is at stake in Washington’s continuing sabotage of the effort in order to protect its Israeli client.  After all, this is not the only case in which opportunities to end the alleged Iranian threat have been undermined by Washington, raising further questions about just what is actually at stake.
In considering this matter, it is instructive to examine both the unspoken assumptions in the situation and the questions that are rarely asked.  Let us consider a few of these assumptions, beginning with the most serious: that Iran is the gravest threat to world peace.
In the U.S., it is a virtual cliché among high officials and commentators that Iran wins that grim prize.  There is also a world outside the U.S. and although its views are not reported in the mainstream here, perhaps they are of some interest.  According to the leading western polling agencies (WIN/Gallup International), the prize for “greatest threat” is won by the United States.  The rest of the world regards it as the gravest threat to world peace by a large margin.  In second place, far below, is Pakistan, its ranking probably inflated by the Indian vote.  Iran is ranked below those two, along with China, Israel, North Korea, and Afghanistan.
“The World’s Leading Supporter of Terrorism”
Turning to the next obvious question, what in fact is the Iranian threat?  Why, for example, are Israel and Saudi Arabia trembling in fear over that country?  Whatever the threat is, it can hardly be military.  Years ago, U.S. intelligence informed Congress that Iran has very low military expenditures by the standards of the region and that its strategic doctrines are defensive -- designed, that is, to deter aggression. The U.S. intelligence community has also reported that it has no evidence Iran is pursuing an actual nuclear weapons program and that “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”
The authoritative SIPRI review of global armaments ranks the U.S., as usual, way in the lead in military expenditures.  China comes in second with about one-third of U.S. expenditures.  Far below are Russia and Saudi Arabia, which are nonetheless well above any western European state.  Iran is scarcely mentioned.  Full details are provided in an April report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which finds “a conclusive case that the Arab Gulf states have... an overwhelming advantage of Iran in both military spending and access to modern arms.”
Iran’s military spending, for instance, is a fraction of Saudi Arabia’s and far below even the spending of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  Altogether, the Gulf Cooperation Council states -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE -- outspend Iran on arms by a factor of eight, an imbalance that goes back decades.  The CSIS report adds: “The Arab Gulf states have acquired and are acquiring some of the most advanced and effective weapons in the world [while] Iran has essentially been forced to live in the past, often relying on systems originally delivered at the time of the Shah.”  In other words, they are virtually obsolete.  When it comes to Israel, of course, the imbalance is even greater.  Possessing the most advanced U.S. weaponry and a virtual offshore military base for the global superpower, it also has a huge stock of nuclear weapons.
To be sure, Israel faces the “existential threat” of Iranian pronouncements: Supreme Leader Khamenei and former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously threatened it with destruction.  Except that they didn’t -- and if they had, it would be of little moment.  Ahmadinejad, for instance, predicted that “under God’s grace [the Zionist regime] will be wiped off the map.”  In other words, he hoped that regime change would someday take place.  Even that falls far short of the direct calls in both Washington and Tel Aviv for regime change in Iran, not to speak of the actions taken to implement regime change.  These, of course, go back to the actual “regime change” of 1953, when the U.S. and Britain organized a military coup to overthrow Iran’s parliamentary government and install the dictatorship of the Shah, who proceeded to amass one of the worst human rights records on the planet.
These crimes were certainly known to readers of the reports of Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, but not to readers of the U.S. press, which has devoted plenty of space to Iranian human rights violations -- but only since 1979 when the Shah’s regime was overthrown.  (To check the facts on this, read The U.S. Press and Iran, a carefully documented study by Mansour Farhang and William Dorman.)
None of this is a departure from the norm.  The United States, as is well known, holds the world championship title in regime change and Israel is no laggard either.  The most destructive of its invasions of Lebanon in 1982 was explicitly aimed at regime change, as well as at securing its hold on the occupied territories.  The pretexts offered were thin indeed and collapsed at once.  That, too, is not unusual and pretty much independent of the nature of the society -- from the laments in the Declaration of Independence about the “merciless Indian savages” to Hitler’s defense of Germany from the “wild terror” of the Poles.
No serious analyst believes that Iran would ever use, or even threaten to use, a nuclear weapon if it had one, and so face instant destruction.  There is, however, real concern that a nuclear weapon might fall into jihadi hands -- not thanks to Iran, but via U.S. ally Pakistan.  In the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, two leading Pakistani nuclear scientists, Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian, write that increasing fears of “militants seizing nuclear weapons or materials and unleashing nuclear terrorism [have led to]... the creation of a dedicated force of over 20,000 troops to guard nuclear facilities.  There is no reason to assume, however, that this force would be immune to the problems associated with the units guarding regular military facilities,” which have frequently suffered attacks with “insider help.” In brief, the problem is real, just displaced to Iran thanks to fantasies concocted for other reasons.
Other concerns about the Iranian threat include its role as “the world’s leading supporter of terrorism,” which primarily refers to its support for Hezbollah and Hamas.  Both of those movements emerged in resistance to U.S.-backed Israeli violence and aggression, which vastly exceeds anything attributed to these villains, let alone the normal practice of the hegemonic power whose global drone assassination campaign alone dominates (and helps to foster) international terrorism.
Those two villainous Iranian clients also share the crime of winning the popular vote in the only free elections in the Arab world.  Hezbollah is guilty of the even more heinous crime of compelling Israel to withdraw from its occupation of southern Lebanon, which took place in violation of U.N. Security Council orders dating back decades and involved an illegal regime of terror and sometimes extreme violence.  Whatever one thinks of Hezbollah, Hamas, or other beneficiaries of Iranian support, Iran hardly ranks high in support of terror worldwide.
“Fueling Instability”
Another concern, voiced at the U.N. by U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power, is the “instability that Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program.” The U.S. will continue to scrutinize this misbehavior, she declared.  In that, she echoed the assurance Defense Secretary Ashton Carter offered while standing on Israel’s northern border that “we will continue to help Israel counter Iran’s malign influence” in supporting Hezbollah, and that the U.S. reserves the right to use military force against Iran as it deems appropriate.
The way Iran “fuels instability” can be seen particularly dramatically in Iraq where, among other crimes, it alone at once came to the aid of Kurds defending themselves from the invasion of Islamic State militants, even as it is building a $2.5 billion power plant in the southern port city of Basra to try to bring electrical power back to the level reached before the 2003 invasion.  Ambassador Power’s usage is, however, standard: Thanks to that invasion, hundreds of thousands were killed and millions of refugees generated, barbarous acts of torture were committed -- Iraqis have compared the destruction to the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century -- leaving Iraq the unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls.  Meanwhile, sectarian conflict was ignited, tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the creation of the monstrosity that is ISIS.  And all of that is called “stabilization.”
Only Iran’s shameful actions, however, “fuel instability.” The standard usage sometimes reaches levels that are almost surreal, as when liberal commentator James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs, explained that the U.S. sought to “destabilize a freely elected Marxist government in Chile” because “we were determined to seek stability” under the Pinochet dictatorship.
Others are outraged that Washington should negotiate at all with a “contemptible” regime like Iran’s with its horrifying human rights record and urge instead that we pursue “an American-sponsored alliance between Israel and the Sunni states.”  So writes Leon Wieseltier, contributing editor to the venerable liberal journal the Atlantic, who can barely conceal his visceral hatred for all things Iranian.  With a straight face, this respected liberal intellectual recommends that Saudi Arabia, which makes Iran look like a virtual paradise, and Israel, with its vicious crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, should ally to teach that country good behavior.  Perhaps the recommendation is not entirely unreasonable when we consider the human rights records of the regimes the U.S. has imposed and supported throughout the world.
Though the Iranian government is no doubt a threat to its own people, it regrettably breaks no records in this regard, not descending to the level of favored U.S. allies.  That, however, cannot be the concern of Washington, and surely not Tel Aviv or Riyadh.
It might also be useful to recall -- surely Iranians do -- that not a day has passed since 1953 in which the U.S. was not harming Iranians. After all, as soon as they overthrew the hated U.S.-imposed regime of the Shah in 1979, Washington put its support behind Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who would, in 1980, launch a murderous assault on their country.  President Reagan went so far as to deny Saddam’s major crime, his chemical warfare assault on Iraq’s Kurdish population, which he blamed on Iran instead.  When Saddam was tried for crimes under U.S. auspices, that horrendous crime, as well as others in which the U.S. was complicit, was carefully excluded from the charges, which were restricted to one of his minor crimes, the murder of 148 Shi’ites in 1982, a footnote to his gruesome record.
Saddam was such a valued friend of Washington that he was even granted a privilege otherwise accorded only to Israel.  In 1987, his forces were allowed to attack a U.S. naval vessel, the USS Stark, with impunity, killing 37 crewmen.  (Israel had acted similarly in its 1967 attack on the USS Liberty.)  Iran pretty much conceded defeat shortly after, when the U.S. launched Operation Praying Mantis against Iranian ships and oil platforms in Iranian territorial waters.  That operation culminated when the USS Vincennes, under no credible threat, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in Iranian airspace, with 290 killed -- and the subsequent granting of a Legion of Merit award to the commander of the Vincennes for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” and for maintaining a “calm and professional atmosphere” during the period when the attack on the airliner took place. Comments philosopher Thill Raghu, “We can only stand in awe of such display of American exceptionalism!”
After the war ended, the U.S. continued to support Saddam Hussein, Iran’s primary enemy.  President George H.W. Bush even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the U.S. for advanced training in weapons production, an extremely serious threat to Iran.  Sanctions against that country were intensified, including against foreign firms dealing with it, and actions were initiated to bar it from the international financial system.
In recent years the hostility has extended to sabotage, the murder of nuclear scientists (presumably by Israel), and cyberwar, openly proclaimed with pride.  The Pentagon regards cyberwar as an act of war, justifying a military response, as does NATO, which affirmed in September 2014 that cyber attacks may trigger the collective defense obligations of the NATO powers -- when we are the target that is, not the perpetrators.
“The Prime Rogue State”
It is only fair to add that there have been breaks in this pattern. President George W. Bush, for example, offered several significant gifts to Iran by destroying its major enemies, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.  He even placed Iran’s Iraqi enemy under its influence after the U.S. defeat, which was so severe that Washington had to abandon its officially declared goals of establishing permanent military bases (“enduring camps”) and ensuring that U.S. corporations would have privileged access to Iraq’s vast oil resources.
Do Iranian leaders intend to develop nuclear weapons today?  We can decide for ourselves how credible their denials are, but that they had such intentions in the past is beyond question.  After all, it was asserted openly on the highest authority and foreign journalists were informed that Iran would develop nuclear weapons “certainly, and sooner than one thinks.” The father of Iran’s nuclear energy program and former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization was confident that the leadership’s plan “was to build a nuclear bomb.” The CIA also reported that it had “no doubt” Iran would develop nuclear weapons if neighboring countries did (as they have).
All of this was, of course, under the Shah, the “highest authority” just quoted and at a time when top U.S. officials -- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Henry Kissinger, among others -- were urging him to proceed with his nuclear programs and pressuring universities to accommodate these efforts.  Under such pressures, my own university, MIT, made a deal with the Shah to admit Iranian students to the nuclear engineering program in return for grants he offered and over the strong objections of the student body, but with comparably strong faculty support (in a meeting that older faculty will doubtless remember well).
Asked later why he supported such programs under the Shah but opposed them more recently, Kissinger responded honestly that Iran was an ally then.
Putting aside absurdities, what is the real threat of Iran that inspires such fear and fury? A natural place to turn for an answer is, again, U.S. intelligence.  Recall its analysis that Iran poses no military threat, that its strategic doctrines are defensive, and that its nuclear programs (with no effort to produce bombs, as far as can be determined) are “a central part of its deterrent strategy.”
Who, then, would be concerned by an Iranian deterrent?  The answer is plain: the rogue states that rampage in the region and do not want to tolerate any impediment to their reliance on aggression and violence.  In the lead in this regard are the U.S. and Israel, with Saudi Arabia trying its best to join the club with its invasion of Bahrain (to support the crushing of a reform movement there) and now its murderous assault on Yemen, accelerating a growing humanitarian catastrophe in that country.
For the United States, the characterization is familiar.  Fifteen years ago, the prominent political analyst Samuel Huntington, professor of the science of government at Harvard, warned in the establishment journal Foreign Affairsthat for much of the world the U.S. was “becoming the rogue superpower... the single greatest external threat to their societies.” Shortly after, his words were echoed by Robert Jervis, the president of the American Political Science Association: “In the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States.” As we have seen, global opinion supports this judgment by a substantial margin.
Furthermore, the mantle is worn with pride.  That is the clear meaning of the insistence of the political class that the U.S. reserves the right to resort to force if it unilaterally determines that Iran is violating some commitment.  This policy is of long standing, especially for liberal Democrats, and by no means restricted to Iran.  The Clinton Doctrine, for instance, confirmed that the U.S. was entitled to resort to the “unilateral use of military power” even to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources,” let alone alleged “security” or “humanitarian” concerns.  Adherence to various versions of this doctrine has been well confirmed in practice, as need hardly be discussed among people willing to look at the facts of current history.
These are among the critical matters that should be the focus of attention in analyzing the nuclear deal at Vienna, whether it stands or is sabotaged by Congress, as it may well be.
Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A TomDispatch regular, among his recent books are Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, Power Systems, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books in new editions. His website is www.chomsky.info.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT.

America: Bankrupt And On Borrowed Time

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/07/2015 17:00 -0400

Submitted by Thad Beversdorf via First Rebuttal blog,

Thomas Jefferson is credited with the following sage advice, “The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.” And so it seems sometimes the answer is right in front of us all along and we just fail to see it.

We hear a lot of talk these days about inflation. For decades the western world has been misled about a necessity for inflation to grow an economy. This is entirely false. Inflation has no relevance to economic growth; inflation is a depressive force on an economy and it can only come by way of increased money supply.

The apex of the discussion is that price increase does not equate to inflation. Inflation is but one of two paths for rising prices. More specifically, prices can rise by way of supply/demand fundamentals of an asset itself and by way of supply/demand fundamentals of the currency form being used to transact the underlying asset. The prior will raise prices in all currency forms while the latter, being inflation, will raise prices only in that relevant currency.
For inflation to occur demand for a given currency must decline relative to its supply. This can happen if consumers lose faith in a currency and thus demand less of it, or by governments increasing supply without proportional increases in demand. The latter is exactly what we’ve seen over the past 100 years but to such a grotesque degree over the past 8 years that it may have actually shattered the foundation of the economy of which it was driving. This is precisely the chain reaction that Thomas Jefferson had warned us would result from a private central banking system.
Once the economy is broken an epidemic of resource misallocation leads to an immense narrowing of income distribution, ultimately paralyzing the velocity of money; the result being an income-less society save for an elite slice. This leads to mass public and consumer debt creation in an effort to stave off the collapsing natural demand that ultimately ends in deflation when the debt efforts, after a short reprise, actually hasten the collapsing demand by hammering the final nail in the budgetary coffin. At such a point deflation is essentially infinite as people are willing to trade anything for a dollar to purchase food, or inflation is infinite as people will simply circumvent dollars and barter; an interesting paradox that in practice will be a moot point given the vast majority will have nothing to trade for food or dollars because ownership is no longer a reality.
It seems then, that Jefferson’s prediction is theoretically sound, but let’s see if we can find any empirical evidence to either support or refute his cautionary message. We know that dollar inflation has been approximately 2400% since 1913, 2000% of that devaluation coming subsequent to 1971 when Nixon moved to a pure fiat currency. The reason we moved to a fiat currency is to remove the restriction on money supply that is inherent to a convertible currency. We can see in the next chart that inflation is directly linked to money supply, which has seen around 1700% increase since 1971.


This ‘easy’ money accelerated significantly around the mid 1990′s and this has led to a misallocation of resources. To see this, let’s look at the relationship between corporate fixed capital expenditures and dividends. The idea being that fixed capital expenditures are economically productive meaning they lead to economic expansion, whereas dividends divert cash off corporate balance sheets and thus detract from capital expenditures, having a contractionary force on the economy.

The above chart clearly depicts a significant change in the economy’s allocation of corporate resources at the same time money printing accelerated. Fixed capital investment was a much larger share of GDP than dividends up until the mid 1990′s when that began to reverse.  Again moving to a market environment that promotes a contracting rather than expansionary economic process.  We should be able to see this effect actually taking place via declining capacity utilization.  As a result of that we should then see declining labour participation rate and declining incomes from slack in the labour market. Looking at the data this is exactly what we find.

Notice that all three indicators begin to trend downward around 1998, shortly after (and one could suggest as a direct result of) the resource misallocation that began a few years earlier in the mid 1990′s. The next link in this chain should be an expansion of consumer loans in an attempt to offset the resulting demand deterioration from the weakening job market conditions.

We find abundant empirical evidence in the above charts showing an acceleration of consumer debt during the mid 1990′s and again around 2009.  And this is perfectly in line with our theory and so we seem to be on the right track.  Now the obvious result of massive increases in consumer debt is that ownership is being replaced by indebtedness.  That is, to a great extent now we rent or borrower our assets as opposed to owning them.

In the above chart we see that home ownership is now back to the level it was before we ended Bretton Woods in 1971. And it’s not just housing, today about 75% of new car sales are being financed and with longer maturities than ever before. In short, ownership of the 2 major assets typical to the traditional American family has been on a sharp decline for the past 10 years with no signs of slowing.
The American dream is built on ownership because it represents substantive progress by way of building a family’s net worth. A net worth that has declined by 40% since 2007 for all but the very top of the economic food chain.  But it’s not only the American dream that is in retreat. The reality is that over the past 8 years increases in public debt have outgrown increases in GDP.  The nation is borrowing more than it’s producing and spending more than it’s collecting every quarter.  A trend that is to continue and to worsen each and every new year according to the CBO’s own projections.


Where does this leave America and really the rest of the western world whose data will mirror the US?

Bankrupt and on borrowed time.

How America Became An Oligarchy

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/07/2015 22:30 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-07/how-america-became-oligarchy
Submitted by Ellen Brown via The Web of Debt blog,

"The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. . . . You have owners."

- George Carlin, The American Dream

According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.
“Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?
The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the doctrine that “all men are created equal” – that all people have “certain inalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – is an American original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but the voters’ collective will no longer prevails.
In Greece, the left-wing populist Syriza Party came out of nowhere to take the presidential election by storm; and in Spain, the populist Podemos Party appears poised to do the same. But for over a century, no third-party candidate has had any chance of winning a US presidential election. We have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is between two candidates, both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age.
In state and local elections, third party candidates have sometimes won. In a modest-sized city, candidates can actually influence the vote by going door to door, passing out flyers and bumper stickers, giving local presentations, and getting on local radio and TV. But in a national election, those efforts are easily trumped by the mass media. And local governments too are beholden to big money.
When governments of any size need to borrow money, the megabanks in a position to supply it can generally dictate the terms. Even in Greece, where the populist Syriza Party managed to prevail in January, the anti-austerity platform of the new government is being throttled by the moneylenders who have the government in a chokehold.
How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten too big to be governed by majority vote?

Democracy’s Rise and Fall

The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called “The Collapse of Democratic Nation States” by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments:

The influence of money was greatly enhanced by the emergence of private banking.  The banks are able to create money and so to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth.  This control of money-creation . . . has given banks overwhelming control over human affairs.  In the United States, Wall Street makes most of the truly important decisions that are directly attributed to Washington.

Today the vast majority of the money supply in Western countries is created by private bankers. That tradition goes back to the 17^th century, when the privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England’s money after Parliament stripped that power from the Crown. When King William needed money to fight a war, he had to borrow. The government as borrower then became servant of the lender.
In America, however, the colonists defied the Bank of England and issued their own paper scrip; and they thrived. When King George forbade that practice, the colonists rebelled.
They won the Revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold.
This was the system euphemistically called “fractional reserve” banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the banks’ privately-issued notes was actually held in their vaults. These notes were lent at interest, putting citizens and the government in debt to bankers who created the notes with a printing press. It was something the government could have done itself debt-free, and the American colonies had done with great success until England went to war to stop them.
President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists’ paper money system when he issued the Treasury notes called “Greenbacks” that helped the Union win the Civil War. But Lincoln was assassinated, and the Greenback issues were discontinued.
In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.
The Populist movement of the 1890s represented the last serious challenge to the bankers’ monopoly over the right to create the nation’s money.  According to monetary historian Murray Rothbard, politics after the turn of the century became a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers.  The parties sometimes changed hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players.
In All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nomi Prins names six banking giants and associated banking families that have dominated politics for over a century. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks.

Democracy Succumbs to Globalization

In an earlier era, notes Dr. Cobb, wealthy landowners were able to control democracies by restricting government participation to the propertied class. When those restrictions were removed, big money controlled elections by other means:

First, running for office became expensive, so that those who seek office require wealthy sponsors to whom they are then beholden.  Second, the great majority of voters have little independent knowledge of those for whom they vote or of the issues to be dealt with.  Their judgments are, accordingly, dependent on what they learn from the mass media.  These media, in turn, are controlled by moneyed interests.

Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then enabled those other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government.
The final blow to democracy, says Dr. Cobb, was “globalization” – an expanding global market that overrides national interests:

[T]oday’s global economy is fully transnational.  The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments. . . . Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not.

The most glaring example today is the secret twelve-country trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If it goes through, the TPP will dramatically expand the power of multinational corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge and supersede domestic laws, including environmental, labor, health and other protections.

Looking at Alternatives

Some critics ask whether our system of making decisions by a mass popular vote easily manipulated by the paid-for media is the most effective way of governing on behalf of the people. In an interesting Ted Talk, political scientist Eric Li makes a compelling case for the system of “meritocracy” that has been quite successful in China.
In America Beyond Capitalism, Prof. Gar Alperovitz argues that the US is simply too big to operate as a democracy at the national level. Excluding Canada and Australia, which have large empty landmasses, the United States is larger geographically than all the other advanced industrial countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) combined. He proposes what he calls “The Pluralist Commonwealth”: a system anchored in the reconstruction of communities and the democratization of wealth. It involves plural forms of cooperative and common ownership beginning with decentralization and moving to higher levels of regional and national coordination when necessary. He is co-chair along with James Gustav Speth of an initiative called The Next System Project, which seeks to help open a far-ranging discussion of how to move beyond the failing traditional political-economic systems of both left and Right..
Dr. Alperovitz quotes Prof. Donald Livingston, who asked in 2002:

What value is there in continuing to prop up a union of this monstrous size? . . . [T]here are ample resources in the American federal tradition to justify states’ and local communities’ recalling, out of their own sovereignty, powers they have allowed the central government to usurp.

Taking Back Our Power

If governments are recalling their sovereign powers, they might start with the power to create money, which was usurped by private interests while the people were asleep at the wheel. State and local governments are not allowed to print their own currencies; but they can own banks, and all depository banks create money when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged.
The federal government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as Abraham Lincoln did. Alternatively, it could issue some very large denomination coins as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks.
The freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom – the freedom to work and to have food, shelter, education, medical care and a decent retirement. President Franklin Roosevelt maintained that we need an Economic Bill of Rights. If our elected representatives were not beholden to the moneylenders, they might be able both to pass such a bill and to come up with the money to fund it.

Home What Would Happen If Martial Law Was Declared In America?

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/02/2015 22:25 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-02/what-would-happen-if-martial-law-was-declared-america
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
In recent weeks, there has been a lot of concern that an upcoming eight week military exercise on U.S. soil known as “Jade Helm” is actually a dress rehearsal for the imposition of martial law in this country.  One of the reasons for the high level of concern is that we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of “urban warfare exercises” conducted by the U.S. military in major U.S. cities over the past decade – including exercises where “dissidents” are hunted down, arrested and hauled away.  As our world becomes increasingly unstable, and as our society rapidly decays from within, many believe that it is only a matter of time before the executive branch will have sufficient excuse to use the extensive martial law powers that it has been accumulating since 9/11.  When that day arrives, what will our nation look like?  What would actually happen if martial law was declared in America?
Well, the first thing that you need to know is that the U.S. Constitution would be “suspended”.
In other words, you would suddenly have no rights at all.
There would be no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom of assembly and you could be arrested at any time for any reason whatsoever.
For the duration of the “emergency”, the military would be in control.  There would be troops in the streets, a curfew would almost certainly be imposed, and armed checkpoints would be set up.
If the “emergency” lasted long enough, we would probably see authorities go house to house confiscating firearms, ammunition and food supplies.
And perhaps most troubling of all, “dissidents” and “subversives” would likely be rounded up and imprisoned.
Perhaps you don’t think that this could ever happen in the United States in 2015.
Well, we do know that this is precisely what the FBI had a plan to do in the 1950s.  The following is an excerpt from a recent RT article…

Documents show the FBI created a “Plan C” during the Cold War, which could have been triggered in the event the US underwent a nuclear attack. It included putting the nation under martial law, rounding up “subversives,” and interning enemy diplomats.

The documents, acquired by transparency journalism organization MuckRock, detail the FBI plan created in 1956, which was shared with several top officials from every governmental department. The FBI also distributed papers regarding the plan to its field offices. The plan would have gone into effect “after a war has begun in which the US is involved or may become involved and prior to an actual attack on the US itself,” according to the documents.

Under Plan C, martial law would be declared and the FBI would enact its ‘Emergency Detention Program,’ which entailed apprehending individuals whose affiliations with subversive organizations “are so pronounced that their continued liberty in the event of a national emergency would present a serious threat to the internal security of the country.” The document shows that as of April 1956, almost 13,000 people “were scheduled for apprehension in an emergency.”

Very sobering.
And we do know that the federal government had a list of at least 8 million names of people that were considered to be “threats to national security” back in the 1980s.  This list was known as Main Core, and it is not known whether this list still exists today.
I have a feeling that it does, and that it is probably much larger than it was back then.
We also know that government documents produced during the Obama administration openly discuss rounding up “dissidents” and taking them to internment camps.  Just consider the following example from Infowars…

A leaked 2012 US Army Military Police training manual, entitled “Civil Disturbance Operations,” described how soldiers would be ordered to confiscate firearms and kill American “dissidents.” The manual also revealed that prisoners would be detained in temporary internment camps and “re-educated” to gain a new appreciation of “U.S. policies,” in accordance with U.S. Army FM 3-19.40 Internment/Resettlement Operations.

So who would those “dissidents” be exactly?
In “72 Types Of Americans That Are Considered ‘Potential Terrorists’ In Official Government Documents“, I detailed how official U.S. government documents specifically identify those that believe in “conspiracy theories” as possible threats.  Others that the government is concerned about include those opposed to abortion, globalism, communism, illegal immigration, the United Nations and “the New World Order”.
I wish that none of this was true.  Go check out the article for yourself.
Another very disturbing government document talks about the need for the U.S. Army to prepare to battle political dissidents in “megacities” and to neutralize groups “who can influence the lives of the population while undermining the authority of the state”.  Here is more from Infowars…

The U.S. Army is preparing to fight political dissidents who challenge the power of the state as “megacities” become the battleground of the future, according to a new report in the Army Times.

The article details how the Army’s Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) worked with US Army Special Operations Command, the chief of staff’s Strategic Studies Group and the UK’s Ministry of Defence earlier this year to wargame the future of armed combat, which will revolve around the neutralization of groups “who can influence the lives of the population while undermining the authority of the state,” a chillingly vague description which could easily be applied to political dissidents.

The plan foresees an unprecedented realignment of U.S. military strategy focused around putting “boots on the ground” in megacities to deal with “politically dispossessed” populations while relying on “more lethal and more autonomous” methods.

Very alarming stuff.
And if we did see martial law declared nationwide, it is likely that all elections would be suspended indefinitely.
That could also potentially include the 2016 presidential election.
Is it possible that Barack Obama could use his emergency powers to stay in the White House beyond his second term?  There are some out there that believe that this could actually happen under the right circumstances.  For example, check out what Dr. Ben Carson said during an appearance on the Alan Colmes radio show…

COLMES: What do you mean though when you say there may not be an election in 2016?

DR. BEN CARSON: There may be so much anarchy going on.

COLMES: Anarchy? So you really think we risk risking an anarchic America to the point where elections might be put on hold, or some kind of emergency is declared with such anarchy that there wouldn’t be a Presidential election in a couple of years?

DR. BEN CARSON: I don’t want to find out. I really don’t want to find out, I don’t want to continue down this pathway that we’re going down.

And the groundwork has certainly been laid for such a scenario.
During his time in the White House, Barack Obama has signed a series of executive orders that give him and his minions an extraordinary amount of power in the event of a major national emergency.
For example, read the following excerpt from an executive order that Obama signed in March 2012…

Sec. 201.  Priorities and Allocations Authorities.  (a)  The authority of the President conferred by section 101 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071, to require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, and to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense, is delegated to the following agency heads:

(1)  the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to food resources, food resource facilities, livestock resources, veterinary resources, plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment and commercial fertilizer;

(2)  the Secretary of Energy with respect to all forms of energy;

(3)  the Secretary of Health and Human Services with respect to health resources;

(4)  the Secretary of Transportation with respect to all forms of civil transportation;

(5)  the Secretary of Defense with respect to water resources; and

(6)  the Secretary of Commerce with respect to all other materials, services, and facilities, including construction materials.

That sounds like it covers just about everything.
Basically, during a time of martial law all of the things that you take for granted today would be out the window.
You would have no rights, and the federal government would be able to do just about anything that it wanted to do.
If that sounds really bad to you, then maybe now you are starting to understand why so many people get upset when they see preparations being made for the eventual imposition of martial law in this country.

Why I’m Not Breaking Up with America This Valentine’s Day

Posted on February 10, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

By John Whitehead, constitutional and human rights attorney, and founder of the Rutherford Institute.

“I love America and I hate it. I’m torn between the two. I have two conflicting visions of America. One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.”― Bono

Almost every week I get an email from an American expatriate living outside the country who commiserates about the deplorable state of our freedoms in the United States, expounds on his great fortune in living outside the continental U.S., and urges me to leave the country before all hell breaks loose and my wife and children are tortured, raped, brutalized and killed.

Without fail, this gentleman concludes every piece of correspondence by questioning my sanity in not shipping my grandchildren off to some far-flung locale to live their lives free of fear, police brutality, and surveillance.

I must confess that when faced with unmistakable warning signs that the country I grew up in is no more, I have my own moments of doubt.

After all, why would anyone put up with a government that brazenly steals, cheats, sneaks, spies and lies, not to mention alienates, antagonizes, criminalizes and terrorizes its own citizens and then justifies it in the name of safety, security and the greater good?

Why would anyone put up with militarized police officers who shoot first and ask questions later, act as if their word is law, and operate as if they are above the law?

Why would anyone put up with government officials, it doesn’t matter whether they’re elected or appointed, who live an elitist lifestyle while setting themselves apart from the populace, operate outside the rule of law, and act as if they’re beyond reproach and immune from being held accountable?

Unfortunately, not only do we put up with a laundry list of tyrannies that make King George III’s catalogue of abuses look like child’s play, but most actually persist in turning a blind eye to them, acting as if what they don’t see or acknowledge can’t hurt them.

The sad reality, as I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, is that life in America is no bed of roses. Nor are there any signs that things will get better anytime soon, at least not for “we the people,” those of us who belong to the so-called “unwashed masses”—the working class stiffs, the hoi polloi, the plebeians, the rabble, the riffraff, the herd, the peons and the proletariats.

For instance, we’re still being spied on by our own government. Incredibly, while the British courts recognize that mass government surveillance of cellphone and online communications is not only illegal but violates human rights, the U.S. courts and politicians continue to pander to the government’s whims, whether or not they run afoul of the rule of law. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) actually wants to make the NSA’s mass surveillance a permanent practice.

Not only is the government unapologetic about spying on its citizens, but government agencies are using their collective surveillance data to carry out Orwellian pre-crime programs that attempt to nab “criminals” before they ever commit a crime. To do so, they have to study our social media posts, our buying habits, and where we travel to and from, and on and on.

We’re still being treated like serfs working for an overlord, with little actual rights when it comes to our property, our bodies, our children or our welfare. It doesn’t really matter what the justifications are for such taxes, regulations, prohibitions and fines if they result in us having little-to-no control over how we live our lives. In Seattle, for example, even one’s trash is subject to government regulation. Residents who fail to separate out their food waste for composting are fined for each violation.

We’re still bartering our freedoms away for the phantom promise of security, and we’re no safer and much less freer than we were two decades ago. First, it was the Patriot Act, which continues to sanction all manner of government intrusions into our lives, from the government tracking what cold medicine we use and how we spend our money to what we read and with whom we communicate.

Then it was whole-body scanners in the airports, which were expensive, invasive and ineffective. Most recently, we’ve been subjected to a song-and-dance number about the need for body cameras on police officers to rein in abusive cops, with little said about how these surveillance cameras will be used to identify and track those in their range, or how difficult the footage will be to acquire if needed for our own defense.

We’re still being fooled into thinking that politics matter and that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when in fact, the two parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted, both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.

Our communities are still being held hostage by militarized police. Despite the fleeting attention paid to the transformation of community police into extensions of the military, the transfer of military equipment from the federal government to localities continues unabated, with more than $28 million worth of tactical equipment distributed in the last quarter of 2014. The federal government, in conjunction with local police, has created a standing army on American soil—something those who drafted our Constitution believed would devastate our freedoms.

We’re still exchanging one set of wars for another, to the delight and profit of the military industrial complex. We’ve gone from waging war against Iraq and Iran to sounding the war drums against North Korea, Syria and ISIS wherever it happens to rear its head.

Every once in a while, we get tossed a bone to satisfy that gnawing, nagging hunger for something that looks and tastes like freedom, democracy and free enterprise. Political elections, town-hall meetings, awards ceremonies, sports spectacles, high-dollar lotteries, reality TV shows, morning news programs and patriotic-themed blockbuster movies: these are all the trappings of a so-called free nation without the substance (what Shakespeare referred to as a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”). Indeed, Big Business, in conjunction with Big Government, have become very adept at distracting the citizenry so that “we the people” often have no clue as to the real nature of the political game being played.

Temporarily assuaged, easily distracted and suffering from an appalling case of public amnesia, we fall right back into our complacency and compliance, content to turn a blind eye to blatant abuses, forgive past transgressions, and forget all of the reasons why we should be mad as hell about the state of our nation.

So why do I stay? Why do any of us continue to put up with the gut-wrenching, soul-sucking, misery-drenched, demoralizing existence that is America today?

Perhaps I stay because I was raised to believe that anything worth having is worth fighting for, and I believe with every fiber of my being that freedom matters. In fact, I come from a long line of Americans who understood that there is a price to be paid for freedom, whether that means standing up to the British military, sitting down in a bus seat reserved for “whites only,” or pushing back against corporations who pollute our waters and pillage our lands for profit.

Perhaps I soldier on because I remember what it was like to grow up at a time when the only surveillance I had to worry about were the neighbors who reported back to my mother whenever I did something wrong, and I desperately want my grandchildren to experience that kind of carefree existence. I want them to know that there’s more to life than metal detectors, lockdowns, random searches and pre-crime units trying to nab them for a crime if they dare step out of line.

Perhaps I persevere because I know that there are genuinely concerned Americans out there, including some good cops, honest politicians and pragmatic idealists, who want to pitch in and turn things around for the better. As long as there is this small but vocal minority who cares enough to stand up and speak out, then all is not completely lost.

Perhaps I stick it out because I know that surveillance, overcriminalization, militarized police, power-hungry politicians and greedy corporations are not exclusive to America, and there’s nowhere you can escape to where tyranny cannot follow. No matter what you think of Ronald Reagan and his politics, he was right when he warned that, “If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”

Most of all, perhaps I keep fighting on because I’m just not ready to give up on America. At least, not yet.

In the words of that revolutionary firebrand Patrick Henry:

Gentlemen may cry, peace, peace — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! — I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!