BRUCE: America’s expanding police state

Neighborhood cops are becoming armed soldiers

With so much happening internationally and the number of scandals, crises and general screw-ups of the Obama administration here at home, it’s worth noting a disturbing development here on the domestic front: a rapidly expanding police state.

On my radio program last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Cheryl Chumley, a reporter for The Washington Times, about her new book, “Police State USA: How George Orwell’s Nightmare is Becoming our Reality.” The title says it all, and aptly describes the shocking transformation of what had been our free society.

We all know about the scope of National Security Agency (NSA) spying. It’s fair to say at this point in our lives that the notion of privacy is all but dead and gone. However, it didn’t start there. In her book, Mrs. Chumley takes us on a ride through history, reminding us of the original intentions of the Founding Fathers versus the assault on the original design by “21st century realities.”

Keep in mind, people in the political class constantly reveal their contempt for regular citizens. That contempt is the inevitable result of a group of people who have convinced themselves that big government is necessary because the little people can’t control their own lives.

These same politicians and bureaucrats then begin to see themselves a genuinely better than everyone else. After all, if they were just like us, then they’d be part of the rabble, and they can’t have that. The solution to their dilemma is a police state.

Mrs. Chumley’s chapters in “Police State USA” provide a treatise on all the elements of society that are under attack as big government seeks to sustain itself through a police state, including aspects of an expanding and increasingly paranoid bureaucratic system that has decided the individual is the problem.


Read More At: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/20/bruceraising-a-police-state-army/

 

Flashback

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKty_3IlXOc&feature=kp

 

The U.S. Supreme Court Is Marching in Lockstep with the Police State

By John W. Whitehead
June 23, 2014

“f the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib, if they can ‘seize’ and ‘search’ him in their discretion, we enter a new regime. The decision to enter it should be made only after a full debate by the people of this country.”—U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

The U.S. Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. In the police state being erected around us, the police and other government agents can probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts.

Whether it’s police officers breaking through people’s front doors and shooting them dead in their homes or strip searching innocent motorists on the side of the road, these instances of abuse are continually validated by a judicial system that kowtows to virtually every police demand, no matter how unjust, no matter how in opposition to the Constitution.

These are the hallmarks of the emerging American police state: where police officers, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.

A review of the Supreme Court’s rulings over the past 10 years, including some critical ones this term, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.


Read More At: https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_us_supreme_court_is_marching_in_lockstep_with_the_police_state

Keep in mind that in former regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the complicity of the courts was the final piece to fall into place before the totalitarian beast stepped out of the shadows and into the light. If history is a guide, then the future that awaits us is truly frightening.

Time, as they say, grows short.

 

US police departments are increasingly militarised, finds report

At 3am on 28 May, Alecia Phonesavanh was asleep in the room she was temporarily occupying together with her husband and four children in the small town of Cornelia, Georgia. Her baby, 18-month-old Bou Bou, was sleeping peacefully in his cot.

Suddenly there was a loud bang and several strangers dressed in black burst into the room. A blinding flash burst out with a deafening roar from the direction of the cot. Amid the confusion, Phonesavanh could see her husband pinned down and handcuffed under one of the men in black, and while her son was being held by another. Everyone was yelling, screaming, crying. “I kept asking the officers to let me have my baby, but they said shut up and sit down,” she said.

As the pandemonium died down, it became clear that the strangers in black were a Swat team of police officers from the local Habersham County force – they had raided the house on the incorrect assumption that occupants were involved in drugs. It also became clear to Phonesavanh that something had happened to Bou Bou and that the officers had taken him away.

“They told me that they had taken my baby to the hospital. They said he was fine he had only lost a tooth, but they wanted him in for observation,” Phonesavanh said.

When she got to the hospital she was horrified by what she saw. Bou Bou was in a medically-induced coma in the intensive care unit of Brady Memorial hospital. “His face was blown open. He had a hole in his chest that left his rib-cage visible.”

Read More At: http://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/jun/24/military-us-police-swat-teams-raids-aclu


If the United States is a police state, then the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its national police force, with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies. In fact, although the DHS’ governmental bureaucracy may at times appear to be inept and bungling, it is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to building what the founders feared most — a standing army on American soil.

The third-argest federal agency behind the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, the DHS — with its 240,000 full-time workers, $61 billion budget and sub-agencies that include the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — has been aptly dubbed a “runaway train.” With good reason, a bipartisan bill to provide greater oversight and accountability into the DHS’ purchasing process has been making its way through Congress.

A better plan would be to abolish the DHS altogether. The menace of a national police force, aka a standing army, vested with so much power cannot be overstated, nor can its danger be ignored. Indeed, as the following list shows, just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to police agencies in the form of grants.

Read More At: http://www.wmicentral.com/opinion/editorials/has-homeland-security-become-america-s-standing-army/article_20e1ecd2-fb35-11e3-bd6f-0019bb2963f4.html

 

10 Facts About The SWATification Of America That Everyone Should Know

The number of SWAT team raids in the United States every year is now more than 25 times higher than it was back in 1980. As America has conducted wars overseas in recent years, our police forces have become increasingly militarized as well. And without a doubt, many of our cities have become much more dangerous places. Thanks to relentless illegal immigration, drug cartels are thriving and there are now at least 1.4 million gang members living in the United States. But there are many that believe that the militarization of our police forces has gone way too far. Almost weekly, SWAT team brutality somewhere in America makes national headlines. You are about to read about a couple of horrific examples of this below. Once upon a time, police in America were helpful and friendly and the public generally trusted them. But now our police forces are being transformed into military-style units that often act like they are in the middle of Iraq or Afghanistan. The following are 10 facts about the SWATification of America that everyone should know…

Read More At: http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/10-facts-about-the-swatification-of-america-that-everyone-should-know

Privileged Purveyors of State Violence Seek to Ban — Or Cage — Their Critics

Although government-aligned media outlets generally are faithful stenographers for the coercive caste, the same is not true of social media. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have fatally undermined the official narrative that law enforcement is a noble calling by offering critics the means to document and publicize the criminal violence and pervasive corruption that characterize the profession. Thus it’s not surprising that police are seeking to ban Facebook pages that document police misconduct and demand accountability.

“There are anti-anti-police pages starting whose main purpose isn’t to engage the anti-police pages intellectually, but just to report and get them banned,” warns LRC reader Buddhadev Chakraborty. “Examples of these pages are Stop the Cop Haters, and Night of Blue Lights.”

Not surprisingly, given that this is the age of Homeland Security Theater, cops and their fellow travelers often seek to provoke comments that can be construed as “threats” or “incitement” – and then demand that Facebook shut the supposedly offensive pages.

Read More At: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/06/william-norman-grigg/privileged-purveyors-of-state-violence%E2%80%A8/

Unless SWAT Stormtroopers Can Burn Infants In their Cribs, ISIS Will Get You!

In the Line of Duty, a company providing what it calls “reality-based training for law enforcement,” eagerly anticipates a terrorist strike by ISIS as a way of changing the subject from the routine atrocities committed by militarized police – such as the savage flash-bang attack that left newborn infant Bou-Bou Phonesavankh fighting for his life in an intensive care unit.

When this `militarization of lea’s [Law Enforcement Agencies] affects infants like Bou Bou, the public’s going to be righteously outraged. But, someday, when ISIS comes a calling, who will be complaining then?” sneered the company’s Facebook page, a statement growing out of the assumption that 3:00 a.m. Stormtrooper raids that leave infants with disfiguring injuries are simply the price we must pay to be protected from whatever “threats” our rulers can conjure.

Read More At: http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/unless-swat-stormtroopers-can-burn-infants-in-their-cribs-isis-will-get-you/