Looking Beyond Election Day: The Issues That Threaten to Derail the Nation
October 31, 2012
By John W. Whitehead
While it may be months before the devastation wrought by Hurricane
Sandy can be fully resolved, Americans cannot afford to lose sight of
the very real and pressing issues that threaten to derail the nation.
What follows is an overview of the major issues that both Barack Obama
and Mitt Romney, despite their respective billion dollar war chests,
have failed to mention during their extensive campaign trail stumping
and televised debates. These are issues that aren’t going away anytime
soon. Indeed, unless we take a proactive approach to the problems that
loom large before us, especially as they relate to America’s ongoing
transformation into a police state, we may find that they are here to
stay.
Militarized police. Thanks to federal grant programs
allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons
to local law enforcement agencies without charge, police forces are
being transformed from peace officers to heavily armed extensions of the
military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons,
pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and
weaponized drones. As Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury, observed, “Today, 17,000 local police forces are equipped
with such military equipment as Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns,
grenade launchers, battering rams, explosives, chemical sprays, body
armor, night vision, rappelling gear and armored vehicles. Some have
tanks.” In other words, what we are witnessing is an inversion of the
police-civilian relationship.
Drones. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000
drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020, all part of an
industry that could be worth as much as $30 billion per year. These
machines will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat
sensors and radar. Some drones are capable of hijacking Wi-Fi networks
and intercepting electronic communications such as text messages.
SWAT team raids. With more than 50,000 SWAT team raids
carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine
police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law
enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related
casualties is on the rise. Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to
address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere
community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper
paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana
possession, to give a brief sampling.
Suspect society. Due in large part to rapid advances
in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof
has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until
proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are
suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and
frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there
is no evidence of wrongdoing. Making matters worse are Terrorism Liaison
Officers (firefighters, police officers, and even corporate employees)
who have been trained to spy on their fellow citizens and report
“suspicious activity,” which includes taking pictures with no apparent
aesthetic value, making measurements and drawings, taking notes,
conversing in code, espousing radical beliefs and buying items in bulk.
TLOs report back to “fusion centers,” which are a driving force behind
the government’s quest to collect, analyze, and disseminate information
on American citizens.
VIPR Strikes. Under the pretext of protecting the
nation’s infrastructure (roads, mass transit systems, water and power
supplies, telecommunications systems and so on) against criminal or
terrorist attacks, VIPR task forces (comprised of federal air marshals,
surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security
officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine
teams) are being deployed to do random security sweeps of nexuses of
transportation, including ports, railway and bus stations, airports,
ferries and subways. VIPR teams are also being deployed to elevate the
security presence at certain special events such as political
conventions, baseball games and music concerts. Sweep tactics include
the use of x-ray technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs, among
other things. These stings inculcate and condition citizens to a culture
of submissiveness towards authority and regularize intrusive,
suspicionless searches as a facet of everyday life.
Invasive surveillance technology. Police have been
outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers
and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology
now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to
detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body
scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling
by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into
vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the nation’s
growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition
software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
USA Patriot Act, NDAA. America’s so-called war on
terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, has chipped away
at our freedoms, unraveled our Constitution and transformed our nation
into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation
as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.
These laws completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional
rights of American citizens, re-orienting our legal landscape in such a
way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law—our U.S.
Constitution—becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United
States.
Schoolhouse to jailhouse track. The paradigm of abject
compliance to the state is being taught by example in the schools,
through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the
classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally
and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. As a
consequence, school districts are increasingly teaming up with law
enforcement to create what some are calling the “schoolhouse to
jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment: suspension
or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a
trip to juvenile court. In this way, young people find themselves in an
environment where they have no true rights and government authorities
have near total power over them and can violate their constitutional
rights whenever they see fit.
Overcriminalization. In the face of a government
bureaucracy consumed with churning out laws, statutes, codes and
regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the
police state and its corporate allies, we are all petty criminals,
guilty of violating some minor law. In fact, the average American now
unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of
vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal and an
inclination on the part of prosecutors to reject the idea that there
can’t be a crime without criminal intent. Consequently, we now find
ourselves operating in a strange new world where small farmers who dare
to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their
community are finding their farms raided, while home gardeners face jail
time for daring to cultivate their own varieties of orchids without
having completed sufficient paperwork. This frightening state of
affairs—where a person can actually be arrested and incarcerated for the
most innocent and inane activities, including feeding a whale and
collecting rainwater on their own property—is due to what law scholars
refer to as overcriminalization.
Privatized Prisons. At one time, the American penal
system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put
under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, as states
attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations,
imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has
turned into a cash cow for big business. In exchange for corporations
buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed
savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90%
occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years. Such a
scheme simply encourages incarceration for the sake of profits, while
causing millions of Americans, most of them minor, nonviolent criminals,
to be handed over to corporations for lengthy prison sentences which do
nothing to protect society or prevent recidivism.
Endless wars. Having been co-opted by greedy defense
contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials,
America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a
rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and
that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not
include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military
bases spread around the globe. Incredibly, although the U.S.
constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50%
of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the
military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact,
the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on
health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to
recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the
country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial
complex at taxpayer expense.
Rise of the Imperial President. During his two terms
in office, George W. Bush stepped outside the boundaries of the
Constitution and assembled an amazing toolbox of powers that greatly
increased the authority of the Executive branch and the reach of the
federal government. Bush expanded presidential power to, among other
things, allow government agents to secretly open the private mail of
American citizens; authorize government agents to secretly, and
illegally, listen in on the phone calls of American citizens and read
our e-mails; assume control of the federal government following a
“catastrophic event”; and declare martial law. Thus, the groundwork was
laid for an imperial presidency, a state of affairs that continued after
Barack Obama’s ascension to the Oval Office and one that will likely
not improve, no matter who wins on Election Day, unless something is
done to restore the balance between government and its citizens.
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