Rethinking 9/11

[John Liberty]

On 10 September, the US economy was strong, although it had begun to slow down after a sustained period of growth. The unemployment rate stood at 4.9%. We were paying down the national debt and there was a $127 billion surplus for the fiscal year ending on 30 September. For some, concern about the nation's debt focused on what might happen in a few years when the debt was completely eliminated and there was no longer a need for US treasuries, a key component in the world's economy.

Worries about the consequences of a debt-free America evaporated soon thereafter. After tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and a near-collapse of the economy, US treasury department figures show the nation's debt grew from less than $6 trillion in 2001 to nearly $16trillion today. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate has remained over 8% throughout 2012 after peaking at 10% in October 2009.

Rightly or wrongly, on 10 September 2001, most Americans believed their phone calls and emails were private and did not suspect that the government might be listening in and keeping tabs. If someone fondled your junk at the airport, you would expect to see the person again, this time as you sat on the witness standing testifying in his or her sexual assault trial. If the government was going to execute a citizen, it was assumed that followed after a trial and appeals in the courts of our judicial system, not a unilateral decision by a president that is immune from any review.

Back then, our most recent recollection of war was Desert Storm, a six-week campaign that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with fewer than 150 US military personnel killed in action. We watched on television as members of the Iraqi armed forces put down their weapons and surrendered by the tens of thousands, something they did in part because they trusted United States military personnel would provide them food, shelter, medical care and humane treatment.

Now, after more than a decade of non-stop war, in which only a small percentage of Americans have ever had any skin in the game, the public seems to pay little attention to the thousands of Americans who have died, the tens of thousands who have been injured, or the hundreds of billions of dollars spent overseas.

Public opinion of the United States tends to vary sharply among people in different countries, but one common trend is that America's reputation has declined across the board over the past dozen years, even among America's closest allies. A Pew Research Center report in 2000 showed the US had an 83% favorable rating in Great Britain. Today, it stands at 60%, up a bit from 53% in 2008. In Germany, the US favorability rating fell from 78% in 2000 to a low of 31% in 2008.

America has taken some of the shine off of that "shining city on a hill" Ronald Reagan described as the envy of the world.

Attitudes of the American public have changed significantly, too. A poll conducted by the Christian Science Monitor in November 2001 showed that two-thirds of Americans were opposed to torture. A survey conduct by the American Red Cross in 2011 showed that a majority of Americans, including nearly six in 10 teenagers, approved of using torture. Perceptions of what is right and wrong changed when fear took hold in the Home of the Brave.

There is ample room for debate about how and why America got to where it is today, but as election day approaches on 6 November, Americans need to ask themselves about the direction they want the nation to move in the years ahead. Do they want the future to be more like the America that existed on 10 September 2001 or are they satisfied with the America that emerged after 11 September?"

tinyurl.com/q7ocrxo

"Consider Inauguration Day 2012, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his “liberal” second inaugural address. On that day everything from his invocation of women’s rights (“Seneca Falls”), the civil rights movement (“Selma”), and the gay rights movement (“Stonewall”) to his wife’s new bangs and Beyoncé’s lip-syncing was fodder for the media extravaganza. The president was even praised (or reviled) for what he took pains not to bring up: the budget deficit. Was anything, in fact, not grist for the media mill, the hordes of talking heads, and the chattering classes?

One subject, at least, got remarkably little attention during the inaugural blitz and, when mentioned, certainly struck few as odd or worth dwelling on. Yet nothing better caught our changing American world. Washington, after all, was in a lockdown mode unmatched by any inauguration from another era -- not even Lincoln’s second inaugural in the midst of the Civil War, or Franklin Roosevelt’s during World War II, or John F. Kennedy’s at the height of the Cold War.

Here’s how NBC Nightly News described some of the security arrangements as the day approached:

“[T]he airspace above Washington... [will be] a virtual no-fly zone for 30 miles in all directions from the U.S. capital. Six miles of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers will be shut down, with 150 blocks of downtown Washington closed to traffic, partly out of concern for car or truck bombs... with counter-snipers on top of buildings around the capital and along the parade route... [and] detectors monitoring the air for toxins... At the ready near the capital, thousands of doses of antidotes in case of a chemical or biological attack… All this security will cost about $120 million dollars for hundreds of federal agents, thousands of local police, and national guardsmen from 25 states.”

Consider just the money. It’s common knowledge that, until the recent deal over the renewal of the George W. Bush tax cuts for all but the richest of Americans, taxes had not been raised since the read-my-lips-no-new-taxes era of his father. That’s typical of the way we haven’t yet assimilated the new world we find ourselves in. After all, shouldn’t that $120 million in taxpayer money spent on “safety” and “security” for a single event in Washington be considered part of an ongoing Osama bin Laden tax?

Maybe it's time to face the facts: this isn’t your grandfather’s America. Once, prospective Americans landed in a New World. This time around, a new world’s landed on us."

"In these years, what might have remained essentially a nightmarish fantasy has become an impending reality around which the national security folks organize their lives -- and ours. Ever since the now largely forgotten anthrax mail attacks that killed five soon after 9/11 -- the anthrax in those envelopes may have come directly from a U.S. bioweapons laboratory -- all sorts of fantastic scenarios involving biochemical attacks have become part and parcel of the American lockdown state.

In the Bush era, for instance, among the apocalyptic dream scenes the president and his top officials used to panic Congress into approving a much-desired invasion of Iraq were the possibility of future mushroom clouds over American cities and this claim: that Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had drones (he didn’t) and the means to get them to the East Coast of the U.S. (he didn’t), and the ability to use them to launch attacks in which chemical and biological weaponry would be sprayed over U.S. cities (he didn’t). This was a presidentially promoted fantasy of the first order, but no matter. Some senators actually voted to go to war at least partially on the basis of it.

As is often true of ruling groups, Bush and his cronies weren’t just manipulating us with the fear of nightmarish future attacks, but themselves as well. Thanks to New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer’s fine book The Dark Side, for instance, we know that Vice President Penis Cheney was always driven around Washington with "a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit" in the backseat of his car.

The post-9/11 National Security Complex has been convulsed by such fears. After all, it has funded itself by promising Americans one thing: total safety from one of the lesser dangers of our American world -- “terrorism.” The fear of terrorism (essentially that bin Laden tax again) has been a financial winner for the Complex, but it carries its own built-in terrors. Even with the $75 billion or more a year that we pump into the “U.S. Intelligence Community,” the possibility that it might not discover some bizarre plot, and that, as a result, several airliners might then go down, or a crowd in Washington be decimated, or you name it, undoubtedly leaves many in the Complex in an ongoing state of terror. After all, their jobs and livelihoods are at stake.

Think of their fantasies and fears, which have become ever more real in these years without in any way becoming realities, as the building blocks of the American lockdown state. In this way, intent on “taking the gloves off” -- removing, that is, all those constraints they believed had been put on the executive branch in the Watergate era -- and perhaps preemptively living out their own nightmares, figures like Penis Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld changed our world.

As cultists of a “unitary executive,” they -- and the administration of national security managers who followed in the Obama years -- lifted the executive branch right out of the universe of American legality. They liberated it to do more or less what it wished, as long as “war,” “terrorism,” or “security” could be invoked. Meanwhile, with their Global War on Terror well launched and promoted as a multigenerational struggle, they made wartime their property for the long run.

In the process, they oversaw the building of a National Security Complex with powers that boggle the imagination and freed themselves from the last shreds of accountability for their actions. They established or strengthened the power of the executive to: torture at will (and create the “legal” justification for it); imprison at will, indefinitely and without trial; assassinate at will (including American citizens); kidnap at will anywhere in the world and “render” the captive into the hands of allied torturers; turn any mundane government document (at least 92 million of them in 2011 alone) into a classified object and so help spread a penumbra of secrecy over the workings of the American government; surveil Americans in ways never before attempted (and only “legalized” by Congress after the fact, the way you might backdate a check); make war perpetually on their own say-so; and transform whistleblowing -- that is, revealing anything about the inner workings of the lockdown state to other Americans -- into the only prosecutable crime that anyone in the Complex can commit.

It’s true that some version of a number of these powers existed before 9/11. “Renditions” of terror suspects, for instance, first ramped up in the Clinton years; the FBI conducted illegal surveillance of antiwar organizations and other groups in the 1960s; the classification of government documents had long been on the rise; the congressional power to make war had long been on the wane; and prosecution of those who acted illegally while in government service was probably never a commonplace. (Both the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, however, did involve actual convictions or guilty pleas for illegal acts, followed in some of the Iran-Contra cases by presidential pardons.) Still, in each case, after 9/11, the national security state gained new or greatly magnified powers, including an unprecedented capacity to lockdown the country (and American liberties as well).

What it means to be in such a post-legal world -- to know that, no matter what acts a government official commits, he or she will never be brought to court or have a chance of being put in jail -- has yet to fully sink in. This is true even of critics of the Obama administration, who, as in the case of its drone wars, continue to focus on questions of legality, as if that issue weren’t settled. In this sense, they continue to live in an increasingly fantasy-based version of America in which the rule of law still applies to everyone.

In reality, in the Bush and Obama years, the United States has become a nation not of laws but of legal memos, not of legality but of legalisms -- and you don’t have to be a lawyer to know it. The result? Secret armies, secret wars, secret surveillance, and spreading state secrecy, which meant a government of the bureaucrats about which the American people could know next to nothing. And it’s all “legal.”"

tinyurl.com/b37dlso

"The belief that weaponized drones won't be used on US soil is patently irrational. Of course they will be. It's not just likely but inevitable. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones "could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun." The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use. It likely won't be in the form that has received the most media attention: the type of large Predator or Reaper drones that shoot Hellfire missiles which destroy homes and cars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and multiple other countries aimed at Muslims (although US law enforcement agencies already possess Predator drones and have used them over US soil for surveillance).

Instead, as I detailed in a 2012 examination of the drone industry's own promotional materials and reports to their shareholders, domestic weaponized drones will be much smaller and cheaper, as well as more agile - but just as lethal. The nation's leading manufacturer of small "unmanned aircraft systems" (UAS), used both for surveillance and attack purposes, is AeroVironment, Inc. (AV). Its 2011 Annual Report filed with the SEC repeatedly emphasizes that its business strategy depends upon expanding its market from foreign wars to domestic usage including law enforcement."

"Like many drone manufacturers, AV is now focused on drone products - such as the "Qube" - that are so small that they can be "transported in the trunk of a police vehicle or carried in a backpack" and assembled and deployed within a matter of minutes. One news report AV touts is headlined "Drone technology could be coming to a Police Department near you", which focuses on the Qube.

But another article prominently touted on AV's website describes the tiny UAS product dubbed the "Switchblade", which, says the article, is "the leading edge of what is likely to be the broader, even wholesale, weaponization of unmanned systems." The article creepily hails the Switchblade drone as "the ultimate assassin bug". That's because, as I wrote back in 2011, "it is controlled by the operator at the scene, and it worms its way around buildings and into small areas, sending its surveillance imagery to an i-Pad held by the operator, who can then direct the Switchblade to lunge toward and kill the target (hence the name) by exploding in his face." AV's website right now proudly touts a February, 2013 Defense News article describing how much the US Army loves the "Switchblade" and how it is preparing to purchase more. Time Magazine heralded this tiny drone weapon as "one of the best inventions of 2012", gushing: "the Switchblade drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It's a kamikaze: the person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to crash it into a precise target - say, a sniper. Its tiny warhead detonates on impact."

What possible reason could someone identify as to why these small, portable weaponized UAS products will not imminently be used by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the US? They're designed to protect their users in dangerous situations and to enable a target to be more easily killed. Police agencies and the increasingly powerful drone industry will tout their utility in capturing and killing dangerous criminals and their ability to keep officers safe, and media reports will do the same. The handful of genuinely positive uses from drones will be endlessly touted to distract attention away from the dangers they pose.

One has to be incredibly naïve to think that these "assassin bugs" and other lethal drone products will not be widely used on US soil by an already para-militarized domestic police force. As Radley Balko's forthcoming book "Rise of the Warrior Cop" details, the primary trend in US law enforcement is what its title describes as "The Militarization of America's Police Forces". The history of domestic law enforcement particularly after 9/11 has been the importation of military techniques and weapons into domestic policing. It would be shocking if these weapons were not imminently used by domestic law enforcement agencies.

In contrast to weaponized drones, even the most naïve among us do not doubt the imminent proliferation of domestic surveillance drones. With little debate, they have already arrived. As the ACLU put it in their recent report: "US law enforcement is greatly expanding its use of domestic drones for surveillance." An LA Times article from last month reported that "federal authorities have stepped up efforts to license surveillance drones for law enforcement and other uses in US airspace" and that "the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday it had issued 1,428 permits to domestic drone operators since 2007, far more than were previously known." Moreover, the agency "has estimated 10,000 drones could be aloft five years later" and "local and state law enforcement agencies are expected to be among the largest customers."

Concerns about the proliferation of domestic surveillance drones are typically dismissed with the claim that they do nothing more than police helicopters and satellites already do. Such claims are completely misinformed. As the ACLU's 2011 comprehensive report on domestic drones explained: "Unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the prospect of a significant new avenue for the surveillance of American life."

Multiple attributes of surveillance drones make them uniquely threatening. Because they are so cheap and getting cheaper, huge numbers of them can be deployed to create ubiquitous surveillance in a way that helicopters or satellites never could. How this works can already be seen in Afghanistan, where the US military has dubbed its drone surveillance system "the Gorgon Stare", named after the "mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them". That drone surveillance system is "able to scan an area the size of a small town" and "the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence that [can] seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity". Boasted one US General: "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."

The NSA already maintains ubiquitous surveillance of electronic communications, but the Surveillance State faces serious limits on its ability to replicate that for physical surveillance. Drones easily overcome those barriers."

tinyurl.com/d4bc4et

"National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney said on Friday that the US government is secretly gathering information “about virtually every US citizen in the country,” in “a very dangerous process” that violates Americans’ privacy.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its sweeping domestic surveillance program, delivered a keynote address at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York.

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country…and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.”

In the decade after 9/11, in an environment of acute threat inflation, covert national security agencies like the NSA have been flooded with new funding and broadened powers. In the name of keeping Americans safe from foreign threats, basic liberties have been discarded.

Similarly, investigative journalist James Bamford wrote in Wired in March that “the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.”

One anonymous official familiar with the NSA’s surveillance program told Bamford, “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

In an interview with Current TV in May, another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, made similar claims of the capability and intent of the NSA’s surveillance activities. “The vast capability of the NSA was increasingly being turned inside the US,” he said, “to surveil networks, emails, phone calls, etc.”

“The United States of America was turned into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purposes of dragnet electronic surveillance,” Drake added.

In the same interview, Binney said “the real problem I see is that the DoJ is covering up for all the crimes that this administration and the previous administration has been committing against every one in the public.”"

tinyurl.com/cyjyzws

"Over the last century, the United States government and its friends in big business have made it absolutely clear that the status quo - no matter how morally reprehensible it may be - must be preserved at all costs, especially when profits are at stake.

Jim Crow laws and institutionalized racial segregation are a good historical example of this powerful and unholy alliance between the state and private sector, where as recently as the 1960's African-Americans were deliberately kept economically disadvantaged to stamp out potential competition with whites. When attempts to reform what was then the status quo came about through the civil rights movement, activists were greeted by the brutality of batons and bullets - courtesy of the state, and at the behest of the white businesses who benefited most from such economic protectionism.

Since the days of Martin Luther King Jr., dozens of examples further demonstrating this whorish relationship between the state and private sector have risen to the surface. Yet only in the last decade or so - namely, since the birth and growth of the internet and social media - has this alliance been put under the microscope like never before for all the world to see, and these two entities have been anything but bashful about their blatant desires to crush exposure and resist change.

Perhaps one of the most prominent and recent examples comes from the financial meltdown of 2008, where Americans witnessed not only a devastated economy, but also a government entirely invested in protecting those responsible for devastating it. This is hardly surprising considering the Obama administration - like the Bush administration before it - had its campaign coffers filled by the goons on Wall Street. Still, some initially held out hope that Obama might nonetheless be different, but when that proved not to be the case, the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged from the ashes of their disappointment. Yet long before encampments were set up in New York City, the federal government - assisted by the same financial institutions responsible for flushing the economy down the toilet - was already preparing to tear Occupy apart.

In fact, documents requested by The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed that "the government communicated throughout the crackdown effort with financial institutions through the Domestic Security Alliance Council, an entity created by the FBI in 2005 that "enhances communications and promotes the timely and bidirectional effective exchange of information keeping the nation's critical infrastructure safe, secure and resilient.""

Not only did the corporate-state alliance successfully detract efforts at achieving accountability, but it also continued to reward Wall Street by subsidizing it with funds taken from the very people who suffered most: the taxpayer. Indeed, while U.S. taxpayers were cringing at the January 2013 announcement that payroll taxes were set to rise, executives at Goldman Sachs were celebrating the announcement that they'd be receiving $1.6 billion in tax-free financing for a new massive headquarters in Manhattan.

Moreover, the financial crash did little to offset the profits of the banking cartel, as revealed by Matthew Zeitlin of The Daily Beast: "JPMorgan reported that it took in $99.9 billion in revenue and $21.3 billion in net income in 2012; in the fourth quarter, it earned $5.7 billion in profits. In total JPMorgan’s 2012 revenue was 12 percent higher than the year before. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, managed to embarrass analysts who undershot its revenue and profits with $34.16 billion and net income of $7.48 billion for the year; in the fourth quarter, Goldman earned $2.89 billion on $9.24 billion in revenues. Goldman’s annual profits rose 68 percent in 2012 from 2011."

Thanks to a concerted effort between the state and financial sector, challengers to the status quo barely stood a chance when it came to establishing any kind of financial reform or putting a dent in the wallets of the bloodthirsty economic titans operating out of their layer on Wall Street. Government agencies shut down the opposition while simultaneously protecting the culprits and even extending benefits to them, but the financial sector is only one example of how this state-corporate scheme works to keep the public subdued and the status quo dutifully preserved.

Beginning in late 2011, lawmakers in a number of states began considering legislation which would criminalize photography and videos on factory farms. Unsurprisingly, many of these lawmakers have ties to a powerful "super-lobby" group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Corporations pay thousands of dollars to be members of ALEC, and in turn ALEC drafts "model bills" which are introduced to legislators. Of the 60 Iowa lawmakers who voted in support of Iowa's "Ag-Gag" laws, at least 14 of them are members of ALEC. Some of ALEC's corporate sponsors include many of the usual suspects: BP, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Exxon, General Motors, Koch Industries, Marathon Oil, and Shell. This is undoubtedly one of the most telling examples of how closely corporations and the government have become embedded with one another.

Still, why would the meat industry go to such lengths to prohibit undercover investigations? Perhaps because the industry knows that exposing the public to the hellish conditions sentient nonhumans are forced to endure on their "farms" causes their valuable customer base to rethink whether they want to take part in such blatant brutality. Researchers from Kansas State University proved this in 2010 when they released the results of a study suggesting that pork and poultry demand would have likely been 2.65% and 5.01% higher today if media coverage of animal welfare problems remained the same in 2008 as it had been in 1999.

The kinds of abuses that have been exposed so far are anything but trivial. As I reported last year, investigations have repeatedly found instances of pigs with bloody, untreated sores abandoned to die alone and uncared for, hens rotting away in grime-crusted cages, and newborn calves with their heads being ruthlessly stomped into the ground. These revelations epitomize the very definition of animal abuse. One can only imagine the outcry if these torturous conditions were being inflicted on dogs instead of pigs, cows, and chickens, even though all of these animals share the same capacity for suffering.

Each year, over six billion non-human land animals are massacred in the U.S. alone, a number that has - at its peak - reached so high as nearly ten billion. To "process" this many lives with kindness and consideration seems virtually impossible - and factory farmers know it. Just ask John Byrnes who, in the September 1976 issue of the trade journal Hog Farm Management, advised farmers to "forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory."

In any case, the collusion here between the state and the corporations profiting from animal cruelty seems beyond apparent. Washington has once again positioned itself on the regressive side of history in yet another effort to ensure profits for favored corporations - ethics be Danged. But while the U.S. government has become quite the expert at shielding abuse of all kinds for its big business friends, what can be said about the way abuses exposed within government itself are treated?

To answer this question, one need only look at the case of Bradley Manning - the whistleblower who allegedly leaked documents to Wikileaks revealing a variety of wrongdoings by the government, examples which include U.S. forces in Iraq gunning down innocent people, to the Obama administration's utterly shameful efforts to block torture probes into the Bush administration.

How did Washington respond to these leaks? Bradley Manning was treated like a criminal, subjected to inhumane treatment, and held without a trial for months. Instead of confronting the crimes, the messenger of the crimes was punished while the status quo regarding core corruptions both domestically and abroad were swept under the rug, thus making it possible for them to be repeated in the future.

Manning's case is hardly unique. Dozens of government whistleblowers have been subjected to similar treatment for merely coming forward to expose core corruptions. Washington clearly has no interest in changing the status quo of its own behavior, let alone the behavior of its corporate sponsors.

Of course, the aforementioned examples are only a handful out of many. Polls overwhelmingly show that U.S. citizens favor ending the costly and inefficient "war on drugs" - yet the government refuses to do so because corporations involved with tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and prisons (to name just a few) make a hefty profit off prohibition. Polls overwhelmingly show that U.S. citizens favor ending the occupation of Afghanistan - yet the state refuses to withdraw because corporations involved with the defense and oil sector rely on U.S. imperialism to make a living.

Regardless, what should be clear from all of this is that the state - funded through mandatory taxation backed by threats of violence - almost always acts as a guardian of the status quo and as a result, seldom positions itself on the side of history which embraces positive change. Because the state is supported by financial institutions, it will always protect them over the taxpayer; because the state is supported by agricultural institutions, it will always protect them over the taxpayer; and because the state is in itself inherently corrupt, and because politicians running the state will do just about anything to maintain their power in society, the state will always put its own interests before the taxpayer.

And so, the taxpayer may be left to wonder: "what exactly am I paying for?" If the taxpayer favors the status quo and fears peace, justice, accountability, and voluntary interaction, paying taxes may be the most important activity of their life. But would it be untrue to suggest that most people living in the United States who are subjected to state taxation prefer peace over war, justice over injustice, accountability over recklessness, and voluntary interaction over the involuntary? If not, then perhaps it's long past time for the taxpayer to truly reconsider what kind of world is being created in their name - with their earnings - through the perpetual maintenance of an inherently dishonest, violent, and corrupt state which is so clearly entrenched in backwards thought and the preservation of the status quo.

[AmazingDomo]

Sept 11, 2013 12:16:36 GMT John Liberty said:

On 10 September, the US economy was strong, although it had begun to slow down after a sustained period of growth. The unemployment rate stood at 4.9%. We were paying down the national debt and there was a $127 billion surplus for the fiscal year ending on 30 September. For some, concern about the nation's debt focused on what might happen in a few years when the debt was completely eliminated and there was no longer a need for US treasuries, a key component in the world's economy.

Worries about the consequences of a debt-free America evaporated soon thereafter. After tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and a near-collapse of the economy, US treasury department figures show the nation's debt grew from less than $6 trillion in 2001 to nearly $16trillion today. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate has remained over 8% throughout 2012 after peaking at 10% in October 2009.

Rightly or wrongly, on 10 September 2001, most Americans believed their phone calls and emails were private and did not suspect that the government might be listening in and keeping tabs. If someone fondled your junk at the airport, you would expect to see the person again, this time as you sat on the witness standing testifying in his or her sexual assault trial. If the government was going to execute a citizen, it was assumed that followed after a trial and appeals in the courts of our judicial system, not a unilateral decision by a president that is immune from any review.

Back then, our most recent recollection of war was Desert Storm, a six-week campaign that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with fewer than 150 US military personnel killed in action. We watched on television as members of the Iraqi armed forces put down their weapons and surrendered by the tens of thousands, something they did in part because they trusted United States military personnel would provide them food, shelter, medical care and humane treatment.

Now, after more than a decade of non-stop war, in which only a small percentage of Americans have ever had any skin in the game, the public seems to pay little attention to the thousands of Americans who have died, the tens of thousands who have been injured, or the hundreds of billions of dollars spent overseas.

Public opinion of the United States tends to vary sharply among people in different countries, but one common trend is that America's reputation has declined across the board over the past dozen years, even among America's closest allies. A Pew Research Center report in 2000 showed the US had an 83% favorable rating in Great Britain. Today, it stands at 60%, up a bit from 53% in 2008. In Germany, the US favorability rating fell from 78% in 2000 to a low of 31% in 2008.

America has taken some of the shine off of that "shining city on a hill" Ronald Reagan described as the envy of the world.

Attitudes of the American public have changed significantly, too. A poll conducted by the Christian Science Monitor in November 2001 showed that two-thirds of Americans were opposed to torture. A survey conduct by the American Red Cross in 2011 showed that a majority of Americans, including nearly six in 10 teenagers, approved of using torture. Perceptions of what is right and wrong changed when fear took hold in the Home of the Brave.

There is ample room for debate about how and why America got to where it is today, but as election day approaches on 6 November, Americans need to ask themselves about the direction they want the nation to move in the years ahead. Do they want the future to be more like the America that existed on 10 September 2001 or are they satisfied with the America that emerged after 11 September?"

tinyurl.com/q7ocrxo

"Consider Inauguration Day 2012, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his “liberal” second inaugural address. On that day everything from his invocation of women’s rights (“Seneca Falls”), the civil rights movement (“Selma”), and the gay rights movement (“Stonewall”) to his wife’s new bangs and Beyoncé’s lip-syncing was fodder for the media extravaganza. The president was even praised (or reviled) for what he took pains not to bring up: the budget deficit. Was anything, in fact, not grist for the media mill, the hordes of talking heads, and the chattering classes?

One subject, at least, got remarkably little attention during the inaugural blitz and, when mentioned, certainly struck few as odd or worth dwelling on. Yet nothing better caught our changing American world. Washington, after all, was in a lockdown mode unmatched by any inauguration from another era -- not even Lincoln’s second inaugural in the midst of the Civil War, or Franklin Roosevelt’s during World War II, or John F. Kennedy’s at the height of the Cold War.

Here’s how NBC Nightly News described some of the security arrangements as the day approached:

“[T]he airspace above Washington... [will be] a virtual no-fly zone for 30 miles in all directions from the U.S. capital. Six miles of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers will be shut down, with 150 blocks of downtown Washington closed to traffic, partly out of concern for car or truck bombs... with counter-snipers on top of buildings around the capital and along the parade route... [and] detectors monitoring the air for toxins... At the ready near the capital, thousands of doses of antidotes in case of a chemical or biological attack… All this security will cost about $120 million dollars for hundreds of federal agents, thousands of local police, and national guardsmen from 25 states.”

Consider just the money. It’s common knowledge that, until the recent deal over the renewal of the George W. Bush tax cuts for all but the richest of Americans, taxes had not been raised since the read-my-lips-no-new-taxes era of his father. That’s typical of the way we haven’t yet assimilated the new world we find ourselves in. After all, shouldn’t that $120 million in taxpayer money spent on “safety” and “security” for a single event in Washington be considered part of an ongoing Osama bin Laden tax?

Maybe it's time to face the facts: this isn’t your grandfather’s America. Once, prospective Americans landed in a New World. This time around, a new world’s landed on us."

"In these years, what might have remained essentially a nightmarish fantasy has become an impending reality around which the national security folks organize their lives -- and ours. Ever since the now largely forgotten anthrax mail attacks that killed five soon after 9/11 -- the anthrax in those envelopes may have come directly from a U.S. bioweapons laboratory -- all sorts of fantastic scenarios involving biochemical attacks have become part and parcel of the American lockdown state.

In the Bush era, for instance, among the apocalyptic dream scenes the president and his top officials used to panic Congress into approving a much-desired invasion of Iraq were the possibility of future mushroom clouds over American cities and this claim: that Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had drones (he didn’t) and the means to get them to the East Coast of the U.S. (he didn’t), and the ability to use them to launch attacks in which chemical and biological weaponry would be sprayed over U.S. cities (he didn’t). This was a presidentially promoted fantasy of the first order, but no matter. Some senators actually voted to go to war at least partially on the basis of it.

As is often true of ruling groups, Bush and his cronies weren’t just manipulating us with the fear of nightmarish future attacks, but themselves as well. Thanks to New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer’s fine book The Dark Side, for instance, we know that Vice President Penis Cheney was always driven around Washington with "a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit" in the backseat of his car.

The post-9/11 National Security Complex has been convulsed by such fears. After all, it has funded itself by promising Americans one thing: total safety from one of the lesser dangers of our American world -- “terrorism.” The fear of terrorism (essentially that bin Laden tax again) has been a financial winner for the Complex, but it carries its own built-in terrors. Even with the $75 billion or more a year that we pump into the “U.S. Intelligence Community,” the possibility that it might not discover some bizarre plot, and that, as a result, several airliners might then go down, or a crowd in Washington be decimated, or you name it, undoubtedly leaves many in the Complex in an ongoing state of terror. After all, their jobs and livelihoods are at stake.

Think of their fantasies and fears, which have become ever more real in these years without in any way becoming realities, as the building blocks of the American lockdown state. In this way, intent on “taking the gloves off” -- removing, that is, all those constraints they believed had been put on the executive branch in the Watergate era -- and perhaps preemptively living out their own nightmares, figures like Penis Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld changed our world.

As cultists of a “unitary executive,” they -- and the administration of national security managers who followed in the Obama years -- lifted the executive branch right out of the universe of American legality. They liberated it to do more or less what it wished, as long as “war,” “terrorism,” or “security” could be invoked. Meanwhile, with their Global War on Terror well launched and promoted as a multigenerational struggle, they made wartime their property for the long run.

In the process, they oversaw the building of a National Security Complex with powers that boggle the imagination and freed themselves from the last shreds of accountability for their actions. They established or strengthened the power of the executive to: torture at will (and create the “legal” justification for it); imprison at will, indefinitely and without trial; assassinate at will (including American citizens); kidnap at will anywhere in the world and “render” the captive into the hands of allied torturers; turn any mundane government document (at least 92 million of them in 2011 alone) into a classified object and so help spread a penumbra of secrecy over the workings of the American government; surveil Americans in ways never before attempted (and only “legalized” by Congress after the fact, the way you might backdate a check); make war perpetually on their own say-so; and transform whistleblowing -- that is, revealing anything about the inner workings of the lockdown state to other Americans -- into the only prosecutable crime that anyone in the Complex can commit.

It’s true that some version of a number of these powers existed before 9/11. “Renditions” of terror suspects, for instance, first ramped up in the Clinton years; the FBI conducted illegal surveillance of antiwar organizations and other groups in the 1960s; the classification of government documents had long been on the rise; the congressional power to make war had long been on the wane; and prosecution of those who acted illegally while in government service was probably never a commonplace. (Both the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, however, did involve actual convictions or guilty pleas for illegal acts, followed in some of the Iran-Contra cases by presidential pardons.) Still, in each case, after 9/11, the national security state gained new or greatly magnified powers, including an unprecedented capacity to lockdown the country (and American liberties as well).

What it means to be in such a post-legal world -- to know that, no matter what acts a government official commits, he or she will never be brought to court or have a chance of being put in jail -- has yet to fully sink in. This is true even of critics of the Obama administration, who, as in the case of its drone wars, continue to focus on questions of legality, as if that issue weren’t settled. In this sense, they continue to live in an increasingly fantasy-based version of America in which the rule of law still applies to everyone.

In reality, in the Bush and Obama years, the United States has become a nation not of laws but of legal memos, not of legality but of legalisms -- and you don’t have to be a lawyer to know it. The result? Secret armies, secret wars, secret surveillance, and spreading state secrecy, which meant a government of the bureaucrats about which the American people could know next to nothing. And it’s all “legal.”"

tinyurl.com/b37dlso

"The belief that weaponized drones won't be used on US soil is patently irrational. Of course they will be. It's not just likely but inevitable. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones "could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun." The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use. It likely won't be in the form that has received the most media attention: the type of large Predator or Reaper drones that shoot Hellfire missiles which destroy homes and cars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and multiple other countries aimed at Muslims (although US law enforcement agencies already possess Predator drones and have used them over US soil for surveillance).

Instead, as I detailed in a 2012 examination of the drone industry's own promotional materials and reports to their shareholders, domestic weaponized drones will be much smaller and cheaper, as well as more agile - but just as lethal. The nation's leading manufacturer of small "unmanned aircraft systems" (UAS), used both for surveillance and attack purposes, is AeroVironment, Inc. (AV). Its 2011 Annual Report filed with the SEC repeatedly emphasizes that its business strategy depends upon expanding its market from foreign wars to domestic usage including law enforcement."

"Like many drone manufacturers, AV is now focused on drone products - such as the "Qube" - that are so small that they can be "transported in the trunk of a police vehicle or carried in a backpack" and assembled and deployed within a matter of minutes. One news report AV touts is headlined "Drone technology could be coming to a Police Department near you", which focuses on the Qube.

But another article prominently touted on AV's website describes the tiny UAS product dubbed the "Switchblade", which, says the article, is "the leading edge of what is likely to be the broader, even wholesale, weaponization of unmanned systems." The article creepily hails the Switchblade drone as "the ultimate assassin bug". That's because, as I wrote back in 2011, "it is controlled by the operator at the scene, and it worms its way around buildings and into small areas, sending its surveillance imagery to an i-Pad held by the operator, who can then direct the Switchblade to lunge toward and kill the target (hence the name) by exploding in his face." AV's website right now proudly touts a February, 2013 Defense News article describing how much the US Army loves the "Switchblade" and how it is preparing to purchase more. Time Magazine heralded this tiny drone weapon as "one of the best inventions of 2012", gushing: "the Switchblade drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It's a kamikaze: the person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to crash it into a precise target - say, a sniper. Its tiny warhead detonates on impact."

What possible reason could someone identify as to why these small, portable weaponized UAS products will not imminently be used by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the US? They're designed to protect their users in dangerous situations and to enable a target to be more easily killed. Police agencies and the increasingly powerful drone industry will tout their utility in capturing and killing dangerous criminals and their ability to keep officers safe, and media reports will do the same. The handful of genuinely positive uses from drones will be endlessly touted to distract attention away from the dangers they pose.

One has to be incredibly naïve to think that these "assassin bugs" and other lethal drone products will not be widely used on US soil by an already para-militarized domestic police force. As Radley Balko's forthcoming book "Rise of the Warrior Cop" details, the primary trend in US law enforcement is what its title describes as "The Militarization of America's Police Forces". The history of domestic law enforcement particularly after 9/11 has been the importation of military techniques and weapons into domestic policing. It would be shocking if these weapons were not imminently used by domestic law enforcement agencies.

In contrast to weaponized drones, even the most naïve among us do not doubt the imminent proliferation of domestic surveillance drones. With little debate, they have already arrived. As the ACLU put it in their recent report: "US law enforcement is greatly expanding its use of domestic drones for surveillance." An LA Times article from last month reported that "federal authorities have stepped up efforts to license surveillance drones for law enforcement and other uses in US airspace" and that "the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday it had issued 1,428 permits to domestic drone operators since 2007, far more than were previously known." Moreover, the agency "has estimated 10,000 drones could be aloft five years later" and "local and state law enforcement agencies are expected to be among the largest customers."

Concerns about the proliferation of domestic surveillance drones are typically dismissed with the claim that they do nothing more than police helicopters and satellites already do. Such claims are completely misinformed. As the ACLU's 2011 comprehensive report on domestic drones explained: "Unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the prospect of a significant new avenue for the surveillance of American life."

Multiple attributes of surveillance drones make them uniquely threatening. Because they are so cheap and getting cheaper, huge numbers of them can be deployed to create ubiquitous surveillance in a way that helicopters or satellites never could. How this works can already be seen in Afghanistan, where the US military has dubbed its drone surveillance system "the Gorgon Stare", named after the "mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them". That drone surveillance system is "able to scan an area the size of a small town" and "the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence that [can] seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity". Boasted one US General: "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."

The NSA already maintains ubiquitous surveillance of electronic communications, but the Surveillance State faces serious limits on its ability to replicate that for physical surveillance. Drones easily overcome those barriers."

tinyurl.com/d4bc4et

"National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney said on Friday that the US government is secretly gathering information “about virtually every US citizen in the country,” in “a very dangerous process” that violates Americans’ privacy.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its sweeping domestic surveillance program, delivered a keynote address at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York.

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country…and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.”

In the decade after 9/11, in an environment of acute threat inflation, covert national security agencies like the NSA have been flooded with new funding and broadened powers. In the name of keeping Americans safe from foreign threats, basic liberties have been discarded.

Similarly, investigative journalist James Bamford wrote in Wired in March that “the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.”

One anonymous official familiar with the NSA’s surveillance program told Bamford, “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

In an interview with Current TV in May, another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, made similar claims of the capability and intent of the NSA’s surveillance activities. “The vast capability of the NSA was increasingly being turned inside the US,” he said, “to surveil networks, emails, phone calls, etc.”

“The United States of America was turned into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purposes of dragnet electronic surveillance,” Drake added.

In the same interview, Binney said “the real problem I see is that the DoJ is covering up for all the crimes that this administration and the previous administration has been committing against every one in the public.”"

tinyurl.com/cyjyzws

"Over the last century, the United States government and its friends in big business have made it absolutely clear that the status quo - no matter how morally reprehensible it may be - must be preserved at all costs, especially when profits are at stake.

Jim Crow laws and institutionalized racial segregation are a good historical example of this powerful and unholy alliance between the state and private sector, where as recently as the 1960's African-Americans were deliberately kept economically disadvantaged to stamp out potential competition with whites. When attempts to reform what was then the status quo came about through the civil rights movement, activists were greeted by the brutality of batons and bullets - courtesy of the state, and at the behest of the white businesses who benefited most from such economic protectionism.

Since the days of Martin Luther King Jr., dozens of examples further demonstrating this whorish relationship between the state and private sector have risen to the surface. Yet only in the last decade or so - namely, since the birth and growth of the internet and social media - has this alliance been put under the microscope like never before for all the world to see, and these two entities have been anything but bashful about their blatant desires to crush exposure and resist change.

Perhaps one of the most prominent and recent examples comes from the financial meltdown of 2008, where Americans witnessed not only a devastated economy, but also a government entirely invested in protecting those responsible for devastating it. This is hardly surprising considering the Obama administration - like the Bush administration before it - had its campaign coffers filled by the goons on Wall Street. Still, some initially held out hope that Obama might nonetheless be different, but when that proved not to be the case, the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged from the ashes of their disappointment. Yet long before encampments were set up in New York City, the federal government - assisted by the same financial institutions responsible for flushing the economy down the toilet - was already preparing to tear Occupy apart.

In fact, documents requested by The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed that "the government communicated throughout the crackdown effort with financial institutions through the Domestic Security Alliance Council, an entity created by the FBI in 2005 that "enhances communications and promotes the timely and bidirectional effective exchange of information keeping the nation's critical infrastructure safe, secure and resilient.""

Not only did the corporate-state alliance successfully detract efforts at achieving accountability, but it also continued to reward Wall Street by subsidizing it with funds taken from the very people who suffered most: the taxpayer. Indeed, while U.S. taxpayers were cringing at the January 2013 announcement that payroll taxes were set to rise, executives at Goldman Sachs were celebrating the announcement that they'd be receiving $1.6 billion in tax-free financing for a new massive headquarters in Manhattan.

Moreover, the financial crash did little to offset the profits of the banking cartel, as revealed by Matthew Zeitlin of The Daily Beast: "JPMorgan reported that it took in $99.9 billion in revenue and $21.3 billion in net income in 2012; in the fourth quarter, it earned $5.7 billion in profits. In total JPMorgan’s 2012 revenue was 12 percent higher than the year before. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, managed to embarrass analysts who undershot its revenue and profits with $34.16 billion and net income of $7.48 billion for the year; in the fourth quarter, Goldman earned $2.89 billion on $9.24 billion in revenues. Goldman’s annual profits rose 68 percent in 2012 from 2011."

Thanks to a concerted effort between the state and financial sector, challengers to the status quo barely stood a chance when it came to establishing any kind of financial reform or putting a dent in the wallets of the bloodthirsty economic titans operating out of their layer on Wall Street. Government agencies shut down the opposition while simultaneously protecting the culprits and even extending benefits to them, but the financial sector is only one example of how this state-corporate scheme works to keep the public subdued and the status quo dutifully preserved.

Beginning in late 2011, lawmakers in a number of states began considering legislation which would criminalize photography and videos on factory farms. Unsurprisingly, many of these lawmakers have ties to a powerful "super-lobby" group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Corporations pay thousands of dollars to be members of ALEC, and in turn ALEC drafts "model bills" which are introduced to legislators. Of the 60 Iowa lawmakers who voted in support of Iowa's "Ag-Gag" laws, at least 14 of them are members of ALEC. Some of ALEC's corporate sponsors include many of the usual suspects: BP, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Exxon, General Motors, Koch Industries, Marathon Oil, and Shell. This is undoubtedly one of the most telling examples of how closely corporations and the government have become embedded with one another.

Still, why would the meat industry go to such lengths to prohibit undercover investigations? Perhaps because the industry knows that exposing the public to the hellish conditions sentient nonhumans are forced to endure on their "farms" causes their valuable customer base to rethink whether they want to take part in such blatant brutality. Researchers from Kansas State University proved this in 2010 when they released the results of a study suggesting that pork and poultry demand would have likely been 2.65% and 5.01% higher today if media coverage of animal welfare problems remained the same in 2008 as it had been in 1999.

The kinds of abuses that have been exposed so far are anything but trivial. As I reported last year, investigations have repeatedly found instances of pigs with bloody, untreated sores abandoned to die alone and uncared for, hens rotting away in grime-crusted cages, and newborn calves with their heads being ruthlessly stomped into the ground. These revelations epitomize the very definition of animal abuse. One can only imagine the outcry if these torturous conditions were being inflicted on dogs instead of pigs, cows, and chickens, even though all of these animals share the same capacity for suffering.

Each year, over six billion non-human land animals are massacred in the U.S. alone, a number that has - at its peak - reached so high as nearly ten billion. To "process" this many lives with kindness and consideration seems virtually impossible - and factory farmers know it. Just ask John Byrnes who, in the September 1976 issue of the trade journal Hog Farm Management, advised farmers to "forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory."

In any case, the collusion here between the state and the corporations profiting from animal cruelty seems beyond apparent. Washington has once again positioned itself on the regressive side of history in yet another effort to ensure profits for favored corporations - ethics be Danged. But while the U.S. government has become quite the expert at shielding abuse of all kinds for its big business friends, what can be said about the way abuses exposed within government itself are treated?

To answer this question, one need only look at the case of Bradley Manning - the whistleblower who allegedly leaked documents to Wikileaks revealing a variety of wrongdoings by the government, examples which include U.S. forces in Iraq gunning down innocent people, to the Obama administration's utterly shameful efforts to block torture probes into the Bush administration.

How did Washington respond to these leaks? Bradley Manning was treated like a criminal, subjected to inhumane treatment, and held without a trial for months. Instead of confronting the crimes, the messenger of the crimes was punished while the status quo regarding core corruptions both domestically and abroad were swept under the rug, thus making it possible for them to be repeated in the future.

Manning's case is hardly unique. Dozens of government whistleblowers have been subjected to similar treatment for merely coming forward to expose core corruptions. Washington clearly has no interest in changing the status quo of its own behavior, let alone the behavior of its corporate sponsors.

Of course, the aforementioned examples are only a handful out of many. Polls overwhelmingly show that U.S. citizens favor ending the costly and inefficient "war on drugs" - yet the government refuses to do so because corporations involved with tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and prisons (to name just a few) make a hefty profit off prohibition. Polls overwhelmingly show that U.S. citizens favor ending the occupation of Afghanistan - yet the state refuses to withdraw because corporations involved with the defense and oil sector rely on U.S. imperialism to make a living.

Regardless, what should be clear from all of this is that the state - funded through mandatory taxation backed by threats of violence - almost always acts as a guardian of the status quo and as a result, seldom positions itself on the side of history which embraces positive change. Because the state is supported by financial institutions, it will always protect them over the taxpayer; because the state is supported by agricultural institutions, it will always protect them over the taxpayer; and because the state is in itself inherently corrupt, and because politicians running the state will do just about anything to maintain their power in society, the state will always put its own interests before the taxpayer.

And so, the taxpayer may be left to wonder: "what exactly am I paying for?" If the taxpayer favors the status quo and fears peace, justice, accountability, and voluntary interaction, paying taxes may be the most important activity of their life. But would it be untrue to suggest that most people living in the United States who are subjected to state taxation prefer peace over war, justice over injustice, accountability over recklessness, and voluntary interaction over the involuntary? If not, then perhaps it's long past time for the taxpayer to truly reconsider what kind of world is being created in their name - with their earnings - through the perpetual maintenance of an inherently dishonest, violent, and corrupt state which is so clearly entrenched in backwards thought and the preservation of the status quo.

I have to admit, this is one of the best written pieces I've read in a while. You have definitely given me something to think about...

[ProfessorKat]

Sept 11, 2013 12:16:36 GMT John Liberty said:

On 10 September, the US economy was strong, although it had begun to slow down after a sustained period of growth. The unemployment rate stood at 4.9%. We were paying down the national debt and there was a $127 billion surplus for the fiscal year ending on 30 September. For some, concern about the nation's debt focused on what might happen in a few years when the debt was completely eliminated and there was no longer a need for US treasuries, a key component in the world's economy.

Worries about the consequences of a debt-free America evaporated soon thereafter. After tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and a near-collapse of the economy, US treasury department figures show the nation's debt grew from less than $6 trillion in 2001 to nearly $16trillion today. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate has remained over 8% throughout 2012 after peaking at 10% in October 2009.

Rightly or wrongly, on 10 September 2001, most Americans believed their phone calls and emails were private and did not suspect that the government might be listening in and keeping tabs. If someone fondled your junk at the airport, you would expect to see the person again, this time as you sat on the witness standing testifying in his or her sexual assault trial. If the government was going to execute a citizen, it was assumed that followed after a trial and appeals in the courts of our judicial system, not a unilateral decision by a president that is immune from any review.

Back then, our most recent recollection of war was Desert Storm, a six-week campaign that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with fewer than 150 US military personnel killed in action. We watched on television as members of the Iraqi armed forces put down their weapons and surrendered by the tens of thousands, something they did in part because they trusted United States military personnel would provide them food, shelter, medical care and humane treatment.

Now, after more than a decade of non-stop war, in which only a small percentage of Americans have ever had any skin in the game, the public seems to pay little attention to the thousands of Americans who have died, the tens of thousands who have been injured, or the hundreds of billions of dollars spent overseas.

Public opinion of the United States tends to vary sharply among people in different countries, but one common trend is that America's reputation has declined across the board over the past dozen years, even among America's closest allies. A Pew Research Center report in 2000 showed the US had an 83% favorable rating in Great Britain. Today, it stands at 60%, up a bit from 53% in 2008. In Germany, the US favorability rating fell from 78% in 2000 to a low of 31% in 2008.

America has taken some of the shine off of that "shining city on a hill" Ronald Reagan described as the envy of the world.

Attitudes of the American public have changed significantly, too. A poll conducted by the Christian Science Monitor in November 2001 showed that two-thirds of Americans were opposed to torture. A survey conduct by the American Red Cross in 2011 showed that a majority of Americans, including nearly six in 10 teenagers, approved of using torture. Perceptions of what is right and wrong changed when fear took hold in the Home of the Brave.

There is ample room for debate about how and why America got to where it is today, but as election day approaches on 6 November, Americans need to ask themselves about the direction they want the nation to move in the years ahead. Do they want the future to be more like the America that existed on 10 September 2001 or are they satisfied with the America that emerged after 11 September?"

tinyurl.com/q7ocrxo

"Consider Inauguration Day 2012, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his “liberal” second inaugural address. On that day everything from his invocation of women’s rights (“Seneca Falls”), the civil rights movement (“Selma”), and the gay rights movement (“Stonewall”) to his wife’s new bangs and Beyoncé’s lip-syncing was fodder for the media extravaganza. The president was even praised (or reviled) for what he took pains not to bring up: the budget deficit. Was anything, in fact, not grist for the media mill, the hordes of talking heads, and the chattering classes?

One subject, at least, got remarkably little attention during the inaugural blitz and, when mentioned, certainly struck few as odd or worth dwelling on. Yet nothing better caught our changing American world. Washington, after all, was in a lockdown mode unmatched by any inauguration from another era -- not even Lincoln’s second inaugural in the midst of the Civil War, or Franklin Roosevelt’s during World War II, or John F. Kennedy’s at the height of the Cold War.

Here’s how NBC Nightly News described some of the security arrangements as the day approached:

“[T]he airspace above Washington... [will be] a virtual no-fly zone for 30 miles in all directions from the U.S. capital. Six miles of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers will be shut down, with 150 blocks of downtown Washington closed to traffic, partly out of concern for car or truck bombs... with counter-snipers on top of buildings around the capital and along the parade route... [and] detectors monitoring the air for toxins... At the ready near the capital, thousands of doses of antidotes in case of a chemical or biological attack… All this security will cost about $120 million dollars for hundreds of federal agents, thousands of local police, and national guardsmen from 25 states.”

Consider just the money. It’s common knowledge that, until the recent deal over the renewal of the George W. Bush tax cuts for all but the richest of Americans, taxes had not been raised since the read-my-lips-no-new-taxes era of his father. That’s typical of the way we haven’t yet assimilated the new world we find ourselves in. After all, shouldn’t that $120 million in taxpayer money spent on “safety” and “security” for a single event in Washington be considered part of an ongoing Osama bin Laden tax?

Maybe it's time to face the facts: this isn’t your grandfather’s America. Once, prospective Americans landed in a New World. This time around, a new world’s landed on us."

"In these years, what might have remained essentially a nightmarish fantasy has become an impending reality around which the national security folks organize their lives -- and ours. Ever since the now largely forgotten anthrax mail attacks that killed five soon after 9/11 -- the anthrax in those envelopes may have come directly from a U.S. bioweapons laboratory -- all sorts of fantastic scenarios involving biochemical attacks have become part and parcel of the American lockdown state.

In the Bush era, for instance, among the apocalyptic dream scenes the president and his top officials used to panic Congress into approving a much-desired invasion of Iraq were the possibility of future mushroom clouds over American cities and this claim: that Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had drones (he didn’t) and the means to get them to the East Coast of the U.S. (he didn’t), and the ability to use them to launch attacks in which chemical and biological weaponry would be sprayed over U.S. cities (he didn’t). This was a presidentially promoted fantasy of the first order, but no matter. Some senators actually voted to go to war at least partially on the basis of it.

As is often true of ruling groups, Bush and his cronies weren’t just manipulating us with the fear of nightmarish future attacks, but themselves as well. Thanks to New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer’s fine book The Dark Side, for instance, we know that Vice President Penis Cheney was always driven around Washington with "a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit" in the backseat of his car.

The post-9/11 National Security Complex has been convulsed by such fears. After all, it has funded itself by promising Americans one thing: total safety from one of the lesser dangers of our American world -- “terrorism.” The fear of terrorism (essentially that bin Laden tax again) has been a financial winner for the Complex, but it carries its own built-in terrors. Even with the $75 billion or more a year that we pump into the “U.S. Intelligence Community,” the possibility that it might not discover some bizarre plot, and that, as a result, several airliners might then go down, or a crowd in Washington be decimated, or you name it, undoubtedly leaves many in the Complex in an ongoing state of terror. After all, their jobs and livelihoods are at stake.

Think of their fantasies and fears, which have become ever more real in these years without in any way becoming realities, as the building blocks of the American lockdown state. In this way, intent on “taking the gloves off” -- removing, that is, all those constraints they believed had been put on the executive branch in the Watergate era -- and perhaps preemptively living out their own nightmares, figures like Penis Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld changed our world.

As cultists of a “unitary executive,” they -- and the administration of national security managers who followed in the Obama years -- lifted the executive branch right out of the universe of American legality. They liberated it to do more or less what it wished, as long as “war,” “terrorism,” or “security” could be invoked. Meanwhile, with their Global War on Terror well launched and promoted as a multigenerational struggle, they made wartime their property for the long run.

In the process, they oversaw the building of a National Security Complex with powers that boggle the imagination and freed themselves from the last shreds of accountability for their actions. They established or strengthened the power of the executive to: torture at will (and create the “legal” justification for it); imprison at will, indefinitely and without trial; assassinate at will (including American citizens); kidnap at will anywhere in the world and “render” the captive into the hands of allied torturers; turn any mundane government document (at least 92 million of them in 2011 alone) into a classified object and so help spread a penumbra of secrecy over the workings of the American government; surveil Americans in ways never before attempted (and only “legalized” by Congress after the fact, the way you might backdate a check); make war perpetually on their own say-so; and transform whistleblowing -- that is, revealing anything about the inner workings of the lockdown state to other Americans -- into the only prosecutable crime that anyone in the Complex can commit.

It’s true that some version of a number of these powers existed before 9/11. “Renditions” of terror suspects, for instance, first ramped up in the Clinton years; the FBI conducted illegal surveillance of antiwar organizations and other groups in the 1960s; the classification of government documents had long been on the rise; the congressional power to make war had long been on the wane; and prosecution of those who acted illegally while in government service was probably never a commonplace. (Both the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, however, did involve actual convictions or guilty pleas for illegal acts, followed in some of the Iran-Contra cases by presidential pardons.) Still, in each case, after 9/11, the national security state gained new or greatly magnified powers, including an unprecedented capacity to lockdown the country (and American liberties as well).

What it means to be in such a post-legal world -- to know that, no matter what acts a government official commits, he or she will never be brought to court or have a chance of being put in jail -- has yet to fully sink in. This is true even of critics of the Obama administration, who, as in the case of its drone wars, continue to focus on questions of legality, as if that issue weren’t settled. In this sense, they continue to live in an increasingly fantasy-based version of America in which the rule of law still applies to everyone.

In reality, in the Bush and Obama years, the United States has become a nation not of laws but of legal memos, not of legality but of legalisms -- and you don’t have to be a lawyer to know it. The result? Secret armies, secret wars, secret surveillance, and spreading state secrecy, which meant a government of the bureaucrats about which the American people could know next to nothing. And it’s all “legal.”"

tinyurl.com/b37dlso

"The belief that weaponized drones won't be used on US soil is patently irrational. Of course they will be. It's not just likely but inevitable. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones "could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun." The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use. It likely won't be in the form that has received the most media attention: the type of large Predator or Reaper drones that shoot Hellfire missiles which destroy homes and cars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and multiple other countries aimed at Muslims (although US law enforcement agencies already possess Predator drones and have used them over US soil for surveillance).

Instead, as I detailed in a 2012 examination of the drone industry's own promotional materials and reports to their shareholders, domestic weaponized drones will be much smaller and cheaper, as well as more agile - but just as lethal. The nation's leading manufacturer of small "unmanned aircraft systems" (UAS), used both for surveillance and attack purposes, is AeroVironment, Inc. (AV). Its 2011 Annual Report filed with the SEC repeatedly emphasizes that its business strategy depends upon expanding its market from foreign wars to domestic usage including law enforcement."

"Like many drone manufacturers, AV is now focused on drone products - such as the "Qube" - that are so small that they can be "transported in the trunk of a police vehicle or carried in a backpack" and assembled and deployed within a matter of minutes. One news report AV touts is headlined "Drone technology could be coming to a Police Department near you", which focuses on the Qube.

But another article prominently touted on AV's website describes the tiny UAS product dubbed the "Switchblade", which, says the article, is "the leading edge of what is likely to be the broader, even wholesale, weaponization of unmanned systems." The article creepily hails the Switchblade drone as "the ultimate assassin bug". That's because, as I wrote back in 2011, "it is controlled by the operator at the scene, and it worms its way around buildings and into small areas, sending its surveillance imagery to an i-Pad held by the operator, who can then direct the Switchblade to lunge toward and kill the target (hence the name) by exploding in his face." AV's website right now proudly touts a February, 2013 Defense News article describing how much the US Army loves the "Switchblade" and how it is preparing to purchase more. Time Magazine heralded this tiny drone weapon as "one of the best inventions of 2012", gushing: "the Switchblade drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It's a kamikaze: the person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to crash it into a precise target - say, a sniper. Its tiny warhead detonates on impact."

What possible reason could someone identify as to why these small, portable weaponized UAS products will not imminently be used by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the US? They're designed to protect their users in dangerous situations and to enable a target to be more easily killed. Police agencies and the increasingly powerful drone industry will tout their utility in capturing and killing dangerous criminals and their ability to keep officers safe, and media reports will do the same. The handful of genuinely positive uses from drones will be endlessly touted to distract attention away from the dangers they pose.

One has to be incredibly naïve to think that these "assassin bugs" and other lethal drone products will not be widely used on US soil by an already para-militarized domestic police force. As Radley Balko's forthcoming book "Rise of the Warrior Cop" details, the primary trend in US law enforcement is what its title describes as "The Militarization of America's Police Forces". The history of domestic law enforcement particularly after 9/11 has been the importation of military techniques and weapons into domestic policing. It would be shocking if these weapons were not imminently used by domestic law enforcement agencies.

In contrast to weaponized drones, even the most naïve among us do not doubt the imminent proliferation of domestic surveillance drones. With little debate, they have already arrived. As the ACLU put it in their recent report: "US law enforcement is greatly expanding its use of domestic drones for surveillance." An LA Times article from last month reported that "federal authorities have stepped up efforts to license surveillance drones for law enforcement and other uses in US airspace" and that "the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday it had issued 1,428 permits to domestic drone operators since 2007, far more than were previously known." Moreover, the agency "has estimated 10,000 drones could be aloft five years later" and "local and state law enforcement agencies are expected to be among the largest customers."

Concerns about the proliferation of domestic surveillance drones are typically dismissed with the claim that they do nothing more than police helicopters and satellites already do. Such claims are completely misinformed. As the ACLU's 2011 comprehensive report on domestic drones explained: "Unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the prospect of a significant new avenue for the surveillance of American life."

Multiple attributes of surveillance drones make them uniquely threatening. Because they are so cheap and getting cheaper, huge numbers of them can be deployed to create ubiquitous surveillance in a way that helicopters or satellites never could. How this works can already be seen in Afghanistan, where the US military has dubbed its drone surveillance system "the Gorgon Stare", named after the "mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them". That drone surveillance system is "able to scan an area the size of a small town" and "the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence that [can] seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity". Boasted one US General: "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."

The NSA already maintains ubiquitous surveillance of electronic communications, but the Surveillance State faces serious limits on its ability to replicate that for physical surveillance. Drones easily overcome those barriers."

tinyurl.com/d4bc4et

"National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney said on Friday that the US government is secretly gathering information “about virtually every US citizen in the country,” in “a very dangerous process” that violates Americans’ privacy.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its sweeping domestic surveillance program, delivered a keynote address at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York.

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country…and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.”

In the decade after 9/11, in an environment of acute threat inflation, covert national security agencies like the NSA have been flooded with new funding and broadened powers. In the name of keeping Americans safe from foreign threats, basic liberties have been discarded.

Similarly, investigative journalist James Bamford wrote in Wired in March that “the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.”

One anonymous official familiar with the NSA’s surveillance program told Bamford, “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

In an interview with Current TV in May, another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, made similar claims of the capability and intent of the NSA’s surveillance activities. “The vast capability of the NSA was increasingly being turned inside the US,” he said, “to surveil networks, emails, phone calls, etc.”

“The United States of America was turned into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purposes of dragnet electronic surveillance,” Drake added.

In the same interview, Binney said “the real problem I see is that the DoJ is covering up for all the crimes that this administration and the previous administration has been committing against every one in the public.”"

tinyurl.com/cyjyzws

"Over the last century, the United States government and its friends in big business have made it absolutely clear that the status quo - no matter how morally reprehensible it may be - must be preserved at all costs, especially when profits are at stake.

Jim Crow laws and institutionalized racial segregation are a good historical example of this powerful and unholy alliance between the state and private sector, where as recently as the 1960's African-Americans were deliberately kept economically disadvantaged to stamp out potential competition with whites. When attempts to reform what was then the status quo came about through the civil rights movement, activists were greeted by the brutality of batons and bullets - courtesy of the state, and at the behest of the white businesses who benefited most from such economic protectionism.

Since the days of Martin Luther King Jr., dozens of examples further demonstrating this whorish relationship between the state and private sector have risen to the surface. Yet only in the last decade or so - namely, since the birth and growth of the internet and social media - has this alliance been put under the microscope like never before for all the world to see, and these two entities have been anything but bashful about their blatant desires to crush exposure and resist change.

Perhaps one of the most prominent and recent examples comes from the financial meltdown of 2008, where Americans witnessed not only a devastated economy, but also a government entirely invested in protecting those responsible for devastating it. This is hardly surprising considering the Obama administration - like the Bush administration before it - had its campaign coffers filled by the goons on Wall Street. Still, some initially held out hope that Obama might nonetheless be different, but when that proved not to be the case, the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged from the ashes of their disappointment. Yet long before encampments were set up in New York City, the federal government - assisted by the same financial institutions responsible for flushing the economy down the toilet - was already preparing to tear Occupy apart.

In fact, documents requested by The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed that "the government communicated throughout the crackdown effort with financial institutions through the Domestic Security Alliance Council, an entity created by the FBI in 2005 that "enhances communications and promotes the timely and bidirectional effective exchange of information keeping the nation's critical infrastructure safe, secure and resilient.""

Not only did the corporate-state alliance successfully detract efforts at achieving accountability, but it also continued to reward Wall Street by subsidizing it with funds taken from the very people who suffered most: the taxpayer. Indeed, while U.S. taxpayers were cringing at the January 2013 announcement that payroll taxes were set to rise, executives at Goldman Sachs were celebrating the announcement that they'd be receiving $1.6 billion in tax-free financing for a new massive headquarters in Manhattan.

Moreover, the financial crash did little to offset the profits of the banking cartel, as revealed by Matthew Zeitlin of The Daily Beast: "JPMorgan reported that it took in $99.9 billion in revenue and $21.3 billion in net income in 2012; in the fourth quarter, it earned $5.7 billion in profits. In total JPMorgan’s 2012 revenue was 12 percent higher than the year before. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, managed to embarrass analysts who undershot its revenue and profits with $34.16 billion and net income of $7.48 billion for the year; in the fourth quarter, Goldman earned $2.89 billion on $9.24 billion in revenues. Goldman’s annual profits rose 68 percent in 2012 from 2011."

Thanks to a concerted effort between the state and financial sector, challengers to the status quo barely stood a chance when it came to establishing any kind of financial reform or putting a dent in the wallets of the bloodthirsty economic titans operating out of their layer on Wall Street. Government agencies shut down the opposition while simultaneously protecting the culprits and even extending benefits to them, but the financial sector is only one example of how this state-corporate scheme works to keep the public subdued and the status quo dutifully preserved.

Beginning in late 2011, lawmakers in a number of states began considering legislation which would criminalize photography and videos on factory farms. Unsurprisingly, many of these lawmakers have ties to a powerful "super-lobby" group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Corporations pay thousands of dollars to be members of ALEC, and in turn ALEC drafts "model bills" which are introduced to legislators. Of the 60 Iowa lawmakers who voted in support of Iowa's "Ag-Gag" laws, at least 14 of them are members of ALEC. Some of ALEC's corporate sponsors include many of the usual suspects: BP, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Exxon, General Motors, Koch Industries, Marathon Oil, and Shell. This is undoubtedly one of the most telling examples of how closely corporations and the government have become embedded with one another.

Still, why would the meat industry go to such lengths to prohibit undercover investigations? Perhaps because the industry knows that exposing the public to the hellish conditions sentient nonhumans are forced to endure on their "farms" causes their valuable customer base to rethink whether they want to take part in such blatant brutality. Researchers from Kansas State University proved this in 2010 when they released the results of a study suggesting that pork and poultry demand would have likely been 2.65% and 5.01% higher today if media coverage of animal welfare problems remained the same in 2008 as it had been in 1999.

The kinds of abuses that have been exposed so far are anything but trivial. As I reported last year, investigations have repeatedly found instances of pigs with bloody, untreated sores abandoned to die alone and uncared for, hens rotting away in grime-crusted cages, and newborn calves with their heads being ruthlessly stomped into the ground. These revelations epitomize the very definition of animal abuse. One can only imagine the outcry if these torturous conditions were being inflicted on dogs instead of pigs, cows, and chickens, even though all of these animals share the same capacity for suffering.

Each year, over six billion non-human land animals are massacred in the U.S. alone, a number that has - at its peak - reached so high as nearly ten billion. To "process" this many lives with kindness and consideration seems virtually impossible - and factory farmers know it. Just ask John Byrnes who, in the September 1976 issue of the trade journal Hog Farm Management, advised farmers to "forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory."

In any case, the collusion here between the state and the corporations profiting from animal cruelty seems beyond apparent. Washington has once again positioned itself on the regressive side of history in yet another effort to ensure profits for favored corporations - ethics be Danged. But while the U.S. government has become quite the expert at shielding abuse of all kinds for its big business friends, what can be said about the way abuses exposed within government itself are treated?

To answer this question, one need only look at the case of Bradley Manning - the whistleblower who allegedly leaked documents to Wikileaks revealing a variety of wrongdoings by the government, examples which include U.S. forces in Iraq gunning down innocent people, to the Obama administration's utterly shameful efforts to block torture probes into the Bush administration.

How did Washington respond to these leaks? Bradley Manning was treated like a criminal, subjected to inhumane treatment, and held without a trial for months. Instead of confronting the crimes, the messenger of the crimes was punished while the status quo regarding core corruptions both domestically and abroad were swept under the rug, thus making it possible for them to be repeated in the future.

Manning's case is hardly unique. Dozens of government whistleblowers have been subjected to similar treatment for merely coming forward to expose core corruptions. Washington clearly has no interest in changing the status quo of its own behavior, let alone the behavior of its corporate sponsors.

Of course, the aforementioned examples are only a handful out of many. Polls overwhelmingly show that U.S. citizens favor ending the costly and inefficient "war on drugs" - yet the government refuses to do so because corporations involved with tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and prisons (to name just a few) make a hefty profit off prohibition. Polls overwhelmingly show that U.S. citizens favor ending the occupation of Afghanistan - yet the state refuses to withdraw because corporations involved with the defense and oil sector rely on U.S. imperialism to make a living.

Regardless, what should be clear from all of this is that the state - funded through mandatory taxation backed by threats of violence - almost always acts as a guardian of the status quo and as a result, seldom positions itself on the side of history which embraces positive change. Because the state is supported by financial institutions, it will always protect them over the taxpayer; because the state is supported by agricultural institutions, it will always protect them over the taxpayer; and because the state is in itself inherently corrupt, and because politicians running the state will do just about anything to maintain their power in society, the state will always put its own interests before the taxpayer.

And so, the taxpayer may be left to wonder: "what exactly am I paying for?" If the taxpayer favors the status quo and fears peace, justice, accountability, and voluntary interaction, paying taxes may be the most important activity of their life. But would it be untrue to suggest that most people living in the United States who are subjected to state taxation prefer peace over war, justice over injustice, accountability over recklessness, and voluntary interaction over the involuntary? If not, then perhaps it's long past time for the taxpayer to truly reconsider what kind of world is being created in their name - with their earnings - through the perpetual maintenance of an inherently dishonest, violent, and corrupt state which is so clearly entrenched in backwards thought and the preservation of the status quo.

Very well written. I agree 110%!

[Gipper]

Sept 11, 2013 12:16:36 GMT John Liberty said:

On 10 September, the US economy was strong, although it had begun to slow down after a sustained period of growth. The unemployment rate stood at 4.9%. We were paying down the national debt and there was a $127 billion surplus for the fiscal year ending on 30 September. For some, concern about the nation's debt focused on what might happen in a few years when the debt was completely eliminated and there was no longer a need for US treasuries, a key component in the world's economy.

Worries about the consequences of a debt-free America evaporated soon thereafter. After tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and a near-collapse of the economy, US treasury department figures show the nation's debt grew from less than $6 trillion in 2001 to nearly $16trillion today. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate has remained over 8% throughout 2012 after peaking at 10% in October 2009.

Rightly or wrongly, on 10 September 2001, most Americans believed their phone calls and emails were private and did not suspect that the government might be listening in and keeping tabs. If someone fondled your junk at the airport, you would expect to see the person again, this time as you sat on the witness standing testifying in his or her sexual assault trial. If the government was going to execute a citizen, it was assumed that followed after a trial and appeals in the courts of our judicial system, not a unilateral decision by a president that is immune from any review.

Back then, our most recent recollection of war was Desert Storm, a six-week campaign that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with fewer than 150 US military personnel killed in action. We watched on television as members of the Iraqi armed forces put down their weapons and surrendered by the tens of thousands, something they did in part because they trusted United States military personnel would provide them food, shelter, medical care and humane treatment.

Now, after more than a decade of non-stop war, in which only a small percentage of Americans have ever had any skin in the game, the public seems to pay little attention to the thousands of Americans who have died, the tens of thousands who have been injured, or the hundreds of billions of dollars spent overseas.

Public opinion of the United States tends to vary sharply among people in different countries, but one common trend is that America's reputation has declined across the board over the past dozen years, even among America's closest allies. A Pew Research Center report in 2000 showed the US had an 83% favorable rating in Great Britain. Today, it stands at 60%, up a bit from 53% in 2008. In Germany, the US favorability rating fell from 78% in 2000 to a low of 31% in 2008.

America has taken some of the shine off of that "shining city on a hill" Ronald Reagan described as the envy of the world.

Attitudes of the American public have changed significantly, too. A poll conducted by the Christian Science Monitor in November 2001 showed that two-thirds of Americans were opposed to torture. A survey conduct by the American Red Cross in 2011 showed that a majority of Americans, including nearly six in 10 teenagers, approved of using torture. Perceptions of what is right and wrong changed when fear took hold in the Home of the Brave.

There is ample room for debate about how and why America got to where it is today, but as election day approaches on 6 November, Americans need to ask themselves about the direction they want the nation to move in the years ahead. Do they want the future to be more like the America that existed on 10 September 2001 or are they satisfied with the America that emerged after 11 September?"

tinyurl.com/q7ocrxo

"Consider Inauguration Day 2012, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his “liberal” second inaugural address. On that day everything from his invocation of women’s rights (“Seneca Falls”), the civil rights movement (“Selma”), and the gay rights movement (“Stonewall”) to his wife’s new bangs and Beyoncé’s lip-syncing was fodder for the media extravaganza. The president was even praised (or reviled) for what he took pains not to bring up: the budget deficit. Was anything, in fact, not grist for the media mill, the hordes of talking heads, and the chattering classes?

One subject, at least, got remarkably little attention during the inaugural blitz and, when mentioned, certainly struck few as odd or worth dwelling on. Yet nothing better caught our changing American world. Washington, after all, was in a lockdown mode unmatched by any inauguration from another era -- not even Lincoln’s second inaugural in the midst of the Civil War, or Franklin Roosevelt’s during World War II, or John F. Kennedy’s at the height of the Cold War.

Here’s how NBC Nightly News described some of the security arrangements as the day approached:

“[T]he airspace above Washington... [will be] a virtual no-fly zone for 30 miles in all directions from the U.S. capital. Six miles of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers will be shut down, with 150 blocks of downtown Washington closed to traffic, partly out of concern for car or truck bombs... with counter-snipers on top of buildings around the capital and along the parade route... [and] detectors monitoring the air for toxins... At the ready near the capital, thousands of doses of antidotes in case of a chemical or biological attack… All this security will cost about $120 million dollars for hundreds of federal agents, thousands of local police, and national guardsmen from 25 states.”

Consider just the money. It’s common knowledge that, until the recent deal over the renewal of the George W. Bush tax cuts for all but the richest of Americans, taxes had not been raised since the read-my-lips-no-new-taxes era of his father. That’s typical of the way we haven’t yet assimilated the new world we find ourselves in. After all, shouldn’t that $120 million in taxpayer money spent on “safety” and “security” for a single event in Washington be considered part of an ongoing Osama bin Laden tax?

Maybe it's time to face the facts: this isn’t your grandfather’s America. Once, prospective Americans landed in a New World. This time around, a new world’s landed on us."

"In these years, what might have remained essentially a nightmarish fantasy has become an impending reality around which the national security folks organize their lives -- and ours. Ever since the now largely forgotten anthrax mail attacks that killed five soon after 9/11 -- the anthrax in those envelopes may have come directly from a U.S. bioweapons laboratory -- all sorts of fantastic scenarios involving biochemical attacks have become part and parcel of the American lockdown state.

In the Bush era, for instance, among the apocalyptic dream scenes the president and his top officials used to panic Congress into approving a much-desired invasion of Iraq were the possibility of future mushroom clouds over American cities and this claim: that Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had drones (he didn’t) and the means to get them to the East Coast of the U.S. (he didn’t), and the ability to use them to launch attacks in which chemical and biological weaponry would be sprayed over U.S. cities (he didn’t). This was a presidentially promoted fantasy of the first order, but no matter. Some senators actually voted to go to war at least partially on the basis of it.

As is often true of ruling groups, Bush and his cronies weren’t just manipulating us with the fear of nightmarish future attacks, but themselves as well. Thanks to New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer’s fine book The Dark Side, for instance, we know that Vice President Penis Cheney was always driven around Washington with "a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit" in the backseat of his car.

The post-9/11 National Security Complex has been convulsed by such fears. After all, it has funded itself by promising Americans one thing: total safety from one of the lesser dangers of our American world -- “terrorism.” The fear of terrorism (essentially that bin Laden tax again) has been a financial winner for the Complex, but it carries its own built-in terrors. Even with the $75 billion or more a year that we pump into the “U.S. Intelligence Community,” the possibility that it might not discover some bizarre plot, and that, as a result, several airliners might then go down, or a crowd in Washington be decimated, or you name it, undoubtedly leaves many in the Complex in an ongoing state of terror. After all, their jobs and livelihoods are at stake.

Think of their fantasies and fears, which have become ever more real in these years without in any way becoming realities, as the building blocks of the American lockdown state. In this way, intent on “taking the gloves off” -- removing, that is, all those constraints they believed had been put on the executive branch in the Watergate era -- and perhaps preemptively living out their own nightmares, figures like Penis Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld changed our world.

As cultists of a “unitary executive,” they -- and the administration of national security managers who followed in the Obama years -- lifted the executive branch right out of the universe of American legality. They liberated it to do more or less what it wished, as long as “war,” “terrorism,” or “security” could be invoked. Meanwhile, with their Global War on Terror well launched and promoted as a multigenerational struggle, they made wartime their property for the long run.

In the process, they oversaw the building of a National Security Complex with powers that boggle the imagination and freed themselves from the last shreds of accountability for their actions. They established or strengthened the power of the executive to: torture at will (and create the “legal” justification for it); imprison at will, indefinitely and without trial; assassinate at will (including American citizens); kidnap at will anywhere in the world and “render” the captive into the hands of allied torturers; turn any mundane government document (at least 92 million of them in 2011 alone) into a classified object and so help spread a penumbra of secrecy over the workings of the American government; surveil Americans in ways never before attempted (and only “legalized” by Congress after the fact, the way you might backdate a check); make war perpetually on their own say-so; and transform whistleblowing -- that is, revealing anything about the inner workings of the lockdown state to other Americans -- into the only prosecutable crime that anyone in the Complex can commit.

It’s true that some version of a number of these powers existed before 9/11. “Renditions” of terror suspects, for instance, first ramped up in the Clinton years; the FBI conducted illegal surveillance of antiwar organizations and other groups in the 1960s; the classification of government documents had long been on the rise; the congressional power to make war had long been on the wane; and prosecution of those who acted illegally while in government service was probably never a commonplace. (Both the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, however, did involve actual convictions or guilty pleas for illegal acts, followed in some of the Iran-Contra cases by presidential pardons.) Still, in each case, after 9/11, the national security state gained new or greatly magnified powers, including an unprecedented capacity to lockdown the country (and American liberties as well).

What it means to be in such a post-legal world -- to know that, no matter what acts a government official commits, he or she will never be brought to court or have a chance of being put in jail -- has yet to fully sink in. This is true even of critics of the Obama administration, who, as in the case of its drone wars, continue to focus on questions of legality, as if that issue weren’t settled. In this sense, they continue to live in an increasingly fantasy-based version of America in which the rule of law still applies to everyone.

In reality, in the Bush and Obama years, the United States has become a nation not of laws but of legal memos, not of legality but of legalisms -- and you don’t have to be a lawyer to know it. The result? Secret armies, secret wars, secret surveillance, and spreading state secrecy, which meant a government of the bureaucrats about which the American people could know next to nothing. And it’s all “legal.”"

tinyurl.com/b37dlso

"The belief that weaponized drones won't be used on US soil is patently irrational. Of course they will be. It's not just likely but inevitable. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones "could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun." The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use. It likely won't be in the form that has received the most media attention: the type of large Predator or Reaper drones that shoot Hellfire missiles which destroy homes and cars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and multiple other countries aimed at Muslims (although US law enforcement agencies already possess Predator drones and have used them over US soil for surveillance).

Instead, as I detailed in a 2012 examination of the drone industry's own promotional materials and reports to their shareholders, domestic weaponized drones will be much smaller and cheaper, as well as more agile - but just as lethal. The nation's leading manufacturer of small "unmanned aircraft systems" (UAS), used both for surveillance and attack purposes, is AeroVironment, Inc. (AV). Its 2011 Annual Report filed with the SEC repeatedly emphasizes that its business strategy depends upon expanding its market from foreign wars to domestic usage including law enforcement."

"Like many drone manufacturers, AV is now focused on drone products - such as the "Qube" - that are so small that they can be "transported in the trunk of a police vehicle or carried in a backpack" and assembled and deployed within a matter of minutes. One news report AV touts is headlined "Drone technology could be coming to a Police Department near you", which focuses on the Qube.

But another article prominently touted on AV's website describes the tiny UAS product dubbed the "Switchblade", which, says the article, is "the leading edge of what is likely to be the broader, even wholesale, weaponization of unmanned systems." The article creepily hails the Switchblade drone as "the ultimate assassin bug". That's because, as I wrote back in 2011, "it is controlled by the operator at the scene, and it worms its way around buildings and into small areas, sending its surveillance imagery to an i-Pad held by the operator, who can then direct the Switchblade to lunge toward and kill the target (hence the name) by exploding in his face." AV's website right now proudly touts a February, 2013 Defense News article describing how much the US Army loves the "Switchblade" and how it is preparing to purchase more. Time Magazine heralded this tiny drone weapon as "one of the best inventions of 2012", gushing: "the Switchblade drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It's a kamikaze: the person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to crash it into a precise target - say, a sniper. Its tiny warhead detonates on impact."

What possible reason could someone identify as to why these small, portable weaponized UAS products will not imminently be used by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the US? They're designed to protect their users in dangerous situations and to enable a target to be more easily killed. Police agencies and the increasingly powerful drone industry will tout their utility in capturing and killing dangerous criminals and their ability to keep officers safe, and media reports will do the same. The handful of genuinely positive uses from drones will be endlessly touted to distract attention away from the dangers they pose.

One has to be incredibly naïve to think that these "assassin bugs" and other lethal drone products will not be widely used on US soil by an already para-militarized domestic police force. As Radley Balko's forthcoming book "Rise of the Warrior Cop" details, the primary trend in US law enforcement is what its title describes as "The Militarization of America's Police Forces". The history of domestic law enforcement particularly after 9/11 has been the importation of military techniques and weapons into domestic policing. It would be shocking if these weapons were not imminently used by domestic law enforcement agencies.

In contrast to weaponized drones, even the most naïve among us do not doubt the imminent proliferation of domestic surveillance drones. With little debate, they have already arrived. As the ACLU put it in their recent report: "US law enforcement is greatly expanding its use of domestic drones for surveillance." An LA Times article from last month reported that "federal authorities have stepped up efforts to license surveillance drones for law enforcement and other uses in US airspace" and that "the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday it had issued 1,428 permits to domestic drone operators since 2007, far more than were previously known." Moreover, the agency "has estimated 10,000 drones could be aloft five years later" and "local and state law enforcement agencies are expected to be among the largest customers."

Concerns about the proliferation of domestic surveillance drones are typically dismissed with the claim that they do nothing more than police helicopters and satellites already do. Such claims are completely misinformed. As the ACLU's 2011 comprehensive report on domestic drones explained: "Unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the prospect of a significant new avenue for the surveillance of American life."

Multiple attributes of surveillance drones make them uniquely threatening. Because they are so cheap and getting cheaper, huge numbers of them can be deployed to create ubiquitous surveillance in a way that helicopters or satellites never could. How this works can already be seen in Afghanistan, where the US military has dubbed its drone surveillance system "the Gorgon Stare", named after the "mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them". That drone surveillance system is "able to scan an area the size of a small town" and "the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence that [can] seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity". Boasted one US General: "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."

The NSA already maintains ubiquitous surveillance of electronic communications, but the Surveillance State faces serious limits on its ability to replicate that for physical surveillance. Drones easily overcome those barriers."

tinyurl.com/d4bc4et

"National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney said on Friday that the US government is secretly gathering information “about virtually every US citizen in the country,” in “a very dangerous process” that violates Americans’ privacy.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its sweeping domestic surveillance program, delivered a keynote address at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York.

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country…and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.”

In the decade after 9/11, in an environment of acute threat inflation, covert national security agencies like the NSA have been flooded with new funding and broadened powers. In the name of keeping Americans safe from foreign threats, basic liberties have been discarded.

Similarly, investigative journalist James Bamford wrote in Wired in March that “the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.”

One anonymous official familiar with the NSA’s surveillance program told Bamford, “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

In an interview with Current TV in May, another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, made similar claims of the capability and intent of the NSA’s surveillance activities. “The vast capability of the NSA was increasingly being turned inside the US,” he said, “to surveil networks, emails, phone calls, etc.”

“The United States of America was turned into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purposes of dragnet electronic surveillance,” Drake added.

In the same interview, Binney said “the real problem I see is that the DoJ is covering up for all the crimes that this administration and the previous administration has been committing against every one in the public.”"

tinyurl.com/cyjyzws

"Over the last century, the United States government and its friends in big business have made it absolutely clear that the status quo - no matter how morally reprehensible it may be - must be preserved at all costs, especially when profits are at stake.

Jim Crow laws and institutionalized racial segregation are a good historical example of this powerful and unholy alliance between the state and private sector, where as recently as the 1960's African-Americans were deliberately kept economically disadvantaged to stamp out potential competition with whites. When attempts to reform what was then the status quo came about through the civil rights movement, activists were greeted by the brutality of batons and bullets - courtesy of the state, and at the behest of the white businesses who benefited most from such economic protectionism.

Since the days of Martin Luther King Jr., dozens of examples further demonstrating this whorish relationship between the state and private sector have risen to the surface. Yet only in the last decade or so - namely, since the birth and growth of the internet and social media - has this alliance been put under the microscope like never before for all the world to see, and these two entities have been anything but bashful about their blatant desires to crush exposure and resist change.

Perhaps one of the most prominent and recent examples comes from the financial meltdown of 2008, where Americans witnessed not only a devastated economy, but also a government entirely invested in protecting those responsible for devastating it. This is hardly surprising considering the Obama administration - like the Bush administration before it - had its campaign coffers filled by the goons on Wall Street. Still, some initially held out hope that Obama might nonetheless be different, but when that proved not to be the case, the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged from the ashes of their disappointment. Yet long before encampments were set up in New York City, the federal government - assisted by the same financial institutions responsible for flushing the economy down the toilet - was already preparing to tear Occupy apart.

In fact, documents requested by The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed that "the government communicated throughout the crackdown effort with financial institutions through the Domestic Security Alliance Council, an entity created by the FBI in 2005 that "enhances communications and promotes the timely and bidirectional effective exchange of information keeping the nation's critical infrastructure safe, secure and resilient.""

Not only did the corporate-state alliance successfully detract efforts at achieving accountability, but it also continued to reward Wall Street by subsidizing it with funds taken from the very people who suffered most: the taxpayer. Indeed, while U.S. taxpayers were cringing at the January 2013 announcement that payroll taxes were set to rise, executives at Goldman Sachs were celebrating the announcement that they'd be receiving $1.6 billion in tax-free financing for a new massive headquarters in Manhattan.

Moreover, the financial crash did little to offset the profits of the banking cartel, as revealed by Matthew Zeitlin of The Daily Beast: "JPMorgan reported that it took in $99.9 billion in revenue and $21.3 billion in net income in 2012; in the fourth quarter, it earned $5.7 billion in profits. In total JPMorgan’s 2012 revenue was 12 percent higher than the year before. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, managed to embarrass analysts who undershot its revenue and profits with $34.16 billion and net income of $7.48 billion for the year; in the fourth quarter, Goldman earned $2.89 billion on $9.24 billion in revenues. Goldman’s annual profits rose 68 percent in 2012 from 2011."

Thanks to a concerted effort between the state and financial sector, challengers to the status quo barely stood a chance when it came to establishing any kind of financial reform or putting a dent in the wallets of the bloodthirsty economic titans operating out of their layer on Wall Street. Government agencies shut down the opposition while simultaneously protecting the culprits and even extending benefits to them, but the financial sector is only one example of how this state-corporate scheme works to keep the public subdued and the status quo dutifully preserved.

Beginning in late 2011, lawmakers in a number of states began considering legislation which would criminalize photography and videos on factory farms. Unsurprisingly, many of these lawmakers have ties to a powerful "super-lobby" group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Corporations pay thousands of dollars to be members of ALEC, and in turn ALEC drafts "model bills" which are introduced to legislators. Of the 60 Iowa lawmakers who voted in support of Iowa's "Ag-Gag" laws, at least 14 of them are members of ALEC. Some of ALEC's corporate sponsors include many of the usual suspects: BP, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Exxon, General Motors, Koch Industries, Marathon Oil, and Shell. This is undoubtedly one of the most telling examples of how closely corporations and the government have become embedded with one another.

Still, why would the meat industry go to such lengths to prohibit undercover investigations? Perhaps because the industry knows that exposing the public to the hellish conditions sentient nonhumans are forced to endure on their "farms" causes their valuable customer base to rethink whether they want to take part in such blatant brutality. Researchers from Kansas State University proved this in 2010 when they released the results of a study suggesting that pork and poultry demand would have likely been 2.65% and 5.01% higher today if media coverage of animal welfare problems remained the same in 2008 as it had been in 1999.

The kinds of abuses that have been exposed so far are anything but trivial. As I reported last year, investigations have repeatedly found instances of pigs with bloody, untreated sores abandoned to die alone and uncared for, hens rotting away in grime-crusted cages, and newborn calves with their heads being ruthlessly stomped into the ground. These revelations epitomize the very definition of animal abuse. One can only imagine the outcry if these torturous conditions were being inflicted on dogs instead of pigs, cows, and chickens, even though all of these animals share the same capacity for suffering.

Each year, over six billion non-human land animals are massacred in the U.S. alone, a number that has - at its peak - reached so high as nearly ten billion. To "process" this many lives with kindness and consideration seems virtually impossible - and factory farmers know it. Just ask John Byrnes who, in the September 1976 issue of the trade journal Hog Farm Management, advised farmers to "forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory."

In any case, the collusion here between the state and the corporations profiting from animal cruelty seems beyond apparent. Washington has once again positioned itself on the regressive side of history in yet another effort to ensure profits for favored corporations - ethics be Danged. But while the U.S. government has become quite the expert at shielding abuse of all kinds for its big business friends, what can be said about the way abuses exposed within government itself are treated?

To answer this question, one need only look at the case of Bradley Manning - the whistleblower who allegedly leaked documents to Wikileaks revealing a variety of wrongdoings by the government, examples which include U.S. forces in Iraq gunning down innocent people, to the Obama administration's utterly shameful efforts to block torture probes into the Bush administration.

How did Washington respond to these leaks? Bradley Manning was treated like a criminal, subjected to inhumane treatment, and held without a trial for months. Instead of confronting the crimes, the messenger of the crimes was punished while the status quo regarding core corruptions both domestically and abroad were swept under the rug, thus making it possible for them to be repeated in the future.

Manning's case is hardly unique. Dozens of government whistleblowers have been subjected to similar treatment for merely coming forward to expose core corruptions. Washington clearly has no interest in changing the status quo of its own behavior, let alone the behavior of its corporate sponsors.

Of course, the aforementioned examples are only a handful out of many. Polls overwhelmingly show that U.S. citizens favor ending the costly and inefficient "war on drugs" - yet the government refuses to do so because corporations involved with tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and prisons (to name just a few) make a hefty profit off prohibition. Polls overwhelmingly show that U.S. citizens favor ending the occupation of Afghanistan - yet the state refuses to withdraw because corporations involved with the defense and oil sector rely on U.S. imperialism to make a living.

Regardless, what should be clear from all of this is that the state - funded through mandatory taxation backed by threats of violence - almost always acts as a guardian of the status quo and as a result, seldom positions itself on the side of history which embraces positive change. Because the state is supported by financial institutions, it will always protect them over the taxpayer; because the state is supported by agricultural institutions, it will always protect them over the taxpayer; and because the state is in itself inherently corrupt, and because politicians running the state will do just about anything to maintain their power in society, the state will always put its own interests before the taxpayer.

And so, the taxpayer may be left to wonder: "what exactly am I paying for?" If the taxpayer favors the status quo and fears peace, justice, accountability, and voluntary interaction, paying taxes may be the most important activity of their life. But would it be untrue to suggest that most people living in the United States who are subjected to state taxation prefer peace over war, justice over injustice, accountability over recklessness, and voluntary interaction over the involuntary? If not, then perhaps it's long past time for the taxpayer to truly reconsider what kind of world is being created in their name - with their earnings - through the perpetual maintenance of an inherently dishonest, violent, and corrupt state which is so clearly entrenched in backwards thought and the preservation of the status quo.

I could not agree more...

[Galt'sGirl]

Sept 11, 2013 12:16:36 GMT John Liberty said:

On 10 September, the US economy was strong, although it had begun to slow down after a sustained period of growth. The unemployment rate stood at 4.9%. We were paying down the national debt and there was a $127 billion surplus for the fiscal year ending on 30 September. For some, concern about the nation's debt focused on what might happen in a few years when the debt was completely eliminated and there was no longer a need for US treasuries, a key component in the world's economy.

Worries about the consequences of a debt-free America evaporated soon thereafter. After tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and a near-collapse of the economy, US treasury department figures show the nation's debt grew from less than $6 trillion in 2001 to nearly $16trillion today. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate has remained over 8% throughout 2012 after peaking at 10% in October 2009.

Rightly or wrongly, on 10 September 2001, most Americans believed their phone calls and emails were private and did not suspect that the government might be listening in and keeping tabs. If someone fondled your junk at the airport, you would expect to see the person again, this time as you sat on the witness standing testifying in his or her sexual assault trial. If the government was going to execute a citizen, it was assumed that followed after a trial and appeals in the courts of our judicial system, not a unilateral decision by a president that is immune from any review.

Back then, our most recent recollection of war was Desert Storm, a six-week campaign that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with fewer than 150 US military personnel killed in action. We watched on television as members of the Iraqi armed forces put down their weapons and surrendered by the tens of thousands, something they did in part because they trusted United States military personnel would provide them food, shelter, medical care and humane treatment.

Now, after more than a decade of non-stop war, in which only a small percentage of Americans have ever had any skin in the game, the public seems to pay little attention to the thousands of Americans who have died, the tens of thousands who have been injured, or the hundreds of billions of dollars spent overseas.

Public opinion of the United States tends to vary sharply among people in different countries, but one common trend is that America's reputation has declined across the board over the past dozen years, even among America's closest allies. A Pew Research Center report in 2000 showed the US had an 83% favorable rating in Great Britain. Today, it stands at 60%, up a bit from 53% in 2008. In Germany, the US favorability rating fell from 78% in 2000 to a low of 31% in 2008.

America has taken some of the shine off of that "shining city on a hill" Ronald Reagan described as the envy of the world.

Attitudes of the American public have changed significantly, too. A poll conducted by the Christian Science Monitor in November 2001 showed that two-thirds of Americans were opposed to torture. A survey conduct by the American Red Cross in 2011 showed that a majority of Americans, including nearly six in 10 teenagers, approved of using torture. Perceptions of what is right and wrong changed when fear took hold in the Home of the Brave.

There is ample room for debate about how and why America got to where it is today, but as election day approaches on 6 November, Americans need to ask themselves about the direction they want the nation to move in the years ahead. Do they want the future to be more like the America that existed on 10 September 2001 or are they satisfied with the America that emerged after 11 September?"

tinyurl.com/q7ocrxo

"Consider Inauguration Day 2012, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his “liberal” second inaugural address. On that day everything from his invocation of women’s rights (“Seneca Falls”), the civil rights movement (“Selma”), and the gay rights movement (“Stonewall”) to his wife’s new bangs and Beyoncé’s lip-syncing was fodder for the media extravaganza. The president was even praised (or reviled) for what he took pains not to bring up: the budget deficit. Was anything, in fact, not grist for the media mill, the hordes of talking heads, and the chattering classes?

One subject, at least, got remarkably little attention during the inaugural blitz and, when mentioned, certainly struck few as odd or worth dwelling on. Yet nothing better caught our changing American world. Washington, after all, was in a lockdown mode unmatched by any inauguration from another era -- not even Lincoln’s second inaugural in the midst of the Civil War, or Franklin Roosevelt’s during World War II, or John F. Kennedy’s at the height of the Cold War.

Here’s how NBC Nightly News described some of the security arrangements as the day approached:

“[T]he airspace above Washington... [will be] a virtual no-fly zone for 30 miles in all directions from the U.S. capital. Six miles of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers will be shut down, with 150 blocks of downtown Washington closed to traffic, partly out of concern for car or truck bombs... with counter-snipers on top of buildings around the capital and along the parade route... [and] detectors monitoring the air for toxins... At the ready near the capital, thousands of doses of antidotes in case of a chemical or biological attack… All this security will cost about $120 million dollars for hundreds of federal agents, thousands of local police, and national guardsmen from 25 states.”

Consider just the money. It’s common knowledge that, until the recent deal over the renewal of the George W. Bush tax cuts for all but the richest of Americans, taxes had not been raised since the read-my-lips-no-new-taxes era of his father. That’s typical of the way we haven’t yet assimilated the new world we find ourselves in. After all, shouldn’t that $120 million in taxpayer money spent on “safety” and “security” for a single event in Washington be considered part of an ongoing Osama bin Laden tax?

Maybe it's time to face the facts: this isn’t your grandfather’s America. Once, prospective Americans landed in a New World. This time around, a new world’s landed on us."

"In these years, what might have remained essentially a nightmarish fantasy has become an impending reality around which the national security folks organize their lives -- and ours. Ever since the now largely forgotten anthrax mail attacks that killed five soon after 9/11 -- the anthrax in those envelopes may have come directly from a U.S. bioweapons laboratory -- all sorts of fantastic scenarios involving biochemical attacks have become part and parcel of the American lockdown state.

In the Bush era, for instance, among the apocalyptic dream scenes the president and his top officials used to panic Congress into approving a much-desired invasion of Iraq were the possibility of future mushroom clouds over American cities and this claim: that Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had drones (he didn’t) and the means to get them to the East Coast of the U.S. (he didn’t), and the ability to use them to launch attacks in which chemical and biological weaponry would be sprayed over U.S. cities (he didn’t). This was a presidentially promoted fantasy of the first order, but no matter. Some senators actually voted to go to war at least partially on the basis of it.

As is often true of ruling groups, Bush and his cronies weren’t just manipulating us with the fear of nightmarish future attacks, but themselves as well. Thanks to New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer’s fine book The Dark Side, for instance, we know that Vice President Penis Cheney was always driven around Washington with "a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit" in the backseat of his car.

The post-9/11 National Security Complex has been convulsed by such fears. After all, it has funded itself by promising Americans one thing: total safety from one of the lesser dangers of our American world -- “terrorism.” The fear of terrorism (essentially that bin Laden tax again) has been a financial winner for the Complex, but it carries its own built-in terrors. Even with the $75 billion or more a year that we pump into the “U.S. Intelligence Community,” the possibility that it might not discover some bizarre plot, and that, as a result, several airliners might then go down, or a crowd in Washington be decimated, or you name it, undoubtedly leaves many in the Complex in an ongoing state of terror. After all, their jobs and livelihoods are at stake.

Think of their fantasies and fears, which have become ever more real in these years without in any way becoming realities, as the building blocks of the American lockdown state. In this way, intent on “taking the gloves off” -- removing, that is, all those constraints they believed had been put on the executive branch in the Watergate era -- and perhaps preemptively living out their own nightmares, figures like Penis Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld changed our world.

As cultists of a “unitary executive,” they -- and the administration of national security managers who followed in the Obama years -- lifted the executive branch right out of the universe of American legality. They liberated it to do more or less what it wished, as long as “war,” “terrorism,” or “security” could be invoked. Meanwhile, with their Global War on Terror well launched and promoted as a multigenerational struggle, they made wartime their property for the long run.

In the process, they oversaw the building of a National Security Complex with powers that boggle the imagination and freed themselves from the last shreds of accountability for their actions. They established or strengthened the power of the executive to: torture at will (and create the “legal” justification for it); imprison at will, indefinitely and without trial; assassinate at will (including American citizens); kidnap at will anywhere in the world and “render” the captive into the hands of allied torturers; turn any mundane government document (at least 92 million of them in 2011 alone) into a classified object and so help spread a penumbra of secrecy over the workings of the American government; surveil Americans in ways never before attempted (and only “legalized” by Congress after the fact, the way you might backdate a check); make war perpetually on their own say-so; and transform whistleblowing -- that is, revealing anything about the inner workings of the lockdown state to other Americans -- into the only prosecutable crime that anyone in the Complex can commit.

It’s true that some version of a number of these powers existed before 9/11. “Renditions” of terror suspects, for instance, first ramped up in the Clinton years; the FBI conducted illegal surveillance of antiwar organizations and other groups in the 1960s; the classification of government documents had long been on the rise; the congressional power to make war had long been on the wane; and prosecution of those who acted illegally while in government service was probably never a commonplace. (Both the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, however, did involve actual convictions or guilty pleas for illegal acts, followed in some of the Iran-Contra cases by presidential pardons.) Still, in each case, after 9/11, the national security state gained new or greatly magnified powers, including an unprecedented capacity to lockdown the country (and American liberties as well).

What it means to be in such a post-legal world -- to know that, no matter what acts a government official commits, he or she will never be brought to court or have a chance of being put in jail -- has yet to fully sink in. This is true even of critics of the Obama administration, who, as in the case of its drone wars, continue to focus on questions of legality, as if that issue weren’t settled. In this sense, they continue to live in an increasingly fantasy-based version of America in which the rule of law still applies to everyone.

In reality, in the Bush and Obama years, the United States has become a nation not of laws but of legal memos, not of legality but of legalisms -- and you don’t have to be a lawyer to know it. The result? Secret armies, secret wars, secret surveillance, and spreading state secrecy, which meant a government of the bureaucrats about which the American people could know next to nothing. And it’s all “legal.”"

tinyurl.com/b37dlso

"The belief that weaponized drones won't be used on US soil is patently irrational. Of course they will be. It's not just likely but inevitable. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones "could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun." The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use. It likely won't be in the form that has received the most media attention: the type of large Predator or Reaper drones that shoot Hellfire missiles which destroy homes and cars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and multiple other countries aimed at Muslims (although US law enforcement agencies already possess Predator drones and have used them over US soil for surveillance).

Instead, as I detailed in a 2012 examination of the drone industry's own promotional materials and reports to their shareholders, domestic weaponized drones will be much smaller and cheaper, as well as more agile - but just as lethal. The nation's leading manufacturer of small "unmanned aircraft systems" (UAS), used both for surveillance and attack purposes, is AeroVironment, Inc. (AV). Its 2011 Annual Report filed with the SEC repeatedly emphasizes that its business strategy depends upon expanding its market from foreign wars to domestic usage including law enforcement."

"Like many drone manufacturers, AV is now focused on drone products - such as the "Qube" - that are so small that they can be "transported in the trunk of a police vehicle or carried in a backpack" and assembled and deployed within a matter of minutes. One news report AV touts is headlined "Drone technology could be coming to a Police Department near you", which focuses on the Qube.

But another article prominently touted on AV's website describes the tiny UAS product dubbed the "Switchblade", which, says the article, is "the leading edge of what is likely to be the broader, even wholesale, weaponization of unmanned systems." The article creepily hails the Switchblade drone as "the ultimate assassin bug". That's because, as I wrote back in 2011, "it is controlled by the operator at the scene, and it worms its way around buildings and into small areas, sending its surveillance imagery to an i-Pad held by the operator, who can then direct the Switchblade to lunge toward and kill the target (hence the name) by exploding in his face." AV's website right now proudly touts a February, 2013 Defense News article describing how much the US Army loves the "Switchblade" and how it is preparing to purchase more. Time Magazine heralded this tiny drone weapon as "one of the best inventions of 2012", gushing: "the Switchblade drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It's a kamikaze: the person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to crash it into a precise target - say, a sniper. Its tiny warhead detonates on impact."

What possible reason could someone identify as to why these small, portable weaponized UAS products will not imminently be used by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the US? They're designed to protect their users in dangerous situations and to enable a target to be more easily killed. Police agencies and the increasingly powerful drone industry will tout their utility in capturing and killing dangerous criminals and their ability to keep officers safe, and media reports will do the same. The handful of genuinely positive uses from drones will be endlessly touted to distract attention away from the dangers they pose.

One has to be incredibly naïve to think that these "assassin bugs" and other lethal drone products will not be widely used on US soil by an already para-militarized domestic police force. As Radley Balko's forthcoming book "Rise of the Warrior Cop" details, the primary trend in US law enforcement is what its title describes as "The Militarization of America's Police Forces". The history of domestic law enforcement particularly after 9/11 has been the importation of military techniques and weapons into domestic policing. It would be shocking if these weapons were not imminently used by domestic law enforcement agencies.

In contrast to weaponized drones, even the most naïve among us do not doubt the imminent proliferation of domestic surveillance drones. With little debate, they have already arrived. As the ACLU put it in their recent report: "US law enforcement is greatly expanding its use of domestic drones for surveillance." An LA Times article from last month reported that "federal authorities have stepped up efforts to license surveillance drones for law enforcement and other uses in US airspace" and that "the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday it had issued 1,428 permits to domestic drone operators since 2007, far more than were previously known." Moreover, the agency "has estimated 10,000 drones could be aloft five years later" and "local and state law enforcement agencies are expected to be among the largest customers."

Concerns about the proliferation of domestic surveillance drones are typically dismissed with the claim that they do nothing more than police helicopters and satellites already do. Such claims are completely misinformed. As the ACLU's 2011 comprehensive report on domestic drones explained: "Unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the prospect of a significant new avenue for the surveillance of American life."

Multiple attributes of surveillance drones make them uniquely threatening. Because they are so cheap and getting cheaper, huge numbers of them can be deployed to create ubiquitous surveillance in a way that helicopters or satellites never could. How this works can already be seen in Afghanistan, where the US military has dubbed its drone surveillance system "the Gorgon Stare", named after the "mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them". That drone surveillance system is "able to scan an area the size of a small town" and "the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence that [can] seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity". Boasted one US General: "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."

The NSA already maintains ubiquitous surveillance of electronic communications, but the Surveillance State faces serious limits on its ability to replicate that for physical surveillance. Drones easily overcome those barriers."

tinyurl.com/d4bc4et

"National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney said on Friday that the US government is secretly gathering information “about virtually every US citizen in the country,” in “a very dangerous process” that violates Americans’ privacy.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its sweeping domestic surveillance program, delivered a keynote address at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York.

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country…and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.”

In the decade after 9/11, in an environment of acute threat inflation, covert national security agencies like the NSA have been flooded with new funding and broadened powers. In the name of keeping Americans safe from foreign threats, basic liberties have been discarded.

Similarly, investigative journalist James Bamford wrote in Wired in March that “the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.”

One anonymous official familiar with the NSA’s surveillance program told Bamford, “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

In an interview with Current TV in May, another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, made similar claims of the capability and intent of the NSA’s surveillance activities. “The vast capability of the NSA was increasingly being turned inside the US,” he said, “to surveil networks, emails, phone calls, etc.”

“The United States of America was turned into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purposes of dragnet electronic surveillance,” Drake added.

In the same interview, Binney said “the real problem I see is that the DoJ is covering up for all the crimes that this administration and the previous administration has been committing against every one in the public.”"

tinyurl.com/cyjyzws

"Over the last century, the United States government and its friends in big business have made it absolutely clear that the status quo - no matter how morally reprehensible it may be - must be preserved at all costs, especially when profits are at stake.

Jim Crow laws and institutionalized racial segregation are a good historical example of this powerful and unholy alliance between the state and private sector, where as recently as the 1960's African-Americans were deliberately kept economically disadvantaged to stamp out potential competition with whites. When attempts to reform what was then the status quo came about through the civil rights movement, activists were greeted by the brutality of batons and bullets - courtesy of the state, and at the behest of the white businesses who benefited most from such economic protectionism.

Since the days of Martin Luther King Jr., dozens of examples further demonstrating this whorish relationship between the state and private sector have risen to the surface. Yet only in the last decade or so - namely, since the birth and growth of the internet and social media - has this alliance been put under the microscope like never before for all the world to see, and these two entities have been anything but bashful about their blatant desires to crush exposure and resist change.

Perhaps one of the most prominent and recent examples comes from the financial meltdown of 2008, where Americans witnessed not only a devastated economy, but also a government entirely invested in protecting those responsible for devastating it. This is hardly surprising considering the Obama administration - like the Bush administration before it - had its campaign coffers filled by the goons on Wall Street. Still, some initially held out hope that Obama might nonetheless be different, but when that proved not to be the case, the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged from the ashes of their disappointment. Yet long before encampments were set up in New York City, the federal government - assisted by the same financial institutions responsible for flushing the economy down the toilet - was already preparing to tear Occupy apart.

In fact, documents requested by The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed that "the government communicated throughout the crackdown effort with financial institutions through the Domestic Security Alliance Council, an entity created by the FBI in 2005 that "enhances communications and promotes the timely and bidirectional effective exchange of information keeping the nation's critical infrastructure safe, secure and resilient.""

Not only did the corporate-state alliance successfully detract efforts at achieving accountability, but it also continued to reward Wall Street by subsidizing it with funds taken from the very people who suffered most: the taxpayer. Indeed, while U.S. taxpayers were cringing at the January 2013 announcement that payroll taxes were set to rise, executives at Goldman Sachs were celebrating the announcement that they'd be receiving $1.6 billion in tax-free financing for a new massive headquarters in Manhattan.

Moreover, the financial crash did little to offset the profits of the banking cartel, as revealed by Matthew Zeitlin of The Daily Beast: "JPMorgan reported that it took in $99.9 billion in revenue and $21.3 billion in net income in 2012; in the fourth quarter, it earned $5.7 billion in profits. In total JPMorgan’s 2012 revenue was 12 percent higher than the year before. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, managed to embarrass analysts who undershot its revenue and profits with $34.16 billion and net income of $7.48 billion for the year; in the fourth quarter, Goldman earned $2.89 billion on $9.24 billion in revenues. Goldman’s annual profits rose 68 percent in 2012 from 2011."

Thanks to a concerted effort between the state and financial sector, challengers to the status quo barely stood a chance when it came to establishing any kind of financial reform or putting a dent in the wallets of the bloodthirsty economic titans operating out of their layer on Wall Street. Government agencies shut down the opposition while simultaneously protecting the culprits and even extending benefits to them, but the financial sector is only one example of how this state-corporate scheme works to keep the public subdued and the status quo dutifully preserved.

Beginning in late 2011, lawmakers in a number of states began considering legislation which would criminalize photography and videos on factory farms. Unsurprisingly, many of these lawmakers have ties to a powerful "super-lobby" group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Corporations pay thousands of dollars to be members of ALEC, and in turn ALEC drafts "model bills" which are introduced to legislators. Of the 60 Iowa lawmakers who voted in support of Iowa's "Ag-Gag" laws, at least 14 of them are members of ALEC. Some of ALEC's corporate sponsors include many of the usual suspects: BP, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Exxon, General Motors, Koch Industries, Marathon Oil, and Shell. This is undoubtedly one of the most telling examples of how closely corporations and the government have become embedded with one another.

Still, why would the meat industry go to such lengths to prohibit undercover investigations? Perhaps because the industry knows that exposing the public to the hellish conditions sentient nonhumans are forced to endure on their "farms" causes their valuable customer base to rethink whether they want to take part in such blatant brutality. Researchers from Kansas State University proved this in 2010 when they released the results of a study suggesting that pork and poultry demand would have likely been 2.65% and 5.01% higher today if media coverage of animal welfare problems remained the same in 2008 as it had been in 1999.

The kinds of abuses that have been exposed so far are anything but trivial. As I reported last year, investigations have repeatedly found instances of pigs with bloody, untreated sores abandoned to die alone and uncared for, hens rotting away in grime-crusted cages, and newborn calves with their heads being ruthlessly stomped into the ground. These revelations epitomize the very definition of animal abuse. One can only imagine the outcry if these torturous conditions were being inflicted on dogs instead of pigs, cows, and chickens, even though all of these animals share the same capacity for suffering.

Each year, over six billion non-human land animals are massacred in the U.S. alone, a number that has - at its peak - reached so high as nearly ten billion. To "process" this many lives with kindness and consideration seems virtually impossible - and factory farmers know it. Just ask John Byrnes who, in the September 1976 issue of the trade journal Hog Farm Management, advised farmers to "forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory."

In any case, the collusion here between the state and the corporations profiting from animal cruelty seems beyond apparent. Washington has once again positioned itself on the regressive side of history in yet another effort to ensure profits for favored corporations - ethics be Danged. But while the U.S. government has become quite the expert at shielding abuse of all kinds for its big business friends, what can be said about the way abuses exposed within government itself are treated?

To answer this question, one need only look at the case of Bradley Manning - the whistleblower who allegedly leaked documents to Wikileaks revealing a variety of wrongdoings by the government, examples which include U.S. forces in Iraq gunning down innocent people, to the Obama administration's utterly shameful efforts to block torture probes into the Bush administration.

How did Washington respond to these leaks? Bradley Manning was treated like a criminal, subjected to inhumane treatment, and held without a trial for months. Instead of confronting the crimes, the messenger of the crimes was punished while the status quo regarding core corruptions both domestically and abroad were swept under the rug, thus making it possible for them to be repeated in the future.

Manning's case is hardly unique. Dozens of government whistleblowers have been subjected to similar treatment for merely coming forward to expose core corruptions. Washington clearly has no interest in changing the status quo of its own behavior, let alone the behavior of its corporate sponsors.

Of course, the aforementioned examples are only a handful out of many. Polls overwhelmingly show that U.S. citizens favor ending the costly and inefficient "war on drugs" - yet the government refuses to do so because corporations involved with tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and prisons (to name just a few) make a hefty profit off prohibition. Polls overwhelmingly show that U.S. citizens favor ending the occupation of Afghanistan - yet the state refuses to withdraw because corporations involved with the defense and oil sector rely on U.S. imperialism to make a living.

Regardless, what should be clear from all of this is that the state - funded through mandatory taxation backed by threats of violence - almost always acts as a guardian of the status quo and as a result, seldom positions itself on the side of history which embraces positive change. Because the state is supported by financial institutions, it will always protect them over the taxpayer; because the state is supported by agricultural institutions, it will always protect them over the taxpayer; and because the state is in itself inherently corrupt, and because politicians running the state will do just about anything to maintain their power in society, the state will always put its own interests before the taxpayer.

And so, the taxpayer may be left to wonder: "what exactly am I paying for?" If the taxpayer favors the status quo and fears peace, justice, accountability, and voluntary interaction, paying taxes may be the most important activity of their life. But would it be untrue to suggest that most people living in the United States who are subjected to state taxation prefer peace over war, justice over injustice, accountability over recklessness, and voluntary interaction over the involuntary? If not, then perhaps it's long past time for the taxpayer to truly reconsider what kind of world is being created in their name - with their earnings - through the perpetual maintenance of an inherently dishonest, violent, and corrupt state which is so clearly entrenched in backwards thought and the preservation of the status quo.

Agreed. 9/11 should have been a time to be thankful for our life and our freedom, not a time to take both away. Terrible tragedy, and the government made it much worse...and they are increasing the potential for another 9/11 with this Syria debacle!