USA Patriot Act, NDAA. America's so-called war on terror will continue to chip away at our freedoms, unravel our Constitution and transform our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the U.S. Constitution, is the map by which we navigate life in the United States.
Militarized police state. Police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers into heavily armed extensions of the military. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America's law-enforcement officials will continue to keep the masses corralled, controlled, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.
SWAT-team raids. With more than 80,000 SWAT-team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by local police for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law-enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties will continue to rise.
Domestic drones. The domestic use of drones will continue unabated. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000 drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020. These machines, which will be equipped with weapons, will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat sensors, and radar.
School-to-prison pipeline. The paradigm of abject compliance to the state will continue to be taught by example in the schools, through school lock-downs where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero-tolerance policies that punish all offences equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior.
Overcriminalization. The government bureaucracy will continue to churn out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, rendering the rest of us petty criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to this overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal.
Privatized Prisons. States will continue to outsource prisons to private corporations, resulting in a cash cow whereby mega-corporations imprison Americans in private prisons in order to make a profit.
Endless wars. America's expanding military empire will continue to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military-industrial complex at taxpayer expense.
Are you getting the message yet?
The next president, much like the current president and his predecessors, will be little more than a figurehead, a puppet to entertain and distract the populace from what's really going on.
As Lofgren reveals, this state within a state, "concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue," is a "hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose."
This is fascism in its most covert form, hiding behind public agencies and private companies to carry out its dirty deeds.
It is a marriage between government bureaucrats and corporate fat cats.
As Lofgren concludes:
In other words, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, as long as government officials--elected and unelected alike--are allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution, the courts and the citizenry, the threat to our freedoms remains undiminished.
So the next time you find yourselves despondent over the 2016 presidential candidates, remember that it's just a puppet show intended to distract you from the silent coup being carried out by America's shadow government.
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