Police State Much?

Mike & Friends Blog

Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan's oldest child Casey was killed in Iraq on April 4th, 2004. Since then she has been on a mission to end the wars and hold George W. Bush accountable

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June 9th, 2011 7:43 PM

By Cindy Sheehan

“Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.”

Steve Allen

“Patriotic” Americans are still berating me for “demeaning” my son’s “sacrifice.” A typical message goes something like this:

“Your son died to give you the right to spew your filth against this country. If it wasn’t for the military and people like your son, you wouldn’t have the freedom to protest.”

Oh, really? If I have the “freedom to protest” then why have I been arrested so many times and why did I have a four-month restraining order from protesting near the White House last year that would have landed my buns in jail for six-months if I violated it? Why are activists still be arrested for solely exercising what used to be our fundamental rights?

In fact, attorney, Bill Quigley has documented that more than 2600 activists have been arrested since Obama was sworn in 2009.

The Constitutional Lawyer turned POTUS is committing atrocities against peace, justice and human rights at a pace that Bush and Cheney only dreamed possible. If Obama can’t have one of us arrested or executed on his orders, then he will gladly diagnose our principled questioning as a mental disorder. Obama even told Steve Pelley of 60 Minutes that if any American dare question his obvious lies around the re-death of Osama bin Laden, then he/she should have “their heads examined.”

I find it extremely interesting that the fundamental values of peace, truth, and justice have been turned into a mental disorder by the POTUS who, as I have pointed out before, has committed innumerable atrocities against these values. However, what I am finding increasingly alarming is the USA’s rapid descent into a police state.

On June 7^th, my sister and I were driving from Sacramento to Los Angeles on I-5—this is a trip that both she and I have made dozens of times since my family moved near Sacramento in 1993. We almost immediately noticed the elevated presence of cop 'copters hovering over the interstate and over nearby communities. Neither of us had ever witnessed so many military convoys and such a police presence in any of the previous times we made the trip. We speculated what it could be all about and I even had to come to a complete stop on I-105 when it looked like a Los Angeles Sheriff’s 'copter was about to land on the roof of my car. Hmm, there is definitely a shift happening, but it’s often hard to pin things down.

Well, the very next day, I learned about two events that shocked even me—I thought the Empire couldn't shock me, but I was wrong.

The very day that my sister and I were traveling the length of our gorgeous state, a Stockton, California man was having his door broken down by what he thought was a S.W.A.T. Goon Squad.

According to Kenneth Wright, a single father of three young children ages, 3, 7 and 11; he heard some commotion outside his Stockton home, so he looked out his upstairs window and saw 15 cops that looked like members of S.W.A.T. Before he could get downstairs to the door, they had battered it down and entered his home. Wright spent the next six hours handcuffed in the back of a cop car with his three frightened children.

Is Kenneth Wright the alleged murderer of thousands of brown people in the Middle East and North Africa? Has this scoundrel cheated millions of people out of their retirement/life savings? Did Mr. Wright authorize the use of torture, or even invade one country illegally?

No, of course not. It turns out that the cops who broke down Mr. Wright's door brutalizing him and traumatizing his children weren’t local or state law enforcement, but an Education Goon Squad that had been granted some kind of vicious police state authority because Mr. Wright’s ex-wife allegedly committed "fraud" on her student loans. How many of us have student loans that are in danger of being defaulted on because we can’t find a job? The primary question is, though, why do most of us have to commit ourselves to years of debt to get a University education which should be free in the most wealthiest country in the world?

The scandal of the rising cost and increasing inaccessibility of higher education can be directly related to the oppression and exploitation of the people that handle Obama like the Marionette that he is.

If the above story doesn’t terrify you, then what about this one:

In the wee hours of Memorial Day, cops in Miami were involved in a high-speed chase that ended with the injuries of four innocent bystanders and the shooting execution of the SUSPECT. Witnesses to the crimes of the P.D. videotaped the entire incident and were then, themselves subjected to police brutality as the Miami cops held guns to their heads and smashed their cell phones. Luckily, one of the victims had the presence of mind to secure the sim card of his phone in his mouth.

Ask yourself: “How terrified would I be if I just witnessed cops brutally shooting a man to death, then holding a gun to my head?”

Incidentally, the Miami PD has also recently been involved in arresting activists from the organization Food Not Bombs for having the audacity to feed the area’s homeless.

The Robber Class obviously doesn’t want hungry people fed, sick people healed, uneducated people schooled, homeless people housed, or poor people prosperous. Their agenda is total domination of the world’s resources and complete income inequality in our own country.

The next time you fly and either have to subject your body to unacceptable levels of radiation in one of the Pervo-Scanners or get molested by TSA—think to yourself: “This is how it starts—my nation is being turned into a police state with nary a whimper.”

At least I loudly protest these violations when I fly and I educate everyone within earshot (including the TSA) that Michael Chertoff (former director of the NSA under Bush) profits from the full-body X-ray machines in airports. The last time I was being illegally molested by a TSA agent because I refused to go through one of the Pervo-Scanners, she said: “Am I hurting you?” And I answered: “Yes, you are beating the crap out of my 4^th Amendment.”

The above stories illustrate that we no longer even have the pretense to the rights to privacy or against illegal search and seizure. Even if the state grants warrants, or passes laws that our privates are now fair game for government perversity, oftentimes these laws directly contravene the Constitution.

However, with the recent reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT ACT, the Constitution has again been rendered “null and void.”

The obvious solution to what ails our nation is to end the wars and invest part of the money in education—forgive student loans and provide free/low cost university education to everyone in this country. Ending the wars will not only have a positive effect on our economy, but we won’t be creating enemies faster than we can kill them, so all of this jack-booted police state thuggery would not be necessary.

With the profit motive being so tempting to the Robber Class, it seems like one of the only recourses left to us now is to film everything that happens around us and hide the sim cards of our phones in one of our body’s crevices—we can at least be witnesses to and document Obama’s rush to total totalitarianism.