‘You’re Either a Cop or Little People’: The American Police State in 2014

For those of us who have managed to survive 2014 with our lives intact and our freedoms hanging by a thread, it has been a year of crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns.

We’ve been held up, stripped down, faked out, photographed, frisked, fracked, hacked, tracked, cracked, intercepted, accessed, spied on, zapped, mapped, searched, shot at, tasered, tortured, tackled, trussed up, tricked, lied to, labeled, libeled, leered at, shoved aside, saddled with debt not of our own making, sold a bill of goods about national security, tuned out by those representing us, tossed aside, and taken to the cleaners.

As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we’ve had our freedoms turned inside out, our democratic structure flipped upside down, and our house of cards left in a shambles.

We’ve had our children burned by flashbang grenades, our dogs shot, and our old folks hospitalized after “accidental” encounters with marauding SWAT teams. We’ve been told that as citizens we have no rights within 100 miles of our own border, now considered “Constitution-free zones.” We’ve had our faces filed in government databases, our biometrics crosschecked against criminal databanks, and our consumerist tendencies catalogued for future marketing overtures.

We’ve been given the runaround on government wrongdoing, starting with President Obama’s claim that the National Security Agency has never abused its power to spy on Americans’ phone calls and emails. All the while, the NSA has been racing to build a supercomputer that could break through “every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.”

We’ve seen the police transformed from community peacekeepers to point guards for the militarized corporate state. We’ve been deemed suspicious for engaging in such dubious activities as talking too long on a cell phone and stretching too long before jogging.

We’ve been arrested for all manner of “crimes” that never used to be considered criminal, let alone uncommon or unlawful, behavior: letting our kids walk to the playground alone, giving loose change to a homeless man, feeding the hungry, and living off the grid.

We’ve been sodomized, victimized, jeopardized, demoralized, traumatized, stigmatized, vandalized, demonized, polarized and terrorized, often without having done anything to justify such treatment.

We’ve been railroaded into believing that it matters whether we vote Republican or Democrat, when truth be told, as the corporate state knows all too well, the only color that matters in politics is green.

We’ve gone from having privacy in our inner sanctums to having nowhere to hide. Even our cities have become wall-to-wall electronic concentration camps, with police now able to record hi-def video of everything that takes place within city limits.

We’ve had our schools locked down, our students handcuffed and arrested, our children’s biometrics stored, their school IDs chipped, their movements tracked, and their data bought, sold and bartered for profit by government contractors.

We’ve been rendered enemy combatants in our own country. We’ve had the very military weapons we funded with our hard-earned tax dollars used against us.

We’ve been silenced, censored and forced to conform. We’ve been shot by police for reaching for a license during a traffic stop, reaching for a baby during a drug bust, carrying a toy sword down a public street, and wearing headphones that hamper our ability to hear.

We’ve been tasered for talking back to police, tackled for taking pictures of police abuses, and threatened with jail time for invoking our rights.

We’ve had our possessions seized and stolen by law enforcement agencies looking to cash in on asset forfeiture schemes, our jails privatized and used as a source of cheap labor for megacorporations, and our buying habits turned into suspicious behavior by a government readily inclined to view its citizens as terrorists.

We’ve been told that national security is more important than civil liberties, that the best way not to get raped by police is to “follow the law,” that what a police officer says in court will be given preference over what video footage shows, that an upright posture and acne are sufficient reasons for a cop to suspect you of wrongdoing, that police can stop and search a driver based solely on an anonymous tip, and that police officers have every right to shoot first and ask questions later if they feel threatened.

Now there are those who still insist that they are beyond the reach of the police state because they have done nothing wrong and have nothing to fear. Yet the lesson of 2014 is simply this: in a police state, you’re either a cop or you’re one of the little people. Right now, we are the little people, the servants, the serfs, the grunts who must obey without question or suffer the consequences.

If there is to be any hope in 2015 for restoring our freedoms and reclaiming our runaway government, we will have to start by breathing life into those three powerful words that set the tone for everything that follows in the Constitution: “we the people.”

Get mad, get outraged, get off your duff and get out of your house, get in the streets, get in people’s faces, get down to your local city council, get over to your local school board, get your thoughts down on paper, get your objections plastered on protest signs, get your neighbors, friends and family to join their voices to yours, get your representatives to pay attention to your grievances, get your kids to know their rights, get your local police to march in lockstep with the Constitution, get your media to act as watchdogs for the people and not lapdogs for the corporate state, get your act together, and get your house in order.

In other words, get moving. Time is growing short, and the police state is closing in. Power to the people!

I held off posting this until today (Monday) as I get the sense that many of us take a welcome break from these machines on week-ends.

I know you've seen these frequently overused words from me in the past but this is another extremely important essay by a man who has spent decades in the trenches of this spiritual and, unless things change, the soon to be physical war now being waged for the soul of America. (If you don't know who John is, you can find out here: https://www.rutherford.org/about/about_john_whitehead/)

As I read John's essay, the words of two of the Founders keep running through my head:

"A nation of well-informed men, who have been taught to know and to prize the rights God has given them, cannot be enslaved. IT IS IN THE REGION OF IGNORANCE THAT TYRANNY BEGINS." Benjamin Franklin.

"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic, but will they keep it? Or will then, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path to destruction." Thomas Jefferson.

The incredible and growing "ignorance" cited by Franklin, coupled with Mr. Jefferson's warning that the "plenty" the system they attempted to leave us has produced an apathy causing us to take "freedom" and that "material abundance" so for granted that we will soon lose it all! The expression that has most often heralded the death of those few previously free nation now gathering dust in the dumpster of history is "Why, THAT could NEVER HAPPEN HERE!"

John's excellent essay MUST lead a serious reader to conclude that it mostly has already!

I'll stop now and simply ask you to read this, think very hard and, if you agree, send this on to your friends and loved ones.

Just to get on record that I am NOT a cop hater. What I DO hate is the POLICE STATE to which we are headed. I blame the cops less than I do the utopian control freaks who have tightened that noose around our necks with stupid and unnecessary "laws" they then send the cops out to ATTEMPT to enforce.

And so should you!

Ever since the so-called War On Drugs (WOD) and, now, the War On Terror (WOT) -- actually more like the War On The Bill of Rights) -- began, our civilian cops have been undergoing MILITARY training. The “authorities” gentle it down with the prefix “Para” but those “dynamic entry” teams would be more at home in Baghdad than Boston. (Well, unless they hit John Kerry’s front door at 3 am, Boston might not be a good example.) Watch “Dallas SWAT” for a dose of how it works.

I have long thought that that sort of activity within the ranks of otherwise “civilian” law enforcement was a push by those with an agenda to bypass posse comitatus for purposes BEYOND the WOD/WOT and other currently criminal behavior.

That the mass of that shrinking minority – the American citizen (thank you Mr. Open Borders Bush and Total Amnesty Obama) – has NOT objected to this erosion of personal liberty does NOT bode well for the future of freedom here.

I wonder what sort of body count of innocent grandmothers and others it will take before folks begin to grasp that they might be more at risk from the cops than the criminals and bring the situation back under control?

My Uncle Bob (R.I.P.) would be horrified.

My Uncle Bob was a 30-year veteran of a police force in suburban Cleveland. He was best man at my wedding in 1962. He served in an era when MOST cops embodied the now frequently hollow motto emblazoned on police units all over this country: “TO PROTECT AND SERVE.”

The last 10 years of his career were spent as the chief Juvenile Detective in his department. When he died, a number of the young men whose lives he had touched years before came forward to tell how his timely and sometimes tough-love intervention turned them around.

I know that many officers STILL try to live that creed today. I also know that there are officers out there who, despite the rulings by the Supremes that they have no obligation to specific, individual citizens (see Warren v. DC for some fascinating and frightening reading on that), would stand between one of us and a bullet – and have.

Having said that, I must also lament that SOME cops are “cowboys.” Too many are simply power driven megalomaniacs who would have dropped on the OTHER side of the law had their lives drifted a degree or two off the course they did take. It is these clowns who give credence to the wry bit of “humor” that there is no situation than cannot be made worse by the presence of the cops.

I believe this to be especially true of far too many federal law enforcement types who have allowed their egos and hubris to become as bloated as the bureaucratic federal behemoth they serve. (See footnote below). Their mandate is no longer to “…protect and serve” the citizens who pay their salaries: It is to crush any meaningful resistance to a growing body of procedures, regulations and policies – too frequently enforced under severely tortured interpretations of the underlying legislative enactments (if any) – and often put in place by executive fiat. The massively abused SEIZURE statutes – laws the author of which now seeks to RESCIND! -- spring to mind.

And one cannot but help to wonder how the clear to anyone with half a brain criminality of the Clintons and now Obama – and their subsequent avoidance of any penalty – has played into the problem? There now seems to be a bright line between the easy, highly flexible, slap-on-the-wrist law for the rich and powerful and the rigidly enforced law against even the tiniest victimless “crimes” committed by those of us further down the food chain. Does anyone in his right mind believe THAT will NOT engender added disrespect for ALL law?

Could those things be a large part of the problem in some of the highly disturbing – and DEADLY (on BOTH sides) – confrontations we have witnessed over the past decade or so? Gordon Kahl, Ruby Ridge, OK City, Waco, Beck… This list WILL lengthen and we’d all better pray that WE will be spared.

Roman historian Tacitus warned that one could tell the level of corruption in a society by the NUMBER of its laws. Anyone doubt the level of corruption here? Am I the only one who thinks we’re long overdue a serious review of the NUMBERS of laws under which we are now forced to exist – and which are increasingly used not to assure our safety or well-being, but to COMMAND AND CONTROL us and KEEP US IN LINE.

Only the most tyrannical and power-crazed members of law enforcement could possibly object to that.

The modern counterparts of my uncle would not object.

It is THEY, after all, who are most likely to catch that bullet – probably fired by someone who has symbolically screamed to himself “I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANY MORE” -- referred to earlier when they sally forth to serve that flimsy warrant or make that bogus arrest.

Dick Bachert (1999) Updated 12/2010 FOOTNOTE:

At a cocktail party back in the late 80's, I struck up a conversation with a fellow -- his name was Joe M. -- whom I'd met on one or two previous events. After my first encounter, Joe's neighbor and my boss at the time told me that Joe was an alcoholic who had just retired from 25 years with the IRS. Needless to say, I was guarded in expressing my political views to Joe as the IRS had helped my dad into an early grave in 1977 -- at age 59 over an estate matter. Joe was pretty deep into his cups at the function in question and began telling IRS "war stories." Most had to do with clear cases of criminal conduct by not very nice people. Joe -- who was a few years short of 60 -- sounded to me like someone who enjoyed helping getting really bad people off the street and I asked why he'd retired early. He told me that what he called "the service" had changed for the worse. Then I asked him about the new people coming in. He shook his head, actually teared up and said that many of them were "really bad." I pressed. "Really bad" meant incompetent? "No -- DANGEROUS," he responded "they like to hurt people."

It was then that I think I understood why Joe drank.

Though provoking post and thread.

I do not think that illegal plunder, such as theft or swindling — which the penal code defines, anticipates, and punishes — can be called socialism. It is not this kind of plunder that systematically threatens the foundations of society. Anyway, the war against this kind of plunder has not waited for the command of these gentlemen. The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. Long before the Revolution of February 1848 — long before the appearance even of socialism itself — France had provided police, judges, gendarmes, prisons, dungeons, and scaffolds for the purpose of fighting illegal plunder. The law itself conducts this war, and it is my wish and opinion that the law should always maintain this attitude toward plunder.

But it does not always do this. Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame, danger, and scruple which their acts would otherwise involve. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons, and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim — when he defends himself — as a criminal.

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.

The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.

Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out every particle of socialism that may have crept into your legislation. This will be no light task.

/Bastiat

Identify the criminal. Depopulate them from your life and the body politic.

Socialism Is Legal Plunder - Bastiat

http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/caucus-members/

Defund/dismantle their collectives.

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