Trump’s Amerikkka
Welcome to the most patriotic police state on Earth.
Recent news articles have shown the largest police union in the United States collectively supporting the presidential candidate, Donald Trump. The hue and cry from the public in areas outside of the northeast United States has varied from mild annoyance to the outright terror of a burgeoning police state.
I contend a police state has been the desired condition for quite some time, at least twenty years and further contend this is not an accident. As educational quality has been impeded by corporate influences, students are getting less of what they need for critical thinking, analysis and independent thought.
In fact, modern students have been taught to be compliant and to live in the shadow of authority. In essence, they have been trained to be afraid. Requiring “helicopter parenting” to navigate schools, unable to walk the streets of a nation, purported statistically, to be safer than its ever been, our youth are taught to be fearful of change and compliant toward authority. They have been conditioned to want an authoritative hand to control everything. The last two decades appear to have been tailored for the rise of the Police State.
Under the guise of the Patriot Act, there has been some of the greatest erosion of individual rights since the McCarthy era. Public protest has become effectively illegal. (Okay, not technically outlawed but note how many protestors seem to end up behind bars even when peacefully protesting while the things protested against rarely suffer the same fate.) Military force is now apparently acceptable to bring to even the most peaceful of protests.
Racial protest such as the one in Ferguson or the protest over the obviously wrongful death of Tamir Rice have only ended badly for the protestors. The police are never charged or held accountable in any way. Most don’t even lose their jobs. At worst, the taxpayers foot the bill paying the family for their loss (if they can afford to hire a savvy enough lawyer); in essence, making police departments unaccountable for their actions in any way and socializing the cost for their dangerous and counter-service oriented behavior.
Whistle-blowing can get you arrested either for not revealing your sources or for revealing things the government doesn’t want known, such as the national capacity for metadata collection and warrant-less wiretapping revealed by former NSA security worker, Edward Snowden. Revealing government abuses can only harm the people who reveal them.
Corporate malfeasance is no longer considered a problem even when it causes massive environmental damage or economic catastrophe. Notice, no one was imprisoned for the oil rig spill of the Deepwater Horizon, one of the most massive ecological catastrophes in the history of the world.
Even when banks are caught participating with criminal organizations, no one ends up in court or jail. No one was arrested for the cause of the Great Recession/Depression, even though we know bankers and other economic participants colluded in the defrauding of nations with the selling of subprime loans as part of bogus collateral packages. They are fined and admit no wrongdoing. Making a bank pay a fine is the same as asking an ice cream vendor for a free cone of ice cream.
Each of these offenses and protests against them are precursors to the erosion of rights and the increase in secular power of the judicial systems of this nation. With search and seizure laws being overturned locally, illegal search and confiscation of goods, money and vehicles is at an all time high.
As quiet as its kept, it would appear we are already in a semi-authoritarian government which punishes anyone who chooses to point out their indiscretions, legal or otherwise. If Donald Trump is elected we can expect such trends to continue as he stacks the Supreme Court with more conservative judges whose judgments will alter the behaviors of the nation, giving more control to corporate forces altering the legal system with jurisprudence such as Citizens United v. FEC which continues to give corporations the power to utilize their great wealth to alter the political landscape in their favor, reducing the capacity of government to protect the quality of life for its citizens while making it possible for corporations to push more of their own agendas.
These agendas, while appearing to benefit the citizens most often allow corporations to store wealth overseas, pay less in taxes, shifting the burden to citizens, reduce corporate responsibility for the environmental aspects of their businesses, such as food safety, toxic waste disposal and removal, and other externalities which become a burden to the public instead of being the responsibilities of the corporations who create them.
As long as the specter of Donald Trump as president exists, corporate powers will be doing everything they can to see his appointment because of the generational effects he will have on policy in this nation. His appointment will reduce the voice of the people and decrease their freedom to protest what are appearing to be economically unsustainable and socially-repressive conditions of which a police state can only further facilitate.
In our modern America, the quality of life continues to degrade, meaningful work and upward mobility are all but figures of speech, and with the news media defanged and unwilling to engage government or corporations, as is their mandate, the inevitability of the police state seems all but assured.
While most live in fear of the impending police state, I contend we are already a police state in everything but name.
Thaddeus Howze is a writer, essayist, author and professional storyteller for mysterious beings who exist in non-Euclidean realms beyond our understanding. You can follow him on Twitter or support his writings on Patreon.
