SearchRecent comments
Democracy LinksMember's Off-site Blogs |
freedom never was allowed.....
What you smell is the stench of a dying republic. Our dying republic. We are trapped in a political matrix intended to sustain the illusion that we are citizens of a constitutional republic. In reality, we are caught somewhere between a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens). The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom
For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people. In other words, we’re allowed to bask in the illusion of freedom while we’re being stripped of the very rights intended to ensure that we can hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution. We’re in trouble, folks. This is no longer America, land of the free, where the government is of the people, by the people and for the people. Rather, this is Amerika, where fascism, totalitarianism and militarism go hand in hand. Freedom no longer means what it once did. This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ commitment to the American experiment in freedom. Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves. My friends, we’re being played for fools. On paper, we may be technically free. In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow. We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit. Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry. With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives. As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.” Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, but we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on. In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom. Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction. The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses. This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine. That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance. We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs. By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law. Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power. If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end. So, what’s the answer? For starters, stop tolerating corruption, graft, intolerance, greed, incompetence, ineptitude, militarism, lawlessness, ignorance, brutality, deceit, collusion, corpulence, bureaucracy, immorality, depravity, censorship, cruelty, violence, mediocrity, and tyranny. These are the hallmarks of an institution that is rotten through and through. Stop holding your nose in order to block out the stench of a rotting institution. Stop letting the government and its agents treat you like a servant or a slave. You’ve got rights. We’ve all got rights. This is our country. This is our government. No one can take it away from us unless we make it easy for them. You’ve got a better chance of making your displeasure seen and felt and heard within your own community. But it will take perseverance and unity and a commitment to finding common ground with your fellow citizens. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re making it way too easy for the police state to take over. So, stop being an accessory to the murder of the American republic. from The Rutherford Institute.
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/the-political-matrix-sustains-the-illusion-of-freedom/
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
|
User login |
enemy within....
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Given the ongoing war between the United States and Russia in Ukraine, it’s natural for Americans to conclude that Russia is our enemy. Not so. Our enemy is instead the U.S. national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — the entity that is responsible for the war in Ukraine and that is destroying our lives, liberties, and well-being here at home.
Our American ancestors would have understood this phenomenon. If the Constitution had called into existence a national-security state form of government, our ancestors would never have accepted it. That would have meant that the United States would have continued operating under the Articles of Confederation, a type of governmental structure without a standing army.
Our American ancestors loathed standing armies, which was the term they used to describe what we call today a national-security state. They understood that big, permanent military establishments are always the enemies of the citizenry. They understood that standing armies or national-security states end up destroying the lives, liberties, and prosperity of the citizenry.
That’s why the Constitution called into existence a limited-government republic, one whose powers were few and limited and that had only a relatively small, basic army. That’s why America lived without a national-security state for more than 150 years.
Today, things are totally inverted. Americans love the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, which is, in actuality, one great big military-intelligence entity that is divided into three wings. Americans don’t see this enormous permanent entity as their enemy or as a grave threat to their lives, liberties, and well-being, as Americans did at the nation’s founding and for the next 150 years. Today’s Americans see the national-security state as their friend, ally, and protector that keeps them safe from all those scary creatures in the world.
But what today’s Americans don’t realize is that it is their very own national-security state that gins up those scary creatures in order to have Americans view their national-security state as their friend and protector.
Recall what the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA said after the 9/11 attacks — that the terrorists had attacked America out of hatred for our “freedom and values.” But it was lie, and they knew it was a lie. The truth was that the U.S. national-security establishment had ginned up the threat of anti-American terrorism by killing vast numbers of people in Iraq, especially children with the U.S. sanctions, knowing full well the depth of anger and rage the continuous death toll would produce among people in the Middle East.
Then came the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which produced a continuous stream of new official enemies —terrorism, Islam, Muslims, and Sharia law, which many Americans were certain was coming to America. Our nation acquired a new cause — the “war on terrorism,” which replaced the now-outdated “war on communism.” The continuous death tolls in Afghanistan and Iraq brought into existence what I called the greatest terrorist-producing machine in history, one that kept the national-security state in high cotton because people were as afraid of the new official enemies as Americans had been of the old official enemies, communism and communists (and Cuba, North Vietnam, Red China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, etc.)
But the national-security establishment knew that there was a good possibility that its war on terrorism might fizzle out, especially if it was no longer killing vast numbers of people, including children, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Thus, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA hedged their bets by slowly but surely reviving Russia as an official enemy. That’s why the national-security establishment used NATO to move eastward by absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact, with the ultimate aim of absorbing Ukraine, which would have enabled the national-security establishment to establish its troops, missiles, and tanks right on Russia’s border.
The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA knew that Russia would invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening. That would enable the U.S. national-security establishment to make Russia an official enemy once again. Equally important, it would enable the national-security establishment to wage war against Russia indirectly, by using U.S.-trained Ukrainian soldiers to fight the war using U.S.-supplied weapons. And with a continuous war against Russia, Americans could be kept agitated and afraid and motivated to continue heaping ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer-funded largess onto the national-security establishment.
It’s worth pointing out that in the process of keeping us “safe” and “secure,” the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA have acquired omnipotent powers, such as assassination, torture, indefinite detention, and secret surveillance, which are exercised not only against foreigners but also against Americans. It’s also worth mentioning that the national-security establishment is one of the critical factors leading America toward national bankruptcy. The federal government’s $35 trillion in debt comes to mind, not to mention the decade-after-decade debasement of the currency.
Ever since the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state, Americans have lived their lives under what amounts to perpetual war for perpetual peace. In the process, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA have made life less safe for the American people while, at the same time, destroyed our liberty and our well-being. With “friends” like that, who needs enemies?
https://www.fff.org/2024/08/23/russia-is-not-our-enemy/
READ FROM TOP
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.