We have a situation where after three or four decades of deliberate and careful planning, a depraved group/junta of corporatist sociopaths has finally taken over the entire system of government.
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 29, 1938. Message to congress
They've bought off the utterly corrupt money-grabbing politicians; they've corrupted much of the citizenry with 24/7 consumerist propaganda that engenders greed, ignorance, and selfishness; they took over the entire mainstream media apparatus turning it into the most powerful and mind-numbing propaganda machine the world has ever seen. And here we are: Friday, June 14, 2013, with a fully installed and entrenched total-information-awareness surveillance police state protecting these parasites.
Here's how "Chris Pyle, a former military instructor who exposed the CIA's monitoring of millions of Americans in the 1970s"
sees it:
Since 9/11 private corporations have greatly expanded the intelligence community. Seventy percent of the community’s budget now goes to private contractors. So members of Congress, reporters, and suspected leakers are not just vulnerable to government surveillance; they are vulnerable to corporate reprisals, should their investigations or disclosures pose a threat to companies in the intelligence business. These surveillance powers can be used not only to protect secret agencies from criticism; they can be used, as General Motors once used them, to try to discredit critics like Ralph Nader.
The emphasis is mine
With the Fourth of July holiday coming up, I keep wondering when will Americans wake up to what's really happening? And if for some strange and miraculous reason, a large enough segment actually does (I'd figure 5 or 10 percent would be enough), when would they come to the realization that the only way to stop this fascist system from entrenching itself is to rise up in opposition, in resistance to it in a very massive and convincing show of force manner.
This could be done peacefully, but time is running out...
Many people believe that they have nothing to fear from government/corporate surveillance because they have nothing to hide. But every bureaucracy is a solution in search of a problem, and if it can’t find a problem to fit its solution, they will redefine the problem. In the 1960s, the surveillance bureaucracies redefined anti-war and civil rights protests as communist enterprises; today the same bureaucracies redefine anti-war Quakers, environmentalists, and animal rights activists as “terrorists.” So political activists, no matter how benign, have good reasons to fear these bureaucracies.
-- Christopher H. Pyle
Christopher H. Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics and Getting Away with Torture. In 1970, he disclosed the U.S. military’s surveillance of civilian politics and worked as a consultant to three Congressional committees, including the Church Committee.
The emphasis is mine
These shifty, debased, corrupt-to-the-core tyrants have been counting on the willful ignorance of much of the American citizenry in order to move their agenda forward. But their rapacious greed has gotten so grotesquely excessive that even the most ardent deniers of this reality are having a hard time keeping their heads buried deep in the sand.
Again, most Americans do not worry, because they are not political activists, reporters, investigating legislators, or crusading attorneys general like Eliot Spitzer. Most Americans are like the Germans who did not fear the secret police because they were not Jews. But all Americans depend on reporters, leakers, and crusading legislators to keep government agencies and private corporations under control. So they should worry about government secrecy, the militarization of surveillance, the privatization of intelligence, and the role of corporate money in elections.
-- Christopher H. Pyle
What to do? Speak truth to power. Keep on doing all the good work when it comes to trying to elect good public servants. Keep doing all you're doing on the different causes that of interest to you, whether it is LGTB rights, the environment and climate change, immigration, the social safety net, etc.
But realize that those things are not enough. We need to congregate in public spaces in huge numbers once again. Leave the fear and apprehension behind. Would you rather die by a thousand slow cuts, alone, marginalized, confused, and dispirited (if and when it is your turn to become a victim of this increasingly brutal system?)
Step out; congregate; protest; exercise your constitutional rights of freedom of assembly. It's time to confront these shifty, slick double-talkers head on.
If the people rise up in solidarity these cowards will back down.
Take the first steps...
Flash mobs have recently become a powerful tactic for political protest, particularly under repressive conditions. In the midst of a harsh crackdown on protests in Belarus in 2011, for instance, dissidents calling themselves “Revolution through the Social Network” began organizing impromptu demonstrations where protesters would simply gather in public spaces and clap their hands in unison. The result was the bewildering sight of secret police brutally arresting people for the simple act of clapping their hands — a powerful challenge to the legitimacy of an increasingly irrational regime
- Beautiful Trouble | A Toolbox For Revolution
They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.