History of the police state in the US

Read it all at Washington's Blog

The Real Reason for Obama’s Threat to Veto the Indefinite Detention Bill (Hint: It’s Not to Protect Liberty)

The police state started in 2001.

 Specifically, on 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney initiated Continuity of Government Plans that ended America’s constitutional form of government (at least for some undetermined period of time.)

On that same day, a national state of emergency was declared … and that state of emergency has continuously been in effect up to today.

Endless war brought to you by the military-industrial-government complex that President Eisenhower warned the US about as he prepared to leave office. It is now an integral aspect of the US economy, and it is now in the process of privatizing the US military through contracting, centralizing and militarizing the domestic security forces, privatizing the US prison system, and repealing posse comitatus.

Did anyone really think it was going to end differently once it got going?

UPDATE:

Ambiguous but alarming new wording, which is tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and was just passed by the Senate, is reminiscent of the “extraordinary measures” introduced by the Nazis after they took power in 1933.

And the relative lack of reaction so far calls to mind the oddly calm indifference with which most Germans watched the erosion of the rights that had been guaranteed by their own Constitution. As one German writer observed, “With sheepish submissiveness we watched it unfold, as if from a box at the theater.”

The writer was Sebastian Haffner (real name Raimond Pretzel), a young German lawyer worried at what he saw in 1933 in Berlin, but helpless to stop it since, as he put it, the German people “collectively and limply collapsed, yielded and capitulated.”

“The result of this millionfold nervous breakdown,” wrote Haffner at the time, “is the unified nation, ready for anything, that is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.” Not a happy analogy.

Read the rest at AlterNet

Battlefield America: Is Gitmo in Your Future?
by Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Randy Wray mentioned at Washington's Blog

Economics Professor and monetary expert Randall Wray told me thatwe should end the regional Federal Reserve banks, as they have such terrible conflicts of interest, strip out all regulatory power from the Fed (since it doesn’t believe ine regulation, anyway), and implement monetary policy with a very small staff. He is not opposed to moving operations over to Treasury and/or the FDIC.

Washington's Blog, Economists: End Or Drastically Downsize the Fed

I've commented numerous times on MMT at Washington's Blog in the past to no avail, so I gave up.

The typical fare there about monetary economics is from neoliberal or Austrian economists and Steven Keen, all about how the national debt is bankrupting the country. But apparently the editor has finally gotten around to Randy, although the general thrust of the blog is still that the big problem in the US is the Fed and the national debt. Hopefully, the editors of the blog will pay some attention to the MMT message and stop spreading nonsense about monetary economics.

Employment In The Tank

The unemployment numbers just out are pretty dismal. See the analysis of Calculated Risk here and here.

What is particularly concerning though it is the comparison of this recession and recovery with previous ones. Calculated Risk provides a chart.

Washington's Blog notes that the numbers for this recession are actually worse that the Great Depression.

Unemployment During the Great Depression Has Been Overstated and Current Unemployment Understated (We've Now Got Depression-Level Unemployment)

The commonly-accepted unemployment figures for the Great Depression are overstated. Specifically, government workers were counted as unemployed by Stanley Lebergott (the BLS economist who put together the most widely used numbers) ... even though gainfully employed and receiving a pay check...

When the figures are adjusted this recession and recovery is far more serious than it is being made out to be in Washington. Paul Krugman warns that the US is facing a repeat of the double-dip of the Great Depression, when stimulus was removed prematurely in 1937. It took WWII for the US to recover fully — after two decades of underperformance.

With housing double-dipping and the ISM manufacturing index rolling over, things are not looking up. Meanwhile, politicians and pundits are occupied with the pseudo-problem of the deficit and debt and talking austerity as the remedy.

UPDATE: Michael Perelman thinks that a double-dip scenario is overly optimistic. He sees deeper problems resulting in long term malaise until fundamental problems are addressed.

The Optimism of a Double-Dip