Tom Englehardt — Is America an incipient police state?

In the United States, increasingly, those in power no longer observe the law.  Instead, they make it up to suit their needs.  In the process, the streets where you demonstrate, as (New York’s mayor keeps telling us) is our “right,” are regularly transformed into yet more fenced-in, heavily surveilled Zuccotti Prisons....

In twenty-first-century America, “rights” are increasingly meant for those who behave themselves and don’t exercise them.  And if you happen to be part of a government in which no criminal act of state -- torture, kidnapping, the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad, the launching of wars of aggression -- will ever bring a miscreant to court, only two crimes evidently exist: blowing a whistle or expressing your opinion.

Read the whole post at AlterNet
How Zuccotti Park Became Zuccotti Prison: Is America Becoming a Police State?

by Tom Englehardt

The 99% movement is now turning from a denunciation of economic inequality to an indictment of political repression as the concern shifts from economic crisis to neo-fascism as ordinary Americans begin to discover for themselves the dark side of the Empire.

Are Lucas and Tolkien turning out to be the literary predecessors of Batra and Strauss & Howe? It seems that no one who has seen Star Wars and LOTR can fail to make the obvious connections based on the graphics.