It's not just the US military that is being given the power to lock American citizens up without due process. Many counties and states are being lied to and manipulated into issuing arrest warrants without due process–no notification, no documentation, etcetera.
The following article from the Wall Street Journal describes modern day versions of debtors prison:
People are being arrested for non-payment of debt as the result of a law suits filed against them by creditors. Often they didn't even know they were being sued. Some were stopped for routine traffic citations, then when a background check was run on them it turned out there was a warrant out for their arrest. Some were arrested at their homes in front of their families.
The Federal Reserve estimates that consumer debt in the U.S is currently about $2.4 trillion. But according to Politico magazine, the combined cost of all the recent financial bailouts could one day reach $23 trillion.
The core of neoliberalism is a political-economic theory masquerading as a scientifically pure economic theory. The central claim is that efficiency and economic growth is the means to maximize individual welfare, and in so doing, neoliberal policies maximize the collective welfare.
In theory, Neoliberalism's key tenets — the supremacy of the market, globalization of capital flows and labour, deregulation, privatization, together with a reduction of government social services — mutually reinforce each other to produce a system of superior moral values by stressing unfettered freedom, fair competition, equality of opportunity, and democracy.
In effect, however, this ideology creates a system of values that subtly discredit the ideas of the public responsibility and popular government in political discourse. In other words, neoliberalism replaces the nuanced idea of using politics to manage problems in ‘the commons' [1] with the absolutist ideal that unfettered individualism always ensures optimal social outcomes. This is a prescription for rape, pillage, and loot.
So this is Christmas, season of peace, time to reflect on the people coming home from a war that most Americans say was not worth it, and those still fighting in another war that raises new doubts by the day.
Many of the service members returning from Iraq — where nearly 4,500 American lives were lost, 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed and about 600,000 Christians were forced to flee the country with other refugees — are paying close attention to the campaign to decide who will be commander in chief.
What would they think of a candidate who says:
“Far from defeating the enemy, our current polices provide incentive for more people to take up arms against us.”
And, “We have an empire. We can’t afford it.”
And, “Acting as the world’s policeman and nation-building weakens our country, puts our troops in harm’s way, and sends precious resources to other nations in the midst of an historic economic crisis.”
The men and women in uniform probably wouldn’t support this proponent of limited engagement. So goes the conventional wisdom, which holds that those in the military support a leader itching for a fight.
But in fact, Representative Ron Paul, the congressman who favors the most minimalist American combat role of any major presidential candidate and who said all of the above quotes, has more financial support from active duty members of the service than any other politician.
As of the last reporting date, at the end of September, Paul leads all candidates by far in donations from service members. This trend has been in place since 2008, when Paul ran for president with a similar stance: calling nonsense at hawk squawk from both parties.
Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed — and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.
The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderlywoman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”
Complete article with emphasis added below the line.
Our predicament parallels Long Depression of 1870s
Matthew Lynn's London Eye, Dec. 14, 2011
LONDON (MarketWatch) — In retrospect, it wasn’t hard to see that the markets were becoming dangerously unstable. Germany had just adopted a new monetary system, and Europe was being flooded with cheap German money. Greece had signed up to a monetary union with Italy and France but was struggling to hold it together.
Financial markets had been deregulated. New technologies were transforming production and communications, allowing money to move across borders at lightening speed.
And a massive new industrial power was flooding the world with cheap manufactured goods, blowing apart old industries.
When it all fell apart in an almighty crash, it was only to be expected.
A prophesy for London, New York or Berlin in 2012? Not exactly. It is a description of Vienna in 1873. In that year, in one of the great crashes of all time, the Austrian markets triggered collapses across Europe, swiftly followed by an equally spectacular collapse in New York. It was the start of what economic historians call the Long Depression, a prolonged period of volatility, unemployment and slumps that lasted an epic 23 years, only coming to an end in 1896.
EXTRACTS:
First, depressions can last a very long time, and when their origins are in a debt bubble they should be measured in decades not years.
Second, this depression is structural.
Three, it’s uneven.
Four, good things are still happening.
Five, it won’t be fixed easily.
….this won’t be over until all three structural problems get fixed. Debt needs to be paid down to manageable levels, a new reserve currency needs to be created, and the euro needs to be put out of its misery. None of these are simple tasks, and none will be done quickly.
Many of us believe that networked resilient communities are the key to the future. These communities are not only a way to survive the current global collapse, they are something more: The next step in social/economic organization. For those of us that are successful (by hook or crook) in building a resilient community, it will be a way of life so productive, vibrant and life affirming that will make our current lives look stagnant, backward, and feudal in comparison.
Currently, our big challenge is to find ways to acclerate the shift to resilient communities as quickly as possible. Why? The ongoing and rapid delcine in the global economic and political environment I've been describing here for the last five years, will make it increasingly more difficult to make a successful shift despite a greater willingness to do so (as in: finally seeing how truly screwed we all are). So, how can we outrun the current collapse into economic depression and political chaos?
One of the fastest ways to a) change behaviors, b) deploy tools, and c) route around bariers (political/economic corruption) is to do it digitally. Digital deployment is the way to get the “networked” portion of “networked resilient communities” rolled out. Let me show you how fast it can be. Here's the rate of deployment and adoption for new technologies over the last Century. The chart from Peter Brimelow that I found on Rob Carlson's site:
Click on Image to Enlarge
Note that with each new product, particularly those with strong network effects, we can see two things:
the lag between discovery and deployment is dropping over time.
the rate of adoption has accelerated over time.
Now that nearly everyone has a computer (either on a desk or in a smart phone), the rate of adoption for new tech has dropped from years to quarters. There's almost no lag between development and deployment, and applications that represent major innovations can roll out to globally significant levels in months. Here's a chart from Asymco that uses the most recent Android data.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Wow. Applications that run on these phones deploy even faster. Given how fast things move now, it's not hard to imagine that a new economic system (better design), decentralized financial wire service, or P2P manufacturing system could sweep the world in months, drawing in tens of millions of people into a ways of creating, trading, and sharing wealth. In short, new digital systems that make the transition to local production within networked resilient communities easier and faster since they can help generate the wealth required to do it without starving/freezing and the vision of the future that motivates people to persist despite setbacks.
Phi Beta Iota: To our great surprise, Brother John does not mention OpenBTS in relation to cell phones, or the Autonomous Internet Roadmap. The forthcoming book from Random House / Evolver Editions, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust, make one core point over and over again: making anything “open” at “root” creates log of log adoption rates–in other words, if cell phone adoption or smart phone adoption is logrithmic now, making the pieces open will make today's adoption rates logrithmic again–meta-logrithmic. This is why there is a power-shift going on–bottom up common sense is being powered by both digital technology, and the access to one another and to information that digital technology brings to the public.
