Americas New Totalitarianism

Unanimously the House of Representatives came together to vote 283 to 136 and the Senate 8613 to pass the $662 billion Defense Authorization Act of 2012. The Act appropriates Pentagon spending for 2012 that includes a pay raise for the Armed Forces. Congress amended the legislation to include changes in the law that leaders felt were necessary to combat counterterrorism. President Obama said that he would sign the legislation, and so it will become law. The amended legislation authorizes military imprisonment of terrorist without trial. It prohibits prisoner transfers to prisons in the United States or their cases adjudicated in the criminal justice system. It is designed to facilitate tough interrogations, which allows the military to do what legally, morally and ethically are prohibited in civil society. Essentially, it abates the Commander and Chiefs authority in the disposition of terrorist classified as prisoners of war. In addition, the amended legislation authorizes tough new sanctions on Iran, and tough new restrictions on Pakistan. The ease by which Congress could agree to spend $662 billion on defense and on legislation that reeks of a militarized state that threatens the foundations of our republican form of government, but cannot agree on funding to make life easier for ordinary Americans such as extending the payroll tax cut and providing for another year of extended unemployment benefits, is simply outrageous. What America is fast becoming is a militarized and totalitarian state. An America at war with itself that is being perpetrated and nurtured by government, the private sector industries that supply military supplies and armaments and those who subcontract services with the military, private security industries associated with Homeland Security, Americas obsession with patriotism and a neurotic fear of terrorism. Perhaps Americas metamorphosis to totalitarianism is conceivably better described as a new American form of totalitarianism. There are substantial sections in its definition that apply to the direction America is evolving. Congress has supplanted old legal and social norms with the USA Patriot Act and with torture euphemistically called enhanced interrogation. Government has legitimized organized violence, which is represented by two wars, pursuit of terrorist with drones, torture, and police violence on Americas streets. In pursuit of its goals, Americas

government employs methods that are insidious, opaque, and kept secret under the cloak of national security. This threat continues to be as menacing to our way of life, wellbeing, and freedom as any we will ever face from any enemy. Its astonishing that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as one example, is under bombardment, and Republicans say they are committed to repealing it, under the proposition that its unconstitutional, as if what Congress has now done is constitutional. The threat to America does not come from Obama, his socialism or whatever other way one might characterize his ideology, but from the U.S. Congress.

Sources: Warren Richey, Does defense bill's anti-terror provision deprive Americans of key rights, The Christian Science Monitor Robert Scheer, There Goes the Republic, TruthDig.com Horatio Green, A Disaster for Individual Freedom, Yahoo! Voices