The Powerful Forces Shredding Our Constitution: "The Rise of the American Corporate Security State" [View all]

[HomerRamone]

http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/23805-the-powerful-forces-shredding-our-constitution-preface-to-the-rise-of-the-american-corporate-security-state

In the United States today, we have good reason to be afraid. Our democracy and our freedoms are impaired. Many Americans have lost their homes and jobs and will never get them back. Our pensions and our privacy are also gone. Most frightening of all, the Constitution that protected us for more than two hundred years from the tentacles of oppressive government and the stranglehold of private wealth is less respected every day.

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now, taking stock years later, we have to recognize that no foreign terrorist shredded the Constitution. Nor did we, as citizens, bankrupt the nation. Powerful forces inside the country did. And worse than that: they intend to keep doing it. They have yet to be stopped. This is the real reason to be afraid: the rise of the Corporate Security State. The Constitution gave us three branches of government to ensure that no one small faction could control the state. Each of them is failing us.

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The Corporate Security State is tipping the balance between the self-interest of a governing corporate elite and the rights of the rest of us to freedom, privacy, safety, and fairness. We can see the power shift manifest in six clear and evolving trends since 2001:

Average citizens are subject to ever-expanding surveillance by the government-corporate complex.
Control of information by the government-corporate complex is expanding.
The separation of powers established by the Constitution is eroding. Rights guaranteed by constitutional amendments are becoming irrelevant. Reporting a crime may be a crime, and informing the public of the truth is treason.
The government-corporate surveillance complex is consolidating. What has been a confidential but informal collaboration now seeks to legalize its special status.
Financial reforms enacted after the crisis are inoperable and ineffective because of inadequate investigations and intensive corporate lobbying.
Systemic corruption and a fundamental conflict of interest are driving us toward the precipice of new economic crises.

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Such a country can only be maintained with greater repression of dissent and suppression of the truth. This is why the government is into deeper and broader surveillance. Instead of funding education and health care, clean air, and water, our taxes are paying for intrusive electronic monitoring - of us.