Police State America

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America October 10, 2019

Minneapolis Police Union Sells ‘Cops For Trump’ T-Shirts

By Tim Nelson MPR (10/7/19) The Minneapolis police union is touting its support for President Trump in the wake of a new city policy that blocks officers from appearing in uniform with the president during a campaign rally this week. Trump is scheduled to speak at Target Center in Minneapolis on Thursday. Ahead of the rally, the city told its police force that officers could not wear their uniform while showing support for candidates at political events or in political ads. Police union president Bob Kroll unveiled the new T-shirt on his Facebook page over the weekend and said they are available for…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, History They Don't Want You To Know, Police State America, Rethuglicans, Right Wing Religion, Surveillance State, Trumpenstan September 30, 2019

Pathocracy: The Pathological Power Of Governments Led By Narcissists & Psychopaths

The danger of democracy transitioning into pathocracy is always real. It is always closer to us than we think, and once it has a foothold, will crush every obstacle in its way. By Steve Taylor The Conversation (9/19/19) After spending his early life suffering under the Nazis and then Stalin, the Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski devoted his career to studying the relationship between psychological disorders and politics. He wanted to understand why psychopaths and narcissists are so strongly attracted to power as well as the processes by which they take over governments and countries. He eventually came up with the term “pathocracy”…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know, Police State America, Surveillance State, Trumpenstan September 30, 2019

Before The Hobnail Boot Of Tyranny Falls, There Are Warnings

By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (9/23/19) Oftentimes big stories are revealed in small footnotes. The Miami Herald recently reported (9/19)that a Marine Corps unit was looking to hold its celebration of the annual Marine Corps Ball at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. “At a time when taxpayer and foreign-government spending at Trump Organization properties is fueling political battles, a U.S. Marine Corps reserve unit stationed in South Florida hopes to hold an annual ball at a venue that could profit the commander-in-chief,” the Miami Herald reported Thursday. The news comes after recent reports of Trump’s struggling Turnberry golf resort in Scotland benefiting from diverted…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, CIA, FBI, Police State America, Surveillance State September 26, 2019

The Trump Whistleblower Scandal Is Proving Edward Snowden Right

Snowden should’ve gone through “official channels,” his critics yelped. Here’s what happens when you do. By Nick Bauman HuffPost (9/24/19) Edward Snowden did it all wrong, his critics thundered. The former National Security Agency subcontractor should have used “other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions,” then-President Barack Obama claimed in an August 2013 press conference, citing an executive order he had signed that — in theory at least — gave intelligence officers some whistleblower protections for the first time ever. “Snowden could have come to me,” George Ellard, then…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America September 26, 2019

A Child Is A Child: The Kids Are Definitely Still Not All Right

Baby concentration camps “are the worst and the last place you would ever want to put a child,” say doctors and functioning human beings. By Abby Zimet Common Dreams (9/24/19) Amidst the latest noise about the latest outrage – treason and Ukraine and extortion oh my – a grisly reminder: Crimes against small, brown humanity are ongoing. Thousands of migrant kids are still imprisoned – children as pawns, children in cages, sick, dirty, hungry, alone, frightened, experiencing “trauma after trauma” until “every heartbeat hurts.” Does it need to be repeated: Baby concentration camps “are the worst and the last place you would…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America September 23, 2019

ACLU Reports Medical Neglect, Maltreatment & Death At Aurora ICE Facility Run By Contract Corporation

The problems inside the Aurora detention facility are not isolated, based on inmate accounts collected by the ACLU. By Saja Hindi The Denver Post (9/17/19) The day Neda Samimi-Gomez learned her 64-year-old father had died in immigration detention in Aurora is etched in her memory. She didn’t get a call from immigration officials until two days after his death. The more details she learned, the sicker she felt. “It was unbelievable that so many people could be involved in my father’s death,” she said. Kamyar Samimi, a Thornton resident, died Dec. 2, 2017, a little more than two weeks after…

ALL ARTICLES, Police State America, Surveillance State September 23, 2019

The Mysterious Death Of The Hacker Who Turned In Chelsea Manning

By Nina Temple-Raston I’ll Be Seeing You / NPR (9/19/19) Debbie Scroggin and her husband live at the end of a series of gravel roads in a lonesome part of Kansas. It is the kind of place where, Debbie says, “you have to drive 15 minutes to get anywhere.” Getting to the Scroggin house involves turning onto a desolate ribbon of gravel that cuts through fields as far as the eye can see. It was easy to think that someone might come here to either get lost or be forgotten. Scroggin remembers Adrian Lamo arriving on a night train…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Deep State, History They Don't Want You To Know, NSA, Police State America, Surveillance State, War State America September 23, 2019

Chris Hedges: New Book Shines Light On Our Real & Invisible Government

All countries need good intelligence officials and agents, not the buffoons, gangsters, sadists and killers who, in the name of national security, do us so much damage. By Chris Hedges TruthDig (9/16/19) There are two forms of government in the United States. There is the visible government—the White House, Congress, the courts, state legislatures and governorships—and the invisible government, or deep state, where anonymous technocrats, intelligence operatives, generals, bankers, corporations and lobbyists manage foreign and domestic policy regardless of which political party holds a majority. The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government are the nation’s bloated and…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America, Surveillance State September 19, 2019

The Full MSNBC Interview: Edward Snowden Warns Of The Intrusive Government Surveillance Threat To Privacy & Our Freedom

[Editor’s Note: For some reason, there was a delay in the interview beginning after the brief opening ad. this is an important interview for every citizen to view and think about deeply. The role of Joe Biden in the suppression of Edward Snowden is especially interesting. — Mark L. Taylor] 11th Hour / MSNBC (9/16/19) On the eve of his memoir ‘Permanent Record’ being published, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden talked at length from Moscow with MSNBC’s Brian Williams in an exclusive interview. This is their discussion in its entirety, edited down slightly for clarity. Link to 54-Minute Video ***** Govt….

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Deep State, History They Don't Want You To Know, Police State America, Surveillance State September 19, 2019

How The FBI Ratcheted Up It’s Power After 9/11 And Helped Install Trump In Office

“I believe the FBI contributed to this breakdown of public trust in government institutions, not just by who it chose to target for disruption but, just as important, who it didn’t.” By Ryan Devereaux The Intercept (9/14/19) MIKE GERMAN, A former FBI special agent, had four years on the job when he took an assignment that would change his life forever. It was 1992. A jury in Simi Valley, California, had just acquitted a group of mostly white Los Angeles police officers for the videotaped beating of a black construction worker named Rodney King. Decades of pent-up anger directed at one…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, History They Don't Want You To Know, Police State America September 16, 2019

Creator Of Stanford Prison Experiment On ICE & Trump’s Camps: It’s How Nazi Guards Behaved

Philip Zimbardo, whose work explored the psychology of cruelty: America under Trump is a “nightmare situation” By Chauncey Devega Salon (9/12/19) Thousands of migrant and refugee children have still not been reunited with their families. Many may never be returned to their parents. Children being held in Donald Trump’s concentration camps and other detention centers have been sexually assaulted by staff members. A new lawsuit against the Trump administration alleges that Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol enforcers are abusing teenage girls and young women by denying them proper sanitary products, leaving the girls in bloody clothes and refusing to allow them to properly…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America September 16, 2019

Calculated: Bullying Cruelty Is The Point

By Abbey Zimet Common Dreams (9/11/19) Sweet mother of God. Racist and cruel doesn’t begin to cover the ongoing atrocities now daily committed – coincidentally, virtually entirely against brown and black people – by the sick demons running our country. The refusal to offer temporary refuge to the desperate survivors of a climate-crisis-fueled hurricane that left 70,000 people homeless and likely killed another 2,500 still missing is only the latest. The day before, ICE officials stonewalled Democrats on their ungodly efforts to deport critically ill kids – in Boston alone, they include a 7-year-old boy with severe epilepsy, a 10-year-old girl blinded by eye cancer and…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, CIA, FEATURE, Police State America, Surveillance State September 16, 2019

Edward Snowden Memoir ‘Permanent Record’ Lays Out The Emerging Worldwide Surveillance Threat

“The greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities, such as facial and pattern recognition.” By Ewen MacKaskill The Guardian (9/13/19) The world’s most famous whistleblower, Edward Snowden, says he has detected a softening in public hostility towards him in the US over his disclosure of top-secret documents that revealed the extent of the global surveillance programmes run by American and British spy agencies. In an exclusive two-hour interview in Moscow to mark the publication of his memoirs, Permanent Record, Snowden said dire warnings that his disclosures would cause harm had not come to pass, and even…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, Police State America September 9, 2019

When The ICE Police State Drag Net Hits Close To Your Home & Family

By Tom Balistrieri Special to the Commoner Call (9/9/19) Big ICE Border Patrol check-point stop on I-89 in West Lebanon, New Hampshire yesterday [9/5] near the exit to a popular local Mexican Restaurant named Gusanoz. The owner, Nick Yager, was interviewed by the local newspaper, and he told them that immigrants have been his best workers. A young Mexican American woman and her kids were caught in the stop. She said they didn’t give her any trouble, but she was scared and she had to explain it to her kids, who were in the backseat. (That ‘Young Mexican American woman…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Democrats, FEATURE, Police State America, Rethuglicans, Surveillance State, Trumpenstan September 5, 2019

America’s Slow-Motion Coup Keeps Grinding Forward: But Is Donald Trump Really The One To Blame?

We need to understand that Trump is a symptom, not the problem. By Andrew O’Hehir Salon (8/2/19) We are in the middle of a slow-motion coup in the United States of America. Even the phrase itself is banal, which is itself a symptom of our moral and political exhaustion. But sometimes clichés are on the money. Most of this coup is happening right out in the open, where those of us who are somewhat paying attention can notice it, bemoan it and then move on to the next day’s real or manufactured outrage. That doesn’t seem to be helping. There…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Deep State, Economic Injustice, FEATURE, History They Don't Want You To Know, One Percenters, Police State America, Screwing With Your Vote, Surveillance State, War State America September 5, 2019

The Deep State Government Hiding In Plain Sight

[Editor’s Note: Be sure to watch all the way through to the end to catch Bill Moyer’s commentary. — Mark L. Taylor] Moyers & Company (4/15/16) Mike Lofgren, a congressional staff member for 28 years, joins Bill Moyers to talk about what he calls Washington’s “Deep State,” in which elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Moyers. Link to 27-Minute Video ***** Essay: Anatomy Of The Deep State In terms…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America September 2, 2019

America: Home Of The Cruel, Land Of The Morally Lost

“All-Out Attack”: Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Policies Target Children, Cancer Patients And Military Servicemembers Democracy Now! (8/30/19) On Tuesday, the Trump administration reportedly ended its “medical deferred action” program, which allows immigrants with serious health problems to stay in the U.S. for up to two years beyond the terms of their visas to receive critical treatment. Just one day later, it announced that some children born to U.S. servicemembers and government employees stationed overseas will no longer automatically receive citizenship. The policy changes come days after the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to allow the Trump administration to implement its…

ALL ARTICLES, Police State America September 2, 2019

The Spy In Your Pocket & The Corporate Snoop In Your Local Police Department

Google Reports Hackers Have For Years Put ‘monitoring implants’ In iPhones By Alex Hern The Guardian (8/30/19) An unprecedented iPhone hacking operation, which attacked “thousands of users a week” until it was disrupted in January, has been revealed by researchers at Google’s external security team. The operation, which lasted two and a half years, used a small collection of hacked websites to deliver malware on to the iPhones of visitors. Users were compromised simply by visiting the sites: no interaction was necessary, and some of the methods used by the hackers affected even fully up-to-date phones. Once hacked, the user’s deepest secrets…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America August 29, 2019

A 1989 Prediction Coming True In US

“Achieving Our Country” “Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book “The Endangered American Dream” is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Gun Cult, Police State America, Surveillance State August 29, 2019

Privacy Experts Say The Trade-Offs Of Intrusive Surveillance Tech To Track Kids In School Aren’t Worth It

“Simply said, this system allows us to have real-time eyes on 18,000 cameras in Miami/Dade County public schools.” [Editor’s Note: Never mind all those military grade guns flooding our communities. So what if some innocent kid goofing around — like the 10th grader profiled — has his future destroyed. Just like the lives of innocents, the privacy and future of kids will be sacrificed to coddle gun slingers, shooters and the gun making corporations profitting off the death of school kids. — Mark L. Taylor] All Things Considered / NPR (8/26/190 The use of tech to track and police our…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America August 22, 2019

“Beyond logic and humanity” — True Horror As Trump DHS Announces Rule To Allow Indefinite Detention Of Migrant Families

“The ever-increasing immigration court backlog means these immigrant families could be held for months or even years.” By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (8/21/19) Rights groups reacted with horror and outrage on Wednesday after the Trump adminstration unveiled a rule that would allow the federal government to detain migrant families for an unlimited period of time. “This is yet another cruel attack on children, who the Trump administration has targeted again and again with its anti-immigrant policies,” Madhuri Grewal, policy counsel with the ACLU, said in a statement. “The government should not be jailing kids, and certainly shouldn’t be seeking to put more kids…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know, Police State America August 22, 2019

‘Maus’ Creator Art Spiegelman’s Marvel Essay ‘refused publication for Orange Skull Trump dig’

Maus author says he was told the comics giant – whose chairman is a prominent Trump supporter – was trying to remain apolitical. By Alison Flood The Guardian (8/16/19) Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump’s campaign – is trying to stay “apolitical”. Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer prize for Maus, his story of the Holocaust, has written for Saturday’s Guardian that he was approached by publisher the…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America August 22, 2019

Alarm As Trump Requests Permanent Reauthorization Of NSA Mass Spying Program Exposed By Snowden

By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (8/16/19) Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates raised alarm Thursday after the Trump administration called on Congress to reauthorize an NSA mass surveillance program that was exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The New York Times, which obtained the Trump administration’s request to Congress, reported that “the administration urged lawmakers to make permanent the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans’ domestic communications, the USA Freedom Act.” “The law, enacted after the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed the existence of the program in 2013, is set to expire in December, but…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America, Rethuglicans August 19, 2019

GOP Leadership Tells House Republicans To Just Lie About White Supremacist Gun Massacres By Calling It ‘violence from the Left’

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” — Martin Luther King Jr. By David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement (8/17/19) House Republican leadership has sent a memo to GOP members of Congress directing them to lie about right wing white supremacist gun massacres, and to call it “violence from the left.” The memo, which The Tampa Bay Times acquired, includes talking points for congressional Republicans to parrot when speaking with reporters or constituents. It instructs them on how to address questions about gun violence, including the domestic terrorism recently perpetrated in El Paso, Texas. If asked a question…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know, Police State America August 19, 2019

Former FBI Agent Reveals The Agency Could Fight Far-Right Violence But Chooses Not To

By Mike German The Guardian (8/16/19) Federal law enforcement officials have all the tools necessary to address far-right violence proactively – as my own successful investigations as an FBI undercover agent in the 1990s indicate. They have simply chosen as a matter of policy not to prioritize these cases. What role racism, latent or overt, plays in these decisions has yet to be explored. There are currently 52 federal terrorism laws available to address entirely domestic acts of political violence. Congress has also passed five federal hate crimes statutes specifically designed to punish the types of violence white supremacists and other far-right militants…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America August 19, 2019

Dozens Of Migrant Children Report Being Sexually Abused After Being Separated From Parents By Trump Policy

By Garance Burke, Juliet Linderman & Martha Mendoza Associated Press (8/16/19) This story is part of an ongoing joint investigation between The Associated Press and the PBS series FRONTLINE on the treatment of migrant children, which includes an upcoming film. After local Guatemalan officials burned down an environmental activist’s home, he decided to leave his village behind and flee to the United States, hoping he’d be granted asylum and his little boy, whose heart was failing, would receive lifesaving medical care. But after crossing the border into Arizona in May of last year, Border Patrol agents tore the man’s 7-year-old son from…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know, Police State America, Trumpenstan August 15, 2019

Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Following Hitler’s Early Rhetoric & Policies

“From the leading constitutional lawyer who has sued every president since LBJ, a masterful explication of the ‘pillars of our democracy’.” — Amazon review By Steven Rosenfeld Independent Media Institute (8/9/19) A new book by one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s—when the Nazis took power in Germany. In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America August 15, 2019

Facial Recognition Technology Test Falsely Tags 26 Lawmakers As Criminals And Exposes Blatant Racial Bias

“One false match is too many, especially when people’s lives are at stake or their freedom is at stake.” [Editor’s Note: The short video accompanying this story is very good. Link below. — Mark L. Taylor] By Lydia O’Connor The HuffPot (8/13/19) In an attempt to show lawmakers how dangerously inaccurate facial recognition technology can be in the hands of police, the American Civil Liberties Union decided to get personal. On Tuesday, the ACLU’s Northern California branch released its findings from running photos of all 120 California state legislators against a database of 25,000 publicly available mugshots using common facial recognition…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, M. Taylor Columns, Police State America, Your Brain On Politics August 12, 2019

Bearing Witness. Telling Truth In A Time Of Lies: Why It Is Important To Call Them What They Are — Concentration Camps

“Terrible things are happening outside… poor, helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared. “ — Anne Frank ***** By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (8/12/19) On Saturday I got into a fiery Facebook squabble with a frequent corporate dem critic objecting to something I posted about the growing network of concentration camps popping up along the southern border. I was accused of “extreme exaggeration” because the situation now is nothing like the death camps in Nazi…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America July 25, 2019

“Unjust and outrageous” — While Coddling & Collaborating With Right Wing Terror Groups, Police Agencies Put Pressure On Anti-Trump Organizers

By Sam Levin The Guardian (7/19/19) The Los Angeles police department has revealed in court that it infiltrated an activist group planning anti-Trump protests, in the latest case of US law enforcement spying on leftwing organizers. A confidential informant working with the LAPD secretly recorded multiple meetings of a group called Refuse Fascism in 2017, according to newly disclosed police documents. The LAPD transcripts, first reported by the Los Angeles Times and reviewed by the Guardian, were submitted in a criminal case against activists who blocked a California freeway during an anti-Trump demonstration. “This case seems to fall into a pattern of police agencies…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America July 22, 2019

Online Masturbation: Texas Border Agent Allegedly Sexually Harassed Mother Of Child Held In Detention Center

“The man appeared to be lying on a bed, with the camera aimed at the lower half of his body. She could see his dark brown shorts, legs and bare feet.” By Sophie Weiner Splinter News (7/17/19) A border agent who worked at a child detention facility in Clint, TX allegedly sent harassing messages to the mother of a 12-year-old child who was detained where he worked, according to the Washington Post. The mother filed a complaint with Customs and Border Protection about the alleged incident. The complaint alleges that the agent sent abusive chats and video calls to the undocumented Guatemalan woman…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, Police State America, Rethuglicans, Trumpenstan, War State America July 18, 2019

This Is How Genocide Begins: A Border Patrol Agent Reveals What It’s Really Like To Jail Migrant Children

“Somewhere down the line people just accepted what’s going on as normal. That includes the people responsible for fixing the problems.” By Ginger Thompson ProPublica (7/16/19) The Border Patrol agent, a veteran with 13 years on the job, had been assigned to the agency’s detention center in McAllen, Texas, for close to a month when the team of court-appointed lawyers and doctors showed up one day at the end of June. Taking in the squalor, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the poor health and vacant eyes of the hundreds of children held there, the group members appeared stunned. Then,…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America July 15, 2019

‘Visit the Camps Yet?’ Campaign Urges Pelosi To See For Herself The Horrific Conditions At Trump’s Concentration Camps

Poster by street artist Absurdly Well. By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (7/12/19) Instead of attacking members of Congress who are fighting to end the appalling conditions inside President Donald Trump’s immigrant detention facilities, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should visit the camps to see firsthand the abuse taking place at the southern border. That’s the message of a new pressure campaign by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), which slammed Pelosi for agreeing last month to pass a $4.6 billion border funding bill with no safeguards for immigrant children. PCCC said in a petition circulated Thursday that Pelosi and other supporters of the legislation—including members of the conservative Blue…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America July 15, 2019

Border Patrol Agents Are Passing Around A Commemorative Coin Mocking Compassion For Migrant Kids

The coin declares “KEEP THE CARAVANS COMING” under an image of a parade of migrants crossing the border. By Dara Lind ProPublica (7/12/19) An unofficial commemorative coin has been circulating among Border Patrol agents at the U.S./Mexico border, mocking the task of caring for migrant children and other duties that have fallen to agents as families cross into the U.S. On the front, the coin declares “KEEP THE CARAVANS COMING” under an image of a massive parade of people carrying a Honduran flag — a caricature of the “caravan” from last fall, which started in Honduras and attracted thousands of people…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America July 11, 2019

‘This Is a Scandal’: Documents Show ICE & FBI Using Facial Recognition To Mine Millions Of Driver’s License Photos

“ICE is running facial recognition searches against millions of photos. You. Your family. Your friends. This is a major violation of privacy.” By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (7/7/19) A trove of public records obtained by privacy experts at Georgetown Law revealed that ICE and the FBI have used facial recognition technology to mine state driver’s license databases for information on millions of Americans without consent, a practice critics condemned as a “disturbing” breach of civil liberties. According to the Washington Post, which first reported on the documents late Sunday, “Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents, and emails over the past five years… reveal…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, Police State America July 8, 2019

“Welcome back to the USA” — Though I’m A Journalist I Didn’t Fully Realize The Abusive Power Of U.S. Border Officials Until They Trounced On My Rights & Privacy

“Regardless of whether you have embarrassing information on your device, it’s about personal autonomy and living in a free society and not a police state.” By Seth Harp The Intercept (6/22/19) I SHOULD HAVE kept my mouth shut about the guacamole; that made things worse for me. Otherwise, what I’m about to describe could happen to any American who travels internationally. It happened 33,295 times last year. My work as a journalist has taken me to many foreign countries, including frequent trips to Mexico. On May 13, I was returning to the U.S. from Mexico City when, passing through immigration at…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know, M. Taylor Columns, Police State America July 4, 2019

Corporate America’s Fascist Hustle: Marketing Hitler’s Mien Kampf With Clever Nazi Coding

Normalizing the abnormal By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (7/4/19) In the early years leading to Adolph Hitler’s rise to power 1930’s corporate Germany looked upon the odd, babbling little man from Austria with dismissive shrugs or disdainful amusement. Surely, no one would ever take the man seriously. But as Hitler’s following of street thugs, unemployed, racists and social misfits grew and torch lit marauding street marches turned into more regimented affairs the German capitalists began to think perhaps Hitler could be massaged and manipulated to their ends. Corporate support, loans, gifts and larger and larger donations turned from…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America, Rethuglicans June 27, 2019

Border Patrol Blocking Americans From Donating Toothbrushes & Diapers For Imprisoned Children

MSNBC’s Mika Scorches Trump Over Sex Assault Denials: ‘What type of woman would you rape?’ ***** “For God’s sake, they’re kids, man.” By Alex Samuels Texas Tribune (6/24/19) On Sunday, Austin Savage and five of his friends huddled into an SUV and went to an El Paso Target, loading up on diapers, wipes, soaps and toys. About $340 later, the group headed to a Border Patrol facility holding migrant children in nearby Clint with the goal of donating their goods. Savage said he and his friends had read an article from The New York Times detailing chaos, sickness and filth in the overcrowded…

ALL ARTICLES, Police State America June 27, 2019

Watch As Bullying, Snide Military Cop Tries To Intimidate Elderly Japanese-American Internment Survivors Protesting Plan To Jail Migrant Kids At WWII Prison Camp

“They want to remove us. We’ve been removed too many times. …We’re saying no more, never again.” [Editor’s Note: Where will all the guards, sycophants, stooges, torturers, toadies, killers and the morally empty needed for the fascist coup come from? Get real, they are all around us. Time to get serious about resistance. — Mark L. Taylor] Democracy Now! (6/25/19) Democracy Now! was there when five Japanese-American elders, survivors of U.S. internment camps, engaged in civil disobedience Saturday outside the Fort Sill Army post in Oklahoma, where the Trump administration plans to indefinitely detain 1,400 immigrant and refugee children starting…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know, Police State America June 27, 2019

Salt Lake Tribune Editorial: Yes, We Do Have Concentration Camps

Salt Lake Tribune, Editorial Board (6/23/19) Yes, we do have concentration camps. They are not work camps. They are not death camps. At least, not on purpose. Our government is not building massive gas chambers and industrial crematoria. It is not conducting sick medical experiments on members of an unfavored class. But that does not mean that the places into which we are herding tens of thousands of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers are not properly called concentration camps. Because that is precisely what they are. When some in the public eye dare to tell that truth, as the media-savvy Rep….