As we speak 10 states are now considering variations of a law written by The American Legislative Exchange Council making it an act of terrorism to report the illegal or unethical farming practices of factory farms. The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act is designed to protect Big-Ag and Big Energy from being held legally accountable for actions that jeopardize food safety while protecting their profits.
New Hampshire, Wyoming, and Nebraska have all had Ag-gag bills introduced aimed at preventing employees, journalists or activists from exposing animal cruelty, dangerous practices or any issue that might lead to serious food safety issues. Three states have already passed such bills, Iowa, Missouri, and Utah. Ten more states are in various stages of consideration of similar legislation.
While there is no doubt that Ag-gag bills are a threat to animals, public health, and the environment they are also part of a growing and insideous threat to America's liberties. That is the whole concept of using the War on Terror apparatus against Americans to stifle dissent against a government that seems to be the worst enemy of its own citizens.
Many of us have had concerns, since the inception of the Patriot Act, that the security apparatus that was being erected was not really for foreign terrorists but was always intended for use against American citizens. None of us breathed any easier when we learned of the FBI's classification of OWS (Occupy Wall Street) as low level terrorists. The FBI collaborated directly with the banking and financial industry against peaceful American protestors in what I believe to be unprecedented ways, giving the banksters participation in the suppression of this movement taking sides with the real criminals against those protesting the theft of trillions of dollars.
We have also seen the resurfacing of a story just yesterday about the Pentagon classifying dissent as terrorism in training manuals. Fox News gave the example of the following question from a DOD manual:
"Which one of the following is an example of low level terrorism?
Attacking the pentagon
IEDs
Hate crimes against racial groups
Protest
The correct answer on this test is protest.
Since 9-11 we seem to have created more than just the trappings of a Police Surveillance state. Police training with the military and increasingly armed like special ops units is one ominous sign. Ongoing curtailment of the Bill of Rights with legislation, such as NDAA, that allows for the indefinite detention of Americans, no matter what lie Obama supporters try to tell, is another warning sign.
But we also have HR 347 that would seem to make peaceable assembly to demand redress of our grievances illegal just by declaring the building you plan to protest at a restricted area, thus now dissent is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. You do not even have to be informed of this classification to be arrested and convicted.
But Obama has also engaged in use of as many as 30,000 drones as part of domestic surveillance and Obama reserves for himself the role of judge, jury and executioner of those he deems need to be killed beyond any rule of our or anyone elses legal code.
All of these things lend credence to beliefs that other writters and I share that the War on Terror apparatus never had anything to do with Al- Quaida but was always intended for use against American citizens.
No one who has read Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine would be surprised by this. As this book painstakingly documents, no nation has been able to put Milton Friedman's Vulture Capitalist economy in place without resorting to police state tactics of terror and intimidation as well as execution of dissenters to quell the public anger over the destruction of the middle class.
This extreme form of Capitalism also features massive redistribution of wealth from the middle class to richest 1%, and accompanying massive unemployment, sometimes as high as 30% as investment in production screeches to a halt. Few governments can withstand the social pressures that this form of harvesting of the national wealth by the richest 1% causes as the lifestyles of most of the nations citizens are painfully destroyed.
The Ag-gag laws that are just now being considered are just part of the process but this is Friedman's Global Vulture Capitalist chickens finally coming home to America roost.
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