Reply #81: Wrong

[Warren Stupidity]

First of all your statement: "If accused, the courts are still open" appears to indicate that you believe that the existence of a court system that follows defined procedures somehow refutes the assertion of the OP that we are already living in a police state. The fact that our 'courts are still open" in no way refutes the OP's assertion. The courts have been open in almost all police states.

Perhaps you meant we are not an absolute police state, at the far end of the spectrum, like for example the stalinist regimes of east germany, the USSR, etc., or modern day China. That is true, we aren't at that extreme yet.

Here are some of the features of a police state that we currently have in our society:

a secret prison system exempt from those open courts you cite or any well defined rule of law that guarantees basic legal rights - gitmo being one example of a far flung and secret prison system.

widespread surveillance of the citizenry - on a day when once again our congress appears to be surrenduring to the champions of modern fascism with telecom immunity for past illegal surveillance and implementation of new and sweeping electronic surveillance powers, claiming that we are not a police state because the courts are open seems a bit naive. Your phone calls, your email, your travel, your credit card purchases and bank transactions are all pouring into massive databases and are all subject to whatever analysis the government chooses to apply to that data.

restrictions on political expression - ever since the inauguration of bush (in a corrupt election) and perhaps even before that, public protests at designated events (including anywhere the president happens to be) are restricted under long standing and unconstituional actions by federal and local police forces. Mass arrests of demonstrators - for example at the 2004 RNC in New York - have been used to suppress protests in addition to simply denying protestors access to public events.

militarization of the police force - this has been going on since the late 70s and has now transformed our local and state police forces from beat-walkers to swat-team style military units.

torture and abuse - and this is not just at gitmo or the rest of the gulag. Our entire prison system (which I am about to talk about separately) practices routine abuse and torture of the prison population.

an ever cascading set of draconian laws that have created a corrupt prison industrial complex that uses the irrational and repressive war on drugs and now its vile offspring, the war on terror, to incarcerate truly astounding numbers of people (more people per capita than any other country) many of whom have done little more than commit economic black market crimes. That prison population, as mentioned above, is subject to widespread abuse as pandering politicians 'reformed' our prison systems to discard anything that might be viewed as rehabilitation in favor of harsh treatment and insanely long sentences. Many states now spend more on incarceration than on education.


The development of extra-legal miltias with ties to political parties, such as blackwater, is perhaps the most troubling recent development. Trained and funded through our imperialist adventure in Iraq, these forces have already seen domestic deployment (for example during Katrina) and constitute the prototype structures for the sorts of police state death squad organizations that were the signature of the worst Latin American police states of the Pinochet era (and continuing right up to the present day for example in Colombia.)