Tom Burghardt: As America's Economy Collapses, "New Normal" Police State is Shaped.

Forget your rights! As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of the tattered "social net", the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first designed by the Bush government. After all, with world share prices gyrating wildly, employment and wages in a death spiral, and retirement funds and publicly-owned assets swallowed whole by speculators and rentier scum, the state 'better' dust off contingency plans lest the Greek, Spanish or British "contagion" spread beyond the fabled shores of "old Europe" and infect God-fearin' folk here in the homeland. Fear NOT: They have the lyrically titled "Civil Disturbances: Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources, otherwise known as Army Regulation 500-50, spells out the "responsibilities, policy, and guidance for the Department of the Army in planning and operations involving the use of Army resources in the control of actual or anticipated civil disturbances." With British politicians demanding a clampdown on social media in the wake of London riots, and with the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency having done so last week in San Francisco, switching off underground cell phone service to help squelch a protest against police violence, authoritarian control tactics , aping those deployed in Egypt and Tunisia, are becoming the norm in so-called "Western democracies." Meanwhile up on Capitol Hill, Congress did their part to defend us from that pesky "Bill of Rights", that is, before 81 of them, nearly a fifth of "our" elected representatives, checked out for AIPAC-funded junkets to Israel.