Tom Burghardt: As our Economy Collapses, we have a "New" Police State!

Forget Your Rights: As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net, the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs, first only imagined by the Bush Administration. 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 raat heere in the USA: Lets hear it now, folks: USA, USA, USA. Fear not, "THEY" have only "OUR" best interests at heart. What the heck: Those of us who were foolish enough to serve in our country's many wars - I served in Vietnam, or Viate Naam, as LBJ, one of our president's liked to call it, but I still follow our disgusting phletora, or is it "phlobotomy", as many of our other temporary so-called occupants in the White House, the ones who can afford it, what with our currency problems, now call it. 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! As "Antifascist Calling" previously reported, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act Lawsuit against the Justice Department (where there REALLY is NO Justice), "demanding the release of of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans' telephone records without any legal process or oversight."