Orwell's 1984: Blueprint for US Authoritarianism Today

George Orwell, born 110 years ago as Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950), was an English novelist and journalist, his works marked by clarity, intelligence and wit, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.  

Pursuant to arriving at an ethical practice of politics and economics also leads to explore, with forethought, constituent factors that may derail truthful manifestation, identifying the points of frailty where deceit and exploitation may deflect from honest engagement and foster predation and degeneracy from the wellbeing of all.  Recognizing the hypocrisy of Stalin, and the plethora if predators rampant in the socialist and communist movements in Europe, Orwell penned the iconic novel 1984, published in 1947, as a clarion call to the world to beware the tides of neo-exploitation from the bold new movements of socialism and communism running astray of concerns for the wellbeing of humanity.  

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism?  Explore the answers HERE

Abby Martin remarks on the 110th birthday of British visionary George Orwell, highlighting 1984's nightmarish prophecy of a dystopian future, in the context of the modern day surveillance state.  

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous when Economic Democracy is established. Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity?  Learn more HERE http://gotoplus.me/ProgressiveSustainability

Watch the first movie, featuring Edmund O'Brien and Michael Redgrave, 1956, in full.  

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Top Ten American Steps Toward a Police State

Guest article

by Juan Cole

The police state, a term first coined in the mid-19th century in German (Polizeistaat), is characterized by a standing political police, by intense domestic surveillance and by restrictions on the movements of citizens.  Police states are on a spectrum, and unfortunately in the past

decade the Unite States has moved toward police-stateness in small but key ways.  Here are the signs:

1. The United States National Security Administration recently requisitioned all Verizon phone records in the US for a period of 3 months.  Your telephone records (who you called and for how long) say a great deal about you.  This is a form of mass surveillance.  

2. The US has assigned 250 NSA agents to sift through a massive further British database of US telecommunications and email, derived from attaching packet analyzers to transatlantic fiber optic cables.  

3. The Federal government claims the right to examine the contents of the laptops of US citizens whenever they enter the United States, in contravention of the Fourth Amendment.  Some 60 million Americans travel abroad annually.  

4. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.  Those in prison have grown from 220 per 100,000 population to over 700 per 100,000 population since 1980.  The US holds over two million inmates, and has 6 million people at any one time under carceral supervision– more than were in Stalin’s Gulag.  State spending on prisons has risen at 6 times the rate of spending on higher education.  

5. Some 6 million persons convicted of felonies have been disenfranchised and cannot vote.  Most are not in prison.  Because of the ‘war on drugs,’ many of these persons are not actually guilty of serious crimes.  The practice hits the poor and minorities.  Some 7 percent of African-Americans is ineligible to vote, but less than 2 percent of whites is.  

6. Police can take DNA samples of all arrestees on serious crimes, whether they are proven guilty or not.  Even Justice Scalia believes the ruling opens the door for DNA sample collection for all arrests.  Some 13 million Americans are arrested annually, 1.6 million on drugs charges and half of those on marijuana charges.

7. American police are becoming militarized, with SWAT teams proliferating, and use of drones, GPS tracking devices, and military equipment, as well as participation of National Guards in the ‘war on drugs.’  

8. Legislators are increasingly attempting to criminalize public protest, as with a current bill that would make it a crime knowingly to ‘trespass’ in security zones where persons are found who are under secret service protection.  Authorities have sometimes also attempted to restrict public protesters to “protest zones”, thus keeping them out of the view of news cameras.  

9. The USA PATRIOT Act institutes gag orders that are a violation of the 1st Amendment,forbidding persons and companies from revealing that the government has secretly asked for surveillance records.

10. The same act allows government agencies (including the Pentagon) to issue “National Security Letters” without any warrant, making broad and unspecific demands for records on large numbers of persons.  

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous when Economic Democracy is established. Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism?  Explore the answers HERE What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity?  Learn more HERE http://gotoplus.me/ProgressiveSustainability