A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (28 page)

CHAPTER 22

Soylent Green is People!

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism–ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
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–FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

T
he one strand that weaves itself throughout all of the dystopian novels and films we have discussed thus far is the fact that the future will be ruled by a government that has fused with a corporate elite. "Orwell," as with other dystopian thinkers, writes sociologist Erich Fromm, "is simply implying that the new form of managerial industrialism, in which man builds machines which act like men and develops men who act like machines, is conducive to an era of dehumanization and complete alienation, in which men are transformed into things and become appendices to the process of production and consumption."
⁵²⁶

Dehumanized people? How else do we explain the aggressive use of SWAT teams for minor crimes in American cities, the use of weapons of compliance on American citizens, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, the President's kill lists, and the drone attacks that wipe out innocent civilians? Consider, too, how we have been reduced to mere consumers, carefully calculated parts of the GDP to be processed, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder.

This was all inevitable once "we the people" lost control of the government which now rules from the centralized bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. Gone are the local governmental units such as towns and counties which used to serve as our primary form of government. Now we are ruled from afar by a governmental elite which too often operates in secret formulating policies and laws.

Take, for example, the fact that the laws under which we are all regulated and sometimes prosecuted are no longer written by our so-called representatives. Such innumerable and often oppressive laws are written by such corporate membership organizations as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). These groups are merely the conduits that the megacorporations use to rule us.

Once an organic process of debate and citizen input, our government now operates as a mechanized bureaucracy, controlled by a corporate elite. The dangers inherent in such mechanical bureaucracies, as Richard Rubenstein tellingly illustrates in his book
The Cunning of History
, is that those caught within their snare are totally dehumanized and eventually eliminated and thrown out like so much human trash. Such was the case with the Nazi death camps, administered by corporations as profit-making ventures. In fact, one of "the chief functions of Auschwitz was to support a vast corporate enterprise involved in the manufacture of synthetic rubber" products for Europe.
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A similar approach is taken in the 1973 film
Soylent Green
. The year is 2022, and the world is suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans, and a miserably hot climate due to the greenhouse effect. Policeman Robert Thorn is dispatched to investigate the murder of a wealthy man who is intimately connected to the Soylent Corporation, whose newest product is Soylent Green, a green wafer advertised as "high energy plankton."

Through the twists and turns of trying to solve the murder while resisting the corporate state's attempt to shut down the investigation, Thorn learns the true secret of Soylent Green. It is made from human beings.

The warning, of course, is that the farther we move into a corporate-state vortex where the bottom line is greed, profit-making, and materialism, human beings will increasingly become more disposable commodities. At the same time, we are sold everything from toothpaste to politicians as products for consumption. This is fascism with a smile.

The point is that we are being conditioned to be slaves without knowing it. That way, we are easier to control. "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude," writes Aldous Huxley. "To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers."
⁵²⁸

All of this can come about without much coercion. As Dr. Robert Gellately, author of
Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1944
, discovered about the German people in Nazi Germany "There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn't the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors."
⁵²⁹

In fact, Gellately realized that those acting as the Gestapo's unsolicited agents and informing on their neighbors were motivated more by greed, jealousy, and petty differences than by any sense of patriotic duty. He found "cases of partners in business turning in associates to gain full ownership; jealous boyfriends informing on rival suitors; neighbors betraying entire families who chronically left shared bathrooms unclean or who occupied desirable apartments. And then there were those who informed because for the first time in their lives someone in authority would listen to them and value what they said."
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Thus, the key to bringing about an authoritarian regime that is geared to controlling, not governing, the citizenry is by selling it–propagandizing it, really–through the legislators, prisons, and the schools.

CHAPTER 23

Are We All Criminals Now?

"Such laws which enable government zealots to accuse almost anyone of committing three felonies in a day, do not just enable government misconduct, they incite prosecutors to intimidate decent people who never had culpable intentions. And to inflict punishments without crimes."
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–Journalist GEORGE WILL

Farm Raid (Anna Vignet/The Daily Californian)

I
s it possible that you are a felon? Or at least a criminal of some sort? This is the reality that more and more Americans are grappling with in the face of a government bureaucracy consumed with churning out laws, statutes, codes, and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies. All the while, the life is slowly being choked out of our individual freedoms. The aim, of course, is absolute control byway of thousands of regulations that dictate when, where, how, and with whom we live our lives.

Incredibly, Congress has been creating on average 55 new "crimes" per year,
⁵³²
bringing the total number of federal crimes on the books to more than 5,000, with as many as 300,000 regulatory crimes.
⁵³³
As journalist Radley Balko reports, "that doesn't include federal regulations, which are increasingly being enforced with criminal, not administrative, penalties. It also doesn't include the increasing leeway with which prosecutors can enforce broadly written federal conspiracy, racketeering, and money laundering laws. And this is before we even get to the states' criminal codes."
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Petty Criminals

In such a society, we are all petty criminals, guilty of violating some minor law. In fact, attorney Harvey Silvergate estimates that the average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal and an inclination on the part of prosecutors to reject the idea that there can't be a crime without criminal intent.
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Consequently, we now find ourselves operating in a strange new world where small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community are finding their farms raided,
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while home gardeners face jail time for daring to cultivate their own varieties of orchids without having completed sufficient paperwork.
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This frightening state of affairs–where a person can actually be arrested and incarcerated for the most innocent and inane activities, including feeding a whale
⁵³⁸
and collecting rainwater on their own property
⁵³⁹
(these are actual court cases)–is due to what law scholars refer to as "overcriminalization," or the overt proliferation of criminal laws.

Welcome to the Nanny State

One of the major concerns in America today is the rise of the so-called "Nanny State," a British concept whereby the government legislates policies that attempt to limit or control human behavior. These laws, which we are told are good for us, are at times petty, and at other times bizarre because of the way they may interfere in our lives. For instance, Gary Harrington of Eagle Point, Oregon, was convicted of violating a 1925 state law by having "three illegal reservoirs" on his property. He allegedly diverted tributaries of the Big Butte River, which is considered public water, for his own use. Harrington says he had been using them to collect rainwater and runoff from melted snow on his own property. For this purported "crime," Harrington was sentenced to thirty days in jail.
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Such laws may be well-meaning, or may even have clear value to society. But what often happens is that such laws get stretched beyond the bounds of common sense. Assuming Harrington's claim to be true, his reservoirs would have been designed to make use of water he already had the right to use. But instead, he cannot save rainwater and snow for use in irrigation or drinking water.

Bizarre Laws and Lemonade Stands

These situations are more common than we think. More and more, sidewalk lemonade stands are being shut down for not having some required permit. Run by children, usually in front of their homes, these tiny stands sell lemonade or cookies for about a quarter per cup. In 2011, police in Coralville, Iowa, shut down three such stands set up during a bicycle race, citing a need to protect riders from health risks. The required permit would have cost $400.
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Criminalizing Lemonade Stands

"If the line is drawn to the point where a four-year-old eight blocks away can't sell a couple glasses of lemonade for 25 cents, then I think the line has been drawn at the wrong Criminalizing Lemonade Stands
_spot
,"
_said
Dustin
Krutsinger, whose daughter Abigail's stand was shut down after just half an hour of operation. She made $4 in sales during that time.
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Other bizarre laws of this nature include:

Minnetonka, Minnesota, has made it illegal for a vehicle to deposit mud or other substances onto streets and highways. It's considered a public nuisance, and the vehicle's owner is subject to a fine of up to $2,000.