"Internally, analysts realize the obvious , which is the break down of globalization. They grasp that the economic situation will deteriorate. Certainly this young generation of Americans are never going to active the economic level of their parents or their grandparents. And they're preparing for civil unrest. They are preparing themselves to create a state by which citizens can be subjugated and they've actually gone very far down that road.
The Authorization to Use Military Force Act, the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendment Act, you know it's just one piece of legislation after another to strip Americans of their most cherished constitutional rights. I mean even the Obama Administration has not found it within itself to restore habeas corpus. All of this was put in place by Bush, but it was codified by the Democrats. In some ways Obama is worse because he's used the Espionage Act now six times to go after whistle blowers and leakers
The National Defense Authorization Act overturns over 200 years of legal precedent, which permits the military to carry out civilian policing. It permits the government to hold US citizens who either substantially support terrorists networks or associated forces (whatever those are) in military facilities, strip them of due process and even hold them overseas in one of our black sites. Until, in the language of the legislation, "the end of hostilities". It is absolutely catastrophic and is part of this slow process by which we are shorn of any legal protection to carry out any kind of free speech or dissident activity.
My tactic is civil disobedience. I think that there is no way in America to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. The political system is rigged, its doesn't really matter whether it's Obama or Bush, and all we have is civil disobedience. So I will use every method available to me to try and obstruct what the corporate state is doing. So when they passed the NDAA, I did not want to let it go unchallenged.
We've underdone a sort of coup d'état in slow motion. We have 35,000 corporate lobbyist who right every piece of legislation, every regulation, every law and it's a narrow, corrupt, rapacious, oligarchic, corporate elite that are "harvesting" the country. It's a business term where they recognize that it's over. They're just bring to grab as much as they can. And the elected official and the political class are just corporate employees."
- Chris Hedges
"Chris Hedges, senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He is a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and was part of a team of reporters that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of a number of books, including Death of the Liberal Class and The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress. He is a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the National Defense Authorization Act."
- Democracy Now
