Armed DHS agents monitor Tea Party protests..

Wayne

Wayne

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Anyone else want to debate me as to whether "Homeland Security" is dangerous and why they bought 4 BILLION+ bullets?

Welcome to the Police State my friends..

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Armed Homeland Security agents monitor Tea Party at IRS protests
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On Tuesday, demonstrations took place at IRS offices nationwide as various Tea Party groups protested being targeted by the agency. Keeping an eye on several protests, however, were armed agents of the Department of Homeland Security, The Blaze reported
http://www.examiner.com/article/armed-homeland-security-agents-monitor-tea-party-at-irs-protests
 
A billion bullets? http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/ssabullets.asp

The article blames Obama. But, really isn't this the Patriot Act's fault? DHS was signed into action by a Republican President (You know that party that claims to be for small government and lowered spending.) It was extended by Obama. This is the fault of two parties.

Don't forget to use the Gun Proponents logic - see guns are good and everyone should brandish guns in society. It's not threatening in any way. Therefore, DHS having guns couldn't possibly be threatening, by their logic of course.
 
I checked on the last extension of the Patriot Act in Congress. 41 R / 30 D approved. 4 R / 18 D did not approve. So again blaming Obama is a bit silly as the Republicans in the Senate overwhelming wanted to continue this tripe. Clearly this is a problem of both parties.
 
Not sure I'm blaming Obama for the DHS taking on the role of lord-overseer. The Government has now become too large, run by probably "dozens" of people all clamoring for power and presenting it as "providing security".
 
I have some strong opinions on this, but given my employment assignment I will have to pass on commenting to an internet forum my opinion :(
 
I will say this. 2013 Wayne sounds an awful lot like 2008 redrumloa.

Whyzaat? ;-)
 
Wayne said:
Anyone else want to debate me as to whether "Homeland Security" is dangerous and why they bought 4 BILLION+ bullets?
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What? You want someone to volunteer to take the opposite side to that question?

Alright, let's see what I can do. Hmmm. OK, here:

This is what is called "Freedom", my friend, and we know it is good (because it is called "Freedom") and if it wasn't a blessing to the world then why would our leaders be spending trillions of our own dollars to spread it by force to the rest of the world?

Plus it's for our own good and people are willing to give up their rights for more security and because it's a democratic country the government only reflects the will of the people so we know it must be what the people want.
 
Wayne said:
Not sure I'm blaming Obama for the DHS taking on the role of lord-overseer. The Government has now become too large, run by probably "dozens" of people all clamoring for power and presenting it as "providing security".
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Wayne, sorry didn't mean to imply you were. The source did single out Obama. The problem there is the Republican alternatives weren't any different nor would be here.
 
redrumloa said:
I have some strong opinions on this, but given my employment assignment I will have to pass on commenting to an internet forum my opinion :(
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Fair enough. It's a free country. You are free to keep your opinions to yourself and not criticize the powers that be.
 
faethor said:
The article blames Obama. But, really isn't this the Patriot Act's fault?
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Not necessarily. Does the law require Obama to make the DHS do what they are doing, or does the law say what the DHS should do and give more latitude to how that is implemented. I don't know the answer to that, I haven't read all the relevant laws, but I suspect that there is a great deal of latitude in it because laws tend to be pretty sloppy with lots left to interpretation. I'm pretty sure that Obama could chose to implement things differently. On the other hand there is some left/right paranoia and some rich/poor paranoia in the governments actions. It certainly looks like things are being set up to control the peasants because the ruling classes are feeling a little uncertain about their future - and probably with good reason. If they can't maintain control over the worlds oil then the dollar is finished and US hegemony ends bringing with it a sudden increase in poverty and unrest (and there's already a lot of that about). Empires never end well.

The left have already, and for a long time, been clamouring about the PATRIOT act, and libertarians have harped on about government over-reach for half a century (but they are loonies so we don't need to listen to them, right). The DHS was used against the Occupy movement coordinating intelligence gathering against them and coordinating the roundup of activists and the clearing of camps - and probably the smear campaigns as well. The right didn't seem to complain about that much. So long as you use the power against minority groups (and make sure you sling enough mud at the same time) you should be able to count on a majority of the people cheering that you are doing it.

That said, I still can't give the Tea Party a free pass. They have been laundering a lot of Koch money. They have been used by some big money to put some real lackeys for the elites into seats. In that sense they really do deserve to be audited for dodgy filings. But so long as the leadership of the country and the power elites keep whipping up factions and then knocking them down they can keep a lid on things. It's called divide and rule and it works.

But if wealth inequality keeps growing and if the jobs don't come back there could come a time when people put their differences aside, stop worrying about whether Gays should marry and start realizing that they all need to eat - well, you have to have some sort of national security force that you can deploy to protect the interests of those with the power.

On the one hand I think that Obama is just playing along with the agenda (because he's in the ruling classes so it's in his own interest) and sometimes I think he's just building things up to be so outrageous that he will drive the people to organize. I've hoped for the latter from time to time but it seems like "the people" need a lot to motivate them.
 
@Fluffy,

I still can't give the Tea Party a free pass
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I don't know enough about them to really care one way or the other. My issue is the use of a HEAVILY ARMED federal "police force" used to patrol (and quell by mere intimidating presence) a protest guaranteed by our First Amendment.. Don't care if it's the Tea Party, or the Klan, or worse, Westboro. I may not like what any of those groups has to say, but I will absolutely defend their right to say it.

The whole thing and the establishment of a Federal police force truly smacks of 1938 Germany to me, and I can only see it getting worse and worse as time goes by and local enforcement is put more and more under thumb...

Hysterical maybe, but I truly get a feeling of dread when I hear of the Federal Government overstepping its' authority like this.

Wayne
 
Wayne said:
The whole thing and the establishment of a Federal police force truly smacks of 1938 Germany to me, and I can only see it getting worse and worse as time goes by and local enforcement is put more and more under thumb...
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A bit late in the day to be going all Naomi Klein, isn't it? Well, maybe not - hopefully not. Did you ever see an of her "Shock Doctrine" talks? She's been calling out the ratcheting up of the police state for a few years but I don't know if anyone in the US paid her much mind because she gets called a "liberal" quite a bit.
 
Never heard of her, sorry...
 
Wayne said:
Never heard of her, sorry...
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I presume that you were not supposed to hear of her. If more people had heard of her and what she had to say (and those many voices like hers) then we wouldn't be so far gone as we are today. You may be starting to feel uncomfortable about things now but there is every possibility that you will, at some time, be running around with your hair on fire over what's going on and there will still be a vast number of sleepy people happy to call you a paranoid nut or worse, liberal/socialist.

Chomsky has been illuminating the course for decades, and people like Orwell saw it plain back in the 1940s but 1984 seems to have dropped out of the school curriculum and the last fun bit of news I heard about 1984 was when Amazon erased the book from the Kindle's of people who had bought it.

So here is a Klein talk from 2007 (when her book The Shock Doctrine came out) and a film by the same name based on the book that came out in 2009. These are both long but they need to be. If you have a few hours or a few occasions to devote some part of an hour, try to watch. There may be a few things you've never heard before in there.
 
Got my Naomi's mixed up. The one I was thinking of initially is Naomi Wolf (End of America) which was the one directly relevant to this thread. Check that one out here. Naomi Wolf you actually may have heard of because she's not Canadian :)

The Naomi Klein stuff is still worth watching though. It's sort of the mechanism by which your rights are being taken away. The basic thrust of it is that model solutions are pre-created and sit around waiting for a "problem" to solve. The PATRIOT act is a good example of that sort of thing. That giant law didn't just get made after 911 you can't just make these things up ion short notice like that - it sat around waiting for something like 911 so it could get dusted off and presented as what was needed. It was just great luck that terrorists managed to evade every branch of US intelligence and pulled of a spectacular attack. Who knows how long they'd have had to wait to bring this in otherwise. (Doubtless something would have eventually happened anyway and maybe they could have introduced some of the provisions bit by bit on little disasters over time, but having a big terrorist attack really helped motivate people to accept this terrible law).
 
I'd recommend watching Shock Doctrine too.

FluffyMcDeath said:
That giant law didn't just get made after 911 you can't just make these things up ion short notice like that - it sat around waiting for something like 911 so it could get dusted off and presented as what was needed. It was just great luck that terrorists managed to evade every branch of US intelligence and pulled of a spectacular attack. Who knows how long they'd have had to wait to bring this in otherwise.
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Much in the same way that it provided the stipulated "Perl Harbor" moment outlined by PNAC for "Multi-theatre war".
 
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