This is fascism

Government and Big Banks Joined Forces to Violently Crush Peaceful Protests

George Washington

Zero Hedge,

31 December, 2012

The definition of fascism used by Mussolini is the “merger of state and corporate power“.

Government and the big banks are in a  malignant, symbiotic relationship. And our economy now exhibits a  merger of state and bank power.

Prominent economist Robert Kuttner said in 2009:

What we have is something perilously close to a dictatorship of the Fed and the Treasury, acting in the interests of Wall Street.

The government and banks use anti-terror laws to stifle dissent.

As Naomi Wolf reports, they joined efforts to violently crush the occupy protests:

The violent crackdown on Occupy [which was protesting the SAME THING as the Tea Party ... and the Boston Tea Party] last fall … was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

 

[A newly-released document] shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens. ….

 

Plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target ….

 

The FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a “terrorist threat”….

 

[The executive Director of The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund - the group which obtained the document] points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it “police-statism”:

 

“This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

 

The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a “Bank Fraud Working Group” met in November 2011 – during the Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its “domestic terrorism” unit. The Anchorage, Alaska “terrorism task force” was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Michigan “joint terrorism task force” was issuing a “counterterrorism preparedness alert” about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Michigan, the FBI and the “Bank Security Group” – multiple private banks – met to discuss the reaction to “National Bad Bank Sit-in Day” (the response was violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state’s Occupy members’ details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis FBI tracked OWS under its “joint terrorism task force” aegis, too. And so on, for over 100 pages.

Eric Zuesse notes:

The FBI was organizing against the OWS movement even before it was known to the general public, and they kept on their campaign against it, until it was dead.

***

The FBI’s police-state snooping and tracking of Occupy Wall Street … had begun even before most Americans knew that there was any such movement for the FBI to snoop against.

 

In other words, the reason why Barack Obama’s “Justice” Department refuses to prosecute even a single one of the mega-bank executives who profited so enormously from having defrauded both mortgagees and the investors in mortgage-backed securities, and who were bailed out by future U.S. taxpayers whose government purchased those remaining “toxic assets” at 100 cents on the dollar, is clear: we live in a police state, and these elite crooks control it. This is not real democracy.

 

Voters were given a choice in November between a President like that but whose liberal rhetoric is condemnatory of “Wall Street,” versus a professional stripper of corporations, whose rhetoric was overtly supportive of Wall Street. And voters chose the former. But this nonetheless is a police state, not an authentic democracy.

Mussolini would recognize it as fascism.

Fun bonus post:

Peaceful Protest Treated as Terrorism By the FBI

 

Yves Smith notes that newly-declassified documents prove that the federal government treated peaceful protesters as terrorists:

The FBI deemed OWS [Occupy Wall Street] to be a terrorist organization and went into “guilty until proven innocent” mode. Many of the FBI descriptions of possible OWS actions or those of affiliated organizations like Adbusters consistently look to have taken the most inflammatory snippets and presented them out of context.

 

The FBI also seems to believe that there is no such thing as peaceful protest, that any non-violent activity has the potential to turn violent and therefore should be treated as violent.

In fact, according to Department of Defense training manuals, all protest is now considered “low-level terrorism”. And see this,this and this.

And an Army colonel has written a paper advocating military methods for “crushing” a Tea Party type insurgency.

Indeed, doing anything to challenge government or big bank policies can get you labeled a potential terrorist in America today.

Do you get it yet?

Big Brother is here, and he’s … very well armed.