Chaos On The Streets Of America

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Should we just expect mass chaos on the streets of America every time a major holiday rolls around? At least 42 people were hit by gunfire in New York City over the Labor Day weekend. The violence got so bad that even the mayor felt compelled to publicly address it. In Chicago, at least 6 people(including a man in a wheelchair) were killed over the Labor Day weekend.

Sadly, this is just a continuation of a trend that we have seen build over the past few years. At the beginning of the summer, there was terrible violence all over America during the Memorial Day weekend. We also saw violence break out during 4th of July celebrations. It appears that wherever large groups of young people gather in America today, there is going to be a very good chance that chaos is going to erupt.

Almost wherever you look, you can see the frustration of the American people starting to boil over. Very few public places seem to be immune.

For example, there have been very disturbing incidents of violence at quite a few NFL games recently. Just check out this video and this video.

There was even one incident recently where coaches and players ganged up to brutally attack a referee during a youth football game in Florida.

What in the world is happening to this country?

People are getting angrier and angrier and they are starting to lash out.

As I have documented previously, there have been a disturbing number of flash mob robberies in the United States this year. When dozens of young people start banding together to loot stores, you know that things are getting bad. Just check out this video of a recent example from the state of Maryland.

When individuals or small groups commit crimes that is bad enough.

But when large groups of people start banding together to commit crimes that is absolutely frightening.

The sad truth is that it is not even safe to take your kids to the state fair anymore. The following is how one local ABC News affiliate described the “flash mob” attacks that took place at the Wisconsin state fair this year….

Milwaukee police said that around 11:10 p.m., squads were sent to the area for reports of battery, fighting and property damage being caused by an unruly crowd of “hundreds” of people. One officer described it as a “mob beating.”

Police said the group of young people attacked fair goers who were leaving the fair grounds. Police said that some victims were attacked while walking. They said others were pulled out of cars and off of motorcycles before being beaten.

Could you imagine your children watching that scene unfold from the backseat of your vehicle?

Could you imagine your wife and your children being pulled out of your vehicle and beaten by rampaging criminals?

Yes, this kind of thing is now happening in the heartland of America.

Even young girls are increasingly participating in violence. Just check out this video of a group of teen girls brutally assaulting a worker outside City Hall in Philadelphia earlier this year.

How in the world did those young girls learn to act like that?

Sadly, that was not an isolated incident. Young women all over the nation have become absolutely brutal. In Minnesota recently, a mob of teen girls beat the living daylights out of a mother and her two daughters until they were black and blue. Apparently the mob of teen girls was enraged over a pair of missing sunglasses.

In America today, the love of most people has grown cold. A growing number of Americans (especially young Americans) seem to have very little empathy for anyone else.

As the economy crumbles, many Americans find themselves doing very low things in order to survive. So far in 2011, dog thefts have increased by 49 percent. These days, people will steal anything of value if it is not bolted down.

What is certainly not helping things is the rampant unemployment all over the nation. Sadly, the younger that you are, the more likely that you are to be unemployed.

According to a recent USA Today article, more than one-fourth of all teens are unemployed at this point….

The unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds ticked up to 25.4% in August from 25% the previous month, the Labor Department said last week. For black teens, unemployment leaped to 46.5% from 39.2% in July. The nation’s jobless rate was unchanged at 9.1%.

But those numbers only tell part of the story. The real picture starts to emerge when you look at how many teens actually do have a job.

Back in the year 2000, more than 50 percent of all Americans teens had a job.

This summer, only 29.6% of all American teens had a job.

So we have a whole lot of teens with a whole lot of time on their hands.

Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough jobs for everyone out there right now. There is intense competition even for the most basic jobs.

The number of Americans with jobs overall continues to decline. For example, the percentage of Californians that are 16 years or older that have a job is the lowest that is has been in over 30 years.

What is even more frightening is that we have just seen another huge wave of layoffs. The following is from a recent CBS article….

It’s been a summer storm of pink slips. Along with Borders, Bank of America, Cisco, Lockheed Martin, and Goldman Sachs have all recently announced mass layoffs.

But a lack of jobs is far from the only reason why the fabric of American society is falling to pieces.

Many believe that another huge reason for all of the chaos on the streets of America is the breakdown of the American family. In 1960, married couples accounted for 75 percent of all households in America. Today, they account for just 48 percent of all households.

Millions upon millions of American children are growing up with only one parent, and that one parent usually has to work so hard that he or she is hardly ever home.

So those kids are being raised by our public schools, by government institutions, by the television, by movies, by video games and by other kids.

Now we are starting to reap what we have been sowing as a society.

Many of our greatest cities have been transformed into rotting war zones. As millions of jobs have been shipped overseas, entire communities have been gutted. Those that remain in these cities find themselves trying to survive in an environment where morality has been thrown out the window.

For example, the following is what one British reporter found during his visit to Detroit….

 

Continue reading “Chaos on the streets of America” at Global Freedom Technology Firm.

Related articles

• It’s Not Just Flash Mob Violence (lewrockwell.com)
• The US Is Becoming a Very Frightening Place (lewrockwell.com)
• Insight: Dismal summer for teen jobs may scar young Americans (huffingtonpost.com)
• 10 Signs That Economic Riots And Civil Unrest Inside The United States Are Now More Likely Than Ever (whitelocust.wordpress.com)
• The American Dream? Lawless America: 20 Examples of Desperate People Doing Desperate Things To Survive (infowebstorm.com)
• Leave the Kids Alone (reason.com)
• Riot Fear: Could It Happen in The U.S.? (abcnews.go.com)
• Teen Mobs: Why Aren’t Young People Being Included in the Conversation? – Beacon Broadside (beaconbroadside.com)
• Our Disintegrating Society (lewrockwell.com)

Bradley Manning: American hero – Opinion – Al Jazeera English

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Bradley Manning: American hero – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.

Bradley Manning: American hero

Four reasons why Pfc Bradley Mannning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, not a prison cell. We still don’t know if he did it or not, but if Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma, actually supplied WikiLeaks with its choicest material – the Iraq War logs, the Afghan War logs, and the State Department cables – which startled and riveted the world, then he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom instead of a jail cell at Fort Leavenworth. Coupon Code: SUMMER10 Save 10% off Compatible and Remanufactured ink and toners {Excludes OEM} President Obama recently gave one of those medals to retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who managed the two bloody, disastrous wars about which the WikiLeaks-released documents revealed so much. Is he really more deserving than the young private who, after almost ten years of mayhem and catastrophe, gave Americans – and the world – a far fuller sense of what the US government is actually doing abroad? Bradley Manning, awaiting a court martial in December, faces the prospect of long years in prison. He is chargedwith violating the Espionage Act of 1917. He has put his sanity and his freedom on the line so that Americans might know what their government has done – and is still doing – globally. He has blown the whistle on criminal violationsof US military law. He has exposed the secretive government’s pathological over-classification of important public documents. Here are four compelling reasons why, if he did what the government accuses him of doing, he deserves that medal, not jail time. 1: At great personal cost, Bradley Manning has given the foreign policy elite the public supervision it so badly needs. In the past ten years, US statecraft has moved from calamity to catastrophe, laying waste to other nations while never failing to damage our own national interests. Do we even need to be reminded that our self-defeating response to 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) has killed roughly 225,000 civilians and 6,000 US soldiers, while costing our country more than $3.2 trillion? We are hemorrhaging blood and money. Few outsideWashington would argue that any of this is making the US safer. An employee who screwed up this badly would either be fired on the spot or put under heavy supervision.  Downsizing our entire foreign policy establishment is not an option. However, the website WikiLeaks has at least tried to make public scrutiny of our self-destructive statesmen and women a reality by exposing their work to ordinary citizens. Consider our invasion of Iraq, a war based on distortions, government secrecy, and the complaisant failure of our major media to ask the important questions. But what if someone like Bradley Manning had provided the press with the necessary government documents, which would have made so much self-evident in the months before the war began? Might this not have prevented disaster? We’ll never know, of course, but could additional public scrutiny have been salutary under the circumstances? Thanks to Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures, we do have a sense of what did happen afterwards in Iraq and Afghanistan, and just how the US operates in the world. Thanks to those disclosures, we now know just how Washington leaned on the Vatican to quell opposition to the Iraq War and just how it pressured the Germans to prevent them from prosecuting CIA agents who kidnapped an innocent man and shipped him off to be tortured abroad. As our foreign policy threatens to careen into yet more disasters in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, we can only hope that more whistleblowers will follow the alleged example of Bradley Manning and release vital public documents before it’s too late. A foreign policy based on secrets and spin has manifestly failed us. In a democracy, the workings of our government should not be shrouded in an opaque cloud of secrecy. For bringing us the truth, for breaking the seal on that self-protective policy of secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 2: Knowledge is powerful. The WikiLeaks disclosures have helped spark democratic revolutions and reforms across the Middle East, accomplishing what Operation Iraqi Freedom never could. Wasn’t it US policy to spread democracy in the Middle East, to extend our freedom to others, as both recent American presidents have insisted? No single American has done more to help further this goal than Pfc Bradley Manning. The chain reaction of democratic protests and uprisings that has swept Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and even in a modest way Iraq, all began in Tunisia, where leaked US State Department cables about the staggering corruption of the ruling Ben Ali dynasty helped trigger the rebellion. In all cases, these societies were smouldering with longstanding grievances against oppressive, incompetent governments and economies stifled by cronyism. The revelations from the WikiLeaks State Department documents played a widely acknowledged role in sparking these pro-democracy uprisings. In Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen, the people’s revolts under way have occurred despite US support for their autocratic rulers. In each of these nations, in fact, we bankrolled the dictators, while helping to arm and train their militaries. The alliance with Mubarak’s autocratic state cost the US more than $60 billion and did nothing for American security – other than inspire terrorist blowback from radicalised Egyptians such as Mohammed Atta and Ayman al Zawahiri. Even if US policy was firmly on the wrong side of things, we should be proud that at least one American – Bradley Manning – was on the right side. If indeed he gave those documents to WikiLeaks, then he played a catalytic role in bringing about the Arab Spring, something neither Barack Obama nor former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (that recent surprise recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom) could claim. Perhaps once the Egyptians consolidate their democracy, they, too, will award Manning their equivalent of such a medal. 3: Bradley Manning has exposed the pathological over-classification of America’s public documents. “Secrecy is for losers”, as the late Senator and United Nations Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say. If this is indeed the case, it would be hard to find a bigger loser than the US government. How pathological is the government’s addiction to secrecy? In June, the National Security Agency declassified documents from 1809, while the Department of Defense only last month declassified the Pentagon Papers, publicly available in book form these past four decades. Our government is only just now finishing its declassification of documents relating to World War I. This would be ridiculous if it weren’t tragic. Ask the historians. Barton J Bernstein, professor emeritus of history at Stanford University and a founder of its international relations program, describes the government’s classification of foreign-policy documents as “bizarre, arbitrary, and nonsensical”. George Herring, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and author of the encyclopedic From Colony to Superpower: A History of US Foreign Policy, has chronicled how his delight at being appointed to a CIA advisory panel on declassification turned to disgust once he realised that he was being used as window dressing by an agency with no intention of opening its records, no matter how important or how old, to public scrutiny. Any historian worth his salt would warn us that such over-classification is a leading cause of national amnesia and repetitive war disorder. If a society like ours doesn’t know its own history, it becomes the great power equivalent of a itinerant amnesiac, not knowing what it did yesterday or where it will end up tomorrow. Right now, classification is the disease of Washington, secrecy its mania, and dementia its end point. As an ostensibly democratic nation, we, its citizens, risk such ignorance at our national peril. President Obama came into office promising a “sunshine” policy for his administration while singing the praises of whistleblowers. He has since launched the fiercest campaign against whistleblowers the republic has ever seen, and further plunged our foreign policy into the shadows. Challenging the classification of each tightly guarded document is, however, impossible. No organisation has the resources to fight this fight, nor would they be likely to win right now. Absent a radical change in our government’s diplomatic and military bureaucracies, massive over-classification will only continue. If we hope to know what our government is actually doing in our name globally, we need massive leaks from insider whistleblowers to journalists who can then sort out what we need to know, given that the government won’t. This, in fact, has been the modus operandi of WikiLeaks. Our whistleblower protection laws urgently need to catch up with this state of affairs, and though we are hardly there yet, Bradley Manning helped take us part of the way. He did what Barack Obama swore he would do on coming into office. For striking a blow against our government’s fanatical insistence on covering its mistakes and errors with blanket secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves not punishment, but the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 4. At immense personal cost, Bradley Manning has upheld a great American tradition of transparency in statecraft and for that he should be an American hero, not an American felon. Bradley Manning is only the latest in a long line of whistleblowers in and out of uniform who have risked everything to put our country back on the right path. Take Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, a Pentagon-commissioned secret history of the Vietnam War and the official lies and distortions that the government used to sell it. Many of the documents it included were classed at a much higher security clearance than anything Bradley Manning is accused of releasing – and yet Ellsberg was not convicted of a single crime and became a national hero. Given the era when all this went down, it’s forgivable to assume that Ellsberg must have been a hippie who somehow sneaked into the Pentagon archives, beads and patchouli trailing behind him. What many no longer realise is that Ellsberg had been a model US Marine. First in his class at officer training school at Quantico, he deferred graduate school at Harvard to remain on active duty in the Marine Corps. Ellsberg saw his high-risk exposure of the disastrous and deceitful nature of the Vietnam War as fully consonant with his long career of patriotic service in and out of uniform. And Ellsberg is hardly alone. Ask Lieutenant Colonel (ret) Darrel Vandeveld. Or Tom Drake, formerly of the National Security Agency. Transparency in statecraft was not invented last week by WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange. It is a longstanding American tradition. James Madison put the matter succinctly: “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.” A 1960 Congressional Committee on Government Operations report caught the same spirit: “Secrecy – the first refuge of incompetents – must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society … Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognise that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than the people.” John F Kennedy made the same point in 1961: “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.” Hugo Black, great Alabaman justice of the twentieth-century Supreme Court had this to say: “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.” And the first of World-War-I-era president Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points couldn’t have been more explicit: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.” We need to know what our government’s commitments are, as our foreign policy elites have clearly demonstrated they cannot be left to their own devices. Based on the past decade of carnage and folly, without public debate – and aggressive media investigations – we have every reason to expect more of the same. If there’s anything to learn from that decade, it’s that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood and money. Thanks to the whistleblowing revelations attributed to Bradley Manning, we at least have a far clearer picture of the problems we face in trying to supervise our own government. If he was the one responsible for the WikiLeaks revelations, then, for his gift to the republic, purchased at great price, he deserves not prison, but a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the heartfelt gratitude of his country. Chase Madar is a lawyer in New York and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, theAmerican Conservative magazine, CounterPunch.org, and Le Monde Diplomatique. His next book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, will be published by O/R Books this fall.  He is covering the Bradley Manning case and trial for TomDispatch.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain‘s latest TomCast audio interview in which Madar discusses the Manning case, click here, or download it to your iPod here. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera’s editorial policy. A version of this article was previously published on TomDispatch.

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WikiLeaks cables: MI6 warns of new suicide bomb wave

Image by fligtar via Flickr

MI6 has warned that Britain faces a “unique” threat from a generation of home-grown terrorists who are not on the intelligence services’ “radar”, secret documents have disclosed.

 

WikiLeaks cables: MI6 warns of new suicide bomb wave

 

 

British-born radicals who undergo terrorist training and become “suicide operatives” will leave the authorities “hard pressed” to prevent an attack, according to a top counterterrorism official at the Secret Intelligence Service. The problem of home-grown terrorists is officially expected to blight Britain for years to come and “will not go away anytime soon”. The warning was sounded in a private briefing from a senior MI6 official to visiting American Congressmen amid growing US fears over the radicalisation of young British Muslims.

The leaked documents also highlight American government concerns that the British intelligence services are struggling to combat Muslim extremists because of budget cuts and a wave of lawsuits from terror suspects. William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, announced further cuts to the counter-terrorism budget earlier this week.

Details of the warnings are contained in diplomatic dispatches from the cache of tens of thousands of US embassy cables leaked to the WikiLeaks website and passed to The Daily Telegraph.

 

 

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