It’s been a year of populist uprisings, economic downturns, political assassinations, and one scandal after another. Gold prices soared, while the dollar plummeted. The Arab Spring triggered worldwide protests, including the Occupy Wall Street protests here in America. Nature unleashed her forces with a massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan, flooding in Thailand and Pakistan, a severe drought in East Africa, and a famine in Somalia. With an unemployment rate hovering around 9.5 percent, more than 4 million Americans passed the one-year mark for being out of a job. After a death toll that included more than 4,500 American troops and at least 60,000 Iraqis, the U.S. military officially ended its war in Iraq. At the conclusion of their respective media-circus trials, Casey Anthony went free while Conrad Murray went to jail. And Will and Kate tied the knot, while Demi and Ashton broke ties. All in all, it’s been a mixed bag of a year, but on the civil-liberties front, things were particularly grim.

Welcome to the new total security state. The U.S. government now has at its disposal a technological arsenal so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. And these technologies are being used by the government to invade the privacy of the American people. Several years ago, government officials acknowledged that the nefarious intelligence-gathering entity known as the National Security Agency had exceeded its legal authority by eavesdropping on Americans’ private e-mail messages and phone calls. However, these reports barely scratch the surface of what we are coming to recognize as a “security/industrial complex” – a marriage of government, military, and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance. The increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance, and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

I talked with former state Senator Howie Carroll last week about the proposal by state Representative Bill Mitchell (R-Forsyth) to kick Chicago and suburban Cook County out of Illinois. Mitchell’s resolution has just a tiny number of co-sponsors, but he’s managed to get himself lots of statewide and national media coverage, and he clearly appears to be enjoying his 15 minutes of fame claiming that his region of the state is tired of paying for Chicago’s liberal programs.

Carroll knows all too well about breaking the state in two because he sponsored just such a resolution back in 1981. Carroll, a Chicago Democrat, proposed to make Cook County a separate state. According to newspaper accounts from the time, the resolution was introduced in the midst of heated fighting between Chicago-area and Downstate legislators over funding for mass transit.

In a move intended to bring evangelical voters behind a single candidate, Iowa social-conservative leaders on December 20 endorsed former Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Rick Santorum for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

“I believe he is ready for a January 3 surprise,” Bob Vander Plaats, president and CEO of the Family Leader – which opposes gay marriage and abortion – said of Santorum. “Hopefully, this gives him a stamp of credibility that some people are waiting for.”

For decades, the political machine has perpetuated a deliberate void in the average American’s knowledge and understanding of our foreign policies, militarism versus defense, and the relative budgets for all three. The mainstream media gives these subjects a wide berth as far as meaningful coverage goes. Even the federal budget for defense breaks out military spending from other significant defense expenditures.

Let’s review how U.S. defense spending compares to the rest of the developed world. Military spending in 2010 for Germany was $46.8 billion, United Kingdom $57.4 billion, France $61.8 billion, Japan $51.4 billion, Russia $52.5 billion, and China $114.3 billion. The U.S. was $687 billion! That is nearly twice as much as all these other countries combined, adding up to $384.2 billion by comparison, according to 2010 World Military Budgets, issued by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Military Expenditure Database.