"What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else." - Author Tom Clancy

The American people remain eager to be persuaded that a new president in the White House can solve the problems that plague us. Yet no matter who wins this next presidential election, you can rest assured that the new boss will be the same as the old boss, and we - the permanent underclass in America - will continue to be forced to march in lockstep with the police state in all matters, public and private.

Indeed, it really doesn't matter what you call them - the 1 percent, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex - so long as you understand that no matter which party occupies the White House in 2017, the unelected bureaucracy that actually calls the shots will continue to do so.

Consider the following a much-needed reality check, an antidote, if you will, against an overdose of over-hyped campaign announcements, lofty electoral promises, and meaningless patriotic sentiments that land us right back in the same prison cell.

Fact: For the first time in history, a majority of members of Congress are millionaires, and U.S. representatives and senator are, on average, 14 times wealthier than the average American. According to a scientific study by Princeton researchers, the United States of America is not the democracy that it purports to be, but rather an oligarchy, in which "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy."

Fact: "Today, 17,000 local police forces are equipped with such military equipment as Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers, battering rams, explosives, chemical sprays, body armor, night vision, rappelling gear, and armored vehicles," reports Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the treasury. "Some have tanks."

Fact: Thanks to an overabundance of 4,500-plus federal crimes and 400,000-plus rules and regulations, it is estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. According to law professor John Baker, "There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. That is not an exaggeration."

Presidential candidates work hard to convince ordinary Americans that they're just like us. Regular folks. Put their pants on one leg at a time, you betcha.

But nobody clears the airspace for me when I fly into a city.

Nor, I bet, do federal agents cordon off several blocks around venues in which you're scheduled to speak, restricting people who don't like you to "free-speech zones" for the duration of your visit.

And if either of us puts the pedal to the metal and flies down Interstate 89 at more than 90 miles per hour to keep appointments in Keene, Claremont, and Concord, New Hampshire, we'll be lucky if we get off with stern lectures and expensive tickets.

Hillary Clinton gets a Secret Service escort. The police don't even consider pulling her over for a ticket. They're there to make sure all us regular people - you know, the ones she's just like - keep ourselves out of her way.

Supporters of a national constitutional convention, as provided for in Article V of the U.S. Constitution, have gained the support of 27 state legislatures for the idea. They need 34.

Republicans and Democrats are at war both with each other and within their own parties over the proposal. Some Republicans want such a convention for the purpose of getting a balanced-budget amendment.

Some Democrats also want a convention for the purpose of overturning the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling and regulating political-campaign spending.

Some members of both parties fear that a convention might get out of hand, producing unforeseen results. History says these Cassandras are correct.

Imagine the following scenario: You're driving along one fine evening, pretty thoroughly drunk, and ram your car through police tape and into a barricade. Suppose further that the barricade you've smashed into is in front of the White House. For good measure, let's add that the police tape you broke was marking off an active crime scene - an ongoing bomb investigation, which you've now dangerously disrupted.

The cops quickly approach your car. What are your chances of avoiding arrest, or worse?

Oh wait. I forgot to mention that you're a Secret Service agent. So it turns out you don't get shot, or Tased, or roughed up, or slapped in jail, or even detained. You just go home.

Precisely this scenario unfolded on March 4, with two seemingly intoxicated Secret Service agents crashing into a barricade at the east entrance to the White House grounds, nearly running over a suspicious object that agents on the scene were in the course of investigating as a possible bomb.

It seems like a common sense, life-saving proposal: U.S. Senators Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) want state motor-vehicle agencies to require completion of automakers' safety-recall repairs before issuing license plates.

Their justification, of course, is safety. But on a closer look, the bill is just a sop to the auto industry. Its biggest effect will be to hurt working people.

Pop quiz: Of the top three causes of auto accidents, where does "failure to get recall items fixed" rank?

Answer: It doesn't.

"The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway, and jail official. The framers would be appalled." - Herman Schwartz, The Nation

Our freedoms - especially the Fourth Amendment - are being choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, Taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases - these are just a few ways in which Americans are being forced to accept that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

Worse, on a daily basis, Americans are being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are - our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.) - to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: We are all guilty until proven innocent.

On February 20, U.S. Representatives Jared Polis (D-Colorado) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) introduced two new bills for federal marijuana legalization. The U.S. government's practice of imprisoning, fining, harassing, and stigmatizing marijuana users is tragic and has damaged many lives. Ending prohibition is a welcome change, but these bills have severe problems. If passed, they would turn marijuana into a cartelized industry rather than a business opportunity for everyday people.

Blumenaur's bill, The Marijuana Tax Revenue Act of 2015 (HR 1014), would place a federal excise tax on marijuana, and occupational taxes on the marijuana-related businesses. Polis' HR 1013, The Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act, would end federal prohibition of marijuana and transfer enforcement from the Drug Enforcement Agency to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives. The bills would subject marijuana to the same sort of taxation and regulation as alcohol and tobacco, using Colorado as a nationwide model. Such a regime would lead to the development of "big marijuana" firms similar to "big alcohol" and "big tobacco."

In late January, the U.S. military-industrial complex reported results for 2014's fourth quarter and expectations for 2015. Good times! Northrop Grumman knocked down nearly $6 billion in Q4 2014 and expects 2015 sales of around $23.5 billion. Raytheon did about as well last fall and expects a big radar order from the Air Force this year. Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced a travel upgrade for the president of the United States - a new Air Force One. Base cost for the Boeing 747-8? $368 million, before presidential modifications.

Anyone who doesn't live under a rock (or whose rock gets bombed periodically) knows that the U.S. government spends more on its military than any other nation-state. A useful way of understanding how much more: If the U.S. "defense" budget were cut by 90 percent, it would remain the first- or second-largest military spender in the world (depending on fluctuations in China's military expenditures).

That 90 percent - and then some - is the single-largest welfare entitlement program in the U.S. government's budget, even omitting "emergency supplementals" for the military misadventure of the week and military spending snuck into other budget lines.

As Loretta Lynch's U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for the office of Attorney General opened on January 28, Republicans were dying to ask her just how friendly she might be to the class of people government defines as "illegal aliens." In an exchange with immigration scrooge Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), Sessions wondered who Lynch believes has the right to work in America. Specifically, he asked: Who has "more right" - a lawful immigrant, a citizen, or a person who entered the country unlawfully? Lynch wisely opted to dodge Sessions' silly multiple-choice question, instead responding that if a person is here unlawfully, she'd prefer it be as a participant in America's workforce.

Sessions' line of questioning - and the answer he was fishing for - reveal much about the political class' warped thinking. The bipartisan immigration-bashing contingent in Washington believes, as Sheldon Richman notes, "permission to work is theirs to bestow." Unfortunately, that belief is the law of the land. Today, who may work is a question decided largely by Washington bureaucrats and special interests jockeying to buy legal monopolies on their services. While you may think yourself free to pursue work of your choosing, the countless prerequisites and riders imposed by government drastically narrow your choices. If you're fortunate enough to overcome those obstacles, your ability to remain effective at your craft is often curtailed as you're forced to wade through a morass of government-mandated compliance.

"You're either a cop or little people." - Police captain Harry Bryant in Blade Runner

For those of us who managed to survive 2014 with our lives intact and our freedoms hanging by a thread, it was a year of crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns.

We've had our freedoms turned inside out, our democratic structure flipped upside down, and our house of cards left in shambles.

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