Turley: ""10 Reasons the U.S. Is No Longer the Land of the Free"

Q:  Which is the largest jailer nation in the world?

A. Iran
B. Saudi Arabia
C. Libya
D. Egypt
[size=14]E. United States of America[/size]

It's not even close..............

Canada adds United States to list of countries that torture

It's the End of the World! Again! And Again! And Again!  -  by Arthur Silber

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2012/01/its-end-of-world-again-and-...

"In my view the most criitical paragraph in Turley's article is this one:

'An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights, become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.'

That's the authoritarian state we live in NOW...

Politics, certainly politics in the modern State, is about control, force and violence. Politics is not going to save you. It never was.."

milo204 wrote:

the US was never the land of the free...just because someone says it doesn't make it so.  

what a useless statement - at least give some comparison throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to countries you feel were more free or explain why the belief caught on around the world that the USA was the land of the free even though according to you that was untrue.

Dostoyevsky wrote:

explain why the belief caught on around the world that the USA was the land of the free even though according to you that was untrue.

First of all, that belief did not, in fact, catch on around the world.

Second, never mistake good PR for reality.

And finally. Slavery of Africans and ongoing racism against African Americans. Systemic genocide against Native Americans. Treatment of so-called illegal Mexican immigrants. 

Daily human rights atrocities are as American as apple pie.

My view of "around the world" is a bit broader than the UK, Bacchus.  But I see your point.

As for the "land of the free" bullshit:

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Quote:

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton's family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises-the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one's life. Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

.....

As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

I reached the conclusions presented in this book reluctantly. Ten years ago, I would have argued strenuously against the central claim made here-namely, that something akin to a racial caste system currently exists in the United States. Indeed, if Barack Obama had been elected president back then, I would have argued that his election marked the nation's triumph over racial caste-the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. My elation would have been tempered by the distance yet to be traveled to reach the promised land of racial justice in America, but my conviction that nothing remotely similar to Jim Crow exists in this country would have been steadfast.

...

I first encountered the idea of a new racial caste system more than a decade ago, when a bright orange poster caught my eye. I was rushing to catch the bus, and I noticed a sign stapled to a telephone pole that screamed in large bold print: The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow. I paused for a moment and skimmed the text of the flyer. Some radical group was holding a community meeting about police brutality, the new three-strikes law in California, and the expansion of America's prison system. The meeting was being held at a small community church a few blocks away; it had seating capacity for no more than fifty people. I sighed, and muttered to myself something like, "Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesn't help to make such an absurd comparison. People will just think you're crazy."

....

By the time I left the ACLU, I had come to suspect that I was wrong about the criminal justice system. It was not just another institution infected with racial bias but rather a different beast entirely. The activists who posted the sign on the telephone pole were not crazy; nor were the smattering of lawyers and advocates around the country who were beginning to connect the dots between our current system of mass incarceration and earlier forms of social control. Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.

Im not just saying the UK, anywhere is Europe, parts of asia and eastern europe/russia believed it Maysie.

Its very well documented.  Scots and Irish just happened to be the first wave. Then jews and other less 'pure' ethnicities from russia fleeing pogroms. Then of course the waves of Italian, balkan, german, austro-hungarian etc fleeing the rigid class structure there.

Im not saying it was true, Im just saying it was a world wide belief that led to many waves of immigration