For First Time, Most Americans Believe Federal Government Threatens Personal Freedoms
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | February 02, 2013
Distrust of the U.S. government has reached an all-time high among Americans, a majority of whom now say Washington represents a threat to their personal freedoms.
According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 53% of respondents said the federal government threatens their own personal rights and freedoms. Those disagreeing numbered 43%.
The percentage of those viewing the government as a threat represents a six-point increase from nearly three years ago, when 47% said they felt that way, and a 23% jump from November 2001, when Americans rallied around their government following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Conservative Republicans are the largest group who distrust Washington, with 76% expressing fear for their personal freedoms. A majority (54%) described the government as a “major” threat.
Three years ago, 62% of conservative Republicans said the government was a threat to their freedom, while 47% said it was a major threat, according to the Pew survey.
Meanwhile, only 38% of Democrats see the government as a threat to personal rights and freedoms, with 16% viewing it as a major threat.
Among gun owners, 62% see the government as a threat, compared with 45% of those without guns.
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Book Review
Got His Gun: Lost His Legs, Arms, and Penis
By David Swanson | War is a Crime | October 27, 2013
Ann Jones’ new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story, is devastating, and almost incomprehensibly so when one considers that virtually all of the death and destruction in U.S. wars is on the other side. Statistically, what happens to U.S. troops is almost nothing. In human terms, it’s overwhelming.
Know a young person considering joining the military? Give them this book.
Know a person not working to end war? Give them this book.
Jones presents the choice before us in the clearest terms in the introduction:
Contrary to common opinion in the United States, war is not inevitable. Nor has it always been with us. War is a human invention — an organized, deliberate action of an anti-social kind — and in the long span of human life on Earth, a fairly recent one. For more than 99 percent of the time that humans have lived on this planet, most of them have never made war. Many languages don’t even have a word for it. Turn off CNN and read anthropology. You’ll see.
What’s more, war is obsolete. Most nations don’t make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious ‘coalition.’ The earth is so small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business.
Jones begins her book with that distinguishing feature of war: death. The U.S. military assigns specialists in “Mortuary Affairs” to dispose of the dead. They dispose of their own sanity in the process. … continue
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Aletho News 
Well, the most progressive, enlightened, and factually correct perspective expressed in this Pew public opinion poll; comes from ‘conservative republicans’ with 76% and 62% of gun owners.
The Democrats prove they have a partisan mental paralysis, and have learned nothing since 9/11 and live in a state of denial, or is it craven complicity?
Independents, get no honorable mention, and are therefore excluded in the ‘public opinion poll’ altogether; just as the mass media excluded them in the electoral propaganda matrix.
Honestly, I do not support whatsoever, the granting of our political power by proxy to politicians. They are as a group mere hired-guns for corporate syndicates of bankers, weapons manufacturers, oil, etc. Middlemen, con-men, usurpers, and co-conspirators in the criminal imperialist wars of aggression that is the specialty of the US Government Inc!
A real National Referendum on any key issue would be the only way to get government ‘”of the People, by the People, and for the People!'”
Obama should have been impeached already for Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes, and High Treason; as should have been all of them (presidents) … for the past 100 years and more. A republic is a device to create an elite with power to repress dissent of the majority, when it adamantly disagrees. Majority rule is only for within the plutocracy, by the fascist top 1% of the population. That is where most of the politicians come from, and they are all funded by to be their indentured incumbents. That system of government, the rule by wealth, is called a Plutocracy.
Pew did not poll the public as to their position as a whole on a proposition as a National Referendum on anything, or Initiatives on real solutions that are never articulated in electoral campaigns. The United States is not a Democracy, never was, never intended to be, and would declare martial law and open fire of the peaceably assembled masses as they fund despots around the world to do. Kent State comes to mind, and then the great labor strikes throughout American History.
The “left” better confront their “liberal friends” on the excesses of the Obama regime, it’s worldwide aggression, and what appears to be, a rush to claiming a checkmate on all non-servile states to capitulate or be annihilated with weapons of mass destruction, why beyond what we have seen nuking Japan in 1945. Out and out, World War III if ultimatums are not swallowed with a shit-eating smile!
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