One of my goals with a weekly installment is to be able to look back at these diaries when Installment 55 comes along.  Have things gotten better or worse in the previous year?  Am I still allowed to blog and will I be doing it from a cage in GitMo?  People tend to have very short memories.  I want this series to provide a trail of crumbs to the Police State.

Welcome to ET, Paul Krugman

Were you there or is this through someone else's eyes?

"... the "movement" in the 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S. was primarily driven by fear of the draft."

ABSOLUTELY!! Guilty as charged.  I busted my ass to become the valedictorian of my high school class of 350+ and I pull a high 60's out of 365 in the draft (summer of '71) and WHAT?  I'm going to go to Viet Nam to get my ass shot off?  So that the likes of LBJ can war profiteer?  My parents don't give a rat's ass if I go to college or go to Viet Nam. (A real pair ... don't get me started.)  Sorry if I looked after No. 1 back then but NOBODY ELSE WAS!

Welcome to ET, Paul Krugman

In terms of police response to protests it was the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999 that "changed everything," not 9-11.

I was born in 1977, so I can only read about the 60's - and from those readings it's clear that the police back then were far worse then than they are today. The difference today is that the technology needed (automated surveillance) to run a police state is available at a cost that doesn't require increasing law enforcement budgets much at all.

you are the media you consume.

Modern America has its roots in the '60s, especially the latter part of the decade when the conservative backlash against the New Deal coalition took hold.  The result in 2008 ain't pretty.

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?

As previously discussed, it is not possible to objectively determine whether a nation has become or is becoming a police state. As a consequence, to draw up an exhaustive list of police states would be inherently flawed. However, there are a few highly debated examples which serve to illustrate partial characteristics of a police state's structure.

I can swear there ain't no heaven but I pray there ain't no hell. _ Blood Sweat & Tears

"I realize that the US system is likely to be the focus of this diary, for various valid reasons, but one should remember that we are all in the same boat, ..."

When I was composing this first Installment I was contemplating telling folks that I was a die-hard Californian and my info selection might reflect this. THEREFORE, if anyone wants to contribute to this series because they have valuable info concerning their geographic area, feel free!  So where are you living, in general?

Your points 2 and 3 ... FANTASTIC!  Tell me more!

Welcome to ET, Paul Krugman

Most people on this blog, excepting those from Eastern Europe, have a limited ideas about what living in a police state is really like.

I lived through the warmer Soviet period until the gentle age of 18, but did not have much chance to suffer from it. Generally, people did not look stressed of limitations - most noticeably, they were looking for commerce or speculation opportunities (free business was perhaps indeed more a luxury of party insiders or criminals). Soon they got their wish - and the capitalist "rate race" offers quite some anxiety and stress, apparently. As for the police (or "milicia" in Soviet times), its function in the Soviet times was indeed more diverse, but frequently more useful as well. (Say, it could deal with alcoholic types more creatively, or do more in domestic violence. On the other hand, general social appearances admittedly improved.) Do corruption and criminality got better? Yes, if you don't care about fine similarities between certain power microeconomics and organized crime, or between some status privileges and indecent lobbying. It is probably a good sign that police job looks more dull (and jokes about them are not advancing).

Perhaps I do not really know what a police state is either. Yet I may wonder, did good Germans feel limited much by the Nazi-time police in their impressive uniforms?

Iraq may provide a special example of living in a police state and after it.

There are strong similarities between a police state and a state where criminal enterprise exercises  essential control over the government.

Any country that allows control of the political process to be dominated by wealth is at risk of becoming a police state.  In 19th Century USA wealthy businessmen routinely brought state police and militias to bear in behalf of their own interests.  That continued up into the 1930s.

Control over the political process by business interests was sufficient to prevent much of their activities from explicitly being made criminal and from those aspects that were criminal from being prosecuted.  Intimidation, co-option or outright purchase of the press facilitated their operations.

Al Capone's control of Cicero, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and his influence on Chicago politics were only different in degree from the power exercised in company towns by mining companies.  This makes a mockery of our rhetoric about "freedom" and "individual liberties."  Attitudes and practices surrounding slavery made directly addressing this problem impossible at the time the US Constitution was written.

The biggest challenge is that a very significant majority of the population have an unconscious or preconscious orientation that favors authoritarian forms of government, even though those forms work against their own interests.  Representative government has survived in the US more as a result of the divided government our founders bequeathed us and the civic conscience of previous leaders than due to the vigilance of the voters.  The division of the government has been systematically eroded over much of the 20th century and recent experience has shown us that we cannot rely on political forbearance to protect what we were given.  It is up to us.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

GLENN GREENWALD: Absolutely. I mean, I found the symbolism of the event very revealing. First of all, as you say, there was a very intended-to-be-intimidating wall of private security surrounding the event, and they were actually infinitely more aggressive and angrier than the Denver police were. And in fact, I was there with Jane Hamsher, the blogger from FireDogLake, who at one point was trying to speak with one of the individuals entering the party, and she was physically pushed by one of the private security members, notwithstanding the fact that the Denver police had been there the entire time, navigating and negotiating where it was that we could stand.

The other aspect of it was, was that what the police had been clearly trained to do is create this façade of being accommodating and cooperative and pleasant, but what it really does is it masks the fact that their strategy is to ensure that any sort of dissident voices, or people off script, are relegated to places where they can't really be heard.

AMY GOODMAN: It's very hard to figure out in these situations. You know, you have a sidewalk, which is owned by the private venue, and where the public can use the public sidewalk, they're showing you the cracks, the crevices in the sidewalk, and they're saying that's theirs, this is yours.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right, well, I mean, I found that very odd, too. At first, we were told that we could stand in a certain place that was on one side of one of the cracks that appeared in the sidewalk, and I was kind of amazed that the Denver police knew with such precision, based on the cracks in the sidewalk, where private and public property were demarcated. But when it turned out that where we were told to stand originally still enabled us to accost the people who were exiting the cars and try to interview them, suddenly the cracks in the sidewalk shifted to a place further away, and then suddenly that became the public-private line, and then we were told to stand there.

The response I'm getting for this piece is remarkable.  Looks like I'll have to budget a few more hours for this project than I had originally planned.

Ah well.

Welcome to ET, Paul Krugman

Thank You!

Welcome to ET, Paul Krugman