"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
Call it what you will - taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures, foreclosures, etc. - but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is theft.
We're operating in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where instead of Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves stealing from the rich to feed the poor, you've got the government and its merry band of corporate thieves stealing from the poor to fatten the wallets of the rich. In this way, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. All the while, the American Dream of peace, prosperity, and liberty has turned into a nightmare of endless wars, debilitating debt, and outright tyranny.
What Americans don't seem to comprehend is that if the government can arbitrarily take away your property, without your having much say about it, you have no true rights. You're nothing more than a serf or a slave.
In this way, the police state with all of its trappings - from surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT team raids, truancy and zero tolerance policies, asset forfeiture laws, privatized prisons and red light cameras to Sting Ray guns, fusion centers, drones, black boxes, hollow-point bullets, detention centers, speed traps and abundance of laws criminalizing otherwise legitimate conduct - is little more than a front for a high-dollar covert operation aimed at laundering as much money as possible through government agencies and into the bank accounts of corporations.
The rationalizations for the American police state are many. There's the so-called threat of terrorism, the ongoing Drug War, the influx of illegal immigrants, the threat of civil unrest in the face of economic collapse, etc. However, these rationalizations are merely excuses for the growth of a government behemoth, one which works hand in hand with corporations to profit from a society kept under lockdown and in fear at all times.
Comment: One of Zionism's most vocal and informed critics and one of only a few historians willing and able to present the truth about Israel, Ilan Pappe says it as it is.
See this recent interview with Mr. Pappe on BBC's HARDtalk for what he's up against when trying to clear up many of the West's twists of truth in the Israel-Palestine conflict:
VIDEO: HARDtalk speaks to anti-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe
And read Mr. Pappe's seminal work on the subject for a detailed account of when, how, and why Israel began to eradicate the Palestinian population: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine