most cops or security guards will do is to tell you to move on, or harass you. my dad lived out of his car in LA for a while, and he said that you need to pick the areas in which you stay carefully - camping in the parking spot of Ralphs in Encino? Not a good idea, too many rich people around, means the cops are diligent.
Camping out in Walmart or in the back of strip mall carparks - not such a big deal.
WORD OF WARNING - you are to an extent at the mercy of whichever asshole in a uniform shows up - DO NOT HAVE DRUGS IN YOUR POSESSION. THis can make a "lets roust this johnny-live-frugal out of the neighbourhood" to "cuff him and book him".
My advice if travelling cross country - great to have a sleeper, but also buy a propane stove, some good camping gear, some fold up camp chairs and half a pound of sticky and make the most of the incredible national and state parks. There are many, and they are cheap.
try camping in Joshua Tree with a ziplock of peyote buttons and a gallon bottle of cactus juice. I lost my fucking mind there in the desert sand, and then found it two days later, in better condition than when I left it.
>So again, you just listed a big list of things which don't actually require a covert surveillance program to implement because the whole point of suppressing people is to be rather overt about doing it.
No, he just mentioned things that could be currently done. However, only on a small scale. To truly disrupt anyone's life like that, and to do that for thousands or millions of suspects or dissidents or what have you, you would need an equal amount of auditors, cops, and so forth.
Now, if you were to automate that schema, you would have yourself a system capable of much more. And by doing it illegally to the extant that even elected representatives are not allowed to have oversight, you could achieve a very great deal.
>was the fact the government was willing to murder dissidents. Has the US government killed a bunch of your neighbors? Disappeared them?
Two arguments.
1) The signs are that we are eroding the legal safeguards that at least made it very difficult and very risky to do this. Now, however, dissidents (call them traitors if you will, that is your opinion) can be whisked to secure holding facilities the world over and subjected to torture, and it is technically legal. US citizens can be assassinated legallly. And now we hear that we have been watched for decades, illegally. Clapper commits perjury, but walks free. Torturers are given clemency, but Snowden is wanted for esponiage. All of this tells me that currently, our freedom is a facade, and soon even that will be able to be dispensed with.
2) You could subscribe to the view that we don't need to be murdered or dissapeared, just convinced that keeping our mouths shut and our eyes on the TV are the safest option. Pepperspraying OWS protesters, militarising the police - I can see why political engagement is dropping, and I'm sure you know who benefits from that. Hint: not us.
>our vote actually has meaning; our votes actually change the elected officials, etc. We still can run a socialist candidate (c.f. Kshama Sawant 2013 in Seattle) and they aren't shut down via police action or other hardcore discrimination.
See, my theory, call me a tinfoil hatter if you will, is that we are on the brink of losing our votes. 1) Collect extensive data on any and all citizens. Any especially politically active citizens will receive extra scrutiny. Ones that are further up in local, state and federal politics will receive even more. This information will be used secretly to ensure that, besides a few outliers who are either allowed to be subversive for the sake of maintaining a smokescreen, all politicians can be controlled. Russell Tice, a prominent NSA whistleblower has alluded to exactly this process occurring under the NSA of today, as it did under J Edgar. He ominously refers to a young man who now resides in a nice white house as one of these who received extra attention. (To me, that explains a whole great deal. And think about it - one of my google searches released to the press would destroy any political career I had, and would be quite enough to turn me into someones puppet, or force me out of politics all together.)
2) With the political market cornered, to an extent, step two begins. Militarise the police. Use infiltration and subversion to delegitimise, split and turn public opinion against activists, whilst also using techniques to track and monitor the most influential ones. Again, there is evidence that the NYPD and other departments have undertaken actions like this. There is a wealth of technology to aid them - tracing FB profiles, using false cell towers, facial recognition tech combined with surveillance cameras, etc. This will have a chilling effect, as mentioned above - acitivists movements are accused of vandalism, of violence, suspect motives, etc, and are also brutally put down. Public sympathy fades, and the support for and involvement in protesting and other forms of activism begin to wither.
Congratulations, you have the makings of a great authoritarian state!
Note that nothing I referred to above is beyond the realms of possibility - in fact, please point to anything I said and I will try to dig up some solid evidence for it.
Quite simply, we are going past the point of no return. It will become progressively more difficult to have an impact on the political apparatus. At some point, it will come down to one thing: a fight.a very bloody fight. it happens every few centuries when an existing political and social order becomes stagnant, and the citizenry are pushed out of fear, hunger or anger to act. When we the people have nothing to lose, that is when things will change. It may not happen tomorrow, or next year, or next decade, maybe not even this century, but it will happen.
How much time will the gentlemen convicted of OVER A TRILLION DOLLARS OF LIBOR MANIPULATION get? Nothing - the only people really suffering there were mortgagees and small to mid size banks.
The banks involved will pay maybe a billion dollars in fines, borne of course by both shareholders (including your 401K) and customers. Meanwhile, the banks profited far more than that, and the individuals involved simply got moved to another office.
I met one of the VPs for Lehman Bros, responsible in all but law for what happened in 2008. He has a very nice job working for a major Asia Pacific bank, and earns a hell of a lot more than you or I ever will.
but it's not a quest for perfect fairness - rather an attempt to maximise benefits. $300B in a vault, whilst millions starve is pretty obviously unfair, and actually detrimental to society overall. generally, when inequality grows, so does societal instability and discord.
At some point, we as a society have to argue with the American Ideology of "free markets for ever, for everyone, for everything."
It simply does not bode well for our species in terms of morality, survival or many other metrics to have people dying of thirst while another man washes his collection of Maybachs.
Some inequality is inevitable. Too much inequality is a disaster.
>What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to help with it.
You realise that, especially where I live, one can make tax deductible donations to a wide variety of organisations? I give away thousands and get to write off much of the tax. In fact, I give away a few thousand and can technically qualify for a different tax bracket, I believe.
>We would have charities all over the place competing for this money, competition would produce far better results than the abysmal record of the state/federal social services.
No, you would have charities spending this money on advertising and gimmicks to get their share of your dollar. Some charities today spend large proportions of their budgets advertising and engaging in lawsuits (e.g. Susan B Komen)
What the government does is use it's uniquely large scale to help people. Education, healthcare, housing, welfare - for many countries in the world, having the government provide these services results in an relatively efficient system. I for one would rather pay the Medicare Levy in Australia than pay for private healthcare in the US - last time I was living there, the US system left me about $1500 worse off, and that was a year without any medical mishaps.
As a two time Obama voter and lifetime Democrat, I wish I could agree. However, I just don't share the optimism.
There have been many opportunities for him to break through that bubble - it's not like there has complete silence on the issue. And what kind of President oversees constitutional breaches of this magnitude and then manages to overlook the entire issue? It's too big, too serious and too illegal for him to be some sort of innocent participant.
The relentless pursuit of whistleblowers, his unwillingness to address the NSA/4th amendment/etc debate on its merits, lack of movement on key policy fronts (anti-drug policy, DHS, serious financial system reform) - all of it indicates to me that while he is not a Muslim Communist Terrorist Baby Killer, he also does not espouse any of the left of center beliefs he held as a younger politician, and for someone who voted him in to see symbolic leadership and practical progress on all these issues, he has been a huge disappointment.
I personally will be campaigning heavily for independent candidates at most levels of government in the future. I will certainly never vote Democrat again. For someone who campaigns, votes, and participates in all areas of civic life, these last few years have left me very disillusioned.