10 Signs That The Highways Of America Are Being Transformed Into A High Tech Prison Grid

10 Signs That The Highways Of America Are Being Transformed Into A High Tech Prison Grid

Michael Snyder
The American Dream
Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Once upon a time, the open highways of America were one of our greatest symbols of liberty and freedom.  Anyone could hop in a car and set off for a new adventure at any time and even our music encouraged us to "get our kicks on route 66″.  But today everything has changed.  Now the highways of America are being steadily transformed into a high tech prison grid.

All over the country, thousands upon thousands of surveillance cameras watch our highways and automated license plate readers are actually being used to track vehicle movements in some of our largest cities.  Many state and local governments have come to view our highways as money machines and our control freak politicians have established a vast network of toll booths, red light cameras and speed traps to keep cash endlessly pouring in.  If all of that wasn't enough, TSA "VIPR teams" are now hitting the interstates and conducting thousands of "unannounced security screenings" each year.  Driving on the highways of America used to be a great joy, but now "Big Brother" is rapidly sucking all of the fun out of it.  Eventually, it may get to the point where Americans simply dread having to go out on the highway.

The following are 10 signs that the highways of America are being transformed into a high tech prison grid….

#1 Surveillance Cameras

All over the United States, a vast network of surveillance cameras is carefully watching our highways.  The following is an excerpt from a recent article in the Baltimore Sun about this phenomenon….

The room is large and well lit, and it buzzes with activity even though its occupants remain seated.

The video screen at the front of the room is as wide as an IMAX, though not quite as tall. It consists of 64 smaller screens – 16 columns of four apiece – that monitor every inch of interstate between Great Wolf Lodge and the Virginia Beach Oceanfront. There is an emphasis on tunnels and bridges, and one corner screen is tuned in to a 24-hour weather report.

If you are driving on an highway in Hampton Roads, VDOT is watching you.

#2 Automated License Plate Readers

In a previous article, I detailed how automated license plate readers are being used to track the movements of every single vehicle that enters Washington D.C.

A recent Washington Post article explained that most people do not even know that they are there….

More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.

With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.

Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.

A lot of police cruisers are being outfitted with this technology around the nation as well.

So if you see a police car pull up behind you, there is a very good chance that a computer has already read your license plate and is giving the officer all of your information.

#3 Ridiculous Regulations

Some of the new "auto safety laws" going in around the nation are absolutely absurd.

For example, do you buckle up your pet when you go for a ride?  Well, in New Jersey you can now be fined up to $1000 for not having your pet properly restrained while you are out driving.

#4 Outrageous Fines

In many areas of the country, unpaid traffic tickets can rapidly become a major financial burden.

For example, the new tolls on the 520 floating bridge in Seattle are absolutely killing some commuters…..

Registered vehicle owners who do not pay their toll within 80 days or more will be mailed a $40 civil penalty for each unpaid toll transaction in addition to a $5 reprocessing fee.

WSDOT confirmed some tolls plus penalty fees have added up to more than $1,000.

#5 Oppressive Toll Roads

Toll roads have become one of the favorite "revenue raising tools" for our politicians.

At this point the tolls on some roads have become so incredibly oppressive that many people simply cannot afford to drive on them anymore.

And for some reason the toll increases are coming especially fast and furious this year.

A recent USA Today article summarized some of the oppressive toll increases that we are seeing all over the nation….

•California and Washington authorized high-occcupancy toll (HOT) lanes, where tolls rise or fall depending on traffic flow. Texas enacted laws authorizing private toll roads and allowing regional authorities to collect tolls. Indiana removed a provision requiring legislative approval for toll roads.

•Some Maryland tolls will double this year as the state seeks money to rehabilitate aging roads, bridges and tunnels.

The use of tolls on interstate highways also is spreading:

•Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, just won approval from the Federal Highway Administration to add tolls on Interstate 95 in his state. The state estimates that tolls on the heavily traveled corridor could generate $250 million over the first five years for expanding, improving and maintaining the highway.

•New York and New Jersey recently announced that E-ZPass commuters will pay $1.50 more and cash customers $2 more to cross bridges and tunnels between the two states.

•Georgia just created toll lanes on Interstate 85 in suburban Atlanta.

The toll hikes are more than chump change: Cash tolls on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge jumped to $4 from $2.50, and to $12 from $8 on all the New York-New Jersey Hudson River crossings.

Toll roads are one of my pet peeves.  Any time I see a toll booth it immediately puts me in a bad mood.

#6 Red Light Cameras

Red light cameras are another favorite "revenue raising tool" for the control freaks that run things.

Unfortunately, these cameras don't always work right so a lot of innocent people end up getting ticketed.

But politicians love them because they can raise a lot of cash.  The following is from a recent Business Insider article….

According to U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group), nearly 700 U.S. cities and towns installed the cameras, which accounted for more than 90 percent of tickets issued for illegal right turns, or rolling stops.

In one New Jersey town, PIRG found 2,500 tickets were issued at one intersection within the first two months of installing a camera.

#7 Speed Traps

In the old days, speed traps were mostly about making the roads safer.

Today, they are mostly about raising money.

One police chief up in Michigan has even admitted that the nature of his job has fundamentally changed….

"When I first started in this job 30 years ago, police work was never about revenue enhancement, but if you're a chief now, you have to look at whether your department produces revenues."

Speed traps are becoming more common almost everywhere, but some areas of the country are worse than others.

A recent report from the National Motorists Association ranked how likely you are to get a speeding ticket in each of the 50 U.S. states….

After crunching the numbers, the NMA found that Nevada is the state most likely to issue you a traffic ticket, followed by Georgia and Alabama. In 2010 Florida took the top spot and Georgia and Nevada tied for second place.

The state where you're least likely to get ticketed is Wyoming, followed closely by Montana. These two ranked at the bottom in 2010 as well.

#8 Government Spying

It has been revealed that the federal government has been secretly putting GPS tracking devices on thousands of vehicles in order to track the movements of people that they are interested in watching.

Most of the time the people involved have not even been charged with any crimes.

The following is a short excerpt from a recent Wired magazine article about this phenomenon….

The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man's girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car.

Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man.

The young man, who asked to be identified only as Greg, is one among an increasing number of U.S. citizens who are finding themselves tracked with the high-tech devices.

The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with"great frequency," and GPS retailers have told Wired that they've sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

#9 Extraction Devices

If you get pulled over by police, you never know what to expect these days.  Previously, I have written about how law enforcement authorities in some parts of the U.S. are using "extraction devices" to download data out of the cell phones of motorists that they pull over.

The following is how a recent article on CNET News described the capabilities of these "extraction devices"….

The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information.

#10 VIPR Teams

If all of the above was not bad enough, now we have to deal with TSA "VIPR teams" terrorizing us on the highways.

If you regularly travel across the country, there is a good chance that you have already encountered one of their "unannounced security screenings".

The following is from a local news report down in Tennessee about how local authorities are working with VIPR teams to fight "terrorism" on the interstates….

You're probably used to seeing TSA's signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).

"Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate," said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.

Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state.

TSA VIPR teams now conduct approximately 8,000 "unannounced security screenings" at subway stations, bus terminals, seaports and highway rest stops each year.

Are you starting to see what I am talking about?

All of this "security" is becoming extremely oppressive.

We don't need "Big Brother" constantly watching us, tracking us and fining us on our highways.

So do you have any examples of how the highways of America are being transformed into a high tech prison grid to add to the list above?

Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….

Organized Shoplifting Rises As Economy Stays Weak (Miami one of the cities)

Organized Shoplifting Rises As Economy Stays Weak

Bonnie Kavoussi
huffingtonpost.com
June 6, 2012

Shoplifting is on the rise.

Nineteen out of 20 retailers have been victims of organized retail crime over the past year, according to a report released by the National Retail Federation on Tuesday. That is up from 16 out of 20 in 2007. And two-thirds of retailers said they have seen an increase in organized retail crime over the past year.

Organized retail crime involves shoplifting with the intent of selling the goods, according to the report. Thieves usually sell stolen goods on street corners, at flea markets, or at pawn shops; return them for fraudulent refunds; or sell them online through auction sites and other websites.

Organized retail crime is most common in Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Phoenix, and San Francisco, according to the report.

Read more

Raw, vegan diets shrink breast cancer tumors

by Allison Biggar 

(NaturalNews) About one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during their lifetime. For men, it's about one in a thousand. Death rates have been going down since 1990 by about 2% each year; a woman's chance of dying is only about one in thirty-five. While the statistics are encouraging, it is still a life-changing illness, leaving us physically ill and emotionally vulnerable.

Traditional treatments for breast cancer include chemotherapy, radiation, and invasive surgeries such as mastectomies. These harsh treatments can often lead to other diseases or even a recurrence of breast cancer since they address the symptoms of the disease, rather than the cause. However, through diet and lifestyle changes, which address the cause of the cancer, breast cancer patients can prevent and reverse this heart-wrenching disease without resorting to conventional treatments.

Healing breast cancer naturally

When Annie Pierce discovered a lump in her breast, she researched everything she could find on alternative ways of healing breast cancer, knowing she could depend on her body's innate wisdom to heal itself.

Cancer cannot survive in an oxygen-rich, alkaline environment so Annie strived to create these conditions in her body through a combination of juicing, nutrition, and herbs. To battle the toxic build-up that contributed to her cancer, as well as alkalize and oxygenate her body, Annie decided to eat a completely raw, vegan diet. Her daily diet consisted of raw fruits and vegetables, almonds, raisins, water and fresh-squeezed juice. By avoiding toxins in processed foods and carcinogens created by cooking foods, she encouraged the acid/alkaline balance in her body to become more stable.

Using herbs to cleanse her blood and nutritionally dense raw food to alkalize it, she was able to shrink the tumor in a short amount of time without drugs, surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation.

"By the sixth day, I could literally feel the lump getting smaller, and by the fourteenth day, it had completely disappeared," Annie explained. "Now, with the new information that I have just recently discovered about cancer being caused by a vitamin B17 deficiency, I fully understand that it was the raw almonds . . . which played a major part in my cancer cure."

A combination of a raw diet and herbal remedies can shrink tumors and help reverse breast cancer. In the United States today, two and a half million women live as breast cancer survivors. A raw diet and natural remedies can improve the quality of life for breast cancer survivors, and help bring down the number of people who are diagnosed every year.

Having survived and found a cure for her breast cancer, Annie has become a stronger advocate of herbal medicine use and eating a raw vegan diet. "Had I not been educated about cancer and its causes at the time that I discovered that lump in my breast, I may have made the grave mistake of being overcome with fear and running to a medical doctor in a panic to get mutilated in surgery, or 'radiated' to death, and/or poisoned to death with chemotherapy treatments."

From Annie's story, others may learn to adopt an alternative approach to healing.

"Taking full control and responsibility of our own individual health is one of the most revolutionary non-violent actions we, as American People, can make. Especially in a time when the government officials are trying to pigeon-hole us into a Health Care System that railroads us straight into the grasps of the Medical and Pharmaceutical Industries whose monetary greed causes them to embrace death and disease, rather than life and good health," says Annie.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.YourNaturalCancerCures.com
http://www.cancer.gov
http://www.holisticvoice.org/annies-story

Congressman Paul - War Drums for Syria? - The CIA Seeks To Destroy Syria

War Drums for Syria?

by Ron Paul

War drums are beating again in Washington. This time Syria is in the crosshairs after a massacre there last week left more than 100 dead. As might be expected from an administration with an announced policy of "regime change" in Syria, the reaction was to blame only the Syrian government for the tragedy, expel Syrian diplomats from Washington, and announce that the US may attack Syria even without UN approval. Of course, the idea that the administration should follow the Constitution and seek a Declaration of War from Congress is considered even more anachronistic now than under the previous administration.

It may be the case that the Syrian military was responsible for the events last week, but recent bombings and attacks have been carried out by armed rebels with reported al-Qaeda ties. With the stakes so high, it would make sense to wait for a full investigation – unless the truth is less important than stirring up emotions in favor of a US attack.

There is ample reason to be skeptical about US government claims amplified in mainstream media reports. How many times recently have lies and exaggerations been used to push for the use of force overseas? It was not long ago that we were told Gaddafi was planning genocide for the people of Libya, and the only way to stop it was a US attack. Those claims turned out to be false, but by then the US and NATO had already bombed Libya, destroying its infrastructure, killing untold numbers of civilians, and leaving a gang of violent thugs in charge.

Likewise, we were told numerous falsehoods to increase popular support for the 2003 war on Iraq, including salacious stories of trans-Atlantic drones and WMDs. Advocates of war did not understand the complexities of Iraqi society, including its tribal and religious differences. As a result, Iraq today is a chaotic mess, with its ancient Christian population eliminated and the economy set back decades. An unnecessary war brought about by lies and manipulation never ends well.

Earlier still, we were told lies about genocide and massacres in Kosovo to pave the way for President Clinton's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. More than 12 years later, that region is every bit as unstable and dangerous as before the US intervention – and American troops are still there.

The story about the Syrian massacre keeps changing, which should raise suspicions. First, we were told that the killings were caused by government shelling, but then it was discovered that most were killed at close range with handgun fire and knives. No one has explained why government forces would take the time to go house to house binding the hands of the victims before shooting them, and then retreat to allow the rebels in to record the gruesome details. No one wants to ask or answer the disturbing questions, but it would be wise to ask ourselves who benefits from these stories.

We have seen media reports over the past several weeks that the Obama administration is providing direct "non-lethal" assistance to the rebels in Syria while facilitating the transfer of weapons from other Gulf States. This semi-covert assistance to rebels we don't know much about threatens to become overt intervention. Last week Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said about Syria, "I think the military option should be considered." And here all along I thought it was up to Congress to decide when we go to war, not the generals.

We are on a fast track to war against Syria. It is time to put on the brakes.

http://lewrockwell.com/paul/paul808.html

Record Number Of US Households On Foodstamps

Record Number Of US Households On Foodstamps

Posted By admin On June 5, 2012 @ 2:49 am In Money Watch |

Zero Hedge ^[1]
June 5, 2012

Last month, when the USDA released the latest foodstamps numbers for the month of February, there was some hope that following a third month of declines, we may just have seen the peak of US foodstamp usage and going forward we would only see the number decline. Sadly, the latest numbers refutes this: in March a total of 46,405,204 persons ^[2]were at or below poverty level and thus eligible for foodstamps ^[3], a 79K increase in the month. Yet while many individuals have learned to game the system, and this numbers at the peak may fluctuate, when it comes to the far more comprehensive and difficult to fudge "households on foodstamps" number, there was no confusion: at 22,257,647, ^[2] the number of US households receiving the "SNAP treatment" rose to an all time high, even as the benefit per household dropped to the second lowest ever. At least all these impoverished believers in hope and change have FaceBook IPO profits to look forward to. Oh wait.

 ^[4]