Democracy (in)action.

Have you seen the video of a student getting violently tasered as he asks John Kerry too many questions about his Skull and Bones bother, George Bush?! See a sharper video and analysis at Ann's People's Geography.

Addendum
Dissident News, has posted Carolyn Baker's article entitled The Police State is Here and Now. In her article, she provides a critical review of Naomi Wolf's Guardian article "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps." Summarized by Baker, they are:

1. Invoking an external and internal threat
2. Establishing secret prisons
3. Developing a paramilitary force
4. Surveiling ordinary citizens
5. Infiltrating citizens' groups
6. Arbitrarily detaining and releasing citizens
7. Targeting key individuals
8. Restricting the press
9. Casting criticism as "espionage" and dissent as "treason"
10. Subverting the rule of law

Barker's point of departure from Wolf, however is in that she considers fascism not a potential but an actuality in present America.

The author of US History Uncensored is unforgiving of the role the corporations have played in the past and play today in installing fascist rule:

American history is replete with a preference on the part of corporations and the politicians they own for an economic and political system on the far right end of the spectrum. In fact, resistance to fascism in the United States has been an arduous and daunting struggle for those who have been able to understand and oppose the appeal that fascism has to the corporatocracy, and in fact, take seriously Mussolini's fundamental definition of fascism: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

She also draws on the analogy of the two political parties in America as mobster families: "They function like players in a crap game that feign opposition to each other, but when the chips are down, they will always unite to serve their common interests." (Without Baker's explicit mentioning, Kerry's inaction pops to mind.)

Baker considers Andrew Mayer's case of police brutality as a myth of the Shock Doctrine, a fascist strategy intended to shock the subversive individual into submission.