Back in June I wrote the post ‘Preserving the Status Quo via the State’s Security & Surveillance Apparatus‘ and said:

You better believe that the financial elite who run this country do have OWS and any other social movement under 24/7 surveillance. Anything that strives to change the status quo of neoliberal capitalism will be undermined and crushed, whether through covert actions or co-optive schemes. Social justice, the environment, and the very habitability of planet earth are not on the agenda of the 1%’ers.

Now we have official confirmation that this indeed was and is the case. Surprise, surprise:

Newly obtained documents confirm that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was monitoring peaceful protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement before the first OWS demonstrations even began…

…The list of documents, says Verheyden-Hilliard, “is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement.”

“These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity,” she writes. “These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.

What more proof do you need that we live under a corporatocracy? Since solving dire problems like climate change would require a complete dismantling of the current capitalist system, i.e. an economic system driven by the profit motive is incompatible with ecological sustainability, we can see why the financial and corporate elite would be hostile to a grass-roots movement which seeks social and environmental justice. Such issues don’t compute with the bottom line of corporations or our war-based economy. Interestingly, the only real attention that was given to OWS by those in power was on how their discontent could be co-opted by the status quo:

As I [Glenn Greenwald] noted several weeks ago, White House-aligned groups such as the Center for American Progress have made explicitly clear that they are going to try to convert OWS into a vote-producing arm for the Obama 2012 campaign, and that’s what “Occupy Congress” is designed to achieve.

Of course the Tea Party was never really a threat to Corporate America because it’s what is termed an astroturf group, as was first reported a few years ago by Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham:

Do you think these free-market idealogues of capitalism are going to clean up the mess left in the wake of climate chaos? Hell no. The unwashed masses are on their own. As long as the elite have the money to insulate themselves from the ravages of our fossil fuel-dependent economy, they will have no real concern for the catastrophes that lie ahead. A case in point is the recent aftermath of the Hurricane Sandy Frankenstorm:

Billionaire David Koch’s prime political organization, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), having failed in its $125 million quest to oust President Barack Obama, is now aiming at a slightly less sophisticated political target: victims of Hurricane Sandy. […]

Earlier this week, AFP, which is chaired by Koch and believed to be financed by several other plutocrats from the New York City region, released a letter warning members of Congress not to vote for the proposed federal aid package for victims of the storm that swept New Jersey, New York City and much of the surrounding area in October. An announcement on the group’s website says that the vote next week for the Sandy aid package will be a “key vote” — meaning senators who support sending money for reconstruction could face an avalanche of attack ads in their next election. Already, opposition to the bill is growing, although it passed one procedural hurdle last [Friday] night. […]

Koch’s top deputy in New Jersey, a surly gentleman named Steve Lonegan, who heads the local AFP state chapter, called the aid package a “disgrace.” “This is not a federal government responsibility,” Lonegan told reporters. “We need to suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves.

‘Change’ will always be an empty campaign slogan when you have a federal government which:

…wastes resources on a multi-trillion dollar Security and Surveillance apparatus to spy on its entire citizenry, in particular OWS protestors, minorities, and government critics/whistleblowers.

…pumps more than half of every tax dollar into the military industrial complex and its war-profiteering cronies who perpetuate our war economy.

…is not alarmed that 50 million Americans are dependent on food stamps while U.S. corporations hoard $22 trillion in secret offshore bank accounts.

…thinks that tax revenues can be maintained while its manufacturing base is off-shored to exploit cheap foreign labor pools.

…uses the growth in corporate profits as the only yardstick for societal well-being.

…marginalizes and prevents the participation of third party candidates within our two-party oligopoly.

…believes that the system described above should be bailed out for its criminal excesses from the billfold of a now beaten-down middle class.

New ‘smile guards’ will soon become mandatory in the work environment of the corporate state:

Will turn-key totalitarianism go all the way?…