The state is deeply embedded into all economic activity already. Pick a type of business at random and go see what permissions you need to seem before you can start, and what rules you must follow while operating.
Yes, but nowhere near the level of Soviet style communism.
Nearly all education is collectivized, as is nearly all medicine now. Your insurance may not be under Obamacare yet, but every doctor and clinic you go to has warped their practice and administration to comply with Obamacare and Medicare mandates.
Good. Education was one thing the soviets were good at, and the problem with Obamacare is that it's a half-assed compromise cluster fuck. Just go full single-payer, and join the rest of the civilized world in making people not have to consciously decide if they can afford to go see a doctor or not.
The NSA knows everwhere you go and everyone you talk to. If they notice you, they can expand that to knowing what you talk about, secretly. They have dirt on everyone worth the effort. Parallel construction is an abomination against justice. Your local police are equipped and trained like soldiers.
These are problems, but have nothing to do with communist influence, per se. When the NSA can disappear you, when being sent to count trees in an Alaskan gulag is a common threat with teeth, then maybe.
People are routinely pushed out of work, even out of companies they founded, and out of polite society for saying things opposed to the party line. Someone out there tries to maintain a list, but it is hard to keep up now. Brendan Eich, Tim Hunt, James Watson, Donald Sterling. Martin O'Malley was just forced to supplicate himself publicly for failing to stick to the party script. Reporters are climbing over one another for a chance to demonize Trump for daring to utter hatefacts in public.
You know, freedom of the press, and freedom of association, aren't exactly Communist bulwarks. Again, of somebody utters 'hatefacts' and winds up doing 20 years in a labour camp of strict regime, we're communist. If the people, having heard somebody exercise their right of free speech, thanks to the free press, then decides to exercise their own right of free speech in criticizing the original speaker, however, that's kind the opposite of communism.