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He Signed It on the Dotted Line
January 10th, 2012
America changed as the new year stumbled across the threshold, but the big shift didn’t get much press, which is easy to understand. Can there be a deader news day than a New Year’s Eve that falls on a weekend? Besides, alive or dead, habeas corpus has never been a topic to set news editors on fire.
The change came with the whisper of Barack Obama’s pen, as he signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual ratification of military Keynesianism — $662 billion this time — which has been our national policy since World War II bailed out the New Deal.
Sacrificial offerings to the Pentagon aren’t news. But this time, snugly ensconced in the NDAA, came ratification by legal statute of the exposure of U.S. citizens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of counsel and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die. Goodbye, habeas corpus. I wrote about this here before Obama signed the bill, but when a president tears up the Constitution the topic is worth revisiting.
We’re talking about citizens within the borders of the United States, not sitting in a hotel or out driving in some foreign land. In the latter case, as the late Anwar al-Awlaki’s incineration in Yemen bore witness a few months ago, that the well-being or summary demise of a U.S. citizen is contingent upon a secret determination of the president as to whether the aforementioned citizen is waging a war of terror on the United States. If the answer is in the affirmative, the citizen can be killed on the president’s say-so without further ado.
We’re also most emphatically not talking about non-U.S. citizens or possibly even legal residents (though I’d urge green card holders to file for citizenship ASAP). Non-citizens get thrown in the Supermax without a prayer of having a lawyer. Under the terms of the NDAA, a suspect’s seizure by the military is a “requirement” if the suspect is deemed to have been “substantially supporting” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces.”
Loom of the Jackboot: Obama Gives Military Extreme Powers
December 29th, 2011Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President Obama had signed into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in contempt of constitutional protections for its citizens or constitutional restraints upon criminal behavior sanctioned by the state.
At least the DPRK doesn’t trumpet its status as the least-best sanctuary of liberty. American politicians, starting with the president, do little else.
A couple of months ago, came a mile-marker in America’s steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic with Obama’s assertion that he has the right as president to secretly order the assassination, without trial, of a U.S. citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his 2009 betrayal of his pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.
Suffer the Little Children
December 23rd, 2011Newt Gingrich, who recently admitted that his own childhood was comfortable, seems to have a problem with youth — poor youth, that is. Back in 1994, the Gingrich master plan to shrink the welfare rolls was to ship the children of the poor off to orphanages. He told a Harvard audience not so long ago that child labor laws are “truly stupid,” and schools should fire janitors and replace them with poor children.
Later, he modified this to “What if they became assistant janitors and their jobs were to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?”
Gingrich insists that his tots-to-janitors plan answers his latest national crisis: Poor kids have no habit of work “unless it’s illegal.” Thus, the former speaker of the house updates Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, who said, “Give me the child until he is seven. Afterward anyone can have him.” Let the infant hand receive the lifelong impress of the janitor’s mop.
The rationales of those attacking child labor laws haven’t changed much down the decades. A glance at “The Town Labourer, 1760-1832: the New Civilization” by J.L. and Barbara Hammond about the histories of the town and country laborers in Britain, provides vivid samples from the early phases of the industrial era.
Barack Obama Plays the Teddy Roosevelt Card a Little Late
December 11th, 2011When in doubt, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It’s article one in every Democratic president’s playbook. Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909. He was manly; he ranched in North Dakota and explored the Amazon. He was a rabid imperialist, charging up San Juan Hill and sending the Great White Fleet round the world. And he loved the wilderness — so long as it was suitably cleansed of Indians. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians,” he wrote in “The Winning of the West,” “but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
When necessary, he could play the populist rabble-rouser’s card, flaying the corporations, railing against “the malefactors of great wealth.” But on Roosevelt’s watch modern corporate America came of age.
Lyndon B. Johnson loved Roosevelt for his “toughness.” Draft-dodging Bill Clinton invoked Roosevelt as his ideal. And now Obama has wheeled out Roosevelt as his role model in denouncing those destroying the supposed guarantee of the American Way — every citizen gets a fair shake at making it into the safe harbor of “the middle class.” Last month, Obama did his own reprise on the Great White Fleet, opening a new U.S. marine base in Australia and flexing his muscles at China.
Then on Tuesday, in Osawatomie, Kan. — where Roosevelt attempted a political comeback in 1910 — Obama told a crowd of 1,200: “At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement.”
Thrown Out of Their Camps, Can the Occupiers Return Stronger?
November 26th, 2011From Manhattan, to Nashville, to St. Louis, to Portland, Ore., to Oakland, Calif., the police this week moved in to clear out the Occupy Wall Street protesters from the various downtown plazas or squares where they’d established their peaceable camps. Mayor of Oakland, Jean Quan, had earlier acknowledged a conference call between 18 mayors across the U.S. discussing strategy, and the mode elected was clear enough. Get them out, by any means necessary.
These marching orders were taken most seriously in the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, at Sproul Plaza, entryway into the University of California at Berkeley. Jack Weinberg’s arrest for soliciting money for the civil rights movement prompted FSMs birth. He was put into a police car, but a spontaneous sit-down trapped it. Eventually, the roof of the vehicle was used as a FSM platform.
A week ago, hundreds of students came out to Sproul Plaza to protest proposed fee hikes of 81 percent that would bring UC tuition from $13,000 to over $22,000. The students’ argument was simple: the banks caused the financial crisis, the financial crisis caused the budget crisis and therefore the banks, not the students, should pay for it. The students drew inspiration from the Occupy Movement and set up their own small encampment on the lawn outside Sproul Hall.
An eyewitness, Michael Levien, described what happened at around 9.30 p.m. this past Monday night: “A phalanx of police in riot gear turned the corner of Sproul Hall and rapidly charged, thrusting their batons with violent force into the crowd. Chanting ‘non-violent protest’ and ‘stop beating students,’ student after student took fierce baton thrusts to their chests and limbs.
“Then the police started swinging, brutally beating people’s chests, arms, knees and backs. They were swinging to hurt. With the crowd behind and the police in front there was no way for people to leave, even if they wanted to. A few people tried to escape in the narrow gap between the students and police. They were savagely beaten. Throughout what can only be described as a terrifying physical attack that has left many with serious injuries, the students stayed entirely non-violent.”
He’s No Bill Clinton!
November 17th, 2011As he prepares to follow Gov. Rick Perry into the oubliette of history, Herman Cain can at least console himself that as an alleged harasser of women, his was certainly a classier act than that of a man who not only got elected president in 1992, but was triumphantly re-elected in 1996 by 47.5 million Americans armed with the knowledge that if you left your wife at the table next to Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas in Macdonald’s, by the time you got back from ordering another round of fries, Bill would be ensconced in your seat, his hand already hovering above your wife’s thigh.
Sharon Bialek, one of the women accusing Cain of seeking to take advantage of her when he was head of the National Restaurant Association in 1997, says that her apprehensions were aroused when in his car, having offered to drive her home, Cain told her he’d called Washington’s Capital Hilton and upgraded her accommodations to a luxury suite. It was only after this material demonstration of his high regard that Cain put his hand up her skirt and then sought to guide her head towards his lower regions. Bialek says the minute she said, “No,” Cain abandoned his advances and drove her home.
America’s Crisis — Has Anyone Got the Slightest Idea What to Do?
November 4th, 2011Just over a year from now, Americans will be deciding whether to re-elect President Barack Obama or … probably Mitt Romney. In the latter case, this is to assume that Mitt, a Mormon and a family man, doesn’t, like one of his rivals for the Republican nomination — Herman Cain — get caught up in the dreadful minefield known as “charges of sexual harassment.” Study recent photographs of the broken Frenchman named Dominique Strauss-Kahn if you want to be reminded of what such charges can do to a candidate for high office.
Do any of the present candidates, Obama included, offer an answer to America’s dreadful situation — a crisis caused by 40 years of neo-liberal onslaught? They do not because there is no answer available within the terms and boundaries of the present system.
The middle class has — at least two-thirds of it — crashed into penury. Americans’ store of value and savings — the house — is worthless; social safety nets have eroded; students emerge from higher education crushed by debt. Thirty million Americans are without work or are working part-time. Nearly 6 million manufacturing jobs in the United States have disappeared since 2000, and more than 40,000 factories have closed. African-Americans have endured the greatest loss in collective assets in their history. Hispanics have seen their net worth drop by two-thirds. Millions of whites have been pitchforked into poverty and desperation.
This is the mulch that has created the Occupy Wall Street movement. Its strength lies in the simplicity and truth of its basic message: The few are rich; the many are poor. In terms of its pretensions, the capitalist system has failed.
Will Tilikum, the ‘Killer Whale’ Gets His Day in Court?
October 30th, 2011Remember Tilikum? Back in 2010, I likened this proud mammal — 6 tons and 22 feet long and the largest orca whale in captivity — to Spartacus. Tilikum was kidnapped by whale-slavers off Iceland at the age of two in 1983. Deliberately starved as part of his “training” in a Sealand tank in Victoria, Canada, Tilikum has spent the past 19 years in SeaWorld, Orlando Fla. The whale has been involved in three lethal onslaughts on his captors, the most recent being an attack on Dawn Brancheau, a trainer he dragged into his tank and drowned in February of 2010.
Why was Tilikum spared? Big whale, big money. There’s a lot riding on the slave orcas toiling away, giving as many as eight performances per a day, 365 days a year. They are the star attractions in each of the Shamu stadiums. Tilikum’s asset value is enhanced by his duties as a sperm donor. He’s a breeding “stud” often kept in solitary, away from the other orcas. He has fathered 13 orcas.
The Occupy Wall Street movement should hoist placards in support of Tilikum and his fellow orca slaves.
SeaWorld got its start in the mid-1960s. After various ups and downs, in the late 1980s, the three SeaWorlds — San Diego Orlando and San Antonio — passed into the hands of the vast brewing conglomerate Anheuser-Busch. The company then pumped millions into upgrades, finally selling the theme parks to the Blackstone Group — a merger and acquisitions group co-founded by the odious Pete Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman, formerly of Lehman and Kuhn-Loeb, for $2.7 billion in 2009.
Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity investment firms, is at the crossroads of crony capitalism, where the political and financial elites engorge and devour. It has been one of the largest investors in leveraged buyout transactions over the last decade, with huge operations in commercial real estate.
‘Peak Oil’ Takes A Deadly Blow
October 23rd, 2011I’ve never believed in “peak oil.” (The notion held with religious conviction by many on the left here, that world production is topping out — and will soon slide, plunging the world into economic chaos.) There’s plenty of oil, with the constraints, as always, being the cost of recovery. Witness the vast new North Dakota oil shale fields. I regard oil “shortages” as contrivances by the oil companies, allied brokers and middlemen to run up the price. I fill my aging fleet of 50s and 60s era Chryslers with a light heart. The 59 Imperial ragtop and the 62 Belevedere wagon get around 18 mpg, which is still way ahead of the SUVs.
Contrary to the lurid predictions of declining U.S. oil production, disastrous dependence on foreign oil and the need for new offshore drilling, not to mention the gloom-sodden predictions of the “peak oil” crowd, the big crisis for the U.S. oil companies can be summed up in a single word that drives an oil executive to panic like a lightning bolt striking a herd of snoozing Longhorns: glut.
Welcome to Our Banana Republic and Its Global Panopticon
October 22nd, 2011The day I became a citizen of these United States, June 17, 2009, in the old Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, I raised my right hand and swore that I “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
To my immediate left in that vast and splendid deco theater was a Moroccan; to my right, a Salvadoran; and around us 956 others from 98 countries, each holding a small specimen of the flag that was about to become our standard. All of us had sworn earlier that day that since our final, successful interviews with immigration officials, we had not become prostitutes or members of the Communist Party.
The sovereignty I was abjuring was the Republic of Ireland, itself not so far from shifting its allegiance from the Irish Constitution to the dictates of European bankers. Since questions about the Bill of Rights were likely to come up in those final interviews, many people in the theater had a pretty clear notion that along with allegiance came certain important protections, such as guarantees of due process and the right to a public trial by jury. There’s no doubt that for many, with vivid memories of summary seizure and arbitrary imprisonment in their biographies, these guarantees had great significance.
But as it turns out, it was all a fraud. The Uzbek down the row from me, who had fled Karimov’s regime, probably had no need to anticipate being boiled alive — a specialite de la maison in Tashkent. But being roasted alive by a Hellfire missile, doomed by the executive order of President Obama, without due process in any court of law, for reasons of state forever secret, could theoretically lie in his future. If presidential death warrants beyond the reach of scrutiny and review by courts or juries are the mark of a banana republic, then we were all waving the flag of just such an entity.
by LeAnn Michelle
"Um.. come to ohio please!! "