On re-establishing our Constitution rights…

There must be a sense of urgency if we are to avoid the excesses of the GWB administration in the Obama administration or in administrations yet to come.  Once an office-holder gets power, it is very difficult to reclaim the power and give it back to its rightful owners (“We, the People”).  

It is also clear that Obama will abandon his principles in the name of “getting SOMETHING done.”  This has held true for every controversial issue that has come before us in the last couple of years (and before that when he voted “present” in the IL State Senate).

The only way we can get our rights re-established within the current governmental structure is to enact campaign finance reform in order to shift the power back to the people and seize it from fat-cat Big Business and their special interest groups and lobbyists.  Until we do this, Congress and the Executive Branch will allow them to “pay to play” and will not make decisions that benefit the people.

Campaign Finance Reform is the first and most critical step.

Once that is in place, a healthcare bill can be passed that benefits the people and not the insurance companies, healthcare providers and Big Pharma.

Decisions about how to solve the economy will move back from “welfare for Big Businesses” and the proper restraints and regulations that were eroded since the Reagan years (and even before that) will be re-established.

And, of course, if we re-establish the natural balance between the three branches that the authors of the Constitution intended (and which have worked reasonably well in the past), it stands to reason that our rights and protections will be re-established as well.  All the executive abuses of the past, from torture, rendition and the writ of habeas corpus to Executive Orders and all the provisions in the last few FISA amendments and the Patriot Act will cease to exist in their present form. 

We must acknowledge that “We, the People” do not have to relinquish our constitutional rights and protections in order to be safer.

 

Fear causes us to make bad decisions out of desperation in order to “feel better” or less fearful of our enemies and the potential threats it presents to our country and its citizens.  And what it really accomplishes is to change what is good about our society and form of government based on our fear and desire for safety.  We only have to look in our past to see how we slaughtered Indians by the millions and imprisoned Japanese American citizens in our own concentration camps because we didn’t trust people who didn’t look like us.

And we must pass a rule that amendments that are not germane to a bill cannot be included in any bill.

We also must demand the SCOTUS rule on whether or not an Executive Order is constitutional and binding, particularly if it includes provisions that are unconstitutional (abolishing the writ of habeas corpus, etc.).

And we must clearly establish the Right to Privacy, which will resolve such issues as abortion and homosexual marriage (and, for all practical purposes, many of the wedge issues that have plagues us since 1980).  I believe the Right to Privacy does exist.  If you look at the Bill of Rights, it is quite apparent that our Constitutional framers believed in the “man’s castle” theory which clearly establishes our inherent Right of Privacy.

Anyway, I think we must approach this issue in two ways:

First, get back control over our elected officials, who have reason to fear Big Business and Special Interests because of the enormous cost of running a successful re-election campaign, through passing campaign finance reform.

Second, we must try to educate “We, the People” and make them realize how dangerous it is to set such precedents that shift too much power to either of the three branches and shift power from the People to the government.  We must re-establish the inherent controls and balance between the three branches of government and the unconstitutional shift of far too much government power to the Executive Branch.  Even if we like and trust (or think we do), the guy in office now, we must remember that these precedents, once set, will empower and candidate that occupies these governmental position in the future. 

Unchecked power and unaccountable authority just don’t work, whether we are speaking of individuals or a political party.  We have seen that throughout the ages, and especially since 1980, when the political parties and special interests influenced the general public in becoming more and more polarized.  And that is the real danger. 

A democracy must be “people-oriented” and “people controlled “  Any act or action that contributes to American society by solving societal problems or preventing abuse by a government branch that refuses to acknowledge their accountability to the law of the land and to We, the People, must be effective and results-oriented in order to succeed and achieve the true goals of a democracy.  Every time we allow wedge issues to consume public discourse and further polarize Americans or sit back and watch our inherent constitutional rights and protections “flushed down the toilet” — regardless of any fear that permeates political discourse or public discourse — we move further and further way from the true freedoms that only a democracy can provide.

Abandoning our democratic values in exchange for the delusion that we are safer is the greatest “win” the terrorists could have hoped for…. and we gave this to them out of fear.

The GWB administration was masterful when it came to fear-mongering.  They proved how instilling fear in the general population could successfully empower an unhealthy, unchecked Executive Branch who believed themselves to be above the law.  And we also see how the country was bankrupted by the GWB administration to the point where the People are now financing with their own tax dollars poorly run companies with incompetent or criminal executive management; who deserve to be punished, not rewarded with multimillion-dollar executive bonuses BEFORE they have paid the American taxpayers back for their bailout money… These are the same executives that routinely and for a significant period of time made bad management decisions and were even criminally negligent to the point that their actions consist of a criminal breach of their fiduciary responsibilities.  And then we allow them their million-dollar bonuses while we are punished for their crime by having to carry the load of an out-of-control national debt.

Campaign Finance Reform is the first step

Without it, the Constitution will not be restored to its original intent, real healthcare that first protects the best interests of the People and not Big Business, Big Pharma and other Special Interest will never pass, and Big Business, the NRA and Special Interests will continue to have improper, excessive access to our elected officials, which results in the power to secretly write bills that benefit them or their industry.

Gay Marriage and the Constitution

The argument over gay marriage rages on, and attempts to “define” marriage as a union between one man and one woman (i.e., the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA), are still being debated in the public forum because of the recent activities of states sanctioning gay marriage (IA, MA, etc.). 

Let me say clearly:  DOMA is unconstitutional.  Why? Because it discriminates between one citizen and another, conferring unequal rights and privileges to the majority and infringing the rights and privileges of the minority.

One of the social conservative arguments against gay marriage is that we are giving legal recognition to the gay lifestyle.  This is patently untrue.  We are not giving legal recognition to any lifestyle by allowing gays to exercise the constitutional rights they already have, including equal rights and equal protection under the law.  DOMA, however, did recognize and attempt to give special legal recognition to the heterosexual lifestyle.   This is in direct conflict with the Founding Principles of our country even if it is the history, tradition and practices of the American people.

The Founding Principles of our government are clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

“Inalienable” rights are rights that cannot be taken away by man or endowed or conferred by man to any citizen.  Likewise, the right to marry would surely fall under the “Pursuit of Happiness” principle.

http://www.defendmarriage.org/defendmarriage/fma_qa.cfm
Whether Americans like it or not, the Supreme Court in June 2003 placed the issue of marriage in the Constitution. In Lawrence v Texas, the Court ruled that state legislatures cannot treat homosexuality any differently than heterosexuality. The Court stated that “our laws and tradition afford constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, [and] procreation” and “persons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes, just as heterosexual persons do.” Relying on Lawrence, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts thereafter forced that state to legalize same-sex marriage. The mayor of San Francisco and other municipalities now say that state and federal constitutions demand the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses.

The finding in Lawrence is interesting, because, like abortion,  it treats marriage as a privacy right. And then there’s the “Justice is blind” principle.  The Court should not treat any citizen differently from any other citizen, at least, not according to the Constitution.  The Constitution does not specifically support or reject any lifestyle.  DOMA is a statute, and is virtually useless in determining rights, because it is not a part of the Constitution or an Amendment ratified by the states.

http://www.defendmarriage.org/defendmarriage/fma_qa.cfm
Since the courts have construed state and federal constitutions to include a purported “right” to same-sex marriage, it is incumbent upon Congress to ensure that the definition of marriage throughout the United States reflects the will of the people. This can only be done through the established amendment process….

As Justice Scalia noted, Lawrence “dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned.” Accordingly, marriage is no longer a decision that the people of the several states can determine for themselves.

And this is appropriate, because our Founders were smart enough to know that government by public opinion poll would lead to great instability and the oppression of the minority.  Majority rule with protection of minority rights is the model they chose.  The same evangelicals and social conservatives who have been wringing their hands over “judges legislating from the bench” lo these many years now want judges to legislate from the bench and uphold DOMA, which is clearly unconstitutional.  Ah!  The ironies of life!

http://www.defendmarriage.org/defendmarriage/fma_qa.cfm
… There is not nor has there ever been a civil right to same-sex marriage. You cannot take away a right that does not exist.

Although I disagree with that logic, let’s reverse that — the same can be said of heterosexual marriage: a civil right to marry has never been specifically defined, heterosexual or homosexual.  The reality is that our Constitution and Founding Principles do not provide for unequal treatment of a minority in contrast with the majority.  Either it is a right for everyone, or no one. 

Distinguishing between civil unions and marriages is also a non-starter, because it again treats one group differently from another. Additionally, it must be resolved at the Federal level, because it will create a situation where one state confers the right to marry to homosexuals and other states may not recognize the marriage.  Once again, it’s either all or nothing at all.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/dixon_02.htm
Article Four of the Federal Constitution states:

“Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

Clause 1: The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.”

In other words, no State has the right to ignore civil agreements reached in other States….

What this essentially means is that State Defense of Marriage Acts (DOMAs) are unconstitutional, plain and simple….

… it also is unconstitutional by virtue of the Tenth Amendment, which states:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

Because the Constitution does not explicitly give the Federal Government jurisdiction over marriage, the right to regulate marriage is, by default, given solely to the States to decide.  Therefore, Congress had neither right nor power to pass DOMA in the first place….

The solution, some may argue, is to amend the Federal Constitution, which is what George W. Bush endorses.  There is one problem with that:  Article Six reads:

“This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

Boiled down, this means that the Constitution is barred from contradicting itself.  Thus, a Federal Marriage Amendment that would deprive a singled-out populace of any rights runs in clear contradiction to Article Four and Amendment Nine of the Constitution.  Amendment Nine states:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

The Constitution says in Amendment Fourteen:

“Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

What this basically means is that the States do not have a right to pick and choose the people to whom it will grant rights and privileges.  If one group of people is allowed to marry, all groups are allowed to marry. …  Plainly, it is discriminatory, and the Fourteenth Article clearly states that selective granting of privileges is not allowed in the United States.

Some may say, “Gays have the right to marry just as everyone else—a right to marry someone of the opposite gender.”  Similar arguments were made in the days of miscegenation in the 1950’s and 1960’s:  “Blacks have the right to marry just as whites do—the right to marry someone of their own race.”  Such a stance is clearly a form of hypocrisy and oppression, and has no place in the America our forebears envisioned, and contradicts the very basis of the repeal of the miscegenation laws.  Albeit slowly, Americans have striven over the years since Brown vs. the Board of Education to uphold that ruling socially; separate but equal is not equal.

One of the arguments for gay marriage is based on the special tax breaks and privileges enjoyed by legal spouses.  Perhaps the best way to “fix” this would be to remove all the government benefits and tax breaks allowed for only married couples.  Then everyone will be equal again.  This would also address the problem that single people are always treated differently in our tax code, etc.

http://www.defendmarriage.org/defendmarriage/fma_qa.cfm
Whatever the Constitution said (or did not say) about marriage for the past 215 years, whatever the history, traditions and practices of the American people confirm (or do not confirm) about the meaning of marriage, marriage is now in the Constitution. The Founders did not do it. But the courts have. Without a constitutional amendment, the judiciary – and not the people – ultimately will determine what marriage means.

If you, as a judge, consider “the history, tradition and practices of the American people” in your deliberations when reaching a decision, you are not a strict constructionist judge by definition. It is interesting that “strict-constructionist-judge-loving” conservatives all of a sudden want judges to legislate from the bench and rule in favor of DOMA, in effect declaring marriage a right only to be enjoyed by heterosexuals.  The Founders did not specifically define marriage, but they did say that all men were created equal and that the majority could not infringe the rights of the minority. So based on the Constitution, DOMA is out. 

The bottom line is that the Constitution does not assert the right to establish a definition of marriage that distinguishes between the majority and the minority to any entity — be it Congress, the several States or the people — thereby infringing the rights of the minority.  The historic and existing definition of marriage is not diminished or disregarded; it is a social construct, not a legal one.  There is no law preventing religions or social groups from using the definition of marriage that suits them within their own practices, so long as they realize it is not a legal construct that can be imposed on other citizens outside their group.

No citizen can be treated differently from another, and, based on that, the DOMA is unconstitutional.  Homosexuals can and should enjoy the same rights and privileges as heterosexuals.  And it is improper for any state to even allow the voters to hold an election to decide to infringe the rights of the minority.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/dixon_02.htm
The religious argument, however, is moot, thanks to the First Amendment, which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…“  It is thus that our forefathers sought to protect all Americans from the religious zealotry of a few, or even many; only 52% of Americans claimed to be Christian of any denomination at the last Census.  Should the other 48% of the American people be made to honor a conception of the Creator they don’t agree with?  Of course not; this is why we have separation of Church and State.

Our Founding Fathers were well-acquainted with religious tyranny and, consequently, went to great lengths to avoid the possibility of creating a theocracy or a democracy wherein the majority could oppress the minority. Keep in mind, they had been the minority before escaping religious tyranny and coming to America. The spirit of individualism was in the room at the Constitutional Convention. The idea that a democracy must empower individuals and balance majority rule with minority protection, that Federal law must supercede State law without encroaching on its purview, and that, above all, the Rule of Law must prevail against the Rule of Man are all important principles that protect us even today.

But the attitude among social conservatives and evangelicals is that they want to impose their beliefs and their lifestyle on the rest of us. And this is neither acceptable nor constitutional, thank God. Those heterosexuals that don’t have strong feelings regarding gay rights are reluctant to enter the fray of public debate. I am not gay either, but I am concerned about having anyone’s rights infringed, because if it can happen to them, it can happen to me on some other issue.

MLK said it best: “If one of us is not free, then none of us are free.”

This issue may not apply to me directly on this particular issue, but the concept does. Equal rights and equal protection under the law must be precious to all of us. The Constitution is the blueprint for our representative democracy. We cannot stand idly by and watch our rights be taken from us and the original intent of the authors of the Constitution betrayed. By definition in the Declaration and the Constitution, only God has the right to confer or take away or infringe rights. As far as man is concerned, it’s not his job to decide which rights his peers have. Our rights are inalienable, and that includes everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, culture, background, gender and/or sexual preference. You don’t have to approve of someone’s lifestyle to recognize that they have the right to make their own choices.

God chose to give us free will. Knowing this, it has always amused me to watch evangelicals arrogantly work so hard to “undo” what God did by trying to limit the choices others can make, but never themselves….

It’s all about the integrity of the process…

When our founding fathers wrote the Constitution of the United States, they were writing this document from the worldview of immigrants who had fled their home country because of tyranny.  Tyranny came to our founding fathers  in many forms, but most often in the form of lack of religious freedom and the enslavement of the “common” man (not nobility) primarily via indenture (debt bondage) and forced labor. 

Contemporary forms of slavery includes: debt bondage, serfdom, forced labour, child labour and child servitude, trafficking of persons and human organs, sexual slavery, children in armed conflict, sale of children, forced marriage and the sale of wives, migrant work, the exploitation of prostitution, and certain practices under apartheid and colonial regimes. As a legally permitted labour system, traditional slavery has been abolished everywhere, but it has not been completely stamped out. There are still reports of slave markets. Even when abolished, slavery leaves traces. It can persist as a state of mind- among victims and their descendants and among the inheritors of those who practised it –long after it has formally ended. (http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/slavery/rapporteur/index.htm)

Additionally, the ascendacy of individualism left its mark on the authors. 

In political philosophy, the individualist theory of government holds that the state should protect the liberty of individuals to act as they wish as long they do not infringe on the liberties of others. This contrasts with collectivist political theories, where, rather than leaving individuals to pursue their own ends, the state ensures that the individual serves the whole society. The term has also been used to describe “individual initiative” and “freedom of the individual.” This theory is described well by “laissez faire,” which means in French “let [the people] do” [for themselves what they know how to do]. This term is commonly associated with a free market system in economics, where individuals and businesses own and control the majority of factors of production. Government interferences are kept to a minimum.

Individualists are chiefly concerned with protecting individual autonomy against obligations imposed by social institutions (such as the state). Many individualists believe in protecting the liberties of the minority from the wishes of the majority. Thus, individualists oppose democratic systems without constitutional protections existing that do not allow individual liberty to be diminished by the interests of the majority. These concerns encompass both civil and economic liberties. For example, they oppose any concentration of commercial and industrial enterprise in the hands of the state, and the municipality. The principles upon which this opposition is based are mainly twofold: that popularly-elected representatives are not likely to have the qualifications, or the sense of responsibility, required for dealing with the multitudinous enterprises, and the large sums of public money involved in civic administration; and that the “health of the state” depends upon the exertions of individuals for their personal benefit (who, “like cells”, are the containers of the life of the body). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualism)

This is why the authors of the Constitution made sure of two things that: 

1. The system of government they set up could be dynamic (change as needed)  with a peaceful transfer of power and well-defined line of authority and reporting structure, and
2. The rights of all citizens, particularly the minority, could not be infringed by the will of the majority. 

That’s why we have a representative form of government with a well-articulated Bill of Rights. It prevents what we now call “government by polls,” of the Rule of Man in majority “group” form.  In a pure democracy, a vote to determine the will of the people really only reflects the will of the majority — the minority never wins unless they can build a coalition with other minority groups.  If the rights of ALL individuals in a society cannot be protected, the result is a tyrannical rule by the majority based on current public opinion, which lends itself to instability and uncertainty.

The authors of the Constitution knew the difference between the Rule of Law and the Rule of Man.  They understood that a pure democracy was not practical.  The Rule of Man — whether by one man or a group of like-minded men —  is fickle and unstable — there is no consistency or continuity between rulers.  There is usually not a peaceful transfer of power.   Living under the Rule of Law means our founding fathers set up a system with integrity — one that could maintain continuity of government during the transfer of power and consistency regardless of who sat in the White House Oval Office or which party was in power at any particular moment in time.

The best example of how ruling by opinion polls can undermine equal rights and equal protection under the law — in a society supposedly based on the Rule of Law — is California.  I believe that it would have been unthinkable to our Founding Fathers that any state vote could infringe on a minority’s rights, as has the defeat of California’s Prop. 8, which has been held up by the California Supreme Court.

The loss of the sanctity of the writ of habeas corpus (requiring a warrant for arrest, search and/or seizure of persons or property) is the most alarming, because it also involves the loss of due process, meaning that the government (thanks to the Patriot Act) can deem individuals to be enemy non-combatants, arrest them, detain them without arraignment or trial, torture them, and even refuse to give them access to an attorney until they have signed a confession written by the government. Our current president, who campaigned on restoring individual rights that had eroded during the last administration, is now considering the concept of preventive detention, where our government can arrest and detain individuals who have not actually committed an act of terror, but are considered to be potential terrorists.  One of the cornerstones of our system of justice was the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” [by a jury of peers]. 

How can a constitutional scholar and professor not be troubled by the concept of detaining someone BEFORE they commit a crime or even make an attempt to commit a crime?

Oscar Wilde once said “Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.” (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/imitates.html) In the case of this issue, Steven Spielberg’s film, Minority Report, may be closer to our new reality than we think..

When I was growing up, the Soviet Union and Red China were the “boogey-men” who committed these types of human rights atrocities.  America was the country that protested this kind of treatment of individuals.  Now we torture detainees. Now we are the “boogey-man.” I have not doubt that, in years to come, our behavior in reaction to terrorism will be deemed as a shameful time for Americans, much like our treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Are America’s better days behind us?

Paddy Ashdown, in a speech given at the 2009 Guardian Hay festival entitled “The end of western hegemony” basically declared America to be “yesterday’s news” among the superpowers ( http://u.tv/News/The-end-of-western-hegemony/21f93f82-c918-4c1f-86a3-36382f2aa00b), but is this the truth? Ashdown’s obvious bias may lie in his professed faith, Islam:

Nezavisne novine. 29 October 2002. (http://www.oscebih.org/public/default.asp?d=6&article=show&id=177. Retrieved on 2007-11-23.)
”I am from Ireland, where society is divided too. In my school children were separated on Catholics and Protestants, but I said that I am a Muslim, because my father was a catholic, my mother a protestant. That’s not a reason why I was so bad student. My teachers told me that knowledge is gaining through whole life, and man is learning all the time. That changed my life. That’s why, this start of education campaign in BiH is the most important, since I came to BiH”, said Ashdown.”

This multiculturalism is a mask for Islamic domination promoted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR, founded by a Hamas leader), the American Muslim Council (AMC, funded by the Saudis, whose founder supports Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda; http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Defensewatch_100903_Wahhabi,00.html), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA, which funds Hamas), the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF, which funds Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist groups), the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council (which funds both Hamas and Hezbollah), the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS), the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), and World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). etc. in many ways, it is far more serious an attack. The goal is to establish Sharia law throughout the nations of the world, which, in effect, establishes a worldwide Caliphate, as Muslims are instructed to do in the Qur’an.

This is frightening on many levels because many extreme left liberals, blinded by their multiculturalist utopia, are suggesting that we “roll over and play dead” rather than commit ourselves to learning from our mistakes AND our successes, then moving forward cognizant of those lessons. We have reached a point in democratic societies where our attempt to be politically correct is infringing our right to freedom of speech. The recent incident with Geert Wilders being refused admission into the U.K. because they feared it would rile the Muslims is very concerning. And our friend Ashdown was very much a part of that effort to keep him out. Other countries in the U.K. are caving to the Muslims’ demands as well. We must find a balance between being respectful of others’ views and speaking our mind freely, without fear of reprisal from any government. But that is a discussion for another day….

On the other hand, we seem to have forgotten over the last eight years that being a world power does not entitle us to be a world bully. Regardless, our place in the world depends on having a strong, stable economy. And we must deal with a two-headed monster: the national debt and our failing industries that produce tangible goods.

So, what should we have learned?

First, we know that deregulation does not work, or, conversely, regulation does work. Whether financial, environmental, social or other, the times when our nation has been most stable is when we had a solid set of enforceable, manageable rules in place, a clear line of authority and agencies empowered with the authority to act. Over the past few decades, “free marketeers” and “free-traders” have been buying their way into the political scene and using their influence to convince politicians of their ideology. It is a siren’s song that we find very seductive, because we Americans are an independent, free-thinking bunch, and anything that has “free” in it sounds like it must be tailor-made for us. But this is not the case.

As for free markets, the laissez-faire (French for “let [the people] do” [for themselves what they know how to do] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez_faire) theory may work beautifully in a laboratory setting where all factors are easily controlled, but in the real world, it has failed miserably. Why? Because man is foible, and you can’t expect the market (run by greedy, unethical men) to police itself. Every time we tried to deregulate, it ciomes back to bite us in the butt. In the ‘80s, it was the Savings & Loan debacle and Michael Milken’s junk bonds; today it is the investment bankers, corrupt credit rating analysts, junk mortgage bundlers, junk derivatives and Bernie Madoff’s fraudulent Ponzi scheme. Hedge funds and derivatives have turned our stock market into a casino where nobody wins. There is not just one piece of deregulation legislation that acts as the dagger to the heart, but rather a thousand paper cuts that finally caused our economy to bleed to death.

As for free trade, we should have learned by now that there is a happy place between free trade and protectionism called fair trade. We are not yet living in a truly global society. America has been far too generous with our markets, with far too few restrictions, or at least enforceable ones. As a result, we find that foreign goods made cheaply, and often without the consumer protections and quality assurance we need, are nevertheless making their way to a store near you. However, this is not reciprocated in kind with many of our trading partners. This must be changed in a reasonable, rational manner to include enforceable consumer, environmental and labor standards. No more lead in children’s toys and no more poison in pet food. No more of our labor force trying to compete with slave labor and child labor in foreign countries.

But the current financial crisis is not just fixing the mortgage industry and the credit crunch or revising trade agreements, it is deeper than that. The U.S. has moved from a self-sufficient nation that produced tangible goods and services to an economy based on consumer spending, paper wealth and banking products that are parasitic and exploitive in nature. In the IT business, we call the current banking model vaporware, because our investment and commercial banks don’t really exist to provide customers with a needed service anymore, but to create a perception of wealth via derivatives, hedge funds and bundling and reselling paper.

In the ‘90s, with the IT industry in overdrive combating the Y2K problem, we envisioned an information economy, but as is the case with all bubbles, that bubble soon burst, because, in the final analysis, IT work is in large part can be a remote service at which other nations like India, Pakistan, Southeast Asia and Japan can excel and provide greater value due to cheap well-educated and well-trained labor. We have also lost our clothing manufacturing to third-world countries with cheap labor, often slave labor or child labor. We now see even our flagship industry – automobile manufacturing – losing steadily to foreign imports and on the verge of not just bankruptcy, but complete collapse.

Why?

It’s time to set some priorities. First, it is a matter of national security for us to free ourselves of foreign oil. Foreign oil is draining our economy of billions of dollars daily. A politician said during the campaign that we borrow money from China to buy oil from Saudi Arabia. This cannot continue! High-priced oil and petroleum products are the single-most factor that drives up cost of tangible goods. When the items necessary for daily life are more expensive, labor cost goes up, which raises the cost of domestic goods even further. It is a vicious spiral. Big Business and their benefactors, primarily Republicans and conservatives, try to sell us the idea that it’s all union labor’s fault, but logic tells us otherwise. Ask any union members if they would take a lower salary (if it was truly a living wage) if accompanied with corresponding cuts in prices of consumer goods, and you might be surprised to find that they would accept that. Why? Because it’s not how much money you make, it’s what your money’s worth (what you can buy with it)! that counts! And that’s why a weak dollar hits the middle and lower classes far worse than the privileged class.

We must cure our need for immediate gratification and short-term thinking and challenge ourselves to value stability and steady growth over immediate “windfall” or unreasonable profits. We need to wake up and realize that all bubbles burst, and feeding frenzies in the Stock Market generally don’t pan out, certainly not for the companies who are victimized by them. What we need is stable, steady growth, not bursts of profitability with long gaps of decline, which is where we have been since the 1980s and the Reagan Revolution with the supply-side economics and trickle-down theory. The “voodoo economics” of the 1980s that GWB warmed over in the last eight years has not worked for the 21st century thus far. Actually, it didn’t really work in the 1980s either.

How to we fix this?

We all heard in the last campaign that it’s about jobs, jobs, jobs…. Well, guess what! It IS about jobs, Jobs, JOBS! We must create jobs. There are two ways to create jobs:

1. We can borrow more money, increase our national debt, exacerbate inflation and put people to work based on government projects, and/or
2. We can find other ways (i.e., tax breaks and incentives, guaranteed loans) to encourage the private sector to create jobs.

The above is a short-term strategy to stop the bleeding of jobs moving overseas. But we also need a long-term strategy. Every time we increase our national debt, we give away a larger and larger portion of our annual budget to the payment of interest on the national debt: money we might as well be flushing down the toilet. And, normally, I would not support increasing the national debt, but this is a critical moment with a window of opportunity that is quickly closing….

The Green Economy and Energy Independence

The buzz word during the last election was the green economy. Unfortunately, this seems to be the one good idea that has been put on the back burner. It is due, in large part, to special interest groups and undue influence on politicians to maintain the status quo — the influence of Big Oil on our politicians. But the lack of progress and lethargic public support is more likely due to the fear of the unknown — we have lived with an oil-based economy for over a century now. Oil, for us, is much like heroin for a junkie; it may give us the temporary “high”/feeling of security, but the reality is that we are killing our economy with foreign oil. It seems unreasonable and unlikely that the U.S. government should start its own energy company, so it is far more likely that providing tax incentives and guaranteed loans for private energy companies who are willing to commit to creating jobs (as well as providing a green energy product and/or service).

Rebuild Our Infrastructure

The equally important issue where the solution will help solve two problems – our crumbling infrastructure and jobs – is government-funded or subsidized innovative projects that repair roads, bridges, tunnels, sewers, waste disposal and recycling, water pipelines, utility lines, etc. Our energy grid is almost maxed out. We have witnessed the tragedy of collapsing bridges.

In addition to wind energy, solar energy, nuclear energy and biofuels obtained from crops, we could address our nation’s waste disposal problems with innovative energy plants using garbage. Right now, we have barges and floating mountains of trash that are killing sea life and polluting are oceans by design simply because we have nowhere to put all this waste. And that doesn’t even cover the waste illegally disposed of in our lakes, rivers and streams.

The answer to our economic crisis need not be elegant, just doable. The problem is we have to light a fire under our politicians and convince them to grow a pair and get this done.

Pay OFF National Debt

If we regain economic stability, we must then seriously pay off our national debt. An old Tennessee Ernie Williams song was “I owe my soul to the company store.” There is much truth in that. As long as China, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries own our debt, they effectively own us. We dare not try to enforce our human rights policies on China unless we want them to call in our loans. Likewise with Saudi Arabia and their human rights issue or their support of Islamic terrorist: should we fall into disfavor with Saudi Arabia, they have the entire Middle Eastern oil cartel at their disposal, and our oil could be cut off overnight if they so chose to exercise that power. Notice that every time we show strength against Muslim nations, particularly Sunni Muslim nations, they cut production. If you doubt that our debt is not an issue of national security, imagine waking up to a world with no electricity in your house and no gasoline to put in your car.

Peace!

Unfortunately, the Beatles song, “All you need is love!” is a utopian, naiive theory that does not work in the time of global jihad . The next component to our economic recovery is to end the war in Iraq and win the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan quickly and efficiently. Conservatives want us to believe that it is “entitlement” programs like welfare, Medicaid and Food Stamps that have bankrupted us. They even include the government-sponsored indivudal retirement investment fund called Social Security as an entitlement. This is a bold-faced lie. The Aghanistan and Iraq wars have almost single-handedly caused our national debt to skyrocket exponentially. We can no longer be policeman for the world. And we must demand that our allies take care of themselves (i.e., Germany, Japan and South Korea, in particular).

Economic Policy and Monetary Policy

The last item of business is regarding currency management. We must have far more transparency in the Federal Reserve System. The idea of creating a hybrid system that would prevent banking panics and balance privatization with government regulation was important. No one would argue that our system needs elastic currency and liquidity, but, Greenspan’s (and the presidents in office during his tenure) reliance on monetary policy to manage the economy (by raising and lowering interest rates) rather than managing the nation’s monetary supply is one of the components of the financial crisis. We have simply not had an effective Treasury Secretary in place to create effective economic policy. Managing the economy by interest rates in place of real economic policy does not work Lance Taylor’s 2004 Reconstructing Macroeconomics maintains that the sources of inflation must be found in the distributional structure of the economy. The Fed was never intended to supplant the Treasury Secretary. And one the Fed’s biggest failures in this current crisis is that it did not “protect the credit rights of consumers” or “contain systemic risk in financial markets” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System). We need a comprehensive economic plan and policy.

Our Founding Principles

The idea that the U.S. should resign itself to obscurity is neither acceptable nor inevitable. We will have just as much relevance and power as we aspire to have, providing we back up our aspiration with perspiration and determination.

It’s not just a question of dominance that drives America, it is a question of whose values will the world respect and follow. Leadership is not solely dependent on a powerful economy or a powerful military; those are secondary to our founding principles of individual equality, freedom and responsibility, a citizen-run government and political process, well-regulated capitalism where everyone is free to participate and grow wealth, and, lastly, the transparency and integrity of our government and political system, which is the Constitution. Our present failure is due not to the weakness of our values, but our failure to observe them. We cannot allow our recent failure in leadership to cause the world to reject our values, rather, we must “clean up our own back yard” and continue to promote our values.

We have been and must continue to be the shining beacon of light in what is now a very dark world.

Reflecting on 2008

Well, I learned a lot this year….

They say a cynic is a disillusioned idealist.  To be honest, I suppose I have qualified on that score for some time now.

For starters, I learned that liberal Democrats are just as prejudiced, biased, dishonest, disreputable and corrupt as the extreme Right Republicans.  I always thought my party was better — more honest, more caring and supportive of the “common” man, more concerned about this planet and its inhabitants, etc.  And that the Republicans were the “bad guys.”  This year, I found out that lust for power trumped ethics and decency hands down — no matter which party you were talking about.

I also found out that the integrity of the Constitution could no longer be taken for granted – that it was not a document on which we common Americans could depend to protect us unless we had money,  power and influence — at least, not so long as our governmental branches all agreed to ignore it when it was convenient [for them] to do so.  I learned that my rights were not as ‘guaranteed” by the Bill of Rights as I thought they were.  I learned that my vote did not always count and my voice was not always heard, particularly if the media did not agree with me.

I learned that journalism as I knew it and studied it in graduate school was DOA.  Truth was passé.  No more who, what, when, where, why.  The new questions were “how will it sell” or “how does it test” (AdSpeak) and “how will it benefit the corporation.”  No more journalistic ethics.  No more publication standards.  No more professional respect and professional distance.  Now our journalists can call female candidates they disagree with c*nts, bitches and hos.  Now they listen to the “tingle down their legs,” not the facts and the truth of the argument.  No more courageous editors and publishers who backed their reporters when the “consequences” of an article spoke truth to power arose.  Not anymore.  At least, not if it was not good for business as interpreted by the corporate executives that controlled the conglomerates that now controlled broadcast and print journalism.  Ratings are now more important than truth.  And it is now apparently sufficient to cry “mea culpa” after the fact when blatantly distributing or broadcasting propaganda for your candidate, masking it as “news.”  It’s OK to be “in the tank” for a candidate so long as you admit to it after the votes are cast and your mea culpa can no longer influence the outcome of the election against your interests.

I also learned that rules do not apply to all of us.  Apparently election fraud is now OK.  Citizens who have the audacity to demand proof that a candidate meet the constitutional requirements for an elected office somehow cannot actually demand proof from anyone that demonstrates this, and no state or federal office (including the Secretaries of State who control the ballots of each state in elections), no court, no party and no candidate is responsible or can be held accountable for providing said proof.  Apparently, publishing a fraudulently “doctored” birth certificate or draft card should be accepted as proof without question.

I learned that political corruption has become so rampant and accepted that political parties and election officials no longer even try to hide election manipulation anymore.  And that caucuses are the easiest election vehicles to manipulate simply by creating rules that eliminate any voting group that is not .likely to support your candidate.

I learned that a DNC Chairman is no longer required to maintain a professional distance from all party candidates during the primary.  That he can cut a deal with a candidate before even the first primary is held to move the party office to his preferred candidate’s home base without anyone so much as batting an eyelash or questioning at least the appearance of impropriety.

I learned that elected officials and party appointees can start a drumbeat during the primary season for the opposition to their candidate WITHIN THEIR OWN PARTY to drop out of an election without the media finding it outrageous and contrary to the old-fashioned “American” way of democracy and open government.

And I found out that the corruption I suspected of the Bush administration — the lies, the deceit, the outright criminality — was all pretty much exactly as I had suspected. 

That was one time I was hoping to be proven wrong.  But I wasn’t.

And here we are now.  The first day of 2009.  What will the future hold?

Well, it is clear to me that no matter who is in power, the American people are in for some hardcore suffering at the hands of the cowards we have sitting in Congress and in the White House.  The economy, the war, virtually every aspect of government has been corrupted by undue corporate influence that is the result of MONEY from PACS, businesses and other special interests that have the resources to cause Congress to act in their best interest instead of ours.  And with Obama’s successful fund-raising without using public funding, we can now consider public funding — our last, best hope of removing money from politics — dead in the water for decades to come.  Now accepting public fundings will be considered an act of political suicide.  As it proved to be for McCain.

So, how do we fix the mess we’re in? 

I hoestly don’t know, but I know sitting back and being silent in our misery is guaranteed failure, so I will continue to speak out, because rewarding bad behavior is a sure-fire guarantee that it will continue.

And I am becoming increasingly more convinced that Ralph Nader is right in saying that we need more political parties to bust up the two-party monopoly that has a vice-like grip on our power structure.  “More voices and more choices” is not sounding nearly as radical and insane as the Dems, bitter from Gore’s defeat, wanted us to believe.

And I have also found that we cannot trust our regulatory agencies to curb the unethical and criminal behavior in any of our industries — not even the so-called “grown-ups” in the banking industry.  That we can now depend on imports from China to be uninspected, drugs to be approved based on political ideology and influence, scientific reports to be fraudulently tampered with to protect political ideology, and all the environmental protections to be rolled back because they were “bad for business.” 

And I learned that the bailout has proven to be welfare for financial giants, not one dime has apparently made its way to purchase risky mortgages or free up the credit market as promised.  But CEOS can rest soundly knowing their unearned, outrageous salaries and  bonuses will be paid in full — even as the corporation they were charged with leading failes and the taxpayer is left holding the bag for that as well.  And if they defraud clients in the tens of billions of dollars, they can rest assured that they will be sleeping in their $7M NYC apartment, not in jail like the rest of us would be if we committed fraud in the tens of dollars.

I look forward to your thoughts….  And, once again, I pray that my suspicions will be proven wrong.  Unfortunately, I have an annoying habit of being right about these things. 

Great Depression II, here we come!

The X Factor

By Lynette Long
www.lynettelong.com
drlynettelong@aol.com
http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/a-letter-from-lynettePosted

 

Gloria Steinem, in her recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, came out strongly against Governor Palin claiming the only thing women have in common with Palin is an X chromosome. I respectfully disagree. Governor Palin knows what it is like to be a woman, a mother, a daughter, a sister – things the two men on the Democratic ticket can never fully understand. She knows what it is like to grow up invisible in an incredibly sexist society, to be stared at, groped, and sexually harassed. She knows what it is like to be smaller in stature than men and physically vulnerable. She knows what it’s like to worry that you are pregnant when you don’t want to be or that you are not pregnant when you want to be. Sarah Palin knows what it is to experience the joys and sorrows of motherhood, to nurse a baby while holding down a job, to leave for work in the morning with a toddler tugging at your pant leg, or to have your children calling you at work to diffuse squabbles or ask for help with homework. She knows that once you get to work you have to speak twice as loud and twice as often to be heard and work twice a hard to go half as far. She knows what it is to be a member of the second sex.

 

Gender is the most fundamental human characteristic. The first comment made when a child is born is either, “It’s a girl” or “It’s a boy.” From that second on, boys and girls live in parallel universes in the same culture. From the nursery room to the board room, boys and girls are given different messages about their respective roles in the world. At the hospital they are given different types of names and wrapped in different color blankets. Once home, baby girls and boys wear fundamentally different clothes and play with different toys. This differentiation extends through school where girls are given less attention, picked less frequently to answer questions and placed less often in advanced science and math classes. Once in the workforce, women are steered into lower-paying careers, paid less for the same work, and forced to juggle the responsibilities of work and home. You can’t learn what it is to be a woman, unless you are one. You can’t have a government essentially devoid of women that knows what’s best for women. You can’t legislate for women, without women.

 

After the last Democratic Primary was over and it was clear Senator Clinton was not going to get the Democratic nomination, myself, and a small group of Clinton supporters met with Senator McCain and Carly Fiorina. I personally explained to Senator McCain that women comprise well over half of the population, yet are underrepresented in every branch of government. I asked him loudly and clearly to choose a woman for the VP slot and to increase the number of women in the cabinet and on the Supreme Court. Senator McCain listened respectfully to my request. Representatives of The New Agenda also met with Carly Fiorina and as well as representatives from the Obama campaign to make similar requests.

 

After the Democratic Primary, I was also in contact with a member of Obama’s Finance Committee. He left several messages on my office phone, “urging” me to support Senator Obama. We had numerous contentious conversations and I finally told him I would be happy to vote for Senator Obama and rally other Hillary supporters to vote for Senator Obama but in return I wanted Obama to pledge gender parity in the cabinet. I foolishly thought equal representation in government was a reasonable request. “What if there aren’t qualified women you still expect us to appoint half women to the cabinet?” he replied. I was confused. “There are 300 million people in this country; you’re telling me you can’t find ten qualified women?” His responded, “You can’t have that.” We had no further conversations. There was nothing more to say.

 

Weeks later I approached a training session for DNC canvassers at a park in my neighborhood. Eager to practice their new skills, they all ran up to me, “Do you support Senator Obama? Do you want to donate money to the DNC?” After explaining that I was a Hillary supporter, I again made my request. I will support Senator Obama if he will pick a woman as his running mate and promise gender parity in the cabinet. The men in the group openly laughed at me and found my request ridiculous. I looked at the horrified faces of the newly minted female canvassers. “They’re laughing at you too,” I muttered.

Not one to give up, I contacted a daughter of a friend of mine who is a policy advisor for Obama. She assured me Obama was a good guy, so I posed my request to her. She generously responded, “I’ll ask him.” When I did not hear back from her in a few days, I shot her another email. She told me how disappointed she was in me for making such a stupid request. Obama was on the “right” side of the issues. Why did it matter whether men or women legislated those issues? I guess the answer from Obama was No. What saddened me was her mother was one of this nation’s greatest champions of title nine, educational equity and gender parity. Her mother and I counted the number of pictures of boys and girls in text books, male and female cartoon characters, and documented the underrepresentation of girls in math classes in our nation’s schools.

 

Yes, policy is important but who decides and delivers that policy is even more important. As Marshall McLuhan profoundly noted, “The medium is the message.” Children incorporate many of their perceptions about gender by five years old. Little girls won’t understand if Sarah Palin is pro-life or pro-choice, believes in gun control or is a member of the NRA, but they will know the Vice-President of the United States of America is a girl and that alone will alter their perceptions of themselves.

 

I have given my loyalty to the Democratic Party for decades. My party, which is comprised primary of women, has not put a woman on a presidential ticket for 24 years. My party refused to nominate my candidate, Hillary Clinton, for president or vice president, even though she received more votes than any other candidate in history. My party stood silently by as Hillary Clinton was eviscerated by the mainstream media. My party was mute while MSM repeatedly called Clinton a bitch and symbolically called me and every other woman in this country a bitch. My party was disturbingly silent when the MSM commented on Hillary’s body or the shrillness of her voice, reminding me and every other woman the fundamental disrespect we endure on a daily basis. My party’s candidate was mute when Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Pfleger openly mocked Senator Clinton from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ. My party’s candidate was silent when the rapper Ludicrous released a new song calling Hillary a bitch. My party and it’s candidate gave their tacit approval for the attacks on Senator Hillary Clinton and consequently women in general.

 

I have a choice. I can vote for my party and it’s candidates which have demonstrated a blatant disrespect for women and a fundamental lack of integrity or I can vote for the Republican ticket which has heard our concerns and put a woman on the ticket but with whom I fundamentally don’t agree on most issues. If Democratic women wait for the perfect woman to come along, we will never elect a woman. We have to seize opportunity where it presents itself. Besides, the Democratic Party is no longer my home. I have no home, but this election I will make my bed somewhere else.

 

I respect Gloria Steinem’s right to support the presidential ticket of her choice but she is openly trying to derail Sarah Palin’s historic candidacy. As Madeleine Albright said, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” I will vote for McCain-Palin. I urge other women to do the same. I might not personally agree with Palin on every issue and I promise to be the first person knocking on her door, if Roe v. Wade, or any other legislation that goes against the rights of women is threatened. But in Governor Palin I find a woman of integrity, who not only talks the talk but walks the walk. I can work with that. I will work with that.

 

When I walk down the street, I don’t have democrat printed on my forehead, but my gender is obvious to everyone and impacts every interaction in my life. Since my country is far from gender neutral, right now for me gender trumps everything else. I urge other women to join me in this fight for equality. Sometimes opportunities occur where you least expect them.

Big Brother Alert! (Actually, SOS, different day…)

See original e-mail (on bottom) and my response to same below:

---

From: Laura Schneider [mailto:Laura Schneider's personal e-mail address]
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2008 5:16 PM
Subject: RE: [Yahoo Group members] REPUBLICANS in Sheep’s Clothing

Michael,
 
The fact that a supposed Democratic group is obsessed with “tracking TCP/IP originating addresses” for the purposes of “keeping republican out of OUR network.”  Hmmm.  No wonder why Obama voted for FISA.  Is this what we can expect from you guys when he gets in the Oval Office?
 
First of all, I don’t buy your crap for a minute.  I am not a Republican and how you determine what the TCP/IP locations of any member are, since most of these Yahoo groups are using Yahoo e-mail IDS, is very suspicious to me.  Being an old, retired IT consultant, I’m sure it’s possible, but it would require a level of access to the membership details that you are not supposed to have, not being directly employed by Yahoo and all.
 
The idea that this “troll patrolling” is such a necessary and worthy goal of THE ONE and his campaign also does not speak well for his respect for our privacy rights.
 
And, as for “getting our information from” any person in this group:  we share information, but anyone, anywhere who takes anything anyone says in any group as gospel without checking the veracity of the statement is an idiot.
 
And that fully applies to these ridiculous claims you just made as well.
 
Butt out of my life and the lives of the people here in this group.  We will check our own information and don’t need you to play hall monitor for us.  We are quite intelligent enough and capable enough of seeing crap when it hits us in the face, and even before it hits the fan..
 
I am ashamed of my party.  Having been a Democrat since 1972, when I was first able to vote in a national (or any) election, I always took pride in the fact that my party was the party of the people.  That my party supported and defended the Constitution and my and everyone else’s civil liberties.
 
Now, after this primary season, where we have seen the DNC intervene in the primary election, promote misogyny, conduct back-room political deals that violate the “Sunshine” aura that used to prevail our party (at least since 1968), manipulate the RBC, and even agree to move the party’s campaign headquarters to the hometown of a candidate before he secured even the presumption of the nomination, much less the official nomination.  Release the VP pick at 3 a.m. just to give Hillary the virtual finger.  Conduct a rigged roll call vote that was a sham and an insult to all Democrats and to all Americans, not just to Hillary and her supporters.  Then play “Addicted to Love” right as Clinton left the stage after giving a speech that encouraged people to vote for the guy who just dissed him.  No, this is not the party I joined in 1972.
 
You Obama thugs are just that — thugs.  You have trampled over the Constitution, just like your bosses — Obama and his mentor Dean.  You are using what I consider to be privacy invasion to play hall monitor like Big Brother in 1984.  And you wonder why even Obama’s supporters were concerned, if not completely infuriated, by his vote for the FISA amendment that made it legal for him or any other president to invade our privacy and take away our 4th amendment rights (and, for all practical purposes, our 1st amendment and other rights, since Freedom of Speech is not likely to happen in an environment where Big Brother is recording your every word).  You want us to entrust this power to anyone, much less someone who is already commanding an army of cyberbullies and thugs to track our every move just because we don’t full-throatedly support his inexperienced ass?  No, I don’t think I’ll be drinking the “Yes you can!” Kool-aid.  You are not welcome to invade my privacy.  Nor am I willing to buy any of your poisoned cum-ba-ya cookies, so much for “the new kind of politics” your hypocritical leader has been preaching.  I don’t believe in your kind of Change, or that it’s for the betterment of my country or my life. 
 
And the fact that you arrogantly, no, actually, hubristically, used this forum to disseminate your message of intimidation to us that “Big Brother is Watching Us” does your candidate harm, not good.  You have killed your own credibility almost instantaneously by stupidly notifying me that you have violated my privacy rights and by attacking the members of my group.  I may not agree with all of them, or even many of them, but I will defend to death their right to say what they believe and believe what they want.  I will also defend to death my right to argue with them about it!
 
So what if some are Republicans?  You act as if that makes them non-enemy combatants that belong in Gitmo, an attitude of self-righteous, sanctimonious rationalization that is characteristic of our current Big Brother in Chief.  You think we are too stupid to know that there are Republicans, Democrats that support Obama, Independents and disaffected Democrats here?  Get over yourselves and go spy somewhere else.
 
If anything, you have reminded us why we are “disaffected” Democrats.

 

——————————————————————————–
From: [Yahoo Group] [mailto:[Yahoo Group members]@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Michael P. Fagan
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2008 8:55 AM
To: [Yahoo Group]
Subject: [Yahoo Group] REPUBLICANS in Sheep’s Clothing

Are some [Yahoo Group members] people really REPUBLICANS against any democrat winning?

I have been monitoring this group for many months now and one thing is VERY clear. More than 10% of the email addresses on this group have been traced back to REPUBLICAN operatives in the REPUBLICAN internet center. Their purpose here is to spread discourse in the democratic ranks and to beat the drums against Obama in order to get McCain elected.

I am the National Coordinator of the USDemocrat Network which operates more than 500 Yahoogroups. We have a membership committee which tracks TCP/IP originating addresses in order to keep republicans out of our network. I had the membership committee trace a hundred or so of the most frequent posters to this group and found that more than half of the most vocal posters on this group were traced back to TCP/IP locations and addresses of REPUBLICAN operatives.

So when you think – really think about it – is the person you’re getting your info from a fellow democrat, or a REPUBLICAN acting like a disgruntled democrat?

Just thought you should know.

Michael P. Fagan
USDemocrat Network

——————–

http://www.usdemocratnetwork.org/index.cfm

The USDemocrat Network is supposed to be a volunteer army of moderators and IT specialists that assist in disseminating information among listservs.  Yeah, right.

If you go to the above link, it tells you that they do not list their membership by real name (there is no actual listing of usernames, either) because of the possibility of malicious or vindictive acts by employers, etc.  (What?  These guys are spending company time to “volunteer?”).  There is no place to contact the group, list a complaint about a member, etc.  There is an address in Slidell, LA.

Michael P. Fagan does, however, have a DNC PB blog profile under same name with Slidell, LA, listed as his home, but NO BLOGS.  http://www.democrats.org/page/dashboard/public/gjvmW .  Also has a membership in the DNC PB Group:  College Democrats at LSU, Joined: Jul 17th, 2008.

Michael also has a profile at mybarackobama.com:  http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/CC3G

Both the DNC and Obama sites show the same picture of him in some kind of uniform, maybe USCG?  i wonder how the USCG would feel about your engaging in political activities on company time and in company uniform?  It’s against the DoD rules, don’t know how the DoT regulates political activities of Coast Guard members?  Anyone want to follow the links, check the uniform and confirm for me?

And another Democratic Yahoo group:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Democrat/messages/99

Also a membership in Citizens for Legitimatet Government (CLG). 

So, Michael, two can play this game.  Wanna know more?  Google Michael P. Fagan and find out the rest of the story for yourselves.

On the intimidation of delegates and the “rigged” roll call vote

The level of disrespect for Hillary, specifically, and the Clintons, in general — not to mention their supporters — has been overt and embarrassing at this convention.  Unfortunately, this has been the style of the true Obama — the intimidating, bullying, disrespectful, power-crazed man — and his mentor, Howard Dean through his DFA, throughout the primary season.

The tactics of GWB in the 2004 election — to isolate and confine protestors and demonstrators to an area off-site and away from the MSM coverage, is another troubling tactic.  Obama and Dean have learned their Rovian tactical lessons well and have incorporated the Rove playbook in this election — a fact which concerns and troubles many loyal, life-long Democrats.  And which, amusingly, does not reflect the “new kind of politics” that Americans assume Obama is referring to in his eloquent, flowery speeches when they sit and listen to him pontificate on the corruption of Washington, scoffing at experience as “Washington trying to boil all the hope out of him.”

Well, I must admit that I had the audacity to hope for something more than an empty suit with a big, however eloquent, mouthpiece.

I am a proud PUMA Democrat and supporter of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. I joined PUMA right after the RBC meeting, when it became evident that the “fix” was in and the party was not going to play fair. PUMAs are loyal, “real” Democrats that espouse traditional Democratic Party values and don’t agree with what is going on in their party right now. Some will vote for McCain (I won’t). Some may vote for Obama. Some will vote for Nader or another 3rd party candidate, and some will only vote for down-ticket Dems. I will definitely vote for down-ticket Dems. I am and will always be a Democrat.

This Gestapo-like intimidation of delegates and disrespect to political opponents is not where it ends. The “troll patrol” mission of search and destroy, trying to find out where DNC PartyBuilder bloggers blog on other sites and who they are reveals how deep the insecurity is in the Obama camp.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! -of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. — Winston Churchill

That’s why Obama failed the “3 a.m.” test when Putin invading Georgia — his fear of making a decision, a commitment. Ted Kennedy once told Obama he needed to run for president before he had a [voting] record to run against. He took that advice to heart, and consequently has avoided making controversial votes ever since. He fears that he might have to run with something besides a “present” vote in the IL State Senate or his complete absence for the vote on Iran in the U.S. Senate — the very kind of vote he so castigated Hillary for on Iraq. His votes on abortion in the IL State Senate have come back to haunt him, and watching him dance around the issue with his swift tongue has been amusing, in some respects, but disheartening in others. His hubris and inexperience and lack of judgment on substantial issues became very evident. And nothing his propaganda machine did or could conceivably do could create a convincing illusion that he was more than an inexperienced man with a tepid, impotent, ineffective response to a real, serious national security threat.

Obama’s solution? Choose a man who had 36 years in Washington (“a new kind of politics” and “change” the way Washington does business?) and who voted FOR the Iraq resolution, just like Hillary.

Obama’s response to critics who supported Hillary? To give Hillary the virtual finger by releasing his VP choice text message at 3 a.m. — the ultimate in immature, sophomoric insults to a lady who has done nothing but try her best to help him.

The disdain in his and his campaign’s remarks toward Hillary and the disparaging comments toward her supporters has done nothing to unify the party, it has divided it. And it is Obama that has done this (or his campaign and supporters on his behalf).

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion. — David Cronenberg

The DNC PartyBuilder (PB) blog apparently has an unpublished list of accepted sources and banned sources — no one I know can tell you where the list is, but it must exist, because the Fist-bump Gang has referred to it numerous times. Who is the Fist-bump Gang? A small group of obsessive Obamabots that are dedicated to rooting out all dissenters and those who are not enthusiastically drinking the “Yes we can!” Kool-aid.

If you publish or excerpt from one of the banned sources that shall remain nameless to all but the Fist-bump Gang, you yourself are labeled a troll, a Republican, an Operation Chaos operative or worse, and a campaign against you ensues. Eventually, you are banned from the DNC PartyBuilder site. No dissent is allowed. My IP address or e-mail address was permanently banned (I cannot get approval to blog or write comments with a different Yahoo address, etc.) for publishing an article from the LA Times about Chris Matthews misogynist behavior this election season. If you read their comments about those of us who have been banned, you would think we had been filthy-mouthed, attacking, smearing “trolls” who had nothing substantive to say. The reality is that they are describing themselves, not us.

Women’s rights was and is a very unpopular issue with Obama supporters, particularly the Fist-bump Gang, at the PB blog. Reminds them too much of the primary season and Hillary’s ability to surmount incredible odds in the mainstream media (MSM). In fact, the Obamabots were outraged and fought mightily against having women’s rights as a topic of the Friday Night Forum on PB, even after we had gay rights and civil rights. This went on for about a month. Apparently women don’t warrant the same consideration. And that’s a good part of the problem overall in the Obama/Dean/DFA-controlled DNC, actually.

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. — John Morley

And what these “Yes we can!” fist-bumping Kool-aid drinkers do accomplish in trying to shout down or shut our dissenters is to create an enemy where none may have existed in the first place. That is absolutely true of me. Resorting to calling me and other Hillary supporters a “bitter” whiner or harridan because my candidate lost an unfair election is based on their inability to see the real, substantive issue here. Where is our party going? And what happened to the core values that our party used to represent? Instead of fighting disenfranchisement, we use it as an election tactic. Instead of being the voice of the people, we are substituting delegates who support the candidate of our choice instead of the candidate the people voted for.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion. — David Cronenberg

The faulty assumption is that the Obama propagandists can cover up the truth with their lies if they just repeat it loud enough and long enough – a tactic GWB and Rove have mastered. They have illusions of gradeur and the self-delusions of a false narrative. Like GWB, they are convinced that the problem is not that they are wrong — it’s not the substance of the message itself, but that they are not properly “controlling” it. It’s a PR problem, not a truth or logic problem. And that is the problem.

And an even bigger problem is that the Obama campaign and the DNC are using the MSM as their personal mouthpiece with the cooperation of the MSM. Rather than aggressively and skeptically questioning the propaganda, the MSM is broadcasting their propaganda for them, unquestioning and without any vetting or sourcing. Watching Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann anchoring at the convention site for MSNBC, I thought I was watching a DNC-sponsored infomercial piece — certainly not the days of Walter Cronkite or Huntley-Brinkley, much less Edward R. Murrow, who Olbermann has arrogantly stolen his sign-off from. This is what we get for letting corporations control our news media — the best marketing tool money can buy. News by focus groups.

Instead of Obama, his campaign and his supporters making efforts to build relationships with disaffected Dems (primarily Hillary supporters), these guys are trying to alienate them further. This has become the SOP on the DNC PB blog. And it is creating further division, not less.

I remember as a business manager, once sitting in a PR seminar where the instructor made the comment that, when your customer has a bad experience with any of your employees, they aren’t mad at that particular employee, they’re mad at the whole company. This is the impact that these “troll patroling” Fist-bump gang-bangers are having on Obama’s candidacy.

I really tried to get on board the “Yes we can!” Kool-aid train after Hillary conceded. I donated to Obama (not much). I created a profile on his website. I posted a few blogs. But I was constantly attacked by the Fist-bump Gang on the DNC site, along with other Hillary supporters (and that was before they realized I had joined PUMA). For those of you reading this comment who have participated in these type of search and destroy missions, there is a quote that is worth thinking about:

One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you. — Dennis A. Peer

And you Fist-bump Gang-bangers — you DNC troll patrolers — should ask yourselves how many votes have you LOST for Obama today or up until now. It may be more than you realize. I know of dozens of people who have been banned or attacked mercislessly by the Fist-bump Gang who would most likely have voted for Obama had it not been for the nasty, divisive tactics of his supporters. At first, we did not blame Obama, but when it continued and worsened upon Obama’s moderator taking over the blog, it became clear it was sanctioned by Obama and an accepted SOP for his campaign. The real concern is will this be the way he governs as well?

If you don’t know what I am talking about, please check out my WordPress blog site (http://lauraschneider.wordpress.com/ ) or the new political blog site that is open to all parties and all candidates’ supporters (http://www.2008election-forum.com). Suffice it to say that the caliber of the Obama supporters I have encountered on the DNC PB blog does not speak well for Obama.

Interestingly enough, these same “troll patrollers” who are so obsessed with cleansing the blog of less enthusiastic Dems are the ones who also admit to patrolling Republican sites and creating dissent and chaos there. So, they are guilty of the very thing on other sites that they accuse us of on the DNC site. It has been my experience that people who are not trusting are usually not trustworthy. Why? Because they expect you to do to them what they would do to you under the same circumstances. They see themselves in the mirror of the eyes of others.

Obama’s supporters have convinced me that he is not capable of leading this country. Why? If he intends the intimidation and censorship and obsession with “controlling the message” to the point where other ideas cannot be entertained in our party, then he is too power-crazed and corrupt to lead our country. If he is eithe runaware or too impotent to influence his supporters to embrace his message of a “new kind of politics” in reality, not just in hot air, then he is too weak to lead our country. Either way, it does not bode well for Obama, or for us as Democrats.

Either way, he fails the basic test of a leader:

The first responsibility of a leader is to DEFINE REALITY [not obscure it]. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant. — Max De Pree

Obama is committed to obscuring reality, not clearly defining it. What is he hiding? His hubris and unabridged lust for power. He will compromise any principle, do anything to get where he wants to go. If that means throwing his grandmother, his minister and our 4th amendment rights under the bus, so be it. Environment? Not a problem, uncer the bus it goes if the polls indicate it will get him a vote or two.

And what has Hillary done? Everything she can to try to unify the party and sell Obama to us. But that is Obama’s job. And Hillary, I’m afraid has already realized that Dean, through his DFA, has already coronated Obama in 2007, when the plans to move the DNC to Chicago were made. She knows, but she is trying to keep the party’s shit together until she can organize a coalition to take our party back. She won’t say so publicly, but she and Bill are fully aware of the travesty that has been done to our party.

What we have to do… is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our differences without fracturing our communities. — Hillary Clinton

This is the kind of leader we need for our party. One that celebrates diversity and encourages us to use our voices, not one that does everything he can to silence us and disenfranchise us.

And finally:

Censorship reflects society’s [here, Obama's] lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~Potter Stewart

Is this where we want to take our party and our country? Sorry, I’m not riding this Kool-aid train….

The Last Roundup

By Christopher Ketcham
Illustration by Brett Ryder
April 29, 2008
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20080430182318128
Wednesday, April 30 2008

For decades the federal government has been developing a highly classified plan that would override the Constitution in the event of a terrorist attack. Is it also compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who could face detention under martial law?

In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president’s henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft’s second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush’s first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration’s various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn’t allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush’s men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.

Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program’s authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey’s words, “to take advantage of a very sick man,” sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft’s sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and “literally ran” up the hospital stairs to beat them there.

Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. “I’m not the attorney general,” Ashcroft told Bush’s men. “There–he pointed weakly to Comey–is the attorney general.” Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey’s presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House “without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality,” he testified.

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can’t help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey’s testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him “to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases.” The larger mystery remained intact, however. “It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate,” the article conceded.

Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed “every 45 days” as part of planning to assess threats to “the continuity of our government.”

Few Americans–professional journalists included–know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it’s no surprise that the president’s passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces–and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it’s a road map for martial law.

While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government�s data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, �There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived �enemies of the state� almost instantaneously.� He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a �national emergency.� Executive orders issued over the last three decades define it as a �natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency,� while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like �riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order.� According to one news report, even �national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad� could be a trigger.

Let�s imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast�say, a suitcase nuke�in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and have been aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a �parallel government� that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.

Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency�s incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem farfetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese-Americans�everyone from infants to the elderly�be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of �militants� and �American negroes� who were to be held at �assembly centers or relocation camps.� In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root�then a subsidiary of Halliburton�was handed a $385 million contract to establish �temporary detention and processing capabilities� for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for �an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs.� Just what those �new programs� might be is not specified.

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who�for a tremendously broad set of reasons�have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state�as seems to be the case with Main Core�even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.

Another well-informed source�a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community�says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets� behavior and tracks their circle of associations with �social network analysis� and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

�The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help,� he says. �Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets.� An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that �it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time.�

A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as �warrantless wiretapping.� In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor �huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records.� Authorities employ �sophisticated software programs� to sift through the data, searching for �suspicious patterns.� In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it�s notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. �The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed,� the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. �Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.�

The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.

Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local �intelligence� reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; �commercial databases�; and unidentified �private sector entities.� Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI�s Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department�s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor anti-war protestors and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.

A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used �to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time.� Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, �What was being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be.� A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: �Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that �Main Core� database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance project.�

If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. �If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues��the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws��so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints.� Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security. �It�s clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear.� Giraldi continues, �I am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many reasons�quite likely, including the two of us.�

Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, the question of legality is murky: �In the event of a national emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these powers��the powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up detention lists, for example�� if Congress doesn�t explicitly prohibit it. It�s really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and Congress has not done so.� Fein adds that it is virtually impossible to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy programs in court �when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no notice to persons on the president�s �enemies list.� That means if Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president says it is�even in secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and invariably rule in his own favor.�

The veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey�s suggestion that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be misleading: �Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence Finding anyway.�

But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of the database is a matter of concern. �The capacity for future use of this information against the American people is so great as to be virtually unfathomable,� the senior government official says.

In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won�t prevent terrorist conspiracies. �Because there is so little historical terrorist event data,� Jonas tells Radar, �there is not enough volume to create precise predictions.�

The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in post-war American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to �accumulate the names, identities, and activities� of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding �security index,� according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by �the National Military Establishment.� By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included “professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid” to unnamed “subversive elements.” This same FBI “security index” was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).

FEMA, however–then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency–already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford’s character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans, which contained information gleaned from wideranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency’s secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator’s findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers “can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers”–a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather’s databases were run “without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate.”

Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a “secret contingency plan,” code named REX 84, which called “for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run
state and local governments.” The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.

North’s program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas Congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. “I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution,” Brooks said. “I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked.” Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, “That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir.” Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals–prisoners, for example–by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, “Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy’s blacklist looks downright crude.” Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.

In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, “The gloves seemed to come off.” What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, “How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?” Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.

In July 2007 and again last August, Rep. Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the “classified annexes” of the Bush administration’s Continuity of Government program. DeFazio’s interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.

But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are “extra-constitutional or unconstitutional.” Around the same time, he told the Oregonian, “Maybe the people who think there�s a conspiracy out there are right.”

Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to designate any American citizen an “enemy combatant” forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies,” which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic insurrections�as permitted under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807–but also to deal with a wide range of calamities, including “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident.”

More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence
expert William Arkin, “allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.”

“We are at the edge of a cliff and we�re about to fall off,” says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There’s no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this–for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, “We have to be cautious.” The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, “You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.’ “

As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey’s testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an “endemic surveillance society,” alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)

These days, it’s rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. “The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny,” Church pointed out in 1975. “And there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.”

Source: Radar Magazine (http://radarmagazine.com/from-the-magazine/2008/04/mayjune_2008_table_of_contents.php). Please purchase a copy of the May/June 2008 issue immediately, or subscribe.

 

DNC Warehouse “Concentration Camp” Uncovered By Reporters

Steve Watson, Infowars.net
Friday, August 15, 2008
http://infowars.net/articles/august2008/150808Camps.htm
(I was unable to insert the pictures in this version, so if you go to the link above, you can see the article complete with pictures and video.)

Cells topped with barbed wire to be used to hold protesters rounded up in mass arrests

A CBS news crew has uncovered a huge warehouse holding facility in Denver, consisting of steel cages topped with barbed wire, ready to receive thousands of protesters at this year’s Democratic National Convention.

“This is a building filled with metal holding cells,” described CBS reporter Rick Sallinger. “We showed up at the facility unannounced today, the doors were wide open, and we managed to shoot for several minutes until a Denver sheriff’s captain asked us to leave.”

The warehouse is located on the north-east side of Denver and is owned by the city. It appears that officials wanted to keep it a secret until the convention began. The police captain captured on film warned that if made public, the facility could be compromised “by people who are potentially trying to be disruptive.”

The CBS footage shows a huge area of metal chain-link cells that measure 5 yards by 5 yards, topped with rolls of barbed wire. Each pen is adorned with an identifying letter.

Signs on the walls of the warehouse read “Warning! Electric stun devices used in this facility.”

On seeing the footage one local political organizer told the crew it resembled a “concentration camp”, while another described it as a “meat processing plant”. The facility has already been dubbed “Gitmo On The Platte”.

Such “prison camps” were also used in 2004 during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. The areas close to the DNC in Boston consisted of concrete walls, barriers and metal cages with barbed wire.

The areas were invisible to the Fleet Center where the convention was held and were referred to as “Boston’s Camp X-Ray”.

At the 2004 RNC in New York holding pens were also employed as protestors and innocent people were swept up in mass arrests and transferred to then-recently closed Hudson Pier Depot at Pier 57 on the Hudson River in Manhattan.

The facility was quickly dubbed “Guantanamo on the Hudson” as thousands were bound and paraded into a large warehouse area behind steel caging.

More recently, such holding areas have been employed in conjunction with the Orwellian concept of “free speech zones”.

The Secret Service has been granted the power to declare “first amendment areas”. They scout locations where the president is scheduled to speak, or pass through, target those who carry anti-Bush signs and escort them to the protest pens prior to and during the event.

Inevitably the pens are far away from the event location and well away from any media spotlight.

Holding pens will also be employed at the RNC later this year with local law enforcement working with the secret service to designate the areas in Minneapolis.