Empire Despotism Upon Us, Restore the Spirit of 1776 Liberty, Let's Create a Real Republic
Americans seem to have forgotten why the Founding Fathers prohibited government from spying on them. Public opinion polls show that a rising percentage of Americans approve of the warrantless National Security Agency wiretaps of Americans that Bush ordered.
Two Years ago Stephen Heller, an actor in LA who worked part time for the law firm of Jones Day, discovered that one of the firm's clients, Diebold, was possibly going to disenfranchise thousands of voters in the next election.
One is simple: parties must allow primaries to be neutrally administered and freely contested. It is in a party’s best interest to identify talented candidates through competition. The first party to reinvigorate its candidate selection process in this way will dominate the other.
Stop! Before reading this Article, please take the following quiz.
Given Bush's now open assertions that he is using his "plenary" -- or unlimited -- powers as commander in chief for the duration of the indefinite War on Terror, Americans can no longer trust that their constitutional rights protect them from government actions.
The truth is, there is a government in office which seeks such complete power and dominance that even some conservatives have started to notice. Too blind to see the true intentions of this bunch, they can at least figure out that an imperial presidency created by George Bush might one day be inherited by Hillary Clinton (complete with her plans for a revolutionary dope-smoking lesbian Marxist state and global UN domination, enforced by an armada of black helicopters), so now even these fools are getting nervous about where this goes. They know that the only difference between the monarchism our Founders so reviled and contemporary Cheneyism is that the technology of our time allows George Bush to turn George III into George Orwell.
I write as a bewildered fan. A fan because I truly admire your past service to our nation as a government official and your past contributions to our intellectual culture. Bewildered because your recent posting on LewRockwell.com compares America’s defense against terrorism to Nazi Germany and because, even more inexplicably, your opinion appears to be based on total fiction.
Today, the Jewish and Zionist propaganda seeks to sully the names of those men as it sullies the rest of the world. It accuses the Allies of having remained indifferent to the calamitous fate of the Jews. It rebukes the neutrals for not having participated in the crusade against Germany. It accuses the Vatican. It accuses the International Committee of the Red Cross. It accuses the Jews who, during the war, belonged to the "Jewish Councils" maintaining relations with the Germans. It accuses the Zionists of the Stern Group who, in 1941, offered Germany a military alliance against Britain. It rebukes all those Zionists who had settled in Palestine, along with their press, for having, during the war, received with skepticism the rumors circulating about the massacres of Jews at Babi Yar or elsewhere and about the gas chambers. It accuses the entire world, or just about.
Chavez’s essential problem was straight out of Econ 101, the law of supply and demand. He needed to limit the supply of labor in order to drive up wages. Just as American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant, was one of the most influential voices calling for the successful immigration-restriction law of 1924, Chavez, during his effectual years, was a ferocious opponent of illegal immigration.
It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was.
From the "intelligence failures" of 9/11 and the Iraq war, to the criminal exposure of CIA operative Valerie Plame, to the use of illegal warrantless wiretaps, the Bush administration has zealously obstructed efforts to conduct full and honest investigations. Now the administration is displaying great zeal to investigate and prosecute the government officials and reporters responsible for publicizing the president's use of illegal wiretaps -- a revelation the administration has characterized as a criminal disclosure of classified information.
I grew up an American, and proud of it. I was taught in school about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Bill of Rights. My brother was a Merchant Marine Officer during the war and had three ships sunk beneath him. We beat the Nazis, the Fascists and the Japanese and made the world safe for democracy. After the war came Nuremberg and the assurance that things like the holocaust could never happen again. The Marshal Plan helped to rebuild the shattered portions of the world. America, Democracy, compassion and help. It was good to be an American. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sad, but necessary to end the war and save lives, we were told.
Those reading this bill may find themselves feeling a sense of déjà vu . In many cases one can just substitute "Iraq" for "Iran" in this bill and we could be back in the pre-2003 run-up to war with Iraq. And the logic of this current push for war is much the same as the logic used in the argument for war on Iraq. As earlier with Iraq, this resolution demands that Iran perform the impossible task of proving a negative – in this case that Iran does not have plans to build a nuclear weapon.
The following essay is the first of a multi-part series on Mind Control and it's effects on the American populace. Each offering will approach the issue, using Orson Welles 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds as the basis for this series.
It now appears likely that Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security, may finally be held accountable for the absolutely non-effective federal response to Hurricane Katrina. As I said at the time, "Chertoff needs to be held accountable for criminal negligence leading to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people in New Orleans."
New Jersey’s civil forfeiture law dangerously transforms law enforcement priorities from fair and impartial administration of justice to the pursuit of property and profit. New Jersey police departments and prosecutors’ offices are entitled to keep money and property confiscated through the state’s civil forfeiture law, thus giving them a direct financial stake in these forfeitures.
At the core of Rumsfeld's own remarks is this admission: "Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs." (Emphasis added.)
The Administration spent $1.6 billion on contracts with advertising agencies ($1.4 billion), public relations firms ($197 million), and media organizations and individual members of the media ($15 million).
Too many Americans are willing to let demagoguery scare them into writing a blank check to any politician who claims he will protect them from the boogeyman. I, for one, will never surrender this free republic, no matter how many enemies, real or imagined, are at the gates. What would be the point? Our ancestors fought for freedom and independence, not for a dictatorship. You can't be free if you give the president unlimited powers to violate both the laws and the Constitution.
In an orchestrated set-up, George W. Bush announced that a plan to fly a plane into the LA Library Tower was thwarted in 2002 and within minutes news networks were showing footage of the same building being destroyed in the movie Independence Day.
Paradoxically, Bush & Company’s relentless push for world hegemony seems to be Balkanizing the world, that is, splintering countries, regions, even zip codes, into smaller units, which are more hostile to each other though ethnically more homogenous.
The Department of Homeland Security in May 2003 urged 18,000 local and state police departments to treat critics of the war on terror as potential terrorists, according to a confidential DHS memo made public in 2004. Suicide bombers, the feds told local lawmen, could be detected by such traits as a "pale face from recent shaving of beard"; they "may appear to be in a 'trance' "; their eyes may "appear to be focused and vigilant"; and their clothing may either be "out of sync with the weather" or just "loose."
If the loyal opposition really wants to talk about an American monarchy, they should begin by looking at the record of the king of the modern welfare state, particularly his use of Executive Orders. While George Bush has signed 196 EOs in five years for an average of around 40 per year, Franklin Roosevelt issued an incredible 3,466 in twelve years, or 288 per year. Of those 3,466 EOs, only 630 were issued during the World War II years, including one that provided for the internment of Japanese and German Americans.
Among the many wonders and marvels of American life in the 20th century, especially after World War II, when our country ruled much of the world economically, was the astounding rise in standards of living among social classes that had hardly known leisure or had a dollar to spare on its accoutrements from time immemorial. The subject of class in America has been so sore that we can barely acknowledge its existence, despite the workings of whole industries devoted to exploiting the envy of the lower orders. The very term—lower orders—would be considered grounds for sacking if I had the misfortune of teaching at a college and will certainly be seized on by critics as evidence of my intellectual unfittedness. In short, any discourse on class consciousness is regarded in America these days as an obscenity far worse than stealing $100 million from the shareholders of a telecom corporation.
Put it simply, the privilege of printing greenbacks so that other nations can buy its oil in dollars is in jeopardy. Financially, printing more dollars so that it can be exchanged for euros wouldn't work either. Oil has been pegged to the dollar for decades. Oil gives value to the dollar; without it the dollar doesn't have the same fundamental strengths as the Swiss Franc. Some claim Saddam Hussein became unpardonable and beyond redemption when he insisted on euros for Iraqi oil sales. He got the currency wrong from October 2000 and a handsome profit till his Weapon for Messing up the Dollar - the more realistic WMD - landed him Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Additionally, some critics in the United States may be more inclined to wonder if the NSA spies on Europeans on behalf of the British wouldn’t the British use their Echelon capability to target U.S. citizens, thus providing legal cover for the NSA?
For the first time in more than 20 years, U.S. nuclear-weapons scientists are designing a new H-bomb, the first of probably several new nuclear explosives on the drawing boards.
Compared to the unilateral actions of iconic liberal-Progressive Presidents, President Bush is a Casper Milquetoast. Liberals on both sides of the political aisle have adjudged President Bush a uniquely power-hungry chief executive bent on destroying our Constitution and creating a dictatorship. Evidently they haven't reviewed the records of some of their favorite Presidents Ð Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.
“This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the principal occasion of our miseries and confusions. But whatever has been the occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure. We have need for more generous remedies than have yet been made use of . . . absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty, is the thing we stand in need of.”
Our population has nearly doubled, and our culture is much more corrupted. I, as an elementary-school kid, could roam my town and even out in the country and woods alone without fear. By the time I had children, I wouldn’t even leave them alone at a school bus stop. I waited until they were safely on the bus. Where did all of these child molesters come from? I’m sure there were some in the past—probably always have been—but when you look at the thousands of registered sex offenders, it makes you wonder.
It was Bush channeling Wilson that landed us in Iraq. Even today, many Americans agree with the president's view of the U.S. invasion as an act of liberation, although many others view the war as patently misguided and morally unjustifiable. What can hardly be denied is that it has exacted enormous, unsustainable costs. Put bluntly, we don't have enough soldiers, enough money or enough friends to persist in this crusade, much less to implement the Bush Doctrine elsewhere to bring freedom and democracy to the entire Mideast.
Throughout the 1990s, Republicans castigated the Clinton administration for conducting foreign policy like social work: vague, ill-defined missions in remote locales from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo. Republicans asked forceful questions about how these missions served the U.S. national interest. In November 1995 a clear majority of Republicans in Congress voted to stop Clinton from sending American forces to Bosnia as part of the Dayton Peace Agreement (a prohibition that Clinton flatly ignored). When a second Balkan crisis erupted in Kosovo, John Bolton had to point out to Bill O'Reilly that the United States had become "involved in a conflict where it has no tangible national interest, where it has no clear objectives in mind, and where the ultimate outcome could be very risky for what our real interests are…"
Congress will soon hold hearings on the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, secretly authorized by President Bush in 2002. But that program is just the tip of the iceberg.
The most important issue is not, however, whether people feel comfortable talking on the phone or sending emails. The real danger is that electronic surveillance can be used to increase and solidify executive power. A president can collect private information not simply about “ordinary Americans,” but extra-ordinary ones – political rivals, journalists, and activists – and use this information against them. After all, if a president is convinced he is right, he may well view those who disagree with him as dangerous and believe it’s legitimate to use any means available to stop them.
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