41 Comments

1. browneyedgirl:

   Ditto! I strongly agree! I have been saying this for years. We just need to get out of everyone elses business. Why do we think we are superior then everyone else?

   27 September 2006, 7:04 pm

2. Zeeland:

   Damn good rant. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

   27 September 2006, 11:55 pm

3. BrianR:

   I think the part of your “rant” about the US government divesting itself from arms sales is very astute.

   So many national politicians think the US is forever stuck in a global military conflict. Even the idealist ones who want peace think its impractical not to be a tough Commander in Chief. I mean they brag about killing on national TV!

   If we stopped funding, inventing, manufacturing, and selling arms to the world there would be a lot less war. The argument that someone else will sell the arms is is just bull. What better way to use the financial power of the US than to bring peace to the world?

   I wish you’d write more ideas for clueless politicians Stan. I know they can be stubborn but these desperate times with radical right-wingers fuckn’ up the world have some more progressive capitalists listening. (or reading blogs that is) Not sure how much influence we can have but I have to hope they’re ready to try new strategies.

   28 September 2006, 9:06 am

4. peggy:

   Stan, I agree with everything you say, exceopt maybe the part about executing CEOs. Why don’t we kill the Shrub? Because we know who will take his place if we do. Probably the same with top CEOs.
   But everything else, I, too, like browneyedgirl, have been saying for years. Most of all stopping the arms trade and all overseas military activity, period. It’s not like nobody has said these things before. It’s not like we’ve all been polite and tactful. It’s that they won’t hear. Our local representatives in government may give us an audience. But not the top guys. It’s not a matter of getting them to listen, because they won’t. It’s a matter of getting them to stop. By any means necessary.

   28 September 2006, 5:28 pm

5. James M:

   Since 1992, the United States has exported more than $142 billion dollars worth of weaponry to states around the world. The U.S. dominates this international arms market, supplying just under half of all arms exports in 2001, roughly two and a half times more than the second and third largest suppliers. The United States supplied arms or military technology to more than 92% of the conflicts under way in 1999.

   http://www.fas.org/asmp/fast_facts.htm

   An end to armament industry subsidization, decriminaliation of drugs — these are great ideas. These two industries, however, also happen to be essential bulwarks of the American economy as it stands today. Mike Ruppert delivered a pretty convincing scenario of what would happen to the economy if we stymied the flow of capital, in the form of laundered drug profits, into U.S. corporations. A nosedive, basically.

   It was really funny to watch CNN’s recent special report on the resurgence of Afghan opium, and all the “we’re powerless to stop it” hand-wringing that ensued. What a joke.

   Someone, either on here or over at FTW, described all this as part of the “tapeworm economy.” I have seen no more apt characterization than that.

   28 September 2006, 7:07 pm

6. skol:

   fyi, “Tapeworm economy” is Catherine Austin Fitts. Her site is here. She’s contributed to FTW and narconews (she contributed a rather large piece to narco, but I can’t find the link)

   28 September 2006, 9:34 pm

7. Comandante Gringo:

   So what you’re saying is that we require socialist revolution — because we AREN’T reasoning with these people. They’d rather KILL us than get it. They certainly won’t be changing their system to suit us — and you can count on a bloody and brutal counter to anything peaceful we try to do about changing the government legally.

   And we start the Revolution *by supporting the mexican revolution* — and everything else coming down the pike from south of the border or from over the water.

   28 September 2006, 9:39 pm

8. Legume Sam:

   Let’s phase out the prison industry!

   29 September 2006, 12:15 pm

9. Timothy R. Anderson:

   Along with the typical ” wrong ” and ” naive ” labels that get thrown at the courageous majority who disagree with President Bush, here’s a new fortune-cookie-style thingy from Mister Uniter / Decider :

   ” You don’t create more terrorism by
   fighting terrorists. ”

   Uh, say again ? Anyway, he then speaks of the danger that Washington D.C.’s policymakers
   might one day fall into the trap of appeasing the terrorists / evildoers . Which rather nicely brings up a thingy for all who view this to discuss :

   Is it or is it not appeasement that
   Saddam Hussein IS ALIVE TODAY ?

   Donald shakes hands with Saddam . Saddam gets to keep right on living.
   Joe L. kisses Pres. Bush . Joe L. gets to keep right on living. Uh, anyone else seeeeeeeeeeee a patteR n developing here ?

   Me ? Well, I am simply the grandson of a faRmer . We’s ain’t all up on who needs to be killed and who needs to live and who needs a divorce and who needs a new car
   and who needs a new ” approach ” and who needs to be challenged and who needs to remain unchallenged.

   Since y’all is bein’ so nice as to read these words , I go right ahead and quote some Woody Guthrie ……. now….. ” If we make it so’s you can’t make money on war ,
   we will all forget what we are killing
   folks for. ”

   Yeah, how about that. ” If we make it so’s
   you can’t make money on war , we will
   all forget what we are killing folks
   for. ”

   Tell ‘em Woody said so !

   Timothy R. Anderson,

   grandson of farmer. Posted 9 / 29 / 06

   29 September 2006, 3:10 pm

10. Jim:

    Folks, get real, get focused. The US is now effectively a dictatorship. People are on forums mouthing fantsies and opinion while their own country is being literally stolen from under them. Our absolutely supine, corrupt, venal, blackmailed, and miserable congress has just said it’s ok to suspend Habeas Corpus. It may be that a miracle will take place and the the Supreme Court may intervene effectively. Not too likely, but possible. So, welcome to our dictatorship, which has hitchhiked the government while we worry about philosophical themes over our capucchinos. We are overfed and overly-comfortable narcissistic fools. so the money-power loves us, enclosed as we are in our little bubbles. This allows them to literally buy-up the world: globalization, privatization, structural adjustments, war on terror, blah, blah, blah! Concedrvatism, liberalism, socialism, feminism…blah, blah, blah.

    “Give me the power to issue a nation’s money; then I do not care who makes the laws.”

    We spend our lives to obtain what is created out of thin air and without any accountability. This rapid concentration of financial and corporate power is creating wars and enslaving peope all over the globe. We have just seen that the laws do not apply to those who control this power. Meanwhile, we are distracted…

    Mike Ruppert got it right: until the money issue is settled nothing will be settled, because they have the power. But we just don’t seem to get it.

    29 September 2006, 4:18 pm

11. Jorge:

    http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/

    Thursday, September 28, 2006
    American Politics: Cowards and Traitors and the People Who Let Them Operate

    As the Bush administration prepares for an illegal and predictably disastrous attack on Iran in the coming weeks (quite possibly with the use of nuclear weapons), and as Congress, the corporate media and the American people carry on as though nothing was happening, it is becoming clear that American democracy and its tradition of constitutional government and rule of law are under attack by two vile and insidious organizations.

    The Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

    The Republicans, in control of both the House and the Senate, are behaving like the Communist Party Central Committee of old in the Soviet Union. With few exceptions, the party’s elected representatives in Congress simply clap and approve the mad schemes and crimes of a president who is increasingly becoming a dictator in all but name.

    In a way, it’s worse than the old Soviet CP, where at least there was sometimes spirited debate before a decision was handed down by the Politburo, and Leninist conformity reigned. In the Republican Party, there isn’t even that limited kind of discussion going on. Schemes like massive tax breaks for the rich, revocation of international treaties on arms control or war crimes, and even a decision to attack a country like Iran that poses no immediate threat to anyone, are developed in the inner sanctum of the West Wing, delivered to the Congress or the public as fact, and no questions are asked.

    Meanwhile, the Democrats, who are supposed to be the party of opposition, and who in fact are very close to the ruling party in numerical strength in both houses, are simply laying low, with a national election at which most of them are facing the voters just six weeks off.

    No effort has been made by these so-called opposition officials to find out what Bush is planning in Iran, even though there have been well-documented reports by Time Magazine, the Nation, the New Yorker, Democracy Now, Truth Out, Common Dreams, Raw Story and other credible news organizations that U.S. troops are already operating in Iran, that bombing targets are being selected, that second-stage war plans are already being worked out, and that large numbers of ships, warplanes and cruise missiles are being rushed to the Iran theater for a purely politically-motivated attack that could come before the election.

    This same so-called opposition chose to sit on its hands while a few lonely Republican critics of Bush’s bill giving the president the power to torture detainees and to hold people indefinitely without charge, struggled against its passage. Afraid to take a stand against this frontal assault on law and the Constitution, the Democratic Party’s elected officials just let the bill pass, when a concerted effort by them to support the Republicans in opposition could have turned the tide.

    It’s hard to say which party is more criminal and disgusting. Certainly the Republicans, who are an integral part of the Bush/Cheney/Rove drive to establish a one-party state and a dictatorial presidency, are traitors to the constitution and violators of their oaths of office to uphold and protect that document.

    But so are the Democrats! It is certainly cowardice and even treachery to be in opposition and then to be unwilling to act in defense of country and Constitution. But perhaps an even greater crime is to run for and win public office pledged to fight on behalf of those who elected you, and then to betray your voters by doing nothing when it really matters.

    And on the important issues of war and peace, protecting basic civil liberties, and challenging the crimes of a presidency run amok, that is what the Democratic Party’s elected officials have done: nothing.

    And what of the American people? We have become the “Good Germans” of yore, not just turning our heads, but actually cheering as a president systematically chops gaping holes in the nation’s founding document, spits on the sacrifices of generations of revolutionary and civil war fighters and the soldiers who died in two world wars, and makes a mockery of the two-centuries-old tradition of tri-partite government.

    Germans who lived through the 1930s and early ’40s at least had an excuse for their inaction: opposing the Nazis was to put one’s life, and the lives of one’s family in grave jeopardy. But we Americans, as we permit torture in our name, permit the jailing of children at Guantanamo (yes, some of those “evil-doers” the president mentions were less than 12 when they were carried over to Cuba from Afghanistan in orange suits with their heads in bags), permit the stripping of citizenship rights from native-born Americans, permit the kidnapping and deportation to other nations of American citizens, permit spying on the conversations of defense attorneys’ conversations with their clients, permit warrantless presidential spying on our own and our neighbors’ communications, permit the launching of undeclared wars on innocent peoples, as we in short permit the deconstruction of all that this nation stands for, we face no real personal danger should we stand up and say “No!”

    We are not arrested or jailed for calling the president a tyrant or a traitor. We are not put on the rack for protesting a criminal war. We are not harassed for defending the victims of Bush’s torture and kidnap policies. None of that happens, at least not yet.

    So why are we so silent?

    Some day, when people in a saner world look back at this period of madness, the American people will not come off very well for this collective somnolence and cowardice.

    29 September 2006, 4:55 pm

12. frank:

    Stan, next time you’re in town, head south out of the SFO Airport on 101 south for ten minutes to Harbor Blvd; head west to El Camino Real, make a left and you’ll run right into Rihab’s Bakery (hahaha), which is run by a cool lady from Iraq. The food is killer. But I couldn’t help wondering what she thought of this country; she had tacked up postcards of Baghdad and other spots around the country behind the register. And here the US is bombing her homeland. I didn’t say much, but happily ate my hummus and falafel and stared out the window. You can even take some of her bread back home with ya. But I like the rant.

    29 September 2006, 5:19 pm

13. Mike Davies:

    I heartily agree The scary question is now are we all subject to being disapeared for expresssing our beliefs now that Torture/Loyalty/Gulag bill has passed the House and Senate? I dont think Iv ever been more discouraged about the future.

    29 September 2006, 8:30 pm

14. Marilyn Farhat:

    A campaign to minimize the negative effect on us by global corporations/politicians can have some effect if enough people all over the world engage in a deliberate effort of divestment from such corporations and their products. However, it would mean a major shift in lifestyle and spending habits and a reevaluation of how we view the world and our place in it. It will have to affect everything in our everyday lives, from the clothes we wear, to what and where we eat, to what cars we buy, to the kind of energy we consume. It will have to involve resisting the financing of any and all organizations and states that use that portion of our money to oppress and kill others.

    The fear that many in the U.S. continue to feel after the September 11 attacks are misplaced. Many fail to realize that we have exported terrorist tactics to many nations through agencies like the School of the Americas and by financing and training regimes and groups in the art of killing, torture, and subversion. Our covert operatives are currently in the Middle East wreaking havoc on the ground by pitting different groups against each other and by weakening any opposition to those we deem our friends.

    Many of you will probably remember the article in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh:
    http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/031215fa_fact in which he discusses the approach of the US government to international relations. Our interventions have led to far more deaths of innocent people around the globe in the last 60 years than all the world terrorists combined against anyone in the world. Far more people have died in Iraq in the last 3 years than died under Saddam in 20 years. In Lebanon alone, over 1,300 people died on the spot as a result of the Israeli blitz campaign. Most of the casualties were civilian and many children. Israel’s 140 casualties were mostly military who died within Lebanese borders during their invasion and occupation of that country. Many were killed in hand to hadn combat. Meanwhile one of our “esteemed” intellectuals, Alan Dershowitz tries to justify war crimes against civilians: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525974885&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle2FPrinter.

    You can also read Norman Finkelstein response to Dershowitz at: http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein08122006.html

    Empires have always ruled by fear. The military and its related institutions and the many sectors of society that rely for their existence on them are vested in maintaining a permanent state of security hyper vigilance because war is good for business. Empires can only exist by conquest and the justification for such conquest. There are way too many people making money off this bogus war and they have us all either snowed or paralyzed with fear while we shop till we drop and while we visit Disney Land at least twice a year.

    29 September 2006, 10:11 pm

15. DeAnander:

    We are overfed and overly-comfortable narcissistic fools. so the money-power loves us, enclosed as we are in our little bubbles. This allows them to literally buy-up the world: globalization, privatization, structural adjustments, war on terror, blah, blah, blah! Concedrvatism, liberalism, socialism, feminism…blah, blah, blah.

    so once again we’re being told that feminism is just a sideshow, despite the substantive and plentiful evidence that misogyny and patriarchy are embedded at the heart of the politics and ideology that keep these thugs in power? or that socialism is irrelevant and has nothing to do with money-power? socialism *is* the analysis of money-power. sigh…

    btw, this country (USA) has already been stolen at least twice — from the first nations people who lived here before whitefellas arrived, and from the immigrant labour that built its infrastructure and wealth (Black slaves, immigrant Chinese, Hispanic farmworkers, etc) but were excluded for generations from any fair share of the profits. all that is new now is that white middle class men are having their “inalienable rights” curtailed — everyone else never had much of any to start with.

    not that the Bush Supreme Dictatorship Law doesn’t scare the bejeezus out of any thinking primate, but spare me the sentimental narratives about how “our” country is being “stolen” — like it was this wondrous fair and free democracy with liberty and justice for all only yesterday, and along came BushCo and wrecked it. arbitrary detention? ask the Japanese immigrants. ask the victims of HUAC about due process and fair trials, or the Rosenbergs or Dreyfus… extralegal torture? ask any of the hundreds of thousands of men and women in US prisons for the last several decades. ask any of the women and girls in sweatshop brothels. executive power hand in glove with corporate wealth? ask the miners of Appalachia.

    sure I’m scared, but it’s not like the waterline of force and fraud and arbitrary state and male power hasn’t been up to our necks all these decades. now it’s just up to our lower lip.

    29 September 2006, 10:48 pm

16. Rhisiart Gwilym:

    Siwmae Stan!

    I love your Memorandum. You’re right of course: the mafia capos shouldn’t be hung, nor suffer any barbarous punishment. To paraphrase Chomsky, if you don’t believe in protecting even the people you most want to torture to death against torture and execution, then you don’t really believe in the abolition of torture and the death penalty.

    However, three things in their disposal really are important:

    1)They should be tried publicly, before the eyes of the entire world, with abolutely scrupulous legal fairness, preferably at Den Haag.

    2)Those convicted should be deprived of all their material wealth, in every form, beyond a modest remnant (by overall global standards, not by the ludicrous standards of the US) to avoid absolute destitution; and as convicted criminals-against-humanity they should be relieved periodically of any new wealth pools which they might put together hereafter.

    (Actually, I think that idea should be applied universally, everywhere in the world where popular tribunals can make it happen, permanently. No-one NEEDS big wealth pools. It should be a universal principle that any who get them should suffer expropriation without apology or compensation, and the loot should be distributed equally to the poorest people everywhere, as ancient civilisations used to do.)

    3)Convicted imperial mafiosi should be compelled to a minimum of ten years of lowly, personal, face-to-face service to the worst-hit communities that they have helped to devastate. (Rumsfeld working as a builder’s assistant on the reconstruction of Fallujah, for example, under the management of Sunni and Cuban supervisors) Nor would I exempt ancient totterers such as Agosto Pinochet or Henry Kissinger, even if all they could do was sit in their wheel-chairs and contribute an hour or so of help each day to the office management work of reconstruction, before they needed to take a nap. A crucial part of this provision is that their surviving victims should be able to see directly face-to-face, within arm’s reach, what little, banal, mediocre shits these supposed monsters really are, and that both sides in this encounter should see also the underlying naked human soul beneath all else.

    From such actions come reconciliation, justice, and a sense of completion.

    One last point, Stan: The Memorandum is a wish-list for a miraculously-transformed society of the — we hope — near future. But in the present reality, it seems that the Bush-Mascotted Junta really may be stupid and desperate enough to make an attack on Iran, against all sense. If this juggernaut, now picking up speed ready for a late October denoument is really in train, how would you, as an ex-US military professional, rate the idea of another ex-US military professional, Wayne Madsen? In his recent piece ‘The Wheels May Be Falling Off The Imperialists’ Plan For Global Hegemony’ (Online Journal). Wayne suggests that the US generals are so near to revolt that it might actually be practical to urge the Joint Chiefs to issue a Writ of Attainder against the BMJ, arrest them in a pro-constitutional coup, and turn them over to the International Criminal Court to stand trial for their vast crimes.

    Seems to me as a European outsider that that approach might just be the best practical bet to save your Republic. That foul swine Mao was dead right when he said that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. What’s left to save democracy in the US? The ratfink mafia capos seem impervious to any more peaceable protest. You seem to suggest, Stan, that honourable and deeply pissed elements within the US military, of all ranks, (genuine US patriots) are being so radicalised by events that they might actually mount such a pro-democracy coup. They would be backed, I imagine, by an awful lot of those US civilians who — as you pointed out a while back — exercise their right to keep and bear arms, so ensuring that a fascist putsch in the US might not be such a cakewalk as the Crazies seem to imagine.

    Failing such a coup, I suppose, somberly, that I shall have to get astride Rocinante again, put on my cardboard helmet, and update and re-issue on behalf of Iran the challenge that I placed on my website (http://ddraiggoch.org) in New Year 03 on behalf of Iraq. Incidentally, not one, NOT ONE! of the mediawhore sewer-rats to whom I sent that challenge had the guts even to reply. A measure of their calibre. Neither the mafia capos, nor their media creatures are any big potatoes really, despite their monstrous virtual images injected into the minds of us common citizens by the Permanent Bullshit Blizzard.

    Cofion gorau i chi, rhyfelwr! Rhisiart Gwilym

    30 September 2006, 8:55 am

17. Marilyn Farhat:

    I think this nation is too vested in its material possessions, the ways to get and keep them, and a sense of moral superiority, to do anything about the abuse of power.

    It may happen when average white Joe or Jane start feeling hunger pangs, when they start losing their jobs, when their homes are pulled from under them because they cannot afford to pay for medical care, and when they start going to prison for resisting and trying to actually do something about it.

    Fifty million Americans (one sixth of the population) have no access to affordable healthcare; and these folks are not the poor or the minorities; those are your middle class working people with families, and they are your single professional men and women who own their own businesses but cannot afford $1,000 a month in health care premiums. Many of them are dying prematurely from lack of preventive care.

    The majority of our high school and college kids are illiterate (let’s not even touch the adults) and are misinformed about history and world affairs.

    Our current political system is is open to abuse. And, sorry folks, I do not believe in total democracies (not that we have one here). I think most people are not fit to vote about many vital issues because, let’s face it, it is difficult to understand those issues and their implications. Democracies are oppressive in principle because the majority can inflict tyranny and oppression legally and democratically. Was not the fate of many a city and its inhabitants put to the vote of the citizens of Athens and other states during the Peloponnesian War? The vote was on whether to kill the inhabitants or not. Is that not what we are doing when we vote about the welfare of our children and the children of the world in all areas of legilsation? Why should we even have to vote about the givens of human life, freedom, and dignity?

    This ship is sinking. It may take a while, but it is sinking, and those who manage to surive and float will have to do something about it. And let’s hope that they will be wise enough not to turn into the bastards they were resisting in the first place.

    There are ways to do it, but it involves a lot of work and a moral set of laws for all time. I am not hopeful even if this regime is changed because we as a people have not changed yet.

    30 September 2006, 11:52 am

18. Stan:

    Maybe we need a different formulaiton for what democracy means. Marilyn, your belief in literacy requirements for political engagement are exctly what was used to prevent Blacks from voting here, and the excuse the Haitian elites use everytime they overturn an election with acoup. Athenian slaves did not vote.

    The formulaton you are giving us is the rationalization for class rule, everywhere… which always resorts to “human nature” as an explanation and lets the current rulers and their system off the hook.

    Elites MAKE issues complicated, then mystify the issues in bureaucracy and lingusitic legerdemain. All politics starts and ends with human bodies, and this does not require a college degree.

    Systems make people the way they are, not the inverse. This is a major point I have been reiterating here, because the belief that bad character makes systems is at the neart of philosophical idealism — and the basis of male bourgeoise rule. The venal materialism you decry is SOCIALIZED into us from birth and reinforced by social conventions, institutions, and beliefs, again and again, every day of our lives… but more importantly!!!!!! by dependency, which sends us back to the system as its vassals for food, shelter, and security. Break the dependency, and the insipid ideological constructs lose their foundations.

    Then again, sometimes to tear up the foundation, you have to first remove the roof (part of what sites like this try to do).

    The value of any social struggle can be fairly accurately guaged by how well it reduces (not displaces) DEPENDENCY. Head on struggle against naked brutality is fairly simple by comparison. That’s why these guys are not that scary (unless we make the the gift of our fear).

    30 September 2006, 1:18 pm

19. Timothy R. Anderson:

    Uh, is it appeasement or is it not appeasement that Saddam Hussein is alive today, Saturday,
    September 30 , 2006 ? Jim, it may be about money, but is it also about BorRoWED
    money BORroWEd moNey boRROWED money ?

    Like I said previous, I’s a farmer’s
    grandson.

    Timothy R. Anderson

    http://www.warisaracket.org

    Because war IS a racket.

    30 September 2006, 1:21 pm

20. Jim:

    Marilyn, the US is your country, since you live in it. That’s not sentimental nonsense, it’s just fact. And you’re putting words in my mouth when you think I say feminism is a “sideshow.” It’s just that if this country reverts to being a real dictatorship, as it threatens too, all these other ends become unachievable in that 1984-like context. What happened to the Japanese hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it. Like I said, get real, get out of your bubble. Face the facts and see what the priorities have to be in order to be able to even envisage any other programs.

    30 September 2006, 5:25 pm

21. Stan:

    I still don’t get this dictatorship talk. Not while we say the things we say over email, and not as just this adminsitration. Poor people NEVER had a right to habeus corpus. Clinton imprisoned more people than any Republican. McCarthyism was worse in terms of state intimdation. This is exactly the kind of breathless alarmism that drove me out of the CP… the fascists are coming, the fascists are coming… it’s gone on for decades, and always translated into supporting Democrats, just as this suggests we have to put feminism aside to “save our democracy.”

    The “tempo task” is male power-preservation play. http://www.why-war.com/news/2004/02/23/genderan.html

    Gotta run. Wet diapers and empty little bellies.

    30 September 2006, 7:13 pm

22. peggy:

    I’m with Rhisiart Gwilym on this one. A bloodless military coup might be the best way.

    Stan, the abolishment of habeas corpus is definitely a matter to be concerned about. The fact that the poor have had insufficient, incompetent legal protection all along does not mean that simply deleting a fundamental consitutional right from the books is a trival act.

    30 September 2006, 9:26 pm

23. DeAnander:

    Ahem. That wasn’t Marilyn. That was me. Try to read the signature line before scolding the messenger.

    And the US is not my country. First off, I’m not a US citizen, I just live here for the moment. And secondly I agree with V Woolf that “as a woman I have no country.” There is no country where, as a woman, I have full citizenship, equal civil rights, physical security, equal pay, etc.

    The rightward slither of the US since the 70s is alarming and unpleasant, but it’s been this bad before. Suggest a read of US history of the 1890’s through WWII. This is just the Alien & Sedition Acts and the McCarthy insanity all over again. They are not yet hanging, burning, and castrating male labour leaders as they did in the teens and 20’s of the last century — not in the US anyway, only in its puppet states like Colombia. And feminism, if you hadn’t noticed, *is* a strategy of resistance to the Bush Regime. They are attacking women’s rights along with the Constitution and every other Enlightenment value, and they need to be fought on all fronts at once.

    It’s about time we had a serious discussion of what “fascism” really means, its historical antecedents, and why it’s generally counterproductive to call any wingnuts we don’t like “fascists.” There are specific aspects to the current rightwing neolib regime that are reminiscent of fascism but after about three years of arguing the point with my buddy JB (whose historical literacy, particularly in the history of the Communist Party USA and Europe, is astonishing) I have come around to his point of view and cannot call BushCo genuine fascists. Authoritarians yes, patriarchal yes, militarist yes, totalitarian wannabes yes. But Fascism was something historically specific and I don’t think the conditions for its recrudescence obtain today. What the elites are working on today is something more like feudalism, imho.

    I’ll try to put together something on “the F word” over the next week or so… [promises promises]

    30 September 2006, 9:32 pm

24. Marilyn Farhat:

    To Jim,

    I do not know what you are referring to regarding feminism and “sideshow.” That was not me. Maybe you were thinking of another poster/commenter?

    I do not appreciate the implication about my allegiance or lack of it to any country or anything questioned by anyone. I have seen things and crap that would send most people here packing and I take everything I do in life seriously. So, I think I am entitled to say anything I want as long as it is civilized and does not attack individual people personally or as long as it does not advocate for violence and oppression.

    We are all adults here and we are entitled to our opinion. Sometimes there is inference about the posters without really knowing them. I do not engage in the tactic of personal condescention and I would appreciate it if others don’t, otherwise I am out of here. There are other things I could be doing and, I can assure you, I am pretty busy.

    The US is my country and I care very deeply about it and the people who live in it, no matter who they are or what they believe in, and I participate fully in all its aspects, political, social, etc. This discussion is part of that involvement that is required of me as a functioning citizen and that I am able and willing to engage in. That does not mean I am not angry about what is happening. I am extremely angry and frustrated and I would hate for the day to come when my son will be forced to join some kind of government enforced military group to go to the Middle East to kill his cousins and grandmother. As Americans, we are closer to the rest of the world than we or those in power are willing to admit. That closeness may be one hopeful aspect in our future as a nation if monopolized on wisely and compassionately.

    Stan,

    I agree we should not be encouraging class divisions or increasing them. The vote issue I was referring to has to do with the issues themselves as much as the people voting on them.

    Also, the lack of information or education I was referring to does not deal with a particular class of people. One can still be a college graduate and be an idiot and an immoral person. Illiteracy to me, I should clarify, encompasses more than just reading or writing. It involves understanding history and our place in it. I did not clarify properly.

    There are certain issues on the ballots that citizens are asked to vote on that they have no clue about, have never heard of before, and have no knowledge of the impact if they pass or not. I have been there and done that. I still struggle with the ballot every time I vote. One would have to be an economic and political scientist to vote wisely on some of those issues. Some of them are not critical, but some issues are. Even our Congress is not fit to do that since, by their admission, they do not read much of the legislation they vote on anyway. That is not a properly functioning democracy.

    At the same time, many who do not understand the issues may opt out of voting, to some degree or altogether, precisely because they do not understand the issues or because they feel that their vote does not count and they are disenchanted with the government. That is a common theme among those who choose not to vote.

    We can never have a perfect world no matter what system of government we get. But the danger in this one is that it is a class society with a lot of injustice in the guise of democracy and freedom. It is a corporate democracy (encouraged by the lobby system) that is wreaking havoc on the world for centuries to come. That is the point. We are presenting a deceiving view to our citizens and the rest of the world, but the world is catching on.

    I think there is a lot of unspoken fear among many in the US precisely because we have not been through the terrible tragedies other nations have gone through in recent history where life and death are the issue. Those societies have become less fearful in their approach to problems.

    I am constantly hearing from my “peace camp” friends that many of them are thinking of leaving (some have left already) because they are dissatisfied with the abuse of power and the way the situation in the Middle East is being conducted. And I ask them, don’t you think that it is better to stay and work on a solution? They just cannot handle the pain and the fear and the realization that their cherished country is headed down a potential abyss. I am a firm believer in sticking it out for the sake of our children even if there is no hope (and I am not saying there isn’t).

    During the last Israeli assault on Lebanon, I was on the phone every couple of days talking to family and friends. The common theme was: we are staying here and dying here. Let them come and kill us. We are waiting for them. This is our home and we are all in it together. Most people in that part of the world have been through hair raising experiences. We, on the other hand, have not, but some of our soldiers have (another disconnect between the citizenry and its combat military). We, as a nation, are disconnected from the violence that is inflicted on other groups on a daily basis around the world.

    I think there is this misperception that since 9-11 we have become more at risk and that terrorists are after us now. Well, terrorism did not start on 9-11 and it was directed at non-Americans long before it was at us.

    At the same time, our history has shown that we have oppressed so many groups from the native Americans, to the African slaves, to the Chinese, to the Irish, to the Japanese, and now the Arabs and Muslims (I probably forgot a few), we really did not lose anything. Let us not even leave out the Communists or anyone that smelled like one. That was one of the most fascist periods of US history. Up until recently, college students and professors could not teach Marxist theory in American colleges. I had to go through the US residency process in the 80s. One of the first questions they ask you is: Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist party? And God help you if you answered “yes.”

    The difference now is that the ruling parties have become bolder in trying to pass legislation that will make it legal to oppress people so they will not be held accountable for the immoral but now legal acts.

    30 September 2006, 10:14 pm

25. lapetrov:

    Marilyn makes a good point about illiteracy, but I see a slight problem with the issue of adding “history” to reading and writing. The fact of the matter is there isn’t any one history. We can all be well-versed in “history,” but never see it from any other perspective than our own (national/ethnic/etc.) point of view.

    I may (think I) understand “history and my place in it,” but where YOU place me and how YOU understand MY history may be radically different than how I see it. Case in point, today I asked my class what they knew about the 1950s and not a single one of them mentioned “atomic age” or realized that while the US was living it up, the rest of the world was basically freaking out about the very real, very scary reality of now-proven, near-instantaneous mass human destruction. They just stared at me.

    None of which is meant to bog us down in an interminable see of “relativism.” But, a fundamental stumbling block to making any headway in the fight for peace and justice is the sad truth that it is too seldom that we see anything from any other point of view but our own, and when we do, it’s too often only to argue against it. We don’t engage each other so much as argue to win the argument/convince others we are “right.” That will get us nowhere; it is an ethos and process that will only produce more of the same as what we’ve already seen forever in “history.”

    (And by “we” I don’t mean to say here, at FS per se.)

    2 October 2006, 9:05 pm

26. Jorge:

    Anti-war.com–Justin Raimondo

    October 2, 2006
    Are You an ‘Unlawful Combatant’?
    Maybe so…

    There has been a great deal of discussion about the Military Commissions Act of 2006 [.pdf], recently passed by both houses of Congress, and most of it has to do with the provisions allowing torture of alien detainees, that is, of non-citizens apprehended in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq, and their treatment at the hands of their American captors. Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, all Republicans, grandstanded for weeks over the torture provisions, then capitulated. Another “Republican maverick,” Arlen Specter, zeroed in on the real issue, however, when he said the bill would set us back 800 years by repealing the habeas corpus protections against arbitrary arrest and jailings – and then went ahead and voted for it, anyway.

    Liberal opposition mainly centered around the morality – or, rather, immorality – of torture, but the debate largely ignored the ticking time-bomb at the heart of this legislation, scheduled to go off, perhaps, in tandem with some future crisis, e.g., another terrorist attack on American soil: the redefinition of the “unlawful combatant” concept that lays the foundations for this administration’s reconstruction of the gulag. Here is the new, broadened definition, as enunciated in the legislation recently passed by the House:

    “The term ‘unlawful enemy combatant’ means – (i) a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant (including a person who is part of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or associated forces); or (ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the president or the secretary of defense.”

    It doesn’t say “alien” or “terrorist,” although it specifically includes members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It says “person” – any person, including American citizens. As Bruce Ackerman, professor of law at Yale and author of Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism, puts it:

    “Buried in the complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.”

    Congress has now granted the president the powers of a dictator. The rest of the story of our slide into absolutism is merely a matter of filling in the details.

    Our rulers will naturally continue to pretend that we live in a normal democratic country, that the Constitution still means something, and that nothing essential has really changed – but, of course, everything has changed, as the post-9/11 War Party has relentlessly argued, and we had better get used to it. Because if you very vocally and aggressively refuse to get used to it, they can and perhaps one day will come for you. As an Arab friend of mine puts it when describing the routine operations of Middle Eastern police states, “You will never see the light.”

    My Arab friend, a recent immigrant, lives in fear of arbitrary arrest, having been constantly exposed to the danger and possibility of it in his native land and during his travels through the Middle East, and it hasn’t faded with his arrival in this country. He flinches every time he sees someone in uniform, glancing up fearfully as I open the door to a FedEx delivery guy, and tracks police cars out of the corner of his eye as they cruise down the street. He is forever posing hypothetical situations in which he becomes the victim of a policeman who confronts him – perhaps on grounds of looking “suspicious” – and the story invariably ends with his deportation. Or perhaps, he says, they will simply “take me” – and with this he simulates a cop grasping him by the neck – “and send me to Guantanamo. I will never see the light.”

    This kind of fear is understandable to Americans only on a very abstract level. We, after all, have no experience with a police state – not in the sense of a systematic totalitarian approach to repression – of which the European and Third World nations have plenty. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for all his elaborate and extensive wartime apparatus of political repression and propaganda, never even came close to the police-state methods of his European cousins-once-removed in Moscow, Berlin, and Rome. And the comic-opera machinations of J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, while reprehensible, never approached the savage efficiency of the KGB – about the only efficient institution in Soviet society.

    The closest we came was in 1798, with the imposition of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which legalized the deportation of alien residents and criminalized criticism of the government, particularly the president. The Acts were, in effect, a Federalist coup d’etat, in which the neo-royalists grouped around the Federalist Party sought to ditch the Constitution and repeal the American revolution.

    The Federalist counter-revolution was carried out under the colors of “national security,” of course, and in the shadow of war: as in the Bushian version, a fifth column of enemy aliens was a major target of the 1798 legislation. The Naturalization Act sought to limit support for the Jeffersonians by lengthening the residency requirements for immigrants: most new citizens of the youthful republic were instinctual Jeffersonians, drawn to the New World by the bright promise of liberty. The Alien Friends Act and the Alien Enemies Act, taken together, comprise a near-exact replica of the Military Commissions Act, mandating the seizure, detention, and deportation of male foreign nationals and resident aliens deemed hostile to the United States in wartime. The target: tens of thousands of French citizens residing in the U.S., who were unsympathetic to the Federalist cause. The real target of the coup leaders, however, wasn’t a foreign-born fifth column, but a domestic one.

    The Sedition Act made it illegal for anyone to write, print, publish, or speak against the government in a manner deemed “false, scandalous, and malicious” and designed to hold the authorities in “contempt or disrepute.” In wartime, argued the Federalists, presaging our own red-state fascists, it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government, and several prominent journalists critical of the Federalists were tried, and some convicted. Opposition to the Sedition Act did much to fuel the subsequent Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1800.

    I wonder if history will repeat itself, this time – or will we enter a timeline where the neo-Federalists finally succeed in their scheme to impose a dictatorship on American shores?

    There is, of course, no equivalent of the Sedition Act of 1798 in the Military Commissions Act: only the seed of one, cited above. It establishes the principle that an American citizen may be seized and locked up in a military prison, stripped of the protections traditionally afforded him by the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, there is the question of how it will be enforced, and certainly there are numerous political factors to consider: repression without some degree of popular support is a risky business, as the Soviets came to understand only after it was too late. The administration must take all this into account before acting.

    In the present legal and political atmosphere, however, it won’t be long before this malignant seed sends its tendrils aboveground and blossoms into a full-grown and fearsome flower of evil. One has only to listen to the latest pronouncement from our Beloved Leader, out on the campaign trail, implying that the Democrats are dancing on the borderline between criticism and treason when they bring up the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Speaking to the Reserve Officers Association, he averred:

    “Some have selectively quoted from this document to make the case that by fighting the terrorists – by fighting them in Iraq – we are making our people less secure here at home. This argument buys into the enemy’s propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we’re provoking them.”

    Translation: A vote for the Democrats – or, rather, as the Great Decider would say, the “cut-and-run” Democrats – is a vote for al-Qaeda. Crude, and it remains to be seen how effective, yet this is not mere campaign rhetoric: Bush’s equation of antiwar criticism with “the enemy’s propaganda” is precisely the argument made by the radical ideologues who inhabit the fever swamps of organized neoconservatism. At their most feverish, the more excitable among them have theorized that the First Amendment is expendable when it comes to the “war on terrorism,” and that speech that tends to “incite” violence in the form of terrorism can be legitimately curtailed. Certainly the Europeans – with recent legislation limiting speech in Britain, and “hate speech” laws endemic throughout the European Union – have made great strides along this road. In America, however, the new authoritarians have, until now, had a tougher row to hoe.

    During the 1940s, the Justice Department – obeying the president’s command to go after antiwar dissenters – launched a sedition trial that initially sought to indict prominent politicians and activists associated with the America First movement, but the radicals in the administration were reined in after the legal difficulties became all too apparent. The Justice Department wound up going after a group of 30 or so mostly harmless cranks, charging them with initiating a Nazi “conspiracy of ideas.” Among the indicted was Lawrence Dennis, the noted writer and intellectual. The trial was a farce from beginning to end.

    Under the Justice Department’s legal theory, anyone who held views that in any way echoed or agreed with any aspect of Nazi ideology or pronouncements could be said to be engaged in “objectively” aiding the enemy. In this way, all the indicted individuals – many of whom had never laid eyes on their fellow “conspirators” – could be tied together, and then linked to an international network headquartered, naturally enough, in Berlin. These people had bought into “the enemy’s propaganda” – and the Roosevelt administration was determined to jail them.

    In the end, however, the drama of the trial petered out and descended into parody. Dragging on for months on end, with testimony mainly consisting of government attorneys reading the defendant’s propagandistic efforts aloud, the Great Sedition Trial of 1940, which started with plenty of fanfare from the administration’s amen corner, soon became a laughingstock, and then – fatally – a bore. When the judge died of a heart attack several months into the trial, the administration thought better of it and pulled in its horns.

    One suspects, however, that this administration will not be so easily deterred. To begin with, they won’t have to deal with a judge or bad publicity, because the “trial” will be conducted by a military tribunal, operating in secret. Secondly, the defendants will stand trial without benefit of constitutional protections normally afforded to all American citizens. I say “normally” because I am still living in the world before the passage of our modern-day Alien and Sedition Act, at least mentally. But it’s a new world, now.

    The exact contours of this strange new world are vague, but they are fast coming into painfully clear focus. As the president equates criticism of the Iraq war with “enemy propaganda,” and the neocon media blares away at the theme of “dissent = treason” – or, as Glenn Reynolds puts it, “they’re not antiwar, they’re on the other side” – it isn’t hard to imagine that we have a few sedition trials in our future.

    My expectations are dire, although this could simply be my own subjective impression, a mood that will pass. I can’t help feeling, however, a sense of gathering dread, attached not just to the Military Commissions Act but arising out of the political atmosphere surrounding its passage. I never could understand – in the sense of share – the fear of authority that emanates from my Arab friend every time he sees someone in uniform. Now, however, I am beginning to feel it myself – as we all will.

    3 October 2006, 3:31 pm

27. Elki:

    As the late Bill Hicks was atested saying:

    “I’m so sick of arming the world and then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms, you know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of them. We’re like the bullies of the world, you know. We’re like Jack Palance in the movie Shane, throwing the pistol at the sheep herder’s feet: “Pick it up.” “I don’t wanna pick it up mister, you’ll shoot me.” “Pick up the gun.” “Mister, I don’t want no trouble, huh. I just came down town here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don’t even know what gingham is, but she goes through about 10 rolls a week of that stuff. I ain’t looking for no trouble, mister.” “Pick up the gun.” Boom, boom. “You all saw him. He had a gun.”

    3 October 2006, 6:09 pm

28. elaina:

    Stan, dude. Your idears are great but you left out the porn industry. I’d like memo #2 to be all about that, please (while it should have been part of memo #1. I’ll forgive you.)

    And no, feminism ain’t a sideshow based in outta touch political-theoretical mental masturbation. Like the revolution will happen without it. Good luck on that, fellas.

    3 October 2006, 8:53 pm

29. Sam:

    For those who refuse to do their homework on the despicable legacy of COINTELPRO in America, Carolyn Baker has done it for you in this report. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the harassment of Mike Ruppert and FTW over the years – including but not limited to the recent burglary of our offices – were all textbook COINTELPRO operations.

    Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has introduced legislation calling for an investigation into current COINTELPRO activities being carried out by the U.S. Government. May God bless and protect Cynthia McKinney and all the important work that she continues to do. However, I am positive her legislation will be shot down in short order, especially considering the fact that she recently “lost” her Congressional seat under extremely suspicious circumstances involving Diebold electronic voting machines.

    Nevertheless, it will be extremely noteworthy for the historical record to see Congress prevent a much-needed investigation at the same moment it gives the executive branch the right to lock up anyone who opposes the President indefinitely and torture them. The American Republic is long dead, and fascism is no longer creeping in this country – it is solidified and documented as the law of the land. – MK]

    THE WAR ON YOU:
    U.S. GOVERNMENT TARGETING OF AMERCIAN DISSIDENTS - Part I

    By Carolyn Baker, Ph.D.

    © Copyright 2006, From The Wilderness Publications, http://www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. This story may NOT be posted on any Internet web site without express written permission. Contact admin@copvcia.com. May be circulated, distributed or transmitted for non-profit purposes only.

    October 3rd 2006, 2:47PM [PST] - In the wake of National Security Agency’s (NSA) admissions that the Bush administration has been wiretapping phone conversations of American citizens and last week’s Congressional approval of the torturing and disappearing of enemies of the state, I have watched progressives, wide-eyed with amazement (in spite of the earlier passage and renewal of the USA Patriot Act), inundate the internet with proclamations that the United States has “now” become a fascist state. When I wrote, “Hello, You Are Now Living In A Fascist Empire” in 2004 and “Why I Will Not Vote In 2004”, my inbox was deluged with diatribes by progressives against my “extremism” and the ease with which I was “giving up hope” on America. When Mike Ruppert wrote two of his most brilliant and astute articles ever, “The ‘F’ Word,” and what became Chapter 23 of CROSSING THE RUBICON, “Eating The Chosen People,” FTW was chastised for being paranoid and pre-supposing that the American republic had already collapsed. Only a few years later, we now hear the same progressive voices drawing the same conclusions that we drew immediately after 9/11. Most continue to maintain some modicum of faith in the disgracefully corrupt election process in the U.S., and few will confront the irrefutable legal and military evidence which confirms that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11 attacks. But FTW readers and others with an incisive map and a working knowledge of American history were not aghast when the U.S. Congress ruled that torture and disappearance are perfectly congruent (I say this with tongue in cheek) with the principles elucidated in the United States Constitution. Those individuals understand that targeting American citizens who hold dissident views is almost as old as our nation itself and certainly as American as apple pie.

    A LONG HISTORY OF TARGETING AMERICAN DISSIDENTS

    In 1798, only 11 years after the U.S. Constitution was signed by its Framers, when tensions between the U.S. and Great Britain were accelerating in a lead-up to the War of 1812, the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by Congress in the John Adams administration. At that time Irishmen and Frenchmen in America were seen as potentially dangerous revolutionaries because of the recent French Revolution and the Irish rebellions. Thomas Jefferson, a lifelong rival but also a friend of John Adams, vehemently opposed the acts as tyrannical, which indeed they were. In fact, one cannot read them without wondering if one is reading Congressional legislation in 1798 or in 2006:
    The Naturalization Act, which extended the residency period from 5 to 14 years for those aliens seeking citizenship; this law was aimed at Irish and French immigrants who were often active in American politics.
    The Alien Act, which allowed the expulsion of aliens deemed dangerous during peacetime
    The Alien Enemies Act, which allowed the expulsion or imprisonment of aliens deemed dangerous during wartime. This was never enforced, but it did prompt numerous Frenchmen to return home.
    The Sedition Act, which provided for fines or imprisonment for individuals who criticized the government, Congress, or president in speech or print.1

    Historian, Howard Zinn, notes that even though the legislation “seemed to directly violate the First Amendment, …it was enforced. Ten Americans were put in prison for utterances against the government, and every member of the Supreme Court in 1798-1800, sitting as an appellate judge, held it constitutional.”2

    During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus when after the outbreak of the war, Lincoln claimed emergency powers and authorized the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of aiding the South. Chief Justice Roger Taney in Ex Parte Merryman was outraged and wrote a lengthy opinion to the contrary. The debate has engaged constitutional scholars ever since.

    In 1866 in Ex-Parte Milligan, Lambden P. Milligan was sentenced to death by a military commission in Indiana during the Civil War for engaging in acts of disloyalty. Milligan sought release through habeas corpus from a federal court. In the final opinion, Justice Davis, speaking for the Court, held that trials of civilians by presidentially-created military commissions are unconstitutional. Martial law cannot exist where the civil courts are operating. One passage from the decision is particularly poignant and extremely relevant in a post-9/11 world:

    The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false, for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence, as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority.3

    During the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, as labor unions organized and gathered power, as socialism grew in popularity among working and other oppressed peoples, industries owned by Rockefeller, Morgan, Harriman, Carnegie, and others, began hiring their own police forces and goon squads to infiltrate labor unions and spy on the political and personal activities of union organizers for the purpose of bringing arrests and convictions and eliminating all socialist activity in the nation. The most notorious example was the Homestead Strike of 1892, when Pinkerton agents killed several people while enforcing the strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie.

    Before and during World War I the United States government became extremely suspicious of pacifists such as Scott Nearing and Jane Addams who opposed the war on moral grounds and who spoke out stridently against imperialism. In 1908 Theodore Roosevelt was frequently borrowing from his Secret Service and using a few agents for special investigations into corruption in various locations throughout the country. In 1918 during the Wilson administration, however, these agents began conducting “slacker raids” on the homes of men opposed to World War I and who refused to serve in the U.S. military.

    The end of World War I and the year 1919 saw the beginning of an era known as the Red Scare in which the United States government became hysterically xenophobic regarding pro-socialist foreigners living in the country. Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer, hired a young investigator, J. Edgar Hoover to lead a witchunt against radicalism in America, and Hoover came up with over 450,000 names of suspected radicals and wrote the first government study of communism called “The Report On Radicalism.” Radicals and labor leaders had been striking, marching, and writing vociferously against government and corporate oppression, and in some cases, detonating bombs.

    On November 7, 1919, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists were arrested. Palmer and Hoover found no evidence of a proposed revolution, but a large number of these suspects were held without trial for a long time. The vast majority were eventually released, but Emma Goldman and 247 other people, were deported to Russia

    On January 2, 1920, another 6,000 were arrested nationwide and held without trial. These raids took place in several cities and became known as the Palmer Raids.
    A. Mitchell Palmer and John Edgar Hoover found no evidence of a proposed revolution, but large numbers of these suspects, many of them members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), continued to be held without trial. When Palmer announced that the communist revolution was likely to take place on May 1st, mass panic took place. In New York, five elected Socialists were expelled from the legislature.

    An excellent book detailing the Red Scare is William Preston, Jr.’s Aliens And Dissenters: Federal Suppression Of Radicals, 1903-1933

    Much more familiar in the minds of most contemporary Americans is the McCarthy Era of the post-World War II 1950s. Rather than the use of raids or goon squads, the FBI and other federal agents utilized blacklisting and paid informants to intimidate and criminalize innocent professionals in government, educational institutions, and the entertainment industry. While most traditional historians teach that the McCarthy Era ended in the mid-fifties, one need only listen to a George W. Bush or Dick Cheney rant on terrorism to hear echoes of the exact ideology of the deranged Senator from Wisconsin. All that is required is to replace the word “communist” with the word “terrorist.”

    In 1956 a special program was designed by the FBI—the Counter Intelligence Program or COINTELPRO, which lasted “officially”, until 1971. In the words of Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, authors of THE COINTELPRO PAPERS, “it involved a unique experiment. Though covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the COINTELPRO’s were the first to be both broadly targeted and centrally directed.” [Churchill and Vander Wall’s book is strongly recommended and contains a treasure-trove of copies of original FBI documents.] While overall operations were centrally directed from Washington, day-to-day operations involved local field offices and required a great deal of communication back and forth from Washington to those offices. COINTELPRO generated an enormous paper trail which was largely kept hidden until the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) brought the paper trail to light, at which time, the FBI discontinued all of its formal domestic counter-intelligence programs, but did not cease its covert activities against U.S. dissidents. In fact, when J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, the FBI “re-packaged” itself as a “new FBI”, but its COINTELPRO operations continued covertly. In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee, named after its founding Chair, Idaho Senator Frank Church, released volumes of documentation of FBI and CIA abuses. Church and his successor were driven from office, and then-National Security Advisor to Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, was instrumental in blocking the flow of information from the Church Committee to the public.4

    Although the original objective of COINTELPRO in 1956 was to “increase factionalism, cause disruption and win defections” inside the Communist Party, USA, it soon expanded to include disruption of the Socialist Workers Party, the Ku Klux Klan, African American nationalist groups, the Black Panther Party (BPP), the New Left, and the American Indian Movement (AIM). While many arrests of members of these groups were made over the decades, it is important to understand that even in cases where crimes had actually been committed, and those cases are few, the FBI policy of neutralizing these groups was in place prior to the arrests. For example, in 1919, J. Edgar Hoover wrote a letter proposing a strategy to neutralize African American nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey. In the proposal, Hoover recommends that the federal government invest vast legal resources to contrive a case against Garvey in order to make him appear guilty of a crime. As Churchill and Vander Hall note, “The key to understanding what really happened in the Garvey case lies squarely in appreciation of the fact that the decision to bring about his elimination had been made at the highest level of the Bureau long before any hint of criminal conduct could be attached to him.”5

    On August 25, 1967, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, wrote a top-priority memo to all field offices clearly defining the purpose of COINTELPRO:

    The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder…No opportunity should be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques the organizational and personal conflicts of the leadership of the groups and where possible an effort should be made to capitalize upon existing conflicts between competing black nationalist organizations.6

    Included in “black nationalist hate-type organizations” were the National Association For the Advancement Of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) under the direction of Martin Luther King, Jr. Increasingly, attention was focused on King of whom Charles Brennan, FBI counter-intelligence specialist, stated: “We must mark [King] now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security…it may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.”7

    As we know Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, 1968 with very few answers regarding his murder and multitudinous questions left behind. The best analysis of King’s murder, in my opinion, is William Pepper’s Orders To Kill and his later analysis, An Act Of State. The racist J. Edgar Hoover, whose own closeted, bizarre sexuality leaves many unanswered questions about his prurient curiosities regarding King’s personal life, ordered surveillance of King’s social activities and friendships, whispering incessantly of King’s purported infidelity to his wife. In a 1968 memo to field offices, Hoover details the strategy for neutralizing black liberation activists. Among them: “Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community. The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically in three ways. You must discredit these groups and individuals to, first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to ‘liberals’ who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalists simply because they are Negroes. Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement….”

    Before King’s death the Black Panther Party was organizing in major cities across America, and in late 1967 the Panthers initiated a free breakfast program for black children and offered free health care to many ghetto residents. By mid-1968 these measures had been augmented by a community education project and an anti-heroin campaign. The party was offering a viable strategy to improve the overall spiritual and material well being of ghetto life. Black community perceptions of the BPP were extremely positive and vastly different from the perceptions of the white police establishment.

    In a September, 1968 memo to COINTELPRO Director, William Sullivan, the FBI office in Washington ordered that, “…the counter-intelligence program against this organization [Black Panther Party] be accelerated and that each office submit concrete suggestions as to future action to be taken against the BPP.”8 The memo continues:

    These suggestions are to create factionalism between not only the national leaders but also local leaders, steps to neutralize all organizational efforts of the BPP as well as create suspicion amongst the leaders as to each others’ spouses and suspicion as to who may be cooperating with law enforcement. In addition, suspicion should be developed as to who may be attempting to gain control of the organization for their own private betterment, as well as suggestions as to the best method of exploiting the foreign visits made by BPP members. We are also soliciting recommendations as to the best method of creating opposition to the BPP on the part of the majority of the residents of the ghetto area.9

    The ultimate tactic of “neutralization” was outright assassination. In late 1968, William O’Neal, working with COINTELPRO had infiltrated the BPP and become the bodyguard of a key member of the Chicago Black Panthers, Fred Hampton. O’Neal supplied the Chicago police and the FBI with the floor plan of Hampton’s apartment, and on the evening of December 3, slipped a dose of secobarbital into a glass of Kool-Aid consumed by Hampton who was comatose in his bed when a fourteen-man police team slammed into his home at 4 AM on the morning of December 4. Hampton was shot three times in the chest and twice more in the head at point-blank range. One year later, December 8, 1969 in Los Angeles, the target was Geronimo Pratt who unbeknownst to police decided to sleep on the floor that night rather than in his bed. A barrage of gunfire burst into Pratt’s apartment but missed him entirely. This time, the Panthers decided to defend themselves, and for four hours fought off police refusing to surrender until the press and the public were on the scene. A U.S. Attorney in San Francisco concluded that, “Whatever they are doing, they are out to get the Panthers.”10

    In 1971, George Jackson, celebrated prison author and honorary BPP Field Marshall, was assassinated in San Quentin Prison, an event which not only eliminated Jackson but neutralized attorney Angela Davis, head of Jackson’s defense organization and a leading spokesperson for the Panthers.

    In Sacramento the FBI used an infiltrator to have the Sacramento chapter of the BPP print a racist and violence-oriented coloring book for children. When it was brought to the attention of Bobby Seale and other Panther members, it was immediately ordered destroyed, but the Bureau mailed copies to companies such as Safeway, Mayfair Markets, and the Jack-In-The-Box Corporation which had been contributing food to the Breakfast for Children Program in order to cause the withdrawal of support for that program.

    The FBI has admitted that during the COINTELLPRO era it ran some 295 distinct COINTELPRO operations against individuals and organizations which were broadly or narrowly considered parts of the black liberation movement.11

    It is important to understand that during the so-called COINTELPRO era–and as we shall learn in subsequent segments of this series, that era never really ended, one strategy used then and now is that of plausible deniability. That is, in case assassinations or other illegal or disrespectable and unpopular activities committed by high-ranking officials become public, those officials may deny connection to or awareness of those acts or the agents used to carry out such acts. As noted by Mike Ruppert in “By The Light Of A Burning Bridge” FTW over the years has frequently been victimized by attacks that appeared to have the fingerprints of COINTELPRO all over them, down to the use of convicted felons to commit those acts, in which case, the FBI or whatever agency(ies) are involved can plausibly deny connection with such individuals.

    Although we hear virtually nothing about COINTELPRO in mainstream media these days, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has introduced legislation to re-open the investigations of the Church Committee into COINTELPRO. As Congresswoman McKinney states: “We still to this day do not know the full scope of the abusive surveillance, targeting, discrediting and disruptive tactics and plans of the past.”

    1 http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h463.html

    2 Howard Zinn, Peoples’ History Of the United States, p.100.

    3 http://www.constitution.org/ussc/071-002a.htm

    4 https://www.cia.gov/csi/monograph/lawmaker/1.htm

    5 Ward Churchill, Jim Vander Hall, COINTELPRO Papers, p.11.

    6 Brian Glick, War At Home: Cover Action Against U.S. Activists And What We Can Do About It, p.77.

    7 Memorandum, William C. Sullivan to Alan H. Belmont, August 30, 1963, captioned “Communist Party, USA, Negro Question, IS-C.” Document quoted in full in U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Assassinations, Hearings on the Investigation of the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vol. 6, 95th Congress, 2d Session, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1978, pp. 143-144.

    8 FBI Memo: COINTELPRO Papers, p. 124.

    9 Ibid., p. 127

    10 Quoted in Elliff, John T., Crime, Dissent and the Attorney General, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA, 1971, p. 140.

    11 COINTELPRO Papers, p. 164.
    ==========================================================

    September 29, 2006, 9:04 am
    Press Release: US Congressional Representative
    http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0609/S00610.htm

    In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

    Press Release
    September 24, 2006

    REP. McKINNEY INTRODUCES LEGISLATION TO RE-OPEN CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS INTO COINTELPRO PAST AND PRESENT

    (Washington, DC) Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA 4^th) has introduced legislation calling for a re-opening of the investigations of the 1970’s by the United States Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities chaired by Senator Frank Church which led to startling revelations concerning federal, state and local intelligence and law enforcement agency violations of Constitutional rights of privacy, limits on search and seizure, surveillance, wiretapping and disruption of dissent and protected activities, and massive collection of dossiers by FBI, CIA, NSA, Pentagon, Defense Intelligence Agencies and other local agencies, targeting the civil rights, Native American and anti-war movements of the period and “neutralizing” their leadership and discrediting the efforts for social change over decades.

    The most infamous of these abuses was the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, or counter intelligence program, and victims of those attacks remain wrongfully imprisoned to this day. CHAOS, GARDEN PLOT, CABLE SPLICER, LANTERN SPIKE, REX 84 and other programs were carried out by agencies ranging from the CIA to FEMA, including planning for massive arrests and martial law, suspending the Constitution. New laws countered many of these excesses and abuses following from the Church Committee revelations, but not all. Surveillance and disruption, as well as planning and exercises for detention and suspension of civil liberties continued through the 1980s and 1990s against legal domestic organizations supporting democratic movements abroad.

    Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, there were immediate calls to renew COINTELPRO-style surveillance, go to Continuity of Government, release intelligence agencies from the restrictions of the Church Committee era laws (which included the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court to pre-approve Presidential surveillance programs), calls to end the principle of Posse Comitatus, which separates police and military functions, and renewed surveillance and disruption by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Transportation Security Agency (TSA), Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and by certain provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT and related.

    Resolution 1056, introduced on September 21, provides for release of all undisclosed government files on similar past and present abuses which do not compromise an existing intelligence, agent, source or method, for judicial relief for the past victims of COINTELPRO and other programs, and for the re-opening of Congressional hearings into the historical abuses as well as the current renewal and expansion of similar programs that violate human, civil and Constitutional rights. The bill has been referred to both House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.

    “We still to this day do not know the full scope of the abusive surveillance, targeting, discrediting and disruptive tactics and plans of the past,” said Representative McKinney, “and a look back the Nixon era Tom Charles Houston plan, referred to as Å’fascist’ by Congressional investigators, shows us it is being implemented in full since 9/11. Congress has a responsibility to open oversight hearings into the new abuses as well as their historical context, and to acknowledge and give relief to its victims then and now.”
    Contact: John Judge 202-225-1955
    ================================================
    September 29, 2006, 9:04 am
    Press Release: US Congressional Representative
    http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0609/S00610.htm

    In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

    Press Release
    September 24, 2006

    REP. McKINNEY INTRODUCES LEGISLATION TO RE-OPEN CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS INTO COINTELPRO PAST AND PRESENT

    (Washington, DC) Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA 4^th) has introduced legislation calling for a re-opening of the investigations of the 1970’s by the United States Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities chaired by Senator Frank Church which led to startling revelations concerning federal, state and local intelligence and law enforcement agency violations of Constitutional rights of privacy, limits on search and seizure, surveillance, wiretapping and disruption of dissent and protected activities, and massive collection of dossiers by FBI, CIA, NSA, Pentagon, Defense Intelligence Agencies and other local agencies, targeting the civil rights, Native American and anti-war movements of the period and “neutralizing” their leadership and discrediting the efforts for social change over decades.

    The most infamous of these abuses was the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, or counter intelligence program, and victims of those attacks remain wrongfully imprisoned to this day. CHAOS, GARDEN PLOT, CABLE SPLICER, LANTERN SPIKE, REX 84 and other programs were carried out by agencies ranging from the CIA to FEMA, including planning for massive arrests and martial law, suspending the Constitution. New laws countered many of these excesses and abuses following from the Church Committee revelations, but not all. Surveillance and disruption, as well as planning and exercises for detention and suspension of civil liberties continued through the 1980s and 1990s against legal domestic organizations supporting democratic movements abroad.

    Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, there were immediate calls to renew COINTELPRO-style surveillance, go to Continuity of Government, release intelligence agencies from the restrictions of the Church Committee era laws (which included the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court to pre-approve Presidential surveillance programs), calls to end the principle of Posse Comitatus, which separates police and military functions, and renewed surveillance and disruption by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Transportation Security Agency (TSA), Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and by certain provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT and related.

    Resolution 1056, introduced on September 21, provides for release of all undisclosed government files on similar past and present abuses which do not compromise an existing intelligence, agent, source or method, for judicial relief for the past victims of COINTELPRO and other programs, and for the re-opening of Congressional hearings into the historical abuses as well as the current renewal and expansion of similar programs that violate human, civil and Constitutional rights. The bill has been referred to both House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.

    “We still to this day do not know the full scope of the abusive surveillance, targeting, discrediting and disruptive tactics and plans of the past,” said Representative McKinney, “and a look back the Nixon era Tom Charles Houston plan, referred to as Å’fascist’ by Congressional investigators, shows us it is being implemented in full since 9/11. Congress has a responsibility to open oversight hearings into the new abuses as well as their historical context, and to acknowledge and give relief to its victims then and now.”
    Contact: John Judge 202-225-1955
    ==================================================
    USA: Congress Rubber Stamps Torture and Other Abuses

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    September 29, 2006
    Amnesty Internationl
    http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0929-08.htm

    In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

    WASHINGTON - September 29 - By passing the Military Commissions Act, the United States Congress has, in effect, given its stamp of approval to human rights violations committed by the USA in the “war on terror”. This legislation leaves the USA squarely on the wrong side of international law, and has turned bad executive policy into bad domestic law. Amnesty International will campaign for repeal of this act and fully expects the constitutionality of this legislation to be challenged in the courts.

    In the “war on terror”, the US administration has resorted to secret detention, enforced disappearance, prolonged incommunicado detention, indefinite detention without charge, arbitrary detention, and torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

    Thousands of detainees remain in indefinite military detention in US custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Congress has failed these detainees and their families. President Bush has defended the CIA’s use of secret detention and in the debates over the Military Commissions Act, members of Congress have done the same. This policy clearly violates international law.
    ============================================
    Gonzales Cautions Judges on Interfering

    By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN
    September 29, 2006
    The Associated Press
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092900511.html

    In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

    WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is defending President Bush’s anti-terrorism tactics in multiple court battles, said Friday that federal judges should not substitute their personal views for the president’s judgments in wartime.

    He said the Constitution makes the president commander in chief and the Supreme Court has long recognized the president’s pre-eminent role in foreign affairs. “The Constitution, by contrast, provides the courts with relatively few tools to superintend military and foreign policy decisions, especially during wartime,” the attorney general told a conference on the judiciary at Georgetown University Law Center.

    “Judges must resist the temptation to supplement those tools based on their own personal views about the wisdom of the policies under review,” Gonzales said.

    And he said the independence of federal judges, who are appointed for life, “has never meant, and should never mean, that judges or their decisions should be immune” from public criticism.

    “Respectfully, when courts issue decisions that overturn long-standing traditions or policies without proper support in text or precedent, they cannot _ and should not _ be shielded from criticism,” Gonzales said. “A proper sense of judicial humility requires judges to keep in mind the institutional limitations of the judiciary and the duties expressly assigned by the Constitution to the more politically accountable branches.”

    His audience included legal scholars and judges, including Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the Bush administration’s most reliable supporters on the Supreme Court.

    The attorney general did not refer to any specific case or decision but only to wartime, military and foreign affairs cases in general.

    Gonzales has sent Justice Department lawyers into federal courts from coast to coast defending Bush’s detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, his plans to try some of them before military tribunals and his use of the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans without court warrants when they communicate with suspected terrorists abroad.

    Over administration objections, the Supreme Court ordered that detainees could challenge aspects of their imprisonment in federal courts and overturned Bush’s plans for military tribunals, forcing Bush to ask Congress to approve a new version of the panels.

    A handful of federal district judges either ordered an end to the warrantless wiretapping or agreed to hear court challenges to it. Opponents of the plan argue the NSA program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s requirement that the government get a warrant from a court that meets in secret before wiretapping Americans to gain intelligence information.

    The administration contends that despite the statute’s language, the president has inherent authority from the Constitution to order such eavesdropping without court permission. Justice lawyers also have argued that the challenges to the NSA program should be thrown out of court because trials would expose state secrets. Most of the judges’ rulings and proceedings have been stayed pending appeal.

    Gonzales also said he thought more states should move away from having judges stand in partisan elections to keep their seats. Gonzales himself as a Texas Supreme Court justice “had to raise enough money to run print ads and place television spots around the state in order to retain my seat.”

    In such contested elections, “most of the contributions come from lawyers and law firms, many of whom have had, or will have, cases before the court,” Gonzales said. “The appearance of a conflict of interest is difficult to dismiss.”

    He noted favorably that some states have adopted other ways of picking judges, including merit selection and appointment with simple up-or-down retention elections rather than contested campaigns. With polls showing many voters think judges can be swayed by campaign contributions, Gonzales said, “If Americans come to believe that judges are simply politicians, or their decisions can be purchased for a price, state judicial systems will be undermined.”

    3 October 2006, 9:33 pm

30. Stan:

    Jorge & Sam,

    Damn!!! Link, guys, use links.

    And Jorge, I’m sorry to break any bubbles, but this “we have lost our Constitutional protections” stuff has been in effect for a lot of folks all along… that is, they never had them.

    We’re not as bad as the Europeans and Asians, my ass. Ask the indigenous folk and the slaves about that. And ask why (mostly with Bill Clinton’s help) there are more than 2 million people in US prisons now.

    Your cranky moderator,

    Stan

    3 October 2006, 11:14 pm

31. DeAnander:

    I’m still chewing on the “how much worse is this” question (and yes, guys PLEASE use links instead of pasting entire articles into a thread… Stan I can get you those links if you want to edit the posts down for length).

    one bad precedent is the possibility of identifying lawyers who defend persons accused by the State as, themselves, anti-Statists or “enemy combatants”. I am not sure how imminent this possibility is but several legal commenters have dwelt on their concern that the language of the bill is vague enough to allow this. since the primary avenue (other than robust social revolution) of challenge and repeal for these repressive laws is defence attorneys, threatening lawyers for presuming to challenge the law is a dangerous mechanism for ensuring it stays on the books.

    btw I should note that this is just an extension of the “tort reform” philosophy that the neocons have been pursuing all along: making it harder and harder for lawyers to represent the public against powerful institutions, whether corporate or state.

    in fact the language is so bloody vague that what it comes down to, as with most of these flag-waving repression bills, is that the Executive can imprison people on a whim for imaginary crimes or dissident opinions, and can change the rules daily as to what is and is not criminal. of course this has been the case for decades if you are poor and Black in a town with a corrupt police force and judiciary; but it’s new to anglo wingnuts like Raimondo (sorry guys, but JR is a libertarian whiteboy wingnut; artfully incendiary as his prose is and much as I tip my hat to him for publishing angry contrarian Ran HaCohen fairly regularly, he’s still a fusty old fuddy-duddy of the patriarchy imho, and a paid up member of the Ayn Rand Appreciation Society).

    hmmm the ACLU should be going ballistic about now — or are they too busy holding hands with their favourite pornographers and bashing feminists?

    repressive institutions fail when one of two things happens — either the functionaries who carry out the repression get sick of it and refuse to continue their work, enforcing lackadaisically or not at all; or “the people” rise up and forcibly compel the functionaries to stand down — by invoking the rule of law and the legitimised armed force of a “loyal core” of police etc, or by vigilante action by the people themselves. oh yeah, the third way: there’s a military coup which replaces the functionaries with a military government which is either less, or more, repressive. and I guess there is a fourth way: outside influences bring about the fall of the government and its functionaries, and it is replaced with something less, or more, repressive.

    so how is this chapter of repression in the US going to pan out? I’d sure like to watch from someplace else, speaking as a resident noncitizen. though my rational brain tells me the odds on my being disappeared in the night are extremely low, consciousness of the radical erosion of my civil rights over the last 5 years leaves me with that uncomfortable feeling of “working without a net” — i.e. the feeling that most of the poor, undocumented, non-White, indigenous, etc. people in this country have always lived with…

    4 October 2006, 1:44 am

32. Jorge:

    Here’s the link

    “Toadies and Timid Men
    How Empires Die”

    By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN

    http://www.counterpunch.com/ramakrishnan10032006.html

    Just two little quotes from it:

    “Indian opposition to the Act, voiced by many well-meaning and eloquent legislators such as Sastri, was ignored. Public outrage was widespread, but unfocused.”

    “Gandhi had two attributes that set him apart from most other leaders –daring and faith.”

    4 October 2006, 9:40 am

33. peggy:

    De - I am in the position you said you would like to be in, watching the US from the outside. I was born and raised in the US, and ended up as a resident of New Zealand sort of by accident, originally with the full intention of returning to my home country to live out the rest of my life there. But now I am getting afraid to go back to the US, just for a visit - because I could, now, under US law, be arrested and detained without trial indefinitely for giving “material support” (in the form published words) to an “enemy” of the United States. Even for being suspected of having connections with that “enemy”. My only protection is my white skin. If I had the same color and regularly spoke the same language as the “enemy” that I have “supported” and if I was actually a native of that country where that “enemy” is fighting, I would certainly be arrested the minute I got off the airplane at LAX (this has happened to some of my friends) and I would be interrogated at length, and then if I was lucky they would send me back to New Zealand. But they *could* lock me up forever, or worse. On the other hand, if I was an asylum-seeker from that country landing on the shores of the US, no matter how strong my case for seeking asylum, they would almost certainly send me back to that country, and I would almost certainly be captured and killed not long after my return.

    To me, this is very scary stuff.

    I understand what Stan has said about the law of habeas corpus having been denied to millions of people of color for a very long time, so why should we privileged middle class white anglophone Americans make such a big deal of being just now deprived of that entitlement?

    I can only answer in response, why shouldn’t we? We are, though in a lesser way, like Gandhi when he was in South Africa and discovered that despite his pale skin color and his previous life of privilege, he was BLACK. Learning what it was like, if only for a brief time and to a limited extent, to be as humiliated and unprotected as blacks had been in that country and elsewhere in the world for centuries, he decided to speak out, and he had the skills to do so effectively.

    So why shouldn’t I, in my own little way, having been pushed, just a little bit, by dint of my expressed political views, over the line from protected to unprotected, speak out? Not just for myself, but for those who have been on the unprotected side all their lives? Only now that I, having lost my protection, feel genuine fear, can I understand the courage of those who have lived unprotected for so long, and have not given in to fear. Now i am more than ever willing to fight for them and get them out of danger. I don’t understand why this is wrong, or unworthy of attention.

    4 October 2006, 11:49 pm

34. peggy:

    p.s. The first sentence of my post above was addressed to DeAnander, but the rest was addressed to a general audience. Just to avoid misunderstanding

    5 October 2006, 1:56 am

35. DeAnander:

    I agree w/you Peggy, a fuss must be made. and we are right to be worried. what I get tired of is the “paradise lost” rhetoric about the Deadbeat Dads of Democracy (my new sobriquet for the Founding Fathers) and how the US was a beacon of light, a bright city on a hill, a land of freedom and truth and justice etc, until that awful Mr Bush came along and spoilt everything. which is not of course your rhetoric, but one hears a lot of it about these days, it’s a standard “Patriotic American Progressive” line. Thom Hartmann for example (sigh). “They’re taking our country from us” etc. — which is how the wrangle started upthread, with a kind of “what you mean we, whiteman” response… it never was “our” country, or all that safe, for most of “us”. but yes, when we whitefolks with adequate means of suppport start being treated like criminals and seditionists and gulag-candidates then the tide of authoritarianism has risen very high — which means those “below” us in the pecking order are submerged very deeply indeed, in danger of drowning.

    5 October 2006, 1:51 pm

36. peggy:

    Maybe we should talk more about the Founding Mothers - I mean the early feminists in the US, many of whom were quite well off financially, but who, for whatever reasons, decided to take a stand for women, at the cost of terrible ridicule.

    6 October 2006, 2:36 am

37. Yolanda Carrington:

    Peggy…I wholeheartedly agree with you, we need to talk about the Founding Mothers. But we first need to be clear about who these “mothers” were.

    Call me cynical, but I don’t believe the early feminists were taking a stand for all women. Seems to me they were asserting their class interests as educated property-owning white folks. They wanted the same rights as the men of their class, not a liberated global sisterhood for all women. Of course, a handful were abolitionists, and some were workers, but the big-time stars of the movement (Elizabeth Stanton, Susan Anthony, Lucy Stone, et al.) were as privileged and bourgeois as they come.

    If you ask me who my Founding Mothers are, hands down—they’re the women who built this country from their productive and reproductive labor. A handful were identified feminists, but even if they weren’t, they are the people who built this society. And as history shows us (Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth), these women were more than capable of taking a stand for themselves.

    6 October 2006, 7:45 pm

38. peggy:

    Yolanda, I agree with you, too. I just wanted to push the ball in a different direction, because I am so tired of hearing about the double effs, whether praise or criticism or whatever. But, yeah, I pushed the ball not exactly in the right direction. Thanks for paying attention to me, by the way.

    8 October 2006, 2:31 am

39. browneyedgirl:

    That is why all these bills are being passed. Because we are all sitting there silently letting this all happen to us. What happen to the people who would stand up for what we believe?!?! Where have we all gone? I am so frustrated, because we all sit here(myself included)moaning and groaning about what is being taken away from us and what are we doing about it? What can we do to change it? I was camping one weekend with my family and friends and we were sitting around a campfire and we asked each other that if we could go back in time and live, what time period would it be? I said I would go back between the 50’s to 70’s. Why? Because people believed in their country and stood up for what they knew was right. They were willing to sacrifce their lives for this country. Now, we just sit and do nothing or runaway(my husband and I have talked about leaving the country). I really want to know what I can do? What can the average person do to make everyone else out there realize what is going on? I want to take a stand and want to be proud to be an american. Right now I feel like there are toooo many of us who are scared. We are so into our own self that we have forgotten how important it is to take a stand for what we believe in. What has happen to the freedom for which this country stands for? Do we know what has been taken from us? So, we all need to realize how how important our freedom is. Okay!!! And do something about it!! Jennifer

    12 October 2006, 10:46 pm

40. Lisa:

    One heroic woman:

    October 16, 2006
    POLITKOVSKAYA: RUSSIAN HERO

    VANCOUVER – When I met Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2002 to discuss her new book about Chechnya, `Dirty War,’ I began by asking her about life in Moscow.

    She brusquely interrupted me, `Please, I am here to speak only of Chechnya.’

    The 48-year old Russian journalist told me her days were numbered. There had already been two attempts in Moscow on her life, and a third in Chechnya.

    Last week, this crusading journalist was murdered in Moscow.

    At a time when too many journalists have become clapping seals for governments or their corporate employer’s party line, Politkovskaya risked her life to report the truth.

    She exposed massive human rights violations being committed by Russian forces against independence-seeking Chechen, as well as economic crimes and gangsterism.

    She was among a handful of Russian journalists who dared cover the brutal war in the Caucasus, fearlessly reporting it in her crusading newspaper, `Novaya Gazeta,’ one of the last free voices in Russia’s mostly government-controlled media.

    But because of mounting death threats against her and her two children, Politkovskaya told me she had regretfully decided to seek political asylum in Austria. Since 1996, 23 Russian journalists have been murdered for reporting on Chechnya and domestic crimes.

    But this hero journalist could not stay silent about the slaughter in Chechnya. She challenged head on the news blackout Moscow imposed on this forgotten and largely invisible conflict.

    I had a taste of what she went through. While covering the 1980’s war in Afghanistan, the Soviets and Afghan Communists put a contract out to kill me as part of their effort to stop western journalists from reporting on the war.

    My own mother, another crusading journalist who sought in the early 1950’s to tell Americans the truth about what plight of Palestinian refugees was finally silenced after numerous threats were made to throw acid in my face.

    Politkovskaya returned to Russia, and continued to cover Chechnya in spite of more death threats and an attempt to poison her. She was about to come out with a critical new book about Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, and the crimes being committed in Chechnya.

    A contract killer murdered Anna Politkovskaya outside her Moscow apartment. The consensus in Moscow was that the finger of suspicion pointed right at Chechnya’s Moscow-installed puppet ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, a brutal Chechen warlord who inherited the job of Moscow’s local thug from his father.

    Politkovskaya’s murder was another sign that Russia, in spite of President Vladimir Putin’s claims it has become a nation under law, is still dominated by its shadowy security organs and ruthless gangsters.

    By now, Moscow has mostly crushed the life out of Chechnya’s 1.5 million people. These tough Muslim mountaineers have battled Russian rule for 400 years. During World War II, Stalin attempted genocide by sending 60% of all Chechen to concentration camps, where the majority perished.

    In 1999, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, Chechen, like Ukrainians and Baltics, declared independence. Russian leader Boris Yeltsin sent his army to crush Chechen independence. The elected Chechen president, Jhokar Dudayev, was assassinated, thanks to electronic locating gear supplied Moscow’s secret police by CIA.

    Chechen fighters, in one of modern history’s most remarkable and valiant feats, defeated Russian invasion forces. In the process, the Russians killed 100,000 or more Chechen civilians by massive carpet bombing and shelling.

    The world turned its back on this massacre. President Bill Clinton hailed its author, Boris Yeltsin, as `the Abraham Lincoln of Russia.’
    The world bought Moscow’s claim that Chechen independence fighters were `Islamic terrorists.’

    Russia invaded a second time and slowly crushed the Chechen by mass killings, savage reprisals, and torture. All the Chechen leaders were murdered. Journalists and aid workers who sought to report this second genocide were killed or kidnapped.

    Some of the remaining few Chechen fighters were driven to desperate acts of terrorism, like the school hostage taking at Beslan. But Moscow relentlessly ground the life out of Chechen resistance.

    The world turned its back on the slaughter of the Chechen people and their struggle for freedom. But Anna Politkovskaya did not. She spoke for those who had no voice.

    She refused to be intimidated and fought to her last breath against injustice.

    Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2006

    16 October 2006, 5:59 pm

41. Lisa:

    Interesting article on the Politkovskaya murder from Sanders research, reprinted with permission at Lewrockwell.com:

    Who Killed Anna Politkovskaya?

    by John Laughland

    http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/laughland2.html

    19 October 2006, 2:04 pm

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