The Formerly Great Writ

Goodbye, habeas corpus. Hello, executive detention.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Monday, Nov. 28, 2005, at 4:27 PM ET


Tucked into the renewal of the Patriot Act, which Congress will reconsider in December, is an unrelated provision that would make it harder for American prisoners to challenge their convictions in federal court. Congress may also soon vote to limit the rights of foreign detainees in Guantanamo Bay to apply to federal court.

'TORTURERS 'R' US'

[Col. Writ. 11/7/05] Copyright 2005 Mumia Abu-Jamal

"The law hath not been dead, thought it hath slept." -- William Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure," (Act II; Scene 2.)
There have been news reports of a number of secret US prisons in Eastern European countries. These reports, coming as they do after reports about torture at Guantanamo Naval Gulag, at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, the Diego Garcia base situated in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and, of course, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, should show us that torture lies at the very heart of the U.S.-declared 'War on Terror'.
What makes this even more remarkable is the robotic response of U.S president George W. Bush, when asked about torture at a press conference recently: "We do not torture."
One wonders, who is this 'we' of whom he speaks?

Fascism Then. Fascism Now?

For those who haven't put the pieces together yet.

Fascism Then. Fascism Now?
When people think of fascism, they imagine Rows of goose-stepping storm troopers and puffy-chested dictators. What they don't see is the economic and political process that leads to the nightmare.

by Paul Bigioni

Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: The vast bulk of legislative activity favors the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.

Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds the exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.

These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. "Yes," he replied, "but we will call it anti-fascism."

By exploring the disturbing parallels between our own time and the era of overt fascism, we can avoid the same hideous mistakes. At present, we live in a constitutional democracy. The tools necessary to protect us from fascism remain in the hands of the citizen. All the same, North America is on a fascist trajectory. We must recognize this threat for what it is, and we must change course.

Give Thanks, Look Forward

I'm a big fan of her work so here you go.

BB

by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas — Since the political world ranges from poor to icky these days, you may think we are gratitudinally challenged this Thanksgiving season. But a mere soupçon of sunny optimism goes a long way toward getting us to dwell on how lucky we are. We are abundantly blessed with lemons. Let us make lemonade.

I am grateful for the extraordinary number of readers who sent along their ideas on How to Fix All This. The ideas ranged from the sublime to the practical, from the universal and global to the price of milk. The country is teeming with good ideas, all of which we need.

Timing Entwined War Vote, Electio

Do you mean that this administration would rush crucial decisions for political gain?

-"I'm shocked and appalled"
B. Simpson

By Ronald Brownstein and Emma Vaughn, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — Tom Daschle, the former Democratic senator from South Dakota, remembers the exchange vividly.

The time was September 2002. The place was the White House, at a meeting in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pressed congressional leaders for a quick vote on a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.

Ex-Powell Aide Criticizes Detainee Effort

Boy, it's kind of frightening when people in or around the White House think that the President is Omnipotent.
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By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer Mon Nov 28, 6:50 PM ET
WASHINGTON - A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees arose from White House and Pentagon officials who argued that "the president of the United States is all-powerful" and the Geneva Conventions irrelevant.

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

Boy, it almost seems old hat now but yet here we still are.

So, why hasn't President Pig Fucker been impeached yet?


By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

N.Y. to Lose $125 Million in 9/11 Aid

By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Wed Nov 16, 7:08 AM ET
WASHINGTON - Congressional budget negotiators have decided to take back $125 million in Sept. 11 aid from New York, which had fought to keep the money to treat sick and injured ground zero workers, lawmakers said Tuesday.

Protection for vaccine makers debated

Yet another nail in the coffin for the little guy.
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- People injured by a vaccine against bird flu or anthrax would have to prove willful misconduct to bring a claim for damages against drug manufacturers or distributors, according to legislation being drafted behind the scenes by Republicans.

A 10-page draft of the legislation obtained by The Associated Press says it would be up to the Health and Human Services secretary to declare that such misconduct occurred. If that declaration is made, the case must be heard in federal court.

The measure, which would be included in a spending bill, would bar any punitive damages and limit awards for physical and emotional pain and suffering and other noneconomic damages to a maximum of $250,000.

John Cusack: On Bush, the Dems, Jon Stewart, Hunter Thompson, Bill Moyers, and King (not Don)

I highly recommend reading the full article, but hear is a taste.

Well done, Mr. Cusack. Well done.
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Murder is a crime. Uunless it is done...by a poooollliiicceeeman. Or an ariissssstoocrat -- Joe Strummer

Bush 2. How depressing, corrupt, unlawful and tragically absurd the administration's world view actually is...how low the moral bar has been lowered...and (though I know I'm capable of intellectually lazy notions of collective guilt) how complicit our silence as citizens is...Nixon, a true fiend, looks like a paragon of virtue next to the criminally incompetent robber barons now raiding the present and future.

But where are the Dems? American foreign policy is in chaos. We are now left in the surreal position of having to condemn American-sponsored torture as official policy while a deranged President Bush orders his staff to attend ethics briefings -- a "refresher course" -- from the White House counsel. The very idea of America is in chaos and this chaos has created a vacuum. 

One question for any Democrat: Who will have the balls to get us out of Iraq? 

If the Democrats don't step up and fill this vacuum, the Republicans will. They will take us out of Iraq. And then the Democrats will be left holding the bag -- first as the enablers who let the Republicans take us into an unnecessary and immoral war, and then as the whipping boys who stood by while the Republicans kept justifying what was clearly an unnecessary and immoral war. They were so worried about positioning themselves as hawks, not being seen as soft on terror and war, that they lost the capacity for outrage when the person responsible for a legal memo that denied the validity of the Geneva Conventions was appointed Attorney General. And it was downhill from there.

This Isn't The Real America

by Jimmy Carter

In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.

Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.

At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements — including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.

Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.

Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.

OPEC AND THE ECONOMIC CONQUEST OF IRAQ

WHY IRAQ STILL SELLS ITS OIL À LA CARTEL
TWILIGHT OF THE NEOCON GODS
Harper's
Monday Oct 24, 2005
By Greg Palast

By special arrangement with Harper's magazine, we are reproducing here for the first time the entire updated article on the US government's secret schemes for seizing control of the oil fields of Iraq.

...For months, the State Department denied the existence of this 323-page document ...


...The switch to an OPEC-friendly policy for Iraq was driven by Dick Cheney himself. "The person who is most influential in running American energy policy is the Vice President," who, said the insider, "thinks that security begins by . . . letting prices follow wherever they may."

Two and a half years and $202 billion into the war in Iraq, the United States has at least one significant new asset to show for it: effective membership, through our control of Iraq's energy policy, in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the Arab-dominated oil cartel.

Just what to do with this proxy power has been, almost since President Bush's first inaugural, the cause of a pitched battle between neoconservatives at the Pentagon, on the one hand, and the State Department and the oil industry, on the other. At issue is whether Iraq will remain a member in good standing of OPEC, upholding production limits and thereby high prices, or a mutinous spoiler that could topple the Arab oligopoly.

CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER

Everything Else Is Propaganda
19 Corporate Crime Reporter 43(3), November 3, 2005

News is something somebody doesn't want you to know.

Everything else is propaganda.

We’ve just returned from the Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) conference being held here in Washington, D.C.

We picked up maybe five pounds of propaganda being handed out by the sponsors – ExxonMobil, Chevron, AstraZeneca, Walt Disney, Pfizer, General Electric, Altria (remember: altriameanstobacco.com), McDonald’s, Edison International, Starbucks, Ford Motor Company, Coca-Cola, Abbott Labs, Microsoft, Monsanto, KPMG, Chiquita – among others.

The news – what these giant multinationals don’t want you to know – is that they hijacked Business for Social Responsibility from its founders.

Reaching the Point of No Return

Incase you know anyone who thinks Nuclear power is the answer to our energy woes.
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...According to Australian physician, anti-nuclear activist, and founder and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, Helen Caldicott, there are also grave health risks that must be factored into the debate. Nuclear reactors consistently release millions of curies of radioactive isotopes into the air and water each year. These unregulated isotopes include the noble gases krypton, xenon and argon, which are fat-soluble and if inhaled by persons living near a nuclear reactor, are absorbed through the lungs and migrate to the fatty tissues of the body, including the abdominal fat pad and upper thighs, near the reproductive organs. These radioactive elements, which emit high-energy gamma radiation, can mutate the genes in eggs and sperm and cause genetic disease.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A 'CONSTITUTION' MAKES?

Col. Writ. 10/19/05] Copyright 2005 Mumia Abu-Jamal

With the proposed constitutional voting out of the way, the nation's president and the press are calling for celebrations, suggesting that Iraq, battered, beaten, all but broken Iraq, is on the yellow brick road to 'democracy.'
Forget, for a second, the nonsense about 'democracy', as if it is a lily that can be planted in desert soil, but the legalistic, word-infested, daze with which Americans treat the subject of 'constitutions', leads many folks to think that once words are written on paper, the deed is almost done.
That is the thinking of many in this business-oriented contract culture: paper equates to power, and what is written becomes real.
But Iraq threatens to prove that paper is, after all, just paper.
And some observers are seeing, not 'democracy' on the horizon, but the harrowing spectre of civil war.

GOP Leaders Urge Probe in Prisons Leak

Notice how the GOP wants to investigate the leak but not the fact that the CIA has prisons.
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By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 9, 2005; Page A01

Congress's top Republican leaders yesterday demanded an immediate joint House and Senate investigation into the disclosure of classified information to The Washington Post that detailed a web of secret prisons being used to house and interrogate terrorism suspects.

The Post's article, published on Nov. 2, has led to new questions about the treatment of detainees and the CIA's use of "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The issue dogged President Bush on his recent trip to Latin America and has created consternation in Eastern Europe.

Schwarzenegger's Agenda Rejected by California Voters

Well, at least my state hasn't gone completely off it's nut. Although my city may be starting too.

BB

Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger lost his gamble to go over the heads of lawmakers as voters rejected every measure he offered to change the political, fiscal and educational policies of the most-populous U.S. state.

In a special election called by the Republican movie star, voters handed Schwarzenegger the biggest loss of his two-year career as governor. Taking the stage as returns poured in last night, Schwarzenegger refused to concede defeat while pledging better cooperation with opponents.

Wal-Mart's Tax On Us

Greg LeRoy
November 09, 2005



Greg LeRoy is the author of The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation and executive director of Good Jobs First . This piece originally appeared on Alternet.org.

Wal-Mart, the Alpha Dog of discount stores, has also become the Alpha Hog at the public trough.

The phenomenal growth of the world's largest corporation has been supported by taxpayers in many states through economic development subsidies. A Wal-Mart official once stated that the company seeks subsidies in about a third of its stores, suggesting that more than 1,100 of its U.S. stores are subsidized. A national survey by Good Jobs First in 2004 looked at 160 stores and all of the company's distribution centers—and found that more than 90 percent of them have been subsidized. Altogether, 244 subsidized facilities in 35 states received taxpayer deals of more than $1 billion.