by Carol Warner Christen
(Swans - January 14, 2008) Now that the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper" as the "president" said, there are unexplored possibilities of a very serious nature to be considered by the states and by the People themselves. The main unexamined questions are below because the Congress has been complicit in illegally removing citizens' rights hand-over-fist last year.
Stephen Lendman listed them in a nineteen-page paper entitled "Police State America - A Look Back And Ahead." It was printed by Tom Feeney of International Clearing House on December 18, 2007. All the rights these three constitutional renegades -- Congress, executive branch, courts -- have dispensed with this year are "... the definition of tyranny." (1)
A list includes: executive branch signing statements; Executive Orders, none of which are allowed by the Constitution; signing statements to ignore the law are also not allowed but done; a claim of "unitary executive authority," which doesn't exist in law, to act on the president's own authority to do anything he says; two congressional authorizations to surrender the war functions of Congress to the executive; Military Order Number 1 removing the wall between the People and the military; plus, allowing the arrest, capture, or kidnapping of non-citizens and citizens anywhere in the world negating due process in courts of law.
Take a deep breath and continue reading the list: evidence secured by the internationally-illegal use of torture with no right of appeal and kangaroo military court trials; total lack of civil court authority in any case; issuance of "National Security Presidential Directives"; over twenty "Homeland Security Presidential Directives"; "full spectrum dominance" over and under the Earth's surface, including the entire electromagnetic spectrum (!) to secure global hegemonic -- supreme -- control over the planet; gave itself permission to deploy nuclear weapons; declare martial law without congressional approval under NSPD-51 for any "national emergency"; allows the vice president to "assure continuity of government" giving him more power than the president. There are other HSPD's affecting the People too numerous for me to mention here.
Congress enacted the USA Patriot Act, granting outrageous powers to the executive branch and included civil liberty threats of enormous import to each of us, i.e., the changing of due process in the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments; First Amendment loss of freedom of association using an undefined and illegal designation, such as "an undesirable group," and the loss of the Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, which is an attack on the home and the persons therein by governmental snoops, police, or the military. No one appears to have given any thought, for example, to the First Amendment, which says "Congress shall make no law..." What part of "no law" don't they understand and why don't we really care to stop them?
Furthermore, the loss of privacy, access to personal records, financial monitoring, access to student records, "delayed notice" warrants to allow snooping in advance, roving wiretaps, e-mail tracking, Internet and cell phone use, use of secret evidence, refusal to allow immigrants to have lawyers, and permitting the CIA now to spy on the People on their home turf are all part of this conspiracy to remove the People from primacy over government.
Even worse, demonstrations can be declared "domestic terrorism" if intended to change officials' minds about war, justice, environments, civil disobedience (??); and, this one takes the cake: dissent of any kind can be called domestic terrorism. It seems we have lost any say regarding the government we pay taxes to support, People. Since the People did not ratify these legal travesties, who says they are legal? The courts seem to agree with the executive or remain mute. All the writings and books about the various problems seem to assume Congress can do anything even when it is told it cannot. Are we in Wonderland now instead of the United States of America?
The article goes on and on and on about our loss of civil rights, civil liberty. I have written by fax (a legal document) to my congressmen in both branches, over and over, about the loss of habeas corpus. Alas, it always is to no avail. The Congress has not undone what it has created without any authority from us. The world is being made over in the image of autocratic tyrants.
We, the People, do not see, do not hear, and do not much care that even the latest "law" allows our thinking itself to be considered "violent radicalization." Is this what those Halliburton detention camps were built for: those of us who "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"? (Dylan Thomas)
We are to be implanted with chips -- which can and do cause cancers -- and we are being followed by unknown spies. We can't board planes without passports after February 2008. My main question is this: how much money do you have to make to be exempt from all this? Apparently, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon doesn't qualify as better than the rest of us. He was stopped twice and had to wait before boarding planes.
Where is the cut-off? Who and how do some get a pass from all this horrid "ownership" of us and our rights? Who decides? Who gave them the right(s)? The entire business is an outrage of proportions that is mind-boggling. We seem to have two obvious classes now, at the least: the especially privileged and the rest of us. Where do you fit? How do or did you find out? Is it money? Is it corporate connections on a board? Is it the favors done, good, bad, or indifferent, to others' well being?
Will the parents of the current president be implanted with a chip? What about the Clintons? How many members of Congress have been implanted or volunteered for one so the spies on the public payroll can spy on all 300,000,000 of us? Since chips and cell phones under some conditions can be turned on by satellite to listen to private conversations, do you think anyone would be interested in your life with its real details? Will some of them enrich themselves by a video game about you? Would you care before or after it's too late? I would feel so much better if the entire government publicly was implanted and then the capitalist owners and their boards before We, the People, even allow it to happen to us. Who do they think they are?
According to a quote by Henry Kissinger, "Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the Third World because the U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries." He further stated, "To give food aid to a country just because they (sic) are starving is a pretty weak reason." (2)
What does private mean? What does public mean? If all our lifetime is to be subject to public scrutiny, what is the point of joy, love, happiness, tender moments, privacy, personal secrets, beingness in all its glory? "Paranoia strikes deep..." as the song says. (3) Even actors and politicians have private lives.
What happens to our psyches when we no longer have private lives because of voyeuristic governments or corporations? Is nothing sacred now that we are "consumers" by corporate definition even on news outlets? Does anyone know what a citizen is anymore? Or, are we just a mass of people to scare, starve, and let die to make room for our betters?
Our hospitals and healthcare are below average if any of us are even lucky enough to find or afford any. New Orleans is still a deliberate mess. I never realized Americans were so unable to rise to an occasion such as that disaster. I remember when we were a competent people. Now, who even knows anyone, really, or cares?
Our own war mongering for oil or resources is disgraceful. Does anyone remember how to solve problems without a gigantic bureaucracy of political appointees who always do the "in" thing for the persons who hired them? How many of them know who really pays their salaries now? Or care? They are feeding at our money trough. Are you?
Another writer, Susan Rosenthal, wrote in "Globalization, Theirs or Ours?" the following statement, which not a single member of the Fourth Estate (the news) has bothered to report to us: "By 2000, U.S. workers took half the time to produce all the goods and services they produced in 1973. If the benefits of this rise in productivity had been shared, most Americans could be enjoying a four-hour work day, or a six-month work year, or they could be taking every other year off from work with no loss of pay." (4)
We are going the way of the dinosaur as a debtor nation, rather than a producing nation. Death or voyeurism is the product with a huge army of ignorant bureaucrats (my apologies to the few who are still trying) and government leaches. If this is the future of life and work, soon no one will bother; and, the funds of even the excessively wealthy will dry up as they come face to face with the rest of us. We'll all be looking for a place to sleep on the streets as is happening to far too many now.
The answer is to back off this consumer-video-driving corporation gestalt and look at each other for reality. The animals are being driven into "urban" areas looking for food. Alaska is melting. The ice for walruses, polar bears, and seals is almost gone. Our own Oregon rivers are becoming too warm for salmon eggs to hatch.
Of course, the news covers shopping or propaganda, not many facts anymore, so we will have to dig for real information. That means reading the newspaper, watching the national and local news, and then digging for the truth on the Internet, assuming one has enough time for the redundancies and information overload.
Who gains by all this if not me and if not the rest of the real People? In the long and tedious debates by the candidates for president of the United States, will we spend most of this year hoping they go away? How many times in the next eleven months will the political repetitions numb our minds, bodies, and souls? During the holidays, when I turned on the news, I heard shopping reports on how well certain stores were doing -- an advertisement as a news item -- and endless little pieces of debates with the pundits winning over the candidates for camera time. I simply turned off the sound day after day because it was not helpful at all. None of the candidates said they'd undo what has been done to the People. Not a one. I wonder if they know. I waited for real news; it never came.
Two evening news shows now are on at the same time, which cuts down watching considerably. I have to wait an extra half hour to catch the third one. I am removing television news from my life and the extra ninety minutes will be more useful to me. I may send each of them a thank-you note for being such an incompetent Fourth Estate. The corporate conglomerates that "own" the news are to blame. I bet they never realize I don't ever buy their products.
Capitalism is not sustainable. It has been likened to cancer as goods are growing too fast, wages shrink, the environment collapses, and we all get sick, animals die, etc. Why do we not understand that China is polluting our country because our corporate boards want cheap goods without paying decent wages to us for those items?
Our babies teethe on lead or worse. Our air is becoming unbreathable since the jet stream carries all the airborne pollutants back to us. We don't even profit; we suffer; we work too long for less and less. Our faulty Fourth Estate only reports good news or deprecatory items. Meanwhile, the population grows worldwide and the endless circular reasoning continues.
Think back to before there were constitutional republics such as ours, won by war and enlightened concepts about people and their rights. As I've said before, the King or Queen led the Princes, Dukes, Barons, Earls, Knights, and Merchants, in that order. Since we did away with all except the Merchants, that class has become so self-important that it now holds the fate of the world in its greedy bourgeoisie hands now. Once again, after 230 years, the People are relegated to the lowest status -- again! -- and are no longer the People to the 101-year-old corporate merchant class.
The manipulations are so apparent in the current presidential sideshows; i.e., all the candidates are members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) except three. They are all being tutored by the Project for the New American Century people, the Trilateral Group, and/or the Bilderberg Group run by David Rockefeller since 1954. Henry Kissinger advises Rudi Giuliani; Zbigniew Brzezinski advises Barack Obama; Hillary Clinton is advised by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who advocated the deaths of children as being acceptable to world leaders. There is a long and published list of these advisors to the candidates. (5) The groups are essentially putting on a show for us since those who are not advised by the CFR will not be heard in the debates on ABC. Is that manipulation, or what?
The world needs real and decent people who actually care about life, about living, about removing the poisons and the crap from the environment and discourse. If not, humanity will have no future because capitalism is not a solution to our problems; it is the creator with the help of those who care only for their own comfort and clout. The propaganda has been so thick, so slanted, and so brain-numbing that no one wants to see the evil, hear the evil, speak the evil. Simplicity and independent farmers, tradesmen, and small businesses with small local banks might start us on the road to recovery as it did in the past.
We, the People, are now considered useless except to consume the products of these predators. Our Founders would be justly disappointed in the results of their efforts by these, their progeny: inhuman corporate "persons."
Notes
1. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18918.htm (back)
2. "Culling the Herd," Sheila Samples, 1/04/2008.
http://www.politcalcortex.com/print/2007/12/17/231035/63 (back)
3. "For What It's Worth," Song, Buffalo Springfield. (back)
4. Patrice Greanville, Editor-in-Chief, Cyrano's Journal Book Review of Understanding American Capitalism, Its Consequences & Alternatives by Joel C. Magnuson, Pilot Light, 2007. (back)
5. Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! - 01/03/08. "Atrocity-Linked U. S. Officials Advising Democratic, GOP Presidential Frontrunners": video and transcript. (back)
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