Grave Error

Nice parody of the ridiculous cry to change the Fourteenth Amendment.

Notice that these brain trusts never mention how this change (or the Arizona immigration law) will create a radical new burden on citizens to prove their citizenship at the beck and call of the state. Remember how incensed Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was when the police arrested him in his own home? Now imagine every single human being born in the U.S. trying to prove that his or her parents are legally documented? Would U.S. citizens need to get a passport before giving birth? Would all drivers and pedestrians walking down the street, regardless of citizenship, need to be able to prove residency at the drop of a dime? Heck, someone from New Jersey may sure look suspicious in Arizona.

And, of course, it goes without saying that by turning newborns into illegal immigrants, you don’t decrease illegal immigration; you just increase the number of illegal immigrants.

Every generation over the past two hundred years has made the same claims about the threats of immigration. And here we are today. The same Constitution, speaking the same language, and yet the same b.s.

Whenever there is the opportunity for the slightest fear, the brave Republicans come running to tell us to be scared out of our minds, and that fate of the nation is dependent on the following three step program: (i) restrict the rights of individuals, (ii) liberate the corporations, and (iii) send in the troops.

From Tom Toles.

It’s like a drug. I keep promising to quit, and then I go ahead and write almost exclusively about politics. But if you have noticed, I have been fairly silent over the past few weeks, and one of the main reasons is that I am simply exhausted by the total lack of seriousness and intellectual rigor in our political dialogue.

From bogus and doctored outrage on things like racism, the environment, socialism, and the urgency of immigration reform (no one has yet to articulate that there actually is an immigration problem), I have grown less interested in weighing in. We elect a change president who turns around and does everything possible to maintain the corporate and political status quos: with each celebrated/hated (watered down) reform pushed by the White House, the regulated industry in question has seen its share prices skyrocket; and with each opportunity for transparency and the rule of law and with the Nobel Peace Prize in his belt, the President repeatedly argues in court for and puts into practice more expansive and less transparent executive powers and has bloated the military budget to historic records. Not to mention the ever increasing dependency on non-uniformed military contractors and the arguably illegal use of the CIA as a paramilitary force in Afghanistan and Pakistan (if not also elsewhere) to take care of business.

And then you turn on any serious news outlet and listen to the serious commentators (like the serious and moderate sounding David Brooks) with their delusional punditry and we are told that “the people are very suspicious of the increase in spending and the increase in the role of government”. Not because we have spent the last nine years building a radically clandestine, billion dollar/year shadow government, but because of Obama’s weak health care and tepid banking reforms? It is always the deficit that keeps us from spending on the people, but there is no shortage of resources to fight interminable and unwinnable wars. Next stop Iran. It all borders on the psychotic. I used to enjoy watching This Week and listening to Left, Right and Center, but now I dread the mere anticipation of how they are going to fabricate the irrelevant and skim past the real issues. For example, is it any shock none of them even alluded to last week’s story on “Top Secret America“? Of course not.

It is almost as if the more important the story, the less likely it will be discussed with any scrutiny. As NYU professor Jay Rosen writes in relation to the Post exposé and the Wikileaks Afghanistan leak,

I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

Last week, it was the Washington Post’s big series, Top Secret America, two years in the making. It reported on the massive security shadowland that has arisen since 09/11. The Post basically showed that there is no accountability, no knowledge at the center of what the system as a whole is doing, and too much “product” to make intelligent use of. We’re wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work. It’s an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’t followed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes.

The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works… and often fails to work?

So let’s leave politics there. At least for a while. Yes, I may still write about a few topics that may be arguably “political”, but I am going to give the pundits and presidents and war-mongers a rest. Let’s call it a summer vacation. On the wagon.

I have pretty much had it with out political discourse. After eight years of policies where we did just about everything wrong, leaving the country in ridiculous shambles, two futile wars, and bending over the corporate and military complex, it is embarrassing to witness how the 2008 movement for change has dissipated completely and been replaced by a compromising president who allows 2008’s losers set the tone. How can a Republican who supported the Bush tax cuts or the wars or deregulation be given airtime to preach about reducing the size of government? How can President Obama be criticized for being anti-business when each time he passes his faux regulations, the regulated industry in questions gets a huge bump in the stock market?

And in the midst of the panic that Obama is radically expanding the size of government, the Washington Post has just published an extensive investigative report on how over the last nine years, the U.S. has created an immense, secretive shadow government that lacks any transparency or accountability whatsoever, costs billions of dollars and employs some 800,000 people.

And guess what the role of this shadow government is? To spy at home and abroad. A couple of loonies in a cave, and we throw the house out the window.

As is always the case, the Republicans are only concerned about the government when it affects corporations and not unarmed citizens.

If this does not create bipartisan uproar, what ever will?

I have already written about our hypocritical, romantic vision of the Second Amendment. Now imagine the Tea Party was Black.

After its second consecutive display of judicial activism on the matter, the Supreme Court has reiterated that individual’s have a Constitutional Right to bear arms. In popular lore – as accepted by the Court’s conservative majority – individuals have a right to protect themselves against an oppressive government. As I have written before, deep in the American historical consciousness, there is this romantic notion of the Founding Fathers as revolutionaries. If in fact that is the basis on which the Second Amendment stands, then under today’s standard wouldn’t our “revolutionaries” who were insurgents and fought by guerrilla warfare, be considered today analogous to terrorists? And how different is a Jihadist than an insurgent whose reason for fighting is to defend one’s nation?

(As an aside, the term “jihad”, roughly meaning “struggle”, outside of the spiritual context was historically used to refer to an obligation to defend one’s nation against foreign attack. In modern Arabic, the term is also a common first name amongst Arab Christians).

Isn’t there something incredibly Jihadist in the psyche of the American who truly believes that the Second Amendment grants an individual the right to armed insurgency? The whole idea of “Second Amendment Remedies” is a fairly standard Republican talking point spewed from the likes of Newt Gingrich to Sharron Angle. According to Ms. Angle,

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

As is usually the case, though, we don’t always appreciate that each of our American values be spread around the world. Also times change. For example, contrary to British protests, our closest allies, the Israelis, unashamedly commemorate the Israeli terrorist bombing that killed British and Arab citizens in 1946. And even though idealist American writers such as Hemingway and Langston Hughes, took up arms against the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War, under the current political climate, fighting an oppressive regime is tantamount to an act of terrorism against the U.S., even when the U.S. is not a party to that conflict (as is the case of Somali Americans traveling to take up arms in Somalia). During the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, then Senators Dole and Lieberman had proposed a bill to lift the arms embargo, so as to give the Bosnians a fair chance. Can you imagine our Second Amendment guardians in favor of exporting an American style right to bear arms to the Afghanis, Iraqis or even the Palestinians?

So for all those who believe in this radical Jihadist reading of the Second Amendment as a fundamental pillar of American democracy, should the U.S. be pushing a similar right to bear arms when promoting democracy around the world?

I recently observed that in the face of the undeniable fact of Israeli’s existence — a country that is a member of the U.N., with embassies around the world, universal health care, 8,419 millionaires (2,519 new ones since 2008), nuclear weapons, and billions of dollars in aid from the world’s largest military power –  the real question should be whether the Palestinians have a right to exist.

Today, according to the Associated Press, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman answered that question: “As an optimist, I see no chance that a Palestinian state will be established by 2012.” In other words, not yet.

This is a nice job by Jon Stewart highlighting the lamentable state of mainstream political journalism in the U.S. Particularly revealing is the comment by Celeste Headlee where she says to the Rolling Stones journalist who revealed the McChrystal story, “you were obviously not worried about access in the future; I can’t imagine you are going to get it”. In other words, in the mainstream press, you don’t report on unfavorable news, lest you not be given access to the politicians in the future. Welcome to the White House. Easy questions, easy answers, easy access; become one with the propaganda machine.

At the suggestion of ReWrite, here is a video from The Chappelle Show that serves as a good accompaniment to yesterday’s post on the Republicans’ cynical worldview of due process for corporations only.

It is hard to think of something more cynical than the Republican reaction to President Obama’s deal with BP. Then again, it should have come as no surprise that Republicans have reiterated their official decree on the supremacy of corporations over individuals. Without getting into the merits of Obama’s $20 billion shakedown of BP(to be honest, I haven’t been paying much attention), the Republicans’ outbursts against the Executive Branch strong-arming a corporation completely ignores the reality of the entire American prosecutorial system and how it treats individuals.

As Joe Barton first said (though he later apologized),

I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday . . . I think it is a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown — in this case a $20 billion shakedown — with the attorney general of the United States, who is legitimately conducting a criminal investigation and has every right to do so to protect the American people, participating in what amounts to a $20 billion slush fund that’s unprecedented in our nation’s history, which has no legal standing, which I think sets a terrible precedent for our nation’s future.

Would Mr. Barton feel the same way about prosecutors who every day use the threat of the death penalty, lifetime sentences, three-strikes-you’re-out, and other means of arm-twisting at their disposal to persuade criminal suspects to reach a plea bargain? Prosecutors particularly love the death penalty because it is the most effective negotiating tool they’ve got. So where does Mr. Barton stand on terrible precedents: you plea or I’ll do everything in my power to send you to your death or “show me the money”?

This may sound exaggerated, but this is in fact what people – not corporations – are up against every time they right or wrongly face a prosecutor. Have Republicans ever seen an episode of Law & Order? Remember that prosecutors are agents of the Executive Branch, and as such their decision to prosecute a case is always a political decision; there really isn’t much of difference between Obama’s political tactic and that of your average district attorney. Apparently for Republicans, though, it is only scandalous when the poor, helpless corporation faces the prosecution.

Even though the Republicans feigned disgust at Mr. Barton’s original statement above, they quickly sent their pundits out to regurgitate their talking points about how Obama was ignoring the rule of law, denying BP due process, and of course, setting a dangerous precedent. Ignoring the obvious error in the due process claim (BP very much has the right to contest the “strong arming” in court), the Right’s sudden passion for due process is remarkably cynical.

Tony Blanky on Left, Right and Center was seriously concerned about “protecting the process of law” (even citing Thomas More), and out of the blue, David Brooks on the NewsHour felt that Obama “very brutally strong armed BP” and was worried about “the erosion of the rule of law”. He was so noble to claim that the law was there to protect “even people who do bad things.” Then George Will on This Week compared Obama to Hugo Chavez, calling his actions the “use of raw political power without recourse to courts that exist for this sort of thing without due process . . .”

Must I state the obvious? Misters Blanky, Brooks, and Will are arguing the exact opposite of what they have been fighting for for the past eight years: the president’s unfettered, unchecked power to indefinitely detain terror suspects without due process. If corporations, according to Citizens United, have the same First Amendment rights as individuals, shouldn’t individuals (even the ones “who do bad things”) have, at a minimum, the same basic rights corporations do when it comes to due process in a court that, as Mr. Will says, “exist[s] for this sort of thing”?

For example, would these gentlemen disagree with President Obama’s continued, indefinite detention in cages of Guantanamo detainees without any recourse whatsoever, even when they have been determined – as in the case of Mohamed Hassan Odaini — by the military and the courts to be completely innocent? Or would they continue to aspire to a world where corporations are free from government interference while individuals are subject to the full force of government’s brutal wrath?