Things are moving incredibly quickly in the economic sector. I wish I had more time to blog.
Wish I had time to locate a heap of linkage to show that the Tax Day Tea Parties are a GOP project to sink the Obama Presidency and revive the old “tax and spend” zombie meme. Instead I’ll just label this entire post opinion, and point out that this website is so transparent that a six-year old should be able to see through the ruse.
Some other thoughts I am having right now.
1. Government spending is neither good nor bad, in and of itself. It is necessary.
2. Just because you label something you don’t like “pork” doesn’t make it so.
3. People who talk about socialism without understanding what socialism is look very ignorant to the rest of us.
4. Free market fundamentalism in the service of elitist kleptocracy is one of the things that got us into this mess. No amount of pedantery aimed at explaining how the excesses of our current political economy have moved us away from “true capitalism” is going to fix the problems we’re dealing with. I don’t think Obama’s done a very good job with the economy up to this point. But the problem isn’t his “interventionism.” His problem is that, in order to stabilize the economy and get back to a sustainable model, we are going to eventually have to temporarily nationalize some finanical institutions fix them, and then put them under responsible ownership, whether anyone likes it or not. If this had been done already and best practices for dealing with failed banks applied, we would be much closer to seeing a real recovery.
5. “Silent Majority” was once a very popular catchphrase among the KKK and their allies. I think it is still something of a racist dogwhistle, even though a lot of young people don’t get that, because they certainly didn’t learn it in history.
6. I don’t like paying taxes. But the people who are saying that taxes are out of control are so out of touch with reality I don’t know how to get through to them. The Bush administration cut a lot of taxes and they didn’t exactly decrease spending. If you want to object to paying taxes, that’s fine. But don’t pretend you’re making a political argument that people ought to take seriously. Just admit you have a personal thing about paying taxes, then move on and try to say something intelligent.
7. Making common cause with people like the Wingnut Daily and Newt Gingrich and Michelle Malkin (who wrote a book defending the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII) doesn’t make you “bipartisan” or independent-minded. It makes you a sucker. You’re never going to get good government this way. These are the same people who were marching in lockstep with the torturers, the war profiteers, the lawyers who eviscerated the Fourth Amendment, and the corporatists less than a year ago.
8. If you think all this talk of “revolution” is harmless, think again. And again.
I think Davenoon’s response to the Tea Party “Manifesto” is entirely appropriate.
The Teabaggers want you to waste your time worrying about “collectivism” and conspiracy theories so you won’t notice that it was their masters and political allies who looted the treasury, broke the economy, shredded the Constitution, and embroiled us in two foreign wars that are bleeding our military to death. But, you know, we’re all free to say and think whatever we want. Lap it right up, if that’s your thing. Don’t forget to stimulate the economy by purchasing some gear before you go.
Just be prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences when they come back to power and keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing for the last 30 years. And if you say one word about “populism” or “groupthink” after this, don’t expect any response other than than the ridicule hypocrites deserve.
We are so screwed by the stupidity of our political discourse. It makes my head hurt.
I am going back to my work on the Alabama PACT now.
. . . it is perfectly possible to be living in a dictatorship and not experience it as such as long as you are either uninvolved in politics or are a genuine supporter of the regime. It’s even possible that you could openly oppose the regime but be deemed sufficiently harmless that no one bothers to harass you, or maybe you are just visible enough that they can’t openly act against you without overexposing their hand. But in a free country, you don’t prevent pacifists from getting on airplanes because you’re trying to prevent terrorists from flying, and you don’t refuse entry into the country to journalists from friendly nations. Neither do you incarcerate people for lengthy periods without trial, let alone torture them. Saddam was a dictator, but many Iraqis went about their daily business without encountering any trouble with him and his government. Millions of Soviet citizens did the same under the USSR, but that wasn’t a free country, either. Pretending that nothing is wrong because you don’t personally know any of the people who are being abused this way does not provide evidence that the country you live in is, in fact, free.
I’ve been nibbling around the edges of that for quite some time now, at least in my own head. Avedon has a nice link to fresh work by Scott Horton in the post, along with the obligatory Greenwald, Froomkin, and Balkin. For my own part, I’ll just remind you that Marcy Wheeler knows a lot about this stuff, too, and leave it at that.
Bostonbloomer has few things to say about this, too.
This is a life or death situation and it is deteriorating. The history and the pathologies that got us to this point are well-documented by organizations like SPLC and by independent scholars. Some of us are trying to understand and deal with the situation in a sane and appropriate manner. We could use some support from our government and some leadership from you right now.
I know you inherited a bad situation. I understand you’re still getting things in order and you have a lot on your plate. Saving the world economy must be taxing the resources of the executive branch to the limit. But a lot of us put our feelings aside and supported you despite the fact that we totally disagree with you on many issues, and despite the fact that you sold us out on FISA.
Since you have given us no indication that you intend to dismantle the surveillance apparatus, I hope these domestic terrorists are very high on your list of “legitimate threats.” Please put everything you can spare into shutting this down, Mr. President. These people are bent on exterminating us.
A lot of us would be proud of you if you used the bully pulpit and the power of the executive branch to take a strong stand on this and shut down the virulent media actors who are inciting political violence against us. Since you are a brilliant and well-respected legal scholar, I am sure you understand the implications of the Rwanda Media Case.
It is time to deal with this issue. It needs to change. I think you can save some lives if you show some leadership here. You can probably score a lot of points, too. It seems like a win-win to me.
A while ago, I wrote that you have to tell stories if you want to win an ideological struggle. Fake Consultant, who writes at Left in Alabama, is quickly becoming one of my favorite storytellers in the blogosphere. I find Fake Consultant’s peculiar combination of laid-back style, wit, and ability to make good points very pleasing. Over the weekend, F.C. had a great story about some goings-on at a high school during the annual Day of Silence.
In my little corner of the world, the plain fact is that it’s probably a lot easier to remain closeted than it is to deal daily with the little taunts and jabs that come your way—and of course for some, there’s the risk that they might end up like Matthew Shepard…a man who ended up out and dead.
There has been a reaction to that reality in high schools, which is why we are today visiting the public spaces just off the campus of Mt. Si High School in Snoqualmie, Washington (home of the Wildcats), where a local church group will be arriving to protest the school’s annual “Day of Silence”, an effort to acknowledge the pressures placed on the school’s gay population.
Displayed among the various protesters today was fear, ignorance, disingenuousness, and a strange mixture of self-righteousness and homoeroticism…and that was just among the people in the church group.
Were minds changed?
Did anyone make a new friend?
And how do Dr. Martin Luther King and the Pledge of Allegiance fit into the picture? Follow along, and we shall see.
If you like the story, you can find more at of F.C.’s work here.
Bonus: PortlyDyke has a great post about an experiment ABC did in which they had gay couples display affection for one another in public. One passerby called 911and reported two men kissing on a park bench, and the police actually sent an officer to investigate!
John Quiggin has some technical questions about prosecuting Bush administration officials for war crimes. I don’t have much legal training, but I’ll gladly offer some opinions. I think his analysis is about right, if he’s talking about cabinet officers and higher officials being prosecuted by another state. If prosecutions outside the U.S. happen at all, I think it’s going to be in an international court, and it’s going to be a deputy-assisstant-something or other. And that’s an outside chance.
Since prosecutions don’t seem to be likely, it wouldn’t hurt to file a grievance against John Yoo with the PA or D.C. bar.
Blue Girl has a must-read about the IDF killing a children in Gaza.
It’s alleged that Karl Rove tried to get Patrick Fitzgerald fired during the Plame affair, and guess whose trial this information emerged from?
Hard-Boiled Dreams of the World has video of a former DEA chief admitting on 60 minutes that the CIA imported cocaine into the country. AND a link to a Rolling Stone article from last year about E. Howard Hunt admitting involvement in the Kennedy assassination.
Googlepages has apparently disabled the page where the original ILWU announcement was posted for violating a policy. I snagged their graphic from FDL and blew it up in case anyone wants to take me up on my suggestion. I couldn’t get the small print at the bottom to come out clear. Here it is:
Well, if Ashcroft thinks he can bully an international criminal court the way he tried to bully a few college students last night, he’s going to come off looking just as foolish. Because Ashcroft had the foresight to say “History will not judge us kindly” during the Principals meetings on torture, some have made the effort to rehabilitate him to a degree. I think we can end that now. He’s guilty and he knows it, that’s why his arguments were so very shallow. A court of law would convict in a matter of minutes.
Republican candidate wishes Hitler a happy birthday. (No Kidding).
Those of you who are starting to get to know me through my writing should understand why I just can’t stay away from this. It has implications for most of the issues I write about: authoritarianism, civil liberties, religion in politics, regressive social practices, human rights, media issues. But first and foremost, it has implications for the rule of law.
The mainstream media should be writing stories like this (must-read) about FLDS instead of engaging in this stupidity, which hardly qualifies as writing at all. The issues Sara raises in her post today are chilling, and they have a big-picture significance to the political problems we’ve been wrestling with in the U.S. at least since Bush took office.
Even though some people are trying to make this about religious freedom and dismiss it by saying it’s all based upon consensual relationships, there are much more important issues at play here. Like so many other issues that plague us today, there’s a point here about the rule of law that needs to be made repeatedly.
We cannot afford to allow any group, religious or otherwise, to set up its own police departments, courts, and healthcare systems and use those institutions to hold our public laws in abeyance and impose their own laws on large numbers of people. That’s tantamount to forming a state-within-a-state, and it’s dangerous. If FLDS can do this, Dominionist groups and separatist political groups can do it, too. This is precisely the sort of thing that has the potential to bring down the system if it becomes widespread enough.
It’s a direct challenge to the state’s monopoly on the use of force within its borders. Since the monopoly on violence is what backs up the laws we use to maintain civil order, that makes it a threat to the legitimacy of the laws and by extension, a threat to our domestic tranquility. This is not the place to have an argument about whether the state ought to use violence to back up our laws. The fact of the matter is that it claims sole authority to do so, and this claim is the single most important factor in maintaining the rule of law (to the extent that we are actually maintaining it at the moment).
If there was ever a case where the government has security and public safety interests that outweigh individual rights to religious liberty, this is one. That said, I think this situation is fraught with peril. Here are the two most significant dangers I see.
First, the politics are not easy to navigate. This gives the national government an incentive to use the First Amendment as a shield to stay out of it, even though the government rarely considers the First Amendment on a host of other issues with First Amendment implications. It’s going to be all too easy for faux-libertarian state and local authorities to do the same, especially in states which don’t have experience dealing with similar groups. This means that absent real public pressure, FLDS is going to continue to operate around the country, and they’re going to keep doing the same things they have been doing in Texas. It’s foolish and dishonest to take a “bad apples” approach here. It’s clear that these people have erected an interstate institutional system and are using it to regulate the behavior of a massive number of people outside the reach of the law.
Second, when officials do attempt to deal with FLDS as Texas is doing now, there’s a danger that people on either side might get out of control and touch off a violent encounter or a mass murder/suicide. When that happens, the people who die are going to be viewed as martyrs and it’s very likely the media will feed that perception. Plus, the authorities who are struggling to deal with this are going to take a hit, even if they’ve done everything reasonably possible to prevent the violence from occurring. The failure to deal proactively with this group has practically guaranteed that the authorities who deal with them on the ground when necessity dictates that they do so will face a no-win situation. Smarter people than me need to be figuring out ways to minimize the risk of violence on all sides when dealing with this group and similar ones.
I am very sensitive to the fact that we must preserve a high degree of autonomy for people who live beyond the boundaries of what passes for “mainstream” in our society. I don’t expect everyone to live the way I do (or anyone to, for that matter). I want to be left alone to make my own choices as much as the next person, and in most cases, I strongly support the rights of others to enjoy the same freedom. That said, there is a mountain of evidence already that this group has engaged in practices which meet our accepted legal definitions of child abuse and human trafficking. They’ve set up institutions to facilitate this behavior across state lines and international borders. These institutions have been paid for in part with public money.
When you view it that way, you can easily see that this is a localized form of authoritarianism (or fascism if you prefer), and it has the infrastructure in place across the country to go national in a big way. FLDS has compounds in Mexico and Canada as well as the U.S. The fact that they have some religious views that a lot of people find strange does not make their operation any less a criminal enterprise than organizations which smuggle slaves purely for profit. The government should take steps to: 1) Give the alleged criminals in this case a fair trial and punish them if convicted; 2) Help the victims recover; and 3) Impose sufficient regulations on this group to prevent them from engaging in criminal behavior in the future.
With all due respect to people who have genuine questions about the implications of this case for individual rights, I must write this. Making this issue all about freedom to worship in one’s own way or about the right to engage in non-conformist family and sexual practices, while failing to deal with the issues I’ve laid out for you here, is concern trolling of the most pernicious sort. We must not give our tacit consent to this behavior. We need to strip away the religious and ideological content of this issue and examine it long enough to understand that these people have developed an organizational blueprint. Any group with enough money and social cohesion can apply this blueprint to their own enterprises. This situation is too dangerous to ignore. It’s one more canary in the mine that those of us who are looking at trends which encourage the breakdown of public order need to be paying attention to.
To me, FLDS’ religious views are not the controlling issue here. Their behavior is the controlling issue. I’m aware that one informs the other; but it’s sometimes helpful to stay away from ideological content when we discuss these issues in the context of law and individual rights. I haven’t said much about the religious content of this issue here for precisely that reason. However, the religious implications are important to the social and political context that everyone caught up in this situation is forced to operate in. It’s important to the media narrative. I think the religious views themselves need to be discussed thoroughly, too. So I’ll have a follow-up post later in the week for my readers who are religious, or who are interested in the perspective of a religious person on the actual religious views of this group.
Tristero, for one, is (obviously) tired of dealing with pro-torture arguments that are too silly consider being presented as Very Serious Arguments That Must Be Dealt With. (The ticking bomb, for example). As am I.
Darcy Burner says it’s time to pick a fight over funding for Blackwater (remember, they’ve been involved in torture and other war crimes).
Arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch recently announced that it would end its relationship with Blackwater after an investigation by a German news station caused an uproar in Germany.
Nightly newscasts losing around 1,000,000 viewers per year, if these numbers can be trusted. Lots of other interesting information on demographics of viewship and such, as well.
Via Jack and Jill Politics’ blistering post on the Pentagon sock puppetry reported in the NYT over the weekend.
There’s been some discussion lately about how to get people outside the blogosphere to engage the torture issue. The NYT had an editorial on torture recently, and Tristero is wondering what sort of laws we might pass to prevent this from happening again. I don’t have an answer to that, because we already have laws to prevent it from happening. Seems to me that the trick is to elect people who will interpret the laws we have according to the standard meanings of words, and severely punish government officials who break the law.
So, I intended to write two more posts today than I actually wrote. I didn’t get them done because I fell asleep.
Since I haven’t written much about the mercenary problem we have in the U.S. lately, here’s a video. the artist is Steve Earle.
The House Resolution referred to at the end of the video was introduced in the House of Representatives last year and has since been killed so don’t call anyone supporting that bill. The one you want to support now is H. Res 799. And you might want to take a look at Wexlerwantshearings.
Links to .pdf documents of the committee’s majority report and letters to Rove and AG Mukasey are available at the committee’s website. The Siegelman case is front-and-center in the 40-page report. I haven’t had time to review it and see if other cases, such as the Wes Teel case, are mentioned.
You may recall that Scott Horton, Legal Schnauzer, and the Gulf Coast Realist were all over the Diaz, Minor, Teel, and Seigelman cases months ago. You can find links to a couple of Horton’s articles on the issue in this post I wrote back in February.
