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"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power": Benito Mussolini
Voltaire on Freedom
"...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." Voltaire, François Marie Arouet (1694-1778), Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
Darwin on Effect of Early Brainwashing
"It is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, whilst the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason." - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871
It was impossible to save the Great Republic
"But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people's liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket."
Mark Twain
E.O. Wilson on population growth and sustainability
"The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct." - E.O. Wilson
Jefferson on Corporations
“I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan. November 12, 1816
How despicable and ignoble war is
Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! - Albert Einstein
Do not despair due to hostility or exclusion
Do not despair due to hostility or exclusion by popular, small minded, or greedy men and women, simply because they reject or cannot understand your truths. Stand up and declare your reality, in defiance of their ignorance and self-serving falsehoods. -- Chris
Anger Looks to the Good of Justice
"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust." -- St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Aside from the fact that Thomas thought heretics should be put to death ;-) he really has hit on something here!
"In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) US Founding Father - Source: Dogwood Papers
"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
The weak do what they must. . .
"The strong do what they will, and the weak do what they must." - Thucydides (c. 460 B.C. - c. 395 B.C.)
Sustainability and Population Growth
"A sincere concern for the future is certainly the factor that motivates many who make frequent use of the word, "sustainable." But there are cases where one suspects that the word is used carelessly, perhaps as though the belief exists that the frequent use of the adjective "sustainable" is all that is needed to create a sustainable society."
"Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?"
The Primary Political Question: "Who benefits? Who pays?"
To cut through the cant of "responsibility," we must ask the double question "Who benefits? Who pays?" This is the first question to ask when a politico-economic system of distribution is proposed. It focuses our attention on operations and their consequences rather than on words. The answer to this double question largely defines the properties of a system. We take it as axiomatic that every social action entails both gain (profit) and cost (loss). We can indicate the way profit and loss are distributed by three alternative verbs: privatize, commonize and socialize. -Garrett Hardin 1985
Thomas Paine on the Defense of Custom
Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
From the Introduction to Common Sense, January 10, 1776
Taking A Position Because It Is Right
Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Galbraith on Respectability
“Political conservatism benefits from the deep desire of politicians, Democrats in particular, for respectability -their need to show that they are individuals of sound, confidence inspiring judgment. And what is the test of respectability? It is broadly whether speech and action are consistent with the comfort and well-being of the people of property and position. A radical is anyone who causes discomfort or otherwise offends such interests. Thus in our politics, we test even liberals by their conservatism.” - John Kenneth Galbraith
They love the liars and hate the truth, Mencken
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars: the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." - - H. L. Mencken - (1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist
a lie so subtle
"Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, 'There is something not right,' no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code." - Carl Gustav Jung
Repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed,
"And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed." -John Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath
Need to write an Oregon Public Records request?
Click on this link and they will write a request for you:
“Its hard to give, Its hard to get, But everybody needs a little forgiveness.” Patty Griffin - from "Forgiveness"
American “Democracy” and Responsibility
"we also have to be precise about the roadblocks that keep people from acting responsibly: A nominally democratic political system dominated by elites who serve primarily the wealthy in a predatory corporate capitalist system; which utilizes sophisticated propaganda techniques that have been effective in undermining real democracy; aided by mass-media industries dedicated to selling diversions to consumers more than to helping inform citizens in ways that encourage meaningful political action."
- Robert Jensen, Professor of journalism, University of Texas at Austin. From Op-Ed, July 8, 2008
OUR UNDISPUTED OVERLORDS
“Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary, reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else.” - Bill Moyers - PBS Commentator
The Politics of Anti-Semitism
The Politics of Anti-Semitism, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, confronts how the slur of "anti-semite" has been used to intimidate critics of Israel's abuse of Palestinians. It includes essays by Uri Avnery, Edward Said, Michael Neumann and Bill and Kathy Christison and more.
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom"
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." -- Somerset Maugham
Human Insensitivity, Arrogance, Ignorance, Greed and Folly
There is perhaps no more certain sign of human insensitivity, arrogance, ignorance, greed and folly than the constant growth and destructive expansion of human populations across the globe—a self-worshiping, voracious cancer that continues to plunder and trash our planet and its creatures while almost imperceptibly picking away at the very support systems of life as we know it. - Me (and many others before)
I am a nature photographer specializing in wildflowers, birds, and other criters.
Some of my wildflower and other photos can be found at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherchristie/sets/
And
http://calphotos.berkeley.edu/cgi/img_query?where-photographer=Christopher+Christie
These photos can be downloaded without charge for personal use and are used for educational purposes in the publications of many organizations, most often for free.
My professional training is in microbiology (BS Microbiology, Honors / Distinction in) and medical technology. I have worked as a microbiologist, medical technologist and Greyhound bus driver. In the late 1980's I grew over 100 native species in a small nursery. Besides identifying, photographing and growing native plants, I enjoy birdwatching, gardening and hiking in the Great Basin and local mountains. In the fall and winter, I used to do raptor counts along the Burnt River in the Hereford area for the East Cascade Bird Conservancy.
“We are swimming with the snakes at the bottom of the well - So silent and peaceful in the darkness where we fell - But we are not snakes and what's more we never will be And if we stay swimming here forever we will never be free” Patty Griffin - from "Forgiveness"
Mysteries
Pictograph From San Rafael Swell, Utah
Endangered Peninsular Bighorn Sheep
Bighorns in Anza Borrego State Park, CA, 1998
Not One More Death, Not One More Dollar
Message On Main Street to End the War
Peace On Main Street
Need money For Schools?
Winnie Moves to New Meadows, Idaho
In 1944 Winnie's house at the logging camp was moved on the back of a truck. In those days, logger's homes were often moved from camp to camp on R.R.flatcars or trucks.
[Added link to Repulsive Progressive Hypocrisy, by Glenn Greenwald, with quote, 2/10/12]
Back on January 23rd, 2012, a Herald editorial made what I could only take as a snide and senseless remark about bloggers. The editorial thought that the rhetoric against the SOPA and PIPA internet censorship acts included both "slight exaggerations" and "hysterical claims." They went on to set up a hypothetical example, an example that is unhinged from the realities of the the two bills, between two bloggers expressing their opinions. They conclude with a dig at bloggers by incorrectly suggesting they would still be able to post their "opinion, ad nauseum" (sic), and suggesting that the opinions posted by bloggers everywhere which opposed SOPA and PIPA were "Conspiracy theories." I guess we can be glad that we still live in a country where small newspapers too, can issue their deriding, error prone editorials, ad nauseam.
Oh damn, here I go again with another blogger "ad nauseam" post questioning the behavior of our President and Congress when they violate our basic Constitutional rights. Thankfully the somnolent, apathetic and hypocritical herd can choose instead to read the fluff in the local papers about the Cattlemen's Association, the Super Bowl, or the "Art of the Spud."
Back in 2011, in one of those moments of ad nauseam conspiracy ferver, I had mentioned that killing American citizens by drone strike without formal charge and trial was a grave violation of our Constitutional protections and our long held right of Habeas Corpus and Due Process in courts of law as stated in the Bill of Rights, I.E. the Fourth, Fifth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.
Now we have leaders from both political parties questioning the Obama administration's authority to order killings of American citizens without due process and asking for the Obama administration's secret interpretations of law that support these killings.
When it comes to national security, Michael V. Hayden is no shrinking violet. As CIA director, he ran the Bush administration's program of warrantless wiretaps against suspected terrorists.
But the retired air force general admits to being a little squeamish about the Obama administration's expanding use of pilotless drones to kill suspected terrorists around the world — including, occasionally, U.S. citizens.
"Right now, there isn't a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel," Hayden told me recently.
As an example of the problem, he cites the example of Anwar Awlaki, the New Mexico-born member of Al Qaeda who was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen last September. "We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him," Hayden notes, "but we didn't need a court order to kill him. Isn't that something?"
Washington, D.C. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden called the Administration’s refusal to share legal opinions pertaining to the executive branch’s understanding of its authority to kill Americans “an indefensible assertion of executive authority.” Wyden has been pressing the Justice Department and other administration officials to share its legal interpretations of the government’s authority in this area for more than a year but, as the Senator writes, “it is increasingly clear that [the Justice Department] has no intention of doing so.”
“To be clear, I am not suggesting that the President has no authority to act in this area. If American citizens choose to take up arms against the United States during times of war, there can undoubtedly be some circumstances under which the President has the authority to use lethal force against those Americans,” wrote Wyden. “However, when the United States is engaged in a military conflict with a terrorist group, whose members do not wear uniforms but instead attempt to blend in with civilian populations in a variety of countries around the world, questions about when the President may use lethal force against Americans whom he believes are part of this enemy force become significantly more complicated.
“Members of Congress need to understand how (or whether) the executive branch has attempted to answer these questions so that they can decide for themselves whether this authority has been properly defined. But it is impossible for elected legislators to understand how the executive branch interprets its own authority if the secret legal opinions that outline the Justice Department’s understanding of this authority are withheld from Congress by the Administration.”
Wyden has long asserted that it is inappropriate for the Administration to rely on what he refers to as “secret law” or classified legal interpretations that grant the government authorities without the knowledge and consent of the American people.
“I understand that government officials who choose to rely on secret law almost invariably believe that their decision to do so is justified, and that their secret interpretations of the law would stand up to public scrutiny. But the only way to find out whether this is true is to ensure that this public scrutiny actually takes place,” wrote Wyden, “Intelligence agencies may sometimes need to conduct secret operations, but they should never be in the position of relying on secret law.”
February 4th, 2012 | by Chris Woods and Christina Lamb
The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.
The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a ‘targeted, focused effort’ that ‘has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.’
Speaking publicly for the first time on the controversial CIA drone strikes, Obama claimed last week they are used strictly to target terrorists, rejecting what he called ‘this perception we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly’. ‘Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties’, he told a questioner at an on-line forum. ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists trying to go in and harm Americans’.
But research by the Bureau has found that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children. A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.
Although the drone attacks were started under the Bush administration in 2004, they have been stepped up enormously under Obama.
There have been 260 attacks by unmanned Predators or Reapers in Pakistan by Obama’s administration – averaging one every four days. Because the attacks are carried out by the CIA, no information is given on the numbers killed. . . . . The legal view Naz Modirzadeh, Associate Director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) at Harvard University, said killing people at a rescue site may have no legal justification.
‘Not to mince words here, if it is not in a situation of armed conflict, unless it falls into the very narrow area of imminent threat then it is an extra-judicial execution’, she said. ‘We don’t even need to get to the nuance of who’s who, and are people there for rescue or not. Because each death is illegal. Each death is a murder in that case.’
During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices — rather than a big, bad, scary Republican — all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates:
The sharpest edges of President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have broad public support, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party. . . . .
Repulsive liberal hypocrisy extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo. A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process. . . . .
[Edited 10/26/11] Listening to the glee of our masters, both political and in media, at the death of Gaddafi, I was left feeling a bit more hopeless, a bit more angry, and perhaps, a bit more wise about the brutal facts of power left to the hands of the ruthless. When one faces ruthless people, as long as one faces that fact directly, one has to refine the response to their threat. Occupy Wall Street is a courageous beginning, but if they continue to be displaced from their occupations by the state power of militarized police [Apparently the local media doesn't think the protesters are members of the public], other tactics will have to be considered. The main point is that state power, whether international coalitions, national, or local, can be both overwhelming, and ruthless. Given the timid behavior of most people, one assumes they already get that.
But I digress.
The Western powers of the undemocratic UN Security Council, and the "defense" grouping called the "North Atlantic Treaty Organization," NATO, declared war on Muammar Gaddafi, for reasons, despite their claims, unrelated to humanitarian issues. Not unexpectedly, the west won their war over a small relatively defenseless nation. This is the well worn pattern. The problem they face now, not unlike the problems they faced in their illegal war against Iraq, is how to form a civil government that promotes more freedom and less suffering than that experienced under the government they deposed. Given that a civil, democratic government takes a back seat to Western access to Libya'a resources, that problem will likely go unnoticed, as will the war crimes committed by the "revolutionary" forces supported by the west. War crimes of the west, and their friends, are after all, not war crimes, but simply 'humanitarian" necessities, as in the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden during the end of World War II, the napalming of villages during the Vietnam war, and the destruction of civilians and their infrastructure during the NATO war on Serbia/Yugoslavia. The fact that NATO and their proxy Libyan quislings destroyed Sirte and other Libyan cities, many civilians included, in order to save civilians from the imagined potential crimes of Gadadfi matters little. Once you get through the nonsensical hypocrisy of the given motives for the brutal and merciless use of force, one is only left with the stark motive of controlling resources.
So now, after the brutal NATO onslaught, and the illegal, perverted, and unbelievably cruel killing of Gaddafi, we are left, not with governance that provided for the people, but with the weasel-eyed Mustafa Abdel Jalil, and the nice folks you can watch in the following videos. Fine, uplifting, humanitarian work, as usual. _____
October 25, 2011 "Global Post" -- SIRTE, Libya — An analysis of video obtained by GlobalPost from a rebel fighter who recorded the moment when Col. Muammar Gaddafi was first captured confirms that another rebel fighter, whose identity is unknown, sodomized the former leader as he was being dragged from the drainpipe where he had taken cover.
A frame by frame analysis of this exclusive GlobalPost video clearly shows the rebel trying to insert some kind of stick or knife into Gaddafi's rear end.
WARNING
Pictures and Videos should only be viewed by a mature audience
October 25, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- - -
The jubilant reaction of Western powers and the foes of Muammar Gaddafi to his barbaric murder on October 20, 2011 raises some serious questions about war crimes committed by the Western-backed National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters and NATO forces.
There are two serious violations of international law here, namely, (1) in relation to the Third Geneva Convention in 1929 and (2) in relation to the UN Security Council Resolution #1973 in 2011. Let me explain first (1) the Geneva Convention and then (2) the UN Resolution hereafter.
(1) The first violation of international law concerns the Third Geneva Convention in 1929, which offers rights to prisoners of war (POWs), such that POWs have certain rights to be protected. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov rightly said on October 21, 2011 that, "in compliance with international law, the moment that a party to an armed conflict is captured, special procedures should be applied to him or her, including assistance, as well as a ban on killing such a person."
But this right was violated, when Gaddafi was captured alive (as POW) and was then repetitively verbally and physically abused before being shot dead shortly after. As "testified by the grainy mobile phone footage seen by the world of the former leader, bloodied and dazed, being dragged along by NTC fighters" in a gruesome way, "Gaddafi can be heard in one video saying 'God forbids this' several times, as slaps from the crowd [of NTC fighters] rain down on his head," as reported by Rania El Gamal for Reuters on October 23.
Then, he was executed by a young NTC fighter named Sanad al-Sadek al-Ureibi, who claimed that he shot Gaddafi after capture, because he did not want him alive; and other fighters celebrated with him after the summary execution. Worse, his dead body was then publicly displayed in a commercial freezer at a shopping center for more celebration.
This act of Western-backed NTC fighters is not only criminal but also barbaric. The foes of Gaddafi may argue that he deserves this fate, but two wrongs do not make a right (which is a well-known logical fallacy), and the answer to criminality is not more criminality. This blatant violation of the Geneva Convention then led Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial executions, to charge on October 21 that "the manner of the deposed Libyan leader's killing could be a war crime," in a report by RT on October 22.
This criminal act by Western-supported NTC fighters is not just restricted to the case of Gaddafi's death but also be extended to the murder of his son (and others in the group). For instance, Gaddafi's son, Mutassim Gaddafi, was captured alive, together with his father, and, in a video released by NTC fighters, he was shown to be "alive in custody, and even casually smoking a cigarette" in a room (surrounded by armed NTC fighters), but in a few moments later, "other images show him dead with gunshot wounds to his neck and abdomen" in the same room, in a report by RT on October 21.
A technical question here is who should be responsible for this criminal act. There are at least five legal possibilities, namely, (a) the individuals who physically abused him and/or pulled the trigger, like Sanad al-Sadek al-Ureibi and others to be identified, (b) the specific unit of NTC fighters which participated in the capture of Gaddafi and his group, (c) the NTC leadership, (d) NATO forces because of their participation (or complicity) in the attack which led to the capture (and the subsequent murder), and (e) certain leaders of Western powers who have given wholehearted support to NTC from the start to encourage the violence against the regime.
It is not surprising that, at the beginning, the NTC tried to cover up the criminal killing by making up fictional stories and blaming others instead. For instance, NTC leader Mahmoud Jibril, first tried to defend NTC by making a dubious public statement to the press that Gaddafi was killed in a crossfire and was shot by one of his own loyalists. But this cover-up was questioned later, even by a senior member of NTC, Waheed Burshan, who said on October 22: "We found that he was alive and then he was dead. And as far as we can tell, there was no fight" (crossfire).
Even "British MP Jeremy Corbyn said that, as Gaddafi was captured alive, he should have been treated as prisoner of war, interrogated and put on trial," but "it looks that there was an element of mob rule in this, and he was indeed killed in the back of the truck," as reported by RT on October 20.
So now, both "the UN Human Rights Office and Amnesty International are calling for an investigation into Gaddafi's death as it raises concerns over what may be the unlawful killing of a prisoner," as reported by RT on October 22. U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville even said on October 20 that he found it very disturbing when "you see someone who has been captured alive and then you see the same person dead....Summary executions are strictly illegal under any circumstances. It's different if someone is killed in combat....But if something else has happened, if someone is captured and then deliberately killed, then that is a very serious matter," as reported by Stephanie Nebehay for Reuters on October 21.
Unfortunately, because of the Western dominance in international legal bodies, any prosecution of war crimes committed by Western forces and their allies is very unlikely, as "Benjamin Barber, an analyst at a US think tank, does not expect anyone will be held accountable for the colonel's death," as reported by RT on October 22.
Now that Gaddafi was dead, the most tragic thing is that this gruesome murder "will cast doubt on the promises by Libya's new rulers to respect human rights and prevent reprisals. It would also embarrass Western governments which gave their wholehearted backing to the NTC," as reported by Rania El Gamal for Reuters on October 23.
Even British MP Jeremy Corbyn soberly warned that "this really does raise some question marks about the command and discipline of the NTC forces and what Libya is going to be like, not just tomorrow, but next month, next year and the next ten years."
Furthermore, according to Shirin Sagedhi, "the gruesome and public killing of Gaddafi was insulting to the people of Libya and the people of the region, as well as the 'idea that democratic forces would brutally kill someone like that,'" in a report by RT on October 22.
(2) And the second violation of international law concerns the UN Security Council Resolution #1973 in 2011, which set up a "no-fly zone" above Libya but did not authorize NATO forces to carry out an attack on any group who were not harming anyone but were fleeing from being attacked instead. Indeed, it was a French jet which "fired on Gaddafi convoy" when it was trying to flee from the ferocious attack by NTC fighers, as confirmed by French defense chief and reported by RT on October 20.
In this specific case, Gaddafi and his few bodyguards were under attack by NTC fighters when they were fleeing Sirte in a convoy, but NATO helped the NTC fighters and carried out an aerial attack (by a French jet) on Gaddafi's convoy (which led to Gaddafi's capture).
But this violates international law, in regard to the UN Security Council Resolution #1973, since, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday rightly pointed out, "the attack on Gaddafi's convoy was directly at odds with the agreed task of guaranteeing a no-fly zone," because "in this specific case one cannot speak of protecting the lives of civilians, either because the convoy did not attack anyone" and was trying instead to escape from the ferocious attack by NTC fighters, or because there was no civilian around to protect (as an excuse) in the first place.
Russia's NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, therefore accused NATO of being "directly involved in the operation to kill the former Libyan leader," since "apparently there were orders that oriented the military servicemen who are in Libya and that directed them to ensure the physical elimination of Gaddafi," as reported by RT on October 21.
Instead of showing respect towards international law, Western powers reacted joyfully to the killing, as shown by the elation of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, when "learned about the death of Muammar Gaddafi via an SMS message" in an interview "filmed by CBS NEWS," exclaimed "Wow!" and thus joyfully said, "We came, we saw, he died!," as reported by Pravda on October 21. And her boss, President Obama, triumphantly announced that, "without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives" of getting rid of Gaddafi and setting up a new regime.
In reaction to this Western joy over the killing, Rogozin thus observed that "the Western elation over the death of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi could have sadistic grounds," as he thus added: "The faces of the leaders of 'world democracies' are so happy, as if they remembered how they hanged stray cats in basements in their childhoods," as reported by RT on October 21.
In this way, Western mainstream media did not waste time to engage in spinning the whole murder into one of bashing Gaddafi and his historical legacy, without telling the rest of the world about the Western complicity in supporting Gaddafi in all these years of dictatorial rule.
For instance, only some years ago, "former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had no qualms doing business with Gaddafi and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi got cozy with him at a United Nations Summit in Rome," as reported by RT on October 21.
In the case of the U.S., the thoughtful comment by Matthew Rothschild on October 21 is worth mentioning: "The hypocrisy of the U.S. position could hardly be greater. In 2003, the Bush Administration rehabilitated Qaddafi, who became an ally of the United States in the 'war on terror.' In fact, the CIA used Qaddafi's intelligence service to torture detainees that the U.S. sent over to Libya. The CIA 'rendered' eight or nine detainees to Qaddafi's intelligence service, and sent questions along with for the torturers to ask, according to Human Rights Watch, in an interview with Democracy Now. The CIA may even have had agents present during some of the questioning. In 2008, Condoleezza Rice visited Qaddafi in Libya. The next year, Obama shook his hand, and John McCain offered him arms. When it was convenient for Washington to support Qaddafi, it did so. When it was convenient to attack him, it did so. But the Obama administration didn't attack Bahrain when it cracked down on people fighting for democracy against that kingdom. No, Washington even let Saudi Arabia, another kingdom, invade Bahrain to help put down the nonviolent uprising."
Many who do not know the history of modern Libya are not aware of the historical contributions of Muammar Gaddafi to his people and the region, even when he has his own failures. Consider, for instance, the following five important contributions by Gaddafi to his country and the region:
(a) He envisioned "the United States of Africa" and thus contributed to the formation of the African Union. In fact, "the African Union is basically the creation of Muammar Gaddafi, who saw it as a vessel for a stronger Africa," as reported by RT on October 20
(b) He succeeded in holding Libya together, which, according to Shirin Sagedhi, was previously fragmented by different "tribes and ethnicities."
(c) He transformed Libya to have "one of the highest GDPs per capita in Africa and...to provide an extensive level of social security, particularly in the fields of housing and education," in a way that many sub-Saharan countries in Africa could only dream of, in the article on Libya by Wikipedia.
(d) He managed to avoid being dominated by the Soviet Union or the U.S. during the Cold War by masterfully playing the Soviet Union against the U.S. without being a puppet of the former. After the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, he continued to fight against Western domination in the region and thus developed bad blood with Western powers.
(e) He overthrew the Kingdom of Libya in a bloodless military coup against King Idris in 1969 and thus brought Libya into the modern era (from monarchic feudalism).
All these achievements are no small feats for a ruler of a small country with only a few million people and thus have allowed Gaddafi to rule for 42 years.
This does not mean that Gaddafi has no failures. Surely, there are good examples to consider, like his personal vanity, his abuse of power, his ruthlessness, and the like. But who has no failures, for a man with his historical status in the modern era?
But all these achievements are now forgotten, as the West had finished using him, and Western mainstream media is now spinning his historical legacy, in accordance to the dominant rhetoric of Western powers in world media.
Yet, history has its final say: Muammar Gaddafi, in the end, is a historical figure in the modern history of Africa and for that matter, the Middle East, in spite of all his personal faults. And the war crimes by Western powers and their allies help perpetuating the vicious cycle of violence and of suffering in the world.
Bodies Found at Sirte Hotel Used by Anti-Gaddafi Fighters
OCTOBER 24, 2011
The entrance to the Mahari Hotel in Sirte, where at least 53 persons were apparently executed. At the time of their killing the hotel was apparently controlled by anti-Gaddafi fighters from Misrata. The red graffiti on the right states "Tiger Brigade," the name of a prominent Misrata fighting group.
Bodies of persons lie in the garden of the Mahari Hotel in Sirte, immediately after they were put into body bags by local residents. At the time of their killing the hotel was apparently controlled by anti-Gaddafi fighters from Misrata. 53 persons were apparently executed at the site. . . . .
All hail humanitarian war. Regime change can be a bitch. Start with sanctions because of 'humanitarian' reasons. If they don't work, arm ragtag mercenaries and implement a 'no-fly zone' through an international body. If the rebels can't hunt down the defunct leader, then just bomb the hell out the country until a bloody carcass vaguely resembling the leader turns up. Then claim that the humanitarian intervention was a wild success. PS: Make sure you destroy enough of the infrastructure to secure a huge IMF bondage loan for reconstruction.
The before and after picture of Libya below shows what the U.S./NATO means by a humanitarian war:
[See link for photos, or just Google "Sirte Libya Destruction photos"]
- Why Libya? Another side of Qadhafi (Gaddafi) [Edited 9/8/11]
- The Siege of Sirte: NATO Bombs and Libyan Rebels Terrorise Sirte, Massacre to follow? _____
Why Libya? Another side of Qadhafi (Gaddafi)
It is obvious that oil played a part in the motivation of the West to provide close cover military support to the rebels of the National Transitional Council. But are there other compelling reasons?
What about the ideology of socialism itself, including Gaddafi's "Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya?" Gaddafi's "Green Book" version of socialism, with it's free education and healthcare, along with it's restrictions on capital accumulation, must be especially repugnant, not to mention threatening, to wealthy Western elites. Capitalist systems, especially those of the Western powers and the US, have tried, over the last century, to stamp out the remnants of real or approximate socialism, where state resources are used to provide for most of the country's people, not just the wealthy. Serbia (former Yugoslavia), is one example. These nationalist and socialist countries that take charge of their own resources to provide for their own people, and, most importantly, protect their resources and people from looting and control by outside capitalist powers, are the targets of regime change. In recent decades, this is usually accomplished under the banner of "democracy" and "humanitarian" intervention, no matter how absurd the claims are.
There are many examples where the US has attempted, usually successfully, to take out regimes that present any socialist example (Cuba, former Soviet Union, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya), where all, or most of the people, not just economic elites, actually have some control over their government and destiny, and where the peoples basic needs, like heath care, are provided for. The Western capitalists target these countries to stamp out all socialist examples and to gain capitalist multi-national corporate control over the resources of these countries. Western governments and their corporate media, from Fox News to MSNBC, to NPR and Al Jazeera will pretend in their class oriented, propagandistic coverage, to say it is not so, but it is really that simple.
Some of you may benefit, but the moral, ethical, and economic costs are high.
[After overthrowing the monarchy] The remaking of Libyan society that Qadhafi envisioned and to which he devoted his energies after the early 1970s formally began in 1973 with a so-called cultural or popular revolution. The revolution was designed to combat bureaucratic inefficiency, lack of public interest and participation in the subnational governmental system, and problems of national political coordination. In an attempt to instill revolutionary fervor into his compatriots and to involve large numbers of them in political affairs, Qadhafi urged them to challenge traditional authority and to take over and run government organs themselves. The instrument for doing this was the "people's committee." Within a few months, such committees were found all across Libya. They were functionally and geographically based and eventually became responsible for local and regional administration.
People's committees were established in such widely divergent organizations as universities, private business firms, government bureaucracies, and the broadcast media. Geographically based committees were formed at the governorate, municipal, and zone (lowest) levels. Seats on the people's committees at the zone level were filled by direct popular election; members so elected could then be selected for service at higher levels. By mid-1973 estimates of the number of people's committees ranged above 2,000.
In the scope of their administrative and regulatory tasks and the method of their members' selection, the people's committees embodied the concept of direct democracy that Qadhafi propounded in the first volume of The Green Book, which appeared in 1976. The same concept lay behind proposals to create a new political structure composed of "people's congresses." The centerpiece of the new system was the General People's Congress (GPC), a national representative body intended to replace the RCC.
. . . .
Remaking of the economy was parallel with the attempt to remold political and social institutions. Until the late 1970s, Libya's economy was mixed, with a large role for private enterprise except in the fields of oil production and distribution, banking, and insurance. But according to volume two of Qadhafi's Green Book, which appeared in 1978, private retail trade, rent, and wages were forms of "exploitation" that should be abolished. Instead, workers' self-management committees and profit participation partnerships were to function in public and private enterprises. A property law was passed that forbade ownership of more than one private dwelling, and Libyan workers took control of a large number of companies, turning them into state-run enterprises. Retail and wholesale trading operations were replaced by state-owned "people's supermarkets", where Libyans in theory could purchase whatever they needed at low prices. By 1981 the state had also restricted access to individual bank accounts to draw upon privately held funds for government projects.
While measures such as these undoubtedly benefited poorer Libyans, they created resentment and opposition among the newly dispossessed [wealthy]. The latter joined those already alienated, some of whom had begun to leave the country. By 1982 perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 Libyans had gone abroad; because many of the emigrants were among the enterprising and better educated Libyans, they represented a significant loss of managerial and technical expertise.
Some of the [wealthy] exiles formed active opposition groups. Although the groups were generally ineffective, Qadhafi nevertheless in early 1979 warned opposition leaders to return home immediately or face "liquidation." A wave of assassinations of prominent Libyan exiles, mostly in Western Europe, followed. Few opponents responded to the 1979 call to "repentance" or to a similar one issued in October 1982 in which Qadhafi once again threatened liquidation of the recalcitrant, the GPC having already declared their personal property forfeit.
Internal opposition came from elements of the middle class who opposed Qadhafi's economic reforms and from students and intellectuals who criticized his ideology. He also incurred the anger of the Islamic community for his unorthodox interpretations of the doctrine and traditions of Islam, his challenge to the authority of the religious establishment, and his contention that the ideas in The Green Book were compatible with and based upon Islam. Endowed Islamic properties (habus) were nationalized as part of Qadhafi's economic reforms, and he urged "the masses" to take over mosques.
The most serious challenges came from the armed forces, especially the officers' corps, and from the RCC. Perhaps the most important one occurred in 1975 when Minister of Planning and RCC member Major Umar Mihayshi and about thirty army officers attempted a coup after disagreements over political economic policies. The failure of the coup led to the flight of Mihayshi and part of the country's technocratic elite. In a move that signaled a new intolerance of dissent, the regime executed twenty-two of the accused army officers in 1977, the first such punishment in more than twenty years. Further executions of dissident army officers were reported in 1979, and in August 1980 several hundred people were allegedly killed in the wake of an unsuccessful army revolt centered in Tobruk.
Asiel spoke to many people in Sirte today - and recounts to us what is going on - it is surrounded by NATO's rebels.
"There is no military in Sirte." NATO is bombing civilian targets--Food storage facilities bombed, little food, electricity has been knocked out, no fuel, people may starve. Massacre to follow, with ensuing long war.
The "humanitarian" intervention by the US & NATO, presented as an intervention to save the lives of Libyans, has been estimated to have killed 50 to 60,000 Libyans. NATO's 8,000 bombing raids in close air support of the "revolutionaries" have had their intended effect, even if not allowed by UN resolutions purportedly passed to protect imagined assaults on civilians in the anti-Gaddafi stronghold of Benghazi, where the rebellion began.
The towns of Sirte, Ben Walid, and Sabha are under siege, with their water and power cut off or under threat of being cut off. Rebel leaders in Benghazi fill the compliant, or is that complicit, international media, with reports of Gaddafi loyalists killing 800 civilians in Sirte, his home town of loyalists, probably to cover for the current and coming crimes of the rebels and NATO. As of now, there is little, if any, information provided from Gaddafi loyalists in the main stream corporate media. In the propaganda war, the rebels need to promote in advance the idea that the coming carnage, to be caused by them, has been caused by Gaddafi and his followers, and the media reports it as fact.
But many articles in the mainstream press contain the following quote:
Siege: "A military operation in which enemy forces surround a town or building, cutting off supplies, with the aim of compelling the surrender of those inside"
Are there international legal requirements under the laws of war that need to be complied with?
"The laws pertaining to siege warfare, however, have changed radically in the post-World War II era. Though the word “siege” is never mentioned as a term of law, the Additional Protocols of 1977 impose restrictions on warfare that, if enforced, would effectively make siege illegal. Besieging forces are not allowed to target civilians or starve them “as a method of warfare,” and relief agencies are authorized to provide aid to needy populations.
The most important limitations are the rules regarding “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population,” including food and water supplies. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 upheld the traditional view that an army may legally block food or other relief shipments into a besieged city if the aid would result in more goods becoming available to the local military forces. But Article 54 of the First Additional Protocol contains an absolute ban on the starvation of civilians as well as forbidding the destruction of foodstuffs, crops, livestock and drinking water supplies that a civilian population relies on for sustenance. This provision may require a besieging force to allow relief supplies to enter a besieged city, even if some of the supplies will inevitably be shared with the defenders. A besieging army is also forbidden, for example, from destroying a city’s drinking water supply.
Comparable rules are found in the Second Additional Protocol, applicable in internal conflict. "
But hey, who cares about international law, certainly not the leaders of the US or "the international community," (i.e., the Western powers) who like the Mafiosi in "The Godfather," give countries with coveted resources an offer they can't refuse--in this case and others, under the banner of "humanitarian intervention." Humanitarian bombs to follow. __
September 05, 2011 "Truth Dig" - -Here we go again. The cheering crowds. The deposed dictator. The encomiums to freedom and liberty. The American military as savior. You would think we would have learned in Afghanistan or Iraq. But I guess not. I am waiting for a trucked-in crowd to rejoice as a Gadhafi statue is toppled and Barack Obama lands on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit to announce “Mission Accomplished.” War, as long as you view it through the distorted lens of the corporate media, is not only entertaining, but allows us to confuse state power with personal power. It permits us to wallow in unchecked self-exaltation. We are a nation that loves to love itself.
I know enough of Libya, a country I covered for many years as the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, to assure you that the chaos and bloodletting have only begun. Moammar Gadhafi, during one of my lengthy interviews with him under a green Bedouin tent in the sprawling Bab al-Aziziya army barracks in Tripoli, once proposed marrying one of his sons to Chelsea Clinton as a way of mending fences with the United States. He is as insane as he appears and as dangerous. But we should never have become the air force, trainers, suppliers, special forces and enablers of rival tribal factions, goons under the old regime and Islamists that are divided among themselves by deep animosities and a long history of violent conflict.
Stopping Gadhafi forces from entering Benghazi six months ago, which I supported, was one thing. Embroiling ourselves in a civil war was another. And to do it Obama blithely shredded the Constitution and bypassed Congress in violation of the War Powers Resolution. Not that the rule of law matters much in Washington. The dark reasoning of George W. Bush’s administration was that the threat of terrorism and national security gave the executive branch the right to ignore all legal restraints. The Obama administration has made this disregard for law bipartisan. Obama assured us when this started that it was not about “regime change.” But this promise proved as empty as the ones he made during his presidential campaign. He has ruthlessly prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where military planners speak of a continued U.S. presence for the next couple of decades. He has greatly expanded our proxy wars, which rely heavily on drone and missile attacks, as well as clandestine operations, in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Add a few more countries and we will set the entire region alight.
The NATO airstrikes on the city of Sirte expose the hypocrisy of our “humanitarian” intervention in Libya. Sirte is the last Gadhafi stronghold and the home to Gadhafi’s tribe. The armed Libyan factions within the rebel alliance are waiting like panting hound dogs outside the city limits. They are determined, once the airstrikes are over, not only to rid the world of Gadhafi but all those within his tribe who benefited from his 42-year rule. The besieging of Sirte by NATO warplanes, which are dropping huge iron fragmentation bombs that will kill scores if not hundreds of innocents, mocks the justification for intervention laid out in a United Nations Security Council resolution. The U.N., when this began six months ago, authorized “all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” We have, as always happens in war, become the monster we sought to defeat. We destroy in order to save. Libya’s ruling National Transitional Council estimates that the number of Libyans killed in the last six months, including civilians and combatants, has exceeded 50,000. Our intervention, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, has probably claimed more victims than those killed by the former regime. But this intervention, like the others, was never, despite all the high-blown rhetoric surrounding it, about protecting or saving Libyan lives. It was about the domination of oil fields by Western corporations.
Once the Libyans realize what the Iraqis and Afghans have bitterly discovered—that we have no interest in democracy, that our primary goal is appropriating their natural resources as cheaply as possible and that we will sacrifice large numbers of people to maintain our divine right to the world’s diminishing supply of fossil fuel—they will hate us the way we deserve to be hated. Libya has the ninth largest oil reserves in the world, which is why we react with moral outrage and military resolve when Gadhafi attacks his citizens, but ignore the nightmare in the Congo, where things for the average Congolese are far, far worse. It is why the puppets in the National Transitional Council have promised to oust China and Brazil from the Libyan oil fields and turn them over to Western companies. The unequivocal message we deliver daily through huge explosions and death across the occupied Middle East is: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you.
History is replete with conquering forces being cheered when they arrive, whether during the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine in World War II, the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon or our own arrival in Baghdad, and then rapidly mutating from liberator to despised enemy. And once our seizure of Libyan oil becomes clear it will only ramp up the jihadist hatred for America that has spread like wildfire across the Middle East. We are recruiting the next generation of 9/11 hijackers, all waiting for their chance to do to us what we are doing to them.
As W.H. Auden understood:
I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
The force used by the occupier to displace the old regime always makes sure the new regime is supine and complaint. The National Transitional Council, made up of former Gadhafi loyalists, Islamists and tribal leaders, many of whom detest each other, will be the West’s vehicle for the reconfiguration of Libya. Libya will return to being the colony it was before Gadhafi and the other young officers in 1969 ousted King Idris, who among other concessions had let Standard Oil write Libya’s petroleum laws. Gadhafi’s defiance of Western commercial interests, which saw the nationalization of foreign banks and foreign companies, along with the oil industry, as well as the closure of U.S. and British air bases, will be reversed. The despotic and collapsed or collapsing regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria once found their revolutionary legitimacy in the pan-Arabism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. But these regimes fell victim to their own corruption, decay and brutality. None were worth defending. Their disintegration, however, heralds a return of the corporate and imperial power that spawned figures like Nasser and will spawn his radical 21st century counterparts.
The vendettas in Libya have already begun. Government buildings in Tripoli have been looted, although not on the scale seen in Baghdad. Poor black sub-Saharan African immigrant workers have been beaten and killed. Suspected Gadhafi loyalists or spies have been tortured and assassinated. These eye-for-an-eye killings will, I fear, get worse. The National Transitional Council has announced that it opposes the presence in Libya of U.N. military observers and police, despite widespread atrocities committed by Gadhafi loyalists. The observers and police have been offered to help quell the chaos, train new security forces and provide independent verification of what is happening inside Libya. But just as Gadhafi preferred to do dirty work in secret, so will the new regime. It is an old truism, one I witnessed repeatedly in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, that yesterday’s victims rapidly become today’s victimizers.
Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. More
September 05, 2011 --- After some 8,000 bombing raids, with estimates of 4 bombs used per attack NATO has already dropped over 30,000 bombs on Libya. That’s almost 200 bombs per day for 6 months, some tens of thousands of tons of high explosives. With an estimated 2 Libyans killed per bomb and without a single NATO casualty the Western regimes have massacred over 60,000 Libyans in the past half year with the rebels themselves having said there have been 50,000 Libyan deaths. One hell of a humanitarian intervention isn’t it? __
"Why are you attacking us? Why are you killing our children? Why are you destroying our infrastructure?" – Television address by Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi, April 30, 2011
By William Blum
September 01, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- A few hours later NATO hit a target in Tripoli, killing Gaddafi's 29-year-old son Saif al-Arab, three of Gaddafi's grandchildren, all under twelve years of age, and several friends and neighbors.
In his TV address, Gaddafi had appealed to the NATO nations for a cease-fire and negotiations after six weeks of bombings and cruise missile attacks against his country.
Well, let's see if we can derive some understanding of the complex Libyan turmoil.
The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO and the European Union — recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, to whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, and call it whatever it wants, like "humanitarian".
If The Holy Triumvirate decides that it doesn't want to overthrow the government in Syria or in Egypt or Tunisia or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or Yemen or Jordan, no matter how cruel, oppressive, or religiously intolerant those governments are with their people, no matter how much they impoverish and torture their people, no matter how many protesters they shoot dead in their Freedom Square, the Triumvirate will simply not overthrow them.
If the Triumvirate decides that it wants to overthrow the government of Libya, though that government is secular and has used its oil wealth for the benefit of the people of Libya and Africa perhaps more than any government in all of Africa and the Middle East, but keeps insisting over the years on challenging the Triumvirate's imperial ambitions in Africa and raising its demands on the Triumvirate's oil companies, then the Triumvirate will simply overthrow the government of Libya.
If the Triumvirate wants to punish Gaddafi and his sons it will arrange with the Triumvirate's friends at the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for them.
If the Triumvirate doesn't want to punish the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan it will simply not ask the ICC to issue arrest warrants for them. Ever since the Court first formed in 1998, the United States has refused to ratify it and has done its best to denigrate it and throw barriers in its way because Washington is concerned that American officials might one day be indicted for their many war crimes and crimes against humanity. Bill Richardson, as US ambassador to the UN, said to the world in 1998 that the United States should be exempt from the court's prosecution because it has "special global responsibilities". But this doesn't stop the United States from using the Court when it suits the purposes of American foreign policy.
If the Triumvirate wants to support a rebel military force to overthrow the government of Libya then it does not matter how fanatically religious, al-Qaeda-related,1 executing-beheading-torturing, monarchist, or factionally split various groups of that rebel force are at times, the Triumvirate will support it, as it did certain forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hope that after victory the Libyan force will not turn out as jihadist as it did in Afghanistan, or as fratricidal as in Iraq. One potential source of conflict within the rebels, and within the country if ruled by them, is that a constitutional declaration made by the rebel council states that, while guaranteeing democracy and the rights of non-Muslims, "Islam is the religion of the state and the principle source of legislation in Islamic Jurisprudence."
Adding to the list of the rebels' charming qualities we have the Amnesty International report that the rebels have been conducting mass arrests of black people across the nation, terming all of them "foreign mercenaries" but with growing evidence that a large number were simply migrant workers. Reported Reuters (August 29): "On Saturday, reporters saw the putrefying bodies of 22 men of African origin on a Tripoli beach. Volunteers who had come to bury them said they were mercenaries whom rebels had shot dead." To complete this portrait of the West's newest darlings we have this report from The Independent of London (August 27): "The killings were pitiless. They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came."
If the Triumvirate's propaganda is clever enough and deceptive enough and paints a graphic picture of Gaddafi-initiated high tragedy in Libya, many American and European progressives will insist that though they never, ever support imperialism they're making an exception this time because ...
The Libyan people are being saved from a "massacre", both actual and potential. This massacre, however, seems to have been grossly exaggerated by the Triumvirate, al Jazeera TV, and that station's owner, the government of Qatar; and nothing approaching reputable evidence of a massacre has been offered, neither a mass grave or anything else; the massacre stories appear to be on a par with the Viagra-rape stories spread by al Jazeera (the Fox News of the Libyan uprising). Qatar, it should be noted, has played an active military role in the civil war on the side of NATO. It should be further noted that the main massacre in Libya has been six months of daily Triumvirate bombing, killing an unknown number of people and ruining much of the infrastructure. Michigan U. Prof. Juan Cole, the quintessential true-believer in the good intentions of American foreign policy who nevertheless manages to have a regular voice in progressive media, recently wrote that "Qaddafi was not a man to compromise ... his military machine would mow down the revolutionaries if it were allowed to." Is that clear, class? We all know of course that Sarkozy, Obama, and Cameron made compromises without end in their devastation of Libya; they didn't, for example, use any nuclear weapons.
The United Nations gave its approval for military intervention; i.e., the leading members of the Triumvirate gave their approval, after Russia and China cowardly abstained instead of exercising their veto power; (perhaps hoping to receive the same courtesy from the US, UK and France when Russia or China is the aggressor nation).
The people of Libya are being "liberated", whatever in the world that means, now or in the future. Gaddafi is a "dictator" they insist. That may indeed be the proper term to use for the man, but it must still be asked: Is he a relatively benevolent dictator or is he the other kind so favored by Washington? It must also be asked: Since the United States has habitually supported dictators for the entire past century, why not this one?
The Triumvirate, and its fawning media, would have the world believe that what's happened in Libya is just another example of the Arab Spring, a popular uprising by non-violent protestors against a dictator for the proverbial freedom and democracy, spreading spontaneously from Tunisia and Egypt, which sandwich Libya. But there are several reasons to question this analysis in favor of seeing the Libyan rebels' uprising as a planned and violent attempt to take power in behalf of their own political movement, however heterogeneous that movement might appear to be in its early stage. For example:
1. They soon began flying the flag of the monarchy that Gaddafi had overthrown.
2. They were an armed and violent rebellion almost from the beginning; within a few days, we could read of "citizens armed with weapons seized from army bases"3 and of "the policemen who had participated in the clash were caught and hanged by protesters"
3. Their revolt took place not in the capital but in the heart of the country's oil region; they then began oil production and declared that foreign countries would be rewarded oil-wise in relation to how much each country aided their cause.
4. They soon set up a Central Bank, a rather bizarre thing for a protest movement.
5. International support came quickly, even beforehand, from Qatar and al Jazeera to the CIA and French intelligence.
The notion that a leader does not have the right to put down an armed rebellion against the state is too absurd to discuss.
Not very long ago, Iraq and Libya were the two most modern and secular states in the Mideast/North Africa world with perhaps the highest standards of living in the region. Then the United States of America came along and saw fit to make a basket case of each one. The desire to get rid of Gaddafi had been building for years; the Libyan leader had never been a reliable pawn; then the Arab Spring provided the excellent opportunity and cover. As to Why? Take your pick of the following:
- Gaddafi's plans to conduct Libya's trading in Africa in raw materials and oil in a new currency — the gold African dinar, a change that could have delivered a serious blow to the US's dominant position in the world economy. (In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars; sanctions and an invasion followed.)
- A host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: "We've got a big image problem down there. ... Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don't trust the US."
- An American military base to replace the one closed down by Gaddafi after he took power in 1969. There's only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It'll perhaps be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base.
- Another example of NATO desperate to find a raison d'être for its existence since the end of the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact.
- Gaddafi's role in creating the African Union. The corporate bosses never like it when their wage slaves set up a union. The Libyan leader has also supported a United States of Africa for he knows that an Africa of 54 independent states will continue to be picked off one by one and abused and exploited by the members of the Triumvirate. Gaddafi has moreover demanded greater power for smaller countries in the United Nations.
- The claim by Gaddafi's son, Saif el Islam, that Libya had helped to fund Nicolas Sarkozy's election campaign6 could have humiliated the French president and explain his obsessiveness and haste in wanting to be seen as playing the major role in implementing the "no fly zone" and other measures against Gaddafi. A contributing factor may have been the fact that France has been weakened in its former colonies and neo-colonies in Africa and the Middle East, due in part to Gaddafi's influence. Gaddafi has been an outstanding supporter of the Palestinian cause and critic of Israeli policies; and on occasion has taken other African and Arab countries, as well as the West, to task for their not matching his policies or rhetoric; one more reason for his lack of popularity amongst world leaders of all stripes.
- In January, 2009, Gaddafi made known that he was considering nationalizing the foreign oil companies in Libya. He also has another bargaining chip: the prospect of utilizing Russian, Chinese and Indian oil companies. During the current period of hostilities, he invited these countries to make up for lost production. But such scenarios will now not take place. The Triumvirate will instead seek to privatize the National Oil Corporation, transferring Libya's oil wealth into foreign hands.
- The American Empire is troubled by any threat to its hegemony. In the present historical period the empire is concerned mainly with Russia and China. China has extensive energy investments and construction investments in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The average American neither knows nor cares about this. The average American imperialist cares greatly, if for no other reason than in this time of rising demands for cuts to the military budget it's vital that powerful "enemies" be named and maintained.
- For yet more reasons, see the article "Why Regime Change in Libya?" by Ismael Hossein-zadeh, and the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks — Wikileaks reference 07TRIPOLI967 11-15-07 (includes a complaint about Libyan "resource nationalism")
A word from the man the world's mightiest military powers have been trying to kill:
"Recollections of My Life", written by Col. Muammar Gaddafi, April 8, 2011, excerpts:
Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called "capitalism," but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer, so, there is no alternative for me, I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following his path, the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us ... I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it. ... In the West, some have called me "mad", "crazy". They know the truth but continue to lie, they know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip.
Comments to the blog have been at least temporarily discontinued due to the posting of a personal e-mail by an anonymous user. ______________________________
by Jim Moss :: Filed Under The Economy, U.S. Domestic Issues :: March 3rd, 2009 @ 1:00 am EST
Many proponents of the free market defend our current system of corporate-based capitalism as if it descended directly from heaven into the pen of Adam Smith and then onto the hearts of our all-knowing Founding Fathers. An investigation of the history of the corporation, however, reveals a much different story.
The first corporations appeared in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and were chartered by governments for specific public missions. The largest and most powerful of these early corporations was The East India Company, founded by Queen Elizabeth in 1600 to facilitate trade between England and her colonies. At the height of its power, The East India Compnay held economic control over 1/5 of world’s population and maintained a private army of over 250,000 soldiers. Unjust taxation policies favoring this company insured that the crown, and not the colonists themselves, reaped the benefits from the colonies’ natural wealth and industry.
During the 18th century, Enlightenment ideals began to challenge the power of monarchies and corporations, and the power of the queen’s corporation began to fade. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 signaled not only a victory over the economic tyranny of the East India Company, it also helped pave the way for the political uprising known as the American Revolution. Also around this time, Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations, arguing for free market economics, but against the concept of large corporations, claiming that they limit fair competition among smaller-sized merchants and artisans.
When the United States gained its independence in 1776, there were 336 corporations in the United States, but most had been chartered by state governments for specific public works projects. The Founding Fathers, still mindful of the crushing power once wielded by the East India Company, severly limited the power of corporations and never would have dreamed of nor allowed the trans-national behemoths we see today. In fact, the original limitations seem laughable when we consider our modern corporations:
1) Corporate charters were granted for fixed periods of time, usually between 10 and 40 years.
Today, corporations are assumed to be open-ended in their duration, only ceasing to exist if they can no longer afford to stay in business. (And sometimes being allowed to continue with government funds even when they can’t sustain themselves!)
2) Corporate charters could be promptly revoked for violations of law or for causing public harm.
Back then, there was corporate accountability. Break the law, and you’re out of business. Today, an offending individual or two might (and I say might) see jail time, but the corporate machine just keeps rolling along. And as for causing public harm…
3) Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose. Could you imagine a government official walking into a board meeting at Disney and telling them that they the only business they can be conducting in the whole company is producing cartoons? 4) Corporations could not own property that was not essential to the fulfilling of their chartered purpose. Does that include luxury jets? How about condos in the Caribbean?
5) Corporations could not own stock in other corporations. I’m beginning to see a trend here. Corporations were not allowed to do anything or own any assets that were not specifically related to the purpose for which they were founded. Period.
6) The personal assets of corporate shareholders were not protected from the consequences of corpoate behavior. Oh snap! If still upheld today, this rule would have meant that anyone who owned stock in any of the companies that needed a bailout would have had to have paid for those bailouts out of their own pockets. Owning part of a corporation meant truly being responsible for that corporation.
Were they around today, the Founding Fathers would look at our corporate climate and our economic situation, and they would say, “We tried to warn you!” But Amercia has not heeded their wisdom. Almost as soon as the country was born, big business interests began to chip away at these constraints on corporate power. Stay tuned for Part 2 of “The History of Corporate Power: The Rise of the Robber Barons”. _____________________
The Roberts-Kennedy Supreme Court Decision
Articles Against the Decision: _____________________
February 03, 2010 "Crisis Papers" -- With the Supreme Court Ruling, Citizens United v. FEC, the government of the United States has, in effect, become a subsidiary of Corporate America.
So isn't it time to rethink a few of our government institutions?
After all, the American public has a well-deserved reputation for discarding shopworn institutions that have ceased to serve any useful purpose, and to replace them with imaginative and appropriate innovations Thus passenger railroads were replaced by the airlines and private automobiles, and daily newspapers by television, which is likely in turn to be supplanted by computers and the Internet.
In the same spirit, I propose that we abolish elections and replace them with auctions.
Clearly, the polling statistics show us that the public has lost interest in elections. Furthermore, the Congress has little inclination to reform campaign finance rules. Why should they bother, when last month SCOTUS, in one fell-swoop, scuttled a century of such reforms by the the Congress and previous Supreme Courts (stare decisis be damned!). The decisive push down the slippery slope leading to Citizens United was the Buckley v. Valeo decision (1976) which ruled that "cash is speech." Because numerous studies have disclosed a high correlation between campaign spending and electoral success, Buckley effectively nullified citizen equality at the ballot box in favor of the "free market" principle that the political influence of an individual or a corporation is properly proportional to one's wealth. (See "A Bribe by Any Other Name"). "Citizens United" has pounded the final nail in the coffin of Abraham Lincoln's naive notion of "government of, by, and for the people."
So let's get real! Let's simply acknowledge the obvious facts: that public offices serve private corporate interests, and that legislators' votes are bought and sold by bidders, politely referred to as "contributors." If this is the way things are let's bring the practice out into the open. If elections are irrelevant relics of simpler and more naive times and public offices have become commodities, let's treat them as such, honestly and openly.
Let's abolish elections and instead, select our politicians by auction.
Consider the Advantages:
The auctions could become a public celebration of "the free market," just as elections were at one time celebrations of the archaic notions of "citizen democracy" and "the public interest." The biennial national "auctions" would be televised, with the TV network anchors as auctioneers. Throughout the realm, wealthy stockholders in their mansions would sit spellbound by their TV sets, cheering on the CEOs as they bid for preferred Congressional treatment of the viewer's investments.
"Conservatives" constantly complain about "tax and spend" government programs. If our proposal is adopted, proceeds from the auction might replace taxes. Furthermore, corporate complaints about spending might subside as the government, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the corporate bidders, spends at the behest of those who "bought" it.
Nor is this the end of opportunities for "revenue enhancement." Just think of the advertising space available on our currency, as portraits of Wall Street CEOs, and such notables as Timothy Geithner, Alan Greenspan, Donald Trump and Bill Gates, replace those of the dead presidents.
Still more opportunities: Recently, corporations have taken to purchasing the privilege of having their names placed on major-league stadia. So why not adopt the same practice for government buildings and agencies: "The Archer-Daniels-Midland Department of Agriculture," "The Smithsonian/Boeing Space Museum," "The Goldman-Sachs Treasury Building," "The Dow Chemical Environmental Protection Agency," "The Eli Lilly Center for Disease Control," "The Halliburton Pentagon Building," and "The Exxon/Mobil Department of Energy."
It is well-known that since the Reagan administration, Congressional legislation has largely been written by corporate lobbyists, even though bills have routinely borne the names of legislators. With the privatization of the government we may now, at last, see an end to such political hypocrisy and the resulting public cynicism about government. With no further pretense of representing "the people," politicians may now be openly identified by their correct designations: e.g., "Senator Libermann from Met Life," "Senator Chamblis from Diebold," "Senator Baucus from United Health," "Senator Gillibrand from Philip Morris," "Senator McCain from the National Rifle Association," and so on.
For purposes of identification, the logos of the corporate sponsors might now appear on the jackets of all members of Congress, and on the front of the podia during their public appearances. On the nightly newscasts, the anchors might announce, "this congressional bill brought to you by the good folks at the Chamber of Commerce." And the tobacco companies, relieved of the embarrassment of the health warnings on the cigarette packs, can replace them with the label "proud co-owners of the United States Government."
Finally, the efficiency managers of USA Inc. can go to work and "downsize" the government, most notably by eliminating redundancies. It has long been observed that federal regulatory agencies are eventually "captured" by the private interests that they are supposed to regulate. Now this "capture" can be openly acknowledged, as the Securities and Exchange Commission merges with the New York Stock Exchange, and the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Aviation Agency, etc., become trade associations of their respective industries. And of course, with the privatization of government, the distinction between corporate lobbyists and members of Congress will disappear entirely, as lobbyists officially and openly become legislators and vice versa.
Radical? Not at all! This proposal and all its nuances make complete sense in light of the pending total corporate takeover of the U.S. government that will surely follow Citizens United v. FEC. We will soon see the full realization of the "conservative" doctrine that "society" is nothing more than a market place, and thus that all social problems can best be solved through privatization and the free market. (See "Beautiful Theory vs. Baffling Reality" and "The State Religion").
We have privatized the Postal Service and much of the military, and soon the schools will follow. Now, thanks to the SCOTUS "gang of five," the total privatization of the government of the United States is soon to follow.
So quit complaining and get used to it.
After all, you can't stop progress!
Note: An earlier version of this essay, titled "A Modest Proposal," was published at this site in February, 2003. I can claim some originality with the idea, now much talked about, of the NASCAR-style logo patches, although no doubt others had thought of it beforehand. I was just not aware of these other inventions. The idea of "The Senator from ..." is, of course, an old one with which I was very familiar.
Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.
On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections—a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.
The decision heralds even furthers corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.
To the editors of The New York Times, the ruling “strikes at the heart of democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.”
The court was split, 5-4, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly called “conservative”) joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that could easily have been settled on narrow grounds and maneuvered the court into using it to push through a far-reaching decision that overturns a century of precedents restricting corporate contributions to federal campaigns.
Now corporate managers can in effect buy elections directly, bypassing more complex indirect means. It is well-known that corporate contributions, sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance in elections, hence driving policy. The court has just handed much more power to the small sector of the population that dominates the economy.
Political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics” is a very successful predictor of government policy over a long period. The theory interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector power coalesce to invest to control the state.
The Jan. 21 decision only reinforces the means to undermine functioning democracy.
The background is enlightening. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment”—the constitutional guarantee of free speech, which would include support for political candidates.
In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts implemented the court’s 1886 decision that corporations—these “collectivist legal entities”—have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood.
This attack on classical liberalism was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the principle as “a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American states as popular governments.”
Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal history that the concept of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that “the powers of the board of directors “are identical with the powers of the corporation.” In later years, corporate rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by the mislabeled “free trade agreements.” Under these agreements, for example, if General Motors establishes a plant in Mexico, it can demand to be treated just like a Mexican business (“national treatment”)—quite unlike a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek “national treatment” in New York, or even minimal human rights.
A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America in which “comparatively small groups of men,” corporate managers, “wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country,” becoming “rivals of the government itself.”
In reality, these “small groups” increasingly have become government’s masters. The Roberts court gives them even greater scope.
The Jan. 21 decision came three days after another victory for wealth and power: the election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the “liberal lion” of Massachusetts. Brown’s election was depicted as a “populist upsurge” against the liberal elitists who run the government.
The voting data reveal a rather different story.
High turnouts in the wealthy suburbs, and low ones in largely Democratic urban areas, helped elect Brown. “Fifty-five percent of Republican voters said they were `very interested’ in the election,” The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll reported, “compared with 38 percent of Democrats.”
So the results were indeed an uprising against President Obama’s policies: For the wealthy, he was not doing enough to enrich them further, while for the poorer sectors, he was doing too much to achieve that end.
The popular anger is quite understandable, given that the banks are thriving, thanks to bailouts, while unemployment has risen to 10 percent.
In manufacturing, one in six is out of work—unemployment at the level of the Great Depression. With the increasing financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of productive industry, prospects are bleak for recovering the kinds of jobs that were lost.
Brown presented himself as the 41st vote against healthcare—that is, the vote that could undermine majority rule in the U.S. Senate.
It is true that Obama’s healthcare program was a factor in the Massachusetts election. The headlines are correct when they report that the public is turning against the program.
The poll figures explain why: The bill does not go far enough. The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll found that a majority of voters disapprove of the handling of healthcare both by the Republicans and by Obama.
These figures align with recent nationwide polls. The public option was favored by 56 percent of those polled, and the Medicare buy-in at age 55 by 64 percent; both programs were abandoned.
Eighty-five percent believe that the government should have the right to negotiate drug prices, as in other countries; Obama guaranteed Big Pharma that he would not pursue that option.
Large majorities favor cost-cutting, which makes good sense: U.S. per capita costs for healthcare are about twice those of other industrial countries, and health outcomes are at the low end.
But cost-cutting cannot be seriously undertaken when largesse is showered on the drug companies, and healthcare is in the hands of virtually unregulated private insurers—a costly system peculiar to the U.S.
The Jan. 21 decision raises significant new barriers to overcoming the serious crisis of healthcare, or to addressing such critical issues as the looming environmental and energy crises. The gap between public opinion and public policy looms larger. And the damage to American democracy can hardly be overestimated.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate. _____
Free Speech for Corporations
There was a very informative Bill Moyers Journal segment last Friday about the Supreme Court decision. His guests on this segment were "Monica Youn, an attorney at NYU School of Law's Brennan Center for Justice, and Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham School of Law."
BILL MOYERS: The decision seems at odds with some of the very positions taken by some of the people who wrote it. I mean, for example, we've heard a lot from conservatives about "judicial activism." That is, judges, liberal judges, Earl Warren and others, actually making decisions that usurp the power of the legislature. So, let me play you an excerpt from Roberts' nomination hearings, when he is talking about judicial activism.
JOHN ROBERTS: Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around...Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath...I do think that it is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent...it is not enough that you may think the prior decision was wrongly decided...the role of the judge is limited; that judge is to decide the cases before them; they're not to legislate; they're not to execute the laws."
Not only did the Chief Justice reach out to overturn precedent, he also went way beyond the case before him:
BILL MOYERS: Is that what he was doing last week?
MONICA YOUN; Absolutely not. This started out as a case about a very narrow issue. It's, is this 90 minute infomercial attacking Hillary Clinton, is this a corporate campaign ad or is it not a corporate campaign ad? And what the court did is they said, "Well, you know, we could rule on that question, but instead let's talk about this entire topic of whether corporate spending in elections should be limited."
BILL MOYERS: In other words, that question was not in the case, that the judges reached out and brought to the court.
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: It was not only not in the case, but the parties stipulated [Stipulation: Something stipulated, especially a term or condition in an agreement between parties to a lawsuit.] that they wouldn't have to deal with these questions. And the judges reached out. The justices reached out and decided to make this statement of their view of corporate independent expenditures.
MONICA YOUN; And this is so disturbing, because one reason that, in that clip, the chief justice is paying, you know, homage to the idea of judicial modesty is people recognize that in this system judges are given a great deal of power. Judges can not only say, "Oh, what you did, Congress, was wrong. But forever more, you are barred from doing anything like that again. That option is completely off the table now." But the way that's limited in our constitutional system is that judges are only supposed to decide the particular case in front of them. They're not going to -- they're not supposed to say, "Oh, we don't like that particular area of the law. Let's just go out and change that, just because we have the five votes to do so." And I can think of very little more scary for our democracy than a five, you know, justice majority that finds itself unconstrained by precedent. That finds itself unconstrained by the case before it. And feels like it can just go out there and pursue its own agenda.
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: This case did overrule established precedent. It dealt with an issue which could have been dealt with on several different minor grounds. Much, much narrower grounds. And this -- these laws against corporate expenditures came after massive public response to what they perceived to be corruption in the system. Passed by Congress with enormous amounts of support. And there are times when justices should get involved. And say, "No, no, no. There is a minority here that is not being protected. There are interests that the public isn't hearing." But here the justices were not reaching out to protect an unheard minority, but rather to protect one of the loudest voices we already have in our politics.
Other Tidbits:
MONICA YOUN; Well, corporations clearly won this decision. I mean, essentially, what the court does is it awards monopoly power over the First Amendment to corporations. You can think about the last couple of elections as, you know, the slow rise of the grassroots. And as a result, the political parties, for the first time, had an incentive to start reaching out to small donors, to start cultivating grassroots organizing networks. And you saw what happened in the last election. Now, what the Supreme Court has done here is really a power play. It takes power away from the grassroots, and it puts it squarely back in the hands of corporate special interests.
It threatens to make these grassroots networks irrelevant. To say, you know, it's no longer going to be worthwhile for, you know, parties to look for fundraising opportunities, $20, $100, even $2,400 at a time, if they can just have multimillion dollar support directly from corporate treasuries.
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: This decision, at base, is about power. And that's why people are responding. That's why people from left and right are responding. This decision means that when you walk past a sign that says Goldman Sachs or Ford, that, what that represents has the same rights that you do to speak about politics, to spend as much money as you want on a political campaign. They are basically equal, and treated as equal entities, even though you're the citizen. That's why there's a really deep grassroots response, is there's a sense that power, political power, is being taken away from the citizen, which is really a core idea of this country.
BILL MOYERS: By permitting corporations to use their own, the money from their own treasuries to advocate for or against a candidate? So, that diminishes the power of the individual?
MONICA YOUN; Well, what the Supreme Court has said by equating money with speech, what the Supreme Court has said is that elections aren't really about votes anymore. What elections are now going to be about is money and who has the most money. And an individual citizen saying, "I can't possibly compete with Wal-Mart, with Exxon Mobil, with Goldman Sachs," is just going to say, "Why should I even bother? My voices will never, my voice will never be heard. My elected official is not going to listen to me. I should just stay home."
BILL MOYERS: But if I understand the decision, it doesn't enable the chairman of Exxon Mobil, or the chairman of GE to write a check to Zephyr Teachout, who's running for Congress from Vermont. It says she can spend as much money as they want to, in the, right up to the election. Right? Advocating that you be elected or defeated?
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: Yeah. Or, what happens more likely is candidates getting threatened and encouraged. It's a much subtler form of corruption. Where your mind shifts to say, "Well, do I really want to take on that financial transaction tax if I know that Goldman Sachs is going to do an ad campaign?"
MONICA YOUN; And I think that the threat is going to be even more of an important weapon than direct, you know, "Vote for so and so who we like."
BILL MOYERS: How do you mean?
MONICA YOUN; I think there's going to be a threat of corporate funded attack ads against elected officials who dare to stand up to corporate interests. Corporations have basically been handed a weapon. And when you walk into a negotiation, and you know that one person is armed and is able to use a weapon against you, they don't have to take out that weapon. They don't have to even brandish it. You know that they have it. And every elected official who goes up against an agenda on regulatory reform, on climate change, on health care, will know that the corporation who, you know, he or she is opposing, can fund a, you know, a $100 million ad campaign to take him or her out.
Also, on the Unions vs Corporations distraction:
BILL MOYERS: Well, proponents of this ruling point out that unions are also freed up by the decision. Have they created a level playing field here between the corporations and the unions?
MONICA YOUN; Well, the short answer to that is that if you compare unions' available funds versus corporation's available funds, we're not talking about a real fight here. But I think the more important fight is why should the only people whose viewpoints count in this, be large organizations with money? Whether that be the unions or the corporations? Why shouldn't ideas be dealt with on their merits? And why shouldn't ideas be dealt with by the number of votes they can command, as opposed to the amount of dollars they can spend? ___________________
Articles in Support of the Decision:
Glenn Greenwald [One of my favorite bloggers]:
What the Supreme Court got right BY GLENN GREENWALD
The Supreme Court yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, declared unconstitutional (on First Amendment grounds) campaign finance regulations which restrict the ability of corporations and unions to use funds from their general treasury for "electioneering" purposes. The case, Citizens United v. FEC, presents some very difficult free speech questions, and I'm deeply ambivalent about the court's ruling. There are several dubious aspects of the majority's opinion (principally its decision to invalidate the entire campaign finance scheme rather than exercising "judicial restraint" through a narrower holding). Beyond that, I believe that corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture. But there are also very real First Amendment interests implicated by laws which bar entities from spending money to express political viewpoints.
I want to begin by examining several of the most common reactions among critics of this decision, none of which seems persuasive to me. Critics emphasize that the Court's ruling will produce very bad outcomes: primarily that it will severely exacerbate the problem of corporate influence in our democracy. Even if this is true, it's not really relevant. Either the First Amendment allows these speech restrictions or it doesn't. In general, a law that violates the Constitution can't be upheld because the law produces good outcomes (or because its invalidation would produce bad outcomes).
One of the central lessons of the Bush era should have been that illegal or unconstitutional actions -- warrantless eavesdropping, torture, unilateral Presidential programs -- can't be justified because of the allegedly good results they produce (Protecting us from the Terrorists). The "rule of law" means we faithfully apply it in ways that produce outcomes we like and outcomes we don't like. Denouncing court rulings because they invalidate laws one likes is what the Right often does (see how they reflexively and immediately protest every state court ruling invaliding opposite-sex-only marriage laws without bothering to even read about the binding precedents), and that behavior is irrational in the extreme. If the Constitution or other laws bar the government action in question, then that's the end of the inquiry; whether those actions produce good results is really not germane. Thus, those who want to object to the Court's ruling need to do so on First Amendment grounds. Except to the extent that some constitutional rights give way to so-called "compelling state interests," that the Court's decision will produce "bad results" is not really an argument.
More specifically, it's often the case that banning certain kinds of speech would produce good outcomes, and conversely, allowing certain kinds of speech produces bad outcomes (that's true for, say, White Supremacist or neo-Nazi speech, or speech advocating violence against civilians). The First Amendment is not and never has been outcome-dependent; the Government is barred from restricting speech -- especially political speech -- no matter the good results that would result from the restrictions. That's the price we pay for having the liberty of free speech. And even on a utilitarian level, the long-term dangers of allowing the Government to restrict political speech invariably outweigh whatever benefits accrue from such restrictions.
I'm also quite skeptical of the apocalyptic claims about how this decision will radically transform and subvert our democracy by empowering corporate control over the political process. My skepticism is due to one principal fact: I really don't see how things can get much worse in that regard. The reality is that our political institutions are already completely beholden to and controlled by large corporate interests (Dick Durbin: "banks own" the Congress). Corporations find endless ways to circumvent current restrictions -- their armies of PACs, lobbyists, media control, and revolving-door rewards flood Washington and currently ensure their stranglehold -- and while this decision will make things marginally worse, I can't imagine how it could worsen fundamentally. All of the hand-wringing sounds to me like someone expressing serious worry that a new law in North Korea will make the country more tyrannical. There's not much room for our corporatist political system to get more corporatist. Does anyone believe that the ability of corporations to influence our political process was meaningfully limited before yesterday's issuance of this ruling?
I'm even more unpersuaded by the argument -- seen in today's New York Times Editorial -- that this decision will "ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections." What evidence is there for that? Over the past five years, corporate money has poured far more into the coffers of the Democratic Party than the GOP -- and far more into Obama's campaign coffers than McCain's (especially from Wall Street). If anything, unlimited corporate money will be far more likely to strengthen incumbents than either of the two parties (and unlimited union spending, though dwarfed by corporate spending, will obviously benefit Democrats more). Besides, if it were the case that this law restricts the ability of Republicans far more than Democrats to raise money in election cycles, doesn't that rather obviously intensify the First Amendment concerns?
Then there's the always intellectually confused discussions of stare decisis and precedent. It's absolutely true that the Citizens United majority cavalierly tossed aside decades of judicial opinions upholding the constitutionality of campaign finance restrictions. But what does that prove? Several of the liberals' most cherished Supreme Court decisions did the same (Brown v. Bd. of Education rejected Plessy v. Ferguson; Lawrence v. Texas overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, etc.). Beyond that, the central principle which critics of this ruling find most offensive -- that corporations possess "personhood" and are thus entitled to Constitutional (and First Amendment) rights -- has also been affirmed by decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence; tossing that principle aside would require deviating from stare decisis every bit as much as the majority did here. If a settled proposition of law is sufficiently repugnant to the Constitution, then the Court is not only permitted, but required, to uproot it.
Ultimately, I think the free speech rights burdened by campaign finance laws are often significantly under-stated. I understand and sympathize with the argument that corporations are creatures of the state and should not enjoy the same rights as individuals. And one can't help but note the vile irony that Muslim "War on Terror" detainees have been essentially declared by some courts not to be "persons" under the Constitution, whereas corporations are.
But the speech restrictions struck down by Citizens United do not only apply to Exxon and Halliburton; they also apply to non-profit advocacy corporations, such as, say, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions, which are genuinely burdened in their ability to express their views by these laws. I tend to take a more absolutist view of the First Amendment than many people, but laws which prohibit organized groups of people -- which is what corporations are -- from expressing political views goes right to the heart of free speech guarantees no matter how the First Amendment is understood. Does anyone doubt that the facts that gave rise to this case -- namely, the government's banning the release of a critical film about Hillary Clinton by Citizens United -- is exactly what the First Amendment was designed to avoid? And does anyone doubt that the First Amendment bars the government from restricting the speech of organizations composed of like-minded citizens who band together in corporate form to work for a particular cause?
What is overlooked in virtually every discussion I've seen over the last 24 hours is how ineffective these campaign finance laws are. Large corporations employ teams of lawyers and lobbyists and easily circumvent these restrictions; wealthy individuals and well-funded unincorporated organizations are unlimited in what they can spend. It's the smaller non-profit advocacy groups whose political speech tends to be most burdened by these laws. Campaign finance laws are a bit like gun control statutes: actual criminals continue to possess large stockpiles of weapons, but law-abiding citizens are disarmed.
In sum, there's no question that the stranglehold corporations exert on our democracy is one of the most serious and pressing threats we face. I've written volumes on that very problem. Although I doubt it, this decision may very well worsen that problem in some substantial way. But on both pragmatic and Constitutional grounds, the issue of corporate influence -- like virtually all issues -- is not really solvable by restrictions on political speech. Isn't it far more promising to have the Government try to equalize the playing field through serious public financing of campaigns than to try to slink around the First Amendment -- or, worse, amend it -- in order to limit political advocacy?
There are few features that are still extremely healthy and vibrant in the American political system; the First Amendment is one of them, and the last thing we should want is Congress trying to limit it through amendments or otherwise circumvent it in the name of elevating our elections. Meaningful public financing of campaigns would far more effectively achieve the ostensible objectives of campaign finance restrictions without any of the dangers or constitutional infirmities. If yesterday's decision provides the impetus for that to be done, then it will have, on balance, achieved a very positive outcome, even though that was plainly not its intent.
UPDATE: I want to add one other point just to underscore how irrational, discriminatory and ineffective these political speech restrictions are. The invalidated statute at issue here exempted media corporations -- such as Fox and MSNBC -- from these restrictions, since the Government obviously can't ban media figures from going on television and opining on elections (the way they do all other corporations). But as Eliot Spitzer noted when urging the Supreme Court to strike down this law (h/t David Sirota), what possible justification is there for allowing News Corp. and GE to say whatever they want about our elections while banning all other corporations (including non-profit advocacy groups) from doing so?
As an elected official who often tangled with wealthy corporations, I recognize that there is a superficial appeal in the prospect of being able to silence their political voices. Of course that is precisely why the First Amendment protects them and why I find myself sympathetic to the First Amendment absolutists in this case. What distinguishes what Citizens United did and what Bill O'Reilly on Fox News -- Rachel Maddow on MSNBC -- does every day? Fox and MSNBC are corporations bombarding the airwaves with political rhetoric, from the right and left, that is as close to "electioneering communications" as anything I can imagine. The McCain-Feingold statute excluded "media companies" from its limitations, a distinction that makes no logical sense. The constitutionality of Citizens United's speech should have nothing to do with what else may or may not go on at the corporation it is part of.
That's what restrictions on political speech almost always do: whether intended or not, they favor the views of certain factions while suppressing others. In this case, it allowed the views of News Corp., GE, and Viacom to flourish (through their ownership of media outlets) while preventing the ACLU and Planned Parenthood from speaking out. As Spitzer said: that is precisely why the First Amendment bars such government efforts to restrict political speech. It is virtually always best -- and Constitutionally mandated -- for the Government to stay out of the business of trying to restrict and regulate political advocacy.
UPDATE II: For those who believe that "money is not speech," I'd be interested in your answers to these questions.
As for the question of whether corporations possess "personhood," that's an interesting issue and, as I said, I'm very sympathetic to the argument that they do not, but the majority's ruling here did not really turn on that question. That's because the First Amendment does not only vest rights in "persons." It says nothing about "persons." It simply bans Congress from making any laws abridging freedom of speech. ____________________________
Follows the article, forwarded by my friend, by James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, the neoliberal [Neoliberal definition from Wiki: "Broadly speaking, neoliberalism seeks to transfer part of the control of the economy from public to the private sector, under the belief that it will produce a more efficient government and improve the economic health of the nation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism) ]" media outlet of Wall Street and corporate America. Yes, those are the people who brought you the bailouts and took the country into economic collapse!
James Taranto (born 1966) is an American columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of its online editorial page, OpinionJournal.com. He is best known for his daily online column, entitled Best of the Web Today, in which he links to and comments on news stories and Web sites submitted by readers. He also appears occasionally on Journal Editorial Report.
Most of Taranto's commentary is politically oriented and conservative/neoliberal in perspective. He lambastes various public figures and organizations, from John Kerry, often described as "the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam," to Reuters, for which he uses headlines with excessive use of quotes in mockery of the service's overuse of scare quotes.
Taranto comments occasionally on topics of special interest to him such as the Roe effect (which proposes that parents who support abortion rights will have fewer children, causing support for abortion rights and politically liberal causes to decline among young people) in his column and also wrote an article[1] about it.
Taranto attended California State University, Northridge, but "never bothered to graduate"[2] after clashing with the journalism faculty over free speech and filing a lawsuit against them. [3]
Floyd Abrams is presented in the article by the college drop-out as "The pre-eminent First Amendment expert ," but there is some disagreement on this. Perhaps he should be seen as a person who promotes free speech at any cost, even the loss of popular democracy:
Floyd Abrams (born July 9, 1936) is an American attorney at Cahill Gordon & Reindel. He is an expert on constitutional law, and many arguments in the briefs he has written before the United States Supreme Court have been adopted as United States Constitutional interpretative law as it relates to the First Amendment and free speech. He is the William J. Brennan Jr. Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Abrams argued for The New York Times and Judith Miller in the CIA leak grand jury investigation. Abrams joined Cahill Gordon & Reindel in 1963, and became a partner in 1970.
Abrams earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1956, and his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1960. He is Jewish and lives in New York City with wife Efrat. Together they have a son, Dan Abrams of MSNBC, and a daughter, Ronnie Abrams. He is a member of the Constitution Project's Liberty and Security Committee[3] and a patron of the Media Legal Defence Initiative. . . . . Criticism
In a column on Slate entitled Memo to Cooper and Miller: Fire Floyd Abrams. Hire Bruce Sanford, Jack Schafer felt Abrams's First Amendment argument was weaker than others' on behalf of the reporters in the Valerie Plame affair. Judges David Sentelle and David Tatel "manhandled" Abrams during the December 8, 2004 oral arguments before the appeals court. In the majority opinion, Judge Sentelle found Abrams' assertion that a First Amendment privilege protects Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller from the subpoena to lack merit. They ordered both reporters to talk to the grand jury about their confidential sources or face jail for contempt, which Miller ultimately did. "Maybe a First Amendment legend isn't what this case called for in the first place," said Shafer. "Maybe Cooper and Miller would have been better served by having a criminal lawyer who knows how to bargain." Shafer thought Abrams would never be successful at the Supreme Court: "...my guess is that they won't [agree to hear the case] if it's argued on First Amendment grounds, preferring to let their Branzburg precedent stand."
"As a narrative matter, [Speaking Freely] fails to explain how exactly Floyd Abrams, revered champion of speech, could possibly have lost the [McCain-Feingold] case. The answer, for those readers left puzzled by Abrams's account, is not merely that the arguments on the other side that soft money created the indelible appearance of a corrupt political system were immeasurably stronger than he allows; they were also presented masterfully by the solicitor general's office, led by Theodore B. Olson, and by lawyers for the congressional sponsors of the campaign-finance bill, led by Olson's Democratic predecessor, Seth P. Waxman. Indeed, much of the real story behind how McCain-Feingold came to be upheld is that Abrams and Starr were simply outperformed as lawyers. It may be asking too much to expect Abrams to tell that particular story." Benjamin Wittes, The Washington Post's Book World.
Anyway, here is Tananto's article in the WSJ:
OPINION: THE WEEKEND INTERVIEWJANUARY 30, 2010 The Media and Corporate Free Speech President Obama says the Supreme Court made a big mistake. The pre-eminent First Amendment expert disagrees. By JAMES TARANTO
I met Floyd Abrams the other evening at the midtown Manhattan headquarters of a multibillion-dollar corporation that a few days earlier had exercised its First Amendment rights to argue that corporations do not have First Amendment rights. I came to the New York Times Co. building not to look in on the competition, but to see the celebrated First Amendment lawyer speak on a panel about press freedom.
Mr. Abrams has represented the New York Times Co. from time to time, most notably in the landmark Pentagon Papers case of 1971. But he and his erstwhile client took opposite sides in the decision we had gotten together to discuss. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which the court decided last week in a 5-4 decision, invalidated federal laws that made certain political speech a crime.
Although Citizens United wasn't Mr. Abrams's case, "I took a special pleasure . . . in this ruling," he tells me over drinks following the panel. That's because it overturned a 2003 decision in a case he lost, McConnell v. FEC, in which a 5-4 majority upheld provisions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold law, including one that criminalized corporate funding of "electioneering communication" within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. Seven years later, with Justice Samuel Alito in the majority, the court reversed that holding.
The First Amendment is the lifeblood of the press. Yet most newspapers—the one you are reading is a notable exception—take an editorial position similar to that of the Times. Why? "I think that two things are at work," Mr. Abrams says. "One is that there are an awful lot of journalists that do not recognize that they work for corporations. . . .
"A second is an ideological one. I think that there is a way of viewing this decision which . . . looks not at whether the First Amendment was vindicated but whether what is simply referred to as, quote, democracy, unquote, was vindicated. My view is, we live in a world in which the word 'democracy' is debatable . . . It is not a word which should determine interpretation of a constitution and a Bill of Rights, which is at its core a legal document as well as an affirming statement of individual freedom," he says. "Justice Potter Stewart . . . warned against giving up the protections of the First Amendment in the name of its values. . . . The values matter, the values are real, but we protect the values by protecting the First Amendment."
A third factor surely is that McCain-Feingold exempted media corporations from its strictures against electioneering. Under this regime, free speech was not a constitutional right but a privilege granted by Congress to companies like those that own the Times and the Journal, but denied to other businesses, labor unions and nonprofit advocacy corporations.
One such group is Citizens United, which produced "Hillary: The Movie," a harshly critical 90-minute documentary. It sued when the FEC denied it permission to broadcast the film via on-demand cable during the 2008 presidential primaries. "Here is a very committed, very conservative entity that does a film attacking then-Sen. Hillary Clinton when she seemed likely to be nominated for president by the Democratic Party," Mr. Abrams says. "I ask myself: Well, isn't it obvious that that sort of speech must be protected by the First Amendment? And then I hear in response to that, 'Well, they could have used a PAC. Or they could have put the film out farther away from the election. Or they could have refrained from taking any money from any corporate grantor.'
"And my reaction is sort of a John McEnroe: You cannot be serious! We're talking about the First Amendment here, and we're being told that an extremely vituperative expression of disdain for a candidate for president is criminal in America?"
Another corporation whose speech was chilled by McCain-Feingold was the American Civil Liberties Union. In his 2005 book, "Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment," Mr. Abrams reports that during the 2004 campaign, the ACLU "broadcast advertisements denouncing the Patriot Act but refrained, as McCain-Feingold required, from criticizing (or even mentioning) President Bush as it did so." Writing for the court in Citizens United, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that if the ACLU "creates a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate's defense of free speech," it would be guilty of a felony under McCain-Feingold.
Yet even though the ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the justices to rule as they did, its Web site has been silent on the decision. Last weekend the ACLU's board met to consider reversing its longstanding opposition to limits on corporate political speech. Mr. Abrams was invited to make a case against the proposed turnabout.
On the other side was Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University. "Professor Neuborne argued that the potential for social harm due to the expenditure of large sums by corporate America was dangerous and worse—that it cannot be tolerated," Mr. Abrams recounts. "I argued that the ACLU had been right all these years in its position. I also pointed out that outsiders might think it a bit fickle for them to change their position days after they had achieved one of the great civil-liberties victories in recent years.
"And I said to them: Look, you bring cases, such as one to strike down a law of Congress which was aimed at 'virtual child pornography'—not real children being filmed, but otherwise wholly pornographic. . . . I said: You didn't do it because you wanted to protect the folks who like to watch child pornography. You did it because you thought the government shouldn't be trusted to make content decisions about who watches anything, and because you thought the principle of avoiding governmental control over what is available on the Internet was so strong."
That case, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, went to the Supreme Court. As in Citizens United, the ACLU's position prevailed in a decision written by Justice Kennedy in 2002. But in Ashcroft he was joined by the four liberal justices rather than the conservatives.
Mr. Abrams says that after he pointed this out to the ACLU board, "I warned that I thought the worst thing the ACLU could do is to become just another liberal public-interest group." The board left the question unresolved pending further study.
Mr. Abrams defends corporate free speech on practical grounds as well, arguing that there is no evidence it causes social harm. Federal regulations do not apply to campaigns for state and local office, and "over half the states have allowed unlimited expenditures and contributions by corporations and unions for a number of years. We haven't seen any explosion of corporate domination or union domination of the political landscape." Nor are states without limits more corruption-prone than those with them.
In Mr. Abrams's view, Citizens United advances rather than hinders democracy: "We want, for example, more Gene McCarthys and Ross Perots and individuals to come upon the scene and have a chance to build a war chest and go on out and try to reform the country as they think best."
McCarthy—the antiwar Minnesota senator whose surprising strength in the 1968 New Hampshire primary prompted Lyndon B. Johnson's retirement—was directly bankrolled by a few wealthy donors. That would be illegal today. The high court upheld restrictions on campaign contributions in Buckley v. Valeo (1976). Although such rules were not at issue in Citizens United, Justice Kennedy made clear that Buckley is still good law because unlimited donations create "the potential for quid pro quo corruption."
To Mr. Abrams, this a reasonable distinction: "I think there's room for more governmental involvement with respect to contributions, because there, I think, there is a greater risk of something in the order of quid pro quo corruption. . . . As of right now, the court has struck the balance pretty well."
Yet if there's no evidence from the states that unlimited contributions encourage corruption, isn't there a strong case for overturning Buckley too? Mr. Abrams demurs: "It's a serious argument, and there's no doubt that it raises First Amendment issues. But my reaction is that where we are now is pretty much where we ought to wind up."
He also rejects my suggestion that judicial liberals have become less supportive of free speech in recent decades. "Very few people are really supportive of free speech, whether they're liberals or conservatives," he says. "The First Amendment for many years played the role, when it triumphed in the courts, of protecting the speech of people who tended to be on the left—so it was minorities or the powerless in our society. The liberals on the Supreme Court today would still protect those people and their rights . . . What's changed is that conservatives found some causes which they have used to vindicate genuine First Amendment rights." He says that Justice Kennedy stands "all by himself on the court" as "the single most consistently protective jurist of First Amendment rights."
Mr. Abrams points out that the first restrictions on corporate and union political speech—overturned along with McCain-Feingold in Citizens United—were part of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a measure that aimed at curtailing labor's power. Taft-Hartley "was vetoed by Harry Truman on the ground that it violated the First Amendment," but the Republican-controlled Congress overrode the veto.
That's a cautionary tale for anyone who seeks advantage by restricting the freedom of others—including media corporations that supported McCain-Feingold because they were exempt from it. If corporations have no First Amendment rights, it is dubious to suggest that media corporations do have such rights.
"The decision in Citizens United provides significant protection for the press in the future," says Mr. Abrams. "The press cannot depend, and indeed ought not depend, upon the largess of Congress to exempt it from regulations on speech that affect the rest of American society. I'm a strong believer not only in protecting the press, but that the press has been the instrumentality which has helped to establish broad protections for all of us through the years."
An example is the 1966 case of Mills v. Alabama, in which the Supreme Court overturned a state law similar to McCain-Feingold except that it applied to the press. A Birmingham editor had been convicted under the Alabama Corrupt Practices Act for publishing an Election Day editorial favoring a local ballot measure.
The law's "electioneering" ban applied only on Election Day, a much narrower restriction than McCain-Feingold's 30- and 60-day limits. The state said the law's purpose was to prevent social harm, namely "confusive last-minute charges and countercharges . . . when, as a practical matter, because of lack of time, such matters cannot be answered or their truth determined until after the election is over."
There was an argument, too, that citizens needed protection from aggregations of power. As Mr. Abrams notes, "many cities, especially small towns, had only one newspaper, and it was the place from which people got most of their news." But "the Supreme Court said unanimously . . . that the notion that a newspaper should be kept from publishing what it wanted to publish—even just one day of the year, even for a supposedly good cause—was alien to this country."
Like any good lawyer, Mr. Abrams can argue in the alternative. I pose a hypothetical: Suppose that Citizens United had gone the other way, that Congress subsequently abolished the media exemption, and that a newspaper corporation hired him to argue that it does have First Amendment rights, even if other corporations do not. How would he make the case? Again he cites Justice Stewart, who held the view that "the institutional press was the only entity set forth in the Bill of Rights as deserving of special protection." Accordingly, Mr. Abrams says, "I would argue . . . that because of the role of the press, it was unconstitutional . . . to bar the press from doing everything it now does."
Later he notes that Citizens United, having been decided 5-4, could be reversed if the court's makeup changes. "I really might have that case one of these days," he says with a chuckle. That would be a supreme irony—especially if his client, once again, was the New York Times Co.
Mr. Taranto, a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.
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I have enormous respect for Floyd Abrams as a defender of free speech and the First Amendment dating back to the Pentagon Papers case.
But now Abrams is trying to defend the indefensible - the right of business corporations to use their shareholders' money to support (or oppose) candidates for public office.
That is the issue in the Citizens United case to be re-argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, Sept. 9. This involves the much-discussed "Hillary - the Movie," the unrelenting assault on the current Secretary of State prepared when she was still a candidate for President. There are a number of ways for the Court to dispose of the case itself without significantly affecting political campaign finance law. But the Court majority has decided to seize the occasion to reconsider long-standing doctrine which prohibits the use of corporate treasury funds to advocate electoral outcomes. Floyd Abrams is advocating such a change in the law, and he previewed his argument on this week's "Bill Moyers Journal" on public television.
Abrams appeared a bit uneasy about his own position as illustrated by his insistence on coupling his defense of corporate speech with that of labor unions - although union speech has nothing to do with this case and can quite easily be distinguished. Not once did Abrams mention corporate speech without adding "and unions."
First of all, the federal ban on corporate political contributions goes back 102 years to the Tillman Act, enacted by Congress in 1907 at the behest of President Teddy Roosevelt. A prohibition on union political spending was not enacted until the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, passed by a Republican Congress over President Truman's veto on the theory that what is good for the corporate goose is also good for the labor gander.
But there is also a more fundamental distinction between corporate speech and union speech. Any union member forced to pay dues against his or her will (under a collective bargaining agreement) is entitled to reimbursement of any portion of those dues used for political purposes. Corporate shareholders have no similar right. Corporate managers decide which candidates to support or oppose without seeking advise of stockholders and without the latter having any recourse if they happen to support the other candidate. Presumably, a dissenting stockholder could sell the stock, but that is not a particularly viable option. Indeed, most of us have no idea in which stocks our IRAs and mutual funds are invested.
Furthermore, the main case Abrams wants the Supreme Court to overrule (Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce) upheld a Michigan law which restricted only corporate speech and exempted labor unions. The Justices upheld the decision of the Michigan Legislature to do so.
Abrams also tried to hide behind the skirt of the ACLU, which he claimed fully supported his position in the Citizens United case. But the ACLU brief in the case specifically limited its argument to a different aspect of the case and did not call for the overruling of Austin.
Floyd Abrams insists that when the First Amendment forbids abridgement of speech, that includes corporate speech. But the fact is there is nothing in our Constitution to suggest that when the Founders spoke of We the People of the United States they had corporations in mind. Indeed, corporations are artificial entities created by the legislative branches of government and provided with certain economic benefits (such as limited liability) which allow them to amass huge treasuries. The legislatures which created these entities should also have the right to restrict what those entities can do with those amassed funds. _________________________
Palestine: "This Time 'We' Went to Far" (Norman Finkelstein)
This Time We Went Too Far By Norman Finkelstein http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24580.htm "Better than any other book, This Time We Went Too Far shows how the massive destruction visited on Gaza was not an accidental byproduct of the Israeli invasion but its barely concealed objective." — Raja Shehadeh, author, Palestinian Walks
For the Palestinians who live in the narrow coastal strip of Gaza, the December 2008 Israeli invasion was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions: in the 22-day-long action 1,400 Gazans were killed, several hundred on the first day alone. More than 6,000 homes were destroyed or badly damaged. The cost of the destruction and disruption of economic life, in one of the worlds poorest areas, is estimated at more than $3 billion.
And yet, while nothing should diminish recognition of Palestinian suffering through these frightful days, it is possible something redemptive will emerge from the tragedy of Gaza. For, as Norman Finkelstein details, in a concise work that melds cold anger with cool analysis, the profound injustice of the Israeli assault has been widely recognized by organizations impossible to brand as partial or extremist.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN investigation headed by Richard Goldstone, in documenting Israel's use of indiscriminate and intentional force against the civilian population during the invasion (100 Palestinians died for every one Israeli), have had an impact on traditional support for Israel. Jews in both the United States and the United Kingdom, for instance, are beginning to voice dissent, and this trend is especially apparent among the young.
Such a shift, Finkelstein contends, can result in new pressure capable of moving the Middle East crisis towards a solution, one that embraces justice for Palestinians and Israelis alike. The seeds of hope were thus sown in the bitter anguish of Gaza. This Time We Went Too Far, written with Finkelsteins customary acuity and precision, will surely advance the process it so eloquently describes.
Norman G. Finkelsteins books include Beyond Chutzpah, The Holocaust Industry, A Nation on Trial and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. [Finkelstein's] place in the whole history of writing history is assured. — Raul Hilberg, author, The Destruction of the European Jews
February 03, 2010 "The Independent" -- A high-ranking officer has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimise military casualties during last year's Gaza war, The Independent can reveal.
The officer, who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, made it clear that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as "means and intentions" – whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter. A more junior officer who served at a brigade headquarters during the operation described the new policy – devised in part to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war – as one of "literally zero risk to the soldiers".
The officers' revelations will pile more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up an independent inquiry into the war, as demanded in the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which harshly criticised the conduct of both Israel and Hamas. One of Israel's most prominent human rights lawyers, Michael Sfard, said last night that the senior commander's acknowledgement – if accurate – was "a smoking gun".
Until now, the testimony has been kept out of the public domain. The senior commander told a journalist compiling a lengthy report for Yedhiot Ahronot, Israel's biggest daily newspaper, about the rules of engagement in the three-week military offensive in Gaza. But although the article was completed and ready for publication five months ago, it has still not appeared. The senior commander told Yedhiot: "Means and intentions is a definition that suits an arrest operation in the Judaea and Samaria [West Bank] area... We need to be very careful because the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] was already burnt in the second Lebanon war from the wrong terminology. The concept of means and intentions is taken from different circumstances. Here [in Cast Lead] we were not talking about another regular counter-terrorist operation. There is a clear difference."
His remarks reinforce testimonies from soldiers who served in the Gaza operation, made to the veterans' group Breaking the Silence and reported exclusively by this newspaper last July. They also appear to cut across the military doctrine – enunciated most recently in public by one of the authors of the IDF's own code of ethics – that it is the duty of soldiers to run risks to themselves in order to preserve civilian lives.
Explaining what he saw as the dilemma for forces operating in areas that were supposedly cleared of civilians, the senior commander said: "Whoever is left in the neighbourhood and wants to action an IED [improvised explosive device] against the soldiers doesn't have to walk with a Kalashnikov or a weapon. A person like that can walk around like any other civilian; he sees the IDF forces, calls someone who would operate the terrible death explosive and five of our soldiers explode in the air. We could not wait until this IED is activated against us."
Another soldier who worked in one of the brigade's war-room headquarters told The Independent that conduct in Gaza – particularly by aerial forces and in areas where civilians had been urged to leave by leaflets – had "taken the targeted killing idea and turned it on its head". Instead of using intelligence to identify a terrorist, he said, "here you do the opposite: first you take him down, then you look into it."
The Yedhiot newspaper also spoke to a series of soldiers who had served in Operation Cast Lead in sensitive positions. While the soldiers rejected the main finding of the Goldstone Report – that the Israeli military had deliberately "targeted" the civilian population – most asserted that the rules were flexible enough to allow a policy under which, in the words of one soldier "any movement must entail gunfire. No one's supposed to be there." He added that at a meeting with his brigade commander and others it was made clear that "if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot. This is essentially the rules of engagement."
The other soldier in the war-room explained: "This doesn't mean that you need to disrespect the lives of Palestinians but our first priority is the lives of our soldiers. That's not something you're going to compromise on. In all my years in the military, I never heard that."
He added that the majority of casualties were caused in his brigade area by aerial firing, including from unmanned drones. "Most of the guys taken down were taken down by order of headquarters. The number of enemy killed by HQ-operated remote ... compared to enemy killed by soldiers on the ground had absolutely inverted," he said.
Rules of engagement issued to soldiers serving in the West Bank as recently as July 2006 make it clear that shooting towards even an armed person will take place only if there is intelligence that he intends to act against Israeli forces or if he poses an immediate threat to soldiers or others.
In a recent article in New Republic, Moshe Halbertal, a philosophy professor at Hebrew and New York Universities, who was involved in drawing up the IDF's ethical code in 2000 and who is critical of the Goldstone Report, said that efforts to spare civilian life "must include the expectation that soldiers assume some risk to their own lives in order to avoid causing the deaths of civilians". While the choices for commanders were often extremely difficult and while he did not think the expectation was demanded by international law, "it is demanded in Israel's military code and this has always been its tradition".
The Israeli military declined to comment on the latest revelations, and directed all enquiries to already-published material, including a July 2009 foreign ministry document The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects.
That document, which repeats that Israel acted in conformity with international law despite the "acute dilemmas" posed by Hamas's operations within civilian areas, sets out the principles of Operation Cast Lead as follows: "Only military targets shall be attacked; Any attack against civilian objectives shall be prohibited. A 'civilian objective' is any objective which is not a military target." It adds: "In case of doubt, the forces are obliged to regard an object as civilian."
Yedhiot has not commented on why its article has not been published.
Israel in Gaza: The soldier's tale
This experienced soldier, who cannot be named, served in the war room of a brigade during Operation Cast Lead. Here, he recalls an incident he witnessed during last winter's three-week offensive:
"Two [Palestinian] guys are walking down the street. They pass a mosque and you see a gathering of women and children.
"You saw them exiting the house and [they] are not walking together but one behind the other. So you begin to fantasise they are actually ducking close to the wall.
"One [man] began to run at some point, must have heard the chopper. The GSS [secret service] argued that the mere fact that he heard it implicated him, because a normal civilian would not have realised that he was now being hunted.
"Finally he was shot. He was not shot next to the mosque. It's obvious that shots are not taken at a gathering." ________________________
Patty Griffin at Floores in Helotes, TX 28 April 2009
[Sensitive, cerebral, troubled and melancholy--one of America's premier song writers and "Songbirds!"]
Useless Desires, also on the Impossible Dream album (The album was professionally recorded and about, say, 3619 times better!)
"Useless Desires"
Say goodbye to the old street That never cared much for you anyway The different-colored doorways You thought would let you in one day Goodbye to the old bus stop, frozen and waiting The weekend edition has this town way overrated
You walk across a baseball field The grass has turned to straw A flock of birds tries to fly away from where you are Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye old friend I can't make you stay I can't spend another ten years Wishing you would anyway
How the sky turns to fire against a telephone wire And even I'm getting tired of useless desires
Every day I take a bitter pill that gets me on my way For the little aches and pains The ones I have from day to day To help me think a little less about the things I miss To help me not to wonder how I ended up like this
I walk down to the railroad track and ride a rusty train With a million other faces I shoot through the city veins Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye old friend You wanted to be free Somewhere beyond the bitter end is where I want to be
How the sky turns to fire against a telephone wire And even I'm getting tired of useless desires
Say goodbye to the old building That never tried to know your name Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye old friend You won't be seeing me again Goodbye to all the windowpanes shining in the sun Like diamonds on a winter day Goodbye, goodbye to everyone
How the sky turns to fire against a telephone wire Burns the last of the day down And I'm the last one hangin' around Waiting on a train track, and the train never comes back And even I'm getting tired of useless desires _____________________________
Grateful Dead--"Ripple"
If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung, Would you hear my voice come thru the music, Would you hold it near as it were your own?
It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken, Perhaps they're better left unsung. I don't know, don't really care Let there be songs to fill the air.
Ripple in still water, When there is no pebble tossed, Nor wind to blow.
Reach out your hand if your cup be empty, If your cup is full may it be again, Let it be known there is a fountain, That was not made by the hands of men.
There is a road, no simple highway, Between the dawn and the dark of night, And if you go no one may follow, That path is for your steps alone.
Ripple in still water, When there is no pebble tossed, Nor wind to blow.
You who choose to lead must follow But if you fall you fall alone, If you should stand then whos to guide you? If I knew the way I would take you home.
La dee da da da, la da da da da, da da da, da da, da da da da da La da da da, la da da, da da, la da da da, la da, da da.
