Where are we living?

We are past the question of democracy or fascism.  That's been firmly answered.  We're now at the question of whether we are living in a free country.  

 

So Much for Political Freedom

It was early March when a representative from the New York City Department of Education’s Office of Special Investigations sat down with Jill Bloomberg, the longtime principal of Park Slope Collegiate in Brooklyn, a combined middle and high school, to inform her that she was under investigation.

The representative told Ms. Bloomberg that she could not tell her the nature of any allegations, nor who had made them, but said that she would need to interview Ms. Bloomberg’s staff.

Then one of her assistant principals, who had met with an investigator, revealed to her exactly what the allegation was, one that seemed a throwback to another era: Communist organizing.

“I think I just said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. This is something O.S.I. investigates?’” Ms. Bloomberg said, using an abbreviation for the Office of Special Investigations. “I mean, what decade are we living in?”

  

The one where Americans finally lose their tenuous hold on sanity.

Make American Great Again.

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Trump Terror: Gaslighting America

Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. [...] Trump’s lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission. That first press conference when Sean Spicer was sent out to lie and fulminate to the press about the inauguration crowd reminded me of some Soviet apparatchik having his loyalty tested to see if he could repeat in public what he knew to be false. It was comical, but also faintly chilling.

  Andrew Sullivan

I agree to a certain point.

Sullivan is leaving out Bush II's loyalty test for Colin Powell when he knowingly lied at the UN about Iraq's "aluminum tubes". Scooter Libby knowingly lied (and surprisingly was convicted) for Bush II/Cheney. And, Oliver North lied to Congress for Reagan during the Iran-Contra crimes. People lied for Eisenhower about Gary Powers' spy plane over Russia. What about James Clapper's lies to Ron Wyden at the Senate hearings? Was he being loyal only to the NSA or was Obama aware and in on that?

A lot of people have no doubt had to pass a loyalty test by lying for a president of the US. Spicer's loyalty test is different only because we've already decided Trump is a fascist. It's not proof of that.

But, there's more to this article.

How are we to respond to a president who in the same week declared that the “murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 45 to 47 years,” when, of course, despite some recent, troubling spikes in cities, it’s nationally near a low not seen since the late 1960s, and half what it was in 1980. What are we supposed to do when a president says that two people were shot dead in Chicago during President Obama’s farewell address — when this is directly contradicted by the Chicago police? None of this, moreover, is ever corrected. No error is ever admitted. Any lie is usually doubled down by another lie — along with an ad hominem attack.

[...]

Interviews with the president himself should not leave a lie alone; the interviewer should press and press and press until the lie is conceded. The press must not be afraid of even calling the president a liar to his face if he persists. This requires no particular courage. [...] As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik once said: “In the life of every honorable man comes a difficult moment … when the simple statement that this is black and that is white requires paying a high price.” The price Michnik paid was years in prison. American journalists cannot risk a little access or a nasty tweet for the same essential civic duty?

No. Because those who would do something honorable are not going to be interviewing Il Duce.

I keep asking myself this simple question: If you came across someone in your everyday life who repeatedly said fantastically and demonstrably untrue things, what would you think of him?

[...]

Here’s what I’d think: This man is off his rocker. He’s deranged; he’s bizarrely living in an alternative universe; he’s delusional.

Or just plain evil.

[W]hen the linchpin of an entire country is literally delusional, clinically deceptive, and responds to any attempt to correct the record with rage and vengeance, everyone is always on edge.

[...]

Every day in countries unfortunate enough to be ruled by a lone dictator, people are constantly subjected to the Supreme Leader’s presence, in their homes, in their workplaces, as they walk down the street. [...] He delights in constantly provoking and surprising you, so that his monstrous ego can be perennially fed. And because he is also mentally unstable, forever lashing out in manic spasms of pain and anger, you live each day with some measure of trepidation. What will he come out with next? Somehow, he is never in control of himself and yet he is always in control of you.

One of the great achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free country may dominate the news cycle many days — but he is not omnipresent — and because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at times. A free society means being free of those who rule over you — to do the things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves — to exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene. In that sense, it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago. It’s less like living in a democracy than being a child trapped in a house where there is an abusive and unpredictable father, who will brook no reason, respect no counter-argument, admit no error, and always, always up the ante until catastrophe inevitably strikes.

That last paragraph is spot on.

Mark Your Calendar

On Jan. 15, @acTVismMunich is hosting a “Freedom & Democracy” event with @jeremyscahill and @Snowden. Live stream: https://t.co/6p616K00IL pic.twitter.com/Vn3rR0YNUr

— The Intercept (@theintercept) January 9, 2017

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

How Free Are We?

And We Are Right Behind 'Em

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

NOW You Can Disrespect France

Thousands of people marched in 70 French cities, including Paris, to demand immediate action to stop France's ongoing state of emergency and openly voice outrage over government plans to revoke the French citizenship of dual nationals, many of them Muslims, convicted of terrorism.

Up to 20,000 protesters – many of them members of human rights groups, political parties and trade unions – took part in a peaceful protest in Paris on Saturday.

[...]

Up to 3,000 people took part in a similar protest in Bordeaux, the organizers said; 1,800 in Toulouse (1,300 according to police); 1,000 in Nantes (800 according to police), AFP reported. Demonstrations also reportedly occurred in Strasbourg, Auxerre, Bayonne, Metz, Nancy, Nice, Nimes, Montpellier, Limoges, Grenoble, Saint-Etienne and Montauban.

[...]

"I am here to protest against the state of emergency and against the deprivation of nationality for dual nationals. That's important because we saw a lot of drifts during the state of emergency, some rallies were prohibited, some people were arrested just for protesting peacefully. That shocks me," one activist told RT's Ruptly video agency.

One woman at the Paris rally, referring to Islamic State, told RTL: “The state of emergency is until when? The end of Daesh? 10 years? Never?”

[...]

Meanwhile, according to the latest poll for Atlantico, as many as 79 percent of French people support the prolongation of the state of emergency for three more months.

  RT

Welcome to the New World Order.

You Want Freedom, Too?

In 2006 – years before ISIS replaced Al Qaeda as the New and Unprecedentedly Evil Villain – Newt Gingrich gave a speech in New Hampshire in which, as he put it afterward, he “called for a serious debate about the First Amendment and how terrorists are abusing our rights–using them as they once used passenger jets–to threaten and kill Americans.”

[...]

With rare exception, Gingrich’s desire to abridge Free Speech rights in the name of fighting terrorism was dismissed as a fringe idea.

[...]

I argued that the Gingrich/McCarthy desire to alter the First Amendment to fight The Terrorists was extremist even when judged by the increasingly radical standards of the Bush/Cheney War on Terror, which by that point had already imprisoned Americans arrested on U.S. soil with no due process and no access to lawyers.

[...]

There are now once again calls for restrictions on the First Amendment’s free speech protections, but they come not from far-right radicals in universally discredited neocon journals, but rather from the most mainstream voices, as highlighted this week by The New York Times.

[...]

The NYT cites two recent articles, one in Bloomberg by long-time Obama adviser Cass Sunstein and the other in Slate by Law Professor Eric Posner, that suggested limitations on the First Amendment in order to fight ISIS.

[...]

It also notes that the desire to restrict the internet as a means of fighting ISIS has seeped into the leadership of both parties: Donald Trump said the “internet should be closed up” to ISIS, while “Hillary Clinton said the government should work with host companies to shut jihadist websites and chat rooms,” a plan that would be unconstitutional “if the government exerted pressure on private firms to cooperate in censorship.”

  Glenn Greenwald

Sounds like a capitulation to me. 

Ass #1: 'Hey! They're still trying to kill us! What do we do?' 

Ass #2: 'Well, they hate us for our freedoms. Maybe if we didn't have any....' 

Or else it's finally an admission that they don't hate us for our freedoms?

All of these proposals take direct aim at a core constitutional principle that for decades has defined the First Amendment’s free speech protections. That speech cannot be banned even if it constitutes advocacy of violence has a long history in the U.S., but was firmly entrenched in the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio. [...] The Brandenburg ruling “overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had threatened violence against political officials in a speech.

The Court ruled that “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” — meaning conduct such as standing outside someone’s house with an angry mob and urging them to burn the house down that moment — “the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force [...]”

[...]

The solution to [the free expression of] dangerous ideas is to confront and refute them, not outlaw them.

[...]

Trying to dictate which views can and cannot be expressed on the internet, aside from being futile, is the modern-day hallmark of an authoritarian.

What makes all of this especially ironic is that not even a year has elapsed since the western world congratulated itself for its flamboyant street celebration of free speech in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders. Remember all that?

Not all madmen look and act like madmen. I'm currently watching a documentary series on Netflix about WWII. From the films of Mussolini and Hitler, you can only wonder how their people didn't recognize them for what they were (or, more terribly, maybe they did), but Stalin...he looks perfectly sane.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Quotes to Remember

"It’s not about not having something to hide; it’s about having something to lose. What we lose when we’re under observation is our humanity."

"Rights are inherent to our nature, they’re not granted by governments, they’re guaranteed by governments. They’re protected by governments."

--Edward Snowden

China Blocks Certain Internet Sites

How terrible. Let's see who else might be doing that.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

They Hate Us for Our Freedoms

Glenn Greenwald has a couple of mentions on his Twitter account this morning about a September 2004 disregarded report of a task force created by Donald Rumsfeld to understand our situation post-9/11 vis-à-vis the Musliim world and our “interventions” therein. Here are some excerpts of that unclassified report:

Americans believe that while the U.S. necessarily shapes foreign policies to support our national interests, those same interests are not necessarily in opposition to the interests of other nations and cultures. To the contrary, Americans are convinced that the U.S. is a benevolent “super power” that elevates values emphasizing freedom and prosperity as at the core of its own national interest. Thus, for Americans, “U.S. values” are in reality “world values” — exemplified by the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the 1975 Helsinki Accords — so deep down we assume that everyone should naturally support our policies.

Yet the world of Islam — by overwhelming majorities at this time — sees things differently. Muslims see American policies as inimical to their values, American rhetoric about freedom and democracy as hypocritical, and American actions as deeply threatening.

In other words, they do not hate us for our values, but because of our policies.

  FAS

Oh, really? Is that the message Der Rumsfeld tried to get across to the American public?

[A] similar series of questions showed even more favorable opinion ratios in favor of U.S. culture and its values — in 2002. Thus it seems that in two years the Jihadi message — that strongly attacks American values — is being accepted by more moderate and non-violent Muslims. This in turn implies that negative opinion of the U.S. has not yet bottomed-out, but is in fact continuing to move dynamically. [...] In Saudi Arabia, a large majority believes that the U.S. seeks to “weaken” and “dominate” Islam itself — in other words, Americans have become the enemy. It is noteworthy that opinion is hardest over against America in precisely those places ruled by what Muslims call “apostates” and tyrants — the tyrants we support. This should give us pause. [...] Furthermore, if regular Muslims are indeed moving to hard “opposition” to the U.S. then we have only so much time to open such a channel before the possibility is closed for the duration of this war.

Yeah. I think we missed it. On purpose, it appears.

The complete report, with recommendations, is here.

This report is a product of the Defense Science Board (DSB). The DSB is a Federal Advisory Committee established to provide independent advice to the Secretary of Defense. Statements, opinions, conclusions , and recommendations in this report do not necessarily represent the official position of the Department of Defense.

No shit.

Another Award for Edward Snowden

In a foreign country, of course.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden received several standing ovations in the Swedish parliament after being given the Right Livelihood award for his revelations of the scale of state surveillance.

  The Guardian

So, where’s the offer of asylum in Sweden?

Philanthropist Jakob von Uexküll, who established the award in 1980, told the parliament: “So Mr Snowden, your Right Livelihood Award is waiting for you. We trust that Sweden will make it possible for you to collect your award here in Stockholm in person in the very near future.”

But don’t hold your breath. Maybe some time before you die.

The awards jury, in its citation, said Snowden was being honoured “for his courage and skill in revealing the unprecedented extent of state surveillance violating basic democratic processes and constitutional rights”.

Isn’t it strange that this is happening? Internationally, we have become the old Soviet Union.

The Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, was also among the recipients. The jury citation said his award was in celebration of “building a global media organisation dedicated to responsible journalism in the public interest, undaunted by the challenge of exposing corporate and government malpractices”.

Brave New World, Revisited

1958- a visionary

Actual quote:

Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit. 

...the first aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making trouble. 

- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, published 1958

Elsewhere in America

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

      I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"        

[T]he Obama administration is fast-tracking the deportation of more than 63,000 women and children from Central America who fled to the United States to escape violence in their home countries.

[...]

The Obama administration has opened two new family detention centers to hold hundreds of women and children from Central America who fled to the United States reportedly to escape violence in their home countries. While most of the 63,000 unaccompanied minors detained at the border since January have now been placed with family members as their cases are processed, those caught with their mothers are being held without bond. A 600-bed detention center run by GEO Group in Karnes City, Texas, opened at the beginning of August and is reportedly already full. Democracy Now! producer Renée Feltz visits a second detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, to report on the poor conditions and lack of due process for migrants, and the lawyers mobilizing to assist them. "Children were not eating. Children were getting very sick," says attorney Megan Jordi. "Every child I saw looked incredibly emaciated and had a hollow look in their eyes."

  Democracy Now!

"How can anyone say we are protecting our liberty and freedom by taking it away?"

Peter Van Buren takes on and answers the top ten justifications for NSA data mining.

They Hate Us for Our Freedom, Right?

The real measure of how free a society is isn’t how its good, obedient servants are treated; it’s how dissidents are treated. And if you go and do any kind of investigative journalism and talk to whistleblowers, or talk to people who are dissenting or are otherwise engaged in activism against the government, or journalists who do that, you find this incredibly disturbing, intense climate of fear. Nobody will talk unless they’re using very sophisticated encryption technologies. [...F]or people who are engaged in actual critical thinking and opposition to those in power, surveillance is menacing. It intimidates people out of engaging in real dissent. That’s its principal danger.

[...]

A society in which people feel like they’re always being watched is one that breeds conformity, because people will avoid doing anything that can prompt judgment or condemnation. This is a crucial part of why a surveillance state is so damaging — it’s why all tyrannies know that watching people is the key to keeping them in line. Because only when you’re not being watched can you really be a free individual.

[...]

I still haven’t gone through all of [the material Edward Snowden gave me], but even though I had been writing for the past four years about how the NSA was building this completely unaccountable and sprawling surveillance system, seeing the truth of it — the hardcore reality of it in their documents — was kind of shocking, I have to say. And I really believe that the most significant revelations are yet to come. I don’t want to keep previewing that — we’re going to take our time vetting it and reporting it and figuring it all out — but the stuff that has shocked me the most is the stuff we haven’t even written about.

  Glenn Greenwald in Harpers

Happy 4th

How Long Before You Relinquish Your Remaining Freedom - Internet Anonymity

President Barack Obama warned of cyber threats to critical US infrastructure and called on Congress to take action in an op-ed published Friday in the Wall Street Journal.

“The cyber threat to our nation is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face,” Obama wrote.

“Foreign governments, criminal syndicates and lone individuals are probing our financial, energy and public safety systems every day.”
  Raw Story

Oh, and...

Twitter said Thursday it was appealing a court ruling ordering it to turn over data on one of its users involved in the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.

[...]

The announcement came weeks after Manhattan criminal court Judge Matthew Sciarrino ruled that law enforcement had the right to see tweets and other user data from Malcolm Harris, who is being prosecuted for disorderly conduct in connection with an Occupy protest on the Brooklyn Bridge last year.
  Raw Story

And Speaking of the Internet...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Dream

Perhaps the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday is a good day to talk about dreams. His most famous speech is called the I Have a Dream speech.

It was a nice dream.  It ended.

But go back to sleep. The dream was better.

Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

[...]

An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them.

[...]

The framers lived under autocratic rule and understood this danger better than we do. James Madison famously warned that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

[...]

Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.

[...]

The indefinite-detention provision in the defense authorization bill seemed to many civil libertarians like a betrayal by Obama. While the president had promised to veto the law over that provision, Levin, a sponsor of the bill, disclosed on the Senate floor that it was in fact the White House that approved the removal of any exception for citizens from indefinite detention.

Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free.

[...]

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free.

[...]

At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

[...]

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company. [ed: In bold: what we now practice; In parentheses: the countries we condemn for the same practice. For the actual referencing instances of each practice in our country, read the full article.]

Assassination of U.S. citizens (Nations such as Nigeria, Iran and Syria have been routinely criticized for extrajudicial killings of enemies of the state.)

Indefinite detention (China recently codified a more limited detention law for its citizens, while countries such as Cambodia have been singled out by the United States for “prolonged detention.”)

Arbitrary justice (Egypt and China have been denounced for maintaining separate military justice systems for selected defendants, including civilians.)

Warrantless searches (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan operate under laws that allow the government to engage in widespread discretionary surveillance.)

Secret evidence

War crimes (Various nations have resisted investigations of officials accused of war crimes and torture. Some, such as Serbia and Chile, eventually relented to comply with international law; countries that have denied independent investigations include Iran, Syria and China.)

Secret court (Pakistan places national security surveillance under the unchecked powers of the military or intelligence services.)

Immunity from judicial review (Similarly, China has maintained sweeping immunity claims both inside and outside the country and routinely blocks lawsuits against private companies.)

Continual monitoring of citizens (Saudi Arabia has installed massive public surveillance systems, while Cuba is notorious for active monitoring of selected citizens.)

Extraordinary renditions

[...]

These new laws have come with an infusion of money into an expanded security system on the state and federal levels, including more public surveillance cameras, tens of thousands of security personnel and a massive expansion of a terrorist-chasing bureaucracy.

Some politicians shrug and say these increased powers are merely a response to the times we live in. Thus, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could declare in an interview last spring without objection that “free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” Of course, terrorism will never “surrender” and end this particular “war.”

Other politicians rationalize that, while such powers may exist, it really comes down to how they are used. This is a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush.

  Jonathan Turley at WaPo

Rationalization is one basic human right that we still have.



UPDATE 1/16/12, 5:35 PM: Turley posted a blog article responding to comments on his WaPo article in which he rebuts the assertions of many that NDAA does not affect American citizens. He closes:

I am hardly shocked that senators are not answering the criticism over this provision by being open about their failure to protect citizens. However, I continue to be amazed by comments on the Washington Post and this blog from citizens that we are not really losing any rights because most citizens are unlikely to be subject to these powers. It is disgraceful argument that only “those” people will be denied rights so I must remain free. Of course, since these are secret powers, you are not likely to know if you have been subject to surveillance or some other measures. More importantly, something is not a right if it is discretionary with your government to allow or to take away. By the time you find yourself denied of the right, it is too late to do anything about it.