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Jane Goodall on climate change: ‘We’ve just been stealing, stealing, stealing from our children, and it’s shocking’
A new take on our current problem of tyranny from the "good guys?"
Maybe.
Maybe not.
But it certainly seems like the Stockholm Syndrome writ large sometimes, doesn't it?
. . . the government needs the police state in order to protect itself from accountability for its crimes, lies, and squandering of taxpayers‘ money.
It Has Happened Here
Paul Craig Roberts
the police state is real
The Bush regime’s response to 9/11 and the Obama regime’s validation of this response have destroyed accountable democratic government in the United States. So much unaccountable power has been concentrated in the executive branch that the US Constitution is no longer an operable document.
Whether a person believes the official story of 9/11 which rests on unproven government assertions or believes the documented evidence provided by a large number of scientists, first responders, and structural engineers and architects, the result is the same. 9/11 was used to create an open-ended “war on terror” and a police state. It is extraordinary that so many Americans believe that “it can’t happen here” when it already has.
We have had a decade of highly visible evidence of the construction of a police state: the PATRIOT Act, illegal spying on Americans in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the initiation of wars of aggression – war crimes under the Nuremberg Standard – based on intentional lies, the Justice Department’s concocted legal memos justifying the executive branch’s violation of domestic and international laws against torture, the indefinite detention of US citizens in violation of the constitutionally protected rights of habeas corpus and due process, the use of secret evidence and secret “expert witnesses” who cannot be cross-examined against defendants in trials, the creation of military tribunals in order to evade federal courts, secret legal memos giving the president authority to launch preemptive cyber attacks on any country without providing evidence that the country constitutes a threat, and the Obama regime’s murder of US citizens without evidence or due process.
As if this were not enough, the Obama regime now creates new presidential powers by crafting secret laws, refusing to disclose the legal reasoning on which the asserted power rests. In other words, laws now originate in secret executive branch memos and not in acts of Congress. Congress? We don’t need no stinking Congress.
Despite laws protecting whistleblowers and the media and the US Military Code which requires soldiers to report war crimes, whistleblowers such as CIA agent John Kiriakou, media such as Julian Assange, and soldiers such as Bradley Manning are persecuted and prosecuted for revealing US government crimes. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33804.htm The criminals go free, and those who report the crimes are punished.
The justification for the American police state is the “war on terror,” a hoax kept alive by the FBI’s “sting operations.”
Normally speaking, a sting operation is when a policewoman poses as a prostitute in order to ensnare a “John,” or a police officer poses as a drug dealer or user in order to ensnare drug users or dealers. The FBI’s “sting operation” goes beyond these victimless crimes that fill up US prisons.
The FBI’s sting operations are different. They are just as victimless as no plot ever happens, but the FBI doesn’t pose as bomb makers for terrorists who have a plot but lack the weapon. Instead, the FBI has the plot and looks for a hapless or demented person or group, or for a Muslim enraged over the latest Washington insult to him and/or his religion.
When the FBI locates its victim, its agents approach the selected perpetrator pretending to be Al-Qaeda or some such and ply the selected perpetrator with money, the promise of fame, or threats until the victim signs on to the FBI’s plot and is arrested.
Trevor Aaronson in his book, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s War on Terrorism, documents that the FBI has so far concocted 150 “terrorist plots” and that almost all of the other “terrorist cases” are cases unrelated to terrorism, such as immigration, with a terror charge tacked on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LpTOrNQ3G9Q#!
The presstitute American media doesn’t ask why, if there is so much real terrorism requiring an American war against it, the FBI has to invent and solicit terrorist plots.
Neither does the media inquire how the Taliban, which resists the US invasion and attempted occupation of Afghanistan, fighting the US superpower to a standstill after 11 years, came to be designated as terrorists. Nor does the US presstitute media want to know how tribesmen in remote regions of Pakistan came to be designated as “terrorists” deserving of US drone attacks on the citizens, schools and medical clinics of a country with which the US is not at war.
Instead the media protects and perpetrates the hoax that has given America the police state. The American media has become Leni Riefenstahl, as has Hollywood with the anti-Muslim propaganda film, Zero Dark Thirty. This propaganda film is a hate crime that spreads Islamophobia. Nevertheless, the film is likely to win awards and to sink Americans into both tyranny and a hundred-year war in the name of fighting the Muslim threat.
What I learned many years ago as a professor is that movies are important molders of Americans‘ attitudes. Once, after giving a thorough explanation of the Russian Revolution that led to communist rule, a student raised his hand and said: “That’s not the way it happened in the movie.”
At first I thought he was making a witty joke, but then I realized that he thought that the truth resided in the movie, not in the professor who was well versed in the subject. Ever since I have been puzzled how the US has survived for so long, considering the ignorance of its population. Americans have lived in the power of the US economy. Now that this power is waning, sooner or later Americans will have to come to terms with reality.
It is a reality that will be unfamiliar to them.
Some Americans claim that we have had police states during other wartimes and that once the war on terror is won, the police state will be dismantled. Others claim that government will be judicious in its use of the power and that if you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.
These are reassurances from the deluded. The Bush/Obama police state is far more comprehensive than Lincoln’s, Wilson’s, or Roosevelt’s, and the war on terror is open-ended and is already three times longer than World War II. The Police State is acquiring “squatter’s rights.”
Moreover, the government needs the police state in order to protect itself from accountability for its crimes, lies, and squandering of taxpayers‘ money. New precedents for executive power have been created in conjunction with the Federalist Society which, independent of the war on terror, advocates the “unitary executive” theory, which claims the president has powers not subject to check by Congress and the Judiciary.
In other words, the president is a dictator if he prefers to be.
The Obama regime is taking advantage of this Republican theory. The regime has used the Republican desire for a strong executive outside the traditional checks and balances together with the fear factor to complete the creation of the Bush/Cheney police state.
As Lawrence M. Stratton and I documented in our book, The Tyranny Of Good Intentions, prior to 9/11, law as a shield of the people was already losing ground to law as a weapon in the hands of the government. If the government wanted to get you, there were few if any barriers to a defendant being framed and convicted, least of all a brainwashed jury fearful of crime.
I cannot say whether the US justice system has ever served justice better than it has served the ambition of prosecutors. Already in the 1930s and 1940s US Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland and US Attorney General Robert Jackson were warning against prosecutors who sacrifice “fair dealing to build up statistics of success.” Certainly it is difficult to find in the ranks of federal prosecutors today Jackson’s “prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.”
Just consider the wrongful conviction of Alabama’s Democratic governor, Don Siegelman by what apparently was a Karl Rove plot to rid the South of Democratic governors. The “Democratic” Obama regime has not investigated this false prosecution or given clemency to its innocent own.
Remember how quickly Bush removed the prison sentence of Cheney’s operative who revealed the name of a CIA undercover agent? The Democrats are a cowed and cowardly political party, fearful of justice, and as much a part of the corrupt police state as the Republicans.
Today the purpose of a prosecution is to serve the prosecutor’s career and that of the party that appoints him or her. A prosecutor’s career is served by high conviction rates, which require plea bargains in which the evidence against a defendant is never tested in court or before a jury, and by high profile cases, which can launch a prosecutor into a political career, as Rudy Giuliana achieved with his frame-up of Michael Milken.
Glenn Greenwald explained how Internet freedom advocate Aaron Swartz was driven to his death by the ambition of two federal prosecutors, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant US Attorney Stephen Heymann, who had no aversion to destroying an innocent person with ridiculous and trumped-up charges in order to advance their careers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/ortiz-heymann-swartz-accountability-abuse
It is rare for a prosecutor to suffer any consequence for bringing false charges, for consciously using and even paying for false evidence, and for lying to judge and jury. As prosecutors are rarely held accountable, they employ illegal and unethical methods and routinely abuse their power.
As judges are mainly concerned with clearing their court dockets, justice is rarely served in America, which explains why the US has not only a larger percentage of its citizens in prison than any other country on earth, but also the largest absolute number of prisoners.
The US actually has more of its citizens in prison than “authoritarian” China which has a population four times larger than the US. The US, possibly the greatest human rights abuser in history, is constantly bringing human rights charges against China. Where are the human rights charges against Washington?
In America the collapse of law has gone beyond corrupt prosecutors and their concocted false prosecutions. Unless it needs or desires a show trial, a police state does not need prosecutors and courts. By producing legal memos that the president can both throw people into prison without a trial and execute them without a trial simply by stating that some official in the executive branch thinks the person has a possible or potential connection to terrorism, tyranny’s friends in the Justice (sic) Department have dispensed with the need for courts, prosecutors and trials.
The Bush/Obama regime has made the executive branch judge, juror, and executioner. All that is needed is an unproven assertion by some executive branch official. Here we have the epitome of evil.
Evidence is no longer required for the president of the US to imprison people for life or to deprive them of their life.
A secret Justice Department memo has been leaked to NBC News that reveals the tyrannical reasoning that authorizes the executive branch to execute American citizens on the basis of belief alone without the requirement of evidence that they are terrorists or associated with terrorists. http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-exclusive-justice-department-memo-reveals-legal-case-for-drone-strikes-on-americans?lite
In “freedom and democracy” America, innocent until proven guilty is no longer the operative legal principle. If the government says you are guilty, you are. Period. No evidence required for your termination. Even Stalin pretended to have evidence.
The United States government is working its way step by step toward the determination that any and every critic of the government is guilty of providing “aid and comfort” to Washington’s “terrorist enemies,” which includes the elected Hamas government in Gaza.
The only critics exempted from this rule-in-the-making are the neoconservatives who criticize the US government for being too slow to throttle both its critics and “anti-semites,” such as former US President Jimmy Carter, who criticize the Israeli government’s illegal appropriation of Palestinian lands.
Most of Palestine has been stolen by Israel with Washington acquiesce and aid. Therefore, nothing is left for a “two-state solution.”
There is no doubt whatsoever that the Israeli government’s theft of Palestine is illegal; yet, Washington, on which Israel is totally dependent, does nothing about law. Law, we don’t need no stinking law.” Washington has might. Might is right. Get used to it.
Not only for Palestinians has law ceased to exist, but also for Americans, and for Washington’s NATO puppets in the UK and Europe, pitiful remnants of once great nations now complicit in Washington’s crimes against humanity. The Open Society Justice Initiative, a NGO based in New York, has issued a report that documents that 54 governments are involved in Washington’s rendition and torture program. Twenty-five of the governments that help Washington to kidnap, disappear, and torture people are European. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/cia-rendition-report-uk-court
The opening decade of the 21st century has seen the destruction of all the law that was devised to protect the innocent and the vulnerable since the rise of the now defunct moral conscience of the West. The West’s moral conscience never applied outside of itself. What happened to people in Europe’s colonies and to native inhabitants of the US and Australia is a very different story.
Nevertheless, despite its lack of coverage to the powerless, the principle of the rule of law was a promising principle. Now America under Bush and Obama, two peas of the same pod, has abandoned the principle itself.
The Obama police state will be worse than the Bush/Cheney police state. Unlike conservatives who in times past were suspicious of government power, Obamabots believe that government power is a force for good if it is in the right hands.
As Obama’s supporters see him as a member of an oppressed minority, they are confident that Obama will not misuse his power. This belief is akin to the belief that, as Jews suffered so much at the hands of Hitler, Israel would be fair to the Palestinians.
Glenn Greenwald writes that “the most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33847.htm
This is the power of a dictator. That Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were said to have this power was part of their demonization as “brutal dictators,” a justification for overthrowing their governments and murdering the dictators and their supporters.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the president of the United States now murders his political opponents just as Saddam Hussein murdered his. How long before critics move from the no-fly list to the extermination list?
And yet, no matter how the present administration tries to carry out the policies of the past one as well as it can, it's never quite up to snuff for them.
Cheney: Obama’s national security nominees are ‘second-rate people’
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates endorses ‘drone courts’
Not that we need any further evidence of skullduggery by our "betters," but Senator Bernie Sanders has also never been afraid to call a spade a spade.
The banks own us, said one of our more progressive representatives in Congress years ago, and no one paid him much attention then.
Is there anyone left not on board with this today?
Sen. Bernie Sanders
In 2010, Bank of America set up more than 200 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands (which has a corporate tax rate of 0.0 percent) to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It worked. Not only did Bank of America pay nothing in federal income taxes, but it received a rebate from the IRS worth $1.9 billion that year.
My buddy RJ sends me the latest info about the government's operations. Sounds boring, doesn't it?
Not really.
Neil Barofsky Tells Jon Stewart How the Ego and Narcissism of Washington Preserve a Broken Status Quo from Yves Smith: Hope you enjoy this chat. I did, despite its predictably depressing conclusion. Stewart and Barofsky do a good job of conveying how DC works and why that guaranteed “a thoroughly broken financial system” would stay intact.
Federal Reserve Hacked and Downplayed - Anonymous hacked the the St. Louis Federal Reserve emergency communications system. ECS is the emergency communications system for seventeen states, with plans to add seven new states this year. ECS estimates it holds 40 percent of America’s state-chartered banks as its users. Sensitive information on thousands at state-charter banks and credit unions—including login information, credentials, IP addresses, and contact information—was listed in a spreadsheet and posted to a government site, then announced and claimed by the “Operation Last Resort” faction of Anonymous.
The Fed downplayed the breach until a host of security groups got on the case. One security group has posted the headers of the hacked pages, showing Anonymous got 4,000 banking executives detailed info, including passwords. A final thought. What do you think the cost of this breach is? The Ponemon survey data shows that the average cost per financial services record breached is $247. Using that calculation the breach cost $247 x 4607 = $1,137,929. I would argue a breach of this type will cost much, much more. That is because thousands of organizations are currently resetting executives passwords on all the systems where there may have been password reuse and are following their incident response protocols. What is more amazing Anonymous youtubes. You'll find yourself agreeing with and it is also the videos are fairly artistic and have over 1.3 million hits already with about five thousand comments in a space of two days.
Data siphoned in Fed reserve hack a “bonanza” for spear phishers - Sensitive details on thousands of banking executives lifted from a hacking involving the Federal Reserve represent a potential "bonanza" for spear phishers looking to snare high-value targets in personalized scam e-mails, a security researcher said. The list is no longer readily available online, but according to Chris Wysopal, CTO of security firm Veracode, it contained details from a Federal Reserve-related database that Anonymous-affiliated hackers claimed to breach on Sunday. It included 31 fields, including home addresses, e-mail addresses, login IDs, and cryptographically hashed passwords. "As you can see, this is a spearphishing bonanza and even a password reuse bonanza for whoever can crack the password hashes," he wrote in a blog post published on Wednesday.
Are we too scared, or not scared enough? - The Economist - THE “safe asset shortage” has consumed a great deal of oxygen within the econoblogosphere over the past few years. (Those who want to catch up on the discussion can read my earlier posts here and here.) Despite widespread agreement that a problem exists, there is significant disagreement about what the problem actually is. Understandably, the different diagnoses lead to radically different prescriptions. . The problem is that there are not enough genuinely safe assets available. Everything else is an inadequate substitute. Central banks may be exacerbating the shortage by buying trillions of dollars worth of safe assets for themselves. A recent paper by Gary Gorton and Guillermo Ordonez suggests a solution. According to them, governments with their own currencies should be running bigger budget deficits to end the shortage. These scholars argue that budget deficits are stimulative during crises because the newly issued risk-free bonds can be used by the private sector as replacements for impaired private debts. More interestingly, they confirm earlier findings that higher levels of government debt during good times make crises less likely in the first place.
Modern Market Alchemy Explained: Converting Junk Debt Into Supersafe Treasurys Out Of Thin Air - From Fed's Stein: "The insurance company might approach a broker-dealer and engage in what is effectively a two-way repo transaction, whereby it gives the dealer its junk bonds as collateral, borrows the Treasury securities, and agrees to unwind the transaction at some point in the future. Now the insurance company can go ahead and pledge the borrowed Treasury securities as collateral for its derivatives trade." Thanks to the magic of FAS 140 banks can literally transform worthless garbage into supersafe Treasurys, then use that newly transformed collateral via further repo as cash to fund simple stock purchases, and at the end of the day nobody knows where the exposure came from, who the counterparty is, and what the ultimate liability is!
Senator John McKeynes - From this AM’s NYT: …the potential impact of the cuts is being cited by both parties. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said the military side alone would eliminate 350,000 jobs directly, and 650,000 more that depend on the government programs. So, not only is this pure Keynesian analysis, but the Senator is recognizing both the direct and indirect effects of the cuts of jobs. In other words, he’s got a multiplier, and it’s a big one! I can’t say how long will it be until these guys go back to saying “the government doesn’t create jobs!” but until then we need to add to our working definition of a Keynesian. It used to be ”a Republican in a recession.” Now it’s also “a Republican facing defense cuts.”
Imbalance in the infrastructure debate - Joseph's previous post builds on this thread from Mark Thoma. Each is worth reading but I think both understate the extraordinary asymmetry between the pro and con in the should-we-spend-on-infrastructure debate (distinct from the where-to-spend debate). Consider the following statements:
1. We need to repair and upgrade the country's infrastructure in the relatively near future (let's say a decade) So far as I can tell, almost no one is willing to stand up and argue against this point.
2. The economy is not operating at full capacity. We've already stipulated that we need to build these things which means we've also agreed to tolerate at least some crowding out at some point in the future. You simply can't have one without the other; you can only seek to minimize the effect.
3. Borrowing costs for the federal government are historically low. As a general rule, repairs don't get cheaper the longer you put them off. This tends to put the burden of proof on those arguing for a delay.
Counterparties: The devil’s in the emails -- There’s a certain inevitability to RBS’s $612 million Libor-rigging settlement and the Justice Department’s civil charges against S&P for faulty ratings. Like at Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Standard Chartered, and UBS, RBS and S&P’s scandals come complete with how-could-they-put-that-in-writing electronic communications. RBS’s contributions to this now-venerable tradition come courtesy of the CFTC and FSA, and are wrapped up nicely by Dealbook and FT Alphaville. One trader asked that the rate set be at a certain level by writing to the submitter that “if u did that i would come over there and make love to you”. Another said “its just amazing how Libor fixing can make you that much money”. Believing that the US dollar Libor was being watched by the Fed, a Yen trader said “dun think anyone cares the JPY Libor”. Scattered throughout is the requisite amount of trading floor profanity, along with a decent number of emoticons. S&P’s written record was more metaphorical and sarcastic. One exec wrote that “this market is a wildly spinning top which is going to end badly”. An analyst said he had “no complaints” about his job, “aside from the fact that the MBS world is crashing, investors and the media hate us and we’re all running around to save face”.
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