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insights Archive for: October 2007
And Still the Constitutional Crisis Escalates
posted by snarko2 on October 9 2007
The ongoing criminal conspiracy known to the mainstream media as the "Bush administration" has subjected we the people of the United States and our Constitution to nearly seven years of perpetual nightmare.
The Bushites' level of contempt for the rule of law, defiance of Constitutional checks and balances, and scorn for the Bill of Rights is unprecedented in the history of our country. So is the degree to which they use government power to promote unfettered playing fields for the great corporate robber barons to run roughshod over the people. All these factors run hand in hand. The history of totalitarian governments provides open roadmaps on how to use the extinction of civil liberties to make a country safe for corporate dictatorship.
Just when we think it cannot possibly get worse, it gets worse. The recent revelations about the murderous activities in Iraq of the private mercenary soldiers in the employment of Blackwater disclose to us more wounds where the Bushite dagger has stabbed deeper still into the guts of our Constitutional democracy.
In a democracy there are not supposed to be private mercenary armies. Under our Constitution only the Congress can declare war. All military forces must be firmly under the control of the people's elected representatives in the Congress in order to ensure that no Julius Caesar can arise to march on the nation's capital with private legions that answer only to him.
It was an exercise of madness for the Congress to have ever allowed the U.S. State Department and Defense Department to hire mercenary private contract forces in Iraq and let them be armed to the gills with full military firepower. In a democracy it is one of the most basic of imperatives that private armies that are not operationally accountable either to the commissioned military chain of command or to the democratic institutions of civilian government cannot be permitted.
As the situation has been allowed to develop, Blackwater's mercenaries are not subject either to the Uniform Code of Military Justice or to the reach of civilian criminal justice back home. In other words they are not subject to the rule of law but are a law unto themselves, backed up by gunpoint.
Benito Mussolini, who ought to know, once described fascism as the marriage of the corporation and the state. How convenient it is for the wealthy owner of Blackwater to have fattened his wealth through the American state handing him a contract to live out his egotistical power fantasies by creating a private army.
How much difference is there between Blackwater's mercenary forces and Mussolini's blackshirts, who marched on Rome to put an end to democratic government in Italy? Do we want to have to find out? Do we want to leave it to the criminal Bushite administration to teach us the answer?
Perhaps more relevant to our own history, is there any difference at all between the Blackwater mercenaries and the hated Hessian mercenaries who augmented British troops in our own Revolutionary War?
This is a monster that cannot be reformed but must be extinguished without delay.
Let your Congressional representatives hear your voice. Let Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid hear your voice. Demand legislation to cancel the Blackwater contracts and disband the Blackwater private army. Tell Nancy and Harry you don't want to hear any whining about veto-proof majorities or needing 60 votes. Demand that they take a stand for the values of American democracy and history and force the Bushite Cult to resist those values by defending the use of a rogue private mercenary army if that is what they insist on doing. Do it now, please.
No Rio Grande Wall
posted by snarko2 on October 5 2007
I'm an American and a Texan and proud of both. I live in a free society. The specter of living behind a walled border makes my blood run cold.
To erect a wall along the Rio Grande River is to advertise to the world that we Americans, the heirs of the noblest revolutionary vision ever bequeathed by one people to the rest of humanity, the very people who gave to the world and to all future time the soul-stirring example of a national identity based on freedom and equality, have so degenerated in our self-confidence that we are afraid to face the rest of the world without cowering behind walls.
Is the planned Rio Grande Valley wall a true reflection of the United States of America of Patrick Henry who proclaimed to the British king and the world, "Give me liberty or give me death"? Is it a true reflection of the America of Thomas Jefferson who wrote that all are "endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? Or of the America of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who told us, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; or of John Fitzgerald Kennedy who told us, "a rising tide lifts all boats"?
To my Republican friends who loved Ronald Wilson Reagan, does the border wall fit the vision of the President Reagan who told Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall"?
Will the construction of a Rio Grande border wall be a true reflection of the indomitable Texas spirit exemplified by Lyndon Baines Johnson, who insisted to us and our fellow Americans that we are capable of constructing a Great Society where hunger, poverty, and racism are vanquished forever?
The idea of building a border wall, I respectfully submit, flies in the face of everything dear about the values of the America and the Texas we learned about as children. The prospect of a border wall should wrench our guts.
The typical immigrants who risk life and limb to enter our country without legal authorization do so in the search for a better future for themselves and their posterity. They come in flight from blighted economies that offer them bleak futures. They do so because they know we Americans and Texans, despite our flaws and despite our being stuck with neo-con government leaders who are hostile to humanity, remain at the grassroots level a great, generous and compassionate people who are instinctively hospitable to strangers in need.
This great country of ours knows how to help impoverished neighbors in the world community build themselves out of despair into prosperity. We did it for nations and peoples all over the world after World War II, both for former enemies as well as for allies.
We can do it again. We are spending over a billion dollars a month in the neo-cons' illegal occupation of Iraq, an occupation that makes some of our very finest young Americans nothing other than bulls-eye targets for the multiple opposing factions of a multiple civil war. It is time not only to withdraw from the Iraqi invasion and occupation that never should have happened, but also to propose and negotiate a mutually agreeable but massive economic aid plan, a new Marshall Plan, for our neighbors to the south.
It is the only way to stabilize the relationship between our economy and the economy of Mexico, and stabilizing that economic relationship is the only way to find a win-win solution. As the more enlightened leaders of our nation's history have always shown us, having a prosperous world around us, where human beings live in hope instead of desperation, is always the best route to national security.
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