Bring a gun.
(Preferably, one that is loaded.)
Find the rabbit!
21 hours ago
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Throwing the Dice on Guns
D.C. v. Heller is being argued today in front of the John Roberts and the Supremes.
Let me just say, now, that the arguments being advanced in support of the District's position are basically inane. Nobody, from the dawn of civilization in Sumer, has ever disputed a government's right to maintain armed groups of men. Whether you call it a "militia" or an "army," that is a prerogative of the State.
The reason for the Second Amendment is the same reason underpinning the First Amendment: They give the populace the right to to be heard. When read together, the two Amendments can be read like this:
"We, the People, have the right to free speech, the right to assemble in peace and the right to come talk to you guys about what concerns us. Should you refuse to let us speak or refuse to listen to us, we have the ability to compel you to do so by force of arms."
Free speech is anathema to tyrants (if that is a concept that is news to you, your education was woefully lacking). Tyrants seek to crack down on free speech, from things such as the Great Firewall of China, imprisoning dissidents and book-bannings to less drastic actions such as the "Free Speech Zones" and carefully screened "Forums of Sycophants" used by Our Preznit. Without the Second Amendment, the right of free speech protected by the First Amendment survives only so long as a president lacks the stomach to brutally crack down on the people.
Free people, citizens, own weapons. Subjects, people whose relative freedoms flow from the will of the sovereign, do not. The argument today will have a major bearing on whether we remain citizens or whether we become subjects.
UPDATE: Pay no attention to reports of what questions the justices asked or how they "appeared" to be leaning. Those news stories are little more than a legal version of Kremlinology. The only thing that counts is the wording of the majority opinion and, to a lesser degree how many justices signed onto it and what it says in the concurrences and the dissents.
Let me just say, now, that the arguments being advanced in support of the District's position are basically inane. Nobody, from the dawn of civilization in Sumer, has ever disputed a government's right to maintain armed groups of men. Whether you call it a "militia" or an "army," that is a prerogative of the State.
The reason for the Second Amendment is the same reason underpinning the First Amendment: They give the populace the right to to be heard. When read together, the two Amendments can be read like this:
"We, the People, have the right to free speech, the right to assemble in peace and the right to come talk to you guys about what concerns us. Should you refuse to let us speak or refuse to listen to us, we have the ability to compel you to do so by force of arms."
Free speech is anathema to tyrants (if that is a concept that is news to you, your education was woefully lacking). Tyrants seek to crack down on free speech, from things such as the Great Firewall of China, imprisoning dissidents and book-bannings to less drastic actions such as the "Free Speech Zones" and carefully screened "Forums of Sycophants" used by Our Preznit. Without the Second Amendment, the right of free speech protected by the First Amendment survives only so long as a president lacks the stomach to brutally crack down on the people.
Free people, citizens, own weapons. Subjects, people whose relative freedoms flow from the will of the sovereign, do not. The argument today will have a major bearing on whether we remain citizens or whether we become subjects.
UPDATE: Pay no attention to reports of what questions the justices asked or how they "appeared" to be leaning. Those news stories are little more than a legal version of Kremlinology. The only thing that counts is the wording of the majority opinion and, to a lesser degree how many justices signed onto it and what it says in the concurrences and the dissents.
We Are So Screwed; Economics Edition, Part II
Here's an analysis of why things are not going to get better anytime soon.
I cannot tell you how much I hope this guy is wrong. I suspect that, if you have children younger than 20 or so, and/or if you have children in the next decade or so, when they grow up, they are going to regard your generation and your parents' generation not as the "greatest generation", but as a massive collection of chowderheads.
There are two major sets of villains here. The first villain is the banks, which designed a system that was guaranteed to fall apart. Reckless practices by the banks brought on the last massive economic meltdown eight decades ago, so here we go again.
Second villain is the Bush Administration and their butt-monkeys in the GOP. Together, they crippled the bankruptcy laws that would give consumers a chance to start over. And Bush has destroyed, between his reckless tax cuts and his even more reckless invasion of Iraq, any ability of the Federal government to do more than hand out band-aids.
Giving people a $600 check to jumpstart the economy is like like trying to jumpstart a Mack truck with a couple AA batteries. If your home has lost so much value that you now owe more on it than you could hope to realize on a sale, $600 might be enough to rent a U-Haul truck to move your stuff out (but maybe not).
We have a president who is completely disengaged from reality and, at a time when we need a leader who is intelligent and engaged in working to solve the nation's problems, we find ourselves with Happy the Incompetent Clown sitting in the Oval Office.
I cannot tell you how much I hope this guy is wrong. I suspect that, if you have children younger than 20 or so, and/or if you have children in the next decade or so, when they grow up, they are going to regard your generation and your parents' generation not as the "greatest generation", but as a massive collection of chowderheads.
There are two major sets of villains here. The first villain is the banks, which designed a system that was guaranteed to fall apart. Reckless practices by the banks brought on the last massive economic meltdown eight decades ago, so here we go again.
Second villain is the Bush Administration and their butt-monkeys in the GOP. Together, they crippled the bankruptcy laws that would give consumers a chance to start over. And Bush has destroyed, between his reckless tax cuts and his even more reckless invasion of Iraq, any ability of the Federal government to do more than hand out band-aids.
Giving people a $600 check to jumpstart the economy is like like trying to jumpstart a Mack truck with a couple AA batteries. If your home has lost so much value that you now owe more on it than you could hope to realize on a sale, $600 might be enough to rent a U-Haul truck to move your stuff out (but maybe not).
We have a president who is completely disengaged from reality and, at a time when we need a leader who is intelligent and engaged in working to solve the nation's problems, we find ourselves with Happy the Incompetent Clown sitting in the Oval Office.
Monday, March 17, 2008
George W. Bush, Proprietor
Since 2001:
(H/T to Political Cat via Alternate Brain)
Here is the scary thing, which Political Cat picked up on: Foreigners (banks, investment houses, governments) had routinely been purchasing a quarter of the Treasury bonds offered for sale. The last Treasury action saw the percentage of foreign purchasers drop to less than 6%, a falloff of 75%. In short, the foreigners are losing their stomach to finance the spendthrift policies of the Bush Administration. The problem is that as the U.S. economy melts down, in part due to the ministrations ofHerbert Hoover George Bush, our economic disaster will spread like a pandemic around the globe.
If foreigners are unwilling to finance U.S. debt, then the the ability of the Federal Reserve to do anything now may be crippled. The Federal Reserve cannot reassure the global financial markets if those markets have lost faith in the Dollar as a currency. If the markets continue to lose confidence, then a global economic meltdown is not far away.
This is the part where, in a just world, you would see George W. Bush and Alan Greenspan being frog-marched out to the Washington Mall to be publicly executed on the lawn in front of the Capitol, watched live by a world-wide television audience. It was more Alan Greenspan who gutted banking regulations under an ideologically driven belief, which he apparently took from the writings of Ayn Rand, that given total freedom, the market would ensure that bad things never happened. It was George W. Bush's administration that removed banks from control of state regulators and placed them under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an agency whose main job was the approval of the location of banking branches.
Greenspan has shown himself not to be the "Sage of Wall Street", but an ideologically driven fool. The current melting down of the financial institutions as a result of the reckless lending of banks who were free from effective regulation could have been foreseen by any economist who looked at what happened when other regulated industries were deregulated (can you spell "Enron").
By way of an analogy, this is what happened:
During the winter of 1943-44, the US Army was faced with having to fight in severe winter conditions in the mountains of Italy. The Army sent over a sufficient supply of warm winter coats and boots to equip the soldiers fighting on the front lines. The problem was that as this huge supply of warm clothing made its way to the front, the REMFs (I think they called them "Pogues" in that war) helped themselves to what seemed to be an endless supply of warm gear. None of the rear-echelon soldiers thought they were doing anything wrong and certainly they didn't realize that there was not enough gear to go around. But the end result was that a lot of GIs in the mountains spent a miserable freezing winter wearing outdated winter uniforms while the REMFs were toasty warm.
Certainly none of the people at the subprime lenders or those who "securitzed" those loans into mislabled triple-A rated securities thought they were doing anything wrong. They saw a way to make a lot of money from a housing market they thought was going to go up forever and they jumped at the opportunity.
But if history has proven anything, it has shown that there is another word for complete deregulation, and that word is "anarchy." We do not "deregulate" the flow of traffic on the highways (imagine removing every traffic light from a city and letting the traffic flow sort itself out). Anarchy in food and medicine production was the reason why the FDA was created a century ago. Recently we have seen how well reducing regulation of slaughterhouses has worked out, which is why massive recalls of beef are becoming more and more common. We do not trust the stores to have fair scales or the service stations to fairly meter out gasoline, which is why there are government officials whose job it is to check those things.
Like it or not, there is a place for government in ensuring that that there is a level of fairness and disciple and that good practices are followed. The Ayn-Rand level of free-marketeers are as misguided and ideologically blinded as were the classical Marxists. Both schools of thought should be consigned to the dustbins of history.
(H/T to Political Cat via Alternate Brain)
Here is the scary thing, which Political Cat picked up on: Foreigners (banks, investment houses, governments) had routinely been purchasing a quarter of the Treasury bonds offered for sale. The last Treasury action saw the percentage of foreign purchasers drop to less than 6%, a falloff of 75%. In short, the foreigners are losing their stomach to finance the spendthrift policies of the Bush Administration. The problem is that as the U.S. economy melts down, in part due to the ministrations of
If foreigners are unwilling to finance U.S. debt, then the the ability of the Federal Reserve to do anything now may be crippled. The Federal Reserve cannot reassure the global financial markets if those markets have lost faith in the Dollar as a currency. If the markets continue to lose confidence, then a global economic meltdown is not far away.
This is the part where, in a just world, you would see George W. Bush and Alan Greenspan being frog-marched out to the Washington Mall to be publicly executed on the lawn in front of the Capitol, watched live by a world-wide television audience. It was more Alan Greenspan who gutted banking regulations under an ideologically driven belief, which he apparently took from the writings of Ayn Rand, that given total freedom, the market would ensure that bad things never happened. It was George W. Bush's administration that removed banks from control of state regulators and placed them under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an agency whose main job was the approval of the location of banking branches.
Greenspan has shown himself not to be the "Sage of Wall Street", but an ideologically driven fool. The current melting down of the financial institutions as a result of the reckless lending of banks who were free from effective regulation could have been foreseen by any economist who looked at what happened when other regulated industries were deregulated (can you spell "Enron").
By way of an analogy, this is what happened:
During the winter of 1943-44, the US Army was faced with having to fight in severe winter conditions in the mountains of Italy. The Army sent over a sufficient supply of warm winter coats and boots to equip the soldiers fighting on the front lines. The problem was that as this huge supply of warm clothing made its way to the front, the REMFs (I think they called them "Pogues" in that war) helped themselves to what seemed to be an endless supply of warm gear. None of the rear-echelon soldiers thought they were doing anything wrong and certainly they didn't realize that there was not enough gear to go around. But the end result was that a lot of GIs in the mountains spent a miserable freezing winter wearing outdated winter uniforms while the REMFs were toasty warm.
Certainly none of the people at the subprime lenders or those who "securitzed" those loans into mislabled triple-A rated securities thought they were doing anything wrong. They saw a way to make a lot of money from a housing market they thought was going to go up forever and they jumped at the opportunity.
But if history has proven anything, it has shown that there is another word for complete deregulation, and that word is "anarchy." We do not "deregulate" the flow of traffic on the highways (imagine removing every traffic light from a city and letting the traffic flow sort itself out). Anarchy in food and medicine production was the reason why the FDA was created a century ago. Recently we have seen how well reducing regulation of slaughterhouses has worked out, which is why massive recalls of beef are becoming more and more common. We do not trust the stores to have fair scales or the service stations to fairly meter out gasoline, which is why there are government officials whose job it is to check those things.
Like it or not, there is a place for government in ensuring that that there is a level of fairness and disciple and that good practices are followed. The Ayn-Rand level of free-marketeers are as misguided and ideologically blinded as were the classical Marxists. Both schools of thought should be consigned to the dustbins of history.
We Are So Screwed; Economics Edition
"The president commended the Federal Reserve for its urgent actions over the weekend. He praised Paulson for working with the Fed and showing `the country and the world that the United States is on top of the situation.' "
Ayup. Like they were when it came to managing the occupation of Iraq. Like they were when it came time to secure Afghanistan. Like they were when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast. Like they have been on oil prices or climate change.
Bush will completely fuck this up, because he only has two tools in his intellectual tool-kit: Killing people and cutting taxes for the wealthy. He has shown a complete lack of interest in any issue or problem that cannot be addressed by either of those two methods.
We are so screwed.
Ayup. Like they were when it came to managing the occupation of Iraq. Like they were when it came time to secure Afghanistan. Like they were when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast. Like they have been on oil prices or climate change.
Bush will completely fuck this up, because he only has two tools in his intellectual tool-kit: Killing people and cutting taxes for the wealthy. He has shown a complete lack of interest in any issue or problem that cannot be addressed by either of those two methods.
We are so screwed.
Our Half Socialist Country
The Republicans have brought us half-socialism. What they have done is they let their rich friends and campaign donors take the profits. But when their companies fail or get into trouble, they stick us with the costs.
Well, enough with that noise. The Golden Rule of Economics still applies here: If we are going to have to pay for something, then we get to have a seat at the table. If we, the American taxpayers, have to bail out these financial imbeciles and their massive Ponzi scheme, all based on worthless securities, then we get to regulate them. Letting these greedy fucks regulate themselves under a delusional idea that the "market will set things right" has not worked. It has proven to make as much sense as letting a bunch of teenagers have an unsupervised party with the liquor sitting out in plain view.
And we had better get some people into Washington who understand that. We cannot walk away from this current financial crisis with the naive belief that the bankers and brokers and investment people will always do the right thing, for this crisis has shown that in many cases, they were little more than bunko artists in $2,000 suits. They lined their own pockets and bought apartments that cost many millions of dollars. Yet, you can see the wreckage they are leaving behind, from the collapse in the housing market to the cratering of state budgets across the country.
While it might even be nice to take the tumbrels into Manhattan and set up a guillotine at Battery Park, what we really need is meaningful regulation of this industry of greedy fucks.
Well, enough with that noise. The Golden Rule of Economics still applies here: If we are going to have to pay for something, then we get to have a seat at the table. If we, the American taxpayers, have to bail out these financial imbeciles and their massive Ponzi scheme, all based on worthless securities, then we get to regulate them. Letting these greedy fucks regulate themselves under a delusional idea that the "market will set things right" has not worked. It has proven to make as much sense as letting a bunch of teenagers have an unsupervised party with the liquor sitting out in plain view.
And we had better get some people into Washington who understand that. We cannot walk away from this current financial crisis with the naive belief that the bankers and brokers and investment people will always do the right thing, for this crisis has shown that in many cases, they were little more than bunko artists in $2,000 suits. They lined their own pockets and bought apartments that cost many millions of dollars. Yet, you can see the wreckage they are leaving behind, from the collapse in the housing market to the cratering of state budgets across the country.
While it might even be nice to take the tumbrels into Manhattan and set up a guillotine at Battery Park, what we really need is meaningful regulation of this industry of greedy fucks.
Oh, and to My Catholic Friends:
Happy Holy Week.
(My grandmother and her siblings are spinning in their graves as I write that, but times change.)
(My grandmother and her siblings are spinning in their graves as I write that, but times change.)
Idiots in Control
In today's NY Times, Paul Krugman explains how much of the responsibility for the current financial mess can be laid at the feet of Alan Greenspan, who still believes that his policy of letting the financial institutions regulate themselves was correct.
Krugman touched on one point, which is the real tiger in the room: The bailing out of the financial institutions is going to cost a lot of money, possibly as much as the Iraq War. Bear Stears was trading at $30 per share on Friday, yet JP Morgan bought them out over the weekend for $2 per share. So either Bear Stearns lost 93% of its value in just over a day or we, the taxpayers, are footing much of the bill.
Maybe three trillion dollars, possibly more, to bail out the financial institutions. Three trillion dollars for the Iraq War. And yet, Bush thinks that cutting taxes for the rich and giving tax breaks to companies like Exxon/Mobil, which has booked profits of ten billion a quarter for the last two years are good ideas.
You can forget the following things taking place in the next decade or more:
The Federal government helping to pay for renovating bridges and highways, which is why you will seen a widespread return of toll roads.
Federal involvement in education. There will be no money for Federal programs, so states will start telling the Department of Education to bugger off. Higher education will slowly drift back to what it was before the Second World War- a perk for the rich.
A permanent base on the Moon.
Americans going to Mars.
Any meaningful fix of Social Security.
In this country, unless you are wealthy, life is going to get harder, as wages remain flat yet the costs of fuel and food are skyrocketing. If you are on the bottom third of the economic ladder, your life is going to become much harder, grindingly so. There will be no real social safety net.
So if your life gets real sucky over the next several years, if you watch the value of the one large asset you have (your home) evaporate, and if it finally hits you that your children and grandchildren are going to be faced with much rougher lives than you and your parents had, and if you want to gaze on the faces of the two criminally negligent men who made this all happen, here you go:
Krugman touched on one point, which is the real tiger in the room: The bailing out of the financial institutions is going to cost a lot of money, possibly as much as the Iraq War. Bear Stears was trading at $30 per share on Friday, yet JP Morgan bought them out over the weekend for $2 per share. So either Bear Stearns lost 93% of its value in just over a day or we, the taxpayers, are footing much of the bill.
Maybe three trillion dollars, possibly more, to bail out the financial institutions. Three trillion dollars for the Iraq War. And yet, Bush thinks that cutting taxes for the rich and giving tax breaks to companies like Exxon/Mobil, which has booked profits of ten billion a quarter for the last two years are good ideas.
You can forget the following things taking place in the next decade or more:
The Federal government helping to pay for renovating bridges and highways, which is why you will seen a widespread return of toll roads.
Federal involvement in education. There will be no money for Federal programs, so states will start telling the Department of Education to bugger off. Higher education will slowly drift back to what it was before the Second World War- a perk for the rich.
A permanent base on the Moon.
Americans going to Mars.
Any meaningful fix of Social Security.
In this country, unless you are wealthy, life is going to get harder, as wages remain flat yet the costs of fuel and food are skyrocketing. If you are on the bottom third of the economic ladder, your life is going to become much harder, grindingly so. There will be no real social safety net.
So if your life gets real sucky over the next several years, if you watch the value of the one large asset you have (your home) evaporate, and if it finally hits you that your children and grandchildren are going to be faced with much rougher lives than you and your parents had, and if you want to gaze on the faces of the two criminally negligent men who made this all happen, here you go:
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Lightly Tripping Down the Road to Fascism
At the end of February, Bush eviscerated the Intelligence Oversight Board. (H/T to C&L)
This is all a part of the Bush objective to strip away all rights of privacy from Americans. One of the things that the IOB was supposed to look for was that the foreign intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and DIA, weren't spying on Americans. Bush, of course, can't have anybody other than his version of Harvey the Rabbit overseeing him.
When I was a child, unless, of course, you were a homosexual, a hippie or a minority, the cops were pretty much a benign group. They drove around in squad cars and they were armed with six-shot .38 revolvers, loaded with round-nose lead ammunition. A lot of cops shot their revolvers at the Police Academy when they went there and then went for the duration of their careers without firing another shot. I'll bet that some of them never took the guns out of their holsters.
It was also a fairly widely-held view that the bust-down-the door, middle-of-the-night police raids and arrests were the hallmark of a totalitarian state. That's what the Gestapo and the KGB did, not Americans. True, the cops used to torture confessions out of suspects, but that had largely died out. (Not completely, though.)
Then came the Vietnam War, with the police and the military infiltrating opposition groups, a tactic that was repeated recently when the Defense Department sought to combat the terroristic threat posed by the Quakers. The Vietnam War brought about police riots and mass arrests carried out at behest of a future Supreme Court Chief Justice (using legal arguments put forth by the British when they were trying to suppress the American Revolution.)
Then came the War on Drugs, with no-knock warrants. The cops became hooked on the drug war, as they began stealing people's property through aggressive forfeiture laws. If the cops today find you with what they consider to be too much cash, they will "confiscate" it from you and you have to prove that it was legally your money. (Yes, that's right, the burden of proof is on you.)
Along with the War on Drugs came the militarization of the police. While never a bunch of long-hairs, many police departments now expect that their uniformed officers have haircuts that would make a Marine DI happy. Police firepower has grown. The police have formed SWAT teams or ESU teams and they use them for routine arrests. (Or they use the SWAT team to take a child at gunpoint to the hospital because the paramedics think the kid should go and the parents do not.)
What drove this home to me were a couple of incidents. One was in Ohio, where an inmate in one of the state prisons wrote to his girlfriend about the proper care of the marijuana plants that she was tending for him. The fact that one woman (who, if I remember correctly, was in her40s) had some pot plants in her basement brought out the full SWAT team to execute a search warrant. As a result, there was a great photograph in the newspaper of a rather chubby cop, in SWAT black and wearing a SS helmet, carefully carrying a potted marijuana plant out of the house.
The second was during the search for the DC Sniper. The cops in Maryland were running a series of roadblocks; some of the cops at the roadblocks were wearing jeans, t-shirts, balaclavas over their heads and carrying assault rifles. If it were not for the badges hung around their necks, in a style reminiscent of the Feldgendarmerie, they looked like well-dressed terrorists.
The police don't seem to care very much that for at least some people, when they run around in all-black uniforms, wearing helmets that look like German Army surplus, they look like Nazi storm troopers. They should care. Whether they like it or not, this is still nominally a free nation and the police need the support of the people in order to be able to function in anything other than "occupying army" mode. When the police are perceived to be acting as occupiers, they are treated as such and nobody wants to be viewed as a Quisling.
We also have a situation where freedom of ideas and freedom of thought is being suppressed. Congress outlawed the sale of adult pornography on military bases in 1995, a bill that was championed by the Right as "protecting the morals of our soldiers" or some such nonsense like that. After all, God forbid that a young soldier get to read through a skin magazine like Penthouse or Hustler after having been on patrol, shot some people and helped pick up the guts of a couple of his buddies who were blown to doll rags by an IED, the poor kid might have his morals corrupted. The outlawing of adult pornography is an outcome that is cheered by the same God-fearing folks on the Right who worry more about the morals of the soldiers than their being properly equipped (a trait that goes back at least as far as World War I) and of some on the Left who regard pornography as being offensive to women.
And yes, this is all a piece of the movement by the goons on the Parents Television Council to make sure that nothing, absolutely nothing, is broadcast that would not have been out of character with the 1950s, when babies sort of arrived on TV by parthenogenesis. It's the mindset that you, as adult Americans, are too feeble-minded to exercise any control over what you may read or what you may watch. You are considered to be too lazy or too stupid to exercise any control over your children. Some of the best things ever aired on television cannot now be aired because of the thugs on the PTC and their enthrallment of the FCC. They could not now air the 1970s miniseries "Holocaust," which had a scene showing naked corpses being removed from a gas chamber and dumped into burial pits. They cannot re-air "Saving Private Ryan," one of the better war movies ever made, and which was shown on network TV before the PTC's goons took over the FCC. They could not re-air the documentary "9/11," which aired on CBS in 2002 with limited commercial interruption.
On the Right, you have prohibitions against drugs and, still in some jurisdictions, prohibition on the sale of alcohol, all under the guise of "protecting the morals" of people. On the Left, you have the attempts to greatly restrict, if not outlaw, the private possession of firearms. The Right is particularly incensed at times with what books may be available through the public libraries or are sold in bookstores. "Heather Has Two Mommies" and the "Harry Potter" series" were examples of that (note the one imbecile who claimed that reading about Harry Potter would mean more school shootings). Bipartisan support exists for the Thought Crime Act of 2007, which can be read to outlaw political protest.
All of this is a form of creeping fascism. When you use the power of the State to make sure that others conform to behavior you approve of, you grant to the State the power to stop you from doing things you may want to do. When you give the State the power to use extraordinary force in some situations, then you will find that, because they invested so much money and training in their shiny new toys, they will use them. And that is how you get grandmothers killed when the police throw a hand grenade into her home. That's how you get great-grandmothers shot over 30 times when the police raid the wrong home on a no-knock raid (and then plant drugs to try and cover up their mistake). And that is how you get an unarmed man shot to pieces, including through the soles of his feet.
We need to get back to a few concepts if we are ever going to have a hope of continuing to live in a free society:
1) Just because someone else does something that you don't approve of, you should not have the power to outlaw it. If their conduct does not directly harm you, keep your nose out of their lives. If they want to sit in their homes and do drugs or collect guns or read adult port or gay porn or Karl Marx or Ann Coulter, that's their business. It is none of yours.
2) Any government confiscation of anyone's property on the charge of being an "instrumentality of a suspected crime" must be held to the same burden of proof that is used for a criminal conviction. If you want to run around with $50,000 in a briefcase, it should be up to the government to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you had nefarious reasons for doing so. If you cannot convict the person, you cannot convict the property.
3) Your right to control your own life doesn't mean that you have the right to control everyone else's. Your television set, for example, comes with a channel-changer and on/off buttons. Learn how to use them.
4) The government cannot spy on Americans. Not without a warrant. And if they do have a warrant, there must be independent oversight. Nobody can be trusted with that level of power without independent supervision. Ever. No exceptions, no excuses. National Security Letters, which give the FBI and other agencies the ability to paw through your records without a warrant, should be outlawed.
I apologize if this seems rambling and disjuncted, but I am writing tonight more from my heart. I am sorry if this does not read like a polished article, for it is not meant to be that. I feel that if we are going to stop fascism from taking over this country, whether from the Right or the Left, we must get away from the idea that we can make people "better". As Malcolm Reynolds said, I do not hold to that. And yes, there may come a time when we have to misbehave. It will be far easier to keep our freedom (at least what is left of it), than it will be to take it back after it has been taken away.
This is all a part of the Bush objective to strip away all rights of privacy from Americans. One of the things that the IOB was supposed to look for was that the foreign intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and DIA, weren't spying on Americans. Bush, of course, can't have anybody other than his version of Harvey the Rabbit overseeing him.
When I was a child, unless, of course, you were a homosexual, a hippie or a minority, the cops were pretty much a benign group. They drove around in squad cars and they were armed with six-shot .38 revolvers, loaded with round-nose lead ammunition. A lot of cops shot their revolvers at the Police Academy when they went there and then went for the duration of their careers without firing another shot. I'll bet that some of them never took the guns out of their holsters.
It was also a fairly widely-held view that the bust-down-the door, middle-of-the-night police raids and arrests were the hallmark of a totalitarian state. That's what the Gestapo and the KGB did, not Americans. True, the cops used to torture confessions out of suspects, but that had largely died out. (Not completely, though.)
Then came the Vietnam War, with the police and the military infiltrating opposition groups, a tactic that was repeated recently when the Defense Department sought to combat the terroristic threat posed by the Quakers. The Vietnam War brought about police riots and mass arrests carried out at behest of a future Supreme Court Chief Justice (using legal arguments put forth by the British when they were trying to suppress the American Revolution.)
Then came the War on Drugs, with no-knock warrants. The cops became hooked on the drug war, as they began stealing people's property through aggressive forfeiture laws. If the cops today find you with what they consider to be too much cash, they will "confiscate" it from you and you have to prove that it was legally your money. (Yes, that's right, the burden of proof is on you.)
Along with the War on Drugs came the militarization of the police. While never a bunch of long-hairs, many police departments now expect that their uniformed officers have haircuts that would make a Marine DI happy. Police firepower has grown. The police have formed SWAT teams or ESU teams and they use them for routine arrests. (Or they use the SWAT team to take a child at gunpoint to the hospital because the paramedics think the kid should go and the parents do not.)
What drove this home to me were a couple of incidents. One was in Ohio, where an inmate in one of the state prisons wrote to his girlfriend about the proper care of the marijuana plants that she was tending for him. The fact that one woman (who, if I remember correctly, was in her40s) had some pot plants in her basement brought out the full SWAT team to execute a search warrant. As a result, there was a great photograph in the newspaper of a rather chubby cop, in SWAT black and wearing a SS helmet, carefully carrying a potted marijuana plant out of the house.
The second was during the search for the DC Sniper. The cops in Maryland were running a series of roadblocks; some of the cops at the roadblocks were wearing jeans, t-shirts, balaclavas over their heads and carrying assault rifles. If it were not for the badges hung around their necks, in a style reminiscent of the Feldgendarmerie, they looked like well-dressed terrorists.
The police don't seem to care very much that for at least some people, when they run around in all-black uniforms, wearing helmets that look like German Army surplus, they look like Nazi storm troopers. They should care. Whether they like it or not, this is still nominally a free nation and the police need the support of the people in order to be able to function in anything other than "occupying army" mode. When the police are perceived to be acting as occupiers, they are treated as such and nobody wants to be viewed as a Quisling.
We also have a situation where freedom of ideas and freedom of thought is being suppressed. Congress outlawed the sale of adult pornography on military bases in 1995, a bill that was championed by the Right as "protecting the morals of our soldiers" or some such nonsense like that. After all, God forbid that a young soldier get to read through a skin magazine like Penthouse or Hustler after having been on patrol, shot some people and helped pick up the guts of a couple of his buddies who were blown to doll rags by an IED, the poor kid might have his morals corrupted. The outlawing of adult pornography is an outcome that is cheered by the same God-fearing folks on the Right who worry more about the morals of the soldiers than their being properly equipped (a trait that goes back at least as far as World War I) and of some on the Left who regard pornography as being offensive to women.
And yes, this is all a piece of the movement by the goons on the Parents Television Council to make sure that nothing, absolutely nothing, is broadcast that would not have been out of character with the 1950s, when babies sort of arrived on TV by parthenogenesis. It's the mindset that you, as adult Americans, are too feeble-minded to exercise any control over what you may read or what you may watch. You are considered to be too lazy or too stupid to exercise any control over your children. Some of the best things ever aired on television cannot now be aired because of the thugs on the PTC and their enthrallment of the FCC. They could not now air the 1970s miniseries "Holocaust," which had a scene showing naked corpses being removed from a gas chamber and dumped into burial pits. They cannot re-air "Saving Private Ryan," one of the better war movies ever made, and which was shown on network TV before the PTC's goons took over the FCC. They could not re-air the documentary "9/11," which aired on CBS in 2002 with limited commercial interruption.
On the Right, you have prohibitions against drugs and, still in some jurisdictions, prohibition on the sale of alcohol, all under the guise of "protecting the morals" of people. On the Left, you have the attempts to greatly restrict, if not outlaw, the private possession of firearms. The Right is particularly incensed at times with what books may be available through the public libraries or are sold in bookstores. "Heather Has Two Mommies" and the "Harry Potter" series" were examples of that (note the one imbecile who claimed that reading about Harry Potter would mean more school shootings). Bipartisan support exists for the Thought Crime Act of 2007, which can be read to outlaw political protest.
All of this is a form of creeping fascism. When you use the power of the State to make sure that others conform to behavior you approve of, you grant to the State the power to stop you from doing things you may want to do. When you give the State the power to use extraordinary force in some situations, then you will find that, because they invested so much money and training in their shiny new toys, they will use them. And that is how you get grandmothers killed when the police throw a hand grenade into her home. That's how you get great-grandmothers shot over 30 times when the police raid the wrong home on a no-knock raid (and then plant drugs to try and cover up their mistake). And that is how you get an unarmed man shot to pieces, including through the soles of his feet.
We need to get back to a few concepts if we are ever going to have a hope of continuing to live in a free society:
1) Just because someone else does something that you don't approve of, you should not have the power to outlaw it. If their conduct does not directly harm you, keep your nose out of their lives. If they want to sit in their homes and do drugs or collect guns or read adult port or gay porn or Karl Marx or Ann Coulter, that's their business. It is none of yours.
2) Any government confiscation of anyone's property on the charge of being an "instrumentality of a suspected crime" must be held to the same burden of proof that is used for a criminal conviction. If you want to run around with $50,000 in a briefcase, it should be up to the government to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you had nefarious reasons for doing so. If you cannot convict the person, you cannot convict the property.
3) Your right to control your own life doesn't mean that you have the right to control everyone else's. Your television set, for example, comes with a channel-changer and on/off buttons. Learn how to use them.
4) The government cannot spy on Americans. Not without a warrant. And if they do have a warrant, there must be independent oversight. Nobody can be trusted with that level of power without independent supervision. Ever. No exceptions, no excuses. National Security Letters, which give the FBI and other agencies the ability to paw through your records without a warrant, should be outlawed.
I apologize if this seems rambling and disjuncted, but I am writing tonight more from my heart. I am sorry if this does not read like a polished article, for it is not meant to be that. I feel that if we are going to stop fascism from taking over this country, whether from the Right or the Left, we must get away from the idea that we can make people "better". As Malcolm Reynolds said, I do not hold to that. And yes, there may come a time when we have to misbehave. It will be far easier to keep our freedom (at least what is left of it), than it will be to take it back after it has been taken away.
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