Tag: Law

Unaccountable Rice: More of Obama’s “Looking Forward” and Stewart’s Sycophancy

October 19, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In 2003, acting as W. Bush’s “National Security Advisor”, Condoleeza Rice was one of the most vocal and mendacious fear mongers pushing for the “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq:

We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon…. we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

Around the same time, Rice also chaired the White House meetings in which “combined interrogation techniques”, i.e. torture, were approved:

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”

Thus did Rice help to unleash a shameful decade of war and torture. At least  a hundred thousand people, perhaps as many as a million and a half, died as a result of the war that she enabled, not to mention the untold numbers of wounded and displaced; Torture is now as American as apple pie, to the enduring shame of us all.

But that doesn’t stop President “Look Forward, Not Backward” from inviting the war criminal to advise him.

And it doesn’t stop corporate shill and professional “moderate” sycophant John Stewart from playing patty-cake with her on the Daily Show, helping the should-be-disgraced Rice reinvent herself and promote her new autobiography.

See also here.

“Personhood” and the 14th Amendment

March 4, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Welcome to the relaunch of The World’s Got Problems. We have been dark for a few weeks but of course the darkness of the world’s problems continues unabated.  So in this inaugural post of the relaunch, I will take a step back and look at certain recent developments as they relate to what I find to be an underlying problem – the dominant political culture’s selective and variable application of the 14th Amendment and the concept of “personhood”.
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Three Fifths of a Person

The United States, at its best, is a political order based on Enlightenment principles of human rights and liberty. But compromises were made at the very beginning, most notoriously by writing slavery into the Constitution. In Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 a distinction is made between “free Persons” and “other Persons”:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

The “other persons” were of course the population of black slaves, not so distant ancestors of the current President’s wife and children, who counted as 3/5ths of a “free Person” for the sake of determining appropriate levels of taxation and representation in the House.

After the Civil War, this “3/5th Compromise” was rendered moot by the 13th Amendment’s abolition of chattel slavery, while the 14th Amendment superseded Acricle 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution and guaranteed “due process” and “equal protection” to every “person”.

Corporate Personhood

What is good enough for a freed slave is good enough for a corporation, apparently – within only a couple of decades, “equal protection” began to be applied to non-human “legal persons”.  In 1886, before hearing arguments for Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, Chief Justice Morrison Waite asserted from the bench:

“The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th Amendment…applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

Although this “obiter dictum” was not officially part of the Court’s decision, court reporter (and former railway president) Bancroft Davis included it in his summary – and it has served as faux precedent ever since.  From Mother Jones:

After Santa Clara, federal judges began granting more and more rights to nonliving “persons.” In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that the Pennsylvania Coal Co. was entitled to “just compensation” under the Fifth Amendment because a state law, designed to keep houses from collapsing as mining companies tunneled under them, limited how much coal it could extract. In 1967 and 1978, businesses prevailed in Supreme Court cases citing the search-and-seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment as protection against fire and workplace safety inspections.

Corporate lawyers have also taken a shine to the First Amendment. In 1978, the Supreme Court agreed with corporations claiming that the state could not limit their political spending in an antitax campaign. Almost two decades later, a federal appellate court struck down a Vermont law requiring that milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone be so labeled. Dairy producers had a First Amendment right “not to speak,” the court said. In California, Nike invoked the First Amendment to fight a lawsuit arguing that the company’s public relations materials misrepresented sweatshop labor conditions.

Most recently, the Retail Industry Leaders Association has relied on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause to fight Maryland’s Wal-Mart law, designed to force the company to expand its spending on employee health care. The retail group has also sued Suffolk County, New York, which last fall passed a similar ordinance aimed at nonunionized supermarkets.

Which brings us to last month when the Supreme Court reasserted the application of legal “personhood” to corporations in their ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which overturns previous campaign finance law and grants corporations (and unions) the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence federal elections.

For Chris Hedges, this marks the final nail in the coffin of democracy. We are now living in a state of “Inverted Totalitarianism“. You can find some some more analysis at the SCOTUSblog. (BTW, the “corporation” icon in the image above is taken from the excellent documentary, The Corporation.)

“Detainees” are not persons.

But while the Supreme Court assumes that corporations are included withing the set of “persons”, actual human beings are still being excluded from the category.

The Obama Administration, for example, decided last month to follow the Bush policy of imprisoning detainees without charges, denying them what the 14th Amendment guarantees to all “persons” – not just citizens.  Glenn Greenwald has analysis of this decision here, where he criticizes the hypocrisy of democratic leaders and liberal pundits who were opposed to these measures under Bush – but defend them now that their guy is in charge. Also, he points out the sad irony of the timing of this decision:

“…today is the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s Executive Order to close Guantanamo within one year — an anniversary the administration decided to celebrate not by fulfilling its terms, but instead by announcing that the central feature of Guanatanamo — indefinite detention with no charges — will continue indefinitely.”

Keep in mind that these “detainees” are merely terrorism suspects – but many have endured torture and years of imprisonment.  Although torture and imprisonment without trial are clearly unconstitutional, those “people” who ordered and legally justified torture brag about their accomplishments, teach at universities and work on their books – without any fear of reprisal.

The US versus THEM mentality that rose from the ashes of 9-11 is still operational under Obama, though it has become more insidious because it appears in intelligent, bipartisan blackface – and therefore now a largely unquestioned feature of “liberal” as well as “conservative” world-views.

Also, it is the perfect mirror of Al-Qaeda’s theological justification for slaughter of civilians – an “American Takfiris”

Homosexuals are people – more or less, sooner or later.

After the 14th Amendment was adopted, there was a wave of marriages between former slaves. But many southern states maintained miscegenation laws which prohibited marriages between the races. It wasn’t until Loving v. Virginia in 1967 that these laws were declared unconstitutional – again by appealing to the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  According to that decision, marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man”.

And yet gay people continue to be denied this right to in all but five of the United States, and the Federal Government does not recognize gay marriage due to the so-called Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by President Clinton.

The two lawyers on the opposite sides of Bush v. Gore are teaming up to challenge California’s Proposition 8 in Federal Court. You can listen to these strange bedfellows argue the case for marriage equality in an interview with Bill Moyers here. (Moyers, always the seeker of truth, plays devils advocate.)

Also, Gay people still can’t serve openly in the military, also a lingering Clinton policy.  Things look like they are turning around here, however, now that the top defense officials are seeking the end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.

Impunity for Trigger Happy Mercenaries?

February 1, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Copenhagen, Epilogue

December 28, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

WGP_COP15_2As expected, COP15 failed to reach a legally binding agreement on climate change, and was marred by the barring of civil society groups from the proceedings, the police suppression of environmental activist groups.

The fault line of the talks fell between rich and poor countries – that is, between rich industrialized countries responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions and the poor and developing countries that stand to lose the most from climate change.

(Naomi Klein explicates the notion of “Climate Debt” here.)

Rich polluting countries disrupted the U.N. negotiations by means of a secret deal presided over by the host country. The end result was a non-binding “Accord”.

Click here to read reactions from some of the major environmental groups, and here to see how the non-binding accord doesn’t even come close to addressing the problem.

Despite the failure of the talks to reach a legally binding agreement, some see silver linings in the end of climate change denial, the chance to move beyond cap and trade schemes, and the explosion of activism with regard to climate justice.

Democracy Now! was reporting from within the COP15 convention center for the entire course of the talks, and you can check our their exclusive and extensive coverage here.

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INCOHERENT BULLSHIT

December 19, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

WGP_NobelWhile Nobel Peace prize recipients of the past have used their acceptance speeches to decry war in Afghanistan, Barack Obama attempted to justify it.

The speech has been praised for its “complexity” and for its “confronting the paradoxes” of a pro-war peace prize speech, but there are seven elements of the speech I found to be incoherent, self-contradictory, simple minded, hypocritical or plain dishonest.

1. WAR IS PEACE

The fundamental incoherence is the root claim that “instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.” This is false. While it may be true that instruments of war have a role in ACHIEVING peace – by replacing an oppressive order with a more just one, for example – it only does this through a SUSPENSION of peace. That is the force of the activist chant, “No Justice, No Peace!”

An exception can be made, perhaps, in the case of the Cold War. One could argue, for example, that atomic weapons “preserved” the peace through the threat of mutually assured destruction. But Cold War peace was war for the “Third World”, and the arms race has left us with a military-industrial-congressional complex that dictates a hawkish foreign policy which includes the bombing of villagers with remote control robots.

2. NON-VIOLENCE IS NAIVE; NON-VIOLENCE IS NOT NAIVE

But regardless of the efficacy of instruments of war in “preserving” the peace, it should be noted that its potential to achieve peace can also be doubted, as it clearly was by both halves of Obama’s guiding binary “North Star” – Martin Luther King and Gandhi. In a blatant self-contradiction, Obama says that “there is nothing weak – nothing passive – nothing naive – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King” but that at the same time he “cannot be guided by their examples alone” because he “must face the world as it is”.

(For a review of MLK’s reasons for opposing imperial wars, see our first post here.)

3. EVIL IS BAD, mmm’KAY?

And how is the world, really, in Obama’s view? It is the world of Christian mythology, where “evil” exists, evolutionary sciences are ignored, and “man” must struggle with the legacy of Original Sin.

“War, in some form or another, appeared with the first man,” Obama asserts.

Who is he talking about? Adam? Cain? Or are we supposed to think of the opening scene of Kubrick’s 2001?

4. “JUST WAR” SHOULD BE GOVERNED MULTILATERALLY; THE EMPEROR’S UNILATERAL ACTIONS ARE JUST

In any case, for Obama the inevitability of war means that one must strive not to end war, but to make it more just. And this is where another incoherence of the speech emerges. First, Obama touts the role of U.S. in creating the U.N., which he commends as a mechanism “to govern the waging of war.” Then he laments that “this old architecture [i.e., the U.N.] is buckling under the weight of new threats” (never mind that the greatest threat to the U.N. in the past decade has been U.S. refusal to be limited by multilateralism and international law). Then he proceeds to re-assert the Bush doctrine of unilateralism and preventive war: “I – like any other head of state – reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation” against “threats to the American people.”

So, “just war” requires multilateral governance but it is the Emperor’s right to act unilaterally in “defense” of his nation against “terrorists”.

(For a comparison between Obama and FDR on unilateralism, see here. For an academic philosopher’s perspective on how Obama’s war fails all six criteria for a “just war”, see here.)

5. THE UNITED STATES HAS MADE THE WORLD SECURE, EXCEPT FOR A FEW MISTAKES

Here Obama’s geo-political unilateralism merges with his mythology of “good” versus “evil” to produce a thorough U.S. Exceptionalism:

“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

Therefore, according to Obama, each of the following either “underwrote” global security or was merely a “mistake”: the overthrow of democracy in Iran (’53), the Vietnam War (’60-’75), the bombings of Cambodia (’69-’75) and Laos (71-’73), C.I.A support of violent right wing movements in Greece (’47-’49), Guatemala (’54 and ’66), Indonesia (’65), Dominican Republic (’65-66), Chile (’73), Angola (’76 -’92), and Nicaragua (81-90), etc. – not to mention the invasion of Iraq or the torture and rendition programs.

According to Obama, the U.S. has done these things “not because we seek to impose our will” but because of “enlightened self-interest,” and he believes that “the United States must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war.”

6. ALL WHO BREAK INTERNATIONAL LAW MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE, EXCEPT FOR U.S. OFFICIALS WHO HAVE BROKEN THE LAW IN THE PAST

Obama’s incapacity for self-reflection (or, less generously, his mendacity) is boundless when it comes to the question of accountability. At every turn, OBAMA’S “Justice” Department has blocked accountability for his predecessor’s torturers and war-starters, but with a straight face he asserts that “those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable” and that “those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted.”

7. WE ALL SHARE A COMMON HUMANITY, EXCEPT FOR AL-QAEDA

Even Obama’s Exceptionalism unravels into incoherence, however. “As the world grows smaller,” Obama muses, ” you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we all basically want the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families.” On the other hand, “negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

According to Obama, we all have a “spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.” All of us, that is, except for the “vicious adversary that abides by no rules.”

UNANIMITY

December 10, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, Barbara Lee received death threats and charges of treason for being the only person in Congress to refuse to grant, as she put it, “a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events – anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit.”

“In granting these overly broad powers,” she continued, “the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk.”

The exercise of those broad powers have indeed ended many innocent lives and are still quite operational – the current President appealed to them when he announced his latest plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan:

“Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al-Qaeda and those who harbored them – an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98 to 0. The vote in the House was 420 to 1.”

Lee was that lone voice in opposition to the blank check for Bush and his successors, and is still in office and sticking to her (opposition to) guns – she opposed Obama’s first Afghanistan troop “surge” and is now opposing this latest one as well – even going so far as to sponsor a bill to cut off funding for the war.

Congratulations, Rep. Barbara Lee, TWGP’s Undersung HeroTM of the month!

CONTINUITIES 5

November 23, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

The World’s Got Problems has been careful to document the many ways in which the Obama administration has maintained continuity with its disgraced predecessor.

This continuity continues as Obama:

Much more here, but regarding that last point, the latest episode of Bill Moyer’s show presents audio recordings of telephone conversations between President Johnson and his advisors on whether to escalate the war in Vietnam in the months before the ’64 elections. Actually listen to LBJ struggle with the options, and reluctantly make the tragic choice to bomb and invade.

Update 09/28/09: Obama chooses not join more than 150 countries in signing a land mine ban.  Throw that on the pile too.

CONTINUITIES 4 (OF JULY)

July 4, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

To commemorate the 4th of July, here is another update on some of the many ways Obama has proven continuous with Bush:

Civil Liberties
Foreign Policy
Environment
Transparency
Sense of Humor
Gay Rights

And for the fuck of it, here is Howard Zinn questioning the necessity and value of the U.S. War of Independence.

(And btw – the Bush/Obama digital mash-up face is not mine. I just jacked it and placed it in the 4th of July context. I would credit, but I can’t find the original artist. And here is another good image on the same topic.)

WORDS AND DEEDS

June 9, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

Despite being hosted by an authoritarian regime that practices torture and crushes dissent, the words delivered in Cairo by the master orator were at times thoughtful, wise, empathetic, measured and hopefully game changing.

Obama’s speech was clearly a reversal of the previous administration’s crusader mentality. Obama greeted the audience in Arabic, outlined the bountiful scientific and cultural contributions of Islamic civilization, and noted that “Islam has always been a part of the American story.”  In short, he proposed to “seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

Moreover, no president has ever publicly admitted to the U.S. role in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. And no recent president has spoken so firmly on the need for Israel to acknowledge the right of Palestine “to exist”, even going so far as to say that “the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.” And he even recognized Iran’s right “to access peaceful nuclear power.”

This is all worthy of approbation, of course, but there were other moments where Obama continued to speak with the blind hypocrisy of the American exceptionalist…

For example, Obama pledged to “ruthlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our national security.  Because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women and children.”

Coming from the man who protects the violent extremists in the previous administration from accountability, and who has himself ordered drone attacks on Afghan villages that predictably kill innocent men, women and children, these word are hypocrisy pure and simple.

The hypocrisy of deploring the “violent extremists” who have “killed in many countries” and who have “killed people of different faiths” and whose “actions are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings” is too obvious to require elucidation.  Without a hint of irony, Obama said that he supports “transparent government” and that “violence is a dead end” and that “it is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children”.

Obama said that “we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan” and that “we seek no military bases there”.  And yet he is sending an additional 17,000 troops there, not including the 68,197 private mercenaries under Department of Defense contracts, and is building gargantuan “embassies” in Kabul and Islamabad.

Obama said that “we would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can.”

To translate: “We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home just as soon as hell freezes over.”

Obama got applause when he reiterated his pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo (where detainees are still being tortured and are commiting suicide in dispair), but that action is irrelevant since “unlawful combatants” are now simply shipped to the extrajudicial prison in Bagram.

I could go on. If you want more, check out Chomsky or Hedges. If you want to see what drunk Zionists thought of Obama’s speech, go here.

CONTINUITIES 3

May 19, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

Obama cheers at his daughter’s soccer game while children of lesser consequence recover from the deadly U.S. air strikes by unmanned drones in the Farah province of Afghanistan.

Honestly, it is hard to keep up with all of the ways the Obama administration represents continuity with the Bush Administration. Here are some more things to add to the list….

Under the Obama administration, as under the Bush administration,attack on Afghan villages by U.S. drones are still a common occurrence– and it looks like these attacks will only increase.

Here is a report about another instance of a drone strike in North Waziristan, where 29 people were killed in the village of Mirali on May 16.

These deadly robots are remote controlled by brave soldiers sitting in air conditioned trailers at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.(USA today posted a softball piece about the training program here.)

Prisoners at Guantanamo are still being stripped of their rights and tortured by brutal extrajudicial “Immediate Reaction Force” thugs.  See here and especially here.

Obama is resorting to a modified version of Bush style military commissions to try Guantanamo detainees, instead of in civilian courts which suffer from an inadmissibility of evidence beaten out of those who would be presumed innocent. See also here.

Obama is continuing the cover-up Bush crimes. I have already posted about how Obama’s DOJ has been been trying to evoke the “state secrets privilege” to block evidence of the U.S. torture regime under Bush.

Now he is refusing to release another batch of “prisoner abuse” photos. See also here. (John Dean thinks that Obama was forced to block release of the photos by “National Security” bereaucrats.)

The Obama administration has also threatened the British government to keep torture evidence concealed.