Monday, December 21, 2009

'Shock & Awe..redux'

Greetings good citizen,

Hope everyone had a nice weekend. Sorry for the silence but other matters conspired. Seems something indeed erupted over the weekend to stir up the blogosphere and perhaps that’s the disturbing part, I haven’t seen a confirming story in the MSM…yet.

Um, flipping that rock over, the tale is running on several, er, ‘mainstream’ blogs which tends to lend this bizarre story credence. What am I babbling about? well, tonight’s offering was purloined from Michael Panzer’s site, Financial Armageddon, and the intro below is an excerpt from Mr. Panzer’s novel of the same name.

Shocked and Unnerved

Everywhere and anywhere, those seen as rejecting even a small measure of an America-centric perspective will be labeled undesirables, subversives, and even “enemy combatants,” whether or not evidence supports the assertion.
--Chapter 11, "Social," Financial Armageddon


Although I predicted as much in my 2007 book, even I am shocked and unnerved at how quickly the U.S. is abandoning principles that once defined our nation as "the land of the free and the home of the brave." In "Supreme Court Guts Due Process Protection," Naked Capitalism highlights a recent development that should frighten the wits out of any American who is still capable of thinking: [If this turns out to be true, good citizen, then nobody can deny that the gauntlet has been thrown to the ground. It is a ‘challenge’ we ignore at our own peril!]

Reader Walter passed along this distressing sighting from Chris Floyd’s blog. American civil liberties were gutted last week, and the media failed to take note of it.

The development? If the president or one of his subordinates declares someone to be an “enemy combatant” (the 21st century version of “enemy of the state”) he is denied any protection of the law. So any trouble-maker (which means anyone) can be whisked away, incarcerated, tortured, “disappeared,” you name it. Floyd’s commentary: [To put ‘Floyd’s observation a different way, you continued membership in US society now depends upon blind obedience to the dictates of the ‘unelected’ who have appointed themselves kings over the rest of us. Oddly, this act constitutes the commission of an act of treason by the president and his henchmen. (The president has no authority to ‘override’ the Constitution on his ‘say-so’ alone.) Worse, a ruling like this automatically ‘impeaches’ the Justices who decided in favor of such a ruling.]

After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials. [This sets two very dangerous precedents, first it challenges the ‘legitimacy’ of the constitution itself by reserving the rights it guarantees to include only select individuals…and secondly, it removes any previous reason on your part to surrender peacefully; as the commission of a ‘crime’ will likely be used to ‘strip’ your rights from you…worse, that crime could be as simple as ‘disagreeing’ with those empowered to strip you of your rights.]

It is hard to overstate the significance of this horrid decision. The fact that the Supreme Court authorized this land grab says we no longer have an independent judiciary, that the Supreme Court itself is gutting the protections supposedly provided by the legal system. Per Floyd:

In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Now Floyd saw this mainly as an issue of the treatment of enemy combatants and Obama hypocrisy about torture, which is bad enough:

The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of “national emergency.” And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law. [Which is why you are declared a ‘non-person’, making your torture and subsequent execution a ‘non-event’.]

And yet this is what Barack Obama — who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer — has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution….let’s be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand — in court — that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities.

Yves here. The implications are FAR worse. Anyone can be stripped, with NO RECOURSE, of all their legal rights on a Presidential say so. Readers in the US no longer have any security under the law. [Make no mistake about it good citizen, the ‘status quo’ has officially declared ‘war’ upon you and yours!]

Roman citizens enjoyed a right to a trial, a right of appeal, and could not be tortured, whipped, or executed except if found guilty of treason, and anyone charged with treason could demand a trial in Rome. We have regressed more than 2000 years with this appalling ruling.


This is SERIOUS SHIT good citizen, especially if it turns out to be true. Losing your job and subsequently, your home is one thing but we’re talking about your right to ‘exist’ here good citizen!

Where do you suppose the first ‘line in the sand’ is going to turn up good citizen? Will they come for the ‘surplus’ population first? Will your failure to produce ‘proof of employment’ cost you your life? Imagine what your workplace will morph into once the boss gets his hands on THAT kind of power…makes you wonder who he will tell you’re fired first, you or the authorities? Hey, he doesn’t want to get fined and that would be all it would take to insure the ‘uh-oh’ squad was waiting for you at the time clock.

Serious, serious shit! And I hope you can see without my saying so that the ‘fabric’ of our society won’t last a month under conditions like that.

The bloodshed will be incredible.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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