NOTE:
To be updated later:
above quotes from The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.by Mike Lofgren at Truthout Sept. 6, 2012
"No matter what set of waiters bring you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen." Huey Long
"The GOP presidential candidates' budget plans are riddled with such fantastic assumptions that no neutral observer could come away with any reaction other than that Republicans are so mathematically challenged that they could not manage a lemonade stand, let alone the finances of a nation of 310 million people whose government spends $3.5 trillion a year."
"As Republicans have grown ideologically more rigid Democrats have almost entirely ceased to have any core beliefs at all – and their grab for corporate money is as egregious as that of the GOP."
above quotes from The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.by Mike Lofgren at Truthout Sept. 6, 2012
Is this the choice for American voters choosing Obama as the lesser of two evils is there no third way . In other times and places the Citizenry have decided to follow a different route whether in 1215 or in 1776 one that of course must be peaceful if those in positions of authority who are in fact the mere puppets of the rich and powerful admit they are in the wrong not the people.
"We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right."
—Magna Carta (1225)*
"King John, at right, puts his seal on the Magna Carta in a panel from the U.S. Supreme Court's bronze doors."
"...The "Great Charter" drawn up on the field at Runnymede on June 15, 1215 between King John and his feudal barons failed to resolve the crisis that had been brewing in England ever since the death of John's brother King Richard I.
Over the long term, however, Magna Carta served to lay the foundation for the evolution of parliamentary government and subsequent declarations of rights in Great Britain and the United States."
"...In attempting to establish checks on the king's powers, this document asserted the right of "due process" of law. By the end of the 13th century, it provided the basis for the idea of a "higher law," one that could not be altered either by executive mandate or legislative acts. This concept, embraced by the leaders of the American Revolution, is embedded in the supremacy clause of the United States Constitution and enforced by the Supreme Court." from Magna Carta: Cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution at Edsitement
Obama makes due process optional along with "Habeas Corpus"** , the Magna Carta of 1215 AD*, US Constitution and Bill of Rights and International Law-Obama the true compassionate conservative war monger but defends Gay Rights and Gay Marriage and women's reproductive rights but unleashes local police forces to crush Occupy Movement - exquisite contradictions and hypocrisy
" Due Process " cartoon by
Brian McFadden NYTimes
Obama's Drone Wars unveiled Killer Drones operating out of Australia. President Obama has used Drones to bomb villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan murdering numerous civilians and merely disdainfully referring to their deaths as "Collateral Damage". Drone strikes are used to attack weddings, funerals and other community gatherings in the hope of getting the odd terrorists or member of the Taliban.
As has been noted previously the USA adds to these war crimes another horrific twist and that is after bombing an area they wait for Good Samaritans and first-responders to arrive at the scene and then bomb them . The barbarity and cynicism of such attacks shows the Obama administration as lacking any regard for human life. In fact to rationalize these murders Obama has insisted that any male of fighting age killed in these Drone strikes are by definition "Enemy Combatants". And yet the Democrats and supporters of Obama ignore his War Crimes while still chastising the Bush administration for its war crimes.
As Mike Lofgren opens his article of Sept. 3, 2011 published in truthout.org Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult he argues that the Democratic Party and Republican party are both rotten to the core since both are now in the hands of the Wall Street thugs,big business and the super wealthy:
Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
"How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted" by bill Moyers,Moyers & Co.via Truthout, Sept. 4, 2012
Bill Moyers: The Republican Party now has the super rich and its corporate wing funding it and the religious right provides the ground troops. Why are so many everyday folks out there in the pews defending the prerogatives of the rich?
Mike Lofgren: That's something of a mystery. The Federal Reserve, in one of their recent reports, found that net household income fell about 40 percent since 2007. That's a tremendous drop. Yet, here we have as the nominee for one of the two major parties, we only have a binary choice in this country, is by all accounts the richest man ever to run for president and was a leverage buyout artist.
The party is really oriented towards the concerns of the rich. It's about cutting their taxes, reducing regulation on business, making things wide open for Wall Street. Now you're not going to get anybody to the polls and consciously pull the lever for the Republicans if they say, "Our agenda is to further entrench the rich and, oh by the way, your pension may take a hit."
So they use the culture wars quite cynically, as essentially rube bait to get people to the polls. And that explains why, for instance, the Koch brothers were early funders of Michele Bachmann, who is a darling of the religious right. They don't care particularly, I would assume, about her religious foibles. What they care about is the bottom line. And these religious right candidates, many of them believing in the health and wealth, name it and claim it prosperity gospel, believe that the rich are sanctified and the poor punished
In an election we expect that the voters examine the actual record of candidates and not just accept whatever they claim in their equisitely hypocritical and fact challenged rhetorical flourishes.
Obama did not shut down Guantanamo Bay prison nor did he make any real attempt to investigate let alone bring to trial the Bush administration's personnel responsible for various war crimes from the coordinated propaganda of lies and misinformation echoed uncritically by the Mainstream Media to convince Americans and the world that they had no choice but to declare war on Iraq to the cover up of the wide spread use of various torture techniques thoughout the US prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan .
President Obama like Bush and Cheney defended the use of interrogation techniques even though these enhanced interrogation techniques are under international law to be torture.
Obama also has insisted that he can unilaterally decide if someone is to be imprisoned indefinitely or if a foreigner or even an American citizen can be assassinated.
President Obama has continued with the same disastrous foreign policy as that of his predecessor .
While Obama criticizes Qaddafi and Assad for their crack down on pro-reform protesters he ignores the Saudi and Bahrain's government crackdown on peaceful pro-reform protesters in their respective countries. So Obama and NATO launched an unnecessarily brutal attack on Libya followed by the barbaric murder of Qaddafi and of course videotaped and posted to YouTube.
There are those who accuse Obama as assassinating Osama Bin Laden and that the special forces sent in were not encouraged to take Osama alive.
And when it comes to the pro-reform uprising by the Occupy Movement the Obama administration did nothing to end the police brutality meted out to peaceful protesters across the USA.
The police tactics which appeared to have been coordinated with the approval of the Security and Intelligence community and possibly the FBI and including the White House.
When in the 1960s Civil Rights protesters and marchers and freedom Riders were assaulted by average citizens and by police the federal government intervened using the FBI and other agencies since local law enforcement were not to be trusted to defend the rights of average American citizens taking part in these civil rights actions.
So Eric Holder and Obama can be held liable for standing back while police forces in Chicago, Portland, NY City rioted against mostly peaceful demonstrators and that the police were in fact using Agent provocateurs to give a justification for police brutality and the rounding up of thousands of Occupy protesters.
Like George W. Bush President Obama has shown little or no regard for international Law or for the rule of law in the United States itself . So again we see an administration that adheres to the Rule Of Law and the US Constitution only when it is in their own interests. So Obama's campaign for re-election continues with a narrative which is more propaganda than fact.
Meanwhile whistleblower Bradley Manning continues to be held indefinitely by order of Obama's decree . And Obama "the great Liberal" is still gunning for Wikileaks spokesperson Julianne Assange for daring to reveal the truth of how rotten to the core the American government and its operators are.
The innocent civilians murdered in Iraq by US forces are blatantly treated as if their deaths were meaningless just because they are not Americans or of European decent.
Due to government propaganda and the Mainstream Media echo chamber many Americans still believe that fewer than 100,000 Iraqis were killed in the 9 year long war which is still taking its toll on Iraqi citizens. In the real world beyond the American propaganda machine many accept that some 600,000 to 1.5 million Iraqis have been killed since the beginning of the war in 2003.
And yet the Democrats and certain TV networks call out the republicans and its conservative media for being fact challenged when in some instances the Democrats and their media outlets are just as bad.
Libya is still in chaos over a year after the murder of Qaddafi and NATO's war crimes committed against the citizens of libya that is the continuous round the clock six month bombardment of Libya's villages, towns, suburbs and cities in Libya.
Meanwhile in Syria in order to depose Assad the USA and Nato are backing with arms and money and advisors extremist groups who are committing atrocities especially against innocent civilians. This is the consequences of Pax Americana that is American Imperialism. The rationale is that the USA and NATO are supposedly outraged by Assad's tyranical rule while backing these brutal murderous terrorists. They used the same excuses in Iraq and libya. But these Neo-liberals when it comes to expanding the American Empire and bombing the crap out of one country after another are no different than the Neoconc and the GOP.
The only hope for Iran is that the Obama administration may not attack Iran before the election and they may have convinced the Israelis to follow their lead and to attack Iran after the election as the Israelis did in their bombardment and invasion of Gaza in 20008 which Obama as president elect and as president did nothing as he did nothing in response to Israel's attack in International Waters on a Turkey ship in the Free Palestine flotilla killing 19 passengers.
The hyocrisy in regard not just to Israel but other American allies as well knows no bounds as the Americans are outraged when Israeli's are killed in a Palestinian suicide attack but are mum when 1,500 Palestinian citizens are killed by the IDF and hospitals, schools and even UN buildings are deliberately targeted by the Israeli war machine. The Americans get hysterical when a government they no longer supports IE Syria, Iraq, Libya uses brute force against protesters but ignore such crimes when committed by governments the USA supports ie Yemen,Saudi Arabia, Bahrain etc.
In Libya it is exstimated that tens of thousands were killed due to the NATO/USA bombarment. So these are Obama's great victories which look to the people on the ground as unmitigated disasters.
War Drums Beat Ever More Loudly Over Iran by Noam Chomsky at Truthout, Sept. 4, 2012
And CNN colludes in the cover-up of attrocities committed in American supported Bahrain against peaceful pro-reform protesters who are imprisoned , shot and killed , tortured and the army and mercenaries track down protesters to their homes and arrest or kill them and set their homes and whole neighborhoods on fire while Clinton meets with the Suadi and Bahrain officials to reassure them of America's unconditional support no matter what they might say in public.
These tyrants are able to remain in power because of America and the West support.
And the Mainstream Media is all too willing to go along with these deceptions.
Why Didn't CNN's International Arm Air Its Own Documentary On Bahrain's Arab Spring Repression? www.guardian.co.uk Sept. 04, 2012
On 19 June 2011 at 8pm, CNN's domestic outlet in the US aired "iRevolution" for the first and only time. The program received prestigious journalism awards, including a 2012 Gold Medal from New York Festival's Best TV and Films. Lyon, along with her segment producer Taryn Fixel, were named as finalists for the 2011 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. A Facebook page created by Bahraini activists, entitled "Thank you Amber Lyon, CNN reporter | From people of Bahrain", received more than 8,000 "likes".
Despite these accolades, and despite the dangers their own journalists and their sources endured to produce it, CNN International (CNNi) never broadcast the documentary. Even in the face of numerous inquiries and complaints from their own employees inside CNN, it continued to refuse to broadcast the program or even provide any explanation for the decision. To date, this documentary has never aired on CNNi.
and : RT Calls Out CNN For Pulling Bahrain Documentary
Published on Sep 5, 2012 by MOXNEWSd0tC0M
September 05, 2012 Russia Today News http://MOXNews.com
Lawless Land - Libya
Journeyman pictures
Published on Apr 23, 2012 by journeymanpictures
Divided Libya awaits election results amid ongoing violence
To see more go to http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures
Follow us on Facebook (http://goo.gl/YRw42) or Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/journeymanvod)
Gaddafi may be gone but Libya is now a country in chaos. Rebel groups are flush with weapons and taking the law into their own hands, persecuting those thought to have been allied to Gaddafi's regime.
Libya's power vacuum has been filled by heavily armed rebels who still control much of the war-torn nation. Images of the sprawling refugee camps reveal the extent of the country's destroyed infrastructure. Mohammed Swehli, a commander of one of the major Misratan Rebel Brigades, denies the widespread allegations of torture and abuse. "They're not bandits, they're not militia groups", he says of the rebels. But video after video has emerged of the torture of perceived Gaddafi loyalists, most of them far too gruesome to broadcast. In some cases the brutal treatment appears to be based solely on the colour of the victim's skin. This report gained rare access to the prisons where thousands are being held indefinitely without charge. One former prisoner shows pictures of his injuries. "This is when they beat me with electric cables. They called me slave", he says. With upcoming elections and new fears over a split between the country's east and west, what does the future hold for post-revolution Libya?
A Film By SBS
Distributed By Journeyman Pictures
April 2012
Notes:
And on Obama's threats to the sovereign nation of Iran see for instance :
War Drums Beat Ever More Loudly Over Iran by Noam Chomsky at Truthout, Sept. 4, 2012
* Magna Carta
from Magna Carta: Cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution at Edsitement
Magna Carta took on greater significance in the 17th century as a result of the weight given to this charter by Edward Coke (pronounced "cook"), one of the leading legal scholars of that century. In 1610, in what is known as Bonham's Case, Coke reiterated the claim that the Great Charter represented a higher law. James Otis would cite Bonham's Case in his attack on the Stamp Act over 150 years later. Thomas Paine would cite the principle in Common Sense, as would leading colonists in their attacks on British rule.
In the meantime, colonial charters issued throughout the 17th and 18th centuries as well as political treatises published by the Commonwealthmen—English libertarians whose radical views influenced the thinking of Enlightenment thinkers in America—reinforced the significance of Magna Carta. Not surprisingly, fundamental rights cited in the Great Charter—habeas corpus and due process of law—found their way into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as well as virtually every state constitution.
Throughout American history, the rights associated with Magna Carta have been regarded as among the most important guarantees of freedom and fairness. However, these rights have not always been applied equally. Discrimination based on racial and ethnic differences has, for example, resulted in unfair practices. Perceived threats to national security have been used to justify withholding certain rights or have influenced the enforcement of constitutional guarantees. Despite or, in some cases, because of these shortfalls, the fundamental principles have remained very much a part of the American experience, finding expression in judicial decisions, legislation, news reports and editorials, as well as in the thinking of informed individuals.
**
Habeas Corpus definition from Amnesty International
Habeas corpus, also known as “The Great Writ” refers to a centuries-old legal concept, fundamental in any democracy. This Latin term, literally meaning, “holding the body”, refers to a legal action that a person can bring in order to seek relief against arbitrary and unlawful detention.
Habeas corpus represents the idea that the king or the President, may not, at his whim, detain whomever he wants without allowing the detainee the opportunity to stand before a fair court to hear the charges against him or her and to have an opportunity to answer the charges. Filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus is a legal challenge to the government’s ability to detain an individual. It is brought against the person(s) responsible for holding a detainee and requires that s/he produce the detainee along with the reasons that this person is being held. The petition challenges the legality of the detention based on a legal or a factual error. So, for example, the error could be that the detention violates the Constitution. Or, the petition could assert that the detainee was incorrectly identified and the government arrested the wrong person. The court then decides if the person is being held lawfully or if the detainee ought to be released.
As a legal concept, habeas corpus is centuries-old. Habeas rights are typically traced back to the Magna Carta of 1215 and have since become a cornerstone of democratic governance and of international human rights law. In the U.S., the Constitution requires that habeas rights can only be suspended under very limited circumstances: “the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
President Bush tried to suspend habeas when he issued a military order entitled, Detention, Treatment and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism. He declared the right to indefinitely detain individuals that he claimed were suspected of having links to terrorism as “unlawful enemy combatants”. In violation of international and Constitutional law, he asserted that these detainees could be held forever without legal counsel, without knowing what they were accused of doing, and without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.
Over the course of years, the Bush administration held over 700 such designated “unlawful enemy combatants” on a U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. All the while, in American court rooms, a vigorous legal battle over the legality of the detentions has ensued. Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court in Boumediene, held that those held at Guantanamo Bay have the right of habeas corpus and can bring such claims in U.S. federal court.
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