RIGHT - November 12, 2009

I was stunned last week to hear that the prosecutor in Council Bluffs has made the defense in a legal action that there is no constitutional bar to framing a defendant in a legal case, and I understand that prosecutors around the nation are alleging that they are protected by something like the sovereign immunity of States from being charged with deliberately denying a defendant a legal trial by keeping secret evidence of innocence. I have always been impressed by the supposed rights conferred by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, no doubt taken in by the immense brouhaha about the perfection of democratic law in this country, but to hear lawyers state that they have no constitutional obligation not to frame a defendant is more than even my cynical mind can bear. And yet I know that in Wisconsin the Attorney General’s office can connive in firing a professor out of tenure, which means out of the profession, with no evidence whatever except for the public reaction to a planted story in the local press. That and the Attorney General’s belief that he is a bad man. Even the law’s explicit requirement is defended on the claim that the State government can give the prosecutor leave to secure the firing even when the legal committees, both faculty and in the Regents, have spoken in explicit terms that there is no evidence against him. But if one can jail an innocent man for decades on forged evidence and claim that the Supreme Court should and will say that he has no remedy against deliberate fraud on the Court by the prosecutor puts the actions of State functionaries above the provisions of constitutional bars against State takings of life, liberty and property without due process. Opportunism of this magnitude makes a complete mockery of US prattling about democracy and the rule of law, operating very close to the rule that might makes right. Is the Supreme Court so openly corrupt?

HOPE - November 5, 2009

It seems that Obama has shot his wad, and has little but hope to offer those who are suffering in the early stages of what appears to be the opening years of a very long Depression. Following Cheney, and listening to the self-proclaimed economic scientists of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush cabinets, Obama has dealt with the banksters with a very open hand, not knowing what they would do with hundreds of billions of Federal dollars, stalling the auto industry for a while, but leaving the States and the working class to reap the results of what the future might bring them. It has been a year now. Many of the States, pinned between constitutions that forbid deficit spending and the urgent needs of the moment, and workers, whose jobs have decreased by about 8 million, not counting those on short hours. And now there has been a trickle of recovery money and a temporary reduction of about 8 % in the number of jobless, even without counting those who have come of working age in this year. And all Obama has for them amounts to crocodile tears and Hope. But Hope delayed, as Proverbs tells us, maketh the heart sick, and hope has little to give to those whose jobs and contracts have been cancelled. The Dem party has little to offer, including many who think that they can leave the jobless to the restoration of time, rather like a farmer who is waiting for his wheat field to plant itself. And while Obama, like Hoover 80 years ago, is a decent man wishing the best for those who are suffering, he is also similarly without a program. And he is leaving the weak with little more than crocodile tears to ease their agony.