PRESIDENTS - May 27, 2010

It is genuinely sickening to see the US President parading in the role of Emperor of the World, especially when any decently informed person knows that the leadership of the Cold War alliance has made him the apologist in chief for some of the most unattractive tyrannies on the planet. The case that should bring this issue up today is the reception of Obama for the appointment of Filipe Calderon by the Fox government in 2006 in the face of universal reports by the international press of the overwhelming exit polls indicating the victory of Lopez Obrador then. Of course, that election was held in the regime of Cheney, untrusted by hardly anyone on the world stage. To see Obama embracing him and honoring him is like a page out of history when corrupt popes pronounced blessings on corrupt monarchs. I don’t know whether it is worse that Obama knows better and lies about it or that he is blind to a fact evident to the world during his brief tour of legislative power. It is almost as bad as Reagan’s embrace of Ferdinand Marcos and his conferring upon him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Calderon has lived down to the dirty events of his installation, presiding over the criminal civil wars taking place in Mexico today. All this, and the pontificating over the election in Iran, where no evidence beyond suspicion indicated the true result of the recent election. In addition, the deciding of which nation must speak the truth about its atomic bombs and which is above that level of decency, and who must be believed when he professes civilian motivation for atomic power. So while US commands respect for its supposed fiscal power, the deep honor that went with our early embrace of the Enlightenment has been eroded by the Cheney regime and the embrace of their filthy hands by Obama leaves us in the position of honoring one of the most worthless corrupt governments while our president poses for holy pictures.

MIRANDA - Thursday, May 20, 2010

Last weekend, I was watching the US A G being grilled on NBC regarding the giving of “Miranda rights” to people he described as terrorists. He told us that he knew they were guilty, and assured the world that his department would do whatever they needed to assure that these guilty men would not be set free even if they were somehow acquitted by a jury of Americans acting under civilian or military law, whichever was necessary to get the job done, with or without evidence under the standards of military or civilian due process. He assured us that the application of Miranda would not stand in the way of executing or imprisoning them, lifelong if necessary, since apparently he was convinced that they were all guilty, with or without usable evidence. Since he had not seen their alleged crimes, we must understand that he was relying on a chain of evidence linking them to the criminal deed, probably a chain of hearsay without any documentation. The talking point reads like this: We all know the accused is guilty, sworn for by the Dept of
Justice (meaning the result of a star chamber-like trial) so why give them the benefit of Miranda? There is no sense in this that the US has a vested interest in being sure of the due process if it results in a conviction and punishment. I always thought that was the point of due process, the fear of unjust conviction being traditionally thought more onerous than that for an unjust acquittal. But since the press has told us that they are all guilty, we need no more cause to deny them the protections of US justice, according to the AG. And they may well be treated as though their guilt were proven by the standards of our Law, since the secret process carried out in the offices of the AG, outside the range of Due Process protections, has condemned them to any level of Justice that they may have been accorded originally by the Cheney regime.

IMMIGRANTS - May 6, 2010

The argument over immigrants is another of those battles of extremes. They stand guard over the positions that attract the most opposition with the threat of condemnation for anything that does not separate the sheep from the goats. In the Right corner the drumbeat is essentially for the application of draconian law, to the extent of cruelty, in fortified borders, military patrols, arrests of illegal entrants with imprisonment and deportation even when that entails breakup of families. On the Left, no one claims that everyone in the world has the natural right to permanent residence in US, barring only criminality and human rights offenses. In fact, there is a much less cruel law now in effect that would ease the attraction to US of people from countries of middling prosperity in which the People stand for predatory government. A simple action that would put more of the onus where it belongs is a strict program of fines for companies (like some meatpackers) that seem often to hire people with questionable social security numbers. It would be reasonable to require the employers to obtain from holders of such numbers data on the date and place of birth, the parents’ names, the names and locations of the schools attended and a full schedule of alternate names and their spellings. Also the employers should be required to vouch for the use of English by workers who claim to be born and raised in US. Fines for employers that are habitual offenders should be stiff and escalating. Demanding such questions in the allegations by those with a genuinely unlikely story would be merely a way of maintaining the Social Security system. The dogged refusal of government after government to press the issue of who is using a bogus SS number is not racism, does not entail arrest or deportation, but would stem the flow of people fleeing the depredations of their ruling economic elites, into the arms of ours.