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Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen.

In eviscerating longstanding rules prohibiting corporations from using their own monies to influence elections, the court invites giant corporations to open up their treasuries to buy election outcomes. Corporations are sure to accept the invitation.

…

We need a constitutional amendment specifying that for-profit corporations are not entitled to First Amendment protections, except for freedom of the press. A constitutional amendment is not a thing to throw around lightly. But today’s decision so imperils our democratic well-being, and so severely distorts the rightful purpose of the First Amendment, that a constitutional corrective is demanded.

Winning a constitutional amendment will be a long-term effort. The starting point is for the people to petition their government to demand action. Public Citizen with allies has launched such a petition effort. Got to www.dontgetrolled.org to sign the petition.

An unusual thing happened today.  The moderate wing of the Republican Party prevailed over the far right wing.  A week after the Republican National Committee drafted a resolution to rename the Democratic Party the Democratic “Socialist” Party, the resolution has been dropped.

The moderates argued that if they passed the resolution, the public would view them as a party so devoid of new ideas that all they can do is resort to petty schoolyard name calling.

RNC Chairman Michael Steele was against the resolution all along.  His side prevailed over the unruly children in his party who still claim that “the proposal was good for the GOP.”

“It has generated the debate we had hoped for,” said Indiana committeeman James Bopp. “It was an effort to educate the American people, and it was successful.”

Yes, it was about as successful as a DNC resolution to rename the Republican Party as the Republican “Fascist” Party would be. 

I’ve made the case a few times on these pages for why the Republicans are fascists, but renaming their party?  Why bother?  They have Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney in the spotlights reinforcing my view every day.

Have you ever had discussions with people who support the Bush warrantless wiretapping program and heard the “if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about” argument?  Well you might want to share this article with those people, because it proves that their trust in government not abusing its power is delusory at best.

From today’s Los Angeles Times:

U.S. intelligence analysts eavesdropped on personal calls between Americans overseas and their families back home and monitored the communications of workers with the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations, according to two military linguists involved in U.S. surveillance programs.

…
 
Describing the allegations as “extremely disturbing,” Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the panel had launched an inquiry and requested records from the Bush administration.
 
The linguists said that recordings of intimate conversations between citizens and their loved ones were sometimes passed around, out of prurient interest, among analysts at an electronic surveillance facility at Ft. Gordon, Ga.
 
They also said they were encouraged to continue monitoring calls of aid workers and other personnel stationed in the Middle East even when it was clear the callers had no ties to terrorists or posed no threat to U.S. interests.

“There were people who called the States to talk to their families,” said Adrienne Kinne, 31, a former Arab linguist in the Army Reserve who worked at a National Security Agency facility at Ft. Gordon from 2001 to 2003.

…
 
“I observed people writing down, word for word, very embarrassing conversations,” Faulk told The Times. “People would say, ‘Hey, check this out, you’re not going to believe what I heard.’”

You probably argued that if we give government unchecked power to invade our privacy, they will abuse it.  You were right.

Why is it that a petite librarian has the conviction to stand up for your rights than gigantic telecom corporations with armies of lawyers?

Read:

Children’s librarian Judith Flint was getting ready for the monthly book discussion group for 8- and 9-year-olds on “Love That Dog” when police showed up.

They weren’t kidding around: Five state police detectives wanted to seize Kimball Public Library’s public access computers as they frantically searched for a 12-year-old girl, acting on a tip that she sometimes used the terminals.

…

“What I observed when I came in were a bunch of very tall men encircling a very small woman,” said the library’s director, Amy Grasmick, who held fast to the need for a warrant after coming to the rescue of the 4-foot-10 Flint.

…

Flint was firm in her confrontation with the police.

“The lead detective said to me that they need to take the public computers and I said `OK, show me your warrant and that will be that,’” said Flint, 56. “He did say he didn’t need any paper. I said `You do.’ He said `I’m just trying to save a 12-year-old girl,’ and I told him `Show me the paper.‘”

Cybersecurity expert Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, said the librarians acted appropriately.

“If you’ve told all your patrons `We won’t hand over your records unless we’re ordered to by a court,’ and then you turn them over voluntarily, you’re liable for anything that goes wrong,” he said.

Well unless you are a telecom company because, if anything goes wrong, you can count on a fascist president and a craven congress to change the law so that whatever it was that might have gone wrong just doesn’t matter anymore.

Well the librarian didn’t buy into that.  When the Feds screamed “Warrant?  Warrant?!  We don’t need no stinking paper!”  Flint didn’t flinch.  She protected the privacy of the patrons of the library.

Maybe the good citizens of this country will take notice and demand the same from the keepers of their personal records and information.

We’ll have to wait and see.

President Bush signed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that was passed by the Senate on Wednesday with the help of, as Paul Krugman put it, the “coalition of the craven” Democrats. 

Bush gave a short speech before signing the bill that basically went like this: “FEAR!  FEAR!  FEAR!  I WILL PROTECT YOU!”  But because his fascist regime needs help from telecommunications corporations to gather phone records, emails, and other forms of electronic communications, and he doesn’t want any citizens checking up on the legality of whatever he’s doing, he added:

“This law will ensure that those companies whose assistance is necessary to protect the country will themselves be protected from lawsuits from past or future cooperation with the government.”

And that is how the Bush Administration operates.  Scare people.  Tell them spying is necessary to protect them.  Claim presidential power to ignore laws or articles of The Constitution that might hinder him.  Get corporations to go along with his plans.  Grant retroactive immunity to them and everyone else involved.  All is well, see?  No laws were broken because now the laws that were in place at the time the laws were broken don’t matter anymore.  Those OLD laws were for pre-9/11 Americans.  We are the new fearful Americans, and we will sell our liberty to a con man so that we can feel safe.

How does the most unpopular president in modern history continue to get away with this total disregard of law and all the principles of individual freedom and liberty?  Well I guess that has to be because congress, lead by the “opposition party” Democrats, is disliked even more than the president.  Why are they loathed?  You have to ask?  Because they are weak!  They are weak minded and weak willed, and they are afraid.  Their weak little minds tell them that it’s political suicide to vote against a bill that helps our government thwart terrorist attacks, even if it contains what is clearly a CYA clause for the president, his staff, and hall his corporate sponsors.

We the people have just been shafted and we know it.

So who will stick up for us if your representatives in Congress won’t? 

The ACLU and The Nation:

A few hours after Bush’s signing, The Nation joined with the ACLU in a lawsuit filed in the US District Court (Southern District) of New York challenging the constitutionality of the Act. The Nation is suing on behalf of itself, our staff and two of our contributing writers–Chris Hedges and Naomi Klein.

…

Hedges, in his reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the so-called war on terror regularly communicates with sources in countries like Palestine, Iran, Syria and Sudan. Klein, in her essential critique of the extension of radical free-market capitalism and the resurgence of imperial militarism, routinely communicates with journalists, political activists, human rights campaigners in the Middle East, South America, and around the world. Sadly, we believe that the communications critical to their reporting could and would be monitored under the FISA Amendments Act. Certainly scores of other journalists would shoulder the same risk.

We are proud, then, to join with other patriots who understand the government’s legitimate interest in protecting the nation against terrorism can be fulfilled without sacrificing the constitutional liberties that make the US worth defending.

We at harikari.com ask you to support them in their cause – OUR CAUSE.  Please donate to the ACLU and keep reading The Nation and spreading the word to anyone who will listen.

More than two and a half years after the disclosure of President’s Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program set off a furious national debate, the Senate gave final approval on Wednesday afternoon to broadening the government’s spy powers and providing legal immunity for the phone companies that took part in the wiretapping program.

Barack Obama voted FOR the bill even though while he campaigned for the Democratic nomination he repeatedly said that he would not support a bill that gave retroactive immunity to the telephone companies. 

And I was just about to send him some money…  I recently read this comment in an Ostertag column on The Huffington Post :  “Senator Obama, you can tap my phone or my wallet, but not both.”  Couldn’t have said it better.

Back to the story:

“The law itself is a massive intrusion into the due process rights of all of the phone subscribers who would be a part of the suit,” said Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer who represents several hundred plaintiffs in one lawsuit against Verizon and other companies. “It is a violation of the separation of powers. It’s presidential election-year cowardice. The Democrats are afraid of looking weak on national security.”

So instead of appearing weak on national security (in whose eyes?) the Democrats appear weak on Freedom and Liberty.  Way to go Dems!  Way to stand up for the Constitution and everything our country USED to stand for.

Makes me sick…

I came across the poster at the top of this post in another NYT article about a collecitve work by sixty artists that produced giant posters for an exhibition titled “Thoughts on Democracy,” a modern day response to Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series based on Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 speech to congress.

Our freedoms and liberties have been stolen from us at an alarming pace since 9-11, and today’s captitulation by Obama and his party to the fear-mongering Bush Republicans seems to me like a capper on the whole sickening process. 

It’s a perfect day to publish a story about the “Thoughts on Democracy” artwork, because our democracy is failing, and people should stop and think about it.  But will they?

It is Sunday afternoon at the Aventura Mall in South Florida, and I’ve come to gauge the impact of a handful of images displayed in 14-foot-high posters near Nordstrom.

…

In the mall at least, the artists’ instincts seemed to be borne out. In an hour and a half, more than 100 people walked by the exhibit. Only 8 stopped to look.

“People don’t care anymore,” said David Babich, 31, one of the few who lingered, gazing at the prints. “They aren’t as affected by stuff that happens.”

Kiss the Fist of Democracy

About two weeks ago the Senate passed their version of the RESTORE Act – the bill that updates FISA for new types of communications that have been developed since FISA was enacted in 1978.  The House version of the bill does not include a grant of immunity to all the telecommunications companies that participated in the government’s spying program.  House Democrats argue that there is no reason to grant immunity because they’ve always had immunity so long as they obeyed the law.  The House version of the RESTORE Act includes protection for telecommunications companies that lawfully participate in the surveillance program in the future.  (Scroll down for my reaction to the eighteen Spineless Motherf@#*ing Democrats that voted for the Senate version of the bill that includes the immunity clause that Bush says absolutely must be included in the final bill.)

Bush has been bashing the House Democrats since Congress reconvened last week.  He has been making false claims about how intelligence agencies haven’t been able to do their jobs since the Protect America Act expired, and about how, without immunity, there would be frivolous lawsuits against telecoms that would lead to their financial ruin.

First off, the intelligence agencies have not been affected in any significant way, because the laws that are in place now allow them to continue their surveillance programs.  The New York Times reported yesterday:

One lawyer in the telecommunications industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity because wiretapping operations are classified, said he had seen little practical effect on the industry’s surveillance operations since the law expired. Most operations appear to have continued unabated, the lawyer said.

Secondly, if the telecoms did not break any laws as Bush claims, then why does he want to grant them immunity?  Furthermore, any lawsuits that do arise would be dismissed by the courts if they were found to be groundless.

Some of the pending lawsuits probably do have merit, and that’s what worries Bush.  A successful lawsuit against a telecom would not only expose the illegal actions of the telecommunications company, it would also expose the lawlessness of the Bush Administration.  So by immunizing the telecoms Bush would in effect be immunizing himself, and that’s what he’s really wants – to save his own ass.

We already know he lied to us about the warrantless spying operation up until December 2005 when he was forced to acknowledge it after the New York Times story was published.  He should have been impeached right then and there, but the anti-American, freedom-hating Republicans in the Senate would never agree to removing their man from the White House.  (And apparently some craven Democrats too.)

So are there grounds for successful lawsuits against any of the telecoms?  Probably.  Here’s an excerpt from a nice rant that Keith Olbermann delivered a couple weeks ago describing what happened at AT&T:

… Did you see Mark Klein on this newscast last November?

Mark Klein was the AT&T whistleblower who explained in the placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood IT desk how he personally attached all AT&T circuits, everything, carrying every one of your phone calls, every one of your e-mails, every bit of your Web browsing into a secure room, room No. 641-A at the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, where it was all copied so the government could look at it.

If we are to believe Bush, the government went to the FISA court and requested permission to tap into communication lines of a suspected terrorists.  AT&T responded by turning over everything they had on everyone using their service.  That’s kind of like the police getting a warrant to search one office in a ninety-story office building and having the security firm for the building giving the police the keys to every office in the building.  Maybe the police would only search the one office they had obtained the warrant for, and maybe they wouldn’t.  Either way, what the security firm did was wrong.

Bush says: 

At issue is a dispute over whether telecommunications companies should be subjected to class-action lawsuits because they are believed to have helped defend America after the attacks of 9/11.

“…believed to have helped defend America?”  Excuse me?  That’s not what the lawsuits are about.  Nobody has any issue with the telecoms legally complying with government warrants that would help find terrorists.  The issue is how these companies violated the privacy of their customers simply because the government asked them to do so.

Bush then played his Fear Card: 

Without the cooperation of the private sector, we cannot protect our country from terrorist attack.

There is a key word missing in that statement:  “legal” and it belongs right before “cooperation.”

There’s a name for the merger of business and state interests in a consolidated effort to deny citizens their privacy and freedoms – it’s called fascism.

The House Democrats are heroically standing up to fascism by not giving in to Bush’s demands.  They should be applauded.

What can you do?  Write your House Reprenstative and urge him or her to not back down on the issue of immunity for telecoms.

And, if you have not signed this petition, do so now.

Here is a part of a rant by David Michael Green posted on CommonDreams.org that you really should read:

Regressives like to call people like me Bush-haters, and so it is important to address that claim before proceeding, because the entire intent of hurling that label at the president’s critics is to undermine their credibility. If you simply hate the man, they imply, you’re not rational, and your critiques can be dismissed. But it isn’t that simple – not by a long shot. First, it should be noted that the regressive right is far wider a phenomenon than just one person. It currently includes an entire executive branch administration, almost (and, just a year ago, more than) half of Congress, a majority of the Supreme Court and probably a majority of the lower federal courts, a biased-to-the-point-of-being-a-joke mainstream media, and tons of lobbyists, think tanks and profitable industries.

But as to George W. Bush, himself, I suspect it’s quite fair to say that most Americans and even most progressives did not originally despise or loathe him. I didn’t. I certainly didn’t admire the guy, nor did I think he was remotely prepared to be president of the United States. (Nor, by the way, was I particularly impressed with Al Gore in 2000.) Bush campaigned as a center-right pragmatist (a “compassionate conservative”, in his words), much as his father had been, and I expected that’s how he would govern if elected. You know, more embarrassing most of the time than truly destructive.

I mention all this because it is important to note what has – and what has not – been responsible for my/our anger, and to make clear that attempts to dismiss that anger as some Bush-hating bias or predisposition are false, a ploy to destroy the messenger when one doesn’t care for the message he’s carrying. If Bush had governed like he campaigned I’m sure I would have disliked him, but neither hated him nor his policies, nor experienced the rage that I feel about what he’s done to the country and the world. Frankly, my feelings toward another center-right Bush presidency would have likely been largely the same as my feelings toward the center-right Clinton presidency which preceded it.

But he hasn’t governed anywhere near to how he campaigned, and he wasn’t even elected properly, and I do in fact feel huge anger at the damage done. Moreover, I cannot for the life of me imagine how anyone – even conservatives – could feel differently. Even the wealthy, to whose interests this presidency is so wholly devoted, have to sleep at night. Even they have children who will inherit a broken country existing in an environmentally and politically hostile world, though no doubt they figure that big enough fences, mean enough private armies, and loads of central air conditioning will insulate them from the damage.

Followed by a litany of nauseating offenses.  Read it all here.

So this is how we are winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people:

The committee staff report said Blackwater guards had engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, and in the vast majority of cases the guards fired their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded. In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims’ family members who complained, and the company sought to cover up other episodes, the report said.

The staff report said that State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of keeping the shootings quiet, and in one case last year, helped Blackwater spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while drunk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve.

The report by the Democratic majority staff of a House committee adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that the company’s guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless disregard for Iraqi life.

…

In the case of the Christmas Eve killing, the report said that an official of the United States Embassy in Iraq suggested paying the slain bodyguard’s family $250,000, but a lower-ranking official said that such a high payment “could cause incidents with people trying to get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family’s future.” Blackwater ultimately paid the dead man’s family $15,000.

In another fatal shooting cited by the committee, an unidentified State Department official in Baghdad urged Blackwater to pay the victim’s family $5,000. The official wrote, “I hope we can put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly.”

And we thought Abu Ghraib made us look bad.  Our government hired mercenaries at Blackwater along with their pals in the State Department are doing their best to make us look even worse.

The price for murdering a guy started at $250,000 (pretty low by U.S. Standards) and quickly dropped to $15,000 so as not to encourage people to commit suicide to enrich their families after they willingly provoke Blackwater security guards to kill them.

That kind of reminds me of some scenes in the Hearts and Minds documentary where they talked about how the government and the media spread propaganda about how the people of Vietnam did not value human life – that their lives were worth nothing.  It was bullshit of course, just like this is. 

Do they really think that there would be a rash of Iraqis volunteering themselves to get shot for a couple hundred thousand dollars?  I don’t think so…

So the price went down to $15,000 and then to $5,000 at the urging of an anonymous State Department official.  That’s great.  Our military doesn’t count Iraqi fatalities, and our hired guns aren’t accountable to anyone, until now I guess, and when they start shooting, they pretty much unload and leave any wounded innocent bystanders to fend for themselves.

When they are confronted by grieving family members, they hand out $5,000.  Not even enough to buy a decent used car.

They don’t seem to be following their own “Core Values.”

P.S.  Says here that Erik Prince, Chairman and CEO of Blackwater, is a fundamentalist Christian.  Guess that means God gave him a license to kill.

Tomorrow our glorious leader will take it up the ass instead of us.

President Bush will undergo a “routine” colonoscopy Saturday…

Snow told reporters Friday that Bush will have the procedure done at his Camp David, Md., mountaintop retreat.

The last time Bush had colon and rectal cancer surveillance was on June 29, 2002. Doctors then advised him to have another colonoscopy in five years.

…

Snow said that because president will be under the effects of anesthesia, he once again has elected to implement Section 3 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. Cheney will serve as acting president until Bush notifies authorities that he is ready to reassume his powers.

It’s not unusual for a man Bush’s age to undergo routine colonoscopy exams.  What’s unusual is that they are actually following the rules outlined in the Constitution.

So if you feel a sudden icy chill shoot up your spine early tomorrow morning, don’t be alarmed.  It’s just the Dark Lord assuming power for what we hope is a very brief period of time.

What harm could he possibly do in a couple of hours?  Oh… maybe start a war against Iran.  No big deal.