[P2P-F] Fwd: "Senate Votes To Let Military Detain Americans Indefinitely"

Fri Dec 2 17:56:23 CET 2011

On 02/12/11 14:42, Patrick Anderson wrote:
> Why would they do this?
> People say "Write your Representative" as though we, the people, were
> in control.
> Who do the Representatives really represent?

There is nothing new here at all, "the state of exception" has always
been central in/to "democracy":
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/009254.html

A Brief History of the State of Exception
by Giorgio Agamben
An excerpt from State of Exception

We have already seen how the state of siege had its origin in France
during the Revolution. After being established with the Constituent
Assembly's decree of July 8, 1791, it acquired its proper physiognomy as
état de siège fictif or état de siège politique with the Directorial law
of August 27, 1797, and, finally, with Napoleon's decree of December 24,
1811. The idea of a suspension of the constitution (of the "rule of the
constitution") had instead been introduced, as we have also seen, by the
Constitution of 22 Frimaire Year 8. Article 14 of the Charte of 1814
granted the sovereign the power to "make the regulations and ordinances
necessary for the execution of the laws and the security of the State";
because of the vagueness of the formula, Chateaubriand observed "that it
is possible that one fine morning the whole Charte will be forfeited for
the benefit of Article 14." The state of siege was expressly mentioned
in the Acte additionel to the Constitution of April 22, 1815, which
stated that it could only be declared with a law. Since then, moments of
constitutional crisis in France over the course of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries have been marked by legislation on the state of
siege. After the fall of the July Monarchy, a decree by the Constituent
Assembly on June 24, 1848, put Paris in a state of siege and assigned
General Cavaignac the task of restoring order in the city. Consequently,
an article was included in the new constitution of November 4, 1848,
establishing that the occasions, forms, and effects of the state of
siege would be firmly set by a law. From this moment on, the dominant
principle in the French tradition (though, as we will see, not without
exceptions) has been that the power to suspend the laws can belong only
to the same power that produces them, that is, parliament (in contrast
to the German tradition, which entrusted this power to the head of
state). The law of August 9, 1849 (which was partially restricted later
by the law of April 4, 1878), consequently established that a political
state of siege could be declared by parliament (or, additionally, by the
head of state) in the case of imminent danger to external or internal
security. Napoleon III had recourse several times to this law and, once
installed in power, he transferred, in the constitution of January 1852,
the exclusive power to proclaim a state of siege to the head of state.
The Franco-Prussian War and the insurrection of the Commune coincided
with an unprecedented generalization of the state of exception, which
was proclaimed in forty departments and lasted in some of them until
1876. On the basis of these experiences, and after MacMahon's failed
coup d'état in May 1877, the law of 1849 was modified to establish that
a state of siege could be declared only with a law (or, if the Chamber
of Deputies was not in session, by the head of state, who was then
obligated to convene parliament within two days) in the event of
"imminent danger resulting from foreign war or armed insurrection" (law
of April 3, 1878, Art. 1).

World War One coincided with a permanent state of exception in the
majority of the warring countries. On August 2, 1914, President Poincaré
issued a decree that put the entire country in a state of siege, and
this decree was converted into law by parliament two days later. The
state of siege remained in force until October 12, 1919. Although the
activity of parliament, which was suspended during the first six months
of the war, recommenced in January 1915, many of the laws passed were,
in truth, pure and simple delegations of legislative power to the
executive, such as the law of February 10, 1918, which granted the
government an all but absolute power to regulate by decree the
production and trade of foodstuffs. As Tingsten has observed, in this
way the executive power was transformed into a legislative organ in the
material sense of the term. In any case, it was during this period that
exceptional legislation by executive [governativo] decree (which is now
perfectly familiar to us) became a regular practice in the European
democracies.

Predictably, the expansion of the executive's powers into the
legislative sphere continued after the end of hostilities, and it is
significant that military emergency now ceded its place to economic
emergency (with an implicit assimilation between war and economics). In
January 1924, at a time of serious crisis that threatened the stability
of the franc, the Poincaré government asked for full powers over
financial matters. After a bitter debate, in which the opposition
pointed out that this was tantamount to parliament renouncing its own
constitutional powers, the law was passed on March 22, with a four-month
limit on the government's special powers. Analogous measures were
brought to a vote in 1935 by the Laval government, which issued more
than five hundred decrees "having force of law" in order to avoid the
devaluation of the franc. The opposition from the left, led by Léon
Blum, strongly opposed this "fascist" practice, but it is significant
that once the Left took power with the Popular Front, it asked
parliament in June 1937 for full powers in order to devalue the franc,
establish exchange control, and impose new taxes. As has been observed,
this meant that the new practice of legislation by executive
[governativo] decree, which had been inaugurated during the war, was by
now a practice accepted by all political sides. On June 30, 1937, the
powers that had been denied Blum were granted to the Chautemps
government, in which several key ministries were entrusted to
nonsocialists. And on April 10, 1938, Édouard Daladier requested and
obtained from parliament exceptional powers to legislate by decree in
order to cope with both the threat of Nazi Germany and the economic
crisis. It can therefore be said that until the end of the Third
Republic "the normal procedures of parliamentary democracy were in a
state of suspension." When we study the birth of the so-called
dictatorial regimes in Italy and Germany, it is important not to forget
this concurrent process that transformed the democratic constitutions
between the two world wars. Under the pressure of the paradigm of the
state of exception, the entire politico-constitutional life of Western
societies began gradually to assume a new form, which has perhaps only
today reached its full development. In December 1939, after the outbreak
of the war, the Daladier government obtained the power to take by decree
all measures necessary to ensure the defense of the nation. Parliament
remained in session (except when it was suspended for a month in order
to deprive the communist parliamentarians of their immunity), but all
legislative activity lay firmly in the hands of the executive. By the
time Marshal Pétain assumed power, the French parliament was a shadow of
itself. Nevertheless, the Constitutional Act of July 11, 1940, granted
the head of state the power to proclaim a state of siege throughout the
entire national territory (which by then was partially occupied by the
German army).

In the present constitution, the state of exception is regulated by
Article 16, which De Gaulle had proposed. The article establishes that
the president of the Republic may take all necessary measures "when the
institutions of the Republic, the independence of the Nation, the
integrity of its territory, or the execution of its international
commitments are seriously and immediately threatened and the regular
functioning of the constitutional public powers is interrupted." In
April 1961, during the Algerian crisis, De Gaulle had recourse to
Article 16 even though the functioning of the public powers had not been
interrupted. Since that time, Article 16 has never again been invoked,
but, in conformity with a continuing tendency in all of the Western
democracies, the declaration of the state of exception has gradually
been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of
security as the normal technique of government.

α

The history of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution is so tightly woven
into the history of Germany between the wars that it is impossible to
understand Hitler's rise to power without first analyzing the uses and
abuses of this article in the years between 1919 and 1933. Its immediate
precedent was Article 68 of the Bismarckian Constitution, which, in
cases where "public security was threatened in the territory of the
Reich," granted the emperor the power to declare a part of the Reich to
be in a state of war (Kriegszustand), whose conditions and limitations
followed those set forth in the Prussian law of June 4, 1851, concerning
the state of siege. Amid the disorder and rioting that followed the end
of the war, the deputies of the National Assembly that was to vote on
the new constitution (assisted by jurists among whom the name of Hugo
Preuss stands out) included an article that granted the president of the
Reich extremely broad emergency [eccezionali] powers. The text of
Article 48 reads, "If security and public order are seriously
[erheblich] disturbed or threatened in the German Reich, the president
of the Reich may take the measures necessary to reestablish security and
public order, with the help of the armed forces if required. To this end
he may wholly or partially suspend the fundamental rights [Grundrechte]
established in Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153." The
article added that a law would specify in detail the conditions and
limitations under which this presidential power was to be exercised.
Since that law was never passed, the president's emergency [eccezionali]
powers remained so indeterminate that not only did theorists regularly
use the phrase "presidential dictatorship" in reference to Article 48,
but in 1925 Schmitt could write that "no constitution on earth had so
easily legalized a coup d'état as did the Weimar Constitution."

Save for a relative pause between 1925 and 1929, the governments of the
Republic, beginning with Brüning's, made continual use of Article 48,
proclaiming a state of exception and issuing emergency decrees on more
than two hundred and fifty occasions; among other things, they employed
it to imprison thousands of communist militants and to set up special
tribunals authorized to pronounce capital sentences. On several
occasions, particularly in October 1923, the government had recourse to
Article 4 to cope with the fall of the mark, thus confirming the modern
tendency to conflate politico-military and economic crises.

It is well known that the last years of the Weimar Republic passed
entirely under a regime of the state of exception; it is less obvious to
note that Hitler could probably not have taken power had the country not
been under a regime of presidential dictatorship for nearly three years
and had parliament been functioning. In July 1930, the Brüning
government was put in the minority, but Brüning did not resign. Instead,
President Hindenburg granted him recourse to Article 48 and dissolved
the Reichstag. From that moment on, Germany in fact ceased to be a
parliamentary republic. Parliament met only seven times for no longer
than twelve months in all, while a fluctuating coalition of Social
Democrats and centrists stood by and watched a government that by then
answered only to the president of the Reich. In 1932,
Hindenburg—reelected president over Hitler and Thälmann—forced Brüning
to resign and named the centrist von Papen to his post. On June 4, the
Reichstag was dissolved and never reconvened until the advent of Nazism.
On July 20, a state of exception was proclaimed in the Prussian
territory, and von Papen was named Reich Commissioner for
Prussia—ousting Otto Braun's Social Democratic government.

The state of exception in which Germany found itself during the
Hindenburg presidency was justified by Schmitt on a constitutional level
by the idea that the president acted as the "guardian of the
constitution;" but the end of the Weimar Republic clearly demonstrates
that, on the contrary, a "protected democracy" is not a democracy at
all, and that the paradigm of constitutional dictatorship functions
instead as a transitional phase that leads inevitably to the
establishment of a totalitarian regime.

Given these precedents, it is understandable that the constitution of
the Federal Republic did not mention the state of exception.
Nevertheless, on June 24, 1968, the "great coalition" of Christian
Democrats and Social Democrats passed a law for the amendment of the
constitution (Gesetz zur Ergänzung des Grundgesetzes) that reintroduced
the state of exception (defined as the "state of internal necessity,"
innere Notstand). However, with an unintended irony, for the first time
in the history of the institution, the proclamation of the state of
exception was provided for not simply to safeguard public order and
security, but to defend the "liberal-democratic constitution." By this
point, protected democracy had become the rule.

α

On August 3, 1914, the Swiss Federal Assembly granted the Federal
Council "the unlimited power to take all measures necessary to guarantee
the security, integrity, and neutrality of Switzerland." This unusual
act—by virtue of which a non-warring state granted powers to the
executive that were even vaster and vaguer than those received by the
governments of countries directly involved in the war—is of interest
because of the debates it provoked both in the assembly itself and in
the Swiss Federal Court when the citizens objected that the act was
unconstitutional. The tenacity with which on this occasion the Swiss
jurists (nearly thirty years ahead of the theorists of constitutional
dictatorship) sought (like Waldkirch and Burckhardt) to derive the
legitimacy of the state of exception from the text of the constitution
itself (specifically, Article 2, which read, "the aim of the
Confederation is to ensure the independence of the fatherland against
the foreigner [and] to maintain internal tranquility and order"), or
(like Hoerni and Fleiner) to ground the state of exception in a law of
necessity "inherent in the very existence of the State," or (like His)
in a juridical lacuna that the exceptional provisions must fill, shows
that the theory of the state of exception is by no means the exclusive
legacy of the antidemocratic tradition.

α

In Italy the history and legal situation of the state of exception are
of particular interest with regard to legislation by emergency executive
[governativi] decrees (the so-called law-decrees). Indeed, from this
viewpoint one could say that Italy functioned as a true and proper
juridico-political laboratory for organizing the process (which was also
occurring to differing degrees in other European states) by which the
law-decree "changed from a derogatory and exceptional instrument for
normative production to an ordinary source for the production of law".
But this also means that one of the essential paradigms through which
democracy is transformed from parliamentary to executive
[governamentale] was elaborated precisely by a state whose governments
were often unstable. In any case, it is in this context that the
emergency decree's pertinence to the problematic sphere of the state of
exception comes clearly into view. The Albertine Statute (like the
current Republican Constitution) made no mention of the state of
exception. Nevertheless, the governments of the kingdom resorted to
proclaiming a state of siege many times: in Palermo and the Sicilian
provinces in 1862 and 1866, in Naples in 1862, in Sicily and Lunigiana
in 1894, and in Naples and Milan in 1898, where the repression of the
disturbances was particularly bloody and provoked bitter debates in
parliament. The declaration of a state of siege on the occasion of the
earthquake of Messina and Reggio Calabria on December 28, 1908 is only
apparently a different situation. Not only was the state of siege
ultimately proclaimed for reasons of public order—that is, to suppress
the robberies and looting provoked by the disaster—but from a
theoretical standpoint, it is also significant that these acts furnished
the occasion that allowed Santi Romano and other Italian jurists to
elaborate the thesis (which we examine in some detail later) that
necessity is the primary source of law.

In each of these cases, the state of siege was proclaimed by a royal
decree that, while not requiring parliamentary ratification, was
nevertheless always approved by parliament, as were other emergency
decrees not related to the state of siege (in 1923 and 1924 several
thousand outstanding law-decrees issued in the preceding years were thus
converted into law). In 1926 the Fascist regime had a law issued that
expressly regulated the matter of the law-decrees. Article 3 of this law
established that, upon deliberation of the council of ministers, "norms
having force of law" could be issued by royal decree "(1) when the
government is delegated to do so by a law within the limits of the
delegation, and (2) in extraordinary situations, in which it is required
for reasons of urgent and absolute necessity. The judgment concerning
necessity and urgency is not subject to any oversight other than
parliament's political oversight." The decrees provided for in the
second clause had to be presented to parliament for conversion into law;
but parliament's total loss of autonomy during the Fascist regime
rendered this condition superfluous.

Although the Fascist governments' abuse of emergency decrees was so
great that in 1939 the regime itself felt it necessary to limit their
reach, Article 77 of the Republican Constitution established with
singular continuity that "in extraordinary situations of necessity and
emergency" the government could adopt "provisional measures having force
of law," which had to be presented the same day to parliament and which
went out of effect if not converted into law within sixty days of their
issuance.

It is well known that since then the practice of executive
[governamentale] legislation by law-decrees has become the rule in
Italy. Not only have emergency decrees been issued in moments of
political crisis, thus circumventing the constitutional principle that
the rights of the citizens can be limited only by law (see, for example,
the decrees issued for the repression of terrorism: the law-decree of
March 28, 1978, n. 59, converted into the law of May 21 1978, n. 191
[the so-called Moro Law], and the law-decree of December 15, 1979, n.
625, converted into the law of February 6, 1980, n. 15), but law-decrees
now constitute the normal form of legislation to such a degree that they
have been described as "bills strengthened by guaranteed emergency."
This means that the democratic principle of the separation of powers has
today collapsed and that the executive power has in fact, at least
partially, absorbed the legislative power. Parliament is no longer the
sovereign legislative body that holds the exclusive power to bind the
citizens by means of the law: it is limited to ratifying the decrees
issued by the executive power. In a technical sense, the Italian
Republic is no longer parliamentary, but executive [governamentale]. And
it is significant that though this transformation of the constitutional
order (which is today underway to varying degrees in all the Western
democracies) is perfectly well known to jurists and politicians, it has
remained entirely unnoticed by the citizens. At the very moment when it
would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and
cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has
entirely lost its canon.

α

The only legal apparatus in England that is comparable to the French
état de siège goes by the term martial law; but this concept is so vague
that it has been rightly described as an "unlucky name for the
justification by the common law of acts done by necessity for the
defence of the Commonwealth when there is war within the realm." This,
however, does not mean that something like a state of exception could
not exist. In the Mutiny Acts, the Crown's power to declare martial law
was generally confined to times of war; nevertheless, it necessarily
entailed sometimes serious consequences for the civilians who found
themselves factually involved in the armed repression. Thus Schmitt
sought to distinguish martial law from the military tribunals and
summary proceedings that at first applied only to soldiers, in order to
conceive of it as a purely factual proceeding and draw it closer to the
state of exception: "Despite the name it bears, martial law is neither a
right nor a law in this sense, but rather a proceeding guided
essentially by the necessity of achieving a certain end."

World War One played a decisive role in the generalization of
exceptional executive [governamentali] apparatuses in England as well.
Indeed, immediately after war was declared, the government asked
parliament to approve a series of emergency measures that had been
prepared by the relevant ministers, and they were passed virtually
without discussion. The most important of these acts was the Defence of
the Realm Act of August 4, 1914, known as DORA, which not only granted
the government quite vast powers to regulate the wartime economy, but
also provided for serious limitations on the fundamental rights of the
citizens (in particular, granting military tribunals jurisdiction over
civilians). The activity of parliament saw a significant eclipse for the
entire duration of the war, just as in France. And in England too this
process went beyond the emergency of the war, as is shown by the
approval—on October 29, 1920, in a time of strikes and social
tensions—of the Emergency Powers Act. Indeed, Article 1 of the act
stated that

    if at any time it appears to His Majesty that any action has been
taken or is immediately threatened by any persons or body of persons of
such a nature and on so extensive a scale as to be calculated, by
interfering with the supply and distribution of food, water, fuel, or
light, or with the means of locomotion, to deprive the community, or any
substantial portion of the community, of the essentials of life, His
Majesty may, by proclamation (hereinafter referred to as a proclamation
of emergency), declare that a state of emergency exists.

Article 2 of the law gave His Majesty in Council the power to issue
regulations and to grant the executive the "powers and duties…necessary
for the preservation of the peace," and it introduced special courts
("courts of summary jurisdiction") for offenders. Even though the
penalties imposed by these courts could not exceed three months in jail
("with or without hard labor"), the principle of the state of exception
had been firmly introduced into English law.

α

The place—both logical and pragmatic—of a theory of the state of
exception in the American constitution is in the dialectic between the
powers of the president and those of Congress. This dialectic has taken
shape historically (and in an exemplary way already beginning with the
Civil War) as a conflict over supreme authority in an emergency
situation; or, in Schmittian terms (and this is surely significant in a
country considered to be the cradle of democracy), as a conflict over
sovereign decision.

The textual basis of the conflict lies first of all in Article 1 of the
constitution, which establishes that "the Privilege of the Writ of
Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion
or Invasion the public Safety may require it" but does not specify which
authority has the jurisdiction to decide on the suspension (even though
prevailing opinion and the context of the passage itself lead one to
assume that the clause is directed at Congress and not the president).
The second point of conflict lies in the relation between another
passage of Article 1 (which declares that the power to declare war and
to raise and support the army and navy rests with Congress) and Article
2, which states that "the President shall be Commander in Chief of the
Army and Navy of the United States."

Both of these problems reach their critical threshold with the Civil War
(1861–1865). Acting counter to the text of Article 1, on April 15, 1861,
Lincoln decreed that an army of seventy-five thousand men was to be
raised and convened a special session of Congress for July 4. In the ten
weeks that passed between April 15 and July 4, Lincoln in fact acted as
an absolute dictator (for this reason, in his book Dictatorship, Schmitt
can refer to it as a perfect example of commissarial dictatorship. On
April 27, with a technically even more significant decision, he
authorized the General in Chief of the Army to suspend the writ of
habeas corpus whenever he deemed it necessary along the military line
between Washington and Philadelphia, where there had been disturbances.
Furthermore, the president's autonomy in deciding on extraordinary
measures continued even after Congress was convened (thus, on February
14, 1862, Lincoln imposed censorship of the mail and authorized the
arrest and detention in military prisons of persons suspected of
"disloyal and treasonable practices").

In the speech he delivered to Congress when it was finally convened on
July 4, the president openly justified his actions as the holder of a
supreme power to violate the constitution in a situation of necessity.
"Whether strictly legal or not," he declared, the measures he had
adopted had been taken "under what appeared to be a popular demand and a
public necessity" in the certainty that Congress would ratify them. They
were based on the conviction that even fundamental law could be violated
if the very existence of the union and the juridical order were at stake
("Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself
go to pieces lest that one be violated?"

It is obvious that in a wartime situation the conflict between the
president and Congress is essentially theoretical. The fact is that
although Congress was perfectly aware that the constitutional
jurisdictions had been transgressed, it could do nothing but ratify the
actions of the president, as it did on August 6, 1861. Strengthened by
this approval, on September 22, 1862, the president proclaimed the
emancipation of the slaves on his authority alone and, two days later,
generalized the state of exception throughout the entire territory of
the United States, authorizing the arrest and trial before courts
martial of "all Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within
the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments,
resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording
aid and comfort to Rebels against the authority of the United States."
By this point, the president of the United States was the holder of the
sovereign decision on the state of exception.

According to American historians, during World War One President Woodrow
Wilson personally assumed even broader powers than those Abraham Lincoln
had claimed. It is, however, necessary to specify that instead of
ignoring Congress, as Lincoln had done, Wilson preferred each time to
have the powers in question delegated to him by Congress. In this
regard, his practice of government is closer to the one that would
prevail in Europe in the same years, or to the current one, which
instead of declaring the state of exception prefers to have exceptional
laws issued. In any case, from 1917 to 1918, Congress approved a series
of acts (from the Espionage Act of June 1917 to the Overman Act of May
1918) that granted the president complete control over the
administration of the country and not only prohibited disloyal
activities (such as collaboration with the enemy and the diffusion of
false reports), but even made it a crime to "willfully utter, print,
write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language
about the form of government of the United States."

Because the sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in
the emergency linked to a state of war, over the course of the twentieth
century the metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential
political vocabulary whenever decisions considered to be of vital
importance are being imposed. Thus, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was
able to assume extraordinary powers to cope with the Great Depression by
presenting his actions as those of a commander during a military campaign:

    I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our
people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.…I am
prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a
stricken Nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.…But in the
event that the Congress shall fail to take [the necessary measures] and
in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not
evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask
the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad
Executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power
that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

It is well not to forget that, from the constitutional standpoint, the
New Deal was realized by delegating to the president (through a series
of statutes culminating in the National Recovery Act of June 16, 1933)
an unlimited power to regulate and control every aspect of the economic
life of the country—a fact that is in perfect conformity with the
already mentioned parallelism between military and economic emergencies
that characterizes the politics of the twentieth century.

The outbreak of World War Two extended these powers with the
proclamation of a "limited" national emergency on September 8, 1939,
which became unlimited on May 27, 1941. On September 7, 1942, while
requesting that Congress repeal a law concerning economic matters, the
president renewed his claim to sovereign powers during the emergency:
"In the event that the Congress should fail to act, and act adequately,
I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act.…The American people
can…be sure that I shall not hesitate to use every power vested in me to
accomplish the defeat of our enemies in any part of the world where our
own safety demands such defeat." The most spectacular violation of civil
rights (all the more serious because of its solely racial motivation)
occurred on February 19, 1942, with the internment of seventy thousand
American citizens of Japanese descent who resided on the West Coast
(along with forty thousand Japanese citizens who lived and worked there).

President Bush's decision to refer to himself constantly as the
"Commander in Chief of the Army" after September 11, 2001, must be
considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers
in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this
title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is
attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the
rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between
foreign and civil war) becomes impossible.

> 
> On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 5:21 AM, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
>> Date: Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 9:04 AM
>> Subject: "Senate Votes To Let Military Detain Americans Indefinitely"
>> To: econowmix at googlegroups.com
>>
>>
>>
>> unfortunately, only the beginning, as confirmed by recent a recent law
>> passing the senate in the US ?
>>
>> Senate Votes To Let Military Detain Americans Indefinitely
>>
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/29/senate-votes-to-let-military-detain-americans-indefinitely_n_1119473.html
>> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/senate-military-detention/
>> also see :
>> http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/30-signs-that-the-united-states-of-america-is-being-turned-into-a-giant-prison
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: Dante-Gabryell Monson [mailto:dante.monson at gmail.com]
>>> Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2011 1:14 PM
>>> To: undisclosed-recipients
>>> Subject: Article : "Why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised
>>> reactions against its own peaceful constituents? "
>>>
>>> The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy
>>>
>>> The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has
>>> touched the third rail of our political class's venality
>>>
>>> Naomi Wolf
>>> guardian.co.uk,�Friday 25 November 2011 17.25 GMT
>>>
>>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy?newsfeed=true
>>> large excerpts :
>>> "US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of
>>> unparallelled police brutality in a�coordinated crackdown against peaceful
>>> OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week."
>>> "The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect
>>> Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate
>>> possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to
>>> target journalists.�The New York Times reported�that "New York�cops have
>>> arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at
>>> reporters and photographers" covering protests. "
>>>
>>> "Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo�that revealed lobbyists
>>> vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this
>>> kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly
>>> not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal
>>> overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle
>>> pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the
>>> highest national levels."
>>>
>>> "The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these
>>> scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command"
>>>
>>> "for the DHS�to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of
>>> command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the
>>> blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their
>>> police forces � pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training
>>> from the DHS � to make war on peaceful citizens."
>>>
>>> "The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message".
>>> Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you
>>> want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers.
>>> These were truly eye-opening.
>>>
>>> The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was
>>> legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets
>>> boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system
>>> to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to
>>> restore the Glass-Steagall Act � the Depression-era law, done away with by
>>> President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks.
>>> This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment
>>> banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of
>>> thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
>>>
>>> No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole
>>> that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting
>>> Delaware-based corporations in which�they themselves are investors."
>>>
>>> "why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against
>>> its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent
>>> years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of
>>> the middle class (or upper middle class) � but they are leaving DC privy to
>>> vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender
>>> Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to
>>> special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are
>>> common knowledge, but the notion that�congressmen and women are legislating
>>> their own companies' profitsis less widely known � and if the books were to
>>> be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum.
>>> Indeed,�we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from
>>> trading on non-public information�they have on companies about which they
>>> are legislating "
>>>
>>> "Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the
>>> DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its
>>> emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists'
>>> privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative
>>> process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake
>>> derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system
>>> that allowed members of Congress to profit personally � and immensely � from
>>> their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally
>>> organised�Occupy movement�� well, you will call out the troops on stopping
>>> that advance.
>>>
>>> So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this
>>> week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only
>>> one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress,
>>> with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised
>>> suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has
>>> touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though
>>> they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are,
>>> those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not."
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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