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

[Dante-Gabryell Monson]

Thank you for this reminder.

Also , it seems that its origins come from :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship

*"A Roman dictator <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator> was the
incumbent of a political
office<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_office> of
the Roman Republic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Republic>. Roman
dictators were allocated absolute power during times of emergency. Their
power was originally neither arbitrary nor unaccountable, being subject to
law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law> and requiring retrospective
justification." *

In the french page on the subject, they mention the etymology of "the one
who talks",
and also mention that usually , set by law, the period of emergency in
which the dictator had power would not exceed 6 months.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictature

which is interesting to compare with the "state of exception"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_exception
( more detailed in french version :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tat_d'exception )

except that... we do not call it "dictatorship" anymore ?

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 6:02 PM, mp <mp at aktivix.org> wrote:

>
>
> 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",  -- whenever "democracy", i.e. rule of
> capitalist, is threatened and has to be saved, it suspends its core
> values of equality before the law/rule of law (destroying the village in
> order to save it, as it were) in order to carry on. It never worked, it
> never will work, but what works is the amazing media macinery, built on
> top of techno promises of future salvation, that distorts reality and
> the public imagination to buy this shit:
> 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."
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net� -
> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
> >>
> >> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com;
> >> Discuss:�
> http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
> >> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
> >> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >> http://www.p2pfoundation.net
> >> https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
> >>
> >>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > http://www.p2pfoundation.net
> > https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
> >
>
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