Tag Archives: Congress

President Obama Begins Indefinite Detention and Turns U.S. Military Against Americans

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment

On New Year’s Eve, while few were paying attention, President Barack Obama signed into law a bill which authorizes the military to investigate and indefinitely detain any American citizen that the President chooses. It is now the law of the land, passed by both houses of Congress and signed by a Democratic president, that you can be identified as a possible terrorist and put into the hands of the military without any communication with the outside world – including attorneys, family, friends, or journalists. The military can then hold you without hearings or trials of any kind for the rest of your life if they so choose.

This is probably the single most frightening legislative act ever undertaken by an American Congress or president. The idea that a president could even remotely consider signing such a draconian and unconstitutional bill into law would never have occurred to me even during the Bush administration. The fact that the first black president in U.S. history is also the first president to turn his military against his own people should bring us all to tears of rage. I voted for this president. I donated to his campaign. For these things, I am now deeply ashamed. This is not a president that brings hope. This is not a man who represents to voters who he really is. This is not a man that I can ever vote for – no matter who the opponent is. Because ultimately, regardless of who Obama’s opponent turns out to be, that person will not have been involved with this law. That person will not have been a person who voted to turn the U.S. military against Americans. That person will not have enacted a law that would fit perfectly into the books of any tin pot dictatorship across the globe. In fact, nearly every dictatorship or authoritarian government worldwide has exactly this law on their books. All dictatorships need this law in order to pick up citizens who dissent and put them away in secret places – or kill them.

I don’t like Ron Paul because I think he’s probably a racist and a homophobe, but he’s angry about this law and he was one of the very few who voted against it. Seems reasonable to me. Let me put it this way: No president who signs a law like this should ever be reelected. Any opponent is preferable by a very wide margin. I hate myself for saying this because I have voted for Democrats all my life. But this is a presidential betrayal of the highest order. Worse, it is a governmental betrayal. Its magnitude is so great that it calls into question our ability to manage a democratic system. It weakens the very foundations of everything we have assumed and trusted about our system. It is an abysmal and terrifying start for the new year.

The ACLU says this about the law:

The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.

No American citizen can allow the U.S. military to take them into custody. And therein lies the real problem. If Americans find that they have no governmental or legal recourse to prevent their arbitrary abduction, arrest or ‘detainment’ by the military, then they have only one possible option left. That would be armed resistance against the U.S. military. What would you do if your son or daughter disappeared into a military prison without any trial? What if all three branches of government agreed that it was just fine to make Americans vanish without trial? With the current climate surrounding the Supreme Court this could certainly happen. What if a president began using this power to make troublesome people or political opponents vanish? What would your option be?

Your option and the option of great numbers of other frightened Americans would be something resembling armed resistance. Eventually, Americans would start killing U.S. military personnel. Soldiers who jumped out of vans to snatch Americans off streets would be shot to death by people defending themselves. This would be justified. In any democracy it would be legal self defense. In a country where the military has been turned against the citizens it becomes justifiable and necessary to kill military personnel while still firmly supporting the nation and its Constitutional basis. This is the unthinkable potential situation created by President Obama and our Congress.

Obama has signed a law that operates outside of the Constitution which guarantees due process to all American citizens. We are all presumed innocent until proven guilty. Obama, the House of Representatives and the Senate do not want that to be the case anymore. They are eliminating that fundamental Constitutional protection. This is a violent and dangerous act against freedom and the American people.

Obama has signed a law which now makes every member of the military a potential threat to every American citizen at home and abroad. You must remember that nothing in this bill requires anyone to prove that a detainee is a terrorist. Since no lawyers or courts are involved no one actually needs to prove anything. The law will simply be used to arrest and hold anyone of the President’s choosing for any reason of the President’s choosing.

A journalist could be detained by the military because the President asserts that the journalist wrote something suspicious in a newspaper article. We may never hear from that journalist again.

Think very carefully about this the next time you watch your troops celebrating Thanksgiving during an NFL broadcast. Those smiling, turkey-eating troops now have the power to march into your house, throw you into a canvas bag and take you to a cinder block cell where no one will ever hear from you again. That’s no exaggeration. What do you think ‘indefinite detention’ means?

The President signed this bill into law with his own little attachment to it – a statement. He claims to have significant issues with the detention provisions. He promises that his administration will never use those provisions to detain Americans. He ‘promises.’ But of course he signs the law. He takes the power. But he wants us all to feel a little better about it because he promises he really won’t use it. This is one creepy little bullshitter if I ever saw one.

Obama has lost all my admiration, my support, my money, and my vote. I will vote for anyone else. Anyone. I don’t care if it’s a Republican. I don’t care if the person can’t read, write, or do arithmetic. The bottom line is that whoever that person is, he or she won’t be Obama. Recall elections should be held to try to remove Senators and Representatives who voted for this bill. I am personally voting for a Democratic primary opponent to my current Representative who voted for this law. People who pose as liberals – like Al Franken – should be removed. The very idea of a liberal Democrat voting for this terrifies me. It really means that we are running out of options. Someone is so interested in gaining this power of indefinite detention that they are willing and able to get everyone working in concert for it. They have totally overcome the distinctions between Democrats and Republicans… liberals and conservatives.

Obama has seized the single most important legal power underlying all dictatorships and authoritarian governments: the power to make people disappear.

Here’s an interesting Russia Times America report on the bill from early December 2011:

Congressional Effort to Censor the Internet

by Cimaxion

The ‘Protect IP’ bill before Congress would give corporations and the government the power to completely shut down internet sites without any due process just for posting a single copyright infringing link. So for a site like Facebook, if a single user posted a single copyrighted something or other, the government could simply pull the plug on Facebook and turn it off.

But chances are the law would be used to stifle expression and ideas from smaller sites. The government would simply have to accuse a site of being engaged in piracy and that site would be effectively terminated.

That’s a terrifying abuse of power. It would complete destroy the internet and anything resembling freedom of communication. This is a glaring example of how a small number of large corporations have taken total control of the Unites States government.

You can sign a petition and learn more at fightforthefuture.org/pipa.

International Space Station May Be Dumped Into the Ocean by U.S. Congress

by Editor

The International Space Station which has taken 11 years and $44 billion to finally bring to a state of completion may be scuttled when its funding runs out in 2015. How about that? One of the greatest achievements in human history – greater than the building of the pyramids – may be dumped into the ocean before it can perform its intended mission which is scientific research and experimentation outside of the Earth’s gravity.

So we elect a man to the presidency twice over who is on the intellectual level of a monkey and give him $80 billion every few months so that he can arbitrarily slaughter the boys and girls of the people who elected him by sending them into a needless Iraqi hell on earth without adequate protection. But we can’t keep the greatest machine ever built by a human hand orbiting the planet? Someone simply must be kidding. I refuse to accept this as a possibility. There’s death money and there’s life money.  Iraq war money is death money and sets human civilization back.  The space station money is life money and it moves civilization forward.  This is a simple equation that almost anyone can figure out.  Except of course the drooling moron retired in Texas.

Opinion Piece: Obama’s Own Images Influence Healthcare Protest Images

by Editor

The controversy over President Obama’s health care reform effort is becoming dangerously angry. Groups consisting almost entirely of white conservatives are agitated about the possibility of legislation that creates new rules for health insurers and establishes some sort of public government-run coverage for those who want or need it. I’ve seen the footage of screaming and shoving at the town hall debates. I’ve seen the footage of the raging white guy snatching the poster of Rosa Parks from the black woman and tearing it to shreds while the white audience applauds his shocking act. I’ve seen the protest signs showing Obama transformed into Hitler. I’ve seen the people holding up swastikas. There’s a lot of rage and alarming racism on display by these people. Furthermore, I don’t see many poor, unemployed or uninsured people screaming and calling the president ‘Hitler.’ One must also stop to consider that many of these angry health care protesters are conservative ‘Christians’ who talk a good game in church about helping the poor and about mercy and all that kind of thing. But when the president actually sits down to try to offer money and government support for health care for people who may desperately need it, these conservative ‘Christians’ go into a frothing rage and call the president ‘Hitler.’

Very strange. Or is it?

Where do these people get all this Hitler fascist stuff? You can easily ascertain that they are not intelligent people simply by watching and listening to them.  Most of them could not tell you where Hitler was born but they seem to throw his name around a lot. They certainly weren’t out there calling George W. Bush ‘Hitler.’ They didn’t hold up swastikas for him. If any U.S. president has even come close to behaving like Hitler, it must be George W. Bush. He actually invaded a country on a false pretext. He imprisoned people without any charges and ordered them to be tortured without mercy for indefinite periods. Hitler did those things and plenty more. Of all U.S. presidents in the history of this nation, George W. Bush most closely matches Hitler in his actions and his assaults upon free speech and the rule of law. So why is Obama being called ‘Hitler’ for initiating some health insurance legislation in Congress?

FaireyObamaPosterPart of the answer is right here in this poster by artist Shepard Fairey. This poster of the candidate Obama became a national icon and is one of the most recognizable political images in our history. It also has a problem.  A big problem.

It’s fascist.

Obama is not fascist.  His images are.  Obama chose this image to represent him in his campaign for the presidency.  Strange choice considering that we are a democracy and naturally recoil at images of giant heroic politicians gazing off into the sky.

The Fairey poster smacks of simplified, hard-edged, focused, efficient, mindless hero-worship.  When images promote hero-worship of political leaders they immediately become oppressive and fascist. NorthKoreaPoster1Look at the North Korean poster with its simple shapes and heroic figures lifting their gazes off and up over the observer’s level as if they are looking into some magnificent future of possibilities and… hope.  The poster from North Korea is doing the same thing the Obama poster is doing.  I’m not going to engage in an argument about the exact definition of fascism versus communism or totalitarianism.  The fact is that all political imagery from repressive governments and totalitarian regimes concerns itself with presenting a leader as a wonderful hero who should be loved for his heroism and his magnificent personality.  The imagery also simplifies itself so that it can be seen from a great distance and be easily understood by unintelligent people.

One may argue that the artist, Shepard Fairey, is infatuated with the techniques of fascist posters from around the world and adopts their forms for his own uses.  Sure.  Artists do that every day.  But as soon as you place those techniques into a political image and promote a particular figure or personality, you are engaging in fascism whether you want to or not.  Perhaps, Fairey never intended the image to become an actual campaign poster.  But Obama easily turned it into one.

Ask yourself this question: what might George Orwell have thought of the Obama poster?

These angry health care reform protesters may not be aware of this direct link between Obama’s imagery and fascism, but they are definitely influenced by it.  They are swimming in fascist Obama imagery everywhere they turn and so they are simply using it for their own purposes.

I’m not letting myself off the foolish hero-worship hook here either.  I was somewhat taken with the Obama poster during the presidential campaign.  I made the following video as my own little effort to help the campaign.  The video focuses entirely on my discovery of one of the posters on the wall of an abandoned building in Baltimore.

My video is part of the problem. It revels in the fascist image of the candidate. I think my little film is actually pretty good, but I am not proud of being bamboozled by that suspect poster.

The Obama cult of personality imagery continues unabated.

obamacoversHe’s popular, certainly.  He’s the nation’s first black president which is fantastic and overdue and accounts for a great deal of the hero-worship.  He is a hero in many respects.  But the images are focused on his face, figure, and personality.  Not his politics.  That puts the images directly into the camp of fascism or near-fascism.  We in the United States typically maintain a somewhat suspicious attitude toward politicians.  That’s a good thing because it keeps them nervous and, with the help of the free press, it keeps them somewhat in line.

But right now president Obama is dealing with people who are expressing enormous hatred which is partly class-based and partly racist.  And, unfortunately, Obama’s own use of images containing fascist elements has unwittingly given these people a weapon with which to attack the foundations of his presidency.  It has also given them the courage to use it.

If you put your face on a poster, someone’s going to throw an egg.