“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” ~Thomas Jefferson
This is the third in a series of reflections on where America is headed and what key errors have led to the decline of the republic. The first essay looked at two recent Supreme Court decisions that usurped long held American freedoms. The second studied the emergence of the surveillance state. This reflection delves into the concentration of arbitrary power in the office of the president of the United States.
Beginning with the Korean War, the courts and Congress ceded to the president the power to initiate wars by reinterpreting “the commander in chief” passage of the Constitution. After Vietnam, in 1973, Congress passed a War Powers Act, which sought to curve this. However, it still grants the president the power to introduce military forces anywhere for any reason for 90 days.
This is a far cry from Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution: “The Congress shall have power to declare War.” Members of Congress like Representative Peter King (R-NY) — who have sworn to uphold the Constitution — say the president doesn’t need Congressional authorization to wage war.
The record on civil liberties at home is no better.
When at war with the southern states, President Abraham Lincoln suspended basic civil liberties such as habeas corpus and, according to Ted Galen Carpenter, “detained confederate sympathizers without trials or used military tribunals to prosecute them . . . A year after the war, in Ex Parte Milligan the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the executive branch’s promiscuous use of military tribunals, ruling such procedures unconstitutional.”
During World War I President Woodrow Wilson imprisoned anti-war activists, suppressed free speech, and imposed racial segregation on federal employees. In World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt, in addition to rounding up Japanese Americans and placing them in internment camps for the duration of the war, also won a case that would be seized on decades later by the Bush Administration. Ted Galen Carpenter explains in the October 2013 issue of Chronicles:
The focus of the Bush administration’s argument was the claimed authority to detain “enemy combatants,” either aliens or U.S. citizens, without providing them access to U.S. civilian courts. . . . That view relied heavily on the 1942 Supreme Court decision Ex Parte Quirin. . . . The Bush Administration extended the Quirin reasoning to cover not just an active, specific terrorist mission (as in Quirin) [so] that U.S. citizens accused of involvement in terrorist schemes were not entitled to due process and other constitutional rights.
Candidate Barack Obama blasted the Bush Administration’s record on civil liberties, but President Obama asserts in a 2011 legal memo the right to target US citizens for execution, without any charges or due judicial process. This is something that no previous president has done.
The United States’ founders drafted a constitution to set up institutions that protected US American liberty and did not rely on good politicians to save the day. Judges and bureaucrats, by reinterpreting “the living Constitution,” have undermined institutional safeguards and centralized arbitrary power in the presidency to the extreme that President Obama now has kill lists which include US citizens listed.
The policies of the British government that American rebels considered despotic were acts of parliament, not arbitrary edicts by a monarch. King George III declared war on the American colonists, but only because that is what parliament wanted. Since 1688, parliament has held political power in the United Kingdom.
Thomas Jefferson, the American rebel who drafted the Declaration of Independence, observed that:
Societies exist under three forms sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under governments wherein the will of every one has a just influence, as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our states in a great one. 3. Under governments of force: as is the case in all other monarchies and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep.
Over the past 150 years, the courts and the Congress in the United States have concentrated power in the office of the president to an extreme that undermines the original intent of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence. The American Heritage Dictionary offers a definition of tyranny as “A government in which a single ruler is vested with absolute power.”
The president of the United States today sits in the Oval Office, reviewing kill lists and unilaterally ordering extrajudicial executions, including American citizens. Are these the actions of a government in a free society?
Originally published in the PanAm Post
An independent report commissioned by the Government found that patients were abused and neglected by hostile staff and were left in humiliating and undignified conditions. The impact on them was “unimaginable”, the report said.
Despite the public exposure the deaths continue and The Daily Mail on October 9, 2013 reports on how taxpayers are left holding the bag while those responsible are not held accountable:Patients, most of whom were treated at the trust’s main hospital in Stafford, were “robbed of their dignity”, left in soiled bedclothes, unwashed and in states of undress in full view of others, it found.
Families of patients had to clean lavatories and public areas themselves, while food and drinks were left out of reach and, it was alleged, patients drank out of vases.
Attitudes of staff were at times “uncaring”. Managers were “in denial” about the problems and were concentrating on cutting costs and hitting targets to achieve foundation trust status, the report said.
There was said to be a culture of fear and bullying with staff concerned they would lose their jobs if targets were not hit.
A scandal-plagued hospital trust has today admitted breaching health and safety law after a a patient died when nurses failed to notice she was severely diabetic and needed insulin.This is the future that awaits all Americans beginning in 2014 as Obamacare is fully implemented, but has already been experienced by American veterans for some time who are receiving government healthcare through the Veterans Affairs Department. Thousands of veterans in the United States have been unnecessarily exposed to disease due to unclean practices in government hospitals.
The Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust has pleaded guilty to failing to ensure the safety of Gillian Astbury, yet no staff will face the consequences in the courts.
The 66-year-old lapsed into a fatal diabetic coma while being treated at Stafford Hospital in April 2007, when staff failed to read her medical history during a 10-day stay.
After her death the NHS trust was prosecuted as an organisation, meaning that individual nurses, doctors and managers will not face jail for their failings.
Today it has pleaded guilty through its barrister to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act by failing to properly manage and organise hospital services, including its systems for record-keeping, patient information and communication between staff members.
It now faces a huge fine, funded by the taxpayer, because magistrates sitting in Stafford committed the case to the town's Crown Court after ruling that their sentencing powers for the offence were insufficient.
Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity. ~Wendell Phillips
In the 20th century, the United States reached levels of wealth for more people than had ever been seen in human history. However, those in power whittled away at the nation’s basic freedoms, slowly and over generations. Complaints were few because material prosperity endured.
Today, massive and unsustainable debts are maintaining the US standard of living. Freedom continues to be whittled away at, but more US Americans are awakening to this hard truth, because material prosperity for many is evaporating. One area that they view with growing alarm is the emergence of the United States of America as a surveillance state, since, along with a militarized police force, it is the infrastructure of totalitarianism.
This is the second in a series of reflections seeking to understand these negative trends in the United States. The first essay analyzed the role of the US Supreme Court — in particular, its decisions that undermined private property rights and forced taxpayers to cooperate with evil. I concluded with the controversial proposition that the present system in the United States is post-constitutional.
For generations, US Americans believed that the first, third, fourth, and ninth amendments found in the Bill of Rights protected the privacy of citizens of the United States — that only a small number engaged in criminal conduct would be subjected to surveillance, following a court order permitting such activity by the authorities.
However, the arrival of new technologies provided the state with the means to circumvent these constitutional provisions. In the state of Florida, for example, automated systems are replacing toll operators, and they either process your information via your Sun Pass or by photographing your license plate and sending you the bill. According to the pre-paid toll program privacy policy, “information concerning a SunPass account is provided only when required to comply with a subpoena or court order.”
In other words, they are compiling and storing information on your whereabouts.
Affirming this reality, the American Civil Liberties Union stated on July 18, 2013, that “Police around the United States are recording the license plates of passing drivers and storing the information for years with little privacy protection. The information potentially allows authorities to track the movements of everyone who drives a car.”
However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation makes clear that the federal and state governments are monitoring not only US Americans’ physical movement, but also their telephone and e-mail communications.
The government is mass collecting phone metadata of all US customers under the guise of the Patriot Act. Moreover, the media reports confirm that the government is collecting and analyzing the content of communications of foreigners talking to persons inside the United States, as well as collecting collecting [sic] much more, without a probable cause warrant. Finally, the media reports confirm the “upstream” collection off of the fiberoptic cables that Mr. Klein first revealed in 2006.
The Edward Snowden revelations expose a national government that is systematically monitoring and recording the communications of the entire US American people all of the time, and beyond. From the Wall Street Journal:
The National Security Agency — which possesses only limited legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens — has built a surveillance network that covers more Americans’ Internet communications than officials have publicly disclosed, current and former officials say. The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology . . .
What is equally disturbing is that private companies are complicit in the behavior — when not engaging in their own monitoring of internet communications — although, to be fair, their will is not always on the side of the spying. (See the video below.) Further, even though the immense and illegal surveillance apparatus is out in the open now, we see no remorse from the instigators and the elected officials responsible. Rather, they are doubling down, and their apologists are right there with them.
Unfortunately, there is no plan; there is no conspiracy. This expansion and centralization of power has continued under both Republicans and Democrats in the United States and would most likely continue under a third party. Centralized power has become an end unto itself, and as the late Czech president Vaclav Havel observed:
Once the claims of central power have been placed above law and morality, once the exercise of that power is divested of public control, and once the institutional guarantees of political plurality and civil rights have been made a mockery of, or simply abolished, there is no reason to respect any other limitations. The expansion of central power does not stop at the frontier between the public and the private, but instead, arbitrarily pushes back that border until it is shamelessly intervening in areas that once were private.
The United States is reaching a tipping point that leads into a totalitarian abyss and the crackdown on privacy whistleblowers is one of many ominous signs regarding where this centralization of power is heading.
Originally published in the PanAm Post.
2,977 victims of September 11, 2001 terror attacksLooking back on the decade since 9/11, one appreciates Edmund Burke’s summary judgment of that generation of British leaders who lost the North American colonies. “A great empire and little minds go ill together.”It is not only the pundits and talking heads questioning the response over the past decade but one of the first two warriors to take to the air on September 11 to defend Washington DC. Her name is Major Heather Penney, of the first District of Columbia Air National Guard, in an interview on C-Span reflecting on September 11 a decade later said beginning at 54 minutes and 31 seconds:
"I often wonder if we have forsaken some of what it means to be Americans - some of what it means to be America in our response to try to assure our citizens of security. There is no such thing as perfect security." [..] Have we been overzealous? Has the pendulum swung too far? Such that we are abdicating our value set in terms of what it means to be an American in our desire to be totally safe?Later on in the same interview she seemed to be echoing a sentiment echoed by Benjamin Franklin over two centuries earlier: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." The erosion of civil liberties, and the passage of the so-called "Patriot Act" are just two of the many shadows to emerge from that horrible day ten years ago that has had terrible consequences over the past decade. Terror and war are the tools that revolutionaries have always used to subvert and destroy established orders and do away with long cherished freedoms.
I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term “conservative” as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the “structures” against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again? On the whole my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when witnessing what this meant, in May 1968 in Paris, that I discovered my vocation.In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting and smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to step back, shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections suddenly left them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground. Cars rose into the air and landed on their sides, their juices flowing from unseen wounds. The air was filled with triumphant shouts, as one by one lamp-posts and bollards were uprooted and piled on the tarmac, to form a barricade against the next van-load of policemen.
[...] Of course I was naïve—as naïve as my friend. But the ensuing argument is one to which I have often returned in my thoughts. What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them? I was obnoxiously pompous: but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the people I knew.
She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.
My friend is now a good bourgeoise like the rest of them. Armand Gatti is forgotten; and the works of Antonin Artaud have a quaint and dépassé air. The French intellectuals have turned their backs on ’68, and the late Louis Pauwels, the greatest of their post-war novelists, has, in Les Orphelins, written the damning obituary of their adolescent rage. And Foucault? He is dead from AIDS, the result of sprees in the bath-houses of San Francisco, visited during well-funded tours as an intellectual celebrity. But his books are on university reading lists all over Europe and America. His vision of European culture as the institutionalized form of oppressive power is taught everywhere as gospel, to students who have neither the culture nor the religion to resist it. Only in France is he widely regarded as a fraud.
The offspring of Focault are speaking out:
