ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

The protests against the Republican convention have barely begun but the police have already begun their crackdown against any one perceived to be involved the demonstrations. Police in the Twin Cities worked with federal officials to detain dozens of activists and conduct a series of coordinated raids on a number of locations. Among them was Democracy Now!’s Elizabeth Press who was detained, along with several others, in a house raid on the video collective, I-Witness Video. Press files a report from the streets of the Twin Cities.

But why should I care, you ask, I’m not a rabble rouser, I won’t have anything to worry about in the police state these tactics hint we’re going towards.

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

Frankly, this is hugely anti-constitutional. In the last 8 years the 4th amendment has been completely bent over the oval office desk and fucked, hard-core, and we’ve said nothing, because only “terrorists” were getting no-knock raids. (Interesting, isn’t it, that the Jews were almost the last to be persecuted by the Nazis, and the first were the communists - persecuted by the Nazis, the socialist party…) Now, our media and others who dissent against the ruling class are being ‘detained’ (the same term they use for captives in Guantanamo, right?), stripped of their rights given to us by the very founders of this country who fought against governmental oppression and intolerance.

Free speech and the right to protest and bear arms against your goverment is enshrined in the very words of the founders of our contry, these aren’t some piss-ass amentments brought to ban flag burning, these are the words of those who risked EVERYTHING to give us everything we hold dear in this country. This is being taken away from us. It will not be given back without fighting for it again. People died for these freedoms (the same freedom we’re claiming to defend in Iraq and yet denying to anyone saying the Iraq war is a bad idea). Do you want to die for these freedoms, against your fellow countrymen who think you shouldn’t have them? Someday you may.

Some may say it will never come to American vs. American for our constitution rights, but to get these rights at all it was British vs. British until they declared American sovereignity.

In 2005, federal authorities concluded that a Monsanto consultant had visited the home of an Indonesian official and, with the approval of a senior company executive, handed over an envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. The money was meant as a bribe to win looser environmental regulations for Monsanto’s cotton crops, according to a court document. Monsanto was also caught concealing the bribe with fake invoices.

A few years earlier, in the age of Enron, these kinds of charges would probably have resulted in a criminal indictment. Instead, Monsanto was allowed to pay $1 million and avoid criminal prosecution by entering into a monitoring agreement with the Justice Department.

In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.

Instead, many companies, from boutique outfits to immense corporations like American Express, have avoided the cost and stigma of defending themselves against criminal charges with a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, which allows the government to collect fines and appoint an outside monitor to impose internal reforms without going through a trial. In many cases, the name of the monitor and the details of the agreement are kept secret.

It’s bribery made legal - oops, we broke the law, here’s some money, don’t prosecute us and don’t tell anyone about it.

Deferred prosecutions have become a favorite tool of the Bush administration. But some legal experts now wonder if the policy shift has led companies, in particular financial institutions now under investigation for their roles in the subprime mortgage debacle, to test the limits of corporate anti-fraud laws.

Some lawyers suggest that companies may be willing to take more risks because they know that, if they are caught, the chances of getting a deferred prosecution are good. “Some companies may bear the risk” of legally questionable business practices if they believe they can cut a deal to defer their prosecution indefinitely, Mr. Khanna said.

Way cheaper and better on the propoganda PR side of things than lawsuits and other muck like that. At least all those companies involved in getting people killed in Iraq (by sending them to their deaths as employees or shooting them to death as Iraqis) don’t have to even worry about the bribery money, since they have been made immune from any law on the face of this earth thanks to the Bush administration. Seriously, can anyone look at this law and say that it’s a good thing with a straight face, I mean, without being payed to by a corporation? It’s already hard enough to get anyone to admit responsibility in a corporate environment, and the bad-deed-doers usually go unpunished, but this is beyond the limit.

Deferred prosecution agreements, or D.P.A.’s, have become controversial because of a medical supply company’s agreement to pay up to $52 million to the consulting firm of John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, as an outside monitor to avoid criminal prosecution. 

If they’re paying that much to avoid prosecution, it must mean they’re killing (or at least substantially harming) people through negligence (or whatever reason) and stand to lose substantially more than $52 million dollars in the ensuing judicial and media feeding frenzy that would go on when their criminal trespass came to light.

At a Congressional hearing last month, Mr. Ashcroft defended the agreements, saying that they avoided “destroying entire corporations” through criminal indictments.

And god forbid any red-blooded money-making American corporation suffer for their criminal offenses.

“Prosecutors understand that a corporate indictment can be a corporate death sentence,” he said. “A deferred prosecution can avoid the catastrophic collateral consequences and costs that are associated with corporate conviction.”

Such consequences which should only be handed down to actual American citizens. Which, technically, corporations are one of. Only with near-unlimited resources and no-one to blame when things go horribly wrong. Sorry our medicine made your heart explode, company policy says we don’t have to care, fuck you.

The agreements were once rare, but their use has skyrocketed in the current administration, with 35 deals last year alone by the Justice Department, lawyers who follow the trend said. Banks, financial service companies and auditors have frequently entered into such agreements, including recent ones involving Merrill Lynch, the Bank of New York, AmSouth Bank, KPMG and others. Beyond financial crimes, deferred agreements have been used in lieu of prosecuting companies — though not individuals — for export control violations, obscenity violations, Medicare and Medicaid fraud, kickbacks and environmental violations.

Shocking. Sho-cking.

Timothy Dickinson, a lawyer in Washington who was the outside monitor for Monsanto, agreed. Corporate lenders caught up in the mortgage scandals should not assume they will be given the chance for a deferred prosecution, Mr. Dickinson said, and the Justice Department should “insist on a guilty plea” rather than offering a deal.

“It’s a tool that will remain to be used by prosecutors in appropriate circumstances, but not every circumstance,” he said. “It depends how egregious the conduct is.”

We’ll see. Oh yes, we shall see.

Apparent gaps in White House e-mail archives coincide with dates in late 2003 and early 2004 when the administration was struggling to deal with the CIA leak investigation and the possibility of a congressional probe into Iraq intelligence failures.

473 days over a period of 20 months

No really, I’m completely shocked. They learned. That’s right, they learned. Otherwise GWB’d have been Nixoned out of office by now. Nixon loved audiotape. That was his undoing. GWB had records destroyed (obviously went for the obvious shotgun method, so they are definately hiding something foul here, there is absolutely no reason for covering up their good-doing, only evil-doing, right?)

The government is of the people, by the people, for the people, right? Why are they telling us it’s none of our business what they are doing? That’s unconstitutional.

Two federal laws require the White House to preserve all records including e-mail.

Facciola gave the White House five business days to report whether computer backup tapes contain e-mails written between 2003 and 2005.

In asking that the complaints be dismissed, the Bush administration says the president’s record keeping practices under the Presidential Records Act are not reviewable by the courts.

The Bush administration had offered to have the government file a sworn declaration stating that the White House is safeguarding all backup materials. Instead, Facciola recommended that the judge in the case, Henry Kennedy, issue a court order because “a declaration is not punishable by contempt. In other words, without such an order, destruction of the backup media would be without consequence.”

Does anyone really think Bush wont completely get away with this? “I’m the President, Terror Terror!” and everyone will start nodding their heads sagely and he will go on to bone us once again. Then partisan accusation will be flung, judicial activism will be alleged, labels will be planted and people will spend more time defending themselves from the labels Bush has given them than actually trying to fight his illegal actions.

Opponents argue that inmates are often not rendered fully unconscious by the first drug in the cocktail as they are supposed to be before the second drug, a paralytic, is administered. They suffer when they are conscious while the paralytic and the third drug, which burns as it enters the system, are given.

Well, we have fancy fucking brain monitoring equipment, we can scan their brains for signs that the suffering system is active or not and how much it is, and we can actually find out, instead of just guessing whether or not these people are dying ‘in peace’ or whatever it’s supposed to be.

Why not offer an option of mental reconditioning against whatever crime it is they have committed? Like build into them an aversion of young people, if they are convicted pedophiles, or an aversion to weapons and violence if they are violent offenders. We have therapy programs for drug users that seek to instill in them a conviction that drugs are ruining their life and their only hope is to quit forever and go to meetings. Why don’t we have PA or MA (paedophilia anonymous or murderers anonymous)?

Today I blog about Chile, the country not the vegetable, and prostitution, the oldest profession. Adult prostitution is legal in Chile. Their sex workers are protected, and I’m honestly surprised they allow this as they are a very Christian nation. But, as the man in the article said “Everyone can do what they want, but if someone tells me that they’ll do something immoral … I’m not going to encourage it.”

I’m only mentioning this because a Chilean prostitute is donating the proceeds of 27 hours of “love” to a charity for poor, disabled children. She has raised $4,000.

In this country, prostitutes are beaten, killed, or jailed, and usually on drugs.

Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness indeed. Of course, this is more newsworthy than the stark American parallels with 1930s Germany.

“Homeland security” — “heimat” — became popularized by the National Socialists [Nazi Party]. Goebbels developed the practice of embedding journalists.

NAOMI WOLF: … If you look at the sequence of, you know, Hitler descending in an airplane in von Riefenstahl’s famous Triumph of the Will and being greeted by the uniformly armed paramilitary sort of surrounding their leader and him saying, “Help us accomplish our mission,” and then you look at other famous images from this administration –

AMY GOODMAN: Like George Bush on “Mission Accomplished.”

NAOMI WOLF: “Mission Accomplished,” exactly right. You look at how, you know, Hitler said we have to invade Czechoslovakia because they’re a staging ground for terrorists and they’re abusing their ethnic minorities

we should be afraid when the state starts to torture people that it sees as at the margins or that citizens see at the margins: brown people on an island in Guantanamo with Muslim names, whatever. That’s what they did in Germany in ’31, ’32: anarchists, communists, Gypsies, Jews, whatever, homosexuals, whatever. You know, people didn’t care, because they were seen as at the margins. People knew about the torture cellars in Germany.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting. During the lead up to Nazi Germany, American reporters were fired by their American editors, pulled back from Germany, because they were sounding the warning. They were saying, “We’re seeing a fascist society build.” And they were told that they were biased, they were not understanding the circumstances in which Hitler was rising up, people were concerned about their economy, they had been devastated, and that they were being alarmist.

There’s more. It always happens to someone else, though, you know. As long as we have true patriots in charge of this nation, we’ll be fine.

Unfortunately, you are always someone else to someone else.

Senator Kennedy via Democracy Now!: Make no mistake about it: waterboarding is already illegal under United States law. It’s illegal under the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit outrages upon personal dignity, including cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment. It’s illegal under the Torture Act, which prohibits acts specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. It’s illegal under the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. And it violates the Constitution. The nation’s top military lawyers and legal experts across the political spectrum have condemned waterboarding as torture. And after World War II, the United States prosecuted — prosecuted — Japanese officers for engaging in waterboarding. What more does this nominee need to enforce existing laws?

I just wish my Senators felt the same. I sent a fax calling shame on Senator Feinstein for voting to approve Mukasey’s nomination. I told her I will vote against her until the end of time for supporting torture and rolling over (again) for Mr. Bush’s anti-American agenda (though not quite in those words.)

This is actually what I said:

Shame on you, Ms. Feinstein, for voting to approve Mr. Mukasey’s nomination. I oppose torture. Waterboarding is torture. If you do not believe so, I invite you to have this practice tried on yourself.

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

I will vote against you from now until the end of time for your betrayals of American ideals and justice. I cannot put into words exactly how saddened and shamed I am.

More Americans have died now than for a war YOU have authorized than in all terrorist attacks against America.

Shame on you. Enjoy your power and privelege of ignoring your constituents while it lasts, as the President you roll over for destroys our country. You make me want to emigrate.

Probably a bit harsh, but I am upset and have no other way of expressing my frustration in a Congress that swept the election due to dissatisfaction with the way our government was being ran and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing to change things for the will of the American people.

For those of you interested, my words to Mr. Kennedy:

 Mr. Kennedy,

I am not one of your constituents, but I wanted to thank you for your vote against Mr. Mukasey and your insightful comments afterwards. It appears you have a strong sense of history and justice, which sadly many Americans, especially the media, lack.

We need more men and women like you in Congress, and in America in general. It seems that you still believe that government in America is “Of the people, by the people, for the people,” and not “Of me, by me, for me,” as Mr. Bush and many other elected and appointed goverment officials seem to believe.

Though you are not my senator, I look forward to helping you create a better America for all our children, including the children of those who will never see them grow up because they have been lost in this misguided war in Iraq.

Go to www.senate.gov and make your voice heard! Demand to know why “We the people” has changed to “We the goverment, and you all had better shut up and follow along.”

“Political analysts say there is some evidence that the confluence of American voices is catching the attention of politicians, but it remains to be seen how much influence the movement may have.”

Instead of a government of the people, by the people, for the people, we seem to have gotten ourselves a government of the government, by the government, for the government. When the government is about the government, you no longer have a democracy, you have a benign dictatorship.

President Bush has sworn to uphold the constitution. Yet he constantly seeks ways around it. In fact according to Article VI of the Constitution, State laws are second only to the Constitution, and no laws shall be made contrary to said constitution. Such at the wiretapping law just blissfully passed by Congress and made ‘law of the land’ by our mis-elected President.

Article VI of the US Constitution

“All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”