Saturday, August 10, 2013

Sunday Round-Up - August 11, 2013

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at post-Constitutional America, the recently eviscerated Voting Rights Act, the "liberal media" and the surprising allies in the unfolding drama in Egypt.  Sources include TomDispatch.com, The Daily Kos, Mother Jones, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

__________________________________________________________________

Quote of the Day
Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far,
justice is always in jeopardy. 
- Walt Whitman
__________________________________________________________________
 
Post-Constitutional America
In a TomDispatch post on August 4, former State Department whistle blower Peter van Buren paints a chilling picture of the America that we are now living in. Two hundred thirty five years to the day after the Continental Congress established the first whistle blower protection law (see below), Wiki-leaker Bradley Manning was convicted on 20 of 22 counts and now faces up to 136 years in prison. The government's actions have "ushered us, almost unnoticed, into post-Constitutional America." Van Buren notes that in recent years, "weapons, tactics, and techniques developed in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the war on terror have begun arriving in the homeland." His examples include up-armored police departments, drones, and "above all, suveillance technolgy." Also present in our post-Constitutional nation is a "new Guantanamo-ized definition of justice." And so to the arrest and detainment of Bradley Manning.   After his arrest, Manning was subjected to "three years of cruel detainment, where, as might well have happened at Gitmo, Manning, kept in isolation, was deprived of clothing, communications, legal advice, and sleep. The sleep deprivation regime imposed on him certainly met any standard, other than Washington’s and possibly Pyongyang’s, for torture." As for the trial itself, "rules of evidence reaching back to early English common law were turned upside down." So what are some aspects of post-Constitutional America as it is beginning to take shape? Just a few examples from Van Buren's post:
  • "Post-9/11, torture famously stopped being torture if an American did it, and its users were not prosecutable by the Justice Department."
  • "Full-spectrum spying is not considered to violate the Fourth Amendment and does not even require probable cause."
  • "Government whistleblowers are commanded to return to face justice, while law-breakers in the service of the government are allowed to flee justice."
  • "Secret laws and secret courts can create secret law you can’t know about for “crimes” you don’t even know exist. You can nonetheless be arrested for committing them."
 
The "Liberal Media"
The Daily Kos had a great post on August 7: "15 Things Everyone Would Know If There Were a Liberal Media".  From the impact of outsourcing on the US job market to the outrageous Republican gerrymandering of Congressional districts to US market-driven health care costs (highest per capita in the world) to the number of prisoners in US jails (we have 25% of the world's prisoners and rank #1 in this department), the post is well worth a read. Here's one of the neat graphics from the post.
 
1965 Voting Rights Act
On the 48th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act being signed into law by LBJ, Mother Jones had a post reminding us of how much the law has meant.   MJ presented "five recent and egregious examples of minority discrimination that were blocked by Section 5, the part of the law the Supreme Court eviscerated in June." Here are two of them:
  • The all-white board of aldermen in the town of Kilmichael, Mississippi (pop. 830), canceled town elections after an unprecedented number of black candidates made it onto the ballot. The DOJ forced an election and the town elected its first black mayor and three black aldermen.
  • After the 2010 census showed that blacks had become a majority in Georgia's Augusta-Richmond, the state Legislature passed a bill that "rescheduled voting from November, which had a traditionally high black voter turnout, to July, which had a low turnout overall, but especially for blacks. The change only affected Augusta-Richmond, and, not surprisingly, was rejected under Section 5."
 
The Egyptian Restoration
Sarah Chayes, in an August 1 article for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "The Egyptian Restoration", tries to address recent developments in Egypt. "Much of the Egyptian population now embraces the very military it seemed bent on ejecting from power during the 2011 revolution. What's the reason for the about-face?", she asks. Chayes offers a reappraisal of the Egyptian Arab Spring based on interviews she conducted in 2011 and in July 2013:
1. The 2011 protesters were not revolting against the military. "The protests were enraged not at Mubarak’s army but at a tight network of high-rolling capitalists who were seen to have hijacked the Egyptian government (military included), rewriting the laws, awarding themselves privileged access to land and other public resources, and employing police repression, all for personal gain."
2. Democracy, per se, was not the aim of the 2011 revolution. "Protesters...were not demanding the vote for the sake of the vote. They were demanding the deliverables that are supposed to result from democracy...[They were demanding] that the perpetrators of the heist of public resources be subject to repercussions...the return of stolen or squandered public assets; an end to the pervasive corruption, which cascaded down from the top of the system to include daily shakedowns by auxiliary police, institutionalized graft in public tenders at all levels of government, and ad hoc fees demanded even by teachers and doctors."
3. The Morsi government was seen to be merely substituting Muslim Brotherhood networks for those of Mubarak. Many Egyptians became convinced "that the Muslim Brotherhood had no intention of enacting the type of systemic corrections the revolutionaries had demanded."
4. The Egyptian military is neither as powerful nor as competent as it is cracked up to be.
5. Some in both the Brotherhood and the military have an interest in continuing the violence. "The goal (achieved masterfully by the Algerian government in the 1990s) would be to present the people—and the international community—with a stark choice between authoritarianism and terrorism."
6. "Egyptians, for now, seem to have convinced themselves that this is indeed the choice they are facing. And they have chosen the former. They have opted for Restoration."
Other Stuff
Comics
Continental Congress' "Whistle Blower" Protection Law (July 30, 1778)
"...it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”
Who Is "Mother Jones"?
Mother Jones is a courageous source of investigative journalism. But who, if anyone, is the publication's namesake? Well, according to Wikipedia: "Mary Harris "Mother" Jones (July 1837– 30 November 1930) was an Irish-American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent labor and community organizer. She then helped coordinate major strikes and cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World."


No comments:

Post a Comment