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.
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Quote of the Day
Judging from the main portions of the
history of the world, so far,
justice is always in jeopardy.
- Walt Whitman
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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."
