Politics in America

The US is one of the few countries in the world where legal fictions have the rights of citizens and human being have "rights" only insofar they they don't try to exercise them. It is an Alice In Wonderland country.

Here is Robert Reich:

A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.

First things first. The Supreme Court’s rulings that money is speech and corporations are people have now opened the floodgates to unlimited (and often secret) political contributions from millionaires and billionaires. Consider the Koch brothers (worth $25 billion each), who are bankrolling the Tea Party and already running millions of dollars worth of ads against Democrats.

Such millionaires and billionaires aren’t contributing their money out of sheer love of country. They have a more self-interested motive. Their political spending is analogous to their other investments. Mostly they want low tax rates and friendly regulations.

Wall Street is punishing Democrats for enacting the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (weak as it is) by shifting its money to Republicans. The Koch brothers’ petrochemical empire has financed, among many other things, candidates who will vote against environmental protection.

This tsunami of big money into politics is the real public nuisance. It’s making it almost impossible for the voices of average Americans to be heard because most of us don’t have the dough to break through. By granting First Amendment rights to money and corporations, the First Amendment rights of the rest of us are being trampled on.

This is where the Occupiers come in. If there’s a core message to the Occupier movement it’s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth poses a grave danger to our democracy.

Yet when Occupiers seek to make their voices heard — in one of the few ways average people can still be heard — they’re told their First Amendment rights are limited.

The New York State Court of Appeals along with many mayors and other officials say Occupiers can picket — but they can’t encamp. Yet it’s the encampments themselves that have drawn media attention (along with the police efforts to remove them).

A bunch of people carrying pickets isn’t news. When it comes to making views known, picketing is no competition for big money .

Yet if Occupiers now shift tactics from passive resistance to violence, it would spell the end of the movement. The vast American middle class that now empathizes with the Occupiers would promptly desert them.

I may be wrong, but if you refuse to give political rights to people, then they will organize and seize those rights by bloody revolution. The words of Thomas Jefferson are prophetic: The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Reclaiming America

Here is Lawrence Lessig on a new coalition to educate Americans about the corrupting influence of big money in politics and their society:

Lawrence Lessig Welcomes Rootstrikers to United Republic from Rootstrikers on Vimeo.

More details at unitedrepublic.org.

Freedom to Peacefully Assemble and Petition the Government

Freedom in action:



The above video is a little hard to square with this very clear statement of citizen's rights in the United States Constitution, specifically the 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I guess the Constitution really means that you have a "right" to peacefully assemble unless the police get annoyed and decide to take pot shots at you and harass you because they find your video camera "annoying".

If you ever read the USSR's Constitution or Communist China's Constitution, they are full of "rights". Wonderful documents. But only a fool would take the chance to act on any of those "rights" because those documents were purely window dressing to wave at the world and declare that those countries were "great democracies" with all the latest and best "rights" for their citizens. Banana Republic USA has joined their ranks. Lots of wonderful "rights" but don't you dare take them seriously.

Update 2011nov10: Here is an article in the San Jose Mercury News about the above incident:

Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminal justice professor who's an expert in police decision-making and use of force, said the video left him "astonished, amazed and embarrassed."

"Unless there's something we don't know, that's one of the most outrageous uses of a firearm that I've ever seen," he said. "Unless there's a threat that you can't see in the video, that just looks like absolute punishment, which is the worst type of excessive force."

Campbell said his friends saw him get hit and rushed him away to the shelter of a doorway. Someone brought an ice pack while a legal observer took down information, and then his friends helped him get to a taxi. He saw a doctor later Thursday, who told him to keep the wound bandaged and iced. He said Monday he has a 1½ -inch wound with swelling and bruising around it.

Campbell said he does social and digital media work for a local nonprofit and supports Occupy Oakland. "I don't camp out there, I've been a participant but not an active organizer," he said. "I've come out for general assemblies and marches, and I came out that day for the general strike to show my support."

He said he brought his camera that night to document any excessive force used by police, never imagining that might make him a target. "I don't know if I was in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time."

He said he wants an independent, not internal, investigation of this and other reports of excessive force, and is considering whether to take legal action.

...

"It looks terrible," agreed Sam Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who consulted with Oakland police on the federal consent decree emerging from the Riders scandal. "It certainly looks like they singled him out to be shot ... and there does not appear to have been any sort of attack by the protester. Clearly, the camera is not approaching the officers, so they couldn't claim that he posed a threat."

Paul Chevigny, professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law, said it looks like "a violation of his First Amendment rights apart from being a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. He has a right to take a film of what the police do -- we've been over this thousands of times -- unless he's interfering in some way.

"The basic problem of police retaliating against people who are trying to record what's going on is perennial," said Chevigny, adding this occurs all over the nation. "They (officers) consider it a kind of 'contempt of cop.' It's an expression of the fact that people do not trust the police. The police read it as a criticism of them. It's not even necessarily that they're trying to prevent people from seeing what they're doing.

"But this extreme version (of retaliation) is very unfamiliar to me," he added. "I can't imagine what they're going to say about shooting this guy. Sounds like the Oakland police need a little brush-up on their training."

The Right to Petition the Government, the Oakland "Occupy Wall Street" Version

Lots of countries have high-sounding "Constitutions" with lots of "rights" and "liberties". The real test is when the citizenry attempt to exercise their rights.

The US has its First Amendment as part of its "Bill of Rights" to its Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Sadly, the authorities interpret that as the right to assemble and petition in some far away scruffy corner where nobody will see you or hear you. If you decide to assemble in an urban area, the authorities will soon decide that you are an "eyesore" that there are "health concerns" and that you have "overstayed your welcome". In short, protest, but not too loudly, not to visibly, and not too long.

You can tell when your rights are "fishy"... they send in the cops in riot gear in the middle of the night and unleash the hounds of hell to drive you away...









News coverage:

• Here is the story of the Iraqi war vet injured by police in Oakland from the UK's Guardian newspaper.


• And here is a timeline account from the UK's Guardian newspaper.


• And here is
  local coverage from the Oakland Tribune.

A legitimate government would assemble the police without riot gear, invite in the press, bring in cameras, send in high profile officials to explain why they want to move and/or suppress the demonstration, and rely on public consensus to get the protesters to leave.

I have no problem with cops in riot gear going in full force on the crazy nihilists who use "protests" as a cover for trashing the city. But if the government is legitimate, they should be able to get all but a handful to leave peacefully if the government truly has the consent of the governed behind them. That they are doing this in the middle of the night with such violence says to me that the government is bought-and-sold by big corporate money and the billionaires behind the scenes. There is nothing "legitimate" in handling peaceful protest in this manner.

An honest government wouldn't be using violation of "camping laws" or the so-called worries over "sanitation" to send in riot cops to beat people with billy clubs and tear gas them. That isn't how you deal with campers and trash. That is how a police state deals with political dissent. So much for the "rights" of Americans under their constitution. US citizens have a Constitutionally "guaranteed right to protest" so long as they do it at home, in a closet, in a whisper, in the dark, and don't let anybody know about their "protest".

You have "Rights" but not the Right to Exercise Your "Rights"

Here is a bit from a post by a legal site that claims to be helping the public. Here they try to explain your "rights" and just how much limitations can be put on them:

As protests supporting Occupy Wall Street have swelled in recent weeks, hundreds of demonstrators have been arrested across the U.S. This weekend, nearly 100 people were arrested in New York and 175 in Chicago. More than 100 protesters were arrested in Boston last week; a few weeks ago, 700 were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.

So, if the First Amendment guarantees the right to peaceable assembly, why do peaceful protestors keep getting arrested — and sometimes pepper-sprayed and beaten up?

We take a closer look at the laws governing protests and how the government can limit them.

Time, place and manner restrictions

The First Amendment is not absolute. Government can make reasonable stipulations about the time, place and manner a peaceable protest can take place, as long as those restrictions are applied in a content-neutral way.

But what constitutes a reasonable time, place and manner restriction? "It depends on the context and circumstances," said Geoffrey Stone, a professor specializing in constitutional law at the University of Chicago. "Things like noise, blockage of ordinary uses of the place, blockage of traffic and destruction of property allow the government to regulate speakers."

Stone gave a few examples of impeding ordinary usage: disturbing patients at a hospital, preventing students from going to school, or, more relevant for the Occupy movement, disrupting the flow of traffic for a long period of time.

The majority of Occupy Wall Street-related arrests have been on charges of disorderly conduct. Under the New York Penal Code, that includes making "unreasonable noise," obstructing "vehicular or pedestrian traffic," or congregating "with other persons in a public place and refus[ing] to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse." Basically, the central question is the standard of reasonableness. "You have to tolerate a certain amount of inconvenience in order to make room for First Amendment activity, but not so much that it disrupts things," Stone said. Individual states' unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct statutes have to fall in line with this standard. "They can regulate it less if they want to," Stone added, "but not more."

I remember as a kid watching the blacks in the Deep South trying to exercise their "right" to vote. They would be made to wait in the hot sun all day. They would be told to come back umpteen times. They would be given "tests" that mysteriously only blacks failed, not whites. Etc., etc. They had "rights" just no right to exercise their rights.

Native Indians in the US signed umpteen "perpetual treaties" only to watch them be torn up a few years later. Many Indian bands have horror stories to tell. The "trail of tears" for the civilized tribes of the US Deep South that freed up land for the big slave plantations is especially egregious. These are tribes that had signed many treaties, even fought on the side of the US revolutionaries and the side of the new United States in the Battle of 1912. All these "rights" and "promises" were ignored to feed the land fever of white slave owners.

This "expert" for propublica goes through the motions as if rights were real and the state is truly interested in your rights and it is just a question of balancing rights with responsibilies. What a load of crap. If they could get away with it, governments would have a rule that you can only demonstrate between 3:00 AM and 4:00 AM on one side of town, and by the way, you must have a permit that can only be picked up on the other side of town between 2:59 AM and 3:00 AM and only those with a valid permit at 3:00 AM at the demonstration site will be allowed to demonstrate. (A version of this is the recent rules where you have have "public" demonstrations during high profile international gatherings but only at a "designated" demonstration site that is miles from where the dignataries gather and is carefully fenced in with riot cops all around to ensure that in this "proper" demonstration area you won't be seen or heard by anybody.)

I'm pretty positive that Syria has a wonderful Constitution which lays out all kinds of "rights" for its citizens. But right now the only "right" that citizens seem to be enjoying is a bullet through the brain or torture in some dungeon run by Bashar al-Assad's thugs. Under the USSR's Constitution people had wondeful, extensive, very progressive "rights". But in reality if you thought you could exercise your rights you would be sent off to a slave labour camp in Siberia or shelved in a 24x7 drugged state in an insane asylum. That's how you got to "exercise" your rights in the USSR.

The thuggery by the US and its police is just one in a long line of countries with wonderful "rights". Sure the top 1% get to exercise those rights. But the 99% better not cross the line. Their "rights" have a way of mysteriously becoming re-interpreted as disorderly conduct, assaulting a police officer, or some other drummed up charge. If you read the labour history of the US (late 19th century early 20th century) it is filled with workers exercising their "rights" only to be mowed by by police or private gangs: the (Homestead Strike, the Lattimer Massacre, the Ludlow Massacre, the Columbine Mine Massacre, the Chicago Memorial Day Massacre, etc.)

Oh... and I just noticed this. A French court has ordered ISPs to block any site that allows people to post videos of police misconduct. I guess the theory is "out of sight, out of mind". Or, if nobody sees it, then it isn't a crime.

The Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris [official website, in French] on Friday ordered [judgment in PDF, in French] French Internet service providers to block access to Copwatch Nord Paris I-D-F, a website designed to allow civilians to post videos of alleged police misconduct. The decision was applauded by the police union, Alliance Police Nationale (APN) [union website, in French], which argued that the website incited violence against police. Jean-Claude Delage, secretary general of the APN, said that "[t]he judges have analyzed the situation perfectly—this site being a threat to the integrity of the police — and made the right decision." Opponents of Internet censorship were also quick to comment on the judgment. Jeremie Zimmermann, spokesman for La Quadrature du Net [advocacy website], a Paris-based net neutrality organization, called the order "an obvious will by the French government to control and censor citizens' new online public sphere." The site was ordered to be blocked immediately.

In France you have the right to think that police might violate the rights of citizens, but you have no right to communicate that belief because that is "an insult to the majesty of the Law". I guess the reasoning is that if you let people question the honesty and integrity of the government then you are on the slippery slope to anarchy. So everybody will be liable by law to only say good things about their laws, their politicians, the rich, and the police. You can insult your neighbor, the poor, immigrants, and dogs in the street. But not the noble "leaders" of society and their enforcers, the police.

The How & Why of America Now Being a Banana Republic

People used to joke about how the US might become a banana republic. But the joke is over. It is reality. The rule of law has completely broken down in the US.

Here is a post by Barry Ritholtz in his The Big Picture blog:

Fraudclosure Errors Destroying Americans’ Property Rights

by Barry Ritholtz

Over the past 2 years, I have warned repeatedly about the dangers to American property rights caused by massive bank fraud, A deadly combination of MERS, robo-signing, and illegal shortcuts have created a horrific situation. A bedrock of our society — the ability for the owner of a piece of real estate to confidently convey that property, along with all associated property rights — is now in danger.

It was the inevitable result of the frauds that too many state Attorneys General seem unwilling to prosecute.

The end results of that massive fraud, and the State’s refusal to hold the wrongdoers accountable, are simply this:

“The highest court in Massachusetts ruled that a homeowner who bought a foreclosure that hadn’t been properly conducted by the foreclosing bank in 2006 didn’t have legal ownership of the property.

The decision by the Supreme Judicial Court casts a cloud over the legal ownership of any properties in Massachusetts where banks didn’t properly convey title when foreclosing. The problem has gained attention nationwide because of banks’ use of “robo-signing” and other dubious practices that may have broken chains of title on foreclosures.

The case follows a previous state court decision that voided a foreclosure when banks couldn’t prove that they owned mortgages when they initiated foreclosure proceedings.”

(WSJ, State Rules on Foreclosure)

The Rule of Law is yet another bedrock foundation of this nation. It seems to get ignored when the criminals involved received billions in bipartisan bailout monies.

The line of bullshit being used on State AGs is that we risk an economic crisis if we prosecute these folks.

The people who claim that fail to realize that the opposite is true — the protest at Occupy Wall Street, the negative sentiment, the general economic angst — traces itself to the belief that there is no justice, that senior bankers have gotten away with economic murder, and that we have a two-tiered criminal system, one for the rich and one for the poor.

Today’s NYT notes the gloom that has descended over consumers, and they suggest it may be home prices. I think they are wrong — in my experience, the sort of generalized rage and frustration comes about when people realize the institutions they have trusted have betrayed them. Humans deal with financial losses in a very specific way — and its not fury. This is about a fundamental breakdown of the role of government, courts, and leadership in the nation. And it all traces back to the bailouts of reckless bankers, and the refusal to hold then in any way accountable.

There will not be a fundamental economic recovery until that is recognized.

Obama is part of the problem and not part of the solution. I could go along when he claimed he didn't want to press charges against Bush administration officials for war crimes. I could understand that was disruptive and would bring out the worst of partisan politics. But when Obama refused to prosecute the fraud and crime among the financial industry, he lost my respect. He is part of the problem. As Ritholtz points out: the economy will not revive until the rule of law is restored in the US. Sadly, there is not one presidential candidate in either party who has indicated a willingness to restore the rule of law.