Today’s Topic: The Final Flaws of American Democracy When Under Stress
Actually, I should say the final flaws of what democracy allows in the name of the people when under stress.
The concepts of the working government were defined in the Constitution and have never been so abjectly changed as to mean something else in the ensuing years of the Bush Presidency. But the perception of the concept of democracy has crashed around our feet and become the muck that all Americans must forge through in order to regain the MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE CONSTITUTION, which are the rights ascribed to the people in the Bill of Rights.
I’ve often talked about the knee-jerk reactions of Congress to daily events that produce ridiculous laws such as the car jacking law. Why was there a necessity to have another law describing principally what had started as a horse thieving law? We have had laws on the books about stealing another person’s property and another person’s transportation for over 100 years. And they weren’t even federal laws. Why was it necessary for Congress to react with new federal law that essentially duplicated law already in place at the state level?
Primarily it is because Congress has become a reactionary legislative body, which doesn’t hold the primacy of the Bill of Rights as the guiding issue on how to legislate for the people. Congress has primarily become a legislative branch under the executive branch, regardless of what Senator Arlen Spector and others may proclaim.
Congressional disapproval in the nation today shadows presidential and vice-presidential disapproval simply because, even with a Democratic majority, they have become unable to protect the people. Protect them from what, one might ask. Well, how about a rogue government of secrecy and hidden agendas. A government who’s very soul exists in presidential findings, secret detention centers employing torture, and a government who would rather spend the national treasure on a war of choice instead of keeping good Americans healthy. A government who has moved the entire idea of the people having recourse against their government for grievances to courts who accept the concept of executive privilege, corporate rights and national security. A government who roams the world kidnapping and imprisoning anyone they, whether the correct person or not, want without concern for accountability.
During the cold war the American public was continually bombarded with the sanctity of the American way by means of holding the Soviet Union up as the greatest plight to the world’s freedom. Yet since the cold war desolved into chaos apparently unpredictable to our CIA, this nation has moved towards finding some other necessary evil to fight in order to continue the military-industrial chokehold on the nation’s treasure.
However, it doesn’t stop there. We have a full out assault by the religious right who desire to break down the walls of separation between church and state established by the Constitution and apply their own ideals and morals to the entirety of the population even though they represent only a fraction of that population.
Normally that wouldn’t even be a problem, but when those elected have too many of the religious right in the pockets, as did many a previous congressman and senator during the last Congress, then we start having problems again with knee-jerk reactions such as the forced effort of the federal legislature to interfere in the Terry Schiavo situation. When should the federal legislative branch become so consumed with self-righteous aggrandizement that they should be allowed to interfere with the life of a specific American? And I mean in any matter? There is nothing in the Constitution that suggests that federal legislators may interfere with a specific individual, and in fact the Constitution gives the individual rights over the government, not vice versa.
And herein lies the problem. For the past six years this republican monopolized government has run ransack over the people time and time again. They quailed the Democrats into believing that they’d never have to opportunity of actually running the legislature. If one can try to argue that this is not the case, then why hasn’t there been any Impeachment proceedings for a President and Vice-President who lied to the people of America and indeed to the world in order to break one of the truest American principles of not being the aggressor in a war of choice?
But rather than continue to harp on "old news" as the Bushies like to say, let us consider some of the newer evidence in the mismanagement and abuse of the American Constitution and subsequent laws.
I’d like to talk about national security. The concept being thrown about is that this administration knows what it is doing and either will not or cannot answer to any questioning of their means and methods due to national security issues.
This is patently false. Never during a time of war has this country’s strengths been more trivialized than under this president. Congress has only been a rubber stamp and, in violation of law, each and every portion of the executive branch has been politicized. Professional bureaucrats have been relegated to placeholders as "free market" contractors have delved deep into the pockets of America’s treasury often without being able to actually produced the products for which they were contracted. Whistleblowers have no recourse in law even though the laws still stand, and the higher courts have been so packed with Bush appointees that legitimate legal recourse is no longer allowed it’s day in those courts.
One wonders just how secure a nation can be when those of it’s own executive branch can proclaim to the world that Valerie Plame is a CIA agent working in the area of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons even as we are trying to negotiate with North Korea about their nuclear weapons.
One also wonders just how secure a nation can be when the Office of the Vice-President keeps jumping around from the Executive to the Legislative Branch when it suit its purposes. By trying to blur the lines of power, the lines dividing the American people from their government has been amplified. Equal and opposite reaction. Are the American people just sheep to unfalteringly follow in the path dictated by the administration, or are the American people the final arbitration when it comes to the power of the president? And is Congress the true representational force that follows the will of the people or just another politicized branch of government gleefully rubberstamping the president’s wildly sweeping demands?
It is easy to wonder when the 2006 elections spoke loudly about America’s will to end the war by electing Democrats who espoused an end to the war, particularly when President Bush offers a deaf ear to the resounding noise of an offended populace.
So how can this administration declare that we are safer when they in fact have brought our level of national security down to the outing of a CIA agent and the negation of an entire country’s legal vote for change?
We are not suffering from some type of war fatigue or news fatigue or even terror alert fatigue. We, the people of America, are suffering from the loss of our ability to control our government. Our government is making terrorists who will gladly kill any American on a daily basis. Our government is walking all over the Constitution on a minute by minute basis and they have tons of willing legal types who will gladly try to foist new interpretations of 60 year old laws on such subjects as torture and habeas corpus, neither caring whether American citizens are caught up within the lies they spread, nor how it turns out in the end.
Our Supreme Court has been stacked since Ronald Reagan with strict "constructionists" who claim to believe in the original intent of the Constitution. The question begged in this instance is why they would be considered "constructionists" unless they were constructing something, like a new Constitution without benefit of Constitutional Amendment as required under law.
The Environmental Protection Agency is no longer protecting the environment but rather those who pollute the environment, i.e. big business.
The National Labor Relations Board, a stronghold of New Deal concern for the working class of middle income wage earners is now a bastion of corporate enablers with direct access to the ear of the President.
The Justice Department no longer dispenses justice in any way shape or form. Instead it brings charges against the people and interferes with the people’s ability to "redress the government" as was defined in the 1st Amendment.
All of the above end up lessening the strength of the American people’s government and directly affects national security. But there is more.
The concept of such large scale contracting out what have typically been professional government bureaucrats jobs to private industry has caused a number of problems. Primary has been the inability of private contractors to establish any ability to provide for contract accountability. Secondarily, the contractors don’t know squat about how the bureaucrats do the job of government, so there is a learning curve even as they are trying to influence the direction of government programs. Free market contracting apparently is not policing itself, so the sum cost to government has become astronomical without any reasonable accountability nor recourse for retrieval of overcharged monies. Companies who contract for government development programs aren’t even able to complete a product and yet not only get paid for their failure, they get follow-on contracts for more work that isn’t likely to produce a product. This administration is supporting the concept of failure through its endeavors to prove that free market enterprise can provide productivity and realize goals by paying these same contractors for their failure.
And not only does this hold true in national security databases and such, but it holds true in virtually all aspects of contracting in supporting our men and women in Iraq. When America pays for tainted water transports, over-billing for gas, R&R facilities who over-count their clientele 12 times a day, construction that has failed inspections, if any, in the first year, pipeline reconstruction to the tune of $75 million without one bit of reconstruction taking place, it is almost too much for the average American to take in. The failures of this administration are ten fold greater than their failure in responding to American citizens’ needs in the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans. Funny how Mississippi faired pretty well as a Republican Governor (Haley Barber) was in power.
And even with what we do know the larger question is begged about what we don’t know. During all this contracting and multiple levels of subcontracting are we enabling the same ideological group of fanatical fundamentalists to infiltrate our ranks? How would we know? How well are the third or fourth levels down subcontractors vetting their employees? And how can we verify that vetting? Will any of these contractor employees become "most favored" to gain entrance to our country as potential citizens?
So here’s the real question. Just how much war profiteering is happening and how fundamentally does it negate our ability to maintain national security?
You see, there’s one program I’ve talked about previously, which is the Terrorist Awareness Database, which was previously the Admiral Poindexter project called the Total Awareness Database. The latter was designed to infiltrate all aspects of information regardless from where the data was pulled from. The name didn’t go over well with Congress, nor did the inclusion of a Reagan era convicted national security advisor, so Poindexter was out and the name of the database changed. But the design of the database was never changed.
To date this program is only marginally operational, thus President Bush had to resort to much more extensive and politically damaging efforts such as widespread illegal wiretapping. But it isn’t the TAD that is the problem because the intricacies are a little too hard for the idiots hired to do the job. Rather, it is the fact that with this database’s inclusions of some half a million Americans, the FBI has had to spent an inordinate amount of time trying to determine whether said Americans were involved with the terrorists or not. Any database person will tell you that 500,000 individual records without proper cross-referencing and appropriate flags will never give a tenable result in a database query.
So has our national security been enhanced by all these programs of which have never provided any real fruit? Not likely.
Are the people working on these highly sensitive products fully vetted so that our national security requirements are fulfilled? Again, not likely.
So how is it that the American people are having their freedoms stepped on and our corporations can take advantage of an idiot C student from Yale who hasn’t once run a prosperous company?
National security claims don’t start at the courts. They end there. Each level of courts in the system provide for in camera meetings in the judge’s chambers for each side to present evidence which cannot go outside of the chambers unless found to be relevant to the defendant’s case. Such provides for the judiciary to weigh the evidence for inclusion or exclusion of a court case. National security claims do not alleviate the courts from such fact finding nor of the public dissemination of such facts if found to be pertinent to the defendant’s case.
To date, no higher court has engaged in such fact finding. Once the claim of national security has been made, the majority have simply rolled over and acquiesced. Fact-finding doesn’t require only the knowledge of the particular case, but indeed can include facts known to the public. Once the public knows a fact it can no longer be a national security concern.
This is why a free press has been so instrumental in helping to maintain a free people and it is the reason people should pay attention to the free press. When the possible sum of $50 billion has gone to war profiteering and a President can ignore 275,000,000 people, then national security is already under assault.
12:57:21 PM 
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