If Obama does one thing for the remainder of his presidency let it bea veto of the National Defense Authorization Act – a law recently passed by the Senate currently which would place domestic terror investigations and interrogations into the hands of the military and which would open the door for trial-free, indefinite detention of anyone, including American citizens, so long as the government calls them terrorists.
So much for innocent until proven guilty. So much for limited government. What Americans are now facing is quite literally the end of the line. We will either uphold the freedoms baked into our Constitutional Republic, or we will scrap the entire project in the name of security as we wage, endlessly, this futile, costly, and ultimately self-defeating War on Terror.
Dear brothers and sisters. Now is the time to open your eyes!
In a stunning move that has civil libertarians stuttering with disbelief, the U.S. Senate has just passed a bill that effectively ends the Bill of Rights in America.
The National Defense Authorization Act is being called the most traitorous act ever witnessed in the Senate, and the language of the bill is cleverly designed to make you think it doesn’t apply to Americans, but toward the end of the bill, it essentially says it can apply to Americans “if we want it to.
Bill Summary & Status, 112th Congress (2011 — 2012) | S.1867 | Latest Title: National Defense Authorization Act for.
This bill, passed late last night in a 93-7 vote, declares the entire USA to be a “battleground” upon which U.S. military forces can operate with impunity, overriding Posse Comitatus and granting the military the unchecked power to arrest, detain, interrogate and even assassinate U.S. citizens with impunity.
Even WIRED magazine was outraged at this bill, reporting:
Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial
…the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”
The passage of this law is nothing less than an outright declaration of WAR against the American People by the military-connected power elite. If this is signed into law, it will shred the remaining tenants of the Bill of Rights and unleash upon America a total military dictatorship, complete with secret arrests, secret prisons, unlawful interrogations, indefinite detainment without ever being charged with a crime, the torture of Americans and even the “legitimate assassination” of U.S. citizens right here on American soil!
If you have not yet woken up to the reality of the police state we’ve been warning you about, I hope you realize we are fast running out of time. Once this becomes law, you have no rights whatsoever in America. — no due process, no First Amendment speech rights, no right to remain silent, nothing.
The US senate does not want us to speak. I suspect even now orders are being shouted into telephones and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there?
Cruelty and injustice…intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance, coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told…if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.
I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War. Terror. Disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you and in your panic, you turned to the now President in command Barack Obama. He promised you order. He promised you peace. And all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
More than four hundred years ago, a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness. Justice, and freedom are more than words - they are perspectives. So if you’ve seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you, then I would suggest that you allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek…then I ask you to stand beside one another, one year from November 5th, 2011, outside the gates of every court house of every city DEMANDING our rights!!
Together we stand against the injustice of our own Government.
We are anonymous.
We are Legion.
United as ONE.
Divided by zero.
We do not forgive Censorship.
We do not forget Oppression.
US SENATE…
Expect us!!
Imagine you walked into a bank, applied for a personal line of credit, and filled out all the paperwork claiming to have no debts and an income of $200,000 per year. The bank, based on these representations, extended you the line of credit. Then, three years later, after fighting disclosure all the way, you were forced by a court to tell the truth: At the time you made the statements to the bank, you actually were unemployed, you had a $1 million mortgage on your house on which you had failed to make payments for six months, and you hadn’t paid even the minimum on your credit-card bills for three months. Do you think the bank would just say: Never mind, don’t worry about it? Of course not. Whether or not you had paid back the personal line of credit, three FBI agents would be at your door within hours.
Where OWS headlines come from
Rep. Joe Walsh: “Occupy” Protesters Are CLUELESS
Tonight, Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly got to talking about a UC Davis police officer’s appalling use of pepper spray on nonviolent protesters over the weekend.
ZUCCOTTI PARK, New York — Early Monday morning, a new enemy dogged the small diehard group of Occupy Wall Streeters who have refused to leave a corner of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, even in the week since New York police officers raided the camp and took away their tents, blankets and other belongings: It started raining.
Among the hardline occupiers is Sonya Zink, who has been living in the park since the movement began in mid September. The night before, the protesters slept sitting up, so as not to violate the new rules designed to discourage anyone from again camping out in the area. Prior to last week’s raid, Zuccotti Park was home to a thriving mini-city, equipped with a “people’s kitchen,” information booths, medic’s tent, library and post office box.
“Sometimes they wake us up even if we’re sitting up,” Zink said of the dozens of police officers and security guards ringing the nearly empty fenced-in area in downtown Manhattan. Zink was among the 200 protesters arrested last week in the NYPD’s middle-of-the-night raid, when she linked arms with other protesters at the center of the encampment to protect the kitchen. She lifted up her shirt to show what she said was a bootprint-shaped bruise from where a police officer kicked her during her arrest.
A woman who was pepper sprayed during during a raid on Occupy Seattle last week is blaming police after she miscarried Sunday.
Jennifer Fox, 19, told The Stranger that she had been with the Occupy protests since they started in Westlake Park. She said she was homeless and three months pregnant, but felt the need to join activists during their march last Tuesday.
“I was standing in the middle of the crowd when the police started moving in,” Fox recalled. “I was screaming, ‘I am pregnant, I am pregnant. Let me through. I am trying to get out.’”
Yes, there always going to be rich and poor. But we used to live in country where rich owned factory and make 30 times what factory worker make. Now we live in country where rich make money by lying about value of derivative bonds and make 3000 times what factory worker would make if factories hadn’t all moved to China.
Capitalism great system. We won Cold War because people behind Iron Curtain look over wall, and see how much more plentiful and delicious cookies are in West, and how we have choice of different bakeries, not just state-owned one. It great system. It got us out of Depression, won WWII, built middle class, built country’s infrastructure from highways to Hoover Dam to Oreo factory to electrifying rural South. It system that reward hard work and fair play, and everyone do fair share and everyone benefit. Rich get richer, poor get richer, everyone happy. It great system.
Then after Reagan, Republicans decide to make number one priority destroying that system. Now we have system where richest Americans ones who find ways to game system — your friends on Wall Street — and poorest Americans ones who thought working hard would get them American dream, when in fact it get them pink slip when job outsourced to 10-year-old in Mumbai slum. And corporations have more influence over government than people (or monsters).
It not about rich people having more money. It about how they got money. It about how they take opportunity away from rest of us, for sake of having more money. It how they willing to take risks that destroy economy — knowing full well what could and would happen — putting millions out of work, while creating nothing of value, and all the while crowing that they John Galt, creating wealth for everyone.
That what the soul-searching about. When Liberals run country for 30 years following New Deal, American economy double in size, and wages double along with it. That fair. When Conservatives run country for 30 years following Reagan, American economy double again, and wages stay flat. What happen to our share of money? All of it go to richest 1%. That not “there always going to be rich people”. That unfair system. That why we upset. That what Occupy Sesame Street about.
Yesterday, police at UC Davis attacked seated students with a chemical gas.
I teach at UC Davis and I personally know many of the students who were the victims of this brutal and unprovoked assault. They are top students. In fact, I can report that among the students I know, the higher a student’s grade point average, the more likely it is that they are centrally involved in the protests.
Capital gains are the key ingredient of income disparity in the US— and the force behind the winner takes all mantra of our economic system. If you want even out earning power in the U.S, you have to raise the 15% capital gains tax.
Income and wealth disparities become even more absurd if we look at the top 0.1% of the nation’s earners— rather than the more common 1%. The top 0.1%— about 315,000 individuals out of 315 million— are making about half of all capital gains on the sale of shares or property after 1 year; and these capital gains make up 60% of the income made by the Forbes 400.
Occupy Wall St - The Revolution Is Love
Who Smashed the Laptops from Occupy Wall Street? Inside the NYPD’s Lost and Found
Worse, it was as if someone along the way purposefully destroyed all confiscated electronics, a strategic smashing of at least part of the digital record logged by full-on occupiers. “Dude, all the laptops are in a row,” he tells us, baffled and raking his shock of brown hair. “They’ve all been smashed with bats.” When asked about the mangled property, LiPani admits that, inevitably, certain items could’ve been damaged in the shuffle: “I’m not surprised,” he says, to hear of damaged laptops. He adds that the DSNY is providing clearance forms to those occupiers concerned their property may’ve been mishandled or misplaced.
Since the Occupy Wall Street movement began, protesters, armed with their intentionally vague demands, have lacked a defining moment or iconic image to help propel media coverage. This week, they got both.
First, police clashed with protesters during Tuesday’s early morning raid on Zuccotti Park, and arrested several journalists. Then on Thursday, the Occupy movement got its face—albeit a bloody one.
During a demonstration in Lower Manhattan, 20-year-old Brandon Watts of Philadelphia grabbed a police officer’s hat and was subsequently tackled and arrested, sustaining a gash to his forehead. Watts’ bloody face appeared on the cover of the Daily News and Metro newspapers on Friday. (Interestingly, the New York Post went with the Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore for its Friday front page; the New York Times featured an A1 photo of the protests above the fold, but no blood.)
Before grabbing the hat, Watts allegedly threw an AAA battery at officers who had set up a barricade.According to the Daily News, he was charged with assault and grand larceny after receiving medical treatment at Bellevue Hospital.
According to the paper, it was Watts’ fourth arrest since the protests began in September.
Thursday also saw more police clashes with journalists. Michelle Fields and Direna Cousins, a pair reporters from the Daily Caller claim they were attacked by the NYPD.
The conservative publication has been critical of Occupy Wall Street, but protesters reportedly came the aid of Fields and Cousins.
After Fields was knocked to the ground, several Occupy Wall Streeters “came up to me right away and asked if I needed any medical assistance,” she wrote. “They were actually very kind and helpful. It was the police officers who were very aggressive.”
