From the Ramparts
by Junious Ricardo Stanton
"One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
For years I have been attempting to alert people to the growing Nazification of the US political system into a totally fascist, depraved police state that poses a significant danger to the whole world. Daily more and more signs indicate the moral rot at the core of this country is metastasizing to the point it is beyond redemption or healing. During the last few months President Barack Obama has signed legislation or issued executive orders that would make Adolph Hitler proud. In December he signed a controversial bill called the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011, a Draconian bill that makes it legal for the United States to indefinitely detain, without legal representation or trial anyone suspected of but not proven to be a "terrorist" including US citizens.
The ACLU was appalled at the signing. This law violates both US and international laws. "The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again. The ACLU believes that any military detention of American citizens or others within the United States is unconstitutional and illegal, including under the NDAA. In addition, the breadth of the NDAA's detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war." http://www.aclu.org/blog/content/president-obama-signs-indefinite-detention-law
Obama is supposed to be an expert on the US Constitution. Based upon his actions on this and several other bills, you couldn't convince me he knows diddly about the Constitution or the Bill of Rights let alone what it means to abide by his sworn obligation to uphold and defend it from all enemies foreign and domestic. This from a bi-racial man who is married to a native born black woman thoroughly conscious of the history of racial animus and injustice of this country. Believe me I get it, Obama was raised by his white grandparents and was relatively sheltered from racial bigotry but come on; this goes way beyond the pale. He is supposed to know the law, he taught Constitutional Law in Illinois. So why does he continuously go along with the abrogation of the law for "security reasons" many of which are totally bogus? Why does he keep pushing the discredited Bu$h agenda if he is supposed to be about "change"?
Unlike most white folks, I don't hold the US Constitution up as some holy and sacrosanct document crafted by righteous and all wise white men; because it was the very document that codified slavery as a form of raising money for the US Treasury which also helped the South politically by allowing them to count our enslaved ancestors as three fifths of a person for Congressional apportionment purposes. "Slavery is seen in the Constitution in a few key places. The first is in the Enumeration Clause, where representatives are apportioned. Each state is given a number of representatives based on its population - in that population, slaves, called 'other persons,' are counted as three-fifths of a whole person. This compromise was hard-fought, with Northerners wishing that slaves, legally property, be uncounted, much as mules and horses are uncounted. Southerners, however, well aware of the high proportion of slaves to the total population in their states, wanted them counted as whole persons despite their legal status. The three-fifths number was a ratio used by the Congress in contemporary legislation and was agreed upon with little debate. In Article 1, Section 9, Congress is limited, expressly, from prohibiting the 'Importation' of slaves, before 1808. The slave trade was a bone of contention for many, with some who supported slavery abhorring the slave trade. The 1808 date, a compromise of 20 years, allowed the slave trade to continue, but placed a date-certain on its survival. Congress eventually passed a law outlawing the slave trade that became effective on January 1, 1808." http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_slav.html
As noble as that may sound/read in reality the US Constitution also called for a ten dollar tax to be levied on imported persons, (they were talking about our ancestors but cunningly cloaked their intent and language by not using the words African or slaves). Article One Section 9 of the US Constitution reads, "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person." That ten dollars went into the treasury of the fledgling nation. So you see the US government also made money off of the slave trade an issue proponents of reparations often over look!
But I digress, this is about Obama and the Nazification of the US of A. President Obama also signed an extension of the USA PATRIOT ACT a bill that eviscerates the US Constitution a bill that was originally signed by most Congress critters even though they never read it! A bill that had been written well before 9-11 even happened! Yet once more and again Obama the purported "man of change" signed an extension to a bill that undermines the basic rights and privacy of all of us.
Why am I making this a big deal? Because we've been down this road before. Read the Church and Pike Committee reports on abuses by the FBI and CIA during the 1970s which include COINTELPRO (FBI) and Operations CHAOS (CIA) and others. The Church Committee report said, "Our investigation has confirmed that warning. We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian regimes. We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as 'vacuum cleaners', 'sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens.' The tendency of intelligence activities to expand beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings. Intelligence collection programs naturally generate ever-increasing demands for new data. And once intelligence has been collected, there are strong pressures to use it against the target. The pattern of intelligence agencies expanding the scope of their activities was well described by one witness, who in 1970 had coordinated an effort by most of the intelligence community to obtain authority to undertake more illegal domestic activity:
The risk was that you would get people who would be susceptible to political considerations as opposed to national security considerations, or would construe political considerations to be national security considerations, to move from the, kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line." http://thirdworldtraveler.com/FBI/Church_Committee_Report.html
That was in the 1970s when what the Church and Pike Committees discovered was illegal. The US Congress, Bu$h's and Obama's actions now make such activity legal!! Obama just signed a bill that makes peaceful demonstrations near federal buildings or where special events take place a federal offense!!? We are at a moral crossroads and a critical juncture in our existence as a country. With his forays into Yemen, Somalia, Libya, by sending Special Ops into Uganda and prepping for war in Syria and Iran, Obama is proving he is as much a warmonger as any psychopathic white man. Obama the Bomber's increasing use of weaponized drones overseas and potentially here at home is alarming and should raise serious moral questions and concerns but they don't. The sight of riot clad police (the US version of the Nazi Gestapo?) beating up on peaceful Occupy Wall Street demonstrators while crooks like Jon Corzine of MF Global, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs go Scott free tells you a lot about where this country is and where it is headed.
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