"Quick, While No One Is Paying Attention!"

Following up on this earlier post of mine and just connecting some additional dots here ...

Expand the post +/-

First, this:

Bush leaves 'staggering' array of problems for successor

Most presidents-elect can look forward to a transition period after Election Day, during which they recover from the rigors of the campaign and assemble their cabinet and White House staff. However, with a looming recession and two wars under way and no fresh initiatives coming from the Bush administration to address them, whoever is victorious in tomorrow's voting won't enjoy that luxury.

"I guess you'd have to have your head examined if you wanted to be president of the United States right now," Professor James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University, told the Associated Press.

Thurber suggested that even though all presidents promise to hit the ground running, "This one will be jumping out of an airplane as soon as the election's over with."

According to a report released by AP on Monday, George W. Bush became president swearing "to confront problems, to not pass them on to future Congresses or future presidents."

However, noted AP's Mark Smith, "after two full terms in the White House, the array of things he leaves his successor to solve is staggering, from an economy rocked by the worst crisis since the Great Depression to a pair of wars, one of which US spy chiefs say is spiraling out of control."

"And then there are those minor crises," added Smith, listing energy costs, immigration, health care, social security, and climate change. "The fixes are all costly and America is flat broke."

Indeed, indeed. Now, this:

Ex-generals: Review Bush's detention authority

Former generals and U.S. Justice Department officials filed briefs Thursday urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Bush administration's authority to indefinitely detain the only suspected enemy combatant held on U.S. soil.

"This unprecedented expansion of executive authority within the borders of the United States is not only at odds with more than 200 years of history, but it is wholly unnecessary," argued former judges and officials, including former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and former FBI Director William Sessions. "The federal government is eminently capable of both protecting our nation's security and safeguarding our proud tradition of civil liberties."

(...) The American Civil Liberties Union asked the high court last month to review a July decision in which the closely divided 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the administration of President George W. Bush has the authority to detain anyone suspected of being an al-Qaida member.

But the court also ruled that suspects must be able to challenge their military detention. The Supreme Court has not yet said whether it will take the case.

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice declined comment on the matter. After the appeals court issued its rulings, Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the decision "recognizes the president's authority to capture and detain al-Qaida agents who, like the 9-11 hijackers, come to this country to commit or facilitate warlike acts against American civilians."

(...) According to documents obtained last week through a Freedom of Information Act request, U.S. military officers at the Charleston prison were ordered to treat prisoners there the same way prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were treated, including depriving them of natural light for months (...).

And then, there is also this:

Bush team rushes environment policy changes

As the U.S. presidential candidates sprint toward the finish line, the Bush administration is also sprinting to enact environmental policy changes before leaving power.

Whether it's getting wolves off the Endangered Species List, allowing power plants to operate near national parks, loosening regulations for factory farm waste or making it easier for mountaintop coal-mining operations, these proposed changes have found little favor with environmental groups.

The one change most environmentalists want, a mandatory program to cut climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions, is not among these so-called "midnight regulations."

Bureaucratic calendars make it virtually impossible that any U.S. across-the-board action will be taken to curb global warming in this administration, though both Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama have promised to address it if they win Tuesday's U.S. presidential election.

Even some free-market organizations have joined conservation groups to urge a moratorium on last-minute rules proposed by the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.

"The Bush administration has had eight years in office and has issued more regulations than any administration in history," said Eli Lehrer of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "At this point, in the current economic climate, it would be especially harmful to push through ill-considered regulations in the final days of the administration."

John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation, which joined Lehrer's group to call for a ban on these last-minute rules, said citizens are cut out of the process, allowing changes in U.S. law that the public opposes, such as rolling back protections under the Endangered Species Act.

(...) The Bush team has urged that these regulations be issued no later than Saturday, so they can be put in effect by the time President George W. Bush leaves office on January 20.

If they are in effect then, it will be hard for the next administration to undo them, and in any case, this may not be the top priority for a new president, said Matt Madia of OMB Watch, which monitors the White House Office of Management and Budget, through which these proposed regulations must pass.

"This is typical," Madia said of the administration's welter of eleventh-hour rules. "It's a natural reaction to knowing that you're almost out of power."

Industry is likely to benefit if Bush's rules on the environment become effective, Madia said.

"Whether it's the electricity industry or the mining industry or the agriculture industry, this is going to remove government restrictions on their activity and in turn they're going to be allowed to pollute more and that ends up harming the public," Madia said in a telephone interview.

What is unusual is the speedy trip some of these environmental measures are taking through the process.

For example, one Interior Department rule that would erode protections for endangered species in favor of mining interests drew more than 300,000 comments from the public, which officials said they planned to review in a week, a pace that Madia called "pretty ludicrous."

Why the rush? Because rules only go into effect 30 to 60 days after they are finalized, and if they are not in effect when the next president takes office, that chief executive can decline to put them into practice -- as Bush did with many rules finalized at the end of the Clinton administration.

Now, please read/re-read this previous post of yours truly from last month and then, of course, the real question becomes this: what else is Bush rushing to implement via decree?

Truly scary indeed ...

"FUBAR needing cleaning up in aisle 5 ..."


(Cross-posted from APOV)

Marching Straight Towards Authoritarianism

Whenever a civilian government either outsources its responsibilities in matters domestic and/or foreign affairs, whether to corporations, security agencies and/or the military, then it is safe to say that it is the beginning of the end of democratic governance - ultimately leading to authoritarian corporatocracy, security state and/or military junta ... or all of the above, also known as fascism.

Expand the post +/-

In addition to the overwhelming assaults on the U.S. constitution, civil rights and human rights (i.e. military commissions, indiscriminate domestic spying, security sweep pre-emptive arrests, renditions, indefinite detentions, torture, etc.), including outsourcing of security and war efforts (Blackwater, anyone?), the U.S. government is now letting go of some of its people-empowered roles in diplomacy and foreign affairs. To whit:

(...) when did a four star general get handed the authority to act as if he were Secretary of State?

The WaPo reports that:

Gen. David H. Petraeus has launched a major reassessment of U.S. strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the surrounding region, while warning that the lack of development and the spiraling violence in Afghanistan will probably make it "the longest campaign of the long war."

The 100-day assessment will result in a new campaign plan for the Middle East and Central Asia, a region in which Petraeus will oversee the operations of more than 200,000 American troops as the new head of U.S. Central Command, beginning Oct. 31.

The review will formally begin next month, but experts and military officials involved said Petraeus is already focused on at least two major themes: government-led reconciliation of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the leveraging of diplomatic and economic initiatives with nearby countries that are influential in the war.

All of this seems like a good idea to me. But, crucially, neither of those themes are military ones and the military shouldn't be leading the way on them. It's about separation of power and having the military subordinate to civilian policymakers rather than the other way around.

So where are the US ambassador, State Dept. and Condi Rice, who should be leading the way on them while the military man concentrates on military matters? For that matter, won't the leaders of other nations involved in the region wonder why America has appointed a de facto proconsul (again) and want their say?

"When you look at a lot of these problems, you see considerable regional connections," Petraeus said yesterday. The effort would embrace all of Afghanistan's neighbors and possibly extend to India, which has had a long-standing rivalry with Pakistan. "There may be opportunities with respect to India," he said.

An overview of the review team's mission obtained by The Post says that including other government agencies and other nations in the planning will "mitigate the risk of over-militarization of efforts and the development of short-term solutions to long-term problems."

Nevertheless, some experts questioned whether Petraeus will have the authority to carry out such a sweeping strategy.

"General Petraeus is not in charge of our diplomacy. He can't decide whether we try to form an international contacts group on Pakistan," said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University.

Moreover, in dealing with Afghanistan at Central Command, Petraeus will face limitations that he did not encounter as the top commander in Iraq, such as the lack of a unified military command and serious resource shortages.

"We don't own it. It's been a NATO effort since 2006. He won't have the same sway with Karzai and the ambassadors and a bunch of other people that he had in Iraq," said a former senior military official with experience in Afghanistan.

Perhaps most worrying of all, Petraus' mini foreign policy is being described as "a policy bridge from one administration to the next" by one of his team members, Clare Lockhart, co-founder of the New York-based Institute for State Effectiveness along with former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani.

"It's about separation of power and having the military subordinate to civilian policymakers rather than the other way around" - Cernig is spot on with this reminder.

However, I would amend this truism to include security agencies alongside the military.

For indeed, remember this, as but one example? (emphasis added)

Canada's spy agency has the green light to meet with Canadians detained abroad (as apart of a national security or terrorism case) before (Foreign Affairs) consular officials do when there are "urgent national security or terrorism-related considerations," says a newly disclosed federal agreement.

Which made me conclude the following (emphasis added):

In effect, Foreign Affairs will leave it up entirely to CSIS to make its own call - and defer to it.

Without any outside oversight whatsoever.

Plain and simple.

(...) This is how your Security State fully awakens, folks: when a country's secret security agency is given the power of life and death, of freedom and detention, over its citizens and whose judgement prevails over constitutional, civilian institutions supposedly mandated to deal in such matters.

After 9/11, we have witnessed a gradual encroachment of security measures which have been eroding our rights of freedom and privacy - all the while either applauding such measures, or remaining indifferent to them, because They. Make. Us. Feel. Safe.

Same thing with regards to human rights overall - whereby too many folks out there actually approve of the use of torture.

What we are now witnessing is the gradual deferment of responsibilities of our governments towards security agencies and the military - with the same mind set of needing to feel secure, which in turn has elevated security and military entities as preeminent Saviors in which We Trust implicitly.

Even for law and order enforcement (meaning: martial law by any other way).

All aided, abetted and amplified by the all-too-eager, gung ho, subservient, approving, supportive, enthusiastic, complicit, propagandist, media.

Indeed, a sickening worship of all things authoritarian and/or military was gleefully on display at the RNC last September (for instance, whether it was about McCain, his wife or Palin, it was inevitably emphasised that either they have served, have as son currently serving and/or had a parent/grandparent who served during WWI, WWII or some othe conflict - the message being that they are from a "strong" bloodline of military service).

The DNC likewise delved into this theme, albeit to a much lesser extent - nevertheless, that a past parent of Obama served and Biden's son being deployed to Iraq were emphasised as well.

That is creeping and already well entrenched militarism for you - case in point:

If I could be granted one small wish about our political discourse, it would be that reporters and pundits would accept -- as disappointing and unglorious as it is -- that, under our Constitution and basic government design, people who aren't in the military don't have a "Commander-in-Chief." The President isn't your "commander," and the "Commander-in-Chief" power, now synonymous in our political culture with "President," is actually extremely limited (Art. II, Sec. 2: "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States").

This endless festishization of "President as Our Commander-in-Chief" is one of those small but pernicious reflections of how militarized we've become, of how we are a society in a state of perpetual and endless war.

Punditman likewise expressed herein his concerns last year over the same phenomenon apparently slowly sinking into Canada's own consciousness:

Wearing camouflage used to signify one of two things: the person was either in the armed forces or was setting out on a different sort of mission that involved drinking tons of beer and killing furry creatures in a forest somewhere. But nowadays, the whole idea of hunting (humans or animals, that is), has been demoted by those who dress like G.I. Joe just because they are out hunting for a latte or an Ipod.

Grow a brain, people. This is all about the militarization of our culture.

(...) Along with camouflage, Canada is now beset by an overabundance of “Support Our Troops” ribbons, t-shirts, bracelets and mugs. You can’t go anywhere without seeing the telltale yellow ribbon on cars. Come to think of it, some are camouflaged. It is high time that the elephant in the room is asked the obvious question that polite Canadians would rather avoid: What does “Support Our Troops” really mean?

Those who decorate their vehicles thusly would have us believe that the decals are politically neutral symbols of support for soldiers overseas. This is nonsense and they know it. The intended audience are those of us who forego yellow ribbons. If you think about it, the phrase “Support Our Troops” is sort of bossy, like a drill sargent’s snarl. This is known in grammatical circles as the “imperative mood.” Therefore the directive to “Support Our Troops” comes off like an order, but with a somewhat fuzzy meaning: What exactly am I supposed to do? Buy a ribbon, I guess.

Yet the context is obvious. This is all about the Afghan War and nothing else. The yellow ribbon campaign has succeeded in convincing at least eighteen Canadian municipal and local governments to affix the decals to police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, buses and other municipal vehicles. Since this is all public property, this is a divisive move, not an inclusive one. Why this cause, but no others? Why not “Support Our Cancer Patients” or “Support Our Single Moms”? Are they less worthy?

(...) One may well ask: where should Canada’s foreign policy priorities be right now? Tied down in Afghanistan, begging NATO allies for more help in what looks more and more like an intractable military stalemate? Or, working through diplomatic channels to try to prevent a global conflagration between the US and Iran that could even go nuclear?

It’s time to ditch the camouflage and put on your thinking caps.

And that is without considering Harper's own drive to militarize Canada further. Peacekeeping? We Canadians apparently don't do that anymore:

(...) Rwanda was there, desperately needing help to prevent a genocide. Dallaire even knew what to do. But the rest of the world, Canada's government included, opted to do nothing. They let "traditional peacekeeping" fail in a grand and horrible way, with 800 000 dead, so they could pretend that "traditional peacekeeping" was itself dead.

And now the Canadian Press is helping them with this pretence. And at the end of article they're going to lament how little we trust journalists.

Referring to failed Bosnia-Serbia intervention, the article continues:

That frustrating experience shaped the attitude of a generation of soldiers, who were eager to shed the United Nations blue beret, which they saw as a symbol of weakness and indecision.

Really? The soldiers saw it as a sign of weakness? Who is writing this article? Where is the survey that demonstrates this? Is this the infantry or the military brass? Besides which, it doesn't matter what the soldiers think. It is the civilian population that selects the missions. If those enrolled don't like peacekeeping, they don't have to stay enrolled.

Yet the public clings to the romanticized notion of brave soldiers standing between belligerents.

Yeah. We stupid, ignorant Canadians have these stupid, romantic morals and values. God, we're so fricking naive, aren't we?

(...) The fact is that Canadians should be in charge of what their military is doing. At this time, we are not. The Liberals failed to steer the military in to the post Cold War peacekeeping force that we wanted. The Conservatives are taking that military force and using it aggressively.

Indeed - for only through military might may one country be taken seriously.

Once again - it all goes back to the fact that Americans and Canadians are sill gripped by the all-encompassing fear of terrorism - which is used whenever convenient to further push more authoritarian security measures, increased militarization/military interventionism, or simply to win elections.

History has clearly shown that fear-driven radical interpretations of the separation of powers within a republic, or any democracy, along with the slow erosion of the rule of constitutional law and the clamor for a single strong and powerful leader in times of crises, have lead to the downfall and de facto end of said republics/democracies - the fall of the Roman republic constituting an obvious, ancient example.

In other words:

Fear + Need for security + Erosion of the rule of Law + Religious fundamentalism + Militarism + Intolerance for opposing/dissenting opinions and beliefs + Calls for a strong and powerful leader = A democracy facing possible overthrow in favor of despotism.

And this little reminder of the 10 steps towards fascism:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy;
2. Create a gulag;
3. Develop a thug caste;
4. Set up an internal surveillance system;
5. Harass citizens' groups;
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release;
7. Target key individuals;
8. Control the press;
9. Dissent equals treason;
and 10. Suspend the rule of law.

All the necessary tools are already on hand.

As the saying goes - one must remember and understand history in order not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

It remains to be established whether we, Americans and Canadians alike, will stand up for our constitutions, our democracy-based societies, or let fear and paranoia sweep them away in lieu of authoritarianism - as we keep allowing our elected representatives to defer their entrusted powers and responsibilities to security agencies and the military.

We better wake up before it is too little, too late ...


(Cross-posted from APOV)

It is.....Is it?

Breathe in deep America,
You are fading.
The liberated their dreams,
We’ve none.

Warriors fall to the streets,
Children face down.
Streets drenched in gloom,
Ours awash in pride.

Rise up to splendor,
It is waiting.
Show the world freedom,
Conquer your death.

Civilization: Amid Old Triumphs, New Threats from Fascism

Bertrand Russell, in his
Wisdom of the West, put forward a simple thesis. Western Civilization is essentially Greek civilization.

There is no civilization but the Greek in which a philosophic movement goes
hand in hand with a scientific tradition. It is this that gives the Greek enterprise its peculiar scope; it is this dual tradition that has
shaped the civilization of the west.

--Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West

In support of his thesis, Russell points to the authoritarian,
theocratic natures of earlier civilizations --Egypt and Babylonia.
Religion, Russell stated, seems inconsistent with the Greek spirit of
free inquiry typified most famously by Socrates and the Platonic
tradition that followed. It is because Greek civilization was primarily
secular, Russell believed, that the spirit of "free inquiry" took root
in the west. This spirit, he believed, was incompatible with both
authoritarianism and religion itself.

A Renaissance of Western Civilization was associated with the pre-eminence of Lorenzo Di Medici in Florence and specifically his support of a new Plato Academy. Eminent scholars -Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano and Demetrios Chalkondyles depicted (above) in Domenico Ghirlandaio's fresco, Zaccaria in the Temple -refocused European attention on the Greek classics and inspired a renewed interest in learning. The plights of Giordano Bruno and Galileo make clear the fact that despite the Greek revival an Eastern religion, Christianity, was, in fact, at odds with the secular nature of inquiry and learning.

But to point that out gets ahead of the story, a story told by Lord Kenneth Clark in his famous Civilization series for the BBC and, most recently, by Thomas Cahill who authored a short but influential book entitled How the Irish Saved Civilization

Although we associate our Western civilization with "the new learning", it was
Scholasticism, kept alive throughout the Dark Ages by clerics, that
survived well into the Rennaisance. Russell points out that throughout
the 7th through the 9th Centuries, Europe witnessed a Papacy walking
the treacherous, narrow line between warring barbarians on the
frontiers and Eastern Emperors who had inherited the trappings of the
Roman Empire -bureaucracy, a rule of law, various standards of
civilization. The barbarians, by contrast, ruled by force. Byzantium
was at least civilized and would, in fact, survive the Middle Ages,
described by William Manchester as A World Lit Only by Fire.

If civilization is best described as a thin veneer over the otherwise rude necessitudes of sheer survival, it fell to clerics to keep alive the more ephemeral ideals -literacy, the rule of law, the faith itself. That story, of course, began well before the 7th century, well before
the fall of Rome itself.

It must surely be one of the great ironies of history that the task of saving civilization may have fallen to the monks of Skellig Michael, a steep rocky crag of an island west of the coast of County Kerry, literally, the cold, dank remote reaches of Ireland.

Never immune from barbarian raids, Ireland's remoteness may have made it the
standard bearer of civilization. In one of two surviving documents attributed to Patricius, otherwise known to history as St. Patrick, an interesting tale is told. A young Patricius, having been kidnapped by "wild Irish pirates" at the tender age of 15 years, escaped his
captivity in County Mayo.
In his "Confession", St. Patrick tells of sailing to Europe with a band
of trader/pirates. On the continent, this unlikely band encountered
scenes of desolation, abandoned villages, ruined farms, a worrisome
lack of food.

And after three days we reached land, and for twenty-eight days journeyed through uninhabited country, and the food ran out and hunger overtook them; and one day the steersman began saying: 'Why is it, Christian? You say your God is great and
all-powerful; then why can you not pray for us? For we may perish of hunger; it is unlikely indeed that we shall ever see another human being.' In fact, I said to them, confidently: 'Be converted by faith with all your heart to my Lord God, because nothing is impossible for him, so that today he will send food for you on your road, until you be sated, because everywhere he abounds.' And with God's help this came to pass; and behold, a herd of swine appeared on the road before our eyes,
and they slew many of them, and remained there for two nights, and the were full of their meat and well restored, for many of them had fainted and would otherwise have been left half-dead by the wayside.

-The "Confessio" of St. Patrick

If ever there was a time for prayer this was it. The faithful will believe that Patricius's prayer worked.

It is easy to conclude that Patricius and his erstwhile friends had encountered the very twilight of empire, the devastation left in the wake of retreating legions. This is arguably the most concrete picture we have of Europe at that time. It's a picture of European civilization
surviving "...by the skin of our teeth", clinging desperately to life like the lichens on the barren rocks of Skellig Michael itself.

This is a notion not easily dismissed and too easily romanticized. After all, we are left the
Book of Kells, produced by Celtic monks around AD 800. This work is a testament to the
stubborn human impulse to rage at seemingly inexorable forces of chaos, decay, and oblivion. Even atheists must recognize the achievements of quiet, impoverished clerics and scholars over a period of several hundred years. But for their efforts, civilization might simply have faded into a highland mist like so many tales of Avalon.

Is it accurate to give so much credit to Ireland? In his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization,
Cahill concedes that Greek literature and the Hebrew and Greek Bibles survived independently elsewhere. "Latin literature would almost surely have been lost without the Irish," he concludes. But, he speculates, "...the national literatures of Europe might not have emerged had the
Irish not forged the first great vernacular literature of Europe."

By the time of the Renaissance, however, it fell to the secular minds of
men like Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo to advance the spirit of inquiry. A broader view is taken by Russell who saw a broad departure from ancient priesthoods originating in Greece and taking shape over centuries of European history. He also saw the persistent threat of
anti-democratic authoritarianism which would be associated in his time with fascism and Nazism:

"There is over a large part of the earth's surface something not unlike a reversion to the ancient Egyptian system of divine kingship, controlled by a new priestly caste. Although this tendency has not gone so far in the West as it has in the east, it has, nevertheless, gone to lengths which would have astonished the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both in England and in America. Individual initiative is hemmed in either by the state or by powerful corporations, and there is a great danger lest this should produce, as in ancient Rome, a kind of listlessness and fatalism that is disastrous to vigorous life. I am constantly receiving letters saying: 'I see that the world is in a bad state, but what can one humble person do?
Life and property are at the mercy of a few individuals who have the decision as to peace or war. Economic activities on any large scale are determined by those who govern either the state or the large corporations. Even where there is nominally democracy, the part which one citizen can obtain in controlling policy is usually infinitesimal. Is it not perhaps better in such circumstances to forget public affairs and get as much enjoyment by the way as the times permit?' I find such letters very difficult to answer, and I am sure that the state of mind which leads to their being written is very inimical to a healthy social life. As a result of mere size, government becomes increasingly remote from the governed and tends, even in a democracy, to have an independent life of its own. I do not profess to know how to cure this evil completely, but I think it is very important to recognize its existence and to search for ways of diminishing its magnitude."

-Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual, p. 18-19:

Have we come all this way only to lose civilization to a new and corporate dark age?