patriot act

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Judge, Jury & Executioner

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I’ve criticised Rand Paul in the past on a few issues, but none of my previous doubts and nitpicks can dilute the sheer brilliance of his almost-thirteen-hour filibuster.

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The absurdity of the legal framework built up by the Bush and Obama administrations was a house of cards for Paul to poke at and watch crumble. Paul’s key question is does Obama believe he can order the killing of an American citizen, on American soil, based on nothing more than his own judgment that the person is a threat?

Under the Fifth Amendment, suspects are entitled to the due process of law:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

And how can any President claim that his own judgment, or that of his Attorney General counts as the due process of law? The targeted drone killings that have occurred in foreign lands — and which Holder admits could theoretically occur on American soil — are very simply extrajudicial killings. And extrajudicial killings are utterly barbaric, incompatible with modern civilisation, incompatible with any notion of human rights or due process, and incompatible with the Constitution.

The status quo evolved very much out of post-9/11 paranoia, as exemplified by Dick Durbin’s Cheneyesque questions aimed at Paul toward the end of the Filibuster, and by Eric Holder’s initial written response referencing Pearl Harbour and 9/11:

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Neither Rand Paul nor myself are suggesting that an attempted violent attack should not be stopped using necessary means (although not excessive means). But if an act of terror has not commenced (and even in many cases where an act of terror has commenced) it should be possible to arrest and question a suspect, rather than killing them. If a suspect can be arrested, charged and tried, there should be no reason why that should not happen.  And unless an act of terror has actively commenced, or unless a suspect can be convicted beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law the government’s suspicion is only a suspicion, and the government has absolutely no business detaining or punishing a suspect.

After 9/11, due process was effectively suspended, and for all of Obama’s lip-service to “change”, this mindset prevailed through his first and into his second administration. Rand Paul’s dogged, tireless questioning — as well as the work of questioners in the media such as Glenn Greenwald, Conor Friedersdorf, Spencer Ackerman, and Micah Zenko —  is acting as a catalyst to break the public and governmental mindset that allowed for the suspension of due process. Due process matters. If it hasn’t been proven that someone has broken the law why should they be punished for it? As humans we have inalienable rights. The fear of terrorism does not trump the right to be tried under the presumption of innocence.

The strength of Rand Paul’s argument means that defenders of the status quo have had to resort to spurious or ad hominem arguments to mount a defence of the President’s position — attacking Paul’s positions on other issues, for example. It was encouraging to see Rand Paul questioning the entire notion of targeted killings and signature strikes altogether, and not just worrying about the prospect of such affairs on American soil. Due process is preferable in all circumstances.  I would have preferred to see Osama bin Laden captured and tried, rather than killed.  Due process is not a sign of moral weakness, but a sign of cultural strength, of sanity, of civilisation.

The Obama administration must eventually understand that their position is untenable. Large swathes of the mainstream media are coming around to the idea that Rand Paul is asking important questions and that due process is more important than national security panic and threat inflation. Paul has struck a blow for the Constitution at the right moment, and to a judicial edifice that has become bloated and corrupt, treating too-big-to-fail bankers with impunity, while coming down like a tonne of bricks on minor intellectual property infractions. He has harnessed the image of a lone filibustering Senator standing up to the machine of the establishment to strike a blow to those who are trying to defend the indefensible. At the very least, Rand Paul has made real oversight of the drone program possible. Hopefully, the days of signature strikes and of targeted killings are numbered. Hopefully, the Constitution and Bill of Rights will reign supreme again in Washington D.C.

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Who Should Be Giving Thanks This Thanksgiving?

Not the wider public.

Our financial system is broken. Our political system is broken. Oligarchs and their cronies reap easy rewards — bailouts, crony capitalism, corporate handouts, liquidity injections, favourable “regulation” (that puts oligarchs’ competition out of a business) — while taxpayers pay the bill.

But no such thing lasts forever.

Thanksgiving is very much the day of the black swan. Nassim Taleb used the example of a turkey fattened up for Thanksgiving as an example of a black swan phenomenon. The turkey sees itself being fed every day by the turkey farmer and assumes based on past behaviour that this will continued indefinitely until the day comes when the farmer kills the turkey. Nothing in the turkey’s limited experiential dataset suggested such an event.

But Thanksgiving also commemorates the end of pre-Columbian America, a huge earth-shattering black swan for the people of the Americas. The day before the first European immigrants landed in North America, very little in the Native Americans’ dataset suggested what was to come.

In a globalised and hyper-connected world, drastic systemic change can occur faster than ever before.

All it takes is the first spark.

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Obama Embraces Gay Marriage

Obama and Corzine — A Match Made in Heaven?

Unlike virtually every mainstream media commentator or political talking head I don’t care about Obama embracing gay marriage.

Now I know that a lot of people on the left — disappointed by his banker-friendly, PATRIOT Act-renewing, indefinite-detention-enabling, American-citizen-assassinating regime — are searching for any reason to vote for him, and plausible reason to defend his record. That’s the nature of tribal politics — “anti-war” Democrats will happily protest the Bush war machine, but they seem quiet when Obama is the one using drone strikes to assassinate American citizens without trial. I don’t like Mitt Romney either, but that’s not the point.

Even for those in favour of gay marriage, let’s not forget that Obama is capable of doing absolutely zero to change the law. Want to introduce a Federal law allowing homosexual couples to marry? Good luck getting it through the Republican Congress.

I’m in favour of consenting adults being able to do whatever they like with each other, but the fact that the current push for gay marriage is supported by Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sachs makes me very suspicious (does he want to sell securitised gay marriage debt?).

It just seems like an easy issue for Obama to posture on, while trampling the Constitution into the dirt.

When it comes to civil liberties, Obama has always talked a good game, and then acted more authoritarian than Bush. He talked about an end to the abuses of the Bush years and an open and transparent government, yet extended the Fourth-Amendment-shredding Patriot Act, empowered the TSA to produce naked body scans and engage in humiliatingly sexual pat-downs, signed indefinite detention of American citizens into law, claimed and exercised the power to assassinate American citizens without trial, and aggressively prosecuted whistleblowers. Under his watch the U.S. army even produced a document planning for the reeducation of political activists in internment camps. Reeducation camps? In America? And some on the left are still crowing that talking about being in favour of gay marriage makes him “pro-civil liberties”? Is this a joke?

Here are a few metrics that we should be judging Obama on:

People not in the labour force is spiking:

The public debt keeps soaring and soaring from eyeball-watering multi-trillion dollar deficits:

Meanwhile India, Iran, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Japan have all ditched the dollar for other currencies in new bilateral trade agreements — which lest us forget is America’s biggest export, and the product that keeps goods and oil flowing into America. This is an extremely dangerous time. While we cannot lump Obama with the blame for the entire U.S. economic system — the system we have was accumulated via Bush, and Cheney, and Paulson, and Clinton, and Bush, and Reagan, and Carter, and Brzezinski, and Nixon, and Kissinger, and Johnson, and Roosevelt and Wilson and Lincoln and probably most significantly of all the father of central banking Alexander Hamilton — Obama certainly has not improved matters.

And it should be obvious to anyone paying attention that Romney — who claims he would support the NDAA and the PATRIOT Act, that he wants to attack Iran, and has hired many ex-Bush staffers, as well as winning the endorsement of both Jeb and George H.W. Bush, and bizarrely claiming to want to start a trade war with China — is cut from the exact same cloth as Bush and Obama.

This is a dead election. Here’s hoping that Ron Paul — who continues to pick up delegates in the Republican race even while being ignored by the mainstream media who would rather talk about Obama’s posturing on gay rights — can cause some mayhem.