Saturday, December 01, 2007

Authoritarian-Corporat-Cronyism At Home; Abroad, Hegemonic Militaristic Imperialism: "Pax Americana, Bipartisana!"

Why does Jane Harman hate privacy, the 4th Amendment, and civil liberty?

Really? What the fuck is that dumb, drooling, vapid bint doing?

I have been complaining literally for years (along with many more far better known, better read, more conspicuously employed bloggers than I) that the claims of the Democratic party to be the champions of the 90% of the country which did NOT own the GOP, Congress, and/or 70% of the national wealth were spurious at best. Both (ostensibly competing) 'Parties' are irreversibly, irremediably, and irredeemably committed to the politics expressed in the hed, above. Such differences as may be 'detected'/imagined are in the means to those ends, not to the ends themselves. The Dems believe the People are better bought or bribed; the Pukes, that they are better--and more cheaply--compelled. Nowhere is the utter synonymy of their interests better illustrated than in their programmatic approaches to 'national security.' A case in point: the (impending) Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, sponsored by (DLC) Democrat Jane Harman of California.
Harman's bill contends that the United States will soon have to deal with home grown terrorists and that something must be done to anticipate and neutralize the problem. The act deals with the issue through the creation of a congressional commission that will be empowered to hold hearings, conduct investigations, and designate various groups as "homegrown terrorists." The commission will be tasked to propose new legislation that will enable the government to take punitive action against both the groups and the individuals who are affiliated with them. ... Harman's bill does not spell out terrorist behavior and leaves it up to the Commission itself to identify what is terrorism and what isn't. Language inserted in the act does partially define "homegrown terrorism" as "planning" or "threatening" to use force to promote a political objective, meaning that just thinking about doing something could be enough to merit the terrorist label. The act also describes "violent radicalization" as the promotion of an "extremist belief system" without attempting to define "extremist..."
I am not the first person to have remarked that this certainly smacks loudly of 'thought police.'Yet a different, tho' screamingly similar, story appeared yesterday, which puts the whole fiasco into its proper, Orwellian perspective, from TruthOut.Org:
H.R 1955: the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 recently passed by the House - a companion bill is in the Senate - is barely one sentence old before its Orwellian moment: It begins, "AN ACT - To prevent homegrown terrorism, and for other purposes."

Those whose pulse did not quicken at "other purposes" have probably not read George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language," or they voted for the other George both times.

Orwell's jeremiad on the corruption of the English language and its corrosive effect on a democracy was written two years before his novel "1984" spelled out in chilling detail the danger of Newspeak, which renders citizens incapable of independent thought by depriving them of the words necessary to form ideas other than those promulgated by the state.

After its opening "tribute" to Orwell, H.R 1955 is strategically peppered with Newspeak regarding the establishment of a National Commission and university-based Centers of Excellence to "examine and report upon the fact and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism and ideologically based violence in the United States" and to make legislative recommendations for combating it.

The "sheer cloudy vagueness" of H.R 1955, as well as its terror factor, may account for its bipartisan 404-6 House vote, but how, in an era informed by the Bush-Cheney administration's egregious assault on the Bill of Rights, can the phrase "other purposes" fail to raise the "National Terror Alert" from its current threat level of "elevated" to "severe"?

Future "other purposes" will undoubtedly be justified by the Act's use of the term "violent radicalization," which it defines as "the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence ..." or by the folksy, Lake Wobegonesque "homegrown terrorism," defined as "the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born [or] raised ... within the United States ... to intimidate or coerce the United States, the civilian population ... or any segment thereof ...."
So, now, you all who put your faith in the "Democratic Party" for the preservation of civil liberties, 'splain this to me. Wtf is going on?

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