Civil Rights

By David Swanson

David Cole of Georgetown University and formerly of the Center for Constitutional Rights has been doing some good writing, not only on our failure to enforce laws against powerful people, but also on our out-of-control epidemic of incarceration which has struck those too unimportant to gain immunity.

By David Swanson

Maryland's state senate has scheduled a hearing on a single-payer healthcare bill for March 10th. California's legislature has passed a single-payer bill three times. Single-payer healthcare bills are advancing in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New Mexico. I recently wrote about two state legislator candidates, Marcus Brandon in North Carolina and Byron DeLear in Missouri, who plan to introduce state single-payer bills immediately upon being elected.

Now, let me tell you about Colorado. Mark Mehringer is a candidate for the Colorado State House from District 7 (Denver). His website at http://votemark2010.com has an issues page and a video on the home page that both put a Medicare-for-All healthcare solution at the top of his agenda.

Ongoing here.

Listen here.

Kucinich Right, Greenwald Wrong
By David Swanson

On Democracy Now! on Tuesday, Congressman Dennis Kucinich said he was working on a Constitutional Amendment to address both "Citizen's United" and "Buckley v. Valejo," meaning the Supreme Court decisions giving corporations outrageous and destructive powers of "free speech" and defining the spending of money as "speech."

Listen here.

Congresswoman Donna Edwards has just introduced a Constitutional amendment, together with Congressman John Conyers.

More below!

By David Swanson

Wow, I was gone less than a week to the Conch Republic, and now return to a nation in which I would heartily recommend to any city, county, or state that it follow the example of the Florida Keys and secede from the so-called union.

By David Swanson

Jamin Raskin, professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at American University, has spoken out powerfully on behalf of a new campaign at FreeSpeechForPeople.org that aims to undo the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to remove limitations on corporations' election spending.

Here's a short video made together with Congresswoman Donna Edwards.

Here's Raskin on Democracy Now!

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today on Citizens United vs. FEC.

Live blog: http://www.scotusblog.com

Decision: PDF.

PUBLIC INTEREST GROUPS CONDEMN SUPREME COURT'S RULING ON CORPORATE MONEY IN ELECTIONS, CALL FOR CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT TO OVERTURN COURT DECISION

"Free Speech Rights Are For People, Not Corporations"

WASHINGTON, DC – A coalition of public interest organizations strongly condemned today's ruling by the US Supreme Court allowing unlimited corporate money in US elections and announced that it is launching a campaign to amend the United States Constitution to overturn the ruling. The groups, Voter Action, Public Citizen, the Center for Corporate Policy, and the American Independent Business Alliance, say the Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC poses a serious and direct threat to democracy. They aim, through their constitutional amendment campaign, to correct the judiciary's creation of corporate rights under the First Amendment over the past three decades. Immediately following the Court's ruling, the groups unveiled a new website – www.freespeechforpeople.org – devoted to this campaign.

"Free speech rights are for people, not corporations," says John Bonifaz, Voter Action's legal director. "In wrongly assigning First Amendment protections to corporations, the Supreme Court has now unleashed a torrent of corporate money in our political process unmatched by any campaign expenditure totals in US history. This campaign to amend the Constitution will seek to restore the First Amendment to its original purpose."

The public interest groups say that, since the late 1970s, a divided Supreme Court has transformed the First Amendment into a powerful tool for corporations seeking to evade democratic control and sidestep sound public welfare measures. For the first two centuries of the American republic, the groups argue, corporations did not have First Amendment rights to limit the reach of democratically-enacted regulations.

"The corporate rights movement has reached its extreme conclusion in today's Supreme Court ruling," says Jeffrey Clements, general counsel to www.freespeechforpeople.org and a consultant to Voter Action. "In recent years, corporations have misused the First Amendment to evade and invalidate democratically-enacted reforms, from elections to healthcare, from financial reform to climate change and environmental protection, and more. Today's ruling, reversing longstanding precedent which prohibits corporate expenditures in elections, now requires a constitutional amendment response to protect our democracy."

In support of their new campaign, the groups point to prior amendments to the US Constitution which were enacted to correct egregiously wrong decisions of the US Supreme Court directly impacting the democratic process, including the 15th Amendment prohibiting discrimination in voting based on race and the 19th Amendment, prohibiting discrimination in voting based on gender.

"The Court has invented the idea that corporations have First Amendment rights to influence election outcomes out of whole cloth," says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. "There is surely no originalist interpretation to support this outcome, since the Court created the rights only in recent decades. Nor can the outcome be justified in light of the underlying purpose and spirit of the First Amendment. Corporations are state-created entities, not real people. They do not have expressive interests like humans; and, unlike humans, they are uniquely motivated by a singular focus on their economic bottom line. Corporate spending on elections defeats rather than advances the democratic thrust of the First Amendment."

"With this decision, the Court has abandoned its usual practice of adjudicating non-constitutional claims before constitutional ones, a radical departure that indicates how far the Roberts Court may be willing to go in order to serve the powerful 'business civil liberties' agenda," says Charlie Cray, director of the Center for Corporate Policy. "While the immediate effect is likely to be a surge in corporate cash in election campaigns, this could also signal the beginning of a sustained attack on the rights and ability of everyday people to govern the behavior of corporations, which, if successful, could effectively eviscerate what's left of American democracy."

“American citizens have repeatedly amended the Constitution to defend democracy when the Supreme Court acts in collusion with democracy's enemies, whether they are slavemasters, states imposing poll taxes on voters, or the opponents of woman suffrage,” says Jamin Raskin, professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at American University’s Washington College of Law. “Today, the Court has enthroned corporations, permitting them not only all kinds of special economic rights but now, amazingly, moving to grant them the same political rights as the people. This is a moment of high danger for democracy so we must act quickly to spell out in the Constitution what the people have always understood: that corporations do not enjoy the political and free speech rights that belong to the people of the United States."

For more information on the constitutional amendment campaign, see http://www.freespeechforpeople.org

John Yoo at UVA
By David Swanson

Noted war criminal and torture lawyer John Yoo is scheduled to speak at UVA law school on March 19, 2010.

The day we go into year eight in the illegal occupation of Iraq that Yoo and Jay Bybee provided "legal" justification for, this "legalizer" of torture and other war crimes will be speaking at a law school, our law school, in our town.

John Yoo is a Professor of Law at Boalt Hall School of Law in Berkeley, California. I've joined in protests at his home at 1241 Grizzly Peak Blvd., Berkeley.

He is a lawyer with the Pennsylvania bar from which he should be disbarred and would be if enough people demanded it. Support: DisbarTortureLawyers.org.

Yoo counseled the White House on how to get away with war crimes, wrote this memo promoting presidential power to launch aggressive war, and claimed the power to decree that the federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming, and stalking do not apply to the military in the conduct of war, and to announce a new definition of torture limiting it to acts causing intense pain or suffering equivalent to pain associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in loss of significant body functions will likely result.

Yoo claimed in 2005 that a president has the right to enhance an interrogation by crushing the testicles of someone's child.

Yoo has been confronted in his classroom: video, and again confronted in the classroom.

He should not imagine he can seek shelter from protests of his open criminality by coming to lecture at the University of Virginia.

Yoo this week told the New York Times that he had worked, not for the law, but for his "client" the president, and that he had no regrets about pretending to legalize torture.

Let's change that.

___

PS: The next day, March 20, I'll be speaking on a panel at the Va Festival of the Book.

November 22, 2009, Bay Area, CA

* 10-11 a.m. protest at John Yoo's (Torture Professor) house, 1241 Grizzly Peak Blvd., Berkeley, CA

Followed by events on David Swanson's book tour: "Daybreak, Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union"

* 12:00 p.m. in downtown Walnut Creek
Community Center
1375 Civic Drive (in Civic Park)
Walnut Creek 94596
925-933-7850
http://www.mtdpc.org

* 3 p.m. at DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland
5433 College Ave., Oakland, CA 94618, (510) 653-9965

* 7:30 PM in the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Hall, 1924 Cedar at Bonita, 1 block East of MLK Jr. Way
Wheelchair accessible. Donation requested.
Co-sponsored by the BFUU Social Justice Committee
http://www.bfuu.org

CONTACT THE ORGANIZERS:
Cindy Sheehan

By David Swanson

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the corporate "mainstream" media make quite a pair. We're hearing a very "balanced" debate over whether KSM should be tried in New York City, and whether the most insane objections to that proposal are really insane or not. But what are we not hearing?

Here's a letter I just sent to my local newspaper:

Letter to the Editor:

As an organizer of the protest of former President Bush at Monticello last July, I was sorry to miss Sunday's panel on free speech and rudeness at PVCC but appreciated your Monday report. I also appreciated the panelists' comments you reported to the effect that TV pundits and producers encourage rudeness. If many people's views were not shut out of major communications outlets, they'd probably be less likely to force them in by shouting.

I was sorry to see, at least in your report of Sunday's panel, no indication that the panelists distinguished any types or shades of rudeness, as opposed to lumping it all together. Here are three types worth thinking about:

By David Swanson

The United States of America owes much of the hope it has right now of remaining what John Adams called "a nation of laws, not men" to Italian law enforcement. Were it not for the fact that Italian prosecutors, unlike their American counterparts, answer to the law rather than a president, the enforcement of laws against a massive crime spree by U.S. officials (and their Italian accomplices) would not have begun.

Watch it here!

In this video (full length 1:13:15) scroll ahead to 53:55 to hear veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern question Congresswoman Jane Harman on her vote for the Authorization to Use Military Force. McGovern also asks her about her rather dramatic shift two years ago to a position of opposing warrantless spying and civil liberties abuses, and whether that shift should be credited to the primary challenge made by Marcy Winograd, which Winograd is renewing next year.

At about 1:01 Harman responds. She claims not to have altered her views whatsoever, which is of course demonstrably false. As McGovern points out, her initial response to the publication of a report on warrantless spying was that it should have been kept secret. On the Authorization to Use Military Force, Harman claims great gullibility and ignorance. She points out that only Congresswoman Barbara Lee voted against it, and claims no one could possibly have known what horrors it would be used for. This is the same law President Obama claims gives him the power to imprison people without charge.