CLINTON WON'T COMMIT TO RENEW CONSTITUTION...

Illinois Senator Barack Obama has finally signed the American Freedom Pledge, joining his fellow Democratic presidential candidates in encouraging the restoration of basic Constitutional principles after the battering they have taken during the Bush-Cheney era.

All the Democrats, that is, except New York Senator Hillary Clinton.

The effort to get presidential contenders to sign on the American Freedom Pledge has been promoted by organizations ranging from the Center for Constitutional Rights to Human Rights Watch, MoveOn.org , Amnesty International USA, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and True Majority.

The pledge is anything but radical. It simply asks candidates to affirm a statement that reads: "We are Americans, and in our America we do not torture, we do not imprison people without charge or legal remedy, we do not tap people's phones and emails without a court order, and above all we do not give any President unchecked power. I pledge to fight to protect and defend the Constitution from attack by any President."

The often embarrassingly cautious Obama campaign had been slow to sign on to the pledge. Earlier this week the American Freedom Campaign, which is promoting the pledge, revealed that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Alaska Senator Mike Gravel had signed the pledge, while former North Carolina Senator John Edwards and Delaware Senator Joe Biden had responded with supportive statements. After a release from the freedom campaign noted that Obama and Clinton had not committed to the Constitution, Obama's aides moved quickly.

Recognizing the value of distinguishing their candidate from Clinton, the front runner in most polls, they got Obama to sign the pledge.

The freedom campaign is promising to turn the heat up on Clinton and Republicans presidential contenders -- aside from Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who signed on to a similar American Freedom Agenda statement promoted by conservative defenders of the Constitution.

"We are very pleased that Senator Obama has joined so many of his colleagues in signing the American Freedom Pledge," says freedom campaign co-founder Naomi Wolf. "But we will not be satisfied until we receive a solid commitment from each and every one of the presidential candidates. This is not just another request from an interest group; this is a test of whether our next president will be true to the vision of our Founders. Any candidate who does not express strong support for defending the Constitution does not deserve to be president."


Posted by John Nichols at 10/03/2007 @ 2:18pm | Email This Post



COMMENTS



So, commitment to Constitutional balance means taking the advice of all the left wing groups, sponsors and donors mentioned, along with dem control of House, Senate, SC, and WH?

I'll pass.

Posted by JOHN MAASCH 10/03/2007 @ 12:13pm | ignore this person


Anything involving Moveon.org and balance is an oxymoron and it never to be taken seriously..except here, I guess.

Posted by JOHN MAASCH 10/03/2007 @ 12:15pm | ignore this person


why should she sign it. the mass media and big dollar operators have declared her the winner. to sign something at this point commits her to a position on an issue. that's bad, committing to a position on an issue if you don't have to. you might have to take action later or be accused of "breaking promises".

besides, as soon as the primary is over, hillary is going to swerve even harder to the right and start pandering to right wing voters. she just needs to get through the primary before she can screw over the liberal voters again with impunity. this is now the time-honored tradition of the democratic party candidates in general: pretend to be liberal in the primary, get nominated, then screw all those people, they have no choice but to vote for you anyway, and pander to the right wing voters and big dollar interests in the general campaign and while in office

Posted by ZERO 10/03/2007 @ 12:16pm | ignore this person


NICHOLS: ....pledge is anything but radical. ....

That's why it can always be non-radically used to bite somebody....interesting, such a nice "pledge" to cover all "people", even non-citizens, terrorists, huh?

Posted by HAPPY 10/03/2007 @ 12:19pm | ignore this person


well, once she's in office i'm sure she'll make plenty of "Signing Statements".

good luck.

Posted by FROSTY ZOOM 10/03/2007 @ 12:21pm | ignore this person


Posted by HAPPY 10/03/2007 @ 12:19pm

don't you realize that includes me?

Posted by FROSTY ZOOM 10/03/2007 @ 12:21pm | ignore this person


http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200 ... nd_taking/

‘Giving' and Taking Email Print Share Del.icio.us Digg Facebook Ma.gnolia Newsvine Reddit StumbleUpon Yahoo

Posted on Sep 17, 2007

AP Photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais

By Chris Hedges

Bill Clinton has written a new book. It is called "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World." He will give a portion of the proceeds to charity. Giving, the former president informs us, gives us fulfilment in life and is "the fabric of our shared humanity."

His book is the political equivalent of "Marley & Me" It is filled with a lot of vapid, feel-good stories about ordinary and wealthy Americans setting out to make the world a better place. It smacks of the philanthropy-as-publicity that characterized the largesse of the robber barons--the Mellons and the Rockefellers--and has become a pastime for our own oligarchic elite. Clinton's call for charity is the equivalent of well-scrubbed prep school students spending a day in a soup kitchen, doling out food to the people whose jobs were outsourced by their mommies and daddies. It does little to alleviate suffering. But it is a balm to the conscience of the oligarchic class that profits handsomely from the impoverishment of the working class, globalization and our anti-democratic corporate state. The rich love to dine out on their own goodness.

The misery sweeping across the American landscape may have begun with Ronald Reagan, but it was accelerated and codified by Bill Clinton. He sold out the poor and the working class. And Clinton did it deliberately to feed the pathological hunger he and his wife have for political power. It was the Clintons who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. The Clintons argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, the Clintons argued, to take corporate money and use government to service the needs of the corporations. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton's leadership, had virtual fund-raising parity with the Republicans. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.

The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Goods would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone would be happier. I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States.

"There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home," President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he was lobbying for the bill.

But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the curious effect of reversing every one of Clinton's rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans for Mexican farmers, they had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States. The Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At least 2 million Mexican farmers were driven off their land from 1993 through 2002. And guess where many of them went? This desperate flight of Mexicans into the United States is being exacerbated by large-scale factory closures along the border as manufacturers leave Mexico for the cut-rate embrace of China's totalitarian capitalism.

Clinton's welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation's social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single parents, off of the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But these were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill.

The growing desperation provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low wages and without unions or benefits. And while Clinton was busy selling out the poor, he lowered the capital gains tax from 28 percent to 20 percent, a reduction that permitted the wealthiest 1 percent of the population to derive 80 percent of the tax savings. Clinton, like George W. Bush, also provided lavish government funding for his corporate backers, including in 1998 a $200-billion highway and transportation package for the big construction companies and a $17-billion increase in the military budget. This was the largest increase in military spending since the end of the Cold War. Corporations, flush with government aid, saw their taxes dwindle. Amway, for example, had its taxes cut during the Clinton years by an estimated $280 million. The Clinton and Bush administrations, through tax breaks and corporate bailouts, have squandered billions of our tax dollars on corporate welfare.

The appreciative oligarchs and corporate class have made Bill rich. He is fond of boasting in public about how wealthy he has become. Hillary raised $26 million in the first quarter of the year, almost three times as much as any politician previously raised at that point in a presidential election.

We face the prospect of having two families govern the country for 16 years. The system is rigged. Our democracy is a consumer fraud. The government has given up any pretence of serving the interests of citizens. The corporations rule. And for all Clinton's charm and talent for self-promotion, he is largely to blame.

Half a century ago, corporations paid 45 percent to 50 percent of the income tax. Today they pay 6 or 7 percent. This is why our infrastructure is crumbling, there is no universal health care, our public education is in crisis, regulatory agencies are impotent and our poor and working class are desperate.

The bottom line is that the Democrats, including John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, will never govern on our behalf. They are hostage to those who put them in power. And it is not us. Until we throw our weight behind fringe candidates such as Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader, if he runs, we will continue to be fleeced by corporate pawns such as the Clintons and the Bushes. It is no longer possible to argue between the lesser of two evils. The corporate state, which is carrying out a coup d'etat in slow motion and has already shredded most of our constitutional rights, is an unmitigated evil. We do not need charity. We need justice. And all of Bill Clinton's heart-warming stories about giving are not going to save us from the corporations who sucked out his soul and seek to imprison the rest of us. "

Hillary said yes to the Lieberman resolution, which calls for "any, and all means of military force to stop Iran. Rather than stopping Cheney's plan to Nuke Iran

she'll extend the war to another front.

She wants to be the next Fascist leader of the free world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps [guardian.co.uk] SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU POST URLS?


Posted by RESE 10/03/2007 @ 12:30pm | ignore this person


http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html

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Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

Tuesday April 24, 2007 The Guardian

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps. As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.


Posted by RESE 10/03/2007 @ 12:32pm | ignore this person


1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.


Posted by RESE 10/03/2007 @ 12:32pm | ignore this person


3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.


Posted by RESE 10/03/2007 @ 12:33pm | ignore this person

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