Most Dangerous Legislation Ever

[Don Jeffries]

61 United States Senators voted for this incredibly horrific bill, which may spell the end for what's left of our civil liberties. If this doesn't wake the sheeple up and get them to stop re-electing 98% of their monstrous "represenatives" each election, then I don't know what will.

http://ppjg.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/5001/

[John Dolva]

From what I've read they are practically dumping the concept of sovereignty in the bin. A tiny minority of the worlds population (those who actually vote) empower a much smaller group to decide the fate of the rest of the world. I for one am not interested in that kind of democracy.

[Steven Gaal]

61 United States Senators voted for this incredibly horrific bill, which may spell the end for what's left of our civil liberties. If this doesn't wake the sheeple up and get them to stop re-electing 98% of their monstrous "represenatives" each election, then I don't know what will.

http://ppjg.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/5001/

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVovvvvvvvvoVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

link http://www.bobtuskin.com/2011/12/02/the-entire-united-states-is-now-a-war-zone-s-1867-passes-the-senate-with-massive-support/

The entire United States is now a war zone: S.1867 passes the Senate with massive support

Commentary, News // Dec 2 2011

By Madison Ruppert

Editor of End the Lie

An official US Navy photograph of detainees at Camp X-Ray at the Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. If our government makes the call, this could be the horrific reality for countless American citizensfor untold years or even decades (Credit: U.S. Navy/Shane T. McCoy)

This is one of the most tragic events I have written about since establishing End the Lie over eight months ago: the horrendous bill that would turn all of America into a battlefield and subject American citizens to indefinite military detention without charge or trial has passed the Senate.

To make matters even worse, only seven of our so-called representatives voted against the bill, proving once and for all (if anyone had any doubt remaining) that our government does not work for us in any way, shape, or form.

S.1867, or the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the fiscal year of 2012, passed with a resounding 93-7 vote.

That’s right, 93 of our Senators voted to literally eviscerate what little rights were still protected after the PATRIOT Act was hastily pushed in the wake of the tragic events of September 11th, 2001.

The NDAA cuts Pentagon spending by $43 billion from last year’s budget, a number so insignificant when compared to the $662 billion still (officially) allocated, it is almost laughable.

The bill also contained an amendment which enacts strict new sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank and any entities that do business with it, a move which will likely have brutal repercussions for the Iranian people – just like the sanctions on Iraq did.

Not a single Senator voted against this amendment, which was voted on soon before the entirety of S.1867 was passed, despite the hollow threats of a veto from the Obama White House.

Based simply on historical precedent, I trust Obama’s promises as much as I trust the homeless man who told me he was John F. Kennedy.

I wish that I could believe that the Obama administration would strike down this horrific bill but I would be quite ignorant and naïve if I did so.

Furthermore, the White House’s official statement doesn’t even say that they will veto the bill. In fact, it says, “the President’s senior advisers [will] recommend a veto.”

As Glenn Greenwald points out, the objection isn’t even about opposing the detention of accused terrorists without a trial, instead it is the contention that, “whether an accused Terrorist is put in military detention rather than civilian custody is for the President alone to decide.”

Obama’s opposition has nothing to do with the rule of law or protecting Americans, in fact, Senator Levin disclosed and Dave Kopel reported that, “it was the Obama administration which told Congress to remove the language in the original bill which exempted American citizens and lawful residents from the detention power”.

As I have detailed in two past articles entitled Do not be deceived: S.1867 is the most dangerous bill since the PATRIOT Act and S.1253 will allow indefinite military detention of American civilians without charge or trial, the assurances that this will not be used on American citizensare hollow, evidenced by the fact that the Feinstein amendment to S.1867, amendment number 1126, which, according to the official Senate Democrats page, was an attempt at “prohibiting military authority to indefinitely detain US citizens” was rejected with a 45-55 vote.

Let’s examine some of the attempts to convince the American people that this will not change anything and that we will still be protected under law.

Florida’s Republican Senator Marco Antonio said, “In particular, some folks are concerned about the language in section 1031 that says that this includes ‘any person committing a belligerent act or directly supported such hostilities of such enemy forces.’ This language clearly and unequivocally refers back to al-Qaida, the Taliban, or its affiliates. Thus, not only would any person in question need to be involved with al-Qaida, the Taliban, or its surrogates, but that person must also engage in a deliberate and substantial act that directly supports their efforts against us in the war on terror in order to be detained under this provision.”

While this might sound reassuring to some, one must realize that the government can interpret just about anything as engaging “in a deliberate and substantial act that directly supports their efforts against us in the war on terror”.

Consider the fact that the Homeland Security Police Institute’s report published earlier this year partly focused on combating the “spread of the [terrorist] entity’s narrative” which sets the stage for the government being able to declare that spreading the narrative amounts to “a deliberate and substantial act that directly supports their efforts against us in the war on terror”.

At the time I wrote:

Part of these domestic efforts highlighted in the report is combating the “spread of the [terrorist] entity’s narrative” but never addressed is why exactly extremist groups have the ability to spread their narrative.

A frightening conclusion that can be drawn from the focus on the “spread of the entity’s narrative” is that such claims could be used to justify limiting the American right to free speech.

It would be very easy to justify eliminating free speech if much of the United States was convinced of the danger of spreading terrorist narrative.

The report doesn’t specifically explain what the narrative is or why it is so dangerous, but one could assume that any anti-government, anti-war, anti-corporatist and pro-human rights speech could be squeezed under this umbrella. Essentially, anything that criticizes or questions the United States could easily be demonized because it is allegedly spreading “the entity’s narrative”.

This raises an important question: could my work and the work of others devoted to exposing the fraud that is the “war on terror” and the intimate links between our government and the terrorist entities they are supposedly fighting be considered to be supporting these entities?

Unfortunately, the only conclusion I can come to is that it is possible for the following reasons:

1) The Department of Defense actually put a question on an examination saying that protests are an act of “low-level terrorism” (which they later deleted after the ACLU sent a letter demanding it be removed).

2) Anti-war activists and websites are deemed worthy of being treated as terrorists and being listed on terrorist watchlists.

3) We likely will never even be told how exactly the government is interpreting S.1867.

In the case of the PATRIOT Act (which is overwhelmingly used in cases that are unrelated to terrorism in every way), there is in fact a secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act, as revealed by Senator Ron Wyden back in May.

In October, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit (read the PDF here) in an attempt to force the government to reveal the details of the secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act.

As of now, we still do not know how the PATRIOT Act is interpreted by the government, meaning that we have no idea how it is actually being used.

I do not believe that it would be reasonable to make the assumption that S.1867 would be interpreted in a straightforward manner, meaning that all of the assurances being made by Senators are worthless.

Glenn Greenwald verifies this in writing the following as an update to the post previously quoted in this article, “Any doubt about whether this bill permits the military detention of U.S. citizens was dispelled entirely today when an amendment offered by Dianne Feinstein — to confine military detention to those apprehended “abroad,” i.e., off U.S. soil — failed by a vote of 45-55.”

Furthermore, as I detailed in my previous coverage of S.1867, Senator Lindsey Graham clearly said, in absolutely no uncertain terms whatsoever, “In summary here, [section] 1032, the military custody provision, which has waivers and a lot of flexibility doesn’t apply to American citizens. [section] 1031, the statement of authority to detain does apply to American citizens, and it designates the world as the battlefield including the homeland.”

The fact that the establishment media continues to peddle the blatant lie that is the claim that S.1867 will not be used on American citizens is beyond me.

This is especially true when one considers the fact that lawyers for the Obama administrations reaffirmed that American citizens “are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida,” although we all know that no proof or trial is required to make that assertion.

As evidenced by the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, no trial is needed for our illegitimate government to assassinate an American citizen.

We can only assume that it is just a matter of time until American citizens are declared to be supporting al Qaeda and killed on American soil without so much as a single court hearing.

More at EndtheLie.com - http://EndtheLie.com/2011/12/02/the-entire-united-states-is-now-a-war-zone-s-1867-passes-the-senate-with-massive-support/#ixzz1fP4ZSRVc

[Steven Gaal]

From what I've read they are practically dumping the concept of sovereignty in the bin. A tiny minority of the worlds population (those who actually vote) empower a much smaller group to decide the fate of the rest of the world. I for one am not interested in that kind of democracy.

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVooooooooVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

Bye,Bye American Rights.....long,long,time ago is today.No angel born in hell,

Could break that Satan's spell.

A long, long time ago. I can still remember

How that music used to make me smile.

An' I knew if I had my chance,

That I could make those people dance.

And maybe they'd be happy for a while.

But February made me shiver,

With every paper I'd deliver.

Bad news on the doorstep.

I couldn't take one more step.

I can't remember if I cried,

When I read about his widowed bride,

But something touched me deep inside,

The day the music died.

So, bye, bye, Miss American Pie.

Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.

An' them good ol' boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye.

Singin' "This'll be the day that I die.

This'll be the day that I die."

Did you write the book of love?

And do you have faith in God above,

If the Bible tells you so?

Now do you believe in rock and roll?

Can music save your mortal soul?

And can you teach me how to dance real slow?

Well, I know that you're in love with him.

'Cause I saw you dancin' in the gym.

You both kicked off your shoes.

Man, I dig those rhythm and blues.

I was a lonely, teenage broncin' buck,

With a pink carnation and a pickup truck.

But I knew I was out of luck,

The day the music died.

I started singing, "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie."

Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.

Them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye."

Singing, "This'll be the day that I die.

This'll be the day that I die."

Now, for ten years we've been on our own.

And moss grows fat on a rolling stone.

But that's not how it used to be.

When the Jester sang for the King and Queen,

In a coat he borrowed from James Dean,

In a voice that came from you and me.

Oh, and while the King was looking down,

The Jester stol' his thorny crown.

The courtroom was adjourned,

No verdict was returned.

And while Lenin read a book on Marx,

The quartet practiced in the park.

And we sang dirges in the dark.

The day the music died.

We were singin', "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie."

Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.

Them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye.

Singing, "This'll be the day that I die.

This'll be the day that I die."

Helter skelter in a summer swelter,

The birds flew off with a fallout shelter.

Eight miles high and fallin' fast.

It landed foul on the grass,

The players tried for a forward pass,

With the Jester on the sidelines in a cast.

Now the half-time air was sweet perfume,

While Sergeants played a marching tune,

We all got up to dance,

Oh, but we never got the chance.

Find more similar lyrics on http://mp3lyrics.com/No

'Cause the players tried to take the field,

The marching band refused to yield.

Do you recall what was revealed,

The day the music died?

We started singin' "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie."

Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.

Them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye.

Singing, "This'll be the day that I die.

This'll be the day that I die."

Oh, and there we were all in one place.

A generation lost in space,

With no time left to start again.

So come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.

Jack Flash sat on a candlestick.

'Cause fire is the devil's only friend.

Oh, and as I watched him on the stage,

My hands were clenched in fists of rage.

No angel born in hell,

Could break that Satan's spell.

And as the flames climbed high into the night,

To light the sacrificial rite,

I saw Satan laughing with delight,

The day the music died.

He was singing, "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie."

Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.

Them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye.

Singing, "This'll be the day that I die.

This'll be the day that I die."

I met a girl who sang the blues,

And I asked her for some happy news.

But she just smiled and turned away.

I went down to the sacred store,

Where I'd heard the music years before,

But the man there said the music wouldn't play.

And in the streets the children screamed.

The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.

But not a word was spoken.

The church bells all were broken.

And the three men I admire most,

The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost,

They caught the last train for the Coast.

The day the music died.

And they were singing, "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie."

Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.

Them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye.

Singing, "This'll be the day that I die.

This'll be the day that I die."

They were singing, "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie."

Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.

Them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye.

Singing, "This'll be the day that I die.

This'll be the day that I die."

[William Kelly]

61 United States Senators voted for this incredibly horrific bill, which may spell the end for what's left of our civil liberties. If this doesn't wake the sheeple up and get them to stop re-electing 98% of their monstrous "represenatives" each election, then I don't know what will.

http://ppjg.wordpres...011/12/01/5001/

I hope they pass it and use it and start arresting Americans without due process and put people in jail and then we can have a revolution too.

[Steven Gaal]

61 United States Senators voted for this incredibly horrific bill, which may spell the end for what's left of our civil liberties. If this doesn't wake the sheeple up and get them to stop re-electing 98% of their monstrous "represenatives" each election, then I don't know what will.

http://ppjg.wordpres...011/12/01/5001/

I hope they pass it and use it and start arresting Americans without due process and put people in jail and then we can have a revolution too.

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVoioioioiVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV*

Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom

Martin Luther King, Jr.

May 4, 1966

The year 1966 brought with it the first public challenge to the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence from within the ranks of the civil rights movement. Resolutions of self-defense and Black Power sounded forth from our friends and brothers. At the same time riots erupted in several major cities. Inevitably a like was made between the two phenomena though movement leadership continued to deny any implications of violence in the concept of Black Power.

The nation’s press heralded these incidents as an end of the Negro’s reliance on nonviolence as a means of achieving freedom. Articles appeared on "The Plot to Get Whitey," and, "Must Negroes fight back?" and one had the impression that a serious movement was underway to lead the Negro to freedom through the use of violence.

Indeed, there was much talk of violence. It was the same talk we have heard on the fringes of the nonviolent movement for the past ten years. It was the talk of fearful men, saying that they would not join the nonviolent movement because they would not remain nonviolent if attacked. Now the climate had shifted so that it was even more popular to talk of violence, but in spite of the talk of violence there emerged no action in this direction. One reporter pointed out in a recent New Yorker article, that the fact that Beckwith, Price, Rainey, and Collie Leroy Wilkins remain alive is a living testimony to the fact that the Negro remains nonviolent. And if this is not enough, a mere check of the statistics of casualties in the recent riots shows that a vast majority of persons killed in riots are Negroes. All the reports of sniping in Los Angeles’s expressways did not produce a single casualty. The young demented white student at the University of Texas has shown what damage a sniper can do when he is serious. In fact, this one young man killed more people in one day than all the Negroes have killed in all the riots in all the cities since the Harlem riots of 1964. This must raise a serious question about the violent intent of the Negro, for certainly there are many ex-GI’s within our ghettos, and no small percentage of those recent migrants from the South have demonstrated some proficiency hunting squirrels and rabbits.

I can only conclude that the Negro, even in his bitterest moments, is not intent on killing white men to be free. This does not mean that the Negro is a saint who abhors violence. Unfortunately, a check of the hospitals in any Negro community on any Saturday night will make you painfully aware of the violence within the Negro community. Hundreds of victims of shootings and cutting lie bleeding in the emergency rooms, but there is seldom if ever a white person who is the victim of Negro hostility.

I have talked with many persons in the ghettos of the North who argue eloquently for the use of violence. But I observed none of them in the mobs that rioted in Chicago. I have heard the street-corner preachers in Harlem and in Chicago’s Washington Park, but in spite of the bitterness preached and the hatred espoused, none of them has ever been able to start a riot. So far, only the police through their fears and prejudice have goaded our people to riot. And once the riot starts, only the police or the National Guard have been able to put an end to them. This demonstrates that there violent eruptions are unplanned, uncontrollable, temper tantrums brought on by the long-neglected poverty, humiliation, oppression and exploitation. Violence as a strategy for social change in America is nonexistent. All the sound and fury seems but the posturing of cowards whose bold talk produces no action and signifies nothing.

I am convinced that for practical as well as moral reasons, nonviolence offers the only road to freedom for my people. In violent warfare, one must be prepared to face ruthlessly the fact that there will be casualties by the thousands. In Vietnam, the United States has evidently decided that it is willing to slaughter millions, sacrifice some two hundred thousand men and twenty billion dollars a year to secure the freedom of some fourteen million Vietnamese. This is to fight a war on Asian soil, where Asians are in the majority. Anyone leading a violent conflict must be willing to make a similar assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that is capable of exterminating the entire black population and which would not hesitate such an attempt if the survival of the white Western materialism were at stake.

Arguments that the American Negro is a part of a world which is two-thirds colored and that there will come a day when the oppressed people of color will rise together to throw off the yoke of white oppression are at least fifty years away from being relevant. There is no colored nation, including China, which now shows even the potential of leading a revolution of color in any international proportion. Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania and Nigeria are fighting their own battles for survival against poverty, illiteracy and the subversive influence of neocolonialism, so that they offer no hope to Angola, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, and much less to the American Negro.

The hard cold facts of racial life in the world today indicated that the hope of the people of color in the world may well rest on the American Negro and his ability to reform the structures of racist imperialism from within and thereby turn the technology and wealth of the West to the task of liberating the world from want.

This is no time for romantic illusions about freedom and empty philosophical debate. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program which will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement.

Our record of achievement through nonviolent action is already remarkable. The dramatic social changes which have been made across the South are unmatched in the annals of history. Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham and Selena have paved the way for untold progress. Even more remarkable is the fact that this progress occurred with a minimum of human sacrifice and loss of life.

Not a single person has been killed in a nonviolent demonstration. The bombings of the 16th Street Baptist Church occurred several months after demonstrations stopped. Rev. James Reeb, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo and Jimmie Lee Jackson were all murdered at night following demonstrations. And fewer people have been killed in ten years of action across the South than were killed in three nights of rioting in Watts. No similar changes have occurred without infinitely more suffering, whether it be Gandhi’s drive for independence in India or any African nation’s struggle for independence.

The Question of Self-Defense

There are many people who very honestly raise the question of self-defense. This must be placed in perspective. It goes without saying that people will protect their homes. This is a right guaranteed by the Constitution and respected even in the worst areas of the South. But the mere protection of one’s home and person against assault by lawless night riders does not provide any positive approach to the fears and conditions which produce violence. There must be some program for establishing law. Our experience in places like Savannah and Macon, Georgia, has been that a drive which registers Negroes to vote can do more to provide protection of the law and respect for Negroes by even racist sheriffs than anything we have seen.

In a nonviolent demonstration, self-defense must be approached from quite another perspective. One must remember that the cause of the demonstration is some exploitation or form of oppression that has made it necessary for men of courage and good will do demonstrate against evil. For example, a demonstration against the evil of de facto school segregation is based on the awareness that a child’s mind is crippled daily by inadequate educational opportunity. The demonstrator agrees that is better for him to suffer publicly for a short time to end the crippling evil of school segregation than to have generation after generation of children suffer in ignorance.

In such a demonstration, the point is made that schools are inadequate. This is the evil to which one seeks to point; anything else detracts from that point and interferes with confrontation of the primary evil against which one demonstrates. Of course, no one wants to suffer and be hurt. But it is more important to get at the cause than to be safe. It is better to shed a little blood from a blow on the head or a rock thrown by an angry mob than to have children by the thousands grow up reading at a fifth- or sixth-grade reading level.

It is always amusing to me when a Negro man says that he can’t demonstrate with us because if someone hit him he would fight back. Here is a man whose children are being plagued by rats and roaches, whose wife is robbed daily at overpriced ghetto food stores, who himself is working for about two-thirds the pay of a white person doing a similar job and with similar skills, and in spite of all this daily suffering it takes someone spitting on him and calling him a n to make him want to fight.

Conditions are such for Negroes in America that all Negroes ought to be fighting aggressively. It is as ridiculous for a Negro to raise the question of self-defense in relation to nonviolence as it is for a soldier on the battlefield to say his is not going to take any risks. He is there because he believes that the freedom of his country is worth the risk of his life. The same is true of the nonviolent demonstrator. He sees the misery of his people so clearly that he volunteers to suffer in their behalf and put an end to their plight.

Furthermore, it is extremely dangerous to organize a movement around self-defense. The line between defensive violence and aggressive or retaliatory violence is a fine line indeed. When violence is tolerated even as a means of self-defense there is a grave danger that in the fervor of emotion the main fight will be lost over the question of self-defense.

When my home was bombed in 1955 in Montgomery, many men wanted to retaliate, to place an armed guard on my home. But the issue there was not my life, but whether Negroes would achieve first-class treatment on the city’s buses. Had we become distracted by the question of my safety we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors.

I must continue by faith or it is too great a burden to bear and violence, even in self-defense, creates more problems than it solves. Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear. Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.

Strategy for Change

The American racial revolution has been a revolution to "get in" rather than to overthrow. We want to share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. The goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent.

If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down the factory. If one needs more adequate education, shooting the principal will not help, or if housing is the goal, only building and construction will produce that end. To destroy anything, person or property, can’t bring us closer to the goal that we seek.

The nonviolent strategy has been to dramatize the evils of our society in such a way that pressure is brought to bear against those evils by the forces of good will in the community and change is produced.

The student sit-ins of 1960 are a classic illustration of this method. Students were denied the right to eat at a lunch counter, so they deliberately sat down to protest their denial. They were arrested, but this made their parents mad and so they began to close their charge accounts. The students continued to sit in, and this further embarrassed the city, scared away many white shoppers and soon produced an economic threat to the business life of the city. Amid this type of pressure, it is not hard to get people to agree to change.

So far, we have had the Constitution backing most of the demands for change, and this has made our work easier, since we could be sure that the federal courts would usually back up our demonstrations legally. Now we are approaching areas where the voice of the Constitution is not clear. We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering the area of human rights.

The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no such assurance of the right to adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income. And yet, in a nation which has a gross national product of 750 billion dollars a year, it is morally right to insist that every person has a decent house, an adequate education and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family. Achievement of these goals will be a lot more difficult and require much more discipline, understanding, organization and sacrifice.

It so happens that Negroes live in the central city of the major cities of the United States. These cities control the electoral votes of the large states of our nation. This means that though we are only ten percent of the nation’s population, we are located in such a key position geographically—the cities of the North and black belts of the South—that we are able to lead a political and moral coalition which can direct the course of the nation. Our position depends a lot on more than political power, however. It depends on our ability to marshal moral power as well. As soon as we lose the moral offensive, we are left with only our ten percent of the power of the nation. This is hardly enough to produce any meaningful changes, even within our own communities, for the lines of power control the economy as well and once the flow of money is cut off, progress ceases.

The past three years have demonstrated the power of a committed, morally sound minority to lead the nation. It was the coalition molded through the Birmingham movement which allied the forces of the churches, labor and the academic communities of the nation behind the liberal causes of our time. All of the liberal legislation of the past session of Congress can be credited to this coalition. Even the presence of a vital peace movement and the campus protest against the war in Vietnam can be traced back to the nonviolent movement led by the Negro. Prior to Birmingham, our campuses were still in a state of shock over the McCarthy era and Congress was caught in the perennial deadlock of southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans. Negroes put the country on the move against the enemies of poverty, slums and inadequate education.

Techniques of the Future

When Negroes marched, so did the nation. The power of the nonviolent march is indeed a mystery. It is always surprising that a few hundred Negroes marching can produce such a reaction across the nation. When marches are carefully organized around well-defined issues, they represent the power with Victor Hugo phrased as the most powerful force in the world, "an idea whose time has come." Marching feet announce that time has come for a given idea. When the idea is a sound one, the cause is a just one, and the demonstration a righteous one, change will be forthcoming. But if any of these conditions are not present, the power for change is missing also. A thousand people demonstrating for the right to use heroin would have little effect. By the same token, a group of ten thousand marching in anger against a police station and cussing out the chief of police will do very little to bring respect, dignity and unbiased law enforcement. Such a demonstration would only produce fear and bring about an addition of forces to the station and more oppressive methods by the police.

Marches must continue in the future, and they must be the kind of marches that bring about the desired result. But the march is not a "one shot" victory-producing method. One march is seldom successful, and as my good friend Kenneth Clark points out in Dark Ghetto, it can serve merely to let off steam and siphon off the energy which is necessary to produce change. However, when marching is seen as a part of a program to dramatize an evil, to mobilize the forces of good will, and to generate pressure and power for change, marches will continue to be effective.

Our experience is that marches must continue over a period of thirty to forty-five days to produce any meaningful results. They must also be of sufficient size to produce some inconvenience to the forces in power or they go unnoticed. In other words, they must demand the attention of the press, for it is the press which interprets the issue to the community at large and thereby sets in motion the machinery for change.

Along with the march as a weapon for change in our nonviolent arsenal must be listed the boycott. Basic to the philosophy of nonviolence is the refusal to cooperate with evil. There is nothing quite so effective as a refusal to cooperate economically with the forces and institutions which perpetuate evil in our communities.

In the past six months simply by refusing to purchase products from companies which do not hire Negroes in meaningful numbers and in all job categories, the Ministers of Chicago under SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket have increased the income of the Negro community by more than two million dollars annually. In Atlanta the Negroes’ earning power has been increased by more than twenty million dollars annually over the past three years through a carefully disciplined program of selective buying and negotiations by the Negro minister. This is nonviolence at its peak of power, when it cuts into the profit margin of a business in order to bring about a more just distribution of jobs and opportunities for Negro wage earners and consumers.

But again, the boycott must be sustained over a period of several weeks and months to assure results. This means continuous education of the community in order that support can be maintained. People will work together and sacrifice if they understand clearly why and how this sacrifice will bring about change. We can never assume that anyone understands. It is our job to keep people informed and aware.

Our most powerful nonviolent weapon is, as would be expected, also our most demanding, that is organization. To produce change, people must be organized to work together in units of power. These units might be political, as in the case of voters’ leagues and political parties; they may be economic units such as groups of tenants who join forces to form a tenant union or to organize a rent strike; or they may be laboring units of persons who are seeking employment and wage increases.

More and more, the civil rights movement will become engaged in the task of organizing people into permanent groups to protect their own interests and to produce change in their behalf. This is a tedious task which may take years, but the results are more permanent and meaningful.

In the future we will be called upon to organize the unemployed, to unionize the business within the ghetto, to bring tenants together into collective bargaining units and establish cooperatives for purposes of building viable financial institutions within the ghetto that can be controlled by Negroes themselves.

There is no easy way to create a world where men and women can live together, where each has his own job and house and where all children receive as much education as their minds can absorb. But if such a world is created in our lifetime, it will be done in the United States by Negroes and white people of good will. It will be accomplished by persons who have the courage to put an end to suffering by willingly suffering themselves rather than inflict suffering upon others. It will be done by rejecting the racism, materialism and violence that has characterized Western civilization and especially by working toward a world of brotherhood, cooperation and peace.

[Greg Burnham]

Great posts Steven.

We need a revolution of MIND and of SPIRIT.

Such a revolution is not violence based. It can't be. In this day and age such mental and emotional meanderings are ill conceived.

Only when slaves refuse to slave (labor) do the masters pay heed for they know not how to labor for themselves. In the wake of such rebellion their control comes tumbling down.

[Douglas Caddy]

[This column is a revelation on the topic]

The Obama Regime Has No Constitutional Scruples

by Paul Craig Roberts

www.lewrockwell.com

December 6, 2011

During an interview with RT on December 1, I said that the US Constitution had been shredded by the failure of the US Senate to protect American citizens from the detainee amendment sponsored by Republican John McCain and Democrat Carl Levin to the Defense Authorization Bill. The amendment permits indefinite detention of US citizens by the US military. I also gave my opinion that the fact that all but two Republican members of the Senate had voted to strip American citizens of their constitutional protections and of the protection of the Posse Comitatus Act indicated that the Republican Party had degenerated into a Gestapo Party.

These conclusions are self-evident, and I stand by them.

However, I jumped to conclusions when I implied that the Obama regime opposes military detention on constitutional grounds. Ray McGovern and Glenn Greenwald might have jumped to the same conclusions.

An article by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate reported that the entire Obama regime opposed the military detention provision in the McCain/Levin amendment. Lithwick wrote: "The secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI, the CIA director, and the head of the Justice Department’s national security division have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the bill are a bad idea. And the White House continues to say that the president will veto the bill if the detainee provisions are not removed."

I checked the URLs that Lithwick supplied. It is clear that the Obama regime objects to military detention, and I mistook this objection for constitutional scruples.

However, on further reflection I conclude that the Obama regime’s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it: Should somebody determined "to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes."

Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime "flexibility."

The Bush/Obama regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs, but "enemy combatants," "terrorists," or some other designation that removes all accountability from the US government for their treatment.

By requiring military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status from detainees.

A careful reading of the Obama regime’s objections to military detention supports this conclusion. The November 17 letter to the Senate from the Executive Office of the President says that the Obama regime does not want the authority it has under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Public Law 107-40, to be codified. Codification is risky, the regime says. "After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect the country."

In other words, the regime is saying that under AUMF the executive branch has total discretion as to who it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion, no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability, and the executive branch does not want accountability.

Those who see hope in Obama’s threatened veto have jumped to conclusions if they think the veto is based on constitutional scruples.

December 6, 2011

Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail], a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House.

[Steven Gaal]

61 United States Senators voted for this incredibly horrific bill, which may spell the end for what's left of our civil liberties. If this doesn't wake the sheeple up and get them to stop re-electing 98% of their monstrous "represenatives" each election, then I don't know what will.

http://ppjg.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/5001/

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last second trick !!

link http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/dont-be-fooled-indefinite-detention-bill-does-apply-american-citizens-us-soil

[William Kelly]

61 United States Senators voted for this incredibly horrific bill, which may spell the end for what's left of our civil liberties. If this doesn't wake the sheeple up and get them to stop re-electing 98% of their monstrous "represenatives" each election, then I don't know what will.

http://ppjg.wordpres...011/12/01/5001/

I hope they pass it and use it and start arresting Americans without due process and put people in jail and then we can have a revolution too.

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVoioioioiVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV*

Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom

Martin Luther King, Jr.

May 4, 1966

The year 1966 brought with it the first public challenge to the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence from within the ranks of the civil rights movement. Resolutions of self-defense and Black Power sounded forth from our friends and brothers. At the same time riots erupted in several major cities. Inevitably a like was made between the two phenomena though movement leadership continued to deny any implications of violence in the concept of Black Power.

The nation's press heralded these incidents as an end of the Negro's reliance on nonviolence as a means of achieving freedom. Articles appeared on "The Plot to Get Whitey," and, "Must Negroes fight back?" and one had the impression that a serious movement was underway to lead the Negro to freedom through the use of violence.

Indeed, there was much talk of violence. It was the same talk we have heard on the fringes of the nonviolent movement for the past ten years. It was the talk of fearful men, saying that they would not join the nonviolent movement because they would not remain nonviolent if attacked. Now the climate had shifted so that it was even more popular to talk of violence, but in spite of the talk of violence there emerged no action in this direction. One reporter pointed out in a recent New Yorker article, that the fact that Beckwith, Price, Rainey, and Collie Leroy Wilkins remain alive is a living testimony to the fact that the Negro remains nonviolent. And if this is not enough, a mere check of the statistics of casualties in the recent riots shows that a vast majority of persons killed in riots are Negroes. All the reports of sniping in Los Angeles's expressways did not produce a single casualty. The young demented white student at the University of Texas has shown what damage a sniper can do when he is serious. In fact, this one young man killed more people in one day than all the Negroes have killed in all the riots in all the cities since the Harlem riots of 1964. This must raise a serious question about the violent intent of the Negro, for certainly there are many ex-GI's within our ghettos, and no small percentage of those recent migrants from the South have demonstrated some proficiency hunting squirrels and rabbits.

I can only conclude that the Negro, even in his bitterest moments, is not intent on killing white men to be free. This does not mean that the Negro is a saint who abhors violence. Unfortunately, a check of the hospitals in any Negro community on any Saturday night will make you painfully aware of the violence within the Negro community. Hundreds of victims of shootings and cutting lie bleeding in the emergency rooms, but there is seldom if ever a white person who is the victim of Negro hostility.

I have talked with many persons in the ghettos of the North who argue eloquently for the use of violence. But I observed none of them in the mobs that rioted in Chicago. I have heard the street-corner preachers in Harlem and in Chicago's Washington Park, but in spite of the bitterness preached and the hatred espoused, none of them has ever been able to start a riot. So far, only the police through their fears and prejudice have goaded our people to riot. And once the riot starts, only the police or the National Guard have been able to put an end to them. This demonstrates that there violent eruptions are unplanned, uncontrollable, temper tantrums brought on by the long-neglected poverty, humiliation, oppression and exploitation. Violence as a strategy for social change in America is nonexistent. All the sound and fury seems but the posturing of cowards whose bold talk produces no action and signifies nothing.

I am convinced that for practical as well as moral reasons, nonviolence offers the only road to freedom for my people. In violent warfare, one must be prepared to face ruthlessly the fact that there will be casualties by the thousands. In Vietnam, the United States has evidently decided that it is willing to slaughter millions, sacrifice some two hundred thousand men and twenty billion dollars a year to secure the freedom of some fourteen million Vietnamese. This is to fight a war on Asian soil, where Asians are in the majority. Anyone leading a violent conflict must be willing to make a similar assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that is capable of exterminating the entire black population and which would not hesitate such an attempt if the survival of the white Western materialism were at stake.

Arguments that the American Negro is a part of a world which is two-thirds colored and that there will come a day when the oppressed people of color will rise together to throw off the yoke of white oppression are at least fifty years away from being relevant. There is no colored nation, including China, which now shows even the potential of leading a revolution of color in any international proportion. Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania and Nigeria are fighting their own battles for survival against poverty, illiteracy and the subversive influence of neocolonialism, so that they offer no hope to Angola, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, and much less to the American Negro.

The hard cold facts of racial life in the world today indicated that the hope of the people of color in the world may well rest on the American Negro and his ability to reform the structures of racist imperialism from within and thereby turn the technology and wealth of the West to the task of liberating the world from want.

This is no time for romantic illusions about freedom and empty philosophical debate. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program which will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement.

Our record of achievement through nonviolent action is already remarkable. The dramatic social changes which have been made across the South are unmatched in the annals of history. Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham and Selena have paved the way for untold progress. Even more remarkable is the fact that this progress occurred with a minimum of human sacrifice and loss of life.

Not a single person has been killed in a nonviolent demonstration. The bombings of the 16th Street Baptist Church occurred several months after demonstrations stopped. Rev. James Reeb, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo and Jimmie Lee Jackson were all murdered at night following demonstrations. And fewer people have been killed in ten years of action across the South than were killed in three nights of rioting in Watts. No similar changes have occurred without infinitely more suffering, whether it be Gandhi's drive for independence in India or any African nation's struggle for independence.

The Question of Self-Defense

There are many people who very honestly raise the question of self-defense. This must be placed in perspective. It goes without saying that people will protect their homes. This is a right guaranteed by the Constitution and respected even in the worst areas of the South. But the mere protection of one's home and person against assault by lawless night riders does not provide any positive approach to the fears and conditions which produce violence. There must be some program for establishing law. Our experience in places like Savannah and Macon, Georgia, has been that a drive which registers Negroes to vote can do more to provide protection of the law and respect for Negroes by even racist sheriffs than anything we have seen.

In a nonviolent demonstration, self-defense must be approached from quite another perspective. One must remember that the cause of the demonstration is some exploitation or form of oppression that has made it necessary for men of courage and good will do demonstrate against evil. For example, a demonstration against the evil of de facto school segregation is based on the awareness that a child's mind is crippled daily by inadequate educational opportunity. The demonstrator agrees that is better for him to suffer publicly for a short time to end the crippling evil of school segregation than to have generation after generation of children suffer in ignorance.

In such a demonstration, the point is made that schools are inadequate. This is the evil to which one seeks to point; anything else detracts from that point and interferes with confrontation of the primary evil against which one demonstrates. Of course, no one wants to suffer and be hurt. But it is more important to get at the cause than to be safe. It is better to shed a little blood from a blow on the head or a rock thrown by an angry mob than to have children by the thousands grow up reading at a fifth- or sixth-grade reading level.

It is always amusing to me when a Negro man says that he can't demonstrate with us because if someone hit him he would fight back. Here is a man whose children are being plagued by rats and roaches, whose wife is robbed daily at overpriced ghetto food stores, who himself is working for about two-thirds the pay of a white person doing a similar job and with similar skills, and in spite of all this daily suffering it takes someone spitting on him and calling him a n to make him want to fight.

Conditions are such for Negroes in America that all Negroes ought to be fighting aggressively. It is as ridiculous for a Negro to raise the question of self-defense in relation to nonviolence as it is for a soldier on the battlefield to say his is not going to take any risks. He is there because he believes that the freedom of his country is worth the risk of his life. The same is true of the nonviolent demonstrator. He sees the misery of his people so clearly that he volunteers to suffer in their behalf and put an end to their plight.

Furthermore, it is extremely dangerous to organize a movement around self-defense. The line between defensive violence and aggressive or retaliatory violence is a fine line indeed. When violence is tolerated even as a means of self-defense there is a grave danger that in the fervor of emotion the main fight will be lost over the question of self-defense.

When my home was bombed in 1955 in Montgomery, many men wanted to retaliate, to place an armed guard on my home. But the issue there was not my life, but whether Negroes would achieve first-class treatment on the city's buses. Had we become distracted by the question of my safety we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors.

I must continue by faith or it is too great a burden to bear and violence, even in self-defense, creates more problems than it solves. Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear. Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.

Strategy for Change

The American racial revolution has been a revolution to "get in" rather than to overthrow. We want to share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. The goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent.

If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down the factory. If one needs more adequate education, shooting the principal will not help, or if housing is the goal, only building and construction will produce that end. To destroy anything, person or property, can't bring us closer to the goal that we seek.

The nonviolent strategy has been to dramatize the evils of our society in such a way that pressure is brought to bear against those evils by the forces of good will in the community and change is produced.

The student sit-ins of 1960 are a classic illustration of this method. Students were denied the right to eat at a lunch counter, so they deliberately sat down to protest their denial. They were arrested, but this made their parents mad and so they began to close their charge accounts. The students continued to sit in, and this further embarrassed the city, scared away many white shoppers and soon produced an economic threat to the business life of the city. Amid this type of pressure, it is not hard to get people to agree to change.

So far, we have had the Constitution backing most of the demands for change, and this has made our work easier, since we could be sure that the federal courts would usually back up our demonstrations legally. Now we are approaching areas where the voice of the Constitution is not clear. We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering the area of human rights.

The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no such assurance of the right to adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income. And yet, in a nation which has a gross national product of 750 billion dollars a year, it is morally right to insist that every person has a decent house, an adequate education and enough money to provide basic necessities for one's family. Achievement of these goals will be a lot more difficult and require much more discipline, understanding, organization and sacrifice.

It so happens that Negroes live in the central city of the major cities of the United States. These cities control the electoral votes of the large states of our nation. This means that though we are only ten percent of the nation's population, we are located in such a key position geographically—the cities of the North and black belts of the South—that we are able to lead a political and moral coalition which can direct the course of the nation. Our position depends a lot on more than political power, however. It depends on our ability to marshal moral power as well. As soon as we lose the moral offensive, we are left with only our ten percent of the power of the nation. This is hardly enough to produce any meaningful changes, even within our own communities, for the lines of power control the economy as well and once the flow of money is cut off, progress ceases.

The past three years have demonstrated the power of a committed, morally sound minority to lead the nation. It was the coalition molded through the Birmingham movement which allied the forces of the churches, labor and the academic communities of the nation behind the liberal causes of our time. All of the liberal legislation of the past session of Congress can be credited to this coalition. Even the presence of a vital peace movement and the campus protest against the war in Vietnam can be traced back to the nonviolent movement led by the Negro. Prior to Birmingham, our campuses were still in a state of shock over the McCarthy era and Congress was caught in the perennial deadlock of southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans. Negroes put the country on the move against the enemies of poverty, slums and inadequate education.

Techniques of the Future

When Negroes marched, so did the nation. The power of the nonviolent march is indeed a mystery. It is always surprising that a few hundred Negroes marching can produce such a reaction across the nation. When marches are carefully organized around well-defined issues, they represent the power with Victor Hugo phrased as the most powerful force in the world, "an idea whose time has come." Marching feet announce that time has come for a given idea. When the idea is a sound one, the cause is a just one, and the demonstration a righteous one, change will be forthcoming. But if any of these conditions are not present, the power for change is missing also. A thousand people demonstrating for the right to use heroin would have little effect. By the same token, a group of ten thousand marching in anger against a police station and cussing out the chief of police will do very little to bring respect, dignity and unbiased law enforcement. Such a demonstration would only produce fear and bring about an addition of forces to the station and more oppressive methods by the police.

Marches must continue in the future, and they must be the kind of marches that bring about the desired result. But the march is not a "one shot" victory-producing method. One march is seldom successful, and as my good friend Kenneth Clark points out in Dark Ghetto, it can serve merely to let off steam and siphon off the energy which is necessary to produce change. However, when marching is seen as a part of a program to dramatize an evil, to mobilize the forces of good will, and to generate pressure and power for change, marches will continue to be effective.

Our experience is that marches must continue over a period of thirty to forty-five days to produce any meaningful results. They must also be of sufficient size to produce some inconvenience to the forces in power or they go unnoticed. In other words, they must demand the attention of the press, for it is the press which interprets the issue to the community at large and thereby sets in motion the machinery for change.

Along with the march as a weapon for change in our nonviolent arsenal must be listed the boycott. Basic to the philosophy of nonviolence is the refusal to cooperate with evil. There is nothing quite so effective as a refusal to cooperate economically with the forces and institutions which perpetuate evil in our communities.

In the past six months simply by refusing to purchase products from companies which do not hire Negroes in meaningful numbers and in all job categories, the Ministers of Chicago under SCLC's Operation Breadbasket have increased the income of the Negro community by more than two million dollars annually. In Atlanta the Negroes' earning power has been increased by more than twenty million dollars annually over the past three years through a carefully disciplined program of selective buying and negotiations by the Negro minister. This is nonviolence at its peak of power, when it cuts into the profit margin of a business in order to bring about a more just distribution of jobs and opportunities for Negro wage earners and consumers.

But again, the boycott must be sustained over a period of several weeks and months to assure results. This means continuous education of the community in order that support can be maintained. People will work together and sacrifice if they understand clearly why and how this sacrifice will bring about change. We can never assume that anyone understands. It is our job to keep people informed and aware.

Our most powerful nonviolent weapon is, as would be expected, also our most demanding, that is organization. To produce change, people must be organized to work together in units of power. These units might be political, as in the case of voters' leagues and political parties; they may be economic units such as groups of tenants who join forces to form a tenant union or to organize a rent strike; or they may be laboring units of persons who are seeking employment and wage increases.

More and more, the civil rights movement will become engaged in the task of organizing people into permanent groups to protect their own interests and to produce change in their behalf. This is a tedious task which may take years, but the results are more permanent and meaningful.

In the future we will be called upon to organize the unemployed, to unionize the business within the ghetto, to bring tenants together into collective bargaining units and establish cooperatives for purposes of building viable financial institutions within the ghetto that can be controlled by Negroes themselves.

There is no easy way to create a world where men and women can live together, where each has his own job and house and where all children receive as much education as their minds can absorb. But if such a world is created in our lifetime, it will be done in the United States by Negroes and white people of good will. It will be accomplished by persons who have the courage to put an end to suffering by willingly suffering themselves rather than inflict suffering upon others. It will be done by rejecting the racism, materialism and violence that has characterized Western civilization and especially by working toward a world of brotherhood, cooperation and peace.

'When peaceful revolution is impossible, then violent revolution is inevitable." - John F. Kennedy

Those who started the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East began with non-violent demonstrations, and based their strategy on those of Martin Luther King and others before him - but when met with violent suppression, it became a battle in which "The Art of War" became the new strategy.

While protesters are the Time's Man of the Year, and peaceful women bloggers won the Nobel Peace Prize, in ever instance it was the violent suppression by the police state that elevated the protests to revolution, and only those countries where the state gave in to the demands of the protesters - Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, where compromise was reached.

BK

Revolutionary Program