The Guantanamo Habeas Cases as Lawmaking. Recommended by Berto Jongman.
Journal: MILNET Selected Headlines
03 Economy, 04 Education, 05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Communities of Practice, EthicsObama’s Credibility Gap (New York Times)
Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.
Public Rifts On Afghanistan: Leaks suggest that the administration is divided, endangering Obama's strategy (Philadelphia Enquirer)
A divided administration will produce an incoherent policy.
U.S. school bans the dictionary (Many Sources)
A California school district has added a new book to the controversial list of literature that is considered unfit for young eyes. . . . It's the dictionary.
Pentagon Report Calls for Office of ‘Strategic Deception’ (WIRED)
The Defense Department needs to get better at lying and fooling people about its intentions. That’s the conclusion from an influential Pentagon panel, the Defense Science Board (DSB), which recommends that the military and intelligence communities join in a new agency devoted to “strategic surprise/deception.”
Journal: Home-Grown Terrorism in USA
08 Immigration, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Government, Law Enforcement
The Homegrown Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland (ARI)
Lorenzo Vidino
ARI 171/2009 – 18/12/2009
EXTRACT 1: All these plots are very diverse in their origin, degree of sophistication and characteristics of the individuals involved. Yet they all contribute to paint the picture of the complex and rapidly changing reality of terrorism of Islamist inspiration in the US. Moreover, they smash or, at least, severely undermine an assumption that has been widely held by policymakers and analysts over the last 15 years. The common wisdom, in fact, has traditionally been that American Muslims, unlike their European counterparts, were virtually immune to radicalisation.
EXTRACT 2: The wave of arrests of the last months of 2009 has contributed to shedding light on a reality that is significantly more nuanced, showing that radicalisation affects some small segments of the American Muslim population exactly like it affects some fringe pockets of the Muslim population of each European country. Evidence supporting this view has been available for a long time, as the cases of American Muslims joining radical Islamist groups date back to the 1970s.[12] According to data collected by the NYU Center on Law and Security, for example, more than 500 individuals have been convicted by the American authorities for terrorism-related charges since 9/11.[13] Most of them are US citizens or long-time US residents who underwent radicalisation inside the US.
Phi Beta Iota: Recommended by Contributing Editor Berto Jongman.
Journal: What Voters Want
10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Civil Society, Reform
In a depression, voters want populism. If they can find potent New Deal economic populism, they will vote for it every time, as US elections between 1932 and 1944 show without a shadow of a doubt. But if they do not find economic populism, they can easily fall prey to the cynical demagogy of cultural populism. That is what has happened in Massachusetts.
The only way to be an economic populist is the shift the cost of the world economic depression and the tax burden generally onto Wall Street financial interests, that is to say onto the malefactors of great wealth who created this crisis in the first place. That is the recipe for winning elections in a depression.
Most Democrats appear to be too far gone on the road to plutocracy to learn that lesson. It therefore may well be time to create a new party to represent the one major political current in American life which is not represented by either of the two big parties of the day. In other words, we desperately need, one way or another, a New Deal economic populist party to lead this country and much of the world out of the world economic depression.
Journal: Trust Busting in the 21st Century
03 Economy, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, lays out the political case for “Trust Busting” in the 21st Century — it is a political argument that Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt would have understood and probably approved of.
Chuck
Simon Johnson Baseline Scenario January 19, 2010
At this stage in the electoral cycle, Democrats should be running hard against big banks and their consequences. Some roots of our current economic difficulties lie in the Clinton 1990s, but the real origins can be traced to the financial deregulation at the heart of the Reagan Revolution – and all the underlying problems became much worse in eight years of George W. Bush’s unique brand of excess and neglect.
The theme for the November midterms should be: Which part of the 8 million jobs lost [since December 2007] do you not understand? The big banks must be reined in and forced to break themselves up, or we’ll head directly for another such crisis.
Instead, the Democrats have fallen into a legislative and electoral trap that – amazingly – they built for themselves.
Continue reading “Journal: Trust Busting in the 21st Century”
Journal: Tea Party Express Rolls Along
11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Government, Reform
Welcome to the Tea Party Express III: Just Vote Them Out!
All throughout the recent Tea Party Express national bus tour we kept receiving calls from people around the nation who lived far away from the route our buses took across America. We vowed at the time to keep the Tea Party Express effort alive – and that’s exactly what we are doing.
Join us from March 27th to April 15th, 2010
as we tell Congress and the White House: “Enough!”
Let’s stand up and stop the bailouts, cap and trade, out-of-control spending, government-run healthcare, and higher taxes! We’re back and determined to take our country back!
Phi Beta Iota: We do not believe that a Civil War is coming for the simple reason that there are not enough organized guns to put down the public if the public is united. The Tea Party Express is more authentic in many ways than the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP), which is much more like organized politics as operated by the two parties that have corrupted the electoral system and block out the other 63 parties from actual participation.
Journal: Second Amendment versus “Police Pirvacy”
07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Law Enforcement, Peace Intelligence, Real Time
Crooked cops in Boston arresting citizens for recording misconduct with cellphones
Phi Beta Iota: The police will not only lose this one, we anticipate that one day the Second Amendment will apply to radar detectors and other forms of defense against state excesses. Certainly the public needs to take its right to be armed–both with weapons and with hip-pocket recording devices, with the utmost seriousness.
Three observations:
1. Society has forgotten how to be civil at the same time that government has forgotten how to govern (satisfy most of the people most of the time, deal humanely with the rest).
2. Police have become increasingly militarized and the 9/11 pork has made them more so, at the same time that the FBI and similar forms of authority have forgotten how to do arrests without a SWAT team crashing through the door first.
3. If you tell the truth and act according to the truth, such counter-surveillance is utlimately beneficial to the truth teller rather than the abuser.
Ultimately, in our view, public use of public technologies to create public intelligence about police abuse and government waste and corporate externalizations of cost (Taiwan now pays for citizen cell recordings of pollution discharges), will be a beneficial means of restoring the public's power over “it's” police forces.
