Len Hart
The Existentialist Cowboy

The U.S. will try to prosecute Julian Assange under laws that violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, laws that were absurd when the U.S. entered World War I and more so now. These are laws that prohibit you from telling the truth about the U.S. government; these are laws that make it a crime to exercise your conscience.

Let's put aside the myth that we are guaranteed 'Freedom of Speech' in the U.S. Certainly, the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution makes such a guarantee but, in practice, we are often denied that right, most notably when it is the government that is sure to be embarrassed or exposed by the mere exercise of free speech. That is the case today! The U.S. Government has threatened to prosecute Julian Assange for violating the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, the law that progressive labor champion Eugene Debs was accused of violating when he dared to oppose U.S. entry into World War I. The world's biggest idiot --Sarah Palin --has irresponsibly called for the assassination of Assange.

The legislation enacted in 1918 is commonly called the Sedition Act, actually a set of amendments to the Espionage Act.

The Espionage Act made it a crime to interfere with the war effort or with military recruitment or to aid a nation at war with the U.S. The Sedition Act extended its provisions to cover a broader range of offenses, notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government bonds. One historian of American civil liberties has called it "the nation's most extreme antispeech legislation."[6] Those convicted under the act generally received sentences of imprisonment for 10 to 20 years.[7] ~ Sedition Act of 1918

The law prohibited MANY forms of speech.

...any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the... form of government of the United States...or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy.

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Len Hart
The Existentialist Cowboy

In the U.S. if you are not rich you are screwed. To top it off, the filthy rich (just one percent own more than the rest of us combined) want to turn over your social security to the big banks. Americans have not confronted the fact that 'privatizing Social Security' equals giving your money to big banksters, the same big banksters who engineered the last depression. Again -the GOP scheme to privatize Social Security is either a heist or a gift, depending upon whether your are for it or against it.

With this gift/booty, the big banksters will invest and/or speculate with your monies offshore and international money markets. Not a single job will be created. Not one! Rather --the effect will be the loss of U.S. jobs just as there has been a loss of U.S. jobs under every GOP President since World War II.

I am hard pressed to name a single instance in history when a GOP tax cut or big business tax cut benefiting only the upper classes has EVER created a single job. In fact, every GOP tax cut or other largesse has resulted declines of both GDP and jobs. To be perfectly clear that is not just a slow down in growth; it is a real decline in job creation itself. That any American believes the GOP line dumped on them by consolidated corporate media is proof that the American education system is a dismal and utter failure --especially with respect to economics.

Texas is the fascist 'lab' experiment which confirms me. At the same time, Texas is nightmare vision of the future that awaits us all. Big corporations have robotized many jobs; the labor movement has been finished since Ronald Reagan waged war against labor and won. As jobs became increasingly technical and/or high tech, education became even more important. The GOP doesn't care about that. In fact, under GOP 'rule', Texas ranks dead last nationwide in high school graduations. As a result crime --especially murder and armed robbery --has increased.

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Len Hart
The Existentialist Cowboy

At the beginning of every fiscal year, the U.S. makes a lump sum payment of cold hard cash to Israel, a procedure not duplicated for any other nation receiving U.S. 'aid'. It looks like a payoff in response to a shakedown because that's what it is! What leverage, we wonder, is used by Israel on the U.S? The Carvellian quick response: terrorism! Terrorism is a racket! Israel exploits 'terrorism' to shake down the U.S. tax payer. Now we know why Israelis danced on 911.

Israel is among the world's richest nations. Nevertheless, Israel receives more U.S. tax payer money than any other 'single recipient' of what is euphemistically called 'U.S. aid', more, in fact, than all of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa combined. Though Israel is barely larger in population than metropolitan Los Angeles, Chicago or Houston, it receives more aid than two continents. Those areas include some of the poorest regions which receive much less U.S. aid than does wealthy Israel who clearly does not need it.

Then what does U.S. aid to Israel consist of? At the top of the list is, of course, the aforementioned cold, hard cash. Other 'aid' includes the weapons of war themselves.

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Len Hart

We've grown up with a Christian-Roman version of European and world history, primarily the Fall of Rome. The Romans --we are taught --created a great empire characterized by a sophisticated system of arrow-straight roads that made possible commerce and travel from the far flung reaches of empire from Briton to Constantinople, from Carthage to Germania.

Just outside the borders of empire, we are taught, lived uncivilized, untutored barbarian hordes intent upon harassing, plundering, threatening the Pax Romana that defined the Greatest Empire the world had ever seen. The term Pax Romana always rang false with me. Was it ever at peace but, rather, an Orwellian perpetual war, the 'corporatized' taking of human life required to keep the Leviathan afloat?

Much speculation about the fall of Rome is false. Fundamentalist Christians in America believe Rome fell because it indulged orgies, homosexuality and the feeding of Christians to lions. The more informed may cite Gibbon and sum up the fall of Rome in a phrase: loss of civic virtue. While no one pretends that Rome was in all ways and all times virtuous, the 'loss of civic virtue' applies as well to fiscal profligacy, arrogance and, perhaps most importantly, the consequences of conquest.

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Len Hart

The establishment derides conspiracies and, for awhile, it was fashionable to deny the existence of 'conspiracies'. In fact, conspiracies are how things get done. Very little is accomplished by one person working alone. If what is to be accomplished is illegal, the 'conspiracy' is called a 'crime syndicate' or 'orgnized crime'.

If the 'conspiracy' in question is legal, however questionable, it is called a corporation or a business enterprise. Theorists on the high court have said corporations are people! But, should you call five idiots who have thus conspired to subvert the U.S. Constitution by the term 'conspirators', you are likely to be called a nut job! But SCOTUS believes mere words on paper is a real, living breathing person if it happens to have a seal on it supplied to you by the Delaware Secreatary of State! So --I ask you --who is nuts?

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Len Hart

St. Thomas More would have called the Military-Industrial complex and their shills on K-street a "conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth!"

As events this week have proven, SCOTUS is too highly venerated. Their latest outrage is the decree that 'corporations are people' and may spend as much money as they like in order to get their stooges into public office.

It is the worst decision since Bush v Gore which was, at the time, compared to Dred-Scott, a decision which in 1857, seven out of nine Supreme Court Justices declared that no slave or descendant of a slave could be a U.S. citizen. As a non-citizen, the court stated, Dred Scott had no rights whatsoever and could not sue in a Federal Court! The court ruled that he must remain a slave.

The court was wrong then. It was wrong again with Bush v Gore! The court is wrong now, dead wrong! Corporations are not people and should, by right, have no rights whatsoever and should, by right, exist as long as the people may find them useful or tolerable.

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Len Hart

In the worst decision since Bush v Gore, the US Supreme Court has worked a 'miracle'. Five 'justices' --John G. Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Antony Kennedy --have conspired to turn mere words on paper into living, breathing 'human beings' and have decreed that these corporations, mere 'legal abstractions', have the same rights of free speech as do living breathing human beings. Who is the 'conspiracy theorist', who is nuttiest when five ideologues in robes can dictate to you that you treat mere 'abstractions' --pieces of paper --as if they were people?

The crooks on K-street may resume their on-going auction of the United States knowing that their nefarious bargains have been blessed by the 'high court', a cult of weird robed people who believe weird things! 'Corporations' --mere abstractions --are given license to sell out the nation and call it 'free speech'!

Should you dare to use the term 'conspiracy' to describe the activities of these crooks on K-street --the lobbies for Israel and other foreign entities --you will be labeled a 'conspiracy theorist'! But SCOTUS, meanwhile, gets away with calling words on paper a 'person' and giving them rights! I ask you: who is nuttier? You for believing what volumes of federal laws have called 'conspiracies'? Or --the SUPREME court who believes an embossed piece of paper with a corporate seal from Delaware on it is a real, living breathing person? I will tell you what I think! I think that five members of the Supreme Court of the United States are nuttier than fruit cakes!

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Len Hart

Chinese rulers and the US elites partnered to enslave US workers and consumers. As a result, the US became a vassal state of China, a huge population which props up the buck so that it can sell us junk via Wal-Mart.

These deals were all worked out with China by Bush Sr et al in the years following Nixon's infamous visit to the forbidden city. In these talks, US leaders, primarily the right wing/GOP, the US consumer and laborer was sold out. The US would become a vassal state, a slave state, a consumer society whose raison d'être was to buy Chinese junk. The big losers are US workers and consumers.

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Len Hart

If the 'President' is elected to represent the people of the United states, then he/she should be elected directly by the people. The Electoral College, in which electors represent states --not people --must be abolished and the 'office' of President elected directly. The voice of the people needs no proxy. The voice of the people must be be heard directly, loudly and often.

Fears that the 'college' might elect a minority President are not merely speculative should the nation be so deeply divided that three or more candidates split the electoral votes among them --no one getting a necessary majority. Precisely that happened in 1824, attempted in 1948 and again in 1968.

There are but two resolutions should it happen again:

■either one candidate could throw his electoral votes to the support of another before the meeting of the Electors, or
■the U.S. House of Representatives would select the president in accordance with the 12th Amendment.

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