Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
STEVEN ROSENFELD, - AlterNet
Stephan: This is a good exegetic essay on what it will take to change Citizens United. It will not be easy, and by the time it happens, it may be too late to return to the democracy we have known all our lives. This is why the selection of Supreme Court justices is so important. One decision and the world changes.
The movement to overturn the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling and confront the doctrine of corporate personhood stands at a perilous crossroads.
Across the country, two distinct strategies are converging on Congress. More than a million people have signed online petitions. State legislators, city and township governments, Democratic Party groups and unions have sponsored and passed measures in 23 states demanding that Congress pass a constitutional amendment to reassert and elevate the political speech of ordinary citizens and roll back the growing political speech and legal privileges of corporations.
The two approaches can be seen in the protest signs and sound bites proclaiming, ‘Money is Not Speech
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Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
Stephan: This trend is reshaping Europe. It has already changed the public conversation there. Although it is often described in terms of the sexual abuse of young people by priests I think that is only the tip of the spear for this trend. After centuries of religious conflict and millions of deaths, Europe seems to have made a collective decision that religion is not worth fighting about. This is an example of how individual choices reflecting a collective shift in the zeitgeist can change society.
In Britain, a de-baptism certificate offered as a joke by the National Secular Society has since turned serious after tens of thousands of people downloaded it.
‘Some people actually do feel actively hostile toward churches,
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Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
JESSICA HOPPER, - NBC News
Stephan: It is becoming increasingly clear that Citizens United has changed the nature of American democracy.
With the South Carolina primary less than a week away, residents of the state are being bombarded with a barrage of political advertisements funded by Super PACs.
‘It’s coming in fast and furious,
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Saturday, January 21st, 2012
Stephan: Here is another dimension of the surveillance that is coming. Orwell couldn't even imagine it.
NEW YORK — New York City’s war on freedom could be adding a new weapon to its arsenal, especially if NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has his say.
The head of the New York Police Department is working with the Pentagon to secure body scanners to be used throughout the Big Apple.
If Kelly gets his wish, the city will be receiving a whole slew of Terahertz Imagining Detection scanners, a high-tech radiation detector that measures the energy that is emitted from a persons’ body. As CBS News reports, ‘It measures the energy radiating from a body up to 16 feet away, and can detect anything blocking it, like a gun.
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Saturday, January 21st, 2012
BERNARD HARCOURT, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: All of this has always been completely predictable, as is its outcome. The kind of civil disobedience events that I experienced in the civil rights movement of the late 50s early 60s, or the Viet Nam public response in the 70s are being made impossible. Like the militarization of police departments around the country it is all part of the next generation of social control.
Notice that this is a non U.S. source.
It’s almost as if Rahm Emanuel was lifting a page from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine – as if he was reading her account of Milton Friedman’s ‘Chicago Boys’ as a cookbook recipe, rather than as the ominous episode that it was. In record time, Emanuel successfully exploited the fact that Chicago will host the upcoming G8 and Nato summit meetings to increase his police powers and extend police surveillance, to outsource city services and privatize financial gains, and to make permanent new limitations on political dissent. It all happened – very rapidly and without time for dissent – with the passage of rushed security and anti-protest measures adopted by the city council on 18 January 2012.
Sadly, we are all too familiar with the recipe by now: first, hype up and blow out of proportion a crisis (and if there isn’t a real crisis, as in Chicago, then create one), call in the heavy artillery and rapidly seize the opportunity to expand executive power, to redistribute wealth for private gain and to suppress political dissent. As Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom in 1982 – and as Klein so eloquently describes in her book:
‘Only a crisis – […]
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