Deceptive, Dubious and Dishonest Origins of Corporate Personhood

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The origins of 'corporate personhood' are dubious, suspicious, crooked! 'Corporate personhood' derived from an informal note from a CLERK:

"The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

There are many things wrong with this statement. For a start, the 14th states clearly that its intention is to forbid a state "...to deny to any person ...equal protection of the law." To apply this to coporations assumes that corporations are people to begin with. Logicians call this a circulus en probando fallacy i.e, a circular argument! Lawyers would say that it 'assumes facts not in evidence'! Specifically , it 'assumes' that corporations are people under the 14th and does so in order to prove that 'corporations are people'. Thus an assumption becomes the premise that 'proves' the assumption; in this case an 'assumption' that 'corporations are people'! In fact, corporations are NOT entitled to the protections of the 14th because they are not, in fact, people!

A political agenda was at work! It is in the interests of the 'corporate party' [GOP] that corporations, their benefactors, be considered people. It is in the interests of this corporate party that corporations be granted privileges which, as mere legal abstractions, they would not, do not in any way deserve or warrant! In this way, I can prove almost anything,however fallacious, however stupid, however backward.

The GOP has learned to hide their 'assumptions' among the panoply of crap that is believed by the GOP rank and file in order to feel good about themselves. In fact, this fallacy would not survive a first semester logic course at university; this fallacy would not survive a sophomore high school debate coach.

Again --the right wing is severely, endemically confused about cause and effect, about premises and conclusions. A conclusion cannot be a rationale for a premise! A conclusion may not precede a premise. "One" precedes "two" and 'causes' --without fail --always precede their effects.

'Corporate personhood' was a desired result! One senses desperation at work. Failing authoritative sources --say --the U.S. Constitution or previous decisions of the high court, the five desperadoes, otherwise disguised as 'justices' seized upon whatever sounded good. Scalia is expert at this. His rationale for Bush v Gore, for example, was just as fallacious --a circulus en probando fallacy.

"...to count first and rule upon legality afterwards is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires."

--Antonin Scalia, CNN Transcripts, December 11, 2000, Supreme Court Bush v. Gore

The effect was simply this: the re-count was halted while Bush was still ahead! If this fallacy, which in fact works backward from a foregone conclusion, is the basis for SCOTUS's 'corporate personhood' decree then we must conclude that valid opinions of and by real jurists and past courts, several hundred years of jurisprudential traditions dating back to MAGNA CARTA mean nothing to Scalia! In better times, Scalia would have been called out, challenged, tarred, perhaps feathered, made to squawk while flapping his flabby arms.

Five republicans on SCOTUS have nothing but contempt for the concept of 'equal protection under the law' guaranteed to all citizens via the 14th Amendment'. They are contemptuous of the Bill of Rights in general.

"Of the cases in this court in which the 14th Amendment was applied during its first fifty years after its adoption, less than one half of one percent invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than fifty percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations"

--Justice Hugo Black 1938*

The Fourteenth Amendment was one of three amendments to the Constitution adopted after the Civil War to guarantee black rights. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth granted citizenship to people once enslaved, and the Fifteenth guaranteed black men the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed by Congress in June 1866 and ratified by the states in 1868. The Radical Republicans had been battling with Andrew Johnson for control of Reconstruction. Johnson was in favor of leaving the future of black people in the hands of white Southerners.

The Radical Republicans disagreed, and they won. The amendment was designed to grant citizenship to and protect the civil liberties of recently freed slaves. It did this by granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States and prohibiting states from denying or abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the U.S., depriving any person of his life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or denying to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. ("No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.") With the exception of Tennessee, the Southern states refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. The Republicans then passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which set the conditions the Southern states had to accept before they could be readmitted to the union, including ratification of the 14th Amendment.

Since Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment -- especially the equal protection clause -- has been applied to a number of cases. It emerged in the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka when the United States Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment as one of its rationales for declaring school segregation unconstitutional.

--Why the progress made by blacks during Reconstruction was seen as a threat by whites, Richard Wormser

In 1971, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Reed v. Reed. Sally Reed had sued when Idaho law presumed that her estranged husband should be automatically selected as executor of the estate of their son, who had died without naming an executor. The Idaho law stated that "males must be preferred to females" in choosing estate administrators.

The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, decided that the Fourteenth Amendment did prohibit such unequal treatment on the basis of sex -- the first US Supreme Court decision to apply the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause to gender or sexual distinctions. Later cases have refined the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to sex discrimination, but it was more than 100 years after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment before it was applied to women's rights.

-Jone Johnson Lewis, Women's Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment - Finally Applied, Reed v. Reed and Roe v. Wade, Findlaw

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Hoover's plan to abolish Habeas Corpus linked to his 'closet' lifestyle

The headlines trumpet J. Edgar Hoover's plan to suspend Habeas Corpus for some 12,000 American citizens. Largely unreported are his motives. His repressive attitudes and policies were, in fact, a shield, his protection against critics. J. Edgar Hoover was a closet, practicing homosexual even as he headed the FBI.

Hoover's FBI kept files on almost everyone of any consequence in government, including several Presidents of the United States. Apparently his plan worked. At a time when the gay lifestyle was very much the subject of whispers, everyone was terrified of Hoover because of how he might retaliate. For decades, Hoover did not merely pursue "commies", he pursued, arrested and prosecuted "gay people" for "being gay". The words "colossal hypocrisy" come to mind.

The recently publicized document, however, is a specific case that makes the point: the GOP is an institutional threat to American Democracy. As we might have suspected, Hoover had planned to do what George W. Bush may have succeeded in doing, that is, suspending habeas corpus and imprisoning in concentration camps without trial or Due Process of law some 12,000 people whose names had somehow gotten on his shit list.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The FBI would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

--Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950

Another famous GOP list maker comes to mind --Richard Nixon, whose "enemies list" was at the very heart of the Watergate Scandal. Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, is a fundamental principle of law traceable to the Magna Carta.

Before penning the Declaration of Independence--the first of the American Charters of Freedom--in 1776, the Founding Fathers searched for a historical precedent for asserting their rightful liberties from King George III and the English Parliament. They found it in a gathering that took place 561 years earlier on the plains of Runnymede, not far from where Windsor Castle stands today. There, on June 15, 1215, an assembly of barons confronted a despotic and cash-strapped King John and demanded that traditional rights be recognized, written down, confirmed with the royal seal, and sent to each of the counties to be read to all freemen. The result was Magna Carta--a momentous achievement for the English barons and, nearly six centuries later, an inspiration for angry American colonists.

--Magna Carta and Its American Legacy

The Bush administration's decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for the US Congress and the Supreme Court. But it shouldn't be! It should be sacrosanct. This issue was settled when King John signed the Magna Carta at the behest of the barons who held the upper hand. Why are we debating now an issue that was settled in the year 1215? Why is the GOP so threatened by habeas corpus? Why would the GOP return the US to a theocratic state akin to what might have existed in the Middle Ages? Why is the GOP backward, retarded, dysfunctional? Why are Republicans, like Huckabee, utterly ignorant of law or history? Why do Republicans fear the intellect? Why do they fear freedom?

Hoover's plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The plan called for "the permanent detention" of 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons.

The FBI, he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow. So the bureau had arranged for "detention in Military facilities of the individuals apprehended" in those states.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have comprised one judge and two citizens. But the hearings "will not be bound by the rules of evidence."

Hoover's July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.

In September 1950, Congress passed and Truman signed a law authorizing the detention of "dangerous radicals" if the president declared a national emergency. But no known evidence suggests any president approved Hoover's proposal.

--J. Edgar Hoover sought mass arrests in 1950, document shows, Herald Tribune

What good is a hearing not bound by the "rules of evidence"? A hearing bound by the rules of evidence is the bloody point! Whenever the power of the state is exercised free of that common sense restraint, you can bet that there is, in fact, no evidence in support of the state's position. "States" throughout history have a lousy record! Why do we put up with it? Why are people so easily fooled?

A state that finds it necessary to lie to its people in order to maintain itself in power is an illegitimate state! Any state which denies to its people the protections of habeas corpus is, by its action, illegitimate and should be --in Jeffersons' words --abolished!! Any state which manufactures a fraudulent state of emergency upon phony terrorist alerts and other lies, is, by its actions, illegitimate and must be voted out or otherwise supplanted. That was precisely the position of Thomas Jefferson who wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

--Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

Later, Che Guevarra would say the same thing even more succinctly:

People must see clearly the futility of maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken.

--Che Guevarra, Guerrilla Warfare, Chapter I: General Principles of Guerrilla Warfare

Bush has already broken the peace. The government of the United States is illegitimate and, is in fact, treasonously at war with the sovereign people of the United States!

Also check out:

Is the internet declaring war on the vampire elites?

J. Edgar Hoover's Dirty Hands

GOP, Hoover, Habeas Corpus, Terrorism

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With Bush in their pocket, the Carlyle Group buys the "Birth Certificate of Democracy" --the Magna Carta

Freedom's most valuable document, the Magna Carta, has been sold at auction to David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a web of Bush supporters if not co-conspirators. This sale of the very origins of our democratic heritage to the Carlyle Group is symbolic of the GOP sell out to the Military Industrial Complex, the merchants of war and death. [ See: Bush Advisers Cashed in on Saudi Gravy Train; Meet The Carlyle Group, Former World Leaders and Washington Insiders Making Billions in the War on Terrorism; The Bush-Carlyle Connection]

Something akin to this occurred March 28th, 193 AD when the Praetorian guards, literally, sold the Roman empire to the wealthy senator Didius Julianus for the bargain price of 6250 drachmas. Our modern day "Didius" has fared better than Julianus, who didn't live out the year. Unless he is brought to trial for capital and war crimes, our own "Crawford Caligula", looks forward to a peaceful retirement where he can exorcise his aggressive demons with a chainsaw and mesquite trees.

The 1297 copy of the Magna Carta is more than an English royal document; it is considerably more than a mere symbol of freedom. It brought a King "to book" for his abuses and established the principle of habeas corpus. Habeas Corpus, as you may recall, was recently abrogated upon a decree by George W. Bush, likewise owned by the Carlyle Group. He was, until now, their trophy. The sale price for Magna Carta was $21.3 million including commission at Sotheby's in New York. We haven't yet determined what price Bush commanded.

Before penning the Declaration of Independence--the first of the American Charters of Freedom--in 1776, the Founding Fathers searched for a historical precedent for asserting their rightful liberties from King George III and the English Parliament. They found it in a gathering that took place 561 years earlier on the plains of Runnymede, not far from where Windsor Castle stands today. There, on June 15, 1215, an assembly of barons confronted a despotic and cash-strapped King John and demanded that traditional rights be recognized, written down, confirmed with the royal seal, and sent to each of the counties to be read to all freemen. The result was Magna Carta--a momentous achievement for the English barons and, nearly six centuries later, an inspiration for angry American colonists.

--Magna Carta and Its American Legacy

I find it tragically ironic that the sale of this venerable document should have gone to the Carlyle Group, a cabal of right wing militarists, neo-fascists, and elitists who have little regard for the principles it established at Runnymede. George W. Bush himself typifies a medieval approach to government. His regime is a subversive throwback to an pre-Magna Carta era characterized by arbitrary, tyrannical rule. In King John's day, the rights of common people cannot be said to have been abused; they didn't even exist. Like King John who was forced to sign the great charter, Bush assumes the power to rule by caprice, by whim, by prejudice. He is, by any definition, a tyrant.

Sotheby's chairman David Redden called the Magna Carta "the birth certificate of freedom". Perhaps! But it is in any case a dramatic reminder of what has been lost to Bush's assault on the rule of law. English nobles literally forced King John I to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. It is, therefore, a document "of unprecedented value to Western civilization". In it there is a line in Latin which reads: "No one is above the law."

If the Magna Carta is not the birth certificate of Democracy, it is the death certificate of despotism. It spells out for the first time the fundamental principle that the law is not simply the whim of the king. The law is an independent power unto itself. And the King could be brought to book for violating it!"

—Simon Schama, History of Britain

Magna Carta is among the most influential developments in the history of constitutional law and may be found throughout the extensive body of common law, English law, and various US documents including, most notably, the US Constitution. Let's put this in the vernacular and in perspective. I have almost 1000 years of settled law on my side. Bush has jack shit!

It is impossible to over-emphasize the significance of Magna Carta whose principles appear throughout the histories of democracies since the English Petition of Right, the Mayflower Compact, The Virginia Declaration of Rights, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, The Nuremberg Principles, and every US Supreme Court decision that has upheld the right of persons to be free of arbitrary rule, to be secure in their homes, to be free of unreasonable arrest in the absence of probable cause.

By contrast, totalitarian states have their philosophical roots in Hegelianism, a straight road to both Nazism and Stalinism. You will find GOP die hards on this dark side of the road. Because the Bush administration is aligned with medievalist and state absolutist ideologues, CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden cannot be sufficiently condemned or excoriated for having denied that "probable cause" was the demonstrable standard that must be met before the state may proceed, in any way, against an individual. Clearly, Hayden had not bothered to read the Fourth Amendment. He was not merely wrong. He was pig-headed, testy, arrogant, imperious. He's also an idiot.

Two words --probable cause --stand between you and a tyrant! I simply cannot and will not recognize the legitimacy of any Bush decree, lie, or obfuscation to the contrary. Bush is an outlaw who has our every law and tradition aligned against him.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006, for example, is, of course, unconstitutional. But worse --it is seditious and revolutionary, abrogating habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence and the rule of law itself.

With a bill as pernicious as this one, it is difficult to settle on a single worst provision. The restrictions on the right of habeas corpus probably qualify, but the bill's over broad definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" runs a close second. ...The bill's different treatment of citizens and aliens reflects political calculations, not legal ones. As the UK House of Lords found in 2004 in ruling against indefinite detention, such a distinction cannot be justified under international law.

--The Military Commissions Act of 2006: A Short Primer, Joanne Mariner, Findlaw

Bush has simply declared himself free to ignore those laws he doesn't like, free to enforce only those laws he does like. By his own admission, he may simply ignore the McCain amendment outlawing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees. He should have been impeached at that very moment. Sadly, Congress was already complicit or, at the very least, compromised. In the meantime, despite the unconstitutional machinations of this criminal regime, the US is still bound to Geneva. Violations thereof which result in death are capital crimes. Bush is in a heap o' trouble.

Bush will ignore such laws because he wishes to continue to preside over "procedures" which satisfy his various perversities. He authorizes procedures that are cruel, inhuman, and degrading. Bush has a personal problem not unlike that of Larry Craig and numerous others in this sorry party. Bush is a pervert; he cannot escape his history --the glee with which he described a mass summary execution, the delight he found in ramming firecrackers up toads so that he could watch them explode in mid-air. Bush is a latter-day Richard Topcliffe, a monster who presumes to occupy the our oval office. His delight in aggressive war, mass destruction and sadistic torture practices has nothing to do with national security. We are less safe! The world is a more dangerous place for as long as Bush has power.

Bush, thus, provides potential "terrorists" a cause celebre. Certainly, terrorism is always worse under GOP regimes. Not content to have thumbed his nose at our laws, traditions, and country, Bush is hell-bent on making it the object of hate and derision. Bush is a lawless menace to civilization, a cretin, a throwback, a liar. It must be shouted from the rooftops. Bush's "administration" is nothing less than rule by decree, a tyranny, inconsistent with the rule of law itself. It is subversive and treasonous. Every American --especially those in government --should simply ignore him, his orders, his illegal decrees. Render this squatter irrelevant.

There is, by contrast, another road that runs straight from Magna Carta to our own Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, the principle of Habeas Corpus.

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

--Magna Carta

Bush claims that he may simply dismiss every US law and the mountainous body of US case law inspired by that principle. He need only declare anyone with whom he disagrees an "enemy combatant". US actions following this heinous absurdity fly in the face of every principle mentioned and linked to in this article. At least 1,000 years of law, heritage, English Common Law and US Case Law affirming the very rule of law say that Bush is dead wrong!

The history of the Magna Carta is the history of a would-be tyrant who had presumed to rule arbitrarily and absolutely. English barons were having none of it. The barons reserved for themselves sweeping powers of appointment, clearly, a check on what might have been the absolute power of the King.

We will appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well.

--Magna Carta

It is tempting to find in that clause the birth of the separation of powers. By appointing justices, the barons took the powers of a judiciary away from King John. Bush has all but reversed this historical trend. He has assumed for himself a judicial power to decree who is and who is not a "terrorist".

In the meantime, Democrats debate how many angels may dance on the head of a pin, failing to challenge the biggest red herring in US history: terrorism. Democrats bought into the paradigm and lost by doing so. Hilary, for example, supported both the phony war on terrorism and the failed war against a phantom menace in Iraq. She has no moral authority, no moral high ground from which to launch the counter-attack against Bush. Democrats, America's last hope, have betrayed the nation and shot themselves in the foot. To whom will the people turn when power has abandoned them?

By doing nothing, Democrats conferred legitimacy upon an illegitimate usurper. Sen. Joseph Biden, though he now says has no confidence in "this President", attacked only Bush's lack of a plan --not the fraudulent nature of the war itself. As far as I know, no Democrat has dared call Bush's regime "illegitimate" though it most certainly is. Voters are left no other choice but to support a Democratic nomination. Slim hopes beat none at all, I suppose. Is it too much to ask that our "leaders" at least give lip service to the legitimate concerns of a disaffected people?

Political rhetoric is just more of the same when, in fact, nothing is the same. How could Democrats have missed the sea change that has taken place, the fundamental challenges to Constitutional government? Where is the outrage? Where is courage? What are the implications? Simply, the Bush junta has subverted the US Constitution and some 1,000 years of progress. Are we to expect a nation of some 300 millions to just walk willingly into a tyrannical dark age?

Habeas Corpus

An update:

A 1950 Plan: Arrest 12,000, Suspend Due Process

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans that he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.

Additional resources:

• Text: Hoover’s Letter to Eisenhower’s Special Consultant (December 22, 2007)
• Documents: The Intelligence Community, 1950–1955 (state.gov) (pdf)
• Purpose and Effect of the Preamble to the Consitution
• Senator Feinstein Warns Against the Bush Administration's Efforts to Vastly Expand Executive Power
• The Death of Habeas Corpus
  
• UN panel issued a stinging report of US torture policies
• Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws
• Now We Know How A Dictator Can Game The Presidency
• Evesdropping on America
  
  
  
  
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Magna Carta: "No one is above the law"

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

That applies to George W. Bush whose medieval approach to government administration is a subversive throwback. Bush assumes the power to rule by caprice, by whim, by prejudice. He is, by any definition, a tyrant. The impending sale of a 13th century copy of Magna Carta, called by Sotheby's chairman David Redden "the birth certificate of freedom", is a dramatic reminder of what has been lost to Bush's attacks on the very rule of law.

I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.

They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws.But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!

--Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia

An original copy of the Magna Carta is to be sold by a New York auction house to the highest bidder. Some history. English nobles literally forced King John I to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. It is, therefore, a document "of unprecedented value to Western civilization". In it there is a line in Latin which reads: "No one is above the law."

If the Magna Carta is not the birth certificate of Democracy, it is the death certificate of despotism. It spells out for the first time the fundamental principle that the law is not simply the whim of the king. The law is an independent power unto itself. And the King could be brought to book for violating it!"

—Simon Schama, History of Britain

Magna Carta is among the most influential developments in the history of constitutional law and may be found throughout the extensive body of common law, English law, and various US documents. Let's put this in the vernacular and in perspective. I have almost 1000 years of settled law on my side. Bush has jack shit!

It is impossible to over-emphasize the significance of Magna Carta whose principles appear throughout the histories of democracies since the English Petition of Right, the Mayflower Compact, The Virginia Declaration of Rights, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, The Nuremberg Principles, and every US Supreme Court decision that has upheld the right of persons to be free of arbitrary rule, to be secure in their homes, to be free of unreasonable arrest in the absence of probable cause that a crime has been committed.

By contrast, totalitarian states have their philosophical roots in Hegelianism, a straight road to both Nazism and Stalinism. You will find GOP die hards on this dark side of the road. Because the Bush administration is aligned with medievalist and state absolutist ideologues, CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden cannot be sufficiently condemned or excoriated for having denied that "probable cause" was the demonstrable standard that must be met before the state may proceed, in any way, against an individual. Those two words --probable cause --stand between you and a tyrant! I simply cannot and will not recognize the legitimacy of any Bush decree, lie, or obfuscation to the contrary. Bush is an outlaw who has our every law and tradition aligned against him.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006, for example, is, of course, unconstitutional. But worse --it is seditious and revolutionary, abrogating habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence and the rule of law itself.

With a bill as pernicious as this one, it is difficult to settle on a single worst provision. The restrictions on the right of habeas corpus probably qualify, but the bill's over broad definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" runs a close second. ...The bill's different treatment of citizens and aliens reflects political calculations, not legal ones. As the UK House of Lords found in 2004 in ruling against indefinite detention, such a distinction cannot be justified under international law.

--The Military Commissions Act of 2006: A Short Primer, Joanne Mariner, Findlaw

Bush has simply declared himself free to ignore those laws he doesn't like, free to enforce only those laws he likes. He stated that he might simply ignore the McCain amendment which outlaws cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees. He should have been impeached at that very moment. Sadly, Congress was already complicit or, at the very least, compromised.

There is only one reason Bush would want to ignore such a law: he wishes to continue to preside over "procedures" which violate the US Constitution and laws. He wishes to continue to authorize procedures that are cruel, inhuman, and degrading. I think Bush has a personal problem. I think Bush is, like Larry Craig and numerous others in this sorry party, a perver. Bush cannot escape his history, the glee with which he described a mass summary execution, the delight he found in ramming firecrackers up toads so that he can watch them explode in mid-air. This is a latter-day Topcliffe, monster who presumes to occupy the our oval office. His delight in aggressive war, mass destruction and sadistic torture practices has nothing to do with national security. We less safe and the world is a more dangerous place for as long as Bush has any power at all.

Bush, thus, provides potential "terrorists" a cause celebre. Certainly, terrorism is always worse under GOP regimes. Not content to have thumbed his nose at our laws, traditions, and country, Bush is hell-bent on making it the object of hate and derision. Bush is a lawless menace to civilization, a cretin, a throwback, a liar. It must be shouted from the rooftops. Bush's "administration" is nothing less than rule by decree, a tyranny, inconsistent with the rule of law itself. It is subversive and treasonous.

There is, by contrast, another road that runs straight from Magna Carta to our own Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, the principle of Habeas Corpus.

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

--Magna Carta

Bush claims that he may simply dismiss every US law and the mountainous body of US case law inspired by that principle. He need only declare anyone with whom he disagrees an "enemy combatant". US actions following this heinous absurdity fly in the face of every principle mentioned and linked to in this article. At least 1,000 years of law, heritage, English Common Law and US Case Law affirming the very rule of law say that Bush is dead wrong!

The history of the Magna Carta is the history of a would-be tyrant who had presumed to rule arbitrarily and absolutely. English barons were having none of it. The barons reserved for themselves sweeping powers of appointment, clearly, a check on what might have been the absolute power of the King.

We will appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well.

--Magna Carta

It is tempting to find in that clause the birth of the separation of powers. By appointing justices, the barons took powers of a judiciary away from King John. Bush has all but reversed this historical trend. He has assumed for himself a judicial power to decree who is and who is not a "terrorist".

In the meantime, Democrats debate how many angels may dance on the head of a pin, falling to challenge the biggest red herring in US history: terrorism. Democrats bought into the paradigm and lost by doing so. Hilary, for example, supported both the phony war on terrorism and the failed war against the phantom menace in Iraq. She has no moral authority, no place from which the launch the counter-attack against Bush. Democrats, America's last hope, have betrayed the nation and shot themselves in the foot.

By doing nothing, Democrats conferred legitimacy upon an illegitimate usurper. Sen. Joseph Biden, though he now says has no confidence in "this President", attacked only Bush's lack of a plan, not the fraudulent nature of the war itself, As far as I know, no Democrat has dared call Bush's regime "illegitimate" though it most certainly is. Voters are left no other choice but to support a Democratic nomination. Slim hopes beat none at all, I suppose. Is it too much to ask that our "leaders" at least give lip service to the legitimate concerns of a disaffected people.

Political rhetoric is just more of the same when, in fact, nothing is the same. How could Democrats have missed the sea change that has taken place, the fundamental challenges to Constitutional government? Where is the outrage? |Where is courage? What are the implications? Simply, the Bush junta has subverted the US Constitution and some 1,000 years of progress. Are we to expect a nation of some 300 millions to just walk willingly into a tyrannical dark age?

The Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus

Habeas Corpus

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How the Ship of State Became the Ship of Fools

The US has caught a nasty virus the symptom of which is running punditry. It's like cruise ship diarrhea without the satisfaction at the end of ordeal or even panic. Some quick notes: Barack Obama is the most shallow, non-descript, boring politician to ever come down the pike --an intellectual lightweight whose soul has been coached out of him by media consultants. In Barack Obama, I find the vacuous echoes of Ronald Reagan, a previous lightweight who had mastered the art of reading buzzwords off a cue card. My skin crawls.

I have stopped listening to what passes for debate these days. It's become a matter of stringing meaningless platitudes together such that they sound like real human speech. Or is it a Japanese robot?

More quick notes: I wish John Edwards were uglier. Hillary Clinton is damaged goods. Ron Paul, still a Republican, has many more scales to shed before he can change his repitil..uh...Republican skin.

God help us --the only intelligent politician in the field is Dennis Kucinich who has only a snow ball's chance in hell of ever becoming President. It's our loss. Watching Democrats is akin to medieval debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I am sick to death of tedious debates about the conduct of the war of aggression against the people of Iraq. The "conduct" of the war is not the issue. Why we continue to stay is! Why we haven't impeached, tried, removed and imprisoned George W. Bush is! Why a grand jury has not been convened to investigate the GOP crime syndicate is! Why corporations rule the US government is! The validity of the electoral process is! Why bother going through the motions until paper trails are mandated at the polls?

I am sick to death of Congress kowtowing to a President who has the support of little more than 25 percent of the American people. Carl Jung predicted our malaise in 1957 in his "The Undiscovered Self", decrying "...apocalyptic images of universal destruction" brought on by WWII and an atomic age ushered in when the United States dropped weapons of mass destruction on two cities in Japan. In its wake, Jung was fearful that 40 percent of the population —called a "mentally stable stratum" —might not be able to keep the lid on mass psychosis; it might be unable to restrain the spread of "dangerous tendencies", presumably: fascism, fanaticism, militarism, and intolerance. Jung seems to have been less concerned with external threats. The more dangerous tendencies he feared were home grown. There are some real issues to be addressed but all have taken a back seat to punditry.

The theme of collapse seems to have reverberated around the world, now manifesting its symptoms in the scientific community’s latest dramatic reports on global warming, the issue of Peak Oil coming further out of the closet — being discussed openly in mainstream media, and the bursting of the US housing bubble that now finds 1 out of every 264 homes in the nation facing foreclosure as each day the value of the dollar decreases and the value of precious metals soars.

--The Cycle of Time

In the meantime, Democrats have failed to challenge Bush's exploitation of the ultimate strawman: terrorism. Bush owns the issue of "terrorism" even if he had to make it all up. As long as Democrats buy into the paradigm, they have no place from which to launch a counter-attack. Democrats too easily conferred legitimacy upon an illegitimate usurper, credibility when, in fact, Bush lied about everything. They are now paying the price for having played Bush's game. The spectre of terrorism has been of greater benefit to Bush than "real" terrorists who share with O.J.'s "real killers" all the characteristics of a phantom menace.

Political rhetoric is just more of the same when, in fact, nothing is the same. How could the Democrats have missed the sea change that has taken place, the fundamental challenges to Constitutional government? What are the implications? Simply, the Bush junta has challenged not only the Constitution but almost 1,000 years of progress. Principles mouthed by Bush simply fly in the face of the Magna Carta, the English Petition of Right, the Mayflower Compact, The Virginia Declaration of Rights, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, The Nuremberg Principles, and every US Supreme Court decision that has upheld the right of persons to be free of arbitary rule, to be secure in their homes, to be free of unreasonable arrest in the absence of probable cause that a crime has been committed.

Significantly, totalitarian states have their philosophical roots in Hegelianism, a straight road to both Nazism and Stalinism. There is, by contrast, another road that runs straight from Magna Carta to our own Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

If the Magna Carta is not the birth certificate of Democracy, it is the death certificate of despotism. It spells out for the first time the fundamental principle that the law is not simply the whim of the king. The law is an independent power unto itself. And the King could be brought to book for violating it!"

—Simon Schama, History of Britain

Bush's demogoguery is an issue and the Democrats should be on the offensive. Instead, most members of Congress lined up behind what Gore Vidal called an "un-American" administration.

Instead of bullshit and platitudes from Obama --nonsense talk about attacking Pakistan, Barack should have been screaming about America's enemies inside the White House --George W. Bush and his every supporter. Do the Democrats get it? Have they not understood what Bush has done? Is Congress without a clue?

The Constitution itself is explicit when it establishes the sovereignty of the people. But, if that were not enough to dispel notions of the "state as absolute", a Bill of Rights was insisted upon and ratified by the people. In the 1960's, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas believed the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to be absolute —beyond the power of Congress or the executive to modify or infringe in any way. We could use someone like Douglas today. As his friend Tommy Corcoran pointed out, Douglas had "wanted the Presidency worse than Don Quixote wanted Dulcinea" and Franklin Roosevelt believed that Douglas would have been the strongest running mate in 1944. It was Democratic bosses who persuaded Roosevelt to pick Harry Truman instead. Oh well! "To err is Truman!"

Democratic "opposition" to Bush seems less naive than irrelevant, locked into the GOP paradigm when Democrats should be forcing a defensive GOP to debate on Democratic turf, on Democratic issues, indeed, the very future of Democracy in America. Tragically, the Democrats will get suckered into debating the "conduct" of a war that should never have begun, a war that is itself a crime, a war that has, in fact, no good end, a war that is, in fact, lost!

Democrats are in danger of blowing the last chance they will ever have to forge a new and better future. It's become a cliche that the Chinese character for "crisis", literally translated, means "dangerous opportunity". If the Democrats fail to make the most of this opportunity, the people of the US will be no better off, nothing will have been gained for the ordeal we have suffered, nothing true, lasting or valid will have been affirmed. What a waste if this should all turn out to be the most irrelevant presidential debate in this nation's history!

And now for something completely different:

Additional resources

• Purpose and Effect of the Preamble to the Consitution
• US Military Investigates Multiple Alleged Massacre Incidents
• Senator Feinstein Warns Against the Bush Administration's Efforts to Vastly Expand Executive Power
• US faces third charge of killing Iraqi civilians
  
• UN panel issued a stinging report of US torture policies
• Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws
• Now We Know How A Dictator Can Game The Presidency
• Evesdropping on America

Discoveries

• Herbie Hancock & Tony Williams
• The Phantom Planet
• Mesa of Lost Women
• Doctor Who - Rose

The Existentialist Cowboy

Conservative Lies
Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq

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