“The knowledge that we are slaves being bought by the hour rather than the lifetime has also been lost. We have been wage slaves for so long that we have forgotten there is any other way to live. We have forgotten that once we had land and tools and could live independently, providing for ourselves, without being forced to sell our labor power for wages.”
I’ve linked to him before… and now I’ll do it again. Highly worth reading.
People are screaming about Defending America From Terrorists. Their method? Abandon bedrock American values. Of course!
“Some people believe our Constitution exists to grant rights to terrorists who want to harm us. I disagree.”
Jane Mayer called out that gem from a Senator (!) Scott Brown political ad that ran last month. Her profile of this “movement” is in the current New Yorker.
And, just for the record, Senator Brown: our Constitution actually does stipulate that “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
I believe the English language included the word “citizen” back in 1789, so I’m pretty fucking sure that when the framers wrote “No person,” that’s exactly what they meant.
In fact, I’m pretty fucking sure that the whole point of guaranteeing the rights of the accused is so that “terrorists who want to harm us” are afforded due process of law. I mean, the law is good enough for serial killers, rapists, arsonists, and mass-murderers, but it crumbles before a kid with explosive underoos?
In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, it’s time to revisit this “Men on Football” sketch from 1992’s In Living Color:
“The books has been read, and the library is closed!”
(h/t: Joe. My. God.)
Creepy but pretty interesting, too. Via the ISO50 blog.
Via dj/rupture comes Auto-Tune the News’ songification of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech in Memphis, the night before he was killed:
“I mean, rather than campaigning for the right to serve in the military, I am going to organize a gang of faggots to extend the right to be ineligible for military service to all of humanity.” So sayeth IOZ, and I heartily concur!
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?”
“The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”
Rebecca Solnit writes in the London Review of Books of the water-powered rise and fall of the North American west:
Eighty per cent of the Colorado River’s water goes to agriculture. Twenty per cent of California’s agricultural water goes to grow low-value alfalfa. The river, in its climate-change-driven decline, will strangle all these projects and make a mockery of the two great dams and the reservoirs that were once signs of triumph over it and over nature. The reservoirs and dams are failing now, long on silt, short on water, products of the short-sightedness that has made the West a place littered with projects that seemed like a good idea at the time.
Indeed, the epitaph for most of the “modern world” could be simply “projects that seemed like a good idea at the time.” The UN’s triennial World Water Development report says, “Humanity has embarked on a huge ecological engineering project with little or no preconception – or indeed full present knowledge – of the consequences. We have sought to redesign and impose a new order on natural planetary systems, built over aeons of time.”
(By the way, that UN quote, the riverbed image, and the inspiration for this blog post’s title, come from Arteries International.)
It’s even creepier than it sounds. Under the new “Secure Communities” program spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security – named in the fashion of Bush’s “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” Initiatives – all local and state police bookings will be run through the DHS master immigration database. Anyone flagged as an “illegal alien” will be detained at the request of DHS.
The idea that your local police would be cooperating with DHS in enforcing immigration rules completely undermines whatever limited trust might still remain between community members and police officers. Don’t just take my word for it; here’s the conclusion of a lobbying group called the Police Foundation:
immigration enforcement by local police undermines their core public safety mission, diverts scarce resources, increases their exposure to liability and litigation, and exacerbates fear in communities already distrustful of police.
The fact that every single person arrested and booked will be run through this system is considered a civil rights PLUS because it avoids the “profiling” of people based on their skin color or perceived ethnic background.
With that so-called advantage, I’m sure a lot of liberals will line up and cheer for the Obama administration’s newest plan to help Keep Us Safe from all those house-cleaners, musicians, DJs, gardeners, nannies, computer programmers, strawberry pickers, and meat packers who currently enable threaten our way of life.