The Truth on Monday

 

States have tried to suppress the right to vote for years and now. This comes after the Supreme Court ruling against Voting Rights Act. We see a coalition of public advocacy groups that have filed a lawsuit. This lawsuit challenges a new North Carolina law. This law severely restricts the right to vote. The lawsuit was called League of Women Voters et al. v. North Carolina. It charges that the North Carolina state's new voting regulations disproportionately affect minority voters. The North Carolina anti-voting law is a huge reactionary piece of legislation that claims to curtail the nonexistent problem of voter fraud to date. It comes after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act in June. Many states have taken similar measures to restrict the franchise. Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and South Carolina previously enacted photo ID requirements at one time precluded or tied up in Voting Rights Act litigation. It will soon to go into effect. The Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general is currently fighting in court to uphold the photo ID law that was enacted by the Republicans. There is a letter from the ACLU to the Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobah. The letter charged his office with impeding the approval of 14,000 voter registration applications in violation of the National Voter Registration Act. Kansas has a voter registration law that requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. A substantially similar requirement in an Arizona law was recently struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The North Carolina government is dominated now by the Republican Party in all levels. The GOP has been the major instigator of the anti-voting legislation in America. The Republicans have a supermajority in both houses of the North Carolina state legislature (including a favorable judiciary and governorship). Reactionaries want more evil policies in North Carolina like dealing with workplace rights to social services. Art Pope, the billionaire magnate of Variety Wholesalers, spent over $2 million on the state’s congressional elections, and in return, Governor Pat McCrory placed Pope in the important post of state budget director. The new North Carolina voting law can disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. It can cause enormous difficulties for working class voters as well as youth and the elderly, by eliminating same day voter registration and shortening the early voting period. During the 2012 election, 2.5 million North Carolinians cast their ballots during the early voting period or more than half the total electorate. In the 2008 and 2012 general elections, more than 70 percent of African-American voters took advantage of early voting. In the 2008 and 2012 elections, approximately 250,000 North Carolinians were able to vote or register to vote or update their registration all at the same time, with African Americans disproportionately taking advantage of this opportunity. Under the new law, there is no same-day registration at all. This is also true for so-called out of precinct voting. In the past, North Carolina voters would have their votes counted in presidential and gubernatorial elections even if they voted at the wrong precinct. These votes will not be counted, with a disproportionate effect on the poor, working class, and young voters, who change residences more frequently. The new law also includes a photo ID provision. This causes another hurdle for low income, working, elderly, and disabled voters who have to obtain an approved government issued ID card to show at the polls. We also realize that both major parties want power, but we have the right to fight for the right to vote. The right to vote came by massive political struggle. Many Constitutional amendments relate to the right to vote. The 15th Amendment was passed in the wake of the Civil War that freed the slaves, states that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State...on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude...” The 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920 amid rising social struggles of the working class and just three years after the Russian Revolution, guaranteed the right to vote to women. The 24th Amendment assured that the right to vote could not be thwarted by a poll tax or any other tax. The Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County caused an assault on the right to vote. The Court's majority opinion used the reactionary doctrine of states' rights as a means to mask its antidemocratic agenda. The majority wanted the right of a state to reject elections beyond the constitutional principles granting power to the federal government to protect the right to vote against the intervention of any state (including the power of states to enact legislation to achieve that end). We know that states' rights was the battle cry of slaveholders of the Confederacy in the Civil War. States' rights has been used as a means to suppress the people in the state in question (from having slavery or harming workers at the polls). The right of the state historically stands in opposition to the rights of the people. The new voting restrictions are against real constitutional principles and progressive values. We are still fighting against a burgeoning surveillance state, militarism abroad, and the assault on all basic democratic rights.

 

There is a Time's reporter who wants to kill Assange. This sick goal is typical of the aims of the political elite in real life. The truth is that the government deals with embarrassing information by targeting whistleblowers and journalists. Time Magazine's senior national correspondent Michael Runwald tweeted tonight the following: "...I can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out [Wikileaks founder] Julian Assange..." That statement is sick and wrong. This view of his is common among many in that political world. We know that under both Bush and Obama, bad government policy can lead into bad results. The government is notorious for manipulating data instead of changing policy. In real life, there are many reporters who never criticize the government in nothing more than a superficial fashion. They are protected and rewarded. The government has repealed long standing laws against using propaganda against Americans on U.S. soil. We know that the government has manipulated social media the entire time. The government has taken to protecting criminal wrongdoing by attacking whistleblowers and any journalists who have the nerve to report on the beans spilled by the whistleblowers. The Obama administration unfortunately prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other Presidents combined. The government has smeared many whistleblowers, threaten reporters, etc. who discuss whistleblower information and harass honest analysts. Some want Julian Assange to face the death penalty for leaking whistleblower information. Establishment figures like Andrew Sorkin and David Gregory have also called for Glenn Greenwald (or the reporter who broke NSA contractor Edward Snowden' story) to be arrested. Journalism should never be criminalized in America, but it is under certain circumstances. Some investigative reporting has been demonized as terrorism. The government admits that journalists could be targeted with counterterrorism laws. For example, after Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others sued the government to enjoin the NDAA's allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans (the judge asked the government attorney 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys). The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge. After the government’s spying on the Associated Press made it clear to everyone that the government is trying to put a chill journalism, the senior national-security correspondent for Newsweek tweeted: "...Serious idea. Instead of calling it Obama’s war on whistleblowers, let’s just call it what it is: Obama’s war on journalism..." The Pentagon recently smeared USA Today reporters because they investigated illegal Pentagon propaganda. There have been reporters covering the Occupy protests being targeted for arrest. The Bush White House worked hard to smear CIA officers, bloggers, and anyone else who criticized the Iraq War. In an effort to protect Bank of America from the threatened Wikileaks expose of the bank’s wrongdoing, the Department of Justice told Bank of America to a hire a specific hardball-playing law firm to assemble a team to take down WikiLeaks (and see this). The American government has been instrumental in locking up journalists in America, Yemen, etc. elsewhere for the crime of embarrassing the U.S. government. Journalists are now being killed globally for embarrassing local government. Even top U.S. government officials question if the same thing is happening in America. Grunwald later deleted the tweet, because it helped Assange's supporters. Grunwald is allied with the elite political class that wants to silence voices of dissent that are deemed too controversial or against corporate interests.

 

There are many major figures in the Bilderberg Group. The Bilderberg's Steering Committee has at least a dozen prominent Americans. David Rockefeller is a member of the Advisory Group. David Rockefeller attended the recent 2013 meeting. We know about David Rockefeller's agenda. He wanted a one world system by his own words in his Memoirs back many years ago. In her book “Web of Debt,” Ellen Brown quoted economist/geopolitical analyst Hans Schicht saying: “What has been good for Rockefeller, has been a curse for the United States. Its citizens, government and country indebted to the hilt, enslaved to his banks.” “The country’s industrial force lost to overseas in consequence of strong dollar policies (pursued for bankers not the country.” Now, it seems that the elite are shifting their power base into younger human beings. Roger Altman is a famous member of the Bilderbergers. Roger is a former Lehman Brothers partner. He left before its dissolution. He was Clinton's Deputy Treasury Secretary. He is a Bilderberg Steering Committee member. He is the founder and executive chairman of Evercore Partners. It’s a prominent predatory investment banking advisory firm. It specializes in mergers, acquisition, divestitures, restructurings, financings and other strategic transactions. It operates the old-fashioned way. It recommends leveraged buyouts, asset-stripping targeted companies, and leaving thousands of employees high and dry on their own. Bilderberger Jeff Bezos is Amazon's founder and CEO. Amazon is the world's largest online retailer. Earlier, he worked on Wall Street and for a New York based hedge fund. As of March 2013, Forbes estimated his net worth at $25.2 billion. Bilderberger Martin Feldstein is a Harvard University Professor of Economics. From 1982 to 1984, he was Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors chairman and chief economic advisor. He was the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) President emeritus. It is an elitist organization. Many of its members have been conservative Nobel economics laureates. Others served as White House chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisors. It ignores the protracted Main Street Depression, but it claims to announce when recessions begin to end. In 2006, Feldstein was on Bush's Intelligence Advisory Board. In 2009, he served Obama in a similar capacity. Martin is also affiliated with the following groups of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and American Enterprise Group among others. He has been a board member of several major corporations. The controversial Timothy Geithner is a member of the Bilderbergers as well. Neo-con Robert Zoellick is a prominent neocon. He was a Project for a New American Century member. He advocated post-9/11 wars. He is a member of the Bilderberg Group as well.  Paul Wolfowitz succeeded Wolfensohn as World Bank president. Zoellick succeeded him. He served from 2007 to 2012. He formerly was a Goldman Sachs managing director, as well as Deputy Secretary of State and US Trade Representative under GW Bush. Under Reagan, he held various Treasury positions. He was Counselor to James Baker, Executive Secretary of the Department, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Policy. He was GHW Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs. He also served as Department Counselor. In 1991 and 1992, he was Bush’s G7 summit representative. He 1992, he served as White House deputy chief of staff. From 1993 – 1997, he was Fannie Mae executive vice president. He bears much responsibility for helping to inflate the housing bubble. Bilderberger James Wolfensohn was once World Bank President. He is a Bilderberger. The World Bank harms nations financially under the guise of structural adjustment harshness. The World Bank prioritizes privatization of state enterprises, mass layoffs, deregulation, deep social spending cuts, wage freezes or cuts, corporate-friendly tax cuts, unrestricted Western corporate market access, trade unionism crushed or marginalized, and stiff repression targeting non-believers. In 2005, Wolfsensohn founded Wolfensohn & Company. It’s a global emerging markets private equity firm. It advises governments and large corporations doing business in emerging market economies. Since 2006, Wolfensohn’s also been Citigroup International Advisory Board chairman. In 2009, he became a China Investment Corporation International Advisory Council member. In October 2010, he regained his Australian citizenship. Other notable Bilderberg attendees include IMF head Christine Lagarde, European President Jose Manuel Barroso, former appointed Italian Prime Minister Mario (three-card) Monti, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, Goldman Sachs International chairman Peter Sutherland, as well as numerous other politicians, corporate bosses, investment firm heads, journalist insiders and others.

 

 

The reactionaries always use faux history as a means to prop up their own agenda. They accept free market extremism like austerity as a cure for the recession. They love continuing the old health care dysfunction system (including the view that you are on your own). They claim to believe in the Framers, but even they would disagree with them on some issues. The reality is that Framers wanted the U.S. Constitution to allow the federal government to have sufficient authority to do what is necessary to promote the general welfare of the nation (including protect the nation). Many Framers never believed in a rigid states' rights philosophy where the federal government was so constrained in their power base at all. Many Framers like George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneu Morris (who authored the famous Preamble) all believed that a vibrant federal government was needed to control the squabbling states. These states once pushed the Articles of Confederation, which almost lead the new country on the brink of disaster.   The Tea Party crowd followed the views of the Anti-Federalists, who said that the new federal structure would cause the cause the states to be bounded under the central government and endanger slavery in the South. Many of the Anti-Federation opposed the Constitution. So, this small government ideology being allied with the Framers collectively is conclusively exposed as a mean. We do not need austerity, free market fundamentalism, etc. Yet, the reality is that key drafters of the Constitution were staunch advocates of a strong central government invested with all the necessary powers to build a young nation and to protect its hard-won independence. Article One, Section Eight authorized a series of powers, including to “provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States” and “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.” In Federalist Paper 44, Madison expounded on what has become known as the “elastic clause,” writing: “No axiom is more clearly established in law, or in reason, than that wherever the power to do a thing is given, every particular power necessary for doing it, is included.” At the time of the Constitutional Convention, Madison wanted a greater concentration of power in the central government. He wanted to give Congress the authority to veto state laws. This proposal was watered down into declared federal statues the supreme law of the land and giving federal courts the power to judge state laws unconstitutional. The Tea Party crowd, the libertarians, and the Republican reactionaries are ideological descendants of the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists wanted to protect slavery as a means to disagree with the strong federal Constitution. Led by pro-slavery Southerners like Patrick Henry and George Mason, the Anti-Federalists warned that the Constitution would concentrate so much power in the federal government that it would lead inexorably to the eradication of slavery. In battling the Constitution’s ratification in 1788, Patrick Henry warned his fellow Virginians that if they approved the Constitution, it would put their massive capital investment in slaves in jeopardy. Imagining the possibility of a federal tax on slaveholding, Henry declared, “They’ll free your n____s!” Patrick Henry was never a paragon of liberty or equality, because he wanted slavery to exist in America forever.  Similarly, George Mason, Henry’s collaborator in trying to scare Virginia’s slaveholders into opposing the Constitution, is recalled as an instigator of the Bill of Rights, rather than as a defender of slavery. A key “freedom” that Henry and Mason fretted about was the “freedom” of plantation owners to possess other human beings as property. As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, the hot button for Henry and Mason was that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected.” Besides the worry about how the federal government might tax slave-ownership, there was the fear that the President – as the nation’s commander in chief under the new Constitution – might ‘federalize” the state militias and emancipate the slaves. “Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the new government failed to provide for ‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit protection for Virginians’ slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote. “Henry called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections – the direct result, he believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia.” James Madison later compromised as a means to appease Jefferson and the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists (like the Tea Party crowd now) pose as populists, but they were funded by the aristocracy (rich slaveholders then and corporate billionaires like the Koch Brothers including Rupert Murdoch today). In both movements, there also has been an undercurrent of racism, pro-slavery then and hostility to the nation’s demographic changes — and African-American president — now. Thomas Jefferson was an anti-Federalist who wanted the South to continue slavery as a means to grow agricultural interests in the South. Jefferson, the coddled son of a wealthy plantation owner, preferred a philosophic or romantic view of revolution, never fully confronting its human horrors and practical challenges. His experience representing the United States in France were marked by both his lavish lifestyle at the fringes of Louis XVI’s court and a blind enthusiasm for the bloody French Revolution. Hamilton despised slavery while Jefferson loved it and viewed blacks as innately inferior, which is a lie. Hamilton saw no problem with a multiracial society. Hamilton was more abolitionist than even John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Hamilton was not perfect, but he supported Toussaint L'Ouverture. Thomas Jefferson and his political allies falsely accused Hamilton and the Federalists of being secret agents of Great Britain (and wanted the Constitution to be replaced with a monarchy). Even Thomas Jefferson as Vice President under Adams devised states' rights views of nullification and even secession. Jefferson’s supposed commitment to a view of the Constitution as limited to the specific powers enumerated in Article One, Section Eight also was cast aside in 1803 when Napoleon offered to sell the Louisiana Territories to the United States. Though the Constitution had no provision for such a purchase, Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison suddenly found new merit in the Constitution’s elastic “necessary and proper” clause.  The Louisiana Territories also opened up more agricultural land and thus the need for more slaves. The Federalists shrank into a narrow regional party in New England and eventually disappeared. Their abolitionist principles and pro-government attitudes suppressed for decades. Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite by claiming to be for all men are created equal, but expressing racism and sexually taking advancing of a young female named Sally Hemmings. A person like that will never have my admiration at all. Further marginalizing the Federalists, Jefferson continued to solidify his political movement, ensuring 24 consecutive years of Virginian control of the White House, with Jefferson followed by James Madison and James Monroe. Today, we see the reactionaries wanting free-market extremism to austerity in the face of recession to letting 30 million Americans suffer without health insurance – the Tea Partiers are convinced they are doing what’s right because it is what the Framers enshrined in the Founding Document. If that misconception is shaken, the Right will have nothing left to sell the American people, except perhaps bigotry and nihilism.

 

 

The 50th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington is nearing. The soon 2013 event is being organized at the Lincoln Memorial by the King Center, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Council of Negro Women to commemorate that extraordinary and consequential demonstration. Some want to extend an invitation to the President of the United States to deliver the keynote address on the very same spot where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his legendary, "I have a dream speech." Many folks were involved in the March back then like Dr. Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Rosa Parks, and many other thousands of human beings. The March was right to call for human rights, peace, and social justice. The President Barack Obama is a controversial figure to some. He is right on some issues and dead wrong on others, especially in terms of his views of foreign policy (which are reactionary). The March on Washington was an important chapter of our African American story since African American history is human history. It is part of our being as human beings. It ought to be strongly respected in any generational composition. The battle is not over. The evil system of white supremacy still plagues society. Many of our political leaders want to advance the agenda of the 1% and not the interests of all of the people. We have to understand that we have ideological and cultural battles in which capitalism and its minions are engaging to try to maintain their dominance. We can never allow the civil rights struggle to be merged with the interests of the U.S. military industrial complex including the capitalist order. Also, we need to reject oppression in any forms and white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy (which is the essence of Eurocentric, bigoted dogma). Now, Obama is not God even. We know that the killing of 16 year old Abdurrahman al-Alawki by a U.S. drone strike, just one of the many innocent dead and maimed civilians who have been casualties of U.S. international aggression under the banner of the War on Terror is wrong. We know that the NATO illegal and immoral invasion of Libya caused the death of more than 50,000. The West is wrong in fermenting the civil war in Syria. There has been the state murder of Troy Davis. There has been huge state repression during the time of this administration including the harm done to Haiti recently by UN peacekeeping forces. The federal government has tried to actively suppress the Occupy Wall Street movement and the National Defense Authorization Act can indefinitely detain and deny the constitutional including human rights of U.S. citizens without judicial review (under certain circumstances). The controversy over Edward Snowden outlines the complex nature of the war on terror and the need for the advancement of the right of human privacy. So, we know that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would disagree with Barack Obama on many issues. As a clergyman, he would show dignity and mutual respect to him though unlike the Tea Party crowd. So, we will continue to fight the global white supremacist capitalist domination of society. Justice, political independence, and real social movements are concepts that we love to adhere to.

 

By Timothy