Mr. Conservatard originally saw an article in the Independent, which is a UK based newspaper called “Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps”. This morning he again saw it again posted on Alternet and he finally got a chance to read the article.

In the article, author Naomi Wolf describes the 10 steps that fascist or closed regimens have used to quell decent and control their populations. She then describes how the Bushtard regime has actively enacted laws to do just that, keep the American population in check.

Mr. C encourages his reader(s)? to visit AlterNet and read the entire article. The point that Mr. C feels that is important is what Wolf describes as the “What If’s” at the end of the article.

What if the US has another “terrorist” attack that makes 9/11 look like a cake walk? What if we have another “Katrina” like natural disaster? What is the government decides to imprison activists, clergy and news editors?

The answer is that Bushtards have been manipulating the legal system for these last seven years to take full advantage of just these types of hypothetical scenarios.

Below is a breakdown of the salient points in Wolf’s article. Read the article and post your thoughts and insights.

Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps

By Naomi Wolf, Chelsea Green Publishing
Posted on April 28, 2007, Printed on April 29, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/51150/

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.

After we were hit on Sept. 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on Oct. 26, 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilization.”

2. Create a gulag.

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) — where torture can take place.

3. Develop a thug caste.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the U.S. military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state program to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens’ groups.

The fifth thing you do is related to step four — you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favor of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under U.S. tax law, have been left alone.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.

In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco, liberal Sen. Edward Kennedy, a member of Venezuela’s government (after Venezuela’s president had criticized Bush), and thousands of ordinary U.S. citizens.

7. Target key individuals.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalize or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight U.S. attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of U.S. journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

9. Dissent equals treason.

And here is where the circle closes: Most Americans do not realize that since September of last year, when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the president has the power to call any U.S. citizen an “enemy combatant.” He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

10. Suspend the rule of law.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialized about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition.’”

Mr. C. Just got done reading an interesting article on Alternet.org called “The ‘Silent’ Ninth Amendment Gives Americans Rights They Don’t Know They Have“. The article is written by Daniel A. Farber who is Sho Sato Professor of Law and Director of the Environmental Law Program at California University at Berkeley.

In this article, Mr. Farber points out exactly what the nebulous ninth amendment to the constitution is and why it was placed in the bill of rights to prevent the federal government from over reaching into the private lives of every American citizen.

If there is one thing that really cheeses Mr. C off is when conservatards try to impose their view of how to live on people who don’t think the same way that they do. Time and time again the conservatards love to tell people how to live their lives, but seem unable to live up to these standards themselves. One could easily call this behavior hypocritical, but that would be too complicated for the average conservatard to understand. Instead calling them “liars” would be more accurate and easier for them to understand.

The ‘Silent’ Ninth Amendment Gives Americans Rights They Don’t Know They Have

By Daniel A. Farber, Basic Books
Posted on April 23, 2007, Printed on April 26, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50404/

The following is an excerpt from Daniel A. Farber’s forthcoming “Retained by the People: The ‘Silent’ Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don’t Know They Have” (Perseus Books, 2007), available April 30.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. –The Ninth Amendment

Everyone knows about the First Amendment right of free speech and the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. Even the once-forgotten Second Amendment, with its “right to bear arms,” has reemerged in public debate. But few people know about the Ninth Amendment, which reaffirms in broad terms rights “retained by the people.” Indeed, the Ninth flies so far under the radar that it has rarely been mentioned even by the Supreme Court.

What a pity. Even more, what a terrible oversight: the Ninth Amendment bears directly on such modern-day constitutional issues as abortion, the right to die, and gay rights.

The Ninth Amendment is key to understanding how the Founding Fathers thought about the liberties they expected Americans to enjoy under the Constitution. They did not believe that they were creating these liberties in the Bill of Rights. Instead, they were merely acknowledging some of the rights that no government could properly deny.

(more…)

Mr. Conservatard would like give a special thanks to “The Dissident” formally known as “Angry Chowder”.

The Dissident has created a great new banner for The Conservatard that portrays a sense of patriotism, and yet disregards it at the same time. Take a look in the blue field on the flag. Where the stars should be we see American corporate logos.

Mr. Conservatard feels that this version of the American flag more closely represents the real state of affairs in America today. Anyone know where Mr. C can get one of these babys?

Western Kentucky University Anti-War protest video. Even the normally “conservative” South is fed up with this illegal war. Video courtesy of The Hillbilly Report.

David Sirotaslams Big Business’ claim that the US is facing a skilled labor shortage. In his article called The Great Labor Shortage Lie, Mr. Sirota goes through the lies that Big Business tells the American public in order to open up cheap imported labor, stagnate wages and export technical jobs overseas.

Since the orriginal great liar Ronald Reagan came into power in 1981, it seems that big business has gotten away with murder. Blame the government, blame the workers, blame the unions. Blame anyone except the overpaid greedy bastards that are running American business and the country into the ground.

The Great Labor Shortage Lie

I’ve said many times before that the best place for information is the business press. The material is written for people who need cold, hard information in order to make money, rather than for the professional political pontificators who are aroused by Beltway spin. The only challenge when reading the business press is to get through the corporate PR. But if you have the patience, you will find out what’s really going on and who is lying to you. This week’s piece in Businessweek on the job market is a good example.

The article begins with a sensationalist headline that only Bill Gates and Tom Friedman could love: “Where Are All The Workers? Companies worldwide are suddenly scrambling to manage a labor crunch.” This is the public rationale from corporate executives (especially in the high-tech industries) for massive job outsourcing and exploitation of the H-1B program: We can’t find the workers we need. We are expected, for instance, to ignore academic studies published recently by the National Academy of Sciences showing that, in fact, there is no shortage of high-tech engineers here in America. We are expected to ignore the data showing that companies are using the H-1B program to drive down domestic workers’ wages by forcing them into competition with imported workers from impoverished countries. We are expected, in short, to believe that layoffs, wage stagnation and pension/health care cutbacks have absolutely nothing to do with corporate executives trying to line their own pockets, and everything to do with workers themselves - and we are expected to believe all this at the very same time new government data shows that the share of national income going to wages is at a record low, and the share going to corporate profits is at a record high.

Yet a few paragraphs into the Businessweek article, the real story starts to trickle out:

“A global labor crunch, already being felt by some employers, appears to have intensified in recent months. That’s in spite of widely publicized layoffs, including Citigroup’s plans to shed as many as 15,000 staffers… Corporations are determined to keep labor costs under control, so they’re reaching deeper into their bag of tricks…Some are lowering their standards for new hires or moving operations to virgin territories other outsourcers haven’t discovered… Economists, of course, will tell you there’s no such thing as a labor shortage. From a worker’s viewpoint, many so-called shortages could quickly be solved if employers were to offer more money. And worldwide, millions of people still can’t find jobs. The strongest evidence that there’s no general shortage today is that overall worker pay has barely outpaced inflation.”

There, finally, is the real story - the story that corporate executives and staid political pundits don’t want anyone to talk about: The Great Labor Shortage Lie (related, of course, to the Great Education Myth - the one I’ve debunked before that claims all of working America’s problems are due to a bad education system). There’s no labor shortage - there’s a cheap labor shortage, because, as the free market fundamentalists all love to say, supply and demand rules everything. And if that’s the case - then there’s no way you can have a real labor supply shortage at the very same time wages (the monetized manifestation of employer demand for labor) continue to stagnate.

Not surprisingly, politicians will do anything to distract attention from these basic facts. You can best see this in in the immigration debate. You may recall that many of the most corrupt politicians in Washington like John McCain continue to say that illegal immigrant laborers are taking jobs that Americans “don’t want to do.” Regardless of how you feel about the very complex issues surrounding the immigration debate, this specific mantra is dishonest at best. When McCain was confronted by workers who said those jobs would be filled by legal domestic workers if employers decided to “pay a decent wage,” he made the laughable claim that legal domestic workers wouldn’t do farm labor for $50 an hour - prompting an eruption of boos.

The reason Big Business groups like the Chamber of Commerce support illegal immigration is because large employers want a pool of desperate workers to either employ at slave wages or to use as a threat to leverage wage concessions out of domestic workers. Put another way, the Big Money interests want to preserve a tool to rig the labor market so as to make sure its natural supply-and-demand dynamics are never allowed to work to raise wages here at home. And politicians like McCain whose campaigns are funded by these same Big Money interests will do anything to help them.

These politicians, of course, couch their bought-off immigration positions in humane terms - pretending that they care about the plight of impoverished Mexicans. Yet, most of these same politicians aggressively supported NAFTA, which deliberately drove 19 million Mexicans into poverty, and even more to the point: advocating for so-called “guest worker” programs that provide a legal framework for American employers to exploit Mexican workers without giving those Mexican workers basic labor/human rights afforded to domestic workers is simply not a humane position either for Mexicans or Americans - it’s a position that creates a 21st Century brand of inhumane economic slavery for Mexicans, and embraces the ongoing efforts to drive American wages into the ground.

So the next time you flip on cable TV and see a pinstriped executive bemoaning labor shortages or a craven right-wing politician portraying their bought-off positions on economic issues as the channeling of Cesar Chavez’s agenda, just remember: Buried in the business press the real facts about the Great Labor Shortage Lie are right there for everyone to see.

In an article from the The Independent, writer Patrick Cockburn indicates that the reason Iran captured 15 British sailer’s is in retaliation to a botched US raid of an Iranian outpost in northern Iraq.

Seems to Mr. Conservatard that the explanation given in this article makes more sense than the one that the US military originally gave as to why the US captured the Iranian representatives back in February.

When will the Conservatards realize that their illegal war is doomed to failure? How many more illegal wars do the people of the world have to tolerate? Impeach and imprison the entire Bush crime family before they morally and financially bankrupts what is left of our great nation.

The botched US raid that led to the hostage crisis

Exclusive Report: How a bid to kidnap Iranian security officials sparked a diplomatic crisis

By Patrick Cockburn

Published: 03 April 2007

 

A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Better understanding of the seriousness of the US action in Arbil - and the angry Iranian response to it - should have led Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence to realise that Iran was likely to retaliate against American or British forces such as highly vulnerable Navy search parties in the Gulf. The two senior Iranian officers the US sought to capture were Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, according to Kurdish officials.

The two men were in Kurdistan on an official visit during which they met the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, and later saw Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), at his mountain headquarters overlooking Arbil.

“They were after Jafari,” Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani, told The Independent. He confirmed that the Iranian office had been established in Arbil for a long time and was often visited by Kurds obtaining documents to visit Iran. “The Americans thought he [Jafari] was there,” said Mr Hussein.

Mr Jafari was accompanied by a second, high-ranking Iranian official. “His name was General Minojahar Frouzanda, the head of intelligence of the Pasdaran [Iranian Revolutionary Guard],” said Sadi Ahmed Pire, now head of the Diwan (office) of President Talabani in Baghdad. Mr Pire previously lived in Arbil, where he headed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Mr Talabani’s political party.

The attempt by the US to seize the two high-ranking Iranian security officers openly meeting with Iraqi leaders is somewhat as if Iran had tried to kidnap the heads of the CIA and MI6 while they were on an official visit to a country neighbouring Iran, such as Pakistan or Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Iran believes that Mr Jafari and Mr Frouzanda were targeted by the Americans. Mr Jafari confirmed to the official Iranian news agency, IRNA, that he was in Arbil at the time of the raid.

In a little-noticed remark, Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian Foreign Minister, told IRNA: “The objective of the Americans was to arrest Iranian security officials who had gone to Iraq to develop co-operation in the area of bilateral security.”

US officials in Washington subsequently claimed that the five Iranian officials they did seize, who have not been seen since, were “suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraq and coalition forces”. This explanation never made much sense. No member of the US-led coalition has been killed in Arbil and there were no Sunni-Arab insurgents or Shia militiamen there.

The raid on Arbil took place within hours of President George Bush making an address to the nation on 10 January in which he claimed: “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.” He identified Iran and Syria as America’s main enemies in Iraq though the four-year-old guerrilla war against US-led forces is being conducted by the strongly anti-Iranian Sunni-Arab community. Mr Jafari himself later complained about US allegations. “So far has there been a single Iranian among suicide bombers in the war-battered country?” he asked. “Almost all who involved in the suicide attacks are from Arab countries.”

It seemed strange at the time that the US would so openly flout the authority of the Iraqi President and the head of the KRG simply to raid an Iranian liaison office that was being upgraded to a consulate, though this had not yet happened on 11 January. US officials, who must have been privy to the White House’s new anti-Iranian stance, may have thought that bruised Kurdish pride was a small price to pay if the US could grab such senior Iranian officials.

For more than a year the US and its allies have been trying to put pressure on Iran. Security sources in Iraqi Kurdistan have long said that the US is backing Iranian Kurdish guerrillas in Iran. The US is also reportedly backing Sunni Arab dissidents in Khuzestan in southern Iran who are opposed to the government in Tehran. On 4 February soldiers from the Iraqi army 36th Commando battalion in Baghdad, considered to be under American control, seized Jalal Sharafi, an Iranian diplomat.

The raid in Arbil was a far more serious and aggressive act. It was not carried out by proxies but by US forces directly. The abortive Arbil raid provoked a dangerous escalation in the confrontation between the US and Iran which ultimately led to the capture of the 15 British sailors and Marines - apparently considered a more vulnerable coalition target than their American comrades.

The targeted generals

* MOHAMMED JAFARI

Powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, responsible for internal security. He has accused the United States of seeking to “hold Iran responsible for insecurity in Iraq… and [US] failure in the country.”

* GENERAL MINOJAHAR FROUZANDA

Chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the military unit which maintains its own intelligence service separate from the state, as well as a parallel army, navy and air force