Rumors of Chaos Verified: Rules Break down
President Obama tried to shift attention away from the NSA’s watchers and listeners by making another disingenuous speech about the economy yesterday, an economy which rewards the wealthy and impoverishes the diminishing middle and working classes because of his own policies: bailing out banker bandidos and by privatizing warfare and intelligence gathering. Conservatives and liberals voted for the Amash Amendment to limit the government’s internal spymasters but failed by a vote of 212 to 205. Still all of New Mexico’s congressional representatives, republicans and democrats, voted to curtail spying on citizens.
Secretary of State John Kerry, a former democrat and presidential candidate, argued with his Russian counterpart about Edward Snowden’s request for asylum. When Russia becomes the country of choice for leakers and civil libertarians, you know that America has lost her moral leadership. Years ago President Jimmy Carter’s human rights foreign policy terrified dictators and fomented revolution but didn’t cost a dime. Instead of sending Drones to the Mid East, Obama should have sent replicas, trinkets, of the now tarnished Statue of Liberty to the tyrants.
Here the Albuquerque Journal today once again focuses on front-page cops who shoot to kill citizens with mental problems, three times front to back, six times back to front, the victim a 66-year old vet, who brandished knives. Yesterday the Journal focused on the death of a Taos woman’s grandson, who they shot three times in the back, while prone on his belly, in his backyard, two cops straddling the victim: they said the victim of bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia struggled and got hold of an officer’s gun, while on his stomach. We’ve heard enough about Levi Chavez and his band of Peyton Place boy and girl cops, which led to the suicide? Or murder? of a young attractive wife, happy hairdresser and mother. If she committed suicide, I’ve got a bridge to sell you out at the Rio Grande Gorge. If George Zimmerman didn’t murder Trayvon Martin, I’ll sell you one of the other bridges in Taos County to raise money for a new E911—Dispatch Center.
In Taos we’ve got cops who don’t know how to enforce the laws governing speech so they have privatized enforcement and deputized a Triple A Tow Truck company as the vigilante of choice. The town mayor and manager early on cast aspersions on the county. Now they wonder why commissioners won’t cooperate in the Command Center follies? –even as the county has been forced to defend its GRT base from annexation by the town’s crackpot six-mile shoestring operation? Do the Palestinians think Israel deals in good faith as settlers encroach on their territory in an extension of the 1967 NAKBA?
Why the town’s attorney said the county, El Prado, and a local acequia had “no standing” to file a lawsuit. But the judge disagreed. Now the commissioners disagree with the town’ unilateral decision-making regarding the E911—Dispatch operations. Si se puede? Maybe, maybe not.
The U.S. Supreme Court anointed George Bush president but he ignored Clintonian security agents’ warnings about Bin Laden, even as whistle-blowers in the FBI tried to call attention to Sunni Arabs, who wanted to learn to fly but not to take off or land airplanes. So the chaos began. Lies about Iraq’s WMD ensued. The USA, Bush and then Obama and the fed bailed out fraudulent bankers who bet on derivatives. Then the U.S. Supreme Court transformed a paper entity, aka corporation, into a person, and the congress and President largely privatized defense and intelligence programs, awarding taxpayer revenue streams to Washington insiders–all under the guise of the national security state and elitism: we know better than you.
It’s difficult to take Obama’s remarks about the economy seriously when we live in a plutocracy—rule by the wealthy. The Obama campaign about “hope” and “change” was one of the biggest political cons in American history. So he tries to divert attention by throwing bones to dreamers, LGBT advocates, and speaking lightly of his experience as a black man. Meanwhile he has eliminated a “functioning democracy,” as President Jimmy Carter recently noted. He will be remembered as the “Drone” president.
After seeing how the U.S. Military tortured Bryan Manning, solitary confinement, standing at attention naked, prior to his “fair” trial in a military court, so Edward Snowden, the pop-culture techno genius and employee of Booz Allen, who revealed to one and all the nasty privatization program installed by Clapper Jim’s NSA colleagues, fled to the “USSR!” This government believes in transparency for us but not for them. Soon local police will be manning drones to keep an eye on conspirators who engage in celebrating fiesta with backyard barbecues.
As for E911-Dispatch costs in Taos, we’re all for cooperation and saving taxpayer money but not as fellow conspirators, allied with a mayor and CEO, whose unilateral decision-making and “conflict of interest” issues skew deliberations and create suspicion. One must draw a line in the sand and say, rhetorically, as Walter said to the Dude in The Big Lebowski. “Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?” Bowlers play by the rules.
The U.S. Constitution and the amendments, think first and fourth, case law and precedent are all about the rules. Then there is the code; the code says you can’t bad-mouth and lie to your partners or shoot a man down in the back, torture friend and foe alike, kill the innocents, men, women and children with drones or guns. When the rules go out the window, you’ve got chaos. I read it in the daily news! Even the Repo Man has a code.