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Democracy

  • Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos
    31 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    By WALT BOGDANICH and JENNY NORDBERG
    PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - As his plane lifted off the runway here in August 2003, Brian Dean Curran rewound his last, bleak days as the American ambassador in this tormented land.
    Haiti, Mr. Curran feared, was headed toward a cataclysm, another violent uncoupling of its once jubilant embrace of democracy more than a decade before. He had come here hoping to help that tenuous democracy grow. Now he was leaving in anger and foreboding.
    Seven months (…)

  • A watched America is not a free America
    27 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    10 comments

    By Doug Thompson
    I stopped for gas on my way home last night, inserting my credit card into the reader at the gas pump at the Exxon station on North Main Street in Floyd, Virginia. It cost just under $40 to fill the 19-gallon gas tank on my Jeep Wrangler.
    With the tank filled, I retrieved the receipt and climbed back into the Jeep but before I could start the engine a bank of high speed computers operated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at 3801 Fairfax Drive in (…)

  • Who Will Tell the People?
    27 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Sheila Samples
    - And who will tell the people - that free speech is a ruse; - The corporations run the country - and then they make the news. - Is it media or mind control - heroic victories or crime? - Who will tell the people... - that we are living in these times. - Song by Willie Nelson
    In his essay on "Character" Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "A chief event in life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us." I’ve had such days, many of them through encounters (…)

  • The End of ’Unalienable Rights’
    25 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    Every American school child is taught that in the United States, people have “unalienable rights,” heralded by the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Supposedly, these liberties can’t be taken away, but they are now gone.
    Today, Americans have rights only at George W. Bush’s forbearance. Under new legal theories - propounded by Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito and other right-wing jurists - Bush effectively holds all power over all (…)

  • RUSSIA’S NEW NGO LAW: A CONTRARY VIEW
    25 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    By William Fisher
    Virtually all human rights groups have condemned Russia’s new law governing non-governmental organizations, but the leader of one major NGO disagrees.
    “Although the parliament has softened somewhat its original draconian bill, the legislation still obliges offices of foreign NGOs to inform the government registration office about their projects for the upcoming year, and about the money allotted for every specific project. Russian government officials would have an (…)

  • Unfathomed Dangers in PATRIOT Act Reauthorization
    24 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    A provision in the "PATRIOT Act" creates a new federal police force with the power to violate the Bill of Rights. You might think that this cannot be true, as you have not read about it in newspapers or heard it discussed by talking heads on TV.
    Go to House Report 109-333 USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 and check it out for yourself. Sec. 605 reads:
    "There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the ’United States Secret Service (…)

  • THE MISSION: Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s final chapter
    23 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    by DAVID LEVERING LEWIS
    In one of his more bizarre Oval Office confidences, Lyndon Johnson said that he didn’t want to “follow Hitler” but that Hitler had the right idea: “Just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn’t true, why, people accept it.” Johnson was speaking by telephone to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, about how to convince Southern whites that Southern blacks deserved the franchise. The curious political-science tutorial came on the (…)

  • Democrats Hold Hearing on Illegal Spying
    23 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    By Congressman John Conyers Jr.
    There can be no doubt that today we are in a constitutional crisis that threatens the system of checks and balances that has preserved our fundamental freedoms for more than 200 years. There is no better illustration of that crisis than the fact that the president is openly violating our nation’s laws by authorizing the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance of US citizens.
    The Bush Administration offers two arguments to justify their actions. (…)

  • The Right to Vote
    23 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Jesse Jackson Jr.
    "The vote" is a human right. It is seen as an American right. In a democracy there is nothing more fundamental than having the right to vote.
    And yet the right to vote is not a fundamental right in our Constitution. Some liberals argue that the fundamental right to vote for every American citizen is implied in the Constitution, based on Supreme Court precedent. Yet when I ask them about the denial of voting representation in Congress to District of Columbia citizens, (…)

  • Representatives call NSA surveillance an illegal treat to civil liberties.
    23 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    WASHINGTON - House Democrats and a panel of legal experts assailed the Bush administration’s secret domestic surveillance program Friday, calling it an illegal and dangerous threat to civil liberties and a presidential power grab that has thrown the country into a constitutional crisis.
    "The president of the United States is violating our nation’s laws by authorizing the National Security Agency to engage in warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the (…)