Truthout: 17 January 2012

Revealed: The FBI's Secretive Practice of "Blackballing" Files
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "Have you ever filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI and received a written response from the agency stating that it could not locate records responsive to your request? If so, there's a chance the FBI may have found some documents, but for unknown reasons, the agency's FOIA analysts determined it was not responsive and 'blackballed' the file, crucial information the agency withholds from a requester when it issues a 'no records' response."
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Constitutional Amendment Not Needed: Congress Already Has a Remedy
James Marc Leas, Truthout: "Here is why a constitutional amendment is not needed to end this disenfranchisement of the 99 percent. The revolutionary leaders who wrote the Constitution, fresh from overthrowing the tyranny of King George, included sufficient checks and balances on all three branches of government - including the courts - to prevent the kind of tyranny we now suffer."
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Wikipedia, Reddit to Shut Down Sites Wednesday to Protest Proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (Video)
Amy Goodman, Democracy NOW!: "Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and sixth most visited site in the world, will join websites like the content aggregator Reddit to 'go dark' on Wednesday in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which are currently being debated in Congress."
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Paul Krugman | Indefensible Claims About Job Creation - and Job Destruction
Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co.: "Greg Sargent is rightly outraged by a claim from Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, that President Obama is a job destroyer."
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US to Force Drug Firms to Report Money Paid to Doctors
Robert Pear, The New York Times News Service: "To head off medical conflicts of interest, the Obama administration is poised to require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment."
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Occupy the Congress: Do You Smell a Rat?
J.A. Myerson, Truthout: "Occupy DC is planning its Occupy the Congress event on January 17 (#J17). With the participation of activists from all 50 states, according to organizers, it will orchestrate a massive day of action designed to send the message that participatory democracy is what has been done in America's plazas and parks over the last four months, not what happens on Capitol Hill, where democracy has been corrupted by the influence of wealth."
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Marjorie Cohn | Close the Guantanamo Gulag
Marjorie Cohn, Truthout: "In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Harvard lecturer Jonathan M. Hansen wrote, 'It is past time to return this imperialist enclave to Cuba.' Obama should heed Hansen's words. For the abiding presence of the Guantanamo gulag is not simply illegal and immoral. It also continues to be a symbol of US hypocrisy and makes us a target for more terrorist attacks."
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In Signal to Israel and Iran, Obama Delays War Exercise
Gareth Porter and Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service: "The postponement of a massive joint U.S.-Israeli military exercise appears to be the culmination of a series of events that has impelled the Barack Obama administration to put more distance between the United States and aggressive Israeli policies toward Iran."
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Robert Reich | Free Enterprise on Trial
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog: "Wall Street has become the center of riskless free enterprise. Bankers risk other people's money. If deals turn bad, they collect their fees in any event. The entire hedge-fund industry is designed to hedge bets so big investors can make money whether the price of assets they bet on rises or falls. And if the worst happens, the biggest bankers and investors now know they'll be bailed out by taxpayers because they're too big to fail."
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Will US Lack of Imagination Lead to Nuclear Nightmare?
David Krieger and Steven Starr, Truthout: "Continued US indifference to Russian security concerns could have dire consequences: a breakdown in US-Russian relations, regression to a new nuclear-armed standoff in Europe, Russian withdrawal from New START, a new nuclear arms race between the two countries, a breakdown of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty leading to new nuclear weapon states and a higher probability of nuclear weapons use by accident or design."
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Moyers & Co. | Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on Engineered Inequality (Video)
Bill Moyers, Moyers & Co.: "In this show segment, Moyers & Company dives into one of the most important and controversial issues of our time: How Washington and Big Business colluded to make the super-rich richer and turn their backs on the rest of us."
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New Tool Reveals Country's Most Polluted Places: How Close Do You Live?
Scott Thill, AlterNet: "The Environmental Protection Agency recently released a comprehensive database of America's greatest greenhouse gas creators. It interactively indexes the 6,700 power plants and other facilities responsible for 80 percent of US emissions, in an accessible online resource that gives interested citizens the ability not only to monitor their local and national pollution, but also to reproduce data-specific graphs and charts to fire off to colleagues and friends on social networks."
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TRUTHOUT'S BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES

In a chilling commentary in The Washington Post, noted Law Professor Jonathan Turley makes the persuasive case that the United States may have become the authoritarian state - in legally assumed powers - that it regularly condemns in nations around the world.

That is not an exaggeration. All these expanded abilities to bypass civil rights that are guaranteed in the Constitution have not yet been utilized by the federal government, but many of them have - and they are now law. This means, at any time, an incident perceived as hostile to the United States could initiate their broad use and turn America into an authoritarian state where habeas corpus no longer exists and indefinite detention does.

More disturbingly, there has been a creeping expansion in this nation of what constitutes a "terrorist." We now have media and, in some cases legal, categories for "environmental terrorists," "animal rights terrorists" etc. We are only one very short step away from movements that challenge the status quo of American government from being called "terrorist."

The sum is greater than its parts, as Turley points out, and that is what is so terrifying to those who value freedom:

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don't operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right....

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens - precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

In short, the Constitution and our legal system, until recent years, guaranteed individual rights to US citizens that could not be dismissed at the discretion of the president, Congress or the military. That, as Turley details in his list of ten new government powers that curtail individual legal protections, means our freedom resides not in the guarantees of the Constitution or the law, but rather rests upon the whims of individuals in power:

The framers lived under autocratic rule and understood this danger better than we do. James Madison famously warned that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

Benjamin Franklin was more direct. In 1787, a Mrs. Powel confronted Franklin after the signing of the Constitution and asked, "Well, Doctor, what have we got - a republic or a monarchy?" His response was a bit chilling: "A republic, Madam, if you can keep it."

Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.

There is a big difference between rights that are based upon law and those that depend upon hope.

We have crossed into an age of legal precedent that could allow for the worst to happen here.

Mark Karlin,
Editor BuzzFlash at Truthout

Walker Recall Effort Collects More Than a Million Signatures
Read the Article at the Hudson Star-Observer

The Only Abiding Faith of the Right Wing Is in a Mythical Free Market
Read the Article at BuzzFlash

French Judge Seeks Access to Guantanamo Over Torture Claims
Read the Article at The Associated Press

Virginia Republican: "Children With Disabilities Are God's Punishment to Women Who Previously Had Abortions"
Read the Article at ThinkProgress

Once Hot, Tea Party Goes Cold
Read the Article at The Hill

A New Batch of Racist Ron Paul Newsletters Released
Read the Article at Talking Points Memo

Iran's Nuclear Scientists Are Not Being Assassinated. They Are Being Murdered
Read the Article at The Guardian UK

The GOP's Race Problem
Read the Article at The Nation

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