Election year
A quick look at my sample ballot seems to reveal an initiative measure related to the Kelo decision. I won't know for certain until I read it more carefully, but reactions to the decision have occurred elsewhere. It wouldn't surprise me to see a reaction show up as a ballot initiative measure here. I don't think it helps much. That's why I'm linking back to the second thoughts I posted last year. Some links from there have changed in the meantime. I will need time to redo them, but the easier ones, the ones that aren't mine, I list below.
The first thing they teach you in law school--and I mean the first thing--is that “property” is a collection of legal rights. They are mental abstractions. They were created in more or less their present form in the middle ages by common law judges.
--Conceptual Guerilla
Cheap-labor conservatives support every coercive and oppressive function of government, but call it “tyranny” if government does something for you--using their money, for Chrissake.
--Conceptual Guerilla
“Wealth” has no tangible reality outside of the social system that creates and regulates its social conventions and symbols.
--Conceptual Guerilla
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege and maintain work discipline.
--Kevin A. Carson
Our view is that scarcity and price--the twin sisters of Malthusian pessimism--provide no ground on which the Iraq war can or should be located. The history of twentieth-century oil is not the history of shortfall and inflation, but of the constant menace--for the industry and the oil states--of excess capacity and falling prices, of surplus and glut.
-- Retort
Regarding Iraq, it is now clear that when it embarked on its invasion, the US had no sense of whether its market-happy post-war reconstruction "plan" had any real chance of success. And the various elements and factions pushing for the war were so fragmented, even contradictory, that by their own admission they were forced to come up with a consensus rationale for the start of the invasion--weapons of mass destruction--which none of them actually believed.
-- Retort
It remains obscure how the imperial master frees itself from an illusion it has cultivated and cherished for four decades. In the first instance, it is trapped by its own apparatus of PACs and fundraisers and agents of influence. In particular, the evangelicals are a sorcerer's apprentice, let loose in a holy war but without any magic words with which to rein them in. And neo-con jingoes are especially well represented in the current White House and Pentagon: any turn away from Israel would be, for them, a deplorable and enraging sign of weakness--evoking the satanic name of Vietnam, no less, which never stops echoing in their skulls.
-- Retort
Secular nation-states within the shatterbelt of oil shared a number of obvious common features--dictatorship, religious oppression, corruption and failed development. Ataturk, Boumedienne, Nasser, Sukarno, Asad, Hussein: the names came to stand for what seemed a necessary association between secularism and repression, between the idea of Progress and the "nationalization" of Islam. As the secular state withered under neo-liberal pressure--and on occasion, as in Somalia, collapsed outright--Muslim civil society filled the vacuum of state failure.
-- Retort
What is a "base," finally, and why does the US want and need to multiply such entities through the known world? We should view the problem through the lens of Guantanamo in particular, as various writers have suggested lately--through what Guantanamo and its satellites make possible, juridically, lawfully/lawlessly. Bases are the state incarnate, it soon becomes clear: they embody the state in its extra-territorial sovereignty, its lawmaking and lawbreaking will; the state in its guise of other-directed war machine, but with other-directedness now become other-penetration, occupation, infection, contamination; in the process offering the infected party (the failed state, the subservient social democracy) a positive model of evasion and abrogation of all social constraint.
-- Retort
Within the American establishment, there are political figures who are acutely conscious of the tremendous dangers that can arise from the current state of affairs. The extent of popular opposition is such that a movement is developing outside the two-party system and challenging not only the war in Iraq, but the corporate and financial elite in whose interests it was carried out.
--James Cogan
For a high court judge in 2006 to refer to the trial of an accused by a Star Chamber-style military commission as an evolutionary development of the common law is a grotesque perversion. On the contrary, it is the judicial sanctioning of the implementation of a legal system that has far more in common with the legal procedures and ideas of the Third Reich than the traditions and customs of the common law.
--Richard Hoffman
Under the immense pressures of class conflict, economic crisis and inter-imperial rivalry, the ruling class attacks democratic structures as it seeks to impose its will by means of force. At the same time, partisan lawyers develop "legal theories" to justify the radical transformation of the legal-constitutional system.
--Richard Hoffman
Consistent with the lawless history of Guantánamo itself, the commissions had an executive procedure designed to guarantee convictions in order to further the government’s political purposes.
--Richard Hoffman
With last week’s news that a second mole was at the heart of the “bomb-making” part of the plot, the question is raised anew of the extent to which the alleged Toronto terror plot was--if not a complete fabrication of the security and intelligence apparatus--at the very least carried out with significant encouragement and “facilitation” from them.
--David Adelaide
I may be helping to pay the fare for the military, but I much prefer to get nothing in return . . . I mean nothing! Soldiers, regardless of status or branch of service, are not fighting to defend our country from enemy nations, nor are they fighting any frontlines of the "war on terror." They are just fighting to please the Lord of the Manor, no one else. As for the idea that they are fighting for our freedoms, it borders on the ridiculous, or perhaps the puerile. The fighting that American troops are engaged in overseas is taking away other peoples’ freedoms--freedom of identity, culture and self-worth--which could easily boomerang and put ours at great peril.
--Ben Tanosborn
We saw the true nature of Iraqi "sovereignty" when it was disclosed that a worried Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki earlier this week made an anxious phone call to Bush to ask whether rumors he had been hearing were true that Bush was planning on replacing him. The call made it clear that Maliki knows he serves in his role solely at the pleasure of the American president. In saner, more honest times, the media would refer to such a situation as colonial, but our lapdog media just plays the game and talks about Iraq as if it were a sovereign nation.
--Dave Lindorff
The first thing they teach you in law school--and I mean the first thing--is that “property” is a collection of legal rights. They are mental abstractions. They were created in more or less their present form in the middle ages by common law judges.
--Conceptual Guerilla
Cheap-labor conservatives support every coercive and oppressive function of government, but call it “tyranny” if government does something for you--using their money, for Chrissake.
--Conceptual Guerilla
“Wealth” has no tangible reality outside of the social system that creates and regulates its social conventions and symbols.
--Conceptual Guerilla
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege and maintain work discipline.
--Kevin A. Carson
Our view is that scarcity and price--the twin sisters of Malthusian pessimism--provide no ground on which the Iraq war can or should be located. The history of twentieth-century oil is not the history of shortfall and inflation, but of the constant menace--for the industry and the oil states--of excess capacity and falling prices, of surplus and glut.
-- Retort
Regarding Iraq, it is now clear that when it embarked on its invasion, the US had no sense of whether its market-happy post-war reconstruction "plan" had any real chance of success. And the various elements and factions pushing for the war were so fragmented, even contradictory, that by their own admission they were forced to come up with a consensus rationale for the start of the invasion--weapons of mass destruction--which none of them actually believed.
-- Retort
It remains obscure how the imperial master frees itself from an illusion it has cultivated and cherished for four decades. In the first instance, it is trapped by its own apparatus of PACs and fundraisers and agents of influence. In particular, the evangelicals are a sorcerer's apprentice, let loose in a holy war but without any magic words with which to rein them in. And neo-con jingoes are especially well represented in the current White House and Pentagon: any turn away from Israel would be, for them, a deplorable and enraging sign of weakness--evoking the satanic name of Vietnam, no less, which never stops echoing in their skulls.
-- Retort
Secular nation-states within the shatterbelt of oil shared a number of obvious common features--dictatorship, religious oppression, corruption and failed development. Ataturk, Boumedienne, Nasser, Sukarno, Asad, Hussein: the names came to stand for what seemed a necessary association between secularism and repression, between the idea of Progress and the "nationalization" of Islam. As the secular state withered under neo-liberal pressure--and on occasion, as in Somalia, collapsed outright--Muslim civil society filled the vacuum of state failure.
-- Retort
What is a "base," finally, and why does the US want and need to multiply such entities through the known world? We should view the problem through the lens of Guantanamo in particular, as various writers have suggested lately--through what Guantanamo and its satellites make possible, juridically, lawfully/lawlessly. Bases are the state incarnate, it soon becomes clear: they embody the state in its extra-territorial sovereignty, its lawmaking and lawbreaking will; the state in its guise of other-directed war machine, but with other-directedness now become other-penetration, occupation, infection, contamination; in the process offering the infected party (the failed state, the subservient social democracy) a positive model of evasion and abrogation of all social constraint.
-- Retort
Within the American establishment, there are political figures who are acutely conscious of the tremendous dangers that can arise from the current state of affairs. The extent of popular opposition is such that a movement is developing outside the two-party system and challenging not only the war in Iraq, but the corporate and financial elite in whose interests it was carried out.
--James Cogan
For a high court judge in 2006 to refer to the trial of an accused by a Star Chamber-style military commission as an evolutionary development of the common law is a grotesque perversion. On the contrary, it is the judicial sanctioning of the implementation of a legal system that has far more in common with the legal procedures and ideas of the Third Reich than the traditions and customs of the common law.
--Richard Hoffman
Under the immense pressures of class conflict, economic crisis and inter-imperial rivalry, the ruling class attacks democratic structures as it seeks to impose its will by means of force. At the same time, partisan lawyers develop "legal theories" to justify the radical transformation of the legal-constitutional system.
--Richard Hoffman
Consistent with the lawless history of Guantánamo itself, the commissions had an executive procedure designed to guarantee convictions in order to further the government’s political purposes.
--Richard Hoffman
With last week’s news that a second mole was at the heart of the “bomb-making” part of the plot, the question is raised anew of the extent to which the alleged Toronto terror plot was--if not a complete fabrication of the security and intelligence apparatus--at the very least carried out with significant encouragement and “facilitation” from them.
--David Adelaide
I may be helping to pay the fare for the military, but I much prefer to get nothing in return . . . I mean nothing! Soldiers, regardless of status or branch of service, are not fighting to defend our country from enemy nations, nor are they fighting any frontlines of the "war on terror." They are just fighting to please the Lord of the Manor, no one else. As for the idea that they are fighting for our freedoms, it borders on the ridiculous, or perhaps the puerile. The fighting that American troops are engaged in overseas is taking away other peoples’ freedoms--freedom of identity, culture and self-worth--which could easily boomerang and put ours at great peril.
--Ben Tanosborn
We saw the true nature of Iraqi "sovereignty" when it was disclosed that a worried Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki earlier this week made an anxious phone call to Bush to ask whether rumors he had been hearing were true that Bush was planning on replacing him. The call made it clear that Maliki knows he serves in his role solely at the pleasure of the American president. In saner, more honest times, the media would refer to such a situation as colonial, but our lapdog media just plays the game and talks about Iraq as if it were a sovereign nation.
--Dave Lindorff