Like serfs in the dark ages, American citizens can be picked up on the authority of some unknown person in the executive branch and thrown in a dungeon, subject to torture, without any evidence ever being presented to a court or any information to the person’s relatives of his/her whereabouts. Or they can be placed on a list without explanation that curtails their right to travel by air. Every communication of every American, except face-to-face conversation in non-bugged environments, is intercepted and recorded by the National Stasi Agency from which phrases can be strung together to produce a “domestic extremist.”
If throwing an American citizen in a dungeon is too much trouble, the citizen can simply be blown up with a hellfire missile launched from a drone....
The people who helped transform a democratically accountable president into a Caesar include John Yoo, who was rewarded for his treason by being accepted as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt school of law. Yoo’s colleague in treason, Jay Scott Bybee was rewarded by being appointed a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. We now have a Berkeley law professor teaching, and a federal circuit judge ruling, that the executive branch is above the law.
The executive branch coup against America has succeeded. The question is: will it stand?AlterNet
It's Time for Americans to Admit That We've Had a Coup d’etat
Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy
I think rather we had AN ELECTION and the guy who won I didnt vote for because he said "We're out of money!" so I voted for the other guy who although he didnt say "We're out of money!" per se, he DID say several times "We're borrowing from the Chinese!"... so perhaps the lesser of two morons...
ReplyDeleteSo a "Lose-Lose" proposition until we can overturn these untruths related to our govts monetary authority and set things right....
btw Roberts is a card-carrying member of the Debt Doomsday Crowd...
rsp,
Paul Craig Roberts - It's Time for Me to Take My Meds
ReplyDeleteCould we stick to economics, please?
"Could we stick to economics, please?"
ReplyDeleteThere''s theoretical econ and political economy. We do political economy here, and whatever government does and doesn't do as an institution has economic impact.
The idea that power is political and has nothing to do with econ is a big reason for a lot of the economic problems the country and world faces in that political power rests on a foundation of economic power and political power is used to extend economic power. This is basic to the difference between an empire, republic, and popular democracy. Without considering the system as a whole, only a partial result in obtainable and in the context of the whole it will be non-representational.
Surely you can do 'political economy' without scraping the bottom of the barrel?
ReplyDeleteMatt, perception is 99% of reality. The paradox here is that even though Roberts is wrong about debt fret, in the perception sense (which resonates with the masses), he's right.
ReplyDeleteThat said, erroneous debt doomsday meme notwithstanding, Roberts is dead nuts right on the issue he discusses in his essay, whether he's a spokesman for the debt doomsday crowd or not.
Mal,
ReplyDeleteAgree they had a Coup in Egypt.. but not here no way...
We had an election and the guy who won is in office and will be for 3 more years until we get to vote again...
Just because policy is not going our exact preferred way we cant go around yelling "Coup!".... this is like "sour grapes" or something... the right libs are always saying "impeach Obama" or something... its also absurd...
We have to get over it and move towards acceptance and keep advocating for better policy and helping people to better understand what our nations true economic options are going into the next election when the current President will have to move on and we get to choose from (more or less) 2 new candidates...
We have not had a "Coup" only a over the top person using hyperbole would assert so in writing or a delusional person would assert this if they were serious....
This is hyperbole from Roberts here...
rsp,
ON the confirmation of John Alito, I wrote that a coup was underway.
ReplyDeleteAs Paul Craig Roberts point out, this started with Bush-Cheney and 9/11 gave then the cover to run with it.
A few people had the courage to stand up at the time and say what was really going down.
Then there are all the conspiracy theorists, and there as lot of them, that believe they have evidence that 9/11 was either a false flag op or else permitted by TPTB, similar to the conspiracy theory that FDR knew in advance of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and did nothing to prevent it.
The point with trends of perception is not so much whether they are justified but rather the impact they have. A whole lot of people on the left and right are getting concerned about this, including President Carter.
Whatever one makes of the situation, I think that anyone would have to agree that everything is in place should a man on a white horse come to power in the future. Moreover, everyone's affairs have been recored for some time and stored permanently for "future use," should occasion arise.
This is a dire state for a republic to slip into, and there's no way to spin this as positive.
But is it a coup? Not in the technical sense yet, but it has the making of it, as far as we can see. And we can't see very far owing to the secrecy.
We are being asked to trust people that have not shown themselves to be trustworthy in the past.
Tom,
ReplyDeleteWe cant be saying "we've had a coup" every time we simply dont get our way in politics... we'd have to have a coup every day... rsp,
The SCOTUS has been politicized, or rather, their appointment process has become politicized. We face a similar possibility in Canada with appointments to our supreme court.
ReplyDeleteGoing on a rant about coups won't convince most Americans that they need to end their apathy about politics. Articles like this reinforce the impression that politics is far removed from the concerns of ordinary people.