Chris Hedges of Alternet, a liberal/progressive news site, reports:
He then goes on, in part (and this is the part I found interesting/provocative):
This quite Tea Party-ish statement from a liberal struck me as interesting (though of course both sides have quite different reasons and reasonings for their brand of revolution.
He then goes on to put the blame on the capitalist system, arguing that the rich and powerful have basically bought the government, and there’s nothing short of the previously mentioned “militant mass movement” that’ll break it.
So what do you all think of the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case? Is Hedges right? Does he have a chance in hell of creating the “militant mass movement” he thinks is necessary (personally, barring an abuse of power so public and egregious that it’s impossible to ignore, I don’t think so)? Even if he did, would it make any difference?
Alternet is also quite heavily involved in conspiracy theories, so take what they say with a grain of salt. A massive grain of salt. The fact that there’s not really any possible “standing” to take against this law until you’ve been imprisoned and released is rather disturbing, but personally I’m kind of dubious that this will end in any sort of government takeover.
Aha, I thought the name of the site sounded familiar, but I only got primary links in the first couple of Google search pages, so I couldn’t confirm.
But I think the thread is worthwhile anyway, to discuss actual legalities, whether the issue as it’s presented by them will get any traction (especially since I saw it being spread online, which may or may not mean anything), whether this represents any sort of mainstream in liberal/progressive thought (or if the Tea Party comparison is even more apt than I thought), etc.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, that passage of the NDAA is an absolute atrocity, and the way the supreme court handles cases needs some serious reworking (newsflash, guys - in many cases, especially the really nasty ones, we’re gonna want to be able to challenge the constitutionality of a law before we get hit by its effects!), but I don’t see this as the kind of “end of democracy” schtick that people like Alex Jones or Chris Hedges make it out to be.
Just because something is legal in the eyes of the government doesn’t necessarily mean it will be used as an everyday tool against the general population.
I think you’ll be hard pressed to find any government which, at some point, never had to make compromises in the name of national security. The question is how far the government needs to go before revolution becomes reality.
As for a “militant mass movement”, the only chance of that ever working is if the threat alone caused the US military to back down. If it ever came down to any sort of actual warfare, I doubt any sort of weaponry that civilians have access to would make much of a difference. The second amendment was created at a time when “you have a gun, we have a gun, this makes us equal” may have been a relatively true statement. Should we be physically oppressed in this day and age, a civilian militia wouldn’t really be able to do anything, regardless of how many red dawn remakes get made.
Keep in mind i’m in favor of gun ownership- I just make no illusions on how effective an army of unfit, untrained, and under armed people would be.
Plus, and this really should be said, a revolution when the populace is well-fed and generally contented is about as likely as a thunderstorm without a cloud in the sky. It’s one thing to realize that the political situation is bad, and that people are getting lugged away; to understand that you’re less free than before and that things are likely going downhill. But how bad do things have to get, really, before you say to yourself “I am going to go out and fight and die for more freedom”? Think about that for a moment. When you decide to start a violent revolution against a corrupt government, you risk your life, your livelihood, sometimes your family. And if you have a job, if you have food, if you have a roof over your head… It takes a whole lot of dissatisfaction to go that far.
I was interested to discover, relatively recently, that a lot of the laws and court cases governing the treatment of citizens in a military context date to the Civil War (which makes sense).
So while it may be questionable whether terrorists are enemies of the state or criminals, the legal basis for handling citizens as enemies of the state in special ways may date back ~150 years and were never overturned.
Don’t know anything about Chris Hedges, but is it necesarily the case that when he calls for “miltitant mass movements”, he is necesarily calling for violent mass movements? When used by right-wingers, “militant” often (usually?) does mean that, shooting people or threatening to do so being the only form of activism they understand or consider acceptable, but in centrist and left-wing discourse I don’t think it has that connotation. All kinds of protest and activism are embraced in a term like “militant”.
Heck, just being an atheist minding your own business can get you called “militant”. Thing is, as long as the politics of fear keep working in the U.S., I don’t see a lot of political impetus to say “Hey, we’ve really gone overboard on this anti-terrorist stuff.” Or at least, not a lot of political impetus to say it and mean it.
There won’t be a mass movement until people feel that they, personally, are being squished. The last major movement in the US was the Civil Rights movement, which only happened because large (large!) numbers of people were being treated unfairly, and had suffered it long enough, and stood up and said NO. No Supreme Court decision is going to roil people up, until/unless the govt actually starts doing more such. Most people are complacent and will not be moved until they personally are affected.
BTW, it’s not the govt that worries me, it’s that the country is now owned by the large corporations who have no “constitution” and respect no rights except their own greed.
This is a terrible law, and it’s not the way we do things. We have a long tradition in this country of waiting until the last minute to panic about a perceived threat and enact oppressive legislation or just use executive orders to deprive people of their rights without allowing an opportunity for judicial review. This pre-emptive action is likely to get overturned, very poor planning by the government in giving us a chance to overturn this legislation before it can be misapplied.
By definition, government must maintain a “monopoly on violence” over the region and people it governs. That is to say, government must have enough power to enforce the law over some portion of the population who, for one reason or another, choose not to follow it.
Not like I’m pro militia or anything, but people seem to think rebels would just face off against the 82nd Airborne Division gun for gun. That’s not the way an insurgency works anyone familiar with the insurgencies in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam should understand that.
The Boston Marathon bombers shut down an entire city with just a couple of pressure cookers stuffed with gunpowder.
On 9/11 terrorists caused millions of dollars of damage, thousands of deaths and changed the course of history with a few box-cutters.
And look at the effects of the various school and mall shootings.
The point is that it doesn’t take a lot of weapons to cause a great deal of havoc. Now the examples I give are criminals, but what if they were just ordinary people lashing out at a repressive government? And what if those people had lots of supporters who would provide them intelligence or sanctuary and were generally uncooperative with authorities? Or if there were elements of law enforcement or the military who also did not share in the oppressive policies of the government?
I honestly don’t know that much about legal structures; it just strikes me as beyond bizarre that you can’t file something along the lines of a general purpose constitutional challenge - that is, if a law violates the constitution, you should be able to challenge it regardless of whether or not it has already affected you. In this case, the challenge would, to my understanding, have to come from those who were unjustly imprisoned to begin with. That’s… not good odds in terms of overturning the law.
SCOTUS has interpreted Article III to require standing. There’s nothing about the cases and controversies clause that really requires the interpretation that it’s been given; it would seem that the abstract question of whether the detention provision of the NDAA is the very definition of a “controversy”.
Agreed. I submit you could get on plenty of government lists by just posting on a message board like this one. I’m uncomfortable with the inclination of most otherwise reasonable people, to “whistle past the graveyard” when it comes to the paranoid, authoritarian government, as though, if we pretend that it’s a benevolent structure, filled with ethical, hardworking members, it won’t show it’s teeth as the mouldering “Hydra” counterpart it appears to be, beneath a thin veneer. Why are the very people who should be wary of the State so quick to handwave this kind of insidiousness away, labeling it “conspiracy theory woo”? I mean, apart from the obvious government shills … I know why they do it.