Corporatism:
noun
the principles, doctrine, or system of corporative organization of a political unit, as a city or state
i.e. FASCISM!
==============
If You're Not Against It
You're A Party To It!!!

Dear Representative Conyers,

I heard this on the radio today and I thought you might appreciate it.

I think Sharlet's book very well might deserve to be entered into the official record.

This is an awesome - must listen - radio interview from the program Writer's Voice, hosted by Francesca Rheannon. She conducted an absolutely fascinating interview with Jeff Sharlet. He recently published a book. It's entitled: The Family:
The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. The interview was stunning.

Please tune in! Thanks to Jeff Sharlet, Francesca Rheannon!

Here's a short description, with a link to the Writer's Voice website. Also included is a pod-cast link.

Robert Whitlock

Francesca Rheannon talks with Jeff Sharlet

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with journalist Jeff Sharlet about his bestselling new book, THE FAMILY. It’s about the real “New World Order” of elite fundamentalism that threatens our democracy.

When Senator Sam Brownback ran for president during the recent primary season few people knew that he’s a member of an elite fundamentalist group that’s waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. It’s called The Family. It counts not just conservatives but also liberals like Hillary Clinton among its intimates and fellow travelers. When the National Prayer Breakfast is held each year–it’s organized by the Family. When we say “our nation, under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, or we read “In God we Trust” on our greenbacks–that’s because of the Family. Founded during the Great Depression in 1933, the Family preaches a gospel of “biblical capitalism,” military might, and American empire. It’s played a crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the harsh economics of globalization. That’s what journalist Jeff Sharlet says in his new book, THE FAMILY: THE ELITE FUNDAMENTALISM AT THE HEART OF AMERICAN POWER...

and the podcast:

ABC Reporter Arrested in Denver Taking Pictures of Senators, Big Donors
Asa Eslocker Was Investigating the Role of Lobbyists and Top Donors at the Convention
By BRIAN ROSS
Aug. 27, 2008—

DENVER -- Police in Denver arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.

Police on the scene refused to tell ABC lawyers the charges against the producer, Asa Eslocker, who works with the ABC News investigative unit.

A cigar-smoking Denver police sergeant, accompanied by a team of five other officers, first put his hands on Eslocker's neck, then twisted the producer's arm behind him to put on handcuffs.

A police official later told lawyers for ABC News that Eslocker is being charged with trespass, interference, and failure to follow a lawful order. He also said the arrest followed a signed complaint from the Brown Palace Hotel.

Eslocker was put in handcuffs and loaded in the back of a police van which headed for a nearby police station.

Video taken at the scene shows a man, wearing the uniform of a Boulder County sheriff, ordering Eslocker off the sidewalk in front of the hotel, to the side of the entrance.

The sheriff's officer is seen telling Eslocker the sidewalk is owned by the hotel. Later, he is seen pushing Eslocker off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic, forcing him to the other side of the street.

It was two hours later when Denver police arrived to place Eslocker under arrest, apparently based on a complaint from the Brown Palace Hotel, a central location for Democratic officials.

During the arrest, one of the officers can be heard saying to Eslocker, "You're lucky I didn't knock the f..k out of you."

Eslocker was released late today after posting $500 bond.

Eslocker and his ABC News colleagues are spending the week investigating the role of corporate lobbyists and wealthy donors at the convention for a series of Money Trail reports on ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson."

A Dream...

Chronological look at the fiasco in Iraq, especially decisions made in the spring of 2003 - and the backgrounds of those making decisions - immediately following the overthrow of Saddam: no occupation plan, an inadequate team to run the country, insufficient troops to keep order, and three edicts from the White House announced by Bremmer when he took over: no provisional Iraqi government, de-Ba'athification, and disbanding the Iraqi armed services. The film has chapters (from History to Consequences), and the talking heads are reporters, academics, soldiers, military brass, and former Bush-administration officials, including several who were in Baghdad in 2003

... And yet, pride of "Party" keeps that Nation's Leaders from exorcising true accountability for the wrongs committed.

I mean, really!
WHO'S BEEN HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THIS P.P.P.?

Remembering Katrina and N.O.L.A.
Katrina Requiem

"Broken Levees, Broken Lives"...the Post-Katrina Focus on Health
Three years after Hurricane Katrina, the people of New Orleans are still waiting...

TAKE ACTION at:
http://www.GuaranteedHealthcare.org

The Boston Review has a nice detailed argument as to why Congress is NOT in order on the subject of impeachment and accountability. Although it does not directly assail Congress for being complicit, silent witnesses, it does clearly point out that Congress is NOT under the Rule of Law but instead following the Rule of Men and is FAILING to pursue Justice, leaving said needed Justice in the hands of We The People.

Presidential Crimes
Moving on is not an option
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR33.5/scarry.php
Elaine Scarry

We have at the present time two government leaders, a president and a vice president, who, according to all available evidence, have carried out grave crimes. Will these two men leave office and live out their lives without being subjected to legal proceedings? Such proceedings will surely release new documents and provide additional testimony important in resolving their guilt or innocence. But the public record is now so elaborate, so detailed, and validated from so many directions that a weight is on the population’s shoulders: does our already existing knowledge of what they have done obligate us to press for legal redress?

The question is painful even to ask, so painful that we may all yield to an easy temptation not to pursue it at all.

...

Still, and this is a second reason to address the wrongdoing of the current administration, let us suppose what is fair to suppose, that Barack Obama and John McCain continue in good health, are as wedded to the law as they appear, that one of the two is elected fairly and honestly, and that the country begins its mighty pivot back to its gravitational center in the rule of law. It will be almost like a miracle cure, an overnight release from our eight-year-long affliction.

Or will it? What will this shift over to the rule of law mean? It will mean that when we are led by a person who does not believe in the rule of law, we will not as a country follow the rule of law; and when we are led by a person who does believe in the rule of law, we will follow the rule of law. If that is the case, the United States will continue to be what it has been during the last eight years: a country governed by the rule of men (their beliefs, their preferences, their choices), not by the rule of law (where beliefs, preferences, and choices are constrained by invariable and nonnegotiable prohibitions on cruelty and fraud). Just as one might in the past have said, “this president was short whereas the next president was tall” or “this president was isolationist whereas as the next president was internationalist,” so now one might shrug and say, “this president believed it was his prerogative to torture whereas the next president believed it was not.” The incalculable damage left by Bush and Cheney’s day-in-and-day-out contempt for national and international law includes the power to sweep forward in time and trivialize into a matter of personal preference any future president’s adherence to the law. Will we become a country in which the rule of law is just another policy preference? Do we really think that the rule of law is to be left in the hands of our leaders?

In deciding about legal redress, we need to be clear about the large stakes in our decision. The very multiplicity of the apparent crimes, the sheer array of arguably broken laws, is dizzying. But that multiplicity must be faced, for in it we will see that what got in President Bush’s way was not any one law but the rule of law itself. It is the rule of law that has been put in jeopardy by a project of executive domination; it is the rule of law that will continue to be in peril; and it is only, therefore, by addressing the crimes through legal instruments—through a formal, legal arena, and not simply through the electoral repudiation of bad policy—that the grave and widespread damage stands a chance of being repaired.

...

As Bugliosi’s preference for a federal rather than a state venue suggests, the main domestic arena for addressing the administration’s aggressive dismantling of the rule of law is not individual citizen, town, or state, but the federal government: the Congress and the Supreme Court. The Senate’s recently released Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information points in the same direction. While it does not make a case for murder prosecutions, it is nonetheless a devastating document, meticulous and relentless, that substantiates Bugliosi’s argument about culpable deceptions.

...

The President and his highest officers together erected a vast structure of lies about Iraq’s phantom nuclear partnership with al Qaeda. But is this latticework of lies itself a prosecutable crime? What is the crime? “Murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and aiding and assisting murder,” says Vincent Bugliosi, triable in either state or federal court. Others might say that the deceptions leading to war are “crimes against humanity” and “crimes against peace.” Still others think that impeachment and removal are the place to start.

...

While the grounds of impeachment are appropriately numerous, and lying in the run-up to the Iraq War is one essential ground, it is crucial for the country to recognize that there is one crime with a legal profile so singular that it can—even standing alone—convey the wholesale contempt for the rule of law displayed by the Bush administration. That crime is the act of torture. The absolute prohibition on torture in national and international law, as Jeremy Waldron has argued in a recent article in Columbia Law Review, “epitomizes” the “spirit and genius of our law,” the prohibition “draw[s] a line between law and savagery,” it requires a “respect for human dignity” even when “law is at its most forceful and its subjects at their most vulnerable.” The absolute rule against torture is foundational and minimal: it is the bedrock on which the whole structure of law is erected. It is only “our clear grip on [this] well-known prohibition” that acts as a “crucial point of reference for sustaining . . . other less confident beliefs” about other prohibitions.

...

“How long won’t you stand for injustice?” asks Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. If you’re going to get tired after half an hour, she advises, or after a week, or after a month, you might as well leave right now. Mother Courage storms into a military headquarters to lodge a complaint, and, finding a young lieutenant there who is waiting to make his own complaint, she launches into her disquisition on the impossible fortitude and stamina required, and does this so effectively that she persuades herself. She promptly leaves without lodging any complaint. The event takes place shortly after the military execution, without trial, of her soldier son.

Part of what makes the thought of prosecuting Bush so aversive is that it would be utterly exhausting. President Bush has repeatedly short circuited protest against one outrageous illegality by quickly carrying out a second, third, fourth, and fifth, so that the citizenry is kept in a permanent state of astonishment and cannot recover its own ground long enough to do more than cry out. Now, at the end of his administration, the sheer number of accumulated wrongful acts disempowers the collective will to act, and tempts us to elect our way back into a legal order, and simply close the door on the revolting spectacle of the last eight years.

But is closing the door actually an option? If the country is to renew its commitment to the rule of law, that outcome will require reeducating ourselves about what the law is. The law aspires to symmetry across cases. Among the more than two million Americans in prison and jail in 2006 was a young woman, Lynndie England, whose smiling face was photographed at Abu Ghraib as she held a dog leash attached to the neck of a naked prisoner. Yet at Guantánamo, where direct White House agency has been elaborately documented, the long list of acts actually practiced includes: “Tying a dog leash to detainee’s chain, walking him around the room and leading him through a series of dog tricks.”61 How long won’t you stand for injustice?

The legal memos to and from the White House have no power to alter the national and international rules against torture. Geneva rules state that they cannot be suspended in wartime, and a country can only withdraw from the accords in peacetime with a one year lead time. Though the definition of torture in the Convention Against Torture is 118 words long, it has only “two key elements” that must be present: “that the act intentionally cause severe suffering and that it have official sanction.”62 The legal memos back and forth among the White House, the Secretary of Defense, and the Office of Legal Counsel, far from minimizing the crime of torture, fulfill its definitional requirements by verifying that it was done with “official sanction.”

Finally—and for us, most important—the international rules against war crimes and torture do not allow prosecution to be thought of as discretionary; they do not allow an escape provision based on electoral euphoria or on one’s doubts about one’s own stamina in fighting injustice. Very distant from a mere disinclination to prosecute is a country’s act of granting an amnesty. The international laws about some criminal acts do, in fact, allow for amnesty if required to establish peace. But torture is not one of those crimes. As Michael Scharf writes, the Commentary to the Geneva Conventions (the “official history” of their adoption) “confirms that the obligation to prosecute is ‘absolute,’ meaning . . . that states parties can under no circumstances grant perpetrators immunity or amnesty from prosecution for grave breaches.” So, too, the Convention against Torture requires that states “submit” cases to the “competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.”64 This means, writes Scharf, that “where persons under color of law commit acts of torture in a country that is a party to the Torture Convention, the Convention requires Prosecution.”65

The United States is a party to these agreements. The duty to prosecute means that the failure of a government to do so violates international law and that the country reneges on its treaty obligations. It also increases the pressure of other countries to bring cases against President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and former Secretary of State Rumsfeld based on the principle of “universal jurisdiction” that permits all parties to a treaty to prosecute grave war crimes that originated in another country.

...

Perhaps the valiant Brattleboro citizens and the stern fighters at the Center for Constitutional Rights doubt whether the ground they stand on is still in the United States. Can the ground be put back under their feet? How long?

(emphasis mine...)

Congressman,
Please do not think that elections clear the slate. The Rule of Law can not be whipped clean each election cycle to start anew. Why burden the Nation with Congressional Representatives that refuse to stand up for the Rule of Law in favor of the Wo/Men that Dictate intentions rather than adhere to Law? What then, does that make Congress but willing participants to the erosion of the Rule of Law.

If you say you're for restoring "The Rule of Law," where are your Articles of Impeachment for crimes committed thus enforcing that Rule of Law into action? From the House Judiciary Committee?

Or do you believe in following the Rule of Men, preferable?

==============
ENFORCE THE RULE OF LAW
IMPEACHMENT IS IN ORDER!!!

House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chair, and Representative, John Conyers Jr.,

I am not satisfied with electoral remedies for the current corruption. I want Congress to take direct action to hold members of the Bush Administration accountable.

See here:

I lined up for this photograph after the regularly scheduled Friday evening Percival Landing peace vigil. The vigil is sponsored by the Olympia F.O.R.. The Friday afternoon/evening vigil has been ongoing on a weekly basis for almost 10 years (since November 1998.)

A similar weekly vigil occurs on Wednesdays from 12 o'clock Noon until 1 pm at the corner of Capitol Way and Legion Avenue, Sylvester Park. The Wednesday vigil has been ongoing weekly for over 28 years, since March 5th, 1980.

Here's me in the picture.

Photo and sign by Glen Anderson of the Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Insist that public officials tell the truth.

Stop the war! and...

Create a culture of peace, justice, nonviolence and sustainability!

more information about the t-shirt, including how you can purchase your own: Bush Lied: They Died

cross-posted at OlyBlog

"What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage."
– Marcus Tullius Cicero

I have no doubt that you're extremely busy, Representative Conyers, but I wanted to ask if you still plan to upload those photos to the gallery.

Go to www.gp.org and join the REAL peoples party!

This is the Real Change that will save America from all the LIES and DECEPTION that we got after the 06 election!!!!

So one more time for good measure:::
INSANITY is, doing the same shit time and time again, and expecting different results!!

Constitution in crises, thanks for letting me know John, I more than likely would have NEVER figured it out without your HELP.

Keep up the good work ,maybe we can get GW IMPEACHED by 2012!!!

OBAMMA supported immunity for the spying on us by the telecom ass holes,making him a traitor to OUR constitution!!!
Only in AMERICA do we have a CHOICE between a FASCIEST, and a TRATOR to see who can RUIN us faster.

"I never voted to send our kids to war, But If I get in the WHITE HOUSE, I will explain why we need to stay at war" Which candidate said something to that effect?
Take your pick.,

Look at the crap that has come from the D e M s since they took power! What a crock of shit they have spewed since day ONE.

The only real candidate for President , Dennis Kucinich scared the hell out of the FASCIEST Media ,so they let him hang out to dry.

The next best person to light a fire under the ass of those that have sold us out is Cynthia McKenny. Go to the GREEN Web Site and see what she has to say.

It's time for a real surge, GO GREEN

Our friend Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar have been unlawfully arrested:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
www.democracynow.org

September 1, 2008

Contact:
Dennis Moynihan
Mike Burke

ST. PAUL, MN—Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was unlawfully arrested in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota at approximately 5 p.m. local time. Police violently manhandled Goodman, yanking her arm, as they arrested her. Video of her arrest can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYjyvkR0bGQ

Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.

Democracy Now! is calling on all journalists and concerned citizens to call the office of Mayor Chris Coleman and the Ramsey County Jail and demand the immediate release of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar. These calls can be directed to: Chris Rider from Mayor Coleman’s office at 651-266-8535 and the Ramsey County Jail at 651-266-9350 (press extension 0).

Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the press and the First Amenmdent rights of these journalists.

During the demonstration in which they were arrested law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force. Several dozen others were also arrested during this action.

Amy Goodman is one of the most well-known and well-respected journalists in the United States. She has received journalism’s top honors for her reporting and has a distinguished reputation of bravery and courage. The arrest of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar is a transparent attempt to intimidate journalists from the nation’s leading independent news outlet.

Democracy Now! is a nationally-syndicated public TV and radio program that airs on over 700 radio and TV stations across the US and the globe.

Video of Amy Goodman’s Arrest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYjyvkR0bGQ

Please, everyone do what you can to speak out on this!

Chairman, please, look into this ASAP!

We need our journalists with integrity, who pursue truth and justice, now more than ever!

Thank you!