Chris Hedges - The Post-Constitutional Era

[HomerRamone]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_post-constitutional_era_20140504

The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power—one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed—a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.

“In declining to hear the case Hedges v. Obama and declining to review the NDAA, the Supreme Court has turned its back on precedent dating back to the Civil War era that holds that the military cannot police the streets of America,” said attorney Carl Mayer, who along with Bruce Afran devoted countless unpaid hours to the suit. “This is a major blow to civil liberties. It gives the green light to the military to detain people without trial or counsel in military installations, including secret installations abroad. There is little left of judicial review of presidential action during wartime."

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The goals of corporate capitalism are increasingly indistinguishable from the goals of the state. The political and economic systems are subservient to corporate profit. Debate between conventional liberals and conservatives has been replaced by empty political theater and spectacle. Corporations, no matter which politicians are in office, loot the Treasury, escape taxation, push down wages, break unions, dismantle civil society, gut regulation and legal oversight, control information, prosecute endless war and dismantle public institutions and programs that include schools, welfare and Social Security. And elected officials, enriched through our form of legalized corporate bribery, have no intention of halting the process.

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Our corporate masters will not of their own volition curb their appetite for profits. Human misery and the deadly assault on the ecosystem are good for business. These masters have set in place laws that, when we rise up—and they expect us to rise up—will permit the state to herd us like sheep into military detention camps. Section 1021(b)(2) is but one piece of the legal tyranny now in place to ensure total corporate control. The corporate state also oversees the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. It can order the assassination of U.S. citizens. It has abolished habeas corpus. It uses secret evidence to imprison dissidents, such as the Palestinian academic Mazen Al-Najjar (http://www.sptimes.com/News/112501/TampaBay/Without_warning__Al_N.shtml ) . It employs the Espionage Act to criminalize those who expose abuses of power (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/06/obama-abuse-espionage-act-mccarthyism ) . A ruling elite that accrues for itself this kind of total power, history has shown, eventually uses it.

[struggle4progress]

1. Poor Hedges evidently can't read judicial opinions with any understanding

The court properly went through the legislative history of the NDAA section in question; found that Congress had been embroiled in a dispute about the current status of the law on indefinite detention as it might apply to US citizens, permanent residents, and persons captured/arrested in the US; determined that Congress had accepted compromise language, not describing the current status of the law, but simply stating that the NDAA did not change the current status of the law on indefinite detention as it might apply to US citizens, permanent residents, and persons captured/arrested in the US; and concluded that the NDAA section in question took no stand on the current status of the law and simply stated that the NDAA did not change the current status of the law

Let us repeat: there is continuing disagreement about the current status of the law on indefinite detention as it might apply to US citizens, permanent residents, and persons captured/arrested in the US; and the NDAA simply said it could not be construed as having any effect on that law

Hedges should be ashamed of himself for promoting this bullshizz