Civil Liberties

"I think there is a proliferation of rights. I am often surprised by the virtual nobility that seems to be accorded those with grievances. . . . I have to admit that I am one of those people that still thinks a dishwasher is a miracle." --Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

I. RIGHTS WE'VE HAD
II. RIGHTS WE NEED
III. CHANGES WE CAN MAKE

 I. RIGHTS WE'VE HAD

According to the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The men who put their signatures to those words sought to endow each other with those rights, and those rights can be gained or lost. And since that day, people around the world have imagined, created, and struggled for a great many additional rights as well.

Want to end killing by militaries or resisters or terrorists or robbers or angry spouses or disgruntled former employees and former home owners?

Want to use something other than killing people to solve our problems?

Then we have to join the civilized world, which has ceased to publicly teach that killing is good by doing it through government (except when aiding in our wars).

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By David Swanson

Over the past half century we've made tremendous progress while sliding backwards quite destructively.  The progress has come in our domestic relations.  We do unbelievably better (not perfectly by any means, but radically better than 50 years ago) at treating people decently even if they aren't white, male, Protestant, educated, handsome, or even heterosexual (there's still particularly room for improvement on that last one).  This progress has drastically improved the lives of millions.

By David Swanson

David Cole of Georgetown University and formerly of the Center for Constitutional Rights has been doing some good writing, not only on our failure to enforce laws against powerful people, but also on our out-of-control epidemic of incarceration which has struck those too unimportant to gain immunity.

Cole argues persuasively that we lock up a dramatically higher percentage of our people than any other nation because it is mostly poor African-American communities that get hit. He points out that when segregation was legal in the 1950s, African-Americans were 30 percent of the prison population, whereas now, with a monstrously increased prison population, African-Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of it. Sixty percent of African-American high school dropouts have spent time behind bars.

Video Compares Fight For Gay Marriage To Past Civil Rights Struggles

By Dave Lindorff

In the ironically named Liberty County Jail since December 11 sits Army Specialist and Iraq War veteran Marc Hall, a rap musician who had the audacity to write a song attacking the Pentagon for subjecting him to a so-called stop-loss order after he had finished his Army tour and had returned from a posting in Iraq.

By Dave Lindorff

So much for economic “green shoots.”

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, along with the servile corporate media, have been quick to grasp at and trumpet every little suggestion that things might be improving, as they did when the Labor Dept. announced last week that new unemployment claims had dropped to “just” 434,000, from a high of 684,000 in the week ended March 28 or last year.

Or when the Commerce Dept. reported last month that November housing starts had risen by 8.9% compared to the prior month.

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.