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Edited on Thu Dec-29-05 01:49 AM by Peace Patriot
because we don't have any of them:
1. Transparent elections
Two far rightwing Bushite corporations--Diebold and ES&S--tabulated 80% of the votes in the 2004 election, using 'TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls. Such election systems were also in use, to a lesser degree, in the 2002 by-elections. Secret vote counting is, by definition, non-transparent. Non-transparent elections are not elections. They are tyranny.
2. The rule of law
The president has announced that he has broken the law 30 times and will continue to do so. The law he is breaking merely requires that he get a warrant from a secret court before or AFTER surveillance of Americans' phone conversations, showing probable cause. He also broke the law by inventing his own category of prisoner--"enemy combatant"--who does not have "prisoner of war" status, and protected human rights, as provided for under the Geneva Conventions, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and other laws; he has ordered or permitted the torture of these and other prisoners; and has conducted unnamed prisoners to secret locations for unknown purposes. He apparently believes that he can write his own laws to justify these actions.
3. Respect for the law by government officials; safety of persons and of the nation
The president has harbored treasonous individuals who have violated federal laws that protect the identities of covert US agents, and who have endangered the lives of US covert agents and foreign assets/contacts, who were engaged in weapons counter-proliferation projects of great importance to US national security. At least one such individual in the president's employ has been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice connected to the investigation of this incident, yet the president has made no effort to investigate the matter himself, and to remove dangerous individuals from the government. No covert agent, or other government employee, can feel safe in such an atmosphere, and the example of lawlessness being protected creates disrespect for the law and general insecurity.
In addition, on September 11, 2001, the east coast of the US was attacked apparently by suicidal hijackers using commercial airlines as missiles to crash into the WTC in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC. The standard operating procedures of the country's air defenses--NORAD and the US Air Force--were not followed on that day, and on that day only, and no satisfactory explanation or investigation has ever been conducted. One of the primary responsibilities of the president is to insure national security. The president failed in that responsibility in several ways before and during this attack, and has neither explained his failures, nor been held accountable for it by Congress.
4. Balance of powers
Protection of civil liberties, freedom from tyranny, and equal protection of the laws for all citizens require a balance of powers within government, which the US Constitution was designed to create. However, the two elected branches of the government--the president and Congress--both gained power in non-transparent elections, favoring one political party, the Republicans--in the case of the president, in the 2004 election, and in the case of Congress in the elections conducted in 2002 and 2004, with varying degrees of transparency, as the new electronic voting systems containing secret programming code controlled by partisans of the Republican Party came on line, resulting in two-thirds of Congress holding office with questionable legitimacy. These two branches tainted with non-transparent elections have been appointing and approving the judges in the third branch, the judiciary. The lack of a "balance of powers" and the overweening influence of one political party, the Republicans, is palpable, and is expressed in many ways, including the exclusion of Democratic Congressional representatives from meetings at which they are entitled to be present, the unfair tabling of Democratic initiatives, unfair scheduling of votes, and so on; and also in the overall lack of representation of the interests of the rank and file of the Democratic Party--workers, the poor, the middle class, small business, and many professions, who constitute at least half of the U.S. population.
5. Free speech
Aides of the president and vice president, and possibly these officials themselves, revealed the identity of covert US agents apparently as political punishment for publicly expressed views of the spouse of an outed agent. Such as action chills free speech, in that it sends the message to all potential dissenters that severe punishment may be inflicted by the president and his regime on any who speak out against them. Free speech is further curtailed by monopolistic practices by the country's news and opinion outlets, so that only the interests of big business and the upper classes are served by news publications and in use of the public airwaves.
6. Respect for oaths of office and the Constitution
The Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war. In October 2002, the Congress voted to transfer the power to declare war to the president, in the case of the invasion of sovereign foreign country, Iraq. The evaluation of the reasons for such an invasion--the offenses that Iraq was said to have committed--was therefore left entirely up to the president, who decided to invade and occupy that country for reasons that all turned out to be false, and that many persons on government and in other nations knew to be false. The members of Congress who voted to give away their power to declare war violated the Constitution and their oath of office to uphold the Constitution with the Iraq war resolution. And the president violated international law, and long-standing US foreign policy, by the arbitrary, pre-emptive, and large scale violence against innocent people, with no justification. Congress furthermore continues to fund this illegal and unnecessary war to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
7. Fair taxation, and taxation with representation
Throughout the planning and execution of an illegal war, the president and Congress have acted to remove the burden of the cost of that war from the richest of Americans and to place that burden on the poorest classes, by repeated tax cuts for the richest Americans, and tax cuts and tax breaks for large corporate business interests, while maintaining or increasing taxes on the poor and cutting all social programs that benefit the poor, the middle class, and small business. The poor and middle class, by far the largest population in the country, have meanwhile been denied proper representation in these decisions by means of non-transparent elections that are controlled by partisans of the president's political party. This is "taxation without representation"--the immediate cause of the first American Revolution.
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