The 2014 GOLDEN BRIOCHE AWARD

The Woodchip Gazette's  GOLDEN BRIOCHE AWARD  for 2014 goes to,

President 

BARACK OBAMA

for

his statement

that the United States is "less racially divided"

than it was when he took office

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Speaking Through Gags

It is time for King Felipe of Spain to step up to the plate and bat down a law which is constitutes a direct assault on civil society and freedom.

Col. Tejero Couping the Congress

As most people (and perhaps some Americans) are aware, Spain has been gripped by fairly ongoing protests since the financial collapse of 2008.  To date, the government has been unable to restore the economy and so the protests continue.

Given its ineptitude and the total failure of its economic policies, Spain’s right-wing ruling party, the Partido Popular, has  passed a law outlawing unauthorized protests.  Nicknamed La Ley Mordaza (the Gag Law) it enacts criminal penalties for protesting without a permit. 

But it does far more than that.  The law which was given the historically ominous name of Law for the Protection of Citizen Security imposes draconian limitations and penalties on the right of public assembly and protest.  It makes it unlawful to:

1. Photograph or record police – 600 to 30.000€ fine.

2. Peaceful disobedience to authority – 600 to 30.000€ fine.

3. Occupy banks as means of protest – 600 to 30.000€ fine. 

4. Not formalizing a protest – 600 to 30.000€ fine. 

5. Carry out assemblies or meetings in public spaces – 100 to 600€ fine. 

6. Impede or stop an eviction – 600 to 30.000€ fine. 

7. Being present at an occupied space (not only social centers but also houses occupied by evicted families) – 100 to 600€ fine.

8. Meeting or gathering in front of Congress – 600 to 30.000€ fine.

It provides for: 

9. Police black lists for protesters, activists and alternative press have been legalized. 

10. The payment of judicial costs, whose amount depends on the fine, in order to appeal.

11. Random identity checks and racial profiling of immigrants and minorities.

12. Police can now carry out raids at their discretion, without the need for “order” to have been disrupted. 

13. External bodily searches are also now allowed at police discretion. 

14. Government prohibition of any protest at will, if it feels “order” will be disrupted. 

15. Any ill-defined “critical infrastructure” is now considered a forbidden zone for public gatherings if it might affect their functioning. 

16. There are also fines for people who climb buildings and monuments without permission.

 These particular provisions of the law make clear what it is about:  it is about protecting the oligarchy.  It is a law entirely worthy of Francisco Franco.

Not surprisingly every other party across the entire political spectrum voted against the law.  But the PP, which controls both chambers of the legislature prevailed.

On 23 February 1981, a right wing cabal attempted a coup aimed at squelching Spain’s renewed democracy.  Felipe’s father, King Juan Carlos, stepped forward and put an end to the coup .

For that he was always remembered gratefully by the people of Spain notwithstanding his later failings.

Colonel Tejero’s action was an assault on democracy from outside the law, whereas the current Gag Law was, without doubt, enacted in accordance with due and democratic process.

But one would have to be an imbecile not to realise that assaults on freedom can come from within the law as well.  Such was the case with the Law for the Protection of the People & State which was enabled by a Reichstag controlled by a single party.

La Ley Mordaza puts the Spanish Monarchy in a very uncomfortable position.  As constitutional monarch, King Felipe is duty bound not to interfere with the democratic process.  Nonetheless, the Spanish Constitution makes it incumbent on the monarch to sanction the laws and to serve as the commander in chief of the armed force and as the symbol of national unity.   It was under this incumbency that Juan Carlos denounced the 1981 coup.

Historical crises are seldom clear and are always discomforting.  That said, Felipe should dare to be the King.  If he does he will earn the gratitude of the nation.  If he does not, neither the monarchy nor the unity of Spain will survive.

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Getting a Grip on Torture.

Former CIA director, JamesWoolsey,  has stated that "enhanced interrogation" is   not torture unless it causes permanent physical damage.

Certainly!  It's  also not torture if rectal flushes are made with all organic and humanely raised ingredients.

People need to get a grip on this thing.

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Credit and Shrugs Where Due

We Chipsters are glad that the Senate has finally released its “Torture Report” and, much as we are loathe to, we applaud Senator Feinstein for shepherding the report from darkness into light.   Given the political realities of Washington D.C., that was no easy task.

That said, we roll our eyes with boredom at the now engulfing tsunami of opinion, counter-opinion and “in depth news analysis.”   Screeches the New York Times

SENATE TORTURE REPORT FAULTS C.I.A. FOR BRUTALITY AND DECEIT

Really?  We never would have guessed.

The problem with Amurrikans is that they neither remember nor deduce.  Their brains are toggles that switch on or off at the presence or absence of triggers.  What spews out of their mouths could as easily be reduced to strings of rubber stamped “concepts.”

We remember an interview many many years ago when Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes asked the then Shan of Iran whether it was true that his secret police shoved “broken Coke bottles” up detainees’ rectums.

An indignant Shah guffawed.  “Uhh, no! We have much more sophisticated methods of obtaining information than that.”

 
“Such as what, your highness?”

The Shah, annoyed at what he evidently considered a kindergarden drill, muttered something about more effective techniques.

 
A wide eyed Wallace, evidently thinking that he a cornered the Shah into one scoop of an admission, expressed astonishment that such techniques were used and openly admitted to being used by an ally of the United States in this day and age.

An equally astonished Shah, evidently realizing he was talking to a child, replied: “...And from whom do you think we acquired learned these methods?"

CAN  ANYONE  IN  WASHINGTON NOT  KNOW  THAT  THE  UNITED  STATES  DEVELOPS,  TEACHES  AND  EMPLOYS TECHNIQUES  OF  TORTURE?

The long list of Latin American dictators installed at U.S. connivance and supported with U.S. funds and advisors attests to the long history of this country’s propagation of torture.  And if the United States teaches torture to its satraps and puppets abroad can there be any reasonable doubt that it employs those same techniques itself?

It is a minimally decent thing that the Senate publicly acknowledged the misdeeds of the United States and it is nice enough to hear at least a partial mea culpa.

All the rest is stuff and nonsense. 

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Payback for Payback

It was reported last week that OPEC decided not to increase oil production thereby insuring that gasoline prices will continue to remain low or lower.

That’s great news of Holiday Gas Guzzlers in Mobilia... including (it must be said in the interests of ‘fair reporting’) the chipsters.

But why?  Why would Venezuela not at least attempt to prevent a slide in its revenues? That is, after all, what crude prices are about.  If Venezuela needs anything it needs revenue... even more than toilet paper.

Well, most likely Venezuela had little alternative but to cow tow to Saudi Arabia’s lead.  But why would the Saudis themselves not seek to keep prices afloat?  They never particularly gave a damn for the American guzzler-driver.  Remember 1970?  Why should the be-sheeted shieks give a rat’s ass now?

One of the chipsters came up with the theory that Saudi Arabia was trying to undercut The Frackers.  It’s a good theory but the question occurs: why not before?  Why now?  Did OPEC finally wake up to the potential competition from fracked oil?  Actually there is no competition. 

Another one of our chipper editorial board came up with the theory that the cartel’s decision was in fact the opening salvo of economic war against Russia. 

The United States aims to break the Russian economy and to this end called in its chips with the Saudis who have little choice but to grit their teeth and payback.

The chipsters  voted and decided that the second alternative was what was actually afoot.  The United States is venturing where Napoleon and Hitler trod before.  That it does so by stealth and stocks is immaterial.  It still seeks to slap down Russia where she belongs.

Will Putin be the one-eyed general?

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What Ever Happened to the Elisor?

Anyone who expected the Ferguson grand jury to return an indictment is living in a Jeffersonian fantasy world. 

Needless to say, there will be the predictable arguments between the equally predictable two sides each of which will cite and ignore the facts as most suits their case. America’s perennial dialectic is nothing if not predictable.

I for one am not going to delve into this unresolvable thicket because the fundamental issue is as simple as it has been ignored:  nemo iudex in causa sua.

Gee... that sounds like Latin!  It is; and it is one of hoary collection of Roman legal maxims considered to jurisprudentially axiomatic.  The maxim holds that no one should be a judge in his own case.

Once this maxim is taken to heart it can be seen that the grand jury process was null and void from the start. 

Officer Darren Wilson was a member of the local law enforcement team.  But so too was Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney.  Is there anyone who doubts that McCulloch is and considers himself to be part of that same local law enforcement team? Of course not.

So — wonder to behold — the law enforcement team has investigated itself and has come to the astonishing conclusion that it did no wrong.

Some savant will no doubt point out that it was the jurors who made the ultimate decision.  That is true enough but they arrived at their decision only upon being guided and instructed in the facts and the law by the prosecutor.  The proceedings were in no wise adversarial and one can bet his last doughnut that the prosecutor carefully insured that the decision he desired was arrived at “fair and square” as the saying goes. 

We have seen this work before. Back in June of this year, in California, the Santa Rosa County Prosecutor’s Office published the results of its own investigation into the fatal shooting of a twelve year old boy by a sheriff’s deputy.  The boy had been carrying a toy AK-47 and was blasted away as he turned around to face the cop who was yelling at him from behind. 

Every single witness who saw the shooting described the police action — from stopping the patrol vehicle to assuming a firing position to killing — as a “seamless” sequence of no more than 10 seconds.  Although he later revised his findings, the state’s coroner initially concluded that the first shot had entered the boy’s back.

There had been no reports of a disturbance.  The boy had not been play shooting at anyone.  He  was simply walking down the street when the deputies swooped down from behind and blasted him into the next world.

Oh what to do?  Just as deputies are trained to shoot, lawyers are trained to obfuscate.  Under the skilled hand of the prosecutor, “ambiguities” (on trivial points to be sure) were discovered in the witnesses’ accounts, allowing them to be “discounted” as not shedding any certain light on the central issue....

Then, over the course of 100 pages, the victim’s turning around motion metamorphosed from one involving a physiologically natural “lift” in the angle of the firearm to an apparent “pointing” of the weapon at the deputy who, of course, in the millisecond allowed, had to make a life and death decision....   

The report, swallowed whole by the establishment press, was a paradigmatic example of sophistical equivocations, non-sequiturs, irrelevancies, and such misstatements as might be called lies by another name.

We dissected this stinking heap of offal line by line in order to prove the more fundamental point that county prosecutors have no due and fair business investigating the misconduct of county law enforcement officers.  They cannot be fair and, in the event, will not be fair because they labor under a fundamental conflict of interest.

There is no doubt in my mind that the same fundamental conflict existed in St. Louis County and that the “case” presented to the grand jury in Ferguson was just as much a heap of misleading sophistries as the Santa Rosa investigative report.   The crafty evasions and subtle confusions that infused the Santa Rosa report were just as presentable to a grand jury in a unilateral, prosecutor-scripted hearing.

There is, as it turns out, a procedure under common law that would have resolved this conflict: the appointment of an elisor.   An “elisor” is a person appointed by the court to take charge of grand jury proceedings when the local officials are themselves disqualified due to a conflict of interest.

The Common Law clearly understood the ancient Roman maxim.  It is symptomatic of decadent corruption of law in the age of tyranny that it never occurred to Mr. McCullough to insure that the proceedings would be at least as above suspicion as Caesar’s favorite boy-toy.   

Infections of the Times

The New York Times has published a slop-ed piece by Thomas Friedman entitled I.S.=Invasive Species.  The title just about reflects the sum and substratum of what passes for thought in Friedman's top half.

"I find it useful at times to use the natural world to illuminate trends in geopolitics and globalization," Friedman explains, “...invasive plant species thrive where the continuity of a natural ecosystem is breached. ...  I can’t think of a better way to understand ISIS.  It is a coalition....  from all over the world ... [which is] putting pressure on all of Iraq’s and Syria’s native species with the avowed goal of reducing the diversity of these once polycultural societies and turning them into bleak, dark, jihadist, Sunni fundamentalist monocultures."

Friedman froths on,

"How do you deal with an invasive species? The National Arboretum says you should “use systemic herbicides carefully” ...  while also constantly working to strengthen and “preserve healthy native plant habitats” .....

The Jew
by Joseph Goebbels
 Der Angriff, 21 January 1929

 One cannot combat the Jew positively. He is a negative, and this negative must be erased from the German equation, or it will always spoil the equation.    One ought not to afford to the Jew in the struggle the means that one affords to every honest opponent  ...  He is a foreigner, an alien to our folk, ..  Opposing the Jew is a matter of personal cleanliness.  Let them scream terror there. To that we answer with the famous utterance of Mussolini: "Terror? Never! It is social hygiene. We are taking these individuals out of circulation, as a physician takes a bacillus out of the body's circulation."

September 16, 1919

Dear Herr Gemlich,

The danger posed by Jewry for our people today finds expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people.   ...   And thus comes the fact that there lives amongst us a non-German, alien race which neither wishes nor is able to sacrifice its racial character or to deny its feeling, thinking, and striving ...   Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the Jew only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination.  ....  In his effects and consequences he is like a racial tuberculosis of the nations.

Sincerely,

Adolf Hitler

In the later half of the Ninetheenth Century, many writers "found it useful" to resort to racio-biological metaphors to explain historical and socio-economic questions and even ethno-cultural identity.   For example,  Vladimir (Z'ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of so-called Revisionist Zionism -- represented by today's Likud -- wrote in 1919,

 

 The source of national feeling ...lies in a man's blood ...in his racio-physico type and in that alone. ...A man's spiritual outlook is primarily determined by his physical structure. For that reason we do not believe in spiritual assimilation.   [A Jew] may be wholly imbued with that German fluid, but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish."

Following the metaphor to their logical medical conclusions, the beliefs and goals of one's opponents were not regarded as things argued against or negotiated over or simply fought over.  No.   By necessary implication from the metaphor they became conditions which needed to disinfected, cauterized, erradicated.  And so it was that the health and well being of the German Folk organism was achieved through,

There is no doubt that the region is involved in an internecine conflict in which atrocities are committed by all sides.    The complexity of the situation is illustrated by a contemporaneous report from Patrick Cockburn,  published in the U.K. Independent.   Such complexity is beyond the capacity of the shrivelled pea that  passes for Friedman's brain, which resorts to simplistic name calling compounded with Monsanto Metaphors.

The success of Friedman as a journalist can only be attributed to a species of nepotism; but whatever the case, and whatever one thinks of the catastrophe in the Middle East, resort to infectious metaphors is, in itself, inherently evil.    The Times should be ashamed were it not so shameless.

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