According to the New York Times, corporations and unions have been prohibited from spending their money on federal campaigns since 1947, and corporate contributions have been barred since 1907.   States have barred corporate expenditures since the late 1800s.

These rules may be set to change, dramatically so.  While the Supreme Court has affirmed as late as 2003 that Congress may curb corporate political contributions, the Roberts Court appears eager and even impatient to strike down these rules and permit a flood of corporate money into state and federal elections.

It is all too easy to bemoan the sad state of corporate influence in American politics; yet the politics of the present may seem like child’s play in a future where corporations are permitted to spend as much as they want, on whoever they want.  Today, a corporation must engage in indirect donations by having its employees donate to “political action committees”; but we may not be too far from a world where a member of the board can simply write a check to the candidate of choice.

For more business-friendly members of the Supreme Court, the issue boils down to “corporate free speech.”  Since the late 1800s, corporations have been defined as “persons” under the law, which has entitled them to legal protections normally entitled only to flesh-and-blood individuals.  Thus, corporations can own property and are entitled to due process.

According to some legal minds, corporations should also be entitled to the full range of free speech protections given to breathing, thinking human beings.  For purposes of election laws, full free speech for corporations would mean the ability to spend money in elections just as a regular person.

Beyond the absurdity of this doctrine, which treats fictitious legal entities that exist only on paper as real life human beings, is also the dramatic and serious consequence of de facto corporate ownership of elections.  A world where corporations can spend freely on elections is a world where corporations purchase their policies in Congress.  It is a world where individual voices would simply be drowned out by the same corporate machinery that promotes the endless torrent of consumerist drivel that we are all exposed to every waking moment of life.

The real problem here is the fiction that a corporation is a “person” under the law.  Why the corporation — a legal entity that exists only on paper, can live forever, and is designed only for profit — is treated the same way as a normal, breathing individual is a rule that makes little common sense.  However, it is a doctrine that has certainly benefited the corporate model.  Even with current restrictions in place, corporations possess frightening levels of influence in government.  Is it really a good idea to give them even more power and control over Congress?

If corporations are “people” for purposes of the law, what we’re really talking about is a social order with two levels of citizenship:  first-class citizenship, given to corporations, and second-class citizenship, given to flesh-and-blood humans.   After all, a corporation can live forever (so long as it is making a profit) and can amass an obscene fortune that would be difficult if not impossible for any one individual to make on his or her own.  And since money talks, and money is equated with speech, this perpetually existing “person” would be able to spend hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars at every election, engaging in the same marketing and public relations brainwashing that we are all so accustomed to in the marketplace, only this time directed towards political policy.  In a world where corporations can “speak” as much as they want, it is clear that laws would be written for the corporations themselves.

This is a matter of constitutional law; if the Supreme Court overturns these rules, Congress could not overturn the Supreme Court.  Only an amendment to the Constitution would prohibit corporations from engaging in the wholesale buying and selling of political candidates, which is really what is at stake here.  This would be a frightening era of American politics:  Halliburton, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and Citi Group engaging in non-stop political campaigning for their darling of the hour, purchasing laws at their leisure, and crushing alternative candidacies wherever they may sprout.

Forty years ago, in Katz v. United States, the Supreme Court addressed the issue of when the government needed a warrant to tap a phone line.  The facts were simple:  Katz was charged with placing illegal bets from a phone booth in Los Angeles to a partner in Miami.  The government had recorded the conversations without a warrant.  Katz sought a court order that the searches were unconstitutional.

In analyzing whether the Constitution protected Katz’s phone conversations, the Supreme Court analyzed the relationship of people to the phone booth.  “[A] person in a telephone booth may rely upon the protection of the Fourth Amendment.  One who occupies it, shuts the door behind him, and pays the toll that permits him to place a call is surely entitled to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world.”  Because Katz expected his conversation to be private, the government was required to obtain a warrant before it could record what he was saying.

Seems simple enough; but here we are, 40 years later, and the world we live in is no longer a world of phone booths, but a world of cell phones, Twitter, online journals and Facebook.

And unlike the days of the phone booth, there are few places anymore — physical or virtual — where people take advantage of privacy.

What happens to privacy in a society that defines its scope by whether or not people “reasonably believe” they are entitled to it?  As we become more accustomed to freely providing our personal data and information in order to take advantage of modern technologies, we are very literally also giving away our right to privacy as well.  To the extent that both individually and as a society we have no “reasonable expectation” that the things we do or say on the Internet are private, the law states that the government is free to mine that data without any warrant or oversight.

What we obtain in convenience we pay for with our privacy.  It is convenient to purchase media through iTunes, to read downloaded books on a Kindle, to keep up with our friends with email and Facebook as opposed to a telephone conversation or (dare I mention) a hand-written letter; but to a large degree, current technologies of communication and connection lie outside the scope of modern legal protections.  From a constitutional standpoint, and absent a Congressional law to the contrary, the government can theoretically keep track of everything we do or say on the Internet without any need for a warrant — since we don’t really believed the Internet is private anyway.

Maybe this would be less of a concern if the Internet was a gimmick, but it is clear that the Internet is becoming an integral part of global society, as necessary as electricity.  Whether or not privacy remains intact will depend almost entirely on whether or not people want or expect privacy on the Internet.  To date, it doesn’t seem that people are that concerned about their privacy.  It may be only a matter of time before people realize how important their privacy is; and how much of it they’ve already discarded.

The war in Afghanistan has played an integral role in America’s self-definition since 9/11.  The two are are intimately related.  The story goes that America invaded Afghanistan to take out Osama bin Laden, and that the war must continue in Afghanistan in order to end the terrorist threat.  In other words:  so long as America is in Afghanistan, the terrorist threat remains at large.   Ending the Afghan war must mean that the terrorist threat is over, and normalcy can return.  9/11 will be over; America can resume a new path; life can go on.

It is because 9/11 and Afghanistan are so intertwined that the war in Afghanistan will likely continue for some time.  To be blunt, America’s business and political leadership profits far too much from 9/11 to end it.

9/11 has been a veritable godsend for America’s leaders.  It has created public fear and led to billions of dollars in financial profit.  It has made people uncomfortable to question the government; it has avoided any inspection of America’s empire all over the world. It has created the “enemy” of terrorism — and when there is an enemy, then the government can do what it wants and corruption can take place without much oversight

This is not the first time an enemy has been used in American politics.  After World War II, American politicians created the enemy of an alleged vast international communist conspiracy as the presumptive reason for America’s imperial project undertaken by combined efforts of business and political elites.

And it worked.  For more than fifty years, people permitted Congress and the President to create a huge military-industrial complex (the very complex that President Dwight Eisenhower had warned the nation about in his farewell address) which pumped trillions and trillions of dollars into military spending at the expense of the domestic common good.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s leaders realized there was no justification for the established presence of the military-industrial complex; and without an enemy, it was only a matter of time before people began to question spending hundreds of billions of dollars without any international enemy.

9/11 brought a new enemy in the form of Osama bin Laden.  The specter of “international terrorism” could take the place of the old communist threat and justify a continued social order predicated on military spending and corporate power.

America did not have to go to war in Afghanistan.  Indeed, prior to 9/11, terrorism was always thought of as a criminal matter, not a matter of war.  In every country in the world, the perpetrators of terrorist acts are typically caught, put on trial, and made to serve long prison sentences.  No “war” is ever declared.  In fact, this was the exact approach taken after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in the United States: the conspirators were caught, put on trial, and sentenced.  America chose to war, because war allows for an enemy.  And it was time for a new enemy.

Without 9/11 — and without the Afghan war — those questions reemerge.  Why does America need F-22s?  What enemy exists that could challenge American power?  What is America’s purpose in this world?  Meaty questions that require substantive answers and genuine leadership.

The real shame in all of this is the role played by President Obama.  President Obama has vowed to continue the Afghan war to some unclear end, at the expense of American and Afghani lives.  For all his promises to honor civil liberties, to defend the common good, to end the influence of corporations and lobbyists, Obama has shown that he is little better than President Bush in the area of international affairs.  He has shown that despite whatever good intentions he may have brought to the Presidency, he is held captive to the same interests and power structures that have created trillions of dollars in debt, a massive imperial war machine, and few remaining cherished liberties.

Instead of asking the American public  tough questions and pulling out of Afghanistan, President Obama apparently favors the woefully misguided approach of his predecessor: pointless death, pointless war expenditure, pointless civilian casualties, all to simply delay the inevitable moment when America will leave.

To this day, Americans continue to hear the same old post hoc justifications for war, including the tried-and-true message used in any colonial war that the “women of Afghanistan” must be saved.   No one in America really cares about Afghan women; if they did, they would wonder why American troops continue to kill these women in countless incidents of collateral damage.

Americans need to really challenge themselves to imagine a world that does not require constant American military intervention.  It would be a wonderful thing for the American military to reserve and replenish itself after eight long years of hard fighting and actually take on a defensive posture, and to allow troops to come home to their loved ones.

But it is clear that peace — any type of peace — is the last thing that American political and business leaders want.  The politicians and the business people benefit financially and politically from a constant state of war.  Weapons can be sold, labor shipped overseas (thus dropping the unemployment rate), and the population kept in check by fear of an enemy that will never really materialize.

No, Afghanistan will be a battleground for American troops for some time; until Americans realize that it is possible to move beyond 9/11 to a different era, an era where fear can be put to rest and war doesn’t have to be the normal state of thing.  That will be the challenge.  And it is with great shame that it likely will be another leader, and not President Obama, who will help Americans get to that point.

Technological developments such as monthly transit swipe cards, services telling you when your friends are nearby, and searches on your PDA for services and business near your current location are just a few examples of technologies that provide very convenient services, yet carry the potential for a complete breakdown in our expectations of privacy.

Twenty years ago, if someone wanted to know your daily activities, they would have to hire a private investigator who would track your movements over a number of days, dig through your garbage, and possibly engage in electronic surveillance to monitor your communications.

These days, that information is all being connected by a variety of Internet services, data which would be hacked or simply even handed over at the discretion of the service provider.  And most people appear to have few qualms about handing over personal data to companies in exchange for services.

From a legal standpoint, whether or not the government needs a warrant to gather personal information depends on society’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.”   In the 1967 case Katz v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the FBI could not wiretap communications on a phonebooth used by Mr. Katz (who was placing illegal bets through the booth) because Katz had a reasonable expectation of privacy that his communications in the phonebooth would be private.

The Court’s holding was based on a mix of technology and social expectation:  “No less than an individual in a business office, in friend’s apartment, or in a taxicab, a person in a telephone booth may rely upon the protection of the Fourth Amendment.  One who occupies it, shuts the door behind him, and pays the toll that permits him to place a call is surely entitled to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world.  To read the Constitution more narrowly is to ignore the vital role that the public telephone has come to play in private communication.”

Whether or not the Government could engage in mass electronic surveillance of the Internet thus depends in part on whether or not society believes the Internet contains elements of private communication.  Email is probably considered private and and would require a warrant in order to review, but what about private messages on a service like Facebook?  Forum postings on a private forum?

There is also the intersection of the “pen registry” cases on Internet communications, which carries the potential to gut any privacy related to web browsing.  Twelve years after Katz, in Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that a “pen register” — a device that simply records the numbers dialed from a particular phone line — was not a “search” under the 4th Amendment because a person who uses a telephone voluntarily conveys the information to the phone company.

The Court wrote:  “When he used his phone, petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the telephone company and “exposed” that information to its equipment in the ordinary course of business. In so doing, petitioner assumed the risk that the company would reveal to police the numbers he dialed. The switching equipment that processed those numbers is merely the modern counterpart of the operator who, in an earlier day, personally completed calls for the subscriber. Petitioner concedes that if he had placed his calls through an operator, he could claim no legitimate expectation of privacy.”

In 1986, Congress passed the Pen Register Act, which requires law enforcement officials to obtain a court order if they wish to use a pen register for surveillance.  However, the standard is much lower than for a warrant — the police only need to certify that the information likely to be obtained is relevant to a criminal investigation, and the judge “shall” issue the order.

The Supreme Court has yet to determine whether or not Internet communications — logging onto a certain website, for example — is considered a private activity that would require a warrant for collection.  In 2001, the USA Patriot Act expanded the Pen Register Act to include Internet communications as part of the definition of a pen register.  But the key issue — whether or not the Constitution protects web surfing as a private activity — has yet to be decided.

Given current values and behavior, society’s belief concerning the relevance of privacy on the Internet is an open question.   People seem happy to hand over private information to vendors such as Amazon and services like Facebook.  As more of these services emerge, and as our lives become more plugged into virtual network after network, there is a real risk that important Constitutional protections will be tossed aside in favor of convenience and “status updating.”  This would be a real shame:  it is far easier to lose a freedom than to gain it.

Six months into office, Obama has failed to take a principled stance on gay rights; has failed to reverse the Bush-era stance on government secrecy; has failed to stand up to big business and instead signed laws giving trillions of dollars to the very companies that produced the greatest economic crisis in one hundred years; and looks ready to discard any government-option in pushing for health care reform.

In addition, when given the opportunity to select a Supreme Court justice, Obama chose a relative moderate.  While it is a wonderful thing that the halls of power are becoming more outwardly diverse, Obama turned down a potential opportunity to select a Supreme Court justice in the vein of William Brennan or Thurgood Marshall, in favor of a “safer” choice.

While Obama’s failure to take principled progressive positions is disappointing, it was also wholly predictable.  Obama’s campaign was based on marketing his youth and racial background — his appearance, in other words — and was not based at all on any real positions.  Indeed, anyone who has borne witness to even two or three presidential elections understands that the campaigns refuse to take positions in order to attract as many voters as possible.  With Obama, dark skin and youth were branded in a way to make people assume that Obama was a bona-fide progressive.

In contrast to Obama, there were at least two politicians running for President in the last election who stated very clearly what they stood for:  Dennis Kucinich (D) and Ron Paul (R).  Both Kucinich and Paul railed against Bush-era constitutional abuses and had clear visions of their direction for America.

Kucinich was the only real progressive candidate in the race.  He was the only candidate who fully supported a single-payer health care system like the ones in place in other industrialized nations.  He called for an end to overseas wars and decried the growing division between rich and poor.  Kucinich was ignored by the media and secured only single digit support amongst Democracts.

Progressives may be angry at what they perceive to be Obama’s shifting positions; but he never really had any positions to begin with.  Obama won based on his supporters’ assumptions, and nothing else.  They saw in him what they wanted to see:  a one man solution to the decades of corruption, corporatism, and militarism that currently plague America.   The illusions of Obama as progressive are as fantastical as the illusions of a socialist which so many die-hard Republicans see in him.  Obama is little more than a mirror who reflects one’s own perceptions of the political good.

At the same time, let’s give credit where credit is due.  Obama is intelligent and an able administrator.  He is capable and competent.  Being able to effectively run a government is no small task, and half the battle of undoing the damage of the George W. Bush presidency is simply ensuring that paperwork goes where it needs to go.  Obama also pledged to change the combative tone in Washington, and to his credit he is far more a uniter than his predecessor.  He listens to the other side even if he doesn’t agree with them.  If an emergency strikes the United States, he is far more trustworthy than his predecessor, who permitted an entire city to be wiped from the map.

But Obama can only do so much — and is perhaps only willing to do so much.  His election as President is yet another reminder that the strength of American politics is ultimately derived from the people — and more specifically, from the ability of the people to make smart choices about the direction of their country.  Progressives can only blame themeslves if they wanted a progressive President, as it was clear to anyone paying attention that Obama would be a moderate leader, and not a reformer.  That does not mean that he is a bad President.  Perhaps a moderate President is what America needs right now.

Ultimately, Obama’s moderate policies should remind people interested in progressive change that progress at the national level is a difficult thing.  Progressives are seriously misguided when they push for greater federal control over America.  There is a reason that our federal republic permits governance at the local and state levels as well — people in South Carolina may not want the same laws as people in Texas or Montana or California.  The institution of the Presidency was designed to act as a unifying position for all Americans, and in many respects, Obama is ably fulfilling that position.  True progressive change is best acquired at the state level — and if a good idea really develops amongst the 50 different laboratories of the states, it can be easily shared with the sibling states.  Progressive voices would do well to remember the wisdom of the Framers in designing a system of limited government at the federal level.  A growing federal government is in fact the greatest obstacle to real progress.

Jawad was 12 years old when he was detained in 2002 by Afghan police who were looking for the perpetrators of a grenade attack.   He was beaten by the Afghanis and then handed over to American forces, who transferred him to Guantanamo Bay. 

In October 2008, a US military judge ruled confessions Jawad had made were inadmissible because they were obtained under torture.

In July 2009, the judge overseeing Jawad’s military tribunal described the US government’s case against him as “an outrage” that was “riddled with holes”.

It is a true testament to government bureaucracy that a twelve year old child caught up in a military sweep was forced to wait seven years before anyone thought the initial mistake should have been corrected.

And it is a true testament to the fear and hypocrisy engendered by the ‘war on terror’ that a young teenager was subject to torture and indefinite detention for close to a decade before anyone decided it was time to make it stop.

What security comes from the torture of an innocent child?  Such a shameful question — a question only asked of a handful of criminal regimes in the world.  Today, Americans are forced to ask this question about the behavior of their own government.

This is not the first time that fear has been used as a weapon against a specific group of people.  During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of anyone with Japanese ancestory in the United States — some 120,000 people.  In Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), the Supreme Court ruled that the order was permissible and turned a willfully ignorant eye to the constitutional injustice perpretated on 120,000 innocent individuals. 

After World War II, the American legal system promised itself that it had learned a lesson; that it would no longer engage in abusive practicies antithetical to democratic values based on fear.  In voiding the factual basis of the unlawful detention some forty years later, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel wrote that the internment of Japanese citizens and the Supreme Court’s willful ignorance of Constitutional abuse stood as a “caution that in times of international hostility and antagonisms our institutions, legislative, executive and judicial, must be prepared to exercise their authority to protect all citizens from the petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused.”

Her decision echoed Justice Frank Murphy’s original dissent in the Korematsu case:

I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

Tellingly, Fred Korematsu, who brought suit against the United States during World War II and succesfully had the factual basis of the decision thrown out in 1984, filed a friend-of-the court brief in Rasul v. Bush, in which Guantanamo Bay detainees challeged their detention as unconstitutional.  “[H]istory teaches that we tend to sacrifice civil liberties too quickly based on claims of military necessity and national security, only to discover later that those claims were overstated from the start,” he wrote in his brief.  ”Typically, we come later to regret our excess, but for many, that recongition comes too late.” 

For Mohamed Jawad, such recognition came after seven years of torture and indefinite detention.  No doubt, there will come a time when Americans will conclude that the government abuses that took place after 9/11 could have been avoided; in time, the people will realize the extent of lawlessness that occupied the Bush regime and the degree to which torture and constitutional deprivations were the rule, and not the exception. 

But it is shameful that America refuses to reflect on the abuses of its past and to learn from them — the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Espionage Act of 1917, and the internment of Fred Korematsu, to name just a few examples.  One day, we must hope, abuses will be curtailed because they won’t happen in the first place; that government leaders, when faced with a critical decision, will expose whatever fears they have to the illumination of reason, and will act in confidence based on the bullwark of constitutional principle.  And if they do not — one can only hope — they will be held accountable to an angry population that will not tolerate the deprivation of their precious freedoms for the false exigencies of a panic, or based on the whim of ambitious politicans who prey on the fears of the innocent.  What value does liberty really possess, if centuries of cultivation are thrown away because of the events of a single day?

According to news reports, Dr. Gates was returning home from China when a neighbor saw him and his taxi driver attempting to force their way through an apparently broken front door.  The neighbor reported seeing “two black males with backpacks on the porch,” with one “wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry.”

By the time the police arrived, Gates was already inside.  According to the police report, Gates began yelling at the police officer, calling him racist, and shouting that he didn’t know who he was “messing” with.  This behavior became the basis of his arrest for “disorderly conduct.”

No doubt police officers have a tough job, but there is an assumption at work concerning the relationship between the police and common citizens that has yet to be fully explored.  What right, exactly, does a police officer have to arrest someone who is ordering a stranger out of his home?  As the police report itself concedes, the police officer had satisifed himself with the identity of Gates; the arrest stemmed from Gates’ anger and yelling at the officer, and nothing else.

Americans have a contradictory perspective on the issue of power and the police.  On the one hand, Americans pride themselves on their independence and their alleged rebellious spirit; but on the other hand, they accord extraordinary levels of entitlement and authority to local police and members of the military, almost to the point of blind obedience.  It was not appropriate for Gates to yell at the police officer, but the police officer — and not Gates — was the person who had the gun and the handcuffs, and it is abusive for Gates to be arrested for simply speaking his mind.

The entire affair also testifies to the lack of community in modern America.  Fifty years ago, neighbors spoke to each other and would have known when people were going on trips.  They would have recognized one another instead of seeing only a “black male with a backpack” trying to “force entry.”  Today, we leave it to the police to deal with other people because we have become uninterested in cultivating contacts in our surrounding vicinity — and when something goes wrong or seems odd, we need the officer with the gun to make things better.

Ultimately, the police officer — like the government official — is a servant of the citizenry.  When society gives people power, there must be something given in exchange.  The power to arrest and to shoot are deadly responsibilities and must be handled with utmost care and by people who will respect those powers.  Even assuming the police officer’s point of view and narrative that he was being yelled at by Dr. Gates and called a racist, the police officer should have turned around and left.  It is clear that arresting Gates was simply a way to show “who was boss” in a way that was inappropriate.

It would be nice if the race issue could be set aside for even just a minute and have a honest discussion concerning the role of police in society, and whether Americans are comfortable with people being arrested in their own home because they happened to raise their voice.

Unfortunately, the details of many of the “unprecedented” programs authorized by Bush remain classified.

The report highlights that the key legal architect for the spying program was John Yoo (the author of the “torture memos” as well).  Yoo concluded that despite laws and constitutional directives which prohibited such broad spying, the President possessed the power to conduct warrantless searches due to his authority as Commander-in-Chief.

Yoo left his post in 2003, and a DOJ official named Patrick Philbin was assigned the role of justifying the spying program.  Philbin immediately had concerns and brought them to the attention of both the White House and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.  Ashcroft agreed that the program was legally problematic.

A key dramatic moment took place on March 4, 2004, when Ashcroft told President Bush that he had problems with the spying program.  The next day, Ashcroft was struck with severe gallstone pancreatitis and was hospitalized.  Apparently hoping to circumvent Ashcroft, then-Office of Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales contacted Ashcroft’s second-in-command James Comey to discuss whether Yoo’s opinions were correct, and whether the DOJ would rely on those opinions to support broad domestic spying.  Comey and other DOJ officials reiterated their position that Yoo’s opinions were flawed.

After days of pressure from Gonzales and the White House, in which Comey was told repeatedly of the importance of the spy program, on March 10 the White House sent chief of staff Andrew Card and Gonzales to the hospital to convince then-recovering Ashcroft to authorize the program.  Comey learned that Card and Gonzales were going to see Ashcroft, and in a race to beat them, he rushed to the hospital himself.  When he arrived, he found a clearly incapacitated Ashcroft, and Comey told Ashcroft “not to sign anything.”  A few minutes later, Card and Gonzales arrived and asked Ashcroft to authorize the spying program, which he refused to do.  The next day, the White House renewed the program without any DOJ approval.

According to the report, the spying program ended on February 1, 2007, but there remain very live questions as to whether domestic surveillance is still ongoing.  In 2008, Congress passed laws which retroactively authorized much (but not all) of the President’s actions.  In addition, Congress also issued broad immunity to telecommunication companies that participate in any domestic surveillance for both past and future actions.  Specifically, the act provides that if the Attorney General requests an electronic service provider to engage in domestic spying, that service provider is immunized from any cause of action in any court.  (Title VII, Sec. 702(h)(3)).  In effect, the exception can swallow the rule:  so long as a telecommunication company can wave a piece of paper with a signature from the Attorney General, they can engage in all sorts of illegal spying on behalf of the President without any fear of lawsuit.

Indeed, following enactment of these laws, courts have simply dismissed lawsuits against telecommunication companies without any discussion of whether their activity was legal.

Perhaps not wanting to look like they are “soft” on terror, Congressmen and women have had no qualms in ceding their authority to hold the President accountable.  And, to ensure that there is really zero accountability, Congress went one step further and deprived the courts of the ability to hear complaints related to illegal abuses.  Effectively, a legal regime has been created in which one person — the President — determines what is right or wrong.

This type of legal framework flies in the face of notions of checks-and-balances.  There is really no way to know for sure whether the government is engaging in illegal domestic surveillance because all safeguards have been removed.  In the name of national security, important Constitutional protections have been subsumed without any outcry from Congress, the courts or the people.  As technology marches on, and as we all become more integrated with that technology, there is a growing shift in permitting the government to have greater control over our thoughts and beliefs.  This is problematic for a number of reasons, but at heart, presents a real threat to the idea of the rule of law.

There are people for whom everything a Democrat does is treason, and for everything a Republican does is idiocy.  Instead of commenting on individual policies and actions, people look to party affiliation as a shortcut in determining political appropriateness.  Like any stereotype, this type of thinking hides more than it reveals, and does nothing to further the aims of good government.

In his 1796 farewell address, President George Washington called political parties the “worst enemy” of government.

Washington commented:  “[T]he common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”

Washington had been caught in the middle of a war between Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans and Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists.  Forced to choose a side, Washington declared himself a Federalist, but in his final act as President he called for both sides to settle their disputes and put the interests of the republic to heart instead.

Mark Twain, as well, wrote harsh words on party loyalty.  He wrote:

Look at the tyranny of party — at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty — a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes — and which turns voters into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.

Twain’s point was that party politics was a way for people to control the minds of others with an us-versus-them mentality.  No matter if the party is corrupt, or duplicitous, or engages in activities that are harmful to democracy; the only thing that matters in party politics is that your party wins and the other one loses.

The dominance of the two-party system in the United States has led to a political framework where there is little alternative in public policy.  The two parties squabble over smaller, hot-button cultural issues such as abortion and the definition of marriage, while much more pressing and meaningful issues — health care, militant foreign policy, expanding federal power, climate change, energy policy — are given little attention.

For example, 72 percent of Americans — an impressive majority — favor a government administered health care plan to compete with private insurance, yet it is this very proposal that faces the most opposition in the halls of government.

The reason for this consensus is that powerful corporate interests have maintained a grip on positions of power for some time, and they strut arm-and-arm with the dominant political parties in ensuring their authority.  The whole notion of “Red” and “Blue” states is a simple divide-and-conquer strategy that splits the American public in order to prevent fundamental and democratic change.

The result is a type of “zombie politics”, where individual Americans unthinkingly fall in lock-step behind a political leader and party without considering the consequences of the policy.

There is no pretense of critical thinking, but simply unwavering uniformity:  a nation of zombies.

There should be no doubt that both political parties and their adherents are guilty of this zombie approach, but there is also little avoiding the truth that adherents to Republican Party ideology are particularly unmoored from genuine principle.  A party that once supported good ideas such as small government and a non-interventionist foreign policy has transformed into a party that waves the banner of religious bigotry, small-minded populism and the literal use of torture against anyone who disagrees with them.  This is the kernel of fascism, and the fact that even 10 or 20 percent of Americans go along with this is in many ways chilling.

Consider a world without the chains of political party, where candidates simply ran on their individual position.   Without the backdrop of a party, candidates could propose novel or creative solutions without needing to worry about a larger party agenda.  More candidates could enter the field without needing to worry about “dominant” candidates supported by powerful parties.  And without the label of a political party, individual citizens would actually have to pay attention to the candidate and engage in critical thinking to determine if the policies make sense and are worthwhile.

For the last fifty years, corporate power, government, the empire, and the division between rich and poor have all increased dramatically — regardless of who has been in office.  Clinton expanded government, but so did George W. Bush.  Nixon bombed Vietnam, but it was Kennedy who got America involved.  George W. Bush lied to the public to start a war in Iraq, but Johnson did the same thing in the Gulf of Tonkin.

And this entire time, corporations have benefited at the expense of individual people.  This is the result of a dysfunctional two-party system and the dominance of zombie politics.

Enough is enough.  At some point Americans need to see the Democratic and Republican parties for what they are: two different handmaidens serving the same greedy power centers, the same corporate elite, the same ostentatious political circles.  And they can do this by dropping their allegiance to their political party, and affirming their allegiance to the Constitution and the republic itself.

It is short, but arguably compelling:

The Los Angeles Times reports that a number of television stations have refused to carry the ad, but other stations (including CNN and MSNBC) are carrying it.

State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has introduced a bill in the California Assembly that would place marijuana in the same regulatory framework as alcohol.  The bill would “legalize the possession, sale, cultivation, and other conduct relating to marijuana and its derivatives by persons 21 years of age and older, except as specified.”  The bill would also “set up a wholesale and retail marijuana sales regulation program . . . [and] ban local and state assistance in enforcing inconsistent federal and other laws relating to marijuana.”

Federal law continues to prohibit the possession and use of marijuana.  The Controlled Substances Act lists marijuana (”cannabis”) as a “Schedule I” drug and prohibits possession and use.  Currently, state and federal laws exist in an uneasy tension.  The Supreme Court has recently ruled that the federal government possesses the authority to regulate marijuana, even in the face of contrary state rules.  The fact that states continue to pass medical marijuana bills — and are even now discussing outright legalization — underscores the fact that even in an age of expansive federal power, the states continue to flex their own authority as separate legal and political entities.