I have gotten a lot of feedback stating that I am overreacting, re: Obama signing away our individual freedoms by signing the National Defense Authorization Act. Fair enough. But lets take a look at just one scenario that is also in the news right now. Not the corporate media but the real news that deals with everything that is going on in this country that doesn’t sell soap.
The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, influenced, as is everything in this country by money, in this case the money behind industrial farming has recommended for many years that animal activists who carry out undercover investigations on farms could be prosecuted as domestic terrorists. The FBI notes that the videotaping, illegal entry and rescue of animals are violations of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. This is what Homeland Security is worried about, a bunch of animal lovers taking pictures of the abuses carried out by the meat industry? The penalties for conviction of such acts cam include terrorism enhancements, which could conceivably add decades to a sentence.
Now with the enhancements of the National Defense Authorization Act the application of the label terrorist could land a human being, trying to save animals from the terrible cruelties of factory farming practices in a gulag for life, without possibility of trial or bail.
An illustration of my point is the arrest recently of Ryan Shapiro and Sarajane Blum who were charged for trespassing and videotaping the abuse of geese that were having food stuffed down their throats to produce pate’. I like pate’ as much as the next guy, but I can do without it if the only way we can produce it is to abuse a helpless bird. I suppose Ryan and Sarajane felt pretty much the same way when they videotaped the abuse in progress.
Now, because of the NDAA they could disappear. That’s right; they could be arrested, charged with terrorism and just disappear. No trial, no bail, none of that good stuff that has, over the last two centuries, made our country a better place to live than many others around the world.
Because of Obama’s failure in signing this abomination, we are now no better, our citizens no safer, than the average resident of Stria or the Congo. We fought a war for eight years in Iraq, to, if our last two presidents are to be believed, eject a dictator. Now our current president has signed into law a piece of trash that will make this country just like the one four thousand American kids gave their lives to overthrow. This place is starting to smell just like Argentina in the ‘70s. We will soon have our own list of Los Desperados.
I understand that the NDAA was about a lot of other things like the defense budget and other things and that’s exactly what was wrong with it. No measure that goes before congress and the president to become law should ever contain more than one subject. This is one of the major flaws in our legal process, and it has, over the years, been abused by lazy and dishonest congressmen, to get their wants through the system. “I can’t get this passed by itself, so I’ll attach it as a rider, to another bill that has a better chance of passing or that must be passed,” the lazy, or dishonest congressman says to himself and we end up with NDAA.
We had to pass the military budget so we got the end of justice in America. Even the lazy president, as he signed it denounced it. Do the work, Barak! This is probably the most important piece of legislation that any president has looked at since the writing of the constitution. It runs contrary to the spirit and the logic of that great document and you signed it just to get the military budget passed.
What you should have done is send it back to congress, told them to cut out the fascist trash and resubmit it and if the military had to wait a while to get more planes that are already obsolete, so be it. You don’t sell what makes our country great, down the drain, just to pass a budget, any kind of budget.
I find it fascinating that the GOP rails against Obama about his healthcare plan, his bailout of the auto industry and his new regulations on Wall Street all of which have been beneficial to the country and not a word about NDAA. Isn’t that strange? Maybe it’s because this denial of justice blends in perfectly with their other idiotic ideas about how a country should be run, Looks like small government, big police force is just the Republican way.