The Furious Spinner

This is what happens to good people who do good things in this U.S. of A. Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, the lawyer who challenged Bush's use of military tribunals (and won), has been told he won't be promoted. It's the Navy's way of saying, "You're fired." Nothing surprises me anymore, but it still makes me sad to see people treated this way. (Sad and infuriated.) Maybe King George will decide now that Swift is siding with the "terrorists" and he'll be send off to jail himself. Of course, now that habeas corpus is dead, any of us could be sent off to jail for years and we'd never see the light of day. Or the light of the moon. *sigh* Every time I think of this, I cry. And I try to figure out what to do. (Didn't any of these politicians ever see The Wrong Man?)

I will leave you with some words from the venerable Howard Zinn:

"There is enormous hypocrisy surrounding the pious veneration of the Constitution and 'the rule of law.' The Constitution, like the Bible, is infinitely flexible and is used to serve the political needs of the moment. When the country was in economic crisis and turmoil in the Thirties and capitalism needed to be saved from the anger of the poor and hungry and unemployed, the Supreme Court was willing to stretch to infinity the constitutional right of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. It decided that the national government, desperate to regulate farm production, could tell a family farmer what to grow on his tiny piece of land.

"When the Constitution gets in the way of a war, it is ignored. When the Supreme Court was faced, during Vietnam, with a suit by soldiers refusing to go, claiming that there had been no declaration of war by Congress, as the Constitution required, the soldiers could not get four Supreme Court justices to agree to even hear the case. When, during World War I, Congress ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech by passing legislation to prohibit criticism of the war, the imprisonment of dissenters under this law was upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, which included two presumably liberal and learned justices: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis.

"It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice.

"The distinction between law and justice is ignored by all those Senators—Democrats and Republicans—who solemnly invoke as their highest concern 'the rule of law.' The law can be just; it can be unjust. It does not deserve to inherit the ultimate authority of the divine right of the king.

"The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no right to work less than twelve hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance....

"Still, knowing the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. Our culture—the media, the educational system—tries to crowd out of our political consciousness everything except who will be elected President and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make. They are not. They deflect us from the most important job citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system. That is why Cindy Sheehan's dramatic stand in Crawford, Texas, leading to 1,600 anti-war vigils around the country, involving 100,000 people, is more crucial to the future of American democracy than the mock hearings on Justice Roberts or the ones to come on Judge Alito....

"Let us not be disconsolate over the increasing control of the court system by the right wing.

"The courts have never been on the side of justice, only moving a few degrees one way or the other, unless pushed by the people. Those words engraved in the marble of the Supreme Court, 'Equal Justice Before the Law,' have always been a sham.

"No Supreme Court, liberal or conservative, will stop the war in Iraq, or redistribute the wealth of this country, or establish free medical care for every human being. Such fundamental change will depend, the experience of the past suggests, on the actions of an aroused citizenry, demanding that the promise of the Declaration of Independence--an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—be fulfilled." 0 comments

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