Politics Plus

Let me begin by offering my condolences to the victims of this mad man and their families, as well as his wife and daughter.  This is a tragedy.

Joseph Stack, the 53-year-old software engineer who piloted the plane that slammed into an IRS building in Austin this morning, posted an online suicide note railing against the federal government. The note, unearthed by the Statesman.com, blasts taxes, the legal system, corporate execs, and the bailout.

“If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time.” writes Stack.

“We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all,” he continues.

“We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.”

Stack goes on to condemn the federal bailout, writing, “Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?”

Stack also takes a shot at the health care system, and the Washington stalemate that has

hindered reform:

Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

What appears to be a right-wing Facebook group [delinked – facebook has axed the group] celebrating Stack has 198 members. The site features the Gadsden flag [Don’t tread on me] and the following description:

Finally an American man took a stand against our tyrannical government that no longer follows the constitution and is turned its back on its founding fathers and the beliefs this country was founded on.

Two people have been hospitalized, and one is unaccounted for… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Alternet>

Before I left yesterday, I read Stack’s manifesto in its entirety.  The man was clearly a wing-nut.  From the text I could not tell whether he was one of ours or one of theirs.  Once is that far gone, it’s difficult to tell the difference.  I only hope this serves to remind us all that, when people, such as Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, call for violence as a solution for our nation’s ills, there are people in our society, who are so imbalanced that, on occasion, one will act out those calls.

The teabagger types, who formed and joined the facebook group lionizing this nut case should be ashamed.  They are so warped that I feel sick just thinking about it.

No matter what, the Haitian quake would have been a major disaster, but it did not have to be quite as bad as it was.

The horror that is the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake has many of us, of course, looking around for explanations of why Haiti is so poor. Since I have no ideas to offer for the resurrection of Haiti, I’ve spent my time looking for people to blame, and there are many. Some of them are French, since the government of Charles X committed an act of armed extortion in 1825 when it demanded of its former slaves 150 million francs in reparations (you know those French, the pact with the devil that was enslavement wasn’t enough for them–they had to make a second pact with the devil that insured Haiti’s impoverishment for generations). The US has been fiddling with Haiti off and on since the French went away, but the sin that really struck me in my researches took place during the Reagan Administration (as did so many in all areas). American hog farmers became nervous about the appearance of African Swine Fever in Haiti, in the 400,000 strong population of indigenous black swine, animals that the peasantry depended upon for survival (article here). American authorities and Haitian authorities then set about exterminating ALL of these hogs. Don’t you love that? Then they sent the peasants a few experimental white hogs from Iowa that were used to luxury conditions, just to see if they might be able to live there. The Haitian hogs were classic hogs who did classic hog business–scavenging, getting fat, making use of what they could find. The new American hogs needed to live in American hog idleness in a world without the facilities they were used to.

Guess what happened to the Haitian peasantry and to their land? The land is denuded, the peasantry has moved to Port-au-Prince, and over-populated Port-au-Prince is now one of the great disaster areas in modern history… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Huffington Post>

As horrific as this story is, there’s even more.  In 2004, Bush and the GOP aided in the overthrow of Haiti’s government.  They also blocked several international loans to help build up Haiti’s infrastructure, which could have facilitated relief.  In addition, Bush and the GOP facilitated dumping US rice on the Haitian market to stabilize the rice here.  This destroyed Haiti’s farm economy and hundreds of thousands more peasants left their land to overpopulate Port-au-Prince even more.  Reagan, Bush and the GOP did not cause the earthquake.  That was ordained in the geological subduction zones that formed the island over a major fault line.  But they did reach out a hand of GOP greed to make it worse.

As most of you probably know, I am a long time opponent of capital punishment for several reasons.  Killing is the most hypocritical way to say, “Don’t kill.”  All too often, we execute the innocent.  The manner in which it is applied is neither consistent nor fair.  It costs several times more money to execute than to incarcerate for life.  Here is a promising development:

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.

“The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “They were absolutely singular on this topic” — capital punishment — “because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.”

The institute is made up of about 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors. It synthesizes and shapes the law in restatements and model codes that provide structure and coherence in a federal legal system that might otherwise consist of 50 different approaches to everything.

In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, the institute created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Several justices cited the standards the institute had developed as a model to be emulated by the states.

The institute’s recent decision to abandon the field was a compromise. Some members had asked the institute to take a stand against the death penalty as such. That effort failed.

Instead, the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created “in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”

That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.

A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.

Roger S. Clark, who teaches at the Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., and was one of the leaders of the movement to have the institute condemn the death penalty outright, said he was satisfied with the compromise. “Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

To summarize this in the simplest terms, the people who wrote the book on capital punishment has come out and said that  that the book is all wrong.  Isn’t it time that the US joined the civilized nations of the world?