Who Rules California

Drought-stricken California’s fracking operations used 70 mn gallons of water last year

Energy companies in California used 70 million gallons of water for the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process to unearth oil and gas reserves, according to officials. The figure comes during the state’s increasingly urgent push to conserve water.

That amount is of water used is less than previously projected by industry -- which estimated fracking used about 100 million gallons of water per year. Nevertheless, water in California is at premium. The state is entering its fourth year of record drought, and a mandatory water reduction plan was announced last week by Governor Jerry Brown. California may only have 12 months’ worth of water left, as snowpack measurements for the year are set to hit record lows. Yet fracking operations are not included in the conservation efforts.

To unleash oil or natural gas from shale or other areas, the fracking process requires blasting large volumes of highly pressurized water, sand, and other chemicals into layers of rock. Once used, toxic fracking wastewater is then either stored in deep underground wells, disposed of in open pits for evaporation, sprayed into waste fields, or used over again.

“Hydraulic fracturing uses a relatively small amount of water – the equivalent of 514 households annually,” Steven Bohlen, the state oil and gas supervisor, told Reuters, which first reported the water usage figure.

Bohlen added that fracking uses more than fresh water, including “produced” water that surfaces during the fracking process that cannot be used for drinking or agricultural purposes.

Patrick Sullivan, a spokesperson for the Center for Biological Diversity and Californians Against Fracking, said while the state’s fracking water use may only equal 514 households, much of that contaminated water can’t be used again, unlike most common household water usage.

“It is water that most likely cannot be put back into the water cycle,” Sullivan told ThinkProgress. “It’s water that is by and large gone for good.”

Reuters also reported last week that environmentalist groups have estimated that oil and gas developers in the state go through 2 million gallons of fresh water per day for oil production.

Fracking has been linked to groundwater contamination, heightened earthquake activity, exacerbation of drought conditions, and a variety of health concerns for humans and the local environment.

Oil and gas companies are under increasingly intense pressure nationwide to respond over increased transparency of chemicals used in the fracking process. As RT has reported, industry has avoided divulging -- often under the cover of official regulatory agencies -- just what chemicals are involved in their toxic injection fluids. Yet drillers insist the chemicals do not endanger human health, contradicting findings by scientists and environmentalists.

“What [oil and gas producers] have been doing, especially in the [California’s agriculturally fertile] Central Valley, is injecting this very contaminated, very salty -- often containing benzene -- water into shallow aquifers and shallow water supplies,” Helen Slottje, of the Community Environmental Defense Council, told RT.

“Water is not replaceable, we don't have any alternative sources for water. But we do have alternative sources for natural gas and oil.”

In March, disclosures in California revealed that a bevy of toxic, cancer-linked chemicals in fracking wastewater are routinely injected back into the ground.

In February, it was reported that California officials permitted oil and gas companies to dispose of waste and other fluids into aquifers containing drinking and irrigation water more than 2,500 times. Significantly, 46 percent of these permits were authorized within the last four years – the same timeframe during which the EPA warned California that regulators were not sufficiently protecting underground water reserves in the drought-stricken state.

In October 2014, the state found that the oil and gas industry had illegally injected about three billion gallons of fracking wastewater into central California drinking water and farm irrigation aquifers.

The executive order signed by Gov. Brown mandates cities and towns to reduce water usage by 25 percent over the next nine months to save approximately 1.5 million acre-feet of water “or nearly as much as is currently in Lake Oroville,” the statement said.

The order also allows California to replace 50 million square feet of lawns throughout the state with drought tolerant landscaping in partnership with local governments; direct the creation of a temporary, statewide consumer rebate program to replace old appliances with more water and energy efficient models; require campuses, golf courses, cemeteries and other large landscapes to make significant cuts in water use; and prohibit new homes and developments from irrigating with potable water unless water-efficient drip irrigation systems are used, and ban watering of ornamental grass on public street medians.

READ MORE: More than 1 million Californians lack access to clean water - study

Alas, fracking operations are exempt from the reduction plan.

“Governor Brown is forcing ordinary Californians to shoulder the burden of the drought by cutting their personal water use while giving the oil industry a continuing license to break the law and poison our water,” Zack Malitz, of the environmental activism group Credo, told Reuters last week.

“Fracking and toxic injection wells may not be the largest uses of water in California, but they are undoubtedly some of the stupidest,” he added.
-Via RT

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--Joe

A Warning - Militarizing the American Police

What you can expect if you can't take a stand for LAW and don't speak out. Henry Siegman's "A Slaughter of Innocents": a Venerable Jewish Voice for Peace, on Gaza expresses my thinking extremely well on Democracy Now, where he identifies the main issue conflicting all humanity, that of "public silence," "allowing evil to prevail"  -- in a Democracy, a disease as deadly and virulent as the Ebola plague.

"I always thought that the important lesson of the Holocaust is not that there is evil, that there are evil people in this world who could do the most unimaginable, unimaginably cruel things. That was not the great lesson of the Holocaust. The great lesson of the Holocaust is that decent, cultured people, people we would otherwise consider good people, can allow such evil to prevail, that the German public—these were not monsters, but it was OK with them that the Nazi machine did what it did. Now I draw no comparisons between the Nazi machine and Israeli policy. And what I resent most deeply is when people say, "How dare you invoke the Nazi experience?" The point isn’t, you know, what exactly they did, but the point is the evidence that they gave that decent people can watch evil and do nothing about it. That is the most important lesson of the Holocaust, not the Hitlers and not the SS, but the public that allowed this to happen. And my deep disappointment is that the Israeli public, precisely because Israel is a democracy and cannot say, "We’re not responsible what our leaders do," that the public puts these people back into office again and again." [Emphasis mine.]

All you get on these blogs are people rehashing their brainwashed propaganda. Or attacking someone with their personal lies and invective. No one stands up for the Law or the truth. And if you dare speak about the evil and the evil incarnates, they enforce their evil upon you with a vengeance. These people are NOT the "decent people" Henry Siegman is talking about. They are the very "Nazi machine and Israeli policy" "monsters" in action.

Well, if what Cosme Caal says below, doesn't scare the hell out of you, nothing will. Personally, I think it is way too late to do anything about what has happened to America. Certainly not any peaceful solution.

The Latin Americanization of U.S. Police Forces

August 27, 2014

by COSME CAAL

Guatemala City.

From Guatemala City I have been keeping up with the events in Ferguson, Missouri and my heart goes out to those United States citizens who are actively resisting a brutal local police state. I sit awake at night and contemplate how one of the greatest nations in the world has become militarized and despotic. Impunity is now normalized in most police departments across the United States and in the minds of many Americans. I did not know I would live to see this phenomenon, yet, the more I peruse online news feeds, the more evident it is to me that Americans, especially minorities, are in great danger of militarized suppression as a matter of state policy.

From our experience in half a century in Latin America I can tell you that, once the human rights of a minority are compromised, it is only a matter of time before they are compromised for an entire nation. From that same experience I can tell you it will take decades before they can be regained. Militarized police forces take on a life of their down, at the expense of the society’s well-being. The social contract that gives the state the duty to organize police forces itself becomes obsolete, almost a joke. Citizens begin to obey agents of the state not out of respect or cooperation, but out of fear of those sworn to protect them. Eventually, the militarized power of the police reaches such magnitude that political leaders lose all ability to rein them in. We experienced this USA-backed militarized transformation of the police in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, and Colombia. What the U.S. helped do to Latin America, it is now doing to itself.

Even when there will officers who want to adhere to the law, militarized policing organizations become an unstoppable and despotic force. The very ideologies that give them life become obsolete, as do all existing laws that protect citizens. Central American dictatorships backed and armed by the United States government in the 1970’s built police forces, outfitted them with military gear, and allowed them to brutalize and kill with impunity. The murder or incarceration of progressive democratic leaders who resisted this transformation was sanctioned by United States intelligence agencies.

I call out to white United States citizens, and those police officers that believe in democracy and the rule of law, to unite with racial minorities who are now being suppressed, and to resist the catastrophic militarization of police forces across the United States. For white Americans to think that their race makes them immune to police brutality is a mistake that cannot be afforded. Central American urban mestizo masses ignored the genocide of hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples. They saw these massacres as not their problem. Today we all suffer militarized suppression. Racial division was our greatest weakness.

We must not shy away from the reality of a racialized United States of America. We must face our racial diversity, embrace its beauty, and unite as one democratic and leading nation. We are not divided at heart or by nature. Media pundits play with our emotions by telling divisive stories of racial conflict. Recently they have trained many white Americans to fear Central Americans who have courageously made it to our borders, escaping undeclared and unstoppable internal conflicts. These are murderous conflicts born out of the very militarization of Central American nation-states by the United States. In Guatemala alone more than 800,000 citizens have been murdered since the peace accords were signed in 1996, after a thirty-six year internal militarized conflict.

But militarized police are not the only problem. Since the 1980’s, government, from Washington D.C. to the states and cities, has been poisoned with inept and cynical politicians who play a racist card to keep Americans divided. And this is a necessary part of a militarized state equation. In fact, 21st century United States politics follows a developing path in place in much of Latin America for half a century. I call it the Latinamericanization of the United States. This path includes politicians selling society to the highest bidder, eradicating laws that protect civilians against poverty, disease, job insecurity, and police brutality.

In Guatemala, for example, politicians have no economic or politics training, or educational experience to hold powerful and influential government office. Social breakdown is such that the average citizen is in danger of death by warring gangs, extortion mafias, or the police. Politicians have carved out the legislative and executive branches in such a way that the military and the police state serves their safety, and that of their families and friends. The police also guard the great fortunes and economic interests. Everyone else must suffer insecurity, poverty, prison, and sometimes, random death. Protests are now officially terrorist acts. Meanwhile the United States continues to provide weapons and military training to these Guatemalan elites.

We can no longer argue that the United States is a country where civil liberties and human rights are protected. While an elite class remains immune to political and police corruption and militarization, this does not hold truth for the majority.

Part of my family escaped to the United States in the 1980’s. We escaped Guatemala’s poverty, racism, and a raging internal conflict, in hopes of a better life. Our story is not new; it is the same story told millions of times over in the last two centuries by earlier migrants. We ended up in Los Angeles, California. I was blessed with my mother’s support to educate myself while she toiled away in underpaid jobs. That did not matter to her. It did not matter to me. We Mayans have been toiling at staying alive for the last five centuries. We are the continuation of that struggle for survival.

I was taught to love the United States by my teachers, and to work hard to contribute to a nation that held so much promise. I did. With great effort and dedication I became a sociologist and historian. I wanted to understand the social fabric that sustains us as Americans and sustains me as a survivor of genocide.

Although pockmarked with racism, my experience in graduate school was one of support by white professors, fellow graduate students, and my beloved students. I learned to have hope in the white American society. I strove to teach my students to understand and take advantage of their privilege to help us make of the United States a better racial democracy.

But living in South Los Angeles in the last decade also revealed to me the parallels of militarized Latin America to many pockets of the United States, and it gave me front row seat to observe the fast militarization of police departments in the United States. African Americans and Latin@s are on lock down in that part of Los Angeles. LAPD will kill anyone in South LA with impunity. Their impunity is now part of the Californian political structure, just as in Latin America. No overseeing agency, citizen watchdog or Californian political coalition can realistically reform the LAPD. For decades people have been suffering. The LA riots of 1992 were an example of that suffering.

In the Rampart scandal police officers sworn to crack down on gangs became a murderous gang themselves. This is a familiar pattern seen across Latin America, where police forces were encouraged to take on tougher tactics to combat the products of mass poverty and severe inequality. Extortion mafias now have Guatemala and El Salvador societies on their knees. Their militarized police forces are riddled with corruption, ineptitude, and seemingly ubiquitous violence. Violence is everywhere. America seems to be heading this way.

Let us not think we will not experience this in the United States. The footage from Ferguson shows the frightening militarization of police officers, playing war against civil society. They will not stop. The governor of Missouri will not stop them. Perhaps he can’t.

I call out to all white Americans, to unite with suppressed minorities who are incarcerated daily, killed in the streets, and who hold little political power against these militarized police forces. It is in their utmost interest to understand that, just as in Latin America, when the white peoples, the mestizos of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, stood aside as indigenous peoples were massacred, subjugation for all is certain once militarized monsters awaken, learn to walk, and find their own developmental path.

Cosme Caal is a community activist and scholar from the Americas. His interests include political mobilization of Mayans in Guatemala and Los Angeles, and the Pachakutik indigenous political organization in the Andean region.

Is Your Neighbor a Threat?

If he or she thinks and acts like this, THEY ARE!

Dismissing the charges of Israeli war crimes. Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, said, quote, "Some are shamelessly accusing Israel of genocide and would put us in the dock for war crimes. But the truth is that the Israeli Defense Forces should be given the Nobel Peace Prize ... a Nobel Peace Prize for fighting with unimaginable restraint." -Democracy Now.

This is Israel's "unimaginable restraint":

"Human Rights Watch released a report, earlier this week, accusing Israeli soldiers of shooting and killing fleeing civilians in Gaza. The group based its reports on interviews with seven Palestinians who fled fighting in the village of Khuza’a."

Ron Dermer is a mentally sick, rotten Ebola-infected, degenerate, puking his plague upon everyone. He is how Israel manifests its putrid, rotten disease plagued country in the world - threatening the lives of all humanity. These Ebola infested sociopathic dead souls will see everyone dead for the want of a few more minutes life as a country. Anyone that accepts the thinking or beliefs that justifies what he says as valid, supports, enables and defends what Israel and the Jews did and are doing to the Palestinians, waging war on defenseless women and children, trying to break the Palestinian people's will risks becoming infected, sick in their soul and die. These dead souls are completely rotten corrupt and spread their deadly plague with a vengeance on the world and in your neighborhood and in your soul. They are a direct threat to everyone and if we do not take immediate action to isolate, quarantine and bury these dead people, we all risk becoming contaminated and dying ourselves.

Below are samples of local commentary, samples of the rotten infected disease-ridden puke vomited out ad nauseum, posted on a somewhat popular blog run by a local businessman. His track record is to censor and block anyone that exposes Jew criminal barbarism or dispute the rampant lies and corruption engendered by him and these sick people. The threat posed to this community through this sick, sociopathic, racist, bigoted blog is real and palpable. Wear your Ebola infection protective gear when you read the following examples. The list of comments on this thread (Mideast Crisis Discussion on Thursday Night Talk this Week) are considerable should you wish to follow the context. Comments by the blog author are also considerable and extremely enlightening, not so much about what he says in defense of the plague-ridden Jews, but about himself.

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[UPDATE II] 
A perfect example of the deadly diseased thinking infecting the World:
Not killing Gazans ‘moral mistake’: Netanyahu

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[UPDATE]
Here is something Eric Kirk and his gang of infected sociopaths need to read, and then shut up with their ignorance and scummy filth. Like all thug bullies, I know it won't do "them" any good in the long run - that kind of Ebola mystery serum won't help them live. DIARIES: LIVE FROM PALESTINE - "We will not rest until we liberate our occupied land," Gaza fighter says

July 31, 2014 at 7:30 am

Erasmus

I disagree with part of Mitch’s comment. One can easily imagine the Gazans reacting to Israel’s dismantling of its settlements there several years ago in a manner quite different from what occurred: instead of destroying the greenhouses left behind by the settlers, they could have used them to grow produce; instead of lobbing rockets at Israeli territory, they could have strengthened their own infrastructure; instead of electing Hamas to power, they could have voted for a party that even the European Union considers terrorist; instead of using cement to construct tunnels into Israeli soil, they could have built shelters. I have no difficulty imagine a scenario quite unlike what we are now witnessing.

August 3, 2014 at 3:54 pm

Mitch

I am sorry for calling you a liar, bolithio. I apologize.

I should just step away from the keyboard when the subject of Israel comes up, because it sends me off the deep end.

August 3, 2014 at 3:23 pm

Mitch

Well, bolithio, perhaps my 3:08 answers some of your questions.

But no, I don’t think ending the Gaza occupation will go a long way, or any distance whatsoever, towards preventing violence. Did you read the Hamas charter?

Yes, I got extremely pissed off when you lied about Oz’s question (sic, sic, sic). That is what the left does — it ignores the absolute day-to-day reality Israel faces and wonders, as if there is any wonder to be had, how Israel can be so mean. If that means my blog persona has offended you, well, I hope the offense was worth it to you.

I feel no need to checkmate you or anyone else, but the smugness with which the world refuses to acknowledge this no win situation and that it has NO IDEA WHATSOEVER how it could respond differently than the IDF is a source of personal rage when I dwell on it, which I will shortly stop doing, for my own sake.

This problem is not Israel’s fault and it is not the Palestinians fault. The world created this problem and the world owes the Israelis and the Palestinians safety within the borders the world set. And the world has demonstrated its total unwillingness to admit that, or lift a finger to protect the descendants of the people it “gave” someone else’s country to.

August 4, 2014 at 7:34 am

Anonymous

“Racist collective punishment of a Third World people” — the people being “punished” in Gaza are of the same race as the Israeli Arabs who sit in the Knesset (parliament) of Israel — and of the man who heads Israel’s highest court. “Collective punishment”? From my vantage point, I see Hamas collectively punishing its own people by putting them in harm’s way — by hiding its rockets among schools, mosques, and hospitals. “Suicide by Israel,” one might call it (by analogy with “suicide by cop,” when a self-destructive person forces another party — a cop — to shoot at him, by engaging in unacceptably menacing behavior). —- This is what I read on a different blog today: If Hamas had its way, Gaza would look a lot like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. If Israel had its way, Gaza would look a lot like Santa Monica. — I can’t disagree with that.

August 4, 2014 at 8:56 am

Andrew Stunich

Anon, your 7:34 a.m. comment is absolutely accurate.

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Juan Cole's take on Israel: Israel Still Holding Gaza Civilians Hostage, Doesn’t Get Geneva Conventions - "So Gaza civilians cannot be denied building materials because somebody else fired a flying pipe bomb into the Israeli desert. The noncombatants don’t bear a personal responsibility for those little rockets."
Also, "Israel and the Erosion of International Humanitarian Law" - Unchecked Murder and Mayhem
[Picture Source]

--Joe

John Kerry admits Israeli Apartheid; and 5 Ways he is Understating It

John Kerry admits Israeli Apartheid; and 5 Ways he is Understating It (via http://www.juancole.com)

(By Juan Cole) In a closed-room meeting of the Trilateral Commission last Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry warned that Israel is on the verge of becoming an Apartheid state, according to a recording obtained by The Daily Beast. The remark will…

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Military Police in Eureka

[Update I: April 1, 2014]
The video says it all about scared shitless paranoid police: The "Bounty" Police Force? Albuquerque Officers Face Protests, Probe over Spate of Fatal Shootings
[Update: March 24, 2014]
This could easily by Eureka, again. - Homeless man shot to death by police after being caught illegally camping.

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Yeah! That's right and no thanks to Murl Harpham and his "Tough Cop" Eureka police department. We are not terrorists neither are all of us criminals. We don't need the violence they bring with their pack-dog mentality and abject paranoia. The question I ask is, Why Eureka?

You got to know when the police, Sheriff's Department and all other policing agencies support a particular candidate for District Attorney, there is only ONE reason, and that is NOT because that person would work to enforce the law for the county with due diligence and impartiality. That person is their to enforce continued police impunity.

Communities grow weary of militarized police

As numerous law enforcement agencies across the United States begin enrolling large armored vehicles into the force, pockets of resistance are forming among some communities concerned with the trend.
***
Speaking with the Journal, Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter Kraska said residents are even more worried about potential police militarization following the recent disclosures of the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance program. When citizens continue to hear about the government’s expanding presence, Kraska said armored vehicles represent “a pretty visual example of overreach.”

Read the complete article.

--Joe

America's New Reality - An Imaginary Constitution

The article needs to be repeated. Juan Cole writes on his blog October 25, 2013, How the US Government Betrayed the Constitution and invented an Imaginary Fascist One

[Fascism: a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power,forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.] -Dictionary.com

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How the US Government Betrayed the Constitution and invented an Imaginary Fascist One

Posted on 10/24/2013 by Juan Cole

The idea of having a strong Federal government was controversial in the early United States, and one of the ways Federalists reassured Americans that it wouldn’t become tyrannical was to append a Bill of Rights to the Constitution.

That attempt to prevent despotism has failed, because the Federal government and its various agencies have set aside the Bill of Rights as a dead letter, substituted for them a bizarre set of interpretations of law, and either avoid having the courts adjudicate their fascist fantasies or managed to have appointed to the bench unethical or authoritarian judges that will uphold virtually anything they do.

How corrupt our system has become is evident when even the New Yorkeremphasizes that a secret Senate report found that torture in the Bush years was “unnecessary” and “ineffective.” Not that it was “unconstitutional.”

The Eighth Amendment of the US constitution forbids ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ US courts have found that the Framers’ injunction was intended to be dynamic, and did not only forbid those things thought barbaric in 1789 but those things contemporary Americans would find cruel and unusual. As Cornell Law school put it,

‘in Weems v. United States it was concluded that the framers had not merely intended to bar the reinstitution of procedures and techniques condemned in 1789, but had intended to prevent the authorization of “a coercive cruelty being exercised through other forms of punishment.” The Amendment therefore was of an “expansive and vital character”41 and, in the words of a later Court, “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” ‘

If a sheriff in a small town arrested a shoplifter and waterboarded him 54 times, the sheriff would go to jail. Federal officials? Not so much.

Let us just underline the Supreme Court’s diction here in Weems. The Framers had sought, they said, to forestall “a coercive cruelty being exercised through other forms of punishment.”

Coercive cruelty. Coercive cruelty was the hallmark of treatment of Federal detainees in the Bush era. That was what Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo were about. Some prisoners were likely victims of manslaughter by coercive cruelty (it is hard to know when to stop).

Waterboarding is illegal (not to mention setting German shepherds on people to viciously bite them). Professor of Law Wilson R. Huhn writes:

“Three major treaties that the United States has signed and unambiguously ratified prohibit the United States from subjecting prisoners in the War on Terror to this kind of treatment. First, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which the Senate unanimously ratified in 1955, prohibits the parties to the treaty from acts upon prisoners including “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; . . . outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”[18] Second, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the Senate ratified in 1992, states that “[n]o one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”[19] Third, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, which the Senate ratified in 1994, provides that “[e]ach State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction,”[20] and that “[e]ach State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture . . . .”

The United States has enacted statutes prohibiting torture and cruel or inhuman treatment. It is these statutes which make waterboarding illegal… The four principal statutes which Congress has adopted to implement the provisions of the foregoing treaties are the Torture Act,… the War Crimes Act…,and the laws entitled “Prohibition on Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of Persons Under Custody or Control of the United States Government”… and “Additional Prohibition on Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.”… The first two statutes are criminal laws while the latter two statutes extend civil rights to any person in the custody of the United States anywhere in the world.

The Torture Act makes it a felony for any person, acting under color of law, to commit an act of torture upon any person within the defendant’s custody or control outside the United States…. Torture is defined as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” upon a person within the defendant’s custody or control… To be “severe,” any mental pain or suffering resulting from torture must be “prolonged.”[29] Under this law, torture is punishable by up to twenty years imprisonment unless the victim dies as a result of the torture, in which case the penalty is death or life in prison.”

But somehow employees of the US military, the CIA and other Federal agencies managed to ignore all that. So yes, unnecessary and ineffective. But also, illegal and unconstitutional and treasonous.

Then of course there is the National Security Agency’s gutting of the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable search and seizure. As long as the unreasonable search and seizure happens on the internet, apparently that is all right. What arrogance, what hypocrisy, what fascism.

An honest appeals court just ruled that the government needs a warrant to put a tracking device on your car and follow you around by GPS. But your cell phone metadata also reveals your movements, and the NSA is scooping that information up, effectively following you around without a warrant, exactly what the court just found unjustified. But the Federal government (yes, the Obama administration) has succeeded in keeping NSA practices out of the courts.

While few Americans care that the NSA was intensively spying on the Mexicans, French and Germans, even on German chancellor Angela Merkel’s private cell phone, they should. The Bill of Rights were once a point of inspiration for human rights activists around the world. Much of what the youth who led the Arab upheavals of 2011 wanted was enshrined in the Bill of Rights. American ideals and rule of law were part of America’s soft power in the world. The European Union is suddenly less cooperative because of our allies’ outrage at being spied on. No one wants to be like creepy peeping toms or vicious torturers, and that is what Americans have become.

Moreover, the NSA foreign spying is racist. Yes, on top of everything else, it involves a racist hierarchy. The US doesn’t intensively spy on Canadians, British and Australians, i.e. on what were called in the 19th century ‘Anglo-Saxons.’ It is only the inferior races that Washington subjects to surveillance.

But all that is crashing and burning as the US government has betrayed those ideals over and over again. We’re being massively spied on by our government, our location, the people we call, the websites we visit, all being monitored constantly. And if the government decides we are terrorism suspects, we could well be tortured. Martin Luther King’s principle of civil disobedience would be categorized as terrorism today, and if he were active in our time, instead of naming a Federal holiday after him, the government would have MLK waterboarded by police dressed up as military commandos.

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-Joe