An Article by:
Steve Hammons

As an average American citizen, I don’t pretend to be an economic or financial expert.

But I do have a “macro” perception of the situation from the viewpoint of an average American.

Reading and hearing the latest news about the plan for a $1 trillion bailout of Wall Street seems to confirm my gut instincts over the years.

My perceptions have been that Wall Street and the financial services sector are part of a culture of very greedy and perhaps crooked people.

Are they greedy, crooked and smart? Or, are they greedy, crooked and dumb?

Maybe they are stupid like a fox.

When you can create a system where people on the inside are making hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions, or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions on Wall Street, and then ask for upward of a $1 trillion bailout from the government and taxpayers, that seems fairly smart.

PLENTY OF SUCKERS

Over the years, the culture of Wall Street has been smart enough to convince many average Americans to put their money in stocks, mutual funds and other “investments.”

On TV, we see frequent ads by investment firms telling us that if we just give them our money, we will have a safe retirement and protect our children. TV and movie personalities get paid big money for these commercials that try to convince us to hand over our money to these investment firms.

We also see investment industry representatives on TV legitimizing schemes to get our money. Giving our money to Wall Street is very smart, they tell us.

The internet has further expanded the range of Wall Street so that anyone can bet their money on various kinds of stocks or other investment gambling.

The laws that launched the 401(k) and similar plans helped channel retirement savings into the Wall Street system. This was also part of the situation surrounding the disintegration of conventional employer pension plans.

There have even been proposals to change the Social Security program so that people can give that money to Wall Street too.

So, Wall Street and the “investment experts” who want our money have been smart enough to convince many suckers to give them money.

Of course, for some people, it doesn’t take much encouragement to bet their money. That is why gambling at casinos is so popular. People seem to have a natural desire to gamble. Maybe it is wired in our brains. It can be like an addiction.

In these ways, and in others, it seems that gambling at a casino and handing your money over to an “investment advisor” and Wall Street can sometimes have similarities.

As the U.S. financial services sector has grown, many people have become investment advisors. They convince gullible people to hand over money to the advisor. Of course, the advisor always takes a cut. And maybe there is compensation that is unseen by the person handing over their money.

WALL STREET AND WASHINGTON

The Wall Street system exists hand-in-hand with the culture of Washington lobbyists and politicians. No surprise there. Wall Street passes out “contributions” to politicians of all stripes, although officials who support Wall Street positions are, of course, especially favored.

Some politicians eagerly go along with the theory of minimal “government interference” in the free market. Until, that is, the system has been looted by greed and apparent incompetence. Then, government involvement is pleaded for. Not involvement actually … just a $1 trillion dollar bailout.

It seems as though the looting of the U.S. Treasury must have some limits. How long can we keep printing money and borrowing from China before there are more serious problems?

First, the war profiteers looted the U.S. Treasury as part of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The homeland security industry was also in line to make big bucks in government contracts and spending.

Now, Wall Street is lining up at the Treasury hog trough to get their share.

Maybe, like individual and group investors now, there is a “run on the (U.S. Treasury) bank” by Wall Street. Get what money you can now from Uncle Sam before the money dries up.

Maybe Wall Street is making a run on the U.S. Treasury to get while the gettin’ is good and before the U.S. Government is in such a dire financial situation that $1 billion bailouts might be more difficult to obtain.

After all, the current administration is due to leave office soon. The gravy train of hundreds of billions of dollars in hand-outs to war profiteers and cronies may be at an end.

This may be the last chance to line up for the big bucks that have been so freely distributed by the U.S. Government in recent years.

Maybe we American citizens have truly been made to be the suckers in many ways. The question now could be: What are we going to do about it?

Tags: corporations, Deregulation, economics, economy, government, legislation, politics, social responsibility, Steve Hammons, wall street. financial bailout
Categories: Commentary, Economics, government, Politics, Legislation, Corporations, social responsibility, Steve Hammons
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An Article by:

Ben Tanosborn

This past Sunday another citizen of the world, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, started his walk in that never-ending pilgrimage we refer to as immortality.  And he did it, not just as a laureate man of letters, but as a man of well thought-out choices, conscience and true humanity; a man who proudly and joyfully accepted his Russian beginnings, but also conceded highest priority to dignity and humanity as inalienable rights for every man.

News of his death came to me over the Internet as I was reading an article by AP writers Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang, “Seoul probes civilian ‘massacres’ by US,” that had just come over the wire.  Thoughts from those two pieces of news were running parallel in my then emotionally-charged mind: here is a man searching for truth (Solzhenitsyn) and, running parallel to it, here is truth searching for a man, some American great man acknowledging that truth… and finding no one.

While reading data of the horrific victimization, actually murder, of countless Korean civilians – as usual, mostly women, children and old people – at the hands of the US military during that 1950-1 period, I couldn’t help but think of the Gulag created by Joseph Stalin, “the whiskered one,” as described by Solzhenitsyn, and emulated militarily by followers of our own American empire: first in Korea, later in Vietnam and, these days, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

How many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, innocent civilians were strafed by bullets, or napalmed, in Korea?  Indiscriminately, yes, for our soldiers couldn’t tell “one gook from the next,” as they claimed… from the North, in flight to the South… or simply trying to find safety, refuge…anywhere.  Over 200 incidents; some, like the one that happened at No Gun Ri, where survivors estimate 400 Koreans died at American hands, have been kept under wraps from the American citizenry; all the military brass needed to do is just classify any and all the facts with the “secret” or “top secret” stamps thus letting the angry-radioactivity cool off, as if converting it to depleted uranium or denying it to be uranium at all, until two or three generations have passed.  By then, who will be charged with war crimes?  It’s not a cover-up since Americans pretend, and some actually believe, that we never engage in torture or cover-ups.  The White House has for decades given a free hand to the Pentagon… after all, crimes of war “just happen,” and the only crime Americans are not permitted to commit is one which may result in lowering the morale of the troops; or one bringing dishonor to the country.

Then I thought of Solzhenitsyn, and his recollection of being an officer in the Soviet Army, observing the inhumane treatment that the Soviets had inflicted on the Germans, military and civilians, in 1945 as WWII came to a close; perhaps crimes that many would excuse as retribution for what the Germans had done years earlier to them; a retribution that he would not find acceptable. 

Today’s counterpoint is simply the ease in which the American military accepts crimes of war, often candy-coating them and making them PR-acceptable, as simply “collateral damage.”  Our American military has gained vast experience at decriminalizing many repugnant acts of war during the past six decades, from No Gun Ri to My Lai to Fallujah, expecting future generations to be the ones passing judgment, if at all.  It will probably be three decades or more before we get to know the truth of what happened in Fallujah, Haditha and some of the other unresolved war crimes committed in the Middle East.  Documents will then be declassified as memories fade and many, or most, of the witnesses to the war crimes, as well as the perpetrators, are dead.  Also, after much of the anger in the victims’ families has subsided.

Solzhenitsyn was a loving son of Russia and its history; but his humanness made him a great citizen of the world.  He denounced what to him needed to be denounced in every facet of life, whether it pertained to the inhumanity of man towards man; or the way modern society was evolving, including such areas as music.  To his regret, and in spite of his desire for privacy, he was used in propagandistic ways by men he did not hold in high esteem, such as Ronald Reagan; and even criticized by many liberal-secularists who failed to understand that his acceptance of religion in the form of Christian Russian Orthodoxy had little to do with faith, and the inhumanity that faith may have caused, and much to do with history and tradition as basis for change.

Why is it that here in America we don’t produce notable figures, heroes of humankind?
Do we prefer not to be “snitches” to those who commit crimes, not to be “traitors” to the ugly face our country may show at times; this, when in truth we really are, maybe without realizing it, whitewashers of crimes… and traitors to our own humanity?
 

Tags: activism, empire, foreign policy, imperialism, military, religion, social responsibility, war
Categories: Commentary, Empire, Foreign Policy, Religion, Imperialism, military
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Following the Larry Craig arrest for lurid conduct in a public restroom, I had posted a sympathetic letter, expressing pity for someone so tortured, self deluded, and sensually deprived.  I contended that this uncover operation executed by a police officer reflected more poorly upon those who conceive and implement such a law enforcement plan than those who fall victim to its ensnarement.

Certainly, the authoritarian mentality responsible for these contraventions into such consensual activities is more alarming – due to its reflection of authoritarian tendencies by those who wield power – than the prospect of people having sex in a restroom. Disregard for civil liberties can be a slippery slope.

The more commonplace these authoritarian incursions into our private affairs become, the more precedents are established for these government-sponsored regulatory interdictions.  The accumulation of previous instances will inevitably change the backdrop against which we interpret the boundaries between government and the private conduct of citizens.  Future affronts to our liberties will appear passé and a matter of course.  Consequently, they will fail to register in our civil libertarian sensibilities; therefore, the governmental intrusions will not incite our condemnation, and we will neglect to call for their repeal.

Additionally, on a more practical level, sting operations in which undercover officers are stationed in bathroom stalls, posing as willing bath house participants, seems excessive for even the pettiest of people to insist upon, and such expenditures of resources can certainly be better directed in support of law enforcement designed to curtail crimes that are perpetrated against victims, who are injured in the process.To allocate resources, while we are supposedly conducting a ‘war on terror,’ toward the enforcement of these ridiculous crimes against morality is a disciplinarian excess that we simply cannot afford.

From the summation above, I hope it is fairly evident that I made a point not to direct criticism or judgment upon Larry Craig.  I sought to demonstrate that the pressing concerns related to this matter centered around the disciplinarian mentalities possessed by those who feel justified in legislating both morality and aesthetics.

However – and tragically – the Senator failed to learn from his experiences as the victim of authoritarian pettiness. I am not referring to any lesson to be learned regarding the precariousness of having sex in public restrooms.  Rather, I am referencing the need for social tolerance and understanding, which one would have hoped Larry Craig to have realized through his embarrassing experiences.  Nonetheless, Craig has decided to sponsor the latest ‘defense of marriage,’ bill that has been presented by the demagogic Religious Right panderers in the Senate. It appears that Craig continues to delude himself into believing that he is ‘heterosexual,’ and that other people are even willing to entertain the prospect that he has not engaged in ‘extra-heterosexual,’ relationships with anonymous partners.

For my part, I have realized that hypocrites of the most profound order probably do not  deserve sympathy and tolerance.

Russell Cole

Tags: liberty, Russell Coles Blog, self governance, Social Change, social policies, social responsibility
Categories: Commentary, liberty, Russell Cole's Blog, self-governance, Social Change, social responsibility
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An Article by:

Ben Tanosborn

It must have been Harry S. Truman, the plainest amongst our plain presidents, who scared us all into having idiots running our government by saying: “Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.”  Of course, he failed to acknowledge the possibility that we could have the worst of both worlds: inefficient government and dictatorship.  And at this moment, we seem to be marching in step to get there soon. 

Are our nation’s best and brightest so repulsed by the bureaucracy in the public sector that decidedly prefer to take up arms running the predatory wing of the private sector?

Maybe some of the “brightest” are doing that, but they cannot also be called “best” while allowing themselves to be corrupted by a heartless capitalism equally ready to reward its bright leaders as it is to deny countless people from sharing the economic trough. 

It does look more and more as if both public and private sectors are being ran by the very same gang of thieves, all operating from a single “carnivalesque” den, where the larcenous elite pick the lazy, career-politicians as their lead carneys for deceit.

And these lead carneys are seldom the brightest, and definitely never the best! 

Americans have done it in the past… so why not again?  I mean… elect the village idiot to be mayor… well, president and CINC for this US-village we live in.  No disrespect intended, not for the sake of disrespect; certainly not by simply calling a dumb ass who aspires to be America’s supreme leader by a first, middle and last name, all in one.  And every village, we are told, is expected, certainly entitled, to have one.  An idiot, that is!

One would think that hitting on nine out of ten prognostications would make most of us who are humility-challenged, a bit giddy zigzagging in haughty satisfaction; almost as if invited to a seminar conducted, ex officio, by none other than Nostradamus – in spirit, of course.  But to me, this nine out of ten “good guesses” that I’ve attained during this past year lose any and all merit when the error, the incredible miss, involves the man of the hour, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the soon-to-be standard bearer for the GOP in the coming presidential election.  And that’s how I messed up, big time, when last May in one of my columns I prematurely called this politician a has-been, and laid to rest his presidential ambitions with an obituary that read R.I.W. (Rest in War) instead of R.I.P. 

Foolish me!  Of all the predictions I’ve made throughout the years, this one I thought to be a cinch, a sure thing… an “almost-certainty” with an infinitesimal margin of error.  I was almost embarrassed to even consider it a prediction instead of a factoid.  Pleassse! How can the Grand Old Party consent to be represented by anyone like John McCain… a person irrelevant in just about every aspect of the party’s conservative tradition; a true morbid warmonger just like the present occupant of the White House; a phony funny-racist; an inarticulate man… one lacking minimal brain power?  How, may I ask?

Could it be that Americans prefer not to have anyone smarter than their surrounding mediocrity leading them?  Or that after having been submerged at the bottom of iniquity with George W. Bush for eight years, we might fee the need for a decompression stop presidency before our nation resurfaces without suffering from the bends? Nonsense… a McCain presidency would be no different from a Bush’s third term… equal opportunity idiocy, and more thieveries of the filthy, or cleanly, rich.

One cannot fathom McCain as the next president of the United States… the new scorn of the gooks and their new replacements, the terrorist Islamo-fascists! Not this burnt scrap from the bottom of Annapolis’ kettle.  But then again, Americans more often than not seem to side with the perceived underdog, particularly when seen as a hero-patriot, and it would be hard to find a greater underdog than the village idiot.

Don’t count McCain out… at least for now!  It’s an indisputable fact that in America, money is total power, and at the end of the day power always grabs the reins.

Tags: Ben Tanosborn, congress, corporations, corporatism, democracy, economics, government, homeland security, imperialism, politics, power, social responsibility
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, Power, Politics, Congress, Corporations, Homeland Security, Imperialism, social responsibility, Ben Tanosborn
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An Article by:

Ben Tanosborn

Subprime loans, my foot!  That subprime fiasco, which is likely to mount losses between one-half and one trillion dollars, is just a small part of the true real estate problem which little by little is starting to take shape; a problem that Wall Street, politicians, economists, and the public at large have been unwilling to talk about, much less confront.  And that is, the multi-trillion dollar excess valuation of real estate in the nation, in both residential and commercial markets; something which for the next 3 to 5 years, at a minimum, will have the US immersed in a recession, a modified version of the one experienced in Japan throughout the 90’s and the first 2 years of the new millennium.

With that introduction, and my crystal ball over a table at center stage, I bring a vision that comes into focus as realities zoom in; a vision which could change drastically the way Americans will be looking at politics by mid-2008 with elections just four months away.  By then, there will be two candidates in place running for the White House, with an overwhelming majority of Americans wishing there was somebody else they could vote for, someone able to get them out of a snowballing real estate mess, then starting to accelerate.  Unfortunately, it will be too late, and we’ll be stuck with two candidates from two parties that always get us into these predicaments that economists and politicians simply dismiss as economic cycles that clear our capitalist system of these so-called excesses, what some describe as accumulated economic debris.

Economic cycles perhaps… but very definitely predictable and largely avoidable.  At least the government should advocate and adopt policies that can dampen, flatten that economic sine wave that dislocates not just capital, but people’s lives.  These cycles have less to do with the workings of a free market, and a lot more to do with lack of necessary governmental controls to curb irresponsible, illicit business conduct and also restrain greed out of control, as it’s always the case with real estate, creating what some may consider punitive levels of taxation.  But, of course, our love of predatory capitalism does not permit any tampering with the Wild West way of doing things.

Realtors throughout the country, in their ever present monopolistic ways and self-serving behavior – holding a good part of the blame in our present state of affairs – continue heralding their lies, forecasting that housing will buck up next year.  Never mind that prices have nowhere to go but down, 20 to 30 percent depending on which metro area or region.  They and those who suck from the same udder – the local newspapers for one – are inundating us with ridiculously optimistic articles and informational data skewed to tell us something they wish to be true, but that is not.

Polls tell us that most people feel that their houses are keeping their value.  Of course, that will always be the case until they have a true, non-speculative, “need” to sell; home prices, more so than commercial properties, have always been sticky, sliding down slowly in contrast with the exuberance exhibited on the way up during those greedy and obscene “flipping days.”  And now that we have reached the limits of affordability and have touched the ceiling, we simply have no room left to grow… just like the price of tulip bulbs in Holland almost four centuries ago.  Has it occurred to Realtors, or anyone else for that matter, that when you talk about housing costs you have to go beyond the mortgage payments and include all other associated expenditures including those of maintenance and energy costs required to keep livable those 2,000-3,000 sq. ft. palacettes?  Undoubtedly these things are known but kept in the hamper with all the other unmentionables, but laundry day has finally arrived. 

This past weekend, Portland-Oregon, an area touted as one of four in the nation where residential real estate prices “presumably” remain steady, was home to the largest homes-auction on record, 240; all owned by one builder.  There were 141 homes sold, all but 6 of them below the so-called “reserve price” which according to the builder, Pollock, represents “his cost”… which can mean just about anything – believe me, I know; that’s my field of expertise in an industry that I intimately know.

But I didn’t have to attend the auction. I already knew that prices in this metro area have decreased from 10 to 15 percent of those a year ago, although Realtors and builders tell us a much different story, drawn from flawed or skewed data, to prove a senseless argument that they are sure to lose.  And here in the Portland-Vancouver area we still have a long way to go, perhaps another 15 to 20 percent drop in prices… or more.

And with little or no equity in our homes, overnight we have become from “psyched rich” to “resisting poor”… with our ATM-homes unable to spit out any more funds, and our homes finally becoming what they always were: brick, mortar and a roof over our heads… and absolutely nothing else.

But these real estate ills are not all our wonderful Fed has bestowed on us in its desire to please the White House; as if that weren’t enough, they have marched us into an era of stagflation.

© 2007 Ben Tanosborn
www.tanosborn.com

Tags: economics, economists, economy, plastic, policy, politics, social responsibility
Categories: Commentary, Economics, Politics, social responsibility
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An Article by

Russell Cole

I have studied the development of this political and social ideology [neoconservatism] to some extent, and its primary forebear is a political philosopher by the name, Leo Strauss. He was most affected by Plato, and, in particular, The Republic. I presume this is where Strauss gained his authoritarian worldview, which is seeded in the monolithic polis speculated by Plato, where the society is structured according to a corporatist regime, negating any differentiation between polity and civil society.

Authoritarians, such as Strauss, tend to be moral realists, similarly to Plato, which provides them with their rhetorical devices needed to justify their ethnocentrism, making it appear not as an ideology spouted by a faction that strives to impose it upon others, but as the natural moral order to which all humanity should aspire and, indeed, be pushed.

However, this belief in absolutes – a single moral order that exists apart from the men and women who speculate over its contents – has the impact of diminishing reality in favor of an impression of the world that is propagated through the contrivance of ad hoc explanations for all events that seem to run contrary to the idealized vision of human sociality articulated in the moral realist’s camouflaged ethnocentrism.

This is the point at which I am mystified the most by the neo-cons: Moral realism results in a negation of the saliency that should otherwise be attributed to contingencies that unfold in empirical reality, in favor of an adoption of a faith-based form of reasoning, where one’s beliefs will always be vindicated in the long-run. In the context of this type of thinking, we can meaningfully interpret the expression “moral courage:” a quality that is lacking in anybody who espouses uncertainty as to the veracity of the neo-conservative system of beliefs. Moral realism, in this instance, ironically, appears to be more of an underlying posit supported by convictions of faith rather than any reflection of reality.

What all of this has to do with Bush, specifically, I do not know, because he is not necessarily intelligent enough to grasp the neocons’ system of thought, such as the case with the intellect of hubris personified, Paul Wolfiwitz. However, I am sure that Bush’s absolute convictions regarding his born again stature in the eyes of his god might translate into the same type of empirically uninformed decision-making processes. Only, in Bush’s case, he has mistaken Chaney whispering in his ear for the Word of the Lord Almighty.

So, then, the question now arises: Why, even as the neo-conservatives – through their follies in Iraq and other ‘terror,’ related policy matters – have completely undressed themselves - Americans continue, as a population, to fail to mobilize in opposition to the Bush Regime?

As far as getting people off of their couches and politically engaged, I believe the problem is the deference we as Americans are socialized to possess and exhibit, beginning at a young age, whereby we are instructed to demonstrate respect and obedience toward our extant sociopolitical institutions. It does not matter what people might suspect or come to believe according to the conclusions reached in their own internal contemplations as long as they are encumbered with a habitual deferential posture that is assumed in relationship to sociopolitical institutions; fixtures that we are socialized to take to be transcendent of human interference and contamination. Even Tocqueville remarked that Americans displayed obedience to sociopolitical institutions, which prevented, according to the French observer, radicalized political behavior. He speculated that American democracy might be made possible by this willing subservience. Therefore, it is a matter of reinvigorating Americans with a sense of existential angst that is the key to unlocking radicalized currents of both thoughts and their associative social undertakings.

Returning to concerns related to religion: I would assume that Bush, indeed, during moments of cynicism, does use religiosity as a political artifice. Remember, the remarks made by Bush in the lead up to the War in Iraq, where he made mention of a “Great Crusade,” that we, as a nation, were about to undertake. Obviously, in retrospect, we can recognize this as a ploy to garner support from the war-mongering-religious-right that finds a place in our unfortunate society.

These remarks are not intended to be a denouncement of all instances of religiosity. I do make a differentiation between the dogma of fundamentalism and the personal spiritualism – associated with countercultural religious movements – which I suspect Jesus – the historical figure – to have proffered the latter in his sermons, because it is only with absolutism and dogma that religiosity manifests its deleterious qualities; what we witness in the Christianity that was tragically left to us by the sexually impotent, female loathing, and physically diminutive Paul, who knew nothing of Jesus other than Christ’s appearances in Paul’s own hysteria and its precipitation of fanciful delusions.

Russell Cole

Tags: corporations, democracy, foreign policy, government, imperialism, National, neoconservatism, politics, Russell Coles Blog, social responsibility, society, sociology
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Despite the best efforts of the Luddite, Jim Crow bigots residing in the backwater town of Jena, Louisiana, the cap is about to burst on these white supremacists, who are in the process of committing what amounts to a lynching of several, young African-American males. This clinical lynching is being conducted under the veneer of a juridical canard. The African-American high school students presently face decades in prison for charges related to an assault that was committed upon a white student in the Jena, LA school district. The African-American students, who have been charged with attempted murder, allegedly assaulted a white student. However, if one is to learn about the circumstances under which these charges have been leveled against the African-American male high school students, a picture emerges that screams of injustice, resulting from a racism that is so severe that I was shocked when I became fully familiar with these insidious events.

Apparently, this whole incident began after African-American students, during their launch break, sat under a tree that had been the providence of white students. In reaction to this apparent affront by the African-Americans, the next day white students had tied lynching ropes from the trees under which the African-Americans had sat. Despite the fact that this symbolic gesture on the part of the young aspiring Klan members constituted nothing less that a direct threat of murder directed against the African-American high school students - where a bystander would be left only to assume that the lives of the black students were in immediate peril - the white students responsible for this unforgivable threat were given a three day suspension. On the days that followed, the assault, for which the Black teenage boys are accused, took place. The African-American adolescent males were arrested and charged, not with simple battery, but attempted murder and the reduced crime of aggravated assault. These hyperbolic charges are only applicable in instances where a deadly weapon is used, according to Louisiana statutes. The first of the Black males to stand trial was convicted for the lesser charge of aggravated assault. According to the jury, the African-American boy’s tennis shoes qualified as a deadly weapon.

To make this whole affair even more sickening, the jury was all white. Additionally, during the case, the judge preceding over the trial had issued a gag order on all witnesses. Consequentially, the parents of the African-Americans, who were to take the stand in defense of their children, were prevented under threat of contempt from making public issue out of this miscarriage of justice; consequentially, the parents were precluded from pursuing recourse through an appeal to the innumerable law professors who would have accepted this case pro bono!

To read more of this revolting affair, you can begin by visiting an article that someone has put up on Wikipedia. It has been marked as potentially biased, but from what I have gathered from other sources, including interviews that were taken by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the account on Wikipedia appears to be, for the most part, spot on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jena_High_School

With the events that have taken place in Jena, LA, I am going to return to the issue of the Tenth Amendment and its properly conceived relation to the Fourteenth Amendment.

I had written three controversial essays focusing on the candidacy of Ron Paul. I had criticized Paul for opposing legislation and certain reforms, which could be implemented by Presidential Decree, that would effectively contribute to the alleviation of the discrimination faced by gays, lesbians, and cross-gender. Paul, of course, explained away his refusal to adopt platform positions in support of the establishment of measures contributing to the equal rights and opportunities by all members of society, via appeal to a Libertarian ideological tenet that embraces the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution over and beyond other Amendments that might lead to divergent conclusions with respect to the appropriate role of the Federal Government and its interventions into social affairs that might alternatively be left to the states in order to regulate. Using the Tenth Amendment and its implications as premises, Paul essentially concluded that the inclusion of gays in the military as well as the extension of Federal Hate Crime Statutes to include crimes motivated out of hate for gays, lesbians, and cross-gender were decisions better left to, in the case of the former, the Military - and its own independent deliberations regarding its Uniform Code of Conduct - and, in the latter, the States and municipalities, who, in the absence of Federal intervention, would assume full responsible for the prosecution of crimes against these sexual minorities.

In opposition to Paul’s stance, I had countered by contending that Federal intervention has been historically demonstrated as a necessary device to extend civil liberties and citizenship rights to marginalized minorities who suffer from persecution and exclusionary practices within the provincial affairs of certain states. In short, my conclusions came down to unavoidable inferences drawn from the brute raw fact that without Federal interdiction these vulnerable minorities might not have their rights protected. I further argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was at stake - which in my opinion is far more significant than any appeal made to the nebulously defined Tenth Amendment

The Tenth Amendment - if one analyzes it with care - does not make specific references to the instances in which it should be prioritized over and beyond other possibly germane and applicable Amendments. In other words, rather than an Amendment intended to delineate specific rights, such as a clear and certain range of defined circumstances, where states should be deferred the sole authority when it comes to issues of civil liberties - the Tenth Amendment, according to my readings, appears to be intended only to limit Federal intrusions when the National Government is in the process of curtailing rights. However, in instances, such as hate crimes, the Federal Government is not inhibiting individuals from practicing types of social actions that fall under the extension of their own negative rights. Contrarily, the Federal Government is merely extending civil liberties by protecting the rights of vulnerable segments of society, who all too often are the deliberate and persistent targets of crimes, which impede the minorities from enjoying their own personal liberties, motivated out hate for the social minorities and the characteristics, which they embody, that make them socially different and identifiable as social outsiders.

This is not to say that the Tenth Amendment should not take on any significance and it should not be appealed to in instances where the Federal Government is in the process of extending its authority in a modality that is an affront to civil liberties. However, conversely, the Tenth Amendment should not be used as a juridical-politico artifice for what amounts to curtailing civil liberties by deferring the responsibility for protecting individual rights to the judgments of states and their provincial practices, in which the manifestation of racism and hate related crimes might be afoot, leading to the legalization of practices that only serve to curtail the rights of minorities. I think that most would agree that the Golden Rule - although not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution - nevertheless, serves as a guiding post for the formation of our best conclusions regarding what social conduct is permissible versus actions on the part of individuals and groups that should be interdicted. Those who act upon others in a manner that prevents the enjoyment of liberties by those upon whom the actions are committed should expect no better by other agencies who might act upon them. I cannot put it any more succinctly.
Returning to the case in Jena, I cannot think of a more compelling example of why the Federal Government must sometimes be permitted to intervene in order to prevent the most egregious instances of the persecuting of disliked minorities. To reiterate, Ron Paul needs to go back to the drawing board, and thoroughly recalculate his position on Federal hate crimes as well as the rights of sexual minorities.
Russell Cole

Tags: bill of rights, constitution, decentralization, democracy, education, government, National, politics, power, Russell Coles Blog, social responsibility, society, sociology
Categories: Commentary, National, Society, Democracy, constitution, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization, Education, Power, Politics, Sociology, social responsibility
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