by Scott Creighton
The NDAA of 2012 generated a great deal of discussion and rightly so, but for the wrong reasons.
No one likes to think that the evil “big guberment” is going to kick in your doors in the dead of night like they do in Afghanistan and Iraq and take away all that “liberty” you have, but the reality is they’ve been doing that for quite sometime, just not to the young, middle-class white guys of the libertarian persuasion… so now of course we have to sound the alarm.
Indefinite detention? 50% of the swollen ranks of the imprisoned here in the United States are there for non-violent drug offenses and most of those people are there for multiple incarcerations serving draconian sentences for simple possession or possession with the intent to distribute $20 worth of coke. Someone busted for their third offense selling coke on the street corner can be given LIFE in a for-profit prison system. That’s LIFE folks. How much more indefinite does it get?
And even if they do get out our glorious “liberty loving” system condemns them to a life of servitude as that they are rarely allowed to better themselves in society because they have the dreaded stigma of a felony conviction on their record. Well, that is, unless they are born to privilege like so many of our felon presidents and politicians.
Shit, didn’t Wells Fargo just pay a 100 million dollar fine for laundering 300+ billion dollars worth of drug money while we got people doing life for 20 bucks worth of crack?
Didn’t the DEA just have to admit they helped launder millions of dollars of drug money for the cartels in Mexico while drug addicts are treated worse than murderers here in the states?
Right now in Brooklyn New York the police have a practice of stopping and searching any young black man they see walking down the street. And you’re worried about illegal roadside searches that violate your constitutional rights?
Ever heard of Rodney King?
Cops run people over racing down the road drunk and they arrest their family members when they come to the scene of the crime. How about that guy who got shot twice in the back while laying on a subway stop covered by more cops?
Ever heard of the Japanese internment camps? How about the Womblies back in the early 1900s? The Ludlow Massacre ring any bells? Kent State perhaps?
That’s to say nothing of the fact that indefinite military detention was one of the things that Obama promised to “CHANGE” when he ran for office back in 2007 and 2008. Seems that the discussion is limited to whether or not we could be rounded up rather than whether or not we should allow our government to do this at all to ANYONE ANYWHERE.
But that said, the real sadness of the NDAA of 2012 has nothing to do with codifying a practice that has existed in this country in one form or another for at least a century (unless you consider slavery to be indefinite detention). The real sadness that no one seems to be talking about is the fact that it continues to fund the Afghanistan occupation while the tri-partisan (Republican, Democrat, Libertarian) campaign against the artificial “deficit monster” is literally destroying the social safety net of this country causing massive hardships and suffering throughout the country.
That aspect of this treasonous bill (and in my opinion, that is treason) has been completely and totally ignored by the libertarian dissident sites across the country for one simple reason… their hero Ron Paul supports this attack on the poor and unfortunate in America and calls the pending social crisis which will soon be unfolding “liberty”
No comments:
Post a Comment