Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Identified as a trouble maker by the authorities since childhood, and resolved to live up to the description, Charles Carreon soon discovered that mischief is most effectively fomented through speech. Having mastered the art of flinging verbal pipe-bombs and molotov cocktails at an early age, he refined his skills by writing legal briefs and journalistic exposes, while developing a poetic style that meandered from the lyrical to the political. Journey with him into the dark caves of the human experience, illuminated by the torch of an outraged sense of injustice.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:56 am

LEONARD COHEN, POISONED BY ZEN
by Charles Carreon
10/14/08

Sometimes an artist produces one work too many. The one that shows he is not only past his prime, but has actually gone to seed. With Ten New Songs, the listener witnesses a great talent going into eclipse.

This is not that grizzled troubadour of the bizarre, who filled acid-soaked brains with images like “then you killed the lights in a lonely lane, and an ape with angel glands, erased the final wisps of pain with the music of rubber bands.” It is not that one who immortalized Suzanne, and reminded us that Jesus was a sailor, etc. From the deck of Leonard’s ship, you could see Salvador Dali, feverishly painting a surreal other shore.

No such fervid imaginations illuminate Ten New Songs, but the title is still descriptive, for Cohen has certainly come up with a “new” way of singing without having a song in his heart. But soon he will be quiet forever, or so he keeps reminding us. Whence came this strange malaise? Cohen has spent the last five years, they say, in a Zen monastery. This would seem to be borne out by the bizarre tilt of his thoughts, such as “I don’t trust my inner feelings — inner feelings come and go.” This may be proper Buddhist dogma, but it isn’t the stuff of good music. This is a New Song indeed — one that ventures indifference as a musical theme. It is actually the worst CD I have ever heard.

I only listened to six and half of the Ten New Songs, but even this brief encounter had a depressing effect similar to a long chat with a suicidal friend. If it weren’t for the depressing effect, however, the CD would be useful for lowering blood pressure. The pacing of these compositions is elephantine. To call them sedate overstates their stimulating effect. Torpid would be more like it. In one tuneless tune, Cohen dwells obsessively on the image of “dark rivers.” I felt like I’d won a free vacation to buy time share in the underworld, and Cohen was the salesman. He was very convincing. I felt dead already.

Zen meditation seems to have lowered the temperature of Leonard’s mind. In one New Song he says he’s turned to ice within, and finds it “crowded and cold” inside himself. One is tempted to caution him to be wary of falling into the same fate as the senescent Ram Dass, who meditated himself into a stroke by visualizing himself as an old man with failing extremities and vision. His adventure of the imagination precipitated exactly what he contemplated, and he now is rolled about by his spiritual nabobs in a wheelchair he calls his “swan boat.” If the lethargic rhythms of the New Songs are any indication, Leonard may be drifting a little close to the big drain that goes straight down. The pulse of this music is so faint as to be nearly comatose, tending toward flatline.

From his present vantage point, Leonard Cohen sees no light, or if he does, he brings no report of it. He has one direction resolved, as well — deeper into the shadowland. He says he knows he’s forgiven, but doesn’t know exactly how. I was left wondering when he’d been found guilty, and if his sentence was perhaps too severe. Leonard seems to be seeking closure and resolution, coming to terms, preparing for the end. But from the results displayed in these New Songs, I suspect he would have been better off keeping his accounts open, getting and spending the rich treasury of the imagination. In this album he seems hypnotized by the anticipated darkness of death. Tragically, his song has preceded him to the grave.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:58 am

GUANTANAMO PROSECUTOR'S RESIGNATION AND TESTIMONY FOR THE DEFENSE IS AN ACT OF TRUE HEROISM, by Charles Carreon

10/24/08

I’ve been railing against the torturers for years, trying to add my small voice to the growing chorus of people who know that the true terrorists have been running Washington for eight years. Now a really meaningful voice is being heard — that of a military prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darren Vandeveld, who was encouraged by his priest to speak out after he confessed in an email:

“I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing, and what we are doing as a country.”


What was the problem? As a prosecutor, which I once was, we learn that it is our duty to disclose any evidence that might indicate that the defendant is innocent to the defense lawyer. Vandeveld disclosed that the trials at Guantanamo being conducted pursuant to Congress’ shamelessly-enacted “Military Commissions Act” were part of a “rigged system” in which “potentially exculpatory evidence” was never being provided to the defense lawyers.

“I have observed,” he wrote, “that a number of defense requests which I considered to be reasonable and in some cases indicated support for were nevertheless rejected by the Convening Authority, presumably on the advice of the Legal Adviser.”


When Vandeveld resigned his position because he couldn’t continue in good conscience, Chief Prosecutor Col. Lawrence Morris tried to force him to take a psychological exam. Way to slander a good guy, colonel! Vandeveld’s replacement, Lt. Col. Doug Stevenson, denies there’s any problem — “There is absolutely no exculpatory evidence in this case that has not been provided to the defense,” Stevenson told the judge. Doesn’t sound right to me. Why would a career Air Force prosecutor flush his career down the toilet to make claims that he can’t back up? And Vandeveld is offering to back them up, by testifying for the defense in the case he was previously prosecuting against Mohammed Jawad, a teenager accused of throwing a grenade that wounded two American soldiers and their interpreter in December 2002. What would he testify?

Vandeveld has told defense lawyers that his office knew Jawad may have been drugged before the grenade attack and that the Afghan Interior Ministry said two other men had confessed to the same crime, according to Michael Berrigan, deputy chief defense counsel for the Guantanamo tribunals.


That would seem rather exculpatory. So the judge, Army Col. Steve Henley, ordered the government to allow Vandeveld to testify, and his testimony was received on Friday, September 28, 2008. At first, he asked for immunity against prosecution, an indication of the kind of fear he has to deal with in this role that fate has thrust him into, but in the end he testified to those and other facts. Perhaps the course of justice will be a little straighter for a poor teenager who was thrust into a war all of a sudden when American soldiers showed up in his homeland. I can’t imagine any of us would’ve behaved differently if the war had been brought to our suburban subdivision, city street, or country road. That’s not terrorism. Some say it’s heroism. I’d stop short of that, because it just sounds like self-defense and defense of your country, which doesn’t elevate you to the heights of human achievement so much as it pulls you down to the common denominator of survival. Self-defense is not heroism, but it is also not a crime, not terrorism, and certainly not a justification to pervert the course of justice with kangaroo-court proceedings. But Lt. Col. Vandeveld has sacrificed his friends, his position, and a great deal more to help a poor boy who maybe didn’t throw a grenade at anybody, maybe was drugged up, maybe was just a victim of our worldwide terror sweep. He suffered disgrace to draw the line between decency and dishonor. Now there’s a hero.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:59 am

DIGITAL ALIBI SPRINGS PAIR HELD SINCE MAY ON DEATH-PENALTY CHARGES, by Charles Carreon

11/19/08

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One day you’re a free man, cashing your paycheck and going to see your girlfriend on the subway. The next day you’re judicial roadkill, hauled in front of a Federal judge on death-penalty charges of killing a man you had no idea existed — a witness in a Federal drug trial. The prosecutors say you did it. The judge says he has probable cause to believe you did. Your brother has been dragged into this thing with you. Lucky thing you have your get out of jail card right in your wallet — a digital witness with no motive to lie — your New York City Metrocard. God bless public transportation — and a little surveillance video at the check-cashing facility where you traded in your check for a few dead Presidents.

For Jason Jones and his brother Corey, all of the above came true in a nightmare that began in May of 2008, when a still-unnamed Federal witness was gunned down. Amazingly, the prosecutors who agreed to grant Jason bail balked at granting it to his brother Corey, claiming their “eyewitness” had him cold, and he still had no alibi. Judge Marrero gave the ixnay to that argument, quoting Heraclitus in his written opinion: “The river now flowing by is not the same river that passed by yesterday.”

Time enough tomorrow to worry about the dark side of this story — What incentives was this “eyewitness” given by prosecutors that caused him to identify the wrong men? Was the “eyewitness” the willing accomplice of the killers, or even the killer? Why did the prosecutors shield their unreliable witness by sticking with an obviously defective theory of the case? And most ominous of all — how long before criminals hire hackers to equip the real bad guys with false digital alibis, or corrupt the digital alibis of their chosen fall guys? In the world of crime and forgery, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Anybody interested in a 24-hour digital tracking device that will establish your whereabouts in the unlikely event the law claims you were where you know you weren’t? It could run on your cellphone. Of course, you could turn it off, if you needed to. But then, would that look bad? Sure as hell would, if you needed an alibi. Oh well, no plan is foolproof.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Oct 14, 2013 8:03 am

NEW YORK TIMES FINANCIAL COLUMNIST SHOWS DREADFUL LACK OF COMMON SENSE, by Charles Carreon

03/17/09

The Case for Paying Out Bonuses at A.I.G.
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Published: March 16, 2009

Do we really have to foot the bill for those bonuses at the American International Group?

It sure does sting. A staggering $165 million — for employees of a company that nearly took down the financial system. And heck, we, the taxpayers, own nearly 80 percent of A.I.G.

It doesn’t seem fair.

So here is a sobering thought: Maybe we have to swallow hard and pay up, partly for our own good. I can hear the howls already, so let me explain.

Everyone from President Obama down seems outraged by this. The president suggested on Monday that we just tear up those bonus contracts. He told the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, to use every legal means to recoup taxpayers’ money. Hard to argue there.

“This isn’t just a matter of dollars and cents,” he said. “It’s about our fundamental values.”

On that last issue, lawyers, Wall Street types and compensation consultants agree with the president. But from their point of view, the “fundamental value” in question here is the sanctity of contracts.

That may strike many people as a bit of convenient legalese, but maybe there is something to it. If you think this economy is a mess now, imagine what it would look like if the business community started to worry that the government would start abrogating contracts left and right.

As much as we might want to void those A.I.G. pay contracts, Pearl Meyer, a compensation consultant at Steven Hall & Partners, says it would put American business on a worse slippery slope than it already is. Business agreements of other companies that have taken taxpayer money might fall into question. Even companies that have not turned to Washington might seize the opportunity to break inconvenient contracts.

If government officials were to break the contracts, they would be “breaking a bond,” Ms. Meyer says. “They are raising a whole new question about the trust and commitment organizations have to their employees.” (The auto industry unions are facing a similar issue — but the big difference is that there is a negotiation; no one is unilaterally tearing up contracts.)

But what about the commitment to taxpayers? Here is the second, perhaps more sobering thought: A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it.

A.I.G. employees concocted complex derivatives that then wormed their way through the global financial system. If they leave — the buzz on Wall Street is that some have, and more are ready to — they might simply turn around and trade against A.I.G.’s book. Why not? They know how bad it is. They built it.

So as unpalatable as it seems, taxpayers need to keep some of these brainiacs in their seats, if only to prevent them from turning against the company. In the end, we may actually be better off if they can figure out how to unwind these tricky investments.

Not that any of this takes the bite out of paying these bonuses. For better or worse — in this case, worse — someone at A.I.G. decided this company needed to sign bonus agreements last year to keep people before the full extent of its problems became clear.

Now we can debate why A.I.G. felt it necessary to guarantee seven executives at least $3 million apiece when the economy was clearly on shaky ground. Perhaps we will find out these contracts were a bit of sleight of hand to enrich executives who knew this financial Titanic had hit the iceberg. But another possible explanation is that A.I.G. knew it needed to keep its people.

That is the explanation offered by Edward M. Liddy, who was installed as A.I.G.’s chief executive when the government effectively nationalized the company last fall. (He is being paid $1 a year.)

“We cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff” the company “if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he said.

There’s some truth to what Mr. Liddy is saying. Would you want to work at A.I.G.? Sure, maybe for $3 million. But not if you could go somewhere else for even more — or even much less.

“The jobs are terrible,” said Robert M. Sedgwick, an executive compensation lawyer at Morrison Cohen who represents a number of employees of banks that have taken government money. “You have to read about yourself in the paper every day. These people are leaving as soon as they can.”

Let them leave, you say. Where would they go, given the troubles in the financial industry? But the fact is, the real moneymakers in finance always have a place to go. You can bet that someone would scoop up the talent from A.I.G. and, quite possibly, put it to work — against taxpayers’ interests.

“The word on the street is that A.I.G. employees are being heavily recruited,” Ms. Meyer says.

Of course, if taxpayers had not bailed out A.I.G., these contracts would not be worth anything. Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, made the point on Monday, when he subpoenaed A.I.G. for the names of the people who received the bonuses. If A.I.G. had spiraled into bankruptcy, its employees would have had to get in line with other unsecured creditors.

Mr. Cuomo wants to know who A.I.G.’s lucky employees are, and how they have been doing at their jobs. So here is a suggestion for him. Get the list, and give those big earners at A.I.G. a not-so-subtle nudge: Perhaps they will “volunteer” to give some of their bonuses back or watch their names hit the newspapers. But in the meantime, despite how offensive and painful it might be, let’s honor the contracts.


With his article The Case for Paying Out Bonuses at A.I.G. , New York Times financial columnist Andrew Sorkin elicited my ire. I actually wrote him an email, and you can do likewise at this link. Or you can just read my strident reply below, that quotes the salient points of his meritless arguments, and tell him you agree with Charles Carreon.

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New York Times Financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin apologist for AIG

1. “This isn’t just a matter of dollars and cents,” he said. “It’s about our fundamental values.” *** the “fundamental value” in question here is the sanctity of contracts. ***If government officials were to break the contracts, they would be “breaking a bond,” Ms. Meyer says.

Contracts are only sacred if they are entered into voluntarily with full understanding of their consequences. The anger of the public is not “buyer’s remorse;” rather, it is justified rebellion against having terms imposed upon them by an AIG management that obtained money under false pretenses and used it for purposes that, if fully known, neither Congress nor the voters would have agreed to. Therefore, these contracts are voidable because of a defect in their formation, i.e., fraud or a mistake as to material terms known exclusively to one party – AIG.

2. A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it.

“prevent them from turning against the company. In the end, we may actually be better off if they can figure out how to unwind these tricky investments.”

This contention is downright silly. Nothing is being “unwound.” AIG has just been paying off its “counterparties,” and in many cases, according to the New York Times, under circumstances where nothing was due under the “Credit Default Swap” insurance policies that AIG had issued. This is insurance malpractice, if you think about it – as if my insurance company gave me a check for the value of my wrecked vehicle because their statistics suggested I was likely to have a wreck someday. These people “turned against the company” long ago by digging the financial hole it is now in. They need to be turned out of their offices by any means less drastic that actual defenestration.

3. A.I.G. knew it needed to keep its people.

“We cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff” the company “if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he said.

Excuse me, but funding the operation of AIG provided these bonus-grabbers with a subsidy for salaries that would simply have evaporated in insolvency. Being subsidized is not being subjected to “continued and arbitrary adjustment.” Your uncritical repetition of this bilge is bizarre. Since when did the New York Times turn “garbage in, garbage out” into a journalistic maxim?

4. [T]he real moneymakers in finance always have a place to go. You can bet that someone would scoop up the talent from A.I.G. and, quite possibly, put it to work — against taxpayers’ interests.

The “real moneymakers” seems like a strange definition for people who lost billions of other people’s money. Perhaps you could get a job as a meaning distorter for Fox News.

1. Perhaps they will “volunteer” to give some of their bonuses back or watch their names hit the newspapers. But in the meantime, despite how offensive and painful it might be, let’s honor the contracts.


Are you deranged? Your solicitousness toward these robber barons has utterly undermined your credibility as a commentator. You are a handsome man, as depicted on the New York Times website, and thus must come from a good family. If you will send me your email address, I will paypal you a dime, like Prof. Kingsfield in Paper Chase, so you can call your parents and tell them that there is grave doubt you will make a real financial reporter.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Oct 14, 2013 8:05 am

OBAMA, OUR NEW "WAR PRESIDENT," VIOLATES THE CONSTITUTION BY FIGHTING THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT OF HABEAS CORPUS, by Charles Carreon

04/11/09

Obama made many promises, three of which I remember clearly — to restore civil rights stolen by Bushman, end the looting on Wall Street, and bring the troops home from Iraq. In a word, “change.” Looking at the results achieved in the last three months on all three fronts, it appears that Americans have been taken for chumps, because if what we’ve got is change, it’s surprisingly indistinguishable from the same old-same old, as our charismatic leader would put it. Today, I’m going to talk about how he’s chosen to continue as our “war president,” and why he should change course now, for the good of the nation.

The Evil of Arbitrary Arrest Under The Tyrannical Authority of “General Warrants” and “Bills of Attainder”

Until you have been subjected to it, you can hardly imagine the terrors inflicted by despots using brute force to arrest and imprison people without cause. I have represented people who were arrested and imprisoned on false charges, but even that does not compare to being arrested for no reason whatsoever. People arrested for no reason naturally fear that they may never be released. Certainly, those detained for no reason are much more likely to be tortured and killed in secret. After all, if you can be arrested for no reason, why would you need a reason to go farther, and commit torture, or simply eliminate the problem? Lots of people like to say it was taxes that caused the revolution, but I suspect unlawful detention was by far the more powerful driver of rebellion. The Declaration of Independence accused King George of a “long train of abuses” against the American colonists, among them:

Depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

King George’s royally-appointed judges would issue “Writs of Assistance,” which were “general warrants” that could be used to arrest anyone without cause and haul them to London for questioning and bogus “trials” without jury. Can you imagine the horror of being taken out of your home for no reason, and put on a sailing ship, seeing the shore of your native land disappearing beyond the horizon? This power, or even the threat of it, would often be used to extract testimony against friends, neighbors and relatives, who would then be arrested on charges of sedition, or other generalized offenses. Obviously, for any person not desirous of living in prison, unlawful detention in itself is mental torture, and many a bird will sing whatever song will spring them from the cage.

The danger of permitting detention without probable cause to believe the person committed a crime was thus dealt with by enacting the Fourth Amendment. On April 30, 2002, U.S. District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin dismissed a Grand Jury indictment that had been issued based on testimony from a person who had been detained under what she characterized as a general warrant issued “for investigative purposes.” The Judge’s opinion is beautiful, as are the citations she chooses from the U.S. Supreme Court case of Stanford v. Texas, that it is my patriotic pleasure to share with you:

“Vivid in the memory of the newly independent Americans,” for example, “were those general warrants known as writs of assistance under which officers of the Crown had so bedeviled the colonists.” Stanford v. Texas, 379 U.S. 476, 481 (1965). Those general warrants were viewed “as the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law book, because they placed the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” Id. (quotation marks omitted). As a result, in December 1791, the Bill of Rights became “the supreme Law of the Land.” U.S. Const. art. VI cl. 2.

The Fourth Amendment states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. U.S. Const. amend. IV.

“These words are precise and clear. They reflect the determination of those who wrote the Bill of Rights that the people of this new Nation should forever ‘be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects’ from intrusion and seizure by officers acting under the unbridled authority of a general warrant.” Stanford, 379 U.S. at 481 (emphasis added).


General Warrants were issued by anti-sedition magistrates operating in the colonies as judicial agents of repression. The British Parliament, in an anti-terrorist mood similar to that of our post-911 Congress, also took a hand in fighting the enemies of the Crown. They used a special type of law to demonize political enemies, called “Bills of Attainder.” The word “attainder” derives from the word “attainted,” as in “ostracised” or “damned.” A Bill of Attainder was a law that named specific individuals and deprived those people of their civil rights — the right to trial on the charges of which they were accused. A Bill of Attainder telescoped the entire prosecution into a single decree.

Under English law, a criminal condemned for a serious crime … could be declared “attainted”, meaning that his civil rights were nullified: he could no longer own property or pass property to his family by will or testament. His property could consequently revert to the Crown…. Bills of attainder were sometimes criticized as a convenient way for the King to convict subjects of crimes and confiscate their property without the bother of a trial—and without the need for a conviction or indeed any evidence at all. Wikipedia.


To the preceding we might add that not only would an “attainted” person and his children be deprived of property, he could be deprived of his freedom, jailed in the Tower for nothing more than being the victim of a legislative decree that “Mr. X is a felonious criminal.” Along with “ex post facto” laws that criminalize past conduct, Bills of Attainder were made unlawful by Article I, Sec. 3, Clause 9 of the United States Constitution, which states: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto shall be passed.”

Because a Bill of Attainder is so clearly unlawful, Congress is careful not to name anyone directly as a target of its laws, but after the Bush coup, the Congress end-ran the Constitution in a three-step process. First, they created the category of “terrorist organizations” for which no clear definition existed, and told the Treasury make a list of “terrorist organizations.” Second, they made it unawful to “provide support” for a terrorist organization — which of course could be anything up to and including holding a bake sale for Chechnian orphans. Third, they created the category of “unlawful combatants,” and gave the Decider the absolute power to decide who was an “unlawful combatant,” a definition that had nothing to do with any objective evidence, and was justified simply on the bald assertion that the Decider was in fact the Decider.

By designating people as “terrorists” or “unlawful combatants,” using standards so broad that anyone could be made subject to the law, and depriving those people of civil rights, the U.S. Congress created a Bill of Attainder that was worse than the original — basically a blank check for the CIA to run anyone into its secret prisons, where, as we now know, they would be delivered into the hands of interrogators who had been told it was lawful to commit torture. I do believe I will indulge myself in a colloquialism — this is Scary Shit.

The “Great Writ” of Habeas Corpus

Ironically, like so much in our jurisprudence, the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus evolved from the exercise of monarchical power for elitist reasons. It happened like this. Mayhap a young nobleman making sport with his noble pals breaketh into a humble cottage, and there before God and nature and her horrified family, drunkenly debaucheth a comely lass, and in the ensuing affray, killeth her brother. A local magistrate clapeth the young lord into irons. The wayward noble’s father approacheth a courtier with silver in hand who then approacheth the King and explaineth the true state of affairs, and that a grievous wrong hath been committed upon a highborn titled male who hath indulged in high spirits and defended his noble person with his cavalry blade against felonious assaults by a commoner. The King findeth his Royal Person affronted by the detention of one to whom He is related by a close degree of consanguinity, and in consequence therof issueth a writ of Habeas Corpus directing the errant magistrate henceforth to “produce the body” of the imprisoned gallant, who is then delivered to a well-appointed judicial chamber and strictly questioned by a duly constituted court of handpicked, well-fed and bewigged legal lords, in consequence of which an acquittal ensueth and the chastened youth is released to the custody of his family with the exhortation to keep his spirits in check lest justice be not in future so merciful. The King’s peace was thus restored. From such ignoble beginnings came the writ of habeas corpus.

Clever lawyers gradually expanded it into a judicial remedy for unexplained detentions in general. They are still issued by the federal courts in an antiquated by effective form, as follows:

We command you that the body of Charles L. Craig, in your custody detained, as it is said, together with the day and cause of his caption and detention, you safely have before Honorable Martin T. Manton, United States Circuit Judge for the Second Judicial Circuit, within the circuit and district aforesaid, to do and receive all and singular those things which the said judge shall then and there consider of him in this behalf; and have you then and there this writ.


Today the writ of habeas corpus is the plea of last resort, and is probably used most by death row defenders to challenge the amazingly unjust proceedings that result in the horrific statistics that have caused several states to suspend executions — lying witnesses, sleeping defense lawyers, phony forensic evidence, prejudice against minority defendants, the whole digusting snowball of injustice that gets rolling in the wake of a gruesome murder, claiming more victims, and leaving the true perpetrators free to kill again. Indeed, the right of habeas corpus for common criminals has not been curtailed. To be deprived of your sacred right to obtain judicial relief from unjust arrest and imprisonment, as in the time of King George, you need to be an Enemy of the State.

Three Towers Fall — One Cherished Right Dies, And Hundreds of “Unlawful Combatants” Are Born

http://archive.org/details/Three_Towers ... Tower_Fall

Congress and the Executive Branch have been acting like King George on steroids ever since the Three Towers came down on September 11th. Two months after thousands were killed in a mass murder for which only a single lone madman (Moussauwi) was prosecuted, on November 13, 2001 Bush granted himself the power to arrest anyone suspected of connection to terrorists or terrorism as an “unlawful combatant,” to be held indefinitely without charges being filed against him or her, without a court hearing, and without access to a lawyer. Hundreds of people were declared unlawful combatants and held in abominable conditions in Guantanamo and in secret CIA prisons by the now-disgraced former President, who of course never saw them, or any evidence, or even knew their names. After the Supreme Court reaffirmed the right of United States citizens to seek writs of habeas corpus even if they had been declared “unlawful combatants” in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004), Congress unlawfully overruled the Constitution by enacting Sec. 1005(e) of the Dept of Defense Appropriations Act of 2006, that provides:

“No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.


In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006), the Supreme Court rejected Congress’s attempts to strip the courts of jurisdiction over habeas corpus appeals. Congress then enacted the Military Commissions Act, that amended the language above to replace habeas corpus with rigged proceedings that have been tainted by the use of tortured confessions as evidence and repudiated by military prosecutors themselves as virtual kangaroo courts:

“No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”


Three Branches of Government Collapse Into One “War President”

On January 17, 2007, Torturer General Alberto Gonzales, still allowed to spew noxious tyrannical propaganda in the halls of Congress in those days, told the Senate that the Constitution didn’t grant even American citizens the right of habeas corpus, calling it a “treasured gift” that the Decider could “decide” to suspend. Erwin Chemerinsky, a respected Constitutional law professor, took exception to Gonzales’ revisionist Constitutional history: “If there’s no habeas corpus, and if the government wants to pick you or me off the street and hold us indefinitely, how do we get our release?” Douglas Kmiec, a federal prosecutor under Reagan and Bush the First, agreed, stating that without habeas corpus: “one of the basic protections of human liberty against the powers of the state would be embarrassingly absent from our constitutional system.” Bruce Fein, another veteran of the Reagan-era Justice Department, said Gonzales was trying to “create the idea that during conflicts, the three branches of government collapse into one, and it is the president.” Yes, that means that in “wartime,” all we need is our dear old father-figure, calling the shots, imprisoning and torturing the bad guys, keeping us safe in our terrorized homeland, our beloved “War President.”

The Judges Finally Turn It Around

The judicial branch gave Bush enough rope to hang himself and everyone in the CIA, if someone had the courage to tie the other end to a stout tree limb. But eventually, they figured that we could maybe go ahead and restore civil rights. In Boumediene v. Bush June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court rejected that idea, holding that Guantanamo detainees have the right to seek a writ of habeas corpus in US Federal Court.

After the election, it seemed possible good news would come from the White House, and on January 21, 2009, Obama declared that the Guantanamo detainees “have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.” That, you might have thought, would be that. But not so fast.

Orwell Said It Would Be Like This

When District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina released 17 Chinese Uighurs in October 2008, who have been held at Guantanamo for no good reason for seven years, no one was surprised that the Bush Justice Department sought and obtained a stay of the ruling. What was surprising was when Obama’s Justice Department continued the same position. But of course, there was something difficult about that case, since no one knows where to send the Uighurs — China might just imprison them, and some people think they’re not good enough to stay in the US. But yesterday, April 10, 2009, the other shoe dropped, and there can now be now doubt that Obama has decided he too is a “War President” who can imprison anyone he likes without a warrant and without judicial recourse. Obama’s lawyers appealed District Judge John Bates’ decision to allow three men detained at Bargram Air Base in Kabul, Afghanistan to seek writs of habeas corpus. So people have the right of habeas corpus, except when they don’t.

Yes, Obama’s face points one way, and his feet walk the other way, in a posture he seems to adopt quite naturally. Power warps the psyche, and is almost impossible to renounce. Get ready for a new age of happy tyranny. It’s 1984 all over again.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Oct 14, 2013 9:50 am

PORN SCHOOL, by Charles Carreon

04/19/09


 
You got kids? Or friends or relatives who have kids? You know, “kids” – those little people who haven’t grown up to be unemployed yet? When you’re a parent, you don’t have much choice about what to do with them during the daylight hours, when they’re not at home watching TV, playing video games, or posting to their mySpace page. You have to send them to school, so they can learn to follow the rules, how to fear authority, how to cower in the face of peer pressure, and how to experience increasing anxiety as testing day approaches and the time for procrastination diminishes. Without these skills, they will be naked before the world, and they may suffer disorientation when they see thieves rewarded with more money to steal, bullshit-artists turned into world leaders, and people who eat worms on television turned into reality stars.

And as a parent, you accept all this. You go to work yourself, if you can find it, and entrust your children to a claque of people called teachers who quack like ducks and reward the best quackers with high grades in quacking, and quack about how nice the quacking sounds when all the students quack in unison, and how cacophonous it is when they quack randomly and out of order. You accept all this, and you even pay taxes and school bonds so the teachers won’t go on strike and quack at you about how hard their jobs are and how mean kids are and how teachers just don’t get any respect.

But I tell you what you don’t do. You don’t expect your kid to come home and tell you that what they taught her in school today was how to strip. You particularly wouldn’t expect it if you lived in a Mormon community like Safford, Arizona, where the largest business is a Federal prison and the nearest strip bar is probably sixty miles away in Tucson across the street from the air base. But that’s what a couple of Safford parents discovered when their daughter came home from school one day a half-dozen years ago. She was just thirteen years old, a preppie kind of girl as she remembers it – a gentle little creature with tender feelings and a body just starting to turn to womanhood -- when she was called to the principal’s office and taught how to take it off.

There in school, where her parents couldn’t protect her, where those who were supposed to protect her had suddenly turned into sexual vampires indulging a sick impulse to leer and humiliate her, they made her take off her shoes, her skirt, her blouse, and then, they told to pull her bra away from her chest and move it side to side, and made her do the same with her panties. And oh, what were they looking for? Acid? Heroin? Crack? Crank? Switchblades? No, something far more dangerous. Something so dangerous, so likely to cause instantaneous derangement of the adolescent mind and senses that not a moment could be wasted. Yes. Ibuprophen.

Hey, don’t look at me like that! Ibuprophen is a powerful pain-reliever, just like Oxycontin and Vicodin, the drugs that turned Rush Limbaugh into the heartless monster that he is. Why do you think people take pain relievers, anyway? To numb themselves to the pain caused by injuring other people. It is hugely popular with bankers, politicians, bailout artists, and social vermin with inflamed consciences and headaches so big they just want to run away from their problems. So these Safford school administrators, they were combating an evil that might be too small for you to see, but they, being used to nipping trouble in the bud, were onto it early, protecting this young lady from herself, and protecting her schoolmates from her. Never mind that they found no ibuprophen – the word got around – there was no way to hide your Advil stash from these stern enforcers of adolescent virtue.

The good of the whole student body had to be considered. So when the young lady’s parents sued, the State of Arizona fought back – through trial, and appeal, and all the way up to the US Supreme Court – which is where it is now. That’s a lot of lawyer hours spent defending the right of school officials to get an intimate view of their students – a lot of taxpayer dollars – but once again, there are powerful factors at work that compel this type of government activity. I can hear Arizona's lawyer arguing right now: "It’s about the big picture, not just about one girl! This could open the floodgates of litigation, your Honor! It would incentivize parents to file lawsuits for money – filthy money – and expose the public treasury to being looted by every child who had to expose their genitals for the good of the school. And that would chill dedicated public servants in the performance of their duty to explore every nook and cranny when necessary to fight the scourge of Advil use now threatening the nation. Your values would have to be on upside down to not see where the real danger lies. After all, a young woman’s virginal assets aren’t tainted when viewed by people without prurient impulses, people who just want to find the Advil. But lawsuits – now there’s something dirty!"
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Oct 14, 2013 9:53 am

ARE NUCLEAR MISSILES OUR EASTER ISLAND STATUES?
by Charles Carreon
04/20/09



Everybody has heard about Easter Island, the place in the South Pacific where the inhabitants, all of Polynesian ancestry, became so obsessed with carving enormous stone statues that they exhausted the resources of the island, cut down all the large trees from which oceangoing canoes could be made, and ended up marooned on the island, unable to fish in the deep sea, trade with other islands, or otherwise maintain the high standard of living they had once enjoyed.

In Collapse – How Societies Fail, author Jared Diamond dug into the story in detail. The island was divided into pie-shaped territories governed by about seven or eight tribes that coexisted in a competitive balance. They didn’t want to have bloody wars, but they had to keep their populations busy with work that would prevent them from hatching plots to overthrow the tribal leaders. Tribal chiefs and priests competed to make ever larger statues, and it consumed a huge amount of slave labor to create and erect each one. When they couldn’t make them any bigger, they competed by placing a little hat of rare red stone at the very top. It must have placed a great strain on the people of the island, because the system broke down suddenly and irreparably all at once while the demented project was still in full swing. Out of a total of 887 statues on the island, 397 were still in production in the main quarry at Rano Rarak, while only 288, just 32% of the total, had been erected, and 92 were abandoned in transport by the slaves who decided to give up the process of hauling them up and down the steep volcanic ravines to their sacred destinations. In the quarry, tools were cast aside as if perhaps there was a sudden revolt. Too late to save the island ecology, however. The leaders who had lead the people into an economic boondoggle were deposed, but the revolutionaries didn’t have enough resources left to work with to save the society.

Ironically, the Easter Islanders were the descendants of heroic seafaring tribes who traversed thousands of miles of open water in outrigger dugouts to reach the remote island. But the civilization they created so depleted the island’s resources that they couldn’t even find enough trees to build their traditional dugouts, and by the time westerners arrived to discover them, their numbers had dwindled to a couple of hundred, and they had descended into cannibalism, watched over and mocked by the stone abominations hewn by their short-sighted, overcompetitive ancestors.

I live in Tucson, Arizona, where the US Air Force housed 18 Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Nuclear Missiles for many years. And I was born in 1956, in the heat of the cold war, when the nation’s military superiority to Soviet Russia was a constant topic of discussion, and people who had bomb shelters really seemed to have an advantage over the rest of us, who didn’t even have basements. Everyone had seen the movies of houses and buildings being swept away by the shockwave, and we lived in real fear. Movies like Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe were the big hits of the day. As Dr. Strangelove reminds us, during those years, there was at least one squadron of nuclear armed B52 bombers in the air every day, all day long, refueling in mid-air so that if need be, our nation would not be late to Armageddon.

If nuclear bombs were going to revolutionize warfare, the results have been underwhelming. Ever since the other guys got them, our nation has not gotten close to using them. Truman directed them dropped on the Japanese only because they could not retaliate in kind and the window of opportunity to ever use them without fear of igniting the apocalypse was closing. He knew that the Russians were going to get them soon, and he wanted to show that the US was not afraid to incinerate 200,000 people in one day. It was now or never. “Give ‘em hell Harry” sure as hell did. Interestingly, of all the nations clamoring to obtain nuclear weapons, the Japanese have never been among them.

The fact is nuclear bombs are not real “weapons.” A weapon is something you can use to destroy your enemy. If it destroys you simultaneously, it’s not a weapon, it’s a suicide device. Imagine calling up a gun company, like Glock, or Ruger, or Remington, and you say, to their product development people, “I have a great idea for a new weapon.” They’re like, “Okay, how does it work.” And you’re all, “It’s great. You pull the trigger, and it simultaneously kills your enemy and you.” They’re like, “That’s not a weapon, you idiot. Who would we sell it to? The police? They would have to hire a whole new police force every time there was a shootout.” But that’s what nuclear weapons are – mass suicide devices, and that’s why we’ve never used them but twice, on a defenseless nation of non-Caucasians.

No, the only purpose for having a nuclear arsenal is for the same reason the Easter Island chiefs built their big statues – because the other tribes had them. People wonder at the excess megatonnage that we have – enough to blow the crust off the earth I once heard, or to knock it off its rotational axis I heard another time – at any rate, far more than any usable amount. Indeed, a much more efficient way to deal with this would be to allow the Russians to actually place their bomb right in Washington D.C., and the US could place one in Moscow, and we’d have an equally effective balance of terror. That would of course be altogether too raw a way of imposing a balance of terror, though, as if Kruschev and Kennedy had just decided to sit down, snort lines of crank and toss off shooter of vodka, and play Russian roulette with a snub nose thirty eight.

So instead, we create these incredibly sophisticated machines. With solid fuel rockets that will nearly put the missile in orbit, with inertial guidance systems that are supposed to enable the things to fly fifteen thousand miles and hit a city, and all stuffed with the rarest of all metals, put together by the most intelligent engineers, and creating toxic waste all along the way. Then we stuff these gigantic pillars of military symbolism in holes in the ground and they sit there. And sit there. And sit there.

You know, they’ve been sitting there so long, the last thing you’d want to do would be to launch one. I mean, would you want to rely on a car built in the fifties or sixties? Would you buy a computer built in the eighties? I mean stuff gets old, and rockets, well they aren’t so f’n reliable in the first place. About every seventh time they launched a space shuttle, it blew up. And with the missiles, they never really tested them extensively. They couldn’t. “Hey Moscow, let us see if we can hit you with a target missile. Just a dud, y’know. Practice our aim.”

No, these suckers were just a big Easter Island scam from the get-go. We took all this time and resources, and built and built and built, and guess what, it had the same result. While our engineers were building missies, they weren’t teaching high school. While our welders and riveters were building missiles, they weren’t building bridges, schools, and hospitals. And the best part of all – the companies that made these things – they knew they would never be tested. It didn’t really matter if they blew up halfway to Moscow, or turned around and hit Pittsburg. The shitstorm on Judgment Day would be thick enough to cover any incompetence. Yeah, we feel sorry for the Easter Islanders. But next to doomsday, cannibalism sounds appetizing.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Oct 14, 2013 9:54 am

CREATIVITY VERSUS COPYRIGHTS, by Charles Carreon

04/20/09



Creativity is the product of greed. That’s what Hollywood, the moviemakers and industry tell us every day. They tell us that if we don’t give them an endless stream of “royalties,” we’ll die in a wasteland devoid of creativity. The radio will go silent, the TV will go blank, cable channels will dry up, movie theatres will be nothing but places to buy overpriced candy and popcorn. Why? Because, these media pushers tell us, they won’t have any incentive to “create content.”

Well, let’s just think about that for a minute. Did creativity begin when the copyright office starting registering copyrights? Did musicians wait to write music until they could get studio contract? Did theater start when Cecil B. DeMille filmed Ben Hur? Gee, I don’t think so.

In fact, the first book to get a copyright was Don Quixote, and the reason it got a copyright was because Miguel de Cervantes, the author, gave a copy to the King of Spain, and the King of Spain liked it so much, he asked Cervantes if there was anything he wanted, because he was the King, and he would give it to him, and Cervantes, being pretty smart, asked if he could have the exclusive right to publish the book for what must have seemed like a long time – twenty years. And the King said, sure, I’ll do that, and he put it right in the introduction to the book, and he signed it, “I, the King.” “Yo, El Rey.”

Man, that’s classy, and legitimate. Twenty years, and after that – boom – into the public domain. Why? Maybe because he hoped that Cervantes would be motivated to write another book. Maybe because he thought that more people would read it if all the publishers of Spain were able to publish the book. So the story of the Ingenious Nobleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, thought to be one of the greatest books ever written, was written without the incentive of a copyright. The copyright was only awarded after the fact as a reward for work well done.

In fact, if we look at how creativity works, we see that this whole idea that it is stimulated by greed is just nonsense. Go to a kindergarten, and watch kids fingerpainting, or making collages, or learning how to play the recorder. What’s in it for them? Where’s the payoff? Somebody clue me in – who’s greasin’ these kids?

Hmmm. It’s a mystery – well maybe it’s not real creativity – poor quality of workmanship – fit only for the refrigerator door. Well, let’s leave the schoolhouse and go watch some grownups in Little Theatre working through some Shakespeare – a little Romeo and Juliet -- “What light from yonder window breaks?” Maybe some Julius Caesar -- “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” And my personal favorite, from Richard the Third, “and cry HAVOC! And let slip the dogs of war…” Hehe, I love that one – just stirs the blood, doesn’t it? And my point was that it was a good thing Shakespeare was able to copyright his works, eh? He wouldn’t have written them, otherwise. Oh, wait a minute – in Queen Elizabeth’s time there were no copyrights. Well, what a goddamn fool he was. Should have just kept it bottled up inside that old bald forehead of his. If he’d had a copyright, he wouldn’t have had to write so many damn plays. Could have just written one big hit and mined the hell out of it. Dumbass.

All of the great classical music, of course, would never have been written without copyrights, though, right? I mean, Mozart? Bach? Brahms? Beethoven? Surely those great musical geniuses were incentivized by the hope of receiving a huge stream of royalties? Or at least sales of sheet music. No? They wrote for patrons who played the music themselves and shared it with their friends? For churches that played it for free? Allowed it to just be copied and resold by strangers with no obligation to send the check to the early equivalent of BMI, or ASCAP?

Wait a minute – we gotta suppress this information! We’ve got to make people think that without copyrights, writers and musicians and visual artists and actors would never be creative at all -- they’d go directly to drugs and alcohol without stopping to produce any books, songs, pictures, plays or movies. They’ve got to make people think that you can’t make a movie if you can’t raise a 100 Million bucks to blow up a a few helicopters and blow a hot blonde and some stud with a pistol in his hand out the window of a skyscraper with a huge fireball about to engulf them, simulating some kind of pyrotechnic orgasm. They’ve got to convince musicians they’re nobody if they can’t make a video with a bunch of hired ass-shakers gyrating around them while they do cool shit like text people and feel themselves up and wander around their house showing off how many pairs of shoes they have. They’ve got to convince actors that they’ll never get an acting job unless they get a nose job or a boob job or give a producer a y-know job. They’ve got to convince you that all of this is entertainment and you wouldn’t want anything different.

And they’re so afraid that you’ll spend a little time with yourself, actually creating. That’s why they keep telling you – give us money, and leave the creating to us. But they’re not creating – there’s no money in that – and where are you going to find another Jim Morrison, another Elvis Presley, another Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, or Syd Barrett? Those guys are all dead – dumbass – we don’t have to pay them any more than we pay Mickey Mouse – we just keep selling their stuff over and over and over. And when they don’t want to die fast enough, we play ‘em for laughs, like Britney and Jacko, we ignore them like Prince. But there are some guys who know how to reinvent themselves – and they stay ahead of the game – like Puff Daddy, I mean P. Diddy, I mean Diddy, soon he’s gon’ be “Diddy Wah Diddy,” or Don’t Know Diddley – at any rate, there’s no need to kill a guy like that – he’s just proves the point we’re tryin’ to make – without a production company to put you up there, you’re nobody.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Oct 14, 2013 9:56 am

FORGET GOLD! WATERBOARD BANKERS!, by Charles Carreon

04/25/09



https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... 74eVMqm9q0

GOLD. My friend Mark asked me whether it would be a good idea to go back on the gold standard. Mark, I said, that would be a great waste of gold. Think about it – what would happen if we went back on the gold standard? Take note, it wouldn’t work unless all the nations in the world did it, and that would mean that for every dollar the US puts in circulation, and every Euro the Eurpoean Union puts in circulation, every peso that Mexico circulates, etcetera, every country, would have to set aside a large supply of solid gold bullion, very large amounts of it, humongous amounts, really, in huge vaults. Security would be an enormous issue, and the gold would be unavailable for any other purpose. While we had it in the vault, we couldn’t use it to manufacture medical, scientific, or consumer devices or for jewelry. It would be totally wasted, sitting there for what? Symbolic purposes. Totally symbolic purposes. And to back all the money currently in circulation, of course, the price of gold would skyrocket to around a hundred thousand dollars an ounce. Alternatively, you could drastically reduce the money supply, which would mean a Starbucks would cost like ten cents, Obama would get paid about fifty dollars a month, and the AIG bailout would only cost around a hundred and eighty million.

But let’s say we’re willing to leave the world’s store of value in the care of a trusted gang of mercenaries like Blackwater (that has, by the way, changed its name to Xe – and just as an aside, you know, the owner of Blackwater is a guy named Prince, so he might actually become the hired killer formerly known as Prince if they take the quest for corporate anonymity far enough, but let’s return to the topic at hand – gold). Let’s give the devil his or her due – what would be the purpose of going back on the gold standard? Well, it would slow the growth of the money supply down to however fast the Canadians (who pretty much control the ecologically devastating mining industry) could tear up the planet to get that hundred-thousand-dollar-an-ounce shiny stuff, and of course, you could weigh it, and with a hand calculator you could figure out how many dollars the bankers would have to share. Leverage would be constrained. The money-lending business would have limits. A huge stack of bullion in a room surrounded with armed guards would perform a symbolic function that takes the place of – takes the place of what? Of honest bookkeeping.

Honest bookkeeping – that’s all we need. People talk about going back to barter, but it doesn’t have to be that primitive. Let’s imagine there’s a market in town, a farmer’s market. It works this way. You have to bring something to the market to trade. The market will open at seven a.m. Everyone sets their price in a unit of value we’ll call a “Mercator,” or Mercs for short So I can put my tomatoes on sale for 3 pounds for a merc. The butcher will offer lamb shanks for 3 mercs a pound, etc. No money changes hands. Instead, every time there’s a sale made, we call for a transactor, and he or she records the transaction in a book. Sales will be made all day long, and at 3 o’clock the market closes. The transactors do the books, and all the balances are reconciled. The transactors go around and give each merchant a statement of their daily balance and transactions completed. If anyone has a negative balance, then they have to either make it up from their merc account, or take a loan from the transactors, or cancel the transaction. Then all goods will change hands at, say 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Of course, we could do all this on computers, in real time, at a data clearinghouse, and have no one show up anywhere, and take delivery at scheduled dates and times. We could do it with million-ton shipments of tomatoes and tankers full of oil. In fact – big dirty secret – large companies and nations do it all the time. Cuba and Venezuela swap oil for medicine, Israel and China swap metals for weapons. Long, long ago, before the US entered the Second World war against Germany, the US swapped bombsights for industrial diamonds, and that trade worked out beautifully – the Nazis used the diamonds to cut steel into weapons that killed Americans, and the Americans used the bombsights to drop bombs on German civilians. You see, when there’s a war to get done, the merchants of death won’t let a lack of cash get in the way.

My point is, that money is a substitute for honest bookkeeping. In a straight barter deal, there’s no bookkeeping. To facilitate multiparty exchange, though, you need a market, and for a market to function smoothly, you need a unit of value for the purely mathematical purpose of reducing all transactions, literally, to a single common denominator. I know I went over your head there if you flunked third grade math, but if so, it’s time to hit the books, because you’ve been getting shafted since you let your buddies count the popsicle money. The common denominator, that unit, has had a lot of names – usually going back to a word for “weight.” A “peso,” literally means a “weight” of silver or gold. A “dollar” is a word for “tollar,” meaning a unit of ten weights. If you buy hash or opium in India, they will still sell you a “tollar,” which is ten grams. Gold was perfect. When you weren’t using it to trade, you could hang it on your woman or your slave. But money became popular. Why? Because people cheat.

The King dealt with cheating like this – he said – I’m going to make a coin, and stamp my royal symbol on it. This coin will be made of pure gold, silver or copper, and it will be marked on both sides with my symbol, so you can’t shave off a piece of it and pass it off as a complete coin. It will be of a regulation size, so if it’s any smaller than that, it’s not a real coin, or it’s been shaved. And to be sure that it’s made of real gold, it will be of a specified weight. If it looks like a gold coin, but it’s not the right weight, it’s counterfeit. And if you counterfeit my money, I will cut your hand off, or hang you, or both. These were ways of preventing cheats from screwing with the all-important fulcrum of exchange – a true, unchanging common denominator. The King didn’t know it, but he was relying on the absolute, unchangeable and unique atomic weights of pure metals, something that has to do with their atomic structure, to prevent counterfeiting. That is a very good hedge against cheating.

As you can see, when you have gold in circulation this way, it’s always available to be melted down and turned into jewelry. Or if you had jewelry, and you wanted money for it, you could give it to the King’s mint, and he would give you back money stamped with the King’s head.

And it is absolutely true what the gold bugs say, that when the French financiers created paper money, it was the beginning of widespread financial fraud. Since then, the workingperson has had to deal with the value of their money going up or down based on the scams of financiers who have sharper pencils and bigger record books, and who now use computers to pyramid deals that completely undermine the reliable value of that common denominator that is the basis of all exchange. We will never return to gold as a standard of value, but it would behoove us to adopt stern rules to enforce honest bookkeeping. I’m not saying cut off hands, or hang people, but how about a little waterboarding? I hear the CIA waterboarded Al Zubaydah 183 times, and as a result, he provided a lot of useful information. If we waterboarded bankers, they might be able to tell us how all that “wealth” they “created” just happened to disappear. And that would be really useful.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Oct 14, 2013 9:57 am

TORTURE, WITCHCRAFT, ALTERNATE REALITY & THE REAL PNAC, by Charles Carreon

04/27/09



We are now face to face with the reality that US intelligence agents and hired brutes tortured hundreds of people, and fed an epidemic of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know that they were armed with legal authorizations signed by a President who thought he had been chosen by God to fight a Holy War, encouraged by lawyers who deliberately misinterpreted the Constitution in order to turn our country into a place that Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini would have been comfortable running.

If there were torture trials, the torturers would defend themselves the same way the German Nazis did at Nuremberg, by saying they were just following orders, and that somehow, they had managed to believe that it was all justified in the name of defending the United States of America. The fact that Obama would basically say, in advance, that he would grant them that defense, should be enough to make it clear that the current President is not exactly an idealist or a believer in justice as a value that supersedes all others. But that’s for another video. Let’s stick with the theme of torture, witchcraft, alternate reality and the Project for the New American Century. We’ll start with torture.

If history tells us anything, it is that every nation can stray into it under the right stimulus. In recent history, Argentina lost 15,000 people to its dirty war. If we imagine the torture chamber, and how it works, you can imagine the unique, special sense of power it gives the torturer. Not to kill, not to extinguish the breath in a man or woman’s body, but to keep it alive, to take the flame of consciousness, and turn the victim’s own awareness into a blowtorch of agony. Life itself is the torturer’s vehicle. His visits are feared. At the sound of his steps, the victim trembles. Gradually or quickly, his whole psyche crumbles, becomes a reflection of the torturer’s godlike power.

Vampiristically, the torturer feasts upon the psychic remains of his victims, and feels himself almost immortal, standing on the other side of terror, agony, and despair, safe in the land of the comfortable, self-controlled, righteous.

That’s the subjective side of it. Don’t let them tell you that these guys hated doing it. No one had to do it. Those who did, did so willingly. But of course, they had their orders to fall back on. Orders to do what? To find the culprits? To unwind plots? To find terrorists? No, that’s not why. If you’ve been reading about this, you’ll know that the “extreme interrogation techniques” used by the CIA and their “contractors” were adopted from Chinese Communist techniques to induce false confessions. The US military had studied these techniques in order to find out how imprisoned American soldiers, held captive by North Korea, had been induced to sign false confessions and make apparently voluntary, but utterly false “confessions.” And the Bush Interrogators were also trying to prove a lie – the existence of a vast, worldwide terrorist threat.

Roll back the centuries to the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the witch trials, the days when this book, The Malleus Maleficarum, was the manual for witch prosecutors. Torture was said to be necessary for every witness, or at least the threat of it. Why? Because of course, there were no witches, and to get people to swear, under oath, that they and their neighbors were witches, torture was absolutely necessary. People just wouldn’t make up stuff like that unless they were tortured. But the mission of the Inquisition was not, theoretically, an evil one. The purpose was actually to prove the existence of the Devil, to give concrete evidence of what the Bible says.

An Inquisitor could actually make God’s vision manifest. What good were the Bible’s tales if no-one could testify to their truth? The Inquisitor, with hammer and tongs, could get the Witches, who knew the Devil directly, to admit their association. The horrific, and salacious tales of demonic sex could be explored in detail. Take a man, a man thought to be upright, a man thought to be faithful to his wife, stretch him on the rack, tie him to the dunking stool, put his foot in an iron boot and heat it over the coals, and then the would come vileness spilling out. He would admit to fornicating with a beautiful female demon, a succubus, night after night. Another witness, a pregnant farmgirl, would be trapped in more lies. The real father would take the stand to deny that he had sex with her. Under torture, she would at last admit to having had sex with a male demon, an incubus, at the Witch’s Sabbath, and thus had conceived the Devil’s spawn. It’s all here in the Malleus, written by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, who received their authorization from Pope Innocent who declared, in something called a “Papal Bull” the existence of an Alternate Reality that only heretics could disbelieve. Listen to this:

It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Tréves, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many.


This is a lot like a Presidential Finding on terrorism. It declares a state of emergency all over Europe, and it blames everything that’s going wrong on – Witches!

So it was with the US interrogators. They started from the assumption that Bush was right, and people who didn’t believe in a worldwide terrorist conspiracy to destroy America were heretics. For a few years after 911, most Americans, fortified with daily doses of Fox’s alternative vision of reality, agreed. But over the long term, in order to keep the United States in a state of terror, to feed military spending and keep on with that Project for the New American Century, they needed “evidence.” They hadn’t found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they hadn’t unraveled the 911 plot. The Bush alliance with the Saudis meant they couldn’t investigate in Saudi Arabia to find the real terror financiers behind the box-cutter gang. They needed to find evidence to support that Fox News alternate reality, and answer the important questions that Bush had planted in our minds: Why do they hate us? What are their plans? When will they strike again? With that information, they could claim to have captured real terrorists, people who were in league with the enemies of America.

But the plan went awry. The Afghan male is a tough nut to crack. Insult, injury, humiliation are like fertilizer to his character. They weren’t European farmers and shepherds, suddenly betrayed by their own companions. They were a different type of torture subject. The setting was different. In isolation, they found solidarity. In their Holy Book, they took refuge. They refused to eat. They refused to lie. They held their captors in contempt. Like mosquitoes trying to draw blood from a stone sculpture, the interrogators failed. And thank God it did, because we, the citizens of America, were the real targets of the Guantanamo project. Not only was it a place to train torturers who could be unleashed in this country, it was a testing ground for how we would tolerate the introduction of torture into our political life.

The plan, my friends, was for torture to leak upstream into our own nation. Think not, my friends, that the mission was to end in Guantanamo. Far from it. That was the pilot. The main show would run in Georgia, Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, places where prison camps and private contractors would be happy to spread the Gospel of Torture, and really get on with building their own alternative history, the real New American Century.
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