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18 Oct 2009 20:37
Corporate Supremacy and the Rape of a Human GirlBy Glenn W. SmithOctober 18, 2009 "FireDogLake" -- We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings.
This isn't science fiction. Just the other day 30 Republicans voted in the U.S. Senate to deny justice to a human victim of rape in order to protect the so-called sovereign rights of corporations.
I'm not much for slippery slope arguments, but when we're buried in mud at the bottom of a slope, it might be prudent to see what we slipped on. In this case, as Thom Hartmann and others have pointed out, it was a court reporter's memo attached to an obscure 1886 Supreme Court case. The memo summarized the court's alleged opinion that the 14th Amendment applied to corporations. Corporations were people, too.
The rape case of Jamie Leigh Jones was just a logical step forward in the long-standing Republican effort to lock Americans out of the nation's courthouses, an effort undertaken on behalf of corporate supremacy. A woman is gang-raped by her fellow employees at government contractor KBR. The company says her contract prohibits her from seeking justice in court.
Thirty Republican U.S. senators voted to safeguard corporations from lawsuits in rape cases. You read that right the first time. The amendment they voted against, by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, would withhold government contracts from corporations that block employees from going to court when raped or sexually assaulted on the job.
The case - and the vote - stirred a little outrage, but not enough.
Jones, of Houston, was drugged and gang raped while working in Baghdad for KBR/Halliburton. She was locked in a shipping container by the company and warned to keep quiet. She didn't keep quiet. Franken and Senate Democrats took up her cause.
The crimes of the rapists and their protectors in the Republican Party reveal "tort reform" as one of the great political cons in U.S. history. Tort reform is the not-missing link in the evolution of corporate supremacy and human inferiority.
The decades-long GOP campaign against civil justice was just part of the effort to place corporations above the law and corporatist elected officials out of the reach of voters. Republican voter suppression was another front in the war on popular democracy.
This is the populist issue of our time. Well, it was the populist issue of bygone times, too, but too damn few took up the cause and the GOP ran away with a victory built on fake field goals, double-reverses, stolen signals and rigged referees.
It sickens me that Republicans could generate faux-populist resentment of wealthy lawyers to seal the public out of the public sphere so corporatists could steal, maim and kill with impunity.
Also, too many progressive organizations stood idly by as the values at the core of democracy were attacked. Where were environmentalists, civil rights groups, women's groups, consumer associations, and campaign finance reformers when Republicans campaigned to give corporations greater legal rights than people? They were sealed away in their silos, their consciences eased by their single-mind focus on their particular issues. It didn't seem to matter to them that their ability to actually achieve anything was being undermined by the attack on democratic institutions and core American values.
Now that we have reached the point where Republicans can argue with a straight face that rape should be overlooked in favor of corporate protectionism maybe this will change.
I think American businesses are waking up to the excesses of the extremist assault on democracy. When all the courthouses are closed, they can't get their business-to-business contracts enforced.
I fear, though, that in many places progressives and their allies are stuck in old habits and personal grudge matches. Moderate business Democrats should finally understand that lawyers did not cause any of the policy problems they care most about: the collapse of public education, support for higher education, a safe environment, a predictable regulatory environment. Progressive advocacy groups should wake up, too. When the public is sealed out of courthouses and capitols, all their earnest work for the environment, civil rights and health care will come to nothing.
It is a sign of our moral confusion that we are forced to have a conversation about whether a woman who has been gang-raped can go to court against her assailants. It is altogether disagreeable that we have to have it with inhuman entities that want us to grant them legal superiority in laws meant for humans.
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UK to appeal order demanding publication of US torture docs
AFP
Prisoners on the way to Guantanamo Bay in Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO. Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions. AFP, October 18, 2009 UK to appeal order demanding publication of US torture docsBritain will appeal against a court ruling ordering it to publish secret US intelligence documents related to the alleged torture of a former Guantanamo Bay inmate, it said.Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 on suspicion of links to extremists and spent six-and-a-half years in US custody in Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.His lawyers are seeking the release of information they say will show that Britain knew he was being tortured during his time in US custody in Morocco, a claim which is strongly denied by officials here.Both Britain and the US spoke out against the ruling.Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he was "deeply disappointed" and warned the judgment could cause the United States to limit the information it shared with Britain in future."The government is deeply disappointed by the judgment handed down today by the High Court which concludes that a summary of US intelligence material should be put into the public domain against their wishes," Miliband said."We will be appealing in the strongest possible terms."Meanwhile, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: "We are not pleased", adding that Washington kept such information confidential "to protect our own citizens".
Mohamed was taken to the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in 2004 and released in February this year, the first detainee to be freed under US President Barack Obama, who has pledged to close the camp.
He himself says it is of vital importance that the material is released to back up his claims of having suffered "medieval" torture.
"The public needs to know what their government has been up to for the last seven years," Mohamed told the BBC.
"There's information in there, which I'm 99 percent sure, states that the US sub-contracted the UK government to do its dirty work."
Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, a legal rights charity acting for Mohamed, agreed.
"The judges have made clear what we have said all along -- it is irrational to pretend that evidence of torture should be classified as a threat to national security," he said.
"All along, the government has been trying to conflate national security with national embarrassment, nothing more, nothing less."
Mohamed was suspected of attending an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and of plotting to build a radioactive "dirty bomb", but was never charged.
Miliband said the "fundamental question" was not the information itself but the risks its publication posed to intelligence-sharing arrangements.
"I've very happy for the documents to be published -- but not by us, by the Americans," he told Sky News television.
In a statement responding to the court ruling, he added: "The US will not prejudice its own intelligence if it perceives that this intelligence may be disclosed at the order of a foreign court or otherwise.
"It remains my assessment that the consequence of the court's judgment today, if left unchallenged, will be a restriction on what is shared with us."
The US intelligence was contained in seven paragraphs that were edited out of a judgment about Mohamed last year at the British government's request, but judges John Thomas and David Lloyd Jones reversed this decision Friday.
"As the risk to national security, judged objectively on the evidence, is not a serious one, we should restore the redacted paragraphs to our first judgment" in August 2008, they said.
The ruling came the day after the head of Britain's MI5 security service, Jonathan Evans, defended working with foreign agencies while insisting Britain did not collude in torture.
He said his service had faced a "real dilemma" about working with some foreign agencies but "would have been derelict in our duty" if it had not, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Article nr. 59050 sent on 18-oct-2009 16:50 ECT
http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=59050
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