America
Is No More
By Paul Craig Roberts
19 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Naïve
Americans who think they live in a free society should watch
this video filmed by students at a John Kerry speech September
17, Constitution Day, at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
At the conclusion of Kerry’s
speech, Andrew Meyer, a 21-year old journalism student was selected
by Senator Kerry to ask a question. Meyer held up a copy of BBC investigative
reporter Greg Palast’s book, Armed Madhouse, and asked if Kerry
was aware that Palast’s investigations determined that Kerry had
actually won the election. Why, Meyer asked, had Kerry conceded the
election so quickly when there were so many obvious examples of vote
fraud? Why, Meyer, went on to ask, was Kerry refusing to consider Bush’s
impeachment when Bush was about to initiate another act of military
aggression, this time against Iran?
At this point the public’s
protectors—the police—decided that Meyer had said too much.
They grabbed Meyer and began dragging him off. Meyer said repeatedly,
“I have done nothing wrong,” which under our laws he had
not. He threatened no one and assaulted no one.
But the police decided that
Meyer, an American citizen, had no right to free speech and no constitutional
protection. They threw him to the floor and tasered him right in front
of Senator Kerry and the large student audience, who captured on video
the unquestionable act of police brutality. Meyer was carted off and
jailed on a phony charge of “disrupting a public event.”
The question we should all
ask is why did a United States Senator just stand there while Gestapo
goons violated the constitutional rights of a student participating
in a public event, brutalized him in full view of everyone, and then
took him off to jail on phony charges?
Kerry’s meekness not
only in the face of electoral fraud, not only in the face of Bush’s
wars that are crimes under the Nuremberg standard, but also in the face
of police goons trampling the constitutional rights of American citizens
makes it completely clear that he was not fit to be president, and he
is not fit to be a US senator.
Usually when police violate
constitutional rights and commit acts of police brutality they do it
when they believe no one is watching, not in front of a large audience.
Clearly, the police have become more audacious in their abuse of rights
and citizens. What explains the new fearlessness of police to violate
rights and brutalize citizens without cause?
The answer is that police,
most of whom have authoritarian personalities, have seen that constitutional
rights are no longer protected. President Bush does not protect our
constitutional rights. Neither does Vice President Cheney, nor the Attorney
General, nor the US Congress. Just as Kerry allowed Meyer’s rights
to be tasered out of him, Congress has enabled Bush to strip people,
including American citizens, of constitutional protection and incarcerate
them without presenting evidence.
How long before Kerry himself
or some other senator will be dragged from his podium and tasered?
The Bush Republicans with
complicit Democrats have essentially brought government accountability
to an end in the US. The US government has 80,000 people, including
ordinary American citizens, on its “no-fly list.” No one
knows why they are on the list, and no one on the list can find out
how to get off it. An unaccountable act by the Bush administration put
them there.
Airport Security harasses
and abuses people who do not fit any known definition of terrorist.
Nalini Ghuman, a British-born citizen and music professor at Mills College
in California was met on her return from a trip to England by armed
guards at the airplane door and escorted away. A Gestapo goon squad
tore up her US visa, defaced her British passport, body searched her,
and told her she could leave immediately for England or be sent to a
detention center.
Professor Ghuman, an Oxford
University graduate with a Ph.D. from the University of California at
Berkeley, says she feels like the character in Kafka’s book, The
Trial. “I don’t know why it’s happened, what I’m
accused of. There’s no opportunity to defend myself. One is just
completely powerless.” Over one year later there is still no answer.
The Bush Republicans and
their Democratic toadies have, in the name of “security,”
made all of us powerless. While Senator John Kerry and his Democratic
colleagues stand silently, the Bush administration has stolen our country
from us and turned us into subjects.
Paul Craig Roberts
was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration.
He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of
Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown:
Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton
of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats
Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
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