Balkanizing Business Via "Religious Freedom" - The Best Way To Destroy the Nation's Economy

Denver 850 KOA talk show host Ross Kaminsky is like too many millions of other lamebrains who just don't grasp the reasons why it would be sheer madness to balkanize American business and allow every religious business owner to run amuck - deciding which customers they will serve or not. Writing in the Sunday, April 5th Denver Post ('Do Liberals Really Care About Rights?') this asshole shows he really has no clue what rights mean or how they exist in the context of the Constitution, and especially in the private enterprise domain..

Kaminsky spends most of the first part of his op-column bellyaching how "the American left, their media allies and the gay rights movement" don't care about genuine rights because they haven't stood up for those of the wedding baker and photographers or pizza makers, who don't wish to serve gays".   But as usual, he has it all ass -backwards.

First, he mixes up free exercise of religion and freedom of association, with freedom to  trade and engage in commerce. No one told or educated this dummy that the two spheres cannot be connected in one to one correspondence, as I noted before. That is, if indeed one has received a license for public commercial trade all "freedom of association" goes out the window.  By the commerce laws of our land, including the commerce clause of our Constitution, the buyer is free to associate his business with any establishment BUT the establishment - as a cornerstone of business - cannot exclude buyers unless they display unbecoming conduct.  As I observed in my prior post on the Indiana RFRA:

The restaurateur or trader is afforded certain privileges (via licensing) to trade or provide services (such as food) in the public domain. Hence, his so called "freedom" is limited to do whatever he wants- and hence that can't include refusal of service unless there are extenuating circumstances, i.e. the customers enter drunk and disorderly. The trader doesn't have the latitude to refuse service on the basis of  skin color, the other person's own beliefs, sexual orientation, pro-choice stance or nationality.

This is also why American businesses like Apple, Starbucks have come out against this nonsense as well as the Indiana Chamber of Commerce in that state. Because they know the chaos that'd be wrought otherwise.  As salon.com author Jeffrey Tayler put it recently:

"Given that RFRAs don’t specify to which religion they pertain, if they do legalize discrimination, they will do so ecumenically, offering adherents of all denominations a chance to bully both rationalists and believers of other cults. "

Which is why the door would open to balkanized chaos. Pharmacies could refuse serving people they regarded as 'sinners'  - say denying birth control pills to young, single women or couples that they knew were living together but unmarried. Owners of home improvement stores could decide that they want no Jews around because after all, they "killed our Savior".   Orthodox Jews could even decide they no longer wish to serve the "unorthodox" and Catholics might decide they no longer wish to serve Protestants.  Private hospitals -operating as businesses - might decide that they will serve the needs of no declared atheists, or  known pro-choice folks or gays on their premises either. Restaurants would feel free to bar anyone who might wish to celebrate a known pagan festival at their venues.

What's wrong with this picture? If you can't see it, there's no point me trying to clarify it for you. And if you can't understand that the model of "everyone going to his own people to conduct business"  is a non-starter you have no business reading this blog. You need to stick to comic strips!   As Tayler humorously put it:

"Presumably followers of the Torah, say, could deny service to those who have performed any of thirty-nine types of activity forbidden on the Sabbath.  If so, beware — these include some pretty improbable things, like putting out fires, writing one’s name and erasing it, flaying a goat and separating threads.......Muslims, in turn, could deny service to Jews and Christians for having rejected the Prophet Muhammad"

Reductio ad absurdum, anyone? But you get the point - I hope. We'd have so much contretemps in trade and business practices that no uniform business basis or national -scale free enterprise would be feasible. It would be "I serve who I wish, when I wish and how". It is precisely for this reason Kaminsky ends up in a rabbit hole of unreason with no resolution because there can't be any. 

But this is why a free market implies total freedom on the part of choice for the buyer - not the seller! The seller is confined and limited not only by regulations (e.g. meat sellers can't vend month old rats with rabies and pass it off as veal) but by limits on his notions of free association. The latter may be fine for his garden parties but not with whom he does business, he must be open to ALL.

Second, Kaminsky makes the error of most right wingers by harping on "negative rights", e.g.

"Ours is uniquely a system of negative rights aimed at ensuring that Americans aren't subject to the whims of others"

Well, I guess unless  the whims emanate from a cartoon, tyrant deity in a magic book.  But the point is that a negative right implies that there are ‘x’ things the government can’t do to you, say take away your guns or deny you property ownership, disposal. By contrast, positive rights assert there are actual positive rights to which you are entitled, say under the Bill of Rights.

  Anyway, not content with his initial ignorant display he writes:

"Our constitution reiterates rights but does not grant them, rather it limits the power of government to infringe on them."

I will argue, however, that not only does a right to privacy certainly exist, but it underpins most other rights that inhere in the amendments to the Bill of Rights

For example, if the presumption to no right to privacy is valid, then the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights is meaningless. To restate that Amendment:

“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.”

But note, “secure in one’s person, house, papers, effects” implies PRIVACY! These are after all MY private papers, my private effects, my house, etc. If an inherent right to privacy was a myth then by all accounts being secure in one’s person, papers, effects wouldn’t matter. This is why in a fascist dictatorship “personal effects” don’t exist. “Personal papers” has no meaning. The state has full monopoly, de facto ownership on whatever the person possesses.

As to the limits on positive rights, Kaminsky clearly doesn't know where to look.  He, like other Reich nuts, needs to read Prof. Garry Wills (‘A Necessary Evil: A History Of American Distrust of Government’, Simon & Schuster, 1999).  The chapter ‘Constitutional Myths’(p. 108). Wills notes that citizens alone possess rights, which neither the states nor the federal government share. Both the latter retain powers and prerogatives, but not rights. Hence, the subtext is that rights can only accrue to human individuals. And these are POSITIVE rights.

Hence, the term "state's rights" is bogus, in error. States have prerogatives, not rights, because states exist as governmental entities not a persons-individuals.

Wills goes on: 

"The Ninth Amendment states that the people retain unenumerated rights”

 "The people:" here refers to flesh and blood citizens, not to a bunch of contractual abstractions (states), or to corporations. .As Wills emphasizes and underscores (ibid.):


“The states have no natural rights. Their powers are artificial, not natural – they are things made by contract.”

Do we truly want to invoke specious arguments on "religious freedom" or "free association" to fracture and balkanize our economy to the extent Jews only frequent Jewish stores, Catholics go to Catholic stores, Muslims go to their own stores, and atheists to atheist stores?  I would hope to hell not because, frankly - given the fragile condition our economy remains in - we can't afford that level of stupidity and short-sightedness to appease some magic man in the skies only given credence in magic books.

As Tayler aptly puts it:
.
"Such are the farcical dilemmas and rank absurdities with which religion threatens to swamp us if it infests our judicial system and trumps secular law, as any RFRA legalizing faith-based discrimination would do.  The ghastly morass to which RFRAs will one day probably lead speaks to nothing but the ahistorical ignorance of their drafters.  The Founding Fathers never meant for religion to play a role in our affairs of state.  If the First Amendment isn’t proof enough of this, doubters might check out other things they wrote."

Bingo!

61 % of 'Muricans Believe Snowden Should "Stand Trial". They Are Paper Patriots!

"America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat"- blogger writing on SmirkingChimp in July.


It boggles the rational mind to comprehend how a people who once valued liberty and had enough education to see through vapid PR, now can't tell their asses from holes in the ground. Such is the case as a new CBS poll has found 61 percent of Americans demand Edward Snowden stand trial, compared to 23 percent who believe Obama ought to grant him amnesty.

This follows on from an earlier (July) Washington Post- ABC News poll. According to the poll's finding:

"The American people, who once defended Edward Snowden’s leaks of sensitive intelligence information gathered by the U.S. government, are starting to turn against him."


If we take common sense for granted in this sampled population (and that is not a foregone conclusion by any means) then one would expect people who are reasonably educated to be aware that their privacy rights are bound up intimately with their 4th amendment rights - to be free of lawless search and seizure. As I noted in previous blogs to do with this issue, while the specific right to privacy isn’t specifically listed in the Constitution,  the Founders understood that as time went on new rights would emerge which they might not be able to think of (e.g. to health care), hence bundled these into the unenumerated rights under the 9th amendment..

We also expect them to be informed enough to grasp the extent of NSA's unconstitutional mass data collection. And hence to realize that if NSA can snatch their email address books, Google searches and content, web browsing histories, Twitter messages, and cell phone calls as well as all telephone call logs, they are in the condition described by Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, who described the NSA programs to the Guardian thusly:

"The Snowden revelations have made clear that there has been an intrusion on our right to privacy of unprecedented scope, yet the government is dismissing any complaints about our right to privacy as irrelevant."

Roth said that from a human rights perspective, one of the biggest missteps the US administration had committed was to insist that there was a difference between the content of private communication and "metadata" – information about where, when and between whom the communication takes place. This distinction was based on a 1979 court case from the pre-digital era, which Human Rights Watch described as "troglodyte".

Roth said: "I used to be a prosecutor – I used to put pen registers on people's phones, collecting the numbers that you dial – but I had to manually compile the numbers. It was very labor intensive, and hence self-limiting. Today, the computer can piece together your entire personal life in a matter of seconds."


Roth also went on to invoke the following analogy for  any recalcitrant or too forgiving (of the NSA)  goobers who can't grasp the extent to which they've been deprived of their privacy:

"Imagine the government putting a video camera in your bedroom and saying 'don't worry, the feed will only go into a government computer, which we won't look at unless we have reason to believe that wrongdoing is taking place'. Would you feel your privacy is being respected? Of course not. But that's exactly what the government is doing."


So really, Americans ought to be getting on their damned knees and THANKING Snowden for revealing what he has about the disgusting trampling of their 4th amendment rights.  To have 61% instead calling for a trial - which any person of even average intellect would understand to be rigged from the outset - is to demonstrate stupidity beyond all bounds. Worse, it evokes memories of the "good Germans" who after WWII had to be dragged into the concentration camps to be shown what they turned a blind eye to during Hitler's reign.

Recall also, for the memory deprived, that the Judges at the Nuremberg War Crime trial told all the Nazi defendants that "following orders" (or oaths) was NO excuse! They were obliged to follow a higher conscience and to disobey unlawful orders or oaths. THIS is exactly what Snowden did.

For those who shudder at giving him amnesty let me also provide another memory jog: The two terrorists who blew up a Cubana Airlines flight (over Barbados in Oct. 1976) Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch walked Scott free thanks to the two Bush presidents.  See e.g. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/042606.html

Excerpt:

"Not only did the first Bush administration free Bosch from jail a decade and a half ago, the second Bush administration has now pushed Venezuela’s extradition request for his alleged co-conspirator, Posada, onto the back burner."

This is one of the murderous rats, Luis Posada - taking 73 lives in the worst terror act in the hemisphere before 9/11


Can 'Muricans be so deaf, dumb, blind and stupid to accept this rat's ass fucker deserves amnesty or pardoning but not Snowden? Then these Americans don't deserve liberty! They deserve to be tossed into some damned Gulag - for their gross stupidity if nothing else.

When the interviewer asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded,

“In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

And this turd gets a pardon??!

So hear me out - IF two TERRORISTS can be given relative freedom by the 2 Bush presidents, then Obama can sure as shit pardon Ed Snowden for fulfilling the duty of a real citizen and whistle blowing on government transgressions of the Constitution! See also:
: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/51088/restore-honor-and-pardon-edward-snowden

I am hoping to learn that this poll was in some way bogus or defective in sampling technique. I refuse to believe so many MORONS can live in this country and call themselves Americans!

See also:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/23/nsa-barack-obama-phone-data-collection-illegal-privacy-board

Keith Alexander's Read The Constitution? Yeah, Right - And I've Seen Pigs Fly & Aliens Land!

At the so-called “Black Hat” (didn’t hear too many of them) Hacker convention in Las Vegas, in reply to some hecklers (“Read the Constitution!”) Gen. Keith B. Alexander insisted: “I did read it and so should you!”  At that point cheers erupted and one had to wonder what kind of crowd had really assembled as hackers – and how many were NSA plants. (Did the NSA scoop up emails indicating hecklers would appear? Hmmmm…..)

But the bottom line is that in light of the latest revelations on the NSA’s “XKeyscore” program – which according to files released by the UK Guardian:

  “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.”

If Alexander HAD read the Constitution as he claims, there’d definitely be NO XKeyscore! Thus, since he definitely missed the memo on the Fourth Amendment, I cite it here for his educational benefit:

“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.”

Note here, Gen. Alexander, that “secure in ONE’S person, papers, house, effects” implies privacy first and is 180 degrees contrary to indiscriminate. mass scooping of data without SPECIFIC warrants, issued according to specific  NAMES from a proper FISA court  (which vanished after the 1978 FISA law was re-done to comply with the Bush lawbreakers – so don’t hand me any BS about what congress did or didn’t do).  All such specific warrants, because they are specific – pertaining to particular house, particular papers, etc. must be issued per person. It can’t be via a mass assembly,  techno-engineered  “gobble up” – done by volume and without naming specific persons or reasons, or as one Guardian commenter put it: “The NSA would have us believe that it is right for them to have all our private information on hand 'just in case' we turn out to be criminals or terrorists”

But “just in case,  to catch 'em later”-   doesn’t cut it (apart from the fact all citizens are to be presumed innocent under our so-called legal system)  The whole frickin’ idea of the 4^th amendment was to make it difficult for government to barge into citizens’  personal belongings, homes and papers, effects – knowing that this presented the very thing the colonists who launched the American Revolution were trying to get away from.  

This is also why in a fascist dictatorship,. “personal effects” or “personal papers” have no meaning. The state, via tyrannical laws (i.e. the Enabling Act and Reich Laws in Nazi Germany) declares it has monopoly powers over every and anything that conceivably can affect the state. The latest excuse (in Nazi Germany it was “Jews”) is “Terrorists”.. They are the new boogey men, like “commies’ were in the 50s-60s.

In this milieu of the faceless total security state,  the citizen can have no privacy in his papers, effects or home whatsoever, because in the mind of the totalitarian paranoid: “What might he or she be concealing that affects the security of the state?” In this guise the state trumpets “security” which supersedes individual privacy and civil rights. The state can then seize anything, any papers or assorted effects it deems problematic, on the mere suspicion that they might compromise the state’s total hegemony. The fact the state has the capacity (technologically)  to do such, is also interpreted by the state as a license and necessity to do it – to preserve “safety”. ("How can we possibly forego such technology in our hands? For 4th amendment rights? Y'er kidding!")

Without the fundamental right of privacy enshrined in the 4^th amendment, “personal papers, effects” have no meaning and  hence the 4th amendment is meaningless and I say by extension so is the entire constitution. It is clear to me from Alexander’s statement that he either regards the 4^th amendment as a quaint anachronism – inhibiting his NSA from their super scoop operations, OR he regards that section of the Constitution as inapplicable. But if he does, then by extension he must regard the whole Constitution as “just a piece of paper” – because none of the other fine statements, proclamations  mean a damned thing without the basic right to privacy enshrined in the 4^th amendment. What you have then is a kind of Potemkin constitution, a Potemkin nation and clearly, Potemkin Patriots.

Prof. Garry Wills has noted in his landmark book, A Necessary Evil-A History Of American Distrust Of Government, Simon & Schuster, 1999,', makes it abundantly clear why only the citizen has rights, not the government. He observes (p. 109):

“The Ninth Amendment talks of 'rights enumerated' and says 'the people' retain unenumerated ones. The rights in the Ninth are not the rights of the state, which can- strictly speaking - have no rights.


"Governments have prerogatives, people have rights - so Hamilton speaks of 'abridgments of prerogative' in the state to protect rights of citizens. What the Ninth says is that the rights enumerated as protected by The Constitution do not exhaust all rights inherent in a people. The states can retain powers, though not rights."

Hence, the term "state's rights" is bogus, in error. States (including the federal state) have prerogatives, not rights, because states exist as governmental entities not as persons-individuals.  It follows that the people then also have the unenumerated right to privacy. While said right isn’t specifically listed in the Constitution the Founders understood that as time went on new rights would emerge which they might not be able to think of (e.g. to health care). In terms of privacy, however, it is clear the language of the 4th amendment shows that privacy is presumed hence the Founders saw no need to elaborate it as a separate right.

We must conclude then that the the NSA, government mass surveillance as evidenced in PRISM and XKeyscore- with their de facto mass warrants (and specious courts that knee-jerk approved such), discloses a rejection not only of citizens’ fundamental right to privacy but any right to be secure in one’s person, papers, effects. So, screw the citizen, the gov’t has arrogated to itself the right to seize anything deemed personal or private once it’s within its purview – whether a phone record, an internet communication, email or whatever. And do it even in real time.

I think not only Gen. Alexander, but his entire outfit needs to read the Constitution again, particularly the Fourth Amendment (maybe write it all out 100 times as our elementary teachers made us do when we didn’t grasp a point.) Oh, and all those yahoos at the “Black Hat” Vegas convention that cheered at Alexander’s snarky riposte to the heckler? THEY need to do the same exercise!

 

See also the related Guardian story:

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data