"The way prosecutorial power is wielded separates real democracies from banana republics." --Scott Horton
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c5005f31-237e-4f9d-bca1-891c7aa2b7b2But there are a number of other criteria: Unelected presidents. Torture. Detention without trial. The uber-rich making out like bandits. Looting of the federal treasury. Militarism. Secrecy. Poverty of the many. Lies and propaganda. Corruption of every kind. Blackmail, bribes, cronysim, theft of resources. Unjust war. Brutal police and prison system. FEAR.
You name it.
It's not just use of the justice system to prosecute the opposition for petty shit that is ROUTINE behavior, on a much LARGER SCALE, by the fascist rulers. It's everything. All the signs are here. We ARE the biggest "banana republic" on earth. It has been done.
Horton advances this notion rather tepidly, it seems to me. WHAT. DO. YOU. EXPECT, in the justice system, when everything else has gone bananas?
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Interesting little tidbit about the USAID and the DC Madam case:
The Bushites had no interest in prosecuting the johns in that case, including "a former high-ranking Bush Administration official (Randall Tobias, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development)...".
GUESS WHAT the Bushites have been using USAID funds FOR? To support fascist coups and to destabilize and topple democratic governments in the oil rich countries of South America--Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina--in order to CREATE "banana republics" there, once again, to regain global corporate predator control of the oil fields, and also to foster slave labor markets.
While creating a big "banana republic" here--by, among other things, ignoring Republican bonging of whores, and prosecuting Democrats--one of those same Republicans was funneling USAID money to the military dictators and "presidents for life" that they want to install in South America! And not only that, they are ALSO using USAID and NED money, and covert budgets, to run a slander campaign AGAINST South American leaders who were actually elected, and actually represent their people, and run scrupulously lawful, beneficial governments (i.e., "Chavez, the dictator)!
It boggles the mind. And, concurrent with that, they lard $5 billion of our tax dollars in military aid to the WORST government in the hemisphere--Colombia---where they chainsaw union leaders and throw their body parts into mass graves, and have slaughtered thousands of political leftists, peasant farmers, human rights workers and journalists.
So, this ain't no innocent shit we're talking about here--powerful guys in government hiring prostitutes. These "immune from prosecution" Republicans are aiding and abetting horrors on behalf of the Bush regime and its global corporate predator puppetmasters.
Which brings me to my last point: It's really, really important for us to understand WHO is behind the fascist coup that we are suffering. It is NOT just a bunch of traitorous Bushite Republicans. It is the free-floating country of global predator corporations and their international financial institutions that are ripping our country to shreds. They now control all the levers of our government, and have created a vast spying network--unprecedented in human history--to oppress us with, and a vast police state with which to enforce their will upon us, and have deliberately drained our treasury, destroyed our "common good" services and regulations, and shredded our Constitution, to disable the potentially most progressive force on earth--the American people. This is not an INTERNAL coup. This is an EXTERNAL war on the American people and our democracy--most of whose agents have placed themselves beyond our reach, in multinational corporations, now fat beyond belief with the profits of our hard-earned labor and our hundred years of infrastructure development and good government, and some of whom have done so recently--as with Halliburton moving its headquarters to the United Arab Emirates--one of the most hideous and oppressive governments on earth. They even tried to sell our port facilities to those sheiks!
And they've gotten control of our voting system--now run on electronic machines with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls--as the final barricade to reform--in ADDITION to the five, rightwing multi-billionaire CEOs who control all news and opinion--and all imagery--in the country.
And I don't know how we deal with the leaders in our own party who have let all this happen. I only know that they are not going to help us. And we have to start with the voting machines!
Elliot Spitzer was an enthusiastic player in the police state system that brought him down. It is difficult to sympathize with him--even though it appears that he was a better man than the fascist bastards who went after him. But if he were really a friend of the people, he would turn on this police state system like a tiger, and seek an END to the prosecution of petty non-violent crimes, and our brutal prison system filled with 75% non-violent offenders--all poor--while war criminals and master thieves go free, and global corporate predators destroy us. If he would end the war on drugs, and end the war on prostitutes, and end the war on the poor, he would get my vote. I care nothing at all that he broke this petty law. Nothing! His private life is none of my business. And the law he is alleged to have broken should not be a law. Laws like this are just fascist tools, DESIGNED not to end vice, but to USE vice to oppress and impoverish and destroy.
In my dreams, I know. But that's what he should do. Turn it around, and go after these fuckers and their police state.