The CIA Must Tell the Truth About My Rendition At 12 Years Old

Khadija al-Saadi

This week, the Senate Intelligence Committee is fighting the White House and the CIA over pre-publication redactions made to a Congressional report on the agency's use of torture and rendition. This debate is very personal for Khadija al-Saadi, who at 12 years old was rendered from Hong Kong to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004.

Her father, an opponent of Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was the main target of the operation. The family accepted a settlement from the British government in 2012 for its involvement.

Here is her story, provided to Gawker by Reprieve, an international human rights NGO.

Two very different flights landed at Mitiga military airport in Libya just over a decade ago. The first was organized by the CIA and MI6. On board were a family of six surrounded by guards, the frightened children separated from their parents, the father chained to a seat in a rear compartment with a needle stuck in his arm. The second flight, only a couple of days later, carried Tony Blair in comfort, on his way to shake hands and do business with Colonel Gaddafi.

I know about the first flight, because I was one of the children. I know about the chains and the needle because Sami al-Saadi—a long-time political opponent of Colonel Gaddafi—is my father and I saw him in that state. I was 12 years old, and was trying to keep my younger brothers and my six year-old sister calm. The guards took us to see our mother once on the 16-hour flight. She was crying, and told us that we were being taken to Gaddafi's Libya. Shortly before the plane landed, a guard told me to say goodbye to my father, at the front of the plane. I forced myself ahead and saw him with a needle in his arm. I remember guards laughing at me. Then I fainted.

We were taken off the plane and bundled into cars. Hoods were pulled over my parents' heads. Libyans forced my mother, sister and I into one car, my brothers and father another. The convoy drove to a secret prison outside Tripoli, where I was certain we were all going to be executed. All I knew about Libya at that time was that Colonel Gaddafi wanted to hurt my father, and that our family had always been moving from country to country to avoid being taken to him. Now we had been kidnapped, flown to Libya, and his people had us at their mercy.

Lying on the Oval Office desk, I'm told, is an official report about what happened to me and my family on that night all those years ago. Our story will be part of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on CIA rendition and interrogation. The only question is whether you will be able to read it, or whether it will be hidden under a smear of black ink.

Yet key evidence is available for anyone to read on the internet: a Libyan intelligence fax with my father's name and "rendition" scrawled over it; transmissions between the Libyans and the CIA organizing who would pay for the plane; faxes detailing the plane's landing requirements. They were found in an abandoned intelligence compound after Colonel Gaddafi fled Tripoli during the Libyan revolution.

I sometimes imagine President Obama reading the Senate report, and wonder whether he ever asks himself who the people named in the report really are. There are other people who have read my name in the report as well: the team of editors, holding their black marker pens and deciding which bits of the report to redact before it gets published. I wonder who will decide whether my name gets a black line drawn through it, and whether he or she will stop to think what that means.

My name is Khadija al-Saadi. I am a 23-year-old Libyan woman. I live in Libya's capital, Tripoli. I study in the humanities faculty of the Tripoli university, and I work in my spare time in a couple of local NGOs trying to improve living conditions in the city. I exist, and this is my story.

For years, I wasn't able to use my real name. That's partly why it's important for me to see it published in the Senate report. We were living in Harrow, a suburb of London, England. My father had fled from Libya, fearing what would happen to us all at Gaddafi's hands, and had been given leave to remain in the UK. Despite the appearance of safety, my father knew that the dictator's reach extended far in those days. So we used different names to try to reduce the risk of being found.

I vaguely remember Harrow. In my memory, it was always misty. I remember my room more vividly, full of children's games, and some of the friends I made at kindergarten.

But life on the run was hard. We had to move frequently, whenever my father grew worried that Gaddafi was catching up with us. I would suddenly find myself in another place, with another culture entirely. Most startling to me was arriving in China. This was a land where no one spoke a language I could understand. I remember the chaotic traffic in the early morning, with cars and motorbikes and bicycles and pedestrians weaving in and out of each other like bees in a hive. I remember the markets, where you could eat snake, dog and rat. And I remember the odd Chinese custom of giving water to guests, rather than the juice or coffee that was our traditional Arab way.

I always knew that I was of Arab origin. Even if our parents—frightened such a small detail might put us in danger—didn't allow us children to mention the name of the country, we also knew that we were from Libya and that we were fleeing from a dictator there because of our father's activities to oppose him. And as children always manage to do, we had all overheard stories of Gaddafi's crimes, and, most frighteningly, what would most likely happen if we ever fell into his hands.

Like my family had done a few days earlier, I imagine Tony Blair also left Mitiga airport in a convoy. I imagine his was rather grander, a celebration rather than a kidnap.

I've watched the videos of the meeting he attended with Colonel Gaddafi in the dictator's bedouin tent that day, and the stroll that the two leaders took together after lunch. I don't know whether the two of them discussed my family. At that same moment, I was in a cell in the secret prison, where we would stay for the next two and a half months. Every few days, the interrogators would show us to our father, putting him under awful emotional pressure.

I think it's likely that they did discuss us, because as we now know, we were back in Libya because of information handed over by British intelligence to their American and Libyan counterparts. Most people think the "deal in the desert" that Blair and Gaddafi struck that day was just about Libyan chemical weapons and British oil rights. For my family, it was personal: it was about my father being handed over to a dictator he had dared to oppose, to be beaten and nearly killed.

The time following our release was confusing. On the one hand, we were taken in by our grandfather and introduced to relatives we had never met. I had seen many of their faces in old photographs that I would occasionally catch my father looking at when we were abroad, but I knew none of their names. The realisation that I had a large family was wonderful, having lived by ourselves for so long. We were constantly worried about our father, and about what we knew Gaddafi's thugs were doing to him.

Life was not normal at all. Gaddafi's agents trailed us wherever we went. Our telephones were very evidently bugged. We were refused official papers or residency documents, and forbidden from travel. Men would come and demand to see my siblings and me at school, and interrogate us. At night, I was constantly frightened that Gaddafi's agents would burst into our house and rearrest us. Torturing family members was a well-known method of extracting information from political prisoners like my father at that time. We had been released, but we were still in a prison.

The freedom we felt after the revolution against Gaddafi was like cold water running through my veins.

My father had been released from jail one year before the uprising, but both he and my brother were rearrested as soon as the revolution gained momentum. Gaddafi's agents began to follow us again, and so our family decided to flee the city. We were smuggled by revolutionaries to the western coast, where we were put on a small rubber boat for the dangerous journey to Tunisia. Gaddafi's forces were firing at anything in the sea with anti-aircraft batteries. We could see the rounds coming, and heard them explode in the water beneath us.

Gaddafi's regime fled, and Tripoli fell. The revolutionaries broke open the prison where my father and brother were being held, and we all breathed freedom for the first time. I could feel it with every ounce of my being. They were the best days of my life.

My family is doing its best now to move on from everything that happened to us. I am at university studying the humanities. My brother Anas, aged 9 when we were rendered, is studying engineering. My brother Mustapha, aged 11 when we were rendered, is studying to be a doctor. Writers, engineers, doctors. We are the future of our country, and the future of this region.

That future, though, needs to be based on a full admission of what has taken place in the past. No one has ever explained to me who was to blame for what happened to my family. This is why I am so determined now to demand that President Obama reveals the whole truth in the Senate report into the CIA rendition programme. I am 23 now, and braver, and I want to see my name—and the names of all the other victims—in black and white in an official report.

I want to know which places were used for the rendition programme; I want to know how my family were kidnapped and moved around like cargo; I want to know who gave the orders at each level. If there are individuals who are uncomfortable about that, it is nothing compared to the feelings I experienced aged 12, speeding through Libya on the way to a secret prison.

Whenever I leave my house now, to go shopping with my family, or to walk around Tripoli's old central square, I see cartoons of Colonel Gaddafi painted on the walls. Sometimes he is drawn as a monkey, sometimes he is a rat, or a chicken, or a fly. He sits meeting with the devil, or peers dazed from a rubbish bin where a boot has kicked him. After the Libyan people had risen up and removed him from power, my father was carried out from one of his prisons, unable to walk. Other prisoners were not so lucky. Two of my uncles were killed in one of the prison massacres that Gaddafi's lieutenants oversaw.

In Libya now, we are trying our best to understand this past, in public, on our street walls. The British and American governments owe their public the same, by revealing exactly what went on during those dark years. Publishing a full, unredacted, version of the Senate report is the only way for us to move forward together and ensure that those years do not happen again.

I think the American people would expect nothing less of their government. These events took place. I am a witness. However many black lines President Obama or his editors try to draw over this report, the truth will not go away.

Naked Brooklyn woman dragged from apartment, left topless in hallway for minutes by NYPD officers

Denise Stewart, 48, opened her Brownsville apartment door to NYPD officers, who heard shouting coming from inside the home, police said. When Stewart, who was wearing only a towel, tried to close the door, cops yanked her into the hallway. Stewart and another daughter, Diamond Stewart, 20, were later charged with assault.

BY John Marzulli , Laura Dimon , Ginger Adams Otis

A Brooklyn grandmother who had just taken a shower was dragged from her apartment by about 12 cops who then stood by for more than two minutes while she was naked in the hallway, according to video that emerged Friday.

Denise Stewart was in her Brownsville apartment on July 13 when police — responding to a domestic disturbance call at the building — pounded on her door at 11:45 p.m. and demanded entry.

Stewart, 48, cracked the door wearing only a towel wrapped around her body and underpants — and was yanked into the hallway by cops over the screams of her family and neighbors.

The video shows a chaotic scene as a dozen or so male officers burst into Stewart’s apartment, while several others struggle to subdue and cuff the nearly naked woman in the hallway outside.

Stewart’s towel got lost in the scuffle, leaving the grandmother dressed only in underpants.

“Oxygen, get my oxygen,” the mother of four can be heard saying to the cops, as they propped her bare body against the wall.

A cop shouts, “OK, OK,” and darts out of the screen.

Neighbors videotaping from the stairwell started shouting as Stewart, who has severe asthma, fainted and fell to the floor.

Stills from a video show NYPD officers responding to a 911 call reporting a domestic disturbance in a Brownsville, Brooklyn, building. Cops pounded on the door and dragged Denise Stewart into the hall while she was wearing a towel, the video shows.

“Yo, her mother got asthma ...y’all wicked, y’all f------ wicked,” shouted one woman.

“Her asthma! Her asthma! Her asthma,” screamed another woman.

For approximately two minutes and 20 seconds, Stewart was bare-breasted in the hallway as additional police officers tramped up the stairs and through the hallway, glancing at her as they passed by.

When cops hauled Stewart’s two sons and two daughters out of the apartment and cuffed them, a female cop finally draped a white towel over Stewart’s exposed torso.

Reached at her home Friday, Stewart told the Daily News she was traumatized.

“It’s disgusting and embarrassing. I’ve been married 16 years. It took my husband 10 years to see my nakedness,” she said.

“I didn’t do nothing wrong,” she said, crying as she recounted the ordeal.

Denise Stewart stood bare-breasted in the hallway for more than two minutes.

The NYPD said they’d gotten a 911 call to the Kings Highway address but didn’t have an apartment number.

They heard shouts coming from Stewart’s apartment. When they knocked, she told them they had the wrong place and tried to shut the door, police said.

Stewart’s 12-year-old daughter had “visible injuries” to her face, cops said. She told officers her mother and older sister beat her with a belt, police said.

Family members tried to prevent them from arresting Stewart, who bit an officer’s finger during the struggle, police said.

Stewart's lawyer, Amy Rameau, said she was told by a Legal Aid attorney also assigned to the case that the 911 call came from a different apartment on an upper floor — and cops went to Stewart’s door by mistake.

Cops removed the 12-year-old from the apartment and say she refused to get into the police car and kicked the door. A police spokesman said the child kicked out one of the police van’s windows, with the broken glass cutting the chin of one of the cops. The cops were treated at local hospitals and released.

Denise Stewart was charged with assaulting a police officer, and — along with her oldest daughter, Diamond Stewart, 20, — resisting arrest, acting in a manner injurious to a child and criminal possession of a weapon.

Stewart’s son Kirkland Stewart, 24, was charged with resisting arrest. The 12-year-old was charged with assaulting a police officer, criminal mischief and criminal possession of a weapon.

Diamond Stewart’s 4-year-old son was also pepper sprayed, the family said.

“They manhandled (Stewart) and behaved in a deplorable manner,” Rameau said. “She feels completely mortified. This is about human dignity.”

The city’s Administration for Children’s Services was called to investigate but didn’t find any evidence of neglect, said Rameau.

“There were no injuries to the child as alleged in the complaint,” the lawyer said.

A police spokesman said the incident is under investigation by Internal Affairs.

Are there emotional no-go areas where logic dare not show its face?

by Richard Dawkins

Are there kingdoms of emotion where logic is taboo, dare not show its face, zones where reason is too intimidated to speak?

Moral philosophers make full use of the technique of thought experiment. In a hospital there are four dying men. Each could be saved by a transplant of a different organ, but no donors are available. In the hospital waiting room is a healthy man who, if we killed him, could provide the requisite organ to each dying patient, thereby saving four lives for the price of one. Is it morally right to kill the healthy man and harvest his organs?

Everyone says no, but the moral philosopher wants to discuss the question further. Why is it wrong? Is it because of Kant’s Principle: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” How do we justify Kant’s principle? Are there ever exceptions? Could we imagine a hypothetical scenario in which . . .

What if the dying men were Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein and Martin Luther King? Would it be then right to sacrifice a man who is homeless and friendless, dragged in from a ditch? And so on.

Two miners are trapped underground by an explosion. They could be saved, but it would cost a million dollars. That million could be spent on saving the lives of thousands of starving people. Could it ever be morally right to abandon the miners to their fate and spend the money on saving the thousands? Most of us would say no. Would you? Or do you think it is wrong even to raise such questions?

These dilemmas are uncomfortable. It is the business of moral philosophers to face up to the discomfort and teach their students to do the same. A friend, a professor of moral philosophy, told me he received hate-mail when he raised the hypothetical case of the miners. He also told me there are certain thought experiments that divide his students down the middle. Some students are capable of temporarily accepting a noxious hypothetical, to explore where it might lead. Others are so blinded by emotion that they cannot even contemplate the hypothetical. They simply stop up their ears and refuse to join the discussion.

“We all agree it isn’t true that some human races are genetically superior to others in intelligence. But let’s for a moment suspend disbelief and consider the consequences if it were true. Would it ever be right to discriminate in job hiring? Etcetera.” My friend sometimes poses this very question, and he tells me that about half the students are willing to entertain the hypothetical counterfactual and rationally discuss the consequences. The other half respond emotionally to the hypothetical, are too revolted to proceed and simply opt out of the conversation.

Could eugenics ever be justified? Could torture? A clock triggering a gigantic nuclear weapon hidden in a suitcase is ticking. A spy has been captured who knows where it is and how to disable it, but he refuses to speak. Is it morally right to torture him, or even his innocent children, to make him reveal the secret? What if the weapon were a doomsday machine that would blow up the whole world?

There are those whose love of reason allows them to enter such disagreeable hypothetical worlds and see where the discussion might lead. And there are those whose emotions prevent them from going anywhere near the conversation. Some of these will vilify and hurl vicious insults at anybody who is prepared to discuss such matters. Some will pursue active witch-hunts against moral philosophers for daring to consider obnoxious hypothetical thought experiments.

“A woman has an absolute right to do what she wants with her own body and that includes any foetus that it might contain. I don’t care if the foetus is fully conscious and writing poetry in the womb, the woman still has the right to abort it because it is her body and her choice.” Do we discuss the hypothetical intra-uterine poet, or does emotion simply close down the discussion, in either direction? Do we think the woman’s right is absolute, absolute, absolute – end of? Or do we think abortion is wrong, wrong, wrong; abortion is murder, no further discussion.?

“We agree that cannibalism is wrong. But if we don’t need to kill someone in order to eat them, can we discuss why it would be wrong? Why don’t we eat human road-kills? Yes, it would be horrible for the friends and relatives of the dead person, but suppose we hypothetically know that this person has no friends or relatives of any kind, why wouldn’t we eat him? Or is there a slippery slope that we should consider?” Do we proceed to discuss such questions rationally and logically with the professor of moral philosophy? Or do we throw an emotional fit and run screaming from the room?

I believe that, as non-religious rationalists, we should be prepared to discuss such questions using logic and reason. We shouldn’t compel people to enter into painful hypothetical discussions, but nor should we conduct witch-hunts against people who are prepared to do so. I fear that some of us may be erecting taboo zones, where emotion is king and where reason is not admitted; where reason, in some cases, is actively intimidated and dare not show its face. And I regret this. We get enough of that from the religious faithful. Wouldn’t it be a pity if we became seduced by a different sort of sacred, the sacred of the emotional taboo zone?

Moving from the hypothetical to the real, if you raise the question of female genital mutilation, you can guarantee that about half the responses you get will be of the form “What about male circumcision?” and this often seems calculated to derail the campaign against FGM and take the steam out of it. If you try and say “Yes yes, male infant circumcision may be bad but FGM is worse”, you will be stopped in your tracks. Both are violations of a defenceless child, you cannot discuss whether one is worse than the other. How dare you even think about ranking them?

When a show-business personality is convicted of pedophilia, is it right that you actually need courage to say something like this: “Did he penetratively rape children or did he just touch them with his hands? The latter is bad but I think the former is worse”? How dare you rank different kinds of pedophilia? They are all equally bad, equally terrible. What are you, some kind of closet pedophile yourself?

I have met the following reaction when discussing the vexed and terrible question of Israel/Palestine. Israeli friends have said to me things like, “We needed a Jewish state because, after the Holocaust, we realised that nobody else was going to look after us, we’d have to look after ourselves. Jews have been downtrodden for too long. From now on, we Jews are going to stand tall and take care of ourselves.” To which, on one occasion, I replied, “Yes, of course I sympathise with that, but can you explain why Palestinian Arabs should be the ones to pay for Hitler’s crimes? Why Palestine? You surely aren’t going to stoop to some kind of biblical justification for picking on that land rather than, say, Bavaria or Madagascar?” My friend earnestly said, “Richard, I think we had better just terminate this conversation.” I had blundered into another taboo zone, a sacred emotional sanctuary where discussion is forbidden. The emotions aroused by the Holocaust are so painful that we are not allowed even to discuss such questions. A friend will terminate the conversation rather than allow entry to the sanctuary of hurt emotion.

On Twitter during the current horrible events in Gaza, I wrote the following:
“The extent of the destruction in Gaza is obscene. Poor people. Poor people who have lost their homes, their relatives, everything.” I was immediately bitterly attacked by friends of Israel. But then I quoted Sam Harris to the effect that “Hamas publicly says they’d like to kill every Jew in the world” and I went on to raise Sam’s hypothetical question: What does that say about Hamas’s probable actions if positions were reversed and they had Israel’s military strength? Sam’s suggestion that this contrast might actually be demonstrating restraint on Israel’s part, unleashed a storm of furious accusations that he, and I, relished the bombing of Gaza’s children.

I also quoted Sam as saying “I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state.” So of course I, and Sam, got vituperative brickbats from Israel and from American Jewish interests. I summed up my position on the fence (linking to an interview with Christopher Hitchens) as follows: “It is reasonable to deplore both the original founding of the Jewish State of Israel & aspirations now to destroy it.” But I swiftly learned that emotion can be so powerful that reasonable discussion – looking at both sides of the question dispassionately – becomes impossible.

Apparently I didn’t learn swiftly enough – and I now turn to the other Twitter controversy in which I have been involved this week.

‘“Being raped by a stranger is bad. Being raped by a formerly trusted friend is worse.” If you think that hypothetical quotation is an endorsement of rape by strangers, go away and learn how to think.’

That was one way I put the hypothetical. It seemed to me entirely reasonable that the loss of trust, the disillusionment that a woman might feel if raped by a man whom she had thought to be a friend, might be even more horrible than violation by a stranger. I had previously put the opposite hypothetical, but drew an equivalent logical conclusion:

“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”

These two opposite hypothetical statements were both versions of the general case, which I also tweeted:

“X is bad. Y is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of X, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think properly.”

The point was a purely logical one: to judge something bad and something else very bad is not an endorsement of the lesser of two evils. Both are bad. I wasn’t making a point about which of the two was worse. I was merely asserting that to express an opinion one way or the other is not tantamount to approving the lesser evil.

Some people angrily failed to understand that it was a point of logic using a hypothetical quotation about rape. They thought it was an active judgment about which kind of rape was worse than which. Other people got the point of logic but attacked me, equally furiously, for choosing the emotionally loaded example of rape to illustrate it. To quote one blogger, prominent in the atheist movement, ‘What would have been wrong with, “Slapping someone’s face is bad, breaking their nose is worse”? Why need to use rape?’

Yes, I could have used the broken nose example. I accept that I must explain why I chose to use the particular example of rape. I was emphatically not trying to hurt rape victims or trivialise their awful experience. They get enough of that already from the “She was wearing a short skirt, I bet she was really begging for it Hur Hur Hur” brigade. So why did I choose rape as my unpleasant hypothetical (in both directions) rather than the “breaking someone’s nose” example? Here’s why.

I hope I have said enough above to justify my belief that rationalists like us should be free to follow moral philosophic questions without emotion swooping in to cut off all discussion, however hypothetical. I’ve listed cannibalism, trapped miners, transplant donors, aborted poets, circumcision, Israel and Palestine, all examples of no-go zones, taboo areas where reason may fear to tread because emotion is king. Broken noses are not in that taboo zone. Rape is. So is pedophilia. They should not be, in my opinion. Nor should anything else.

I didn’t know quite how deeply those two sensitive issues had infiltrated the taboo zone. I know now, with a vengeance. I really do care passionately about reason and logic. I think dispassionate logic and reason should not be banned from entering into discussion of cannibalism or trapped miners. And I was distressed to see that rape and pedophilia were also becoming taboo zones; no-go areas, off limits to reason and logic.

“Rape is rape is rape.” You cannot discuss whether one kind of rape (say by a ‘friend”) is worse than another kind of rape (say by a stranger). Rape is rape and you are not allowed even to contemplate the question of whether some rape is bad but other rape is worse. I don’t want to listen to this horrible discussion. The very idea of classifying some rapes as worse than others, whether it’s date rape or stranger rape, is unconscionable, unbearable, intolerable, beyond the pale, taboo. There is no allowable distinction between one kind of rape and another.

If that were really right, judges shouldn’t be allowed to impose harsher sentences for some rapes than for others. Do we really want our courts to impose a single mandatory sentence – a life sentence, perhaps – for all rapes regardless? To all rapes, from getting a woman drunk and taking advantage at one end of the spectrum, to holding a knife to her throat in a dark alley at the other? Do we really want our judges to ignore such distinctions when they pass sentence? I don’t, and I don’t think any reasonable person would if they thought it through. And yet that would seem to be the message of the agonisingly passionate tweets that I have been reading. The message seems to be, no, there is no spectrum, you are wicked, evil, a monster, to even ask whether there might be a spectrum.

I don’t think rationalists and sceptics should have taboo zones into which our reason, our logic, must not trespass. Hypothetical cannibalism of human road kills should be up for discussion (and rejection in my opinion – but let’s discuss it). Same for eugenics. Same for circumcision and FGM. And the question of whether there is a spectrum of rapes, from bad to worse to very very much worse, should also be up for discussion, no less than the spectrum from a slap in the face to a broken nose.

There would have been no point in my using the broken nose example to illustrate my logic, because nobody would ever accuse us of endorsing face-slapping when we say, “Broken nose is worse than slap in face”. The point is trivially obvious, as it is with the symbolic case of “X is worse than Y”. But I knew that not everybody would think it obvious in the special cases of rape and pedophilia, and that was precisely why I raised them for discussion. I didn’t care whether we chose to say date rape was worse than dark alley stranger rape, or vice versa. Nor was I unaware that it is a sensitive issue, as is pedophilia. I deliberately wanted to challenge the taboo against rational discussion of sensitive issues.

That, then, is why I chose rape and pedophilia for my hypothetical examples. I think rationalists should be free to discuss spectrums of nastiness, even if only to reject them. I had noticed indications that rape and pedophilia had moved out of the discussion zone into a no-go taboo area. I wanted to challenge the taboo, just as I want to challenge all taboos against free discussion.

Nothing should be off limits to discussion. No, let me amend that. If you think some things should be off limits, let’s sit down together and discuss that proposition itself. Let’s not just insult each other and cut off all discussion because we rationalists have somehow wandered into a land where emotion is king.

It is utterly deplorable that there are people, including in our atheist community, who suffer rape threats because of things they have said. And it is also deplorable that there are many people in the same atheist community who are literally afraid to think and speak freely, afraid to raise even hypothetical questions such as those I have mentioned in this article. They are afraid – and I promise you I am not exaggerating – of witch-hunts: hunts for latter day blasphemers by latter day Inquisitions and latter day incarnations of Orwell’s Thought Police.

Police chiefs call for presumed innocence in background checks

New voluntary guidelines call on police forces to keep mental health contacts and other non-conviction records confidential in most cases. Police chiefs are also calling on the province to bring in legislation on what police can and can’t disclose.

By: Robert Cribb

Police forces across Ontario are being told to stop disclosing unproven allegations, withdrawn charges and 911 mental health calls in background checks shared with employers, volunteer organizations and U.S. border officials.

The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP) issued the strong new recommendations Wednesday amid an ongoing Star investigation documenting how the professional and personal lives of innocent Ontarians have been undermined by routine disclosures of non-conviction records.

The voluntary guidelines call on forces that sign on to keep mental health police contacts and unproven charges confidential except under exceptional circumstances. OACP is also calling on the government of Ontario to introduce legislation that would compel all of the province’s 57 police forces to follow clear rules about what they can — and cannot — disclose.

“The only way to ensure mandatory compliance is with the creation of legislation,” said Paul Cormier, co-chair of the OACP subcommittee that created the new guidelines. “It’s a good question why we don’t have legislation. I don’t think it’s ever been contemplated.”

As it stands, records ranging from police surveillance notes to mental health incidents that never prompted a charge or conviction are making their way onto police background checks and the computer screens of U.S. border officials, the Star investigation has shown.

The fallout includes lost jobs and educational opportunities, inability for some people to enter the U.S. and roadblocks to volunteering with agencies that serve vulnerable Ontarians.

Until now, only about half the province’s police forces had signed on fully to the existing OACP guidelines, said Cormier.

It’s unclear how that compliance level will be affected by the strict new rules, he said.

“It’s tough to predict. It certainly is a change,” said Cormier, whose own police force in Waterloo has been releasing non-conviction records on police checks in accordance with OACP’s previous policy.

“I think community pressure will help. People have been calling on this for years.”

Several police forces contacted by the Star on Wednesday said they will be reviewing the new guidelines before making any decisions on whether to adopt them.

Spokespeople with Peel Regional Police and Hamilton police said they are in compliance with the new guidelines, and a spokesperson with York Regional Police said the force will be signing on.

The Toronto Police Service, which has been criticized by lawyers, privacy advocates and citizens for releasing non-conviction and mental health records, is reviewing the new rules, spokesman Mark Pugash said in an email response.

“I’m still hopeful that all police services will accept the update,” said Abby Deshman, director of the public safety program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. “I want this to work. But I wouldn’t be surprised if compliance levels for the new guidelines are lower than we currently have … We think strong direction from the province will be needed.”

Deshman has met with representatives of the new Liberal government in recent weeks and says they appear “very open to considering legislative or other provincewide solutions if this guideline doesn’t result in substantial compliance.”

Paula Osmok, executive director of the John Howard Society of Ontario, said the new guidelines, if adopted, will “greatly reduce the amount of stigma and discrimination Ontarians with non-conviction records face,” but Osmok echoed support for the creation of provincial legislation.

The Star investigation has triggered hundreds of calls and emails from innocent Canadians whose lives have been upended by non-conviction records.

Nancy Lucas, a 60-year-old Whitby resident, recently had her application to volunteer with a community organization rejected after the criminal background check she was required to produce included a withdrawn 1994 charge for “uttering threats.”

At the time, she was going through a stressful divorce and was suffering from depression that prompted hospitalization, she says.

The alleged threat happened during a phone conversation with her then husband of 17 years from a hospital pay phone after she says she learned from one of her children that his girlfriend was in their home.

Directly after leaving the hospital, she went with her lawyer to the Pickering police station, where she says she was strip-searched, fingerprinted, had her mug shot taken, was handcuffed and transported to the Oshawa police station.

Rather than go through the costly process of fighting the charge, she says she agreed to sign a peace bond and the charge was withdrawn.

After a career working with children in schools without incident, the 20-year-old charge came as a shock when it reappeared on her police background check this year.

“Needless to say, I did not get the volunteer position,” she said. “After living peacefully and lawfully in Canada, born and raised and making it to 60 years without so much as a parking ticket, I find it unfair, unjust and absolutely ridiculous that this incident appears on any document that can affect my day-to-day enjoyment of living and travelling.”

Lucas went to her local police station earlier this month to apply to have the charge removed.

“I was told it will take six months and there’s no guarantee. They could say no and you’ve got no recourse,” she said.

Jennifer Temple, a 58-year-old Welland resident, says her entire life and career have been affected by a 1985 charge police laid in order to ensure her testimony in court against her then husband.

After her testimony helped convict him on a break-and-enter charge, her own charge was quickly withdrawn.

But it has left a permanent scar on her record that ended her career as a residential counsellor and blocked her ability to earn a good living and volunteer in her community, she says.

“I am one of the very many who has had my working life consistently damaged by non-conviction records,” she said. “In a world where people are fighting for jobs, it really takes you out. I was simply not employable in my field.”

Temple has spent the past four decades self-employed. She worked as a painting contractor, and now runs a rare books business with her second husband.

“It has impacted what I’ll be eligible for under the Canada Pension Plan, having worked minimum wage for so long,” she added.

Last year Temple paid $600 to a company promising to help expunge past police records. A year later, she’s had no confirmation that her record has been cleared, and the company is telling her there’s no guarantee it will work.

“Someone who has been arrested, tried and convicted and received a pardon is much more likely to be able to get a job than those who are pure as the driven snow,” she said. “If you weren’t convicted, it’s impossible. Is that not obscene?”

Interaction with Salt Lake City police after officer shot dog

Police State Insanity! Cops Assault and Arrest This Man for Saying ‘Fuck’

Matt Agorist

 

(Wakeforest, N.C.) — A video uploaded to youtube Wednesday by Janell Gill, shows a man being arrested and tasered by the Wake Forest Police Department for allegedly saying the word “fuck.”
At the beginning of the video we can see that police are tasering him and claiming that he is ‘resisting.’



He is face down on the pavement, with 3 cops on top of him, with taser prongs in his back, while cops are twisting his arms into painful positions, and because he is not completely limp, they are calling it ‘resisting.’

Since the video doesn’t begin until after the man is on the ground, it could lead the viewer to assert that he could have done something else to be in this position, other than say ‘fuck.’ However, at the 2:00 mark, one of the arresting officers explains why he is arresting this man.

“Right now he’s being arrested for disorderly conduct…he’s cursing in the street…”

When the onlookers begin voicing their complaints to the officers, they are threatened with arrest as well.

“Stop cussing in the street or you’re going to jail too!”

Apparently Wake Forest Cops think that the First Amendment does is not applicable in this neighborhood.

Kudos to Mr. Gill for filming this incident and using such professionalism with the police.
If the Wake Forest Police Department is so concerned with the language of an individual  they should send a SWAT team south into Dalton, Georgia to arrest Officer John Gurrieri, who dropped the f-bomb several times, on a school bus, full of children.

Theater of the absurd in the American police state grows more tragic and incomprehensible

By John W. Whitehead

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Whether it’s the working mother arrested for letting her 9-year-old play unsupervised at a playground, the teenager forced to have his genitals photographed by police, the underage burglar sentenced to 23 years for shooting a retired police dog, or the 43-year-old man who died of a heart attack after being put in a chokehold by NYPD officers allegedly over the sale of untaxed cigarettes, the theater of the absurd that passes for life in the American police state grows more tragic and incomprehensible by the day.

Debra Harrell, a 46-year-old South Carolina working mother, was arrested, charged with abandonment and had her child placed in state custody after allowing the 9-year-old to spend unsupervised time at a neighborhood playground while the mom worked a shift at McDonald’s. Mind you, the child asked to play outside, was given a cell phone in case she needed to reach someone, and the park—a stone’s throw from the mom’s place of work—was overrun with kids enjoying its swings, splash pad, and shade.

A Connecticut mother was charged with leaving her 11-year-old daughter in the car unsupervised while she ran inside a store—despite the fact that the child asked to stay in the car and was not overheated or in distress. A few states away, a New Jersey man was arrested and charged with endangering the welfare of his children after leaving them in a car parked in a police station parking lot, windows rolled down, while he ran inside to pay a ticket.

A Virginia teenager was charged with violating the state’s sexting law after exchanging sexually provocative videos with his girlfriend. Instead of insisting that the matter be dealt with as a matter of parental concern, police charged the boy with manufacturing and distributing child pornography and issued a search warrant to “medically induce an erection” in the 17-year-old boy in order to photograph his erect penis and compare it to the images sent in the sexting exchange. The police had already taken an initial photograph of the boy’s penis against his will, upon his arrest.

In Georgia, a toddler had his face severely burned when a flash bang grenade, launched by a SWAT team during the course of a no-knock warrant, landed in his portable crib, detonating on his pillow. Also in Georgia, a police officer shot and killed a 17-year-old boy who answered the door, reportedly with a Nintendo Wii controller in his hands. The cop claimed the teenager pointed a gun at her, thereby justifying the use of deadly force. Then there was the incident wherein a police officer, responding to a complaint that some children were “chopping off tree limbs” creating “tripping hazards,”pulled a gun on a group of 11-year-old boys who were playing in a wooded area, attempting to build a tree fort.

While the growing phenomenon of cops shooting family pets only adds to the insanity (it is estimated that a family pet is killed by law enforcement every 98 minutes in America), it’s worse for those who dare to shoot a police dog. Ivins Rosier was 16 when he broke into the home of a Florida highway patrol officer and shot (although he didn’t kill) the man’s retired police dog. For his crime, the teenager was sentenced to 23 years in prison, all the while police officers who shoot family pets are rarely reprimanded.

Meanwhile if you’re one of those hoping to live off the grid, independent of city resources, you might want to think again. Florida resident Robin Speronis was threatened with eviction for living without utilities. Speronis was accused of violating the International Property Maintenance Code by relying on rain water instead of the city water system and solar panels instead of the electric grid.

Now we can shrug these incidents off as isolated injustices happening to “other” people. We can rationalize them away by suggesting that these people “must” have done something to warrant such treatment. Or we can acknowledge that this slide into totalitarianism—helped along by overcriminalization, government surveillance, militarized police, neighbors turning in neighbors, privatized prisons, and forced labor camps, to name just a few similarities—is tracking very closely with what we saw happening in Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.

When all is said and done, what these incidents reflect is a society that has become so bureaucratic, so legalistic, so politically correct, so militaristic, so locked down, so self righteous, and so willing to march in lockstep with the corporate-minded police state that any deviations from the norm—especially those that offend the sensibilities of the “government-knows-best” nanny state or challenge the powers that be—become grist for prosecution, persecution and endless tribulations for the poor souls who are caught in the crosshairs.

Then there are the incidents, less colorful perhaps but no less offensive to the sensibilities of any freedom-loving individual, which should arouse outrage among the populace but often slip under the radar of a sleeping nation.

For instance, not only is the NSA spying on and collecting the content of your communications, but it’s also going to extreme lengths to label as “extremists” anyone who attempts to protect their emails from the government’s prying eyes. Adding insult to injury, those same government employees and contractors spying on Americans’ private electronic communications are also ogling their private photos. Recent revelations indicate that NSA employees routinely pass around intercepted nude photos, considered a “fringe benefit” of surveillance positions.

A trove of leaked documents reveals the government’s unmitigated gall in labeling Americans as terrorists for little more than being suspected of committing “any act that is ‘dangerous’ to property and intended to influence government policy through intimidation.” As The Intercept reports: “This combination—a broad definition of what constitutes terrorism and a low threshold for designating someone a terrorist—opens the way to ensnaring innocent people in secret government dragnets.” All the while, the TSA, despite the billions of dollars we spend on the agency annually and the liberties to which its agents subject travelers, has yet to catch a single terrorist.

No less disconcerting are the rash of incidents in which undercover government agents encourage individuals to commit crimes they might not have engaged in otherwise. This “make work” entrapment scheme runs the gamut from terrorism to drugs. In fact, a recent report released by Human Rights Watch reveals that “nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the United States since 9/11 featured the ‘direct involvement’ of government agents or informants.”

Most outrageous of all are the asset forfeiture laws that empower law enforcement to rake in huge sums of money by confiscating cash, cars, and even homes based on little more than a suspicion of wrongdoing. In this way, Americans who haven’t been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of wrongdoing, are literally being subjected to highway robbery by government agents offering profit-driven, cash-for-freedom deals.

So who or what is to blame for this bureaucratic nightmare delivered by way of the police state? Is it the White House? Is it Congress? Is it the Department of Homeland Security, with its mobster mindset? Is it some shadowy, power-hungry entity operating off a nefarious plan?

Or is it, as Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt suggests, the sheepish masses who mindlessly march in lockstep with the government’s dictates—expressing no outrage, demanding no reform, and issuing no challenge to the status quo—who are to blame for the prison walls being erected around us? The author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt warned that “the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

This is where democracy falls to ruin, and bureaucracy and tyranny prevail.

As I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we have only ourselves to blame for this bureaucratic hell that has grown up around us. Too many of us willingly, knowingly and deliberately comprise what Arendt refers to as “cogs in the mass-murder machine.”

These cogs are none other than those of us who have turned a blind eye to the government corruption, or shrugged dismissively at the ongoing injustices, or tuned out the mayhem in favor of entertainment distractions. Just as guilty are those who have traded in their freedoms for a phantom promise of security, not to mention those who feed the machine unquestioningly with their tax dollars and partisan politics.

And then there are those who work for the government, federal, state, local or contractor. These government employees—the soldiers, the cops, the technicians, the social workers, etc.—are neither evil nor sadistic. They’re simply minions being paid to do a job, whether that job is to arrest you, spy on you, investigate you, crash through your door, etc. However, we would do well to remember that those who worked at the concentration camps and ferried the victims to the gas chambers were also just “doing their jobs.”

Then again, if we must blame anyone, blame the faceless, nameless, bureaucratic government machine—which having been erected and set into motion is nearly impossible to shut down—for the relentless erosion of our freedoms through a million laws, statutes, and prohibitions.

If there is any glimmer of hope to be found, it will be at the local level, but we cannot wait for things to get completely out of control. If you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.

Obedience is the precondition to totalitarianism, and the precondition to obedience is fear. Regimes of the past and present understand this. “The very first essential for success,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.” Is this not what we are seeing now with the SWAT teams and the security checkpoints and the endless wars?

This much I know: we are not faceless numbers. We are not cogs in the machine. We are not slaves. We are people, and free people at that. As the Founders understood, our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us, to be taken away at the will of the State; they are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.

Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind Americans what it really means to be a free American, and learn to stand our ground in the face of threats to those freedoms, and encourage our fellow citizens to stop being cogs in the machine, we will continue as slaves in thrall to the bureaucratic police state.

Constable Shoots and Paralyzes Man While Serving Warrant Over Unpaid Parking Tickets

Ed Krayewski

Imagine a company hiring a debt collector that sends armed representatives to customers’ homes and threatens to put them in cages if they don’t pay up. That’s not allowed in America, unless your company is the government. NBC Philadelphia reports on the latest instance of police brutality during petty law enforcement to make the news:

The [Pennsylvania state] constable [in Lehigh County] told the District Attorney he felt his life was in danger as he tried to serve 38-year-old Kevin McCullers.

McCullers, who had 31 outstanding parking tickets, was shot as he tried to back out of his driveway along the 3400 block of Portland Drive in Whitehall Township around 7:30 a.m. Thursday. His girlfriend says McCullers was on his way to Dunkin' Donuts and was surprised by the constable.

"They never knocked on the door! No nothing! I just heard the gunshots! He pulled the car out of the garage and all I heard were gunshots," said Hafeezah Muhammad, who added that McCullers, who was hit in the back, may not walk again. "For parking tickets?! It's insane."

Does Lehigh County or Pennsylvania need to hire constables to serve warrants over parking tickets?* Setting aside for a moment the ethical questions arising from government fining regimes, couldn’t local cops flag vehicles with an excessive number of parking tickets for towing? A lot of cops spend a lot of time running plates on shift anyway.

As to the ethical questions, Brian Doherty has written about how the fines attached to petty violations like jaywalking, suspended licenses, or marijuana in public view, and the fines attached to paying the initial fines late, helps the government trap lower income and marginalized people in a cycle of indebtedness and imprisonment. It happens on a daily basis, usually without the use of lethal force. So long as the policing priorities (like using the police as a revenue generator) that create situations where people are shot and paralyzed over their government debts remain unquestioned, incidents like this will keep happening.

*Pennsylvania State Constables are elected, per our unmatched commentariat.

Satanists want Hobby Lobby-style religious exemption from abortion counseling laws

The Satanic Temple wants the government to respect the Dark Lord when it comes to accessing abortion care

Katie McDonough

Remember how satanists are building a statue of a 19th century goat-man occult symbol to place outside the Oklahoma State Capitol because there is already a Ten Commandments monument on display? Well, those same satanists are now using the Supreme Court’s sweeping Hobby Lobby decision to challenge coercive mandatory counseling laws by requesting a religious exemption for satanists (and non-satanists).

“While we feel we have a strong case for an exemption regardless of the Hobby Lobby ruling, the Supreme Court has decided that religious beliefs are so sacrosanct that they can even trump scientific fact,” Satanic Temple spokesperson Lucian Greaves said in a Monday statement. ”This was made clear when they allowed Hobby Lobby to claim certain contraceptives were abortifacients, when in fact they are not. Because of the respect the Court has given to religious beliefs, and the fact that our our beliefs are based on best available knowledge, we expect that our belief in the illegitimacy of state­ mandated ‘informational’ material is enough to exempt us, and those who hold our beliefs, from having to receive them.”

The claim here is not quite as apples-to-apples as the Ten Commandments/goat-man hybrid statue, but you can easily follow their thinking. The Hobby Lobby decision granted 90 percent of the corporations in the United States a kind of religious personhood under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. So now the government can’t require Hobby Lobby or any corporation to include comprehensive contraceptive coverage in its employer health plan if that coverage violates the corporation’s religious beliefs.

Because medicine and scientific fact are the tenets of satanists’ faith, then medically inaccurate and coercive counseling laws present a substantial burden, according to Greaves. This is pretty much what Ruth Bader Ginsburg was talking about in her dissent when she said the justices had “ventured into a minefield.” It just so happens that these are satanists making a faith claim under the legal precedent, and not, you know, a company that produces soy milk and hates birth control. But it’s the same idea.

According to data from the Guttmacher Institute, 35 states require people seeking abortion care to undergo counseling before they can have the procedure. In South Dakota, a state-mandated script forces doctors to tell patients that having an abortion will lead to an “increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide,” based on a refuted but often-cited study linking abortion care to mental health problems. According to the same script, the procedure “will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being.” (In addition to providing patients with inaccurate information, the mandatory counseling session is another way states can force people seeking care to make multiple trips to the clinic, adding a time and cost burden to the procedure that can make it harder to access. But since “don’t waste my time” is not yet a tenet of any religious faith, those burdens may not apply in the satanists’ claim.)

As Greaves notes, the Satanic Temple isn’t the first organization to challenge the mandatory counseling laws, but it is the first to do so as a matter of faith. Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights groups challenged much of the South Dakota “informed consent” script, and succeeded in getting certain portions of it — including false medical claims — invalidated. But other parts of the script that doctors must read, like the line about “the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being” and the suicide ideation stand because other courts — including the Supreme Court – have made it clear that states are allowed to restrict access to abortion based on really dubious claims.

The Satanic Temple has provided a pre-written letter that people can present to their doctors in an attempt to be exempted from mandatory counseling. So while doctors in South Dakota and elsewhere in the country read patients their state-mandated script, patients can now come back with a satan-mandated rebuttal:

I regard any information required by state statute to be communicated or offered to me as a precondition for an abortion (separate and apart from any other medical procedure) is based on politics and not science (“Political Information”). I regard Political Information as a state sanctioned attempt to discourage abortion by compelling my consideration of the current and future condition of my fetal or embryonic tissue separate and apart from my body. I do not regard Political Information to be scientifically true or accurate or even relevant to my medical decisions. The communication of Political Information to me imposes an unwanted and substantial burden on my religious beliefs.

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats

By NICK HANAUER

Memo: From Nick Hanauer
To: My Fellow Zillionaires

You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about. In 1992, I was selling pillows made by my family’s business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then, that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed. I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough—and that time wasn’t far off—people were going to shop online like crazy. Goodbye, Caldor. And Filene’s. And Borders. And on and on.

Realizing that, seeing over the horizon a little faster than the next guy, was the strategic part of my success. The lucky part was that I had two friends, both immensely talented, who also saw a lot of potential in the web. One was a guy you’ve probably never heard of named Jeff Tauber, and the other was a fellow named Jeff Bezos. I was so excited by the potential of the web that I told both Jeffs that I wanted to invest in whatever they launched, big time. It just happened that the second Jeff—Bezos—called me back first to take up my investment offer. So I helped underwrite his tiny start-up bookseller. The other Jeff started a web department store called Cybershop, but at a time when trust in Internet sales was still low, it was too early for his high-end online idea; people just weren’t yet ready to buy expensive goods without personally checking them out (unlike a basic commodity like books, which don’t vary in quality—Bezos’ great insight). Cybershop didn’t make it, just another dot-com bust. Amazon did somewhat better. Now I own a very large yacht.

But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks.

At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument; I’ve had many of you tell me to my face I’m completely bonkers. And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.

Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.

***

The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is. If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression—so that we help the 99 percent and preempt the revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforks—that will be the best thing possible for us rich folks, too. It’s not just that we’ll escape with our lives; it’s that we’ll most certainly get even richer.

The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts.

What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too.

It’s when I realized this that I decided I had to leave my insulated world of the super-rich and get involved in politics. Not directly, by running for office or becoming one of the big-money billionaires who back candidates in an election. Instead, I wanted to try to change the conversation with ideas—by advancing what my co-author, Eric Liu, and I call “middle-out” economics. It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.

Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

On June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called “The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.” Forbes labeled it “Nick Hanauer’s near insane” proposal. And yet, just weeks after it was published, my friend David Rolf, a Service Employees International Union organizer, roused fast-food workers to go on strike around the country for a $15 living wage. Nearly a year later, the city of Seattle passed a $15 minimum wage. And just 350 days after my article was published, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray signed that ordinance into law. How could this happen, you ask?

It happened because we reminded the masses that they are the source of growth and prosperity, not us rich guys. We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees. We reminded them that if businesses paid workers a living wage rather than poverty wages, taxpayers wouldn’t have to make up the difference. And when we got done, 74 percent of likely Seattle voters in a recent poll agreed that a $15 minimum wage was a swell idea.

The standard response in the minimum-wage debate, made by Republicans and their business backers and plenty of Democrats as well, is that raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Businesses will have to lay off workers. This argument reflects the orthodox economics that most people had in college. If you took Econ 101, then you literally were taught that if wages go up, employment must go down. The law of supply and demand and all that. That’s why you’ve got John Boehner and other Republicans in Congress insisting that if you price employment higher, you get less of it. Really?

Because here’s an odd thing. During the past three decades, compensation for CEOs grew 127 times faster than it did for workers. Since 1950, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased 1,000 percent, and that is not a typo. CEOs used to earn 30 times the median wage; now they rake in 500 times. Yet no company I know of has eliminated its senior managers, or outsourced them to China or automated their jobs. Instead, we now have more CEOs and senior executives than ever before. So, too, for financial services workers and technology workers. These folks earn multiples of the median wage, yet we somehow have more and more of them.

The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.

Most of you probably think that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is an insane departure from rational policy that puts our economy at great risk. But in Seattle, our current minimum wage of $9.32 is already nearly 30 percent higher than the federal minimum wage. And has it ruined our economy yet? Well, trickle-downers, look at the data here: The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle. Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage? San Francisco and Seattle. The fastest-growing big city in America? Seattle. Fifteen dollars isn’t a risky untried policy for us. It’s doubling down on the strategy that’s already allowing our city to kick your city’s ass.

It makes perfect sense if you think about it: If a worker earns $7.25 an hour, which is now the national minimum wage, what proportion of that person’s income do you think ends up in the cash registers of local small businesses? Hardly any. That person is paying rent, ideally going out to get subsistence groceries at Safeway, and, if really lucky, has a bus pass. But she’s not going out to eat at restaurants. Not browsing for new clothes. Not buying flowers on Mother’s Day.

Is this issue more complicated than I’m making out? Of course. Are there many factors at play determining the dynamics of employment? Yup. But please, please stop insisting that if we pay low-wage workers more, unemployment will skyrocket and it will destroy the economy. It’s utter nonsense. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics isn’t believing that if the rich get richer, it’s good for the economy. It’s believing that if the poor get richer, it’s bad for the economy.

I know that virtually all of you feel that compelling our businesses to pay workers more is somehow unfair, or is too much government interference. Most of you think that we should just let good examples like Costco or Gap lead the way. Or let the market set the price. But here’s the thing. When those who set bad examples, like the owners of Wal-Mart or McDonald’s, pay their workers close to the minimum wage, what they’re really saying is that they’d pay even less if it weren’t illegal. (Thankfully both companies have recently said they would not oppose a hike in the minimum wage.) In any large group, some people absolutely will not do the right thing. That’s why our economy can only be safe and effective if it is governed by the same kinds of rules as, say, the transportation system, with its speed limits and stop signs.

Wal-Mart is our nation’s largest employer with some 1.4 million employees in the United States and more than $25 billion in pre-tax profit. So why are Wal-Mart employees the largest group of Medicaid recipients in many states? Wal-Mart could, say, pay each of its 1 million lowest-paid workers an extra $10,000 per year, raise them all out of poverty and enable them to, of all things, afford to shop at Wal-Mart. Not only would this also save us all the expense of the food stamps, Medicaid and rent assistance that they currently require, but Wal-Mart would still earn more than $15 billion pre-tax per year. Wal-Mart won’t (and shouldn’t) volunteer to pay its workers more than their competitors. In order for us to have an economy that works for everyone, we should compel all retailers to pay living wages—not just ask politely.

We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It’s simply not true. There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good.

So forget all that rhetoric about how America is great because of people like you and me and Steve Jobs. You know the truth even if you won’t admit it: If any of us had been born in Somalia or the Congo, all we’d be is some guy standing barefoot next to a dirt road selling fruit. It’s not that Somalia and Congo don’t have good entrepreneurs. It’s just that the best ones are selling their wares off crates by the side of the road because that’s all their customers can afford.

So why not talk about a different kind of New Deal for the American people, one that could appeal to the right as well as left—to libertarians as well as liberals? First, I’d ask my Republican friends to get real about reducing the size of government. Yes, yes and yes, you guys are all correct: The federal government is too big in some ways. But no way can you cut government substantially, not the way things are now. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush each had eight years to do it, and they failed miserably.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress can’t shrink government with wishful thinking. The only way to slash government for real is to go back to basic economic principles: You have to reduce the demand for government. If people are getting $15 an hour or more, they don’t need food stamps. They don’t need rent assistance. They don’t need you and me to pay for their medical care. If the consumer middle class is back, buying and shopping, then it stands to reason you won’t need as large a welfare state. And at the same time, revenues from payroll and sales taxes would rise, reducing the deficit.

This is, in other words, an economic approach that can unite left and right. Perhaps that’s one reason the right is beginning, inexorably, to wake up to this reality as well. Even Republicans as diverse as Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum recently came out in favor of raising the minimum wage, in defiance of the Republicans in Congress.

***

One thing we can agree on—I’m sure of this—is that the change isn’t going to start in Washington. Thinking is stale, arguments even more so. On both sides.

But the way I see it, that’s all right. Most major social movements have seen their earliest victories at the state and municipal levels. The fight over the eight-hour workday, which ended in Washington, D.C., in 1938, began in places like Illinois and Massachusetts in the late 1800s. The movement for social security began in California in the 1930s. Even the Affordable Health Care Act—Obamacare—would have been hard to imagine without Mitt Romney’s model in Massachusetts to lead the way.

Sadly, no Republicans and few Democrats get this. President Obama doesn’t seem to either, though his heart is in the right place. In his State of the Union speech this year, he mentioned the need for a higher minimum wage but failed to make the case that less inequality and a renewed middle class would promote faster economic growth. Instead, the arguments we hear from most Democrats are the same old social-justice claims. The only reason to help workers is because we feel sorry for them. These fairness arguments feed right into every stereotype of Obama and the Democrats as bleeding hearts. Republicans say growth. Democrats say fairness—and lose every time.

But just because the two parties in Washington haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean we rich folks can just keep going. The conversation is already changing, even if the billionaires aren’t onto it. I know what you think: You think that Occupy Wall Street and all the other capitalism-is-the-problem protesters disappeared without a trace. But that’s not true. Of course, it’s hard to get people to sleep in a park in the cause of social justice. But the protests we had in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis really did help to change the debate in this country from death panels and debt ceilings to inequality.

It’s just that so many of you plutocrats didn’t get the message.

Dear 1%ers, many of our fellow citizens are starting to believe that capitalism itself is the problem. I disagree, and I’m sure you do too. Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter. That is why investments in the middle class work. And tax breaks for rich people like us don’t. Balancing the power of workers and billionaires by raising the minimum wage isn’t bad for capitalism. It’s an indispensable tool smart capitalists use to make capitalism stable and sustainable. And no one has a bigger stake in that than zillionaires like us.

The oldest and most important conflict in human societies is the battle over the concentration of wealth and power. The folks like us at the top have always told those at the bottom that our respective positions are righteous and good for all. Historically, we called that divine right. Today we have trickle-down economics.

What nonsense this is. Am I really such a superior person? Do I belong at the center of the moral as well as economic universe? Do you?

My family, the Hanauers, started in Germany selling feathers and pillows. They got chased out of Germany by Hitler and ended up in Seattle owning another pillow company. Three generations later, I benefited from that. Then I got as lucky as a person could possibly get in the Internet age by having a buddy in Seattle named Bezos. I look at the average Joe on the street, and I say, “There but for the grace of Jeff go I.” Even the best of us, in the worst of circumstances, are barefoot, standing by a dirt road, selling fruit. We should never forget that, or forget that the United States of America and its middle class made us, rather than the other way around.

Or we could sit back, do nothing, enjoy our yachts. And wait for the pitchforks.

Hobby Lobby: Latest in Evolution of Corporate Consitutional Rights

by Jeff Reifman

The History of Corporate Constitutional Rights

In light of this week’s Hobby Lobby ruling that corporations are persons under the law which can hold religious beliefs, I thought it would be good to revisit the origin and evolution of corporate personhood and corporate constitutional rights.

While the word corporation never appears in the Constitution, the Supreme Court has been slowly expanding rights for corporations since the early 19th century. These are judge-made “Constitutional” rights granted to corporations through misguided interpretations of the law; some might call these activist judges. The modern Roberts Court has been the most radical.

The model brief (pdf) by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) describes how Supreme Court judges have gradually found rights for corporations in the Constitution:

1819: Beginning with Dartmouth College v. Woodard, the Supreme Courted granted Constitutional Contracts clause protections to Corporations for the first time. This right is historically used by corporations holding property rights to sue communities and states to overturn regulations on harmful environmental practices such as fracking.

1886: Then, with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the Court granted Constitutional rights for the first time to Corporations and created the concept of corporate personhood.

The Courts found personhood for corporations by abominably leveraging the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, building power on the successful work of abolitionists who fought against slavery:

“For much of the nation’s first century, corporations were seen as a means to an end, not unlike associations. They were ‘chartered,’ or called into existence, by the states, and their charters could be revoked at any time; they were not considered ‘persons’ until after the Civil War, when business magnates began to avail themselves of the 14th Amendment’s antidiscrimination protections.” – When is a Corporation Like a Freed Slave (Mother Jones)

1889: Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad Company v. Beckwith - the Court granted Due Process protections to corporations.

1893: Noble v. Union River Logging the court grants Corporations Fifth Amendment protections of double jeopardy.

1906: Hale v. Henkel - the court grants Corporations Fourth Amendment protections for unreasonable search and seizure.

1978: First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti - the Court Grants First Amendment protections to corporations.

2010: Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission - the Court significantly expands the First Amendment rights of Corporations ruling that they can spend unlimited amounts on elections.

2014: This week, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby - the Court holds that for profit corporations are persons under the law which can hold religious beliefs.

You may also be interested in Seattle’s Stand Against Treating Corporations as People, which highlights how these laws confer Constitutional rights upon the foreign investors holding interest in many corporations as they sue American communities.

My personal view is that the long term impact of money on the makeup of government at all levels in the United States has now fundamentally corrupted our democracy, a view recently backed up by a Princeton research study. You can read more about this and my theory of change here: It’s Time for a Populist Culture War on Corruption.

The Constitution Initially Expanded Rights for People

This trend of increasing corporate power reverses the early evolution of the Constitution which historically expanded rights for people, beginning with its first ten amendments (The Bill of Rights). But these rights did not apply to slaves or women at the time. More amendments were needed over time to include these groups:

1865: The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.

1868: The Fourteenth Amendment extended Due Process and Equal Protection for all persons.

1870: The Fifteenth Amendment provides the right to vote to former slaves and minorities (but not women).

1920: The Nineteenth Amendment provided the right to vote for women.

1971: The Twenty-Sixth Amendment provided the right to vote for 18 year olds, reversing Oregon v. Mitchell (1970)

The question of whether corporations are persons is not one of perception. It is not clouded by whether corporations come to life at some moment of conception. In fact, the rule of corporate personhood is best ridiculed by dissenting Montana State Supreme Court Justice James C. Nelson:

“Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited-liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.”

It is past time that the application of human rights to corporate legal entities be eliminated.

The Supreme Court Trails Culture

Supreme Court decisions tend to trail cultural sentiment by many years. But I believe that cultural change is occurring with regards to corporate “constitutional rights” and corporate speech. Supreme Court approval ratings remain near 25 year lows and 65 percent of citizens of both parties disapprove of Citizens United. Congress’ approval rating recently dropped to its lowest ever, 16%.

The makeup of the Supreme Court and the impact of cultural changes does deliver change over time. Whether changed by the adoption of new amendments or the Supreme Court’s own decisions and reversals, there is ample evidence of Constitutional law as a living, breathing, ever-changing entity.

• Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) – Rules that blacks do not have the right to sue in Federal Court, reversed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) – Rules for segregation saying it does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, reversed by Brown v. Board of Education Topeka (1954)
• The Eighteenth Amendment enacts the prohibition of alcohol and the Twenty-First Amendment repeals it.
• West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937) upholds minimum wage legislation passed by the State of Washington
• Mapp v. Ohio (1961) required courts exclude evidence seized illegally from trial clarifying and expanding the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, reversing earlier decisions such as Wolf v. Colorado (1949)
• Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967) prohibits employment discrimination based on political affiliation, reverses Adler v. Board of Education (1952)
• Roe v. Wade (1973) - Rules that the right to abortion in the first trimester is protected by right of privacy.
• Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce (1990) validated campaign finance restrictions before later being reversed by Citizens United (2010)
• Lawrence v. Texas (2003) invalidated sodomy laws in thirteen states, overturned Bowers v. Hardwick (1986).
• United States v. Windsor (2013) struck down bans on same sex marriage.