the final nail in the coffin of hope for America’

s near-term, and likely longer-term, future.

It confirmed the bankruptcy of our current social/political Buy Lasix Online Pharmacy No Prescription Needed structures and values. If the future looked bleak before the debt-ceiling debacle, Brand Cialis Online it now looks black – economically, politically, and socially.

Foreigners can often see into a country’s heart more clearly than its inhabitants. The following opinion piece in Der Spiegel, expresses eloquently the dire straits the US is in.

Opinion

Once Upon a Time in the West

A Commentary by Jakob Augstein

Der Spiegel, August 4, 2011

The US is a country where the system of government has fallen firmly into the hands of the elite. An unruly and aggressive militarism set in motion two costly wars in the past 10 years.

Society is not only divided socially and politically — in its ideological blindness the nation is moving even farther away from the core of democracy.

It is losing its ability to compromise.

America has changed. It has drifted away from the West.

The country’s social disintegration is breathtaking. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently described the phenomenon. The richest 1 percent of Americans claim one-quarter of the country’s total income for themselves — 25 years ago

that figure was 12 percent.

It also possesses 40 percent of total wealth, up from 33 percent 25 years ago. Stiglitz claims that in many countries in the so-called Third World, the income gap between the poor and rich has been reduced. In the United States, it has grown.

Economist Paul Krugman, also a Nobel laureate, has written that America’s path is leading it down the road to "banana-republic status." The social cynicism and societal indifference once associated primarily with the Third World has now become an American hallmark. This accelerates social decay because the greater the disparity grows, the less likely the rich will be willing to contribute to the common good. When a company like Apple, which with €76 billion in the bank has greater reserves at its disposal than the government in Washington, a European can only shake his head over the Republican resistance to tax increases. We see it as self-destructive.

The same applies to America’s broken political culture. The name Cheap Cialis "United States" seems increasingly less appropriate.

Something has become routine in American political culture that has been absent in Germany since Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik policies of rapprochement with East Germany and the Soviet Bloc (in the 1960s and ’70s): hate. At the same time, reason has been replaced by delusion. The notion of tax cuts has taken on a cult-like status, and the limited role of the state a leading ideology. In this new American civil war, respect for the country’s highest office was sacrificed long ago. The fact that Barack Obama is the country’s first African-American president may have played a role there, too.

The West, C’est nous

There’s no deliverance in sight. One can no longer depend on politics in America.

The reliance of Congress members on donations from the rich has become too great.

Nor will there be any revolutionary storming of the Bastille in America. Popular anger may boil over, but the elites have succeeded in both controlling the masses and channeling their passions. Take the Tea Party, which has enjoyed godfather-like bankrolling from brothers and billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch and found a mouthpiece in Rupert Murdoch’s populist, hatred-stirring Fox News.

From a European perspective, it all looks very strange: it’s a different political culture. There are other rules at play, different standards.

More and more we view America with the clear notion that we are different…

Full article and author biography

Without it, all dissenting information would be squashed before it ever made it to the public – or failing that, Viagra Jelly the sources would be gagged by the corporate/government complex.

This story gave me a lift in the midst of the dismal politics of America.

Roylat

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By Mary Watkins and Tim Bradshaw in London and Joseph Menn in San Francisco

Published: December 8 2010 14:17 | Last updated: December 9 2010 00:01

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Computer hackers disrupted MasterCard’s online payment processing system for several hours

on one of the busiest shopping days of the year as part of revenge attacks on companies that blocked services to WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing where to buy cialis Soft”>Kamagra Soft website.

A group of “hacktivists” known as Anonymous spearheaded the attacks and dubbed real kamagra cheap viagra online buying generic propecia them “Operation Payback”.

Automated barrages by WikiLeaks’ defenders also temporarily buy online amoxil shut down web lasix generic pages controlled by other companies that have cut connections with WikiLeaks, including credit card network Visa, whose public home page was down for less than an hour.

In a statement, Visa said its regular payment processing was unaffected.

As government criticism cheapest place to buy viagra online | buy cialis jelly | purchase levitra online of WikiLeaks’ Buy Drugs mass release of US confidential diplomatic cheap amoxil online cables has intensified, so too has online support for the site, particularly levitra costs buy cialis overseas among internet freedom enthusiasts.

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“This is one of the biggest trading days in the internet Online Viagra ampicillin online buy shopping calendar. This is an extremely Buy Amoxil bad time for this to happen,” Mr Prideaux said.

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the strong condemnation of the actions. Here is the story as reported by the LA Times.

Ashcroft buy cheap ampicillin buy Amoxil generic buy diflucan can be sued over arrests, appeals court rules

A 9th Circuit panel levaquin buyviagra | buy cialis overseas | buy levitra drugs says the ex-attorney general violated the rights of citizens held as material witnesses without cause after 9/11. Rights advocates praise the ruling in Abdullah Kidd’s case.

• By Carol J. Williams
• LA Times

Septe

mber 5, 2009

• Then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft violated the rights of U.S. citizens in the fevered wake of the Sept.
  buy septilin
  accutane education legal

  11 terrorist attacks by ordering arrests on material witness warrants when the government lacked probable cause, a federal appeals court said in a scathing opinion buy cialis soft Friday.

• In a ruling that said Ashcroft could be sued for prosecutorial buy viagra online discount abuses, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the former attorney general immunity from liability for how he used the material witness viagra soft warrants in national security
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  investigations.
  Members of the panel, all appointees of Republican presidents, characterized Ashcroft’s detention policy as "repugnant to buy amoxil the Constitution, and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters levitra brand price of our national history."
  Civil liberties advocates cheered the ruling in the case brought by Kansas-born Muslim convert Abdullah Kidd, saying it spotlighted excesses committed by the Bush administration in the post-9/11 scramble to thwart terrorist plots.

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"The court made it very clear today that . . . Ashcroft’s use of the federal material witness law circumvented the Constitution," said Lee Gelernt, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued Kidd’s case. "Regardless of your rank or title, you can’t escape liability if you personally created and oversaw a policy that deliberately violates the law."

The ruling could allow levitra cost Kidd’s suit for damages to proceed to lasix order trial if the government doesn’t appeal to a larger 9th Circuit panel or seek Supreme Court review.

A spokesman for Ashcroft, Mark Corallo, didn’t return phone calls.

Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller said: "We will review the court’s decision and make a determination in the future as to what the government’s next step will be."

Although the ruling denied immunity kamagra to buy Buy Nolvadex Online Jelly”>Cialis Jelly to Ashcroft, the buy cialis government would probably be responsible viagera for covering any successful damage claims brought by those found to have been wrongly arrested.

Kidd, a former University of Idaho running back whose birth name was Lavoni T.

Kidd, sued Ashcroft after he was arrested at Washington Dulles International Airport en route to a Saudi scholarship program in March 2003.

He was handcuffed, strip-searched and shuttled can you buy viagra in stores among interrogations in Virginia, Oklahoma and Idaho before being released 16 days later and ordered to surrender his passport and live with his wife and in-laws in Nevada.

The arrest cheap levitra generic led to Kidd being denied a security clearance and losing his job with a government contractor.

In his 2005 complaint, Kidd noted that then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, in an appearance Viagra Jelly before a congressional subcommittee during Kidd’s detention, had pointed to his arrest and that of confessed 9/11 masterm ind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as evidence of government progress

in reining in terrorists.
"To this day, the government has never explained why the director of the FBI would tell the United States Congress that the arrest of Mr.

al Kidd — supposedly a witness — represented one of the government’s noteworthy recent successes in the war on terrorism," the complaint stated.

It is unclear how many U.S. citizens were picked up on material witness warrants in the sweep conducted by national security forces after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Like the preventive detention abroad of foreign terrorism suspects and the CIA’s "extraordinary rendition" program, in which suspected enemies were whisked from foreign locales to interrogation "black sites," the material witness arrests were conducted Buy Viagra, Buy Cialis, Buy Levitra Without Buy Female Viagra Online Pharmacy No Prescription Needed Prescription where can buy viagra in secret.
At least two other prominent Muslim converts are known to have been arrested as supposed material witnesses.

Alleged would-be "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla was detained at Chicago O’Hare buy real viagra without prescription | buy cialis fast shipping | low price levitra International cytotec generic Airport and held for 3 1/2 buy amoxicillin years without charges before his 2007 conviction in an unrelated terrorism buy vardenafil case in Florida.

Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon attorney erroneously connected to the 2004 Madrid train bombings, was also arrested as a material witness and held for two weeks.

He was never charged, and has received an apology from the U.S. government as well as a $2-million settlement. amoxicillin amoxil
Constitutional law scholars applauded the 9th Circuit decision as affirmation of citizens’ rights to be free from illegal detention.

"This is really important," said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.

"This is a federal court of appeals saying that what was done here under the material witness statute was clearly a violation of the Constitution — that it was not protected by prosecutorial absolute immunity."

That means that the unknown numbers of online ampicillin wrongfully detained suspects could sue Ashcroft for damages, claiming their rights were violated, Chemerinsky said.

Georgetown Law professor David Cole said that Ashcroft purchase levitra online adopted an aggressive "preventive paradigm" after Sept. 11 designed "to incapacitate people who government officials thought suspicious but lacked evidence of any wrongdoing. They were locked up and then investigated, rather than the other way around."
Virtually all of the targets had nothing to do with terrorism, Cole said.

Online Levitra buy Brand Levitra

The Supreme Court has made a distinction between using material witness warrants to ensure someone’s appearance at trial and misusing them to detain someone to be investigated for suspected wrongdoing, the panel noted in its 98-page opinion.

The panel also cast the previous administration’s practice of detaining suspects without cause as behavior that the framers of the Constitution would have found Viagra online abhorrent.

The judges, acomplia cheap alluding to the George W.

Bush administration, said that although generic nolvadex "some confidently assert that the government has the power to arrest and detain" suspects without evidence of wrongdoing, the panel considered cialis soft such preemptive detentions amoxil Jelly”>Viagra Jelly "an best viagra online engine of political tyranny."

The opinion was written by Circuit Judge Milan D. Smith Jr., an appointee of Bush’s, whose practices buy drugs without prescription in the war on terrorism were at the heart of the case.

Circuit Judge Carlos T. Bea, a fellow Bush appointee,wrote buy ampicilin online a separate opinion partially concurring buy propecia cheap and partially dissenting.

Smith was joined fully by Senior Circuit Judge David R. Thompson, named to the bench by President Reagan.
c arol.williams@latimes.com

David G. Savage in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.