Matt Taibbi wrote an interesting article about civilian drone killings, At Least We’re Not Measles: Rationalizing Drone Attacks Hits New Low. The article generally is an attack on all those (including an embarrassing number of liberals) who have been apologizing for these attacks. In particular, he goes after Michael Kugelman, who argues that we shouldn’t worry about drone deaths because more people in Pakistan die each year from measles. Great argument, huh?

But late in the article, Taibbi gets to an issue that is very close to my heart: universal rights.

I read the entire Constitution of the United States recently. What I found was that there are a total of 22 references of “citizen.” And pretty much without exception, these references have to do with voting: who can be president, senator, representative, and who can vote for them. I bring this up because back a while, I heard some people talking about how only citizens have rights of Habeas Corpus. This is what the Constitution says about this in Article I Section 9: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” You see: no “citizen” there. Conservatives like to claim that the Bill of Rights is just about citizens. It isn’t. This goes back to the Declaration of Independence (and further), where Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” That’s “all men” and not “all men who just happen to be born in a particular place.”

This is all about natural rights. Either these rights are universal, or they aren’t real. As a nation, we can’t run all over the world forcing other countries to treat their people by our standards of universal rights. But we also can’t deny those rights by running all over the world killing people without due process of law. Claiming that it is all okay because we are at war is just an apologia. We are always at war and so can always claim that. It is the same as claiming that we can kill anyone we want to because we are America. And if you scratch the surface of arguments like those of Michael Kugelman, that’s all that you’ll find.

This article was based in part on a prior article.

My sister directed me to this Liberals4America Facebook page: While you were busy bitching about a guy who bought a Snickers with food stamps, this was happening to your tax dollars!

What I find most disturbing about this is the guy bitching about the “abuse” of food stamps. In many cases, he’s a liberal, or at least liberal-leaning. But he’s the kind of guy that Republicans can get to vote for them. All they need is a candidate who says the magic words in the magic way—someone like Ronald Reagan or Marco Rubio. And this is the real problem that we face.

If we all stick together, we can do something about the most profitable company in the world not paying any taxes. But we can’t do a thing if conservatives manage to set us against each other. Sure, there are poor people who take advantage of the system. But they represent nothing compared to the rich people who take advantage of the system. That’s what we have to remember.

And there’s something else. Why do people think it is wrong to buy a Snickers with food stamps? We all enjoy junk food from time to time. Why is it that we expect the poor to lead ascetic lives? Isn’t there something wrong with all of us who want to punish people for the crime of being poor? Isn’t this just another example of assuming that poverty is the result of moral inadequacy? Shouldn’t the example of just about every rich person throughout history prove to us that this isn’t that case?

Let he who is without sin start the bitching!

Afterword

That tax refund of $156 million? That’s $5 per second. A common variation of this quotation is that in the time you were bitching, Exxon pocketed $9,000 of your taxes. That would be equivalent to a half hour of bitching. I wouldn’t doubt that the quote came from an annoyed liberal who had to listen to a friend complain for a half hour about this. I know people who will go on and on about this kind of thing. Kind of like complaining about a hangnail after your arm was just ripped off.

You gotta love this. You know the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)? It’s the act that sets up courts to make sure that secret wiretaps of suspected foreign agents were all above board—that law enforcement agencies weren’t going crazy just wiretapping everyone. You may remember that the Bush administration was very unhappy with it because it was getting in the way of keeping America safe the way the administration did right up to the morning of 11 September 2001.

Funny thing about the FISA courts. The government has made 38,093 requests from 1979 through 2011. In that time, the FISA courts have denied—Wait for it!—just 11 requests. In fact, before 2003, they never denied a request. Of the 11 rejections since then, 10 were during the Bush administration. To some extent, this understates how much the FISA courts do. Often the courts get the government to modify their requests. These are things like, “You want 39 wiretaps, but we’re only gonna give you 38!” So it is still pretty bad.

What is most remarkable about this is that during the Bush administration, 14,353 requests were made (38% of all requests). And note: this is a much higher request rate than either of the administrations surround it. I think this means that the Bush administration was just generally more interested in spying than in protecting anyone. Nonetheless, given the very large number of requests and the the very low number of denials (0.07%), what was the big deal the administration made of the FISA courts?

Regardless of all this, we ought to take note of just how feckless is “government oversight.” The fact is that all of the power players in the public and private sectors are inbred. They take care of there own and under most circumstances they don’t care at all about the little people like you and me. If you see the American Revolution as a war between the people and the aristocracy, then we lost that war. The aristocracy won. And silly us who think that one part of the aristocracy is going to protect us from another.

H/T Matt Taibbi