Carter Is Correct — but Ignores the Growth of the Predatory State

Finally, a prominent Democrat is speaking out about the Obama administration’s drone murders and its sending of death squads around the world to assassinate people the president considers to be “enemies.” Jimmy Carter, in a NY Times op-ed, writes that the U.S. Government now regularly violates the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then includes a number of things that are obvious:

The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

At one level, Carter is right, and his words are a warning to the Political Classes in this country that have declared open warfare on everyone else. However, while Carter concentrates on foreign policy and the U.N. Declaration, what he leaves out is just as telling.

The Declaration of Independence is a much more eloquent statement on human rights than anything U.N. bureaucrats could conceive if for no other reason than it goes to the source of oppression: governments themselves. Yet, Carter, as he has throughout his political career, pointedly ignores it, depending instead upon an organization that sees itself as the shadow government of the whole world to be the “shining light” of freedom.

(Carter is a Democrat, and all Democrats really do see the State as the creator of freedom and prosperity, and thus have no problem unleashing the power of the state in the name of “human rights.” Typical Republicans, on the other hand, can talk the “freedom talk” with the best of libertarians, but then want us to believe that unleashing the police and home and the U.S. Armed Forces abroad both spreads and “protects” freedom, as though the source of liberty is government violence. In the end, both worship State agencies and look to State power as the final arbiter of the good society.)

Carter also leaves out the growth of police power at home, which is signified by the fact that dozens of federal agencies from the IRS to the EPA have their own SWAT teams that regularly raid hapless and unarmed people and brutalize the innocent. He also pointedly ignores the militarization of both local and federal police forces, and the vast increases in the U.S. prison population that naturally have arisen from the proliferation of “laws” and unaccountability (protected by the U.S. Supreme Court) of those that enforce it from police to prosecutors to judges.

It was during the Carter administration that the U.S. Department of Justice decided to expand the scope of RICO laws to include things that might be mere regulatory violations and to intimidate and destroy people in the “legitimate” business world. Carter’s U.S. attorneys ultimately laid the table to the predations of Rudy Giuliani and beyond to where federal prosecutors literally lurk behind almost any legitimate and honest business transaction because the feds have the power to criminalize nearly anything they wish.

Although I do believe that in many ways, Carter has been an eloquent voice against the murderous foreign policy of the U.S. Government, nonetheless he really does not seem to understand that the violence that America has perpetrated abroad also has translated into police violence at home. I believe that as a Democrat, Carter is perfectly comfortable with the EPA shutting down American businesses on false pretenses, the IRS staging raids against people who have not paid their taxes, and the growth of the State that gobbles the possessions of ordinary people.

In the end, Carter is a Progressive, and Progressives believe that governments not only should be empowered to “protect” our rights, but that governments themselves really are the very creator of what the U.S. calls “Human Rights.” This is sad, because his views attack only the symptoms of State violence, not its root causes.

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6:14 am on June 25, 2012