Kafka's America

The terms of Obama’s proposed TPP ‘trade’ treaty with Asian countries won’t be made public until the treaty has already been in force for at least four years. The terms of Obama’s proposed TISA (Trade In Services Agreement) with 52 nations won’t be made public until the treaty has already been in force for at least five years. Obama’s proposed TTIP treaty with European countries has been so successfully hidden, that even the number of years it will be kept from the public isn’t yet known.

Secret laws are not democracy. This is the opposite of democracy.

Secret trade laws are just the start for this Obama presidency.
Obama has create 19 secret directives that are enforced just like they are laws.

"The only reason we know about it is the sequential numbering of the directives, and realizing they skipped a few," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks the directives.
PPD-29 isn't the first to be tacitly acknowledged only by a missing number. Of the 30 PPDs issued by Obama, 19 have not been released. And for 11 of those, the White House has not disclosed even the subject of the order.
"It's not only the public that doesn't have copies. It's also Congress that doesn't have copies," Aftergood said. "It's a domain of largely unchecked presidential authority."
But they have the same legal force as an executive order, forming a body of largely secret law, said Harold Relyea, a political scientist who advised Congress on national security directives before retiring from the Congressional Research Service.
"The difference is that while executive orders are public by law — they must be published in the Federal Register to be effective —- PPDs are not," he said. "It is a kind of secret law. People have to obey it. But it's a directive that can allocate money, direct people or take a course of action."

I would ask how this is any difference from Rule by Royal Decree, except that Royal Decrees generally aren't secret!
How would you even know if you were breaking one of these laws?

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

If you are like me your first response would be, "This can't be Constitutional." However, the Supreme Court has already ruled in favor of secret laws.
It wasn't until last year that the Obama Administration was finally forced to reveal the legal justification for assassinating American citizens. A justification that hasn't been tested in open court.

"Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached?"
- Franz Kafka, The Trial

I emphasize open court because plenty happens in secret courts, courts in which neither defendants or their representatives ever see.

Federal magistrate judges, in addition to issuing routine search warrants, hear warrant applications for electronic surveillance orders, which grant permission to monitor cellphones, personal computers and other electronic devices. These orders are almost always secret and almost never become unsealed.
In 2006, magistrates issued over 30,000 sealed electronic surveillance orders — more than the entire output of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court since its creation in 1978. These orders constitute a massive body of unpublished case law. “It is as if they were written in invisible ink,” Judge Stephen Wm. Smith said, “legible to the phone companies and Internet service providers who [receive them], yet imperceptible to unsuspecting targets, the general public, and even other arms of government.”

We've all heard about the FISA court and its infamous lack of oversight, but even if FISA went away tomorrow the problem wouldn't go away.
What's more, the Obama Administration has told the FISA court, the formal secret court, to ignore public court rulings. In truth, FISA "has basically become a parallel Supreme Court, but one which operates in almost total secrecy."

""The final verdicts of the court are not published, and not even the judges have access to them; thus only legends remain about ancient court cases."
- Franz Kafka, The Trial

What you probably didn't know is that the Obama Administration is not the only body making secret laws.

Even Congress produces secret law. The most common source is the classified budget annex. Prepared by the intelligence committees, classified annexes are attached to general appropriations bills and detail the budget for intelligence programs authorized for that budget cycle. As its name suggests, the contents of the classified annex are secret; even many lawmakers are unable to read the annex before voting on it.

Holding votes on bills without being able to know the content of the bill is a joke. It's all the song and dance of democracy without any of the content.
And those bills concern more than just money.

It seems only logical that with secret courts ruling on secret laws that you must also have secret prisons for secret prisoners to do secret interrogations on.

In some cases, the facilities in Cuba, Iraq, Lithuania, Thailand, Romania, Afghanistan and Poland are still in operation, more than six years after the Obama administration banned the enhanced interrogation tactics detailed in a lengthy report on the CIA's surveillance program released Tuesday.

There is an increasingly popular t-shirt I've seen that says "Orwell's 1984 wasn't supposed to be an instruction manual."
It appears that Kafka's t-shirt time has also arrived.
I'm certain that Orwell, Huxley and Kafka would not be happy to know that their warnings were ignored.

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Jews who escaped Germany in the 1930s, said about 20 years ago when they saw the increasing totalitarian nature of the USofA:

We can't go through this again!

However, do we have any choice? Not much methinks,only a lot of hard, hard work and suffering can possibly reverse this travesty.

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LapsedLawyer's picture

showing up at the polls because the sh*t which-fascist-is-friendlier choices we'll have, how it appalling we are for allowing the other side (debil Republicans) to win. Wacko

They use the acronym "DINO" to mean "Democrats In Name Only" but they need to change a few letters, because it really means "Democracy In Name Only."

Meant to add that this is not only Kafka, but also Joseph Heller as well, which really is The Trial, but funnier, in the way that makes you laugh to keep from screaming at the terrifying recognition of reality.

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"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-- John Lennon