Wall Street scammers have done far more damage to our economy than any Middle Eastern terrorists have, so we need to use the Bush administration's methods on his buddies:
- No assumption of innocence, especially for execs at companies seeking bailouts. If you buy or sell something that isn't a tangible product or service for a living, you are a danger to society. The less an average person can understand what it is you buy and sell, the greater danger you are to society. If you doubt that, watch the documentary THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM about Enron.
- No fourth amendment rights to restrictions on searches. If they get the cash, we get to dig through their trash--their personal trash. And bank accounts, phone records, or anything else that would tell us where the money went.
- Likewise, no fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. We should use every means at our disposal to find out what they know about money laundering, hiding assets, and which politicians and regulators are on the take. There has been some great advances made in lie detection technology in the last decade. Brains scans can determine if someone is lying with 100% accuracy, and even if they won't speak, they can detect whether or not someone recognizes a photo or some other stimulus. We should give those technologies their first real world test.
- Forfeiture of property beyond what they stole or scammed. This requires borrowing the forfeiture rules from the War on Drugs, were if they find one pot seed in your carpet, they'll take your car or house even if it was from someone who was housesitting for you. If forfeiture is supposed to be a deterrent to drug dealers, it should be equally effective on these equally greedy bastards.
- Pre-emptive military strikes on countries that harbor Wall Street types and their assets. We cannot wait for the United Nations to act against the Cayman Islands, Seychelles, and Lichstenstein. We must strike before the economic terrorists can move their assets to another safe haven. We cannot wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a Great Depression.
- Torture. If torture works on ideologically motivated prisoners as the Bushies claim, imagine how much more effective it will be to get off-shore account numbers from some pampered trust fund baby. Hell, you wouldn't even have to strip them naked. Just take away their valets and they won't know how to put their own clothes on.
- Access to attorneys. If they can contact an attorney, they could use code words or even facial expressions to give approval to shift assets to different shell corporations or off-shore accounts.
- Renditions. It is very likely that even the Americans most hurt by these assholes won't have the stomach to waterboard or sexually assault a banker, broker, or hedge fund manager. Therefore, we should consider outsourcing this work to a country that has a better track record of dealing with oligarchs run amok: Russia. It would also help stabilize relations after the Bush administration & McCain's saber-rattling in their direction.
Prison sentences could also be outsourced. Imagine how much we could save on gaurds, food, health care, and accommodations if we store these assholes in CHINA.
These terrorists steal not merely to enrich themselves, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America's middle class grows fearful, politically weaker, and smaller in number. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.
We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. (Applause.)
Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command -- every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war -- to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.
This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.
We ask every nation to join us. We will ask, and we will need, the help of police forces, intelligence services, and banking systems around the world.
I also want to speak tonight directly to the capitalists throughout the world. We respect your faith. It's practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of profit blaspheme the name of the wealthy. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack capitalism itself. The enemy of America is not our many capitalist friends; if you want to make a living providing clearly defined financial services on honest terms that don't exploit the desperate or push the middle class into poverty, we have no quarrel with you. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government and politicians of any party that supports them.
The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.
Fellow citizens, we'll meet violence with patient justice -- assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the United States of America.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html">Thanks to George W. Bush's speech writers and legal advisor like Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, and Jay Bybee for these policies and words
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