Government: The Deadliest Scourge

July 31, 2013
lewrockwell.com
By Charles Burris

The primary object of every government ruling elite is survival — masquerading under the rubric of “national security” — the jealous maintenance of its power, prestige, opulence and privilege against all potential rivals.


GOVERNMENT: THE DEADLIEST SCOURGE

Civilization is based on the fear of violent death. Thus concluded authoritarian political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his famous Leviathan in 1651, written following the devastation and chaos of the English Civil War. Man’s fate without organized civil government was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” Hobbes concluded.

Yet somberly reflecting upon the untold billions butchered over hundreds of centuries by the systematic slaughter of war, slavery, torture and famine, one must agree with Edmund Burke that, in fact, statism has been mankind’s deadliest scourge.

Burke, founding father of conservatism, in surveying man’s sordid record in his classic, A Vindication of Natural Society, in 1756 observed: “By sure and uncontested principles, the greatest part of the governments on Earth must be concluded to be tyrannies, impostures, violations of the natural rights of mankind, and worse than the most disorderly anarchies.” The cure was worse than the disease.

History has seen the unvarying, wearisome parade of one parasitic government succeeded by another for thousands of years. Is this the price we have paid for civilization?

While we eagerly await the welcome demise of a Nicolae Ceausescu, an Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Ferdinand Marcos or Manuel Noriega, visible rulers are always vulnerable. It is in the hidden, murky political sub-strata where insurgency is born.

Despite their labeling, all governments are oligarchies. All states or regimes are characterized by the brutal struggle for power in its diverse open and concealed forms by competing elites. (Just ask former House Speakers Jim Wright and Jim Barker).

The most significant political division to be observed in such internecine warfare is that between the rulers and the ruled, the “ins” and the “outs,” the elite and the non-elite. The primary object of every government ruling elite is survival — masquerading under the rubric of “national security” — the jealous maintenance of its power, prestige, opulence and privilege against all potential rivals.

This rule is initially based upon naked force and fraud. Later, it is sustained by habituation to subjection and obedience by an elaborate formula propped up with a widely held ideology, religion, or myth.

“The devices — of bread and circuses, of ideological mystification and dependency — that all rulers today use to bamboozle and gull the masses have not substantially changed for centuries,” observed economist and political philosopher Murray N. Rothbard.

All governments, no matter how ruthless and despotic (or seemingly benevolent and just), rest upon this “engineering of consent” of the gullible majority, largely by the propaganda beamed at the populace by the rulers and their intellectual apologists in the complacent and compliant news media.

Governments do not remain in power except by the willing acquiesce and apathetic resignation of their subject peoples.

In 1989, we witnessed an elemental force of destructive fury spontaneously arise to cleanse the Earth of the barbarism of statism and its attendant corruption and predation. This hurricane-like ferocity is freedom, and its contagion is sweeping from continent to continent, nation to nation, person to person.

Freedom has always been the genius of American civilization; indeed, of all civilization. It is time for each of us, as Americans and, more importantly, as human beings, to solemnly renew our civic religious legacy, and swear in our hearts with Thomas Jefferson, “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

It is time for each of us to be in the vanguard of this worldwide renascence of human liberty in the last decade of the 20th century, joining in solidarity with our brothers and sisters abroad in declaring war upon the state, all governments, as destroyers of rights and plunderers of the common heritage of humanity.

Charles A. Burris is a writer and political communications research consultant.

Senator Ron Wyden on Domestic Data Collection and Privacy Rights

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is by far the most outspoken foe in Congress of the NSA and the domestic surveillance state that was created by Woodrow Wilson in 1917, accelerated by Harry Truman, and made exponential by the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001.

He delivered a remarkable speech on July 23 at a meeting held by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. This is a standard Democratic Party Beltway organization: pro-union, pro-global warming, pro-green, pro-big government. But on civil liberties, it is on the side of rolling back the federal government in general and the NSA in particular.

Wyden’s speech was a summary of how the NSA has provided incorrect information to Congress and the public. He did not say “lies,” but this is what he clearly meant. He admitted that Snowden — unnamed — blew the whistle on the NSA. Snowden provided evidence of the extent of the data collection, which the NSA’s director had categorically denied to Congress had been going on. Wyden’s speech is the best summary I have read on the extent of the NSA’s systematic deception of Congress.

He ended his speech with these words:

We find ourselves at a truly unique time in our Constitutional history. The growth of digital technology, dramatic changes in the nature of warfare and the definition of a battlefield, and novel courts that run counter to everything the Founding Fathers imagined, make for a combustible mix. At this point in the speech I would usually conclude with the quote from Ben Franklin about giving up liberty for security and not deserving either, but I thought a different founding father might be more fitting today. James Madison, the father of our constitution, said that the the accumulation of executive, judicial and legislative powers into the hands of any faction is the very definition of tyranny. He then went on to assure the nation that the Constitution protected us from that fate. So, my question to you is: by allowing the executive to secretly follow a secret interpretation of the law under the supervision of a secret, nonadversarial court and occasional secret congressional hearings, how close are we coming to James Madison’s “very definition of tyranny”? I believe we are allowing our country to drift a lot closer than we should, and if we don’t take this opportunity to change course now, we will all live to regret it.

The NSA — secret budget — is using a secret law and a secret court system — the FISA-authorized court system — to construct a truly Orwellian apparatus for spying on the American public. Members of Congress are not legally able to reveal any of this. He said that he cannot legally speak of what he knows. Were it not for Snowden, he made clear, he could not have spoken about what he knew before Snowden went public.

Death Squad USA

July 27, 2013
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Kay Griggs, a colonel’s wife, speaks out about the imperial military. (Thanks to Jack Douglas)

President Obama and the race problem

How The Unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act Came Into Being

The Federal Reserve Is A Fraud...illegally created in 1913

This is a short video clip of the beginning of Aaron Russo's Freedom To Fascism. It describes how the fraudulent Federal Reserve System was created...how the banks illegally took over the American Government.

Mark Levin explains how we can rescue America from Tyranny

July 10, 2013
therightscoop.com

 For the first time Mark Levin begins to discuss his much awaited new book, The Liberty Amendments, and describes a process we can use to turn back the tide on this leviathan of a federal government we have. And the federal government will have no say about it.

In short, the founders made a way in the Constitution for the states to amend the Constitution WITHOUT the Federal Government’s involvement. It’s not a constitutional convention, but rather a convention for amending the Constitution. Mark Levin believes this is the only way back to a constitutional republic but he’s under no illusion that it will be easy. In fact, he said there has been at least one attempt to do this and it was not successful.

He explains the process below    TO LISTEN

Above The Law...Freedom files...Judge Andrew Napolitano

July 10, 2013
judgenap.com

Fidelity to the rule of law is the centerpiece of a free society. It means that no one is beneath the protection of the law and no one is absolved of the obligation to comply with it. The government may not make a person or a class of persons exempt from constitutional protections, as it did during slavery, nor may it make government officials exempt from complying with the law, as it does today.
Everyone who works for the government in the United States takes an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws written pursuant to it. In our system of government, we expect that Congress will write the laws, the courts will interpret them and the president will enforce them. Indeed, the Constitution states that it is the president's affirmative duty to enforce the law. That duty is not an abstract formulation. Rather, it means the president cannot decline to enforce laws with which he disagrees or whose enforcement might cause him or his political allies to lose popularity. It also means the president cannot make up his own version of the law as a substitute for what the Constitution commands or Congress has written.
In the modern era, presidents have rejected the value of the rule of law and instead followed their own political interests. President George W. Bush, for example, while signing into law a federal statute prohibiting the government from reading your mail without a search warrant, boasted that he had no intention of enforcing that law -- and we know that he famously did not enforce it.
But no modern president has picked and chosen which laws to enforce and which to ignore and which to rewrite to the extremes of President Obama. His radical rejection of the rule of law, which presents a clear and present danger to the freedom of us all, has had fatal consequences.
The law requires that if American tax dollars are being given to the government of another country, and that government is toppled by its military -- the common phrase is a coup d'‚tat -- the flow of cash shall stop immediately, lest we support financially those who have betrayed our values.
In Egypt, the military arrested the president, suspended the Constitution and installed a puppet regime. But Obama, embarrassed at the fall of the popularly elected but religiously fanatical government he supported, refuses to consider that military takeover a coup. Instead he has called it a popular uprising supported by the military, and he has continued the flow of your dollars into the hands of a military that has been murdering scores of peaceful demonstrators daily in the streets of Cairo.
The president's signature domestic legislation -- Obamacare -- is scheduled to become effective in stages. One of its provisions, requiring employers of more than 50 persons to offer health insurance acceptable to the feds to all of their employees, becomes effective on Jan. 1, 2014. In anticipation of its becoming law, insurance carriers and employers have calculated that instead of costs going down, as the president promised, they will certainly go up, resulting in the loss of jobs. So the president, mindful of the midterm congressional elections in November 2014 and fearful that Democrats who supported this law might suffer at the polls at the hands of deceived and thus angry voters, announced on the Fourth of July weekend that he planned not to enforce that provision until Jan. 1, 2015.
When he wanted to use military force in Libya and Pakistan -- two allies -- without congressional approval, out of fear, no doubt, that Congress might turn him down, he dispatched the CIA to do his killing. Why? Because federal law requires that he report all offensive use of the military to Congress and eventually obtain its approval for continued use. Because the CIA largely operates in secrecy, the president needn't report its behavior publicly or even acknowledge that it took place.
In the same vein, he recently moved all records of the Osama bin Laden killing from the military -- which carried it out -- to the CIA. Why? Because the military is largely susceptible to the Freedom of Information Act, which commands transparency, and the CIA is largely not. He probably fears that the truthful version of bin Laden's demise will become known. If so, it would be the fourth version of those events his administration has given.
When he wanted to kill an American and his 16-year-old son in Yemen because the American, though uncharged with any crime and unasked to come home, might be difficult to arrest while advocating war in a foreign country, he wrote his own rules for governing his own killings. He did so in secret and notwithstanding clear language in the Constitution expressly prohibiting the government from taking life, liberty or property without due process of law.
And when he wanted to keep us safe from terrorists but servile to him by spying on all of us, he established an enormous network of domestic spies who have access to all of our phone calls, emails and text messages. And he did this despite unambiguous language in the Constitution requiring a search warrant based on particularized probable cause of crime about the records he wanted to seize or the venues he wanted to search.
What's going on?
What we have is a runaway government, dismissive of the Constitution it has sworn to uphold, contemptuous of the law it is required to enforce and driven by its own values of maximum control and minimum personal freedom. And we have a Congress supine enough to let this happen, as well as a judiciary so tangled in its own arcane procedures that immeasurable human freedom will be destroyed and Obama out of office before any meaningful judicial review can be had.
Is this the rule of law? What shall we do about?

Ted Cruz’s Father Delivers Epic Speech Touting Patriotism and Lambasting Obama’s ‘Socialist’ Inclinations

June 6, 2013
theblaze.com

Rafael Cruz, the father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, invigorated the crowd during tonight’s FreedomWorks Free the People event.

Upon rising to power, he said that Castro, like Obama, spoke about hope and change. While the message sounded good at the time, it didn’t take long for socialism to take root in his home country. And he paid the price.

Describing his own personal journey escaping Cuba and working hard to build a life for himself in the U.S., the elder Cruz noted comparisons that he believes exist between Fidel Castro’s governance and President Barack Obama’s executive actions.

Entrepreneurs Responsible for Almost All Economic Growth

'Train wreck' Obamacare begins to unravel; massive government boondoggle set to self-destruct by 2015

June 8, 2013
naturalnews.com

(NaturalNews) Even before it is fully implemented, Obamacare is already starting to self-destruct. The White House announced last week it will simply invent its own interpretation of the law and "delay the enforcement" of the employer Obamacare mandate for another year, to 2015. This, we are told, is to allow businesses more time to "smooth" compliance with the law, but that's only the cover story. In reality, the entire private sector economy was preparing to fire tens of millions of workers, cut their hours and radically downsize companies in order to avoid going bankrupt under Obamacare mandates that no one can afford.

Described as a "train wreck" by one of its original authors (Sen. Baucus), and called a "fiasco for the ages" by the Wall Street Journal, Obamacare is a massive government boondoggle that's headed for complete disaster.

In a desperate effort to get out of the way of that oncoming train, insurance companies are scrambling to flee the market entirely. America's largest health insurer, UnitedHealth, has just announced it's closing shop in California and walking away from all health insurance customers there.

That's how bad Obamacare really is, even for the insurance companies: it's better to close up shop than even attempt to serve customers under the government's onerous rules. Read More

Government Spying Has Always Focused On Crushing Dissent … Not On Keeping Us Safe

June 7, 2013
washingtonblog.com

Governments Spy On Their Citizens for Control and Power

Top terrorism experts say that mass spying on Americans doesn’t keep us safe.

High-level American government officials have warned for 40 years that mass surveillance would lead to tyranny. They’ve warned that the government is using information gained through mass surveillance in order to go after anyone they take a dislike to. And a lieutenant colonel for the Stasi East German’s – based upon his experience – agrees.

You don’t have to obsess on the NSA’s high-tech spying to figure out what the government is doing. Just look at old-fashioned, low-tech government spying to see what’s s really going on.

Instead of focusing on catching actual terrorists, police spy on Americans who criticize the government, or the big banks or the other power players. Read More

Beck Unveils Epic ‘Man in the Moon’ Spectacular...Free the People 2013: Glenn Beck

"You are at the same time arrogant and self-loathing. You are a puzzle. But the ancient truth remains: as the light grows dimmer, things begin to become harder to see,” the Man in the Moon said during the conclusion of the show.

June 7, 2013
theblaze.com

More than 20,000 Americans came from across the nation to participate. TheBlaze extensively highlighted many of the events and the excitement that unfolded during the week. But it was the finale that created the most intrigue.

After months of anticipation, Glenn Beck unveiled his highly-anticipated “Man in the Moon” event to a sold-out audience on Saturday night at the USANA Amphitheater in West Valley City, Utah.

The initiative, which offered up an epic rendition of America’s story — both past and present — provided thousands in attendance the ability to view the world through a unique lens. Rather than hearing from a human narrator, the historical and contemporary accounts were told by the “Man in the Moon.” Read More

Author Brad Thor Warned of the NSA Scandal And Previews a Controversy He Says Is ‘Bigger’

 

June 6, 2013
theblaze.com

"The story of an organization that exists in Washington, D.C., poses as a part of the United States government — it is not — and is more secretive than the NSA, more secretive than the CIA, and some would allege is even more powerful than the United States government.”

t doesn’t even take one page for you to be blown away by Brad Thor’s highly successful thriller from last summer “Black List.” It’s right there on the first page of the preface.

But why are we talking about last year’s success rather than his latest project (“Hidden Order“) slated for release on Tuesday? Because last year’s book warned of one of this year’s biggest scandals: the NSA spying story.

“This is not only real stuff, but it chilled me to the bone,” Thor told TheBlaze in a sit-down interview in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Friday. “This” is the NSA’s capability to surveil its own citizens — but not just its capability, also its willingness and practice.

“I said, ‘That’s what I’m going to base my thriller, “Black List,” on,’ and that’s what I did.”

The first page of the book makes that clear. On it is a transcript of a 1975 “Meet the Press” appearance featuring Sen. Frank Church. At that time — nearly 40 years ago — Church issued a dire warning on what would happen if the U.S. government ever decided to turn its intelligence-gathering capability on its own people. The correlation to the most recent headlines is eery [emphasis added]:

“[America’s intelligence gathering] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left. Such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.

If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. Read More

Dennis Michael Lynch...The Cost of Amnesty- They Come To American

Happy Independence Day

Washington Is Driving the World to the Final War

July 1, 2013
lewrockwell.com
By Paul Craig Roberts

V For Vendetta, a film that portrays evil in a futuristic England as a proxy for the evil that exists today in America, ends with the defeat of evil. But this is a movie in which the hero has super powers. If you have not seen this film, you should watch it. It might wake you up and give you courage. The excerpts below show that, at least among some filmmakers, the desire for liberty still exists.

Whether the desire for liberty exists in America remains to be seen. If Americans can overcome their gullibility, their lifelong brainwashing, their propensity to believe every lie that “their” government tells them, and if Americans can escape the Matrix in which they live, they can reestablish the morality, justice, peace, freedom, and liberty that “their” government has taken from them. It is not impossible for Americans to again stand with uplifted heads. They only have to recognize that “their” government is the enemy of truth, justice, human rights and life itself. Read More