What Has Mark Levin Wrought?

 


 August 18, 2013
americanthinker.com
By James V Capua

In The Liberty Amendments Mark Levin has delivered more than advertised. He promises a credible agenda for reinvigorating constitutional government based on an approach to the amendment process which avoids the liabilities of better known options. What he delivers, though, is a vast, potentially game-changing political arsenal that can be drawn upon by everyone from had-it-up-to-here Tea Partiers to Republican candidates at least sentient enough to know they need something more than budget and deficit talk. Want to tell Karl Rove that he and his white board have had their day? Want alternative arguments for attempting to convince wooden-headed Republican campaign contributors that they need to improve their selection standards? Want to find a framework to create a working political alliance between Conservatives and Libertarians for 2014 and 2016? Want a positive agenda to undergird a primary purge of inert Republican officeholders? Hell, want a platform for a broad-based third party of the Right, or just a useful new PAC to divert yet more conservative dollars from the lame RNC?

Now this is not to say that Mr. Levin embraced all, or even most, of these objectives in writing this book, nor need he. Levin has no difficulty saying what he means. To a dispirited and increasingly hopeless people he urges, essentially, "Put not your trust in Reinces," and shows us, chapter and verse, how our salvation lies in our own hands. While his proposals are intended to spur a discussion of limited constitutional government that goes beyond the usual Republican/conservative "I'm for it," followed up by focused political action, he would probably, with varying degrees of intensity, separate himself from some of the potential applications for The Liberty Amendments that I cite -- most notably serving as the basis of a third party movement or even facilitating aggressive reaching out to Libertarians. But President Obama remains busy deconstructing the separation of powers, the social order, the national interest, and the rule of law.The Congress has settled upon the Power of Whining over the Power of the Purse as the preferred means to control a lawless President and a defiant bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the only response from the Republican cucumber sandwich crowd this summer has been to chow down on greasy Jersey Shore fare and to select, of all places, Romney's home state as a venue for their own version of The Biggest Loser. If ever there was a time when it was necessary to put away the "dogmas of a quiet past," this is surely it. Levin's amendments proposal, as powerful ideas often do, opens up a variety of avenues to think anew, act anew, and ultimately to disenthrall ourselves.

One of the most malignant consequences of Republican betrayal of Tea Party exertions in 2010 has been its effect on conservative citizens' morale. Nothing is more dispiriting than being played for a sucker. How then to rouse conservatives for the next battle? What about a principled yet tangible agenda that transcends the candidate and facilitates building a winning coalition? "Trust me; I'm a constitutional conservative," or "I'm a businessman and know how to create jobs," are not enough to cut it anymore. Dead-end distinctions -- he's a Libertarian; he doesn't like the Flat Tax; she changed her mind on abortion; he's great on individual freedom but wobbly on national defense, etc., will never produce a governing majority, and are perfect tools for the Legacy Media to lever apart the opposition. The Liberty Amendments offer a vehicle for creating a diverse constitutional restoration coalition, outside of the parties, but without actually attempting to replace one, with a common allegiance over and above policy notions and politicians' beloved "plans" to help single-parent families with children between the ages of seven and thirteen. Imagine the result -- candidates for all levels of office, from local to national, endorsing, to coin a phrase, fundamental transformation, a transformation, moreover, for which the medium -- primarily state and local action -- is also the message. Of course, with success, subsequent governing will require specific policy debates, but these now would have to proceed within the framework of common principle --- an interesting prospect indeed -- policy horse trading among freedom advocates. Liberty Amendments Coalition debates would also have a salutary effect upon political language, for example "Citizen" would have to be restored to its primacy of place ahead of the socio-economic, ethnic, and interest group categories that now dominate political discourse. In all, a vast improvement over the internal Republican "debate "on "comprehensive immigration reform" with its creation of a new form of performing art -- the kabuki circus.

Academics can quibble, consultants can deprecate, performing TV monkeys can misunderstand or distort, but Mark Levin has released a powerful idea into the wilds of American politics and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. For our sakes, let's hope it prospers.

How The Corrupt Establishment Is Selling Moral Bankruptcy To America

 

August 14, 2013
alt-market.com
By Brandon Smith

Morality is a highly misunderstood component of human nature. Some people believe they can create moral guidelines from thin air based on their personal biases and prejudices. Some people believe that morality comes from the force of bureaucracy and government law. Still, others believe that there is no such thing; that morality is a facade created by men in order to better grease the wheels of society.

All of these world views discount the powerful scientific and psychological evidence surrounding Natural Law — the laws that human beings form internally due to inherent conscience regardless of environmental circumstances. When a person finally grasps inborn morality, the whole of the world comes into focus. The reality is that we are not born “good” or “evil.” Rather, we are all born with the capacity for good AND evil, and this internal battle stays with us until the end of our days.

Every waking moment we are given a choice, a test of our free will, to be ruled by desire and fear, or to do what we know at our very core is right. When a man silences his inner voice, the results can be terrible for him and those around him. When an entire culture silences its inner voice, the results can be catastrophic. Such a shift in the moral compass of a society rarely takes place in a vacuum. There is always a false shepherd, a corrupt leadership that seeks to rule. Rulership, though, is difficult in the face of an awake population that respects integrity and honor. Therefore criminals must follow these specific steps in order to take power:

Pretend To Be Righteous: They must first sell the public on the idea that they hold the exact same values of natural law as everyone else. The public must at first believe that the criminal leaders are pure in their motives and have the best interests of the nation at heart, even if they secretly do not.

Pretend To Be Patriotic: Despots often proclaim an untarnished love of their homeland and the values that it was founded upon. However, what they really seek is to become a living symbol of the homeland. They insist first that they are the embodiment of the national legacy, and then they attempt to change that national legacy entirely. A corrupt government uses the ideals of a society to acquire a foothold, and when they have gained sufficient control, they dictate to that society a new set of ideals that are totally contrary to the original.

Offer To “Fix” The Economy: Tyrants do not like it when the citizens under them are self sufficient or economically independent. They will use whatever methods are at their disposal including subversive legislation, fiat currency creation, corporate monopoly and even engineered financial collapse in order to remove the public’s ability to function autonomously. They will begin this process under the guise that the current less-controlled and less-centralized system is “not safe enough,” and that they have a better way to ensure prosperity.

Offer To Lend A Hand: Once the population has been removed from its own survival imperative and is for the most part helpless, the criminal leadership moves in and offers to “help” using taxation and money creation, slowly siphoning the wealth from the middle class and raising prices through inflation. Eventually, everyone will be “equal”; equally poor that is. In the end, the whole nation will see the rulership as indispensable, for without them, the economy would no longer exist and tragedy would ensue.

Create External Fear: Once in place, the criminal leadership then conjures an enemy for the people, or multiple enemies for the people. The goal here is to create a catalyst for mass fear. When the majority of people are afraid of an external threat, they will embrace the establishment as a vital safeguard. When a society becomes convinced that it cannot take care of itself economically, little coaxing is required to convince them that they are also not competent enough to take care of their own defense. The government not only becomes caregiver and nanny, but also bodyguard. At this point, the establishment has free reign to dissolve long cherished liberties while the masses are distracted by a mysterious threat hiding somewhere over the horizon.

Create Internal Fear: They move the threat from over the horizon, right to the public’s front door, or even within their own home. The enemy is no longer a foreigner. Now, the enemy is the average looking guy two houses over, or an outspoken friend, or even a dissenting family member. The enemy is all around them, according to the establishment. The public is sold on the idea that the sacrifice needed in order to combat such a pervasive “threat” is necessarily high.

Sell The People On The Virtues Of Moral Relativism: Now that the populace is willing to forgo certain liberties for the sake of security, they have been softened up enough for reprogramming to begin. The establishment will tell the people that the principles they used to hold so dear are actually weaknesses that make them vulnerable to the enemy. In order to defeat an enemy so monstrous, they claim, we must become monstrous ourselves. We must be willing to do ANYTHING, no matter how vile or contrary to natural law, in order to win.

Honesty must be replaced with deceit. Dissent must be replaced with silence. Peace must be replaced with violence. The independent should be treated with suspicion. The outspoken treated with contempt. Women and children are no longer people to be protected, but targets to be eliminated. The innocent dead become collateral damage. The innocent living become informants to be tortured and exploited. Good men are labeled cowards because they refuse to “do what needs to be done,” while evil men are labeled heroes for having the “strength of will” to abandon their conscience.

Thus, the criminal leadership makes once honorable citizens accomplices in the crime. The more disgusting the crime, the more apt the people will be to defend it and the system in general, simply because they have been inducted into the dark ceremony of moral ambiguity.

The actions of the state become the actions of all society. A single minded collectivist culture is born, one in which every person is a small piece of the greater machine. And, that which the machine is guilty of, every man is guilty of. Therefore, it becomes the ultimate and absurd purpose of each person within the system to DENY the crime, deny the guilt, and make certain that the machine continues to function for generations to come.

Though we have already passed though most of the above stages, Americans are still not yet quite indoctrinated into the realm of moral relativism. This, though, is swiftly changing.

The Current Sales Pitch

Just take a look at the attitude of the Obama Administration and the mainstream media towards Edward Snowden and his recent asylum approved by Russia.

The White House, rather than admitting wrongdoing in its support for the NSA’s mass surveillance of American citizens without warrant, or even attempting to deny the existence of the PRISM program, is now instead trying to promote NSA spying as essential to our well being while wagging a finger of shame at Snowden and the Russian government for damaging their domestic spy network. Obama has lamented on Russia’s stance, stating that their thinking is “backwards.”

Did I miss something here? I’m no fan of the Russian oligarchy, but shouldn’t Obama and most of the NSA (let alone every other Federal alphabet agency) be sitting in a dark hole somewhere awaiting trial for violating the Constitution on almost every level? Yet, we are instead supposed to despise Snowden for exposing the crime they committed and distrust any country that happens to give him shelter?

Due to public outcry, Obama has attempted to pacify critics by announcing plans to make NSA mass surveillance “more transparent”. First, I would like to point out that he did NOT offer to end NSA spying on Americans without warrant, which is what a President with any ounce of integrity would have done. Second, Obama’s calls for more transparency have come at the exact same time as the NSA announces its plans to remove 90 percent of its systems administrators to make sure another “Snowden incident” does not occur.

Finally, when the public called for an investigation into the NSA and the Director of National Intelligence in the handling of the Snowden affair and the PRISM program, the White House appointed none other than James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, as part of the team that would "investigate" any wrongdoing. The Obama Administration insists that Clapper, a documented liar who told Congress that the NSA was not involved in mass domestic spying, was not going to "head" the panel of investigators, even though a White House memo specifically named Clapper as the man who would form the so-called "independent group". The White House still admits that Clapper will be involved in the process.

So, just to reiterate, the people who perpetrated the criminal act of warrant-less surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans, and who were caught red-handed lying about it, are now appointed to investigate their own crime.

Does this sound like a government that plans on becoming “more transparent”?

Ask yourself, would Obama have called for ANY transparency over the NSA whatsoever if Snowden had never come forward? Of course not! The exposure of the crime has led to lies and empty placation, nothing more.

In the meantime, numerous other political miscreants have hit the media trail, campaigning for the NSA as well as other surveillance methods, bellowing to the rafters over the absolute necessity of domestic spy programs. Fifteen years ago, the government would have tried to sweep all of this under the rug. Today, they want to acclimate us to the inevitability of the crime, stating that we had better get used to it.

Their position? That Snowden’s whistleblowing put America at risk. My questions is, how? How did Snowden’s exposure of an unConstitutional and at bottom illegal surveillance program used against hundreds of millions of innocent Americans do our country harm? Is it the position of the White House that the truth is dangerous, and deceit is safety?

I suspect this is the case considering the recent treatment of military whistleblower Bradley Manning, who has been accused by some to have “aided Al Qaeda’s recruiting efforts” through his actions. How did Manning do this? By releasing information, including battlefield videos, that were hidden from the public containing proof of U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Perhaps I’m just a traditionalist and not hip to modern diplomatic strategy, but I would think that if you don’t want to be blamed for war crimes, then you probably shouldn’t commit war crimes. And, if you don’t want the enemy to gain new recruits, you should probably avoid killing innocent civilians and pissing off their families (there is also ample evidence suggesting that the CIA has done FAR more deliberate recruiting for Al Qaeda than Bradley Manning could have ever accomplished on accident). Just a thought.

So, to keep track - U.S. government funds and trains Al Qaeda, but is the good guy. U.S. government commits war crimes, but is the good guy. U.S. government hides the truth from the American people, but is the good guy. Bradley Manning exposes war crimes, and is the bad guy. Moral relativism at its finest. Moving on...

The shift towards moral bankruptcy is being implemented in the financial world as well. Investors, hedge funds, and major banks now surge into the stock market every time the private Federal Reserve hints that it may continue fiat stimulus. When bad news hits the mainstream feeds, people playing the Dow casino actually cheer with glee exactly because bad economic news means more QE from the Fed. They know that the Fed is artificially propping up the markets. The Fed openly admits that it does this. And, they know that our fiscal system is hanging by a thin thread. And you know what, very few of them care.

The Fed created the collapse with easy money and manipulated interest rates, and now, some people cheer them as the heroes of the U.S. financial structure.



The American narrative is quickly changing. There has long been criminality and degeneracy within our government (Democrat and Republican) and the corporate cartels surrounding it, but I believe what we are witnessing today is the final step in the metamorphosis that is totalitarianism. The last stage accelerates when the average citizen is not just complicit in the deeds of devils, but when he becomes a devil himself. When Americans froth and stomp in excitement for the carnival of death, and treat the truth as poison, then the transformation will be complete.

Humanity Is Drowning In Washington’s Criminality

 

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
August 13, 2013

Amerika has become despised by everyone who has a moral conscience and a sense of justice.

Americans will soon be locked into an unaccountable police state unless US Representatives and Senators find the courage to ask questions and to sanction the executive branch officials who break the law, violate the Constitution, withhold information from Congress, and give false information about their crimes against law, the Constitution, the American people and those in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Guantanamo, and elsewhere. Congress needs to use the impeachment power that the Constitution provides and cease being subservient to the lawless executive branch. The US faces no threat that justifies the lawlessness and abuse of police powers that characterize the executive branch in the 21st century.

Impeachment is the most important power of Congress. Impeachment is what protects the citizens, the Constitution, and the other branches of government from abuse by the executive branch. If the power to remove abusive executive branch officials is not used, the power ceases to exist. An unused power is like a dead letter law. Its authority disappears. By acquiescing to executive branch lawlessness, Congress has allowed the executive branch to place itself above law and to escape accountability for its violations of law and the Constitution.

National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper blatantly lied to Congress and remains in office. Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, has also misled Congress, and he remains in office. Attorney General Holder avoids telling Congress the truth on just about every subject, and he also remains in office. The same can be said for President Obama, one of the great deceivers of our time, who is so adverse to truth that truth seldom finds its way out of his mouth.

If an American citizen lies to a federal investigator, even if not under oath, the citizen can be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison. Yet, these same federal personnel can lie to Congress and to citizens with impunity. Whatever the American political system is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with accountable government. In Amerika no one is accountable but citizens, who are accountable not only to law but also to unaccountable charges for which no evidence is required.

Congress has the power to impeach any presidential appointee as well as the president. In the 1970s Congress was going to impeach President Richard Nixon simply because he lied about when he learned of the Watergate burglary. To avoid impeachment, Nixon resigned. In the 1990s, the House impeached President Bill Clinton for lying about his sexual affair with a White House intern. The Senate failed to convict, no doubt as many had sexual affairs of their own and didn’t want to be held accountable themselves.

In the 1970s when I was on the Senate staff, corporate lobbyists would send attractive women to seduce Senators so that the interest groups could blackmail the Senators to do their bidding. Don’t be surprised if the NSA has adopted this corporate practice.

The improprieties of Nixon and Clinton were minor, indeed of little consequence, when compared to the crimes of George W. Bush and Obama, their vice presidents, and the bulk of their presidential appointees. Yet, impeachment is “off the table,” as Nancy Pelosi infamously declared. http://www.nytimes.com/cq/2006/11/08/cq_1916.html Why do Californian voters send a person to Congress who refuses to protect them from an unaccountable executive branch? Who does Nancy Pelosi serve? Certainly not the people of California. Most certainly not the US Constitution. Pelosi is in total violation of her oath of office. Will Californians re-elect her yet again? Little wonder America is failing.

The question demanding to be asked is: What is the purpose of the domestic surveillance of all Americans? This is surveillance out of all proportion to the alleged terrorist threat. The US Constitution is being ignored and domestic law violated. Why? Does the US government have an undeclared agenda for which the “terrorist threat” is a cover?

What is this agenda? Whose agenda is more important than the US Constitution and the accountability of government to law? No citizen is secure unless government is accountable to the Constitution and to law. It is an absurd idea that any American is more threatened by terrorism than by unaccountable government that can execute them, torture them, and throw them in prison for life without due process or any accountability whatsoever. Under Bush/Obama, the US has returned to the unaccountable power of caesars, czars, and autocrats.

In the famous play, “A Man For All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England, asks: So, you would have me to cut down the law in order to chase after devils? And what will we do, with the law cut down, when the devil turns on us?

This is the most important legal question ever asked, and it is seldom asked today, not in our law schools, not by our bar associations, and most certainly not by the Justice (sic) Department or US Attorneys.

American conservatives regard civil liberties as mere excuses for liberal judges to coddle criminals and terrorists. Never expect a conservative Republican, or more than two or three of them, to defend your civil liberty. Republicans simply do not believe in civil liberty. Democrats cannot conceive that Obama–the first black president in office, a member of an oppressed minority–would not defend civil liberty. This combination of disinterest and denial is why the US has become a police state.

Civil liberty has few friends in government, the political parties, law schools, bar associations, or the federal judiciary. Consequently, no citizen is secure. Recently, a housewife researched online for pressure cookers looking for the best deal. Her husband was searching for a backpack. The result was that a fully armed SWAT team appeared at the door demanding to search the premises and to have questions answered. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/67864/

I am always amazed when someone says: “I haven’t done anything wrong. I have nothing to fear.” If you have nothing to fear from the government, why did the Founding Fathers put the protections in the Constitution that Bush and Obama have stripped out? Unlike the Founding Fathers who designed our government to protect the citizens, the American sheeple trust the government to their own demise.

Glenn Greenwald recently explained how the mass of data that is being accumulated on every American is being mined for any signs of non-terrorist-related criminal behavior. As such warrantless searches are illegal evidence in a criminal trial, the authorities disguise the illegal way in which the evidence is obtained in order to secure conviction based on illegally obtained evidence. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35773.htm

In other words, the use of the surveillance justified by the “war on terror” has already spread into prosecutions of ordinary criminals where it has corrupted legal safeguards and the integrity, if any, of the criminal court system, prosecutors and judges.

This is just one of the many ways in which you have much to fear, whether you think you are doing anything wrong or not. You can be framed for crimes based on inferences drawn from your Internet activity and jokes with friends on social media. Jurors made paranoid by the “terrorist threat” will convict you.

We should be very suspicious of the motive behind the universal spying on US citizens. The authorities are aware that the terrorist threat does not justify the unconstitutional and illegal spying. There have been hardly any real terrorist events in the US, which is why the FBI has to find clueless people around whom to organize an FBI orchestrated plot in order to keep the “terrorist threat” alive in the public’s mind. At last count, there have been 150 “sting operations” in which the FBI recruits people, who are out of touch with reality, to engage in a well-paid FBI designed plot. Once the dupes agree, they are arrested as terrorists and the plot revealed, always with the accompanying statement that the public was never in any danger as the FBI was in control.

When 99 percent of all terrorism is organized by the FBI, why do we need NSA spying on every communication of every American and people in the rest of the world?

Terrorism seldom comes from outside. The source almost always is the government in power. The Czarist secret police set off bombs in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. The Nazis burned down the Reichstag in order to decimate the communists and assume unaccountable power in the name of “public safety.” An alleged terrorist threat is a way of using fear to block popular objection to the exercise of arbitrary government power.

In order to be “safe from terrorists,” the US population, with few objections, has accepted the demise of their civil liberties, such as habeas corpus, which reaches back centuries to Magna Carta as a constraint on government power. How, then, are they safe from their government? Americans today are in the same position as the English prior to the Great Charter of 1215. Americans are no longer protected by law and the Constitution from government tyranny.

The reason the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution was to make citizens safe from their government. If citizens allow the government to take away the Constitution, they might be safe from foreign terrorists, but they are no longer safe from their government.

Who do you think has more power over you, foreign terrorists or “your” government?

Washington defines all resistance to its imperialism and tyranny as “terrorism.” Thus, Americans who defend the environment, who defend wildlife, who defend civil liberties and human rights, who protest Washington’s wars and robbery of the people in behalf of special interests, all become “domestic extremists,” the term Homeland Security has substituted for “terrorist.” Those who are out of step with Washington and the powerful private interests that exploit us, other peoples, and the earth for their profits and power fall into the wrong side of Bush’s black and white division of the world: “you are for us or against us.”

In the United States independent thought is on the verge of being criminalized as are constitutionally guaranteed protests and the freedom of the press. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/10/james-risen-prison-journalism-criminalised The constitutional principle of freedom of speech is being redefined as treason, as aiding an undefined enemy, and as seeking to overthrow the government by casting aspersions on its motives and revealing its secret misdeeds. The power-mad inhabitants of Washington have brought the US so close to Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia that it is no longer funny. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to see the difference.

The neoconservatives have declared that Americans are the “exceptional” and “indispensable people.” Yet, the civil liberties of Americans have declined the more “exceptional” and “indispensable” that Americans become. We are now so exceptional and indispensable that we no longer have any rights.

And neither does the rest of the world. Neoconservatism has created a new dangerous American nationalism. Neoconservatives have given Washington a monopoly on right and endowed its military aggressions with a morality that supersedes the Geneva Conventions and human rights. Washington, justified by its “exceptionalism,” has the right to attack populations in countries with which Washington is not at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen. Washington is using the cover of its “exceptionalism” to murder people in many countries. http://news.antiwar.com/2013/08/11/us-drones-pound-yemen-but-targets-arent-all-militants/print/ Hitler tried to market the exceptionalism of the German people, but he lacked Washington’s Madison Avenue skills.

Washington is always morally right, whatever it does, and those who report its crimes are traitors who, stripped of their coddling by civil liberties, are locked away and abused until they confess to their crimes against the state. Anyone who tells the truth, such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, are branded enemies of the state and are ruthlessly persecuted.

How does the “indispensable, exceptional nation” have a diplomatic policy? How can a neoconized State Department be based on anything except coercion? It can’t. That is why Washington produces nothing but war and threats of war.

Wherever a person looks, whatever a person hears, it is Washington’s threat–“we are going to bomb you into the stone age” if you don’t do what we want and agree to what we require. We are going to impose “sanctions,” Washington’s euphemism for embargoes, and starve your women and children to death, permit no medical supplies, ban you from the international payments system unless you relent and consent to being Washington’s puppet, and ban you from posting your news broadcasts on the Internet.

This is the face that Washington presents to the world: the hard, mean face of a tyrant.

Washington’s power will survive a bit longer, because there are still politicians in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the NGOs in Russia, who are paid off by the almighty dollar. In exchange for Washington’s money, they endorse Washington’s immorality and murderous destruction of law and life.

But the dollar is being destroyed by Quantitative Easing, and the domestic US economy is being destroyed by jobs offshoring. http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/TAA0731131.html

Rome was powerful until the Germans ceased to believe it. Then the rotten edifice collapsed. Washington faces sooner or later the same fate. An inhumane, illegal, unconstitutional regime based on violence alone, devoid of all morality and all human compassion, is not acceptable to China, Russia, India, Iran, and Brazil, or to readers of this column.

The evil that is Washington cannot last forever. The criminals might destroy the world in nuclear war, but the lawlessness and lack of humanity in Washington, which murders more people as I write, is no longer acceptable to the rest of the world, not even to its European puppet states, despite the leaders being on Washington’s payroll.

Gorbachev is correct. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a debacle for the entire world. It transformed the US from the “city upon the hill,” the “beacon for humanity,” into an aggressive militarist state. Consequently, Amerika has become despised by everyone who has a moral conscience and a sense of justice.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously the editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrati

Glenn thrashes Sen. Lindsey Graham’s idiotic comments on Egypt

August 8, 2013
glennbeck.com

Glenn’s blood hit the boiling point on radio this morning in reaction to some pretty remarkable audio from Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about the crisis in Egypt. During a visit to Cairo earlier this week, the Senators sat down with CBS News and admitted that the country is “just days or weeks” away from “all out bloodshed.”

Glenn Beck Explains the ‘Real Reason Why You Should Care About the Middle East’

The American Surveillance State Is Here - Can It Be Evaded?

August 2, 2013
alt-market.com
By John Whitehead

This article was written by John Whitehead and originally published at The Rutherford Institute

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.” – Philip K. Dick, author of Minority Report

On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. As I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

The revelations by Edward Snowden only scrape the surface in revealing the lengths to which government agencies and their corporate allies will go to conduct mass surveillance on all communications and transactions within the United States.

Erected in secret, without any public input, these surveillance programs amount to an electronic concentration camp which houses every single person in the United States today. Indeed, government whistleblower Russ Tice, who exposed the NSA’s warrantless surveillance of American phone calls as far back as 2005, insists that despite Obama administration claims that the NSA is simply collecting metadata, the NSA is in fact retrieving “the contents of emails, text messages, Skype communications, and phone calls, as well as financial information, health records, legal documents, and travel documents.”

These communications are being stored in the NSA’s Utah Data Center, a massive $2 billion facility that will be handling yottabytes of data (equivalent to one septillion bytes—imagine a one followed by 24 zeroes) on American communications. This Utah facility is opening amidst a backlash against NSA surveillance. Most recently, the Obama administration and the NSA went into overdrive to quash an amendment sponsored by Justin Amash (R-Mich.) that would have cut off funds to the NSA if it collects surveillance data on American citizens who are not under criminal investigation. It was a bold move, especially when one considers that the NSA operates off a budget of approximately $10 billion. After all, when the government no longer listens to the citizenry—when it no longer abides by the Constitution, which is our rule of law—and when it views the citizenry as a source of funding and little else, we have no choice but to speak to the government in a language it understands—money.

Unfortunately, lobbyists and the Washington elite succeeded in defeating the amendment 217-205. Not surprisingly, many of those who voted down the bill were also recipients of campaign funds from the lucrative security/surveillance sector.

In the face of such powerful lobbyists working in tandem with our so-called representatives, any hope of holding onto even a shred of privacy is rapidly dwindling. Indeed, the life of the average American is an open book for government agents. As Senator Ron Wyden, a longtime critic of the American surveillance state, points out, government agencies operate based upon a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act which allows them to extract massive amounts of data from third party agencies, enabling them to collect information on “bulk medical, financial, credit card and gun-ownership records or lists of ‘readers of books and magazines deemed subversive.’”

Cell phones are equally vulnerable, serving as a “combination phone bug, listening device, location tracker and hidden camera.” Indeed, it’s incredibly easy to activate a cell phone’s GPS and microphone capabilities remotely. For example, the FBI uses the “roving bug” technique, which allows agents to remotely activate the microphone on a cellphone and use it as a listening device. A federal judge actually ruled in 2006 that this was a constitutional technique when it was used to listen to two alleged mobsters, despite the fact that no phone call was taking place at the time.

With private corporations also taking advantage of this technology, the outlook is decidedly grim. In an attempt to mimic the tracking capabilities of online retailers, brick-and-mortar stores now utilize WIFI-enabled devices to track the movements of their customers by tracking their phones as they move throughout the store. The data gathered by these devices include “‘capture rate’ (how successful window displays are at pulling people into the store); number of customers inside the store; customer visit duration and frequency; customer location within the store; people who walk by the store without coming in; and the amount of foot traffic around the store.”

Combined with facial recognition technology, our cell phones have become a tell-all about our personal lives. For example, one Russian marking company, Synqera, “uses facial recognition technology to tailor marketing messages to customers according to their gender, age, and mood.” As one company representative noted, “if you are an angry man of 30, and it is Friday evening, [the Synqera software] may offer you a bottle of whiskey.”

Americans cannot even drive their cars without being enmeshed in this web of surveillance. As confirmed by an ACLU report entitled, “You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’ Movements,” the latest developments in license plate readers enable law enforcement and private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants, all across the country.

License plate readers work by recognizing a passing license plate, photographing it, and running the information against a pre-determined database that lets police know if they’ve got a “hit,” a person of interest, though not necessarily a suspected criminal. There are reportedly tens of thousands of these license plate readers now affixed to police cars and underpasses in operation throughout the country. The data collected from these devices is also being shared between police agencies, as well as with fusion centers and private companies.

Indeed, while all drivers’ data is being collected, only a fraction of the data collected constitutes a “hit.” An even smaller fraction of those “hits” actually result in an arrest. Overall, the hit rate for criminal activity gleaned from the license pictures is usually between .01% and .3%, meaning that over 99% of the people being unnecessarily surveilled are entirely innocent.

The implications for privacy are dire. All of the data points collected by license plate readers can be traced and mapped so that a picture of a vehicle’s past movements can be re-constructed. Furthermore, the photographs produced by license plate readers “sometimes include a substantial part of a vehicle, its occupants, and its immediate vicinity.”

In addition to tracking tens of thousands of innocent people, the data collected by license plate readers is often kept far beyond any reasonable period of time. Data retention policies vary widely, from the Ohio State Highway Patrol, which deletes non-hits immediately, versus some localities which hold on to data for weeks, months, or years. Some localities hold on to the information indefinitely.

To cap it off, private companies are also getting into the data collection game, as data collected on innocent drivers is being shared between both government agencies and corporations. One such business, Final Notice, offers the information they gather to police agencies and intends to start selling the information to other groups soon, including bail bondsmen, private investigators, and insurers.

Another company, MVTrac, claims to have data on “a large majority” of vehicles in the US, and the Digital Recognition Network (DRN) claims to have a network of affiliates of more than 550. These affiliates feed over 50 million plate reads into a national database containing “over 700 million data points on where American drivers have been.”

This is the United States of America today, where liberty and privacy are the currency for any and all essential services. Short of living in a cave, cut off from all communications and commerce, anyone living in the concentration camp that is America today must cede his privacy and liberty to a government agency, a corporation, or both, in order to access information via the internet, communicate with friends and family, shop for food and clothing, or travel to work.

We have just about reached the point of no return. “If we do not seize this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we are all going to live to regret it,” warned Senator Wyden. “The combination of increasingly advanced technology with a breakdown in the checks and balances that limit government action could lead us to a surveillance state that cannot be reversed.”

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.