This is an excerpt from Edgar J. Steele’s Nickel Rant of April 15, 2009. You can read it in its entirety by clicking here.
We have two choices: revolution or secession. We cannot work within the system because the system has frozen us out and refuses to allow us back in. Our “elected” representatives view us with disdain and more than a little fear. Why else do you think they are strengthening the enabling legislation for the woefully-named Patriot Acts and, now, openly discussing gun registration and confiscation?
The Federal government is lost to us and running full force into the arms of the New World Order, per the orders of the real masters of America: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), composed of some of the most evil men and women ever to inhabit Washington, DC.
Why else do you think that CFR-member bankers are being bailed out right and left while we are left to flail hopelessly in an ever-rising tide of debt and regulation? Why else do you think that AIG, which still pays its executives million-dollar bonuses for failing, is given billions upon billions of our tax dollars, which it then dutifully funnels to the banks and congressional pension funds that it insures? Why else do you think that major corporations that should have gone under long ago are being shored up with your tax dollars? Not to save the workers’ jobs, because our “leaders” certainly care nothing for them, but to save the banks and insurance companies who have propped up those failing corporations.
Just as Russia was looted late last century and left for dead, so is America now being looted – and by the same tribe of people. America will be left just as hollowed out as was Russia, unless we do something about it and do it quickly.
I sometimes come in for criticism for not advocating revolution in America, which is something that our founding fathers, if alive today, certainly would foment. I like to visualize George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine magically transported to this time, then setting off for Washington, DC in a red Cadillac convertible with a road map in one hand and a bazooka in the other. However, I cannot espouse violent revolution, folks. First, it goes against my basic, non-violent nature. Second, it is illegal and would get me arrested in a heartbeat. Just how much good would I be able to accomplish from a jail cell?
Used to be, I advocated change within the system. Then, when it became apparent, during the Bush administration, that such change was impossible, I began to advocate preparing for the inevitable collapse, both financial and, possibly, militarily at the hands of those that we have offended internationally (which includes everybody else in the world by now). Picking up the pieces was my new strategy for New America, which I envisioned rising, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of a fallen America.
While I still believe in preparing for the worst, I have become hopeful of a new avenue: secession on a state-by-state basis. Call it wishful thinking, if you like, but secession still strikes me as a viable alternative to simply waiting for the coming apocalypse.
Yes, Lincoln seemed to foreclose the possibility of secession with his War of Northern Aggression (you may know it as the Civil War), wherein he oversaw the wholesale slaughter of brothers by brothers in pursuit of his unconstitutional objective of “preserving the Union,” which didn’t then deserve to be preserved, as proven by the manner in which the North manhandled the South during the period we laughingly call “The Reconstruction.”
I submit that today’s Union – today’s America – has lost its legitimacy even moreso than did Lincoln’s and I call for a modern wholesale secession by the various States now making up the United States. I call for this to be an orderly, lawful and peaceful secession. A non-violent revolution of a sort, in fact.
The United District of America
Just imagine, for a moment, the result if all 50 states were to secede at once, leaving the Federal government to preside over merely the District of Columbia. The states then could recall all of their men in uniform from wherever posted, seize all federal property within their boundaries and demand that all federal employees either throw in their lot with the state or move to the District of Columbia. There literally would be nothing the Federal government could do about its well-deserved predicament, particularly with its major tax revenue sources cut off.
Secession is Our Legal Right
The Constitution certainly has the legal basis for secession still in place: It resides within the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states and the people all “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states.” You see, because secession is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution or its Amendments, such power resides still within the states themselves and the people. This is a crucial fact that we must keep in mind at all times.
Similarly, the legal precedent for secession is laid out in America’s Declaration of Independence: “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government … when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.”
It is the utmost in irony that none other than Abraham Lincoln, who did more single-handed damage to the US Constitution than, even, George W. Bush, rose up in Congress in January 1848 before he became President and stated: “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right – a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” Mind you, Lincoln meant even down to neighborhoods being able to secede from the Union.
The US Constitution: a Breached Contract
View the Constitution as a contract between us, the States and the Federal government. The Federal government has breached that contract in more ways than I have hours left in my life in which to recount its transgressions against all of us, both individually and as States.
For example, though its duties are few, the Federal government simply refuses to perform many of them:
Rather than “provide for our common defense,” our Federal government initiates foreign wars without provocation and without congressional declaration – wars that actually heighten the danger of our being attacked from without. Similarly, it refuses to protect our southern border and declines to protect us from the de facto invasion by countries to our south.
The Federal government has abdicated its responsibility to “coin money (and) regulate the value thereof” by delegating to a private, foreign-owned corporation (the Federal Reserve Bank) that duty, which has managed to steal 98 cents out of every dollar issued since its inception in 1913. This single failing is responsible for the current financial catastrophe now befalling America.
Rather than “provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the Militia…reserving to the States…the appointment of the officers and the authority of training the Militia,” the Federal government has done its best to destroy anything resembling militias in America, preferring instead to implement an unconstitutional and permanent “standing army.”
“The privilege of Habeas Corpus” repeatedly has been suspended in direct contravention of the US Constitution.
Our system of lobbying, campaign funding and proven election fraud on the part of officials has robbed us of our constitutional guarantee of a “republican form of government,” accountable directly “to the people.”
We have installed as President a person who is not “a natural born citizen” and, quite possibly, not even “a citizen of the United States,” incredible as that may be to contemplate, let alone comprehend.
Previously, I have written at length as to how each and every single element of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights has been abrogated or abridged by unconstitutional legislation, ultra vires judicial decisions and by executive fiat. Very little remains of the original ten Amendments comprising the Bill of Rights. In particular, the Tenth Amendment has been stripped of its mandate that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Copyright ©2009, Edgar J. Steele
Collectivism of every stripe has as its gravamen the control of a nation’s citizenry. Increased organization leads to greater control. Organization is
Oddly enough, there comes a point in national corruption when a little more control actually results in a fairer distribution of the bounty of that nation’s economic system, as in America’s health system today, which is grossly unfair to the multitudes of uninsured and underinsured middle-class Americans.
As I said: to argue about differing economic models or alternate political systems is to engage in the wrong argument altogether. The real nub: individualism vs. collectivism. Without collectivism one cannot have true order and organization, from which one exacts an unfair and often-unseen advantage over others.
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