by Tibor R. Machan

Too often now when people voice fear of the American government, whether it is homeland security or health-care reform, one is accused of being irrational or paranoid. It is that familiar “It can’t happen here” syndrome at work. But there are good reasons not to dismiss such concerns under current circumstances.

When society is considered a collective — akin to a team, only not voluntarily established like most sport teams — those who see themselves as its leaders and charged with selecting goals everyone must pursue can quite easily slip into a mode of thinking that construes all opposition a form of betrayal. If, for example, the federal government is understood along these lines, setting goals for us all for which resources and hard work are needed, and dissent from which may threaten the ability to collect those resources and secure such work, the dissenters will naturally be perceived as traitors to the cause. Indeed, their obstreperousness will easily be perceived as dangerous obstruction of justice! After all, those who lead us toward a goal they consider vital to the public interest do understand themselves to be promoters, champions of social justice. How else are they to understand wealth redistribution, for example?

In all the literature I have run across in my now quite long career in the field of political philosophy, insisting on the idea that the rich must not be allowed to keep their wealth, the poor must be made to share in the wealth of the nation, the indigent are legally entitled to support obtained by taking from those who have it — all these views are defended mainly as varieties of social or economic justice. And is it not even a crime today to obstruct justice? Sure, that means obstructing law, but it is called obstruction of justice, is it not? Because if the law itself is deemed as just, then those who oppose it are in cahoots with criminals who obstruct it. And by the lights of the collectivists, laws promoting their idea of the public interest are indeed just.

How can a bona fide promoter of social justice tolerate serious, persistent dissent? It is not possible unless one is firmly committed to the idea of individual rights, the right, for example, to campaign against and even withdraw from various projects government officials consider vital to the public interest. And when a country’s government is administered by officials who do not believe in individual rights, as for instance President Obama is not — judging by his close association with and reliance on the advice of legal theorists who denigrate such rights as fictitious — the concern that dissent will land one in hot water with government officials is quite rational.

OK, for a while there is the protection afforded by the First Amendment to the Constitution but with sufficient savvy the defenders of the public interest as they see it could very well see full warrant for weakening such protection. This is one of the lessons of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to pack the Supreme Court when that court would not go along with his plans for the country, plans that involved breaching the principles of the Constitution. Roosevelt did not believe in the Bill of Rights as traditionally understood in America’s legal history but crafted, instead, a Second Bill of Rights. It wasn’t only that some of the older interpretations of the Bill of Rights needed to be straightened out but that the very idea of citizens having basic, unalienable rights stood in the way of his aggressive statism.

Today, the legal team of President Obama is of the same mind as FDR was when he launched the New Deal. What is needed, they argue, is the reaffirmation of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, with its emphasis on entitlements and the coerced services needed from everyone so as to deliver on these. So when one opposes this policy, one is clearly an obstructionist. One is breaking ranks from an army that needs all the soldiers to be dedicated and loyal. Patriotism is then defined as falling in line with the government’s plans.

Why is it such a surprise, then, that the Obama administration is attacking those American citizens who voice opposition to, for example, its plan for the virtual nationalization of the health-care profession in America? Why be surprised that opponents of bailouts and stimulus programs are denigrated and marginalized instead of argued with? Such people are seen as vicious opponents of social and economic justice, and such opposition is quite intolerable to anyone who cares for such justice, is it not?

Once the bulwark against this kind of tyranny — namely the basic rights of individuals and the legal system that rests on those rights — is rejected as ultimately mythical, what will stand in the way of treating dissenters as traitors?

The fear of the American government becoming more and more tyrannical is not irrational but completely justified by the logic of the current administration’s attitude about political and legal theory. What we are seen as, all of us, is tools and resources for carrying out the government’s plans. Anyone who disagrees may well need to be neutralized.

by Larry Flint, Huffington Post

The American government — which we once called our government — has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “economic royalists,” who choose our elected officials — indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.

This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment’s hesitation, they took our money — yours and mine — to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame. They don’t care what you and I think about them. Henry Kissinger refers to us as “useless eaters.”

But, you say, we have elected a candidate of change. To which I respond: Do these words of President Obama sound like change?

“A culture of irresponsibility took root, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.”
There it is. Right there. We are Main Street. We must, according to our president, share the blame. He went on to say: “And a regulatory regime basically crafted in the wake of a 20th-century economic crisis — the Great Depression — was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st-century global economy.”

This is nonsense.

The reason Wall Street was able to game the system the way it did — knowing that they would become rich at the expense of the American people (oh, yes, they most certainly knew that) — was because the financial elite had bribed our legislators to roll back the protections enacted after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Congress gutted the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial lending banks from investment banks, and passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed for self-regulation with no oversight. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently revised its rules to allow for even less oversight — and we’ve all seen how well that worked out. To date, no serious legislation has been offered by the Obama administration to correct these problems.

Instead, Obama wants to increase the oversight power of the Federal Reserve. Never mind that it already had significant oversight power before our most recent economic meltdown, yet failed to take action. Never mind that the Fed is not a government agency but a cartel of private bankers that cannot be held accountable by Washington. Whatever the Fed does with these supposed new oversight powers will be behind closed doors.

Obama’s failure to act sends one message loud and clear: He cannot stand up to the powerful Wall Street interests that supplied the bulk of his campaign money for the 2008 election. Nor, for that matter, can Congress, for much the same reason.

Consider what multibillionaire banker David Rockefeller wrote in his 2002 memoirs:

“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

Read Rockefeller’s words again. He actually admits to working against the “best interests of the United States.”

Need more? Here’s what Rockefeller said in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order.” They’re gaming us. Our country has been stolen from us.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, notes that esteemed economist John Kenneth Galbraith laid the 1929 crash at the feet of banking giant Goldman Sachs. Taibbi goes on to say that Goldman Sachs has been behind every other economic downturn as well, including the most recent one. As if that wasn’t enough, Goldman Sachs even had a hand in pushing gas prices up to $4 a gallon.

The problem with bankers is longstanding. Here’s what one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had to say about them:

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their father’s conquered.”

We all know that the first American Revolution officially began in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. Less well known is that the single strongest motivating factor for revolution was the colonists’ attempt to free themselves from the Bank of England. But how many of you know about the second revolution, referred to by historians as Shays’ Rebellion? It took place in 1786-87, and once again the banks were the cause. This time they were putting the screws to America’s farmers.

Daniel Shays was a farmer in western Massachusetts. Like many other farmers of the day, he was being driven into bankruptcy by the banks’ predatory lending practices. (Sound familiar?) Rallying other farmers to his side, Shays led his rebels in an attack on the courts and the local armory. The rebellion itself failed, but a message had been sent: The bankers (and the politicians who supported them) ultimately backed off. As Thomas Jefferson famously quipped in regard to the insurrection: “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Perhaps it’s time to consider that option once again.

I’m calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.

Let’s set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn’t effective — if the politicians ignore us — we do it again. And again. And again.

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It’s time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.

by J.D. Tuccille

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which federal officials denied proven treatment for syphilis to African-American men just to see how the disease progressed, came to a belated end in 1972, so Ezra Klein, the high-school intern … err … young columnist at The Washington Post can perhaps be forgiven for failing to recognize the officially sanctioned 40-year abomination as evidence that we do indeed have a “government capable of madness.” But government officials have engaged in other horrors in recent memory, so his astonishment that many Americans distrust the state can only be taken as appalling naivete — or incredible idiocy.

On August 11, Klein wrote:

What we’re seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It’s distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the “institutional checks” that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either. That claim is not about what is in this bill, or what government has done in Medicare and Medicaid and the VA. It is about what a certain slice of Americans think their government — and by extension, their fellow citizens — capable of.

Leave aside, for the moment, the wisdom of the various health care proposals rattling around the chambers of Congress at the moment. Can anybody with even a passing knowledge of the past century’s history say with a straight face that governments — very much including the one under which we live — are not capable of madness?

R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Hawaii, has made a rather depressing name for himself by calculating the number of people murdered by governments during the course of the twentieth century. His latest estimate, revised upwards, stands at 262,000,000.

Yes, that mountain of bodies can mostly be blamed on the world’s totalitarian governments, with bloody additions tossed in by merely authoritarian political systems. But democracies are capable of madness, too. The American Civil Liberties Union is currently digging through memos written by the late, unlamented Bush administration, which authorized the use of torture against detainees. The Obama administration is still resisting efforts to shine some light on just who is being held under brutal conditions at Bagram, in Afghanistan.

And then there’s Tuskegee, which continued for decades under presidents and congresses from both major political parties.

Ezra Klein may ridicule public doubts about the wisdom of allowing the government further control over health care as the equivalent of demanding “what will prevent you from beating your wife?” of elected officials. But the truth of the matter is that government has been an abusive and untrustworthy partner for as long as it has existed. That doesn’t mean that everything politicians touch ends in horror and bloodshed, but it’s hardly an exercise in paranoia to voice the “distrust in the political system” that Klein finds so worrisome.

In fact, our political system was built on an (imperfect) system of checks and balances meant to minimize the toll it takes on life, liberty and property since the founders didn’t trust what they were creating. So when Klein objects that “A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the ‘institutional checks’ that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other,” we have to wonder just how long he’s been skipping Social Studies class to pen his oh-so-earnest columns.

In the end, maybe the Obama administration’s proposals for a greater government role in health care will prove to be a good idea. I doubt it, but I’ve been wrong before. But in the course of the debate over those proposals, questions about the trustworthiness of the government — and its potential for madness — should take center stage.

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – Small businesses that received $682 million in IOUs from the state say California expects them to pay taxes on the worthless scraps of paper, but refuses to accept its own IOUs to pay debts or taxes. The vendors’ federal class action claims the state is trying to balance its budget on their backs.

Lead plaintiff Nancy Baird filled her contract with California to provide embroidered polo shirts to a youth camp run by the National Guard, but never was paid the $27,000 she was owed. She says California “paid” her with an IOU that two banks refused to accept – yet she had to pay California sales tax on the so-called “sale” of the uniforms.

The class consists mostly of small business owners, many of whom rely on income from government contracts to keep afloat. They say California has used them as “suckers” as it looks for a way to bankroll its operations while avoiding its own financial obligations.

“Instead of seeking funds through proper channels, the State has created a nightmare,” the class says. “Many of these businesses will not survive if they are required to wait until October 2009 to have these forced IOUs redeemed by the State.”

The class claims the state is violating the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. It demands that California be ordered to honor its own IOUs, plus interest. They are represented by William Audet.

by Paul Joseph Watson

Three million Americans are being forced to answer intrusive questions about their private lives under threat of home visits and fines by the government in the guise of The American Community Survey.

The survey, which is sent to 3 million random homes each year, is in addition to the census but demands far more invasive information from citizens, such as how many times they have been married, if they have a toilet that flushes, and how much is left outstanding on their mortgage.

According to one North Texas resident, “The questionnaire also wants answers about where she works, how much money she makes, and what time she leaves for work each day – the hour and minute! “I thought it was intrusive. I don’t have a high regard for the federal government collecting this information anyway,” the woman told CBS 11 News. “You don’t know what they’re going to do with it.”

“Why do they need to know this? They don’t, in my opinion,” the woman said, before further stating that she thinks the personal questions are un-American. “Do they really need to know if we have a mortgage and whether this house is free and clear? That’s intrusive.”

The U.S. Census Bureau claims the survey helps them “determine where to locate services and allocate resources.”

If the person refuses to respond to the the survey or merely skips one question, then the Census Bureau promises that they will be fined and harassed until they do, a process that includes telephone calls and home visits.

However, it’s all hot air as no one has ever been charged with a crime for refusing to answer the ACS survey, and indeed several members of Congress have denounced the invasive questions as a violation of the Right to Financial Privacy Act.

On its very face, this is also a flagrant violation of the 5th amendment. Any census form that goes beyond asking how many people live in the residence is a violation of the 5th amendment, and court cases have established this, yet the census becomes more and more invasive each time.

Despite the fact that refusal to respond to the survey carries no ultimate penalty, the vast majority of the millions who receive it will doubtless comply in the face of threats of harassment and fines.

Objections to the invasive information being demanded by the government in the form of the survey arrive on the back of similar concerns about the 2010 census itself, particularly howcensus workers are using GPS to electronically tag every home in America.

In February, the Obama administration moved control of the census out of the Department of Commerce and into the White House, a tactic slammed as a trick by Democrats to keep their majorities in Congress.