Global Governance Utopianism and the Threats to Freedom

By Avi Davis | June 10, 2012 | Breitbart News

It does not take much to trace the lineage of the global governance movement.  Beginning with the very first work on international law, written by Herman Grotius in 1623, down through the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant and Karl Krause and to the mid- 20th century novels of H.G. Wells, a line can be drawn threading together advocacy of intellectuals and political leaders for the establishment of some kind of global authority to be placed in charge of governing mankind’s work and activities.

Born in Crisis

The Meaning Of The Constitution

By Edwin Meese III | September 16, 2009 | Heritage Foundation

The Constitution of the United States has endured for over two centuries. It remains the object of reverence for nearly all Americans and an object of admiration by peoples around the world. William Gladstone was right in 1878 when he described the U.S. Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”

Part of the reason for the Constitution’s enduring strength is that it is the complement of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration provided the philosophical basis for a government that exercises legitimate power by “the consent of the governed,” and it defined the conditions of a free people, whose rights and liberty are derived from their Creator. The Constitution delineated the structure of government and the rules for its operation, consistent with the creed of human liberty proclaimed in the Declaration.

Justice Joseph Story, in his Familiar Exposition of the Constitution (1840), described our Founding document in these terms:

We shall treat [our Constitution], not as a mere compact, or league, or confederacy, existing at the mere will of any one or more of the States, during their good pleasure; but, (as it purports on its face to be) as a Constitution of Government, framed and adopted by the people of the United States, and obligatory upon all the States, until it is altered, amended, or abolished by the people, in the manner pointed out in the instrument itself.

By the diffusion of power—horizontally among the three separate branches of the federal government, and vertically in the allocation of power between the central government and the states—the Constitution’s Framers devised a structure of government strong enough to ensure the nation’s future strength and prosperity but without sufficient power to threaten the liberty of the people.

Empowering Individuals or Bureaucrats?

By Rep. Paul Ryan | May 2012 | American Spectator

Also in Choice Symposium

• James Piereson – A Time for Choosing
• Stephen Moore & Peter Ferrara – The Road From Serfdom
• David N. Bass – The Millennial Perspective

The choice and the contrast in health care.

In March, as the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of President Obama’s partisan health care law, the American people saw an event that could mark the end of bureaucrat-controlled health care. At the same time, just across the street in the halls of Congress, they witnessed a powerful reaffirmation of the American Idea as the House of Representatives passed the Path to Prosperity—a budget for the federal government.

45 Signs That America Will Soon Be A Nation With A Very Tiny Elite And The Rest Of Us Will Be Poor

By Staff Report | April 2, 2012 | End of the American Dream

The middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in the United States today.  America is a nation with a very tiny elite that is rapidly becoming increasingly wealthy while everyone else is becoming poorer.  So why is this happening?  Well, it is actually very simple.  Our institutions are designed to concentrate wealth in the hands of a very limited number of people.  Throughout human history, almost all societies that have had a big centralized government have also had a very high concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite.  Throughout human history, almost all societies that have allowed big business or big corporations to dominate the economy have also had a very high concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite.  Well, the United States has allowed both big government and big corporations to grow wildly out of control.  Those were huge mistakes.  Our founding fathers attempted to establish a nation where the federal government would be greatly limited and where corporations would be greatly restricted.  Unfortunately, we have turned our backs on those principles and now we are paying the price.

A Hidden History of Evil

By Claire Berlinski | Spring 2010 | City Journal

Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?

MARC RIBOUD/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Though Mikhail Gorbachev is lionized in the West, the untranslated archives suggest a much darker figure.

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.

Then there’s Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who once spent 12 years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas—political psychiatric hospitals—after being convicted of copying anti-Soviet literature. He, too, possesses a massive collection of stolen and smuggled papers from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which, as he writes, “contain the beginnings and the ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century.” These documents are available online at bukovsky-archives.net, but most are not translated. They are unorganized; there are no summaries; there is no search or index function. “I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them,” Bukovsky writes. “Editors shrug indifferently: So what? Who cares?”

The originals of most of Stroilov’s documents remain in the Kremlin archives, where, like most of the Soviet Union’s top-secret documents from the post-Stalin era, they remain classified. They include, Stroilov says, transcripts of nearly every conversation between Gorbachev and his foreign counterparts—hundreds of them, a near-complete diplomatic record of the era, available nowhere else. There are notes from the Politburo taken by Georgy Shakhnazarov, an aide of Gorbachev’s, and by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev. There is the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev—Gorbachev’s principal aide and deputy chief of the body formerly known as the Comintern—which dates from 1972 to the collapse of the regime. There are reports, dating from the 1960s, by Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Central Committee’s International Department until 1987 and then Gorbachev’s advisor until 1991. Zagladin was both envoy and spy, charged with gathering secrets, spreading disinformation, and advancing Soviet influence.

When Gorbachev and his aides were ousted from the Kremlin, they took unauthorized copies of these documents with them. The documents were scanned and stored in the archives of the Gorbachev Foundation, one of the first independent think tanks in modern Russia, where a handful of friendly and vetted researchers were given limited access to them. Then, in 1999, the foundation opened a small part of the archive to independent researchers, including Stroilov. The key parts of the collection remained restricted; documents could be copied only with the written permission of the author, and Gorbachev refused to authorize any copies whatsoever. But there was a flaw in the foundation’s security, Stroilov explained to me. When things went wrong with the computers, as often they did, he was able to watch the network administrator typing the password that gave access to the foundation’s network. Slowly and secretly, Stroilov copied the archive and sent it to secure locations around the world.

When I first heard about Stroilov’s documents, I wondered if they were forgeries. But in 2006, having assessed the documents with the cooperation of prominent Soviet dissidents and Cold War spies, British judges concluded that Stroilov was credible and granted his asylum request. The Gorbachev Foundation itself has since acknowledged the documents’ authenticity.

Bukovsky’s story is similar. In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin’s government invited him to testify at the Constitutional Court of Russia in a case concerning the constitutionality of the Communist Party. The Russian State Archives granted Bukovsky access to its documents to prepare his testimony. Using a handheld scanner, he copied thousands of documents and smuggled them to the West.

The Russian state cannot sue Stroilov or Bukovsky for breach of copyright, since the material was created by the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, neither of which now exists. Had he remained in Russia, however, Stroilov believes that he could have been prosecuted for disclosure of state secrets or treason. The military historian Igor Sutyagin is now serving 15 years in a hard-labor camp for the crime of collecting newspaper clippings and other open-source materials and sending them to a British consulting firm. The danger that Stroilov and Bukovsky faced was real and grave; they both assumed, one imagines, that the world would take notice of what they had risked so much to acquire.

Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The ‘commonly accepted’ version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.

For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:

Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.

Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?

And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.

Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:

H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .

M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .

H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.

M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!

H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.

One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.

Read the full article here.

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Why Congress Must Confront the Administrative State

By Robert Moffit, Ph.D. | April 2, 2012 | Heritage Foundation

Abstract: The triumph of the administrative state has been made possible by the emasculation of the legislative power. Washington’s problem is not merely federal spending and debt; it is the arrogance of centralized power. The time is therefore ripe for a major national discussion not only about the size of government, but also about the processes of government. Americans have a choice: to be governed by the rule of law, as hammered out in open legislative debate carried on by elected representatives who are directly accountable to us, or the rule of administrators who are most certainly not accountable to us. The rule of regulators is arbitrary and unaccountable government—exactly what the Founders wished to prevent in crafting the Federal Constitution.

Steve Kroft of CBS recently interviewed President Barack Obama. In response to a question on his job performance, the President ranked himself fourth among America’s chief executives (behind Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln) in the production of policy initiatives.[1]

Critics quickly ridiculed his self-assessment as narcissistic nonsense. They’re wrong.

President Obama is transforming American government. Few Presidents have enjoyed more success in enacting such a large policy agenda in such a short period of time.

• Within weeks of his inauguration, the President signed into law a major expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and Medicaid.
• He quickly followed this up with the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “stimulus” bill), adding $831 billion to our deficits.
• In 2010, Congress passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd–Frank bill), providing for massive and far-reaching financial regulation.
• And on March 23, 2010, he signed into law the 2,800-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). It is the largest single piece of social legislation in American history, expanding federal control over one-sixth of the American economy and the personal lives of more than 300 million citizens.

Combine this massive legislative production with his zealous regulatory program. While Washington’s bureaucratic regime has been growing since the early 1900s, under President Obama its growth has exploded. In 2009 and 2010 alone, federal agencies issued 7,076 final rules.[2]

While the President insists that his regulatory output is less than that of President George W. Bush, a closer look reveals that his “major” regulations—those having an annual impact of at least $100 million each—were more numerous. Since President Obama took office in 2009, federal agencies have issued 75 major regulations with an annual additional cost to the economy of $38 billion.[3] Taken altogether, the Small Business Administration last year estimated that the total cost of America’s regulatory burden reached $1.75 trillion—more than twice what Americans pay in individual income taxes.[4]

The U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury, and Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are at the center of this regulatory storm. They alone account for 43 percent of all rules in the federal pipeline.[5] Of the 43 major rules issued in 2010, 10 were based on EPA mandates.[6] With the President’s health and environmental initiatives alone, the Obama White House has dwarfed the regulatory agenda of its predecessors.

The national health law expands the administrative power of the HHS Secretary beyond anything previously attempted. The Secretary is required to act—indicated by the statutory language “shall”—1,563 times in the final language of the legislation, and 40 specific provisions of the law mandate or permit the issuance of regulations.[7] Senate Republican Policy Committee staff estimate that the new law creates 159 new agencies or entities, but the Congressional Research Service says that the exact number is “unknowable” inasmuch as certain powerful federal offices are created administratively without direct congressional authorization.

While the law’s schedule of implementation stretches out over eight years, the most far-reaching provisions—the mandates on individuals, employers, and states—take effect in 2014. Nonetheless, in less than two years, the national health law has already generated over 11,000 pages of rules, regulations, and guidelines and related paperwork in the Federal Register.

Just consider the law’s 15-member Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). The powerful board will make its initial recommendations for detailed and specific Medicare payment cuts in January 2015, and the Secretary is empowered to put them into effect unless Congress enacts an alternative set of payment cuts to meet statutory Medicare spending targets.[8] The board’s automatic recommendations are subject to neither administrative nor judicial review, and the law further requires a three-fifths Senate majority to block IPAB’s prescriptions.

Peter Orszag, President Obama’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has observed that the extraordinary power of this new board is “the largest yielding of sovereignty from the Congress since the creation of the Federal Reserve.”[9]

In 2010 alone, Congress enacted 217 bills that became law, but that same year, federal agencies issued 3,573 final rules covering a wide variety of economic activities.[10] Today, more than at any other time in our history, we are less and less governed by the rule of law, hammered out in legislative deliberations as the Founders intended, and more and more governed by the rule of regulation. We are subject to edicts promulgated by administrators—persons we do not know and will never know, persons protected by civil service law and tenure who are not accountable to us and will never be accountable to us. Nonetheless, the administrators’ detailed decisions have the force of law.

Regulation, as law, can and does directly affect whether or not we can start or run our businesses, determine how many persons we can or cannot afford to hire, how we may or may not use our land or dispose of our property. Not only do administrators publish thousands of pages of regulations, but our fellow citizens can sometimes also go to jail for violating them.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE

Ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing the triumph of the administrative state, but that conquest is only possible because of the emasculation of the legislative power. The Founders made Congress the lawgiver, as clarified in Article I, Section 1 of the Federal Constitution. So much of their focus, reflected in The Federalist and other writings, was on how to check and balance the predominant legislative power, to channel and contain personal ambition and factional interest, to restrain potentially tyrannical majorities and safeguard the rights of beleaguered minorities, to secure personal liberty and protect the rights of property.

Though federal power has grown steadily since President Washington took the oath of office, today the relationship between the individual and the government is changing in a qualitative way. Americans are increasingly the subjects of an administrative regime rather than the free citizens of a democratic republic with a limited government.

Picking Winners and Losers. This steady transfer of legislative power to administrators has another inescapable consequence: arbitrary rule. The champions of administrative power invariably couch their arguments in appeals to expertise. The more complex the economic sector to be planned or regulated, the more that strict uniformity in the application of the rules becomes problematic.

In broad congressional grants of power, lawmakers give administrators wide latitude in the development and enforcement of the rules, so those who make the rules can also unmake them by granting waivers and exemptions. In the case of the health care law, HHS has already granted over 1,722 temporary waivers to certain businesses, unions, and gourmet restaurants in San Francisco that don’t have to comply with national coverage rules that apply to other companies throughout the country.

Treating similarly situated Americans differently, either as individual citizens or as citizens of a particular state, amounts to arbitrary rule; and arbitrary rule is inherently unjust.

THE NEED FOR A HIGHER LEVEL OF PUBLIC DEBATE

Today’s debate over the powerful bureaucracy is usually framed in terms of economic impact: How will federal rules affect economic growth and job creation, the price of gasoline or electricity, the cost of health insurance or the quality of medical care? While this level of debate is necessary, it is insufficient. Yes, we cannot neglect the trees, but it is really the health of the forest that matters.

The big question is this: How does this bureaucratic ascendancy affect ordinary Americans? My answer: Our very civic life is at stake, not just our prosperity.

The current trend is an affront to our self-government. The tacit assumption: Millions of us are not smart enough to make our own decisions for ourselves. Rather, we need to be closely supervised by officials. They will prescribe for us, for example, what kind of light bulbs and washing machines we should use. The provision of nutritional or caloric information on restaurant menus, or food items dispensed through vending machines, is now a federal mandate under Section 4205 of the Affordable Care Act.

Our supervision, though distant and impersonal, becomes more precise and detailed. We are to become increasingly dependent on government for our well-being. Today, almost half of Americans (48.5 percent) live in households that are getting some form of government assistance, largely funded from federal revenues, but nearly half (49.5 percent) of our citizens pay no federal income taxes. But today’s Progressives are still dissatisfied. In their view, the many are to be even more dependent on the few, and the few (the hated “rich,” however they are defined) should be paying even more in taxes than they do today.

Over time, these dynamics will change the character of our people, with corrosive consequences for our political culture and our economic prosperity. America will have a progressively larger class of dependent citizens, and that spirit of freedom and independence for which the Founders risked their lives and fortunes will be broken.

It does not have to be this way. Our task is to paint the big picture, the overarching framework of American civic life. The great medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, the “First Whig,” defines law as an edict of reason, promulgated by the sovereign for the common good of the community.[11] The law instructs citizens in their rights and duties, and thus has a teaching function. That being the case, as lawmakers, you must become teachers of the Constitution, carriers of our rich political culture of republican government.

What must we do to preserve and protect the constitutional traditions of limited government, individual liberty, the separation of powers, and the unique advantages of federalism? James Madison, “the Father of The Constitution,” was not a lawyer, but he was a Congressman. And in that role, he was also a teacher: He routinely employed his formidable talents in the education of his colleagues and fellow citizens on the first principles of government.

In my reading of the public mood, you also have an eager audience. More and more Americans hunger for the wisdom of the Founders, are reading their biographies, and seek to understand their tightly reasoned arguments for the adoption of our Constitution. They are also becoming aware that there is something deeply wrong with the way in which they are being governed and that this process deviates from the intentions of the Founders. They correctly sense that modern government is ever more distant and disconnected from them. They are right.

HOW WE GOT HERE

President Obama, like President Woodrow Wilson, is a real “Progressive,” but what does that mean? In his recent speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, he recalled President Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism.”[12] A genuine Progressive, TR favored the imposition of inheritance taxes and the income tax and became the standard bearer of the Progressive Party in 1912.

Reflecting that tradition, President Obama and his ideological allies are also vigorous champions of aggressive executive power.[13] Commenting on President Obama’s governance, New York Times columnist David Brooks predicts, “When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era…. It’s a progressive era based on faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.”[14]

Welcome to the “100 Years War” of American politics. Progressivism, after all, was America’s dominant political movement from 1890 to 1920. While the Progressives are identified with social reform and the reining in of corporate interests and trusts, they focused intensely on structural reform of government, particularly civil service reform and the democratization of our politics.

No modern American political movement has been more successful. Within a relatively short span of time, progressives backed the adoption of four transformative amendments to the Constitution. They fostered the income tax (Sixteenth Amendment) and secured direct election of U.S. Senators (Seventeenth Amendment); many backed Prohibition (Eighteenth Amendment); and they allied with the suffragettes (Nineteenth Amendment). In the several states, they broke the power of the political bosses and enacted initiative and referenda and the recall of public officials.

Long before the New Deal of the 1930s, Progressives concentrated power in Washington. With the backing of the Progressives, Congress created the Federal Reserve System (1913) and the Federal Trade Commission (1914). Federal employment soared.[15] During the Great War, Congress (in the Overman Act of 1918) gave President Wilson enormous discretionary power to consolidate and rearrange executive offices and agencies. Meanwhile, dissent, especially criticism of America’s entry into the war, was suppressed.

“Permissiveness,” the hallmark of the Sixties, was never welcome among Progressives, old or new. Under the rule of the new Progressives, if you want to just “do your own thing,” you won’t. You will do what you are told. If you think you can just “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” think again. You will be forced, for example, to buy government-approved health benefits—including federally certified abortifacients—or pay a fine. You will behave. You will conform. You will comply. You will not march to a different drummer.

The old Progressives were earnest and well-intentioned—old-fashioned “do gooders.” They were also stern and sober social reformers. During the Progressive Era, Congress suppressed the lottery business and interstate prostitution. They enforced prohibition on the sale and manufacture of alcohol,[16] and they imposed taxes on narcotics. Personal vice had become a public enemy. Professor Charles Beard, a leading Progressive historian, wrote in 1930: “Perhaps no country in the world, except Russia, places so many restraints on what is called ‘personal liberty,’ the right to do as one pleases in personal conduct and on the use of property.”[17]

Because Progressivism is an old and recurrent stream in our public life, its influence on public policy is so immense that it is a given: part of our national landscape. Progressive intellectuals generally had—and still have—a profound faith in social science, a conviction that scientific expertise was the key to social progress, especially in a social and economic order that was increasingly complex. Administration was to be the change agent. Again, Beard: “Thus, in our day, a new social science is being staked out and developed—the science of administration in a ‘great society.’ If the ‘great society’ is to endure, then it must make itself master of administration.”[18]

For Progressives, true liberty was not merely freedom from, or “negative” liberty, meaning freedom from arbitrary rule or tyrannical coercion, as embodied in the venerable natural rights tradition of the American Revolution. True liberty was the freedom to be, to act, to grow personally and to fulfill one’s potential.

This was “positive” liberty. It was to be achieved by the removal of economic and customary restraints, creating fairness in social and economic relations, liberating all persons, regardless of class or condition, from the unwelcome vicissitudes of the market and providing child care, education, universal health care, and pensions: in short, security. Justification for government action would be grounded, as Beard argued, not in power, but in service. This new liberty would be secured through broad-scale central planning and social and economic regulation.

Positive liberty, therefore, was to be achieved through the positive state. Think personal “growth” in a straitjacket.

Such ideological assumptions justified a federal role in health care and a national system of social insurance (based on the German model) for pensions in the Progressive Party platform of 1912. They explain the passion for centralization of power, particularly in the executive branch of national government, where scientific expertise would be able to work its will. “Progressivism,” wrote Professor Ralph Gabriel of Yale University, “was an aspect of the rising cult of science.”[19]

But Progressivism carries within it the seeds of contradiction. While Progressives long championed the democratization of our institutions, sunlight in government, and the elimination of the baneful influence of corporate interests, they clung stubbornly to a faith that public problems could be effectively solved through bureaucratic decision-making: little bands of experts appointed to an expanding number of government boards, commissions, or panels. That is at the heart of the Progressive conception of modern government.[20]

Populist rhetoric notwithstanding, the reality of Progressive rule is profoundly undemocratic, precisely because it takes crucial decision-making that directly affects the lives of millions of citizens “out of politics.” Thus, you have the administrative state: the rule of administrators.

Read the full article here.

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A New Declaration of Independence

By Eileen F. Toplansky | April 28, 2012 | American Thinker

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary to ensure that a President, who has led the country to near ruin and who is working to discard the basic principles upon which this Great Country rests, be peaceably removed it is incumbent upon us that we submit the reasons to the people.

Without any in-depth research or vetting about his background, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44^th president of the United States.  There were voices of caution who early on exposed Obama’s connections to former terrorist Bill Ayers, anti-American vilifier Reverend Wright, crook Tony Rezko, and anti-Semite Rashid Khalidi, but they were laughed at as the people allowed themselves to be demagogued on hope and change.  Evidence continues to suggest that Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate is, indeed, a forgery.  This would make his presidential eligibility suspect.

Thus, the American people are at a critical watershed moment in our history.  The facts are in; Obama’s ideology and core principles are now public and exist for all to see.  We can no longer claim ignorance; we can no longer be naïve; we can no longer deny what is patently before us.  The record of this current president is a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these United States.  To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Mr. Obama has “given himself the powers to declare martial law[.]  It is a sweeping power grab that should worry every American.”  Thus, “Barack Obama is very dangerous, the apotheosis of an insidious strain of authoritarianism that destroys from within.”  In a statement published on December 31, 2011, Mr. Obama states that “[t]oday I have signed into law H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012.”  Though he claims that he has “signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists,” it was Mr. Obama who “demanded the removal of any and all protections for US citizens and legal residents.”

And like King George III, Obama has now established the distinct possibility of placing “[s]tanding armies without the Consent of our legislatures” — although sadly, in this case, the Senate passed this unwholesome disgrace.  King George III would be pleased.

In fact, Mr. Obama sees fit to bypass the “pesky” Constitution whenever it suits him, thus ignoring limited-government tenets which were at the core of the Founding Fathers’ belief system.  Thus, the NDAA detention mandate allows indefinite military detention not just to foreigners; now “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

In fact, should Mr. Obama be re-elected to a second term, “our rights to speech, religion and property, and to privacy in our persons and homes, will be transformed.”  Mr. Obama has already “hectored Christianity on matters of conscience.”  Through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare, Mr. Obama is forcing Catholic institutions to pay for insurance covering contraceptives.  Why, when “religious liberty was weighed against access to birth control, did freedom lose?” — a clear intrusion into the first of the five protections of the First Amendment.  Bishop Daniel Jenky has likened President Obama’s health care policies to the attacks on the Catholic church by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin of yesteryear.  Dare we go down that totalitarian road again?

The onslaught against free speech has been heightened because of the “cooperation between [Mr. Obama] and the OIC or Organization of Islamic Cooperation.”  The “Obama administration stands ‘united’ with the OIC on speech issues,” thus silencing Arab reformers and anyone who makes any allegedly negative remarks about Islam.  The “repressive practices” of the OIC member-nations speak volumes about their restrictions on free speech.  Hence, “the encroachment of de facto blasphemy restrictions in the West threatens free speech and the free exchange of ideas.”  That an American president would threaten this most fundamental right is yet another resounding reason why he needs to be removed from office.

In December of 2009, Nat Hentoff, a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, asserted that “[i]f congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care ‘reform’ measure to send to the White House for President Obama’s signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions[.]” Thus, “these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your life span, have never met you[.]  Is this America?”  Hentoff concludes his piece with the revelation “I’m scared and I do mean to scare you.  We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be.”

Thus, we still hold “these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  And “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, laying its foundation on such principles … as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  We do not declare violent revolution but do demand the secure right to change the government through the ballot box.

But even this fundamental right is being seriously eroded as the Department of Justice openly and arrogantly dismisses genuine cases of voter intimidation with nary a word of concern by Barack Obama.  Although there is visual proof and  evidence of threats to the voting public as well as exhortations of death threats to a man on trial, Attorney General Eric Holder turns a blind eye.

By his selective indifference, Mr. Obama has created a racially divisive atmosphere in America.  He continues to promote this hateful attitude wherein the civil rights progress made in this country for all its citizens is ignored.  Surely, Mr. Obama has “excited domestic insurrections amongst us” as he engages in racial division, class warfare, and phony gender wars.  If Mr. Obama is, indeed, so interested in the rights of women, then why does he support Islamic sharia law, which demands second-class status for women?  These diversions serve to stir up resentments; unfortunately, they are successful in obfuscating the shameless actions of this 44^th president.

Mr. Obama is not content with taking the country down the path to “European socialism.”  His centralized control of the health care industry, his increases in entitlement programs, his redistribution of capital — in fact, his sweeping regulations that give the government new authority to control the entire financial sector — are reminiscent of Karl Marx’s 10-Point Agenda, and although communism was unknown in 1775, the signatories of the Declaration knew of the absolute power of the monarchy and would see through the oligarchic nature of this “ism.”

Amazingly, Mr. Obama has assured Russian leaders (who have gained their power through rigged elections) that American concessions are coming their way, but they [the Russian leaders] must wait because he is seeking re-election and he dare not tell his own people of his true intentions.  What credible reason would a loyal American president have for weakening American and allies’ defense systems?  During the open microphone conversation between Obama and Medvedev, a puppet of KGB Putin, the world learned whose interests Obama was truly serving.  Surely, this is “enough to chill friends and allies, democrats and dissidents, all over the world.”

Furthermore, Obama has “obstructed the Administration of Justice[,]” instead pitting one group against the other through “waivers.”  If ObamaCare is so laudable, why extend waivers in the first place?  In fact, it is yet another example of how manipulative Mr. Obama is when he tries to make the people “dependent on his will alone.”

Mr. Obama has ignored the laws of our country to impose an arbitrary and capricious rule of law by outside forces.  He finds it more expedient to pit the federal government against an American state which is trying only to enforce federal immigration law.  To this end, Mr. Obama has seen fit to “subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution[,]” which was so clearly enumerated in the Declaration of Independence as reason to reject King George III.   By issuing a Universal Period Review (UPR), the first of its kind, Mr. Obama has given the United Nations the right to dictate to Arizona.  Thus, the “stakes for our national sovereignty have just been raised.”  Despotic countries of the United Nations have now been empowered to dictate how Americans should conduct themselves.  Is this not reminiscent of King George III “waging war against us”?

Moreover, the Obama State Department ordered the “suspension of routine border inspection procedures in order to whisk (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamists into our country.  Thus, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party did not have to go through the normal procedures of inspection.  Recall that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission statement is “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!”  Negotiating with the Muslim Brotherhood is akin to negotiating with the dictator Hitler.  It is appeasement all the way.  Why does the Obama administration cavort with such people?  Does this not make him unfit to defend the interests of America?

Read the full article here.

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Lawmaker’s ‘How to Slap Washington’ Strategy

By Bob Unruhe | April 30, 2012 | WND

Urges other states to protect citizens, build own detention prevention

Virginia has passed a new law that bars state cooperation with any federal detention of its citizens under Barack Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, and a lead lawmaker there says other states should do the same.

“If Congress and the president must suspend a citizen’s civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights to fight the war on terrorism, then we have lost that war, having lost the very purpose for which the war is being fought – to preserve the American constitutional republic,” Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall wrote in a letter this week to legislative leaders around the country.

“Let Congress and the president hear from the states as we join together, so that we soon may see the day that they repeal this terrible law (NDAA),” he wrote.

Marshall’s HB1160 passed the Virginia House of Delegates by a vote of 87-7 and the Virginia Senate 36-1 just a week ago, making Virginia the first state to approve such legislation.

His concern was that NDAA “literally turns the entire country into a military battlefield, conferring extraordinary powers on the U.S. armed forces against its own citizens.”

“Not since the American Civil War has there been such a claim of power over the nation’s citizenry,” he said. “Thank God, we live under a Constitution of competing independent and sovereign states, not a monolithic centralized power in Washington, D.C.”

Marshall’s letter noted Virginia was the first state in the nation to refuse cooperation “with federal authorities who, acting under the authority of section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), could arrest and detain American citizens suspected of aiding terrorists without probable cause, without the right to know the charges against them, and without the procedural rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Our new law goes into effect on July 1, 2012.”

He told lawmakers, “While we would hope that the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives would be vigilant to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens, even when addressing the problem of international terrorism, those efforts in Congress failed at the end of last year, and President Obama signed NDAA into law on December 31, 2011.

“While the [state] bill was modified several times along the way of passage, including amendments from our governor who wanted language to ensure state cooperation with the federal government where it is legal and constitutional, I hope our effort will be a motivation, and perhaps even a model for other state legislatures that they too would take a stand in resisting federal overreach,” he said.

“I was particularly heartened by support from the Japanese American Citizens League, which reminded the Virginia General Assembly that illegal detentions could occur in the future, because they have occurred in the past – with President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 and the roundup of 110,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps because they were classified as ‘suspected enemy aliens.’”

He said, “Today we face a similar situation. The so called ‘War on Terror’ has led to the same kind of hysteria and racist actions by government. I can also say that we have lacked the political leadership to identify that this kind of forced indefinite detention is a repeat of what happened during WWII.”

Marshall offers lawmakers in other states information on how to prepare a similar bill on his DelegateBob.com site.

The Virginia plan endured various twists and turns en route to becoming law. When finally approved by the legislature, the governor still had concerns. He proposed amendments that were adopted without change by lawmakers. Under the state’s procedures, no further signature is needed, and the plan becomes law on July 1.

Marshall said the final bill is “a real slap in the face to Washington.”

“I had liberals voting for this,” he said.

An analysis by the Tenth Amendment Center said the bill “prevents any agency, political subdivision, employee, or member of the military of Virginia from assisting an agency of the armed forces of the United States in the conduct of the investigation, prosecution, or detention of a United States citizen in violation of the United States Constitution, Constitution of Virginia, or any Virginia law or regulation.”

House Bill 1160 addresses several obscure sections of the NDAA of 2012 that appear to allow unlimited detentions by U.S. military forces and federal law enforcement agencies of even U.S. citizens without charges or a court hearing.

The federal plan targets citizens who are classified as belligerents or who are suspected of involvement in terrorist activities. Marshall told WND that he was alarmed to find out that Obama specifically had wanted that section included in the law.

Read the full article here.

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The subversive network taking over America

By Wes Vernon | April 30, 2012 | Renew America

The time has long passed when we could afford to look the other way on the extent to which subversive influences — communist and jihad-oriented Islamists — have for years been worming their way into the high councils of our government.

So let’s say this again: When the Cold War ended, the enemies of America did not just go away. America is under attack from Communists (with both a large and small “c”) and Jihadists.

These two threats to America (by violent means if necessary) have philosophical differences, but they are bound together by an identical ultimate goal: a one-world dictatorship where they can rule forever by the threat of death for dissenters. Recall this column reported a meeting where supposedly “intellectual thinkers” seriously contemplated the incarceration of 100 million Americans and killing 25 million of them — all in order to complete the takeover. (See “Hollywood’s red stripes” — 10/31/11.)

No congressional committee is investigating this threat to kill Americans and rule the world — a scandal in itself.

Priorities, please

So why on earth should we become embroiled in an out-to-lunch debate over whether every conspirator in this plot carries a Communist Party card in his pocket? Who cares? What matters is that they are moving closer and closer to our destruction and we’re demanding that a congressman who sounds the alarm can produce photocopies of the Communist Party USA cards (complete with official membership numbers) of the plotters. Have we lost all sense of proportion?

Earlier this month, as Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) was asked by a constituent, “What percentage of the American legislature do you think are card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists?” Congressman West answered that he believed “there are about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party that are members of the Communist Party.” When asked to name them, the freshman lawmaker replied, “It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

Combination: Uproar and….silence

Because West used imprecise language with the term “members of the Communist party,” critics took the opportunity to nitpick. The head of the Communist Party itself said West “didn’t know what he’s talking about.” Politico— the de facto magazine version of the Washington Post — called West a “McCarthyite.” Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial writer Steve Chapman demanded that House Republicans “either condemn West and expel him from the caucus or else confirm that his views are perfectly acceptable.”

Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media sent Chapman a video of Rep. Danny K. Davis, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, following the latter’s cheerful acceptance of an award from The People’s World (longtime Communist organ) at a meeting of the Chicago headquarters of the Communist Party USA.

Since Chicago is the neighborhood of Chapman’s newspaper, one would think he could easily access (right under his nose) the goings-on of a local congressman’s award possibly just a stroll down the street from the Tribune Building. But the video is available to the world via “Rebel Pundit” Jeremy Segal, a disciple of the late Andrew Breitbart. On the tape, Davis sheepishly evaded Segal’s persistent questioning. (Breitbart’s fight for America lives. Right on!)

No small matter

But here is the more alarming angle to this story — one worthy of a storied media outlet that in better times dubbed itself “the World’s Greatest Newspaper”: This same Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) is a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Talk about the proverbial fox in the henhouse.

That is the committee whose investigations inevitably lead it into the inner workings of the infrastructure (human and otherwise) required to see to it that we are protected from those who want us dead. And a member of that sensitive panel says (as Davis does in the video) that citizens should not be concerned with communists.

Beyond that, Davis is a mere reflection of the mindset that dominates the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The group is chock-a-block with members who have given aid and comfort to America’s enemies. We do not claim to read their minds to determine what motivates them. It is their records that matter.

What is a conspirator?

Back to the question: Was Congressman Allen West off base when he called out the Congressional Progressive Caucus? Answer: No.

Read the full article here.

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The Empire of Poverty [Video]

By Daniel Greenfield | April 29, 2012 | Sultan Knish

Controlling a large number of people isn’t easy. The United States alone consists of 312 million people spread out across nearly 4 million square miles. Add on nearly 500 million for the population of the European Union and another nearly 4 million square miles of territory. Then pile on Canada with 34 million people and another 4 million square miles, Australia with 22 million and 3 million square miles and a few other stragglers here and there, and the postmodern rulers of the progressive empire have to cope with nearly a billion people spread out across 15 million square miles.

Large territories and large numbers of people are very difficult to govern. Structures tend to break down and people further away from the centers of power don’t listen to the boys at the top. The only way to make a going proposition of it is to consolidate as much power as possible at the center and the very act of centralizing power leads to tyranny.

The most direct chokehold possible is physical. China’s rulers, faced with vast territory and population, turned to the water empire. The modern West is quickly rediscovering a more sophisticated form of hydraulic despotism, cloaked in talk of saving the planet and providing for everyone’s needs.

Western resources are not innately centralized, which makes seizing control of them and routing them through a central point more difficult. This has to be done legislatively and has to be justified by a universal benefit or a crisis. One example of this is FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Act which allowed the government to control wheat grown on a farm for private consumption. Another is nationalizing health care by routing the commercial activity of medicine through government organs. Both services and commodities can be controlled in this manner.

But the larger challenge is that the West is rich and a water empire depends on scarcity. Central control is much less potent if there is plenty of the commodity or service available. It’s only when shortages are created in bread or health care that the system really wields power by rationing a scarce commodity or service.

If a resource is scarce, then the water empire has to distribute it efficiently. But if a resource is widely available, then the water empire has to find ways of making it scarce, until the demand vastly outstrips the supply.

The modern water empire is dependent for its power on manufactured shortages. The rise of the progressive state was closely tied to its exploitation of shortages. Its challenge has been to win the race with industrial productivity by manufacturing shortages and destroying wealth faster than it could be created. While the machine of industry created wealth, the machine of government destroyed it. Today the machine of government is very close to winning the race, creating a state of permanent shortages.

Manufactured shortages are the great project of modern governments. This manufacture is done by prohibitively increasing the cost of creating and distributing products and services, by controlling the means of production in the name of wealth redistribution and by prohibiting the production on the grounds that it is immoral or dangerous. Over the 20th century the transition was made from the first to the second and finally to the third.

The third means of manufacturing shortages is the final trump card in the race between human ingenuity and government power. It began with pollution regulation and has reached the stage where all human activity, from a bike ride to the corner to a puff of exhaled air, is a form of pollution. The carbon footprint is to the human being what the Agricultural Adjustment Act was to wheat, a mandate for total central regulation of all human activity.

While the second means of manufacturing shortages only justified redistributing wealth, the third prevents its creation. It is the final lock of the water empire. When it slides into places, shortages become permanent and the Empire of Poverty rules over all.

The Empire of Poverty is the modern incarnation of the water empire, its feigned concern for social equality disguising its hunger for total power. With the third stage, the empire of poverty is mostly putting aside its pretense of controlling production in order to maximize human benefits from the products or services and is shifting over to controlling production in order to deny use of the products and services to those who need them.

Global Warming rhetoric is still couched in the usual social justice rhetoric, aimed at the poorer kleptocracies who are eager to join the line for a handout, but its logic is poverty driven. It is not out to create wealth, but to eliminate it, on the grounds that cheaply available food or electricity is an immoral activity that damages the planet.

Read the full article here.

Adam Taxin interviews Daniel Greenfield for a bit under five minutes about his Sunday, April 29, 2012 column, “The Empire of Poverty.”

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Agenda 21: The End of Western Civilization (Part One)

By Kathleen Marquardt | January 21, 2012 | NewsWithViews.com

Wake-up call, Part 1

“Global sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.” -Professor Maurice King

Birth of an abomination

In simple terms Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is the end of civilization as we know it. It is the end of private property, the elevation of the collective over the individual. It is the redistribution of America’s wealth to the global elite, it is the end of the Great American Experiment and the Constitution. And, it is the reduction of 85% of the world’s population.

In 1992, twenty years ago this summer, Agenda 21/Sustainable Development was unveiled to the world at the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio. (While Agenda 21 was introduced in June, 1992, it was already installed as public policy in communities across the country as early as 1987.)

In his opening remarks at the ceremonies at the Earth Summit, Maurice Strong stated: “The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.” If this is true, then he and his cohorts must be even more against individual sovereignty. Keep this quote in mind as you read about Agenda 21.

George H.W. Bush was in Rio for the ceremonies and graciously signed on for America so that our Congress did not have to spend the time reviewing the treaty and learning then what dastardly deeds were in store for us — that protecting the environment would be used as the basis for controlling all human activity and redistributing our wealth.

Definitions of Sustainable Development

U.N. definition of Sustainable Development:

“meeting today’s needs without compromising future generations to meet their own needs.”

In actuality, Sustainable Development is not sustainable unless the population actually is reduced by the 85% called for by the globalists. The true purpose of Sustainable Development and all of its policies is the control of all aspects of human life — economic, social and environmental (see 3 Es of Sustainable Development further into article).

Here is how the UN described Agenda 21 in one of its own publications in a 1993 article entitled “Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save our Planet:” “Agenda 21proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by EVERY person on Earth…it calls for specific changes in the activities of ALL people… Effective execution of Agenda 21 will REQUIRE a profound reorientation of ALL humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.”

So George H.W. Bush signed the Rio Accord and a year later Clinton established his President’s Council for Sustainable Development which would render the guidelines of Agenda 21 into public policy to be administered by the federal government via all departments. In doing this, Bush and Clinton set up Agenda 21 as ruling authority, i.e, implementing a U.N. plan to become U.S. policy across the whole nation and into every county and town. And every succeeding president has fully endorsed and implemented Agenda 21 through every department of the federal government.

If one were to research the source of U.S. policy, one would find that much of our policy of the last few decades is the outcome of agreements we have entered into via treaties with the U.N. And that policy has trickled, no gushed, down into every state and into almost every other jurisdiction — county, city, town — in the nation; Sustainable Development is the official policy of our country even though many citizens are yet ignorant of its existence. And this policy encompasses an entire economic and social agenda.

So what is Sustainable Development?

According to its authors, the objective of Sustainable Development is to integrate economic, social and environmental policies in order to achieve reduced consumption, social equity, and the preservation and restoration of biodiversity (the 3Es of sustainability). They insist that every societal decision be based on environmental impact, focusing on three components; global land use, global education, and global population control and reduction.

Look at these words, they are part of the new vocabulary:

Free trade, open space, smart growth, smart food, smart buildings, regional planning, walkable, bikeable, foodsheds, viewsheds, consensus, partnerships, preservation, stakeholders, land use, environmental protection, development, diversity, visioning, social justice, heritage, carbon footprints, comprehensive planning, critical thinking, community service, regional planning.

All of these words are part of the Newspeak, the altering of the English language as a tool to promote a global government through a diabolical agenda called Agenda 21. In fact, the world will be retooled from top to bottom through this agenda and using the new vocabulary. This is not just policy but a complete restructuring of life as we know it. We not only will be taught how we must live, but where we are allowed to live; taught how to think and what is acceptable thinking; told what job we will be allowed to have; taught how we can worship and what we will be allowed to worship; and we will be brainwashed into believing that the individual must cede all to the collective.

Private property will be a sin that will be eradicated as will be free-market economics which will be replaced by public private partnerships and a planned central economy. Individualism will be rooted out and social justice will rule the land. Social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people “to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment.” – in other words, the redistribution of wealth. This will be achieved through an organizational structure of land use controls; control of energy and energy production; control of transportation; control of industry; control of food production; control of development; control of water availability; and control of population size and growth. And all of this will be decreed under the guise of environmental protection.

Read the full article here.

Click here for part —–> 1, 2, 3, 4,

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Andrew Klavan: Why Racism and Conservatism Don’t Mix [Video]

I think we should have a frank conversation about race…  because I always take my moral cues from second rate political hacks.

A week or so ago, National Review severed its connection with self-described “benign racist” writer John Derbyshire over a controversial column he wrote for Taki’s Magazine. Reading the commentary and comments about this event, I began to notice that the word racism is not well understood. Leftists, of course, feel that racism means “any uncomfortable facts spoken by a conservative.” Some conservatives seem to have been bullied into accepting that definition and go about on tiptoe speaking in hushed voices to avoid getting pilloried. Other conservatives, in angry rebellion against the bullying, seem to feel that whatever trash they want to talk about their fellow man is A-OK as long as some set of statistics gives them cover.

Personally, I’m a big fan of dictionaries in these situations since, for words to work properly, they have to have definitions. Thus, at the risk of great personal hernia, I have hoisted down my Webster’s Third New International Unabridged, circa 1976, which I keep around for when I want a definition untainted by political correctness or stupidity. But I repeat myself.

“Racism:  The assumption that psychocultural traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another which is usually coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to domination over others.”

Thus, as we see, it is not racist in itself to point out, say, that black people commit an inordinate amount of the violent crime in this country. (My terrific City Journal colleague Heather Mac Donald does this regularly and, far from thinking to fire her, her editors value her highly, as do I.) Facts are facts.

What is racist, however, according to Webster, is the belief that high crime rates among blacks — or any other psychocultural outcomes — are somehow biologically determined; that you can tell who will win or lose the game of Life by the color of his skin.

I do not believe you can be a true, thinking, coherent conservative and a philosophical racist at the same time. Here’s why:

Read the full article here.

Expert Warns: 100% Certainty of Total Catastrophic Failure of the Entire Power Infrastructure Within 3 Years [Video]

By Mac Slavo | April 20, 2012 | SHTF Plan

As smart grid metering systems expand across the developed world, many are starting to ask whether the threats posed by the new devices, which officials promise will save energy and reduce end user utility costs, outweigh their benefits. In addition to documented health concerns resulting from radiation emissions and no cost savings being apparent, opponents of the technology argue that smart meters are violative of basic privacy rights and give the government yet another digital node of unfettered access to monitor and control personal electricity consumption.

Now, an alarming new documentary suggests that security problems with the inter-connected and seemingly convenient smart grid may be so serious that they could lead to a catastrophic failure of our nation’s entire power infrastructure.

In an interview for the upcoming documentary titled Take Back Your Power, Cyber defense expert David Chalk warns that our nation is in crisis. Not only are our smart power grids susceptible to hacking, but they may very well already be infected with Trojan viruses and back doors that will ultimately lead to disastrous consequences:

(Video interview follows excerpts)

The front door is open, and there is no lock to be had.

There is not a power meter or device on the grid that is protected from hacking, if not already infected with some sort of Trojan horse than can cause it to be shut down, damaged or completely annihilated.

We can’t take a massive outage all at once.

When we say ‘it goes down,’ we’re talking about generators burning out. We’re talking about coal plants being damaged. We’re talking about destruction of equipment. This isn’t just a matter of electrons going around and shutting off the moving data.

Physical equipment can be damaged… watch some of the videos of cyber attacks on generators and other devices. You’ll see they’re actually damaged. Multi million dollar machines are hacked into.

We look at corporations. We look at the very companies like Symantec that are there to protect us having been hacked, and their code is in the public domain.

…

Bring forward a technology and I will show you that it’s penetrable. I’ll do it on national TV, I’ll do it anywhere… I can guarantee you 100% that there is nothing out there today – nothing – that can’t be penetrated.

We need safety and security, and today that does not exist in the smart grid.

—

Via Business Wire

“Unless we wake up and realize what we’re doing, there is 100% certainty of total catastrophic failure of the entire power infrastructure within 3 years,” said Chalk.

“This could actually be worse than a nuclear war, because it would happen everywhere. How governments and utilities are blindly merging the power grid with the Internet, and effectively without any protection, is insanity at its finest.”

Preview Take Back Your Power:

As Mr. Chalk points out, even the top security firms in the country have been hacked, and the head of US Cyber Security confirms that military systems are under constant attack and have been broken by hackers who have gained access to sensitive military and space agency systems (including active Jet Propulsion Labs spacecraft). Our entire drone fleet, yet another node in the ever expanding control grid, was recently compromised by a virus that was able to log access commands and passwords for high security military systems. The vulnerabilities of these systems became starkly clear when Iran’s military broke global positioning encryption and took control of a U.S. military drone over their airspace.

This is no longer about a single computer going down or file directories being accessed. Cyber conflict is moving into an entirely new realm, where rogue hackers or state-sponsored cyber operations are capable of targeting physical grid infrastructure like power, water,  and oil refineries, commerce and transportation systems. According to one expert, such an attack has the potential bring down life as we know it in America in a matter of just 900 seconds.

Some would argue that we need more governance over the grid system, or stricter penalties for those who compromise it, or further yet, more monitoring and tracking so attacks can be prevented.

The other option, however, is that we take individual Americans off the traditional grid altogether by empowering them through tax credits and de-regulation, so that every one of us can have their own personal smart grid in their home, independent of intervention from government or traditional energy industry players.

Only this limited government, personal responsibility solution is capable of providing a truly impenetrable level of power grid safety and security for each and every person in the United States.

However, like all things government, the narrative seems to be to first create the problem, then move to fix it by more centralization, control and dependence. It’s a trend we see not just in our energy sector, but every aspect of our lives.

Hat tip Satori

Author: Mac Slavo
Views: 13,973 people have read this article (new feature)
Date: April 20th, 2012
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to http://www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

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The Life and Death of the Old Right

By Murray N. Rothbard | September 1990 | Lew Rockwell 

The libertarian movement was once a mighty movement, hardcore but not kooky, part of the mainstream of American ideological and political life. In the 18^thand 19^th centuries (for example, in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian movements), libertarians were even the dominant political force in the country. America was, indeed, conceived in liberty. But right now, I’m not going back that far: I’m talking about the origins of the modern 20^th century movement. For various reasons, the Progressive movement had wiped out 19^th century intellectual and political libertarianism, and, by the 1920s, it was reduced to a few vibrant but lone intellectuals such as H.L. Mencken and his friend, Albert Jay Nock.

But then something happened to shock libertarianism back to life – the cataclysmic Great Leap Forward into collectivism hailed as the New Deal. It’s a process of historical reaction: a sudden social change will often give rise to a fierce opposition. Opposition to the New Deal was, necessarily, a coalition politics united on a negative: hatred of the socialism of the New Deal. Increasingly gathering into that coalition were the few libertarian or individualist intellectuals, the heritage and the remnants of the old Jeffersonian Democracy left from the days of Grover Cleveland – men such as Senator James A. Reed of Missouri and Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland, and Republicans, including formerly stalwart statists and Progressives such as Herbert Hoover, who condemned FDR for going much too far.

As the New Deal intensified and was championed by the Democrats, the opposition inevitably coalesced around the Republican Party. It was a strange transformation, since, from its inception in the 1850s, the Republican Party had always been the party of statism and centralized Big Government. Well, life is strange some times, and this shift was no stranger than what had happened to the Democrats, during the 19^th century the party of minimal government and laissez-faire.

When Roosevelt dragged America into World War II, the growing opposition, which I have called the “Old Right,” shifted its moorings and changed some of its alliances. Some economic free-marketeers, such as Lewis W. Douglas, became ardent pro-war New Dealers; while former progressives, mainly Republican, who opposed the war, began to see the deep connection between interventionism and Big Government in domestic as well as foreign policy. As a result, by the end of World War II, the Old Right, largely Republican but still including Jeffersonian Democrats (such as Rep. Samuel Pettingill of Indiana), was consistently libertarian, opposing statism at home and war and intervention abroad.

The Old Right was a strong and vibrant movement, dominant in the Republican Party in Congress (especially in the House of Representatives) and constituting roughly the Taft wing of the party. The Old Right was firmly opposed to conscription as well as war or foreign aid, favored free markets and the gold standard, and upheld the rights of private property as opposed to any sort of invasion, including coerced integration. The Old Right was socially conservative, middle class, welcoming people who worked for a living or met a payroll, and was the salt of the earth.

What the Old Right lacked was not a political mass, but rather an intellectual cadre, and the small but increasing number of hard-core libertarians influenced by Mises and Rand and Nock after World War II provided a growing intellectual foundation for that movement. What we have to realize, and we almost have to shake ourselves to believe, is that hard-core libertarians were not considered kooks and crazies; we were treated only as extreme variants of a creed that almost everyone on the Old Right believed: peace, individual liberty, free markets, private property, even the gold standard. And since we were simply consistent upholders of a creed which the entire Old Right believed, we were able, though small in number, to influence and permeate the views of the broad mass of Old Right Americans. It was a happy symbiosis.

That’s why, politically, all libertarians, whether minarchists or anarcho-capitalists, were happy to consider ourselves “extreme right-wing Republicans.” [The general term for the broader movement was “individualist” or “true liberal” or “rightist” – the word “conservative” was not at all in use before the publication of Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind in 1953].

Read the full article here.

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How the President ‘Accommodates’ Free-Market Thinking

By Andrew B. Wilson | April 6, 2012 | The American Spectator

He does it the same way a boa constrictor swallows its prey.

Living like a liberal isn’t easy. Just ask Matt Labash, who tried it for ten days — doing his best to break none of the 538 commandments found in the book: 538 Ways to Live Work and Play Like a Liberal.

To take one example, the book tells you to question the source of the foodstuffs at your local grocery or supermarket. Labash manned up to the task. Seeing a big pile of Chiquita bananas on display at a Trader Joe’s, he grilled a stock clerk, who played it safe by referring him to a manager named Sunshine.

“Say, Sunshine,” he said. “You guys stock Chiquita bananas here. Don’t they lop off their workers’ hands to keep them in line?”

“I’ve heard something like that,” she laughed nervously. “But I really couldn’t tell you specifics — though you should check our website if you’re curious about labor conditions.”

At first glance, it might seem that all Labash got from his valiant and sustained effort of trying to think and live like a liberal was a brilliantly funny cover story in the Weekly Standard. But his story also clues us into an important reality.

Most of us who aren’t liberals are caught up in the same dreary game of thinking it is necessary to go along with the liberal playbook in many matters. We do it without even thinking about it. This is how Labash described the scene at the Weekly Standard:

Many of his other liberalizing-the-workplace suggestions I skip, because we already do them. We already recycle. We don’t have plastic water coolers. We already have environmentally friendly toilets… Krebs [i.e. the author, Justin Krebs] says to relax the office dress code. But if our dress code were any more relaxed, we’d be wearing cut-offs and half-shirts to work, making us look like some sort of neocon Mountain Dew commercial.

Our acquiescence to liberal norms allows liberals to think that they have already won the cultural war and have only a mopping up exercise to do before getting back to the kind of raw political power that they enjoyed at the outset of the Obama administration.

This allows the president to act in a magnanimous way — like a cat playing with a mouse that has no chance of escape. In such a mood Mr. Obama went out of his way to sing the praises of free enterprise in his speech on Wednesday to the Associated Press.

Perhaps you didn’t know that Barack Obama might be the second coming of Milton Friedman or F. A. Hayek. But this is straight from the official transcript of his speech:

As president, I’ve eliminated dozens of programs that weren’t working, and announced over 500 regulatory reforms that will save businesses and taxpayers billions, and put annual domestic spending on a path to become the smallest share of the economy since Dwight Eisenhower held this office. I know that the true engine of job creation in this country is the private sector, not Washington, which is why I’ve cut taxes for small business owners 17 times over the last three years.

So I believe deeply that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. My mother and grandmother who raised me instilled the values of self-reliance and personal responsibility that remain the cornerstone of the American idea.

Read the full article here.

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Cicero: Power and law are not synonymous

“Power and law are not synonymous. In truth, they are frequently in opposition and irreconcilable. There is God’s Law from which all equitable laws of man emerge and by which men must live if they are not to die in oppression, chaos and despair. Divorced from God ís eternal and immutable Law, established before the founding of the suns, man ís power is evil no matter the noble words with which it is employed or the motives urged when enforcing it. Men of good will, mindful therefore of the Law laid down by God, will oppose governments whose rule is by men, and if they wish to survive as a nation they will destroy the government which attempts to adjudicate by the whim of venal judges.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 B.C.

Hat Tip: Roger S. Sayles, From Sovereign to Serf

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Tom Woods: Nullify Now Tour, Philadelphia, March 31, 2012

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Understanding the Culture War: Gramscians, Tocquevillians and Others

By Steven Yates | January 6, 2001 | Lew Rockwell

We start the new century and the new millennium with a problem of major proportions: the seemingly unstoppable march of political correctness through American institutions and life. A recent article in the journal Policy Review, published by the Heritage Foundation, is worth reading for its insights into how we have ended up in this predicament – and also for why we seem unable to figure a way out of it. The article is by John Fonte, of the Hudson Institute, and is entitled “Why There Is a Culture War.” If this article is any indication, Fonte’s forthcoming book Building a Healthy Culture, of which the article is an excerpt, is likely also worth reading as a barometer of where we stand.

Fonte contrasts “two competing worldviews” that are currently struggling for dominance in America. It would be fair to say that the two really are at war: Fonte somewhat euphemistically calls the contest an “intense ideological struggle.” One he calls “Gramscian”; the other, “Tocquevillian,” after the intellectuals he credits with having authored the respective warring ideologies: the Italian neo-Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, author of Prison Notebooks and other works, and the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the influential Democracy in America.

It becomes clear that one cannot understand either the meteoric rise or apparent immunity of political correctness to attack without understanding Gramsci. Rarely would I recommend actually studying a Marxist social philosopher, but this guy merits our attention. Gramsci (1891-1937) agreed with Karl Marx that every society could be divided into “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes (e.g., Marx’s own “bourgeois” and “proletariat”), but for the first time, expanded the latter into an ensemble of subordinate, marginalized groups instead of a single, homogeneous group. Whereas Marx had spoken only of the proletariat, Gramsci spoke not just of propertyless workers but also of “woman, racial minorities and many ‘criminals.’” Fonte documents how Gramsci distinguished two ways the dominant group exercises control, whereas Marx had only written of one. First, there is direct domination through coercion or force – political might in service of the economic interests of the bourgeoisie. Second, there is what Gramsci calls hegemony, which means the pervasive and mostly tacit use of a system of values that supports and reinforces the interests of the dominant groups. The repressed groups may not even know they are repressed, in Gramsci’s view, because they have internalized the system of values that justifies their repression. They have internalized a “false consciousness” and become unwitting participants in their own domination.

Is this sounding familiar yet? Think of the radical feminist philosophy professors and law professors who speak of romantic candlelight dinners – a staple of ordinary American life – as a form of prostitution. They justify this seemingly outrageous claim on the grounds that American women exist in “false consciousness,” the hegemonic product of male-dominated (and capitalistic) values. The sense of abhorrence felt by “ordinary” women at radical feminist claims is nothing more than this “false consciousness” asserting itself. Gramsci went on to argue that before there could be any “revolution” in Marx’s sense it would be necessary to build up a “counter-hegemony,” or system of values favoring the repressed groups that would undermine or delegitimize the hegemony-created consciousness. And because hegemonic values permeate the whole of society and are embodied in the warp and woof of daily life, daily life becomes part of the ideological battleground. All the institutions we take for granted – schools, churches, the media, businesses, as well as art, literature, philosophy, and so on – become places where the “counter-hegemonic” values can be seeded and allowed to take root. They become domains to be infiltrated, and brought into the service of the movement. As the radical feminists put it, “the personal is the political.” It is interesting how the latter have lifted this idea from a white male European philosopher mostly without credit. The point, however, is to create a new kind of “consciousness” free of the values that allow the dominant group(s) to repress the subordinate groups. Only this will throw off the shackles of “hegemony” and lead to true revolution.

Gramsci saw an important role in the transformation of society for those he called “organic” intellectuals (as opposed to “traditional” intellectuals). “Organic” intellectuals were to be intellectuals belonging to the repressed groups and making an effort to undermine the “hegemony” with the assistance of any “traditional” intellectuals they could persuade to defect from the dominant point of view. They will flourish as the roots of counter-hegemony grow. In other words, Gramsci was recommending recruiting radicalized women, members of minority groups, and others into the fold – affirmative action before that term was coined. Changing the minds of “traditional” intellectuals was particularly valuable, as they were already well positioned within the dominant educational institutions. The “long march through the institutions” – a phrase we also owe to Gramsci – began.

Antonio Gramsci’s name is not exactly a household word. Many people concerned about political correctness have no doubt never heard of him. To describe him as important, however, is probably the understatement of the new year. He sketched, in works such as Prison Notebooks, the basic outline of the agenda that would begin to be implemented in American colleges and universities, and then carried to the rest of society, in the final quarter of the 20^th century. The efforts accelerating in the 1990s, no doubt helped along by having one of their own (perhaps it was two of their own) in the White House. Clearly, we find echoes of Gramsci’s notion of an “organic” intellectual in today’s calls for more and more “diversity” in all areas of society: universities, the workplace, etc. The mass conversion of “traditional” intellectuals to the Gramscian struggle helps explain why this diversity is a diversity of faces and not ideas. “Traditional” intellectuals have power, especially in education. The gatekeepers control who is admitted to the academic club, and the “traditional” intellectuals control the gatekeepers. Today, an outspoken conservative might as well not even apply for an academic appointment in a public university. But feminists of all stripes and colors (and sexual preferences and fetishes) are more than welcome!

Gramsci, we ought also to note, described himself as an “absolute historicist,” whose views derive from the philosopher Hegel. All systems of value, all moral codes, etc., are entirely the products of the historical epoch and culture which gave rise to them. There is no such thing as an “absolute” or an “objective” morality. There are only systems of value that represent either the (mainly economic) interests of those in power or of those not in power; and one of the jobs of “organic” intellectuals is to develop systems of value that will undermine the former. Capturing control over language, especially the language of morality, has a major role to play in this because of the doors it opens to psychological control over the masses. Most people will reject ideas and institutions if they become convinced of their basic immorality; most people, too, lack the kind of training that will equip them to untangle the thicket of logical fallacies that might be involved. This all helps pave the way for the Gramscian transformation of society.

Clearly, political correctness in all its manifestations, from academic schools of radical feminism, “critical race theory,” gay and lesbian “queer theory,” etc., to the preoccupation with “diversity” as an end in itself, is the direct descendent of Gramsci, and the chief arm of enforcement of the ongoing Gramscian transformation of American society. Consider efforts to transform our understanding of the law. Fonte observes: “Critical legal studies posits that the law grows out of unequal relations of power and therefore serves the interests of and legitimizes the rule of dominant groups.” The academic movement known as “deconstruction,” however one defines it, is a systematic effort to destroy the legitimacy of the values of “dominant groups”: straight white Christian males of (non-Marxist) European descent. The values to be destroyed: truth as the goal of inquiry, transcendent morality as the guide to human conduct, freedom and independence as political ideals, hiring and contracting based on merit. All are rationalizing myths of the dominant consciousness, in the Gramscian scheme of things.

The transformation is now very much underway, as Gramscian footsoldiers have captured not just the major institutions in the English-speaking world (Ivy League universities) but also huge tax-exempt foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and so on) that have been bankrolling Gramscian projects for decades. Fonte cites author after author to document the millions that have flowed to academic feminist endeavors, diversity-engineering projects in universities and sensitivity-training re-education programs in corporations. The plain truth is, we can no longer trust large corporations. Fortune 500 companies have become as reliable footsoldiers in the creation of a politically correct America as universities. Even Bill Gates of Microsoft has gotten on the official bandwagon, with his creation of minority-only scholarships last year. With the money now behind it, small wonder political correctness has become so difficult to oppose!

Read the full article here.

Doomed from the Start: The Myth of Limited Constitutional Government in America

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo | February 25, 2010 | Lew Rockwell

Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: An Open Letter to Glenn Beck

After spending a lifetime in politics John C. Calhoun (U.S. Senator, Vice President of the United States, Secretary of War) wrote his brilliant treatise, A Disquisition on Government, which was published posthumously shortly after his death in 1850. In it Calhoun warned that it is an error to believe that a written constitution alone is “sufficient, of itself, without the aid of any organism except such as is necessary to separate its several departments, and render them independent of each other to counteract the tendency of the numerical majority to oppression and abuse of power” (p. 26). The separation of powers is fine as far as it goes, in other words, but it would never be a sufficient defense against governmental tyranny, said Calhoun.

Moreover, it is a “great mistake,” Calhoun wrote, to suppose that “the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the powers of the government, without investing those for whose protection they are inserted, with the means of enforcing their observance, will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers” (emphasis added). The party “in possession of the government” will always be opposed to any and all restrictions on its powers. They “will have no need of these restrictions” and “would come, in time, to regard these limitations as unnecessary and improper restraints and endeavor to elude them . . .”

The “part in favor of the restrictions” (i.e., strict constructionists) would inevitably be overpowered. It is sheer folly, Calhoun argued, to suppose that “the party in possession of the ballot box and the physical force of the country, could be successfully resisted by an appeal to reason, truth, justice, or the obligations imposed by the constitution” (emphasis added). He predicted that “the restrictions [of government power in the Constitution] would ultimately be annulled, and the government be converted into one of unlimited powers.” He was right, of course.

This is a classic statement of the Jeffersonian states’ rights position. The people of the free, independent and sovereign states must be empowered with the rights of nullification and secession, and a concurrent majority with veto power over unconstitutional federal laws, if their constitutional liberties are to have any chance of protection, Calhoun believed. The federal government itself can never, ever be trusted to limit its own powers.

How did Calhoun come to such conclusions? One answer to this question is that he was a serious student of politics, history, and political philosophy for his entire life, and understood the nature of government as much as anyone else alive during his time. He also witnessed first hand or quickly learned about the machinations of the sworn enemies of limited constitutional government in America: men such as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, John Marshall, Joseph Story and Daniel Webster.

America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, did a much better job of limiting the tyrannical proclivities of government than the U.S. Constitution ever did, and it did so while permitting enough governmental power to field an army that defeated the British Empire. The limits on government that the Articles contained outraged the advocates of unlimited governmental powers, such as Alexander Hamilton, which is why the “Perpetual Union” that was created by the Articles was abolished as all the states peacefully seceded from that union

The Founding Fathers of Constitutional Subversion

The constitutional convention was Hamilton’s idea as much as anyone’s. Upon arriving at the convention Hamilton laid out the plan of his fellow nationalists: a permanent president or king, who would appoint all governors, who would have veto power over all state legislation. This monopoly government would then impose on the entire nation a British-style mercantilist empire without Great Britain, complete with massive corporate welfare subsidies, a large public debt, protectionist tariffs, and a central bank modeled after the Bank of England that would inflate the currency to finance the empire.

Hamilton did not get his way, of course, thanks to the Jeffersonians. When the Constitution was finally ratified, creating a federal instead of a national or monopolistic, monarchical government, Hamilton denounced the document as “a frail and worthless fabric.” He and his Federalist/nationalist colleagues immediately went to work destroying the limits on government contained in the Constitution. He invented the notion of “implied powers” of the Constitution, which allowed him and his political heirs to argue that the Constitution is not a set of limitations on governmental powers, as Jefferson believed it was, but rather a potential stamp of approval on anything the government ever wanted to do as long as it is “properly” interpreted by clever, statist lawyers like Alexander Hamilton or John Marshall. Hamilton “set out to remold the Constitution into an instrument of national supremacy,” wrote Clinton Rossiter in Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution.

One of the first subversive things Hamilton did was to rewrite the history of the American founding by saying in a public speech on June 29 1787, that the states were merely “artificial beings” and were never sovereign. The “nation,” not the states, was sovereign, he said. And he said this while the constitutional convention was busy crafting Article 7 of the Constitution, which holds that the Constitution would become the law of the land only when nine of the thirteen free and independent states ratified it. The states were to ratify the Constitution because, as everyone knew, they were sovereign and were delegating a few express powers to the central government for their mutual benefit.

It was Hamilton who first invented the expansive interpretations of the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses of the Constitution, which have been used for generations to grant totalitarian powers to the central state. He literally set the template for the destruction of constitutional liberty in America the moment it became apparent at the constitutional convention that he and his fellow nationalists would not get their way and create a “monarchy bottomed on corruption,” as Thomas Jefferson described the Hamiltonian system.

Hamilton’s devoted disciple, John Marshall, was appointed chief justice of the United States in 1801 and served in that post for more than three decades. His career was a crusade to rewrite the Constitution so that it would become a nationalist document that destroyed states’ rights and most other limitations on the powers of the centralized state. He essentially declared in Marbury vs. Madison that he, John Marshall, would be the arbiter of constitutionality via “judicial review.” The Jeffersonians, meanwhile, had always warned that if the day ever came when the federal government became the sole arbiter of the limits of its own powers, it would soon declare that there were, in fact, no limits on its powers. This of course is what the anti-Jeffersonians wanted — and what has happened.

Marshall also repeated Hamilton’s bogus theory of the American founding, claiming that the “nation” somehow created the states. He amazingly argued that the federal government was somehow created by “the whole people” and not the citizens of the states through state political conventions, as was actually the case. In the name of “the people,” Marshall said, the federal government claimed the right to“legitimately control all individuals or governments within the American territory” (Edward S. Corwin, John Marshall and the Constitution, p. 131).In the case of Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee Marshall invented out of thin air the notion that the federal government had the “right” to veto state court decisions. Marshall also made up the theory that the so-called Supremacy Clause of the Constitution makes the federal government “supreme” in all matters. This is false: The federal government is only “supreme” with regard to those powers that were expressly delegated to it by the free and independent states, in Article 1, Section 8.

All of the Hamilton/Marshall nonsense about the founders having created a monopolistic, monarchical government and having abolished states rights or federalism was repeated for decades by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story and Daniel Webster. Story was“the most Hamiltonian of judges,” wrote Clinton Rossiter. His famous book, Commentaries on the Constitution, published in 1833, could have been entitled“Commentaries on Alexander Hamilton’s Commentaries on the Constitution,” says Rossiter. He “construed the powers of Congress liberally,” i.e., meaning there were virtually no limits to such powers; and “upheld the supremacy of the nation,” i.e., of monopolistic, monarchical, and unconstitutional government. StoriesCommentaries provided a political roadmap for “the legal profession’s elite or at least among the part of it educated in the North during the middle years of the nineteenth century,” wrote Rossiter.

Story’s “famous” Commentaries are filled with phony history and illogic. On the Articles of Confederation, he wrote that “It is heresy to maintain, that a party to a compact has a right to revoke that compact.” But of course the Articles were revoked!

Secession of a single state would mean “dissolution of the government,” Story wrote. Nonsense. After eleven Southern states seceded in 1860—61 the U.S. government proceeded to field the largest and best-equipped army in the history of the world up to that point. It was hardly “dissolved.”

In a classic of doubletalk, Story admitted that “The original compact of society . . . in no instance . . . has ever been formally expressed at the first institution of a state.” That is, there was never any agreement by the citizens of any state to always and forever be obedient to those who would enforce what they proclaim to be “the general will.” Nevertheless, said Story, “every part should pay obedience to the will of the whole.” And who is to define “the will of the whole”? Why, nationalist Supreme Court justices like Joseph Story and John Marshall, of course.

Story admitted that social contract theories of “voluntary” state formation were mere theoretical fantasies. He also held the rather creepy and totalitarian, if not barbarian view that “The majority must have a right to accomplish that object by the means, which they deem adequate for the end . . . . The will of the majority of the people is absolute and sovereign, limited only by its means and power to make its will effectual.”

Contrary to the political truths expressed by Calhoun which have all proven to be true, by the way Story expressed the elementary-schoolish view that the appropriate response to governmental oppression should be only via “the proper tribunals constituted by the government”which would supposedly “appeal to the good sense, and integrity, and justice of the majority of the people.” Trust the politicians and lifetime-appointed federal judges to enforce their view of “justice,” in other words. That hasn’t really worked out during the succeeding 170 years.What Story is saying here is not that there should be a national plebescite on all policy issues that can express the “will of the majority.” No, as with Hamilton he adopted the French Jacobin philosophy that such a “will” was possessed in the minds of the ruling class, and that that class (the Storys, Hamiltons, Marshalls, etc.) somehow possessed “absolute” power as long as it has the military means to “make its will effectual.” Here we have the theoretical basis for Abe Lincoln’s waging of total war on his own citizens.

Story also repeated John Marshall’s fable that the Supremacy Clause created a monopolistic government in Washington, D.C. and effectively abolished states’ rights, along with the equally ridiculous myth that the Constitution was magically ratified by “the whole people”(presumably not counting women, who could not vote, or slaves and free blacks).

Another famous and influential subverter of the Constitution was Daniel Webster, who repeated many of these same nationalist fables during his famous U.S. Senate debate with South Carolina’s Robert Hayne in January of 1830. This is a debate that Hayne clearly won according to their congressional colleagues, and the media of the day, although nationalist historians (a.k.a., distorians) have claimed otherwise.

Webster then presented a totally false scenario: “One of two things is true: either the laws of the Union are beyond the discretion and beyond the control of the States; or else we have no constitution of general government . . .” Huh? All the laws? Are the people to have no say whatsoever about laws they believe are clearly constitutional? Apparently so, said Daniel Webster.The first Big Lie that Webster told was that “the Constitution of the United States confers on the government itself . . . the power of deciding ultimately and conclusively upon the extent of its own authority.” No, it does not. John Marshall may have wished that it did when he invented judicial review, but the document itself says no such thing. As Senator John Taylor once said, “The Constitution never could have designed to destroy [liberty], by investing five or six men, installed for life, with a power of regulating the constitutional rights of all political departments.”

The a-historical fairy tale about the Constitution being somehow ratified by “the whole people” was repeated over and over by Webster. His strategy was apparently to convince his audience not by historical facts but by repetition and bluster. “The Constitution creates a popular government, erected by the people . . . it is not a creature of the state governments,” he bellowed. Anyone who has ever read Article 7 of the U.S. Constitution knows that this is utterly false.

Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution clearly defines treason under the constitution: “Treason against the United States shall consist in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Thus, treason means levying war against“them,” the sovereign states. This is why Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of treasonous behavior under the Constitution. Had the North lost the war, he could have been justifiably hanged.In fine French Jacobin fashion, Webster asked, “Who shall interpret their [the peoples’] will? Why “the government itself,” he said. Not through popular votes, mind you, but through the orders, mandates, and dictates of “the government itself.” The people themselves were to have nothing to do with “interpreting” their own “will.”

Webster attempted to re-define treason under the Constitution by claiming that “To resist by force the execution of a [federal] law, generally, is treason.” Thus, if the federal government were to invade a sovereign state to enforce one of its laws, a clearly treasonous act under the plain language of the Constitution, resistance to the invasion is what constitutes treason according to Webster. He defined treason, in other words, to mean exactly the opposite of what it actually means in the Constitution.

Then there is the elementary-schoolish faith in democracy as the only necessary defense against governmental tyranny: “Trust in the efficacy of frequent elections,”“trust in the judicial power.” Well, we tried that for decades and decades, Daniel, and it didn’t work.

All of these false histories and logical fallacies were repeated by other nationalist politicians for decades. This includes Abraham Lincoln, who probably lifted his famous line in The Gettysburg Address from this statement by Webster during his debate with Hayne: “It is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people. The people of the United States have declared that this Constitution shall be the supreme law.” Of course, they did not.

Hamilton, Marshall, Webster, Story, and other nationalists kept up their rhetorical fog-horning for decades, trying to convince Americans that the founding fathers did, after all, adopt Hamilton’s plan of a dictatorial executive that abolished states rights and was devoted to building a mercantilist empire in America that would rival the British empire. But their rhetoric had little or no success during their lifetimes.As Lord Pete Bauer once said in commenting on the rhetoric of communism, whenever one hears of “the people’s republic” the “peoples’government,” etc., it is a sure bet that the people have nothing whatsoever to do with, or control over that government.

New Englanders plotted to secede for a decade after Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1800; all states, North and South, made use of the Jeffersonian, states’ rights doctrine of nullification to oppose the Fugitive Slave Act, protectionist tariffs, the antics of the Bank of the United States, and other issues up until the 1860s. There was a secession movement in the Mid-Atlantic states in the 1850s, and in 1861 the majority of Northern newspaper editorialists were in support of peaceful secession (see Northern Editorials on Secession by Howard Perkins).

The false, nationalist theory of the American founding was repeated by Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address (and praised decades later by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, wherein Hitler mad his case for abolishing states’ rights and centralizing all political power in Germany). In the same speech Lincoln threatened“invasion” and “bloodshed” (his words) in any state that failed to collect the newly-doubled federal tariff tax. He then followed through with his threat.

The only group of Americans to ever seriously challenge this false nationalist theory, Southern secessionists, were mass murdered by the hundreds of thousands, including some 50,000 civilians according to James McPherson; their cities and towns were bombed and burned to the ground, tens of millions of dollars of private property was plundered by the U.S. Army; Southern women, white and black, were raped; and total war was waged on the civilian population. This is what finally cemented into place the false, Hamiltonian/nationalist theory of the American founding, for the victors always get to write the history in war. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, is “limited only” by the state’s “power to make its will effectual,” as Joseph Story proclaimed. The technology of mass murder in the hands of the state finally made this will “effectual” in the first half of the 1860s. Americans have been mis-educated and misinformed about their own political history ever since. It is this mis-education, this false theory of history, that serves to prop up the Hamiltonian empire that Americans now slave under.

[Hat Tip: Gunny G]

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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Invisible Empire: A New World Order Defined [Running Time 02:14:01]

The Coming Clash of Worldviews

By John McLaughlin | March 23, 2012 | American Thinker

Current conventional wisdom about the November elections says the biggest issue will be “jobs” and who can best revive the economy.  However, emerging out of the rhetorical fog is the shape of something far more fundamental: a stark oncoming clash of worldviews demanding resolution.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Barack Obama, unable to run for re-election on a record of positive economic accomplishments during his first term, has decided to reframe the election debate as a final choice between two worldviews.  If he hadn’t done so, the same debate would have been forced upon him by those terrified by what they see ahead.

In his recent State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama sought to define the conflict as being between two irresolvable opposites of his choosing:

We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by.  Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

He goes on to present a false choice between doing nothing and creating an economy in which achievers must be pulled down rather than the poor raised up — all in the interests of “fairness.”  At no point does Obama consider reducing the cost, size, and reach of government.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) makes clear that Obama’s worldview has never had an underlying economic argument.  Instead, in a recent interview published in The Wall Street Journal, Cantor claims that it is “all about social justice.”

The “philosophical starting point” of today’s Democrats, as Mr. Cantor sees it, is that they “believe in a welfare state before they believe in capitalism. They promote economic programs of redistribution to close the gap of the disparity between the classes. That’s what they’re about:  redistributive politics.”

In a speech on the Senate floor last summer, Marco Rubio (R-FL) made clear that the competing worldviews to be settled in the upcoming election will be between those who believe that the government’s job is to “deliver economic justice” and those who believe that the government’s job is to “promote economic opportunity.”

Are these views reconcilable?  Senator Rubio thinks not.

Ultimately, we may find that between these two points there may not be a middle ground, and that, in fact, as a nation and as a people, we must decide what we want the role of government to be in America, moving forward.

Interestingly, the conflict between freedom for individual wealth-creation at all economic levels and government-enforced wealth-redistribution has roiled since the earliest days of our nation’s founding.  As students of world history know, the dominant governing model worldwide for thousands of years involved a strong central authority usually led by a ruling individual, be he king or tribal chief or dictator by some other name.  Not until the 17^th century would groups of individuals escaping the tyranny of Europe’s top-down rule settle on the shores of a new continent to try a different way.

On a ship to the new land, Pilgrims so adverse to the old ruling model voted to adopt a new one — a “Commonwealth” — where each family would provide common goods for the community to be shared equally.  As documented by their first American governor, William Bradford, the Plymouth colony suffered mightily as a result.  Some refused to contribute equally.  Basic human nature kicked in as  top producers refused to assist slackers, and the colony almost perished from disease and hunger.  In desperation, they established a private property model, with individuals free to profit from the results of their efforts.  Prosperity returned within a year.  We now celebrate Thanksgiving as a result.

Read the full article here.

Global Governance: The Quiet War Against American Independence

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A Fabian Socialist Dream Come True

In Republicae’s excellent article at NolanChart,  he warns that “The gradual revolution of the Fabian Socialists is quickly becoming a reality in America.” Indeed it is. In support of his warning, he provides the following evidence:

In 1942, Stuart Chase, in his book “The Road We Are Traveling” spelled out the system of planning the Fabians had in mind; the interesting thing is to look at that plan in comparison to 2008 America.

1. Strong, centralized government.

2. Powerful Executive at the expense of Congress and the Judicial.

3. Government controlled banking, credit and securities exchange.

4. Government control over employment.

5. Unemployment insurance, old age pensions.

6. Universal medical care, food and housing programs.

7. Access to unlimited government borrowing.

8. A managed monetary system.

9. Government control over foreign trade.

10. Government control over natural energy sources, transportation and agricultural production.

11. Government regulation of labor.

12. Youth camps devoted to health discipline, community service and ideological teaching consistent with those of the authorities.

13. Heavy progressive taxation.

You can access Stuart Chase’s book at Scribd. You can learn more about Stuart Chase from Wikipedia. Interestingly, Wikipedia provides a list of 18 “trends in contemporaneous politics around the world” which Chase referred to as Political System X.

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]