The latest edition of The Liberty Voice is in the mail to all of our faithful subscribers and in your favorite restaurants, taverns, bookstores and street newsboxes.
This is our first edition that we accepted paid advertisements, and the response has been (frankly, surprisingly) favorable! Let us know what you think! Send an e-mail to sherry@thelibertyvoice.com and share your valued insights and comments.
This winter issue features many local writers which are new to The Liberty Voice as well as our more seasoned columnists like Ellen Brown and Paul Craig Roberts.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this issue, including some outstanding liberty candidates who are launching their campaigns in our paper. I hope the intelligent readers of The Liberty Voice will find at least one candidate that they can and will support in these important races.
(Sponsored by “Ken Matesz for Governor” committee. Ken Matesz is running as a Libertarian for Governor of Ohio in 2010. This article was written by Ken Matesz.)
This article as seen on the front page of The Liberty Voice was sponsored by: Craig Schweitzer for Ohio State Representative, 2nd District
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
The person who profits from this law will complain bitter-ly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system.
The Choice Before Us
This question of legal plunder must be settled once and for all, and there are only three ways to settle it: We must make our choice among limited plunder, universal plunder, and no plunder. The law can follow only one of these three.
We all know that Congress and the President consistently violate their oath to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But did you know that every local politician also takes an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and of their state?
As a local official, I decided that I would uphold that oath by voting NO on certain city ordinances funded by unconstitutional federal money.
Before a city can spend money, the Council has to vote on the ordinance authorizing the expenditure. In order to uphold my oath, I have had to vote NO on many such ordinances which were politically difficult. I’ve had to vote NO on buying three police cruisers with “drug money” taken in a drug raid. Why? Because the “war on drugs” is a totally unconstitutional policy.
I’ve even had to vote NO on a “safe sidewalks to schools” grant. Why? Because there is no authority in the enumerated powers of Congress, which grants the federal government the right to give money to cities.
Why are so many local politicians violating their oath? It’s because the average citizen is not calling them on it. If we the people are ever going to have a Constitution that has any teeth, then we will have to give it meaning by confronting local politicians who violate their oath. When the next local election comes up, the Constitution can be made the issue by making it known how many times an incumbent violated his or her oath.
I bought in to the madness of 2008 – the belief that electing a young new Democrat from the Senate might, just maybe, this time, change things for good. He had the ground support and momentum, which I was a part of, and he even spoke like he understood what the majority of Americans were going through. After eight years of blatant criminal leadership in the White House, we all thought that maybe this time, the Washington insiders would hear us loud and clear, and our collective hope for change would be realized.
Fast forward to the present day, when our new President has sat in the top powerhouse of this country’s government for a year. Some people under-stand that all government, no matter what the level, is a slow-moving process, but there are undoubtedly signs from the past 365 days that the American people’s hopes for change have been usurped again. As has always been the case in the two-party system, when we “throw the bums out”, so to speak, every two to four years, we really are just changing the mask on a deceitful, corporate beast. As Ralph Nader said in 2008, Barack Obama is just as corporate as George W. Bush, from “A to Z”.
A glimpse at his three big “accomplishments” of the past year shows us that indeed, to paraphrase The Who, the new boss is the same as the old boss, and we have been fooled again.
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;
To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;
Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises—the closing of the Guantanamo prison. But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit.
In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantanamo meant ceasing to hold people in violation of our legal principles of habeas corpus and due process and ceasing to torture them in violation of US and international laws.
All Obama would be doing would be moving 100 people, against whom the US government is unable to bring a case, from the prison in Guantanamo to a prison in Thomson, Illinois.
Are the residents of Thomson despondent that the US government has chosen their town as the site on which to continue its blatant violation of US legal principles? No, the residents are happy. It means jobs.
The hapless prisoners had a better chance of obtaining release from Guantanamo. Now the prisoners are up against two US senators, a US representative, a mayor, and a state governor who have a vested interest in the prisoners’ permanent detention in order to protect the new prison jobs in the hamlet devastated by unemployment.
Neither the public nor the media have ever shown any interest in how the detainees came to be incarcerated. Most of the detainees were unprotected people who were captured by Afghan war lords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” in order to collect a proffered bounty. It was enough for the public and the media that the Defense Secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, declared the Guantanamo detainees to be the “780 most dangerous people on earth.”
Even a cursory read of a single issue of the Financial Times (December 28, 2009) illustrates the divergent strategies toward empire building. On page one, the lead article on the US is about its expanding military conflicts and its ‘war on terror’, entitled, “Obama Demands Review of Terror List”. In contrast, there are two page-one articles on China, which describe China’s launching of the world’s fastest long-distance passenger train service and China’s decision to maintain its currency pegged to the US dollar as a mechanism to promote its robust export sector. While Obama turns the US focus on a fourth battle front (Yemen) in the ‘war on terror’ (after Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan), the Financial Times reports on the same page that a South Korean consortium has won a $20.4 billion dollar contract to develop civilian nuclear power plants for the United Arab Emirates, beating its US and European competitors.
On page two of the FT there is a longer article on the new Chinese rail system, highlighting its superiority over the US rail service: The Chinese ultra-modern train takes passengers between two major cities, 1,100 kilometers, in less than 3 hours whereas the US Amtrack ‘Express’ takes 3 ½ hours to cover 300 kilometers between Boston and New York. While the US passenger rail system deteriorates from lack of investment and maintenance, China has spent $17 billion dollars constructing its express line. China plans to construct 18,000 kilometers of new track for its ultra-modern system by 2012, while the US will spend an equivalent amount in financing its ‘military surge’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as the new war front in Yemen.
As we all know, on Christmas Day Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (Mutallab) boarded a plane in Denmark with a makeshift bomb hidden in his underwear. Thanks to an alert passenger and the technical difficulty involved, the bomb did not detonate, the bomber caught himself on fire, the plane landed safely and the young man, Mutallab, is in custody.
The performance of the corporately controlled Orwellian media is again abysmal to the point of being a joke. We must ask ourselves, “why?”
Enter Kurt Haskell.
Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell witnessed two important events, neither of which has been widely reported although his testimony and collaborating testimony is available via You Tube videos of local news coverage including Mlive (Michigan live), NPR, Fox News, Antiwar radio, and Alex Jones’ Prison Planet.
Mr. Haskell reports that he and his wife were sitting on the floor in a crowed room playing cards when he witnessed the so-called “Sharp Dressed Man.” Haskell, who speaks carefully as an attorney, states that while Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit. He says the suited ‘Indian’ man asked ticket agents whether a supposed ‘Sudanese refugee’ (the terrorist, Mutallab) could board without a passport. The sharp-dressed man said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time.’ Mr. Haskell makes clear that this does not mean that Mutallab did not have a passport, only that the well-dressed man attempted and evidently succeeded in getting him on a plane with-out displaying a passport. Haskell has clarified that the Indian-looking man could have been Pakistani or other, that he would not have been able to discern nationality. Mr. Haskell has confirmed that surveillance video would have been taken in this crowed departure area (in Amsterdam), but complains that they have not been released.
When I decided to run for Governor of Ohio, some people close to me asked about my thoughts on the State income tax. I immediately answered that, if I had my way, I would do away with the income tax altogether. The suggestion my friends gave was that I choose a less “radical” position on the topic because, “Most people think of that stance as very unrealistic” and therefore may not take my candidacy seriously. In other words, these new advisors to my candidacy were already asking me to compromise my position for political expediency. I will not do it. Ever.
I cannot tell a lie. Now, I don’t know whether George Washington ever really did say that, but I just did. When it comes to my candidacy for governor, I will not lie for political position. What George Washington did say is that, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” Mr. Washington, more than two centuries ago understood why I cannot support income taxes. A tax on the fruits of labor of individuals is theft – the forceful taking of what is not rightly owned.
Any person in the State of Ohio or anywhere else in these united States of America who took the earnings of another under threat of punishment would be arrested, convicted and thrown in jail. If a bully in the school yard tells another kid that he must relinquish his lunch money or face a beating after school, the bully is viewed as a fearful tyrant, a threat, perhaps even a terrorist. Yet the common person in America today is expected to relinquish anywhere from 7-35% of his earnings to IRS belligerence.
The argument, from those who think abolishing income taxes is wishful thinking, is that if we don’t have the income tax, we will not be able to “get” the various “services” that the State of Ohio provides. Those who wage this argument have forgotten that there was no individual State income tax in Ohio as recently as 1971. That’s right; the Ohio income tax is less than forty years old. All of my peers and their parents actually lived during a period when there was no State income tax in Ohio.
Does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government was able to track a single cow born in Canada almost three years ago to the exact stall where she slept in the state of Washington? They also tracked her calves right down to their stalls. Why then are they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country?
Maybe we should give each of them a cow.
THE CONSTITUTION
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq and others. … Why don’t we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years and we’re not using it anymore.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse or Congress is this — you cannot post ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery’ and ‘Thou Shall Not Lie’ in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians.
“Let them eat cake,” the notoriously callous words ascribed to Marie Antoinette, were probably said a century earlier by Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV. But whoever said them, the statement conveyed the mindset of an aristocracy oblivious to the realities confronting the poor — and is still with us to this day.
“Congressmen, what shall we do about the 30 million Americans lacking health insurance?”
“Why, that is simple. Force them to buy it. Fine them heavily if they don’t!”
“What if they don’t have the money?”
“Then take it from those who do!”
The health reform bills now coming through Congress are not focused on how to make health care cheaper, more effective, or how to eliminate waste and fraud as originally envisioned. The public option has been dropped from the Senate bill and radically watered down in the House bill. Rather than focusing on making health care affordable, the bills focus on how to force people either to buy health insurance if they don’t have it, or to pay more for it if they do. If you don’t have insurance and don’t purchase it, you will be subject to a hefty fine. And if you do purchase it, premiums, co-pays, co-insurance payments and deductibles are liable to keep health care cripplingly expensive. Most of the people who don’t have health care can’t afford to pay the deductibles, so they will never use the plans they are forced to buy or be fined.
To subsidize those who can’t pay, the Senate bill would make families earning two to four times the poverty level who don’t have employer-sponsored insurance surrender 8% to 12% of their income to insurance payments, or pay a fine. In another effort to make the insurance payments “affordable,” the Senate bill calls for the lowest cost plan to cover only sixty percent of health care costs.
“In other words,” writes Dr. Andrew Coates, “a guarantee of insurance industry dominance and the continued privatization of health care in every arena.”
According to ICE.gov, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement website, ICE is “the largest investigative agency in the U.S. Department of Home-land Security. Formed in 2003 as part of the federal government’s response to the 9/11 attacks, ICE’s mission is to protect the security of the American people and homeland by vigilantly enforcing the nation’s immigration and customs laws. With more than 19,000 employees in over 400 offices in the U.S. and around the world, ICE plays a vital role in … protecting the nation…. [with] innovative investigative techniques.”
Indeed.
Reports from the New York Times and the ACLU suggest that ICE has been intentionally covering up evidence of mistreatment and death in order to avoid inquiry and embarrassment.
On January 9th the New York Times reported several troubling stories about what was occurring to people in these ICE facilities. For example, as one man lay dying of head injuries, ICE was busy at work, not figuring out how to get him medical assistance, but rather held conferences discussing whether the man should be released and sent to Africa in order to avoid publicity.
In another case, a 22-year-old-detainee was in severe pain due to a broken leg and, according to his family, denied his prescription pain killers. ICE medical records show that he was given Motrin…the only problem with ICE’s account is that by the time the medication was given, he was already dead…he committed suicide.
Some of the greatest journalists and analysts in America also happen to be comedians. Watching The Last Laugh with John Bird (in the guise of investment banker, George Parr) and John Fortune (together known as the Long Johns), the same can certainly be said of British comedians as well.
The following is a transcript of this insightful comedian team who brilliantly and accurately describe the mindset of the bailed-out bankers.
John Fortune: George Parr, you are an investment banker.
John Bird: Well, I don’t think there is any call for insults or name calling.
Fortune: Sorry, I was just…
Bird: We have after all just been through a very difficult situation.
Well, but let’s face it, you are an investment banker, and I just wanted to get your view of the turmoil that is now engulfing the financial world.
Well, I’m of a certain age, there aren’t many of us left from my generation, and I can look back at a time when the world seemed a simpler place, with some sense of certainty and order. I think this is a golden age of banking.
You’re thinking of the 60’s perhaps or even the 50’s.
No, I was thinking more of June last year. Why can’t we go back to the time when people took the word of a banker as gospel. Now we get suspicion, finger pointing, people arguing, and all sorts of difficult questions.
What sort of questions?
Nit-picking pointless sorts of things like, I don’t know… Where’s the money gone? As if I’m supposed to know.
I write, not as a man, rather as one living in a delusion, caught in the painful grip between life and love; one besieged on all sides by fate, longing, sorrow and hope. It is a woman I speak of, one unlike any other…the same story told throughout time. And just like Romeo did after staring at Juliet, I find myself asking….have I ever loved before? Have I ever breathed so deeply or dared climb such mountain tops so as to witness the fullness and splendor of the world, where one wrong step, one single slip would break one’s heart, dashing it upon the earth below.
Like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, man and God ever reaching for one touch, one longful gaze between Adam and his maker, simply to feel such love, such bliss, if even only for a moment.
My dear reader, I have been Adam’s finger and I speak now of that moment, when dream’s dreams have come to pass and the sweet nectar of the gods has coursed through my veins. I now do my feeble best to put pen to paper, to speak that which cannot be spoken, to describe that which is without description.
What a week we have all just endured! While the Democrats were re-writing the federal takeover of health care behind closed doors, the public face of the federal government was fixated on denying and then explaining all the gaps in its intelligence gathering. The Obama administration has been finger-pointing over who in the government let a murderous thug on a plane in Amsterdam that he tried to explode over Detroit. First, the government said that the system worked. Then the President said it didn’t. Then he announced that the intelligence communities and security people would start to talk to each other so the bad guys could be kept out. Weren’t they supposed to be doing this all along?
At Newark Liberty Airport last Sunday, a TSA agent left his post, and a young man walked past it to kiss his girlfriend good-bye. Then the young man turned and left the secured area and left the airport. So far no harm, no foul. But because the government’s surveillance cameras in the airport didn’t work, the feds panicked and ordered over 10,000 passengers to leave the terminal, go out into the 15-degree Newark, NJ cold at night, and then re-enter the airport. Flights were delayed and missed, kids did not get to school on Monday morning, and soldiers were listed as AWOL. All because the government overreacted to a kiss. This humiliated the feds: New Jersey’s 86-year-old senior Senator Frank Lautenberg demanded that the guy who kissed his gal be hunted down and prosecuted because of the chaos he caused. He caused? Let’s see; the government has cameras that watch us every time we scratch our noses, and when those cameras don’t work, the government blames the person whose picture it was taking? Come on.
All this, of course, brings out the false argument of liberty versus security. And we hear that the government must take our freedoms in order to keep us safe. That’s hogwash.
By readers’ request: The following is a preview of one article that will be in the next print edition of The Liberty Voice, to be released on January 12, 2010…make that January 15, 2010.
…and I tried hard to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame. The racism could no longer mask the reality of the occupation. These were people. These were human beings.
I’ve since been plagued by guilt, anytime I see an elderly man, like the one who couldn’t walk, who we rolled onto a stretcher and told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt anytime I see a mother with her children, like the one who cried hysterically, and screamed that we were worse than Saddam as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt anytime I see a young girl, like the one I grabbed by the arm and dragged into the street.
We were told we are fighting terrorists. The real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. It has long been used to justify the killing, subjugation and torture of another people.
Racism is a vital weapon employed by this government. It is a more important weapon than a rifle, a tank a bomber or a battleship. It’s more destructive than an artillery shell, or a bunker buster, or a tomahawk missile.
A former Marine Corps officer, Murtha was the first Vietnam War veteran elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. A member of the Pennsylvania House from 1969 to 1974, in 1974 he narrowly won the special election held to choose the successor to the incumbent, who died in office. In the first decade of the 21st century, Murtha has been best known for his calls for a withdrawal of American forces in Iraq.
“There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus,” says St. Luke on why Mary and Joseph found themselves in Bethlehem, “that all the world should be taxed.” Joseph had to go to his own city because the tyrannical Roman government was conducting a census. But the information may have been used for more than just taxation. The Roman government’s local ruler later decided he wanted to find the Christ child and kill Him.
Did the government make use of census data to find out where the members of the House of David were? We can’t know for sure, although a later Roman despot did. But we can know that Joseph made a huge error in obeying the census takers in the first place. They were up to no good. In fact, another group of religious Jews in Judea decided that they would not comply with the Roman government’s demand to count and tax them. The group was known as the “Zealots” (yes, that’s where the word came from). They saw complying with the census as equivalent to submitting to slavery. Many ended up paying for their principled stand with their lives.
And yet, their resistance arguably made would-be tyrants more cautious. For 10 centuries after Constantine, when feudal Europe was broken up into thousands of tiny principalities and jurisdictions, no central government was in a position to collect data on its citizens. This is one of the many great merits of radically decentralized political systems: There is no central power that controls the population through data gathering and population enumeration.
The only exception in Europe in those years was William the Conqueror who, after 1066, attempted to establish in England a centralized and authoritarian society on the Roman model. That meant, in the first instance, a census. The census was compiled in The Doomesday Book, so named by an Anglo-Saxon monk because it represented the end of the world for English freedom.
The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security does not come from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe.
The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University, often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50 years in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced in May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three children—two of whom remain missing—and spirited to a secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured and mistreated for five years. The American government has no comment, either about the alleged clandestine detention or the missing children.
Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York landmarks and notes referring to “mass-casualty attacks.” But despite these claims the government prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or links to al-Qaida—the reason for her original appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years ago. Her supporters suggest that the papers she allegedly had in her possession when she was found in Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental deterioration, perhaps the result of years of imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to the court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was described as a “match gun” that operates by lighting a match.
This is the text from Rep. John Adams’ speech given at the Taxed to the Max Rally last Saturday. It was such great message, we asked Rep. Adams to send them so we could pass them along to you.
I come from the cornfields of west-central Ohio….where the 78th house district is ranked second in the state for manufacturing per capita…..and the owners of those businesses will tell you that they can compete with any country in the world…if government would just get out of the way…….one owner has told his children to go where the jobs are ….. and you can keep more of what you earn…go and I’ll catch up with you later….he tells them.
8 million people moved in 2007….and those who study migration patterns will tell you that they moved ….not because of weather ….as the liberals would have you believe but they moved to where the jobs are. And businesses move to the states that are the most tax friendly……with least regulatory burden.
Let me remind you:
Ohio’s income tax was only instituted in 1971
Ohio ranked 47th in 1970 for state and local tax burden as % of income
Ohio ranked 24th in 1994 for state and local tax burden as % of income
Ohio ranked 5th in 2007 for state and local tax burden as % of income
Ohio is a high tax and high regulatory state. A state in rapid decline. Why target the personal income tax? The personal income tax is highly punitive on those who generate the wealth and capital in Ohio. When the tax base is broad, tax rates can be kept as low and non-confiscatory as possible. Rather than having the high wage earners leave the state, they will stay. As consumers, we should understand this: he who has the lowest price wins.
“WHERE’S THE CHANGE?!” The sixty million Americans who voted for Obama are scratching their heads and questioning the War on Terror paradigm and the ever-escalating 9/11 wars. This is the perfect time to deprogram them with Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters–the book carefully designed for and tested on real live Obama voters.
It’s guaranteed to turn the average Obama voter into a War on Terror skeptic overnight! The revised and updated 2010 edition, shipping in March, includes almost 20 pages of all-new material questioning Obama’s peace prize, the record military budget and troop deployments, plans to try KSM and the false-confession five, the Afghan escalation and war on Pakistan, the Ft. Hood shooting, the Christmas Day flaming-underwear affair, the invasion of Haiti, new threats to Iran, and more.
“As false-flag flammable underwear plots fizzle, plans to try terror patsies founder, military budgets metastasize, the Constitution remains condemned to irrelevance, criminal wars continue, and the more things change the more they stay the same, this book, sadly, remains more relevant than ever.” – Kevin Barrett, revised and updated 2010 edition, Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters
“Americans have now joined the rest of the world in regarding the war in Iraq as illegitimate because based on lies. Kevin Barrett’s book shows that the same is true of the war in Afghanistan. President Obama’s promise to base his administration’s policies on good intelligence should, therefore, lead him to bring this war to a quick end.”–David Ray Griffin, author of The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False
Barack Obama ran an unprecedented Presidential campaign – utilizing the power of design to help secure the seat of the President of the United States of America. However, his iconic emblem, the ever present “O”, holds more power than even Obama knows. Bill Whittle points out the dangers of branding an ideology with an icon and how, perhaps, the powerful symbol will be used against the very man it built up.
In this video, PJTV takes a somewhat naive view of these icons, but the message holds some very powerful truths.
One (of the many) icons Whittle mentions, was not analyzed, but would be an interesting subject: the GOP elephant. Why were the stars turned upside down in 2000? This is the old Republican icon:
This is the new symbol of the GOP:
It would appear that symbols can in fact tell us a lot.
A federal judge reports that the plaintiffs in the lawsuits by first responders to the World Trade Center may be getting closer to a settlement.
It’s been eight and a half years since thousands of fire fighters, police officers and other city workers and volunteers rushed to the site, and clawed through the rubble in search of possible survivors and remains of the victims of the terrorist attack.
Lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the city have been dueling in court. And there have been many delays.
That it’s taken this long is a disgrace. Some of these first responders suffered major injuries or illnesses. Hundreds have died already.
But now Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein, monitoring the case, reports: “There have been intensive discussions going on looking to settlements of individual cases and globally of all cases.” He says the parties have worked hard and that the settlement is “complicated.”
“In America you can say anything you want — as long as it doesn’t have any effect.”
- Paul Goodman
Progressive activists and writers continually bemoan the fact that the news they generate and the opinions they express are consistently ignored by the mainstream media, and thus kept from the masses of the American people. This disregard of progressive thought is tantamount to a definition of the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy; it’s a matter of who owns the mainstream media and the type of journalists they hire — men and women who would like to keep their jobs; so it’s more insidious than a conspiracy, it’s what’s built into the system, it’s how the system works. The disregard of the progressive world is of course not total; at times some of that world makes too good copy to ignore, and, on rare occasions, progressive ideas, when they threaten to become very popular, have to be countered.
So it was with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Here’s Barry Gewen an editor at the New York Times Book Review, June 5, 2005 writing of Zinn’s book and others like it:
There was a unifying vision, but it was simplistic. Since the victims and losers were good, it followed that the winners were bad. From the point of view of downtrodden blacks, America was racist; from the point of view of oppressed workers, it was exploitative; from the point of view of conquered Hispanics and Indians, it was imperialistic. There was much to condemn in American history, little or nothing to praise. … Whereas the Europeans who arrived in the New World were genocidal predators, the Indians who were already there believed in sharing and hospitality (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed among them), and raped Africa was a continent overflowing with kindness and communalism (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed there).
One has to wonder whether Mr. Gewen thought that all the victims of the Holocaust were saintly and without profound cultural differences.
Prominent American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once said of Zinn: “I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.”
Most of us Americans have a deep and abiding respect and admiration for our country’s fighting men who have served–and are serving–within the US Armed Forces. We appreciate their willingness to put themselves in harm’s way for the preservation of our nation’s liberty and independence. We honor their sacrifice. Indeed, many of us share that sacrifice with the deaths, dismemberments, and paralysis of our most cherished loved ones who were killed or injured in the line of duty.
It is time, however, that we awaken to the reality of what our military is becoming and where it is heading. Suffice it to say, this is not your father’s army.
On December 8, 1941, my father, Ed Baldwin–along with his two brothers, Bud and Gene–marched down to a recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, to enlist. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor the day before, and no branch of service had to beg people to enlist that day. Bud joined the Navy. Gene joined the Marines. When government officials saw Dad’s resumé, they selected him to help construct the atomic bomb. All three brothers served their country with distinction throughout the war.
But what all of us need to realize is, World War II was the last
constitutionally fought war in which America has been engaged. The United Nations was created at the end of WWII, and ever since then, our military forces have increasingly become the peacekeeping” arm of that evil institution.
By Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed MA DPhil (Sussex)
hat tip: the Independent
Sunday, 7 February 2010
In his February Vanity Fair hitpiece, Christopher Hitchens argues that the post-9/11 world has driven Gore Vidal ‘Loco’ – the signs, he says, were always there, but 9/11 and events thereafter ‘accentuated a crackpot strain that gradually asserted itself as dominant.’
Hitchens begins his missive with Gore’s take on 9/11 itself, in which he ‘insinuated or asserted that the administration had known in advance of the attacks on New York and Washington and was seeking a pretext to build a long-desired pipeline across Afghanistan.’
And then Hitchens goes on, drawing on Vidal’s October 2009 interview with Johann Hari:
‘He openly says that the Bush administration was ‘probably’ in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would “certainly fit them to a T”; that Timothy McVeigh was “a noble boy,” no more murderous than Generals Patton and Eisenhower; and that “Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war” by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Coming a bit more up-to-date, Vidal says that the whole American experiment can now be described as “a failure”; the country will soon take its place “somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs”; President Obama will be buried in the wreckage – broken by “the madhouse” – after the United States has been humiliated in Afghanistan and the Chinese emerge supreme. We shall then be “the Yellow Man’s burden,” and Beijing will “have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport.”’
Gore Vidal has ‘descended straight to the cheap, and even to the counterfeit’, becoming a peddler of ‘crank-revisionist and denialist history’ in an ‘awful, spiteful and miserable way’. His writing and speaking witnesses ‘the utter want of any grace or generosity’, the ‘entire absence of any wit or profundity’, all replaced by ‘sarcastic, tired flippancy’ and ‘lugubrious resentment’. Even a cursory reading of Hitchens’s attack leaves a distasteful residue on the tongue – Gore Vidal is now eighty-five; has lost of the use of his legs; and lost his partner of 50 years. It is unsurprising that his irony is more cutting, his criticisms more caustic, and his tone more inflexible. Hitchens approach, however, is to relentlessly kick an old man when he’s down, rather than to engage critically and constructively with what his still sharp mind has learned.
False Profits: Recovering From the Bubble Economy By Dean Baker PoliPoint Press, 2010
He who feels punctured must once have been a bubble.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 6th century BCE
As the nation struggled to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the people who got us here are desperately working to rewrite history. The basic story of this economic collapse is very simple. The Federal Reserve Board, guided by its revered chairman, Alan Greenspan, allowed an $8 trillion housing bubble to grow unchecked.
- Dean Baker’s “False Profits”
The delicious double-entendre of Dean Baker’s most recent title is enhanced by the book’s cover photo of a trio of false prophets, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan and Henry (Hank) Paulson, all of whom are thoroughly excoriated within the book’s pages for their responsibility in feeding, prolonging, misdiagnosing and incorrectly responding to the 2007-2009 financial meltdown and the associated economic collapse. However, the book also chronicles the loss of $8 trillion of housing “wealth,” $1.4 trillion in annual demand, whatever financial security the vast majority of baby-boomers ever had, “increases” in homeownership rates and any other widespread economic gains associated to the post-2000 period.
Truthout has published Dean Baker’s columns about net job losses for 2000-2010, a decade that also saw a 26 percent drop in the stock market, the elimination of the $236 billion federal budget surplus President Bush inherited and its transformation into a record deficit and the overall deliquesce of any societal and most people’s personal economic “profits.”
by Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini
Hat tip: The Wall Street Journal
Friday, February 5, 2010
After months of shrugging off debt problems in Dubai, Greece and other smaller economies, markets yesterday seemed suddenly aware of the risks of sovereign default.
Back in November, when the question of Dubai’s solvency came to a head, it was ultimately bailed out by its rich older brother, Abu Dhabi. Now, the European Union is doing its best to avoid promising a similar bailout to Greece, though in the end few believe Brussels will allow Athens to go under.
The current crisis in Greece is only the worst example inside the EU. The PIGS—Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain—all boast public debt above or headed for 100% of GDP. Though the PIGS acronym was apparently coined by British bankers, Britain, Ireland and Iceland also smell distinctly of bacon.
The problem isn’t confined to Europe. Japan and the United States, by most reckonings the world’s largest economies, also face pressing questions about their sovereign debt levels. To be sure, the U.S. and Japan can sustain such deficits more comfortably than small countries like Greece or Portugal where the government’s ability to curb public-sector spending is rightly suspect. Yet even in economic giants, bad policy could cause investors to move out of debt they have long considered a safe haven. The moment is approaching when the artificial line separating the wealthy from emerging markets will lose much of its relevance.
Around the country, twenty two states are currently considering a bill known as the “Firearms Freedom Act.” This bill declares that guns, accessories, and ammunition made within a state, sold within that state and kept in that state are not subject to federal laws or regulations under the “Interstate Commerce Clause” of the Constitution.
Montana and Tennessee passed a Firearms Freedom Act into law in 2009, and a number of states are moving that direction in the 2010 legislative session. In South Carolina, where a Firearms Freedom Act was also introduced in 2009, some representatives have taken things a step further.
NULLIFYING GUN REGISTRATIONS
Introduced in the South Carolina General Assembly this week is House Bill 4509 (H4509), which if passed, would make law that “no public official of any jurisdiction may require registration of purchasers of firearms or ammunition within the boundaries of this State.”
Few people understand what really happened in New Orleans or what caused it. Fewer still realize that they too may be living under a similar or an even greater threat. This video exposes the key myths and misunderstandings about the New Orleans flood.
Yesterday, I inadvertently squandered $4000 plus worth of medical resources during a lunch break. That I could do this, gain no benefit, and not even see the bills, is what’s right and wrong with American medical care.
I’ll tell the story in moment but first consider that none of the politically active reform proposals being debated deal with the absence of market pricing for medical care, that system-wide problem that there is a disconnect between the supplier and the consumer, and this problem is absolutely pervasive. You rarely know the prices of what you are getting, and even when you do, the prices are an abstraction: something to know but not act on, since they don’t really affect your premiums as with other forms of insurance.
The result is hardly surprising. End-user costs soar higher and higher and resource use lacks that essential component of economizing by priority. The American system just assumes that there is no such thing as too much technology, too many drugs, too much service, too much care. The consumer, in the end, isn’t really a consumer but a passive conduit of an unchecked contractual relationship between producer and third-party payers who are heavily subsidized by taxpayers.
If the economy deteriorates in the L-shaped “hockey-stick” rut that many economists forecast, what political price will President Obama and the Democrats pay for having returned the financial keys to the Bush Republican appointees who gave away the store in the first place? Reappointing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may end up injuring not only the economy but also the Democratic Party for years to come. Recognizing this, Republicans made populist points by opposing his reappointment during the Senate confirmation hearings last Thursday, January 27 – the day after Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address.
The hearings focused on the Fed’s role as Wall Street’s major lobbyist and deregulator. Despite the fact that its Charter starts off by directing it to promote full employment and stabilize prices, the Fed is anti-labor in practice. Alan Greenspan famously bragged that what has caused quiescence among labor union members when it comes to striking for higher wages – or even for better working conditions – is the fear of being fired and being unable to meet their mortgage and credit card payments. “One paycheck away from homelessness,” or a downgraded credit rating leading to soaring interest charges, has become a formula for labor management.
As for its designated task in promoting price stability, the Fed’s easy-credit bubble has made asset-price inflation the path to wealth, not tangible capital investment. This has brought joy to bank marketing departments as homeowners, consumers, corporate raiders, states and localities run further and further into debt in an attempt to improve their position by debt leveraging. But the economy has all but neglected its industrial base and the employment goes with manufacturing. The Fed’s motto from Bubblemeister Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke has been “Asset-price inflation, good; wage and commodity price inflation, bad.”
The Economic Policy Institute provides a much needed counter-weight to those cheerleading the use of Cadillac-as-Chevy taxes to pay for the Senate health care bill. It shows, generally, that the millionaire’s tax used to fund the House bill is far more progressive than the Cadillac-as-Chevy tax used to fund the Senate bill, which ends up taxing those at $20-30,000 more than it taxes those at $500,000 to 1 million a year.
In fact, it makes an even more striking point. Given the way the economy has worked in the last several decades, one of the few ways to fund health care in such a way that will keep up with rising health care costs is to tax the rich.
While a funding source that grows with health care costs is a desirable goal, it should be noted that for the last three decades one of the only things in the American economy that actually has grown as fast as overall health costs is the incomes of the richest 1% of households.
The paper points out two central reasons why the excise tax won’t be as progressive as its champions claim.
Most importantly, it shows that the cost of a plan does not reflect exclusively on how generous the benefits of that plan are. On the contrary, plan cost has more to do with group size and overall health than it does with the benefits granted.
Officials, journalists, activists say 9/11 truth activists pose a violent threat; call for secret government disruption of their work – or worse
You know you’re getting somewhere on issues of paramount public importance such as a new 9/11 investigation, when your opponents stop making fun of you and start describing you as a threat to the established order, and supporting interference with or the elimination of your First Amendment rights, and even accuse you of being a terrorist.
Background 1: Weitzman’s Defamation
One of the first shots in the threat campaign was fired just over two years ago by Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (to which we responded).
President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti.
A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal ‘pact with the Devil.’
Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.
Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.
After the Christmas attack on flight NW253, many legislators are scrutinizing the Transportation Security Administration and demanding expanded operations with more federal air marshals on long distance flights. Much has been made of the lack of an air marshal team on this flight that narrowly avoided catastrophe. Not enough has been made of the TSA’s continual assault against its own employees, who expose serious safety lapses only to be fired.
The TSA fired one author of this piece, a former federal air marshal, for revealing a 2003 cost-cutting plan to cancel air marshal coverage from long-distance flights on the eve of a confirmed al-Qaeda suicidal hijacking plan. The type of targeted flight in that case was exactly like flight NW253.
The TSA plan never went into effect after Congress protested — based solely on the whistleblowing disclosure. TSA justified the firing with a single charge of “Unauthorized Disclosure of Sensitive Security Information” — an unclassified “hybrid secrecy” label the TSA retroactively applied to the disclosure.
While the problem was first widely exposed in 2003, it has not been fixed — an anonymous TSA official recently shared with the media that air marshals were not on NW253 because of “budget issues.”
America’s public schools were once considered the hope of freedom and democracy. Yet, as John Whitehead reveals in this week’s vodcast, students currently attending public schools will be marked by overreaching zero tolerance policies, heightened surveillance, and an emphasis on behavior-controlling drugs–all resulting in the destruction of privacy and freedom.
Jean Saint-Vil: Canada should own up to hosting 2003 summit to plot Aristide’s overthrow
Last week, CBC’s Radio One’s The Current featured a panel discussion that included Ottawa-area resident Jean Saint-Vil, who is active with the solidarity network Canada Haiti Action. Afterwards, we invited him to visit at the Straight Goods News Ottawa bureau.
Media coverage of and political reaction to the Haitian disaster don’t offer much perspective on the situation. Saint-Vil explained that Haitian realities that go beyond the stereotypes of endemic poverty and corruption. He pointed to a racist subtext that subtly portrays Haitians as incompetent and ignores a centuries-old history of oppression and foreign meddling.
Saint-Vil said, for instance, that Haiti has never recovered from reparations it was forced to pay to France, totaling $40 billion in modern currency. Returning that money to the Haitians would help them recover much better than a patchwork of foreign “aid” with all the vested interests and strings inevitably attached.
Jean Saint-Vil talks to Pat Van Horne about Haiti’s realities, part 1
A talk delivered to the New England Antiwar Conference, MIT, January 30, 2010.
by Peter Dale Scott
Hello everyone! I’m honored to be invited to this important anti-war conference. As I am in the final stages of editing my next book, The Road to Afghanistan, I have been turning down invitations to speak. But I was eager to accept this one, and to join my friends and others in debunking the war on terror, the false justification for the Afghan-Pakistan war.
Let me make my own position clear at the outset. There are indeed people out there, including some Muslim extremists, who want to inflict terror on America. But it is crystal clear, as many people inside and outside government have agreed, that it makes this problem worse, not better, when Washington sends large numbers of U.S. troops to yet another country where they don’t belong.1
A war on terror is as inappropriate a cure as a U.S. war on drugs, which as we have seen in Colombia makes the drug problem worse, not better. The war on terror and the war on drugs have this in common: both are ideological attempts to justify the needless killings of thousands — including both American troops and foreign civilians — in another needless war.
Why does America find itself, time after time, invading countries in distant oil-bearing regions, countries which have not invaded us? This is a vital issue on which we should seek a clear message for the American people. Unfortunately it has been an issue on which there has been serious disagreement dividing the antiwar movement, just as it divided people, even friends, inside the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s.
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“I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle .” by Winston Churchill
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
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Testifying in November 2007 before a House subcommittee of the Homeland Security committee, 
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