Watching the debate on healthcare was like having a nightmare while living in the circus. The clowns never hear those they “entertain,” yet they continue to throw nasty legislation at the public. In one of the better moments from the debate, a Representative said the bill was totally unconstitutional, as the Federal Government does not have the authority to force the public to purchase anything. In an online forum, one gentleman stated that the bill is tantamount to extortion. It is apparent that we are down to the only peaceful recourse available…Support local State Sovereignty bills; the only way to overturn the healthcare nightmare, as well as all other over-reaching federal legislation!
When the subject of the Tenth Amendment has been raised in past conversation, some have laughed and some have said, “Oh, that will never work.” Since its passage, many States have tried to invoke their Tenth Amendment rights on several occasions. The largest combined effort, before now, was during the Civil War, when eleven states sought to secede from the united States. Interestingly enough, the last time people got truly fired up about their States rights was during the Roosevelt Administration’s “New Deal.” Why do we have such a magnificent amendment to protect the states if we are not going to use it?
The February 2008 CRS Report for Congress, after quoting the Tenth Amendment, states, “While this language would appear to represent one of the most clear examples of a federalist principle in the Constitution, it has not had a significant impact in limiting federal powers. Initially, the Supreme Court interpreted the Tenth Amendment to have substantive content, so that certain ‘core’ state functions would be beyond the authority of the federal government to regulate.” Yet, in the past, as now, the Federal Government continues to take what it wants, expecting the states to bow down in servitude.
In the Swiss newspaper Zeit-Fragen, Professor Dr. Eberhard Hamer from Germany asks, “How Sovereign is Europe?”
He examines the issue and concludes that Europe has little, if any, sovereignty. Professor Hamer writes that the sovereign rights of Europeans as citizens of nation states were dissolved with the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty on Dec. 1, 2009. The rights of the people have been conveyed to a political commissariat in Brussels. The French, Germans, Belgians, Spanish, British, Irish, Italians, Greeks, and so forth, now have “European citizenship whatever this may be.”
The result of aggregating nations is to reduce the political participation of people. The authority of parliaments and local councils has been impaired. Power is now concentrated in new hierarchical structures within the European Union. European citizenship means indirect and weak participation by people. Self-rule has given way to authoritarian rule from top to bottom.
While speaking to a large crowd of over a thousand people on the campus of Arizona State University last December, Congressman Ron Paul mentioned one thing that might come about as the result of the federal government habitually ignoring the Constitution: Nullification.
About five minutes into the video segment which you’ll find below, he said, “There’s not much attention paid to the Constitution in Washington. There’s not much attention paid to it by our executive branch of government. And we don’t get much protection from our courts. So one thing that might finally happen from this if the people finally feel so frustrated that they can’t get the results out of Washington — They’re going to start thinking about options. They might start thinking about nullification and a few things like that.”
As someone who attended that rally and was doing my best to represent my state’s chapter of The Tenth Amendment Center, I know I cheered very loudly and was very pleased when the rest of the crowd applauded enthusiastically.
For anyone who is unfamiliar with the concept of state nullification, it was the idea expressed by then sitting vice president, Thomas Jefferson, when he authored what came to be called the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. The resolutions made the case that the federal government is a creature of the states and that states have the authority to judge the constitutionality of the federal government’s laws and decrees. He also argued that states should refuse to enforce laws which they deemed unconstitutional.
The United States does not control its own destiny. Rather it is controlled by an international financial elite, of which the American branch works out of big New York banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wall Street investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, and the Federal Reserve System. They in turn control the White House, Congress, the military, the mass media, the intelligence agencies, both political parties, the universities, etc. No one can rise to the top in any of these institutions without the elite’s stamp of approval.
This elite has been around since the nation began, becoming increasingly dominant as the 19th century progressed. A key date was passage of the National Banking Act of 1863, when the system was put into place whereby federal government debt was used to collateralize bank lending. Since then we’ve paid the freight through our taxes for bank control of the economy. The final nails in the coffin came with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
In 1929 the bankers plunged the nation into the Great Depression by constricting the money supply. With Franklin D. Roosevelt as president, the nation struggled through the decade of the 1930s but did not pull out of the Depression until the industrial explosion during World War II.
After the war came the Golden Age of the U.S. economy, when the working man, protected by strong labor unions, became a true partner in the prosperity of the industrial age. That era lasted a full generation. The bankers were largely spectators as Americans led the world in exports, standard of living, science and space exploration, and every measure of health, longevity, and culture.
The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over
Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.
You can see it in the way America’s dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America’s standing at the global level is even more striking. With the nationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.
Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China’s success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.
For the first time, The Liberty Voice included a color spread in its printed version! Pick up your copy of The Liberty Voice to see this dramatic photo-journalism piece (hat-tip Norman Finkelstein) on the tragedy currently befalling Palestinians.
Watching the debate on healthcare was like having a nightmare while living in the circus. The clowns never hear those they “entertain,” yet they continue to throw nasty legislation at the public. In one of the better moments from the debate, a Representative said the bill was totally unconstitutional, as the Federal Government does not have the authority to force the public to purchase anything. In an online forum, one gentleman stated that the bill is tantamount to extortion. It is apparent that we are down to the only peaceful recourse available…Support local State Sovereignty bills; the only way to overturn the healthcare nightmare, as well as all other over-reaching federal legislation!
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