Tag Archives: Dictatorship

Can the Government Require You to Eat Asparagus?

open quoteWhile hearing oral arguments about the constitutionality of the new health care law yesterday, a Virginia judge suggested that the legal logic underlying the law’s individual mandate, which requires everyone to purchase health insurance, could give the federal government “boundless” power over U.S. citizens. From The Wall Street Journal’s report on yesterday’s hearing:

Allowing [the individual mandate], Judge Hudson said, could open the door for the federal government to require residents to buy a car, join a gym and “eat asparagus,” he said. “It’s boundless.”close quote (Read more from poorrichards-blog.blogspot.com)

This is what I said.

The lawless Wild West attacks WikiLeaks

From Salon:

open quoteWikiLeaks has never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted for one or convicted of one. A consensus of legal experts agree that prosecuting the organization or Julian Assange for any of its leaks would be difficult in the extreme. Despite those facts, look at just some of the punishment that has been doled out to them and what has been threatened:close quote

[There is a better list on Salon, with links and pics.]

-Paypal freezes WikiLeaks Account
-Australia cancels Assange’s passport
-Swiss bank freezes WikiLeaks founder’s legal defense fund
-Amazon cuts off WikiLeaks
-Seattle-based software company, Tableau removed charts links to by Wikileaks in response to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s statement.
– former Canada adviser claims Julian Assange should be assassinated
– WikiLeaks should be designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization,’ Rep. Peter King fumes

open quoteJust look at what the U.S. Government and its friends are willing to do and capable of doing to someone who challenges or defies them — all without any charges being filed or a shred of legal authority. They’ve blocked access to their assets, tried to remove them from the Internet, bullied most everyone out of doing any business with them, froze the funds marked for Assange’s legal defense at exactly the time that they prepare a strange international arrest warrant to be executed, repeatedly threatened him with murder, had their Australian vassals openly threaten to revoke his passport, and declared them “Terrorists” even though — unlike the authorities who are doing all of these things — neither Assange nor WikiLeaks ever engaged in violence, advocated violence, or caused the slaughter of civilians.

This is all grounded in the toxic mindset expressed yesterday on Meet the Press (without challenge, naturally) by GOP Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said of Assange: “I think the man is a high-tech terrorist. He’s done an enormous damage to our country, and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law.” As usual, when wielded by American authorities, the term “terrorist” means nothing more than: “those who impede or defy the will of the U.S. Government with any degree of efficacy.” Anyone who does that is, by definition, a Terrorist. And note McConnell’s typical, highly representative view that if someone he wants to punish isn’t a criminal under the law, then you just “change the law” to make him one.

But that sort of legal scheming isn’t even necessary. The U.S. and its “friends” in the Western and business worlds are more than able and happy to severely punish anyone they want without the slightest basis in “law.” That’s what the lawless, Wild Western World is: political leaders punishing whomever they want without any limits, certainly without regard to bothersome concepts of “law.”

. . . .

People often have a hard time believing that the terms “authoritarian” and “tyranny” apply to their own government, but that’s because those who meekly stay in line and remain unthreatening are never targeted by such forces. The face of authoritarianism and tyranny reveals itself with how it responds to those who meaningfully dissent from and effectively challenge its authority: do they act within the law or solely through the use of unconstrained force?

. . . .

Yahoo News!’ Michael Calderone has a very good article documenting how major American media outlets — as always — snapped into line with the authorities they serve by ceasing to use the term “whistle-blower” to describe WikiLeaks. close quote (Read more from salon.com)

TSA: Thou Shalt Acquiesce

open quoteAs a 40-year student of bureaucracy, beginning with Ludwig von Mises’s great little book, Bureaucracy (1944), I have come to recognize a series of near laws governing bureaucracy. This one is, as far as I can see, unbreakable, comparable to the law of gravity.

Some bureaucrat will enforce a written rule in such a way as to make the rule and the bureaucracy seem either ridiculous, tyrannical, or both.

There is no way to write the rules so that some bonehead in the system will not find a way to become a thorn in someone’s side – a thorn that cries out for removal.

There are corollaries to this iron law of bureaucracy.

1. The bureaucrat in question will not back down unless forced to from above.
2. His superiors will regard any public resistance to the interpretation as an attack on the bureaucracy’s legitimate turf.
3. The bureaucracy’s senior spokesman will defend the policy as both legitimate and necessary.
4. Politicians will be pressured by voters to have the policy changed.
5. The bureaucracy will tell the politicians that disaster will follow any such modification of the policy.
6. The public will finally get used to it.
7. The politicians will switch to some other national crisis.
8. The internal manual will then be rewritten by the senior bureaucrats to make the goof-ball application mandatory.
9. Senior management will increase the budget so as to enforce the new policy.
10. Politicians will acquiesce to this increased budget.

This leads me to North’s law of bureaucratic expansion:

Any outrageous interpretation of a bureaucratic rule, if widely resisted by the public, will lead to an increased appropriation for the bureaucracy within two fiscal years.

There is an exception.

If the enforcement of the interpretation requires major expenditures for new equipment, the process will take only one fiscal year.

. . . .

On the other hand, it is in the self-interest of their supervisor. Now we come to another law of bureaucracy, an extension of Parkinson’s famous law: “Work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion.” Professor Parkinson had another law, less known but more rigorous: promotions take place when a bureaucrat increases the number of employees subordinate to him. Parkinson worked out the numbers in the 1950s. It was no joke. There is a large body of academic articles devoted to this rule. Here is a recent example.

The supervisors want these scanners. They want employees with their sanitary gloves. These people must be trained to do these jobs. They must be moved out of the line. This means the supervisor will be able to call for additional staff. His budget will rise.

. . . .

I rue the day when a terrorist on a plane blows it up by inserting a powerful explosive into a large orifice.

Talk about bin Laden winning the war! If the see-through scanners are there to detect explosive underwear, think of the anal bomb’s impact on airport security procedures.

“No,” you think to yourself. “It could not go that far.” You are ignoring Law #1:

Some bureaucrat will enforce a written rule in such a way as to make the rule and the bureaucracy seem either ridiculous, tyrannical, or both.

. . . .

The scanners have pushed a vocal minority of the public over the line. “This goes too far!” Yet, on the face of it, the procedure seems harmless. No, there will not be any explosives discovered. But there is no big risk to the traveller, other than missing a flight. That threat will pressure travellers to get into line early. That will demonstrate the power of the TSA. That is good from the point of view of TSA’s senior officials. It means that they can ask for a larger appropriation next fiscal year. “We are experiencing long lines and delays. We need more personnel.”

The public is under assault by every conceivable government agency. This is so common that the public no longer senses it. Hardly anyone knows that the “Federal Register” publishes 70,000 pages of regulations each year: fine print, three columns. These rules are rarely rescinded, only added to.

. . . .

CONCLUSION

Increasing Federal debt allows the public to avoid the pain of paying for the safety nets and subsidies. But increasing bureaucracy is an annoyance that confronts us daily. Voters do not understand the capital markets. They do understand pat-downs.

The government is vulnerable, because it cannot pass a law against bureaucratic rule #1. It cannot stop some bureaucrat from enforcing the letter of some regulation. The list of regulations grows by 70,000 pages per year. It is cumulative.

We should enjoy what is happening to the TSA. We should send along videos to those we interact with. We must use the tools at our disposal to remind people that the government is intrusive, the government is stupid, and the government does not back down.

When the day of fiscal reckoning arrives, and there is no way to get the money for another bailout except from the Federal Reserve System, we will have an opportunity to remind the people around us: “We told you so.” More to the point: “We told you why.”

Rule #1 can be stopped in only one way: to cut off the funding. That can be done in two ways: (1) outright government bankruptcy; (2) inflation.

Either way, we told them so.close quote (Read more from lewrockwell.com)

Commentary on the recent repeal of gay-marriage Iowa

I consider this issue another tragedy of public property. Because the definition of marriage is presided over by the state, those of us who have strong beliefs about it are FORCED to do battle.

Can you imagine a world in which the government didn’t even know if I was married, didn’t preside over the definition and didn’t require a $40 fee for permission?

Conflicting points of view co-exist more peacefully when government isn’t involved.

In a such a world, the fact that two people choose to call themselves married, or the fact that some people don’t consider my marriage legitimate is no more a threat to me than, say, my neighbor adopting dietary habits that I consider nonsensical and counter productive.

Please feel free to disagree with me. Most of my friends do. :)

2010 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Mario Vargas Llosa on the Tea Parties

I found Vargas’s column about the Tea Parties and translated it through Google translation, which made for some garbled English, but most of it remained understandable.

Here are some excerpts, with emphasis added:

open quoteBecause of his [the Tea Party’s] face [is hidden(?)] below ultraconservative, reactionary, populist and demagogic, and the nonsense that can claim some of their leaders, like those who say that President Obama is a Muslim ambush that want socialism for the United States or outbursts of Mrs. Christine O’Donnell, candidate for Delaware, a former practitioner of witchcraft who has accused homosexuals have created AIDS, there are in the core of this movement something healthy, realistic, deeply democratic and libertarian. The fear of runaway growth of the state and bureaucracy, whose tentacles are increasingly infiltrated into the private lives of citizens, cutting and stifling their freedom and their initiatives, the appropriation by the public sector functions or services that society civil could take more effective and less waste of resources, the creation of striking systems of social assistance can be financed only with systematic increases in taxes, which will result in falling living standards of middle and lower classes.

These fears are not free, respond to the reality of our time and originate from problems like living in the First and the Third World. But in the U.S. have a particular resonance, as always lively touch a nerve in a country where individualism is not ever had the bad press it has in Europe, in the collectivist doctrines that have taken deep roots in its modern history. A U.S. European pilgrims came seeking freedom, to practice their religion, it was not official, to defend the right of individuals to be independent, to choose your life without any limitation other than respect for life forms others. In the purest American tradition is not the state but the citizen is responsible first of its failure or success. . . .

For a long time, this ideal design was more or less respected and worked with the extraordinary development and prosperity of the country as a result. . . .

Then, because of wars, economic inequality multiplied, reformist political action was being amended, in many ways to improve it, but sometimes for worse. And among the latter, no doubt, given that inflation elephantine bureaucracy that, as much as in Europe, has reduced the area of freedom and autonomy of the individual, resulting in shrinkage of civil society and, therefore, the responsibility of the citizen against himself, his family and social group. . . .

In modern society, where the State is God, the individual is becoming less responsible, because reality can be just him, it pushes each extra day being only a state-dependent. For almost everything: studying, heal, get a job, enjoy a safe, participate and enjoy the cultural life, retirement account with the State. The idea that that is the final destination of the evolution that has followed the situation in his country is simply intolerable for a significant part of the United States, where the idea of the sovereign individual that should not be coil or exploitation by the State. . . .

If the State is decentralized and slim, if not . . . the individual is no longer free and has become an automaton manipulated by invisible and all-powerful bureaucrats who, in the shadows of their offices, taking all important decisions concerning their fate. . . .

In many cases, they [private individuals] do better and spend less than bureaucrats. In culture, for example, here in the United States, largely, magnificent museums, operas and concerts, dance, major exhibitions, public libraries are funded mainly by civil society. True, there are tax incentives that encourage this generosity, but the main reason is a cultural tradition, not entirely disappeared, which induces people to act, take initiative to invest their money in what they think right and necessary. Unlike others, this message from the Tea Party deserves to be taken into account.close quote

Dropping the Mask of Ecofascism

Great Mises daily article. Here’s my excerpt:

open quoteModern authoritarian movements tend to adopt the strategy of avoiding talking about or even hinting at the coercion they will adopt to deal with those opposed to the supreme rule of the all-powerful state apparatus. They deny that they are fascist movements and instead adopt a slew of fanciful euphemisms for the coercive policies they propose to inflict on their brutalized subjects. You silly fool! They are not robbing people — they are just “asking them to pay their fair share.” They are not micromanaging people’s lives — they are just “looking after their health and welfare.” They are not silencing dissent — they are just “ensuring tolerance” and fighting “hate.” They are not trespassing against private property — they are just “managing the economy.” They are not enslaving people — they are just “encouraging volunteerism.” Didn’t you realize?

Of course, every so often, a modern fascist movement develops such a degree of hubris that it decides to dispense with all the euphemisms and denials and openly display the coercive means underlying its ambitions. . . .

Exhibit A: The “No Pressure” Short Film

. . . .

Exhibit B: The Greenpeace Skinhead-Thug-in-Training Video

. . . .

Exhibit C: The “Planet Slayer” Game

Some more ecofascist propaganda, this time designed directly for young children. The Planet Slayer game features, among other things, a cartoon pig game used to calculate carbon-dioxide emissions. It helpfully informs children when they should die in order to ensure they do not use more than their “fair share” of the planet. Other helpful information for children includes some harsh words against “cultural imperialism” (i.e., the free choice of people in other countries to adopt certain products and practices from Western countries) and this helpful instruction: “Organise and socialise comrades. Together we can save the world!”

eco fascism for children

. . . .close quote

Jeffrey Tucker: Government is Unraveling Civilization by Force

Recommend starting @ 10:30

Lenin’s slogan “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

The left used to believe in material progress.

By 1958 the claim that Capitalism was impoverishing the world was so ridiculous that the left abandoned it. A writer named Galbraith, in “The Affluent Society” led the way in the new “post-materialist” socialist critique of capitalism. The new criticism was of moral and materialistic degradation, and also claiming that the private secor impoverished the public sector (huh?).

Lew Rockwell quote: “It’s as if the socialists discovered that their plan creates poverty, so they decided to change their name to environmentalists to make poverty the goal.” HA!

@ 17:00 he reads a list of titles from Amazon.com about “sustainability.” Very funny.

@ 18:05 he picks apart a youtube interview with an Australian environmentalist. (very funny)

@ 24:20 He offers a list of examples:

* the last factory which made incandescent bulbs shut down.

* U.S.A. bedbug infestation (because D.D.T. is banned based on a propaganda book). Another chemical, propoxyl (?) that would get rid of them are also banned. Ohio Dept. of Health has pleaded in vain with the EPA to allow it.

* EPA recommends hot water, but also restricts temperature of water heaters.

* Mandatory recycling. Limited garbage pickup.

* Plumbing. Shower heads, toilets.

* Pseudoephedrin. People have gone to join for buying too much.

* Cars.

* Subsidies of electric car.

* Attack on energy, oil.

* Accusing BP of being like a terrorist organization.

* Attack on internet in the name of intellectual property. (Some libertarians disagree with this criticism.)

33 Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True

For details on each of these, please visit newworldorderreport.com

1.The Dreyfus Affair: In the late 1800s in France, Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted of treason based on false government documents, and sentenced to life in prison.

2.The Mafia: This secret crime society was virtually unknown until the 1960s, when member Joe Valachi first revealed the society’s secrets to law enforcement officials.

3.MK-ULTRA: In the 1950s to the 1970s, the CIA ran a mind-control project aimed at finding a “truth serum” to use on communist spies. Test subjects were given LSD and other drugs, often without consent, and some were tortured.

4.Operation Mockingbird: Also in the 1950s to ’70s, the CIA paid a number of well-known domestic and foreign journalists (from big-name media outlets like Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS and others) to publish CIA propaganda. The CIA also reportedly funded at least one movie, the animated “Animal Farm,” by George Orwell. The Church Committee finally exposed the activities in 1975.

5.Manhattan Project:The Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb. The project was led by the United States, and included participation from the United Kingdom and Canada.

6.Asbestos: Between 1930 and 1960, manufacturers did all they could to prevent the link between asbestos and respiratory diseases, including cancer, becoming known, so they could avoid prosecution. American workers had in fact sued the Johns Manville company as far back as 1932, but it was not until 1962 that epidemiologists finally established beyond any doubt what company bosses had known for a long time – asbestos causes cancer.

7.Watergate: Republican officials spied on the Democratic National Headquarters from the Watergate Hotel in 1972.

8.The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The United States Public Health Service carried out this clinical study on 400 poor, African-American men with syphilis from 1932 to 1972. During the study the men were given false and sometimes dangerous treatments, and adequate treatment was intentionally withheld so the agency could learn more about the disease.

9.Operation Northwoods: In the early 1960s, American military leaders drafted plans to create public support for a war against Cuba, to oust Fidel Castro from power. The plans included committing acts of terrorism in U.S. cities, killing innocent people and U.S. soldiers, blowing up a U.S. ship, assassinating Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees, and hijacking planes. The plans were all approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but were reportedly rejected by the civilian leadership, then kept secret for nearly 40 years.

Author James Bamford, “A Pretext For War”, discusses the declassified “Operation Northwoods” documents revealing that in 1962 the CIA was planning to stage phony terrorist attacks on the US and blame it on Cuba to start a war.

10.1990 Testimony of Nayirah:A 15-year-old girl named “Nayirah” testified before the U.S. Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers pulling Kuwaiti babies from incubators, causing them to die. The testimony helped gain major public support for the 1991 Gulf War, but — despite protests that the dispute of this story was itself a conspiracy theory — it was later discovered that the testimony was false.

11.Counter Intelligence Programs Against Activists in the 60s:COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. The FBI used covert operations from its inception, however formal COINTELPRO operations took place between 1956 and 1971. The FBI’s stated motivation at the time was “protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order.”

12.The Iran-Contra Affair: In 1985 and ’86, the White House authorized government officials to secretly trade weapons with the Israeli government that were then secretly traded with Iran in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages held in Iran. The funds from the trades were then used to help finance the illegal war in Nicaragua. The plot was uncovered by Congress in 1987.

13.The BCCI Scandal: The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The Bank was registered in Luxembourg. Within a decade BCCI touched its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and had assets in excess of US$ 20 billion making it the 7th largest private bank in the world by assets. In the late 1980’s BCCI became the target of a two year undercover operation conducted by the US Customs Service. This operation concluded with a fake wedding that was attended by BCCI officers and drug dealers from around the world who had established a personal friendship and working relationship with undercover Special Agent Robert Mazur. After a six month trial in Tampa, key bank officers were convicted and received lengthy prison sentences. Bank officers began cooperating with law enforcement authorities and that cooperation caused BCCI’s many crimes to be revealed.

14.CIA Drug Running in LA: Pulitzer Prize Award winning journalist Gary Webb exposed this alongside LAPD Narcotics Officer turned whislteblower and author Michael Ruppert, CIA Contract Pilot Terry Reed, and many others. In August 1996 the San Jose Mercury News published Webb’s “Dark Alliance”, a 20,000 word, three-part investigative series which alleged that Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold and distributed crack cocaine in Los Angeles during the 1980s, and that drug profits were used to fund the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras. Webb never asserted that the CIA directly aided drug dealers to raise money for the Contras, but he did document that the CIA was aware of the cocaine transactions and the large shipments of cocaine into the U.S. by the Contra personnel.

15.Gulf of Tonkin Never Happened:The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is the name given to two separate incidents involving the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.

16.The Business Plot:In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States.

17.July 20, 1944 Conspiracy to Assassinate Hitler:Among another 20 some odd attempts, this one was one of the largest conspiracies involving hundreds of loyalists in the highest echelons of Hitler’s inner circle.

18.Operation Ajax: For years, Britain had a spiffy trade deal with Iran regarding their prodigious oil fields. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was basically a giant money machine for the Anglo half, while the Iranian half got shafted. That all changed in 1951 when Iran nationalized the AIOC and the Iranian parliament elected Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister. Mossadegh was relatively secular, something that pissed of Iranian clerics, but he was also very nationalistic.He was a democratically elected, pro American figure but the West saw his nationalizing of the oil fields a communist move(something Mossadegh thought was the right of the people to profit and pay for services in the country with).Those oil fields were under the control of British Petroleum, but unfortunately Mossadegh overruled this long standing business control.The United States sent Kermit Roosevelt, FDR’s nephew and CIA coordinator in to figure out the mess.

The best he could come up with was to confront Mossadegh and have him overthrown and this was accomplished by bringing in what the agency refers to as “jackals.” The United States backed the return of the Shah of Iran, one of the most brutal dictators the country had ever seen and intentionally overthrew years before with the democratic leader, Mossadegh. Until 1979, that is, when a pissed off Iranian populace finally revolted and replaced the monarchy with an anti-West Islamic Republic.

19.Operation Snow White:Some time during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided that they’d had enough.Apparently, the Church of Scientology managed to perform the largest infiltration of the United States government in history. Ever.5,000 of Scientology’s crack commandos wiretapped and burglarized various agencies. They stole hundreds of documents, mainly from the IRS. No critic was spared, and in the end, 136 organizations, agencies and foreign embassies were infiltrated.

20.Operation Gladio:Gladio is a code name denoting the clandestine NATO “stay-behind” operation in Italy after World War II, intended to continue anti-communist resistance in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, “Operation Gladio” is used as an informal name for all stay-behind organizations, sometimes called “Super NATO”.

The role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and its relationship to right-wing terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the Years of Lead and other similar clandestine operations is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation.

21.The CIA Assassinates A Lot Of People (Church Committee): The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the CIA and FBI after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.The Committee uncovered, among many other things, that the CIA had violated its charter to perform only gathering of intelligence.

For example, the assassinations of Allende in Chile and Mossadegh in Iran. Assassinations against Central and South American leaders and revolutionaries, as well as Africa, Middle East and East Asia.The list was tremendous.They even declassified a “Heart Attack Gun” the Agency had made for the use of killing someone without it being detected.Cancer, car accidents, skiing accidents, suicide, boating accidents, heart attacks, and just plain being shot were common assassination methods.The hearings, although recorded in full in congressional record, the mainstream media and official policies, is still largely not taught in American schools on recent history.

22.The New World Order:This popular conspiracy theory claims that a small group of international elites controls and manipulates governments, industry and media organisations worldwide. The primary tool they use to dominate nations is the system of central banking. They are said to have funded and in some cases caused most of the major wars of the last 200 years, primarily through carrying out false flag attacks to manipulate populations into supporting them, and have a grip on the world economy, deliberately causing inflation and depressions at will. The people behind the New World Order are thought to be international bankers, in particular the owners of the private banks in the Federal Reserve System, Bank of England and other central banks, and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group. Now, although this conspiracy theory was ridiculed for years, it turns out that the Bilderberg does meet and requests no media coverage.They receive no media coverage.

In 2002, Rockefeller authored his autobiography Memoirs wherein, on page 405, he wrote:

“For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents … to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

23.Kennedy Assassination – the 2nd Investigation by Congress Few People Know About, United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA): The HSCA was established in 1976 to investigate the John F. Kennedy assassination and the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. The Committee investigated until 1978, and in 1979 issued its final report, concluding that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated by a conspiracy involving the mob, and potentially the CIA.The House Select Committee on Assassinations undertook reinvestigations of the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1979, a single Report and twelve volumes of appendices on each assassination were published by the Congress. In the JFK case, the HSCA found that there was a “probable conspiracy,” though it was unable to determine the nature of that conspiracy or its other participants (besides Oswald).

24. 1919 World Series Conspiracy:The 1919 World Series (often referred to as the Black Sox Scandal) resulted in the most famous scandal in baseball history. Eight players from the Chicago White Sox (nicknamed the Black Sox) were accused of throwing the series against the Cincinnati Reds.

25.Karen Silkwood:Karen was an American labor union activist and chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, United States. Silkwood’s job was making plutonium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods.After being hired at Kerr-McGee, Silkwood joined the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union local and took part in a strike at the plant. After the strike ended, she was elected to the union’s bargaining committee and assigned to investigate health and safety issues. She discovered what she believed to be numerous violations of health regulations, including exposure of workers to contamination, faulty respiratory equipment and improper storage of samples. She also believed the lack of sufficient shower facilities could increase the risk of employee contamination.

26.CIA Drug Smuggling in Arkansas:August 23, 1987, in a rural community just south of Little Rock, police officers murdered two teenage boys because they witnessed a police-protected drug drop.The drop was part of a drug smuggling operation based at a small airport in Mena, Arkansas. The Mena operation was set up in the early 1980’s by the notorious drug smuggler, Barry Seal. Facing prison after a drug conviction in Florida, Seal flew to Washington, D.C., where he put together a deal that allowed him to avoid prison by becoming an informant for the government. As a government informant against drug smugglers, Seal testified he worked for the CIA and the DEA. In one federal court case, he testified that his income from March 1984 to August 1985, was between $700,000 and $800,000. This period was AFTER making his deal with the government.

27.Bohemian Grove:For years, many conspiracy theorists were saying that the rich and powerful met every year in the woods and worshiped a giant stone owl in an occult fashion.It turns out, ABC, CBS, NBC, and many other credible news agencies investigated this and found out, its true.It is said to be just all fun and games, like brotherhood style fraternity stuff.

28.Operation Paperclip: Operation Paperclip was the code name for the 1945 Office of Strategic Services, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency recruitment of German scientists from Nazi Germany to the U.S. after VE Day.

29.The Round Table:British businessman Cecil Rhodes advocated the British Empire reannexing the United States of America and reforming itself into an “Imperial Federation” to bring about a hyperpower and lasting world peace. In his first will, of 1877, written at the age of 23, he expressed his wish to fund a secret society (known as the Society of the Elect) that would advance this goal:“To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonization by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labor and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.”

30.The Illuminati:The Order of the Illuminati was an Enlightenment-age secret society founded on May 1st, 1776, in Ingolstadt (Upper Bavaria), by Adam Weishaupt, who was the first lay professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. The movement consisted of freethinkers, secularists, liberals, republicans and pro-feminists, recruited in the Masonic Lodges of Germany, who sought to promote perfectionism through mystery schools. As a result, in 1785, the order was infiltrated, broken and suppressed by the government agents of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, in his campaign to neutralize the threat of secret societies ever becoming hotbeds of conspiracies to overthrow the monarchy and state religion.In the late 18th century, reactionary conspiracy theorists, such as Scottish physicist John Robison and French Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel, began speculating that the Illuminati survived their suppression and became the masterminds behind the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.

31.The Trilateral Commission:The Trilateral Commission is a private organization, established to foster closer cooperation among the United States, Europe and Japan. It was founded in July 1973 at the initiative of David Rockefeller, who was Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations at that time. The Trilateral Commission is widely seen as a counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations.In July 1972, Rockefeller called his first meeting, which was held at Rockefeller’s Pocantico compound in New York’s Hudson Valley. It was attended by about 250 individuals who were carefully selected and screened by Rockefeller and represented the very elite of finance and industry.

32.Big Brother or the Shadow Government:It is also called the “Deep State” by Peter Dale Scott, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. A shadow government is a “government-in-waiting” that remains in waiting with the intention of taking control of a government in response to some event.It turned out this was true on 9/11, when it was told to us by our mainstream media.For years, this was ridiculed as a silly, crazy conspiracy theory and, like the others listed here, turned out to be 100% true.It is also called the Continuity of Government.

Bill Moyers . . . . released a documetnary titled, The Secret Government, which exposed the inner workings of a secret government much more vast that most people would ever imagine. Though originally broadcast in 1987, it is even more relevant today. Interviews with respected top military, intelligence, and government insiders reveal both the history and secret objectives of powerful groups in the hidden shadows of our government.

33.The Federal Reserve Bank:.

Columiba Univ. President: “Journalism Needs Government Help”

This goes to show you what sort of boot-licking, power hungry cowards rise to positions of prominence in American academia. No surprise he was recently named deputy chair of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

I almost choked when I read Lee Bollinger’s op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal advocating public financial support of the mainstream media. This is the Lee Bollinger who is the president of Columbia University and was recently named deputy chair of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The article says more about the writer and the mainstream media than it does its subject matter. It is unbelievable and irresponsible that anyone in his position should seriously advocate subsidies for the press.

What Bollinger is saying is that he wants us to pay for news from journalists he thinks we should read, not what we think we should read. As a law professor he is an expert in first-amendment issues. If he is an expert then he is the exemplar of the problem with scholarship and intellectualism in America today. He obviously distrusts our ability to make choices about the news we wish to read; he is eager to supplant our judgment with his. If he believes that forcing us to pay for news services we don’t want is the key to constitutional freedoms and freedom of the press, then we are in trouble because he is in a position to do something about it.

He frames the debate in these terms:

We have entered a momentous period in the history of the American press. The invention of new communications technologies — especially the Internet — is transforming the human capacity to speak, perhaps as monumentally as the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. This is facilitating the largest and fastest expansion of global economic growth in human history. Free speech and a free press are essential to a dynamic economy.

At the same time, however, the financial viability of the U.S. press has been shaken to its core. The proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers. Newsrooms have shrunk dramatically and foreign bureaus have been decimated. My best estimate is that there are presently only a few dozen full-time foreign correspondents from the U.S. covering all of China, despite the critical importance of that nation to our future.

Let me translate what he is saying — competition thrives because of new media, yet because newspapers and television journalism have failed to innovate and keep up we must subsidize them, because their reporting is (was) better. He cites NPR, PBS, and BBC as the ideals of journalism. The common theme is that these services are all supported by government. Further, he suggests, we need, as an instrument of foreign policy, to compete with China’s CCTV and Xinhua News, and Qatar’s Al Jazeera. If the BBC is the standard, then I urge you to actually listen to it as it drones on about what is happening in the UN or Mali today.

Bollinger believes that press freedoms and government support are compatible, not antithetical. If anything in history is obvious, it is the fragility of freedom of the press. Of course, this is something Jefferson and Madison fully understood when they thought they nailed down press freedom forever. (Read more from mises.org)

The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant. (Read more from time.com)

Use garages.

Trotsky: The Ignorance and the Evil

Many modern day communist wannabe’s cling to the idea that the catastrophic, mass murdering failures of communism can be blamed on bad people being put in charge in the system. “If only Trotsky had risen to power instead of Stalin,” they lament.

This essay is for them. Is is largely a critique of the book “Leon Trotsky” by Irving Howe, Viking Press, 1978, which offers a very tepid criticism of the mass murderer.

Some excerpts:

BACKGROUND:

Leon Trotsky has always had a certain appeal for intellectuals that the other Bolshevik leaders lacked. The reasons for this are clear enough. He was a writer, an occasional literary critic — according to Irving Howe, a very good one — and an historian (of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917). He had an interest in psychoanalysis and modern developments in physics, and, even when in power, suggested that the new Communist thought-controllers shouldn’t be too harsh on writers with such ideas — not exactly a Nat Hentoff position on freedom of expression, but about as good as one can expect among Communists.

Above all, Trotsky was himself an intellectual, and one who played a great part in what many of that breed have considered to be the real world — the world of revolutionary bloodshed and terror. He was second only to Lenin in 1917; in the Civil War he was the leader of the Red Army and the Organizer of Victory.

. . . .

Trotsky lost out to Stalin in the power struggle of the 1920s, and in exile became a severe and knowledgeable critic of his great antagonist; thus, for intellectuals with no access to other critics of Stalinism — classical liberal, anarchist, or conservative — Trotsky’s writings in the 1930s opened their eyes to some aspects at least of the charnel-house that was Stalin’s Russia. During the period of the Great Purge and the Moscow show trials, Trotsky was placed at the center of the myth of treason and collaboration with Germany and Japan that Stalin spun as a pretext for eliminating his old comrades.

THE IGNORANCE:

In analyzing the Tsarist regime, Trotsky had picked up on the strand of Marxist thought that saw the state as an independent parasitic body, feeding on all the social classes engaged in the process of production. This was a view that Marx expressed, for instance, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

More importantly, the class character of Marxism itself — as well as the probable consequences of the coming to power of a Marxist Party — had been identified well before Trotsky’s time. The great 19th-century anarchist Michael Bakunin — whose name does not even appear in Howe’s book, just as not a single other anarchist is even mentioned anywhere in it — had already subjected Marxism to critical scrutiny in the 1870s. In the course of this, Bakunin had uncovered the dirty little secret of the future Marxist state:

The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class…. But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all … but there will be a government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many “heads overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars. [Emphasis added.]

This perspective was taken up somewhat later by the Polish-Russian revolutionist, Waclaw Machajski, who held, in the words of Max Nomad, that — “nineteenth century socialism was not the expression of the interests of the manual workers but the ideology of the impecunious, malcontent, lower middle-class intellectual workers … behind the socialist ‘ideal’ was a new form of exploitation for the benefit of the officeholders and managers of the socialized state.”

Thus, that Marxism in power would mean the rule of state functionaries was not merely intrinsically probable — given the massive increment of state power envisaged by Marxists, what else could it be? — but it had also been predicted by writers well known to a revolutionary like Trotsky. Trotsky, however, had not permitted himself to take this analysis seriously before committing himself to the Marxist revolutionary enterprise. More than that: “To the end of his days,” as Howe writes, he “held that Stalinist Russia should still be designated as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ because it preserved the nationalized property forms that were a ‘conquest’ of the Russian Revolution” — as if nationalized property and the planned economy were not the very instruments of rule of the new class in Soviet Russia!

It remained for some of Trotsky’s more critical disciples, especially Max Shachtman in the United States, to point out to their master what had actually happened in Russia: that the Revolution had not produced a “workers’ State,” nor was there any danger that “capitalism” would be restored, as Trotsky continued to fret it would. Instead, there had come into an existence in Russia a “bureaucratic collectivism” even more reactionary and oppressive than what had gone before.

. . . .

One slight obstacle was encountered, however, on the road to the abolition of the price system and the market: “Reality,” as Trotsky noted, “came into increasing conflict” with the economic “system” that the Bolshevik rulers had fastened on Russia. After a few years of misery and famine for the Russian masses — there is no record of any Bolshevik leader having died of starvation in this period — the rulers thought again, and a New Economic Policy (NEP) — including elements of private ownership and allowing for market transactions — was decreed.

The significance of all this cannot be exaggerated. What we have with Trotsky and his comrades in the Great October Revolution is the spectacle of a few literary-philosophical intellectuals seizing power in a great country with the aim of overturning the whole economic system — but without the slightest idea of how an economic system works. In State and Revolution, written just before he took power, Lenin wrote,

The accounting and control necessary [for the operation of a national economy] have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.

With this piece of cretinism Trotsky doubtless agreed. And why wouldn’t he? Lenin, Trotsky, and the rest had all their lives been professional revolutionaries, with no connection at all to the process of production and, except for Bukharin, little interest in the real workings of an economic system. Their concerns had been the strategy and tactics of revolution and the perpetual, monkish exegesis of the holy books of Marxism.

The nitty-gritty of how an economic system functions — how, in our world, men and women work, produce, exchange, and survive — was something from which they prudishly averted their eyes, as pertaining to the nether-regions. These “materialists” and “scientific socialists” lived in a mental world where understanding Hegel, Feuerbach, and the hideousness of Eugen Duehring’s philosophical errors was infinitely more important than understanding what might be the meaning of a price.

Of the actual operations of social production and exchange they had about the same appreciation as John Henry Newman or, indeed, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. This is a common enough circumstance among intellectuals; the tragedy here is that the Bolsheviks came to rule over millions of real workers, real peasants, and real businessmen.

THE EVIL:

Howe puts the matter rather too sweetly: once in power, he says, “Trotsky was trying to think his way through difficulties no Russian Marxist had quite foreseen.” And what did the brilliant intellectual propose as a solution to the problems Russia now faced? “In December 1919 Trotsky put forward a series of ‘theses’ [sic] before the party’s Central Committee in which he argued for compulsory work and labor armies ruled through military discipline….”

So, forced labor, and not just for political opponents, but for the Russian working class. Let Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, the left-anarchists from the May days of 1968 in Paris, take up the argument:

“Was it so true,” Trotsky asked, “that compulsory labor was always unproductive?” He denounced this view as “wretched and miserable liberal prejudice,” learnedly pointing out that “chattel slavery, too, was productive” and that compulsory serf labor was in its times “a progressive phenomenon.” He told the unions [at the Third Congress of Trade Unions] that “coercion, regimentation, and militarization of labor were no mere emergency measures and that the workers’ State normally had the right to coerce any citizen to perform any work at any place of its choosing.”

And why not? Hadn’t Marx and Engels, in their ten-point program for revolutionary government in The Communist Manifesto, demanded as point eight, “Equal liability for all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture”? Neither Marx nor Engels ever disavowed their claim that those in charge of “the workers’ state” had the right to enslave the workers and peasants whenever the need might arise. Now, having annihilated the hated market, the Bolsheviks found that the need for enslavement had, indeed, arisen. And of all the Bolshevik leaders, the most ardent and aggressive advocate of forced labor was Leon Trotsky.

. . . .

He [Howe] says that in the struggle with Stalin, Trotsky was at a disadvantage, because he “fought on the terrain of the enemy, accepting the damaging assumption of a Bolshevik monopoly of power.” But why is this assumption located on the enemy’s terrain? Trotsky shared that view with Stalin. He no more believed that a supporter of capitalism had a right to propagate his ideas than a medieval inquisitor believed in a witch’s right to her own personal style. And as for the rights even of other socialists — Trotsky in 1921 had led the attack on the Kronstadt rebels, who merely demanded freedom for socialists other than the Bolsheviks. At the time, Trotsky boasted that the rebels would be shot “like partridges” — as, pursuant to his orders, they were.

. . . .

When Trotsky promoted the formation of worker-slave armies in industry, he believed that his own will was the will of the Proletarian Man. It is easy to guess whose will would stand in for that of Communist Man when the time came to direct the collective experiments on the physiological life, the complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physiological training, the reconstruction of the traditional family, the substitution of “something else” for blind sexual selection in the reproduction of human beings, and the creation of the superhuman.

This, then, is Trotsky’s final goal: a world where mankind is “free” in the sense that Marxism understands the term — where all of human life, starting from the economics, but going on to embrace everything, even the most private and intimate parts of human existence — is consciously planned by “society,” which is assumed to have a single will. And it is this — this disgusting positivist nightmare — that, for him, made all the enslavement and killings acceptable!

Surely, this was another dirty little secret that Howe had an obligation to let us in on.

Howe ends by saying of Trotsky that “the example of his energy and heroism is likely to grip the imagination of generations to come,” adding that, “even those of us who cannot heed his word may recognize that Leon Trotsky, in his power and his fall, is one of the titans of our century.”

This is the kind of writing that covers the great issues of right and wrong in human affairs with a blanket of historicist snow. The fact is that Trotsky used his talents to take power in order to impose his willful dream — the abolition of the market, private property, and the bourgeoisie. His actions brought untold misery and death to his country.

Shadowy Spy Group Building Dossiers On Internet Users For Feds

An organization that tracks 250 million IP addresses a day has been developing portfolios on Internet users and handing the information to U.S. federal agencies as the latest incarnation of the supposedly defunct Total Information Awareness spy program is revealed.

A group calling itself Project Vigilant went public at yesterday’s Defcon security conference in an effort to add more recruits to its 600 member strong cyber spy force. The outfit announced that it had been tracking “Internet villains” for no less than 14 years and handing the information to federal authorities as part of a massive intelligence gathering program.

However, the target of one such investigation did not fall into the category of cyber criminals – “terrorists, drug cartels, mobsters” – that the group claims to be fighting.

The organization “encouraged one of its “volunteers”, researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April,” reports Forbes.

. . . .

Project Vigilant is an offshoot of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Total Information Awareness, a program designed to catalogue, “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend,” as the New York Times’ William Safire wrote in November 2002.

TIA, symbolized by its logo of an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid shining upon the globe, was supposedly nixed by Congress shortly after it became public, but the program merely went underground and continued as a part of the Pentagon’s “black budget” and in conjunction with a plethora of private contractors in the same mould as Project Vigilant.

As Capitol Hill Blue reported back in 2004, “Despite Congressional action cutting funding, and the resignation of the program’s controversial director, retired admiral John Poindexter, DARPA’s TIA program is alive and well and prying into the personal business of Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

DARPA has hired private contractors to perform the exact same duties set out in Total Information Awareness, and Project Vigilant is undoubtedly one of them. By hiring private companies to do the dirty work of spying on the American people, Congressional audits can be avoided and legal barriers can be sidestepped.

Project Vigilant is clearly nothing less than a government controlled attack dog fulfilling its role to implement the cybersecurity agenda, which as we have exhaustively documented has nothing to do with security and everything to do with political oppression, Chinese style Internet censorship, and the total evisceration of free speech on the world wide web. (Read more from prisonplanet.com)