Earthhope Action Network Blog

The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good

2012-01-21T07:56:00.000-08:00

By Conor Friedersdorf The Atlantic January 21, 2012

An overzealous bill that claims to be about stopping child pornography turns every Web user into a person to monitor

Every right-thinking person abhors child pornography. To combat it, legislators have brought through committee a poorly conceived, over-broad Congressional bill, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It is arguably the biggest threat to civil liberties now under consideration in the United States. The potential victims: everyone who uses the Internet.

The good news? It hasn't gone before the full House yet.

The bad news: it already made it through committee. And history shows that in times of moral panic, overly broad legislation has a way of becoming law. In fact, a particular moment comes to mind.

In the early 20th Century, a different moral panic gripped the United States: a rural nation was rapidly moving to anonymous cities, sexual mores were changing, and Americans became convinced that an epidemic of white female slavery was sweeping the land. Thus a 1910 law that made it illegal to transport any person across state lines for prostitution "or for any other immoral purpose." Suddenly premarital sex and adultery had been criminalized, as scam artists would quickly figure out. "Women would lure male conventioneers across a state line, say from New York to Atlantic City, New Jersey," David Langum* explains, "and then threaten to expose them to the prosecutors for violation" unless paid off. Inveighing against the law, the New York Times noted that, though it was officially called the White Slave Traffic Act (aka The Mann Act), a more apt name would've been "the Encouragement of Blackmail Act."

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That name is what brought the anecdote back to me. A better name for the child pornography bill would be The Encouragement of Blackmail by Law Enforcement Act. At issue is how to catch child pornographers. It's too hard now, say the bill's backers, and I can sympathize. It's their solution that appalls me: under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you've been assigned.

Tracking the private daily behavior of everyone in order to help catch a small number of child criminals is itself the noxious practice of police states. Said an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: "The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American." Even more troubling is what the government would need to do in order to access this trove of private information: ask for it.

I kid you not -- that's it.

As written, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 doesn't require that someone be under investigation on child pornography charges in order for police to access their Internet history -- being suspected of any crime is enough. (It may even be made available in civil matters like divorce trials or child custody battles.) Nor do police need probable cause to search this information. As Rep. James Sensenbrenner says, (R-Wisc.) "It poses numerous risks that well outweigh any benefits, and I'm not convinced it will contribute in a significant way to protecting children."

Among those risks: blackmail.

In Communist countries, where the ruling class routinely dug up embarrassing information on citizens as a bulwark against dissent, the secret police never dreamed of an information trove as perfect for targeting innocent people as a full Internet history. Phrases I've Googled in the course of researching this item include "moral panic about child pornography" and "blackmailing enemies with Internet history." For most people, it's easy enough to recall terms you've searched that could be taken out of context, and of course there are lots of Americans who do things online that are perfectly legal, but would be embarrassing if made public even with context: medical problems and adult pornography are only the beginning. How clueless do you have to be to mandate the creation of a huge database that includes that sort of information, especially in the age of Anonymous and Wikileaks? How naive do you have to be to give government unfettered access to it? Have the bill's 25 cosponsors never heard of J. Edgar Hoover?

You'd thing that Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), who claims on his Web site to be "an outspoken defender of individual privacy rights," wouldn't lend his name to this bill. But he co-sponsored it! You'd think that the Justice Department of Eric Holder, who is supposed to be friendly to civil libertarians, would oppose this bill. Just the opposite. And you'd think that lots of tea partiers, with all their talk about overzealous government and intrusions on private industry, would object.

But they haven't.

As Julian Sanchez recently wrote on a related subject, "In an era in which an unprecedented quantity of information about our daily activities is stored electronically and is retrievable with a mouse click, internal checks on the government's power to comb those digital databases are more important than ever... If we aren't willing to say enough is enough, our privacy will slip away one tweak at a time."

Image credit: Flickr user MonkeyManForever

*The piece originally stated that David Langum was affiliated with the University of Chicago. In fact, the only connection is that the quoted argument was published by the University of Chicago Press. Thanks to the alert reader who caught my error.

Source: The Atlantic

Earthhope Action Network

Anonymous Downs Government, Music Industry Sites in Largest Attack Ever

2012-01-21T07:04:00.000-08:00

Russia Today January 21, 2012

Hacktivists with the collective Anonymous are waging an attack on the website for the White House after successfully breaking the sites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America.

In response to today’s federal raid on the file sharing service Megaupload, hackers with the online collective Anonymous have broken the websites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA, Motion Picture Association of America and Warner Music Group.

“It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the concurrent attack on Justice.org,” Anonymous operative Barrett Brown tells RT on Thursday afternoon.

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Only hours before the DoJ and Universal sites went down, news broke that Megaupload, a massive file sharing site with a reported 50 million daily users, was taken down by federal agents. Four people linked to Megaupload were arrested in New Zealand and an international crackdown led agents to serving at least 20 search warrants across the globe.
The latest of sites to fall is FBI.gov, which finally broke at around 7:40 pm EST Thursday evening.

Less than an hour after the DoJ and Universal sites came down, the website for the RIAA, or Recording Industry Association of America, went offline as well. Shortly before 6 p.m EST, the government's Copyright.gov site went down as well. Thirty minutes later came the site for BMI, or Broadcast Music, Inc, the licensing organization that represents some of the biggest names in music.

Also on Thursday, MPAA.org returned an error as Anonymous hacktivists managed to bring down the website for the Motion Picture Association of America. The group, headed by former senator Chris Dodd, is an adamant supporter of both PIPA and SOPA legislation.

Universal Music Group, or UMG, is the largest record company in the United States and under its umbrella are the labels Interscope-Geffen-A&M, the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group and Mercury Records.

Brown adds that “more is coming” and Anonymous-aligned hacktivists are pursuing a joint effort with others to “damage campaign raising abilities of remaining Democrats who support SOPA.”

Although many members of Congress have just this week changed their stance on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, the raid on Megaupload Thursday proved that the feds don’t need SOPA or its sister legislation, PIPA, in order to pose a threat to the Web.

Brown adds that operatives involved in the project will use an “experimental campaign” and search engine optimization techniques “whereby to forever saddle some of these congressmen with their record on this issue.”

Source: Russia Today

Earthhope Action Network

Urge the Senate to Oppose Indefinite Military Detention

2011-11-27T12:54:00.000-08:00

FASCISM IS COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU.

The U.S. Senate is considering the unthinkable: changing detention laws to imprison people — including Americans living in the United States itself — indefinitely and without charge.

The Defense Authorization bill — a "must-pass" piece of legislation — is headed to the Senate floor with troubling provisions that would give the President — and all future presidents — the authority to indefinitely imprison people, without charge or trial, both abroad and inside the United States.

Urge your Senators to oppose sections 1031 and 1032 of the Defense Authorization bill.

The Revolutionaries' Revenge

2011-10-23T07:09:00.000-07:00

The Revolutionaries' Revenge

Earthhope Action Network

By Sally Zelikovsky American Thinker

The media are mistakenly characterizing the Occupy Wall Street movement as unemployed Millennials with a legitimate gripe against Wall Street consistent with the Tea Party, or as a rag-tag group of unemployed stoners with no coherent message, not to be taken too seriously. After spending hours interviewing protesters in Oakland, California, both characterizations are way off base. If either scenario were apt, these folks would be marching on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and storming Congress. Instead, they're taking on Wall Street and storming the homes of the wealthy and the buildings of large corporations.

It's Mourning in America, friends. Wake up to the fetid smell of Marxism taking over Main Street, intent on crushing Wall Street.

Each person interviewed in Oakland had the same story to tell, and if you listen carefully to the video from the main stream press, it's this: capitalism is the root of all evil.

According to the Occupiers, Big Business has corrupted our government, corporations exploit workers, the rich control everything, the top 1% own somewhere between 30% and 60% of all wealth, the disparity between the rich and the remaining 99% is growing and the property-owning bourgeoisie is responsible for that. The workers need to take control of the means of production and mount a revolution to overthrow capitalism by expropriating property from the bourgeoisie. The workers need to rise up (fist pump), redistribute capital more equitably and establish a Marxist paradise -- slaying the neo-liberalism dragon and enthroning the worker, all in the name of "economic justice."

We can pretend this isn't the case by sticking our heads in the sand, but facts are facts. When thousands say they want to overthrow capitalism and redistribute property, take them at their word, especially when their chants, signs, words, actions, websites and blogs all support that. And when they are as highly-organized, highly-funded, highly-networked, highly-mobilized and highly-motivated as the Wall Street Occupiers are, then we need to be afraid, be very afraid.

How grassroots can this movement be when a simple scroll through the internet reveals that Big Labor and Big Community Organization are openly supporting it, organizing it, taking donations for it and drafting petitions for it? Some of those organizations are MoveOn, SEIU, AFL-CIO, National Nurses United, Working Families Party, Van Jones' Rebuild the Dream, Adbusters, US Day of Rage, Take the Square, October 2011, We are the 99%, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, CREDO and MoveOn's very own Avaaz.org -- the international progenitor of the Arab Spring.

A cornucopia of America's pop culture glitterati have thrust themselves into the midst of the Occupation with calls for revolution from Danny Glover; shouts of solidarity from Van Jones; cheers from Al Gore that OWSers are "pointing out the flaws in our system"; and professions from Michael Moore (whose latest agitprop was presciently entitled "Capitalism: A Love Story") that "There's a shared feeling among people down there that this economic system that we have is unfair."

All of the people interviewed at Occupy Oakland spoke with one voice: we must get rid of the system. And they didn't hold back when probed: the system we must dismantle is capitalism.

It's no coincidence that three of the most progressive members of Congress have thrown their support behind the Occupation. Congressman Keith Ellison cast the issue as one of class warfare -- pitting the "overwhelming majority of Americans" against the "super wealthy." Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky marched-shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow travelers at Occupy Chicago. And, in contrast with her hateful rants about the Tea Party, Nancy Pelosi invoked G-d and blessed the Occupiers while prognosticating that they are going "to be effective."

The most revealing endorsement for the Occupation came from the White House itself, as President Obama expressed sympathy for the protesters who demonstrated a "broad-based frustration about how our financial system [capitalism] works." But the Occupation Revolution cannot come as any surprise to Obama given that he has been fomenting class warfare, redistribution and fundamental change since he happened upon the political scene.

Emails from MoveOn.org have consistently focused on demands for income equality and forcing corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes. The Bay of Rage website unabashedly explains that they are "an anti-capitalist initiative" that will "function during this period of austerity" as a "clearing house" for information and action. At the bottom of the home page, the stakes are clearly laid out: "austerity or civil war."

Still don't believe me? From the Bay of Rage website:

This Friday, Oct 14^th, the 5th day of Occupy Oakland, an anti-capitalist bloc led the first march out of Oscar Grant Plaza (Frank Ogawa Plaza). A diverse crowd of at least 200 chanted "Fuck the police, we don't need 'em. All we want is total freedom", "Burn the Banks", and " 1, 2, 3, 4 - organize for social war" throughout the demonstration.

From MoveOr.org emails:

They're called "the 99%," because they stand for all of us left behind by the massive concentration of wealth among the richest 1%. The protesters' unrelenting campaign against the corporate takeover of our democracy is being fought in the best traditions of nonviolent resistance.
The signs, placards, and chants focus on standing up for what the protesters are calling "the 99%" of us who are suffering while Wall Street bankers grow richer by the day.

Peruse the sites: references to the Arab Spring, calls for an American Fall (pun intended with all seriousness) and envy for uprisings in Egypt, Greece and London are ubiquitous, as are demands for revolution, resistance and the abolition of capitalism.

Marxist rhetoric plays like a broken record: bourgeoisie, oppressed workers, inequality, redistribution, capitalism and solidarity. Fortunately, MoveOn is there to define for us the "oppressed":

"The 99% protesters represent all of us who are being left behind: union workers, public servants, the poor, the unemployed, seniors, the disabled, young people graduating off a cliff to no jobs."

Does this list truly represent 99% of the US population? If 1% includes millionaires and billionaires, wouldn't the 99% have to include all of those mid-level executives, professionals and small business owners, etc.? Yes. But for purposes of this Marxist Revolution, if you have money in the bank or own property -- be it a hot dog stand or beauty salon -- then you are part of the bourgeoisie. The 99% have lumped bourgeois property owners (who really make up the vast majority of the middle) together with the 1% of millionaires and billionaires. To any rational mind this doesn't make sense, but it doesn't matter. The property, hard work and success of Main Street and the American Dream have been targeted by the so-called 99%.

And just when "social justice" and "capitalist pig" have become part of the American vernacular, we have to acquaint ourselves with new buzz words parroted by Marxist retreads form the 60s and their "useful idiot" Occupiers: "economic justice" is the latest moniker for economic parity among all of G-d's creatures and "neo-liberalism" is the latest in a string of dirty words blaming corporations for just about everything.

None of this is being done in secret. It's all out in the open. We just choose to look the other way.

America has to wake up to this new reality: the Cold War battle between communism and capitalism is back, only this time it's on our front porch. It went underground in the 70s, got an education, put on a suit, bought a house and had a couple of kids. Then it used the schools to educate new foot soldiers and manipulated the pop culture to indoctrinate the next generation of fellow travelers who seek to create a new world order in the image of old world Marxism. Bill Ayers and his allieshave been very busy -- and successful. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this bona fide fifth column has patiently been marking time, waiting for the right moment to pounce on an oblivious, comfortable middle class, re-cast it as the wealthy ruling class, and take it down with a series of fatal bites to the jugular. Gramscitold Marxists generations ago that they had to take over education and the culture to bring about the revolution. The smart ones listened and acted.

TV personalities like Geraldo Rivera can label this description of the Occupation as "harsh, paranoid or delusional," but I base my conclusions on the up-close-and-personal interviews I conducted at Occupy Oakland.

Pretending this is something different than it is, is a dangerous game. In his Iron Curtain speech, Churchill lamented: "Last time I saw it all coming and I cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention."

And in Elie Wiesel's Night, the townspeople were as incredulous as Geraldo in heeding the warnings of Moshe the Beadle, who, left for dead in a Nazi massacre, miraculously found his way home. Although Moshe tried to warn his landsmen about the atrocities he witnessed and knew were destined for them all, "the people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad." Geraldo, America, are you listening?

Think of the suffering and treasure that might have been spared if the comfortable masses had taken seriously the warnings of Churchill or Europe's real Moshes.

I am no Churchill but I admonish my fellow countrymen: don't shrug this off as bunch of unsettled kids. Don't wait for the Iron Curtain of oppression to fall while you go about your daily life, business as usual. It's anything but.

Take a moment to surf the net, attend a MoveOn meeting or talk to a few occupiers. "There's something happening here." "There's battle lines being drawn." "Young people speaking their minds". "A thousand people in the street." We better stop and ask "hey, what's that sound, everybody look what's going down."

It's your country and the Marxists aren't coming -- they're here.

"Working men of all countries, unite!" Marx, 1847
"People of the world unite!" Mao, 1970
"It's time for us to unite. It's time for them to listen. People of the world, rise up on October 15th!" www.15october.net, 2011

Sally Zelikovsky is a former attorney, turned mother of three. She is the Founder of Bay Area Patriots and Coordinator of the San Francisco Tea Party.

[See also: Occupy Wall Street and the Chicago '68 Riots - ed.]

Government Trains Troops to Run American Cities

2010-10-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

By Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com

Local government officials are training active duty military soldiers to run communities, re-igniting fears that troops will be used to deal with civil unrest in the event of a total economic collapse or other national emergency in a newly militarized America.

“The 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division met with City Manager Mary Corriveau, Mayor Jeff Graham and other City officials gaining insight about city infrastructure,” reports ABC 50.

“Government 101 is a new program that Fort Drum has established to learn from local officials about what it takes to run a community efficiently.”

The 10th Mountain Division is a light infantry division of the United States Army based at Fort Drum, New York that specializes in fighting under harsh terrain and weather conditions. The unit was deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 for one year and then to Iraq in April 2008.

The troops are being prepared for “A sitution where in essence they will become the local government,” said Corriveau.

Watch the clip.

The program is ostensibly aimed at preparing troops to govern occupied areas of Afghanistan, but as we highlighted over the last two years, the real purpose behind the training could hit a lot closer to home.

A similar program that was announced back in September 2008 involving the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was geared around training troops who had recently returned from Afghanistan to conduct “homeland patrols” which began on October 1st of that year.

According to an Army Times report, part of the troops’ mission was to deal with “civil unrest and crowd control” by using non-lethal weapons against the American people. After the announcement caused controversy, the Army Times was forced to issue a clarification, claiming that the non-lethal weapons training was intended for use overseas, but the part about “civil unrest and crowd control,” a complete violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, was not retracted.

In November 2008, Northcom announced that over the course of the following three years, an additional 4,700 troops would be assigned for domestic homeland security missions.

The very next month, the Armed Forces Press Service initiated a propaganda campaign designed to convince the American people that deploying the 3rd Infantry Division in the United States in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act was a good thing, as fully uniformed soldiers were photographed helping to save car wreck victims, in another effort at incrementally conditioning Americans to accept troops on the streets as normal, despite the fact that it is the hallmark of corrupt dictatorships and empires in terminal decline like the former Soviet Union.

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Under the pretext of “helping” local communities short of police in difficult economic times, U.S. troops are now occupying America as the country sinks into a state of de facto martial law.

The military are now being called upon to undertake roles normally designated to police as Americans are incrementally acclimated to accept the presence of troops on the streets as an everyday occurrence.

One example occurred in Kingman Arizona, where National Guardsmen were filmed “providing security” and directing traffic.

During the Kentucky Derby on May 2 last year, Military Police were on patrol to deal with crowd control.

We reported on numerous other instances of militarized units being used in traffic control, checkpoints, and security procedures.

With the government preparing to seize Americans’ private pensions as the economy further deteriorates, innumerable forecasters are predicting riots and mass civil unrest once the vanishing middle class finally rises from its slumber and realizes that their entire way of life is under immediate threat.

Unless we can communicate the fact that having troops patrol the streets is not normal and in reality is a warning siren for a country in dire straights, those same troops will soon be firing non-lethal weapons at angry American citizens – or worse.

As Gerald Celente often warns, once Americans have lost everything, they will begin to lose it – rioting in massive numbers and mirroring the growing civil unrest we are already seeing in Europe as people rise up en masse in a backlash against austerity measures and governments raising the age of retirement and seizing pensions.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.

Microsoft Proposes Government Licensing Internet Access

2010-10-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

by Paul Joseph Watson Infowars

State should have power to block individual computers from connecting to world wide web, claims Charney

A new proposal by a top Microsoft executive would open the door for government licensing to access the Internet, with authorities being empowered to block individual computers from connecting to the world wide web under the pretext of preventing malware attacks.

Speaking to the ISSE 2010 computer security conference in Berlin yesterday, Scott Charney, Microsoft vice president of Trustworthy Computing, said that cybersecurity should mirror public health safety laws, with infected PC’s being “quarantined” by government decree and prevented from accessing the Internet.

“If a device is known to be a danger to the internet, the user should be notified and the device should be cleaned before it is allowed unfettered access to the internet, minimizing the risk of the infected device contaminating other devices,” Charney said.

Charney said the system would be a “global collective defense” run by corporations and government and would “track and control” people’s computers similar to how government health bodies track diseases.

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Invoking the threat of malware attacks as a means of dissuading or blocking people from using the Internet is becoming a common theme – but it’s one tainted with political overtones.

At the launch of the Obama administration’s cybersecurity agenda earlier this year, Democrats attempted to claim that the independent news website The Drudge Report was serving malware, an incident Senator Jim Inhofe described as a deliberate ploy “to discourage people from using Drudge”.

Under the new proposals, not only would the government cite the threat of malware to prevent people from visiting Drudge, they would be blocked from the entire world wide web, creating a dangerous precedent by giving government the power to dictate whether people can use the Internet and effectively opening the door for a licensing system to be introduced.

Similar to how vehicle inspections are mandatory for cars in some states before they can be driven, are we entering a phase where you will have to obtain a PC health check before a government IP czar will issue you with a license, or an Internet ID card, allowing you to access the web?

Of course, the only way companies or the government could know when your system becomes infected with malware is to have some kind of mandatory software or firewall installed on every PC which sends data to a centralized hub, greasing the skids for warrantless surveillance and other invasions of privacy.

Microsoft has been at the forefront of a bid to introduce Internet licensing as a means of controlling how people access and use the world wide web, an effort that has intensified over the course of the past year.

During this year’s Economic Summit in Davos, Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, said that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses – in other words government permission to use the web.

“We need a kind of World Health Organization for the Internet,” he said, mirroring Charney’s rhetoric about controlling cyberspace in a public health context.

“If you want to drive a car you have to have a license to say that you are capable of driving a car, the car has to pass a test to say it is fit to drive and you have to have insurance.”

“Don’t be surprised if it becomes reality in the near future,” wrote ZD Net’s Doug Hanchard on the introduction of Internet licensing . “Every device connected to the Internet will have a permanent license plate and without it, the network won’t allow you to log in.”

Just days after Mundie’s call for Internet licensing, Time Magazine jumped on the bandwagon, publishing an article by Barbara Kiviat, one of Mundie’s fellow attendees at the elitist confab, in which she wrote that the Internet was too lawless and needed “the people in charge” to start policing it with licensing measures.

Shortly after Time Magazine started peddling the proposal, the New York Times soon followed suit with a blog entitled Driver’s Licenses for the Internet?, which merely parroted Kiviat’s talking points.

Of course there’s a very good reason for Time Magazine and the New York Times to be pushing for measures that would undoubtedly lead to a chilling effect on free speech which would in turn eviscerate the blogosphere.

Like the rest of the mainstream print dinosaurs, physical sales of Time Magazine have been plummeting, partly as a result of more people getting their news for free on the web from independent sources. Ad sales for the New York Times sunk by no less than 28 per cent last year with subscriptions and street sales also falling.

As we have documented, the entire cybersecurity agenda is couched in fearsome rhetoric about virus attacks, but its ultimate goal is to hand the Obama administration similar powers over the Internet to those enjoyed by Communist China, which are routinely exercised not for genuine security concerns, but to oppress political adversaries, locate dissidents, and crush free speech.

Indeed, Internet licensing was considered by the Chinese last year and rejected for being too authoritarian, concerns apparently not shared by Microsoft.

Any proposal which allows the government to get a foot in the door on dictating who can and can’t use the Internet should be vigorously opposed because such a system would be wide open for abuse and pave the way for full licensing and top down control of the world wide web.

Source: Infowars

Anarchy vs. Barney Fife

2010-10-05T07:23:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

by Mark R. Crovelli Lew Rockwell

If you ever fell victim to the prejudice that people today are smarter and more intellectually sophisticated than the people of the 1^st or 13^th centuries, you need only ask your friends and neighbors about the terrifying word "anarchy" to prove to yourself that our generations are just as stupid and foolish as any others. Even mentioning the word with a straight face is bound to put your acquaintances on edge, which is remarkable in itself. But, once they recover their senses from hearing the word pronounced out loud without a clap of thunder following on its heels, they will usually offer an argument against anarchism that rivals in its sheer stupidity any arguments that the flat-Earthers ever gave in antiquity.

It usually goes something like this: Human nature is so intrinsically evil and depraved that, without cops walking the streets, judges locking up potheads, and politicians buying hookers and crack in Washington, the entire world would devolve into a horrifying bloodbath. Murder and rape would run rampant as soon as the "criminals," (that is, all of us, as per our shared evil nature), got word that the police were no longer in the business of shooting, beating and incarcerating them. Virtually everyone and everything would be killed or destroyed in the ensuing mayhem. Cannibalism would probably even reappear for the barbaric survivors of the initial anarchic bloodbath. That’s right, cannibalism.

So, as you can clearly see, the fragile fabric of society is held together ultimately by the simple police officer, whom we all take for granted, and whose life is spent deterring the innumerable "criminals" out there from butchering one another, like you and me. Without police officers, given human nature’s intrinsic depravity, life would indeed be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

The sheer stupidity of arguments along the lines that human nature is so totally depraved that society would devolve into cruel chaos in the absence of police officers is almost difficult to fathom. One can forgive the flat-Earthers of yesterday for not being gifted enough in astronomy and mathematics to determine that the giant hunk of rock they stood on is spherical, but how can one forgive the people of today for thinking that that guy wearing blue polyester with mustard in his mustache in the corner of the deli is the very linchpin of human society? How can one forgive an intellectual error as large as the one that presumes that you and I would probably fight each other to the death if it wasn’t for that woman with a mullet and a radar gun under the highway overpass? How will future generations be able to comprehend an intellectual error as large as the one that holds that our very lives and our entire civilization hang oh-so tenuously from a 56-inch braided duty belt?

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If our lives and fortunes were indeed dependent upon protection from a handful of people swaddled in hideous blue polyester, mankind would have long ago lost them. If human nature were truly as depraved as these arguments would have us believe, then the chubby blue line would long ago have been annihilated by its vastly numerically superior criminal adversaries. No "criminal" worth the name would be deterred from committing his favored atrocities by a small group of lightly-armed fat people, whose national reputation is tied inextricably to the donut. To even suggest that this 300 million-strong horde of savage, would-be criminals are kept at bay only by some irrational fear of blue polyester is so asinine that it makes the flat-Earthers look like geniuses by comparison.

This intellectual error is all the more inexcusable in America, where the population is armed to the teeth with high-powered rifles, pistols, and shotguns. If the American population were truly as depraved as this argument would have us believe all people are, then its bloodlust could hardly be contained by a few pudgy men and women carrying small caliber pistols. The thought is as laughable as would be an argument to the effect that the hardened and rifle-toting farmers of Mayberry were deterred from slaughtering one another by Andy Griffith and his slow-witted sidekick.

On another level, moreover, arguments to this effect are deeply insulting to people like you and me, for they insinuate that you and I are savage beasts that are only kept in check by those enlightened and portly souls who populate the local police force. Unlike those ultra-civilized "public servants," you and I would like nothing more than to cut each other’s throats, if only the peace-loving police officers of the world weren’t holding us back. The truth, as anyone with eyes in America should be able to tell you, is precisely the reverse, since police officers and soldiers are often the most depraved perpetrators of the very crimes they claim to "protect" Americans from. The police are people just like us, after all, even if their waists are often larger, and they are capable of the same brutality as any other people.

There are some intellectual errors that one can excuse, or at least understand. The people of antiquity could not see that the Earth was round, so one can understand that they did not grasp that seemingly obvious truth There are other intellectual errors, however, that are so idiotic and so self-evident that they smash to pieces any sense of superiority we might be foolish enough to entertain over other peoples. Such is the magnitude of the error of dismissing the sublime idea of free-market anarchism by assuming that the geniuses in blue keep us savages from killing each other.

October 5, 2010

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

The Best of Mark R. Crovelli

Child Still Expelled for Toy Gun - a Year Later

2010-09-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

from NBC Miami News

View more news videos at: http://www.nbcmiami.com/video.

Free Exercise of Religion? No, Thanks.

2010-09-15T15:31:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

By Christopher Hitchens Slate

The taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.

A recent blizzard of liberal columns has framed the debate over American Islam as if it were no more than the most recent stage in the glorious history of our religious tolerance. This phrasing of the question has the (presumably intentional) effect of marginalizing doubts and of lumping any doubters with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, the anti-Semites, and other bigots and shellbacks. So I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled "free exercise of religion"?

No, I am not. Take an example close at hand, the absurdly named Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. More usually known as the Mormon church, it can boast Glenn Beck as one of its recruits. He has recently won much cheap publicity for scheduling a rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. But on the day on which the original rally occurred in 1963, the Mormon church had not yet gotten around to recognizing black people as fully human or as eligible for full membership. (Its leadership subsequently underwent a "revelation" allowing a change on this point, but not until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.) This opportunism closely shadowed an earlier adjustment of Mormon dogma, abandoning its historic and violent attachment to polygamy. Without that doctrinal change, the state of Utah was firmly told that it could not be part of the Union. More recently, Gov. Mitt Romney had to assure voters that he did not regard the prophet, or head of the Mormon church, as having ultimate moral and spiritual authority on all matters. Nothing, he swore, could override the U.S. Constitution. Thus, to the extent that we view latter-day saints as acceptable, and agree to overlook their other quaint and weird beliefs, it is to the extent that we have decidedly limited them in the free exercise of their religion.

One could cite some other examples, such as those Christian sects that disapprove of the practice of medicine. Their adult members are generally allowed to die while uttering religious incantations and waving away the physician, but, in many states, if they apply this faith to their children—a crucial element in the "free exercise" of religion—they can be taken straight to court. Not only that, they can find themselves subject to general disapproval and condemnation.

It was probably the latter consideration that helped impel the majority of American Orthodox Jews to give up the practice of metzitzah b'peh, a radical form of male circumcision that is topped off, if you will forgive the expression, by the sucking of the infant's penis by the rabbi or mohel so as to remove any remaining blood or debris. A few tiny sects still cling to this disgusting ritual, which in New York a few years ago led to a small but deadly outbreak of herpes among recently circumcised babies. On that occasion, despite calls for a ban on the practice from many Jewish doctors, the vastly overrated Mayor Michael Bloomberg chose an election year to say that such "free exercise" should not be interfered with.

We talk now as if it was ridiculous ever to suspect Roman Catholics of anything but the highest motives, yet by the time John F. Kennedy was breaking the unspoken taboo on the election of a Catholic as president, the Vatican had just begun to consider making public atonement for centuries of Jew-hatred and a more recent sympathy for fascism. Even today, many lay Catholics are appalled at the Vatican's protection of men who are sought for questioning in one of the gravest of all crimes: the organized rape of children. It is generally agreed that the church's behavior and autonomy need to be modified to take account both of American law and American moral outrage. So much for the naive invocation of "free exercise."

One could easily go on. The Church of Scientology, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, and the Ku Klux Klan are all faith-based organizations and are all entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. But they are also all subject to a complex of statutes governing tax-exemption, fraud, racism, and violence, to the point where "free exercise" in the third case has—by means of federal law enforcement and stern public disapproval—been reduced to a vestige of its former self.

Now to Islam. It is, first, a religion that makes very large claims for itself, purporting to be the last and final word of God and expressing an ambition to become the world's only religion. Some of its adherents follow or advocate the practice of plural marriage, forced marriage, female circumcision, compulsory veiling of women, and censorship of non-Muslim magazines and media. Islam's teachings generally exhibit suspicion of the very idea of church-state separation. Other teachings, depending on context, can be held to exhibit a very strong dislike of other religions, as well as of heretical forms of Islam. Muslims in America, including members of the armed forces, have already been found willing to respond to orders issued by foreign terrorist organizations. Most disturbingly, no authority within the faith appears to have the power to rule decisively that such practices, or such teachings, or such actions, are definitely and utterly in conflict with the precepts of the religion itself.

Reactions from even "moderate" Muslims to criticism are not uniformly reassuring. "Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s," Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like. What is needed from the supporters of this very confident faith is more self-criticism and less self-pity and self-righteousness.

Those who wish that there would be no mosques in America have already lost the argument: Globalization, no less than the promise of American liberty, mandates that the United States will have a Muslim population of some size. The only question, then, is what kind, or rather kinds, of Islam it will follow. There's an excellent chance of a healthy pluralist outcome, but it's very unlikely that this can happen unless, as with their predecessors on these shores, Muslims are compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are exclusive to themselves. The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization. Those who pretend that we can skip this stage in the present case are deluding themselves and asking for trouble not just in the future but in the immediate present.

Source: Slate

The Constitution, The Articles of Confederation and Southern Independence

2010-09-10T11:09:00.000-07:00

by Steve Belttari Earthhope Action Network

Even though the Kennedy brothers were my original instructors in state's rights (Why Not Freedom, The South Was Right), I do not agree with their strategy of a Constitutional Amendment. There is a great deal of schizophrenic thinking when it comes to the U.S. Constitution. One moment Southern Nationalists will say that the constitution created big government and all those evils associated with it, and the next moment they want to use the same constitution to limit government. It can't be both, either the government that the Constitution created was limited, or it was not.

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I have no schizophrenia whatsover on the subject matter, the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent government that the Constitution created is the antithesis of limited government. I think Southern Nationalists should focus on what would have happened to the South if the states had retained their sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation. The slavocracy would have never been able to maintain the allegience of the 85% of white Southerners who didn't own slaves, so slavery would have been phased out from pressure from within the South, but instead, the North-South government that the Constitution created, caused poor white Southerners to rally behind the slavocracy, because of an outside threat (the North) to their way of life.

The South's recreation-leisure oriented life of low intensity agriculture was more conductive to limited government and the South would have had a leveling effect on the more commercial North, under the Articles of Confedration. I think Southern Nationalists should focus on these things and on their God given right to revolt against the Federalist's tyranny.

Source: Earthhope Action Network

Obama Hauls Arizona Before the UN Human Rights Council

2010-08-29T15:02:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

By Ben Johnson Impeach Obama Campaign

Apparently Barack Obama is not content to make a federal case out of his immigration feud with Arizona; he just made it an international one.

The president’s first-ever report on U.S. human rights to the UN Human Rights Council contains a rich vein of offensive material. So far, one aspect has not been reported: our petty president used the situation to bash Arizona’s immigration law — and possibly transfer jurisdiction over the law from Arizona to the UN.

Throughout the report, which sounds like an Obama campaign speech, the president discusses “the original flaw” of the U.S. Constitution, America’s tolerance for slavery, and his version of our long and despicable history of discriminating against and oppressing minorities, women, homosexuals, and the handicapped. After each complaint, he addresses how he is delivering us from ourselves, patting himself on the back for such initiatives as ending “torture,” promoting Affirmative Action, and passing health care legislation.

In his section on “Values and Immigration,” he praised the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to provide better medical care for detainees and increase “Alternatives To Detention” (e.g., letting them go). Then he turned to the one state that has had the temerity to stand in his way of fundamentally transforming the American electorate:

A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.

On Obama’s command, Attorney General Eric Holder has sued the State of Arizona for passing a law that he criticized without reading, and which merely upholds federal law. (He gave sanctuary cities a pass.) He now threatens an additional lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio for “racial profiling” when arresting illegal immigrants near the Mexican border.

Obama’s turns his skirmish with Jan Brewer from a states rights dispute into an international human rights cause. It also places Arizona’s law in the hands of the United Nations.

The national report is but the first step of the international government’s review process. On November 5, the United States will be examined by a troika of UN bureaucrats from France, Japan, and Cameroon (an oppressive nation which is a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference). This trio will consider three items: Obama’s self-flagellating report, reports written about America by UN tribunals or international governing bodies, and testimony from NGOs with a pronounced anti-American bias. It will also consider “voluntary pledges and commitments made by the State,” such as suspending an Arizona state law.

Then the French, Japanese, and Cameroon diplomats will draw up a plan of action for the United States to implement.

Nations are re-examined every four years. The Human Rights Council looks for voluntary compliance. However, its website asserts, “The Human Rights Council will decide on the measures it would need to take in case of persistent non-cooperation by a State with the” World Body.

When the Left cannot win at the ballot box (virtually every time), it overrules the people in the courts. Now that Obama is not sure he can prevail in the courts, he has overruled the American people by hauling Arizona and the two-thirds of Americans who support its law before the United Nations.

Source: Impeach Obama Campaign

Mexican Police to Patrol NY?

2010-08-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

by Jeffrey Smith American Free Press
NEW YORK, New York

In a series of events which has caused wide notice and a storm of protests, the government of Mexico, through its consulate in New York in the United Nations, has announced it will begin patrolling the New York City borough of Staten Island to “safeguard” its nationals there.

The actions of Mexico come after a series of incidents the Mexican government terms “bias attacks.”

Ironically, these so-called “hate crimes” have been perpetrated by blacks and Asians, indicative of rising tensions between various ethnic groups in the U.S. The Catholic Examiner and NBC New York both reported the Mexican government’s intention to mount surveillance, patrol and police in and around the Staten Island community of Port Richmond, which in recent years has seen a large influx of Mexican illegal immigrants.

Since the Examiner’s coverage, however, councilor officials, city hall and the local press have begun to carefully de-emphasize any possible role of Mexican law enforcement or military in efforts to secure the neighborhood.

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Mexican officials have set up a neighborhood office and a local phone hot line for their nationals to report “bias incidents”—regardless as to whether they are in the United States legally.

New York City police had been monitoring the situation and investigating the reported assaults as local crimes. The actions of the Mexican government have caused Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to order what many observers say is the most concentrated police mobilization since the World Trade Center disaster.

The main street of Port Richmond was swiftly transformed into what the New York Times described as a war zone like atmosphere with over 120 newly assigned officers, high-intensity night lighting, two huge “sky tower” police observation posts, frequent helicopter overflights and 20 police cars to watch the center of the relatively small neighborhood. Several long-term residents described it as a constant hornet’s nest of activity.

Both published reports and residents say that reports of fights between Mexicans and other groups began years ago, in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Many charge the present round of incidents started in 2003 with one loss of life in 2006, which might not even be connected to the present series of events.

At a major community gathering held at the historic St. Phillips Baptist Church, speakers addressed the current situation in the neighborhood and the borough, while Mexican councilor officials looked on.

But while the Richmond anti-violence organization and assorted left-leaning journalists who attended may have been expecting a mea culpa from local residents, what they got instead was a blast of community push-back. Speaker after speaker from the black community told of horrendous conditions the largely illegal immigrants had brought to their community. Speakers described the pattern in communities affected by an influx of illegals.

Community residents, many of whom are black first-time homeowners, told of constant disputes, alcohol and drug sales, late night disruptions, trespassing and public urination.

Others in the audience, who declined to testify, spoke of men wearing clothes bearing symbols of La Raza, Aztlan and other militant pro-Mexican groups.

They also spoke of repeated attempts to summon the state liquor authority’s enforcement agency to deal with the surging illegal liquor sales in the area, with little in the way of a response.

Jeff Smith is an New York-based freelance writer.

Free Speech: Why Philadelphia’s Licensing and Taxing of Blogs is Creeping Fascism

2010-08-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

by Darren Wolfe Earthhope Action Network

The recent decision by the City of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania to require a Business Privilege License (cost $300) of blogs and that the blogs be taxed on any profits has generated a well deserved outcry from free marketers across the country. Many have invoked Chief Justice John Marshall’s famous words, "The power to tax involves the power to destroy." They are right, this will be the end of independent blogging in Philadelphia and around the world when this spreads across countries.

The tax is actually the least of the threats to blogging the city is creating. The major threat is the licensing. Once the precedent is established that blogs can be licensed the government’s control of the blogosphere will grow in small increments until it can shut us all down by simply requiring and then denying said license. Simply charging a high licensing fee will close the majority. There’s no doubt in this libertarian’s mind the government would love nothing more than to have the Internet as limited and controlled as it has television and radio. In other words, they will apply the corporate media model to it. All these independent bloggers have been a great source of anxiety for our rulers. Why the masses are actually getting some truth! This is a tremendous threat to their power. Much better for them if there are only a few corporate sources of information.

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Does this sound far fetched? Let us consider a little history in other media namely television and radio. Back in the bad old days there where only three major television networks operating nationally. There were some local stations too, of course. Radio was and still is owned by large corporate entities. Now cable and satellite television have expanded the number of channels available, but the change has not affected the government’s control of the media. All need a license to operate. Just as important they can be easily bought off with advertising. The government controlled the flow of information to the people. It is perfect example of fascism with nominally private corporations under the government’s control and doing their bidding.

Enter the internet. Almost completely unregulated it is liberty at its best. By the dawn of the twenty-first century people were getting information and opinions that could be hidden from them before. People are networking and communicating with like-minded people from around the globe. Anyone with intelligence, a computer, and internet access can blog successfully. Independently shot videos of all manner of things the government doesn’t want exposed can be disseminated easily and at no cost. Governments and corporations are profoundly threatened by this new freedom to communicate and trade independently. To them blogging is a menace that must be stopped!

This author very much doubts that the Obama administration will be suing Philadelphia to stop their taxing and licensing scheme like they sued Arizona over their immigration law. It’s all up to us to stop this tyranny before the internet goes the way of television and radio. To this end I ask everyone to join the boycott of the City of Philadelphia until they come to their senses and leave the bloggers alone. This travesty must be stopped here before it spreads. Please show your support at our Facebook page "Boycott Philadelphia Until the Bloggers Are Free!".

Darren Wolfe, otherwise known as The International Libertarian, is the former Eastern Vice Chair of the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania. He grew up in Puerto Rico and lived in Venezuela for seven years, including the first year of Chavez's rule.His articles have appeared on OpEdNews.com, the Libertarian Penn, and the Nolan Chart. Links to his work have been picked up by news services such as Rational Review and the NYPost.com. Follow me on Twitter

©2009 Darren Wolfe, all rights reserved. You must have written permission from the author in order to republish this work.

Help Stop the Federal Wolf Killing Plan

2010-08-27T11:05:00.000-07:00

from Defenders of Wildlife

The federal Wildlife Services agency (a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture) is the primary wolf-killer in the United States -- and now want to expand their wolf-killing operations. They plan to work with Idaho officials to eliminate up to 80 percent of the wolves in north-central Idaho by land and from the air.

Their plan also includes killing entire packs -- including gassing helpless wolf pups in their dens -- and surgically sterilizing alpha wolf pairs.

This unacceptable killing plan cannot be allowed to go forward -- especially since wolves in Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies regained protections under the Endangered Species Act.

Please take action now
to speak out against the Wildlife Services plan to expand their wolf-killing role in Idaho.

Pups like the ones in the photo could be killed in their dens with poisonous gas. The deadline for comments is August 31st! Please take action today.

ACORN to McCain: Have You Lost That Loving Feeling?

2010-08-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

Neocon liberal Republicrat John McCain was an ACORN supporter.

John McCain's Attack On Liberty

2010-08-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

by Chuck Baldwin Campaign for Liberty

Anyone paying attention knows that John McCain has been a Big-Government Globalist Neocon (BGGN) for virtually his entire senatorial career. As with many BGGNs hiding out in the Republican Party, McCain likes to talk about smaller government, but his track record is littered with the promotion of one big government program after another. But, what else would one expect from a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)?

Lately, however, McCain has outdone himself. He has introduced two bills in the US Senate that are about as Machiavellian as they could be. I am referring to S.3081, a bill that would authorize the federal government to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial, and S.3002, a bill that would authorize the federal government to regulate vitamins, minerals, and virtually all health and natural food products.

According to Examiner.com, "John McCain introduced a bill into the U.S. Senate which, if passed, would actually allow U.S. citizens to be arrested and detained indefinitely, all without Miranda rights or ever being charged with a crime."

The Examiner report continued by saying "This bill, introduced by McCain, who despite overwhelming evidence, claims to be a 'conservative,' would not only take away our right to a trial, but would also allow the federal government to arrest and imprison anyone the current administration deems hostile.

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"Of course, that would be the same administration whose Homeland Security Secretary has classified veterans, retired law enforcement, Ron Paul [and Chuck Baldwin] supporters, and conservatives as 'terrorists.'"

The Examiner report concluded by saying "If it was not clear before, it should be now that John McCain has as little respect for the Constitution as he does for our borders."

Amen!

If McCain gets his way, your constitutional right to a speedy trial by jury is gone, as well as your constitutional right to Habeas Corpus. But, of course, they would attempt to justify this by claiming it is being done in the name of national security and the war on terrorism.

See the Examiner report at:

http://tinyurl.com/examiner-mccain-s3081

Regarding McCain's desire for the federal government to take over the vitamin industry, attorney Jonathan Emord wrote, "If you had any doubt about whether John McCain is a limited government conservative, you may put that doubt to rest—he is not. On February 3, 2010, John McCain introduced to the United States Senate the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010. Reflecting upon this poorly written bill, I am struck by the fact that John McCain apparently sees little difference between fissile material and dietary supplements. He is intent on regulating supplements as if they were radioactive enriched uranium rather than bioactive vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and botanicals that more often than not help people.

"The Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010 enjoys support from the most liberal members of Congress. It is an invitation for the FDA to assume broad new powers and replicate here the system now operating in Europe over dietary supplements where dietary ingredients are presumed adulterated and unlawful to sell unless pre-approved by the government. In short, good bye free enterprise, good bye limited government, and hello more heavy handed, arbitrary and punitive FDA bias against the beleaguered dietary supplement industry."

See Emord's column at:

http://www.newswithviews.com/Emord/jonathan118.htm

Please remember, this is the same John McCain who, during the 2008 Presidential campaign, said he would "order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America." Of course, McCain didn't explain where this authority would come from, because such a proposal has no legal or constitutional authority. And, by the way, this one little sentence, if implemented, would cost taxpayers some $300 billion.

McCain also said he wanted to tap Mr. Climate Change Wacko himself, Al Gore, "to work in his administration on developing a new and much tougher U.N.-sponsored global warming treaty."

(Source: Cliff Kincaid. See his column at:

http://www.newswithviews.com/Kincaid/cliff260.htm )

This is the same John McCain who addressed the Hoover Institution on May 1, 2007, and said if he were elected President, he would create a new international organization known as the "League of Democracies" (LD).

In advancing the LD, McCain said, "We should go further and start bringing democratic peoples and nations from around the world into one common organization, a worldwide League of Democracies." He then added, "The new League of Democracies would form the core of an international order . . ."

See McCain's speech to the Hoover Institution at:

http://www.cfr.org/publication/13252/

If McCain and his CFR buddies get their way, this new LD would be a United Nations on steroids! As I said all over America on the campaign trail in 2008, "John McCain is a globalist." Of course, so is Barack Obama. In fact, every President since (and including) George H.W. Bush has been a full-fledged, rotten-to-the-core globalist.

And, yes, this is the same John McCain who was one of the primary movers and shakers (along with Obama, Lindsey Graham, and G.W. Bush) who attempted (and would again) to provide amnesty to illegal aliens and open America's borders to illegal immigration.

And now McCain wants the federal government to take over the vitamin industry, and he wants to give the federal government the power to jail American citizens indefinitely without trial.

The citizens of Arizona can do the American people—and liberty itself—a great favor this year by giving Senator John McCain his walking papers. Big-Government dinosaurs like McCain are an albatross around the neck of freedom and constitutional government. If we don't send them packing now, the shackles they put around our throats will become insufferable.

Source: Campaign for Liberty

Fox News Shareholder Funded ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Imam: Report

2010-08-24T13:14:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

Fox News Shareholder Funded ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Imam: Report

by Raw Story

The second largest shareholder in News Corp. -- the parent company of Fox News -- has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to causes linked to the imam planning to build a Muslim community center and mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, says a report from Yahoo!News.

According to the report from Yahoo!'s John Cook, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who owns seven percent of News Corp., "has directly funded [Imam Feisal Abdul] Rauf's projects to the tune of more than $300,000."

Cook reports that Prince Al-Waleed's personal charity, the Kingdom Foundation, donated $305,000 to Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow, a project sponsored by two of Rauf's initiatives, the American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative, which is building the Manhattan mosque.

That Fox News' second-largest shareholder, after Rupert Murdoch, has financial links to the "Ground Zero mosque" will be seen as ironic by critics of the news network, who have watched with chagrin as the network's talking heads attempt to link the mosque to radical Islamism.

Last week, Daily Show host Jon Stewart lambasted Fox panelist Eric Bolling's attempt to link the Cordoba Initiative to Hamas and Iran. Stewart used News Corp.'s connections to Prince Al-Waleed, and the prince's connections to the Carlyle Group and Osama bin Laden to make a tongue-in-cheek argument that Fox News may be a "terrorist command center."

"Stewart didn't need to take all those steps to make the connection," Cook writes.

Cook also reports that Prince Al-Waleed has in the past funded a number of Islamic organizations that have been maligned by Fox News commentators:

Al-Waleed donated $500,000 to the Council on American-Islamic Relations — which has been repeatedly denounced on Fox News's air by Geller and others as a terror group — in 2002. Indeed, Rauf's "numerous ties to CAIR" alone have been cited by the mosque's opponents as a justification for imputing terrorist sympathies to him, yet few people seem to be asking whether Murdoch's extensive multi-billion business collaboration with the man who funds both Rauf and CAIR merits investigation or concern.

Other beneficiaries of Al-Waleed's largess include the Islamic Development Bank, a project designed to "foster the economic development and social progress of [Muslims] in accordance with the principles of Shari'ah." The IDB funds the construction of mosques around the world, and has been implicated by frequent Fox News guest Stephen Schwartz in an attempt to spread radical Wahhabism (a fundamentalist branch of Islam) throughout the United States.

Cook notes that it was none other than News Corp.'s New York Post that reported on Prince Al-Waleed's donation to Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow. He reports that Fox News had no comment for his article, and emails to the prince's Kingdom Foundation were not returned.

Prince Al-Waleed owns an estimated $2.5-billion-worth of News Corp. Majority shareholder Rupert Murdoch recently took a stake in the prince's Middle East-based media conglomerate, Rotana Group. Murdoch and Prince Al-Waleed are reportedly working on launching an Arabic news network that will compete with existing pan-Arabic networks Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.

(Editor's note: Original article's headline incorrectly referred to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal as co-owner rather than the second largest shareholder.)

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0821/fox-shareholder-funded-mosque-imam

Patrick Henry: Enemy of the State

2010-08-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

by Ryan McMaken Lew Rockwell

Little is said today of Patrick Henry. He still makes it into a book on American history here and there primarily because he was without a doubt one of the greatest (if not the greatest) orator of his generation, and when the American revolution became imminent in the 1770’s he was among those who had the greatest grasp of when the conflict would come and what it would bring.

The episode in his life that apparently warrants mention by mainstream historians is his speech to the House of Burgesses – which was meeting illegally without the consent of the Crown’s governor. It was late March 1775 – before the farmers of Lexington and Concord had had the opportunity to humiliate the most powerful army on Earth – and Henry knew that a clash of arms was near. In an effort to win support for a bill that would raise an army for Virginia and illegally appoint officers without the consent of the Crown, Henry clamored for the Virginia militia to take arms against the British:

"The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms…Let it come. I repeat, Sir, Let it come…Is life so dear or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

Today, these comments are treated as hyperbole, a mere gentleman’s exercise in arousing legislators to action. With Henry, nothing could be further from the truth. For as Murray Rothbard has pointed out numerous times, the court historians of our age would have us believe that the American revolution was no revolution at all, but merely an unfortunate disagreement among refined compatriots. But for Patrick Henry – and he was certainly not alone in such sentiments – British rule was nothing short of barbaric tyranny, a despotism to be ripped from American soil no matter what the price in blood.

In 1775, Patrick Henry was not simply attempting to arouse the passions of his fellow Virginians. He was suggesting a practical course of action: arming the population of Virginia against the troops of the British Crown. By late April he was making good on his own exhortations, and following the British seizure of a cache of arms owned by the Virginia militia, Henry himself led a militia company in a raid on the British capturing British funds as compensation for the theft of the arms. The governor of Virginia declared Henry an outlaw, and he went into hiding as a champion of the Revolution.

Henry never wavered in his support of American independence during the eight years of the Revolution, but perhaps his most valiant effort to preserve American liberties came with the ratification debates over the Constitution of 1787. Henry was a defender of the Articles of Confederation, the government formed during the waning days of the Revolutions, and which had provided the colonies peace and international recognition ever since.

At the Virginia ratification debates of 1788, Patrick Henry denied that the propaganda of the Federalists was based on anything but scare tactics, and defied the Federalists to provide convincing evidence that the Articles of Confederation had not provided what the colonists had fought for in the Revolution. Indeed, Henry contended, to adopt the new Constitution would be akin to a Revolution greater than the one just finished, except this revolution was of an older variety:

"Revolutions like this have happened in almost every country in Europe: similar examples are to be found in ancient Greece and ancient Rome: instances of the people losing their liberty by their own carelessness and the ambition of a few. We are cautioned…against faction and turbulence: I acknowledge that licentiousness is dangerous, and that it ought to be provided against: I acknowledge also the new form of Government may effectually prevent it: Yet, there is another thing it will as effectually do: it will oppress and ruin the people…I am not well versed in history, but I will submit to your recollection whether liberty has been destroyed most often by the licentiousness of the people or by the tyranny of rulers? I imagine, Sir, you will find the balance on the side of tyranny."

The real reason behind scrapping the old constitution, Henry suspected, was really that of garnering more power for those who had already tasted the perks of consolidated government. They hid this behind a façade of "economic prosperity," but Patrick Henry contended that such things were not the business of governments: "You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and prosperous people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the end of your government." For when government gives free men the power to secure their own rights, economic prosperity can only follow. But when men of government come to claiming the need to tax to increase your liberty and prosperity, beware. After all, Henry tells us, liberty is the foundation of prosperity, not the other way around. Nations like Great Britain become great "not because their government is strong and energetic," but because "liberty is its direct end and foundation." (Fortunately, Henry didn’t live to see the nightmarish British Empire of the 19th century.)

In addition, Henry was not one to rely on parchment barriers to keep the grasping hand of the state at bay. To believe that mere laws, created by men, could keep a mighty government at bay is a delusion – a fool’s game of wishful thinking. Just as he had prophesized before the beginning of the Revolution, liberty would never be preserved by anything but force:

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined…The Honorable Gentleman who presides told us, that to prevent abuses in our government, we will assemble in Convention, recall our delegated powers, and punish our servants for abusing the trust reposed to them. Oh, Sir, we should have fine times indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only necessary to assemble the people! Your arms wherewith you could defend yourselves are gone…Did you ever read of any revolution in any nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? A standing army we shall have also, to execute the execrable commands of tyranny: And how are you to punish them? Will you order them to be punished? Who shall obey these orders?

Henry knew there was but one means to preserving liberty: a de jure and de facto separation of power between the independent states and an American Union. Anything less was mere imagination. A Congressman here and a Senator there does nothing to preserve liberty. For where the force resides, there also will the power be. The states will merely be reduced to bureaucratic districts of the consolidated government.

Looking back across the centuries, it is difficult to contend that Henry was wrong. He had boycotted the Constitutional Convention of 1787 because, as he so eloquently put it, "I smell a rat" and suspected the worst: that the independent colonies that had thrived for over a century were to be herded under one consolidated government, a vast government apparatus founded not on liberty, but on the bureaucratic dreams of monarchists and mercantilists like Alexander Hamilton.

In his final stand against the new order, Patrick Henry presented his audience with a choice – a choice between empire and liberty:

"If we admit this consolidated government, it will be because we like a great splendid one. Some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire; we must have an army, a navy, and a number of things: When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, Sir, was then the primary object…But now, Sir, the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation, is about to convert this country to a powerful and mighty empire."

And quite an empire it has become. Today, as Americans, half our incomes are taxed away to that consolidated government; we send our sons to die toppling dictators armed and financed by those same taxes; we bleat like sheep for protection from each other and every foreign bogeyman near and far, and we call it liberty!

And for most Americans today, Patrick Henry is no doubt seen as a hopeless romantic, an impractical partisan of an imperfect ideology. He should have compromised and joined the Convention, we are told. His vision for America is in the dustbin of history. A fine man for a revolution perhaps, but of little use for our civilized government of today. Such are the rationalizations we now must resort to.

Patrick Henry may have failed to prevent the destruction of the free states of 18^th century America, but he speaks to us across the centuries. Henry provides us with an eloquent example of those men of principle who put liberty first and were not afraid to fight for it. Today, as we beg for scraps at government’s table, perhaps we could learn a little something about courage and liberty from Mr. Henry.

Unlike Henry, we have bought the lie that government made us rich, and that government can keep us that way. We have accepted the farce that an armed and independent people means nothing in the face of great dangers in far away lands. Indeed, these are the same lies spouted in Henry’s time. As Patrick Henry knew, Federalists, the ideological great-grandfathers of our own tax-happy centralizers, built everything on fear. Fear of economic decay, fear of foreign enemies, and fear of disunity. For a civilized and free people, the answers to such fears could no more be found in the hands of government in 1788 as today. Indeed, for Henry, it is those hands that are the only true threat to liberty.

"Fear is the passion of slaves" Henry tells us, for an armed and confident people are sure of their liberties, and not afraid to demand them. But we live in a country ruled by fear. Fear of terrorists, or criminals, or punishment by the state. How then, can we conclude anything other than that we are ourselves slaves? It would appear that we can not, and Patrick Henry would no doubt agree.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] is a regular columnist for LewRockwell.com.

Ryan McMaken Archives

Source Lew Rockwell

New York 10th Amendment Rally

2010-08-23T18:43:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

By Better Future

It was a beautiful, rain free day on August 7th at the Capitol Steps in Albany where freedom loving New Yorkers gathered in support of the United States Constitution, focusing on the 10th Amendment. The rally began as patriotic music, including songs by local bands the Ameros and American Spirit Unbroken, played while tables were set up by the speakers and candidates. Organizers, driven by the desire to spread the message of the importance of State's Rights in restoring our Republic and individual liberty, coordinated this event in six weeks with minimal experience and funding. The rally was mainly promoted via internet and some radio announcements from Hudson, NY where many of the organizers originate. Traditionally, New York is a left-wing state, but this is a spark that will set afire many more people in the state toward stopping the Federal Government’s intrusion on our liberties.

Many outstanding speakers spoke with great zeal about states’ rights. Leonard Roberto, founder of Primary Challenge, was both MC and a speaker who implored the attendees to keep up the fight for freedom. He gave a brief history lesson comparing Christians of 2,000 years ago, whose lives were a testament of the truth and faith that they held within them and “they loved not their life unto the death” to patriots and our founding fathers of 200+ years ago. Our founding fathers believed we were endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights and that no legislature gave them to us and no legislature could take them away. They also gave up their lives willingly to secure freedom in their day. Mr. Roberto says that it’s going to take brave, unselfish and determined patriots like the Christians of Jesus’ time and patriots such as our founding fathers to secure freedom in our day. Patriots who love freedom unto the death, who are willing to sacrifice their time, money, even their TVs - all, if necessary, are what’s needed to secure a free people.

The first speaker, Rick Montes, State Coordinator of New York Tenth Amendment Center, revved up the crowd by explaining how our founding fathers desired and set up the Federal Government so that it wouldn’t become a tyranny. They didn’t want a consolidated national government, but rather individual, sovereign states with only limited powers granted to the Federal Government. Which is why they included the 10^th Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Mr. Montes also expounded on Nullification as a way a state can defy the Federal Government and do the will of the people of that state. He closed with a warning to those attending the rally to be vigilant and know what the Constitution says and also quoted from Patrick Henry, stating, “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.”

Tim Chichester of Columbia County told how the 17^th Amendment affects our state sovereignty. Because of the 17^th Amendment, it puts the US Senators’ allegiance with the Federal Government, as opposed to allegiance to the state. It allows the Federal Government to supersede the state government by imposing regulations and control over the state, instead of letting the state government run itself.

John Wallace, retired New York State Trooper and now Oath Keeper, as well as an American Politics Radio Show host, moved the crowd by boldly telling everyone where our rights come from – our Creator! He explained how under both Democratic and Republican administrations the Federal Government has increased its powers beyond its Constitutional limits. Mr. Wallace stated that in our 234 year history, certain generations of Americans have been called upon to defend liberty and it is our sacred duty to defend liberty for our posterity. He said it is a critical time in our county’s history because our liberty is in mortal danger and that we are the generation that must act; for this is our time to stand up and be counted – this is our time to join together as one united force to defend liberty in America.

Sprinkled in between the main speakers were some local candidates and one state-wide candidate: Deborah Busch (Assembly 104^th District), Ted Danz (21^st Congress District), Robert Domenici (NYS Senate 46^th District), and Gary Berntsen (US Senate - NY). Each of the candidates conveyed the importance of state sovereignty, which resounded with those present who desire the State of New York to be restored to its former glory as a sovereign state. A local Tea Party Activist, Tom Chandler, addressed the very important issue of racism which the enemies of freedom like to use to try to divide the freedom movement. Bob Schulz, a long-time veteran of patriotic activism, concentrated on the Articles of Freedom, a document authored by the Continental Congress of 2009. This document is a 14 point plan to save the Constitution, the first point addressing state sovereignty.

The Keynote Speaker was Sheriff Richard Mack of Arizona, a now retired sheriff who successfully overturned the Brady Bill during the Clinton Administration. Back in 1994, the Federal Government threatened to arrest sheriffs if they didn’t enforce the Brady Bill. In 1997, Sheriff Mack sued the Federal Government on the 10^th Amendment and won! This was a grand victory toward freedom for all of us! The case upheld the sovereignty of the state over the Federal Government. Sheriff Mack said, “The greatest threat to our God given Constitutional American liberty is our own Federal Government.” The Sheriff mentioned that James Madison said that the states need to erect barriers against the encroaching of the national authority. He also said that when the Federal Government becomes too oppressive, the county Sheriff is America’s last stand. It is the sheriffs’ duty to protect us against enemies both foreign and domestic.

The founding fathers required public officials to take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution because they wanted to protect the rights of the people. If our elected officials just kept their oaths, we’d get our freedom back! The Sheriff noted that Judge Scalia, US Supreme Court Justice, ruled that state legislatures are not subject to federal direction. The Constitution is supreme, not the Federal Government! The people of New York can stop National Health Care by making the Federal Government irrelevant! Also, the Federal Government has the responsibility (one of its limited powers), to protect our borders, something they are simply refusing to do. The Mack/Prince vs. the US lawsuit declares: “But the Constitution protects us from our own best intentions: It divides power among sovereigns and among branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to the crisis of the day.”

Sheriff Mack closed by asking, “Can we, ordinary citizens, really make a difference?" He answered it with a quote by John Quincy Adams, “Duty is ours, results are God’s.” John Wallace once again addressed the excited and empowered crowd and closed the rally by administering the Oath Keepers Oath to all those present who wished to become honorary Oath Keepers. Mr. Wallace ending with three words: Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! as those in attendance enthusiastically shouted after him.

Many thanks goes out to the organizers who unselfishly gave countless hours of their time and energy to make this rally happen and to all the speakers and candidates, as well as to fellow New Yorkers who came to learn more about the 10th Amendment and stand in unison with a very important message to Washington and Albany: “Obey the Constitution."

[See the videos of the event here: www.10thonthe7th.com]

Source: Earthhope Action Network

US Jobless Claims Rise to 500K - Highest Level Since Nov. 2009

2010-08-19T17:54:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

By Luca Di Leo and Sarah N. Lynch New York Post

Via Freedom's Phoenix

The number of U.S. workers making new claims for jobless benefits unexpectedly rose last week to the highest level in nine months, the Labor Department said in its weekly report Thursday -- a distressing sign for an already weak labor market.

Initial unemployment claims rose by 12,000 to 500,000 in the week ended Aug. 14. It was the highest level since Nov. 14, when claims stood at 509,000.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires predicted filings would decline by 4,000.

The four-week moving average, which aims to smooth volatility in the data, rose by 8,000 to 482,500. It was the highest level since December 2009. New claims for the previous week, ending Aug. 7, were revised up to 488,000 from the originally reported 484,000.

The rise in claims was particularly troubling because analysts had been expecting an improvement for some time. They said recent data was likely distorted by seasonal adjustment factors tied to factory shutdowns by carmakers and the hiring and firing of temporary workers for the 2010 Census.

The level of new claims fell steadily from a high of 651,000 in March 2009 to a low of 439,000 in early February. Since then, however, it crept back up, and the latest rise to 500,000 was particularly worrying.

U.S. labor conditions already looked poor. The economy lost 131,000 jobs in July, and the unemployment rate stayed at a high 9.5 percent. After its policy-setting meeting last week, the Federal Reserve noted that the recovery in the jobs market slowed. The central bank decided to prevent its balance sheet from shrinking to counter the slowdown in the economy.

In the Labor Department's claims report Thursday, the number of continuing claims -- those drawn by workers for more than one week in the week ended Aug. 7 -- fell by 13,000 to 4,478,000 from the preceding week's revised level of 4,491,000. The previous estimate was 4,452,000. Continuing claims are reported with a one-week lag.

The unemployment rate for workers with unemployment insurance for the week ended Aug. 7 was 3.5 percent, unchanged from the prior week.

The report also has a state-by-state breakdown of new claims for the week ended Aug. 7, when there was another troubling increase.

The largest increase in claims occurred in California, which saw a rise of 4,393 due to layoffs in the service industry. The largest decrease in claims took place in Wisconsin, which saw a fall of 1,873. No additional details were provided for Wisconsin.

Source: New York Post

Bombshell: Barack Obama Conclusively Outed as CIA Creation

2010-08-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

Posted By Matt Ryan Infowars

NEWS ALERT: Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen is scheduled to appear live on the Alex Jones Show tomorrow THURSDAY AUGUST 19 at 1 PM EST / 12 NOON CST, to reveal his groundbreaking series on Barack Obama’s true origins. Madsen will share the bombshell revelations and extensive information from the following three articles– and even more that has not yet been revealed. Tell your friends, family and contacts to tune in and learn the truth. Also visit the Wayne Madsen Report for further research and other exclusive reports.

PREFACE Alex Jones and Aaron Dykes

Infowars.com

August 18, 2010

“Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father — my grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British. But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.”

- Barack Obama, 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address

Far from being the mere ‘son of a goat herder’ (as he deceptively paraded during and even before his candidacy), strong evidence has emerged that President Barack Obama is the product of the intelligence community. Investigative reporter and former NSA employee Wayne Madsen has put together an extensive three-part (and growing) series with conclusive proof and documentation that Barack Obama Sr., Stanley Ann Dunham, Lolo Soetoro and President Barack Obama himself all hold deep ties to the CIA and larger intelligence community. And that’s just the beginning.

After his election, President Obama quickly moved to seal off his records via an executive order. Now, after two years of hints and clues, there is substantial information to demonstrate that what Obama has omitted is that his rare rise to power can only be explained by his intelligence roots. However, this is more than the story of one man or his family. There is a long-term strategic plan to recruit promising candidates into intelligence and steer these individuals and their families into positions of influence and power. Consider that it is now declassified former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was recruited into MI5 before becoming a labour leader, or that George H. W. Bush not only became CIA director in 1976 but had a deeper past in the organization. While we may never know many pertinent details about these matters, one thing that is certain is that the American people have never been told the truth about who holds the real power, nor who this president– and likely many others– really is. Thus, we urge everyone to read Wayne Madsen’s deep report and seek the truth for yourself.

——————-
The Story of Obama: All in The Company (In Three Parts)
Wayne Madsen

Wayne Madsen Report

August 18, 2010

PART 1: The Story of Obama: All in The Company (Part I)

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen has discovered CIA files that document the agency’s connections to institutions and individuals figuring prominently in the lives of Barack Obama and his mother, father, grandmother, and stepfather. The first part of his report highlights the connections between Barack Obama, Sr. and the CIA-sponsored operations in Kenya to counter rising Soviet and Chinese influence among student circles and, beyond, to create conditions obstructing the emergence of independent African leaders.


From 1983-84, Barack Obama worked as Editor at Business Internation Corporation, a known CIA front company.

President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960s post-coup Indonesia on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation. Dunham met and married Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather, at the East-West Center in 1965. Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1965 to serve as a senior army officer and assist General Suharto and the CIA in the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno.

Barack Obama, Sr., who met Dunham in 1959 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, had been part of what was described as an airlift of 280 East African students to the United States to attend various colleges — merely “aided” by a grant from the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, according to a September 12, 1960, Reuters report from London. The airlift was a CIA operation to train and indoctrinate future agents of influence in Africa, which was becoming a battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union and China for influence among newly-independent and soon-to-be independent countries on the continent.

The airlift was condemned by the deputy leader of the opposition Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) as favoring certain tribes — the majority Kikuyus and minority Luos — over other tribes to favor the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), whose leader was Tom Mboya, the Kenyan nationalist and labor leader who selected Obama, Sr. for a scholarship at the University of Hawaii. Obama, Sr., who was already married with an infant son and pregnant wife in Kenya, married Dunham on Maui on February 2, 1961 and was also the university’s first African student. Dunham was three month’s pregnant with Barack Obama, Jr. at the time of her marriage to Obama, Sr.


The CIA allegedly recruited Tom M’Boya in a heavily funded “selective liberation” programme to isolate Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta, who the American spy agency labelled as “unsafe.”

KADU deputy leader Masinda Muliro, according to Reuters, said KADU would send a delegation to the United States to investigate Kenyan students who received “gifts” from the Americans and “ensure that further gifts to Kenyan students are administered by people genuinely interested in Kenya’s development.’”

Mboya received a $100,000 grant for the airlift from the Kennedy Foundation after he turned down the same offer from the U.S. State Department, obviously concerned that direct U.S. assistance would look suspicious to pro-Communist Kenyan politicians who suspected Mboya of having CIA ties. The Airlift Africa project was underwritten by the Kennedy Foundation and the African-American Students Foundation. Obama, Sr. was not on the first airlift but a subsequent one. The airlift, organized by Mboya in 1959, included students from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland.

Reuters also reported that Muliro charged that Africans were “disturbed and embittered” by the airlift of the selected students. Muliro “stated that “preferences were shown to two major tribes [Kikuyu and Luo] and many U.S.-bound students had failed preliminary and common entrance examinations, while some of those left behind held first-class certificates.”
Obama, Sr. was a friend of Mboya and a fellow Luo. After Mboya was assassinated in 1969, Obama, Sr. testified at the trial of his alleged assassin. Obama, Sr. claimed he was the target of a hit-and-run assassination attempt after his testimony.


CIA-airlifted to Hawaii, Barack Obama Sr., with leis, stands with Stanley Dunham, President Obama’s grandfather, on his right.

Obama, Sr., who left Hawaii for Harvard in 1962, divorced Dunham in 1964. Obama, Sr. married a fellow Harvard student, Ruth Niedesand, a Jewish-American woman, who moved with him to Kenya and had two sons. They were later divorced. Obama, Sr. worked for the Kenyan Finance and Transport ministries as well as an oil firm. Obama, Sr. died in a 1982 car crash and his funeral was attended by leading Kenyan politicians, including future Foreign Minister Robert Ouko, who was murdered in 1990.

CIA files indicate that Mboya was an important agent-of-influence for the CIA, not only in Kenya but in all of Africa. A formerly Secret CIA Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, dated November 19, 1959, states that Mboya served as a check on extremists at the second All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) in Tunis. The report states that “serious friction developed between Ghana’s Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya who cooperated effectively last December to check extremists at the AAPC’s first meeting in Accra.” The term “cooperated effectively” appears to indicate that Mboya was cooperating with the CIA, which filed the report from field operatives in Accra and Tunis. While “cooperating” with the CIA in Accra and Tunis, Mboya selected the father of the president of the United States to receive a scholarship and be airlifted to the University of Hawaii where he met and married President Obama’s mother.

An earlier CIA Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, secret, and dated April 3, 1958, states that Mboya “still appears to be the most promising of the African leaders.” Another CIA weekly summary, secret and dated December 18, 1958, calls Mboya the Kenyan nationalist an “able and dynamic young chairman” of the People’s Convention party who was viewed as an opponent of “extremists” like Nkrumah, supported by “Sino-Soviet representatives.”

In a formerly Secret CIA report on the All-Africa Peoples Conference in 1961, dated November 1, 1961, Mboya’s conservatism, along with that of Taleb Slim of Tunisia, are contrasted to the leftist policies of Nkrumah and others. Pro-communists who were elected to the AAPC’s steering committee at the March 1961 Cairo conference, attended by Mboya, are identified in the report as Abdoulaye Diallo, AAPC Secretary General, of Senegal; Ahmed Bourmendjel of Algeria; Mario de Andrade of Angola; Ntau Mokhele of Basutoland; Kingue Abel of Cameroun; Antoine Kiwewa of Congo (Leopoldville); Kojo Botsio of Ghana; Ismail Toure of Guinea; T. O. Dosomu Johnson of Liberia; Modibo Diallo of Mali; Mahjoub Ben Seddik of Morocco; Djibo Bakari of Niger; Tunji Otegbeya of Nigeria; Kanyama Chiume of Nyasaland; Ali Abdullahi of Somalia; Tennyson Makiwane of South Africa, and Mohamed Fouad Galal of the United Arab Republic.
The only attendees in Cairo who were given a clean bill of health by the CIA were Mboya, who appears to have been a snitch for the agency, and Joshua Nkomo of Southern Rhodesia, B. Munanka of Tanganyika, Abdel Magid Shaker of Tunisia, and John Kakonge of Uganda.

Nkrumah would eventually be overthrown in a 1966 CIA-backed coup while he was on a state visit to China and North Vietnam. The CIA overthrow of Nkrumah followed by one year the agency’s overthrow of Sukarno, another coup that was connected to President Obama’s family on his mother’s side. There are suspicions that Mboya was assassinated in 1969 by Chinese agents working with anti-Mboya factions in the government of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta in order to eliminate a pro-U.S. leading political leader in Africa. Upon Mboya’s death, every embassy in Nairobi flew its flag at half-mast except for one, the embassy of the People’s Republic of China.


Jomo Kenyatta, first President of Kenya.

Mboya’s influence in the Kenyatta government would continue long after his death and while Obama, Sr. was still alive. In 1975, after the assassination of KANU politician Josiah Kariuki, a socialist who helped start KANU, along with Mboya and Obama, Sr., Kenyatta dismissed three rebellious cabinet ministers who “all had personal ties to either Kariuki or Tom Mboya.” This information is contained in CIA Staff Notes on the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, formerly Top Secret Umbra, Handle via COMINT Channels, dated June 24, 1975. The intelligence in the report, based on its classification, indicate the information was derived from National Security Agency intercepts in Kenya. No one was ever charged in the assassination of Kariuki.

The intecepts of Mboya’s and Kariuki’s associates are an indication that the NSA and CIA also maintain intercepts on Barack Obama, Sr., who, as a non-U.S. person, would have been lawfully subject at the time to intercepts carried out by NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

PART 2: Special Report. The Story of Obama: All in The Company - Part II

In Part I of this WMR special report, we revealed the connections between Barack Obama, Sr. and the CIA-affiliated Airlift Africa project to provide college degrees to and gain influence over a group of 280 eastern and southern African students from soon-to-be independent African nations to counter similar programs established by the Soviet Union and China. Barack Obama Sr. was the first African student to attend the University of Hawaii. Obama Sr. and Obama’s mother Stanley Ann Dunham met in a Russian language class in 1959 and they married in 1961.

The African airlift program was administered by Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya, a fellow Luo tribe mentor and friend of the senior Obama. According to CIA documents described in Part I, Mboya also served the CIA in ensuring that pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese African nationalists were stymied in their attempt to dominate pan-African nationalist political, student, and labor movements.

One of Mboya’s chief opponents was Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who was ousted in a CIA-inspired coup in 1966, one year before to Obama Sr’s son, Barack Obama, Jr. and his mother joined Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian who Obama’s mother met at the University of Hawaii in 1965, when President Obama was four years old.

In 1967, Obama and his mother joined her husband in Jakarta. In 1965, Lolo Soetoro had been called back from Hawaii by General Suharto to serve as an officer in the Indonesian military to help launch a bloody CIA-backed genocide of Indonesian Communists and Indonesian Chinese throughout the expansive country. Suharto consolidated his power in 1966, the same year that Barack Obama, Sr.’s friend, Mboya, had helped to rally pro-U.S. pan-African support for the CIA’s overthrow of Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966.

East-West Center, University of Hawaii, and CIA coup against Sukarno

Ann Dunham met Soetoro at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. The center had long been affiliated with CIA activities in the Asia-Pacific region. In 1965, the year that Dunham met and married Soetoro, the center saw a new chancellor take over. He was Howard P. Jones who served a record seven years, from 1958 to 1965, as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia. Jones was present in Jakarta as Suharto and his CIA-backed military officers planned the 1965 overthrow of Sukarno, who was seen, along with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), as allies of China.

When Jones was chancellor of the East-West Center, he wrote an article for the Washington Post, dated October 10, 1965, in which he defended Suharto’s overthrow of Sukarno. Jones was “invited” by the Post to comment on the Suharto coup, described as a “counter-coup” against the Communists. Jones charged that Suharto was merely responding to an earlier attempted Communist-led coup against Sukarno launched by Lt. Col. Untung, “a relatively unknown battalion commander in the palace guard.”

Jones’s article, which mirrored CIA situation reports from the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, continued by stating that the alleged leftist coup on September 30 ”came within an inch of succeeding through the assassination of six of the top military command. It might well have succeeded had not Defense Minister Nasution and a number of other senior generals also maked for assassination acted fast in a dramatic counter-coup.” Of course, what Jones did not inform the Post’s readers was that the Suharto “counter-coup” had been assisted with the strong help of the CIA.

Sukarno never blamed the Communists for the assassination of the army generals nor did the Indonesian Cabinet, where the second= and third-ranking leaders of the PKI were present. The possibility that the assassination of the generals was a CIA/Suharto “false flag” operation to affix blame on the PKI cannot be ruled out. Two days after Suharto’s coup, a CIA “rent-a-mob” burned down the PKI headquarters in Jakarta. As they marched past the U.S. Embassy, which was also the site of the CIA station, they yelled out, “Long live America!”

Untung later said that when he became aware that Suharto and the CIA were planning a coup on October 5, 1965 – Indonesian Armed Forces Day – forces loyal to him and Sukarno moved first. Jones described this as “typical Communist propaganda.” Suharto moved against Sukarno on October 1. Jones iterated that “there was not an iota of truth . . . in the accusation that the CIA was working against Sukarno.” History has proven otherwise. Jones accused the Communists of taking advantage of Sukarno’s failing health to beat out the other candidates to succeed him. The goal, according to Jones, was to have PKI boss D.N. Aidit succeed Sukarno. Sukarno did not die until 1970, while under house arrest.

A CIA paper, formerly classified Secret and undated, states “Sukarno would like to return to the status quo ante-coup. He has refused to condemn the PKI or the 30th September Movement [of Lt. Col. Untung]; instead, he calls for unity of Indonesia and asks that no vengeance be taken by one group against the other. But, he has not succeeded in forcing the Army to abandon its anti-PKI activities and, on the other hand, he has bowed to their demand by appointing its single candidate General Suharto as head of the Army.” Suharto and Barry Obama Soetoro’s step-father Lolo Soetoro would ignore Sukarno’s call for no vengeance, as hundreds of thousands of Indonesians would soon discover.

The mass murder by Suharto of Indonesian Chinese is seen in the CIA paper’s description of the Baperki Party: “the leftist Baperki Party, with its major strength in rural areas, is largely Chinese-Indonesian in membership.” A CIA Intelligence Memorandum, dated October 6, 1966 and formerly classified Secret, shows the extent of the CIA’s monitoring of the anti-Sukarno coup from various CIA agents assigned as liaisons to Suharto’s army units surrounding the Presidential Palace in Bogor and at various diplomatic posts around the country, including the U.S. Consulate in Medan, which was keeping track of leftists in that Sumatran city and, which, in an October 2, 1965, Intelligence Memo, reported to the CIA that the “Soviet consul-general in Medan has a plane standing by that could be used for evacuation of Soviet citizens from Sumatra.” The October 6 memo also warns against allowing Untung from developing a following in Central Java.

A CIA formerly Secret “Weekly Summary Special Report” on Indonesia, dated August 11, 1967, and titled “The New Order in Indonesia,” reports that in 1966, Indonesia re-aligned its economy in order to receive International Monetary Fund (IMF) assistance. The CIA reports its is happy with the new triumvirate ruling Indonesia in 1967: Suharto, Foreign Minister Adam Malik, and the Sultan of Jogjakarta, who served as minister for economics and finance. The report also rejoices in the outlawing of the PKI, but states it “retains a significant following in East and Central Java,” where Ann Dunham Soetoro would largely concentrate her later efforts on behalf of USAID, the World Bank, and the Ford Foundation, all front activities for the CIA to “win the hearts and minds” of the Javanese farmers and artisans.

A CIA Intelligence Memorandum, formerly Secret and dated July 23, 1966, clearly sees the Muslim Nahdatul Ulama party {NU), the largest party in Indonesia and Muslim, as a natural ally of the United States and the Suharto regime. The report states that helped Suharto put down the Communists in the post-coup time frame, especially where the NU was strongest: East Java, where Obama’s mother would concentrate her activities, and North Sumatra and parts of Borneo. An April 29, 1966, formerly Secret CIA Intelligence Memorandum on the PKI states: “Moslem extremists in many instances outdid the army in hunting down and murdering members of the party [PKI] and its front groups.”

Dunham and Barry Soetoro in Jakarta and USAID front activities

Having A Supply Of Healthy Foods That Last Just Makes Sense
Dunham dropped out of the University of Hawaii in 1960 while pregnant with Barack Obama. Barack Obama Sr. left Hawaii in 1962 to study at Harvard. Dunham and Obama divorced in 1964. In the fall of 1961, Dunham enrolled at the University of Washington while caring for her infant son. Dunham was re-enrolled at the University of Hawaii from 1963 to 1966. Lolo Soetoro, who Dunham married in March 1965, departed Hawaii for Indonesia on July 20, 1965, some three months prior to the CIA’s coup against Sukarno. Soetoro, who served Suharto as an Army colonel, was clearly called back from the CIA-connected East-West Center to assist in the coup against Sukarno, one that would eventually cost the lives of some one million Indonesian citizens. It is a history that President Obama would like the press to ignore, which it certainly did during the 2008 primary and general election.

In 1967, after arriving in Indonesia with Obama, Jr., Dunham began teaching English at the American embassy in Jakarta, which also housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia and had significant satellite stations in Surabaya in eastern Java and Medan on Sumatra. Jones left as East-West Center chancellor in 1968.

In fact, Obama’s mother was teaching English for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was a major cover for CIA activities in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia, especially in Laos, South Vietnam, and Thailand. The USAID program was known as Lembaga Pendidikan Pembinaan Manajemen. Obama’s mother, painted as a free spirit and a “sixties child” by President Obama and people who claimed they knew her in Hawaii and Indonesia, had a curriculum vitae in Indonesia that contradicts the perception that Ann Dunham Soetoro was a “hippy.”

Dunham Soetoro’s Russian language training at the University of Hawaii may have been useful to the CIA in Indonesia. An August 2, 1966, formerly Secret memorandum from the National Security Council’s Executive Secretary Bromley Smith states that, in addition to Japan, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, the Suharto coup was welcomed by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies because its created a non-aligned Indonesia that “represents an Asian counterweight to Communist China.” Records indicate that a number of CIA agents posted in Jakarta before and after the 1965 coup were, like Dunham Soetoro, conversant in Russian.

Dunham Soetoro worked for the elitist Ford Foundation, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Bank Rakyat (the majority government-owned People’s Bank of Indonesia), and the CIA-linked USAID while she lived in Indonesia and later, Pakistan.

USAID was involved in a number of CIA covert operations in Southeast Asia. The February 9, 1971, Washington Star reported that USAID officials in Laos were aware that rice supplied to the Laotian Army by USAID was being re-sold to North Vietnamese army divisions in the country. The report stated that the U.S. tolerated the USAID rice sales to the North Vietnamese since the Laotian Army units that sold the rice found themselves protected from Communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese attack. USAID and the CIA also used the supply of rice to force Laotian Meo tribesmen to support the United States in the war against the Communists. USAID funds programmed for civilians injured in the war in Laos and public health care were actually diverted for military purposes.

In 1971, the USAID-funded Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale was accused of being a CIA front. USAID-funded projects through the Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities (MUCIA) — comprising the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and Michigan State — were accused of being CIA front projects, including those for “agricultural education” in Indonesia, as well as other “projects” in Afghanistan, Mali, Nepal, Nigeria, Thailand, and South Vietnam. The charge was made in 1971, the same year that Ann Dunham was working for USAID in the country.

In a July 10, 1971, New York Times report, USAID and the CIA were accused of “losing” $1.7 billion appropriated for the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program in South Vietnam. CORDS was part of the CIA’s Operation Phoenix program, which involved CIA assassination and torture of South Vietnamese village elders and Buddhist clerics. USAID money was also directed to the CIA’s proprietary airline in Southeast Asia, Air America. In Thailand, USAID funds for the Accelerated Rural Development Program in Thailand were actually masking a CIA anti-Communist counter-insurgency operation. USAID funds programmed for public works projects in East Pakistan in 1971 were used for East Pakistan’s military fortifications on its border with India, in the months before the outbreak of war with India, in contravention of U.S. law that prohibited USAID money for military purposes.

In 1972, USAID administrator Dr. John Hannah admitted to Metromedia News that USAID was being used as a cover for CIA covert operations in Laos. Hannah only admitted to Laos as a USAID cover for the CIA. However, it was also reported that USAID was being used by the CIA in Indonesia, Philippines, South Vietnam, Thailand, and South Korea. USAID projects in Southeast Asia had to be approved by the Southeast Asian Development Advisory Group (SEADAG), an Asia Society group that was, in fact, answerable to the CIA.

The U.S. Food for Peace program, jointly administered by USAID and the Department of Agriculture, was found in 1972 to be used for military purposes in Cambodia, South Korea, Turkey, South Vietnam, Spain, Taiwan, and Greece. In 1972, USAID funneled aid money only to the southern part of North Yemen, in order to aid North Yemeni forces against the government of South Yemen, then ruled by a socialist government opposed to U.S. hegemony in the region.

One of the entities affiliated with the USAID work in Indonesia was the Asia Foundation, a 1950s creation formed with the help of the CIA to oppose the expansion of communism in Asia. The East-West Center guest house in Hawaii was funded by the Asia Foundation. The guest house is also where Barack Obama Sr. first stayed after his airlift from Kenya to Hawaii, arranged by the one of the CIA’s major agents of influence in Africa, Mboya.

Dunham would also travel to Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, and Thailand working on micro-financing projects. In 1965, Barack Obama Sr. returned to Kenya from Harvard, with another American wife. The senior Obama linked up with his old friend and the CIA’s “golden boy” Mboya and other fellow Luo politicians. The CIA station chief in Nairobi from 1964 to 1967 was Philip Cherry. In 1975, Cherry was the CIA station chief in Dacca, Bangladesh. Cherry was linked by the then-U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, Eugene Booster, to the 1975 assassination of Bangladesh’s first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and members of his family.

The hit on “Sheikh Mujib” and his family was reportedly ordered by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Bangladesh was also on the micro- and macro-financing travel itinerary of CIA-linked Ann Dunham.

CIA banking and Hawaii

Meanwhile, Dunham Soetoro’s mother, Madelyn Dunham, who raised young Obama when he returned to Hawaii in 1971 while his mother stayed in Indonesia, was the first female vice president at the Bank of Hawaii in Honolulu. Various CIA front entities used the bank. Madelyn Dunham handled escrow accounts used to make CIA payments to U.S.-supported Asian dictators like Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu, and President Suharto in Indonesia. In effect, the bank was engaged in money laundering for the CIA to covertly prop up its favored leaders in the Asia-Pacific region.

One of the CIA’s major money laundering fronts in Honolulu was the firm of Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong (BBRDW). After the CIA allowed the firm to collapse in 1983 amid charges that BBRDW was merely a Ponzi scheme, Senator Daniel Inouye of the US Senate Intelligence Committee said the CIA’s role in the firm “wasn’t significant.” It would later be revealed that Inouye, who was one of the late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens’s best friends in the Senate, was lying. In fact, BBRDW was involved heavily in funding covert CIA programs throughout Asia, including economic espionage against Japan, providing arms for Afghan mujaheddin guerrillas in their war against the Soviets and covertly supplying weapons to Taiwan. One of BBRDW’s principals was John C. “Jack” Kindschi, who, before he retired in 1981, was the CIA station chief in Honolulu. BBRDW’s chairman Ron Rewald had a counterfeit college degree certificate provided for the wall of his office by the CIA’s forgery experts and his name was inserted in university records as an alumnus.

A false history for BBRDW was concocted by the CIA claiming the firm had operated in Hawaii since it was a territory. President Obama is currently plagued by allegations that he has fake college and university transcripts, a phony social security number issued in Connecticut, and other padded resume items. Did Hawaii’s fake BBRDW documents portend today’s questions about Obama’s past?
BBRDW conducted its business in the heart of Honolulu’s business district, where the Bank of Hawaii was located and where Obama grandmother Madelyn Dunham ran the escrow accounts. The bank would handle much of BBRDW’s covert financial transactions.

Obama/Soetoro and the “years of living dangerously” in Jakarta

It is clear that Dunham Soetoro and her Indonesian husband, President Obama’s step-father, were closely involved in the CIA’s operations to steer Indonesia away from the Sino-Soviet orbit during the “years of living dangerously” after the overthrow of Sukarno. WMR has discovered that some of the CIA’s top case officers were assigned to various official and non-official cover assignments in Indonesia during this time frame, including under the cover of USAID, the Peace Corps, and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA).

One of the closest CIA contacts for Suharto was former CIA Jakarta embassy officer Kent B. Crane. Crane was so close to Suharto after “retiring” from the CIA, he was reportedly one of the only “private” businessmen given an Indonesian diplomatic passport by Suharto’s government. Crane’s company, the Crane Group, was involved in supplying small arms to the military forces of the United States, Indonesia, and other nations. A foreign policy adviser to Vice President Spiro Agnew, Crane was later nominated as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia by President Ronald Reagan but the nomination was dead-on-arrival because of Crane’s dubious links to Suharto. The ambassadorship would instead go to John Holdridge, a close colleague of Kissinger. Holdridge was succeeded in Jakarta by Paul Wolfowitz.

Suharto’s cronies, who included Mochtar and James Riady of the Lippo Group, would later stand accused of funneling over $1 million of illegal foreign contributions to Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.
President Obama has twice postponed official state visits to Indonesia, perhaps fearful of the attention such a trip would bring to the CIA connections of his mother and Indonesian step-father.

In the 1970s and 80s, Dunham was active in micro-loan projects for the Ford Foundation, the CIA-linked East-West Center, and USAID in Indonesia. One of the individuals assigned to the U.S. embassy and helped barricade the compound during a violent anti-U.S. student demonstration during the 1965 Suharto coup against Sukarno was Dr. Gordon Donald, Jr. Assigned to the embassy’s Economic Section, Donald was responsible for USAID micro-financing for Indonesian farmers, the same project that Dunham Soetoro would work on for USAID in the 1970s, after her USAID job of teaching English in Indonesia. In a 1968 book, “Who’s Who in the CIA,” published in West Berlin, Donald is identified as a CIA officer who was also assigned to Lahore, Pakistan, where Dunham would eventually live for five years in the Hilton International Hotel while working on microfinancing for the Asian Development Bank.

Another “Who’s Who in the CIA” Jakarta alumnus is Robert F. Grealy, who later became the director for international relations for the Asia-Pacific for J P Morgan Chase and a director for the American-Indonesian Chamber of Commerce. J P Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon is being mentioned as a potential replacement for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose father, Peter Geithner, was the Ford Foundation’s Asia grant-selector who funneled the money to Ann Dunham’s Indonesian projects.

CIA Black Projects and Hawaii

While in Pakistan, Dunham’s son Barack visited her in 1980 and 1981. Obama visited Karachi, Lahore, and Hyderabad, India during his south Asia visits. It was during the time period that the CIA was beefing up its anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan from Pakistan.

A January 31, 1958, heavily-redacted formerly Secret NOFORN [no foreign dissemination] memorandum for CIA Director Allen Dulles from the Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA for Research and Reports [name redacted] reports on a fact-finding mission to the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East from November 17 through December 21, 1957.

The CIA Office of Research and Reports (ORR) chief reports a meeting with the staff of retired Army General Jesmond Balmer, a senior CIA official in Hawaii, about requests by the Commander-in-Chief Pacific (CINCPAC) for “a number of detailed, time-consuming research studies.” The ORR chief then reports about a CIA “survey of students at the University of Hawaii who have both Chinese language and research ability.” The ORR chief also reports that at a South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) Counter Subversion Seminar at Baguio, Philippines held from November 26-29, 1957, the Economic Subcommittee discussed an “economic development fund” to combat “Sino-Soviet Bloc subversive activities in the area and a consideration of possible counter-measures which might be employed.”

The Thailand and Philippines delegations were pushing hard for U.S. funding for an economic development fund, which may have provided the impetus for later USAID projects in the region, including those with which Peter Geithner and Obama’s mother were intimately involved.

Although CIA geo-political covert operations at the University of Hawaii are well-documented, the agency’s darker side of research and MK-UKTRA type operations has not generally been associated with the University of Hawaii.

A series of formerly Confidential CIA memoranda, dated May 15, 1972, points to the involvement of both the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the CIA, and the University of Hawaii in the CIA’s behavioral science program. The memos are signed by then-Deputy Director of the CIA Bronson Tweedy, the chief of the Intelligence Community’s Program Review Group (PRG) [name redacted], and CIA Director Richard Helms. The subject of the memos is “ARPA Supported Research Relating to Intelligence Product,” The memo from the PRG chief discusses a conference held on May 11, 1972, attended by Lt. Col. Austin Kibler, ARPA’s Director of Behavioral Research. Kibler was the chief for ARPA research into behavior modification and remote viewing. Others mentioned in the PRG chief’s memo include CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence Edward Proctor, the CIA Deputy Director for Science and Technology Carl Duckett, and Director of the Office of National Estimates John Huizenga.

In 1973, after CIA Director James Schlesinger ordered a review of all CIA programs, the CIA developed a set of documents on various CIA programs collectively called the “Family Jewels.” Most of these documents were released in 2007 but it was also revealed that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s director of MKULTRA, the agency’s behavior modification, brainwashing, and drug testing component, had been ordered by Helms, before he resigned as CIA director, to be destroyed. Duckett, in one memo from Ben Evans of the CIA to CIA Director William Colby, dated May 8, 1973, conveys that he “thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program,” meaning Gottlieb’s drug testing program under MKULKTRA.

Senior Gerald Ford administration officials, including Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ensured that after the production of the “Family Jewels” documents, no CIA revelations were made about CIA psychological behavior-altering programs, including MKULTRA and Project ARTICHOKE.

The May 15, 1972, set of memos appears to be related to the CIA’s initial research, code named SCANATE, in 1972 into psychic warfare, including the use of psychics for purposes of remote viewing espionage and mind control. The memo discussed Kibler from ARPA and “his contractor,” which was later discovered to be Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California.

In a memo from CIA Director Helms to, among others, Duckett, Huizenga, Proctor, and the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which later inherited reote viewing from the CIA under the code name GRILL FLAME, Helms insists that ARPA had been supporting research into behavioral science and its potential for intelligence production ”for a number of years” at “M.I.T., Yale, the University of Michigan, U.C.L.A., and University of Hawaii and other institutions as well as in corporate research facilities.”

The role of the University of Hawaii in CIA psych-war operations continues to this day. The chief of research for DIA’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC) Behavioral Sciences Program, Dr. Susan Brandon, who was reportedly involved in a covert program run by the American Psychological Association (APA), Rand Corporation, and the CIA to employ “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including sleep and sensory deprivation, intense pain, and extreme isolation on prisoners held at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and other “black prisons,” received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Hawaii. Brandon also served as assistant director of Social, Behavioral, and Educational Sciences for the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the George W. Bush White House.

The CIA’s close connections to the University of Hawaii continued to the late 1970s, when the former President of the University of Hawaii from 1969 to 1974, Harlan Cleveland, was a special invited speaker at CIA headquarters on May 10, 1977. Cleveland served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs from 1961 to 1965 and Lyndon Johnson’s ambassador to NATO from 1965 to 1969 before taking up his position at the University of Hawaii.

A CIA Director of Training memo dated May 21, 1971, reports on the active recruitment of a U.S. Marine officer who was entering graduate school at the University of Hawaii.

The Family of Obama and the CIA

There are volumes of written material on the CIA backgrounds of George H. W. Bush and CIA-related activities by his father and children, including former President George W. Bush. Barack Obama, on the other hand, cleverly masked his own CIA connections as well as those of his mother, father, step-father, and grandmother (there is very little known about Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, who was supposedly in the furniture business in Hawaii after serving in Europe during World War II). Presidents and vice presidents do not require security background checks, unlike other members of the federal government, to hold office. That job is left up to the press. In 2008, the press failed miserably in its duty to vet the man who would win the White House. With the ties of Obama’s parents to the University of Hawaii and its links to MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE, a nagging question remains: Is Barack Obama a real-life “Manchurian Candidate?”

PART 3: August 19, 2010 — SPECIAL REPORT. The Story of Obama: All in the Company — Add one more Obama family member to the CIA payroll. Part III

WMR previously reported on the CIA links of President Obama’s mother, father, step-father, grandmother to the CIA. Not much is known about Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, who Obama mistakenly referred to as “his father” in two speeches, one recently to the Disabled American Veterans.

What is officially known about Stanley Armour Dunham is that he served with the 9th Air Force in Britain and France prior to and after the D-Day invasion. After the war, Dunham and his wife, Madelyn and his daughter Stanley Ann — Obama’s mother — moved to Berkeley, California; El Dorado, Kansas; Seattle; and Honolulu. Armour Dunham is said to have worked for a series of furniture stores.

Obama maintains that his mother and father first met in a Russian-language class at the University of Hawaii in 1959. However, a photograph has emerged of Stanley Armour welcoming Barack Obama, Sr., complete with traditional Hawaiian welcoming leis, from Kenya. Obama, Sr. was the only Kenyan student airlifted to Hawaii as part of the CIA-inspired Airlift Africa project that saw Obama and 279 other students from British eastern and southern African colonies brought to the United States for college degrees prior to their homelands gaining independence from Britain. The students were selected by Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya who would later conduct surveillance for the CIA at pan-African nationalist meetings. Mboya was particularly focused on two African leaders who were seen as too close to the Sino-Soviet bloc, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sekout Toure of Guinea.

Stanley Armour Dunham with Barack Obama, Sr. at welcoming ceremony to Hawaii. The presence of two US Navy personnel indicates the plane may have landed at Hickam Air Force Base, an indication of the U.S. government’s and CIA’s role in the Airlift Africa project.

The photograph of Armour Dunham with Barack Obama, Sr., indicates that the “furniture salesman” in Hawaii was, in fact, working with a CIA-funded project to rapidly educate aspiring politicians to serve in post-independence African governments to counter Soviet- and Chinese-backed political leaders in the region.

There is a strong reason to believe that Armour Dunham worked in the 1950s for the CIA in the Middle East. An FBI file on Armour Dunham existed but the bureau claimed it destroyed the file on May 1, 1997. Considering the sour relations between the FBI and CIA during the Cold War, it is likely that Armour Dunham was being monitored by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in the same manner as a number of other CIA officials and agents were being surveilled. Similarly, the pre-1968 passport records of Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, were destroyed by the State Department.
There is a photographic clue that the Dunhams may have been assigned by the CIA to Beirut, Lebanon in the early 1950s. A photograph of Obama’s mother and grandparents has emerged that shows Stanley Ann Dunham wearing what may be a school uniform with the insignia of “NdJ,” which stands for the College Notre-Dame de Jamhour, a private Jesuit Catholic French language school in Beirut, Lebanon. Graduates of the school include three former presidents of Lebanon, Amine Gemayel, Bashir Gemayel, and Charles Helou, all of whom maintained close relations with Washington.

Did Obama’s mother [left] go to a private school in Lebanon in the early 1950s while her father [middle] worked for the CIA in Beirut?

There is also the curious nature of President Obama’s Social Security Number, issued in Connecticut, a state where there is no other evidence of his ever being a resident. Adding to the mystery is a New York City address for a “male” named Stanley Ann Dunham, 235 E. 40th St Apt 8F, New York NY 10016-1747. The address is a few blocks away from the address of the Ford Foundation. Ann Dunham did work briefly in New York for the Ford Foundation.

On August 9, 2010, WMR reported, “In a December 19, 1971, article in the Boston Globe by Dan Pinck, [a historian and former OSS officer] titled ‘Is everyone in the CIA?’ it is alleged that identifying US Agency for International Development (USAID) officers as CIA agents was a ‘reasonably accurate accounting of certain leading operatives and associates of the CIA.’ President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro worked for USAID in rural Java in Indonesia. Pinck’s article was a review of a 1968 book, ‘Who’s Who in the CIA’ published in Berlin.”

WMR has obtained a rare copy of “Who’s Who in the CIA,” from England. The book, published in West Berlin in 1968, lists some 3,000 CIA agents and agents-of-influence around the world.
The book also contains a reference to one CIA operative whose area of primary place of operation was Mercer Island, Washington. He was retired Air Force General Don Zabriskie Zimmermann, who was the Chief Engineer for the Boeing Company in Seattle. Before retiring from the Air Force, Zimmermann was the Air Force Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Development in Foreign Countries. Ann Stanley Dunham reportedly graduated from Mercer Island High School in 1960 and met Obama later that year in a Russian language class after her parents moved to Hawaii. Stanley Ann’s mother, Madelyn Dunham, worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas during World War II.

The book lists the number of CIA agents in countries during the 1950s and 60s where Obama’s father, mother, step-father Lolo Soetori, and allegedly, his grandmother and grandfather worked:

Indonesia
Jakarta   64
Surabaya 12
Medan 8
Hollandia 1

Kenya
Nairobi 19
Mombassa 2
Lebanon
Beirut 61     (including one agent also assigned to Jakarta, Lahore, and Karachi and another assigned to Lahore)

Hawaii
Honolulu   6 (one agent also assigned to Canton Island and another was fluent in French, Stanley Ann Dunham spoke French, Urdu, Bahasa Indonesian, and she studied Javanese at the University of Hawaii, in addition to Russian).

COMMENT: We commend Wayne Madsen for his vast exposé of Barack Obama’s true background. Madsen will appear on the Alex Jones Show tomorrow THURSDAY AUGUST 19 at 1 PM EST / 12 NOON CST, to reveal even more bombshell details of his deep research into this matter. Tune in for this vital info and visit the Wayne Madsen Report for further details.

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China targets U.S. troops with arms buildup

2010-08-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

By Bill Gertz The Washington Times

China targets U.S. troops with arms buildup

Pentagon cites 'anti-access' missiles in report

**FILE** Chinese army trucks carrying new long-range and cruise missiles are shown off during China's 60th anniversary celebration in October 2009. (Associated Press)

China is aggressively building up military forces capable of striking U.S. forces in the western Pacific and elsewhere as part of what the Pentagon calls an array of high-tech "anti-access" missiles, submarines and warplanes in its latest annual report.

The report to Congress on China's military power, released Monday, also warned that China's military is extending its global military reach beyond a weapons buildup to wage regional war with Taiwan and the United States. The report also questioned U.S.-China military exchanges, noting that Beijing is using the visits and meetings for political influence operations and intelligence gathering.

"China is fielding an array of conventionally armed ballistic missiles, ground- and air-launched land-attack cruise missiles, special operations forces, and cyberwarfare capabilities to hold targets at risk throughout the region," the report said.

• Click here to read the report (PDF).

Release of the assessment comes amid reports that China has surpassed Japan as the world's second largest economy in terms of gross domestic product, highlighting Beijing's expanding global power.

Japan's nominal GDP, which isn't adjusted for price and seasonal variations, was worth almost $1.29 trillion in the April-to-June quarter compared with almost $1.34 trillion for China, the Associated Press reported. The figures are converted into dollars based on an average exchange rate for the quarter.

The 74-page Pentagon report highlighted numerous military developments by China's 125-million-troop army, including the first mention of a new multiple-warhead, long-range road-mobile missile, and details on China's plan to field aircraft carriers.

Full story

Source: Washington Times

The Anatomy of the State

2010-08-17T07:47:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

This essay is from Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays by Murray N. Rothbard (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2000 [1974]), pp. 55–88.

What the State Is Not

The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the "private sector" and often winning in this competition of resources. With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, "we are the government." The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that "we owe it to ourselves"; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have "committed suicide," since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.

We must, therefore, emphasize that "we" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people.[1] But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority.[2] No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that "we are all part of one another," must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.

If, then, the State is not "us," if it is not "the human family" getting together to decide mutual problems, if it is not a lodge meeting or country club, what is it? Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.[3] Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects. One would think that simple observation of all States through history and over the globe would be proof enough of this assertion; but the miasma of myth has lain so long over State activity that elaboration is necessary.

What the State Is

Man is born naked into the world, and needing to use his mind to learn how to take the resources given him by nature, and to transform them (for example, by investment in "capital") into shapes and forms and places where the resources can be used for the satisfaction of his wants and the advancement of his standard of living. The only way by which man can do this is by the use of his mind and energy to transform resources ("production") and to exchange these products for products created by others. Man has found that, through the process of voluntary, mutual exchange, the productivity and hence the living standards of all participants in exchange may increase enormously. The only "natural" course for man to survive and to attain wealth, therefore, is by using his mind and energy to engage in the production-and-exchange process. He does this, first, by finding natural resources, and then by transforming them (by "mixing his labor" with them, as Locke puts it), to make them his individual property, and then by exchanging this property for the similarly obtained property of others. The social path dictated by the requirements of man's nature, therefore, is the path of "property rights" and the "free market" of gift or exchange of such rights. Through this path, men have learned how to avoid the "jungle" methods of fighting over scarce resources so that A can only acquire them at the expense of B and, instead, to multiply those resources enormously in peaceful and harmonious production and exchange.

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the "economic means." The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another's goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed "the political means" to wealth. It should be clear that the peaceful use of reason and energy in production is the "natural" path for man: the means for his survival and prosperity on this earth. It should be equally clear that the coercive, exploitative means is contrary to natural law; it is parasitic, for instead of adding to production, it subtracts from it. The "political means" siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also lowers the producer's incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence. In the long run, the robber destroys his own subsistence by dwindling or eliminating the source of his own supply. But not only that; even in the short run, the predator is acting contrary to his own true nature as a man.

We are now in a position to answer more fully the question: what is the State? The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the "organization of the political means"; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.[4] For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively "peaceful" the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.[5] Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a "social contract"; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation. The classic paradigm was a conquering tribe pausing in its time-honored method of looting and murdering a conquered tribe, to realize that the time-span of plunder would be longer and more secure, and the situation more pleasant, if the conquered tribe were allowed to live and produce, with the conquerors settling among them as rulers exacting a steady annual tribute.[6] One method of the birth of a State may be illustrated as follows: in the hills of southern "Ruritania," a bandit group manages to obtain physical control over the territory, and finally the bandit chieftain proclaims himself "King of the sovereign and independent government of South Ruritania"; and, if he and his men have the force to maintain this rule for a while, lo and behold! a new State has joined the "family of nations," and the former bandit leaders have been transformed into the lawful nobility of the realm.

How the State Preserves Itself

Once a State has been established, the problem of the ruling group or "caste" is how to maintain their rule.[7] While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long-run problem is ideological. For in order to continue in office, any government (not simply a "democratic" government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature. But support in the sense of acceptance of some sort it must be; else the minority of State rulers would eventually be outweighed by the active resistance of the majority of the public. Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State – the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility) – must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.[8] [9]

Of course, one method of securing support is through the creation of vested economic interests. Therefore, the King alone cannot rule; he must have a sizable group of followers who enjoy the prerequisites of rule, for example, the members of the State apparatus, such as the full-time bureaucracy or the established nobility.[10] But this still secures only a minority of eager supporters, and even the essential purchasing of support by subsidies and other grants of privilege still does not obtain the consent of the majority. For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the "intellectuals." For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the "opinion-molders" in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.

It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State. Put simply, we may state that the intellectual's livelihood in the free market is never too secure; for the intellectual must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is precisely characteristic of the masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual matters. The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure and permanent berth in the State apparatus; and thus a secure income and the panoply of prestige. For the intellectuals will be handsomely rewarded for the important function they perform for the State rulers, of which group they now become a part.[11]

The alliance between the State and the intellectuals was symbolized in the eager desire of professors at the University of Berlin in the nineteenth century to form the "intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern." In the present day, let us note the revealing comment of an eminent Marxist scholar concerning Professor Wittfogel's critical study of ancient Oriental despotism: "The civilization which Professor Wittfogel is so bitterly attacking was one which could make poets and scholars into officials."[12] Of innumerable examples, we may cite the recent development of the "science" of strategy, in the service of the government's main violence-wielding arm, the military.[13] A venerable institution, furthermore, is the official or "court" historian, dedicated to purveying the rulers' views of their own and their predecessors' actions.[14]

Many and varied have been the arguments by which the State and its intellectuals have induced their subjects to support their rule. Basically, the strands of argument may be summed up as follows: (a) the State rulers are great and wise men (they "rule by divine right," they are the "aristocracy" of men, they are the "scientific experts"), much greater and wiser than the good but rather simple subjects, and (b) rule by the extent government is inevitable, absolutely necessary, and far better, than the indescribable evils that would ensue upon its downfall. The union of Church and State was one of the oldest and most successful of these ideological devices. The ruler was either anointed by God or, in the case of the absolute rule of many Oriental despotisms, was himself God; hence, any resistance to his rule would be blasphemy. The States' priestcraft performed the basic intellectual function of obtaining popular support and even worship for the rulers.[15]

Another successful device was to instill fear of any alternative systems of rule or nonrule. The present rulers, it was maintained, supply to the citizens an essential service for which they should be most grateful: protection against sporadic criminals and marauders. For the State, to preserve its own monopoly of predation, did indeed see to it that private and unsystematic crime was kept to a minimum; the State has always been jealous of its own preserve. Especially has the State been successful in recent centuries in instilling fear of other State rulers. Since the land area of the globe has been parceled out among particular States, one of the basic doctrines of the State was to identify itself with the territory it governed. Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State's advantage. If "Ruritania" was being attacked by "Walldavia," the first task of the State and its intellectuals was to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack was really upon them and not simply upon the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of "nationalism" has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles.

Many and subtle are the ideological weapons that the State has wielded through the centuries. One excellent weapon has been tradition. The longer that the rule of a State has been able to preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon; for then, the X Dynasty or the Y State has the seeming weight of centuries of tradition behind it.[16] Worship of one's ancestors, then, becomes a none too subtle means of worship of one's ancient rulers. The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism; there is no better way to stifle that criticism than to attack any isolated voice, any raiser of new doubts, as a profane violator of the wisdom of his ancestors. Another potent ideological force is to deprecate the individual and exalt the collectivity of society. For since any given rule implies majority acceptance, any ideological danger to that rule can only start from one or a few independently-thinking individuals. The new idea, much less the new critical idea, must needs begin as a small minority opinion; therefore, the State must nip the view in the bud by ridiculing any view that defies the opinions of the mass. "Listen only to your brothers" or "adjust to society" thus become ideological weapons for crushing individual dissent.[17] By such measures, the masses will never learn of the nonexistence of their Emperor's clothes.[18] It is also important for the State to make its rule seem inevitable; even if its reign is disliked, it will then be met with passive resignation, as witness the familiar coupling of "death and taxes." One method is to induce historiographical determinism, as opposed to individual freedom of will. If the X Dynasty rules us, this is because the Inexorable Laws of History (or the Divine Will, or the Absolute, or the Material Productive Forces) have so decreed and nothing any puny individuals may do can change this inevitable decree. It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any "conspiracy theory of history"; for a search for "conspiracies" means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane "social forces," or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible ("We Are All Murderers," proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on "conspiracy theories" means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the "general welfare" reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions. A "conspiracy theory" can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State's ideological propaganda.

Another tried and true method for bending subjects to the State's will is inducing guilt. Any increase in private well-being can be attacked as "unconscionable greed," "materialism," or "excessive affluence," profit-making can be attacked as "exploitation" and "usury," mutually beneficial exchanges denounced as "selfishness," and somehow with the conclusion always being drawn that more resources should be siphoned from the private to the "public sector." The induced guilt makes the public more ready to do just that. For while individual persons tend to indulge in "selfish greed," the failure of the State's rulers to engage in exchanges is supposed to signify their devotion to higher and nobler causes – parasitic predation being apparently morally and esthetically lofty as compared to peaceful and productive work.

In the present more secular age, the divine right of the State has been supplemented by the invocation of a new god, Science. State rule is now proclaimed as being ultrascientific, as constituting planning by experts. But while "reason" is invoked more than in previous centuries, this is not the true reason of the individual and his exercise of free will; it is still collectivist and determinist, still implying holistic aggregates and coercive manipulation of passive subjects by their rulers.

The increasing use of scientific jargon has permitted the State's intellectuals to weave obscurantist apologia for State rule that would have only met with derision by the populace of a simpler age. A robber who justified his theft by saying that he really helped his victims, by his spending giving a boost to retail trade, would find few converts; but when this theory is clothed in Keynesian equations and impressive references to the "multiplier effect," it unfortunately carries more conviction. And so the assault on common sense proceeds, each age performing the task in its own ways.

Thus, ideological support being vital to the State, it must unceasingly try to impress the public with its "legitimacy," to distinguish its activities from those of mere brigands. The unremitting determination of its assaults on common sense is no accident, for as Mencken vividly maintained: The average man, whatever his errors otherwise, at least sees clearly that government is something lying outside him and outside the generality of his fellow men – that it is a separate, independent, and hostile power, only partly under his control, and capable of doing him great harm. Is it a fact of no significance that robbing the government is everywhere regarded as a crime of less magnitude than robbing an individual, or even a corporation? . . . What lies behind all this, I believe, is a deep sense of the fundamental antagonism between the government and the people it governs. It is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members. . . . When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before. The notion that they have earned that money is never entertained; to most sensible men it would seem ludicrous.[19]

How the State Transcends Its Limits

As Bertrand de Jouvenel has sagely pointed out, through the centuries men have formed concepts designed to check and limit the exercise of State rule; and, one after another, the State, using its intellectual allies, has been able to transform these concepts into intellectual rubber stamps of legitimacy and virtue to attach to its decrees and actions. Originally, in Western Europe, the concept of divine sovereignty held that the kings may rule only according to divine law; the kings turned the concept into a rubber stamp of divine approval for any of the kings' actions. The concept of parliamentary democracy began as a popular check upon absolute monarchical rule; it ended with parliament being the essential part of the State and its every act totally sovereign. As de Jouvenel concludes:

Many writers on theories of sovereignty have worked out one . . . of these restrictive devices. But in the end every single such theory has, sooner or later, lost its original purpose, and come to act merely as a springboard to Power, by providing it with the powerful aid of an invisible sovereign with whom it could in time successfully identify itself.[20]

Similarly with more specific doctrines: the "natural rights" of the individual enshrined in John Locke and the Bill of Rights, became a statist "right to a job"; utilitarianism turned from arguments for liberty to arguments against resisting the State's invasions of liberty, etc.

Certainly the most ambitious attempt to impose limits on the State has been the Bill of Rights and other restrictive parts of the American Constitution, in which written limits on government became the fundamental law to be interpreted by a judiciary supposedly independent of the other branches of government. All Americans are familiar with the process by which the construction of limits in the Constitution has been inexorably broadened over the last century. But few have been as keen as Professor Charles Black to see that the State has, in the process, largely transformed judicial review itself from a limiting device to yet another instrument for furnishing ideological legitimacy to the government's actions. For if a judicial decree of "unconstitutional" is a mighty check to government power, an implicit or explicit verdict of "constitutional" is a mighty weapon for fostering public acceptance of ever-greater government power.

Professor Black begins his analysis by pointing out the crucial necessity of "legitimacy" for any government to endure, this legitimation signifying basic majority acceptance of the government and its actions.[21] Acceptance of legitimacy becomes a particular problem in a country such as the United States, where "substantive limitations are built into the theory on which the government rests." What is needed, adds Black, is a means by which the government can assure the public that its increasing powers are, indeed, "constitutional." And this, he concludes, has been the major historic function of judicial review.

Let Black illustrate the problem:

The supreme risk [to the government] is that of disaffection and a feeling of outrage widely disseminated throughout the population, and loss of moral authority by the government as such, however long it may be propped up by force or inertia or the lack of an appealing and immediately available alternative. Almost everybody living under a government of limited powers, must sooner or later be subjected to some governmental action which as a matter of private opinion he regards as outside the power of government or positively forbidden to government. A man is drafted, though he finds nothing in the Constitution about being drafted. . . . A farmer is told how much wheat he can raise; he believes, and he discovers that some respectable lawyers believe with him, that the government has no more right to tell him how much wheat he can grow than it has to tell his daughter whom she can marry. A man goes to the federal penitentiary for saying what he wants to, and he paces his cell reciting . . . "Congress shall make no laws abridging the freedom of speech.". . . A businessman is told what he can ask, and must ask, for buttermilk.

The danger is real enough that each of these people (and who is not of their number?) will confront the concept of governmental limitation with the reality (as he sees it) of the flagrant overstepping of actual limits, and draw the obvious conclusion as to the status of his government with respect to legitimacy .[22]

This danger is averted by the State's propounding the doctrine that one agency must have the ultimate decision on constitutionality and that this agency, in the last analysis, must be part of the federal government.[23] For while the seeming independence of the federal judiciary has played a vital part in making its actions virtual Holy Writ for the bulk of the people, it is also and ever true that the judiciary is part and parcel of the government apparatus and appointed by the executive and legislative branches. Black admits that this means that the State has set itself up as a judge in its own cause, thus violating a basic juridical principle for aiming at just decisions. He brusquely denies the possibility of any alternative.[24]

Black adds:

The problem, then, is to devise such governmental means of deciding as will [hopefully] reduce to a tolerable minimum the intensity of the objection that government is judge in its own cause. Having done this, you can only hope that this objection, though theoretically still tenable [italics mine], will practically lose enough of its force that the legitimating work of the deciding institution can win acceptance.[25]

In the last analysis, Black finds the achievement of justice and legitimacy from the State's perpetual judging of its own cause as "something of a miracle."[26]

Applying his thesis to the famous conflict between the Supreme Court and the New Deal, Professor Black keenly chides his fellow pro-New Deal colleagues for their shortsightedness in denouncing judicial obstruction:

[t]he standard version of the story of the New Deal and the Court, though accurate in its way, displaces the emphasis. . . . It concentrates on the difficulties; it almost forgets how the whole thing turned out. The upshot of the matter was [and this is what I like to emphasize] that after some twenty-four months of balking . . . the Supreme Court, without a single change in the law of its composition, or, indeed, in its actual manning, placed the affirmative stamp of legitimacy on the New Deal, and on the whole new conception of government in America.[27]

In this way, the Supreme Court was able to put the quietus on the large body of Americans who had had strong constitutional objections to the New Deal:

Of course, not everyone was satisfied. The Bonnie Prince Charlie of constitutionally commanded laissez-faire still stirs the hearts of a few zealots in the Highlands of choleric unreality. But there is no longer any significant or dangerous public doubt as to the constitutional power of Congress to deal as it does with the national economy. . . .

We had no means, other than the Supreme Court, for imparting legitimacy to the New Deal. [28]

As Black recognizes, one major political theorist who recognized – and largely in advance – the glaring loophole in a constitutional limit on government of placing the ultimate interpreting power in the Supreme Court was John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was not content with the "miracle," but instead proceeded to a profound analysis of the constitutional problem. In his Disquisition, Calhoun demonstrated the inherent tendency of the State to break through the limits of such a constitution:

A written constitution certainly has many and considerable advantages, but it is a great mistake to suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the power of the government, without investing those for whose protection they are inserted with the means of enforcing their observance [my italics] will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers. Being the party in possession of the government, they will, from the same constitution of man which makes government necessary to protect society, be in favor of the powers granted by the constitution and opposed to the restrictions intended to limit them. . . . The minor or weaker party, on the contrary, would take the opposite direction and regard them [the restrictions] as essential to their protection against the dominant party. . . . But where there are no means by which they could compel the major party to observe the restrictions, the only resort left them would be a strict construction of the constitution. . . . To this the major party would oppose a liberal construction. . . . It would be construction against construction – the one to contract and the other to enlarge the powers of the government to the utmost. But of what possible avail could the strict construction of the minor party be, against the liberal construction of the major, when the one would have all the power of the government to carry its construction into effect and the other be deprived of all means of enforcing its construction? In a contest so unequal, the result would not be doubtful. The party in favor of the restrictions would be overpowered. . . . The end of the contest would be the subversion of the constitution . . . the restrictions would ultimately be annulled and the government be converted into one of unlimited powers.[29]

One of the few political scientists who appreciated Calhoun's analysis of the Constitution was Professor J. Allen Smith. Smith noted that the Constitution was designed with checks and balances to limit any one governmental power and yet had then developed a Supreme Court with the monopoly of ultimate interpreting power. If the Federal Government was created to check invasions of individual liberty by the separate states, who was to check the Federal power? Smith maintained that implicit in the check-and-balance idea of the Constitution was the concomitant view that no one branch of government may be conceded the ultimate power of interpretation: "It was assumed by the people that the new government could not be permitted to determine the limits of its own authority, since this would make it, and not the Constitution, supreme."[30]

The solution advanced by Calhoun (and seconded, in this century, by such writers as Smith) was, of course, the famous doctrine of the "concurrent majority." If any substantial minority interest in the country, specifically a state government, believed that the Federal Government was exceeding its powers and encroaching on that minority, the minority would have the right to veto this exercise of power as unconstitutional. Applied to state governments, this theory implied the right of "nullification" of a Federal law or ruling within a state's jurisdiction.

In theory, the ensuing constitutional system would assure that the Federal Government check any state invasion of individual rights, while the states would check excessive Federal power over the individual. And yet, while limitations would undoubtedly be more effective than at present, there are many difficulties and problems in the Calhoun solution. If, indeed, a subordinate interest should rightfully have a veto over matters concerning it, then why stop with the states? Why not place veto power in counties, cities, wards? Furthermore, interests are not only sectional, they are also occupational, social, etc. What of bakers or taxi drivers or any other occupation? Should they not be permitted a veto power over their own lives? This brings us to the important point that the nullification theory confines its checks to agencies of government itself. Let us not forget that federal and state governments, and their respective branches, are still states, are still guided by their own state interests rather than by the interests of the private citizens. What is to prevent the Calhoun system from working in reverse, with states tyrannizing over their citizens and only vetoing the federal government when it tries to intervene to stop that state tyranny? Or for states to acquiesce in federal tyranny? What is to prevent federal and state governments from forming mutually profitable alliances for the joint exploitation of the citizenry? And even if the private occupational groupings were to be given some form of "functional" representation in government, what is to prevent them from using the State to gain subsidies and other special privileges for themselves or from imposing compulsory cartels on their own members?

In short, Calhoun does not push his pathbreaking theory on concurrence far enough: he does not push it down to the individual himself. If the individual, after all, is the one whose rights are to be protected, then a consistent theory of concurrence would imply veto power by every individual; that is, some form of "unanimity principle." When Calhoun wrote that it should be "impossible to put or to keep it [the government] in action without the concurrent consent of all," he was, perhaps unwittingly, implying just such a conclusion.[31] But such speculation begins to take us away from our subject, for down this path lie political systems which could hardly be called "States" at all.[32] For one thing, just as the right of nullification for a state logically implies its right of secession, so a right of individual nullification would imply the right of any individual to "secede" from the State under which he lives.[33]

Thus, the State has invariably shown a striking talent for the expansion of its powers beyond any limits that might be imposed upon it. Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the State is profoundly and inherently anticapitalist. In a sense, our position is the reverse of the Marxist dictum that the State is the "executive committee" of the ruling class in the present day, supposedly the capitalists. Instead, the State – the organization of the political means – constitutes, and is the source of, the "ruling class" (rather, ruling caste), and is in permanent opposition to genuinely private capital. We may, therefore, say with de Jouvenel:

Only those who know nothing of any time but their own, who are completely in the dark as to the manner of Power's behaving through thousands of years, would regard these proceedings [nationalization, the income tax, etc.] as the fruit of a particular set of doctrines. They are in fact the normal manifestations of Power, and differ not at all in their nature from Henry VIII's confiscation of the monasteries. The same principle is at work; the hunger for authority, the thirst for resources; and in all of these operations the same characteristics are present, including the rapid elevation of the dividers of the spoils. Whether it is Socialist or whether it is not, Power must always be at war with the capitalist authorities and despoil the capitalists of their accumulated wealth; in doing so it obeys the law of its nature.[34]

What the State Fears

What the State fears above all, of course, is any fundamental threat to its own power and its own existence. The death of a State can come about in two major ways: (a) through conquest by another State, or (b) through revolutionary overthrow by its own subjects – in short, by war or revolution. War and revolution, as the two basic threats, invariably arouse in the State rulers their maximum efforts and maximum propaganda among the people. As stated above, any way must always be used to mobilize the people to come to the State's defense in the belief that they are defending themselves. The fallacy of the idea becomes evident when conscription is wielded against those who refuse to "defend" themselves and are, therefore, forced into joining the State's military band: needless to add, no "defense" is permitted them against this act of "their own" State.

In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogans of "defense" and "emergency," it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace. War thus provides many benefits to a State, and indeed every modern war has brought to the warring peoples a permanent legacy of increased State burdens upon society. War, moreover, provides to a State tempting opportunities for conquest of land areas over which it may exercise its monopoly of force. Randolph Bourne was certainly correct when he wrote that "war is the health of the State," but to any particular State a war may spell either health or grave injury.[35]

We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely – those against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State's openly assigned priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d'être.[36]

How States Relate to One Another

Since the territorial area of the earth is divided among different States, inter-State relations must occupy much of a State's time and energy. The natural tendency of a State is to expand its power, and externally such expansion takes place by conquest of a territorial area. Unless a territory is stateless or uninhabited, any such expansion involves an inherent conflict of interest between one set of State rulers and another. Only one set of rulers can obtain a monopoly of coercion over any given territorial area at any one time: complete power over a territory by State X can only be obtained by the expulsion of State Y. War, while risky, will be an ever-present tendency of States, punctuated by periods of peace and by shifting alliances and coalitions between States.

We have seen that the "internal" or "domestic" attempt to limit the State, in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, reached its most notable form in constitutionalism. Its "external," or "foreign affairs," counterpart was the development of "international law," especially such forms as the "laws of war" and "neutrals' rights."[37] Parts of international law were originally purely private, growing out of the need of merchants and traders everywhere to protect their property and adjudicate disputes. Examples are admiralty law and the law merchant. But even the governmental rules emerged voluntarily and were not imposed by any international super-State. The object of the "laws of war" was to limit inter-State destruction to the State apparatus itself, thereby preserving the innocent "civilian" public from the slaughter and devastation of war. The object of the development of neutrals' rights was to preserve private civilian international commerce, even with "enemy" countries, from seizure by one of the warring parties. The overriding aim, then, was to limit the extent of any war, and, particularly to limit its destructive impact on the private citizens of the neutral and even the warring countries.

The jurist F.J.P. Veale charmingly describes such "civilized warfare" as it briefly flourished in fifteenth-century Italy:

the rich burghers and merchants of medieval Italy were too busy making money and enjoying life to undertake the hardships and dangers of soldiering themselves. So they adopted the practice of hiring mercenaries to do their fighting for them, and, being thrifty, businesslike folk, they dismissed their mercenaries immediately after their services could be dispensed with. Wars were, therefore, fought by armies hired for each campaign. . . . For the first time, soldiering became a reasonable and comparatively harmless profession. The generals of that period maneuvered against each other, often with consummate skill, but when one had won the advantage, his opponent generally either retreated or surrendered. It was a recognized rule that a town could only be sacked if it offered resistance: immunity could always be purchased by paying a ransom. . . . As one natural consequence, no town ever resisted, it being obvious that a government too weak to defend its citizens had forfeited their allegiance. Civilians had little to fear from the dangers of war which were the concern only of professional soldiers.[38]

The well-nigh absolute separation of the private civilian from the State's wars in eighteenth-century Europe is highlighted by Nef:

Even postal communications were not successfully restricted for long in wartime. Letters circulated without censorship, with a freedom that astonishes the twentieth-century mind. . . . The subjects of two warring nations talked to each other if they met, and when they could not meet, corresponded, not as enemies but as friends. The modern notion hardly existed that . . . subjects of any enemy country are partly accountable for the belligerent acts of their rulers. Nor had the warring rulers any firm disposition to stop communications with subjects of the enemy. The old inquisitorial practices of espionage in connection with religious worship and belief were disappearing, and no comparable inquisition in connection with political or economic communications was even contemplated. Passports were originally created to provide safe conduct in time of war. During most of the eighteenth century it seldom occurred to Europeans to abandon their travels in a foreign country which their own was fighting.[39]

And trade being increasingly recognized as beneficial to both parties; eighteenth-century warfare also counterbalances a considerable amount of "trading with the enemy." [40]

How far States have transcended rules of civilized warfare in this century needs no elaboration here. In the modern era of total war, combined with the technology of total destruction, the very idea of keeping war limited to the State apparati seems even more quaint and obsolete than the original Constitution of the United States.

When States are not at war, agreements are often necessary to keep frictions at a minimum. One doctrine that has gained curiously wide acceptance is the alleged "sanctity of treaties." This concept is treated as the counterpart of the "sanctity of contract." But a treaty and a genuine contract have nothing in common. A contract transfers, in a precise manner, titles to private property. Since a government does not, in any proper sense, "own" its territorial area, any agreements that it concludes do not confer titles to property. If, for example, Mr. Jones sells or gives his land to Mr. Smith, Jones's heir cannot legitimately descend upon Smith's heir and claim the land as rightfully his. The property title has already been transferred. Old Jones's contract is automatically binding upon young Jones, because the former had already transferred the property; young Jones, therefore, has no property claim. Young Jones can only claim that which he has inherited from old Jones, and old Jones can only bequeath property which he still owns. But if, at a certain date, the government of, say, Ruritania is coerced or even bribed by the government of Waldavia into giving up some of its territory, it is absurd to claim that the governments or inhabitants of the two countries are forever barred from a claim to reunification of Ruritania on the grounds of the sanctity of a treaty. Neither the people nor the land of northwest Ruritania are owned by either of the two governments. As a corollary, one government can certainly not bind, by the dead hand of the past, a later government through treaty. A revolutionary government which overthrew the king of Ruritania could, similarly, hardly be called to account for the king's actions or debts, for a government is not, as is a child, a true "heir" to its predecessor's property.

History as a Race Between State Power and Social Power

Just as the two basic and mutually exclusive interrelations between men are peaceful cooperation or coercive exploitation, production or predation, so the history of mankind, particularly its economic history, may be considered as a contest between these two principles. On the one hand, there is creative productivity, peaceful exchange and cooperation; on the other, coercive dictation and predation over those social relations. Albert Jay Nock happily termed these contesting forces: "social power" and "State power."[41] Social power is man's power over nature, his cooperative transformation of nature's resources and insight into nature's laws, for the benefit of all participating individuals. Social power is the power over nature, the living standards achieved by men in mutual exchange. State power, as we have seen, is the coercive and parasitic seizure of this production – a draining of the fruits of society for the benefit of nonproductive (actually antiproductive) rulers. While social power is over nature, State power is power over man. Through history, man's productive and creative forces have, time and again, carved out new ways of transforming nature for man's benefit. These have been the times when social power has spurted ahead of State power, and when the degree of State encroachment over society has considerably lessened. But always, after a greater or smaller time lag, the State has moved into these new areas, to cripple and confiscate social power once more.[42] If the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were, in many countries of the West, times of accelerating social power, and a corollary increase in freedom, peace, and material welfare, the twentieth century has been primarily an age in which State power has been catching up – with a consequent reversion to slavery, war, and destruction.[43]

In this century, the human race faces, once again, the virulent reign of the State – of the State now armed with the fruits of man's creative powers, confiscated and perverted to its own aims. The last few centuries were times when men tried to place constitutional and other limits on the State, only to find that such limits, as with all other attempts, have failed. Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever. Perhaps new paths of inquiry must be explored, if the successful, final solution of the State question is ever to be attained.[44]

Notes

[1] We cannot, in this chapter, develop the many problems and fallacies of "democracy." Suffice it to say here that an individual's true agent or "representative" is always subject to that individual's orders, can be dismissed at any time and cannot act contrary to the interests or wishes of his principal. Clearly, the "representative" in a democracy can never fulfill such agency functions, the only ones consonant with a libertarian society.

[2] Social democrats often retort that democracy – majority choice of rulers – logically implies that the majority must leave certain freedoms to the minority, for the minority might one day become the majority. Apart from other flaws, this argument obviously does not hold where the minority cannot become the majority, for example, when the minority is of a different racial or ethnic group from the majority.

[3] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Bros., 1942), p. 198.

The friction or antagonism between the private and the public sphere was intensified from the first by the fact that . . . the State has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the service of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.

Also see Murray N. Rothbard, "The Fallacy of the 'Public Sector,"' New Individualist Review (Summer, 1961): pp. 3ff.

[4] Franz Oppenheimer, The State (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926) pp. 24–27:

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one's own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. . . . I propose in the following discussion to call one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the "economic means" for the satisfaction of need while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the "political means". . . . The State is an organization of the political means. No State, therefore, can come into being until the economic means has created a definite number of objects for the satisfaction of needs, which objects may be taken away or appropriated by warlike robbery.

[5] Albert Jay Nock wrote vividly that

the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime. . . . It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.

Nock, On Doing the Right Thing, and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Bros., 1929), p. 143; quoted in Jack Schwartzman, "Albert Jay Nock – A Superfluous Man," Faith and Freedom (December, 1953): p. 11.

[6] Oppenheimer, The State, p. 15:

What, then, is the State as a sociological concept? The State, completely in its genesis . . . is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group of men on a defeated group, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors.

And de Jouvenel has written: "the State is in essence the result of the successes achieved by a band of brigands who superimpose themselves on small, distinct societies." Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power (New York: Viking Press, 1949), pp. 100–01.

[7] On the crucial distinction between "caste," a group with privileges or burdens coercively granted or imposed by the State and the Marxian concept of "class" in society, see Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 112ff.

[8] Such acceptance does not, of course, imply that the State rule has become "voluntary"; for even if the majority support be active and eager, this support is not unanimous by every individual.

[9] That every government, no matter how "dictatorial" over individuals, must secure such support has been demonstrated by such acute political theorists as Étienne de La Boétie, David Hume, and Ludwig von Mises. Thus, cf. David Hume, "Of the First Principles of Government," in Essays, Literary, Moral and Political (London: Ward, Locke, and Taylor, n.d.), p. 23; Étienne de La Boétie, Anti-Dictator (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), pp. 8–9; Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1998), pp. 188ff. For more on the contribution to the analysis of the State by La Boétie, see Oscar Jaszi and John D. Lewis, Against the Tyrant (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 55–57.

[10] La Boétie, Anti-Dictator, pp. 43–44.

Whenever a ruler makes himself dictator . . . all those who are corrupted by burning ambition or extraordinary avarice, these gather around him and support him in order to have a share in the booty and to constitute themselves petty chiefs under the big tyrant.

[11] This by no means implies that all intellectuals ally themselves with the State. On aspects of the alliance of intellectuals and the State, cf. Bertrand de Jouvenel, "The Attitude of the Intellectuals to the Market Society," The Owl (January, 1951): pp. 19–27; idem, "The Treatment of Capitalism by Continental Intellectuals," in F.A. Hayek, ed., Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 93–123; reprinted in George B. de Huszar, The Intellectuals (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960), pp. 385–99; and Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1975), pp. 143–55.

[12] Joseph Needham, "Review of Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism," Science and Society (1958): p. 65. Needham also writes that "the successive [Chinese] emperors were served in all ages by a great company of profoundly humane and disinterested scholars," p. 61. Wittfogel notes the Confucian doctrine that the glory of the ruling class rested on its gentleman scholar-bureaucrat officials, destined to be professional rulers dictating to the mass of the populace. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 320–21 and passim. For an attitude contrasting to Needham's, cf. John Lukacs, "Intellectual Class or Intellectual Profession?" in de Huszar, The Intellectuals, pp. 521–22.

[13] Jeanne Ribs, "The War Plotters," Liberation (August, 1961): p. 13. "[s]trategists insist that their occupation deserves the 'dignity of the academic counterpart of the military profession.'" Also see Marcus Raskin, "The Megadeath Intellectuals," New York Review of Books (November 14, 1963): pp. 6–7.

[14] Thus the historian Conyers Read, in his presidential address, advocated the suppression of historical fact in the service of "democratic" and national values. Read proclaimed that "total war, whether it is hot or cold, enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to play his part. The historian is not freer from this obligation than the physicist." Read, "The Social Responsibilities of the Historian," American Historical Review (1951): p. 283ff. For a critique of Read and other aspects of court history, see Howard K. Beale, "The Professional Historian: His Theory and Practice," The Pacific Historical Review (August, 1953): pp. 227–55. Also cf. Herbert Butterfield, "Official History: Its Pitfalls and Criteria," History and Human Relations (New York: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 182–224; and Harry Elmer Barnes, The Court Historians Versus Revisionism (n.d.), pp. 2ff.

[15] Cf. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, pp. 87–100. On the contrasting roles of religion vis-à-vis the State in ancient China and Japan, see Norman Jacobs, The Origin of Modern Capitalism and Eastern Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1958), pp. 161–94.

[16] De Jouvenel, On Power, p. 22:

The essential reason for obedience is that it has become a habit of the species. . . . Power is for us a fact of nature. From the earliest days of recorded history it has always presided over human destinies . . . the authorities which ruled [societies] in former times did not disappear without bequeathing to their successors their privilege nor without leaving in men's minds imprints which are cumulative in their effect. The succession of governments which, in the course of centuries, rule the same society may be looked on as one underlying government which takes on continuous accretions.

[17] On such uses of the religion of China, see Norman Jacobs, passim.

[18] H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 145:

All [government] can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

[19] Ibid., pp. 146–47.

[20] De Jouvenel, On Power, pp. 27ff.

[21] Charles L. Black. Jr., The People and the Court (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 35ff.

[22] Ibid., pp. 42–43.

[23] Ibid., p. 52:

The prime and most necessary function of the [Supreme] Court has been that of validation, not that of invalidation. What a government of limited powers needs, at the beginning and forever, is some means of satisfying the people that it has taken all steps humanly possible to stay within its powers. This is the condition of its legitimacy, and its legitimacy, in the long run, is the condition of its life. And the Court, through its history, has acted as the legitimation of the government.

[24] To Black, this "solution," while paradoxical, is blithely self-evident:

the final power of the State . . . must stop where the law stops it. And who shall set the limit, and who shall enforce the stopping, against the mightiest power? Why, the State itself, of course, through its judges and its laws. Who controls the temperate? Who teaches the wise? (Ibid., pp. 32–33)

And:

Where the questions concern governmental power in a sovereign nation, it is not possible to select an umpire who is outside government. Every national government, so long as it is a government, must have the final say on its own power. (Ibid., pp. 48–49)

[25] Ibid., p. 49.

[26] This ascription of the miraculous to government is reminiscent of James Burnham's justification of government by mysticism and irrationality:

In ancient times, before the illusions of science had corrupted traditional wisdom, the founders of cities were known to be gods or demigods. . . . Neither the source nor the justification of government can be put in wholly rational terms . . . why should I accept the hereditary or democratic or any other principle of legitimacy? Why should a principle justify the rule of that man over me? . . . I accept the principle, well . . . because I do, because that is the way it is and has been.

James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition (Chicago: Regnery, 1959), pp. 3–8. But what if one does not accept the principle? What will "the way" be then?

[27] Black, The People and the Court, p. 64.

[28] Ibid., p. 65.

[29] John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), pp. 25–27. Also cf. Murray N. Rothbard, "Conservatism and Freedom: A Libertarian Comment," Modern Age (Spring, 1961): p. 219.

[30] J. Allen Smith, The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government (New York: Henry Holt, 1930), p. 88. Smith added:

it was obvious that where a provision of the Constitution was designed to limit the powers of a governmental organ, it could be effectively nullified if its interpretation and enforcement are left to the authorities as it designed to restrain. Clearly, common sense required that no organ of the government should be able to determine its own powers.

Clearly, common sense and "miracles" dictate very different views of government (p. 87).
[31] Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government, pp. 20–21.

[32] In recent years, the unanimity principle has experienced a highly diluted revival, particularly in the writings of Professor James Buchanan. Injecting unanimity into the present situation, however, and applying it only to changes in the status quo and not to existing laws, can only result in another transformation of a limiting concept into a rubber stamp for the State. If the unanimity principle is to be applied only to changes in laws and edicts, the nature of the initial "point of origin" then makes all the difference. Cf. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), passim.

[33] Cf. Herbert Spencer, "The Right to Ignore the State," in Social Statics (New York: D. Appleton, 1890), pp. 229–39.

[34] De Jouvenel, On Power, p. 171.

[35] We have seen that essential to the State is support by the intellectuals, and this includes support against their two acute threats. Thus, on the role of American intellectuals in America's entry into World War I, see Randolph Bourne, "The War and the Intellectuals," in The History of a Literary Radical and Other Papers (New York: S.A. Russell, 1956), pp. 205–22. As Bourne states, a common device of intellectuals in winning support for State actions, is to channel any discussion within the limits of basic State policy and to discourage any fundamental or total critique of this basic framework.

[36] As Mencken puts it in his inimitable fashion:

This gang ("the exploiters constituting the government") is well nigh immune to punishment. Its worst extortions, even when they are baldly for private profit, carry no certain penalties under our laws. Since the first days of the Republic, less than a few dozen of its members have been impeached, and only a few obscure understrappers have ever been put into prison. The number of men sitting at Atlanta and Leavenworth for revolting against the extortions of the government is always ten times as great as the number of government officials condemned for oppressing the taxpayers to their own gain. (Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy, pp. 147–48)

For a vivid and entertaining description of the lack of protection for the individual against incursion of his liberty by his "protectors," see H.L. Mencken, "The Nature of Liberty," in Prejudices: A Selection (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), pp. 138–43.
[37] This is to be distinguished from modern international law, with its stress on maximizing the extent of war through such concepts as "collective security."

[38] F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Appleton, Wis.: C.C. Nelson, 1953), p. 63. Similarly, Professor Nef writes of the War of Don Carlos waged in Italy between France, Spain, and Sardinia against Austria, in the eighteenth century:

at the siege of Milan by the allies and several weeks later at Parma . . . the rival armies met in a fierce battle outside the town. In neither place were the sympathies of the inhabitants seriously moved by one side or the other. Their only fear as that the troops of either army should get within the gates and pillage. The fear proved groundless. At Parma the citizens ran to the town walls to watch the battle in the open country beyond. (John U. Nef, War and Human Progress [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950], p. 158. Also cf. Hoffman Nickerson, Can We Limit War? [New York: Frederick A. Stoke, 1934])

[39] Nef, War and Human Progress, p. 162.

[40] Ibid., p. 161. On advocacy of trading with the enemy by leaders of the American Revolution, see Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York: Viking Press, 1946), vol. 1, pp. 210–11.

[41] On the concepts of State power and social power, see Albert J. Nock, Our Enemy the State (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1946). Also see Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York: Harpers, 1943), and Frank Chodorov, The Rise and Fall of Society (New York: Devin-Adair, 1959).

[42] Amidst the flux of expansion or contraction, the State always makes sure that it seizes and retains certain crucial "command posts" of the economy and society. Among these command posts are a monopoly of violence, monopoly of the ultimate judicial power, the channels of communication and transportation (post office, roads, rivers, air routes), irrigated water in Oriental despotisms, and education – to mold the opinions of its future citizens. In the modern economy, money is the critical command post.

[43] This parasitic process of "catching up" has been almost openly proclaimed by Karl Marx, who conceded that socialism must be established through seizure of capital previously accumulated under capitalism.

[44] Certainly, one indispensable ingredient of such a solution must be the sundering of the alliance of intellectual and State, through the creation of centers of intellectual inquiry and education, which will be independent of State power. Christopher Dawson notes that the great intellectual movements of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were achieved by working outside of, and sometimes against, the entrenched universities. These academia of the new ideas were established by independent patrons. See Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961).
Reprinted from Mises.org.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was the author of Man, Economy, and State, Conceived in Liberty, What Has Government Done to Our Money, For a New Liberty, The Case Against the Fed, and many other books and articles. He was also the editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

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Source: Lew Rockwell

The Origins of Nullification

2010-08-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

Earthhope Action Network

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo Lew Rockwell

The defenders of centralized governmental power (a.k.a. tyranny) despise the Jeffersonian idea that the citizens of the states have a right to nullify what they believe to be unconstitutional federal laws. They hate it so much that they falsify history whenever they are forced to discuss it when it becomes news, as it has in recent months. Their favorite falsehood is the myth that nullification was the idea of U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun, the principal architect of South Carolina’s nullification of the federal "Tariff of Abominations" in 1832. This tariff, sponsored by Henry Clay, raised the average tariff rate to 45% with tariffs on some items exceeding 100%. Since almost all of the items covered by the tariff were manufactured in the Northern states, only Northern manufactures would benefit from them by charging higher prices once international competition was prohibited by the tariff on imports. South Carolinians, Virginians, and other Southerners correctly believed that the tariff was a break with the constitutional compact that outlawed discriminatory taxation. They were correct to interpret the Tariff of Abominations as an attempt by the neo-Puritanical New England "Yankees" to use the power of the central state to plunder them (and all consumers for that matter). That was a trend they sought to nip in the bud with their nullification law.

The defenders of this particular form of legal plunder usually heap the worst calumny imaginable on Calhoun, a former vice president of the United States and one of America’s most brilliant political theorists (read his Disquisition on Government), by associating him with slavery and nothing but slavery. The not-so-veiled implication is that nullification was some kind of white supremacist plot. Associating nullification with Calhoun and only Calhoun, and then relentlessly smearing him, is nothing more than a dishonest diversionary tactic on the part of the defenders of consolidated or centralized governmental power, the purpose of which is censorship of all discussion of the nullification of unconstitutional federal laws.

The idea of nullification was actually popular among the American colonists, long before Calhoun’s time, but is most closely associated with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves of 1798. Jefferson authored the Kentucky Resolve at the request of the Kentucky legislature as a way of nullifying the hated Sedition Act that was being enforced by President John Adams. This law essentially outlawed free political speech in America.

As soon as the Federalist Party gained power it outlawed free speech, in clear violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The spark that ignited this totalitarian impulse was an editorial by the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora newspaper. Bache was a follower of Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party, and was outspokenly opposed to the Federalist program of protectionist tariffs, central banking, corporate welfare, high taxes, and a large public debt. In an editorial he called John Adams "old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams." Federalists responded in kind. Noah Webster called the Democratic-Republicans "the refuse, the sweepings of the most depraved part of mankind . . ."

Abigail Adams is said to have gone berserk over Bache’s characterization of her husband, and she and the Federalist newspapers began calling for Bache’s punishment. The result was the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act was enacted on July 14, 1798, and made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government or its officials." Of course, the government itself would solely decide what constituted improper and illegal speech, as was the case in the Soviet Union and all other totalitarian states during the twentieth century. The law was written so as to expire on the day that John Adams left office so that it would only be used against Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party.

Many of Jefferson’s followers resented the ostentatious displays of king-like grandeur that the Adams’s were known for. For example, according to the Wikipedia entry on the Alien and Sedition Acts, in July of 1798 President John Adams and his wife Abigail were making their way back home to Braintree, Massachusetts in elaborate carriages as part of a parade, with canons firing to celebrate their entry into every city and town along the way. A man named Luther Baldwin was sitting in a pub in Newark, New Jersey where, upon hearing the canon fire, said "There goes the president and they are firing at his arse." He also said that he didn’t care if "they fired through his arse." For this he was sent to prison and assessed fines and court costs.

In November of 1798, a man named David Brown put up a liberty pole in Dedham, Massachusetts with the words, "No Stamp Act, No Sedition Act, No Alien Bills, No Land Tax [referring to Hamilton’s national property tax], Downfall to the Tyrants of America; Peace and Retirement to the President; Long Live the Vice President [Jefferson]." For this he was fined and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

Several dozen newspaper writers who were supporters of Jefferson were arrested under the Sedition Act for criticizing the government. In addition, Federalist party mobs often attacked newspapers and newspaper editors who were sympathetic to the Democratic-Republican Party or who criticized John Adams. Federalist Roger Griswold, a congressman from Connecticut, attacked fellow Congressman Mathew Lyon of Vermont by beating him with a hickory cane on the floor of the House of Representatives after Lyon criticized the Federalists as being "in opposition to the interests and opinions of nine-tenths of their constituents."

After Lyons wrote a newspaper article suggesting that Adams had "an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice," the Adams administration convened a grand jury and indicted Lyons. After walking the Revolutionary War veteran through the town of Vergennes, Vermont in shackles, he was imprisoned. He ran for reelection from prison and won handily.

All of this is what motivated Thomas Jefferson to author the Kentucky Resolve of 1798, accompanied by Madison’s Virginia Resolve, which was almost identical (See William J. Watkins, Jr., Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and Their Legacy). Section One of Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolve reads as follows:

Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution For the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self Government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force . . . . That the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common Judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well as of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

Madison’s Virginia Resolve, in turn, declared that "in case of deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact [i.e., the Constitution], the States who are parties thereto, have the right and are duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them."

With Jefferson’s election as president, the Sedition Act ended at midnight on March 3, 1801, the moment Jefferson became president. Upon assuming the office, Jefferson ended all ongoing prosecutions and pardoned those who had been convicted under the Sedition Act.

South Carolina’s nullification of the Tariff of Abominations in 1832 was not even the second example of the principle of nullification being implemented. Far from it. After President Jefferson enacted a trade embargo in response to British theft of American ships and the kidnapping of American sailors, New England legislatures nullified the embargo act by quoting Jefferson himself. For example, on February 5, 1809, the Massachusetts legislature declared that the embargo was "not legally binding on the citizens of the state" and denounced the law as "unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional" (See James J. Kilpatrick, The Sovereign States). All of the New England states (where the shipping industry was concentrated), plus Delaware, officially nullified the embargo act.

When the War of 1812 broke out (also the work of Henry Clay as much as anyone), the New England Federalists essentially seceded from the union by not participating in the war. Their political vehicle was nullification. As stated by the Connecticut state assembly:

[I]t must not be forgotten that the state of Connecticut is a FREE SOVEREIGN and INDEPENDENT State; that the United States are a confederated and not a consolidated Republic. The Governor of this State is under a high and solemn obligation, ‘to maintain the lawful rights and privileges thereof, as a sovereign, free and independent State,’ as he is ‘to support the Constitution of the United States,’ and the obligation to support the latter imposes an additional obligation to support the former. The building cannot stand, if the pillars upon which it rests, are impaired or destroyed.

This statement by the Connecticut state assembly echoed Jefferson’s states’ rights interpretation of the Constitution, as beautifully stated in the Kentucky Resolve. This places modern-day "conservatives" and "neo-conservatives" in a conundrum: They would like to nullify "Obamacare" and much of the other socialistic legislation that is being passed, and the movement in favor of state nullification as the vehicle for doing so is gaining more and more momentum by the day (see the Web site of the Tenth Amendment Center). But to embrace nullification is to associate oneself with the Jeffersonian compact theory of the state that was overthrown at gunpoint by the Lincoln administration, after several generations of nationalist/consolidationist/Yankee politicians failed to do so through the normal, non-violent political process. As Jefferson clearly stated in the Kentucky Resolve, the states are free, independent, and sovereign. They therefore have a right of secession as well as nullification. Jefferson himself wrote frequently in favor of a states’ right of secession. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence was nothing if it was not a declaration of secession from the British Empire.

An easy prediction is that the neocons will in fact advocate nullification as long as the Democrats are in power. But when they reassume power they will revert back to their cornerstone ideology of Lincoln idolatry, centralization, militarization, censorship, spying, torturing, endless warmongering, and denunciation of nullification and all other forms of the American tradition of states’ rights, otherwise known as federalism.

August 7, 2010

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

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Source: Lew Rockwell

The Sunset of the State

2010-08-08T07:44:00.000-07:00