Established Concentration DEATH Camps, etc.

Established Concentration DEATH Camps, etc.

If you have never heard of the things written below, you will think it is written by some far out extremist.  You would certainly wonder if it could be true, or just the imagination of some wild eyed fanatic.. I first heard of these matters a few years back, and they have been confirmed to me by different sources. These ARE FACTS, people, believe me.

===== READ THE PREPARATIONS THE ENEMY IS MAKING ===== Christians Face Persecution/Martyrdom Under Martial Law...And Church Seizure! Date:9/19/01 11:43:45 AM Pacific Standard Time From:MyTWaryor4JC - Pam Schuffert I received a report from Pensacola, Florida about one Pastor and his visitation by several FEMA officials. They told him, "Pastor, we've decided that UNDER MARTIAL LAW we are going to SEIZE YOUR CHURCH and use it for our base of operations here."  Does FEMA or the government have the power to do so??? ABSOLUTELY.. under martial law, as our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms are swept away and we are forced to come under pre-existing PRESIDENTIAL EXECUTIVE ORDERS that deny us our previous liberties under the Constitution. UNDER MARTIAL LAW, FEMA can seize :your home, family members and separate them, your vehicles, your land and possessions including food supplies, your Church, and more. The Presidential Executive orders will turn America into a police state and military dictatorship, denying Christians and other groups the previous RIGHT TO FREELY ASSEMBLE. Which means that you and your fellow Christians can be SUBJECT TO ARREST for failure to disperse when you meet for Church gatherings on Sundays or any other days, gather for prayer meetings, etc. There are excellent website that publish and  discuss the PRESIDENTIAL EXECUTIVE ORDERS THAT WE ARE GOING TO COME UNDER AS THE SIGNS OF MARTIAL LAW PROGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT CONTINUES TO EVOKE EMERGENCY POWERS that are increasingly taking away from our freedoms and civil liberties. Church in America, be prepared for the great persecution that is soon to take place on American soil. When Jesus Christ declared, "Ye shall be hated of ALL nations..." speaking of the end times specifically, realize that ALL NATIONS must include the United States of America! ."..And then shall they deliver you up to tribulation and to be put to death...BUT HE THAT ENDURETH TO THE END SHALL BE SAVED." NOT "he that shall be raptured," but rather "he that endureth to the end." (From Matthew 24) Christians who have anxiously been following events in American indicating coming persecution and testing have also been hoping intensely that a Rapture will take them out BEFORE they will be tested and tried for their faith (as other Christians worldwide have been in recent decades.) I remind them that no "quicky Rapture" came to save the millions of Christians who were imprisoned or slain under communist takeover in Russia, China and many other nations. No Rapture came to rescue Sudanese Christians from Moslem persecution and literal crucifixion in many cases. No Rapture saved the many Cuban Christians who died with Jesus Christ on their lips in front of Fidel's communist death squads. They were allowed to be tested as by fire for their faith. And according to the many words of prophecy I have collected from Pastors and prayer groups regarding these coming events (which confirm end time Bible prophecy), I personally believe that the  TRUE Christians in America are going to face the great trial of their faith, which will ultimately result in imprisonment and literal martyrdom for their steadfast faith and confession of Jesus Christ. (I speak of millions of persecuted and martyred Christians in the times to come in America.) Admitted one youth Pastor in California whom I interviewed while distributing my book, PREMONITIONS OF AN AMERICAN HOLOCAUST, "Ma'am, none of what you are sharing with me is a surprise. God showed me in a vision TWICE a few nights ago that MARTIAL LAW WAS COMING, and I saw it all happen. I saw myself arrested and dragged before a modern guillotine, and asked, 'Pastor, are you willing to renounce your faith and work with us, or die?' I remember being very sacred, but I would never renounce my faith in Jesus. I was then beheaded. I woke up, wondering what it all meant. I went back to sleep, and the same vision repeated itself, only this time I was put into a prison to 'rethink' my decision. But I still confessed Jesus as Lord, and was beheaded. I always know, when God repeats a vision, that it will come to pass." Friends, the tools of our persecution are all in place. The hundreds of thousands of modern guillotines manufactured in Japan and China are here, waiting for the hour of martial law and the termination of all deemed "resisters of the NWO." Revelation 20:4 is clear on the persecution/martyrdom if those end time believers in Jesus who refuse to cooperate with the New World Order and it's cashless society "MARK." "And I saw the souls of them beheaded for the witness of Jesus and the Word of God..."  (If all the worthy saints are raptured, who is left to die for their faith and testimony of Jesus Christ??? Certainly not backslidden, apostate "Christians" who have missed the Rapture! Church, wake up!) The concentration camps are all in place to "terminate resisters of the New World Order" as it comes down under martial law. "Oh, all of us in the intelligence community know about the concentration camps in America. We all know that they are to terminate the resisters of the New World Order under martial law..." admitted my personal friend Michael Maholy, 20 years Naval Intel/CIA and previously a dedicated worked for the NWO under Bush Sr.   Michael became a Christian and decided to blow the whistle on the NWO agenda. "The Satanists in the CIA hated the Christians, because they were the one thing that stood in the way of our implementing the New World Order in America. So we came up with the concentration camps you are now investigating. I even helped to draw up some of the blueprints for some of them. Although I greatly regret my role now, nevertheless they stand to this day and will be activated UNDER MARTIAL LAW. We lusted for the hour of martial law when we could finally get our hands on them legally...I tell you, it will be BRUTAL RAPE, TORTURE AND DEATH for them once they are arrested and taken to the concentration camps under martial law..." (Admission of my friend, former CIA assassin and satanist high priestess, now Christian lecturer/author exposing the NWO and Satanism.) The boxcars and shackles are in place across America to haul all resisters away, Nazi style, to the deathcamps of America under martial law. "God has been giving me dreams of Christians being arrested in America and taken to railroad boxcars and hauled away like cattle to be slaughtered in concentration camps," admitted one Montanan Christian who I met at a Derek Prince prophecy conference. "I used to wonder what this meant, but with your explanation of what will happen under martial law, I NOW UNDERSTAND WHAT GOD WAS TRYING TO TELL ME!" I advised her that there were several concentration camps and sightings of boxcars and shackles already in Montana, waiting for that hour. Christians in America, I write these things NOT to instill a spirit of fear, which God never gives us, but rather to illustrate the reality of Bible prophecy regarding end time persecution of all believers  and how it will be manifested in our nation.  Most Pastors have NOT prepared you to face this reality. They have constantly swept God's warnings through visions and prophecies and books such as mine aside, and instead given you an "exit" mentality revolving around the Rapture. While it is absolutely true that Jesus Christ IS coming soon, nowhere in Scriptures do we find ANY verse guaranteeing that We, the Church in North America,  are SO special that WE WILL BE RAPTURED prior to end-time persecution and the trial of our faith! No, the Christians in many other countries can go through end-time persecution and martyrdoms, but NOT US. I have found this false theological doctrine and subsequent "escapist"  presumption rampant across America as I have traveled and lectured, and it has saddened me greatly. Those who believe in this type of teaching will scarcely take the time to prepare their hearts before God to suffer and die for  their testimony of Jesus Christ and their refusal to deny Him before men. And, as Scripture soberly declares, there WILL be a GREAT FALLING AWAY before Christ returns and we are gathered to Him. What frequently causes a falling away BUT PERSECUTION! You are watching with your own eyes the beginning of the END of America as we have known her, and the beginning of the great persecution of the Church in America is about to commence. I suggest you take the time to fall upon your faces before the Living God ad implore Him to give you and your family the grace to endure throughout the coming persecution, and purpose in your heart to confess Jesus Christ as Lord both in word and deed faithfully, even if this means a fiery trial of faith and the tools of persecution I have documented that are prepared against the Christians in America for this coming hour. We must never be moved to deny our faith under fire! It is a matter of your eternal salvation. Sincerely, Pam Schuffert reporting from Hawaii

People, we are being warned from all quarters, and not just from our own thinking.  The boxcars, concentration camps, and guillotines are not figments of someone’s runaway imagination.  Read Mat 24.  I did not mention the next verse in my “The Beginning of Sorrows” article.  It reads: All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake. He tells us of the beginning of sorrows which we must surely be in, and that THEN, when the sorrows have begun, THEN shall they deliver you up etc.. If He is speaking in sequence of events, we could soon be in for it, and it will be "Counterfeit Christianity" that will stand and point the finger at the ones to be rounded up, even as RELIGION Crucified Jahshuwah.   At least two “Pick up” lists have already been written for those who have expressed anything / anywhere, in dissent of the NWO.  One is called "The Red List."  These not only are being "picked up" right now, but have been for sometime.  I have watched much of this "picking up" take place over the last twenty years. Then there is the "Blue List."  These will be the first ones to be picked-up when the mass arrests begin to send a message to the rest of the population.  Great fear shall enter many at that time, and then it is that the rubber meets the road.  It will be fish or cut bait.  It is easy to say we would never deny Jahshuwah now, but entirely different when the situation is staring us in the face, and the Kingdom of Darkness shuts out the Light until we feel forsaken, and presses FEAR upon the mind.  The "Pre-Trib Rapture Doctrine" is for cowards.  For those that cannot face the reality of what lies ahead.  The thing they "feared the most" will come upon them. I think it quite possible that the “woman” is being brought to her travail.  I have said for a very long time now, that we as a people in this nation are too smug, and living too soft.  Something must take place to WAKE US UP, and put us on our faces!!!  It might just be that we are now entering the events that will do just that.  I do not believe that the most grievous persecution that is to come will come upon us now.  I do not want to over alarm you.  At the same time, I want you to be fully aware that this persecution has really already begun.  Not only have “churches” already been shut down by our government as test cases, but murders of those exposing our government and its Satanic Determination.  The latest being William Hooper, a man that did much to wake people up to what is really happening.   If I wrote how wicked our leaders are, how prevalent and deep the worship of Satan is in the NWO, and how determined they are to wipe "Christianity" from off of the earth, people would not believe me. You might read the editorial concerning  "Human Sacrifices", if you have not done so. Jahshuwah gave us a very stern warning concerning this day we are presently in.  Notice that He is NOT talking to the world, but TO HIS FOLLOWERS: And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and CARES OF THIS LIFE, and so that day come upon you UNAWARES.  For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore, and pray ALWAYS, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man. list of us Camps

7 Reasons to Oppose Red Flag Guns Laws

7 Reasons to Oppose Red Flag 

Guns Laws

The Associated Press reports Congress is seriously considering red flag gun laws.

These laws, also called “extreme risk protection orders,” allow courts to issue orders allowing law enforcement to seize firearms from people who’ve committed no crime but are believed to be a danger to themselves or others.

President Trump has signaled his backing of bipartisan Senate legislation sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

“We must make sure that those judged to pose a grave risk to public safety do not have access to firearms and that if they do those firearms can be taken through rapid due process,” Trump said in a White House speech.

Red flag laws have garnered support from several conservative intellectuals, as well, including David French of National Review and Ben Shapiro.

Here are seven reasons red flag laws should be opposed, particularly at the federal level.

1. There’s No Evidence Red Flag Laws Reduce Gun Violence

Most people haven’t heard of red flag laws until recently—if they have at all—but they aren’t new.

Connecticut enacted the nation’s first red flag law in 1999, followed by Indiana (2005). This means social scientists have had decades to analyze the effectiveness of these laws. And what did they find?

“The evidence,” The New York Times recently reported, “for whether extreme risk protection orders work to prevent gun violence is inconclusive, according to a study by the RAND Corporation on the effectiveness of gun safety measures.”

The Washington Post reports that California’s red flag went basically unused for two years after its passage in 2016. Washington, D.C.’s law has gone entirely unused. Other states, such as Florida and Maryland, have gone the other direction, seizing hundreds of firearms from gun-owners. Yet it’s unclear if these actions stopped a shooting.

With additional states passing red flag laws, researchers will soon have much more data to analyze. But before passing expansive federal legislation that infringes on civil liberties, lawmakers should have clear and compelling empirical evidence that red flag laws actually do what they are intended to do.

2. Congress Lacks the Authority

The Founding Fathers clearly enumerated the powers of the federal government in the Constitution. Among the powers granted in Article I, Section 8 are “the power to coin money, to regulate commerce, to declare war, to raise and maintain armed forces, and to establish a Post Office.”

Regulating firearms is not among the powers listed in the Constitution (though this has not always stopped lawmakers from regulating them). In fact, the document expressly forbids the federal government from doing so, stating in the Second Amendment that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

3. We Have Federalism

Unlike the federal government, whose powers, James Madison noted, are “few and defined,” states possess powers that “are numerous and indefinite.”

Indeed, 17 states and the District of Columbia already have red flag laws, and many more states are in the process of adding them. This shows that the people and their representatives are fully capable of passing such laws if they choose. If red flag laws are deemed desirable, this is the appropriate place to pursue such laws, assuming they pass constitutional muster. But do they?

4. Red Flag Laws Violate Due Process

The Constitution mandates that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

Seizing the property of individuals who have been convicted of no crime violates this provision. Gun control advocates claim due process is not violated because people whose firearms are taken can appeal to courts to reclaim their property. However, as economist Raheem Williams has observed, “this backward process would imply that the Second Amendment is a privilege, not a right.”

Depriving individuals of a clearly established, constitutionally-guaranteed right in the absence of criminal charges or trial is an affront to civil liberties.

5. Red Flag Laws Could Lead to More Violence

In 2018, two Maryland police officers shot and killed 61-year-old Gary Willis in his own house after waking him at 5:17 a.m. The officers, who were not harmed during the shooting, had been ordered to remove guns from his home under the state’s red flag law, which had gone into effect one month prior to the shooting.

While red flag laws are designed to reduce violence, it’s possible they could do the opposite by creating confrontations between law enforcement and gun owners like Willis, especially as the enforcement of red flag laws expands.

6. It’s Not Just the “Mentally Ill” and Grave Threats Who Are Flagged

In theory, red flag laws are supposed to target individuals who pose a threat to themselves or others. In practice, they can work quite differently.

In a 14-page analysis, the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island explained that few people understand just how expansive the state’s red flag law is.

“It is worth emphasizing that while a seeming urgent need for [the law] derives from recent egregious and deadly mass shootings, [the law’s] reach goes far beyond any efforts to address such extraordinary incidents,” the authors said. Individuals who find themselves involved in these proceedings often have no clear constitutional right to counsel.

“As written, a person could be subject to an extreme risk protective order (ERPO) without ever having committed, or even having threatened to commit, an act of violence with a firearm.”

Though comprehensive information is thin, and laws differ from state to state, anecdotal evidence suggests Rhode Island’s law is not unique. A University of Central Florida student, for example, was hauled into proceedings and received a year-long RPO (risk protection order) for saying “stupid” things on Reddit following a mass shooting, even though the student had no criminal history and didn’t own a firearm. (The student also was falsely portrayed as a “ticking time bomb” by police, Jacub Sullum reports.) Another man, Reason reports, was slapped with an RPO for criticizing teenage gun control activists online and sharing a picture of an AR-15 rifle he had built.

Individuals who find themselves involved in these proceedings often have no clear constitutional right to counsel, civil libertarians point out.

7. They’re Basically Pre-Crime

As I’ve previously observed, red flag laws are essentially a form of pre-crime, a theme explored in the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, based on a 1956 Philip K. Dick novel.

I’m not the only writer to make the connection. In an article that appeared in Salon, Travis Dunn linked red flag laws “to the science fiction scenario of The Minority Report, in which precognitive police try to stop crimes before they’re committed.”

That government can prevent crimes before they occur may sound like sci-fi fantasy (which it is), but the threat posed to civil liberties is quite real.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that the president recently called upon social media companies to collaborate with the Department of Justice to catch “red flags” using algorithmic technology.

The idea that governments can prevent crimes before they occur may sound like sci-fi fantasy (which it is), but the threat such ideas pose to civil liberties is quite real.

Compromising civil liberties and property rights to prevent acts of violence that have yet to occur are policies more suited for dystopian thrillers⁠—and police states⁠—than a free society.

It’s clear that laws of this magnitude should not be passed as an emotional or political response to an event, even a tragic one.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Washington Times. 

What has happened to America is a tragedy

American Recessional

What has happened to America is a tragedy

 So, the tumult and the shouting--such as it was--dies, the Capitalists and the Cronies depart, still stands this diseased, battered country, reeling in furious confusion, justified outrage, passionate nonsense, and reflex violence as it shifts its focus to the geeks and freaks--the Bearded Lady, Sword Swallower, and Pinhead--who’ll parade their freakish kinks...

No.  I can’t do it any more.  There’s no zest, no satisfaction, no pride in ridiculing an unmitigated tragedy, and what has happened to America is a tragedy.  To make fun, to satirize, to cleverly lampoon it, as if there was a purpose in such ridicule is just too sad, too grim an exercise to justify.
 

What’s changed?  Why won’t the old ways of critiquing our country work any more?  It’s because wit, humor, and irony are devices used to impel change for the better.  They lose all effect when change is impossible and essential change is no longer conceivable in America.
 

The root cause is our system--fantasized, mythologized, sacralized--built on injustice, inequity, and engineered privilege, with a profound and tacit hypocrisy that even its purveyors couldn’t comprehend.  Our foundation was laid on footings of genocide, slavery and empowered oligarchy and the  nation so based and created evolved exactly as it had to do.
 

The last four years of Trump, has forced into high relief and placed under spotlights, the grotesque falsity and ugliness that our deeply corrupt polity has made hallmarks of our failed state.  Yet these years of the Trump Era have altered nothing significant about us, nor have they deviated from the dark, sinister character of our notorious history.  Their dull, dense and banal evil were the inevitable result of decades of raw crime that went before. 
 

What they have done--in their bald vulgarity, in their gallumphing, puerile hubris, their refusal to mask our historic amorality with fulsome, exculpatory rhetoric and paeans of high spiritual purpose--is to advertise in grisly detail the vacuous arrogance, blatant cruelty, bottomless avarice, and brazen, bullying aggression that has insulted, violated, and alienated the world.
 

It is psychological fact that when the gap yawns too wide between what is asserted and reality, when a description clearly no longer matches an object, when what is said bears no relation to what is experienced, then the faith they’re intended to bolster evaporates and is gone.  This is what has happened in America.  From our beginning, our Exceptionalist mythology, with its heroic gospel, its philosophical poetry and gorgeous, vital imagery had kept its iron lock on the minds and hearts of a vast majority of us.  It has taken only one lifetime for it to be exposed, decoded, and sprung.
 

Americans, long taught that they were a superior people in the most just, honorable, wise, heroic nation on earth have had their faith battered and broken, gradually, against their will, by decades of crime and folly, with each new outrage and imbecility hard-sold to them as what it was not: an action of the most heroic humane kind, for the most admirable of motives.
 

Perfected in World Wars I and II, sustained with difficulty in Korea, it began to rapidly unravel in Vietnam, and the blatant, bloody fiascos of Aghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and--diplomatically--Iran, have proven the myth a maudlin yarn of bathetic fiction.  Only ignorant, blind, propagandized boobs and kooky xenophobes still cling to the gory fairy tale of Exceptionalism and the dirty joke of America’s purity and nobility it trumpeted to the world.
 

Concurrent with the bloody amorality of America all over the earth, as our government partnered with and coddled dozens of the most brutal, vile, murderous maniacs ever to live, arming their police states, death squads, torture regimes, and mercenary jihadis, the myth was used to hoodwink and impoverish the great bulk of innocents at home who supported it.
 

For generations the economic security of working people has been actively undermined and their wages eroded by their own corporate government.  They were told there was no money for social well-being as they watched a tiny clique of titans of finance enrich itself beyond imagination, and obscene “defense” budgets milk billions via government fiat for the War Machine to kill millions of peasant “enemies” in places they couldn’t find on a map. 
 

Deception and murder overseas; fraud and crushing punishment at home: these are the filthy realities the grotesque fairy tale so long and diligently concealed from us.  That horror is ended.  It’s deep, fatal effects are not.
 

The greatest peril to a state occurs when its people no longer believe that it represents them.  When that faith fails, as it did in Periclean Athens, in late imperial Rome, Republican Spain, and Weimar Germany, state machinery seizes up, its authority dissolves, and there is war in the streets.  That we are nearing such a point is made obvious by the bitter polarity and violent opposition between Trump and anti-Trump factions, but also in a deeper,  more dangerous division between the tyrannical, wealthy oligarchy that owns the country and demands endless war and American hegemony, and the great majority that lives as economic victims of that insane ruling clique.
 

Now, faced with by far the most ominous sociopolitical disfunction of our modern history, and with the overlay of the unknown destructive potential of Coronavirus and the certainty of inexorable climate catastrophe already evident, we are given the Presidential election of 2020, hyped to the max by solemn, phony politicians and hysterical media flacks, packaged as if it addressed, in any way, the interlocking complex of impending disasters.
 

The absurdist commedia del arte of two old, ridiculously inept, and grossly impaired buffoons heading two sick cadres of leased political whores who jointly serve the .0001%, is the memento mori of America.  Regardless of the outcome of this sorry farce, the end of the country in any recognizable form will be accelerated, fast tracked to implosion.As in any natural process, disintegration will not be sudden or immediate.  Dissolution may take as long as creation.  As it proceeds, Americans will suffer and their suffering will be intense, acute and inescapable.  They will grope and grasp for answers, remedies, fixes, and find none.  They have been schooled that all problems have solutions and can be overcome.  It is not so.  Their myth deceived them.
 

The end of Rome ushered in a thousand years of darkness in Europe and nothing could prevent it but precedents are meaningless.  Modern countries and cultures do not disappear in failure or even war, nor do entire peoples.  Matter, says science, is neither created nor destroyed.  When a great nation fails and falls apart, there remains the eternal resilience of the life force, which is unending.  That force will always be with us. 

Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net

Some dare call it treason

Some dare call it treason

Donald Trump admitted he’s deliberately dismantling Postal Service because he believes he’ll lose his re-election bid if Americans get to vote by mail – which is why this is the most outrageous and unethical act of his corruption-laced presidency. Which is why the Billings Gazette deserves high praise for telling it like it is in the first sentence of its editorial last week. “The attempted dismantling of our United States Postal Service is beyond political malpractice. It is treasonous.”
Indeed, Trump’s actions are beyond the pale of any president in recent memory. Far from making America great again, our nation is now mostly pitied by the global community as we tumble from “the shining light on the hill” to the depths of a Banana Republic run by a deranged would-be dictator.

 

If anyone has any doubt about that, his latest threat to our right to vote -- the very foundation of our democracy -- should dissolve the illusions hiding under their red MAGA hats. As reported by the Washington Post, Trump told his Fox News puppet Sean Hannity: “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals (sic).”

 

That the president does not have the legal or constitutional authority to interfere in state-run election processes makes no difference to the Grifter-in-Chief. As he has done throughout his life, Trump’s approach to challenges of his illegality is “sue me.” A number of states’ attorneys general have already decided to do just that, but given the glacial pace of the nation’s legal system, it’s highly unlikely the issue could be decided before the clock ticks down to November’s election.

 

How bad is it? Montanans can check the excellent articles by Lee reporter Tom Lutey that the removal of postal equipment began a week after Trump contributor Louis DeJoy became Postmaster General and that “at least two key machines in the state's largest sorting center in Billings” were removed as well as in Great Falls and Missoula. In a fine display of Trumpian “efficiency,” the Postal Union reports that “parts of the dismantled machinery have already been sold as scrap metal” and cannot be returned to service.

 

In keeping with the enormous and disgusting tidal wave of lies from the administration, DeJoy told a Senate committee nothing more will be done until after the election, when the dismantling of the nation’s Postal Service will continue while stretching credulity to the breaking point by claiming he actually didn’t know about the removal of hundreds of postal boxes nationwide. That an email was sent out telling postal managers not to reconnect sorting machines destroys whatever flimsy façade of propriety DeJoy is trying to slide by Congress. That Treasury Secretary Mnuchin has reportedly halted $10 billion in Congressionally-approved funding for the Postal Service only adds to the voter suppression put in motion by Trump’s band of historically unethical thugs.

 

Adding insult to injury, the Republican convention to formally nominate Trump for president starts today and Americans will be subjected to a false construct of “alternative facts,” rosy scenarios, and hollow promises of a better future. But with over a million new unemployment claims for 21 out of the last 22 weeks, a thousand Americans dying daily from Covid-19, an economy in shambles, and the intentional voter suppression by dismantling the Postal Service, their blather is as phony as a three-dollar bill.

 

As the Gazette courageously editorialized Trump’s treason “is an outrage which Montanans cannot and should not put up with.”

George Ochenski writes from Helena. His column appears each Monday on the Missoulian's Opinion page. He can be reached by email at oped@missoulian.com. - "Source" -

Peaceful coexistence and cooperation are not an option for U.S.

Peaceful coexistence and cooperation are not an option for U.S.

Dyed-in-the-wool patriots know that the United States of America is God’s gift to the world. Policymakers have risen the story to doctrinal status. It’s referred to as American Exceptionalism, and it basically means if we say it or do it, it’s ok.
It’s a nice thing to be backed up with this doctrine when you have ambitious plans for the rest of the world. And nobody else has it. Only the United States of America. In fact, the rest of the world can’t even imagine having a doctrine like it, but it doesn’t doubt that we act like we have it.

Is there a plausible explanation for this widely asserted doctrine? In other words, taken seriously as an idea, what, in the American historical experience, as distinguished from that of other states, could account for this difference?*
The argument in support begins with the country’s founding documents and the beautiful ideals expressed in them. Much effort has been put into the manufacture of a steady, upward national trajectory from these revolutionary ideals, thereby idealizing the present as well.

The explanatory power in this case is limited in that it can only account for things that do not contradict the story it is attempting to prove. This is bound to be unsatisfying for anyone investigating the links from past to present who finds a great deal of contradiction. An opposing view to the utilitarian version that is sold to Americans can be argued from the same standpoint, that of American Exceptionalism, to yield a non-utilitarian version with historical relevance.

What makes us exceptional, and what has it led to? The United States is the only western country where slavery was legal from the day it was founded. The U.S. republic was founded in 1776, with legal slavery. As just one alternate example, the French republic was founded in 1789, the same historical era as the U.S., but without legal slavery. After more than 200 years of evolution, the two states are quite different. In two areas of public policy, France has federal universal health care, a legal communist party, the Parti Communist Francaise, and a large, and at least until the 1990’s, communist industrial union, the Confédération Générale du Travail.*

As an example of how slavery, as a historical experience, may affect the evolution of a state, we can cite the absence of universal medical care in the United States.*

In slavery, the slave is the property of the owner and the maintenance of the slave, as property, is the responsibility of the owner and, specifically, not the state. In the evolution of such a state away from slavery, where the slave evolves into an employee and the slave owner into an employer, the slave owner’s provision of medical care to slaves would naturally evolve into the employer providing medical care as a fringe benefit to employees. In such a state, evolved from slavery, it would be alien for the state to provide universal medical care to its citizens.*

Another U.S. historical experience which can be traced to its evolution from slavery is the violent U.S. reaction to communism. The slave era analogue would be the slave owner’s violent reaction to the pre-Civil War abolition movement.*
Going on, the slave owner had to be deeply suspicious of the slave because of the natural resistance toward being a captive. Escape was always a possibility. Group activity was especially suspicious as it might signal rebellion. Slaves either accepted their complete subordination to the master or were dealt harsh punishment. Since they were worth more alive than dead, beatings had to be administered with cost in mind.

With the end of legal slavery, the legal control and punishment of the former slave population was passed onto local, state, and federal enforcement agencies. The evolution of this is an outsized criminal system (by far the world’s largest) notoriously known for incarcerating a strikingly large number of black prisoners. In a bizarre echo of the past, it is economically more sound to keep these prisoners alive than to execute them.

The slavery experience was not one of shared economic interest. To a black under slavery, there was no economic interest outside of the tightly controlled owner/slave relationship. The owner’s economy was the slave’s economy. Any question of “economic interest” belonged strictly to the owner.

In transitioning from an owner/slave relationship to an employer/employee relationship, the employer takes on the role of the owner in regard to the economic interest of the employee. Is it inexplicable why so many people vote against their economic interest? Not if it’s seen as today’s capitalists enjoying the same mastery over the economic system that former slave owners once enjoyed. The modern wage earner in the U.S. has been conditioned to accept the pay grade and to let economics run as a matter of course. Today’s wage earner has no economic interest…not that they can see.

By having chosen as a starting point the same year, 1776, but instead of building from a set of professed ideals incorporated in founding documents we build out from the corporeal reality of a slave nation, a different trajectory emerges and American Exceptionalism is turned on its head.

What country would dare birth itself in language unsoothing to the ear? Better to watch what it does. And by choosing another year, 1945, a chance emerges.
In that year, the United States again marks itself as the exception among nations in that it becomes the only country to ever drop atomic bombs on cities full of people. Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided the experimental proof of what the blasts’ initial heat output — hotter than the surface of the sun — could do to a city and its inhabitants, while the Soviet Union learned the lengths a country could go to when it no longer felt obliged to have “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”. Winston Churchill was so moved by the weapon’s tangible display that he suggested dropping one on the Kremlin.

How has this exceptional national experience affected the evolution of the United States in its foreign policy, and how does it differ from countries that have never dropped atomic bombs on cities?
As a result of their defeat, Japan adopted a pacifist constitution and Germany enacted very liberal asylum laws. The United States went on to develop more atomic bombs. It is a matter of U.S. state policy to keep the nuclear threat alive in all disputes. No other nuclear capable state threatens their offensive use.
As a result of its established military superiority, the United States expanded its base footprint. Today it has overseas military bases in every country that it commands, around 800 in 80 countries, comprising 90-95% of the world’s foreign military bases. Put another way, the U.S. total of overseas bases is 9-19 times more than all the rest of the world’s countries combined.
The Soviet Union, the country that played the greatest role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, didn’t make it into the 21st century. With no more rivals in sight, the United States pushed the NATO bloc steadily east toward Russia. Now, with a real chance at world domination, peaceful coexistence and cooperation was not an option. Throughout all the post WW2 years, the foreign invasions and interventions never ceased, from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The U.S. is no longer restrained by international laws and conventions or, for that matter, even U.S. law. Having put idealistic notions aside, the world is what the United States says it is. Indefinite detention is what it says it is. Torture is what it says it is. And planning, initiating, and waging a war of aggression against a sovereign nation is what it says it is.
The Declaration of Independence held certain truths to be self-evident. Truth, as a concept, is an intellectual tool useful in winning arguments, and this is how it is used in the Declaration.
As seen from the perspective of a state evolved from strict power concepts, truth is the weapon of the weak. This explains why purveyors of American Exceptionalism have no need to resort to it.


(Note) *These five paragraphs are taken from a private 
communication with Otto Hinckelmann (otto5.com) that provided the concept for the essay. The author’s contribution is one of embellishment.

James Rothenberg writes on U.S. social and foreign policy. jrothenberg3@gmail.com

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FREEDOM OR ANARCHY,Campaign of Conscience

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Attack of the Tomato Killers: The Police State’s War on Weed and Backyard Gardens

Attack of the Tomato Killers: The Police State’s War on Weed and Backyard Gardens

“They came again this morning at about 8:00 o’clock. A large cargo-type helicopter flew low over the cabin, shaking it on its very foundations. It shook all of us inside, too. I feel frightened … I see how helpless and tormented I am becoming with disgust and disillusionment with the government which has turned this beautiful country into a police state … I feel like I am in the middle of a war zone.”—Journal entry from a California resident describing the government’s aerial searches for marijuana plants

Backyard gardeners, beware: tomato plants have become collateral damage in the government’s war on drugs, especially marijuana.

In fact, merely growing a vegetable garden on your own property, or in a greenhouse on your property, or shopping at a gardening store for gardening supplies—incredibly enough—could set you up for a drug raid sanctioned by the courts.

It’s happened before.

After shopping for hydroponic tomatoes at their local gardening store, a Kansas family found themselves subjected to a SWAT team raid as part of a multi-state, annual campaign dubbed “Operation Constant Gardener,” in which police collected the license plates of hundreds of customers at the gardening store and then investigated them for possible marijuana possession.

By “investigated,” I mean that police searched through the family’s trash. (You can thank the Supreme Court and their 1978 ruling in California v. Greenwood for allowing police to invade your trash can.) Finding “wet glob vegetation” in the garbage, the cops somehow managed to convince themselves—and a judge—that it was marijuana.

In fact, it was loose-leaf tea, but those pesky details don’t usually bother the cops when they’re conducting field tests.

Indeed, field tests routinely read positive for illegal drugs even when no drugs are present. According to investigative journalist Radley Balko, “it’s almost as if these tests come up positive whenever the police need them to. A partial list of substances that the tests have mistaken for illegal drugs would include sage, chocolate chip cookies, motor oil, spearmint, soap, tortilla dough, deodorant, billiard’s chalk, patchouli, flour, eucalyptus, breath mints, Jolly Ranchers and vitamins.”

There’s a long list of innocent ingredients that could be mistaken for drugs and get you subjected to a raid, because that’s all it takes—just the barest whiff of a suspicion by police that you might be engaged in criminal activity—to start the ball rolling.

From there, these so-called “investigations” follow the usual script: judge issues a warrant for a SWAT raid based on botched data, cops raid the home and terrorize the family at gunpoint, cops find no drugs, family sues over a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, and then the courts protect the cops and their botched raid on the basis of qualified immunity.

It happens all the time.

As Balko reports, “Police have broken down doors, screamed obscenities, and held innocent people at gunpoint only to discover that what they thought were marijuana plants were really sunflowers, hibiscus, ragweed, tomatoes, or elderberry bushes. (It's happened with all five.)”

Surely, you might think, the government has enough on its hands right now—policing a novel coronavirus pandemic, instituting nationwide lockdowns, quelling civil unrests over police brutality—that it doesn’t need to waste time and resources ferreting out pot farmers.

You’d be wrong.

This is a government that excels at make-work projects in which it assigns at-times unnecessary jobs to government agents to keep them busy or employed.

In this case, however, the make-work principle (translation: making work to keep the police state busy at taxpayer expense) is being used to justify sending police and expensive military helicopters likely equipped with sophisticated surveillance and thermal imaging devices on exploratory sorties every summer—again at taxpayer expense—in order to uncover illegal marijuana growing operations.

Often, however, what these air and ground searches end up targeting are backyard gardeners growing tomato plants.

Just recently, in fact, eyewitnesses in Virginia reported low-flying black helicopters buzzing over rural and suburban neighborhoods as part of a multi-agency operation to search for marijuana growers. Oftentimes these joint operations involve local police, state police and the Army National Guard.

One woman reported having her “tomato plants complimented by the 7 cops that pulled up in my yard in unmarked SUVs, after a helicopter hovered over our house for 20 minutes this morning.” Another man reported a similar experience from a few years ago when police “showed up in unmarked SUV's with guns pulled. Then the cops on the ground argued with the helicopter because the heat signature in the ‘copter didn’t match what was growing.”

Back in 2013, an aerial surveillance mission spotted what police thought might be marijuana plants. Two days later, dozens of city officials, SWAT team, police officers and code compliance employees, and numerous official vehicles including dozens of police cars and several specialized vehicular equipment, including helicopters and unmanned flying drones, descended on The Garden of Eden, a 3.5-acre farm in Arlington, Texas, for a 10-hour raid in search of marijuana that turned up nothing more than tomato, blackberry and okra plants.

These aerial and ground sweeps have become regular occurrences across the country, part of the government’s multi-million dollar Domestic Cannabis Eradication Program. Local cops refer to the annual military maneuvers as “Eradication Day.”

Started in 1979 as a way to fund local efforts to crack down on marijuana growers in California and Hawaii, the Eradication Program went national in 1985, right around the time the Reagan Administration enabled the armed forces to get more involved in the domestic “war on drugs.”

Writing for The Washington Post, Radley Balko describes how these raids started off, with the National Guard, spy planes and helicopters:

The project was called the Campaign Against Marijuana Production, or CAMP… In all, thirteen California counties were invaded by choppers, some of them blaring Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as they dropped Guardsmen and law enforcement officers armed with automatic weapons, sandviks, and machetes into the fields of California … In CAMP’s first year, the program conducted 524 raids, arrested 128 people, and seized about 65,000 marijuana plants. Operating costs ran at a little over $1.5 million. The next year, 24 more sheriffs signed up for the program, for a total of 37. CAMP conducted 398 raids, seized nearly 160,000 plants, and made 218 arrests at a cost to taxpayers of $2.3 million.

The area’s larger growers had been put out of business (or, probably more accurately, had set up shop somewhere else), so by the start of the second campaign in 1984, CAMP officials were already targeting increasingly smaller growers. By the end of that 1984 campaign, the helicopters had to fly at lower and lower altitudes to spot smaller batches of plants. The noise, wind, and vibration from the choppers could knock out windows, kick up dust clouds, and scare livestock. The officials running the operation made no bones about the paramilitary tactics they were using. They considered the areas they were raiding to be war zones. In the interest of “officer safety,” they gave themselves permission to search any structures relatively close to a marijuana supply, without a warrant. Anyone coming anywhere near a raid operation was subject to detainment, usually at gunpoint.

Right around the same time, in the mid-1980s, the federal government started handing out grants to local police departments to assist with their local boots-on-the-ground “war on drugs.” These grants (through the Byrne Grant program and COPS program, both of which started to be phased out under George W. Bush, only to be re-upped by Barack Obama) could be used to pay for additional police personnel, equipment, training, technical assistance and information systems. However, studies show that while these federal grants did not improve police effectiveness or drug deterrence, they did incentivize SWAT team raids.

But how do you go from a “war on drugs” to SWAT-style raids on vegetable gardens?

Connect the dots, starting with the government’s war on marijuana, the emergence of SWAT teams, the militarization of local police forces through the federal 1033 Program, which allows the Pentagon to transfer “vast amounts of military equipment—machine guns and ammunition, helicopters, night-vision gear, armored cars—to local police departments,” and the transformation of American communities into battlefields: as always, it comes back to the make work principle, which starts with local police finding ways to justify the use of military equipment and federal funding.

Each year, the government spends between $14 and $18 million funding helicopter sweeps and police overtime to help the states track down illegal marijuana plants. These sweeps are even being carried out in states where it’s now legal to grow marijuana.

The sweeps work like this: Local police, working with multiple state agencies including the National Guard, carry out ground and air searches of different sectors. Air spotters flying overhead in helicopters relay their findings to police on the ground, who then carry out a search-and-destroy mission.

Mark my words: the use of police drones will make these kinds of aerial missions even more common.

For the most part, aerial surveillance is legal. As Arthur Holland Michel writes for The Atlantic: “When it comes to law enforcement, police are likewise free to use aerial surveillance without a warrant or special permission. Under current privacy law, these operations are just as legal as policing practices whereby an officer spots unlawful activity while walking or driving through a neighborhood.”

There have been a few notable exceptions.

In 2015, the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that surveillance from a low-flying helicopter conducting an aerial search for marijuana by state police and the national guard was illegal under the U.S. Constitution. The court reasoned that “when low-flying aerial activity leads to more than just observation and actually causes an unreasonable intrusion on the ground—most commonly from an unreasonable amount of wind, dust, broken objects, noise, and sheer panic—then at some point courts are c and require a warrant before law enforcement engages in such activity. The Fourth Amendment and its prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures demands no less.”

In Philip Cobbs’ case, helicopter spotters claimed to have seen two lone marijuana plants growing in the wreckage of a fallen oak tree on the Virginia native’s 39-acre family farm.

Cobbs noticed the black helicopter circling overhead while spraying the blueberry bushes near his house. After watching the helicopter for several moments, Cobbs went inside to check on his blind, deaf 90-year-old mother. By the time he returned outside, several unmarked police SUVs had driven onto his property, and police (ten in all) in flak jackets, carrying semi-automatic weapons and shouting unintelligibly, had exited the vehicles and were moving toward him.

Of course, it was never about the two pot plants.

What the cops were really after was an excuse to search Cobbs’ little greenhouse, which he had used that spring to start tomato plants, cantaloupes, and watermelons, as well as asters and hollyhocks, which he planned to sell at a roadside stand near his home. The search of the greenhouse turned up nothing more than used tomato seedling containers.

Nevertheless, police charged Cobbs with misdemeanor possession of marijuana for the two plants they claimed to have found. Eventually, the charges were dismissed but not before The Rutherford Institute took up Cobbs’ case, which revealed that police hadn’t even bothered to secure a warrant before embarking on their raid of Cobbs’ property—a raid that had to cost taxpayers upwards of $25,000, at the very least—part of their routine sweep of the countryside in search of pot-growing operations.

Two plants or two hundred or no plants at all: it doesn’t matter.

A SWAT team targeted one South Carolina man for selling $50 worth of pot on two different occasions. The Washington Post reports: The SWAT team “broke down Betton’s door with a battering ram, then fired at least 57 bullets at him, hitting him nine times. He lost portions of his gallbladder, colon, bowel and rectum, and is paralyzed from the waist down. He also suffered damage to his liver, lung, small intestine and pancreas. Two of his vertebrae were damaged, and another was partially destroyed. Another bullet shattered his leg.” After security footage showed that most of what police said about the raid was a lie, the cops settled the case for $2.75 million.

Monetary awards like that are the exception, however.

Most of the time, the cops get away with murder and mayhem. Literally.

Bottom line: no amount of marijuana is too insignificant if it allows police to qualify for federal grants and equipment and lay claim to seized assets (there’s the profit motive) under the guise of fighting the War on Drugs.

SWAT teams carry out more than 80,000 no-knock raids every year. The vast majority of these raids are to serve routine drug warrants, many times for crimes no more serious than possession of marijuana.

Although growing numbers of states continue to decriminalize marijuana use and 9 out of 10 Americans favor the legalization of either medical or recreational/adult-use marijuana, the government’s profit-driven “War on Drugs”—waged with state and local police officers dressed in SWAT gear, armed to the hilt, and trained to act like soldiers on a battlefield, all thanks to funding provided by the U.S. government, particularly the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has not abated.

Since the formation of the DHS post-9/11, hundreds of billions of dollars in grants have flowed to local police departments for SWAT teams, giving rise to a “police industrial complex” that routinely devastates communities, terrorizes families, and destroys innocent lives.

No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day. Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling.

Unfortunately, general incompetence, collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids tend to go hand in hand with an overuse of paramilitary forces.

In some cases, officers misread the address on the warrant. In others, they simply barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building. In another subset of cases, police conduct a search of a building where the suspect no longer resides.

SWAT teams have even on occasion conducted multiple, sequential raids on wrong addresses or executed search warrants despite the fact that the suspect is already in police custody. Police have also raided homes on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers, fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed.

All too often, the shock-and-awe tactics utilized by many SWAT teams only increases the likelihood that someone will get hurt with little consequences for law enforcement, even when the raids are botched.

Botched SWAT team raids have resulted in the loss of countless lives, including children and the elderly. Usually, however, the first to be shot are the family dogs.

SWAT raids are usually carried out late at night or shortly before dawn. Unfortunately, to the unsuspecting homeowner—especially in cases involving mistaken identities or wrong addresses—a raid can appear to be nothing less than a violent home invasion, with armed intruders crashing through their door.

That’s exactly what happened to Jose Guerena, the young ex-Marine who was killed after a SWAT team kicked open the door of his Arizona home during a drug raid and opened fire. According to news reports, Guerena, 26 years old and the father of two young children, grabbed a gun in response to the forced invasion but never fired. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. Police officers were not as restrained. The young Iraqi war veteran was allegedly fired upon 71 times. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

The problems inherent in these situations are further compounded by the fact that SWAT teams are granted “no-knock” warrants at high rates such that the warrants themselves are rendered practically meaningless.

This sorry state of affairs is made even worse by U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have essentially done away with the need for a “no-knock” warrant altogether, giving the police authority to disregard the protections afforded American citizens by the Fourth Amendment.

Clearly, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, something must be done.

When the war on drugs—a.k.a. the war on the American people—becomes little more than a thinly veiled attempt to keep SWAT teams employed and special interests appeased, it's time to revisit our drug policies and laws.

“You take the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all the rights you expect to have—when they come in like that, the only right you have is not to get shot if you cooperate. They open that door, your life is on the line,” concluded Bob Harte, whose home was raided by a SWAT team simply because the family was seen shopping at a garden store, cops found loose tea in the family’s trash and mistook it for marijuana.

“Our family will never be the same,” said Addie Harte, recalling the two-hour raid that had police invading their suburban home with a battering ram and AR-15 rifles. As The Washington Post reports:

Bob found himself flat on floor, hands behind his head, his eyes locked on the boots of the officer standing over him with an AR-15 assault rifle. “Are there kids?” the officers were yelling. “Where are the kids?” “And I’m laying there staring at this guy’s boots fearing for my kids’ lives, trying to tell them where my children are,” Harte recalled later in a deposition on July 9, 2015. “They are sending these guys with their guns drawn running upstairs to bust into my children’s house, bedroom, wake them out of bed.”

It didn’t matter that no drugs were found—nothing but a hydroponic tomato garden and loose tea leaves. The search and SWAT raid were reasonable, according to the courts.

There’s a lesson here for the rest of us. As Bob Harte concluded: “If this can happen to us, everybody in the country needs to be afraid.”

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2019/08/01/first-legal-hemp-planted-ohio-under-2018-farm-bill-senate-bill-57/1888903001/