Obama’s Military Purge

Obama has made clear he will aggressively pursue anyone who defies his agenda


Obama’s Military Purge


Is the Obama administration in the midst of a military purge? This year alone, nine senior commanding generals have been fired by the administration, and retired generals and current commanders who have spoken to TheBlaze believe that political ideology is the primary impetus behind the effort. “I think they’re using the opportunity of the shrinkage of the military to get rid of people that don’t agree with them or not toe the party line,” a senior retired general told website. “Remember, as Rahm Emanuel said, never waste a crisis.” The general spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still provides the government with services and believes this administration would retaliate against him.



The terminations have a distinctly political odor surrounding them in at least three cases. In all three of these cases, Benghazi is at root. U.S. Army Gen. Carter Ham was heading the United States African Command when our consulate came under attack on September 11, 2012. Ham told Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) he was never given a “stand down” order preventing him from securing the consulate. Yet the Washington Times, citing sources in the military, said he was given the order and immediately relieved of command when he decided to defy it. The Times further noted that Ham “retired” less that two years after receiving the command when all other commanders of similar stature have stayed on far longer. Sources told TheBlaze Ham was highly critical of the Obama administration’s decision not to send reinforcements to Benghazi.

Rear Adm. Charles Gaouette, Commander of Carrier Strike Group Three for the Navy, was relieved of duty for allegedly using profanity and making “racially insensitive comments.” Though he was cleared of criminal violations under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, administrative penalties have effectively ended his career. In testimony regarding Benghazi, Gaouette, who was in charge of Air Craft Carriers in the Mediterranean Sea on the night of the attack, told Congress there may not have been time to get flight crews to Libya. But under cross examination, he admitted he could have sent planes to that location.

Major General Baker, a two-star general who served as commander of the Joint Task Force-Horn at Camp Lamar in Djibouti, Africa, was fired for alcohol and sexual misconduct charges. The U.S. reportedly runs counter-terror operations out of Djibouti, and once again, military officials told TheBlaze Baker was involved in some aspect of Benghazi.



The other six were terminated for a variety of alleged offenses. Army Brigadier Gen. Bryan Roberts, commander of Fort Jackson beginning in 2011, was fired for adultery. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Gregg A. Sturdevant, director of Strategic Planning and Policy for the U.S. Pacific Command and commander of the aviation wing at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, was terminated over a successful attack on that facility by the Taliban, resulting in two American deaths and the destruction of eight American planes. Sturdevant claims British forces were responsible for security at the base prior to the attack.

Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Charles M.M. Gurganus was terminated for questioning the “winning hearts and minds” policies that led to “green on blue” murders of American officers by “trusted” Afghan recruits. Other Afghan recruits led a platoon into an enemy ambush. Army Lt. Gen. David Holmes Huntoon Jr was “censored” for “an investigation” into an “improper relationship,” according to the Department of Defense. A blog written by a 26-year-old cadet medically discharged from West Point claims the three-star general was under investigation because a West Point Superintendent “improperly used” his office, and because of an insufficient investigation of a lewd email chain perpetrated by the men’s rugby team. Nothing was officially released by the DoD regarding any of the charges.

The last commanders, three-star Vice Admiral Tim Giardina, and Major General Michael Carey, were fired within 48 hours of each other. Giardina was the deputy commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, an entity that oversees all nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines. He was commander of the Submarine Group Trident, Submarine Groups 9 and 10, which comprise all 18 of our nuclear-armed submarines. He was fired for the alleged use of counterfeit gambling chips at an Iowa casino. Carey, commander of the 20th Air Force, a role that put him in charge of 9,600 people and 450 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles at three operational wings, was fired “due to a loss of trust and confidence in his leadership and judgment,” said Air Force spokesman Brig. Gen. Les Kodlick. The decision to fire Carey was made by Lt. Gen. James Kowalski, the head of the Air Force Global Strike Command. Obama fired Giardina.

The firing of military leaders goes much further than top generals, however. On its Facebook page, Breitbart.com compiled a list of more than 197 military commanders, mostly at the rank of Colonel or above, who have been purged by the Obama administration since 2009.

According to military.com, allegations of sexual misconduct account for the firing of 30 percent of military commanders over the past eight years. That figure that increases to 40 percent when “ethical lapses” such as sexual assault and harassment, pornography, drugs and drinking are lumped together. But there are other dubious reasons why these commanders have been terminated, ranging from unspecified dereliction of duty, to improper saluting.

One of the largest purges occurred on the last day of November in 2011, when the administration terminated 157 Air Force Majors, a move the Chapman University of Military Law and its associated AMVETS Legal Clinic characterized as illegal. They noted that the Department of Defense specifies that absent extenuating circumstances, service members within six years of retirement would ordinarily be retained, and allowed to retire on time and collect benefits.

The Air force cited budget shortfalls as their primary reason for the terminations. Yet as institute director Maj. Kyndra Rotunda explained, based on the Defense Department’s Instruction 1320.08, “derogatory information” is the only reason officers can be terminated. “The defense department’s own regulation does not authorize what the defense department is doing,” Rotunda contended at the time. “The Airmen relied on the law when they entered service and now the Secretary wants to change that law, without authority.”

Earlier that same month, two-star Major Gen. Peter Fuller was relieved of his command in Afghanistan, after he told Politico that Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other government officials in that country were “isolated from reality.” Ironically, Fuller was fired by Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who was himself the subject of an FBI investigation a year later, for his role in the sex scandal that led to the resignation of CIA Director and retired general David Petraeus. Despite the FBI informing the Pentagon it had uncovered thousands of pages of emails between Allen and Florida socialite Jill Kelley, President Obama subsequently expressed “faith” in Allen’s ability to continue doing his job. It is impossible to determine whether Allen’s ideology played a role in maintaining that faith.

2012 also saw several terminations of officers based on questionable rationale. In May, Commander Derick Armstrong, commanding officer of the guided missile destroyer USS The Sullivans, was relieved of duty by Vice Adm. Frank Pandolfe “as a result of an unprofessional command climate that was contrary to good order and discipline,” according to a Navy news release. A week earlier, the Navy relieved Cmdr. Dennis Klein of command of the submarine USS Columbia, citing a loss of confidence in his ability to serve effectively.

Stars and Stripes listed several other Navy commanders relieved of duty in 2012. While some on the list were terminated for seemingly legitimate reasons, a curious lack of specificity applied to others. They include Capt. James CoBell, commanding officer of Oceana Naval Air Station’s Fleet Readiness Center Mid-Atlantic, who was let go for “leadership issues”; Cmdr. Franklin Fernandez, commanding officer of Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 24, for a “loss of confidence” in his ability to command due to allegedly “driving under the influence”; Capt. Marcia Lyons, commander of Naval Health Clinic New England, for problems with her “command climate”; and Capt. Sean McDonell, commander of Seabee reserve unit Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 14 in Jacksonville, FL, for mismanagement and unspecified “major program deficiencies.” Several others were fired for “inappropriate personal behavior” or “personal misconduct.”

Theories for these purges run the gamut. One posits that anyone associated with Benghazi had to go. Another states that many of these firings are an effort to clean up “operational failures,” most notably a 2007 incident in which six nuclear-tipped missiles went missing for 36 hours. Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, who has been an outspoken critic of the Obama administration, believes it is part of the president’s strategy to reduce America’s standing in the world. “[Obama is] intentionally weakening and gutting our military, Pentagon, and reducing us as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged,” he contended.

Vallely’s assessment was echoed by a source at the Pentagon who wished to remain anonymous because the source was not authorized to speak on the subject. He or she contended that “young officers, down through the ranks, have been told not to talk about Obama or the politics of the White House. They are purging everyone and if you want to keep your job—just keep your mouth shut.”

This theory finds validation when one considers the Obama administration’s larger assault on the military. The military is the last organized bastion of conservative values, due in large part to the nature of the military itself. Yet, in recent years, the push to embrace progressive values, such as openly gay servicemen, women in combat and diversity worship have been pursued with vigor. Even the aforementioned effort to “win the hearts and minds” of Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan, as opposed to pursuing victory, marks a sea change from traditional military values.

Not only is the Obama administration apparently on a mission to undermine the integrity of the military in this way, but it has also revealed itself to be entirely intolerant of dissent of any kind. Whether it is reporters or domestic opposition groups such as the Tea Party, Obama has made clear he will aggressively pursue anyone who defies his agenda. Now it seems that chilling message his been sent to the military as well.

Rationed Food and Purposeful Starvation

Inhumanity of a desperate human in the quest for survival is glaring and devastating evidence why communists should never be allowed to take power again

Rationed Food and Purposeful Starvation

I remember our daily food always coming from a long, long line at the end of which was a loaf of bread, a liter of milk, a stick of butter, a bottle of murky cooking oil, or a kilo of bones with traces of meat and fat on them.



The interminable lines looked like this bread line pictured above. We never knew what was sold at the end of a line we happened to come upon, but we knew we needed whatever people lined up to buy, so we joined the line.

If we wanted to eat, we learned at a very young age that we had to stand in long lines every day, often in bitter cold at 4 a.m. in hopes that the store would not run out of bread or milk by the time we made it to the front counter.

People carried cash and a shopping bag just in case they discovered hard-to-find items: toilet paper, aspirin, cotton balls, soap, potatoes, oranges, apples, flour, sugar, or cooking oil. From time to time, the shortage was so bad, we were issued rationing coupons. Once you ran out of rationing coupons for the month, you could not buy anything unless you were lucky enough to have extra cash to shop from the burgeoning black market of hoarders with communist party connections.



The ruling elite, of course, was fat and happy, shopping at their own grocery stores, usually located underground at the local Communist Party headquarters.

It wasn’t that the country did not produce enough food in spite of its disastrous centralized communist party planning. The mad dictator Ceausescu was determined to industrialize the country at the expense of people’s food – he exported so much to the West in exchange for technology and hard currency that the Romanians had to make do with the leftover food not fit for export.

The agricultural five year plan was developed by communist bureaucrats who were community organizers with very little experience at producing anything and very little formal education. They were schooled in the fine art of radical agitation.

Around Christmas time and Easter, there would be more food sent to stores, the lines were shorter for a few days and the stores better stocked. But that did not last very long. People would wipe out the supply in no time and the store shelves would be empty again, with one very expensive salami hanging behind the counter or in the window, buzzed by flies.

But that was nothing compared to the Soviet plan to starve the Romanian population of Bessarabia in 1946-1947 in order to achieve collectivization. According to the 1897 census, almost 48% of the population was Moldovan and thus spoke Romanian. Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina were Romanian-held prior to the military occupation by the Soviet Red Army during June 28-July 4, 1940. To avoid a military conflict, Romania withdrew from the area following a Soviet ultimatum delivered on June 26. The Romanian province was recaptured by Ion Antonescu from 1941-1944 and then reoccupied by the Soviets in 1944. The regions were subsequently incorporated into the USSR.

I recently came across an eye-witness, 25-minute documentary by Bogdan Parlea, “Marturii Despre Suferintele Romanilor din Basarabia” (“Witness to the Suffering of the Romanians in Bessarabia”), produced by the Fundatia Sfintii Inchisorilor and Fundatia Parintele Arsenie Boca. Hundreds of thousands of Moldovans died at the hands of their Soviet Socialist tormentors who confiscated their crops by force and shipped the food to the USSR. Wheat and corn was left to rot and mold in uncovered wagons at train stations; it was done to leave farmers as poor and desperate as possible in order to better manipulate and control them.

According to Alexandru Moraru, the gazette “Moldova Socialista” (“Socialist Moldova”) reported on January 28, 1947, that the food industry in the region had exceeded butter production by 33.2 percent, meat production by 32.5 percent, and canned food by 101.9 percent. This was the food confiscated from the starving Moldovans who were too weak to bury their own dead.

It was a Soviet state secret - nobody was allowed to write or speak about the horrors that took place in Chisinau, Orhei, Balti, Cahul, and other villages, how collectivization agents took the last drop of food and grain from the farmer’s barns, and how the children of Moldova were kidnapped, brought into homes, murdered, cooked, and eaten.

Survivors were interviewed as eye witnesses to the communist power which forced peasants to pay confiscatory taxes as well as huge quantities of their crops to the Soviet state, leaving them with little to eat. The small crop yields resulting from a very dry growing season coupled with the forced confiscation in the name of collectivization caused mass famine. Ten percent of the 1.5 million population died of starvation and a large percentage that survived were severely malnourished, looking like Holocaust victims.

Anatolie Iov Spinei described how the crop yield in 1946-1947 was only 500-600 kg per hectare due to the draught that year and the forced quota to the Soviet state was also 500-600 kg.

Eugenia Ciuntu described how her family dug a large barrel in the ground and hid grain inside but the Soviet community organizers came with sticks and tapped the ground, finding the barrel in the soft dirt. They were tapping everywhere, even hay stacks, in an attempt to find every last drop of grain.

Petre Buburuz, Orthodox Priest, explained that the end game was to starve and kill as many peasants as possible, take their land, and establish the Soviet collectives, the “colhoz.” He described how people kidnapped other people and sold them for meat.

Margareta Spanu Cemartan talked about the “communist ideology to scare people, to bring them to desperation,” to make them acquiesce to become part of the collectivization when faced with the prospect of dying. Farmers will turn in their pre-determined quota of grain to the waiting trains, receive a receipt, and then the communist agents would come back for a second round of quotas, forcing them to sweep the last kernels of wheat and corn from their barns and give up their last chicken, cow, or pig. They were left with 8 children and nothing to feed them.

What did they eat? How did they survive? Parents fed their children first and chose to die the swelling and painful death of starvation. Nadejda Botea told how some men ground tree bark to feed their families. Valentina Sturza said that those found hiding food, were sent to Siberia 10-15 years in labor camps. Some survived by boiling non-poisonous weeds.

Ion Moraru said that every family had to turn in a certain quantity of everything that was produced on a farm, eggs, meat, grain, milk, cheese, wool, but not all peasants had all of these, so they had to pay extra taxes to make up for the shortage of food quota. Many were taken to the police precinct and beaten.

Those in charge of the collective farms were afraid to tell Stalin and his henchmen that the crop had been poor because of the draught. Consequently, the quotas were not adjusted to reflect the low crop yield.

People were so desperate to eat, they sold everything of value, icons, gold items, carpets, windows, doors, silverware, candlesticks, rosaries, including the clothes off their backs. According to Anatolie Iov Spinei, “Bread had become the currency.  A carpet was worth a loaf of bread.”

Teodosia Cosmin talked about eating weeds. Her mom sold every piece of clothing in her daughters’ dowry trunks in order to survive.

Anastasia Ursachi talked about farmers keeping cows and goats in the house with them otherwise they were stolen and eaten. “Women carried babies to term, killed them, and fed them to the other children,” she said.

They ate all dogs and cats. Nadejda Botea described how a woman’s husband passed away; she put the body in the attic and fed him daily to her children. The weak were robbed of their food and possessions, so deep was the desperation.

Those who did not engage in cannibalism were so weak, they were unable to bury their dead. They dragged them into mass graves and abandoned them. Some died when the new crop came in and families ate too much.

After watching this shocking eyewitness documentary with film footage of that time period, I will never again look at food in the same way. The inhumanity of a desperate human being in the quest for survival at all costs is glaring and devastating evidence why communists should never be allowed to take power again.

Obama’s Legacy is Failure

Like the fable of the little boy who cried wolf too often, millions of Americans no longer believe anything Obama says these days


Obama’s Legacy is Failure

 

  No need to wait around three years and beyond to know what Barack Obama’s “legacy” will be. It will be failure. Few, if any, presidents have demonstrated his level of incompetence and ineptitude.



 Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, is called President Obama’s legacy legislation, the one for which he will be remembered, much as Franklin D. Roosevelt is remembered for Social Security or Harry Truman is remembered for Medicare. Obama is likely to regret his legacy, though you can be sure that while he lives he will blame its failure on everyone but himself.


Obamacare, enacted in his first term, will be emblematic of the eight years in which every policy Obama initiated swiftly became a failure. Does anyone recall his “stimulus” with “shovel ready jobs” that did not materialize? Or “Cash for Clunkers”? How many millions were loaned to “green energy” companies that rapidly went bankrupt? Not everything failed. His “war on coal” has been a success if you measure success in the number of plants generating electricity shut down and workers laid off. And, of course, there is the doubling of the national debt. It’s a long list.


The legislative history of Obamacare begins when it was passed by the House on November 7, 2009 and by the Senate just before midnight on Christmas Eve, 2009. Both houses of Congress had Democratic Party majorities, but it required a lot of arm-twisting and political bribery to enact the bill. President Obama signed it into law on March 21, 2010. It is doubtful that most members of Congress actually read the bill before voting to pass it.



 By 2010, the midterm elections gave power to Republicans in the House and narrowed the margin in the Senate. Significantly, the Senate refused to consider any of the legislation the House sent over to end the government shutdown.


Virtually everything the President said about Obamacare before and since its passage has been a lie.
In many ways Obamacare is a mirror image of his character or lack of it. Passed off as a moral responsibility to provide health insurance coverage to those who could not afford it, Obamacare is filled with hidden taxes. When you tax something, you tend to get less of it. It is blatantly unconstitutional in its implementation of fines for failing to sign up.


To date, Obamacare’s initial impact has been to turn fulltime jobs into part-time jobs. It has doubled and tripled insurance premiums. It has caused a reduction in physicians as many elect to retire or close their private practices due to its low levels of compensation. Many will not accept patients on Medicare or Medicaid.


Indeed, to implement Obamacare, $500 billion was taken from Medicare with an additional $818 billion to be taken from Medicare Part A in 2014-2023. For the senior citizens who were depending on Medicare to help cover expenses, the likelihood is that they will receive reduced services and a poorer quality of care, if they even find care.


The nationalization of 16% of the nation’s economy has been a socialist dream that has been around since the 1980s. It has arrived and, like socialism everywhere, it is a failure.


Another Obama legacy is his failure to get the economy on track since the 2008 financial crisis. It was a crisis caused by the interference in the housing market that has been around since the creation of two government “entities”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who not only purchased billions in mortgage loans, but demanded that loans be made to those who lacked the capacity to repay them. They then bundled the loans as “assets” and sold them to Wall Street. Though Wall Street is blamed for the crisis, the government seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Both are back in business. This is a formula for future crises.


According to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 90 million Americans are not working.


As Terence P. Jeffery of CNS News recently noted, “In January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, there were 80,507,000 Americans not in the labor force. Thus, the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 10,102,000 during Obama’s presidency.”


A recent report from a coalition of businesses, advocacy groups, policy experts, and nonprofit organizations concluded that 49 states have seen an increase in the number of families living in poverty and 45 states have seen household median incomes fall in the last year.


Led by Opportunity Nation, a think tank that focuses on the young, the report concludes that almost 15% of those aged 16 to 24 no longer attend school or have a job. This is a vast aimless and frequently hopeless cohort of the population. It does not bode well for the future in terms of skills that will not be taught and will not be utilized.


And yet this is a President who, in the wake of the failure of the Obamacare website, said, “Thousands of people are signing up and saving money as we speak.” He is lying.


Like the fable of the little boy who cried wolf too often, millions of Americans no longer believe anything Obama says these days. Even for his supporters, the evidence is so great as to be unavoidable.


It is increasingly likely that the 2014 midterm elections will resemble the 1994 election that returned Republicans to control of Congress after some four decades by the Democratic Party.

 

The Coming Theft of Our Savings and Wealth

Obama's efforts will result in both short term and long term impoverishment of our nation.

The Coming Theft of Our Savings and Wealth


The United States of America are in a terrible, terrible situation. We are saddled with a government comprised of anti-American Marxists who hate our freedom and everything America used to stand for. This cadre of traitors seeks nothing less than to “fundamentally transform” America from a free nation of citizens into a slave nation of serfs. To do this, their every move since the Obama administration took office has been calculated to destroy the middle class backbone of our nation. A strong, vital middle class is a bulwark for any free nation, and therefore is an obstacle and impediment to the communistic goals of Obama and his gang of governmental thugs.



 A good example of this is the ObamaCare debacle. The whole point to this program is to impoverish the middle clases by requiring them to spend onerous amounts of their money buying more expensive health insurance, while simultaneously subsidizing the “Free Stuff Army” half of the country that voted for Obama. Meanwhile, the calculated effort of the Left is toward the failure of ObamaCare, so that it can be replaced by something even worse—single payer socialized medicine in which the government completely controls health care access for most people and the only folks who can obtain “gold star” private health care are the very rich (i.e., like the “elite” in Washington and their buddies in the news media and Hollywood). Just look at the current issues with the Healthcare.gov website rollout, which has been an absolute disaster. I strongly suspect that this has been purposeful, intended to frighten people into demanding that ObamaCare be scrapped…to be replaced with the single-payer system the left-wingers have wanted all along. If the middle classes can be forced into a single-payer system, then they will be fleeced to pay for it, seeing their wealth frittered away, while the health care sword of Damocles is held over their heads lest they get out of line (“You’re a member of the Tea Party? I’m sorry, the doctor won’t be able to see you…”)


Yet, for American left-wingers, the relatively slow process of bilking the middle classes out of their aggregated wealth is not quick enough to solve the various “revenue deficit” problems that keep them from spending even more on expanded government projects to take away even more freedom. What would work much more quickly would simply be to directly confiscate the wealth of the middle classes by taking over their savings and investment. And that, while unthinkable for most of American history, appears like it may be on the horizon.



 An astute reader sent me a link to an article that appeared last week in Natural News, in which the author warns us about impending changes to banking capital controls (i.e. how you can move your money around and where) are being put into place that appear calculated to allow the U.S. government to more easily nationalize private funds contained within our banking system,


“This is the beginning of the capital controls we’ve been warning about for years. Throughout history, when governments are on the brink of financial default, they begin limiting capital controls in exactly the way we are seeing here.


“Following that, governments typically seize government pension funds, meaning the outright theft of pensions for cops, government workers, etc., is probably just around the corner.


“Finally, the last act of desperation by governments facing financial default is to seize private funds from banks, Cyprus-style. The precedent for this has already been set in Cyprus, and when that happened, I was among many who openly predicted it would spread to the United States.


“This is happening, folks! The capital controls begin on November 17th. The bank runs may follow soon thereafter. Chase Bank is now admitting that you cannot use your own money that you’ve deposited there.”


I  am, absolutely right in my warnings. As I pointed out, what is being proposed here is not some pie-in-the-sky, far out wacko conspiracy theory. Instead, it has already happened elsewhere, with Cyprus being the most recent and well-known example. Cypriots , who thought their money was safe in the banks, woke up to find one day that they could no longer access their own money, it was locked in the banks, and the reason for this was so that their government could grab it without worrying about people withdrawing it ahead of time.


These capital controls that are being implemented (and not just by Chase, by the way) are designed to prevent Americans from moving their wealth away from where it can be confiscated by the federal government.


The ban on transferring funds overseas? That’s so you don’t move your money to Switzerland or the Cayman Islands or some other place where it is inaccessible to Obama’s rapacious reach after the government starts the confiscation—we can’t have anybody panicking and refusing to “contribute” for “the common good,” can we?


The $50,000 limit is designed to keep small business owners, retirees, and others with relatively large amounts of disposable cash from withdrawing it out of the federal government’s grasp. Remember—the limit is for TOTAL transactions, meaning that direct depositing money into your bank is included, which means you probably won’t be able to even approach the $50,000 limit through withdrawal. It’s much easier for the government to smash and grab your bank account when its safely tucked away in an electronic file on a bank’s hard drive than it is for them to find where you buried your cash out somewhere on your fifty acres of wooded land.


And my warning about raiding government pension funds? That’s already been happening at the state and local levels, justified by the appeal to municipal bankruptcies such as Detroit’s. How much longer until the federal government decides to do the same to its retired and currently employed workers as well?


But it goes even further than what I mentioned. As I wrote about three years ago, the government has already been considering the possibility of confiscating private 401(k) and other savings accounts as well. Americans have billions upon billions of dollars tied up in these retirement accounts, and the government would love to get its hands on that cash. But why stop with 401(k)s? What about health savings accounts? After all, when we get our glorious workers-and-peasants single-payer medical system in place, there won’t be any place for private citizens to be going outside of the government system, will there? So they’ll grab that money, and use it to fund socialized medicine. Apply the same to all the rest of the various methods of retirement funding and savings out there.


All of this is about keeping your money in the banking system until the government formally transfers it to itself. Why do you think the Obama administration really and truly does not care about our debt and deficits? Because it intends to make up the difference by expropriating all that private wealth which just gets in the way of total government control anywise. Kill two birds with one stone.

 
And guess what? The banks facilitate them in doing this because, according to the law, the money you deposit in the bank is not “technically” even yours anymore. It belongs to the bank, and you are merely an “uninsured creditor.” Theoretically, this means that the bank is in debt to you because it has taken the money you deposited and invested it. But look at that word “uninsured”—that means that if the bank gives away your money, you’re on the hook for it and have no way of ever getting it back, even under the FDIC. You can’t sue or pursue other legal remedies under the law. The system, even with this flaw, works tolerably well in normal circumstances because banks have an incentive to not play fast and loose with depositors’ monies lest depositors go elsewhere and the bank go under. But when the government has essentially co-opted all the major banks, using bailout funds to get them hooked into corporatist-style “public-private” partnerships, the banks no longer have to worry about this, and can afford to be the tools of government wealth confiscation.


Even worse, should the government take this step, is that this would not only destroy the wealth and capacity of the middle classes now, but it would essentially destroy America as a haven of wealth creation, innovation, and investment for decades to come, even should we manage to free ourselves from the communistic cadre currently in Washington.


One of the things that made the modern Western world what it has been—with its wealth, prosperity, technology, industrialization, and so forth—has been the fact that Western nations were places where private citizens and corporations could generate, store, and invest wealth and feel reasonably secure that this wealth and investment would be safe, both from foreign enemies and especially from their own governments. Because Western nations operated on principles based in the rule of law, especially the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, these nations became centers in which people wanted to deposit their money. People would much rather have parked their cash in London or New York than in some place like Zimbabwe or Bolivia, where the next whim of the dictator or the next left-wing revolution might result in all your wealth being nationalized and lost.


The West, and especially the United States, traditionally has been a safe place to invest in research and technology, to build new factories, to develop land, to place your money so that it would grow. As a result, we had high-paying jobs, high standards of living, access to mass production that lowered the cost of living, and abundant sources of capital investment to keep the engine going.


What Obama and his administration appear to be contemplating would destroy that reputation and that good will that has been built up for over 200 years. They’d essentially be throwing sand in that engine, grinding it to a halt. If America is no longer a safe place for your money, where it will be protected from any tin pot dictator needing a quick burst of funds, then that money will go elsewhere. Japan, China, Europe, the Middle East—they will stop investing here, and we will be the poorer for it. In turn, this will further destroy the middle classes because there won’t be money for new factories to be built by Japanese car companies in Kentucky or Alabama. There won’t be money to support research and development to produce new products that make our lives cheaper and easier by German or Scandinavian countries in California or New England. There won’t be capital investment in land and buildings by Middle Eastern or Chinese money. While we tend to focus on jobs lost overseas, keep in mind that the USA receives a very significant influx of foreign money that helps our nation grow—because the foreigners know that we are (or rather, were) a place where their money is safe and where it can bring them returns.


Obama’s efforts will result in both short term and long term impoverishment of our nation. What can we do about it?


Well, in the short term, it might be a wise idea to spread your money around to try to get around the capital controls. If you’re planning on moving large chunks of funds overseas to safety, you’d better get it done before November 17. It may even be time to consider simply withdrawing your wealth from the banking system in toto and going back to the use of cash and barter for services. It sounds primitive—but it’s better than being broke because Big Brother Obama stole it from you.


In the long term, the only real answer is to work to get Obama and his gang of Marxists out of office and away from the places where they can do damage as quickly as possible. If we ever do wrestle control of our own government back from them, then there will be the long, hard slog of righting what they set wrong, purging government at every level of their supporters, and returning America back to a safe haven for the world’s money.


STAND FREE PATRIOTS AND CITIZENS

Obama Doctrine: Embolden our enemies. Undermine our friends. Diminish our country.

Obama Doctrine: Embolden our enemies. Undermine our friends. Diminish our country.

Obama’s friends are America’s foes

For nearly five years, this column has described the Obama Doctrine with nine words:  Embolden our enemies. Undermine our friends. Diminish our country.



Virtually everything President Obama has done since coming to office falls into one or more of those categories.  He promised to fundamentally transform America, and he is doing so with a vengeance by adhering to policies that conform to those nine words.

So imagine our surprise when Mr. Obama denounced his political opponents in Congress with the following words: “…Probably nothing has done more damage to America’s credibility in the world, our standing with other countries, than the spectacle that we’ve seen these past several weeks. It’s encouraged our enemies, it’s emboldened our competitors, and it’s depressed our friends, who look to us for steady leadership.”



Now, this is hardly the first time President Obama has tried to shift the blame for his myriad failures onto others.  But it is especially important in this instance that he not be allowed to get away with it because we have plenty of reason to believe that the predictable – and predicted – repercussions of the Obama Doctrine are about to come due, big time.  Worse yet, the associated costs are likely to be sufficiently high, in both blood and treasure, that Team Obama must not be permitted yet again to obscure or deflect its responsibility.

The truth is that Mr. Obama has throughout his presidency confused our enemies with America’s friends, and vice versa.  A case in point has been his strategically ominous transposing of the character and actual status two of the Eastern Mediterranean’s most strategically important states: Turkey and Israel.

Barack Obama has treated Turkey as a reliable partner even though, for the better part of a decade under its Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, this nation that is supposedly a NATO ally has been aligning ever more palpably with our adversaries.  Among the symptoms of this trend: the fomenting of rabid anti-Americanism by the Erdogan regime and its increasingly state-controlled media; Erdogan’s promoting of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Libya and Syria; and his assistance to Iranian efforts to circumvent U.S. and international sanctions.

By contrast, notwithstanding President Obama’s occasional gestures and rhetoric to the contrary, his administration has behaved towards Israel as though it were, at best, a country in which we have no interests.  At worst, Mr. Obama seems to consider the Jewish State as a hostile power.  He has: repeatedly demeaned its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; contributed to its international isolation (for example, by demanding at one point an end to settlement expansion as a precondition for the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations); and subverted its vital interests (notably, by declaring that Israel must withdraw to the indefensible pre-1967 borders).

Particularly reprehensible has been the Obama administration’s indifference to Turkey’s serial acts of aggression against Israel.  Notably, it effectively sided with the Turks when Erdogan sponsored an effort to violate the Israeli blockade of Hamastan in the Gaza Strip, a provocation that resulted in the loss of life of nine Turks.  In due course, Team Obama insisted that Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly apologize for the deaths of the provocateurs, then seemingly did nothing when Erdogan contemptuously dismissed Israel’s gesture.

Even more worrisome, Turkey reportedly recently compromised an Israeli spy-ring in Iran by blowing the cover of Iranian operatives who had met with their handlers on Turkish soil.  The disclosures have evidently led to the liquidation of at least some of those agents working behind enemy lines, and the loss of a precious human intelligence capability at a most sensitive time.  Now, more than ever, we need the ground truth about what is going on with respect to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, not just the disinformation being served up by the mullahs and their apologists.

The question occurs:  What else is the Turkish regime prepared to jeopardize to curry favor with America’s enemies at the expense of U.S. friends – or perhaps our own, even more immediate and direct security interests?  For example, thanks to its status as a putative NATO ally, Turkey has access to some classified U.S. intelligence and even our state-of-the-art F-35 stealth fighter jet.  Isn’t it realistic to expect that such sensitive items will be compromised, too?

We persist at our peril in ignoring the untrustworthy nature of Recep Erdogan’s agenda – to say nothing of abetting it by construing him, as President Obama does, as one his closest associates among foreign leaders.  Ditto Team Obama’s practice of subverting our one, true ally in the region: Israel.  Should we not change course, you can bet we will have more enemies and fewer friends. And the blame for the mayhem that ensues will lie squarely with our Commander-in-Chief.

If President Obama is really worried about our diminished standing in the world and really wants to establish who’s responsible for it, he needs to look in the mirror.  And whether he chooses to do so or not, the rest of us had better make it much harder, not easier, for him to perpetrate this sort of reckless and dangerous national security fraud.  After all, with friends like Barack Obama’s, America neither needs nor can afford more enemies.

Who Will Protect You from the Police? The Rise of Government-Sanctioned Home Invasions

The Fourth Amendment has been reduced to little more than words on paper.

Who Will Protect You from the Police? The Rise of Government-Sanctioned Home Invasions

“Democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman.”—Winston Churchill

It’s 3 a.m. You’ve been asleep for hours when suddenly you hear a loud “Crash! Bang! Boom!” Based on the yelling, shouting and mayhem, it sounds as if someone—or several someones—are breaking through your front door. With your heart racing and your stomach churning, all you can think about is keeping your family safe from the intruders who have invaded your home. You have mere seconds before the intruders make their way to your bedroom. Desperate to protect your loved ones, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, your son’s baseball bat, or that still unloaded gun you thought you’d never need. In a matter of seconds, the intruders are at your bedroom door. You brace for the confrontation, a shaky grip on your weapon. In the moments before you go down for the count, shot multiple times by the strangers who have invaded your home, you get a good look at your accosters. It’s the police.



Before I go any further, let me start by saying this: the problem is not that all police are bad. The problem, as I point out in my book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, is that increasing numbers of police officers are badly trained, illiterate when it comes to the Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, and, in some cases, willfully ignorant about the fact that they are supposed to be peacekeepers working for us, the taxpayer.

Unfortunately, with every passing week, we are hearing more and more horror stories in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals. Never mind that the unsuspecting homeowner, woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, has no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by a criminal as opposed to a government agent. Too often, the destruction of life and property wrought by the police is no less horrifying than that carried out by criminal invaders.

Consider, for example, the sad scenario that played out when a SWAT team kicked open the door of ex-Marine Jose Guerena’s home during a drug raid and opened fire. Thinking his home was being invaded by criminals, Guerena told his wife and child to hide in a closet, grabbed a gun and waited in the hallway to confront the intruders. He never fired his weapon. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. The SWAT officers, however, not as restrained, fired 70 rounds of ammunition at Guerena—23 of those bullets made contact. Guerena had had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

Seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was sleeping on her living room sofa, which was positioned under a window, when suddenly, the silence of the night was shattered by a flash grenade thrown through the living room window, followed by the sounds of police bursting into the apartment and a gun going off. Rushing into the room, Aiyana’s father, Charles, found himself tackled by police and forced to lie on the floor, his face in a pool of his daughter’s blood. It would be hours before Charles would be informed that his daughter was dead. The 34-year-old suspect the police had been looking for would later be found elsewhere in the apartment building.

Then there was the time police used a battering ram to break into the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson, mistakenly believing her house to be a drug den. Fearing that burglars were entering her home, which was situated in a dangerous neighborhood, Johnson fired a warning shot when the door burst open. Police unleashed a hail of gunfire, hitting Johnson with six bullets. Johnson died.

Eighty-year-old Eugene Mallory suffered a similar fate when deputies with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, claiming to have smelled chemicals related to the manufacture of methamphetamine, raided the multi-unit property in which Mallory lived. Thinking that his home was being invaded by burglars, Mallory allegedly raised a gun at the intruders, who shot him six times. Mallory died. “The lesson here,” observed the spokesman for the sheriff’s department, “is don’t pull a gun on a deputy.”

In Fort Worth, Texas, two rookie police officers sent to investigate a possible burglary circled 72-year-old Jerry Waller’s house with flashlights shining. Waller, concerned that his home was being cased, went to his garage, armed with a gun for self-defense. The two officers snuck up on Waller, who raised his gun on the intruders. When Waller failed to obey orders to lower his gun, the officers shot and killed him. It turned out the officers had gone to the wrong address. They blamed the shooting death on “poor lighting.”

During a raid in Ogden, Utah, police dressed in black and carrying assault rifles charged into a darkened home. Upon entering the hallway and encountering a man holding a shiny object that one officer thought was a sword, police opened fire. Three shots later, 45-year-old Todd Blair fell to the floor dead. In his hands was a shiny golf club.

In Sarasota, Florida, a mixture of federal and local police converged on the apartment complex where Louise Goldsberry lived after receiving a tip that a child rape suspect was in the complex. Unaware of police activity outside, Louise was washing dishes in her kitchen when a man wearing what appeared to be a hunting vest pointed a rifle at her through her window. Fearing that she was about to be attacked, Louise retrieved her revolver from her bedroom. Meanwhile, the man began pounding on Louise’s front door, saying, “We’re the f@#$ing police; open the f@#$ing door.” Identifying himself as a police officer, the rifle-wielding man then opened the door, pointed a gun at Goldsberry and her boyfriend, who was also present, and yelled, “Drop the f@#$ing gun or I’ll f@#$ing shoot you.” Ironically, the officer later justified his behavior on the grounds that he didn’t like having a gun pointed at him and because “I have to go home at night.”

These incidents underscore a dangerous mindset in which civilians (often unarmed and defenseless) not only have less rights than militarized police, but also one in which the safety of civilians is treated as a lower priority than the safety of their police counterparts (who are armed to the hilt with an array of lethal and nonlethal weapons), the privacy of civilians is negligible in the face of the government’s various missions, and the homes of civilians are no longer the refuge from government intrusion that they once were.

It wasn’t always this way, however. There was a time in America when a man’s home really was a sanctuary where he and his family could be safe and secure from the threat of invasion by government agents, who were held at bay by the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Fourth Amendment, in turn, was added to the U.S. Constitution by colonists still smarting from the abuses they had been forced to endure while under British rule, among these home invasions by the military under the guise of writs of assistance. These writs were nothing less than open-ended royal documents which British soldiers used as a justification for barging into the homes of colonists and rifling through their belongings. James Otis, a renowned colonial attorney, “condemned writs of assistance because they were perpetual, universal (addressed to every officer and subject in the realm), and allowed anyone to conduct a search in violation of the essential principle of English liberty that a peaceable man’s house is his castle.” As Otis noted:

“Now, one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. Custom-house officers may enter our houses when they please; we are commanded to permit their entry. Their menial servants may enter, may break locks, bars, and everything in their way; and whether they break through malice or revenge, no man, no court can inquire. Bare suspicion without oath is sufficient.”

To our detriment, we have now come full circle, returning to a time before the American Revolution when government agents—with the blessing of the courts—could force their way into a citizen’s home, with seemingly little concern for lives lost and property damaged in the process.

Actually, we may be worse off today than our colonial ancestors when one considers the extent to which courts have sanctioned the use of no-knock raids by police SWAT teams (occurring at a rate of 70,000 to 80,000 a year and growing); the arsenal of lethal weapons available to local police agencies; the ease with which courts now dispense search warrants based often on little more than a suspicion of wrongdoing; and the inability of police to distinguish between reasonable suspicion and the higher standard of probable cause, the latter of which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property.

Indeed, if Winston Churchill is correct that “democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman,” then it’s safe to say that we no longer live in a democracy. Certainly not in a day and age when the Fourth Amendment, which was intended to protect us against the police state, especially home invasions by government agents, has been reduced to little more than words on paper.

It’s time we begin to look at what powers are available to the people to help cure this disease.

It’s time we begin to look at what powers are available to the people to help cure this disease

Speakin’ Out: Big government blindness

Many of those who have been elected by the people of this nation to represent them in Washington have a disease called big government blindness, and it’s time to reign in an out of control government in Washington, D.C.



While I’ve always considered it more problematic with the Democrat Party, both parties are victims of big government blindness. The ultimate end of this affliction is the removal of citizen input from political and government decision-making. Unelected people from behind the scenes write laws too long for the legislators to read and too complicated to understand, and Congress is expected to simply give a nod of assent to them and then go to spinning their lies of why it’s so good for us.

In order to reverse this unconstitutional process, it’s time we begin to look at what powers are available to the people to help cure this disease.



In establishing a government by which the States could function in a unified manner, the Founders wrote a Constitution that provided for three branches of government that would be subject to the people and their respective states.

Then, to help insure that the central government would be limited government over the states and the people, at the time the states voted to approve the Constitution, they also voted to approve ten amendments to accompany its passage.

As was stated in the preamble to these 10 amendments, which became known as the Bill of Rights: “The Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added…”

The Constitution was written to establish and maintain a federal government that would be self-limiting. Rather than take away the power from the states that voted to become united, it provided the means for the states to make decisions that would, when and if it was necessary, stop a central government in Washington D.C. that was afflicted with big government blindness.

The 10th Amendment to the Constitution says: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

And one of the powers of the states and the people is provided in Article V of the Constitution: “...on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, [Congress] shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments.” The best-seller book “The Liberty Amendments” by Mark Levin proposes 11 such amendments that would bring Congress and the White House back into line. Citizens of all these United States need to talk to their state legislators about voting for a national Amendment Convention to propose such amendments.

Where is the Rule of Law?

Maybe the definition of the Rule of Law has changed and I missed it in the flurry of death by a thousand paper cut changes

Where is the Rule of Law?

“A lie can go half way around the world before truth can even put its pants on.” – Mark Twain

Where are common sense, logic, critical thinking, belief in God, accountability, and the Rule of Law? Have they been replaced by the Fabians’ Social Justice Doctrine, controlled chaos, endless corruption, good is bad, evil is good, mindless propaganda, and political correctness?



The Rule of Law is the cornerstone of our Republic and, without the Rule of Law, there is tyranny. Sen. Rand Paul wondered about the Rule of Law on the floor of the Senate: “Either we’re a nation of laws or not.” He continued, “If we ignored our own laws, are we in any position to preach to the rest of the world about democracy and the Rule of Law?” (C-SPAN radio 7/31/13)

The Rule of Law is necessary for freedom, justice, and equality to prevail, without it we are ruled by a government of men and women who make arbitrary decisions on a whim. When the Rule of Law is not respected, nobody is truly safe from government encroachment, intrusion, and abuse.

When ICE agents were ordered by DACA directive to violate federal law in non-deportation policies because of lack of jurisdiction, the ICE agents’ lawyer said, “There has to be a forum in which the rule of law can be restored.” Kris W. Kobach, the lawyer for the ICE union continued, “This is without question a lawless amnesty being imposed upon America. All Americans, regardless of how they feel about the amnesty, should be concerned when a president can flagrantly ignore the law and violate the Constitution.”

Has this administration followed the Rule of Law or have they deliberately ignored it? Is this the new norm?

In the tsunami of executive orders and laws passed against the wishes of the majority of the American people, was it legal to give Congress and its staffers a 75% subsidy to insulate them from the expensive and harmful effects of Obamacare?

Was it legal to give exemptions from the unaffordable Affordable Care Act to special groups and not enforce the law across the board in a timely manner, as it was passed?

Was it legal to fire AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin for doing his job and exposing the corruption of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson?

Was it legal to hound Republican administration appointees with often-absurd and/or invented accusations while ignoring crass corruption and illegal behavior of Democrat administration appointees?

Was it legal to wipe out GM and Chrysler bondholders by ignoring the bondholders “prior claim” and violating bankruptcy laws involving the order of compensation, and giving unions preferred status?

Was it legal to give the EPA so much power over Congress that it was able to force administratively the “cap” portion of “cap and trade?”

Was it lawful to declare the Senate in recess in order to make “recess” appointments to the National Labor Relations Board? Has dissolving legislative bodies throughout history not been the hallmark of dictatorships?

Was it lawful to decree the Dream Act passed when Congress refused to pass it?

Was it legal to ignore the language of the Affordable Care Act and to run federal subsidies for state-run exchanges in states that refused to set up exchanges? Current litigation is underway in the Oklahoma.

Was it legal to delay implementation of the Affordable Care Act mandate in spite of the clear terms of the statute?

Was it legal to send millions in farm subsidies to dead farmers?

Was it legal to sweep under the rug the Benghazi incident in which four Americans died needlessly? Yet we “feel” that it is our duty to get involved in someone else’s civil war because citizens there died and they happen to live under a dictatorship in the proximity of a lot of natural gas?

What happened to the Solyndra Criminal Probe investigation?  What happened to the many other criminal investigations relating to the “Green Energy” scams? You can hear crickets in the mainstream media.

Did the artificially low interest rates purposefully enable out-of-control government spending with cheap money? Did the government pressure the bond rating agencies such as Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch to not downgrade the U.S. debt further? If they did so, was it legal? “The Truth” wants to know because the media is reporting very little.

Maybe the definition of the Rule of Law has changed and I missed it in the flurry of death by a thousand paper cut changes. Maybe the new Rule of Law is now the plain clothes police everywhere, who no longer serve and protect since we don’t know who they are to ask for help in an emergency, they just ticket us to death for speeding, or the drones hovering over quiet residential neighborhoods, or the EPA police surprising a few law-abiding miners in Alaska, or the fully geared and assault ready police in the metro, the TSA molesting and irradiating us at airports, or the IRS making sure that we pay all of our taxes, including the Affordable Care Act tax?

On the worst of days, D.C. is a place to fear and the seat of power, corruption, and pettiness

On the worst of days, D.C. is a place to fear and the seat of power, corruption, and pettiness
District of Columbia, the Seat of Power and Corruption

Washington, D.C. and its surrounding suburbs are interesting places to visit. Populated by over two hundred different nationalities, legal and illegal, it is a hodge-podge of humanity stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on most days and nights.



One of the most densely policed places in the world, it is easy to lose yourself in the many purposefully narrowed streets to make them difficult to vehicular traffic; the roads with double names, one name before it crosses a major highway and another name on the other side; the barricaded buildings; the check points, and the unmarked police cars and menacingly looking plain-clothed police armed for urban assault.

On the best of days, the District of Columbia is a lovely place to visit if you are a museum lover, an admirer of the many monuments and memorials on the National Mall; the Reflecting Pool; the botanical gardens; the art galleries of the Smithsonian; the green parks with creative and intricate statues; the Natural History Museum; the Spy Museum; Madam Tussauds Wax Museum, and the Ford Theatre where President Lincoln was assassinated.

On the worst of recent days, D.C. was a dangerous place for an unarmed young mother with a toddler in the back seat of her car who got so lost and frightened, trying to escape from so many men and women pointing guns at her, she did not stop in time and was shot. Did she deserve to die? Should they have shot her tires first or used road spikes? Life used to be precious to our Western culture, not death.

On the worst of days in September, a crazed gunman with employment credentials and revenge on his clouded mind shot a lot of innocent people in the office building in which he had easy access and clearance to enter.

On the best of days of spring, D.C. is a fragrant symphony in pink cherry blossoms, surrounding the Tidal Basin and dotting the landscape of the surrounding buildings. The 1912 gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo becomes a joy every year during the month of April, snowing flowers everywhere.

On the worst of government shutdown days, overzealous and petulant D.C. bureaucrats who claimed to serve the people turned away WWII veterans from their own memorial for which they’ve paid dearly in blood and treasure. Politicians wanted to make life as miserable as possible for American citizens during the unnecessary government shutdown. The government was too broke, they said, to stay open but found money to hire armed police and personnel to man barricades in an open-air monument that otherwise does not require much maintenance or guarding.

On the worst of days this week in D.C. the vets, who were arrested for crossing over the barricades at the Vietnam Memorial, were shocked when illegal aliens who broke our laws and crossed our borders illegally were allowed to rally on the National Mall, demanding amnesty. The illegal aliens and their progressive activists and lobbyists have more power and rights under this administration than American citizens do.

Breitbart News reported that an elaborate set of “four Jumbotrons, port-a-potties, special event fencing, tents, and raised and lighted stages” were set up across the National Mall for illegal aliens who invaded the U.S. in violation of our law.  Meanwhile, veterans who fought in Normandy, Europe, Iowa Jima, North Africa, and freed Europe of the scourge of Nazism were told by gun-carrying park police to back off and move along from the monuments they paid for with their blood and treasure.

On the best of days, D.C. witnessed millions of peaceful tea party marchers who were taxed enough already, yet most of the MSM ignored them and wrote them off as a few thousand radical right wingers with extreme views, an “AstroTurf movement” as Nancy Pelosi so derisively called them.

On the worst of days, D.C. is a place to fear and the seat of power, corruption, and pettiness. Big rig drivers understood that. Unlike the past when truckers caused gridlock in Washington with their demonstrations, few American truckers showed up this time to protest their bloated government that does not seem willing to stop spending, taxing its citizens, and devaluing the American dollar. Truckers were afraid – the implied threat of the National Guard was promoted on Social websites and many retreated in fear of their government. Those who did show up and had to obey the closed roads signs spent upwards of $1,500 one way in fuel alone to make a stand against the tyrannical government.

The District of Columbia is the seat of government for the select few, the globalists with money, the lawyers, progressive education policy deciders, and the powerful lobbies that determine the fate of 307 million Americans and indirectly the economic fate of the rest of the world.

Washington, D.C. is our nation’s capital but it appears more like the capital of everyone-who-hates America and its culture, where deals are made secretively in the dead of night, where the American stellar health care enjoyed by generations has been destroyed in the name of progressive Marxist fairness, social justice, and community organizing, replaced by rationing and death panels.

D.C. is now a place where extreme leftists reign, undermining the rule of law. Michael Reagan said, the “law is applied through a filter of how the application affects a group, instead of being applied impartially regardless of the group or individual circumstances.” (reaganreports.com)

On a cloudy day, when the District of Columbia was cloaked in a gray mantle of drizzling rain, I went to the mall to walk. One of the chain store windows displayed 3 oversized, bright red signs with the unfortunate words, “SALE! Thank Congress; Thank Mr. Obama, Government Shut Down SALE!!! Extra 20% off, up to 70% off.”

Commerce is good for the country, we are a consumer-oriented economy, and two-thirds of our GDP is consumption. Some might even say there is too much conspicuous consumption.

Should we thank Congress for not doing its job and passing a budget in four years? Should we thank Mr. Obama and Congress for passing the unaffordable Affordable Care Act in the middle of the night with only Democrat votes? Should we thank Nancy Pelosi for telling us that we must pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it? We did find out, Rep. Pelosi, and we don’t like it one bit.

Should we thank our president for taking a wrecking ball to our stellar healthcare? Health insurance did need revamping, several million Americans did not have insurance, could not afford it or were dropped because of preexisting conditions, but why replace it with one-payer government-run ineptitude which turns out to be much more expensive? How are those exchanges that cost taxpayers over $693 million working out so far? After all, they were quite pricier than originally quoted ($93 million).

On sunny days D.C. is a place of green parks, paved streets, and heavily shuttered and protected glass and concrete buildings occupied by faceless bureaucrats in grey suits, carrying heavy briefcases stuffed with new regulations, rules, laws, and taxes that the American proletariat must follow and obey.

Forcing People to Be Free

The coercive nature of modern liberalism
Forcing People to Be Free

America is a country that is fundamentally divided between two general worldviews and opposing ideologies.  On the one hand, we have those – small-government conservatives, constitutionalists, biblical Christians, libertarians, patriots, what I generally refer to under the heading of “liberty lovers” – who tend to support greater respect for the natural rights of the individual, limits placed on the government by the rule of law, more power for the people themselves over and against the agents and officers of the state, and greater objective freedom for the average citizen to live his or her life as they want.



On the other hand, we have the opposite – liberals, left-wingers, socialists, communists, big-government “conservatives,” and the like – who are diametrically opposed to natural freedom.  They support more government, more regulation, more intrusion, less privacy, more power over our lives by the officers of the ever-enlarging state.

This divide is an old one – there have been self-styled “progressives” and socialists as far back as the last half of the 19th century who have seen natural rights and the Constitution as an impediment to their plans.  The notion of using the government to make people do certain things “for their own good” or “to help others” is not new.  Neither are the virulence and the destructiveness of these efforts when put into practice – the more vigorously they are implemented, the more human lives and freedom are obliterated.

And let’s face it – force, coercion, the threat of punishment for non-compliance, these are the tools of today’s modern liberal.

These are the folks who want to microregulate what people can eat and drink.  Liberals, not conservatives or liberty lovers, are the ones who impose regulatory burdens onto people and businesses by banning salt, trans-fats, upsized sodas, etc. etc.  It is at the behest of left-wingers that militarized federal police swarm into Amish dairies and dump out thousands of gallons of fresh milk, combating the “crime” of selling unpasteurized fresh milk to willing buyers who will presumably be consuming it that same day.  It was a Democrat-controlled Congress that sent the bill to be signed by a Democrat President that criminalizes selling homegrown food to others, which could be used to outlaw farmer’s markets, and which has even been interpreted as allowing the government to outlaw all private gardening.

Left-wingers are the ones who passed the law that will destroy America’s health care system, all the while forcing you to purchase increasingly expensive health insurance – a mandate that you can only opt out of by paying an onerous fine.  The statists are the ones who tell you what you can and can’t do with your land.  They’re the ones perennially trying to outlaw speech that they don’t like from the radio and other broadcast media.  The Left is the side that thinks it’s fine to force business owners to operate against their personal convictions.  They’re the people who think that if you think the wrong way, it’s legitimate to punish you for it.  They’re the people who think it’s fine for the government to spy on all Americans, for “security.”

The examples of the coercive nature of modern liberalism could go on for pages.  Ultimately, though, what these examples of compulsion and intimidation boil down to is this: modern liberals hold to a very illiberal view of what is meant by terms like “liberty,” “freedom,” and “rights.

Liberals believe in what is termed “positive liberty.”  This means that “liberty” is the use of government to give to people things that they do not have, or at least which they don’t get for free.  “Liberty” means “positive action” where you have to do something for someone else.  In the liberal mindset, if you are “freeing” people, it is by giving them free goodies of some sort or another, paid for by other people.  This is why left-wingers speak of “the right to free health care” or “the right to free housing.”  Refusing to contribute the funds to pay for these “rights,” then, is described by liberals as “oppression.”

You don’t support “freedom” if you don’t think we should give everyone free meals, birth control, and whatever else they may want.  Likewise, you don’t support “freedom” if you refuse to provide goods or services to someone else, even if the provision of these goes against your own will and conscience.  Ironically, by standing for your own personal choice of action, you are “denying liberty” to someone else by not giving them what they want.

Obviously, this is the mindset of the criminal

Obviously, this is the mindset of the criminal.  I’m sure many a burglar, armed robber, and rapist have justified their actions by deluding themselves into believing that their victims owed them what was being taken.  In a sense, modern American liberalism is just ideological robbery and rape writ large.

Conservatives and liberty lovers, on the other hand, believe in what is termed “negative liberty,” which is largely defined by delineating what you cannot do to or take from other people, especially with reference to the government.  When we say that every individual has a natural right to life, for instance, this means that there is no justification for harming the person or life of another person who has not committed a criminal act his or herself.  To speak of a natural right to property means that it is illegitimate to try to justify taking away someone else’s money, land, ideas, or labor to benefit someone else by means of wealth redistribution or transfer payments.  These rights are negative because they don’t let you do things to other people, or use the power of government to take things from them.  Each person is secure in his or her individual life, property, and other rights.

Liberals hate the idea of negative rights for two reasons.

First, their view of “positive rights” emphasizes dealing with people as groups, tribes, constituencies, and so forth, while the “negative rights” view looks at us as individuals.  The word “individual” is a dirty word to most left-wingers.  Liberals love it when people think of themselves in terms of some mass of humanity larger than themselves.  Incidentally, this is why radical Islam and modern liberalism get along so well, despite the many seeming points of disagreement they would have: both act to dehumanize the individual and subsume him into a greater whole that negates his own individuality at the expense of the tribe.

Government is not supposed to set or to benefit some groups over and against others so as to divide and conquer the people

But this brings me to the second, and concomitant, reason why liberals hate negative rights – the mass of humanity liberals want you to identify with must not be the nation as a whole, but some subset of people within the nation who can be set against other subsets and used as a tool for punishing the “wrong” groups of people.  Yet, negative rights emphasize the notion that each individual person has natural rights ex Deo that exist entirely apart from belonging to some subset that “deserves” wealth redistribution or other benefits because of past injustices, real or imagined.

Further, the negative rights view understands the Lockean proposition that each individual has joined with all others in a commonwealth that exists for the mutual defense and advancement of each individual member of that body.  Under this view, while we are not anarchists who want to destroy all government, we know that government is supposed to exist to benefit all members of society by protecting them in the exercise of their natural, inborn rights.  Government is not supposed to set or to benefit some groups over and against others so as to divide and conquer the people and bring them under the total control of the state, which is what those on the Left want to see happen.

So we come to the question – what should conservatives and liberty lovers do in response to the current state of affairs in our country?  The answer is nothing less than to force people to be free – by our definition of the term.

Whenever and wherever conservatives and liberty lovers get into positions of power, they must use their positions to ruthlessly, relentlessly, uncompromisingly advance our agenda of real, natural rights-based liberty.  We must force liberals to accept that the 2nd amendment affirms our God-given right to defend ourselves from criminals, both in and out of the government – and if they don’t like the laws we pass that extend greater freedom to all Americans to exercise this right, then too bad.

We must seek to force left-wingers to accept that the productive classes will have to survive with less taxation and that the work-capable welfare addicts and corporate tax-recipient friends-of-Obama “green” companies like Solyndra and LightSquared will have to survive standing on their own two feet instead of picking someone else’s pockets.

We need to force homosexuals to accept the sad reality that other people can say what they like too, inside and outside of their churches, and that freedom of speech and religion extends to everyone.  In every area where the Left intrudes itself unjustly into our lives, we have to force, coerce, and require liberals to accept that they can no longer micromanage, over-regulate, and dominate our lives.

This is as it should be because real, negative, natural rights-based freedom harms no one else
This is as it should be because real, negative, natural rights-based freedom harms no one else.  For example, an able-bodied man sitting at home collecting his welfare check and watching reality television will not be harmed when that check stops coming – instead it will do him good because he will have to learn to stand on his own and make his own way, instead of stealing from other people who work for their livings.  He may not like that the government no longer forces other people to subsidize his laziness, but it does him no real harm to have to take responsibility for his own life.  And it will help the people whose natural right to the fruits of their own labor is being infringed to not have this happen anymore.

In short, it doesn’t hurt you to accept that other people have and can enjoy their natural rights.  You are not harmed by not being allowed to intrude yourself into other people’s lives and property.  Unlike the use of that word by the Left, the freedom that we on the Right argue for is true freedom, it allows every individual to prosper, to enterprise, to work, to achieve with their own lives as much as they are able and willing to try to.  The “freedom” that the Left proposes serves only to harm, and eventually destroy, the productive classes in society – the people who build, grow, and advance our society through their efforts.  Eventually, as the history of Communism the world over demonstrates, this ends up hurting everyone when they are brought under tyranny and into the poverty of equal socialist misery.

Ours is the better way, and it’s time we got serious about forcing people to refrain from intruding into our lives and fortunes, forcing them to be free.