Federal Marijuana Legalization Could Raise $130 Billion, Add 1 Million Jobs by 2025

Federal Marijuana Legalization Could Raise $130 Billion, Add 1 Million Jobs by 2025

In addition to putting dent in failed 'War on Drugs,' legalization could put hundreds of thousands of people to work and generate billions in revenue

By Jon Queally
January 10, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - Though a key argument for legalizing marijuana in the United States is that it would put a tremendous and necessary dent in the domestic and global failure known as "the War on Drugs," a new analysis out Wednesday reveals that federal legalization could also raise more than $130 billion in tax revenue by 2025 while also creating more than 1.1 million new jobs.

The new study was published by New Frontier Data—a research and marketing firm whose stated mission is to "inform cannabis-related policy and business decisions through rigorous, issue-neutral and comprehensive analysis of the legal cannabis industry."

As the Drug Policy Alliance has shown, the criminalization regime and enforcement of keeping marijuana and others drugs illegal costs the U.S. government more than $50 billion annually—that includes the outrageous costs of imprisoning tens of thousands of people for nonviolent drug offenses.

Meanwhile, according to New Frontier CEO Giadha Aguirre De Carcer,  the government would stand to do very well if marijuana, as has been shown in Washington state and Colorado, was taxed as a legal commodity. "The three most common business taxes that any standard business pays to the federal government are federal business taxes, payroll taxes and sales taxes," De Carcer explained. "If cannabis businesses were legalized tomorrow and taxed as normal businesses with a standard 35% tax rate, cannabis businesses would infuse the U.S. economy with an additional $12.6 billion this year."

As opposed to the current patchwork of states that have legalized either medical marijuana, its recreational use, or both, the analysis looked at what could happen if the U.S. government made it legal to sell marijuana nationwide and included these major findings:

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If full legalization occurred in all 50 states today, there would be an excess of 782,000 jobs, and would increase to 1.1 million jobs by 2025.
Full legalization would result in more legal businesses participating in the market, more consumers participating in the legal market, and more employees on official payrolls, resulting in $4 billion in payroll taxes. By 2025, payroll deductions would increase to $5.9 billion.
Assuming a sales tax at the federal level was implemented at 15%, the total tax revenues from 2017–2025 would theoretically be $51.7 billion. This amount of revenue would be entirely new revenue to the U.S. Treasury, as there are currently no federal sales or excise taxes.
By combining the business tax revenues, the payroll withholdings based on the theoretical employment required to support the industry, and the 15% retail sales tax, one can calculate the total federal tax revenue potential of legalization: The combined total is estimated to be $131.8 billion.
The difference between the current structure and the theoretical model is a $76.8 billion increase in federal tax revenues.
The new data comes in the wake of polling that shows historic levels of support for marijuana legalization nationwide. In October of 2017, a Gallup survey found that 64 percent of Americans now favor legal marijuana—the highest level ever recorded. It's also an issue that receives backing from people across the political spectrum. According to the Gallup poll, a majority of Republicans (51%) are in favor while Independents (67%) and Democrats (72%) support legalization at even higher levels.

This article was originally published by Common Dreams -

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How Sessions’ Announcement Threw Cannabis Industry Into the Weeds

A Tale of Two Americas: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Go to Jail

A Tale of Two Americas: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Go to Jail

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” ― Nelson Mandela

This is the tale of two Americas, where the rich get richer and the poor go to jail.

Aided and abetted by the likes of Attorney General Jeff Sessions—a man who wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if it smacked him in the face—the American dream has become the American scheme: the rich are getting richer and more powerful, while anyone who doesn’t belong to the power elite gets poorer and more powerless to do anything about the nation’s steady slide towards fascism, authoritarianism and a profit-driven police state.

Not content to merely pander to law enforcement and add to its military largesse with weaponry and equipment designed for war, Sessions has made a concerted effort to expand the police state’s power to search, strip, seize, raid, steal from, arrest and jail Americans for any infraction, no matter how insignificant.

Now Sessions has given state courts the green light to resume their practice of jailing individuals who are unable to pay the hefty fines imposed by the American police state. In doing so, Sessions has once again shown himself to be not only a shill for the Deep State but an enemy of the people.

First, some background on debtors’ prisons, which jail people who cannot afford to pay the exorbitant fines imposed on them by courts and other government agencies.

Congress banned debtors’ prisons in 1833.

In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the practice to be unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause.

“Despite prior attempts on the federal level and across the country to prevent the profound injustice of locking people in cages because they are too poor to pay a debt,” concludes The Atlantic, “the practice persists every day.”

Where things began to change, according to The Marshall Project, was with the rise of “mass incarceration.” As attorney Alec Karakatsanis stated, “In the 1970s and 1980s, we started to imprison more people for lesser crimes. In the process, we were lowering our standards for what constituted an offense deserving of imprisonment, and, more broadly, we were losing our sense of how serious, how truly serious, it is to incarcerate. If we can imprison for possession of marijuana, why can’t we imprison for not paying back a loan?”

By the late 1980s and early 90s, “there was a dramatic increase in the number of statutes listing a prison term as a possible sentence for failure to repay criminal-justice debt.” During the 2000s, the courts started cashing in big-time “by using the threat of jail time – established in those statutes – to squeeze cash out of small-time debtors.”

Fast-forward to the present day which finds us saddled with not only profit-driven private prisons and a prison-industrial complex but also, as investigative reporter Eli Hager notes, “the birth of a new brand of ‘offender-funded’ justice [which] has created a market for private probation companies. Purporting to save taxpayer dollars, these outfits force the offenders themselves to foot the bill for parole, reentry, drug rehab, electronic monitoring, and other services (some of which are not even assigned by a judge). When the offenders can’t pay for all of this, they may be jailed – even if they have already served their time for the offense.”

Follow the money trail. It always points the way.

Whether you’re talking about the government’s war on terrorism, the war on drugs, or some other phantom danger dreamed up by enterprising bureaucrats, there is always a profit-incentive involved.

The same goes for the war on crime.

At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.

Sessions’ latest gambit plays right into the hands of those who make a profit by jailing Americans.

Sharnalle Mitchell was one such victim of a system for whom the plight of the average American is measured in dollars and cents. As the Harvard Law Review recounts:

On January 26, 2014, Sharnalle Mitchell was with her children in Montgomery, Alabama when police showed up at her home to arrest her. Mitchell was not accused of a crime. Instead, the police came to her home because she had not fully paid a traffic ticket from 2010. The single mother was handcuffed in front of her children (aged one and four) and taken to jail. She was ordered to either pay $2,800 or sit her debt out in jail at a rate of fifty dollars a day for fifty-nine days. Unable to pay, Mitchell wrote out the numbers one to fifty-eight on the back of her court documents and began counting days.

This is not justice.

This is yet another example of how greed and profit-incentives have not only perverted policing in America but have corrupted the entire criminal justice system.

As the Harvard Law Review concludes:

[A]s policing becomes a way to generate revenue, police start to “see the people they’re supposed to be serving not as citizens with rights, but as potential sources of revenue, as lawbreakers to be caught.” This approach creates a fugitive underclass on the run from police not to hide illicit activity but to avoid arrest for debt or seizure of their purportedly suspicious assets… In turn, communities … begin to see police not as trusted partners but as an occupying army constantly harassing them to raise money to pay their salaries and buy new weapons. This needs to end.

Unfortunately, the criminal justice system has been operating as a for-profit enterprise for years now, covertly padding its pockets through penalty-riddled programs aimed at maximizing revenue rather than ensuring public safety.

All of those seemingly hard-working police officers and code-enforcement officers and truancy officers and traffic cops handing out ticket after ticket after ticket: they’re not working to make your communities safer—they’ve got quotas to fill.

Same goes for the courts, which have come to rely on fines, fees and exorbitant late penalties as a means of increased revenue. The power of these courts, magnified in recent years through the introduction of specialty courts beyond your run-of-the-mill traffic court (drug court, homeless court, veterans court, mental health court, criminal court, teen court, gambling court, prostitution court, community court, domestic violence court, truancy court), is “reshaping the American legal system—with little oversight,” concludes the Boston Globe.

And for those who can’t afford to pay the court fines heaped on top of the penalties ($302 for jaywalking, $531 for an overgrown yard, or $120 for arriving a few minutes late to court), there’s probation (managed by profit-run companies that tack on their own fees, which are often more than double the original fine) or jail time (run by profit-run companies that charge inmates for everything from food and housing to phone calls at outrageous markups), which only adds to the financial burdens of those already unable to navigate a costly carceral state.

“When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor,” stated former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “Not because they’re a danger or a flight risk — only because they are poor. They don’t have money to get out of jail, and they certainly don’t have money to flee anywhere. Other people who do have the means can avoid the system, setting inequality in place from the beginning.”

In “Policing and Profit,” the Harvard Law Review documents in chilling detail the criminal justice system’s efforts to turn a profit at the expense of those who can least afford to pay, thereby entrapping them in a cycle of debt that starts with one minor infraction:

In the late 1980s, Missouri became one of the first states to let private companies purchase the probation systems of local governments. In these arrangements, municipalities impose debt on individuals through criminal proceedings and then sell this debt to private businesses, which pad the debt with fees and interest. This debt can stem from fines for offenses as minor as rolling through a stop sign or failing to enroll in the right trash collection service. In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don’t appear in court after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can’t pay their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail. If an arrestee owes fines in more than one of St. Louis County’s eighty-one municipal courts, they are passed from one jail to another to await hearings in each town.

Ask yourself this: at a time when crime rates across the country remain at historic lows (despite Sessions’ inaccurate claims to the contrary), why does the prison population continue to grow?

The prison population continues to grow because of a glut of laws that criminalize activities that should certainly not be outlawed, let alone result in jail time. Overcriminalization continues to plague the country because of legislators who work hand-in-hand with corporations to adopt laws that favor the corporate balance sheet. And when it comes to incarceration, the corporate balance sheet weighs heavily in favor of locking up more individuals in government-run and private prisons.

As Time reports, “The companies that build and run private prisons have a financial interest in the continued growth of mass incarceration. That is why the two major players in this game—the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group—invest heavily in lobbying for punitive criminal justice policies and make hefty contributions to political campaigns that will increase reliance on prisons.”

It’s a vicious cycle that grows more vicious by the day.

According to The Atlantic, “America spends $80 billion a year incarcerating 2.4 million people.” But the costs don’t end there. “When someone goes to prison, nearly 65 percent of families are suddenly unable to pay for basic needs such as food and housing... About 70 percent of those families are caring for children under the age of 18.”

Then there are the marked-up costs levied against the inmate by private companies that provide services and products to government prisons. Cereal and soup for five times the market price. $15 for a short phone call.

The Center for Public Integrity found that “prison bankers collect tens of millions of dollars every year from inmates’ families in fees for basic financial services. To make payments, some forego medical care, skip utility bills and limit contact with their imprisoned relatives… Inmates earn as little as 12 cents per hour in many places, wages that have not increased for decades. The prices they pay for goods to meet their basic needs continue to increase.”

Worse, as human rights attorney Jessica Jackson points out, “the fines and fees system has turned local governments into the equivalent of predatory lenders.” For instance, Jackson cites:

Washington state charges a 12% interest rate on all its criminal debt. Florida adds a 40% fee that goes into the pockets of a private collections agency. In California, penalties can raise a $100 fine to $490, or $815 if the initial deadline is missed. A $500 traffic ticket can actually cost $1,953, even if it is paid on time. And so we are left with countless tales of lives ruined—people living paycheck to paycheck who cannot afford a minor fine, and so face ballooning penalties, increasing amounts owed, a suspended license, jail time, and being fired from their jobs or unable to find work.

This isn’t the American Dream I grew up believing in.

This certainly isn’t the American Dream my parents and grandparents and those before them worked and fought and sacrificed to achieve.

This is a cold, calculated system of profit and losses.

Now you can shrug all of this away as a consequence of committing a crime, but that just doesn’t cut it. Especially not when average Americans are being jailed for such so-called crimes as eating SpaghettiOs (police mistook them for methamphetamine), not wearing a seatbelt, littering, jaywalking, having homemade soap (police mistook the soap for cocaine), profanity, spitting on the ground, farting, loitering and twerking.

There is no room in the American police state for self-righteousness. Not when we are all guilty until proven innocent.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

It is fast becoming a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations,” and its rise to power is predicated on shackling the American taxpayer to a debtors’ prison guarded by a phalanx of politicians, bureaucrats and militarized police with no hope of parole and no chance for escape.



By John W. Whitehead

The war on Trump

The Lawyers' War on Trump

 Daniel Greenfield

The original civil war was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new civil war is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.

From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, from political sabotage at the DOJ by Obama appointees like Sally Yates to Patagonia’s lawsuit over national monuments, the cold civil war set off by the left’s rejection of the 2016 election results has been a paper war largely waged by lawyers.

“The biggest threat to New Yorkers right now is the federal government,” Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York recently declared. The radical leftist pol who had once vowed to do everything possible to elect Hillary Clinton was explaining his hundred lawsuits against the government on everything from net neutrality to the travel ban meant to keep out the Islamic terrorists running over tourists near Ground Zero and bombing commuters in the tunnels off Times Square.

Islamic terrorists have killed thousands of people in New York City in the last two decades. Net neutrality’s current death toll hovers around zero. The Federal government is far less of a threat to New Yorkers than their own government which insists that Islamic terrorists should be able to kill them. But it is a great threat to a class of political lawyers whose ranks include AG Schneiderman, Hawaii’s Judge Derrick Watson, Mueller’s team, Sally Yates, the ACLU and countless other #resistance combatants.

The blatant secessionism of the AG’s premise is no longer extraordinary. Not when California’s Jerry Brown tours the world signing independent environmental treaties. Schneiderman is one of a number of blue state attorney generals who have decided that their primary focus shouldn’t be enforcing the law, but resisting the Federal government. But Scheiderman is also articulating the central tenet of the new #resistance which, despite Antifa’s antics, is more dedicated to legal sabotage than actual violence.

It’s still a paper civil war. For now.

The loss of the two elected branches of government has forced the left to default to the unelected third. Like AG Schneiderman, the left’s legal civil war appears to reject the authority of the Federal government. But despite the posturing, blue staters aren’t serious about seceding. Nor have they become newfound converts to the rights of states to go their own way when they disagree with D.C.

New York and California’s #resistance apparatchiks aren’t rejecting the authority of Federal judges. They’re turning to them and relying on them. Instead they’re rejecting the authority of elected Federal officials. Their secession isn’t Federal, it’s democratic. They want a strong central government. They just aren’t willing to allow the American people to decide who gets to run it.

That’s what the civil war is about.

Will the American people govern themselves? Or will Mueller, Schneiderman, Watson, Yates and ten thousand other elites with law degrees be allowed to turn elections into a meaningless farce?

Federal judges have seized previously unimaginable amounts of power by not only blocking orders that had always been considered an essential part of presidential authority on flimsy premises that when dissected amount to a critique of President Trump’s character (not to mention the sovereign entitlement of the University of Hawaii to set national immigration policy for the entire country based on its urgent need for Syrian grad students), but by demanding that agencies under the control of the President of the United States enact their orders, such as accepting transgender military recruits.

The absurd outcomes of these rulings, that the University of Hawaii can set national immigration policy, but not the President of the United States, and that fitness to serve in the military can be determined by a Federal judge, but not by the military or the commander in chief, are only an irrational side effect of a conflict between the elected branches of government and an unelected class of political lawyers.

The Mueller investigation has to be seen in the context of a battle between the democratic powers of the people to choose their own representatives and the lawyers who actually run the government. Elections are being replaced by investigations and litigation as the engines of government. You don’t need to win an election to investigate elected officials. You don’t need public support to sue either.

Government by litigation and investigation shifts power away from voters to lawyers. What was meant to be a last resort for redressing serious violations instead becomes the primary test for holding political office. When investigation and litigation become more powerful tools than en election, then a politician must court the political legal class ahead of the country’s voters and put his obligations to them first.

That intended outcome is also the cause of the conflict.

President Trump refused to put the political class ahead of the voters. The legal civil war is being fought to reaffirm the centrality of the establishment over the voters. The civil war is a conflict between the political class and the people. It’s a struggle over the tools of government being waged with those tools.

Populism isn’t always a threat to the establishment. Obama’s populism didn’t threaten the establishment because its purpose was to reaffirm its power. Hope and Change just meant building a coalition that would vote for more government power in exchange for political goodies. But Trump’s populism challenges the existence of the establishment and its ability to distribute those goodies.

Politicians often run against the political machine. But most just want to pull the levers. Trump has challenged its power and its existence. And that is what set off the civil war.

Legal conflict is the last stage before physical conflict. The lawyers’ war is a last ditch effort by the establishment to wrest physical control of the government from President Trump. Unable to give the orders as the representatives of the people, the left is asserting every possible valid and invalid legal stratagem to run the government anyway. And to run President Trump out of town.

If its legal gambit fails, the left will default fully to mass protests, street violence and terrorism.

But the beauty of the legal gambit is that it allows the left to make common cause with establishment non-radicals like Mueller or the FBI’s Strzok who disprove of President Trump without sharing the left’s larger political agenda. A civil war fought by lawyers is cleaner and less ugly than one fought with bombs and bullets. If President Trump can survive the lawyers’ war, his opposition will be split between radicals who support violence and an establishment that wants to keep things running.

That is the Mueller test.

If the Democrats can’t sweep into office on the investigation’s coattails, the whole thing dies with a whimper. As Trump reshapes the judiciary, the judicial activism will matter less. The lawyers’ war will either end with the next election. Or it will begin in earnest. And only voter turnout will decide that.

Meanwhile the civil war continues. It’s a civil war fought with paperwork. But its outcome will determine whether the “government of the people, by the people, for the people” that President Lincoln invoked in the Gettysburg Address will thrive or “perish from the earth.”

Governments are run by bullets and paper, by force and process. Today’s civil war is still a paper war. But if the paper civil war fails, the rest of it may be fought the same way as the original civil war.






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We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.

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I am my brother's keeper.

The Race to Censor Internet News

The Race to Censor Internet News

How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off? Easy. It’s becoming a business model.

Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard. This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red. Forget politically unbiased algorithms. The ratings will be conducted by "qualified, accountable human beings" from teams of “40 to 60 journalists.” Once upon a time, journalism meant original writing. Now it means deciding which original writing to censor. 

"Can trust be monetized?" The Street’s article on News Guard asks. But it isn’t really trust that’s being monetized. It’s censorship. It’s doing the dirty work that Google and Facebook don’t want to do. 

The Dems and their media allies have been pressuring Google and Facebook to do something about the “fake news” that they blame for Trump’s win. The big sites outsourced the censorship to media fact checkers. The message was, “Don’t blame us, now you’re in charge.” 

Facebook made a deal with ABC News and the AP, along with Politifact, FactCheck and Snopes, to outsource the censoring for $100K. When two of these left-wing groups declare that an article is fake, Facebook marks it up and viewership drops by 80%. 

Facebook is reportedly considering adding the Weekly Standard to its panel of fact checkers. Even if that were to happen, it would be the difference between putting the New York Times without David Brooks or the Times with David Brooks in charge of deciding what you can read on Facebook. Adding a token conservative who is acceptable to the left doesn’t change the inherent bias of the system. 

Not only does the roster of fact checkers lean to the left, but so do its notions of what’s true and false. For example, Snopes and Politifact both insist that General Pershing’s forces never buried the bodies of Muslim terrorists with pigs. But General Pershing specifically stated in his autobiography, "These Juramentado attacks were materially reduced in number by a practice that the Mohamedans held in abhorrence. The bodies were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig.” 

Both the New York Times and the Scientific American reported on it at the time. Despite that Snopes rated this widely accepted historical fact as “False” and Politifact marked it as “Pants on Fire”. 

Snopes also recently marked a story that Christ Church in Virginia is removing a George Washington plaque as false even though the church publicly announced that it was doing so. 

Politifact and Snopes are entitled to their incorrect opinions. The trouble is that they don’t extend the same privilege to those they disagree with. And Google and Facebook promote fake fact checks while burying sites that discuss actual historical facts. The big internet companies don’t want to get involved in all these arguments. But nor are they willing to let their users decide for themselves anymore. 

And so Net Nanny for news has become an actual business model. Instead of protecting children from pornography, News Nanny protects adults from news. And from views outside the left’s bubble. 

By adopting the News Nanny model, Google and Facebook are treating their users like children. 

The News Guard model is in some ways even more insidious than biased fact checking because it sets up lists of approved and disapproved sites. Google is rolling out something similar with its “knowledge panels” for publishers. Search for the New York Times and the panels will tell you how many Pulitzers the paper has won. Search for Front Page Magazine and the panel note describes it as, “Political alignment: Right-wing politics”. No note listing a left-wing political alignment appears in the panel for the New York Times despite its recent laudatory series about the Soviet Union and Communism. 

The media never has an official political orientation. Not even when it’s cheering Communism. But its opponents and critics always have one. Follow Google’s link for Front Page’s political alignment and the top entry states, “Right-wing politics hold that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable”. 

That’s a wholly inaccurate description of either Front Page Magazine or conservative politics in America. And it’s another example of how the fight against “fake news” by the left actually ends up producing it. 

And it isn’t meant to stop there. 

The Google Blog casually mentions that the panels will also list, “claims the publisher has made that have been reviewed by third parties”. You get one guess as to who those “third parties” will be. 

Fact checking has become a pipeline to censorship. The big social and search companies outsource fact checking to third parties and then demonetize, marginalize and outright ban views and publishers that those third parties disagree with. Fact checks are no longer an argument. They’re the prelude to a ban. 

Google and Facebook respectively dominate search and social media. When they appoint official censors for their services, those left-wing fact checkers become the gatekeepers of the internet. 

And the internet isn’t supposed to have gatekeepers. 

Senator Al Franken, of all people, made that point at the Open Markets Institute. OMI’s people have emerged as the leading opponents of big tech monopolies on the left. 

“No one company should have the power to pick and choose which content reaches consumers and which doesn’t,” Franken said. “And Facebook, Google and Amazon, like ISPs, should be neutral in their treatment of the flow of lawful information and commerce on their platform.” 

There is no more obvious example of the lack of neutrality than Facebook and Google’s partnership with “fact checkers”. If Net Neutrality means anything, it should strike down Google’s partnership with Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network and Facebook’s use of Snopes to silence conservatives. 

When sites picked and chose content based on algorithms, they were deciding which content reached users based on what was likely to be popular. And, occasionally, based on their own agendas. Now they are picking and choosing which content reaches users based on political orientation. While the advocates for Net Neutrality rage against cable companies, Comcast and Charter aren’t engaging in political censorship. No matter how they disguise it, Google and Facebook’s news nannies are. 

News Guard is an ominous warning that online censorship is becoming a viable business model as the big tech companies look around for someone else to do their dirty work for them. But subcontracted censorship is still censorship. And the only people impressed by the credentials of the “fact checkers” are those who share their politics. Unfortunately that covers the leadership of Google and Facebook. 

Discussions about fake news often begin and end with “trust”. Major media outlets with Pulitzers are trustworthy. Major fact checking operations are also trustworthy. Even Snopes is somehow trustworthy despite its utter lack of professionalism, and its founders accusing each other of embezzlement, 

But “trust” has more than one meaning. We trust those people and organizations we like. And sometimes those organizations form a trust. And anyone who isn’t in, is untrustworthy. 

Trust in the mainstream media has never been lower. Yet the big tech companies insist that mainstream media sources are the only trustworthy ones. They want us to trust them, because they don’t trust us. 

The internet was a revolutionary environment that liberated individuals to make their own choices. Bloggers could compete with big media. Leaked emails could bring down a government. But the internet is becoming less free. Access is controlled by a handful of tech companies that keep getting bigger and bigger. The survivors of the scale wars will combine cable, content and commerce in new ways. And in a politicized culture, they won’t just signal their political views, they will enforce them. 

If we don’t fight now, ten years from now conservatives will be the rats in the walls of the internet.

Democrats snd Bill Clinton ?

Why the Democrats Really Turned on Bill Clinton

In the winter of ’56, Khrushchev told the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that Stalin may not have been a very nice guy. In the fall of ’17, the media began to concede that maybe Bill Clinton did abuse a whole bunch of women. And maybe those women weren’t really part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to make a bloated piggish progressive hero seem like he might not be a very nice guy.

Why are Democrats turning on the Clintons? Same reason Khrushchev turned on Stalin. They’re purging the Clintons for the same reasons that they defended them. They’re calling out Bill Clinton for his sexual assaults for the same reasons that they covered them up. It’s about power and money.

The Democrats smeared Bill Clinton’s accusers then. Now they’ll exploit them to throw the Clintons out. 

The #MeToo campaign provided an opening. But if you really want to understand why the left is disavowing Bill Clinton, ignore the hashtags and look at the bigger picture. 

Earlier this month, the rollout of Donna Brazile’s book raked Hillary Clinton and her campaign over the coals. The former interim DNC boss made the case that the Clinton campaign had rigged the primaries. 

Brazile’s outrage at the rigging is laughable. Not only was she caught passing a debate question to Hillary, but the only reason she was allowed to replace Debbie Wasserman Schultz is that she was a Clintonista who had served as a Clinton adviser and was promoted to head Gore’s campaign. 

After Hillary’s collapse, Brazile was left out in the cold. Like Schultz, she was one of Hillary’s fall girls. And unlike Schultz, she didn’t have a cozy congressional district to call her own. Her CNN contract was torn up after the debate question leak. (Though if you think CNN was actually surprised that a Clinton ally leaked it to the Clintons, you’re also shocked that there’s gambling going on at Rick's Cafe Americain. CNN had disavow Donna who then had to disavow Hillary. Now the Dems are disavowing the Clintons.) 

Brazile’s book tour was Act 1 in purging the Clintons from the Dem establishment. Talking about Bill Clinton’s sexual harassment and abuses is Act 2. And the odds are very good that there’s an Act 3. 

Why get rid of the Clintons? Let’s look at what the First Grifters have been doing to the Dems. 

In May, Hillary rolled out Onward Together. The new SuperPAC was supposed to fundraise for lefty groups. But the groups don’t actually appear to be getting the cash. 

Understandable. The flat broke Clintons always have lots of bills to pay and private jets to book. And good chardonnay doesn’t come cheap. A 1787 vintage Chateau d'Yquem runs to $100K a bottle. 

Fresh from that success, a paid advisor to Hillary co-launched something being called Party Majority. This wonderful new organization would “act as a parallel structure to Democratic Party committees at the national and state levels”, vacuuming up a whole lot of cash while putting its boot on the DNC. 

The Clintons were once again trying to displace the DNC. And that would let them skim a lot of cash from the DNC to fund their political operation and lifestyle. And, even once again, rig the process. 

Who’s up for Hillary in 2020? 

Party Majority rolled out in early November. Since then the Clintons are suddenly being hit from all sides by their own. 

Funny how that works. 

If President Hillary Clinton were in the White House, the First Gentleman could work his way through an entire nunnery and every media outlet in the country would praise him as our greatest feminist. 

If the Clintons had done the decent thing (for the first time in their miserable grifter lives) and stepped away from politics, Bill could have been a bitter, bigoted and befuddled Democrat elder statesman. 

Just like Jimmy Carter. 

But the Clintons just wouldn’t stop. And so the circular firing squad has finally been convened. Its members are hypocritically pretending that they’re purging Bill because they suddenly care about the women he had sexually assaulted over the years. 

It only took the Dems an entire generation to figure out that rape is wrong. 

Hillary Clinton’s approval ratings are terrible. Every time she goes on television, more people are likely to vote Republican. Her entire existence is a reminder of why the Democrats lost so badly in ’16. 

Not only won’t Hillary Clinton retire to bake cookies and send anonymous threatening letters to her neighbors because their kids occasionally throw a ball over her mansion’s iron gates, but she insists on sabotaging the 2020 candidates who are her party’s best hope to succeed where she miserably failed. 

Hillary Clinton’s book, What Happened, took numerous shots at Bernie Sanders. And her entire book tour appeared designed to sabotage his book tour. Then she began attacking Joe Biden. 

Both Bernie and Joe, unlike her, are viable 2020 candidates. (Which says nothing good about the Dems.) 

The media doesn’t suddenly “believe Juanita”. Or rather it always knew that Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones and the other women were telling the truth. It didn’t silence them because it thought they were lying. It silenced them because they were telling the truth about its guy.

Now Bill Clinton isn’t the media’s guy anymore. He’s a problem. 

And what the media does “believe” is that the Clintons will continue to be a liability that might cost them victories in 2018 and 2020. The DNC badly needs money. The Clintons are once again posing a threat to the DNC’s financial viability. And the Dems have become less willing to lose House and Senate seats to sate the insatiable greed of the grifters from Hope. 

Then there’s 2020. The Dems don’t want to risk their nominee facing passive aggressive attacks by Hillary Clinton. Nor do they even want to see Hillary Clinton on the air for the entire election. 

The Clintons could have had a nice retirement. Seats on boards and foundations. Occasional smaller scale speaking gigs. Bill would have been a featured speaker at the next DNC convention. 

And maybe even Hillary in a lesser role. 

But they wouldn’t go quietly. And now the left is making it a mandatory retirement. 

Act 1 blames Hillary for rigging the primaries. Act 2 calls out Bill’s abuse of women. Acts 3, 4 and 5 will delve into some other Clinton scandals that Democrats have been denying for over a generation. If the Clintons don’t get the message, the final act will plant a big red boot in their behinds. 

And this won’t even be the first time that the Dems tried to get rid of the Clintons. 

After Bill’s time was up, the Dems and the media tried to head off a Hillary political career at the pass. Let’s flip through the pages of the New York Times in 2001 that describes Hillary's “calamitous Senate debut” and cautions that “talk about her presidential prospects has ground to a halt.” 

“The man is so thoroughly corrupt it's frightening,” a Times column reads. “The Clintons may or may not be led away in handcuffs someday.” 

In AmSoc, history is constantly being rewritten. A few years later, no criticism of the Clintons could be allowed. And everyone forgot that Carter’s chief-of-staff had called them, “The First Grifters.” 

Or at least they pretended to forget. 

It’s not the first time that the Dems have tried to get rid of the Clintons. But it might be the last. 

Like Stalin’s Communist successors, Democrats should not be allowed to pretend that they knew nothing or that their purge of the Clintons is motivated by a sudden attack of integrity. 

They’re purging the Clintons for the same reason that they covered up for them. 

They’re calling out Bill Clinton for his sexual assaults for the same reason that they covered them up. 

They did it out of political self-interest then. And they’re doing it out of political self-interest now. There’s nothing clean or honest about what they’re doing. There’s no moral reckoning here. Only a political reckoning. It’s not about the women Bill abused. It’s about DNC cash and the 2020 election. 

That’s the dirty, ugly truth. And it’s as dirty and ugly as the Clintons and the Democrats.

How Obama Brought Back Muslim Enslavement of Black People

How Obama Brought Back Muslim Enslavement of Black People

America’s first black president didn’t bring “Hope” to America, but he did bring slave auctions to Africa. After Obama “liberated” Libya for the Islamist rebels, Arab Muslims sell black slaves for a few hundred dollars at slave auctions.

While leftists tear down the statues of slave owners from centuries ago, it was the left that brought back the sale of black men as property. 

Slavery was always one of Barack Obama’s favorite subjects. 

It was a favorite subject because it provided him with countless opportunities for tearing down America. 

When called upon to disavow the racist, anti-Semitic and anti-American rants of his mentor, he instead denounced the Constitution as “stained by this nation's original sin of slavery.” At the funeral of the Dallas police officers murdered by a member of the racist hate group he supported, he once again invoked this original sin even while he was justifying Black Lives Matter’s bigotry and violence. 

At Hillary’s DNC convention, Michelle Obama claimed that the White House had been “built by slaves”. 

The unifying theme was that America’s racist past made its origins, including their constitutional restraints on his power, illegitimate. A Constitution tainted by slavery should not be able to inhibit the actions of the nation’s first black president. His wife had a special moral authority over the White House because it had been built by slaves. Slavery gave the Obamas a unique moral claim on power. 

But Barack Obama and his ancestors had never been slaves. They might have been slave owners and sellers. And America’s first black president unquestionably helped bring Muslim slavery back to Libya.

After Obama invaded Libya to aid the Muslim Brotherhood, black slaves are being sold there once more. 

Videos show black people being put up for sale for as little as $400 by Arab Libyan Muslim slave traders. The black men being sold as slaves are described as “big strong boys for farm work.” 

After years of lecturing Americans about the “original sin” of slavery, Obama brought it back. 

The black men being sold as slaves are Nigerians. Islam forbids Muslims to enslave Muslims. Nigeria has a large non-Muslim population. It is likely another case of Arab Muslims selling Christians into slavery. 

Unlike President Bush, Obama paid little attention to Africa. When he did pay attention to Africa, it was largely to reward Muslim violence against African Christians in Nigeria, Kenya or Côte d'Ivoire. 

And, most prominently, Libya. 

Obama’s Arab Spring encouraged Islamist movements in their bids for power whether they used ballots or bullets. The resulting devastation in the Middle East, with its death toll in the hundreds of thousands, and the rise of ISIS, has captured the world’s attention. But the Islamist wave spread chaos and terror through Africa. Egypt and Tunisia fell into the hands of Islamist killers who brutalized their own people even as the media cheered these “democratic revolutions”. Boko Haram allied with ISIS in Nigeria. 

And Obama illegally bombed Libya to aid the Muslim Brotherhood and allied Islamist groups in their bid for power. The regime change operation in Libya had been urged on by Hillary Clinton. The former Secretary of State had been encouraged by her associates to use it as a platform for a presidential run. But the Islamist takeover in Libya made for a bad photo op. Our attempts to address the flow of Qatari weapons into the hands of terrorists (after Obama gave a pass to their weapons smuggling scheme during the civil war) led to the Benghazi massacre. And the blackest stain on Hillary’s record. 

But it didn’t stop with Benghazi. 

Libya tumbled into a second civil war between Islamists and the Libyan government. Despite the media blackout, the violence touched off by Obama’s regime change has never really stopped. ISIS has a significant presence in Libya. And until recently had a death grip on parts of Benghazi. 

And that isn’t the worst of it. 

The Islamist Arab rebels had quickly begun targeting Africans during the civil war in a racist purge. Photos and videos showed beheadings, beatings and mutilations. The false claims of genocide in Benghazi that Obama had used to justify his invasion became real when his invasion led to the actual ethnic cleansing of Africans in Libya. 

The first black president, who had allied with hate groups such as Black Lives Matter that accused America of genocide, had made possible an actual genocide of black people by his Arab Muslim allies. 

The rebels he had armed and backed would identify themselves as, “The Brigade for Purging Slaves, Black Skin”. 

And then it got even worse. 

The Tuaregs, a Berber Islamist people whose leaders claim to trace their “pure” ancestry back to Mohammed, invaded and captured a large section of Mali. Accompanying them were Al Qaeda Jihadists. The Tuaregs keep slaves and have been at war with the “blacks”. Their hostilities were motivated in large part by the conviction that “blacks” were slaves while they were the descendants of Mohammed. 

Obama ignored another racist Islamist war caused by his pro-Islamist intervention. Instead it was the French that stepped up. The recent deaths of four American soldiers in Niger however can be traced back to the disaster in Mali. 

Sgt. La David Johnson, the African-American soldier whose condolence call by President Trump touched off a storm of leftist outrage, was murdered after being captured and tied up. The Jihadists who murdered Johnson are believed to be from the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, an ISIS affiliate empowered by the Mali invasion, whose perpetrators are from a group deeming themselves “white”. 

While President Trump has been accused of racism by Rep. Frederica Wilson over the death of the African-American soldier, it was Obama who had empowered the racist Islamists that murdered him. 

Meanwhile back in Libya, the slave trade has made a comeback. Videos show public slave auctions in Libya where light skinned Arab Libyans sell black Nigerians for a few hundred dollars. 

The slave auction, that terrible institution, wasn’t brought back by the right. It was the left. 

Slavery isn’t new to the Islamic world. And where Islam rules, slavery returns. The leftist-Islamist alliance doesn’t just mean the burning of churches and the bombing of synagogues, or that Jewish students are hounded out of college campuses while European streets flow with blood. 

Muslims immigrants have brought slaves to America. When Islamists took over Egypt, one of their political projects was undoing the ban on slavery. "It's not possible to say that slavery is inherently absolutely categorically immoral in all times and places since it was allowed by the Quran and the Prophet," Professor Jonathan Brown, an Islamic Civilization professor, at Georgetown, insisted. 

Brown is an Islamic convert. The Washington Post, and the rest of the left, came to his defense. 

The left spends a great deal of time lecturing Americans on the evils of slavery. But it is they and their allies, from Cuba to Libya, who practice slavery today. 

The slave auction is ancient history in America. But Obama’s Islamist alliance brought it back to Africa.

Identity Politics Works Until You Run Out of Other People

Identity Politics Works Until You Run Out of Other People

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously observed that socialism works until you run out of other people’s money. Identity politics also works until you run out of other people.

And then #MeToo becomes #NotMeToo. 

Other people’s money can be borrowed against. That’s why we have the national debt that we do. But identity politics has multiplied too abruptly and explosively to postpone the reckoning much longer. What were once simple categories of three races and two genders has mutated into an infinite alphabet of sexual identities, a Big Bang of ethnicities, national, cultural, racial and religious, each with its own microaggressions, that easily tops two hundred and shows no signs of slowing down its expansion. 

Intersectionality, the Das Kapital of identity politics economics, tries to manage the complex network of interactions even as it purges Jews and white people. And now it’s even starting to purge men. 

The left is running out of other people. 

#MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, the campus purges of ‘whiteness’ and ‘toxic masculinity’, the civil wars within the LGBT alphabet soup all point to the ‘other people’ crisis of the left. The latest social justice wave has made men, white people and even white gay men into hate objects. The resentment coalition of identity politics is fracturing into a tribal war of identity microgroups against everyone else. 

The economics of socialism and the political economics of identity politics both come down to the core leftist creed of redistributing the wealth and privilege supposedly hoarded by a minority. Seize all the wealth from the rich and fund free health care. Take away white privilege and open up society. Open the borders of the United States to the Third World. Shut down factories and end all pollution. Destroy capitalism, the patriarchy, heteronormativity, whiteness and every other strawman raised up by the left. 

That is the engine of the three radical R’s of the left: Resentment, Revolution and Redistribution. 

It’s a scam. Like every scam, it relies on using the greed of the mark against him. Con artists are in the easy money business. They promise the men and women they scam that they can have easy money. But it’s only the con artist who ends up easily making money out of the deal. That’s the scam the left pulls. 

It’s why leftist politics is the greatest and deadliest scam ever perpetrated in human history. 

The Russian peasants who were promised their own land were instead chained to feudal collectivist farms. They were reduced to sharecroppers who were unable to leave the lands of their masters. The workers who were promised bread starved in the cities. The soldiers who were promised peace died in a more horrifying war. When Stalin told his mother that he was the new czar, the scam was complete. 

It was the same story from the Soviet Union to Communist China, from Cuba to Cambodia, from the ghettoes of blue states to the rusting factories of union shops, from the decaying farmlands of Europe to the blighted working class of Britain. The scam ends with mass misery for everyone except the leftist scammers. The revolutionaries get rich and powerful while everyone else loses everything. 

But every scam has a choke point. That’s where the bait turns out to be the hook. It’s where the revolution runs out of other people’s money and comes for your life savings. It’s when environmentalism doesn’t mean shutting someone else’s factory, but raising your energy bills, banning your plastic bags and shutting down the business that pays your wages. 

It’s when the new horrible racist or sexist of the week isn’t that guy on the news. It’s you. 

The choke point is when the revolution you supported runs out of all the other people who supposedly had it coming. And its machinery of smears, thievery and murder (for the people) reaches you. 

The great scam of the left is convincing the majority that the solution to their problems lies with a small minority. Get rid of the 1 percent and the 99 percent will live like kings. Get rid of a few southern racists and we can all be brothers. Ban X, regulate Y and outlaw Z and we’ll all be better off for it. 

The choke point is when the small minority expands to include you. And then it’s no longer a few billionaires. It’s the upper middle class. And then it’s the entire middle class. It’s all white people. It’s all men. And then it’s everyone. The minority turns out to be the majority. And that’s the scam. 

Identity politics is approaching its own choke point. It’s running out of other people. 

The theme of intersectionality is that everyone is privileged and everyone is oppressed. The choke point of identity politics is being hidden behind complex formulas that openly stigmatize all white people and all men, but that’s the bait that actually and ultimately lines up everyone for privilege redistribution. 

The war on ‘whiteness’, a racist academic construct, is the identity politics equivalent of the denunciations of the middle class. The ‘white privilege’ slogan makes it clear that the left isn’t just coming for a small indefensible minority (which is where the left always starts its lynch mob), but for a narrow and envied majority. White people in identity politics, like the middle class in economics, are the choke point where the seductive 1 percent lie gives way to the lesser lie that splits society apart. 

Intersectionality is the identity politics equivalent of Bolshevism. Inside its rhetoric and formulas is the final and fatal truth that it isn’t merely a narrow minority that must be dispossessed, but everyone. It’s not only a small minority or even a majority that is guilty. Everyone is oppressive. Everyone is guilty. 

Universal guilt is the jagged hook waiting at the end of the shiny lure. The left educates its marks into resenting easy targets and then expands that resentment into circles that eventually encompass our entire society. No race, class or gender is truly exempt. Eventually the purges even reach the acolytes of the left. Just ask the old Bolsheviks of the USSR or the leftist media heads rolling under #MeToo. 

It’s the final stop of leftist politics where all its rotten ideas sink into the muck. Everyone is guilty of polluting the environment. And everyone must pay the carbon tax. Everyone has privilege and must check their privilege. Everyone has too much money. Even if they hardly have anything at all. 

The left is not in the business of partial revolutions. That too is part of the scam. Its revolutions are total. And totally fatal. The revolutions begin with the 1 percent, but they are meant to end with 100 percent. 

Leftist revolutions run on resentment and greed. And when they have worked through the most obvious targets of that resentment and greed, they will turn on anyone who can be resented or envied. 

And that’s everyone. Everyone is enviable to at least one other person. And that’s enough. 

Intersectionality’s mantra of universal privilege and guilt is in the toxic DNA of leftist politics. Everyone is guilty. Everyone must pay. No race, gender or class provides any ultimate immunity from the reckoning. With so many identities, the next purge can come from anywhere. Even as the left rages against Trump, its own civil war is underway. Sandernistas are battling Clintonistas. Every group is asserting its own oppression. Leftists are readying a final purge of pro-life Dems. Campus culture denounces whiteness. Everyone is waiting for the next social justice hashtag to sweep through with its wave of political terror. 

The revolution is here. And leftists are running out of other people to feed to the guillotine.

Freedom of Conscience To What Extent

The Price of Freedom: Renewing Courage and Conscience

The Perspective

Freedom is sweat, tears and blood. Indeed, history is replete and continues to repeat itself in a cause of a struggle to redeem one's nation and people. When men and women brush aside the fear for personal safety, ready to pay a price for human dignity and discover strength by confronting evil and say "NO MORE", swift victory is certain to be won. When men and women who live by the power of inward moral conviction, and are not under bondage to outward restrictions; energy is bond to release that conquer's evil.

This article is a testimony of my effort to deepen the understanding of our readers and as a medium to express my respect, pay tribute to and applaud the Liberian Human Rights Community that has paid, and continues to pay, a thankless price for raising an active voice against the evil and human rights tragedy that is consuming our country and its people. The Liberian Human Rights Activists with firm sense of social responsibility who are compelled by international standards to call the Government of Liberia to judgment for its horrible human rights violations, and change its policies and implement good governance, have suffered severe punishment under the regime of Charles Taylor.

Instead of giving respectability to these national heroes of conscience for their service to humanity, they are imprisoned and charged with bogus crimes, tortured and forced to leave the country for fear of their lives.

These unplanned departures of the lucky ones have proven too bitter a pill to swallow. These faint-hearted, spirited and dashing young men and women whose struggle and crusade for the respect of human dignity and the rule of law are made to suffer because of their commitment to protecting the rights of the people. Taylor sanctions these inhumane acts and his loyal disciples have destroyed the souls and hope of these courageous people for trying to save their beloved country. Yes, their escape has destroyed families, as some were breadwinners for their families, leaving what they have worked for and owned.

In this vein, we pray for our colleagues back home who in the face of growing threats continue to speak out and face persecution at the hands of the government's insane security men, who are graduates of the school of death and holding the sword in their hands waiting for order from their supreme commander to persecute and execute human rights defenders. These mass murderers and high-core sadists and their chief have considered human rights defenders (moral crusaders), as troublemakers and enemies of the state. What a pity!

I write from experience. I was there and felt the pains and wrath of these mass murderers. I experienced the cruel hands of torture administered by these tugs. They told me "who do you think you are - we will skin you death". I was stripped naked at the police headquarters and one of the officers with "muscled jacket dealt" with me. He kicked me with his booth while he escorted me into the cell. I was pushed into the inner room among the high-core criminals. I shivered, hating the environment, hating the tightness in my throat and told myself not to cry. I tried to be brave to cope with my new environment, but raindrop-sized tears rolled down my cheeks. I got angry with myself for behaving like a child and used the back of my hand to stifle my tears.

In my hour of contemplation, I was greeted by one of the prisoners with "welcome to our den and be a man". While grief is normal and natural, clearly the most powerful of all emotions, it is also the most neglected and misunderstood experience, often by both the griever and those around him. I was weeping because a nasty man, a drug addict was torturing me - kicking and hitting me all over my body because I was part of the voices that echoed loud and clear, telling the angels of terror and death, men who engaged in relentless campaign of anarchy and bloody games that this thing is wrong. This thing must stop! That was a price for standing up for what is morally right and trying to secure justice for our people. 

The irony and saddest fact of it all is, the engagement role played by Liberian politicians during this horrible situation in Liberia. Politicians that should be vocal on these ills in our society, sit in the corner mute - watching these demons displaying their cruelty, they wait on elections' timetable. It is indeed an unpardonable sin for these political leaders to not condemn or criticize Taylor and his followers. These crude and murderous politics in our country will have to STOP. 

However, I salute and pay tribute to the Human Rights defenders in Liberia and encourage them to continue because they are our only hope in these darkest hours in our country. Their relentless crusade and commitment to be the voice that continues to speak on behalf of our people. The facts remain that we are part of the whole (society) and as such, we cannot seek personal comfort within the context of threatening national disasters. When we allow the fear and uncertainty of our security to isolate us from looming threat only would we suffer personal loss and jeopardize the peace of our families and the larger society. Failure to stand for what is morally right is the prelude to becoming a victim of what is criminally wrong. 

Though, you expose yourself to danger in honoring your conscience for a noble and humble cause, it is worth bearing in mind that you represent courage, strength, suffering and sacrifice- the courage of conviction, strength of character, suffering for rights and sacrifice of life. Those who carry sinister agenda and whose conscience and influence are designed to blight the soul of a nation and its people, and who are purveyors of terror, sow seeds of anarchy are always on the wrong side of history. But your faith, moral conviction and willing commitment to answer the call of duty, brings fore the reality that, indeed, you are a catalyst of change for a better Liberia.

And in the words of Sir Winston Churchill, "history will be kind to me because I intend to write it". And that is true we write our own history and eulogy through the choices we make and the consequences they leave us and future generations. Based on this reasoning, when we are true to our conscience, and work to bring relief in the lives of our people and our neighbors to experience peace, then satisfaction is guaranteed. To this effect, I say Bravo to the Liberian Human Rights Defenders! 

Joseph F Barber

By James Torh

How It Could Finally Be Possible to Prosecute War as a Crime

How It Could Finally Be Possible to Prosecute War as a Crime

By David Swanson

War is a crime. The International Criminal Court has just announced that it will finally treat it as a crime, sort-of, kind-of. But how can war’s status as a crime effectively deter the world’s leading war-maker from threatening and launching more wars, large and small? How can laws against war actually be put to use? How can the ICC’s announcement be made into something more than a pretense?

The Kellogg-Briand Pact made war a crime in 1928, and various atrocities became criminal charges at Nuremberg and Tokyo because they were constituent parts of that larger crime. The United Nations Charter maintained war as a crime, but limited it to “aggressive” war, and gave immunity to any wars launched with U.N. approval.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) could try the United States for attacking a country if (1) that country brought a case, and (2) the United States agreed to the process, and (3) the United States chose not to block any judgment by using its veto power at the U.N. Security Council. Desirable future reforms obviously include urging all U.N. members to accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ, and eliminating the veto. But what can be done now?

The International Criminal Court (ICC) can try individuals for various “war crimes,” but has thus far tried only Africans, though for some time now it has claimed to be “investigating” U.S. crimes in Afghanistan. Although the U.S. is not a member of the ICC, Afghanistan is. Desirable future reforms obviously include urging all nations, including the United States, to join the ICC. But what can be done now?

The ICC has finally announced that it will prosecute individuals (such as the U.S. president and secretary of “defense”) for the crime of “aggression,” which is to say: war. But such wars must be launched after July 17, 2018. And those who can be prosecuted for war will be only citizens of those nations that have both joined the ICC and ratified the amendment adding jurisdiction over “aggression.” Desirable future reforms obviously include urging all nations, including the United States, to ratify the amendment on “aggression.” But what can be done now?

The only way around these restrictions, is for the U.N. Security Council to refer a case to the ICC. If that happens, then the ICC can prosecute anyone in the world for the crime of war.

This means that for the force of law to have any chance of deterring the U.S. government from threatening and launching wars, we need to persuade one or more of the fifteen nations on the U.N. Security Council to make clear that they will raise the matter for a vote. Five of those fifteen have veto power, and one of those five is the United States.

So, we also need nations of the world to proclaim that when the Security Council fails to refer the case, they will bring the matter before the U.N. General Assembly though a “Uniting for Peace” procedure in emergency session to override the veto. This is what was just done in December 2017 to overwhelmingly pass a resolution that the U.S. had vetoed, a resolution condemning the U.S. naming Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

Not only do we need to jump through each of these hoops (a commitment to a Security Council vote, and a commitment to override the veto in the General Assembly) but we need to make evident beforehand that we will be certain or likely to do so.

Therefore, World Beyond War is launching a global petition to the national governments of the worldasking for their public commitment to refer any war launched by any nation to the ICC with or without the Security Council. Click here to add your name.

After all, it is not only U.S. wars that should be prosecuted as crimes, but all wars. And, in fact, it may prove necessary to prosecute junior partners of the United States in its “coalition” wars prior to prosecuting the ring leader. The problem is not one of lack of evidence, of course, but of political will. The U.K., France, Canada, Australia, or some other co-conspirator may be brought by global and internal pressure (and the ability to circumvent the U.N. Security Council) to submit to the rule of law prior to the United States doing so.

A key detail is this: how much organized murder and violent destruction constitutes a war? Is a drone strike a war? Is base expansion and a few home raids a war? How many bombs make a war? The answer should be any use of military force. But in the end, this question will be answered by public pressure. If we can inform people of it and persuade the nations of the world to refer it to trial, then it will be a war, and therefore a crime.

Here’s my New Year’s resolution: I vow to support the rule of law, that might may no longer make right.

This article was originally published by World Beyond War -

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Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis

Joseph F Barber 

U.S. Military Massacred Civilians in Somalia

U.S. Military Massacred Civilians in Somalia

By atenda Gwaambuka

On the 25th of August, the United States of America’s military led an operation in Somalia's Bariire region that resulted in the death of 10 civilians and at least one child on the 25th of August. It was a massacre whose taint on the U.S. forces’ reputation can be compared to the Black Hawk Down incident of 1993. The victims of the operation were farmers and in its wake, hundreds of people in the Somali town of Afgoye protested, demanding justice for those killed. Survivors refused to bury the dead until the Somali government withdrew allegations that they were members of Al-Shabab and paid reparations. This was revealed in a Daily Beast report written by Christina Goldbaum.

Here's what we learnt:

U.S. Military Lies About its Operations in Africa

AFRICOM claims all its soldiers do is advise, assist and in very limited circumstances, accompany missions. This implies that U.S. soldiers do not go in the front line yet that is exactly what happened in Somalia. The Daily Beast report says U.S. Special Operators fired upon unarmed civilians as bullet casings found on the scene were American, instructed Somali counterparts to collect weapons stored inside a home and place them beside the bodies of those killed before photographing them. American diplomats are said to have also pressured the Somali government to bury unfavorable findings of a Somali Federal Government investigation. This is the height of dishonesty.

U.S. Intelligence is not as reliable as we think

The operation in Somalia is said to have been based on information from unreliable sources. The U.S. soldiers got their information from a Somali National Army brigade leader who is a former Al Shabab commander as well as from a militia leader who is in direct rivalry to the clan of the killed farmers. The translator they used was the same person who they used in another operation that resulted in the death of civilians. These three may have misled the U.S soldiers who are also to blame for their lapse in vigilance. The military was thus sucked into what seems to be a local clan conflict.

Predictably, however, the United States Military denied the claims.

This article was originally published by The African Exponent -

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Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis

Joseph F Barber