Well, I am here to tell you that it just isn’t true!

America already has gone to Hell in a handbasket, and it’s only getting worse by the day.

Most Americans are in denial about how totalitarian and self-servingly corporatist this whole society is becoming.

But, if you just look around you, and consider the everyday assaults on innocents by government police, the federal bureaucrats’ illicit “war on terror” and the drug war, the bureaucratization of just about everything, the Obama-Pelosi-John Roberts Unaffordable Careless Act … it’s a never ending Hell, and worse.

Yes, America has decayed into a third world banana republic, and the military’s internment camps are ready, especially for those disobedient individualists who actually believe in morality.

Even economic historian Robert Higgs – during his appearance at the 2013 Mises University – suggested that people ought to leave the country if they can. In that speech Higgs clearly tells us about the destructiveness of the State.

Dr. Higgs is the author of the 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan. The post-9/11 surge in hysteria and totalitarianism is proof that Higgs knew exactly what he was talking about.

So some call it pessimism, some call it realism. I’m a realist. 

However, there are some people in the Liberty movement, such as another economic historian, Tom Woods, who seem more optimistic. Woods travels extensively, giving speeches and he has many YouTube videos promoting liberty. Here is Woods’s speech at the 2013 Mises University.

Dr. Woods’s book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21^st Century, shows that perhaps there really are ways to push Leviathan back.

And there really have been some positive developments toward liberty. (Sort of…)

Just the fact that the House of Representatives’ vote against Congressman Justin Amash’s amendment to defund the NSA’s warrantless bulk-spying program was such a close vote, is an encouraging prospect.

But it kind of gets a little less encouraging.

While it is good that the vote was close, we saw that the Pelosi-Democrat Establishment twisted arms to get people to vote to preserve the government’s criminal spying.

And would you believe that the majority of those congresspeople who voted against the Amash amendment had actually received twice as much as the Yes-voters in campaign donations from the very defense and intelligence contractors who profit from that program? Yup.

So how’s that “We the People” thing working out for you?

Apparently, military contractors and others benefit from these invasive and unconstitutional programs. Who knew?

And besides the Military-Security-Corporatist Complex, there are examples of government-corporate conniving in other areas. And it’s not a good sign of “progress,” in my opinion.

For example, a recent CDC study attempted to show that HPV vaccines not only reduced cases of HPV, but can also prevent cervical cancer. Even in boys. Now, that’s quite an achievement.

(I’m sure that GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, whose vaccines were used in the study, were quite pleased with the skewed results.)

As I have noted previously, hardly anyone in the MSM challenged the CDC or brought up the many deaths or injuries that were caused by the HPV vaccines. And this simpatico PBS interview with one of the CDC’s senior flunkies is just one example.

It takes LRC bloggers and Freedom of Information Act requests by Judicial Watch to get actual information on the harm that such vaccines have caused.

Oh, don’t get me started on the vaccine stuff, like this latest item about a deadly 5-in-1 vaccine pushed by Bill Gates on babies in mainly developing countries.

And only a handful of people pointed out those Merck-funding California legislators who voted to force the HPV vaccine on kids. (Perhaps Nancy Lugosi twisted their arms, too.)

Why, even the flu vaccine has its controversies. But one might think that when NPR spends an hour discussing the importance of the flu vaccine, they might also mention the importance of nutritional support and vitamins as better and healthier means of prevention.

But no, not only did they not include a nutrition expert or alternative medicine practitioner on the panel that day, they did include someone from GlaxoSmithKline.

So, if a government bureau like the CDC says something, if the bureaucrats make assertions and cite their studies, and if the doctors say so, I guess the people will largely believe them. Even the stenographers of the MSM.

But getting back to the faux “security” schemes that are turning America into Nazi Germany as we speak, a U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that police do not need warrants to track people via their cell phones. I guess that implies that they don’t need suspicion either.

So when government goons know when you are away from your home for certain periods of time, might that not make your home, you know, vulnerable? (Ya think?)

The court is saying that the phone service providers are businesses, so their records do not have the same Fourth Amendment protections that private citizens have. (Or used to have, to put it more accurately.)

That court ruling gives the government the power to demand any records of any company with which you do business, no matter how private that information might be, and for any reason.

So how could this newest encroachment not be used by bureaucrats or their minions against critics of the regime, political dissidents, journalists who ask tough questions, or whistleblowers?

Oh wait, they already are doing that!

Can you believe there are still people who scoff at the “Hell in a handbasket” remark? 

And after his many months in solitary confinement and torture, the kangaroo court has found Bradley Manning guilty of “espionage.”

“Espionage” is the government’s view of a military or government employee with a conscience who believes that the American people have a right to know when their government and military bureaucrats and soldiers commit criminal acts, as well as the utter incompetence and corruption of U.S. diplomats.

Those disclosures are “espionage” to the bureaucrats of the State.

I think that Bradley Manning’s kangaroo judge belongs to the same country club as Chief Kangaroo John Roberts. (But don’t tell them I said that.)

With the crimes of the State and its cracking down on truth-tellers, this article shows the extreme extent to which the U.S. government will go to propagandize the American people to not question the government’s frauds, corruption, waste, and criminality.

The Rulers are desperately clinging on to their power as more and more people are waking up to the truth. That more people are waking up is reason for optimism.

But there are still many people who just don’t want to hear the truth, such as regarding their own Presidents’ war criminality, or that their government would pass a massive health care “overhaul” without most of the legislators actually having read the bill, or that the bill was written largely by the Big Insurance and Big Pharmaceutical companies at our expense.

And they would rather not hear that their own government bureaucrats are listening in on their private phone calls or reading their emails, or collecting “nearly everything a user does on the Internet,” as part of colossal fishing expeditions to find the slightest indication of “terrorism” that will be impossible to find in such a way.

That reminds me – recently a guy who innocently searched “pressure cookers” and “backpacks” at his work computer while with his former employer, was turned in to the police by someone at the former workplace, a la “If You See Something, Say Something” crapola.

The government goons who came to his house had said, according to Justin Raimondo, that they do those things about 100 times a week, and that 99 of those intrusions turn out to be totally unnecessary.

Bureaucrats!

Soon the goons’ visits will not be because of “pressure cookers” or “bombs,” but because of “anti-war,” “freedom,” or noting the U.S. government’s culpability in 9/11, and other Regime-criticizing searches or expressions.

Oh wait, they already are doing that!

Most Americans would not want to hear that the history of such government spying on its own people and neighbors spying on one another is mainly used to weed out political dissent and critics of the Rulers.

Sadly, many of our fellow Americans are pathologically misinformed, as Thomas DiLorenzo has described.

But, as Paul Craig Roberts has pointed out, it seems to be difficult for the average individual to consider other points of view or facts which refute what people already believe to be true. And that goes for even the most seasoned news media analysts, scientists, and academics.

And even in 2013, many people actually believe the government when it says that “keeping us safe” requires fascist criminality against the government’s own people.

The truth is, while there is very little chance that an Islamic terrorist will ever have any effect on your life, there is a much greater chance that your life will be abused, molested, robbed, assaulted, terrorized or murdered by an American government official.

And you “progressives” out there are just as responsible for turning America into the current police state as are the conservatives and neocons, by the way.

But the truth is still difficult for many people to handle.

So, as America has reached Hell in a handbasket, people still would rather believe the myth that government is a “necessary evil,” or that when it gets very, very bad, it can be “reformed.” (Nope.)

So no, the government is not “We the People.” (Another myth.)

Does that handbasket have a round-trip option?

Two different emailers commented on my view that George Zimmerman was “stalking” Trayvon Martin and that his stalking provoked Martin. Both emailers brought up Florida law regarding the definition of “stalking.”

Frankly, I couldn’t care less what a state government’s statutes define as “stalking,” because it doesn’t matter what those laws are, because they are not real laws. Those laws are what some legislators say they are. But who the hell are those legislators, and what the hell do they know?

Those laws that these politicians make up are not real laws – they are not natural law, which is basic and consists of the non-aggression principle and common sense, in my opinion.

As far as responsibility and culpability are concerned,, George Zimmerman saw some guy leaving a store, and because the guy wore a “hoodie,” therefore that’s “suspicious.” Martin gave no indication that he was engaged in any kind of criminality (such as if he had just robbed the store he was leaving, of which there was no such indication), or threatening behavior, as far as I can assess, based on all the information I have heard thus far.

Yet Zimmerman chose to pursue by following Martin rather than merely identifying himself as a neighborhood watch volunteer, and asking who Martin was or if he lived in that “gated community.”

So yes, Zimmerman “started it” with his stalking. And I mean stalking in the practical sense, because “legal” definitions mean nothing. “Legal” definitions come from State-employed parasites, many of whom are law school graduates but who know nothing about The Law, and who do not understand aggression vs. non-aggression, and whose loyalties are mainly to the State and not to justice or freedom and peace.

Unfortunately, America is a country with many zombies now, many people wandering along, holding and staring down at their cell phones, constantly having to check for email or texting nonsense to people who couldn’t care less.

And a population of ignoramuses who don’t pay attention to the actual details in the news but unthinkingly believe what their President or congressfelons tell them.

So, because of all this, there may be rioting if George Zimmerman is found “not guilty.” Paul Huebl expresses concern about possible rioting in the streets of the cities, and I am concerned, too. The fact that I am white and live in a city area doesn’t help relieve anxiety.

The police state isn’t helpful either. What we saw in Watertown a few months ago was quite distressing. That was a good example of when the police themselves become the criminals. They criminally and unconstitutionally ordered people from their homes at gunpoint, searched homes without warrants and left doors wide open, terrifying residents and leaving their homes vulnerable. It was a thoroughly criminal operation, and they didn’t even catch the suspect they were looking for – some private citizen found him hiding in a boat.

Alas, most of the sheeple there approved of what was done to them, obediently believing what their armed and badged enforcers and marauders told them, in the name of “keeping them safe.” It was “for their own good,” after all.

Possible Zimmerman-related rioting would likely be mainly by black people committing acts of violence against white people simply for being white. This has been happening a lot in recent years.

Or otherwise minority or city youths feeling angry and desperate because of what the white liberal politicians have done to destroy their opportunities and their futures.

Can you imagine AG Eric Holster being in charge of quelling such rioting?

But why would it be necessary for police to shut off cell phone service in such times of rioting, as Huebl suggests might happen? To make it difficult for the rioters to organize and to relay where police cars might be situated and so on, supposedly.

But what about the other people who want to protect themselves from rioters? Don’t they have a right to organize? Of course they do.

So police shutting off everybody’s cell phone service would be a crime against those who need communications to protect themselves. The police in this instance would be aiding and abetting the violent rioters!

And Huebl mentioned the possibility of shutting off utilities as well. Huh? What the hell is the point of THAT? But then, we are talking about government bureaucrats, after all.

Yet another reason why even utilities services need to be decentralized and privatized.

Well, I have stated before that I’m just as terrified of the out-of-control police now, as much as violent rioters, white or black.

Salon.com recently published an excerpt from Radley Balko’s book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. But it’s not just the crazed militarizing of the police that is frightening. As Balko mentions, the police are arresting and assaulting and murdering people merely for gambling on football games, and they are violently enforcing licensure laws, and enforcing medical marijuana laws.

In other words, non-crimes. The police are committing actual crimes against innocent civilians to enforce laws against non-crimes! That is what “The Law” means now in Amerika. Another reason why statutes and legislated “laws” are not law, but nothing but a bunch of crap. Just an excuse to give power-hungry neanderthals the power to commit acts of aggression against innocent human beings and get away with it.

I think that Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s work on distinguishing between artificial State law and private law needs to be seriously considered. More in-depth analysis can be found in Hoppe’s book, Democracy, The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order.

In my opinion, the natural law against aggression doesn’t take into account what a State-employed politician says, or what some State-employed crony judge says. Natural law against aggression is based on common sense, private property and self-ownership. You own your life, your person, your papers and effects, and you have an absolute right to protect yourself against ANY aggressor.

In fact, Gary North recently wrote about the moral and practical way to deal with aggressors and invaders:

In Houston on Sunday afternoon, three armed men entered a home and demanded payment. They got payment. The owner of the home grabbed his gun, shot two of them dead, and scared off the third, who ran.

This is the kind of welcome that should greet all such intruders in America, every time. It should greet all such intruders, all over the world, every time. If there were more greetings like this, there would be fewer intruders like this.

The case will automatically be referred to the grand jury, but authorities will tell the grand jury that this force was justified. In Houston, the voters believe that armed resistance to armed intruders is the proper response. This opinion has filtered down through the political system. In Houston, people are armed. Intruders may be armed, but they know that they may meet others who are even better armed inside the homes which they invade.

The two dead intruders will not be arrested, tried, convicted, and sent to jail for several years at the public’s expense. They will simply be buried. From a a tax-efficiency standpoint, this is surely the way to handle armed intruders.

In Houston and in Texas generally, this is the prevailing opinion. Intruders in Texas take their lives in their hands. This is where intruders should take their lives. Briefly. Then, the remains of the intruders can be taken to the appropriate resting place.

In some parts of America, this opinion would be regarded as barbaric. Especially among intruders. Illinois, New York State, and Connecticut side with the intruders. The third intruder, assuming he remains in the same line of work, would be wise to move to Illinois, New York State, or Connecticut. He should move out of Houston.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist,visit his blog .

Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

To begin, I think that George Zimmerman should have been charged with manslaughter, not murder, in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

Some people believe that Zimmerman shouldn’t have been charged with anything, as his shooting supposedly was in “self-defense.” But in my view, if Zimmerman initiated the act of stalking and provoking Martin, then Zimmerman is responsible for the ultimate consequences of his choice to stalk and threaten Martin, especially when Martin was not acting suspiciously.

I know, a lot of people disagree with me on that, especially many conservatives. Many conservatives don’t believe in personal responsibility, and they disagree with my belief that individuals should take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Perhaps Zimmerman should have instead considered buying one of those private drones for surveillance, if he felt that the unfamiliar Martin seemed suspicious. That way, Zimmerman wouldn’t be physically stalking Martin, and would have avoided being a threatening presence and the ultimate confrontation could have been prevented.

Now, now. Don’t get upset. There is nothing wrong with using privately-owned surveillance drones for one’s own private property or for a “gated community.”

And there would then be nothing wrong with private counter-surveillance drones if need be.

But being a police-wannabe or a government agent-wannabe as Zimmerman apparently is, nevertheless stalking people is just not a good idea.

But when Zimmerman is found “not guilty,” there will be race riots (regardless of Zimmerman’s Hispanic heritage).

This is because of collectivism, of course. If one white guy is perceived to be guilty of murdering a black guy, then all white people have his guilt, just as, in the minds of many, all white people have the guilt of the slaveholders in the past.

But, as the individualist Ron Paul has pointed out, those people who can only think in terms of racial groups are racists.

And Fred Reed noted, despite what the white-dominated U.S. Congress and state governments have done for black Americans, with the ending of segregation, with State-controlled charity and affirmative action, “Whitey” is still responsible for the severe problems which black people continue to endure.

Obviously not all people of color think those things. But those who have that kind of mentality do not appear able to see themselves as racists.

Sadly, many of the central planners’ collectivistic programs to benefit black Americans have gone against such intended beneficiaries, and against their liberty. So, the “antidote to racism is liberty,” as Dr. Paul put it.

But when the economic collapse and “civil unrest” occur, as a result of the collectivists’ central planning run amok, and the EBT cards and ATMs stop working and there are food shortages, well, perhaps you might want to consider getting out of the city ahead of time, that’s all (especially if you are white).

Speaking of “Whitey,” the trial of Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger is still ongoing, and it’s really a barrel of laughs. Last week, for example, one witness was asked to identify Bulger. So, as described by the Boston Herald’s Laurel Sweet on Howie Carr’s radio show, the witness looked around the courtroom like he was on To Tell the Truth, and finally pointed at Bulger, “How you doing Jim?” Heh.

Who needs a laugh-track when you have the Whitey Bulger trial?

Though the George Zimmerman trial may need some laugh-tracks, after those bad “knock-knock” jokes. But I digress.

Seriously, just what is it with these zealous government prosecutors who have this compulsion to overcharge defendants, as with George Zimmerman? Is it mainly to further their own careers? But the prosecutor must have known that there was no evidence to support an actual murder conviction. Hmmm. The cynic in me wants to suggest that TPTB may have urged the prosecutor to overcharge, to intentionally get a “not guilty” verdict, for the purpose of…who knows.

But the prosecutors these days are really getting away with real crimes just as many cops are, including knowingly pursuing the convictions (or worse) of innocent people.

And what was it with that sick pursuit of some Internet geek kid like Aaron Swartz, as prosecutors harassed and hounded him to the point of suicide, in the name of what? His “victims” didn’t even care to press charges.

And the corrupt lawyers and judicial apparatchiks all stick up for each other, too. It’s a sick culture now.

For instance, the Oklahoma Supreme Court recently refused to disbar a bad prosecutor, as requested by the OK Bar Association. Their reasons were that because many prosecutors were corrupt and abusive in those “old days” (way back in the 1990s!), this one should be excused.

Well, I think that state Supreme Court justices such as those in Oklahoma who defend the “bad apples” should themselves be impeached! They are not “OK.”

And I don’t understand why so many cops are out of control now. Some people view them as “heroes,” and many of them may very well have been – in the past, but now not so much.

To me, a “hero cop” is one who has courage. A “hero cop” is one who turns in a bad cop. That takes courage.

But in today’s criminal police state, even the good apples are sticking up for the criminal cops. The good cops who act as whistleblowers are being fired from their jobs, or otherwise demoted, transferred, or ostracized.

And to me, a “hero cop” refuses to enforce bad laws. A law is bad if it has nothing to do with protecting the people from the aggression or fraud of others. That is to say, most laws.

A law enforcement officer – local, state or federal – who refuses to enforce drug laws is a “hero,” and those who refuse to enforce criminally invasive regulations of otherwise peaceful trade and commerce are “heroes,” in my view.

Supposedly, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is either a “hero” or a “traitor.” Well, he certainly isn’t a traitor – it’s the other way around. The government agents who are breaking into and trespassing innocent Americans’ communications – those government criminals are the real traitors.

But I don’t think Snowden is a “hero,” as many of these invasive and criminal spy programs had already been revealed years before. And also because Snowden’s release of information to Glenn Greenwald and the U.K. Guardian seems to have been too controlled, too unnecessarily redacted, as though it is still to protect the State.

That monster Leviathan State. The good little helpers out there still need to protect the damn State, and they can’t see that it is just something not worth protecting!

And I share The Daily Bell, Naomi Wolf and Robert Wenzel’s skepticism as well. Wolf points out how “super-organized” Snowden was in his PowerPoint presentations and in arranging his interview with Greenwald, in which “he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling.”

Am I too cynical?

Now, if any whistleblower is an actual “hero,” it is Bradley Manning. So many documents Manning released to WikiLeaks were not at all redacted, and the American people were able to get a real glimpse of the war crimes by the military, and the incompetence and corruption of our diplomats.

But I’m sure that James Claptrapper would disagree with me on that.

Related: Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger asks, Has Edward Snowden been added to Obama’s Kill List?

And former CIA officer Philip Giraldi very well sums up what our buffoonish Rulers have done to America, and to our freedom.

That reminds me, do you think that Rolling Stone investigative journalist Michael Hastings was assassinated? How about Andrew Breitbart?

Unlike Snowden and Manning, those two now-dead ones were journalists. Hmmm.

Well, whether those deaths were of foul play or not, I must say that government’s criminality is so in-your-face now.

And now, our incompetent and/or corrupt judges are allowing the NSA to make use of private communications “inadvertently” collected sans warrants.

So why don’t they just go into people’s homes and search everything there, hoping to find some indication of crime or “terrorism,” or whatever? (Oh, wait, they already did that in Watertown.)

The feds can not only “inadvertently” grab encrypted info but keep it indefinitely, and for the purpose of attempting to ultimately decrypt it in order to invasively and criminally pry into your private communications with others.

But there are other reasons why we should be concerned with this criminal behavior by government, besides the invasion of American’s privacy and security. Such compromised private communications could involve those with someone’s business associates.

One can easily predict that the bureaucrats will make use of all this criminal spying, and expand it to non-national security-related policies, such as enforcing patent laws or “insider trading” laws.

You see, one reason for encryption is to protect private business information, such as from one’s competitors, which one has a right to do, after all.

Some government bureaucrats, however, could be using the surveillance to steal private information for the purpose of cahoots with victims’ competitors. Such government spying and information-stealing could be a much more invasive and criminal means of the bureaucrats’ own illicit version of “insider trading,” if you know what I mean.

So besides the abuse of average Americans’ private information, this surveillance criminality can also compromise the people’s right to protect their honest ways of making a living (something which most government bureaucrats know nothing about!).

So Whitey Bulger isn’t the only gangster who should be prosecuted, if you ask me.

Now, in Edward Snowden’s interview with Glenn Greenwald, Snowden made it clear that this surveillance state will only get worse, and warned of possible “turnkey tyranny,” especially with future administrations in Washington (i.e. those who may not be as favorable to civil liberties as the Obama Administration has been).

Some further causes for concern include the IRS scandal and the wiretapping and persecuting of journalists. Obviously, these government crimes have nothing to do with “national security,” but with silencing critics of the Regime and cracking down on dissent. And bureaucrats might also get carried away and attempt to snuff out those who probe too intensely into the Rulers’ shenanigans.

But how carried away will these Washington commissars get? Will they use such powers to pursue political correctness and anti-discrimination laws as well? Will they send drones after those who make politically-incorrect comments?

So, even though Premier Obama doesn’t seem to understand things like, I don’t know, the U.S. Constitution, or due process, and the fact that he has never allowed his college transcripts to be made public, and the fact that many white people voted for his teleprompter him mainly because he’s black, I better not refer to him as an “affirmative action president,” or I might be indefinitely detained or worse. (And I shouldn’t mention that he referred to his white grandmother as a “typical white person” either, not that that would mean anything.)

But we’re not allowed to point certain things out, no matter how true they might be. As Dr. Thomas Sowell observed, even news “journalists” censor the racial aspects of riots and mob violence. People are more sensitive now to certain verbal subject matter, but actual violence is excused. Oh, well.

As Edward Snowden mentioned, it’s only going to get worse, all this stuff. Or is it?

Perhaps we can just be risky and do and say what we think is right (and hope for the best).

Recent events are enough to make anyone express “vitriolic rhetoric.”

First there was the IRS scandal, in which various IRS flunkies have been targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny, and attempting to interfere with the groups’ First Amendment-protected rights of dissent from the Regime.

My article, Tea Partiers May Need the ACLU Soon was on LewRockwell.com in 2010. The article didn’t mention the IRS targeting the Tea Party, but I did note that the unconstitutional George W. Bush policies that many amongst the Tea Party and conservative wing supported – policies which remove due process and presumption of innocence – may very well come back to haunt those very Tea Partiers.

And now the U.K. Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and former NSA worker Edward Snowdenhave revealed, albeit in a somewhat coordinated and controlled manner, the National Security Agency’s spying on all Americans’ phone calls, emails and other methods of private communications regardless of actual suspicion, probable cause or warrants.

Yeah, NOW some of the conservatives are waking up to the dangers of these George W. Bush policies they supported for many years, as I hear them yapping on the radio. But that’s mainly because the current dictator is Barack Obama. If these revelations came out while Bush was still President, the conservatives would be defending it.

Oh wait a minute, this did come out while Bush was President, in December, 2005 when the New York Times revealed that Bush authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and emails without warrants and that in fact some of the eavesdropping involved U.S.-only calls. But the hysterical conservative dupes such as Malkin and Coulter wanted to hang the Times for such a treason as reporting the government’s criminal activity.

But now that Obama is in charge, Rush Limbaugh et al. have finally heard of the “Fourth Amendment.”

Alas, there are still goofballs and degenerates in the U.S. Senate who have no problem with the NSA spying program. In fact, the senior U.S. Senator from South Carolina says he has Verizon and he wants the NSA to spy on him, on customers of Verizon and other telecom providers’ customers.

Apparently, South Carolina’s senior ignoramus doesn’t listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Is there a psychiatrist out there who is not on the State payroll who can explain these people?

Apparently those gullible sheeple of the U.S. Senate aren’t concerned that such government eavesdropping and spying on Americans’ private communications could get in the wrong hands or be used for devious purposes.

Oh wait a minute, such government eavesdropping and spying actually has been used for devious purposes, as reported in 2008 by Brian Ross and ABC News in this “Exclusive” story.

Well, it may not have been that exclusive, given that Warisacrime.org’s David Swanson had reported on the same story a year earlier. But we can’t expect ABC to cite such alternative sources who are not sufficiently State-licking propagandists. (As they apparently are at ABC and its ilk. But I digress.).

According to the ABC “Exclusive” story, two U.S. military linguists and some of their “fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad’s Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.”

“‘Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another,’” explained the former Navy linguist in that ABC story. And some of the conversations being intruded on were of a very personal nature, including “phone sex,” according to this McClatchy story.

But we should believe government bureaucrats when they say that the illegal snooping only involves the phone records and “metadata.”

They aren’t really ”listening in.”

However, in his interview with the U.K. Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, NSA spy story leaker Edward Snowden stated, “If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

If you have seen the 2010 Washington Post series on the overreaching extent of this National Security Gestapo that very questionable characters in Congress continue to support, you would know that a lot of private military- and security-related government contractors themselves have access to the same kind of private information on Americans that government workers have, including NSA and others. (See the Washington Post series here, in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

Much as I don’t want to spoil the Andrew McCarthy-Charles Krauthammer fantasyland that this Bush-Obama police state is “keeping us safe” and that anti-NSA spy complainers are “overreacting,” the truth is that the U.S. government’s police state isn’t keeping us safe.

As Marcy Wheeler and Jason Ditz have detailed, despite the massive, unconstitutional surveillance methods already in place for years, the government bureaucrats’ gloating over “thwarted attacks” has been widely exaggerated. And many, many crimes of all sorts continue to be committed throughout America despite such close government scrutiny of web searches, phone calls, and emails.

So this constantly growing police state really isn’t about protecting the American people from terrorism. It’s really about “thwarting” political opposition to the Rulers and suppressing dissent. The IRS scandal and the Justice Department’s surveillance of AP and Fox News reporters are indications of the same thing.

As Cato Institute’s Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, has pointed out, quoting former Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman,

(Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) had let the bureau “be used by presidents for nakedly political purposes” and engaged in “subtle blackmail to ensure his and the bureau’s power.”…

And, quoting the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under Sen. Frank Church in 1976, Gene Healy continues,

Under “Project Minaret,” from the early 1960s until 1973, the NSA compiled watch lists of potentially subversive Americans, monitored their overseas calls and telegrams, sharing the results with other federal agencies.

Watch-listed Americans “ranged from members of radical political groups, to celebrities, to ordinary citizens involved in protests.” Under Project Shamrock, the NSA collected all telegraphic data entering or leaving the United States, “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.”

(And see this related commentary by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.)

So, it was happening then, but it isn’t happening now? (As Nancy Mussolini might say, Are you serious?)

So some of the so-called representatives of the American people, such as Sen. Diane Feinstein and Speaker John Boehner, have referred to NSA leaker Edward Snowden as having committed “treason” and that he is a “traitor.” These people obviously haven’t studied their history, such as how the German people supported their own criminal State during the Nazi period. Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation explains here the similarities of that era’s Germans and today’s American sheeple.

Now, I wonder if Sen. Feinstein, someone who is also known to be a compulsive leaker herself, has ever considered the possibility of her own phone calls, emails, web searches etc. being snooped on by the NSA and could information obtained from such communications possibly get into the wrong hands?

Has she discussed campaign strategies with consultants which she wished would remain private? How about private phone calls with campaign contributors or military contractors?

What if a political opponent had obtained such information? Or a Democrat primary opponent?

Perhaps she doesn’t care. As the Guardian’s Glenn Greewald noted, Feinstein’s husband himself has benefited from the National Security Stasi that “DiFi” defends so dearly.

That just shows how all this Amerikan Gestapo stuff – besides being as un-American as it possibly could be – really is a protection racket.

But can you imagine just how paranoid those NSA workers (and FBI, etc.) must be at their offices, wondering whether their co-workers may have accessed their private communications, and what the co-workers might know about them? (“Why are you looking at me that way?” “OMG, she knows about my seeing the psychiatrist!” etc.)

Eventually, one hopes that the bureaucrats will overwhelm each other with paranoia, suspicion and self-destruction. Perhaps Gary North was right: In the end, the police state is doomed.

And I think it is quite commendable that Sen. Rand Paul wants to take this NSA spying issue all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But what, exactly, will that accomplish? The Supreme Court has shown itself to be a group of nine ignoramuses, authoritarians and government apparatchiks. They are employed by the State – of course they will side with the State in most cases. Duh.

After all, the high court’s most recent bad decision was their allowing police to take arrestees’ DNA alongside fingerprinting. Dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia predicted that anyone arrested, “rightly or wrongly,” can have one’s DNA submitted into a “national DNA database.”

And that decision is especially disturbing given that DNA used as evidence is not as foolproof as many people think it is.

Rush Limbaugh’s new pal, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, clearly recognizes the right of the people to be “secure in their persons” from these intrusions by the State when it lacks probable cause.

Many government police have been arresting people for the most frivolous of reasons, and for acts which are non-arrestable “offenses,” includingfailure to use a turn signal or walking the dog without a leash. And the “high” court also approved the sicko strip-searches that such arrestees would also have to endure.

And the Fourth Amendment refers to our right to be secure in our “persons,” but also our “houses, papers, and effects.”

Now, just how secure is an individual whose phone calls and emails are being eavesdropped on by government employees and private contractors, especially given the likelihood that such personal information will get in the wrong hands and be used for devious purposes?

This whole thing is nuts! It’s beyond “Orwellian.”

Whether it’s the TSA, DHS or NSA and FBI, the U.S. government’s treating an entire population as criminal suspects will not protect them from terrorists, from foreign invasions, bombings, or shootings.

And we are not “secure” when political power-grabbers are intruding their way into the most intimate daily aspects of our private lives, our homes, and our businesses.

And all this is for no good reason as well!

As I tried to explain in my article, The 22 Year Bush War of Aggression on Iraq, it was our own government that started this long war and other aggressions overseas, well before 9/11.

So as Glenn Greenwald, author of How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok, pointed out in this article with reference to the 2004 Donald Rumsfeld-commissioned task force, and in this article (and as Laurence Vance has observed as well), the Islamists, jihadists, or otherwise inhabitants of those invaded Middle-Eastern and Asian territories have expressed not their hatred for America’s “freedom and values,” but their anger and retaliation against the U.S. government’s violence, occupations, and criminality on their lands and against their people.

In other words, not only are we less safe because of our own government’s criminal spying intrusions and predations against us, but we are less safe because our stupid government bureaucrats keep starting wars of aggression for no good reason against foreigners who will obviously retaliate!

So, if you really want to prevent terrorism, then stop invading countries that were of no threat to us, stop drone bombing and murdering innocent civilians on a daily basis, and stop occupying foreign lands that are not U.S. territories, with U.S. government apparatus and military bases.

And stop believing government bureaucrats and their little helpers who say that these bureaucrats aren’t illegally eavesdropping on your private life.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Have you ever thought about the morality or legitimacy of politicians forbidding you to have a vegetable garden in your own front yard, or buying or selling raw milk, or merely having a lemonade stand without a local bureaucrat’s permission?

You see, when the armed bureaucrat is arresting the peaceful raw milk seller, the harmless vegetable gardener or the little lemonade proprietor, those arrestees are not the criminals here.

Those otherwise peaceful people have harmed no one, but they are the victims of the actualcriminal, the one who is violating their rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. He is the aggressor and the criminal, he is the one who should be thrown in jail!

Much of what the State does now is largely criminal in nature: the violent enforcement of “victimless crimes,” the warrantless spying and searches, the prosecutorial misconduct and assetforfeiture, and the drone bombings and murders of innocent civilians overseas, just to name a few.

Even the President and Congressmen – rubber-stamped by the Chief Comrade Roberts – ordering every individual to buy health insurance, are giving an unlawful order, in my opinion.

And the people in a supposedly free country have an inherent right to resist these government crimes and unlawful orders!

So besides the dictates of loathsome bureaucrats, Americans are also enslaved by the government-protected banking cartel and legal tender laws, and the sadistic impulses of the “law enforcers” who actually enforce – and often with malice aforethought – all those Soviet-like rules, orders, and prohibitions of the loathsome bureaucrats.

But millions of people still cling to this horrifying, increasingly-totalitarian State – the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court, state legislatures, local police, etc. – as their Savior, voluntarily choosing to be slaves to these bureaucratic worst of the worst in society.

And the faithful cling to their Rulers, despite how contemptuously those Rulers view the people whose hard labor funds the Rulers’ paychecks.

Unfortunately, most people tend to go into denial about what’s really happening to America, even though they see the growing totalitarianism right before their very eyes.

So here is a very well done video by Larken Rose which not only refutes the assertion that “it can’t happen here,” but describes how totalitarianism ishappening here, and only getting worse.

As part of our enslavement, the State demands involuntary payments for nothing, while simultaneously locking out entrepreneurs, laborers and immigrants alike.

The current IRS scandal, for example, as Robert Murphy points out, is that those complainers amongst our fellow hoi polloi want to be exempt from the same criminal wealth-seizures the State inflicts on everyone else.

But the complaint should be that everyone should be exempt from any transaction that is involuntary, coerced, compelled, or accompanied by threats from the taker.

“But we must pay for government’s services,” some people cry.

Yes, we must pay for huge bureaucracies such as the FDA and HHS so they can take care of the fat cats of Big Insurance and Big Pharma. That sounds fair.

And we must pay for DEA, FBI and local police S.W.A.T. raids to make sure that innocent, peaceful civilians who have harmed no one have their homes broken into and even be murdered for no good reason. Check.

And we must pay for more wars and false flags to provoke more foreigners and take care of the fat cats of the military industrial complex. (Except we can’t actually say that out loud. Shhh.)

But the enslaved State-faithful live their lives with rationalization, knowing full well that their labor and livelihoods are being raped by genuine shysters.

I wish more people could understand the inherent immorality and undermining of the rule of law caused by any form of compulsory State taxation, including sales taxes, for example.

You see, when you have a transaction you then have a contract, which is presumably voluntary. However, the transaction is supposed to be between the two traders, neither of whom voluntarily consented to a third-party intruder coming along and seizing part of the trade.

But if third parties (such as government bureaucrats) were allowed to intrude into other people’s lives, contracts and property, then what’s the point of having any laws against trespass, theft, or harassment?

And the government’s thuggish restrictions on employment, entrepreneurs and immigration lock out those who want to start a business here but can’t. That is because of the government’s union protectionism, costly red tape or, because of minimum wage laws prospective entrepreneurs can’t afford to employ enough laborers including entry-level workers.

You see, in the current collectivist slavery, the U.S. government assumes ownership of the capital and labor of both American and immigrant entrepreneurs and workers. Just as Americans are slaves of their government bureaucrats’ restrictions, mandates and other intrusive trespasses, so are prospective businesspeople and immigrants.

I’ll never understand the collectivist anti-foreigner crowd, those who believe in some sort of communal ownership of the whole territory with total disregard for private property and freedom of trade. (Are they closet communists? Who knows.)

And now we have ObamaCare, which is now compulsory, just like the dysfunctional government-run retirement scheme.

I can’t believe that Americans would bow to their government’s demand to report their private medical or insurance status, and allowing such private information to be entered into government databases. Absolutely shameful!

And similar to the Nazi-like ”If You See Something Say Something” campaign, doctors will be obliged to report patients’ gun ownership, and report on patients’ “abnormal” behaviors or their criticism toward the government, etc.

The deniers don’t think this is a big deal, but this really is right out of Nazi Germany.

Both doctor and patient are made to follow orders like prisoners, and any mistake one makes in various payment matters or reporting matters could cause one or both of them to be heavily fined (i.e. robbed) by the State, or even jailed.

Following the Boston Marathon bombings, there was a completely unconstitutional police siege, door-to-door searches mainly in nearby Watertown. Heavily militarized government police ordered residents to leave their homes while the homes were searched, without warrants, without probable cause. Some media propagandists even denied that such illegal behavior even occurred.

Will the “authorities” be knocking on the doors of those reported by doctors to have criticized government-run medical care? Or a patient who mentioned that he and his wife had an “argument”?

In contrast, in a free society the people would never allow government police ”authorities” to harass innocent people who are not suspected of having committed actual crimes, or order innocent people out of their homes as happened in Watertown. Such a suggestion would be absolutely absurd to freedom-loving people.

Frankly, a government monopoly on policing and security shouldn’t exist anyway, and can easily and more economically be replaced with private providers. Boston was a great example of why market law is morally and practically better than martial law.

And when we have freedom (as opposed to the current slavery and government disarmament of the people) there would be no records of which private civilians have what weapons and who doesn’t.

For some reason, the ignoramuses and chicken littles don’t understand that such an atmosphere would discourage would-be muggers, rapists, burglars, murderers, mass shooters, and government thugs from committing their crimes.

But sadly, most Americans, hypnotized by hours of television watching and constantly staring at their cell phones like zombies, defend the criminality of the State.

And economically, a real free market (sans slavery) would be this: the workers, producers, and salespeople voluntarily contract with other employers, clients, customers, laborers, shoppers, for some kind of goods, labor or services, in exchange for some kind of monetary compensation and/or other goodies. And any third-party such as a government bureaucrat who intrudes into such associations or contracts demanding reporting or receiving a take from the laborer’s compensation or traders’ income is nothing but a criminal and will be treated as such.

With freedom, American business owners can hire whomever the employers feel are the best-qualified and who can best serve their customers, the treasured consumers. And such employers would have the freedom to pay workers whatever the employer decides the workers’ labor is of value, regardless of what government bureaucrats or union meddlers have to say about it. And yes, the workers actually benefit from a real free market.

The consumers are much better served as well, when there is freedom than under the current slavery.

And in the much preferable scenario of medical freedom, because there will be no government regulations, red tape, mandates, restrictions, protectionist patent laws, taxes, licensure or other governmental intrusions, the prices for medical care, medical equipment, insurance, pharmaceuticals or supplements will be much, much lower and more affordable to most people.

With freedom, the medical patient sees a doctor of one’s own choosing, or doesn’t see a doctor at all. It’s the individual’s choice. No government involvement here.

And one contracts with a third party insurer if one wants to, and doesn’t do so if one doesn’t want to.

No bureaucrats involved here. No fascist Nazi-like orders from non-productive apparatchiks like Nancy Lugosi and Chief Comrade Roberts.

And the patient’s payment is between doctor and patient, including whether the patient wants to pay with cash or use a third-party insurer, or can receive services for free, for that matter.

Also, the conversation between the doctor and patient is between doctor and patient only – there is a confidentiality and trust which will not be broken into by the bureaucratic burglars of Leviathan.

If it’s none of the neighbors’ business, then it’s none of the government’s business, I always say.

And no ObamaCare-Patriot Act-Complex tyranny. No government databases. No billion-dollar boondoggle NSA domestic spying centers in Utah.

And with guns, regarding background checks and databases, as mentioned, a free society would have no records of civilian arms ownership (or have any other government-run databases of any information on innocent private people!).

However, if government agents such as local police or the feds must be armed, there should be privately-run civilians’ databases of government employees’ weapons possessions, and other matters as well.

A database on the Internet into which all government employees or prospective employees, armed or not, must enter their complete personal background information including school records, criminal records, gun ownership, etc. And if you don’t like that, then don’t work for the government!

Besides making it uncomfortable for anyone to work for the government, free people must shun government employees, as Jim Davies noted.

Then, we would hope to have fewer and fewer government employees to enslave us, and harass, extort, expropriate, burglarize, mug, rob, search, abuse, assault, unlawfully detain, unlawfully arrest or jail, taser, shoot, or murder the people.

In a society of real freedom, all relationships, associations and contracts are to be voluntary. Restoring private property rights, the individual’s right of self-ownership, and the non-aggression principle is just common sense, after all.

With freedom rather than slavery, no more compulsory government Social Security, tax-thefts, land-thefts, IRS, the Fed, or any other such illicit monopolies and criminal rackets in Washington.

The people really have to decide, and soon, whether they want to continue being slaves, or whether they want to live in a land of real freedom.

You know, some people who are afraid of the necessary decentralization process will bring up the collapse and decentralization of the old Soviet Union, and how millions of people just couldn’t handle such sudden freedom. But that was because the government bureaucrats who had been in control made the process gradual and painful.

Then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, Perestroika and Glasnost schemes were “only expedient measures to preserve the centrality of the Soviet Communist Party and to salvage what was left of the socialist system,” according to Russian-born economist Yuri Maltzev, author of Requiem for Marx.

Those Soviet bureaucrats were the real “bitter clingers” there, the power addicts who couldn’t let go of their little fiefdoms.

And that is exactly what we will experience here in America, by decentralizing gradually, as the bureaucrats attempt to preserve their central planningcrimes.

As Murray Rothbard wrote,

Holding back, freeing only a few areas at a time, will only impose continuous distortions that will cripple the workings of the market and discredit it in the eyes of an already fearful and suspicious public …

To achieve genuine freedom, the role of government and its advisers must be confined to setting their subjects free, as fast and as completely as it takes to unlock their shackles. After that, the proper role of government and its advisers is to get and keep out of the subjects’ way.

So, now it is time for a “Requiem for Soviet Amerika,” that’s for sure.

We must resist the evils of collectivism, socialism, and compromise, as Rothbard observed.

There is no other way out of the Rulers’ Soviet-style legislative trespasses, and their constantly provoking foreigners to justify their parasitic warbureaucracies, but to dismantle that Leviathan apparatus.

It is finally time to undo the slavery of central planning, the shackles of State monopoly, and the lawlessness of authoritarianism, root and branch.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Scott Pelley recently confessed that he and others in the news media have been “getting the big stories wrong, over and over again.” He then goes on to blame the alternative media for that, and web news, bloggers and tweeters lacking “editors,” i.e. censors, and states that alternative news gatherers and distributors are not “real journalists.”

Pelley, who replaced “real journalist” Dan Rather via Cutesy Katie, is admitting to getting the big stories wrong, yet he is totally clueless as to why that is.

For example, Pelley cites his inaccurate reporting on the Sandy Hook story. And he referred to merely getting a few details wrong, such as stating that Nancy Lanza was a teacher at that school when she was not.

But Pelley, as with most of the reporters, anchors and editors of the mainstream news media, did not seem to explore whether the alleged shooter Adam Lanza may have been taking psychiatric drugs which may have contributed to his alleged violent behaviors.

However, Pelley did do a story on 60 Minutes in which he interviewed some people who knew the Lanzas who, as with some other close Lanza family associates, had said that Adam was “on medication” to treat his Asperger’s Syndrome. But Pelley did not follow up on the medication angle.

We just have not been hearing from mainstream news providers that most of the recent mass shootings have been by perpetrators on psychiatric drugs, especially SSRI antidepressants, including alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes. It has been asserted but not yet verified that the Sandy Hook shooter was also on psychiatric medication.

Have the media largely omitted any mention of the recent mass shooters’ use of psychiatric drugs because the media just want to help Premier Obama and Frau Feinstein implement their gun-grabbing fetishes? (Or is it because the news networks make a lot in ads from the Big Pharma drug dealers?)

It’s not just a matter of getting facts wrong, it’s a matter of obvious omission.

But this isn’t really about the mainstream news “journalists” getting things wrong, over and over again.

This is, once again, a matter of State-aggrandizing propagandists pushing a particular agenda. In this case, it’s the gun control agenda, along with the push for a police state.

Incidentally, was it on purpose that CBS Evening News hire an anchor who sounds like Richard Nixon? But I digress.

Because the facts do not support their cause, the gun-grabbers have been using emotional appeals, including exploiting the Sandy Hook tragedy, to disarm their victims while aiding and abetting the violent criminals out there who don’t obey the law including gun laws.

And Lawrence O’Donnell’s recent misinformation and dishonesty in defense of the police in Watertown illegally ordering people from their homes while police searched without warrants or probable cause was disgraceful. Talk about “getting it wrong, over and over and over again.”

It seems like we may be seeing more of that kind of criminal, thoroughly unconstitutional behavior committed by police, and maybe even military as well, mainly to satisfy the Rulers’ gun-control agenda, their need to disarm the civilian population so there will be no resistance against their further Soviet criminality.

Now, you “liberals” out there: Do you really believe that if the people amongst the civilian population were armed, openly or concealed, that more people would just go shooting wantonly and recklessly?

According to John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, the cities with more gun restrictions (e.g. Chicago) have very high violent gun-related crimes and deaths, and those with fewer restrictions have lower rates of gun-related violence.

Here is Scott Pelley’s interview of the gun-grabbing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just days after the Sandy Hook shooting. Once again, they emotionalize the gun issue by bringing up the families of the victims of gun-related violence, with Bloomberg asking Pelley, “Do you really want to call them up and say, ‘oh it’s hopeless, we’re just going to keep killing more and more people’”?

But they never discuss the valid points made by John Lott and others and the statistics which back up their assertions, including the many lives saved by someone who possessed a firearm and used it in self-defense.

Unfortunately, the “progressives” seem to want only police to be the ones with weapons, but not private civilians. In contrast, a much freer and safer society would have it the other way around.

So like good little sheeple, the “liberals” do not seem to be concerned with why police do not keep statistics on police-perpetrated gun-related deaths.

But why does the Left want a police state?

And I can see why the conservatives refer to the liberals as “criminal-coddlers,” in the Left’s constant defense of violent criminals. The Left’s gun-grabbing agenda is a part of their “criminal-coddling” in their intentionally disarming innocent people by government force and by law. When the Left’s adored State disarms innocent people, they are ipso facto arming the criminals.

But doesn’t this go with the larger picture of why the Left love confiscatory taxes, fascist regulations and welfare redistribution schemes and Big Government bureaucracies? They want the power (via the armed State) to steal from other people and tell them what to do, and they don’t want their victims to have the right or the means to defend themselves!

So just what is it about the State, its apparatchiks, and its propagandists in the media who help to push the agenda of the State’s criminals? In my view, there is some sort of power trip involved in aiding and abetting the State’s crimes against innocent human beings’ persons and property.

One grandiose example of the Left and the biased media’s “criminal-coddling” was their propagandist push for the George W. Bush Iraq War ten years ago.

Talk about “getting it wrong, over and over and over again.”

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

As I have already mentioned, in their ordering people from their homes while the homes are illegally searched, the police compromised the people’s “right to be secure,” as the Fourth Amendment describes it. For how “secure” are people while strangers go through their homes without those homeowners or residents being there to supervise those cops? Government bureaucrats are NOT trustworthy, and they prove themselves as such day after day. As I have mentioned before, all you have to do is read William Grigg’s articles, Radley Balko or Cop Block and even the Cato Institute to understand this.

As seen in the video posted above, an even further example of these addicted-to-overkill police compromising of the people’s right to be secure is that after police searched homes, they left doors open and unlocked. Absolutely disgusting.

And as far as searching private property goes, the police need to have a specific reason to suspect that there is something or someone of a criminal nature in or on a specific property, they need to have probable cause and a warrant signed by a judge. For a judge to sign the warrant, there needs to be probable cause. In Watertown, the police needed to show that the wanted suspect was likely to be hiding in a specific house to which the specific warrant (that they didn’t have) applied. If a judge signs a search warrant without being shown probable cause, that judge is illegally signing a warrant. Police who use illegally obtained warrants are criminals. You can’t just do wide, sweeping fishing expeditions of entire neighborhoods. (Maybe in Nazi Germany or North Korea perhaps, but not in America in which the government must follow and obey the rule of law.)

As we can see from the video, the people of this Watertown neighborhood were frightened and intimidated by out-of-control, over-zealous cops high on adrenaline. It would take a lot of guts to actually stand up to them, to not open the door, and to demand that these armed government bureaucrats state their specific reason to believe that a specific suspect is hiding in their specific home. And the people need to demand that police have a legally-obtained warrant. It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone with some courage had done that.

Such demands by the people should also apply if police are searching for drugs, weapons or other items they believe to be “illegal.”

As Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote recently, the criminal British government bureaucrats of the time of the American Revolution wrote their own warrants and lacked suspicion and probable cause, and the criminal government bureaucrats of the post-9/11 hysteria are also illegally writing their own warrants. This is shameful, and thoroughly un-American.

And if these armed government bureaucrats actually broke into such a home in Watertown or elsewhere, would the owner or resident have a moral and legal right to defend oneself and one’s family? This, by the way, is one of the most important reasons why the Second Amendment was written into the Bill of Rights.

These points and criticisms are especially relevant now, given that the police all across America have been knowingly and criminally falsely arresting and detaining, falsely charging and prosecuting totally innocent individuals, including planting evidence and lying. (Here is the latest update on that.)

And we have cops who do those things in order to meet their arrest quotas. It’s absolutely sickening. See this and this by Radley Balko, William Grigg, and the Young Turks on the arrest quotas, and Roger Roots on the prosecution quotas, and more from William Anderson recently on the corruption of the prosecutors.

And there is the immoral and counter-productive drug war.  Now that the precedent has been set in Watertown, and given how dishonest police and prosecutors are now, we will have warrantless, suspicionless, random sweeping searches of buildings and neighborhoods, without probable cause, based on baseless “tips” and the “If You See Something Say Something” campaign. And that will be mainly to do with the drug war, in which people consuming, buying or selling, or possessing drugs, are NOT committing any crime, and have a right to their freedom to do such things. I am sure this Nazi-like policy will also spread to other areas of life, in which just about everything, every little innocent and harmless act, has been made into a felony, or at least a misdemeanor. Just read Harvey Silverglate’s book Three Felonies a Day to understand that.

In my opinion, all this Nazi police-state crap is why we must abolish the government’s monopoly in community policing and security, and also give the government’s self-serving monopoly in ultimate judicial decision-making the heave-ho.

But as James Bovard, author of Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, wrote,

One of the best ways to reduce police brutality is to greatly reduce the number of laws that police have to enforce. “Order” is something different from keeping people subdued through sheer fear of violent government agents.

To some people, referring to “sheeple” sounds demeaning. However, when we have an entire population of millions in the greater Boston area not going out of their homes, and an entire community under siege because of one lone criminal, I will say, “Sheeple.”

Americans seem so dependent on the government for everything, and are so hypnotized now by the government’s fear-mongering and rationalizations for its abuse.

The people really seem to be saying, “Sock it to me!” like on the 1960s TV series, Laugh-In. The star would say, “Sock it to me,” which would be followed by the star getting hit over the head by a giant club, a wall caving in on the chump, or a huge amount of water being splashed on the dupe’s person.

Well, I think that each time we have an election, like last November, the American people say, “Sock it to me, baby!”

And then they get socked. And then they act surprised. “Wha happen?”

What reminded me of this was one of the U.S. senate’s latest turncoats, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who attempted to pass a gun control compromise bill, which failed.

This was the “conservative” that Tea Partiers were swooning over in his failed bid to defeat Sen. Arlene Specter, but later did get elected to the senate. So, with Toomey’s latest gun control compromise, I was saying, “Sock it Toomey, baby.”

In fact, one conservative Boston Herald columnist felt very betrayed by former Republican Sen. Scott Brown in his switch to the anti-2^nd Amendment side, and his votes for Dodd-Frank, raising payroll taxes and the Obama “jobs” bill. She compared such a betrayal to “leaving a bride at the altar.”

But this pattern of the American people getting bamboozled by these professional pols never seems to stop. Americans continue to have faith in their Rulers, despite the betrayals, the squandering of the loot they steal, and their growing police state Leviathan that threatens each and every one of us.

And to get an idea of what masochistic sheeple the people of Massachusetts are, in 2008 they voted by 70%-30% against repealing the state income tax. (Who in his right mind would vote against being able to keep more of his own earnings?)

And now Gov. Deval Patrick and the legislature want to raise taxes even more!

So, like the people of Massachusetts, the American people continue to beg, “Sock it to us, government.”

As H.L. Mencken wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

And with that, Attention Deficit Democracy author James Bovard observed, “We now have the Battered Citizen Syndrome: the more debacles, the more voters cling to faith in their rulers.”

And this is also how Americans tend to respond to crises, whether they be natural disasters, a mass shooter, or being attacked by terrorists. When these crises happen, the extremely naïve and gullible people plead with their Rulers – government bureaucrats – to increase the intrusions, their wealth confiscations, their police state, and so forth. “Anything to keep us safe. Please. Sock it to me – good and hard!”

And the government Rulers really do sock it to the people – good and hard.

So, this past week there was a “lockdown” situation in the Boston area to find one lone alleged killer, a 19-year-old “pothead” who played soccer and who most of his acquaintances couldn’t believe could be involved in the Boston Marathon bombings.

Outside of Police State Watertown, the entire Boston area was literally a ghost town, all day. Millions of people “advised” by the fascist government police to stay at home and don’t go out. And the martial law police state didn’t even achieve its goal of catching the suspect!

But how much of an added risk would it have been to people’s lives to just go about their business that day, go to work, do their shopping, or go to school, regardless of whether one lone criminal was on the loose?

Well, life is full of risks, but the sheeple of America have become phobic of any risk in life whatsoever, unfortunately.

In contrast to the fascists’ tyrannizing and terrorizing of the obedient sheeple, Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger had this more sensible alternative to the police state lockdown in Boston:

What should be the response is that every American who lives in that area should go about their business while openly carrying a pistol, rifle or both.

Go ahead – try that terrorist crap with the proper response to such an event and see how long you live.  That would instantly be the end of those terrorists and the economic disruption would be zero.  It would also send a strong message – pull that crap and we the people will do our duty as citizens to the common defense.

Unfortunately, such a scenario is too frightening to the sheeple who would rather be kept in their martial law prisons.

But while Toomey’s compromise gun-grabbing bill was voted down this week, Premier Obama has been hinting at yet another executive power grab. On the senate’s vote against the Toomey-Manchin compromise, Obama whined, “They blocked common-sense gun reforms…”

You mean “communist” sense reforms, don’t you, Herr Obama?

Anyway, it is truly a disgusting act of exploitation the way Obama paraded the survivors of the Sandy Hook massacre around to get votes for his fascist gun-grabbing.

While they continue to be emotionally manipulated by the simple-minded rationale that making them defenseless will “reduce gun violence,” the sheeple do not see that they are making themselves more vulnerable to government’s gun violence.

As Judge Napolitano wrote,

The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.

We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense.

And Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes passionately wrote a Pledge of Resistance against the government’s disarmament agenda.

Now, before readers panic and conclude that I am promoting any kind of “anti-government militia movement,” no, I am not doing that.

I am merely pointing out the primary reason the writers of the Bill of Rights included the 2^nd Amendment: to protect the people’s right to defend themselves against government tyrants.

As we have seen with the Amerikan police state, Leviathan’s growing tyranny and recent Presidents’ starting of wars for no good reason, the early Americans had many reasons to oppose even the existence of a national standing army, as Jacob Hornberger wrote here and here.

However, the “conservative” Tea Partiers seem just as ignorant as many progressives, as seen by the Tea Partiers’ level of authoritarianism and deference to Washington’s central planners.

The conservatives, nationalists and collectivists of the right also say, “Sock it to me” in their love of men in uniforms, their worship of all things police and military, and their demonizing of anyone who dares to question the legitimacy of government police and military.

These authoritarians will have a very hard time understanding the possibility of tyranny happening here in Good ol’ US of A, as voluntaryist Larken Rose pointed out.

So, even if the “Law and Order conservatives” read William Grigg, Cop Block, Radley Balko, and Rick Horowitz every day, they still wouldn’t understand how like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany America is now.

And the people around here in Boston cheered all the militarized police in their fascist security theater. Most of the obedient sheeple would never believe the possibility of FBI or private agents involvement in the Boston Marathon bombings prior to the event itself. And nationally conservative and liberal statists tend to believe what government bureaucrats and the media propagandists will tell them. (Whether the “lockdown” and siege of Watertown was because of “sequestration” threats and needing to justify an overly-bloated federal agency budget, or the local police attempting to justify more federal handouts, or just because many of these “cops-n-robbers” neanderthals just get off on these situations, who knows. But I digress.)

Now, there have been many arguments over what exactly the phrases “promote the general welfare” and “provide for” the general welfare mean in the U.S. Constitution. My own interpretation is that “promote” means to advance and “welfare” means the general well-being of the people within the territory over which the federal government has jurisdiction.

Clearly, the federal government has gone against the promoting of our general welfare in the extreme, as have state and local governments. The terribly destructive consequences of government gun-grabbing, the Federal Reserve’s monetary central planning, the non-productive U.S. Congress’s stealing more and more private wealth from the actual workers and producers, and the executive branch’s continued lawlessness, provoking of foreigners and domestic overreach have all made us less prosperous, less safe, and less secure.

And in the past I have compared the federal government to an occupying foreign government in Washington, inflicting its criminality against the American people, and that is a more accurate way to view those buffoons and crooks: they are invaders.

How could we not view the federal government as an occupying foreign regime when its own military personnel are engaging in psy-ops of U.S. senators? Psychological operations are mainly used by governments against enemies in order to manipulate the enemies’ emotions, behavior and decisions toward one’s own advantage. But given that U.S. senators supposedly represent the American people (and given all the other threats against us such as the feds purchasing a billion rounds of ammunition for domestic use, and the IRS, the FBI and NSA criminally spying on innocent Americans), one would have to conclude that either the military or the feds in general view the American people as the enemy.

The feds have not only been AWOL in their abandonment of their duty to “promote the general welfare,” but, with psy-ops, false flag ops, and intrusions run amok such as ObamaCare, they obviously do not have the American people’s interests at heart.

“But that’s what elections are for,” cry the naïve and gullible.

U.S. elections are repeatedly just rearranging of deck chairs, as I have noted before. For conservatives and Tea Partiers, nothing has changed for the better since the elections of 1980, 1994 or 2000.

One can easily predict that in 2014 the conservatives will elect the same old slithering snakes and sleazebags dressed in Tea Party outfits, the same old turncoats who will promise to repeal ObamaCare and oppose gun control but then go on to vote for more socialized medicine and gun registration.

Before there is to be a real economic collapse, and civil unrest and martial law (which is obviously the direction in which America is heading), the people need to pry themselves from the grasp of government’s control and its tyranny.

Sooner or later, people will have to realize that as an institution of monopoly, compulsion and coercion the government is thus inherently an organization of criminality. The people need to stop being its willing victims.

So, rather than being sheeple saying “Sock it to me!” to the abusive Big Daddy Government, the people need to realize that what America needs is notreforming (which is impossible), but a complete dismantling of the federal government, because it should never have existed in the first place. Its existence has provided for nothing but a place for traitors, shysters and violent psychopaths, and it just gets worse and worse.

Decentralization, nullification, localism and secession are clearly in order, before it’s too late.

This past week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on two same-sex marriage cases: California’s voter-approved Proposition 8, which changed the state constitution to eliminate the state-recognized ‘right’ (i.e. state-granted privilege) of same-sex couples to marry; and regarding the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as only between one man and one woman, and which restricted federal benefits and inter-state marriage recognition to only opposite-sex marriages.

The arguments and Justices’ questions in these cases showed that the laws that legislators (and voters) make are more and more confusing, intrusive and nonsensical, in my view.

In these arguments, the Supremes expressed doubts as to the high court even having jurisdiction, as well as whether the cases had legal standing for review.

In arguments involving the California case this week, the Justices seemed to express doubts as to whether they even wanted to bear the burden of deciding the equality of homosexual couples.

As George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley commented, “Indeed, they looked like so many elderly drivers in Florida driving slowly on the highway with their turn signal on, looking desperately for an off-ramp.”

Sadly, our society, state legislatures and Congress are filled with many slow drivers with their turn signals forever on and never turning. Turley is correct in observing that the clueless court clucks seem disoriented, as these cases shouldn’t be too difficult to decide, in my view.

Perhaps the overpaid highly-paid Justices have more important things on their minds, such as what temperature at which to set their bubble baths later on, and so forth.

However, in the past Turley has suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court should be expanded to perhaps 19 Justices.

Hmmm. Will that really solve the conflicts which arise in our society? (No, I think that perhaps 49 or 149 Justices might be better. Or even 535, if you get my drift.)

So just recently, Nullification author Thomas Woods has been taking some jabs at how some people in America view the U.S. Supreme Court as the Ultimate Decider:

If the peoples of the states created the federal government and its subdivisions as their agent, how do they permanently lose the ability to stop their own creation from destroying them? Since when does the agent tell the principals what its powers are?

To say that the Supreme Court must decide constitutionality in the last resort is to beg all the relevant questions. To say that the Supreme Court has itself decided that it must be this arbiter is to take question-begging to quite an extreme. How can the Supreme Court, part of an agent of the states, have the absolutely final say, even above the sovereign entities that created it? As Madison explained in 1800, the courts have their role, but the parties to the Constitution naturally have to have some kind of defense mechanism in the last resort.

Actually, marriage was essentially a private matter until around the 18^th Century.

As LRC columnist Ryan McMaken wrote, the State got into the marriage business because the statists couldn’t bear the thought of contracts being transferred without the State’s intrusions and thefts. And it also has to do with control. The bureaucrats of the State love control.

So besides whether these same-sex marriage cases have legal standing before the high court, some of the Justices had expressed concern as to whether these issues should really be left to the states to decide.

But when the high court refers to “the states,” they really mean the states’ governments, the state legislatures and state courts should decide the outcomes of these cases. Really, we’re talking about politicians, bureaucrats, and government-appointed state court judges.

Sorry. But our liberty and the rights of the individual should not be dependent upon the whims of politically-appointed bureaucrats on courts, or even elected representatives in legislatures. Then, you are not talking about rights or liberty, you are talking about state-granted privileges.

And the Supremes often decide cases on the bases of the conflicts between the rights of the individual and “compelling State interest.” Or “balancing the rights of society as a collective against the rights of the individual.” Again, in this case we are then not talking about “rights,” but state-granted privileges.

But society or the collective does not have “rights,” only individuals have rights, and they are inherent rights which pre-exist any governments. There is no compromise that can be made here. If there is a compromise, then the individual really doesn’t have rights.

And when there is compromise of the individual’s rights, there is no liberty.

But, alas, America has degenerated from a liberty-loving population following the Revolution to one in which the political process is used for some people to impose their will and way of life onto others.

So it’s always something, as Roseanne Rosanadana used to say. Either the voters of California do not believe in the rights of the individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or the U.S. Congress wants to define how certain private relationships and contracts must be by law.

And as more amongst the population are increasingly confused about liberty and rights, so are these “Supreme” Justices in Washington.

Now, were I a Supreme Court Justice (and obviously I am not, nor will I ever be, nor would I ever want to be, nor do I think that such a body of Ultimate Deciders has any real legitimacy or moral standing in a free and just society, but I digress…), I would say that it doesn’t matter whether the California Proposition 8 case has legal standing – of course not. And if I had to adhere to the extremely flawed and unjust U.S. Constitution, I would say that the First Amendment protects the individual’s right of freedom of association, and the Ninth Amendment – something which the late Judge Robert Bork compared to an “inkblot” – protects the rights of the individual not enumerated in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

I would then give examples of rights not enumerated in the Bill of Rights, including the right to establish voluntary contracts with others, contracts the terms of which are really the matters of those parties involved, and not the business of any third parties, be they one’s neighbors, the majority of voters of Commie California, Moral Majority hacks activists, state legislators, or court judges. And those contracts include in matters both personal and economic. (Why in the alleged 21^st Century are we even debating these issues?!)

And, regarding the Defense of Marriage Act case, of course that’s “unconstitutional,” because no where in the Constitution does it authorize Congress to define or interfere with the personal relationships and contracts of the people of the United States.

I know, I know, there are those out there who desperately search the U.S. Constitution in its every detail, hoping to find some word or phrase they can use to justify their own selfish impositions of their way of life onto others, but whatever.

If homosexuals want to be married and have a legally-binding contract, then that is their right as human beings. The Defense of Marriage Act and the California voter-approved law violate those fundamental human rights.

So, it comes down to this: We really have to decide as an evolved, civilized society who owns the life of the individual.

There is collective ownership of the individual, or there is self-ownership.

There cannot be anything in between. No “shared” ownership of the individual’s life between the individual and the society in which one lives. That’s nutso.

And you really can’t have liberty without the society’s recognition of the individual’s right to self-ownership. In fact, the entire rule of law and the idea of civilized society is based on this, in my view, and self-ownership’s pal, the non-aggression principle. At least, that’s how I see it.

The anti-same-sex marriage advocates are really saying that they as a majority of society (and as enforced by the almighty State) own the life of each individual, as well as other people’s private contracts. Otherwise, even if they disagree with the kinds of private, voluntary contracts which other individuals want to have, the majority of meddlers and intruders are really obligated to buzz off, or “MYOB!” (which is a phrase we no longer hear in the People’s Republic of Amerika now).

And to complicate matters, many of these cases are to do with government benefits, such as in the case of death of spouses, divorces, etc.

But there should be no such thing as “government benefits,” which are redistributed from other members of society whose earnings and wealth are seized from them involuntarily, through coercion or threats of violence. Once again, how can the society call itself “civilized” while simultaneously implementing such dishonest and immoral schemes?

And people are worried about the children whose parents are homosexuals. But what about the many, many children for generations and centuries, raised by heterosexual parents, who were beaten, humiliated and brutalized as part of their upbringing? Such cases are still widespread in our society. Things haven’t changed much there. What about them? (And no, I’m not saying that the heterosexuality of those abusive parents had anything to do with their abuse!)

And I can’t believe the ignorance I am hearing on talk radio. People are actually concerned that, “if we allow gays to marry, then more and more people will be gay and marry one another, there will be no more heterosexuals to reproduce the human race!”

Well, the many surveys which have been done on the percentage of homosexuals in society have ranged from 1 to 20%, so it probably has always been around 10% or so.

Despite the Left’s encouraging homosexuality in the government school curriculum and pop culture for decades, I don’t think that that or the legalization of same-sex marriage in some states has changed that general percentage, or ever will.

But it is sad that so-called conservatives and traditionalists feel this compulsion to immorally use the armed power of the State as a means of social engineering (what are they, leftists?) to force their way of life onto others. A healthy society – which ours isn’t, not by a long shot – really values procreation without State-enforced social engineering and legal compulsion to do it.

So to conclude, it really is a mistake to rely on the U.S. Supreme Court for answers to any issue, certainly not the same-sex marriage issue.

I really thought that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo eminent domain ruling was the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as the Court’s legitimacy as Ultimate Decider was concerned.

Then, last year the Supremes decided in favor of the ObamaCare mandate, with Chief Bureaucrat John Roberts declaring that the mandate was a “tax,” even though its proponents weren’t even arguing that it was a tax.

The Court’s self-delegitimizing was at that point a matter of settled law, in my book.

Several commentators have been observing the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, but really the U.S. government’s war on Iraq began over 22 years ago.

In January 1991, then-President George H.W. Bush started the war on Iraq, and imposed sanctions and no-fly zones, which were continued by President Bill Clinton throughout the 1990s. By 2001, hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqi deaths were wrought by the U.S. government and the UN, and there was widespread anti-American anger felt by many in the Middle East.

Here is a brief review of what led up to the elder President Bush’s 1991 war on Iraq:

In 1990, Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, were engaged in disputes with Kuwait. Iraq believed that Kuwait was siphoning Iraq’s oil via horizontal drilling, and Iraq also believed that Kuwait’s own oil production was above OPEC quotas which allegedly effected in lower oil profits for Iraq.

Saddam Hussein had been the U.S. government’s favorite during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, which Saddam had started with his invasion of Iran. The U.S. government’s arming and providing tactical battle planning to Iraq, despite U.S. officials knowing that Iraq was using chemical weaponsduring that conflict, were well documented.

When Saddam considered invading Kuwait, he met with then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, and asked her what kind of response the U.S. would have to such an invasion.

In their discussion, according to the New York Times, Glaspie stated, “…we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60′s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. (Sec. of State) James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.” (More here.)

Apparently, Saddam Hussein took those words as a green light to invade Kuwait.

However, George Bush the elder then did a bait-and-switch, and began preparing for his war on Iraq. But the biggest task for Bush was to convince the American people that the war on behalf of Kuwait, an extremely anti-democratic, authoritarian monarchy, was not for oil but for “liberating” Kuwait from Saddam.

To sell this war to the American people, the government of Kuwait hired as many as 20 PR and lobbying firms. One PR firm in particular, Hill and Knowlton, was apparently the “mastermind” of the PR campaign, according to PR industry experts John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, whose book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You provides the details of the Bush-Kuwait PR campaign, as excerpted by PR Watch.

Both Bush presidents were skilled salesmen in their demonizing those who would be on the receiving end of their own wars of aggression. Philip Knightley, author of the book, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, in an October 2001 article described the repeated stratagem of warmongers’ use of propaganda to demonize the enemy to rationalize a new war for the warmongers’ own people to support it.

The most effective PR ploy was the congressional testimony of a teenage Kuwaiti girl who stated, emotionally, that she witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of hospital incubators and leaving them “on the cold floor to die.” The girl later turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. And not only was that fact suppressed until after Bush’s war began, but the information she gave was false, and the girl had been coached by an executive of Hill and Knowlton. (Video)

Murray Rothbard gives quite a few further details regarding the whole 1990-91 Bush-Iraq-Kuwait wheeling-and-dealing here and here.

During the elder President Bush’s 1991 Gulf War, one of the most egregious acts that the U.S. military committed against the Iraqis was to intentionally destroy civilian water and sewage treatment centers and electrical facilities.

According to researcher James Bovard, U.S. Air Force Col. John Warden published an article in Airpower Journal, titled, “The Enemy as a System,” in which Warden told of the U.S. military’s intentional targeting of the civilian infrastructure as a means to undermine Iraqi “civilian morale.” Bovard also cites a June 23, 1991 Washington Post analysis, which quoted a Pentagon official as stating, “People say, ‘You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.’ Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.”

By the mid-1990s, diseases such as cholera, measles, and typhoid had led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and a skyrocketing infant mortality rate, with many more deaths by the year 2000. This campaign of cruelty was advanced further by the U.S. government and the UN through sanctions and no-fly zones, which prevented medical treatments and the means of repairing damaged infrastructure from being imported into Iraq. Clearly, such a controversial campaign of bombing civilian water and sewage treatment centers must have been approved beforehand by then-President George H.W. Bush and his Sec. of Defense Dick Cheney.

Justifiably, there was widespread anger amongst the inhabitants of the Middle East by 2001. In fact, one of the main motivations of the 9/11 terrorists was the Gulf War’s subsequent sanctions against the Iraqi civilian population.

Besides the sanctions throughout the 1990s as continued by President Bill Clinton, Clinton himself inflicted more bombing of Iraq.

Some people have now been comparing George Bush Jr.’s 2003 revival of the long war on Iraq with the extended war in Vietnam of the 1960s and 1970s, especially combined with the younger Bush’s war of aggression in Afghanistan and Obama’s continuation of those wars and starting new ones.

The younger George Bush’s 2003 war on Iraq was really a continuation of what his father had started in 1991. Investigative journalist Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, asserts that Bush Jr. was planning to invade Iraq as early as 1999 to take advantage of the “political capital” his father had built up earlier in Iraq.

(Can you imagine a President Jeb Bush in 2016? But I digress.)

In the elder President George Bush’s January 16, 1991 speech from the Oval Office, when he claimed that his 1991 war “will not be another Vietnam” (approx. 6:45), he also spoke of the “New World Order” (7:30).

The neoconservatives and progressive interventionists have been implementing their plans for global hegemony for decades, and using the force of the U.S. government to do it. But there is a frightening love of government that connects these interventionists, far outweighing any actual love forfreedom and peace they could possibly have.

And now, after all these 22 years of Bush war quagmires and trillions of dollars in debt, and with warnings regarding the warmongers’ plans for Iran (which was part of the neocons’ plans all along), can the American people ever wake up to the truth about all this?

Now, the elder George Bush was elected President in 1988. But given how entrenched the Establishment’s interventionist policies were by that time, when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s it wouldn’t have mattered whether Bush or Democrat Michael Dukakis was elected in 1988. Given the myth of the “progressive peacenik,” a hypothetical Dukakis administration of 1989-1993 would most probably have been similar to the current one of Barack Obama. And with similar militarist reactions to Iraq as Bush in the name of furthering the obsession for hegemony that statists of both left and right have (and to keep the military-industrial-complex happy, too).

However, during the 1988 presidential campaign, had the media given Libertarian Party nominee Ron Paul the same free advertising they gave both Bush and Dukakis, the American people would have seen the clear alternative from the Bush-Dukakis statist quo.

And how would a President Ron Paul have handled the collapse of the Soviet Union? Given that any threats or perceived threats from overseas had vanished overnight, Ron Paul would have closed all the overseas U.S. military bases that existed then, including all the European and Asian bases and other foreign U.S. governmental apparatus. He would have brought all U.S. troops home, and many of them would have gone into the private sector to become productive workers, business owners and employers.

A President Paul would have shrunk the federal government by eliminating many useless departments, bureaus and programs, which Ronald Reagan promised to do but didn’t. And Paul would have abolished the fascist income tax. The economic boom of the 1990s would have been magnified by many times, for sure.

And a President Ron Paul would have educated the American people on the actual ideas of liberty. He would have informed the people of what a realfree market is – something that the Heritage Foundation, Glenn Beck, and, ugh, Willard Romney wouldn’t know if they fell over it.

There also wouldn’t have been a U.S. government invasion of Iraq in 1991, bombing of civilian infrastructure, sanctions and no-fly zones, and provocations of foreigners becoming determined to retaliate. There may not (or probably not) have been a 9/11, and the police state in America that was already growing by the early 1990s would have been put to a stop. (And the younger George W. Bush probably wouldn’t have even been elected governor of Texas, let alone President of the U.S.) And there wouldn’t have been any U.S.-initiated wars in Afghanistan and other countries as well.

But, “woulda, coulda, shoulda” is just not realistic, and what happened, happened. The misery, destruction, collapse of the American economy in addition to all these wars – it happened, thanks to neocons and progressive interventionists.

The central planners in charge must have very serious clinically pathological delusions of grandeur and a hunger for power and control in their attempts to “remake the Middle East in America’s image” or “make the world safe for democracy” (but not freedom and peace), while coveting those foreign territories’ natural resources and slaughtering innocents.

So, call me old-fashioned, but it takes a really sick, criminal mind to intentionally destroy the water and sewage treatments of an entire civilian population, and forcibly withhold their medical treatments and repairs. And it takes a very demented person to view entire populations and cultures in other parts of the world as sub-human and whose lives are not worthy of any “inalienable rights” to life, liberty, and peace.

As I have stated in the past, America’s culture has declined over the past century. The greater power we have allowed governments to usurp, the further “third world” America has become.

The Bush wars of the past 22 years have not been helpful to human progress, that’s for sure.

This is really a follow-up from my previous article on the government-media complex’s continuingwar propaganda. To clarify, my bringing up Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was not a defense of him but a defense of due process and the rule of law.

I happen to believe that all people must act under the rule of law with no exceptions, including government bureaucrats.

And in my previous article, I referred to “war” as an artificial concept. There’s really no such thing as war – only criminal aggression, which is what “war” is. You are either behaving aggressively in society, or you are peaceful and respectful of the lives and property of others. There’s no middle ground there.

However, there are those who believe that “9/11 changed everything,” and that “we’re at war with al Qaeda.” They believe those things because they had been bamboozled by government bureaucrats and their apparatchiks who already had questionable plans in place for wars – inAfghanistan and Iraq – and for a police state for America well before 9/11.

And our rulers say we are “at war with al-Qaeda,” even though our own government has been supporting al-Qaeda in Syria, supported its rise inLibya, and in fact supported Osama bin Laden early on (similar to the Israeli government’s own dippy central planners helping to create Hamas).

Do people know these things?

So I personally find the corrupt buffoons of the U.S. government terrifying. We are not “at war with al-Qaeda”; the U.S. government has been at waragainst the American people.

But some people want to suggest that my wanting to tell the truth about our government’s shenanigans, or my defending the right of all people to due process, or suggest that a Bradley Manning exposing government crimes, could possibly be “aiding and abetting” the enemy, or being an “enemy combatant.”

So given our dangerous government’s absurdly broad and ambiguous definition of “enemy combatant,” you can see why I find these U.S. officials terrifying.

And it isn’t just the President’s unconstitutional power to kill an innocent human being sans due process, it’s also the NDAA’s indefinite detention of Americans without due process, the FISA or otherwise searches and seizures without due process, all these thoroughly un-American police state policies now.

For instance, U.S. government agents had paid villagers in Pakistan to drop spy transmitter chips in areas that would lead to innocents being captured for torture or innocents being murdered by drones. And many of the Guantanamo detainees who were taken by U.S. forces from abroad had beenfound to be totally innocent, having been turned in by local villagers being paid by U.S. government officials, or in which no evidence against them existed or whose capture had been a result of informants giving false confessions (which is the real purpose of torture, by the way).

Can you imagine combining those imbecilic central planner-type policies with the more recent “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign? Can you imagine being the victim of some Nazi-brownshirt neighbor falsely turning you in for no good reason, and government agents treating you like a “terrorist”?

Now, occasionally I hear Mark Levin on the radio. Sometimes he can go on and on and on about how great the Constitution and Bill of Rights are, and criticizing the Obama socialist agenda with point after point on ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, etc., and lately he has even been criticizing theEstablishment Republicans in Congress. Good so far.

But then, he starts talking about U.S. government foreign policy, and pulls a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on us – totally turning against the Bill of Rights, due process and the rule of law, and spewing the ignorance and moral relativism of the neo-conned chickenhawks who have been starting the wars and occupations that have caused terrorist blowback against America.

Sadly, the neocons have unwittingly turned Thomas Jefferson’s America into a Stalin-like America. The neocons brought their deranged collectivist and globalist vision to America, and the conservatives and “constitutionalists” such as Levin bought it, hook, line and sinker.

One issue that Mark Levin was discussing late last week (on 3/8/13) was the decision of the Obama Administration to bring a terrorism suspect into a civilian court for trial, rather than bring him to Guantanamo or some other torture regime. Of course, the cognitively dissonant Levin was against the idea of a civilian trial.

Levin and other neocons actually believe that we’re really at war, as our central planning rulers have been telling us since 9/11, and that “war is different.”

“War is an exception, and therefore the Bill of Rights needs to be suspended,” seems to be what the zombie neocons have been saying.

Well, Levin – supposedly a big fan of the “Founding Fathers” – doesn’t seem to understand that the Bill of Rights includes inalienable rights that all human beings have, pre-existing any government. And these rights, such as the right to due process, the right to require your accuser to present evidence against you in a court of law, the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms, the right to be secure in your person, papers, property and effects, apply to all human beings, everywhere.

The Bill of Rights doesn’t say “These rights only apply to Americans, or to people who happen to be within the borders of the United States.”

So, if some government bureaucrat, the President, a military general or soldier, or one’s next-door neighbors want to accuse someone of something, then one has a natural, inherent right to require the accuser to present evidence against the accused or otherwise they must leave him alone. That’s theAmerican way. (It might not be the Nazi Germany way, but it is the American way.)

And it doesn’t matter what crimes others or the government accuses someone of, terrorism, murder, rape, doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter who is being accused, foreigner or American, “over there” or “over here.”

But due to the widespread cognitive dissonance of today’s Americans (and generations afflicted with government-controlled schooling), one type of crime is now different from all others. Terrorism is different. Because of terrorism, we must remove what used to be seen as inalienable rights from all people domestic or foreign, and we must blindly and obediently trust the judgment of politicians and militarists.

This kind of trust in politicians is quite misplaced, to say the least, as Future of Freedom President Jacob Hornberger observed just recently.

The fact is, a crime of aggression is a crime of aggression, whether a suicide bomber blows up a marketplace, whether a drugged-up psychopath shoots innocents at a school, or whether a government ruler takes an organized military overseas and invades a country that was of no threat to his people, and occupies those foreign lands by force and destroys those entire societies. Those are all crimes of aggression.

You see, in 1991 when the U.S. government initiated a criminal act of military aggression against Iraq, intentionally destroyed Iraq’s civilian water and sewage treatments and electrical centers, imposed sanctions and no-fly zones and prevented materials from being imported to repair the damage and prevented medical supplies from being imported, and the rates of cancer and cholera and other illnesses amongst the Iraqi civilian population skyrocketed as a result during the 1990s, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, those acts are all crimes, regardless of the propaganda government bureaucrats disseminated.

During the 1990s, Ron Paul actually warned us several times that, if the U.S. government continued with those aggressions against people on foreign lands, there could very well be a terrorist attack within the U.S.

But there are a lot of people now in America who actually think it’s absurd to bring up the actions of our own government which preceded 9/11. They think it’s absurd for someone to suggest we apply the Golden Rule to U.S. government foreign policy. “How dare you suggest that our government shouldn’t “do unto others what we would not want others to do unto us”!

That denial of human rights in others, the same inalienable rights that one claims for oneself, is incredibly selfish and shows how self-centered and anti-social the philosophy of “Exceptionalism” really is.

So the American Exceptionalists believe in our government’s right to invade and occupy other countries, but that the people in those countries do not have the same kind of right to self-defense that we Americans have, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out.

For example, while many of the conservatives, the “moral values” crowd and self-proclaimed “patriotic Americans” now fear the Left and the feds’ gun control agenda because “patriots” believe in the 2^nd Amendment, the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms, they nevertheless supported U.S. troops confiscating arms from innocent civilians in Iraq, making Iraqis totally defenseless.

Meanwhile, the obsessive bureaucrats and their flunkies fail to see the big picture – they fail to understand the causes and effects regarding terrorism.

And so Bradley Manning has been referred to by ignoramuses as a “traitor,” because he released so-called classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks. As I mentioned in my previous article, Manning wanted the American people – not jihadists or al-Qaeda, mind you, but the American people – to know about the crimes, incompetence and corruption of our rulers.

But the real traitors here are our central planners who have been intentionally starting wars and provoking foreigners to justify the always-expanding, tax-eating central planning and military bureaucracy.

The treasonous central planners had a duty is to “protect the peace,” to keep Americans safe and secure from foreign aggression. But what they have been doing – starting wars and provoking foreigners – has made Americans less safe and less secure.

The central planners are derelicts of duty who have not been “promoting the general welfare” or well-being of America and instead have diminished it.

But the Exceptionalists still don’t see it that way. The zombies continue to stare at their iPhones and their TVs, and let the propagandists hypnotize them.

And then we have a well-meaning filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul, but the real rulers still seem to be the ignorant Sens. Graham and McCain, and the dangerous Obama and John Brennan, to our detriment.

Some people believe that Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster to delay the vote to confirm the barbaric John Brennan as CIA Director was effective. However, there are skeptics, and I am one of them. We still seem to be ruled by government officials who are clueless about how to maintain a civilized society and are clueless about human rights.

And Americans seem to depend on a mainstream media for information but are getting government propaganda instead.

For instance, during a PBS discussion about Sen. Paul’s filibuster and the drone program controversy, New York Times national security correspondent Scott Shane incorrectly asserted that U.S. officials “have in one case, in September of 2011, killed one American overseas. And that was Anwar al-Awlaki, who had joined the al-Qaida branch in Yemen and was actively plotting terrorism against the United States.”

Now, either Shane really believes what he is saying – in which case he is not a very good reporter – or he knows these items of information are not true and is merely “parroting the party line,” as the old saying goes.

First, U.S. government drones bombed and murdered at least three Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was not even accused of any crimes or of terrorism.

And secondly, Shane also stated – falsely – that Anwar al-Awlaki was “actively plotting terrorism against the United States.” The Obama Administration never presented any evidence against al-Awlaki. And, as analysts have demonstrated, any evidence against al-Awlaki that may have existed was weak and its use in an actual trial probably couldn’t have convicted him.

This case was very similar to the Osama bin Laden case, in which neither the Bush nor Obama Administrations had any evidence to prove bin Laden’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. As George W. Bush stated regarding the Taliban’s requiring the Bush Administration to present evidence against bin Laden, “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”

Obama’s technique was similar, in that his refusal to present evidence against al-Awlaki was based on secrecy, an important part of totalitarian regimes. But “We know he’s guilty, and we don’t have to prove it to you” is basically what the Obama Regime implied in its refusal to disclose its alleged evidence.

The main problem that the U.S. government had with Anwar al-Awlaki, however, was with his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy which he included in his religious sermons, speech entirely protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in this very important article on this subject, the First Amendment protects the advocating of violence as a means of defending oneself against violent and tyrannical governments. Greenwald pointed to a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, its reversal of Brandenburg v. Ohio, which separated the difference between forms of speech which “‘advocate or teach the duty, necessity, or propriety’ of violence ‘as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform’” and forms of speech which are an “incitement to imminent lawless action.”

You see, from the point of view of the millions of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis and other foreigners who have been the victims of the U.S. government’s wanton socialist violence and destruction not just since 9/11 but especially since the first U.S. government war on Iraq in 1991, they actually view the U.S. government as a tyrannical foreign invader and occupier (which it has been).

But especially since 9/11 many in the mainstream news media have been obediently and subserviently repeating what government bureaucrats and their spokesflunkies have been dictating to them, rather than actually engaging in real investigating or research. They certainly do not seem to have beenquestioning the assertions of government officials, that’s for sure.

And we also have some of the most ignorant and short-sighted congressmen and senators in Washington as well. In response to Sen. Paul’s example of Vietnam and the possibility of drone murdering Jane Fonda in her cavorting with the North Vietnamese in Hanoi, rather than arresting her and charging and trying her for treason, Sen. John McCain replied, “To somehow allege or infer that the president of the United States is going to kill somebody like Jane Fonda or somebody who disagrees with the policies is a stretch of imagination which is, frankly, ridiculous.” Yet, that is exactly what Obama did to Anwar al-Awlaki and why he did it.

Sadly, most of the American people do not know these important facts, as the mainstream news media seem to have been merely copying and pasting the latest White House press releases, and passing them off as “news,” especially since 9/11.

In fact, part of our problem, and which is why some true patriots are concerned for Americans’ future as a free society and not just another banana republic dictatorship, is that we have actual powerful U.S. senators who do not understand the uniquely American ideas of due process and presumption of innocence.

In my article, Senators Who Love the Government But Hate America, I referred to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s outburst, “If you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re not going to be given a lawyer.” And my reply was: Who will determine whether or not one has “betrayed” one’s country?

Graham and others seem to want the President or military generals to make such a determination. But those who actually know their history know how empowering the President to be judge, jury and executioner ends up. (Not good.)

However, it seems to me that these rulers are more concerned with whether someone has betrayed the government, not the country.

In betrayal of certain bureaucrats’ policies, not in betrayal of their fellow people. Graham even suggested that political speech could be curtailed during times of “war.”

And as more information has come out about Army Private Bradley Manning’s release of overly-classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks, andwhy he would do that, we have seen that Manning’s motivations were out of a duty not to government bureaucrats but out of a duty to the American people. (We cannot say the same about George W. Bush and Barack Obama, however.)

Manning saw that crimes were being committed against foreign people, and in America’s name, and he believed that the American people had a right to know about them.

So there are now many examples of government censorship of political speech since 9/11. But these senators who want to label someone as an “enemy combatant” merely for questioning or criticizing short-sighted, counter-productive and dangerous government policies, such as the “war on terror” itself and its legitimacy, are really acting to protect the government and its minions.

And thanks to the propagandists, the Orwellian story of 9/11 suggests that these conflicts all began on 9/11. To this day, the propagandists still refuse to acknowledge that the U.S. government’s disastrous foreign interventions, and especially its 1991 first war of aggression on Iraq and subsequent sanctions were major provocations against the people of that region of the world. But, true to their diehard socialist agenda, the rulers went ahead after 9/11 to increase the interventions, wars, and crimes of renditions, indefinite detentions of innocents, tortures and murders of foreigners.

But all this war stuff is a crock, as I mentioned here. War is really an artificial concept used by collectivists, statists, racists and power-grabbers to rationalize the commission of criminal acts of aggression against others and get away with it. This is the whole point of American Exceptionalism, by the way.

Perhaps some of the people will finally see the illegitimacy of these wars when the Washington regime begins to target the American people more directly (after disarming them and making them totally defenseless, of course), which is where we seem to be heading, as I noted in my 2010 article,Tea Partiers May Need the ACLU Soon.

And, as Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger pointed out recently, the early Americans and Revolutionaries also warned us over 200 years ago against an armed federal government run amok.

I think our government has run amok.

There have been several different predictions and scenarios involving how inflation and austerity measures in the U.S. could bring about food shortages and other shortages, food riots, looting, violent protests, flash mobs, and martial law.

All these things can be prevented, of course, if more people could wake up to the fact that government central planning in money and economic matters is inherently flawed and doomed to failure, societal self-destruction and collapse.

Some people see the recent German court decision to approve German bailouts of irresponsible European governments as a new dictatorship for Germany and a boon for investors. And there are others who see this new scheme as the beginning of runaway hyperinflation in Europe that will spread to the U.S.

Following this decision by the high German court, the U.S. Federal Reserve has announced a new round of quantitative easing (QE3). Some people believe that QE3 will cause more economic instability, and further destruction of the dollar.

Eventually the austerity measures we have been seeing in Europe will reach the U.S.

Austerity measures will hit public employee benefits and pensions, and welfare and Medicare recipients (but not the bloated salaries, benefits and pensions of Congressmen and their beloved bureaucrats).

But it seems that the U.S. government has been pushing hard to get as many people dependent on government as possible. Food stamps spending has more than doubled since Barack Obama became President, although the number of Americans on food stamps almost doubled from 2001 to 2009 during the presidency of George W. Bush as well.

And the Obama Administration has gone so far as to push U.S. food stamps onto Mexicans! (And Mexicans can't even vote for Obama this November — theoretically, that is.)

Also distressing is how private corporations profit from the government's exploiting the population's vulnerabilities that the government's own interventions cause. One example is JP Morgan Chase's shamefully profiting from the food stamps program.

Incidentally, employees of JP Morgan Chase donated over $800,000 to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and, so far over $155,000 to Obama's 2012 effort. (There certainly has been no quid pro quo here, as former President George Bush the Elder might say.)

Now, regarding eventual shortages, austerity and civil unrest in America that would involve the unavailability of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) payments, in large part affecting food stamp recipients, one scenario I've seen details how rioting and turmoil could unfold, mainly beginning in the cities, but eventually flowing out into the suburbs. It is not a pretty picture.

One would think that the government bureaucrats who control these social programs could see ahead what would happen when withholding such benefits, especially with millions of people dependent on them for their daily sustenance. So, in the case of possible future EBT cards not functioning followed by rioting and violence, one has to wonder whether such an action by the government could be purposeful.

In the aforementioned scenario, the writer emphasizes urban minorities as the ones mainly perpetrating the flash mob rioting and violence. But, in 2010 34% of food stamp recipients were white, 22% black and 29% Hispanic, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

However, the flash mobs committing acts of violence in the cities in recent years do not seem to be associated with government austerity measures, food stamps, hunger, etc. In some instances, such violence has been racially motivated, black against white, as witnessed in this account, for example. Unfortunately, the mention of such a modern social phenomenon in the U.S. is politically incorrect, as many newscasters and newspapers reporting on those events censor the race of the perpetrators and that of victims, as author Thomas Sowell has noted. Race demagogues such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Shrapnel have gained much fame and popularity from such "race-hustling."

So are the Chicago-Washington community organizers and agitators trying to promote race riots? Obama and his "social justice" cohorts do not seem to have any comments on the violence committed by inner-city punks. The Holder Justice Department has refused to prosecute black against white voter intimidation cases. And Obama wants public schools to stop disciplining misbehaving black students. Hmmm.

And why have U.S. military recruiters allowed so many white supremacists to join the military?

It appears that the efforts of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and now the election of Barack Obama as President do not seem to have healed the friction among the races in America.

So there seem to be extremists on both sides, and the rest of us are caught in the middle.

But when there will be government austerity and EBT card non-functionality, the flash mob violence we have seen recently will probably be much worse, regardless of race or ethnicity.

But, racial conflicts aside, why have the Bush and Obama Administrations increased spending on food stamps so much? Social programs such as food stamps rob people of their incentive to provide for themselves, and they become serfs to bureaucrats.

It is as though these imbecilic bureaucrats are encouraging the masses to get dependent on these bureaucrats, and for devious purposes.

No, they wouldn't do that. Not that there hasn't been enough information about Obama and his immoral, unconstitutional acts as President to indicate any sort of deviousness, no.

With the moral hazard of government bureaucrats' luring people into this kind of dependence and serfdom, QE3 will cause further economic instability, part of the inherent moral hazard of having a central bank and lack of freedom and competition in money and banking. Such Fed policies continually rob the people through inflation, particularly the lower and middle classes.

Added to those moral hazards of these professional bureaucrats are Congress's raising the debt ceiling, Washington's lack of prosecuting criminally irresponsible banksters, the 2008 extortion-like bankster bailout, and foreclosure fraudsters.

And Obama's pushing through Congress the bill allowing for indefinite detention of Americans without charge or evidence, and his signing it into law, followed by his appealing the judge's striking it down — there probably isn't any deviousness behind that, and probably won't be any targeting of political dissenters during future civil conflicts in America, no. (There certainly hasn't been any of that, not in America, no.)

All these acts of government criminality could be leading America into a total breakdown of society.

So these people in Washington are either extremely clueless and don't know what they're doing, or they are doing these things intentionally, in which case they are just plain evil.

So, could the ruling elites be purposefully trying to cause so much massive dependence on government and such massive weakening of the financial and monetary systems, followed by a false-flag type economic collapse and sudden withholding of government benefits and unavailability of our own money in the bank, to intentionally bring about rioting and violence?

And, if Romney is elected in November, would he be any different from Obama?

And so, if these scenarios play out, and there is indeed massive civil unrest in America, we already know that various federal agencies and local and state police as well are preparing for it. The police state that J. Edgar Hoover, Oliver North, and Dick Cheney put in place is being fully embraced by Obama, the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, FBI and CIA, as well as many local police neanderthals all across America — it is as though they are drooling for some action, and for a chance for them to show the rest of the world just how tough they are.

Can you imagine people with the kind of extremely questionable character and level of dishonesty and untrustworthiness as Obama and Romney presiding over a situation of military martial law?

In addition to all this, the Obama Administration has allowed foreign troops onto U.S. soil. NATO troops were in training in Tampa just prior to the Republican Convention. They now have Russian soldiers training in the U.S., and some insiders believe that these foreign troops are joining with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security toward some sort of illicit action against Americans under the pretense of "peacekeeping" during a time of civil unrest in America.

In my opinion, having foreign troops coming into the U.S. for any reason is dangerous, and Sheriff Richard Mack agrees with me.

And now, because of inner-city gun-related crime rates, and recent isolated shootings and mass killings, the emotionalistic calls for gun control have been on the increase. This despite violent criminals who disobey laws against assault, rape and murder probably are not inclined to obey gun laws as well.

And, as John Lott has noted, would-be assaulters, rapists and murderers are less likely to commit their crimes when they know their prospective victims are armed.

But because of the emotionalism surrounding certain tragedies, even Republicans such as SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia, radio host Michael Savage and TV host Bill O'Reilly have shown irrationality on the matter. How will Americans, in their cars stuck in busy intersections when flash mobs rampage and attack them, be able to defend themselves if they have been disarmed by the government? When looters and burglars break into their homes and businesses, how will disarmed homeowners and businesspeople protect themselves?

And you can say what you want about anti-UN "conspiracy theories" and so forth. But, mirroring a zany 1961 U.S. State Department call for complete civilian disarmament, the 2012 UN Arms Trade Treaty would require signing member nations to enact much stricter national gun ownership restrictions. That was up for a vote in July but has been postponed until probably later this year. Some analysts have interpreted Article 15 of the Treaty to allow for foreign troops in the U.S. to confiscate guns from Americans in their homes. Even having U.S. troops going around door to door to search for and confiscate firearms is itself illegal and unconstitutional, but foreign troops?

It should not be difficult to believe that not just local police but our own U.S. troops would go door to door to seize Americans' means of self-defense, when we know that they have much experience in doing just that in Iraq, a country in which U.S. troops had no business or reason to be, violating private Iraqi civilians' own right to bear arms and defend themselves.

As the people's right to defend themselves against looters, rioters, rapists and killers, as well as against government tyranny, is being criminally whittled away by the degenerates in charge, those same degenerates are arming themselves up and preparing for something that could be interpreted as outright treason.

I have already expressed concern about martial law and explained that U.S. military and other federal armed goons and local police, who have all sworn to obey and defend the Constitution of the United States, are obligated to disobey unlawful orders by commanding officers including the U.S. President.

Unlawful orders include those in which a soldier or an officer is ordered to violate a presumably innocent civilian's rights to free speech, protest, dissent and criticize the government, right to bear arms and defend oneself against criminal assailants including government criminals, right to due process, and "right to be secure" in one's person, home and effects. If the officer or soldier does not suspect a civilian of some actual crime, then that agent of government is obligated by law to leave the civilian alone, no matter who ordered otherwise. (The Oath Keepers have made a list of orders they will not obey.)

Further treasonous is the rulers' inviting foreign troops in to aid in the rulers' abuses.

And, given the criminality of monetary easing to enrich bankers while creating inflation that robs the poor, one might very well describe those actions as treasonous as well.

If only Americans had listened to the American Revolutionaries' warnings about paper money and tyranny, wealth redistributionism, and their warnings against foreign entanglements.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

This article at the Examiner details with links how the Grand Old Progressives a.k.a. "Republicans" stole the nomination away from Ron Paul, from the 2011 straw polls to the first 2012 primaries and caucuses, and leading up to the Republican National Convention.

At the conclusion of the convention, and in an extreme instance of the kinds of threats that Establishment State-apparatchiks are known for, real thugs apparently tried to give some freedom advocates a strong message.

But despite the contempt that Romney and his fellow Establishment ilk continue to show toward Tea Partiers, Constitutionalists, cultural and religious conservatives, and libertarians, it seems that these grassroots freedom advocates just can't let go of their blind faith in these politicians. Author James Bovard calls it "Battered Citizen Syndrome."

I have been observing politics since high school in the 1970s. But in this election season and last week's Republican Convention it is the first time I have seen grown men and women act like spoiled rotten children, like babies — like Democrats. But the clueless Republicans — they would never admit to it, despite their obvious and blatant Soviet-like silencing of the Ron Paul delegates and rules-changing shenanigans.

It used to be that the Democrat Party was the party of immature brats who just want to take other people's money and their stuff, and the Republicans were the mature, responsible types who "worked for a living" and believed in playing by the rules.

Sorry. The Republicans have shown no shame in their childish impatience and short-sightedness, and especially since 9/11. They ostracized the one actual conservative in the Republican race, Ron Paul. And they were delusional and ignorant to seriously promote Willard Romney as a "conservative" and a "capitalist."

In their short-sighted impatience and nominating Romney that included the rules changes and the way the Romney people treated the Ron Paul delegates, these infantile Republicans have increased the risk of alienating real conservatives and libertarians and their Romney losing to Obama.

But in their immediate-gratification selfishness and their power-pumped adrenaline for more power, the elitist Republicans just can't see that. You see, it is these delusional Republicans who are the real tinfoil hat wearers, not the rational and realistic Ron Paul.

And now it's the Democrats' turn, this week. Speaking of "rules changes," because these old fools were ridiculed for their omission of God and Jerusalem in the Democrat Platform, Convention Chairman Antonio Villaraigosa gaveled the revised version through on a "two-thirds" vote, even after three votes in which the "ayes" were obviously not in the two-thirds. He was "booed" by the "anti-God, anti-Israel" crowd, as Michael Savage would say.

But these useless conventions and State-aggrandizing elections are the natural consequences of democracy, of publicly-owned government and the centralization in DC of power and control over a large territory. Natural consequences of people forfeiting control over their own lives and destinies to a small group of bipartisan elitists and bureaucrats in Washington.

What we have been seeing is the natural decivilizing process of such centralization of power and the people's willingly enslaving themselves to serve the non-productive rulers. Economist and philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe has explained these phenomena in his great book, Democracy, The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order.

In that book, Hoppe explains, among other things, the long-term effects of empowering a centralized government with wealth-confiscation and redistribution, and the decivilizing effects of such redistributionism in terms of the breakup of the family and the cultural decline of the society. He also points out how such a scheme weakens the principles of private property, production and voluntary exchange that are, as Hoppe notes, the "ultimate source of human civilization."

Those very principles have been totally abandoned by Republicans — their rhetoric means nothing when they continually support socialists, fascists, warmongers and professional bureaucrats to rule over us. And such principles were resoundingly trashed by the Democrats and "progressives" a century ago with Democrat President Woodrow Wilson.

The temporary rulers of a democracy do not actually own the country and thus they are not particularly interested in its capital stock, as Hoppe has noted. This makes their decision-making short-sighted and exploitative. This has been true in America with Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, throughout most of America's existence.

And the pattern of America's conservatives blindly and loyally following Republicans off the cliff has increased over the past 20 or 30 years now. Despite Ronald Reagan's government expansion, the 1994 "Republican Revolution," the Bush II years and the exploitation of 9/11 (in which the government seemed to have had some complicity), the Republican Party Faithful continue to be suckered in to supporting more Big Government, more socialism and fascism, and less and less freedom.

Given Romney's record as governor and his statements over the years, how the hell could any rational person actually believe he will cut away at Leviathan and restore our liberty?

Unfortunately, the nation's conservatives and Republicans let themselves be fooled and bamboozled by the post-9/11 fear-mongering propaganda of the Bush Administration. They would never believe that when the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, President George H.W. Bush would start a new, totally unnecessary conflict — in Iraq — to justify the continuation of an already overly-bloated military-industrial complex. The Iraqi sanctions throughout the 1990s continued to provoke Middle-Easterners, which led to 9/11.

The Romney-supporting "conservatives" do not seem to see how the system of redistributionism also includes their tax dollars being stolen from them for the sake of pleasing the profiteers of the military-industrial complex racket.

And the Democrats! Throughout this convention this week, it seems there has been no mention of Obama's wars and his drone bombings murdering innocent civilians overseas, his NDAA law, his war on whistleblowers, his war on medical marijuana and war on drugs in general, the issues of which so-called "liberals" would normally be very critical.

But no, the unprincipled Democrats and liberals now join the unprincipled conservatives and Republicans, as the Democrats now cheer on their Messiah.

So conservatives who actually believe in conservatism and traditional moral values and fiscal responsibility, and antiwar liberals and progressives who support civil liberties and individual rights, all had their chance with Ron Paul. But in their democratically-developed collective infantilization, they instead have gone with two anti-freedom warmongers, both bought and paid for by Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, the worst of the worst.

But, in my opinion, even Ron Paul doesn't go far enough as far as emphasizing the futility and failure of central planning. (Yes, believe it or not, conservatives, when you support Dick Cheney and Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice, you are supporting "central planners," and very bad ones at that!) I wish that Ron Paul could have been more direct in just stating the truth that central planning doesn't work, as the great 20th Century Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises showed in his book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis.

The truth is, most Republicans and conservatives are no longer people who believe in fiscal responsibility or moral values. And most Democrats and liberals no longer believe in peace and civil liberties. They love central planning and the State, they love and worship Washington and its imbecilic and corrupt bureaucrats, no matter how those rulers destroy everything they touch, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and especially in America. That is the true, inherent nature of central planning.

The major political parties of today are a result of the continuing devolution and decivilization of society in their immaturity and infantilization, their pettiness, and their refusal to face the reality that they have been supporting tyrants and criminals, non-productive politicians and bureaucrats, most of whom have spent their entire adult lives feeding at the public trough (or benefiting indirectly from it).

These Parties of the State need to stop supporting socialists and fascists, and stop silencing, arresting or detaining those who want their freedom back and who want to cut the chains of Leviathan's enslavement.

And soon We the People will need to take the Tenth Amendment more seriously, that's for sure.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Thanks to anti-liberty militarists such as Lt. Col. Oliver North, a former employee of the White House basement, and socialist neocons such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Irving Kristol (and don't forget Junior Kristol), America is now a police state.

And increasingly, those who criticize the government and its imbecilic bureaucrats and police goons are being made victims of an out-of-control Leviathan tyranny run amok.

During the Reagan years, Oliver North and his fellow police staters equated political dissent with treason. But it is really our current government bureaucrats who commit acts of treason with their militant suppression of dissent.

That is in addition to their starting wars of aggression that have done nothing but provoke foreigners to act against us.

Former Marine Brandon Raub was criminally abducted by federal Secret Service and local police authorities and detained illegally without charge in a psychiatric hospital, because some people didn't like his questioning the official government theories of 9/11.

Brandon Raub's lawyer, John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute has stated that there are others who have been criminally abducted and detained because of their views. As witnessed in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, North Korea and China, when Leviathan grows and its minions' power and control grow, tolerance of dissent diminishes.

America's descent had begun long ago, but in more recent years it descends at a more rapid pace. That is what our giving authority and power to central planning bureaucrats gives us.

Washington's Blog details how others besides Raub have also been seized and taken to psychiatric wards for expressing doubts of government claims. And there Washington also writes about mental health professionals who assert that questioning the government's explanations for 9/11 is the sane thing to do.

Check out Brandon Raub's Facebook post of November 11, 2011, given to CBS 6 in Richmond, Virginia. Such words obviously do not pose any threat to others, but we can see how much closer Brandon Raub is to Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry than most of our current government bureaucrats are! That essay also includes assertions about the government's alleged involvement in 9/11.

But in the USSA, you can't say those things here.

As Washington's Blog also noted, the U.S. government planned indefinite detention of citizens long before 9/11. Thanks, Oliver North.

But here is some information on 9/11. For example, over 1,700 architects and engineers support the assertions made by the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, that the World Trade center towers and Building 7 were brought down by explosives, not by planes or fires. Here is the group's evidence page. Specifically, here is a collection of videos with these scientists' explanations. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, by the way, does not blame any particular individual or group for involvement in 9/11.

And here, Paul Craig Roberts asks if the critics of the 9/11 truth movement have a case.

(Hmmm. I wonder what enabled a friend to warn comedian and activist Dick Gregory to cancel a trip to New York just before 9/11? And why did certain Pentagon officials also cancel trips at the same time? Why was San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown also warned to cancel a flight to New York the day before the attacks? Just wondering.)

A lot of people believe that Americans were just here innocently minding our own business when we were suddenly attacked by a group of Muslim terrorists on 9/11, because they "hate us for our freedom and values." Part of that is true. Most of us Americans were sitting here innocently minding our own business.

But our government bureaucrats — in their zeal to expand the U.S. government's grasp overseas, especially since 1990 — were intentionally provoking those people on foreign lands, particularly in the Middle East and Asia.

Speaking of warnings, even Ron Paul gave us warnings throughout the 1990s of possible terrorist attacks on American soil, because he was one of the few people in Washington to understand what the effects of an aggressively interventionist U.S. foreign policy would be. (But more recently, his wise advocacy of the Golden Rule in foreign policy gets booed by modern day worshipers of our national security central planning bureaucrats.)

And also, for further investigation on what actually led to 9/11, Eric Margolis and James Bovard have more on what might have motivated the terrorists to commit such terrorist acts.

Finally, independent journalist James Corbett produced this video that questions the official 9/11 explanation in less than 5 minutes. It is quite thorough.

Here is Corbett's transcript of that video that includes many, many helpful links. Take a look, if you have an open mind, that is.

It is indeed unfortunate that the government is targeting military vets now, and government criminals (sorry for the redundancy) will probably escalate their criminality against honest skeptics that will probably include non-military people. But jeepers, I hope I don't get criminally abducted and illegally detained by government goons, simply for providing readers here with some links to honest information that questions the government's official 9/11 conspiracies. But then, I've never been a member of the military. (It's against my religion — I'm a devout coward.)

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Michael Rozeff's post on the Lew Rockwell blog is correct: "Obama Will Win." Rozeff asserts that "Ron Paul was the strongest candidate for the nomination, but the Republicans chose to die instead…"

The so-called conservatives in America who preferred a socialist Big Government Establishment crackpot like Romney will nominate him and sweep Obama to a second term. The Romney supporters will once again put themselves in denial, call Romney a "conservative," a "capitalist" (which he certainly is not!) and pretend that he would actually entertain the thought of cutting budgets, cutting deficits, dealing with the National Debt, dealing with the current failed system of monetary central planning, and so on.

America is also a sick country, and a banana republic with a "Chief Justice" who bent over backwards to rubber stamp Obama's SovietCare. America is sick, with millions of people dependent on government, and millions unnecessarily employed by governments — federal, state and local. And America is a police state.

A few nights ago while filling in for Michael Savage, Jed Babbin was defending Romney's choice for VP, Paul Ryan, and defending Ryan's budget that does nothing to heal America's economic problems. The fill-in host was also defending Ryan's plan to "replace" ObamaCare with something that the Republicans have in mind, which is nothing resembling free markets, and not having any better sense of medical freedom and privacy. Just the same kind of socialism and medical fascism, but a little less socialism to fool the voters so that these socialist Republicans can get themselves reelected, for that is the bottom line. (See Jacob Hornberger on Republicans' unwillingness to repeal ALL medical socialism, and see Laurence Vance on the socialist, unconstitutional Paul Ryan budget here, and see Vance here — and here and here on Republican hypocrisy on ObamaCare, and see Robert Wenzel's take on Paul Ryan's "slick healthcare plan," and Wenzel's list of articles on Paul Ryan.)

And then the next night, Michael Savage returned to his show, and brought up the millions of rounds of ammunition that the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies have purchased, like they know something is going to happen and they're preparing for it. But Savage said that many people now fear Obama, and fear that Obama is going to start something of a violent nature against the American people. Yes, Obama is something to fear, given all his recent executive orders, his use of a new Soviet-like medical takeover to have more control over the people's private lives.

So listen everyone, we had better get to the polls this November and vote for Romney to prevent the tyranny — NOT!

Because these "conservatives" like Savage don't seem to want to believe that Romney will do the same thing, especially now that the police state apparatus is in place for him to do it. The same police state apparatus that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney put in place for Obama to do what he's doing now.

The people in denial who nominated an outright socialist and fascist will have to face the fact the Willard Romney is as much a political opportunist and a self-centered narcissist as Obama, just another politician who wants power and doesn't want the people to have freedom!

So of course Romney approves of NDAA and opposes due process, approves of assassinating Americans without showing evidence against the accused, supports torturing of innocents, supports the idiotic drug war, and starting wars of aggression against foreigners who were of no threat to us. Romney is just another part of Amerika's banana republic sickness of statism.

So in addition to these clowns, we have the Homeland Security secretary whose department is alleged to discriminate against male employees and use sexual humiliation against them as well. I am not surprised, given James Janet Napolitano's sick TSA that exists solely for security theater and for no other reason, as its employees humiliate and intimidate travelers as well as sporting event attendees and others. And the buffoons of the "Supreme" Court also approved of police strip searching of people arrested for parking tickets and walking dogs without a leash.

Only in a sick, banana republic is all this happening. As Naomi Wolf observed, governments use sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses.

You see, the difference between Ron Paul and his son, Sen. Rand Paul, is that Ron Paul wants to get rid of the totally unnecessary and criminal TSA altogether, but Rand Paul wants to merely rearrange the deck chairs. I am not surprised that Rand — who wants to deport or put in prison certain people (such as Muslims?) merely for attending certain political speeches — and who is apparently clueless about why we have had terrorism in the first place, would endorse Willard Romney.

So, the TSA criminality at the airports and elsewhere is mere security theater, and isn't preventing terrorism. Neither are the wars that George W. Bush started and Obama continues to wage. The real way to end the threat of terrorism in America is to end U.S. government provocations overseas that it has been committing for 6 or 7 decades now.

You see, if you go over and trespass on foreign lands and murder foreigners as the U.S. government has been doing since World War II, and since 1990 in the Middle East especially, that provokes the foreigners and makes them want to come over here and do the same to us. And mind you, it is not we the American people who have been initiating such provocations overseas, it is our government that has been doing it. But we the American people are made more vulnerable over here by our stupid government bureaucrats and politicians' aggressions overseas!

Unfortunately, the history ignoramuses, the TV-hypnotized public, don't see it that way. They believe that everything began on 9/11, and won't believe you if you inform them of what our government imbeciles have been doing since well before 9/11. (See here and here for further details.)

You have to shake off all the government-media-complex's propaganda to really understand what our government has done to foreigners as a means of making us less secure and more vulnerable.

It would have helped had mainstream media reporters, TV show hosts and pundits not ignored and smeared Ron Paul during the presidential campaign, though. He could've gotten the truth out more effectively. CNN's Candy Crowley was just one example out of many.

But as I referred to in my article, Authoritarianism or Self-Determination (that didn't seem to get very much attention, oh well), the mainstream media won't tell you what the government is doing. Anything that glorifies the State and diminishes liberty is what matters. So the Michael Savage "conservative" crowd have been propagandized to support the Bush-Obama "war on terror," and growing police state.

But the Left is so taken in by feel-good socialist class warfare and envy politics, they would never believe what a fascist tyrant Obama really is. Glenn Greenwald is one of the few writers who exposes the Obama warmongering and the corrupt news media who serve his interests for more power. Many on the Left wouldn't believe Obama's war on government whistleblowers (and see here).

Greenwald wrote about how the Obama Administration's war on whistleblowers is reaching more than just the Department of Defense and military, and the extent to which bureaucrats are covering up their tracks to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests and basic government transparency guidelines. Greenwald notes:

(Evading legal transparency requirements is, like persecuting whistleblowers, a standard practice for the Most Transparent Administration Ever™: recently disclosed emails revealed that Jim Messina — then-former White House deputy chief of staff, now the Obama campaign manager – deliberately met with lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry at coffee houses rather than the White House when drafting the health care bill, and used his personal rather than official email account to communicate with them, in order to evade record-preservation and transparency obligations).

If you think the Obama Administration is corrupt, then given how dishonest, phony, flip-flopping and unprincipled Romney is, and given how then-Gov. Romney's staff replaced Massachusetts State House computers and hard drives as a means of covering up maintaining bureaucratic secrecy, do you honestly believe that a President Romney will be any less corrupt and sleazy than the current White House communist occupant?

And some of these bureaucrats don't even try to hide their incompetence and delusional behaviors now. On the face of it, Fast and Furious is a socialist, central-planning program to do something stupid (deliver guns to Mexican gangsters) with the intention of effecting some fantasized goal that, if the central planners actually thought about their stupid plan they would decide against it.

Actually thinking about their own proposals and policies is something foreign to government bureaucrats. The planners would have decided against Fast and Furious based on all the possible (and likely) unintended consequences (e.g. guns getting in the "wrong hands" and ending up being used to murder innocents).

The real answers to problems that the central planners are allegedly attempting to deal with are: ending the socialist war on drugs, ending the socialist war on immigration, and ending the socialist war on guns.

But we can safely speculate that AG Eric Holster's real intention with Fast and Furious is to convince enough people to accept the government's disarming of the people so that the civilian population can't defend themselves against Leviathan's tyranny. Even the clueless Republicans and conservatives, including Michael Savage, want to help the government disarm the civilian population. Savage and others cave to the emotionalism associated with a shooting in a theater or at a  religious house of worship, but do not understand the real issue — and this relates to why the Obama Administration is loading up on ammunition coinciding with their attempts to disarm the American people. Savage and others don't understand that, if the government, police and military possess AK-47s and other similar types of weaponry, then the civilians have a right to be equally armed.

Why? Jacob Hornberger pointed out why the American Revolutionaries opposed the government even having a standing army in the first place. And as Laurence Vance showed, the centralized military is used as the President's personal army, and doesn't serve the interests of the people of the country. The federal government's military, and other agencies that are now allowed to have armed power and authority, will be used by the President, Obama/Romney etc., against the people. And yes, it "can happen here." (And it already has.)

But the gullible TV-hypnotized American public will vote for Obama or Romney, and probably Obama will win.

The U.S. is continuing on life support, as Americans live under an inherently flawed system of central planning that is destined to collapse under its own weight. If the clueless conservatives really wanted to reverse the growth of Leviathan and the threat of federal government tyranny, they had their chance in 2012 with Ron Paul. (Perhaps there's another chance.)

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Well, another "Independence" Day has come and gone. Yet, each year that goes by, we have less independence and less freedom to direct and control our own lives and destinies.

Just what happened to the passion for self-determination of the Revolutionaries who seceded from the dictatorial King George's rule?

When Honest Abe Lincoln used the armed forces to punish people for separating from his rule, that reversed the independence achieved by the earlier Revolutionaries. The idea of self-determination had been stomped by the boot of federal government authority.

And unlike the American Revolutionaries who questioned and challenged creepy King George's laws, dictates and intrusions, most current Americans seem to be uncritically and unthinkingly accepting of government's abuses. How can we reverse this trend?

In fact, many Americans are calling for more laws, more bureaucracies, and more police. Worse, those who openly question or criticize government's incompetent, corrupt or criminal actions are referred to by the authoritarian majority as "unpatriotic" or "conspiracy theorists."

It is an uphill battle for those of us who want to restore our freedom and our right to self-determination.

The Authoritarian Schools

It seems to me that many of these American authoritarians — left and right, liberal and conservative — are products of government schools.

America's educational ranking has dipped from #1 to the double digits.

But what have dragged the schools down, in my opinion, are the federal government, teachers' unions, political correctness, and the cultural degenerates who have taken control over the schools.

The schools are authoritarian and punitive, and many of the teachers unions won't allow competency testing of teachers. Critical thinking amongst the youths is punished, as a child's natural expressions of curiosity get diagnosed as "hyperactive," or "oppositional defiant disorder," and many of the schools are outright prisons now.

However, one method of teaching that is contrary to the statists' authoritarian, top-down approach is the Montessori method, a program founded by Italian physician Maria Montessori. The Montessori method allows the individual child's education to be directed from the natural impulses and interests of the child, within the framework of some set limits. The teachers respect and encourage the child's self-direction. Within classrooms, the ages of the children are usually within about three years, but not necessarily all the same age.

This concept is similar to the political concepts of individual liberty and self-determination, and "government by the consent of the governed."

Here is an in-depth article by Stephan Kinsella on the Montessori program. And, as this Montessori school notes, "classrooms are child-centered, not teacher-centered," and "emphasis is on individual learning, not group learning."

Clearly, our current control freak bureaucrats and teachers unions would not accept such a program in which the natural, self-directed learning impulses of an individual child are encouraged.

Now, since college my interests in psychology have been specifically in self psychology. I am very much influenced by Swiss psychologist Alice Miller, especially her book Drama of the Gifted Child. (That Scribd link is to the original 1979 version, which I recommend. In the1996 revision, however, Miller made too many changes, and for the worse.)

Miller's books, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child, have also influenced me. Other theorists similar to Alice Miller include D.W. Winnicott and Heinz Kohut.

One of Alice Miller's main ideas is that of narcissistic disturbance.

Regarding the Montessori child-centered education program, some readers may be concluding that such a program only encourages narcissism (and selfishness).

On the contrary, as Alice Miller has noted, when the child's own natural, individual impulses and self-direction are respected, encouraged and loved by the teachers and caretakers, then the child's real inner self is what is being nurtured.

A narcissistic disturbance occurs, however, when the child's true self and self-direction are not tolerated by the adults in the child's world, and, as a reaction, the child takes on a false self identity, becomes conforming to the group at the expense of one's individuality, or can become anti-social or abusive.

It is this "disturbance" that characterizes our authoritarian government schools. Government school teachers and bureaucrats seem to be very demanding that their students follow meaningless rules and regulations to satisfy the teachers' and bureaucrats' insatiable need for control.

And that kind of narcissistic disturbance is how I view our current top-down, authoritarian political system. Members of the "false-self," power-craving ruling class climb over others and spend millions to get to the highest positions of power. And their agendas are to expand the power of the State and enrich themselves at the expense of others, and at the expense of our freedom. They do not want people to have more freedom, only less, and they want themselves to have more power.

Sadly, that is the Soviet, authoritarian Amerika in which we now suffer. Such a banana republic has been officially confirmed by the Chief Banana Republican of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, in his vote-switching, Orwellian judicial contortionist ObamaCare acrobatics.

Thanks to the bug-bitten Roberts, the Supreme Court has empowered the federal government to enslave all Americans even further by calling a mandate a "tax."

The Authoritarian News Media

The modern authoritarian worship of the State has also been brought to us by professional journalists, the Press, those whose role it was supposed to be to challenge the rulers, and expose their corruption, incompetence and criminality. Unfortunately, mainstream news media reporters, editors, commentators and pundits are by and large propagandists and shills for the State now.

The State stenographer mainstreamers have enmeshed themselves and their false identities with the collective and with the State and power, and they now view the ideas of self-determination, self-direction, individualism and independence with suspicion and contempt.

With Chief Bureaucrat Roberts's judicial acrobatics were "conservative" pundits Charles Krauthammer and George Will as further self-contorting State apologists. The so-called conservatives seemed to join Roberts's attempt to save the "legitimacy, reputation and stature" of the high court (but not saving our liberty!).

Sorry, statists, this ObamaCare decision has further reduced the court's "legitimacy and stature." People with actual common sense can now see how absurd the Supreme Court's rulings have been. Each one of the Justices (sic) is clearly just another government bureaucrat, and nothing more.

The State-power apologists amongst the Press have increasingly become more appendages of the State than its watchdogs. That correlates, in my view, with how Americans in general have grown more in deference to authority, especially governmental authority.

One particularly depressing recent showing of such authoritarianism was a column by David Brooks of the New York Times (which I haven't gotten since 1987, by the way). Brooks believes that America does not have a "leadership problem," but a "follower problem."

To Brooks, people who "reject hierarchies and leaders" believe that the "whole world should be like the Internet – a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king." (Doh!)

"Vast majorities of Americans don't trust their institutions," says Brooks. But he says it's because of vanity, because we pretend that we are better than everyone else around us.

Are these statists too caught up in their emotional enmeshment with the State to understand that it is they who think they're better than everyone else?

And could our "distrust of our institutions" possibly be because of the wars that our "leaders" have started for no good reason? And all the anti-American retaliation they have caused? Or because of the Bush-Obama police state that is turning America into Nazi Germany right before our very eyes?

Or Congress spending like drunken sailors and forcing our grandchildren to have to pay for their selfishness?

No, there aren't enough blind, obedient followers of authority who should get on their knees for the State, according to Brooks, apparently.

Americans' choices for "leaders" include incompetents such as Premier Obama and Premier-Wannabe Romney, and other warmongers and moonbats, but it's not enough for Brooks, it seems.

But from the alternative media such as the Internet, there are real journalists who not only point out how authoritarian America has become, but just how subservient to the State today's so-called journalists have become.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald, for example, has recently pointed out how the New York Times acted as a State-propagandist sheet in helping the Obama Administration whitewash its murders of innocent civilians overseas.

And Greenwald has also highlighted a Newsweek/Daily Beast video that glorified President Obama's drone bombing of innocents overseas, and Hollywood producer Davis Guggenheim's "documentary" of Obama the great leader with great accomplishments that shouldn't be questioned. (David Boaz recently detailed those great accomplishments.)

And let's not forget those ghastly "JournoLists" from a few years ago, those "left-leaning" news reporters who intentionally omitted certain things about Barack Obama in their news stories, in an attempt to sway the 2008 election.

And more recently a smilingly biased George Snuffleupagus celebrated the Roberts Mandate-Tax ruling with Vicki Reggie Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Those "false selfs," artificial elites and false intellectuals obediently defend the State's further expansion.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains here how the natural elites and intellectuals of the past became replaced by these current artificial elites.

And the artificial elites and false intellectuals do their best to suppress the speech of those who oppose the State. (Here is Jon Stewart's exposé of "journalists" Chris Wallace et al. and their very unprofessionally ignoring of Ron Paul last year.)

Authoritarian Propagandists for Unnecessary Wars

And the one main way of the authoritarians — left and right — to further propagandize for further State power and control, and further encroachments and usurpation of our liberty and right of self-determination, has been through war and war propaganda (more here).

Greenwald recently focused on Scott Pelley's 60 Minutes profile of Defense Sec. Leon Panetta, described as "13 uninterrupted minutes of drooling propaganda."

Greenwald has also written about NBC's Brian Williams and Jim Miklaszewski, CNN's Erin Burnett and ABC's Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross as fear-mongers and State-propagandists for war with Iran.

And, as Alice Miller noted (via Arthur Silber) in her book, The Untouched Key, "In the fact of mobilization for war … the questions of the younger generation are silenced. To doubt the wisdom of the state is regarded as treason. Any discussion or consideration of alternative possibilities is eliminated at a single stroke."

Miller has written on the origins of dictators' evil and the dynamics of cruelty (with further elaboration by Arthur Silber). With people whose real self was suppressed in their earliest days, and having internalized the cruelty, humiliations, neglectfulness, abuse or violence of their early primary caretakers, their denial of the suffering of others is easier. They are more prone to believing the lies and propaganda of their "authorities," more accepting of the criminality of those in charge, such as the warmongering Bush and Obama Administrations, and more accepting of the State's intrusions against them, such as due process-destroying Patriot Act and NDAA, and TSA groping, molesting and cancer-scanners.

Some people refer to such unquestioning support and blind obedience to the criminal State as a form of "Stockholm Syndrome."

A further example: When WikiLeaks revealed how incompetent, corrupt or criminal our government "leaders" really are, many Americans including journalists were more upset with WikiLeaks than about how corrupt and incompetent the government criminals are.

More recently, CNN contributor LZ Granderson suggested that Americans and the Press should stop being so "nosy" about what the government is up to. Stop investigating, stop exposing government and military corruption and crimes, stop challenging government bureaucrats' actions and assertions. And don't question the State's intrusive and illegal surveillance of innocent people either! Let the State intrude into our lives, but how dare we know what they're up to!

And the zeal with which U.S. military hacks have persecuted alleged whistleblower soldier Bradley Manning would make the bureaucrats of SAVAK and the current Iranian Regime proud.

The authoritarians in charge who hate individual liberty and self-determination — and the authoritarian Americans who support them — are the ones who support the U.S. government's provoking of foreigners overseas, but "boo" someone who advocates peace, personal responsibility and the Golden Rule.

Many Americans just don't seem to understand how much of a police state the U.S. has become. There's something in the news every day, but people don't want to see it, because it's so horrifying a thought, even though it's a reality now.

How Do We Restore Our Right to Self-Determination?

How can we restore our right to self-determination when control-freak bureaucrat regulators send police after those who wish to remain independent, or "off the grid"? How do we stop the Gestapo-like tactics that government agents are using against homeowners? When people try to exercise their right to self-determination, they are punished.

Obama and his ilk are going right along with the UN's campaign to disarm innocent, law-abiding civilians, which coincides with the apparent true gun control intentions of his administration's Fast and Furious criminal scheme. And U.S. Army manuals are training the troops to confiscate Americans' guns.

Again, how are we to protect ourselves against government-police encroachments? That very kind of self-protection was the very reason for the 2nd Amendment! Just as a child has the God-given right to gouge the eyes out of or kick in the balls any bigger person who abuses, molests, or threatens to harm, abduct or kill him.

Premier Obama is clearly preparing for some kind of military law to rule American streets, and his latest Executive Order among many now gives himself the power to seize control over all communications networks including our phones and the Internet.

Obama has given himself the power to have innocent civilians detained indefinitely or killed by military soldiers, without due process, without Obama or his minions being required to present evidence against the accused. With his murder of Anwar al-Awlaki, Obama has shown that he will use this power against people whose only crime was being critical of Obama and the U.S. government.

Obama's Department of Homeland Security has ordered 400 million rounds of ammunition, and new weaponry as well, and is clearly preparing for something.

So, as the Republican Conventioneers prepare to replace the current socialist-fascist-communist with another authoritarian puppet (and NATO troops prepare for a possible false flag op), it seems to be an uphill battle to convince people to question and challenge government bureaucrats' lies and disbelieve their propaganda. (Unless Ron Paul abandons the GOP and runs for President as a third-party candidate, of course.)

Conclusion

People need to let go of their faith in an inherently failed system of central planning.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe explained in his book, Democracy, The God That Failed, just how the structures of central planning, publicly-owned government, a government with a monopoly in territorial protection, and the abandonment of private property and contract rights could very well lead to our current situation.

Our current system inherently breeds the authoritarianism under which we are suffering.

Some solutions that need to be considered (and soon) include:

1. Our dissolving the U.S. government even more decisively than the Soviet Union was dissolved. (More here, here, here, and here.)

2. States seceding and restoring independence and freedom from authoritarian federal dictatorial rule. (More here, here, here, here, and here.)

3. Nullification. Thomas Woods's book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, is helpful to understand how to unshackle ourselves from the federal Leviathan slave master. Woods responds to nullification skeptics here. (More here, here, here, here, and here.)

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

In order to maintain a peaceful, civilized society, it is necessary to assume that human beings have rights. Among such rights are the right of each human being as an individual to self-ownership and the right to liberty, and the right to be free from others' aggression.

Your right to own your own life is really the basis of not being enslaved by others. And part of your right to self-ownership includes every aspect of your life, including your own private health and medical matters.

As Wendy McElroy noted this week in her article, Your Identity Is Yours, "The right to privacy rests largely on a presumption of innocence. It assumes that — in the absence of evidence of wrongdoing — an individual has a right to shut his front door and tell other people (including government) to mind their own business."

And these rights are negative rights in that we have them inherently as human beings, as Judge Napolitano reminds us many times.

However, some people believe that human beings have positive rights, that is, a right to have something provided to one by society, by the community, such as medical treatment, an education, etc. But this implies that one has a right to demand others to provide such things.

If you have a right to medical treatment, then, obviously your neighbors are obligated to provide it to you.

But what if Dr. Johnson doesn't want to treat Mr. Jones? And what if Mr. Smith doesn't want to contribute to Mr. Jones's medical treatment? In the view of the artificial positive rights crowd, Mr. Jones has a right to demand that Mr. Smith contribute to Mr. Jones's health care and demand that Dr. Johnson treats him.

But what if Mr. Jones smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish? Should he still have a right to use the armed power of the State to order Mr. Smith to contribute to his medical treatment, and order Dr. Johnson to treat him?

You see, these artificial positive rights actually contradict our negative, natural rights. With the individual's natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, one has a right to seek medical treatment, and engage in voluntary associations with others, doctors, nutritionists, etc. It also includes the right to not associate with others with whom one does not want to associate.

The individual's right to self-ownership, the right to own one's own life, includes the right to not be violated or enslaved by others. That includes the right to live one's life and not be ordered by others to participate in some group medical or insurance scheme against one's will.

Of course, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights do not specifically mention such rights, because the Bill of Rights could not possibly enumerate all the rights to do with our own lives as we wish — that list would never end. That is why the Ninth Amendment reads: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The individual has a natural, inherent right to not be ordered by others to buy health insurance. The individual has a right to not be ordered by others to have to visit a doctor, or a government-approved doctor, or to report one's private medical matters to anyone. Sure, if an individual establishes a contract with an insurer voluntarily, part of the agreement of which includes a provision that the individual provide such information, then that is the individual's right to choose if one wants to do that.

If someone chooses to be a medical doctor, devotes hours and hours every day and years of intensive study and labor toward training to become a medical doctor, then who is it that owns such efforts, labor, energy and the actual career itself? That doctor? One's neighbors? The government? Alas, many on the progressive "liberal" Left believe that the community and the State have such ownership rights.

Sorry, progressives. Of course that doctor is the sole owner of one's work, and it is that doctor's right to trade one's skills with employers' compensation or with patients' fees.

It is also that doctor's right to treat for free those who are in financial need, as Dr. Ron Paul has done in his medical practice.

Such a practitioner has a self-ownership right to voluntarily associate with and establish contracts with others, or to not do so with others, and a right to not be ordered by government bureaucrats to treat anyone that the doctor does not want to treat. Such an individual has a right to arrange one's practice in such a way not that government bureaucrats order it to be, but in a way that the doctor believes it should be.

And the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship is such that when an individual voluntarily goes to a doctor and establishes an association or contract with that doctor, then it is the patient and doctor who have the sole right of contract to decide on and control the terms of that contract, not some non-productive government bureaucrat!

Individuals also have a right to refuse a doctor's prescription or a vaccine, if the individual has determined that alternatives might be better, or especially if information on specific drugs shows that they might actually be harmful.

And that reminds me, why are Barack Obama, Willard Romney and others so obsessed with ordering people that they must have health insurance, but rarely if ever encourage people to act preventatively?

Sorry, but calling for more BMI screening or outright banning certain foods or drinks, or mandating certain things is not preventative medicine. We do not seem to hear these people encouraging personal responsibility, or that people take vitamins and supplements that are shown to be much better for daily health maintenance than the things these government people are constantly suggesting.

Now, if someone wants to suggest that the individual does not own one's own life, one's private matters, one's diet and nutritional decisions, and one's own private business or medical practice, then you might be suggesting that such parts of an individual's life are really owned by one's community. In that case, the community has the right to make demands on the individual, and the right to use the individual and one's person and labor however the community desires.

It is this very health care debate in which the "liberals" and progressives have shown their true motivations.

The "health care" schemers want to force people to report their private medical matters to the government, or otherwise compel people to do something that might go against their better judgment. So if the individual does not obey orders, the Left activists want to fine (i.e. steal from) that individual, or, if one doesn't pay the fine, the Left activists would have him arrested and jailed by IRS goons.

Not a very caring, compassionate or peaceful way to show your "liberal" concern for others, in my opinion.

For these reasons, more rational people need to view the schemers' motivations as suspicious. They seem more motivated to just have control over others, at the expense of liberty and even at the expense of others' good health.

And the "health care" schemers' attitude toward doctors really reflects the Left's general resentment and envy toward those who work hard and develop special skills, and become successful at not only helping others but making a good living at it.

In this famous passage from Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged, the doctor explains why he refuses to practice medicine in a world in which his life and work are owned by the government:

"I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago," said Dr. Hendricks. "Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything — except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the u2018welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but u2018to serve.' That a man's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards — never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind — yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in the operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it — and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't."

The way it used to be, the government and its police left people alone to pursue their interests, including medical practitioners whose careers naturally helped those in need.

But now, Washington's Politburo intellectuals, bureaucrats and fascists are obsessed with ordering people around and enslaving the working class.

So to conclude, when it comes to health care, here are some of your real rights that bureaucrats have been usurping away from you:

You have a right to see a doctor if you want to.

You have a right to not see a doctor if you don't want to.

You have a right to buy insurance.

You have a right to not buy insurance.

You have a right to not participate in a government-controlled medical scheme.

You have a right to not be vaccinated.

You have a right to not take prescription drugs.

You have a right to exercise your own ways of preventative medicine.

You have a right to take vitamins and nutritional supplements.

You have a right to access your vitamins and nutritional supplements. And a right to be free of the Big Pharma-FDA revolving door attempting to shut down supplement makers for the sake of Big Pharma profits.

You have a right to drink raw milk.

You have a right to farm and grow your own food on your own property, and a right to share it with your neighbors, and it's none of government bureaucrats' business!

You have a right to be free from sniveling, cowardly, control-freak bureaucrats who don't like your independence sending S.W.A.T. teams to your property to terrorize (or murder) you for providing for yourself and your family.

You have a right to refuse a government bureaucrat's order to buy health insurance.

And you have a right to tell the government to stick it.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Given so many bad decisions by the Supreme Bureaucrats in Washington in the past few years, I am not surprised that they would uphold one of the worst and most clearly un-American pieces of legislation in U.S. history.

The Supremes upheld the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare. The biggest surprise for me was that the "conservative" appointee of President George W. Bush, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined the four communists "liberals" in approving what is essentially the power of the federal government to order Americans to buy health insurance.

As Ryan McMaken observed, "Now that one of Bush’s appointees saved Obamacare for Obama, every conservative who voted for Bush to get u2018strict constructionists' on the bench should have the word u2018sucker' tattooed on his or her face."

Chief Bureaucrat Roberts wrote the majority opinion. Now, in that terrible, freedom-destroying opinion, Roberts wrote, as told by Reuters,

“The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority.

“Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness,” he concluded. The conservative Roberts joined the four most liberal justices to uphold the law’s key provision.

The threatened fine as punishment for not buying health insurance is not a "tax." To me, a government "tax" is a fee that is imposed on the civilian, non-government victim to involuntarily use government services. That is supposedly why we have taxes: to pay for government services (that we did not contractually agree to use in the first place).

You cannot call this punishment-fine a "tax" because the people whose wealth is being stolen are not being punished for not using a government service. They are being punished for not buying a privately-provided medical insurance plan. It is not a "tax." As Nancy Lugosi would say, "Are you serious?"

Perhaps it is time for Chief Bureaucrat Roberts to retire, no?

And this fascism will be enforced by the notorious and unconstitutional IRS. In my opinion, IRS income-thefts are unconstitutional because they consist of government bureaucrats intruding and prying into individuals' private lives, which they have no right to do.

The Fourth Amendment states that we have a "right to be secure" in our persons, papers, houses and effects. The Fifth Amendment states that we have a right not to be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

So just who are these government bureaucrats to demand that we report our private financial contracts and employment matters, property sales, bank accounts to them? All these matters are private matters and are none of the government's damn business!

This reporting to the government our private financial matters, our private health and medical matters, or other matters that are private has been one big step toward yet another tyranny that has taken us all down to the status of banana republic.

As Leviathan grows in size, power and intrusiveness — and more and more every day, it seems — our liberty shrinks and shrinks.

Of course, Barack Obama's main goal — and that of many Democrats and progressives — is for single-payer health care. That's a total government monopoly over the health care-insurance system (i.e. SovietCare).

Total State control is what many of these tyrants crave, and for them to be at the top. This Supreme decision fuels their totalitarian fire.

But, there shouldn't be too much panic amongst the freedom-loving masses. As in 2010, the voters can always elect anti-ObamaCare candidates to the Senate and Congress this November, candidates who will promise to repeal ObamaCare if elected.

But wait a minute! Didn't many of those candidates in 2010 who were elected also promise to repeal ObamaCare? And did they repeal ObamaCare? Nope. Oh well, as I wrote in March, 2010, these elections are mere rearranging of deck chairs, and just kicking the can down the road toward Amerika's final collapse.

So while Congress is not reliable in saving us from the federal government's overreaches, usurpations and intrusions, neither is the Supreme Court.

The Supremes are a government monopoly in ultimate judicial decision-making. Monopolists are not accountable.

But these monopolists will obviously be loyal to their fellows who also "work" for the State. They will not come to the defense of the individual and one's liberty.

Another problem with these well-fed and pampered Supreme Monopolist Bureaucrats is their lacking in common sense.

For example, the five "conservative" Justices recently voted to uphold police strip-searches of people arrested for minor offenses such as overdue parking tickets or walking a dog without a leash. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that "people detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals."

But Justice Kennedy, how many people arrested for overdue parking tickets really turn out to be "the most devious and dangerous criminals"? There is no common sense in that! In my opinion — and, of course, I may be way off here, I don't know — when a case comes before you in which someone has been arrested for an overdue parking ticket, someone who has actual common sense would say, "It's just a parking ticket! That's NOT an arrestable offense!" Such a Justice with actual common sense would vote to forbid such invasive, potentially harmful strip-searches. But not Justice Kennedy (and his four fellow supreme schmucks). Some states have been expanding their long lists of arrestable offenses now, in the Totalitarian States of Amerika.

By the way, if someone actually is arrested for some minor thing, such as walking a dog without a leash, he or she should not only sue the local police department, but have the arresting officer arrested and charged with endangerment. That officer's arresting some innocent civilian and bringing him or her to the police station and made to stay in a cell with actual criminals is endangering that civilian's life. In this case, it is the arresting officer who is the dangerous criminal! But I digress.

So, as an alternative to the useless "Supreme" Court, what is needed is scrapping the whole system in favor of freedom. No restrictions on competition. People should exercise their God-given right to seek third-party arbitrators in their communities or their neighborhoods and not be forced to use the one government-run service. In an actual free society, no one would have any monopoly power, certainly not the power to order someone to buy health insurance, or do this or that against one's will.

And the inhabitants of each of the states that compose the United States of America should not be forced by law (or the Constitution!) to have to rely on the federal Supreme Bureaucrats for the final word on anything.

As I mentioned, Americans having this federal-government monopoly in ultimate judicial decision-making has shown to be counter-productive to the preservation of liberty. We can probably expect that, when the economy and the system collapses and there is civil unrest and martial law, the Obama Regime will attempt to totally disarm the civilian population, and the Supremes will uphold that. "It's an emergency, you know."

In our current system of so-called justice, such a non-contractual, not-voluntarily agreed-upon relationship between the people and the federal government has shown to be a complete farce. In such a bizarre, banana republic system, the people are serfs of the State and its bureaucrats.

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe stated in Private Law Society,

Just imagine a security provider, whether police, insurer or arbitrator, whose offer consisted in something like this: I will not contractually guarantee you anything. I will not tell you what specific things I will regard as your to-be-protected property, nor will I tell you what I oblige myself to do if, according to your opinion, I do not fulfill my service to you — but in any case, I reserve the right to unilaterally determine the price that you must pay me for such undefined service. Any such security provider would immediately disappear from the market due to a complete lack of customers. Each private, freely financed security producer instead must offer its prospective clients a contract. And these contracts must, in order to appear acceptable to voluntarily paying consumers, contain clear property descriptions as well as clearly defined mutual services and obligations …

While states, as already noted, are always and everywhere eager to disarm its population and thus rob it of an essential means of self-defense, private law societies are characterized by an unrestricted right to self-defense and hence by widespread private gun and weapon ownership. Just imagine a security producer who demanded of its prospective clients that they would first have to completely disarm themselves before it would be willing to defend the clients' life and property. Correctly, everyone would think of this as a bad joke and refuse such on offer. Freely financed insurance companies that demanded potential clients first hand over all of their means of self-defense as a prerequisite of protection would immediately arouse the utmost suspicion as to their true motives, and they would quickly go bankrupt. In their own best interest, insurance companies would reward armed clients, in particular those able to certify some level of training in the handling of arms, charging them lower premiums reflecting the lower risk that they represent. Just as insurers charge less if homeowners have an alarm system or a safe installed, so would a trained gun owner represent a lower insurance risk.

People would thus be able to defend themselves if some neanderthal claiming to be a neighborhood security provider attempted to "arrest," kidnap and detain someone for an overdue parking ticket. The same thing would apply to someone claiming to punish an individual for disobeying government bureaucrats' fascist commands to buy health insurance.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

The conservatives are up in arms over Barack Obama's "executive order" regarding immigration and deportation laws, his granting amnesty to about a million young people whose parents brought them over to the U.S. when they were children. "He's pandering to the Hispanics in an election year," they cry. "Obama is inviting more u2018invaders' into the country, a whole new group of voters for Democrats!" and so forth.

Of course Obama's move is political. Does Obama really care about the lives of all these people, and about protecting them from immoral deportations? Not really, given how deportations have skyrocketed in record numbers during his administration.

But very briefly for those worried about Obama's Executive Orders: Yes, there is a huge problem if those orders involve further dictatorial intrusions, restrictions on our liberty, or property or wealth confiscations.

But I have no problem if such an Executive Order involves ignoring or nullifying existing intrusions, restrictions or confiscations.

When an act of positive law, an ordinance, government-imposed mandate or restriction violates someone's life and liberty, then that is an immoral act of positive law (enforced by armed police), and it must be repealed forthwith.

It doesn't matter who repeals it, Congress or the President, struck down by courts, nullified by the people — whatever — or whether "proper constitutional procedures" are followed. If something is an immoral act of aggression against innocent human beings, get rid of it, immediately!

Philosophically and morally, the conservatives who see entrants not officially authorized by the U.S. government as "invaders," do not realize how communistic their views of State-controlled exclusion really are.

The conservatives support the federal government's central planning of the population as far as who gets in and who doesn't. And with such central planning, they thus support the collective ownership of the entire territory. However, when the collective assumes ownership and control of an entire territory, then everything within the territory goes with that collective (or State) control.

It is impossible to empower a collective population with that kind of group territorial ownership but at the same time say that each individual, each parcel of "private" property, and each business within the territory is privately owned, and that each private owner has ultimate control and sovereignty of one's property, business, and one's life. In reality, each individual is merely "renting space," and is owned by the collective.

Part of this communistic approach to things by the conservatives can be seen in their apparent obsession with citizenship. Do you see how some conservatives are obsessed with Obama's citizenship, like that matters? Oh, the constitution says something about "eligibility," but the Constitution itself is extremely flawed.

But being a "citizen" really does go with that idea of collective ownership of the territory and of everything and everyone within it.

Is an individual more a citizen of the government than of the country or of the territory? Unfortunately, many people conflate the country of America with the government.

Citizenship is really a euphemism for how the government owns us. And the more imperialistic and hegemonic the U.S. government has become, the more it has claimed ownership over other territories, foreign lands and economies, and the foreigners themselves.

What we have now is a contradiction of the principles of liberty and self-ownership, as referenced in the American Declaration of Independence.

Sadly, there are many narcissistic people who want to believe that the individual's rights to life and liberty mentioned in the Declaration only apply to Americans. But no, all human beings have inalienable rights to life and liberty.

So, if we accept the premise that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," and that such rights are natural, inherent rights that each individual has as a human being, then we would have to acknowledge that of course all human beings have a right to freedom of movement, freedom of travel, and the right to migrate anywhere in the world, as long as they don't trespass on private property.

Actually, as consumers of goods and services in America, we should want to have as many people migrating to America as we can have. The more immigrants, the more people who are available not only as laborers, but as businesspeople and entrepreneurs to employ more Americans.

The immigration issue shows the conservatives' contempt for consumers, and for private property rights and freedom of contract. The conservatives approve of the intruder government's seizure of and control over private businesses and contracts between employers and laborers, at the ultimate expense of consumers.

These central planning intrusions not only violate the property and contract rights of both business owners and workers in the moral sense, but such government intrusions have shown to be impractical, and cause distortions in markets.

Or planned chaos, as Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises would call it. And as Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger noted in Immigration Socialism versus Freedom and the Free Market,

Hayek pointed out that the central planner, no matter how brilliant, can never possess the requisite knowledge and expertise to plan and direct a complex market activity. One of the primary reasons for that inability is that market conditions, which turn on ever-changing subjective valuations of people, are changing constantly, and they're different in every particular locale across the land.

With the idea of immigration freedom, Hornberger compares the freedom to travel, work and establish voluntary employment contracts with how Americans of different U.S. states interact:

After all, look at the United States, the largest free-trade and free-movement zone in history. People are free to cross borders of the different states. No border patrol. No customs. No interstate checkpoints. No passports. No papers. It works the same way when people cross from county to county.

It didn't have to be that way. The Framers could have said, "Each state shall have the sovereign prerogative of controlling its borders from the people of other states." Thank goodness they didn't do that, because if they had, there is no doubt that many a state government would today be exercising that power, to protect its state from competing workers and producers …

The same principle of free trade and free movements of people that characterize the domestic United States is what should be adopted for international borders as well: people freely crossing back and forth, visiting, touring, buying, selling, investing, opening businesses, working, and living their lives as easily as people do domestically.

The true moral defense of private property rights and contract rights in immigration, labor and employment is this: Each individual has a right of ownership of one's own life. The businessperson has started one's business with one's own effort, labor and capital. Therefore, that individual has a God-given right to do with one's own property whatever one wishes, as long as one does not violate the persons or property of others.

That means that any third party who interferes with that individual's business, including the contracts that such a businessperson establishes voluntarily with one's customers and employees, that third party is being an intruder, a trespasser.

Such intruders and trespassers include government bureaucrats and their armed agents attempting to enforce artificial socialist controls over the lives, property and businesses of others.

And from the laborers' perspective, the foreign worker has right to work, earn an income to support one's family, and has a right to travel as long as one doesn't trespass on private property, and has a right to establish voluntary contracts with employers.

And consumers have a right to trade their wealth with the businesspeople and seek the best quality service or goods at the best price, and it's no one else's business.

The current collective- and government-ownership of the territory, businesses, labor and the people effects in an egregious diminution of liberty and is a disservice to consumers.

The current socialist, central planning control over businesses forces the consumers to be served by only non-immigrant workers, many of whom may be less qualified than immigrant workers may be.

In a free society of private property and the sanctity of private contracts, the consumers would rule and be better served by the producers of goods and services, the employees of whom being the best available workers according to the producers' own judgments and the consumers' satisfaction — but NOT according to non-productive government bureaucrats!

Alas, conservatives prefer the current situation of socialist government controls, economic central planning, restrictions, intrusions, even police state policies such as the Arizona "Your Papers, Please" law, and arrests and deportations, in the immigration issue.

Further, many people erroneously view immigrants as draining America's wealth and productivity and making us less safe in our communities. I would agree that the welfare state has acted as a magnet for the foreign-born non-productive class.

But at the same time, America had also been a magnet for the very productive and motivated amongst foreigners wanting to come here for a better life for themselves and for their families. (But not so much now for foreigners, or for native-born Americans, unfortunately.)

In fact, a major recent study has shown that, with large changes in immigration laws since 1965, there is "no evidence that (immigrants) have reshaped the social fabric in harmful ways," and concluded that "America is neither less safe because of immigration nor is it worse off economically."

However, what really have reshaped America's social fabric are the welfare state policies of FDR and LBJ, and government's seizure of control over education, which have added to the destruction of the family and the discouragement of independent living and critical thinking among the general population.

America is worse off economically not because of immigrants but because of the obscene growth of the government sector, which siphons wealth from the productive sector.

And America is worse off economically because of government's intrusions in Americans' economic lives, with taxation-thefts and regulatory trespasses, and especially because of government bureaucrats' imbecilic fiscal and monetary central planning.

And America is less safe not because of foreign immigrants but because of the growing police state, and because of U.S. government foreign policy, which for many decades — certainly well before 9/11 — has consisted of invading and occupying foreign lands, interfering with foreign peoples' business, and bullying and provoking foreigners.

But when some of these collectivist-conservatives on the radio bark about immigrants as "intruders" who "don't belong in our country," there is a definite need for clarification on who the real intruders are.

The ones who really don't belong in America are the communist-oriented non-productive bureaucrats in Washington. The legislators who make laws that violate our liberty, their aides who actually write the bad laws that are really meant to favor special interests and established businesses, the contractors, the government "workers" with their bloated pensions.

In other words, the non-productive government sector, many of whom are hostile to the very principles of private property and individual freedom that made America the once-great nation that it was.

Those are the real intruders, the true foreign invaders occupying our precious lands. They are the ones who should be given a dishonorable discharge, deported, exiled, given the heave-ho, and taken away to places more acceptable to them, such as North Korea or Iran or Cuba, rather than their continually making America into their Soviet-style police-state paradise of plunder and pillage and siphoning off the hard labor of the productive class.

Those non-productive Washington prison wardens really ought to cut the government's shackles that tie us down, enslave and imprison us. So too should they cut the shackles of the entrepreneurial immigrants who would otherwise start businesses, provide jobs, and provide goods and services to consumers (that non-productive government bureaucrats don't do!).

More people are now realizing how impossible it is for Washington central planners to run things in a territory as large and populated as the U.S. So, eventually we will have to break up into smaller sections or just return sovereignty and independence to each state. Obviously, migration into states would then be handled much more easily.

Perhaps President Obama has only begun to set people free, first with the immigration issue. Maybe next by ending the illicit and immoral drug war. (Or maybe not.)

But as long as Executive Orders set people free, how could anyone in his right mind oppose them?

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

We are certainly at a crossroads in America, with Election 2012. The political ruling class has usurped many of our rights away, and stolen much of the private wealth and capital that had provided jobs and opportunities and had raised the standard of living more than in any other society.

But the farce that these elections continue to be merely reinforces my point that such elections are mere rearranging of deck chairs.

The Ron Paul people have been following the rules at the state conventions and winning delegates to go to the national convention, while, apparently, the Romney people have been allegedly engaging in cheating and dirty tricks, the latest of which has been in my dreaded state, the People's Republic of Massachusetts.

But why Ron Paul is trying to get the nomination of a party that has been a socialist-neocon-central planning party for 150 years, I'll never know.

The convention will be a Romney-coronation police state nightmare, especially for those who are there on behalf of Paul.

As Lew Rockwell advised, it may even be a good idea that the Ron Paul delegates not even attend the convention, for their own safety.

My prediction is that Ron Paul's delegates will not be treated well there, and there will most certainly be agents provocateurs trying to provoke some kind of disruption that would then be blamed on Ron Paul.

And if the nominating process actually does go to a second ballot in which Ron Paul delegates then give Romney a real challenge, the Ron Paul people will be accused of cheating, as though they didn't legitimately win their delegate status.

But is all this worth it, especially given how within the national Republican Party many people are still hostile to Ron Paul's message of freedom, personal responsibility, and peace?

That is why I still believe that Ron Paul should run as a third party candidate.

Unfortunately, those delusional anti-Obama conservatives — the ones who keep saying how important it is that we oust Obama, and that we all must get behind Romney — do not understand that they want to get behind a socialist, mealy-mouthed politician who is really no different from Obama, except for the rhetoric, which means nothing in the real world.

And then there are those people who think that a Ron Paul third-party run would harm Rand Paul's chances in 2016, if he were to run for President at that time. "Yech," is what I have to say to that. And the reason for that is that electing any one of the current statists who support the status quo now will just be a further kicking the can down the road which will definitely lead to the economic collapse, civil unrest, martial law and chaos that trend forecasters such as Gerald Celente have been predicting for a while.

What really got me was this interview that was going viral, in which Rand Paul defended Romney's record at Bain Capital, but was erroneously being labeled as an "endorsement" of Romney. Most of the comments on that post show that many people in the liberty movement are still supportive of Ron Paul, would never vote for Willard Romney under any circumstances, and believe that a Rand Paul endorsement of Willard (or worse, a Rand Paul VP nomination with Willard) would be a total sell-out.

The truth is, the real Romney is not a "capitalist." He is a socialist. And it is that Romney-Obama socialism and central planning that have been destroying America for a century.

But in their irrational cognitive dissonance and fear and panic of an Obama reelection, the "conservatives" say we must in solidarity all get behind the socialist Romney in November. But who is it exactly that the hysterical ones are supporting?

Delusional Republicans and conservatives nationwide who are all getting behind Romney in November means this: They would be getting behind

• a "global warming" true believer who will consider carbon taxes and whose energy and environmental advisors are also true believers and energy-corporatists,
• someone who supported the socialist Wall Street bailout and is in fact bought and paid for by Wall Street banksters,
• a governor who raised taxes on businesses,
• someone who supports the Federal Reserve and who would reappoint clueless Ben Bernanke as Chairman,
• someone who believes that government should mandate health insurance,
• a nanny-state drug warrior, including the war on medical marijuana,
• someone who said he would have signed the NDAA bill that Obama signed just months ago that should make Tea Partiers even more fearful of the tyrannical central planners in D.C.,
• and someone who supports strong governmental controls on civilian gun ownership (Given Romney's support of NDAA and his being a strong chickenhawk militarist, I'm sure that a President Romney would make good use of the 450 million rounds of ammunition that DHS has ordered.)

Now, is Rand Paul really sure that he wants to get behind that kind of candidate in the 2012 presidential election?

Ron Paul is none of those things.

But, most of all — and this is where Rand Paul is wrong in that aforementioned interview — Willard Romney is no "capitalist." No real capitalist would impose insurance mandates on people by the force of law.

No real capitalist would implement a health insurance bureaucracy called the "Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority." Or even consider "carbon taxes," and so on and so on.

Dr. Paul is the true capitalist in his support of truly free markets, private property, and the sanctity of voluntary contracts under the rule of law.

Remember now, the zombie Republican Convention Romney fanatics — part of the real "Tinfoil Hat" crowd — the ones who will be attempting to shut out the Ron Paul delegates, will be supporting one of the most socialist Republican candidates in a long time.

One big difference between Obama-Romney and Ron Paul: When the economy does collapse and there is civil unrest, both Obama and Romney will impose a treasonous, civil liberties-crushing, due process-free federal martial law, but Ron Paul will not do that.

Instead of the Obama-Romney unconstitutional, un-American martial law, Ron Paul would (at least I think he would) restore to the people their God-given right to protect themselves form aggressors, from burglars, looters, rioters, muggers, thieves, rapists and other violent criminals.

Imposing martial law against the American people would pose even more of a threat against our security than rioters and thieves themselves, by unleashing an already out-of-control government-security complex and military onto innocent civilians.

The military has long been the Presidents' personal army, just as the American Founders feared.

In a society of true common sense and the preservation of freedom, the civilians would be armed, and the employees of government would not. Threats from foreigners would be met with immediate resistance from an armed, vigilant public.

Statist Presidents such as the two Bushes, Clinton and Obama and their minions have been making that go the other way to the point of the current tyranny we have today, with their disarming of the American people, and their starting of wars of aggression and provoking of foreigners to make us less safe, their spreading the military across the globe and weakening our actual security.

Romney would continue that path toward greater weakness by way of the neocons' delusional hegemonic fantasies.

Now, if Ron Paul does not get the Republican nomination for President at the convention, then, as Justin Raimondo has suggested, Paul really ought to run as a third party candidate, either as an Independent, or perhaps Gary Johnson could step aside and let Dr. Paul run as the Libertarian Party candidate.

However, as prominent voluntaryist Carl Watner has stated, attempting to restore freedom via the political electoral process is futile, as the use of the State's own apparatus of institutionalized aggression ends up serving the State's own ends. You cannot force people to be free.

Which is not to say that we can't elect Ron Paul who would at least dismantle immediately some of the federal government's most egregious grasps on our persons and property.

You see, unlike the current and past socialists and statists who have ruined America, and who promise further ruination, Ron Paul doesn't want to use the political system to implement some political agenda or program. Unlike those other politicians who want these political offices because they crave power and control over others, Ron Paul just wants us to have our freedom.

No, Dr. Paul wants to be elected to the presidency to dismantle the unconstitutional extensions of the President's executive power that Obama and previous Presidents have given themselves without the approval of the people's representatives in Congress, Paul would fire all the czars, and repeal many of the federal government's intrusions and encroachments into our lives and liberty.

Now, some people are worried that a Ron Paul third-party run would harm Rand Paul's political future, Rand's potential for a 2016 presidential run. First, America can't wait that long for a restoration of our freedom. And also, honest people ought not be concerned with political career-planning.

Ultimately, what Americans need to do is engage in mass non-violent resistance. They need to withdraw their consent of all the economy-destroying, liberty-crushing socialist policies that these bureaucrat imbeciles have imposed on us.

As Carl Watner pointed out,

The goal of voluntaryist resistance is to abolish the political power structure and its success or failure in obtaining that objective rests squarely on the degree to which its strategy succeeds in delegitimizing the State and in inducing people to withdraw their support from the government. Its major strategies rest on education (which heightens public awareness of the evils of the State) and in persuading large numbers of persons to refuse to cooperate with the government … Voluntaryists must structure the conflict situation with the government in such a manner that the government becomes responsible for the resulting actions. Mass non-cooperation and widespread civil disobedience present a “resist or abdicate” dilemma to the government. In resisting voluntaryist demands, the government becomes responsible for its own repressive acts. In abdicating, the government not only loses face but political power.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

If Hitler had won the war, we'd all be speaking German now.

~ a typical interventionist warmonger

We don't have to worry about some Hitler invading America and turning this into a dictatorship, because that is what we already have now. And worse.

They're really all the same now: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea … and now, the USSA.

It is of no surprise to me that the same kinds of warmongers — from Honest Abe Lincoln waging war against secessionists and Fascist Delano Roosevelt's internment camps to Dubya and Obama's "anti-terror" (i.e. anti-due process, anti-civil liberties) wars — are those who do as much as they can to steal what private wealth they can and enslave the people's labor.

In addition to the "Enemy Expatriation Act," an act proposed by Sen. Joe Lieberman that would remove citizenship from terror suspects not convicted, now the clown's fellow moonbat-fascist Senator Chuckles Schumer proposes to punish people who renounce their American citizenship and move to countries with less wealth-confiscation powers. This is in response to Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin's move to Singapore and his September, 2011 U.S. citizenship renunciation.

So, besides all the anti-due process policies these people in Washington have been inflicting on Americans since 9/11, in their desperate attempts to steal as much wealth as they can from others, they will go after their tax-theft victims who attempt to flee the country.

But, as the Daily Bell noted, "governments don’t need taxes anymore. Why do you need to extract funds from citizens when you print all the money you want anyway?"

So really, it isn't as much that Chuckles feels the U.S. government needs even more of people's money, it's the attitude of envy and covetousness by the socialists who rule over us: "How dare you leave the country and take your own property with you?"

And another provision that the lowlifes propose is to never allow these expats to return to the U.S. Now, what a childish display of overt resentment! Talk about ignoramuses with an utter lack of understanding of what freedom is all about.

It is actually these senators who don't belong in America. They need to grow up, and stop persecuting Americans who earned and acquired their wealth through hard work, honest investment, and being the actual producers of society! (What, exactly, have Joe Lieberman and Chuckles Schumer actually produced for others, or services they have actually provided to others, except for feeding off the public trough?)

What clinging government bureaucrats like Lieberman and Schumer remind me of are those parents and school administrators who panic if they see a child playing alone in a playground or park while the parent goes into a store. Or when police see a child or pre-teen kid walking home alone from school, and actually seize the child and take him home in the cruiser. Have you heard those stories?

We live in a very clinging, perverted society now in which the idea of independence and freedom is to be shunned, as the smothering, narcissistic adults can't bare to let the kids have their own space, live by their own free will, and become independent from their authorities.

In the same way, the State's proclaimed ownership of the people and their labor keeps the people enslaved and imprisoned. And it's sick.

Another thing that envious, fascist senators here remind me of is the enforcement during the 19th Century of the Fugitive Slave Laws. If a slave ran away to his freedom, which was his right to have, this law (which Honest Abe Lincoln supported, by the way) mandated that the slave be captured and brought back to his "owner," and without anything resembling due process. It also punished severely anyone who had helped or sheltered the runaway slave.

Well, this is very much like what these clinging slave masters in Washington are doing, and not just to wealthy American expats, but to the rest of us poor slobs, as well.

Well, I would like to ask Chuckles Schumer: Who is actually driving away these ex-patriots? Why are they leaving America? And who is it that is driving away American businesses to offshore locations? Is it really just their greed? After all, the real greed is on the part of government bureaucrats who can't get enough of other people's wealth, and who can't get enough from markets through illicit means while virtually exempting themselves from laws the rest of us must obey.

Or is it the American consumers who are driving away these expats? Is their patronage so overwhelming to businesses and thus scaring them away? Nope. It's these damn government bureaucrats.

It is these government bureaucrats and their tyrannical tentacles that are pushing people out of the U.S.

People are trying to escape now from this Prison State. The wealthy ones are lucky if they actually can get out. But many of us do not have the wealth and can't afford any big moves, or some people have medical issues which make a big move impossible. So, many of us will have to suffer in the near future because these bureaucrats in Washington are turning America into a Nazi-Soviet concentration camp.

The truth is, no one should have his citizenship renounced or revoked more than these covetous, clinging senators. It would be very difficult for anyone to be more un-American than these senators.

But this wealth-covetousness-clingingness is not all: Not only are these criminals trying to make it difficult via taxation for someone to escape the Amerikan Prison State with one's own wealth that one rightfully acquired, but they are also making it difficult to leave via draconian bureaucratic means.

The State Department may not have yet approved the proposed passport application form DS-5513, which would require the memory, research and disclosure of personal information about one's entire life history (including facts about, yes, one's circumcision, for instance). But our right to freedom of travel, the right to leave and return to our homes as we please, has apparently already been restricted by the State Department's illegal use of another, similarly intrusive form, and because of that some people have already been denied a passport.

Requested on these forms is information about you and your family members that most people could not possibly remember. It is an unbelievable Bureaucratic Berlin Wall that is being designed to keep the people inside the prison to exist on behalf of those covetous, sadistic slave masters in Washington.

Even the drones now that the federal and local governments are using to act as surveillance-spies (to make sure no one can escape alive) are not necessary, as those bureaucratic forms will be enough. All it will take to prevent someone's escape from the U.S. government's imprisonment is some lowly, scar-faced bureaucrat in some DC office stamping "Application Denied." (Drones not needed, but the treasonous criminal bureaucrats will use them anyway.)

Yes, the Gestapo senators who hate America and who hate freedom really are turning the United States into Nazi Germany, East Germany, and the Soviet Union.

"If we didn't win World War II, we'd all be speaking German now"?

No, we wouldn't be speaking German now, but we are living in Nazi Germany. No, not because of invasion from Nazis, but because of the foreign regime that has occupied Washington, DC for 150 years that has turned the guns on the American people.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

While Ron Paul will no longer actively campaign in the remaining state primaries, he will nevertheless continue in the delegate-winning strategy, and go to the Republican convention. Contrary to State-shilling media hoaxers and propagandists, Dr. Paul has NOT dropped out of the race, and those who hope for a future of freedom should vote in remaining primaries.

But one must wonder why Ron Paul has not received as many votes as he should have during this election campaign.

Well, one of the unfortunate consequences of democracy and especially government's seizure of education has been the decline in critical thinking and common sense in America.

In the mainstream of America, the people love the State, and they demonize those who challenge the State's authority, legitimacy and policies. It seems that some of those most maligned are the libertarians, particularly the Austrian economists, historical revisionists, anarcho-capitalists or market anarchists, and voluntaryists.

Remarkably, it is these libertarians whose views are closer to those of the American Founders than the modern mainstream statists. Yet it is the libertarians — advocating individual freedom, the non-aggression principle, private property rights, freedom of trade and voluntary exchange, and equality under the rule of law — who are dismissed as "Tinfoil Hat" wearers.

Our society has become an Orwellian, Bizarro World in which dependence, irresponsibility, recklessness and aggression are good — and peace, independence, responsibility and prudence are bad.

Only in Amerika does advocating independence, responsibility and the rule of law give one a "Tinfoil Hat" status.

Here, I will set the record straight, that the opposite of all that is actually the case, in government spending and monetary policy, and in foreign policy.

Government Spending and Monetary Policy

In a recent debate between Ron Paul and Paul Krugman, Ron Paul summarized the differences between him and Krugman: "(Paul Krugman) believes in big government … and I believe in very small government. I emphasize personal liberties. I don't like a managed economy, whether it's through central economic planning or monetary policy, or even Congress doing it."

There Ron Paul described the true fiscally conservative and responsible approach that Krugman in the past declared to be of the "Tinfoil Hat" crowd.

Krugman and his fellow Keynesians support increasing government debts and deficit spending, and believe that more people should be dependent on the government, such as "the poor," students and the elderly. And they advocate greater tax-thefts of the workers and producers of society to involuntarily finance such dependence and serfdom.

The Keynesians and statists continue to fantasize that corporatism, militarism, tax-thefts, debts and deficit-spending are helpful to Americans.

But when crashing back down to Earth, we learn that those who are most helped by stimulus, government social programs and war profiteering are the government bureaucrats themselves and corporate special interests. (e.g. ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, Solyndra, body scanners, etc.)

Can you get any more "Tinfoil Hat" than the elitist daydreamers wanting more of such government activism and intrusions?

In reality, the State is the true "1%," as evidenced by the wealthiest districts of America surrounding Washington, D.C.

But we must no longer allow these elitist daydreamers to continue forcing their delusions onto the rest of us! The people have a right to know the truth!

Government deficit-spending and the National Debt force future generations to have to involuntarily pay for current and past generations' self-indulgence and irresponsible spending habits.

Philosophically, Ron Paul believes that if it's wrong for your neighbors to take your earnings from you (that is, to force you to do extra labor to serve others involuntarily), then it's just as immoral for government bureaucrats and their armed police to do that.

No one should be above the law.

And Ron Paul understands that when you rely on funding the government through borrowing, you are creating a moral hazard.

There's no "Tinfoil Hat" there — only a sound, rational belief in protecting the rights of the individual, protecting private property from theft and intrusion, and a belief that no one should be above the law.

Another moral hazard is the printing of money out of nothing. For a government to just spend money that doesn't exist, or that has nothing of value backing it, is extremely irresponsible. It ought to be considered a crime, as it is equal to actual theft and fraud.

This fiat money printing causes inflation. It is a sneaky, backdoor way of government bureaucrats and their "private" banking cartel associates to get easy money right away to spend — while causing price inflation of everyday necessities, which makes it more difficult for those in the lower and middle classes to afford to provide their daily needs, especially in food and energy.

Through this backdoor inflation-tax, the Primary Dealer Big Banks are virtually stealing from the poor and middle class. This is not just a real moral hazard, but it also should be considered a crime.

So the truth is, those who advocate these schemes of debts robbing future generations and fiat-money printing robbing the current population are really the true "Tinfoil Hat" wearers of our time.

For more on these issues, see Murray Rothbard in Taking Money Back and Repudiate the National Debt, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe in Why the State Demands Control of Money. (And more information here [.pdf], here, here, here, and here.)

And here is an important interview of Ron Paul covering monetary policy, the business cycle, government-stimulated artificial inflation and bubbles, and the role of government in private economic matters.

By the way, unlike clueless Krugman and Bernanke et al., Ron Paul predicted the housing bubble and economic downturn of 2007-2008, as did many amongst the Austrian school of economic thought. That was based on their knowledge of history, and understanding of cause and effect, as well as the moral hazard that results from excusing people from personal responsibility and the rule of law.

In economic matters and monetary policy, Ron Paul wants to bring the government's budget back down to only funding that which the Constitution authorizes, and eliminate the tyrannical IRS (and most of the other dirty three-letter words in Washington).

Ron Paul also wants to repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, repeal legal tender laws and allow for competing currencies.

Unthinkingly, many people believe that those proposals are of a Tinfoil Hat variety, whereas it really is the status quo of monetary serfdom that only real Tinfoil Hatters would support.

Forcing the entire population to only use the one government-issued, government-debased currency is very authoritarian and dictatorial, and it violates the people's right to freedom of exchange.

People have a God-given right to choose any medium of exchange they want, and, unlike the chaos that the current central planning monetary dictatorship causes, a natural order would result from a society of monetary freedom.

And regarding the government's control over the nation's banks and the people's wealth and savings, why can't an individual or group who wants to serve one's community own and operate a bank? In a society of freedom, there would be no central government bank (and thus no revolving door between a "Federal Reserve" and the dreaded private sector), banks would compete for the people's business, and the currently legalized fraud of fractional reserve banking would not be allowed under the rule of law.

More important, in such a society of freedom, those bankers who engage in risky and irresponsible investment and lending practices would be held accountable and would not be bailed out by taxpayers involuntarily. Those local banks with the best reputation would attract more customers, while the irresponsible ones would be forced out of business or be sent to jail. A system of freedom would also reward consumers who take responsibility for their own banking choices, too.

As Jacob Hornberger noted just recently, we need to separate banking and state.

Only real Tinfoil Hat wearers would support an authoritarian, top-down central banking authority and a cartel of government-controlled "private" banks who can get away with crimes of theft, fraud, and "bailout" extortion-looting.

Foreign Policy

On foreign policy, I still can't believe the number of people who actually "boo" Ron Paul's suggestion that we apply the Golden Rule to foreign policy.

Now, a lot of people have this false "Tinfoil Hat" view of Ron Paul and libertarians in foreign policy mainly out of ignorance of actual history, as well as lacking skills in critical thinking.

Unfortunately, too many Americans simply believe the propaganda that government bureaucrats tell them, as repeated to them by the State's lapdog media stenographers.

Besides ignorance, a problem with many Americans is their belief in American exceptionalism — that the U.S. government may trespass on foreign lands with military bases and occupations against the will and approval of the actual inhabitants of those lands, but foreign governments may NOT trespass and occupy OUR lands. This long-ingrained moral relativism has reinforced many Americans' narcissistic, communistic self-appointed role as rulers of the world, as owners of the entire world's territories.

It is this attitude of American covetousness that has contributed to so many people viewing as absurd Ron Paul's asking how we would like it if a foreign government invaded our territory and occupied our lands. The question is not so absurd, when you consider all the aggressions and provocations committed by the U.S. government against foreigners.

And when I refer to most Americans as ignorant, many of them actually don't know such facts of history as our government having started a war against Iraq a first time (even though Iraq was of no threat to us), in 1991, and intentionally destroyed Iraq's civilian water and sewage treatment centers. Those actions, along with the sanctions and no-fly zones on Iraq, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis throughout the 1990s. And all this led to widespread anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East.

Prior to that during the 1950s, on behalf of the British Empire and its covetous craving for Iran's oil, the U.S. government and its CIA staged a coup and overthrew the Iranian Prime Minister Mosaddegh, and installed the Shah of Iran for the next 25 years. The U.S. government supported the Shah's tyranny, and that led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The Iranian population knew damn well that the U.S. government was the main supporter of their tyrant leaders.

Just look at this description of the Shah's notorious torture and spy regime, and how it compares to America's current police state of NDAA, NSA spying, torture regime, the DHS and the TSA.

Unlike the Tinfoil Hat wearers, Ron Paul understands that when you go across the street and provoke your neighbors, trespass on their property and steal their stuff (and murder their family members), they will try to retaliate against you.

Dr. Paul wants to dismantle the Leviathan militarist and police state apparatus that are turning us into the Soviet Union.

The real Tinfoil Hat wearers support keeping or even expanding the current Leviathan nightmare.

Now, do people really believe that if we close down the foreign U.S. military bases and bring the troops home, stop initiating wars against others who were of no threat to us, and shut down the Nazi-like, Soviet-like police state at home, that we would make ourselves even more vulnerable to terrorism?

Sorry, the opposite is true. Our government's aggressions, intrusions, and provocations are what really have compromised our security and made us vulnerable to terrorism.

After all, during the 1990s Ron Paul actually foresaw the increased probability of terrorist attacks on our soil, based on the U.S. government's provocations overseas.

Only Tinfoil Hat wearers would think that you can provoke your neighbors but think they wouldn't (or shouldn't) fight back.

The truth is, the main purpose of post-Cold War militarism and the "terrorism" charade has been for certain special interests to profit from the labor and savings of the American workers and producers. (For more on that, see this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.)

Conclusion

While the Ron Paul campaign will probably be accused of "stealing" Republican national Convention delegates, it is really the Ron Paul campaign who are following the rules of primaries and state conventions in their accumulation of delegates.

But it is the Romney people who have been committing the shenanigans, and are the true alleged cheaters and alleged vote-stealing fraudsters.

Some people just crave political power and artificial financial advantages over the people, while Ron Paul wants the opposite: Freedom!

There is a reason why so many people are enthusiastic about Ron Paul: Because they believe in freedom, and Ron Paul is the only candidate who has said that he wants us all to have our freedom.

The younger crowd amongst the Ron Paul supporters have a very good understanding of the dwindling freedom and prosperity we have in America, and it is they who will have to suffer many, many years in the future of the kind of Total State-controlled, impoverished society that the Obama and Romney statists are giving us, and the young people know it.

But the Tinfoil Hatters want it all to continue, and at these young people's expense, to which the young people reply, "Up your nose with a rubber hose!"

For those whose only real familiarity with Ron Paul is from the propagandist mainstream media and the neocon talk radio blabbermouths, here are some of Dr. Paul's own writings and speeches:

Hundreds of articles by Ron Paul (Three of my favorites: Paper Money and Tyranny, The End of Dollar Hegemony and What Really Divides Us) and Ron Paul's many books promoting freedom, peace and free markets

Here are some of Ron Paul's books that are available for free online:

• A Foreign Policy of Freedom [.pdf]
• The Case for Gold [.pdf]
• Freedom Under Siege: The U.S. Constitution After 200-Plus Years [.pdf]
• Gold, Peace, and Prosperity [.pdf]
• Pillars of Prosperity: Free Markets, Honest Money, Private Property [.pdf]

And there are these more recent books:

• Liberty Defined (Intro, with links to buy the book)
• End the Fed
• The Revolution: A Manifesto

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Once, again, the "gay marriage" or same-sex marriage distraction is in the news and on the talk shows. Some people say it is a societal or cultural issue that government must address, and others say it is a religious issue.

The same-sex marriage issue is a private issue. And yes, the individual has a right to marry.

Who the hell is the government to allow or forbid private people to establish their own voluntary associations, relationships, contracts and marriages?

Regarding the right to marry, while the Bill of Rights does not mention that specifically, the Ninth Amendment does state that "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

There are an infinite number of rights that human beings have. Each individual has an inherent right as a human being to one's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as long as one doesn't interfere with anyone else's same right.

Based on this right of self-ownership, each individual has an absolute natural right to do with one's life, one's person and property as one wishes, as long as one is peaceful. Unfortunately, statists and politicians do not understand this.

Murray Rothbard addressed the right to self-ownership in his magnum opus, The Ethics of Liberty. (Here is The Ethics of Liberty online at the Mises Institute.)

In my view, the individual owns one's own life.

The community in which you live does not own you, your neighbors do not own you, the State does not own you.

You own you.

Therefore, the State has no jurisdiction over your life and has no legitimate authority to determine whether you may or may not marry or whom you may or may not marry.

Each individual has the right of self-ownership and jurisdiction over one's own life, as long as one does not violate anyone else's person or property. And each individual human being has a right to establish voluntary contracts with others who are mutually agreeable to said contracts. Such contracts are not the business of the State or of your neighbors, as they are private contracts. The terms of the contracts and who may or may not participate in them are the business of those who are the parties to such contracts, those who voluntarily agree to such terms, and it's no one else's business.

Third parties who attempt to intrude themselves into such contracts, whether they be your neighbors, Grandma Harriett, or government bureaucrats, are intruders, trespassers, and just plain meddlesome busybodies. And that includes marital contracts.

Does it matter what past court decisions have said about marriage and marital contracts? Not really. Courts are State monopolies of ultimate judicial decision-making; therefore they are illegitimate, because, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has noted, many people within a given jurisdiction did not voluntarily agree to or sign on to a contract to employ such courts. If there is a dispute in a marriage involving a marital contract, the moral and ethical way to settle such a dispute is for the parties to the contract to find a third-party arbitrator. They should not be compelled by legal force to have to use the State's one monopoly court.

Now, the only candidate for President who believes that the government should stay out of the marriage issue, to my knowledge, has been Ron Paul.

And in my opinion, there should be complete separation of marriage and state. No one should have to get a license issued by government bureaucrats to marry. It is not the business of the government to permit or forbid a private individual to establish one's own private contracts voluntarily.

It seems to me that some so-called conservatives, such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, believe that the State owns the lives of the people, and should use its armed power to dictate who may or may not marry, and should dictate the terms of these private contracts. Obviously, some religious conservatives do not believe in the inalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These statists support a community's use of the State and its compulsory legal and police powers to force a certain social view onto the entire population, a.k.a. social engineering.

I believe that Willard Romney does not have the same kind of repressive social convictions as the other statist reactionary politicians, as Romney is the epitome of finger-in-the-air weathervane pol. Despite his past support of "state's rights" on the issue of same-sex marriage, currently for political reasons, Romney supports the proposed federal constitutional amendment defining marriage to please the religionists and conservatives who believe in socialist government-managed social engineering and societal central planning in marriage.

Regarding the idea of employment- or tax-related financial benefits or privileges associated with marriage: Private employers have an inherent right to dish out whatever benefits they want to give employees, and based on their own views of morality. No one should interfere with that basic private property right.

But since government employers are government agencies, and because everyone owns the government, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe observed in his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, then everyone should be included in benefits without arbitrary discrimination against certain groups of people.

And with the complicated, destructive tax-theft system now in place, what we have now is social conflict and the planned chaos of socialism and central planning. The only way to resolve these issues is to get rid of the socialist system now in place, get rid of the welfare state, and restore the people's freedom of voluntary association and contracts, and their right to keep every bit of the fruits of their labor.

But really, we need to ignore these petty distractions and concentrate on the more important issues, such as the wars that George W. Bush started and that Barack Obama has escalated and expanded in our government's continuing provocations of people overseas, and the police state that further destroys our liberty and compromises our security.

Yes, the right to marry is as much a right to establish contracts in any other part of life, and it's nobody else's business. It is just as much a human right as the right to not be drone-bombed to death or detained indefinitely sans due process by a dictatorial President run amok.

Among the current presidential candidates, only Ron Paul supports freedom of contract, as well as promises to repeal many of the intrusions into our lives, liberty and property that government bureaucrats have inflicted on us. Romney and Obama do not believe in restoring such individual freedom; their desire is for more power and control for themselves and their fellow government elitists over the lives of the people.

Let's hope that Ron Paul continues to make waves in the GOP, and if he doesn't get the nomination, let's hope he then runs against the two Republicrat and Demopublican statists Obomney and Rombama.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

That was Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign slogan, which manipulated the voters to give Reagan a second term of deficit-spending, expanding the welfare/warfare state, and further enlarging Big Government.

Barack Obama will do similar manipulating of the masses.

For many decades it has not been "morning in America," given America's extreme decline, economically and culturally. Many Americans today are dependent and ignorant, and more and more aspects of daily life have been politicized and centralized into an increasingly frightening and totalitarian Washington, D.C.

Many Americans are impatient, intolerant, short-sighted, self-centered, and our irresponsible, spend-happy Congress merely reflects the general population.

Last Fall's Black Friday shopping frenzy was a clear example of what Americans have become.

In Washington, Congress has continuously, selfishly and irresponsibly been voting to raise the debt ceiling to pay for all its goodies to please the lobbyists and in their own push for reelection. "Let my constituents' grandchildren pay for my extravagance!" say the selfish congressmen. The Republicans are no different from the Democrats.

And the government has been encouraging Americans to overspend on their credit cards, buy homes they can't afford, and encouraging students to go into debt already at age 18.

Meanwhile, if the Republicans actually do repeal Obama's Soviet health care plan, they want to replace it with a Republican version of SovietCare.

With conservatives like this, who needs liberals?

The reckless, clueless Congress voted to give the President the power to have the military arrest and detain indefinitely anyone he feels is a "terrorist" or otherwise criminal, without being required to show evidence against the accused. The real reason for this may very well be as a preemptive action when America's predictable economic collapse and civil unrest occur.

After all, why then did the Department of Homeland Security order hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition? That's for a domestic agency, not the military.

Because of the War on Drugs that Obama is prosecuting, and the sick obsession with drug users that local police neanderthals seems to have these days, innocent middle-aged women who never harmed anyone are being arrested and tortured for buying Sudafed at the store.

In America today, the progressives and liberals celebrate Barack Obama as a "warrior" President, by continuing to be in denial of Obama's daily drone bomb murders of innocent civilians overseas. Meanwhile, the left's Messiah cracks down on medical marijuana users and whistleblowers like a remorseless beast while simultaneously protecting torturers and government agents spying on Americans.

With liberals like this, who needs conservatives?

And the schools now are prisons. Many of them have police patrolling hallways.

In America today, according to the American Dream Blog, little pre-teen kids are being arrested and handcuffed from school for giving another kid a wedgie, for bringing a plastic butter knife to school, for using perfume, and for burping in class. A 6-year-old boy was charged with sexual assault when playing tag.

Whatever happened to common sense in America? What kind of teacher or school administrator would call police on these children? When I was growing up, no cop I ever heard of would even think of arresting a child, and for those things.

In the government schools, the teachers unions want smaller class sizes and higher pay and more benefits, for a nine-month school year. As Elizabeth Warren might say, "Good for them!"

But teachers don't want to be tested and promoted based on merit and ability. Many teachers today are themselves poorly educated. America's international educational ranking has gradually sunk especially since Jimma Carter imposed the federal Department of Education on us.

When I was in school, we had large classes, and teachers were in control. We didn't have teachers and school administrators and parents drugging their kids up on Ritalin and SSRIs, and other poisonous, mind-altering, behavior-altering drugs back in the dark ages of civility, respect for others and an encouragement to learn.

And now there are anti-bullying and zero tolerance policies, pushed by ignoramuses and control freaks who have no common sense at all.

But some school districts and state legislatures are trying to reform their "Zero Tolerance" policies. Here's my way of reform: Abolish government schools completely!

And so many people now seem to be paranoid and think that any stranger is a potential child molester, and people are so sensitive now that if you say the wrong thing, you'll be accused of harassment or worse. I would never be a teacher now out of fear of false accusations or lawsuits. Much of the idiocy in today's America is due to the politicization and centralization of education. There is no more freedom of thought, freedom of conscience or freedom of expression.

And God forbid one might walk down a neighborhood street alone where there are kids, our of fear of being viewed as "suspicious." With the DHS "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign, everyone is suspicious of everyone else, and you can't trust your neighbors anymore. Not because they might molest your children or steal your lawn furniture, but because they might report you to local government bureaucrats as "suspicious," or for doing something on your own property without a government-bureaucrat's permission.

And these days with the growth of government and its intrusions into every intimate aspect of our everyday lives, one is viewed as "suspicious" for wanting to homeschool one's kids or for refusing vaccines. Government Child Protective Services (sic) social workers and the police own your children. If a neighbor thinks something in your home is "suspicious," watch out! Based on false accusations, your kids can be taken away and abused by government bureaucrats. Was there always a little Hitler or Stalin in these government bureaus all across America?

Just a few decades ago, we never would have thought that a "Child Protective Service" could be so corrupt that it would involve itself in child sex trafficking. The late Georgia state senator Nancy Schaeffer's investigation into these things may have cost her her life.

America's popular culture and Hollywood have also contributed to the decline of our society, and the elites have targeted the children. It is the cultural and political elites who are the biggest threats to the children, certainly not everyday parents and average Joes.

And when did so many things in America become so sexualized? Why do so many parents these days seem to allow their little pre-teen girls to wear those skimpy little clothes, revealing a lot of skin and making them look like sluts? And at the same time, kids get arrested for merely hugging a friend in school! What a sick, backwards, demented society America has become!

In America today, police are strip searching people who have been arrested for overdue parking tickets, for walking a dog without a leash, and other minor "offenses," and the Supreme Court said this kind of treatment by perv-cops toward innocent civilians is okay.

The TSA is now well known for its workers' sexual molesting of little children and disabled elderly Americans. The TSA has been committing sex-related crimes against innocent civilians for several years now at the airports, and are now moving on to commuter rail and buses, and local bus routes where the misfits and hooligans harass innocent commuters.

The U.S., as Naomi Wolf has asserted, now uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses. I can't believe that there would have been one Supreme Court justice just 30 or 40 years ago who would have approved of strip searching innocent civilians arrested for minor offenses. Perhaps those justices who lived through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and who knew of Hitler and Stalin's sick abuses of the civilian population, would have seen the handwriting on the wall if such a strip search case appeared before them.

If Obama declares martial law and directs the military to arrest and detain protesters and critics of the government (a.k.a. "terrorists") — an order sure to be approved by those lettered imbeciles of the Supreme Court — how safe will we and our children be when many members of the military have no problem with sexually assaulting their own comrades?

Supreme Court justices in times past were well educated and informed in history. But it is very hard to believe that today's Supreme Court who claim to believe in "original intent" would actually know original intent if they fell over it.

"The Fourth Amendment? What's that?"

"The Fifth Amendment? Never heard of it."

"Inalienable?" (Crickets.)

In America today, many good cops who protect innocent civilians from the bad cops' barbaric violence are punished. As William Grigg observed, the good cops are "targeted for the unforgiveable offense of u2018crossing the Blue Line' by taking the side of a Mundane being attacked by a member of the Brotherhood." Was it always this way? (No, because in times past, most people had a sense of morality. But not today, alas.)

Cops used to be protective of innocent civilians. But nowadays, so many of them seem to enjoy harassing and bullying innocent civilians, male and female. The neanderthals seem to get off on it. Many cops these days are getting away with actual crimes, while their comrades come to their defense.

These University of California, Davis campus police officers just nonchalantly pepper-sprayed protesters sitting peacefully on the ground. I can't see how anyone could do that to people. In the old days, I don't think that cops or university police would have done that. If protesters were asked to leave and they didn't leave, then usually the cops physically removed them (and usually without causing too much harm). But spraying pepper spray in their faces? What kind of sick sadist would do that?

On May Day 2012, some Occupy protesters, observing May Day with protests and occupying, had already experienced just how much like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany America has become, especially in New York.

This "Us vs. Them," government vs. civilians attitude has become quite prominent, especially since 9/11. People with government and police authority have been given such artificial authority, and it seems to go to their heads. Many of them act like Nazis now.

"It's morning in America" for the power-grabbing politicians, bureaucrats and armed police, especially now that they are getting their FEMA camps in place, and have ordered their hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition for DHS.

America is a banana republic basket case, and the real psychopaths and lunatics are the rulers and their minions and brownshirts.

Can innocent, peace-loving, freedom-loving civilians survive in this People's Republik of Amerika in the case of total economic collapse, food shortages, civil unrest, and martial law?

Or is there some sort of alternative way to handle the societal and cultural decline and totalitarian centralization that are taking us down?

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

In my previous column I included some ways to protect ourselves from the tyrannically intrusive ObamaCare monstrosity, via the U.S. Constitution. However, in the same piece I questioned the Constitution's legitimacy and its logic.

The Constitution contains a self-contradictory structure that monopolist government bureaucrats and the police have been ignoring for many decades.

In fact, it is the very Constitutionally mandated monopolies that bureaucrats illegitimately have that violate our God-given rights.

Here are some examples of the Constitution's inconsistency: Part of the Constitution's Fifth Amendment states that "(no person) shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…"

Note how it does not stipulate, "except during a war," or "except during the U.S. government's War on Terror." That is because the Founders believed that there should be no exceptions to this rule.

And also, the Fifth Amendment specifies "in any criminal case," but not in other cases in which police (or military) or other private civilians could very well not be investigating any criminal case, but could just be on a Gestapo-like fishing expedition.

The right to presumption of innocence is part of our natural, inalienable rights, and history has shown that government power-grabbers are not particularly concerned for the people's right to presumption of innocence.

A century of government central planning has created generations of shortsighted, irresponsible rulers in America. With rule by emotion and not reason, we have police, legislative and court bureaucrats who do not seem able to see things form the point of view of an individual being criminally victimized by agents of the State.

The Fifth Amendment also states, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." It does not forbid the government from taking private property — it only states that when covetous government bureaucrats do take your property, with or without your consent, they are supposed to compensate you for it.

There is no provision in the Constitution that protects one's person and private property from a criminal intrusion. There is a hint of that in the Fourth Amendment, with the phrase, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…" But federal, state and local governments have repeatedly committed person- and property-invasion crimes against innocent civilians, and courts have repeatedly defended those State crimes.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is loaded with monopoly powers assigned to government that violate individuals' God-given, inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It gives so much monopolistic, centralized power to the federal government that many of the Founders knew that such powers would be misused and become the Leviathan tyranny the federal government now is.

In Article I, Section 8, Congress is given the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States." But who the hell is a government bureaucrat to interfere with or intrude into an individual's private contracts?

This immediately violates the individual's right to establish voluntary contracts with others. Contracts among individuals are the sole business of the parties to such contracts, and not the business of government bureaucrats. My philosophy is that if it's none of the neighbors' business, it's none of the government's business.

A federal government with its artificial authority over an entire territory implies that the government owns the territory, and that the bureaucrats employed by the government have some sort of territorial ownership rights of control, a very communistic structure if there ever was one.

And who the hell are government bureaucrats to "coin money"? That's also part of Article I, Section 8. Money is an important commodity and it is the individual's right to choose by what means one wants to trade with others. Giving government control of the people's money gives the government the power to steal from the people.

In contrast, the market would be efficient in the "regulation" of various media of exchange, that is, were the market freed from monopolistic, governmental bureaucratic intrusions.

Murray Rothbard explains the myth of "efficient government service."

And Hans-Hermann Hoppe covers the origin and stability of the State, and noted the absurdity of a society with government monopolies and the absence of a contract between the people and the State.

The truth is, there's really no need for a "Constitution" to maintain peace and civility in a free society. Just follow the rule of law, by forbidding the initiation of physical aggression, forbidding theft and fraud, and forbidding trespass.

Assigning a monopoly power to an institution — government — in which the people are compelled by law to use, with threats of violence to enforce such a relationship, is immoral and criminal in nature, and violates the individual's right to choose which services one wants to use.

In a free, civilized society, no one should be above the law, and no one has any legitimate authority over anyone else without voluntary consent.

And regarding any actual need for a centralized government with power and authority over the entire territory, I have addressed that here, here and here.

But everything in a society, particularly one as large as the United States, really must be controlled locally.

There are those who agree with localization, but worry about "national defense." But in reality, the original purpose of the federal government's Constitutionally mandated territorial security monopoly has long been forgotten. The bigger and more powerful the federal government had become, the more each temporary ruler has used such powers to intentionally act aggressively, inhumanely and belligerently against foreigners, the more they have done nothing but provoke foreigners to act against the people of the United States. I have addressed the federal government's central planning monopoly in territorial protection here, here and here. (And for more, see this, this [.pdf], and this.)

And here Hans Hoppe analyzes the association between democracies and war.

And we have been seeing, day after day, how the local governments' monopoly in community policing and security not only gives the government-monopolized police the power to be above the law, but many times now government police have been getting away with crimes of murder, assault, theft, rape, property destruction, and terrorizing innocent civilians. (Just see any of these LRC articles by Will Grigg to find many examples.)

And because of the power of local and state governments, as well as the federal government, to artificially make just about every civilian behavior a crime, no matter how harmless and innocent, the police are arresting people really for no good reason (except mainly to raise revenue to fund local and state bureaucrats' six-figure salaries that they probably would not be getting in a freed market). This is what America has come to: lawlessness and criminality mainly committed by the agents of the State.

In a community in which policing were done by voluntary groups and individuals, and by competitive firms, all individuals would have to live under the rule of law, all individuals would be equal under the law, and no one would be allowed to be above the law. (And that would also apply to George Zimmerman, whose initial act of stalking Trayvon Martin was questionable at best.)

Currently, many government-monopolized police do not obey the rule of law because they have monopoly status in which they are above the law. The truth is that such an unequal, artificial relationship between civilians and armed government bureaucrats seems to naturally lead to a system of institutionalized criminality.

And now, thanks to the passive, sheeple-like compliance and submissiveness on the part of the American people, these local government bureaucrats (as well as the federal bureaucrats) have more and more armed power, and our liberty and security are going down the drain (along with our economic prosperity that we used to have, thanks to the monetary and financial monopolists in Washington).

Monopolists are not accountable. No "Constitution" holds monopolists accountable — that's a fantasy, a dream that can never come true, because of human nature, and because no human being is an angel.

Giving people artificial armed power and authority over others has been the Founders' biggest mistake. But can we reverse this? Well, where there's a will, there's a way, that's for sure.

Eventually, Americans will have to face these truths and stop kicking the can down the road toward the necessary restructuring. And better sooner than later.

And no, there can be no Perestroika, or "reform," of government monopolies and central planning. It all needs to be abolished, as the Soviets did, and decentralization and localization must occur.

Americans need to take back their freedom, not just with their right to self-defense and their right to bear arms, but by removing monopolies from government bureaucrats.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

No, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on ObamaCare and the individual mandate will not matter, especially when, as protected by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the states have a right to nullify the individual mandate — or all of ObamaCare if they want to.

The statists who rule over us, and their apparatchiks and propagandists, want to assert that the "Civil War settled everything" on issues of nullification and state secession. Those authoritarians suggest that President Abe Lincoln's U.S. government war on the seceding states "settled" the states' (and their individual inhabitants') attempts at independence and the freedom to exercise their right to self-determination and the right to control their own lives.

The statists say that the federal government is supreme and the entire population must obey the will of our high-and-mighty federal rulers. But such an assertion goes against the principles of the American Revolutionaries.

Economic Historian Thomas Woods addressed these issues in his book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century. In an article that appeared last year, Woods addressed specific points made by the critics of nullification.

Of course people have a right to buy or to not buy health insurance. And yes, that right to choose is just as inherent and God-given a right as are the rights to self-defense and free speech. Just because the Bill of Rights does not list such a right to choose to buy or not to buy health insurance does not mean that such a choice is not a right.

The Bill of Rights could not possibly enumerate all the rights we as individual human beings have, or such a list would never end. This was addressed by the Ninth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which states: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Some people believe that the federal government is empowered to tell the people what to do, and that federal bureaucrats are our bosses. But the reverse is true. The states had formed the federal government as an agent to act on behalf of the states' interests. The federal government is employed by the people of the states. The people of the states are the federal government's boss.

And it was especially Lincoln's war against the people that reinforced the reversal of that original relationship into a centralized, federal dictatorship. President Barack Obama's communist-like recent Executive Order to seize all of America's resources, including food, agriculture, water and labor resources during non-emergency peacetime was a huge step further down America's descent into totalitarian tyranny.

Obama's recent Executive Order — in addition to Obama's command that all Americans must buy health insurance — was just the most recent in a long list of federal power-grabs since Lincoln's War on Independence. Here are just a couple more examples:

• The order via legal tender laws that all Americans must use only U.S. government-issued currency as their sole medium of exchange. And this despite the fact that the Federal Reserveu2018s central planning manipulators have distorted prices, caused massive swings in the business cycle, caused constantly high unemployment levels, and devalued the dollar and its purchasing power. Such authoritarian dictatorial policies have greatly diminished freedom and enhanced the bureaucrats' power to steal from us poor slobs.
• The order that all Americans must participate in the federal government-run retirement scheme known as Social Security, against the will and better judgment of individuals. The promises made by the government could not possibly be kept in such an inherently flawed and treacherous scheme. It is immoral for anyone to interfere with an individual's right to save, spend or invest one's earnings or wealth however one wants.

Regarding the Supreme Court, just how has this gang of nine protected our liberty or our rights (particularly, as noted in the American Declaration of Independence, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness)?

Just recently the Supreme Bureaucrats approved of police strip-searching arrestees of minor technical violations such as parking tickets and so forth. In a typical judicial monopoly departure of common sense and in statist loyalty to police power, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that "people detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals." Obviously, Kennedy isn't aware of how local police neanderthals are known to arrest as many civilians as they can in the name of revenue collection quotas (and for jailer pervs to get off on power trips strip-searching innocent people).

In his apparent love for the TSA and his reference to all Americans as potential terrorists, Justice Kennedy went on to state that, "One of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks was stopped and ticketed for speeding just two days before hijacking Flight 93." Hmmm. So we therefore better let the police strip-search Grandma or some teenager on her way to a part-time job, to use Kennedy's obediently childlike reasoning.

And last year, in an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Bureaucrats approved of police criminally breaking into private property, and without a warrant, based on an officer's belief that residents are flushing marijuana down the toilet ("destroying evidence"). "Oooo, someone has marijuana in his own home, we better break in and get him!" This decision shows just how much government schooling has influenced even the highest public officials in the land.

The common sense opinion by Justices would be to nullify the actual law that police are illegally trying to enforce, such as laws against harmless and victimless drug possession. And this common sense approach should apply to the Court's decision on ObamaCare as well.

I am assuming that a President Ron Paul's Supreme Court Justices would not only strike down bad laws or policies such as ObamaCare based on violations of particular Constitutional protections, but that they would also outright nullify bad laws based on common sense, the Constitution notwithstanding.

After all, the U.S. Constitution itself has been a flawed document from the beginning, and the product of Hamiltonian centralists who got the Leviathan monstrosity they wanted, despite the Anti-Federalists'protests. As we have seen, from Lincoln to Wilson to Roosevelt to Bush/Obama, and from the Supreme Court, the FBI, the CIA and police departments all over America, the Constitution has been ignored time and again. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has observed, the Constitution is itself "unconstitutional" in its multiple self-contradictions.

What the Constitution actually did was, instead of being a document whose rules and provisions were to protect the rights and liberty of the individual, it empowered a centralized, federal government to rule over the masses, and gave such an institution monopoly powers. Those monopoly powers go against the very core of the rights of the individual and the individual's freedom to choose amongst various competitors in various industries, in health care, retirement planning, food and nutrition, and many other areas.

19th Century individualist Lysander Spooner observed that the Constitution has "no inherent authority or obligation," and that the Constitution's alleged contractual obligations are to those who signed such a document, but not to others. (Members of the "Supreme" Court need to read more Lysander Spooner and less Barack Obama and Paul Krugman.)

Now, regarding Obama's SovietCare and the idea of insurance mandates or government takeovers of the medical care industry (which has been Obama's intention all along), Lew Rockwell noted that this socialized medicine is really "subsidizing sickness." To me, health insurance discourages people to take care of themselves toward prevention of illnesses in the first place. An insurance mandate orders people to not act preventatively, and it implies that they should increase risky behaviors and lifestyles.

Unfortunately, rather than advocating personal responsibility and removing governmental restrictions on our medical freedom, politicians such as FDR, LBJ, Obama and Nancy Lugosi have gone the other way in diminishing our medical freedom and becoming more and more intrusive in our private personal matters.

But Hans-Hermann Hoppe had this better four-step solution to the health care situation in America:

1. Eliminate all licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other health-care personnel. Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health-care services would appear on the market…
2. Eliminate all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices. This means no more Food and Drug Administration, which presently hinders innovation and increases costs…
3. Deregulate the health-insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control. One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for example, because it is in one’s own hands to bring these events about…
4. Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate such subsidies, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives and to work for a living. In the first instance, that means abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.

As Hoppe noted, "only these four steps, although drastic, will restore a fully free market in medical provision. Until they are adopted, the industry will have serious problems, and so will we, its consumers."

But, regardless how the Supreme Bureaucrats decide, and in addition to our exercising our right to nullify federal dictates, the real solution to protecting ourselves from clueless bureaucrats and their totalitarian medical intrusions is this: DON'T GET SICK!

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

My articles for LRC have been increasingly difficult and frustrating to write. More recently I have been trying to get people to understand America's current police state. Yes, I have received some favorable emails when my articles have appeared, but there are also ones from those in denial, who refer to me as "nuts," "conspiracy theorist," and so on.

Now, to say that America is becoming like Nazi Germany is not an exaggeration. But too many people glance over such assertions in disbelief, perceiving such things as absurdities. They are in denial, and just do not want to believe what's going on.

In my article on martial law, I emphasized that public officials are obligated to disobey unlawful orders, even those issued by the President of the United States. If the President orders suspension of civil liberties and basic rights protected by the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, then governors, mayors, state troopers, police officers and military personnel must disobey those unlawful orders. Those officials have sworn to an oath to obey the Constitution, not to obey the President of the United States.

"But we're at war!" some people cry. No, sorry. Regardless of what the warmongers say, there is no time ever to excuse violations of the people's rights and their liberty, during war or peacetime.

America is dangerous now, but the reason isn't because of Islamic terrorists — it's because of government bureaucrats, central planners run amok.

The problem is that bureaucrats who MUST have war and expanded powers, including suppression of civil liberties, will change the laws to suit their narcissistic needs for more power.

And America is dangerous because too many amongst the general population are no longer raised with a sense of moral values and personal responsibility. Americans seem to get easily swept up into a national fervor for war, for killing and death. Just look at these past ten years of destruction that our government has caused overseas, and the American people's passive acceptance of it based on the government's emotion-driven propaganda.

One item of evidence of America's decline in decency and values is how America's youngsters are so bloodthirstily drawn to the latest pop culture phenomenon called The Hunger Games, #1 on Amazon.com this week. Because of modern Americans' craving for war and sadism, and because of their widespread support for the Bush-Obama wars of the past decade, Americans have become even more desensitized to violence.

But this series of books supposedly has an anti-war tone or message. However, I wonder how many people who have read the books (or have seen the movie) are more "anti-war" than they were previously.

In continuing their apparent militantly exceptionalist attitude, and with much ignorance as well (especially of Muslims), many Americans now seem to have an insatiable craving for violence, sadism, cruelty, torture, murder, blood and death.

Fifty or sixty years ago, when America was perhaps a little more decent and moral in general than it is now, in no way would so many parents have let their kids see this movie or read the books.

Like The Hunger Games, America has a corrupt, degenerate central government that has grown into a monstrous Leviathan, consisting of professional bureaucrats and politicians who seem to delight in pitting one group of Americans against another, with class warfare and governmental-provocation of racial conflicts, and struggles between police and civilians. It is as though Washington's political class wants to see conflicts between armed government agents and everyday civilians, via the drug war, the "war on terror," and thousands and thousands of needless regulations and laws that could cause the most innocent amongst us to be on the receiving end of a criminal S.W.A.T. team raid.

And now, Barack Obama is taking full advantage of the post-9/11 police state apparatus that the Bush-Cheney Administration set up. This is being used, in the name of "keeping us safe" and along with the massively intrusive ObamaCare in the name of "keeping us healthy and insured," to gain even more control over the people's lives, their fortunes, their businesses, associations and contracts.

Recent Unconstitutional Acts by Barack Obama and Congress:

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) gives the President the power to have the military arrest and detain indefinitely anyone the president says is a "terrorist," or a "terrorist supporter," without providing any evidence against the accused.

NDAA is a clear and present danger to American liberty, a codification of dictatorship, and a treasonous act of turning the U.S. military against the people. And it is the reason why author Chris Hedges is suing Barack Obama.

Some legislators are claiming that they weren't aware that in NDAA they voted for such removal of due process of Americans, but in fact, they knew exactly what they were doing.

And just recently, Attorney General Eric Holder defended the President's self-granted power to assassinate Americans based on the President's own judgment of guilt, without due process, without presenting any evidence of any kind.

But every human being who is accused of something has an inherent right to require that the accuser show evidence to prove such alleged guilt. No circumstances are too important — not wars, terrorism, and not economic collapse — that the government or Presidents be relieved of their burden to show evidence against the accused.

Infowars.com recently compared these Washington policies to similar police state policies of Chile's dictator General Augusto Pinochet during the 1970s. The NDAA law could now be considered as Washington's reactionary and desperate response to political dissent and economic collapse.

Obama's most recent extreme overreach was his signing the Executive Order, the National Defense Resources Preparedness (NDRP) order, which gives the President complete control over all resources within the U.S. territory including water and agriculture, energy, transportation and food, during war or emergency. But this revised version gives the President such supreme powers in peacetime.

In this new example of totalitarianism the President also seizes control over the nation's labor forces, and it is not merely a demand to conscript Americans into the military, but to conscript Americans to serve in other non-military labor capacities, and during peacetime as well. (Hmmm. Sounds a little like communism, if you ask me.)

And with the FEMA camps, there is plenty of evidence that the U.S. government either foresees or is planning for some sort of catastrophic event, economic collapse, or civil unrest. In an intensive investigation by former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura and Alex Jones, the investigators found one "residential center" (video here, starts at about 25 minutes) with locked doors, barbed wire fencing facing the inside of the property, and a children's playground. Officials at the center refused to give information about what the place was for. Investigators also found stacks of hundreds of thousands of coffins and plans for mass graves. Investigators found plenty of evidence that camps and rendition sites are to be used to deal with possible massive political dissent in America. (more here, here, here, here, here, and here)

Analysis

No doubt many readers dismiss all this as "conspiracy theory," and FEMA probably has its explanations such as preparations for possible biological warfare, mass epidemics, and so forth. (And we all know, after Katrina, just how competent FEMA is in managing disasters.) That all these acts by federal U.S. government bureaucrats — NDAA, NDRP, the power to detain or assassinate Americans without showing evidence against the accused, the FEMA camps and prison-like facilities — could actually be meant for devious purposes by political power-grabbers is something that most people just would not want to acknowledge. The thought that the U.S. government and U.S. military could be designating the American people as the enemy is a frightening thought.

Now, some people believe that Obama is using his new military dictatorship and detainment camps on behalf of various left-wing groups, such as the Weather Underground, to "transform America" into communist rule. But many of these police state policies and Homeland Security intrusions were begun by the Bush Administration and even by previous administrations, such as Jimmy Carter who first signed FEMA into existence, and the Reagan Administration that included Oliver North acting out of the White House basement and who eagerly called for martial law at the drop of a hat.

However, we also have seen testimony from the 1970s by an FBI agent who infiltrated the Weather Underground, and who described how academic types such as Bill Ayers were allegedly plotting to bring down the U.S. government to make way for foreign communist regimes to occupy America, and that resisters and dissenters would be "eliminated." Here is a brief video of the FBI agent's descriptions:

I'm sorry to put it in such a crass way, but that is exactly what they are doing. Ever since the September 11th attacks, these power-grabbing scoundrels have been putting policies in place that were planned well before 9/11, searching us, tracking, frisking, scanning, taxing and regulating and spying on us.

The War on Terror and the War on Drugs have a combined effect of really being the government's war on us, the American people, and a war on freedom. The airport TSA is now spreading over to train stations and bus depots, football stadiums and other public places.

While these non-productive bureaucrats are suggesting that their intrusive, Nazi-like policies are to prevent terrorism, they themselves have been terrorizing the American people, and treating us all like criminal suspects, like prisoners.

The latest are the FBI's wanting Internet café owners to report on "suspicious" people, and the FBI and DHS wanting other businesses to report on people for behaviors that are really normal behaviors. (See here, here, here, and here.)

Paying for things with cash in Internet cafes or other businesses is seen as "suspicious" now. Other behaviors that are suspicious, according to the FBI and DHS, include believing in "individual liberty," distrusting "centralized federal authority," and "supporting political movements for autonomy." Hey! I believe those things! And I pay for things with cash! But why the hell is the government telling the local police or businesses I patronize that because of those things that I am "suspicious"?

What these schmucks are in fact doing with all this is terrorizing ME! When I go into the store and pay with cash, I have to be concerned now that people there will view me with suspicion or report me to police. Just because of paying with cash!

And I also have a blog, and I've written quite a lot of articles, most of which promote "individual liberty," and which express "suspicion of centralized federal authority" (Gee, I wonder why!), and which promote "autonomy," and which promote getting rid of the Nazi-like, Soviet-like federal Leviathan altogether and letting each state have its independence and sovereignty, which is the right of all people within any given territorial area to have. THAT makes me "suspicious"!

What I don't understand is, why are there so few advocates of liberty within the government to fight against this turning of America into Nazi Germany? Oh, sure, there's Ron Paul, and there's Rand Paul. But why don't we who actually love America and who actually want freedom here have any real representation in government?

How could 93 out of 100 U.S. Senators vote to give the President the power to have the military apprehend and detain anyone the President labels a "terrorist" or a criminal, without any evidence against the accused? These imbecilic senators have willfully approved of turning America into a banana republic and have turned the presidency into a dictatorship!

And I can't believe that so many Americans support this police state fascism. Glenn Greenwald notes that 77% of liberal Democrats approve of President Obama's drone program, and over 50% of them approve of the use of drone strikes on Americans.

I have written a page listing many articles on how America has turned into a police state. LRC published this article by Eric Peters on how a coward cop pulled a soccer mom out of her car during a normal traffic stop, tasered her, threw her onto the ground and arrested her, right in front of her kids! Among the comments on the YouTube page of the video in Peters's article, the comment, "you deserve to get tazed, you dumb b***h!" received 35 thumbs up.

That's 35 future American brownshirts now.

Now, regarding the government's enlisting of private civilians to spy on each other for the government, such spying now reaches into the financial sector. As Simon Black noted,

In the financial system, there are droves of civilian agencies that have been coerced into becoming government spies. As we discussed a few weeks ago, everyone from bankers to brokers to gold dealers are obliged to submit u2018suspicious activity reports' to the federal government. They even have minimum quotas.

What's more, these so-called "SARs" must remain top-secret. It's a crime for your banker to inform you that you were the subject of a suspicious activity report.

Yesterday, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the federal agency which oversees the legions of unpaid government spies, added a few more businesses to the list. Now non-bank mortgage lenders and originators must u2018assist law enforcement' by submitting suspicious activity reports.

The comparison to Nazi Germany is not at all an unreasonable one. There were many in Nazi Germany who reported on their neighbors and business associates out of fear of the government. That could very well be a major reason here for one's betrayals of fellow civilians, such as with those new business requirements mentioned above. When we see all the S.W.A.T. team raids and local police abuse and murders of innocent civilians being shown in the news and discussed on talk shows and on blogs on a daily basis, one can see why there is good reason to fear the government.

It may take a large group of businesspeople to organize themselves as a group in their refusal to help the government spy on its own population.

And it also takes courage. A year ago I wrote about a businessman who was accused by the FBI of a non-crime known as "insider trading," and who had the courage to stand up to investigators. He was asked to wear a wire when meeting with clients to gather evidence against them, and he not only refused but he emailed his clients to warn them of those FBI "fresh-faced eager beavers." No, he wasn't trying to warn them to cover up anything; he was protecting his associates from the government's illicit entrapment.

However, more recently that individual has been accused of making threatening phone calls to the two FBI agents involved in the case. But, according to the Wall Street Journal, "he made the calls to the FBI agents u2018to force public exposure' of their u2018criminal activities' and u2018Constitutional violations.'

"In a follow-up email," continues the Journal, "(he) said the calls were threatening only u2018to the poor FBI agent’s ego, which of course we know is always hugely inflated.'"

You see, these are the ones with a real sense of honesty and integrity, showing loyalty to their clients and customers of their legitimate, aboveboard businesses, and NOT showing loyalty to dishonest, persecuting government bureaucrats. (Further info on that particular case here and here.)

A business owner who is showing obedience and loyalty to a criminal bureaucracy that is run amok is what loyalists of Nazi Germany were in their reporting others to the Gestapo. It wasn't always out of fear of the government.

But others in Nazi Germany reported on their neighbors because of petty personal resentments, envy and business partnerships turned sour.

We need to protect ourselves and attempt to restore whatever freedom we might have had in America. We need to turn the tables on these bureaucratic egomaniacs, bimbos and Nurse Ratcheds, these people who act like invading foreigners trying to turn every member of the American population against one another.

Given that the government is implementing these policies that are extremely violating of our liberty and privacy, and interfering with our peace of mind and sense of security as well, it is really these government bureaucrats and all their obedient underlings who are committing criminal acts against the people.

If businesspeople such as bankers and lenders are being coerced by the government to file "suspicious activity" reports, they need to organize themselves and together as an entire group they need to refuse to report on their own customers and clients.

Now, I am not involved in any kind of so-called "insider trading," or any kind of business, and I have no investments or any real wealth of any kind. And I certainly have never engaged in any actual criminal activity. No, I am just some schlep, but because of what these dumb bureaucrats have been doing to America — turning her into another Nazi Germany, another Soviet communist dictatorship — I am concerned about what government bureaucrats, police or military might do to me, or what my neighbors could do. It really is these government bureaucrats who are the real terrorists.

Rather than this trend of overreaching government arresting and persecuting innocent Americans, and spying on them and tracking their every move without any initial suspicion or due process, perhaps it is time to bring criminal charges against the people who are conniving and concocting these schemes.

Perhaps it is time to charge the heads of FBI and Homeland Security (sic) with inciting criminal mischief in their coercing private businesspeople to spy on and report innocent people for no good reason.

Perhaps it is time to charge them with inciting endangerment, as they are literally endangering the lives of innocent people whose neighbors, mortgage lenders or store cashiers may perceive or misperceive their behaviors in a particular way, or even whose neighbors or associates may hold resentments or want to act out of envy or racist sentiments.

Government bureaucrats are turning America into Nazi Germany, because this trend is only getting worse every day. George W. Bush and Barack Obama will be viewed much later in history as the Presidents who took America down this horrible road.

Currently, Obama is still President, and he has the power to end this trend, and undo this tyranny if he wants to be seen more positively by future generations.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

At a recent debate when Ron Paul mentioned the "Golden Rule," that we should treat foreigners as we should be treated, he was booed by a number of people in the audience. This happened at a previous debate. At that previous debate, Paul further questioned how we would like it if a foreign government invaded and occupied the U.S. and set up its military bases here.

How can so many people (and so many popular radio talk hosts and their listeners) condemn the suggestion that everyone must be equal under the rule of law?

The myth of American exceptionalism is that the U.S. is an example of moral progress, peace and prosperity for the rest of the world to follow. But that has not been the case during most of America's existence.

Perhaps America was somewhat exceptional at its founding, when the ideas of the rights of the individual and private property were taken seriously. But when a Constitution, which limited the rights of the individual and empowered a centralized government, was written and ratified, that was really the end of such moral exceptionalism.

The Founders had the right idea, but the statists, centralists and fraudsters took control, and that was the end of that.

The societal and moral advancement that the Founders took from the Enlightenment has tended to regress backwards, as America's federal government continually expanded in size and intrusiveness, and its actions overseas became more primitively aggressive.

The moral degeneracy of America escalated considerably when Honest Abe Lincoln waged a brutal and immoral war against civilians in order to compel the population into a life of enslavement by central planners. Woodrow Wilson unnecessarily extended World War I, which contributed to the rise of Hitler. FDR's New Deal really was the final nail in the coffin for whatever freedom there was remaining in America.

In foreign affairs, for the past century the reality of American exceptionalism has been this: that our government may interfere in the internal affairs of foreign nations, may place its governmental apparatus and military bases on other peoples' territories, may commit acts of aggression, murder, and property destruction, and get away with it through rationalization and propaganda — but other governments may not do that on our lands or do those things to our people.

American exceptionalism is the belief that our government need not be accountable under the rule of law, while we hold foreigners accountable.

Regarding the current "War on Terror," yes, real terrorists attacked America on September 11, 2001. But when our government then invades and destroys whole countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, then you should logically expect the targeted innocent foreigners to defend their territories.

One thing that America's government-controlled schools (both public and private) have accomplished over the past century is the suppression of critical thinking skills. Instead, because the people have allowed the almighty State and its media stenographers and propagandists so much influence and intrusion into the entire education system, the result has been generations of people with an instilled unquestioned loyalty to the State theocracy.

Because of this, America has become increasingly authoritarian and restrictive in its liberty to the point of the police state and non-sustainable, bankrupting empire we currently suffer. Those who question The Powers That Be are themselves stigmatized and marginalized, and in some cases, punished and persecuted. Americans have been cheering their government's illicit aggressions overseas, and booing those who stand for the Golden rule and the rule of law.

In fact, some of the same people who have been supporting the U.S. government's immoral aggressions overseas have been those preaching the loudest about "Christian moral values." Sorry, but when one supports one's government invading other countries that were of no threat to us, one's preaching of Christian morality is just hypocrisy.

And when people assert Americans' right to defend America against invaders, yet refer to foreigners who defend their own lands, their lives and their families from invaders and occupiers as "terrorists," no wonder Christianity and moral values have declined in America.

The narcissism of modern State worship is such that, when the exceptionalists assert that the U.S government must have a "presence" on foreign lands, it is as though they view those lands as theirs, just like a possessive child would do. It seems more like covetousness, if you ask me.

No, the narcissistic exceptionalists, who pray to the democratic god of the secular State, seem to believe that their government may commit acts of aggression against foreigners, but not the other way around. Praise the almighty State, as it can do no wrong.

Former Senator and current presidential candidate Rick Santorum seems to be one of those more outspoken worshipers of the State and its aggressive expansion overseas. Santorum even believes in the central planning of the almighty State domestically, in the social area.

Santorum wants to use the armed police apparatus of the State to impose his own personal social views onto the rest of the population, much like the Islamists that he ironically criticizes for wanting to impose their Sharia Law onto others.

If we don't behave in our private lives as Santorum and his beloved almighty State order us to do, then we are infidels, apparently.

And I heard another American exceptionalist recently, Sean Hannity, express total cluelessness in his pushing the anti-Iran fear-mongering that is being used to start yet another unnecessary, counter-productive war. In arguing with a caller, Hannity was saying that (and I am paraphrasing) he merely wanted to prevent mass violence and bloodshed that could be prevented by forcibly removing Iran's nuclear capability. Hannity was referring primarily to protecting Israel (despite the fact that Israel has a few hundred nuclear warheads and Iran knows this).

So regarding the possibility of mass bloodshed, Hannity has apparently been oblivious to the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis throughout the 1990s, killed by U.S. government violence and sanctions, and the further hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis since the U.S. government's 2003 invasion.

Because of reliance on mainstream news outlets and talk radio for their brainwashing information, most people don't even know recent history, and they therefore don't seem to understand Ron Paul's point about "blowback."

When dissidents openly criticize the State, its intrusions and its violence, the faithful seem intensely threatened, as though they have been personally harmed. The dissidents must be booed and ostracized, even though here Ron Paul is the one with the sense of morality and he is the one who believes that our government must be accountable under the rule of law as others must be.

But as our society gradually degenerated over the past century in its abandonment of moral values and the rule of law, it should be of no surprise now that the exceptionalists have no problem with their primitive priests of the almighty State apprehending and detaining someone without charges, without even being required to show evidence against the accused, as agents in an advanced society would have to do. The exceptionalists have faith in their beloved State (until they find themselves falsely accused and unlawfully detained, of course).

The religion of State has shown its ugliness with the Bradley Manning whistleblower case. Many people have reacted emotionally to this case, and with much ignorance, that's for sure. It is as though whistleblower critics have been on a medieval witch hunt with the Manning case.

This young soldier allegedly released "classified" information to WikiLeaks. But, if the chat logs are legitimate, Manning's motivations were not on behalf of any foreign government, financial interest or any element hostile to America.

On the contrary, Manning's motive was out of love for his country, and to expose the corruption of our government's imbecilic bureaucrats and expose the military's war crimes. If anything were un-American, it would be covering up those crimes.

And despite the government's hysterical propaganda, the truth is that the release of the classified information probably could not have caused any harm to any U.S. soldier overseas or to any American at home.

Some critics of Manning and WikiLeaks' Julian Assange have been calling for their imprisonment or death. That is because the critics' loyalty just doesn't seem to be as much to their country as it seems to be to the government, the almighty State.

That is what our sick culture has become: an authoritarian theocracy with total rule over us. The Total State seems to be what the primitive-thinking narcissists want, and that is why so many people cheer the State, cheer its wars and the deaths of foreigners, and that is why they boo the ideas of freedom, personal responsibility and accountability under the rule of law.

With our authoritarian culture now, we are definitely surrounded — not by Muslims, but by the almighty criminal State, by federal, state and local government Gestapo bureaucrats.

And we are doomed unless we reverse course — and that means chopping away at the many, many layers of Leviathan, the bureaucracies, the foreign bases and the domestic camps, chopping away until we finally are able to restore the freedom the founders envisioned when they created America.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz