The FBI account of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s apprehension by MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) police in the federal indictment against him was self-serving at best, and fanciful at worst:

On the evening of April 19, 2013, police investigation revealed that there was an individual in a covered boat located at 67 Franklin Street in Watertown. After a stand-off between the boat’s occupant and the police involving gunfire, the individual was removed from the boat and searched.

While it was technically true that Tsarnaev’s apprehension “involved” gunfire, Tsarnaev was not among those who had fired any of the guns that night. The FBI later admitted that Tsarnaev had been unarmed in the boat. All of the dozens – possibly hundreds – of rounds fired off in the moments before the arrest were by arresting officers or their back-up units, not by Tsarnaev. After that cowboy-like melee, the wounded Tsarnaev was arrested.

The FBI account implied a back-and-forth gun battle that ended in Tsarnaev’s surrender. But the reality was that trigger-happy police risked killing an unarmed suspect who already had suffered serious wounds. In essence, it’s only by sheer luck – and poor marksmanship – that Tsarnaev will live to stand trial for his alleged crimes. Interestingly, officials are also investigating whether MBTA Police Officer Richard Donahue was wounded by friendly fire in the shoot-out the night before that resulted in the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s older brother.

Moreover, it wasn’t so much a “police investigation” that revealed Tsarnaev to law enforcement as it was a tip from a Watertown resident after the governor’s curfew had been lifted. Franklin Street resident David Henneberry left his house to inspect his boat after police lifted the Watertown curfew. There Henneberry found Tsarnaev in the boat, bleeding, and called the police. Henneberry’s house was a couple of blocks outside of the official search zone, where police were conducting house-to-house searches. In essence, the dragnet-style search ordered by politicians in charge of the police response had done nothing to apprehend the suspect. Nor did the massive use of military ordnance on display on the streets of Boston-area towns speed the apprehension of the suspects. In fact, the “stay-in-place” curfew – officially voluntary – likely delayed apprehension of the 19-year-old Tsarnaev. The political order to vacate the streets had the practical effect of taking a million pairs of eyes off the getaway scene for the duration of the curfew.

Even the criminal charge against Tsarnaev was a result of a legislative exaggeration. The official federal indictment charged Tsarnaev and his brother – who had been killed in a shootout with police the previous night – with using a “weapon of mass destruction.” The term “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD) was once a term describing only chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, but in 1994, federal law expanded the definition to include any “destructive device” (bomb) or big-bore “projectile” of more than .50 caliber. By the 1994 legal standard, even an air-powered potato gun can legally qualify as a WMD.

Ironically, the Tsarnaev brothers – if guilty of the Boston Marathon bombings – will have killed fewer people than many other ordinary serial killers. The death toll in the whole Boston area spree was five people (including the elder Tsarnaev brother), whereas – for example – in October 2002, Washington, D.C., snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo killed 10 people. By way of contrast, officials in Washington, D.C., did not shut down much of the metropolitan area – as Massachusetts officials did – in order to look for the suspects. Nor did Washington politicians call out the National Guard or employ massive military equipment in order to deal with what was in reality a greater threat to public safety. The divergence between the reactions to threats in public safety today and how officials reacted just a few years ago is telling.

Terrorism: Fear Is Greater Than the Actual Threat

As radical leftist organizer Saul Alinsky once pronounced in his book Rules for Radicals, with political force “the action is in the reaction,” meaning that sometimes it’s more effective to take advantage of a provocation – or even create one – in order to achieve political goals. Alinsky also noted that in politics “the threat itself is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Both such “rules for radicals” apply to the terrorism problem, in that Americans will not give up their cherished freedoms absent a perceived threat. Thus, liberty-hating radicals have come out of the woodwork in the Boston Marathon bombing aftermath, proposing “cures” for the terrorist threat that involve vastly expanded government intelligence and massive surveillance of Americans.

Those calls for more government surveillance of Americans have found a voice in the mayor of New York City. “We live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days,” Michael Bloomberg said in an April press conference. “And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.” Mayor Bloomberg went on to conclude: “Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11.”

In those few sentences, Bloomberg outlined the two false assumptions in virtually every call for more surveillance of Americans: 1. This point in history with the emergence of bombers is new and more scary than in the past and 2. Trading away freedoms for security will lead to more security.

Even before Dhzokhar Tsarnaev’s arrest, slate.com’s technology columnist Farhad Manjoo had joined the surveillance cheerleading squad in his April 19 column for the online magazine: “Cities under the threat of terrorist attack should install networks of cameras to monitor everything that happens at vulnerable urban installations. Yes, you don’t like to be watched. Neither do I. But of all the measures we might consider to improve security in an age of terrorism, installing surveillance cameras everywhere may be the best choice. They’re cheap, less intrusive than many physical security systems, and – as will hopefully be the case with the Boston bombing – they can be extremely effective at solving crimes.”

Manjoo frets about this being an age of terrorism, even though America has been in the era of terrorism at least since the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Riot, when an anarchist bomb-thrower tossed a handmade dynamite bomb into a crowd of police trying to break up an anarchist demonstration. Several police were killed in the blast, and others were killed by police friendly fire in the ensuing melee. The Haymarket Riot later became a global communist holiday after the Second International in Paris commemorated the riots in 1889. Although Chicago police were unable to find the Haymarket bomb-thrower, they did find the bomb factory and many of the bomb-thrower’s confederates.

Law-enforcement agencies had better luck tracking down a far larger wave of bombings from 1917-20 in the wake of the anarchist/Bolshevik revolutions in Europe. The United States suffered some 125 bombing attempts across the country. In April 1919, the bombers sent 36 mail bombs of dynamite to congressmen, leading businessmen, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, governors, leading newspapers, and U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. On June 2 of the same year, the anarchists tried again, setting off larger bombs in eight different cities and again targeting leading politicians and businessmen, including Attorney General Palmer. On September 1, 1920, a horse-drawn cart full of 500 pounds of dynamite – surrounded by metal shrapnel – exploded on Wall Street, killing 38 people.

The era was known as the “Red Scare” despite the fact that the threat was real, and Attorney General Palmer called for the deportation of the anarchists (mostly Italian followers of Luigi Galleani) and Bolsheviks (mostly Russian) from the country as a cure for the chaos:

I have been asked, for instance, to what extent deportation will check radicalism in this country. Why not ask what will become of the United States Government if these alien radicals are permitted to carry out the principles of the Communist Party as embodied in its so-called laws, aims and regulations? There wouldn’t be any such thing left. In place of the United States Government we should have the horror and terrorism of bolsheviki tyranny such as is destroying Russia now.

Reaction to the “Red Scare” of 1919-20 involved the same type of apocalyptic rhetoric as that employed against the threat of Islamic extremism today. And it involved some repression of civil liberties: Aliens were deported without formal due process and the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (a forerunner of the FBI) engaged in warrantless searches and seizures. But the reaction to more than one hundred bombings was otherwise far more muted than the response to the Boston Marathon bombings: The federal government and local police did not call out the National Guard and deploy military ordnance on the streets of America, nor did they shut down whole cities or collude with local officials to issue curfew restrictions. Perhaps most importantly, the popular reaction against the Palmer raids strengthened the idea that civil liberties needed to be protected.

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The month-long United Nations conference to draw up a global Arms Transfer Treaty (ATT) failed to achieve consensus after the United States, Russia, and China requested more time to consider a draft treaty, according to the United Nations. The draft treaty, which would have required national gun registration, required unanimity among the nations assembled in order to advance.

“I am disappointed that the Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) concluded its four-week-long session without agreement on a treaty text that would have set common standards to regulate the international trade in conventional arms,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. Ban termed the lack of agreement a “setback.” Ban said that the UN’s commitment to signing “a robust ATT is steadfast” and that the global body would continue to work toward what he termed “a noble goal.”

Proponents of the global gun control measure argued that the ATT draft treaty would not have impacted private firearms ownership in the United States under the Second Amendment, as the treaty was nominally directed to international transfer of firearms. Of course, assurances that gun ownership will not be impacted by the UN treaty fell on deaf ears to the National Rifle Association and other supporters of the Second Amendment. While draft versions of the ATT did not explicitly call for the ban on privately held firearms, they did call for national gun registration and vague “control” measures that could be implied to include gun collection. From an administration that recently argued in court that not purchasing health insurance constituted interstate “commerce” that Congress can regulate under the Constitution, gun owners were not about to give the federal government a loophole that allowed for confiscation of firearms – even an improbable loophole.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who focuses upon the kids surrounding the smart kid’s test paper. He writes for LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

The United Nations is polishing up a global Arms Transfer Treaty (ATT) this month in a New York convention that would create a global registry of private ownership of firearms. This treaty – which would also mandate creation of a national collection agency for those guns and is contrary to the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment – has the long-standing and enthusiastic backing of the Obama State Department, headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

u201CConventional arms transfers are a crucial national security concern for the United States, and we have always supported effective action to control the international transfer of arms,u201D Hillary Clinton noted as early as October 14, 2009. Clinton boasted that u201Cthe United States regularly engages other states to raise their standards and to prohibit the transfer or transshipment of capabilities to rogue states, terrorist groups, and groups seeking to unsettle regions.u201D Of course, that speech was delivered at the same time the Obama administration was transferring some 2,000 small arms to Mexican drug gangs in the u201CFast and Furiousu201D gun-walking scandal.

The State Department website nevertheless absurdly continues to boast that u201CThe United States has in place an extensive and rigorous system of controls that most agree is the ‘gold standard’ of export controls for arms transfers.u201D

In view of such obviously false public statements, one may question the sincerity of Obama State Department promises about u201Credlinesu201D to the UN ATT, which supposedly protect the Second Amendment: u201CThe Second Amendment to the Constitution must be upheld. There will be no restrictions on civilian possession or trade of firearms otherwise permitted by law or protected by the U.S. Constitution. There will be no dilution or diminishing of sovereign control over issues involving the private acquisition, ownership, or possession of firearms, which must remain matters of domestic law.u201D The Obama State Department also promises u201CThere will be no mandate for an international body to enforce an ATT.u201D

So America’s Second Amendment rights are safe, right?

Hardly.

The draft of the treaty prepared earlier this year by the UN Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) explains that the treaty is aimed at crime control as well as rogue militias in developing nations:

The majority of conflict deaths are caused by the use of small arms, and civilian populations bear the brunt of armed conflict more than ever. Also, small arms are the dominant tools of criminal violence.

The PrepCom report of February 2012 – despite protestations by the Hillary Clinton’s minions – is not limited merely to international transfer of firearms. The draft treaty covers u201Ctransfersu201D as well as imports and exports of firearms:

The international transactions or activities covered by this Treaty include those listed below and defined in Annex A:

(a) Import;

(b) Export;

(c) Transfer…

In this matter, the 2012 conference is merely following the goals of the 2001 UN Programme of Action on small arms, which required national gun registries and collection agencies for those guns once they’ve been registered. The 2001 Programme of Action requires nations:

To ensure that comprehensive and accurate records are kept for as long as possible on the manufacture, holding and transfer of small arms and light weapons under their jurisdiction. These records should be organized and maintained in such a way as to ensure that accurate information can be promptly retrieved and collated by competent national authorities.

To develop and implement, where possible, effective disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programmes, including the effective collection, control, storage and destruction of small arms and light weapons…

The UN is still seeking this kind of broad control over private firearms ownership, and UN General Assembly resolution 66/47, adopted December 2, 2011 in advance of this month’s conference that it seeks to ban u201CThe illicit trade in small arms and light weapons in all its aspects.u201D [Emphasis added]

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who focuses upon the kids surrounding the smart kid’s test paper. He writes for LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul emerged from the Minnesota state Republican Party convention in St. Cloud with a clean sweep, winning nearly all the national convention delegates available for his presidential campaign in addition to a party endorsement of the Paul-aligned U.S. Senate candidate Kurt Bills. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Paul’s campaign organized at the precinct, congressional, and state levels to win the 13 delegates chosen May 19 at the state convention. One Paul-aligned prospective delegate graciously stepped aside – resulting in Paul garnering 12 of the 13 available slots – so local Congresswoman and former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann could attend the Tampa national convention as a delegate.

Overall, including delegates won prior to the state convention, the Paul campaign has claimed 32 of the 40 national delegates selected in Minnesota, a state where Paul had handily lost the caucus to Rick Santorum.

But winning over GOP presidential delegates is only part of Paul’s agenda. He intends to influence local political races, in addition to independents and Democrats. “There is a revolution in ideas going on,” Representative Paul told the audience to raucous applause in a May 18 evening speech, “and isn’t a narrow revolution. It isn’t just a conservative group in the Republican Party. It’s much, much bigger than this. I am convinced that we have good support in the Republican Party for liberty ideas. But I am convinced … for every vote we get in the Republican primaries that there are at least two votes who are independent or even Democrats who will look at these serious principles of limited government, personal liberty, less war and doing something with the Federal Reserve system.”

While Paul’s presidential nomination by the GOP is not likely to happen, his movement has seen stunning successes in congressional primaries and nomination of state party leadership. “I was glad to see my son win,” Paul told the audience. “And I’d be glad to see Kurt Bills win.” Bills had received the endorsement of Congressman Ron Paul as well as the endorsement of Paul’s son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Minnesota State House Speaker Kurt Zellers had also thrown his political weight behind Bills.

Rep. Bills’ endorsement by the Minnesota GOP convention had been expected, but not not his overwhelming victory against better-funded opponents. According to the Minnesota’s Bemidji Pioneer for May 19: “It wasn’t close among the 2,000 state convention delegates: Bills won with 64 percent of state party convention vote, well ahead of 21 percent for Dan Severson and 15 percent for Pete Hegseth.”

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who focuses upon the kids surrounding the smart kid’s test paper. He writes for LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

Ron Paul forces staged organizational coups this weekend in Nevada and Maine, where they won a majority of the delegates who will represent their states at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. In addition, Paul won most of the delegates thus far selected by the Iowa GOP. The coups follow up Paul campaign victories a week earlier in Louisiana and Massachusetts, where Paul supporters dominated district caucuses.

In Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney won the primary by a huge margin earlier in the year, all Ron Paul supporters chosen as delegates to the national convention are pledged to vote for Romney on the first ballot. In Nevada, most of the Paul delegates are bound to support Romney on the first ballot. However, in other states, such as Maine and Iowa, the delegates are not bound by the earlier state contests.

The Portland Press-Herald reported May 5 that Paul supporters in Maine succeeding in electing their own state convention chairman over the GOP establishment’s choice by a mere four votes, demonstrating their clout and setting the tone for the rest of the convention. “Paul supporter Brent Tweed edged Charles Cragin 1,118 to 1,114 in a very close vote,” the Portland Press-Herald reported.

The two-day convention then went on to elect as delegates 21 Paul supporters who will comprise 87.5 percent of the state’s 24-member delegation to Tampa. This lop-sided Paul victory occurred despite a narrow official Romney win of about 100 votes in caucuses earlier in the year (though there were numerous voting irregularities that could have changed the vote total). Paul supporters have essentially taken over the Maine GOP, though some Paul supporters found the term a bit dramatic. “Takeover is strong word; we’re all registered Republicans here,” Paul supporter Matthew McDonald told the Bangor Daily News. “But Chairman Webster called Ron Paul supporters wingnuts, he saw us as a fringe minority; now we hold the power of the convention.”

In Nevada, the same happened May 5-6. The Ron Paul campaign won 22 of the 28 Nevada delegates and gained control of much of the state and municipal party leadership. And Paul supporters accomplished this despite threats from the Republican National Committee not to nominate too many Ron Paul supporters and some fraud by Romney supporters. Some Romney supporters at the Reno convention distributed a fake slate of Ron Paul supporters seeking delegate spots to blunt the Paul assault. “The list included some Paul supporters but hidden among the Paul supporters were obvious Romney supporters,” according to Ray Hagar of the Reno Gazette-Journal.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who focuses upon the kids surrounding the smart kid’s test paper. He writes for LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

Texas Congressman and Obstetrician Ron Paul “dominated” the Louisiana presidential caucuses April 28, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Paul supporters also out-organized the presumed GOP presidential nominee in caucuses in former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s home state of Massachusetts, and Paul supporters took over the Alaska Republican Party the same day.

The Times-Picayune reported that “under party rules, Paul is guaranteed at least 17 of the 46 delegates to the convention at which Romney will almost certainly be nominated for president.” The final tally will likely be even stronger, as Paul – who lost popular votes in caucuses states such as Iowa and Minnesota, but emerged with a clear majority of delegates – will likely out-organize remaining rival Romney. Louisiana is also a primary state. Based on their performance in the primary, 10 of the delegates are guaranteed to primary winner and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, while five delegates are guaranteed to Mitt Romney (who placed second in the primary).

Romney’s home state of Massachusetts is also a primary state won by the former Governor, so nearly all of the delegates will be pledged to vote for Romney on the first ballot. But that hasn’t stopped Romney’s home-state delegates from really becoming Paul delegates who could abandon Romney on a second ballot at the national convention. According to Seamus Light of PolicyMic.com, in Massachusetts the “Romney” delegates are really Ron Paul delegates. “While all delegates are required to vote for Romney during the first round of the Tampa convention (but not during a second vote), district voters are allowed to choose whoever they want to fill those roles. Thus, there were two camps: the official Romney-approved slate, and the Ron Paul-allied Ronald Reagan Unity Liberty Slate.” Ron Paul’s Ronald Reagan Unity Liberty Slate swept the caucuses.

The Ron Paul movement – labeling it a campaign at this point is far too limiting – also claimed a third victory in selecting new leadership for the Alaska Republican Party April 27. The Alaska GOP convention chose Goldwater Republican Russ Millete as its new chairman in what the Alaska Dispatch described as an “alliance between the tea party and Paulites.” The Alaska Dispatch noted that erstwhile U.S. Senate candidate and Tea Party favorite Joe Miller and his wife spent the day coordinating with the Ron Paul campaign during the successful GOP insurgency.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who focuses upon the kids surrounding the smart kid’s test paper. He writes for LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

Will Mitt Romney’s "victory" in the February 11 Maine presidential caucuses be taken away like his phony victory in Iowa? That now seems quite possible. The Maine GOP declared the former Massachusetts Governor the narrow winner of the state’s presidential caucus February 11, but Romney’s 194-vote margin of victory over Texas Congressman Ron Paul is being whittled away as more results have been reported.

Moreover, the state’s rural Washington County – along with a few other communities that postponed their caucuses February 11 – will hold the final caucuses Saturday, February 18 and may decide the victor of the non-binding straw poll.

But GOP Party Chairman Charlie Webster insists that he will not release updated results from the additional caucuses, even as he comes under increasing fire from his fellow Maine Republicans and national Ron Paul campaign officials. In results in the three counties that have been released to the public, Ron Paul won more votes than were reported in the official results. Webster claims that the missing votes – when all of them are counted — will favor Romney, and that he is not going to give the press access to updated results. “No one has access,” he told the Daily Caller February 15. “There will be no access. We will give it to the committee on March 10. We are not going to release them [the missing votes]. People can whine and complain and plead, but I’m not going to make them public.”

Webster admits there were clerical errors in the tally on February 11. “What I tell people is that I’m not going to fire my staff because they make clerical errors,” he told the Daily Caller. “My poor staffer is in tears, because people are harassing her.”

Washington County, which will caucus February 18, has some powerful party officials who are already complaining about Webster’s claim he will not announce updated results. “I think it’s not surprising that there would be very strong objections to the notion that our votes wouldn’t count in Washington County,” Maine Senate President Kevin Raye (R-Perry) told the Bangor Daily News February 14. “I’ve made known my position that those votes should count and the [GOP] chair said he would take that request to the state committee.” Raye’s district is in Washington County.

While Paul campaign officials immediately balked about the Maine GOP Chairman’s premature decision to award Romney the victory in advance of the Washington County caucuses, errors in the official vote totals have metastasized as more results have become known. "It’s no longer just about Washington County," the Christian Science Monitor reported February 15. "There are towns whose votes went uncounted, and other towns whose caucus dates are yet to come. Plus – and here’s the big finish – the Paul forces are now fully alerted, and if you’ve ever been on their wrong side, you know what that means. Their social media organizations are going to be focused on turning out more caucus attendees than the Washington County GOP has ever seen."

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who focuses upon the kids surrounding the smart kid’s test paper. He writes for LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

The mass media have repeated the official results for the Maine GOP presidential caucuses that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney narrowly beat Texas Congressman Ron Paul by a 39 percent to 36 percent margin. But the official results are incomplete. And postponement of the results from one of Ron Paul’s strongest counties, Washington County, because of a forecasted snowstorm may alone have tipped the balance in Romney’s favor.

Ron Paul’s campaign confidently predicted victory when the final votes are tallied. "Only 194 votes [statewide] stand between Paul and a first place victory," RonPaul2012 blogger Jack Hunter pointed out in a post after the media declared Romney the winner. "Washington County is a stronghold for Paul and has yet to report. It might be a week before we know the final outcome there and Washington County is expected to yield 200 votes or more." Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum placed third with 18 percent of the vote in the official Maine caucus, while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich placed fourth with six percent of the vote.

Hunter’s prediction is not just braggadocio. In south Washington County, Maine, Paul beat Romney by 132 votes in a February 7 Cottage Grove precinct-level caucus preceding the county "super-caucus" that was supposed to be held September 11 but will now be held February 18. Maine’s South Washington County Bulletin reported February 8: "In District 57 … Texas Congressman Ron Paul was the favorite among Republicans. Paul earned 237 votes in the non-binding poll, followed by Santorum’s 209 votes. Mitt Romney had 105 votes in the district, Newt Gingrich 61 votes." The February 7 south Washington precinct-level caucus results, which were not reflected in the official statewide total, were alone sufficient to offset two-thirds of the difference between Romney and Paul in the official statewide totals.

The cancellation of the Washington County super-caucus alone among Maine caucuses scheduled for February 11 has led many Paul supporters to suspect electoral shenanigans by the Republican establishment to deny Paul a state victory. That Washington County would vote heavily in favor of Paul was well-known, and Paul was widely seen as the only credible threat to Romney.

Maine state GOP Chairman Charlie Webster vowed that later caucuses would not be counted in the vote totals. "Some caucuses decided not to participate in this poll and will caucus after this announcement," Webster told the Associated Press February 11. "Their results will not be factored in. The absent votes will not be factored into this announcement after the fact."

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who focuses upon the kids surrounding the smart kid’s test paper. He writes for LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

The Republican primary has finally boiled down to three candidates: Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

And each has a similar campaign strategy. Ron Paul is smartly running on his record of being a consistent conservative over 30 years. Flip-floppers Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are likewise smartly running on Ron Paul’s record of 30 years of ideological consistency.

Is it any wonder why Newt Gingrich has said he doesn’t want any “negative” campaign ads?

Newt has been working his way up the polls by copying off the smart kid’s paper, Ron Paul. Until recent months, there’s been no daylight between Newt and Obama on the issue of the individual mandate. Now, like Ron Paul, he calls it “unconstitutional.” Likewise, Gingrich’s opposition to global warming legislation took place after the Nancy Pelosi commercial promoting it. Guess who opposed global warming legislation all along? Gingrich has also suddenly discovered the evils of the Federal Reserve after doing nothing about it when he was Speaker of the House (and was in a position to prevent the economic bubbles this nation has suffered) at a time Ron Paul was screaming for action.

Likewise, Newt has proven he’s a political amphibian on the Freddie Mac segment of the housing bubble. “We have a much more liquid and stable housing finance system than we would have without the GSEs,” he told Freddie Mac in a published 2007 article at the height of the housing bubble. “Millions of people have entered the middle class through building wealth in their homes, and there is a lot of evidence that homeownership contributes to stable families and communities. These are results I think conservatives should embrace and want to extend as widely as possible.”

Of course, at that time Gingrich was making about $300,000 per year from Freddie Mac (totaling $1.6 million) for giving such great “historical” advice. Those were indeed great “results” for Newt’s bank account, but they blew up a liability bubble that has since cost taxpayers more than $150 billion in bailouts, or about 100,000 times Newt’s profit from the deal.

Newt is smart enough not to go around regurgitating the Wall Street banking bubble agit-prop today he was paid to disseminate in 2007. Instead, he claimed in a November 9 debate that in conversations with Freddie Mac that “I said to them at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible. It turned out, unfortunately, I was right.” Again, Newt was copying off the smart kid’s paper. While there’s nothing on the public record to back up that Newt was saying this at the time (and there is the above-mentioned contrary evidence), Ron Paul warned of the housing bubble even more eloquently in 2001, 2002, 2003, and in 2007 when Gingrich was telling conservatives to “embrace” the Freddie Mac business model.

So you can see the motivation behind Newt’s very public policy not to criticize his opponents. He’s desperately hoping they’ll return the favor and not point out the contrast between his past and Ron Paul’s past.

The closest Newt has come to criticizing Rep. Paul has been the dust-up over the good doctor’s reluctance to be told “you’re fired” in an over-hyped debate moderated by Donald Trump. “I’m actually very surprised that one of my friends would have said that,” Gingrich said of Dr. Paul. “This is a country of enormously wide-open talent. You know, Donald Trump is a great showman. He’s also a great businessman.”

“My friend”? With friends like that, Ron Paul doesn’t need any enemies. Newt dropped his “friend” and colleague Ron Paul like a shot in 1996 by backing the Democratic incumbent Greg Laughlin with Republican National Committee support. Newt wanted to keep Paul from returning to Congress, and thought he could succeed by convincing Laughlin (who’s liberal record Gingrich had criticized previously as a “Clinton clone”) to switch to the Republican Party with a promise of a committee chairmanship. He convinced Laughlin to switch over, “switching over” is a process that Newt has done countless times, but failed to keep Dr. Paul down. “Clinton clone” Laughlin had to find another line of work.

Gingrich’s laudatory comments about Trump are understandable only from the perspective that Trump — if you’ll pardon the pun — has been gaming the system for years. Trump drove his hotels into bankruptcy once, and his casinos into bankruptcy three times. So much for the house always winning. You can sort of understand Gingrich’s hero-worship of Trump. “The Donald” used government “eminent domain” to try to evict the elderly Vera Coking from a house she owned in order to build a “limousine waiting area” for the Trump Plaza Hotel in between his fits of using government muscle to free himself of his debts. If the trust-fund born Trump can use showmanship to create the impression he’s a great businessman, then certainly Gingrich’s showmanship can fool Republican primary voters that he’s always been a small government man.

As a high school teacher, I’ve seen the “copy off the smart kid’s paper” tactic before. The problem is that it almost never works. Even though the copier always considers himself “the smartest person in the room,” they always copy imperfectly and in a way that makes it obvious.

In Gingrich’s case, his remarks on the “war on terrorism” are that imperfect match. Gingrich — seeing demographics of Hispanic immigration — has campaigned on behalf of a jury trial before illegals can be deported. Newt told Mike Huckabee on Fox December 3 of illegals that they needed jury trials: “Ultimately, they are u2014 I believe they are u2014 more trustworthy. If you ask me would I trust a jury or a Washington bureaucrat, I would rather have my fate decided by a jury of my peers than have my fate decided by a Washington bureaucrat.” And if that position were a mere concern for the welfare of hard-working Hispanics rather than cynical politics, the sentiment would be welcome.

But at the October 7 Values Voters Summit, Gingrich stressed that this ancient Anglo-Saxon right should not be extended to American citizens. “I would instruct the national security officials in a Gingrich administration to ignore the recent decisions of the Supreme Court” guaranteeing habeas corpus and trial rights of terrorist suspects, Gingrich said. “And I would interpose the presidency in saying, as the commander in chief, we will not enforce this.”

Gingrich’s excuse for hitting the delete key on the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution (not to mention Article III) is that terrorists are under the “law of war” rather than civilian law. What he means by “law of war” is “no law at all,” other than the leadership principle. That’s the principle where we must trust in the elected leader to keep us safe and decide who should be put in prison, without any checks and balances or that mamby-pamby constitution stuff. As a highly paid “historian,” Newt must know that the last guy who asserted the “leadership principle” did very well in the polls, though today it sounds a little creepy in the original German (fuhrerprinzip).

Newt’s supporters should urge him to re-think this position through carefully. “But Newt,” they might ask, “if domestic enemies don’t get a jury trial, how will you stay out of prison?”

Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who focuses upon the kids surrounding the smart kid’s test paper. He writes for LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

With the recent decline in the polls of the candidacies of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, Tea Party members have two top tier candidates to consider as an alternative to the liberal Massachusetts Republican Mitt Romney: Herman Cain and Ron Paul.

But how do these two Tea Party favorites stack up on economic issues? Here’s a quick survey on their differences:

TARP Bailout

One of the biggest issues leading to the formation of the Tea Party movement was – after the burgeoning deficit – reaction against the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) law. Many Americans joined the Tea Party to stop what was obviously political favoritism being sold by fear-mongering government leaders, and it resulted in a number of pro-TARP Republican veterans losing their primaries and anti-TARP Republicans winning the day on the November 2010 general election.

During the housing bubble, profits were privatized. But once “too big to fail” Wall Street banks saw major losses on risky bets made in the real estate market, they came crying to Washington and demanded taxpayers pick up the shortfall. Establishment politicians in Washington obliged, selling the bailout package with a heaping helping of fear. Mitt Romney said “all the jobs” in America would be gone if the trust funds of the super-rich were not bailed out using the tips of cab drivers and waitresses.

Herman Cain: Cain called TARP a “win-win for the taxpayer” in an October 20, 2008 column. “Unprecedented problems require unprecedented solutions. The actions by the Treasury are a win-win for the taxpayer.” After Congress passed the TARP bailout, Cain complained about how the money was doled out, but not about the principle of crony-capitalism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized. Cain said in the October 11 Bloomberg/Washington Post debate that “They were discretionary in which institutions they were going to save, rather than apply it equitably, which is what most of us thought was going to be done. The implementation of it is where they got off-track.” Cain has never made it clear who he believes should have gotten a bailout that didn’t, or even if he believed that every failing institution should have been bailed out by taxpayers, but it’s clear from that statement that he believed that the taxpayer bailouts didn’t go far enough.

Ron Paul: Congressman Paul publicly opposed the TARP bailout and voted against the bill as congressman, charging that the bailout was the antithesis of the free market and instead “what we’ve had is cronyism, it’s interventionism and inflationism, and corporatism. That’s what is wrong. What we need is more freedom, not more government.”

Federal Reserve audit/$16 trillion secret bailout

If the TARP bailout using taxpayer dollars was bad, the Federal Reserve bailout was much worse. The Federal Reserve secretly lent at least $16 trillion in funds funneled through various Federal Reserve emergency facilities  – more than the entire size of the U.S. economy, and 22 times the size of the TARP bailout – to favored banks and corporations from 2008 through 2010. And the Federal Reserve Bank steadfastly refused to release the bailout information even to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) until Bloomberg won a Freedom of Information lawsuit in December 2010.

After Bloomberg won partial access to the bailout information, the GAO was able to come up with the $16 trillion figure as the bailout total. What came out of the GAO partial audit was that the Federal Reserve highly favored elite Wall Street banks with the following funds: $2.5 trillion for Citigroup, $2.0 trillion for Morgan Stanley, $1.9 trillion for Merrill Lynch and $1.3 trillion for Bank of America.

Cain: Herman Cain – a former chairman of the Kansas City branch of the Federal Reserve Bank – was an opponent of a GAO audit of the Fed until 2011, telling Neil Boortz’s radio audience in December 2010 that “There’s no hidden secrets going on in the Federal Reserve to my knowledge. And I tell people, we’ve got 12 Federal Reserve Banks. Find out which district you are in, call them up and go from there. We don’t need to waste money with another commission or an audit.” Cain now says (in the Bloomberg debate) that he never opposed an audit, but that he doesn’t care if one is done. “I have also said, to be precise, I do not object to the Federal Reserve being audited. I simply said, if someone wants to initiate that action, go right ahead. It doesn’t bother me. So  you – I’ve been misrepresented in that regard. I don’t have a problem with the Federal Reserve being audited. It’s simply not my top priority.”

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) schooled former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) on foreign policy issues in the August 11 GOP presidential debate in Ames, Iowa.

Asked by Fox News channel anchor Chris Wallace why Paul was "soft" on Iran in his opposition to economic sanctions against the country, Paul told the debate audience that the threat from Iran was small when looked at through the lens of history: "Just think of what we went through in the Cold War when I was in the Air Force, after I was drafted into the Air Force, all through the Sixties. We were standing up against the Soviets. They had like 30,000 nuclear weapons with intercontinental missiles. Just think of the agitation and the worry about a country that might get a nuclear weapon some day."

Paul concluded of sanctions: "That makes it much worse. Why would that be so strange if the Soviets and the Chinese had nuclear weapons, we tolerated the Soviets. We didn’t attack them. And they were a much greater danger. They were the greatest danger to us in our whole history. But you don’t go to war with them."

Paul also asked the audience to consider the nuclear issue from the perspective of the Iranian people:

Just think of how many nuclear weapons surround Iran. The Chinese are there. The Indians are there. The Pakistanis are there. The Israelis are there. The United States is there. All these countries … why wouldn’t it be natural if they might want a weapon? Internationally, they might be given more respect. Why should we write people off? In the Fifties, we at least talked to them. At least our leaders and Reagan talked to the Soviets. What’s so terribly bad about this? And countries you put sanctions on you are more likely to fight them. I say a policy of peace is free trade, stay out of their internal business, don’t get involved in these wars and just bring our troops home.

Paul’s statements did not sit well with neo-conservatives at the debate podium. Rick Santorum, who had authored a sanctions bill against Iran as a Senator, took particular umbrage at Paul’s analysis:

Iran is not Iceland, Ron. Iran is a country that has been at war with us since 1979. Iran is a country that has killed more American men and women in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan than the Iraqis and the Afghans have. The Iranians are the existential threat to the state of Israel.

While Santorum’s claim about more Americans being killed by Iranians in Iraq and Afghanistan than by the natives of those countries is patently false, Paul responded with a deeper historical analysis, noting:

The senator is wrong on his history. We’ve been at war in Iran for a lot longer than ’79. We started it in 1953 when we sent in a coup, installed the Shah, and the reaction – the blowback – came in 1979. It’s been going on and on because we just don’t mind our own business. That’s our problem.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a high school history teacher in Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes to The New American, Examiner.com, AntiWar.com and — of course — LewRockwell.com.

“I’m Ron Paul, I’m a Congressman from Texas serving in my tenth term. I am the champion of the Constitution.”

~ Ron Paul (R-Texas), self introduction in the CNN presidential debate, June 5, 2007

The statement above was not mere braggadocio; Representative Ron Paul has the most consistent record in Washington of defending the constitutional limits of government of any person in Congress. Over nearly three decades, Representative Paul has never voted for a tax increase, an unbalanced budget, a debt limit increase, federal gun restrictions, foreign aid, bailouts of private institutions, or unconstitutional spending of any kind.

He consistently earns a perfect 100-percent rating on The New American’s “Freedom Index,” and has stood alone in defending the U.S. Constitution in so many 434-1 votes in the House of Representatives that he earned the nickname “Dr. No.” He is also a Duke University Medical School graduate and obstetrician who’s delivered 4,000 babies.

He has served 12 terms as a Republican Congressman, but broke briefly with the GOP to run as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988. He also sought the GOP presidential nomination in 2008. It was Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential run that gave birth to the modern Tea Party, and he has been called the “Godfather” of the Tea Party movement. The election to the Senate of Ron Paul’s son, Rand Paul (also a medical doctor), was the most widely celebrated Tea Party victory of the 2010 election cycle.

Representative Paul voted against the Iraq War (decrying the war’s violation of Christian just-war principles), voted against the Patriot Act (because of its violations of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), and has championed the idea of auditing and eventually abolishing the Federal Reserve Bank (the nation’s central bank) and replacing it with the gold standard.

It’s on economic issues that Ron Paul shows his greatest strength and foresight.

He first became interested in economics when the post-WWII Bretton Woods agreement over the gold standard broke up in 1971, and began a lifelong study of the Austrian school of economics. Concern for the economic calamities facing the nation today inspired his first run for Congress in 1976, and Paul accurately predicted the 2007-08 housing bubble/bust as early as September 6, 2001, when he said in a speech from the House floor:

The Federal Reserve credit created during the last eight months has not stimulated economic growth in technology or in the industrial sector, but a lot of it ended up in the expanding real estate bubble, churned by the $3.2 trillion of debt maintained by the GSEs, the Government Sponsored Enterprises. The GSEs, made up of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Bank, have managed to keep the housing market afloat, in contrast to the more logical slowdown in hotel and office construction…. Instead of the newly inflated money being directed toward the stock market, it now finds its way into the rapidly expanding real estate bubble. This too will burst, as all bubbles do. The Fed, the Congress, or even foreign investors can’t prevent the collapse of this bubble.

Rep. Paul’s repeated – and amazingly accurate – predictions of the housing bust were panned by GOP primary voters in 2007 and early 2008, as the enormity of the economic crisis had not yet become apparent. In an October 9, 2007 GOP presidential debate, Ron Paul was the only candidate who believed that the economy was not on a sound footing, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson claimed there was no recession looming. Ron Paul’s warnings were ignored, as was the Austrian school of economics he had come to follow.

But once the recession – and the reasons behind it – became clear, the media and voters took a renewed interest in both Paul and Austrian economics, though too late for the 2008 presidential cycle.

Likewise, Rep. Paul suffered from poor timing in his opposition to the Iraq War during the 2008 GOP primary, when the war was being waged by a fellow Republican President and Osama bin Laden was still at large. At the time, many GOP primary voters wrongly believed there was a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Rep. Paul’s insistence in 2007 presidential debates that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan was ignored by his rivals and the voters alike. Since then, however, Osama bin Laden has been found and killed in Pakistan. And the appetite for more wars among both voters and members of the military alike has abated substantially.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a high school history teacher in Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes to The New American, Examiner.com, AntiWar.com and — of course — LewRockwell.com.

A number of constitutionalists have warned that the new "Super Congress" – technically a joint committee of Congress – may be unconstitutional. The new entity will be created out of the Obama-Boehner debt limit deal. "It smells," Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) told Fox News August 1. "I just don’t understand why Congress is so willing to give up its responsibilities to 12 people…. It’s a reflection that they don’t have answers."

Former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano told Fox News August 1 that he thinks the law may be unconstitutional:

"Members of the Senate and members of the House have the opportunity under the Constitution to debate items that are sent to them and to modify items that are sent to them. To force them to vote just yes or know with no debate, not to follow the rules of the House, which permits amendments, not to follow the rules of the Senate, which permits a filibuster, is such a substantial removal of the authority the Constitution gave them that this legislation is treading in waters that might not be constitutional."

One might agree with Napolitano that these points make the Super Congress unwise without agreeing that these particular points may make the Super Congress unconstitutional as well. After all, the U.S. Constitution provides that "Each House [of Congress] may determine the Rules of its Proceedings" (Art. I, Sec. 5) and choose its own officers (Art. I, Sec. 2 and 3). These powers of Congress in the U.S. Constitution are plenary; there are no limitations on them. And Congress has long chosen to fast-track (allow no amendments) most treaties and trade agreements that have been negotiated over many months, in order to avoid sending negotiators abroad again to renegotiate the agreements.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a high school history teacher in Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes to The New American, Examiner.com, AntiWar.com and — of course — LewRockwell.com.

"How sweet it is! Finally, after all these years! Caught?… You want to threaten me?… You want to threaten to pick me off from the cemetery across the street from my house now? Who’s laughing now, Whitey?" ~ WRKO-Boston radio talk-show host and Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr

Nobody was happier to hear of the arrest of Boston Irish mobster James "Whitey" Bulger on June 22 than Boston radio talk show host and Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr, who had reportedly been on a Bulger assassination list when Bulger was on his spree. (Only the fact that Carr came out of his house with his little daughter prevented triggerman Kevin Weeks from putting the outspoken columnist and top-rated talk-show host in the grave.)

But the FBI may not have been so happy to hear Bulger was finally in federal custody, as new corruption revelations may create additional shock waves through the FBI.

Bulger had inducted several top FBI agents in the Boston office into his gang, and used the FBI as his enforcement arm to eliminate his rivals within his own Winter Hill Gang and in the Italian La Cosa Nostra (Mafia). According to his indictment, Bulger’s gang committed at least 19 murders in a spree that lasted from 1965-1994. He spent 16 years evading federal officials, some of whom may never have wanted him to have been captured alive. Two FBI agents were eventually convicted of crimes related to helping Bulger commit murder, H. Paul Rico (who died in prison in 2004) and John Connolly (who will soon be transferred from a federal prison where he’s serving time for a RICO conviction to Florida to serve 40 years for a murder charge).

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a high school history teacher in Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes to The New American, Examiner.com, AntiWar.com and — of course — LewRockwell.com.

Congressman Ron Paul delivered a five-minute speech on the floor of the House of Representatives May 25, a short speech that may sound to the uninformed like one wild statement after another. In his speech, Dr. Paul (he's an obstetrician) made a number of charges that the executive branch of government has established a virtual dictatorship with the willing assistance of Congress and many Americans who fear for their "security." But Congressman Paul is complaining about the erosion of constitutional protections that have already happened. Following is his speech verbatim, along with links documenting his allegations. All words are by Congressman Paul; hyperlinks were added by The New American's Thomas R. Eddlem.

The Last Nail

by Congressman Ron Paul

The last nail is being driven into the coffin of the American Republic. Yet, Congress remains in total denial as our liberties are rapidly fading before our eyes. The process is propelled by unwarranted fear and ignorance as to the true meaning of liberty. It is driven by economic myths, fallacies and irrational good intentions. The rule of law is constantly rejected and authoritarian answers are offered as panaceas for all our problems. Runaway welfarism is used to benefit the rich at the expense of the middle class. Who would have ever thought that the current generation and Congress would stand idly by and watch such a rapid disintegration of the American Republic? Characteristic of this epic event is the casual acceptance by the people and political leaders of the unitary presidency, which is equivalent to granting dictatorial powers to the President. Our Presidents can now, on their own:

• Order assassinations, including American citizens;
• Operate secret military tribunals;
• Engage in torture;
• Enforce indefinite imprisonment without due process;
• Order searches and seizures without proper warrants, gutting the Fourth Amendment;
• Ignore the 60-day rule for reporting to the Congress the nature of any military operations as required by the War Power Resolution;
• Continue the Patriot Act abuses without oversight;
• Wage war at will;
• Treat all Americans as suspected terrorists at airports with TSA groping and nude x-raying.

And the Federal Reserve accommodates by counterfeiting the funds needed and not paid for by taxation and borrowing, permitting runaway spending, endless debt, and special interest bailouts.

Yet the history of the American Republic reveals that the Founding Fathers not only supported anonymous political writing and speech by enacting the First Amendment, they regularly engaged in anonymous political speech themselves. Anonymous political speech is as American as the anonymously written Federalist Papers. Or, for that matter, the Anti-Federalist Papers, some of which were written by Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee.

Political “progressives” are engaging in a coordinated attack against this constitutionally protected form of free speech. MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow, interviewing the candidates for Oregon’s 4th Congressional District, noted that a mysterious group, Concerned Taxpayers of America, had funded $150,000 in television commercials supporting the Republican challenger in the race, Dr. Art Robinson. In advance of interviewing the incumbent Democrat Pete DeFazio, Maddow opined that anonymous television advertisements that express political opinions were:

Money-laundering on a grand scale. Money-laundering, that’s what it is, to take over the Congress of the United States of America. There is no ceiling on what you can spend. This is the way the elections are running right now. After the Citizens United, after the campaign finance changes that conservatives are supporting this year, this is the way our elections run in America now. And this, this is the context in which every individual American citizen of average, mediate, moderate or extreme means every American in the country is deciding whether or not it’s a good idea to donate 25 bucks to their chosen candidate to try to make a human-sized difference in this year’s elections. What do you think your odds are of making a difference, a human-sized difference, as a regular human, a regular citizen if this is the landscape in which our elections get decided now? …You don’t stand a chance.

Of course, this is not the way elections are being held right now. Elections are simply ballots and counting. What Maddow was describing is political speech, the kind of speech the First Amendment was specifically written to protect. The First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.” Maddow assumes that the American people are mindless morons who will do the bidding of whatever anonymous voices on the television tell them, and that an individual with a powerful message can never obtain a large audience through the Internet. The reality is that the anonymous spending remains a tiny proportion of total campaign spending. Maddow told the Republican Art Robinson, “It would be illegal for somebody to give you a $150,000 donation,” but Robinson replied of the Concerned Taxpayers of America television advertisements that “I’m delighted that these people have helped to level the playing field.”

Of course, the playing field is not leveled. Thompson has to contest with Political Action Committees that have lined the pockets of his opponent, Pete DeFazio, by far more than the $150,000 Concerned Taxpayers of America have spent. Moreover, he has to contend with big media, like MSNBC’s Maddow, who are openly sympathetic with DeFazio. And the biggest of all money influences in the political campaign is also working against Robinson: federal handouts. Federal transfer payments to farmers, the poor, retired, union highway workers, state workers, local school officials, all are geared toward the age-old election strategy of u201Ctax, spend, and electu201D first perfected during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s u201CNew Deal.u201D

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a high school history teacher in Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes to The New American, Examiner.com, AntiWar.com and — of course — LewRockwell.com.

Nullification is an indispensable book about what could become the most effective means of stopping an out-of-control federal government: nullification. "Nullification" is simply an act by states (and occasionally individuals) to resist unconstitutional federal laws. The term “nullification” was coined by Thomas Jefferson in his 1798 Kentucky Resolutions that protested the Alien and Sedition Acts’ unconstitutional criminal ban on criticism of the President. (The ban violated the First, Ninth, and 10th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.) Loaded with primary sources among the more than 100 pages of appendices, Thomas Woods’ Nullification should become an action manual for committed activists of the Tea Party movement on the issue of federal healthcare mandates and a host of other issues.

Woods begins his must-read book by exploding one of the three main arguments usually levied against state nullification of unconstitutional federal laws: There’s nothing in the Constitution about nullification. The three basic arguments against nullification are: 1. It’s unconstitutional, 2. It doesn’t work, and 3. It is nothing more than a tool of racists or secessionists who want another civil war. Woods proves definitively that none of these arguments have the slightest merit. He is quick to point out in Nullification the irony of the first objection to nullification: Most of the politicians who pushed the healthcare law (and are presumed to be nullification opponents) don’t care in the slightest about the U.S. Constitution anyway.

The author explains the constitutional justification for nullification of unconstitutional laws: the 10th Amendment. Indeed, nowhere in the Constitution is any branch of the the federal government given the exclusive right to “interpret” the document. (Yes, it sounds silly to speak about needing an “interpreter” to read a document written in straightforward English prose, but that’s the unfortunate terminology government uses today.) It’s true that the Supreme Court has always acted as if it has the exclusive right to “interpret,” but the supremacy clause in Article 5 of the Constitution merely stipulates:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

The supremacy clause simply states that judges must follow the Constitution, not that the Supreme Court is the exclusive judge of what is — or is not — constitutional. Likewise, other branches of government are bound to follow the Constitution. Article 2 specifies the President must swear to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” In fact, if there is an exclusive interpreter of the Constitution, it is the states or the people, since the 10th Amendment stipulates: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

If the exclusive right of interpretation is not expressly delegated to the United States — and indeed it is nowhere found in the text of the Constitution — then that authority clearly resides in the states and the people. The 10th Amendment is key to understanding both the limitations of the federal government as well as the unlimited nature of the response appropriate from the states and the people. The 10th Amendment figures prominently in Nullification.

Woods also exposes the canard that nullification has never been successful, taking this historical fiction out to the factual Woods-shed. The author cites numerous examples of how nullification has worked in the past, and is continually working in the present. For example, the federal Real ID Act of 2005 tried to tell states how to issue drivers’ licenses but has been effectively nullified by the states. Half of the states issued formal declarations that they have no intention of ever complying with the federal mandate and Woods notes that “resistance was so widespread that although the law is still on the books, the federal government has, in effect, given up trying to enforce it.”

Contrary to claims that nullification is only a tool of racists, nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act from the Compromise of 1850 was also widespread and highly effective, Woods points out. In fact, nearly every state that later seceded (primarily in reaction to Lincoln’s election to the presidency) mentioned it in their resolution of secession. Mississippi complained that Northern state officials “nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.” South Carolina and Texas made almost identical claims, with Georgia complaining in its secession resolution: “For above twenty years the non-slave-holding States generally have wholly refused to deliver up to us persons charged with crimes affecting slave property. [Northern state officials] shield and give sanctuary to all criminals who seek to deprive us of this property or who use it to destroy us. This clause of the Constitution has no other sanction than their good faith; that is withheld from us.”

Woods almost entirely ignores Jim Crow laws in Nullification, perhaps because it is already well known and emphasis upon it could politically detract from popularization of the nullification issue. But he is quick to point out that nullification was employed against racism in nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act decades before racists copied the tactic and nullified the “equal protection” and clause of the 14th Amendment. Both Jim Crow supporters and their civil rights activist rivals used nullification, though civil rights protesters arguably only attempted to nullify state laws.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a high school history teacher in Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes to The New American, Examiner.com, AntiWar.com and — of course — LewRockwell.com.

Walter Reddy
is the patriotic organizer of the Committees of Safety, arguably
a founding father of the modern Tea Party movement, and his right
to keep and bear arms has been taken from him. It doesn’t matter
that he has committed no crimes, and has not been charged with a
crime. A Connecticut judge told him at a hearing that Reddy had
no right to an attorney and that "I’m ready to rule" to
take Reddy’s guns away before the patriotic organizer had the chance
to say one word in his defense.

Ready had organized
the first modern-day Tea Party rally, a December
2007 rally at Boston’s Faneuil Hall that featured the then-little-known
Rand Paul as a keynote speaker. Rand Paul, an eye surgeon and son
of Rep. Ron Paul, has since gone on to become the most prominent
U.S. senator associated with the Tea Party movement.

The following
facts are undisputed by both sides of the legal dispute over possession
of guns:

• Police in
  Weston, Connecticut, based in part upon an unsubstantiated FBI
  statement that Reddy was a "person of interest" in a
  domestic terrorism investigation, executed a search and seizure
  warrant at Reddy’s home on February 14 that involved the local
  SWAT team. The police took a pump-action shotgun and an antique
  revolver from Reddy.
• Walter
  Reddy has no criminal record of any kind.
• Reddy was
  never charged with a crime, but his legally held guns were taken
  from him anyway. He is, however, a widely known constitutional
  political activist and persistent critic of big government.
• Reddy repeatedly
  asked for an opportunity to get a lawyer before a February 25
  hearing on possession of his guns, and was denied his request
• The chief
  witness brought by the state against Reddy explicitly stated that
  Reddy had never acted in a threatening or violent way.
• No other
  witness even attempted to claim that Reddy was threatening or
  violent.

"The fact
that he wasn’t given the opportunity to get a lawyer [for the hearing]
is just wrong," Reddy’s lawyer Joseph
Secola told The New American. "It just seems to
me that he was not accorded the necessary due process of law. He
asked repeatedly for a continuance to get counsel and it was repeatedly
denied."

According to
the hearing transcript provided by Secola, Connecticut Superior
Court Judge Bruce Hudock ruled that, because Connecticut law requires
a hearing within 14 days of a seizure of private property, the judge
couldn’t delay the hearing long enough for Reddy to hire a lawyer.
"Well, as I read – before I turn to the State – as
I read the statute, in particular, 29-38c(d), it says no later than
fourteen days after the execution of the warrant, the Court shall
hold a hearing to determine whether the seized firearms should be
returned to the person, or held for the State for a period not longer
than one year. So I see a ‘shall,’ and shall means that there is
no – shall means shall. That means we’ve got to have a
hearing in my opinion."

But Secola
stressed that the purpose of the 14-day limit in the Connecticut
law is to protect the property owner, not the state. "When
he says that the law forces me to deny the continuance, that’s absurd….
The law can be waived by the party getting the benefit of the legal
right," Secola told The New American, who termed the
judge’s ruling "legal error" subject to appeal. In Reddy’s
case, the lawyer he had initially selected to represent him had
a court date for another client that day and couldn’t appear at
the scheduled hearing on such short notice. "This guy was just
railroaded throughout the entire process," Secola concluded.

How badly was
Reddy railroaded? Not only was he denied an opportunity to get a
lawyer, Judge Hudock told Reddy at the beginning of the case: "Unless
you have anything further to say, I’m ready to rule."
The unusual part of that statement was that the judge said this
before Reddy had the chance to give any testimony, call any witnesses,
or present any evidence. How could the judge have possibly been
"ready to rule" fairly without hearing both sides first?

Reddy did have
something to say in his own defense. But not surprisingly, the judge
ruled: "The court finds that … you are a risk of imminent
personal injury to other individuals." He ordered Reddy’s guns
be kept from him for a full year.

How the court
came to such a conclusion is interesting, and possibly frightening
for conservative political activists in present-day America.

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the rest of the article

April
23, 2010

Thomas R.
Eddlem [send
him mail] is a high school history teacher in
Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes
to The New American,
Examiner.com,
AntiWar.com and — of
course — LewRockwell.com.

Thomas
R. Eddlem Archives

“Fifteen years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the United States is experiencing an antigovernment climate remarkably similar to the atmosphere that preceded the attack,” the SPLC reported at a symposium keynoted by former President Bill Clinton April 16. But now it’s worse, they say:

Unlike the 1990s, however, mainstream commentators and politicians are pouring fuel on the fire with heated antigovernment rhetoric and outrageous conspiracy theories, such as the suggestion that the president is creating "death panels" or that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a rash of leprosy cases in the United States. "It just stokes the fire and I don’t see anything that’s moving us toward any kind of calming down," said SPLC Intelligence Project Director Mark Potok.

A big part of SPLC alarm response is a new enemies list of sorts, a catalog of people and organizations the Montgomery, Alabama-based organization doesn’t like. The SPLC list of 36 enemies “at the heart of the resurgent movement” opposing big government includes a mix of perfectly reasonable people along with some who have fallen for quirky but harmless conspiracy theories, as well as what the SPLC calls their “enablers”: Fox News Contributor Judge Andrew Napolitano and Congressmen Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and Paul Broun. Among those who have made the list are The New American’s publisher John McManus, TNA contributor Chuck Baldwin, Gun Owners of America chairman Larry Pratt, WorldNetDaily founder Joe Farah, radio talk-show host Alex Jones, and constitutionalist author Edwin Vieira, Jr. The list includes birthers, truthers, militia members, and other people the SPLC calls political heretics, but not one of which the SPLC accuses of advocating violence or law-breaking. The SPLC attacks many constitutionalist organizations, from the John Birch Society to the Oathkeepers to the Three Percenters:

Although the resurgence of the so-called Patriots — people who generally believe that the federal government is an evil entity that is engaged in a secret conspiracy to impose martial law, herd those who resist into concentration camps, and force the United States into a socialistic "New World Order" — also has been propelled by people who were key players in the first wave of the Patriot movement in the mid—1990s, there are also a large number of new players. What follows are profiles of 36 individuals at the heart of the resurgent movement.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a high school history teacher in Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes to The New American, Examiner.com, AntiWar.com and — of course — LewRockwell.com.

The recent
decision
by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to begin holding press
conferences may be one more indication of the increased influence
of Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas). The Federal Reserve has long
ignored the public and conducted its proceedings in cloister, but
the Wall Street Journal reported
April 21 that Bernanke will hold the Fed's first scheduled press
conference ever after Wednesday April 27 Open Market Committee meeting.

The meeting
will determine changes, if any, in Federal Reserve target interest
rates and the fate of the "quantitative easing" program
of the Federal Reserve to purchase some $600 billion in U.S.
government debt securities by June. Most observers expect interest
rates – currently set at historic lows, nearly zero –
and the quantitative easing program to continue as scheduled.

The decision
to hold a press conference conflicts with nearly a century of Federal
Reserve operational secrecy. "Twenty years ago," the Wall
Street Journal reported April
21, "the central bank didn't even tell the public when
it was changing interest rates. Well-paid Fed watchers on Wall Street
had to read the tea leaves and figure it out for themselves. Mr.
Bernanke's predecessor, Alan Greenspan, conducted one on-the-record
television interview shortly before the 1987 stock-market crash
and never did another."

As recently
as 2009, Bernanke told then-Representative
Alan Grayson (D-Florida) that he didn't know where some $500
billion in in Federal Reserve credit to foreign banks had gone,
and that he would not reveal the information to congressional committees.
But the press conference change is occurring just as polling
numbers published by the Gallup track increasing distrust of
the Federal Reserve's decisions among the American public. For
the first time in recent memory, more Americans distrust the Federal
Reserve Bank's decision-making than trust it.

This distrust
is in part a result of the economic performance of the nation in
recent years, but also must be partially chalked up to the persistent
critique by Representative Ron Paul, the new Chairman of the House
Monetary Policy Subcommittee. Paul has authored a best-selling book
calling for abolition of the Fed, End
the Fed, and has begun hearings that have exposed Federal
Reserve policies that are responsible for the unprecedented rise
in commodities prices in recent months.

Read
the rest of the article

April
22, 2010

Thomas R.
Eddlem [send
him mail] is a high school history teacher in
Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes
to The New American,
Examiner.com,
AntiWar.com and — of
course — LewRockwell.com.

Thomas
R. Eddlem Archives

~ MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough to "Austrian school" economics adherent Peter Schiff on Morning Joe, March 25, 2009

Scarborough’s reference to Cassandra — the character from Greek mythology given the gift of prophecy and the curse that nobody would believe her predictions — was particularly apropos to the Austrian school of economic theory until the latest economic crash. The name of this free-market economic school acknowledges the fact that many of the school’s "founding fathers" were Austrian nationals and disciples of the Austrian economist Karl Menger. Of course, the "Austrian school" is not a school in the traditional sense of the word denoting a physical structure; the term defines those who believe in pure free-market economics and laissez-faire principles. The Austrian school has a long history of amazingly accurate economic predictions while at the same time being completely ignored by the political establishment and virtually ignored by the mainstream media.

Prescient Predictions

But that lack of credibility to the public faded entirely once the Austrian school’s predictions again came true. One of the few exceptions to the media blackout against the Austrian school before 2008 was Euro Pacific Capital President Peter Schiff, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut, who had given a number of television interviews in advance of the current recession. Schiff repeatedly pointed out with astonishing accuracy what would happen and — more amazingly — why it would happen. Among the more famous of these interviews was an August 28, 2006 CNBC-TV debate with Reagan-era "supply-side school" economist Arthur Laffer. Laffer, a famed economic advisor to President Reagan, is perhaps the most prominent of the supply-side theoreticians and best known for the "Laffer curve" that explains how government can extract the most taxes from taxpayers without choking economic activity. After hearing Schiff predict a severe recession in 2007 or 2008, Laffer replied:

What he’s saying is that savings is way down in the United States, but wealth has risen dramatically. The United States economy has never been in better shape. There is no income tax increase coming in the next couple of years. Monetary policy is spectacular. We have freer trade than ever before…. I think Peter is just totally off base, and I just don’t know where he’s getting his stuff.

Schiff replied: "When you see the stock market come down and the real estate bubble burst, all that phony wealth is going to evaporate and all that is going to be left is the debt we accumulated to foreigners."

Laffer next bet Schiff a penny in the same interview that Schiff was wrong. Laffer claimed he hadn’t paid Schiff the penny on HBO’s October 24, 2008 Real Time With Bill Maher show.

Schiff was not the only Austrian to accurately predict the current recession. Congressman Ron Paul made virtually identical predictions. Interviewed on February 23, 2010 — shortly after Paul won the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) presidential straw poll on who conservatives would like to run for the next presidential election — on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Scarborough noted:

Here’s what Ron Paul predicted in 2003 about … the bubble that was growing through Fannie and Freddie and the banks: [Video clip] "Ironically, by transferring risk of a widespread credit default, the government increases the likelihood of a painful crash in the housing market. Like all artificially created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When house prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty, their equity will be wiped out. The more people who will be investing in the market, the greater the effects across the economy when that bubble bursts. Even Fed Chairman Greenspan has expressed concerns that government subsidies make investors underestimate the risk of investing in Freddie and Fannie." You called it right. That was in 2003, Congressman. 2003, five years and five days before the crash. How did you know?

Actually, Rep. Paul had also said essentially the same thing a year earlier than that, in a July 16, 2002 speech before the U.S. House of Representatives.

How did he know? Representative Paul explained to Scarborough that he was

just trying to understand economics from an Austrian free market perspective. It sort of goes to show that with a little perseverance sometimes you can come as a winner in the end. And I think we are winning on arguing the case for free markets over government intervention…. It isn’t me that makes these predictions, it’s the predictions made by good Austrian economists, people like Mises and Hayek and Rothbard and Sennholz. They taught us this, it’s available, and the young people especially are responding to this and studying this school of thought.

Austrian school economics received a massive national hearing during Rep. Paul’s presidential race in 2008, though — like Cassandra — his predictions of an economic crash were not accepted by enough Republican Party primary voters to win him the presidential nomination. That has all changed since the crash, Rep. Paul told The New American in an interview for this story. He sees a rising interest in the Austrian school: "There has been a dramatic change with the collapse in the economy because the Austrians predicted it. They’ve been right before."

He’s right on both counts. The media is covering Austrian economists more than ever. Rep. Paul has been a frequent guest on national television and enjoyed two national best-selling books, The Revolution: A Manifesto and End the Fed, since losing the Republican presidential nomination. His "Campaign for Liberty" — a non-political interest group founded to continue the grass-roots activism of mostly younger 2008 campaign volunteers — received more than $4 million in donations in just the first few months after President Obama was elected. Rep. Paul acknowledges that "the campaign lit a match." But he’s quick to add that "the work was done many many years ago," by Ludwig von Mises and others.

Found to Be Fundamentally Sound

Rep. Paul is correct about the Austrian school making accurate forecasts in the past in addition to analysis of the most recent recession. Austrian school economist Friedrich A. von Hayek predicted the Great Depression years in advance of the infamous 1929 Wall Street stock market crash. Hayek’s Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle — first published from Austria in 1929 — predicted the Great Depression. Hayek was granted a Nobel Prize in Economics (much later, in 1974) for his pre-Depression and Depression-era related work in the study of economics. The Nobel committee explained in a press release about the award:

Perhaps, partly due to this more profound analysis, he was one of the few economists who gave warning of the possibility of a major economic crisis before the great crash came in the autumn of 1929. Von Hayek showed how monetary expansion, accompanied by lending which exceeded the rate of voluntary saving, could lead to a misallocation of resources, particularly affecting the structure of capital. This type of business cycle theory with links to monetary expansion has fundamental features in common with the postwar monetary discussion.

Originally written during 1928 — and published in the German language in 1929 — Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle provided the theoretical models that proved an economic crash was coming in the United States and other countries. The June 1932 preface to the English edition explained more specifically that the Federal Reserve had continued an inflationary, easy-credit policy under the Hoover administration (further continued and accelerated by the Roosevelt administration) that was bound to drag out the Depression: "Far from following a deflationary policy, central banks, particularly in the United States, have been making earlier and more far-reaching efforts than have ever been undertaken before to combat the depression by a policy of credit expansion — with the result that the depression has lasted longer and has become more severe than any preceding one." The acceleration of that easy-credit policy under the Roosevelt administration guaranteed that the Great Depression would last until the end of World War II (though the war itself "cured" the unemployment part of the depression). And for many Austrians, today’s Federal Reserve policies are mirroring those of the early 1930s.

Hayek’s “trade cycle” is today called the “business cycle” by most Austrians, who use a term called “praxeology” to describe their approach. Praxeology is simply a word of Greek derivation employed by the Austrian school that means “the study of human action.” The action being studied in this case is economic action of a people. Austrian school economists understand the common-sense principle that nations — like people — build wealth from savings and investment and not from borrowing and spending.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a high school history teacher in Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes to The New American, Examiner.com, AntiWar.com and — of course — LewRockwell.com.

One of the first things I tell my American history students is that every dictatorship throughout all of history was an executive branch dictatorship. The Roman Senate fell by giving its powers to the Caesars, and the U.S. Congress is following in that path by ceding its power to the president. Conversely, all the free countries in human history have had legislatures dominate and tame the executive branch.

As if to confirm the fact that the presidency is becoming an out-of-control dictatorship, the White House spokesmen Dan Pfeiffer and Rahm Emmanuel told the New York Times this past weekend that if Congress won’t pass their agenda they’ll enact it by dictatorial decree. "The challenges we had to address in 2009 ensured that the center of action would be in Congress," White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer told the Times in Saturday’s news dump. "In 2010, executive actions will also play a key role in advancing the agenda."

But the role of the president under the U.S. Constitution is not to make laws. It is simply to execute the laws passed by Congress. Article I, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution begins: "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." Since the Constitution mandates that "all" law-making powers reside in the Congress, none are left for the president. The president’s job is that “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed” under Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Constitutionally speaking, the president was designed by the founders to be nothing more than the errand-boy of Congress.

Obama won’t be the first to take us from the "rule of law" to "rule by one man." The Bush and Clinton administrations paved the way for unconstitutional executive orders. Clinton advisor Paul Begala told the New York Times of Clinton’s executive orders: "Stroke of the pen. Law of the Land. Kinda cool."

President Bush and his neo-conservative theoreticians were even worse, as they posited the idea that the president was above all law. Former Bush Assistant Attorney General John Yoo’s recent book Crisis and Command contends presidential powers are unlimited by any law: "The executive was, rather, the servant of necessity, bound to act in accordance with, in the absence of, or in extraordinary emergencies, in defense of the republic, even contrary to regularly constituted law."

This is the authoritarian personality long championed by both much of the Democratic leadership on the "left" and all of the neo-conservative Republicans on the "right." Neo-conservatives like John Yoo explicitly endorse the idea of an omnipotent presidency that erases all the rights of the people. In his wordy and overpriced book, Crisis and Command, John Yoo claims the Constitution created a president with unlimited powers. The Constitution of the founders, Yoo wrote, "did not carefully limit the executive power, as [it] did with the legislative, because they understood that they could not see the future."

If the president has unlimited power, then he can take away the rights of the people to be free from detention without trial, torture, etc. That’s why Yoo fails to mention the natural law or the inalienable rights of man as "endowed by their Creator" in his book. The whole concept of individual rights is only discussed in the context of privileges that the president can suspend when he deems it necessary. And forget about any role God has on those rights. God makes no appearance in Yoo’s Crisis and Command, not even a cameo.

Yoo mentions Enlightenment writers such as Locke, Montesquieu and Blackstone in Crisis and Command, but he acts as if they had nothing to say about individual rights or God. After all, if you have an unlimited executive, you can’t have inalienable rights. An all-powerful president can’t tolerate an all-powerful God giving out inalienable rights to everyone willy-nilly. The all-powerful presidency is a jealous god. The real lesson of the Enlightenment era, Yoo implies, is a clarion call for the same old unlimited executive power that has existed in every dictatorship in most of the governments throughout world history.

This is what the modern presidency has become, a new Caesar whose powers are without limit.

Unfortunately the national leadership of the Republican Party has bought wholly into Yoo’s argument that government gives out rights instead of God, and that government ought not to "give" rights to people we don’t like. One recent example is Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown, who ran a close January 19 election to succeed Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. Brown stated in a television commercial in the week before the election that "Some people believe our Constitution exists to grant rights to terrorists who want to harm us. I disagree. Our laws are meant to protect this nation, not our enemies. As your senator, I will never compromise our nation’s security." The clear implication of Brown’s campaign ad is that government gives out rights — not God — and that government shouldn’t give them out to people it doesn’t like.

When I was in college, I joined the anti-communist John Birch Society because I feared that the Soviet dictators would bring their totalitarianism to America. Under Soviet rule, Brezhnev and Gorbachev could and did "disappear" anyone they didn’t like into a wide-ranging secret prison network of gulags where the person would be outside of law. Those consigned to the gulags would have no right to a trial and could even be detained indefinitely without charges. The imprisoned could be tortured at will, or even killed by their government tormentors. Many of those tortured were innocent. That frightened me, but I never would have guessed then that President Bush had done all of those things to America and its citizens (see the links on each of the Soviet atrocities above for proof). It’s true that the average American Fox-servative remains ignorant of these facts, because we won’t hear the details of tortured innocents like Maher Arar, Khalid el-Masri, Omar Deghayes or the Tipton Three on the Fox News Channel. Nor will the Fox News Network tell its audience that the Obama administration has openly ratified all of these Bush-era attacks on the Bill of Rights except for the torture. Fox-servatives love the dictatorial state; they just wish it were run by the party of Pompey instead of the party of Caesar.

All of the really bad ideas that the federal government initiated throughout our nation’s history originated with the office of president: This includes most of the wars as well as warrantless surveillance, detention without trial, torture and all of the socialist legislation since the New Deal. Each was only adopted by the president pushing Congress, or more recently, by a president ignoring Congress altogether.

The presidency itself needs to be knocked down from its perch. The only thing that will save the American republic is a renewed focus upon the Congress and cutting down the presidency to size. The founding fathers designed the legislature — Congress — to be the dominant branch of a very small federal government. That’s the lesson of history that anyone who takes the care to read the founding documents learns. When Representative Ron Paul ran for president in 2008, he was really running for a lower office — constitutionally speaking — than the congressional position he already had.

The only appropriate celebrations of President’s Day these days involve spitting, ridicule and obscene gestures.

Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a high school history teacher in Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes to The New American, Examiner.com, AntiWar.com and — of course — LewRockwell.com.

"God isn’t
a Republican or a Democrat," a friend in my men’s prayer group
said to me a while ago after temporarily posting his Republican
political preference on his Facebook profile. This young friend
uses Facebook primarily to evangelize on behalf of Christ, and was
annoyed by a bunch of complaints from Democratic friends about how
the Republicans opposed Christian principles such as favoring war
and social justice.

"You’re
right," I jokingly replied. "God’s not a Republican or
a Democrat. But He might be a libertarian," But then I corrected
myself and added, "Of course, I’m only half kidding about that."

My friend reminded
me of a conversation I had a short while earlier with a different
Catholic friend after "World Food Day," who told me that
Catholic social teaching included the doctrine that food, clothing
and shelter were inalienable "rights." As a Catholic myself,
I know that the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference claim
that "All people have a right to life and a right to secure
the basic necessities of life (e.g., food, clothing, shelter, education,
health care, a safe environment, and economic security)." In
practice, the U.S. Catholic bishops have backed government taxation
and force as the means of providing those "rights."

I disagreed
with my second friend, saying that there’s nothing in traditional
Catholic teaching (i.e., pre-Vatican II) that says if a person refuses
to work for his food that he should have a right to eat his fill.
To the contrary, I cited St. Paul’s command about people who don’t
work shouldn’t eat (2
Thessalonians 3:10-12):

"When
we were with you, we instructed you that if anyone was unwilling
to work, neither should that one eat. We hear that some are conducting
themselves among you in a disorderly way, by not keeping busy but
minding the business of others. Such people we instruct and urge
in the Lord Jesus Christ to work quietly and to eat their own food."

I explained
to my friend that St. Paul understood one cannot describe a material
good as a "right," other than a right to what you’ve produced
(which accounts for "Thou
shall not steal" and "Thou shall not covet"),
since creating unearned material rights imposes a type of slavery
on the persons who are obligated to provide those material goods.
And if there’s a social mechanism for providing those goods as "rights,"
such as government, rights can only be provided through the violence
of a barrel of a gun.

But my “World
Food Day” friend rejected St. Paul’s teaching. I mentioned that
latter conversation to a third Catholic friend of mine, who responded:
"Well, St. Paul was a bit crazy. He also said wives should
obey their husbands. You’ve got to understand that St. Paul’s was
a patriarchal society. Had it been a matriarchal society, he would
have said the reverse."

The ignorance
astounded me.

Paul’s commands
about marriage are a perfect example of Christian teaching, though
perhaps among his most misunderstood teachings. In Ephesians
(5:20-25), St. Paul instructs:

"Be subordinate
to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be subordinate
to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his
wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior
of the body. As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should
be subordinate to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your
wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for
her…"

St. Paul gives
one set of instructions to wives, and another set of instructions
to husbands. They are differently worded, but they essentially say
the same thing, that each person in the marriage is told to serve
the other. Neither is told they have the right to boss the other
around. St. Paul’s instructions impose a personal moral burden,
but his instructions are based on freedom … not authority! In
St. Paul’s world, nobody has the right to demand anything from anyone
else, even if individuals are called to serve each other. What and
how much you give is based upon your own conscience, not the violence
of the state.

In the same
way Jesus talked about voluntary giving, not government socialism.
He imposed individual moral burdens, not social burdens. Probably
the best example of that teaching is the story of the Good Samaritan
from Luke’s
Gospel (10:30-35). Responding to a scholar in the law,

"Jesus
said ‘A man fell victim to robbers as he went down from Jerusalem
to Jericho. They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him
half-dead.

A priest
happened to be going down that road, but when he saw him, he passed
by on the opposite side.

Likewise
a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him, he passed by
on the opposite side.

But a Samaritan
traveler who came upon him was moved with compassion at the sight.

He approached
the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them.
Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn and
cared for him.

The next
day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper
with the instruction, ‘Take care of him. If you spend more than
what I have given you, I shall repay you on my way back.’

‘Which of
these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?’

He answered,
‘The one who treated him with mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and
do likewise.’"

Note that Jesus
didn’t say that society or government should have provided him the
care he needed. Rather, he instructed the scholar to pay out of
his own pocket as the Good Samaritan had. It was an individualistic
charge, a personal burden for mercy and charity. In this story,
of course, the Rabbis and Levites may very well have been government
employees, as they had been at various times throughout Biblical
history.

The Bible and
long Catholic social experience is a story about individual moral
burdens and property rights, not social obligations and government
handouts, despite what a few Catholic bishops and liberal Protestant
ministers may say today. Christianity and Judaism are arguably the
most individualistic of all religions. The Bible devotes two of
the ten commandments to property rights issues, and many of the
other commandments deal with protecting what traditionalists would
call natural law, the inalienable rights of individuals. When it
comes to government and social burdens, Christianity and Judaism
warn that government can be a substitute for God himself. In 1
Samuel 8, the Israelites begged Samuel for a king, which God
granted with the warning that they would be burdened by high taxes
and their sons dying in foreign wars for their blasphemy for wanting
a king other than Yahweh.

I’m not a theologian,
so I can’t say for sure that God is a voluntarist and libertarian.
But He sure sounds like one to me.

February
3, 2010

Thomas R.
Eddlem [send
him mail] is a high school history teacher in
Southeastern Massachusetts and a freelance writer who contributes
to The New American,
Examiner.com,
AntiWar.com and — of
course — LewRockwell.com.

Thomas
R. Eddlem Archives

Federal Reserve Open Market Committee Chairman Ben Bernanke is pulling out all the stops to kill Congressman Ron Paul’s legislation to audit the Federal Reserve Bank, this time with a November 29 op-ed column in the Sunday Washington Post.

“I am concerned, however, that a number of the legislative proposals being circulated would significantly reduce the capacity of the Federal Reserve to perform its core functions,” Bernanke wrote, adding that "a House committee recently voted to repeal a 1978 provision that was intended to protect monetary policy from short-term political influence.”

Ron Paul’s legislation, H.R. 1207, recently passed the House Financial Services Committee, and a majority of the whole House (307 of 435) have cosponsored the overwhelmingly popular bill. The legislation would require the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to audit the Federal Reserve annually and disclose the results to the public. Bernanke opposes the audit while at the same time claiming that the Fed is adequately audited:

In its making of monetary policy, the Fed is highly transparent, providing detailed minutes of policy meetings and regular testimony before Congress, among other information. Our financial statements are public and audited by an outside accounting firm; we publish our balance sheet weekly; and we provide monthly reports with extensive information on all the temporary lending facilities developed during the crisis. Congress, through the Government Accountability Office, can and does audit all parts of our operations except for the monetary policy deliberations and actions covered by the 1978 exemption. The general repeal of that exemption would serve only to increase the perceived influence of Congress on monetary policy decisions, which would undermine the confidence the public and the markets have in the Fed to act in the long-term economic interest of the nation.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer who writes for The New American, AntiWar.com, Examiner.com, and — of course — LewRockell.com. And he’s never again going to write a wise-guy bio tag, because the last one mistakenly ended up in a book…. Well, he’s not going to write one of those for a while anyway.

Thomas R. Eddlem Archives

The Pew study
also noted that the increased skepticism crossed party lines (though
Republicans remain the most skeptical) and geographical location.
The Earth has not warmed over the past 10 years, and some
have reported slight global cooling over the same period.

Yet President Obama was on the stump at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology October 23, retailing the old line about the undeniable inevitability of global warming:

So we are seeing a convergence. The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized. But I think it’s important to understand that the closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we’ll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we’re engaged in. There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy — when it’s the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs. There are going to be those who cynically claim — make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.

Perhaps most importantly for leftists seeking dramatic government-mandated behavioral changes for Americans, many Americans who once viewed global warming as a serious problem no longer do so. Only 35 percent of Americans (down from 44 percent in April 2008) believe global warming is a “very serious” problem. Moreover, the data from the Pew study says that only 36 percent of Americans say global warming is being caused by human activity, while the rest do not believe there is solid evidence that global warming is occurring, attribute global warming to natural causes, or are unsure.

Read the rest of the article

Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer who writes for The New American, AntiWar.com, Examiner.com, and — of course — LewRockell.com. And he’s never again going to write a wise-guy bio tag, because the last one mistakenly ended up in a book…. Well, he’s not going to write one of those for a while anyway.

Thomas R. Eddlem Archives

President Obama: Okay. It’s a guy’s turn. Gentleman right there in the back, with the green.

Eddlem: Mr. President, I object to your government takeover of health care.

Obama: This is not some government takeover. If you like your doctor, you can keep seeing your doctor. This is important. I don’t want government bureaucrats meddling in your health care, but I also don’t want insurance company bureaucrats meddling in your health care either. That’s what reform is about.

Eddlem: But you’re saying is that the federal government would regulate private companies on the corporatist model, as designed by Benito Mussolini. Mussolini had the government run companies through regulations. What kind of regulations would you impose on insurance companies?

Obama: Insurance companies will be prohibited from denying coverage because of your medical history. A recent report found that in the past three years, more than 12 million Americans were discriminated against by insurance companies because of a preexisting condition. No one holds these companies accountable for these practices. But we will. And insurance companies will no longer be able to place an arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. Now, what we need to do is come up with a uniquely American way of providing care. So I’m not in favor of a Canadian system, I’m not in favor of a British system, I’m not in a favor of a French system.

Eddlem: But you are in also favor of what you call a "public option," a government program that would be socialist by definition.

Obama: So there’s been talk about this public option. This is where a lot of the idea of government takeover of health care comes from. All we want to do is set up a set of options so that if you don’t have health insurance or you’re underinsured you can have the same deal that members of Congress have, which is they can look at a menu of options — we’re calling it an exchange, but it’s basically just a menu of different health care plans — and you will be able to select the one that suits your family best.

Eddlem: But the plans for member of Congress are paid for by the taxpayer.

Obama: Now, I recognize, though, you make a legitimate — you raise a legitimate concern. People say, well, how can a private company compete against the government?…

Eddlem:… actually private companies shouldn’t have any trouble with that…

Obama: And my answer is that if the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining — meaning taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do — then I think private insurers should be able to compete. They do it all the time. I mean, if you think about — if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.

Eddlem: So why would you want to create another inefficient Post Office that isn’t needed?

Obama: Most other countries have some form of single-payer system. There are differences — Canada and England have more of what’s called — what people I guess would call a socialized system, in the sense that government owns the hospitals, directly hires doctors — but there are a whole bunch of countries like the Netherlands where what they do is, it’s a single-payer system only in the sense that government pays the bill, but it’s all private folks out there — private doctors, private facilities. So there are a bunch of different ways of doing it.

Eddlem: But are you saying the European socialized medicine programs are better than our private system?

Obama: Clearly we’ve got a system that isn’t as efficient as it should be because we’re not healthier than these people in these other countries. And I do think that having a public option as part of that would keep the insurance companies honest, because if they’ve got a public plan out there that they’ve got to compete against, as long as it’s not being subsidized by taxpayers, then that will give you some sense of what — sort of a good bargain for what basic health care would be.

Eddlem: So you think government offers a "bargain" and is more efficient compared to private medicine?

Obama: First of all, it is important to know that Medicare is a government program. So when you hear people saying, “I hate government programs, but keep your hands off my Medicare” — (laughter) — then there’s a little bit of a contradiction there.

Eddlem: I know it’s a government program, and even you have pointed out that it contains a lot of waste.

Obama: Example number one: Subsidies to insurance companies under Medicare amount to about $177 billion over 10 years. That’s how much we think we could save by eliminating subsidies to insurance companies that are offering what’s called Medicare Advantage. It doesn’t help seniors any more than regular Medicare does.

Eddlem: So we agree that Medicare is wasteful and should be replaced with a private and voluntary alternative?

Obama: Medicare is a terrific program and it gives our seniors security. And I want Medicare to be there for the next generation, not just for this generation. But if we don’t make some changes in how the delivery system works, if we don’t eliminate some of the waste and inefficiencies in the system, then seniors are really going to be vulnerable. So what we’ve proposed is not to reduce benefits — benefits on Medicare would stay the same — it’s not to ration. What we are asking is that we eliminate some of the practices that aren’t making people healthier.

Eddlem: Well, I’ve been forced to dump about $1,000 per year into Medicare for more than 25 years and have never received a penny in benefits. It doesn’t sound like such a spiffy a deal to me, especially with you talking about it going deep into the red within ten years. That’s long before this 43-year-old will qualify for "benefits." But you have boasted you can cut a lot of waste out of Medicare over-and-above that $177 billion in corporate subsidy to the insurance industry, right?

Obama: There’s about $500 billion to $600 billion over 10 years that can be saved without cutting benefits for people who are currently receiving Medicare, actually making the system more efficient over time.

Eddlem: So you’re saying you need to create a huge new government health care bureaucracy that you promise will be efficient, even though the health care program you’re currently running is insanely wasteful. But this huge new government health care program of yours will cost $1 trillion. How are you going to pay for it without bankrupting the country?

Obama: Paying for it is not simple. I don’t want to pretend that it is. By definition, if we’re helping people who currently don’t have health insurance, that’s going to cost some money. It’s been estimated to cost somewhere between, let’s say, $800 billion and a trillion dollars over 10 years. Now, it’s important that we’re talking about over 10 years because sometimes the number “trillion” gets thrown out there and everybody think it’s a trillion dollars a year — gosh, that — how are we going to do that? So it’s about a hundred billion dollars a year to cover everybody and to implement some of the insurance reforms that we’re talking about.

About two-thirds of those costs we can cover by eliminating the inefficiencies that I already mentioned. So I already talked about $177 billion worth of subsidies to the insurance companies. Let’s take that money, let’s put it in the kitty.

Eddlem: But Mr. President, you’ve already told the American people repeatedly that our government current health care expenditures are on a trajectory toward "breaking the federal budget." You’ve said we can’t afford the status quo. If you spend all the Medicare "savings," as you say you plan to, we won’t be any better off. So you’ve basically told us we don’t have a "kitty" to spend. Aren’t you really keeping us on that path to bankruptcy?

Obama: I just think I would rather be giving that money to the young lady here who doesn’t have health insurance and giving her some help, than giving it to insurance companies that are making record profits. Now, you may disagree. I just think that’s a good way to spend our money.

Eddlem: "Our money"? You must mean "other people’s money." But Mr. President, what about the option of not spending the money you’ve already said the government won’t have?

Obama: That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of money.

Eddlem: No, Mr. President. It’s a lot of money that doesn’t even exist. You said so yourself!

Obama: That’s over 10 years, though, all right? So that’s about $90 billion — $80 billion to $90 billion a year. About two-thirds of it — two-thirds — can be obtained by doing some of the things I already mentioned, like eliminating subsidies to insurance companies. So you’re right, that’s real money. And the Congressional Budget Office has agreed with that; this is not something I’m just making up; Republicans don’t dispute it.

Eddlem: No, Mr. President, that’s patently untrue. The Congressional Budget Office has analyzed all of the bills and said that none of them eliminate more than $219 in projected increased costs, less than a quarter of the total. The CBO analysis of the House bill (H.R. 3200) says that the bill would add $239 billion to the deficit over and above the status quo, even with a massive $583 billion tax increase. Ted Kennedy’s bill would add more than a trillion dollars directly to the deficit, according to the CBO. And as far as your remark about the Republicans "don’t dispute it," talking to Chuck Grassley and ignoring just about every other Republican in the country doesn’t count.

Obama: When I look at the federal budget and realize that if we don’t control costs on health care, there is no way for us to close the budget deficit — it will just keep on skyrocketing — when I look at those two things, I say we have to get it done.

Eddlem: But Mr. President, the CBO says your plan would add hundreds of billions to the deficit!

Obama: And my hope is we can do it in a bipartisan fashion, but the most important thing is getting it done for the American people.

Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer who writes for The New American, AntiWar.com, Examiner.com, and — of course — LewRockell.com. And he’s never again going to write a wise-guy bio tag, because the last one mistakenly ended up in a book…. Well, he’s not going to write one of those for a while anyway.

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Throughout the 2008 presidential primaries, Rep. Paul railed against the Federal Reserve Bank and the coming economic crash. And all the other GOP candidates seemed to look at him like he had just crawled out of the grassy knoll. So did most voters, except for a coterie of highly-motivated and mostly young primary voters he organized. Then economic reality happened, and the establishment GOP’s economic model crashed along with the party’s election hopes. Everything changed.

Ron Paul’s “rEVOLution” (revolution with “love” spelled backwards) has been the sole bright light among GOP organizing efforts since Obama’s election. In a party marred by the awkward resignation of Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin from the Alaska governorship and a variety of sexual scandals (David Vitter, John Ensign, Mark Sanford, etc), Ron Paul alone has unified the GOP around an overwhelmingly popular proposal: Auditing the Federal Reserve. His bill (H.R. 1207) has every Republican House member, a score of senators and — according to a July Rasmussen poll — three quarters of the American people backing it. He even has significant bipartisan support: More than a third of the Democrats in the House also cosponsor the bill, which is the reason why two-thirds of the entire Democrat-dominated House is currently cosponsoring the legislation.

On the health care debate, Rep. Paul seems the perfect candidate to give the GOP an authoritative spokesman to oppose Obama’s expensive health care agenda. Dr. Paul is a medical doctor, an obstetrician who has delivered more than 4,000 babies.

Meanwhile, the Ron Paul revolution appears to be flowering politically. Consider the following:

Web Organization: The Ron Paul “rEVOLution” movement created more than a dozen highly trafficked websites, including DailyPaul.com, LewRockwell.com, RonPaul.com, in addition to Dr. Paul’s official CampaignForLiberty.com. These websites have kept the revolutionaries active and on-task since the letdown of the election.

Tea Parties: From those websites and the election year Meetups emerged the nucleus of the “Tea Party” rallies that exploded nationwide this year. Although the “Tea Party” movement was a larger, organic uprising than simply the result of a single presidential candidacy, most of the original rallies were first organized by Ron Paul supporters. More importantly, precious few of the Tea Party attendees were actively identifying themselves with other national Republican leaders. Ron Paul revolutionaries have helped to keep the tea parties non-partisan, targeting not just Democrats, but also left-leaning Republicans like Iowa’s Senator Chuck Grassley, who has been working with Obama to extend federal controls over health care.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who loves the Constitution and contributes to LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

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Asked by This Week’s George Stephanopoulos about the Obama Administration’s terrible economic prognostications in advance of passage of the $787 billion “stimulus” spending bill back in February, Vice President Joe Biden regurgitated a familiar talking point:

Stephanopoulos: While we’ve been here, some pretty grim job numbers back at home — 9.5 percent unemployment in June, the worst numbers in 26 years. How do you explain that? Because when the president and you all were selling the stimulus package, you predicted at the beginning that, to get this package in place, unemployment will peak at about 8 percent. So, either you misread the economy, or the stimulus package is too slow and too small.

Biden: The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy.

Of course, if you eliminate the “and everyone else” from that sentence, he’s simply stating the painfully obvious. The only appropriate response to such a sentence is a sarcastic: DUHH!!!

The “and everyone else” part is the big, well-rehearsed lie. There were plenty of people who predicted a severe recession well in advance of Obama’s bad predictions. Representative Ron Paul predicted the housing bubble would result in a crash, writing in 2002 that “like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever.… Perhaps the Federal Reserve can stave off the day of reckoning by purchasing GSE debt and pumping liquidity into the housing market, but this cannot hold off the inevitable drop in the housing market forever. In fact, postponing the necessary but painful market corrections will only deepen the inevitable fall. The more people invested in the market, the greater the effects across the economy when the bubble bursts.”

Peter Schiff, the economic adviser for Rep. Paul’s presidential campaign, predicted the crash and the severity of the crash years in advance in a series of television interviews that today are compiled into a series of “Peter Schiff was right” videos on YouTube that have garnered millions of views. (Perhaps Biden is unfamiliar with YouTube?) Legendary investor Jim Rogers predicted in January 2008: “We are probably going to have one of the worst recessions we’ve had since the Second World War. It’s not a good scene.”

But under the Washington idea of “everyone,” people who follow the U.S. Constitution and understand the Austrian school of economics don’t count. The reality is that dozens of Austrian school economists (as well as a few from other economic schools) predicted the recession with astonishing precision, but according to the Washington view, only people who follow the erroneous philosophy of John Maynard Keynes count.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who loves the Constitution and contributes to LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

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$29 $21

The Federal Reserve caused the current economic crisis by suppressing interest rates and creating the housing bubble, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, Euro Pacific Capital president Peter Schiff, and others have charged. And now there’s finally been enough political push-back for the damage the Federal Reserve has wreaked that the Fed will be hiring a lobbyist.

The Federal Reserve’s choice of lobbyist is Johns Hopkins University Vice President Linda Robertson, who serves in a public relations role at the medical school. Robertson served as an aide on Capitol Hill in the House of Representatives. She served throughout the Clinton administration as a senior advisor to three treasury secretaries, and won the Treasury Department’s highest award, the Alexander Hamilton award. Her partisan service in the Clinton administration could be a sign that the Fed will tie its future to the Democratic Party, which is currently in charge of both legislative chambers of Congress and the White House.

Robertson has experience lobbying for another Ponzi scheme besides the Federal Reserve, but it is not something she’d likely want to boast about. Bloomberg.com reveals that she “headed the Washington lobbying office of Enron Corp., the energy trading company that collapsed in 2002 after an accounting scandal.” Not surprisingly, Robertson’s Johns Hopkins biography omits her lobbying efforts on behalf of Enron.

Could the Fed be anticipating an Enron-style collapse? The political tides seem to favor a political debacle for the Fed, and even some former Fed officials are realizing it. “Some members of Congress think there are votes in attacking the Fed” after it “unnecessarily and unwisely entangled monetary policy with fiscal policy,” former St. Louis Fed President William Poole told Bloomberg.com.

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Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who loves the Constitution and contributes to LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

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