Restoring Freedom in the United States: Dismantle the Welfare-Warfare State and Reform the Patriot Act

"Well, the truth is, there are simple answers, they just are not easy ones." ~ Ronald Reagan

 

Despite trillions spent on defense, terrorists on September 11, 2001, murdered 2,977 men, women, and children on US soil. The US military was only able to put two jets in the air to protect the entire Eastern seaboard and the two planes did not have live ammunition. Popular Mechanics, in a report debunking 911 myths, reports that on that day "there were only 14 fighter jets on alert in the contiguous 48 states" in a year when the military had a US$400 billion dollar budget and hundreds of military bases in 130 countries around the world. Frederick the Great's observation that “He who defends everything defends nothing.” was once again proven true. Major Heather Penney, of the first District of Columbia Air National Guard, was one of the first two warriors to take to the air on September 11, 2001, to defend the United States from a terrorist attack. In a 2011 interview on C-Span, she reflected on September 11 a decade later, observing:

I often wonder if we have forsaken some of what it means to be Americans ... to try to assure our citizens of security. There is no such thing as perfect security. ... Have we been overzealous? Has the pendulum swung too far? Such that we are abdicating our value set...?

What led this courageous pilot to such a dire reflection? A month after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed and George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act into law that expanded state power while undermining individual freedoms. Since then, the United States has been at a turning point, and the options are clear: continued arbitrary rule in a bankrupt police state or the restoration of accountability and limits. The first seems ominous, since history is littered with the wreckage of states, including democracies, that overextended themselves both domestically and internationally. If we are to address root problems in the policy realm and save the United States from "abdicating its value set", we will have to end the welfare-warfare state. Murray Rothbard, a US American economist, historian, and political theorist, noted back in 1973 that the emergence of the permanent welfare-warfare in the United States was first observable following World War II with the Cold War.

The underlying premise of the welfare-warfare state is that the radical expansion of the size and scope of the government and its intrusion on privacy can resolve challenges to security. This has been demonstrated to be flawed. Paul Cianca's shooting rampage at LAX airport and simultaneous terrorist bombings in totalitarian communist China in early November 2013 reveal once again that giving up freedoms does not translate into a guarantee of security. The welfare-warfare state did not protect American lives and property on 9/11 and a further expanding security and surveillance under the Patriot Act did not stop one lone gun man from successfully killing a TSA official and wounding at least one other or two young Muslim men on April 15, 2013 from bombing the Boston Marathon killing three and seriously wounding many more.

It did not have to be this way.

When the Cold War ended, Patrick Buchanan announced his candidacy for president in 1991, calling for a national discussion to, in effect, end the welfare-warfare state. Two decades later, and with the problem only ballooning, Buchanan summed up the policy he had wanted to see implemented at the time: "After the Cold War we should have downsized the empire dramatically and returned to become a more normal nation in a more normal time."

There are consequences to the path taken, and Buchanan has outlined the cost in treasure. At the same time the military footprint overseas while expensive and unsustainable also leads to more terrorists targeting the country. Buchanan offers an explanation of the terror attacks on the United States that the "mainstream" fails to make:

Evil though they may be, Islamic killers are over here because we are over there. They are not trying to kill us because they dislike our domestic politics, but because they detest our foreign policy. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. . . . As Osama bin Laden said, they want us to stop propping up the Saudi regime they hate, and to get off the sacred Saudi soil on which sit the holiest shrines of Islam. They want our troops out of Saudi Arabia – and if we don’t get out, they are coming over here to kill us any way they can.

Reforming the Patriot Act and making defending the lives, liberty and property of American citizens the main priority of American foreign policy not advancing the narrow interests of what President Eisenhower described in his farewell address as the military-industrial complex. There is still time to turn things around both restoring freedom and increasing security by dismantling the welfare-warfare state.

Why Beauty Matters: A documentary by Roger Scruton

The revolutionaries have trashed beauty in favor of the ugly and the perverse. Philosopher Roger Scruton in the documentary "Why Beauty Matters" does just that explain why the beautiful is important.

Please enjoy the video below and offer your comments.

Slouching Towards a US Government of Wolves over Sheep

 “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” ~Thomas Jefferson

 American rebels listed King George III’s “catalogue of crimes” on July 4, 1776, declaring the monarch a tyrant and independence from the British crown. Eleven years later those rebels drafted a Constitution that delegated the power to make war to the Congress, not the President. Although formally observed today, for all express purposes it is a dead letter.

This is the third in a series of reflections on where America is headed and what key errors have led to the decline of the republic. The first essay looked at two recent Supreme Court decisions that usurped long held American freedoms. The second studied the emergence of the surveillance state. This reflection delves into the concentration of arbitrary power in the office of the president of the United States.

Beginning with the Korean War, the courts and Congress ceded to the president the power to initiate wars by reinterpreting “the commander in chief” passage of the Constitution. After Vietnam, in 1973, Congress passed a War Powers Act, which sought to curve this. However, it still grants the president the power to introduce military forces anywhere for any reason for 90 days.

This is a far cry from Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution: “The Congress shall have power to declare War.” Members of Congress like Representative Peter King (R-NY) — who have sworn to uphold the Constitution — say the president doesn’t need Congressional authorization to wage war.

The record on civil liberties at home is no better.

When at war with the southern states, President Abraham Lincoln suspended basic civil liberties such as habeas corpus and, according to Ted Galen Carpenter, “detained confederate sympathizers without trials or used military tribunals to prosecute them . . . A year after the war, in Ex Parte Milligan the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the executive branch’s promiscuous use of military tribunals, ruling such procedures unconstitutional.”

During World War I President Woodrow Wilson imprisoned anti-war activists, suppressed free speech, and imposed racial segregation on federal employees. In World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt, in addition to rounding up Japanese Americans and placing them in internment camps for the duration of the war, also won a case that would be seized on decades later by the Bush Administration. Ted Galen Carpenter explains in the October 2013 issue of Chronicles:

The focus of the Bush administration’s argument was the claimed authority to detain “enemy combatants,” either aliens or U.S. citizens, without providing them access to U.S. civilian courts. . . . That view relied heavily on the 1942 Supreme Court decision Ex Parte Quirin. . . . The Bush Administration extended the Quirin reasoning to cover not just an active, specific terrorist mission (as in Quirin) [so] that U.S. citizens accused of involvement in terrorist schemes were not entitled to due process and other constitutional rights.

Candidate Barack Obama blasted the Bush Administration’s record on civil liberties, but President Obama asserts in a 2011 legal memo the right to target US citizens for execution, without any charges or due judicial process. This is something that no previous president has done.

The United States’ founders drafted a constitution to set up institutions that protected US American liberty and did not rely on good politicians to save the day. Judges and bureaucrats, by reinterpreting “the living Constitution,” have undermined institutional safeguards and centralized arbitrary power in the presidency to the extreme that President Obama now has kill lists which include US citizens listed.

The policies of the British government that American rebels considered despotic were acts of parliament, not arbitrary edicts by a monarch. King George III declared war on the American colonists, but only because that is what parliament wanted. Since 1688, parliament has held political power in the United Kingdom.

Thomas Jefferson, the American rebel who drafted the Declaration of Independence, observed that:

Societies exist under three forms sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under governments wherein the will of every one has a just influence, as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our states in a great one. 3. Under governments of force: as is the case in all other monarchies and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep.

Over the past 150 years, the courts and the Congress in the United States have concentrated power in the office of the president to an extreme that undermines the original intent of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence. The American Heritage Dictionary offers a definition of tyranny as “A government in which a single ruler is vested with absolute power.”

The president of the United States today sits in the Oval Office, reviewing kill lists and unilaterally ordering extrajudicial executions, including American citizens. Are these the actions of a government in a free society?

 Originally published in the PanAm Post

 

Obamacare and the Ghosts of Future Past

The future of healthcare in the United States can already be seen in the United Kingdom, and it is a cautionary tale. The Stafford Hospital scandal is a glimpse of the future in America and the recent past in Great Britain. Officials have called for its dissolution but the record of shame cannot be hidden. As many as 1,200 patients died, who shouldn't have, but no hospital officials held responsible for conditions that were inhumane.

This is what an independent government review found when it examined conditions at the hospital and reported in The Daily Telegraph on February 24, 2010:

An independent report commissioned by the Government found that patients were abused and neglected by hostile staff and were left in humiliating and undignified conditions. The impact on them was “unimaginable”, the report said.

Patients, most of whom were treated at the trust’s main hospital in Stafford, were “robbed of their dignity”, left in soiled bedclothes, unwashed and in states of undress in full view of others, it found.
Families of patients had to clean lavatories and public areas themselves, while food and drinks were left out of reach and, it was alleged, patients drank out of vases.
Attitudes of staff were at times “uncaring”. Managers were “in denial” about the problems and were concentrating on cutting costs and hitting targets to achieve foundation trust status, the report said.
There was said to be a culture of fear and bullying with staff concerned they would lose their jobs if targets were not hit.

Despite the public exposure the deaths continue and The Daily Mail on October 9, 2013 reports on how taxpayers are left holding the bag while those responsible are not held accountable:

A scandal-plagued hospital trust has today admitted breaching health and safety law after a  a patient died when nurses failed to notice she was severely diabetic and needed insulin.
The Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust has pleaded guilty to failing to ensure the safety of Gillian Astbury, yet no staff will face the consequences in the courts.
The 66-year-old lapsed into a fatal diabetic coma while being treated at Stafford Hospital in April 2007, when staff failed to read her medical history during a 10-day stay.
After her death the NHS trust was prosecuted as an organisation, meaning that individual nurses, doctors and managers will not face jail for their failings.
Today it has pleaded guilty through its barrister to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act by failing to properly manage and organise hospital services, including its systems for record-keeping, patient information and communication between staff members.
It now faces a huge fine, funded by the taxpayer, because magistrates sitting in Stafford committed the case to the town's Crown Court after ruling that their sentencing powers for the offence were insufficient.

This is the future that awaits all Americans beginning in 2014 as Obamacare is fully implemented, but has already been experienced by American veterans for some time who are receiving government healthcare through the Veterans Affairs Department. Thousands of veterans in the United States have been unnecessarily exposed to disease due to unclean practices in government hospitals.

The US Surveillance State and the Totalitarian Tipping Point

Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity. ~Wendell Phillips

 

In the 20th century, the United States reached levels of wealth for more people than had ever been seen in human history. However, those in power whittled away at the nation’s basic freedoms, slowly and over generations. Complaints were few because material prosperity endured.

Today, massive and unsustainable debts are maintaining the US standard of living. Freedom continues to be whittled away at, but more US Americans are awakening to this hard truth, because material prosperity for many is evaporating. One area that they view with growing alarm is the emergence of the United States of America as a surveillance state, since, along with a militarized police force, it is the infrastructure of totalitarianism.

This is the second in a series of reflections seeking to understand these negative trends in the United States. The first essay analyzed the role of the US Supreme Court — in particular, its decisions that undermined private property rights and forced taxpayers to cooperate with evil. I concluded with the controversial proposition that the present system in the United States is post-constitutional.

For generations, US Americans believed that the first, third, fourth, and ninth amendments found in the Bill of Rights protected the privacy of citizens of the United States — that only a small number engaged in criminal conduct would be subjected to surveillance, following a court order permitting such activity by the authorities.

However, the arrival of new technologies provided the state with the means to circumvent these constitutional provisions. In the state of Florida, for example, automated systems are replacing toll operators, and they either process your information via your Sun Pass or by photographing your license plate and sending you the bill. According to the pre-paid toll program privacy policy, “information concerning a SunPass account is provided only when required to comply with a subpoena or court order.”

In other words, they are compiling and storing information on your whereabouts.

Affirming this reality, the American Civil Liberties Union stated on July 18, 2013, that “Police around the United States are recording the license plates of passing drivers and storing the information for years with little privacy protection. The information potentially allows authorities to track the movements of everyone who drives a car.”

However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation makes clear that the federal and state governments are monitoring not only US Americans’ physical movement, but also their telephone and e-mail communications.

The government is mass collecting phone metadata of all US customers under the guise of the Patriot Act. Moreover, the media reports confirm that the government is collecting and analyzing the content of communications of foreigners talking to persons inside the United States, as well as collecting collecting [sic] much more, without a probable cause warrant. Finally, the media reports confirm the “upstream” collection off of the fiberoptic cables that Mr. Klein first revealed in 2006.

The Edward Snowden revelations expose a national government that is systematically monitoring and recording the communications of the entire US American people all of the time, and beyond. From the Wall Street Journal:

The National Security Agency — which possesses only limited legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens — has built a surveillance network that covers more Americans’ Internet communications than officials have publicly disclosed, current and former officials say. The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology . . .

What is equally disturbing is that private companies are complicit in the behavior — when not engaging in their own monitoring of internet communications — although, to be fair, their will is not always on the side of the spying. (See the video below.) Further, even though the immense and illegal surveillance apparatus is out in the open now, we see no remorse from the instigators and the elected officials responsible. Rather, they are doubling down, and their apologists are right there with them.

Unfortunately, there is no plan; there is no conspiracy. This expansion and centralization of power has continued under both Republicans and Democrats in the United States and would most likely continue under a third party. Centralized power has become an end unto itself, and as the late Czech president Vaclav Havel observed:

Once the claims of central power have been placed above law and morality, once the exercise of that power is divested of public control, and once the institutional guarantees of political plurality and civil rights have been made a mockery of, or simply abolished, there is no reason to respect any other limitations. The expansion of central power does not stop at the frontier between the public and the private, but instead, arbitrarily pushes back that border until it is shamelessly intervening in areas that once were private.

The United States is reaching a tipping point that leads into a totalitarian abyss and the crackdown on privacy whistleblowers is one of many ominous signs regarding where this centralization of power is heading.

Originally published in the PanAm Post.