Monday, November 30, 2015
The solution is pretty simple...
Blame the Refugee Crisis and Terrorism on Empire and Intervention
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Whenever statist polices produce crises, libertarians are inevitably asked what the libertarian position is to resolve the crises. Two recent examples involve the refugee crisis in Europe and the terrorist crisis in Paris. “How would you libertarians deal with these two crises?” people ask us.
Libertarianism, however, is not a philosophy that purports to fix the problems that arise from statism. Instead, it is simply a philosophy of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government. In other words, we libertarians tell people: If you want a society of freedom, prosperity, and harmony, here is what you need to achieve it.
Oftentimes, that just isn’t satisfactory to people. They want answers now to the crises that are staring them in the face. They want to know what libertarians propose to resolve the refugee crisis in Europe and the terrorist crisis in Paris.
Okay, here are some libertarian proposals for resolving these two crises.
1.At the end of the Cold War in 1989, dismantle the national-security establishment and end all U.S. interventionism around the world.
2.Don’t intervene in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, which will end up killing tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens.
3.Don’t bomb the water-and-sewage treatment plants in Iraq because that will only end up causing people to get sick and to die from infectious illnesses.
4.Don’t impose sanctions on Iraq, which will end up killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
5.Don’t station U.S. troops near Islamic holy lands.
6.Don’t impose no-fly zones over Iraq.
7.Terminate all foreign aid to Israel, Egypt, and all other Middle East regimes.
If the United States had adopted those libertarian positions, there never would have been a 9/11 crisis in the United States, which means that there wouldn’t have been invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which means there wouldn’t be an ISIS.
Keep in mind, after all, that when the terrorists struck on 9/11, they were retaliating against the United States for the death and destruction that the U.S. government had been wreaking on the Middle East since the end of the Cold War. That’s something that many people just don’t want to face. For them, confronting, questioning, and challenging the legitimacy of federal governmental policies, especially those of the Pentagon and the CIA, is akin to heresy. “You hate America,” they say whenever we libertarians question U.S. foreign policy, as if the national-security establishment and the country were one and the same thing.
Throughout the time that we libertarians were recommending those policies, the statists cried, “Don’t listen to those libertarians. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Empire and interventionism are the keys to America’s future. As the world’s sole remaining empire, we can remake the Middle East into a paradise of democracy and freedom. We’ll do our job. You just keep thanking the troops.”
Once it was clear that the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan had failed miserably in bringing a paradise of freedom, prosperity, and harmony, we libertarians made the following proposal:
Bring all the troops home, discharge them. End all foreign interventionism and foreign aid. Dismantle the Cold War-era national-security establishment.
Once again, however, the statists cried, “Don’t listen to those libertarians. Even though Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out to be disasters and horror stories, let’s not give up now. Otherwise, the troops will have died and killed in vain. And national honor and credibility are at stake. Let’s double down with interventions in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. And by all means, let’s continue providing armaments both to the Israeli government and to the military dictatorship in Egypt.”
The result? Mass chaos and crisis, just like in Iraq and Afghanistan — and just as we libertarians said would happen.
The most amazing part of all this is how people just will not permit themselves to confront the root cause of all this horror.
Look at any mainstream newspaper in the land. They devote several pages to the refugees who are fleeing the Middle East in a desperate attempt to save their lives and the lives of their families. They talk about the reaction to the refugee crisis, among both Europeans and Americans. The big question of the day, insofar as Americans are concerned, is whether to admit refugees from Syria, a country that is mired in crisis, in large part because of the U.S. government’s interventionist determination to effect regime change there.
But hardly anyone focuses on the root cause of these crises: The U.S. government, as well as the French government, both of which have been bombing Syria to smithereens for months, killing countless people in the process.
Many Americans are railing against the idea of admitting any Syrian refugees into the United States owing to the possibility that a terrorist might sneak into the country posing as a refugee. But not a peep of protest against the U.S. government for putting the refugees and well as the American people into this spot. There are no demands to stop bombing Syria, to stop assassinating people in Yemen, to stop supporting brutal dictators in the region. It’s as if such Americans just assume that the U.S. government has the “right” to kill people over there and that it’s the job of the citizenry to just keep thanking the troops for their service and for keeping us safe and secure by killing ever-increasing numbers of people over there.
The reaction among the French citizenry is no different. There is obviously tremendous anger and outrage against the Islamic State for killing innocent people. But what I find fascinating is that there is no anger or outrage against the French government for producing the conditions that motivated the terrorists to retaliate against the French citizenry. Like many Americans, the French seem to view their national government as a deity, one that can do no wrong. Just support the troops and don’t ask any uncomfortable questions regarding French foreign policy. Don’t ask what motivates people to be so filled with rage as to commit suicide in the hopes of killing large numbers of innocent people. Or, even worse, just blame it on their religion or their so-called hatred for America’s or France’s “freedom and values.”
Let’s not forget, after all, that this isn’t a chicken and egg problem. The French government, like the U.S. government, started the killing of people over there, which was followed by the retaliatory terrorist attacks on 9/11 here in the United States and recently in Paris. That point was made by Ron Paul seven years ago, when he quite correctly pointed out in that famous Republican presidential debate: They came over here to kill us because we (i.e., the U.S. government) went over there and killed them.
It is quite possible to be angry and outraged over both matters — to be angry and outraged over the terrorist attacks and also the government policies that then motivated people to engage in the terrorist attacks. But that has not been the mindset of most French people, just as it wasn’t the mindset of most Americans after 9/11. Instead, the standard mindset, which is nurtured and encouraged by the mainstream press, is: “We now have to retaliate for these terrorist attacks. We need to double the number of bombs we were dropping before the terrorists struck.”
But that’s precisely what the U.S. government did after the 9/11 attacks. It doubled down by doing more killing — much more killing in fact— than it was doing before the attacks. Wouldn’t you think that the French would at least ask U.S. officials: “How is that working out for you?” They would learn that ever since 9/11, the U.S. government has been the greatest terrorist producing machine in history. Every time they kill one person, five more join the opposing forces, ready to retaliate by killing innocent human beings with a suicide bomb.
When does it all stop? It all stops when people finally stop responding to the Siren song of the statists and begin listening to us libertarians.
Link:
http://fff.org/2015/11/30/blame-the-refugee-crisis-and-terrorism-on-empire-and-intervention/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Whenever statist polices produce crises, libertarians are inevitably asked what the libertarian position is to resolve the crises. Two recent examples involve the refugee crisis in Europe and the terrorist crisis in Paris. “How would you libertarians deal with these two crises?” people ask us.
Libertarianism, however, is not a philosophy that purports to fix the problems that arise from statism. Instead, it is simply a philosophy of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government. In other words, we libertarians tell people: If you want a society of freedom, prosperity, and harmony, here is what you need to achieve it.
Oftentimes, that just isn’t satisfactory to people. They want answers now to the crises that are staring them in the face. They want to know what libertarians propose to resolve the refugee crisis in Europe and the terrorist crisis in Paris.
Okay, here are some libertarian proposals for resolving these two crises.
1.At the end of the Cold War in 1989, dismantle the national-security establishment and end all U.S. interventionism around the world.
2.Don’t intervene in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, which will end up killing tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens.
3.Don’t bomb the water-and-sewage treatment plants in Iraq because that will only end up causing people to get sick and to die from infectious illnesses.
4.Don’t impose sanctions on Iraq, which will end up killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
5.Don’t station U.S. troops near Islamic holy lands.
6.Don’t impose no-fly zones over Iraq.
7.Terminate all foreign aid to Israel, Egypt, and all other Middle East regimes.
If the United States had adopted those libertarian positions, there never would have been a 9/11 crisis in the United States, which means that there wouldn’t have been invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which means there wouldn’t be an ISIS.
Keep in mind, after all, that when the terrorists struck on 9/11, they were retaliating against the United States for the death and destruction that the U.S. government had been wreaking on the Middle East since the end of the Cold War. That’s something that many people just don’t want to face. For them, confronting, questioning, and challenging the legitimacy of federal governmental policies, especially those of the Pentagon and the CIA, is akin to heresy. “You hate America,” they say whenever we libertarians question U.S. foreign policy, as if the national-security establishment and the country were one and the same thing.
Throughout the time that we libertarians were recommending those policies, the statists cried, “Don’t listen to those libertarians. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Empire and interventionism are the keys to America’s future. As the world’s sole remaining empire, we can remake the Middle East into a paradise of democracy and freedom. We’ll do our job. You just keep thanking the troops.”
Once it was clear that the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan had failed miserably in bringing a paradise of freedom, prosperity, and harmony, we libertarians made the following proposal:
Bring all the troops home, discharge them. End all foreign interventionism and foreign aid. Dismantle the Cold War-era national-security establishment.
Once again, however, the statists cried, “Don’t listen to those libertarians. Even though Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out to be disasters and horror stories, let’s not give up now. Otherwise, the troops will have died and killed in vain. And national honor and credibility are at stake. Let’s double down with interventions in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. And by all means, let’s continue providing armaments both to the Israeli government and to the military dictatorship in Egypt.”
The result? Mass chaos and crisis, just like in Iraq and Afghanistan — and just as we libertarians said would happen.
The most amazing part of all this is how people just will not permit themselves to confront the root cause of all this horror.
Look at any mainstream newspaper in the land. They devote several pages to the refugees who are fleeing the Middle East in a desperate attempt to save their lives and the lives of their families. They talk about the reaction to the refugee crisis, among both Europeans and Americans. The big question of the day, insofar as Americans are concerned, is whether to admit refugees from Syria, a country that is mired in crisis, in large part because of the U.S. government’s interventionist determination to effect regime change there.
But hardly anyone focuses on the root cause of these crises: The U.S. government, as well as the French government, both of which have been bombing Syria to smithereens for months, killing countless people in the process.
Many Americans are railing against the idea of admitting any Syrian refugees into the United States owing to the possibility that a terrorist might sneak into the country posing as a refugee. But not a peep of protest against the U.S. government for putting the refugees and well as the American people into this spot. There are no demands to stop bombing Syria, to stop assassinating people in Yemen, to stop supporting brutal dictators in the region. It’s as if such Americans just assume that the U.S. government has the “right” to kill people over there and that it’s the job of the citizenry to just keep thanking the troops for their service and for keeping us safe and secure by killing ever-increasing numbers of people over there.
The reaction among the French citizenry is no different. There is obviously tremendous anger and outrage against the Islamic State for killing innocent people. But what I find fascinating is that there is no anger or outrage against the French government for producing the conditions that motivated the terrorists to retaliate against the French citizenry. Like many Americans, the French seem to view their national government as a deity, one that can do no wrong. Just support the troops and don’t ask any uncomfortable questions regarding French foreign policy. Don’t ask what motivates people to be so filled with rage as to commit suicide in the hopes of killing large numbers of innocent people. Or, even worse, just blame it on their religion or their so-called hatred for America’s or France’s “freedom and values.”
Let’s not forget, after all, that this isn’t a chicken and egg problem. The French government, like the U.S. government, started the killing of people over there, which was followed by the retaliatory terrorist attacks on 9/11 here in the United States and recently in Paris. That point was made by Ron Paul seven years ago, when he quite correctly pointed out in that famous Republican presidential debate: They came over here to kill us because we (i.e., the U.S. government) went over there and killed them.
It is quite possible to be angry and outraged over both matters — to be angry and outraged over the terrorist attacks and also the government policies that then motivated people to engage in the terrorist attacks. But that has not been the mindset of most French people, just as it wasn’t the mindset of most Americans after 9/11. Instead, the standard mindset, which is nurtured and encouraged by the mainstream press, is: “We now have to retaliate for these terrorist attacks. We need to double the number of bombs we were dropping before the terrorists struck.”
But that’s precisely what the U.S. government did after the 9/11 attacks. It doubled down by doing more killing — much more killing in fact— than it was doing before the attacks. Wouldn’t you think that the French would at least ask U.S. officials: “How is that working out for you?” They would learn that ever since 9/11, the U.S. government has been the greatest terrorist producing machine in history. Every time they kill one person, five more join the opposing forces, ready to retaliate by killing innocent human beings with a suicide bomb.
When does it all stop? It all stops when people finally stop responding to the Siren song of the statists and begin listening to us libertarians.
Link:
http://fff.org/2015/11/30/blame-the-refugee-crisis-and-terrorism-on-empire-and-intervention/
"All over France, from Toulouse in the south to Paris and beyond, the police have been breaking down doors, conducting searches without warrants, aggressively questioning residents, hauling suspects to police stations and putting others under house arrest."
Enslaving People to Keep Them Safe from Government-Produced Enemies
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Take a look at this excerpt from a New York Times article from a couple of days ago:
All over France, from Toulouse in the south to Paris and beyond, the police have been breaking down doors, conducting searches without warrants, aggressively questioning residents, hauling suspects to police stations and putting others under house arrest.
The extraordinary steps are now perfectly legal under the state of emergency decreed by the government after the attacks on Nov. 13 in Paris that left 130 dead — a rare kind of mobilization that will continue. The French Parliament voted last week to extend the emergency for three more months, which means more warrantless searches, more interrogations, more people placed under house arrest.
Now read the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Guess who the American people were addressing when they enacted that amendment. They were addressing officials of the U.S. government. By enacting the amendment, our American ancestors were essentially telling federal officials: “Don’t even think about doing what European government have always done to their citizens. We are hereby making it clear that you lack the power to do that.”
Why did our American ancestors enact the Fourth Amendment? Because they knew that governments everywhere attract the same type of people — those who mean well as they smash down people’s doors with the aim of keeping people in society “safe and secure,” including from enemies that government policies produce. By enacting the amendment, our American ancestors were striving to protect American society from those types of people within the federal government.
Notice something important about how that amendment was constructed: There are no exceptions provided in it. That is, the amendment doesn’t say: “unless there is a war or a crisis, in which case the provisions of this amendment are suspended until the end of the war or the crisis.”
Why wasn’t that sort of exception included in the amendment? For a very simple reason: Because our American ancestors understood that it’s during wars and crises when these types of federal officials are going to be the most eager to keep people “safe” by bashing down their doors in search of “the enemy.” Our ancestors clearly understood that it is during wars, emergencies, and crises that people are in the greatest danger of losing their liberty at the hands of their own government officials.
And never forget: It’s the concept of liberty that motivated our American ancestors to enact the Fourth Amendment (and the Fifth, Sixth, Eight, and other amendments in the Bill of Rights). They understood that a free society is one in which government officials are absolutely prohibited from bashing down people’s doors without judicially issued warrants.
How did our American ancestors arrive at this understanding? Because they had experienced the phenomenon first hand by their own government officials — when they were citizens of Great Britain. They also knew that this sort of conduct had characterized European countries throughout history.
Look at these words by James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution:
The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
There are two critical points in Madison’s words: One, that European regimes have long enslaved their citizenry under the pretext of defending them from foreign dangers. Two, that European regimes oftentimes incite the very danger that is then used as the excuse for assuming “temporary” dictatorial powers to keep people “safe” from the dangers the government has produced. That certainly is what’s going on in France, where terrorists are retaliating for the French government’s interventionist bombing campaign in Syria.
It’s not only the French who engage in this sort of thing. What the French are doing is a mirror image of what German officials did with the Enabling Act after the terrorist attack on the Germany Reichstag in the 1930s.
Do you see now why our American ancestors were so leery about bringing the federal government into existence when the Constitution was being proposed to them? They were concerned that it would become a giant militarist monstrosity, one that would end up inciting dangers that it would then use as the excuse for suspending, “temporarily” of course, the rights and liberties of the American people.
Even when our ancestors accepted the deal and permitted the federal government to come into existence, albeit with extremely few, limited, enumerated powers, that still wasn’t good enough for them. They were obviously still extremely concerned. Some today would say that they were overly “paranoid.” They wanted to make certain that federal officials got the point, which is why they expressly prohibited them from depriving them of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other such rights and expressly prohibiting them from wielding the power to bashing down people’s doors without a warrant.
Consider all the foreign-policy woes that have afflicted America ever since the 1940s. They all have one common denominator: the national-security state or what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. If America had never adopted this totalitarian governmental structure, Americans today would not be besieged with ongoing crises of terrorism from the Middle East or anywhere else or be dangerously confronting the possibility of war with Russia. The fear of terrorism and Muslims that now holds so many Americans in its grip is directly rooted in the policies of invasion, occupation, coups, regime-changes, torture, partnerships with dictators, and assassination that the national-security establishment has brought to our country.
And don’t forget what Ike said about this totalitarian apparatus in his Farewell Address: That it is alien to American values, one that poses a grave risk to the liberties and democratic processes of the American people. The Founding Fathers knew what Ike was talking about, which is why they refused to permit enormous standing armies, secret intelligence agencies, and surveillance agencies to be part of America’s governmental structure.
Not surprisingly, the U.S. national-security establishment has used the threats that its own polices have produced to do the same thing that France and other European countries have done throughout history — suspend the rights and liberties of the citizenry in the name of keeping them “safe” from the enemies that the national-security establishment itself has produced. While it’s true that U.S. officials are not yet bashing down people’s doors in search of terrorists or communists, it’s also true that they now wield such totalitarian powers as military arrest of citizens and their indefinite military detention, torture, and assassination, all without due process of law and trial by jury.
The American people need to make a choice, the same choice that people throughout history have made: Do you want to live in a genuinely free society or not? If so, then that requires a rejection of the police-state system of France and a restoration of a limited, government constitutional republic to our land.
That means an institutional change, a change in the form of the federal government. It requires the dismantling, not the reform, of the national-security establishment that President Eisenhower observed was alien to our way of life and that threatened to enslave us in the name of protecting us from the enemies it produces.
That’s the way to achieve a free society. It’s also the way to achieve a peaceful, prosperous, harmonious, and safe society.
Link:
http://fff.org/2015/11/25/enslaving-people-to-keep-them-safe-from-government-produced-enemies/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Take a look at this excerpt from a New York Times article from a couple of days ago:
All over France, from Toulouse in the south to Paris and beyond, the police have been breaking down doors, conducting searches without warrants, aggressively questioning residents, hauling suspects to police stations and putting others under house arrest.
The extraordinary steps are now perfectly legal under the state of emergency decreed by the government after the attacks on Nov. 13 in Paris that left 130 dead — a rare kind of mobilization that will continue. The French Parliament voted last week to extend the emergency for three more months, which means more warrantless searches, more interrogations, more people placed under house arrest.
Now read the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Guess who the American people were addressing when they enacted that amendment. They were addressing officials of the U.S. government. By enacting the amendment, our American ancestors were essentially telling federal officials: “Don’t even think about doing what European government have always done to their citizens. We are hereby making it clear that you lack the power to do that.”
Why did our American ancestors enact the Fourth Amendment? Because they knew that governments everywhere attract the same type of people — those who mean well as they smash down people’s doors with the aim of keeping people in society “safe and secure,” including from enemies that government policies produce. By enacting the amendment, our American ancestors were striving to protect American society from those types of people within the federal government.
Notice something important about how that amendment was constructed: There are no exceptions provided in it. That is, the amendment doesn’t say: “unless there is a war or a crisis, in which case the provisions of this amendment are suspended until the end of the war or the crisis.”
Why wasn’t that sort of exception included in the amendment? For a very simple reason: Because our American ancestors understood that it’s during wars and crises when these types of federal officials are going to be the most eager to keep people “safe” by bashing down their doors in search of “the enemy.” Our ancestors clearly understood that it is during wars, emergencies, and crises that people are in the greatest danger of losing their liberty at the hands of their own government officials.
And never forget: It’s the concept of liberty that motivated our American ancestors to enact the Fourth Amendment (and the Fifth, Sixth, Eight, and other amendments in the Bill of Rights). They understood that a free society is one in which government officials are absolutely prohibited from bashing down people’s doors without judicially issued warrants.
How did our American ancestors arrive at this understanding? Because they had experienced the phenomenon first hand by their own government officials — when they were citizens of Great Britain. They also knew that this sort of conduct had characterized European countries throughout history.
Look at these words by James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution:
The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
There are two critical points in Madison’s words: One, that European regimes have long enslaved their citizenry under the pretext of defending them from foreign dangers. Two, that European regimes oftentimes incite the very danger that is then used as the excuse for assuming “temporary” dictatorial powers to keep people “safe” from the dangers the government has produced. That certainly is what’s going on in France, where terrorists are retaliating for the French government’s interventionist bombing campaign in Syria.
It’s not only the French who engage in this sort of thing. What the French are doing is a mirror image of what German officials did with the Enabling Act after the terrorist attack on the Germany Reichstag in the 1930s.
Do you see now why our American ancestors were so leery about bringing the federal government into existence when the Constitution was being proposed to them? They were concerned that it would become a giant militarist monstrosity, one that would end up inciting dangers that it would then use as the excuse for suspending, “temporarily” of course, the rights and liberties of the American people.
Even when our ancestors accepted the deal and permitted the federal government to come into existence, albeit with extremely few, limited, enumerated powers, that still wasn’t good enough for them. They were obviously still extremely concerned. Some today would say that they were overly “paranoid.” They wanted to make certain that federal officials got the point, which is why they expressly prohibited them from depriving them of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other such rights and expressly prohibiting them from wielding the power to bashing down people’s doors without a warrant.
Consider all the foreign-policy woes that have afflicted America ever since the 1940s. They all have one common denominator: the national-security state or what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. If America had never adopted this totalitarian governmental structure, Americans today would not be besieged with ongoing crises of terrorism from the Middle East or anywhere else or be dangerously confronting the possibility of war with Russia. The fear of terrorism and Muslims that now holds so many Americans in its grip is directly rooted in the policies of invasion, occupation, coups, regime-changes, torture, partnerships with dictators, and assassination that the national-security establishment has brought to our country.
And don’t forget what Ike said about this totalitarian apparatus in his Farewell Address: That it is alien to American values, one that poses a grave risk to the liberties and democratic processes of the American people. The Founding Fathers knew what Ike was talking about, which is why they refused to permit enormous standing armies, secret intelligence agencies, and surveillance agencies to be part of America’s governmental structure.
Not surprisingly, the U.S. national-security establishment has used the threats that its own polices have produced to do the same thing that France and other European countries have done throughout history — suspend the rights and liberties of the citizenry in the name of keeping them “safe” from the enemies that the national-security establishment itself has produced. While it’s true that U.S. officials are not yet bashing down people’s doors in search of terrorists or communists, it’s also true that they now wield such totalitarian powers as military arrest of citizens and their indefinite military detention, torture, and assassination, all without due process of law and trial by jury.
The American people need to make a choice, the same choice that people throughout history have made: Do you want to live in a genuinely free society or not? If so, then that requires a rejection of the police-state system of France and a restoration of a limited, government constitutional republic to our land.
That means an institutional change, a change in the form of the federal government. It requires the dismantling, not the reform, of the national-security establishment that President Eisenhower observed was alien to our way of life and that threatened to enslave us in the name of protecting us from the enemies it produces.
That’s the way to achieve a free society. It’s also the way to achieve a peaceful, prosperous, harmonious, and safe society.
Link:
http://fff.org/2015/11/25/enslaving-people-to-keep-them-safe-from-government-produced-enemies/
"If you trust government officials and politicians to set a minimum wage for unskilled workers, you should logically trust those same bureaucrats and politicians to set all prices, wages, and interest rates in the economy. Inevitable result: Soviet-style central planning, command-and-control, and economic chaos like in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela."
Ten reasons that market-determined wages are better than government-mandated minimum wages
Carpe Diem
Based on a minimum wage debate I participated in recently at Northwood University, here are ten reasons that I support market-determined wages over government-mandated minimum wages.
1. Government-mandated minimum wages are always arbitrary and almost never based on any sound economic/cost-benefit analysis. Why $10.10 an hour (Obama said “ten-ten is easy to remember”) and not $9.10 or $11.10 an hour? Why $15 an hour and not $14 or $16 an hour or $25 an hour? In contrast, market-determined wages reflect supply and demand conditions that are specific to local market conditions and vary widely by geographic region and by industry.
2. A uniform federal minimum wage may be sub-optimal for many states, and uniform state minimum wages may be sub-optimal for many cities. A one-size-fits-all approach to a single, uniform federal minimum wage is really a “one-size-fits-none approach.”
3. Minimum wage laws require costly taxpayer-funded monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, whereas market wages don’t require enforcement.
4. Minimum wage laws discriminate against unskilled workers in favor of skilled workers, and the greatest amount of discrimination takes place against minority groups, like blacks. Milton Friedman called the minimum wage the most anti-black law in America.
5. Adjustments to total compensation following minimum wage hikes will disadvantage workers in the form of reduced hours, reduced fringe benefits, and reduced on-the-job training, and a lower quality work environment.
6. Many unskilled workers will be face reduced employment opportunities because of minimum wage laws and will be denied valuable on-the-job training, and the opportunity of acquire experience and skills.
7. Minimum wage laws prevent mutually advantageous, voluntary labor agreements to take place at whatever wage is mutually agreeable, which sometimes could be as low as $0.00 an hour for an unpaid internship that provided valuable on-the-job training and work experience.
8. To the extent that higher minimum wages result in lower profits or higher prices for firms that employ workers at the minimum wage, that’s a form of legal plunder by unskilled workers from employers and/or consumers which I find objectionable.
9. Market wages are efficient and market-clearing, whereas government mandated wages are inefficient and create distortions in the labor markets that prevent market-clearing and lead to surpluses.
10. If you trust government officials and politicians to set a minimum wage for unskilled workers, you should logically trust those same bureaucrats and politicians to set all prices, wages, and interest rates in the economy. Inevitable result: Soviet-style central planning, command-and-control, and economic chaos like in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. If you agree that economy-wide central planning and price controls would be undesirable, then I think you should also agree that the minimum wage law, as an arbitrary, artificial, government-mandated price control is undesirable. There are better ways to help unskilled workers than a distortionary government price control.
Link:
http://www.aei.org/publication/ten-reasons-that-market-determined-wages-are-better-than-government-mandate-minimum-wages/
Carpe Diem
Based on a minimum wage debate I participated in recently at Northwood University, here are ten reasons that I support market-determined wages over government-mandated minimum wages.
1. Government-mandated minimum wages are always arbitrary and almost never based on any sound economic/cost-benefit analysis. Why $10.10 an hour (Obama said “ten-ten is easy to remember”) and not $9.10 or $11.10 an hour? Why $15 an hour and not $14 or $16 an hour or $25 an hour? In contrast, market-determined wages reflect supply and demand conditions that are specific to local market conditions and vary widely by geographic region and by industry.
2. A uniform federal minimum wage may be sub-optimal for many states, and uniform state minimum wages may be sub-optimal for many cities. A one-size-fits-all approach to a single, uniform federal minimum wage is really a “one-size-fits-none approach.”
3. Minimum wage laws require costly taxpayer-funded monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, whereas market wages don’t require enforcement.
4. Minimum wage laws discriminate against unskilled workers in favor of skilled workers, and the greatest amount of discrimination takes place against minority groups, like blacks. Milton Friedman called the minimum wage the most anti-black law in America.
5. Adjustments to total compensation following minimum wage hikes will disadvantage workers in the form of reduced hours, reduced fringe benefits, and reduced on-the-job training, and a lower quality work environment.
6. Many unskilled workers will be face reduced employment opportunities because of minimum wage laws and will be denied valuable on-the-job training, and the opportunity of acquire experience and skills.
7. Minimum wage laws prevent mutually advantageous, voluntary labor agreements to take place at whatever wage is mutually agreeable, which sometimes could be as low as $0.00 an hour for an unpaid internship that provided valuable on-the-job training and work experience.
8. To the extent that higher minimum wages result in lower profits or higher prices for firms that employ workers at the minimum wage, that’s a form of legal plunder by unskilled workers from employers and/or consumers which I find objectionable.
9. Market wages are efficient and market-clearing, whereas government mandated wages are inefficient and create distortions in the labor markets that prevent market-clearing and lead to surpluses.
10. If you trust government officials and politicians to set a minimum wage for unskilled workers, you should logically trust those same bureaucrats and politicians to set all prices, wages, and interest rates in the economy. Inevitable result: Soviet-style central planning, command-and-control, and economic chaos like in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. If you agree that economy-wide central planning and price controls would be undesirable, then I think you should also agree that the minimum wage law, as an arbitrary, artificial, government-mandated price control is undesirable. There are better ways to help unskilled workers than a distortionary government price control.
Link:
http://www.aei.org/publication/ten-reasons-that-market-determined-wages-are-better-than-government-mandate-minimum-wages/
"We are closer to World War III than we have been in decades, and yet most Americans are still completely and totally oblivious to what is taking place."
The Bizarre Explanation For Why The U.S. Has Avoided Bombing ISIS Oil Wells
By Michael Snyder
Why hasn’t the U.S. bombed the oil wells that ISIS controls into oblivion by now? Would you believe that it is because the Obama administration “didn’t want to do environmental damage”? Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell has publicly admitted that we have purposely avoided damaging the main source of income for ISIS, and his explanation for why we were doing this is utterly bizarre. But at this point what could the Obama administration say that would actually make sense? Everyone now knows that ISIS has been making hundreds of millions of dollars selling oil in Turkey, and that this has been done with the full knowledge and complicity of the Obama White House. This is potentially the biggest scandal of the entire Obama presidency, and yet so far the Republicans have not jumped on it.
If you or I even gave five bucks to ISIS, we would be arrested and hauled off to Guantanamo Bay. And yet Barack Obama is allowing ISIS to funnel massive quantities of oil through our NATO ally Turkey, and he is not doing anything to stop this from happening. It is a betrayal of the American people that is so vast that it is hard to put into words.
By now, virtually everyone on the entire planet knows exactly what is going on. For example, Iraq’s former National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie shared the following on his Facebook page on Saturday…
“First and foremost, the Turks help the militants sell stolen Iraqi and Syrian oil for $20 a barrel, which is half the market price.”
Until Russia started bombing the living daylights out of them, an endless parade of trucks carrying ISIS oil would go back and forth over the Turkish border completely unmolested. Following the downing of a Russian SU-24 bomber by Turkey in an area where many of these trucks travel, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to publicly air this dirty laundry. Just check out what he told reporters following a meeting with French President Francois Hollande last week…
Commercial-scale oil smuggling from Islamic State controlled territory into Turkey must be stopped, Putin said after meeting Hollande in Moscow.
“Vehicles, carrying oil, lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon,” said Putin, reminding the press that the scale of the issue was discussed at the G20 summit in Antalya earlier this month, where the Russian leader demonstrated reconnaissance footage taken by Russian pilots.
The views resemble a “living oil pipe” stretched from ISIS and rebel controlled areas of Syria into Turkey, the Russian President stressed. “Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there – empty.”
“We are talking about a commercial-scale supply of oil from the occupied Syrian territories seized by terrorists. It is from these areas [that oil comes from], and not with any others. And we can see it from the air, where these vehicles are going,” Putin said.
If the Russians could see all of this, the U.S. military could see it too. In fact, we have far better surveillance capabilities than the Russians do.
So why didn’t Obama put an end to this?
Well, as I mentioned above, former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell told PBS that the Obama administration didn’t want “to create environmental damage”, and he insists that the oil wells are “infrastructure that’s going to be necessary to support the people when ISIS isn’t there anymore”. The following comes from the Daily Caller…
Appearing on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” on Tuesday, Rose pointed out that before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the U.S. had not bombed ISIS-controlled oil tankers.
Morell explained, “Prior to Paris, there seemed to be a judgment that … look, we don’t want to destroy these oil tankers because that’s infrastructure that’s going to be necessary to support the people when ISIS isn’t there anymore, and it’s going to create environmental damage. And we didn’t go after oil wells — actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls because we didn’t want to do environmental damage and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure, right.”
In case you think that this is some sort of a joke, you can watch video of Morell making these comments on PBS below…
After the horrific terror attacks in Paris, the Obama administration finally was shamed into bombing a few of these oil trucks. But 45 minutes before the U.S. military bombed them, they dropped leaflets telling the truck drivers to “get out of your trucks now and run away from them”.
What kind of “war on terror” are we running?
Why in the world would we want to warn the terrorists to get away from their trucks?
Meanwhile, things between Russia and Turkey continue to get even more tense. The Russians have slapped severe economic sanctions on the Turks, they have shut down all channels of communication with Turkey’s military, and they are bombing every Turkish vehicle that they can find inside Syria. The following comes from a report that was put out by Debka…
In the last two days, Putin has been found saying one thing and doing another: Although he declared that Russia would not go to war with Turkey for “stabbing it in the back”, debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report that since Wednesday night, Nov. 25, Russian heavy bombers and warplanes have been hitting every Turkish vehicle moving or stationary inside Syria.
They bombed the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, located on the Turkey-Syria frontier, as well trailers and tractors parked in an area belonging to the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, on the Syrian side of the border.
As I wrote about the other day, it has been documented that our NATO ally Turkey has been “training ISIS militants, funneling weapons to them, buying their oil, and tending to their wounded in Turkish hospitals”. Now, heavy bombing by the Russians threatens to cut off those links…
In addition to punishing the Turkish leader, Russia’s massive military operations in Syria aim to degrade the rebel groups fighting the Assad regime. Heavy bombing sorties this week on the Syrian-Turkish border are cutting off tens of thousands of rebels from their only source of fresh supplies of weapons, ammo, food and fighters, leaving them without a line of retreat and nowhere to send their wounded.
At this point, Russia and Turkey are very close to a state of war.
But as a member of NATO, the United States is obligated to help protect Turkey if a full-blown shooting war does break out.
We are closer to World War III than we have been in decades, and yet most Americans are still completely and totally oblivious to what is taking place.
Hopefully cooler heads will prevail, because things over in the Middle East threaten to spiral completely and totally out of control.
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-bizarre-explanation-for-why-the-u-s-has-avoided-bombing-isis-oil-wells
By Michael Snyder
Why hasn’t the U.S. bombed the oil wells that ISIS controls into oblivion by now? Would you believe that it is because the Obama administration “didn’t want to do environmental damage”? Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell has publicly admitted that we have purposely avoided damaging the main source of income for ISIS, and his explanation for why we were doing this is utterly bizarre. But at this point what could the Obama administration say that would actually make sense? Everyone now knows that ISIS has been making hundreds of millions of dollars selling oil in Turkey, and that this has been done with the full knowledge and complicity of the Obama White House. This is potentially the biggest scandal of the entire Obama presidency, and yet so far the Republicans have not jumped on it.
If you or I even gave five bucks to ISIS, we would be arrested and hauled off to Guantanamo Bay. And yet Barack Obama is allowing ISIS to funnel massive quantities of oil through our NATO ally Turkey, and he is not doing anything to stop this from happening. It is a betrayal of the American people that is so vast that it is hard to put into words.
By now, virtually everyone on the entire planet knows exactly what is going on. For example, Iraq’s former National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie shared the following on his Facebook page on Saturday…
“First and foremost, the Turks help the militants sell stolen Iraqi and Syrian oil for $20 a barrel, which is half the market price.”
Until Russia started bombing the living daylights out of them, an endless parade of trucks carrying ISIS oil would go back and forth over the Turkish border completely unmolested. Following the downing of a Russian SU-24 bomber by Turkey in an area where many of these trucks travel, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to publicly air this dirty laundry. Just check out what he told reporters following a meeting with French President Francois Hollande last week…
Commercial-scale oil smuggling from Islamic State controlled territory into Turkey must be stopped, Putin said after meeting Hollande in Moscow.
“Vehicles, carrying oil, lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon,” said Putin, reminding the press that the scale of the issue was discussed at the G20 summit in Antalya earlier this month, where the Russian leader demonstrated reconnaissance footage taken by Russian pilots.
The views resemble a “living oil pipe” stretched from ISIS and rebel controlled areas of Syria into Turkey, the Russian President stressed. “Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there – empty.”
“We are talking about a commercial-scale supply of oil from the occupied Syrian territories seized by terrorists. It is from these areas [that oil comes from], and not with any others. And we can see it from the air, where these vehicles are going,” Putin said.
If the Russians could see all of this, the U.S. military could see it too. In fact, we have far better surveillance capabilities than the Russians do.
So why didn’t Obama put an end to this?
Well, as I mentioned above, former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell told PBS that the Obama administration didn’t want “to create environmental damage”, and he insists that the oil wells are “infrastructure that’s going to be necessary to support the people when ISIS isn’t there anymore”. The following comes from the Daily Caller…
Appearing on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” on Tuesday, Rose pointed out that before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the U.S. had not bombed ISIS-controlled oil tankers.
Morell explained, “Prior to Paris, there seemed to be a judgment that … look, we don’t want to destroy these oil tankers because that’s infrastructure that’s going to be necessary to support the people when ISIS isn’t there anymore, and it’s going to create environmental damage. And we didn’t go after oil wells — actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls because we didn’t want to do environmental damage and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure, right.”
In case you think that this is some sort of a joke, you can watch video of Morell making these comments on PBS below…
After the horrific terror attacks in Paris, the Obama administration finally was shamed into bombing a few of these oil trucks. But 45 minutes before the U.S. military bombed them, they dropped leaflets telling the truck drivers to “get out of your trucks now and run away from them”.
What kind of “war on terror” are we running?
Why in the world would we want to warn the terrorists to get away from their trucks?
Meanwhile, things between Russia and Turkey continue to get even more tense. The Russians have slapped severe economic sanctions on the Turks, they have shut down all channels of communication with Turkey’s military, and they are bombing every Turkish vehicle that they can find inside Syria. The following comes from a report that was put out by Debka…
In the last two days, Putin has been found saying one thing and doing another: Although he declared that Russia would not go to war with Turkey for “stabbing it in the back”, debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report that since Wednesday night, Nov. 25, Russian heavy bombers and warplanes have been hitting every Turkish vehicle moving or stationary inside Syria.
They bombed the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, located on the Turkey-Syria frontier, as well trailers and tractors parked in an area belonging to the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, on the Syrian side of the border.
As I wrote about the other day, it has been documented that our NATO ally Turkey has been “training ISIS militants, funneling weapons to them, buying their oil, and tending to their wounded in Turkish hospitals”. Now, heavy bombing by the Russians threatens to cut off those links…
In addition to punishing the Turkish leader, Russia’s massive military operations in Syria aim to degrade the rebel groups fighting the Assad regime. Heavy bombing sorties this week on the Syrian-Turkish border are cutting off tens of thousands of rebels from their only source of fresh supplies of weapons, ammo, food and fighters, leaving them without a line of retreat and nowhere to send their wounded.
At this point, Russia and Turkey are very close to a state of war.
But as a member of NATO, the United States is obligated to help protect Turkey if a full-blown shooting war does break out.
We are closer to World War III than we have been in decades, and yet most Americans are still completely and totally oblivious to what is taking place.
Hopefully cooler heads will prevail, because things over in the Middle East threaten to spiral completely and totally out of control.
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-bizarre-explanation-for-why-the-u-s-has-avoided-bombing-isis-oil-wells
"Terrorism is increasing worldwide because of US and western interventionism. That does not mean that if we suddenly followed a policy of non-interventionism the world would become a peaceful utopia. But does anyone really believe that continuing to do what increases terrorism will lead to a decrease in terrorism?"
The War on Terror is Creating More Terror
Ron Paul
The interventionists will do anything to prevent Americans from seeing that their foreign policies are perpetuating terrorism and inspiring others to seek to harm us. The neocons know that when it is understood that blowback is real – that people seek to attack us not because we are good and free but because we bomb and occupy their countries – their stranglehold over foreign policy will begin to slip.
That is why each time there is an event like the killings in Paris earlier this month, they rush to the television stations to terrify Americans into agreeing to even more bombing, more occupation, more surveillance at home, and more curtailment of our civil liberties. They tell us we have to do it in order to fight terrorism, but their policies actually increase terrorism.
If that sounds harsh, consider the recently-released 2015 Global Terrorism Index report. The report shows that deaths from terrorism have increased dramatically over the last 15 years – a period coinciding with the “war on terrorism” that was supposed to end terrorism.
According to the latest report:
Terrorist activity increased by 80 per cent in 2014 to its highest recorded level. …The number of people who have died from terrorist activity has increased nine-fold since the year 2000.
The world’s two most deadly terrorist organizations, ISIS and Boko Haram, have achieved their prominence as a direct consequence of US interventions.
Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn was asked last week whether in light of the rise of ISIS he regrets the invasion of Iraq. He replied, “absolutely. …The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq.” He added, “instead of asking why they attacked us, we asked where they came from.”
Flynn is no non-interventionist. But he does make the connection between the US invasion of Iraq and the creation of ISIS and other terrorist organizations, and he at least urges us to consider why they seek to attack us.
Likewise, the rise of Boko Haram in Africa is a direct result of a US intervention. Before the US-led “regime change” in Libya, they just were a poorly-armed gang. Once Gaddafi was overthrown by the US and its NATO allies, leaving the country in chaos, they helped themselves to all the advanced weaponry they could get their hands on. Instead of just a few rifles they found themselves armed with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns with anti-aircraft visors, advanced explosives, and vehicle-mounted light anti-aircraft artillery. Then they started killing on a massive scale. Now, according to the Global Terrorism Index, Boko Haram has overtaken ISIS as the world’s most deadly terrorist organization.
The interventionists are desperate to draw attention from the fact that their policies contribute to terrorism. After the Paris attacks, neocons like former CIA director James Woolsey actually pinned the blame on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden! He claimed that because of Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance the terrorists were using sophisticated encryption. He even called for Snowden to be hanged because of it. But it was untrue: the Paris attackers did not use encryption, and other groups had used encryption long before the Snowden revelations.
Terrorism is increasing worldwide because of US and western interventionism. That does not mean that if we suddenly followed a policy of non-interventionism the world would become a peaceful utopia. But does anyone really believe that continuing to do what increases terrorism will lead to a decrease in terrorism?
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-war-on-terror-is-creating-more-terror.html
Ron Paul
The interventionists will do anything to prevent Americans from seeing that their foreign policies are perpetuating terrorism and inspiring others to seek to harm us. The neocons know that when it is understood that blowback is real – that people seek to attack us not because we are good and free but because we bomb and occupy their countries – their stranglehold over foreign policy will begin to slip.
That is why each time there is an event like the killings in Paris earlier this month, they rush to the television stations to terrify Americans into agreeing to even more bombing, more occupation, more surveillance at home, and more curtailment of our civil liberties. They tell us we have to do it in order to fight terrorism, but their policies actually increase terrorism.
If that sounds harsh, consider the recently-released 2015 Global Terrorism Index report. The report shows that deaths from terrorism have increased dramatically over the last 15 years – a period coinciding with the “war on terrorism” that was supposed to end terrorism.
According to the latest report:
Terrorist activity increased by 80 per cent in 2014 to its highest recorded level. …The number of people who have died from terrorist activity has increased nine-fold since the year 2000.
The world’s two most deadly terrorist organizations, ISIS and Boko Haram, have achieved their prominence as a direct consequence of US interventions.
Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn was asked last week whether in light of the rise of ISIS he regrets the invasion of Iraq. He replied, “absolutely. …The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq.” He added, “instead of asking why they attacked us, we asked where they came from.”
Flynn is no non-interventionist. But he does make the connection between the US invasion of Iraq and the creation of ISIS and other terrorist organizations, and he at least urges us to consider why they seek to attack us.
Likewise, the rise of Boko Haram in Africa is a direct result of a US intervention. Before the US-led “regime change” in Libya, they just were a poorly-armed gang. Once Gaddafi was overthrown by the US and its NATO allies, leaving the country in chaos, they helped themselves to all the advanced weaponry they could get their hands on. Instead of just a few rifles they found themselves armed with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns with anti-aircraft visors, advanced explosives, and vehicle-mounted light anti-aircraft artillery. Then they started killing on a massive scale. Now, according to the Global Terrorism Index, Boko Haram has overtaken ISIS as the world’s most deadly terrorist organization.
The interventionists are desperate to draw attention from the fact that their policies contribute to terrorism. After the Paris attacks, neocons like former CIA director James Woolsey actually pinned the blame on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden! He claimed that because of Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance the terrorists were using sophisticated encryption. He even called for Snowden to be hanged because of it. But it was untrue: the Paris attackers did not use encryption, and other groups had used encryption long before the Snowden revelations.
Terrorism is increasing worldwide because of US and western interventionism. That does not mean that if we suddenly followed a policy of non-interventionism the world would become a peaceful utopia. But does anyone really believe that continuing to do what increases terrorism will lead to a decrease in terrorism?
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-war-on-terror-is-creating-more-terror.html
Some things you haven't been told by the mainstream media...
Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting: Five astonishing things the mainstream media isn't reporting (that everyone should know)
by Mike Adams
In the aftermath of the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting, the mainstream media is -- predictably -- functioning as nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Obama administration. In addition to twisting the reporting on the story in an attempt to blame all gun owners for the actions of one lunatic, the media is deliberately censoring critical parts of this story in order to mislead the public.
I've just posted a podcast at HealthRangerReport.com that reveals the FIVE astonishing things the mainstream media isn't reporting about this shooting in Colorado Springs.
Listen to my full podcast below...
Some things you haven't been told by the mainstream media
• Did you know that the shooter self-identified as a female in his voter registration?
• Did you know this shooter was NOT active in any pro-life activities?
• Were you aware that Planned Parenthood commits violence every day against nearly-born children by killing them during "partial birth abortions" to harvest their organs? (Do you know which other country is famous for harvesting human organs for resale? It's Communist China...)
• Did you know that most firearms owners support local law enforcement and don't "hate" cops or wish to shoot them?
• Did you know that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than killed in a mass shooting in America?
• Were you aware that "gun control" really means a gun monopoly in the hands of the government while disarming law-abiding citizens?
• Did you know there have already been 2,700 shootings this year in Chicago, one of the most tightly gun-controlled cities in America?
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/052134_Planned_Parenthood_shooting_Colorado_Springs_gun_control.html#ixzz3syVpGU3m
by Mike Adams
In the aftermath of the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting, the mainstream media is -- predictably -- functioning as nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Obama administration. In addition to twisting the reporting on the story in an attempt to blame all gun owners for the actions of one lunatic, the media is deliberately censoring critical parts of this story in order to mislead the public.
I've just posted a podcast at HealthRangerReport.com that reveals the FIVE astonishing things the mainstream media isn't reporting about this shooting in Colorado Springs.
Listen to my full podcast below...
Some things you haven't been told by the mainstream media
• Did you know that the shooter self-identified as a female in his voter registration?
• Did you know this shooter was NOT active in any pro-life activities?
• Were you aware that Planned Parenthood commits violence every day against nearly-born children by killing them during "partial birth abortions" to harvest their organs? (Do you know which other country is famous for harvesting human organs for resale? It's Communist China...)
• Did you know that most firearms owners support local law enforcement and don't "hate" cops or wish to shoot them?
• Did you know that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than killed in a mass shooting in America?
• Were you aware that "gun control" really means a gun monopoly in the hands of the government while disarming law-abiding citizens?
• Did you know there have already been 2,700 shootings this year in Chicago, one of the most tightly gun-controlled cities in America?
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/052134_Planned_Parenthood_shooting_Colorado_Springs_gun_control.html#ixzz3syVpGU3m
"The first cause of government is and can only be suppression of our human nature and loss of our identity as human beings and individuals."
The (im)morality of government
by Bob Livingston
When we are born into a system, we have no imperative to inquire. We automatically and unconsciously assume that things that are, have always been. The system is prescribed.
We accept it and it becomes a part of us. We do not feel animosity or hostility toward authority that we are born under. We are all born into “conventional wisdom.” Every bit of information we get from the very beginning of our existence “sells” us on authority. This goes on through “public education” and throughout life. The only acceptable social and moral thing to do is to accept authority, conform to authority and above all, never question authority, let alone its morality and its modus operandi.
The more generations that pass without open conflict with authority, the more the public mind conforms and the more the people and the government become one. Any “deviant” who questions authority is sure to encounter a hostile response from his friends and neighbors. He has defiled the holy place.
Men by nature are followers. Therefore, when authority appears, they follow. When absolute authority emerges, the people follow without question, even to the point of self-sacrifice. Millions of people will give their own lives and those of their sons and daughters in war and never question or consider what they are doing. The mystique of government authority holds in its hands life and death — ours.
In the course of understanding our relationship to government, we at some point have to drop the facade of political idealism. We have to reduce our mental processes to a consideration of first cause.
Whatever the stated cause of government, it degenerates into a colossal parasite that is immoral, illegal, fraudulent and deceptive. By nature and by definition, government under any name is oppressive. In time, we come to understand that it cannot be otherwise.
Government has to extract its substance from the workers and producers of wealth. The compelling authority of government is not legal or moral. It is organized force and intimidation. Government force is derived from sophisticated mind-altering techniques that cause the people to “volunteer” the transfer of their wealth and assets to the government. Government force is a deceptive and esoteric system of getting people to act upon fictions that they cannot understand. Failure to do so carries civil and criminal penalties.
For example, “dollars” and “income” are fictions. Yet we swear under penalty of perjury every year on IRS 1040 “income” tax forms that we received “dollars” as “income.” Our involvement in these fictions can mean nothing but entanglement and loss of human liberty.
The first cause of government is and can only be suppression of our human nature and loss of our identity as human beings and individuals. Hence, government authority and propaganda seeks to fade the individual into group consciousness. Altruistic philosophy and self-denial are the government propaganda used in this process. The fiction of egalitarianism was first expressed in the French Revolution as liberty, equality and fraternity. This also was the beginning of crowd manipulation.
The more the individual is diminished into crowd consciousness, the easier to develop the psyche of self-sacrifice to the state. Self-sacrifice means a willingness to die in foreign wars or a willingness to transfer your labor and wealth to the government under the fiction of the income tax, Social Security tax or inheritance tax. All governments use this psychological phenomenon. Example of the propaganda: “Are you paying your fair share?”
Governments must destroy the identity of the individual and subvert him to the mass conscience and control by the state.
Governments can only be expressed as organized force that consistently strives to control productive people, their lives and their property. The public mind and the political will of the people are created by government propaganda to perpetuate itself and its hidden agenda.
Governments use economic, social, moral and legal fictions to twist rational thought into self-sacrifice and the destruction of individualism. Men, by nature, do not willingly volunteer their property, their labor and their being into servitude. But they are manipulated by an esoteric system based upon word manipulation.
Without anyone taking notice, change agents distort key words in our language. This blunts, diminishes and distorts our thinking process to the great advantage of unseen authority. This process is so gradual as to be imperceptible. Out of it evolves very sophisticated control and plunder. When our words are manipulated, our thoughts are manipulated into false realities and illusions. Consequently, our competitiveness and survival instincts are reduced in favor of dependence on government authority. We have seen in one generation the masculine feminized and the feminine masculinized into a system called transgenderization, in which a person’s “sex” becomes whatever he/she believes it to be at the moment. Transgender was neither a word nor a concept a generation ago.
Governments are made up of corporate fictions or artificial persons. Therefore, the greatest enemy of government is the individual, and particularly the individualist. This sets up perpetual conflict and an ongoing effort of government to manipulate the individual against his best interest in favor of government and central authority. The ultimate goal of governments is to create nonpersons who are nothing more than chattels or merchandise “for use in commerce.”
The individual feels oppressed and confused because he is dealing with government doublespeak that he cannot confront. He imagines that he understands government but has to deal with many complicated fictions as he strives to conform to “the law.”
Human liberty can exist or be restored only with an accurate perception of reality. Mind-distorting fictions of government must be exposed. To do otherwise is to keep us dependent on an ivory tower mysticism based on lies and the duplicity of politicians and bureaucrats.
Government is a parasite cult, organized and disguised behind a peculiar language of code words and phrases. It uses its esoteric money creation system, wrapped in fictions and legalese, to affect the most massive transfer of wealth in the history of the world from the producers to itself (the nonproducer). This massive transfer system was best described by Merrill Jenkins, the original monetary realist, who revealed the fraud of the monetary system in several books and lectures.
In the years since I started to research and write about this massive fraud, I have still not come across anyone who describes how this happened and how it affects you better than Merrill Jenkins. We are both monetary realists, and while I write books and have published a monthly newsletter since 1969, he enlightened on the fraud of the monetary system in a series of wonderfully revealing lectures. I have made them available to you here. But aside from those who have read what we have been revealing, not one in 10 million today even suspects what is happening.
Nothing significant in our lives can or will happen unless and until we challenge our mental processes to investigate the morality and philosophy of government.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/the-immorality-of-government/
by Bob Livingston
When we are born into a system, we have no imperative to inquire. We automatically and unconsciously assume that things that are, have always been. The system is prescribed.
We accept it and it becomes a part of us. We do not feel animosity or hostility toward authority that we are born under. We are all born into “conventional wisdom.” Every bit of information we get from the very beginning of our existence “sells” us on authority. This goes on through “public education” and throughout life. The only acceptable social and moral thing to do is to accept authority, conform to authority and above all, never question authority, let alone its morality and its modus operandi.
The more generations that pass without open conflict with authority, the more the public mind conforms and the more the people and the government become one. Any “deviant” who questions authority is sure to encounter a hostile response from his friends and neighbors. He has defiled the holy place.
Men by nature are followers. Therefore, when authority appears, they follow. When absolute authority emerges, the people follow without question, even to the point of self-sacrifice. Millions of people will give their own lives and those of their sons and daughters in war and never question or consider what they are doing. The mystique of government authority holds in its hands life and death — ours.
In the course of understanding our relationship to government, we at some point have to drop the facade of political idealism. We have to reduce our mental processes to a consideration of first cause.
Whatever the stated cause of government, it degenerates into a colossal parasite that is immoral, illegal, fraudulent and deceptive. By nature and by definition, government under any name is oppressive. In time, we come to understand that it cannot be otherwise.
Government has to extract its substance from the workers and producers of wealth. The compelling authority of government is not legal or moral. It is organized force and intimidation. Government force is derived from sophisticated mind-altering techniques that cause the people to “volunteer” the transfer of their wealth and assets to the government. Government force is a deceptive and esoteric system of getting people to act upon fictions that they cannot understand. Failure to do so carries civil and criminal penalties.
For example, “dollars” and “income” are fictions. Yet we swear under penalty of perjury every year on IRS 1040 “income” tax forms that we received “dollars” as “income.” Our involvement in these fictions can mean nothing but entanglement and loss of human liberty.
The first cause of government is and can only be suppression of our human nature and loss of our identity as human beings and individuals. Hence, government authority and propaganda seeks to fade the individual into group consciousness. Altruistic philosophy and self-denial are the government propaganda used in this process. The fiction of egalitarianism was first expressed in the French Revolution as liberty, equality and fraternity. This also was the beginning of crowd manipulation.
The more the individual is diminished into crowd consciousness, the easier to develop the psyche of self-sacrifice to the state. Self-sacrifice means a willingness to die in foreign wars or a willingness to transfer your labor and wealth to the government under the fiction of the income tax, Social Security tax or inheritance tax. All governments use this psychological phenomenon. Example of the propaganda: “Are you paying your fair share?”
Governments must destroy the identity of the individual and subvert him to the mass conscience and control by the state.
Governments can only be expressed as organized force that consistently strives to control productive people, their lives and their property. The public mind and the political will of the people are created by government propaganda to perpetuate itself and its hidden agenda.
Governments use economic, social, moral and legal fictions to twist rational thought into self-sacrifice and the destruction of individualism. Men, by nature, do not willingly volunteer their property, their labor and their being into servitude. But they are manipulated by an esoteric system based upon word manipulation.
Without anyone taking notice, change agents distort key words in our language. This blunts, diminishes and distorts our thinking process to the great advantage of unseen authority. This process is so gradual as to be imperceptible. Out of it evolves very sophisticated control and plunder. When our words are manipulated, our thoughts are manipulated into false realities and illusions. Consequently, our competitiveness and survival instincts are reduced in favor of dependence on government authority. We have seen in one generation the masculine feminized and the feminine masculinized into a system called transgenderization, in which a person’s “sex” becomes whatever he/she believes it to be at the moment. Transgender was neither a word nor a concept a generation ago.
Governments are made up of corporate fictions or artificial persons. Therefore, the greatest enemy of government is the individual, and particularly the individualist. This sets up perpetual conflict and an ongoing effort of government to manipulate the individual against his best interest in favor of government and central authority. The ultimate goal of governments is to create nonpersons who are nothing more than chattels or merchandise “for use in commerce.”
The individual feels oppressed and confused because he is dealing with government doublespeak that he cannot confront. He imagines that he understands government but has to deal with many complicated fictions as he strives to conform to “the law.”
Human liberty can exist or be restored only with an accurate perception of reality. Mind-distorting fictions of government must be exposed. To do otherwise is to keep us dependent on an ivory tower mysticism based on lies and the duplicity of politicians and bureaucrats.
Government is a parasite cult, organized and disguised behind a peculiar language of code words and phrases. It uses its esoteric money creation system, wrapped in fictions and legalese, to affect the most massive transfer of wealth in the history of the world from the producers to itself (the nonproducer). This massive transfer system was best described by Merrill Jenkins, the original monetary realist, who revealed the fraud of the monetary system in several books and lectures.
In the years since I started to research and write about this massive fraud, I have still not come across anyone who describes how this happened and how it affects you better than Merrill Jenkins. We are both monetary realists, and while I write books and have published a monthly newsletter since 1969, he enlightened on the fraud of the monetary system in a series of wonderfully revealing lectures. I have made them available to you here. But aside from those who have read what we have been revealing, not one in 10 million today even suspects what is happening.
Nothing significant in our lives can or will happen unless and until we challenge our mental processes to investigate the morality and philosophy of government.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/the-immorality-of-government/
"Things are beginning to come together as to what the U.S. is and has been up to in Syria..."
ISIS Oil Company: A CIA-Owned Subsidiary?
By Jack Perry
I guess the world is heading into the basement to find dad’s old 45 record of “Eve of Destruction” right about now. But the eastern world exploding is courtesy of the red, white, and blue, to paraphrase a more recent song. Get a load of SecState Kerry over here! Hey, John. John! The time to urge calm was BEFORE a Russian plane got shot down. As in, weeks ago when Turkey first threatened doing that.
Russia has already retaliated with some economic sanctions against Turkey, demonstrating that NATO isn’t the only kid on the block that can build a treehouse and hang a sign outside that says, “No other kidz allowed!” It would appear Turkey will need some new markets for Turkish delight candies. But the long-range SAMs that Russia just parked over there can do more than ensure Turkish exports plummet in price. Gee, I bet there will be some good prices to be had on Turkish goods in another couple of months. If the world lasts that long, depending on the breaks.
Look, by now it should be no mystery at all that the United States has been backing terrorists in Syria and it’s only a matter of time before hard evidence becomes public. Why else would Turkey be so hot and bothered to knock off Russian aircraft bombing Syrian terrorists along the border? After all, would you want terrorists crossing over the border and using your country as a safe haven? Unless it already IS a safe haven, and always has been. Which is why, as you’ll recall, Turkey was the place the U.S. government was training those so-called “Syrian moderates”. As I said previously, were this not the case, a NATO nation like Turkey would have been ordered by the United States to escort Russian planes away. Even if they had to do it fifteen times a day, the procedure is to scramble fighters and escort the Russian planes away. It always has been. Until now.
Lots of people are now remembering that during the Cold War, politicians who were relatively sane lay awake nights whenever Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces moved closer to the border of NATO territory. Because it was only a hop, skip, and a border clash away from World War Three. Let’s not forget the U.S. itself almost started World War Three during the Able Archer exercise in Western Europe. The Soviets misread that as a first strike prep and before it was over, Soviet Bear bombers were spooling up on the tarmac. People are now starting to remember that, gosh, wasn’t this how we thought the end of the world was going to start? And wasn’t that EXACTLY WHY Soviet planes were NOT to be shot down, but escorted away?!
Things are beginning to come together as to what the U.S. is and has been up to in Syria. For whatever reason, the U.S. cannot let Syria go. Seriously folks, if this was a romantic relationship, we would have moved on by now, even if “moving on” meant going down to the courthouse to obtain a restraining order. It is beyond an obsession, so there has to be some money here. Putin basically said this, pointing out that oil tanker convoys going into Turkey from Syrian ISIS forces look like a line of ants going after a molten lollipop on the sidewalk. Now, color me crazy (and many do), but I think the ISIS Oil Company is a shell corporation headed up by the CIA. They can’t? The CIA already has a venture capital firm. Look up “In-Q-Tel” to see for yourself.
There must be tons of untraceable cash changing hands over there. I think in the beginning, it started as a covert op to topple Assad. But now, there’s a lot of oil being had at bargain prices—or traded outright for weapons in some cases. Hey, if you can trade a $50 AK for $500 worth of oil, there’s a lot that can be risked or overlooked. See, I just can’t buy that this is all about Assad. I mean, All About Assad would be the name of a great romantic comedy, but as foreign policy? I don’t think so. I smell a scam. Since we are talking about the United States government, it’s hard not to smell a scam. There has to be some tangible reason they’re willing to risk a tussle with the Russkies—and using Turkey to protect ISIS and al-Qaida assets from Russian airstrikes.
Who knows who’s involved, how deep it goes, and what the “official” end game is? But what if the “end game” is what we see already in play? The desire to garner this oil at pennies on the dollar and all that money goes into pockets with no oversight whatsoever? History is loaded with examples of that having happened before. And the CIA does have some experience in these types of things. In fact, their rap sheet on that looks like Webster’s dictionary, plus all of the encyclopedias.
I think it’s more than the fact the U.S. government is insane. We can blame political inbreeding for that. But bring some money into this that cannot be traced and is “off-the-books”, there’s a lot they’ll risk. Hey, they won’t have to fight that war. That’s what they’ve got YOUR kids for.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/11/jack-perry/isis-oil/
By Jack Perry
I guess the world is heading into the basement to find dad’s old 45 record of “Eve of Destruction” right about now. But the eastern world exploding is courtesy of the red, white, and blue, to paraphrase a more recent song. Get a load of SecState Kerry over here! Hey, John. John! The time to urge calm was BEFORE a Russian plane got shot down. As in, weeks ago when Turkey first threatened doing that.
Russia has already retaliated with some economic sanctions against Turkey, demonstrating that NATO isn’t the only kid on the block that can build a treehouse and hang a sign outside that says, “No other kidz allowed!” It would appear Turkey will need some new markets for Turkish delight candies. But the long-range SAMs that Russia just parked over there can do more than ensure Turkish exports plummet in price. Gee, I bet there will be some good prices to be had on Turkish goods in another couple of months. If the world lasts that long, depending on the breaks.
Look, by now it should be no mystery at all that the United States has been backing terrorists in Syria and it’s only a matter of time before hard evidence becomes public. Why else would Turkey be so hot and bothered to knock off Russian aircraft bombing Syrian terrorists along the border? After all, would you want terrorists crossing over the border and using your country as a safe haven? Unless it already IS a safe haven, and always has been. Which is why, as you’ll recall, Turkey was the place the U.S. government was training those so-called “Syrian moderates”. As I said previously, were this not the case, a NATO nation like Turkey would have been ordered by the United States to escort Russian planes away. Even if they had to do it fifteen times a day, the procedure is to scramble fighters and escort the Russian planes away. It always has been. Until now.
Lots of people are now remembering that during the Cold War, politicians who were relatively sane lay awake nights whenever Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces moved closer to the border of NATO territory. Because it was only a hop, skip, and a border clash away from World War Three. Let’s not forget the U.S. itself almost started World War Three during the Able Archer exercise in Western Europe. The Soviets misread that as a first strike prep and before it was over, Soviet Bear bombers were spooling up on the tarmac. People are now starting to remember that, gosh, wasn’t this how we thought the end of the world was going to start? And wasn’t that EXACTLY WHY Soviet planes were NOT to be shot down, but escorted away?!
Things are beginning to come together as to what the U.S. is and has been up to in Syria. For whatever reason, the U.S. cannot let Syria go. Seriously folks, if this was a romantic relationship, we would have moved on by now, even if “moving on” meant going down to the courthouse to obtain a restraining order. It is beyond an obsession, so there has to be some money here. Putin basically said this, pointing out that oil tanker convoys going into Turkey from Syrian ISIS forces look like a line of ants going after a molten lollipop on the sidewalk. Now, color me crazy (and many do), but I think the ISIS Oil Company is a shell corporation headed up by the CIA. They can’t? The CIA already has a venture capital firm. Look up “In-Q-Tel” to see for yourself.
There must be tons of untraceable cash changing hands over there. I think in the beginning, it started as a covert op to topple Assad. But now, there’s a lot of oil being had at bargain prices—or traded outright for weapons in some cases. Hey, if you can trade a $50 AK for $500 worth of oil, there’s a lot that can be risked or overlooked. See, I just can’t buy that this is all about Assad. I mean, All About Assad would be the name of a great romantic comedy, but as foreign policy? I don’t think so. I smell a scam. Since we are talking about the United States government, it’s hard not to smell a scam. There has to be some tangible reason they’re willing to risk a tussle with the Russkies—and using Turkey to protect ISIS and al-Qaida assets from Russian airstrikes.
Who knows who’s involved, how deep it goes, and what the “official” end game is? But what if the “end game” is what we see already in play? The desire to garner this oil at pennies on the dollar and all that money goes into pockets with no oversight whatsoever? History is loaded with examples of that having happened before. And the CIA does have some experience in these types of things. In fact, their rap sheet on that looks like Webster’s dictionary, plus all of the encyclopedias.
I think it’s more than the fact the U.S. government is insane. We can blame political inbreeding for that. But bring some money into this that cannot be traced and is “off-the-books”, there’s a lot they’ll risk. Hey, they won’t have to fight that war. That’s what they’ve got YOUR kids for.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/11/jack-perry/isis-oil/
Friday, November 27, 2015
“We have serious doubts this was an unintended incident and believe this is a planned provocation”...
Meet The Man Who Funds ISIS: Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkey's President
By Tyler Durden
Russia’s Sergey Lavrov is not one foreign minister known to mince his words. Just earlier today, 24 hours after a Russian plane was brought down by the country whose president three years ago said “a short-term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack”, had this to say: “We have serious doubts this was an unintended incident and believe this is a planned provocation” by Turkey.
But even that was tame compared to what Lavrov said to his Turkish counterparty Mevlut Cavusoglu earlier today during a phone call between the two (Lavrov who was supposed to travel to Turkey has since canceled such plans).
As Sputnik transcribes, according to a press release from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lavrov pointed out that, “by shooting down a Russian plane on a counter-terrorist mission of the Russian Aerospace Force in Syria, and one that did not violate Turkey’s airspace, the Turkish government has in effect sided with ISIS.”
It was in this context when Lavrov added that “Turkey’s actions appear premeditated, planned, and undertaken with a specific objective.”
More importantly, Lavrov pointed to Turkey’s role in the propping up the terror network through the oil trade. Per the Russian statement:
“The Russian Minister reminded his counterpart about Turkey’s involvement in the ISIS’ illegal trade in oil, which is transported via the area where the Russian plane was shot down, and about the terrorist infrastructure, arms and munitions depots and control centers that are also located there.”
Others reaffirmed Lavrov’s stance, such as retired French General Dominique Trinquand, who said that “Turkey is either not fighting ISIL at all or very little, and does not interfere with different types of smuggling that takes place on its border, be it oil, phosphate, cotton or people,” he said.
The reason we find this line of questioning fascinating is that just last week in the aftermath of the French terror attack but long before the Turkish downing of the Russian jet, we wrote about “The Most Important Question About ISIS That Nobody Is Asking” in which we asked who is the one “breaching every known law of funding terrorism when buying ISIS crude, almost certainly with the tacit approval by various “western alliance” governments, and why is it that these governments have allowed said middleman to continue funding ISIS for as long as it has?”
Precisely one week later, in even more tragic circumstances, suddenly everyone is asking this question.
And while we patiently dig to find who the on and offshore “commodity trading” middleman are, who cart away ISIS oil to European and other international markets in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars, one name keeps popping up as the primary culprit of regional demand for the Islamic State’s “terrorist oil” – that of Turkish president Recep Erdogan’s son: Bilal Erdogan.
His very brief bio:
Necmettin Bilal Erdogan, commonly known as Bilal Erdogan (born 23 April 1980) is the third child of Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, the current President of Turkey.
After graduating from Kartal Imam Hatip High School in 1999, Bilal Erdogan moved to the US for undergraduate education. He also earned a Masters Degree in John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2004. After graduation, he served in the World Bank as intern for a while. He returned Turkey in 2006 and started to his business life. Bilal Erdogan is one of the three equal shareholders of “BMZ Group Denizcilik “, a marine transportation corporation.
Here is a recent picture of Bilal, shown in a photo from a Turkish 2014 article, which “asked why his ships are now in Syria”...
Read the rest here:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/11/tyler-durden/funds-isis-us-turkey-france-israel/
By Tyler Durden
Russia’s Sergey Lavrov is not one foreign minister known to mince his words. Just earlier today, 24 hours after a Russian plane was brought down by the country whose president three years ago said “a short-term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack”, had this to say: “We have serious doubts this was an unintended incident and believe this is a planned provocation” by Turkey.
But even that was tame compared to what Lavrov said to his Turkish counterparty Mevlut Cavusoglu earlier today during a phone call between the two (Lavrov who was supposed to travel to Turkey has since canceled such plans).
As Sputnik transcribes, according to a press release from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lavrov pointed out that, “by shooting down a Russian plane on a counter-terrorist mission of the Russian Aerospace Force in Syria, and one that did not violate Turkey’s airspace, the Turkish government has in effect sided with ISIS.”
It was in this context when Lavrov added that “Turkey’s actions appear premeditated, planned, and undertaken with a specific objective.”
More importantly, Lavrov pointed to Turkey’s role in the propping up the terror network through the oil trade. Per the Russian statement:
“The Russian Minister reminded his counterpart about Turkey’s involvement in the ISIS’ illegal trade in oil, which is transported via the area where the Russian plane was shot down, and about the terrorist infrastructure, arms and munitions depots and control centers that are also located there.”
Others reaffirmed Lavrov’s stance, such as retired French General Dominique Trinquand, who said that “Turkey is either not fighting ISIL at all or very little, and does not interfere with different types of smuggling that takes place on its border, be it oil, phosphate, cotton or people,” he said.
The reason we find this line of questioning fascinating is that just last week in the aftermath of the French terror attack but long before the Turkish downing of the Russian jet, we wrote about “The Most Important Question About ISIS That Nobody Is Asking” in which we asked who is the one “breaching every known law of funding terrorism when buying ISIS crude, almost certainly with the tacit approval by various “western alliance” governments, and why is it that these governments have allowed said middleman to continue funding ISIS for as long as it has?”
Precisely one week later, in even more tragic circumstances, suddenly everyone is asking this question.
And while we patiently dig to find who the on and offshore “commodity trading” middleman are, who cart away ISIS oil to European and other international markets in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars, one name keeps popping up as the primary culprit of regional demand for the Islamic State’s “terrorist oil” – that of Turkish president Recep Erdogan’s son: Bilal Erdogan.
His very brief bio:
Necmettin Bilal Erdogan, commonly known as Bilal Erdogan (born 23 April 1980) is the third child of Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, the current President of Turkey.
After graduating from Kartal Imam Hatip High School in 1999, Bilal Erdogan moved to the US for undergraduate education. He also earned a Masters Degree in John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2004. After graduation, he served in the World Bank as intern for a while. He returned Turkey in 2006 and started to his business life. Bilal Erdogan is one of the three equal shareholders of “BMZ Group Denizcilik “, a marine transportation corporation.
Here is a recent picture of Bilal, shown in a photo from a Turkish 2014 article, which “asked why his ships are now in Syria”...
Read the rest here:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/11/tyler-durden/funds-isis-us-turkey-france-israel/
"Has anyone thought this through?"
Stumbling to War With Russia?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian warplane was a provocative and portentous act.
That Sukhoi Su-24, which the Turks say intruded into their air space, crashed and burned — in Syria. One of the Russian pilots was executed while parachuting to safety. A Russian rescue helicopter was destroyed by rebels using a U.S. TOW missile. A Russian marine was killed.
“A stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists,” said Vladimir Putin of the first downing of a Russian warplane by a NATO nation in half a century. Putin has a point, as the Russians are bombing rebels in northwest Syria, some of which are linked to al-Qaida.
As it is impossible to believe Turkish F-16 pilots would fire missiles at a Russian plane without authorization from President Tayyip Recep Erdogan, we must ask: Why did the Turkish autocrat do it?
Why is he risking a clash with Russia?
Answer: Erdogan is probably less outraged by intrusions into his air space than by Putin’s success in securing the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, whom Erdogan detests, and by relentless Russian air strikes on Turkmen rebels seeking to overthrow Assad.
Imperiled strategic goals and ethnicity may explain Erdogan. But what does the Turkish president see down at the end of this road?
And what about us? Was the U.S. government aware Turkey might attack Russian planes? Did we give Erdogan a green light to shoot them down?
These are not insignificant questions.
For Turkey is a NATO ally. And if Russia strikes back, there is a possibility Ankara will invoke Article V of NATO and demand that we come in on their side in any fight with Russia.
And Putin was not at all cowed. Twenty-four hours after that plane went down, his planes, ships and artillery were firing on those same Turkmen rebels and their jihadist allies.
Politically, the Turkish attack on the Sukhoi Su-24 has probably aborted plans to have Russia join France and the U.S. in targeting ISIS, a diplomatic reversal of the first order.
Indeed, it now seems clear that in Syria’s civil war, Turkey is on the rebel-jihadist side, with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah on the side of the Syrian regime.
But whose side are we on?
As for what strategy and solution President Obama offers, and how exactly he plans to achieve it, it remains an enigma.
Nor is this the end of the alarming news.
According to The Times of Israel, Damascus reports that, on Monday, Israel launched four strikes, killing five Syrian soldiers and eight Hezbollah fighters, and wounding others.
Should Assad or Hezbollah retaliate, this could bring Israel more openly into the Syrian civil war.
And if Israel is attacked, the pressure on Washington to join her in attacking the Syrian regime and Hezbollah would become intense.
Yet, should we accede to that pressure, it could bring us into direct conflict with Russia, which is now the fighting ally of the Assad regime.
Something U.S. presidents conscientiously avoided through 45 years of Cold War — a military clash with Moscow — could become a real possibility. Does the White House see what is unfolding here?
Elsewhere, yet another Russia-NATO clash may be brewing.
In southern Ukraine, pylons supporting the power lines that deliver electricity to Crimea have been sabotaged, blown up, reportedly by nationalists, shutting off much of the electric power to the peninsula.
Repair crews have been prevented from fixing the pylons by Crimean Tatars, angry at the treatment of their kinfolk in Crimea.
In solidarity with the Tatars, Kiev has declared that trucks carrying goods to Crimea will not be allowed to cross the border.
A state of emergency has been declared in Crimea.
Russia is retaliating, saying it will not buy produce from Ukraine, and may start cutting off gas and coal as winter begins to set in.
Ukraine is as dependent upon Russia for fossil fuels as Crimea is upon Ukraine for electricity. Crimea receives 85 percent of its water and 80 percent of its electricity from Ukraine.
Moreover, Moscow’s hopes for a lifting of U.S. and EU sanctions, imposed after the annexation of Crimea, appear to be fading.
Are these events coordinated? Has the U.S. government given a go-ahead to Erdogan to shoot down Russian planes? Has Obama authorized a Ukrainian economic quarantine of Crimea?
For Vladimir Putin is not without options. The Russian Army and pro-Russian rebels in southeast Ukraine could occupy Mariupol on the Black Sea and establish a land bridge to Crimea in two weeks.
In Syria, the Russians, with 4,000 troops, could escalate far more rapidly than either us or our French allies.
As of today, Putin supports U.S.-French attacks on ISIS. But if we follow the Turks and begin aiding the rebels who are attacking the Syrian army, we could find ourselves eyeball to eyeball in a confrontation with Russia, where our NATO allies will be nowhere to be found.
Has anyone thought this through?
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/11/patrick-j-buchanan/us-deliberately-starting-wwiii/
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian warplane was a provocative and portentous act.
That Sukhoi Su-24, which the Turks say intruded into their air space, crashed and burned — in Syria. One of the Russian pilots was executed while parachuting to safety. A Russian rescue helicopter was destroyed by rebels using a U.S. TOW missile. A Russian marine was killed.
“A stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists,” said Vladimir Putin of the first downing of a Russian warplane by a NATO nation in half a century. Putin has a point, as the Russians are bombing rebels in northwest Syria, some of which are linked to al-Qaida.
As it is impossible to believe Turkish F-16 pilots would fire missiles at a Russian plane without authorization from President Tayyip Recep Erdogan, we must ask: Why did the Turkish autocrat do it?
Why is he risking a clash with Russia?
Answer: Erdogan is probably less outraged by intrusions into his air space than by Putin’s success in securing the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, whom Erdogan detests, and by relentless Russian air strikes on Turkmen rebels seeking to overthrow Assad.
Imperiled strategic goals and ethnicity may explain Erdogan. But what does the Turkish president see down at the end of this road?
And what about us? Was the U.S. government aware Turkey might attack Russian planes? Did we give Erdogan a green light to shoot them down?
These are not insignificant questions.
For Turkey is a NATO ally. And if Russia strikes back, there is a possibility Ankara will invoke Article V of NATO and demand that we come in on their side in any fight with Russia.
And Putin was not at all cowed. Twenty-four hours after that plane went down, his planes, ships and artillery were firing on those same Turkmen rebels and their jihadist allies.
Politically, the Turkish attack on the Sukhoi Su-24 has probably aborted plans to have Russia join France and the U.S. in targeting ISIS, a diplomatic reversal of the first order.
Indeed, it now seems clear that in Syria’s civil war, Turkey is on the rebel-jihadist side, with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah on the side of the Syrian regime.
But whose side are we on?
As for what strategy and solution President Obama offers, and how exactly he plans to achieve it, it remains an enigma.
Nor is this the end of the alarming news.
According to The Times of Israel, Damascus reports that, on Monday, Israel launched four strikes, killing five Syrian soldiers and eight Hezbollah fighters, and wounding others.
Should Assad or Hezbollah retaliate, this could bring Israel more openly into the Syrian civil war.
And if Israel is attacked, the pressure on Washington to join her in attacking the Syrian regime and Hezbollah would become intense.
Yet, should we accede to that pressure, it could bring us into direct conflict with Russia, which is now the fighting ally of the Assad regime.
Something U.S. presidents conscientiously avoided through 45 years of Cold War — a military clash with Moscow — could become a real possibility. Does the White House see what is unfolding here?
Elsewhere, yet another Russia-NATO clash may be brewing.
In southern Ukraine, pylons supporting the power lines that deliver electricity to Crimea have been sabotaged, blown up, reportedly by nationalists, shutting off much of the electric power to the peninsula.
Repair crews have been prevented from fixing the pylons by Crimean Tatars, angry at the treatment of their kinfolk in Crimea.
In solidarity with the Tatars, Kiev has declared that trucks carrying goods to Crimea will not be allowed to cross the border.
A state of emergency has been declared in Crimea.
Russia is retaliating, saying it will not buy produce from Ukraine, and may start cutting off gas and coal as winter begins to set in.
Ukraine is as dependent upon Russia for fossil fuels as Crimea is upon Ukraine for electricity. Crimea receives 85 percent of its water and 80 percent of its electricity from Ukraine.
Moreover, Moscow’s hopes for a lifting of U.S. and EU sanctions, imposed after the annexation of Crimea, appear to be fading.
Are these events coordinated? Has the U.S. government given a go-ahead to Erdogan to shoot down Russian planes? Has Obama authorized a Ukrainian economic quarantine of Crimea?
For Vladimir Putin is not without options. The Russian Army and pro-Russian rebels in southeast Ukraine could occupy Mariupol on the Black Sea and establish a land bridge to Crimea in two weeks.
In Syria, the Russians, with 4,000 troops, could escalate far more rapidly than either us or our French allies.
As of today, Putin supports U.S.-French attacks on ISIS. But if we follow the Turks and begin aiding the rebels who are attacking the Syrian army, we could find ourselves eyeball to eyeball in a confrontation with Russia, where our NATO allies will be nowhere to be found.
Has anyone thought this through?
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/11/patrick-j-buchanan/us-deliberately-starting-wwiii/
"In the end, socialism can only survive by growing, throttling the life out of the free markets, destroying the economic growth that has been the wellspring of human progress for half a millennium, and implementing ever-more radical attacks on the traditional moral and social order. The havoc wrought by socialist policies inevitably produces pressure for more socialist measures to solve them, as with America’s never-ending but wholly manufactured “healthcare crisis.” The loss of economic freedom will eventually lead to the loss of all other freedoms, just as Marx envisioned. So-called class distinctions will be obliterated as humankind descends into the abyssal equality of universal serfdom. Socialism, then, regardless of its flavor, is the willful campaign to extinguish the lamps of civilization and eradicate every vestige of human progress."
What’s Behind Bernie Sanders' Socialism?
Written by Charles Scaliger
At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on October 30, senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders attempted to clarify in what sense he is a “socialist.” One voter in attendance, echoing the beliefs of many Americans, remarked, “I come from a generation where that’s a pretty radical term — we think of socialism (with) communism. Can you explain to us exactly what that is?” Sanders responded, in part: “If we go to some countries, what they will have is health care for all as a right. I believe in that. They will have paid family and medical leave. I believe in that. They will have a much stronger childcare system than we have, which is affordable for working families. I believe in that.”
Sanders went on to clarify that he regards himself as a democratic socialist: “What I mean by Democratic socialism is looking at countries in Scandinavia that have much lower rates of child poverty, that have a fairer tax system that guarantees basic necessities of life to working people. Essentially what I mean by that is creating a government that works for working families, rather than the kind of government we have today which is largely owned and controlled by wealthy individuals and large corporations.”
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Sanders, the only self-acknowledged socialist ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate, is careful to distinguish “democratic socialism,” which supposedly distinguishes a democratic political system alongside a socialist economic system, from more authoritarian and even totalitarian forms of socialism such as Marxism, Stalinism, Maoism, and communism generally.
In making such a distinction, Sanders is hardly alone. A number of influential socialists, such as Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene Debs, Erich Fromm, and Howard Zinn, view “democratic socialism” as “socialism from below,” demanded and implemented by the grassroots, and “authoritarian socialism,” such as Stalinism, as “socialism from above.” The Scandinavian model of democratic socialism mentioned by Sanders is a popular talking point among democratic socialists, inasmuch as countries such as Denmark and Sweden appear prosperous, happy, and free despite being socialist.
While polls suggest that Bernie Sanders is unlikely to capture the Democratic nomination for president, his newfound national prominence as a presidential candidate has spurred a renewed interest in socialism. Given America’s struggles with violent crime, chronic unemployment, healthcare affordability, and the quality and cost of education, what could possibly be wrong with the sort of socialism that the likes of Sanders and Scandinavia believe in?
The Evolution of Socialism
Modern socialism’s roots may be traced back at least as far as the French Revolution, although earlier experiments in forced communitarianism, such as the radical Digger and Leveler movements that sprang up during the English Civil War in the mid-17th century, have also cast long shadows.
Socialism in its many subvarieties is but part of a larger political stream of thought that we might call “utopianism,” which presumes to create a social order contrary to human nature. In addition to socialism, the utopian impulse has given rise to radical anarchism, as well as to experiments with coercive religious communalism, including the Jonestown commune of the Peoples’ Temple, led by Jim Jones (an atheist who deceived his followers with fabricated “healings” and supposed religious miracles).
But of all the manifestations of utopianism, socialism in its many guises has proven the most enduring and — at least in our day — by far the most popular. It is often divided into revolutionary socialism — of the sort that convulsed the world in 1848, the Russian Empire in 1917, China in the 1940s, Cambodia in the 1970s, and so on — and democratic socialism, which has found favor in the parliaments and Congresses of every Western country since at least the mid-20th century. Revolutionary socialism has appeared in several flavors, but may be roughly divided into national socialism (of which German Nazism is the best-known example), which appeals to nationalism and racial exceptionalism to justify the implementation of state control over the private sector, and international socialism, which seeks to export socialism worldwide and has as its goal a unitary global socialist order. Democratic socialism, meanwhile, has been known by many names (including, in the United States, “progressivism”), but may be characterized in general as an effort to institute an egalitarian socialist order by “working within the system,” using a gradualist (or “Fabian”), long-term strategy to persuade democratically elected governments to legalize socialist programs such as government-controlled healthcare and school systems.
The difference between revolutionary socialism, especially Marxism and its ideological offspring, and democratic socialism is primarily a matter of degree; communism has been characterized as “socialism in a hurry” because of its insistence on the violent overthrow of “bourgeois” society and government. In point of fact, the League of the Just, the underground group of European revolutionaries who became the first proponents of communism, considered themselves socialists. Friedrich Engels, the wealthy colleague and patron of Karl Marx who helped bankroll the early Communist Party in Europe, explained in the preface to the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto the virtual equivalency of communism and socialism as they were then understood:
The history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most wide spread, the most international production of all socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California.
Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the “educated” classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist.... Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that “the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take.
Engels’ distinction between “working class” communists and “middle class” socialists is misleading. The theoreticians, leaders, and financiers of both movements were typically middle-class intellectuals (such as Marx) and upper-class money men (such as Engels). In particular, Robert Owen, the Welsh social reformer whose Owenite movement in England and America is credited with coining the term “socialism,” was a middle-class merchant and mill manager, as well as a successful entrepreneur who eventually became a prominent member of the elite Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Owen set up utopian communes in Britain and America, where he advocated causes such as the eight-hour workday. His experimental communities were regarded with narrow suspicion by most early Americans because of their repudiation of free enterprise and the private ownership of property.
Owens’ first American community, New Harmony in Indiana, lasted only two years before collapsing. One disaffected member of New Harmony recognized that the community failed because of its repudiation of personal property rights and liberty, admitting: “We had a world in miniature — we had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result.... It appeared that it was nature’s own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us … our “united interests” were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation.”
Late in life Owen, who had renounced Christianity as a young man, became intensely interested in spiritualism, in which he immersed himself for the last four years of his life.
The followers of Charles Fourier, another early utopian socialist, set up cooperative communities (which he called “phalanxes”) in Europe and America; “Fourierism” found expression in locations as far-flung as Ohio, Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and counted among its adherents prominent American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fourierism sought to eradicate poverty by raising wages and establishing a minimum standard of income for all members of the community. Fourier was also intensely interested in human sexuality, and encouraged complete sexual freedom in his phalanxes. He also was an early proponent of homosexuality and homosexual rights. His program called for nothing less than total sexual emancipation and for universal education. Fourier, who died in 1837, was also one of the earliest political reformers to call for a “new world order” of universal harmony and international cooperation.
These men and others were the first of the utopian, non-revolutionary socialists, to whom modern democratic socialism owes much of its ideological pedigree. The interest in such conceits as state-mandated minimum wages and eight-hour workdays is as characteristic of socialism today as it was two centuries ago — but today, such policies have been almost universally embraced and are seldom even acknowledged as socialist innovations. Meanwhile the repudiation of Christianity and of Judaeo-Christian morality evident in both Fourierism and Owenism is still very much a feature of the modern Left — the ideological heirs of Owen, Fourier, and their ilk.
The other early strain of socialism, the communism of Marx and Engels, had its organizational roots in the European revolutionary underground that grew out of the French Revolution and its aftermath. Philippe Buonarroti, for example, was one of Marx’s most important influences. A member of the Babeuf conspiracy in late revolutionary France, Buonarroti was a professional agitator and subversive who advocated a conspiratorial and revolutionary path to radical socialism. His History of Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of Equals,” based on his own experiences, was a recipe for revolutionary egalitarianism that was a must-read for 19th-century socialist revolutionaries, including Karl Marx.
Even a cursory reading of Marx’s most famous work, the Communist Manifesto, reveals Marx’s lust for revolutionary violence, a passion clearly not shared with more genteel utopians such as Owen and Fourier. Yet in reality, how different was Marx’s communist program? Marx — like Owen and Fourier — was opposed to Christianity and traditional morality, and their eradication by force became one of the paramount goals of the communist program. Marx, like other socialists, believed that capitalism and inequality of wealth were responsible for all of the ills afflicting humanity, and sought to eliminate them by eliminating private property. However, Marx and the communists differed very clearly from other socialists of the day in ambition; where Owen, Fourier, and others were content to publish pamphlets and set up small utopian communities wherever they could attract a sufficient following, the communists sought nothing less than the complete overthrow of the existing sociopolitical order, by violent means and everywhere in the world.
In pursuing these goals, the communists proved to be far more resourceful and better organized than other socialists; in the same year (1848) that the Communist Manifesto was first published, nearly every nation in Europe was convulsed by revolution in what turned out to be the opening spasm of communist revolutionary activity that captured the world’s two largest countries (Russia and China) in the 20th century, not to mention countless smaller states all across the globe.
The Communist/Socialist Program
The Communist Manifesto articulates a clear, simple program for the advancement of communism, a program that must be held to be the first comprehensive enunciation of the socialist program as well, except on a different timetable. Most of the elements of Marx’s famous “ten planks of Communism,” which appeared very radical when they were written, are almost universally accepted today. They are:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
Of these, numbers two (heavy progressive income tax), five (a monopolistic central bank), six (state control of communication/media and transportation), and 10 (“free” public schools and abolition of child labor) have been nearly or entirely accomplished in the United States and most other Western countries. Most of the others are well on their way to fruition in the United States. Number one, for example (the abolition of private property) has not yet been fully realized, but private property rights have been diluted to the point of being nearly meaningless, thanks to the proliferation of heavy property taxes, environmental and zoning regulations, and countless other government controls limiting the ways in which “private” land may be used.
Number four (the confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels) has only recently gained momentum, with asset forfeiture laws allowing the state to strip property from people accused of criminal activities, leading to flagrant, systemic theft of private assets by local, state, and federal governments alike. Meanwhile, as more and more Americans living overseas are forced to pay ever-heavier taxes to Washington (no other country besides Eritrea seeks to tax its citizens living and working abroad), increasing numbers of them are seeking to renounce their American citizenship. The federal government has responded by branding them disloyal and levying enormous new excises that, for wealthy individuals, may amount to confiscation of a significant portion of their assets.
Thus the “Communist” program of Karl Marx is being brought to fruition in the United States and the rest of the Western world, but largely without revolution, bloodshed, and purges — at least not yet. While the communist movement in Europe sparked a number of violent uprisings during the 19th century. It made little progress on the other side of the Atlantic — at least not openly.
But in America, the decades after the Civil War saw the birth of a new political movement every bit as foreign to American traditions and hostile to personal liberty as revolutionary communism, but with a gentler countenance: “progressivism.” Birthed as a movement for broad social reform in Europe and the United States, by the end of the 19th century, the “progressive” agenda had won many adherents in Washington, including Theodore Roosevelt and Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge. Senator Beveridge’s legislative activities in the first years of the 20th century embodied the progressive program; among other things, Beveridge sponsored a bill for federal meat inspection, fought for the passage of anti-child labor legislation, and supported the federal control of railroads, the institution of an eight-hour work day, and the regulation of “trusts” (Big Business). Senator Beveridge, like most progressives, was also a strong supporter of American interventionism, of which the Spanish-American War was viewed as a noble example of enlightened empire-building. Self-styled progressives such as Woodrow Wilson popularized the notion that America’s proper role was to make the world safe for democracy. Progressivism also figured prominently in the push to create a universal public education system championed by progressive John Dewey, in the fledgling conservationist/environmental movement fostered by Theodore Roosevelt, and in the drive for the federal government to have direct regulatory authority over the business sector. All of this, and much more, was defended in the name of using the power of the state to achieve positive good, to engineer improvements in society that the private sector, left to its own devices, would supposedly neglect.
Yet for all their benign rhetoric, the progressives were bitter foes of the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers and of the limited constitutional government they created. Wrote historian William Leuchtenberg: “The Progressives believed in the Hamiltonian concept of positive government, of a national government directing the destinies of the nation at home and abroad. They had little but contempt for the strict construction of the Constitution by conservative judges, who would restrict the power of the national government to act against social evils and to extend the blessings of democracy to less favored lands. The real enemy was particularism, state rights, limited government, which would mean the reign of plutocracy at home and a narrow, isolationist concept of destiny abroad.”
Over the last century, progressivism has carried the day in the United States, with activist government coming to dominate virtually every aspect of what was once the private sector. It is taught and learned unquestioningly in public schools, universities, and law schools, usually under the banner of “liberalism” or “progressivism” — but it is socialism all the same, listing as its achievements many of the ideals of the Owenites, Fourierists, and communists.
In the meantime, more overt socialism continued to evolve, with the organizational starting point of modern democratic socialism probably being the founding, in London, of the Fabian Society in 1884. Unlike the communist revolutionaries, the Fabians were dedicated to the promotion of socialism by gradualist means that mimicked the patient, piecemeal military strategy of Roman general Fabius Maximus. Fabius wore down the invader Hannibal and his formidable army by waging a years-long war of harassment and attrition that eventually led to the Carthaginian conqueror’s withdrawal from Italy. Aptly, the Fabians adopted as their first coat of arms a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and their symbol the patient tortoise.
From its inception, Fabianism attracted many prominent supporters, including George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Annie Besant. They advocated a minimum wage and a national, government-run healthcare system, among many other familiar projects. They proved ambitious organizers. In 1895, they founded the London School of Economics, which remains one of the world’s most influential centers of economic thought and policymaking, and in 1900, the Labor Party, which became the dominant political party in Britain during much of the 20th century, ushering in legislatively much of the socialist program in Britain. In other parts of the Anglophone world, “liberal” political parties like the Democrats in the United States and the Liberal Party of Canada rushed to align their priorities with those of Britain’s Fabian-inspired and -controlled Labor Party.
Meanwhile, socialism in America was organized into an overt political force with the establishment of the Socialist Party of America in 1901, a merger of the Social Democratic Party of America and the Socialist Labor Party. Drawing much of its early support from labor unions, the Socialist Party soon had its own champion, the indefatigable Eugene Debs, who dedicated his life to the transformation of American society along socialist lines. Whereas the progressive movement was a way to enact the socialist agenda without calling it by name, the Socialist Party and its flamboyant leader provided pressure from the radical Left, propagandizing the masses without successfully electing anyone to actual positions of government power.
Debs, a five-time Socialist Party candidate for president, got his start on the radical fringes of the Democratic Party in the late 1800s, organizing labor strikes. He was eventually jailed for his agitation, and embraced the socialist program while in jail. Because of his exceptional oratorical skills and personal charisma, Debs rose rapidly to prominence in the American socialist movement.
As we have seen, the establishment Left, then as now, self-identified as “progressive” rather than “socialist,” but only because “socialism” was such an unpopular term. In point of fact, the American progressives, in both style and substance, were almost indistinguishable from the more honestly named Fabian Socialists of England, while the firebrand Debs and his followers resembled more the Old World revolutionary agitators than boardroom socialists.
It is worth noting that the Socialist Party of America was a coming together of both labor union-centered socialism (sometimes called syndicalism) and democratic socialism. And the latter group, beloved of presidential candidate and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, is indistinguishable in its turn from American progressivism and British Fabian socialism. All of these groups attempt to institute socialism by popular consent and are content to work within the forms of the law to accomplish their ends instead of trying to violently uproot existing laws and social norms by revolutionary subversion.
Among those aims that have successfully been achieved legislatively in the United States are the federally mandated minimum wage and 40-hour work week; the prohibition on child labor; federal control over the agricultural, banking, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors; federal limitations on business activities and private property ownership in the name of environmental protection; government subsidy of college student loans and academic research; federal control over public schools and education; a heavy graduated federal income tax; and the federal monopoly on the money supply and control of the banking sector, as embodied by the Federal Reserve. These and a myriad other federal intrusions into the workings of the formerly free market and curtailment of the formerly sacrosanct right to private property are all elements of the socialist program, a program that seeks to substitute for private, consensual enterprise and individual, God-given rights forced, centrally-controlled economic activity and egalitarian “collective” rights enforced by state decree.
Bernie Sanders’ own presidential platform includes such socialist staples as a sharp increase in the minimum wage, creating a “single payer” government healthcare system, creating a universal government child care program, breaking up financial corporations deemed too large, instituting a government program to provide job training for young people, legislation to strengthen the power of unions, and legislation to impose a carbon emissions tax on businesses. This on top of the vast web of existing socialist controls — which Sanders enthusiastically supports — over private property, enterprise, and nearly every God-given right once protected by the Bill of Rights. Sanders is, for example, a perfervid supporter of gun control and heavy, progressive, ubiquitous taxation, and, in general, government involvement in every conceivable aspect of our private lives.
But inasmuch as the aims of progressivism, Fabian socialism, and communism — as well as the democratic socialism so beloved of Bernie Sanders — are all the same in the long run, so must they have similar outcomes for humanity, sooner or later.
And what are those outcomes? In his magisterial work on socialism, economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out that the basis of economic activity is voluntary exchange, which is enabled by economic calculation. Absent voluntary exchange, rational economic calculation (pricing and valuation) is impossible, except for very simple economic domains such as individual households. Wrote Mises: “Without calculation, economic activity is impossible. Since under Socialism economic calculation is impossible, under Socialism there can be no economic activity in our sense of the word. In small and insignificant things rational action might still persist. But, for the most part, it would no longer be possible to speak of rational production. In the absence of criteria of rationality, production could not be consciously economical.”
Thus socialism as an economic system is fundamentally irrational and impracticable. Its universal implementation would trigger a swift end to the complex, extended economic order that the free markets have built up over the centuries. It is possible only piecemeal, as arid expanses of centralized control within the fertile, life-giving pastures of the free markets. For a time, the successes of capitalism confer on socialism — which parasitizes free enterprise like a lamprey its host — the false appearance of vitality. But even fragmentary socialism of the type that now characterizes the American economy is always retrogressive, not progressive, destructive and not productive. It — and not “irrationally exuberant” capitalism — is responsible for mass impoverishment, recessions, and depressions, yet it is seldom indicted nowadays in the courts of media or public opinion.
Socialism — in the guise of national healthcare; a graduated income tax; an inflationary central bank (the Federal Reserve); government subsidies of agriculture, automobiles, and a myriad other sectors; or any of a host of other illegitimate government controls on the economy — is inflicting a death of a thousand bureaucratic cuts on the American and world economy. And because it is almost never held to account, more socialism is always demanded as a remedy. ObamaCare, for example, did not appear out of thin air, but was proposed as the solution to the havoc already wrought on the healthcare sector by previous socialist half measures (Medicare and Medicaid chief among them).
Because socialism is fundamentally utopian and irrational, it also places great emphasis on uprooting and destroying the entire social fabric upon which the free market and a legal system limiting the power of government rests: the traditional moral values practiced by Western society for centuries. This is the reason that most socialists are instinctively hostile to religion, for example, and supportive of all policies that militate against the family and practices destructive to it, like sexual license, abortion, homosexuality, and the sexualization of children.
In the end, socialism can only survive by growing, throttling the life out of the free markets, destroying the economic growth that has been the wellspring of human progress for half a millennium, and implementing ever-more radical attacks on the traditional moral and social order. The havoc wrought by socialist policies inevitably produces pressure for more socialist measures to solve them, as with America’s never-ending but wholly manufactured “healthcare crisis.” The loss of economic freedom will eventually lead to the loss of all other freedoms, just as Marx envisioned. So-called class distinctions will be obliterated as humankind descends into the abyssal equality of universal serfdom. Socialism, then, regardless of its flavor, is the willful campaign to extinguish the lamps of civilization and eradicate every vestige of human progress.
Bernie Sanders and his fellow socialists from Washington to Scandinavia may refuse to accept socialism’s true nature. But Senator Sanders likely also does not recognize that his chief rival, Hillary Clinton, is also a socialist, as are many of the Republican presidential candidates (in fact, Sanders’ cumulative Freedom Index score, as good a yardstick as any of socialist leanings, is 26 percent which, while no great shakes, is significantly higher than “Democrat” Hillary Clinton’s 19 percent). Indeed, whether “progressive,” “liberal,” or even “moderate,” nearly everyone in Washington in both parties supports most of the planks of the socialist movements in days past, from minimum wages to the Federal Reserve to graduated income taxes. The only difference between them and Bernie Sanders is that the senator from Vermont is a little more honest. But they are all equally culpable in waging a campaign that, sooner or later, must destroy civilization, if allowed to run its ruinous course.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/22027-what-s-behind-bernie-s-socialism
Written by Charles Scaliger
At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on October 30, senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders attempted to clarify in what sense he is a “socialist.” One voter in attendance, echoing the beliefs of many Americans, remarked, “I come from a generation where that’s a pretty radical term — we think of socialism (with) communism. Can you explain to us exactly what that is?” Sanders responded, in part: “If we go to some countries, what they will have is health care for all as a right. I believe in that. They will have paid family and medical leave. I believe in that. They will have a much stronger childcare system than we have, which is affordable for working families. I believe in that.”
Sanders went on to clarify that he regards himself as a democratic socialist: “What I mean by Democratic socialism is looking at countries in Scandinavia that have much lower rates of child poverty, that have a fairer tax system that guarantees basic necessities of life to working people. Essentially what I mean by that is creating a government that works for working families, rather than the kind of government we have today which is largely owned and controlled by wealthy individuals and large corporations.”
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Sanders, the only self-acknowledged socialist ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate, is careful to distinguish “democratic socialism,” which supposedly distinguishes a democratic political system alongside a socialist economic system, from more authoritarian and even totalitarian forms of socialism such as Marxism, Stalinism, Maoism, and communism generally.
In making such a distinction, Sanders is hardly alone. A number of influential socialists, such as Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene Debs, Erich Fromm, and Howard Zinn, view “democratic socialism” as “socialism from below,” demanded and implemented by the grassroots, and “authoritarian socialism,” such as Stalinism, as “socialism from above.” The Scandinavian model of democratic socialism mentioned by Sanders is a popular talking point among democratic socialists, inasmuch as countries such as Denmark and Sweden appear prosperous, happy, and free despite being socialist.
While polls suggest that Bernie Sanders is unlikely to capture the Democratic nomination for president, his newfound national prominence as a presidential candidate has spurred a renewed interest in socialism. Given America’s struggles with violent crime, chronic unemployment, healthcare affordability, and the quality and cost of education, what could possibly be wrong with the sort of socialism that the likes of Sanders and Scandinavia believe in?
The Evolution of Socialism
Modern socialism’s roots may be traced back at least as far as the French Revolution, although earlier experiments in forced communitarianism, such as the radical Digger and Leveler movements that sprang up during the English Civil War in the mid-17th century, have also cast long shadows.
Socialism in its many subvarieties is but part of a larger political stream of thought that we might call “utopianism,” which presumes to create a social order contrary to human nature. In addition to socialism, the utopian impulse has given rise to radical anarchism, as well as to experiments with coercive religious communalism, including the Jonestown commune of the Peoples’ Temple, led by Jim Jones (an atheist who deceived his followers with fabricated “healings” and supposed religious miracles).
But of all the manifestations of utopianism, socialism in its many guises has proven the most enduring and — at least in our day — by far the most popular. It is often divided into revolutionary socialism — of the sort that convulsed the world in 1848, the Russian Empire in 1917, China in the 1940s, Cambodia in the 1970s, and so on — and democratic socialism, which has found favor in the parliaments and Congresses of every Western country since at least the mid-20th century. Revolutionary socialism has appeared in several flavors, but may be roughly divided into national socialism (of which German Nazism is the best-known example), which appeals to nationalism and racial exceptionalism to justify the implementation of state control over the private sector, and international socialism, which seeks to export socialism worldwide and has as its goal a unitary global socialist order. Democratic socialism, meanwhile, has been known by many names (including, in the United States, “progressivism”), but may be characterized in general as an effort to institute an egalitarian socialist order by “working within the system,” using a gradualist (or “Fabian”), long-term strategy to persuade democratically elected governments to legalize socialist programs such as government-controlled healthcare and school systems.
The difference between revolutionary socialism, especially Marxism and its ideological offspring, and democratic socialism is primarily a matter of degree; communism has been characterized as “socialism in a hurry” because of its insistence on the violent overthrow of “bourgeois” society and government. In point of fact, the League of the Just, the underground group of European revolutionaries who became the first proponents of communism, considered themselves socialists. Friedrich Engels, the wealthy colleague and patron of Karl Marx who helped bankroll the early Communist Party in Europe, explained in the preface to the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto the virtual equivalency of communism and socialism as they were then understood:
The history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most wide spread, the most international production of all socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California.
Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the “educated” classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist.... Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that “the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take.
Engels’ distinction between “working class” communists and “middle class” socialists is misleading. The theoreticians, leaders, and financiers of both movements were typically middle-class intellectuals (such as Marx) and upper-class money men (such as Engels). In particular, Robert Owen, the Welsh social reformer whose Owenite movement in England and America is credited with coining the term “socialism,” was a middle-class merchant and mill manager, as well as a successful entrepreneur who eventually became a prominent member of the elite Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Owen set up utopian communes in Britain and America, where he advocated causes such as the eight-hour workday. His experimental communities were regarded with narrow suspicion by most early Americans because of their repudiation of free enterprise and the private ownership of property.
Owens’ first American community, New Harmony in Indiana, lasted only two years before collapsing. One disaffected member of New Harmony recognized that the community failed because of its repudiation of personal property rights and liberty, admitting: “We had a world in miniature — we had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result.... It appeared that it was nature’s own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us … our “united interests” were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation.”
Late in life Owen, who had renounced Christianity as a young man, became intensely interested in spiritualism, in which he immersed himself for the last four years of his life.
The followers of Charles Fourier, another early utopian socialist, set up cooperative communities (which he called “phalanxes”) in Europe and America; “Fourierism” found expression in locations as far-flung as Ohio, Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and counted among its adherents prominent American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fourierism sought to eradicate poverty by raising wages and establishing a minimum standard of income for all members of the community. Fourier was also intensely interested in human sexuality, and encouraged complete sexual freedom in his phalanxes. He also was an early proponent of homosexuality and homosexual rights. His program called for nothing less than total sexual emancipation and for universal education. Fourier, who died in 1837, was also one of the earliest political reformers to call for a “new world order” of universal harmony and international cooperation.
These men and others were the first of the utopian, non-revolutionary socialists, to whom modern democratic socialism owes much of its ideological pedigree. The interest in such conceits as state-mandated minimum wages and eight-hour workdays is as characteristic of socialism today as it was two centuries ago — but today, such policies have been almost universally embraced and are seldom even acknowledged as socialist innovations. Meanwhile the repudiation of Christianity and of Judaeo-Christian morality evident in both Fourierism and Owenism is still very much a feature of the modern Left — the ideological heirs of Owen, Fourier, and their ilk.
The other early strain of socialism, the communism of Marx and Engels, had its organizational roots in the European revolutionary underground that grew out of the French Revolution and its aftermath. Philippe Buonarroti, for example, was one of Marx’s most important influences. A member of the Babeuf conspiracy in late revolutionary France, Buonarroti was a professional agitator and subversive who advocated a conspiratorial and revolutionary path to radical socialism. His History of Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of Equals,” based on his own experiences, was a recipe for revolutionary egalitarianism that was a must-read for 19th-century socialist revolutionaries, including Karl Marx.
Even a cursory reading of Marx’s most famous work, the Communist Manifesto, reveals Marx’s lust for revolutionary violence, a passion clearly not shared with more genteel utopians such as Owen and Fourier. Yet in reality, how different was Marx’s communist program? Marx — like Owen and Fourier — was opposed to Christianity and traditional morality, and their eradication by force became one of the paramount goals of the communist program. Marx, like other socialists, believed that capitalism and inequality of wealth were responsible for all of the ills afflicting humanity, and sought to eliminate them by eliminating private property. However, Marx and the communists differed very clearly from other socialists of the day in ambition; where Owen, Fourier, and others were content to publish pamphlets and set up small utopian communities wherever they could attract a sufficient following, the communists sought nothing less than the complete overthrow of the existing sociopolitical order, by violent means and everywhere in the world.
In pursuing these goals, the communists proved to be far more resourceful and better organized than other socialists; in the same year (1848) that the Communist Manifesto was first published, nearly every nation in Europe was convulsed by revolution in what turned out to be the opening spasm of communist revolutionary activity that captured the world’s two largest countries (Russia and China) in the 20th century, not to mention countless smaller states all across the globe.
The Communist/Socialist Program
The Communist Manifesto articulates a clear, simple program for the advancement of communism, a program that must be held to be the first comprehensive enunciation of the socialist program as well, except on a different timetable. Most of the elements of Marx’s famous “ten planks of Communism,” which appeared very radical when they were written, are almost universally accepted today. They are:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
Of these, numbers two (heavy progressive income tax), five (a monopolistic central bank), six (state control of communication/media and transportation), and 10 (“free” public schools and abolition of child labor) have been nearly or entirely accomplished in the United States and most other Western countries. Most of the others are well on their way to fruition in the United States. Number one, for example (the abolition of private property) has not yet been fully realized, but private property rights have been diluted to the point of being nearly meaningless, thanks to the proliferation of heavy property taxes, environmental and zoning regulations, and countless other government controls limiting the ways in which “private” land may be used.
Number four (the confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels) has only recently gained momentum, with asset forfeiture laws allowing the state to strip property from people accused of criminal activities, leading to flagrant, systemic theft of private assets by local, state, and federal governments alike. Meanwhile, as more and more Americans living overseas are forced to pay ever-heavier taxes to Washington (no other country besides Eritrea seeks to tax its citizens living and working abroad), increasing numbers of them are seeking to renounce their American citizenship. The federal government has responded by branding them disloyal and levying enormous new excises that, for wealthy individuals, may amount to confiscation of a significant portion of their assets.
Thus the “Communist” program of Karl Marx is being brought to fruition in the United States and the rest of the Western world, but largely without revolution, bloodshed, and purges — at least not yet. While the communist movement in Europe sparked a number of violent uprisings during the 19th century. It made little progress on the other side of the Atlantic — at least not openly.
But in America, the decades after the Civil War saw the birth of a new political movement every bit as foreign to American traditions and hostile to personal liberty as revolutionary communism, but with a gentler countenance: “progressivism.” Birthed as a movement for broad social reform in Europe and the United States, by the end of the 19th century, the “progressive” agenda had won many adherents in Washington, including Theodore Roosevelt and Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge. Senator Beveridge’s legislative activities in the first years of the 20th century embodied the progressive program; among other things, Beveridge sponsored a bill for federal meat inspection, fought for the passage of anti-child labor legislation, and supported the federal control of railroads, the institution of an eight-hour work day, and the regulation of “trusts” (Big Business). Senator Beveridge, like most progressives, was also a strong supporter of American interventionism, of which the Spanish-American War was viewed as a noble example of enlightened empire-building. Self-styled progressives such as Woodrow Wilson popularized the notion that America’s proper role was to make the world safe for democracy. Progressivism also figured prominently in the push to create a universal public education system championed by progressive John Dewey, in the fledgling conservationist/environmental movement fostered by Theodore Roosevelt, and in the drive for the federal government to have direct regulatory authority over the business sector. All of this, and much more, was defended in the name of using the power of the state to achieve positive good, to engineer improvements in society that the private sector, left to its own devices, would supposedly neglect.
Yet for all their benign rhetoric, the progressives were bitter foes of the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers and of the limited constitutional government they created. Wrote historian William Leuchtenberg: “The Progressives believed in the Hamiltonian concept of positive government, of a national government directing the destinies of the nation at home and abroad. They had little but contempt for the strict construction of the Constitution by conservative judges, who would restrict the power of the national government to act against social evils and to extend the blessings of democracy to less favored lands. The real enemy was particularism, state rights, limited government, which would mean the reign of plutocracy at home and a narrow, isolationist concept of destiny abroad.”
Over the last century, progressivism has carried the day in the United States, with activist government coming to dominate virtually every aspect of what was once the private sector. It is taught and learned unquestioningly in public schools, universities, and law schools, usually under the banner of “liberalism” or “progressivism” — but it is socialism all the same, listing as its achievements many of the ideals of the Owenites, Fourierists, and communists.
In the meantime, more overt socialism continued to evolve, with the organizational starting point of modern democratic socialism probably being the founding, in London, of the Fabian Society in 1884. Unlike the communist revolutionaries, the Fabians were dedicated to the promotion of socialism by gradualist means that mimicked the patient, piecemeal military strategy of Roman general Fabius Maximus. Fabius wore down the invader Hannibal and his formidable army by waging a years-long war of harassment and attrition that eventually led to the Carthaginian conqueror’s withdrawal from Italy. Aptly, the Fabians adopted as their first coat of arms a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and their symbol the patient tortoise.
From its inception, Fabianism attracted many prominent supporters, including George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Annie Besant. They advocated a minimum wage and a national, government-run healthcare system, among many other familiar projects. They proved ambitious organizers. In 1895, they founded the London School of Economics, which remains one of the world’s most influential centers of economic thought and policymaking, and in 1900, the Labor Party, which became the dominant political party in Britain during much of the 20th century, ushering in legislatively much of the socialist program in Britain. In other parts of the Anglophone world, “liberal” political parties like the Democrats in the United States and the Liberal Party of Canada rushed to align their priorities with those of Britain’s Fabian-inspired and -controlled Labor Party.
Meanwhile, socialism in America was organized into an overt political force with the establishment of the Socialist Party of America in 1901, a merger of the Social Democratic Party of America and the Socialist Labor Party. Drawing much of its early support from labor unions, the Socialist Party soon had its own champion, the indefatigable Eugene Debs, who dedicated his life to the transformation of American society along socialist lines. Whereas the progressive movement was a way to enact the socialist agenda without calling it by name, the Socialist Party and its flamboyant leader provided pressure from the radical Left, propagandizing the masses without successfully electing anyone to actual positions of government power.
Debs, a five-time Socialist Party candidate for president, got his start on the radical fringes of the Democratic Party in the late 1800s, organizing labor strikes. He was eventually jailed for his agitation, and embraced the socialist program while in jail. Because of his exceptional oratorical skills and personal charisma, Debs rose rapidly to prominence in the American socialist movement.
As we have seen, the establishment Left, then as now, self-identified as “progressive” rather than “socialist,” but only because “socialism” was such an unpopular term. In point of fact, the American progressives, in both style and substance, were almost indistinguishable from the more honestly named Fabian Socialists of England, while the firebrand Debs and his followers resembled more the Old World revolutionary agitators than boardroom socialists.
It is worth noting that the Socialist Party of America was a coming together of both labor union-centered socialism (sometimes called syndicalism) and democratic socialism. And the latter group, beloved of presidential candidate and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, is indistinguishable in its turn from American progressivism and British Fabian socialism. All of these groups attempt to institute socialism by popular consent and are content to work within the forms of the law to accomplish their ends instead of trying to violently uproot existing laws and social norms by revolutionary subversion.
Among those aims that have successfully been achieved legislatively in the United States are the federally mandated minimum wage and 40-hour work week; the prohibition on child labor; federal control over the agricultural, banking, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors; federal limitations on business activities and private property ownership in the name of environmental protection; government subsidy of college student loans and academic research; federal control over public schools and education; a heavy graduated federal income tax; and the federal monopoly on the money supply and control of the banking sector, as embodied by the Federal Reserve. These and a myriad other federal intrusions into the workings of the formerly free market and curtailment of the formerly sacrosanct right to private property are all elements of the socialist program, a program that seeks to substitute for private, consensual enterprise and individual, God-given rights forced, centrally-controlled economic activity and egalitarian “collective” rights enforced by state decree.
Bernie Sanders’ own presidential platform includes such socialist staples as a sharp increase in the minimum wage, creating a “single payer” government healthcare system, creating a universal government child care program, breaking up financial corporations deemed too large, instituting a government program to provide job training for young people, legislation to strengthen the power of unions, and legislation to impose a carbon emissions tax on businesses. This on top of the vast web of existing socialist controls — which Sanders enthusiastically supports — over private property, enterprise, and nearly every God-given right once protected by the Bill of Rights. Sanders is, for example, a perfervid supporter of gun control and heavy, progressive, ubiquitous taxation, and, in general, government involvement in every conceivable aspect of our private lives.
But inasmuch as the aims of progressivism, Fabian socialism, and communism — as well as the democratic socialism so beloved of Bernie Sanders — are all the same in the long run, so must they have similar outcomes for humanity, sooner or later.
And what are those outcomes? In his magisterial work on socialism, economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out that the basis of economic activity is voluntary exchange, which is enabled by economic calculation. Absent voluntary exchange, rational economic calculation (pricing and valuation) is impossible, except for very simple economic domains such as individual households. Wrote Mises: “Without calculation, economic activity is impossible. Since under Socialism economic calculation is impossible, under Socialism there can be no economic activity in our sense of the word. In small and insignificant things rational action might still persist. But, for the most part, it would no longer be possible to speak of rational production. In the absence of criteria of rationality, production could not be consciously economical.”
Thus socialism as an economic system is fundamentally irrational and impracticable. Its universal implementation would trigger a swift end to the complex, extended economic order that the free markets have built up over the centuries. It is possible only piecemeal, as arid expanses of centralized control within the fertile, life-giving pastures of the free markets. For a time, the successes of capitalism confer on socialism — which parasitizes free enterprise like a lamprey its host — the false appearance of vitality. But even fragmentary socialism of the type that now characterizes the American economy is always retrogressive, not progressive, destructive and not productive. It — and not “irrationally exuberant” capitalism — is responsible for mass impoverishment, recessions, and depressions, yet it is seldom indicted nowadays in the courts of media or public opinion.
Socialism — in the guise of national healthcare; a graduated income tax; an inflationary central bank (the Federal Reserve); government subsidies of agriculture, automobiles, and a myriad other sectors; or any of a host of other illegitimate government controls on the economy — is inflicting a death of a thousand bureaucratic cuts on the American and world economy. And because it is almost never held to account, more socialism is always demanded as a remedy. ObamaCare, for example, did not appear out of thin air, but was proposed as the solution to the havoc already wrought on the healthcare sector by previous socialist half measures (Medicare and Medicaid chief among them).
Because socialism is fundamentally utopian and irrational, it also places great emphasis on uprooting and destroying the entire social fabric upon which the free market and a legal system limiting the power of government rests: the traditional moral values practiced by Western society for centuries. This is the reason that most socialists are instinctively hostile to religion, for example, and supportive of all policies that militate against the family and practices destructive to it, like sexual license, abortion, homosexuality, and the sexualization of children.
In the end, socialism can only survive by growing, throttling the life out of the free markets, destroying the economic growth that has been the wellspring of human progress for half a millennium, and implementing ever-more radical attacks on the traditional moral and social order. The havoc wrought by socialist policies inevitably produces pressure for more socialist measures to solve them, as with America’s never-ending but wholly manufactured “healthcare crisis.” The loss of economic freedom will eventually lead to the loss of all other freedoms, just as Marx envisioned. So-called class distinctions will be obliterated as humankind descends into the abyssal equality of universal serfdom. Socialism, then, regardless of its flavor, is the willful campaign to extinguish the lamps of civilization and eradicate every vestige of human progress.
Bernie Sanders and his fellow socialists from Washington to Scandinavia may refuse to accept socialism’s true nature. But Senator Sanders likely also does not recognize that his chief rival, Hillary Clinton, is also a socialist, as are many of the Republican presidential candidates (in fact, Sanders’ cumulative Freedom Index score, as good a yardstick as any of socialist leanings, is 26 percent which, while no great shakes, is significantly higher than “Democrat” Hillary Clinton’s 19 percent). Indeed, whether “progressive,” “liberal,” or even “moderate,” nearly everyone in Washington in both parties supports most of the planks of the socialist movements in days past, from minimum wages to the Federal Reserve to graduated income taxes. The only difference between them and Bernie Sanders is that the senator from Vermont is a little more honest. But they are all equally culpable in waging a campaign that, sooner or later, must destroy civilization, if allowed to run its ruinous course.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/22027-what-s-behind-bernie-s-socialism
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
"Mark my words: if we do not push back against the menace of the police state now, if we fail to hold onto the Constitution and our constitutional republic, and if we allow the government to remain the greatest threat to our freedoms, then future Thanksgivings will find us paying the price with tyranny at home and anarchy throughout the world."
This Thanksgiving, Let’s Say ‘No Thanks’ to the Tyranny of the American Police State
John W. Whitehead
“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.”—Daniel Webster
Thanksgiving is not what it once was.
Then again, America is not what she once was.
Americans have become so enthralled by the “bread and circuses” of our age—tables groaning under the weight of an abundance of rich foods, televisions tuned to sports and entertainments spectacles, stores competing for Black Friday shoppers, and a general devotion to excess and revelry—that we have lost sight of the true purpose of Thanksgiving.
Indeed, the following is a lesson in how far we have traveled—and how low we have fallen—in the more than 200 years since George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation, calling upon the nation to give thanks for a government whose purpose was ensuring the safety and happiness of its people and for a Constitution designed to safeguard civil and religious liberty.
This Thanksgiving finds us saddled with a government that is a far cry from Washington’s vision of a government that would be a blessing to all the people:
governed by wise, just and constitutional laws
faithfully executed and obeyed by its agents
assisting foreign nations with good government, peace, and concord
promoting true religion, virtue and science
and enabling temporal prosperity.
Instead, as the following shows, the U.S. government has become a warring empire, governed by laws that are rash, unjust and unconstitutional, policed by government agents who are corrupt, hypocritical and abusive, a menace to its own people, and the antithesis of everything for which Washington hoped.
George Washington didn’t intend Thanksgiving to be a day for offering up glib platitudes that require no thought, no effort and no sacrifice. He wanted it to be a day of contemplation, in which we frankly assessed our shortcomings, acknowledged our wrongdoings, and resolved to be a better, more peaceable nation in the year to come.
It is in that true spirit of Thanksgiving that I offer the following list of things for which I’m not thankful about the American police state.
The U.S. has become a corporate oligarchy. As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. As such, the citizenry has little if any impact on the policies of government. There are 131 lobbyists to every Senator, reinforcing concerns that the government represents the corporate elite rather than the citizenry.
Americans are being jailed for profit. Imprisoning Americans in private prisons and jails run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business, with states agreeing to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in privately run prisons for at least 20 years. And how do you keep the prisons full? By passing laws aimed at increasing the prison population, including the imposition of life sentences on people who commit minor or nonviolent crimes such as siphoning gasoline. Little surprise, then, that the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. The government’s tendency towards militarization and overcriminalization, in which routine, everyday behaviors become targets of regulation and prohibition, have resulted in Americans getting arrested for making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, feeding a whale, holding Bible studies in their homes, and picking their kids up from school.
Endless wars have resulted in a battlefield mindset that is infecting the nation. The Departments of Justice, Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense have passed off billions of dollars worth of military equipment to local police forces. Even EMS crews and fire fighters are being “gifted” with military tanks, Kevlar helmets and ballistic vests. Police agencies have been trained in the fine art of war. It has become second nature for local police to look and act like soldiers. Communities have become acclimated to the presence of militarized police patrolling their streets. Americans have been taught compliance at the end of a police gun or taser. Lower income neighborhoods have been transformed into war zones. Hundreds if not thousands of unarmed Americans have lost their lives at the hands of police who shoot first and ask questions later. And a whole generation of young Americans has learned to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
Militarized police, shootings of unarmed citizens, SWAT team raids, misconduct and qualified immunity have transformed the U.S. into a police state. What we must contend with today is the danger of having a standing army (which is what police forces, increasingly made up of individuals with military backgrounds and/or training, have evolved into) that has been trained to view the citizenry as little more than potential suspects, combatants and insurgents. Despite propaganda to the contrary, it is estimated that U.S. police kill more people in days than other countries do in years. On an average day in America, at least 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams (although I’ve seen estimates as high as 300 a day), which are increasingly used to deal with routine police matters: angry dogs, domestic disputes, search warrants, etc. Every five days a police officer somewhere in America engages in sexual abuseor misconduct.
The barrier between public and private property has been done away with. Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures, foreclosures, etc.—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is theft. What Americans don’t seem to comprehend is that if the government can arbitrarily take away your property, without your having much say about it, you have no true rights and no real property. In this way, the police state with all of its trappings—from surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT team raids, truancy and zero tolerance policies, asset forfeiture laws, privatized prisons and red light cameras to Sting Ray devices, fusion centers, drones, black boxes, hollow-point bullets, detention centers, speed traps and abundance of laws criminalizing otherwise legitimate conduct—has become little more than a front for a high-dollar covert operation aimed at laundering as much money as possible through government agencies and into the bank accounts of the corporate oligarchy that rule over us.
The technologically-driven surveillance state has become the fourth branch of government. This fourth branch—the NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, etc.—came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC. This age of technological tyranny has been made possible by government secrets, government lies, government spies and their corporate ties. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. The police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state.
The schools, modeled after quasi-prisons, are churning out future compliant citizens. Within America’s public schools can be found almost every aspect of the American police state that plagues those of us on the “outside”: metal detectors, surveillance cameras, militarized police, drug-sniffing dogs, tasers, cyber-surveillance, random searches, senseless arrests, jail time, the list goes on. Whether it takes the form of draconian zero tolerance policies, overreaching anti-bullying statutes, police officers charged with tasering and arresting so-called unruly children, standardized testing with its emphasis on rote answers, political correctness, or the extensive surveillance systems cropping up in schools all over the country, young people in America are first in line to be indoctrinated into compliant citizens of the new American police state.
The courts have become courts of order in an age of government-sanctioned tyranny. With every ruling handed down by the courts, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts, largely lacking in vision and scope, rendering narrow rulings that have nothing to do with true justice. This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. Given the turbulence of our age, with its police overreach, military training drills on American soil, domestic surveillance, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, wrongful convictions, and corporate corruption, the need for a guardian of the people’s rights has never been greater. Yet when presented with an opportunity to weigh in on these issues, what does our current Supreme Court usually do? It ducks. Prevaricates. Remains silent. Speaks to the narrowest possible concern. More often than not, it gives the government and its corporate sponsors the benefit of the doubt. Rarely do the concerns of the populace prevail.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, these are abuses that no American should tolerate from its government, and yet not only do we tolerate them, but we help to advance them by supporting meaningless elections, allowing ourselves to be divided by partisan politics, and failing to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution.
Mark my words: if we do not push back against the menace of the police state now, if we fail to hold onto the Constitution and our constitutional republic, and if we allow the government to remain the greatest threat to our freedoms, then future Thanksgivings will find us paying the price with tyranny at home and anarchy throughout the world.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/this-thanksgiving-lets-say-no-thanks-to-the-tyranny-of-the-american-police-state.html
John W. Whitehead
“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.”—Daniel Webster
Thanksgiving is not what it once was.
Then again, America is not what she once was.
Americans have become so enthralled by the “bread and circuses” of our age—tables groaning under the weight of an abundance of rich foods, televisions tuned to sports and entertainments spectacles, stores competing for Black Friday shoppers, and a general devotion to excess and revelry—that we have lost sight of the true purpose of Thanksgiving.
Indeed, the following is a lesson in how far we have traveled—and how low we have fallen—in the more than 200 years since George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation, calling upon the nation to give thanks for a government whose purpose was ensuring the safety and happiness of its people and for a Constitution designed to safeguard civil and religious liberty.
This Thanksgiving finds us saddled with a government that is a far cry from Washington’s vision of a government that would be a blessing to all the people:
governed by wise, just and constitutional laws
faithfully executed and obeyed by its agents
assisting foreign nations with good government, peace, and concord
promoting true religion, virtue and science
and enabling temporal prosperity.
Instead, as the following shows, the U.S. government has become a warring empire, governed by laws that are rash, unjust and unconstitutional, policed by government agents who are corrupt, hypocritical and abusive, a menace to its own people, and the antithesis of everything for which Washington hoped.
George Washington didn’t intend Thanksgiving to be a day for offering up glib platitudes that require no thought, no effort and no sacrifice. He wanted it to be a day of contemplation, in which we frankly assessed our shortcomings, acknowledged our wrongdoings, and resolved to be a better, more peaceable nation in the year to come.
It is in that true spirit of Thanksgiving that I offer the following list of things for which I’m not thankful about the American police state.
The U.S. has become a corporate oligarchy. As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. As such, the citizenry has little if any impact on the policies of government. There are 131 lobbyists to every Senator, reinforcing concerns that the government represents the corporate elite rather than the citizenry.
Americans are being jailed for profit. Imprisoning Americans in private prisons and jails run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business, with states agreeing to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in privately run prisons for at least 20 years. And how do you keep the prisons full? By passing laws aimed at increasing the prison population, including the imposition of life sentences on people who commit minor or nonviolent crimes such as siphoning gasoline. Little surprise, then, that the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. The government’s tendency towards militarization and overcriminalization, in which routine, everyday behaviors become targets of regulation and prohibition, have resulted in Americans getting arrested for making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, feeding a whale, holding Bible studies in their homes, and picking their kids up from school.
Endless wars have resulted in a battlefield mindset that is infecting the nation. The Departments of Justice, Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense have passed off billions of dollars worth of military equipment to local police forces. Even EMS crews and fire fighters are being “gifted” with military tanks, Kevlar helmets and ballistic vests. Police agencies have been trained in the fine art of war. It has become second nature for local police to look and act like soldiers. Communities have become acclimated to the presence of militarized police patrolling their streets. Americans have been taught compliance at the end of a police gun or taser. Lower income neighborhoods have been transformed into war zones. Hundreds if not thousands of unarmed Americans have lost their lives at the hands of police who shoot first and ask questions later. And a whole generation of young Americans has learned to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
Militarized police, shootings of unarmed citizens, SWAT team raids, misconduct and qualified immunity have transformed the U.S. into a police state. What we must contend with today is the danger of having a standing army (which is what police forces, increasingly made up of individuals with military backgrounds and/or training, have evolved into) that has been trained to view the citizenry as little more than potential suspects, combatants and insurgents. Despite propaganda to the contrary, it is estimated that U.S. police kill more people in days than other countries do in years. On an average day in America, at least 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams (although I’ve seen estimates as high as 300 a day), which are increasingly used to deal with routine police matters: angry dogs, domestic disputes, search warrants, etc. Every five days a police officer somewhere in America engages in sexual abuseor misconduct.
The barrier between public and private property has been done away with. Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures, foreclosures, etc.—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is theft. What Americans don’t seem to comprehend is that if the government can arbitrarily take away your property, without your having much say about it, you have no true rights and no real property. In this way, the police state with all of its trappings—from surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT team raids, truancy and zero tolerance policies, asset forfeiture laws, privatized prisons and red light cameras to Sting Ray devices, fusion centers, drones, black boxes, hollow-point bullets, detention centers, speed traps and abundance of laws criminalizing otherwise legitimate conduct—has become little more than a front for a high-dollar covert operation aimed at laundering as much money as possible through government agencies and into the bank accounts of the corporate oligarchy that rule over us.
The technologically-driven surveillance state has become the fourth branch of government. This fourth branch—the NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, etc.—came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC. This age of technological tyranny has been made possible by government secrets, government lies, government spies and their corporate ties. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. The police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state.
The schools, modeled after quasi-prisons, are churning out future compliant citizens. Within America’s public schools can be found almost every aspect of the American police state that plagues those of us on the “outside”: metal detectors, surveillance cameras, militarized police, drug-sniffing dogs, tasers, cyber-surveillance, random searches, senseless arrests, jail time, the list goes on. Whether it takes the form of draconian zero tolerance policies, overreaching anti-bullying statutes, police officers charged with tasering and arresting so-called unruly children, standardized testing with its emphasis on rote answers, political correctness, or the extensive surveillance systems cropping up in schools all over the country, young people in America are first in line to be indoctrinated into compliant citizens of the new American police state.
The courts have become courts of order in an age of government-sanctioned tyranny. With every ruling handed down by the courts, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts, largely lacking in vision and scope, rendering narrow rulings that have nothing to do with true justice. This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. Given the turbulence of our age, with its police overreach, military training drills on American soil, domestic surveillance, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, wrongful convictions, and corporate corruption, the need for a guardian of the people’s rights has never been greater. Yet when presented with an opportunity to weigh in on these issues, what does our current Supreme Court usually do? It ducks. Prevaricates. Remains silent. Speaks to the narrowest possible concern. More often than not, it gives the government and its corporate sponsors the benefit of the doubt. Rarely do the concerns of the populace prevail.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, these are abuses that no American should tolerate from its government, and yet not only do we tolerate them, but we help to advance them by supporting meaningless elections, allowing ourselves to be divided by partisan politics, and failing to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution.
Mark my words: if we do not push back against the menace of the police state now, if we fail to hold onto the Constitution and our constitutional republic, and if we allow the government to remain the greatest threat to our freedoms, then future Thanksgivings will find us paying the price with tyranny at home and anarchy throughout the world.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/this-thanksgiving-lets-say-no-thanks-to-the-tyranny-of-the-american-police-state.html
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