PoLiTiCaLlY CoRrEcT

General comments about the world today

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Our Loss of Liberties in a Topsy-Turvy America by Charles Goyette

Our Loss of Liberties in a Topsy-Turvy America

by Charles Goyette

You’re a householder. The downstairs servants are stealing the silverware. The upstairs servants refuse to tell you about it. But they do insist on their right to shuffle through the papers on your desk and read your diary.
You own a business. You’re forbidden from going through your employees’ expense accounts or checking the books. On the other hand, your employees snoop through your credit-card records and your bank account.
You’re a citizen. Your employees in the government insist on operating in secret, and they even criminalize the act of someone telling you what they are doing. But they feel entitled to know what websites you visit, whom you call and where you are when you call, and to even help themselves to your social media friends list.
Who is the master, and who the servant here? Whose business is it, and who is the employee? Who is the sovereign, and who is the subservient?

It’s as though we’ve stumbled into a bizarro world, like the one that confounds Superman, or in the Seinfeld episode when Elaine encounters people the exact opposite of her friends. Everything has gone topsy-turvy.

The government is supposed to operate in the open. Your affairs are supposed to be private. How that has been stood upside down!

The prohibitions against government in the Bill of Rights are essential to the privacy of Americans who wish to go about their business peacefully and unmolested. They are a linchpin of our prosperity. But witness what the politicians of both parties have done.

Politicians of both parties are violating our right of privacy

Thanks to Edward Snowden and others, we know that the National Security Agency eavesdrops on Americans without court warrants. We have discovered the government’s creation of databases of trillions of telephone calls without probable cause. How does any of this square with the Bill of Rights? (“Amendment 4 — Search and Seizure. 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.”)

In the same spirit of renegade disregard of our privacy, the FBI under the Patriot Act has issued hundreds of thousands of “National Security Letters,” effectively subpoenas demanding information. That the branches of American government are divided as a check on power is meaningless when the executive is allowed to read the judicial branch out of the picture. The FBI, the CIA, and now even the Pentagon issue these demands on their own initiative without a demonstration of probable cause and without judicial oversight.

Worse still, these “subpoenas” are accompanied by a gag order forbidding the recipients from telling anyone about the government’s activity. This results in a truly surreal situation in which the FBI and other agencies threaten their victims with criminal charges to keep their extra-judicial activities secret, thus trampling on both the First and Fourth amendments at the same time.
More renegade disregard? All right, try this. Judge Andrew Napolitano describes the bizarro inversion of the Constitution in which a mere dozen members of Congress have been allowed to supplant the entire Congress:

“Since 9/11, the Bush and Obama administrations have succeeded in claiming they have congressional consent for the massive NSA spying by merely getting a consensus from the Gang of 12. There is, of course, no provision in the Constitution for the substitution of all 535 members of Congress with a select group of 12 of them, but Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama have gone along with this.”

“The kicker is that all members of the Gang of 12 have been sworn to secrecy and threatened with prosecution if they reveal to anyone, including other members of Congress, what the NSA and other intelligence agencies reveal to them.”

Of course, many of these outrages stem from the 9/11 attacks. But since the government operates in secrecy, Americans may never learn the sordid details of state sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks. Twenty-eight pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 report have been concealed from the American people by both the Bush and Obama administrations. But Congressmen Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) describe themselves as “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks that they have discovered in the report.

They are prohibited by federal law from revealing details they have learned.

We may not have star chambers yet, the abusive state security courts of kings that the founders tried to prevent, but we have had torture, so we can’t be sure. But we know that we have secret courts.

Up is down and down is up wherever you look. Even the smallest public companies are audited. The government insists on it. But we can’t even get close to an audit of the biggest, most powerful financial institution on the face of the earth, the Federal Reserve.

Its operations are secret.

The government has never enjoyed more secrecy. Your private affairs — financial, medical, social and family relationships, communications, and activities — have never been more open to state snooping.

No good can come of this.

Best regards,

Charles

posted by chris # 4:22 AM 0 Comments

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

not even a smidgen of corruption.......

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There was "not even a smidgen of corruption" at the IRS, Barack Obama tells us. Obama blamed the targeting on rules that were "difficult" to interpret and that caused "bureaucratic" mistakes, but the rules have been in place since 1959 and until 2010 there didn't seem to be a problem implementing them, nor was there any targeting of disfavored political groups. We know Obama's lying partly because his lips were moving, but it was made clearer in the latest congressional hearing on the political targeting perpetrated by the IRS on Obama's opponents.

House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) revealed a June 2012 email from Treasury attorney Ruth Madrigal to IRS officials, including Lois "Plead the Fifth" Lerner, regarding the political activity of tax-exempt groups and how the IRS could more easily keep tabs on those groups "off-plan," which Camp noted means "hidden from the public." No wonder Lerner refused to testify before Congress.

The email reveals that the proposed new rules published in the Federal Register in November 2013 were actually being ironed out at least by 2012, and other evidence suggests it was as early as 2011. That means the IRS's targeting was clearly intentional and officials wanted to codify such tactics. Furthermore, the political targeting wasn't, as Obama claimed, the result of "confusion" over the old rules. Indeed, IRS officials seemed to believe the Supreme Court had erred in its Citizens United decision on campaign finance reform, and they sought to rectify that via regulation.

Even the ACLU -- no friend of conservatives -- warned of its "serious concerns" with the proposed IRS regulations, saying that the IRS "threatens to discourage or sterilize an enormous amount of political discourse in America." Indeed, the First Amendment was written to protect political discourse precisely of the kind coming from the Tea Party.

Nevertheless, new IRS Commissioner John Koskinen did the unthinkable at the hearing: He apologized for his agency's targeting of Tea Party groups. It's "intolerable," he said, and "It won't happen going forward." Furthermore, "to the extent that people suffered accordingly, I apologize for that." His apology is all fine and good, but it doesn't fix the problem or stop the proposed new rules from codifying the abuse. It also doesn't hold anyone accountable for effectively silencing the Tea Party in an election year. (In fact, IRS officials just received $62.5 million in bonuses.) Given what we know so far, the very legitimacy of Barack Obama's re-election can be called into question because of a serious and scandalous abuse of power that went far beyond some "bureaucratic" mistakes in a Cincinnati office.

posted by chris # 4:55 AM 0 Comments

Saturday, February 08, 2014

Does any of this sound like what is happening today in the United States?

Saul Alinsky
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American
community organizer and writer. He is generally considered to be the
founder of modern community organizing. He is often noted for his book
Rules for Radicals.

In the course of nearly four decades of political organizing, Alinsky
received much criticism, but also gained praise from many public
figures. His organizing skills were focused on improving the living
conditions of poor communities across North America. In the 1950s, he
began turning his attention to improving conditions in the
African-American ghettos, beginning with Chicago's and later traveling
to other ghettos in California, Michigan, New York City, and a dozen
other "trouble spots".

His ideas were adapted in the 1960s by some U.S. college students and
other young counterculture-era organizers, who used them as part of
their strategies for organizing on campus and beyond. Time magazine
once wrote that "American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's
ideas," and conservative author William F. Buckley said he was "very
close to being an organizational genius."
________________________________

How to create a social state by Saul Alinsky

There are 8 levels of control that must be obtained before you are
able to create a social state.

The first is the most important.

1) Healthcare –
Control healthcare and you control the people

2) Poverty –
Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier
to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for
them to live.

3) Debt –
Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to
increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.

4) Gun Control –
Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way
you are able to create a police state.

5) Welfare –
Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income)

6) Education –
Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what
children learn in school.

7) Religion –
Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools

8) Class Warfare –
Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more
discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the
support of the poor.

Now, think...
Does any of this sound like what is happening today in the United States?

posted by chris # 4:48 AM 0 Comments