When The Shouting Stops

ORIGINAL LINK

I've been trying for some time now to understand the reaction of Hillary Clinton’s supporters to her defeat in last week’s election. At first, I simply dismissed it as another round of the amateur theatrics both parties indulge in whenever they lose the White House. Back in 2008, as most of my readers will doubtless recall, Barack Obama’s victory was followed by months of shrieking from Republicans, who insisted—just as a good many Democrats are insisting today—that the election of the other guy meant that democracy had failed, the United States and the world were doomed, and the supporters of the losing party would be rounded up and sent to concentration camps any day now.

That sort of histrionic nonsense has been going on for decades. In 2000, Democrats chewed the scenery in the grand style when George W. Bush was elected president. In 1992, it was the GOP’s turn—I still have somewhere a pamphlet that was circulated by Republicans after the election containing helpful phrases in Russian, so that American citizens would have at least a little preparation when Bill Clinton ran the country into the ground and handed the remains over to the Soviet Union. American politics and popular culture being what it is, this kind of collective hissy fit is probably unavoidable.

Fans of irony have much to savor. You’ve got people who were talking eagerly about how to game the electoral college two weeks ago, who now are denouncing the electoral college root and branch; you’ve got people who insisted that Trump, once he lost, should concede and shut up, who are demonstrating a distinct unwillingness to follow their own advice. You’ve got people in the bluest of blue left coast cities marching in protest as though that’s going to change a single blessed thing—as I’ve pointed out in previous posts here, protest marches that aren’t backed up with effective grassroots political organization are simply a somewhat noisy form of aerobic exercise.

Still, there’s more going on here than that. I know some fairly thoughtful people whose reaction to the election’s outcome wasn’t histrionic at all—it consisted of various degrees of shock, disorientation, and fear. They felt, if the ones I read are typical, that the people who voted for Trump were deliberately rejecting and threatening them personally. That’s something we ought to talk about.

To some extent, to be sure, this was a reflection of the political culture of personal demonization I discussed in last week’s post. Many of Clinton’s supporters convinced themselves, with the help of a great deal of propaganda from the Democratic Party and its bedfellows in the mainstream media, that Donald Trump is a monster of depravity thirsting for their destruction, and anyone who supports him must hate everything good. Now they’re cringing before the bogeyman they imagined, certain that it’s going to act out the role they assigned it and gobble them up.

Another factor at work here is the very strong tendency of people on the leftward end of American politics to believe in what I’ve elsewhere called the religion of progress—the faith that history has an inherent tilt toward improvement, and more to the point, toward the particular kinds of improvement they prefer. Hillary Clinton, in an impromptu response to a heckler at one of her campaign appearances, phrased the central tenet of that religion concisely: “We’re not going to go back. We’re going to go forward.” Like Clinton herself, a great many of her followers saw their cause as another step forward in the direction of progress, and to find themselves “going back” is profoundly disorienting—even though those labels “forward” and “back” are entirely arbitrary when they aren’t the most crassly manipulative sort of propaganda.

That said, there’s another factor driving the reaction of Clinton’s supporters, and the best way I can find to approach it is to consider one of the more thoughtful responses from that side of the political landscape, an incisive essay posted to Livejournal last week by someone who goes by the nom de Web “Ferrett Steinmetz.” The essay’s titled The Cold, Cold Math We’ll Need to Survive the Next Twenty Years, and it comes so close to understanding what happened last Tuesday that the remaining gap offers an unsparing glimpse straight to the heart of the failure of the Left to make its case to the rest of the American people.

At the heart of the essay are two indisputable points. The first is that the core constituencies of the Democratic Party are not large enough by themselves to decide who gets to be president. That’s just as true of the Republican party, by the way, and with few exceptions it’s true in every democratic society.  Each party large enough to matter has a set of core constituencies who can be counted on to vote for it under most circumstances, and then has to figure out how to appeal to enough people outside its own base to win elections. That’s something that both parties in the US tend to forget from time to time, and when they do so, they lose.

The second indisputable point is that if Democrats want to win an election in today’s America, they have to find ways to reach out to people who don’t share the values and interests of the Left. It’s the way that Ferrett Steinmetz frames that second point, though, that shows why the Democratic Party failed to accomplish that necessary task this time. “We have to reach out to people who hate us,” Steinmetz says, and admits that he has no idea at all how to do that.

Let’s take those two assertions one at a time. First, do the people who voted for Donald Trump in this election actually hate Ferrett Steinmetz and his readers—or for that matter, women, people of color, sexual minorities, and so on? Second, how can Steinmetz and his readers reach out to these supposedly hateful people and get them to vote for Democratic candidates?

I have no idea whether Ferrett Steinmetz knows anybody who voted for Donald Trump.  I suspect he doesn’t—or at least, given the number of people I’ve heard from who’ve privately admitted that they voted for Trump but would never let their friends know this, I suspect he doesn’t know anyone who he knows voted for Trump. Here I have a certain advantage. Living in a down-at-the-heels mill town in the north central Appalachians, I know quite a few people who supported Trump; I’ve also heard from a very large number of Trump supporters by way of this blog, and through a variety of other sources.

Are there people among the pro-Trump crowd who are in fact racists, sexists, homophobes, and so on? Of course. I know a couple of thoroughly bigoted racists who cast their votes for him, for example, including at least one bona fide member of the Ku Klux Klan. The point I think the Left tends to miss is that not everyone in flyover country is like that. A few years back, in fact, a bunch of Klansmen came to the town where I live to hold a recruitment rally, and the churches in town—white as well as black—held a counter-rally, stood on the other side of the street, and drowned the Klansmen out, singing hymns at the top of their lungs until the guys in the white robes got back in their cars and drove away.  Surprising? Not at all; in a great deal of middle America, that’s par for the course these days.

To understand why a town that ran off the Klan was a forest of Trump signs in the recent election, it’s necessary to get past the stereotypes and ask a simple question: why did people vote for Trump? I don’t claim to have done a scientific survey, but these are the things I heard Trump voters talking about in the months and weeks leading up to the election:

1. The Risk of War. This was the most common point at issue, especially among women—nearly all the women I know who voted for Trump, in fact, cited it as either the decisive reason for their vote or one of the top two or three. They listened to Hillary Clinton talk about imposing a no-fly zone over Syria in the face of a heavily armed and determined Russian military presence, and looked at the reckless enthusiasm for overthrowing governments she’d displayed during her time as Secretary of State. They compared this to Donald Trump’s advocacy of a less confrontational relationship with Russia, and they decided that Trump was less likely to get the United States into a shooting war.

War isn’t an abstraction here in flyover country. Joining the military is very nearly the only option young people here have if they want a decent income, job training, and the prospect of a college education, and so most families have at least one relative or close friend on active duty.  People here respect the military, but the last two decades of wars of choice in the Middle East have done a remarkably good job of curing middle America of any fondness for military adventurism it might have had.  While affluent feminists swooned over the prospect of a woman taking on another traditionally masculine role, and didn’t seem to care in the least that the role in question was “warmonger,” a great many people in flyover country weighed the other issues against the prospect of having a family member come home in a body bag. Since the Clinton campaign did precisely nothing to reassure them on this point, they voted for Trump.

2. The Obamacare Disaster. This was nearly as influential as Clinton’s reckless militarism. Most of the people I know who voted for Trump make too much money to qualify for a significant federal subsidy, and too little to be able to cover the endlessly rising cost of insurance under the absurdly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” They recalled, rather too clearly for the electoral prospects of the Democrats, how Obama assured them that the price of health insurance would go down, that they would be able to keep their existing plans and doctors, and so on through all the other broken promises that surrounded Obamacare before it took effect.

It was bad enough that so few of those promises were kept. The real deal-breaker, though, was the last round of double- or triple-digit annual increase in premiums announced this November, on top of increases nearly as drastic a year previously. Even among those who could still afford the new premiums, the writing was on the wall: sooner or later, unless something changed, a lot of people were going to have to choose between losing their health care and being driven into destitution—and then there were the pundits who insisted that everything would be fine, if only the penalties for not getting insurance were raised to equal the cost of insurance! Faced with that, it’s not surprising that a great many people went out and voted for the one candidate who said he’d get rid of Obamacare.

3. Bringing Back Jobs. This is the most difficult one for a lot of people on the Left to grasp, but that’s a measure of the gap between the bicoastal enclaves where the Left’s policies are formed and the hard realities of flyover country. Globalization and open borders sound great when you don’t have to grapple with the economic consequences of shipping tens of millions of manufacturing jobs overseas, on the one hand, and federal policies that flood the labor market with illegal immigrants to drive down wages, on the other. Those two policies, backed by both parties and surrounded by a smokescreen of empty rhetoric about new jobs that somehow never managed to show up, brought about the economic collapse of rural and small town America, driving a vast number of Americans into destitution and misery.

Clinton’s campaign did a really inspired job of rehashing every detail of the empty rhetoric just mentioned, and so gave people out here in flyover country no reason to expect anything but more of the same downward pressure on their incomes, their access to jobs, and the survival of their communities. Trump, by contrast, promised to scrap or renegotiate the trade agreements that played so large a role in encouraging offshoring of jobs, and also promised to put an end to the tacit Federal encouragement of mass illegal immigration that’s driven down wages. That was enough to get a good many voters whose economic survival was on the line to cast their votes for Trump.

4. Punishing the Democratic Party. This one is a bit of an outlier, because the people I know who cast votes for Trump for this reason mostly represented a different demographic from the norm out here: young, politically liberal, and incensed by the way that the Democratic National Committee rigged the nomination process to favor Clinton and shut out Bernie Sanders. They believed that if the campaign for the Democratic nomination had been conducted fairly, Sanders would have been the nominee, and they also believe that Sanders would have stomped Trump in the general election.  For what it’s worth, I think they’re right on both counts.

These voters pointed out to me, often with some heat, that the policies Hillary Clinton supported in her time as senator and secretary of state were all but indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush—you know, the policies Democrats denounced so forcefully a little more than eight years ago.  They argued that voting for Clinton in the general election when she’d been rammed down the throats of the Democratic rank and file by the party’s oligarchy would have signaled the final collapse of the party’s progressive wing into irrelevance. They were willing to accept four years of a Republican in the White House to make it brutally clear to the party hierarchy that the shenanigans that handed the nomination to Clinton were more than they were willing to tolerate.

Those were the reasons I heard people mention when they talked in my hearing about why they were voting for Donald Trump. They didn’t talk about the issues that the media considered important—the email server business, the on-again-off-again FBI investigation, and so on. Again, this isn’t a scientific survey, but I found it interesting that not one Trump voter I knew mentioned those.

What’s more, hatred toward women, people of color, sexual minorities, and the like weren’t among the reasons that people cited for voting for Trump, either. Do a fair number of the people I’m discussing hold attitudes that the Left considers racist, sexist, homophobic, or what have you? No doubt—but the mere fact that such attitudes exist does not prove that those attitudes, rather than the issues just listed, guided their votes.

When I’ve pointed this out to people on the leftward side of the political spectrum, the usual response has been to insist that, well, yes, maybe Trump did address the issues that matter to people in flyover country, but even so, it was utterly wrong of them to vote for a racist, sexist homophobe! We’ll set aside for the moment the question of how far these labels actually apply to Trump, and how much they’re the product of demonizing rhetoric on the part of his political enemies on both sides of the partisan divide. Even accepting the truth of these accusations, what the line of argument just cited claims is that people in the flyover states should have ignored the issues that affect their own lives, and should have voted instead for the issues that liberals think are important.

In some idyllic Utopian world, maybe.  In the real world, that’s not going to happen. People are not going to embrace the current agenda of the American Left if doing so means that they can expect their medical insurance to double in price every couple of years, their wages to continue lurching downward, their communities to sink further in a death spiral of economic collapse, and their kids to come home in body bags from yet another pointless war in the Middle East.

Thus there’s a straightforward answer to both of Ferrett Steinmetz’ baffled questions. Do the people who voted for Trump hate Steinmetz, his readers, or the various groups—women, people of color, sexual minorities—whose concerns are central to the politics of today’s American Left? In many cases, not at all, and in most others, not to any degree that matters politically. They simply don’t care that much about the concerns that the Left considers central—especially when those are weighed against the issues that directly affect their own lives.

As for what Ferrett Steinmetz’s side of the political landscape can offer the people who voted for Trump, that’s at least as simple to answer: listen to those voters, and they’ll tell you. To judge by what I’ve heard them say, they want a less monomaniacally interventionist foreign policy and an end to the endless spiral of wars of choice in the Middle East; they want health insurance that provides reasonable benefits at a price they can afford; they want an end to trade agreements that ship American jobs overseas, and changes to immigration policy that stop the systematic importation of illegal immigrants by big corporate interests to drive down wages and benefits; and they want a means of choosing candidates that actually reflects the will of the people.

The fascinating thing is, of course, that these are things the Democratic Party used to offer. It wasn’t that long ago, in fact, that the Democratic Party made exactly these issues—opposition to reckless military adventurism, government programs that improved the standard of living of working class Americans, and a politics of transparency and integrity—central not only to its platform but to the legislation its congresspeople fought to get passed and its presidents signed into law. Back when that was the case, by the way, the Democratic Party was the majority party in this country, not only in Congress but also in terms of state governorships and legislatures. As the party backed away from offering those things, it lost its majority position. While correlation doesn’t prove causation, I think that in this case a definite case can be made.

More generally, if the Left wants to get the people who voted for Trump to vote for them instead, they’re going to have to address the issues that convinced those voters to cast their ballots the way they did. Oh, and by the way, listening to what the voters in question have to say, rather than loudly insisting that they can only be motivated by hatred, would also help quite a bit. That may be a lot to ask, but once the shouting stops, I hope it’s a possibility.

via IFTTT

American Communism

ORIGINAL LINK

We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America, by Kate Daloz, PublicAffairs, 355 pages, $26.99

In 1971, a young man named Bernie Sanders visited Myrtle Hill Farm, a rural Vermont commune for disaffected white middle-class kids. Its residents' back-to-the-land lifestyle was meant to free them from a culture that had come, in the midst of war and racial unrest, to seem "an unstoppable torrent of death and destruction, all for no reason."

Myrtle Hill had an all-are-welcome policy—for three days. Then the core owners would decide by consensus whether you were cool to hang around. Sanders' tendency to just sit around talking politics and avoid actual physical labor got him the boot.

That's just one of the stories in Kate Daloz's We Are As Gods, a loving but honest history of hippie communes in Vermont in the 1970s. Daloz has the journalist's gift for getting people to explain themselves, the historian's ability to explain the context in which they made their choices, and the novelist's power for revealing character through action, plot, and the perfectly chosen detail. While she focuses on a small group of communal and quasi-communal rural homesteads within a few miles of each other in Vermont—one of which housed her parents, Judy and Larry—Daloz explains that her characters represented a large and unprecedented cultural and demographic shift.

The decision to build a saner, purer way of life away from urban civilization and private property was "being made almost simultaneously by thousands of other young people all across the country at the same moment for almost the same reason," she writes. No other point in American history, Daloz says, saw so much deurbanization, with as many as a million young Americans going back to the land. Almost all of them, she notes, were from middle-class white backgrounds; most were well-educated, with no fear that they couldn't make their way quite well in normal society. This gave them a safety net "that made such radical choices possible."

Their motive was liberty—the freedom to control their own environment, education, technology, diet, productivity. (To the significant number of draft dodgers and teen runaways involved, their very liberty to live free of violence was at stake.) But though this is not Daloz's central point, her fine-grained narrative shows that being free of the technologies and wealth thrown off by the national and international division of labor carried with it its own tyranny.

Many of these young communalists believed their world was doomed, whether through nuclear war, fascistic repression, or ecological megadeath. Learning how to live off the land, then, was about survival itself, not just ideological self-satisfaction. One of this book's main characters was driven to rural Vermont by the realization that if the industrial civilization that was all he knew broke down, he'd "just fucking die. You'd just stand there and die." He felt it his duty to thrive off only the soil, water, and animals on his property with techniques that didn't require energy or fuel from the outside world.

But as everyone in We Are As Gods soon learned, a small group of human beings pitted against nature were at a far greater disadvantage than they dreamed. Despite the valorization of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and its ethos of learning to master the tools and technologies of self-sufficient living, far too many people attracted to the movement knew—as Robert Houriet, one of the original chroniclers of the scene, put it—all about the Tarot but nothing about how to fix a pump.

Myrtle Hill outlasted the vast majority of similar communes that arose at the same time. Its rise and fall, from 1970 to the mid-'80s, is the spine of the book's narrative. (Daloz notes that groups with a unified and specific religious or sociological goal tended to last longer than ones with the pure, groovy "let's hang out and be free together" attitude of Myrtle Hill.)

One of the original Myrtle Hill couples, Fletcher and Nancy, had already lived at what might be the original weird arty hippie commune of the era, Colorado's Drop City, whose open-door policy quickly led it to druggy, decadent decay while helping to popularize the idea of jury-rigged geodesic domes as good hippie living. Fletcher and Nancy hoped that non-rat-race life in rural Vermont would give them plenty of time to pursue their interests in filmmaking and painting. It didn't work out that way.

The lives of the Myrtle Hill gang become intertwined with a smaller communal grouping of two couples in a nearby farmhouse dubbed Entropy Acres. The latter's troubles were many and varied. To start with, since one of the couples held the actual deed to the property, the other couple often felt powerless. The couples also dueled over the propriety of eating meat. Fully committed to a "no modern conveniences" ethic, they tried to farm for money using no machine power. The task was incredibly hard and remarkably unlucrative. Their early attempt to pump organic carrots into the national supermarket system grossed $3,000 for 18,000 pounds of carrots; each individual vegetable had been touched by human hands at least four times and their cultivation worked five adults all day every day for months.

When the Entropy Acres couples tried to re-enter the cash-for-labor economy by seeking jobs as county school bus drivers, they became poster children for the often tense relationship with the townies, who rejected them because it was rumored (correctly) that they grew a little pot on their homestead.

While most of the story takes place in Vermont, a few of her characters understandably didn't want to suffer through Northeast winters without sufficient warm shelter, so they hit the road to survey, and thus help Daloz's readers survey, the burgeoning communal scene across the country.

In one fascinating chapter, we see another example of a commune rubbing against its noncommunal neighbors the wrong way. In a California commune called Morningstar, landowner Lou Gottlieb, formerly a popular folksinger with the Limeliters, declared that "shitting in the garden…is a spiritual act, as well as a constitutional right." He tried to create a legal workaround by signing over legal ownership of the land to "God," but the plan failed. His gang of neighbor-aggravating hippies were condemned as public enemies by Gov. Ronald Reagan and most of the makeshift structures were bulldozed by the authorities.

Daloz's reporting displays the full range of communal experience. There was free love, and sometimes there was jealousy. There was self-sufficiency, and sometimes there was no way to keep warm. There were canvas tents for shelter, and sometimes there were icicles hanging from the inner ceiling that could take your eye out. (And if you were sheltering your cow in such a tent, and the snow settled too heavy, there were a collapsed tent and a dead cow.) There was tobogganing through the snow with your loving comrades, drunk on your homemade dandelion wine; and then there was spreading meningitis and staph to each other. There was the joy of building a self-contained toilet system, and then the relief of putting out a fire in that toilet without burning down your whole dome.

There were children being raised by a village, and there were parents getting tense and angry when another adult tried to discipline their kid. There was talk of total equality, and there was the reality that the women were cooking, cleaning, and minding the children while men got high around the fire and made big plans. There was the glorious freedom of disconnection from the corporate death culture, and there was the endless drudgery required to eat and be anything close to comfortable.

The final blow that shattered the Myrtle Hill experiment came courtesy of the expanded drug war in the Reagan '80s. Jed, one of the early Myrtle Hill residents, took to growing lots of marijuana. He protected that pot with lots of guns and fences on what was supposed to be group land, and became consumed by a raging paranoia that destroyed any sense of communal togetherness, fun, or eventually even safety. (Though Daloz does not seem to have interviewed Jed himself, one of her central characters, Myrtle Hill's mainstay matriarch Lorraine, also briefly dabbled in pot growing on the property. Lorraine said her motive was needing cash to pay taxes.)

When Jed got busted, the Myrtle Hill crew needed a lot of expensive legal help and political pull to avoid having their land seized by the feds. Craig, Myrtle Hill's original source of cash, was proud of the "communal land trust" legal structure in which the full-timers (each of whom had been chosen by consensus) took turns making the monthly mortgage payments. Eventually, a legal entity controlled by all of them owned the land.

But even before Jed's bust, some of the folks who had put tons of sweat equity into improving the land and the houses on it realized they were trapped unless they were willing to abandon the homes they'd built. A normal American landowner could make money by selling her property if she wanted to leave. That wasn't possible under Myrtle Hill's communal structure, which sucked for those who felt terrorized by the erratic Jed.

After the trauma of his arrest, the communards managed to agree to split ownership into a more standard personal model for the 20 acres surrounding each individual home. Three of the group continued to own the remaining unoccupied land communally for a few years. Then their "spouses called a reality check" on paying taxes on land they didn't use, and they sold it.

Daloz cares deeply for her characters—remember, two of them are her parents—and she is ultimately kind in her judgments about their successes and failures, their impact on themselves and America. But she is an honest enough reporter that not every reader will share her perspective. You may be charmed by a hippie romance that begins when the young lady sees that the young man keeps peanut butter smeared on his hat brim in case he gets hungry, or you may not. But Daloz's caring, detailed understanding of who these people are, why they did what they did, and the lessons they learned is skilled enough that it's hard not to become interested in seeing whether everything turns out well for them.

From this reader's perspective, it doesn't. The communalists' physical and emotional experiences seem harder than they needed to be. (Not that most of them didn't have a lot of edenic memories as well.) Lives far less ambitious and adventurous than the ones these colonists chose can also go wrong, so perhaps they ought not be uniquely faulted for their fecklessness. But it can't be denied that this is a story of people who were very mistaken in their assumptions about how their choices would work out for them.

For one thing, they often didn't realize that pre-industrial rural life was never so much self-sufficient as village-sufficient: It was idiotic to try to be your own grower, miller, baker, and blacksmith if it wasn't absolutely necessary. They also grossly underestimated how much richer, healthier, and more comfortable the divisions of labor found in industrial civilization make us.

Yet her characters did not completely eschew the market economy; because these communes were voluntary experiments with room for lots of trial and error, they were able to make some lasting contributions to American culture beyond an extended lesson in things not to do. Craig, one of Myrtle Hill's founders, recognized the need to get their groovy foodstuffs organized, sold, and transported. So he began the Loaves and Fishes trucking company, which helped forge a national network among food co-ops for those who wanted homemade cheeses and granolas and exotic spices such as cumin that had previously been very hard to find in the U.S.

Such hot modern brands as Celestial Seasonings, Burt's Bees, Tom's of Maine, Stonyfield Yogurt, and Cascadian Farms Organic all arose from the setting Daloz chronicles. As she notes in her conclusion, "every last leaf and crumb of today's $39 billion organic food industry owes its existence" to the 1970s hippie commune scene. America's diet would be far less varied and interesting without them.

Meanwhile, as Daloz notes, "every YouTube DIY tutorial, user review, and open-source code owes something to the Whole Earth Catalog," the periodical that energized the movement and spawned the epigram ("We are as gods and might as well get good at it") from which the title of Daloz's book is taken.

In her brief but entertaining survey of earlier waves of voluntary rural communism, Daloz quotes Louisa May Alcott, who grew up on a commune called Fruitlands. Though she lived a century before Myrtle Hill came into being, Alcott could have been summarizing Daloz's own spirit of clear-eyed admiration tinged with admonition when she noted that "to live for one's principles, at all costs, is a dangerous speculation; and the failure of an ideal, no matter how humane and noble, is harder for the world to forgive and forget than bank robbery or the grand swindles of corrupt politicians." Daloz helps us forgive, but not forget.

via IFTTT

Obama Refuses to Pardon Edward Snowden. Trump’s New CIA Pick Wants Him Dead.

ORIGINAL LINK

President Obama indicated on Friday that he won’t pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even as President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to run the CIA: Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who has called for “the traitor Edward Snowden” to be executed.

Pompeo has supported nearly unfettered NSA surveillance, has blamed Muslim leaders for condoning terror, and is one of the most hyperbolic members of Congress when it comes to describing the Islamic State, which he has called “an existential threat to America” and “the most lethal and powerful terrorist group ever to have existed.”

In an interview with Obama published on Friday, German newspaper Der Spiegel asked: “Are you going to pardon Edward Snowden?” Obama replied: “I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves, so that’s not something that I would comment on at this point.”

But P.S. Ruckman, editor of the Pardon Power blog said Obama is wrong to suggest he couldn’t pardon Snowden if he wanted to. Ruckman noted that Obama has previously only granted pardons and commutations to people who have already been convicted. “I just think what he may have better said is: ‘I prefer that he present himself to a court and then we’ll talk turkey.’ But technically in terms of the Constitution, there are no restrictions at all.”

The operative Supreme Court ruling, from 1886, states that “The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.”

Obama said that although Snowden “raised some legitimate concerns,” he “did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community.”

Obama also suggested that the debate is between people holding two extremist positions: people who “think we can take a 100-percent absolutist approach to protecting privacy” and “those who think that security is the only thing and don’t care about privacy.”

Very few people actually occupy either extreme. But Pompeo, a three-term congressman and former Army officer, is about as close as it comes to the latter.

In a 2014 letter, Pompeo accused Snowden of “intentional distortion of truth that he and his media enablers have engaged in.” Pompeo supports virtually no legal barriers to having the NSA spy on Americans, and has alarmed civil liberties advocates with many of the positions he has taken while serving on the House Intelligence Committee. Not only has he argued that the NSA should resume its phone records program, he has called on Congress to “pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database.”

“What’s needed is a fundamental upgrade to America’s surveillance capabilities,” reads a Wall Street Journal piece Pompeo co-wrote in January.

Pompeo is also a staunch defender of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, calling it an “important national asset,” and repeatedly arguing that closing the facility would endanger Americans. He has also defended CIA torturers, saying that “these men and women are not torturers,” and that “the programs being used were within the law.” He called the exhaustive, 6,000-page Senate torture report “some liberal game being played by the ACLU and Sen. Feinstein.”

Civil liberties groups immediately expressed concern about Pompeo as CIA director. The position requires Senate confirmation.

“Congressman Pompeo’s positions on bulk surveillance and Guantanamo Bay also raise serious civil liberties concerns about privacy and due process,” the ACLU said in a statement. “These positions and others merit serious public scrutiny through a confirmation process. His positions on mass surveillance have been rejected by federal courts and have been the subject of several lawsuits filed by the ACLU.”

Pompeo has also accused Islamic faith leaders of being “potentially complicit” in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. “When the most devastating terrorist attacks on America in the last 20 years come overwhelmingly from people of a single faith, and are performed in the name of that faith, a special obligation falls on those that are the leaders of that faith,” Pompeo said in a speech on the House floor. “Instead of responding, silence has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts and more importantly still, in those that may well follow.”

Because numerous Islamic leaders had in fact condemned the attack, the Council on American Islamic issued a letter calling his remarks “false and irresponsible,” and urged him to publicly correct them.

Top photo: Pompeo listens at a hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

The post Obama Refuses to Pardon Edward Snowden. Trump’s New CIA Pick Wants Him Dead. appeared first on The Intercept.

via IFTTT

Facebook and Google Ready to Kill Alternative Media for the Government

ORIGINAL LINK
A war on freedom of the press is a war on you.

via IFTTT

Venezuela Caps Daily Bank Withdrawals at US $5 to Avoid Bankruptcy

ORIGINAL LINK


via IFTTT

Vaccine Liability Protection

Vaccine Liability Protection: "Another sign that autonomy and civil liberties are being threatened in America is the recently proposed change to public health law published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).1

This allows federal officials to use police power to apprehend, isolate and involuntarily quarantine travelers simply suspected of being at risk for getting measles or other infections until they sign a contract agreeing to application of “public health measures,” like vaccination.

A big reason they can get away with it is that nobody is accountable in a civil court of law when people are harmed by public health laws. Curbing civil liberties under the guise of protecting the public health and national security has become big business."

'via Blog this'

The Indian Government Just Eliminated 80% of the Country’s Cash

ORIGINAL LINK
Pay attention, America.

via IFTTT

Freedom of Thought and Religious Beliefs Are Under Attack

ORIGINAL LINK

By Dr. Mercola

Your freedom of thought, conscience and religious beliefs are under attack, so it is really vital that you listen to the information presented by Barbara Loe Fisher in this interview with me.

Fisher co-founded the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) in 1982 and she has been a leading health rights advocate defending the human right to informed consent to medical risk taking, including the legal right to make voluntary vaccine choices — a right that has been severely eroded in the U.S. over the past three decades.

“If we don’t have the right in this country to make health care choices, including vaccine choices, that impact our bodies and the bodies of our children, we’re really not free in any sense of the word,” she says.

“I’ve seen this evolve over almost 35 years now. It became clear several decades ago that the goal of public health officials and the medical trade organizations and industry was to have everyone in the country … have to get every single government-recommended vaccine … That is what I saw happening, but I didn’t know how long it was going to take.”

Unprecedented Attack on Personal Beliefs in 2015

In 2015, the American media went berserk reporting an outbreak of measles at Disneyland.

By the time the media hysteria hyping irrational fear of measles and demonizing parents with unvaccinated school children was over, there had been 131 cases of measles reported in California and only 189 cases of measles reported nationally for the whole year.  

What was interesting about the 2015 measles outbreak that started all the fear mongering, was that when you looked at the California cases with vaccine records, it became clear the outbreak was not about unvaccinated school children at all:  

Fifty percent of the reported measles cases were adults and only 18 percent were in school-aged children. Yet that measles outbreak in 2015 was used by industry and medical trade lobbyists to fuel an all-out assault on personal belief exemptions in state vaccine laws.

It was an assault that specifically targeted the non-medical exemptions for religious, conscientious or philosophical beliefs filed by parents so their children can attend school. As noted by Fisher:

“What happened in 2015 was unprecedented in terms of the numbers of bills that were introduced in the states to take away non-medical vaccine exemptions. There were over 100 bills introduced. There was an assault in at least 11 states to take away the exemptions.

[P]eople signed up for our [NVIC] Advocacy Portal online and we helped them to preserve the exemption in nine states. But we lost California, which was a huge loss because that’s the biggest state.

The personal belief exemption was eliminated and it took out both the religious and the philosophical exemption in one fell swoop …

We have a 94 to 97 percent, sometimes almost 100 percent, vaccine coverage rate with federally recommended vaccines in the United States … [Yet] in 2015 we saw the most vicious assault I have ever seen on parents who take exemptions or who don’t give their children all of the vaccines.

There were calls for these parents to be charged with child medical neglect, for them to be publicly identified and humiliated online, for them to be sued, and for them to be jailed.

At the same time, we saw an assault on doctors; doctors who were critical of vaccine safety, doctors who were giving children medical vaccine exemptions, doctors who were taking care of children who were not fully vaccinated. The rhetoric was over the top in terms of viciousness in 2015.

Again, how many measles cases did we see in America? One hundred wighty-nine cases of measles. Not one death, not one injury, that I’ve seen, was reported.”

Your Involvement Protected Health Rights in 2016

This year, yet another 100 vaccine related bills were introduced and most tried to either add more vaccines to state mandates or restrict or eliminate vaccine exemptions.

The NVIC opposed about 70 percent of them. Fortunately, only eight of those bills were actually passed this year, and none of the bills to eliminate vaccine exemptions passed.

The reason for this, Fisher says, is because people saw what happened in 2015 and started to get much more involved in the political process in 2016.

Whenever NVIC put out an Action Alert through the online NVIC Advocacy Portal, more parents, grandparents, health care professionals and other concerned citizens personally contacted their state legislators and showed up for committee meetings and public hearings to make their concerns known.   

It is so important for you to know that you can make a difference when you take action to protect your freedom and, together, we are making a difference. This can be seen from the fact that many bad vaccine bills were defeated this year because people stood up for their rights.

I want to express my deep appreciation and gratitude to all you who worked with NVIC and participated in the legislative process in your states this year. Yes, some battles were still lost, but it is through persistence that we can collectively make a huge difference.

“It’s the only reason we didn’t get the medical and religious [vaccine] exemption taken away in Virginia this year,” Fisher says. “The only reason was because people got energized and showed up.”

Public Health Officials Militarize Vaccine System Through Rule Making

Unfortunately, because we’ve been successful in stopping these state bills trying to take away your freedom, public health officials are now starting to invoke rulemaking authority to bypass the democratic process altogether.

Rulemaking authority is given by Congress to federal legislators, and given by state legislators to the people who operate government and government employees.

On August 15, 2016, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) in the Federal Register to amend the Public Health Service Act, which governs public health law. We warned you about this several months ago in this newsletter.

What the CDC wants to do is expand the use of police power to detain and involuntarily quarantine you if you are traveling by airplane into the U.S. If you have a cough, rash, low-grade fever or other minor symptoms of illness, they want to enlist airline personnel to report you to the CDC.

Then, if public health officials think you might be infected with or could get infected with measles or another communicable disease, they want the legal authority to apprehend and:

• Detain you for 72 hours without access to an attorney to appeal the detention
• Evaluate you medically
• Offer you a contract to sign that will allow them to treat you, such as vaccinate you, as a condition of being released
• Electronically monitor you after your release

Disease Eradication Efforts Historically Turn Into Militarized Efforts

The same would apply if you travel between states, especially if you’re travelling on an airline or by ship, bus or train. NVIC is vehemently opposed to this and submitted a public comment on Oct. 14, 2016, calling on the CDC to withdraw the NPRM.¹ The CDC has not implemented this rule yet but they have the authority to do so, even though CDC officials received more than 15,500 public comments by Oct. 14 — most of them opposing the NPRM.

“In 2005, they [CDC officials] tried this. They got enough public pushback that they didn’t implement. The thing I’m worried about is that we have a President who’s on his way out. He can issue executive orders. We do not know what is going to happen between the elections and when he leaves,” Fisher says.

“We don’t know if measles is going to be put on that isolation and quarantine list … They’ve just declared measles eradicated in the Americas. If you take a look at the last two years, you’ll see this progression. Clearly it has all been to set up this idea that measles must be eradicated from the earth.

What happens when they say “Let’s eradicate?” Well, we know what happens. There was a militarization of the public health infrastructure to eradicate smallpox and polio. This means just what it sounds like: It means detention, isolation, quarantine and vaccination.

I am concerned that even if we are successful in protecting state exemptions, if you have a federal law that allows the militarization of the public health infrastructure, we’re going to be in a very difficult situation here. What can we do? We have to become involved in government. We cannot take government for granted and our freedoms for granted. If we don’t hold our elected officials accountable, then we are going to have laws passed that are going to be oppressive.”

Vaccine Roulette Before Pharma Blackmailed Congress

A major problem today is that major profit-making industries, and the drug industry in particular, wield tremendous influence over our federal government agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and CDC. Their money, presence and political influence can be clearly seen on Capitol Hill and just about everywhere.

A perfect example is the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. Fisher was a young parent of a DPT vaccine injured child when the television documentary “DPT: Vaccine Roulette” was aired in the spring of 1982. It was the first time American parents had been informed that a vaccine recommended and mandated by the government could brain injure and kill children.

That ground breaking investigative report was the catalyst for the formation of the non-profit charity known today as the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) that Fisher co-founded with other parents of vaccine injured children.

Within months,  drug companies declared they would stop producing childhood vaccines recommended and mandated by government unless Congress indemnified them from liability. Congress jumped into action and proposed legislation to restrict vaccine lawsuits.  

“We were contacted because we were this new group. There had never been a group like this,” Fisher says. “They said to us, ‘We are going to pass legislation to protect the vaccine supply in this country. You can either come to the table and argue for what you think the families should get or you cannot come to the table. But we’re going to pass this with or without you.’”

NVIC Helped Put Safety Provisions Into Law

Communication at that time was telephones and snail mail. Messages could get out via TV or radio, but there was no world wide web and few parents had personal computers.

Parents of vaccine injured children had no political power, but NVIC’s co-founders networked with families and fought as hard as they could to protect the rights of children and families. They preserved the legal right of parents to sue vaccine manufacturers when there was evidence the company could have made the vaccine less toxic, and they got vaccine safety informing, recording and reporting provisions into the 1986 law — even though the safety provisions have never been enforced.

Five Years Ago US Supreme Court Banned Vaccine Injury Lawsuits

Then, in 2011, the Supreme Court heard the case of Bruesewitz v. Wyeth. Vaccine manufacturers, medical trade organizations and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared that all vaccine injury lawsuits should be banned.

“The Supreme Court said, ‘Any FDA-licensed vaccine is unavoidably unsafe and there shall be no more lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.’ Done. Not even if you could show a vaccine could have been made safer,” Fisher says.

“On that same day, the Supreme Court said that seatbelt manufacturers, car manufacturers, are liable for defective seatbelts, but vaccine manufacturers are not liable for defective or unsafe vaccines. So here we are, with the medical trade associations all saying ‘no more non-medical exemptions,’ after they have narrowed the medical exemptions so that no medical condition qualifies for medical exemption.”

Intimidation Tactics Are Being Used Against Doctors

During the measles outbreak of 2015, doctors criticizing vaccine safety and mandatory vaccination laws or giving children medical vaccine exemptions were publicly attacked. This year, the state Medical Board charged California pediatrician Dr. Bob Sears with “gross negligence” for “improperly exempting” a 2-year old boy from vaccination.²

Dr. Sears gives vaccines in his practice but allows parents to make the choice about whether or not to vaccinate their children. He has been an outspoken supporter of flexible exemptions in mandatory vaccination laws and now his medical license may be on the line simply because he wrote a medical vaccine exemption after a child had an adverse reaction to a previous vaccination.

As noted by Fisher, the medical contraindications that CDC officials consider an official reason to grant a child a medical vaccine exemption have become so incredibly narrow that about 99 percent of all children, including those who have had previous vaccine reactions, do not qualify for a medical exemption. What’s happening to Sears is sheer harassment and nothing else, designed to make other doctors think twice before they suggest a child might be at high risk for suffering a vaccine reaction. Fisher asks:

“How can you mandate a product that can cause injury or death that some people are more susceptible to having a reaction to, basically removing the medical exemptions so nothing qualifies [and then] remove the personal belief exemption so you can’t exercise freedom of conscience and religious belief, and penalize you if you don’t obey the law that literally could take your life or your child’s life?

This is insanity. It’s cruel. It is inhuman. You [Dr. Mercola] opened up this interview with the statement that freedom of thought, conscience and religious belief is under attack. Absolutely, our bodies are under attack by laws that are punitive, particularly for those of us who have genetic or biological reasons for having a greater susceptibility [for vaccine injury].”

Vaccine Injuries Are More Common Than You’re Led to Believe

Vaccine injuries are real. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which was created as part of the Vaccine Compensation Act, shows that about 71,000 reactions and nearly 350 deaths have been reported following receipt of the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine alone since 1990.

Studies have shown that doctors and other vaccine providers are massively underreporting injuries and deaths that follow vaccination, perhaps fewer than 1 to 10 percent of serious adverse events are ever reported to VAERS, so the real number may be around 35,000.

Adding insult to injury, the government is not doing a good job on finding out how many people are actually suffering serious health problems after vaccination. Even when reactions are reported to VAERS, health officials rarely follow up on vaccine reaction reports.

NVIC’s Video Vaccine Reaction Reporting on Memorial for Vaccine Victims

This month, NVIC has expanded its online International Memorial for Vaccine Victims by adding a video vaccine reaction reporting feature called Protect Life: Witness A Vaccine Reaction at NVIC.org. You can post a video description of a vaccine reaction that you, your child or someone you love has experienced, where it will be archived permanently and accessible to millions of people who visit NVIC.org.

“One of the things that we feel strongly about at the NVIC is that people who have had vaccine reactions, whose loved ones have suffered vaccine injury and death, need to publicly witness. NVIC has had, for more than a decade, the International Memorial for Vaccine Victims. We were one of the first websites to really formalize the public reporting of vaccine reactions. We have a vaccine reaction registry that is 35 years old.

Most people know somebody who was healthy, got vaccinated, and was never healthy again. This is what people across the country need to understand. It can be you. It can be your child, your mother, your sister, your friend. Everybody is a candidate …

I encourage everyone who has had an experience with a vaccine reaction to participate because when you publicly share your vaccine reaction story with others, it can turn the terrible tragedies that have occurred from vaccine injuries into saving lives by making others aware that vaccines can cause serious harm.

You can take your story, record it on your cell phone or computer and post it on NVIC’s Memorial for Vaccine Victims. You could save 100, 1,000, 10,000, 1 million people’s lives because they were so inspired by your story that they understood the truth, finally. If more people do this, the more compelling the evidence becomes.

Related Articles:

  The Forgotten History of Vaccinations You Need to Be Aware of

  Vaccines — Are They Still Contributing to the Greater Good?

  Why Are Vaccine Rights Being Removed While Safety Issues Are Increasingly Brought to the Fore?

 Comments (16)


via IFTTT

Martin Armstrong Exposes "The Real Clinton Conspiracy" Which Backfired Dramatically

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

Meanwhile, Hillary lost not merely because she misread the “real” people, she decided to run a very divisive and nasty negative campaign, which has fueled the violence ever since. According to WikiLeaks emails from campaign John Podesta, Clinton colluded with the DNC and the media to raise what they thought would be the extreme right among Republicans to then make her the middle of the road to hide her agenda.

Clinton called this her “pied piper” strategy, that intentionally cultivated extreme right-wing presidential candidates and that would turn the Republicans away from their more moderate candidates. This enlisted mainstream media who then focused to Trump and raise him above all others assuming that would help Hillary for who would vote for Trump. This was a deliberate strategy all designed to propel Hillary to the White House.

The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee along with mainstream media all called for using far-right candidates “as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right.” Clinton’s camp insisted that Trump should be “elevated” to “leaders of the pack” and media outlets should be told to “take them seriously.”

If we look back on April 23, 2015, just two weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a message on straregy to manipulate the Republicans into selecting the worse candidate. They included this attachment a “memo for the DNC discussion.”

The memo was addressed to the Democratic National Committee and stated bluntly, “the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field.” Here we find that the real conspiracy was Clinton manipulating the Republicans. “Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper.”

“Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.”

The Clinton strategy was all about manipulating the Republicans to nominate the worst candidate Clinton called for forcing “all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election.”

It was not Putin trying to rig the elections, it was Hillary. Clinton saw the Republican field as crowded and she viewed as “positive” for her. “Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right.” Clinton then took the strategic position saying “we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party.”

Her manipulative strategy was to have the press build up Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously.”

This conspiracy has emerged from the Podesta emails. It was Clinton conspiring with mainstream media to elevate Trump and then tear him down. We have to now look at all the media who endorsed Hillary as simply corrupt. Simultaneously, Hillary said that Bernie had to be ground down to the pulp. Further leaked emails showed how the Democratic National Committee sabotaged Sanders’ presidential campaign. It was Hillary manipulating the entire media for her personal gain. She obviously did not want a fair election because she was too corrupt.

What is very clear putting all the emails together, the rise of Donald Trump was orchestrated by Hillary herself conspiring with mainstream media, and they they sought to burn him to the ground. Their strategy backfired and now this is why she has not come out to to speak against the violence she has manipulated and inspired.

This is by far the WORST campaign in history and it was all orchestrated by Hillary to be intentionally divisive for the nation all to win the presidency at all costs. She has torched the constitution and the country. No wonder Hillary could not go to the stage to thank her supporters. She never counted on them and saw the people as fools. The entire strategy was to take the White House with a manipulation of the entire election process. Just unbelievable. Any Democrat who is not angry at this is clearly just a biased fool. Wake up and smell the roses. You just got what you deserve.

 

via IFTTT

‘We the People’ Against Tyranny: Seven Principles for Free Government

ORIGINAL LINK

Time to vote with our feet” through sustained, mass civil disobedience!

“As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid.”—Former presidential advisor Bertram Gross

As history teaches us, if the people have little or no knowledge of the basics of government and their rights, those who wield governmental power inevitably wield it excessively. After all, a citizenry can only hold its government accountable if it knows when the government oversteps its bounds.

Precisely because Americans are easily distracted—because, as study after study shows, they are clueless about their rights—because their elected officials no longer represent them—because Americans have been brainwashed into believing that their only duty as citizens is to vote—because the citizenry has failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the Constitution—because young people are no longer being taught the fundamentals of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, resulting in citizens who don’t even know they have rights—and because Americans continue to place their trust in politics to fix what’s wrong with this country—the American governmental scheme is sliding ever closer towards a pervasive authoritarianism.

This steady slide towards tyranny, meted out by militarized local and federal police and legalistic bureaucrats, has been carried forward by each successive president over the past fifty years regardless of their political affiliation.

Big government has grown bigger and the rights of the citizenry have grown smaller.

However, there are certain principles—principles that every American should know—which undergird the American system of government and form the basis for the freedoms our forefathers fought and died for.

The following seven principles are a good starting point for understanding what free government is really all about.

First, the maxim that power corrupts is an absolute truth. Realizing this, those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights held one principle sacrosanct: a distrust of all who hold governmental power. As James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights, proclaimed, “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.” Moreover, in questions of power, Thomas Jefferson warned, “Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” As such, those who drafted our founding documents would see today’s government as an out-of-control, unmanageable beast.

The second principle is that governments primarily exist to secure rights, an idea that is central to constitutionalism. In appointing the government as the guardian of the people’s rights, the people give it only certain, enumerated powers, which are laid out in a written constitution. The idea of a written constitution actualizes the two great themes of the Declaration of Independence: consent and protection of equal rights. Thus, the purpose of constitutionalism is to limit governmental power and ensure that the government performs its basic function: to preserve and protect our rights, especially our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the government today has discarded this principle and now sees itself as our master, not our servant. The obvious next step, unless we act soon, is tyranny.

The third principle revolves around the belief that no one is above the law, not even those who make the law.This is termed rule of law. Richard Nixon’s statement, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” would have been an anathema to the Framers of the Constitution. If all people possess equal rights, the people who live under the laws must be allowed to participate in making those laws. By that same token, those who make the laws must live under the laws they make. However, today government officials at all levels often act as if they are royalty with salaries and perks that none of the rest of us are afforded. This is an egregious affront to the citizenry.

Fourth, separation of powers ensures that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government. People are not perfect, whether they are in government or out of it. As history makes clear, those in power tend to abuse it. The government is thus divided into three co-equal branches: legislative, executive and judicial. Placing all three powers in the same branch of government was considered the very definition of tyranny. The fact that the president today has dictatorial powers would have been considered a curse by the Framers.

Fifth, a system of checks and balances, essential if a constitutional government is to succeed, strengthens the separation of powers and prevents legislative despotism. Such checks and balances include dividing Congress into two houses, with different constituencies, term lengths, sizes and functions; granting the president a limited veto power over congressional legislation; and appointing an independent judiciary capable of reviewing ordinary legislation in light of the written Constitution, which is referred to as “judicial review.” The Framers feared that Congress could abuse its powers and potentially emerge as the tyrannous branch because it had the power to tax. But they did not anticipate the emergence of presidential powers as they have come to dominate modern government or the inordinate influence of corporate powers on governmental decision-making. Indeed, as recent academic studies now indicate, we are now ruled by a monied oligarchy that serves itself and not “we the people.”

Sixth, representation allows the people to have a voice in government by sending elected representatives to do their bidding while avoiding the need of each and every citizen to vote on every issue considered by government. In a country as large as the United States, it is not feasible to have direct participation in governmental affairs. Hence, we have a representative government. If the people don’t agree with how their representatives are conducting themselves, they can and should vote them out. However, as the citizenry has grown lazy and been distracted by the entertainment spectacles of modern society, government bureaucrats churn out numerous laws each year resulting in average citizens being rendered lawbreakers and jailed for what used to be considered normal behavior.

Finally, federalism is yet another constitutional device to limit the power of government by dividing power and, thus, preventing tyranny. In America, the levels of government generally break down into federal, state and local branches (which further divide into counties and towns or cities). Because local and particular interests differ from place to place, such interests are better handled at a more intimate level by local governments, not a bureaucratic national government. Remarking on the benefits of the American tradition of local self-government in the 1830s, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed:

Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it. Without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it has not got the spirit of liberty.

Unfortunately, we are now governed by top-heavy government emanating from Washington DC that has no respect for local institutions or traditions.

These seven vital principles have been largely forgotten in recent years, obscured by the haze of a centralized government, a citizenry that no longer thinks analytically, and schools that don’t adequately teach our young people about their history and their rights.

Yet here’s the rub: while Americans wander about in their brainwashed states, their “government of the people, by the people and for the people” has largely been taken away from them.

The answer: get un-brainwashed.

Learn your rights.

Stand up for the founding principles.

Make your voice and your vote count for more than just political posturing.

Never cease to vociferously protest the erosion of your freedoms at the local and national level.

Most of all, do these things today.

If we wait until the votes have all been counted or hang our hopes on our particular candidate to win and fix what’s wrong with the country, “we the people” will continue to lose.

Whether we ever realize it not, the enemy is not across party lines, as they would have us believe. It has us surrounded on all sides.

Even so, we’re not yet defeated.

We could still overcome our oppressors if we cared enough to join forces and launch a militant nonviolent revolution—a people’s revolution that starts locally and trickles upwards—but that will take some doing.

It will mean turning our backs on the political jousting contests taking place at all levels of government and rejecting their appointed jesters as false prophets. It will mean not allowing ourselves to be corralled like cattle and branded with political labels that have no meaning anymore. It will mean recognizing that all the evils that surround us today—endless wars, drone strikes, invasive surveillance, militarized police, poverty, asset forfeiture schemes, overcriminalization, etc.—are not of our making but came about as a way to control and profit from us.

It will mean “voting with our feet” through sustained, mass civil disobedience.

As journalist Chris Hedges points out, “There were once radicals in America, people who held fast to moral imperatives. They fought for the oppressed because it was right, not because it was easy or practical. They were willing to accept the state persecution that comes with open defiance. They had the courage of their convictions. They were not afraid.”

Ultimately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it will mean refusing to be divided, one against each other, by politics and instead uniting behind the only distinction that has ever mattered: “we the people” against tyranny.

# # # #

John W. Whitehead, Newsbud Contributing Author & Analyst,  is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law and human rights. He is the president and spokesperson of the Rutherford Institute. Mr. Whitehead is the author of numerous books on a variety of legal and social issues, including A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Arkansas and a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Arkansas School of Law, and served as an officer in the United States Army from 1969 to 1971.

via IFTTT