"This Congress and President Obama have shredded the Bill of Rights. We have one last chance to restore the Founding Fathers' bastion against a rogue Central State: the Bill of Rights."
"Everything that Richard Nixon did to me, for
which he faced impeachment and prosecution, which led to his resignation, is
now legal under the Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and
the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)." Daniel Ellsberg. Can Congress legalize tyranny
by passing a law that says it can? Can Congress shred the Bill of Rights by
passing a law that says it can? Well, Congress has passed such a law, and
President Obama--the most effective Trojan Horse president in American history,
a plutocrat dressed as a "progressive"-- rushed to sign it on New
Years Eve 2011 when nobody was looking.
This is not a partisan issue, though various flaks and
toadies are attempting to make it so. Here is how the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) describes the NDAA:
"President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law. It contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. The dangerous new law can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. He signed it. Now, we have to fight it wherever we can and for as long as it takes."
Here is a discussion of the two key sections of the
act:
The problem that all the congressional supporters of the NDAA don't seem to get is that the difference between a dissenter and a "belligerent" is in the eye of the beholder. This is why the Founding Fathers guaranteed civil liberties against the power of the Central State. Now those guarantees have been overthrown by the pursuit of endless war against an ill-defined threat by a congressional act that no military or law-enforcement agency requested: this is 100% politico-instigated.
We have one last chance to restore at least a part of the Bill of Rights. Some members of Congress awakened from their fund-raising somnambulance and proposed the Due Process Guarantee Act which would restore the Bill of Rights to its proper place in US law.
So do one thing today for the nation and its
liberties: contact your representative and senators to press them to support
this bill. Ask them which military or law enforcement agencies requested that
Congress nullify the Bill of Rights with the NDAA. Advise them to do the
correct thing for once in their sordid little careers and vote for the Due
Process Guarantee Act.
This page lists other articles about the NDAA and also
provides links to find your representative and Senators:
The only presidential candidate who has vowed to axe
the NDAA provisions is Ron Paul. If you support any other candidate, ask why
they are supporting the gutting of the Bill of Rights under the Orwellian
umbrella of GWOT (global war on terror).
2. Law-Abiding
Taxpayers Are Treated as Criminals While the Real Criminals Go Free
"Law-abiding taxpayers are treated like criminals while the criminal class of financiers and State apparatchiks are free to loot and pillage muppets and taxpayers alike."I recently received quite an education about how law-abiding taxpayers are treated by the state of California via dozens upon dozens of emails detailing how the Golden State ransacked the bank accounts of law-abiding taxpayers in other stateswithout notification or due process, as if the citizens being looted were crafty bankers who'd stolen church funds to live tax-free in an offshore tax haven.
As we all know, crafty (and politically protected)
bankers are free to loot churches, muppets and the taxpayers at will while
taxpayers are looted by lawless government. Here is a typical account of state thievery. It is anonymous for a
good reason: As I noted last week, law-abiding citizens are terrified
of their governments, local, state and Federal, as they know that
these agencies are literally above the law and will exact retribution on anyone
who reveals their tyrannical trashing of due process or who questions their
feudal pillaging of oppressed debt-serfs.
I received a letter last year that we owed the state
of California's Franchise Tax Board $90,000 for taxes in the year 2008.We
replied to the Franchise Tax board in a similar manner as RT stating that:
-- Did not reside in California in 2008
-- Did not file a State income tax return in California in 2008
-- Did not have any outstanding tax issues with California in 2008
-- Did no business in California in 2008
-- Owned no property in California in 2008
The CA Franchise Tax board responded by putting a lien
on us in the state - fortunately, our banks and assets have no business in CA
or I am certain our accounts would have been robbed as well.
After a great deal of uncertainty and angst, I found
an accountant in CA who advised us that we needed to file a complete CA tax
return for 2008 even though we did not owe any tax. We filed the return and
received a response that we owed the state $625 to cover the State's collection
fees. We paid the fee and within two weeks received a "refund" check
for the $625.
On reflection, we felt as if we had been "held
up" by some powerful gangsters and if it had not been for an honest tax
accountant we would have suffered much financial damage.
This basic story is repeated thousands of times
annually, and while
California may hold special status as the most predatory, parasitic,
due-process-be-damned state, it's clear that other state and local governments
are pursuing similar strategies of lawless looting under the cover of
tyrannical statutes approved by elected lackeys of the financial aristocracy.
Is financial tyranny "legal" if some state
legislature claims it is legal? Or is all
financial tyranny above the law, regardless of what the elected toadies and
apparatchiks claim? Would the Supreme Court, another set of lackeys, ever rule
that a state cannot steal funds from a private bank account without due process
other than a concocted claim that the person might owe the state taxes?
Of course it won't, for the Supreme Court has long ago
given up restricting government's ability to loot and pillage the citizenry.
The Court can't even be roused to defend the Bill of Rights, the most sacred
set of civil liberties the nation holds (or held-- the Bill of Rights has been
annulled by the Orwellian "national defense" NDAA.
Based on dozens of detailed accounts, I finally
figured out how the state of California calculates the tax you owe it.
1. If you ever resided in California or filed a tax return there, even 20 years ago, then any 1099 you receive from anywhere from now until your death is "proof" that you owe tax on that income to California.
2. If you live elsewhere but retain a license to do any kind of business in California, you must be hiding income and therefore you owe substantial taxes to California based on bureaucratic calculations of the average income others with your license earned.
3. If you ever filed a tax return in California, if you stop filing tax returns then you will be targeted and brought to ground as a tax dodger. The only way to escape the lawless wrath of the state's Franchise Tax Board is to keep filing tax returns in California until you die, even if you moved away years ago and earned no income there.
Yes, the mere cessation of filing is "proof"
you're hiding income and are a tax dodger whose bank account must be stripped
clean. Wells Fargo Bank, a recipient of taxpayer funds in the billions of
dollars, deducts $100 or even $150 to do the state's dirty work, and then when
it's shown the taxpayer owes the state no taxes, the bank doesn't refund the
fee--are you kidding?
The banks and their management are still free to
plunder, loot, defraud, pillage, misrepresent risk, assets and liabilities--all
backstopped by taxpayer funds. If this
isn't the acme of Orwellian reversal, then precisely what is? Taxpayers whose
accounts have been looted by the state on the flimsy pretenses listed above
must then endure the Kafkaesque torture of pleading with California'a Franchise
Tax Board to return the money that was stolen from them without due
process.
The Franchise Tax Board tells the powerless taxpayer
(let's call him Josef K.) that if he's lucky (and who's lucky when caught in a
fearsome web of bureaucracy) his money might trickle back to him in 6 to 8
weeks. The $100 stolen by Wells Fargo-- that's your "penalty" for
ever having admitted that you lived in California.
It's like the Hotel California--you can move out any
time you like, but you can never leave the tax liability. I am not making this up--I have dozens of
detailed accounts of people moving out of California many years ago and having
no business or property in the state, yet a 1099 from years past or the mere
"failure" to keep filing state returns in perpetuity triggers an
unannounced and unexplained raid on their private bank account and/or a lien
against any property they own in California.
Then, after much anguish and expense, the trumped-up,
totally fabricated, delusional claims of tax liability dissolve and then they
begin the bureaucratic nightmare of trying to wrest their money from the rogue
state's grasp.
Meanwhile, Federal prosecution of financial
fraud has fallen to a 20-year low.Coincidence? No; lack of funding and powerful political protection play
roles in protecting the real criminals from any risk. Brown-nosing Republicans
have made ceaseless efforts to gut any agencies still clinging to an interest
in prosecuting financial crimes, but financial tyranny starts by gutting the
statutes themselves so fraud, embezzlement, etc. are no longer crimes.
Not filing a tax return in California even though you
moved out of the state 10 years ago, however, is a crime--but as in an Orwellian nightmare, the
"law" isn't written down, it is embedded in some bureaucratic rules
that are hidden from the taxpaying citizens. It isn't "legal," but
since due process has been abolished, who cares what's legal or illegal?
It's actually very simple: whatever the state or Federal government does to you, that's legal. Whatever action you take to protect your rights is illegal.
3. We had to Destroy Democracy in Order to Save It
The National Security State has an Orwellian imperative: destroy democracy in order to "save" it.Here is what I consider to be the dominant narrative of what I call the National Security State. The National Security State is comprised of the Pentagon, the Armed Forces, the CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, the corporate military-industrial complex that profits from it and the "black" budgets, agencies and operations that are hidden from the citizenry in the name of "national security."
Here's the narrative: we were surprised by a
treacherous, shadowy, sinister enemy and we have to set aside the niceties of
democracy and civil liberties to combat this new and terrible foe. This was the narrative after Japan's attack on
Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and it set in motion a total-global-war
mobilization of the entire American society and economy.
Civil liberties? Gone, baby: Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 Americans to concentration camps
hastily erected in various wastelands. It was for their own good, and for the good of the war effort, of
course; but no questions or legal niceties were allowed. Executive Orders from
the Commander in Chief (the President) are like that.
The entire economy and populace were commandeered for
the war effort. Since the
nation was still in the grip of a decade-long Depression, then borrowing a
couple trillion dollars into existance and mobilizing the populace for global
war was actually a welcome development to most people.
Since this was a war for national survival and
democracy, anything that hindered the war effort (except making a profit, of
course) was deemed unpatriotic. The propaganda machine duly cranked out films
demonizing our enemies, burying defeats and glorifying victories.
The narrative was repeated in the 1950s once the
Soviet Union obtained the nuclear bomb. Once again we were surprised by a treacherous, shadowy, dangerous
enemy and we had to set aside the niceties of democracy and civil liberties to
combat this new and terrible foe. Communist infiltrators were everywhere, and
had to be rooted out. Niceties like civil liberties were tools used by the
Commies to mask their heinous efforts to undermine our way of life.
The net result of this narrative was that any
self-aggrandizing moron in Congress could slander a decorated and revered
general in the U.S. Army (Sen. Joe McCarthy and General George Marshall) and
get away with it. Since
Commie sympathizers could be anywhere at any time, then domestic spying was necessary,
and on a vast scale.
Fortunately, the National Security State had developed
the necessary infrastructure for handling espionage and spying on a global
scale, so it was a straightforward task to set up a domestic spying operation.
If civil liberties had to be trampled to do so, it was necessary to protect the
nation and "our way of life."
You see the key point in the narrative: "our way
of life" is more important than civil liberties. This is of course an orwellian reversal of what
the Founding Fathers had in mind, which was that civil liberties are
our way of life.
The narrative that domestic spying was necessary to
root out sinister underground bad guys led directly to the COINTELPRO subversion and suppression of Vietnam War-era domestic dissent in the
1960s.
The danger of political activities being lumped in
with criminal activity is higher than most complacent Americans believe. It's easy to be naive about the essentially
unlimited powers of the National Security State. Most people believe that only
"bad people" get caught by the government trawler, but it isn't quite
that simple. Anyone perceived as threatening or impeding the State's Imperial
ambitions may be targeted. Please don't say that it "can't happen
here" because it already happened here.
I was with a friend when the FBI swooped in to arrest
him for political crimes against the State, i.e. refusing to support an illegal
(undeclared) war. At the time, the FBI had some 10,000 agents tasked with
suppressing or disrupting the antiwar movement by whatever means were deemed
necessary. Meanwhile, the agency's anti-Mob (organized crime) unit was reduced
to minimal staffing. When the State feels its Imperial agenda threatened, then
run-of-the-mill criminality gets ignored and the full resources of the State
are turned on political resistance to the National Security State.
Having been called into the FBI office myself for
grilling (after being threatened along the "we know where you live"
line), I can say from experience that the boundaries which are supposed to
protect our rights only exist if you can afford high-powered legal
representation and if you are able to raise a stink in the "right
circles," i.e. within the Power Elites.
The default narrative is to become a repressive Police
State with an active secret intelligence program against domestic dissent, i.e. COINTELPRO, the secret campaign to
infiltrate, undermine, marginalize and/or subvert the antiwar movement.
This program employed illegal entry ("black bag
jobs") and surveillance, extralegal force and violence (creating and
funding extremist front groups to commit the violence at arms distance from the
Federal government), and psychological warfare ("dirty tricks,"
harassment, misinformation, setting up pseudo-movements run by government
agents, threaten activists' parents landlords, employers, etc.)
The 1976 Church Committee formed to investigate the
domestic intelligence campaigns concluded:
"Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association."
Anyone who doesn't believe their government is capable
of Police State repression and subversion of First Amendment rights should
research COINTELPRO more fully. Nothing will be more threatening to the State
than former insiders (those whose belief in the system has faded) turning into
whistleblowers on the web. Nothing damages the National Security State more
than a truthful accounting of its excesses.
Here is one source text:
Put simply: the State holds all the hammers, and you
know what happens to raised nails.
It is self-evident that the Federal government must
retain the means to track and arrest foreign agents of unfriendly governments
or groups who are operating on U.S. soil. This is understood. The critical
point being made here is that these counter-espionage efforts must comply with
the Constitutional limits on government powers and not subvert our civil liberties.
It is an effortless slide for those in power to define
domestic dissent as a "threat" that must be subverted, disrupted and
suppressed--and limiting the Power Elites from pursuing such over-reach is the
entire purpose of the Constitution.
Under the Obama administration, the National Security
State has once again staked out the "legal" grounds for total
mobilization of the American populace and economy. I invite all supporters of President Obama to carefully read his
recent Executive Order entitled (with a truly Orwellian flourish) National Defense Resources
Preparedness.
This Executive Order is chockful of extralegal
directives and vaguely defined over-reach, of the sort that will be delineated
more clearly when the Commander in Chief executes the broad powers laid out in
this order.
The president will also be executing democracy and our
civil liberties when he invokes this Executive Order. Even the most starry-eyed naive supporter of
President Obama cannot read this document as anything but a blueprint for total
mobilization and the destruction of the Constitution, democracy and our
remaining civil rights.
If this Executive Order doesn't frighten you, then
you're in denial.
It's actually very simple:
whatever the National Security State does anywhere on Earth is legal. Whatever action you take to protect your civil liberties is illegal.
4. "Consumer Protection" Just Another
Federal Reserve Power Grab
How to mask yet another Federal Reserve power grab? Call it "consumer protection."
This is truly Orwellian: the latest and greatest
Executive Branch/Federal Reserve power grab is labeled "consumer
protection." I am indebted to correspondent Jim S. who seems to be one of the few
Americans to have actually sorted through this monstronsity and gleaned its
true nature: an unprecedented extension of Executive (i.e. Imperial Presidency)
and Federal Reserve power.
Let's start by recalling that the Federal Reserve is a
consortium of private banks. Calling a private consortium of banks the "Federal Reserve"
is the original Orwellian misdirection, for there is nothing
"Federal" about the Federal Reserve. It is not a government agency.
Now guess who will fund and control this vast new
bureaucracy of "consumer protection"? Yes, the private consortium
known as the Federal Reserve.
"The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will be an independent unit located inside and funded by the United States Federal Reserve. It will write and enforce bank rules, conduct bank examinations, monitor and report on markets, as well as collect and track consumer complaints."
Since managing the money supply and interest rates is
the ultimate "consumer protection," we can ask how well the Fed
managed those tasks in the past 15 years:alas, their management has been catastrophic for the
nation and the middle class, which has been gutted by their policies of serial
bubble blowing, leveraged speculation and bank predation.
The very last private consortium any sane person would
select to run a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be the privately
owned parasites of the Federal Reserve. Doesn't the vast, sprawling bureaucracy of the
Federal government already have agencies experienced in regulating consumer
protection? Why do we "need" to consolidate all financial consumer
data and regulation under the control of a non-government consortium that has
amply proven itself to be the enabler and enforcer of institutionalized bank
predation, embezzlement and fraud?
This is beyond bizarre. If we had to assign the task of protecting
consumers to a privately owned consortium, then we'd be better off giving the
task to IBM. But the bank-owned toadies in Congress handed all this power to
the Federal Reserve. One wonders how it is legal that a private consortium now
has power over all financial data in the U.S.
Here is Jim's summary:
"You are more than familiar with the Shadow Banking System running parallel, black-box-like to the Federal Reserve System...no regulation, no accounting, notional hypothecation upon notional re-hypothecations accounting for leverages to the Moon, and in the end, essentially infinite debt."
The CFPB represents to me a complete, contained Shadow
US Government System established by the Dems and the Fed right under our very noses. One of the
profound things I have not completely conveyed is what I see as the
invisibility cloak and impenetrable shield the CFPB has for total immunity from
evaluation, oversight, attack, etc.
The CFPB is funded by the FED with any amount of money
it asks for and is completely unaccountable as to how it uses it...unlimited
funding. The CFPB is answerable to no entity regarding its deliberations,
decisions with the full force of law, disclosure of agendas.
It will link through its fully unaccountable Director
through established Executive Branch inter-agency councils and sub-councils to
every agency and sub-agency it desires or any agency wishing to associate/link
with the CFPB (e.g.IRS requests Director to have instant nanosecond access for
behaviorial data collection on consumers via their formerly private credit
card, bank, credit union, stock market and forex market and commodity market
accounts....and, Director Cordray says in nanoseconds,....OK!)
Under the opaque umbrella of the CFPB, all Executive
Agencies, formerly accountable to the Congress in some way, will become opaque
to the Congress insofar as they are associated with the CFPB. Congress can
request info from the CFPB, none has to be given at all.
The CFPB is an autonomous creature of the Federal
Reserve, completely cloaking itself with total immunity from any Congressional
controlling authority.
The establishment of a Shadow Government Executive
Branch "coup" is a direct follow-up to Paulson's "gun to the
head" of Congress in 2008 when the world was only hours from a Federal Reserve derivative originated
financial crash. Congress capitulated with the initial $700B. and in the
meanwhile the Fed has printed debt loans to the tune of $16T to fund the
interest liabilities of short term derivative rollover and refinancing demands.
Jim also noted the dearth of mainstream media coverage
of the CFPB, and suggested this story:
“The CFPB director will have vast rulemaking, supervisory, investigative and enforcement powers and the authority to regulate any person or business that offers or sells a ‘financial product or service,” the Senate Republicans told Obama. “This authority will directly affect every American household by limiting their choices when purchasing financial products, restricting the availability of credit to consumers, and increasing the cost of goods or services purchased using credit.”
“Despite the vast power vested in the hands of the director, there are no effective checks on the director’s authority,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on Banking Committee.
“When you set up something that is outside the control of the elected branches, when you set up something that doesn’t require the appropriations by Congress to make sure they can continue their work only on the basis of their complying with the constitutional requirements, then you have essentially set up the potential for a rogue agency which does not have any controls and therefore you’re affecting the liberty of the people.”
The Dodd-Frank bill, like Obamacare, is tyranny by
complexity. Who can plow through thousands of pages of these bills except those
gaming the legislative process to their own advantage?
Consider the Glass-Steagall Act, at 37 pages in
length, and the 2,319-page monstrosity of the “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform
and Consumer Protection Act:" (Source)
Back in December, Nick Schulz helped put the size of
the 2,074-page healthcare bill into some historical context by comparing its
length to some previous bills that rank among the most consequential in U.S.
history, like the 82-page Social Security Act of 1935 and the 74-page Civil
Rights Act of 1964.
Now that Congress has passed the “Dodd-Frank Wall
Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act,” it might be a good time to compare
the 2,319-page financial reform bill (245 pages longer than the healthcare
bill) to the previous bills listed below (and see graph) that are considered
among the most consequential legislative acts for banking and finance.
1. Federal Reserve Act (1913) – 31 pages.
2. Glass-Steagall Act (1933) – 37 pages.
Like everything else, this issue has been put through
the partisan meat grinder. Everybody knows the banking sector owns Congress,
but how it is even legal to grant extraordinary powers over the entire
financial system to a private consortium without congressional oversight? It
simply doesn't pass the most basic constitutional "sniff test."
The entire Dodd–Frank
Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act should be nullified as
an unconstitutional power grab. The asleep-at-the-wheel lackeys on the Supreme Court better wake up
soon or democracy and "the will of the people" will be mere memories.
Thanks to Dodd-Frank, it boils down to this:
whatever the Federal Reserve does with the data it collects from Federal government agencies is private and none of your business. Whatever financial actions you take that create a digital record is the now the Fed's business.
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