Protesting Everything (and Nothing)

The unrest sweeping across Brazil is about much more than a nine-cent rise in bus fares

By William Waack

For the past few days, thousands of angry Brazilians have been flowing out into the streets of major cities in protest, paralyzing city centers, burning vehicles, looting and vandalizing stores, even attempting to storm government buildings in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Brasilia.

It's quite frightening to watch so many people here in Brazil protesting against everything—i.e., against nothing. Truth be told, there is a long list of possible complaints, each of which is in itself worth taking to the streets. There’s the incompetent government, which is incapable of managing public investments or spending public funds wisely. Then there are Brazil’s crime rates, among the worst in the world. And then there are the abuses committed with public money—and I'm not even talking about corruption as such. Public services in disarray? Bad schools? Wasting money on subsided interest rates for the eternal friends of the government? Creating welfare programs that only make their beneficiaries even more dependent on government handouts? Big construction projects that go nowhere and cost twice what they were supposed to? You name it; we’ve got it. And it’s worth getting upset about.

Yet the current protests originally started as a challenge to rising prices for public transportation in some of Brazil’s biggest cities: a nine-cent rise in bus fares. This is actually an old and very familiar cause: a demand for free rides on public buses, subways and trains. Also familiar, though hardly universal, are calls for no private enterprises—and no profits. Who will pay for services, then? Romantic revolutionaries don’t have to answer that question. They trade in political mysticism, always fairly popular in Brazil.

That is why many of the protesters aren’t angry that inflation has been running persistently at 6.5 percent for year (the government’s management of electricity and fuel prices notwithstanding)—although they should be. No, they’re angry instead that the people should have to pay for anything that is “public.” The original organizers of these demonstrations are radical splinter groups that are notorious, among other things, for forging links with North Korea (in their view, a “democratic” country that is oppressed by the West). They propose a half-Stalinist, half-Maoist way of managing society.

Live Brie or Die

Guns and Cheese

By  Mark Steyn

In the all-seeing security state, nothing gets past their eyes — and everything gets pasteurized. American ports are on an FDA orange alert:

Since March, several hundred pounds of the bright orange cheese [Mimolette] have been held up by US customs because of a warning by the Food and Drug Administration that it contained microscopic cheese mites.

The mites are a critical part of the process to produce mimolette, giving it its distinctive grayish crust…

According to the FDA’s Patricia El-Hinnawy, there’s no official limit, but the target is no more than six mites per square inch. For Mimolette, that’s a near impossible standard.

Immigration, the IRS, cheese . . . it’s all about “targets,” isn’t it? And the great thing about targets, as opposed to laws, is there’s nowhere to go to vote them down.

Benoit de Vitton is the North American representative for Isigny, one of the largest producers of Mimolette. In March, de Vitton began receiving letters from each of the dozen importers he works with, saying that their Mimolette shipments had been detained.

De Vitton estimates that he now has about a ton of cheese sitting in FDA warehouses in New Jersey.

This rang a wearily familiar bell with me. From my book America Alone, page 182:

In America, unpasteurized un-aged raw cheese that would be standard in any Continental fromagerie is banned. Americans, so zealous in defense of their liberties when it comes to guns, are happy to roll over for the nanny state when it comes to the cheese board . . . The French may be surrender monkeys on the battlefield, but they don’t throw their hands up and flee in terror just because the Brie’s a bit ripe. It’s the Americans who are the cheese-surrendering eating-monkeys — who insist, oh, no, the only way to deal with this sliver of Roquefort is to set up a rigorous ongoing Hans Blix-type inspections regime.

Has the FDA with its insistence on over-processed, homogenized, one-size-fits-all food done anything for the health of the American people? Well, you can’t help noticing the one size is now the largest in the developed world. But let’s stick to principles here:

The federalization of food may seem peripheral to national security issues, and the taste of American milk – compared with its French or English or even Québécois equivalents – may seem a small loss. But take almost any area of American life: what’s the more common approach nowadays? The excessive government regulation exemplified by American cheese or the spirit of self-reliance embodied in the Second Amendment? On a whole raft of issues from health care to education the United States is trending in an alarmingly fromage-like direction.

China discovers the Mediterranean

"The Mediterranean is not a border, but a place for trade"

By Pietro Longo 

Fernand Braudel, maybe the most important historian of the Mediterranean region, wrote that "the Mediterranean is not a border, but a place for trade". 

This sentence is true for all the METR countries (Middle East, Europe, Turkey, Russia) but also for those far countries, like China, which have strong interests in the Mediterranean. The so-called Arab Springs and the Chinese penetration in the region challenge the position of those analysts who theorized the shift of the fulcrum of trade routes toward the "East". As the United States, the unique long-standing superpower of the post-Cold War era, has gradually withdrawn from the Mediterranean, according to these readings, it follows a loss of centrality of the whole region. 

Doing business across the Mediterranean is still relevant for some of the "rising powers", such as China. The pride of China's fluvial trade and exchanges started centuries before Western kingdoms sought to explore and exploit the world. Still, the rise of Westernized warships and sea power was made possible because of Chinese navigational innovations. 

Even today, China's economic power lies in maritime trade and, then, in Chinese long projection eastward and westward. Maritime trade secures China with everything the country needs for its economic growth, especially oil and energy sources. But maritime trade is also important for trading goods, acquiring new markets. China and the Mediterranean are linked by two reasons: oil and markets. Keeping stability in the region and in its fluvial corridors are, then, crucial points for the Chinese strategy towards the Middle-East. 

Coming Soon: A Dramatic Downshift In Company Size, Plus Hours Worked

Lawyers and Bureaucrats expected to thrive

By Bill Frezza
The regulatory state never sleeps, relentlessly working day and night to tilt the economic playing field in favor of the politically connected. The regulations it imposes on the rest of us may or may not provide wider public benefits commensurate with their costs. But one thing is for certain: They reduce economic growth in two significant ways.

First and foremost, they inflict compliance costs on businesses. According to the most recent edition of the Ten Thousand Commandments, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) annual snapshot of the federal regulatory state, these costs amounted to $1.8 trillion in 2012—a staggering sum that exceeds 10 percent of the total size of our barely growing economy. One way or another these costs are either passed on to consumers via higher prices, taken out of the hide of workers through lower wages, or extracted from savers and investors as a result of lower profits.

But the damage doesn’t end there. The heavy burden of regulatory compliance can more easily be borne by large companies than small ones, which gives established firms protection from emerging competitors. For that reason, many federal mandates and regulations do not come into effect until corporations reach a certain size. Labor regulations, for example, often kick in when a company reaches a certain number of employees. This creates a tremendous disincentive to growth.

A recent study on the impact on business growth of regulatory thresholds built into Italian labor laws is quite instructive of how this works.  In “The Unintended Consequences of Italy’s Labour Laws,” published by the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, Matthew Melchiorre of CEI and Emilio Rocca of Italy’s Istituto Bruno Leoni explain how one of the most restrictive labor regimes in the European Union has led to persistent unemployment, a wholesale shift to temporary workers, an explosion of under-the-table and “informal” market dealings, and stagnant economic growth.

Wages in Italy are set across entire industries and work categories through a series of mandatory national collective bargaining agreements covering 70 percent of the country’s labor force. This is done without regard to regional differences in cost of living or worker productivity. Potential efficiencies are homogenized out of the market through the elimination of competitive advantages. Service guild labor cartels originally set up by Mussolini remain intact to this day, stifling competition and limiting market entry through restrictive licensing and regulatory schemes.

The Party Is Over

It has been a great party. Enjoy the memories!

by Mark J. Grant

I watched the business channels yesterday and winced. I cannot tell you how many times I heard that, "This was a great opportunity to buy." It is a great opportunity to buy I suppose if you are a masochist and enjoy people using a scalpel on your face.  Maybe if you enjoy the pain it is a "great opportunity to buy" equities but that would be about it. For the rest of you I would suggest moving quickly to cash and maybe buying some debt where the cash flows at 6.00%-8.00% overcome the price of the securities. Bonds will eventually bounce back as the flight to safety intensifies but the timing of this is quite uncertain.

I was also astounded with the number of people saying that the Fed didn't say anything new. These people must be living in Borneo and far out into the jungle. The Fed came out and said as clearly as any Fed has ever said; "We are going to unwind the trade." Yes, sure, there was the usual huff and puff about a change in market conditions could change our viewpoint but that is not relevant. What was relevant is that the Fed stated and quite clearly that, "The party is over."

At every party there are two kinds of people. There are those that want to go home and those that don't. The trouble is that the ones that don't want to leave will lose money if they do so they try and extend the entertainment.

Now it has been a four year celebration and the last guests might leave at midnight or 1:00 A.M. so none of us are quite sure when they will stumble out but the host has made the announcement. Now it is time for everyone to get ready to go home. The latest announcement by the Fed was one hundred percent different than Bernanke's Congressional testimony and to not understand what was said will cost institutions billions of dollars and some people their jobs.

The Fallacy At The Heart Of The New E.U.-U.S. Trade Talks

The public sees trade as a zero sum game between Us and Them

By Dan Ikenson,

Has the intellectual debate about free trade been won? The close-to-consensus answer among several scholars discussing that question at Cato last week is “yes.” The better answer is “wrong question.” After all, how much does it really matter that free traders have won the intellectual debate when, in practice, trade policy is distinctly anti-intellectual and free trade is the rare exception, not the rule, around the world?

Consider the just-launched Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations. If the free trade consensus were meaningful outside the ivory tower, these negotiations would not take place. At the heart of the talks rests the fallacy that protectionism is an asset to be dispensed with only if reciprocated, in roughly equal measure, by “negotiators” on the other side of the table. But if free trade were the rule, trade policy would have a purely domestic orientation and U.S. barriers would be removed without any need for negotiation because they would be recognized for what they are: taxes on consumers and businesses. It really is that simple. 

But the TTIP is shaping up to be the mother of all negotiations: an interminable feast of mercantilist horse-trading, self-serving press conferences, and ever-premature, congratulatory pronouncements all intended to aggrandize negotiators and politicians who thirst to be seen doing something to restore economic hope without having to shake their respective vested interests from their protected perches. It’s all quite nauseating, really, but at least it serves to remind us that free trade is the rare exception, and when all else fails…

The Paradox of Habeas Corpus

For better or worse, if the United States were to create another Guantanamo, we would probably turn first to habeas corpus when we challenge it

by Jonathan Hafetz

This month marks the five-year anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court decision that upheld the Guantanamo detainees' constitutional right to habeas corpus—a writ requiring the government to justify a person's imprisonment in a court of law. The ruling offered a pointed rejoinder to the abuses committed in the name of the war on terror. "Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote. "Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers."

The five past years, however, have called Boumediene's significance into question. Relatively few Guantanamo detainees have been released as a result of court orders issued in response to habeas petitions. Habeas, moreover, has failed to dislodge the underlying system of prolonged indefinite detention at Guantanamo; judges have largely endorsed the idea of holding terrorism suspects as wartime captives. Rather than checking the exercise of state power, the availability of habeas corpus has arguably helped legitimize it.

This tension between the ideal and the reality of habeas corpus is central to Anthony Gregory's excellent new book, The Power of Habeas Corpus in America. Gregory, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, provides a valuable contribution to the literature on habeas corpus, one with broader implications for civil liberties, state power, and justice in a liberal democracy. The book does not attempt to capture all of the complex doctrinal shifts in habeas over the centuries. Instead, it synthesizes these developments to underscore a paradox: the way habeas serves as "both as an engine and a curb on state power." In the process, Gregory charts how power dynamics have historically shaped struggles over habeas and its role in American society.

Gregory situates this paradox early in habeas' history. During the 15th and 16th centuries, habeas served mainly as a mechanism for England's central courts to assert control over ecclesiastical courts and other rival tribunals. By demanding that reason be given why any of the king's subjects was imprisoned, habeas helped increase the crown's authority and legitimacy.

Five Stonking Crashes

The population at large, will continue to float somewhere between ignorance and gullibility until it's too late

By raul ilargi meijer

Little by little the realization is seeping through that, provided we can agree a recovery cannot be purchased outright, there is no such thing as a recovery anywhere in the western world. Mind you, I said seeping, and I could even have said trickling; it's a slow process. And that is a direct consequence of various vested interests in producing the illusion of recovery and growth which exist in the realms of politics, finance and media.

A few days ago, in the shadows of its revelations concerning Edward Snowden, The Guardian - in its Sunday sister The Observer - ran another piece that warrants scrutiny. The core line in it is this:

Trying to solve a debt problem with more debt has created a bigger bubble, (and it's hard to see what the central banks can do).

(The core term in it of course is "stonking crashes", I love that.) And then Wednesday Jill Treanor, also for the Guardian, quoted Bank of England director Andy Haldane:

"Let's be clear. We've intentionally blown the biggest government bond bubble in history ... "

Combine the two, and you get a peek into the reality of what moves our economies these days, and it's not a pretty peek once you think it through. It shows you that all the talk of recovery is just empty air, whether you're in Europe, Japan or the US. That is, again, if we can agree that a recovery cannot be purchased. i.e. that you cannot solve a debt problem with more debt.

As reasonable as this may sound, it's not something everyone will easily agree to; there's a whole camp around Paul Krugman that would disagree. What they don't understand is that no amount of stimulus can lead to a real recovery if the initial debt levels are too high, because you would need to achieve absolutely miraculous growth levels just to avoid being overrun by interest payments. Such growth levels are nowhere in sight. That means that the bottom line of Bernanke's QEs and Draghi's OMT and Japan's Abenomics will prove to be just another transfer of public funds to the private sector disguised as measures to benefit the general public.

How Syria's Islamists govern with guile and guns

The Shape of Things to Come

By Oliver Holmes and Alexander Dziadosz

The Syrian boys looked edgy and awkward. Three months ago their town, the eastern desert city of Raqqa, had fallen to rebel fighters trying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad's government. Now the four boys - clad in tight jeans and bright T-shirts - were whitewashing a wall to prepare it for revolutionary graffiti.

"We'll make this painting about the role of children in the revolution," one of the boys told two journalists.

A white Mitsubishi pulled up and a man in camouflage trousers and a black balaclava jumped out and demanded that the journalists identify themselves. He was from the Islamic State of Iraq, he said, the Iraqi wing of al Qaeda linked to an Islamist group fighting in Syria called Jabhat al-Nusra.

The boys kept quiet until the man pulled away, and then started talking about how life has changed in the city of around 250,000 people since the Islamists planted their flag at the former governor's nearby offices.

"They want an Islamic state, but most of us want a civilian state," the boy said. "We're afraid they're going to try to rule by force."

As he finished his sentence, the same white car roared back round the corner. This time two men, both in balaclavas and holding Kalashnikov assault rifles, stepped out.

"Painting is forbidden here," one fighter said. The graffiti was too close to the group's headquarters. One of the boys made a brief, almost inaudible protest.

"We're sorry," the fighter said. "But painting is forbidden." His comrade stroked his long beard and said: "We are not terrorists. Don't be afraid of us. Bashar is the terrorist."

Venezuela Imploding Like the Soviet Union

The answer : "more and more socialism"

By Fabio Rafael Fiallo

The crumbling of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s demonstrated two things: One, that deep-seated economic inefficiencies could force a political system to implode; and two, that such an implosion could be hastened by the ideological obstinacy of its leaders. 

The state's mismanagement of the economy -- exacerbated by the Cold War arms race against the U.S and the cost of the invasion of Afghanistan -- left in tatters the once powerful Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Thus, in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded the visionless and ideologically-corseted Konstantin Chernenko at the summit of power in the USSR, he couldn't but realize that the Soviet system lacked economic oxygen to continue playing a superpower. Four years later, the Berlin Wall crumbled.

The current situation in Venezuela -- under the Chavez-designated heir and proclaimed winner of a tainted election Nicolás Maduro -- is similar to, and no less untenable than, that of the Soviet Union at the time of Chernenko.

The misallocation of resources brought about by price and foreign exchange controls, the wasting of oil revenue in the funding of domestic patronage and regional alliances, as well as the paralysis of private investment due to the government's hostility against the entrepreneurial class, have taken a heavy toll on the Venezuelan economy. Rampant inflation, multiple devaluations and chronic shortages of essential goods form just part of the hardships enjoyed by the Venezuelan population.

Gone are the days when Hugo Chávez boasted about being able to cut oil exports to the "Empire" (i.e. America). More than ever before, the Venezuelan regime badly needs the foreign exchange generated by such exports.

As a matter of fact, oil sales to other countries do not provide as much fresh foreign exchange as do the corresponding exports to the United States. Although at a 30-year low, exports of oil to the U.S. are still 50 percent higher than those to China. Moreover, out of the 640 thousand barrels per day that Venezuela ships to China, 30 percent is destined to pay back the debt contracted by Hugo Chávez with Beijing ($42.5 billion).

Obama hits a wall in Berlin

A bad start for second term

By George F. Will

The question of whether Barack Obama’s second term will be a failure was answered in the affirmative before his Berlin debacle, which has recast the question, which now is: Will this term be silly, even scary in its detachment from reality?

Before Berlin, Obama set his steep downward trajectory by squandering the most precious post-election months on gun-control futilities and by a subsequent storm of scandals that have made his unvarying project — ever bigger, more expansive, more intrusive and more coercive government — more repulsive. Then came Wednesday’s pratfall in Berlin.

There he vowed energetic measures against global warming (“the global threat of our time”). The 16-year pause of this warming was not predicted by, and is not explained by, the climate models for which, in his strange understanding of respect for science, he has forsworn skepticism.

Regarding another threat, he spoke an almost meaningless sentence that is an exquisite example of why his rhetoric cannot withstand close reading: “We may strike blows against terrorist networks, but if we ignore the instability and intolerance that fuels extremism, our own freedom will eventually be endangered.” So, “instability and intolerance” are to blame for terrorism? Instability where? Intolerance of what by whom “fuels” terrorists? Terrorism is a tactic of destabilization. Intolerance is, for terrorists, a virtue.

It is axiomatic: Arms control is impossible until it is unimportant. This is because arms control is an arena of competition in which nations negotiate only those limits that advance their interests. Nevertheless, Obama trotted out another golden oldie in Berlin when he vowed to resuscitate the cadaver of nuclear arms control with Russia. As though Russia’s arsenal is a pressing problem. And as though there is reason to think President Vladimir Putin, who calls the Soviet Union’s collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” is interested in reducing the arsenal that is the basis of his otherwise Third World country’s claim to great-power status.

Wind Farms and the Tyranny of the Elites

Ceausescu would have loved 'em

By James Delingpole

Wind farms are like one of those frustratingly unripened boils: you know that you shouldn't keep squeezing but they're so noxious and irritating and hideous that you just can't resist. If you've got the same problem, then I heartily recommend you read this brilliant essay on the subject by Russell Taylor.

I love his dismissal of people who claim to find wind turbines beautiful:

  "….a sentiment I find as credible as a Soviet peasant admiring the Tiger tank that had just squashed his grandmother."

But what really grabbed me was his analysis at the end of wind turbines' totemic significance to the left. I've touched on this before myself. It's why I christened them "eco-crucifixes", because they're not really about viable energy or even saving the planet but rather, like "stranded" polar bears on melting ice floes, an emblem of the ubiquity and dominance of the new global religion. And it's why, in the past, I have likened them to the fortress-like cathedrals the Catholic church erected to crush the resistance of the Cathar 'heretics' in South West France.

Taylor has a cleverer take:

Wind turbines serve an additional purpose for the Left, similar to that performed by the tower blocks Ceausescu built in the middle of farmland, or the factories found on the horizon of Soviet rural scenes: they are statements of power. These steel sentinels remind country-dwellers that they are within the gravitational pull of the capital’s dark star, and that if they believe they are free to reject the beliefs of the metropolitan elite, they can think again.

The countryside has long been an object of suspicion for liberal townies, who consider it a viper’s nest of erroneous thought, inhabited by toffs, retired colonels, golf-playing Rotarians and other conservative bogeymen. The propensity of country folk to choose their own values, to observe age-old traditions and to rely on each other to get by puts them in conflict with everything the Left stands for. In the liberal worldview, you’re either one of them, one of their flock, or an enemy of the people whose way of life must be destroyed. First they banned fox hunting, then they ruined the landscape. What next? Collectivised farms? Internment camps for UKIP voters?

Who Are The Real Traitors?

“I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.” – Edward Snowden

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace.

We ask not your counsels or arms.

Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”  - Samuel Adams

By Jim Quinn
There are weeks that change the course of human history. There are weeks when people must choose sides. There are weeks that expose the real American traitors. There is no middle ground in this debate. You are either on the side of freedom, liberty, truth, transparency and the U.S. Constitution or you are on the side of mindless obedience, oppression, deception, corruption and tyranny. A courageous young Millennial named Edward Snowden has risked his life and his future to expose the illegal, surreptitious surveillance programs being conducted by the United States government in clear violation of the 4^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The NSA, with the full knowledge of Barack Obama and Congress, has been covertly collecting phone and internet records on millions of Americans with the full cooperation of Verizon and other mega media/data corporations. Our owners have been using the U.S. Constitution to wipe their asses. The 4^thAmendment to the U.S. Constitution is so unambiguous that any intelligent politician, bright journalist or fifth grader in Miss Sabatini’s history class could interpret its meaning and intention. Our founding fathers believed in truth, clarity and simplicity. The traitorous sociopaths in control of our government today believe in obfuscation, ambiguity and complexity.

Living Constitution?

Do you believe the mass collection of metadata information from millions of Americans with no probable cause is an unreasonable search as defined by the 4^th Amendment? Do you believe the complete lockdown of one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the country and the door to door search by heavily armed government security thugs for one wounded teenager, without warrants or probable cause, was a violation of the 4^th Amendment? Do you believe secretive governmental agencies have the right to partner with the biggest internet/communications/mass media corporations in the world to record your phone calls, read your emails, and monitor your internet communications under the bogus justification of the War on Terror (you are more likely to be struck by lightning twice than to be killed by a terrorist)?  Do you believe that government agencies tasked with revenue collection can be used to create an enemies list based upon whether you donated to the Ron Paul campaign, believe in liberty, or belong to a Tea Party organization? Do you believe allowing minimum wage government drones to molest little old ladies, paraplegics and three year old children, while conducting full body scans on all airline passengers really makes you safer from phantom terrorists? Do you believe having 30,000 high tech surveillance drones that can see you picking your nose in your driveway from 25,000 feet are not a violation of your privacy rights?

Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

If you answered in the affirmative to any or all of the questions above you are either a government apparatchik, someone dependent upon the surveillance state for your paycheck, a victim of decades of mind control through corporate mass media propaganda, or one of the willfully ignorant masses. Of course the ignorant masses will not be reading these questions as they are focused on the inbred royal family saga, Kim Kardashian’s bastard child pregnancy, and the upcoming episodes of Honey Boo Boo, Teen Mom, I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant, Duck Dynasty, Real Housewives of Idiocracy or paying $200 on their plastic debt accumulator to watch multi-millionaire freaks of nature play children’s games. Those who argue the U.S. Constitution is a living document open to interpretation by the interchangeable corporate fascist parties that control the reins of power at Versailles on the Potomac are nothing but apologists for the corrupt status quo. The American people are provided the illusion of choice by their owners, but the major policies are kept intact – never ending war, never ending currency debasement, and never ending screwing of the middle class.

The revelations by Millennial martyr, Edward Snowden, about the PRISM program and the fact that the NSA harvests data directly from the servers of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and other corporate co-conspirators came just days after disclosure that our Orwellian trained keepers had been shredding the 1^st Amendment. The Obama administration has continuously flaunted the Bill of Rights when they interfere with their mission to create a centrally planned welfare/warfare state. Republicans don’t resist Obama’s efforts on Constitutional grounds, as they have no love for its constraints either. The seizure of AP reporter phone records in an effort to uncover leaks and to intimidate the free press, monitoring of reporter James Rosen using false information to obtain a warrant, and the computer hacking of lead Benghazi CBS reporter Cheryl Attkisson are clearly violations of the 1^st Amendment.

There has been faux outrage among those in the establishment. It’s nothing but a game to entertain their rabid disciples. There is virtually no difference between the pretend parties who alternately operate as figurehead leadership in Washington D.C. Both parties cooperated to crush the peaceable assembly of young people exercising their right to petition the government about the blatant criminality of Wall Street bankers. The supposed Soros inspired OWS movement was subdued by Democratic mayors using their local military police hooligans, supported by the Federal surveillance state, in cooperation with the very same criminal Wall Street banks who had destroyed the worldwide financial system in their ransacking of the nation’s wealth through a well planned and executed control fraud.

The cheerleading of this disgusting display of fascist tactics by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and the likes of CNN, MSNBC, and Bloomberg News told me everything I needed to know. Those within the status quo will circle the wagons whenever there is a threat to their wealth, power and control. If you make it onto the establishment’s enemies list, the Constitution will not protect you. The only true free speech is being exercised on the internet, for now. The plutocracy of wealthy corporate elite and their captured puppet politicians are attempting to crush dissent and free speech by restricting access to anti-establishment websites, introducing legislation to control the internet and as we now know hacking into sites considered enemies of the state. The guarantee of 1^stAmendment protection has increasingly becoming a quaint old fashion notion in this fascist state.

First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Constitution has been increasingly treated as an optional instructional manual by what passes for leadership in this country. An all-out assault has been waged on the 2^nd Amendment by the control freaks who want to create a national gun registry so they know where to send their military assault teams when the time comes. Every assault on our liberties, rights and freedoms is done on behalf of the children. Sinclair Lewis once declared:

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

He was wrong. Fascism has come to America, wrapped in fiat currency, carrying a child as a prop, in the name of the War on Terrorism. Presidents have been flaunting their disdain for Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution since World War II. The Imperial American Empire has been militarily enforcing its hegemony over the world since the 1950’s without Congress ever declaring war, as required by the Constitution. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Syria are just the latest victims of our hypocritical interventionist state. Our predator drones roam the skies above foreign countries murdering suspected bad guys at the whim of PS3 trained gutless techno geeks sipping a decaf on their 9 to 5 shift.  The corrupt spineless swine in Congress expose themselves as nothing more than bought off acolytes of the military industrial complex warned about by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961:

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

America’s broken bootstraps

All men are by nature equal, but differ greatly in the sequel

By George F. Will, 

A quarter of a millennium later, that couplet from a colonial American almanac defines an urgent challenge. Modern society increases how, and the predictability of how much, people differ in the sequel.

If America is to be equitable, with careers open to all talents and competent citizens capable of making their way in an increasingly demanding world, Americans must heed the warnings implicit in observations from two heroes of modern conservatism. In “The Constitution of Liberty” (1960), Friedrich Hayek noted that families are the primary transmitters of human capital — habits, mores, education. Hence families, much more than other social institutions or programs, are determinative of academic and vocational success. In “The Unheavenly City” (1970), Edward C. Banfield wrote: 

All education favors the middle- and upper-class child, because to be middle or upper class is to have qualities that make one particularly educable.”

Elaborating on this theme, Jerry Z. Muller, a Catholic University historian, argued in the March-April 2013 issue of Foreign Affairs that expanding equality of opportunity increases inequality because some people are simply better able than others to exploit opportunities. And “assortative mating” — likes marrying likes — concentrates class advantages, further expanding inequality. As Muller said, “formal schooling itself plays a relatively minor role in creating or perpetuating achievement gaps” that originate “in the different levels of human capital children possess when they enter school.”

The Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey argued in “Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter — and More Unequal” that this growth intensifies society’s complexity, which “has opened a great divide between those who have mastered its requirements and those who haven’t.” Modernity — education-based complexity — intensifies the demands on mental abilities. People invest increasingly in human capital — especially education — because status and achievement increasingly depend on possession of the right knowledge.

From Spencer's 1884 to Orwell's 1984

More than a grim coincidence

By Henry Hazlitt

In 1884, Herbert Spencer wrote what quickly became a celebrated book, The Man Versus The State. The book is seldom referred to now, and gathers dust on library shelves — if, in fact, it is still stocked by many libraries. Spencer's political views are regarded by most present-day writers, who bother to mention him at all, as "extreme laissez faire," and hence "discredited."

But any open-minded person who takes the trouble today to read or reread The Man Versus The State will probably be startled by two things. The first is the uncanny clairvoyance with which Spencer foresaw what the future encroachments of the State were likely to be on individual liberty, above all in the economic realm. The second is the extent to which these encroachments had already occurred in 1884, the year in which he was writing.

The present generation has been brought up to believe that government concern for "social justice" and for the plight of the needy was something that did not even exist until the New Deal came along in 1933. The ages prior to that have been pictured as periods when no one "cared," when laissez faire was rampant, when everybody who did not succeed in the cutthroat competition that was euphemistically called free enterprise — but was simply a system of dog-eat-dog and the-devil-take-the-hindmost — was allowed to starve. And if the present generation thinks this is true even of the 1920s, it is absolutely convinced that this was so in the 1880s, which it would probably regard as the very peak of the prevalence of laissez faire.

Privacy Isn't All We're Losing

The surveillance state threatens Americans' love of country

By PEGGY NOONAN

The U.S. surveillance state as outlined and explained by Edward Snowden is not worth the price. Its size, scope and intrusiveness, its ability to target and monitor American citizens, its essential unaccountability—all these things are extreme.

The purpose of the surveillance is enhanced security, a necessary goal to say the least. The price is a now formal and agreed-upon acceptance of the end of the last vestiges of Americans' sense of individual distance and privacy from the government. The price too is a knowledge, based on human experience and held by all but fools and children, that the gleanings of the surveillance state will eventually be used by the mischievous, the malicious and the ignorant in ways the creators of the system did not intend.

For all we know that's already happened. But of course we don't know: It's secret. Only the intelligence officials know, and they say everything's A-OK. The end of human confidence in a zone of individual privacy from the government, plus the very real presence of a system that can harm, harass or invade the everyday liberties of Americans. This is a recipe for democratic disaster.

If—again, if—what Mr. Snowden says is substantially true, the surveillance state will in time encourage an air of subtle oppression, and encourage too a sense of paranoia that may in time—not next week, but in time, as the years unfold—loosen and disrupt the ties the people of America feel to our country. "They spy on you here and will abuse the information they get from spying on you here. I don't like 'here.' "

Trust in government, historically, ebbs and flows, and currently, because of the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department, Benghazi, etc.—and the growing evidence that the executive agencies have been reduced to mere political tools—is at an ebb that may not be fully reversible anytime soon. It is a great irony, and history will marvel at it, that the president most committed to expanding the centrality, power, prerogatives and controls of the federal government is also the president who, through lack of care, arrogance, and an absence of any sense of prudential political boundaries, has done the most in our time to damage trust in government.

Democracy vs. freedom

Conflating democracy with freedom, we elevated one narrow means over a desired universal end

By RALPH PETERS

With the very best intentions, we got it wrong. By elevating the establishment of democracy above all other priorities in states beyond Europe, we got elections — then had to watch freedom suffer.

The roads to Tahrir, Taksim and Red Squares have been paved with good intentions, but led to the oppression of those who shared our values.

The headline example is Turkey, whose democratically empowered prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was welcomed at the White House as a “friend” by our president — even as his government methodically undercut the country’s secular constitution, imposing his party’s Islamist values step by skillful step and imprisoning more journalists than China.

Mesmerized by elections, we forgot freedom.

Acceptance, Silence, and Submission

"War on Terror" and Battered Wives

Muslim revert Arnoud van Doorn performs Umrah in Saudi Arabia with new friend Sheikh al-Sudais and his local minder

By mark steyn

Four years ago in this space, I was anticipating an increase in Islamic-conversion rates in the likes of Amsterdam and Rotterdam:

Let's say you work in an office in those cities: One day they install a Muslim prayer room, and a few folks head off at the designated time, while the rest of you get on with what passes for work in the EU. A couple of years go by, and it's now a few more folks scooting off to the prayer room. Then it's a majority. And the ones who don't are beginning to feel a bit awkward about being left behind.

What do you do? The future showed up a lot sooner than you thought. If you were a fundamentalist Christian like those wackjob Yanks, signing on to Islam might cause you some discomfort. But, if you're the average post-Christian Eurosecularist, what's the big deal? Who wants to be the last guy sitting in the office sharpening his pencil during morning prayers?

Funny how quickly it all happened. There was the woman on reception, but she retired. And the guy in personnel who used to say, sotto voce, that Geert Wilders had a point. But he emigrated the year after Wilders did.

I didn't know the half of it. The other day, Arnoud van Doorn, the producer of Wilders's anti-Islamic film Fitna, announced that he'd converted to Islam — or "accepted Islam," as they say — and made a pilgrimage to Medina to repent and ask for Allah's forgiveness. There's a lot of it about. Tony Blair's sister-in-law has converted. So has Gitmo guard Terry Holdbrooks, who was touched by the way the detainees "wake up each day and smile," and Katherine Russell, the "all-American girl" from Rhode Island who married Tamerlan Tsarnaev and whose parents were "very supportive" of their daughter's decision to "accept Islam" and retreat beneath the veil and stayed "very supportive" right up until their son-in-law blew up the Boston Marathon.