Liberty Maven

With the USA Patriot Act set to expire at the end of this year, and Congress mulling around even more nefarious replacements for it, it’s time to keep in mind the major items in it that make it evil (as compiled by the ACLU):

1. Search your home and not even tell you… by conducting secret “sneak and peek” searches of your home or office, without informing you that a warrant was issued.  (SECTION 213)
2. Collect information about what books you read, what you study, your purchases, your medical history and your personal finances … without probable cause.  (SECTION 215)
3. Label you a “terrorist” if you belong to an activist group … and the USA PATRIOT Act broadly expands the official definition of terrorism, so many domestic groups that engage in certain types of civil disobedience could very well find themselves labeled as terrorists.  (SECTIONS 411, 802)
4. Monitor your e-mails and watch what internet sites you visit … by monitoring Internet traffic and e-mail communications
   on any Internet service provider — *without* probable cause. (SECTION 216)
5. Take away your properly without even a notice or a hearing if the government merely says a person or organization has engaged in or is planning an act of “domestic terrorism.” The government could thus effectively bankrupt an organization with which it disagrees.  (SECTION 806)
6. Spy on innocent Americans by allowing a vast array of information on U.S. citizens to be collected and shared with the CIA (and other non-law enforcement officials) without proper judicial oversight or other safeguards.   (SECTIONS 203 AND 901)
7. Put immigrants in jail indefinitely.  The USA PATRIOT Act permits indefinite incarceration of immigrants and other non-citizens without the government having to show that they are, in fact, terrorists.  (SECTION 412)
8. Wiretap you under a warrant that doesn’t even have your name on it. Judges are required to approve a wiretap without even knowing who is to be wiretapped or where the wiretap is to be placed.  (SECTION 216)

Read more here and here.

As noted in a story by James W. Harris at The Advocates for Self-Government, a group that wants to provide free medical care to out nation’s poor is being blocked by government bureaucrats:

An organization of volunteer doctors and other health care professionals wants to provide free medical care to tens of thousands of poor people across America.

But — incredibly — government bureaucrats won’t let them.

That’s the extraordinary story told by journalist David Freddoso in the Washington Examiner newspaper.

The article begins this way:

“Stan Brock just wants to help. The former co-star of ‘Wild Kingdom’ wants to deliver free medical, dental and vision care to the poor. … Brock simply wants to provide care free of charge, at the hands of unpaid volunteer doctors and dentists using donated equipment.

“Brock’s group, Remote Area Medical, wants to bring its services to Washington [D.C.], and soon. He wants his volunteer eye doctors to grind new glasses on the spot for those having trouble seeing.

“He wants his dentists to pull rotten teeth and perform root canals in badly neglected mouths. He wants to give checkups and HIV tests to the uninsured and the underinsured. No questions asked.

“The only question is whether the bureaucrats will let him do it.”

Continue the story…

D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

We’re pleased to welcome BJ Lawson to the pages of the Downsizer-Dispatch as a Commentator.

Here’s BJ’s first call to action . . .

Your success promoting the Audit the Fed bills has scared the banking cartel into offering a fake alternative, the so-called Federal Reserve Accountability Act (S 1803).

Please send Congress a letter opposing S 1803, and favoring the real Audit the Fed bill, S 604.

You can use my letter to Congress as a guide to your own . . .

I want my Senators to oppose S 1803, and support S 604 instead. I also want my House Rep. to reject any attempt to foster a bill similar to S 1803 in that chamber.

S 604 would perform a real audit of the Federal Reserve, but S 1803, the so-called Federal Reserve Accountability Act, would actually help the Fed avoid accountability! It would . . .

* Severely limit the scope of any audit,
* Set unreasonable time-frames that will delay or postpone certain audits indefinitely,
* Permit some audits to be performed only one year after a program has been terminated.

Give me a break!

It should be perfectly obvious to any reasonable person that active Federal Reserve programs need the most accountability. And what about programs that are never terminated? Focusing audits on terminated programs is like closing the proverbial barn door after the cow is gone, while giving on-going programs a permanent pass.

Frankly, it seems to me that S 1803 is a fraud designed to preserve the status quo while fooling some Americans into thinking you’ve enacted a real reform. Where did this idea come from anyway? The banking lobby?

You politicians constantly claim that citizens who aren’t doing anything wrong have nothing to fear from their government. Well, if the Federal Reserve isn’t doing anything wrong then it too has nothing to fear. S 1803 actually enhances my suspicion that the Federal Reserve is probably doing lots of bad things!

The cure for this is transparency.

The self-serving political claim that Federal Reserve transparency would disrupt the financial markets is simply wrong. Financial markets require honesty and transparency for the efficient allocation of capital, and for systemic stability. The lack of transparency for Federal Reserve actions is actually the source of market disruption, and creates constant chaos in our international financial relationships.

Please audit the Fed! And make sure it’s a real audit, not a fake one.

Believe me, I’m paying close attention to how you represent me.

END OF SAMPLE LETTER

You can send your letter to Congress using the DownsizeDC.org Educate the Powerful System.

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D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

Subject: Our first press release to the national media

Your work has made “reading the bills” a national issue. You accomplished this with zero help from the media. Now Congress and other groups are piggy-backing on your work, attempting to steal both your steam and your thunder, pushing non-reforms like H. Res. 554. Do you . . .

* Want to stake a claim to the results of your work and the need for the real “Read the Bills Act?”
* Let the media know what the “real deal” is

If so, here’s what we want to send to the national media early next week . . .

“It will pave the way for our Read the Bills Act,” declared Jim Babka, President of DownsizeDC.org.

DownsizeDC.org created its “Read the Bills Act” (RTBA) in 2005. Constituents have bombarded their representatives in Congress with a quarter-million letters supporting RTBA. Babka has also presented it to beltway groups.

“Public pressure and my presentations are what led the Republicans to pick-up ‘reading the bills’ as a talking point. But when the people witness how worthless their approach is, demands to pass our RTBA will increase.”

The 72-hour rule makes cosmetic changes to House rules.

House members are supposed to receive readable copies of bills three days before a vote. The rule is rarely followed.

The rule changes that time requirement from 3 days to… 72 hours.

It also requires that the public gets the bill at the same time. Babka likes this real change, however…

“It’s only a rule; not a law. So it can be waived in many instances, and doesn’t apply in others. There’s no enforcement mechanism to penalize Congress when they violate their rules. And three days isn’t nearly enough time to read the monster-sized bills Congress routinely passes.”

DownsizeDC.org’s ‘Read the Bills Act’ can’t be waived and requires Congress to…

* Read the entire bill out-loud before a quorum
* Post all bills on the Internet for seven days before voting

If ignorance of the law is no defense for citizens, such ignorance must not be permitted to Congress. That’s why RTBA also provides citizens with a solid legal defense against laws passed in violation of these requirements. Babka concluded:
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D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

Quote of the Day: “While few would argue that criminals ought to be able to keep the proceeds of their crimes, civil forfeiture allows the government to seize and keep property without actually having to prove a crime was committed in the first place. . . . Proceeds from civil forfeiture at the state and local level usually go back to the police departments and prosecutors’ offices, giving them a clear and unmistakable incentive to seize as much property as often as possible.” – Radley Balko

Such outrages are nothing new in the War on Drugs, but we’re seeing more abuses as criminal law becomes increasingly federalized. For instance, federal agents are now exploiting the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act to seize bank accounts and computers.

The leader of a new Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering task force admits that unlike criminal cases where the suspect is presumed innocent until proved guilty, in civil asset forfeiture cases . . .

* if you lose property to an asset forfeiture seizure you must prove your innocence in order to get it back
* you have no 5th amendment protections — even your silence can be used against you

Civil asset forfeiture is also alive and well at the local level, where police steal money from citizens in order to pay for new equipment.

Under Illinois law, the state can withhold cash, cars, or other property for six months without even a preliminary hearing! Under the law, three innocent people had to wait over a year to get their cars back. They, along with three innocent people who had money stolen from them, have argued the Constitutionality of the Illinois law.

The “good” news is that this law will be argued in the Supreme Court this month in Alvarez v. Smith.

The bad news is that the most positive outcome is likely to be only a reduction of the time you must wait before a preliminary hearing. The Court isn’t expected to strike down the law, even though civil asset forfeiture proceedings clearly violate the 14th Amendment provision that no state “can deprive any person of . . . property, without due process of law.”

Congress can do what the Court will not. Tell your representatives to abolish Civil Asset Forfeiture using our Educate the Powerful System.

Use your personal comments to mention the example of the widow who may lose her home because her now dead husband grew marijuana that he used to ease his pain from cancer.

You can send your message here.

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One book near the top of my must-read list is Thomas DiLorenzo’s Hamilton’s Curse.  Having previously read The Real Lincoln and listened to DiLorenzo speak in person and on talk shows like Baltimore’s Ron Smith Show, I am already a fan.  Today at the Future of Freedom Foundation, George C. Leef references DiLorenzo’s book as he gives his own scathing rundown of how Hamilton and his legacy has greatly ruined this country.  Here’s a small piece:

…Hamilton looks pleasant enough in his portrait on our $10 bill, but he was an arrogant egomaniac.

Hamilton was a determined opponent of Jefferson’s laissez-faire philosophy at every turn. When it came to trade, he demanded high protective tariffs because he thought, in the mercantilistic tradition, that if a nation produced “its own” goods rather than purchasing them from “other countries” it would become stronger. Mercantilism was inseparable from economic nationalism — the foolish and destructive idea that political boundaries have great economic significance. (We still suffer grievously from this idiocy, of course.) Individual American consumers would be harmed by artificially high prices for items they might have bought less expensively from producers in other countries, but Hamilton was not concerned about the problems of individuals. His obsession was with “strengthening” the nation.

In the early years of the United States, Hamilton battled against Jefferson’s reading of the Constitution as placing severe limits on federal authority. To Hamilton and his Federalist allies, the wording of the Constitution, especially the enumerated powers of Congress, meant nothing more than an intellectual game of trying to invent interpretations that gave the government “inherent” powers that it was not specifically given. Contrary to the sensible, restrictive reading of the Constitution defended by Jefferson, Hamilton insisted that the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses were meant to give the federal government almost limitless powers.

Leef then goes on to discuss the traitorous presidencies of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and disasters in the form of the 17th Amendment, the income tax, and the Federal Reserve Act.  I highly recommend reading the entire article.

As part of the platform that got him elected almost a year ago, Barack Obama promised not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 annually.  But now he’s seriously pushing the idea that all citizens be forced to carry health insurance or else the IRS will impose a penalty.  And he claims this isn’t a tax.

In an interview on Sunday, George Stephanopoulos grilled President Obama by asking the rather obvious question, “Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money [to buy insurance], fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?”

Jeff Jacoby’s op-ed on Boston.com discusses the president’s response:

As part of the New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt confiscated all privately-owned gold and made it illegal to own the shiny metal, and fixed its price.  Jim Powell of the Future of Freedom Foundation goes through the history of the disastrous actions taken by FDR and the aftermath.

Roosevelt understood that he must apply the full force of federal power to suppress the natural desire for gold in troubled times. The Emergency Banking Act, signed into law March 9, amended the Federal Reserve Act by adding a new subsection (n), which empowered the secretary of the Treasury to demand that all Americans surrender their gold and receive paper money. The following day, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6073, which made it illegal for Americans to take gold out of the country.

In his first “fireside chat,” delivered on March 12, Roosevelt didn’t say a word about his backstage maneuvering to seize gold. He remarked that “hoarding during the past week has become an exceedingly unfashionable pastime.”

Less than a month later, on April 5, 1933, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6012, which expropriated privately owned gold. He ordered Americans to surrender their gold to the government by May 1, 1933. Violators would be subject to a $10,000 fine or as many as 10 years in prison.

Read the article here.

A man who had the gall to exercise his Constitutional right to bear arms has come under fire, so to speak. The man, William Kostric, chose to open carry his handgun in a leg holster while holding up a sign prior to an Obama Town Hall meeting in New Hampshire the other day. What the hell was this guy thinking? Let’s find out…

See the following video from MSNBC reporting the story while it was happening:

The sign he happens to be holding doesn’t help calm fears about this man’s intentions, but think about it. If he were intending to do harm to anyone why would he be advertising that he has a weapon? He attempts to clear things up a bit when he was a guest on Hardball later in the day.

It seems to me that Chris Matthews comes off looking more crazy than the guy with the gun in this segment.

Some have suggested Kostric was doing it just to provoke. I agree, and I think that is a wonderful thing. If it takes this kind of peaceful provocation to open eyes and minds then I’m all for it.

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D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

Quote of the Day: “You can make a small fortune in farming – provided you start with a large one” – Anonymous

When we first launched our Freedom to Farm campaign back in April, we mentioned that House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman said “he intends to pass a strong food safety bill soon.”

This bill we warned you about, the 109-page H.R. 2749, is Waxman’s promise.

The good news is that some of the most egregious trial balloons from earlier bills such as H.R. 875 have gone by the wayside . . .

* There will be no new Food Safety Administration bureaucracy
* The bill seems to define “farm” in such a way that backyard gardens won’t be included in the regulations
* Direct farm-to-consumer, farm-to-restaurant, and farm-to-grocery store transactions will be exempt
* There is no implementation or incorporation of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS)

YOU are to be thanked for this. DC Downsizers were part of a large army of concerned citizens that killed earlier bills.

But the bad news is very bad. This bill . . .

* authorizes warrantless searches of farms
* imposes a $500 tax (or “registration fee”) of all operators in all steps of the food production chain
* imposes civil penalties up to $20,000 per individual for each violation
* creates a food trace-back system, burdening farms and small businesses with reams of new paperwork
* empowers the Dept. of Health and Human Services to micro-manage the raising and harvesting of crops (you might have assumed that Congress would’ve handed the U.S. Dept of Agriculture this terrible power).

In essence, Congress wants to punish the innocent and protect the guilty. It is not small farms and businesses that were the source of contaminated food scares, but rather the processing facilities of large corporations. Yet this bill will only drive small farms out of business, which means reduced competition and higher prices in an already-bad economy.

Please use DownsizeDC.org’s proprietary Educate the Powerful System to send a letter to Congress telling them to defeat H.R. 2749. Tell them the bill will only hurt competition and put undue burdens on small farmers. Let’s send enough messages to frighten Congress and kill this bill.

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