Political Theatre

The Democrats, who just got control of congress with a clear mandate to end the war have passed a bill to give the president the money to continue the war for more than another year. It has about 20% vote buying gravy built in and has some restrictions that might just end the war in time for the 2008 presidential election. I wonder if that timing is an accident.

Of course, the president is unhappy about it and threatens to veto. There will be pious talk about the need to support the troops, that if we do not give the president the money he is asking for we will be leaving the troops in Iraq without food or bullets. All the while, the administration will be demonizing Iran, setting us up for another disastrous misadventure.

We need to cut to the chase! Congress can say no more money for fighting. There is only money for leaving. If the president vetoes that, he is the one leaving the troops without food or bullets.
No compromise that continues the war for any amount of time is acceptable.

If Congress compromises away their anti-war mandate, it will be time for massive civil disobedience. Either they cut off the money to the war or we cut off the money to them.

As a child growing up in New York City in the 1950s I was surrounded by Holocaust survivors (with tattooed numbers on their arms) and constant discussion about how it happened. How did the German citizens let it happen? Didn't they know it was happening? Didn't they notice all the people disapearing from their midst? Did they let their civil liberties melt away before they realized what was happening and then it was too dangerous to speak out? Of course, we thought that it could not happen here! Not in America with our free speech, free elections and the constitution!

But it is happening here. Our civil liberties are melting away and it will soon be too dangerous to speak out. Of course we are not there yet. We can still stop it. We just have to wake up and understand what is happening. We must see that the two party system is a race to the bottom. Each party wants total control and that is the first value. It doesn't bother them that the price of their total control is your future, your live and your weatlh.

The government is using our money to commit heinous war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are kidnapping and torturing prisoners at GITMO, and other prisons around the world. Does Congress become accomplices by funding this activity? Are we not accomplices by continuing to support the government?

YOU WANT TO LEGALIZE DRUGS! ARE YOU CRAZY?

In America, everyone knows that drugs are the worst possible things on Earth and we must do everything possible to prevent people of any age using those terrible things.

As a result, we as a nation have spent many decades trying to arrest ourselves out of drug usage.

• We have more of our population in jail than any other nation in the world, even those evil Godless Communist dictatorships.
• We routinely kill people during no-knock raids because we fear that those dastardly druggies will flush the evidence down the toilet.
• We deny sick people access to useful medicine because they might enjoy it.
• Our government has even shot down a private plane full of missionaries in the Andes because it was flying a course that drug couriers often flew.
• Tobacco kills 400,000 people a year but is legal for those 18 or older. Alcohol kills over 100,000 people a year but is legal for those 21 or older. Marijuana has never killed one person in all of human recorded history but is illegal for everyone. It is responsible for three quarters of a million arrests a year.
• By continuing this War on Drugs, we make a common weed more valuable than gold by weight and enrich a whole industry of growers, transporters, sellers, police, prison guards, prison builders, and prosecuting and defense attorneys.
• The cost to society is on the order of $100 billion per year when you include the lost productivity of those poor souls rotting in jail for nothing.
• Your children are placed in danger from the law if they chose to engage in harmless experimentation. There is nothing that marijuana can do that is anywhere near what an arrest can do to your child’s future.
• We, all of us, are placed in danger of drug related crime needed to pay the black market prices of "illegal" drugs, or to settle disputes between dealers who cannot use the courts.
  
  If you want to live in a free nation, it has to be free for everyone. If you want to be free to go to a church of your choice, drink an occasional cocktail, go to political meetings, smoke cigarettes or whatever you might like to do that someone else might think wrong, then you must support similar freedom for everyone else. If you want to be secure in your home and not have to worry about a dangerous no-knock search by police based on the word of paid informers or personal enemies, then help us end the insane War on Drugs.
  
  We tried, in the last century, to prohibit alcohol. It did not work out, did it? Alcohol use increased, we created a criminal underworld to supply it and locked up a bunch of people. It is time to rethink the anti-drug paradigm and restore freedom for us and future generations. In the process, we will put the seedy underworld that now supplies drugs out of business overnight.
  

One more impeachable offense

To add to the already impressive list of impeachable offenses by our current president, we have one more insult to our constitutional order and the rule of law.

It seems that, just before Christmas, the president signed a bill related to the post office. That bill reaffirmed existing law that clearly states that mail can be opened by the government only with a search warrant. The Fourth Amendment allows no other option.

Our lawless president took the opportunity to add a signing statement http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/12/20061220-6.html to assert that the law did not apply when he, the decider, thought it was an emergency national security situation. As usual with such assertions, there is no definition or limits on this asserted power.

So, to sum up, the decider can decide to:

• Lock people up indefinitely without charge or trial
• Listen in on phone calls
• Record all the phone numbers you call or that call you
• Investigate what books you read, what movies you see
• Track all your monetary transactions
• Monitor your e-mail activity
• Read your paper mail

All this without the concurrence of any judge or needing to state any prima facia reason to do so. How is this functionally different from the actions of the KGB in the old USSR? You know, the country of the Godless Communists. Oh Yeah! That is the difference. We have God on our side.

I am so glad that I live in a free country under the rule of law where the government exists to protect my rights, not to take them away.

3000 dead

I just got the news that the 3,000 th American Soldier died in Iraq fighting for the glory of Who?The only clear winner is Halliburton and other friends of George Bush.

Clearly, there was no legitimate purpose for this war. There was no US national interest involved. There were no illegal weapons to make a self defense claim, no connection to 9-11 to even make a revenge claim.

We can only guess about the thought processes of the idiot in the White House. He is probably just following the directions of some cold blooded plotter whose intent was to get rich. Surely the war has disrupted the world oil market and raised the price of oil for ALL suppliers. Domestic suppliers have won the oil lottery.

How does anyone's personal financial gain justify 3000 American dead, at least half a million Iraqi dead and the waste of a trillion dollars or so?

How will history report this war? Where will the worst long term affects be felt? I think that it will be in the economics. The huge debt that the Federal government is assuming to pay for this fiasco will burden our people for generations. I can conceivably bring down the dollar and create economic devastation such as this nation has never seen.

The economics will take precedence because that is what we will know about. We wont know about the people killed who might have done great things for the world.

Immigration

One of the hottest topics of discussion in the last year or so has been immigration. The focus has been mostly on illegal immigration but I see a lot of negative feeling about legal immigrants as well. This is probably because most folks are fuzzy about the difference.

I have received many widely circulated e-mails telling me the great net cost of immigration over the benefits. I find the basic premise hard to believe because I know that this nation grew great and strong from the large waves of immigrants that came here from war torn strife all over the world. Indeed my own grandparents came to these shores running from the ravages of World War 1 (father's side) and the Czarist Pogroms in Russia (mother's side).

What is different now from that time, 90 or so year ago when my grandparents arrived? There was no welfare state in America then. Immigrants came here with the expectation to work but here they would get to keep the product of their work and could make a life for themselves and their children. They did not expect any handouts and none were given. They formed mutual help organizations with other immigrants from the same town in the "Old Country", called friendship or benevolent societies. This is how they took care of widows and orphans in the early years. In the later years, these organizations turned into burial organizations and have largely disappeared since our society offers other means (life insurance) to deal with those problems.

Today, we have developed a massive welfare state in the US that has bad effects in every aspect of our lives. First of course we have the huge tax rates, collected mostly by a progressive income tax that is clearly designed to prevent any new upstart wealthy families. The way to progress in a capitalist society is education, get a good job and earn a high salary, accumulate wealth to invest in a business and become wealthy. The progressive income tax breaks that chain when you start earning a high salary. It starts sucking your money up and prevents the capital accumulation phase. It should be no surprise that the progressive income tax was invented by Karl Marx and was a prime feature of the Communist Manifesto.

But I digress. I will state unequivocally that open immigration is not compatible with the welfare state. The welfare state tends to attract those who would benefit from it rather than workers who want to make their own way.

So we know from experience that immigration with no welfare state is a positive good and that the welfare state is damaging to the productive people in society. I will be so bold as to say that the welfare state is evil. It depends on continual organized theft from the productive to the non-productive members of society (immigrants or native born).

So what is the correct (moral) position for a freedom loving Libertarian? Should we accept the evil welfare state as an unchangeable fact of nature like a mountain or an earthquake , that we have to learn to live with and rant about immigrants using that welfare state. I say NO.

We should respect the rights of individuals, no matter what geographical area they were born in, to freely interact with any other individual on a voluntary basis. The demise of the welfare state should be the goal of our activities.