Anti-war: War, Peace, and the State

Murray Rothbard on war, peace, and the state.

We Are Not Free: The Secret Government - The Constitution in Crisis

The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis, by Bill Moyers






History is so incredibly important to understand the world we live in.  It let's us know the pattern of the world and how it repeats itself.  In this video we see the recent history of the United States during the Iran Contra scandal.  We see how the CIA and FBI are organizations that are counter to a free society.  We see how war is truly the health of the state.  We see how we are repeating ourselves.

The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad. - James Madison

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. . . . [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and . . . degeneracy of manners and of morals. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. . . .

[It should be well understood] that the powers proposed to be surrendered [by the Third Congress] to the Executive were those which the Constitution has most jealously appropriated to the Legislature. . . .

The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war . . . the power of raising armies . . . the power of creating offices. . . .

A delegation of such powers [to the President] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments.

The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it, is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted.

The separation of the power of raising armies from the power of commanding them, is intended to prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them.

The separation of the power of creating offices from that of filling them, is an essential guard against the temptation to create offices for the sake of gratifying favourites or multiplying dependents. - James Madison from Letters and Other Writings of James Madison.

  Excerpts from the film:

I wouldn't be here if my father and my brothers were involved in the secret war.  I am here because I have no choice of being here...[The] CIA goofed up because they weren't willing to carry through with their goals.  They think it's so simple that people are like pawns in a game like a chess game.  In a game you can move them wherever you want but you have to understand that human life is very different from playing a game because a game once you lose there's nothing at stake, but when you lose a person's life or devastate a whole country, as they did to my country. - Hmong man from Laos

Can we have perpetual war and democracy? - Bill Moyers

If we continue these policies to rob ourselves in order to feed this national security monster we're going to continue to degrade American life.  That's real national security.  National security for the United States is making the United States a good place to live where people want to be active, intelligent, involved citizens.  For people at the top to say this world is so complicated and so dangerous, just a few of us need to govern it and hold the secrets in, and we will tell you what's good for you.  That is moving down the road to dictatorship. - Roger Wilkins

Oliver North was the Colonel who was spot lighted in the video.  He believed in obeying orders of the president (king) regardless if they were legal or ethical.

The person that posted this video had the following commentary.  Not all his beliefs are necessarily mine.

This is the full length 90 min. version of Bill Moyer's 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government to carry out operations which are clearly contrary to the wishes and values of the American people. The ability to exercise this power with impunity is facilitated by the National Security Act of 1947. The thrust of the exposé is the Iran-Contra arms and drug-running operations which flooded the streets of our nation with crack cocaine. The significance of the documentary is probably greater today in 2007 than it was when it was made. We now have a situation in which these same forces have committed the most egregious terrorist attack on US soil and have declared a fraudulent so-called "War on Terror". The ruling regime in the US who have conducted the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, are now banging the war drum against Iran. We have the PATRIOT act which has stripped us of many of our basic civil rights justified by the terror of 9/11 which is their own doing.

War & Social Security

• This is the desire of those who proclaim war
• ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’
• ...the chain of historical events which led up to today’s National Security State and the American empire. From Harry Truman to Barack Obama, we have seen an out-of-control executive branch wage unconstitutional, undeclared wars by centralizing power in the presidency. How did this all come about? Here are three exceptional documentaries which introduce that history. The first film is the 1987 PBS documentary, The Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis, narrated by Bill Moyers. It explores the comprehensive background of the secret covert government established in 1947 by the National Security Act. In particular, this powerful video compares and contrasts the Iran-Contra affair of the Reagan era with that of the Watergate scandal of 12 years earlier which brought down Richard Nixon. The second documentary is the exceedingly rarely seen 1988 Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair, narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery. As you watch this extraordinary story unfold, you will see precisely why this incredible film has been shoved down the Orwellian Memory Hole for many decades. It discusses not only the hidden dimensions of the Iran-Contra affair but also the October Surprise scandal of 1980; CIA complicity in the global narcotics trade; CIA assassinations and covert activities; and FEMA, REX84, and the suspension of the U. S. Constitution.
• 
  Many of the Reagan administration criminals and nefarious characters featured in both of these first two documentaries will later turn up in the George W. Bush administration — “continuity of government.” A key component to the Iran-Contra affair was the secret shipment of cocaine from Central America to the United States under the cover of the National Security State. One of the major delivery points of these narcotics was Mena, Arkansas. The third documentary, The Clinton Chronicles, details how then governor Bill Clinton and his administration were up to their eyeballs in these illegal covert activities. For more information on these matters, please consult this book list.
• Get the links
•  Social Security & The Ponzi Scheme (by Christopher Manion)
• In 1956, my father got Pearl-Harbored (one might say he was almost Hiroshima’d) for suggesting on his popular radio show that Social Security was a “Ponzi Scheme.” He told the story of Ponzi’s arrest, incarceration, and ultimate deportation to Italy — and then made some poignant observations about the Social Security program:
  
  “Ironically, Ponzi was hardly out of the country before the same federal government that had imprisoned him for fraud proceeded to adopt the Ponzi “get rich easy” scheme as its very own. Ponzi had represented his financial jackpot as a “securities exchange.” The federal government proceeded to call it “Social Security.”
  
  The federal government was able to add some important features to this bizarre shell-game that were unavailable to Ponzi. First of all, the federal government cannot be prosecuted for fraud. But more important than that is the exclusive governmental feature of compulsory participation.”
  
  Today, 54 years later, Paul Krugman exonerates the Federal Ponzis, insisting that “cruel attacks” on its solvency are baseless because “Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund.” But just in case — how could the Compassionate Krugman resist?—- he one-ups Ponzi with his usual bromide: tax the rich.
  
  In the mid-1980′s, a stalwart senate staff colleague of mine decided to find this “Social Security Trust Fund.” She finally found it, literally, in the desk drawer of a mid-level federal bureaucrat somewhere in West Virginia — handwritten numbers representing the “value” of the “trust fund” for each passing year. Of course, the “bank account” had no money in it: Congress had already spent every penny.
  
  

We Are Not Free: The War on Milk

• The Regime's War on Food
•  "I drink raw milk, sold illegally on the underground black market," admits organic farmer and polymath Joel F. Salatin in the foreword to David Gumpert's book The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle over Food Rights. "I grew up on raw milk, from our own Guernsey cows that our family hand-milked twice a day. We made yogurt, ice cream, butter and cottage cheese. All through high school in the early 1970s, I sold our homemade yogurt, butter, buttermilk, and cottage cheese at the curb market on Saturday mornings."
  
  This was possible only because our rulers -- who plunder our earnings to subsidize production of government-approved toxins such as high fructose corn syrup, and don't hesitate to confer the "safe foods" label on Twinkies and other hydrogenated wads of incremental death -- hadn't yet decided to protect us from the scourge of unprocessed natural foods, such as raw milk.
  
  That oversight has since been corrected. As a result, explains Salatin, home dairy producers like the family in which he grew up are forbidden to sell their products at a contemporary farmer's market. 

  

• My thoughts:  Read the whole article it's interesting. This war has been going on for some time.  I know it seems ridiculous (and it is) but this is a definite sign that government has grown far to large.
  

AZ New & Blogs 7/22/2010

• To Jim Deakin and his followers: 
• That said, he will NOT win. But he may be in a position to affect the outcome of the election.   Staying in the race could make the difference between electing a new senator or sustaining the same-old-same old; that is, assuring that John McCain becomes the Republican candidate and probable US Senator for the State of Arizona for a third term.
• My thoughts: Hhhmmm…vote for two guys that received the same freedom index score (~40%) from the New American website or vote for the outlier. I’ll vote for the outlier. If Deakin wasn’t in the primary election I would not vote for either. I’ll probably vote 3rd party in the general election. I only vote pro freedom. This compromising stuff is what has lead us down the path of tyranny. The comments about throwing your vote away by voting your what you believe instead of voting for the person you already know is going to win is ridiculous. Should I have voted for Obama because I knew ahead of time that he was going to win? I think not. Neither will I vote McCain or Hayworth, they’re the same.
• Should the U.S. Restrict Immigration? 
• Recent debates about Arizona’s new immigration law have taken as self-evident that immigration restrictions are good policy, with the only question being which level of government should enforce the law, and how. Yet the case for immigration restrictions is far from convincing.
• Advocates of these restrictions rely on four possible arguments. First, that immigration dilutes existing languages, religions, family values, cultural norms, and so on. Second, that immigrants flock to countries with generous social welfare programs, leading to urban slums and inundated social networks. Third, that immigration can harm the sending country if the departing immigrants are high-skilled labor. Fourth, that immigration lowers the income of native, low-skill workers.
• A Top U.S. Government Murderer Admits He Likes Murdering 
• Well, duh, that’s why he got a job where he can get paid to indulge in his criminal pleasure. Of course, he’s been warned since he made this statement to keep the truth to himself if he wants to keep his job.
• Buz Mills quits the race 
• What Mills is saying is that SB 1070 has sucked all the oxygen out of the room for any discussion of the serious problems facing Arizona: a depressed economy and the fiscal mismanagement of this state.
• Jan Brewer cannot succeed as a demagogue on her own. It takes a complicit news media to allow her to focus attention on SB 1070 rather than to hold her accountable for her actions and inaction as governor.
• Obamacare looks unhealthy for businesses 
• White Castle, which has offered health insurance to its employees since 1924, is considering dropping coverage entirely as one possible way of off-setting the expected financial hit. That would leave the company’s 10,000 formerly covered workers to seek health insurance on their own — most likely from the federal exchange. The feds will impose $2,000-per-person fines on companies that don’t offer coverage, and whose employees turn to federally subsidized insurance instead, but the article cites an IHOP franchise owner who expects the fines to cost roughly half what coverage costs under the new federal scheme.
• The Immigration Problem Resolved 
• With all the efforts being made by states and cities to address the so-called “illegal immigration” problem — including making it a crime to rent to or employ such people — I wonder why the most obvious solution has not been offered.  An Arizona statute gives the police power to stop and question those who, on the basis of skin color, might be such an “illegal.”  But this raises too much uncertainty.  Why not require every “illegal immigrant” to wear a symbol on their clothing — perhaps a yellow star would do the trick — and then the police would not have to resort to questionable “equal protection” practices.  Later on, if the “problem” continues, those wearing the required yellow stars could be rounded up, put onto trains, and transported to “relocation centers” in Utah and Nevada — all in the interest of “national security,” of course.
• BTW, for those who get upset that people who are emigrating to California do not speak the language of resident Californians, bear in mind that the early English-speaking immigrants entered a state in which Spanish was the prevailing language and culture!
• Falling prices prompt concern over home values 
• Home prices in metropolitan Phoenix have been slipping during the past month, prompting concern about a double dip in the region's housing values.
• The average price-per-square-foot of metro Phoenix home sales fell to $89.38 this week, according to Mike Orr's Cromford Report, which analyzes daily sales data from the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service and public records. Current sales prices are down about 4 percent from a month ago when the average square-foot sales price was $92.90. The low for the region's home prices during this downturn was $82.11 per square foot on April 6, 2009.
• The housing market received a boost from the federal homebuyer tax credit. But most of those sales have now been recorded. Some housing-market analysts believe Arizona's new immigration law is impacting home sales and foreclosures in the state. But whether the impact is negative or positive isn't clear yet.

AZ New & Blogs

• John Stossel on Drugs and the Drug War
• Immigration, Individual Rights, and the New Deal 
• In fact, until the 1930’s, the US was generally (though not perfectly) open to immigration, because we accepted the premise that someone who was born beyond our borders had no less right to find their fortune in this country than someone born in Boston or New York.  I won’t rehash the history of immigration nor its importance to the building of this country, because I don’t want to slip from the philosophical to the pragmatic in my arguments for immigration.
• My Immigration Reform Plan 
• For the first 150 years of this country’s history, our country was basically wide-open to immigration.  Sure, there were those opposed (the riots in NYC in the 19th century come to mind) but the opposition was confined mainly to xenophobes and those whose job skills were so minimal that unskilled immigrants who could not speak English were perceived as a threat.   It was only the redistributionist socialism-lite of the New Deal and later the Great Society that began to make unfettered immigration unpopular with a majority of Americans, who rightly did not wish to see the world’s poor migrate to the US seeking an indolent life of living off of government handouts.
• This is phenomenal.  After years of being stay-at-home moms or whatever, women in America decided it was time to go to work.  This was roughly the equivalent of having 40,000,000 immigrants show up on our shores one day looking for work.  And you know what? The American economy found jobs for all of them, despite oil embargos and stagflation and wars and "outsourcing".
• Kobach’s Defense of SB1070 
• When our governor is saying that the majority of Arizona’s 500,000 illegal immigrants are all drug mules, that none of them are really looking for honest work, and that all they do is cause crime up to and including beheadings in the desert, I get angry to hear the same stupid arguments that many of our grandparents heard about their ethnic groups (though the beheading thing seems to lack historical precedent).  (more on the immigration non-crime wave here).
•  The language of SB1070 has never matched the arguments supporting it.  SB1070 mainly gives the police power to be more intrusive at certain traffic stops and harass day labor centers.  What in the heck does this have anything to do with drug cartels and armed paramilitary gangs on the border?  If, as our governor says, illegal immigrants are not really looking for legitimate work, then why is most of our enforcement via employers offering legitimate work?
• No, the Arizona travel alert isn’t just a stunt 
• The American Civil Liberties Union is raising eyebrows with the travel alert it has issued for Arizona, even before the state’s infamous SB 1070 (PDF) goes into effect.
• The ACLU points out that police, especially in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Venezuela-esque Maricopa County fiefdom, “are already beginning to act on provisions of the law” and their efforts are “meant to create a hostile enough environment for Latinos and other people of color that they voluntarily leave the state.”
• July 7, 2010: "Guest Workers Aid Border Security" featuring Stuart Anderson 
• @7:14: What we saw in the past is that under the Pesero (sp) program, which is an agricultural labor program, we saw that what happened was the Mexican farm workers were able to come in legally to work.  And when there was increase inforcement around 1953 -'54 what we saw happen was at the same time the US government made it easier for people to come in legally under the Pesero program and while 1953 approximately 880,000 people were apprehended at the border which is kind of a proxy for illegal entry by 1959 the numbers had fallen to well under 100,000, which all told represented approximately a 90% decrease in illegal entry.  The Pesero program was later tightened up in terms of its rules and later abandoned altogether by congress by complaints from labor advocates in 1964 and we saw that that was the beginning of the great increases in illegal entry that we see up to the present day.  End @8:39
• Cartels using children to bring drugs to the US 
• Records kept by Customs and Border Protection show 130 minors were caught attempting to bring drugs through entry ports from Sonora into Arizona during fiscal year 2009, an 83 percent increase over the previous year.
• My thoughts:  Prohibition doesn't work.  Where there is a demand you will get the services if people truly want it.  This article is another good argument for legalizing drugs.  Remember the government can't even keep drugs out of jails and away from children.  What makes people think they can keep our borders safe from drug dealers?
• True News Tucson debunks the closing of parts of AZ 
• Boldly risking certain death by decapitation at the hands of ubiquitous Mexican drug smugglers, "Real News Tucson" drives through the section of southern Arizona supposedly ceded to Mexico. Oddly enough, the only trouble they encounter comes at a Border Patrol checkpoint two dozen miles inside the border, where they are definitively told by a BP agent that the notion part of Arizona has been surrendered to Mexican control -- and are therefore inaccessible to Americans -- is "false information."
• Addicted to the Warfare State 
• Retired Mesa police officer Bill Richardson, who worked in counter-narcotics task forces in several Arizona counties, believes that Babeu -- like Arpaio and Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (chief sponsor of SB 1070) -- is "fanning the flames of fear, that the undocumented are the root cause of crime in Arizona. In fact, they are not."
• Feds Challenge Arizona Immigration Law 
• Yesterday, the Obama administration filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Arizona’s recently enacted law that is designed to curb illegal immigration. The Arizona law has not yet taken effect — that will occur on July 29.  To generate more discussion and debate, Cato will be hosting a policy forum on the legal challenge and related issues on July 21.  If the weather in DC continues to cooperate, it will feel like we are actually in Arizona.
• Big Money Speaks 
• While there was some evidence of statistically significant changes in one of the five goals of Maine’s and Arizona’s public financing programs, we could not directly attribute these changes to the programs, nor did we find significant changes in the remaining four goals after program implementation. Specifically, there were statistically significant decreases in one measure of electoral competition—the winner’s margin of victory—in legislative races in both states. However, GAO could not directly attribute these decreases to the programs due to other factors, such as the popularity of candidates, which affect electoral outcomes. We found no change in two other measures of competition, and there were no observed changes in voter choice—the average number of legislative candidates per district race. In Maine, decreases in average candidate spending in House races were statistically significant, but a state official said this was likely due to reductions in the amounts given to participating candidates in 2008, while average spending in Maine Senate races did not change. In Arizona, average spending has increased in the five elections under the program. There is no indication the programs decreased perceived interest group influence, although some candidates and interest group officials GAO interviewed said campaign tactics changed, such as the timing of campaign spending.
• Additional Medicaid funding stalls in Congress putting AZ in a bind  (Subscriber)
• Hope is fading that Congress will approve hundreds of millions of dollars that Arizona is counting on to operate its Medicaid program, and state lawmakers don’t know whether they’ll have to scrounge for cash, beg for help or drastically downsize the state-run health care system. In late May, the U.S. House of Representatives stripped $24 billion ...
• My thoughts: More reason to stop socialism.  There's no reason that AZ should be beholden so much to the federal government.
• The DailyShow with Jon Stewart:  Arizona's Photo Radar 
• Olivia Munn explores the debate between Arizona's highway safety and the invasion of privacy.
• After Words with Judge Andrew Napolitano 
• The Libertarian commentator debates politics, history and what he considers to be the unconstitutional behavior of both the Bush and Obama administrations, with consumer advocate and four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
• My thoughts:  This is very good.  I would highly recommend watching it.
• Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan? 
• Just before dawn on Dec. 24, an American cruise missile soared high over the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula, arced down toward the dark mountains above the Rafadh Valley in Yemen's Shabwa province and found its mark, crashing into a small stone house on a hillside where five young men were sleeping. Half a mile away, a 27-year-old Yemeni tribesman named Ali Muhammad Ahmed was awakened by the sound. Stumbling out of bed, he quickly dressed, slung his AK-47 over his shoulder and climbed down a footpath to the valley that shelters his village, two hours from the nearest paved road. He already sensed what had happened. A week earlier, an American airstrike killed dozens of people in a neighboring province as part of an expanded campaign against Al Qaeda militants. (Although the U.S. military has acknowledged playing a role in the airstrikes, it has never publicly confirmed that it fired the missiles.)

AZ News & Blogs 5/22/2010

• How You Gonna Keep them Down on the Farm? 
• Immigration within Cuba, Not Allowed!
• Mission Accomplished! 
• Barack Obama has now been president for 16 months. Congratulations once again to my fellow Americans for demanding change and electing a man with the guts to stand up to the Bush war machine!
• Board votes to keep 5 state parks open 
• The Arizona State Parks Board voted Wednesday to keep open five more parks slated for closure next month, leaving only four on the chopping block just months after the board voted to close nearly all state parks.
• “The parks that we have in our system are the crown jewels of this state, and we have the responsibility to protect those assets for future generation of Arizonans,” said Chip Davis, a supervisor on Yavapai County, which raised $50,000 and hopes to raise another $110,000 to keep open Red Rock State Park near Sedona.
• See also: Private companies can manage state parks , New tax for state parks would entrench wrong approach to funding , and Look for a business partner to fund state parks .

National News Monday 5/10/2010

Libertarianism:

• Stossel, What is a libertarian? 
• Stossel on Taxes 
• An Inconvenient Tax 
• The Simpsons & Civil Liberties 
• Ron Paul & Civil Liberties 
• Mother's Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe 1870 

National Politics 

• Obama Doesn't Like that People Can Know the Truth see also Comments by Lew Rockwell 
• Thoughts on Elena Kagan the New Nomination to the US Supreme Court see also this article and this article
• National Debt 

This Week in Abuses by the State  

•  Kent State Killings and New Information Released from FBI
  
  • My Thoughts:  Don't trust the government to ever give you enough information to make a reasonable decision on policy and reactions to disasters.
• Joe Lieberman vs.  Citizen Shahzad see also this Times Opinion Piece and Terrorists and Over Blown Fear
• Update: Joe Introduces Bill to Back His Words
• US Military Special Forces May Have Been Involved In Capture 
• My Thoughts:  Ernest  Hancock talks about taking away of your citizenship in context of civil liberties.  It's interesting to see politicians actually talk about it.  It defeats the purpose of having civil liberties if we can arbitrarily take them away at a persons whim.  It's interesting that this already happens with President Obama being able to sentence Americans to death without due process.
• How Many Laws Are Useful?  Consider the consequences. 
• Suspicious Package: TSA Worker Jailed After Junk Joke
• Pulling away from a Federal officer is an assault (Listen to video)
• My Thoughts:  I was question the veracity of things I read and listen to.  Even with main stream media (MSM) I have to question it since I know I've been lied to so much.  But assuming this video is true it makes me ask the question, what are we doing?  This is not congruent to a free society.
• Gregory Girard: Political Prisoner