The Politicians and the Founders

Both President Obama and Sen. John McCain cited the Founders in their weekly radio addresses today, as they made the case for government actions that would have appalled those Founders. Obama invoked “the indomitable spirit of the first American citizens who made [independence] day possible” in arguing for a federal takeover of education, energy, and health care.

He might have trouble explaining how his policies reflect the spirit of the men who left us such words as these:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must be happy.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.

Meanwhile, McCain called for the American government to more vigorously support the protesters in Iran. What would the Founders say to him?

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible….Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. …Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

Maybe each week there should be three national radio broadcasts: one from the incumbent president, one from the other big-government party, and one reflecting the views of the Founders.

Source: The CATO Institute

Remembering What the Declaration of Independence is Not

When we celebrate the Fourth of July, we are celebrating one of the most important political documents in the history of the world. The Declaration is a statement to the world -- the people of the world was the audience -- about the very nature of government and its relationship to men. Sometimes we appreciate what this document was, but perhaps we need even more to appreciate what it was not.

It was not a poll-driven summation of current opinion. The men who gathered in Philadelphia did respect each other's talents and knowledge, but the document they signed was not not driven by the latest Gallup or Zogby poll results. What was right and true was not dependent upon popular opinion.

The signers did not even seek a vote of the people. No referendum was necessary for the Declaration of Independence and it might well have failed in some of the colonies. The "will of the people," so precious to demagogues, did not determine what was right and true. The people can fall for Hitler, adore Obama, and be enchanted by silly or wicked men. The purpose of government, as the Declaration clearly states, is to secure liberty and not to implement that dubious, inconstant sentiment "the will of the people."

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence represented the absolute opposite of "interest group politics" so slavishly worshipped in political science departments. They pledged their lives, their wealth, their liberty, and their honor -- everything -- on a toss of the dice. Often, even if the revolution won, these men personally lost. The game was not about them, their economic interest, or their political ambition. They won if America became a new order of liberty in the world. Interest politics would have led them all to make peace with the Crown. Moral principles led them to what Churchill would later call "blood, toil, sweat, and tears."

The brave men in Philadelphia were engaging in unconstitutional action. Britain had a constitution, albeit a largely unwritten one, and Jefferson knew that he was defying our equivalent of the Supreme Court. He and his colleagues defied the moral power of a system which no longer treasured liberty above advantage or caprice. Rulers making decisions which did not really affect them, living thousands of miles from their subjects, lacked the moral authority to wield law.

Moral authority was the heart of the Declaration as well. It lacked a separation of church and state and instead there was a unity of God and government. All men were created equal by God. That is the foundational point of the Declaration from which all else flows like the spring of liberty. If all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, politics is clear and simple. If that is true, then -- of course! -- protecting these inalienable rights is the only reason that governments are instituted among men. These were truths which, in the magical pen of Jefferson, the brave authors and signers held to be "self-evident." There is a Creator. He made us. He made us, specifically, free in body and in conscience. We are not sheep or some sort of oddly self-domesticated animals. We are creatures in the image of a Creator, unique in reality, and given the power to choose.

The men who wrote and signed the Declaration are all dead, long, long, dead -- they never expected otherwise. If we met their ghosts today, they would not ask about our technological marvels or our global economy or our medical breakthroughs or space travel. If we told them about our partisan debates or the new King in Washington, they might cringe like a father over an addled child.

But when speaking of what they wrote in 1776 -- signing their own death warrants, in some respects -- they might ask us this: "We did not mean to confuse you. That is why the words we chose were so clear. You are free creatures of God. Government is your creature, your chattel, your tool -- nothing more. We studied history long before we wrote our brief statement of liberty. You own government or rather the spirit of free men owns government. You fret about ‘stuff.' Why? We are all dead now, as we knew we would be. But we chose to die free, following our consciences - that is the only real choice in life. What confused you?" The principle of liberty is easy. All it requires is courage and honor.

Source: American Thinker

Why Does Our Government Still Spy On, Arrest and Persecute Dissidents?

One needn't return in time to the McCarthy Era to find many individuals who have been investigated and persecuted for holding vilified opinions.

Recently, an American Civil Liberties Union report pointed out, "Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as ‘low level terrorism’.”

Although DoD officials removed the offensive section at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance is still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law-abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many government departments and agencies.

Indeed the participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960's using Gandhi's Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza.

(My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both were in attendance. When the film crew focused on us, she stood tall, faced the agents with their telephoto lens, glared in disdainful defiance and, simultaneously, threw the corner of her coat over my face. Afterwards, she muttered, "How dare they try to intimidate us!")

With that history in mind, it shouldn’t be assumed that the treatment of Nobel Peace Award winner Aung San Sui Kyi in Myanmar would be all that different if she were leading protests in the United States. While it's commendable that U.S. spokespersons object to her most recent arrest, they still might seem to be a bunch of hypocrites.

For instance, a number of Nobel Peace Award recipients, such as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), have had difficulties of their own on American soil.

"AFSC’s work, always open and resolutely nonviolent, has been under government surveillance for decades. The Service Committee secured nearly 1,700 pages of files from the FBI under a Freedom of Information request in 1976,” the AFSC said in seeking more recent “war on terror” records.

“These [earlier] files show that the FBI kept files on AFSC that dated back to 1921. Ten other federal agencies kept files on AFSC, including the CIA, Air Force, Navy, Internal Revenue Service, Secret Service, and the State Department. The CIA has intercepted overseas mail and cables in the 1950s, and some AFSC offices (and even its staff's homes) have been infiltrated and burglarized in the late 1960s into the 1970s."

AFSC associate general secretary for justice and human rights, Joyce Miller, asked, “How can we speak of spreading democracy in Iraq while dismantling it here at home?” She further remarked, “Political dissent is fundamental to a free and democratic society. It should not be equated with crime.”

Add to the AFSC problems, those pertaining to Nobel Peace Award recipient Nelson Mandela, who only a year ago had the designation "terrorist" removed from his name, under protest by the State Department, so that he no longer suffered travel restrictions from the U.S. government.

Yet his travel curtailment was not nearly as awful as was Ramzy Baroud's blockage. He, the editor of Palestine Chronicle, had his U.S. passport seized by a consular officer at an overseas American Embassy. Similarly, Sen.Edward Kennedy was, also, flagged by the U.S. no-fly list.

Then again, Ted Kennedy received much less harassment than did Nobel Peace Award winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire after her flight from Guatemala had been directed to Ireland through Houston:

"She was probably tired and ready to get back to Belfast, where her attempts to bring about an end to The Troubles in 1976 made her at 32 the youngest Nobel Peace Prize-winner ever,” according to an article in the Houston Press.

“Since then, she's been given the Pacem in Terris Award by Pope John Paul II, and the United Nations selected her (along with the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Jordan's Queen Noor and a dozen or so other fellow Nobel Laureates) as an honorary board member of the International Coalition for the Decade.

"Unfortunately for Maguire, her flight back home to Northern Ireland was routed through Houston, where none of that meant diddly. Federal Customs officials were far less interested in any of that than they were in a box on the back of the transit form she filled out on her flight.

"'They questioned me about my nonviolent protests in USA against the Afghanistan invasion and Iraqi war,' Maguire said later in a statement. 'They insisted I must tick the box in the Immigration form admitting to criminal activities.'

"Maguire was detained for two hours -- grilled once, fingerprinted, photographed, and grilled again. She missed her flight home. She was only released after an organization she helped found -- the Nobel Women's Initiative -- started kicking up a fuss."

One can add to her troubles countless other ones wherein human rights and environmental supporters have been repeatedly hassled for no other reason than that they're holding views that don't jive with positions at any number of U.S. government institutions.

One needn't return in time to the McCarthy Era to find many individuals who have been investigated and persecuted for holding vilified opinions. For example, Stephen Lendman, a peace advocate and writer in his seventies with a permanent knee injury that delimits travel, has been repeatedly investigated by the FBI.

At the same time, he is joined by myriad others such as assorted activists in Maryland whose names were put on federal terrorist lists by state police who infiltrated their groups. As such, their perfectly legal activities, freedom of speech and right to unhindered assembly have been criminalized.

Simultaneously, there's a certain inescapable irony and disingenuous quality presented by the Western government heads who are harshly critical of the Iran crackdown on dissenting citizens while they, themselves, condone similar ironfisted policies in their own lands.

Their two-faced position is barely hidden beneath the surface of their mock concern for the well-being of Iranian protesters as they urge their own and allied troops into battle, show little (if any) sincere remorse over the slaughter of masses of civilians that happen in the process and make sure that demonstrators at home are disregarded, denigrated or preemptively rounded up as happened at the 2008 Republican National Convention and similar events.

Then again, one might find himself in pretty good company if he were singled out as unpatriotic and treacherous for holding viewpoints or undertaking actions that go contrary to the perspectives that a certain hawkish and totalitarian segment of society holds.

All the same, every method conceivable might be used to hunt down the offenders and, when taken to the extreme, render their seemingly provocative positions ineffectual by any means possible, including imprisonment and murder.

Anyone who doubts this to be the case needs only to remember what happened to people like Howard Fast; the slain Freedom Riders Andy Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner; the thirteen shot students at Kent State University at which Ohio National Guardsman fired sixty-seven rounds over a thirteen second period, and scores of others who have stood against mainstream policies.

Meanwhile, stigmatizing dissidents is a fairly common practice. As such, “There are 1.1 million people on the [U.S.] Terrorist Watch List and there is a 35 per cent error rate, minimum, for that list,” according to ACLU's Michael German.

Furthermore, the overzealous and aggressive surveillance tactics used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to check the public's e-mails, telephone calls and other communications are the same ones as were in use during George W. Bush's administration. Likewise, the amount of spying on personal exchanges is as high as it ever was.

In relation to recent claims by Justice Department and national security officials that the over-collection was unintentional, U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey and Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, commented: “Some actions are so flagrant that they can't be accidental.”

Additionally, the act of tracking e-mailed transmissions and other interactions has seemed in violation of federal law, according to lawyers at the Justice Department. Regardless, the practice continues.

At the same time, the decision to designate social activists as troublemakers, while singling them out for intimidation, threats and investigations, carries serious legal and political implications in democratic societies.

The further measure of subjecting them to the sorts of difficulties that Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ramzy Baroud, AFSC members and innumerable others have endured is clearly based in xenophobic, paranoid and despotic thinking. It embodies the kind of authoritarian mentality and oppressive activities that one finds in the worst types of tyrannical regimes.

As Harry S. Truman suggested, "Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

Due to this fear, are we, then, to all conform with lock-step in perverse obedience to the State's dictates, outlooks and agendas in an increasingly Orwellian milieu?

If not, then we must constantly remind ourselves and each other of U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's vision: "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

Source: Alter Net

Americans Love Government

Philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that "Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education." And, it was Albert Einstein who explained, "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." So which is it -- stupidity, ignorance or insanity -- that explains the behavior of my fellow Americans who call for greater government involvement in our lives?

According to latest Rasmussen Reports, 30 percent of Americans believe congressmen are corrupt. Last year, Congress' approval rating fell to 9 percent, its lowest in history. If the average American were asked his opinion of congressmen, among the more polite terms you'll hear are thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks. But what do the same people say when our nation faces a major problem? "Government ought to do something!" When people call for government to do something, it is as if they've been befallen by amnesia and forgotten just who is running government. It's the very people whom they have labeled as thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks.

Aside from the general level of disgust that Americans have for congressmen, there's the question of whether there is anything that Congress does well. What about Social Security and Medicare? Congress has allowed Social Security and Medicare to accumulate an unfunded liability of $101 trillion. That means in order to pay promised elderly entitlement benefits, Congress would have to put trillions in the bank today earning interest. Congressional efforts to create "affordable housing" have created today's financial calamity. Congress props up failed enterprises such as Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service with huge cash subsidies, and subsidies in the forms of special tax treatment and monopoly rights. I can't think of anything that Congress does well yet we Americans call for them to take greater control over important areas of our lives.

I don't think that stupidity, ignorance or insanity explains the love that many Americans hold for government; it's far more sinister and perhaps hopeless. I'll give a few examples to make my case. Many Americans want money they don't personally own to be used for what they see as good causes such as handouts to farmers, poor people, college students, senior citizens and businesses. If they privately took someone's earnings to give to a farmer, college student or senior citizen, they would be hunted down as thieves and carted off to jail. However, they get Congress to do the identical thing, through its taxing power, and they are seen as compassionate and caring. In other words, people love government because government, while having neither moral nor constitutional authority, has the legal and physical might to take the property of one American and give it to another.

The unanticipated problem with this agenda is that as Congress uses its might to take what belongs to one American to give to another, what President Obama calls "spreading the wealth around," more and more Americans will want to participate in the looting. It will ultimately produce something none of us wants: absolute control over our lives.

The path we're embarked upon, in the name of good, is a familiar one. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the '30s and '40s with the men usually associated with those names. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the name of "social justice." In Germany, it led to the Enabling Act of 1933: Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation and, after all, who could be against a remedy to relieve distress? Decent but misguided Germans, who would have cringed at the thought of what Nazi Germany would become, succumbed to Hitler's charisma.

Today's Americans, enticed, perhaps enchanted, by charismatic speeches, are ceding so much power to Washington, and like yesteryear's Germans are building the Trojan Horse for a future tyrant.

Source: George Mason University