Category Archives: freedom

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Secession: Are We Free To Go? Ron Paul

Is all the recent talk of secession mere sour grapes over the election, or perhaps something deeper?   Currently there are active petitions in support of secession for all 50 states, with Texas taking the lead in number of signatures.  Texas has well over the number of signatures needed to generate a response from the administration, and while I wouldn’t hold my breath on Texas actually seceding, I believe these petitions raise a lot of worthwhile questions about the nature of our union.

Is it treasonous to want to secede from the United States?  Many think the question of secession was settled by our Civil War.  On the contrary; the principles of self-governance and voluntary association are at the core of our founding.  Clearly Thomas Jefferson believed secession was proper, albeit as a last resort. Writing to William Giles in 1825, he concluded that states:

“should separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left, are the dissolution of our Union with them, or submission to a government without limitation of powers.”

Keep in mind that the first and third paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence expressly contemplate the dissolution of a political union when the underlying government becomes tyrannical.

Do we have a “government without limitation of powers” yet?  The Federal government kept the Union together through violence and force in the Civil War, but did might really make right?

Secession is a deeply American principle.  This country was born through secession.  Some felt it was treasonous to secede from England, but those “traitors” became our country’s greatest patriots.

There is nothing treasonous or unpatriotic about wanting a federal government that is more responsive to the people it represents.  That is what our Revolutionary War was all about and today our own federal government is vastly overstepping its constitutional bounds with no signs of reform.  In fact, the recent election only further entrenched the status quo.  If the possibility of secession is completely off the table there is nothing to stop the federal government from continuing to encroach on our liberties and no recourse for those who are sick and tired of it.

Consider the ballot measures that passed in Colorado and Washington state regarding marijuana laws.  The people in those states have clearly indicated that they are ready to try something different where drug policy is concerned, yet they will still face a tremendous threat from the federal government.  In California, the Feds have been arresting peaceful medical marijuana users and raiding dispensaries that state and local governments have sanctioned. This shouldn’t happen in a free country.

It remains to be seen what will happen in states that are refusing to comply with the deeply unpopular mandates of Obamacare by not setting up healthcare exchanges.  It appears the Federal government will not respect those decisions either.

In a free country, governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. When the people have very clearly withdrawn their consent for a law, the discussion should be over.  If the Feds refuse to accept that and continue to run roughshod over the people, at what point do we acknowledge that that is not freedom anymore?  At what point should the people dissolve the political bands which have connected them with an increasingly tyrannical and oppressive federal government?  And if people or states are not free to leave the United States as a last resort, can they really think of themselves as free?

If a people cannot secede from an oppressive government, they cannot truly be considered free.

via Secession: Are We Free To Go?.

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Truthdig – Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All

Posted on Nov 19, 2012

By Chris Hedges

Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.

In the new global landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the United States’ own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and “disappeared.” The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine.

The impending collapse of the international economy, the assaults on the climate, the resulting droughts, flooding, precipitous decline in crop yields and rising food prices are creating a universe where power is divided between the narrow elites, who hold in their hands sophisticated instruments of death, and the enraged masses. The crises are fostering a class war that will dwarf anything imagined by Karl Marx. They are establishing a world where most will be hungry and live in fear, while a few will gorge themselves on delicacies in protected compounds. And more and more people will have to be sacrificed to keep this imbalance in place.

Because it has the power to do so, Israel—as does the United States—flouts international law to keep a subject population in misery. The continued presence of Israeli occupation forces defies nearly a hundred U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for them to withdraw. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, established in June 2007, is a brutal form of collective punishment that violates Article 33 of the Fourth 1949 Geneva Convention, which set up rules for the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” The blockade has turned Gaza into a sliver of hell, an Israeli-administered ghetto where thousands have died, including the 1,400 civilians killed in the Israeli incursion of 2008. With 95 percent of factories shut down, Palestinian industry has virtually ceased functioning. The remaining 5 percent operate at 25 to 50 percent capacity. Even the fishing industry is moribund. Israel refuses to let fishermen travel more than three miles from the coastline, and within the fishing zone boats frequently come under Israeli fire. The Israeli border patrols have seized 35 percent of the agricultural land in Gaza for a buffer zone. The collapsing infrastructure and Israeli seizure of aquifers mean that in many refugee camps, such as Khan Yunis, there is no running water. UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) estimates that 80 percent of all Gazans now rely on food aid. And the claim of Israeli self-defense belies the fact that it is Israel that maintains an illegal occupation and violates international law by carrying out collective punishment of Palestinians. It is Israel that chose to escalate the violence when during an incursion into Gaza earlier this month its forces fatally shot a 13-year-old boy. As the world breaks down, this becomes the new paradigm—modern warlords awash in terrifying technologies and weapons murdering whole peoples. We do the same in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Continued:

via Truthdig – Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All.

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Govt accessing private data more than ever in 2012 – Google – YouTube

Google says the number of government requests to access and remove on-line data has risen throughout 2012. The US once again topped the list, asking for the private information of almost 8,000 users in the first six months of the year.

RT discusses the surveillance trend with Loz Kaye, leader of the UK Pirate Party.

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[46] Police State 101, Torture Impunity, Obama’s Second Chance? – YouTube

On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to Ian Freeman, Host of “Free Talk Live”, about the police state and the erosion of American civil liberties. Abby then talks to RT Arabic Correspondent, Reema Abu Hamdieh, about the polarized views of Arabs in the Middle East toward a second Obama Administration. BTS wraps up the show with a look at torture, murder and rape by US military contractors going unpunished.

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Dismantling Linear Time with Dan and Vicki Mathews Dec. 6, 7, 8

Dr. Dan and Vicki Mathews

invite you to join them to celebrate

Dismantling Linear Time

A once in a lifetime event!

December 6, 7, 8, 2012

at

Peace Valley Sanctuary

Caddo Gap, AR

Home of the conscious Earth Keeper Crystal

Festivities launch Thursday at 3pm

and wrap up Sunday noon.

Dr. Dan and Vicki Mathews will dismantle linear time through Holy Divine Healing equations done with the group

each evening at 7pm.

If you cannot be there in person, there is the option of participating via telephone at no charge for up to 150 people.

By being on the call you will receive the energetics of the equations although please note that much of the call will be non-verbal.

 

You must register using the form below to be sent the conference call number by email closer to the event.

 

​Note:  An MP3 audio recording of the calls will be available for purchase.  See info below the registration form for more details.

via Events.

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Will You Make Obama and Congress Produce Change? | The Clyde Fitch Report

Einstein’s credited with defining insanity this way: repeating the same action over and over and expecting a different result.

So here we are. Tuesday’s elections returned Barack Obama to the White House and kept control of the Senate in the Democrats’ hands and the House of Representatives in the Republicans’ grasp, and probably a more divided House.

Of course, we realize we were damned if we did or damned if we didn’t in voting for Obama or Romney: two millionaires married to the military-industrial complex. And the only two candidates the corporate media let you hear in “debates.”

If you’d have heard the Third Party debates on an independent network you’d have discovered four candidates, from conservative to liberal, who didn’t agree with the two Big Guns on these issues: the economy, the Federal Reserve, student-loan debt, endless war, deadly drones killing innocents, and the National Defense Authorization Act—which allows your military to arrest anyone in the world, including Americans, and to imprison them without charge or trial. They also spoke of a growing police state at home, which the two Eye Spy Guys wouldn’t dare mention.

So the votes went to the two One-Percenters, with the less rich one winning again. But enough bitching about election reality. So where do we go from here in our own living reality?

Throughout this year, if you heard any independent investors (not Wall Street banksters) interviewed about the economy, they consistently weren’t impressed or even concerned that much with the presidential race. They’re concerned about the Federal Reserve’s endless printing of money, which they see going to the banks while the Fed keeps interest rates artificially low, costing savers billions.

They also see this and the continually rising national debt eventually leading to a more catastrophic economic meltdown than the nation and world suffered in 2008. They don’t feel it’s something the Republican or Democratic presidential candidates, or Congress, or the Fed are willing to do anything about.

We saw Obama and Romney avoid or twist—from the two national political conventions through the Dynamic Duos’ “debates”—five vital issues they didn’t want to honestly face: water, food, energy, the military-industrial complex, and personal-and-economic health. Those vital issues will remain with us through the next four years, and we’ve included links to explain them. We review them here.

We have pointed out, and will continue to point out, that politicians are not leaders, they’re followers. It’s up to you to get organized, get educated and get active, so that you understand the vital issues’ significance, and so you can get politicians to follow your lead in bringing change. We also show the two ways you can directly take your government back…if you want to.

via Will You Make Obama and Congress Produce Change? | The Clyde Fitch Report.

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Big Brother (Homeland Security) Keeps Going Local | The Clyde Fitch Report

President Obama is looking to further tighten the federal grip on a functioning America for the sake of “security,” this time getting more heavily involved in state and local private operations.

Continued:

via Big Brother (Homeland Security) Keeps Going Local | The Clyde Fitch Report.

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John Grisham » The Racketeer

Given the importance of what they do, and the controversies that often surround them, and the violent people they sometimes confront, it is remarkable that in the history of this country only four active federal judges have been murdered.

Judge Raymond Fawcett just became number five.

Who is the Racketeer? And what does he have to do with the judge’s untimely demise? His name, for the moment, is Malcolm Bannister. Job status? Former attorney. Current residence? The Federal Prison Camp near Frostburg, Maryland.

Continued:

via John Grisham » The Racketeer.

Really liked this novel! The dynamics of unjust imprisonment and loss of personal freedoms, retribution… are very compelling.