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Sunday, September 30, 2012

The Prisons We Call "Airports"


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by William Grigg

A woman who had passed through airport security in Houston was detained by the Transportation Security Administration and forbidden to board the plane as punishment for exhibiting a ?bad attitude.?

The TSA, which apparently exists in order to provide gainful employment for deviants and petty criminals, recently began a policy of testing beverages for explosives. This includes bottled drinks and coffee purchased by airline customers inside secure areas of airports.

The woman involved in the Houston episode ? which was captured on video -- was confronted by TSA personnel who demanded that she surrender her water bottle to be ?tested.? Since she had been through two security screenings, the woman didn?t see the point of this petty harassment and drank the water ? something she obviously wouldn?t have done if it had contained explosives or poison.

?Let me get this straight,? she said when TSA personnel refused to let her on the plane. ?This is retaliatory for my attitude, this is not making the airways safer.?

?It pretty much definitely is,? one TSA employee admitted.

In the age of the Homeland Security State, every airport operates like a prison. Then again, so does the rest of our society as well.


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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Man Investigated By Police For Buying Ammunition


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Commercial fisherman questioned over purchase of a few boxes of ammo even as feds buy bullets in huge quantities
Paul Joseph Watson


A commercial fisherman was investigated by police for purchasing a few boxes of ammunition at his local gun store, a shocking example of how Americans are being intimidated out of exercising their second amendment rights even as the federal government buys up bullets in vast quantities.

In a You Tube clip, Brian Loftus reveals how on the 28th of August he purchased a few boxes of ammunition from his local gun shop only to receive a phone call later that same evening at 9:30pm from the State Police.

The cops said they needed to talk to Loftus because he had ?purchased a large amount of ammunition.?

Loftus said the police told him someone who was in the gun store while he made the purchase who works for the Chief of Police reported Loftus to make sure he ?wasn?t going to do something crazy.?

Loftus told the police he had no criminal record, a fact they immediately confirmed having admitted that they had already checked his record. Loftus told the police they shouldn?t even be pulling the record unless he was a suspect in a crime, which he was not.

?As things are progressing in the country, this is becoming more prevalent and as someone who has swore an oath to defend the Constitution like I have and these officers have, they have to wonder how many people are they gonna call? Are they gonna call their brother in law next time he goes to buy some ammunition or their brother or sister or son ? where does it end?? asked Loftus.

?I shoot that amount of ammunition on a good weekend at the range so why are they calling me to ?make sure? that I?m not going to do something crazy?.I?m just a hard working, tax paying American who loves his country and loves the constitution,? he added.

The fact that Loftus was investigated for buying a few boxes of bullets is ironic given that the federal government is making huge ammo purchases as the establishment media labels those who express concern about the fact as paranoid conspiracy theorists.

As we highlighted last week, the Associated Press attempted to whitewash the Social Security Administration's recent purchase of 174,000 bullets while completely ignoring a far larger purchase by the DHS which totaled over 1.4 billion bullets.

Back in March, Homeland Security?put out a solicitation?for 450 million rounds of .40-caliber hollow point bullets that are designed to expand upon entry and cause maximum organ damage, prompting questions as to why the DHS needed such a large amount of powerful bullets merely for training purposes.

This was followed by?another DHS solicitation?asking for a further 750 million rounds of assorted bullets, including 357 mag rounds that are able to penetrate walls.

?It doesn?t matter what side of the aisle you are on, if you love freedom and you love America you have to wonder where does this go?.where does it stop?? asked Loftus.

The reason Loftus was harassed by police was almost certainly related to his membership of the Oath Keepers organization, a group that simply advocates people who swear an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution should not violate it.

The Oath Keepers organization is not a "militia," as some claim, it is merely a loose network of current and former military and law enforcement professionals who have sworn not to obey unconstitutional orders such as gun confiscation, warrantless searches and mass internment of Americans. The group is committed to non-violence.

Members of Oath Keepers who have previously been targeted by authorities include?the parents of a newborn babywho was snatched from them by the New Hampshire Division of Family Child Services accompanied by police after authorities cited the parents' association with the Oath Keepers organization as one of the primary reasons for the seizure of the child.

During a public meeting last year,?Quartzite Chief of Police Jeff Gilbert referred to the Oath Keepers as ?terrorists?after ten police Quartzsite police officers and Oath Keepers blew the whistle on Gilbert for repeated false arrest and harassment of political opponents.
_
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for?Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.


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Of Bidens and Bikers: Does Anybody Remember Derek Hale?

by William Norman Grigg

A fragment of folk wisdom dubiously attributed to Bismack informs us that God watches out for ?fools, small children, and the United States of America.? During a campaign stop in Seaman, Ohio, Joe Biden?s proprietary blend of foolishness and childishness may have proven fatal were it not for the intervention of Providence ? or, at least, the close supervision of the Secret Service.

Biden inflicted himself on customers enjoying an otherwise pleasant Sunday meal at Cruiser?s Diner. Acting on the familiar and entirely unwarranted assumption that Mundanes delight in being pestered by their tax-engorged overseers, Biden struck up a conversation with a group of bikers ?in black leather vests and bandanas,? as Politico recounts the event.

Spying a female member of the club, Biden ?pulled a chair in front of himself and pulled her nearly into his lap,? continues the report. ?He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned in for a conversation as photographers snapped away.?

Biden apparently thought that his behavior was puckishly charming, and the assembled media lickspittles did nothing to dispel that delusion. One needn?t have a Betazoid?s empathic gifts to recognize that the two male bikers who flanked Biden were neither flattered by Biden?s presence, nor amused by the adolescent attentions he had forced on their female companion. After all, this was a brazen violation of the second rule of biker etiquette (the relevant section of which could be paraphrased as ?Keep your hands off of `our? women?).

Biden?s strained attempt at a mock-populist photo-op occurred during the same news cycle in which the Dear Leader himself took part in a staged bearhug in a pizza joint in Florida. I find myself wondering how Biden?s campaign appearance may have turned out if the circumstances had been altered slightly ? if, for instance, his son Beau Biden had decided to make a similar overture to a group of bikers. Had this happened, there is a small but tantalizing possibility that Biden the Younger may have been taught the kind of painful lesson from which fools often receive necessary instruction.

In addition to being the glorious outpouring of vice presidential loins ? and thus heir to his father?s incurable foolishness ? Beau Biden is Delaware?s Attorney General. Five years ago, Biden the Younger consummated the official cover-up of the police murder of Marine veteran Derek Hale, who was repeatedly shot with a Taser and then gunned down by at point-blank range on the front porch of a home in Wilmington on November 6, 2006.

Derek Hale, an Iraq combat veteran, joined an ?outlaw motorcycle club? (OMC) called the Pagans shortly after being discharged from the Marine Corps for medical reasons. In November 2006 he was making a run from his home in Virginia to Wilmington as part of a ?Toys for Tots? promotion. He was unaware of the fact that about a year earlier the Delaware State Police had opened an investigation into several members of the Pagans OMC.

Derek was not the subject of the investigation. He had no criminal record, and there were no warrants out for his arrest on the day he was murdered.

On November 6, 2006, Derek was house-sitting for a friend, who had broken up with his wife and was moving to a new apartment. Sandra Lopez, the soon-to-be ex-wife of Derek's friend, arrived with an 11-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter early in the afternoon to remove some personal belongings.

Derek -- wearing a hooded sweatshirt -- was sitting quietly on the front porch of the home when an unmarked police car and a blacked-out SUV arrived at around 4:00 PM and decanted a thugscrum of 8-14 heavily armed police. According to a half-dozen eyewitnesses, the officers were dressed in black, and displayed no police insignia of any kind.

Derek stood as the police surrounded the porch. Within a few seconds, he was hit with the first of what would be seven Taser blasts during a space of 73 seconds. According to eyewitnesses ? one of whom, Howard Mixon, was threatened by the officers when he pointed out that Derek was helpless and unresisting ? Hale?s last words were a plea for the police to get the children to safety. Witnesses also described how Derek, who was paralyzed from the Taser assault and left wallowing in a puddle of vomit, repeatedly attempted to comply with demands to remove his hands from his pockets.


[He was actually Tasered seven times.]

Derek was prone, unarmed, and helpless when Lt. William Brown of the Wilmington Police Department murdered him by shooting him three times at point-blank range.

The official report commissioned and signed by Beau Biden dismisses eyewitness accounts, retailing as irreproachable truth the self-serving version of the incident provided by the death squad that murdered Derek Hale.

Biden?s report asserted that the Taser barrage was necessary ?to overcome Derek Hale?s resistance to the arrest so he could be taken into custody without injury to himself or to the officers.? The arrest was unlawful, and Derek Hale offered no resistance ? apart from his inability to comply because of the Taser attack itself.

The document also claims that Hale ?continued to keep his hand in his pocket as if holding a weapon and turning in a threatening manner toward a nearby officer armed with an empty Taser.? According to the description provided by disinterested observers, Derek was thrown to his side by a Taser strike, and was too busy vomiting into a flower bed to ?threaten? any of the people who had just attacked him.

Derek was within easy reach of his armed assailants. But taking a hands-on approach might have involved a risk to ?officer safety? ? one that was both infinitesimal and, to the valiant badasses of the Wilmington PD, entirely unacceptable. So for the benefit of Beau Biden and the other authors of the official report the officers confected a story worthy of a Marvel comic book in which Derek ripped the barbs from his clothes and stood up in a ?threatening? manner.

Because of this ?menacing? behavior, insists the Biden Report, the Taser-wielding officer nearest to the victim ?believed he was in immediate danger and, thus, began an evasive move. Lt. Brown believed that the use of deadly force was immediately necessary to prevent serious injury or death to that officer.? A second officer was preparing to gun down Derek when Brown shot the victim.

The police had the advantage of numbers and firepower. Their subject had been under surveillance for days; he was clearly not a threat. He had been Tasered seven times when Lt. Brown pulled the trigger. According to Beau Biden, this was entirely justified because of fears on the part of the assailants that Derek ? who was in convulsions ? had not been rendered entirely immobile.

Attorney Thomas Neuberger, who represented Derek's widow Elaine in a lawsuit filed against her husband's murderers, described Biden?s report as ?a shameless cover-up because the use of deadly force was not justified. Fourteen heavily armed and trained police officers should be able to arrest a citizen without killing him after they have Tasered him seven times and he is lying in a pool of his own vomit."

Shortly after he filed the lawsuit on behalf of Derek?s widow and stepchildren, Neuberger told me that when Thomas MacLeish became commander of the Delaware State Police in 2005, his most urgent priority was to improve the public image of his scandal-plagued agency.

?Over the past several years, we've represented a lot of police officers, including some from SWAT teams, so it's not as if we're anti-police, even though we consider the State Police [DSP] hierarchy to be corrupt," Neuberger told me in early 2007. "We've gone to court on behalf of whistleblowers and officers who have filed civil rights complaints of various kinds. Of the ten lawsuits we've filed, we've either won or successfully settled nine of them. Most of the cases have involved the Delaware State Police, and the DSP's hierarchy has received a lot of negative publicity. I suspect that might be what's behind the raid in which Derek was killed.?

Clearly, the DSP wanted to find a suitable ?threat? ? preferably one that was telegenic without posing significant risks to ?officer safety? ? to cast as an antagonist in a high-profile PR campaign. The Pagans were a perfect fit. The Feds cut themselves in for a piece of the action, and a joint ?task force? was created to target the Pagans.

Eventually, the DSP was able to produce a 160-count indictment against several members of the motorcycle club. That document was replete with lurid ? and studiously vague ? allegations of ?racketeering? and ?gang activity.? Derek was never a criminal suspect. In fact, he didn't become a "person of interest" until after he had been murdered by the police.

Immediately after the shooting, the DSP contacted the Virginia State Police and -- in a deliberate act of official perjury -- told them that Derek was a suspect in a narcotics investigation. Police from Delaware and Virginia barged into the Hale family's Manassas home, shoving aside a grieving wife and two devastated children in order to carry out a charade of a search in the service of an official fiction.

Not content to murder Derek and terrorize his already traumatized family, the people who orchestrated that charade defiled the victim?s memory. On November 21, 2006, the DSP issued a press release that was a Soviet-grade specimen of official mendacity. The State Police claimed that Derek ?was at the center of a long term narcotics trafficking investigation? and that his death was a justifiable use of force because he had ?resisted arrest.?

By exonerating the police who murdered Derek Hale ? including William Brown, who actually pulled the trigger ? Beau Biden conferred his imprimatur on the post-mortem assassination of the victim?s character. He also disposed of the matter before a suitable answer was found to the most important question: Why was a paramilitary strike team sent to arrest him? The most reasonable explanation is that the federally supervised task force wanted to intimidate him into becoming an informant.

At the time of Derek Hale?s murder, several other Pagans were already on the federal payroll. One of them, James ?Pagan Ronnie? Howerton, was recruited by the FBI in 2004.

While being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars as an undercover Fed, Howerton ? a convicted murderer became the club?s sergeant-at-arms.

In 2009, the Feds breathlessly announced that they had compiled a massive indictment against the Pagans as an interstate criminal conspiracy? only to see that document deflate into a small number of relatively trivial charges against specific members of the club. The ?criminal enterprise? claim boiled down to the accusation that the Pagans had committed a federal offense by running a raffle. The City of Wilmington paid a $975,000 settlement to Derek?s family in December 2010, avoiding a civil trial scheduled for the following July.

The biker milieu isn?t to everybody?s taste. Like every other private association, biker clubs do occasionally attract people inclined toward violent crime. Clear-eyed social observers would conclude that innocent people are far safer in the company of bikers ? including members of Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs ? than in the company of police.

William Queen, an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, spent roughly 30 months infiltrating the Mongols Motorcycle Club. His labors ? which cost a great deal in money extracted from tax victims, and nearly destroyed Queen?s family ? yielded an insignificant haul of controlled substances and ?illegal? firearms.

Trite and pointless as the operation proved to be, it did give Queen an opportunity to strut and preen about his supposed accomplishments.

?While they are wearing that patch, they are untouchable to the world at large,? wrote Queen of the Mongols in his memoir, Under and Alone. ?No one can make trouble for them without bringing down the fury of the whole Mongol Nation.?

As Queen conceded, that description applies much better to the violent, lawless brotherhood that employs him: ?Living full-time as an outlaw gave me a perspective few law-enforcement officers ever get to experience. I was often more at risk from my supposed brothers in blue than from my adopted brothers in the gang.?

By covering up the murder of Derek Hale, Beau Biden performed an indispensable service on behalf of the people to whom Queen refers as ?outlaws with badges.?

Biden the Younger is now serving as the Obama Campaign?s semi-official emissary to military veterans, some of whom might want to confront him about traducing the memory of Derek Hale, an honorably discharged Marine combat veteran.
_
William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.


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Friday, September 28, 2012

Thomas S. Szasz (1920-2012)


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By Robert Higgs

With great sadness, I note the passing on September 8 of the man I have long described as the greatest living libertarian. Thomas Szasz was, among other things, a powerful influence on the movement to release people who were being held in prisons on "psychiatric" grounds, even though they had not been convicted of any crime. Virtually single-handedly, he waged a half-century war against the use of psychiatric excuses to punish innocent people or to relieve people who had committed crimes of responsibility for their actions. He exposed in countless ways the unholy alliance of the state and the psychiatric profession, and he laid bare the bogus foundation on which this alliance rests. He was one of the greatest humanitarians of the twentieth century, a man of incisive mind, unflagging determination, and tremendous energy. He died at 92, only a year after the publication of the latest of his many books. His curriculum vitae is a stunning testament of his intellectual breadth and depth and of his unyielding devotion to human freedom.

I got to know Tom in my capacity as editor of The Independent Review, and over the years I was proud to have placed several of his articles in the journal. As a friend and as a supporter of his work, I would send him little notes or news items occasionally. He was always prompt and gracious in his replies. From time to time he would send me items he thought might interest me. In this way, I got to know him better and greatly enjoyed his private, frank expressions of opinion about events and persons.

When I sent him one of my little messages on August 31, 2012, he replied quickly, as usual, thanking me, asking about my personal situation after Hurricane Isaac, and adding some unexpected personal information about himself. "Good to hear from you," he said. "I am ok. Have stopped writing. I have had my say. Enough is enough." I immediately wrote back to him: "You surprise me. I thought you would continue to write as long as you continued to breathe. But if ever a writer gave an account of himself, you are the one. Your lifetime's work is a monument that will instruct and inspire people forever."

To my statement that I had expected him to continue writing as long as he lived, he responded: "I thought so too, but I didn't expect to live this long (92.5). Writing was?is?very much a part of my being. I feel that I have lost a large part of myself, but so have I also parts of my body?strength, mobility, hearing, etc. But I have enough left to carry on: I live alone, drive, walk with a cane (not far or long), etc., and am blessed with two wonderful daughters, very independent (a dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic and a university librarian in Va.), fine sons-in-law, and great grandson (senior at Carleton College, linguistics + premed). So no one needs me. A good feeling in old age. (But dangerous earlier.)" I was glad to know that he was still getting along fairly well, notwithstanding his limitations. Eight days later, he died.

In 2006, I was extremely honored to receive from the Center for Independent Thought one of its?Thomas S. Szasz Awards?for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties. On the occasion of this award, Tom made his way to Oakland, where The Independent Institute hosted a presentation program at which he and I spoke to a full house. This unforgettable occasion was the first and only time I ever had the pleasure of Tom's company in person. As always, he was extremely gracious.

Tom was unique, and he is utterly irreplaceable. Throughout his long life, he did not simply fight the good fight; he fought a truly magnificent fight, nearly alone against the hostile ranks of his own profession and the world at large, notwithstanding the ridicule and dishonor he so often received from people more interested in pelf and self-deception than in the plain truth. Tom's arguments were not technical or difficult to follow; many required only the precise, correct use of language. Someday, one fervently hopes, the world will look back in astonishment that such a battle ever needed to be waged, and will honor Tom's memory as we now honor the memory of those who fought against the entrenched institution of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tom fought to free our minds from fundamental misunderstandings, warning us against the perils of submission to the superstition, deliberate deception, and fraud that prop up the therapeutic state and its countless self-interested operatives.

RIP, dear friend. It is one of my life's greatest honors to have known you and to have called you a friend, and I shall always esteem your memory.


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The Bill Clinton Myth


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by James E. Miller

Earlier this week, former U.S. president Bill Clinton gave the keynote address to the Democractic National Convention in an effort to lend some of his popularity to Barack Obama.? With the unemployment rate still stubbornly high at 8.1%, Obama has lost many of the enthused voters who put him into the Oval Office in 2008.? Clinton was tapped to deliver the speech not only because of his image of a wonkish pragmatist but because of his presiding over the booming economy of the late 1990s.? Like a prized mule, Clinton was dragged out to give Democrats someone to point to and say that his policies were the hallmark of smart governance.

What attracts the left, both politicians and media, to Slick Willy is the fact that he presided over a thriving economy even while raising taxes.? This coincidence was championed as a justification for higher tax rates by Obama in his own speech before the DNC.

I want to reform the tax code so that it?s simple, fair, and asks the wealthiest households to pay higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 -- the same rate we had when Bill Clinton was president; the same rate we had when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest surplus in history, and a lot of millionaires to boot.
The Clinton-era tax hikes, it is alleged, provided the federal government the means to create a healthy middle class.? Or at least that's the only casual connection that can be gathered from such a philosophy.? The left claims that economic growth is driven primarily by middle class spending.? This spending needs to be subsidized in turn by government initiatives.? As Nobel Prize winning economist and class warrior Joseph Stiglitz puts it:
Many at the bottom, or even in the middle, are not living up to their potential, because the rich, needing few public services and worried that a strong government might redistribute income, use their political influence to cut taxes and curtail government spending. This leads to underinvestment in infrastructure, education, and technology, impeding the engines of growth.
Stiglitz's thinking rests on the Keynesian theory that economies are reliant on strong levels of consumption and demand.? And with the right people in office, the state is the most capable institution of spending a nation into prosperity.

However this is a misunderstanding of the difference between spending by private individuals and political spending.? Government is incapable of being run like a business.? Enterprise is based off the principle of satisfying voluntary patrons with no guarantee of success.? Even in a hampered market economy where corporations receive special privileges via the state, the consumer remains the kingmaker.? On the other hand, government receives all income through coercive measures.? Profit and loss accounting is of little concern when losses are borne by the taxpayer and profits are immediately devoted to political projects.? Should the public Treasury run low, tax collectors can be sent forth to shakedown the unpresuming citizens.

When it comes to rational economic calculation, public officials need not worry about spending money effectively. To attribute increased revenue being taxed away from the private economy with robust growth misconstrues how wealth is created.? Government doesn't create wealth; it merely transfers it between parties.? Similarly, it only consumes capital that has already been produced.? Because society existed before the state and because the state functions off of what it pilfers from society, public expenditures do not add to net wealth.? In order for one tax dollar to be spent, it has to be first taken from the pocket of a taxpayer.? Whatever subjective desires could have been achieved by that dollar become overridden to satisfy the whims of the political class.

As journalist of the old right Garet Garrett wrote in his vital essay "The Revolution Was"

If you raise agricultural prices to increase the farmer?s income the wage earner has to pay more for food. If you raise wages to increase the wage earner?s income the farmer has to pay more for everything he buys. And if you raise farm prices and wages both it is again as it was before. Nevertheless, to win the adherence which is indispensable you have to promise to increase the income of the farmer without hurting the wage earner and to increase the wage earner?s income without hurting the farmer. The only solution so far has been one of acrobatics.
The money distributed by politicians and bureaucrats is forever stained with previous sin.? The fact that the economy didn't stagnate under higher taxes during Clinton's term in office doesn't demonstrate that taxation has no harmful effects.? Economies aren't closed experiments where one variable can be introduced and the effects observed.? There are far too many factors at play.? Concrete theories based off certain truths must be applied in such a way to interpret date and wring sense out of it.? Good economic conditions weren't a result of heightened taxes but instead prevailed in spite of them.? While the productivity gains from the newly widespread use of personal computers and the internet had a positive effect on growth, another factor often goes unmentioned.? The later-half of the 1990s may be looked back upon as golden years but much of the gains experienced by the stock market were not representative of organic growth.? A significant amount of investment came not from natural causes but from monetary manipulation by the Federal Reserve.? See the following chart for the year-over-year percentage of growth of the M2 money supply.

As Pace University professor of economics Joseph Salerno writes:

In 1992 and 1993, the Fed gunned the money supply increasing it at double-digit annual rates in an attempt to propel the economy into a more expeditious recovery.? In 1994, the Fed reversed course and held the monetary growth rate at low levels through 1995.??In 1996 it did another about-face and substantially increased the pace of monetary inflation through 1999.??Just as the Austrian business cycle theory predicted, real private investment soared from a low of 12 percent of GDP in 1991 to an unprecedented high of 20 percent of GDP by mid-2000 with a pause in the tight money years 1994-1995.

"?like the stock bubble, the investment bubble was driven by monetary inflation and doomed to collapse whenever Greenspan decided that the economic data were signaling impending price inflation and slammed on the monetary brake.??This occurred last year (2000) when consumer price inflation shot up to nearly 4 percent per year and jolted Greenspan and the FOMC into raising short-term interest rates. Indeed the money supply actually shrunk by $20 billion and its annual rate of growth (year over year) plummeted from an average of 6.23 percent for the period1996-1999 to -1.24 percent in 2000.

This monetary tightening devastated the New Economy and the NASDAQ tanked, falling by over 50 percent from its high in March 2000.??But, even more importantly, it also brought the investment boom in the real sector of the economy to a screeching halt.

Like the decade that preceded the Great Depression, productivity gains which drove consumer prices downward masked the amount of monetary stimulus being pumped into the economy.? When the bubble collapsed, Greenspan once again turned to the printing press to bail himself out.? Instead of causing a bubble in the tech sector, the burst of inflation made its way into the housing sector.? By the time the housing bubble popped, Greenspan left the chairmanship of the Fed to great acclaim.? Milton Friedman writing in the Wall Street Journal declared Greenspan had "set the standard" for Fed chairmen in maintaining stable prices and growth.? In actuality, he and his colleagues of the Federal Open Market Committee were responsible for the continuation of the boom-bust cycle and current Great Recession.

Today, Clinton still takes credit for Greenspan's manipulated boom.? His supporters on the left love nothing more than to point at his presidency as vindication of the backwards theory that higher taxes equal more growth.? Clinton wasn't a policy wonk; he was a politician who dipped into the Social Security trust fund to give an appearance of balancing the budget while the national debt still climbed higher.

Through all of his financial scandals, womanizing, aggressive foreign policy approaches, and possible cover ups, it is actually fitting that Clinton is still looked to by the political establishment as someone worthy of respect.? He is representative of F.A. Hayek's timeless lesson: in government the worst rise to the top and state power corrupts.
_
James E. Miller holds a BS in public administration with a minor in business from Shippensburg University, PA. He is the Editor in Chief at the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada and a current contributor to his hometown newspaper, the Middletown Press and Journal.


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People don't like to discuss it but it doesn't remove history. Clinton was involved in Mena airport drug trafficking for the CIA on the home leg of the Iran Contra scandal (Guns, Money, Drugs, Money Guns and loop). There are multiple witness testimony on Youtube. It takes about twenty hours to double check it all but Clinton had no problem looking the other way if anybody was murdered. However he didn't do it for money. Clinton's a lot smarter than that. Politics is a struggle for power, and the contest for high office like the White House is a struggle for world power. What kind of people do you think you would find engaged in struggles for world power?

"One of the most fascinating incidents, I think, was when Bill Clinton mentioned Carroll Quigley by name in his first inaugural address. Quigley was the only person Clinton thanked by name in that whole speech. It was Quigley who had spotted the potential of young Clinton when he was a student. Quigley learned that Clinton had, since he was only 15 years old, set his sights on the Presidency. When he got to know Clinton and saw that Clinton was completely bereft of morals and that there was no illegality he would not commit to achieve his goals, he knew that he had a man who was CFR material. It was Quigley who got him the Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and put young Clinton under the guidance and control of the CFR." - Lake E. High, Jr., A True History Of The World In Our Time, 2004

Here's a list of suspicious deaths connected to the Clinton family:

whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/BODIES.html

Speaking of Rhodes, here's his philosophy in a nutshell:

"We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories." - Cecil Rhodes, English businessman, mining magnate, politician and the colonizer of the state of Rhodesia, which was named after him

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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The Liberal Way to Run the World - "Improve" or We'll Kill You


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by John Pilger

What is the world's most powerful and violent "ism"? The question will summon the usual demons such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged", because only one ideology claims to be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is liberalism.

In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill described the power of empire. "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians," he wrote, "provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end." The "barbarians" were large sections of humanity of whom "implicit obedience" was required. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville also believed in the bloody conquest of others as "a triumph of Christianity and civilisation" that was "clearly preordained in the sight of Providence".

"It's a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers," wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, "but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its openended nature - its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] selfrighteous fanaticism." He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which Blair promised to "reorder this world around us" according to his "moral values". At least a million dead later - in Iraq alone - this tribune of liberalism is today employed by the tyranny in Kazakhstan for a fee of $13m.

Blair's crimes are not unusual. Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or all of the following. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted and their people bombed. The historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. This has been principally the project of the liberal flame carrier, the United States, whose celebrated "progressive" president John F Kennedy, according to new research, authorised the bombing of Moscow during the Cuban crisis in 1962. "If we have to use force," said Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state in the liberal administration of Bill Clinton, "it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future." How succinctly she defines modern, violent liberalism.

Syria is an enduring project. This is a leaked joint US-UK intelligence file:

"In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces... a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals... a necessary degree of fear... frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention... the CIA and SIS should use... capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension."

That was written in 1957, though it might have come from a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute, A Collision Course for Intervention, whose author says, with witty understatement: "It is highly likely that some western special forces and intelligence sources have been in Syria for a considerable time." And so a world war beckons in Syria and Iran.

Israel, the violent creation of the west, already occupies part of Syria. This is not news: Israelis take picnics to the Golan Heights and watch a civil war directed by western intelligence from Turkey and bankrolled and armed by the medievalists in Saudi Arabia. Having stolen most of Palestine, attacked Lebanon, starved the people of Gaza and built an illegal nuclear arsenal, Israel is exempt from the current disinformation campaign aimed at installing western clients in Damascus and Tehran.

On 21 July, the Guardian commentator Jonathan Freedland warned that "the west will not stay aloof for long... Both the US and Israel are also anxiously eyeing Syria's supply of chemical and nuclear weapons, now said to be unlocked and on the move, fearing Assad may choose to go down in a lethal blaze of glory." Said by whom? The usual "experts" and spooks.

Like them, Freedland desires "a revolution without the full-blown intervention required in Libya". According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. Read the Unicef report on the children killed, "most [of them] under the age of ten". Like the destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, these crimes were not news, because news as disinformation is a fully integrated weapon of attack.

On 14 July, the Libyan Observatory for Human Rights, which opposed the Gaddafi regime, reported, "The human rights situation in Libya now is far worse than under Gaddafi." Ethnic cleansing is rife. According to Amnesty, the entire population of the town of Tawargha "are still barred from returning [while] their homes have been looted and burned down".

In Anglo-American scholarship, influential theorists known as "liberal realists" have long taught that liberal imperialists - a term they never use - are the world's peacebrokers and crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. They have taken the humanity out of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves warmongering power. Laying out whole nations for autopsy, they have identified "failed states" (nations difficult to exploit) and "rogue states" (nations resistant to western dominance). Whether or not the regime is a democracy or dictatorship is irrelevant. The same is true of those contracted to do the dirty work. In the Middle East, from Nasser's time to Syria today, western liberalism's collaborators have been Islamists, lately al-Qaeda, while longdiscredited notions of democracy and human rights serve as rhetorical cover for conquest, "as required". Plus ?a change.


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Spoilt for choice as every Ism is a schism created through zionIsm aka world dominance/governance and a dance of necromance. Commune-Ism has only left the stage as it has infected the entire audience. Please stop using al-Qaeda and instead use CIA as much of the population recognises it to be so.

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Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government



by Enigmax

The nightmare week for Demonoid has just reached a huge crescendo, with news coming out of Ukraine that following a massive DDoS attack the site has now been busted by local authorities. Those looking for a U.S. connection to the raid won?t be disappointed ? a source in the country?s Interior Ministry says that the action was scheduled to coincide with Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky?s trip to the United States.

Last week thousands of Demonoid users feared the worst when their beloved site disappeared from the Internet. Many thought that the site had been busted, but were eventually relieved to hear that it was ?only? a massive DDoS attack.

But today the roller-coaster ride plummeted to new depths, with confirmation coming out of Ukraine that the DDoS was just the beginning ? the site has been busted by the authorities.

ColoCall is the largest datacenter in Ukraine and a place that has been Demonoid?s home in recent years. But in the middle of last week, in the wake of the DDoS attack, government investigators arrived at ColoCall to shut Demonoid down.

?Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid and sealed them,? an anonymous ColoCall source confirmed. ?Some equipment was not seized, but now it does not work, and we were forced to terminate the agreement with the site.?

As reported on TorrentFreak following our discussions with Demonoid?s admin last week, there were suspicions that the site may have been subjected to some kind of exploit or hack in addition to the DDoS. That version of events is now confirmed by the ColoCall source.

?Shortly after [the DDoS] a hacker break-in occurred, and a few days later came the investigators,? the source added.

But aside from the busting of the site, which is the biggest BitTorrent-related raid in recent memory and one that has taken out the world?s largest torrent site/tracker combo, there is a rather large international sting in the tail.

Despite general opinion that Demonoid did not contravene Ukranian law, especially since it blocked all Ukranian IP addresses to avoid upsetting the locals, the site still attracted the attention of the authorities there. That, according to a source in the country?s government, is all down to the United States getting involved.

A source inside the Interior Ministry has informed Kommersant that the raid on Demonoid was timed to coincide with the very first trip of Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky?s trip to the United States. On the agenda: copyright infringement.

Ukraine had promised the United States that it would improve its attitude and efforts towards enforcing copyright and no doubt its Western partner will be very pleased indeed that Demonoid?s head has been presented on a platter.

But while Demonoid?s servers are in custody, the site?s admin does not appear to be. The ColoCall source would not say who is behind the site, only that its management is located in Mexico. The devil may yet be back?.

TorrentFreak contacted the Demonoid admin for a comment but we have yet to hear back


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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

A State-Sponsored Anti-Sikh 'Hate Crime' the Media Ignores



by William Grigg

Deranged ex-federal employee Michael Page, a former Army psy-ops specialist, committed what has been variously described as a "hate crime" and an act of "domestic terrorism" by murdering six people gathered for worship at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Since the alleged murderer is dead, we can only speculate as to his motives (and those of his reported accomplices, as well).

There is little room for speculation, however, regarding to attitudes and motives of a uniformed assailant who severely beat an innocent and helpless Sikh in an incident that took place five years ago about 112 miles south of Oak Creek. The perpetrator's motive was to steal the victim's property, and it there was no ambiguity about the fact that he despised the victim on the basis of his perceived ethnicity.

Thankfully, the victim -- Joliet, Illinois resident Kuldip Singh Nag -- wasn't shot. However, he was pepper-sprayed and severely beaten on the morning of March 11, 2007 by a police officer named Ben Grant, who materialized on his doorstep to announce that he was going to tow away a van that was sitting immobile in Nag's driveway because the vehicle had an expired license tag.

When Nag objected to the impending auto theft, Grant attacked him, threw him to the ground, and beat him mercilessly in front of his horrified wife and children while befouling the air with obscene -- and ignorant -- racial invective: "You f*****g Arab! You f*****g immigrant, go back to your country before I kill you!"

Nag, a Navy veteran who received the Bronze Star for his service in the first Gulf War, was already residing in "his" country. Granted, he had difficulty recognizing it after being assaulted on his own property by an armed, tax-devouring bully. As is often the case in acts of state-sponsored terrorism of this kind, the victim was eventually convicted of "aggravated assault" for the supposed crime of trying to cover his head for protection against repeated baton strikes inflicted by the government-licensed thug.

"I was just trying to cover up with my arms," Nag testified during his trial two years later. "He kept telling me `Go home' and `f****g Arab.' I'm not Muslim, but if I was, is that a crime in America?"

Prior to being assaulted and abducted by Grant, Nag had seen his home defaced with graffiti conveying essentially the same message that had dribbled down Grant's tax-fattened chin. On two other occasions vandals had shot at the family's house with a BB gun.

Officer Grant was ostensibly enforcing a municipal "quality of life" ordinance of a kind routinely employed to extort revenue on behalf of the ruling criminal clique. That ordinance permits police of ticket and tow away "inoperable vehicles" from private property. However, as Rajpir Singh of the Sikh-American Legal Defense and Education Fund told me in an interview several years ago, Grant's actions were not in compliance with established policies.

"This was the first instance, the first notice of any kind Nag received that his van was in violation of the local ordinance," Singh explained. "Since the van had never been ticketed before, the appropriate action would have been to leave a windshield advisory warning that it would be towed within a certain time." Mr. Nap and his family never received the proper notice.

Furthermore, the license decal was too small to be seen from the street -- even by an officer trolling for revenue-generating code violations. How did that van come to Grant's attention?

"The police apparently received a telephone complaint from a neighbor," Nag's attorney Paul Chawla points out. Chawla, who resides in Chicago area, describes the particular section of Joliet where Nag and his family had lived for about three years as? "not all that receptive to immigrants."

It's entirely possible that the beating Nag suffered, and the spurious criminal conviction inflicted on him, resulted from an anonymous tip phone in by someone residing nearby (the word "neighbor" wouldn't apply here) who resented the presence of a turban-wearing man he considered a "f*****g Arab."

In any case, this racially charged crime was an act of state terrorism by a local police officer that was ratified by the "justice" system. Predictably, the police state profiteers at the SPLC didn't consider it worthy of their attention.


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Hypocrisy Central



by Jacob G. Hornberger

One of the things about liberals that really fascinates me is their hypocrisy, especially when it comes to one of their favorite attacks on libertarians for opposing the welfare state. Whenever libertarians call for the abolition of the moral and economic abomination known as the welfare state, liberals have their standard knee-jerk attack: ?You hate the poor! Libertarians hate the poor!?

The implication, of course, is that liberals love the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Liberals love power and money as much as conservatives do. Their ?love the poor? bromide is nothing more than a convenient way to justify their ardent support of the money and power that accompanies the welfare state way of life.

How do we know that this ?love the poor? bromide is nothing but a sham?

That?s easy. Just look at how liberals treat illegal immigrants, who are among the poorest people in the world. They treat them as badly as conservatives do, perhaps even worse. In fact, President Obama has more deportations than his predecessor, President Bush. And he?s proud of it! His recent exception for American children born of illegal immigrants is obviously nothing more than a well-timed campaign gimmick to garner Hispanic votes.

Here?s a good example of how much liberals love the poor. The Los Angeles Times reports that a woman named Encarnacion Bail Romero and 135 other illegal immigrants were arrested in 2007 at a Missouri poultry processing plant. She had used a fake Social Security number to get the job and so the Obama feds charged her with federal ?aggravated identity theft.? She got sentenced to two years in prison and was sent 1000 miles away to serve her time.

Now, let?s reflect on what?s really happening here. This woman is doing nothing more than trying to sustain and improve her life through labor. At the fundamental level, that?s her ?crime.? She crossed the international border to seek employment with someone who wished to employ her. She found a job and an American employer hired her. It was a consensual transaction. Both sides benefited. She obviously worked hard, as most immigrants do, because she stayed employed.

But under federal law, she was required to produce a Social Security number, so she used a ?stolen? number. But who got harmed here and who benefited by the use of that unauthorized Social Security number? Her employer extracted a certain percentage of her salary and sent it to the Social Security Administration. But her Social Security account was credited with the money. It was someone else?s account that got credited. She didn?t benefit at all. Several decades from now when she?s ready to retire, she won?t be able to claim that Social Security ?benefit.?

Okay, so she used a ?stolen? Social Security number to get the job. But isn?t it the government that steals her money? Yet, she?s the one who goes to prison!

Two years in prison for that? Two years in jail for coming to the United States to work through a consensual labor relationship with an American employer who liked her work.

Oh, but that?s not the end of it. Guess what the love-the-poor liberals are now doing to Encarnacion Bail Romero. They?re taking away her son. Missouri state officials, under Democrat Governor Jay Nixon, have instituted legal proceedings to terminate her parental rights over her son and give the child to an American couple.

Their ground for termination? They say that she abandoned her child when she went to prison.

Don?t you just love it? Have you ever seen such rank hypocrisy? They claim to love the poor and then they punish a poor woman who is just doing her best to sustain her life and the life of her child with labor. They send her to jail and then use the incarceration to take her child away from her.

Of course, conservatives aren?t any winners in this area either, but then again at least they don?t purport to love the poor, as liberals do. Conservative immigration hypocrisy arises when conservatives say they love ?free enterprise, private property, and limited government? and then enthusiastically support the mistreatment and abuse of foreigners who are just coming here to work for American employers who like hiring them.

There is only one political philosophy that is consistent with moral and religious values. That philosophy is libertarianism. It is only libertarians who embrace open immigration, a way of life that truly helps the poor through the defense of such fundamental, inherent, God-given rights as freedom of movement, freedom of travel, freedom of association, freedom of contract, and freedom of commerce.
_
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.


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George Washington University Constitutional Law Professor, Jonathan Turley, wisely noted, "Anyone who believes there are 2 parties in Washington DC is a fool."

Anyone who continues to write about the 'libruls/conservatives is also a fool. It's all a scripted play with everyone reciting their lines. Neither side of the face gives a dam about America or Americans. It's all one big organized crime syndicate.

So which side of the head are your going to vote for this time?

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Sunday, September 23, 2012

Gibson Guitar Forced to Pay $350,000 Ransom to Feds



Chris | InformationLiberation

Gibson Guitar has agreed to pay a $300,000 ransom to the Federal government in order to be allowed to continue their business. Additionally, $262,000 worth of wood the government stole from them will not be returned. To add insult to injury, as CNN reports, the company was forced to make a "community service payment" of $50,000 to the U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to "promote conservation and development of tree species used in making musical instruments."

The fact demand for said trees is what encourages them to be planted and conserved is ignored, but that's obviously irrelevant as this is about Federal bureaucrats feeling powerful.

The company was unable to challenge the government in court as going to court would have have forced them to further suspend all wood imports during what would have been a long drawn out trial, destroying their business in the process.

NYT reports:

Henry E. Juszkiewicz, Gibson?s chief executive, said the company still maintains the ebony from Madagascar was exported legally under that country?s laws. But he agreed to the settlement, he said, because it frees the guitar maker to continue importing wood from India, which, unlike Madagascar, is the major supplier of rosewood used in many fretboards.

For the last year, he said, the criminal proceedings in court had effectively cut off Gibson from sources of hardwood in both Madagascar and India, and its luthiers were forced to make guitars with laminated fret-boards or fingerboards made of woods not traditionally used in guitars, which some customers did not like.

?The alternative was pretty onerous,? he said. ?We would have had to have gone to trial and we would have been precluded from buying wood from our major source country. For the ability to carry on with the business and remove this onerous Sword of Damocles, if you will, we feel this is about as good a settlement as we can get.?

In total, it appears the company has had to pay around $2 million dollars to the U.S. government for the "privilege" of doing business. But hey, why should they complain? After all, "they didn't build the business themselves," as our Dear Leader said, they should just feel grateful to have the high honor of working as slaves to pay the salaries of bureaucrats actively working to destroy them. That's the new American way!
_
Chris runs the website InformationLiberation.com, you can read more of his writings here. Follow infolib on twitter here.

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Latest Economy
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In a socialist country, free business is not welcome. Time for Gibson to move to another, more friendly, country?? Problem is, a rosewood-fretboard sounds and feels different than one made from ebony . One of the reasons rare trees are protected is exactly
so they can still be used in places where there is no substitution .

This is not 'socialism', it is 'idiocy' -
(admitted, the two can be more than hard to distinguish.. )
The greens are not 'socialists', they are disillusioned communists turned
overtly totalitarian . They might as well join the neo-cons, that's how crazy and fanatic they are .

Anyway, the price of ebony-fretboard equipped guitars is going to sky-rocket . Soon the gubernment will want some kind of 'endangered species license' if you want to even own one ..

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Saturday, September 22, 2012

Your "Duty" To Protect and Serve the Police

by William Norman Grigg

Police have no enforceable duty to protect an individual threatened by criminal violence. A lawsuit recently filed in New Hampshire demonstrates that police are taught to assume that citizens have a moral and legal duty to protect them.

Beverly Mutrie of Greenland, New Hampshire is being sued by four police officers who were wounded during an April 12 shootout at the home of her late son, Cullen. Greenland Police Chief Michael Maloney was killed in the gunfight. Following an eight-hour standoff involving SWAT operators and dozens of police officers, Cullen and his girlfriend, Brittany Tibbetts, were found dead in what was described as a murder-suicide.

Mrs. Mutrie?s only connection to the events of April 12 is the fact that she owned the home where the shootout took place. The lawsuit filed by the officers claims that she ?indirectly supported and facilitated? illegal activity that supposedly occurred on the premises. She has not been charged with a crime.

In addition to being an act of simple vindictiveness, the lawsuit against Beverly Mutrie is probably an attempt by the municipality ? which wasn?t cut in for a share of the ?forfeiture? haul ? to confiscate her home. An interrogatory interview of Mrs. Mutrie focused entirely on her insurance coverage. The DEA seized three vehicles found on the property and $14,320 in cash that was found on the body of Brittany Tibbetts.

The raid itself may have been prompted by concerns that the case against Cullen Mutrie was weak. An aspiring firefighter who spent much of his time in the gym, Cullen came to the attention of a state narcotics task force in July 2010 when an officer serving a restraining order found anabolic steroids during a search of the home. In a bench trial, Cullen was found guilty of domestic assault against a live-in girlfriend. He was put on probation and required to undergo an anger management assessment.

In January, an informant working with the state drug task force allegedly bought a small amount of oxycodone from Cullen?s girlfriend. Over the next several weeks, while the police continued their surveillance of the home, Cullen reconsidered his initial guilty plea on the steroid-related charges. His attorney, Stephen Jeffco, filed a motion to suppress the drug evidence as the product of an illicit search. As Rockingham County Attorney Jim Reams points out, the case was ?set for trial when the shootout began.?

Police arrived at Cullen?s home on April 12 to serve a no-knock warrant. Two of the officers, who were acquainted with Cullen and aware of the home?s surveillance cameras, gestured to be let inside. When Cullen refused to grant entry, Task Force agents forced open the door. Cullen reportedly opened fire, wounding four of the officers and killing Chief Maloney. An eight-hour standoff ensued, during which time the alleged murder-suicide took place.

If Cullen Mutrie, who was 6?3? tall and weighed 275 pounds, was involved in criminal conduct, what was his mother supposed to do about it ? spank him? Assuming that she was aware of his activities, she could have called the police, who had already been investigating her son for nearly two years. If she had been an accomplice or an accessory, Mrs. Mutrie would face criminal charges, rather than what amounts to an extortion attempt.

The persecution of Beverly Mutrie is neither the first, nor the worst, case of its kind.

In June 2007 Karen Mies, a 66-year-old hospice nurse from Shingle Springs, California, suffered two losses no wife and mother should ever endure. Her husband, 72-year-old Arthur, was killed in an entirely unanticipated act of irrational violence on the part of their 35-year-old son, Eddie.

After the police were notified, Eddie was killed in an armed stand-off involving the local SWAT team, a helicopter provided by the state police, and several deputies from the El Dorado County Sheriff's Department.

More than one hundred rounds were fired in the June 5, 2007 shoot-out. In addition to the deaths of Arthur and Eddie, three deputies -- Jon Yaws, Greg Murphy, and Melissa Meekma -- suffered gunshot wounds. The injuries suffered by deputies Yaws and Murphy required multiple surgeries and lengthy hospitalization, but weren?t life-threatening.

In the months prior to that horrible day, Eddie?s behavior had become erratic, leading his friends and family to wonder if he suffered from a psychological condition. Karen and Arthur had tried, unsuccessfully, to find suitable help for their troubled son ? but they certainly didn?t anticipate that his problems would culminate in murder.

Displaying preternatural grace, Karen inquired after the health of the injured deputies, telling a friend that her sole consolation was the fact that they would survive. A measure of the depth of her good character is offered by the fact that she didn?t recant that statement after Yaws and Murphy filed a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against her and her husband?s estate.

The deputies claimed that Karen ? who was not charged as an accomplice ? shared the culpability for the injuries allegedly inflicted on the deputies by her son. Eddie Mies was characterized in the document as "a diagnosed schizophrenic" with a "criminal history" who displayed "paranoia and [a] propensity for violence." For these reasons, insisted the deputies, Karen should have known it was "necessary to avoid allowing Eddie Mies access to firearms," and they claimed that she displayed actionable negligence by permitting such access.

In a television interview, Yaws appeared to accuse the Mies family of conspiring to endanger his life and those of his fellow officers. When Jake Mies, Eddie's brother, made a frantic 911 call to report that his father had been shot, he told the operator that he didn't know who had committed the crime. Yaws characterized this as a deliberate lie, and accused Karen of being a party to the deception.

"We were directly lied to when they said they didn't know who had done it," asserted Yaws. "We thought it was a random person [on the ground] through the neighborhood. We would have handled it entirely differently if we had known it was someone from the residence."

Even if this had been true, it's difficult to see how the knowledge that the shooting was an aggravated domestic dispute would have changed the tactical situation. The police deployed overwhelming force, then used a CHP helicopter to flush Eddie into the open where he was quickly killed by the SWAT team.

Immediately after the incident the El Dorado Sheriff?s Office peddled a self-dramatizing version of the episode in which Eddie Mies supposedly ?tried to bait the officers? into a thicket near the house. The department also claimed that he had devised "an elaborate system of bunkers and tunnels" akin to the labyrinth Colonel Hogan's resistance cellcreated beneath Stalag 13. The lawsuit asserted that Eddie was "found dead in a bunker with a cache of weapons and ammunition, as well as a change of clothes."

After the suit was filed, Karen Mies took a reporter from the Sacramento Bee on a walking tour of the family's 2.5 acre property, where she and her late husband had raised six children.

The "ammunition cache" was an old toolbox containing bullets, birdshot, and useless junk. The "change of clothes" was a jacket. At the time of his death, Eddie was armed with a shotgun and a revolver he had purchased legally as an adult. The warren of "bunkers" and "tunnels" consisted of a handful of small depressions and sunken trails "where the kids used to play," Karen pointed out.

In similar fashion, Eddie's psychological problems and "criminal" history were generously embroidered by the deputies. Although his behavior had become alarming to his friends and family, Eddie was never diagnosed with schizophrenia or any other mental disorder. His "criminal history" consisted of traffic arrests in Wyoming and Nevada.

Although it is clear that Eddie had killed his father, it was never firmly established that he actually shot the deputies, who may well have been injured as a result of ?friendly fire.? When asked about this possibility, Bill Clark, who at the time was chief deputy DA for El Dorado County, blithely replied that his office had been ?too busy? to complete its official inquiry.

Lawsuits of the sort filed against Beverly Mutrie and Karen Mies are generally foreclosed or dismissed on the basis of the "Fireman's Rule,? which recognizes that police and emergency workers assume certain risks inherent in their jobs.

In 1996, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME, the official tax-feeders' union) enacted a resolution denouncing the ?Fireman?s Rule? as a form of "unfair and indefensible treatment of public safety employees and law enforcement officers" and supporting efforts to "reform or abolish the Fireman's Rule wherever it exists." The AFSCME, through its affiliate, the National Law Enforcement Officers Rights Center, has quietly lobbied for modifications to the ?Fireman?s Rule? while looking for a promising lawsuit that could abolish it outright.

The lawsuit against Karen Mies was quickly snuffed out by a gale-force outburst of public revulsion, at least some of it inspired by the fact that the female deputy who had been wounded didn?t join in the suit.

The shootout that prompted the lawsuit against Beverly Mutrie is much better suited to the needs of the cynical tax-feeders? lobby. It involves the death of Chief Michael Maloney, who ? in a cinematic touch -- was eight days from retirement (at age 48, following a 26-year law enforcement career that was otherwise devoid of danger).

Thousands of law enforcement personnel attended Maloney?s funeral, including career criminal Eric Holder, who apparently wasn?t too busy fomenting racial tensions, covering up FBI torture-murders, or supplying high-performance weaponry to Mexican criminal syndicates.

If Beverly Mutrie had been visiting her son on April 12, and been shot by one of the officers during the raid, her assailant would be shielded from a lawsuit by the spurious principle of ?qualified immunity.? The lawsuit filed against her is intended to advance the perverse principle that citizens have a legal responsibility to act as the equivalent of human shields for police officers ? a development that is both revolting and entirely predictable.
__
William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

Copyright ? 2011 William Norman Grigg


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The Police: Useless, but not Harmless

by William Norman Grigg

The bad news for Rafael Lopez was that the 27-year-old Iraq war veteran had been robbed and severely beaten by a gang of at least 10 men on the street outside the Aqua nightclub in Minneapolis. The good news ? or Lopez initially thought ? was that the assault took place less than ten yards away from the 1st Police Precinct station.

Bruised and bloodied, Lopez attempted to enter the station to file a complaint, only to be met by Officer Aaron Hanson, who angrily told him to leave. As Lopez tried to explain what had just happened to him, two of Hanson?s comrades ?came out, put their gloves on and were yelling at me, telling me to get out,? he later recalled.

This was the second time that evening that the intrepid Officer Hanson of the Minneapolis PD had consciously refused to come to the aid of Lopez and his friends.

Lopez had come to the aid of his friend Joshua Rivera, whose wife Magdalena was being harassed and intimidated by a pack of street thugs. While trying to escort Magdalena to safety, he was blind-sided by several of the goons. When Rivera came to Lopez?s aid, he was swarmed and beaten unconscious. Magdalena ran to the police station to seek help. She was able to get through the front door, but found that the inner door was locked. She managed to get Hanson?s attention and frantically gestured for him to come out, ?but he just shrugged his shoulders,? she recounted.

Magdalena went back outside and borrowed a cell phone to call 911. A few minutes later ? long after he could have provided any help ? Hanson ambled outside. After Magdalena described what had happened to her husband and their friend, the officer blithely explained ?that he didn?t need to deal with this because it happens all the time,? she testified in an official complaint. Without offering to call an ambulance, or even asking if anybody had been seriously hurt, Hanson quickly retreated into the station and locked the door behind him. It was ?literally 10 seconds and he was already going back inside,? Magdalena observes.

Later that morning, Lopez went back to the station to file an incident report.

?He figured police surveillance cameras on the street and at the police station captured the assault,? related the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. ?He hoped the videos would lead to the identity of the assailants, whom he suspected were members of a gang because they were all wearing white and red shirts. It turned out he wasted his time.?

A few days after the September 2, 2011 assault, the Minneapolis PD dispatched an official notice to Lopez informing him that ?this case does not meet our threshold for investigative assignment at the present time.?

If the gallant men of the Minneapolis PD can?t be bothered to investigate a violent gang rampage that took place less than thirty feet from a precinct station ? in full view of the department?s surveillance cameras ? how can the department justify its existence?

As the Pioneer-Press noted, ?the building would have emptied had it been a member in blue being pounced on outside.? This is proven, ironically, by the actions of Officer Aaron Hanson in an incident that took place seven years earlier.

During the May 2004 ?Art-A-Whirl? festival in downtown Minneapolis, two off-duty officers --- Robert Kroll and Wallace Krueger ? got their skivvies in a bind when a pedestrian named Jackson Mahaffy accidentally hit Krueger?s car with a shoulder bag. The officers tracked down Mahaffy, threw him to the ground, and began to kick and punch him on the pretext of issuing a citation for ?misdemeanor damage to property.?

Kroll called police dispatch to report ?damage of property and an assault? and request assistance. A few minutes later, several squad cars converged on the scene, one of which decanted the valorous Officer Hanson, who quickly established his "command authority" by beating up a woman.

Mahaffy was kidnapped and detained by the Minneapolis PD on patently bogus charges ? assault on an officer, damage to property, and inciting a riot ? which were promptly dropped by the City Attorney. Mahaffy?s lawsuit against the department was dismissed on the familiar and patently spurious grounds of ?qualified immunity.?

In his lawsuit, Mahaffy noted Officer Hanson and his partner arrested him without conducting an investigation ? which would have meant, at very least, hearing his side of the story and interviewing eyewitnesses on the scene. In its ruling dismissing thelawsuit, the U.S. District Court for Minnesota noted that Hanson and his partner ?responded to a call indicating an off-duty officer needed assistance. Under such circumstances, officer safety is considered the first priority.? (Emphasis added.)

Of course, officer safety is ever and always the first ? and only ? priority.

Accordingly, when mere Mundanes were beaten and robbed in front of the precinct station, it was entirely appropriate for Hanson to cower behind a locked door, and then seek reinforcements to help repel persistent pleas for aid from the victims. For the same reason, when a Mundane was beaten by fellow officers as summary punishment for accidentally inflicting trivial damage on a cop?s automobile, however, the department responded in force when the assailants called for ?assistance.?

By coming to the aid of his friends, Rafael Lopez acted as a peace officer ? an individual who interposed himself to protect innocent people from criminal violence. Officer Hanson, who fraudulently collects a tax-funded paycheck for supposedly providing that service, was studiously indifferent to any consideration apart from his own physical safety and the institutional needs of his department. This is exactly what we should expect from a state functionary of his ilk. We should be grateful to him for offering such a compelling illustration of the fact that government police agencies are useless ? but not harmless.

A more recent illustration was provided last Thursday (July 26) during a drug store robbery in Portland, Oregon.

Shortly after noon, Rob Anderson, who owns a computer software store, sauntered over to nearby Central Drugs to buy some aspirin.

?I didn?t notice anything until the pharmacist behind the counter yelled for us to `Get out of here! We?re closed!? Anderson told the Oregonian. ?I thought that was kind of weird.?

Anderson wasn?t aware that just a few minutes earlier, a robber ? later identified as Jocelin Olson ? had entered the store with his hand concealed in a pocket.

?I have a gun!? Olson bellowed. He fled with a bag of prescription drugs.

Anderson, who had seen enough to recognize that a robbery was underway, spotted a uniformed officer in a marked police car, and informed the valiant defender of the public weal that a robbery was in progress a block away. The heroic paladin of public order replied that he was off duty and told Anderson to call 911. He then rolled up his window and drove away.

?We all expect a little better from the police in this situation,? Anderson later recalled, expressing entirely appropriate disgust ? and entirely undeserved confidence in the character and competence of government law enforcement officers.

While the officer, in compliance with the Prime Directive of law enforcement, ?officer safety,? was making himself scarce, two employees of the drugstore ? one of whom had obtained his personal firearm ? gave chase to the bandit, eventually tracking him down and arresting him without the aid of the exalted personages in government-issued official attire. One of them restrained the suspect (who had only feigned carrying a gun) in a half-nelson hold until the police tardily arrived.

The Portland Police Department refuses to identify the police officer who fled the scene rather than tangle with an (apparently) armed robber. That officer would most likely have been as bold as Hector if he had been dealing with an unarmed 12-year-old girl, or a skinny, unarmed, mentally handicapped street person.

Portland Police Officer Chris Humphreys ? who, as we?ll shortly see, is regarded as exemplary by that department -- shot the former at point-blank range with a beanbag round. In a separate incident, Humphreys -- with the help of three colleagues -- chased down and beat to death the latter, a 145-pound schizophrenic named James Chasse.

On another occasion, Humphreys beat a helpless man 30 times with a baton before discovering that the victim wasn?t the suspect he was pursuing.

Humphreys was placed on paid vacation after shooting the 12-year-old girl. That prompted a complaint from Sgt. Scott Westermann, commissar of the local police union, who insisted that Humphreys ?exemplified everything one could imagine a police officer should be."

Humphreys and another officer were eventually given two-week suspensions for the killing of James Chasse ? a trivial "punishment" which was reversed by an arbitrator exactly two weeks before one of their comrades helpfully displayed the utter uselessness of the agency that employs them.

Upset over public criticism of his tax-funded criminal career, Humphreys filed for ?stress disability,? and his brethren in the police union ? insisting that he had ?suffered enough? ? held a rally at City Hall. Each of them wore a custom t-shirts bearing the unwittingly incriminating inscription: ?I Am Chris Humphreys.?

Police departments exist to enforce the will of the municipal corporations that employ them. Any actual service they render with respect to the protection of person and property is incidental to that mission. Fortunately ? albeit tardily ? tax victims across the country are finally starting to understand this fact, as the financial burden of supporting the state?s enforcement caste becomes unbearable.

?Traditionally, U.S. voters have backed generous pay and benefits for the cops and firefighters willing to risk their lives to keep citizens safe,? notes a Reuters report (that dutifully regurgitates the official myth that police departments actually serve the interests of public safety). ?But as economic conditions have worsened and many local governments have run into severe fiscal problems, that attitude has started to change. Since the 2007 recession, some cities have tried to roll back pension benefits and pay, among the most rigid and, in some cases, highest expenses in municipal budgets.?

A suitable example is offered by the City of North Las Vegas, which -- reeling from the catastrophic collapse of the real estate market and shackled by untenable union salary and benefit agreements -- has declared itself an economic ?disaster area.?

?We are in a fiscal emergency,? City Council Member Wade Wagner told the Washington Post. ?North Las Vegas is ground zero basically for foreclosures in the nation?. So because our property taxes have declined so much, we really had to invoke this [emergency statute].?

North Las Vegas spends most of its tax funding (66 percent) on ?public safety." It?s not as if police officers in that city serve on sacrificial terms: A police officer like Kent Marscheck, whose base salary is $55,000, can pull down a total of $200,000 a year in overtime and other benefits, and a police sergeant like Bradley Walch -- whose base salary is $61,000 -- can receive more than $237,000 in total compensation.

The city suspended its union contracts with the police and fire department on June 15. Predictably, the police union filed a lawsuit against the city government to prevent layoffs.

Thanks to the intervention of Sen. Harry Reid, the Justice Department?s Community Oriented Policing Services program (COPS) provided a $1.75 million grant to the North Las Vegas Police Department. This money will go to pay the partial salaries of 14 officers ? if, that is, the city government can wrangle $3.2 million in matching funds from the cash-strapped taxpayers or leery bond investors. If this deal is consummated, the result will be the worst of both worlds for city residents: They will pay more for a unionized "local" police force that is effectively controlled by Washington, and entirely unaccountable to them.

Then again, all police departments consider themselves unaccountable to the populations they supposedly serve.

Two years ago, Chris Mesley ? who serves as spokesthug for the Albany, New York Police Officers Union ? gave eloquent expression to the disdain the armed tax-feeders have for the citizens whose paychecks they plunder: ?If I?m the bad guy to the average citizen ? and their taxes have to go up to cover my raise, I?m very sorry about that, but I have to look out for myself and my membership? As the president of the `local,' I will not accept `zeroes' [no increase in salaries or benefits]. If that means ... ticking off some taxpayers, then so be it."

In a public comment offered at a meeting of the Common Council, an Albany resident who identified himself as "Justin" pointed out that the city's median annual household income in 2009 was about $33,000. In the same year, Mesley -- who was hired as a patrol officer in 1992 -- received a base salary of $70,289, while also devouring at least another $30,000 for serving as union president. During 2008 and 2009, Mesley?s union contract provided "retroactive raises" of four percent; this happened at time when the productive economy was shrinking and raises of any kind were practically unheard of by people who, unlike Mesley and his chums, earn an honest living.

"Chris Mesley is making three times or more the median salary and is complaining that he might not get a raise," Justin observed. "The sense of entitlement of Chris Mesley and all those who think alike has led to the pilfering of state and city coffers. They are like leeches, sucking the taxpayers dry, and that's an insult to leeches. At least leeches know when to let go."

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg played to that inexhaustible sense of entitlement when he suggested that police nationwide should go on strike until the law-abiding public disarms itself.

?I don?t understand why the police officers in this country don?t stand up collectively and say, `we?re going to go on strike,? Bloomberg blurted in an interview with CNN?s Piers Morgan. ?We?re not going to protect you unless you ? the public ? through your legislature do what?s required to keep us safe. After all, police officers want to go home to their families.?

Given that the police don?t protect us, we?d be immeasurably better off if all of them went home to their families ? permanently.
__
William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

Copyright ? 2011 William Norman Grigg


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