It has not happened over night. But over time, the political class has chipped away small pieces of our liberty until you wake up one day and realize that what at first were tiny little chips have become huge chunks of lost freedom. What we used to take for granted as free Americans is now viewed by the politicians in this country as their their domain, and their right to do as these please, paying lip service or no attention to the freedoms guaranteed by the inconveniences of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The past three weeks have made this trend all the more evident, with startling revelations that the IRS has been turned into a political weapon of the Obama administration to harass and burden Americans with opposing political and religious views and suppress their freedom of speech rights.
The press and journalism industry found out recently that this administration will do as they please to secretly spy on and obtain information on the inner workings of the press, suppressing the freedom of the press guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
And the entire country found out that this administration holds the promise of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in contempt when someone in the Obama administration denied military relief and left over 20 Americans alone to die in the midst to a terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
Late last year, we laid out our case to prove that we are no longer living in a free country. The entirety of that post is listed below. However, to that list of shame from December, let us add the following transgressions against freedom that have come to light in just the past few weeks:
- You are no longer living in a free country when the political class uses the IRS to harass, threaten, and strong arm Americans and non-profit political groups that have a different political viewpoint than the current Presidential administration, as what happened with Tea Party and conservative citizens, political campaign donors, and political non-profit groups.
- You are not longer living in a free country when the political class uses the IRS to harass, threaten and strong arm peaceful religious organizations, as what happened with several Christian and Jewish religious organizations and non-profits.
- You are no longer living in a free country when the free press can have the phone logs of its reporters and telephones secretly taken with no apparent approval of a judge or grand jury proceeding, as what happened when the Associated Press learned that the phone logs of its reporters and its organization were secretly obtained by the Obama administration.
- You are no longer living in a free country when members of the political class can sacrifice innocent American lives to further their political gains, as what happened when military relief was denied to over two dozen Americans fighting a terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
And you are no longer living in a free country, as witnessed by the following transgressions against freedom that we highlighted back in December:
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December 31, 2012
As we start the new year, one would hope that we could look forward to better times and better lives. However, in the U.S. democracy, that might be a tall order, given the obscene growth and reach of the Federal government in this country and the politicians that operate it. We have previously discussed this erosion of freedom and the perverting of liberty principles in the following popular post:
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-freedom-pyramid-where-it-is-and.html
Given this review of how a democracy should work, read the following and then you decide if you think you are still living in a free country:
- You are not living in a free country if your retirement medical care, via Medicare, is dependent on the actions and whims of Federal government politicians.
- You are not living in a free country if a large percentage of your retirement cash flow, via Social Security, is dependent on the actions and whims of Federal government politicians.
- You are not living in a free country if your pre-retirement medical care, via the ramifications of Obama Care, is dependent on the actions and whims of Federal government politicians.
- You are not living in a free country if your ability to go to college, via student loans, is dependent on the actions and whims of Federal government politicians.
- You are not living in a free country if your ability to get a home mortgage, via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is dependent on the actions and whims of Federal government politicians.
- You are not living in a free country if almost a third of your annual earnings go to taxes to support all levels of wasteful inefficient, and criminally infested government programs and entities.
- You are not living in a free country if the Federal government’s executive branch can commit U.S. military resources and taxpayer wealth to foreign military actions (e.g. Libya, Yemen, Syria) without Congressional or Constitutional approval.
- You are not living in a free country if the Federal government’s executive branch can independently and arbitrarily designate any American for assassination and then actually commit that assassination without due process of law (e.g. Anwar al-Awlaki).
- You are not living in free country when the Federal government can hold a U.S. citizen in prison for an indefinite period of time without due process of law if that government arbitrarily defines that citizen as a potential threat to national security (National Defense Authorization Act - NDAA)
- You are not living in a free country when a President can seize control of all forms of communications when it alone decides it is in the national interest (Executive Order - Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions)
- You are not living in a free country when the Federal government can collect and store every electronic communication any citizen makes (e.g. email, text messages) in massive data storage centers (e.g. Bluffdale, Utah) without due process, a warrant, or privacy protection.
- You are not living in a free country when the Federal government executive branch thinks it can affix a GPS tracking device to any citizen’s car without a warrant (see U.S. Vs. Jones decision).
- You are not living in a free country when the executive branch thinks it has the power to arbitrarily ignore judicial rulings and existing laws (e.g. Gulf Of Mexico drilling moratorium and DOMA).
- You are not living in a free country when government agents, via TSA, are allowed to legally grope and grab U.S. citizen’s body parts in the name of national security.
- You are not living in a free country if government and political class spending has rung up trillions of dollars of national debt that will eventually have to be paid by you, your children, and your grandchildren.
- You are not living in a free country if you privacy rights can be almost arbitrarily be violated by the Patriot Act and the NDAA legislation.
- You are not living in a free country when crony capitalism wastes billions of taxpayer dollars every year without any redeeming societal benefits (e.g. Solyndra, Fisker, Telsa).
- You are not living in a free country if your political leaders hold you and your opinions in contempt:
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - those Americans that opposed Obama's health care reform effort are un-American.
- Congressman Charles Rangel - those Americans that opposed Obama's health care reform effort are like the racists that opposed the civil rights movements in the 1960s.
- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - American tourists that come to D.C. in the summer physically smell.
- Congressman Dick Grayson - those Americans with a different opinions from him are knuckle dragging Neanderthals.
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - those Americans against the building of a mosque close to Ground Zero in New York City needed to be investigated.
- Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee - Tea Party members used to wear Ku Klux Klan white sheets.
- Congresswoman Maxine Walters - Tea Party advocates “can go to hell."
- Czar Van Jones - those opposed to the President's policies are a_ _ h_ _ _ s.
- Vice President Joe Biden and other Democrats in Congress - Those Americans that support Tea Party principles are terrorists.
- You are not living in a free country when politicians can use billions of taxpayer dollars, via earmarks, to finance their perpetual re-election campaigns.
- You are not living in a free country where politicians decide what private companies live (e.g. Citigroup) and what private companies die (e.g. Lehman Brothers.)
- You are not living in a free country when those in office can maximize their re-election chances with favorable gerrymandering of Congressional districts.
- You are not living in a free country if your selection of a Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party via the primary and caucus system can be overturned by a small cadre of insiders in the upper echelon of the party called "super delegates."
- You are not living in a free country when sitting politicians can automatically grant themselves annual pay increases regardless of how poorly they led the nation during the past year.
- You are not living in a free country when sitting politicians cannot be removed from Congressional committee posts regardless of how poorly they performed their jobs on those committees (e.g. Intelligence committee members who did not foresee the 9-11 attacks, Finance committee members who did not foresee the coming of the "Great Recession", Interior Department committee members that did not properly oversee the BP oil rig inspection process, etc.)
- You are not living in a free country when any level of government can seize your property for a supposedly fair price and turn it over to developers for a private sector development project.
- You are not living in a free country when perceived and actual voter fraud casts significant doubt on whether or not your vote was counted fairly and if the true winner prevailed.
So let's review. Politicians control our pocketbooks, our health care, our retirement funding, who we vote for, invade our privacy, read our electronic communications, potentially manipulate our voting results, violate our property rights, and control our ability to get a mortgage or student loan while calling us names if we dare to disagree with them. Hardly sounds like the traditional definition of a democracy to me.
The beauty of this system, that the political class has worked out for themselves, is that they are able to keep us fighting among ourselves. This diverts our attention to the fact that our freedom and liberty have slowly been stripped away. We have reached a point in this country that a great portion of our lives is no longer controlled by our brains, our energy, our freedom, and our initiative but by about 600 people sitting in Congress and the executive branch of the Federal government.
We vehemently, and fruitlessly, fight among ourselves over relatively trivial issues while the political class strips us of our wealth and our liberty without ever solving a major issue:
- We are no closer to a rational drug policy in this country since Nixon declared War On Drugs in the 1960s, with this void allowing a narco state to develop just south of our border with Mexico.
- We are no closer to a rational and coherent national energy policy despite the oil crises from the 1970s.
- We are no closer to having world class public schools despite the warning of failing public schools from early in the Reagan administration and the expenditure of trillions of dollars since then.
- We are no closer to having a coherent and effective immigration plan and strategy.
- We are no closer to having an effective strategy for containing escalating health care costs.
- We are no closer to having a sane, balanced budget process for the Federal government with the political class spending trillions of dollars more than they bring in in revenue.
We no longer live in a free country and we have allowed the politicians to do it to us. That is why it is so important to begin the cleansing process and the restoration of freedom with the implementation of the following steps, some of which were laid out in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government:
Step 1 - reduce Federal spending by 10% a year for five years in order to tame our out of control political class spending.
Step 14 - implement specific and fair processes to eliminate the current gerrymandering process for Congressional districts.
Step 17 - eliminate the "Super Delegate" process
Step 19 - strengthen eminent domain laws to prevent the arbitrary confiscation of private property.
Steps 20, 21, 22 - Make the following changes to the Patriot Act to protect the privacy of citizens: review every section of the Act to see if each part is still really needed for national security, make it illegal to intercept any form of communications of a citizen without a judge-approved warrant, notify any citizen if they have been investigated and cleared by any government agency investigation, and finally appoint the members to the oversight committee of the Act, a committee that has never been staffed.
Step 28 - repeal Obama Care, an atrocity that imposes thousands of rules and dozens of taxes on the nation without solving the root causes of our escalating health care costs and replace it with the process described in Step 28.
Step 34 - implement a citizen approval process that would remove politicians from Congressional committees for gross dereliction of duty.
Step 37 - eliminate the Congressional process that automatically grants an annual pay increase to Congressional members, replacing it with a citizen satisfaction based pay system.
Step 39 - implement term limits for all Federal politicians in order to get some fresh thinking and problem solvers involved with the myriad issues facing America, "one and done."
Disband the czar process and restore the Constitutionally mandated checks and balances of our government processes.
Time is running out to fix what the political class has destroyed in this country from a liberty, privacy, freedom, budget, economic, and Constitution perspective. We have allowed this situation to arise and we are the ones that need to fix it. Otherwise, some morning we will wake up and realize that fifty years ago, Nikita Khrushchev got it right when he said:
"You Americans are so gullible. No, you won't accept communism outright; but we'll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have communism. We won't have to fight you; we will so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands." Nikita Khrushchev, 1962
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To this ignoble list we now add the ghost of Nixon past: the political use of the IRS to go after political enemies and the destruction of the freedom of the press. Shameful, both on the political class and ourselves for letting this happen. What will you do about it? Take action or prove Khrushchev right?
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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