Proving his antagonist's point? Socrates insisted that justice was something other than the "advantage of the stronger" -- yet he submitted to an unjust death sentence, thereby apparently validating the idea that citizens have a moral responsibility to submit to officially sanctioned injustice.
"Justice is merely the advantage of the stronger.... Injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, firmer, and more masterful than justice."
Thrasymachus the Sophist, as quoted in Plato's Republic (book I).
Accompanied by the familiar fanfare of self-congratulation, the FBI recently arrested four members of the "sovereign citizen" movement in last Vegas.
Most people have never heard of "paper terrorism," a concept invented a little more than a decade ago by federal prosecutors and their enablers in so-called "watchdog" groups (most prominently the Southern Poverty Law Center, a litigation-fueled, self-sustaining scam run by racial ambulance chaser and alleged pervert Morris Dees).
"Paper terrorism" occurs anytime a "public servant" -- that is, a tax-supported parasite employed by one of the state's instruments of extraction, suppression, or punitive violence -- finds himself dealing with the inconvenience of a bogus property lien or phony civil judgment.
This is a tactic frequently used by people commonly called "anti-government extremists" but who are actually very talented at mimicking the government's criminal behavior in pursuit of their private interests.
Ersatz legal documents filed by adherents of "Sovereign Citizen" and "Common Law" movements hardly qualify as weapons of mass destruction; they're more like low-yield instruments of particularized harassment. Any trouble they cause results from a form of gullibility to which government employees are particularly susceptible -- namely, the Vogon-like tendency to take at face value any piece of paper embossed with official-looking insignia and cluttered with impenetrable legal prose.
This is a perfect example of the kind of opportunistic fraud that is the inevitable by-product of omnivorous government. Were it not for the fact that government emits an endless blizzard of paper intended to do exactly the same kind of thing that "paper terrorists" are attempting -- that is, to confiscate earnings or property for punitive purposes -- the scam run by the latter wouldn't work. As it is, however, the bogus legal paperwork is sometimes scooped up without a second thought, as if it were so much white confetti in a snowdrift.
Nor is this the only way in which some self-designated "Sovereign Citizen" activists flatter our rulers by earnestly imitating their criminal behavior. Quite frequently the practitioners of "paper terrorism" pursue other scams involving phony cashier's checks and other spurious financial instruments -- a parallel we'll examine in greater detail anon.
The arrests in Vegas followed three years of arduous undercover work by Nevada's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), whose confidential informants boldly infiltrated meetings of the "paper terrorist" cell in its tenebrous lair of diabolical evil -- or, as the venue is listed in the arrest warrant, "Denny's restaurant at Fremont Street and Boulder Highway."
"Sovereigns" in court: An artist's rendering of Samuel Davis (left) and Jan Lindsey.
The "Sovereign Citizens Court" in Las Vegas was headed by retired FBI agent-cum-tax resister Jan Allen Lindsey, which is sufficient cause to suspect a set-up. To that we must add the fact that every criminal act allegedly committed in this scheme -- such as the sale of unregistered parts to convert semi-automatic rifles into machine guns, and the laundering of large sums supposedly stolen from Wachovia Bank -- was a done at the initiative of the JTTF's provocateurs.
This doesn't mean that the "sovereign citizens" involved in this affair were entirely blameless. It does, however, mean that this incident -- like so many recent ones involving the purported interdiction of terrorist plots -- was, in effect, a production scripted and stage-directed by the FBI.
Although the Bureau accuses the group of charging $96,000 in fees to launder the supposedly stolen funds through a trust fund, not a penny actually stolen from any bank changed hands.
Let's be unambiguously clear about one thing: To the extent that "sovereign citizens," or anybody else, defraud innocent people out of any amount of money or property, they're committing a crime. When people circulate phony cashier's checks in exchange for cash or goods, they're stealing. It's that simple, and simply wrong. And the morality of the matter is not affected in any way by the fact that generating and circulating phony money and other financial instruments is one of the major activities of the government ruling us.
Just a few weeks before the Feds deployed a small army to round up a handful of people accused of stealing nothing, others in the employ of Leviathan were eagerly acting as accomplices in a $30 billion heist committed on behalf of AIG, which was already in receipt of $130 billion in funds stolen from the taxpayers.
Widely considered the "world's largest insurance company," AIG is in fact a taxpayer-supported criminal enterprise, and -- what's much the same thing -- a key pillar of the entire political and financial establishment.
At the time of the company's de facto nationalization last fall, former AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg(who was himself deeply implicated in an Enron-style accounting fraud scandal) quietly admitted that it had lost 90 percent of its advertised value. Greenberg's estimate was far too modest; AIG's value is actually best expressed by using a single-digit, donut-shaped number.
Nevertheless, because AIG was and remains deeply entwined in the multi-national criminal enterprise called modern finance, and its demise would result in injury to a lot of powerful people who donate to political campaigns, the Federal Reserve issued $130 billion to keep the firm in operation.
This was the moral equivalent of stealing the same amount from private savings accounts, pensions, and investments.More than $50 billion of the $130 billion bail-out was "laundered" through AIG on behalf of the firm's cohorts in crime (or "counter-parties," to use the Banksters' preferred euphemism) -- the elitist criminals running Goldman Sachs (aka the Shadow Treasury Department), Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and various European banking interests, such as Deutsche Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
The criminal elite: AIG's Maurice Greenberg (right), seen here with Robert Rubin (left) and David Rockefeller (center) at a 1998 meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The $130 billion slopped in AIG's trough was the product of just one of many, many such acts of subtle larceny committed since last September, a period that witnessed an $8 trillion crime spree carried out by the Fed and the Treasury Department on behalf of insolvent financial institutions in order to protect them from the consequences of their fraudulent accounting practices.
There is a profoundly vulgar eleven-letter compound word involving the term "cluster," often heard falling from the lips of people with a military background, that perfectly describes the system referred to by AIG. Now the firm and its, ahem, partners in this Fed-abetted orgy of financial corruption insist that the rest of us have to pay the bill and clean up after them.
In describing the source of its collapse, AIG's sensibilities are too chaste to permit its analysts to employ the appropriate "f-word": "Fraud."
The document describes how AIG's AAA credit rating "was used to backstop a $2 trillion financial products trading business" that grew out of "an over-reliance on U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities in its investment portfolios...."
Worthless: In a legitimately free market, all of AIG's paper would be worth the same as this non-negotiable display check.
In other words:
AIG, which is the world's largest insurer of investment securities, was investing its operating capital in the same feculent pool of mortgage-backed securities it was insuring. And it was carrying on this fraudulent enterprise behind an unearned AAA credit rating. In this way it became a central player in the multi-trillion-dollar "derivatives" market.
The following illustration comes as close as anything I've seen to a suitable description of the derivatives market:
Take a group of mortgage loans, most of them squishy with impending failure and pungent with ripening fraud; "securitize" them into a bond; then place that bond between two mirrors that face each other in such a way that the mutual reflections appear to trail off into infinity.
Now, rather than selling the bad mortgage bond, you sell as many reflections of that bond as you can, counting each sale as "profit." This scam, which eventually entangles municipal governments, pension funds, and countless others, will continue as long as easy credit continues to flow, and you can maintain the pretense that the original bond has marketable value. And this requires that the criminally fraudulent enterprise that issued that instrument maintain its own supposed viability.
As AIG tells the story, this is where the rest of us come in. Unless the Treasury Department and Fed continue to steal from what the rest of us have earned and saved in order to continue making regular payments to AIG, the company will collapse, starting a catastrophic chain reaction in the derivatives market. Ultimately, the entire economy will bleed to death when the house of mirrors called the derivatives market becomes a supernova of razor-sharp shards.
Stalin's infamous dictum about one death being a tragedy and a million deaths a statistic captures just the most horrifying variation on a key political principle: If a crime is big enough, it becomes official policy. Steal $10,000 from the local bank, and you're a felon; steal $8 trillion on behalf of the banks, and you're a federal policy-maker.
"Terrorism," as the term is commonly used, refers to the privatization of the lethal political violence carried out by way of government monopoly.
Those accused of "paper terrorism" are following that logic in bureaucratic fashion.They emulate the behavior of the Federal Reserve and its seraglio of fractional reserve banks by creating worthless but official-looking financial paper, and they mimic the behavior of the banking system's enforcement mechanism by filing legal documents intended to punish those who don't play along in the scheme by exchanging valuable goods and services for worthless paper.
The only material difference between what the government does, and what "sovereign citizens" attempt to do, is that captured in Thrasymachus's notorious statement that "justice is the advantage of the stronger": Our Rulers can force us to use the ugly, innately worthless scrip and slugs they call "money," and to submit to the endless larceny they commit through inflation and taxation. They also have the means to pursue those who infringe on their criminal monopoly.
It should be obvious, but is worth pointing out anyway, that all of this criminal nonsense is an outgrowth of the evil system of fiat money and income taxation inflicted on Americans in annus horribilis 1913. It would be worth the pain of a deep but relatively brief depression to bring that system to an end. Unfortunately, our rulers are doing everything within their considerable power to prevent that much-desired outcome.
Immortal scholar, noteworthy victim of lethal police brutality:
The heroic Archimedes.
While Archimedes is rightly revered for his many imperishable contributions to science, he could also be considered the first recorded victim of lethal police brutality.
A native of Syracuse, Archimedes did his considerable best in the doomed but worthy effort to repel Roman invaders. Following the conquest, Roman soldiers were dispatched to "pacify" the restive streets of the newly conquered city.
One afternoon, so the story goes, Archimedes was sitting inoffensively at the side of a street drawing geometric equations in the sand when some mouth-breather in Roman military garb trod heedlessly on the improvised tablet, ruining the elderly scientist's calculations.
By this time, the venerable physicist was in his ninth decade, and he saw no point in enduring this act of thoughtless vandalism by an armored imbecile to pass without protest.
"Please don't disturb my circles,"Archimedes insisted in what was probably a direct but polite tone of voice.
Like law enforcement officers who would follow in his footsteps -- albeit in jackboots rather than sandals -- the Roman soldier took offense that a mere civilian, and an elderly one at that, would demand deference from someone wearing the uniform and insignia of authority.
If the technology had been available, the Roman quite likely would have given Archimedes a "ride on the Taser." Instead, the thug withdrew his sword and summarily killed him.
Some might object that this crime was committed by a soldier in an occupying army, not by a civilian police officer. That objection has merit, if only to underscore what should be an obvious fact: Government police officers are an army of occupation, particularly now.
It makes little difference whether law enforcement personnel are of the federal or "local" variety, or whether they are dressed in quasi-civilian attire or kitted out in full paramilitary drag. American civilians are generally expected to render to law enforcement personnel the kind of docile submission that Archimedes -- at the price of his life -- refused to offer the Roman soldier who was patrolling his neighborhood in Syracuse.
Under the martial law mind-set, civilians are to give instant and unqualified obedience to any armed individual in a state-issued costume. I had plenty of experience with this attitude while living in Guatemala under martial law following the 1983 military coup that ousted CIA-installed President Efrain Rios Montt.
Anybody who has spent any time at airports since 9-11 will likewise recognize that mentality. And Portuguese-born Canadian citizen DesiderioFortunato can testify about the treatment one can expect if he insists on rudimentary courtesy from the anencephalic knuckle-draggers who act as border guards for the Department of Homeland Tyranny.
Mr. Fortunato resides in British Columbia and maintains a part-time home in Washington State. He regularly crosses the border separating quasi-socialist Canada into the quasi-fascist U.S.A.
Like many people, he resents being treated like a criminal or a domesticated animal; unlike most, he actually does something about it -- specifically, he insists that border guards display a particle of courtesy when issuing instructions to people driving through the border crossing.
This takes a certain admirable temerity of the sort one wouldn't expect in a 54-year-old professional jazz dancer, but such is Fortunato's honest profession, and such is his disposition.
According to Fortunato, he has often chided Canadian border guards by asking them to say "please" when telling him to shut off his motor or perform other tasks. This request is generally honored, often with a sheepish grin -- on the Canadian side of the border, that is. Last week, during a crossing into the United States, Fortunato was gruffly instructed to turn off his engine by a tax-fattened time-server.
"Excuse me sir -- `please,'" Fortunato replied. It would have taken a tiny fraction of a single second to honor that reasonable request. But had the border guard done so he would have been deferring to a mere mundane, someone not clad in the sacred vestments of the Most High and Holy State. So the ill-tempered drudge escalated his demands, finally threatening to assault Fortunato with pepper spray.
Fortunato -- showing that, in the language of Louis L'Amour, he had more "sand" than an entire concert hall full of Republican Chickenhawks -- stood his ground. So the thug pepper-sprayed him, and, with the help of several of his fellow trough-swillers, gang-tackled and handcuffed the middle-aged professional dancer. Fortunato was held for three hours before being released -- without apology -- into Canada.
Let's be clear about something: This had absolutely nothing to do with protecting the borders of the United States from terrorists or any other threat. An actual terrorist would go out of his way to be inconspicuous. The assault on Fortunato was intended to punish him for failing to offer proper submission to the Man In The Uniform.
"Our officers will give direct orders or commands to passengers," explained Mike Milne, a spokesdrone for the Customs and Border Protection (CPB) agency. "It is the obligation of the passenger to be compliant with those." (Emphasis added.) The same point was made by Tom Schreiber, CPBStaffelführer in Blaine, Washington: "This is not a situation where we're asking; this is a situation where we're ordering you to do that." (Emphasis added.)
Once again: Whenever a civilian is told that he is subject to the "orders" of someone in uniform, martial law exists.
A few weeks before Fortunato was treated to a chemical-weapon assault by the heroic guardians of our sacred northern frontier, a photographer named Robert Taylor (no, not that Robert Taylor) was accosted by a police officer while attempting to take a photo of a train.
"The cop wanted my ID, and I showed it to him," Taylor told the New York Times. "He told me I couldn't take the pictures. I told him that's not true, that the rules permitted it. He said I was wrong. I said, `I'm willing to bet your paycheck.'"
Of course, Taylor was right and the tax-gobbler was wrong: The photographer was able to call up the relevant transit authority rule on his BlackBerry.But that didn't end the matter, of course.
A police sergeant materialized and immediately began lying on behalf of his subordinate: The sergeant insisted that their rules were different from those of the transit authority, a claim intended -- once again -- to get Taylor to yield to those garbed in the accoutrements of the State's priestly caste.
Taylor wasn't having any of it."I [told the sergeant], `If you feel I'm wrong, give me a summons and I'll see everyone in court.' The sergeant told them to arrest me." The photographer was handcuffed and given a batch of summonses, all of them eminently dismissable and most of them quickly dismissed.
The one significant charge the police insist on pressing is "disorderly conduct," which supposedly took the form of speaking to the officers in an "unreasonable voice.""Unreasonable" in this instance refers to a tone of voice other than one associated with timid, cringing submission.
This is the same supposed offense that got Archimedes killed, and led to the assault on DesiderioFortunato: Mr. Taylor refused to behave like a whipped dog when confronted by an armed bureaucrat. In fact, he insisted on treating the officers as equals before the law, rather than the incarnation of The Law.
Martial law exists anywhere an individual can find himself arrested, assaulted, or murdered simply for insisting on being treated as a free man. The 2006 murder of Michael Kreca in San Diego provides the most compelling example I've seen that such a condition exists -- albeit in a latent form -- wherever government police are found.
Kreca, a gentle and unassuming man and accomplished writer specializing in freedom-related issues, was walking in Sorrento Mesa one morning in when he was accosted by two police officers -- Officer Samantha Fleming and Sgt. Elmer Edwards -- who claimed they had heard gunshots. Kreca replied that he had not been shooting and hadn't heard gunfire.
He consented to a body search -- during which his arms were physically restrained by the officers -- that turned up, in the waistband of his baggy casual clothes, a 9mm pistol he carried for personal protection.
According to the official police account, Officer Fleming told Kreca that she was going to handcuff him “for her safety."
“No, you're not going to do that,” replied Kreca. “Let me go; I want to leave.”
Bear in mind that Kreca had consented to a pat-down search, something he wouldn't have done if he harbored violent intentions toward the officers. They had no reason to treat Kreca as a threat, much less to arrest him -- apart from the arrogant assumption, typical of their professional tribe, that a civilian in possession of a firearm is a "threat."
As Kreca tried to leave, a needless and pointless scuffle ensued. It ended when Sergeant Elmer Edwards valiantly placed his gun against Kreca's chest and fired twice, killing him.
Predictably, an official inquiry found that Sgt. Edwards “acted within the law,” since California statutes permit police “to use deadly force to protect themselves and members of the public from serious injury or death....” The same report by the District Attorney acknowledged that "Irrespective of any laws applicable to situations where peace officers use deadly force in accomplishing their duties, the law of self-defense is available to any person" and that homicide is justifiable "when resisting an attempt by a person to commit grave bodily injury or to kill any person."
This observation was intended as a supplemental defense for the officers who murdered Kreca, since Sgt. Edwards insisted that he was afraid Kreca was reaching for his gun. This made no sense, given that Kreca was confronting two armed individuals and hadn't resisted at all until the police threatened to shackle him.
And it shouldn't be forgotten that the kill-shots were executed with the gun in the victim's chest, not by an officer diving for cover in fear for his or her life.
Furthermore, after the police murdered Kreca they found that his gun wasn't loaded – which means that he couldn't have shot them even if he had wanted to. So the "justifiable homicide" defense here is based on the subjective impression on the part of Sgt. Edwards that Kreca was going to shoot him and his partner with an empty gun. That assumes, of course, that Edwards' account of the shooting itself wasn't perjury, which is never a safe assumption in incidents of this kind.
Kreca had much more to fear from the police than they had to fear from him. The proof of this proposition resides in the simple fact that he is dead, and his murderers continue to pollute the earth.
"The truth is told by whoever is left standing," explained Tom Zarek, Battlestar Galactica's resident arch-Machiavel, after he presided over the massacre of his political opponents. Kreca is dead, his murderers agree on a cover story, and those with the authority to prosecute the crime have accepted that account as the "truth."
In practically every jurisdiction in this once-free land, it is a "criminal offense" -- and often a felony -- to disarm a "peace officer." Why isn't it a crime to disarm a law-abiding citizen?
Every encounter between civilians and the state's armed enforcers has the potential to escalate into an episode of state-inflicted lethal violence. If we permit them -- and only our principled resistance, peaceful where possible, but forceful where necessary, is the only thing that will stop them -- those who presume to rule us intend to reduce us to abject helotry. And the question is not whether this will happen, since it's already taking place.
A hoary truism teaches us that crisis reveals character, rather than shaping it. To the extent the word "character" applies to the government ruling us, that maxim certainly applies with respect to the state of permanent crisis we have experienced since 9-11.
The tyrannical practices and powers exhibited in the name of Homeland Security -- from aggressive war to torture -- are not foreign to the Regime that rules us. The open-ended "war on terror" simply provided an opportunity for the State's agents to institutionalize official crimes that had been committed on a more informal basis prior to The Day Everything Changed.
At the malignant heart of this system we find the extraordinary claim -- now embraced, to the surprise only of the professionally gullible, by Obama the Blessed and his ruling clique -- that the president has the power to order the open-ended detention of anyone he designates an "enemy combatant."
This claim, which was validated by Congress in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, is a de facto repeal of habeas corpus. This is the foundational due process guarantee in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberty protected by law, and perhaps the most important concession wrested from King John at Runnymede in 1215.
Absent the protection provided by habeas corpus, rulers can forego such formalities as indictment and trial and simply lock people up until they run out of birthdays. The Bush Regime insisted that the president, through the exercise of a protean, extra-constitutional "commander-in-chief" power, can designate individuals as "enemy combatants" and imprison them indefinitely.
Fear the mullet, but respect due process: Former "enemy combatant"-turned-criminal defendant Ali Al-Marri.
Now the Obama administration is pursuing exactly the same course with respect to a case involving a second "enemy combatant," Ali Al-Marri.
Although media commentators insist that Obama is "likely to handle accused terrorists in a significantly different way" from that followed by his predecessor, the crucial point here is that he, like Bush, is seeking to render Al-Marri's case moot, which would preserve the presidential claim by default.
The Military Commissions Act was not the only, or even the first, congressional assault on the habeas corpus guarantee. An earlier, and more damaging, attack came in the form of the "Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006," which permits the open-ended "civil confinement" of those who are designated "sexually dangerous persons" (a category that sounds a lot like the old Soviet concept of "socially dangerous persons").
"Civil confinement" is a variation on "civil commitment," under which the several states, acting on the malevolent doctrine of parens patriae (the "parenthood" of the state), institutionalize the mentally ill for treatment.
As the Soviets demonstrated through their use of pscyhiatry as an enforcement arm of the State (the assumption being that only the mentally ill would dissent from the Party-ordained consensus), this practice is pregnant with awful abuses, one of which is its subtle expansion to include sex offenders who have served their allotted sentences but are still confined to state custody.
Massachusetts recently became the first state to have a "sexually dangerous person" civilly committed to the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons under the Adam Walsh Act. In principle, this amounts to a life sentence inflicted, "Minority Report"-style, for hypothetical crimes yet to be committed.
In January, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the federal civil confinement of sex offenders on narrowly federalist grounds. That court quite properly pointed out that Congress had exceeded its constitutional authority by creating a federal system of civil confinement. But the deeper question -- can any government, state or federal, simply amend a court-prescribed punishment into a life sentence? -- was left untouched by that court.
The issue is headed to the Supreme Court and, once again, the Obama/Holder "Justice" Department has adopted the perspective of the Bush administration on this issue, namely that the end of a prison term doesn't necessarily mean the end of an individual's imprisonment.
One of the sitting Supreme Court Justices, Samuel Alito, has already ruled in favor of indefinite detention without trial in the "civil contempt" case of H. Beatty Chadwick, a 73-year-old, cancer-stricken former attorney who has been imprisoned for 14 years on a civil contempt charge.
The charge against Chadwick grew out of a contentious and bizarre divorce in 1992. His ex-wife Barbara made extensive and unverifiable claims of suffering from abuse, manipulation, and pathological control at the hands of her ex-husband. She demanded millions in alimony, and the trial judge ordered Chadwick to put the funds in a court-controlled account. Chadwick, who claimed that the sought-for millions didn't exist.
When investigators hired by the court couldn't find more than a small fraction of the expected sums, the Judge found Chadwick in contempt and sent him to prison, presumably to jar his memory or at least break his will. And he remains in prison to this day, despite the fact that he has never so much as been accused of a crime, let alone tried or convicted for one.
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that detainees at Guantanamo are covered by the habeas corpus guarantee, a writer who has chronicled the Chadwick case took note of the ironic fact that accused terrorists actually enjoy due process protections Chadwick has been denied. Just a few months earlier, a three-judge federal panel dismissed a habeas corpus petition filed by Chadwick on the remarkable grounds that if he were permitted to challenge his detention he would go free, and thus will have "beaten the system."
We can't have that, of course.
Samuel Alito's contribution to this matter was a ruling in 2002 that Chadwick's imprisonment without trial -- which at that time had lasted merely seven years -- was permissible because the purpose of civil contempt is coercion, rather than punishment. That is to say, it is a form of extortion through confinement, which -- Alito's schoolboy sophistries aside -- is unambiguously a form of cruel and unusual punishment, in addition to a violation of the guarantee of a fair and speedy trial and the protection against self-incrimination.
All of those abuses, according to Alito and his ilk, are acceptable when a Judge recites the incatatory phrase "civil contempt."
Chadwick's case, though exemplary in its cruelty, is hardly unique.
Political prisoner: Former investment manager Martin Armstrong, imprisoned for years without benefit of trial.
Ten years ago, Martin A. Armstrong -- who dealt in precious metals, antiquities, and other investments -- was accused of securities fraud by the federal government (which prefers to have a monopoly on the practice of securities fraud and related corruption).
Ordered by a judge to produce $5 million in gold and other assets, Armstrong replied that he didn't have them. Insisting that Armstrong was lying, the judge ordered him imprisoned for civil contempt indefinitely.
Denied access to a jury trial, cut off from the resources needed to mount a defense, Armstrong has now served a longer prison term than he would have been given if convicted of the fraud charge of which he remains legally innocent. His former clients have been repaid the money they lost in what was, according to Armstrong, a devastating loss growing out of high-risk transactions he did not authorize.
In 2006, shortly after being ordered into solitary confinement in "the hole" in Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center, Armstrong was brow-beaten into a guilty plea on one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. This was the end result of the government's strategy of attrition, according to his attorney, Thomas Sjoblom: "I think the government just wore Marty out."
Through the practice of judicial extortion called "civil contempt," notes the New York Times, "criminal prosecutors have never had to prove their 24-count indictment at trial.... Nevertheless, they have gotten their desired result -- a lengthy prison term for Mr. Armstrong."
Federal prosecutors, it shouldn't be necessary to point out, are formed from the congealed scum that suppurates out through the cracks of our most prestigious law schools. Their mission is to climb the career ladder to ever-greater heights of wealth and prestige by vindicating the federal government in every legal conflict, irrespective of the truth of a given case.
Federal attorneys have long made use of "civil" lawsuits to compel inoffensive citizens and business owners to comply with bureaucratic enactments. They, along with law enforcement agencies both federal and local, have made extensive use of "civil" asset forfeiture to steal untold amounts of money and property from people never formally charged with crimes.
And, acting in collusion with the infinitely vain, dress-wearing chair-moisteners who call themselves "Judges," prosecutors can use "civil contempt confinement" to circumnavigate the criminal justice system altogether.
Arbitrary, extra-juridical imprisonment didn't begin with the Bush Regime, which refined and institutionalized that abuse by listing it under the prerogatives of the "unitary executive" (a concept, incidentally, that was pioneered with the help of a young Reagan Justice Department lawyer named ... Samuel Alito). I can't help but suspect that Obama and his legions of plunderers and social engineers will find novel and terrifying uses for the practice in the service of their vision of "social justice."
"[H]e that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary."--
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter VII: Of Political or Civil Society; section 92.
The State in its elemental form: The implicit threat behind all government action is made overt in this police officer's personalized headgear....
... and here's the threat made tangible: The caption to this photo helpfully explained, "Anti-war protester learns a lesson about protesting."
For the second time in less than a year, a lethal mass shooting has been carried out by an obscure and probably deranged individual of vaguely right-wing inclinations.
Last Friday (February 27), Dannie R. Baker, a 59-year-old self-described minister who followed a distant and eccentric orbit around Florida's Walton County Republican Party, shot five college-age Chilean students, killing two of them. As is generally the case in tragedies of this kind, the a police tactical unit showed up in time to collect the shooter after his victims were already dead or critically injured.
Agent of "revolution"? Accused murderer Dannie R. Baker.
The "Reverend" Baker was known to the local Republican leadership, who -- to their credit -- didn't actively seek his company, although he was described as "active" in the 2004 election campaign.
Last year, party officials became concerned about a series of "disturbing" e-mails from Baker and contacted the Sheriff's office to express their concerns.
Murder victims: Nicolas Corp, 23 (left) and Racine Balbontin (22).
Like Baker, Adkisson was a middle-aged man of with a murky background on the margins of the Republican-aligned right. Where Baker's "revolutionary" intentions, if any, remain sketchy, Adkisson unflinchingly described his crime as an act of revolutionary suicide terrorism.
In a four-page written harangue left as a kind of suicide note-cum-political manifesto, Baker described his premeditated act as the "symbolic killings" of people connected to the liberal Democrats he passionately hated, and predicted that he would die at the hands of police in his effort to "get the ball rolling" on the supposedly worthy project of annihilating liberals wherever they could be found.
Some left-leaning activists and commentators insist that the actions of Adkisson and Baker are inspired by a tendency they call "eliminationism" -- a desire to exterminate the "other," however that category is defined. That analysis is difficult to dispute, given the way that conservatism in the Age of Limbaugh has curdled into a kind of tribalism seasoned by adolescent resentment and blended with an implacable appetite for power.
The dominant conservative critique of the Obama administration, after all, doesn't focus on its profligacy, foreign adventurism, and insistence on centralizing power at the expense of liberty; in that respect, Obama is just like his predecessor and, in some ways (at least so far), a touch less extreme. No, the critique is simply that Obama and his people are part of "Them," rather than "Us": They belong to the wrong tribe, and are exercising the power we covet.
After all, the GOP-aligned Right didn't erupt in revolutionary outrage when the Bush administration destroyed habeas corpus or created a corporatist economic dictatorship within the Treasury Department, to name just two of its myriad offenses against liberty. However, now that the power-engorged executive branch is controlled by Them, Sean Hannity has started to cultivate sedition and Limbaugh, envisioning the Republican re-conquest of the government, has started to talk about "payback" in terms that bring to mind a Khmer Rouge commissar contemplating a purge.
As somebody who considers the State to be nothing more than a criminal syndicate pursuing a monopoly, I consider sedition to be a fine and noble calling worthy of all decent and Godly people. But statists of the conservative stripe engage in purely situational sedition: They want to undermine our present crop of rulers in order to replace them, not to abolish State impositions on liberty.
That is the thinking behind Hannity's little survey about the preferred mode of insurrection and Limbaugh's crusade to bring down Obama -- to the extent that the term "thinking" describes what goes on behind Hannity's Neanderthal forehead ridge, or the process that leads to the verbal expression of Rush Limbaugh's appetites.
This isn't to say that the left is blameless in all of this. It was the left that not only legitimized but institutionalized the politics of collectivist grievance. Collectivist movements are always eliminationist in potential, and quite often in practice.
Homeland Security in Chile, 1973: Santiago National Stadium serving as an open-air detention camp for political enemies of the new junta.
The biggest difference I can see is that "right-wing"* collectivists prefer to eliminate troublesome people right away (videthe Chilean junta filling Santiago National Stadium with dissidents and other disposable troublemakers following Pinochet's 1973 coup), while left-wingers seek to "re-educate" their victims first before liquidating those deemed incapable of thought reform.
A subsidiary distinction: "Lone wolf"-style political violence is more the style of the pseudo-individualist Right, since the Left prefers a more systematic approach.
It seems likely that we will see other episodes of "lone wolf"-style armed terrorism by people like Adkisson and Baker -- comets dragged out of conservatism's Oort Cloud, or perhaps given a nudge sun-ward by federal agents of mayhem deployed for that purpose.
Given the possibility that people perceived as "liberals" will be targeted for future politically inspired violence -- in addition to the increase in routine criminal violence that will occur as the depression deepens -- a question urges itself upon us: Why aren't liberals (with a few worthy exceptions) reconsidering their opposition to the right to armed self-defense? Why aren't they buying guns, rather than supporting measures intended to take them away from others?
"Eliminationism," as practiced by the Revolutionary Left: Under the direction of a progressive lawyer named Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the revolutionary French Jacobinsconductednoyades -- mass drownings of Christian Vendeans deemed ineducable and thus subject to liquidation. Perhaps inspired by the given name of the official who supervised them, these acts of mass murder, which anticipated modern collectivist mass-killings from the Soviet Union to Cambodia, were called "republican baptisms."
I suspect that the answer is this: Just as Left-collectivists prefer institutionalized armed violence through the State to "lone wolf"-style episodes of individual political violence, they believe it would be best for all of us to be disarmed apart from the sanctified agents of State repression, rather than permitting individuals to provide for their own protection.
People of that political persuasion might want to re-examine their premises before the "eliminationist" Right regains power and renders the question moot. But there is a more immediate potential threat that should command the immediate attention of all of us, irrespective of our political viewpoints. It is described by Russian-born, America-educated Dimitri Orlov, one of the wittiest and most capable exponents of what could be called "Collapse Theory."
Orlov spend a great deal of time in the Soviet Union during its painful and tumultuous transition. During the 1990s, he began to see some crucial parallels between the behavior of that crusading socialist superpower just prior to its collapse, and the behavior of our own crusading corporatist superpower on the eve of its own systemic crisis. He was present when the State's administrative system broke down at the same time the country was inundated with waves of demobilized soldiers returning from Afghanistan, or from manning the garrisons of the far-flung Soviet empire.
The collapse of the Regime's financial system will quite probably take down the administrative apparatus as well. We're barely into what will be a very long and deep depression, and already every state government faces an acute fiscal crisis, with most large cities following suit. At some point, imperial ambitions will yield to fiscal reality, and the troops stationed abroad will come home, apart from those likely to be lost should the Regime manage to lose an entire army in the Gulf region.
Police departments, both state and local, will be forced to lay off personnel, and prisons bulging at the seams will start releasing convicts (most likely beginning with those who committed violent crimes against persons and property, rather than the non-violent offenders who could be considered political prisoners rather than actual criminals).
The Business End of the State, Russian Edition: Russia's Omon police force subdues a protester. The Omon forces are similar to American riot police, albeit better educated and less pathologically violent.
The end result, Orlov explains, "will be a country awash with various categories of armed men, most of them unemployed, and many of them borderline psychotic":
"The police in the United States are a troubled group. Many of them lose all touch with people who are not `on the force' and most of them develop an `us-versus-them' mentality. The soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer from a variety of psychological ailments as well. All of them will sooner or later realize that their problems are not medical but political. This will make it impossible for society to continue to exercise control over them. All of them will be making good use of their weapons training and other professional skills to acquire whatever they need to survive. And the really important point to remember is that they will do these things whether or not anyone thinks it legal for them to be doing them."
It is important to understand that Orlov's observation is speculative only as it applies to our country; what he describes he has seen in "post-Soviet" Russia.
Even after the State lost its ideological rationale for plunder, the country was still buried beneath armed men who had made a career in extracting wealth at gunpoint. Oddly enough, being clothed in the power of the State and carrying out errands of violence on its behalf didn't purge such men of the "baseness of human nature." And rather than retiring when the Soviet flag was furled, they continued in the same profession as free-lancers until they found employment in the same field under the successor Regime.
The implosion of Washington's imperial State will probably follow a similar trajectory. What rational person of any political persuasion would choose to be disarmed in such circumstances, or any others?
__ *I'm aware that the political "Right" on a properly defined political spectrum would refer to less government, or even the absence of that institutional affliction. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm using the term "Right" with reference to nationalist and traditionalist tendencies, as opposed to the egalitarian and "progressive" impulses that characterize the "Left." In this model, total government can be imposed by either "progressives" or "reactionaries."
