tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-247669322024-03-07T17:53:30.582ZThe Jacksonian PartyThis site is dedicated to my ideas of a Jacksonian Party and what it means to run the Nation under the Jacksonian precepts. Spare Government is good government. People are responsible for their actions. Be friendly and be befriended. Act honorably and be honored. Do otherwise and expect to be treated with indifference. Attack the Republic, and you will be killed.
Comments shall be civil and contain no personal attacks, and are subject to deletion otherwise.A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.comBlogger270125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-46601134559272030992014-05-06T22:57:00.001Z2014-05-06T22:57:59.346ZWhy an investigation is necessary<p>I'm cribbing from some of my online commentary...</p> <p>Just as investigating the cover-up of Watergate revealed what was being covered-up, so too it will be here.</p> <p>And the best part is getting the people from the CIA Annex and asking them if they had to sign an NDA.</p> <p>Really, the Administration forcing people to do that shows that there is something to cover-up. And that would be signed under duress, and thus null and void.</p> <p>The President has responsibility for those that serve under him, especially a hand-picked Ambassador sent to a place undergoing a civil war with terrorist attacks on-going. That is HIS representative there, HIS Ambassador sent there by HIM to do this job.</p> <p>Where were the assets to extract him and his team in case things went south? Where were the naval and air assets necessary to do that in a place that is undergoing such turmoil? Who sends an Ambassador and critical national security personnel to such a place WITHOUT AN EXTRACTION PLAN?</p> <p>Why was Stevens and, indeed, all the personnel put in such a vulnerable situation with no way out?</p> <p>Why?</p> <p>That isn’t a political question. It is a question that involves the Head of State, Head of Government and CinC: that is his responsibility to make sure that those people are protected with all means necessary and NOT having a way to get them out is dereliction of duty of the highest order because it was done ON HIS ORDERS.</p> <p>That is before you even get to the cover-up. Investigating the cover-up will shed light on these questions because they are integral to the cover-up, itself.</p> <p>The power of the Legislative Branch is to check the power of the Executive via ensuring that the Executive is executing the laws properly and carrying out the duties of President.  Watergate was a cover-up for a burglary for political gain, and this investigation into Benghazi will have that as a side-show, as well as the lack of care shown to those under the President's direct guidance and protection was done in an attempt to win an election.  That is political in nature.  The acts of neglect are matters of State directly attributed to the Presidential duties and no President is beyond such review.  I cannot think of a case similar to this one in which a personally appointed Ambassador for a specific mission in such a dangerous area was left without adequate protection and ready forces to get him out if things went to pot.  That is because Presidents take their job seriously and don't do such things unless it is absolutely and positively vital to the US and he is ready to explain that vital interest if things go wrong.</p> <p>To date we have not gotten that, which is, in itself, dereliction of duty as Head of State.  Blaming the exercise of First Amendment speech as the focal cause for the attack is a gross attack on the rights of American citizens which is beyond the pale for any politician of any party to perform, not to speak of the President doing so and having cabinet members back him up on that.  There was zero justification for that, but that, as awful as it is, is just part of the cover-up and meant to be inflammatory and distracting from the actual events they are meant to hide.</p> <p>Anyone trying to paint this as merely politics is missing the actual job of the President that was not done on multiple counts.</p> <p>Even President Carter tried to rescue the Embassy personnel in Iran.</p> <p>President Obama couldn't even manage THAT.</p> <p>Or ordering the military to sanitize the site where this took place so that the INTEL carried by the Ambassador on operations in-country and in-theater would not fall into the hands of our enemies.  That was never done and that is the job of the President as well.</p> <p>Why wasn't any of this done?</p> <p>What is being covered up is woven into the fabric of the lies told after it.  And the best place to start with any after-action investigation is with the survivors.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-682493706734249112014-04-02T18:31:00.001Z2014-04-02T18:31:10.851ZUnamended right<p>There is a fascinating part in the US Constitution (<a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html">archives.gov</a>) about a right guarantee and it isn't in the Bill of Rights but in the body of the Constitution, itself.  Not even one of the more well known rights.  That is probably why it gets ignored.</p> <p>It is a direct grant of right to the State Legislatures, and sits way down in Art. V, you know the Amendment process:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#004080">Article. V.</font></p> <p><font color="#004080"><strong>The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary</strong>, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; <strong>and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate</strong>.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>There, right at the end.</p> <p>The State is granted equal suffrage in the Senate.</p> <p>State suffrage at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, meant that individuals chosen via the State Legislatures were the ones doing the representation of the State.  Throughout Art. V the only body that is mentioned at the State level is the State Legislature.</p> <p>Now Amendment XVI changed the process of choosing Senators:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000a0">AMENDMENT XVII</font></p> <p><font color="#0000a0">Passed by Congress May 13, 1912. Ratified April 8, 1913.</font></p> <p><font color="#0000a0"><strong>Note: Article I, section 3, of the Constitution was modified by the 17th amendment.</strong></font></p> <p><font color="#0000a0">The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.</font></p> <p><font color="#0000a0">When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.</font></p> <p><font color="#0000a0">This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Does Amending the process of choosing a Senator abolish the right granted via Art. V to the State Legislatures?</p> <p>By changing the meaning of Suffrage for a State from Legislature to direct election of the people, the State Legislature is cut out of the decision making process for Senators.  That should be it, right?  I mean you cleverly cut out the State Legislatures and remove their power grant in the Senate in one easy change.  </p> <p>Yet the State Legislature is the ONLY State level organization mentioned in Art. V and it is specifically considered as having suffrage in Art. V in the Senate.  If Amendment XVII did, indeed, intend to remove the power granted to the State Legislatures for considering Amendments, it could have said so.  This is not normal Senate duty, do remember, but deciding on an Amendment to the Constitution, to which the States were originally granted ways to have a say in it via their Legislatures: via the normal process of voting for it at the State level and via their representative in the Senate. </p> <p>Sadly I do believe that the States signed away their representation with the move to direct election of Senators.  The idea of popular suffrage and direct election of Senators have left the States without a direct voice in the federal government.  </p> <p>Yet the original intent of the Amendment process remains via implication of how Legislatures were to choose Senators and the Senators having a direct say via their votes in the Senate in the Amendment process.  So whenever you hear about how the US always 'expands' rights, do remember that it has removed and say from the State Legislature on how to run the Nation not just via normal votes but via Art. V Amendment votes.  If that simple Amendment to give direct elections of Senators didn't remove the State Legislative suffrage right for Amendments, then every single Amendment after Amendment XVII would be brought into question.  Because while the people vote directly on Senators, the sovereignty of the several States rests in their representatives at the level of the State Legislature.  By agreeing to Amendment XVII the State Legislatures agreed to give up part of their say and walk away from the guarantee they had in the Constitution for representation directly.  Their only real recourse is to pass a bill saying that the current Senators don't represent their State and the Consent to let them sit as representatives of the State, not the people of the State but the State as an entity, is withdrawn.</p> <p>And what State Legislature has the courage to do that?  Really, if you have to gag someone, isn't it better to convince them to gag themselves?  Saves a lot of fuss when you can do that.  </p> <p>The State Legislatures could still do all sorts of mischief to popularly elected Senators... too bad they keep making sure the gag is tightly in their mouth and that they make it clear that they no longer want to do their jobs of representing their States.  </p> <p>Even with the consent they gave during the Amendment process, the State Legislatures could still have a say over the representatives of the State in the Senate via the Art. V grant.  That right has been left unamended and still sits in Art. V but by Amendment XVII has been changed from a sovereign exercise of will to representation to one of negating representation if the sovereign no longer believes that its representative is representing it.  Consider this right to be a veto power over a Senator by the State Legislature, because they are the ones to decide if the State is being properly represented for the Amendment process.</p> <p>The will to exercise this right?  Absent.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-12088454370015071462014-03-19T12:36:00.001Z2014-03-19T12:36:03.696ZWhat would a Tea Party foreign policy look like?<p>Is there a Tea Party foreign policy?</p> <p>In general it can be said that the Tea Party movement is concerned with local and National affairs, and this is true   of the branches of the Tea Party that are being seen in the UK, Italy, Israel, Australia and even in such places as Russia and China (the Vodka Party and a more underground movement in China).  Getting local and National government under control so that it stops wild spending, gets out of people's lives and lowers taxation, all while continuing to pay down debt, is the main target of the Tea Party organizations.  Foreign policy has been outside the realm of this, which has allowed some National politicians like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to try and craft some sort of foreign policy out of Reaganism or Libertarianism.  There is a problem in trying to graft on a foreign policy outlook that doesn't grow from the sentiments of a movement: it is likely to be rejected in whole or in part by the movement.  Worse is that it can serve as a 'wedge issue' that could split up Tea Party organizations into factions.</p> <p>What has not been attempted is to look at the foundations of the interior of the movement and ask: what grows from this as a foreign policy?</p> <p>Key issues internally beyond taxes are sustained by the support of the Natural Rights of Man as Individual.  Thus Liberty and Freedom for the individual are the underpinning for the tax and small government message.  By removing power to do things at the local and National level from government, the things done then devolve down to the people to address at a more localized level.  Foreign policy is the direction of a Nation as a whole and how it interacts with brother Nations.  If we seek to sustain liberty and freedom at home and have a government that recognizes that all rights and power come from the people, then should that not be a defining part of a Tea Party foreign policy?</p> <p>If this is put center stage then there is an outgrowth from that in that the Tea Party movement seeks to recognize that the power of the individual is paramount and that those Nations that wish to befriend the US must also have similar sanctuary from tyranny for the rights of the individual FROM government.  That makes the Bill of Rights and the general rights secured by the US Constitution a touchstone to how we approach brother Nations, and in that we have a ready-made list of actual items that brother Nations that wish to be friendly to the US must have:</p> <p>- Freedom of conscience</p> <p>- Freedom of religion</p> <p>- Freedom of speech</p> <p>- Freedom of the press</p> <p>- Freedom to peaceably assemble</p> <p>- Freedom to petition government</p> <p>These are Freedoms FROM government regulation, and even the US has fallen down on the job as its political elites have determined that government must be an arbiter of these things for the people.  Yet that power is not granted to it, thus all laws dealing with restricting these freedoms are against the US Constitution.  Even the famous 'not yelling fire in a crowded theater' is a LOCAL and STATE concern and is one of attaching liability, by law, to actual actions of malice towards others.  Hateful language is protected, language used to stampede people so as to harm them is not protected not because it is an exercise of speech but is abridging civil speech to coerce others to panic with a threat to their lives.  You don't yell fire in a crowded theater: you get up in front of all people and point out that there is a fire in the room and it needs to be evacuated in an orderly fashion so that all can be safe from it.  That might still get people killed, yes, but that has devolved responsibility of those reactions to the individuals by giving them the information necessary to make a decision.  That is the civil use of freedom of speech, and all freedoms have responsibilities that go hand-in-hand with them to uphold them as a freedom for all people.</p> <p>After this comes additional rights from government.</p> <p>- The right to keep and bear arms</p> <p>- The right to not have troops or government agents stationed in your home</p> <p>- The right to security in your papers, property and person</p> <p>- The right not to self-incriminate</p> <p>- The right to a jury trial by your peers</p> <p>This goes on for a bit more, but the point is made that these are actual rights and freedoms to be exercised.  From the legacy of Great Britain comes these rights and they were hammered out to keep monarchs, which is to say the head of government, from encroaching more and more on the liberties of individuals and their freedoms by passing laws against certain activities that intruded into these areas.</p> <p>It should be noted that the right to keep and bear arms is an adjunct to the Natural Right and Liberty of being armed and that as the negative form, which is to say offensive warfare, is relegated to the State, the positive form, that is defense from war, defense of the State, defense of life, papers and property... indeed defense of all other Civil Rights is backed by the Natural Right and positive Natural Liberty of defensive warfare and self-defense.  As our works and property are gained by exercising our freedom and liberty to gain them, thus exchanging time for goods, any taking of these things without due process of law is a threat to the life you have already created for yourself.  And when due process intrudes further than conscience allows, then the people have the right of self-defense of their lives in whole.</p> <p>As a basis for foreign policy by a Tea Party these cannot be seen as 'window dressing' by a government.  A government cannot have a right to keep and bear arms and then require so many things to be done that, effectively, no one may be armed.   Civil government cannot abolish the positive Natural Liberty of warfare or the Natural Right to self-defense via arms.  All arms are included in this, and as those who break the law see no compunction about following arms restrictions, the people must be able to counter such threats by similar civil arms.  Similarly having freedom of speech but having that right so circumscribed by government to quash petitioning of government or to even allow freedom of civil assembly is not supporting the freedom of individual speech, assembly or petition of government.</p> <p>Minimal government requires maximal individual liberty and the exercise thereof.  This is not, exactly, a Libertarian view as libertarians elected to office have seen fit to pack in their own ideas of personal liberty that require such things as grades going to a college student and not to their parents.  That intrudes on contractual agreements within a family and should be something that Libertarians uphold as a Natural source of contracting.  And yet that is not the case.  From that a minimalist view of government requires that government get out of the support of going to college completely and lower the burden of government to all of the people and let individuals see if they can actually afford the burden of further education.  Thus Libertarians can be caught in the idea of government doing 'good things' from their perspective, while Tea Partiers will take a view of government as a Punisher and that giving it the carrot and the stick is the recipe for tyranny.</p> <p>Foreign policy wise this then puts requirements on those who would befriend the US to off-load as much of the overburden of government to the people of their government to their people.  As I've said the US has been doing just the opposite from this for over a century and it has led to fiscal ruin and debt that cannot be paid and, under the current view, has no intention of EVER being paid off.  The slow-roll of bonds and modest overspending and debt passed out of the rear view mirror back in the 1970's and isn't on the horizon ANYWHERE.  Fiscal rectitude by a brother Nation is something we need to practice at home and if it is a top value, then it is something the US should be encouraging abroad.</p> <p>This then gives a set of tests to a Tea Party foreign policy of which of our brother Nations we can be friendly to and which will get reciprocity from the US.  This does not mean that all of such individual Natural and Civil rights and liberties are to be maximal, this is true, but that they must able to be practiced and government recognize that it is not the purveyor of these rights and liberties but the protector of them for their people.</p> <p>Free Trade was a Reagan era mantra and the practice of it to make people free just has not worked.  Mexico is, if anything, in worse straights for its people due to NAFTA than they were before it.  The massive upheavals in their economy and the direct competition with US agriculture has had large-scale effects on Mexico which has created a large set of criminal syndicates that are waging war against the citizens of Mexico.  It is a good thing that local neighborhoods and towns take up arms in their own defense in Mexico and it is a bad thing that they must break the law to do so as their government restricts the use of even bolt action rifles to its citizens.  Why do we have free trade with such a Nation?  Similarly freer and more open trade with China has seen the few there, its government officials and cronies, prosper while the people of China earn little and have internal inflation going on that their own government can't even recognize.  The people have no freedom of assembly or petition of government, and yet it gets Most Favored Nation Trade Status?  Why?</p> <p>In general this outline of a foreign policy begins to break out into a tri-fold path, which is something I've looked at before, but with an ideological backing to it that can be well understood.  The outline of the path is clear, and requires that those who put forth nostrums on things like Free Trade making people freer actually demonstrate this mantra after decades of trying it.  There are negative cases to this, and as those point to a major problem with the supposition, the mantra, itself, must be put in doubt and re-examined.  The US is not the World's Policeman and, in the words of John Quincy Adams, we support freedom and liberty everywhere, but are guardians only of our own.  To that end the first goal on the military side of foreign policy, is to help bolster and deepen the self-defense capacity of friendly brother Nations.  This can be done with direct trade, yes, but can also be done by seeking to have restrictions on the use of arms repealed so that there is a greater reservoir of those who can defend their own Nation to be called upon in event of crisis.  Working together militarily comes at the END of this process, not the BEGINNING, and those Nations that recognize that their own self-interest is best served by a civil armed populace goes a long way towards demonstrating the concept that governments cannot predict when and where war will happen as the negative Natural Liberty of warfare can be reclaimed by those who go savage and use it against their fellow man to their own ends.  If governments could control this, then they are the ones liable for every act of individual, which is to say personal, warfare as they CONTROL IT.  That is not the case.</p> <p>Thus: </p> <p>Path I is established: foreign relations with those friendly to the US and who hold the same values for individual Liberty and Freedom are key to good relations.  From this grows fiscal rectitude, the removal of State overburden, the lowering of the accumulation of debt and the outlook that debts cannot be contracted for at high levels ad infinitum.  These are the Nations that deserve free trade: they are friendly, they support the rights and liberties of their people including the freedom from government, and seek to foster a fiscal climate at the large scale that allows greater freedom and liberty at the small scale.</p> <p>Path II comes from those Nations not on Path I but who are not hostile in word or deed towards the US.  These are Nations to which we cannot afford allegiance and from that trade with them can be burdened.  A 10% tariff, which is to say a 10% payment of the value of goods to be imported by those seeking to sell them in the US, is paying the freight to support a government which fosters trade amongst Nations.  Want to get that lowered or removed?  Become friendlier to the US and begin upholding the values necessary for Path I.  This is something that can be tuned by Congress and by giving a framework as to why it is imposed it also puts a value on being able to support such individual liberties and freedoms to those who don't support them in full or who are not friendly nor unfriendly to the US.  The middle of the road is a perfectly safe place to be, don't expect the US to help you, however, unless you start to move towards Path I.</p> <p>Path III is what is left.  Nations hostile to the US in word and deed, who have shown themselves to be untrustworthy in treaties and who seek to put their own people under tyrannical rule.  We don't trade with these Nations.  Indeed, part of that 10% tariff should go towards support of the military so that we are well armed AGAINST them.  If they give safe harbor to terrorists, pirates or any other form of Private War, then they are an enemy not just of this Nation but to the order between all Nations as they do not seek to act in ways compatible to civilized life.  We do not have to be antagonistic towards these Nations, no.  We do need to be well armed against them.  On the tit-for-tat scale they wish to live and so that is all they do understand, and we can only respond in ways that befits a civilized Nation in the brotherhood of Nations.  Sanctions are one thing.  Quarantine another.  Translating our works that describe our traditions and how man is the source of all power of government and then getting them to the people of those Nations hostile to us, is a third way.  There are others, of course, but the scope of what can be done is held in by civilized restraint and by holding the civil sword well honed and practiced with.</p> <p>This outgrowth of a tripartite set of paths within foreign policy would be a direct outgrowth of the ideals held by Tea Partiers.  Ideology drives policy, not the other way around as is the case in the modern world that slips into tyrannical ends for government.  Moreover it is a set of principles that are well understood internationally and are easy to remember, as anyone can remember: Friends, Neutrals, Enemies.  That is the path of Law of Nations amongst all Nations in all Eras in all places on Earth without regard to race, ethnicity, culture or any other thing.  It was practiced by the Ancient Mayans like this, and so did the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Egyptians act like this.  International law is only a set of contracts between brother Nations that is built up and each holds the others to account for signing onto the contract we call treaties.  Nations can leave treaties, as well, and have that full right and responsibility to do so so as to safeguard their own people.  That is upheld via this tri-fold Path system and in particular it points out who those seeking to bring down the civil, international agreements between Nations are and points them out for all to see.</p> <p>As a policy system it allows large amounts of work and fine tuning for individual cases, and yet the touchstones are clear and abundant, so that easy to pass milestones in improving the civil rights of citizens leads to better trade and more robust interaction, and improved self-defense.  Reaganites should understand such a systems as should Libertarians as it puts individual rights and liberties in a civil context into a foreign policy system that then seeks to uphold them for all mankind while securing them abundantly at home.</p> <p>Of course this means the home-side dovetail of actually removing the burdens to civil exercise of rights that have been put in place for the last century and more, at home.  This is leading by example.</p> <p>An Exemplar Nation.</p> <p>Showing the Way.</p> <p>A Shining City on a Hill.</p> <p>We need some good neighbors.</p> <p>And we need to clean up our act at home to get them, first.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-71727185524847995592014-03-01T12:40:00.001Z2014-03-01T12:40:47.194ZDo you remember...?<p>Do you remember about how the START Treaty was going to make the world a safer and more stable place? I do.</p> <p>Do you remember a time when Nations would actually declare their intentions and declare war before invading another country so that civilized norms between Nations are affirmed? I do.</p> <p>Do you remember when the Left wanted the world to hold to standards of International Law? I do.</p> <p>Do you remember when the Left criticized drawing lines and making threats as a serious destabilizing element of foreign policy? I do.</p> <p>Do you remember a time when a President of the US would decry an act against International Law and the Laws of War as such? I do.</p> <p>Do you remember a time when a President would have just said the plain things about International Law, the Laws of War and that the US decries barbaric invasions of an undeclared nature as making a Nation into a rogue as such activities were destabilizing to all Nations? I do.</p> <p>Do you remember a time when a President, seeing foreign aggression would speak openly about working with our allies so as to formulate a response against rogue regimes? I do.</p> <p>Do you remember a time when the Left decried activities of the US in the past when each and every particular of International Law was seen as unjust and that made the US a barbaric place? I do.</p> <p>Do you see the way the Left reacts to this and how it now, when push comes to shove against a barbaric actor who does things against all standards of International Law, are making excuses for him? I do.</p> <p>Yes I do remember these things and see the response of the oh-so righteous Left when a tyrant decides to just step into a place on his own without declaring war.</p> <p>I remember that with Austria by reading history.</p> <p>I remember that with Saddam Hussein and Kuwait by seeing it unfold.</p> <p>I remember that by seeing Congress draft modern day uses of force, which are declarations of war, and having the Left decry the civilized manner of work between Nations as ‘illegal’ and ‘uncivilized’.</p> <p>And now I see it again with Putin and Russia.</p> <p>And I also see the inability to address civilized standards of diplomacy, the normality of relationships between Nations and the laws of war as part of the way civilized Nations act as not being upheld by the Left today.</p> <p>Yes I see all of that and understand who the enemy is.</p> <p>They are clear by their actions and inactions, both.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-33637459079214833222014-02-14T14:25:00.001Z2014-02-14T14:25:53.668ZForm and function<p>Following the class on Early Modern England of the Tudor and Stewart from Yale online <a href="http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-251">HIST 251: Early Modern England</a> which covers the time period of the late 16th century to the early 18th century and is presented by Professor Keith E. Wrightson offers a look at the problems of the mid- to late-16th century, the time covering Henry VIII, Edward VI, Jane Gray, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I.  This period saw an increase in the population of England, which had been stable since at least the 13th or 14th century.  The records are not good but sizes of villages, towns and cities indicate that coming into the 16th century there were between 2.2 and 2.4 million people in England and by the end of the century that had grown to 3.1 to 3.3 million people.  There was no great advance in public sanitation, medicine or improvement in diet or climate that can be pointed to for this phenomena.  It is possible that the closing of the Monestaries and Nunneries by Henry VIII contributed to this (approx. 25 to 28% of society had been involved with the Church prior to this) which may influence the number of marriages and children being born.  That would be a contributing factor but unlikely to be the driving one.</p> <p>What happened due to this is classical economic: productivity didn't increase, the land still produced only so much in the way of crops and trade could not increase significantly to off-set shortfalls in food.  Thus with more people and more demand for all goods and limited production basis for goods to be sold and traded, prices rose.  With that poverty increased and a stable work system from the prior century, where individuals worked within 20 miles of where they were born, began to break up.  It was seen, at the time, as a moral problem and that by putting the Crown at the head of the Church of England, that this was some form of moral lack which was being visited upon the Nation as a whole.  That moral view of poverty is one that understood that there were different types of poor.</p> <p>First there were those who were poor by circumstances.  Widows and those that fell gravely ill and could not work fell into this category.  These people were poor through no fault of their own and it was a moral duty to care for such individuals by families and through charity both through the Church and by civic means through holding special Ales and meals so that the poor could be cared for.  These poor will always be with us: the poor of circumstance.</p> <p>Second are those who are poor because they lack will to work.  These poor could do something about their problems and deserved perhaps a bit of a charitable hand up at a civil level to at least pay their keep until they could get regular work.  Continuing not to work, after that, was a moral lack of the individual involved.</p> <p>Those without work in that era faced an economy that would have to expand to employ more people, yet that was not happening.  Thus the poor who lacked work and actively searched for it meant that the old system of working jobs in and around where one was born began to erode, and there were soon people wandering far outside their local environs in the search of work.</p> <p>In modern times we have added an additional category that has two aspects to this: the cyclical poor.</p> <p>Cyclical poverty was something seen by those migrant laborers who moved from job to job seasonally, usually with harvest or catch at fisheries.  These individuals were not poor by circumstance or moral character, but by job type and this required different strategies of saving and planning one's life.</p> <p>The other aspect of this is the rags to riches to rags or shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves phenomena where someone may start poor and find a way to 'make good' then spend their wealth until they are poor again.  This can take generations or it can be with just one individual in a single lifetime.</p> <p>The forms of poverty in the Early Modern period of England meant hardship, hunger and often rootless wandering in search of work and being able to find a spouse and create a household as I went over in a prior post on this.  Without enough work to sustain a larger family basis and without enough positions available to allow enough work for those willing to do it the economy shifted in ways unknown to prior generations.  The hardship on the poor had effects on the Yeoman and Gentry classes which utilized the necessity for implementing higher land use fees and custom, shortened lease terms and then used funds to buy up lands that the Crown made available as it sold of prior Church land to fund overseas adventures.  The amount of land necessary to rise into the landed Gentry class expanded and number of Yeomen became minor Gentry via consolidating land holdings.</p> <p>Elizabeth I when she came to power had seen the effects of these changes and took some pages from prior Monarchs in England who had to quell problems in the land that were problematical to the Nation.  Straight out of Henry I she took the idea of revaluing the coinage, which meant that there would be a stable currency with a value that everyone understood.  This is no minor feat during inflationary cycles when the suspicion of adulterated or shaved coinage means the currency value is not respected.  She also took advice to implement the first patent system so that inventors of devices would have a limited term of being sole producers so that some new forms of work could come about to employ more people to the profit of the inventor.  Within the Mercantile Capitalist system this would mean that competition could take place on ingenuity and such law would foster advancement of new ways of doing business to increase the number of people employed in new endeavors.  And for those without enough money to actually invest in creating something new she also put forward a grant system wherein those with good ideas could come to the Crown, outline them and seek to get a minor grant to start up their venture.  </p> <p>Finally, to deal with foreign affairs, particularly the wars and support for Catholic monarchs by Spain, she had to modernize the Navy while, at the same time, downsizing its utilization of resources which led to lighter, faster and deadlier ships that were hard to target and yet packed a punch above their normal weight class.  There would be some foreign expeditions, yes, and they would be ones that would not have an extremely high overhead and would seek to further support for Protestantism and require Spain to expend resources at a distance which is always a high cost affair.</p> <p>Of the things that most attracted the Vikings to England during the time of the Danelaw, then under Canute and later under William the Conqueror was that the English people were enormously productive beyond their numbers.  For a period of time between the 7th and 9th century the city of York was the second largest city in Europe, right after Constantinople, which is no mean feat.  Canute left England alone as its vast prosperity was something he did not want to disturb, and he generally left areas under his control to local rule and imposed only a new leadership when it was necessary to assure fealty to him.  Elizabeth I is such a compelling figure in so many ways, perhaps the most intelligent of all the Monarchs of England or at least since Henry I, that it is easy to overlook her understanding of the role of the Monarch in the economy of the Nation as a whole.  She is so appreciated for her enigmatic stances on religion, both re-instituting a Protestant form of Christianity but keeping many of the trappings and forms of Roman Catholicism, that her deep and abiding trust in her own people is often overlooked in the realm of economics.</p> <p>What she did was to bolster the ability of individuals to be prosperous by their own hand and only put forth limited funds (as they were limited after all the trials and tribulations from the time of her father's divorce to her accession to the throne) to reinforce the economy and shift the Navy from a relatively high overhead affair to one of somewhat lesser overhead.  The Crown could not make the realm prosperous and Elizabeth I put her trust in the people of England to work through inflationary times and use the support she instituted to become far more prosperous which would mean more jobs and productivity for the entire economy.  Before the era of economics she put forth a basic understanding that an economy flows up from its people, not down from the Crown, which was a hard thing to think of coming after the Late Medieval Period.  Plus by taking these measures she would shift the moral case away from the Crown and back to the people, so that they could figure out the best and most moral way to deal with their concerns.</p> <p>Her wisdom on these matters elude many modern economists who take a very primitive and class oriented view of a Nation and do not understand that a government can only foster prosperity, not institute it.  If her government lacked funds for many things, which it did, by concentrating on the basics of defending the Nation, ensuring the value of the currency, and allowing people to utilize their ingenuity to create businesses and jobs, were in many ways extraordinary and show a keen insight into the basis of a Nation's economy which the majority of modern or modernistic politicians seem unable to grasp.  Her father had, in effect, redistributed the wealth of the Church to fund his Crown ventures and the result was inflation and a slow disintegration of a stable way of life.  With the money spent, the land in the hands of the Gentry and Yeomanry, the Crown could not spend as it did under Henry VIII and, instead, had to find a new way to do much with very little.  In doing this Elizabeth I draws us in on this level as well and demonstrates what an extraordinary woman and Queen she was who placed her faith not in government but in the people of England.  She figured she could handle the government on her own and beguile it and later generations no end, which she accomplished.</p> <p>We could learn much of how a government that keeps to its knitting and lets the people be free to innovate and protects such innovation for limited duration can help change the economic aspects of the people and the Nation to the benefit of all.  Sadly such advanced learning is overlooked in a more primitive redistribution of wealth and an impoverishing of all to the benefit of the very, very few.  For so much supposed learning of the current crop of Elites, they sure aren't that advanced in their thinking.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-32559925182115461812014-01-21T19:17:00.001Z2014-01-21T19:17:43.669ZOne interesting stat from early modern England<p>This is one of those times where a single statistic can open up a wealth of insight, and yet it does not come from our present but our past.  This one is coming from the <a href="http://oyc.yale.edu/courses">Open Yale courses</a>, which are freely available for viewing and have some of the most interesting professors that can have a wealth of information.  The stat comes from the <a href="http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-251">HIST 251: Early Modern England</a> which covers the time period of the late 16th century to the early 18th century and is presented by Professor Keith E. Wrightson.  To understand the transformation of England during this period it is necessary to see where it started from circa Henry VII, just before all the major changes in England took place.  I've been watching these with my lady and our side conversations tend to make the simple presentation quite long as it is necessary to pause the presentation so we can discuss material.  Thus the insight comes from that discussion.</p> <p>In the mid- to late-16th century there was a relatively stable social stratification that has the Nobility at the top, the Gentry of landed estates and 'gentle birth' next, then the Yeomen class who were not of 'gentle birth' and tended to be well considered in towns and cities running trades and businesses (as well as some farms which was necessary for the era, the Craftsmen and those earning a living via craft work, and then gradations through the poor end of the spectrum which ends in Unskilled Labor.  The Clergy are considered separate (remember pre-Henry VIII) and while they can have power, it is not by lineage (as in the Nobility and Gentry) but by appointment to position (such as Bishop or Arch Bishop) by the Pope.  Literacy was low outside of those who could afford such education or that required it for daily operation (like the Clergy).  Schooling was done at home and as soon as children could contribute in any way to a household, they did so via work, first at home and then, if coming from a poorer family, by paying a Master Craftsman to take on a boy as an apprentice or by going to a household to work in any of a variety of tasks for a one year term.</p> <p>This society can be characterized as stratified and one in which survival at all but the upper ranks of society is a constant pre-occupation.  Mercantile capitalism tends to fall in to the Yeomanry and Craftsman realms of society, and while the Yeomanry were socially limited they could earn quite a lot of money and purchase land from plying business trades.  Across all strata of the non-Clergy is one particularly interesting phenomena and the statistic of interest: marriage tended to be put off until the early- to mid- 20's.  This was done because establishing a new household is a costly affair (even for the rich) and must be done with much due consideration.  At the upper ranks of society choices in one's class were limited, and matches between young men and women could take time but also required agreement between families.  Sliding down into the Gentry, Yeomanry and Craftsman realms of society, men and women had a bit more in the way of choices and leeway, but parental and family consent made marriage a multi-lateral agreement in which any single party could hold a veto.  This sort of concern lessened going down to the lowest levels of society, where there was a lot more freedom for couples, agreement tended to be limited to parents, but start-up costs of a new household was high in proportion to the income of the poor.</p> <p>From that this society can be said to have a high overhead cost of maintenance to it: it costs a lot of time as well as funds to get a household going.  Child birth, statistically, would happen within 18 months of marriage and then be a cyclic affair every 2 or 3 years of the woman's childbearing years.  Added to this was the high rate of infant mortality, endemic diseases, pandemics of plague, plus the normal assort of death by accidents, and life expectancy, while better than in Neolithic times, tended to be in the mid-30's with rare individuals surviving past 60.</p> <p>Why is this interesting?</p> <p>My lady was startled because of the American experience with families up to the early 20th century: large families with marriage happening in the late Teens.  Many marriage laws for what society would consider 'children' today included age of consent down to 12 in some States.</p> <p>There are important changes by the start of the 19th century for Americans, but the life expectancy had not increased much over the 16th century, and while the Industrial Revolution would begin to transform America after the 1820's, American family size continued to be large even with advances in medicine, public sanitation and better diet.  Taking these factors into consideration, there is one other major factor that is encountered in the US that sets it apart from its Early Modern English forbearers in the 16th century: it is a society of not much in the way of 'classes' and it is one with a low overhead for maintenance.</p> <p>The first is relatively self-explanatory, and while there were major land and slave holders in the Southern States (an equivalent of the Gentry class circa 16th century England)  and huge differences between those living in cities and those in rural areas, these are not largely different from the share-cropper system and differences between city and rural folk of the 16th century.  Without the rest of the class structure to burden the system and plenty of wilderness to settle in what happened is that the Americans of the early 19th century gained a definition that stuck until the early 20th century: a Frontier Culture.</p> <p>By now, of course, this has interrupted all viewing of the course as this is a vital topic but approached in an oblique way.  There are large differences between a 'Settled' culture and a 'Frontier' culture, most of which revolve around the cost of maintenance of the infrastructure necessary to sustain the culture.  It is difficult to think of Early Modern England as a 'settled culture' but it has natural geographic limits to it, even when you consider Great Britain or the UK as a whole: these are islands and have definite boundaries and no frontiers.  Once an island has undergone initial exploration and settling, that is it for new resources and to get claimed land one must purchase it, which requires capital.  If you live in a town or city you can rent space, of course, but in the villages and household settings to have a new household requires land either by purchase or lease, and then a home on it.  There are many records in England from the late 16th century onwards, which allows us to glimpse a bit of everyday life via the records of deaths and coroner's inquests.  Prof. Wrightson recounts the death of one young woman who was working as a servant in a household who, at her death, had a total of 3 Pounds, 3 cows, and a chest containing items of clothing, bedding, bowl, spoon and the like.  Indeed an average of all deaths can actually yield that individuals owned perhaps as many as 25 to 35 items, total upon death.  The savings of a young woman was that of hoping to find a husband, marry, and establish a household amongst the poorer ranks of society.  She was already bringing something to the table for a marriage: she was gathering necessary overhead capital and goods for the start of a future household.</p> <p>This is a stark contrast to the American Frontier experience that included clearing land, marrying early, and settling that cleared land for little to no overhead cost beyond sweat equity.  Raw materials were readily available, land was anywhere from free to cheap (compared to Early Modern England, at least), and the idea of 'go forth and multiply' was something that was held near and dear to the heart in reverence to God.</p> <p>What is the condition of America today?</p> <p>Settled.</p> <p>It has a high overhead cost of maintenance to start a household.  Even with politicians distorting lending markets no end, the cost of starting a household is high.  Those that learn the Trades in America, today, actually have a low overhead cost from education: there is less burden on them and a trade craft repays the cost of education in it quickly.  A distorted market in 'Higher Education' arising from the 'good deed'  in the GI Bill post-WWII flooded colleges and universities with people which then changed the requirements in the marketplace for what is a 'minimum necessary education'.  That 'Higher Education' no longer repays itself and is a debt burden to those who go through such education and have no useful job skills at the end of it.  It is a high cost that must be paid down before starting a family.  The result?  The age of marriage has increased, couples expect both parties to bring something to the new household, children are put off for a period of time after marriage, on average and yes there are exceptions to this just as there were in Early Modern England of the 16th century.</p> <p>At the lowest end of the economic spectrum there is a payment of funds from tax receipts (or in added debt) to the poor to 'care for women and children' who happen to have children out of wedlock.  Women get payments based on number of children and husbands are no longer required to get support: government has taken on that role.  The result is a liquidation of the once solid poor family structure that was purposefully uprooted during the 'Urban Renewal' that started with the Truman Administration and the movement of poor families from homes they owned to tenements they rented from under the 'Great Society' programs.  Add in payments based on childbirth to women who are not required to be married and have a stable family situation, and you liquidate the foundations of the stable culture that was once a part of the urban landscape prior to the 1950's.  Although a Nation in which by any objective standard pre-1940 there is no poverty, at all, we still have the strange belief that the poor are a condition of poverty.  And yet the poor are always with us, as being poor is part of the condition of individuals within mankind.  </p> <p>Poverty, as such, was transitional in America where anyone could aspire to be a 'rags to riches' story and maybe end up in the Middle Class or at least better off than one's parents in material goods and security.  What there also used to be was no support system for the rich who failed: you could go from rags to riches to rags and cycle back and forth between them.  The establishment of regulatory regimes to allow failing concerns to remain open (and even get direct government help via taxpayer funds) means that those who make poor decisions under those regulatory regimes no longer fail and they no longer succeed, either.  They become zombie concerns depending on the lifeblood of taxpayer funds and supported regulatory regimes to survive and exist.  Any comparisons between this and later English companies supported by the Crown and later found to be bankrupt is purely coincidental with the Modern England.  In the Early Modern England there was too much upheaval to allow for such things.</p> <p>Thus there are similarities of type between the US of 2014 and mid- to late-16th century England, but not of kind.  There are entirely different sets of overhead concerns for starting a household, and yet they arise for the same reason of being in a settled and geographically limited society.  The Old West in America is just that: the historical Old West.  And while there are still unsettled lands in the US, no one can rightly call them a Frontier in the expansive way of the early 19th century.  Yes Alaska is still nasty, has a low population level and if you can gather the overhead costs to establish yourself there, it has a frontier-like feel to it.  Social stratification becomes more apparent in the modern US but not due to the gentleness of birth but the connectedness to corrupt government and those that serve and service its corruption.  Just as in Early Modern England this is not a stable situation.</p> <p>The result in Early Modern England was the Industrial Revolution and the great colonization effort that spanned the globe.</p> <p>America, today, is at the cusp of a similar sort of transformation, as well.  It is not a dour and bleak totalitarian one, that is if we don't work to counter it.  No, it is one that also had an antecedent in Early Modern England: a New Frontier.</p> <p>America has tested its endless expanse and now is home to many private concerns that dream big dreams of endless expanses of territory and wealth to be made.  It can't be made just by the rich or even with robotic systems, as those are fragile to this new and hostile wilderness.  And in this wilderness children will learn from the earliest of ages how to survive, what to do and not to do, and the rest of 'education' as we know it will be geared to those concerns first and foremost.</p> <p>What happened when the English had access to new territories?  Some people were banished to them.  Others fled to them because of the freedom they offered for a new life at great risk.  They were Frontiers.  No social stratification.  Relatively low cost of overhead compared to what was left behind. Great and terrible risk to eke out a new life together with those who also decided that this was better than being settled.  Vast populations from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy... they followed when the cost of transportation to the Frontier was cheap enough to escape the settled lands of their old homes.</p> <p>As I've said before and say again: there isn't anything so wrong with America that a New Frontier will not cure.</p> <p>Freedom and Independence will beckon to us, to all mankind.</p> <p>No one from the time of Henry VII could have seen the rapid changes that would follow his death.</p> <p>And we can compress those massive changes of centuries down to decades, and no totalitarian power will be able to stop it once the flood gates open.</p> <p>All we must do is curtail the grasp of tyranny in the present, hold it off by all means possible, and a New Frontier will open to us.  Like Early Modern England seemed a strange place to look for such transformation in its stratified ways and settled lands, so, too, does America look like a strange place to expect the push for a New Frontier.  Yet Early Modern England was pre-adapted to such things by its history and America, along with a few other Nations, is pre-adapted to Frontier culture by its cultural heritage.  </p> <p>It is easy to fight tyranny in space: open an airlock.  Nature plays no favorites, but you can.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-87059357648163423122014-01-01T05:01:00.000Z2014-01-01T05:01:00.844ZRecovery<p>A personal retrospective on my physical well-being.</p> <p>I hope to get some more normal posts up, but such is life.</p> <p>Late in 2004 I began a trip into a land of darkness where my mind was slowly losing track of work and I was beginning to feel exhausted beyond anything I had experienced in my life before that.  With that also came a lack of awareness of these things and the simple and all too human attempt to rationalize these sensations.  Being made senseless and having one's mind dimmed when aided and abetted by rationalization meant that things that should have alerted me to my dire straights were passed off... until my body forced the issue by giving me a cataleptic attack while driving.  No accident resulted, but that warned me that something truly serious was going on, even through the mists of my befuddled state of mind and being, which was turning into a strange place where being awake and being asleep meant little difference at all.</p> <p>By 2005 I just wanted to know what was causing these attacks and if they could be dealt with, and the list of tests I went through was long and deep.  The only change had been in a standard medication, one of the statins, and when my endocrinologist heard the symptoms he took me off them, but the damage had been done and worse was to come after that until the full extent of it was finally reached.  My brain had the normal attributes of someone a good 20 years older than my physical age, and yet that was not a natural thing.  Narcoleptic conditions run in the male side of my family and I had thought I had escaped them as they have two general periods of onset: up to teenage years and then again in one's 60's.  Well, my brain had reached that magic age, I guess, just decades ahead of schedule.</p> <p>Climbing out of that pit meant trying to get my thought structure back together as it had been shattered and eroded by this condition.  I had become a creature of willpower alone, determined not to let this be the end of my life.  The hardest work in my life would not be physical, would not be trying to write great pieces of fiction or histories to last the ages, but to merely scrape back a formulation of my thoughts out of a land between waking and dreaming and back, fully, into the land of the waking and living.  We take the fact that we think for granted, at least most people do, but somewhere within my psycho-dynamic toolkit there is a repair kit that allowed me to begin the hard work of reconstructing my mental capabilities to get some thinking capacity up and running again.</p> <p>Those dark days are dealt with in my early blogging, which take place after the internal collapse of my mental structure, diagnosis and the first medications to deal with the actual phenomena.  There is no magic pill to rejuvenate the mind, as yet, to repair damage and to regain lost capacity.  Maybe we shall have that in some future, but until that point one is stuck with the old fashioned way of hard work.  I set myself some tasks to exercise my mind: learn some rudiments of Javascript, find out just what terrorism is (not the talking around it to attempt to call it something else, but its actual being as an activity) and then to learn connectivity structures based on Person-to-Person systems which are the basis for so much of human life that it pervades the far reaches of the horrific and the criminal realms.  For, as my Uncle Joe used to say disparagingly of so many corporate and government affairs, 'it isn't what you know, its who you know'.</p> <p>Thus diagnosis was done by others, but I was willing to go through just about any test they cared to put me through, and I would hazard a good couple of hundred of vials of blood were taken to that end.  I have a long, long, long list of things I don't have and for that I am very thankful, indeed!  I will give the Sherlock Holmes method of scratching off stuff from a list and whatever you are left with is what it is a hat tip: it works.  Unfortunately it is the brute force method of logic, and I prefer inductive reasoning of 'this is the only thing that fits to make the entire thing work' sort of approach to the list scratching business.  As I have learned, that is a bent of mind that one must have by some means other than education as no one can teach you how to take a look at a whole thing and then see where something is missing and say what it is.</p> <p>Countering the effects of the problem, although not the problem itself, came next.  I was a Type 1 diabetic before this happened and can tell you that dealing with a problem is not the same as curing it.  For all the advances in genetics, biology, biochemistry, and 3D structural analysis of molecules and how they interact, plus the human genome, a simple auto-immune disease dating back into the far reaches of human ancestry is still beyond modern medicine to cure.  Somehow every promising approach is thwarted by it.  Yet one gains a toolkit of mental requirements to deal with such a problem on a daily basis and that means I had one available for yet another problem that has no cure.  We know that there are cases of spontaneous remission of Type 1 diabetes after about 20 years of having it: the poor immune system just gets tired of fighting that part of the body and natural regeneration takes place for islet cells.  That I still have the condition points to an immune system that is still misdoing its job!  Now I also get to take medications that modern medical science can say what its structure is, but has no real idea of how it works.</p> <p>There are times when I suspect the strain of being known as Witch Doctor is still with us to this day. 'What is it, what does it do?' you ask and the response is 'Dunno, it just works, take it.'</p> <p>I am not nor ever have been impressed by degrees sitting up on a wall.</p> <p>Doctors are still practicing medicine.  They need more practice, less overhead, please, as the practice still is not perfected.</p> <p>Now all of this research, fiddling with code, playing with stuff got me to firearms as there was a warning bell going off in my head circa 2007.  A good year before the elections, hell before there were candidates, some part of me was saying: Prepare For No Good Shall Come Of This.  I took NRA training to ensure that I properly understood function and safety of firearms, plus only rudimentary cleaning... there needs to be a real course on that, not just gunsmithing but just 'how the hell do you clean this piece of Swiss watchmaking called a gun?' sort of course.  And I like older firearms, so drift punches, springs, and scouring around for parts became a ready past-time.  All of this is DIY in the firearms community, and the modern arms are much, much simpler to work with than much of the older stuff until you get back to the bolt action rifle: those are, at least, pretty simple to understand.</p> <p>My goal was to next find out what sort of useful skills I had or could gain, and I'm still on that path today.  Firearms leads to stocks made of wood and that means wood finishing.  In my family lineage is woodworking going back at least a couple of generations, and I had not only shop class but a father who did cabinetry in his spare time.  That means I had some of the old 'young shop assistant' sort of deal going on, although not a lot of it, enough to get me familiar with the tools of the trade.</p> <p>Building back stamina became the major goal as of 2009-10 and woodworking, well once you start using the manual tools you now have a major way to utilize physical capacity and measure endurance, now, don't you?  Even on the power tool side, the lifting and toting of boards, planks, and other less savory bits of trees can get you all sorts of exercise, especially if you have a small shop and need to set up and break down the power tools so that you can have access to the rest of the shop when you aren't using them.</p> <p>Up until the past few weeks here has been the deal: 1 day of a few hours of work, 2 days of recovery.  Doesn't matter if the day is woodworking, shopping, or whatever, either.  On rare times I could string a couple of days together and then need additional down time to recover.  That was getting me to an even keel, but the boat still had water up to the gunwales and I was bailing as fast as I could.  Stamina was not returning but I at least could keep what I had.</p> <p>About a month ago I talked with my neurologist who told me that there are some preliminary longitudinal studies that indicate that for diabetics in Japan and Germany (two populations with a major concern over the disorder by genetic causation) that the use of a CPAP helps to lower the HbA1c (a basal blood glucose reading that you strive to get to 7% as a diabetic) by a full 1%.  That is an eye-opener, to be sure.  A real eye-opener as a CPAP improves flow of air to the lungs while sleeping.  I had tried a CPAP before as there were indications of some marginal sleep problems, and they continue to be marginal and the neurologist doesn't know what to make of the actual readings as they aren't showing a disorder but something else going on... but that a CPAP might help that and the the cause to actually get one.</p> <p>Done!</p> <p>The prior CPAP device made my sleep worse, not better.</p> <p>There have been improvements over the last 6-7 years, not grand ones but gradual ones, to the point where I can actually tolerate the device, more or less.</p> <p>It will take some months of use to see what it does for that long term basal blood glucose reading.</p> <p>A more immediate effect is to get lots of oxygen into my system at night and well distributed through my body.  I do wake up logy, no two ways about it: it is the sleep of someone who has worked themselves to exhaustion.  I knew what that felt like, back before 2004.  It is the sleep that when you wake up you just had no idea of how tired you actually were.  Apparently I need that sort of sleep.</p> <p>From that sleep I now have better and larger amounts of physical energy and mental awareness longer into the day and even into the evening.  I can accomplish a lot more with the energy once I get the logy feeling out of the system.  Learning to hand plane maple that has just been skip planed is really hard work, let me tell you.  Yet I haven't been tempted to power tools (although I have a planing jig for a router) because it just feels good to be able to put some actual physical capacity into the work.  For a few hours at a stretch.  So now I can have sore muscles when I wake up!  This is a good thing.</p> <p>The next step of the recovery is actually reversing not just the effects of one of my major conditions, but the thing, itself.  Those require an actual, functioning medical system in which trying to redistribute wealth and making everyone sicker in the name of 'health insurance' is not the goal.  That is an enemy to actual scientific advancement.  Strange that the most backward looking people are now on the political Left: they are starting to sound like the old fogies who just want to do things the same, tired old way that doesn't work well because that is all they know and will tell you about how righteous it is to do things the broken, tired, old way.  Yet the 21st century isn't going to wait for them to catch up, and no matter how much kicking, screaming, and theft under the guise of 'doing good' goes on, this century is set to steamroller the prior 3,000 years of advancement with changes that seemed impossible just a decade ago.  Be it the first formulation for a warp drive or getting to the bounds of computer capacity and then leapfrogging that with quantum computing or finding out that the ways to deal with disorders and diseases isn't to just ameliorate the effects but treat the damned things with some skill ('what does this drug actually do?' 'I dunno, it just works') and get the idea of practice out of the way or education that is self-performed via online systems of study that can't be categorized but can be tested as to skill, knowledge and capacity to utilize it... everything, and I do mean everything, that has been the foundation for the modern world is about to undergo a sea change that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like something for children.</p> <p>Thus my goal is to survive the current bout of MegaStupidity via Centralized Insanity of Government and get to this new age of Individual Freedom and Liberty writ large.</p> <p>As has been my threat: the more I recover, the less I will be posting.</p> <p>I hate repeating myself and that is mostly what I would be doing to no good effect.</p> <p>I need to recover so I can join this up and coming age of wonder.</p> <p>The age of Back to Basics, DIY and reaching for the stars and getting off this damned starter home of a planet.</p> <p>And I hope you will join me.</p> <p>For we are better than the old 20th century has led us to think.</p> <p>And governing is the problem, and government is not the solution.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-80106025423146941322013-12-01T17:00:00.000Z2013-12-01T17:00:01.246ZMorals and Ethics, Health Care and Government<p>The disaster that is Obamacare continues to point to the ever widening problems of having a government attempt to impose its own idealistic ideas of what the process is of providing health care, which is not the same as 'health insurance', runs into obstacles where simple ideology driven bureaucratic rules and regulations run up against the common man and his enterprises.  Of the most concerning is the attempt to impose regulations mandating coverage of abortion and 'birth control' upon diverse groups who have religious teachings that make those immoral practices.  They are not just immoral for oneself but, to hold true to their religious teachings, it is immoral to support these services in any real way.  Thus the first of many suits, and truly it should be a class action suit, is one by Hobby Lobby that refuses to obey the power of government over religious principles in their common enterprise Hobby Lobby.  I'll use <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/29/the-real-fight-over-the-hobby-lobby-case/">a <em>Hot Air</em> article</a> as it is where I left some commentary and I will give that to you in an unvarnished way: </p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Religion is the observation of holding oneself to account to set of beliefs that have real world practice attached to them. Corporeal individuals may not have that transgressed by mere human law as the observance and practice is to a higher moral authority than any government can ever hope to be. The corporate entity is a voluntary association of individuals under a set of agreements and, as such, may have religion as their basis in practice and observation which includes a moral code and doctrine behind it.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">No one is forcing employees to work at a such a concern that has such requirements and performs such practices. Even if you disagree with them and sign up to the corporation, you are not allowed to enforce your belief system upon the others in the voluntary cooperation out of respect for their beliefs. If you want to be employed by a place that offers you services that don’t have such restrictions then go find them, you are not forced to work at a concern that does not share your practices nor your beliefs.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">I have my own problem with corporate entities, but they tend to dwell in the realm of duration and lack of finality of them when they allow, abet and encourage criminal activities amongst its members to the benefit of the corporate entity. Three Strikes and you’re out would be a start to ending such abuse, but that is a far different thing than the internal practices that are not criminal in nature and adhere to a known set of moral standards that the company upholds for those voluntarily associating with it.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Where does the government get off telling a corporate or corporeal entity that they must support practices that are considered immoral by their belief system? Those who abjure such practices are not in any way, shape or form utilizing them and if others wish to do so then let them PAY FOR IT based on some other agreements but do not force those who hold a higher standard to paying for something which they consider to be immoral in the extreme.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">This doesn’t stop at the corporate level and paying for abortion and contraceptive access is that camel’s nose under the tent sort of deal. What if some fine grandee of a bureaucrat gets through required euthanasia of the old, the sick or the mentally ill? Not just paying for ‘access’ to it, which in and of itself has extreme moral problems attached to it due to the way that bureaucrats are stretching ‘voluntary’ to become involuntary… if government becomes the arbiter of morality, then we have truly lost our way as it is only fit to punish things that are immoral that physically effect individuals and STOP THEM and PUNISH those who commit such acts. When you force individuals to support things they consider immoral, then where can it draw the line on ANY OTHER act? I have seen governments of men, not of law, and I want nothing, whatsoever, to do with them. And that is coming into sharp focus today more so than at any other time in our history.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">ajacksonian on November 29, 2013 at </font><a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/29/the-real-fight-over-the-hobby-lobby-case/comment-page-1/#comment-7524139"><font color="#9b00d3">10:18 AM</font></a></p> </blockquote> <p>All of Obamacare is about substituting the good sense of individuals in procuring methods of health care with that of government regulation, bureaucracy and punishment.  In the past century we have been witness to medical experimentation upon blacks without fully informing them of what they were signing up for, forced sterilization of the mentally ill at government institutions, and we currently have States that have regulations for euthanasia.  These are not questions of speculation but ones of fact done under government auspices, Federal and State, and at the behest of political doctrines and adherents who pushed for such things as eugenics, population control via abortion and sterilization, and having medical personnel 'assist' in suicide.  These are, one and all, moral wrongs in so many religions held by so many believers that it is not funny.  Yet that these things happened is a fact of our history in this Nation and demonstrates the evils of government willing to take expedient means towards ideological ends to the detriment of its citizens.</p> <p>The Hobby Lobby case is not just about this one corporation, a collection of private citizens chartering a company to do certain legal activities in a voluntarily cooperative manner run by owners who have a belief system that requires their moral adherence to laws that come from a source other than Nature or mere civil government.  To have freedom of expression is not just in expressing oneself verbally but through activities and actions that follow in a given line of conscience that comes from no source under government or Nature's control.  Forming a company to serve the public in certain venues by believers and then running it in accordance with their belief system is freedom of expression and religion, both.</p> <p>When government seeks to impose its power over the individual and begin to dictate practices that one holds as immoral, then ethics require that those mere civil laws not be followed so as to be true to eternal moral laws handed down from the highest power of God.  It matters not if God is the singular, the plural or a vague understanding of the morality behind the universe and life itself, that one believes in it and is true to it in their daily lives which hinders none, harms none and is widely understood puts this case into a full Amendment I application: freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and freedom of free association amongst one's fellow citizens.</p> <p>Civil Government is without wisdom and has problems even finding out what it did last week or last year, not to speak of what it has done decades ago.  It is not a thinking being but a freely made construct amongst the people of a Nation or State to do common activities for the defense and protection of all and, in the case of the US, to stay away from all matters of morals and ethics in following moral practices.  Government itself is a Punisher and necessary evil and not granted power to do good, but to punish the wicked and those who would disrupt society.  The good of society is from its citizens figuring out how to lead good, moral and ethical lives within mortal boundaries of income, savings, sustaining life, creating families, and creating communities in which we all seek to help each other and prosper in that doing.  </p> <p>It is not immoral to seek to make a profit to sustain a company after paying one's workforce and providing them with agreed upon benefits.  It is not the icon of payment, not the coin or bill or credit exchange pieces, that are evil but only in the pursuit of same without thought to ensuring that it is gained via properly provisioned service or goods under payment contract.  In pursuit of money as its own end, there is no real good, but in pursuit of wealth which is accumulated by providing the best value at the lowest cost to one's fellow man and making a profit to expand such provisioning is true wealth beyond any dollar or penny hoarded.</p> <p>Providing goods and services by individuals who hold a strict moral code and ethically abide by it is no sin and is not illegal.</p> <p>Forcing such individuals to support immoral practices with forced payment into a system which requires such support: that is pure evil as it substitutes the power of government for the teachings of God.</p> <p>And only death, destruction and chaos ever come from that.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-59655625420612710612013-11-09T23:18:00.001Z2013-11-09T23:18:30.125ZIdeology to Eschatology<p><a href="http://dictionary.die.net/ideology">Ideology</a></p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">Source: WordNet (r) 1.7 </font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">ideology <br />     n 1: an orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation [syn: political orientation, political theory] <br />     2: imaginary or visionary theorization</font></p> </blockquote> <p><a href="http://dictionary.die.net/eschatology">Eschatology</a></p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">Source: WordNet (r) 1.7</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">eschatology <br />     n : the branch of theology that is concerned with such final things as death and judgment; heaven and hell; the end of the world</font></p> </blockquote> <p>The modern day Left started with an ideological framework that arose out of the works of Karl Marx and then added to via the International meetings on Marxism and then put through the lenses of Progressivism, Soviet Communism, socialists like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels">Friedrich Engels</a> who had impact on US Socialism via his works with Marx, European Anarcho-Syndicalist movements, the works of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci">Antonio Gramsci</a> and cultural hegemony as seen in the Frankfort School of cultural Marxism, then onto National Socialism and Nazi Fascism.  Taken as a whole, starting with Marx, the ideology derived from this school of thought is one that is based on an end of economic systems and the final removal of the capitalist or owning class of society and the rule of the Proletariat.  As an ideology it has its roots in the post-Classical period coming after <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke">John Locke</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith">Adam Smith</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant">Immanuel Kant</a>, and as a form of response to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism">Utilitarianism</a>.</p> <p>I have gone over the ground of Marxism multiple times, most recently in <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2013/02/what-is-value-of-anything.html">What is the value of... anything?</a> and review some of the highlights and problems of Marxism from the time of Marx.  Economically Marxism's problems with defining value, exactly who is being exploited, explaining what alienation of labor is and why its abolition is seen as a historical imperative does not address a part of Marxism that keeps it alive, and that is its sociology.  Within the Old Left (Communists, National Socialists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, American Progressivists) there was a requirement of scholarship for those on the 'inside' of the movements.  You had to know Marx and Engels, at the very least, be able to go through the rhetoric of Marxism via Hegel's Dialectical Materialism and then continue on with how bad those owning businesses were in their exploitation of labor.  Even given misplaced basis for arguments, there had to be a rational structure of argumentation on those points and defense of the critical starting points to assert the end points of the ideology.</p> <p>This formed a sociological structure within Marxists circles that I got to witness first hand growing up in a family of socialist sympathizers.  It was an old First International sort of adherence, however, and had nothing to do with the Second or Third Congresses dominated by the (so-called as they put it) Communists.  Thus the first divisions were International Congress divisions and they would break out to the 'true believers, the rest of you are wrong' First Congress types and then those seen as corrupt: Communists (Soviet sort), National Socialists (all stripes), Progressives, social hegemonists... basically anyone save the strongly influenced Anarch-Syndicalists who cribbed a lot from US First International followers who themselves cribbed from Engels.  As you can tell by the long list of Marxist derivatives, there was a lot of in-fighting, factionalism and otherwise fierce boundary disputes within Marxists circles based on who you followed and what their form of argumentation was.  This could get broken down inside factions via different argument strains and who followed which form of their own particular brand of Marxism.</p> <p>What this strongly looks like is a religious movement, and that is due to the fact that human nature (which Marx criticized the Utilitarians for not understanding) is seen as something that will go through a sudden, global transformation amongst the Proletariat.  Basically from nowhere, although the Marxists will point to the evils of capitalist exploitation, etc. but the actual gripes that the actual proletarians had (versus the idealized ones of the Marxists) had more to do with banal things like pay, working conditions, bad bosses and then, lo and behold, abusive Union bosses.  Labor Unions, seen as a first step towards Socialism and this grand uplifting of proletarian thought, turned out to be just another human made and manned system with all the faults of all such systems that man makes.  Instead of uplifting worker education they served to line the pockets of Union Bosses with worker funds and then walk away richer for it and cut deals with the very people they were supposed to protect the workers from.  The First Congress types saw Trade Unions as just another corrupt system and lumped them in the 'everybody else' category of 'not true socialists' right next to the National Socialists.</p> <p>A strange thing happened from the days of the Old Marxist Left (roughly up to the mid-1970's encompassing the 'New Left' which was just warmed-over Old Left) and today: the grandiose vision of Marx was retained but the rhetoric, the internal logic, the ability to argue based on it all disappeared.  Lock, stock and barrel the current Authoritarian Left no longer has intellectual roots in Marx, Marxism or even logic.  Meet up with a Leftists today and they couldn't even attempt to give a good description of the Labor Theory of Value or to even explain what Alienation of Labor is.  Handwave as much as you like at the Frankfurt School, but they sought a domination through culture and have, instead, reinvented nihilism.</p> <p><a href="http://dictionary.die.net/nihilism">Nihilism</a></p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">Source: WordNet (r) 1.7 </font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">nihilism <br />     n 1: a revolutionary doctrine that advocates destruction of the social system for its own sake <br />     2: the delusion that things (or everything, including the self) do not exist; a sense that everything is unreal [syn: nihilistic delusion] <br />     3: complete denial of all established authority and institutions</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Given that Marx gave us an Eschatology of end-times, it is little wonder that those seeking a cultural domination would come up with nihilism.  Trying to unmoor past and present, seek to remove objective reasoning and, instead, personalize all political and economic points of view and then enforce those on everyone from some intellectual elite that doesn't have rational thinking as its basis, is it any wonder that you come to nihilism?</p> <p>The feel-good and warm-fuzzies of Marxism are retained, that workers paradise and everyone getting goodies for nothing and their chicks for free remains to this day the heart of the Left and, in fact, dominates it.  If the Frankfurt School is to blame for its institutional marching to the point where politicians no longer believe in balancing a check book for THEMSELVES not to speak of the governments they seek to run, is it any wonder the rest of us are left scratching our heads asking: just how the hell is THIS supposed to work?</p> <p>If there is no inherent difference between work and non-work, then why work?</p> <p>If you hand out a dole to everyone for just existing, then who grows the food and why?  To what end?</p> <p>Being generous with tax revenue and then some, means that you are taking economic vitality and encouraging non-vitality and asking our children to pay for it.  And if you don't teach them the value of actually earning a living, and they don't repay the debts, then who is going to grow the food?</p> <p>Mao had the lovely idea of whipping the intellectuals into line, even a good amount of his supporters, by putting them to grow food for others and starve as they did so.  Radical material simplification, as one professor puts it about the Dark Ages: you are poor, hungry and have a short life deprived of the benefits of a civilization that once flourished.</p> <p>Marxism has always had an eschatological view of the human race: it was always an end time religion because it never got the basics of human nature right and assumed a massive change intellectually that would free the working class and remove alienation of labor.  That's right, everyone would get to do the entire job for themselves!  You would be a fisher, raise wheat and corn, have chickens, read and print books, go hunting, and have the satisfaction of knowing that your labor was no longer alienated!</p> <p>Unfortunately fishing is not catching.</p> <p>Unfortunately hunting is not always successful.</p> <p>Unfortunately chickens get sick, as do pigs, cattle, and you have to care for them as well as yourself.</p> <p>To keep warm you must chop your own wood, mine your own coal or make your own nuclear reactor.</p> <p>And then you would have to find the time to write about how grand your life was and how good it was to have unalienated labor.</p> <p>Because all of it, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, you are going to do it all and even when you do it with your fellow liberated proletarians, you dare NOT divide up labor into different parts because that will alienate your labor from the entire affair.</p> <p>To support unalienated labor is impossible, but the Left has decided to support the unemployed who should be seeking a job but now get supported for nearly two years and are taught how to live off the money taken by government for them.  Their labor is lacking.  Your labor's wages are stolen via government and given to those who have decided that living on what government gives them from you is better than working for a living and supporting themselves.  This isn't labor that is no longer alienated as their labor is no longer done: that which is not done cannot be alienated as it is never present.</p> <p>What drives this is no longer an ideology but the belief in the end state of an ideology: the ideology, itself, is no longer discussed or thought about as a thing in and of itself.  At this point there is a belief in Marx that is no longer intellectual and not even rooted in his texts or the body of work of those closely associated with him.  Leftists are atheists because they want to be in the belief that Marx is right, not through reading Marx and understanding Marx, but just believing in him.  Their attacks on those who read religious texts is thus an anti-intellectual attack, no matter how dressed up and how many degrees are held by those going after religion, their own belief structure is based on unread texts and only on assumptions.</p> <p>The devolution of Marxism from rhetorical premise and argumentative structure that requires thought has been slow, but has become greatly accelerated as the 'March through the institutions' is no longer based on something that has definition, but on the belief that the end result is 'good'.  Yet what is 'good' is never defined in a hard, fast and discernable way: good has no end state to it of limits to how much good any bureaucratic organization can do.  In fact the growth of bureaucracy is an in-bred 'good' in the belief that more of it and more power to it will get 'good' results.  And because human nature is no longer studied, nor the very impacts of it upon prior Marxist ideology and its factionation, it is not understood that a bureaucracy has no intellect, has no fast goal, cannot become an 'expert' no matter how many it hires, and that the Iron Law of bureaucracy is that those that further the ends of the bureaucracy get rewarded as the bureaucracy expands.  Thus the end goal a bureaucracy, any bureaucracy, is the expansion of bureaucracy by the bureaucracy for the bureaucracy.  Other goals become secondary to that quest for greater power.</p> <p>Marxist ideology is not, of necessity, nihilistic and was, in fact, seen as something a bit more humanized than Utilitarianism.  Yet the very problems of Utilitarianism are seen in Marxism in its later stages of demeaning the individual, of not understanding the human nature of the individual and not addressing that there is more to the individual than, in the case of Marx, labor not utility.  Yet the very way labor is posited makes it utilitarian, thus the premise of Marx is eschatology within an ideology based on a belief and criticism that is has scant difference from the ones Marx leveled at Utilitarianism.</p> <p>This cannot be argued to those who follow only the nihilistic eschatology of modern Marxism/Leftism because those inside the belief system don't bother to read and grapple with Marx.  It is always about doing 'good' through government, growing government and never asking if this is good for all the individuals in society.  Yet they speak of the 'collective' but then only want to do better for parts of it, not the whole thing, and thus they even miscomprehend what collectivism is and sacrifice it on the alter of special preferences.  </p> <p>I never thought I would wish for the day of actual, intellectual Marxists arguing the rhetoric of Marx for policy, but they are not to be found.  The Marxism in the halls of power today, under a Progressivist/Liberal/Left guise is one that is rudely divorced from the ideology of Marx and connected to the end state eschatology of Marx.  Even that doesn't follow Marx as they screw up the Marxist notion of collectivism and replace it with special privileges for a few.  That is a National Socialist conception from Fascism as gone through the form of its German descendent, and this one isn't the one at Frankfurt but the one that got tried at Nuremburg.  It, too, had an end state eschatology that it elevated above ideology, and it was hard to find parsers of Marx amongst the National Socialists who started out as off-shoots of the International Socialist schools.  Gramsci would have his ideas picked up the the West but his body would be killed by Italian Fascists, which demonstrates the allure of special privilege nihilistic eschatology based roughly on Marx.</p> <p>Too bad those followers of this anti-human form of Marxism don't bother to read history, either, because it is littered with such examples and death tolls attributable to it.  Better to go on pushing 'forward' never looking at where the path gets you and never asking 'just where in the hell are we going?'  The moment you do that you are decried as being against this or that special privileged group, or as someone who is an anarchist, which is strange because that is just another nihilistic eschatology.  Thus point out the bad ends of the road and you are said to be using a nihilistic eschatology by those who are using a nihilistic eschatology and don't want it mentioned that this is what they are doing.  And if you ask where they get these ideas from they just say its because it 'feels good' to do these things and have government do it for them with other people's money.</p> <p>Lately, though, they are finding out they have to pay for their good ideas by finding out that their health insurance policy has been canceled and that they will have to get a much more costly one that does less for them.  Only once they start to get mugged by their own creation do they realize that there is pain involved to the many for the few with their 'good feeling' policies.  Better that it be a lot of pain, swiftly and deep today, so that more will see this is not good at all so that we can start requiring that people think and work for themselves and help the collective to get out of the mess the privileged got us into with their strange religion based only on good feelings and an nihilistic eschatology.  Ideologues you can at least argue with on the basis of something.  Those with a worldview religion based on someone they never read have belief in nothing and no idea what they are actually arguing about, just that they are always right.  Religious zealots who are unlearned and don't bother to ever think about what they say, you only can argue with and never, ever get anywhere.  I'll take the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons, or any other religious sect that at least honestly reads about itself than this strange sect on the Left that just believes it is right because it said so.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-35171137765767709642013-11-01T16:45:00.000Z2013-11-01T16:45:00.421ZCongressional software design<p>The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was a piece of legislation that did far more than just try to transform the medical care and delivery sector of the economy and also brought in such things as Student Loans under its heading in a separate section of the bill.  Be that as it may the bulk of the bill dealt with a series of mandates and payments to government (taxes and penalties), and within those the requirement of health insurance companies to provide certain types of care for 'free', plus hand out individual 'subsidies' meant that there had to be a large-scale interplay between private insurers and the public purse.  To facilitate that a series of 'exchanges' were to be set up either by the State governments or, if they opted out of Obamacare, the federal government.  Thus there are a whole list of exceptions, exemptions, requirements and so forth that differ per State that the entire system must provide for, and these vary from State to State, as well.</p> <p>In the previous part of my life before ill-health befell me, I worked for the federal government on the DoD civil side for an Agency that had some actual things to produce for the military.  As I was technically astute and able to deal with large scale bureaucracies (my prior university experience gave me that) I was able to shift from production work, which I enjoyed, to process improvement (or one of its synonymous variations over time) and then to new system procurement.  Thus I got to learn the government side of contracting, specifications and requirements: the whole series of hoops to go through to show that what you wanted would work, it had a set cost and it would have a series of set functions while interacting with previous work systems.  This required a whole set of understanding from the system level architecture to data file types and their metadata, library storage of digital work, shifting work from physical media to digital media and back again...plus all the network architecture for a closed system, software specifications to do particular types of work, and the equipment that would be required to proof and make press ready printing plates.  I became a one-man band of specialists and held a number of specialist hats for the agency as well as the Contracting Officer Technical Representative (COTR) hat for the project.</p> <p>In that era of the late 1990's the federal government was shifting from the old procurement systems of detailed specifications and looking to utilize Commercial Off The Shelf technology (COTS) and go from a 'low bidder always wins' to 'best value can win' paradigm.  That last meant that if a contractor actually exceeded minimum specifications and offered more value for the dollar than the lowest bidder, it was possible to seek a change in funding levels with a justification for it.  I got to experience that and a firm from the old 'sole source' days trying to leverage its contacts to win with a lowball and then up the price through a series of Request For Changes (RFCs).  In contracting parlance the RFC can start to add to the cost of the contract if accepted by both sides, although either side can propose one.  The US Navy is infamous for their massive cost over-runs due to the number of RFCs on ship construction... luckily I was working on a simple IT project, but knew the RFC dance from my time in the agency.</p> <p>For a contract Request For Proposal I had a tight set of specifications, workstation requirements, networking requirements, library storage system requirements, software requirements... an entire system specified for with minimal performance levels to it.  That went about 20% over on final award, but we got way more for that money in the way of reliability and software backing than the lowball bidder could ever provide.  I had spent years working with everyone from every system that would be impacted by this project not just the output groups but those on the input and library storage realm, as well as making the system Continuation Of Operations Plan compliant in case any single site were totally destroyed, so that we could at least get data to a printer with digital systems and get product. </p> <p>Because I had been through the process improvement dances by attending seminars and inter-governmental meetings and just reading a lot on the subject, I was fluent on things like the <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Mythical-Man-Month-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959">Mythical Man-Month</a></strong> and the concept of a <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-March-Edition-Edward-Yourdon/dp/013143635X">Death March</a></strong> development project.  In prior times my agency had a large scale project that suffered from the mythical man-month problem of program management, and it was a Death March as well: it was an IT system specified for in the 1980's, getting first deliverables in the mid-1990's and had a Y2K bug that would kill it.  Some items were delivered mere weeks before Y2K.</p> <p>When you are specifying for how many people you need to do a project you do it in man hours or man months (or man years depending on the scale of it).  It is a generalized way of estimating how many people you need to do tasks on a project and useful for scaling personnel for a project or program.  So many people to work so many hours on X task gets you so man man hours.  Burden that by 20% and you get a realistic ballpark figure of how many actual people you need.  The burdening is to add in such things as sick time, unexpected delays, bureaucracy, etc.  Unfortunately when you have a project that has had only a few people on it and it is behind on its schedule, you start to try and throw more people at the problem.  These people are not up to speed on the project, may not know all the work that has gone on, and may or may not have the necessary skill sets to do the work.  As a program manager you need those man hours or man months of work in, however, and when you are late you do throw people at the project to burn those man hours up.  What happens, however, is that the delays get longer as the new people do take time to get familiarized with the system and when they make mistakes they have to be caught and then work re-done.  The less familiar people are with the project the more likely they are to commit mistakes which actually begins to set meeting the deadline further back.  Of course to avoid that you add more people to the project!</p> <p>Ed Yourdon who wrote the <strong>Death March</strong> book (I read it in 1st edition back in the day) followed through on this mentality to see how modern program managers dealt with the problems of the mythical man-month.  Mostly they hadn't.  But a new phenomena had cropped up and it wasn't just in the Info. Tech. world, either, and that was the problem of changing customer specifications and unrealistic milestone schedules.  A death march project suffers from poor specifications for a system from the start and I read books to try and deal with just that problem as part of my job, too.  With poor specifications and milestone schedules what happens is that a project gets started with one set of specifications that then get changed in whole or in part, and prior work which was accepted now no longer advances the program to its milestones and must be abandoned.  On the IT side, however, some of that is in software code modules which may still have absolutely valid functions to help meet the schedule, so that software is kept for those functions.  New software is build around it for other functions but, when debugging must occur, problems can crop up between that older module and newer work if all the data structures haven't been well defined: old code may start to work on other parts of data passed to it due to the way it was sent to the module.  Even worse there may be dependencies in the module for information from other modules which weren't developed and that will hang up the entire development for that function to de-conflict these problems.  This eats up time.  It can invite the mythical man-month problem, and does, but also has feedback to the customer as the code structure may now need to be changed based on the newer specifications so as to avoid older software.  In theory you want to just rebuild modules from scratch, but as they have already been accepted you are stuck with them as a developer. Plus de novo work costs more, which wasn't budgeted for.</p> <p>In a death march a project has a moving set of specification goal posts and the mythical man-month personnel problem plays into the problem as individuals begin to identify the project as one that actually can't reach its goals.  Yet because the customer wants results and money is available the project continues and begins a process of cycling through people within it, so that the people who started the death march project may be gone within a few months as the first set of changes come in and they see either a program manager unable to get the idea of hard set specifications or a customer unwilling to provide them.  Because money flows the project continues, and the personnel begin to flow as well so that the second group have not just the mythical man-month problem of not knowing the project fully, but also have already completed code that may not be well documented to deal with.  Without impeccable program documentation both outside and inside the computer code, new personnel face the daunting task of having to deal with changed functions and not fully understanding what has been done before them.  Of course the first set of changes brings problems and may break prior functions, thus requiring code rework... fine and dandy if it ended there, but a death march will see requirements and functions change yet again due to changes in management, possibly, or changes in customer specifications and requirements as they process through what the prior set of changes actually are.  The morale of a death march project is abysmal, and yet it happens often enough to have its own set of criteria adorning it and its own category of failure.</p> <p>Obamacare came in with Congress setting some pretty broad but ill-conceived specifications for what would be a software project.  Plus there are hard legal deadlines set by Congress that met political realities but have no real parallel for a large scale software project.  In other words the federal customer shopped around a project with ill-defined goals and expectations and an unknown number of variables for which organizations and systems it would have to interact with.  Each State that didn't want to do an 'exchange' then changed the federal system as it must cover that State with all of its legal requirements, as well, which generate up new system requirements and interactions with previously designed code.  The number of States that refused was high, when it was expected to be only a couple of States, and that meant more had to be picked up by the federal system.  Yet that system now had to interact with insurance groups in different States each having their own data requirements.</p> <p>The SCOTUS decision also gave States leeway on other parts of the law which also affected the 'exchanges' and because States took different routes on that, each of them that went away from the original template then brought with it changes to the system. </p> <p>What Congress created was an ever changing set of functional variables within the system that would not allow the overall interaction to be a known quantity until a date perhaps as little as six months and no more than a year before the deliverable was required, by statute, to be in place.  In the modern age such laws that have so many parts to them become, effectively, IT projects.  They are designed by a committee.  They are carried out by an entirely different branch of government that must deal with its complexities, and yet the activation date is set to political realities not actual realities of software design and roll-out.  This latter problem is one that is well known: large scale systems fail more often than they succeed in all realms of business and government.</p> <p>By not taking these realities into account the law is bad law, and is worse as a software design and integration project.  Any complex system requiring interactions between a set of knowns (federal agencies) has problems within the federal government.  The FBI tried twice in the 1990's to create a single sign on system for its agents to get access to all the databases the agency held.  It failed both times because the systems each had their own data standards, hardware and software, and some had human interaction requirements because they were never dreamt of being fully automated in the first place.  DoD attempted to revamp its pay system in the '90s, as well, and failed to replace multiple separate pay and leave systems with a single, unified one.  Another part of the DoD attempted a large scale system roll out for gathering map data and the RFC database became nearly as large as the project, itself.  And any ship the Navy has built for it will have a huge file behind it of changes done with a frequency that is mindboggling.  The federal government has problems within each of its departments and agencies, and working across them in an automated way is problematical due to the complexity of existing IT infrastructure.  When the States, private insurance companies and all the individuals in the US are added to this, along with federal and State laws that are at variance for each State, is it any wonder that this system is failing like we see it failing today?</p> <p>Each of the three branches of the federal government has changed the specifications for the system: the legislative by the law itself, the executive in trying to prioritize functions, and the judicial by changing the interpretation of the law in a way unknown from all prior rulings.  Each of these entities can change the parameters, functions and deliverables of the system in an instant.  And yet the already accepted code is just that: accepted.  It is there be it functional, semi-functional or zombie waiting for some errant function to bring it back to life once more.  It is the far-reaching scope of the law that is a failure because no federal entity can deal with so much complexity.  The software is on a death march because of the inability of any of the three branches of the federal government to grasp that they are writing deliverable code requirements with variable function parameters.  Yet even if this was done by hand on paper it wouldn't work because of the rate of change to parameters of each part of the system: State, three branches of federal, insurance systems and advances in medical technology shifting the entire basis for treatments and medications.</p> <p>That last is at peril with Obamacare as it puts a high price on new treatments and attempts to create a static system to deal with what already exists in the way of medicine.  Yet, with the entire genome now available for study, we are getting some of the first treatments to long-standing diseases which have the opportunity to alter what we see as medicine and health care.  You and I can adapt to that quite readily.  A large, hide-bound bureaucracy with hard coded imperatives and functions in its software will not.  Our freedom and liberty make it possible to change the entire idea of what health care actually is, and the idea of 'insurance' may get replaced by other systems of delivering health care that have little to do with doctors or pharmacies, and yet costs less and is more widely  distributed.  We are heading into an era of miniaturized labs on a chip that can do more complete work than an actual lab employing tens or hundreds of people per lab.  Similarly with stem cells that can come from each individual and be differentiated to organ based cells, these cells can be printed into a 3D matrix to be put into the body without fears of rejection factors.  Telemedicine and automated systems for analysis aren't just on the horizon with the former being here for nearly a decade and the latter now available interactively via web sites.  Incorporate these with labs on a chip and miniaturized sensors and you have something very close to Larry Niven's Autodoc: a machine capable of doing a complete bio-analysis of an individual to find systemic problems and even treat certain conditions, as well as do simple things like set bones, and call on specialized individuals or emergency personnel.  </p> <p>Just take a look at the last century of medicine and compress the number of changes coming down to half or one-quarter of that time.  What sort of fit is a One Size Fits All Fits None Well system of paying for health care for what is coming?</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-71369711234641046362013-10-01T17:30:00.001Z2013-10-01T17:30:22.214ZGovernment furlough<p>So the US government is down to essential personnel only, today.</p> <p>Note the sky has not fallen.</p> <p>Note, also, that the Earth continues to spin on its axis and revolve around the sun.</p> <p>The Nation has not fallen into chaos.</p> <p>I've been through this in the Clinton ear and was considered 'essential personnel' back in the day.  Which meant I had to go to work for warfighter support.</p> <p>Who else had to go to work?</p> <p>Guards, you need guards and the security people.</p> <p>The people in the boiler room and HVAC, yeah you needed them, too.</p> <p>Our office manager, although without secretary, which is the first time I actually got to see anyone in management actually have to do, you know, work.  Type their own letters. Get the office mail (what there was of it). Track secure packages.  Sign off on work product.  That sort of thing.</p> <p>There was someone at the mail room but that is because the loading dock had to be open, and their boss covered the mail room, as well.  The mail room staff, you know the people who package and sort stuff, they weren't there and you had to DIY packaging for any outgoing packages.</p> <p>Who wasn't there?  Whole cadres of mid-level and upper-level managers, the GS-13 through GS-15 types, save for one GS-15 per Directorate.  The rest?  Gone.  Lights off.</p> <p>Cafeteria workers were not there.</p> <p>Nor was the EEO staff.</p> <p>Or any of the Human Resources staff, except their boss.</p> <p>Janitorial crew was skeleton, enough to clean the washrooms and any other messes that showed up.</p> <p>Grounds people were missing.</p> <p>And anyone who didn't have work product headed to the warfighter, they were not there.</p> <p>Basically the building I was in was mostly empty save for the rooms dedicated to actually getting stuff made to go out the door, and people to take it out the door to couriers.</p> <p>I have a suggestion for a CR.</p> <p>Make it an 'essential staff only' CR and put it in for a few months until everyone can get settled down to trying to figure out what is and isn't needed any more.</p> <p>The debt will get maintenance payments.</p> <p>The military will be on duty.</p> <p>SSA and M&M checks will get processed.</p> <p>As the Interstates are actually a military requirement during the Cold War, they can get to do repair work on it... give the USACE something to do beyond pork spending.</p> <p>The border will have people manning it.</p> <p>USPTO will be open.</p> <p>USPS too, come to that, as well as USGS, or at least those parts actually making maps and charts.</p> <p>A few other select places covered by the US Constitution would be open.</p> <p>It's interesting that while Ambassadors are mentioned in the Constitution, a State Dept. isn't.  Maybe we can get the military to run the rest of it?</p> <p>Everything else?</p> <p>Do that for long enough and it becomes the 'new normal'.</p> <p>Six to eight months ought to do it, and then the GAO which will be open on skeletal staff, can start to shut down buildings and auction off equipment... and then the buildings themselves...</p> <p>And if President Obama wants to do it his way or the highway on the debt ceiling, then he should be thanked for wanting to run a government on $2.5 trillion/year and not on $4 trillion a year!  Tell him that he will be admired for his fiscal astuteness that the government should only spend what it takes in and that a skeleton 'essential personnel only' government is a good start on that process.</p> <p>Always give an enemy what they want in a way they will not like and will look duplicitous in refusing.</p> <p>Works every time.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-62856378530456250912013-09-01T12:08:00.001Z2013-09-01T13:45:05.547ZThin Red Line<p>This week we have been witness to an alleged Chemical Weapons (CW) attack in Syria, probably the second or third such attack since President Obama put his 'red line' to work during the last election campaign to make himself sound good and strong on National Defense.  This was after Libya, which crossed no lines of using CW, and which the US and Europeans supported with arms and logistical supplies.  Of the things we delivered to Libyan rebels were US made MANPADs that have gone missing and appear to have been transferred to the Syrian 'rebels', mostly al Qaeda organization types either from AQ itself or AQ in the Magreb.  Added on to that is that the Syrian 'rebels' from AQ have also gotten their hands on CW stores of the regime at outlying bases and you now have two sides armed with CW capability.</p> <p>A final part of this mix is Hezbollah which tested out Surface to Surface Missiles (SSM) and Iranian copies of the anti-ship Silkworm Missile, the latter used against an civilian cargo freighter and an Israeli Destroyer.  Thus there is a whole panoply of weapons available amongst all the parties involved, not to speak of the improved SCUDs that Syria has and the rumored Bio Weapon program that got kicked off when dual-use equipment was delivered to Syria in the '90s to help it make a pharmaceuticals industry which then shut down after the equipment was delivered.  Syria has a long line of backers going back decades which include: USSR/Russia, China, North Korea and its main backer, Iran.</p> <p>Thus we are left with a specter of both sides having access to CWs and the entire Syrian conflict devolving into an artillery battle (with some SSM components also held by both sides because the regime had such weapons at outlying bases as well), and one in which one side has no air wing and the other side has one but is faced with an array of US and Libyan made MANPADs which threaten to neutralize not just fixed wing assets but rotary wing assets, as well.</p> <p>Back in <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2006/12/syrian-wmd-sites-basic-list.html">2006 I did a review of the known Syrian weapons sites</a> and what they looked like from Open Source INTEL to get a handle on just what it was that Syria had in-place at the time.  I've since looked at other imagery near al-Baida and seen what looks to be the rumored site of where Saddam's WMD programs ended up in Syria and it is typical of its other sites: some military surface emplacements and then indications of a larger underground structure , in the case of al-Baida, inside a mountain.  This is not only not unusual for Syria, but with its associations with NoKo and its expertise with having one of the most heavily dug in military systems on the planet, Syria most likely has put in defenses to thwart, divert or otherwise try to minimize the threat of 'bunker buster' bombs.  And as they had a good, close look at US capability in Iraq plus some INTEL coming via Iran from Af-Pak, Syria most likely has a good idea of the modern US capacity with such weapons.</p> <p>Now comes President Obama's 'red line' being crossed and there are some essential questions to be asked, just on the military side of things.</p> <p>1) Who has been using CWs in Syria?  Whenever you see photos of men with pails of chemicals to pour into an artillery shell, do realize that those are the oldest of the old shells in Syria.  They updated their CW capacity during the '70s by purchasing Spin Mix In Flight shell technology from Egypt which was supplied to them from the USSR.  So anyone using the old 'mix in pail and load' deal are most likely the lowest of the low end troops with old technology that was most likely at outlying bases, since you wouldn't want the modern shells to be used against you in a civil war... which this is, BTW, with outsiders trying take over, as well, in the form of AQ/AQIM.  It is easy enough to fake an artillery CW attack: just wait for an enemy artillery barrage and then mix some pails of chemicals, add some C-4 and blow them up in the craters or nearby.  This is a vital question as intervening against EITHER side means that the US is taking a PARTISAN SIDE in a civil war.  By damaging one side you help the other, which is the logic of old-style warfare like we are being handed in Syria.</p> <p>2) If the point is to warn against using CW's, then why state just that [or even as what the President suggested in his proposed authorization document, all WMDs – added after initial post] ?  President George W. Bush gave the somewhat broad idea that getting rid of Saddam was to keep the world's worst weapons from the world's worst people.  That project is now a failure in Syria as that is precisely what is going on.  At this point AQ/AQIM must be assumed to have at least CW in its inventory to distribute to agents.  That is backed by the pre-OIF word from the Kurds that Saddam had trained AQ in CWs, and from our own CIA in Afghanistan where they found a site where AQ was using the Iraqi documents to create and test out CWs on animals and living human beings who were not volunteers.  Thus AQ has demonstrated knowledge, background and willingness to dabble in CWs and now have CWs in their inventory of available arms.  If President Obama's goal is to warn any Nation or organization (the much harder of the two to convince) that using CWs is off-limits, then why limit the attack to just CWs [or WMDs]?  Indeed, why use a conventional attack, at all?  The only way to make sure that the CW complexes, chemical facilities and actual source mines of phosphate are interdicted is not through conventional attacks, but with nuclear attacks.  That, of course, would just up the ante in the WMD game, but its still a hard chip to get access to even with nuclear proliferation... as long as Pakistan remains semi-stable, that is.  Or until Iran develops its own nuclear capacity.  Anything that leaves any of that infrastructure in place for the 'winner' means that you will have a CW capable State at the end of the conflict which, one would think, is just the opposite goal of what is being sought.</p> <p>3) Attacking Syria would be easy if we hadn't PO'd the Israeli's, who have a demonstrated knowledge and capacity to take down Syrian (indeed just about anyone's) air defenses.  That still leaves us with the specter of US manned aircraft getting taken down with US made MANPADs that went to Libya and were transferred to the Syrian 'rebels'.  As I mentioned earlier these are not the only threats to be aware of, and SSM and anti-ship missile threats are also available to the Syrian regime and Hezbollah.  The dug-in nature of the Syrian main military sites, situated in regime strongholds, means that we cannot be assured of effectiveness of 'bunker buster' type bombs due to the passive and active defenses the regime has put in place due to Israeli capacity in that arena.  </p> <p>Even if some of the weapons arrayed against US air and sea assets aren't the most modern, they do not have to be as a good number of them are man-portable or non-fixed site devices, which means that a feint against a ship would draw an air response that can then be met with a numerically high number of attacks.  Even stealth capacity is no proof against simple man-guided missiles and they won't even give you a lock-on warning, either.  Saddam was caught with his pants down because he expected the US to be thwarted for long months by Turkish duplicity and was lazily re-arranging his military to meet what he expected to be a long-way off US threat.  The Syrian regime is now given warnings of a date for decision and that will most likely be one of date of attack, as well.  Thus the chances of getting to and taking out arms that are the target goes down due to dispersal and defensive capabilities used to keep such arms, while other weapons (like SAM and MANPADS) get deployed to dissuade or take down US attacking aircraft.  While Syria is no virtual fortress like NoKo, it is a State with a major coastal mountain range, and mountain warfare is the 'great equalizer' against even the most sophisticated opponents. I <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2007/02/mountain-warfare-and-what-it-takes.html">looked at that in 2007</a> and anyone unfamiliar with what Mountain Warfare is might want to think about the topic.  Even though these are not the high mountains of Af-Pak, even the relatively low range in Syria has the same sorts of elements as are seen elsewhere and in other conflicts, and the US must take that to heart when going after any sort of hardened system set in a mountain range: Syria is not Libya, and the likelihood of getting a cruise missile into a cave opening will be much lower now that Syria knows the US has that capacity and has had decades to analyze it and prepare for such attacks.  If you wanted to take out Syria the time was way back when in Iraq when they were actively aiding and abetting the movement of terrorists into Iraq from Syria.  Too bad this President can't draw on that, huh?</p> <p>4) Sectarian conflict is already going on in Syria between Shia and Sunni populations and, within the Shia population, between your average run of the mill types and the local Alawite sect which has its own teachings from Mohammed.  Consider them to be the LDS of Islam.  Being a minority of a minority (with Shia Islam around 10% of the population and the Alawite sect just 10% of that or 1% of the local population) and the specter of any US attack being cast as an attack against a religious minority raises its ugly head, as well.  The last thing the US needs on a regional basis is to raise sectarian conflicts to a bitter height by attacking one of them.  If we took the more even-handed approach that our allies took in Libya when all combatants took on the same garb and you couldn't tell regime from rebel from terrorist from civilian, then you might be able to make a case.  I dubbed that the 'Kill Them All' doctrine as it meant killing anyone who was fighting that you could set your sights on.  That, of course, would mean going after rebel caches of CWs as well... something we haven't heard about so far.  It's like the President wants to pick sides, pick winners, and not tell anyone that is what he is doing.  Oh, yes, that is because that IS what he is doing.</p> <p>5) Finally, and this really should be heard out, if our aim is to help the 'defenseless civilian population' then why, oh why, aren't we planning to do that?  Really, if your goal is to preserve lives in a civil war where two sides (regime and 'rebels') are armed but the majority of the population (known as 'victims') aren't then why bother with either the regime or the 'rebels'?  A simple and much cheaper, plan is to buy up every AK from the global black market and air drop them by the pallet load to the civilian population.  Every town, village, farmhouse, collection of huts, places where people are seen living in caves, nomadic Bedouin, basically anyplace where you can find that isn't in control of the regime or 'rebels', should be well armed so that they aren't 'victims' any more.  If the idea is that the right to keep and bear arms is based on the fundamental positive liberty of warfare (self-defense) and the synthetic right to protect your property (gained by your liberty and thusly representative of your life's work), then this natural right is also a positive civil right and those deprived of arms when a war is ongoing (especially a 'respect no sides' civil war) are being offered up for slaughter.  If a well-armed society is a polite society and one likely to kill off hotheads, then isn't the place for this to be tested?  Syria has been a police State under one family for decades.  Civil rights, human rights and natural rights are abridged and abused there by both 'sides'.  And whoever 'wins' the civilian population loses.  If we really mean that we are about human liberty and freedom, and the right to not be abused by anyone, by no government and by no feral humans, then why not do the obvious and arm the civilian population and let THEM start to figure out what THEY WANT in the way of government?  Yes, that will make the conflict bloodier for a time, but a lot of that blood is going to the Tree of Liberty, not the Weed of Tyranny, and the end result will be something that the locals actually WANT.  Hey, it may be something horrific, right?  Yes.  Of course anyone wanting to do that must NOT PO the local population as it is well armed... and that is a much, much better state of affairs than has existed in Syria.  Ever.</p> <p>Now for a few additional questions, but these are not about the military side of things.</p> <p>Remember the 'anti-war coalition'?  You know the Leftist/Socialist/Code Pink/International Answer sewer groups?  Where are they?</p> <p>I haven't heard from them since Obama has been elected.</p> <p>They claimed to have such high morals and were against international conflicts because they impoverished people and took away from the goodie takings at home.  So where are these people?</p> <p>You know the types that said we should have learned ever so much more about Iraq before going in?  Remember those people?  I do.</p> <p>Where are they?</p> <p>Why are they not organizing marches starting, well, right after Sec. State Kerrey delivered his asinine pabulum, but where were they yesterday?  OK, there might be a few Harley-Davidsons roaming around DC, but that shouldn't keep the stalwart defenders of their own moral certitude from doing anything.  Can't they get their collective heads out of their collective rectums to realize the smell they are getting is their own?</p> <p>I don't call them the 'duplicitous Left' for nothing, you know.</p> <p>And where are all those who tout 'international law' for everything going on as the answer?  They should be crying out for the sanctions provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention to be put into force!  OK, they may be stuck in Syria not signing on to that... but where is the outrage on THAT?  Shouldn't they be going to every other signatory State and pointing out that it has a MORAL DUTY TO ACT against a rogue regime using such weapons?  Oh, wait, that is silence I'm hearing from the 'international law' crowd.  So sorry, I thought you were serious about it.  'Duplicitous' doesn't even begin to cover them.</p> <p>So where are all these high minded types of all stripes that came out of the woodwork for years on this topic?</p> <p>Where are their morals?  Their courage to 'stand up to da Man'? Where is their rage against the system delivering eternal war?  Can't they even just run a pot luck dinner to get a few attendees anywhere?</p> <p>Their lack of outrage now is their badge of cowardice, duplicity and lack of morals and ethics.  It is bad news for a 'movement' when the most scrupulous member of it is Cindy Sheehan who at least continued to criticize Obama for the same things she criticized Bush for.  She is yet another of the 50 Shades of Maroon, but she is a consistent shade, I'll give her that, but no less maroon for it.  President Obama and his Administration seem to want to get a corner on the Shades of Maroon market, and it appears to be working.  And 50 Shades of Maroon doesn't even begin to cover it.</p> <p>A final thought.</p> <p>Notice the political acumen to get this 'crisis' delayed long enough so that it hits the budget 'crisis' and the installment of Obamacare 'crisis', along with a nearing debt ceiling 'crisis'... and probably three or four more that I can't quickly remember... but isn't that such great timing?</p> <p>Its like there is a plan behind it, or something.</p> <p>Yet another of the 50 Shades of Maroon.</p> <p>Nope, 50 is just not enough, methinks.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-46401630692316375692013-08-01T11:43:00.001Z2013-08-01T11:43:57.723ZPassively implicit<p>When looking at the US Constitution I take a view of it as a structuralist, that is to say that the form of government is given as a structure that has a number of interlocking parts that are defined, limited and created to serve a purpose.  Structural analysis means that you take the words as they are presented in the context of the English language.  I laid this out in <a href="http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2013/03/structural-analysis-of-amendment-ii.html" target="_blank">Structural analysis of Amendment II</a>, and that rests on the work that I looked at earlier by Nicholas Rosencranz who laid out how the sentence structure of the English language creates the structure of government in the <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1611210" target="_blank">Subjects</a> and <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1844749" target="_blank">Objects</a> of the Constitution.  The lineage of the US Constitution starts with agreements outlined in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and King Alfred all the way through to Bill of Rights put in place with James II, which I went over in <a href="http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2012/12/roots-of-constitutional-government.html" target="_blank">Roots of constitutional government</a>.  For this article I'm going to be building off my article on <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2013/07/taxation-via-sales.html" target="_blank">Taxation via sales</a>.</p> <p>Taxation was part of the trigger for the US Revolution and it is understood that the Founders and Framers both had a view that taxation is a necessary evil to run the organ of society known as government.  As a necessary evil it must be limited so that it does not over stress the body which is society that requires the functioning of government to do the few and necessary things to allow for the individuals to be free.  With that said taxation takes many forms and the US Congress gets some particular types taxation in <a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html" target="_blank">Art I, Sec 8</a>, in part:</p> <blockquote> <p><b><font color="#9b00d3">Section. 8.</font></b></p> <p><a name="1.8.1"></a><font color="#9b00d3">The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;</font></p> </blockquote> <p>If Congress was getting the complete taxation power with this clause then there would be no need to put in Duties, Imposts and Excises, now, would there?  In fact it took an Amendment for Congress to get the income tax, and even that Amendment has been misused as it nowhere indicates that Congress may levy different taxes on different income levels.  The Progressive Income Tax requires not just the Income Tax part, but a specific exemption of the Privileges and Immunities clause and Amendment V and Due Process of Law which is to be applied equally to all citizens.  Be that as it may, later in Sec 8 is a clause that indicates what the scope of the Taxation power actually is:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Duties, Imposts and Excises are generally taxes aimed at the National level and at international trade.  Thus the regulatory or regularizing power of Congress writing law in support of Treaties or, in cases where there are no trade treaties, setting the Nation's tax policy towards importation of goods to sustain trade, thus are complementary to the Duties, Imposts and Excises previously mentioned.  That is to say there is an explicit venue given for the Taxation power that is complete for Congress for international trade modified by Treaties.  Thus even where it is a complete power it is one that has limitations via Treaty.</p> <p>Next is Sec 9 where one tax power is restricted and then modified by Amendment:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, </font><a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_amendments_11-27.html#16"><font color="#9b00d3"><strike>unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken</strike></font></a><font color="#9b00d3"><strike>.</strike></font></p> </blockquote> <p>This is the first outright restriction to the Taxation power and now limiting it.  Do note that this is a passive clause and that it does not mention Congress nor does it mention any other branch or any other government.  Thus this applies to all governments and all branches of all governments in the United States.  Remember in Sec 8 there is the language 'The Congress shall have...' is an explicit grant of power and as all of Sec 8 is a single sentence with many semi-colons, all of that is covered under that.  There is no need to repeat it per line as the separate grants are broken up for clarity's sake, for readability, and to let someone catch their breath if they had to read it as a single sentence.</p> <p>In Section 9 each clause is a single, stand-alone sentence, complete in and of itself.  These sentences are not started by explicit and active restrictions upon, say, Congress, but are passive and general in nature.  The Framers were more than capable of starting a sentence 'Congress shall make no law...' but these clauses do not start with that beginning.  As the Constitution is about the organization of the United States and what the role of the States shall be, when States require separate coverage they are mentioned, as in Sec 10, and I'm coming back to Sec 9, but here is the language on Taxation in 10:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>With 'No State shall...' we are given a definitive subject and then a set of Objects with modifiers.  It is this language that is absent in Sec 9 and without an actual Subject that is defined then the generalized Subject is being addressed to all levels of all governments.</p> <p>Imposts and Duties on Imports or Exports is a linking of topics in Sec 10 and due to that linkage these powers are addressed to those objects.  That explicit language and linkage then gives proper definition to the prior Congressional power on Imposts and Duties: Imports and Exports.  If a State wants a special exemption it must go to Congress and that only for the necessary execution of inspection laws.  By making those funds go to the US Treasury this is seen as a federal power granted to Congress and is for Imports and Exports.</p> <p>Now back in Sec 9 there is the final clause and one that clearly de-limits powers and it is this:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>As with the prior prohibition this one is given a passive voice and does not state 'Congress shall make no law...' nor does it start 'No State shall...' but, instead, addresses Taxation as a whole.  This is a restriction on the Taxation <strong>power</strong>, itself.  By not having either Congress or the States as the subject, as with the previous passive and standalone clause, this clause then addresses all governments in the United States. </p> <p>This is an implicit restriction on taxation of goods moved from State to State on goods exported from one State to another State.  No government may do this in the United States.</p> <p>Now lets flip this around into a different arena and ask: what is the form of this restriction on an international scale?</p> <p>The States of the United States are seen as Sovereign entities and actually have an escape hatch from the US Constitution embedded within it in Sec 10:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>This language also shows up later in the Constitution in Art IV:</p> <blockquote> <p><b><font color="#9b00d3">Section. 4.</font></b></p> <p><a name="4.4.1"></a><font color="#9b00d3">The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>In Art IV, Sec 4 the guarantee of a Republican Form of Government is to the States, which are signatories to the US Constitution after ratification by the people of that State.  The protections against having this subverted are to protect the States against Invasion and domestic Violence.  In Art I, Sec 10 there are a set of powers that a State recovers if the United States does not support this and it is the ones they agree to set aside outside of these specific causes.  When you examine that list you get the conception of the broad headings that the States recover in full upon invasion, imminent threat of Danger or having their government threatened with being overturned via non-Republican means are broad and sweeping.  These powers are what we call the Foreign Policy power and the Military power, not just the defensive Militia power which is due to all men, but the assertive and external Military power.  Also it regains all the taxation powers and the powers to build new military fortifications and equipment to guard itself.</p> <p>In International Affairs a State with the full Foreign Policy, Military and Taxation power is known as an independent Nation State: a country.</p> <p>Thus the States must have these powers to set aside in this agreement known as the US Constitution, as you cannot recover what you did not have to start with.  That is simple logic.</p> <p>Taking the US Constitution as a TREATY DOCUMENT and examining what the form of Taxation is we then come to a conclusion of the limitation on the Taxation power that is startling due to the understanding that is underlying it.  It is the scope and form of Treaty that many who have argued on the necessity of unburdened trade have used at the International scale and has its full form seen with an organizations of States that agree to this view so as to have a coherent Nation amongst them.</p> <p>What is a trade agreement that unburdens trade amongst equals and limits the power of an oversight group so that it may not burden such trade via direct taxation?</p> <p>What is a trade agreement that sets up a system whereby sellers in one State that is signatory to the Treaty cannot have its goods or services taxed by a recipient State and its citizens?</p> <p>What is the form of trade agreement that abolishes duties, imposts and excises save for necessary inspection and then those funds applied only to those inspections to ensure that agreed-upon legal trade is all that is going on between States?</p> <p>Why this does have a modern term, doesn't it?</p> <p>This is known as a FREE TRADE AGREEMENT.</p> <p>Right there, in the US Constitution, powerfully stated by not being explicit, not a direct power grant, but by restricting all the governments involved, including the agreed-upon oversight body.  It is one of the most subtle and yet powerful statements on the positive value of trade between States to knit a Union together and to allow that free men when trading with other free men in States that all fall under the Treaty shall have NO TAXATION applied to that direct sale from individual to individual, State to State.</p> <p>And that means no 'Value Added Tax', 'Sales Tax' or any other thing not directly related to quantity, amount or hazard of a given good.  Taxation for tonnage is also removed unless it has safety or verification inspections involved.  The federal government can tax per gallon, per carton of cigarettes, or by any other gross weight and measure so long as it involves upkeep of infrastructure due to those particular items in the way of hazard or safety.</p> <p>What no government can do is tax by VALUE of the trade involved.</p> <p>Thus a nickel per gallon on tax is there without regard to the actual cost per galloon.  It is there if it is a penny per gallon and it is there if it is ten thousand dollars per gallon: the quantity is what matters, not the value.  And do note that is for interstate sales, only, so that in-State sales remain the realm of the State government.</p> <p>Governments will always seek new sources of revenue and tax the hell out of anything they can get their hands on and yet still be unable to balance their budgets.</p> <p>A free people have an 'out' from onerous taxation: our fellow citizens in the other States under this Free Trade Agreement embedded in the US Constitution.  As a remedy to overburdening of taxes this is one of the most sublime resorts that the ordinary citizen has to escape taxes, become closer with his fellow citizens and support the Union between the States.</p> <p>Because that is the realm of the Preamble of the US Constitution and note who is invoking it and what we promise to do:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3"><strong>We the People</strong> </font><font color="#9b00d3">of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.</font></p></blockquote> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-85730326606971958302013-07-13T16:17:00.001Z2013-07-13T16:17:56.049ZContinuity or something else?<p>I watched a program last night on <a href="http://military.discovery.com/" target="_blank">Discovery's Military Channel</a> that  focused on the Continuity of Operations Plan or Continuity of Government Plan, which is something I came to know about working on the civilian side of an agency in DoD.  It is pretty serious stuff this trying to safeguard information and stand up some operations if the main sites of the agency get taken out.  This extends across the entire US federal government and all agencies have some variation of the COOP (as I came to know it).  It was an interesting program as it gave a couple of scenarios that would cause the COOP to be put into action and it pointed out that on 9/11 it actually was utilized and actually failed to keep the President informed during a crisis or re-establish communications between secure sites.  If this had been a more serious attack on the US, the COOP would have failed the federal government.</p> <p>Although there are contingency plans in place for continuing government ever since this became a question and actually caused the creation of Amendment XXV which puts in an order of succession for the job of President in case the person occupying that job is incapacitated or dies.  That was ratified into being in 1967 during the Cold War when the possibility of having the entire top of government vaporized at one stroke was something to be considered.</p> <p>Do we really need more than that?</p> <p>The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (<a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/19" target="_blank">3 USC 19</a>) is the Public Law created by Congress to add depth to the existing schema of President and Vice-President set out in the <a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html" target="_blank">US Constitution</a> and in Amendments XII and XX to clear up issues on elections and Amendment XXV put in place in 1967.  This ability by Congress to do such work is generated through Art. II,  Sec. 1, Clause 6 which provides for the power of Congress to establish such a succession and amended by Amendment XXV Section 3.  The top four people are the President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House and then President pro tempore of the Senate.  This act has been amended to then start in on the Cabinet with the Secretary of State, Treasury, Defense, Attorney General, Interior, Agriculture,  Commerce, Labor, HHS,  HUD, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veteran's Affairs and then DHS.  Would you consider a government headed up by, say, the Secretary of HUD to be legitimate?  How about Education?  Interior?  </p> <p>I have problems with the Secretary of State but it is at least a major 'Hat' of the Presidential job requirements – foreign policy.  Actual those hats are Head of State, Head of Government, Commander in Chief of the Armies and the Navies, and Chief Pardoner, and if you went with just the 'Hats' then you would get State, Treasury, Defense and AG which is just about where it should end, as well.  Why?  Any government that has suffered the loss of the President, VP, Speaker and President pro tempore has failed in ways that you cannot even begin to imagine and, really, the actual legitimacy of the government falling into appointed and approved position holders is something that even in the Cold War was questionable.  You might get a 'continuity' of government, yes.  The legitimacy of that government, led by unelected officials is lost because this is a Nation that upholds a representative say in selecting our government.</p> <p>Then there is the part that the program didn't get into: the States.  Each State has its own form of COOP in place and the actual legitimacy of the US federal government comes from the signatories to the US Constitution: the States.  The States had to get approval from their citizens to sign on to the Constitution, and it is those functional governments that are the actual ones who instituted the federal government to act as an arbiter amongst them.  If that arbiter and protector of all of the States cannot protect all of the States and actually has harm fall on to any State due to negligence, incapacity or inability to adequately supply protective measures to all of the States, then the federal government has failed in its main duty: protection of the States.  Each and every State gets a way out of this via the US Constitution and its something to consider at this point when we look at failure of the federal government to protect the States.  This is covered in Art. I, Sec. 10, Clause 3:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>The Framers of the Constitution did not create a 'suicide pact' but put in this one vital clause which gives the State back its full Sovereign powers.  The ability to do these things, are indicative not of a State but of a Nation as they are the full foreign policy and military powers necessary for the backing of a Nation.  If the federal government cannot protect a number of States from, say, an EMP attack or, via neglect, allows a State or group of States to be invaded, then that State finds itself with its full powers returned to it.  All of the facets of what it takes to run and independent Nation re-appear for events that are so devastating to a State that any delay in response will mean disaster or that disaster has befallen a State and the federal government has proven and demonstrated its incompetence to the point where it can no longer be considered as the trusted arbiter of the powers granted to it.</p> <p>With the three days to the return of barbarism seen after Super Storm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina and the general decay of infrastructure, the States and federal government must rely on having a population ready to respond to disasters.  A strong and prepared civil population is the greatest strength to the continuity of government, operations and the legitimacy of government.  Fly the elected and appointed officials around as much as you want, but it is the States that hold the cards in a disaster and the trump card is the return of the powers they granted to the federal government which is so concerned about keeping itself going that it has neglected its duties to protecting the States as entities.</p> <p>Even the relatively lack-luster scenario of an eastern EMP attack shows that the amount of time it takes to get the COOP running is in the days to weeks category.  Talking about a President trying to impose martial law onto States that he or she has neglected, is no longer an act to restore civil order but an Act of War on those States.  A Governor is put into the foreign policy arena and while accepting help from such a COOP government may call for that, it is no longer in the capacity of a Governor of a State but a Head of State: that military arrangement is a treaty and should be treated as such.  At that point in time the Governor may already have had to call upon a civilian militia, utilize police forces and declare martial law, yes, but those are all internal and normal parts of a sovereign Nation to re-organize after a disaster.  </p> <p>The reason and rationale for letting States retain this responsibility and the power to address it, is so that the federal government is not overburdened with a function it cannot fulfill in whole, in part or at all.  After no regular natural disaster has the US federal government proven to be prompt, efficient, or even capable of dealing with a catastrophe of wide ranging scope.  With FEMA the federal government insists it has a role.  With FEMA it is widening the scope of possibility for its own failure.  FEMA isn't capable of addressing disasters and may only serve as the nucleus for creating a disaster of federal legitimacy.  While it was created with good intentions during the Cold War, no one addressed the fact that the federal government doesn't have the power or capacity to actually deal with disasters, be they the nuclear one of that era or the wide-ranging problems of natural disasters and under-maintained infrastructure of the modern era along with man-made and natural disasters that can cause infrastructure to fail catastrophically.  That EMP burst has all sorts of protection for the military, President, various cabinet level officials, Congress, SCOTUS... you are left SOL and then are expected to go savage and have to be suppressed under martial law.</p> <p>See how that works?</p> <p>That is not a system to enhance liberty and freedom, but one created to maintain power over you, not look to you as the source of power and legitimacy.  The most chilling thing I heard was the director of FEMA saying it had the job of 'protecting our way of life'.  I'm sorry, but that is the job of the citizenry and the citizenry is the creator of a way of life, and when its government fails it then continuing on in the old way of life that led to disaster is a non-starter.  If the old way of life produces disaster, then any government seeking to sustain it is not legitimate and not dealing with realities and not seeking the assent of the people as the legitimizer of that power.  Stepping in after a wide-spread failure of government leading to disaster has one result: Sovereign States.  The legitimacy of government shifts to the more local government and if the State government fails then we are in Hamilton's <a href="http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/federalist-no-26/" target="_blank"><em>Federalist No. 26</em></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community <em>require time</em> to mature them for execution. <strong>An army, so large as seriously to menace those liberties, could only be formed by progressive augmentations</strong>; which would suppose<strong> not merely a temporary combination between the legislature and executive, but a continued conspiracy for a series of time</strong>. Is it probable that such a combination would exist at all? Is it probable that it would be persevered in, and transmitted along through all the successive variations in a representative body, which biennial elections would naturally produce in both houses? <strong>Is it presumable that every man the instant he took his seat in the national Senate or House of Representatives would commence a traitor to his constituents and to his country?</strong> Can it be supposed that there would not be found one man discerning enough to detect so atrocious a conspiracy, or bold or honest enough to apprise his constituents of their danger? <strong>If such presumptions can fairly be made, there ought at once to be an end of all delegated authority. The people should resolve to recall all the powers they have heretofore parted with out of their own hands, and to divide themselves into as many States as there are counties in order that they may be able to manage their own concerns in person.</strong></font></p> </blockquote> <p>You don't have to be a conspirator to create the conditions of an over-extended military or a government that seeks to impose its will into every facet of daily life.  In this case it is easy to substitute unbridled government in the place of the military and come up with the same formula and result and you don't even need a conspiracy to do it.  Indeed what you need is the belief that laws are forever, that government must continually grow and never recede, and that power devolves downward and is not granted upward.  All of this done out in the open, often with great fan-fare, claiming that government can take care of part of your retirement, or help you in finding that first house to buy, or watch over markets that you should be keeping an eagle's eye upon.   This claim can fairly be made and even demonstrated in our modern times.  Alexander Hamilton proposes that in the event of the disaster of government seeking to impose its will upon the people, that the power to deal with that is not at the State level, but at the county level, the local level.  The US Constitution holds the sweetened condensed version of this in Art. I, Sec. 10, Clause 3, but here Alexander Hamilton points out that if the government failure is wide enough, deep enough and thorough enough, that the only answer is to end the delegation of authority upward and reclaim it at the most local of level possible.</p> <p>Still, if something like the scenario of an EMP destroying the electronic infrastructure of the eastern US did happen... you have a large number of States involved, at least 23-24 and possibly up to as many as 26-28.  Out of 50.  The federal government, by not helping the States and citizenry to prepare, by not informing the citizenry of what necessary preparations would be and what the likelihood of such an attack would be, would be delinquent in its responsibilities to the States and the citizens.  By not having effective counter-measures, interceptors (and the scenario really does posit something an AEGIS vessel should be able to handle) nor even being able to identify the actor(s) involved, has failed in other, subsidiary duties and directly granted powers to it.</p> <p>How much has the US government told you about EMP attacks?  How has it helped you to prepare for them? <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2006/06/geophysics-for-common-man-pt-2-fun.html" target="_blank">I can name a list of things</a> that can and most likely will happen to North America that the US federal government can't handle and they are just natural disasters.  Yet FEMA isn't prepared for any of them.  It can't handle a good sized large hurricane, yet that is its supposed duty, at which it fails even with small events like tornadoes ruining small towns.  And yet its job is to 'protect our way of life' and that way of life is currently in a dark, dismal failure mode because it refuses to recognize that you are the greatest mover and protector of your own life and that self-government is the most secure and best of all governments as it requires self-restraint.  It has failed on that score and continues to fail on that, continuously.</p> <p>It isn't the people who are endangering the legitimacy of government at this point, it is the government, itself.  A COOP plan to continue a failure is failure and the promotion of failure as a good thing.  It isn't.  It will kill you if you don't prepare for it.  And failure on such absolute terms delegitimizes the concept: if it was restricted to just protecting the physical US territory then, yes, the President needs to be safeguarded.  The rest?  Elected officials and then appointed officials with an unelected bureaucracy.  The COOP plan for that sort of thing is damned simple: help the States as they request it, ensure that free elections can be held and then find out what the <strong>NEW</strong> way of life is from people who have gone on a 'back to basics' course across a wide geographic area.  If you can't do that, then you are not backing legitimacy of citizenship and the citizenry to guide their own affairs but seeking to impose a 'way of life' on them that bears little or no relationship to the actual real world circumstances.  Those people in such a disaster-ridden State not only deserve to be free and independent, they have earned it via the lackluster federal system that hasn't supported them and treated them as subjects or slaves and failed in essential duties granted to it.  If we ever got a CONUS EMP or a global CME, then the US just might not be a single Nation any longer but something much closer to a league of confederacies of Free States.</p> <p>You can have a republic if you can keep it.</p> <p>Doing that requires paring down the federal government and picking up the slack on your end.  That is non-negotiable to retaining freedom and liberty as well.  Want a United States to be preserved?  Then prepare for disaster and hold government accountable to its misdeeds as<strong> no one can do this for you</strong>.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-83542698778159715142013-07-05T12:39:00.001Z2013-07-05T12:39:16.852ZMisrule and privacy<p>Do you have a fundamental right to privacy?</p> <p>That is to ask: do you have the fundamental right to have freedom and liberty in your movement, your personal information, your associates,  and your transactions without being watched over by government?  In the US there is an exception for being suspected of a crime and requiring a judge to issue a warrant to gather information on you, and that is only for a criminal investigation.  Roe v. Wade ruled that a woman had a right to privacy and that came from the 'emanations' and 'penumbra' of the US Constitution, not solidly rooting it in Amendments IX and X.  Your privacy, which is to say your freedom to conduct lawful business without the scrutiny of government and to have liberty in your own lawful affairs, is rooted in Amendments IX and X, not on the SCOTUS ruling of Roe v. Wade</p> <p>Today we have two major sections of the US federal government that does not believe in your fundamental right to privacy and feel free to intrude on your affairs, capture data about you and do with it what they please:  DoJ and NSA.  Actually, the IRS has now demonstrated its want for your medical information to run Obamacare and has already seized medical records of millions of US citizens without their knowing about it.  In collecting this information without due process procedures in open court available for public scrutiny, the US government has, in fact, decided that you are subjects and no longer citizens.  Eric Holder's positions as Attorney General of the US is that you have no privacy in your e-mail or online activities, and yet you don't see him ready to put forward the entire DoJ archives of e-mail and traffic records that flow through the Internet from all the parts of DoJ.  Not all of it revolves around criminal investigation and mere administrative e-mails, which is to say procedural and fiduciary e-mails, should be open to the public on demand if AG Holder really means what he says.</p> <p>Instead you are supposed to be transparent to the government and the government is to be opaque to you, the subject because you have not done the things necessary to remain a citizen.</p> <p>Now if you think the NSA capture of metadata is benign and can explain why the NSA needs more record space than can hold the entire history of mankind, to date, up to five times over then may I ask: why?  Are you made more or less secure by this activity?  More importantly, if and when government uses such information to malign purposes, say quelling political discontent by some power hungry group or cabal, is your liberty secured or threatened by this data capture?</p> <p>Do hold that thought for the exact, same question can be asked about the domestic wiretap information garnered by DoJ and your financial and medical records held by the IRS.  Are you safer in your possessions, your effects, your ability to travel, which is to say your freedom and liberty to exercise it as you will with this or without it?  Not just for today, mind you, but in a worst case scenario of malign government deciding to prosecute past crimes that they decree illegal now, because they no longer feel restrained by the US Constitution and are going to be quite able to create ex-post facto laws and then pull up records to see who has to be rounded up.  Data collection is only about today when it is restricted to case work that must start from scratch and the public record.  Yet, in silence, the government has decided that we are all future criminals, and that no one is secure from its scrutiny, ever.</p> <p>Let us change venue for a moment and go to the Google Glasses and HUD developments of other groups that is starting up in the last six months to a year.  This is Gen Zero of these devices which will augment your reality by offering you a computer display on the inside of glasses to help you better understand the world.  No matter how stylish they become, they are an artifact of on-line use and technology and there are good real world uses to them.  Add in a cell phone connection on-demand and there you have the NSA and DoJ ready to collect your data queries along with your GPS position, and timestamp.  What you want, when you want it and where you want it are now all available metadata to them, and you have decided to write it off.  Isn't that grand?</p> <p>What would you want out of such a system? </p> <p>High Definition overlays?  Easily done by installing a camera either at the bridge section over the nose or, if you want 3D object recognition, one each at the base of the arms so you get stereo vision and 3D capability. </p> <p>Virtual Real World Synthesis?  This is where the cameras on your device begin to automatically filter resolution for re-display either with semi-transparent lenses or meshing up the virtual and real world together for display on the inside of the glasses.</p> <p>Active object and face recognition?  Boy won't this be handy to call up the publicly shared data on individuals and items, huh?  Never a bad date... and that stalker will be able to figure out if you are armed or not.  Good job, that!  Always easier to target the unarmed than the armed, you know.</p> <p>Active tracking of finances in real time?  Handy at the store and probably a Version 1 or 2 item to let you find out the UPC code information and maybe look for competitive pricing before you go shopping.  Add in an on-line inventory system and you can even know if you should go to a store or not, based on what you want.  Mind you, they capture that query information and may only make that available to their 'special customers' who agree to give up their shopping habits at that store chain to them.  Which is then sold in bulk to marketers who accumulate all your 'special' purchase information together to more readily target you with ads, on the fly, and to help you 'decided' in favor of certain products and services.  Handy, huh?</p> <p>Photo and Video Capture?  Full HD resolution photos and video capture, at least locally to start but for those who love streaming this stuff to your FB or other social media account, now your friends will always know where you are, what you are doing, with whom, where you go and how long you stayed there.  Heck, a bit of hacking and they can know how much you spent, too.   Even create a full 3D image of your body, clothed and unclothed!  Just like the TSA!</p> <p>Cellphone is a given.  Add in a couple of small aural conducting speakers to vibrate your skull so you can hear stuff and maybe wrap the arms a bit around the ears to get microphones close to the mouth with some data augmentation to clear up your voice, and you now have full data capture of what you do.  The cellphone system may become a bit strapped, but there is plenty of spectrum left over from the demise of the old broadcast TV just sitting out there.  I'm sure all of that can be pressed into service in no time at all, legally or otherwise.</p> <p>Expect all of that in the 5 to 15 year time horizon.</p> <p>You couldn't live without your cellphone, right?</p> <p>And as you don't give a flying whoop about government data capture for them, then you certainly won't mind government knowing all of that information I've just outlined, right?</p> <p>If you want a National Sales Tax, just imagine how easy THAT would be to implement and NOT even require the seller to get it: they can charge you on your purchases DIRECTLY without any of that messy privacy stuff because you signed it away.  Why bother with a middle-man when you can just grab that information DIRECTLY FROM YOU CONSTANTLY.  By giving the government the power to tax individual purchases it is given a reason to collect that data.  And why do it on the bulk side when you can get far more in revue AFTER the mark-up has been put in place?</p> <p>And finances are not even the start of it.</p> <p>Messy divorce?  Those details will now never go away because of social media.  Have a lover on the side... and how short a time is it until that is found out?  Paternity test shows that the husband is not the father?  Spend too much?  Spend too much time with friends and neglect your children?  Pregnant?  Every argument that is captured by these devices will be put up for constant reminder to you of your past.  They will not go away.</p> <p>This will be wonderful for exercise!  Your doctor and the IRS can see just how much of it you do, when you do it, how often and what you do.  Sex, too, of course since that is mere exercise, you know?  What is your favorite position?  How often?  How much?  And if you forgot and kept those glasses where they can see what you are doing, then, really, its your fault, right?</p> <p>Your private life?  Gone.  And that is if, and only if, you do nothing today to not just celebrate Independence but to BE Independent.</p> <p>I have a couple of cellphones in the Faraday Cage.  Pay a fee to make sure I can get some connection in the case of a disaster if there are any surviving cell phone towers or at least ones that are powered up and working.  They are a few years old.  I don't use them for non-emergency purposes and I live without them.</p> <p>Beyond these blogs and a couple of places I sometimes leave commentary, I have no social media connection or contacts.  Period.  No FB, no Twitter, no LI, and that is fully and completely intentional. I keep a public e-mail account by a compromised company, the same one you are reading this from, BTW.  Always glad to use the enemy's tools against them.  </p> <p>Yes conservatives should be utilizing social media.  I am no conservative.</p> <p>If you saw the movie <em>Minority Report</em>, you have a sense of how this is going, outside of the putative storyline there are the surroundings of the characters that must be taken into account.  Advertising that is always addressing itself to you as you go through malls, along sidewalks, indeed everywhere there is a camera there is a means to follow and contact you.  Luckily you will be carrying the necessary tracking devices with you in your brand new HUD Mark X!</p> <p>I cannot live and get the necessary tools for being Independent without making on-line purchases.  You can spin-up real quickly by doing so.  Getting tools, fasteners, raw materials, equipment and the rest of it is done much faster via those channels and doing without them slows up a process that I do not have years to do.  Minimal exposure is about the best I can accomplish.  This isn't the 1970's or 1980's or 1990's, but the 21st century.   This is no longer an era where privacy can be assumed but must be protected actively, by you, against all intrusions no matter how seemingly benign they disguise themselves as for you to agree to them.</p> <p>And if life extension continues on at its current rate, this sort of thing will not leave you, forever.  No matter if you turn over a new leaf, the moment you do that is recorded.  Your first instance of failure is recorded.  Everything you do, say, purchase, talk to, and every movement you make will be recorded.  At that point you are no longer a citizen nor subject, but a lab rat who is no longer a person, no longer an individual, but just a collection of data to be devoured by companies and government.  Your pluses and minuses as a person all get recorded constantly because you agree to it and actively want it.  You will even pay for it.</p> <p>Yes, yes indeed you will pay for it.</p> <p>Forever.</p> <p>I will do my best to live to the attitude of <em>The Prisoner</em>:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">My life is my own.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">I am a free man.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Are you?</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-82590332778880480072013-06-16T00:03:00.001Z2013-06-16T00:05:29.016ZWhat policy in Syria?<p>Lee Smith notes at <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamas-syria-policy-mess_735325.html?nopager=1">The Weekly Standard</a> that Obama's Syria policy is a mess.</p> <p>I'll go further: Obama doesn't have a policy on Syria.</p> <p>If we had a policy of doing nothing, we would be doing nothing and Obama would be saying a lot about it.  Instead there is silence.</p> <p>We have armed the 'rebels' with MANPADs, of course.  Part of the Benghazi debacle that wound up with our Ambassador and 3 others dead was that the US was supporting the transfer of MANPADs from Libya to the Syrian 'rebels' via Turkey.  So there was that policy, which fell flat on its face.  That was the outcome of the Libyan 'policy' which spread al Qaeda and arms into northern Africa with predictable results.  Apparently no one has a real stomach for that sort of outcome with a WMD armed Syria.  </p> <p>Imagine chemical weapons use spreading through the Middle East by an al Qaeda victorious 'rebel' faction if Obama follows the Libyan policy.</p> <p>Grand, huh?</p> <p>So Russia and Iran are backing the Assad regime.</p> <p>Various others are backing the 'rebels', which are basically al Qaeda backed terrorists and a few renegade military regime members.</p> <p>And Obama's policy?</p> <p>You don't really want to back the WMD toting and using Assad.</p> <p>The rebels aren't what you would call 'westernized' or seeking 'a modern democracy'.</p> <p>Thus Obama has trouble saying who he would back and why.</p> <p>So here's an idea that fits with the American tradition and lets you know we have done something, without having to put boots on the ground.</p> <p>The regime is armed.</p> <p>The 'rebels' are armed.</p> <p>The general population is defenseless and unarmed by and large.</p> <p>It seems that there is one group that really needs protecting that could do a great job on their own if only they had weapons... </p> <p>The typical US solution?  Arm the population.</p> <p>A well armed society is a polite society, no?  I mean after the petty tyrants and hot heads get killed off, things get real polite.</p> <p>That is a viewpoint, of course, and biased on the idea that one's Natural Rights should be backed and that the right to Keep and Bear Arms is fundamental to a civil society, personal defense and liberty for the individual.</p> <p>Using that the general policy would be: buy up every black market AK-47 on the planet (they go for about $150 used on the black market and are a loss leader), purchase all the surplus ammo (7.62 x 39) that you can get your hands on, photocopy Arabic instruction manuals (French and English to, come to that) and then start airdropping these in cases to every farmhouse, every village, every tent you can get off of satellite.  Leave an additional message that when an area declares itself OPEN and FREE OF THE REGIME AND THE REBELS that more arms and ammo will be airdropped when you leave a BIG SIGN on a nearby hillside or painted on rooftops of SEND MORE, PLEASE.  More or less weekly.</p> <p>This will:</p> <p>1) Drain the small arms black market of AK-47s, which has been a big objective of nearly every major power for decades.  Ask Ollie North for help, he can point you to black market arms dealers.</p> <p>2) It will put a run on AK ammo.  Sorry, that is the way the cookie crumbles.  This is generally a good thing, though, as the regime will be well supplied with 7.62 x 39 and so will the rebels as the AK platform is Russian backed and ubiquitous to any insurgency.  The locals should be able to get more ammo with a few thousand rounds per weapon to start with.  It becomes self-sustaining when rebels or the regime attack such areas with boots on the ground.</p> <p>3) It breaks up the logjam in Syria no end. The Kurds in Syria have been getting arms from someone (not the US as that would be a rational thing to do, and not the Iraqi government, either, as they are PO'd that this is happening), so with a lot of local reinforcements there should be some fracturing of Syria with a possible aim to creation of a Lesser Kurdistan or a Greater Iraq.  That will distract Iran no end as these areas are generally Sunni in nature, which will change the power balance in the Middle East.</p> <p>4) It will horrify the Turks as they are backing the 'rebels'.  Sorry, that's payback for what you did with us before OIF.  Obama can point out he is saving them money because it costs a lot to be a part of NATO and the EU.  And sorry about the Kurds getting restless again in Turkey, but, you know, Post World War I treaties and all that.  International Law.  The US didn't sign on to shafting the Kurds.</p> <p>5) The Left has been so hot about arming those without arms in so many Red areas that it isn't funny.  All under the verbiage of saving 'the people' of a country.  So when you do that directly they will COMPLAIN and it can be pointed out that this is what they have called out for in the past that it isn't funny.  Obama should be good at that, tweaking his old pals and saying that this is the sort of thing they ASKED FOR NOW ISN'T IT?  He's just being ideologically consistent... yeah, as if he had an ideology beyond screw everyone.  But the Left hasn't been well screwed yet and their time is just about here for Obama.  The Royal Shaft of the BOGU group.</p> <p>6) Obama can jaw about how innocents need to be able to protect themselves against tyrants and terrorists!  And they are Islamic to boot!  America befriends Muslims! Heh.</p> <p>No this will never happen as it would take a conniving, back-stabbing, double-crossing Lefitst to do this.</p> <p>Say, wait, don't we have one of those in the White House?</p> <p>Boy wouldn't that be a great distraction from the NSA, IRS, spy and intimidate YOU policy?  Now people would have something to complain about as he would be FOR gun control at home, but against it abroad.  What a commotion that would cause to try and distract YOU from the spying on YOU scandal and the Amnesty Illegals to Fundamentally Screw YOU legislation that the dipsticks Upon the Hill want to pass to screw YOU over Royally.</p> <p>Pure and utter chaos would be the result.</p> <p>Seems that is what Obama wants, no?</p> <p>So just offering a friendly tip to the President on how to bring it about.</p> <p>Get a new policy for Syria Mr. President.</p> <p>Arm the general population.</p> <p>The "Let Them Figure It Out" policy.</p> <p>Or the "Lets you and them and those others fight" policy.</p> <p>Relatively cheap, barely topping a couple of billion which is, what, all the vacations and golf trips the President has taken, combined?  Very cheap as these things go.  Probably has that floating around as excess in someone's budget.  Foreign policy is the President's domain and we aren't actually entering INTO a war, just supplying Humanitarian Aid.  Because the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is a fundamental Human right in need of aid now, isn't it?</p> <p>This is better than the policy we have.</p> <p>Because we don't have one.</p> <p>And, really, do you want to arm al Qaeda backed 'rebels' who love to terrorize the people of Syria?  Haven't they suffered enough under the Assads?  How about letting them have a say in things for once? And you don't even need to 'Nation Build' as you're letting the locals figure out how to do that on their lonesome.  And we get to PO Putin, Iran, al Qaeda, Assad, Hezbollah... wouldn't that be fun?  And they couldn't even complain that we were supplying sophisticated arms, training or much of anything else beyond old fashioned 'vintage' and used AK-47s.  And the Black Market arms dealers will love you until they realize that the US has just made the AK-47 the most expensive small arms to deploy in mass quantities because we bought them all and redistributed them to Syria.  And I do mean every single one that can be purchased by that route: clean out the inventory.  Lock, stock and barrel.  Then start in on the AK-74s.</p> <p>A well armed people form a polite society.</p> <p>Want a good outcome in Syria?</p> <p>Arm the people of Syria to the teeth so that when anyone says anything bad about someone else, the result is immediate and lethal.</p> <p>Those that are left are polite.</p> <p>And maybe a bit trigger happy, given, but that gets you that polite society.</p> <p>Arm them all.  Let them figure it out as WE SURE AS HELL CAN'T.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-16058540429327952952013-06-11T17:26:00.001Z2013-06-11T17:26:13.325ZProcess that Preserves<p>I've written about the problems of the NSA surveillance of Americans in <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2013/06/presumed-guilty.html" target="_blank">Presumed Guilty</a>, and will switch from that to the man who actually revealed the NSA PRISM program and fled to Hong Kong: Edward Snowden.</p> <p>I am not going to pre-judge his actions, but note that they are in violation of the law with presumable harm to National Security involved.  Like any other person accused of a crime he deserves his day in court and I recommend that he do come to a US Embassy and publicly relinquish himself for a public trial.  It will take time for the enormity of his actions to hit Mr. Snowden and when that happens it is my dearest wish that he does come in from the cold.</p> <p>Really that is the best course of action as the one he is on now leaves him open to accusations and no closure that a trial provides.  If he truly believes he did the right thing then, while he does have much to fear from the legal system, it is a system and it has a process to it.  It is a process that preserves rights and liberty of our citizens.</p> <p>As I outlined in Presumed Guilty, Amendments IV, V and VI put together the legal system to be followed with in the US and it is one of presumed innocence at the start with the onus of proof of wrongdoing falling to the accuser.  It is a process where the accuser must gather evidence, seek warrants for more information from a judge, and present that evidence in a public court so that the accused has an opportunity for a public trial by jury.  There have been numerous prior proceedings involving secrecy laws and the information within them and the procedure of reading on a judge, attorneys and jury is well understood and well known.</p> <p>Truly the government need only show that the program was compromised.</p> <p>I presume that Mr. Snowden's defense was that in his view the program was unconstitutional either in its basis or execution, and that his Oath required him to reveal the program to the American people as a whole.  Most of the attention is being put to Amendment IV:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong><font color="#9b00d3">Amendment IV</font></strong></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>As Mr. Snowden is pointing out that the NSA collection of information on American citizens in a wholesale manner is not only not allowable without a warrant, but that the whole of the people cannot be suspected for crimes of particulars done by individuals.  Thus even if the FISA court gave a Warrant for such activities, that Warrant is in violation of the Constitution: Warrants are for cases of individuals or small groups, not the entire population of the US.  If the NSA sought such a broad Warrant then it is in violation of the Constitution by seeking such and not narrowing its scope down to particulars and individuals.  If there is a Constitutional breach at that point it can have one of three sources, it it has happened:</p> <p>1 – Judicial lack of oversight and not putting a narrow scope to data collection to protect the liberty and freedom of Americans.  You are presumed innocent of a crime and when the Executive asks for data on you via a warrant you are then suspected of a crime.  The entirety of the American people cannot be suspected of a crime and it is incumbent on the Executive to narrow the procedure down to likely individuals and their associates, not the whole of the People.  By not recognizing this basic piece of logic, the Judicial branch in authorizing such a Warrant can be found in breach of the Constitution.  At that point the Warrant is rescinded and all individuals not associated with suspected terrorists are removed from the data stores in their entirety, including all back-ups.</p> <p>2 – Executive branch problems can fall into the area of not interpreting the law correctly and creating an unconstitutional execution of it via programs.  In this instance a law would be Constitutional but the PRISM concept would be violating basic protections and freedoms of the People as a whole and in their individual particulars.  Any program so ill-crafted as to need all of the data on all of the people to find the very few who may be supporting terrorists is so ill-conceived that it points to a basic and systemic problem in not just the program but in those who created and authorized it.</p> <p>3 – Legislative works are not always found to be Constitutional and Congress may have given a law that contravenes the basic protections of the American people as a whole and as individuals.  The entire scope of the law may be so ill-created and ill-conceived that no one doing the process of approving it in Congress realized just how wrong-headed it was.  However if Congress did craft the law properly, but was not informed of the scope of the resulting program and what it entailed, then that is a failure of the Executive branch to properly inform the Legislative branch about the implementation of the program.  If the law, itself, is the fault then it lies with Congress at the very passage of it and all programs and functions created by it go away, and the data stores are destroyed.  A lack of Executive accountability, however, puts the Executive at jeopardy for not performing a duty to Congress as required by Congress so that Congress can exercise oversight.  In this instance a program and law can be Constitutional but both Mr. Snowden and all who are in the Executive reporting chain can be held accountable for not properly accounting the program to Congress.</p> <p>These are the possible problems that Mr. Snowden may have seen and the remedy for his defense is not in Amendment IV, the basis for his revealing the program which he sees as problematical, but in Amendment VI:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong><font color="#9b00d3">Amendment VI</font></strong></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">In all criminal prosecutions, <strong>the accused shall enjoy the right to</strong> a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to <strong>be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.</strong></font></p> </blockquote> <p>This procedure in which the prosecution hands over all its collected evidence to the accused and opens those items up to further scrutiny by the accused is known as 'discovery'.  When getting a Warrant the Executive seeks to discover more information about someone and when it accuses them that information is then handed over.  That scrutiny is critical because the defense must be allowed access to exculpatory information in the way of witnesses and documents.</p> <p>In this case the discovery would presumably happen on the PRISM program within the NSA.</p> <p>The scope of it would be limited to those documents and procedures that detail the entire history of the program from its original emplacement in a Bill and authorized by Congress, to the implementation and creation of it, to how it functioned so that the Executive demonstrates that it is doing a responsible job in executing the program and properly informing Congress of it on a basis set by Congress.</p> <p>The defense would not actually want much in the way of things like hardware, software, and who is running which piece of equipment as those would be a distraction and not relevant to the defense.  What is wanted is the high level Legislative enabling Bills and then how the Executive processed those to programs, with given scope and necessary high level overview of the program, and then how it proceeded over time.</p> <p>The defense has multiple ways to demonstrate that Mr. Snowden operated under his Oath and duties to the Constitution and need but show how the scope of PRISM contravenes the power granted to the federal government in any single particular: with just one Constitutional problem he is vindicated.</p> <p>An accuser has the power of the State behind them, but in this case it would be relatively open and shut if there is a strong belief that PRISM did all of the following:</p> <p>1 – Is a Constitutional power granted to Congress.</p> <p>2 – The Executive properly carried out the power that Congress enacted.</p> <p>3 – The Executive properly ran the program within the scope of the power grant from Congress for the program.</p> <p>4 – That no Warrants exceeded the Constitutional limits placed upon the NSA.</p> <p>5 – That the Judicial branch did not improperly authorize any Warrant for the PRISM program.</p> <p>6 – That the Executive branch kept Congress properly informed about the program so that Congress could give scrutiny to it so that the program was being run to their satisfaction.</p> <p>Even though 6 is not a killer to getting a guilty verdict, it then opens the entirety of the reporting chain to prosecution.  And that opens up whole bunches of cans of worms because when the NSA goes rogue and lies to Congress, there is a huge problem in the National Security establishment, all the way up to the DNI who said that such programs didn't even exist nor collect data on American citizens.</p> <p>So it is my dearest and most sincere wish that Mr. Snowden turn himself in because his worries of <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2007/10/incredible-lightness-of.html" target="_blank">Triad contacts</a> inside the US political establishment <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-dont-you-know-and-why-wont-they.html" target="_blank">are valid</a>, and drones are not the only thing in the clandestine arsenal that can take out an individual overseas.  And even <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2008/03/connecting-some-dots-between-candidates.html" target="_blank">Russia isn't safe</a>, either, come to that.</p> <p>If you are a supporter of the PRISM program then you want Mr. Snowden brought in for trial because you believe it will withstand Constitutional scrutiny.  Really, there is little to worry about in that instance if you believe that.</p> <p>If you are not a supporter of the PRISM program then you want Mr. Snowden to come in on his own and then support him to get the best crack team of lawyers who know the security laws and how to dance them.  People used to chasing down bureaucratic paper trails, using documents to build a defense and showing just what the scope of the PRISM program actually is.  You don't get that with finger-pointing and argument, but with a court case.</p> <p>And if you simply want Justice to be served, you want Mr. Snowden to come in or be brought in to trial.  If he acted properly in his assessment of the PRISM program, then he will be vindicated and the program shattered in public disclosure after he is found innocent.  And if he is guilty and the program is Constitutional and legally constructed and run, then the security apparatus will ensure that the information in the trial doesn't see the light of day.</p> <p>If the entire process, including the Judiciary, has been corrupted thoroughly, then a trial will also show that, quite well.</p> <p>Being on the run is only a temporary phenomena and you either find a safe haven, get brought in to trial or wind up dead because you know far too much and a trial would reveal that and possibly more.  If Mr. Snowden winds up dead, you will know that is exactly the case.  And then we have a real problem on our hands because someone no longer wants the process to preserve the system.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-90799004913495769542013-06-03T12:08:00.001Z2013-06-03T21:39:47.412ZIdeology of Tyranny<p>Recently I've looked at how Russia has moved from a Communist State to a Police State run by the secret police.  This shift from totalitarianism via political ideology derived from Marx to one derived from the pure use of power is one that is a direct flow, culturally, in Russia dating back to the early Czars all the way to Vladimir Putin.  The horror of such a regime isn't in its biased enforcement of laws to keep a regime elite in power, but in the violation of the social compact with those that merely try to enforce an equality of law upon all citizens.  That is the <a href="http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2013/04/end-game-against-freedom.html" target="_blank">End Game Against Freedom</a> article that centers on a film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in <em><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Poisoned-by-Polonium/dp/B005IC517C">Poisoned by Polonium</a></strong></em>.  Litvinenko attempted to simply put down a moral basis to do his job of law enforcement so that the law could be upheld in a neutral manner.  This was inside the FSB, the secret police organization that traces its roots directly back to the Cheka of the Czars, and he had an entire unit of men who also viewed with horror the things they were being asked to do to keep the regime in power: harass citizens, extort money from businessmen, plant evidence, use blackmail on judges, and even murder those who had the temerity to simply want a common law enforced for everyone.  Not only was the man they were going after inside the police, but he upheld an ideological point of view that Litvinenko's unit was in agreement with.  The men of the unit went on record as to what they had been ordered to do, who ordered them to do it, and why they thought they had been given such orders.  By revealing that the secret police, as individuals and units, had their own, separate funding garnered by extortion and blackmail of businesses, this unit had exposed how a secret police can act secretly even to its own budget to the enrichment of the police officers involved.  From Alexander Litvinenko:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Everyone realizes I don't know any secrets.  The only secrets I know are about organized crime and corruption, and they can't legally be considered state secrets.  Even if I wanted to work for British intelligence, I have nothing to tell them.  How can I be a traitor to my country?</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Why are they so angry with me?</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Because I have spoken about the one thing that is important, holy to them.  One officer said to me, "You can out all our agents, to hell with them.  We'll recruit new ones.  But you did one deadly thing.  You made public our system of earning money.  Do you want us to use the underground?"</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">That is why they hate me so much.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>In any normal society this would be the activity of organized crime, but in Russia there is a political blending between the FSB and organized crime: between the State and criminals. I went over that in <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2008/07/taste-of-oil-for-food-and-its-chefs.html">A taste of Oil For Food and its chefs</a>, and it works out like this:  Marc Rich (the man who was on the run from FBI prosecution and who would be pardoned by President Clinton at the behest of Eric Holder) ran in a predatory investment environment so that he was willing to invest in places where there were either sanctions against investing or steep penalties for doing so, so that he could make money off of troubled regions of the world.  Russia, just in the post-USSR period, was very troubled in that it had no foreign cash reserves and its industrial base had no owners and no way to run things.  Organized crime in Russia had cash, and so did Marc Rich and together they were able to get legislation put in place that would allow criminal money to be used for purchasing ex-State run industries.  From that there were three types of owners for these businesses at the start of modern Russia: the State, Organized Crime, and corrupt outside investors.  This is a pattern from Marc Rich of finding raw materials concerns in foreign Nations that have limited access to markets via sanctions, purchasing those goods at a pittance, and then working those black market goods into the grey and open markets.  In Russia this was augmented by a process of 'tolling' which was exchanging goods from the USSR for cash, and not having any taxes to pay for the importation of any other goods.</p> <p>When dealing with sums involved in such transactions the banking system must be used, and it was (and still is) relatively porous to criminal funds moving through the global financial system. In my article on the <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2007/11/red-mafia-and-its-connectivity.html" target="_blank">Red Mafia and its connectivity</a>, I outline how the Bank of New York was penetrated by at least one organization of the Red Mafia (and because it still has not been thoroughly investigated, no one can say for sure just what the current extent of the penetration actually is nor how many organizations have penetrated it) that was moving $70 billion worth of funds and transactions over a period of years between other Nations and Russia.  Most of that was for Oligarchs, yes, but there are definite tracks that lead to an outfit run by the Chernoy brothers, who used the unique method of not being computerized and having one brother with an eidetic memory to remember where all the paper front companies were.  Literally no one working inside their main front organization actually suspected that the transactions that were taking place were between off-shore companies stood up just for the length of the transaction and then dissolved soon thereafter.  Without a paper trail, no one can be prosecuted, and that unique approach means that just how much illicit money through drug running, extortion overseas, white slavery and murder for hire went through the system is unknown.  What can be said is that one large swindle involving Semion Mogilevich in the YBM Magnex scandal netted $1 billion over its 4 years of operation in cornering the permanent magnet market via illegal trades.  Note that this was the Canadian market that was penetrated by a Russian operation started by a Red Mafia leader in Virginia, USA, with funds then being funneled through the penetrating group of the Bank of New York in NYC and then filtered out to Cypress, where Mogilevich had a holding company, and then filtered into Russia to support his organized crime syndicate that stretched all the way from Moscow to China.</p> <p>This puts the life and times of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Khodorkovsky-Mikhail/dp/B00917IQ8G"><strong><em>Khodorkovsky</em></strong></a> a documentary by Cyril Tuschi ), which I went through in <a href="http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2013/04/end-of-moral-state.html" target="_blank">End of the moral State</a>, into fine focus.  The USSR had no banks, no one had a checking or savings account, nor credit cards, nor owned stock or bonds in companies.  Yet the Red Mafia had been dealing with capitalist regions for decades, faced brutal repression in the USSR and became far more brutal because of the repression.  Khodorkovsky saw the need for a banking system in Russia if it was to make a post-Communist transition, but knew little of what banks were, what they did or how they operated.  Those few with any cash standing up Menatap Bank had to go to Great Britain's banking industry for help on just the basics, and that also led to problems in those early days of keeping track of just where funds were coming from.  Surely funds coming from a well established, well known Western global banking system were secure, right?</p> <p>Yet that was not the case and Menatap suffered because it was becoming known as a conduit for funds that was not transparent, did not keep open books and was suspected of helping to funnel organized crime funds into Russia.  This was the result as seen from Irina Yasina journalist who worked with Khodorkovsky to help establish his education works and who was the director of Open Russia:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">At some point, Yukos was also a non-transparent company.  Minority shareholders were treated badly and no quarterly reports were submitted, like in the West.  That's what it was like in the beginning. After a series of scandals, Khodorkovsky understood:  If you make a company transparent, you attract investment.  He learned from his mistakes and knew this would also make money.  So it was actually a business project.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>What happened is that Mikhail Khodorkovsky learned the basis for a capitalist system:  open books and transparency of accounts.  This would wind him up in Siberia, now having his sentence extended by the Putin regime for a third time because he was running an organization that could no longer be extorted for funds.  Both Menatap and Yukos would demonstrate that the fundamental requirement for a working capitalist system is open accounting, transparency and equal application of the law to all businesses with favoritism towards none.  This changed the course of Khodorkovsky's life and businesses from those that were not transparent with few willing to invest, to ones with open transparency and books and loads of investors.  Going from nothing to the richest man under 40 on the planet in less than a decade can be done legally, and Khodorkovsky proved it.  If he had not actually pushed back against the corrupt politicians put in place by the FSB, he would now be the richest man on planet Earth.</p> <p>What did he run up against?</p> <p>Again from the Litvinenko film:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">In our country, the special services are, in fact, a secret political organization that uses sharp methods, secret methods, not against spies and terrorists, but solely to keep a ruling class in power.  In 1999, for example, to seize power, the FSB used secret methods that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.  If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns and fly in with jets maybe.  But everyone would notice. The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods, and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government and seized every organ of power.  If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party, then the FSB is the armed unit of – of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>In the USA, Congress has been willing to hand over more and more policing powers not just to individual agencies (which they are allowed to do) but to larger police organizations which now fall under the Dept. of Justice rubric.  Further the tax collection system has also garnered not only its own policing powers but its own court system, which is run to the interest of collecting taxes, not protecting individual rights and freedoms.  Under the guise of 'financial penalties' Congress has empowered the IRS to use both jail time and punitive fines as coercement techniques and that has now spread via special 'categories' of companies to allow the forceful hand of the elite to put pressure on citizen political concerns.  If the IRS were to seize power by disenfranchisement of individuals through: suppression of freedom of speech,  suppression of freedom of association, intimidation tactics against not just those wishing to start companies but their families, donors and families of donors, discourage the citizen's protected right to directly address government, and then hold the penalty of perjury over any wrong detail... would you notice?</p> <p>This coercion and intimidation did not start with the election of Barack Obama, no this had started long before that.  Long before Richard Nixon threatened to do this.  Coming from <a href="http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa12.htm" target="_blank">The Federalist #12</a> (Courtesy: constitution.org) by Alexander Hamilton we get this view on taxation after looking at wartime taxation:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">But it is not in this aspect of the subject alone that Union will be seen to conduce to the purpose of revenue. There are other points of view, in which its influence will appear more immediate and decisive. It is evident from the state of the country, from the habits of the people, from the experience we have had on the point itself, that it is impracticable to raise any very considerable sums by direct taxation. <strong>Tax laws have in vain been multiplied; new methods to enforce the collection have in vain been tried; the public expectation has been uniformly disappointed, and the treasuries of the States have remained empty</strong>.<strong> The popular system of administration inherent in the nature of popular government</strong>, coinciding with the real scarcity of money incident to a languid and mutilated state of trade,<strong> has hitherto defeated every experiment for extensive collections, and has at length taught the different legislatures the folly of attempting them.</strong></font></p> </blockquote> <p>And then further on:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d"><strong>In France, there is an army of patrols (as they are called) constantly employed to secure their fiscal regulations against the inroads of the dealers in contraband trade</strong>. Mr. Neckar computes the number of these patrols at upwards of twenty thousand. This shows the immense difficulty in preventing that species of traffic, where there is an inland communication, and places in a strong light the disadvantages with which the collection of duties in this country would be encumbered, if by disunion the States should be placed in a situation, with respect to each other, resembling that of France with respect to her neighbors. <strong>The arbitrary and vexatious powers with which the patrols are necessarily armed, would be intolerable in a free country.</strong></font></p> </blockquote> <p>In the modern USA all attempts to garner more and more money for government by taxation has found that after a certain point the increases become detractions to revenue generation, as was demonstrated by Art Laffer.  Yet tax regulation has gone inexorably upwards, more and more power over personal information is vested in the IRS, and it now has an army of agents willing to roam the land to enforce its own form of political viewpoint AND use arbitrary and capricious audits against not just businesses but individuals as well to both garner revenue and suppress speech.  And as the IRS is the agency put in to the role of collecting your medical information under Obamacare, the inroads and reach of the US federal government into the lives of individuals is about to increase many fold.</p> <p>This, too, was seen by Hamilton:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">What will be the consequence, if we are not able to avail ourselves of the resource in question in its full extent? <strong>A nation cannot long exist without revenues. </strong>Destitute of this essential support, it must resign its independence, and sink into the degraded condition of a province. This is an extremity to which no government will of choice accede. <strong>Revenue, therefore, must be had at all events.</strong> In this country, <strong>if the principal part be not drawn from commerce, it must fall with oppressive weight upon land</strong>.<strong> It has been already intimated that excises</strong>, in their true signification, <strong>are too little in unison with the feelings of the people, to admit of great use being made of that mode of taxation</strong>; nor, indeed, in the States where almost the sole employment is agriculture, are the objects proper for excise sufficiently numerous to permit very ample collections in that way. <strong>Personal estate (as has been before remarked), from the difficulty in tracing it, cannot be subjected to large contributions, by any other means than by taxes on consumption</strong>. In populous cities, it may be enough the subject of conjecture, to occasion the oppression of individuals, without much aggregate benefit to the State; but beyond these circles, it must, in a great measure, escape the eye and the hand of the tax-gatherer. As the necessities of the State, nevertheless, must be satisfied in some mode or other, the defect of other resources must throw the principal weight of public burdens on the possessors of land. <strong>And as, on the other hand, the wants of the government can never obtain an adequate supply, unless all the sources of revenue are open to its demands, the finances of the community, under such embarrassments, cannot be put into a situation consistent with its respectability or its security</strong>. Thus we shall not even have the consolations of a full treasury, to atone for the oppression of that valuable class of the citizens who are employed in the cultivation of the soil. <strong>But public and private distress will keep pace with each other in gloomy concert; and unite in deploring the infatuation of those counsels which led to disunion.</strong></font></p> </blockquote> <p>The wants of any government can only be met by totalitarian excesses of control of all parts of the economy: and yet even that will not fund it nor will it guarantee security and, in failing that, it will lose respect and support.</p> <p>In Russia the secret police (Cheka, KGB, FSB) gained control by infiltrating all levels of law, and then moving into politics to control all levels of the economy.  Taxation plays only a small role in Russia where the population has never had a democratic expression of the popular will without the influence of the elite or organized crime, when the two can be told apart from each other.  Vladimir Putin swindled St. Petersburg, Russia of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in what was supposed to be a goods for food arrangement with Western Europe.  The goods went out and he pocketed the cash, and formed a money laundering bank that then reached out to the Colombian cartels.  With that personal money he was then able to help push the FSB forward with political candidates directly FROM the FSB, so that the second generation of laws could be geared towards the FSB and the elite, with the FSB serving not only on the criminal apprehension and prosecution side of things, but also serving as 'advisors' to courts and judges, letting them know who to judge guilty.</p> <p>In the USA we have a system of politicians using the laws to create an arm of government that reaches into the financial and now health concerns of every American and suppresses attempts by citizens to form organizations to cut all of government down to an accountable size, remove broad powers from unaccountable agencies and their agents, all while trying to keep out of a court system run by and for those same agencies and agents.  On the DoJ side there are abuses of power under the rubric of National Security to wiretap journalists without informing those organizations they are tapping of who they are tapping and why they are tapping them and how long such taps will be used, and for what purposes as is required by law.  Further the DoJ goes 'judge shopping' to find a judge who will sign off on such open-ended, clandestine wiretaps, all to try and find out who the sources for a journalist are when that journalist is exercising First Amendment rights.</p> <p>That same DoJ is given oversight on running the BATFE and then abusing that privilege by sending unaccountable arms to organized crime across the border and even overseas, without using proper IMEX treaty controls to do so, thus contravening not just federal law but international law as agreed to by the USA and places like Mexico and <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2011/07/11/operation-castaway-did-atf-sell-guns-to-honduran-gangs-too/" target="_blank">Honduras</a>.  Those arms then filter back into the USA via those criminal organizations, and has led to the death of Brian Terry and other federal agents inside the USA.  This is only surpassed by the State Dept. running arms to other organized crime organizations in Mexico, moving Libyan MANPADs to 'rebels' in Syria affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda and then not bothering to protect Ambassador Stevens when the same jihadi-based organizations we got to protect him then turned on him, thus obscuring just which arms were shipped into and out of Libya and by whom.</p> <p>Apparently there is another group of elites in the world who see fit to use the government of the USA and its organs against the people of America and who then create disorder overseas via US federal agencies and organs to their own ends which are neither legal nor lawful in any way, shape or form.</p> <p>Do note that this is caused by both parties in the USA, over a number of decades and slowly built to control not just the lives of American Citizens, but to bring to heel multiple Nations through different means via the utilization of corrupt politicians with the Ideology of Tyranny.</p> <p>What is that Ideology of Tyranny?</p> <p>Raw power for the elites in charge to terrorize the lives of the common man on all corners of the Earth.</p> <p>You can see it in small scale in Russia.</p> <p>It is about to be on your doorstep and the doorstep of billions of people across the globe.</p> <p>The only thing to stop it is each of us being awake, pointing out the outlines of such Tyranny, and continuing the civil discourse until the Tyrants can't take it any longer.  Then comes our Natural Right to protect ourselves, our loved ones, our property and our society against the inroads of such Totalitarianism.</p> <p>And, just so you know, the best form of attack to bring the Tyrants of the world up short: humor, derision, and just pointing out how damned stupid they are to think that power, control and force actually make THEM safe.  There are plenty of fine examples of elites with lopped off heads, spilled guts, sudden attempts to fly out of 10 story windows, and just plain old numbers on their backs so they can be worked to death by the thing they create.  In their attempts to make everyone heel to them, they always forget to heel themselves to any inner guidance beyond all consuming power.  All consuming power consumes all, including those doing the holding.  Laugh at them for their willful ignorance of history, deride them in thinking that a necessary evil can be given good things to do and not become a pure evil, and that societies are created amongst men and governments mere temporary things used to help sustain society and that when government attempts to become society it becomes its own enemy and will soon be attacking itself.</p> <p>You can't ask Litvinenko about that.</p> <p>You might get a word from Khodorkovsky.</p> <p>And you might just want to physically write down that you will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.</p> <p>Your life is your own.</p> <p>And smile when you do it.</p> <p>Tyrants hate those who smile in freedom.</p> <p>It will make you a target, but soon, very soon, the targets will all be pointing in at the elites.  When everyone else is the target, then you aren't in a good situation because it is you that are the violent one and it is you that are in the 10 ring: target all others and you become the target.</p> <p>And that day is also coming.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-74364878094194376842013-05-03T11:23:00.001Z2013-05-03T11:23:11.888ZObamacare train wreck and you<p>Commentary I left at <em><a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/02/reid-were-gonna-need-a-lot-more-obamacare-money-to-stop-the-train-wreck/" target="_blank">Hot Air</a></em> on Harry Reid suddenly realizing that the Obamacare system he helped to connive into being isn't solvent, needs way more cash and won't do what it was purported as its actual points of being... but it is a sinkhole of cash that is vast and black in the budget.  Just like SSA and the M&Ms and other entitlements.  The question is: what to do about it.</p> <p>The answer is simple and I've repeated it often in many ways, but here it is, again for this question:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Same answer to Obamacare as to the rest of the federal government:</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Start in the House… fund by agency… don’t fund some agencies fully or use funding towards other programs and leave Obamacare high and dry.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">There are a ton of programs you can kill by not funding them.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Just because a prior Congress wants it doesn’t mean a current Congress is obliged to fund it. There is no law against not funding these things, none at all. This requires a wholesale change of the R party in the House, particularly the sclerotic leadership. Obama can’t stop the House from not funding items, only keep on sending the bills back TO fund parts of agencies. If he wants to kill off some government agencies by killing their funding: LET HIM DO IT VIA THE VETO.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">And then THANK HIM to rub salt in the wounds.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Would he really not want to sign off on a downsized IRS? And to put the IRS FIRST to set the tone. Then HHS. Then FDA.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">You want this to happen? Then the House Republican ‘we have to fund everything other Congresses started’ contingent MUST GO. There is no law that says they MUST DO THAT. One Congress cannot bind another Congress via legislation and since the House holds the purse strings, it is there that fiscal rectitude must start. Not the Senate. Not the POTUS. Not the SCOTUS. You want to get a smaller government? Start at the US House of Representatives. Want to blame someone for the deficit? Also the US House. And the Debt as well. Surely for $3.2 trillion you can run a minimal government… if the debt service payments don’t EAT IT ALL UP, of course. </font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">That is the Obama goal to collapsing the Nation: create a debt so vast that even current revenue can’t support minimal payments.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Your Nation goes under, your currency becomes worthless, your savings disappear and no amount of POWER from DC can make that better because it CAN’T BE FUNDED ANYMORE. If we are very lucky there are two elections left before that happens. If we are unlucky there is only one. If our luck has run out, you have seen our last election as a free people.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Change doesn’t start in DC: it starts with you, holding DC accountable and telling them to ‘stop the spending’. Yes they aren’t listening there or on the compliant and submissive Left… they want a tyrant, a dictator, a despot… their freedom isn’t in question. Yours is. Act like a free man who expects government to be beholden to the people, live like a free man who expects to be held accountable for his misdeeds, and praise virtue whenever and wherever it appears and support it. You carry through the actions and you just might be able to protect your liberty and join with those who think like you to ensure them. </font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">There is a cost to this, of course. </font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Your money: gone. </font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Your savings: gone. </font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Your property: ravaged and destroyed. </font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">You: free to start over or die trying.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Remember I’m the guy in poor health who won’t survive for long if the system goes south. Yet I’m preparing for those losses as best as I can. Because my freedom is priceless beyond any value, and I am more than prepared to be impoverished to remove this system of petty tyranny of rules above law and those who think they are above any law making the rules for themselves. You can start now by pestering your Congresscritters. It won’t change them, but it will change you.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">ajacksonian on May 3, 2013 at </font><a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/02/reid-were-gonna-need-a-lot-more-obamacare-money-to-stop-the-train-wreck/comment-page-2/#comment-6945093"><font color="#9b00d3">7:11 AM</font></a></p> </blockquote> <p>This isn't about Obamacare.</p> <p>This isn't about our dysfunctional government of Progressive Elites.</p> <p>It is all about you and how you live your life.</p> <p>Want a better government?  Make sure you are a prepared to be a better person, first.  And help society to recover from the insane beliefs fostered by Marx and the Left for over a century about government being the source of your liberty.  It isn't.</p> <p>Government is instituted amongst men.</p> <p>Government does not exist first and creates man... sorry that isn't how it works.</p> <p>And the best government is self-government.</p> <p>Once you got that figured out, you begin to resent all these other governments trying to tell you how to live your life.  Then your choices start to become obvious and your path, simple.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-64765020634216998522013-04-15T12:55:00.001Z2013-04-15T12:55:03.345ZEnd of the moral State<p>This is a follow-up to my previous post on <a href="http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2013/04/end-game-against-freedom.html" target="_blank">End Game Against Freedom</a>.</p> <p>From the film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Poisoned-by-Polonium/dp/B005IC517C"><strong><em>Poisoned by Polonium</em></strong></a>, Litvinenko in his own words:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">Who is Putin?</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">We are told, "Wait till he's President, then you'll know."</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">Imagine someone becoming prime minister in Britain with people asking, "Is he a thief, or isn't he?"  The real issue here is human morality.</font> </p> </blockquote> <p>And then:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">In the Soviet Union, there were two ideologies: communist and criminal.  In 1991, the communist ideology died.  The criminal remained.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>What did Alexander Litvinenko do to get assassinated like he did?  When an esotaric radioactive isotope is ingested then you are beyond a simple murder and now must have the resources behind you to actually plan such a killing and acquire such material which is not readily available.  That is not the hallmark of the Red Mafia, which would normally just leave you dead someplace, anyplace, perhaps in public to make an example of you.  If the criminals want you dead, you are killed.  If you are made to suffer, that takes personal and private malice above and beyond simple criminal affairs.  When you see material involved that only a Nation with nuclear capacity and the ability to get, purify and deliver a short-lived isotope is involved you are now into State-enacted murder.  That is called: assassination.</p> <p>If this is the case then the crux of the matter is the knowledge he had, which everyone, even Putin, admits are not State secrets.  Litvinenko had no access to nuclear weapons or facilities and although he did serve in the military in Chechnya, he was not a high ranking officer in the command staff, but a low level tank commander.  So what is it that made him a target to be assassinated?</p> <p>Putin:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">Litvinenko knew no secrets.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>No State secrets, true.  But there are that other sort of secret that involves the State...</p> <p>Litvinenko:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">Everyone realizes I don't know any secrets.  The only secrets I know are about organized crime and corruption, and they can't legally be considered state secrets.  Even if I wanted to work for British intelligence, I have nothing to tell them.  How can I be a traitor to my country?</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">Why are they so angry with me?</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">Because I have spoken about the one thing that is important, holy to them.  One officer said to me, "You can out all our agents, to hell with them.  We'll recruit new ones.  But you did one deadly thing.  You made public our system of earning money.  Do you want us to use the underground?"</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">That is why they hate me so much.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>This system was to choose a series of private businesses and shake them down for money by threats of bringing prosecution against them.  As was explained earlier in the documentary, FSB officers are attached to courts as 'lawyers' and they serve as a conduit to inform judges what to do, either through bribes or threats of prosecution against the judge, or just through simple replacement of the judge.  Once you take a bribe, any bribe, a judge is then compromised to the FSB.  By outing such information to the public, Litvinenko became a threat and was tried for treason.  Although he had released no state secrets, only made public those things that the government officials wish kept private about how they shake down businesses.  The implication is that this goes beyond just the FSB, although that, alone would be bad enough.</p> <p>There is another reason for why Litvinenko was on the hit list, and that isn't discussed in this film.  He apparently had information on the murder of Vladimir Petukhov  the mayor in Nefteyugansk.  Before his death, Litvinenko had visited Israel and Leonid Nevzlin:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Yeah, I think in a way he held the door open with us.  He visit me three months, I think it was, before he was killed.  And he left some papers about what was really, because of some blames on me, what was really under this blame.  Because he was part of KGB and, for instance, he knew from the people in the KGB of the real case of the mayor of Neftyugansk, Petukhov.  So he left his evidence, names and etcetera, and who killed Petukhov and why he was killed...</font></p> </blockquote> <p>That is from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Khodorkovsky-Mikhail/dp/B00917IQ8G" target="_blank"><strong><em>Khodorkovsky</em></strong></a> a documentary by Cyril Tuschi and yet another film I recommend for those interested in liberty, freedom and morality.  A bit later in that interview Nevzlin would tell us that he passed that information on to Israeli police and Scotland Yard.  Here is an unexpected intersection between one of the oligarchs of Russia, the KGB/FSB, Putin, Litvinenko and the stark contrast between two sides of the suppression of liberty by State power.</p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky" target="_blank">Mikhail Khodorkovsky</a>, as the documentary examines, is an unusual case in the Russian post-USSR power struggle as he is not part of the functionaries of the State, in main the FSB, nor a part of the criminal class that infested the rule writing of the early Russian Duma.  In those early years there was a place for the type of people that Boris Berezovsky talked about with Nekrasov:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">B – What a price humans have to pay for knowledge.  How hard it is to rise above the common wisdom. </font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">N- Is it even more difficult for Russians, would you say?</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">B -  I know what you mean.  The Russian mentality is that of slaves. That's why the system of forced limitations is so welcome. So why then am I advocating liberalism in Russia?  Am I contradicting myself, advocating freedom for the Russians, going against the nation's character?  So, is Russia ready, which means her people ready to take up the responsibility of freedom? I think they are ready.  Because once the tyrannical dictate was lifted, millions of entrepreneurs appeared, a myriad of independent politicians and journalists appeared.  Russia turned out fully prepared for this crucial, historical step.  We only needed to move forward and consolidate that freedom.  And so my main conflict with the authorities today  is about individual independence.  All those stupidities – media controls, "vertical power" – have one result.  Destruction of freedom in the minds of Russia's citizens.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Of that new entrepreneurial class was a group that would start from the ground-up, and would attempt to actually put real capitalism into play in Russia.  Of those Mikhail Kodorkovsky is the most notable as he started with next to nothing to form a bank in Russia without even knowing how a checking account worked because there had been no banks, no checking accounts, no savings accounts, nothing like that in the USSR.  They had to ask experts in to teach them the basics of banking and they did make mistakes, but also made money as Bank Menatep was far more secure than anything else in Russia at the time, which is not to say that it was secure by Western standards as the scandals that came to it demonstrated.</p> <p>Bank Menatep would also fund a bid for the Yukos oil concern, which had been a State run oil system in the USSR.  Bids from outside Russia were excluded, and while there are complaints of corruption about that it must also be asked what government would want to hand over such a large concern to foreign owners?  If a reasonable and reliable bidder inside Russia could be found then why not hand it over to them?  It was sold at a fraction of its value at $300 million, which was a huge amount in those days in Russia.  </p> <p>Do remember that a few years previously there had been, effectively, $0 in Russia, and Putin's swindling of St. Petersburg via non-use of sold goods abroad was placed in its lower range at $92 million.  Yukos also had $3 billion in debt, so anyone who was purchasing it was getting a massive amount of debt and the responsibility to pay it off.  This was also in a period in which Saddam Hussein was effectively bottoming out the oil market by selling Iraqi oil far under market prices so as to depress the oil market.  Given that background and realizing that transparency was necessary for running the firm, one would have expected failure of Yukos.  Instead it succeeded, wildly, because it was a transparent, open organization that allowed public scrutiny of its affairs and transactions.</p> <p>From Irina Yasina journalist who worked with Khodorkovsky to help establish his education works and who was the director of Open Russia:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">At some point, Yukos was also a non-transparent company.  Minority shareholders were treated badly and no quarterly reports were submitted, like in the West.  That's what it was like in the beginning. After a series of scandals, Khodorkovsky understood:  If you make a company transparent, you attract investment.  He learned from his mistakes and knew this would also make money.  So it was actually a business project.</font>  </p> </blockquote> <p>And that made him rich, at one point the richest man under 40 on the planet and headed to become the richest man on the planet, period.  </p> <p>If oligarchs are to be deplored, and oligarchies which they are a part of, then what about an oligarch who is setting up a template for breaking up the oligarchical system?  Khodorkovsky and the people that came to Yukos were embodying a spirit that did not see them spend on lavish estates, fast cars and the high life, but something far different.  They did live in good homes, yes, but Khodorkovsky also started funding scholarships and schools.  It is forgotten that in the early days of US capitalism there were more than Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, but also Carnegie, Ford and Westinghouse.  Even Rockefeller would start building foundations, charities and just give money away.</p> <p>Cyril Tuschi:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">On the advice of an American PR firm, Khodorkovsky establishes in 2000 <a href="http://www.old.khodorkovsky.info/openrussia/" target="_blank">Open Russia</a> an organization to support education in Russia.  Khodorkovsky invests $100 million in universities, boarding schools, and training programs for journalists.</font> </p> </blockquote> <p>In Russia, which did not have such a foundation of moral philanthropy as we know it in the West, to find it suddenly appearing in the post-Soviet era in Russia is nothing short of astounding.  Khodorkovsky, even before he was charged with crimes under Putin's regime, had started that transformation by talking of the need for a civil society so that freedom can flourish.  </p> <p>From Khodorkovsky's mother, Marina Khodorkovsky:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Education! Mischa's central idea was, that democracy doesn't trickle top down.  It has to become a necessity from the bottom up. When people start to broaden their horizons, they start to think and develop other interests.  That was his core idea.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>There is a central dynamic in capitalism that is a moral one and it has to do not just with wealth but its uses.  Khodorkovsky writing from prison:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">I must thank prison.  In a way I am freer here than when I was leading the company. I'm only responsible for myself, here.  Here I've come to realize that owning assets, especially large assets, does not automatically make a person free at all.  As a co-owner of Yukos, I had to expend huge amounts of energy to protect this wealth.  I had to abstain from anything that might jeopardized my wealth. I also had to impose limits on myself, because speaking openly and frankly could have harmed those assets.  I had to ignore a lot and put up with many things all for the sake of my personal wealth, to preserve it and increase it.  Not only did I control this wealth, it controlled me, as well.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>These are not the words nor thoughts of a man in bed with a regime or criminal organization, but a capitalist with morals and ethics speaking about what acquired wealth does to one.  Unlike George Westinghouse, Mikhail Khodorkovsky hasn't learned the morality of ethical use of capital, but he has learned the basics that even Rockefeller had to learn: when you have so much wealth you are its prisoner as well as its owner and you are the one for your own sorry state of circumscribed freedom.  The only answer to this burden is to lessen it: Andrew Carnegie sold his entire company to J. P. Morgan, while Ford ensured of good worker pay so that they could afford to actually buy the products they made, and Westinghouse concentrated on improving the workplace, work hours, working conditions, and lives of his employees so that they could own the homes the lived in that had electricity and running water in them. </p> <p>Capitalism is based on providing goods that are wanted by individuals at the lowest price possible to make a profit so as to not only sustain but increase production, while lowering costs.  If no one wanted the goods or services provided, a company would go under, and yet we, in the West, now have a corrupted banking system and industrial system where companies are supported by the State and must answer to its tune.  All in the name of 'saving' such companies that rightfully deserve to fail.  If Yukos was barely able to support itself and had huge debt, then what does it say when the company is turned around, opens its books and becomes successful?  In other words it stepped free of regime support, learned what it means to be accountable to shareholders and then did the right thing to increase its transparency to increase its business and attract more capital.  </p> <p>At heart capitalism and companies are moral and ethical organizations of individuals while government is an organization of power.  When companies and governments work together it is to the detriment of the moral and ethical roots of capitalism and does nothing but make stronger the power of government over its citizens.  Contributing factory space, production time and other commodities at a low price to defend a Nation where a company resides is one thing.  To take orders from government in peace time on what to make, how to make it, how to produce it and then to kick-back money to campaigns and politicians is inherently immoral as it robs shareholders of their say in the company, and unethical as it puts those in charge of the company in the position of betraying shareholders for their own interests in a share of government power and support.  It is, in other words, fraud.</p> <p>Yukos was a very wealthy company and one of the wealthiest in Russia when Putin came to power.  This from Aleksey Kondaurov, former KGB general:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">The relationship between Putin and Khodorkovsky was in order.  They met regularly and discussed various issues. We had good relations with the government.  After all, the operation was really very powerful.  There was no other company like ours.  We were the country's biggest taxpayer.  We paid more taxes than Gazprom, who were bigger than us.  Which is why we had a good relationship with the secret service.</font> </p> </blockquote> <p>Via paying taxes, Yukos becomes something quite different than the other companies run by oligarchs who had non-transparent companies: a respected business.  Transparency, paying what you owe in taxes, paying off debt, gaining investors, and becoming rich are combined together and they cannot be separated.  Becoming rich is only a sin if it is your sole and only goal, and this was not the case with Mikhail Khodorkovsky who ensured that his business did the right things to demonstrate that it had responsibilities to attend to in the governmental affairs area via good relationships with government but also to support its civil duty to pay taxes like any good corporate citizen.  It was not there asking for special privileges, special monies, special projects or other such things in promises for political support from the company.  And the FSB, Putin's own organization, understood just who it was that was the largest taxpayer in Russia and appreciated that, respected it, save for at the very highest of ranks.</p> <p>Former Yukos lawyer, Dmitry Goldlobov recounts what happened:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Putin told them: "Okay guys, stay away from politics, okay?!" And everybody agreed.  Everyone nodded and said: "Okay".  Khodorkovsky nodded as well.  He didn't say: "Dear Mr. Putin, I won't stay away from politics! I'll be just in the Duma" or something.  He agreed.  And afterwards he violated that deal.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Why?  That idea behind Open Russia: a better educated civil society with many interests and a bottom up democratic institution.  To have that sort of institution, to get to a democracy, there needs to be a competition in ideas and ideologies.  And Litvinenko already told us what remained after the USSR in the way of ideology: criminal ideology.  If Boris Yeltsin had tried to build something better but was overcome by the corrupt institutions that remained, particularly the FSB but also the infiltration of the criminal class into business and politics, then what did Vladimir Putin represent?</p> <p>Litvinenko had outlined this, as well:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">In our country, the special services are, in fact, a secret political organization that uses sharp methods, secret methods, not against spies and terrorists, but solely to keep a ruling class in power.  In 1999, for example, to seize power, the FSB used secret methods that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.  If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns and fly in with jets maybe.  But everyone would notice. The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods, and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government and seized every organ of power.  If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party, then the FSB is the armed unit of – of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>If you are aware that to run an ethical concern, be it business or government, there must be transparency, and the man in charge and, indeed, the whole establishment of government, is not transparent but has a veneer of democracy on top of it, then what do you do?  Ethically you know that any agreement you make with such a government can be over-ruled by those in power at a whim.  In fact the FSB is particularly good at 'compromising' people and bringing false charges to conviction via a compromised judiciary process.  Without criminal, judicial or police help, just why would you stand by a corrupt government?  Even worse, what can you do to change it?  Khodorkovsky realized that any agreement he made with Putin was ephemeral as Putin had already been shown to be underhanded in his business and official dealings before coming to office.  A corrupt government does not gain the loyalty of ethical individuals be they citizens or corporations.</p> <p>For doing this, Khodorkovsky's bank had a sanatorium, the RUS, seized by the State.  This was a good if not the best hotel in town and its seizure was rumored to be done on Putin's orders for his wife, who liked the place.  No real legal pretext was given: assets were seized without any indications of having done anything wrong.  Khodorkovsky did nothing, at first, as this was an act of raw power by the Kremlin.  Other business leaders approached Khodorkovsky to speak out about corruption in the Kremlin during their annual, televised meeting with Putin on 19 FEB 2003. Leonid Nevzlin was his business partner and summarized it like this:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Khodorkovsky was asked to bring up the topic of corruption at the Kremlin.  I remember he was unsure whether he would or not.  But it had to be done on principle.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>And then Alexander Temerko, a former Yukos VP recounts:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Voloshin told Khodorkovsky: "TV will be there!  We'll instruct the stations to broadcast your speech about corruption! And Putin will definitely react in the right way."</font> </p> </blockquote> <p>That is charming naiveté, at best, as it must be remembered that this is the same Putin who deceived St. Petersburg, ran the KGB/FSB, worked to launder money for drug cartels in Germany and who had now taken offense that some business leader might actually be funding the opposition and responded by seizing assets using the power of the State to do so.  With those things known, and do choose just one or two before the seizure event, why would anyone expect Putin to act 'in the right way'?</p> <p>From Aleksy Kondaurov, a security advisor:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">At the meeting with Putin he said – and I think this sealed Khodorkovsky's fate – "We started the corruption process, so we should end it."</font></p> </blockquote> <p>From Igor Yurgens, Economic Advisor to President Medvedev:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">I was present at the meeting and I can tell you that, uh, uh, he handled that confrontation [?] in an arrogant manner.  To be objective I can tell you that sitting in front of the acting President accusing the President, practically, of covering up for the corruption in the State controlled oil company.  That was a little bit too much.  He could have chosen a more elegant way or less confrontational way, but what he said was true.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>And part of what was said at the meeting:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Khodorkovsky - Experts from our organizations analyzed the extent of corruption in Russia and all arrived at the same figure: it is estimated at $30 billion.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">Putin – You've mentioned the merger between Rosneft and Severneft.  I obviously feel that Rosneft's chairman should react to this and offer further explanation.  Although some aspects are immediately obvious: Rosneft is a state-run company which must increase its reserves.  Because these reserves simply aren't sufficient.  Some other oil companies, such as Yukos, have excessive reserves.  Yet how has Yukos achieved this?  That's a question we should discuss today. As well as payment or non-payment of taxes. We did discuss this with you previously, didn't we? Not long ago.  Your company also had difficulty paying taxes.  But respect is due to the management of Yukos – for coming to an agreement with the tax authorities – settling all claims and issues with the state.  But how were these problems created? Perhaps that is why so many people study tax law. Are you following me?  I'm hereby putting the ball back in your court.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>So what is Putin's point?  Yukos, by his own admission, has paid up on its taxes and is, indeed, the largest taxpayer in Russia.  It has large reserves of oil, yes, but gained via commercial activity as he puts no other activity forward that can explain that.  Marginal tax rates are not enough to make or break expansion of reserves and if he has complaints about what prior administrations did in awarding Yukos, then why doesn't Putin want those administrations investigated?  Of course he was the head of the FSB under those administrations and if he had anything at the time, he should have spoken up.  Of course there is that matter of SPAG with Putin sitting on its board and being head of the FSB while the company was charged and convicted of money laundering for drug cartels... perhaps he had other worries at the time, eh?</p> <p>What you see at work, however, is the head of a corrupt State, or soon to be head, dodging responsibility and transparency, while complaining that a transparent company that has done the right thing might be in the wrong.  If you bring up the Yukos reserves then what about Rosneft's inability to perform marginal expansion or just pay for oil on the open market, or purchase the rights from other companies to their reserves?  If there are any problems with Yukos on taxes then what about Rosneft and its main function of actually running its oil affairs competently?  This is how you cover up corruption at the State level: you blame the innocent or cast doubt on their legitimacy.  Any head of State that is pointing out all the wrongs in others, is in the process of casting them as not being upright while not addressing if he or she has the moral and ethical stature to actually accuse others of anything.  The more you hear haranguing, accusations, belittling, and bringing up past affairs that are ALREADY SETTLED, then you are hearing from someone who, themselves, have something to hide.</p> <p>It is this that is the indicator of a corrupt State.  If Vladimir Putin wanted to have businesses stay out of politics then, really, the State must stay out of interfering with businesses.  The moment a State decides to wield its power to tell companies what to do or actually purchases companies to be run by the State, then the companies involved have a right, duty and obligation to protect the assets they have from their shareholders and have direct input back into the State.  This is the heart of the process of corruption and collusion between a State, any State, and its business community.  It is one thing to uphold laws of transparency of accounting, keeping good books, and being accountable to shareholders and quite another thing to impose the power of the State towards State ends on private concerns.  Russia, of course, has an entire history of just this problem, going back to the Czars and including the entire history of the USSR and now the post-Soviet era.</p> <p>From this confrontation Khodorkovsky would attempt to get foreign companies, Exxon and Chevron, involved with Yukos not only to allow those companies into the Russian market but give Yukos a foothold in the American market.  He would establish a foreign outpost of Yukos in Houston, TX which would become the basis of such agreements and would also serve as a separate part of Yukos outside of Russian laws.  Of course this wouldn't do as it would make Yukos an independent, international concern.  This resulted in the arrest of Yukos leading official after Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev while he was in hospital and then whisked away to an FSB secret jail.  Isn't it wonderful when State run secret police have secret jails?  At that point Khodorkovsky started telling those close to him in the company and his family to get out of Russia because he didn't want any more hostages taken by Putin.</p> <p>The State sent people to Khodorkovsky trying to extort money from him so that they would leave him alone.  But he had already seen that sort of trap: once you give money like that you are on the hook forever and they can reneg on the agreement at any time and jack up the costs on a whim.  Besides, Yukos was transparent, had regular outside audits and published those openly.  Yukos had no money to give that could not immediately be seen, and Khodorkovsky had already said that he wasn't running away from Russia as a political exile.  Yukos had paid its taxes, settled any arrears and was in good standing as a taxpaying company.  He was, in other words, not giving into the temptation of easy corruption, an easy life.  That isn't his goal any longer, but for that longer vision of an informed Russian civil society, and he knows that he will pay a price to be on that road.</p> <p>Two days before his arrest giving a speech at Belgorod University, Mikhail Khodorkovsky said:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Elections alone won't build a civil society.  But it's a first step towards creating a normal state, in which it isn't merely pleasant to work, but also to live.  Let us build it together.  Thank you.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>And then in a television interview on Belgorod TV the day before his arrest:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Interviewer - You were in America when your Yukos offices were searched. But you still came back to Russia.  Aren't you afraid that men with handcuffs might suddenly turn up?</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">Khodorkovsky – As long as our country isn't fully a civil society, nobody is safe from the people with the handcuffs.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>The trial on tax evasion, itself, was a pre-determined affair run by the FSB and, ultimately, Putin.  Khodorkovky's denial for early release similar and hinged on missing a sewing class in jail, while otherwise being a model prisoner.  As his time in prison was running out Putin had him tried and convicted of other charges, stealing hundreds of millions of barrels of oil which, strangely, no one can find missing or hidden, anywhere.  Yet still he was convicted of doing the impossible.  The message was clear to those that followed Khodorkovsky's path in business or who hadn't thought that the State would reach out to seize any of the oligarchs: they fled Russia.  And who spoke out against this?</p> <p>The silence from the West is deafening.</p> <p>There were long standing groups working to free political dissidents in the USSR who dared speak out against the regime.  But Khodorkovsky, for all his insights into what it takes to have a civil society, gets no support.  A business man who has straightened up the ways of his company and himself, who supports a freer and more well informed society, who behaves with demonstrable morals and ethics can't get that.  Yet he did the right thing, by forming an organization with the goal of expanding the civil sphere, personally donating to schools and institutes, donating to a political opposition so that there could BE a political opposition that could get its ideas before the public.  Too bad it comes from a businessman and not some lowly transgendered artiste speaking in coffeehouses, huh?  The latter would get some press, at least.  An ethical businessman who happens to be the richest man under 40 on the planet?</p> <p>Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister of Germany about what happened after the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky with respect to Khodorkovsky and then Yukos a bit later:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">We had a vested interest in asking, can't we solve the Khodorkovsky issue –even after his arrest?  Can't we solve this, so that he might be released from prison? But Putin was highly emotional and totally rejected it. </font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">[..]</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">It concerned the property right at Yukos.  In respect of which the international part of Yukos filed a lawsuit with a Texas court.  The question was: How can the property rights of Yukos be transferred? We had a meeting with former German Chancellor Schroder, Putin and myself – and the Russian Foreign Secretary.  And we met on this sailing ship that's permanently moored in Hamburg, "Rickmer Rickmers" or whatever that ship is called.  We sat below deck. Putin was quite cheerful –wel, yes, in a good mood, saying: "Tomorrow, you'll see how it works!".  Exactly that day Yukos was put up for auction and suddenly an investment group from Novosibirsk, or Irkutsk, or wherever, turned up out of the blue, made a bid for Yukos.  And was awarded the rights.  They immediately sold them on to Rosneft and disappeared into thin air.  And with this trick, the address, at which a civil lawsuit in America could have been served, simply vanished.  And Rosneft could say, "I don't know what the problem is.  We acquired it lawfully.  Any issues you have with this investment group that doesn't exist anymore are not our concern".  Therefore the whole issue, at least, regarding the legal aspects, was rigged.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>That is what is left in the place of an ethical business situation: one in which a State-owned concern that can't manage itself well is given the assets via a rigged system that is opaque to all concerned in order to escape legal ramifications of seizure of property.  And those in power in the West who are elected officials and should be seeking to have other governments respect human rights?</p> <p>Again from Joschka Fischer:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">The world isn't what you imagine.  There are interests and values.  But the idea that there are human rights and we will enforce them by any means, is of course absurd.  Then you'd create the opposite of human rights.  That's not how the world works. </font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">Tuschi – But you're still quite an idealist when it comes to the world in general.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">Fischer – But I am also a realist.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">T – No, you are not at all.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Indeed our rights are endowed to us as individuals and governments are creations of man, not Nature.  Human rights cannot be enforced by governments at all.  It is, however, governments that have the responsibility to respect human rights as they are the creation of men.  Fischer is quite right in that government is not the enforcer of rights as that would make it the granter of rights.  With that said it is not absurd for people to seek to have governments respect human rights, especially those of their citizens.</p> <p>Milan Horacek, Human Rights Delegate in the EU government:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">In all my human rights work, this is the first time I've defended a capitalist, but they are also entitled to human rights.  Which is why I said in my plennary speeches that, at the age of sixty, I have now decided to defend rich people.  One can't distinguish between human rights for the young, old, poor or rich.</font> </p> </blockquote> <p>From Andre Glucksmann who covered some of this in the Nekrasov film:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">Putin's regime is a regime of oligarchs who own Russia in its entirety, who sell their oil themselves making a huge profits while 50% of the population lives below the accepted poverty line.  So it's a regime of profiteers.  But you may call it what you like.  Of the many types of capitalism, this is one of the worst if it's capitalism.  If it's socialism, it's also very ugly.  So it's -</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">Nekrasov – It isn't socialism.</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">G – Well it does have many socialist characteristics.  There is the power of the police, the power of the army, the absence of freedom of expression. Virtually totalitarian.  I also think there are rich men who have become strong supporters of public freedom, that's to say, the rights of man, social security and so on, who find themselves in deepest Siberia.  I mean Khodorovsky.  So I think it's necessary to support both the unemployed who demand food and the capitalists like Khodorovsky, who may be called a capitalist, but he is also for freedom.  On the other hand, we must condemn all those who suppress and prohibit freedom of expression.  In my opinion, Russia has gone back to something it had under the tsars.  Always – At some points, the possibility of real reforms, efforts for reform.  But under the tsars, under communism and today, it was and is an autocracy.  What your Putin calls "vertical power".  That's the way things are now. In my opinion, that's dangerous.  Not only for the Chechens who are being massacred without anyone allowed to say how awful it is, and not only for Russia that is being stifled, but also for the West.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>What we can get from these two films is that there is a deep sickness in Western culture as a whole as seen by the inaction of governments with regards to Russia.  But this goes further than just Russia or governments.  </p> <p>Again from Glucksmann:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#0000ff">You know, France, among the elite, has always suffered from the morbid influence of a Russian mirage.  Later it was the Soviet mirage, bit it had been a Russian mirage.  In the beginning, the French salons of the 18th century were full of admiration for Catherine II and, before that, Peter the Great.  Peter the Great was received by the French Academie just like Putin now.  Together with Bernard-Henry Levy and Philippe Sollers, I wrote a petition to say it was shameful. But there is indeed a kind of innocent and inane admiration, that is to say ignorant admiration, for a state that asserts itself as rational and Western in its appearance.</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">Nekrasov – So what about Chechnya?</font></p> <p><font color="#0000ff">G – That's a scandal!  But even Voltaire knew that Peter the Great had killed his son under torture.  But he tried to hide this fact.  There were also some partisans of Russia at the time of the philosophers, like Diderot.  But he went to see Russia, and though he could no longer protest openly – since he was paid by Catherine II – he left some papers in his drawer.  When Catharine read them, she was appalled.  What did he write?  He wrote, "The Russia of Catherine II has rotted before it ripened."  Instead of ripening, it has rotted.  I'd say its not just the leaders.  There is something wide-spread, a wide-spread malady that exists.  When Hermann Broch, the great Austrian writer, was asked in 1945, "So you think all Germans were fascists? Nazis?" He said no.  "So?" He said, "Listen, there are Nazis, and then there are those who let them come to power, who stood by and let it happen." And that includes all Europeans, without exception. There is then a crime of indifference that is even more fundamental because it is the condition that permits the Nazi crime.  The Nazi crime itself was committed by the Nazis and the part of the population of Germany and also of Europe, but only a part.  Yet the crime of indifference that first authorized the Nazis to take power, and later to wield it in the known way, that is a general crime committed by the Europeans, the leaders and also the population. The crime of indifference consists of closing one's eyes when criminal behavior begins.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Do you see governments trying to pick winners and losers for technology?</p> <p>How about bailing out banks and deciding which financial institutions need to go under and which should remain?</p> <p>Have you ever seen a government bail out a failing firm for any reason beyond saving some section of it for defense related purposes?</p> <p>The disease is socialism, and it doesn't matter if you call it International, National, Communism or 'The Third Way', it is a horror whenever it starts because it is utilizing the power of the State to bring society under its control via controlling its businesses either via outright expropriation (Nationalization, which means a bunch of bureaucratic cronies who don't know the business will run it) or via cronies and payoffs (which means a bunch of business people who don't know  how to run a business efficiently but do know how to grease palms is running it).</p> <p>Cronyism starts via 'subsidies' and the State telling private firms and individuals what they can do through enticement.  Or via rigging the market via 'regulations', which tend to favor larger firms over smaller, since they can grease palms more thickly.  Those that point this out as corruption become the targets for well funded political attacks, which then turns into laws limiting what you can and cannot say about such activities.  Those laws are enforced by some National government police system, which typically is a Secret Service.  Power is thus transferred bit by bit from government to just a single organ of it: the Secret Police.  It may start as a form of Praetorian Guard or some such, but at some point the leader of the Guard becomes the head of State.</p> <p>It is why the Red Guard was killed off by the Reds after the October Revolution: the State had the Cheka and it was far more efficient at finding threats to the State than the Red Guard was.  It is the reason the early Black Shirts in Italy were hunted down by the State.  And the SA by the SS in Germany.  Even the most fervent ideological supporters of the ruling caste found themselves on the outs when they were no longer necessary to grab State control.  In fact they were a threat to State control as they knew how to get up the rungs into power.</p> <p>And the population as a whole?</p> <p>Docile.  Not wanting to think about what the ends were of these means.  Lulled into poverty and then distracted by merely physical means, like hard drugs, sex, music and concentrating on frivolities while the State provided more and more of their lives until the State could decide who lived and who died.  That is the end-game of every Western terrorist group, and the object is to seize the State police power.  Mind you they never think that they can be destroyed by that same power once control over society is concentrated into the hands of the very few.  Men like Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky and Litvinenko are threats to this system as they tried to show the corruption at the heart of the State, did their best to educate themselves and then realized that the entirety of society needed to be educated as well.</p> <p>Litvinenko was assassinated for speaking the truth.</p> <p>Berezovsky fled and that gives him limited input into Russian society.</p> <p>Khodorkovsky... he helped to set up the way the laws worked in post-Soviet Russia, and admits this and that they were as moral as they could be, those who did this, but that their society was unable to see what morality was.  Once awakened to what was wrong, he became transparent, funded education, pushed for a more open society and then funded the opposition movement.  He was no longer going to be playing the game he set up because it is corruptive, and continues past wrongs.  He subjected himself to a corrupt system with typical outcomes, which he knew.  He left Putin with a truly awful decision.</p> <p>A dead Khodorkovsky is a martyr and can never, ever change how he thinks.</p> <p>A live Khodorkovsky might be re-corrupted, but you also know that he knows exactly what the system can do to him and the more you make it bad, and the longer he perseveres, the worse you look.  Not manly at all for the manly Putin to have a businessman tortured because he refused to play ball.  But you can't lock him up forever.  And without him the economic system has lost its vibrancy, its ability to rapidly expand... and yet the very qualities that allow it to do that means that the State control is threatened.</p> <p>As the man who spent time in jail with Khodorkovsky said: he is alive because he is standing in someone's way and they can't just kill him.  Yet, in unjust exile, his point becomes stronger by the day.  Strong enough to pierce the indifference of Russian society?</p> <p>He is in jail for a reason.</p> <p>Would you gladly submit to a corrupt system created by your own ignorance and indifference so as to change it?</p> <p>That is the dilemma of <em><strong><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner" target="_blank">The Prisoner</a></strong></em> and his answer still stands:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">I will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.  My life is my own.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>It is the only way to be free when the State seeks absolute control over you via society.</p> <p>Don't think of Khodorkovsky as a man, just as #6.  And still he smiles in court a testament to the power of just one man.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-32787044162692222712013-04-03T18:37:00.001Z2013-04-03T18:37:09.721ZEnd Game Against Freedom<p>Note this is a cross-post.  I am looking to utilize some of this material for another post, but that is a look at what it takes to retain freedom (or gain it) when governments no longer respect freedom and liberty of the individual.  The post now follows.</p> <p>What is the End Game of the global elites against freedom and liberty?  We can see its path by addicting populations to 'social' provisions such as 'retirement' and 'health care', which are different things than living a good life or providing good doctors and medicine.  This is the Redistributive State which seeks to undermine freedom by giving people material goods in return for those people relinquishing ever more control of their lives to the State.</p> <p>This can be done by means of an Elite funding or promulgating a lower societal uprising so as to force society to be under enough pressure to call for a crackdown on those putting them at risk.  It is a mug's game, a violent game of 3 Card Monte in which those seeking to lead a normal life are The Mark.  When you agree to the 'good' that such government provided social programs can do at the cost of taking money from those who have rightfully earned it via their liberty, you agree to limit the liberty of all: of the rich to be rich, of the poor to realize that they are the source of their own problems, and of the middle class to purchase the passivity of the poor with the wealth of the rich and hoping for a few scraps for themselves.  When you wash, rinse and repeat this sort of thing you are in the  process of breaking the will of individuals to have a free society, to stand up for freedom and ridiculing them because they actually support the ability of people to get rich and of the poor to also have that same opportunity.  What is offered is the class system, at first, which turns into a self-fulfilling Caste System with those at the upper levels dictating to the rest of society how it shall act in its own terms.</p> <p>The modern West is in one or more cycles of this, but it is interesting to look at one society where this has reached an end-game: there are no longer any illusions of providing social goods because they aren't necessary as the will of those to have a civil society have been broken.  In China there is so much autocratic control and police suppression that it is hard to get information out, but in another place there is just enough of a shame culture left and the attempts to have a veneer of civilization remaining that we can get a look at what this looks like. </p> <p>I've reported on the Red Mafia before a number of times, and this time I'm coming at it not from the 'find all low level sources to piece together a framework' end, but at the other end of what happens when a very few who actually want to do their jobs in government AS jobs in government actually give the high level framework in stark detail.  I found this through Amazon Pime's service in  film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in <em><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Poisoned-by-Polonium/dp/B005IC517C" target="_blank">Poisoned by Polonium</a></strong></em>.  I had looked at part of the aftermath of this assassination of Litvinenko, but the lead-up to it and the high levels of corruption and societal abuse it points at is telling.  It is a film I urge everyone to see since, if you want to see where a quasi-western State ends when its elites assume autocratic control, there is no better overview of just how this can come to be.</p> <p>The events the film reviews are centered on the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990's where the productive capacity of the old Soviet industries came under the sway of two general classes of individuals: old Soviet elites and organized crime.  In some cases there is no differentiating between the two because they have a connecting link in the secret service, the FSB which used to be the KGB, and actually dates back to the Czar's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka" target="_blank">Cheka</a>.  At one point they are actually referred to in their modern FSB incarnation under that term: their name changes but their methodology of violence in service to State remains.  </p> <p>From Litvinenko we hear about this directly:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">In our country, the special services are, in fact, a secret political organization that uses sharp methods, secret methods, not against spies and terrorists, but solely to keep a ruling class in power.  In 1999, for example, to seize power, the FSB used secret methods that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.  If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns and fly in with jets maybe.  But everyone would notice. The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods, and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government and seized every organ of power.  If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party, then the FSB is the armed unit of – of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Normally a 'Police State' is something created by a dictator or tyrant as a means to control the population by deploying the police as parts of the government with the sole aim to keep the people controlled by police power.  In the case of Russia this has been flipped around where it is the Secret Police that now put forward their own minions into politics to give a veneer of choice but, in actuality, by their brutal and repressive methods that they keep secret but are whispered about, there is no choice at all.  Really if something is undertaken to sway the public via terrorist means promulgated by the Secret Police who, exactly, is going to investigate them?  Anyone seeking to do so can be intimidated via the system that is in place of informers, records, laws promulgated to help keep the police in power, and then enforced by a corrupt legal system upon those who try to bring the actual truth forward.</p> <p>With tin-pot tyrants if you have a revolution to get rid of the tyrant, can you be sure that it wasn't the secret police that actually instigated the revolt to put themselves into power?  And when a society shucks off its old totalitarian State apparatus, what happens if it actually keeps the secret police around?  Unfortunately this last question is answered in Russia.</p> <p>One of the men a special unit of the FSB was to frame a man or take him out of ciruclation , and that manwas Lt. Colonel Trepashkin who was starting to piece together just what was going on inside Russia.  He recounts his story:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">My first conflict in the '90s was with today's FSB director Patrushev.  I rounded up a gang that laundered money, murdered people, consisted of war lords.  At some point, I had finally managed to get them, but then the problems really started.  There was that classic chain of protection that gangsters always have whether in the FSB, the military intelligence, or in the police.  I was told to drop the case.  I said "Why, these are criminals, we have to indict them.  I won't drop it!"</font> </p> </blockquote> <p>The agent inside the FSB who was told to frame him so that Trepashkin would be stopped and was recorded on tape in case anything happened to any of the men from the special group in the FSB:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Trepashkin knew something, and they were afraid he'd reveal it in court.  That was my first assignment in the new department that I found really suspicious.  We ended up avoiding it and never completed it.  At the concluding session of 1997 – [..] My boss Kamyshnikov came to me and said, "You must kill Berezovsky."</font></p> </blockquote> <p>There is one relevant question that can be asked of Russian society, however, before going on to how the FSB got into power: were the Russian people ready for freedom from an autocratic, indeed, authoritarian State?  For that there is an answer from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Berezovsky_%28businessman%29" target="_blank">Boris Berezovsky</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Berezovsky -  So we can put forward – So a certain hypothesis can be put forward.  The better the opportunities a political system offers its members, the citizens, the more efficient the system is.  But the citizens must accept, voluntarily, certain limitations on free will.  A transition from a totalitarian system to a liberal one can only take place when enough of its citizens learn to accept certain inner limitations of free will.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">Nekrasov – Perhaps the transition from external limitations to inner ones.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">B – Exactly!</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">N -  Inefficient systems force external limitations.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">[..]</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">B – What a price humans have to pay for knowledge.  How hard it is to rise above the common wisdom. </font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">N- Is it even more difficult for Russians, would you say?</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">B -  I know what you mean.  The Russian mentality is that of slaves. That's why the system of forced limitations is so welcome. So why then am I advocating liberalism in Russia?  Am I contradicting myself, advocating freedom for the Russians, going against the nation's character?  So, is Russia ready, which means her people ready to take up the responsibility of freedom? I think they are ready.  Because once the tyrannical dictate was lifted, millions of entrepreneurs appeared, a myriad of independent politicians and journalists appeared.  Russia turned out fully prepared for this crucial, historical step.  We only needed to move forward and consolidate that freedom.  And so my main conflict with the authorities today  is about individual independence.  All those stupidities – media controls, "vertical power" – have one result.  Destruction of freedom in the minds of Russia's citizens.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>One can see where Boris Berezovsky is a very dangerous man to the FSB and those that they support.  The betrayal of freedom in Russia post – USSR started at those places that were the worst off condition-wise.  This exploitation would not only put the criminal oligarchs in power, but they would do so with the help of the FSB and the new Duma which had barely gotten time to get itself together.   The film recounts a cover-up of this period in which Vladimir Putin was involved with a company he had going in Germany which was in contact with the Colombian Cartels and served as a money laundering outfit.  Putin was, at that point, head of the FSB while sitting on the board of that company.  This is recounted by <a href="http://www.juergen-roth.com/" target="_blank">Jürgen Roth</a>, a German writer who has been tracking the Red Mafia's work:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Jurgen Roth - When the premesis of the SPAG here in the Frankfurt area were searched around lunchtime – Well, the offices were searched all day.  But around lunchtime, the Chancellor's office was informed.  That same day, the Russian Interior Ministry was tipped off about the search, which is strange.  Even before the search took place, the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt tried to suppress the case.  </font><font color="#c0504d">What was on their mind was that Putin was central to this whole affair.  The prosecutor investigating the case didn't get any help.  </font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">It all started with a report about money laundering in Liechtenstein.  In this report the BND, the federal intelligence service, there was a note about the SPAG company laundering money for Russian criminal organization called Tambovskaya.  And so the Public Prosecutor Kirkpatrick opened an investigation.  Soon after that, it was confirmed that money laundering was taking place, that the Tambovskaya connection existed and that Putin might be involved.  </font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">When the company was founded, Putin was on the board of directors for half a year in 1993.  After that he was on the advisory board until 2000.  During that time he was in St. Petersburg and also already director of the FSB.  So he was on the advisory board of SPAG while he was the director of the FSB.  </font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">Now I am familiar with the workings of the FSB.  If someone somewhere so much as farted, he got a written report about it.  And it's hardly plausible that Putin was not informed about all this, about what was going on with SPAG's money and that the people behind it were criminals, classic mafiosi.  He was under investigation for accepting large sums of drug money,  which is undisputed.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">N- That was ascertained?</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">R – It was ascertained by the courts in Liechtenstein.  You can also track his longtime intelligence connections to Germany, to Dresden. I've got a list of all the intelligence officers from the GDR era, and Putin is on it.  Even back then, he kept close connections with the entire intelligence community involved in dirty business.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">N – The East German?</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">R – The GDR intelligence service.  Stasi.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">N- Corruption and things?</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">R – Not only corruption.  Corruption – That's a matter of course.  No one even discusses that anymore.  It's more to do with spying and destruction.  How do I destroy a political opponent?</font></p> </blockquote> <p>This is not the first instance that Putin was involved with underhanded dealing for personal gain via criminal means.  This starts with a lead that Litvinenko gives:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">Shortly after I gave the interview on Radio Liberty, publications appeared that accused me of slandering our president.  Not to mention that Putin was caught stealing metal assignments and funds in the early '90s in St. Petersburg.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>To properly understand what Putin was doing in Leningrad it is important to hark back to what else was going on in the Non-Ferrous Metals outfits at the time, and here I wall draw on my prior piece <a href="http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2008/07/taste-of-oil-for-food-and-its-chefs.html" target="_blank">A taste of Oil For Food and its chefs</a>, which goes over the process of 'tolling'.  With the Russian economy crippled by State facilities being unable to make any payroll at all, the workers were down to barter of goods their facilities produced in exchange for other goods from other workers in other facilities.  This was causing problems as stuff like food wasn't made locally and had to be brought into many regions and without a cash  based system to work with, there was no way to barter ovens, say, for eggs, cheese and milk.  Those who stepped in to put money into these facilities were generally of two major classes: rich elites of the former Soviet State, and organized crime.  Some facilities did try entrepreneurial capitalism, yes, but for large metal works, aluminum plants, steel foundries, titanium smelters... heavy industry in other words... you needed cash.  Lots of cash.  And these 'investors' wanted a 'sweet deal' from the new government and they insisted on 'tolling'.</p> <p>This form of 'tolling' is unlike having to pay a certain charge on a toll-based road, however, as that is a government tax on use of that road by those who travel on it.  Here it is something else entirely: the agreement by the government not to put a tariff on goods that the producers get in exchange for their output.  What this put in place was a system whereby the workers actually got paid a pittance, almost all of what was produced went outside the country, what came back after sales had no tariff on them and were then sold at above market prices locally.  If you run this sort of system then those running the business get to keep their overseas money, put a small amount in goods to come back, garner a huge windfall of increased prices for those goods versus what a competitive market would garner and then pocket those profits, as well.  Because State power is used to enforce who gets market share and is able to exclude exterior competition and their better managed systems, what you get is a near monopoly on certain regions and markets by what is effectively monopolies run by organized crime.  Isn't it great when you get to write the bills to be passed like this?</p> <p>From this the section of the film in which Leningrad (St. Petersburg) comes into clear focus because the situation was one in which Putin was part of a transactional scheme to exchange raw materials for food, or metals for food in 1991-92.  Any FSB agent who understands this sort of region and its criminal element is set to make out like a bandit which is, exactly, what Putin did and was written up and dismissed from the program by local officials about the external affairs office and has since been made to disappear as a document and is very difficult to find copies of it anywhere, even on the Internet.  The value of the amount embezzled was $11.5 million which meant that the citizens of St. Petersburg would go hungry and food would be rationed there for the first time since WWII.  That amount is a low-end figure as it doesn't go into specific foodstuff costs which were left out from the contracts.  From the report:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">There are reasons to suggest that partners did not intend to import foodstuffs to St. Petersburg.</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">[..]</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">The recommendations to refer the case to the city prosecutor's office and to remove Mr. Putin from his position.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>In 2000 another investigation clarified that because of what happened St. Petersburg did not receive foodstuffs in excess of $92 million, but the total cost left unjustified to the committee amounts to $850 million.  All from an organization that was being run by Mr. Putin.</p> <p>And how did Vladimir Putin get into power?</p> <p>If you are the head of a secret police organization using illegal means to enforce power, to work with organized crime, and to partake of such crimes as well, and you have the power and means to undercut the judiciary and subvert military officers, then you are left with very little to resist you.  With that said there is one pretext for a State assuming additional powers and that is war.  In this case the war in Chechnya and, most critically, the second phase of it that started with the bombing of a bridge and then an apartment complex in Moscow.</p> <p>Those bombings had one strange artifact to them: in the case of the bridge bombing there was an FSB agent found dead at the site of it and in the apartment complex bombing an FSB agent was indicted for having supplied the necessary explosives.  Or should it be said that these were Special Agents, for they were.  The denial of the FSB is, ostensibly, 'we couldn't have done it'.  Even though agents of the FSB are implicated.  Indeed this brings into question why a tank column was stopped outside of Grozny for days and then bombed just before the other attacks.  Tank columns do not stop by roadsides for days at a time as that is wasteful in men and resources who can be better used for doing other things, like not needing field maintenance.  If you are trying to put together a meme of advancing terrorist attacks, would there be a better way to do it than just as it was done?  Because terrorists, you see, don't work on 'front lines' and don't need to 'advance' via announcing themselves with periodic attacks along a given axis of movement: they are not military units.</p> <p>To get more State power over media, over the economy, over people, is there any means better than a war?</p> <p>If the secret police of a State using illegal means put forward a program to require the current regime to delegitimize itself, would there be any better way than to start what is, essentially, a civil war and then assert 'special powers' in 'rooting out terrorists' by that self-same secret police?  And then, in the midst of awful, bloody fighting, wouldn't it be nice to have political backing, even if from extreme nationalists, for such activity?  Because that also came with the Chechen war and is one of the most startling visual artifacts of the documentary: skinheads chanting for Putin while waving a flag with a black hammer and sickle in a white circle on a red field.  The swastika replaced by the hammer and sickle.  And chants for killing them all, the Chechens and, although none had any involvement in this, the Jews.</p> <p>With the election of Vladimir Putin also came the election of a high number of FSB agents and officials also 'winning' elections so that every organ of the State was soon in control of the government.  Some may remember the terrorist attack on the theater in Russia where patrons were held captive by 'terrorist' gunmen.  One of those was an FSB agent who was put into a high position by Putin some months after the 'terrorist attack'.</p> <p>If China points to international socialism becoming a formulation of national socialism, which is to say fascism, then when genocidal war is mixed into that, as is the case in Russia, you get a form of fascism known as Nazism. Of course it will be denied up and down the line, yet the supporters of State power continue to show up with proper symbology be it that twisty, interlocking geometric design of the New Dawn party in Greece, or the swastika replaced hammer and sickle flag in Russia.  This, most virulent form of socialism at the nationalist scale, is a horror for mankind... although not a lesser horror than international socialist kind as both look to kill to get to and remain in power.  Often with tens of millions dead in that quest.</p> <p>The true horror is the attitude taken by prosecutors and governments outside of Russia when companies started by FSB agents or organized crime in Russia, and it is hard to say which is worse at this point, are then suspected of criminal acts.  Money laundering, drug running, and, of course, murder using exotic means like a highly rare, short lived, radioactive metal like Polonium.  Litvinenko thought he was safe in Great Britain, but safety is only an illusion unless the State will actually do its job to keep you safe from exterior attack... not turn a blind eye towards it or refuse to ask hard questions or even seek to shut down inquests.  Yet, in the West, we see that in Great Britain and Germany, and if that sort of thing is going in those States, one with the longest history of people seeking democratic freedom and the other the one place that should have learned its lessons about the horrors of NOT investigating such things, then what does that say about the rest of Europe and the West as a whole?</p> <p>In the US we have a man like Eric Holder who, it must be remembered, was involved in some very sorry episodes in the Clinton Administration, proving to be duplicitous in the Elian Gonzales affair, who also put forward a pardon for Marc Rich.  The same Marc Rich who would show up in post-Soviet Russia to bring 'tolling' as a concept with him to teach to the oligarchs.  It is certain Vladimir Putin knew of Marc Rich – as the head of the FSB that would not escape his notice.  And as Marc Rich had investments in operations going across Russia, east to west, it is very likely that Vladimir Putin had more than a nodding acquaintance of Marc Rich's tactics and techniques.  Did Putin actually know Marc Rich, a man then on the lam from the FBI for questioning with an international search warrant out for him prior to his pardon?  Especially as Putin used the methodologies that Rich brought with him to absolute perfection, can that be just chalked up to being a real good study of those techniques?  You don't use them by accident, that's for sure, but with criminal intent as the two commissions investigating the starving of St. Petersburg pointed out.  And as the courts in Liechtenstein also pointed to in the case of SPAG.  Makes you wonder where SPAG got its money, doesn't it?  </p> <p>Back to Eric Holder, for a moment, how does such a man pushing for a known organized crime participant to get a pardon, which he must have known in his position at the FBI, get a 'pass' by any political establishment?  How does a duplicitous public official with policing powers entrusted to him violate that trust and, yet, get promoted?  How does criminal operations of running guns to Mexican Cartels, and to other non-State operators overseas, against the treaties we have signed with these Nations, actually get a yawn from the media?</p> <p>What does the End Game Against Freedom look like?</p> <p>Vladimir Putin had many contacts in the intelligence and police community overseas.</p> <p>Here's a thought.</p> <p>President Eric Holder.</p> <p>But only after some suitable 'national emergency' has taken place in which 'extraordinary powers' need to be used to 'stop' advancing 'attacks' by organizations that don't do advancing 'attacks'.  That is the equivalent in the US.</p> <p>The End Game Against Freedom is a Police State.</p> <p>Run by the Secret Police, not a dictator creating one but a dictator put in power by one.</p> <p>Who watches the Watchmen?</p> <div class="blogger-post-footer">Brought to you by A Citizen of the Republic</div> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-70633373381905896072013-03-17T16:08:00.001Z2013-03-29T15:52:49.391ZStructural analysis of Amendment II<p>From the <a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html" target="_blank">US Constitution's Bill of Rights</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">Amendment II</font></p> <p><font color="#9b00d3">A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>To do some analysis on this Amendment requires examining it by its parts as this is a passive voice clause that hints at it being of a large scope unlike the active voice clauses that mention a particular part of government or government function.  To those not familiar with this sort of terminology I point you to two prior posts looking at the work of Nicholas Rosencranz in – All agree or none shall pass <a href="http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2010/05/all-agree-or-none-shall-pass.html" target="_blank">Part 1</a> and <a href="http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2011/06/all-agree-or-none-shall-pass-part-2.html" target="_blank">Part 2</a>.  His work on the <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1611210" target="_blank">Subjects</a> and <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1844749" target="_blank">Objects</a> of the US Constitution serve as a means to examine the inter-contextual structure of the Constitution and its Amendments via the SVO structure of sentences.</p> <p>To begin comes the passive voice system in which the subject is not one of a stated power or function of the US government nor, indeed, any State government which would get direct recognition.  Here the subject is the Militia which has prior mention in the <a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html" target="_blank">US Constitution</a> which allows for the context of Amendment II to be seen in light of what the prior citations are for this subject.  In Article I, Section 8 there is this mention:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;</font></p> <p><a name="1.8.16"></a><font color="#9b00d3">To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;</font></p> </blockquote> <p>These are passive voice clauses as compared to the five more active voice clauses seen preceding them in Section 8 regarding the Army and Navy which are power grants to Congress:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;</font></p> <p><a name="1.8.11"></a><font color="#c0504d">To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;</font></p> <p><a name="1.8.12"></a><font color="#c0504d">To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;</font></p> <p><a name="1.8.13"></a><font color="#c0504d">To provide and maintain a Navy;</font></p> <p><a name="1.8.14"></a><font color="#c0504d">To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;</font></p> </blockquote> <p>In these clauses Congress is granted power to do things: To define and punish Piracies and Felonies; To declare war, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; To raise and support Armies; To provide and maintain a Navy; To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.</p> <p>These are all things Congress is granted power to do and they are specific power grants to specific Objects be they legislative in nature or to parts of the government specifically created and cited by this language.  Congress is not granted power to create the Militia but to arm, organize, train and discipline the Militia when it is actively called up for service.  This is a function not of creation but of regulation to normalize the operations of the Militia to that of the military power granted to Congress.  This is not a power grant to Congress for creation of such a body or organization.  This is the power granted to Congress for the Militia is exacting: it may provide for calling forth the Militia and that the Militia will act under the Law to suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.  In those two instances Congress is granted only the power to tell the Militia it must act in accordance to the Laws of the Union which are not just the civil laws but the military laws used to govern the stated Army and Navy powers of Congress.  Those Laws are those of the Piracies and Felonies, War, Letters, Rules of Capture, and Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces as well as the Militia.  These are militarily known as the Laws of War and are operational in nature, which means they are how a military is to operate and what the rules are it is to follow when in war.</p> <p>The internal organization, creation, and all other powers for how the Militia gets its officers are not granted to Congress but to the States the Militia comes from.  That is to say that the power of assigning officers, creating drill routines, how often training is supposed to happen and how the Militia gets organized is not granted to Congress but to the States separately.  The second clause is thus one of regulation during a call-up to service which is strictly limited to war or suppression of insurrection.</p> <p>From this the Militia begins to get a definition:</p> <p>1) Militias are State bodies created by the States,</p> <p>2) Militias can be called into service by Congress during war or to suppress insurrection,</p> <p>3) Congress can regularize the operations of Militias to be in accord with army and navy laws, rules, procedures and common arms,</p> <p>4) Militias have their internal command structure determined by their respective States, not by Congress,</p> <p>5) Militias are not regular forces under the command of Congress and are explicitly stated as bodies that may be called forth in service to the Union but are otherwise not under Congressional power.</p> <p>There are two additional clauses in Article I that deal with these powers, and they are in Section 10, which is in regards to the States, and I will give you the first and third clauses as the second does not deal with war powers:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">[..]</font></p> <p><font color="#c0504d">No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>These are active voice prohibitions and exceptions that pertain to the war powers and the Militia is an adjunct to those powers.  The first is an explicit prohibition on the States on war powers that they may not utilize nor exercise: Treaties, Alliance, Confederation and Letters.  The second is an active voice prohibition with exception.  States are not allowed without Consent of Congress to keep Troops or warships in time of peace or enter into Agreement or Compact with another State or foreign Power, or engage in war.  The exception is explicit on these things: unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.  Any State suffering invasion or in imminent Danger that no other forces can come to defend the State is then relieved of such prohibitions.</p> <p>From this we get another definition of the Militia:</p> <p>6) Militia are not Troops or navy.</p> <p>That is Militias are not standing forces but those individuals of a State who come together to practice the arts of war but do not form a standing military organization.  They do not get regular pay from the State.  While uniforms may be regularized, actually getting one can be done either by purchase or donation of used equipment.  In fact all the equipment and supplies rely on those who volunteer for such work without pay and with only the internal rank recognition as formulated by their State.  As is often seen in movie depictions these are 'Honorary' titles, save during call up to arms by Congress or utilized by their State to combat invasion or Dangers, in which case they become active and formal titles of rank.</p> <p>A Militia  is not the National Guard unit as that is part of an organization directly created by Congress, under standard Congressional regulations for the army and the navy, with its internal structure defined by Congress.  National Guard have many appearances of Militia in duties and their ability to be called up by Governors but their internal command structure is one created by Congress, not the States.  </p> <p>If the National Guard were a Militia they would be able to own their own weapons and equipment, be responsible for them and train as their States provided for, as well as have rank positions that were solely a State concern.  The bases, armories, equipment, supplies, provisioning, and all other things would be the property of the Militia, the members of the Militia or set aside by the State to form volunteer Troops that answer to the State, first, then federal government only during times of war or insurrection.  In some instances the National Guard is explicitly called a Reserve Unit of a military branch, and a Militia is specifically not a Reserve but an autonomous unit under direct regulation of their respective States as non-standing forces.</p> <p>Moving on to Article II, Section 2 and the Executive Branch there is the following, in part:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; [..]</font></p> </blockquote> <p>This is an active voice in 'The President shall...' and a direct and specific power grant to the individual of the President.  As leader of the armed forces, the President also becomes leader of the Militia of the several States only when they are called into service by Congress.  Thus there is a two part requirement with order precedence: active call into service by Congress then allows the Presidential power of command.  What is interesting is that the States generally place their Governor (or other determined Executive) in charge of the Militia during call to service for the State.  </p> <p>This is an ongoing tradition of the several States as existed before the Constitution  as I examined for a number of the States <a href="http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-basis-for-amendment-ii-before.html" target="_blank">in this posting</a>.  Indeed during such times of service a Governor's power grant of Field Marshal or General (or whatever a State determines it to be) would then place the Governor in charge of his Militia during call up by the legislature in that State and such duties would also place that Governor in charge during a call up by Congress as the leader of the Militia.  This would serve as a check and balance on the President and federal power and also allow for a voice in wartime to be heard from the States, especially on operations taking place within that State (to repel an invasion, say).  The President would get overall command of forces, yes, but the particular way those commands are passed down would be through the Governor (who may appoint a State determined Militia Officer in charge of actual disposition, but the chain of command would still be present).</p> <p>That is the Executive power grant and it is short and sweet.</p> <p>In the Judicial power grant in Article III there is this from Section 2 and do note the internal link to an Amendment is in situ from the Archives:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d"><strong>The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority</strong>;--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;--to <strong>all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction</strong>;--to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;--to Controversies between two or more States;-- </font><a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_amendments_11-27.html#11"><font color="#c0504d">between a State and Citizens of another State</font></a><font color="#c0504d">,--between Citizens of different States,--between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.</font></p> <p><a name="3.2.2"></a><font color="#c0504d">In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. <strong>In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make</strong>.</font></p> <p><a name="3.2.3"></a><font color="#c0504d">The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; <strong>but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed.</strong></font></p> </blockquote> <p>During active calling for the Militia they serve as an adjunct to the regular forces and under the codes for them set by Congress.  In general when operating in the field on hostile territory, even during an insurrection, the State may not be said to be in control of such territory where that conflict is taking place or that the actual land is contested via force of arms.  Thus the military code is in place for field operations and as they are not normal, civilian operations they operate under the Courts Martial system.  Thus Courts Martial are normally not jury trials but ones by Tribunal or, if in the field during combat, often by a commanding officer who must make a life or death decision on the spot.</p> <p>There is an appeals process to the Supreme Court and that is a direct and mentioned power grant to it.</p> <p>Thus we now know who regulates the Militia: the States in Peace and the Congress only under calling forth in war.  This regulation is one that is in the nature of training, organization, and command structure.  Prior to the US Constitution, State Constitutions tended to leave the lowest and most local level of the Militia up to local organization and officers below a certain rank, and then those companies would come under the structure regulated by the State.  In this case 'regulation' is in regards to the regularization of duties, training, etc. not in what you arm yourself with.  If a higher level wants the Militia to have different arms in the field, then it must supply them and train the Militia in its usage, which is the Congressional language that says as much.  There are no prohibitions in such regularization and, indeed, it is usually an upgrading of arms and armament when it is supplied by Congress.  And nothing prevents the Militia from using what it wants to as each individual must support himself within the organization.</p> <p>From this we now have a much better definition of the Subject of the Amendment II: the Militia.</p> <p>Next is the Verb in the SVO sentence and it reads as follows:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">being necessary to the security of a free State,</font></p> </blockquote> <p>The Militia is a pre-requisite to a free State and that has a similar mention in the body of the Constitution in Article IV, Section 4:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#c0504d">The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>This is an active voice part of the compact between the States and the US government which is created by the signatories to the Constitution, which are the duly elected representatives of that State with the assent of the people of that State.  The purpose of this larger government is to ensure that a Republican Form of Government is in every State, which is to say a multi-way power division between branches that have separate power domains, and that the government shall protect each State from Invasion.  Here we learn an important proviso on the prior Article I, Section 8 mention of suppression of insurrections: that can only be done when a State Legislature, or Executive when the Legislature is not actively convened, petitions Congress for this intervention.  Thus there is a State check on the suppression of insurrection power and is broadened to domestic Violence for the States.  Not only is this a positive check on Congressional over-reach, but it actually puts a greater scope on what a State may see as violence against the State as an entity.</p> <p>It can then be said that as the States are guaranteed a Republican Form of Government and that each State shall be a free State, that the Republican Form of Government is a pre-requisite for a free State.  Indeed this goes with prior examination of Art. I, Sec. 10 and that the scope of governments in the States are to have Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches, although their exact powers are determined by each State.</p> <p>A Militia then serves two purposes from Amendment II:</p> <p>1. It serves to keep an established free State as free,</p> <p>2. It is the foundation of a free State as its guarantor.</p> <p>The US government is only to serve to protect each of the States and to come in service when a State Legislature or, in limited circumstances, Executive calls upon Congress for help.  As seen in Art. I, Sec. 10, the normal prohibitions upon a State to keep Troops disappears during an invasion, emergency which shall not admit of Delay which is larger domestic Violence against the State as an entity.  Isn't it nice how the same stuff gets repeated in slightly different terms throughout the Constitution so that people can get a good idea of what a specific power is?  Art. IV, Sec. 4 does that without ever once mentioning the Militia, and yet it now fully scopes out the power relationship with regards to it via the States and the larger government they have created.</p> <p>If this larger government is the external guarantor of a free State, the Militia is the internal guarantor of it.  Amendment II puts the Militia in an exactly equal power position as the entirety of the US federal government in the Verb activity of the Militia.  They are exactly equal in power and are given the same domain with the exception of which is internal and which is external, and the line between them is demarcated and explicitly drawn.  It is because of that equivalence of power and stature that the Congress cannot control and regulate the Militia at all times, as that would make a sham of having a free State.  To have a free State you must have:</p> <p>1. A Militia.</p> <p>2. A Republican Form of Government.</p> <p>Anything that is a necessary prerequisite for something else thus places it ahead of the other thing.  If A is necessary to having B, then B cannot be necessary to have A: A comes before B.  And if B is necessary to get C, then A comes before C.</p> <p>A = Militia</p> <p>B = free State</p> <p>C = United States government</p> <p>A then B.</p> <p>B then C.</p> <p>Militia before a free State before the United States government.</p> <p>That is the explicit logic structure set up by Amendment II and is in accord with creation of the Constitution by free States.  You do not get to the United States before you get to a free State and you do not get to a free State before you have a Militia.</p> <p>Now comes the Object of the SVO sentence:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3">the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Who makes up the Militia which is the Subject of this Amendment?  That is answered: the people keeping and bearing Arms in a way that is not infringed upon.</p> <p>Who would do such infringing?  Who is this prohibiting, in other words?</p> <p>The power of a passive voice is that when it is not explicit (which would create an active voice, as in Amendment I) then it is universal for that domain in question.  You can go to Amendment III and see this sort of thing at work with the 'No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without consent of the Owner...'  This is a universal protection against any that would house a Soldier in a private residence.  It does not matter if Congress wants it done or if the Executive orders it, or a Judge requires it: it is prohibited from all THREE from doing this.  Their power is limited, and circumscribed during peace time and then in times of war there is necessary military law to follow for territories under dispute.  In other words even during wartime there is a necessary set of laws to follow for Soldiers as set by Congress.  Yet at no time is 'set by law' mentioned in Amendment II, which means there are no provisos to Congress making law in this area.</p> <p>Amendment IV also is a passive voice reading 'The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers...' is one that is against the Executive who must seek a Warrant from a Judge before violating these protections.  Otherwise, on just the say-so of an Executive this cannot be done.  What is more is that Congress cannot order a blanket search by law without having provisions for the Judiciary to moderate it via the Warrant process.  Yet the Executive and Judiciary are not mentioned in Amendment II.</p> <p>Take a look at Amendment V, and I'll do a bit more with it here as it mentions the Militia, but as individuals:</p> <blockquote> <p><font color="#9b00d3"><strong>No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,</strong> unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, <strong>except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger</strong>; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.</font></p> </blockquote> <p>Note that while serving under call-up during wartime means you are subjected to military law and its system, so the standard civilian protections are not enforceable for individuals serving during a war.  Why don't jihadis get a civil trial?  They are at war with us, waging illegal war and are subject to military justice whenever they wage war against the Nation.  Similarly if you are in the Militia under call-up and commit a crime in-theater, you can expect military justice as given by Congress.  Thus when called up the Militia is under military law, and when not serving they are under civilian law.  It would be expected that during time of training in the voluntary Militia you would be under the laws set by your State for such activities and training.</p> <p>It can be seen that there are laws for the individual regarding the Militia, how it is formed (done by the State) and how it serves under call-up either by the State or by Congress.  These are not prohibitory laws for firearms, but laws for conduct and order within the ranks and during combat.  Thus these are not venues to prohibit arms of any sort and they are universal and inclusive of not just the federal government but, because A then B, of the State as well.  Internally this is consistent with the other Amendments in the Bill of Rights and the Body of the Constitution as well, and this provision has rooting in both and must be read as part of the existing structure of the Constitution itself.</p> <p>Would this mean that there are no prohibitions on any arms for anyone?</p> <p>No, there are prohibitions and one of the simplest deals with loss of certain civil rights by criminals.  Convicted felons have their <strong>civil rights</strong> restricted in regards to the franchise and the keeping and bearing of arms as such individuals have demonstrated that they have placed themselves outside the law for their own reasons in the way of crime and are no longer trusted with either the franchise nor the right to bear arms.  But do note that felons who pick up any readily available arms for self-defense against animals or other criminals (or in times of war) will not be prosecuted as they have exercised their positive <strong>natural liberty </strong>to preserve their own life.  To those wishing to give back the franchise to felons, why not the right to keep and bear arms?  If they have, indeed, served their time and done penance, and you wish to trust them with the franchise, then why not with arms as they come in hand-in-hand should not your trust be perfect in that regard?</p> <p>Looking back to the Common Law, there were restrictions on arms one could not bear on their own, such as cannons and mortars.  These crew-served weapons one could own (a man's home is his castle) but couldn't take along with him to the store or city council meeting.  Keeping and bearing meant that you could keep such heavier arms, but had restricted utilization of them because you could not bear them.  Keep and bear arms means things you can carry with you.  And back in that day it was not just muskets, pistols and such, but axes, swords, long knives, sabers... anything you could afford, really.  About the only other restrictions were on those who had lost all touch with reality, those who were violently insane, or just unable to learn how to operate even the simplest of arms or who were so withdrawn that very little could reach them save hunger.  They were usually restricted by confinement, kept from dangerous objects by family or cared for by individuals or institutions that tended to the sick.  If you heard voices but performed your duties, recognized commands and realized the voices in your head couldn't order you to do anything but that guy with rank insignia could, then you had the opportunity to defend yourself like the rest of them.  While we may have improved upon diagnosis, description and some treatment of these problems, the social controls seem to be less, today, than they were way back when before the Framing.  If you can't trust your fellow man to help on this, then bucking the stupidity up to government isn't an answer and becomes a whole different sort of problem.</p> <p>Thus the restrictions upon individuals are those of self-government, caring for your fellow man, and seeing that those who are criminal really may do their time, but that lack of self-control for a felon means that there is a serious lack of something there that time just may not heal.  That's about it.  </p> <p>A free State is not just kept by armed citizens, it is formed by armed citizens, and that logic is one that is at the basis of Amendment II.  It is a recognition that the positive natural liberty of bearing arms is not just self-defense, but in the creation of a free State that will recognize your rights as an individual to be free to live in a society that respects you and that government is forced to respect by its very foundation.  Of course there are dangers to this, but there is worse danger and blood... rivers of blood... due to tyrants and autocrats, despots and dictators, emperors of many stripe who have decided that slavery for others is better for them... when government is not forced to recognize that it is accountable to free citizens who are willing to change or abolish government when it no longer respects their freedom and liberty.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-79578613064507494902013-03-07T22:02:00.001Z2013-03-07T22:02:44.053ZSen. Paul's filibuster and the question<p>Congratulations to Sen. Rand Paul for utilizing the filibuster on a question that he has been asking for nearly a month and asked of the head of DoJ, Eric Holder, and the White House during that period: in their opinion does the President have the power to order a drone attack against an American on American soil without due process of law procedures?</p> <p>This is not the question: can the President order someone stopped when they are in the process of attacking the United States?  That is an in-process question where someone is armed, known, dangerous, affiliated with an organization that has already attacked the United States or has otherwise made clear their intention to attack the United States on their own or in affiliation with others.</p> <p>That, incidentally, is called Treason and has its own due process procedure set by the US Constitution.</p> <p>And a single penalty after trial and being found guilty of same.</p> <p>The White House, Eric Holder and Mr. Brennan, the man who's nomination for head of CIA has caused all of this to come out, have all given a big, hearty waffle on this question.  Do note that if this was the previous Administration that the Left, the MFM and all sorts of others would be denouncing that President and calling attention to this question.  Their complicity in partisan, tyrannical ends is demonstrated by their lack of doing anything.  Save Code Pink and the ACLU, I will grant those organizations and any others that have stood up to join with Sen. Paul and his fellow Senators that assisted on this that they have followed on an ethical and moral line of reasoning.  No matter how much you may not like what some of these organizations do, and how insane their motivations may be at times, they are consistent in their insanity.</p> <p>As for me the question should be self-evident: no, the President does not have that power nor authority to go outside due process.  Going after those actually wielding weapons, planting bombs or hacking into the infrastructure of, say, a major sewage system to put its contents into the drinking water of millions of people, those people should be stopped with whatever force is necessary short of an indiscriminant missile attack.  Anything that has a warhead measured in pounds of explosives, launched from any platform including a shoulder fired weapon from an individual, is a bit much to go after an individual who is not in a tank, not in an APC, not in a hijacked aircraft about to hit a building or other infrastructure component, or in a known and designated bunker or other fortified area.  The potential for the innocent getting hurt or killed in a non-war zone is far too high to be using explosives outside of a testing range  or other designated safe facility utilized for the training of same.</p> <p>And as to the question of being on a 'kill list', I have <a href="http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2012/06/lack-of-doctrine-secrecy-and-list.html" target="_blank">addressed that previously</a> as something that has a lack of stated doctrine and procedure with legal framework attached to it.  The Congress can and should play a part in this using their Article I, Section 8 powers under the Letters language as that is the power that is granted to Congress to address and deal with the Private Enemies of the United States and the language allowing Congress the power to set the means by which the military forces of the US operate.  This would allow Congress to name specific groups that have attacked the United States as Private Enemies of the Nation, and that joining such a group is treasonous as it is one that has waged Private War on the US as defined in the Law of Nations.  Further it could tell the President that individuals of that organization, foreign and domestic, are to be publicly put on a list of those individuals to be brought in by any means necessary, apprehended when feasible overseas, and that these individuals are admonished to turn themselves in to any US Embassy or any US military base or organization for proper tribunal or trial.  Congress could place the general activities of 'terrorism' as those of 'piracy' and put forward, via legislation, that all such individuals are engaged in Piracy when they attack the US on their own and not as part of a Nation.  This would actually allow the removal of the cumbersome terrorist statutes and embrace the pre-existing framework of Piracy trials which are also a known part of the international framework of understanding between Nations. </p> <p>These things would then set a basis for doctrine of apprehension for the Executive Branch and also define when private individuals who are actively part of an organization attacking the US may be attacked, and that other individuals or organizations, public or private, that are aiding and abetting such hostile groups or individuals are to be put on a separate list so that proper legal proceedings can go forward to freeze their assets whenever possible and seize them once proper legal recognition and status is done via trial.</p> <p>Thus I applaud Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster.</p> <p>I also humbly suggest that he start legislation to finally get a hard and fast set of legal understandings put forward to properly define and scope out just what a President can and cannot do with drones and other unarmed vehicles in the pursuit of 'terror' groups overseas.  Congressional input and designation of groups is necessary, and the President will then have to ask Congress to add or remove organizations to such a list as this is a WAR POWER of the Congress at work.  That would then set a methodology that is public and well understood on who is on such a list, and what recourse they have to turn themselves in for proper legal procedures be they citizens or foreigners, at home or abroad.  This would then involve all three branches of government and could even set up an initial tribunal system to find out just who is and is not a 'combatant', with the military running such under the Geneva Conventions and defining that 'terrorism' falls under the 'Saboteurs and Espionage' trials for military affairs.  Those trials are well known and understood, and have a single outcome when guilty, and it is immediate and summary in nature.  That would also clear out Gitmo and allow the US to shut it down once the last of the detainees are processed.</p> <p>These things are things that can be done by a Senator or Representative and work with others to put legislation forward and move it through Congress.</p> <p>That is how the entire thing is supposed to work.</p> <p>Best to remind everyone of that while there is still time.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-73922897346022024712013-02-17T13:03:00.001Z2013-03-04T00:17:59.234ZFreedom vs. Utopia<p>I've been continuing on with The Moral Foundations of Politics presented by Professor Ian Shapiro at Yale as part of their <a href="http://oyc.yale.edu/political-science/plsc-118">Open Yale courses</a> and have now gotten into the post-Classical views on politics, leaving the 19th century behind as such propositions as Utilitarianism and Marxism are both seen as so flawed as to not offer a complete nor satisfactory means to remove politics from society.  Indeed, that singular goal of turning science into a means of replacing politics proved to be ill-founded, ill-thought out and when the scientific method is rigorously applied to either they both fall short of their goals of removing politics from the affairs of Man.  Simply put, you can't get rid of it due to the complexities of societies and individuals and the fact that valuations on such affairs cannot be rendered objectively but subjectively.  Both the maximization of social utility and the creation of the bureaucratic self-ending State prove to have so many problems as they are both a threat to human liberty because of the underlying principles involved.  Thus in the 20th century, while adherents to both ideals try to find a way forward with them, their ability to have good outcomes in the world lead to problems that show philosophies of Man that are unable to deal with Man as he is.</p> <p>From that point Professor Shapiro moves to a late 20th century thinker called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nozick" target="_blank">Robert Nozick</a>, who proposed the utilization of subjectivity and Man's freedom to analyze just what sort of political system and results one gets starting from just about any point in the political spectrum.  Instead of trying to work through a mechanical system, like both Utilitarianism and Marxism that assert a methodology of approach to render objective means, Nozick proposes a subjective approach utilizing post-Newtonian conceptions in the way of Einstein's 'thought experiments'.  His goal is not to step outside of society and politics but to temporarily put it aside and ask a fundamental question: what is the purpose of the State?</p> <p>The thought experiment entails having you, the individual, ask yourself what sort of situation you would be in if no State government existed.  Yes, it is an impossible situation but this is a thought experiment, not a real world goal to reach.  If every politician, judge, lawyer and political activist suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke along with every bureaucrat and every tome of laws and regulations they created, why would you need them?  What is their purpose?  And what would your reaction be in this case where the State, as we know it and as has been known to every generation of mankind, suddenly evaporated?  It is a profound question and the answers you get start to show major lines of thought in the 1980's and forward to today, but not in the mainstream of political thought until just recently.</p> <p>In that Stateless state you would be back to your Natural Rights and Liberties and must rely on self-governance.  But that is no assurance against Man in that State of Nature (red of tooth and claw) and to protect yourself you must actually do that and also protect those things you create that allow you to survive.  Otherwise you would fall prey to Savage Man because that is the state of being you have entered into.  To protect yourself you might band together with others who are like minded with you to help, but then the burden of protecting all of those things you own as individuals and each of your individual lives falls to you, and you have more and better things to do with your liberty than that, don't you?  Thus you may find others who have decided on a division of labor as a means to achieve this end (remember how Marx hated that?) so that they can protect your belongings as you went about doing other things.  You form a Stateless contract with such a group as there is no one to enforce it other than each other, but you can work on a principle of accountability and of one's word being their bond, with proof of that only coming over time.  From that the basis of protective organizations starts and we could liken this to Mafia families or bands of Warlords and their personal followers.</p> <p>What happens in this state of being without a State?  This is, perhaps, the Anarchist dream Utopia but it has a problem: there is no one to really enforce the contract.  Worse still is that to gain market and expand, as any organization must due to internal needs and requirements of administration and covering ever more people as they become popular, such bands then start to compete for market space.  What happens when rival protection rackets start to go after the same territory?  Conflict.  And that is what happens with these protection organizations, as they may start at a low-level of threats and intimidation to gain market (or go out of existence as stronger organizations prevail) until open conflict ensues.  In this way the more capable organizations will expand and flourish to cover more and more population until they cover a society.  At that point there is a power dynamic change as the legitimizing power to enforce protection can be used against a population, but that population also has some capability to withhold funding the organization at large to hold it accountable.  In either case you get the State.  </p> <p>From a start of pure Statelessness you get the State and yet it is just that one power and function that has been granted to it: to protect one's life and property from others harming them.  This is a Utilitarian conception of John Stewart Mill and this is the State that protects it: The Night Watchman State.  And who watches these Watchmen?  All members of society. </p> <p>Such a minimalist State allows maximum freedom to exercise individual liberty, protects all members of society and their property (although you never lose the responsibility, duty and right of self-protection), but otherwise does nothing else and is held in check from expansion by the population at large.  While not a new conception of such a State, it comes with a far different set of underpinnings than Enlightenment or Classical or even Ancient views of it since it is a State in thought experiment only, not a goal nor objective to achieve: this is not a rigorous methodology to create a new realm of morality in politics, but an analytical tool to analyze what is or is not moral in politics.</p> <p>If one steps away, mentally, from their current society and asks if any idea is good or bad to each individual in society, then they must look at the greatest harm done as well as the greatest good generated on any political question.  This is not a means with an end, but a pure tool to wield in cutting away questions of their normal externalities and get to the actual propositions involved.  Thus something like, say, 'should there be a minimum wage?' or 'should there be unemployment benefits?' can be asked not by pointing out to the 'good' that can be done but also to looking at the harm it can do, and no political proposition or law is harmless.  Passing legislation to say that rabbits are cute is not the same as enforcing a taking of wages to fund the unemployed or to require redirection of resources directly to a minimum wage as a forced part of any contract: there is harm done and to a large number of people and then only to benefit a minority of the population by removing liberty or the fruits of liberty at the direction of government.  That is a moral question and an ethical one that brings home the actual question: is it right to take away money that represents a person's time spent in productive labor to give it to someone who has lost their job?  That is actually not a simple question to ask as it entails lost productivity of not only individuals and a society in an attempt to give temporary recompense to those who have lost a job.  That is a harm.  Anything done to an individual that removes their liberty or its creations is a harm as it is those very things that the State is supposed to PROTECT.  Why?  You just went through that thought experiment and can see that the best and most minimal thing a State is supposed to do is PROTECT your life and the artifacts of time spent with your liberty, not take them and give them to others.</p> <p>As you are now outside the actual system (with thought experiments) and are not contained within it you also get to ask: how does this effect me without my knowing where I will be in the economic scale once I step back into the active society?  Remember this is a thought experiment and while performing it you have no attributes of the society involved: you have no class, you have no social standing, you have no religion, you own nothing and you are detached in all ways from that society that you can manage so as to try and render a moral judgment on a political activity from all parts of society.  Yes you will have difficulty doing that detachment, which is why such an analytical tool requires rigor in its use and you must self-analyze any bias you bring to the table.  It is a tool that cuts into not just political morality but into your own moral basis as an individual, and when it cuts it can cut deeply.</p> <p>Now consider a real world example of a famous professional athlete who has put into his contract that every person coming to a home game puts a quarter into a box for the player to watch the game.  This contract is negotiated between the player and the team (as it is a team sport) and they are agreeable to it.  You, as a fan, get to decide if you want to go to those games and see a world famous athlete play in full knowledge that you'll be paying that athlete 25 cents.  This is a Pareto Perfect situation in which everyone gets to decide if this additional cost is worth the result.  It is also a form of promise from the player to play well as if he can get enough people excited with his play to fill the arena every night, then he makes more money over his career.  There is no force to enter into the contract, and yet it is agreeable to the player and the team.  You have a choice as to paying what amounts to a private tax that is a very small cost compared to the ticket price, and 25 cents isn't all that much.  The player makes millions of dollars in this method.  It also has the benefit of being a real-world example as this is what Wilt Chamberlain had in his contract, so you can't say that it isn't possible.</p> <p>That player gains wealth beyond what he is guaranteed to get from his salary or wages from people just showing up to watch him play home games.  The team makes far more money from the increase in ticket sales and has a strange form of personal commitment from the player to continue playing at top form or even improve.  The fan gets better on-court play that is more entertaining to them from the player.  Does Wilt Chamberlain deserve all that money?  He did earn it after all, by utilizing a freely negotiated part of a contract acceptable to all involved.  Does anyone think that he isn't entitled to that and to be protected from its being seized in order to, say, give it to the poor?</p> <p>This example is a powerful one as it demonstrates a principle of freedom allowing for the unequal distribution of wealth via freely negotiated contracts.  It is, perhaps, the largest game-changer in the approach to morality in politics that anyone has developed and is one of the keenest tools to pull apart redistributive systems.  Those on the Left would criticize Wilt Chamberlain and say that he did not deserve to have such accumulated wealth and that the State should have some say in how it is used (through taxation, say) even though these are negotiated payments to see an ephemeral activity for the temporary enjoyment of those watching a game.  It is a price paid for enjoyment and the social experience of a game, not productive activity which irks the social moralists even more.  The goal of those moralists is to reach a Utopian end-state (usually a Marxist one as it involves forcible redistribution of wealth) and they have just run into the worst kind of roadblock that can be put in front of them: the death of the Utopian end-state ideal.</p> <p>With this tool a different Einsteinian 'thought experiment' can progress and it is one that can be used against a Utopian end-state.  Lets make that a State where everyone is exactly equal in material wealth, have all their needs met and contribute accordingly.  </p> <p>Now put in place the freedom of contract.  </p> <p>What do you get?  </p> <p>Unequal results, the accumulation of wealth and the end of the level end-state which disappears in relatively short order as everyone makes subjective decisions on what to do with their freedom to exercise their liberty.  </p> <p>The great thing is that Mr. Nozick lived to see this come about in the fall of the Eastern Bloc in such places as Poland and Czechoslovakia where State owned businesses were apportioned out by one-share per citizen.  Each citizen had equal ownership in these businesses to do with as they pleased with the shares.  Some put them under mattresses, others burned them, others used them as toilet paper and others started purchasing them.  Within 5 years those firms that actually had any productive capability had gained majority owners, and not through an original wealth imbalance (as was the case in Russia) but through the free play of a free market starting out in an egalitarian starting condition.  It didn't last long.  Nor does any equal distribution system of wealth as human freedom is its death knell when liberty is allowed to be freely exercised.</p> <p>Any State that violates its minimalist being to redistribute wealth is thus in conflict with human liberty and freedom.  And even if it reaches some desired form of 'equality' across all of mankind, the moment that freedom is allowed back in, then the entire thing will evaporate in short order without the force of the State to back it.</p> <p>You really can learn a lot just by wanting to find out about abstruse areas of thought like the moral basis of politics.</p> <p>And, yes, this is also the death knell for any attempt at 'collective' humanity that isn't coercive and authoritarian, despotic in all ways to the individual.  The greatest tool to wield against it?  Individual liberty.</p> <p>It was once a revolutionary idea.</p> <p>And it still is.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24766932.post-72978300041731085752013-02-01T17:38:00.001Z2013-02-01T17:38:25.482ZA purely aha! moment<p>I've been watching a few different classes at the Lecture Kings site on my Roku Box, and of particular interest has been ones from Yale.  One series that I finished just a week or so ago was on Ancient Greece and it was full of all sorts of interesting information on era of the pre-Polis Greek civilization and then the rise of the Polis and then its fall.  A very good series of lectures that were both entertaining and enlightening, both.</p> <p>After going through a number of course titles and brief overviews from various institutions, I wound up back at Yale for a series on the moral underpinnings of political thought.  This course starts just at the end of the Enlightenment and during the Classical period and after a brief intro utilizing the Eichmann trial to illuminate what the role of a citizen is in a State and what are the moral boundaries of a State with regards to its citizens.  That, in itself, is a thought provoking set of classes and it will be used as a touchstone to examine how the Classical and Post-Classical formulations of modern political theory play out over time.  This starts out with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham" target="_blank">Jeremy Bentham</a> and the concept of utilitarianism which he pushed as not just a legal formulation (which is to say laws based on a concept) but a moral formulation for society.  Utilitarianism has a core tenet that is called 'the greatest happiness principle' in that man, for any action or decision, will make decisions to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  For a State, then, the goal is to maximize happiness for the majority of its members and that is a standard that follows for all decisions of government.  He put forward that nature gives us these two masters, pleasure and pain, and that we are driven in all decisions by them.</p> <p>It is fascinating that for a man who declaimed that there was no 'natural law' or 'natural rights' that he has put forward both a natural law (that nature inflicts pleasure and pain) and a natural right (man to choose between them so as to maximize pleasure).  Yes there are some problems with utilitarianism, but it does serves as a basis for other political thought (such as libertarianism) although not through Bentham but through his friend James Mill and particularly through his son <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill" target="_blank">John Stuart Mill</a>.  If Bentham would put forward raw utility (which is to say the maximizing of pleasure for the majority in society) to its limits, then John Stuart Mill would shift that towards the maximization of liberty for the individual and out of State control.  Neither Bentham nor Mill saw much from government as being necessary, and Mill shifted the conception from government utilizing laws so that individuals could maximize pleasure to a set based on the harm principle, where so long as someone is not harming others or property, they should be free to live their lives without interference.  Mill also adds in a community principle in that harming oneself or one's property may put the community at disadvantage as a form of intervention particularly for those incapable of self-government.  Otherwise freedom, particularly freedom to discourse, is a necessary precondition in society amongst individuals.</p> <p>If libertarianism can trace its roots to a strong foundation point, that point is laid by John Stewart Mill.  It is a utilitarian point, however, and one that rests on legal not natural rights.</p> <p>After utilitarianism under Bentham, Mill and others, comes <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx" target="_blank">Karl Marx</a> as the next of the Classical political philosophers and it is in watching the first lecture on him that I received an aha! moment and it is because of the context of the time that Marx lived in that I had not fully considered before.  Marx lived at a time when science was coming to the forefront of industry in that items that had only empirical meaning in the 17th and 18th century were now getting practical application.  Going from theories of pressure to utilizing steam as a motive source of power and a replacement for stationary power sources, was seen as a liberating concept for mankind.  Being able to place real values based upon empirical equations (and through that also note other things going on that were outside of theoretical concerns) meant that areas of learning in the natural sciences of physics, chemistry and astronomy were all moving into practical concerns for industrial design.  </p> <p>Adam Smith had done a good job in describing how divided labor in a pin factory (one man to move a wire reel to a cart, another to start the unspooling process, another to run the cutting machine, etc.) meant that production for all of the workers involved jumped by orders of magnitude by concentrating on single tasks.  Smith calculated that 18 men could turn out something on the order of 48,000 pins a day (all put into paper, boxed and then put into a shipping crate) while if they all did the entire production of each pin themselves, their production might be in the dozen per person.  Labor reduced to a task process created efficiency, in other words.</p> <p>Now if you are able to place real valuation on labor, you should then have a Labor Theory of Value in which value is meant as exchange value (a commodity).  There is a lot to go into on the LTV but its setting due to time and place puts it in an era when science was moving to engineering, which is to say that the lovely empirical stuff was getting real nuts and bolts put to it to see if it could work.  The work force of, say, steam pressure was once just an empirical thing, which meant you had so much steam in so much volume at a certain temperature and it could be said to have a force behind it that could be calculated from those parameters.  Hydraulic power would utilize similar equations (pressure, volume, fluid density) which are applied to pneumatics, and those equations (and even some of the meanings of terms) are applied to electricity (the pressure or volume of electricity as an example).  So it should be obvious that if natural laws pertain to such things then it is perfectly natural that man and his activities conform to similar laws for labor and production.</p> <p>Setting aside the rest of Marx for a moment, the late Classical and Neo-Classical thoughts on political morality (and economics as well) had something else to deal with: it was understood that profits were declining.</p> <p>Period.</p> <p>Any school of thought either had to incorporate that as part of its basis or explain it in some way by its process.  This had been an understood phenomena seen across economies.  Profits were declining.  And since that really sounds like a natural function of an economic system, which is to say industrial capitalism, anyone wanting to put forward any sort of theory on politics and the economy had to take this into account.  Utilitarian thought put it at a nexus of individual response and freedom of discourse so as to maximize pleasure... yes, difficult to comprehend in those terms, but you can see at least some glimmer of how that works.  Marx puts it as the centerpiece of the overall analysis of capitalism and how it has the seeds of its own destruction buried within it.  Further there is a natural value of a commodity that is different from its market value and that is the intrinsic value of that commodity.</p> <p>Given the pre-condition it is impossible not to get an aha! moment out of this sort of thing.  If declining profits are a natural function of industrial capitalism, then there must be something driving that function.  Just as heat creates steam which in a confined vessel raises pressure, so there must be some natural force behind capitalism which causes declining profits.  This is the 19th century, after all!  Why soon man would have everything explained...</p> <p>As the formulation of socialism that results from this is scientific socialism, isn't the very first place to see if it is well founded is upon its preconditions?  Really, if the decline in profits is due to some other function not directly related to labor or value in a direct and immediately corresponding way, then a LTV will have problems standing.  That is to say that if profits are declining for other reasons outside those of the given system of analysis, then the system of analysis must be revised, re-done or just scrapped... just like scientists do.</p> <p>Off-hand I can think of a number of analytical basis known in the 19th century and used by scientists and engineers to test out declining profits.  First is to have exactly the same test and experimental baselines and to control the unknowns in an experiment.  This is known as 'repeatability' and if you can't find equivalent conditions or ones with known differences that can be described, then your chances of actually describing a phenomena in a precise way is nil.  You will get different vapor pressures if water has different soluble compounds in it, therefore you test with pure water to find vapor pressure and the amount of energy to move from water to vapor.  Similarly if profits are declining in multiple industries, they must be comparable on an unadulterated basis: changes to composition mix will give you different and non-conforming results.</p> <p>An observable phenomena is only of note if you can verify the circumstances of each observation and compare the differences between them, especially if you are examining the exact, same phenomena.</p> <p>After that there are variables to each experimental arrangement, which is to say some of the differences involved in each experiment.  This is related to the first, but in a slightly different way, in that the measurement of profits is one that is performed slightly differently for different parts of the economy.  Within each sector profits will vary on a number of axes based not just on traditional supply and demand curves, but also things like the number of competitors and the efficiency (and productive capacity) of each one.  Profits will tend to maximize when there are few competitors in a given sector or when market share is seen as 'captured' by certain firms.  With that said the ability to open new markets within a sector or expand markets means increased opportunity to build competition which will effect the bottom line.  While one large firm (A) will have maximal profits, when it gains two competitors (B & C) profits for (A) will suffer due to competition and pricing will be changed to reflect that.  The two competitors (B & C) will go from zero profits to the potential of some profits and perhaps even positive profits, which will still be less than (A) alone.  Taken as a whole amongst all three firms (A, B & C) profits have declined and production of goods has increased and prices have adjusted for that.</p> <p>What is fun is that the amount of labor per object or commodity may have actually increased due to lack of initial experience of the competitors unless they have a way of increasing productivity that the first firm could not implement.  Suddenly declining profits is not a problem of capitalism, per se, but a function of competition, new entrants, expanding markets, market share, and a whole host of other vectors that each must be considered separately for each sector of the economy.  But if you consider declining profits as a principle and guiding effect (like the energy garnered when water flows downhill over a certain grade or the amount of work energy it takes to haul something uphill or hoist it up into a building) then you get a wholly different viewpoint on what sort of economic theory is possible.  When it is made a constant, which is to say a natural invariable, and not something amenable to other functions but part of the guiding of how a system works, you get very different results.</p> <p>That was the aha! moment of seeing how the confluence of the natural sciences and industry were moving into economic and political thought and morality.</p> <p>All it took was one sentence about the requirement to explain declining profits and all the rest just followed.  It is that one minor piece that, once added, suddenly makes so much so very clear.</p> A Jacksonianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07607888697879327120noreply@blogger.com0