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We have lost our moral compass as a people and have embraced a secular view of morality rather than God’s.
This observable fact, as America has entered the new millennium, is the circumstance of the New World Order, as envisioned and planned for a very long time by the International Banking cartel and the United Nations.
Oppression has become more refined and more insidious in recent decades.
We frequently see scenes like IRS agents dragging Amish tax resisters out of their scanty homes or the Los Angeles police beating a suspect.
We can expect to see the frequency of similar scenarios escalate as we are pushed forward into a global government and the New World Order.
The fact that only a minimum number of people physically resist government agents is not confirmation that the state is violating fewer people’s rights.
The level of tyranny imposed by government agencies is less evident today primarily because the vast majority of citizens capitulate to government demands before the government resorts to enforcement.
America is ripe for a cataclysmic revolution.
The lack of an armed uprising is not evidence of a lack of discontent and hostility.
Six corporations presently control all forms of media (newspaper, TV, radio, etc.) in the United States, and they have been diligent accomplices in a massive cover-up of federal crimes and oppression of the people.
Many Americans apparently believe politicians and policy experts have been wise enough to create a government that does not crush the people it was created to protect and serve.
The question of individual liberty is now often marketed as a question of a ruler’s intentions toward the citizen.
But lasting institutions are far more important than transient intentions.
The last seventy-five years have seen the sapping of most constitutional restraints on capricious government power.
American political assessment suffers from a predisposition to appraise government by exalted ideals rather than by insipid and shocking reality.
We have a romantic tendency to judge politicians by their dictum rather than by their day-to-day actions and a tendency to view the growth of government power by its promise rather than by its results.
The decline of liberty is not primarily from specific acts of government, but from the collective force of hundreds of thousands of decrees, hundreds of taxes, and thousands of officials with unrestricted power over other Americans.
Our political leaders say they have tried to improve the quality of life by multiplying the amount of intimidation, by militarizing police power, by giving one group of people the power of invention over others as to how they must conduct their affairs.
The power accumulating in a central government is not put on display at the Smithsonian Institute; it is exercised in day-to-day life.
The larger it becomes, the more oppressive it will become, regardless of the intentions of those who advocate larger government.
The average American’s understanding of liberty and the threat to its survival has declined sharply since the nation’s birth.
The Massachusetts colonists rebelled after the British agents received “writs of assistance” that allowed them to search any colonist’s property.
Modern Americans submit passively to law enforcement sweep searches of buses, schools, and housing projects without valid search warrants.
Virginia revolted in part because King George imposed a two-pence tax on the sale of a pound of tea.
Americans today are complacent while Congress imposes billions of dollars in taxes, increasing the projected federal debt into double digit trillions.
Federal agencies have the power to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury in suits against private citizens.
Maine revolted primarily because the British Parliament issued a decree confiscating every white pine tree in the colony; modern Americans are largely complacent when local regulatory agencies impose almost unlimited restrictions on individuals’ rights to use their own property.
The initial battles of the Revolution occurred after British troops tried to seize the colonists’ private weapons; today, residents in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities submit to de facto prohibition on handgun ownership imposed by the same government that grossly fails to protect the citizen from private violence.
The 1775 Revolution was largely a revolt against growing arbitrary power.
Nowadays, seemingly the only principle is to have no political principle: to judge each act of government in a vacuum - to assume that each expansion of government power and nullification of individual rights will have no future impact.
The Founding Fathers looked with horror at the liberties that they were losing, while modern Americans focus myopically on the freedoms that they still retain.
America needs fewer laws, not more prisons.
The Founding Fathers realized that some amount of government was necessary in order to prevent a “war of all against all.”
By trying to seize far more power than is necessary or granted by the Constitution over American citizens, the federal government is destroying its own legitimacy.
We face a choice not of anarchy or fascism, but a choice of limited or unlimited government.
Because it is a necessary evil, it is necessary to vigilantly limit government’s disruption of citizens’ lives.
We the people delegated to ourselves the responsibility as the ultimate protector of the Constitution.
We the People are the ultimate court.
When our government is unwilling or refuses to abide by the constitutional mandates we required, it is our sacred duty to stand up against that government and to either alter or abolish it.
But oppression remains an evil that must be minimized in a free society.
The ideal is not to abolish all government, but to structure it so as to achieve the greatest respect for citizens’ rights and the least violation of their liberty.
The question is not whether Americans have lost all their liberties, but whether the average American is becoming less free with each passing year - with each session of Congress - with each new shelf row of Federal Register Publications.
American liberty can still be rescued from the encroachments of government.
The first step to saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose our liberties unless fundamental political changes occur.
I would propose that the Constitution be amended to require that the entire House of Representatives be composed only of females and the Senate be composed only of males.
That would be a natural balance of power.
It works in families; why not Congress and the American family?
The most recent example of congressional action and loss of liberty can be found in the new PATRIOT Act (short for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”).
This act of Congress primarily expands existing law, giving federal law enforcement agencies greater intelligence-gathering power, and has the effect of curtailing or eroding constitutional protections for citizens.
In the wake of September 11th , most of us believed that the law might be reasonable in granting enforcement agencies these expanded powers.
But the facts as have been revealed by Congress do not support that contention.
That tragedy occurred not because of inadequate anti-terrorism law, but because of the federal intelligence agencies’ own internal procedural failure.
The PATRIOT Act does not, therefore, help us to fight terrorism better.
What it does do is:
1 . It upsets the balance of power in our government, putting unnecessary power in the hands of the Executive, and brings us one step closer to what Chancellor Hitler achieved in pre-war Germany.
Increases the administrative burden on presently overburdened intelligence agencies; making terrorism more difficult for them to fight.
Destroys many of our hard-won unalienable rights and liberties for which so many of our ancestors and our own generation fought and died.
The Patriot Act is a complicated law.
I have assembled for this Chapter the sections which I feel are most troubling.
Specifically, the Patriot Act:
Permits agents of law enforcement to enter and search your home, in secret, without ever informing you.
The U.S. Constitution requires not only probable cause to search, but that you are notified of the search.
Section 213 of the Patriot Act disembowels the notice requirement of the 4th Amendment.Section 216 of the act permits agents of the government to tap your phone or computer without probable cause having been established.
Under this section, a judge MUST authorize a warrant as long as law enforcement agents certify that the surveillance is “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.”
No probable cause of criminal activity is required to issue the warrant, and the criminal activity does not have to have anything to do with terrorism.
This violates the probable cause provision of the 4th Amendment.
So for all intents and purposes, the 4th Amendment is a dead letter.In addition, Section 218 permits the government agent to carry out secret searches and wiretaps without showing probable cause merely by certifying that there is a “significant” foreign intelligence purpose.
This also evades the 4th Amendment protection.Section 411, in tandem with section 802, expands the power of government to designate a group as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Any group which endorses so-called “terrorist activity” which under 802 may be otherwise a lawful protest activity, can be designated as a terrorist organization.
This would enable government to designate such groups as the California Tree Huggers, Protestors in Puerto Rico objecting to bombing of their land, or those Protestors against the World Trade Organization, as terrorists, such as in Seattle, New York, Chicago and Washington.
Good-bye, 1st Amendment.Section 411 also allows the government to indict anyone who provides material support or assistance to a terrorist organization.
It is now possible for the federal government to determine that a domestic organization is in fact a terrorist group, i.e. the Michigan Militia, or Save a Patriot, American Rights Litigators, or any group who may disagree with government policy.
One man makes the determination of terrorist - the President.
No evidence is necessary and no court can stop that designation.
No more 5th Amendment!Section 412 of the PATRIOT Act permits the government to arrest and detain immigrants indefinitely for nothing more than a visa violation.
In fact, of the one thousand, two hundred known immigrant detentions since 9/11, the ACLU determined that only about five had been detained on terrorism-related charges.Section 802 creates the crime of “domestic terrorism.”
This criminalizes any acts of any member of the public that merely appear to the government’s determination to be intended to “influence the policy of the government by intimidation or coercion” or to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”
This section would make just about any act of civil disobedience in protest against government policy into an act of domestic terrorism.
Anyone who responds in writing to the IRS by objecting to one of its decisions could and probably will be labeled a domestic terrorist.
There goes the 5th Amendment.
Our Congress, at the urging of the President and the Attorney General, has enacted criminal, unconstitutional legislation.
As an example of its new application, we now see what is planned for the rest of us.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said, “If you don’t agree with the government, YOU are a terrorist.”
Attorney General Ashcroft pushed the U.S. Patriot Act through an overwhelmingly dim-witted Congress soon after September 11th.
He has subverted more elements of the Bill of Rights than any Attorney General in American history.
This is the same man who was beaten by a dead man in his bid for the Senate.
Under the Justice Department’s new definition of “enemy combatant” (which won the enthusiastic approval of the President and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) anyone can be defined as an “enemy combatant,” very much including American citizens, and they can be held indefinitely by the government, without charges, a hearing, or a lawyer - in short, incommunicado.
Good-bye the entire Bill of Rights.
Now more Americans are also going to be dispossessed of every fundamental legal right in our system of justice and put into camps.
Ashcroft’s terrorism FBI guidelines:
“The nature of the conduct engaged in by a [terrorist] enterprise will justify an inference that the standard [for opening a criminal justice investigation] is satisfied, even if there are no known statements by participants that advocate or indicate planning for violence or other prohibited acts.”
That conduct can be simply “intimidating” the government, according to the USA Patriot Act.
This book would qualify under those guidelines.
The following words of Thomas Jefferson from the Kentucky Resolutions sound as though they were written yesterday in describing the Patriot Act.
“That if the acts before specified should stand, these conclusions would flow from them; that the general government may place any act they think proper on the list of crimes, and punish it themselves whether enumerated or not enumerated by the constitution as cognizable by them: that they may transfer its cognizance to the President, or any other person, who may himself be the accuser, counsel, judge and jury, whose suspicions may be the evidence, his order the sentence, his officer the executioner, and his breast the sole record of the transaction: that a very numerous and valuable description of the inhabitants of these States being, by this precedent, reduced, as outlaws, to the absolute dominion of one man, and the barrier of the Constitution thus swept away from us all, no rampart now remains against the passions and the powers of a majority in Congress to protect from a like exportation, or other more grievous punishment, the minority of the same body, the legislatures, judges, governors and counselors of the States, nor their other peaceable inhabitants, who may venture to reclaim the constitutional rights and liberties of the States and the people, or who for other causes, good or bad, may be obnoxious to the views, or marked by the suspicions of the President, or be thought dangerous to his or their election, or other interests, public or personal.
Jefferson’s statement is as valid in 2003 as it was in 1798.
It lends a chilling historical prospective to the present “Patriot Act” and our present condition compared to events in America in 1798 brought on by the Alien and Sedition Act (Whiskey Rebellion).
Congress and the other branches of the federal government are not a party to the Constitution; they are products of it.
The Constitution vests Congress with certain delegated authorities under Article I; nothing more.
Within its own borders, state authority is antecedent to that of the United States, and as parties to the Constitution, the several states have both the right and responsibility to correct their agent, the United States, when ambition seeks to abuse or expand powers which have been delegated.
Of more immediate importance where the instant matter is concerned, those who exceed the law, whether of the State or the United States, are accountable to the law of the land and, ultimately, to the People of the land within the several States.
Operation under color of law is outlaw, criminal, and accountability must be in law.
Judges, magistrates, attorneys for the Department of Justice, and enforcement people do not have immunity when they exceed the law as it is written.
This War on Terrorism is not a war at all.
Congress is the only constitutional body that can declare war.
It is a convenient tool being used by the President to expand power and control over each of us Citizens nothing more.
The government will not be happy until the last vestiges of our Constitution are torn from us, leaving no protection from the servitude expected from us all.
The federal government has never kept its word in either the conduct of internal policy (Constitution), in treaties with the Indians or in international policy.
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