Freedomshift

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him… The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are. The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair. – H.L. Mencken

What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse . Since then, we have been terrorized, traumatized, and acclimated to life in the American Surveillance State. The bogeyman’s names and faces change over time, but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has transitioned us to life in a society where government agents routinely practice violence on the citizens while, in conjunction with the Corporate State, spying on the most intimate details of our personal lives. Ironically, the 14 th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks occurs just days before the 228 th anniversary of the ratification of our Constitution . Yet while there is much to mourn about the loss of our freedoms in the years since 9/11, there is virtually nothing to cele...

Since New Year’s is traditionally a time for resolutions, and since the new Congress convenes this week, I thought I would suggest some New Year’s resolutions for Congress: 1)  Bring the troops home — Congress should take the first, and most important, step toward ending our hyper-interventionist foreign policy by bringing our troops home and closing all overseas military facilities. The American people can no longer afford to bear the cost of empire. 2)  Pass the Audit the Fed bill — The American people deserve to know the entire truth about how the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy benefits big-spending politicians and financial elites while harming average Americans. 3)  Repeal the PATRIOT Act and rein in the National Security Agency — It is approaching two years since Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the NSA’s unconstitutional spying. Yet Congress still refuses to put a leash on the surveillance state. Congress should take the first step to...

Why would the government want to punish people that are just trying to work hard, become more self-sufficient and take care of their families?  There are approximately 3 million preppers in the United States today, and often they appear to be singled out for punishment by bureaucratic control freaks that are horrified at the thought that there are families out there that actually want to try to become less dependent on the system.  So if you use alternative methods to heat your home, or if you are not connected to the utility grid, or if you collect rainwater on your property, or if you believe that parents should have the ultimate say when it comes to health decisions for their children, you could become a target for overzealous government enforcers. Once upon a time, America was the land of the free and the home of the brave, but now we are being transformed into a socialist police state where control freak bureaucrats use millions of laws, rules and regula...

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." -Ayn Rand

George Orwell, the pen name by which Eric Blair is known, had the gift of prophecy, or else blind luck. In 1949 in his novel, 1984, he described the Amerika of today and, I fear, also his native Great Britain, which is no longer great and follows Washington, licking the jackboot and submitting to Washington’s hegemony over England and Europe and exhausting itself financially and morally in order to support Amerikan hegemony over the rest of the world. In Orwell’s prophecy, Big Brother’s government rules over unquestioning people, incapable of independent thought, who are constantly spied upon. In 1949 there was no Internet, Facebook, twitter, GPS, etc. Big Brother’s spying was done through cameras and microphones in public areas, as in England today, and through television equipped with surveillance devices in homes. As everyone thought what the government intended for them to think, it was easy to identify the few who had suspicions. Fear and war were used to keep everyo...

The White House's 'death of bin Laden' story has come apart at the seams. Will it make any difference that before 48 hours had passed the story had changed so much that it no longer bore any resemblance to President Obama's Sunday evening broadcast and has lost all credibility? So far it has made no difference to the once-fabled news organization, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which on May 9, eight days later, is still repeating the propaganda that the SEALs killed bin Laden in his Pakistani compound, where bin Laden lived next door to the Pakistani Military Academy surrounded by the Pakistani army. Not even the president of Pakistan finds the story implausible. The BBC reports that the president is launching a full-scale investigation of how bin Laden managed to live for years...

There has never been such an opportunity for the US government to stage a false flag event in order to start yet another war as there is today. The set up is obvious to libertarians and some sane others, but it eludes most all Americans who are busy dancing in the street after the so-called killing of Osama bin Laden. Consider the timing of this attack by US Navy SEALs, and then consider recent events. First, the economy is in shambles, unemployment is sky high, price inflation is excessive, and the US military has been bombing civilians in an attempt to assassinate Gaddafi, including murdering innocent little children. Our money is being destroyed before our eyes. The wars are not going well for the ruling elite, and Obama’s ratings are horribly low at the beginning of his presidential crusade. One very important factor is that criticism of these wars has been growing at an accelerated pace. Hatred of the insidious TSA is also becoming much more evident. While civil libe...

Government payouts—including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance—make up more than a third of total wages and salaries of the U.S. population, a record figure that will only increase if action isn’t taken before the majority of Baby Boomers enter retirement. Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data. “The U.S. economy has become alarmingly dependent on government stimulus,” said Madeline Schnapp, director of Macroeconomic Research at TrimTabs, in a note to clients. “Consumption supported by wages and salaries is a much stronger foundation for economic growth than consumption based on social welfare benefits.” The economist gives the country two stark choices. In order to get welfare back to its pre-recession ratio of 26 percent of pay, “either wages and ...

When our founding fathers established this nation, they did so with the intention that government would be very limited and that there would be a tremendous amount of liberty and freedom.  But today that is such a distant memory that we don't even remember what "the land of the free and the home of the brave" actually means anymore.  Our lives are constrained by literally millions of laws, rules and regulations and it gets worse every single day.  The federal government, state governments, local governments and even homeowners associations have become absolutely tyrannical.  There is a "law" or a "rule" for almost everything now, and many of them are absolutely ridiculous.  Big Brother is ripping our liberties and freedoms away from us at a blistering pace.  Just about any activity that you can think of other than sitting completely still in utter silence in your own home is tightly regulated by government.  This is not what our founding ...

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS The year 2011 will bring Americans a larger and more intrusive police state, more unemployment and home foreclosures, no economic recovery, more disregard by the US government of US law, international law, the Constitution, and truth, more suspicion and distrust from allies, more hostility from the rest of the world, and new heights of media sycophancy. 2011 is shaping up as a brutal year for American democracy. The Republican Party has degenerated into a party of Brownshirts, and voter frustrations with the worsening economic crisis and military occupations gone awry are likely to bring Republicans to power in 2012. With them would come their doctrines of executive primacy over Congress, the judiciary, law, and the Constitution and America’s rightful hegemony over the world. If not already obvious, 2010 has made clear that the US government does not care a whit for the opinions of citizens. The TSA is unequivocal that it will reach no accommodation with Am...

See this video as an example After 9/11, the fear of another attack on U.S. soil cleanly supplanted the fear of having one`s penis chopped off by a vengeful lover in the pantheon of irrational American fears. While we`re constantly being told that another attack is imminent and that radical Islamic fundamentalists are two steps away from establishing a caliphate in Branson, Missouri, just how close are they? How do the odds of dying in a terrorist attack stack up against the odds of dying in other unfortunate situations? The following ratios were compiled using data from 2004 National Safety Council Estimates, a report based on data from The National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, 2003 mortality data from the Center for Disease Control was used. -- You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack -- You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack -- You are 11,00...

Flags. These are always a bad sign. Hardly a politician appears on television who doesn’t stand in front of an American flag, sometimes three American flags. A venomous nationalism now poisons the air, and grows. We are off and rolling. The trappings of fascism spread. General David Petraeus, commander of the Eastern Front, poses with the President in the White House in combat fatigues. The country is now the Homeland, reminiscent of the Nazi Fatherland and the Soviet Motherland. We hear of American Exceptionalism, the ritual self-idolization beloved of pathological nationalism. Blood and Soil. The American Dream. Ubermenschen. All we need is a short Austrian. We may get one. The times ripen for a man on a horse. (Or perhaps a woman: Twitler of Alaska looms.) An ignorant population, unread, unfamiliar with the outside world, focuses its anxieties on troubling dark things lurking abroad, the brown hordes from the south, the rising Chinese, inexplicable Moslems who want to kill all C...

(Dec. 17) -- Here's one proposition not up for partisan debate: America is woefully overcriminalized, and the criminal law is woefully overfederalized. Today there are nearly 4,500 federal criminal laws on the books, and most of them have been added in just the last few decades. A groundbreaking, nonpartisan study conducted this year by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Heritage Foundation revealed that many of these laws lack even the most basic protection: an adequate criminal intent requirement. That means Americans can be convicted and thrown in prison for doing something -- actually, one of thousands of seemingly innocuous things -- they had no idea was against the law. This overcriminalization has real-world consequences. Throwing in prison people who didn't intend to break the law, or who violated laws that shouldn't be crimes in the first place, imposes an unnecessary burden on taxpayers to pay for their senseless incarceration. This...