Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS:

Air Force threatens to prosecute servicemen and family members who read WikiLeaks. Seriously.

"Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News has published a document from the legal office of Air Force Material Command warning service members that if they access WikiLeaks from a personal computer they will be subject to prosecution under the Espionage Act. In addition, the document says that family members of Air Force personnel who access WikiLeaks are subject to prosecution."

The collapse of the US is coming so fast that a day doesn't go by without an outrageous story of government oppression like this.

SOCIALISM:

The new TSA union moves to block airports from hiring private contractors for security, even though they would be force to behave exactly like the TSA, because the union doesn't want to lose jobs.

GM's woes, now the woes of the American taxpayer, continue.

"Less than two years after the government's historic $50 billion taxpayer bailout of the Detroit automaker, now forever known as "Government Motors", the troubled company installed its fourth CEO, Dan Akerson - another "finance guy" to be sure, but far more concerning to GM's long-term health, also a creature of Washington.

Akerson is a former telecom exec turned private equity guy who was installed at GM by political operatives in the Obama White House. While there's little question that Akerson has his talents, they most assuredly aren't in the car-making business (as even he is quick to admit). No, Akerson's talents are in private equity finance - or more accurately, politically-connected private equity finance."

Great.

TAX AND SPEND:

Just as government officials scared people into believing if taxpayers didn't bail out Wall Street in 2008 that martial law would result, they're again fearmongering to insure Congress raises the debt ceiling.

It looks like government spending and debt is growing out of control in Texas too. This will put a damper on its economic growth. This goes to show you that all governments are corrupt.

Stories of government waste and corruption so outrageous the news doesn't bother to report them.

"The finance minister had a collection of 2,500 exotic cars, 500 properties, five yachts, and nine world-class aircraft. He had managed to spend $900,000,000 in the London jeweler Asprey, apparently guaranteeing the old age retirements of a number of attractive women who consort with kleptocrats."

"On January 29, 2002, CBS Evening News reported that the Pentagon had lost track of $2.3 trillion, yes, $2,300 billion. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted, "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." "We know it is gone," said Jim Minnery of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, "but we don’t know what they spent it on.""

What's a couple of trillion between government and serfs, right?

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Republicans limit public seating in Ron Paul's first hearings on the Fed. The Fed is powerful. When you can print money, you can buy any politician, bureaucrat, reporter, editor, or anybody else you want, and it owns both Republicans and Democrats. They don't want the printing press lining their pockets to be shut down. Paul's question for the Fed: Why didn't handing out trillions create any jobs?

EDUCATION:

Using the web to continue education during snow days. This begs the question, why not do this every day? Brick and mortar schools should be allowed to go away. The reason they don't is that government looting has made us so poor, both parents typically work in middle class households and government schools serve as baby-sitters.

HEALTH CARE:

On the nature of the US being ruled by men, not law, and the consequences for Obamacare.

"On July 9, 1986, CBS television ran a show titled The Burger Years. It was an interview with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger. It was the most important interview ever granted by a sitting Chief Justice. It was conducted by the former public relations spokesman for Lyndon Johnson, Bill Moyers, who by 1986 had become a respected media figure, a Voice of Disinterested Authority – the only Establishment survivor of the sinking of the U.S.S. Lyndon. In that interview, this exchange occurred.

CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER: Constitutional cases – constitutional jurisprudence is open to the Court to change its position in view of changing conditions. And it has done so.

MOYERS: And what does it take for the Court to reverse itself?

CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER: Five votes.

This may sound cynical. It was not cynical. It was a forthright statement of judicial principle. Five people decide the meaning and applicability of the foundational document of American civil government. At any time, one of these five can change his or her mind, or be replaced on the court by someone who does not share this view. Then the Constitution is reinterpreted, and whatever was lawful before becomes unlawful, or vice versa."

The painful truth.

"There are conservative voters who still believe that taking control of Congress and the Presidency will lead to a transformation of the nation. This places far too much trust in national politics. The political system is rigged by lawyers. It always has been."

More painful truth.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Mubarak and Suleiman are working the tried and true process of divide and conquer against Egyptian opposition groups, but so far, the united opposition has not collapsed. Egyptian Google exec who had been imprisoned by Egyptian secret police freed. The US-picked successor to Mubarak gains clout.

Why does Egypt need a military? Funded by the US?

"Tanks don’t float very well, and almost never fly, so you can use them only against countries with whom you have borders. Unless you have much more navy than Egypt does. So the choices are to fight Libya, Sudan, or Israel. The first two have no detectible military, and thus no need of being fought, and the third has too much. Actually, why does Egypt have an army at all?

The tanks come from Washington, which gives the Egyptian military, unneeded by Egypt, huge annual subsidies. (While people go hungry.) Why? Not to attack Libya and Sudan, which mostly just sit there, and certainly not to attack Israel, Congress being essentially a subcommittee of the Knesset. Anyway, it wouldn’t work.

So, obvious as zits on a prom queen, Washington is paying the Egyptian military to kill Egyptians to keep them in line. But something is wrong. The soldiers aren’t doing it. It’s weird."

Worse yet, the Egyptian people demand that military because they like to think they're threatened by or threaten Israel. They ask for their own oppression. Much like people in the US.

"Why, you might ask, do the intelligence agencies prove so bad at knowing things? Don’t spooks have high Boards and come from pricey universities?

Yes. But you have to understand that people are not born stupid. They have to work at it. When they come from similar backgrounds, and work in semi-isolated bureaucracies with distinct ideologies that don’t match how the world really works, you get bright, dedicated idiots."

Ivy Leaguers.

"It’s simple enough for garden ants and some intellectuals to get it: Most of the world hates us because we meddle where we shouldn’t, engender bloody revolutions, and impose every penny-ante Stalin we can scratch up. If you have democracy in countries where everyone hates you, you get governments that hate you. Thus you can’t want democracy. You have to want obedient brutal dictators with torture chambers. It’s what we always want, and usually get. This makes people hate us even more. Round and round we go."

Lots of painful truth today.

POLITICS:

Tom Woods's new book, Rollback, recommends repealing all of government before government takes us all over a cliff.

Political numbers look good for Republicans in 2012, and that's bad for America. We need to oust the two parties, not keep bouncing between them.

LOCAL:

Local farmer's markets. Organic food Dayton. Healthy Alternative. Aullwood Audubon Center and Farm. Dorothy Lane Oakwood.

If this essay was supposed to make me think that Kasich is going to fix the spending problem in Ohio, it failed. Have the state government take over schools? How does that cut spending? We should be talking about abolishing the state department of education, not bargaining with teachers unions.

MISC:

I think Rothbard's criticism of Reagan and the media is off-base here.

"It is conventional wisdom that media people are biased in favor of liberalism, No doubt. But that is not important, because the media, especially elite media who have the most to lose, are also particularly subject to the knave/coward syndrome. If they pander to Reaganism, they get the approval of the deluded masses, their customers, and they get the much-sought-after access to the President and to other big-wigs in government. And access means scoops, carefully planted exclusive leaks, etc. Any sort of effective opposition to the President means, on the other hand, loss of access; the angering of Reagan-deluded masses; and also the angering of their bosses, the owners of the press and television, who are far more conservative than their journalist employees.

One of Reagan’s most notable achievements was his emasculation of the liberal media because of his personal popularity with the masses. Note, for example, the wimpy media treatment of Iran-Contra as compared to their glorious attack on Watergate. If this is liberal media bias, then the liberals need to be saved from their friends."

I can't speak to Iran-Contra because I never cared about it, but during Reagan's term, the media was terrible to him. They constantly claimed he was going to start a nuclear war. They called him all kinds of names. The media vitriol against Reagan was worse than it was against Bush. And Reagan had a Democrat Congress and Congress the purse strings, so there's no way that Reagan shifted the balance of looting in favor of Republicans like Obama and the Democrat Congress shifted the balance of looting in favor of Democrats. I think the press hated Reagan for his rhetoric as much as the people loved him for it.

"In the history of ideological movements, there have always been people willing to sell their souls and their principles. But never in history have so many sold out for so pitifully little. Hordes of libertarian and free-market intellectuals and activists rushed to Washington to whore after lousy little jobs, crummy little grants, and sporadic little conferences. It is bad enough to sell out; it is far worse to be a two-bit whore. And worst of all in this sickening spectacle were those who went into the tank without so much as a clear offer: betraying the values and principles of a lifetime in order to position themselves in hopes of being propositioned. And so they wriggled around the seats of power in Washington. The intellectual corruption spread rapidly, in proportion to the height and length of jobs in the Reagan Administration. Lifelong opponents of budget deficits remarkably began to weave sophisticated and absurd apologias, now that the great Reagan was piling them up, claiming, very much like the hated left-wing Keynesians of yore, that "deficits don’t matter.""

Rothbard saves his most vitriolic attack for turncoat libertarians.