Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 20, 2010

The term kleptocracy refers to a government run by thieves. In a sense, the term is redundant, since every government is created through aggression and sustained by theft.

While employed by the New York branch of the criminal syndicate called the Federal Reserve, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner conspired to conceal critical facts about the Fed?s bailout of the AIG insurance conglomerate.

Hundreds of billions of dollars pilfered from taxpayers were filtered through AIG to pay its counterparties ? banks such as Goldman-Sachs who had invested in AIG?s junk securities and should have been forced to absorb their own losses. Instead, the taxpayers were forced to make good on those bad investments.

This is the equivalent of a loan shark shaking down small business owners to pay bad debts contracted by other people. Admittedly, that analogy is unfair to loan sharks, who are generally more honorable than Geithner and his ilk.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 19, 2010

In June 2006, the public was informed that three suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay had simultaneously committed suicide. This was described as a form of ?asymmetrical warfare? intended to demoralize the American public and embolden our enemies.

Through diligent research into thousands of pages of heavily redacted documents, faculty and students at Seton Hall Law School discovered that the three supposed Jihadists ? none of whom had been charged with a crime ? had been tortured to death.

Rather than hanging themselves, they had been suffocated by having rags stuffed down their throats. The remains turned over to relatives had been savagely mutilated; the throats had been removed in order to conceal evidence.

This horrifying account is confirmed in the current issue of Harper?s magazine, which provides first-person testimony from Army Staff Sgt. Joseph Hickman, an eyewitness to these atrocities whose patriotic decency will not permit him to remain silent.

How can Christians countenance crimes of this kind, supposedly committed in our name?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 18 2010

As District Attorney for Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Martha Coakley ? now the state?s attorney general and Democratic senate candidate ? prolonged the patently unjust imprisonment of Gerald Amirault, an innocent man wrongfully convicted of child abuse and sentenced to decades in prison.

The unjust conviction of Gerald Amirault, his mother Violet, and sister Cheryl, is among the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history. The trio was convicted of grotesque child abuse charges in the absence of a particle of material evidence.

Judicial hearings in the mid-1990s overturned the convictions of Violet and Cheryl due to extensive subornation of false testimony from children by Coakley?s former boss.

Violet Amirault died of cancer in 1997 while threatened with another prosecution. Coakley dropped the charges against Cheryl but campaigned with then-Governor Jane Swift to deny parole to Gerald. Five years later Gerald won parole but today he remains under a form of house arrest.

Coakley is typical of those willing to build political careers atop the broken lives of innocent people.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 15, 2010

After achieving its independence in 1804, Haiti was required to pay huge reparations to France. The nation struggled to discharge that debt for roughly a century and a half. This was made more all the more difficult by repeated foreign intervention, including a lengthy U.S. military occupation in the early 20th century.

Suffering under a government devoted entirely to plunder, Haiti was left utterly destitute, unable to develop a modern economy that could create infrastructure and social institutions adequate to deal with large-scale emergencies.

Advocates of eugenicist population control insist that Haiti?s problems are created by too many people, rather than too much government. UN officials have exploited the country?s misery to promote abortion and sterilization. One abortionist who collaborated in the UN?s anti-natalist assault sneered that Haitians should be left to ?stew in [their] own juices.?

The unfolding tragedy in Haiti is a heart-rending illustration of the way that avoidable government corruption exacerbates unavoidable natural catastrophes.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 14, 2010

In chapter 13 of the book of Luke Jesus confronts some common assumptions about suffering.

Referring to innocent Galileans slaughtered by Pontius Pilate and Jerusalem residents who died when a tower collapsed, Jesus said: ?[D]o you think that they were worse sinners than all [others]? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.?

In reacting to the horrifying earthquake in Haiti, the Rev. Pat Robertson apparently forgot that passage. He insisted that Haiti?s misfortunes reflect a supposed pact with the Devil made by Haitian rebels during the war for independence from France.

Leaving aside the fact that no such pact occurred, it?s illogical ? and un-Biblical -- to assume that all Haitians ? including faithful, committed Christians ? would be bound by it. Furthermore, the intractable poverty and lack of economic development afflicting that country reflect decades of official corruption and profligacy. Our own country has countenanced exactly the same kind of political misrule, and unless we repent we will likewise perish.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 13 , 2010

Charlie Mitchener, a contractor from Las Vegas, has endured several burglaries, the most recent occuring on January 3 of this year.

Complying with a request from the responding police officer, Mitchener provided personal identification and a copy of his firearms permit. Before determining if the area was secure, the police officer ordered Mitchener to surrender his personal firearm and submit to being handcuffed. This was supposedly done, the officer said, to make sure ?that we [are] all safe.?

As Mitchener pointed out to Vin Suprynowicz of the Las Vegas Review-Journalpointed out to Vin Suprynowicz of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, this may have made the officer feel safer, but it put his own life in jeopardy. If the burglar had still be on-site, the handcuffed and disarmed civilian wouldn?t have been able to protect himself.

For the police, ?officer safety? is always the first consideration. Mitchener?s experience is particularly significant in that it demonstrates how police are taught to regard armed citizens as potential enemies.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 12, 2010

Hitler?s National Socialists devised a new term to describe the centralization of all political functions in the hands of the Fuhrer and his party: Gleichschaltung, a word often translated as ?synchronization,? an innocuous word to describe the process that created a murderous unitary government that controlled all aspects of German life.

By limiting the powers of the central government and protecting the powers of the states, the U.S. Constitution was designed to prevent the emergence of a monolithic central government of the sort Hitler and his comrades created.

On January 11, the Obama administration unveiled an executive order representing a dreadful milestone in the process of American Gleichschaltung ? the establishment of a ?Council of Governors? to aid in the ?synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities? both domestically and abroad. This doesn?t mean that troops will soon flood our streets and death camps will sprout across the countryside. But that executive order makes it even likelier that such afflictions will descend on our country.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 11, 2010

On January 3, graduate student Haison Jiang dropped his girlfriend off at the Newark Airport. In the absence of a Transportation Security Administration guard, Jiang escorted his girlfriend to the boarding area.

The supposed security breach triggered a lockdown that left passengers stranded for up to six hours. Several days later Jiang was arrested at his home in Piscataway, interrogated for a few hours, then released. He has been charged with ?defiant trespass? and faces a $500 fine.

New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, displaying a disposition suitable to one of Mao?s Red Guards, is infuriated over the supposed leniency displayed toward Jiang, describing his act of escorting his girlfriend without government permission as ?a terrible deed.? Significantly, the TSA guard whose absence permitted Jiang?s supposed offense is likely to escape any kind of professional censure.

Jiang came to the U.S. from Communist China in 2004. It?s doubtful his new home is significantly freer than the country he left.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 8, 2010

One by one, the Midwestern states that once hosted America?s major manufacturers are being overwhelmed by the tax-consuming class.

Four years ago, the population of government employees in Michigan exceeded the number of people employed in manufacturing, and government employees made, on average, 18 percent more than private sector workers.

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce reports that in 2009, for the first time since relevant statistics began to be kept in 1959, government employees outnumbered Wisconsin manufacturing workers. Fifty years ago, manufacturing workers outnumbered government employees three-to-one; since that time the number of people working in manufacturing has slightly decreased, while government payrolls have exploded.

As is the case elsewhere, government is claiming an ever-bigger share of the Wisconsin economy. In the last legislative session, the state government approved $2 billion in tax increases and increased state spending by 6.5%.

These trends aren?t confined to the Midwest; they?re visible everywhere in the U.S. If not arrested, government growth will permanently destroy our prosperity.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 7, 2010

John Locke observed that slavery consists of being subject to the ?arbitrary will of another man? ? something Americans can experience every time they check in at an airport.

Joan Rivers, an easily recognizable 76-year-old Jewish woman, makes a singularly unlikely terrorist. Yet she was recently kept off a flight because her Passport lists her by both her showbusiness and married names.

Three-year-old Josh Pitney received an early lesson in government power and individual servitude when his Play-Doh was confiscated by a TSA official at the New Orleans Airport. No regulation authorized the confiscation, yet a bureaucrat who can?t tell plastique from Play-Doh swiped the child?s favorite Christmas gift.

Veteran war correspondent Michael Yon was arrested, handcuffed, and interrogated in Seattle for refusing to tell a TSA screener how much money he makes. In his travels throughout Asia and the Arab world, Yon observes, ?No country has ever treated me so badly.?

Our economy and prestige are in steep decline, but the USA leads the world in airport harassment.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.