Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 18, 2010

Before announcing his retirement from the Senate, Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd proposed a large-scale reform of the banking industry. Predictably, it would ignore the fundamental problem – the incurably corrupt Federal Reserve System and the culture of collusion it has created in the government-wedded financial services industry.

Dodd, a supposed tribune of the people, arranged a parting gift to one of his most treasured constituencies – Connecticut’s Mohegan Indian Tribal Council, which operates one of the highest-grossing casinos in the country. Dodd arranged for the Council to receive $54 million in so-called “stimulus” money to finish construction of a community center.

The money was earmarked for rural development programs in impoverished communities. In 2009, despite the economic slow-down, the Mohegan Sun casino pulled in more than $1.3 billion in revenue.

As the song by Billie Holliday put it, “Them’s that got shall get, them’s that not shall lose.” So it was in the last government-induced Great Depression, and so it will be in the one that has begun.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 17, 2010

Sending an innocent man to be tortured in Syria is an exercise of official discretion – but hurting the feelings of those who did so by questioning their motives is unconscionable cruelty.

This is , the official position of the squalid regime ruling us as laid out by both the Bush and Obama juntas.

Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen with no criminal history or inclinations whatsoever, was detained while changing planes at JFK airport. He was sent, by way of “extraordinary rendition,” to Jordan, where intelligence officials delivered him to Syria. There he underwent nearly a year of torture and other abuse until, broken, he signed a bogus terrorism confession.

Rather than being prosecuted, Arar was released to Canada. There he received an official apology from the government, which is continuing an official inquiry.

The Supreme Court recently refused to hear a lawsuit filed by Arar, tacitly endorsing the Bush/Obama view that it’s a crime to hurt the feelings of government officials who conspire to torture the innocent.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 16, 2010

Ryan Snodgrass, a Colorado rafting guide, was arrested and charged with “obstructing government operations.” His supposed crime was to jump into Clear Creek and save a young rafting student while government-employed rescue workers dithered nearby.

Sheriff Don Kruger complained that Snodgrass "jeopardized the rescue operation." In fact, Snodgrass had ample training and was fully prepared to conduct the rescue. His composure and professionalism contrasted sharply with the potentially lethal timidity of the government-employed search and rescue team.

Jamie Hinton, volunteer fire chief for tiny Magnolia Springs, Alabama, was threatened with imprisonment for “violating the federal and state chain of command” by organizing a town effort to protect the local bay from the BP oil spill. Terrified that the town might seize the initiative, BP and the Obama administration promise to preserve the harbor – but Hinton and his friends stand ready to act.

Tax-feeders can be expected to punish productive citizens whose competence underscores government’s corruption and inefficiency.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 15, 2010

Puerto Rico is now being patrolled by troops who recently returned from Iraq. National Guard personnel are manning checkpoints and conducting other police duties in response to a recent uptick in violent crime.

What is happening in Puerto Rico is increasingly common, in spite of the fact that the federal Posse Comitatus law explicitly forbids the use of the military in domestic law enforcement. Specialized National Guard task forces were used to provide security during the 2008 Democratic and Republican national conventions. During the Republican event in Minnesota, troops aided militarized riot police in the mass detention of nearly 300 people, who were arrested without probable cause of any kind while sitting peacefully in a public park.

The National Guard was also deployed on the streets of Pittsburgh during last fall’s G-20 economic summit. Troops in armored vehicles employed a so-called “sonic cannon” developed for use in Iraq.

Remember: We cannot be an empire abroad and a free republic at home.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 14, 2010

In a gesture fraught with symbolic significance, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing has announced that the city will relocate the headquarters of the police and fire departments to the long-vacant MGM Grand Detroit casino.

Detroit, once the showcase of America’s manufacturing might, is a virtual ghost town. Unemployment rates are reaching the stratosphere. Abandoned homes once valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars remain unsold at prices as low as one dollar apiece. The city is demolishing 10,000 houses – including, recently, the childhood home of Mitt Romney. By some estimates, there are more than 90,000 abandoned homes in Detroit.

Similarly, soaring unemployment and a rapidly spreading foreclosure blight are killing Las Vegas. Nationally, about a quarter of all households are “underwater” on their mortgages – meaning they owe more than their houses are currently worth. In Nevada, that figure is a horrifying 65 percent, and Vegas is the epicenter of that unprecedented disaster.

These are snapshots of a country rapidly headed for Third World status.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 11, 2010

Of the 431,000 jobs supposedly created by the U.S. economy in May, 411,000 were temporary positions with the Census Bureau, which is engaging in deliberate fraud to inflate employment statistics.

Census employee Naomi Cohn has disclosed that “the Census Bureau is hiring more people than needed – while at the same time doling out only a few half days of work to many employees….” Cohn’s training class consisted of 80 employees, despite the fact that “only 17 were needed for the project….” A mob of 20 enumerators was sent to count visitors at a local soup kitchen, a task easily performed by a single employee.

A Census position “cannot reasonably be characterized as a job,” Cohn contends. Like many other employees, Cohn has been fired and re-hired by the Bureau several times – and on each occasion the Bureau reported the supposed creation of another job.

As Nietzsche observed, everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has is stolen.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 10, 2010

No later than 2012, the federal government’s aggregate debt will exceed the gross domestic product. That same government is siphoning away what remains of the private wealth of our country, lavishing it on politically connected criminals on Wall Street.
Common people with petty debts are treated much differently.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune describes how “people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts.” Incarcerated debtors are forced to sign documents permitting the garnishment of wages and bank accounts. The beneficiaries are huge, centralized collection firms that have purchased old debts for pennies on the dollar. In one instance a man was given “indefinite incarceration” over a $350 debt.

Petty thieves find themselves behind bars, or dangling from a noose. The big-time criminals are those who run the jails and operate the gallows. In similar fashion, the world’s largest debtors are using government power to enrich themselves while people unable to pay much smaller debts increasingly find themselves in modern debtor’s prison.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 9, 2010

It sometimes seems as if incurable economic illiteracy is a prerequisite of a political career. North Carolina Congressman Brad Miller offers a splendid example of this disability in his proposed “Residential Construction Lending Act.”

By providing cheap credit and encouraging lenders to offer mortgages to unqualified buyers, the recent Federal Reserve-engineered housing boom produced an unprecedented housing glut.
Recovery in the residential real estate sector requires the liquidation of that over-supply. Warren Buffet suggested, semi-facetiously, that the first step to recovery would be to “blow up a lot of houses.” The city government of Detroit intends to act on that principle by demolishing at least 10,000 vacant houses over the next three years.

A much better approach to liquidation would be to permit prices to fall in order for the present housing inventory to be sold. But Rep. Miller, in classic Keynesian fashion, seeks government intervention to keep prices inflated. This approach, which is typical of government “stimulus” programs, will simply prolong and deepen the depression.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 8, 2010

During an August 1997 counter-terrorism conference at the University of Illinois-Chicago, your correspondent saw a presentation by ATF official Kathleen Kiernan in which she explained how the agency was helping to train Palestinian ruler Yasser Arafat’s secret police agencies. But Washington was aiding Arafat’s rivals as well.

In the late 1980s, Hamas, the so-called Islamic Resistance Organization, was created as a rival to Arafat’s Fatah faction. Several accounts describe how Hamas – the Palestinian branch of the CIA-supported Muslim Brotherhood – was given material support by Israeli intelligence as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy.

In a January 2006 election promoted by the Bush administration, Hamas won a legislative majority. Its position was strengthened as a result of a Palestinian civil war instigated by the Bush administration for the supposed purpose of removing Hamas from power.

The terrorism plaguing Israel, and the suffering of the Palestinians, reflect Washington’s perverse efforts to micromanage affairs that are none of its business and beyond its competence.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 7, 2010

As St. Augustine observed, a government is a criminal gang that has given itself permission to murder, torture, and steal.

This fact was made vivid in a recent speech by former President George W. Bush in which he not only defended his unconstitutional decision to wage aggressive war on Iraq, but also publicly admitted that he had ordered his subordinates to commit the crime of torture, a felony that can be prosecuted as a capital offense.

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed,” Bush told the Economic Club of Grand Rapids.

The use of controlled drowning against that high-ranking al-Qaeda operative was just one of the crimes authorized by Bush. The advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights reports that the Bush-era CIA violated numerous laws and conventions – including the post-WWII Nuremberg Convention and the so-called b Common Rule on medical research – by using detainees as experimental subjects to refine torture techniques.

How can any rational person believe that foreign terrorists pose a greater threat than the government ruling us?

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