Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

August 12 2011

Forty years ago this August 15, the Nixon administration closed the ?gold window? ? that is, it defaulted on the federal government?s debts by severing the connection between the dollar and gold. This meant that debts would be paid with dollars that were, in effect, IOUs written to cover IOUs drawn on an empty bank account.

In the mid-1970s, Washington entered into a corrupt financial entente with Saudi Arabia in which Riyadh agreed to accept worthless fiat dollars in exchange for the world?s most coveted commodity. This petro-dollar accord provided a few decades of entirely artificial viability for the dollar: Since the Saudis and the OPEC cartel were willing to accept dollars for oil, the greenback remained the world?s reserve currency.

This arrangement meant giving the Saudis advanced military hardware and committing the U.S. military to defend the Saudis. It led to two wars against Iraq, a war against Libya, and may lead to war with Iran. And still, the dollar?s demise is unavoidable ? and with it will die our standard of living.

Few things are more painful than the inevitable end of an unsustainable fantasy.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 11, 2011

With the support of a majority of City Commissioners, Mary Lee Cook, the 84-year-old Mayor of Oak Hill, Florida, recently fired the city?s six-member police force. This came several weeks after the police reportedly found a handful of ?scrawny? marijuana plants on the octogenarian?s property. No charges were filed against Mayor Cook, who insists that the plants were placed there by a political enemy in the police force seeking to damage her reputation. The dismissed police chief, incidentally, has a history of personal drug abuse

In Quartzsite, Arizona ? population 3,600 -- the Town Council has attempted to dismiss all but three members of its 14-man police force. In that case, the Council is at odds with the mayor, who has accused the Council of misappropriating funds. The officers facing dismissal have accused the police chief of abusing his authority in the service of a corrupt ruling clique on the Council, which has declared a state of emergency and now does business behind closed doors.

Episodes of this kind are erupting all across the United States and as bankrupt municipal governments degenerate into factional squabbles that may soon take on the nature of gang warfare.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 9 2011

According to the Sacramento Bee, the migratory wave from Mexico to California has gone into reverse. While the official unemployment rate in the U.S. is around ten percent, in Mexico the rate is lower than five percent. Mexicans who had immigrated to the U.S. without official permission are now returning to their homeland, which right now boasts a healthier economy than the United States.

Illegal immigration has long been a problem, but it was never a crisis. The police state measures imposed as supposed ?solutions,? however, will remain part of the architecture of official repression. One good example is the so-called ?Safe Communities Initiative,? through which information on criminal suspects is compiled in huge federal databases for the alleged purpose of identifying criminal aliens. Several states had objected to the program on federalist grounds, or out of concerns over racial profiling.

On August 5, the Obama administration unilaterally decreed that states can no long opt out of that program ? which, like nearly everything else the administration has done, is a brazenly unconstitutional usurpation of power.

Never forget: The walls being built by our rulers are intended to keep us in, not to keep foreigners out.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 8, 2011

Like thousands of other police union officials nation-wide, John Barnes of Michigan?s Warren Police Association is infuriated that he and his comrades may have to start paying a larger share of their own health care and pension benefits.

This matter will require the immediate, personal attention of members of the police union in lobbying the Michigan legislature in Lansing. Barnes prescribed a very direct approach:

?[I]f we cannot earn their respect we will do what we have always done ? hit it with a flashlight until we gain compliance!?

When challenged about what can be reasonably construed as a threat of insurrectionary violence, Barnes insisted that this was simply as specimen of ?cop speak? that was not intended for general public consumption. Besides, he continued, ?I will refrain from using inflammatory language as soon as those attacking me and my fellow police officers refrain from using the same.?

We are indebted to Mr. Barnes for dispelling the pious misunderstanding that police exist to protect and serve anything but their own tribal interests.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 5, 2011

Police in in Renton, Washington seek to arrest and prosecute an anonymous satirist who created several animated cartoons mocking the scandal-plagued police department.

The videos ?target specific members of the City of Renton and Renton Police Department with the intent to embarrass and emotionally torment the victims,? claimed police investigator Ryan Rutledge in a July 11 affidavit filed in King County Superior Court. Rutledge contends that the videos are covered by the Washington State ?cyberstalking? statute.

Remarkable as the case in Renton may be, this is not the first time a city government and its armed enforcement apparatus have sought to identify and prosecute an anonymous critic.

In 2008, municipal officials in the town of Whitewater, Wisconsin, particularly Police Chief James Coan, targeted the pseudonymous John Adams, publisher of www.freewhitewater.com , which lambasted the town?s ?narrow-minded" political class.

Police departments are persistently looking for ways to circumnavigate that troublesome First Amendment. In many jurisdictions they seek to use wiretapping statutes to prosecute citizens who record their public actions. Now police are attempting to redefine criticism of its performance as a form of ?cyberstalking.?

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 4, 2011

In a memorable scene from the 1970s film ?Animal House,? the odious Dean Wormer of fictional Faber University informs the slovenly misfits of the Delta House fraternity that they?ve been on ?double-secret probation? and are facing expulsion from college. Apparently the people running Washington?s intelligence bureaucracy have seen that film, and drew inspiration from it for the official interpretation of the so-called PATRIOT Act.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has referred to a ?secret? PATRIOT Act ? meaning a classified interpretation of the statute that would permit extensive covert surveillance of American citizens.

Wyden and fellow Senator Mark Udall affixed an amendment to the Patriot Act reauthorization that would require the Attorney General ?publicly [to] disclose the United States Government?s official interpretation of the USA Patriot Act.?

Their concerns were deflected by the Select Committee, which rejected Wyden and Udall?s proposed amendment.

What this means, of course, is that for the foreseeable future, all Americans will be on ?double-secret probation? ? under unremitting scrutiny, and subject to the whims of people who are entirely unaccountable to us.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 3, 2011

During the overwrought and ultimately pointless Capitol Hill melodrama over raising the debt ceiling, the public was routinely told that it would be unprecedented for the federal government to ?default on its obligations.?

Let it first be understood that raising the debt ceiling is actually a way to continue evading financial obligations.

Secondly, financial affairs commentator Marc Joffe, former Senior Director at Moody?s Analytics, points out that the U.S. government has actually gone into default on at least three prior occasions ? most recently in 1979, when the Treasury Department failed to redeem roughly $122 million in T-bills.

The biggest default in American history, however, occurred in August 1971 when the Nixon administration severed the dollar?s connection to gold. As Charles Goyette points out in his book The Dollar Meltdown, this was done because foreign creditors, alarmed over the profligacy of Washington in fighting a distant war in Vietnam while expanding the welfare state, were demanding to exchange their dollars for gold.

Washington defaulted on its obligations forty years ago. Our deepening economic collapse is merely the long-deferred but inevitable consequence of living in a fiat money society.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 2, 2011

Sterling Heights, Michigan resident Ramsey Tossa is an Iraqi expatriate who served as a translator for U.S. troops occupying his country. He lived under the reign of one-time Washington subcontractor Saddam Hussein, and assisted in the military operation that led to his capture.

It?s reasonable to surmise that Mr. Tossa, and many of his relatives, are familiar with the dreaded ?2:00 a.m. knock? that is a familiar tactic of secret police everywhere, including in Saddam?s Iraq. It?s also reasonable to believe that once Tossa became a naturalized U.S. citizen, he never expected to experience that kind of state terrorism in America. Nonetheless, Mr. Tossa?s home was recently invaded by a paramilitary team from the DEA, who thrust open the doors at 2 a.m., seized Tossa by the neck and threw him to the ground, and held him at gunpoint while his wife and daughter looked on in horror.

The thugs gave no explanation and certainly didn?t display a warrant. It was later revealed that the DEA was looking for someone who didn?t even live at that address.

"The first thing I thought was they were terrorists,? Tossa later recalled. His first impression was unassailably correct.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

August 1, 2011

For a crime to exist, three conditions must be met: There must be criminal intent, a violation of a specific criminal statute, and a victim. Any act failing to meet all three of those criteria cannot legitimately be called a crime.

In any society that can reasonably be described as free, the laws are few in number, clearly stated, easily understood, and difficult to violate; crimes would consist only of an injury to the person or property of another. The Federal Register and the federal criminal code overteem with literally tens of thousands of statutes, enactments, and bureaucratic decrees that carry the force of law.

A spokeswoman for the arm of government calling itself the Justice Department told the Wall Street Journal that there is ?no quantifiable number? of federal criminal statutes, which occupy at least 27,000 pages of the federal code. Furthermore, most recently enacted statutes do not require that prosecutors establish criminal intent on the part of the accused.

The legitimate purpose of the law, John Locke observed, is to enlarge freedom by protecting individual liberty. By that standard, the enactments inflicted on us by the government presuming to rule us aren?t legitimate laws.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

July 29, 2011

When the economy takes a nose-dive, households tighten their belts. Governments, on the other hand, tighten nooses.

Household budgets confront dramatic increases in the cost of non-discretionary items ? food, energy, and housing. All government spending, on the other hand, is purely discretionary: There quite literally is nothing government does that could honestly be described as indispensable. Yet rather than biting the proverbial bullet and spending less ? as households are forced to do ? governments are increasingly relying on revenue extracted at gunpoint.

?As states and municipalities continue to grapple with the recession's fallout ? [they?re] turning to more modest, narrowly crafted increases in fees and fines -- nickel-and-diming their way to a balanced budget,? reports the AP. This can mean doubling common fees, radically increasing fines, and expanding the number and kinds of activities that can be turned into potentially lucrative violations.

At a time when households are forced to do more with less, why can?t local governments do the same? There are countless ways to answer that question, but they can all be easily digested into this simple proposition: County governments have constituencies to feed, and they have Sheriff's Departments to command.

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