Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

June 16, 2011

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has misdiagnosed the causes of the current economic collapse, so it shouldn?t surprise us that the cure he prescribes would be lethal.

The ongoing depression followed the collapse of an investment bubble created through the Federal Reserve?s inflationary monetary policies. The bailouts that began in late 2008 amounted to corporate welfare extorted from taxpayers in an act of wealth redistribution right out of the Communist Manifesto.

For some reason, Kristof persists in acting as if this system has something in common with free market capitalism. To cure our downturn, Kristof suggests that the entire economy should be modeled after the Pentagon, which in the words of retired four-star general Wesley Clark represents ?the purest application of socialism.?

Of course, since the advent of the National Security State in 1947, the Pentagon has essentially been the focal point of the American economy. Many of the corporations displaying the wage disparities lamented by Kristof are military contractors effectively immune to market competition.

Radio commentator Scott Horton disapprovingly, but correctly summarized Kristof?s argument as follows: ?America ought to be Communist ? just like the Pentagon.?

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

June 13, 2011

When the Soviet Union withdrew its military forces from Hungary in 1990, Moscow had the temerity to demand that Budapest pay nearly a billion dollars in compensation for the supposed investment made during that long occupation. The Hungarians, who neither invited the Soviets nor benefited from their unwanted presence, were understandably outraged.

During a recent visit to Iraq, Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher took a page from the Soviet handbook by suggesting that ?some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the megadollars we have spent here in the last eight years.? Noting that the U.S. is mired in a deepening economic downturn ? brought on, in large measure, by decades of imperial meddling and aggressive warfare ? Rohrabacher made an appeal to pity: "We could certainly use some people to care about our situation as we have cared about theirs.?

Taken literally, Rohrabacher?s suggestion would require that some large, wealthy foreign power ? such as China, perhaps -- invade and occupy the United States after imposing a murderous decade-long embargo to soften us up. That?s the same peculiar kind of ?caring? Washington inflicted on the Iraqis, who understandably aren?t interested in paying for that supposed privilege.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

June 10, 2011

The conservative political philosopher Robert Nisbet lamented that many of his fellow conservatives were enamored with the Warfare State. War, wrote Nisbet, is a form of ?licensed immorality? ? not only with respect to killing other human beings, but in matters of sexual conduct.

"What is in the first instance licensed ? by war stays on to develop into forms which have their own momentum," warned Nisbet. The consequences of that State-authorized depravity proliferate in ways people can?t anticipate.

A remarkable example was revealed last October, when the federal government disclosed that for two years following World War II, U.S. officials deliberately infected hundreds of innocent Guatemalans with syphilis. This was done in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin as an antibiotic to treat GIs who returned with venereal diseases.

Test subjects included Guatemalan conscripts, mental patients, and even orphans. These impoverished, unwilling victims ?were seen as things to be experimented on,? observes Guatemalan medical official Carlos Mejia. Nazi doctors who did such things were prosecuted ? and some of them executed ? at Nuremberg.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

June 8, 2011

Many of Barack Obama?s critics have accused him of promoting radical Islam ? either by supporting it directly, or passively acquiescing to it. A recent essay in Human Events magazine managed to criticize Obama for being insufficiently zealous in his efforts to impose Sharia law on Afghanistan.

According to Tara Servatius, ?The Obama administration is so desperate to appease the Islamic savages and cut a peace deal with them that U.S. negotiators no longer require preconditions of Taliban fighters we negotiate with?.? By way of illustration, she complains that ?U.S. negotiators and their British counterparts aren?t even requiring that the Taliban embrace the Afghan constitution that our troops and many Afghans paid for with blood .?

The Afghan constitution for which Americans have killed and died states:

"Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic... The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam.... In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam."

According to Servatius, ?If the American public got the full story on this, they?d be outraged.? This is true, albeit not for reasons that reflexive war promoters like her would appreciate.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

June 7, 2011

Why are police are trained to treat camera-wielding citizens as if they were criminals?

On June 2, a uniformed officer for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority noticed a citizen filming him. The officer waddled over to warn the bystander ? ?speaking not as a police officer, but as a person? ? that if the filming didn?t stop, he would ?[blanking] break his face.? Of course, if the roles were reversed, the citizen would have been arrested for threatening the cop, even if the threat had been directly only at the ?person? and not at the uniform.

After Miami Beach police shot and killed a man on Memorial Day, they confiscated a camera from a witness at gunpoint and tried to destroy the video. To his credit, the witness extracted the memory card and concealed it in his mouth, thereby preserving evidence that the police had sought to destroy. The same police illegally confiscated a camera from a local news crew.

Police often insist that if citizens are doing nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear from them. Why doesn?t that principle apply to the police?

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

June 6, 2011

Police were sent to the Bowling Green, Ohio apartment of Attorney Robert B. Blackwell on April 27 after a family member requested that they perform a ?welfare check.? Police opened the locked door and forced aside a sofa that had been used as a barricade. Blackwell was shotbecause he allegedly pointed a gun at the armed strangers who had entered his home without invitation.

Stacey Burns of Fort Worth suffered from several health problems, including diabetes and clinical depression. On three occasions, her family called the police to assist in committing her to a hospital. The fourth incident of this kind occurred on May 23, when two officers entered her home and found her with a pair of scissors.

The official story is that she charged at one of the officers, who ? according to the police union attorney ? had ?no choice? but to shoot her several times.

Now that ?close and kill? has effectively replaced ?protect and serve? as the police credo, the last thing people should do in dealing with an emotionally troubled relative is to invite police intervention.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

June 3, 2011

Three private citizens in Orlando, Florida have been arrested for the supposed offense of feeding homeless and hungry people without government permission.

On the other end of the continent, police and emergency personnel in Alameda, California watched from the shore while a 52-year-old man named Raymond Zack waded into the ocean and drowned. The man stood in neck-deep water for roughly two hours.

According to police Lt. Sean Lynch, the government personnel didn?t intervene because the clearly suicidal man was ?potentially violent,? and thus posed a potential risk to the highly-trained, lavishly compensated, and union-protected ?first responders.?
Apparently, that peril persisted even after the man was dead, since it fell to a passer-by to retrieve the body from the surf.

The spectators in Alameda are presumably paid to take some modest risks to help others, but their government positions effectively insulate them from responsibility to do so. The members of Orlando?s Food Not Bombs, by way of contrast, feed people out of a sense of moral responsibility ? and yet were hauled off to jail for lack of official permits.

The juxtaposition of those events tells us everything we need to know about the nature of political government.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty minute

June 2, 2011

No public policy has done more to undermine the Bill of Rights than the war on drugs. That campaign has militarized and nationalized local police and turned them into a plundering army of occupation. So in a way it?s not surprising that the entire program grows out of several UN global conventions, the most important of which is the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

In a new report, the Global Commission on Drug Policy observes that the UN, through the International Narcotics Control Board, and the U.S. Government ?have worked ? to ensure that all countries adopt the same rigid approach to drug policy ? the same laws, and the same tough approach to law enforcement.? This ?global drug prohibition system? has literally killed millions ? including more than 30,000 who have died in Mexico over the past five years.

Millions of principled, patriotic Americans want to end our country?s involvement in the misbegotten collectivist enterprise called the United Nations. This is an entirely laudable goal and necessary objective. Pending the happy day when the U.S. is out of the UN and vice-versa, here?s a worthy intermediate step: End the UN?s global war on drugs.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

June 1, 2011

Thirteen-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb was seized by the Syrian secret police. One month later, Hamza?s lifeless body was returned to his family. He had been whipped with heavy cables, shocked, and castrated.

The secret police sought to break the resistance of Hamza?s father, whom the Syrian government regarded as a terrorist. And this behavior is entirely appropriate ? at least according to John Yoo, a key legal adviser to George W. Bush. Yoo notoriously said that a president has the supposed authority to order to sexual torture of a child in order to gain leverage with his parents.

?I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that,? Yoo insisted during a debate at Notre Dame when asked if the president could order an interrogator to crush a child?s testicles. That view of limitless executive authority is shared by the regime of .Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad

The Bush administration used the same Syrian secret police as torture subcontractors as part of its so-called war on terror. The government ruling us is no better, in principle and increasingly in practice, than the one that murdered and mutilated 13-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 31, 2011

In 1942, FDR?s Solicitor General Charles Fahy concealed an official intelligence report concluding that there was no evidence of espionage or widespread disloyalty among Japanese-Americans.

Fahy chose to perjure himself before the Supreme Court by describing the mass internment as a ?military necessity.? As a result, 120,000 innocent people were imprisoned, and their property stolen from them.

Fahy?s crime was recently uncovered by Fahy?s most recent successor, acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal. It?s difficult to believe that he is the first who held the post in the interim who became aware of Fahy?s deception ? yet it has taken nearly seven decades for the truth to emerge.

Major Neil Franklin, a retired 30-year police officer and director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, has an opportunity to make more immediate redress. In a dramatic speech, Franklin denounced the corrupt fraud called the ?War on Drugs,? and asked forgiveness for the role he had played in the assault on the Bill of Rights. Franklin insists that many active police officers share his views; hopefully he will help mobilize them to bring an end to this ongoing atrocity.

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