"Nation of Laws" (Tell a Lie Often Enough)

Writing last time about the means by which the military industrial coup d’etat used confusion, deceit, and bewilderment to cow and subjugate the nation, I spoke of what I long ago came to call “the IRS tactic,” that of writing law so voluminous and convolute as to be incapable of interpretation or understanding. When one has been given – or has arrogated to himself - authority to interpret such a law (or laws), he has become de facto a dictator. The existence of the law is a sham, mere pretense of legality, and a mockery of democracy.

Of course, however, it is also a precept of law as old as Roman times that the government may not be a criminal. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote (in Olmstead v. U.S. - 277 U.S. 438), "Government is the potent, omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution."

But who will make the government obey the law? "Quis custodet ipsos custodes," the Latin motto says – who will take custody of the custodians? Who, should the "custodians" have decided to demand their droit du seigneur, to violate brides on their wedding night, can prevent them? And who, should the "custodians" have elected to sell the prerogative provided under their ius primae noctis they have enacted, will prevent them? Which of our supposed constitutional rights is safe from sale to the highest bidder – or any bidder, for that matter?

None of the “American” freedom myths I wrote about in “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story” has ever annoyed me the way the “equal under the law” myth has – and does. Nowhere is the falseness of our freedom myths more thunderously obvious than where legal process is the subject. Anyone poor who has ever sought to prosecute any kind of lawsuit, or been accused of any kind of crime – even when he has incontrovertible proof of innocence – knows better.

In the first place, the law having to do with both procedure and process and statute language itself has deliberately been made so esoteric, so convolute in structure and meaning, as to be understood only by persons with college degrees - Juris Doctor degrees. Read a legal opinion – it’s the law, you know (it isn’t, but you’re made to believe it is) – sometime. Try to read the rules of civil procedure, without which you can’t so much as get your case into a court.

Then, call an attorney; ask him what he charges an hour. Try to imagine someone poor – an unemployed white male or anyone unprotected by ideological and political correctness, for instance; how about someone living on social security – having to hire an experienced and skilled lawyer. Or, for that matter, any lawyer. If your case is against the Internal Revenue, the first thing that happens in the Nation of Laws, Land of the Free, is that the government seizes ALL your money, and attaches all your property. Imagine hiring a lawyer who knows you have, or will have, no money or property.

While you’re doing all that imagining, try to imagine an attorney who will actually represent your interests against the government - who, after all, decides (license?) whether he is allowed to practice his profession. Try to imagine a lawyer who will give you a real defense against IRS (no law vague or incomprehensible in its meaning is constitutional – so how come no lawyer has ever dared defend his client on that basis?).

Tell me, if equality under the law is the law of the land, how is it that Bill Gates and an old lady who has only enough money that she has to subsist on cat food pay the same fine for, say, speeding? A hundred bucks for the Microsoft billionaire is the same deterrent as for one of our senior citizens living on social security? Sure!

That’s justice? Sure. You can imagine that, accused of murder, Mr. Gates and the senior citizen on social security will have the same caliber of lawyer and defense? You don’t remember the O.J. Simpson case, obviously. Or is it that you can imagine that the old lady on cat food could pay fees necessary to have Johnny Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Shapiro, and Barry Scheck on her defense team . . .? And never mind money to pay for all the expert witnesses.

Sure - hell, yes! You obviously haven’t noticed how the rich always get off, while the poor don’t. You imagine that the percentage of rich and poor inside our prisons is the same as outside.

But then, there’s the myth. “Tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” Maybe you really haven’t noticed. So, who “tells the lie often enough?” Why, none other than the “free press.” When I said nothing ever annoyed me like the myth of equality under the law, I should have made an exception for the myth of free press. How obvious can you get? The media in the United States amounts in fact to no more nor less than relentless indoctrination – perpetuation of those freedom myths.

And that was by design. After what was called Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program immediately after the same became the nation’s Gestapo (not my choice of terms, but that of none other than J. Edgar Hoover), that’s what our fourth estate was re-structured and directed to do, after all. By design!

More about “Mockingbird” in a minute. We were talking about equality under the law: try to imagine the IRS treating FoxNews the way the former treats John Q. Citizen. Try to imagine the tax collector treating CBS News the way they treated me. Sure you can. On the other hand, try to imagine a newscaster or pundit who dares (or dared - ever) to publish the truth about IRS outrages. Go to a law library, look up all the cases like these, then ask yourself why you never heard a word about them (note the quotation marks – this is from the record):

"'March 4, 1976: Ten minutes after Clyde H. Allisan and Ralph W. Foster, two IRS agents, left the residence of Robert Smiley in Salem, the latter was found dead from a bullet wound in the head. Two thousand dollars, which Smiley had in his pockets, was gone. Local police reported the death as a suicide. No autopsy was performed. The IRS agents were neither interviewed nor interrogated. No hearing was held.
“'A weeks later five IRS agents seized all the vehicles comprising Smiley's business inventory and sold them. The Treasury Department refused to answer any questions on the matter. They also refused to let IRS agents Allisan and Foster be interviewed. Meanwhile, IRS agents continued to harass Smiley's broken-hearted, destitute, ill widow to the point that she attempted suicide on October 23, 1976.”
'In June, 1988 Kay Council of High Point, NC came home one night to find a note from her husband, Alex: ‘My dearest Kay - I have taken my life in order to provide capital for you. The IRS and its liens against our property have dried up all sources of credit for us. So I have made the only decision I can. It's purely a business decision. You will find my body on the lot on the north side of the house.’
“'At the end of a nine-year battle, the IRS ruled that the Councils owed three hundred thousand dollars in taxes, interest, and penalties. When their financial resources were exhausted, Mr. Council committed suicide to provide Mrs. Council with two hundred, fifty thousand dollars in insurance money to continue the battle.'
“'Jasper and Lucille Gates of Denver, CO received a letter from the IRS stating that they had overpaid their 1972 tax by $1,197. However, they never received a refund. Instead, in June 1974 they were notified, without explanation, that they owed $4,451. Soon another letter came, claiming the deficiency was $4,206. In October the IRS claimed they owed $13,700, in November it was $15,000. By October 1975 the alleged deficiency had grown to $16,000 - all without explanation. Then, in August 1978, still without explanation or warning, the IRS seized their bank accounts worth about $13,000 and their home worth about $100,000. They sold the home for $16,000. Mrs. Gates, in a wheel-chair, was evicted, the Gates' furniture and personal effects were thrown into the street. When the news media contacted the IRS, the U.S. Gestapo cited the Privacy Act, and refused comment.'
"'The IRS claimed Donald McGrath owed $39.65, refusing to say why (remember my original argument with them?). Instead they persuaded McGrath's bank to transfer $39.65 from his account to the IRS. Finally, incited by IRS officials and IRS-inspired police reports, a sheriff’s deputy shot Donald McGrath to death.’
“'IRS goons jumped Stephen and Mona Oliver of Fairbanks, Alaska as they sat in their car, a Volkswagen. When they had smashed out the VW’s driver’s side window and windshield with clubs, they dragged Stephen from the vehicle. Having beaten him into submission, they likewise dragged Mona out through the broken windshield, then across the broken glass, leaving her stunned, bruised, and bleeding.'
'In 1983, five IRS thugs without warrant raid the home of Vietnam veteran Charles Streich, ostensibly to collect $500. When they have arrested Streich and taken his AR-15 rifle, it conveniently turns up in court with M-16 parts. Streich is convicted of assault and possession of an unregistered machine gun.'
"The record does not explain how the illegally obtained weapon could have been used as evidence in the first place.’
“'Colluding with Post Office officials to intercept the mail, IRS agents stole a mortgage check written by one Donald Thurow. They altered the check by stamping "Internal Revenue Service" over the payee line, and cashed it.'
“'In 1984, seven or eight armed IRS agents occupied the Engleworld day-care center in Detroit’s Allen Park. They changed the locks, took about twenty children hostage, and locked them up. Because the day-care center' allegedly owed taxes of $14,000, parents were obliged to pay ransoms before the IRS would release their children. Marilyn Derby, Director of Engleworld said, ‘It was a very scary situation, like the Gestapo was here. Children were crying. Parents were trembling. I told one woman whose hands were shaking that she shouldn't sign anything she didn't want to. She signed anyway.’”
“'In 1986, Pipersville, PA, the IRS claimed that Thomas Treadway owed them $247,000. They started seizing his assets the same day (note the absence of any concern for the law or their own rules of procedure). Without bothering to claim the lady owned taxes, they also they seized the farm and bank accounts of Shirley Lojeski, a friend. They seized $22,000 from her bank account, too.
“'Two months later, a federal appeals officer found the entire $247,000 assessment against Treadway unreasonable. When the lady sued successfully in federal court to have the lien against her farm removed, the IRS dragged its feet for four months, causing Lojeski to become far in arrears of her mortgage payments.
“'When Lojeski tried to collect damages in court, a federal court ruled that the IRS manual established only internal procedures, not a due-process standard.'”

Tell me – if the press and media are what you think they are, why weren’t stories like that nationwide news? Why didn’t they get at least the same coverage as the O.J. trial, or that of Kobe Bryant, or Natalee Holloway, or the Duke University Lacrosse Team Rape case? Why didn’t the brutal behavior of IRS merit at least the attention given any of the Nancy Grace Rape of the Week stories, or pap like “American Idol?”

Oh, yeah – by the way: Lojeski and her friend Treadway also lost $75,000 in legal and accounting fees. Remember what I said about being able to afford the law that’s for everyone? The legal fees, should you somehow be fortunate enough to be able to hire a lawyer, are just the price of being a citizen in a corporate capitalist dictatorship. You have the same rights as Bill Gates. Sure you do.

Just ask me – everything the IRS did to Tom Treadway and Shirley Lojeski they did to me long before, and twice.

But the press says we’re free. We can do anything we please. And so are they. Free! They can report on anything they like. Sure. They’re the people’s watchdog on government. But with a war going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thousands of our troops – that’s our fellow citizens, people like us. mind you - being killed and wounded, with literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis having been killed on account of our illegal invasion, the nation’s journalists report on who’s screwing whom in Hollywood, and what a cute - "lovable" - dog did in Germany. It’s national news. Hell, yes!

I mentioned Operation Mockingbird. Did the media tell you about that? No, you bet your sweet ass they didn’t. After all, it’s about why the “fourth estate” in the land of the free press is so docile. You wouldn’t expect the “free press” to hold weeks of “special coverage” on something like that, now, would you? After the CIA and military industrial complex coup d’etat soon after World War Two, your government paid in big bucks of your money for a program intended to neutralize the media. “Mockingbird” was so successful that one CIA operative at the time described the news media like this: "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." You can watch FoxNews, for instance, and tell yourself things have changed since then? REALLY?

There’s more. Your free press tells you that you’re free of want – while millions eat pet food or go to bed hungry, forego medical treatment because only a rich man can afford either it or health insurance, and the only way to get their government’s attention (unless they’re an illegal alien) is to riot or blow something up. The press says you’re free of fear and a dozen more things you know damned well are a lie, but you also know you can’t find a forum unless you sell yourself and your soul to one crack-brained “ism” or the other - your "representatives" in Congress only listen to the military industrialist lobbyists who own them.

Free? The “Land of the Free” is free when you can pay for it.