“When in the Course of Human Events . . ."

“Now’s the time, and now’s the hour; see yon front o’ battle lour . . .”

A couple of weeks ago, I published my concern that the military industrial complex in power here would not relinquish the reins of government to a new administration. I’m apparently not alone in that, and I have a number of people of societal gravitas and credentials who share my worry. This is serious, people, and we, the citizenry had better wake the hell up: the alternative may be nothing less than our children and grandchildren in totalitarian slavery.

“All men,” said Abigail Adams, “would be tyrants if they could.” Damn – I’d have loved to know that woman!

Thom Hartmann began his program on Thursday by reading from a new Executive Order which allows the government to seize the assets of anyone who interferes with its Iraq policies.

He then introduced old-line conservative Paul Craig Roberts -- a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan who has recently become known for his strong opposition to the Bush administration and the Iraq War -- by quoting the "strong words" which open Roberts' latest column: "Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran."

"I don't actually think they're very strong," said Roberts of his words. "I get a lot of flak that they're understated and the situation is worse than I say. ... When Bush exercises this authority ... there's no check to it. It doesn't have to be ratified by Congress. The people who bear the brunt of these dictatorial police state actions have no recourse to the judiciary. So it really is a form of total, absolute, one-man rule. ... The American people don't really understand the danger that they face."

Roberts said that because of Bush's unpopularity, the Republicans face a total debacle in 2008, and this may be why "the Democrats have not brought a halt to Bush's follies or the war, because they expect his unpopular policies to provide them with a landslide victory in next year's election."

However, Roberts emphasized, "the problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that Cheney and Rove and the Republicans are ignorant of these facts, or it assumes that they are content for the Republican Party to be destroyed after Bush has his fling." Roberts believes instead that Cheney and Rove intend to use a renewal of the War on Terror to rally the American people around the Republican Party. "Something's in the works," he said, adding that the Executive Orders need to create a police state are already in place.

"The administration figures themselves and prominent Republican propagandists ... are preparing us for another 9/11 event or series of events," Roberts continued. "Chertoff has predicted them. ... The National Intelligence Estimate is saying that al Qaeda has regrouped. ... You have to count on the fact that if al Qaeda's not going to do it, it's going to be orchestrated. ... The Republicans are praying for another 9/11."

Hartmann asked what we as the people can do if impeachment isn't about to happen. "If enough people were suspicious and alert, it would be harder for the administration to get away with it," Roberts replied. However, he added, "I don't think these wake-up calls are likely to be effective," pointing out the dominance of the mainstream media.

"Americans think their danger is terrorists," said Roberts. "They don't understand the terrorists cannot take away habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. ... The terrorists are not anything like the threat that we face to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution from our own government in the name of fighting terrorism. Americans just aren't able to perceive that."

Roberts pointed out that it's old-line Republicans like himself, former Reagan associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein, and Pat Buchanan (!) who are the diehards in warning of the danger. "It's so obvious to people like us who have long been associated in the corridors of power," he said. "There's no belief in the people or anything like that. They have agendas. The people are in the way. The Constitution is in the way. ... Americans need to comprehend and look at how ruthless Cheney is. ... A person like that would do anything."

The italics above are mine – what have I been saying? The current President of the U.S. and his cabal have literally (and I do not, ever, use that word incorrectly) made a mockery of law during the past six years. The Congress, owned as I’ve said lock, stock, and barrel by corporate America and the military industrial complex, has failed utterly to enforce the law. The White House and military industrial complex’s agent, none other than the U.S. Attorney General, has declared publicly that the U.S. Constitution is “an old document.”

What – you don’t understand what he means?!

I know these people. I have, as I noted yesterday, and have noted before (I wrote a book about it), faced these people down in the streets and at the door of my homes. In no instance of the literally scores of attacks on my constitutional rights as a citizen did the federal government or its emissaries show the slightest regard for the law. Their authority was that of power – muscle and guns – and beaten at their own game, they resorted to the tactics of every dictatorship in history – they attacked my family and friends.

One, more, time: WAKE THE HELL UP! You’re next.

Several people who have read my recent “blog” are apparently (experience has made me suspicious of Americans who profess ignorance or disbelief) nonplussed. Interested in the concept of guerrilla law, and desirous of doing everything they can to recover control of the country and destiny, they are so badly educated and informed that they know nothing of the history of law required. That’s not surprising, of course – it’s what government since time immemorial has endeavored to do. People knowledgeable about the laws by which they are governed are hard to abuse, and no intelligent person in his right mind can have any doubt about why our legal system has been brought by government and the corporations that control it to the status quo.

There are, as a matter of fact, a number of other people, among them wife Rita’s daughter and son-in-law, who are still unable to disabuse themselves of the idea that the Democratic Party – Republican Party rivalry remains real, and evidence that we still have a political process. That, of course, is evidently not true, with things like the unprecedented opening of the supposed political campaign this early an example of the Operation Mockingbird propaganda techniques now being used to “deceive, confuse, and bewilder” the public order to keep them in a controlled, Orwellian and only virtual reality.

As I’ve just observed, a president confident of the public’s feckless distraction and the congress’ co-option and sell-out to lobbyists commissioned and controlled by the nation’s profit-mad corporations, has, in fact, seized despotic power.

That there can be no doubt of that – he announces it publicly and continually – while the public persists in its Orwellian stupor attests, moreover, to the fact of an Operation Mockingbird media.

Frankly, even I am astonished, wondering what in the hell it will take to convince you, make you aware of what has happened?

Folks the so-called “debate” of night before last was nothing more than an operation designed to create a soap opera, a professional wrestling, television circus and electronic tabloid magazine by which to seize and hold the interest of the tabloid-reading, Britney Spear, Anna Nicole Smith, bimbo-of-the-week adulating public. Aware that events during the last two presidential administrations have uncovered the cesspool that is government, faced with the very real possibility of the rise of a real political party and what might be for all practical purpose total repudiation of the electoral process, the nation’s corporate masters are becoming nervous.

And dangerous.

Another case in point, that having to do with the insidious nature of law controlled only by government, and an example incontrovertibly probative thereof, is the federal tax code. Year after year, no tax authority has ever been able to interpret uniformly the literally scores of thousands of pages of convolute, nonsensical, and incomprehensible “law.” In witness of that fact, whole library rooms and buildings are required to contain all the volumes of record of court rulings which represent the effort to decide what the law means.

This of course, makes mockery of the concept of law. It makes mockery of the law because it means that only the government can say what the law means and is, and what the citizen is required to do. That courts may be called upon to interpret the law in no way changes that. The tax code is incontrovertibly unconstitutional as a creature of a legislature; and as a matter of contract between parties, it is unenforceable. No law or contract too vague to be uniformly interpreted by a court or other authority is constitutional and legal in the United States of America.

More, the entire legal system of the U.S. is of similar character now. The government, and the corporations that own it, are the only ones who can say what it means – or even says. It is therefore axiomatic that, inasmuch as only those able to pay the staggering costs of legal counsel and court process necessary to know what the law is, no fairness under the law – fairness required by the U.S. Constitution – exists. More in that regard, law that punishes unequally is likewise unconstitutional; and law that fines the poor in the same amount as the rich is obviously unfair.

I could go on for pages and books, but my point is this. Only law that is very simple has meaning or use for the common man. That is law prescribed and settled by history. Basic. Even more to the point, law, in the final analysis, is what large groups of people decide. That, when you think of it, is how the government at all levels determines what the law is. “Government,” said George Washington, is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force.”

Law, in other words, is what the greatest force says it is; and when enough people have decided what the law is – too many to be put in jail or to let their fellows be put in jail – THAT is the law .

The greatest force – whether the government or a group too big for the government to punish - does, in fact, what it pleases regardless of what has been enacted and written in the law. “Law enforcement” – George Washington’s “force” - achieves its aims by using overwhelming numbers and the force of numbers to work its way. Might does not make – or mean – right; still, the nation’s law libraries, filled as they are with tens of thousands of instances in which government and law enforcement agencies have arbitrarily violated – as the government did in my own experience - the rights of citizens, attest to the fact that government is not concerned with justice or rule by constitutional law. Each infringement upon the Constitution and its Bill of Rights has result in a narrowing of personal freedoms supposedly guaranteed by that same Constitution. When the government has done what it obviously knows is obviously wrong, the citizens’ recourse is to the government’s courts – an absurd state of affairs now becoming more apparent to the public with every passing outrage.

“Rule of Law” has in the United States become nonsense. It is everywhere apparent that government owned by corporations and the super-rich has nothing but contempt for the rights of the people or the law designed to protect them from government.

That I continue piling up examples and evidence, I hope, speaks of my extreme concern.

The illegal immigration matter is yet another example, a supreme one, of corporate government contempt for the concept of law. In New Haven, Connecticut – the latest example of official malfeasance, misprision, and subornation of violation of immigration law – illegal aliens – criminal violators of the law – are to be protected by public officials sworn to uphold the law they now choose to use brute force to violate.

Daily, now, the public is left to stand in stupefied disbelief at such news. But how do we retaliate?

First, let’s recall something from long ago, July 4, 1776, to be exact:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

“A decent respect to the opinions of mankind . . .” I have stated several – certainly not all; the president’s contemptuous and public rejections of the law number in the hundreds – of the reasons we, the people, must regain political power. The public fact that the president repudiates the law, and the Congress suborns and misprisions his crime will do for “causes which impel.”

Then, too rebellion always means bloodshed. Everything in one’s power must be done to prevent that. Make no mistake, however - the government’s willingness to resort to violence at the drop of a hat is as thunderously apparent as forty thousand SWAT raids in the past few years, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and dozens like it can make it. You might, in weighing the U.S. government’s willingness to kill in slaughter-like proportions, consider the War in Iraq.

How to proceed: first, and most practicable for most people, start writing letters; not just to Congress, but to judges and police officials. These people have a duty to enforce the law - illegal immigration included. Judges have a duty to order it enforced (issue, that is, court orders called writs of mandemus or quo warranto).

Get a Nolo press, pro se (suit without lawyer) publication; learn the simple process to petition the court for the writ. It only takes a little research to learn more (and I'll be writing about it here). Places that help illegal aliens send money (obtained under false pretenses) back to Mexico are violating the law. They can be ordered by the courts to stop, and the police can be ordered to watch the places for illegal immigrants. Etc. This crap all goes on because we are too damned lazy to do our civic duty to our country.

Write to congressmen and senators, anyone in government, for that matter – including police officials. Be angry (you have damned good right to be), and say so. Write again and again (make a copy of your first letter, mail it every week). Organize everyone you can to do the same. Use, “network,” the internet. Write a letter (I’ll publish an example here, then do the same), then e-mail it as many times as possible.

Call public officials at all levels – as many and as often as possible – to inquire concerning how to calculate legal damages you are suffering at the hands of illegal immigration. You’ll be told by them that this is practice of law and they aren’t licensed to practice law. Don’t be deterred – it’s the message the phone call sends that is important.

Call clerks of courts and anyone else connected with the courts; ask how to obtain small claims forms necessary for filing suit against illegal aliens and those hiring and employing them. Be sure you include reference to illegal aliens and those hiring and employing them.

Start doing everything you can to learn how many illegal aliens reside in your city, town, or country, and who employs them. Call newspapers. Ask Hispanics you know or meet how many illegal aliens they know (in my next – this is becoming too long – essay here, I will include useful phrases in Spanish to use when inquiring). Remind them that to know of a crime being committed and to do nothing is a punishable crime in itself.

Get a bumper sticker that says, “Mexican, if I catch you in my country without proper documentation, you will be arrested – even if I have to do it myself (Mejicano, si le hallase a usted en mi país sin documentación, usted estaría detenido – aún cuando el que lo hace fui yo).

That will do for starters (as I said, this is already too long . . .) Next, we’ll have more, with necessary details. We take back our country now, or we lose it.

What is important now is for YOU to do something. Some of us have been carrying the ball too long, now.