Posts

Watch Edward Snowden Detail How Phones Are Used to Spy on You

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Smartphones are an important way for governments, tech companies and bad actors to snoop on you, as you leave a digital paper trail. But how does this happen?

. . .The whistleblower said that carriers are able to track your device and therefore figure out your identity via cellular towers. Snowden adds that the movements of your phone are the movements of you as a person and are unique, as you go to your home and workplace every day.

“What this means is that whenever you’re carrying a phone, whenever the phone is turned on, there’s a record of your presence at that place that is made and being created by companies. It does not need to be kept forever, and in fact there’s no good argument for it to be kept forever. But these companies see that as valuable information,” Snowden explains.

The former NSA contractor says all of this data is stored as part of bulk collection or mass surveillance, regardless of whether you did anything wrong. “And that was just talking about how you connect to the phone network. That’s not talking about all those apps on your phone that are contacting the network even more frequently.”

Snowden says that shutting your phone off does work in some ways, but questioned how you would know that your modern, sealed smartphone is actually turned off.

(Read more from “Watch Edward Snowden Detail How Phones Are Used to Spy on You” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

America on the Brink: ‘Adolf Hitler Is Alive and Well in the United States, and Is Fast Rising to Power’

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Yet another shooting.

Yet another smear of ugliness, hatred and violence.

Yet another ratcheting up of the calls for the government to clamp down on the citizenry by imposing more costly security measures without any real benefit, more militarized police, more surveillance, more widespread mental health screening of the general population, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more gun control measures, more surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at so-called soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do more stop-and-frisk searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more government monitoring of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

All of these measures play into the government’s hands.

All of these measures add up to more government power, less real security and far less freedom.

As we have learned the hard way, the phantom promise of safety in exchange for restricted or regulated liberty is a false, misguided doctrine that has no basis in the truth.

Things are falling apart.

When things start to fall apart or implode, ask yourself: who stands to benefit?

In most cases, it’s the government that stands to benefit by amassing greater powers at the citizenry’s expense.

Unfortunately, the government’s answer to civil unrest and societal violence, as always, will lead us further down the road we’ve travelled since 9/11 towards totalitarianism and away from freedom.

With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that not only terrorizes the public but also destabilizes the country’s fragile ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Clearly, America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, racism, classism, xenophobia, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing government corruption and brutality, and a growing economic divide that has much of the population struggling to get by—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long.

Yet there is a method to this madness.

Remember, authoritarian regimes begin with incremental steps. Overcriminalization, surveillance of innocent citizens, imprisonment for nonviolent—victimless—crimes, etc. Bit by bit, the citizenry finds its freedoms being curtailed and undermined for the sake of national security. And slowly the populace begins to submit.

No one speaks up for those being targeted.

No one resists these minor acts of oppression.

No one recognizes the indoctrination into tyranny for what it is.

Historically this failure to speak truth to power has resulted in whole populations being conditioned to tolerate unspoken cruelty toward their fellow human beings, a bystander syndrome in which people remain silent and disengaged—mere onlookers—in the face of abject horrors and injustice.

Time has insulated us from the violence perpetrated by past regimes in their pursuit of power: the crucifixion and slaughter of innocents by the Romans, the torture of the Inquisition, the atrocities of the Nazis, the butchery of the Fascists, the bloodshed by the Communists, and the cold-blooded war machines run by the military industrial complex.

We can disassociate from such violence.

We can convince ourselves that we are somehow different from the victims of government abuse.

We can continue to spout empty campaign rhetoric about how great America is, despite the evidence to the contrary.

We can avoid responsibility for holding the government accountable.

We can zip our lips and bind our hands and shut our eyes.

In other words, we can continue to exist in a state of denial.

Whatever we do or don’t do, it won’t change the facts: the nation is imploding, and our republic is being pushed ever closer to martial law.

As Vann R. Newkirk II writes for the Atlantic:

Trumpism demands that violence be solved by local militarization: increased security at schools, the arming of teachers, and now, the adoption of guns in places intended quite literally to be sanctuaries from the scourges of the world. Taken altogether, what Trumpism seems to intend is the creation—or perhaps the expansion—of the machinery of a police state…

In facing what appears to be a rising tide of violence—a tide that Trump himself elevates and encourages—the prescription of arms merely capitulates to the demands of that bloodshed. The purpose of political violence and terrorism is not necessarily to eliminate or even always to create body counts, but to disempower people, to spread the contagion of fear, to splinter communities into self-preserving bunkers, and to invalidate the very idea that a common destiny is even possible. Mandates to arm people accelerate this process. They inherently promote the idea that society cannot reduce the global level of harm, and promote the authoritarian impulses of people seeking order.

Where Newkirk misses the point is by placing the blame squarely on the Trump Administration.

This shift towards totalitarianism and martial law started long before Trump, set in motion by powers-that-be that see the government as a means to an end: power and profit.

As Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, recognized years ago, “Adolf Hitler is alive and well in the United States, and he is fast rising to power.”

Roberts was not comparing Trump to Hitler, as so many today are wont to do.

Rather, he was comparing the American Police State to the Nazi Third Reich, which is a far more apt comparison.

After all, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics and have used them repeatedly against American citizens for years now.

Indeed, with every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.

These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where the only law that counts comes in the form of heavy-handed, unilateral dictates from a supreme ruler who uses a secret police to control the populace.

The empowerment of the Gestapo, Germany’s secret police, tracked with the rise of the Nazi regime in much the same way that the rise of the American police state corresponds to the decline of freedom in America.

How did the Gestapo become the terror of the Third Reich?

It did so by creating a sophisticated surveillance and law enforcement system that relied for its success on the cooperation of the military, the police, the intelligence community, neighborhood watchdogs, government workers for the post office and railroads, ordinary civil servants, and a nation of snitches inclined to report “rumors, deviant behavior, or even just loose talk.”

In other words, ordinary citizens working with government agents helped create the monster that became Nazi Germany. Writing for the New York Times, Barry Ewen paints a particularly chilling portrait of how an entire nation becomes complicit in its own downfall by looking the other way:

In what may be his most provocative statement, [author Eric A.] Johnson says that ‘‘most Germans may not even have realized until very late in the war, if ever, that they were living in a vile dictatorship.’’ This is not to say that they were unaware of the Holocaust; Johnson demonstrates that millions of Germans must have known at least some of the truth. But, he concludes, ‘‘a tacit Faustian bargain was struck between the regime and the citizenry.’’ The government looked the other way when petty crimes were being committed. Ordinary Germans looked the other way when Jews were being rounded up and murdered; they abetted one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century not through active collaboration but through passivity, denial and indifference.

Much like the German people, “we the people” have become passive, polarized, gullible, easily manipulated, and lacking in critical thinking skills. Distracted by entertainment spectacles, politics and screen devices, we too are complicit, silent partners in creating a police state similar to the terror practiced by former regimes.

Can the Fourth Reich happen here?

It’s already happening right under our noses. Much like the German people, “we the people” are all too inclined to “look the other way.”

In our state of passivity, denial and indifference, here are some of the looming problems we’re ignoring:

Our government is massively in debt. Currently, the national debt is somewhere in the vicinity of $21 trillion. Approximately half of our debt is owned by foreign countries, namely China, Japan and Saudi Arabia.

Our education system is abysmal. Despite the fact that we spend more than most of the world on education, we rank 36th in the world when it comes to math, reading and science, far below most of our Asian counterparts. Even so, we continue to insist on standardized programs such as Common Core, which teach students to be test-takers rather than thinkers.

Our homes provide little protection against government intrusions. Police agencies, already empowered to crash through your door if they suspect you’re up to no good, now have radar devices that allow them to “see” through the walls of our homes.

Our prisons, housing the largest number of inmates in the world and still growing, have become money-making enterprises for private corporations that rely on the inmates for cheap labor.

We are no longer a representative republic. The U.S. has become a corporate oligarchy. As a recent academic survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen.

We’ve got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world compared to other western, industrialized nations.

The air pollution levels are dangerously high for almost half of the U.S. population, putting Americans at greater risk of premature death, aggravated asthma, difficulty breathing and future cardiovascular problems.

Despite outlandish amounts of money being spent on the nation’s “infrastructure,” there are more than 63,000 bridges—one out of every 10 bridges in the country—in urgent need of repair. Some of these bridges are used 250 million times a day by trucks, school buses, passenger cars and other vehicles.

Americans know little to nothing about their rights or how the government is supposed to operate. This includes educators and politicians. For example, 27 percent of elected officials cannot name even one right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment, while 54 percent do not know the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war.

Nearly one out of every three American children live in poverty, ranking us among the worst in the developed world.

Patrolled by police, our schools have become little more than quasi-prisons in which kids as young as age 4 are being handcuffed for “acting up,” subjected to body searches and lockdowns, and suspended for childish behavior.

We’re no longer innocent until proven guilty. In our present surveillance state, that burden of proof has now been shifted so that we are all suspects to be spied on, searched, scanned, frisked, monitored, tracked and treated as if we’re potentially guilty of some wrongdoing.

Parents, no longer viewed as having an inherent right to raise their children as they see fit, are increasingly being arrested for letting their kids walk to the playground alone, or play outside alone. Similarly, parents who challenge a doctor’s finding or request a second opinion regarding their children’s health care needs are being charged with medical child abuse and, in a growing number of cases, losing custody of their children to the government.

Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Accounts are on the rise of individuals—men and women alike—being subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops.

Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. The courts were established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet the courts increasingly march in lockstep with the police state, while concerning themselves primarily with advancing the government’s agenda, no matter how unjust or unconstitutional.

Americans have no protection against police abuse. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What is increasingly common, however, is the news that the officers involved in these incidents get off with little more than a slap on the hands.

If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities. Rubbing salt in the wound, even monetary awards in lawsuits against government officials who are found guilty of wrongdoing are paid with taxpayer funds.

Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police. In early America, government agents were not permitted to enter one’s home without permission or in a deceitful manner. And citizens could resist arrest when a police officer tried to restrain them without proper justification or a warrant. Daring to dispute a warrant with a police official today who is armed with high-tech military weapons would be nothing short of suicidal. Moreover, as police forces across the country continue to be transformed into extensions of the military, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield.

Now these are not problems that you can just throw money at, as most politicians are inclined to do.

These are problems that will continue to plague our nation—and be conveniently ignored by politicians—unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things.

We’re caught in a vicious cycle right now between terror and fear and distraction and hate and partisan politics and an inescapable longing for a time when life was simpler and people were kinder and the government was less of a monster.

Our prolonged exposure to the American police state is not helping.

As always, the solution to most problems must start locally, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in our communities.

We’ve got to refrain from the toxic us vs. them rhetoric that is consuming the nation.

We’ve got to work harder to build bridges, instead of burning them to the ground.

We’ve got to learn to stop bottling up dissent and disagreeable ideas and learn how to work through our disagreements without violence.

We’ve got to de-militarize our police and lower the levels of violence here and abroad, whether it’s violence we export to other countries, violence we glorify in entertainment, or violence we revel in when it’s leveled at our so-called enemies, politically or otherwise.

For starters, we’ll need to actually pay attention to what’s going on around us, and I don’t mean by turning on the TV news. That will get you nowhere. It’s a mere distraction from what is really going on. In other words, if you’re watching, that means you’re not doing. It’s time to get active.

Pay attention to what your local city councils are enacting.

Pay attention to what your school officials are teaching and not teaching.

Pay attention to whom your elected officials are giving access and currying favor.

Most of all, stop acting like it really matters whether you vote for a Republican or Democrat, because in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t.

While you’re at it, start acting like citizens who expect the government to work for them, rather than the other way around. While that bloated beast called the federal government may not listen to you without a great deal of activism and effort brought to bear, you can have a great—and more immediate—impact on your local governing bodies.

This will mean gathering together with your friends and neighbors and, for example, forcing your local city council to start opposing state and federal programs that are ripping you off. And if need be, your local city council can refuse to abide by the dictates that continue to flow from Washington, DC. In other words, nullify everything the government does that is illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

Finally, remember that when you strip away all of the things that serve to divide us, we’re no different underneath: we all bleed red, and we all suffer when violence becomes the government’s calling card.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the oppression and injustice—be it in the form of shootings, surveillance, fines, asset forfeiture, prison terms, roadside searches, and so on—will come to all of us eventually unless we do something to stop it now.

Unless we can learn to live together as brothers and sisters and fellow citizens, we will perish as tools and prisoners of the American police state. (For more from the author of “America on the Brink: ‘Adolf Hitler Is Alive and Well in the United States, and Is Fast Rising to Power'” please click HERE)

_____________________________________________

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available online at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Lawmaker Slips Up, Admits ‘We Have to Regulate Every Aspect of People’s Lives’

/0 Comments/in , /by

You should remember the name Jesse Dominguez. He lives in Santa Barbara where he is a city councilman.

The reason you should care about this particular councilman in Santa Barbara is because he holds a surprising view of personal freedom and liberty. Dominguez recently said in a public meeting: “Unfortunately, common sense is just not common. We have to regulate every aspect of people’s lives.” . . .

The answer to that is probably not, because after Dominguez blurted out those blatantly progressive words, the backlash ensued and an apology followed.

“I just wanted to apologize,” Dominguez said at the beginning of the meeting, according to Santa Barbara’s Noozhawk. “A few weeks ago I made a string of words in a rhetorical fashion about regulation and they were not taken as rhetorical and that’s my fault so I want to apologize.” . . .

Unfortunately for Dominguez, what happens in Santa Barbara doesn’t necessarily stay in Santa Barbara. When word spread about the councilman’s lack of confidence his constituents’ intelligence, social media weighed in.

(Read more from “Lawmaker Slips Up, Admits ‘We Have to Regulate Every Aspect of People’s Lives’” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Federal Government Cannot Account for $21 Trillion in Expenditures. Massive Black Projects, Incompetency, or Graft?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

By Laurence Kotlikoff. On July 26, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported”. The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments. According to the GAO’s Comptroller General, “Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment or are not tied to specific accounting transactions…. For an auditor, journal vouchers are a red flag for transactions not being captured, reported, or summarized correctly” . . .

Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress. The July 2016 report indicates that unsupported adjustments are the result of the Defense Department’s “failure to correct system deficiencies.” The result, according to the report, is that data used to prepare the year-­end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. The report indicates that just 170 transactions accounted for $2.1 trillion in year—end unsupported adjustments. No information is given about these 170 transactions. In addition many thousands of transactions with unsubstantiated adjustments were, according to the report, removed by the Army. There is no explanation concerning why they were removed nor their magnitude. . .

The July 2016 report is not the only such report of unsubstantiated adjustments. Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, conducted a search of government websites and found similar reports dating back to 1998. While the documents are incomplete, original government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015. (Read more from “Federal Government Cannot Account for $21 Trillion in Expenditures. Massive Black Projects, Incompetency, or Graft?” HERE)

__________________________________________________

After Trillions Mysteriously Go “Missing,” DoD Getting Audited for First Time in History

By Matt Agorist. “The Defense Department is starting the first agency-wide financial audit in its history,” the Pentagon’s news service said this week, announcing that they are finally going to follow through with something they promised to do for years.

Beginning in 1996 all federal agencies were mandated by law to conduct regular financial audits. However, the Pentagon has NEVER complied with that federal law. In 20 years, it has never accounted for the trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds it has spent, in part because “fudging” the numbers has become standard operating procedure at the Department of Defense, as revealed in a 2013 Reuters investigation by Scot Paltrow, which detailed the illicit tasks of 15-year employee, “Linda Woodford [who] spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts.”

“Every month until she retired in 2011,” Scot J. Paltrow wrote for Reuters, “she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s – a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

“And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. ‘A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate,’ Woodford says. ‘We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.’”

“Over the last 20 years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when an audit would be completed,” Rafael DeGennaro, director of Audit the Pentagon, told the Guardian earlier this year. “Meanwhile, Congress has more than doubled the Pentagon’s budget.”

In what will likely be an immense and highly politicized dog any pony show, the Pentagon is now claiming this will start immediately.

“It demonstrates our commitment to fiscal responsibility and maximizing the value of every taxpayer dollar that is entrusted to us,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Dana W. White said.

“Beginning in 2018, our audits will occur annually, with reports issued Nov. 15,” the Defense Department’s comptroller, David L. Norquist, said, noting the audits will now be an annual task.

As NPR reports, as for how the audit would work, Jim Garamone of the official DoD News agency reports that the department’s Office of the Inspector General has “hired independent public accounting firms to conduct audits of individual components — the Army, Navy, Air Force, agencies, activities and more — as well as a department-wide consolidated audit to summarize all results and conclusions.”

Exactly what will come of this enormous feat of counting the money spent on spreading the American empire remains a mystery. However, what is not a mystery is the trillions that have “gone missing” as a result of the Pentagon’s refusal to comply with 20 years of audits.

As TFTP reported at the time, a Department of Defense Inspector General’s report, released in 2016, left Americans stunned at the jaw-dropping lack of accountability and oversight. The glaring report revealed the Pentagon couldn’t account for $6.5 trillion dollars worth of Army general fund transactions and data, according to a report by the Fiscal Times.

According to the report by the Fiscal Times:

An increasingly impatient Congress has demanded that the Army achieve “audit readiness” for the first time by Sept. 30, 2017, so that lawmakers can get a better handle on military spending. But Pentagon watchdogs think that may be mission impossible, and for good reason…

The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), the behemoth Indianapolis-based agency that provides finance and accounting services for the Pentagon’s civilian and military members, could not provide adequate documentation for $6.5 trillion worth of year-end adjustments to Army general fund transactions and data.

The DFAS has the sole responsibility for paying all DOD military and personnel, retirees and annuitants, along with Pentagon contractors and vendors. The agency is also in charge of electronic government initiatives, including within the Executive Office of the President, the Department of Energy and the Departing of Veterans Affairs.

While there is nothing in the IG’s report specifying that the money has been stolen, the mere fact that the Pentagon can’t account for how it spent the money reveals a potentially far greater problem than simple theft alone. Also, other reports put the toll of missing money upwards of $10 trillion.

The accounting errors and manipulated numbers, though obviously problems in their own right, highlight a far greater problem for the Defense Department than only bad recording keeping and wasteful spending habits. In reality, they are a representation of the poor decision-making, and lack of oversight and accountability that plague our nation’s government as a whole and this audit, however promising on the surface, will likely prove to be more of the same. (For more from the author of “After Trillions Mysteriously Go “Missing,” DoD Getting Audited for First Time in History” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Do Americans Really Oppose a Government Shutdown?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Oh no, it’s government shutdown time again!

We are always told that a government shutdown is the worst thing in the world. And even if it isn’t the worst thing in the world, everybody thinks it is. The voters will simply not tolerate shutting down the government, and any political party that attempts it will surely suffer the consequences at the next election. Never mind that this was conclusively proven to be untrue when, in the 2014 election, Republicans made significant gains despite having shut down the government earlier that year. Forget about that. It’s history. The important thing is that, as government funding is about to expire, Congress must unconditionally authorize more spending … or else!

To demonstrate this point with data, the folks at Politico are touting a poll that claims 63 percent of Americans want Congress to avoid a shutdown AT ALL COSTS. Only 18 percent think a temporary shutdown is okay as a bargaining chip to further policy goals. And 19 percent have no opinion one way or the other.

So there you have it. “At all costs” is pretty unambiguous. For a majority of Americans, there is literally nothing more important than keeping the government (or at least the 17 percent of it actually affected by a shutdown) up and running. Except none of that is true.

A close look at the data reveals that the words “at all costs” actually translate to “as long as it doesn’t cost anything I care about.” When pollsters ask more detailed questions about specific programs (What if a shutdown is needed to reauthorize CHIP, the children’s health insurance program? What if a shutdown is needed to address DACA or other immigration concerns?), suddenly shutting down the government doesn’t seem so scary. It turns out most people are perfectly willing to shut down the government temporarily in order to achieve an outcome they favor, even if they won’t admit this right out to pollsters.

What does this mean? It means that, contrary to the overwhelming media narrative that endless, bottomless, and limitless government funding must come before all else and that shutdowns are terrible symptoms of broken democracy, the actual American people don’t really care. What people actually care about is the implementation of specific policies that align with their values and priorities. How we get there and whether a shutdown is a path toward implementation aren’t really important. To put it another way, voters don’t want to see how the sausage is made; they just want to eat it.

Despite the Left’s fondness for polls, statistics, and the illusion that number-crunching will yield useful insights about inherently unpredictable things like human behavior, more often than not we see methodology being manipulated to produce a result that fits a political narrative. If we learned anything from the 2016 election, it should be that we can’t trust polls, at least not at face value. How you ask the questions matters. Who you ask matters. Even the person doing the asking matters. Presenting topline numbers, as Politico has done, and using them to draw conclusions about what the American people actually think, especially about issues many people don’t really understand, yields neither knowledge nor wisdom. It just allows hack journalists to make claims that support what they already believe. (For more from the author of “Do Americans Really Oppose a Government Shutdown?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The Pentagon Is Actively Poisoning Americans Across the US and It’s 100% ‘Legal’

/0 Comments/in , , /by

The idea that a government is actively poisoning its citizens may sound like the perfect propaganda plot to send the mainstream media into a feeding frenzy, and to make American neoconservatives beg for the invasion of a sovereign nation—unless it is happening in the United States.

The Department of Defense and its contractors are currently using at least 61 active military sites across the country to “burn and detonate unused munitions and raw explosives in the open air with no environmental emissions controls,” according to a series of bombshell reports from ProPublica that give insight into the largest source of pollution in the country: The Pentagon.

One of those sites is located at an army ammunition plant in Radford, Virginia. The town consists of around 17,000 people, and it is home to an elementary school that “has been ranked by researchers as facing some of the most dangerous air-quality hazards in the country.”

The rate of thyroid diseases in three of the surrounding counties is among the highest in the state, provoking town residents to worry that emissions from the Radford plant could be to blame. Government authorities have never studied whether Radford’s air pollution could be making people sick, but some of their hypothetical models estimate that the local population faces health risks exponentially greater than people in the rest of the region.

Congress banned American industries from using “open burns” to dispose of hazardous waste in 1984, with the land disposal restrictions program for the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency was instructed to specify “either concentration levels or methods of treatment for hazardous constituents to meet before land disposal.”

However, ProPublica noted that lawmakers granted the Pentagon and its contractors “a temporary reprieve from those rules to give engineers time to address the unique aspects of destroying explosive military waste. That exemption has remained in place ever since.”

In the United States, outdoor burning and detonation is still the military’s leading method for dealing with munitions and the associated hazardous waste. It has remained so despite a U.S. Senate resolution a quarter of a century ago that ordered the Department of Defense to halt the practice ‘as soon as possible.’ It has continued in the face of a growing consensus among Pentagon officials and scientists that similar burn pits at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan sickened soldiers.

As The Free Thought Project reported in February 2016, a former U.S. Marine and Army sergeant detailed the horrific conditions U.S. soldiers faced in Iraq and Afghanistan in a book titled, The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers. The book highlighted the constant streams of toxic smoke from the burning of waste, which created lifelong health issues for both soldiers and local civilians.

While the current number of active military sites using operations similar to “burn pits” stands at 61, there are records of nearly 200 sites in the U.S. that have a history of burning hazardous explosives in the open air.

ProPublica noted that facilities such as the one in Radford—which burns raw explosives in bonfire-like piles—operate using special government permits “that are supposed to keep the process safe, limiting the release of toxins to levels well below what the government thinks can make people sick.” However, even the EPA officials who govern the process “acknowledge that the permits provide scant protection.”

In addition to directly affecting the health of residents by polluting the air, the explosive residue from these burn sites is also affecting local residents by poisoning their drinking water.

In Huntsville, Alabama, officials began monitoring the drinking water after they found that the level of perchlorate in the soil was 7,000 times higher than safety limits, and in Grand Island, Nebraska, underground drinking water supplies were affected after explosive residues spread more than 20 miles from the site at the ammunition plant.

The important thing to remember is that according to the United States government, everything they are doing is legal—they have just found loopholes in order to justify any actions that would be considered “illegal” if they were committed by anyone else.

This is another reminder that just because something is “legal,” does not mean it is right, and that—as hundreds of thousands of Americans are experiencing firsthand—the U.S. government does not have the best interest of its citizens in mind, and it is not above poisoning them, in order to fuel the fire that sustains the U.S. war machine. (For more from the author of “The Pentagon Is Actively Poisoning Americans Across the US and It’s 100% ‘Legal'” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Gay Pride Month and the ‘Shot Heard Round the World’

/0 Comments/in , /by

Quick quiz: According to statements published by the U.S. government, where was the shot fired that was “heard round the world”? Lexington and Concord, you say?

Good answer — but you’re only halfway there. There was another “shot heard round the world,” says the National Park Service. That one was in June 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, where two nights of rioting “led to the development of the modern LGBT civil rights movement.”

The Gay-Rights “Shot Heard Round the World”

You read that right. The U.S. government has co-opted Ralph Waldo Emerson’s deeply symbolic phrase to make the birth of the gay rights movement symbolically equal to the birth of our own country. To fill in the rest of the quotation:

The riots inspired LGBT people throughout the country to organize and within two years of Stonewall, LGBT rights groups had been started in nearly every major city in the U.S. Stonewall was, as historian Lillian Faderman wrote, “the shot heard round the world … crucial because it sounded the rally for the movement.”

There’s history at Stonewall, to be sure. And its reach was indeed global. The month of June is now designated “Pride Month,” and almost 150 gay pride festivals are scheduled in cities around the world.

But what does this mean for true freedom?

The Depth of Our National Confusion

It’s worth noting that Lillian Faderman’s full quote read, “to many homosexuals, male and female alike, the Stonewall Rebellion was the shot heard round the world” (emphasis added).

I give her credit for identifying the group who might have seen it that way. The Park Service’s version leaves that out, making it a statement for us all.

I shudder to think of how celebrations in 2017 would have turned out if Stonewall had happened a week later that year, on July 4. As far as I can tell, the White House has never been lit up in red, white, and blue. We’ve all got images seared on our brains, though, of it lit up in the six rainbow colors of the gay rights movement.

This isn’t just happening on some obscure web page, in other words. The gay rights movement has become America’s new freedom movement. It perfectly depicts the depth of our national confusion.

Freedom Based in the Image of God

For there is “freedom,” and there is freedom.

There is the freedom for which our forefathers fought at Lexington, Concord and beyond. It was a view of liberty rooted in a biblical understanding of what it means to be human.

They knew that humans are made in the image of God. We’re not just today’s snapshot in some ever-changing course of evolution. Instead human nature is a stable, enduring, real. We have a moral nature based in God’s own character. We have a well-designed sexual nature, based in God’s plan for us as individuals, couples and families who build communities and cultures together. We have a destiny based on how we relate to God in Christ and to each other in accordance with God’s design for us.

Argue all you want about whether America was founded as a Christian nation, there’s no denying that our founders’ view of human nature that was deeply influenced by the Bible’s view of humanity. Even Thomas Jefferson, who was no Christian, knew at our inalienable rights come from our Creator. Not government, not courts, not even (later on) our Constitution.

Our founders fought for freedom from political tyranny that kept them from determining their own course. Their fight was never for the “freedom” to do whatever anyone chose, though. Quite the opposite. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Freedom was not merely the ability to do as one wanted; it was the ability to do as one ought.

Or Freedom Based in Making Ourselves Our Own Creators

That’s the freedom for which the shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. Stonewall’s freedom has almost nothing to do with that. With all thought of a Creator cast aside, “freedom” now means being able to create ourselves after our own wills. Not satisfied with your sex? Create yourself all over again! Not content with the morality that’s held the Western world together – in spite of various wars and injustices – for centuries? Call it off! Re-make marriage while you’re at it!

And why not? The view now is that nothing about us is fixed. We’re evolving, so we can make ourselves whatever we decide to be. The same goes for human purpose and moral standards: There’s nothing there but what’s evolved over the eons, but we can alter that, too, as we will.

Our Choice: Celebrating Freedom or Free Fall

We claim this as a new-found freedom. But we’re like the kite that yearned to fly high and away, free of the string it thought was holding it down. Freedom? No. Free fall.

Yet this is the freedom our own Park Service symbolically equates with Lexington and Concord. The patriotism of red, white and blue is being displaced by the spectrum of the gay rainbow.

America was never perfect. It took us way too long to recognize that human rights belong to everyone. Still we got there in law and (to an obviously lesser, yet still helpful, degree) in practice. The shots fired at Lexington and Concord led ultimately to our country becoming the world’s greatest champion for true freedom. The shot fired at Stonewall is leading us in another direction altogether.

The LGBT crowd will be celebrating their “pride” this month. That’s their choice. Our own Park Service seems to be saying everyone else is obliged to join them. I can’t think of anything else that so clearly shows the depth of our national confusion. (For more from the author of “Gay Pride Month and the ‘Shot Heard Round the World'” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Who Wins and Who Loses Under These 8 Big Government Policies

/0 Comments/in , /by

It’s clear that many big government policies are creating winners and losers in America.

The story has been the same for decades. Government makes friends with a company or an industry, blocks out the competition with regulation, and in some cases gives the company subsidies.

Such cronyism is bad for innovators and for consumers. But fewer people realize that it’s also bad for the poor.

A recent report from The Heritage Foundation detailed 23 of these big government policies that hurt the poor, and provided concrete ways to address them.

Winners and losers from big government policies are not always clear. And yet for some crony policies, the winners and losers are very clear.

The winners are a small group of identifiable government cronies, while the losers include people of little or no influence with the government.

Here is a look at eight big government policies from the report that benefit government cronies at the expense of other groups of people, including the poor.

1. Renewable Fuel Standard

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandated that renewable fuels be mixed into America’s gasoline supply, primarily by using corn-based ethanol. Then, the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Acts significantly increased the amount that must be mixed in.

This mandate is known as the Renewable Fuel Standard. It forces the use of higher levels of biofuels than the market would otherwise bear. The result has been higher food and fuel prices.

Who Wins: Corn farmers, soybean farmers, and biofuel companies.

Who Loses: Consumers of gasoline, consumers of food, and farmers that rely on feedstock and restaurants.

2. Federal Sugar Program

The federal government tries to limit the supply of sugar that is sold in the United States.

This federal sugar program uses a combination of price supports, marketing allotments that limit how much sugar processors can sell each year, and import restrictions that reduce the amount of imports.

As a result, the price of American sugar is consistently higher than world prices.

Who Wins: Sugar growers and sugar harvesters.

Who Loses: Workers in sugar-using industries, and consumers of food (including bread) that contains sugar.

3. Catfish Inspection Program

As a result of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s catfish inspection program, the USDA inspects catfish while the Food and Drug Administration inspects all other seafood.

This creates duplication because seafood processing facilities that produce both catfish and any other seafood will have to deal with two different types of seafood regulatory schemes instead of just one.

This program also creates a non-tariff trade barrier that will make it extremely difficult for foreign catfish exporters to export to the U.S., likely reducing competition for the domestic catfish industry.

Who Wins: Domestic catfish producers.

Who Loses: Domestic catfish consumers.

4. The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (the Jones Act)

The Merchant Marine Act—nicknamed after Sen. Wesley Jones, R-Wash.—requires the use of domestically built ships when transporting goods between U.S. ports. The ships must also be U.S.-owned, and mostly U.S.-crewed.

Who Wins: The U.S. domestic shipping industry.

Who Loses: The U.S. military, automobile drivers, users of propane and heating oil, and anyone benefitting from the trade and transportation of goods between U.S. ports.

5. Occupational Licensure

Licensure laws create government requirements for being allowed to practice a profession. These requirements exist even though the market would produce certification options if consumers desired such information.

Who Wins: Workers who have already obtained licenses.

Who Loses: People wanting to work who can’t because they don’t have a license, and consumers who have to pay higher prices for services.

6. Economic Development Takings

On June 23, 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Kelo v. City of New London that the government can seize private property and transfer it to another private party for economic development.

This type of taking was deemed to be for “public use” and ruled a proper use of the government’s eminent domain power under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Who Wins: People who successfully lobby the government to seize other people’s property for financial gain.

Who Loses: Property owners who have their property seized.

7. Home-Sharing Regulations

Local governments sometimes ban or excessively regulate home-sharing—that is, renting out one’s home to accommodate travelers, such as through Airbnb.

When this happens, consumers have less choices of where to stay when traveling, hotels can charge higher prices, and homeowners and renters can’t make full use of their legally possessed homes to earn income for themselves.

Who Wins: Hotel employee union lobbies, and the hotel industry.

Who Loses: Homeowners and renters.

8. Ride-Sharing Regulations

In some state and local jurisdictions (such as outside Portland, Oregon; Alaska; and Austin, Texas), the government bans or heavily regulates ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft.

These companies are popping up all over because they meet consumers’ needs, but they are being held down in certain cities where the government backs the establishment industry.

Who Wins: Traditional taxicab companies.

Who Loses: Uber, Lyft, and drivers looking for low barriers to entry; taxicab customers; customers who want to go in or out of certain neighborhoods that traditional taxi drivers avoid; and users of public transportation seeking to complete the “last mile” of their trips.

When industries or groups win special favors from politicians at the expense of ordinary Americans and the poor, it is an affront to freedom—especially to the economic freedom of the poor.

Policies that drive up prices—especially of commodities—are harder to absorb if you are poor.

The policies listed above can block off the only escape route that poor people have from poverty, preventing them from doing what they are good at for a living, for example, or from renting out their home or other property.

All Americans should have the same opportunities open to them. But when government cronyism rears its ugly head, they don’t.

Those who fall on the losing side of cronyism are more likely to agree with President Ronald Reagan when he said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” (For more from the author of “Who Wins and Who Loses Under These 8 Big Government Policies” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The Truth Is Vault 7 Is Empty! Government Is Totally Incompetent!

/0 Comments/in , , /by

In this video, Vin Armani takes a deep dive into Vault 7 and discovers that the CIA’s technology isn’t nearly as scary as media reports have made out. Most of their “hacking” tools require a tech-savvy agent to be physically in the same room as the target device in order to install malware. And most of their malware is wiped out by the next routine software update by the device maker.

Watch the full broadcast here.

(For more from the author of “The Truth Is Vault 7 Is Empty! Government Is Totally Incompetent!” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

When Is It Time to Revolt? The 50 States vs. The Gigantic Vampiric Bureaucracy Known as the Federal Government

/0 Comments/in , , /by

People who can wake up care.

There are 50 countries in the US. They’re called states.

All right, that’s an exaggeration. They are states. But they could be countries.

If you don’t think so, consider the 2015 state budget of tiny Rhode Island: $8.9 billion. The 2016 budget for the nation of Somalia was $216 million.

The 10th Amendment to the US Constitution reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States [government] by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The 11th Amendment reads: “The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.”

If you combine these two Amendments, you begin to see the considerable powers granted to the states.

Of course, now, relatively few people care about these powers. They should, but they don’t.

The Civil War over the issue of slavery convinced a majority of Americans that states’ power was a bad thing—and it had to be remedied when high moral principles and intolerable suffering were at stake.

This premise was, however, expanded to include almost any issue on which the federal government wanted to assert its supremacy.

Which is where we are now.

And the Congress has been more than happy to cement that assertion of overweening federal power, by passing budgets that hand over huge sums of money to the states—otherwise known as bribes for giving in and surrendering.

The states lost that war without a shot being fired.

There is another way so-called “Progressives” look at illegitimate and unconstitutional federal power: it is the wonderful solution to problems the states refuse to solve for themselves.

If a state or states can’t see the wisdom of regulating an industry that pollutes, the federal government must step in and take control. When it does, the control is hailed as a victory.

But is it? The solution, in the long run, can be worse than the problem. As time passes, the federal government exerts more and more power over the states—any one of which could rightfully claim it has the size and money to rank as a country.

America, more and more, becomes a single entity, ruled from above, at a great distance, by a gigantic vampiric bureaucracy. This is exactly the kind of centralization the Republic’s Founders tried to avoid.

Conventional wisdom asserts that the states will do great harm to their citizens, because the states are locally inept, corrupt, ignorant, and cruel, whereas the federal government is kinder, gentler, more humane, and wise. The states are more likely to be run by greedy businessmen, while the federal government can maintain greater distance and rule with equanimity and fairness.

This is largely propaganda, and now, in 2017, it is difficult to run tests of the conventional wisdom, because the federal government has taken such major blocks of states’ former powers into its own hands.

But here is an example of such a test: the US Department of Education, a federal agency. It employs a mere 4400 people, and it has a staggering annual budget of $68 billion.

What in the world are those 4400 people doing with that much tax money and money printed out of thin air?

Here is the defining statement from the Department’s website:

ED’s 4,400 employees and $68 billion budget are dedicated to: “Establishing policies on federal financial aid for education, and distributing as well as monitoring those funds [throwing giant sums of money at the states while binding the states to all sorts of rules and conditions and guidelines and bribes.].”

“Collecting data on America’s schools and disseminating research [surveillance, data mining, profiling, invasive pseudoscientific psychological screening].”

“Focusing national attention on key educational issues [propaganda, indoctrination, useless public relations, b.s.].”

“Prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal access to education [preempting the states’ ability to handle those issues themselves].”

The individual states could run and fund their own schools. Of course, they wouldn’t have the $68 billion each year to work with, but that would be their problem to solve.

The fact that it isn’t their problem now speaks to the federal policy of piling up insupportable budget debt to the sky and then pretending it doesn’t exist. “Here’s 68 billion dollars. No problem. We’ll print more when we need it.”

So the test would be: eliminate the US Department of Education.

Turn back the full responsibility for education to the states.

Perhaps then, the states would realize how insane their own governments are, because those governments, too, are running on the fumes of unpayable debt.

A rude awakening for all concerned, at every level? Most certainly. But the degree of overarching federal power would shrink a bit.

And in the long run, that is a good thing. An important thing.

And the next step would be individual communities within the states taking back control of their own schools. And many more parents homeschooling their own children.

The whole operation is called Decentralization.

And it starts at the top, where the biggest power grab of all occurred. Where the Constitution was stepped on, twisted, co-opted, ensnared, burned, scrapped, defamed, ignored, and ridiculed.

Think about this. How many schools in America, all of which receive gobs of federal money, actually teach the Constitution in a serious way, article by article, amendment by amendment, day by day, through all grades, with increasing depth and sophistication?

None.

As in: NONE.

Why should the schools teach the Constitution? After all, they’re sucking in money from a federal government that opposes the document and its essential separation of powers.

Coda: There are people who think what I’m proposing is beyond the pale. For example, what about the great civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s? It resulted in the passage of federal legislation that changed the landscape of America and canceled racism in many resistant states.

Yes, and it also resulted in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which was launched in 1966, and continues in one form or another to this day. Trillions of dollars have been poured into inner cities, and the conditions in those areas are far worse than in 1966.

How can that be? It can be, because along with the money came Dependence on the federal government. Lifelong dependence. Which was the actual motive behind the whole operation. It was no favor to the poor. It was a war on the poor. Honest programs aimed at developing self-sufficient businesses were cast aside and purposely rejected. Why? Because they could have worked. Because they would have lifted people up.

But instead, we now have equality. Equality of dependence. That was the federal ruse. That was the op.

What looks like federal intervention on behalf of the high moral ground turns into a long-term enduring disaster.

The solution to the problem turns out to be worse than the problem.

Why should we care about fake morality, devised to appear like a gift from the gods?

We should care about the self-sufficiency, power, imagination, and visions of many individuals. We should support the work that springs from those wells of deep energy.

The Constitution, in its own way, was an attempt to establish a platform from which those qualities could emerge.

It limited the force that could be applied from the highest controls of government.

Perverse criminals at every level rise and fall. But the Founding ideas and ideals remain. And so do the individuals who grasp them and live in freedom. (For more from the author of “When Is It Time to Revolt? The 50 States vs. The Gigantic Vampiric Bureaucracy Known as the Federal Government” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.