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President Obama just announced late this evening that a deal has been reached to cut government spending and raise the debt ceiling in order to avoid a debt default. If the deal is approved on Monday, it will raise the debt ceiling by between $2.1 and $2.4 trillion in three installments: $400 billion immediately, $500 billion this fall subject to a disapproval vote by Congress, and $1.2 to $1.5 trillion more after a special committee agrees on a matching amount of spending cuts that will be in addition to $900 billion in spending cuts proposed in the bill. With no tax increases included in this plan, all of this additional debt will eventually be monetized and paid for through monetary inflation.

Although the deal is supposed to cut as much as $2.4 trillion in spending over the next decade, Obama said that none of the spending cuts will occur anytime soon so that not to derail the phony economic recovery. That’s right, none of the cuts will come until early 2013 and by then we will need to once again raise the debt ceiling to north of $20 trillion. If our elected representatives were serious about cutting spending, they would have the bulk of the spending cuts now and not in the future when many of them will be out of office.

This deal is a complete and total sham, and will do nothing to prevent hyperinflation. In no way will these spending cuts be mandated and nothing will force future Congresses to abide by them. Even with these cuts, government spending is going to increase every single year for the next decade. As price inflation spirals out of control in the years ahead causing the purchasing power of the dollar to plummet, all government employees will demand higher salaries and it will cost more to run all parts of the government. Future Congresses will raise spending and make the spending cuts proposed in this deal meaningless.

NIA believes that all of the events that took place in Washington this weekend were scripted in advance. It is likely that both parties knew from the beginning what deal they would ultimately agree to, but came out with these other proposed bills in order to satisfy tea party supporters and make them think that their efforts are making a difference. The reality is, although the tea party movement helped Republicans take over the House of Representatives so that Democrats didn’t have free rein in Washington, most of the new Republicans elected to Congress haven’t followed through with their promises and have failed to make any kind of a positive difference.

Everybody in Washington assumes that interest rates will remain at artificially low levels for the rest of this decade. The interest rate that the U.S. paid on its total marketable debt in the month of June was only 2.38%. Exactly one decade earlier, in June of 2001, we paid 6.162% interest on our total marketable debt or 159% higher than current average interest rates. On August 15th we owe our next interest payment of approximately $30 billion. Imagine if that payment rises 159% higher to $77.7 billion or $932.4 billion annualized. Later this decade, interest rates will not only rise back to normal levels like we had in 2001, but will likely rise to artificially high levels to balance out the damage being created today from artificially low interest rates.

If this bill is approved by Congress and the President on Monday, it will avoid a short-term honest debt default but just about guarantee a default by inflation later this decade. There is about a 1 in 1,000 chance that future Congresses will stick with the spending cuts in this bill, but even if they do, rising interest payments will not only wipe out the $2.4 trillion in spending cuts, but they will add trillions more to future deficits and the national debt. A new Gallup Poll shows that 53% of Americans oppose raising the debt ceiling compared to only 37% who favor an increase. We pray that millions of Americans march to Washington tomorrow in protest of this bill and that millions more call, email, and fax their elected representatives in the morning demanding that they vote no.

It is important to spread the word about NIA to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, if you want America to survive hyperinflation. Please tell everybody you know to become members of NIA for free immediately at: http://inflation.us

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by Michael S. Rozeff

Recently by Michael S. Rozeff: Observations and Opinions on the Libyan War

A chorus of U.S. and international officials keeps chanting that “Gaddafi must go” because, they keep repeating, he has lost legitimacy.

Let’s turn the tables. How legitimate is the U.S. government? I’m not talking about the popularity of particular persons like Obama, Bush I, Bush II, or Clinton. Changing faces, political parties, and administrations in Washington is a lost cause. I’m talking about national government itself. Should Washington be dismantled? Has Washington lost legitimacy as a government? If so, as a remedy, as a guide to action, as an objective to work toward, the U.S. government must go!

There are many valid ways to criticize the U.S. government. Any small government or anarchist perspective gives rise to a critique. Any adherent of constitutionality has another critique. For example, Lysander Spooner’s critique is devastating. Anyone who looks to the government’s effectiveness in serving the public will have yet another perspective. Anyone who restricts attention to economic and monetary matters will find plenty to criticize. Anyone who focuses on rights and liberties will be able to make important criticisms.

Here my perspective is to question the legitimacy of the U.S. government. Legitimacy is the perspective being used loudly by many world leaders against Gaddafi. I wonder, can we camp on their grounds and turn their own ideas against them?

World heads of state do not usually shine the light of legitimacy on one another, much less on themselves. Oh no, they are very quiet and reserved in that area. They don’t want people questioning their legitimacy, so they don’t raise the idea. Libya is atypical. Some leaders are using the rhetoric of legitimacy against Gaddafi. They believe that they can confine its use to him. They believe that they can restrict illegitimacy to instances of outright violence and ignore hidden violence. This serves their purposes.

In the post-Soviet era, criticisms by world leaders of the U.S. tend to be restrained, muted and timid. The world’s states are essentially in cahoots with one another. Many are beholden to the U.S. or tied in via relations of one kind and another. They cannot be too critical. Many have their own domestic problems and don’t want to stir up nests of hornets.

We are not so confined. If we use Obama’s criterion that violence against one’s people is a sign of government illegitimacy, then how many world governments are themselves legitimate? They all use violence and the threat of violence to maintain themselves. The fact that the threats of violence are effective and prevent outright blood on the streets doesn’t remove the presence of violence as the government’s means of controlling its citizens. Once we look under the hood at the motor of government, we find violence. At what point does such violence mean that the government’s leaders or the government itself – its very form – have lost legitimacy?

We Americans have a strong basis for questioning the legitimacy of the U.S. government. It is our right. We live here. It is de facto our government. We have to bear the consequences of what it does to us. We are the ones who, in many theories of government, supposedly give our consent. We experience the threat of violence if we disobey the government’s laws. We have a tradition of freedom and self-government that supports questioning our government’s legitimacy. Most of this applies to other peoples throughout the world.

So, to begin with, what do Americans think of their national government? Let’s look at those polls that ask Americans whether or not the country is going in the right direction or the wrong direction. I am assuming that Americans make a connection between their government and the country’s direction. This assumption is warranted because the national government is the largest single factor in the economy and on the economy. The most important media focus is Washington and politics. We constantly hear about the economic and other policies coming out of Washington.

Let’s look first at the polls with the longest histories. The Pew Research Center poll dates from January 1997. The very first poll found that 58% of the people were dissatisfied with the way things were going. Today, that reads 73%. The average over all of its 85 polls for the percent satisfied is 34.35%, for those dissatisfied is 59.12%, and for those unsure is 6.49%. (These do not add to 100% precisely due to rounding error.) This high level of dissatisfaction is not due to a few outliers. Americans are consistently dissatisfied in poll after poll.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll goes back to early December of 1995. This has four possible answers: satisfied, dissatisfied, mixed, and unsure. Over its 122 polls, the averages are 37.06%, 48.98%, 10.86%, and 3.09%. These results are like those in the Pew poll. The satisfied contingent is in the 34-37% range.

The Gallup Poll goes back to 1994. There are 179 polls. Those satisfied with the way things are going average 39.78%. The dissatisfied average 57.70%.

There are numerous other polls with shorter track records. They show the same thing. For example, in the Time Poll of August, 2010, 57% said the country was on the wrong track and 34% said it was on the right track. From 2004 to the present, the satisfied number got to 51% once. That was its maximum. The rest of the time it stayed between 28% and 46%. The CBS News Poll is another example of a poll that shows the same thing. Those who think the country is seriously off on the wrong track have ranged from 48% to 89% since 2006. The average is 66.4%.

In a macro sense, these polls tell much of the story. We have a period of almost 20 years in which things are not going right and a large majority says they are not going right. This does not by itself prove that the national government is illegitimate or should be scrapped, but it is a building block in my argument. Why? The government uses violence to collect revenues and spend. It uses violence to control the economy. People are unhappy, generally speaking, with the results.

Let’s look more deeply into a few specific areas that illustrate the lack of legitimacy of the U.S. government.

One of the criteria of an illegitimate government is that it acts violently against its own people. Obama used this criterion against Gaddafi. One measure of this is the number of people or the percentage of the population in prison. The statistics on this from 2006 show that the U.S. has imprisoned over 1 percent of its adult population. It has the largest number of inmates (2.5 million) in the world. Although the U.S. has only 5% of the world’s population, it has 25% of the world’s prisoners in its jails and penitentiaries. The U.S. has 739 people per 100,000 of population “serving time, awaiting trial or otherwise detained.”

Jailing Americans is a high growth industry. In the year 1880 in America, there were about 61 persons in jail per 100,000 (see Table 3-3 here). This had grown to 133 as of 1980, and then it shot up sharply when the War on Drugs and fixed prison terms for drug offenses were instituted. The incarceration rate and the number of persons incarcerated has grown very steeply since 1980:

It is implausible that Americans commit more violent crimes than any other people. It is implausible that American policing is that much more efficient at catching criminals and convicting them. It’s far more plausible that the War on Drugs and sentencing play a huge role in creating crimes and criminals that then fill the jails.

This is evidence that U.S. government violence against Americans is a real phenomenon of large and extremely serious scope. It is doubtful that Gaddafi’s violence has been more serious or pervasive.

Another criterion of an illegitimate government is that it debauches the currency. There is absolutely no question that the U.S. government has instituted an unconstitutional currency of fiat dollars in place of gold and silver money. There is no question that it has done this through an unconstitutional central bank, and there is no question that this central bank has debauched the currency. There is also no question that the government has violently seized a monopoly on currency issue and prevented its own citizens from using monetary alternatives. The seizure by the U.S. government of the people’s gold in 1933 exemplifies this violence.

For much of its history, 1,000 U.S. dollars were convertible into just over 48 ounces of gold (at a rate of $20.67 per ounce). Today, 1,000 U.S. dollars can buy about 0.71 ounces of gold (at $1,400 per ounce.) This is not because anything special has happened to gold to make its price rise as compared with other goods and services. It is because the government has printed paper dollars in tremendous amounts, creating an excess supply that has driven the value of each paper unit down from 48 ounces of gold to 0.71 ounces of gold.

World leaders challenged Robert Mugabe’s legitimacy in 2008 due to election thuggery. They did not link his legitimacy to his hyperinflation, despite the fact that it impoverished the nation. That is because they too use inflation and think of it as a legitimate tool of government. But Mugabe does lack legitimacy for having wrecked Zimbabwe’s economy with inflation, and, by the same token, the U.S. government should be held to like account for creating Great Depressions, for stealing the savings of those on fixed incomes, and for expropriating and redistributing wealth through the insidious but nonetheless violent means of inflation.

I am aware that a few low-level ignorant economists in the Federal Reserve have taken to sniping at Ron Paul. One of them argued that inflation is neutral, or that it raises all prices, including wages and rents. This argument is shallow and false. It misses the Austrian point entirely. But if inflation is neutral, why then does hyperinflation ruin an economy? And if inflation is neutral, why does anyone, including the Federal Reserve, even pay attention to inflation or to money supplies? Why would some of the Fed’s governors be worried about reversing its latest inflation (quantitative easing)? Why would Bernanke be crowing over the success of this round of inflation?

Accompanying inflation has been another sign of government illegitimacy, namely, a monstrously excessive government debt. This signifies both a tremendous amount of past wasted expenditures and future hardship. Every issue of government debt signifies that taxes in the future must be raised to service that debt. This increases the hidden economic violence imposed on the population. There is no good reason to distinguish between the outright clubbing of people physically and the ill effects on people’s lives of taxation.

Another source of illegitimacy of the U.S. government is its vast expansion of power. This has simultaneously violated the Constitution and extinguished the rights of Americans. It has got to the point where a President who is sworn to uphold the Constitution refers to it as a scrap of paper.

Another President, Barack Obama, has enunciated his right to assassinate American citizens without due process of law. Furthermore, a federal judge dismissed a case brought by the ACLU to prevent such assassinations. At present, we have a situation in which due processes of law that go back to the time of Jesus and before cannot be maintained by legal means in the courts of the United States! A government that claims the right to assassinate has, by Obama’s own criterion of legitimacy, relinquished its own claim to legitimacy.

U.S. government acts that have undermined its claim to legitimacy are particularly prominent in military forays and in going to war. There is no good reason having anything to do with the public safety, security, or welfare of Americans why the U.S. government invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, why it bombed Yugoslavia, why it is now bombing Libya, why it went to war over Kuwait, why it sends bombs into Pakistan, and why it sent military forces into Haiti for years on end during the Clinton administration. None of these countries threatened America or attacked it.

The U.S. government has repeatedly betrayed the public trust. Candidates have repeatedly made promises that they dramatically reversed once in office. They have lied and covered up. They have fabricated international incidents. They have used the fog of the U.N. and NATO to cover their actions. Presidents have gone to war without obtaining Congressional declarations. Of course, Congress has participated by funding these wars. One administration after another has honed the fine art of propaganda and misinformation.

The U.S. government is acting in numerous other ways to curtail domestic freedoms, and these actions can only be construed as violence of the U.S. government against its own people. Travel within the U.S. and across its borders has become an exercise in assault, delay, intimidation, and stupidity, with wholesale use of unreasonable searches and seizures. The invasions of privacy, financial and other, are worthy of any police state. The U.S. has resorted to renditions, kidnappings, torture, and indefinite detentions. The FBI has resorted to creating conspiracies and crimes.

My point is not to document all the ways in which the U.S. government uses violence against Americans. It is not to document all the sources of illegitimacy. It is to point out that every libertarian critique of the U.S. government, that may have been couched in terms of its going against the Constitution or suppressing freedoms or employing aggression, is also a critique of the legitimacy of the U.S. government. We can use the same grounds of illegitimacy that world leaders occasionally use to criticize certain behaviors of other world leaders like Gaddafi and Mugabe. We can use those grounds to criticize governments like the U.S. government that portray themselves as legitimate. They portray themselves as paragons of democracy or freedom, but beneath this surface, the signs of their illegitimacy are everywhere.

Why has a largely dissatisfied public not changed the government’s policies in 20 years? Why, in fact, have things gone even more wrong and led to even more dissatisfaction? There are many reasons and they go back many years. What’s important for our purpose is not these reasons, which have to do with the institutionalized structures that are set firmly in place, but the fact that the people at large no longer control the government, even when they vote.

The fact is that the government is now a corporativist institution that is largely unaccountable and that has insulated itself from accountability by means of payoffs, wealth transfers, political party duopoly, redistricting, the income tax, lobbies, and by control of education, media, science, and intellectuals. The very fact that government lies beyond popular control and reform explains why people have become cynical about reform or have given up hope of reform. But what is far more important is that it shows once again that the government lacks legitimacy. A legitimate government should depend on consent. It should be under control by the public. It should be responsive to them, not in the hands of special interests. And the fact that the government cannot be reformed without an almost unimaginable degree of change in American thought and society is the reason why this illegitimacy means that the entire government structure must go. Changing faces and parties in Washington is ineffective.

The U.S. government must go. We the People have a genuine right to say this and make it happen. In my opinion, the U.S. government is so profusely and deeply illegitimate in so many institutionalized ways and the people are so tied up with it that meaningful reform of a gradual nature is impossible. I think we need to make serious and deep change happen. It is my very firm belief that it must be done non-violently if it is to produce a long-lasting free country. We should not spurn or discourage important actions that genuinely reduce the size and scope of the national government, both now and in the future, and do not plant the seeds of its future expansion. Actions that significantly reduce government violence against its citizens are worthy. But if the goal of serious, broad, and deep change is kept in mind, then success at one or more of such actions should stimulate even further efforts, not cause them to abate.

One change that needs to occur is in the hearts and minds of Americans. From that will flow peaceful changes in government. At present, most Americans are wedded to conflict, violence, and political means. They are wedded to power struggles and to wealth appropriations and transfers via government. However, the use of violent means to achieve a reduction in government violence is not going to succeed. It perpetuates the game of violence.

We know that about 60 percent of Americans are dissatisfied and think that the country is going in the wrong direction. They are not anti-state, they are not anti-war, and they are not pro-market. That is, they don’t yet see what the solutions are. They do not see that the militarism must be brought to a close, that the Empire must be terminated, that State powers must be drastically shrunk, that the State is the problem, not the answer. They do not appreciate the virtues of liberty. The anti-federalist and libertarian heritage is unknown to them and buried under centuries of mis-education in the “virtues” of government and big government. They are bombarded with violent solutions from Left and Right.

The amount of re-education and awakening that must be done is very large. We need free speech to accomplish it. No one should fear using free speech to the maximum. Fear no evil. Fear no Goliath. Do not fear telling others openly “The U.S. government must go!” It must go using peaceful means, not the bombs and rockets that the U.S., Britain, and France are using in Libya, but it must go. It must go because it is doing violence to the American people at an increasing rate, with prospects for enhancing such violence. It must go because this violence de-legitimizes the government. The government’s violence is a major source of the dissatisfaction in the country, since people cannot get ahead in such an environment. The national government must be taken apart and dismantled because this is what is right. Anything less than this as a goal will not succeed. Anything less will saddle the U.S. indefinitely with a government like some of those in Europe. Worse, it poses a substantial threat of turning into a totalitarian nightmare. We will simply drag on at far less than our potential as human beings. Many of us will leave. Anything less will relegate the American dream of self-governing peoples living in liberty to a quaint fairy tale.

The new frontier and the great society were not bad slogans as such slogans go, but in the hands of the government they were dreams made reality by government service, taxation, wars, and government solutions to social problems. These involve violence and slavery in disguised and not-so-disguised forms. They involve illegitimate government, using the very criteria of those in government who are its strongest advocates. If we are to have big social dreams, let these dreams be made reality by and in freedom and peace, not in slavery and violence.

April 4, 2011

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.

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Most recently known for his bid for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan is distinguished for his successful careers in motion pictures, broadcasting, and politics.

Mr. Reagan was a player and production supervisor of television’s “General Electric Theater” for eight years and hosted and acted in the “Death Valley Days” television series. For many years he owned and operated a horse breeding and cattle ranch.

Elected California’s 33rd governor in 1966, he was re-elected in 1970. After leaving office in early 1975, Governor Reagan began a daily radio commentary program, nationally syndicated, and a weekly newspaper column in which he is still involved.

Governor Reagan delivered this address on the Hillsdale College campus in the Ludwig von Mises Lectures Series.

---

During the presidential campaign last year, there was a great deal of talk about the seeming inability of our economic system to solve the problems of unemployment and inflation. Issues such as taxes and government power and costs were discussed, but always these things were discussed in the context of what government intended to do about it. May I suggest for your consideration that government has already done too much about it? That indeed, government, by going outside its proper province, has caused many if not most of the problems that vex us.

How much are we to blame for what has happened? Beginning with the traumatic experience of the Great Depression, we the people have turned more and more to government for answers that government has neither the right nor the capacity to provide. Unfortunately, government as an institution always tends to increase in size and power, and so government attempted to provide the answers.

The result is a fourth branch of government added to the traditional three of executive, legislative and judicial: a vast federal bureaucracy that’s now being imitated in too many states and too many cities, a bureaucracy of enormous power which determines policy to a greater extent than any of us realize, very possibly to a greater extent than our own elected representatives. And it can’t be removed from office by our votes.

To give you an illustration of how bureaucracy works in another country, England in 1803 created a new civil service position. It called for a man to stand on the cliffs of Dover with a spy glass and ring a bell if he saw Napoleon coming. They didn’t eliminate that job until 1945. In our own country, there are only two government programs that have been abolished. The government stopped making rum on the Virgin Islands, and we’ve stopped breeding horses for the cavalry.

We bear a greater tax burden to support that permanent bureaucratic structure than any of us would have believed possible just a few decades ago. When I was in college, governments federal, state and local, were taking a dime out of every dollar earned and less than a third of that paid for the federal establishment. Today, governments, federal, state, and local, are taking 44 cents out of every dollar earned, and two-thirds of that supports Washington. It is the fastest growing item in the average family budget, and yet it is not one of the factors used in computing the cost of living index. It is the biggest single cost item in the family budget, bigger than food, shelter and clothing all put together.

When government tells us that in the last year the people in America have increased their earnings 9 percent, and since the inflation is 6 percent, we’re still 3 percentage points better off, or richer than we were the year before, government is being deceitful. That was before taxes. After taxes, the people of America are 3 percentage points worse off, poorer than they were before they got the 9 percent raise. Government profits by inflation.

At the economic conference in London several months ago, one of our American representatives there was talking to the press. He said you have to recognize that inflation doesn’t have any single cause and therefore has no single answer. Well, if he believed that, he had no business being at an economic conference. Inflation is caused by one thing, and it has one answer. It’s caused by government spending more than government takes in, and it will go away when government stops doing that, and not before.

Government has been trying to make all of us believe that somehow inflation is like a plague, or the drought, or the locusts coming, trying to make us believe that no one has any control over it and we just have to bear it when it comes along and hope it will go away. No, it’s simpler than that. From 1933 until the present, our country has doubled the amount of goods and services that are available for purchase. In that same period we have multiplied the money supply by 23 times. So $11.50 is chasing what one dollar used to chase. And that’s all that inflation is: a depreciation of the value of money.

Ludwig von Mises once said, “Government is the only agency that can take a perfectly useful commodity like paper, smear it with some ink, and render it absolutely useless.”

There are 73 million of us working and earning by means of private enterprise to support ourselves and our dependents. We support, in addition, 81 million other Americans totally dependent on tax dollars for their year-round living. Now it’s true that 15 million of those are public employees and they also pay taxes, but their taxes are simply a return to government of dollars that first had to be taken from the 73 million. I say this to emphasize that the people working and earning in private business and industry are the only resource that government has.

In Defense of Free Enterprise

More than anything else, a new political economic mythology, widely believed by too many people, has increased government’s ability to interfere as it does in the marketplace. Profit is a dirty word, blamed for most of our social ills. In the interest of something called consumerism, free enterprise is becoming far less free. Property rights are being reduced, and even eliminated, in the name of environmental protection. It is time that a voice be raised on behalf of the 73 million independent wage earners in this country, pointing out that profit, property rights and freedom are inseparable, and you cannot have the third unless you continue to be entitled to the first two.

Even many of us who believe in free enterprise have fallen into the habit of saying when something goes wrong: “There ought to be a law.” Sometimes I think there ought to be a law against saying: “There ought to be a law.” The German statesman Bismark said, “If you like sausages and laws you should never watch either one of them being made.” It is difficult to understand the ever-increasing number of intellectuals in the groves of academe, present company excepted, who contend that our system could be improved by the adoption of some of the features of socialism.

In any comparison between the free market system and socialism, nowhere is the miracle of capitalism more evident than in the production and distribution of food. We eat better, for a lower percentage of earnings, than any other people on earth. We spend about 17 percent of the average family’s after-tax income for food. The American farmer is producing two and one-half times as much as he did 60 years ago with one-third of the man-hours on one-half of the land. If his counterparts worldwide could reach his level of skill we could feed the entire world population on one-tenth of the land that is now being farmed worldwide.

The biggest example comes, I think, when you compare the two superpowers. I’m sure that most of you are aware that some years ago the Soviet Union had such a morale problem with the workers on the collective farms that they finally gave each worker a little plot of ground and told him he could farm it for himself and sell in the open market what he raised. Today, less than 4 percent of Russia’s agricultural land is privately farmed in that way, and on that 4 percent is raised 40 percent of all of Russia’s vegetables, and 60 percent of all its meat.

Some of our scholars did some research on comparative food prices. They had to take the prices in the Russian stores and our own stores and translate them into minutes and hours of labor at the average income of each country. With one exception they found that the Russians have to work two to ten times as long to buy the various food items than do their counterparts here in America. The one exception was potatoes. There the price on their potato bins equalled less work time for them than it did for us. There was one hitch though—they didn’t have any potatoes.

In spite of all the evidence that points to the free market as the most efficient system, we continue down a road that is bearing out the prophecy of De Tocqueville, a Frenchman who came here 130 years ago. He was attracted by the miracle that was America. Think of it: our country was only 70 years old and already we had achieved such a miraculous living standard, such productivity and prosperity, that the rest of the world was amazed. So he came here and he looked at everything he could see in our country trying to find the secret of our success, and then went back and wrote a book about it. Even then, 130 years ago, he saw signs prompting him to warn us that if we weren’t constantly on guard, we would find ourselves covered by a network of regulations controlling every activity. He said if that came to pass we would one day find ourselves a nation of timid animals with government the shepherd.

Was De Tocqueville right? Well, today we are covered by tens of thousands of regulations to which we add about 25,000 new ones each year.

The Cost of Government Regulation

A study of 700 of the largest corporations has found that if we could eliminate unnecessary regulation of business and industry, we would instantly reduce the inflation rate by half. Other economists have found that over-regulation of business and industry amounts to a hidden five-cent sales tax for every consumer. The misdirection of capital investment costs us a quarter of a million jobs. That’s half as many as the president wants to create by spending $32 billion over the next two years. And with all of this comes the burden of government-required paperwork.

It affects education—all of you here are aware of the problems of financing education, particularly at the private educational institutions. I had the president of a university tell me the other day that government-required paperwork on his campus alone has raised the administrative costs from $65,000 to $600,000. That would underwrite a pretty good faculty chair. Now the president of the Eli Lilly drug company says his firm spends more man-hours on government-required paperwork than they do today on heart and cancer research combined. He told of submitting one ton of paper, 120,000 pages of scientific data most of which he said were absolutely worthless for FDA’s purposes, in triplicate, in order to get a license to market an arthritis medicine. So, the United States is no longer first in the development of new health-giving drugs and medicines. We’re producing 60 percent fewer than we were 15 years ago.

And it’s not just the drug industry which is over-regulated. How about the independent men and women of this country who spend $50 billion a year sending 10 billion pieces of paper to Washington where it costs $20 billion each year in tax money to shuffle and store that paper away. We’re so used to talking billions—does anyone realize how much a single billion is? A billion minutes ago Christ was walking on this earth. A billion hours ago our ancestors lived in caves, and it is questionable as to whether they’d discovered the use of fire. A billion dollars ago was 19 hours in Washington, D.C. And it will be another billion in the next 19 hours, and every 19 hours until they adopt a new budget at which time it’ll be almost a billion and a half.

It all comes down to this basic premise: if you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom and in fact all freedom. Freedom is something that cannot be passed on genetically. It is never more than one generation away from extinction. Every generation has to learn how to protect and defend it. Once freedom is gone, it’s gone for a long, long time. Already, too many of us, particularly those in business and industry, have chosen to switch rather than fight.

We should take inventory and see how many things we can do ourselves that we’ve come to believe only government can do. Let me take one that I’m sure everyone thinks is a government monopoly and properly so. Do you know that in Scottsdale, Ariz., there is no city fire department? There, the per capita cost for fire protection and the per capita fire loss are both one-third of what they are in cities of similar size. And the insurance rates reflect this. Scottsdale employs a private, profit-making, firefighting company, which now has about a dozen clients out in the western states.

Sometimes I worry if the great corporations have abdicated their responsibility to preserve the freedom of the marketplace out of a fear of retaliation or a reluctance to rock the boat. If they have, they are feeding the crocodile hoping he’ll eat them last. You can fight city hall, and you don’t have to be a giant to do it. In New Mexico there’s a little company owned by a husband and wife. The other day two OSHA inspectors arrived at the door. They demanded to come in in order to go on a hunting expedition to see if there were any violations of their safety rules. The wife, who happens to be company president, said “Where’s your warrant?” They said, “We don’t need one.” She said, “You do to come in here,” and shut the door. Well, they went out and got a warrant, and they came back, but this time she had her lawyer with her. He looked at the warrant and said it does not show probable cause. A federal court has since upheld her right to refuse OSHA entrance.

Why don’t more of us challenge what Cicero called the arrogance of officialdom? Why don’t we set up communications between organizations and trade associations? To rally others to come to the aid of an individual like that, or to an industry or profession when they’re threatened by the barons of bureaucracy, who have forgotten that we are their employers. Government by the people works when the people work at it. We can begin by turning the spotlight of truth on the widespread political and economic mythology that I mentioned.

A recent poll of college and university students (they must have skipped this campus) found that the students estimated that business profits in America average 45 percent. That is nine times the average of business profits in this country. It was understandable that the kids made that mistake, because the professors in the same poll guessed that the profits were even higher.

Then there is the fairy tale born of political demagoguery that the tax structure imposes unfairly on the low earner with loopholes designed for the more affluent. The truth is that at $23,000 of earnings you become one of that exclusive band of 10 percent of the wage-earners in America paying 50 percent of the income tax but only taking 5 percent of all the deductions. The other 95 percent of the deductions are taken by the 90 percent of the wage-earners below $23,000 who pay the other half of the tax.

The most dangerous myth is that business can be made to pay a larger share of taxes, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us. Business doesn’t pay taxes, and who better than business could make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business. Passing along their tax costs is the only way businesses can make a profit and stay in operation.

The federal government has used its taxing power to redistribute earnings to achieve a variety of social reforms. Politicians love those indirect business taxes, because it hides the cost of government. During the New Deal days, an under-secretary of the treasury wrote a book in which he said that taxes can serve a higher purpose than just raising revenue. He said they could be an instrument of social and economic control to redistribute the wealth and income and to penalize particular industries and economic groups.

We need to put an end to that kind of thinking. We need a simplification of the tax structure. We need an indexing of the surtax brackets, a halt to government’s illicit profiteering through inflation. It’s as simple as this: every time the cost-of-living index goes up one percent, the government’s revenue goes up one and one-half percent. Above all we need an overall cut in the cost of government. Government spending isn’t a stimulant to the economy; it’s a drag on the economy. Only a decade ago, about 15 percent of corporate gross income was required to pay the interest on corporate debt; now it’s 40 percent. Individuals and families once spent about 8 percent of their disposable income on interest on consumer debt, installment buying, mortgages, and so forth. Today, it’s almost one-fourth of their total earnings. State and local government in the last 15 years has gone from $70 billion to $220 billion. The total private and public debt is growing four times as fast as the output of goods and services.

Again, there is something we can do. Congressman Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) has a bill before the Congress designed to increase productivity and to create jobs for people. Over a three-year period, it calls for reducing the income tax for all of us by a full one-third. And also it would reduce the corporate tax from 48 to 45 percent. The base income tax would no longer be 20 percent but 14 percent, and the ceiling would be 50 percent instead of 70 percent. Finally, it would double the exemption for smaller businesses before they get into the surtax bracket. It would do all of the things that we need to provide investment capital, increase productivity, and create jobs.

We can say this with assurance, because it has been done twice before: in the ’20′s under Harding and Coolidge and again in the ’60′s under John F. Kennedy. In the ’60′s the stimulant to the economy was so immediate that even government’s revenues increased because of the broadening base of the economy. Kemp’s bill is gaining support but unfortunately the majority in Congress is concerned with further restrictions on our freedom.

To win this battle against Big Government, we must communicate with each other. We must support the doctor in his fight against socialized medicine, the oil industry in its fight against crippling controls and repressive taxes, and the farmer, who hurts more than most because of government harassment and rule-changing in the middle of the game. All of these issues concern each one of us, regardless of what our trade or profession may be. Corporate America must begin to realize that it has allies in the independent business men and women, the shopkeepers, the craftsmen, the farmers, and the professions. All these men and women are organized in a great variety of ways, but right now we only talk in our own organizations about our own problems. What we need is a liaison between these organizations to realize how much strength we as a people still have if we’ll use that strength.

In regard to the oil industry, is there anyone who isn’t concerned with the energy problem? Government caused that problem while we all stood by unaware that we were involved. Unnecessary regulations and prices and imposed price limits back in the ’50′s are the direct cause of today’s crisis. Our crisis isn’t because of a shortage of fuel; it’s a surplus of government. Now we have a new agency of enormous power, with 20,000 employees and a $10.5 billion budget. That’s more than the gross earnings of the top seven oil companies in the United States. The creation of the Department of Energy is nothing more than a first step towards nationalization of the oil industry.

While I believe no one should waste a natural resource, the conservationists act as if we have found all the oil and gas there is to be found in this continent, if not the world. Do you know that 57 years ago our government told us we only had enough for 15 years? Nineteen years went by and they told us we only had enough left for 13 more years, and we’ve done a lot of driving since then and we’ll do a lot more if government will do one simple thing: get out of the way and let the incentives of the marketplace urge the industry out to find the sources of energy this country needs.

We’ve had enough of sideline kibitzers telling us the system they themselves have disrupted with their social tinkering can be improved or saved if we’ll only have more of that tinkering or even government planning and management. They play fast and loose with a system that for 200 years made us the light of the world. The refuge for people all over the world who just yearn to breathe free. It’s time we recognized that the system, no matter what our problems are, has never failed us once. Every time we have failed the system, usually by lacking faith in it, usually by saying we have to change and do something else. A Supreme Court Justice has said the time has come, is indeed long overdue, for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.

What specifically should be done? The first essential for the businessman is to confront the problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management. It has been said that history is the patter of silken slippers descending the stairs and the thunder of hobnail boots coming up. Back through the years we have seen people fleeing the thunder of those boots to seek refuge in this land. Now too many of them have seen the signs, signs that were ignored in their homeland before the end came, appearing here. They wonder if they’ll have to flee again, but they know there is no place to run to. Will we, before it is too late, use the vitality and the magic of the marketplace to save this way of life, or will we one day face our children, and our children’s children when they ask us where we were and what we were doing on the day that freedom was lost?

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Rolling Stone | April 5th Edition

ERIK HEDEGAARD

He was the ultimate keeper of secrets, lurking in the shadows of American history. He toppled banana republics, planned the Bay of Pigs invasion and led the Watergate break-in. Now he would reveal what he’d always kept hidden: who killed JFK

Once, when the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami. The scourges recently had been constant and terrible: lupus, pneumonia, cancers of the jaw and prostate, gangrene, the amputation of his left leg. It was like something was eating him up. Long past were his years of heroic service to the country. In the CIA, he’d helped mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But no longer could you see in him the suave, pipe-smoking, cocktail-party-loving clandestine operative whose Cold War exploits he himself had, almost obsessively, turned into novels, one of which, East of Farewell , the New York Times once called “the best sea story” of World War II. Diminished too were the old bad memories, of the Bay of Pigs debacle that derailed his CIA career for good, of the Watergate Hotel fiasco, of his first wife’s death, of thirty-three months in U.S. prisons — of, in fact, a furious lifetime mainly of failure, disappointment and pain. But his firstborn son — he named him St. John; Saint, for short — was by his side now. And he still had a secret or two left to share before it was all over.

They were in the living room, him in his wheelchair, watching Fox News at full volume, because his hearing had failed too. After a while, he had St. John wheel him into his bedroom and hoist him onto his bed. It smelled foul in there; he was incontinent; a few bottles of urine under the bed needed to be emptied; but he was beyond caring. He asked St. John to get him a diet root beer, a pad of paper and a pen.

Saint had come to Miami from Eureka, California, borrowing money to fly because he was broke. Though clean now, he had been a meth addict for twenty years, a meth dealer for ten of those years and a source of frustration and anger to his father for much of his life. There were a couple of days back in 1972, after the Watergate job, when the boy, then eighteen, had risen to the occasion. The two of them, father and son, had wiped fingerprints off a bunch of spy gear, and Saint had helped in other ways, too. But as a man, he had two felony convictions to his name, and they were for drugs. The old spymaster was a convicted felon too, of course. But that was different. He was E. Howard Hunt, a true American patriot, and he had earned his while serving his country. That the country repaid him with almost three years in prison was something he could never understand, if only because the orders that got him in such trouble came right from the top; as he once said, “I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land.”

Years had gone by when he and St. John hardly spoke. But then St. John came to him wanting to know if he had any information about the assassination of President Kennedy. Despite almost universal skepticism, his father had always maintained that he didn’t. He swore to this during two government investigations. “I didn’t have anything to do with the assassination, didn’t know anything about it,” he said during one of them. “I did my time for Watergate. I shouldn’t have to do additional time and suffer additional losses for something I had nothing to do with.”

But now, in August 2003, propped up in his sickbed, paper on his lap, pen in hand and son sitting next to him, he began to write down the names of men who had indeed participated in a plot to kill the president. He had lied during those two federal investigations. He knew something after all. He told St. John about his own involvement, too. It was explosive stuff, with the potential to reconfigure the JFK-assassination-theory landscape. And then he got better and went on to live for four more years.

They sure don’t make White House bad guys the way they used to. Today you’ve got flabby-faced half-men like Karl Rove, with weakling names like “Scooter” Libby, blandly hacking their way through the constraints of the U.S. Constitution, while back then, in addition to Hunt, you had out-and-out thugs like G. Gordon Liddy, his Watergate co-conspirator and Nixon’s dirty-tricks chief, who would hold his own hand over an open flame to prove what a real tough guy he was. It all seems a little nutty now, but in 1972 it was serious business. These guys meant to take the powers of the presidency and run amok. Hunt, an ex-CIA man who loved operating in the shadows and joined Nixon’s Special Investigations Unit (a.k.a. “the Plumbers”) as a $100-a-day consultant in 1971, specialized in political sabotage. Among his first assignments: forging cables linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of South Vietnam’s president. After that, he began sniffing around Ted Kennedy’s dirty laundry, to see what he could dig up there. Being a former CIA man, he had no problem contemplating the use of firebombs and once thought about slathering LSD on the steering wheel of an unfriendly newspaperman’s car, hoping it would leach into his skin and cause a fatal accident. But of all his various plots and subterfuges, in the end, only one of them mattered: the failed burglary at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1972.

The way it happened, Hunt enlisted some Cuban pals from his old Bay of Pigs days to fly up from Miami and bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which was located inside the Watergate. Also on the team were a couple of shady ex-government operators named James McCord and Frank Sturgis. The first attempt ended when the outfit’s lock picker realized he’d brought the wrong tools. The next time, however, with Hunt stationed in a Howard Johnson’s hotel room across the way, communicating with the burglars by walkie-talkie, the team gained entry into the office. Unfortunately, on the way into the building, they’d taped open an exit door to allow their escape, and when a night watchman found it, he called the cops. The burglars were arrested on the spot. One of them had E. Howard’s phone number, at the White House, no less, in his address book. Following this lead, police arrested Hunt and charged him with burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping. Abandoned by his bosses at the White House, he soon began trying to extort money from them to help pay his mounting bills, as well as those of his fellow burglars, the deal being that if the White House paid, all those arrested would plead guilty and maintain silence about the extent of the White House’s involvement.

That December, his wife, Dorothy, carrying $10,000 in $100 bills, was killed in a plane crash, foul play suspected but never proved. Two years later, impeachment imminent, Nixon resigned his presidency. And in 1973, E. Howard Hunt, the man who had unwittingly set all these events in motion, pleaded guilty and ultimately spent thirty-three months in prison. “I cannot escape feeling,” he said at the time, “that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do.”

After his release, Hunt moved to Miami, where he remarried, had two more children and spent three decades living a quiet, unexceptional life, steadfastly refusing to talk about Watergate, much less the Kennedy assassination. His connection to the JFK assassination came about almost serendipitously, when in 1974 a researcher stumbled across a photo of three tramps standing in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza. It was taken on November 22nd, 1963, the day of Kennedy’s shooting, and one of the tramps looked pretty much like E. Howard. In early inquiries, official and otherwise, he always denied any involvement. In later years, he’d offer a curt “No comment.” And then, earlier this year, at the age of eighty-eight, he died — though not before writing an autobiography, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond , published last month. Not surprisingly, those things he wrote down about JFK’s death and gave to his eldest son don’t make an appearance in the book, at least not in any definitive way. E. Howard had apparently decided to take them to the grave. But St. John still has the memo — “It has all this stuff in it,” he says, “the chain of command, names, people, places, dates. He wrote it out to me directly, in his own handwriting, starting with the initials ‘LBJ’ ” — and he’s decided it’s time his father’s last secrets finally see some light, for better or for worse.

Out in Eureka, a few days before his father’s death, St. John is driving through town in a beat-up mottled-brown ’88 Cutlass Sierra. He is fifty-two. His hair is dark, worn long, and despite his decades as a drug addict, he’s still looking good. He has a Wiccan girlfriend named Mona. He’s also an accomplished and soulful guitar player, leaning heavily toward Eric Clapton; he can often be found playing in local haunts during open-mike nights and is working on putting a band together, perhaps to be called Saint John and the Sinners or, though less likely, the Konspirators. He’s got a good sense of humor and a large sentimental streak. The last time he saw his father, in Miami, was a week ago.

“I sat by his bedside holding his hand for about ten hours the first day,” St. John says somberly. “He hadn’t been out of bed in ten weeks, had pneumonia twenty-seven times in the last sixteen months. He’s such a tough old motherfucker, that guy. But he had all this fluid in his lungs, a death rattle, and I thought, ‘Any minute now, this is it, his last breath, I’m looking at it right here.’ A couple of times my stepmom, Laura, would say, ‘Howard, who is this?’ He’d look at me and her, and he didn’t have a clue. Other times, he would quietly say, ‘St. John.’ He said he loved me and was grateful I was there.”

At the moment, Saint doesn’t have a job; his felonies have gotten in the way. He has to borrow money to put gas in his Cutlass. Beach chairs substitute for furniture in the tiny apartment where, until recently, he lived with an ex-girlfriend, herself a reformed meth addict, and two kids, one hers, one theirs. “I would’ve loved to have lived a normal life,” he says. “I’m happy with who I am. I don’t have any regrets. But all the shit that happened, the whole thing, it really spun me over.”

And not only him but his siblings, too — a brother, David, who has had his own problems with drugs, and two older sisters, Kevan and Lisa, who still hold their father responsible for the tragedy of their mom’s death. Dorothy Hunt was staunchly loyal to her husband and, after his arrest, helped him with his plans to blackmail the White House. On December 8th, 1972, carrying $10,000 in what’s regarded as extorted hush money and, some say, evidence that could have gotten Nixon impeached, she boarded United Airlines Flight 553 from Washington to Chicago. The plane crashed, killing forty-three people onboard, including Dorothy. The official explanation was pilot error, but St. John doesn’t believe it. He thinks that the Nixon White House wanted to both get rid of his mother and send a message to his father. Nonetheless, he says he tries not to place blame.

“She got on that plane willingly and lovingly, because that’s the kind of woman she was,” he says. “They had lots of marital problems, but when it came down to it, she had his back, and she could hang in there with the big dogs. She was really pissed at Nixon, Liddy, all those guys, and she was saying, ‘We’re not going to let them hang you out to dry. We’re going to get them. Those motherfuckers are going to pay.’ So I’ve never held what happened against him. I had bitterness and resentment, but I always knew he did what he had to do given the circumstances.”

And at times, he even seems to think of his dad with pride: “Did you hear that the character that Tom Cruise plays in the Mission: Impossible movies is named after him? Instead of Everette Hunt, they named him Ethan Hunt. I know he’s been portrayed as kind of an inept, third-rate burglar, but burglary wasn’t really his bag. My dad was a really good spy, maybe a great spy.”

But then he starts talking about what it was like growing up the eldest son of Everette Howard Hunt, and a different picture emerges. “He loved the glamorous life, cocktail parties, nightclubbing, flirting, all that,” Saint says. “He was unfaithful to my mom, but she stayed with him. He was a swinger. He thought of himself as a cool dude, suave, sophisticated, intellectual. He was Mr. Smooth. A man of danger. He was perfect for the CIA. He never felt guilt about anything.”

In the early days of the cold war, the CIA’s mandate was simple: to contain the spread of communism by whatever means necessary; it was tacitly given permission to go about its dirty business unfettered by oversight of any kind. For much of the Cold War, it was answerable to no one. And if you were lucky enough to become one of its agents, you had every right to consider yourself a member of an elite corps, a big swinging all-American dick like no other.

The middle-class son of a Hamburg, New York, attorney, E. Howard Hunt graduated from Brown University in 1940 with a bachelor’s in English, joined the Navy during World War II, served in the North Atlantic on the destroyer Mayo , slipped and fell, took a medical discharge and wound up in China working under “Wild” Bill Donovan in the newly formed Office of Strategic Services. When the OSS was transformed into the CIA, Hunt jumped onboard. He loved action as much as he hated communism, and he soon began operating with a level of arrogance entirely typical of the CIA. He was instrumental, for instance, in planning the 1954 coup in Guatemala that overthrew the left-leaning, democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, and ushered in forty years of military repression, which ultimately cost 200,000 Guatemalans their lives. Years later, when asked about the 200,000 deaths, E. Howard said, “Deaths? What deaths?” Like Saint says, he never felt guilt about anything: “He was a complete self-centered WASP who saw himself as this blue blood from upstate New York. ‘I’m better than anybody because I’m white, Protestant and went to Brown, and since I’m in the CIA, I can do anything I want.’ Jew, nigger, Pollock, wop — he used all those racial epithets. He was an elitist. He hated everybody.”

In the early Fifties, his father could often be seen cruising around in a white Cadillac convertible; he loved that car. He also loved his cigars and his wine and his country clubs and being waited on by servants and having his children looked after by nannies. He was full of himself and full of the romantic, swashbuckling, freewheeling importance of his government mission. He had quite an imagination, too. When he wasn’t off saving the world from Reds, he spent much of his time in front of a typewriter, hacking out espionage novels, some eighty in all, with titles such as The Violent Ones (“They killed by day, they loved by night”) and I Came to Kill (“They wanted a tyrant liquidated, and cash could hire him to do it”).

Wherever E. Howard was stationed — he’d pop up Zelig-like in hot spots from Japan to Uruguay to Spain — he and his family lived lavishly and well, all presumably to lend credence to his cover job as a high-ranking embassy official. One estate was as large as a city block, and one dining table as long as a telephone pole, with the parents sitting at distant opposite ends. Sadly, he treated his children the way he and the CIA treated the rest of the world. They were supposed to bend to his will and otherwise be invisible. God forbid during a meal one of them should speak or rattle a dish.

“Whenever I made a sound, he looked at me with those hateful, steely eyes of his, a look of utter contempt and disgust, like he could kill,” St. John says. “He was a mean-spirited person and an extremely cruel father. I was his firstborn son, and I was born with a clubfoot and had to have operations. I suffered from petit-mal seizures. I was dyslexic and developed a stutter. For the superspy not to have a superson was the ultimate disappointment, like, ‘Here’s my idiot son with the clubfoot and glasses. Can we keep him in the closet, Dorothy?’ ”

Later, E. Howard moved the family to the last home it would ever occupy as a family, in Potomac, Maryland. It was called Witches Island. It was a rambling affair, with a horse paddock, a chicken coop, the Cold War bonus of a bomb shelter, and a fishing pond across the way. E. Howard wanted Saint to attend a top-flight prep school and one night took him to a dinner at St. Andrew’s School, to try and get his son enrolled. In the middle of the meal, Saint leaned over to his dad and whispered, “Papa, I have to go to the bathroom.” His father glared at him. Pretty soon Saint was banging his knees together under the table. “Sit still,” his father hissed. Saint said, “Papa, I really have to go.”

“I ended up pissing in my pants at the dinner,” Saint says. “Can you imagine how humiliating that was? Unbelievable.” He didn’t get into St. Andrew’s. He ended up settling for a lower-tier boarding school called St. James, near Hagerstown, Maryland. His second year there, in 1970, after being repeatedly molested by a teacher, he broke down and told his mother what was going on. She told his father. And rumor had it that E. Howard came up to St. James with a carload of guns to make the teacher disappear. “He was really, really pissed off,” says Saint. “He wanted to kill.” In any case, at the school, neither the teacher nor St. John was ever seen again.

That same year, his father retired from the CIA after being relegated to the backwaters for his role in the Bay of Pigs. He went to work as a writer for a PR firm. He was bored and missed the hands-on action of the CIA.The following year, however, his lawyer pal Chuck Colson, who was special counsel to Nixon, called him up with an invitation to join the president’s Special Investigations Unit as a kind of dirty-tricks consultant. He signed on. He really thought he was going places.

A round the time of st. john’s Miami visit in 2003 to talk to his ailing father about JFK, certain other people were also trying to get things out of E. Howard, including the actor Kevin Costner, who had played a JFK-assassination-obsessed DA in the Oliver Stone film JFK and had become somewhat obsessed himself. Costner said that he could arrange for E. Howard to make $5 million for telling the truth about what happened in Dallas. Unbeknown to St. John, however, Costner had already met with E. Howard once. That meeting didn’t go very well. When Costner arrived at the house, he didn’t ease into the subject. “So who killed Kennedy?” he blurted out. “I mean, who did shoot JFK, Mr. Hunt?”

E. Howard’s mouth fell open, and he looked at his wife. “What did he say?”

“Howard,” Laura said, “he wants to know who shot JFK.”

And that ended that meeting, with E. Howard grumbling to himself about Costner, “What a numskull.”

But then St. John got involved, and he knew better how to handle the situation. For one thing, he knew that his stepmother wanted to forget about the past. She didn’t want to hear about Watergate or Kennedy. In fact, E. Howard swore to Laura that he knew nothing about JFK’s assassination; it was one of her preconditions for marriage. Consequently, she and her sons often found themselves in conflict with St. John.

“Why can’t you go back to California and leave well enough alone?” they asked him. “How can you do this? How dare you do this? He’s in the last years of his life.”

But Saint’s attitude was, “This has nothing to do with you. This stuff is of historical significance and needs to come out, and if you’re worried that it’ll make him out to be a liar, everybody knows he’s a liar already. Is this going to ruin the Hunt name? The Hunt name is already filled with ruination.”

So when Saint arrived in Miami to talk to his dad, the two men spent a lot of time waiting for Laura to leave the house. Saint painted the living room and built a wheelchair ramp. In the mornings, he cooked breakfast. In the afternoons, he plopped a fishing hat on E. Howard’s head and wheeled him around the neighborhood. They drank coffee together. And watched lots of Fox News. And when Laura finally left, they talked.

Afterward, another meeting was arranged with Costner, this time in Los Angeles, where the actor had fifty assassination-related questions all ready to go. (The actor declined comment for this article.) Though the $5 million figure was still floating around, all Costner wanted to pay E. Howard at this point was $100 a day for his time. There would be no advance. St. John called Costner.

“That’s your offer? A hundred dollars? That’s an insult. You’re a cheapskate.”

“Nobody calls me a cheapskate,” said Costner. “What do you think I’m going to do, just hand over $5 million?”

“No. But the flight alone could kill him. He’s deaf as a brick. He’s pissing in a bag. He’s got one leg. You want him to fly to Los Angeles and for $100 a day? Wow! What are we going to do with all that money?!”

“I can’t talk to you anymore, St. John,” Costner said. And that was the end of that, for good. It looked like what E. Howard had to say would never get out.

One evening in Eureka, over a barbecue meal, St. John explains how he first came to suspect that his father might somehow be involved in the Kennedy assassination. “Around 1975, I was in a phone booth in Maryland somewhere, when I saw a poster on a telephone pole about who killed JFK, and it had a picture of the three tramps. I saw that picture and I fucking — like a cartoon character, my jaw dropped, my eyes popped out of my head, and smoke came out of my ears. It looks like my dad. There’s nobody that has all those same facial features. People say it’s not him. He’s said it’s not him. But I’m his son, and I’ve got a gut feeling.”

He chews his sandwich. “And then, like an epiphany, I remember ’63, and my dad being gone, and my mom telling me that he was on a business trip to Dallas. I’ve tried to convince myself that’s some kind of false memory, that I’m just nuts, that it’s something I heard years later. But, I mean, his alibi for that day is that he was at home with his family. I remember I was in the fifth grade. We were at recess. I was playing on the merry-go-round. We were called in and told to go home, because the president had been killed. And I remember going home. But I don’t remember my dad being there. I have no recollection of him being there. And then he has this whole thing about shopping for Chinese food with my mother that day, so that they could cook a meal together.” His father testified to this, in court, on more than one occasion, saying that he and his wife often cooked meals together.

St. John pauses and leans forward. “Well,” he says, “I can tell you that’s just the biggest load of crap in the fucking world. He was always looking at things like he was writing a novel; everything had to be just so glamorous and so exciting. He couldn’t even be bothered with his children. That’s not glamorous. James Bond doesn’t have children. So my dad in the kitchen? Chopping vegetables with his wife? I’m so sorry, but that would never happen. Ever. That fucker never did jack-squat like that. Ever.”

Not that it was all bad back then, in Potomac, at Witches Island. E. Howard played the trumpet, and his son was into music too, so sometimes the pair went down to Blues Alley, in Georgetown, to hear jazz. Back home, E. Howard would slap Benny Goodman’s monster swing-jazz song “Sing, Sing, Sing” on the turntable, and the two would listen to it endlessly. And then, sometimes, during the stomping Harry James horn solo, E. Howard would jump to his feet, snapping his fingers like some cool cat, pull back his shirt sleeves, lick his lips and play the air trumpet for all he was worth. It was great stuff, and St. John loved it. “I would sit there in awe,” he says. But the best was yet to come.

It was well past midnight on June 18th, 1972. Saint, eighteen years old, was asleep in his basement bedroom, surrounded by his Beatles and Playboy pinup posters, when he heard someone shouting, “You gotta wake up! You gotta wake up!”

When he opened his eyes, Saint saw his father as he’d never seen him before. E. Howard was dressed in his usual coat and tie, but everything was akimbo. He was a sweaty, disheveled mess. Saint didn’t know what to think or what was going on.

“I don’t need you to ask a lot of questions,” his father said. “I need you to get your clothes on and come upstairs.”

He disappeared into the darkness. Saint changed out of his pajamas. Upstairs, he found his father in the master bedroom, laboring over a big green suitcase jumble-filled with microphones, walkie-talkies, cameras, tripods, cords, wires, lots of weird stuff. His father started giving him instructions. Saint went to the kitchen and returned with Windex, paper towels and some rubber dishwashing gloves. Then, in silence, the two of them began wiping fingerprints off all the junk in the suitcase. After that, they loaded everything into E. Howard’s Pontiac Firebird and drove over to a lock on the C&O Canal. E. Howard heaved the suitcase into the water, and it gurgled out of sight.

They didn’t speak on the way home. St. John still didn’t know what was going on. All he knew was that his dad had needed his help, and he’d given it, successfully.

The next day, dressed in one of his prep-school blazers, he drove to a Riggs Bank in Georgetown and met his father inside the safety-deposit-box cage. His father turned him around, lifted his blazer and shoved about $100,000 in cash down the back of his pants. The boy made it home without picking up a tail. Then his father had him get rid of a typewriter. Saint put the typewriter in a bag, hoofed it across the Witches Island property onto the neighboring spread and tossed it into the pond where he and his brother David used to go fishing.

“Don’t ever tell anybody you’ve done these things,” his father said later. “I could get in trouble. You could get in trouble. I’m sorry to have to put you in this position, but I really am grateful for your help.”

“Of course, Papa,” Saint said.

Everything he had done, he’d done because his father and his gang of pals had botched the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Soon his mother would be killed in a plane crash, and his father would be sent to jail, and Nixon would resign, and his own life would fracture in unimaginable ways. But right now, standing there with his father and hearing those words of praise, he was the happiest he’d ever been.

Years later, when saint started trying to get his father to tell what he knew about JFK, he came to believe the information would be valuable. He both needed money and thought he was owed money, for what he’d been through. Also, like many a conspiracy nut before him, he was more than a little obsessed.

“After seeing that poster of the three tramps,” he says, “I read two dozen books on the JFK assassination, and the more I read, the more I was unsure about what happened. I had all these questions and uncertainties. I mean, I was trying to sort out things that had touched me in a big way.”

Touched him and turned him upside down, especially the death of his mother. He had been particularly close to her. She was part Native American and had sewed him a buckskin shirt that he used to wear like a badge of honor, along with a pair of moccasins. At the same time, Saint feels that he never got to know her. She told him that during World War II, she’d tracked Nazi money for the U.S. Treasury Department, and Saint believes that early in her marriage to his father, she may have been in the CIA herself, “a contract agent, not officially listed.” But he isn’t sure about any of it, really.

“In our family, everything was sort of like a mini-CIA,” he says. “Nothing was ever talked about, so we grew up with all of these walls, walls around my father, walls around my mother, walls around us kids, to protect and insulate us. You grow up not knowing what really happened. Like, who was my mom, for Christ’s sake? Was she a CIA agent? What was her life really like?” The one thing he does know is that when she died, so in large part did the Hunt family.

Once his father went to prison, Saint moved to Wisconsin, where he worked in a potato-processing plant and spent the rest of his time dropping acid. In 1975, he moved to the Oakland, California, area, started snorting coke and for five years drove a bakery truck. He was in a band and hoped to become a rock star, though touring alongside Buddy Guy was about the biggest thing that ever happened. Then he gave up coke and took up meth and a while later started dealing meth. Twenty years flew by. He had wild sexual escapades; he shacked up with two sisters — “nymphs,” he calls them. But mainly his life, like his father’s, was a rolling series of misfortunes. He received insurance money after his mom died, and bought a house; a week later, it burned down in some drug-related fiasco. His brother David followed a similar path; leaving boarding school, he hooked up with Saint, and together they set about snorting and dealing away the years.

Finally, in 2001, on the heels of two drug busts, Saint decided to go straight. With his ex-girlfriend, their daughter and her son, he stayed in a series of shelters, then took them to live in Eureka, several hours north of Oakland. He’s since earned a certificate in hotel management, but jobs don’t last. And the questions and uncertainties about his father continue to circulate in his head.

“In some ways we turned out similarly,” he says. “He was a spy, into secrets and covert activity. I became a drug dealer. What has to be more covert and secret than that? It’s the same mind-set. We were just on opposite sides of the — well, actually, in our case, I guess we weren’t even on opposite sides of the law, were we?” T hat time in miami, with saint by his bed and disease eating away at him and him thinking he’s six months away from death, E. Howard finally put pen to paper and started writing. Saint had been working toward this moment for a long while, and now it was going to happen. He got his father an A&W diet root beer, then sat down in the old man’s wheelchair and waited.

E. Howard scribbled the initials “LBJ,” standing for Kennedy’s ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under “LBJ,” connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that’s never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales’ name, with a line, the framed words “French Gunman Grassy Knoll.”

So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that’s the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories.

“By the time he handed me the paper, I was in a state of shock,” Saint says. “His whole life, to me and everybody else, he’d always professed to not know anything about any of it. But I knew this had to be the truth. If my dad was going to make anything up, he would have made something up about the Mafia, or Castro, or Khrushchev. He didn’t like Johnson. But you don’t falsely implicate your own country, for Christ’s sake. My father is old-school, a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, and that’s the last thing he would do.”

Later that week, E. Howard also gave Saint two sheets of paper that contained a fuller narrative. It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: “Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons.”

David Atlee Phillips, the CIA’s Cuban operations chief in Miami at the time of JFK’s death, knew E. Howard from the Guatemala-coup days. Veciana is a member of the Cuban exile community. Sturgis, like Saint’s father, is supposed to have been one of the three tramps photographed in Dealey Plaza. Sturgis was also one of the Watergate plotters, and he is a man whom E. Howard, under oath, has repeatedly sworn to have not met until Watergate, so to Saint the mention of his name was big news.

In the next few paragraphs, E. Howard goes on to describe the extent of his own involvement. It revolves around a meeting he claims he attended, in 1963, with Morales and Sturgis. It takes place in a Miami hotel room. Here’s what happens:

Morales leaves the room, at which point Sturgis makes reference to a “Big Event” and asks E. Howard, “Are you with us?”

E. Howard asks Sturgis what he’s talking about.

Sturgis says, “Killing JFK.”

E. Howard, “incredulous,” says to Sturgis, “You seem to have everything you need. Why do you need me?” In the handwritten narrative, Sturgis’ response is unclear, though what E. Howard says to Sturgis next isn’t: He says he won’t “get involved in anything involving Bill Harvey, who is an alcoholic psycho.”

After that, the meeting ends. E. Howard goes back to his “normal” life and “like the rest of the country . . . is stunned by JFK’s death and realizes how lucky he is not to have had a direct role.”

After reading what his father had written, St. John was stunned too. His father had not only implicated LBJ, he’d also, with a few swift marks of a pen, put the lie to almost everything he’d sworn to, under oath, about his knowledge of the assassination. Saint had a million more questions. But his father was exhausted and needed to sleep, and then Saint had to leave town without finishing their talk, though a few weeks later he did receive in the mail a tape recording from his dad. E. Howard’s voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, and he sometimes wanders down unrelated pathways. But he essentially remakes the same points he made in his handwritten narrative.

Shortly thereafter, Laura found out what had been going on, and with the help of E. Howard’s attorney put an end to it. St. John and his father were kept apart. When they did see each other, they were never left alone. And they never got a chance to finish what they’d started. Instead, the old man set about writing his autobiography and turned his back on his son. He wrote him a letter in which he said that Saint’s life had been nothing but “meaningless, self-serving instant gratification,” that he had never amounted to anything and never would. He asked for his JFK memos back, and Saint returned them, though not before making copies.

There is no way to confirm Hunt’s allegations — all but one of the co-conspirators he named are long gone. St. John, for his part, believes his father. E. Howard was lucid when he made his confession. He was taking no serious medications, and he and his son were finally on good terms. If anything, St. John believes, his father was holding out on him, the old spy keeping a few secrets in reserve, just in case.

“Actually, there were probably dozens of plots to kill Kennedy, because everybody hated Kennedy but the public,” Saint says. “The question is, which one of them worked? My dad has always said, ‘Thank God one of them worked.’ I think he knows a lot more than he told me. He claimed he backed out of the plot only so he could disclaim actual involvement. In a way, I feel like he only opened another can of worms.” He takes a deep breath. “At a certain point, I’m just going to have to let it go.”

Out in Eureka, Saint has been reading an advance copy of E. Howard’s autobiography, American Spy . In it, his father looks at LBJ as only one possible person behind the JFK killing, and then only in the most halfhearted, couched-and-cloaked way. He brings up various other possibilities, too, then debunks each of them.

But of all the shadings and omissions in the book, the only one that truly upsets St. John has to do with the happiest moment in his life, that time in 1972, on the night of the Watergate burglary, when he helped his father dispose of the spy gear, then ran money for him and ditched the typewriter.

The way it unfolds in the book, St. John doesn’t do anything for his dad. And it’s E. Howard himself who dumps the typewriter.

“That’s a complete lie,” Saint says, almost shouting. “A total fabrication. I did that. I mean, he never took me aside and thanked me in any kind of deep emotional way. But I’m the one who helped him that night. Me! And he’s robbing me of it. Why?”

Like so many other things, he will never know why, because the next day, on January 23rd, in the morning, in Miami, the old spymaster dies.

Later in the day, Saint started reading a few of the obituaries.

One starts off, “Sleazebag E. Howard Hunt is finally dead.”

“Oh, God,” Saint says and goes looking for how The New York Times handled his father’s death. The obit reads, “Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends. But the record shows that he mishandled many of the tasks he received from the CIA and the White House. He was ‘totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him. . . .’ ”

“Wow,” Saint says. “I don’t know if I can read these things. I mean, that is one brutal obituary.”

But the Times is right, of course. E. Howard was a danger to anybody around him, and any list of those in danger would always have to include, right at the top, his firstborn son, St. John.

Related Posts:

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• BTL Update 2012 April 16
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• Reality Zone Unfiltered News December 18-24
• Reality Zone Unfiltered News 2010 November 27-December 3
• Reality Zone Unfiltered News 2010 November 6-12
• Operation Red Pill News 2010 September 2
• In Lies We Trust: The CIA, Hollywood and Bioterrorism

Bob Schulz
We The People Foundation

On Monday November 29 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States entered the following orders:

Case 10-446
KERCHNER, CHARLES, ET AL. V. OBAMA,
PRESIDENT OF THE U.S., ET AL.

The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

Case 10-560
SCHULZ, ROBERT L. V. FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM, ET AL

The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

Both cases were controversies involving subject matter critical to the primary governmental functions and intent of law set forth in the Constitution for the United States.

Kerchner was defending his individual Right to a President that is a natural born citizen.

Schulz was defending his individual Right to a government that does not give or lend public funds to private corporations for definitively private purposes (i.e., the $700 billion AIG and TARP financial bailouts), a power not inherent in the People, much less transferable or granted by the People to the Government.

The Judicial Article III of the Constitution guarantees Kerchner and Schulz that the merits of their cases would be heard by the independent, federal courts (“the judicial Power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution ..”).

However, the lower courts violated Article III, summarily dismissing the cases for “lack of standing,” on the (erroneous) ground that because the injuries to Kerchner and Schulz were no different from the injuries suffered by the rest of the people in the country, neither Schulz nor Kerchner’s Petitions to cure constitutional torts could proceed. By dismissing the cases on “lack of standing”, the courts essentially suggest that Kerchner and Schulz should have directed their Grievances to Congress – as if the issues raised were political questions and America was a pure democracy with rights granted by the will of the majority, rather than a Republic with unalienable, individual, Natural Rights, guaranteed by written Constitutions, enforceable through an independent Judiciary.

Kerchner and Schulz had Petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States to overrule and reverse the “no standing” rulings of the lower courts and send the cases back to the lower courts for a hearing on the merits of the constitutional challenges. In denying both Petitions for Certiorari and avoiding a judicial examination of the merits for no other discernable reason than political eagerness, the Supreme Court added a ruthless sneer to the Grievances.

About all that can be said about the Kerchner and Schulz cases is we can add “presidential eligibility” and “corporate welfare” to the dung heap of other desecrations of our sacred Charters of Freedom, including but by no means limited to violations of the war, money, taxes, privacy, property, immigration, petition and sovereignty clauses — all of which have been the subject of repeated Petitions and court challenges that have been either ignored by government officials or tersely dismissed by abuses of one judicial doctrine or another.

Unfortunately, this leaves us – the People – with but one irrefutable conclusion: the Constitution is NOT now serving any meaningful purpose. The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of man and whim. The Constitution has become a mere menu of words, phrases and ideas which the government may choose to define or ignore at its sole will and discretion.

The way the system is working is in sharp contrast to the way it was designed to work. Ignoring Article V’s prescriptions for orderly change, our elected and appointed officials are now doing whatever they think best, literally unrestrained by either the written words of the Law itself or the intent behind those words – i.e., the set of principles, prohibitions and mandates proclaimed to govern them - the Constitution for the United States, the Supreme Law of the Land.

Rather than three independent, co-equal branches of a highly-limited federal Government, each designed to be a check and balance on the other two, keeping them in their constitutional places, with the People possessing the ultimate Power, we now suffer the branches cooperating in decisions to deny the People their creator-endowed, unalienable Rights to life, Liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness.

Since 1995, People have been attempting to hold the Government accountable to the Constitution by exercising the little-known, unalienable Right guaranteed by the last ten words of the First Amendment, “.and to Petition the Government for a Redress of Grievances”.

While this Right was placed in the First Amendment as the PRIMARY means through which the power of the People to directly hold the Government accountable could be exercised, peaceably, our modern-day existence of materialism and apathy, public largesse for votes, and routine usurpation of power by the Government, has left the “capstone Right” of the Bill of Rights dormant and all but forgotten. Ask any attorney to cite the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment and most will not mention the Right to Petition the Government for a Redress of Grievances.

We were first motivated by the knowledge that a departure from the Constitution in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on, until the People are reduced to misery and suffering.

We knew, “The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.” Thomas Jefferson. Notes on the State of Virginia, 1782.

We know that each violation of the Constitution has a ravaging effect on America, Her People, economy, reputation and security, and that the whole of the devastation would be greater than the sum of the parts.

We know that an act of tyranny anywhere is a threat to Freedom everywhere.

We repeatedly Petitioned the Government to remedy the following violations and abuses of the Constitution and the Rights of the People

1.       the $ 20 billion bailout of Mexico in 1995 without approval by Congress; and

2.       the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 after Congress refused to authorize it; and

3.       the direct, un-apportioned tax on labor; and

4.       the withholding of earnings from the paychecks of workers; and

5.       the Federal Reserve System’s fiat, debt-based currency; and

6.       the decision to invade Iraq by the President, rather than Congress; and

7.       the USA Patriot Act; and

8.       the federal gun control laws; and

9.       the failure of Presidents to enforce the immigration laws; and

10.    the movement toward a North American Union; and

11.    the counting of votes in secret by machines; and

12.    the eligibility to be President if both parents are not U.S. citizens; and

13.    the $ 85 billion bailout of AIG; and

14.    the $ 700 TARP bailout.

The result has always been the same: utter silence and failure to respond by every official in the Congress and Executive, and outright dismissal of any and all Petitions pursued through the Judiciary. However, under well established U.S. law, silence is admission, when a public official has a duty to respond and fails to do so.

The People further decided to test the attitude of the Judiciary specifically challenging the nature of the First Amendment Petition clause itself. On July 19, 2004, the People filed a lawsuit asking the federal Court to formally declare — for the first time in history — the Constitutional meaning of the last ten words of the First Amendment.  The title of this historic case (sponsored by the We The People Foundation) was, We The People v. United States.

The Court was asked to answer two fundamental questions: 1) whether the Government is obligated under the First Amendment to respond to Petitions for Redress of violations of the Constitution; and 2) whether the People possess the Right to retain their money until those Grievances are redressed.

Obviously, the correct answer to the first question is “yes” – the Government is obligated to respond. To speculate otherwise would be to call into question why the clause was even included as part of the First Amendment. It is noteworthy that the Petition clause is the only part of the Amendment which articulates a specific and direct form and process of communication from the People to the Government, thereby reiterating the potent principle from the Declaration of Independence that defines government as a servant of the People. Finally, in the words of the Supreme Court of 1803, “It cannot be presumed that any clause in the constitution is intended to be without effect….” Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 174.

The correct answer to the second question is also “yes” – the People must be able to enforce their Rights, or they essentially have none. The Right to withhold money as a peaceable means for the People to “weigh in” on and Redress unconstitutional governmental acts arises from the Founding Fathers and their sound reasoning as to how a Republic must operate to ensure the Rights of a Free People.

Indeed, the Right of Petition to secure Redress against government transgressors has evolved as the cornerstone of the law of Western Civilization finding its first written citation as part of Magna Carta in 1215 A.D.

On October 6, 2006 oral arguments were heard by the United States Court of Appeals regarding the nature of the Right to Petition.

Traditionally, Appeals Courts issue their decisions within 4-6 weeks following oral arguments. However, the decision in the Right to Petition lawsuit was issued more than seven months after oral arguments. Why the delay?

In hindsight, we now know activities were quietly taking place within the other two branches of the Government that appear to have directed the verdict in our case.

Rather than work in good faith with the People’s concerns by responding directly to our Petitions for Redress, the Government chose to “clamp down,” through a (constitutionally abhorrent) tripartite treaty – a tripartition, divided among the three branches, for the purpose of (unlawfully) colluding to deny the People their First Amendment Right to hold the government accountable to the Constitution. These actions were taken in a manner to attract the least attention possible.

First, in December, 2006, the 109^th Congress passed the “Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006.” (Summary, H.R. 6111) Please note the title. This Act was meant to retroactively extend tax credits that had expired in 2005: Sounds good for the People – but look again.

Tucked away in the Act was a provision (Title III — Health Savings Accounts, Section 407) (see full text) that authorized the (Executive Branch) Treasury Department to make law (i.e., unconstitutionally) to administratively prescribe a list of “specified frivolous positions,” and impose a penalty of $5,000 on any person who uses a “specified frivolous position” as a ground of reasoning for retaining his money from the Government. Disturbingly, there is no definition of “frivolous” in the Act.

Then, on March 15, 2007, the Treasury Department published Notice 2007-30, a list of “Frivolous Positions”, again, without defining “frivolous.” Included on the frivolous list – i.e., subject to a $5,000 penalty, among numerous other well-researched and proven positions, is Government’s refusal to respond to First Amendment Petitions for Redress of Grievances. (See paragraph (9)b of the Notice).

In other words, citizens who raise the issue of government’s failure to respond to First Amendment Petitions of Redress are subject to a $5,000 penalty. 

In short, all the “positions” cited in the Treasury Notice (including the full exercise of the First Amendment Right to Petition) are deemed “frivolous” simply because Government says so.

Then, on May 8, 2007, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit finally issued its decision in We The People v. United States (seven months after it heard oral argument), ruling that the Government is not obligated to respond to the People’s First Amendment Petitions for Redress and, therefore, the People do not have the Right to retain their money until the Government responds.

The Judiciary fell into line with the “verdict” directed by the actions of the Legislative branch on December 9, 2006, and the Executive branch on March 15, 2007. A ruling that abused the judicial doctrine of stare decisis by relying on a principle of law laid down in two irrelevant cases.

It is difficult to come to any other conclusion but that there has been a tacit assent by the three branches of the central government to actively thwart and quash any attempt by the People to enforce their Right to hold the Government accountable to the rest of the Constitution, even as the Government has patently refused to honor its obligation to respond to the People’s First Amendment Petitions for Redress.

The People of America should roil when they fully realize what effect these actions have had upon their Freedom.

A Petition for Certiorari (w/ Appendix) was filed, but the Supreme Court refused to hear the case which could have recognized the People’s Right to peaceably hold the Government accountable to the Constitution, thereby shifting the ultimate power in our society from the Government back to the People, where it was meant to reside in the first place.

A Scheme Well-Concealed

Who among us knew that a very lengthy bill, the “Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006,” widely popular because it retroactively extended for two years, hundreds of tax credits that had expired in December 2005, which was introduced and passed both houses of Congress in three days in December 2006 (with no record of who voted for or against the bill) actually included a buried provision that authorized the Executive branch to prescribe a list of “specified frivolous positions” and to fine anyone $5,000 if they cite any of those positions as a reason for retaining their money? The Table of Contents for the Act itself runs 25 pages.

Who among us knew that on March 15, 2007, the IRS published Notice 2007-30 containing a list of “specified frivolous positions,” and that the list included “the Right to Petition the Government for Redress of Grievances”, among many others and now being used against citizens who are standing up and acting on their beliefs?

Who among us was able to see the connection between the acts of the Congress and Treasury and the May 8, 2007 decision by the Court in We The People v. United States, declaring the Government is not obligated to respond to the People’s Petitions for Redress of constitutional torts and the People have no Right to peaceably enforce their Rights?

What great discords and suffering might have been prevented, especially now, in these days of great national distress and economic turmoil had a government founded of the People, by the People, and for the People, been willing to openly answer the questions asked by the People in their Petitions for Redress.

It is clear that we, the People are up against unjust government and laws. If we are to maintain the great American experiment, it is essential for the leaders of every group of “Freedom Keepers” to come together and meet face-to-face, with great haste, to develop a “Liberty Matrix” and a peaceful course of action for the Free to defend the greatest governing documents ever given to mankind and with the recollection that the cause of America is still the cause of the World.

Related Posts:

• Constitutional Right Outlawed by Congress
• Reality Zone Unfiltered News 2011 January 29-February 4
• Reality Zone Unfiltered News 2011 January 8-14
• The Future is Calling (Part 1) – The Chasm
• Reality Zone Unfiltered News 2010 October 30-November 5
• An Introduction to the Articles of Freedom
• BTL Update 2011 October 30
• Reality Zone Unfiltered News 2011 January 15-21
• Reality Zone Unfiltered News 2010 December 11-17
• Reality Zone Unfiltered News 2010 September 25-October 1

The Mentality of the American Politician
“Right off purge the thought that “your elected representatives” are yours. They belong to the government. The government owns them and the government pays them. They don’t vote for you. They vote for the government.”
Personal Liberty Digest 2010 October 18

Related Posts:

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• Books
• The Future is Calling (Part 1) – The Chasm
• The Future is Calling (Part 2) – Secret Organizations and Hidden Agendas

A “sockdolager” is a knock-down blow. This is a newspaper reporter’s captivating story of his unforgettable encounter with the old “Bear Hunter” from Tennessee.

From “The Life of Colonel David Crockett”, by Edward S. Ellis
(Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1884)

---

CROCKETT was then the lion of Washington. I was a great admirer of his character, and, having several friends who were intimate with him, I found no difficulty in making his acquaintance. I was fascinated with him, and he seemed to take a fancy to me.

I was one day in the lobby of the House of Representatives when a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support—rather, as I thought, because it afforded the speakers a fine opportunity for display than from the necessity of convincing anybody, for it seemed to me that everybody favored it. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose. Everybody expected, of course, that he was going to make one of his characteristic speeches in support of the bill. He commenced:

“Mr. Speaker—I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it.

We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him. This government can owe no debts but for services rendered, and at a stipulated price. If it is a debt, how much is it? Has it been audited, and the amount due ascertained? If it is a debt, this is not the place to present it for payment, or to have its merits examined. If it is a debt, we owe more than we can ever hope to pay, for we owe the widow of every soldier who fought in the War of 1812 precisely the same amount.

There is a woman in my neighborhood, the widow of as gallant a man as ever shouldered a musket. He fell in battle. She is as good in every respect as this lady, and is as poor. She is earning her daily bread by her daily labor; but if I were to introduce a bill to appropriate five or ten thousand dollars for her benefit, I should be laughed at, and my bill would not get five votes in this House. There are thousands of widows in the country just such as the one I have spoken of, but we never hear of any of these large debts to them. Sir, this is no debt.

The government did not owe it to the deceased when he was alive; it could not contract it after he died. I do not wish to be rude, but I must be plain. Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity.

Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much of our own money as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.”

He took his seat. Nobody replied. The bill was put upon its passage, and, instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as, no doubt, it would, but for that speech, it received but few votes, and, of course, was lost.

Like many other young men, and old ones, too, for that matter, who had not thought upon the subject, I desired the passage of the bill, and felt outraged at its defeat. I determined that I would persuade my friend Crockett to move a reconsideration the next day.

Previous engagements preventing me from seeing Crockett that night, I went early to his room the next morning and found him engaged in addressing and franking letters, a large pile of which lay upon his table.

I broke in upon him rather abruptly, by asking him what devil had possessed him to make that speech and defeat that bill yesterday. Without turning his head or looking up from his work, he replied:

“You see that I am very busy now; take a seat and cool yourself. I will be through in a few minutes, and then I will tell you all about it.”

He continued his employment for about ten minutes, and when he had finished he turned to me and said: “Now, sir, I will answer your question. But thereby hangs a tale, and one of considerable length, to which you will have to listen.”

I listened, and this is the tale which I heard:

---

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we could. When we got there, I went to work, and I never worked as hard in my life as I did there for several hours. But, in spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made homeless, and, besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many women and children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them, and everybody else seemed to feel the same way.

The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done. I said everybody felt as I did. That was not quite so; for, though they perhaps sympathized as deeply with the sufferers as I did, there were a few of the members who did not think we had the right to indulge our sympathy or excite our charity at the expense of anybody but ourselves. They opposed the bill, and upon its passage demanded the yeas and nays. There were not enough of them to sustain the call, but many of us wanted our names to appear in favor of what we considered a praiseworthy measure, and we voted with them to sustain it. So the yeas and nays were recorded, and my name appeared on the journals in favor of the bill.

The next summer, when it began to be time to think about the election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. I had no opposition there, but, as the election was some time off, I did not know what might turn up, and I thought it was best to let the boys know that I had not forgot them, and that going to Congress had not made me too proud to go to see them.

So I put a couple of shirts and a few twists of tobacco into my saddlebags, and put out. I had been out about a week and had found things going very smoothly, when, riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of a stranger than any other, I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came to the fence. As he came up I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but, as I thought, rather coldly, and was about turning his horse for another furrow when I said to him: “Don’t be in such a hurry, my friend; I want to have a little talk with you, and get better acquainted.”

He replied: “I am very busy, and have but little time to talk, but if it does not take too long, I will listen to what you have to say.”

I began: “Well, friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called candidates, and…”

“’Yes, I know you; you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine. I shall not vote for you again.’

This was a sockdolager… I begged him to tell me what was the matter.

“Well, Colonel, it is hardly worthwhile to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. But I beg your pardon for expressing it in that way. I did not intend to avail myself of the privilege of the Constitution to speak plainly to a candidate for the purpose of insulting or wounding you. I intend by it only to say that your understanding of the Constitution is very different from mine; and I will say to you what, but for my rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest. But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is.”

“I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake about it, for I do not remember that I gave any vote last winter upon any constitutional question.”

“No, Colonel, there’s no mistake. Though I live here in the backwoods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say that last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by a fire in Georgetown. Is that true?”

“Certainly it is, and I thought that was the last vote which anybody in the world would have found fault with.”

“Well, Colonel, where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity?”

Here was another sockdolager; for, when I began to think about it, I could not remember a thing in the Constitution that authorized it. I found I must take another tack, so I said:

“Well, my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve its suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing Treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did.”

“It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing to do with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government.

So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other.

No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose. If twice as many houses had been burned in this county as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief. There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week’s pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men in and around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life. The Congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from the necessity of giving by giving what was not yours to give.

The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.”

I have given you an imperfect account of what he said. Long before he was through, I was convinced that I had done wrong. He wound up by saying:

“So you see, Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is a precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people. I have no doubt you acted honestly, but that does not make it any better, except as far as you are personally concerned, and you see that I cannot vote for you.”

I tell you I felt streaked. I saw if I should have opposition, and this man should go talking, he would set others to talking, and in that district I was a gone fawn-skin. I could not answer him, and the fact is, I did not want to. But I must satisfy him, and I said to him:

“Well, my friend, you hit the nail upon the head when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. I intended to be guided by it, and thought I had studied it full. I have heard many speeches in Congress about the powers of Congress, but what you have said there at your plow has got more hard, sound sense in it than all the fine speeches I ever heard. If I had ever taken the view of it that you have, I would have put my head into the fire before I would have given that vote; and if you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I wish I may be shot.”

He laughingly replied:

“Yes, Colonel, you have sworn to that once before, but I will trust you again upon one condition. You say that you are convinced that your vote was wrong. Your acknowledgment of it will do more good than beating you for it. If, as you go around the district, you will tell people about this vote, and that you are satisfied it was wrong, I will not only vote for you, but will do what I can to keep down opposition, and, perhaps, I may exert some little influence in that way.”

“If I don’t,” said I, “I wish I may be shot; and to convince you that I am in earnest in what I say, I will come back this way in a week or ten days, and if you will get up a gathering of the people, I will make a speech to them. Get up a barbecue, and I will pay for it.”

“No, Colonel, we are not rich people in this section, but we have plenty of provisions to contribute for a barbecue, and some to spare for those who have none. The push of crops will be over in a few days, and we can then afford a day for a barbecue. This is Thursday; I will see to getting it up on Saturday a week. Come to my house on Friday, and we will go together, and I promise you a very respectable crowd to see and hear you.”

“Well, I will be here. But one thing more before I say good-bye… I must know your name.”

“My name is Bunce.”

“Not Horatio Bunce?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Mr. Bunce, I never saw you before, though you say you have seen me; but I know you very well. I am glad I have met you, and very proud that I may hope to have you for my friend. You must let me shake your hand before I go.”

We shook hands and parted.

It was one of the luckiest hits of my life that I met him. He mingled but little with the public, but was widely known for his remarkable intelligence and incorruptible integrity, and for a heart brimful and running over with kindness and benevolence, which showed themselves not only in words but in acts. He was the oracle of the whole country around him, and his fame had extended far beyond the circle of his immediate acquaintance. Though I had never met him before, I had heard much of him, and but for this meeting it is very likely I should have had opposition, and had been beaten. One thing is very certain, no man could now stand up in that district under such a vote.

At the appointed time I was at his house, having told our conversation to every crowd I had met, and to every man I stayed all night with, and I found that it gave the people an interest and a confidence in me stronger than I had ever seen manifested before.

Though I was considerably fatigued when I reached his house, and, under ordinary circumstances, should have gone early to bed, I kept him up until midnight, talking about the principles and affairs of government, and got more real, true knowledge of them than I had got all my life before.

I have told you Mr. Bunce converted me politically. He came nearer converting me religiously than I had ever been before. He did not make a very good Christian of me, as you know; but he has wrought upon my mind a conviction of the truth of Christianity, and upon my feelings a reverence for its purifying and elevating power such as I had never felt before.

I have known and seen much of him since, for I respect him—no, that is not the word—I reverence and love him more than any living man, and I go to see him two or three times every year; and I will tell you, sir, if everyone who professes to be a Christian lived and acted and enjoyed it as he does, the religion of Christ would take the world by storm.

But to return to my story: The next morning we went to the barbecue, and, to my surprise, found about a thousand men there. I met a good many whom I had not known before, and they and my friend introduced me around until I had got pretty well acquainted—at least, they all knew me.

In due time notice was given that I would speak to them. They gathered around a stand that had been erected. I opened my speech by saying:

“Fellow citizens—I present myself before you today feeling like a new man. My eyes have lately been opened to truths which ignorance or prejudice, or both, had heretofore hidden from my view. I feel that I can today offer you the ability to render you more valuable service than I have ever been able to render before. I am here today more for the purpose of acknowledging my error than to seek your votes. That I should make this acknowledgment is due to myself as well as to you. Whether you will vote for me is a matter for your consideration only.”

I went on to tell them about the fire and my vote for the appropriation as I have told it to you, and then told them why I was satisfied it was wrong. I closed by saying:

“And now, fellow citizens, it remains only for me to tell you that the most of the speech you have listened to with so much interest was simply a repetition of the arguments by which your neighbor, Mr. Bunce, convinced me of my error.

“It is the best speech I ever made in my life, but he is entitled to the credit of it. And now I hope he is satisfied with his convert and that he will get up here and tell you so.”

He came upon the stand and said:

“Fellow citizens—It affords me great pleasure to comply with the request of Colonel Crockett. I have always considered him a thoroughly honest man, and I am satisfied that he will faithfully perform all that he has promised you today.”

He went down, and there went up from the crowd such a shout for Davy Crockett as his name never called forth before.

I am not much given to tears, but I was taken with a choking then and felt some big drops rolling down my cheeks. And I tell you now that the remembrance of those few words spoken by such a man, and the honest, hearty shout they produced, is worth more to me than all the honors I have received and all the reputation I have ever made, or ever shall make, as a member of Congress.

“NOW, SIR,” concluded Crockett, “you know why I made that speech yesterday. I have had several thousand copies of it printed and was directing them to my constituents when you came in.

“There is one thing now to which I will call your attention. You remember that I proposed to give a week’s pay. There are in that House many very wealthy men—men who think nothing of spending a week’s pay, or a dozen of them for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of those same men made beautiful speeches upon the great debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased—a debt which could not be paid by money, particularly so insignificant a sum as $10,000, when weighed against the honor of the nation. Yet not one of them responded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it.”

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“Whensoever the federal government assumes unconstitutional powers, a “nullification of the act is THE rightful remedy”.”
Thomas Jefferson

“A government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have…The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.”
Thomas Jefferson

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”
George Washington

“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence.”
John Locke

“A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers… ‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”
Friedrich August von Hayek

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority…There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”
Noah Webster

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
Lord Acton

“We need a revolution every 20 years just to keep government honest.”
Thomas Jefferson

“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
Samuel Adams

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