Monopoly "Money"

Bernard von NotHaus, the creator of the Liberty Dollar, is optimistic that he and his associates will have the benefit of “a spectacular trial” for the supposed crime of providing customers with something of value – platinum, gold, silver, and copper coins – in exchange for something innately value-less – the decorated ragpaper and junk metal slugs the Regime insists we treat as money.

Speaking with the New York Sun – the quasi-official publication of the Warfare/Homeland Security State – von NotHaus anticipated the opportunity to “put this country's monetary system on trial.”

He said this as if he truly believes the Regime would permit such a thing to happen. And even if von NotHaus were permitted the luxury of a trial – as opposed to having his company's wealth simply stolen through “asset forfeiture,” which appears to be the case at present – it's entirely possible that our monetary system will effectively collapse before the case against the Liberty Dollar is aired in a courtroom.

Relics of a time when there was money in U.S. currency: Kennedy Half-Dollars minted in 1964, the last year the Regime put silver in its official coins.

Should that collapse occur, von NotHaus – who, like most intelligent observers, has warned that the fiat money system eventually must destroy itself -- won't be allowed to argue that truth is a perfect defense. The FBI's investigation -- which took two years and employed the services of “confidential informants” and other covert means to collect evidence of peaceful, mutually beneficial commercial exchanges – is designed to set up a political trial, if a trial is even permitted.

According to the affidavit (.pdf) filed by FBI Special Agent Romagnuolo, the political objective of von NotHaus's organization, The National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Codes (NORFED) makes it a subversive criminal conspiracy.

“As the organization's name implies,” writes Romagnuolo, “the goal of NORFED is to undermine the United States government's financial systems by the issuance of a non-governmental competing currency for the purpose of repealing the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Code.”

As we should expect of someone good enough for government work, Romagnuolo is dishonestly amalgamating two issues here – the first being NORFED's creation of a currency intended to compete with the “dollar” (the quotation marks are apposite here, since the fiat scrip known by that name is not a dollar as defined in law), the second being the effort to repeal the measures that created the Federal Reserve and Income Tax systems. The latter is a far broader movement than the former, and it includes many millions of people who had nothing to do with NORFED or the Liberty Dollar.

Romagnuolo being a Fed, can't write with economy or clarity (only the top-of-the-line tax feeders can even speak clearly), so it's difficult to know to what extent conscious dishonesty, rather than mere ineptitude, is in play here. But his description of the “criminal activity” NORFED and its associates supposedly engaged in leaves the impression that anyone who seeks the same objectives is likewise engaged in criminal conduct, albeit through other means.

Consider: What are the elements of this supposed crime? More specifically, what is the mens rea, or criminal intent? The allegation is not that von NotHaus and his associates sought to commit robbery or fraud, but rather that they sought to bring about the repeal of existing laws, and changes in present institutions, through peaceful, consensual means.

Where “undermining” the nation's financial system is concerned, nobody does it better than the Fed. The greenback's relentless decline is driving economically marginal Americans toward starvation, while buoying the spirits of foreign detractors. Yet we are supposed to believe that NORFED's largely unsuccessful efforts imperil whatever remains of our national prosperity.

Now that Chavez and Ahmadinejad have made explicit public mention of the innate worthlessness of the fiat dollar, it wouldn't surprise me to see the Regime make an attempt to describe NORFED, the Liberty Dollar (and perhaps even the Ron Paul presidential campaign) as “ideational co-conspirators” with our foreign enemies du jour. Implausible as such a charge would be, it would still make as much sense as the “crime” alleged in the FBI affidavit.

The “offense” here, in fact, is to find a creative and peaceful way to challenge the Regime's fraudulent financial system, which is upheld by lethal force. And it's not as if the Liberty Dollar crack-down illustrates that “the government hates competition,” in the words of a familiar punchline.

Nobody involved in the Liberty Dollar movement ever compelled anyone to accept the private currency, or deliberately defrauded people into accepting it. That's the government's racket. Nor did the movement circulate counterfeit US currency – that is, non-official counterfeit currency. As the FBI affidavit concedes, the Liberty Dollar was exactly what it was advertised – privately minted coins made out of precious metals, or warehouse receipts backed by the same.

Tyranny exists wherever government exercises the power to force people to live a lie. NORFED threatened to “undermine” the fraudulent and tyrannical system under which we live by providing a tangible example of a hard money system in operation.

Critics of the Liberty Dollar -- the kind of people who mistake sub-sophomoric snarkiness for substance -- sometimes describe it as the equivalent of Monopoly money, because it's not backed by the "full faith and credit" of the Regime. The inescapable truth, however, is that the dollar is an instrument of force and fraud, and since the Regime claims a monopoly on the same, it is the federal "dollar" that is best described as monopoly "money."

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Robber State Strikes (Updated)

There are occasions – and they are coming with increasing frequency – on which the Regime ruling us is laid bare to confront us in the stark majesty of its unalloyed evil.

For many of us, such incidents resonate with those awful hours on April 19, 1993, when the Regime's enforcers immolated scores of innocent people in a religious sanctuary at Mt. Carmel in Texas. We think also of such atrocities as the 78-day terror bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, a campaign meant to force an Orthodox Christian population (ruled, as most are, by a socialist government) to surrender territory they consider sacred to Islamo-Marxist terrorists. And of course, the ongoing criminal occupation of Iraq testifies powerfully of the true nature of the Regime as the world's most powerful and murderous criminal enterprise.

Yesterday, the essential nature of the Regime was on display in Evansville, Indiana when agents of the FBI and the Secret Service attacked (I refuse to employ the gelded euphemism “raided”) the office of the Liberty Dollar, a company that manufactures beautiful precious metal bullion coins.

In an act of undisguised armed robbery, the Feds stole the company's inventories of gold, silver, and platinum, as well as two tons of recently delivered Liberty Dollars – in gold, silver, and copper, depending on the face value – bearing the likeness of heroic Republican Presidential aspirant Ron Paul (whose campaign, incidentally, had nothing to do with that tribute).

The Secret Service was involved in this crime because the Regime considers the private manufacture of precious metal coins to be “counterfeiting” -- and their use in private, voluntary, fully-informed transactions to be a species of “fraud.”

Roughly a year ago, I published an account of a conversation with Becky Bailey of the US mint. Ms. Bailey had condemned the Liberty Dollar as a criminal enterprise, since what the Feds are pleased to call the “law” forbids the use of gold and silver as legal tender.

In a telephone interview, I asked Bailey to answer the following hypothetical question: If an individual went to a local diner and offered a Liberty Dollar in exchange for a meal, and the proprietor agreed to provide the service on those terms, “is that transaction a crime?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I'm not an attorney, but our legal team has looked this over carefully, and they're convinced that exchanging gold and silver medallions for goods or services as if they were real currency – including in barter – is a violation of 18 USC section 486.”

I pointed out that the U.S. Constitution authorizes only the use of those metals as legal tender. That being the case, I asked, “How can it be a federal crime to use the only legal tender recognized by the Constitution in private transactions?” Ms. Bailey bridled at that question, asking if I wanted “to debate the legal and constitutional issues”; I replied that I wasn't interested in a debate, but simply asking her to explain a clear factual contradiction. She maintained that the constitutional language regarding the use of gold and silver had been rendered moot when the federal government went off the gold standard.

Tyranny is the condition that prevails whenever the government claims the power to render the law “moot.”

Those assigned to peddle lies on behalf of the Regime regarding the Liberty Dollar robbery – FBI Agent Wendy Osborne of the Bureau's Indianapolis Office, and Suellen Pierce of the US Attorney's Office for the Western District of North Carolina – aren't answering questions. This, too, is to be expected: Spokes-drones for a totalitarian collective can't speak until they are programmed with the appropriate talking points.

The criminals who plundered Liberty Dollar of its precious assets likewise froze the company's bank accounts, and made off with the company's files and computers. This suggests to me that the Feds may go after the organization – and possibly its customers – as a “criminal conspiracy.”

This is a “conspiracy,” once again, to sell people precious metals at a price they agree to pay, for use in private barter transactions between fully informed, law-abiding citizens.

Last time the Regime stretched forth its hand to steal privately owned gold, it did so on the pretext of the national emergency created by the Great Depression.

What the Regime is attempting to do here, in the absence of a similar crisis, is to criminalize the use of real money at a time when the State-issued pseudo-currency is in full meltdown.

For a first-hand account of this atrocity from Liberty Dollar co-founder Bernard von NotHaus, via RonPaulRadio.com, go here.

Update

A warrant, as Lew Rockwell has pointed out, is a note the government writes to itself giving itself permission to steal your property. With that in mind, the search and seizure warrants used to provide a patina of "legality" to the Feds' Liberty Dollar heist make for interesting reading (they've been posted at the Liberty Dollar website).

In keeping with recent trends in Federal larceny, this was described as a "civil forfeiture." Which means that the property stolen by the burglars with badges has been found guilty, and will only be released if the victims can prove that it wasn't involved in a crime. This includes everybody who bought Ron Paul Liberty Dollars, or who conducted other business with the company that was interrupted in mid-transaction when the Regime sicced its Goon Squad on the company.


According to the seizure warrant, "American Liberty Dollar and/or Hawaii Dala currency and/or precious metals of gold, silver, copper, or platinum or other substance and United States currency are forfeitable to the United States ... because it is property involved in, or traceable to, money laundering, or because it is, or is traceable to, gross receipts and proceeds obtained, directly or indirectly, as a result of mail fraud...."


It isn't necessary to prove that anybody at Liberty Dollar, or any of their customers, committed an act of "money laundering" or "mail fraud." The allegations -- with were pulled out of the tax-fattened fundament of an individual identified as Special Agent Andrew F. Romagnuolo of the FBI -- are sufficient to "justify" the theft as a forfeiture.

Mr. Romagnuolo's office number is 828.253.1643. If you call him, please be impolite.

ANOTHER PAGE...

The Regime's imperial foreign policy is the primary reason that the fraudulent fiat currency called the “dollar” is in free-fall. A very plausible recent estimate places the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at $1.6 trillion by 2009. And those costs will grow exponentially should the war expand to encompass Iran, Syria, and other nations.

By any rational measurement, the Iraq war has been a moral, strategic, and economic disaster. Tomorrow night (Friday, November 16) I will have an opportunity to explain why.

I will be debating the proposition, “Resolved: The U.S. Has A Justified Military Presence In Iraq” with the estimable Bryan Fischer, Executive Director of the Idaho Values Alliance. Mr. Fischer will argue the affirmative, I will argue the negative, with Pastor Glenn Ferrell of the Sovereign Redeemer Presbyterian Church moderating.

The event will be held at the College of Idaho's Langroise Center Recital Hall, beginning at 7:00 PM. For those living in the Treasure Valley interested in attending, the address is: 2112 Cleveland Blvd in Caldwell. Parking will be available at the Jewett auditorium just off College Avenue. Seating is limited, and a video recording will be made of the event.

Completely Gratuitous Video Extra

In describing the fine art of scenery-chewing, we can employ an ascending scale of adjectives:

There is stentorian, then there's Shakespearean, and finally, there's Shatnerian.

The last refers to the ... oddly metered ... curiously ... punctuated ... styleofdeliverymadefamous by – the – one-and-on-ly WILLIAM SHATNER.

Love him, hate him, or merely study him out of anthropological curiosity, you must admit that it is difficult to ignore Mr. Shatner when he's in mid-oratory.

Candace Bergen, Shatner's multiple-award-winning* co-star on Boston Legal, once said that sharing a scene with him is a bit like trying to share a stage with animals and cute children: You're lucky to be noticed at all. (She meant that as a species of compliment, I think.)

Although he's absorbed plenty of abuse for his unfettered style, I consider Mr. Shatner to be an exceptionally fine actor when he's on (see, for example, his performance as Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, his role as military prosecutor N.P. Chipman in the made-for-TV drama The Andersonville Trial -- in both of which his co-star was Richard Basehart, oddly enough -- or the sheer lunatic genius and occasional poignancy he displays as Denny Crane in the above-mentioned Boston Legal).

It was as the intrepid Starship Captain James Tiberius Kirk that Mr. Shatner found his defining role, of course. In the video clip that follows, Cap'n Jimmy T is given the opportunity – by way of a plot so exquisitely ludicrous it would make Baron von Munchausen say, “Hey, dude, I ain't buyin' that” -- to extol the singular virtues of the United States Constitution.

Yes, the scene is hammy enough to fill a boxcar full of Hot Pockets. But you know what? It gets to me. And I think the Ron Paul Revolution could do worse than to make the phrase “The Holy Words will be obeyed” into one of its rallying cries.

____

*I should point out that Mr. Shatner himself is a multiple Emmy winner.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Anatomy of a Highway Patrol Heist

Last June, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals placed its imprimatur on a stunt pulled by the DEA and Oregon's Deschutes County Sheriff's Department: The police staged an elaborate phony carjacking in order to seize a car from a suspected drug courier. The driver and his companion were deposited in a nearby hotel while the police rummaged through the vehicle, eventually finding a substantial quantity of narcotics.

Oh, sure: The police could have obtained a warrant to search the vehicle based on evidence they had already obtained.* But this would have deprived them of the chance to indulge their adolescent desire to play “Punk the Perp.”

While a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court insisted that the search resulting from this elaborate deception didn't violate the Fourth Amendment, Judge Raymond C. Fisher did express some misgivings over the precedent being set. “I do not ... mean to endorse this police action as a model for future creative seizures,” caviled Fisher in his concurring opinion.

“Why not?” I asked in reply to Fisher's limp attempt at pre-emptive damage control. “If this operation [involving a staged carjacking] was utterly copasetic from a constitutional point of view, why shouldn't it serve as the template for countless others just like it? In any case, Ray baby, it's too late: You and your comrades have just green-lit countless similar projects to be carried out by the Feds and their local franchisees, who are in pre-production as we speak: Storylines are being broken, scripts are taking form, and auditions are underway, casting couches are being defiled....”

Actually, the puerile little deceptions I described were already being staged before last June's decision. One of them involved Ben Peech, a 10-year veteran of the Wyoming Highway Patrol and president of the State Highway Patrol Association.

"Good morning, Ma'am. I'm conducting a pretext stop in the hope of finding something in your vehicle worth confiscating."

Last April 7, Peech phoned in a bogus report to REDDI (Report Every Drunk Driver Immediately), Wyoming's DUI hotline, to create an excuse for him to be on patrol at 3 a.m. Wyoming State Troopers generally don't operate after midnight, and Peech was concerned that the subjects of a sting he had arranged with a “confidential informant” from the DEA might be scared away.

To maintain the pretense, Peech had his DEA colleague phone in a second phony DUI tip. He also urged the REDDI dispatcher to omit his name from the call log – a request the dispatcher refused to grant.

At 3 a.m., Peech stopped a Dodge pickup driven by Rusty Boschee of Elk Grove, California. At the time, the vehicle was traveling four miles an hour over the posted 75 mph limit on I-80. A search turned up about $3.3 million in cash and several cell phones. Boschee and his passenger denied that the money belonged to them, but emphasized the obvious point that its rightful owner would be upset if it didn't arrive.

Although no narcotics evidence was found, Peech arrested Boschee and his passenger and confiscated the money. The driver and his companion were later released, but the Feds announced their intention to “forfeit” -- that is, steal – the cash. (A recent federal court decision -- .pdf -- held that “possession of a large sum of money” by a motorist “is `strong evidence' of a connection to drug activity,” and thus grounds for summary forfeiture.)

So what happened here was this: Trooper Peech committed at least three crimes – making a false DUI report, suborning a second, and attempting to induce the dispatcher to submit a bogus call log – in order to create a pretext for a traffic stop. And to defend this fraud, Peech has invoked the same Ninth Circuit Court decision mentioned above.

This incident took place last April. On October 9, Peech was fired by the Wyoming Highway Patrol, which described him of “flagrant” misconduct. In the termination letter to Peech, Highway Patrol Administrator Col. Sam Powell wrote: “Your actions discredited you and the [Highway Patrol] and the REDDI program.”

For his part, Peech insists that the firing had nothing to do with misconduct; rather, it was an act of retaliation for his involvement in creating a local lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police. He points to the time lag separating his offense from his termination as evidence of bad faith.

“[T]here is no doubt in my mind at all that it was retaliatory,” complains Peech. “It is totally unheard of for something to come back from that far back.”

What – you mean there was an ulterior motive at work, and that the police officials who fired Peech acted on a pretext? But police never do that kind of thing.

Interestingly, both Peech and veteran police experts agree that fraud and deception are perfectly acceptable law enforcement tools. Peech's mistake, apparently, was using those tools on a freelance basis, rather than obtaining appropriate permission from his supervisor.

“People get arrested for making false reports,” observed Edward Mamet, a law enforcement consultant who spent 40 years with the NYPD. “ If he did that without supervisory approval, there's no excuse for that.” (Emphasis added)

Retired police chief Andrew J. Scott, who also works as a consultant, insists that Peech's mini-crime-spree displayed “initiative,” but faults the Trooper for “not passing this on to his supervisor and getting approval.”

As far as Peech is concerned, the entire affair is pointless. Everything he did must be appropriate, 'cause it's just what the cops do on TV.

I'm serious.

“The fact of the matter is, and everyone knows it from watching TV, the cops are allowed to use subterfuge and things like that to protect informants in an investigation,” Peech insists.

In the action movie unspooling in the very tiny theater of Ben Peech's mind, he's the tough but honest cop, a loose cannon who plays by his own rules.

Yeah, sure: He has to bend the law every now and then, but he stays true to his own moral compass.

Yeah, this is harsh -- but we're at war with crime, and sometimes corners just have to be cut.

Sometimes that means he gets cross-wise with the suits and the desk-bound supervisors who have forgotten what it's like out there: Nine times in the past ten years, Peech has been reprimanded for various infractions; he earned a written reprimand for firing his shotgun into the floorboards of his patrol car, and was briefly suspended on two other occasions for damaging the vehicle.

But that's just how TROOPER PEECH rolls, man. And you better hit your knees each night in abject gratitude that there are guys like him on the Thin Blue Line!

... or something like that.

So now that refugee from a direct-to-video action flick has been fired for failure to get official sanction for his acts of official fraud. Doesn't this mean that the money stolen from Boschee's truck should be returned?

Well... no.

“We're not going to stop pursuing the forfeiture action at this time,” sniffed John Powell, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney in Wyoming.

Which is to say: The Feds consider themselves entitled to keep that cash, despite the fact that the only documented crimes in this entire episode were those committed by the State Trooper who seized it.

[Thanks to the anonymous fact-checker on the comments thread for correcting my error regarding the location of Deschutes County: It is in Oregon, rather than in Washington, as I had mistakenly written.]

Good Cop News

Ramon Perez, an exemplary police officer who was fired by the Austin, Texas Police Department for refusing to use his Taser needlessly against a non-violent, elderly suspect, has been named "Civil Libertarian of the Year" by the Central Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The award recognizes Perez "for his courage, bravery and unwavering commitment to protect the Constitution and serve with integrity."


Officer Perez, a Christian lay minister of conservative theological and political views, was deemed to be morally unsuitable for police work because of his refusal to carry out a clearly illegal and unconstitutional order from a superior. The suspect in question was taken into custody without violence, and the use of a Taser in that situation would have violated the APD's explicit departmental policy.

A clinical psychologist working for the department, who examined Perez on a pretext (there's that word again!), insisted that he had an excessively "well-developed set of personal beliefs ... based primarily on his religious beliefs" that detracted from his ability to perform as expected -- which, in this specific case, meant that he would follow the orders of a superior, rather than the Constitution and the law.

Officer Perez informs me that the lawsuit he has filed against the department "is gaining momentum. We expect to go to Fedral Court Western District this June."


One Last Thing...


Just a few days ago I made this prediction:

"Write this down in ink: Ron Paul, who harbors no detectable rancor toward anyone of woman born and goes to exceptional lengths to treat everyone with respect, will be smeared as a `hater.' This is chiefly because of the genuine hatred – born out of fear – he inspires in many who have made their peace with the Power Elite. Their reasoning – if we can torture that word into applying here – would be this: `Obviously he's a hateful man, or else we wouldn't hate him so.'”

No, my middle initial doesn't stand for "Nostradamus"; it wasn't necessary to be some sort of seer to foretell what has since come to pass.

What is really interesting is to see how the larger prediction in that essay -- that Ron Paul's supporters would be traduced as an "America-hating" Fifth Column -- was fulfilled, and that the chief vessel of this libel is that flatigious ass-hat Glenn Beck, who denounces us (I'm hardly an undecided voter) as a "domestic enemy" that might be dealt with by the military.

______

*My point about a search warrant is offered with the tacit disclaimer – herewith made explicit – that all enforcement actions in the so-called “War on Drugs” are constitutionally indefensible, since the counter-narcotics enterprise itself is fundamentally illegitimate.

Dum spiro, pugno!