Animal Farm in Atlanta

(Photo used for illustrative purposes only.)













[Civilized peace among people requires] that each man shall do, towards every other, all that justice requires him to do: as, for example, that he shall pay his debts, that he shall return borrowed or stolen property to its owner, and that he shall make reparation for any injury he may have done to the person or property of another.


[Peace among human beings also requires] that each man shall abstain ... from committing theft, robbery, arson, murder, or any other crime against the person or property of another.


So long as these conditions are fulfilled, men are at peace.... But when either of these conditions is violated, men are at war. And they must necessarily remain at war until justice is re-established.


Lysander Spooner, Natural Law (1882)




A loud banging on the door pried Rob Rudnick from sleep's insistent embrace shortly before 7:00 the morning of March 10.


When he opened the door to the Carrollton, Georgia warehouse that serves as unofficial headquarters for Neal Horsley's gubernatorial campaign (and sleeping quarters for volunteers), "the first thing I saw was a SWAT shield and a bunch of machine guns pointing at me," Rudnick recalled to Pro Libertate.


Within minutes, Rudnick, Horsley, and campaign volunteer Esther O'Toole were lying handcuffed, face-down on the floor with machine guns pointed at their backs. Although Rudnick and Mrs. O'Toole were released, Horsley was dragged off to jail. Before the end of the day, he and Esther O'Tool'e husband Jonathan (who was arrested in the late afternoon) would be behind bars, charged with making "terroristic threats" against the life of "Sir" Elton John.


Neither Horsley nor O'Toole has ever met Elton John, or displayed any interest in trying to make his acquaintance. Neither has said or written a syllable indicating an intention to harm him in any way, and they haven't the means to do so even if that were their desire.


The flamboyant, superannuated British pop singer is immensely wealthy and constantly surrounded by a phalanx of security personnel. The little-known Horsley is a pugnacious and controversial Christian activist and provocateur (which is not to say that he's an agent provocateur) of severely limited resources.


Despite all of this, Horsley and O'Toole were targeted for a daybreak paramilitary raid conducted by what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called "members of the Atlanta police fugitive squad and U.S. Marshal's office." Rudnick expanded that description by telling Pro Libertate that he saw "a couple of guys wearing FBI SWAT gear" as well.


By day's end the two were charged with making a "terroristic threat" against John, as well as "criminal defamation" and using the Internet to communicate a death threat. As Rudnick said, "This was all about Neal's recent videos about Elton John."

Lochinvar he ain't: "Sir" Elton, whose title proves that, as is the case with Nobel Peace Prizes, they're just giving knighthoods away these days.

In a recent Parade magazine interview, "Sir Elton" was quoted describing Jesus of Nazareth as "a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man."



He subsequently amended that comment by claiming that this was how he chooses to see Jesus, and blaming Parade's editorial staff for engendering controversy by presenting his remarks poorly.



It's reasonable to surmise that John's meaning was understood by tens of millions of Christians who were offended by the characterization.


Few took greater offense than Horsley, who is preparing a stunt campaign for the Georgia Governor's office on a platform calling for Christians to secede from the United States. Horsley produced two videos for distribution via his YouTube channel.


The first video documented a protest Horsley and O'Toole conducted outside John's Atlanta condominium in which they held signs proclaiming "Elton John Must Die," the fine print of which was the reference "Hebrews 9:27": "... it is appointed to men once to die, but after this the judgment."


Horsley and O'Toole did not intend to kill John, nor were they soliciting the services of someone else to accomplish that criminal deed, but rather a recognition of a biological reality from which John is not immune, coupled with a warning, rooted in biblical teachings, about a judgment to which he will be liable.


Horsley claims that his intention is "remind Elton John that he has to die" -- that's a statement of a biological reality, not a threat of incipient violence -- and that his desire is not see Elton John suffer, but rather to repent.

***


***

If Horsley, who appears quite sincere in his beliefs, were acting out of hatred toward Elton John, calling him to repentance wouldn't make much sense: After all, if he hated the singer and was convinced he was going to hell, wouldn't Horsley simply get out of his way?


That being said, this must be said as well:


Reasonable people -- including those who (like myself) are committed Christians -- can consider this to be tasteless and counter-productive. It takes a considerable gift for creative dishonesty coupled with something akin to clinical paranoia to treat it as a threat of any kind, however.



Reginald Dwight (aka Elton John), pre-knighthood and pre-Hair Club for Men (or its British equivalent).



The second video posted by Horsley (which has apparently been removed from YouTube) is unambiguously tasteless and offensive in an unqualified sense. It is a palimpsest of the hideous video record of Daniel Pearl's execution by a clique of Islamist terrorists.


In Horsley's rendering, the face of the murdered American reporter is altered with the insertion of Elton John-style star-shaped eyeglass lenses.


The caption points out that in the Islamic religion, Jesus of Nazareth -- while not worshiped as Lord and Savior -- is revered as a prophet second in stature to Mohammed. Indeed, it is common for devout Muslims to pronounce a ritual benediction ("peace be upon him") when making reference to Jesus, just as they do when mentioning Mohammed.


Horsley's point, which is made allusively, is that Muslim militants of the same kind who were so theatrically aggrieved by a Danish newspaper cartoon of Mohammed might well take offense over Elton John's characterization of Jesus Christ.


For the past several decades, Horsley has cultivated a reputation for high-profile, confrontational activism, much of it focused on abortion. He helped organize (but reportedly had no official position in) the group that created the "Nuremberg Files" website, which published information about abortionists and their associates "in anticipation that one day we may be able to hold them on trial for their crimes against humanity."


A federal court ruled in 2002 that the information on that website constituted "true threats" against the abortionists profiled therein and awarded Planned Parenthood -- which is already choking on taxpayer subsidies -- a huge civil judgment.



Horsley's activism has led to many collisions with law enforcement officials both locally and across the country. His history with the police includes an early-1970s drug conviction that led to a prison term, during which he became familiar with Chuck Colson's prison ministry and converted to Christianity.


Although there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his pro-life beliefs (which included, to his credit, opposition to the Vietnam War long before he became concerned about abortion), many of Horsley's would-be allies are put off by what could be seen as an appetite for publicity and a juvenile penchant for vulgarity. The latter trait is perhaps best illustrated by his bizarre intimation that prior to becoming a Christian he engaged in bestiality.


That Horsley is an irritant to the local police is obvious (and, taken in and of itself, could be considered admirable). Rudnick told me that a few days prior to the raid, "we got a call from the Carrollton police asking Neal to go downtown and talk with them about the Elton John videos. He wasn't willing to go, and when they got insistent he said, `Well, you'll just have to arrest me.'"


That conversation illustrates quite convincingly that Horsley -- despite being a certifiable annoyance -- was not a threat of any kind. (It's worth considering, as well, that if Horsley were actually involved in terrorism of any sort, his bail would most likely have been set higher than $40,000.) Defying an invitation to talk to the police is not a criminal offense, nor does one commit a crime by daring the police to arrest him.


Clearly, somebody -- most likely employed by the federal government, given the admitted involvement of the Marshals Service and the reported involvement of the FBI -- is trying to make a point, and probably to create a despotic precedent. (In light of the fact that the abortion lobby decreed that March 10 would be commemorated as the "Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers," perhaps a functionary connected to that lobby ordered Horsley's arrest that morning as a celebration of sorts; stranger and more whimsical things have happened.)


The other charges against Horsley are just as facially absurd as the terrorism-related count. If, as any honest person would recognize, Horsley's protest falls within the legal category of "innocuous speech," then he can't be prosecuted for transmitting that speech over the internet.


Invoking Georgia's little-used and best-repealed "Criminal defamation" statute is a classic use of a "cover charge" by police to justify slapping the handcuffs on someone they consider obnoxious but whose behavior cannot honestly be described as criminal.


The relevant portion of that statute (section 6-11-40) declares: "A person commits the offense of criminal defamation when, without a privilege to do so and with intent to defame another, living or dead, he communicates false matter which tends to blacken the memory of one who is dead or which exposes one who is alive to hatred, contempt, or ridicule, and which tends to provoke a breach of the peace." (Emphases added.)


If Horsley's protest falls within that definition, Elton John's original statement should as well: His comments as published in Parade certainly have no basis in the extant records describing the individual known as Jesus of Nazareth -- whether one considers Him to be alive or dead, divine or merely a moral teacher.

Elton, who maintains his home in Atlanta with the man he calls his "husband," certainly knows enough to understand that characterizing Jesus as he did would inevitably "provoke a breach of the peace."


The provocation becomes even more acute in light of Elton's publicly expressed desire to abolish organized religion -- something that could only be accomplished through terroristic means.


Just as Horsley could be accused of using his rhetoric to foment violence against Elton John, "Sir" Elton's remarks about banning religion could be seen as enjoining anti-Christian violence from people with the means to imprison, kill, and otherwise persecute people who espouse that faith.


This being the case, why isn't Elton John also being investigated under the criminal defamation statute? John is at least as plausible a threat to Horsley as Horsley is to John -- which is to say that neither poses any material threat to the other. Both of them said things that can be regarded as hateful and offensive, but neither committed an offense against the person or property of the other -- and that is the threshold consideration when determining if an actual crime has taken place.


Yet one of them was thrown face-down to the floor with a gun barrel at his neck and thrown in jail because the subject of his intemperate -- but constitutionally protected -- speech is wealthy, politically well-connected, and a member of a specially protected class.



Be sure to get your daily dose of sedition each weeknight from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time on Pro Libertate Radio -- courtesy of the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Czars to Serfs: Pay Up and Shut Up

"A Peasant Leaving His Landlord on Yuri's Day," by Sergei V. Ivanov.



A wealth of unnecessary and petty [regulations] here engenders a whole army of clerks, each of whom carries out his task with a degree of pedantry and inflexibility, and a self-important air solely designed to add significance to the least significant employment. He refrains from speaking, but you can see him thinking, more or less: "Make way for me; I am a cog in the mighty machine of state."


-- Astolphe Louis Leonor, the Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
(1839)



“If I’m the bad guy to the average citizen … and their taxes have to go up to cover my raise, I’m very sorry about that, but I have to look out for myself and my membership," grunted Chris Mesley, president of the Albany, New York Police Officer's Union. "As the president of the `local,' I will not accept `zeroes' [no increase in salaries or benefits]. If that means ... ticking off some taxpayers, then so be it."


It would be difficult to find a more candid expression of the parasite class's predatory contempt for the productive than the words that departed Mesley's snout. The police union capo will occasionally remove that appendage from the public trough just long enough to spew demands for an ever-larger share of the wealth produced through the honest labor of others, or to justify some corrupt privilege he claims as a "cog in the mighty machine of state." In all of this he is entirely typical of the army of public employees pillaging what little remains of America's wealth.


A brave resident of Albany who identified himself as "Justin" pointed out in an admirably confrontational speech to that city's Common Council that the city's median annual household income in 2009 was about $33,000. In the same year, Mesley -- who was hired as a patrol officer in 1992 -- received a base salary of $70,289, while also scarfing down at least another $30,000 for serving as union president.


"Chris Mesley is making three times or more the median salary and is complaining that he might not get a raise," Justin observed. "The sense of entitlement of Chris Mesley and all those who think alike has led to the pilfering of state and city coffers. They are like leeches, sucking the taxpayers dry, and that's an insult to leeches. At least leeches know when to let go."


The implacability of Mesley's union is made vivid in the fact that its recently expired contract granted "retroactive raises" of four percent for both 2008 and 2009 -- years during which private sector employment declined and raises were scarce, at best, for those in the productive class.


Special exemption from parking tickets -- one of the myriad ways sheep are fleeced on behalf of the lupine law enforcement caste -- is another of the perquisites and emoluments demanded by Mesley and his comrades.

Unalloyed porcine arrogance: Chris Mesley, president of the Albany Police Officer's Union.

An investigative report compiled by Albany's City Common Council documented the existence of a secret "VIP list" maintained by Mesley's union containing the names of police officers and others who would be given "ghost tickets" -- citations they didn't have to pay -- when parked in ways that would result in fines or towing in cases involving mere Mundanes. Those on the list could be recognized by the presence of a union-created bull's-eye bumper decal.


Mesley insists that he is immune to a Common Council subpoena to testify regarding the "ghost ticket" scandal, and he quite predictably declined to offer testimony when the demand was softened to an invitation.


On the one occasion he deigned to cooperate in the inquiry, Mesley insisted that he wasn't obligated to answer questions dealing with his conduct as president of the local Police Union. Since his "official" duties didn't include traffic enforcement, Mesley simply refused to answer questions about his union's "ghost ticket" racket.


Were a common citizen to display similar non-cooperation, a bench warrant would likely result.


Several years ago, Mesley displayed an atypical investigative zeal as he and his police union comrades, seeking to identify the "mole" responsible for leaking a piece of corrupt police business to the press, illegally obtained information about a private citizen's e-mail account.


Robert W. Berry, a pastor from Boca Raton who until recently lived in Albany, had learned that Mesley's union had intervened with Chief James Turley to reduce the disciplinary suspension of an officer who had turned away a criminal suspect trying to turn himself in. That officer, who was occupied surfing the Web for porn or conducting some other important business, told the suspect to come back later.


Originally given a 30-day paid vacation by way of punishment, the officer -- thanks to Mesley's intervention -- saw that suspension reduced to a single week by Chief Turley.


When Berry learned of this -- most likely from one of the decent and conscientious Albany police officers he counted among his friends -- he fired off an e-mail to the local media. In contrast to the torpid reaction displayed toward the bank robber, the department -- led by Mesley's union -- focused with laser-like intensity on the task of identifying the "mole." After all, it simply wouldn't do for the tax-victim public to know how little service they were getting in exchange for the salaries paid to their purported protectors.


Through means they refused to disclose, and without either a warrant or a subpoena, Mesley and his colleagues were able to obtain Berry's confidential information.


Both Berry and Albany County District Attorney David Soares were infuriated by this Stasi-style violation of privacy. But this is simply the order of things as understood by Mesley and his porcine ilk: He belongs to a class the law doesn't restrain, and Mundanes such as Berry belong to a class the law doesn't protect.


While Mesley has distinguished himself through public displays of abrasive arrogance, his overdeveloped sense of entitlement and reflexive contempt for tax victims are typical of the mentality displayed by statist cogs found all across late imperial America. The machinery of government regimentation and redistribution continues to grow and consume an ever-greater share of our country's ever-depleting wealth.


Forbes magazine reports that the five wealthiest counties in the United States (in terms of per-capita income) can be found in orbit of the Imperial Capital City and Wall Street, which constitute the binary system around which revolve all of the institutions of our imperial system of corporate socialism.


Imagine, if you can stand to, a binary system composed of two omnivorous black holes devouring everything within their joint event horizon, and you'll have a pretty good understanding of how America's welfare-warfare economy operates.


America probably crossed the economic event horizon during the October Revolution of 2008, which saw Congress ratify the creation of a corporatist economic dictatorship within the Treasury Department.



Just as it's impossible for light to escape the gravity well of a black hole, it is impossible to penetrate to the inner workings of the engine of plunder created through the TARP legislation. However, just as we can learn about the conditions that create black holes by examining gamma-ray outbursts, the supernova of corruption that created the TARP singularity resulted in some revealing after-effects.


"To be honest with you, I really hope it blows up," exclaimed an employee of AIG, the worthless insurance and investment conglomerate that was bought with taxpayer money in September 2008. "I think the U.S. taxpayer deserves to lose a trillion dollars over this thing for the way they have behaved."


This outburst took place during a March 2009 conference call between Gerry Pasciucco, the official hired to unwind AIG's financial services portfolio, and employees in the conglomerate's offices in London, Paris, and Hong Kong.


As of May 2009, AIG's financial services sector consisted of "44,000 often complex, long-dated derivatives with a notional value of $2 trillion," according to the Newark Star-Ledger. The key to that description, of course, is the cute little modifier "notional," a word that serves as a three-syllable license to lie. Using exactly the same approach I could claim that my "notional" assets are valued somewhere in the high seven figures, irrespective of the dismal reality reflected in my actual bank balance.


Prior to September 2008, AIG was involved in "insuring" -- by way of credit default swaps -- Goldman Sachs' immensely lucrative and entirely corrupt traffic in sewer-grade mortgage-backed securities. After the bubble burst, AIG was left owing huge sums to its "counter-parties," including Goldman. The federal buyout of AIG was actually a payoff to the insolvent company's counter-parties, beginning with Goldman.


If the insurance company had gone bankrupt, it would have been required to make an equitable distribution of whatever assets it had (which could be rounded up to nothing) among its creditors; this meant that Goldman would have eaten a huge loss. Instead, thanks to the nationalization of the AIG under comrade Bush, 100 percent of Goldman's potential losses were subsidized by the taxpayers.


This represented an interesting update on Marx's famous formula: The Feds had the ability to extract wealth from the taxpayers, and Goldman had the need. AIG provided a convenient conduit for this act of redistribution, and its corporate cadres were just the right kind of public-spirited people to accept huge salaries and bonuses in exchange for rendering such a service.


Oddly enough, those compelled to surrender our wealth weren't terribly as enamored of this arrangement. Some of us loudly expressed that displeasure. According to a transcription of the March 2009 AIG conference call, which was published a few days ago in the Washington Post, AIG's financial services drones are mortified by the uncivilized attitudes and behavior of the firm's critics.



Corporate socialist: AIG financial services director Gerry Pasciucco is the tool second from the right wearing a sportcoat over a Che Guevera t-shirt.



The supposedly unconscionable behavior denounced by unnamed AIG functionary quoted above consisted of public outrage over $100 million in "retention bonuses" -- all of it coming out of the earnings of tax victims -- paid to the firm's employees.


It wasn't enough for the Regime to plunder what wealth remains in the hands of private households -- many of which were once middle class, and are now teetering on the precipice of absolute destitution -- on behalf of Wall Street kleptocrats. The necromancers at AIG who helped transmute bad debts into corporate profits apparently believe that the public should be grateful for the privilege of being expropriated, and that any complaints are acts of aberrant persecution.


One AIG staffer referred to critics of firm as "a bunch of immoral bigots." Another excoriated politicians who had condemned the subsidized bonuses as hypocrites who really ought to dispense with the pretense of public-spiritedness and revel unabashedly in the vulgar rewards of statist opportunism: "They only care about the next election, just like we only care about the next bonus. Well, none of them cares about the country, [just as] none of us cares about the institution. They really don't care, and I really don't care. And frankly, if a trillion dollars gets lost, fine."


AIG's behavior is typical of the new, federally supported Wall Street nomenklatura.


Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, who deserves a Pulitzer for his work but is more likely to be fed a Lubyanka Breakfast, points out that the nation's six largest banks -- all of them on the federal dole -- "set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007." At Goldman Sachs, the de facto shadow Treasury Department, average take-home per-employee compensation was $498,246, "a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years."


"In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street's eye-popping profits come from, exactly?" Taibbi writes. "A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these [emunctory apertures] not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?"



The answer, of course, is that rather than creating wealth, Wall Street's kleptocrats are carrying out exactly the same fraudulent schemes they pursued before the bubble collapsed; this time, however, they had "the full financial support of the U.S. government" -- which means, of course, official promises to extract as much wealth as possible until the economy is a dessicated, lifeless husk.


It's tempting to refer to our present condition as "serfdom," but that term is a poor fit. Serfs, after all, enjoyed greater economic mobility than we do.



For your daily dose of uninhibited anti-government invective, tune in to Pro Libertate Radio weeknights from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Grand Distractions

Eeek, a Nazi: Somehow people like Paul Mullet (yes, that is his actual name) don't leave me palsied with terror.



















"... it will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by fear of looking insufficiently progressive." -- Charles Peguy



If I were seeking to unload a piece real estate and received an offer from a qualified buyer who worked as an organizer for the Communist Party, I'd happily sell it to him. Of course, the repellent politics espoused by the purchaser are based in a denial of property rights. However, by engaging in lawful, mutually beneficial commerce with that individual, I would be making him a hypocrite in practical terms while doing nothing to compromise my own standards.




I would apply exactly the same reasoning to an organizer for a neo-Nazi organization that espouses a slightly modified version of the same socialist perspective promoted by the Communists. In this case, the purchasing party would make himself a two-fold hypocrite by violating both the racial and economic tenets of his political creed (to understand why the former is the case, consult the photograph found in the upper right-hand margin of this space).



There are many people whose ethical calculations differ from mine, and who thus wouldn't do business with someone who promotes one or both of those sibling totalitarian ideologies. There are limits to what I would tolerate, as well: Although I would sell or rent to someone who represents a despicable but powerless political cult, I wouldn't be so congenial to someone employed as a revenue officer for the IRS.



If I lived in a rural community subject to the destructive whims of a federal agency such as the Bureau of Land Management or the U.S. Forest Service, I would be similarly disinclined to do business with officials representing those bureaucracies. This was the approach used several years ago in Elko County during a land-use conflict between local landowners and elected officials, on the one hand, and the socialist nabobs in the U.S. Forest Service, on the other.



A righteous rural rebellion: Activists from the "Jarbidge Shovel Brigade" (left) and below) celebrate Independence Day, 2000 by clearing a local road that had been blocked by agents of the U.S. Forest Service.



In response to efforts by the USFS to lock up local lands, the Elko County Commission urged local residents "to let the Forest Service know what you think about this by not cooperating with them. Don't sell goods or services to them until they come to their senses."


Those who followed that course of action made a calculated trade-off: They were willing to forego potential profit in exchange for making a political statement of what they considered to be greater value. This freed up economic opportunities for others in Elko.


Customers employed by the USFS were able to buy whatever they needed. This didn't stop Gloria Flora, the regional USFS commissarina, from whining about the "discrimination" supposedly suffered at the hands of local merchants, but all her petty complaints accomplished was to indicate that the message being sent by the proposed boycott had been loudly and clearly received.


(Full disclosure: Grant Gerber, one of the ringleaders of the "Jarbidge Shovel Brigade" that organized local efforts to combat the federal occupiers, is related to me by marriage.)


Doing business with proponents of unsavory political views doesn't help to entrench the power of the government that is presently confiscating our wealth, threatening what liberties we still exercise, and stealing the future from the children we love. Unlike business dealings with agents of the official plunderbund, taking money from a radical socialist in a legitimate commercial transaction doesn't involve the receipt of stolen property.


I earnestly wish someone had explained all of this to the residents of John Day, Oregon last week when hundreds of people from that lovely eastern Oregon town suffered a collective loss of bladder control over the prospect that a handful of neo-Nazis might purchase property in Grant County.


John Day and surrounding Grant County, Oregon (cumulative population circa 8,000) have endured tremendous material suffering at the hands of the federal eco-bureaucracy, which -- working in league with private sector eco-radicals -- has used "endangered species" designations to ravage the local timber and ranching industries.


Grant County has suffered tremendously, in material terms, from the actions of the Feds. It has suffered nothing at all from the barely discernible activities of neo-Nazis. Yet a visit by a handful of Nazi-worshiping nitwits caused the community to tie itself in knots. I can't help but suspect that this is a product of the weakness Charles Peguy described as a "fear of looking insufficiently progressive" -- which in this case means a frantic concern that the mere presence of a politically unsavory person taints an entire community.


"That's the last thing our reputation needs," moaned John Day Mayor Bob Quinton after he learned of the visit by self-described Aryan Nations representatives. As Mayor of an economically depressed town still under siege by the Feds and their eco-radical cohorts, Quinton would be wise to worry about more tangible concerns.


The Aryan Nations delegation was headed by Paul R. Mullet -- yes, that is his real name -- a neo-Nazi from a northern Idaho town called Athol, which probably sounds a lot like an epithet frequently heard by him.


For reasons only he can explain, Mullet wants to be recognized as the leader of a neo-Nazi cult that disintegrated in 2004 after its leader, the "Reverend" Richard Butler, went to meet his Maker (and, presumably, to upbraid Him for ruining the world by populating it with so many "impure" specimens of humanity). Mullet's self-appointment as leader of Butler's little sect is disputed by some of the late "Reverend"'s disciples.


On February 17, Mullet -- in "uniform," no less -- visited John Day in the company of three others of his persuasion. Their stated intention was to purchase property for what they described as a "national compound" to house and train Aryan Nations cadres and be the center of an international neo-Nazi jamboree in 2011.


It's a bit strange that these fellows chose the term "compound" to describe that facility, given that the word is generally applied by the government and its media servitors to buildings that house people the government intends to exterminate. This is just one of several oddities about Mullet's visit.


Mullet's peculiar tactlessness wasn't limited to gadding about in his "uniform." After checking in to a local motel, Mullet and his bunkmates made a point of displaying a swastika flag. Where Butler made a point of being insular and secretive in his official dealings, Mullet and his crew were determined to make themselves conspicuous.



One of the first visits Mullet and his comrades paid in John Day was to the office of the Blue Mountain Eagle, Grant County's weekly newspaper.



"They just came by the office and said, `We're here in town and we just want to let you know what's going on," commented Scotta Callister, the paper's editor, to the Spokane Spokesman-Review. In her own report Callister quoted Mullet as claiming that his group would be "a good fit with the values here" -- a line that was perfectly calibrated to trigger any newspaper reporter's crusading reflex.


Callister, who relocated to John Day from hyper-liberal Portland not terribly long ago, behaved in perfectly predictable fashion. Acting as the self-appointed "watchdog" of her adopted community -- she quickly organized a movement to oppose Mullet and his group.



Within hours of Mullet's visit, Callister was in touch with Tony Stewart and Norm Gissel, a pair of "human rights" activists from northern Idaho who agreed to visit John Day to help "mobilize the community" against the supposed Aryan Nations threat.


No, it's not Bull from "Night Court" -- it's Fuhrer manque Paul Mullet decked out in his "uniform."


Two "community meetings" were quickly scheduled, along with various public protests in which local residents -- none of whom had ever displayed a tremor of sympathy for white supremacists views -- could loudly reassure each other about the depth of their tolerance and the purity of their political opinions.



On the day that the PC pep rally was underway in Grant County, the federal eco-bureaucracy was expected to make an announcement pregnant with awful possibilities for that section of Oregon, as well as much of the western United States.


February 26 was the announced deadline for a decision regarding the status of the Sage Grouse, a type of prairie chicken that subsists on sagebrush. That decision, which was delayed because of the unexpected death of a federal bureaucrat, could kill off what remains of central Oregon's ranching industry, which requires cattle grazing on what adherents of the "biocentric" worldview would describe as the sage grouse's habitat. It could also shut down coal mining and oil and gas development in Wyoming, which would have severe consequences for energy consumers -- a group that includes all of us, more or less.



The sage grouse: A bigger threat to rural Oregon than the Aryan Nations.



A federal decree designating the sage grouse as "endangered" would have potentially lethal consequences for property rights and economic development in eleven states.



But for the untimely demise US Fish and Wildlife Service Director Sam Hamilton, that decision would have been handed down last Friday (February 26), while residents of John Day, Oregon -- an economically crippled community that stands to lose even more because of such a designation -- was being whipped into a froth of sterile sanctimony by two imported "human rights" hucksters over the non-existent threat posed by Paul Mullet and his buddies.



Mullet purports to be negotiating to buy property in John Day, but nobody in Grant County will confirm that claim. Perhaps the would-be Aryan Nations leader went to John Day fishing for a pretext to file a discrimination lawsuit. Maybe he was looking to elevate his profile within his tiny, malodorous sect.


Color me cynical, but I can't resist the suspicion that Mullet was put up to this stunt by somebody. If it weren't for the material support it receives from the federal government, the white supremacist movement wouldn't exist. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that somebody attached to a three-letter agency gave Mullet a handful of cash and told him to cut up trouble in Grant County. In any case, Mullet's visit certainly provided a timely distraction.


Grant County, Oregon could survive the presence of a handful of wretched but powerless neo-Nazi goons in its midst. It isn't likely to survive the ongoing war against its economy being waged by a pitilessly aggressive federal eco-bureaucracy.


So, naturally, on a day when the latter was scheduled to announce its latest onslaught, John Day was up in arms over the supposed threat posed by the former.


This episode depicts, in microcosm, one of the ways Americans are being socialized into accepting their servitude. Sure, we're dispossessed, saddled with debts we didn't contract and cannot discharge, confront the prospect of a blighted economic future for us and our foreseeable posterity -- but hey, at least we display the attitudes demanded of us by our self-appointed moral tutors.




Be sure to get your daily dose of unfiltered anti-government extremism each weeknight (6:00-7:00 Mountain Time) on Pro Libertate Radio, courtesy of the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Sheep-Shearing Season on the Revenue Ranch

During the most recent Federal Reserve-engineered economic bubble, state and local governments made extravagant promises to their tax-feeder constituencies regarding pensions and other benefits. Now that the bubble has burst, sales and property taxes -- once a mighty, roaring river of revenue -- have been reduced to a thin, pathetic trickle.


This comes at a time when, as the New York Times reports, there is "a $1 trillion gap between what all 50 states have promised their workers [sic -- a more accurate description is "employees"] and what they have set aside."


As the economic crisis deepens, how will state and municipal governments continue to provide for their most cherished constituency -- those who live by plundering the productive?


Wendy McElroy highlights one approach being pioneered by the town of Tracey, California: The city will now impose a surcharge on emergency services that have already been paid for through taxes. Residents of that city will be charged $300 for the fire department to respond to a medical emergency; non-residents will be billed $400 for the same service. There is the option of paying an annual $48 fee for "premium" 911 service.


Note carefully that this is not privatization. Taxes will still be extracted, but tax victims will now have the privilege of paying twice for the same services. If you're a Tracey resident and see someone having a heart attack, McElroy wryly comments, "you should quickly set a trash bin on fire. Otherwise, by calling for help, your monthly budget may not stretch to include mortgage or food." Tracey's political class simpers that the city government is running a $9 million budget deficit. Interestingly, that is exactly the amount spent each year on employee pensions.



Rather than renegotiating those benefits, the city government is putting the screws to economically burdened tax victims, and doing so in a way that is going to cost the lives of some of them. "Forget that phone bills already include a charge to cover 911," continues McElroy. "Forget that property taxes already assist with those costs. The politicos don't care. They want your money. And they will let people die -- many of them elderly poor -- rather than deliver services for which they have already been paid."


In other jurisdictions, the wealth-devouring class is resorting to other potentially lethal revenue enhancement strategies. Before examining the specifics, two principles should be kept in mind.


First, government -- unlike private entities that offer goods or services in exchange for revenue -- engages in pure consumption. As a result, all sources of government revenue involve destruction of wealth, rather than mutually beneficial commerce that enhances both parties.


Second, everything government does to obtain revenue contains an implicit death threat. Anyone who resists or refuses the demand for revenue with sufficient tenacity will find himself on the receiving end of an explicit threat made by an armed stranger in a government-issued costume.

A gathering of statist shearers: Maryland State Police and personnel from the St. Mary's County assemble before carrying out "Operation Most Wanted Weekend," a 2008 exercise in "taxation by citation."

Those principles provide the proper context to examine the tactics employed by various municipal and state governments to conduct what former Sheriff Richard Mack perceptively describes as "taxation through citation."



To put the matter bluntly, police -- the self-described "Sheepdogs" -- aren't here to protect the flock, but rather to make sure that we're securely penned in when it's sheep-shearing season.



During the penultimate weekend of February, police in Minneapolis-St. Paul Minnesota conducted an elaborate and lucrative sting to enforce the state's primary seat belt law.


Officers disguised as homeless people were dispatched to harass drivers at a busy intersection: The "homeless" people -- most likely in violation of traffic ordinances, certainly in violation of the 4th Amendment and Minnesota's state equivalent -- would peer into cars and then radio ahead to their cohorts in officially sanctioned crime, who would hand each "offender" an extortion note (more commonly called a "traffic ticket").


Dave Kvam, the deputy police chief of Maplewood (a suburb of St. Paul), insists that the multi-departmental racket was a justifiable exercise. After all, he told local reporter Ruben Rosario, "police have received numerous complaints of panhandling, and he believes the seat-belt law is a good one and should be enforced" -- by, among other things, having police violate ordinances against panhandling. That parallel is a bit unfair: Although panhandlers may be obnoxious, even the most tenacious of them couldn't get away with demanding money at gunpoint, as Kvam's fellow street criminals did during the seat-belt ambush.


Each victim would typically be mulcted $25 for declining to wear seat belts, coupled with a $75 "petty misdemeanor surcharge fee" -- which is essentially a tax inflicted on people for refusing to obey a spurious enactment the tax-absorbing class calls a "law" -- plus an additional $8 kickback to the state crime bosses in St. Paul (who had already been given a $3.5 million federal bribe to enact the primary seat-belt "law" in the first place). At least 122 citations were handed out in a space of three and a half hours.


As Rosario points out, the homeless ruse has been used not only in Minnesota but also "in Houston and a few other jurisdictions." (As we will discuss anon, Houston is also the scene of another creative effort to harvest revenue from the plebes.) As the economy sickens and street people become a more visible presence, it's quite likely their numbers will frequently include predatory, revenue-hungry police.


The tax-extracting class afflicting Texas will celebrate the beginning of March with the fourth annual "Warrant Roundup," a yearly event in which police fan out to shakedown or imprison anyone with unpaid citations of any kind. This includes not only traffic tickets, but also fines for violating any of the myriad morally unsupportable but lucrative provisions in state and municipal building, planning, zoning, and safety codes.

*** ***

The armed revenue farmers presented in this film clip were on their best behavior, of course. They weren't shown banging on the door of some underpaid, overburdened private citizen at or before daybreak, demanding money and dragging away in handcuffs those who couldn't pay. They weren't shown barging into classrooms or workplaces to present the same demands and inflict public humiliation on those not capable of complying with them.


All of this does occur during warrant roundups, however -- a fact prominently mentioned in official pronouncements, if played down, for propaganda purposes, by government-aligned stenographers in the local media.



At the risk of culpable redundancy, I make the point once again: All of this is done for the purpose of collecting revenue on behalf of the political class, not to serve or protect the productive public. This is made quite clear by the opening lines of a Houston Chronicle account of a "warrant roundup" conducted last August: "Nearly 2 million warrants worth more than $340 million are outstanding in the Houston area, and in most cases they're not for hard-core criminals. They're for average citizens who haven't settled minor traffic and ordinance citations."


Revenue farmer in the rear-view: No good can come from this.



Of the eight people listed as "Houston's Most Wanted" during the round-up -- people who had at least 100 outstanding warrants -- four were cited for the apparently grievous offense of “failure to securely attach a tax permit to a coin-operated machine.” Other grievous offenses committed by that band of shameless rogues include failure “to conspicuously post at every entrance a sign stating smoking is prohibited,” and “having no hand-washing sign in a bathroom used by employees.”


How can Houstonians sleep peacefully in their beds knowing that such marauders are on the loose? As Barney Fife might exclaim: "It's a regular reign of terror!"

According to the Chronicle, in 2008 the Houston Police Department -- in tacit recognition of the fact that its primary function is to plunder the populace rather than to protect it -- “purchased automated license plate readers that read up to 60 vehicle license plates per minute." This allows the police to identify those with outstanding warrants, including the growing number of people who “have to choose between paying their grocery bill or their tickets.”

What a shameful lack of civic consciousness! How dare such people put food on their tables when there are tax-feeders pining for revenue? And coughing up the money is so much more convenient now that police “have the ability to run credit card payments so people can settle their outstanding warrants on the spot.”

For those who cannot pay off the parasite class and its armed enforcers, debtors’ prison awaits: As the Texas Court of Appeals recently observed, Class C misdemeanors “are still crimes, and … the person charged can be arrested on warrant like any ordinary criminal, forced to travel a long distance to attend the court, [and be] remanded in custody and imprisoned in default of payment of the fine.”

The only things that government makes -- as I've said before -- is criminals out of innocent people, and corpses out of living human beings. A Government's lethality increases the more energetically it criminalizes innocuous behavior.

In light of that relationship, it's reasonable to suspect that the ruling class in the Lone Star State appears determined to precipitate a bloodbath: The Texas Public Policy Foundation points out that 779 Texas statutes identify “misdemeanors,” but “only 64 of those instances are in the Penal Code or Code of Criminal Procedure.”

In the once-free Lone Star State, concludes the Texas Public Policy Foundation, "the criminal law is not just for criminals anymore. The same is true of imprisonment: Half of all Texans behind bars were incarcerated for nonviolent offenses.

This trend is not confined to Texas. The state and municipal governments that disfigure our country like pustules on the face of a smallpox victim are relentless in devising new measures intended to justify the extraction of wealth at gunpoint. This aggression will only increase as the depression deepens.

At some point, those presuming to rule us won't be satisfied merely to fleece their increasingly bedraggled flock. That's when the options for the sheep will be clarified into a stark and unmistakable choice between revolt and slaughter.

Be sure to tune in to Pro Libertate Radio for your daily dose of sedition -- weeknights from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Tyrants, Torturers, and Taxmen: Pillars of "Civilization"

Not a scene from a movie: Stormtroopers assault a legitimate, lawful business in Las Vegas at the behest of the criminal terror syndicate called the Internal Revenue Service.













Maxwell Smart (referring to various implements of torture): Are you sure KAOS has all these devices?

CONTROL scientist Carlson: Oh, yes -- it's standard equipment for terrorist organizations.

Max: Well, where did you get these?

Carlson: From the Bureau of Internal Revenue.




"More tax is collected by fear and intimidation than by the law. People are afraid of the IRS."


Given its source -- former IRS District Chief David Patnoe -- that indictment of the Regime's most notorious secret police organ could be considered a confession. What he describes can only be called state terrorism.


The IRS is an agency that uses the threat of lethal violence to terrorize people into surrendering their legitimately earned wealth. In their unguarded moments, officials of that dreaded terror syndicate admit that they are at war with the public they supposedly serve.


"The language of war and the culture of conflict are the only means to prepare us for what is expected of us," recalled former IRS revenue officer Richard Yancey in his invaluable memoir Confessions of a Tax Collector. "How else could they [the commissars whom Yancey and his fellow cadres in the agency] demand what was expected of us? You can't take [the] life savings [of income tax victims], their car, their paycheck, the roof over their head and the heads of their children, without dehumanizing them, without casting yourself in a role that by necessity makes them the enemy."



One of Yancey's supervisors considered taxpayers to be, at best, fodder for the firing squad. That official, Yancey recalls, ended a profanity-infused tirade by describing taxpayers unable to surrender every dime demanded by agents of federal extortion as "Deadbeats ... if it were up to me, I'd line 'em all up against a wall and shoot them."



Yancey's supervisor obviously shared the late Joseph Stack's view that "violence is the only answer" -- whether that violence is implicit or overt.


Perhaps that official will receive one of the sixty Remington Model 870 pump-action shotguns ordered by the Treasury Department for the IRS's Criminal Investigation Division (in this case, the name refers to investigations conducted by, rather than of, criminals).



Interestingly, each of those shotguns has a barrel fourteen inches long, much shorter than the "illegally" modified shotguns sold by Randy Weaver to an undercover ATF agent who carefully entrapped Weaver in the hope of forcing him to become an informant for that detestable outfit.



When Weaver -- displaying admirable character -- refused to become a stukach, the same Regime that entrapped him laid siege to his family, murdering his wife and only son. Weaver had never had any trouble with the "law" prior to his encounter with a street-level thug employed by the ATF -- an agency that could be considered the clumsier, more overtly thuggish sibling of the IRS. Despite the fact that he had done no harm to anybody, Randy Weaver and his family like the "deadbeats" denigrated by Yancey's IRS supervisor, were seen as suitable targets for extermination.


The term "deadbeats," of course, is properly applied to people who refuse to carry out legitimate contractual obligations by making timely payments. Since nobody has the moral right to claim the property of another through force, there is nothing legitimate about the supposed "obligations" the IRS enforces through terrorism.


Those who cannot or will not pay what the IRS demands are not deadbeats in any sense. They are "criminals" in exactly the same sense that the term could be applied to escaped slaves in the antebellum South, or those who abetted their escape in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act.


Those who refuse to pay taxes are making a prudential calculation with which I do not agree, but one that neither harms nor threatens me in any way. The same cannot be said of the means used by the IRS to enforce the spurious enactments its functionaries call the "law" -- a usage that illustrates that not even the language is safe from the violence employed by that abhorrent agency.



The outpouring of statist sanctimony following Joseph Stack's despairing murder-suicide attack against the IRS was predictable -- and as malodorous -- as the consequences of drinking untreated water in Mexico. The effects of that onslaught are most unpleasant in the immediate vicinity of the main emunctory orifice, which in the present case is the fraudulent outfit called the Southern Poverty Law Center.



"This morning's attack by Joseph Andrew Stack against an IRS building in Austin, Tex., is a reminder again of how extreme hatred of government can morph into violence," oozed SPLC commissarina Heidi Berich.



Neither she nor anyone else at the SPLC deigned to prescribe the proper attitude toward a government that can ruin a man's career and financial prospects through a small change in the vast and all-but-inscrutable tax code. Nor has the SPLC or other self-anointed arbiters of acceptable political attitudes evinced concern over the hatred toward tax victims that can be found suppurating from the IRS, or the violence that frequently results from it.


In 1997 congressional testimony, Houston IRS agent Jennifer Long explained that the agency teaches its agents to use "tactics -- which appear nowhere in the IRS manual ... to extract unfairly assessed taxes from taxpayers, literally ruining families, lives, and businesses -- all unnecessarily and sometimes illegally."


"The IRS will often pursue a taxpayer who is viewed to be vulnerable," testified Long. "To the IRS, vulnerability can be based on a perception that the taxpayer has limited formal education, has suffered a personal tragedy, is having a financial crisis, or may not necessarily have a solid grasp of their legal rights. Please understand, many agents are encouraged by management to pursue tax assessments that have no basis in tax law from individuals who simply can't fight back. However, it that taxpayer does object or complain, every effort will be made by the IRS to run up their tax assessment, despite their financial resources and force them to capitulate to IRS demands."


In many cases, Long continued, "IRS Management can determine that a particular taxpayer is simply someone `to get.'... Management will go about fabricating evidence against that taxpayer to demonstrate that he, or she, owes [sic] more taxes than was originally claimed."


"In certain instances, the IRS Management has even employed its authority [sic -- the IRS exercises power, not authority] to intimidate the actual taxpayers into fabricating evidence against its own IRS employees," Long disclosed. This is done to retaliate against any IRS agent who objects to the agency's illegal and immoral tactics. Sometimes the threats are mingled with offers of reduced or vacated tax judgments or even cash awards to those willing to perjure themselves.


Those disclosures, remember, were made by an active duty employee of the IRS. To her considerable credit, Long eschewed the long-established practice of other defectors from crime syndicates by declining to concealing her identity. Not surprisingly, Long's genuinely patriotic act of public truth-telling provoked severe and undisguised retaliation from the agency's ruling oligarchy.



A year prior to Long's testimony, a videotaped training lecture by an IRS agent for the Arkansas-Oklahoma district was leaked to the public. In that record (described and documented in James Bovard's 2000 book Feeling your Pain) the instructor is seen catechizing the trainees about the supposed virtues of arrogant, sadistic cruelty:



"Make them cry. We don't give points around here for being good scouts. The word is `enforced.' If that's not tattooed on your forehead, or somewhere else, then you need to get it. Enforcement. Seizure and sales. That's our mind-set.... You're not out there to take any prisoners. Prisoners are like an installment agreement. They [prisoners] have to be fed and clothed and housed. All that stuff. They're expensive. We're not here to do that. If you've got an assessment, enforce collection until they come to their knees."



The SPLC and its allies, who play to prurient interests by diligently documenting and publicizing vituperative utterances by repulsive but obscure and powerless Klansmen and neo-Nazis, have never bestirred themselves to object to violent rhetoric of this kind issuing from the tax-devouring pie-hole of someone who actually carries out such terroristic threats against helpless people. (It's worth remembering that many of those professional racists are federal assets paid with funds extorted from the taxpayers by the IRS.)



In his memoir, Yancey recalls a similar training session in which he and other future revenue agents were told by the instructor that the IRS had no use for "those who anguished over each closure, as if their decisions meant life or death for the taxpayer."



One trainee, in whom the light of human decency had yet to be extinguished, objected that the decision to confiscate a tax victim's money and property very often are matters of life and death. Oh, pish, retorted the supervisor: The IRS's mission has nothing at all to do with "doing the right thing for the taxpayer"; your mission is that of "protecting the government's interest."



"But what if the government's interest is wrong?" persisted the trainee.



"Our interest is never wrong or right," rejoined the supervisor in a reply worthy of his kindred spirits in the service of other totalitarian enforcement organs. "It just is."



From that perspective, the State -- like Jehovah Himself -- is a self-existing, morally autonomous entity, and its consecrated agents are likewise above accountability to any power under heaven.



Former IRS Revenue Officer David Patnoe offers a parallel account to that of Yancey. In his congressional testimony, Patnoe -- who became a representative of tax victims before the IRS's Collection Division in California -- described, in detail, the "outright illegal and highly behavior of IRS officials he encountered in his new profession.


In one case, an IRS functionary placed an illegal levy on $21,000 on an account belonging to one of his customers, a small businessman who owed no taxes but paid $7,000 in what can only be described as ransom in the hope of appeasing the IRS.


"I informed the Revenue Officer that ... her actions were not just abusive, but blatantly illegal," Patnoe recalled. "The Revenue Officer responded with one word: `AND?'"


That single, contemptuous syllable -- like so many other lawless actions undertaken by IRS functionaries -- offers an echo of Vladimir Lenin's 1920 definition of "scientific dictatorship": "Power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules." (Emphasis added.)


In the days that have passed since Joseph Stack made the tragic and unsupportable decision to end his life in an act of aggressive violence (taking the life of another man, a father and grandfather, in the process), the organs of approved opinion have barraged the public with potted platitudes denouncing Stack's lawless behavior.


During that same period, the Regime served by the IRS killed at least dozens -- more likely scores, or even hundreds -- of innocent people in an illegal war of aggression against a distant, impoverished land.


The branch of the central government wittily called the department of "Justice" announced that its lengthy investigation of the Bush Regime's torture policies would result in no criminal, civil, or professional penalties against the apparatchiks who had devised "legal" rationales for those crimes.


The official report of that investigation revealed that one of the architects of the torture state, John C. Yoo, was committed to the principle that it is a suitable and proper use of presidential "authority" to order the wanton slaughter of civilians, if mass murder comports with his "tactical" judgment.


All of this provided the coda to a week that began -- as if by way of depraved overture -- with former Vice President Dick Cheney smugly confessing to the crime of abetting torture during his reign.


Yet we are ordered to believe, or at least pretend to believe, that all of this was eclipsed by Joseph Stack's self-destructive act of criminal violence.


The unduly revered Oliver Wendell Holmes, a belligerent statist (albeit one more akin to Maistre and Mussolini, rather than Marx and Lenin), memorably described taxes as the price we're compelled to pay for "civilization."


After all, absent the key confiscatory role played by the tax collector, how could torturers and other agents of state-sanctified violence perform their vital civilizing functions?

Civilization is built on the foundation of peaceful cooperation, rather than official coercion. It won't be restored through cathartic but morally unsound and strategically counter-productive acts of retaliatory aggressive violence.



The least we can do -- perhaps all we can do -- is exercise the liberty to call things by their proper names (e.g., "taxpayers" are more properly called "tax victims"; one doesn't "owe" taxes, but has them "extorted" from him), and use whatever peaceful means are at our disposal to cultivate contemptuous disrespect for anyone employed by the Regime's apparatus of wealth confiscation.


Each gesture of this sort, taken individually, seems as evanescent as a snowflake. But an avalanche begins as nothing more than a particularly large gathering of individual snowflakes that somehow found their way to the high ground.

Be sure to tune in each weeknight (6:00-7:00 Mountain Time) for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!