Category: Federalization

Destroying Democracy to Retain the Presidency

The Trump Campaign is employing three approaches to prevent Joe Biden’s ascendancy to President of the United States. The Trump Campaign takes the approach that the election is illegitimate as a result of the popular vote in sovereign states and by the state electoral college.

Approach # 1 is to challenge all aberrations at the local level and imply there is a conspiracy to steal the election at the state level. IF there is sufficient doubt about the integrity of the election process, the Trump Campaign seeks to have state legislators choose electors to vote for the federal election.

Approach #2 is to challenge any/all changes in the election rules that were implemented due to COVID or to the use of large mail-in voting. This is to restrict the number of ballots to be counted and is considered to be voter suppression.

Approach #3 is to use unprecedented challenges at the federal level to throw the election to the Supreme Court. The fewer the people to influence, the greater the opportunity to win one’s argument.

It is dishonorable to destroy the integrity of the American election process to keep Donald Trump as President.

I predict we will see multiple Republican states take measures to vote by legislature when the election integrity is challenged. I also suspect that the federal government will challenge the Constitution and try to assert control over federal elections instead of allowing the states to control the election.

There are two more months for the Trump Campaign to invoke measures that break the backbone of American Democracy. If they are successful, be prepared for oligarchs to rule America and your only value as a human being is to support the oligarchs.

Make my day, Mr. President

Please do, Mr. President. Please send federal troops into Seattle with congressional Republican support. Our state governments need a reminder that the Federal government has too much power and should be trimmed back.

You state governors and state citizens could use a lesson that your federal representatives are too independent of your state’s authority.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-says-hes-planning-crackdown-on-seattle-protesters/ar-BB15w7pH?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=mailsignout

Removing local control over the siting of cell towers

Goodbye local control over the siting of cell towers in Wisconsin.State statute 66.04040 removes all vestiges of town or municipality control unless the political unit of government has zoning authority. This removes almost all towns and some villages from local control over the siting of cell towers. It vests some authority to the county but limits that authority severely.

Ok, so why is this happening? Why is the Wisconsin state legislature removing local control over so many items?

#1. The frac sand industry took a shellacking when the travails of the Town of Cooks Valley with the frac sand industry became public knowledge. Using blogs and the Wisconsin Town’s Association as megaphones, the word quickly spread to town officials that if you want to control your destiny, you better adopt ordinances to control the industry before it comes to your town. Numerous towns enacted protective ordinances modeled after Cooks Valley’s to ensure they did not lose air, water, or lifestyle quality in their towns. The frac sand industry sought to fight the issue in court and the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled with the towns and against the industry.

#2 It is so much harder to get the Supreme Court to invalidate laws than anything else so crafty industry professionals began lobbying legislators  to enact legislation that removed town authority and placed authority in state laws. When state laws pre-empt local towns from taking any direct action against the industry companies, it forces towns to sue the state government if towns want any power at all. The advantage to industry is that state authority and legislators are a defense against town action. Good gig if you can get it. And they did.

#3 People want to be let alone but today’s industries terraform the surroundings into inhospitable places to live. From high capacity wells that drop the local water table to farmland run-off that causes a loss of aquatic plants and an increase in algae blooms, local people are tired of industries creating problems that cannot be solved locally.

#4 The transmission of useful information through social media to local officials means that industries no longer have years to operate with invisible/hidden tactics that take advantage of small town officials who once were not aware what was happening 100 miles away.

So the cell tower industry chose to pre-empt local control and establish state authority for the application and siting of cell towers. A smart move on their part to limit the ability of local authority to do anything about it.

2. If a political subdivision has in effect on July 2, 2013, an ordinance that applies to a class 2 collocation and the ordinance is inconsistent with this section, the ordinance does not apply to, and may not be enforced against, the class 2 collocation.

3. A political subdivision may regulate a class 2 collocation only as provided in this section.
4. A class 2 collocation is subject to the same requirements for the issuance of a building permit to which any other type of commercial development or land use development is subject.
The passage above from 66.0404 says precisely what it means: 1. If a local town already has an ordinance , this law negates that ordinance. 2. The local town is not permitted to get creative in how it controls the siting of cell towers, its power is limited to what the statute specifically gives it.  3. Local officials cannot create a new requirement for cell tower ‘permit applications’ different than any other commercial development or land use permit applications.
Sneaky law. It snubs local authority like a red-headed step child.
Too late to do anything about this attack on local control. Barron County’s cell tower ordinance has been killed by 66.0404 and the only thing that Barron County can do now is write a pablum-oriented ordinance in compliance with state law.
Forget the fights about abortion and immigration, our liberty is at stake. I have said many times that local control is being usurped by the feds and by the state. At the federal level, we are the Federal States of America instead of the United States of America. At the local level, we are simply becoming vassal political units with the responsibility to carry out state mandates and no authority to create ones ourselves.This loss of freedom and liberty to choose for ourselves is what makes the current state of affairs so heinous.
The Freedom to Choose is the foundation of liberty. Controlling the list of what we can choose from is tyranny and oppression.
We are up the river without a paddle if this momentum to remove local authority continues.
When the feds centralize power over the state and the state centralizes power over municipalities, nothing good can come from it.

 

The Debt Bomb, Martial Law, and the Fall of Democracy

Update: The President signed the bill to keep the government running into January and February. Look for a repeat experience in 2014. I might repeat this post at the same time.

These three things appear to be linked now.

I have recently come to believe that the Debt Bomb is America’s newest weapon for world domination. It is the opposite of the neutron bomb. The neutron bomb killed people and left all the infrastructure intact but the Debt Bomb kills the infrastructure and leaves the people intact. And when there are people and no infrastructure then there is chaos in the streets. I am not the first to write about Debtonation

I believe the US will default on its obligations and cause a financial panic around the world as it chooses which creditors it will and will not pay. You can believe that it will not pay those who compete with us or move against us. It will always pay its citizens something but it will greatly reduce that amount through emergency legislation or emergency power grabbing by a clueless President. The default will last long enough to send a serious message to those who depend upon US trade and industry.

The Central Banks of Western Democracy appear to be colluding to defeat their banking rivals. Those rivals are Persian, Asian, and Communist Petrodollar systems that fund countries opposed to Euro-American domination. The Debt Bomb scenario seems to bring the world to its knees by wrecking the infrastructure of a global trading system and re-establishing a World Order with fewer players.

With that World Order will come chaos in cities around the world. Cities survive based upon the transport of goods into them like food, shelter, and medicine. When these are trucked, flown, and shipped into the cities and that transportation becomes volatile, then chaos results and refugees result and business, industry, and economies fail. And when those fail, society fails.

When society fails, martial law takes its place. The US has been putting in place the infrastructure to support federal martial law for two decades now and has stepped up its pace the last three years so much that ordinary people are remarking about it. Alex Jones and his PrisonPlanet TV have captured some people’s attention. The shredding of the US Constitution, the establishment of combat battalions in the US, the coordinated “drills” between police and military that have taken place over the past seven years, the acknowledgement of FEMA camps for housing large numbers of citizens, the billion bullet purchase by government agencies who have no police or military standing, and the establishment of a universal government surveillance system all points to the eventual establishment of Federal martial law in the United States.

With martial law in the US will come the end of Democracy as we know it. The Senate and the House have given huge powers to the Executive Branch to create rules that govern our daily lives. The only defensive weapon that the Congress has is the power to de-fund the Executive branch of the government. And that weapon is meaningless when Congress has no money in the Treasury and cannot issue bonds anymore. Congress has shown itself to be incompetent and soon it will show itself to be corrupt. When that happens, the Treasury Department will serve the President instead of legislation, the military will support the Treasury, and the President will sequester the Supreme Court until military control has been asserted over Washington , DC. The President will assert huge emergency powers to run the country up until the day the Pentagon tires of him. The purge of generals that has been taking place the last few years is to break the fraternity that would keep the Executive Branch, Congress and the Supreme Court viable. A call for a new Constitution will change our democracy forever.

The Republican and Democrat parties will be neutered and absorbed into some new political party. Because blame will fall on the two-party democracy system, a single political party will emerge under a new Constitution. The US military-industrial complex will be at the center of world economic domination.

This is the future of the US. A near term future if there are no changes in the pace of implementation. A long term future if you and I resist these changes through our democratic process. Vote independently and make your voice heard.

HR 368 rule change…Eric Cantor: unitary executive?

Just watch the video first.

This leaves Eric Cantor, as majority leader, as the only person who can unblock this stalemate. And he is meeting with the President. My guess is that they are learning ‘who has it my way or the highway’.

I think default is possible now. No one can afford to lose face in this struggle.

I am now convinced that Republicans and Democrats are stress testing our Republic, our financial system, and the world. They wish to see how far they can go to break the system. Stress testing. I just hope they do not intend to failure test the system. The difference between stress test and failure test is that stress testing has a limit at which you stop testing. A failure test is to test until the thing breaks.

Woe to all. But here we are with one day to go and nobody is worried. The plan to make the American government look incompetent is successful. When the government decides who gets paid and who does not when shut down, we will see the full power of the Executive Branch on display. They alone will decide under some Emergency Powers to choose who wil be paid and who will not. That is the beginning of the phase to show the civilian government is corrupt.

Each party will favor itself and Americans will be upset. At the right time, the military (instead of the police) will assert themselves into quelling domestic riots. That is the end of the beginning.

The Fed no longer manages the credit and money supply….

…it manages the stock market now.  Playing a game by making money available at super low rates continues the Fed role in boosting the stock market. It is criminal how the Fed is colluding with investment banking plus the market to keep money flowing into stocks instead of other investments.

From the Plunge Protection Team to interest rate manipulation to dollar redemption, the Fed is doing whatever it takes to keep the US stock market afloat. We don’t know why. Probably never will but there will come a time when no one will care that the Fed is doing anything at all. Then we will all suffer.

There are many people talking about the coming world depression cycle. It will not be pleasant. One cannot have low growth in the economy and a growing Dow Jones without a large correction. Part of this game is to say “What else are you going to invest your money in to make more money? Gold? Ha, the methods to reduce the price of gold and silver from their highs have been very successful. It is down almost a third now. Oil? Ha! The frack oil from the Central Plains will be driving the price of a barrel of oil even lower than the hybrid auto industry has driven it down. If it weren’t for the minor inflation of the dollar, oil would be less today than ten years ago. In Business? Ha. Investments mean buying brick and mortar and machinery. You won’t find a safe haven for cash in those area in America. Buy stocks, sit on your butt and watch them grow. As long as the Fed can get away with it, the stock market will prosper and become increasingly disconnected from the worth of some companies.

So the Fed will continue to pump money into the world but not into anyone’s economy. The cash will be held by banks and others. The market will rise until someone says “ENOUGH”!

Outside the Constitution

We rarely think about laws and how they are put into place and by whom, but we should.

The Constitution Daily has an interesting article about how the IRS is deciding what it will and will not allow for filings from same sex couples.

The Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause, in Article IV, of course, does require the states to honor “the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other state.” But does a marriage decree qualify for that kind of respect? It probably does not, for two reasons. First,  the Supreme Court for decades has interpreted the clause to require respect for court orders, not other forms of state government action, and marriage decrees are technically not court documents. Second, the court also for a long time has said that there is an exception to the requirement when a state has a “public policy” that forbids it to respect another state’s action in a given area.

If those two reasons were not enough to deny marriage decrees in one state from recognition in another, Congress has given states explicit permission to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

That is a provision of the Defense of Marriage Act—Section 2—that was not under review before the Supreme Court this year.  Section 2 reads: “No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.”

So how does that work? Congress says ‘if it is an opposite sex marriage all you states have to recognize it but if it is a same sex marriage then none of you states are bound by it.’

And if you are paying attention then you know that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not the least bit disturbed by the Defense of Marriage Act.

So here is what the IRS did:

…the Internal Revenue Service has used its own authority to interpret the federal tax laws to take a major step toward nationalizing the right of married same-sex couples to equal access to federal tax benefits, even if they move into a state that formally refuses to recognize their marriage.

In what is called a “revenue ruling,” which just went into effect on Monday, the IRS gave such couples the right to federal tax equality, so long as their marriage was valid in any state. The ruling, the IRS noted, “applies to all federal tax provisions where marriage is a factor, including filing status, claiming personal and dependency exemptions, taking the standard deduction, employee benefits, contributing to an IRA and obtaining the earned income tax credit or child tax credit.”

The ruling, the IRS stressed, “applies regardless of whether the couple lives in a jurisdiction that recognizes same-sex marriage or  jurisdiction that does not recognize same-sex marriage.” The tax rights for such couples, the agency added, are based upon the validity of the marriage where it was performed, not whether there is a right to marry where the couple currently lives.

This is a form of Constitution-making by a federal agency since the IRS did not wait for the courts to widen the scope of marriage equality before the agency chose to do so using its own administrative powers. The tax equality its ruling decreed, the IRS said in explaining why it acted, is necessary to avoid the constitutional problem that would arise if same-sex marriages were treated differently based solely on sexual orientation.

Now you are thinking ‘so what? Isn’t that what we want?’ Well, marriage is a State matter, no matter where Congress chooses to stick its nose. But once again, federal power seeks more power. And agencies seek ever more power to decree as they wish.

Will we stop this snowball from rolling?

 

Military muscle in the drug war makes me crazy

Sheesh. Does anybody remember the freakin’ Golden Triangle in the Far East?

When you mix the CIA and drugs?

So now when I read:

A covert U.S. operation sending manned aircraft south of the border has helped Mexican police identify, capture and kill some of that country’s most wanted criminals, according to sources.

Under the direction of the Pentagon’s Northern Command, “Operation Lowrider” began in 2011 after the death of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jamie Zapata.

“It’s been successful in identifying, eliminating and bringing to justice those who brought tons and tons of drugs into the United States,” says Phil Jordan a former DEA Special Agent and director of the agency’s El Paso Intelligence Center.

Unlike drones operated by the Department of Homeland Security, the two prop planes are manned by a subcontractor to Sierra Nevada, a U.S. defense contractor, according to the website vocative.com. Using advanced eavesdropping equipment, “pattern of life” reconnaissance missions expose the schedules and routines of high level traffickers.

…I get a little crazy about this.
I don’t know what the solution is but I do know that using the military to perform like policemen during a drug war is just plain nuts. I like mission specific DEA operations. I like SWAT Team actions for drug arrests. But there is something inherently wrong about using the US military to police the world for drug trafficking.
Perhaps it is because the CIA gets so involved in drug trafficking with impunity that I am bothered by having the one part of the federal government that is supposed to protect me ( the US Military) from being involved in drug activities. Keep drugs away from the US military command operations.

 

 

 

Federal Gov’t: Thy name is Oppression!

This is the face of Oppression before Tyranny:

Two major encrypted email providers have shut down in recent days rather than cooperate with federal investigators, including the service used by NSA intelligence leaker Edward Snowden. The two services, Lavabit — the client Snowden used — and Silent Mail both posted notices on their websites explaining they will shut down their services shortly.

The owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, insinuated in his post Thursday that his site had become the target of a federal investigation and that he personally was subject to a gag order as a result, Forbes reports. Rather than becoming “complicit in crimes against the American people”, Levison had decided to shutter his nearly ten-year-old business and fight the investigation in court. Levison finished his post by bluntly warning anyone from storing data in the United States.

Silent Mail’s creators decided to end their encrpyted email service on Friday in conjunction with Levison, bluntly announcing that they had “preemptively discontinued the service to prevent spying.”

I am fairly certain that most have not encountered the strong arm use of Power over others. This is an example how the use of Power can be a deterrent to a legal activity. Note that this is not an abuse of Power. Abuse signifies a rational limit or a statutory limit was exceeded. This was simply the use of Power to make things difficult for the operator to continue performing a legal act. Money and the cost of a defense is often used to ‘influence’ others into a different course of action as it did in this instance.

“We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now,” wrote Jon Callas, co-founder and CTO of privacy-focused software called Silent Circle in a Friday blog post. “We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.”

The company did not announce any plans to shut down any of their other encrypted applications, including video chat and document sharing programs.

Silent Mail goes dark on Monday.

The Fourth of July 2013 Memorial?

Independence Day… Time for a memorial or a celebration?

The news tells us about the US government spying on its citizens.

Fireworks displays at military bases are suspended because of sequestration.

A citizen is hounded around the world, his passport is revoked, and foreign nations fear granting him asylum because the USA is after him. His crime? He revealed the illegal and unethical nature of US spying around the world.His trial? Never happened.

The President vacations in Africa while White House tours are suspended. A purge of US generals is occurring. The President has the highest record of charging whistleblowers with crimes in the history of the US.

Congress is determined to hold its breath until it dies rather than breathe legislative life into anything.

The Supreme Court is rife with partisanship instead of objectivity.

Two teen age boys are in jail facing charges of terrorism because they mouthed off while playing video games.

American citizens are hunted down and killed without a trial.

American citizens are no longer secure in their possessions or their homes.

National Security Letters allow any federal law enforcement to acquire anything about you they wish without showing that you are a suspect in a crime.

This is not the Fourth of July like any other. It is the first memorial to the Fourth of July.

Like you, I love my country and what I always thought it stood for. I wish it stood for those things today. Freedom, Responsibility, Choice, Constitutional Government, and the Rights of Citizens. These noble ideas have been trammeled in the pursuit of global power and by making people serve the government.