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My Zoning Crackdown Eviction Notice & 1996 Playboy Article on Zoning

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iron fist 2013032434iron_fist_300Reading about the city of Richmond’s zoning code crackdown on Tom Blanton reminded me of how I fell into similar crosshairs while living in Blacksburg, Virginia in the late 1970s. Here’s the riff from Public Policy Hooligan:

How An Eviction Notice Made Me an Anti-Zoning Zealot -

In late 1976, I moved into a small windowless room in the basement of a stout brick house less than a mile from the [Virginia Tech] university library. I shared a bathroom with a jumpy Vietnam Vet who always avoided eye contact. Even for an engineering major, he was uncommunicative.

The other residents in that house were a hodgepodge of college students – good fellows who were quieter and more studious than most at Tech. The biggest excitement occurred when an agriculture major – a future USDA extension agent – “dropped a dime” on the landlord. After Clarence phoned in a complaint to the city of Blacksburg about a few loose electrical wires in the laundry room, our house was raided by a SWAT team armed with ticket books instead of automatic weapons. Four pre-middle-aged G-men started yelping as if they had found a vat full of hidden corpses. In reality, the worst offense was six people residing in a house zoned for occupancy by not more than five unrelated people.

I was appalled at the bureaucratic hysteria. We were good neighbors – we never set the deck on fire or sacrificed live animals on the front lawn.  If we weren’t disturbing the peace, why was the government disturbing us? Blacksburg had no slums, so the code enforcement chumps had to concoct crises out of thin air. The government’s notion of benevolence was limited to throwing its rule book at violators – and to hell with collateral damage. Since my room was the smallest in the house, my rent was the lowest – $45 a month – and I got an eviction notice.

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Seeking a new cheap abode in the middle of the Tech academic quarter would have been a damn nuisance. I suggested to the landlord, a Tech professor of education, that I pay rent in cash under the table. He liked that idea. The Zoning Gestapo never checked with the Post Office to see if the same number of people continued receiving mail at that address. Those occupancy restrictions had nothing to do with safety; instead, they aimed to prop up property values of nearby homes. I sensed that this was an illegitimate use of government power, but I did not yet understand the policy’s full noxiousness. (The motto on the Virginia state seal to the left is “Sic Semper Tyrannis” – “thus always to tyrants.”  But apparently there was an asterisk for zoning officials.)

My experience made zoning law far more vivid for me. Seventeen years later, in Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, I wrote, “The essence of zoning is the shotgun behind the door – the pending call on police to drag someone away in handcuffs and bulldoze their home. Zoning is not simply a question of bureaucrats and local politicians coming up with byzantine ordinances — but of the full force of government waiting to fall on the head of anyone who violates one of the constantly changing local land-use decrees.”

And here’s an article I did for Playboy in 1996 on zoning tyranny:

Playboy, March 1996

HEADLINE: Conform … or else: no citizen has the right to control his own land; The Playboy Forum; Column

BYLINE: Bovard, James

No citizen has the right to control his own land,  but every citizen has the right to control his neighbor’s land

The most coercive government sometimes is not the one in Washington, though it tries. It’s more likely to be the one next door. These days the greatest threats to your pursuit of happiness come from your neighbors in the form of zoning board bureaucrats, planning commission design cops and pain-in-the-ass regulators.

Want to build a retirement home on that land you bought years ago in the Columbia River gorge? Sorry, your neighbor liked the view as much as you did. You now own an officially designated “scenic area” where you can look but not touch.

Want to park your pickup truck in your driveway? If you live in Flossmoor, Illinois, forget it. Parking pickups in driveways is illegal.

Want to change the color of your living room? A man’s home is his castle, unless you live in Coral Gables, Florida, where town fathers charge residents $35 to get a permit for interior paint jobs. Building inspectors patrol the streets looking for painters’ trucks parked at homes that have not paid the fee.

Want to write an article in your home office about absurd zoning violations? Better live outside of Los Angeles. The city prohibits freelance writers from working out of their homes in residential neighborhoods, fearing that the tap-taptap of their keyboards could devastate the quality of life.

Besides, what are you doing inside your home? You should be out worklng on your lawn. Pasadena, California tried to ban residents from allowing weeds to grow in their yards, a policy sometimes referred to as crabgrass fascism.

As these and many other recent examples show, local zoning officials across the nation have become petty dictators. Modern zoning laws presume that no citizen has a right to control his own land–and that every citizen has a right to control his neighbor’s land.

The abuse of zoning laws began in the first years of the 20th century. A breakthrough ruling by the Supreme Court in 1926 held that zoning laws were justified exercise of the police power of the state. But precedents go back even earlier. Judge Lemuel Shaw, writing in 1851, held that: “Rights of property, like all other social and conventional rights, are subject to such reasonable limitations in their enjoyment as shall prevent them from being injurious.” That makes sense. You shouldn’t be able to turn just any property into an open-air rifle range. But by 1954, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas proclaimed: “The concept of public welfare is broad and inclusive; the values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as dean, well balanced as well as carefully patrolled.”

While many people conceive of zoning as government acting to prevent sharply conflicting land uses such as an ammunition plant next to a day-care center, these laws have become far more invasive and arbitrary in recent years. Architectural correctness is a particularly tricky standard, yet it’s enforced with an iron fist by local bureaucrats. Eleven states currently allow zoning restrictions based on aesthetic criteria alone. Officials in Laguna Beach, California prohibited a family from moving into its new home because inspectors decreed that the house had been painted the wrong shade of white. The Office of Code Enforcement in Alexandria, Virginia sent certified letters to 22 homeowners in June 1993 threatening to condemn their properties unless they touched up the chipping paint on their windowsills and door frames.

There is no statutory limit to the idiocy of zoning and planning boards. Stephen Page of Pacific Grove, California had to spend more than $600,000 and endure five years of bureaucratic hell to get permission to build his house. During one of the endless Architectural Review Board meetings on his request, one board member told Page: “In my former life as a seagull, I was flying up and down the California coastline and saw your house built shaped as a seashell, rather like a nautilus seashell, built out of driftwood and feathers, with the aperture facing out to sea.” (We are not making this up.)

Zoning is not simply a question of local bureaucrats coming up with byzantine ordinances (or a community planning vision). The real abuse comes from enforcing those statutes with the weight of government.

A store owner in Princeton, New Jersey was threatened with a 90-day jail sentence in t 993 for the crime of having a few barbecue grills lined up in front of his hardware store. Though Irving Urken had put the grills and other goods outside his store for 57 years, a new zoning ordinance banned placing anything in front of the store– except books, flowers, plants, vegetables and newspapers.

East Hampton, New York issued a warrant for the arrest of a food shop owner guilty of an unauthorized exhibition of large orange gourds. Advertising executive Jerry Della Femina, who co-owns a local market, had a few dozen pumpkins stacked in front of his store. Village bureaucrats ruled that the pumpkins were the equivalent of a sign advertising the sale of pumpkins and thus that a sign permit was required.

In Skaneateles, New York the local government responded to one couple’s zoning violations by sending in sheriff’s deputies to arrest and jail the wife. The city then drove a backhoe through the $350,000 lakefront home, razing it completely. The house, it seems, was “too big.” What’s more, it had an indoor pool and a three-car garage. The owner, who had fought a seven-year zoning battle, claimed that a former inspector had given permission for the changes.

Malibu, California enacted a new zoning code in 1993 that defined nearly 80 percent of the homes in the city as nonconforming–and required that the nonconforming homes be torn down after 20 years. Hire your lawyer now, but don’t get your hopes up.

Perhaps you believe that it is the duty of citizens to familiarize themselves with the law and to seek out clear rulings from regulators. In some cases, even that doesn’t help.

In August 1993 Seal Beach, California ordered a homeowner to remove a 30-foot observation dome atop his house—even though the city’s Planning Department had explicitly approved the house and dome design three years earlier. (The homeowner had built the dome so that his children could learn about astronomy.) The city council ordered the destruction of the dome because it didn’t comply with zoning rules enacted after the dome’s construction. (Never mind that 100 other buildings were granted exception from the new rule.) The dome came down.

In 1985 New York City gave a developer permission to build a 31-story apartment building. After the building was up, the city announced that its officials had misread their own zoning maps and demanded that 12 stories be slashed off the building. As a result of the city’s ruling, the developer was forced to spend $1 million for a 7000pound robot to demolish the extra space, floor by floor.

In September 1993 the New York City building commissioner bushwhacked Fordham University. Fordham had received permission from the city to build a 480-foot radio tower on its campus in the Bronx. After the radio tower was almost half finished, the city government reversed its position and revoked the building permit. The government’s action cost Fordham more than half a million dollars

Courts generally side with local government in any challenge, but that is not enough for some town officials. Planning bureaucrats consider their petty edicts to be above challenge. Newtown Borough, Pennsylvania requires citizens to pay a $10,000 nonrefundable fee in order to challenge the constitutionality of a local zoning ordinance.

The reigning principle of legislation in the former Soviet Union was “everything is prohibited which is not specifically permitted.” The American Planning Association recommends a similar rule: “It is good practice to include a general ‘violations’ section in zoning regulations that, in part, says, ‘It shall be a violation of this ordinance to make any use of property not expressly permitted by this ordinance or a permit or other approval granted hereunder.’” This is the situation that is already existing in many areas of the U.S. As consultant Dick Cowden observed, “Anyone who buys property and hopes to alter its use is considered, almost by definition, to be in violation of a land use plan”

Perhaps the single most controversial land use regulations at the national level concern wetlands. When the Environmental Protection Agency drafted regulations that closed wetlands to development, environmental groups applauded. Migratory birds, it seems, need a place to rest. What constitutes a wetland? According to the EPA, if a duck crossing state lines on its annual flight looks down and stops to refresh itself, we’re talking wetland.

The “glancing geese” test sparked a full revolt. Journalists tell of developers unable to turn farms into a $5 million golf course, of farmers being unable to plant, of homeowners being arrested for trying to grow grass in their backyards–because their property had been designated a wetland. One couple in Washington State had the bad luck to own a beautiful farm–ash groves and pastures. The state built a highway nearby and a drainage channel backed up and turned the pastures into a bog. The state then added insult to injury by labeling the bog a wetland. Because the land could no longer be farmed, the state canceled the land’s agricultural status, recalculated the tax rate and demanded $8000 in back taxes.

The property rights movement has chosen an inspired weapon–the concept of “taking.” If the government has intruded onto a citizen’s property and interfered with the owner’s property rights to such a degree that the conduct amounts to a constitutional taking, the government must purchase the property from the owner. Activists in Washington State pushed for reform that would have forced the state to compensate the property owner for the loss of his livelihood. (Say the feds find a spotted owl in your backyard. If they think the spotted owl is worth saving, let them pay for it.)

The foes of Washington Referendum 48 estimated that such a law would cost local governments from $278 million to $899 million a year, and that ultimate compensation costs would range from $3.8 billion to $11 billion. Darrell Harting, a supporter of the legislation, told the press: “If that’s true, what the $11 billion really represents is how much money they’ve been stealing from individual property owners who were unlucky enough to have the socalled resource they were so concerned about protecting.”

Government abuses of zoning laws were clearly foreseen back in 1926 by Supreme Court Justice Willis Van Devanter. While the majority of the Court held that a town could outlaw apartment buildings (calling them parasites on the neighborhood), Van Devanter dissented: “The plain truth is that the true object of the ordinance in question is to place all property in a straitjacket. The purpose to be accomplished is really to regulate the mode of living of persons who may hereafter inhabit the community.” As the decision took note of the conflicting interests involved: “That our cities should be made beautiful and orderly is, of course, in the highest degree desirable, but it is even more important that our people should remain free.”

Are we still free?

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On Twitter @jimbovard

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My Wall St. Journal op-ed on The Great Raisin Robbery

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Why the California Raisins Have Stopped Singing

Using 1930s-era regulations, the USDA can commandeer up to half a farmer’s harvest.

by James Bovard     Wall Street Journal   May 27, 2014

Earlier this month the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. Department of Agriculture taking 47% of a farmer’s harvest does not violate the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause as long as the government aims to drive up crop prices. The May 9 decision was the latest absurdity in a decade-long legal battle pitting California raisin growers Marvin and Lena Horne against the USDA’s outmoded raisin regulatory regime.

Under current law, the 1930s-era federally authorized Raisin Administrative Committee can commandeer up to half of a farmer’s harvest as a “reserve”—to purportedly stabilize markets and prevent gluts. The Hornes were fined almost $700,000 for refusing to surrender control of 47% of their 2002 harvest to the government committee and 30% of the harvest the following year. After judges declared that the Hornes could not sue in federal court for unjust takings—i.e., government confiscation without just compensation—the case landed in the Supreme Court.

Last June the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that California raisin growers have standing to file a takings claim in federal court. Even liberal justices were amazed at the heavy-handed, archaic nature of the regulatory regime. During oral arguments, Justice Stephen Breyer declared: “I can’t believe that Congress wanted the taxpayers to pay for a program that’s going to mean they have to pay higher prices as consumers.” Justice Elena Kagan suggested that the statute authorizing the raisin cartel could be “the world’s most outdated law.”

Writing as if they were inspired by Justice Kagan’s quip, the Ninth Circuit panel reached back a hundred years to justify perpetuating federal control of the raisin business. The decision declared, “Raisin prices rose rapidly between 1914 and 1920, peaking in 1921 at $235 per ton. This surge in prices spurred increased production, which in turn caused prices to plummet back down to between $40 and $60 per ton.” Crop prices skyrocketed during those years in large part because the World War I-era U.S. Food Administration cornered markets and vastly inflated demand by providing cheap credit to European allies to purchase boatloads of harvests. Federal intervention spurred a boom and bust that ravaged American farmers in the early 1920s.

The Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 authorized the secretary of Agriculture to appoint farmer-dominated committees to control production. The subsequent crop marketing orders were based on the New Deal philosophy of “managed abundance”—prosperity through “universal monopoly and universal scarcity.” The Ninth Circuit decision quotes a 1943 Supreme Court ruling justifying regimenting raisin farmers because the industry became “compelled to sell at less than parity prices.”

But the parity index was concocted by government agricultural economists in the 1920s to justify federal aid to farmers. “Parity” was based on a set ratio of farm prices to nonfarm prices, in correlation with the ratio that prevailed in 1910-14, a boom time for farmers. Because production costs for both farm and nonfarm goods radically changed, it never made any economic sense to rely on “parity” but it was a popular political ploy.

The Ninth Circuit judges’ curiosity seemingly never extended beyond reading USDA press releases. Their decision this month declared that “the Marketing Order ensures ‘orderly’ market conditions by regulating raisin supply.” But the raisin committee’s sweeping powers have failed to prevent vast swings in prices farmers receive. Many California farmers have shifted their land to other crops; the acreage devoted to raisin production has plunged since 2000. The Ninth Circuit effectively declared that a taking is not a taking if the government intends to benefit the victim, regardless of how much damage the government inflicts.

The judges played down the Hornes’ losses because they only involved “personal property”—not “real property” such as land. This is a slippery distinction that at least one other federal appeals court has utterly rejected. The decision stressed that the “Hornes did not lose all economically valuable use of their personal property,” presumably since the feds did not take all their raisins.

The judges noted that “the Hornes can avoid the reserve requirement . . . by planting different crops” not subject to federally authorized commandeering. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia captured the reality far better when he said in oral arguments in March 2013 that the USDA in effect offers farmers a choice: “Your raisins or your life.”

The Ninth Circuit decision illustrates how judicial docility and economic illiteracy can vest boundless power in bureaucracies. The Hornes will likely appeal to the Supreme Court. This could potentially result in a landmark takings ruling that finally torpedoes the raisin regime and numerous other USDA cartels.

Mr. Bovard is the author, among other books, “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006) and “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty” (St. Martin’s, 1994).

On Twitter @jimbovard

wsj raisin article illustration BN-CY414_edp052_G_20140526161656

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Freedom Fighter Jon Utley Tribute Video Now Online

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I blogged a few weeks ago about the tribute gathering for the 80th birthday of Jon Utley, the publisher of American Conservative and one of the most dedicated and principled pro-freedom and antiwar activists in the nation.   The Committee for the Republic  and the Empire Salon have now placed online the video from that event.  There were lots of fine speakers; the best part was Jon’s comments about his own life and career.

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On Twitter @jimbovard

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Chalk Line Fever by Tom Blanton

Wash. Times: Bill Clinton’s Body Snatching Legacy in Kosovo

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jpb kosovo wash times 8_4_2014_b1-bovard8201_s877x1066Washington Times, August 5, 2014

When the spoils of war are human organs

by James Bovard
Bill Clinton’s Kosovo ‘freedom fighters’ trafficked in body parts

Former President Bill Clinton continues to be feted around the world as a progressive champion of human rights. However, a European Union task force last week confirmed that the ruthless cabal he empowered by bombing Serbia in 1999 has committed atrocities that include murdering individuals to extract and sell their kidneys, livers and other body parts.

Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in “unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites.”

A special war-crimes tribunal is planned for next year. The New York Times reported that the trials may be stymied by cover-ups and stonewalling: “Past investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo have been undermined by witnesses’ fears of testifying in a small country where clan ties run deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy high posts in the government.” American politicians have almost entirely ignored the growing scandal. Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as “the George Washington of Kosovo.” A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Mr. Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.

The latest allegations might cause some Americans to rethink their approval of the 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia killed up to 1,500 civilians. In early June 1999, The Washington Post reported that “some presidential aides and friends are describing [bombing] Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton’s ‘finest hour.’” Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because the Serbs were allegedly committing genocide in Kosovo. After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Mr. Clinton and Britain’s Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war stopped a new Hitler in his tracks.

The KLA’s savage nature was well-known before the Clinton administration formally christened them “freedom fighters” in 1999. The prior year, the State Department condemned “terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.” The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden. Arming the KLA helped Mr. Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Mr. Clinton was aided by many congressmen anxious to portray U.S. bombing as an engine of righteousness. Sen. Joe Lieberman whooped that the United States and the KLA “stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.”

After the bombing ended, Mr. Clinton assured the Serbian people that the United States and NATO agreed to be peacekeepers only “with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold.” In the subsequent months and years, American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serb civilians, bombing Serbian churches and oppressing any non-Muslims. Almost a quarter-million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Mr. Clinton promised to protect them. By 2003, almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in Kosovo in 1999 had fled, and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic Albanian.

In 2009, Mr. Clinton visited Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, for the unveiling of an 11-foot-tall statue of himself. The allegations of the KLA’s involvement in organ trafficking were already swirling, but Mr. Clinton overlooked the grisly record of his hosts. Instead, he stood on Bill Clinton Boulevard and lapped up adulation from supporters of one of the most brutal regimes in Europe. A commentator in the United Kingdom’s The Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Mr. Clinton “with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999.”

Shortly after the end of the 1999 bombing campaign, Mr. Clinton enunciated what his aides labeled the Clinton doctrine: “Whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.” In reality, the Clinton doctrine was that presidents are entitled to commence bombing regardless of whether their accusations against foreigners are true. As long as the U.S. government promises great benefits from bombing abroad, presidents can usually attack whom they please.

Mr. Clinton’s war on Serbia was a Pandora’s box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq and for the Obama administration to bomb Libya. Both interventions sowed chaos that continues to curse the purported beneficiaries.

Unfortunately, Bill Clinton will never be held liable for killing innocent Serbs or for helping body-snatchers take over a nation the size of Connecticut. Mr. Clinton is reportedly being paid up to $500,000 for each speech he gives nowadays. Perhaps some of the well-heeled attendees could brandish artificial arms and legs in the air to showcase Mr. Clinton’s actual legacy.

James Bovard is the author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006) and “Lost Rights” (St. Martin’s, 1994).

* Thanks to WT’s Alexander Hunter for the great art work at the top!

On Twitter @jimbovard

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FFF: How Trade Wars Shaped Early American History

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ffflogo Future of Freedom, June 2014

How Trade Wars Shaped Early American History, Part 1

by James Bovard

Fair trade is once again a rallying cry for many Americans. Many contemporary leftists believe that the U.S. government should impose restrictions or tariffs on imported goods that are alleged to have been produced by underpaid or oppressed Third World workers. Few contemporary protectionists are aware of the sordid history of trade conflicts earlier in American history.

Restrictive trade policies were a major cause of the American Revolution. “In 1732, England slapped heavy duties on American pig iron, and, in a death blow to the hat industry, decreed that hat makers were forbidden to have more than two apprentices each,” as an 1892 Stanford University monograph noted. In 1750 Britain prohibited Americans from erecting any mill for rolling or slitting iron; William Pitt exclaimed, “It is forbidden to make even a nail for a horseshoe.” The Declaration of Independence denounced King George for “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.” Many Founding Fathers recognized the corrupt nature of such restrictions. Benjamin Franklin observed, “Most of the statutes or acts, edicts, arrests, and placarts of parliaments, princes, and states, for regulating, directing, or restraining trade, have been either political blunders, or jobs obtained by artful men for private advantage, under pretense of public good.”

The first Congress under the Constitution passed a new tariff in 1789 with an ad valorem rate of 8 percent; the entire tariff code consisted of a single sheet of rates posted at U.S. custom houses. (By the 1980s, the tariff code would fill two hefty volumes with more than 8,000 different categories.) While the 1789 tariff seemed high to many Americans at the time, the tariff levels would continue rising and reach triple that level by 1816.

In 1791 Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton issued “Report on Manufacturers,” in which he sought to persuade Americans to support high tariffs for infant industries to spur economic development: “Though it were true, that the immediate and certain effect of regulations controlling the competition of foreign with domestic fabrics was an increase of price, it is universally true, that the contrary is the ultimate effect with every successful manufacture…. In a national view, a temporary enhancement of price must always be well compensated by a permanent reduction of it.” Hamilton neglected to explain why higher prices always lead to lower prices, but that did not deter subsequent generations of protectionists from invoking him as if his report had been handed down from Mount Sinai.

As the 1800s began, the United States’s trade was rollicked by the competing embargoes imposed on European trade by Britain and by Napoleon in France. In response to British attacks on American ships, Thomas Jefferson imposed a temporary embargo on trade with England in 1807. Inefficient American manufacturers loved the boycott and also profited heavily from the War of 1812. After that war ended, the northern part of the United States was permeated by “mushroom industries” — businesses that had thrived only because they were sheltered from foreign competition. To protect the new companies, Congress enacted a tariff in 1816 that was far higher than any prior import barrier.

The profits for factory owners generated by that tariff helped spur more pro-tariff propaganda in Washington. Northern congressmen began to advocate a ban on importing any product that any American chose to manufacture. Southern farmers, whose cotton and tobacco were the prime exports of the nation, were forced to buy in a protected market and sell in a free market. Even before the doctrines of David Ricardo reached America, Virginian farmers were protesting to Congress that government policy should not scorn a nation’s comparative advantage: “That instead of struggling against the dictates of reason and nature, and madly attempting to produce every thing at home, countries should study to direct their labors to those departments of industry for which their situation and circumstances are best adopted.”

In 1821 a congressional Committee on Manufactures released a report asserting “that commerce is exporting, not importing,” and “the excess of exports over imports is the rate of profit.” Tariff proposals were widely seen as a way to enrich the North at the expense of the South. The committee easily got rid of this objection: “The committee thus publicly declare, that if the proposed tariff had, in their opinion partaken of the character imputed to it, it would not have received their sanction; this House certainly would withhold theirs.” The committee recommended blind faith in the (future) generosity of factory owners: “It is a fact, which cannot be too often repeated, which has been verified by every experience, confirmed on every trial, that, when the domestic market has been secured to the domestic manufacturer, domestic competition has reduced the price to the consumer.”

Sen. John Taylor of Virginia, in a fiery reply to the congressional report entitled Tyranny Unmasked, warned, “The Committee have entirely overlooked by far the most important branch of political economy, namely, the economy which teaches nations not to expend the principles which secure their liberty, in search of money…. How could it happen that exchanges of property with foreigners should ruin us, but that transfers of property to capitalists should do us no harm?” Taylor had a far better grasp of economic history than did the congressional committee: “In the history of the world, there is no instance of a political economy bottomed upon exclusive privileges, having made any compensation for the deprivation it inflicts.”

“The American system”

Early Americans recognized the issue of principle in trade restrictions far more clearly than did their successors. A Committee of the Citizens of Boston warned in 1827, “Let it never be forgotten, that the question … is not so much what may be beneficial to manufacturers, as whether government has a right to benefit these, to the manifest injury both of the agricultural and commercial classes.” Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts was one of the most eloquent opponents of trade barriers. He derided protectionism as “a policy which no nation had entered upon and pursued without having found it to be a policy which could not be followed without great national injury, nor abandoned without extensive individual ruin.”

Sugar tariffs were one of the heaviest burdens on American consumers in the 1820s. After 1816, tariff hikes drove U.S. sugar prices to more than double the world price. Sugar farmers in Louisiana petitioned Washington to maintain the tariff, claiming that they needed government help in their “war with nature” trying to produce sugar in a climate not ideally suited to it. One Southern politician warned that dropping sugar tariffs could inflict widespread collateral damage because “the ruin of the sugar planters would depreciate slave property in the United States by $100,000,000.”

Wool was the item that received the most attention from the early American protectionists. The main reason for Congress’s obsession to protect wool — one of the most primitive industries — was the pervasive distribution of sheep among congressional districts. In the 1820s wool cost twice as much in the United States as in Britain. As the 1892 Stanford study noted, “Even though the tariff was up to 150% on some wool products, one-third of wool supply still came from abroad. Naturally, the tariffs were carefully designed so that the tariffs were far higher in the lowest-quality clothing than on the highest-quality clothing; this allowed the poorest citizens to best partake of the benefits of ‘the American system.’” By the late 1820s, the wool lobby was infesting Washington, wailing about a supposed epidemic of smuggling of clothes across the national borders.

In 1828 Congress passed the “Tariff of Abominations” — a crushing, heavy tariff that explicitly sacrificed one part of the country to another part. Northern manufacturers got almost all the benefits of protection, while Southern farmers were forced to pay higher prices for comparatively inferior American products and lost their cotton export markets because of foreign retaliation against the United States.

In 1832 Congress upped the tariffs still higher. South Carolina declared the new tariff unconstitutional and thereby null — and busied itself buying cannon and signing up volunteers to defend its state’s rights. Congress backed down and lowered the tariffs, but the clash bitterly alienated the North and South and helped paved the way for the Civil War.

Protectionists had long insisted that sagacious government restrictions could speed the development of the American economy. But some of the tariffs that Congress imposed actually subverted industrial development. Prior to the Revolution, American iron manufacturers had been competitive with foreign products. But after Congress imposed a high tariff on iron imports, U.S. producers sharply raised their prices. Former Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, in an 1832 report, condemned “the injustice and mischievous effects of an exaggerated duty on an article of such general use as iron. It falls upon the farmer, the mechanic, the shipping interest, and on every branch of the iron manufacture, those few excepted which have been embraced by the partial protecting system.”

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Wash. Times: Shenandoah Burning – Forgetting Atrocities Breeds New Wars

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Washington Times, October 1, 2014

Lessons for today from the Shenandoah’s Civil War flames

When civilian atrocities are forgotten, war and its injustices become more likely

This is the 150th anniversary of one of the Civil War’s most destructive and controversial campaigns. After Confederate armies had used the Shenandoah Valley to launch several invasions of the North, Union Gen. Philip Sheridan unleashed a hundred-mile swath of flames that left vast numbers of civilians tottering toward starvation. Unfortunately, the burning of the Shenandoah Valley has been largely forgotten, foreshadowing how subsequent brutal military operations would also vanish down the memory hole.

In August 1864, supreme Union commander Ulysses S. Grant ordered Sheridan to “do all the damage to railroads and crops you can. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” Sheridan set to the task with vehemence, declaring that “the people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war” and promised that, when he was finished, the valley “from Winchester to Staunton will have but little in it for man or beast.”

Some Union soldiers were aghast at their marching orders. A Pennsylvania cavalryman lamented at the end of the fiery spree: “We burnt some sixty houses and all most of the barns, hay, grain and corn in the shocks for fifty miles [south of] Strasburg … . It was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.” An Ohio major wrote in his diary that the burning “does not seem real soldierly work. We ought to enlist a force of scoundrels for such work.” A newspaper correspondent embedded with Sheridan’s army reported: “Hundreds of nearly starving people are going North not half the inhabitants of the valley can subsist on it in its present condition.”

After one of Sheridan’s favorite aides was shot by Confederates, Sheridan ordered his troops to burn all houses within a five-mile radius. After many outlying houses had been torched, the small town at the center — Dayton — was spared after a federal officer disobeyed Sheridan’s order. The homes and barns of Mennonites — a peaceful sect who opposed slavery and secession — were especially hard-hit by that crackdown, according to a 1909 history of Mennonites in America.

By the end of Sheridan’s campaign, the former “breadbasket of the Confederacy” could no longer even feed the women and children remaining there. An English traveler in 1865 “found the Valley standing empty as a moor.” Historian Walter Fleming, in his classic 1919 study “The Sequel to Appomattox,” quoted one bedeviled local farmer: “From Harpers Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles, the country was almost a desert… . The barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing without roof, or door, or window.” John Heatwole, author of “The Burning: Sheridan’s Devastation of the Shenandoah Valley” (1998), concluded: “The civilian population of the Valley was affected to a greater extent than was the populace of any other region during the war, including those in the path of Sherman’s infamous march to the sea in Georgia.” Unfortunately, given the chaos of the era at the end of the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath, there are no reliable statistics on the number of women, children and other civilians who perished thanks to “the burning.”

Some defenders of the Union tactics insist that there was no intent to harshly punish civilians. However, after three years of a bloody stalemate, the Lincoln administration had adapted a total-war mindset to scourge the South into submission. As Sheridan was finishing his fiery campaign, Gen. William Sherman wrote to Grant that “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman had previously telegrammed Washington that “[t]here is a class of people — men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” President Lincoln congratulated both Sheridan and Sherman for campaigns that sowed devastation far and wide.

After the Civil War, politicians and many historians consecrated the conflict as a moral crusade and its sometimes-grisly tactics were consigned to oblivion. The habit of sweeping abusive policies under the rug also permeated post-Civil War policy toward the Indians (Sheridan famously declared, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”) and the suppression of Filipino insurgents after the Spanish-American War. Later, historians sometimes ignored U.S. military tactics in World War II and Vietnam that resulted in heavy civilian casualties.

The failure to recognize how wars routinely spawn pervasive brutality and collateral deaths lowers Americans’ resistance to new conflicts that promise to make the world safe for democracy, or rid the world of evil, or achieve other lofty sounding goals. For instance, the Obama administration sold its bombing of Libya as a self-evident triumph of good over a vile despot. Instead, chaos reigns in Tripoli. As the administration ramps up bombing in Syria and Iraq, both its rhetoric and its tactics echo prior U.S. misfires.

Since 1864, no prudent American should have expected this nation’s wars to have happy or uplifting endings. Unfortunately, as long as the spotlight is kept off atrocities, most citizens will continue to underestimate the odds that wars will spawn debacles and injustices that return to haunt us.

James Bovard is the author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006) and “Lost Rights” (St. Martin’s, 1994).

On Twitter @jimbovard

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Torture Deja Vu: Congress Covered up Torture 8 Years Ago

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great caretoon om%20tolesIt is good that Americans are finally learning some of the details of the CIA torture regime thanks to the Senate Intelligence Committee report.  But were the most shocking details redacted? Will we ever know?  Following is a piece I wrote 8 years ago after Congress enacted the Military Commissions Act which effectively retroactively legalized torture. (The Tom Toles’ cartoon perfectly captured the effect of that legislation.)  The article wrapped up with a burst of positive thinking: “President Bush has been able to seize nearly boundless power because his administration has been able to control what Americans know. But this control is crumbling. Democratic congressional investigations, court cases, and the military tribunals themselves could unearth far more damaging documents and photographs than anything seen thus far.”  It took far too long  for much of that evidence to finally come out….

December 18, 2006 issue of the American Conservative.

Bush’s Torture Ticking Time Bomb: Sins of Commission

By James Bovard

Have Republicans become the party of torture, secret prisons, and indefinite detention? In his speech last month on signing the Military Commissions Act, President Bush declared that the bill “sends a clear message… We will never back down from the threats to our freedom.” “Rough interrogation” (a.k.a. torture) in the name of freedom may be Bush’s clearest ideological legacy.

Bush endlessly reminds listeners that “the U.S. does not torture” and that “torture is not an American value.” But “What is torture?” is the Bush version of the Pontius Pilate question. Bush appears to be using the definition of torture crafted by Justice Department official John Yoo: if detainees weren’t maimed or killed, they weren’t tortured. And the Justice Department acts as if, even if detainees are killed during interrogations, it is best to treat the deaths as harmless errors.

The MCA was rushed through Congress in September to overturn a Supreme Court decision that struck down Bush’s military tribunals and scorning of the Geneva Conventions. The new law -far more dangerous than the more controversial Patriot Act- is perhaps the biggest disgrace Congress has enacted since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Stephen Grey, the author of Ghost Plane, notes, “The act grants fewer rights to defendants than the Nazis got at Nuremberg.”

The MCA awarded Bush the power to label anyone on earth an enemy combatant and lock then up in perpetuity, nullifying the habeas corpus provision of the Constitution and “turning back the clock 800 years,” as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) said. While only foreigners can be tried before military tribunals, Americans accused of being enemy combatants can be detained indefinitely without charges and without appeal. Even though the Pentagon has effectively admitted that many of the people detained at Guantanamo were wrongfully seized and held, the MCA presumes that the president of the United States is both omniscient and always fair.

Instead of clear standards established by the legislature, the president decrees what methods of brutalizing detainees are allowed, regardless of the Geneva Convention or the U.S. Anti-Torture Act. As Yale law professor Jack Balkin notes, “The President has created a new regime in which he is a law unto himself on issues of prisoner interrogations. He decides whether he has violated the laws, and he decides whether to prosecute the people he in turn urges to break the law.” White House press spokesman Tony Snow agreed that the law made Bush the “final arbiter on torture.”

Though U.S. government interrogation methods have been intensely controversial around the world, most congressmen looked the other way and rubber-stamped Bush’s legislative wish list. The Boston Globe reported in September that “because of the Bush administration’s restrictive policy on sharing classified information with Congress, very few of the people engaged in the debate will know what they’re talking about.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Al.) epitomized the prevailing righteous ignorance when he declared, “I don’t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.” The less they know, the easier it is for Republican congressmen to deny U.S. government wrongdoing.

Since the end of the Middle Ages, civilized nations have frowned on relying on brute force to determine facts in judicial proceedings. But Monty Python appears to be the patron saint of the MCA. “Evidence” gained via coercion is admissible as long as a military judge deigns that the methods used did not rise to torture. Military commissions can accept “evidence” produced by interrogations that violated “cruel, unusual or inhumane treatment” standardsas long as such abuses occurred before Dec. 30, 2005, when Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act. (Bush effectively vetoed this law with a signing statement.) It was nice that Congress formally picked a date for the rebirth of decency, but it doesn’t have sticking power.

The Bush team is exploiting fears on national security to practically guarantee the use of tortured confessions. The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to prohibit defendant Majid Khan, a former Catonsville, Md. resident who was nabbed in Pakistan, from revealing to anyone -even his defense attorney -the interrogation methods he endured. A Justice Department spokeswoman claimed that letting Khan discuss his interrogation with his lawyer “is inadequate to protect unique and potentially highly classified information that is vital to our country’s ability to fight terrorism.” Thus, the feds can use whatever Khan said against him while hiding the methods that made him squeal.

The MCA creates procedural biases akin to a 1938 Moscow show trial. Defense attorneys can “challenge the use of hearsay information obtained through coercive interrogations in distant countries only if they can prove it is unreliable,” the Washington Post noted.  But it will be almost impossible to disprove an accusation when a defense lawyer is not allowed to question or perhaps even know who made the charge.

From early 2002, some high-ranking Bush administration officials have apparently feared that they could face prosecution for their interrogation policies. But the MCA retroactively decriminalized tortureat least such actions committed before the end of 2005. The act will make it almost impossible for victims of torture (or their survivors) to bring cases against perpetrators. The closest precedent for this blanket pardon comes not from American justice but from the amnesty laws Latin American regimes enacted to immunize military officials who carried out bloody crackdowns against leftists in the 1970s and 1980s.

Like an old-time southern segregationist campaign, the Republican Party has proceeded to portray any congressmen who failed to vote for the MCA as a “terrorist lover.” House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) claimed that Democrats had “voted in favor of new rights for terrorists,” and House Majority Leader John Boehner declared that Democrats “voted against bringing the most dangerous terrorists to justice.” The National Republican Senatorial Committee denounced incumbent Democrats who voted against suspending habeas corpus for having “sided with trial lawyers and terrorists.” After Bush signed the bill, a Republican National Committee press release was headlined, “Democrats would let terrorists free.”

Throughout the fall campaign, the GOP used the MCA to flaunt its “tough on terrorism” message. At a “Texas Victory Rally” on Oct. 30, Bush declared, “When it came time to vote on whether or not to allow the CIA to continue its program to detain and question captured terrorists, more than 80 percent of House Democrats voted against it.” Bush coached the audience to respond to his questions as if the event were a giant DARE rally. The president asked, “When it comes to questioning terrorists, what’s the Democrat’s answer?” The audience roared, “Just say no!”

Aside from Bush and other Republicans’ dishonest taunts of Democrats, torture was a non-issue in congressional campaigns. The New York Times noted, “In a season of shameless attack ads, torture is still too shameful to be debated.” Few, if any, Democratic candidates had enough confidence in themselves or the voters to highlight the Bush administration’s worst abuse of power.

That doesn’t mean, however, that they won’t use the investigative powers their new majority affords. For though Bush rhetorically takes the high ground on the torture issue, it now appears that the president may personally have blood on his hands. On Nov. 14, the ACLU released a CIA letter confirming the existence of “a directive signed by President Bush granting the CIA the authority to set up detention facilities outside the United States and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees.” This confirms a May 2004 e-mail from the FBI’s “On Scene Commander” in Baghdad stating that U.S. military officials in Iraq assured him that a secret presidential Executive Order permitted using extreme interrogation techniques considered illegal by the FBI including “sensory deprivation through the use of hoods,” stress positions, and military dogs.

The Justice Department has so far blocked release of the actual document, but a federal judge may force the feds to cough it up. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is also demanding to see the document. If this Bush letter does hit the streets, it may be akin to a 1972 memo from Richard Nixon specifying the exact methods of lock-picking the Watergate burglars should use. Bush’s involvement in the torture scandal may be far deeper than Nixon’s involvement in Watergate.

The Bush secret ruling on interrogation methods may explain the Justice Department’s passivity on torture cases. The CIA Inspector General recommended that the Justice Department prosecute a CIA agent involved in the demise of an Iraqi detainee at Abu Ghraib. As the New Yorker reported, Manadel al-Jamadi died during an interrogation during which his head was covered in a plastic bag and he was “shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe.” This was one of at least eight cases the CIA referred for prosecution, including cases of homicides during CIA interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the Justice Department refuses to prosecute any of the alleged torturers. The feds cannot prosecute CIA agents without risking public disclosure of the presidential order authorizing the torture of detainees.

As long as the Justice Department doesn’t prosecute federal torturers, Bush can continue denying U.S. torture. People killed during interrogations thus remain the exceptions that prove the rule that the U.S. never tortures. The military classified the deaths of at least 34 detainees as suspected or confirmed homicides; the CIA has released no tally of its morgue entries.

The New Yorker noted, “under the Bush Administration’s secret interrogation guidelines, the killing of Jamadi might not have broken any laws.” Unfortunately, there is no reason to assume that Bush has not given interrogators a license to kill. Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, told a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee early this year that Bush could order killings of suspected terrorists within the United States. When Newsweek contacted the Justice Department to verify this novel legal doctrine, spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos stressed that Bradbury’s comments occurred during an “off-the-record briefing.” Any Bush-ordered killings within the United States would also presumably be off-the-record.

President Bush has been able to seize nearly boundless power because his administration has been able to control what Americans know. But this control is crumbling. Democratic congressional investigations, court cases, and the military tribunals themselves could unearth far more damaging documents and photographs than anything seen thus far.

The MCA is “enabling act” legislation that preserves the appearance of law while empowering the commander in chief to do as he pleases. Bush’s torture policies may signal that he accepts the dicta of Richard Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” But the firewall of high approval ratings that buttressed Bush when the first Abu Ghraib photos leaked is gone. The media is exasperated with the administration’s penchant for secrecy. Much of Bush’s conservative intellectual bodyguard has given up the fight. It remains to be seen how much dunking, thumping, and cold water the Bush team can survive.

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy and eight other books.

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Senate Torture Report – My Initial Two Cents+

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I have not finished reading the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture.  Following are some of my initial thoughts via Twitter @jimbovard –

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Freeman: Government as Slaveowner (2000)

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Leviathan_by_Thomas_Hobbes

UPDATE: Here are some perhaps improved versions of a few lines in the following essay (thanks to Twitter space limits):

Government worship tautology: because government has almost boundless power, it is presumably the source of all rights.

*A good definition of liberty must provide a barricade that 10,000 federal agents cannot breach.

*Tax burdens are morally irrelevant only if government automatically owns all the labor of all citizens.

*Statists presume that govt. is a pagan Earth Mother from which all things come & has a right to take all things back.

***

The Foundation for Economic Education reposted a piece I did for them early this century on the perils of presuming that government is the source of all rights. Sheldon Richman, the Freeman editor back then,  accepted and edited that piece.  When I wrote about government off the leash back then, many folks said I was far too cynical.  Late the following year, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed during Senate testimony: “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists—for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies…”  At the same time that Ashcroft tarred critics as traitors, he knew the government had already commenced massive illegal wiretaps, illegal detentions, and brutal interrogation methods that violated federal law.

The Freeman, February 2000

Government as Slaveowner

by James Bovard

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” This assertion captured the idealism and the principles of this nation’s Founding Fathers.

Unfortunately, the notion of the citizen’s inviolable right to liberty is vanishing from the American political landscape. Attorney General Janet Reno, in a 1995 speech vindicating federal actions at Waco, informed a group of federal law enforcement officers: “You are part of a government that has given its people more freedom . . . than any other government in the history of the world.” Contemporary politicians and political scientists have greatly improved on Thomas Jefferson. Progressive thinking about government is exemplified in a new book titled The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxation (Norton, 1999), by Princeton University professor Stephen Holmes and University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein.

Holmes and Sunstein perform dazzling intellectual gymnastics that leave common sense in the dust. They begin by asserting that “the individual rights of Americans, including the right to private property, are generally funded by taxes, not by fees. This all-important funding formula signals that, under American law, individual rights are public not private goods.” Thus, it is completely up to the current government what rights—if any—today’s citizens will have.

The American Revolution was fought in large part because colonists believed the British government was violating their pre-existing rights. However, Holmes and Sunstein reveal that “rights are rooted in the most shifting of all political soils, that of the annual budgetary process, a process thick with ad hoc political compromises.” All rights are mysteriously created somewhere in the congressional appropriation process—somewhere between the first draft of a legislative bill on an intern’s laptop and the notes a lobbyist slips to a congressman while wheeling and dealing on the final version.

Holmes and Sunstein spare no effort to stomp out any notion of inviolable rights. They say, “It is more realistic and more productive to define rights as . . . selective investments of scarce collective resources, made to achieve common aims and to resolve what are generally perceived to be urgent common problems.” The authors also define rights as “welfare-enhancing investments, extracted by society for society’s purposes” and assert that “all legal rights are, or aspire to be, welfare rights.”

Thus when the Founding Fathers proclaimed in the Bill of Rights that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” it was no different from contemporary congressmen’s voting for food stamps.

Freedom through Intervention

Holmes and Sunstein work overtime to attribute every freedom to government intervention, asserting that “Religious liberty is certainly no more costless than other legal rights. American citizens are more or less free to worship or not, as they wish, but their freedom in this respect makes a claim upon the public fisc, even when it is not subsidized out of public budgets (through, for example, police and fire protection of churches and other religious institutions).” If a single drop of government money could conceivably be involved in some activity, the entire activity becomes the equivalent of a government handout. And regardless of how much in taxes a person pays, if he receives any benefit at all from any government activity, he becomes the moral equivalent of a public-housing resident who never worked a day in his life.

In perhaps the book’s most creative passage, Holmes and Sunstein reveal that “Our freedom from government interference is no less budget-dependent than our entitlement to public assistance. Both freedoms must be interpreted. Both are implemented by public officials who, drawing on the public purse, have a good deal of discretion in construing and protecting them.” The fact that you can see the words on this page clearly is only because some police supervisor deterred a traffic cop from whacking you in the head with his billy club this morning. The Bill of Rights was created as a bulwark to defend citizens against government. Yet because government lawyers must occasionally interpret its clauses (usually to subvert plain meaning), any citizen not boar hogged by government officials miraculously becomes a government dependent.

Holmes and Sunstein reveal that “rights depend in practice on the going rate of taxation.” Thus the higher the tax rates, the more rights people have. Unless citizens live under the heel of the tax collector, they cannot hope to have any freedom. The Internal Revenue Service is never mentioned in the book. Instead, taxation is portrayed practically as an abstraction, as something that just happens and automatically fills up government coffers with rights fodder.

“A tax deduction is a form of public subsidy,” write Holmes and Sunstein. But to believe this is to assume that politicians are entitled to 100 percent of everyone’s income. If politicians set the tax rate at 99 percent, and allow people a tax deduction for food and clothing, then everyone’s budget supposedly becomes a government handout.

The so-called tax burden is an illusion because whatever title anyone has to own something came originally from government. In an earlier book, Sunstein stressed that “a system of private property is a construct of the state” and “governmental rules are implicated in, indeed constitute, the distribution of wealth and entitlement in the first instance.” Thus government can presumably revoke the rights to any property without violating the rights of the purported owner. This presumes that government is the equivalent of some pagan Earth Mother from whom all things come—and who thus has a right to take all things back.

The only way to justify treating tax burdens as morally irrelevant is to assume that government owns all the labor of all the citizens in society. Taxes are not an imposition but merely government reclaiming its rightful property. But did the government bequeath the sweat of the brow of the carpenter who built a house that he sold, or the muscle by which a laborer dug a ditch, or the idea that the software writer used to revolutionize computer use around the world, or the courage of a businessman who staked his life savings on a new product that made life easier for millions? An edifice of freedom cannot be built on a foundation of slave ethics.

Holmes and Sunstein argue in effect that because politicians help set the rules for economic markets, they somehow become entitled to what anyone produces. This makes as much sense as saying that federal patent clerks deserve all the rewards for new inventions, since they approve and register new patents, or that a bank security guard is entitled to carry home armfuls of money from the vaults he guards.

Citizens at Fault

Every failure of government is somehow the citizens’ fault. Sunstein notes that “The Fourth Amendment right [against unreasonable government searches and seizures] cannot be absolute unless the public is willing to invest the enormous amounts necessary to ensure that it is seldom violated in practice. The fact that the Fourth Amendment is violated so regularly shows that the public is not willing to make that investment.” Thus the only reason that police routinely carry out unconstitutional searches is that taxes are not high enough.

The one part of the Bill of Rights that Holmes and Sunstein strictly avoid mentioning is the Second Amendment, which guarantees citizens the right to keep and bear arms. The Founding Fathers saw widespread private gun ownership as a necessary check against the threat of tyranny. Even Harvard law professor and “progressive” icon Laurence Tribe recently admitted that “It becomes impossible to deny that some right to bear arms is among the rights of American citizens.” Presumably the authors believe that people must pay taxes so that government can confiscate everyone’s guns.

Holmes and Sunstein see government as the alpha and omega of all rights, all liberties, all existence: they cannot conceive of anything happening that was not first ordained by politicians and inflicted by bureaucrats. They declare that “To take the cost of rights into account is therefore to think something like a government procurement officer, asking how to allocate limited resources intelligently while keeping a wide array of public goods in mind.” Neither Sunstein nor Holmes has spent time around the General Services Administration headquarters, where real procurement officers waste billions every day.

The authors never attempt to explain where or how government got all the rights. Supposedly, government officials have them because government spends the money to protect them. But the money government spends was first earned by private citizens. How can citizens acquire rights only by government’s taking away much of their paychecks in order to protect the remainder of their income and their other rights? If rights are the result of the government budget, then the rights must originate with the person who produced the money, not with the government agents who seized it. The adulation of government turns into a tautology: in the final realm, government is the source of all rights merely because it has the power to fleece and subjugate its citizens.

Portraying all rights as dispensations of government is a scam to convey absolute power to government officials. Since rights are solely the creation of government, any limitation on government power supposedly becomes a threat to rights.

Americans endorsed the creation of the federal government over 200 years ago so that it could fulfill a handful of narrowly prescribed functions. Government was intended to be a hired clerk, not a divine master. Each person has a natural right not to be made a government pawn, a right to sovereignty over his own body, his own life, and his own peaceful actions. As Etienne de la Boéttie, a sixteenth-century French thinker, observed, “It is fruitless to argue whether or not liberty is natural, since none can be held in slavery without being wronged.”

Americans must choose between “government-issue liberty” and “self-reliant liberty.” The choice is between a concept of freedom based on government handouts and a concept of freedom based on restraint of government, between a liberty in which people are perpetually treated as children needing to be restrained and a liberty in which they are allowed to experiment, take chances, and pay for their own bloody noses. It is a choice between a freedom in which each person can make his own mistakes or a freedom in which each person becomes another statistic in the government’s mistakes. The choice between the two freedoms comes down to a question of whether people will benefit more from being left alone to build their own lives or from somebody’s confiscating much of their building material and imposing the structure he thinks best. A good definition of liberty must provide a barricade that 10,000 enforcement agents can’t breach.

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Military History Now: Sheridan’s Scorched Earth Campaign — The Union Army’s Forgotten War Crime

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civil war shenandoah burnng alfred waud sketch 9_302014_4tb1-3-the-burning-8201_s877x631

 

military history now cropped-Banner4Nathan Millet, the editor of MilitaryHistoryNow.com, today posted my article on Sheridan’s 1864 burning of the Shenandoah Valley.

MilitaryHistoryNow.Com, February 2, 2015

Sheridan’s Scorched Earth Campaign — The Union Army’s Forgotten War Crime

by James Bovard

GEORGE ORWELL WROTE in 1945 that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” The same moral myopia has carried over to most Americans’ understanding of the Civil War. While popular historians have recently canonized the war as a veritable holy crusade to free the slaves, in reality civilians were intentionally targeted and brutalized, particularly in the final year of the conflict.

The most dramatic forgotten atrocity in the Civil War occurred a little more than 150 years ago when Union Gen. Philip Sheridan laid waste to a hundred mile swath of the Shenandoah Valley leaving vast numbers of women and children at risk of starvation. Surprisingly, this scorched earth campaign has been largely forgotten, foreshadowing how subsequent brutal military operations would also vanish into the Memory Hole.

“We burnt some sixty houses and all most of the barns, hay, grain and corn in the shocks for 50 miles [south of] Strasburg… It was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.”

In August 1864, supreme Union commander Ulysses S. Grant ordered Sheridan to “do all the damage to railroads and crops you can… If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” Sheridan set to the task with vehemence, declaring that “the people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war” and promised that, when he was finished, the valley “from Winchester to Staunton will have but little in it for man or beast.”

Because residents of the region lived within the borders of a state that had seceded from the Union, Sheridan acted as if they had automatically forfeited their property, if not their very lives. Yet some Union soldiers were aghast at the marching orders. A Pennsylvania cavalryman lamented at the end of the fiery spree: “We burnt some 60 houses and all most of the barns, hay, grain and corn in the shocks for 50 miles [south of] Strasburg… It was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.”

An Ohio major wrote in his diary that the burning “does not seem real soldierly work. We ought to enlist a force of scoundrels for such work.”

A newspaper correspondent embedded with Sheridan’s army reported: “Hundreds of nearly starving people are going North. Not half the inhabitants of the valley can subsist on it in its present condition.”

After one of Sheridan’s favourite aides was shot by Confederate soldiers, the general ordered his troops to burn all houses within a five mile radius. After many outlying dwellings had been torched, the small town at the center – Dayton – was spared only after one Federal officer outright disobeyed Sheridan’s order. The homes and barns of Mennonites – a peaceful sect who opposed slavery and secession – were especially hard hit by that crackdown, according to a 1909 history of Mennonites in America.

By the end of Sheridan’s campaign, the former “breadbasket of the Confederacy” could no longer even feed the women and children remaining there. An English traveler in 1865 “found the Valley standing empty as a moor.”

Historian Walter Fleming, in his classic 1919 study, The Sequel to Appomattox (available here), quoted one bedeviled local farmer: “From Harper’s Ferry to New Market, which is about 80 miles, the country was almost a desert. The barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing without roof, or door, or window.”

John Heatwole, author of The Burning: Sheridan’s Devastation of the Shenandoah Valley (1998), concluded: “The civilian population of the valley was affected to a greater extent than was the populace of any other region during the war, including those in the path of Sherman’s infamous march to the sea in Georgia.” Unfortunately, given the chaos of the era at the end of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, there are no reliable statistics on the number of women, children, and other civilians who perished thanks to “the burning.”

Some defenders of the Union’s military tactics insist that there was no intent to harshly punish civilians. But, after three years of a bloody stalemate, the Lincoln Administration had adapted a ‘total war’ mindset to scourge the South into submission. As Sheridan was finishing his fiery campaign, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to Gen. Grant that “[U]ntil we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of it’s roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman had previously telegrammed Washington that “[T]here is a class of people – men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” President Lincoln congratulated both Sheridan and Sherman for campaigns that sowed devastation far and wide.

The carnage inflicted by Sheridan, Sherman, and other northern commanders made the South’s post-war recovery far slower and multiplied the misery of both white and black survivors. Connecticut College professor Jim Downs’ recent book, Sick From Freedom, exposes how the chaotic situation during and after the war contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of freed slaves.

After the Civil War, politicians and many historians consecrated the conflict and its grisly tactics were consigned to oblivion. The habit of sweeping abusive policies under the rug also permeated post-Civil War policy towards the Indians (Sheridan famously declared “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and the suppression of Filipino insurgents after the Spanish-American War. Later historians sometimes ignored U.S. military tactics in World War Two and Vietnam that resulted in heavy civilian casualties.

The failure to recognize how wars routinely spawn pervasive brutality and collateral deaths lowers Americans’ resistance to new conflicts that promise to make the world safe for democracy, or rid the world of evil, or achieve other lofty sounding goals. For instance, the Obama administration sold its bombing of Libya as a self-evident triumph of good over a vile despot; instead, chaos reigns in Tripoli. As the administration ramps up bombing in Syria and Iraq, both its rhetoric and its tactics echo prior U.S. misfires. The proclaimed intentions of U.S. bombing campaigns are far more important than their accuracy.

Since 1864, no prudent American should have expected this nation’s wars to have happy or uplifting endings. Unfortunately, as long as the spotlight is kept off atrocities, most citizens will continue to underestimate the odds that wars will spawn debacles and injustices that return to haunt us.

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James Bovard is the author of author of Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, Terrorism and Tyranny, and other books. More info at www.jimbovard.com; on Twitter @jimbovard. This article originally appeared on CounterPunch.com in 2014. It was reprinted with permission of the author.

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USA Today: Eric Holder’s Lawless Legacy

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holder photo 635581526667584264-AFP-535997574-69309020USA Today, February 3, 2015

Eric Holder’s lawless legacy

by James Bovard

As Holder retires, Obama’s attorney general bulldog should be vilified, not praised

Eric Holder is reaping applause as his six-year reign as Attorney General comes to a close. But Holder’s record is profoundly disappointing to anyone who expected the Obama administration to renounce the abuses of the previous administration. Instead, Holder championed a Nixonian-style legal philosophy that presumed that any action the president orders is legal.

Holder championed President Obama’s power to assassinate people outside the United States — including Americans — based solely on the president’s secret decrees. On March 6, 2012, Holder defended presidentially-ordered killings: “Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, it does not guarantee judicial process.” TV comedian Stephen Colbert mocked Holder: “Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do.” For Holder and the Obama administration, reciting certain legal phrases in secret memos was all it took to justify executions.

Though Holder had criticized the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps before he took office, he became the key defender of National Security Agency’s email dragnet. Even after Edward Snowden had revealed that the NSA was illegally vacuuming up millions of Americans’ email and other communications, Holder falsely proclaimed in June 2013 that, “The Government cannot target anyone… unless there is an appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation…” But confidential documents revealed that the NSA’s definition of terrorist suspect is so ludicrously broad that it includes “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.”

Holder has continued the tradition of previous attorney generals of exonerating government officials who commit politically-approved crimes. Though President Obama admitted that U.S. government officials were guilty of torture, the only CIA official that Holder prosecuted was John Kirakou, a courageous whistleblower who publicly admitted that the CIA was waterboarding. Holder is also complicit in the Obama administration’s decision to suppress a massive amount of information about illegal interrogation practices that occurred during the prior administration.

Holder was lavishly praised last month after he announced that the Justice Department will cease sharing loot seized from Americans with state and local police. But in 2009, shortly after he took office, Holder bragged at the Asset Forfeiture National Leadership Conference about his role in championing forfeiture in congressional testimony ten years earlier and proclaimed that “the Asset Forfeiture Program provides vitally important funding for law enforcement.” Holder reversed course last month only after a Washington Post expose proved that his favored program created an incentive for lawmen to wrongfully confiscate property from thousands of innocent Americans. Holder has proposed no compensation to the victims of the seizure frenzy he helped unleash.

Newspapers also heaped accolades on Holder for his declaration last month on Martin Luther King Day about “the troubling reality…that we lack the ability right now to comprehensively track” police shootings across the nation. But there was a law on the books that Congress enacted in 1994 to require the Attorney General to collect and publish annual data on “the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” Holder, like prior attorney generals, ignored the mandate. And the Justice Department continues covering up killings by federal agents, including a rash of fatal shootings by Border Patrol agents and the FBI killing of 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev during questioning at his Florida apartment in 2013 regarding the Boston Marathon bombing.

Since Obama was lawfully elected, Holder’s Justice Department has acted as if anything that Obama’s appointees chose to do is automatically legal. Thus, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concocted a new rule to punish businesses that refuses to hire ex-convicts. Thus, the Department of Housing and Urban Development devised an arbitrary new standard to punish businesses that fail to give preferential treatment to minorities (a policy that the Supreme Court will likely strike down later this year). Nor has Holder had any complaints about the White House’s frenetic rewriting of the Affordable Care Act to protect Democratic candidates from an anti-ObamaCare backlash.

After Obama himself, Holder bears primary blame for leaving the 2008 campaign promise of “hope and change” in ruins. Almost a century ago, H.L. Mencken quipped that the “ironically so-called” Justice Department was in fact “a fecund source of oppression and corruption…” Unfortunately, Holder did little in office to refute Baltimore’s best-known cynic.

James Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan.

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Wash. Times: Redneck Ethnic Cleansing Recalled

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Washington Times, February 5, 2015

Redneck ethnic cleansing recalled

by James Bovard

Few things vanish from public memory more quickly than government atrocities. When I was growing up on a mountainside across from the Shenandoah National Park in the 1960s, no one spoke of the injustices committed against the mountaineers brutally expelled from their homes in the 1930s to create that park. Instead, all that mattered in Front Royal, Virginia, my nearby hometown and the northern entrance of the park, was that the tourists the park attracted were good for local business.

Now, almost 80 years after the park was opened, more attention is finally being paid to the redneck ethnic cleansing committed by both the state and federal government. “Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal,” by Sue Eisenfeld, a Johns Hopkins University writing instructor, beautifully captures the mountain people and the official vendetta that made them refugees from their own land.

The Shenandoah National Park was erected on a pyramid of lies. The original advocates claimed that the parkland was practically uninhabited — ignoring the 15,000 people residing within the originally proposed park boundaries. They claimed the land was undeveloped, near-virgin turf — despite its long history of timber harvesting, mining and beef cattle production. They also claimed the land was worth only a trifle of its actual value and thus would be cheap to acquire.

But the biggest deceits involved vilifying the mountaineers who inhabited what was then known as Virginia’s “Great Mountains.” Families had lived and worked on those ridges and hollows since the 1700s and flourishing communities dotted the landscape. But when they refused to vacate their land to satisfy a grand political vision, they were quickly tarred as know-nothing sociopaths.

Miriam Sizer, a social worker who reported to the state of Virginia, bemoaned that children in one hollow were “uncouth” and “tobacco-chewing.” National Park Service director Arno Cammerer derided some of the mountain residents as “scum.” Shenandoah National Park superintendent J.R. Lassiter denounced people living in the targeted area for suffering from a lack of “independence and resourcefulness.” But most of the mountaineers were doing just fine until they were plundered.

Families were paid as little as a dollar an acre for land worth ten times that much. Virginia’s ruling political machine was confident the new park would be a magnet for tourists, so it engineered a blanket condemnation. The land grab was spearheaded by William Carson, a wealthy businessman who orated that “there is no higher conception of duty than to feel we are of service to the State.” The government could have easily bought from willing sellers most of the land along the ridges and mountain crests where the Skyline Drive, the crown jewel of the park, was built. But politicians wanted vastly more land on both sides of the mountain range.

Shortly after taking office in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt visited a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the future Shenandoah National Park. While a CCC bugler played “Happy Days Are Here Again,” CCC torchbearers ignited a large effigy labeled “fear” and “Old Man Depression.” FDR cheered: “That’s right, burn him up.”

A few years later, CCC members were sent to burn down the homes of mountaineers who refused to vacate their land — a chilling example of how FDR’s “freedom from fear” required giving federal agents unlimited power. The Hoover administration had promised that the vast majority of residents would not be required to vacate, but the Roosevelt administration reneged. When I often hiked the park’s trails and back areas as a Boy Scout, I did not realize that some of the standalone chimneys I saw were lonely reminders of the CCC vendetta.

In one case, an unsubmissive homeowner and filling station owner was ambushed by four plainclothes sheriffs and deputy sheriffs and dragged off. Ms. Eisenfeld relates how the victim, 62-year-old Melanchton Cliser, “stood proudly in handcuffs and delivered a ‘quavering rendition of the entire Star Spangled banner,’ then delivered a speech about defending his rights, guaranteed by the Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution” before being wrestled into a sheriff’s car.

The Archdeaconry of the Blue Ridge complained of the inhumane “wholesale depopulation of the park area.” Many of the displaced people were relocated into what Ms. Eisenfeld calls “an internment camp of sorts.” “Resettlement” communities were set up with boxy white houses, many of which did not include running water or electricity. And the one certainty was that the new homes lacked the million-dollar views that their tenants previously relished.

The commandeering of 176,000 acres for the park provoked court battles that helped establish politicians’ right to seize private property for any purpose they proclaimed. In the subsequent decades, the same legal doctrines sanctified expelling more than a million urban residents from their homes. The dictatorial creation of the Shenandoah National Park is a warning that government cannot ravage property rights without ruining lives far and wide.

• James Bovard is the author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006) and “Lost Rights” (St. Martin’s, 1994).  For more  of my experiences in the Shenandoah National Park and that neck of the woods, see Public Policy Hooligan.

* Unfortunately, I could not find any drawings or photos of C.C.C. boys carrying torches. Below is another CCC poster and one from its sister program, the Work Progress Administration (commonly referred to as “We Poke Along”).  I’m not sure which font that poster is using but…

ccc small cccWork Progress Administration poster 3b48918r

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Wash. Times: Saving ObamaCare with Supreme Hypocrisy?

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wash times jpb supreme ct artwork 3_112015_b3-bovard8201_s878x1019Washington Times, March 12, 2015

Saving Obamacare with supreme hypocrisy

By James Bovard  – March 12, 2015

Justices fret over coercing states while endlessly menacing individuals

At last week’s Supreme Court oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act, several justices questioned whether a verdict against Obamacare would be “unconstitutionally coercive” to state governments that did not create health care exchanges. Justice Sonia Sotomayor fretted that such a ruling could result in “intruding on the federal-state relationship.” The Supreme Court is sometimes hypersensitive about the rights of state governments at the same time it rubber-stamps the destruction of the rights of private citizens.

For instance, the Affordable Care Act trounces freedom by giving the Internal Revenue Service the right to heavily fine individuals who do not purchase federally approved insurance policies, canceling millions of individuals’ insurance policies, entitling the Health and Human Service Department to outlaw many low-cost health insurance options, and compelling individuals and businesses to subsidize other people’s abortions and contraception.

Unfortunately, this is typical of the oppressive practices the Supreme Court has countenanced in recent decades:

In 2005, the Supreme Court blessed condemning private homes under eminent domain authority so local politicians could redistribute the land to favored businesses. Previous Supreme Court rulings empowered local governments to raze entire neighborhoods based on shadowy aesthetic considerations with no relation to public safety.

Supreme Court decisions on asset forfeiture have helped police confiscate cars, cash and other property from scores of thousands of Americans without a criminal conviction. The nationwide epidemic of legalized looting became so embarrassing that Attorney General Eric Holder recently promised to curb the abuses.

In 1982, the Supreme Court entitled government agents to intrude onto private land without a warrant as long as they did not venture into areas where individuals were involved in “intimate activities” (i.e., nudist camps). The resulting “open fields” doctrine often makes it practically impossible to convict a government agent of trespassing.

The Supreme Court has failed to curb the federally funded militarization of police and the profusion of no-knock raids across the nation. Instead, the court has continually granted new powers to law enforcement, such as its 2001 decision sanctifying the arrest of a Texas mother whose only crime was that her child wasn’t seat-belted during a short drive. Even though Texas law did not authorize arrests for seat -belt violators, the court upheld handcuffing the mother to avoid creating a “systematic disincentive to arrest” people for even “very minor criminal” offenses. Since almost everybody is violating some arcane government edict, the court practically gave lawmen the prerogative to jail whom they pleased.

The court has turned a blind eye to almost all the civil liberties abuses of the war on terror. The court has done nothing to curb the Obama administration’s crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers. The court has refused to accept any case challenging the Transportation Security Administration’s whole-body scanners that take explicit “birthday suit” photos of almost every airline passenger.

Nine years after revelations that the National Security Agency was illegally commandeering Americans’ email and phone records, the court has done nothing to curb an abuse far worse than the British “general warrants” that helped provoke the American Revolution. In a 2013 decision, the court effectively absolved warrantless federal spying on citizens because the victims could not prove they had been spied on — a ludicrous precondition for objecting to a secret surveillance regime.

Even when the feds have clearly violated a statute such as the Anti-Torture Act, the court either refuses to accept key cases or effectively grants immunity to all the officials involved in breaking the law. The court’s acquiescence makes it far easier for agencies to cover up outrageous conduct that would shock Americans if it was exposed.

Supreme Court decisions have helped Congress and multiple presidents camouflage the arbitrary federal fiats that increasingly domineer Americans’ lives. The Supreme Court has granted federal agencies vast sway over private companies by pretending that racial hiring quotas are not coercive. Instead, they are merely “goals and timetables — regardless of whether bureaucrats ravage companies that fail to hire and promote by race and gender.

America’s prisons are overflowing in part because the Supreme Court has objected to few of the 4,500-plus criminal statutes Congress enacted. Thanks to the threat of ruinous mandatory minimum penalties, 97 percent of defendants plead guilty. As Justice Antonin Scalia noted in a 2012 dissent, the current system “presents grave risks of prosecutorial overcharging that effectively compels an innocent defendant to avoid massive risk by pleading guilty to a lesser offense.”

The Supreme Court will likely rule on the Obamacare case in June. Does the court believe that unlimited coercion of citizens is OK but that any pressuring of state governments is a cardinal sin? If the court saves Obamacare to avoid “unconstitutionally coercing” state governments, it will be another milepost on the Supreme road to serfdom.

• James Bovard is the author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006) and “Lost Rights” (St. Martin’s, 1994).

On Twitter @jimbovard

*Thanks to Alexander Hunter for the awesome artwork.

wash times jpb supreme ct artwork 3_112015_b3-bovard8201_s878x1019

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FFF: Forgotten Civil War Atrocities Breed More Carnage

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civil war atrocity photo captured from FFF website CaptureThis is the 150th anniversary of General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.  Many commentators are touting Lee’s surrender as a triumph for freedom.  While it was a great blessing that slavery ended, the Civil War set precedents for ignoring atrocities that continue to bedevil America.  Here’s a piece from the January issue of The Future of Freedom:

Forgotten Civil War Atrocities Bred More Carnage
by James Bovard

George Orwell wrote in 1945 that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” The same moral myopia has carried over to most Americans’ understanding of the Civil War. While popular historians have recently canonized the war as a practically holy crusade to free the slaves, in reality civilians were intentionally targeted and brutalized in the final year of the war.

The most dramatic forgotten atrocity in the Civil War occurred 150 years ago when Union Gen. Philip Sheridan unleashed a hundred-mile swath of flames in the Shenandoah Valley that left vast numbers of women and children tottering towards starvation. Unfortunately, the burning of the Shenandoah Valley has been largely forgotten, foreshadowing how subsequent brutal military operations would also vanish into the Memory Hole.

In August 1864, supreme Union commander Ulysses S. Grant ordered Sheridan to “do all the damage to railroads and crops you can…. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” Grant said that Sheridan’s troops should “eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.” Sheridan set to the task with vehemence, declaring that “the people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war” and promised that when he was finished, the valley “from Winchester to Staunton will have but little in it for man or beast.”

Because people lived in a state that had seceded from the Union, Sheridan acted as if they had automatically forfeited their property, if not their lives. Along an almost 100-mile stretch the sky was blackened with smoke as his troops burned crops, barns, mills and homes.

Some Union soldiers were aghast at their marching orders. A Pennsylvania cavalryman lamented at the end of the fiery spree, “We burnt some sixty houses and all most of the barns, hay, grain and corn in the shocks for fifty miles [south of] Strasburg…. It was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.” An Ohio major wrote in his diary that the burning “does not seem real soldierly work. We ought to enlist a force of scoundrels for such work.” A newspaper correspondent embedded with Sheridan’s army reported, “Hundreds of nearly starving people are going North … not half the inhabitants of the valley can subsist on it in its present condition.”

After one of Sheridan’s favorite aides was shot by Confederate soldiers, Sheridan ordered his troops to burn all houses within a five-mile radius. After many outlying houses had been torched, the small town at the center — Dayton — was spared after a federal officer disobeyed Sheridan’s order. The homes and barns of Mennonites — a peaceful sect that opposed slavery and secession — were especially hard hit by that crackdown, according to a 1909 history of Mennonites in America.

By the end of Sheridan’s campaign the former “breadbasket of the Confederacy” could no longer even feed the women and children remaining there. In his three-volume Civil War history, Shelby Foote noted that an English traveler in 1865 “found the Valley standing empty as a moor.” The population of Warren County, Virginia, where I grew up, fell by 11 percent during the 1860s thanks in part to Sheridan’s depredations.

Historian Walter Fleming, in his classic 1919 study, The Sequel to Appomattox, quoted one bedeviled local farmer: “From Harper’s Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles, the country was almost a desert…. The barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing without roof, or door, or window.” John Heatwole, author of The Burning: Sheridan’s Devastation of the Shenandoah Valley (1998), concluded, “The civilian population of the Valley was affected to a greater extent than was the populace of any other region during the war, including those in the path of Sherman’s infamous march to the sea in Georgia.”

Unfortunately, given the chaos of the era at the end of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, there are no reliable statistics on the number of women, children, and other civilians who perished thanks to “the burning.”

Abraham Lincoln congratulated Sheridan in a letter on Oct. 22, 1864: “With great pleasure I tender to you and your brave army the thanks of the nation and my own personal admiration and gratitude for the month’s operation in the Shenandoah Valley.” The year before, in his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln had justified the Civil War to preserve a “government by consent.” But, as Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner retorted, “The only idea … ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this — that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”

Some defenders of the Union military tactics insist that there was no intent to harshly punish civilians. But, after three years of a bloody stalemate, the Lincoln administration had adapted a total-war mindset to scourge the South into submission. As Sheridan was finishing his fiery campaign, Gen. William Sherman wrote to Grant that “until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman had previously telegrammed Washington that “there is a class of people — men, women, and children — who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” Lincoln also congratulated Sherman for a campaign that sowed devastation far and wide.

The carnage inflicted by Sheridan, Sherman, and other northern commanders made the South’s postwar recovery far slower and multiplied the misery of both white and black survivors. Connecticut College professor Jim Downs’s recent book, Sick from Freedom, exposes how the chaotic situation during and after the war contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of freed slaves.

Ironically, a war that stemmed in large part from the blunders and follies of politicians on both sides of the Potomac resulted in a vast expansion of the political class’s presumption of power. An 1875 American Law Review article noted, “The late war left the average American politician with a powerful desire to acquire property from other people without paying for it.” The sea change was clear even before the war ended. Sherman had telegraphed the War Department in 1863, “The United States has the right, and … the … power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle — if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” Lincoln liked Sherman’s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.

After the Civil War, politicians and many historians consecrated the conflict and its grisly tactics were consigned to oblivion. The habit of sweeping abusive policies under the rug also permeated post–Civil War policy towards the Indians (Sheridan famously declared that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and the suppression of Filipino insurgents after the Spanish-American War. Later historians sometimes downplayed U.S. military tactics in World War II that killed vast numbers of German and Japanese civilians.

The same pattern is repeating with the Vietnam War. The Pentagon is launching a major effort to commemorate its 50th anniversary — an effort that is being widely denounced as a whitewash. The New York Times noted that the Pentagon’s official website on the war “referred to the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which American troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, as the My Lai Incident.” That particular line was amended but the website will definitely not be including the verdict of David Hackworth, a retired colonel and the most decorated officer in the Army: “Vietnam was an atrocity from the get-go…. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted.”

The failure to recognize how wars routinely spawn pervasive brutality and collateral deaths lowers Americans’ resistance to new conflicts that promise to make the world safe for democracy, or rid the world of evil, or achieve other lofty-sounding goals. For instance, the Obama administration sold its bombing of Libya as a self-evident triumph of good over a vile despot; instead, chaos reigns. As the administration ramps up bombing in Syria and Iraq, both its rhetoric and its tactics echo prior U.S. misfires. The proclaimed intentions of U.S. bombing campaigns are far more important than their accuracy. And the presumption of collective guilt of everyone in a geographical area exonerates current military leaders the same way it exonerated Sheridan’s 1864 torching of Mennonite homes.

Since 1864, no prudent American should have expected this nation’s wars to have happy or uplifting endings. Unfortunately, as long as the spotlight is kept off atrocities, most citizens will continue to underestimate the odds that wars will spawn debacles and injustices that return to haunt us.

******

On Twitter @jimbovard

www.jimbovard.com

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Mises Inst.: The Washington Intellectual Gravy Train

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JPB Mises Intellectuals #2 CaptureThe Mises Institute’sThe Austrian” Newsletter

The Washington Intellectual Gravy Train

by James Bovard

Intellectuals have long been glorified as champions of truth and defenders of society’s highest values. But in Washington, they serve as Leviathan‘s Praetorian Guard. Intellectuals are thriving in DC thanks in large part to the ruinous policy advice they proffer.

The District of Columbia has 120 times more political scientists per capita than the rest of the nation. But rather than producing “good governance,” the 3,200 political scientists and legions of other would-be Brain Trusters provide endless excuses to further extend the federal sway. Intellectuals usually come to Washington to help politicians leash other Americans, not to leash the government. And since they presume their preferred policies are better than freedom, intellectuals propel government programs to force their inferiors to “take their medicine.”

Washington think tanks have proliferated at the same time federal policies have become far more intrusive and harebrained. There are now roughly 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which are little more than “cash machines for power” for politicians. Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005: “It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it.” May’s think tank extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations. Journalist Ken Silverstein, in an excellent report last year on think tank corruption, noted, “The Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based think tank, has never met a weapons program it didn’t like. That is not surprising since a good chunk of its funding — about $2.5 million in 2010 — comes from defense giants like Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman.”

Some think tanks are fronts for political operatives. Jack Abramoff, the most powerful lobbyist in Washington, placed an aging beach lifeguard at the head of American International Center, a think tank he created to funnel money to himself and his favorite causes. The scam was fruitful until Abramoff’s other machinations won him admission to federal prison. Newt Gingrich’s boutique think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, pocketed $37 million from health care corporations and industry groups before going bankrupt in 2012 after Gingrich’s presidential campaign floundered. Gingrich used his op-eds and speeches to tout positions favored by his think tank donors and omitted mentioning who was bankrolling his operation.

Think tanks are increasingly lackeys for foreign governments. The New York Times last June exposed how the government of Norway paid the Center for Global Development $5 million to hustle Washington officials to boost foreign aid spending. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar to set up a research institute that, according to the Qatar government, would devote itself to “reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones.” After an especially tawdry fixed election in 2011, the Kazakhstan government image was burnished by two think tanks on its payroll — the Center for Security and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies. The Atlantic Council, another prominent DC think tank, pockets cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and NATO.

Some think tanks offer little more than an intellectual version of “rent-a-mobs” of political protestors. In the same way that medieval kings grabbed any shabby pretext to invade neighboring countries, today’s politicians perennially seek pretexts to further invade citizens’ lives. And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers of medieval courts, assure their masters that God — or at least social science — blesses their aggression.

Washington think tanks provide a sheen of intellectual legitimacy to Leviathan. The profusion of think tanks and policy wonks also spawn the illusion that ideas drive policy in Washington. But in most cases, the ideas are simply pretenses to sanctify the pursuit of power.

The role of intellectual grafters in contemporary Washington is epitomized by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who received a $297,000 federal contract for aiding the push for the Affordable Care Act and earned the nickname, “the Oracle of ObamaCare.” He boasted in 2009 of his “black box” software program he used to gin up the numbers to promote the Obama legislative agenda. Invoking a secret computer model is the contemporary version of the tricks Merlin the magician practiced in King Arthur’s court. Gruber told a conference of economists in 2013 that the administration had to bamboozle the public about ObamaCare due to “the stupidity of the American voter.” His comments sparked a conservative firestorm but the liberal New Republic exonerated him as an “independent-minded professor” devoted to the public good.

The more power politicians capture, the more profitable lying about government becomes. Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, in his famous 1944 essay in The Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” showed why, once government acquires vast power, “the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion.” In the same way, Washington is biased in favor of intellectuals who defend torture, total government surveillance, and the president’s assassination prerogative. The advocates and apologists for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq continue to be esteemed inside the Beltway as foreign policy visionaries.

The bigger government becomes, the more the “intellectual playing field” is tilted in favor of servility. Kowtowing is also spurred by Medals of Freedom, National Humanities Awards, and other honorifics bestowed by the White House and federal agencies. Regardless of how badly previous government policies failed, the expert consensus is almost always in favor of new programs and new interventions. Washington intellectuals fret far more about public distrust of government than about federal oppression of American citizens.

The closer that intellectuals get to politicians, the more weaselly they usually become.

The Washington definition of “independent thinker” is merely someone without a visible receipt for his opinions. Americans should be as wary of “gravy train intellectuals” as they are of congressmen and other serial perjurers.

JPB Mises Intellectuals #1

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MP3 of Ernie Hancock Interview on Rand Paul, Cigars, TSA Tyranny, and D.C. Rascals

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ernie hancock snippetFreedomsPhoenix Chief Hellraiser Ernie Hancock and I had a rollicking hour this morn on his Liberty Radio Network program. Plenty of federal agencies took a whupping. I alternated at times between admitting that “I don’t know shit” about some ongoing controversy & striving to “draw the Curtain of Mercy” on other topics.

Ernie had excellent observations on the Rand Paul campaign. Apparently, he has been courted to throw his support behind them like he did for Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012 (Ernie’s “Revolution” campaign spurred massive youth support for Ron Paul). But Ernie has the impression that Rand is triangulating his positions and relying too much on focus groups rather than the hardline principles that drove his father’s campaigns. Ernie’s goal is to sway far more people to “free your mind” and political action is usually a delusory path to that goal. I mentioned that much of the media’s coverage of the Rand’s @filibuster on the Patriot Act was more critical of the opponents of federal surveillance than of the NSA crime wave.

Ernie asked if there were any rays of hope on the horizon. I said it was encouraging how young people in Turkey rose up against the government after they were brutally suppressed in demonstrations 2 years and toppled the prime minister’s party – thanks in part to their social media activism.

He asked about the reaction to Operation Jade Helm in Washington. I said that folks around here don’t give a rat’s patooie about it and assume that anyone who is concerned is a rube or paranoid.

Ernie opened up with a lot of questions on the FDA war on cigars. I mentioned that, when folks see me smoking, they often ask me if I was smoking a Cuban cigar. I explain that freelance writers are not allowed to smoke Cuban cigars. I have not smoked that many Cubans over the years, but most of those I have fired up have been inferior to relatively cheap (and mild) Dominican stogies. I mentioned that in the 1990s, when cigars became high status, some guys would hold cigars in a way so people could see the fancy brand band on the cigar. Those are the kind of dweebs who would benefit from the FDA’s proposal to largely exempt $10+ cigars from regulation.

I mentioned that if I am smoking cigars, it is rare for people to come up and proselytize to me – except about the evil of smoking. And for those folks, a single puff of smoke usually sends them on their way.  Another bright side: for every day that I smoke cigars instead of doing cocaine, I save $500.

Ernie asked about a couple recent articles that have gone viral. I said that that was thanks to the effort of good folks who would retweet or post ’em on Facebook – which I greatly appreciated.

Ernie asked my view on the U.S. dollar and currency crises.  I prefaced my response: “It’s always a bad move for people to take financial advice from a college dropout.”

The post MP3 of Ernie Hancock Interview on Rand Paul, Cigars, TSA Tyranny, and D.C. Rascals appeared first on James Bovard.

King John Butchered Authors of Magna Charta

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… or at least he tried to butcher them.  On this day 800 years ago, King John was compelled to sign Magna Charta, formally accepting a limit to his prerogative to ravage everything in England.  But the ink on his signature was barely dry before he brought in foreign forces and tried to wipe out the barons who had compelled him to sign the Charta.  The English almost lost their newly-recognized rights within months of the signing because they were not sufficiently suspicious of the King. As David Hume noted in his magisterial History of England, “The ravenous and barbarous mercenaries, incited by a cruel and enraged prince, were let loose against the estates, tenants, manors, houses, parks of the barons, and spread devastation over the face of the kingdom. Nothing was to be seen but the flames of villages and castles reduced to ashes, the consternation and misery of the inhabitants, tortures exercised by the soldiery to make them reveal their concealed treasures…”

Few people recall that Pope Innocent speedily sought to annul the charter and formally absolved King John of any obligation to obey Magna Charta.  English liberties received a boost from the death of King John less than a year after Runnymede.

The real lesson of Magna Charta is that solemn pledges do not make tyrants trustworthy.  Similarly, American presidents are required to pledge upon taking office that “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully… preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” At this point, that oath does little more than spur cheers from high school civics teachers.  It has been more than 40 years since any president paid a serious price for trampling the law.  And presidents have a prerogative to trample constitutional rights as long as they periodically proclaim their devotion to democracy.

In the final realm, Magna Charta was simply a political promise – and it would only be honored insofar as private courage, resolution, and weaponry compelled sovereigns to limit their abuses.

For an excellent analysis of why the heritage of Magna Charta did not prove a panacea in this nation, see Anthony Gregory’s The Power of Habeas Corpus in America (Cambridge, 2013).

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Here’s David Hume’s account of what happened after Magna Charta was signed (copied from the excellent Liberty Fund online version of Hume’s history):

John seemed to submit passively to all these regulations, however injurious to majesty: He sent writs to all the sheriffs, ordering them to constrain every one to swear obedience to the twenty-five barons.s He dismissed all his foreign forces: He pretended, that his government was thenceforth to run in a new tenor, and be more indulgent to the liberty and independance of his people. But he only dissembled, till he should find a favourable opportunity for annulling all his concessions. The injuries and indignities, which he had formerly suffered from the pope and the king of France, as they came from equals or superiors, seemed to make but small impression on him: But the sense of this perpetual and total subjection under his own rebellious vassals, sunk deep in his mind, and he was determined, at all hazards, to throw off so ignominious a slavery.t He grew sullen, silent, and reserved: He shunned the society of his courtiers and nobles: He retired into the Isle of Wight, as if desirous of hiding his shame and confusion; but in this retreat he meditated the most fatal vengeance against all his enemies.u He secretly sent abroad his emissaries to inlist foreign soldiers, and to invite the rapacious Brabançons into his service, by the prospect of sharing the spoils of England, and reaping the forfeitures of so many opulent barons, who had incurred the guilt of rebellion, by rising in arms against him.w And he dispatched a messenger to Rome, in order to lay before the pope the Great Charter, which he had been compelled to sign, and to complain, before that tribunal, of the violence, which had been imposed upon him.

Innocent, considering himself as feudal lord of the kingdom, was incensed at the temerity of the barons, who, though they pretended to appeal to his authority, had dared, without waiting for his consent, to impose such terms on a prince, who, by resigning to the Roman pontiff his crown and independance, had placed himself immediately under the papal protection. He issued, therefore, a bull, in which, from the plenitude of his apostolic power, and from the authority, which God had committed to him, to build and destroy kingdoms, to plant and overthrow, he annulled and abrogated the whole charter, as unjust in itself, as obtained by compulsion, and as derogatory to the dignity of the apostolic see. He prohibited the barons from exacting the observance of it: He even prohibited the king himself from paying any regard to it: He absolved him and his subjects from all oaths, which they had been constrained to take to that purpose: And he pronounced a general sentence of excommunication against every one, who should persevere in maintaining such treasonable and iniquitous pretensions.

The king, as his foreign forces arrived along with this bull, now ventured to take off the mask; and, under sanction of the pope’s decree, recalled all the liberties which he had granted to his subjects, and which he had solemnly sworn to observe. But the spiritual weapon was found upon trial to carry less force with it, than he had reason from his own experience to apprehend. The primate refused to obey the pope in publishing the sentence of excommunication against the barons; and though he was cited to Rome, that he might attend a general council, there assembled, and was suspended, on account of his disobedience to the pope, and his secret correspondence with the king’s enemies.z Though a new and particular sentence of excommunication was pronounced by name against the principal barons;a John still found, that his nobility and people, and even his clergy, adhered to the defence of their liberties, and to their combination against him: The sword of his foreign mercenaries was all he had to trust to for restoring his authority.

The barons, after obtaining the Great Charter, seem to have been lulled into a fatal security, and to have taken no rational measures, in case of the introduction of a foreign force, for reassembling their armies. The king was from the first master of the field; and immediately laid siege to the castle of Rochester, which was obstinately defended by William de Albiney, at the head of a hundred and forty knights with their retainers, but was at last reduced by famine.30th Nov. John, irritated with the resistance, intended to have hanged the governor and all the garrison; but on the representation of William de Mauleon, who suggested to him the danger of reprizals, he was content to sacrifice, in this barbarous manner, the inferior prisoners only.b The captivity of William de Albiney, the best officer among the confederated barons, was an irreparable loss to their cause; and no regular opposition was thenceforth made to the progress of the royal arms. The ravenous and barbarous mercenaries, incited by a cruel and enraged prince, were let loose against the estates, tenants, manors, houses, parks of the barons, and spread devastation over the face of the kingdom. Nothing was to be seen but the flames of villages and castles reduced to ashes, the consternation and misery of the inhabitants, tortures exercised by the soldiery to make them reveal their concealed treasures, and reprizals no less barbarous, committed by the barons and their partizans on the royal demesnes, and on the estates of such as still adhered to the crown. The king, marching through the whole extent of England, from Dover to Berwic, laid the provinces waste on each side of him; and considered every state, which was not his immediate property, as entirely hostile and the object of military execution. The nobility of the north in particular, who had shewn greatest violence in the recovery of their liberties, and who, acting in a separate body, had expressed their discontent even at the concessions made by the Great Charter; as they could expect no mercy, fled before him with their wives and families, and purchased the friendship of Alexander, the young king of Scots, by doing homage to him.

 The barons, reduced to this desperate extremity, and menaced with the total loss of their liberties, their properties, and their lives, employed a remedy no less desperate; and making applications to the court of France, they offered to acknowledge Lewis, the eldest son of Philip, for their sovereign; on condition, that he would afford them protection from the violence of their enraged prince. Though the sense of the common rights of mankind, the only rights that are entirely indefeasible, might have justified them in the deposition of their king; they declined insisting before Philip, on a pretension, which is commonly so disagreeable to sovereigns, and which sounds harshly in their royal ears. They affirmed, that John was incapable of succeeding to the crown, by reason of the attainder, passed upon him during his brother’s reign; though that attainder had been reversed, and Richard had even, by his last will, declared him his successor. They pretended, that he was already legally deposed by sentence of the peers of France, on account of the murder of his nephew; though that sentence could not possibly regard any thing but his transmarine dominions, which alone he held in vassalage to that crown.1216. On more plausible grounds, they affirmed, that he had already deposed himself by doing homage to the pope, changing the nature of his sovereignty, and resigning an independant crown for a see under a foreign power. And as Blanche of Castile, the wife of Lewis, was descended by her mother from Henry II. they maintained, though many other princes stood before her in the order of succession, that they had not shaken off the royal family, in chusing her husband for their sovereign.

Philip was strongly tempted to lay hold on the rich prize which was offered to him. The legate menaced him with interdicts and excommunications, if he invaded the patrimony of St. Peter, or attacked a prince, who was under the immediate protection of the holy see.c But as Philip was assured of the obedience of his own vassals, his principles were changed with the times, and he now undervalued as much all papal censures, as he formerly pretended to pay respect to them. His chief scruple was with regard to the fidelity, which he might expect from the English barons in their new engagements, and the danger of entrusting his son and heir into the hands of men, who might, on any caprice or necessity, make peace with their native sovereign, by sacrificing a pledge of so much value. He therefore exacted from the barons twenty-five hostages of the most noble birth in the kingdom;d and having obtained this security, he sent over first a small army to the relief of the confederates; then more numerous forces, which arrived with Lewis himself at their head.

The first effect of the young prince’s appearance in England was the desertion of John’s foreign troops, who, being mostly levied in Flanders, and other provinces of France, refused to serve against the heir of their monarchy.e The Gascons and Poictevins alone, who were still John’s subjects, adhered to his cause; but they were too weak to maintain that superiority in the field, which they had hitherto supported against the confederated barons. Many considerable noblemen deserted John’s party, the earls of Salisbury, Arundel, Warrene, Oxford, Albemarle, and William Mareschal the younger: His castles fell daily into the hands of the enemy: Dover was the only place, which, from the valour and fidelity of Hubert de Burgh, the governor, made resistance to the progress of Lewis:f And the barons had the melancholy prospect of finally succeeding in their purpose, and of escaping the tyranny of their own king, by imposing on themselves and the nation a foreign yoke. But this union was of short duration between the French and English nobles; and the imprudence of Lewis, who, on every occasion, showed too visible a preference to the former, encreased that jealousy, which it was so natural for the latter to entertain in their present situation.g The viscount of Melun, too, it is said, one of his courtiers, fell sick at London, and finding the approaches of death, he sent for some of his friends among the English barons, and warning them of their danger, revealed Lewis’s secret intentions of exterminating them and their families as traitors to their prince, and of bestowing their estates and dignities on his native subjects, in whose fidelity he could more reasonably place confidence.h This story, whether true or false, was universally reported and believed; and concurring with other circumstances, which rendered it credible, did great prejudice to the cause of Lewis. The earl of Salisbury and other noblemen deserted again to John’s party;i and as men easily change sides in a civil war, especially where their power is founded on an hereditary and independant authority, and is not derived from the opinion and favour of the people, the French prince had reason to dread a sudden reverse of fortune. The king was assembling a considerable army, with a view of fighting one great battle for his crown; but passing from Lynne to Lincolnshire, his road lay along the sea-shore, which was overflowed at high water; and not chusing the proper time for his journey, he left in the inundation all his carriages, treasure, baggage, and regalia. The affliction for this disaster, and vexation from the distracted state of his affairs, encreased the sickness under which he then laboured; and though he reached the castle of Newark, he was obliged to halt there, and his distemper soon after put an end to his life,17th Octob. Death and character of the king. in the forty-ninth year of his age, and eighteenth of his reign; and freed the nation from the dangers, to which it was equally exposed, by his success or by his misfortunes.

nyt illustration for magna carta untitled[great illustration from 6/15/2015 New York Times]

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MP3 of Magna Carta Turkey Shoot on Scott Horton Show

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Scott Horton and I had a rowdy chat on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta on his radio show.  Everyone seems to have forgotten how King John tried to slaughter the barons after he promised to limit his power.  Following is the nub of my comments in this interview:

From the mid-1200s onwards, English kings were compelled to pledge that they would obey the Great Charter. Magna Carta was not perfect and it was probably trampled more often than it was respected until recent centuries.

But Magna Carta established the principle that the king forfeits his right to reign if he violates the law of the land. Magna Carta gave footing for people who wanted to put a leash on the king’s power when he went too far. It set a moral and philosophical standard by which the subsequent monarchs could be judged and condemned.

The Magna Carta was written as if it was a recognition of pre-existing rights. In contrast, Attorney General Janet Reno famously told federal law enforcement officers in 1995: “You are part of a government that has given its people more freedom . . . than any other government in the history of the world.” But if freedom is a gift from the government to the people, then government can take freedom away at its pleasure. The federal government was only allowed to come into existence because politicians promised in the Bill of Rights to recognize and respect pre-existing rights of American citizens

magna charta signing CHhWQjxUwAAFs0N

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Germany Should Release Courageous Al Jazeera Journalist Ahmed Mansour

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The German government seized one of Al Jazeera’s best known and most courageous journalists, Ahmed Mansour, this weekend at the behest of the Egyptian government.  Al Jazeera has done some of the best work of any media organization in the world exposing the abuses and oppression of the Egyptian government.  It is appalling that a western government would even consider becoming complicit in Egypt’s growing tyranny.

Mansour was the only journalist who remained in Fallujah in April 2004 when the Bush administration determined to brutally punish that city after four Blackwater security guards were killed there. Mansour continued broadcasting despite the demands by the U.S. military that he exit the locale.   His reports showed that the U.S. bombing campaign was inflicting far more damage on civilians and the city than the U.S. government admitted. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denounced his reporting as “vicious and inaccurate.” Mansour wrote a book, Inside Fallujah: An Unembedded Narrative – about his experience during that clash. (He has written at least 16 other books.)  Here is a confidential U.S. government report on its Fallujah debacle released by Wikileaks.  The U.S. military had previously bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Iraq, killing at least one journalist.

I had dinner with Mansour a couple times when I was in London in 2006 for an hour-long interview on his talk show – the most popular program on Al Jazeera with 25 million live viewers. Every place we went in London,  he was enthusiastically greeted by people who recognized him (OK, we were going to Arabic restaurants, but…). If my memory serves, Ahmed had been previously violently attacked when he was reporting in Egypt during the Mubarak reign. Here is a link to the video of that interview and an Arabic transcript. (I have not been able to track down an English translation.)

Egypt recently issued an arrest warrant claiming that Mansour “tortured an unidentified lawyer in Tahrir Square during the uprising against President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.”  The fact that the warrant does not even bother naming that the person that Mansour purportedly tortured should have been sufficient to get it laughed out of any respectable courtroom.  Germany is considering turning Mansour over to the Egyptian government to face the trumped-up charge.

The Egyptian regime – which came to power after overthrowing an elected ruler – has proven its contempt for both law and decency many times.  The New York Times notes, “Mr. Sisi’s government and its supporters, on the other hand, have talked about Al Jazeera as if it were a terrorist organization seeking to bring down the government.” Al Jazeera has shown far more courage in exposing Egyptian government atrocities than has the Obama administration or the U.S. State Department.

Here is the type of shameless persecution sanctified by the Egyptian government’s legal shams: “A criminal court here sentenced 529 people to death on Monday after a single session of their mass trial, convicting them of murder for the killing of a police officer in the city of Minya during riots after the ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, state media reported. The swift conviction of so many in one stroke was a sudden acceleration of the sweeping crackdown against Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters and against other dissenters that has unfolded since his removal last summer.” (That ruling made it appear that the Egyptian government had adapted the FBI/Waco model of justice.)

If Germany sends Mansour to Egypt, it would be akin to western governments rounding up escaped Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and sending them back to Moscow.  In 2011, Al Jazeera broadcast comments by a 23-year-old female protestor Salma Al-tasi in Tahil Square: “We do not trust a government that sends thugs to kill us.” And what sort of government rounds up journalists abroad and sends them to a regime that wants to kill them?

UPDATE: The German government just announced Mansour’s release.  But it is an outrageous that he was ever detained at the behest of the Egyptian government.

A photo/poster from the 2011 Egyptian protests against the Mubarak regime

A photo/poster from the 2011 Egyptian protests against the Mubarak regime

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