Robert David Steele is speaking and answering questions for one hour from 0800 Thursday morning, 5 January 2012, at the College Convention 2012 in Concord, New Hampshire. The first multi-party event of the electoral season in New Hampshire, it includes appearances by “one major,” Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, and Buddy Roemer, among others. Robert will provide a contextual explanation of when and how America began to unravel, beginning in 1975, provide an overview of the Third Party situation, explain the short and long options on Electoral Reform, and generally outline the “Seven Promises to America” as listed below and documented on this website–more substance and truth than on all the other campaign websites combined.
Seven Promises
01 JOBS. Full employment for citizens instead of bailing out white collar crooks.
02 ELECTORAL REFORM. Restoring integrity to governance.
03 COALITION CABINET. Any honest American can govern with a coalition cabinet.
04 BALANCED BUDGET. Crowd-sourced, citizens in the aggregate should rule.
05 TAX & MONEY REFORM. APT Tax, end the Fed, stop exploding the dollar.
06 TRUE COST ECONOMICS. The truth at any cost reduces all other costs.
07 RESILIENCE. Focus on distributed state and local resilience.
When it comes to corruption, cronyism and general muppetry in Washington D.C., the only real question is ‘where does one start?‘ Yet one has to start somewhere to conclude with a list of the ten most corrupt and despicable marionettes in D.C. Which is precisely what JudicialWatch has done in its annual compilation of the “Top 10 Most Corrupt Politicians in Washington D.C.” for 2011. And confirming what everyone knows, that both the left and right are merely irrelevant names for the same general social affliction, or should we call it by its true name – wealth pillage – the split is even between democrats and republicans. In no particular order, the winners of 2011 are…
Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL)
Former Senator John Ensign (R-NV)
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL)
Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA)
Rep. David Rivera (R-FL)
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)
Rep. Don Young (R-AK)
Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)
And of course:
Attorney General Eric Holder
President Barack Obama
While a detailed look is really not necessary as we are quite familiar with everyone on this list, here it is nonetheless?
Demobilized soldiers will be able to study Asian cooking this year at the government’s expense, as part of an effort to reduce the number of foreign workers employed as cooks in Asian restaurants by training Israeli professionals to replace them.
It’s shocking for two reasons – one is the xenophobia that is rising to astonishing heights in Israel: not even the cooks of foreign cuisine can be foreign (I’ll come back to this) – but because of what it says about how Israel is using US military aid at a time of drastic cuts and austerity for American citizens. Haaretz says:
The cooking courses are estimated to cost about NIS 4.5 million a year, about NIS 1 million of which will come from the Defense Ministry budget.
That’s a few hundred thousands dollars – small change in the grand scheme of things – but not for the Israeli soldiers who will enroll in the course:
Six courses are scheduled for this year in the north, center and south, with a minimum of 25 students in each course.
Some recently demobilized soldiers taking the course may receive aid for housing and living expenses for the first few months. Though the NIS 30,000 tuition [about $8,000] is fully subsidized, students will have to pay NIS 1,800 each for clothing and equipment.
Is this what US aid is being used for?
Everyone knows that the US gives several billion dollars a year of taxpayer aid to Israel’s military – with few strings attached. The US in effect subsidizes sushi-making courses for Israelis, but at what price?
“My Lord, I can touch a bell on my right hand and order the arrest of a citizen of Ohio; I can touch a bell again, and order the imprisonment of a citizen of New York; and no power on earth, except that of the President, can release them. Can the Queen of England do so much”?
So saith William Seward to Lord Lyons, but it could have just as easily been Hillary Clinton or Eric Holder to some foreign official.
The corps of sappers in the legislative branch have been busy undermining the Constitution while the populace has been focused on important things like Kim Kardashian's divorce or Donald Trump's hair. Two retired Marine Generals, Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar wrote an Op-Ed in the December 12, 2011, NY Times opposing the provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, saying:
“One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past….A second provision would mandate military custody for most terrorism suspects. It would force on the military responsibilities it hasn’t sought. This would violate not only the spirit of the post-Reconstruction act limiting the use of the armed forces for domestic law enforcement but also our trust with service members, who enlist believing that they will never be asked to turn their weapons on fellow Americans.”
As retired military men, they know that “service members” aren't going to be asked to do anything; they are going to be ordered upon pain of incarceration or death to do as they're told. Many people express the opinion that Americans would never fire on their countrymen. Where this idea comes from is a mystery. George Washington led any army of about 15,000 men to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. This is the only time that a sitting American president led troops in battle, even though only two or three people were killed.
Reconstruction is conclusive evidence that the army will perpetrate barbarous acts against Americans over a long period. Whether you think the Bonus Marchers were rabble or deserving veterans, the fact is that the army attacked and dispersed them when told to do so. For a more recent – and deadly- example, the Kent State Shootings illustrate that troops will fire on unarmed civilians. In the Kent State incident, the person killed who was closest to the Guardsmen was 265 feet away. This was Jeffrey Miller, the person lying dead in the famous photograph from the shooting.
Police routinely beat, club, gas, “taze” or shoot people when told to and they are not a different species from military personnel. John Marshall chronicled many of the outrages perpetrated against citizens in his 1869 book American Bastile. If you are in doubt about how the military will act, his book is a good place to start your research.
When there is a legal challenge – as there almost certainly will be – to the provisions in the NDAA allowing indefinite detention of citizens by the military, it will become apparent that present-day citizens owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Colonel Lambdin P. Milligan. Milligan was imprisoned by the Union for several months and had been sentenced to death by hanging. He sued demanding a writ of habeas corpus, his suit reaching the Supreme Court.
Several people tried to get the steel-spined Milligan to withdraw the suit, assuring him of a pardon if he would drop it. He refused.
The Supreme Court heard the case and rendered a verdict in 1866. Some of the relevant parts from a syllabus of the case (here) are:
7. Military commissions organized during the late civil war, in a State not invaded and not engaged in rebellion, in which the Federal courts were open, and in the proper and unobstructed exercise of their judicial functions, had no jurisdiction to try, convict, or sentence for any criminal offence, a citizen who was neither a resident of a rebellious State nor a prisoner of war, nor a person in the military or naval service. And Congress could not invest them with any such power.
8. The guaranty of trial by jury contained in the Constitution was intended for a state of war, as well as a state of peace, and is equally binding upon rulers and people at all times and under all circumstances.
9. The Federal authority having been unopposed in the State of Indiana, and the Federal courts open for the trial of offences and the redress of grievances, the usages of war could not, under the Constitution, afford any sanction for the trial there of a citizen in civil life not connected with the military or naval service, by a military tribunal, for any offence whatever.
Congress of course pays even less attention to the Constitution now than it did then, but it will be interesting to see how this is decided. Congress not only doesn't have any such authority, but is specifically forbidden by the 4th, 5th, 6th and probably the 10th Amendments from delegating this non-existent authority.
When it comes to enforcing this, it cannot be hoped that many soldiers will refuse to follow whatever orders they are given. There are a lot more like Charles Graner than Antonio Taguba or Hugh Thompson.
“We must expand from one-day marches and demonstrations to weeks of creative direct action and activities,” wrote Stephen Lerner in New Labor Forum, a quarterly left-labor journal, several weeks before Occupy Wall Street took shape. One way to do that, he continued, “is to build these kinds of longer and more involved protests around students and community groups that have the energy and willingness to take time off from their day-to-day lives to engage in more intense activity (which includes the risk of getting arrested.)”
Lerner wasn’t volunteering activists to do anything that he hadn’t already done. As the primary architect of the Service Employees International Union’s Justice for Janitors campaign, which remains the most successful (and against-the-odds) private-sector organizing campaign of the past quarter-century, Lerner had planned and participated in dozens, if not hundreds, of disruptive demonstrations over the years to dramatize the janitors’ cause. At the same time, he had headed up campaigns that identified and brought pressure on the leading institutional investors in the real estate companies that owned the office buildings in America’s downtowns, and won the support and participation of community, religious and political leaders and organizations in the janitors’ actions. (I recall one instance in Los Angeles when elected officials not only marched with the janitors down Wilshire Boulevard, but accompanied the janitors’ negotiating committee to a bargaining session with management. Nothing like having an assembly speaker sitting alongside union leaders across the bargaining table to concentrate management’s mind.)
Contrary to the fulminations of Glenn Beck, Lerner had nothing to do with the formation and operations of Occupy Wall Street—but in the broadest sense, OWS was following the pages in Lerner’s playbook whether they knew it or not. Shortly after the 2008 crash, Lerner conceived and headed up a financial sector project at SEIU. The project took many and varied forms, among them advocating the formation of state-owned banks to serve as alternatives to the existing banking structure, and building a mass movement against Wall Street. It called for the investment of resources in community and movement organizations that unions didn’t control. Indeed, Lerner soon became an advocate for focusing unions on some extra-union activities. It was, he argued, the highest form of labor self-interest: Unless the balance of economic and political power in the U.S. was radically shifted, the decline of unions would only accelerate.
. . . . . . .
Lerner is neither in nor of Occupy Wall Street. On the anarcho-syndicalist continuum, the OWS activists are the anarchos while Lerner is the syndicalist. (I’ve known Lerner for about 20 years, and I don’t think forestalling decisions until consensus is achieved is something that would even occur to him.) Be that as it may, his name is very near the top of that lamentably short list of strategists of how to rebalance power in America so that the 99 percent have more of it, and it speaks well of the labor movement that so many of its leaders have embraced, however warily, his strategies for change.
Moving quickly on Christmas Day after the US Senate voted 86 – 14 to pass the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011 (NDAA) which allows for the indefinite military detention of American citizens without charge or trial, Montanans have announced the launch of recall campaigns against Senators Max Baucus and Jonathan Tester, and Congressman Denny Reberg, who all voted for the bill.
Montana is one of nine states with provisions that say that the right of recall extends to recalling members of its federal congressional delegation, pursuant to Montana Code 2-16-603, on the grounds of physical or mental lack of fitness, incompetence, violation of oath of office, official misconduct, or conviction of certain felony offenses.
Section 2 of Montana Code 2-16-603 reads:
“(2) A public officer holding an elective office may be recalled by the qualified electors entitled to vote for the elective officer's successor.”
The website Ballotpedia.org cites eight other states which allow for the recall of elected federal officials: Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. New Jersey's federal recall law was struck down when a NJ state judge ruled that “the federal Constitution does not allow states the power to recall U.S. senators,” despite the fact the Constitution explicitly allows, by not disallowing (“prohibited” in the Tenth Amendment,) the states the power to recall US senators and congressmen:
Phi Beta Iota: This is being added as a Constitutional Issue at BigBatUSA.org. It is absurd for any court to deny the right of a state to recall its own elected federal officials.
