Another Sign of the End of America

Forward by M. Richard Maxson

     Is the "great experiment  " known as the United States coming to an end? Has it already happened and we just don't realize it? It may already too late! 
   

Guest Column

In second term, Obama will allow UN to tax Americans

 By Zeno Potas

    

    It should come as no surprise that President Obama will raise taxes if he is re-elected.  But here’s the shocker: He will invite the United Nations to tax Americans directly.  And the proceeds would go directly to the Third World.  In this way, Barack Obama will, indeed, realize the dreams of his father. There are pending in the U.N. all kinds of plans to tax Americans and redistribute their wealth – not to other Americans – but to other countries.  These taxes will not be like our U.N. dues paid by a vote of our Congress.  Nor akin to foreign aid which we choose to give.  They would be mandatory levies imposed by treaty on American citizens.  And, since they would be enumerated in a Treaty – not an act of Congress --  only the president and the Democratic Senate need be on board.  The Republican House has no role in the Treaty-making process.

Here is what Obama, and his backers with the UN are planning for us:

• A “Robin Hood” tax on financial transactions.  Every time you buy or sell a stock or a bond or exchange money while travelling, you’d be hit with a financial transactions tax (a percentage of your transaction) that would go to the UN.
  
• A global tobacco tax with the funds to flow to the World Health Organization (WHO).
  
• A UN-imposed tax on billionaires all over the world. And don’t delude yourself for a moment that it is only the 1600 current billionaires who will be hit.  Once the precedent of a UN tax on US citizens is approved, it will gradually grow downwards to cover more and more Americans.  Again the funds will go to the UN.
  
• Under the Law of the Sea Treaty – up for Senate ratification in December of the lame duck session – offshore oil and gas wells would have to pay a proportion of their revenues to the International Seabed Authority, a UN-sponsored organization, which would distribute the loot to the third world.
  
• A carbon tax on all U.S. or other foreign commercial or passenger aircraft flying to Europe.  Nominally to fight climate change, these revenues would also go to the third world.
  
• A mandatory assessment to be imposed on the U.S. to compensate third world nations for the costs of reducing their carbon output.
  
• These taxes are, of course, only the first steps.  Once the principle is established of UN taxation of American citizens, the sky is the limit.

Is there any organizations less worthy of our trust to spend our money wisely than the United Nations?  Beset by almost constant scandal, bereft of any in-house oversight or even audit, the UN is one of the most corrupt of all international organizations.  In "Black Helicopters," we document how pervasive this corruption really is.
And where would the money go?  To so-called less developed countries.  The taxes are part of a global plan of redistribution of wealth from the Northern Hemisphere (US, Europe, Japan) to the Southern Hemisphere (Latin America, Africa, and South Asia).
But don’t think that this flow of wealth will reduce poverty.  Foreign aid doesn’t work.  It really just puts a pot of money on the table in third world countries that automatically goes to whoever controls the presidential palace.  Coups, civil wars, revolutions, and all sorts of violence usually ensue as various factions, tribes, or ethnic groups try to get their hands on the money.  Real reduction in poverty can come only through foreign direct investment and trade, not via massive exports of northern hemisphere wealth to countries controlled by corrupt oligarchs.
Even a victory in the election of 2012 may avert the threat of rampant globalism.  Obama and his lame duck Senate will sign and try to ratify a broad range of global treaties to give away our sovereignty and expose us to UN taxation.
This is a warning call to saving our freedom while we still can!

The Greatest Danger is Here

by M. Richard Maxson

    Constitutional violations are a regular occurrence under this administration. It is apparent that there is no stopping this slide towards a new constitution and new form of government in the 21st century. It is happening right in front of our faces. The media propagandists have ignored and side lined these events in as it serves the purpose of the Democrat/Socialists that now transforming this country. We have failed to remember what  Benjamin Franklin said “(You have) A republic, if you can keep it.” Not a democracy, not a democratic republic. But “a republic, if you can keep it.” We are losing it. These are some examples of the trampling of the Constitution.

   The Ruse: - During the 2008 election campaign, Obama  spoke of "opening up and creating more transparency in government," so that government spending plans would be posted on the Internet for days before they passed into legislation. After he was elected president, Obama said, "My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government."
    The Result: -  The D/S passed a mammoth ObamaCare bill so fast that even members of Congress didn't have time to read it, much less the general public. It was by no means posted on the Internet for days before the vote, as promised.

    The Law: -  The Constitution of the United States requires transparency as well. When people are nominated by a President to become Cabinet members, the Constitution requires that they be confirmed by the Senate before they can take office, so that facts about them can become known before they are given the powers of their offices.
    The Violation: - Obama appointed Cabinet members, he also made other appointments to powerful positions created by Executive Orders -- people aptly called "czars" for the vast, unchecked powers they wielded, in some cases greater than the powers exercised by Cabinet members. These "czars" never had to be confirmed by the Senate, and so had no public vetting before acquiring their powers. We had unknown and unaccountable rulers placed over us.

    The Law: -  The Constitution's requirement that Congress pass a budget every year.
    The Reality: -  The Democratically controlled Senate during the Obama administration has not passed a budget for three consecutive years.

    The Law: -  In his oath of office, the President swears to see that the laws are faithfully executed.
    The Reality: -  Once in the White House, Obama  proceeded to explicitly waive the enforcement of laws he didn't agree with. The immigration laws are a classic example. Failing to get Congress to pass some version of amnesty, Obama simply issued an Executive Order exempting certain classes of illegal immigrants from the immigration laws on the books.

     If any President can unilaterally change the law, we are not likely to have the same freedom under rule by presidential fiat as under Constitutional government. This is especially dangerous in a President's second term, when he need no longer have to consider what the voters want. With a couple more Supreme Court appointments he can permanently change the very nature of American government.

    

Citizens Rights Begin to Disappear

by M. Richard Maxson*
  
    Today marks the 225th anniversary of the signing of this unique and prescient document. Every American should take a moment to reflect on what a treasure we have in America. Our constitutional republic has survived for over two centuries. The Framers of the Constitution believed in a separation of powers, so that no government—and certainly no particular branch of government—would become so mighty, so imperial, as to threaten the God-given freedom of the People.

     Our framers established three distinct branches of government so that each would serve as a check on the others, and so that none could trample on individual liberty. And so they created a House of Representatives to represent the people in proportion to the population of a state. They created a Senate to represent the interests of the states. They vested executive power in the President. And they created an independent judicial branch.

    The First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from infringing upon the freedom of speech, the freedom of association and the freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Speech is language and other forms of expression; and association and petition connote physical presence in reasonable proximity to those of like mind and to government officials, so as to make your opinions known to them.

     When the Framers of the Constitution wrote the First Amendment, they lived in a society in which anyone could walk up to George Washington or John Adams or Thomas Jefferson on a public street and say directly to them whatever one wished. They never dreamed of a regal-like force of armed agents keeping public officials away from the public, as we have today. And they never imagined that it could be a felony for anyone to congregate in public within earshot or eyesight of certain government officials. And yet, today in America, it is.

    Mr Obama signed into law the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. This law permits Secret Service agents to designate any place they wish as a place where free speech, association and petition of the government are prohibited.
    
      Thus, federal agents whose work is to protect public officials and their friends may prohibit the speech and the gatherings of folks who disagree with those officials or permit the speech and the gatherings of those who would praise them, even though the First Amendment condemns content-based speech discrimination by the government. 

       The new law also provides that anyone who gathers in a “restricted” area may be prosecuted. And because the statute does not require the government to prove intent, a person accidentally in a restricted area can be charged and prosecuted, as well. This abominable legislation enjoyed overwhelming support from both political parties in Congress because the establishment loves power, fears dissent and hates inconvenience, and it doesn’t give a damn about the Constitution. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent, and only three members of the House voted against it. And the president signed it in secret.

    Another one of those God-given rights is the right to self-defense, embodied in the Second Amendment as the right to “keep and bear Arms.”  That right has faced some severe challenges in recent years.. In 2008, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment is, indeed, an individual right. Two years later, the Court held in that the Second Amendment applies to the individual states. Both cases were decided on a 5-4 vote. Put another way, Americans are just one Supreme Court justice away from losing those rights.

    The make-up of the next Supreme Court may well hinge on the outcome of the elections this November. Should any of the five conservative jurists on the Court retire or leave, a re-elected President Obama would almost certainly replace him with yet another judge in the mold of his two picks thus far--Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Both are liberals hostile to Second Amendment rights.  The margins in many Supreme Court decisions are razor thin.

     Certainly, we cannot take it for granted that the Constitution will always be faithfully interpreted to support the freedoms and proper role of the federal government. As we celebrate the U.S. Constitution today, many conservatives worry that the next 225 years may not be as kind to the idea of a limited federal government committed to protecting the natural rights of all citizens.

Read the Constitution here:
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution.html


*With thanks to Brian Darling and Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

Don't Remain Silent

by 

       M. Richard Maxson                  

    The governmental structures in America are set forth in the Constitution. The Constitution was written -- largely by James Madison -- to define and to limit the federal government, and it was quickly amended by adding the Bill of Rights so as to be sure that natural rights would be respected by the government. The Constitution provides for protection against the tyranny of the majority.

    The separation of powers into legislative, executive and judicial branches of government is at the heart of the Constitution of the United States -- and the Constitution is at the heart of freedom for Americans. No President of the United States is authorized to repeal parts of legislation passed by Congress. He may veto the whole legislation, but then Congress can override his veto if they have enough votes. Nevertheless, every President takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws that have been passed and sustained -- not just the ones he happens to agree with.

     The greatest distinguishing factor between countries in which there is some freedom and those where authoritarian governments manage personal behavior is the Rule of Law. The idea that the very laws that the government is charged with enforcing could restrain the government itself is uniquely Western and was accepted with near unanimity at the time of the creation of the American Republic. Without that concept underlying the exercise of governmental power, there is little hope for freedom.

     If laws passed by the elected representatives of the people can be simply over-ruled unilaterally by whoever is in the White House, then we are no longer a free people, choosing what laws we want to live under. 

    When a President can ignore the plain language of duly passed laws, and substitute his own executive orders, then we no longer have "a government of laws, and not of men" but a President ruling by decree, like the dictator in some banana republic.

 
    When we confine our debates to the merits or demerits of particular executive orders, we are tacitly accepting arbitrary rule. The Constitution of the United States cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution. But, if we allow ourselves to get bogged down in the details of particular policies imposed by executive orders, and vote solely on that basis, then we have failed to protect the Constitution -- and ourselves.

    We live in perilous times. The president acts above the Rule of Law and fights his own wars. Congress acts below the Rule of Law by letting the president do whatever he can get away with. And this summer, the Supreme Court rewrote the Rule of Law.

    There have been many wise warnings that freedom is seldom lost all at once. It is usually eroded away, bit by bit, until it is all gone. You may not notice a gradual erosion while it is going on, but you may eventually be shocked to discover one day that it is all gone, that we have been reduced from citizens to subjects, and the Constitution has become just a meaningless bunch of paper.

The Demise of Constitutional Freedoms

  by M. Richard Maxson

  Over the coarse of my lifetime I have seen the freedoms guaranteed to all citizens by the Constitution disappear in bits and chunks through legislation slipped into law by the Congress. Except for a few years during the 2000's the Congress of the United States has been controlled by the Democrat-Socialist party. It is they who have inched this country quietly to the left.

    Freedom is seldom destroyed all at once. More often it is eroded, bit by bit, until it is gone. This can happen so gradually that there is no sudden change that would alert people to the danger. By the time everybody realizes what has happened, it can be too late, because their freedom is gone.

   One of the tricks of professional magicians is to distract the audience's attention from what they are doing while they are creating an illusion of magic. Pious talk about "giving back" distracts our attention from the cold fact that politicians are taking away more and more of our money and our freedom There have been three huge pieces of legislation that have deprived Americans of their individual freedoms.

They are:

The"War" on Drugs - 

Property rights are terminated if charged with a crime under this law in complete violation of the Constitution.

The Patriot Act - 

In the name of protecting the "Homeland" the right to privacy, free speach, and due process have been almost eliminated. The President even has the right to kill American citizens anywhere in the world.

 Obamacare - 

Congress can now lawfully command any behavior of individuals that it pleases whether or not the subject of the behavior is a power granted to Congress by the Constitution, and it may punish noncompliance with that command, so long as the punishment is called a tax.

    The whole point of the collectivist mindset is to concentrate power in the hands of the collectivists -- which is to say, to take away our freedom. They do this in stages, starting with some group that others envy or resent -- Jews in Nazi Germany, capitalists in the Soviet Union, Caucasians in the US(although they do it to themselves), or foreign investors in Third World countries that confiscate their investments.

    The Democrat-Socialists believe that some very wise people -- like themselves -- need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.They have a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. The left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution's limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges' new interpretations, based on notions of "a living Constitution" that will take decisions out of the hands of "We the People," and transfer those decisions to our betters.

    The self-flattery of the vision of the left also gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision, which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left, and regardless of its disastrous consequences.Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling our birthright of freedom.
    

Ignoring the Law

by M. Richard Maxson*

   The President, when he is sworn into office, takes the oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the the United States. Mr. Obama’s first term shows his repeated disregard and contempt for the Constitution that he has sworn to uphold. He has continually circumvented Congress’s constitutional role and he has denigrated the job of the judiciary. These repeated infractions seem to stem from a fundamental disregard for the rule of law and the text of the Constitution.
    Our framers established three distinct branches of government so that each would serve as a check on the others, and so that none could trample on individual liberty. For instance, our Constitution gives the Senate a key check on executive power by requiring the president to seek Senate approval to appoint senior officials. Article II provides that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate shall appoint ... officers of the United States.” The president may bypass the Senate under only one circumstance: “The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate.” This winter, the Senate did not go into recess and on January 3 conducted a pro forma session. But the next day, the president simply declared the Senate to be “in recess,” though it plainly was not. Then, he purported to appoint several officers, evading the Senate’s constitutional role. It was the first time in U.S. history that a president attempted to make recess appointments when the Senate -- by its own lights -- was not in recess.
    These appointments have been challenged in court, and it is likely that they will be declared unconstitutional. Making illegal appointments is just one way Obama has undermined the separation of powers. He has also skirted his duty to fairly implement the laws. The Constitution grants Congress the authority to enact legislation but requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Obama failed to do this when adherence to the law would not reach his desired result.
     Policy results seem to trump law when it comes to the role of the judicial branch as well. The Supreme Court is the final word on the Constitution. Mr. Obama has disparaged the judiciary’s constitutional function when the court has not rubber-stamped his agenda. Mr. Obama does not believe in the Constitution. To him it is just an obstacle in his way to a new America. It must be pointed out to him by critics that judicial review has been part of our constitutional system of separation of powers for over 200 years.
    During oral arguments on ObamaCare, many of the Justices asked pointed questions about the law’s constitutionality. Several justices were clearly troubled by this unprecedented intrusion upon individual liberty.
Their fear is that if this stands then government would be allowed to  regulate “every human activity from cradle to grave".
     When he is not denigrating the work of the judicial branch, Obama has found it convenient to sidestep the judiciary altogether. Last September, the administration targeted and killed U.S. citizen. Five months later, Attorney General Eric Holder asserted unchecked power to target and kill U.S. citizens. Recent reports that Mr. Obama makes the final targeting decision acting as judge, jury and executioner. He claimed that judicial review was not needed because the executive branch had done its own internal evaluation.
     Due process is essentially a judicial check on executive power, which safeguards citizens’ life and liberty. As Alexander Hamilton explained, “the words ‘due process’ have a precise technical import, and are only applicable to the proceedings of courts of justice.” The administration’s position undermines the judiciary’s constitutional function and turns the Due Process Clause into a dead letter, eliminating a core constitutional right. And Obama’s manipulation of “due process” – like his manipulation of “recess” undermines another fundamental check on executive power.
     Again and again, President Obama bypasses the Constitution to enhance his own power, sidestep the other branches, and reach the outcome he wants. The notion that public servants – who take an oath to uphold the Constitution – may substitute their own judgment for the rule of law subverts the axiom that our country is “a nation of laws, not of men.” We have agreed to be governed by an objective body of law that our elected officials have a duty to evenhandedly uphold and apply.
    Our framers understood this concept, which is why they created a system where no person – including the president—is above the law. If the President cherry picks which parts of the Constitution to obey and which to ignore, our Constitution becomes nothing more than a piece of paper.

*Special thanks to  Stephanie Hessler

 

Most American Voters Worry About the Constitution.

Comment By,
  

     M. Richard Maxson

    Liberal commentators were shocked this past week when in three days of oral argument in the lawsuits challenging Obamacare, five Supreme Court justices — a majority — asked questions strongly suggesting they think the legislation is unconstitutional. They think the document is too old and doesn't apply well in the 21st century. So the Constitution — and the limits it places on Congress' powers — is once again part of our politics. And will continue to be, whichever way the Court rules.

    The assumption by the Democrat party is that the federal government's power to regulate the economy has no limits. Fortunately for Americans the arguments, developed by Georgetown Law professor Randy Barnett and others, that it is beyond the powers conferred by the Constitution for Congress to mandate the purchase of a commercial product — health insurance in Obamacare — were certainly taken seriously by a majority of Supreme Court justices last week and the government's lawyers were unable to answer the questions of both liberal and conservative justices, if Congress can do this, what can't it do? (Refer to the US Constitution)

     Members of Congress may reasonably regard themselves as bound to vote against measures they conscientiously believe unconstitutional. Barry Goldwater did this when he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, even though he had integrated his own business many years before, on constitutional grounds.
    Goldwater's constitutional argument, predictably, wasn't accepted by the Supreme Court. And his vote gave the Republican Party an unfair reputation for being anti-civil rights. But I think he was entitled to think his oath required him to vote that way.

    Clearly, the two parties are divided on the constitutionality of the Obamacare mandate. Polls have shown large majorities of voters think the provision is unconstitutional.

    Voters can and should reasonably ask candidates for Congress their views on this and other constitutional issues and call on them to vote against measures they consider beyond Congress' constitutional powers.

    The constitution is the foundation of our society and has proven over the centuries to be rock solid. True Americans should continue to oppose these Progressive/Liberal/Democrat, or whatever they want to call themselves, that are hell-bent on making our constitution irrelevant.