Joseph Marohl

Step One. No employee or executive of a given company can earn more than fifty times what any other employee or executive in the same company earns. No exceptions.

Step Two. Productivity and usefulness will always receive greater rewards than consumption and ineffectuality. Need will always receive greater compensation than cunning.

Step Three. No wealth is inheritable. Personal wealth dissolves upon decease. Survivors may purchase properties thus left in limbo—and in life, individuals are free to give gifts to whomever they please.

Step Four. Every college and university student will have to minor in some area to ensure that she or he can make and repair something of use to society or can provide another service that has demonstrable benefits to others.

Step Five. Nothing in the universe will cost more than a million dollars. Anyone who buys anything that costs a million dollars will know up front that he or she will never see a profit from reselling it. The cost of things will be adjusted to fit the new economy—no form of housing will cost more than $70,000, no bicycle will cost more than $100, no loaf of bread more than 25 cents, etc.

Step Six. Workers and investors will share equally in the profits of any venture—with exceptions for work and investments of exceptional value (provided such value can be supported in evidence). Workers and investors will share equally in the risks of any venture—with exceptions for workers or investors for whom the costs of the risk are demonstrably more severe than for other workers or investors.

Step Seven. Advertising will be restricted to the description of verifiable facts about the product (size, color, ingredients, etc.) or the service (time frame, processes, equipment, etc.). No promises will be made or implied that products contribute meaningfully to one’s sex life, sense of belonging, closeness to nature, patriotism, rebel image, desire for eternal youth, or admiration for small animals and children. Appeals to magical thinking or impulse will be strictly forbidden.

Step Eight. The porn industry will be recognized as a religious organization—in the service of the god Eros. Like other religious groups, it will operate tax free, yet remain free to encroach on legislation and judicial interpretation of laws uninhibitedly. If politicians and judges caught with their panties down are no more subject to censure or impeachment than a new President who commissions three Protestant prayers for his inauguration, the nation may spare itself the cost of investigating, censuring, and impeaching politicians over what they do with their willies and pussies with consenting partners.

(Of course, it would seem to make better sense to tax porn … and churches …, just to relieve the public debt, if nothing else, though arguably porn, anyway, provides a service to society.)

Allison Bricker

Representative Alcee Hastings (D-FL) introduced House Resolution 645, ‘National Emergency Centers Establishment Act’ last Thursday in the well of the House of Representatives.¹ The bill is currently assigned to the House Armed Services and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committees. Neither committee has added the bill to their calendar as of this writing.

The bill directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish at a minimum, six national emergency centers on active or inactive military installations in case of natural disaster or national “emergency.” According to Title XXLI-Chapter 68, Subchapter I-Section 5122, Subsection 1 of United States Code, the term “emergency” is defined as:

(1) Emergency.- “Emergency” means any occasion or instance for which, in the determination of the President, Federal assistance is needed to supplement State and local efforts and capabilities to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in any part of the United States.

Additionally, Section 2, Subsection 4 of the bill is extremely vague in its wording, leaving it to the complete discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security as to how to make use of these “national emergency” centers. For those following the news, the introduction of this bill is just another in a line of recent troubling announcements that began last September when the Army Times reported on the deployment of troops domestically for the first time in American history.

Following the Army Times article, in late November, amidst a nation awash in the historic nature of the Presidential Election, an internal memo leaked from CitiBank² indicating that if/when government bailouts fail, gold will make a Bull Run especially as political instability and domestic rioting becomes a reality. On the heels of the Citibank memo, the United States Army War College published, “Known Unknowns Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development.”³ The author goes on to detail a clear warning against excessive adherence to past defense and national security convention, and argues that future disruptive, unconventional shocks are inevitable. The report also details the need to abandon foreign security threats at the outset of domestic uprising.

Rumors of detention camps have circulated the internet message-boards and YouTube channels ad nauseum, increasing substantially in the last two years. The rumors were dismissed and ignored in large part even after CBS MarketWatch reported back in 2006 that Halliburton subsidiary KBR Construction was awarded a $385 Million Dollar five year option contract to construct detention facilities for the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.⁴

However, on January 17th during a radio interview, Gerald Celente of The Trends Research Institute said:

“there are reports moving over the wire about some two-hundred detention camps in the United States that are empty.”

Gerald Celente
The Jeff Rense Show
January 17th, 2009

Unfortunately, the interviewer did not press him for further detail on the statement and thus the interview moved on to the institute’s forecast of complete economic collapse and ensuing revolution. The gravity of such statements is not easily dismissed as hyperbole. Mr. Celente has built a career on forecasting various calamities prior to their occurrence. Additionally, he regularly appears on CNN, Fox Business, the Today Show, etcetera. In fact, CNBC recently said of Mr. Celente and the institute:

“There’s not a better trend forecaster than Gerald Celente. The man knows what he’s talking about.”
CNBC

Fellow readers, I must admit as much as my conscious would prefer to dismiss the possibility of a return of detention camps like we saw in World War II with the Japanese and in the 19th Century with Native Americans, I am hard pressed to justify their existence for a completely benign purpose. It is difficult to rationalize the need for at a minimum, six camps on military bases, staffed twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred and sixty five days a year, with “state-of-the-art” fully staffed command and control centers simply for a possible earthquake, flood, or tornado.¹

As of this writing, we are currently awaiting comments on the bill from both the ACLU and the Libertarian Party. Additionally, we will make tracking this bill’s progress through both committees and Congress a top priority. Please make sure to stay with The Smoking Argus Daily for updates on this developing story.

Source(s): ¹GovTrack.us – House resolution 645, ‘National Emergency Centers Establishment Act’ • ²CitiBank Memo Technical Developments in the Foreign Exchange and Asset Markets • ³ Army War College ‘Known Unknowns Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development • ⁴ CBS MarketWatch “KBR awarded Homeland Security contract worth up to $385M”, published Jan. 24, 2006

Allison Bricker

During an inquiry to Senator Evan Bayh’s (D-IN) Washington D.C. office regarding the then future confirmation vote of Timothy Geithner, The Smoking Argus Daily’s call was answered by voicemail.  After identifying myself, leaving contact information, the nature of my call, and our publication deadline, I was instructed to press one to confirm my message.  However, upon confirming my message, the automated voice relayed that the message could not be delivered due to the Senator being over his mailbox limit of unanswered messages and the call was then automatically disconnected.

We find this absolutely deplorable that a Senator who spends over $1 million Dollars annually staffing his four various offices would be so arrogantly uninterested in corresponding with constituents or fielding questions from the press.  It is amazing to me, such arrogant audacity on the heels of a controversial confirmation vote as to not have a staff member available to answer the phone.  -Public servant indeed.

The Smoking Argus Daily then phoned Indiana’s Senior Senator, Senator Lugar (R-IN) in hopes he might advise the careless Junior Senator to tend to his inbox in lieu of casting yet another vote to benefit one his wife’s company’s.¹

In the end , Senator Evan “I’m too busy for Constituents” Bayh ended up voting ‘aye’ for tax cheat Timothy Geithner¹ as the next Secretary of the Treasury.  A tax cheat in charge of Treasury as well as the Internal Revenue Service, and inattentive elected officials.  Perhaps fellow readers, we just chalk this up to another fine example of the much ballyhooed “Change” in Washington.

We did manage to reach Senator Bayh’s Press Secretary on Tuesday in hopes of receiving some form of official comment as to the justification for voting to confirm Tim “Turbo-Tax” Geithner.  However, after confirming and reconfirming our email address to said Press Secretary, the promised statement never arrived.  Perhaps it is a difficult task, attempting to rationalize a vote for a Tax-Cheat-in-Chief while the rest of us our coerced into compliance via withholding and the joy of multiple schedule 1040’s.

Source(s): ¹Journal Gazette “Across the boards” -Published: December 16, 2007 • ²Confirming Timothy F. Geithner, of New York, to be Secretary of the Treasury

Allison Bricker

Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) takes to the House floor during one minute speeches to rail against bank bailouts, the creation of money out of thin air, ergo fractional reserve banking, and returning monetary policy to the Treasury Department.

Joseph Marohl

Here are some words from Matthew Parris, gay British Conservative, in yesterday’s The Times (UK) on the present financial crisis:

“This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it’s the correction to a long run of irrational confidence. All that stuff about the emerging Asian giants wasn’t just phrasemaking for party conference speeches. It was true. We’re falling behind. We face a mountain of debt: the difference between the life we are able to sustain and the life we were enjoying.

“Politicians cannot do much to jack up the first. So it falls to them to arrange and explain a reduction in the second. The great task facing the next British government is to help the country to recognise and embrace its fate: that we should get poorer, and slip with as good a grace as possible into the world’s second league. Yes, there is a rebalancing required: a rebalancing of popular expectation.”

Parris’s penchant for bile and outright hatefulness aside, and not so evident here besides, the column raises some pertinent points. The United States and the nations of Europe have not relied on productivity for some time. The idea of actually producing a product has been in decline since World War II. And, Parris points out elsewhere, it’s probably too late to turn back to industrialism and so, needless to say, much too late to return to agrarianism.

I suppose the reason we can not return to an economy based on productivity is that technology today has advanced to the point that inhuman technology can mass produce things more consistently and efficiently than human workers can—a circumstance that has relegated us humans to the role of consumers of what the machines produce for us (sometimes useful and wholesome, sometimes not).

Parris applauds India and China for thrusting ahead of the West in recent decades. In a world divided between venture capitalists with hedge funds and unskilled labor with desperate growling bellies, India with its rigid caste system and China with its totalitarian form of Confucianism have proved to have the traits evolutionarily favorable to survival. The Western democracies, with their quaint embrace of Enlightenment values like education, liberty, and equality and their Romantic obsession with individualism, humanism, and pleasure, have taken a serious fall on the course and can expect to be put out of their misery soon.

I suspect that Parris belongs to the set that blames the laziness of poor people and union members for the present decline. Lord knows, the upper classes have worn themselves out struggling to pull us up on our feet. And all we’ve done in return is clamor for even more liberties, decent health care, affordable living conditions, and equality for everyone. It must be awful for them. And when disaster strikes, they allow us 30 months to pull ourselves up to some measure of prosperity—and then the “free ride” of welfare and charity dries up. And, honestly, what more can they do? There are limits.

Responding to Parris’s column, Andrew Sullivan, British-born American little-c conservative, states on his blog this morning:

“I don’t understand why, after two decades of bubbling our way to phony prosperity through the dotcom chimera and the housing boom, it is somehow a ‘crisis’ that our standard of living is falling. It is surely a good thing that the standard of living is falling. It means that reality is beginning to return. A hangover may be painful but its cure is not a bout of more binging. My fundamental concern with the stimulus is that its spending be focused directly on real investment and immediate demand and that it be swiftly followed by a brutal assault on long-term entitlement and defense spending.

“We need to take a machete to social security and Medicare and a very sharp scalpel to all domestic discretionary spending. And we need to think very hard about big withdrawals of troops in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and about the foreign aid we give Egypt and Israel. Between the boomers at home and the expanding, unending empire abroad, the next generation will have no sane fiscal future unless something is done very very soon.”

I agree. The standard of living should fall—though I might add that it’s in society’s interest to ensure a reasonable bottom. Unless we want cities of slums and even more burgeoning criminal networks and gangs, not to speak of the current “Mad Max” scenarios the American bourgeoisie is currently envisioning, we need to protect, as much as possible, those who have not yet achieved what we regard as an average standard of living.

To the extent that constraints on the poor and the wealthy ought to be fair, if not entirely equitable, I support what some (including Sullivan) demonize as “class warfare.” The prosperous should not continue to go unchecked in their pursuit of even greater prosperity.

I suspect there’s enough blubber on the thighs of CEOs of most mega-gigantic corporations to feed every assembly-line worker. If we can limit welfare moms to 30 months of benefits, we can probably afford to limit Presidential candidates to no more than two residences. Outcries against government restraints on liberties almost never extend to the benefit of poor workers.

It just seems more reasonable to me, if restraint is needed at all, and I would always insist on no unneeded restraints whatsoever, to restrain the powerful, rather than the powerless. To burden further the already powerless is, de facto, to give undeserved, unjust, and unconscionable immunity and privilege to the powerful.

Joseph Marohl

In a blog on yesterday’s Huffington Post, John Fischer raises a pointed question: Are Americans afraid of the changes President Obama and a majority of Americans say we need? He even goes so far as to compare Obama’s inaugural address to McCain supporter Phil Gramm’s offhand comment that we’ve become a “nation of whiners,” while emphasizing that Gramm’s remark was basically a plea to ignore the current problems and just think positive, while Obama’s plea is to make sacrifices to solve those problems.

But do Americans know how to make sacrifices anymore? Do I, individually? And we should keep in mind that “making sacrifices” is a voluntary act, not simply “dealing with” losses we suffer but have had no say in. And, perhaps needless to say, “making sacrifices” means WE sacrifice something, not merely look to others to sacrifice.

Some of the other commentators on Obama’s address last Tuesday have noted that its audience failed to respond to the call for “sacrifice”—a word used only twice in the speech and in both cases comfortably couched in the past tense: our “ancestors” and American soldiers in “Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.” But the idea of sacrifice is not far behind the rest of the address, notably in the phrase “the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.”

The idea of the “common good” prevailed in olden days. The signers of the Declaration of Independence “mutually” put up “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” as collateral to ensure the independence of the United States from Great Britain. Today, faced with scary economic prospects, how many John Hancocks would put up their weekends, their tax returns, and their partisan political stances to ensure the independence of the United States from its creditors (mainly China, Japan, and the U.K.) or from undue influence of lobbyists for global corporations or from religious fanaticism of every stripe? (Not to mention lobbyists for “special interests” such as my own.)

And do we today even believe that such sacrifice matters? Do we believe it could work? Do we have the confidence the original declarers of independence had that there even exists meaning outside ourselves?

Perhaps more to the point, the point of Fischer’s article anyway, is whether we Americans have become such wusses that the current economic downturn strikes us a much worse than it really is. According to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, cited by Fischer, our present recession does not stack up impressively against those of 1948 and 1957, much less the Great Depression, the most common historical analogy given as proof of how tough we all have it now. There’s no denying that things are dire and promise to get worse—but is the hand-wringing really called for? Can’t we just buckle down the way previous generations did and tough this thing out?

And even if the perspective of the report resembles Gramm’s can-do Pollyanna-ism (we are, after all, citing the dubious Federal Reserve), might it also be true that the sky is not falling? Or, if it is, that it has fallen much worse on our parents and grandparents, and they were just able to take it better than we are?

And are the solutions being proposed really addressing the larger problem, or do they simply treat the immediate symptoms that the general public are finding so scary? Is a Band Aid from Obama better than George W. Bush “kissing it and making the hurt go away” by telling us to visit Disney World to fight terrorism? “More now than ever,” writes Fischer, “we are confronted by the very real possibility that the system we rely on for our style of living has reached its breaking point.”

We have now had almost two decades to gloat over the failure of Soviet communism (while not being overly impressed by Russian capitalism’s propensity for gangsterism and government corruption). Is it now time for the other shoe to drop? Hasn’t American-style capitalism been limping for quite a while now—hurt either by creeping socialism or more probably, in my opinion, by the rise of consumer capitalism (over an economy based on actual productivity) and the rise of legally protected, publicly irresponsible, government supported, and media controlling corporations?

I’m just asking. And, yes, I’m asking a lot of questions … and giving no real answers. And, in passing, to those—and there are many—who just hate it when people complain about things but have nothing better to offer, I’d like to say, “That’s bullshit, and fuck you.” Asking the right questions is 99% of getting the right answers.

Maybe we Americans are spoiled on easy answers—no-diet, no-exercise fitness plans, and a smiling, cute-though-still-troublingly-Jewy-looking Jesus who is down with suburbia and conspicuous consumption.

Maybe we can’t take the truth, as Jack Nicholson once screamed in a movie. Maybe we face crises now by looking to others to make the sacrifices for us … or by finding bigger, cuddlier daddies to pick us up and promise to fix everything up for us, nice and easy, just the way we always like it.

We have our myths and paladins to remind us of who we once were as Americans. We have our role models even now—“the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.” Who and how many among us are really ready to pick up that mantle?

I may be complaining, but at least I’m not whining.

Allison Bricker

National Security Agency
9800 Savage Road
Fort George G. Meade MD 20755-6217

Re: Domestic Spying on Americans

Dear Men and Women of the National Security Agency,

As I am sure you are aware, your agency’s existence is decreed by an October 1952 Presidential Memorandum under President Truman¹ and Executive Order 12333, issued by President Regan². Neither of the aforementioned directs your mission towards domestic surveillance of Americans. However your first loyalty, regardless of the President in office, the state of the world, or any other contrived danger, is to the Constitution of the United States; the Supreme law of the Land. Moreover, the liberties enunciated in our Constitution are not negotiated benefits or rights granted by the government of your employ, but rather are an absolute prohibition against government encroachment upon that which is unalienably ours by birth alone.

More precisely and not withstanding the failure of former Director of the National Security Agency, Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, USAF to grasp our absolute inherent right to be free from random warrantless searches³, the agency’s current work, whereby you scoop up all domestic communications is a complete and utter violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Regardless of what you may have been told by politicians, superiors, or peers, the work you are doing, is the work of tyrants and dictators. This work is wholly unbecoming of a supposedly free and independent nation. I urge you to look throughout history at the people and governments that have employed the same types of tactics. You will not find patriots, individuals who carried the beacon of liberty; you will only uncover despots, kings, and totalitarian states, concerned not with preserving freedom, but only the continued functioning of the state apparatus.

It is indeed enlightening that the President that altered your mission, President Bush via presidential order⁴ in 2002, did so under the darkness of secrecy. Additionally, after issuing his then secret order, President Bush lied to us, your fellow citizens, saying two years after the fact that the United States government would only listen to calls made to foreign individuals originating from within the United States of America. He lied ever further when he said:

“… anytime you hear the United States government talk about “wiretap”…it requires, a “wiretap” requires a court order. Nothing has changed by the way.
When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

George W. Bush
43rd President
United States of America
April 20th, 2004

The recent admission of your former coworker, Russell Tice⁵ only confirmed our suspicions that the NSA was indeed listening to all domestic communications. Some in your agency may see Mr. Tice as a traitor, but if he is, he is a traitor only to the despots and their unlawful orders. This in turn makes him a patriot for his defense of the Constitution, again the Supreme law of the land, trumping, Executive Order, Presidential Directive, etcetera.

Furthermore, your employer, the Federal government, derives its authority and power solely from the consent of the governed. I am here to tell you, “We the People,” do not give our consent to any agency within the Federal government randomly without cause snooping and listening in on our private conversations.

More importantly however, the agency’s wide net, whereby all are guilty until proven innocent, does not keep us safe from terrorism, it does not even prevent terrorism, all it does is turn us from a free and independent nation into a police state. How is robbing us of our liberties in anyway beneficial or in support of the American Republic or your agency’s core charter?

President Obama has already indicated that he wishes to retain these unconstitutional powers. In fact, thanks to the remnants of a free press, we are aware of your agency’s Cray super-computer, nicknamed, “Black Widow.”⁶ We know that the agency continues to scan millions of phone calls and emails every hour, all without ever relaying to a court who, when, where, or why it suspects the parties of wrong doing. What part of “probable cause” does the NSA not understand? Where is the oath or affirmation needed in order to conduct these searches?

Where do your loyalties lie? Is it to American ideals, principles, Liberty? Alternatively, do they lie with an individual who has convinced you the tyranny you help perpetrate is a necessary evil?

Perhaps for many of you within the agency, it is easy to become detached from the obvious usurpation of our liberties as the “Black Widow” scans through lines of meta-data deep within your agency’s headquarters. No matter how it has happened or if you knew the full ramifications thereof, you must stop obeying what you know to be wrong. You must resist any unlawful orders given to you, as your supreme duty is to the Constitution, not an order.

In closing, if when you took the job at the NSA you did so out of a love for this country and a desire to help protect America from harm, please reaffirm that ideal within yourself. Please know that the agency you work for is using this desire for its own motivation. The greatest threat to a free nation is a government, which respects not the liberty it professes to defend.

Cordially,

Allison Bricker

Source(s): ¹Memorandum of October 24, 1952, President Truman • ²National Archives – Executive Order 12333–United States intelligence activities • ³Video -Michael Hayden: “probable cause” is not in the 4th Amendment • ⁴New York Times “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts” • ⁵MSNBC – Countdown with Keith Olberman, Interview with former NSA analyst Russell Tice 01/21/2009 • ⁶Pakistan daily “Barack Obama’s ‘Black Widow’ : The Super Spy Computer

Allison Bricker

Dr. Paul spoke yesterday to Bloomberg Television about the pending nomination of New York FEDERAL RESERVE Bank President, Timothy Geithner’s Senate confirmation as Secretary of Treasury. It appears that regardless of the fact that Tim Geithner failed to pay $34,000 in taxes, he will indeed become the “purser in chief” over our tax dollars. The following video also features the debut of our new editorial video crawl. We hope you find the crawl useful and look forward to any comments and/or suggestions you may have in how we may improve it further.

Joseph Marohl

I watched the inauguration yesterday on MSNBC. Thankfully, it was a snow day (so is today), my classes were canceled, and I didn’t have to justify the broadcast as integral to my British literature course (I couldn’t, wouldn’t, and would have then missed the broadcast, as my students would have, as well).

One thing stood out in MSNBC’s coverage of the formalities—the less than solemn reactions of the crowd, predominantly black, chanting “O-Ba-Ma” for the new President, and booing the departing President, breaking into the chorus of Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” at both his appearance on the stands and his exit. Something about MSNBC’s location made it easy for the masses’ vocalizations to all but drown out the network’s appointed color commentators. It didn’t seem that the dignitaries on the stand, including Obama and Bush, could even hear these rude outbursts, which sounded like the mindless self-expression of Super Bowl fans.

I’d say that 30% of me felt disapproval for the heckling, a bit less for the chanting in unison (matching, no doubt intentionally, the usual grunting braggadocio of “U-S-A U-S-A” at all kinds of events, from pro wrestling to Independence Day parades). It struck me—or less than a third of me—as unseemly, inappropriate to the cultural and political gravitas of the moment, which I felt was more elegantly served by the day’s scheduled program—Aretha Franklin’s stirring rendition of “America the Beautiful” (and the ornate black woman’s “church” hat she sported) and Joseph Lowery’s by turns transcendent and saucy closing prayer.

But 70% of me—the part that was thrilled to see Muntadhar al-Zeidi pitch his shoe at George W. Bush in Iraq, regretting only his bad aim—was right with the rowdiness—more liberated and democratic in spirit than the babble of MSNBC commentators who tried to cast the proceedings in the light of Washington tradition and fetishistic awe for what they described as America’s one concession to “royal” pomp and ceremony.

To my mind, Bush deserved to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of DC on a rail. In this light, a little jeering, probably not even audible to the arrogant asshole, is comparably civil and gracious. Further, I hope the fact that Bush gave no last-minute pardons for persons chargeable with war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan (including himself and Dick Cheney, I assume) means that trials may indeed occur during the Obama Presidency (I have my doubts, though).

Rowdiness is a particular affect of American democracy, from the wild and wooly West to rock’n’roll to student sit-ins in the 1960s. (Unfortunately, other examples include the lynchings, fraternity hazings, and gang banging.) I hope the Obama election is the first of many, hopefully stronger waves of renewed democracy in American life and politics—and I hope no less that it will be joined with a respect for rational argument and variety of opinion that Obama himself likes to talk about.

We’ll see.

That said, the other thing that stood out in MSNBC’s coverage was the calculated (it seemed obvious to me) posing of individuals and small groups within the historic mass of witnesses to the occasion. The cameras focused on beaming faces—some with toothy, unaffected smiles, others modeling themselves on Old Masters’ paintings of beatific saints at the moment of epiphany—and, with irritating frequency, weeping faces. Now I have to admit that I wept practically nonstop through the whole hour-long program, moved in part by the historic moment of acquiring a young black President, in part out of relief for seeing the Bush gang’s butts heading for the door, but, irrationally perhaps, I resented the network’s insistent use of cutaway shots of crowd reaction, which were the visual equivalent of a laugh track or melodramatic strings designed to telegraph “appropriate” emotional responses to the event. For that reason, in retrospect, I wish I had watched the inauguration on C-SPAN, with minimal pathos (or so I imagine).

I have not watched any of the subsequent replaying of and commentary on the inauguration … by design. Having watched the event once through is enough. The tendency of news media (particularly television) to replay such occasions ad nauseum tends to dull feeling and discourage thinking. (Admittedly, blogging about the event is subject to the same charge, though I’d hasten to point out crucial distinctions—such as the difficulty of filtering the barrage of television noise compared to the act of will involved in choosing whether or not to read this blog.)

Weeping, cheering Obama, and booing Bush aside, the nation now has serious issues to face and problems to solve—as Obama’s speech tried to emphasize. Issues and problems require disciplined thinking more than heartfelt emoting. They also require resolve, not just the heat of a moment. But without feeling, even a feeling of outrage at Bush’s epic betrayals, without a sense of bonding with fellow Americans and with the whole world of humanity, all we’d have of liberty and democracy would be bloodless documents and marble monuments.

I don’t think Thomas Jefferson himself would mind if twenty-first-century American democracy included a bit more of the spirit of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” and a little less unblinking, unthinking “Hail to the Chief.”

Allison Bricker

The Smoking Argus Daily spoke with Mr. Bob Schulz, Chairman of the “We the People Foundation“. Many may recall Mr. Schulz and the organization taking out full-page advertisements in USA Today at the turn of the millennium protesting the legality of the Income Tax.

Since then, the organization and its members have submitted several Petitions for Redress to Congress¹, the President, and the Supreme Court. All have been ignored, refused, or entirely dismissed by the courts. Thus, 2009 finds Mr. Schulz traveling the country driving from city to city calling for the formation of a formal Continental Congress.

The plan calls for the selection of three delegates from each of the fifty states, with nominations submitted via their website and confirmed at state level nominating conventions². Mr. Schulz also explained to me that unlike the 1st Continental Congress which met secretly, the Continental Congress of 2009 will be streamed live over the internet for the world to bear witness. When asked about the prospect of not reaching a quorum, Mr. Schulz replied confidently that with such resounding resentment towards the Federal government across the nation, attaining full representation would be in no way a problem.

Whereas a lack of representation may not be a problem, his group has encountered some trouble with their initial choice of venue. Mr. Schulz originally desired for the event to take place at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, just down from Independence Hall. However, according to Mr. Schulz when he called to wire the $14,000 Dollar deposit and finalize the contract in order to secure the facility for the first two weeks, the National Constitution Center Sales Associate began changing the terms of the proposal.

This reporter attempted to speak with the sales associate in question at the National Constitution Center, but my request was denied. The women who answered the phone stated she was the sales associate’s supervisor and thus “knew all about the incident in question.”

The supervisor, who refused to give her last name, and as such shall be referred to as “Supervisor Kelly”, first attempted to lay blame on Mr. Schulz for changing the dates from February to March. She then emphatically denied that the event’s function had anything whatsoever to do with the sudden unavailability. When asked to provide a quote for the sake of accuracy, Supervisor Kelly, finally figured out that I was from the press, (even though I identified myself at the onset of the call) immediately refused to answer any further questions, and instead attempted to direct me to the Center’s public relations department.

It is the hope of this blogger that we at The Smoking Argus Daily might be able to help facilitate a conversation between Mr. Schulz and Mr. Russell Means regarding a change of venue. Moving the location of the gathering to within the boundaries of the Republic of Lakotah is both closer to the geographic center of the continent³ and a land truly befitting of such a historic undertaking⁴.

During my interview with Mr. Schulz, when asked if he planned on using this solely as a publicity stunt where he would find himself as President and Director in Chief of the proceedings, he replied:

“I would love to see Ron Paul preside over it [Continental Congress 2009], I think he should resign… his seat in the House, I mean he’s done there, there is nothing more he can do there [in the House of Representatives], he has done a marvelous service for the country in waking up a lot of people to the message of freedom.”

Mr. Bob Schulz
Telephone Interview
January 20th, 2009

We also spoke in reference to the current economic crisis and how in this time of lost jobs and bailouts, what might a delegate to the Continental Congress expect to spend. Mr. Schulz indicated that according to figures based on lodging in Philadelphia coupled with the length of the meeting, delegates can expect an approximate cost of $7,000 Dollars to cover lodging and food. Regardless of the hefty price tag, Mr. Schulz reiterated that he expects a full house. He continued saying that the various state organizations through fund raising would help defray the costs per individual and that in some instances his organization would also work to help offset the direct cost to the delegates.

Mr. Schulz said that he hopes the Delegates will concentrate on pointing out clear violations of the Constitution, drafting a formal Redress of Grievances, and issuing a call for individuals and business to withhold all economic support/resources to the Federal government. He also made clear neither he nor the “We the People Foundation” is calling for violent overthrow and instead hoped to prevent any such necessity via this Continental Congress. Nevertheless, and with an air of pragmatism in his voice, Mr. Schulz acknowledged that there are only two possible reactions from government: they either stand down or clamp down.

For the sake of providing some comparative perspective, the 2nd Continental Congress drafted the infamous “Dickinson Olive Branch Petition”⁵ in the Summer of 1775. The petition requested King George the III repeal the “Coercive Acts” and make an honest effort towards reconciliation. However, the King’s return proclamation stated that the colonies were in a state of open rebellion and anyone who corresponded with or aided those in open rebellion to the crown would be tried for treason.

Shortly thereafter, Dr. Benjamin Franklin uttered the ominously witty words, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.” So perhaps before running off to begin your fund raising drive in hopes of becoming a delegate, it would be wise to ask yourself if you are ready to pledge your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor in such a historic endeavor, and if not, might I suggest staying home.

Source(s): ¹We the People Foundation – Petitions for Redress of Grievances • ² Continental Congress 2009 – January 19th, 2009 Update, Online Delegate Nomination Form • ³ United States Geological Survey “Elevations and Distances of the United States • ⁴ 2007 – Lakotah Unilateral Withdrawal • ⁵ Brown, Weldon A.; Empire or independence; A Study in the Failure of Reconciliation, Page 35, 1774-1783; Port Washington, N. Y., Kennikat Press; 1966, c1941