By John Pugsley

Driving from California to East Texas, my daughter and grandson were 90 miles into the Lone Star state when traffic was stopped at a road block just outside the little town of Sierra Blanca.

Drug-sniffing dogs worked down the line of cars. Under treatment for a medical condition for which her California doctor prescribed medical marijuana, my daughter had a small amount in her luggage in the trunk. The dogs immediately sniffed it. She showed the police her medical authorization, but California law didn’t apply in Texas. She and my grandson were arrested, taken to jail and put into a holding tank with a dozen or more men and women who had been arrested for the same crime.

A few days later, singer Willie Nelson was arrested at that same checkpoint. My daughter was fined $550. Perhaps Willie got off just signing a few autographs.

A short time later my grandson and I drove back to California. A dozen or so miles after crossing into California, we were suddenly funneled into another roadblock … only this time it was manned by half a dozen armed Border Patrol agents.

We were asked to state our citizenship, and then carefully scrutinized by an unsmiling officer who finally waved us through.

An even more sobering surprise awaited us…

We were stopped at a second roadblock 20 miles later … and yet again 15 miles after that. Three roadblocks between the California border and San Diego!

Never in six decades of driving in the United States had I ever experienced being stopped at even one checkpoint. My only prior experience was in Nicaragua in 1956 when that country was under the strong-arm dictatorial rule of Anastasio Somoza. Every few kilometers my companions and I were stopped by armed soldiers, questioned and required to show passports. We were all grateful to be from the “land of the free,” where such things couldn’t happen…

The rise of checkpoints in America, as well as the indignities we suffer at the hands of airport TSA agents, is merely outward evidence of a much deeper net being cast around individual liberty.

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By Chris Hedges

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

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The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act just passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate and has the potential to change the U.S. food industry more than any other law ever passed by the U.S. Congress.

In the name of “food safety”, the U.S. government would be given an iron grip over the production, transportation and sale of all food in the United States. Hordes of small food producers and organic farmers could potentially be put out of business. If this bill becomes law, the freedom to grow what you want, eat what you want and to share food from your gardens with your neighbors could be greatly curtailed. It would give the FDA unprecedented discretion to regulate U.S. food production.

Because of how vaguely it is written and because of how much discretion it gives to the FDA, it is potentially a very, very dangerous law.

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By Gene Healy

What’s surprising about Washington’s ongoing anti-WikiLeaks conniption isn’t what the purloined cables disclose about American foreign policy. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates admits that, despite a few “awkward” exposures, the consequences for U.S. national security will be “fairly modest.”

No, what’s really telling is how Washington’s political class has reacted to WikiLeaks. As they see it, anyone who threatens to undermine government secrecy is morally equivalent to Osama bin Laden.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., says that if existing laws can’t stop WikiLeaks, “we need to change the law,” dammit, because the organization’s founder, international man of mystery Julian Assange, is a “high-tech terrorist.”

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By Meredith Jessup

Type in a search of “ObamaCare” into Google — the world’s most popular search engine — and the results may surprise you. According to Politico’s Ben Smith, the Obama administration has purchased top billing to divert internet surfers away from antagonist websites to a new “sponsored link” — the Department of Health and Human Service’s (HHS) healthcare.gov:

“We are using a bunch of search term[s] to help point people to HealthCare.gov. Part of our online efforts to help get accurate information to people about the new law (i.e. also use Facebook, Twitter, blogs and webcasts),” an HHS official confirmed by e-mail.

The ad buy represents a kind of recognition that the Administration has, to a degree, lost a battle over defining its terms, and that “ObamaCare” — coined and used largely by detractors of the plan — is in wide circulation. A search for the term on Google yields 2.5 million results.

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By Warner Todd Huston

111 companies and organizations were granted waivers by Obama’s Dept. of Health and Human Services so that they could get out of having to comply with Obamacare and unions were particularly well rewarded by the HHS with these waivers.

Interestingly, there was no great announcement of these waivers issued to the press. The HHS buried the waiver announcement six layers deep on its webpage and posted them on Friday when they imagined no one would notice. It’s a typical Friday evening document dump so common when an administration wants to avoid the prying eyes of the people. So much for the “most transparent administration in history,” eh?

One thing is sure about these waivers. Obama rewarded his union pals quite well.

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By Julian Assange

Wikileaks deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

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By B.T.

Surviving isn’t so much about the equipment you have or don’t have, it’s going to boil down to the attitude you possess. Not the possessions. Preparedness is an attitude, not an inventory. If we are all to wait until the last moment to make the necessary changes in our lives, we’ll be grossly unprepared. I no longer believe that it’s a matter of if, but when the SHTF.

I don’t believe I’m just going to wake up one day and hear it on the radio, grab my bug-out-bag, my M1A and jump in my fully outfitted, fully fueled and prepped rig with a secured trailer full of equipment, call my survival squad buddies and make some Mad Max convoy run to our distant retreat all fully armed and stocked with the necessities of the apocalypse, fending off the Golden Horde with superior firepower while at the same time hastily planting seeds and sending out missions to establish a perimeter.

I thoroughly believe the beginning of the end will come more like a thief in the night, like some viral disease that cripples you over time.

Being prepared is all fine and dandy, but if you are thinking of it like some apocalyptic insurance policy, that you’ll just activate when the moment is upon us, then the attitude is all wrong. The powers that be have always inflicted the ills of their master plan and fiscal folly upon us over an extended period of time, the frog in the hot water analogy. This will be no different and don’t think it won’t.

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By Lew Rockwell

Opt Out should be our new motto.

Civil disobedience is heroic and effective, but all governments depend on the consent of the governed. We can withdraw our consent. We can Opt Out of the State.

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By Melissa Clouthier

I have never written this anecdote because, well, it happened pre-blogging and shortly post-9/11. It was August of 2002 and we were traveling up to Michigan for a family reunion. My autistic son was a toddler, my daughter an infant in arms.

Northwest Airlines and Continental merged around that time and our tickets merged legs of the trip. Part Continental and part Northwest Airlines caused us problems. Even at the airline checkin counter, the agents had trouble printing the boarding passes.

Time ticked by and getting through security became more of an issue because the ticketing agents took so long to figure things out. We were going to miss our flight.

So, I told my husband to go ahead and try to get the plane to wait. That left me to go through security with a stroller, a baby, and an autistic toddler who wandered.

The TSA didn’t like the split ticket and selected me and my children (but interestingly not my husband) for full pat-downs.

…

I told the TSA agent,”If something happens to my children, I will come after you.”

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By Chuck Baldwin

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies.”

I would argue that we, like our patriot forebears, have also endured “patient sufferance.” For at least a half-century, we have patiently endured the erosion and abridgment of our freedoms and liberties. We have watched the federal government become an overbearing and meddlesome Nanny State that pokes its nose and sticks its fingers in virtually everything we do. We cannot drive a car, buy a gun, or even flush a toilet without Big Brother’s permission. We are taxed, regulated, and snooped-on from the time we are born to the day we die. And then after we are dead, we are taxed again.

In the same way that Jefferson and Company patiently suffered up until that shot was fired that was heard around the world, we who love freedom today are likewise patiently suffering “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” In fact, I would even dare say that these States United have become a boiling caldron of justifiable frustration and even anger.

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By Ian Mathis

“The Social Security Trust Fund is misnamed. It cannot be trusted, and it is not funded.”

–Former US Comptroller General David Walker, July 2010.

If David Walker – who was essentially the US government’s accountant from 1998-2008 – can make jokes like that about Social Security, we’re in trouble. Indeed, as we noted in our essay “The End of Social Security as We Know It”, the Social Security Trust recently began paying out more than it is taking in. Over the next 75 years, the Fund will require an additional $5.4 trillion to pay for scheduled benefits.

Given the deplorable fiscal condition of the Social Security Trust Fund, some forward-looking Americans are asking, “Why can’t I just opt out?” Even middle-aged members of the Baby Boom generation are wondering if there will be any Social Security left for them when the time comes…and if they wouldn’t be better off abandoning the government’s mandatory retirement plan.

So can you opt out? In a word, yes.

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By Nelson Hultberg

More and more Americans today are coming to understand the terrible truth about our Federal Government — that it seeks to dominate us as citizens, to mold us into a society of dutiful Stepford Wives totally beholden to the wishes of elite politicians, bureaucrats and bankers. Those who study history, independent of the public school system, understand that this state aggrandizement process has been under way for the past 100 years in America in one form or another, and that it is taking place because too many of our citizens sanction such dictatorial usurpation and actually work diligently for its implementation.

This process has resulted in the lion’s share of our earnings being annually confiscated by these governmental elites and then redistributed to despicable projects of waste and war to further their dream of world collectivism. It has led to the shocking debasement of our currency and an endless escalation in the cost of staying alive. It has brought about the degeneration of our economy from a robust engine of industry and personal self-reliance to an effete conglomeration of bloated consumers subsisting on financial gimmickry and debt addiction. As a result, America, once a proud land of muscular factories and productive people, has become a stuporous society of shopping malls and welfare crybabies.

Why this process is taking place is one of the most disheartening questions in all of history. What follows is an attempt to show why and how it is unfolding. There are other reasons as to “why and how” than the ones given here. Tyranny’s evolution is always a complex process with many forces coalescing to bring about freedom’s demise. This essay, however, is a look into the two most important of those forces — ideas and money

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By Michael Boldin

There are a few core beliefs that guide me in everything I do as the founder of the Tenth Amendment Center

1. Rights are not “granted” to us by the government — they are ours by our very nature, by our birthright.
2. ALL just political authority is derived from the people — and government exists solely with our consent!
3. We the people of the several states created the federal government — not the other way around!
4. The Tenth Amendment defines the total scope of federal power as being that which has been delegated by the people to the federal government in the Constitution — and nothing more.
5. The People of each State have the sole and exclusive right and power to govern themselves in all areas not delegated to their government.
6. A Government without limits IS A TYRANNY!
7. When Congress enacts laws and regulations that are not made in Pursuance of the powers enumerated in the Constitution, the People are not bound to obey them.

These seven items — are what establish the proper role of government under the constitution. But sadly, an honest reading of the constitution as the founders and ratifiers gave it to us makes clear that MOST of what D.C does today is NOT authorized by the constitution.

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By Intuition

I hold these truths to be self-evident: that I own my body, life, and all products of my labor; that no other person has any claim on such things absent my informed voluntary consent; that I have the right to defend myself against any and all usurpations of my self-ownership by using any force as may be necessary; and that any and all instances where violence is initiated are abjectly immoral in civilized society.

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By Dan Steward

We are told at a young age that we should be seen and not heard. It is constantly, and even worse, surreptitiously thrust into the innermost depths of our skulls that all of us should just sit down, shut up and just take it. We supposedly don’t matter to those obsessed with control over others, who feel that they may become big, by giving their victims the notion that they are all so very small.

Persons hidden far and away in a land separated from us appear to be the ones making all the important decisions. Persons who mistakenly lay claim to knowing what our needs are are busy making the choices for us so we need not busy our pretty little heads about it further. Sure there’s the scripted questions from the Town Halls that the crafty politicos stage for us. Sadly their meeting houses are just a slick mirage to hide their contempt for you.

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It is often said that “we do not negotiate with terrorists.” Normally, this platitude is propagated by government officials to help whip up a sort of nationalistic frenzy in the populace. Its meaning is almost always hollow, however, as governments routinely bribe, support, or otherwise acquiesce to terrorist organizations. Nor is it lost on the anarchists that government itself is the greatest terrorist organization in existence.

The theory, though, against negotiating with terrorists is sound. What we relinquish to the state today only helps to make it stronger. Furthermore, when a terrorist organization’s threats are succumbed to the natural result is the unintended consequence of encouraging greater and more frequent threats. When an individual submits to a government edict or tax in the attempt to avoid a more barbarous response, the end result is the transfer of state aggression to another unfortunate individual in lieu of oneself.

The situation we find ourselves in today is one where previous generations have kicked the can instead of slaying the beast. Now this parasite, known as the state, has grown so large that it will kill the host, the productive class, unless it is stopped.

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By Ernest S. Christian and Gary A. Robbins

The Internet is a large-scale version of the “Committees of Correspondence” that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington’s failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.

People are asking, “Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?”

Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency.

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By John Whitehead

Democratic government is breaking down, and we are reaching a crisis point in American society. Increasingly, America resembles a police state. Everywhere we go, we are watched as the government amasses massive data files on us. We are plagued by a faltering economy and a monstrous financial deficit that threatens to bankrupt the country.

Black oil continues to poison the Gulf, devastating the environment and those who depend on it for their livelihood. Overtaxed Americans are losing their jobs and homes. Small businesses are preparing to deal with the bureaucratic nightmare of red tape arising from Congress’ health reform legislation. State governments are struggling to remain operational. Partisan politics has put a stranglehold on any real hope for governmental reform. The Supreme Court has adopted a pro-business, pro-government, pro-political correctness mindset that bodes ill for individual freedom. And to top it all off, our elected representatives in Washington DC are jetting around at taxpayer expense, enjoying perks the likes of which the average American will never experience.

This is more serious than a government that is simply malfunctioning. These are symptoms of a government that is out of control, and a government out of control is one that won’t listen to its people.

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By Chuck Baldwin

The Tea Party in Utah flexed its muscle over the weekend and booted longtime establishment Republican senator, Bob Bennett, from office. Hooray! (Now, Arizona, please do America a favor and show John McCain the door!) Unfortunately, Tea Party activists were unsuccessful in Indiana, as longtime establishment Republican, Dan Coats, defeated the principled patriot, John Hostettler. Boo!

Predictably, mainstream Republican spokesmen are lamenting Bennett’s ouster, saying Bennett was a true conservative, touting an 80% ranking in the American Conservative Union (ACU) index. However, the ACU index is completely irrelevant to the true measure of a congressman’s fidelity to constitutional government. The index that people should pay attention to is the Freedom Index (formerly called the Conservative Index) at The New American magazine. This index is far and away more accurate in determining a congressman or senator’s fidelity to limited government. In this index, Bennett’s latest rating was a pathetic 50.

Bennett needed to go; the good people of Utah did America a great favor by showing him the door. I trust and pray that this is an indication of how the November elections will fare.

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