PoliticalAction.com Blog

Oh yes, those legislative busybody scanners are at it again, mandating that full body imaging x-ray devices be installed in every airport in the nation by 2013, under the illusory premise of increasing safety.

This is another unconstitutional tactic that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to, but that doesn’t bother Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) who introduced S. 3536, the Securing Aircraft From Explosives Responsibly: Advanced Imaging Recognition Act of 2010, (SAFER AIR Act). “To enhance aviation security and protect personal privacy, and for other purposes,” is the leading line of the SAFE AIR bill text.

The goal of the bill must be “for other purposes,” because there will be no personal privacy when more and more travelers, both adults and children, are singled out for an extra security check that is in reality a revealing sneak peek at their anatomy, minus their clothes. Spending millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on more machines will do little to “enhance aviation security,” either, as it as already been established that the Detroit bomber’s explosives would not have been detected by such a machine, and even firecrackers have been missed.

The facts remain the same: Having a complete stranger view your almost-naked body is a violation of your privacy and civil rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. Adult and child images have been saved on these machines, even though DHS policy already forbids such practices. A weak reiteration of this policy in new legislation will have zero effect in curbing existing abuses and securing these images that are recorded and stored in the machines — machines that also have the ability to transfer those images at the click of a button. And transfer them they will, between themselves, as it says in the text of the bill:
“An image produced using advanced imaging technology that shows personal or nonstandardized images shall be transferred using a secure connection to a location that enables an employee of the Department of Homeland Security to view the image without risking the exposure of the image to the public.”

There is also the question of health concerns over the radiation exposure, especially for frequent fliers, or anyone with medical problems, prostheses, etc.

Oh sure, the bill contains pathetic attempts to include privacy clauses. One section forbids TSA personnel from having cameras near the machinery, but they really wouldn’t need this precaution because apparently the screeners are adept at saving and transferring nude images generated by these devices, having practiced on 35,000 of them already. Passengers specially picked for extra attention can always opt out of the machine scanning and instead choose the ever popular personal groping session by a person of the same sex, if one is available.

Best thing to do with this legislation is contact your senators and tell them to throw out S. 3536 when it comes before them for the sake of real privacy, health, safety, and freedom.

Currently S. 3536 sits in the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. Urging the committee members to drop the legislation now would save a lot of time and trouble down the road.

Thanks,

Your friends at The John Birch Society

Texas Straight Talk
Rep. Ron Paul (R) – TX 14

Last week the National Bureau of Economic Research published a report on the effect of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq that confirmed what critics of our foreign policy had been saying for years. The killing of civilians, although unintentional, angers other civilians and prompts them to seek revenge. This should be self-evident. The Central Intelligence Agency has long acknowledged and analyzed the concept blowback in our foreign policy.

It still amazes me that so many think that attacks against our soldiers occupying hostile foreign lands are motivated by hatred toward our system of government at home, or by the religion of the attackers. In fact, most of the anger toward us is rooted in reactions towards seeing their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and other loved ones, being killed by a foreign army. No matter our intention, the violence of our militarism in foreign lands causes those residents to seek revenge if innocents are killed. One does not have to be a Muslim to react this way – just human.

Our battle in Afghanistan resembles the battle against the many-headed Hydra monster in Greek mythology. According to former General Stanley McChrystal’s so-called insurgent math, for every insurgent killed, ten more insurgents are created by the collateral damage to civilians. Every coalition attack leads to six retaliatory attacks against our troops within the following six weeks, according to the NBER report. These retaliatory attacks must then be acted on by our troops, leading to still more attacks, and so it goes. Violence begets more violence. Eventually more and more Afghanis will view American troops with hostility and seek revenge for the deaths of a loved one. Meanwhile we are bleeding ourselves dry militarily and economically.

Some say if we leave, the Taliban will be strengthened. However, those who make that claim ignore the numerous ways our interventionist foreign policy has strengthened groups like the Taliban over the years. I have already pointed out how we serve as excellent recruiters for them by killing civilians. Last week I pointed out how our foreign aid to Pakistan specifically makes it into the Taliban’s coffers. And of course we provided the Taliban with aid and resources in the 1980s when they were our strategic allies against the Soviet Union.

For example, our CIA supplied them with stinger missiles to use against the Soviets, which are strikingly similar to the ones now allegedly used against us on the same battlefield according to the Wikileaks documents. As usual, our friends have a funny way of turning against us. Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein are also prime examples. Yet Congress never seems to acknowledge the blowback that results from our interventionism of the past.

Our war against the Taliban is going about as well as our War on Drugs or our War on Poverty, or any of our government’s wars. They all tend to create more of the thing they purport to eradicate, thereby dodging any excuse to draw down and come to an end. It is hard to image even winning anything this way. We have done enough damage in Afghanistan, both to the Afghan people and to ourselves. It’s time to reevaluate the situation. It’s time to come home.

From an email today from John Dennis:

We took a major step on the road to defeating Nancy Pelosi. Thanks to your support I am the official Republican nominee taking on Nancy Pelosi for her congressional seat this November. I am honored to be one of the few Liberty candidates to have won a Republican primary.

Our opponent couldn’t be more infamous, reviled or polarizing. Nancy Pelosi has become the symbol of unconstitutional stimulus schemes, baliouts, nationalized healthcare programs, and now an ever growing undeclared war in Afghanistan.

With your support I continue to stand against these policies and will take the debate directly to and against the current Speaker of the House. Together we can retire Nancy Pelosi this November and begin restoring our Constitution.

We have made great strides since winning the Primary! Our campaign has hired a campaign manager and a communications director, we have taken on new fundraisers and this week we are opening a brand new Headquarters. Our team is also putting the finishing touches on new branding, web and advertising campaigns.

In order to stock up Headquarters with yard signs, push cards, t-shirts, bumper stickers and other volunteer materials we are having a Money Blast TODAY!

Can you make a contribution of $20 in order to help us purchase these promotional materials?

As Pelosi’s approval rating continues to plummet our political capital and momentum is on the rise. Nancy Pelosi must be retired; now is the time, I am the candidate, you are the resistance!

Stay tuned to our campaign as we continue to roll out new and exciting initiatives. I look forward to working with you over the next three months.

In Liberty,
John Dennis

Ron’s Right Again, As Usual:

Texas Straight Talk
Rep. Ron Paul (R) – TX 14

I have often spoken about the excessive size of government, and most recently how waste and inefficiency needs to be eliminated from our military budget. Our foreign policy is not only bankrupting us, but actively creating and antagonizing enemies of the United States, and compromising our national security. Spending more and adding more programs and initiatives does not improve things for us; it makes them much much worse. This applies to more than just the military budget.

Recently the Washington Post ran an extensive report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the bloated intelligence community. They found that an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. Just what are all these people up to? By my calculation this is about 11,000 intelligence workers per al Qaeda member in Afghanistan. This also begs the question – if close to 1 million people are authorized to know top secrets, how closely guarded are these secrets?

They also found that since the September 11 attacks, some 17 million square feet of building space has been built or is being built to accommodate the 250 percent expansion of intelligence organizations. Intelligence work is now done by some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private contracting companies in about 10,000 locations in the United States.

The former Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, has asserted that US intelligence now has the authority to target American citizens for assassination without charge or trial. How many of these resources are being devoted to spying on American citizens for nefarious reasons at home rather than targeting foreign enemies abroad?

It has been pointed out how much information we had about the impending attacks on 9/11, but because of layers upon layers of bureaucratic inefficiencies, our intelligence community was unable to act meaningfully on that information. Obviously we needed drastic change. But it was pretty clear that we did not need more bureaucracy, more confusion, more expenditures and more government.

It is even claimed by some leaders that the intelligence community has grown this way by design; that it is advantageous to have more than one set of eyes looking at the same information. With this logic, is there any number of intelligence employees at which we achieve diminishing returns? Can there ever be too many cooks in the kitchen, in their view?

Are there any problems at all that the government wouldn’t attempt to solve by throwing more money at them? Even now, the government is trying to solve our economic problems related to too much government spending and debt, with more government spending and debt.

The problem with our intelligence community before 9/11 was not an inability to collect information. Therefore, the post-September 11 build-up of the surveillance state does nothing to enhance safety. Instead what Americans have gotten in return for the billions of tax dollars spent on security is a surveillance state that reads our e-mails, wiretaps us without warrants, and strip searches grandmothers at airports. This is yet another instance in which Americans would be safer, richer and freer if our government would simply look to the Constitution and respect the boundaries it has set.

Nothing else needs said!

Texas Straight Talk – A weekly column
Rep. Ron Paul (R) – TX 14

Lately many have characterized this administration as socialist, or having strong socialist leanings. I differ with this characterization. This is not to say Mr. Obama believes in free-markets by any means. On the contrary, he has done and said much that demonstrates his fundamental misunderstanding and hostility towards the truly free market. But a closer, honest examination of his policies and actions in office reveals that, much like the previous administration, he is very much a corporatist. This in many ways can be more insidious and worse than being an outright socialist.

Socialism is a system where the government directly owns and manages businesses. Corporatism is a system where businesses are nominally in private hands, but are in fact controlled by the government. In a corporatist state, government officials often act in collusion with their favored business interests to design polices that give those interests a monopoly position, to the detriment of both competitors and consumers.

A careful examination of the policies pursued by the Obama administration and his allies in Congress shows that their agenda is corporatist. For example, the health care bill that recently passed does not establish a Canadian-style government-run single payer health care system. Instead, it relies on mandates forcing every American to purchase private health insurance or pay a fine. It also includes subsidies for low-income Americans and government-run health care “exchanges”. Contrary to the claims of the proponents of the health care bill, large insurance and pharmaceutical companies were enthusiastic supporters of many provisions of this legislation because they knew in the end their bottom lines would be enriched by Obamacare.

Similarly, Obama’s “cap-and-trade” legislation provides subsidies and specials privileges to large businesses that engage in “carbon trading.” This is why large corporations, such as General Electric support cap-and-trade.

To call the President a corporatist is not to soft-pedal criticism of his administration. It is merely a more accurate description of the President’s agenda.

When he is a called a socialist, the President and his defenders can easily deflect that charge by pointing out that the historical meaning of socialism is government ownership of industry; under the President’s policies, industry remains in nominally private hands. Using the more accurate term – corporatism – forces the President to defend his policies that increase government control of private industries and expand de facto subsidies to big businesses. This also promotes the understanding that though the current system may not be pure socialism, neither is it free-market since government controls the private sector through taxes, regulations, and subsidies, and has done so for decades.

Using precise terms can prevent future statists from successfully blaming the inevitable failure of their programs on the remnants of the free market that are still allowed to exist. We must not allow the disastrous results of corporatism to be ascribed incorrectly to free market capitalism or used as a justification for more government expansion. Most importantly, we must learn what freedom really is and educate others on how infringements on our economic liberties caused our economic woes in the first place. Government is the problem; it cannot be the solution.

Texas Straight Talk – A Weekly Column
Rep. Ron Paul (R) – TX 14

Last week I introduced a very important piece of legislation that I hope will gain as much or more support as my Audit the Fed bill. HR 4995, the End the Mandate Act will repeal provisions of the newly passed health insurance reform bill that gives the government the power to force Americans to purchase government-approved health insurance.

The whole bill is rotten, but this provision especially is a blatant violation of the Constitution. Defenders claim the Congress’s constitutional authority to regulate “interstate commerce” gives it the power to do this. However, as Judge Andrew Napolitano and other distinguished legal scholars and commentators have pointed out, even the broadest definition of “regulating interstate commerce” cannot reasonably encompass forcing Americans to engage in commerce by purchasing health insurance. Not only is it unconstitutional; it is a violation of the basic freedom to make our own decisions regarding how best to meet the health care needs of ourselves and our families.

The new law requires Americans to have what is defined as “minimum essential coverage.” Some people may claim that the requirement to have “minimal essential coverage” does not impose an unreasonable burden on Americans. There are two problems with this claim. First, the very imposition of a health insurance mandate, no matter how “minimal,” violates the principles of individual liberty upon which this country was founded.

Second, the mandate is unlikely to remain “minimal” for long. The experience of states that allow their legislatures to mandate what benefits health insurance plans must cover has shown that politicizing health insurance inevitably makes it more expensive. As the cost of government-mandated health insurance rises, Congress will likely respond by increasing subsidies for more and more Americans, adding astronomically to our debt burden. An insurance mandate undermines the entire principle of what insurance is supposed to measure – risk.

Another likely response to rising costs is the imposition of price controls on medical treatments, and limits on what procedures and treatments mandatory insurance will have to reimburse. This is happening in other countries where government is intrinsically involved in these decisions and people suffer and die because of it.

This will only increase the bottom line of the very insurers the legislation was supposed to control. Meanwhile, alternate methods of healthcare delivery and financing, such as concierge doctors, alternative medicine, or physician owned hospitals will be greatly harmed, if not put out of business altogether, when the entire country is forced into the insurance model. It will be difficult for families to come up with extra money to pay for alternate healthcare of their choice when their budget has been squeezed by this mandate to buy insurance. This will in turn reduce competition for healthcare dollars. Health insurers, like many other corporations in other industries, have now used the legislative process anti-competitively to corner the healthcare market. Instead of calling this socialized medicine, we should call it corporatized medicine, since the reform is to force us all into being customers of these corporations, whether we like it or not.

Congress made a grave error by forcing all Americans to purchase health insurance. The mandate violates fundamental principles of individual liberty, and will lead to further government involvement in health care. It is time for legislation that fights back for the freedom of the people on this issue. It is time to End the Mandate.

Peter Schiff Youtube: Why Obamacare is unconstitutional. Why the war on drugs is illegal.