by Edgar J. Steele
April 15, 2009
"Between the silence of the mountains
"And the crashing of the sea
"There lies a land I once lived in
"And she's waiting there for me."
--- Moody Blues, Question, from A Question of Balance (Justin Hayward, 1970)
Audio files of Idaho - You Can See New America From Here: |
| 4-8-09 - Christians? In America? mp3 audio 4-1-09 - Ed Gov, Not Fed Gov mp3 audio 3-25-09 - We're All Terrorists Now mp3 audio 3-18-09 - Second Annual State of the Revolution mp3 audio 3-11-09 - The Road to Hell is Paved with Bailout Money mp3 audio |
"The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority ... it is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people."
--- Frank Cobb, Editor, New York World (1920)
My name is Edgar J. Steele.
America is sick. No news there. Like a patient with a fever, America seems dazed and confused. She knows that there is something gravely wrong, but just can't quite seem to put her finger on the root cause.
We are way past the stage when rest and a little medication will help America's natural immune system to overcome her problems. As with a severely disease-ravaged body, the time has come for surgery. Just as a ruptured appendix will kill you, so will America's current malady kill her without radical surgery. We must excise the real problem.
Government is the Problem, not the Solution
And what, exactly, is the problem, you ask? Easy. Government. Federal government, in particular, though government at all levels has come to be part of the problem. Like a cancer left unchecked, the disease has metastasized to all parts of the body politic.
Today's "Tea Parties," held throughout America, merely are a symptom of America's disease, much as a patient's lunatic ravings are symptoms of an advanced fever. And, like the lunatic ravings of a fevered patient, these public meetings, protests and outcries will do little good. Petitions? A total waste of time.
Nor will the media do justice to the public protests. The media is part of the disease, you see. It is no accident that flagship newspapers throughout America are running aground and ceasing operations. They lost their way and stopped reporting the news, becoming mere parrots for establishment thinking. Little wonder that we stopped reading them. Less wonder that TV news has become a mere parody of its former self, becoming primarily entertainment for the masses of unfurrowed brows now populating America's vast wasteland.
However, like a patient slipping in and out of the grip of a mounting fever, there are pockets of lucidity apparent throughout America. The Tea Parties are symptoms of those lucid moments. More substantial, though, is the growing anti-Federal-overreaching sentiment being expressed in state legislatures, best exemplified by Idaho's recent sovereignty and anti-gun-confiscation legislation.
I rail against the bureaucratic and mindless nature of Idaho government at all levels, but the fact is that Idaho is light years ahead of such bastions of communism as California, Massachusetts and New York. Nor is it a coincidence that those three states are among the most financially troubled and corrupt states in the country.
Idaho - You Can See New America From Here
Idaho isn't ideal, by any stretch of the imagination. Idaho needs a major overhaul, beginning with the way in which she bows to Federal pressure. Idaho certainly isn't New America, but you can see New America from here.
Recently, I posed the following question to the primary list that receives these rants of mine: Should I seek the Constitution Party nomination for Governor of Idaho in the 2010 election? The response was overwhelming and uniformly positive. In fact, you were wildly supportive. What I didn't expect - what came as a real shock to me - was the high percentage of out-of-state respondents who stated that they would move to Idaho if I won the Governorship. A great many said they would move here if I simply ran, then offered to help in the campaign.
I have tried to respond to each and every one of those email replies, something I simply cannot normally do, because of the sheer quantity of them. Thank you so much for your outpouring of support. Know that I read your emails - all of them - every single week. Please understand that I simply cannot answer or acknowledge but a handful. Again, however, I read them all and they all have influence upon my thinking.
But it is the obvious yearning for real change that is apparent in the many hundreds (well over a thousand) of emails I received, particularly those who expressed a desire to move to Idaho. That desire for change is what elected Obama, of course. And that is what is beginning to sink his poll numbers, as America realizes that his rhetoric about change was simply that - rhetoric. I find it particularly ironic to listen to MSNBC news anchors report that Obama's poll numbers exceed 75% when MSNBC's own on-line poll clearly shows 60% of Americans disapproving or outright hating the man's performance as President.
Bush on Steroids
It is a relief to be rid of Bush, to be sure, but we still have the Bush mentality astride America. We still are in Iraq and we are there for good, too, as Obama's administration finally has admitted. Any Iraqi troop drawdown will be sent to Afghanistan, where we actually are expanding the war, not to mention north Pakistan where America now is conducting extensive bombing, as well. Gitmo still operates. The Bush doctrine of pre-emptive warfare lives on. Domestically, personal liberty shrinks daily while the Department of Homeland Security operates more and more like the new Gestapo.
Probably, it is just coincidence, but have you ever noticed: Rearrange the letters in the name "Barack Obama," drop a couple, add a few others and you end up with the phrase "George W. Bush on steroids." Coincidence? You be the judge.
SPENDING vs. spending
W's tax and spend has become TAX AND SPEND under Obama. We have gone beyond simply saddling future generations with debt to be repaid for our current profligacy. Now America has sailed into uncharted (for her) waters by assuming debt that clearly never can be repaid. Debt that will bankrupt America with even a nominal increase in interest rates, in fact.
Depression? Yes, this is a Depression, though they will not admit it until it becomes all too obvious to more than just a few of us. Now, however, we have laid the groundwork for inflation akin to that experienced by Germany between last century's major wars - what is known as Weimar inflation. In the process, America's entire middle class will be dropped down to the poverty level. We have no more than another three years, in my opinion, before the real financial troubles grip all of us.
You know this, of course. You have read my rants and, possibly, my book by now. You have read others', as well. You know what is coming, though you may yet have hope that the worst can be averted. It cannot. The time is past for normal measures. Now the time has come for major surgery.
Two Choices: Count 'em - Two!
We have two choices: revolution or secession. We cannot work within the system because the system has frozen us out and refuses to allow us back in. Our "elected" representatives view us with disdain and more than a little fear. Why else do you think they are strengthening the enabling legislation for the woefully-named Patriot Acts and, now, openly discussing gun registration and confiscation?
The Federal government is lost to us and running full force into the arms of the New World Order, per the orders of the real masters of America: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), composed of some of the most evil men and women ever to inhabit Washington, DC.
Why else do you think that CFR-member bankers are being bailed out right and left while we are left to flail hopelessly in an ever-rising tide of debt and regulation? Why else do you think that AIG, which still pays its executives million-dollar bonuses for failing, is given billions upon billions of our tax dollars, which it then dutifully funnels to the banks and congressional pension funds that it insures? Why else do you think that major corporations that should have gone under long ago are being shored up with your tax dollars? Not to save the workers' jobs, because our "leaders" certainly care nothing for them, but to save the banks and insurance companies who have propped up those failing corporations.
Just as Russia was looted late last century and left for dead, so is America now being looted - and by the same tribe of people. America will be left just as hollowed out as was Russia, unless we do something about it and do it quickly.
I sometimes come in for criticism for not advocating revolution in America, which is something that our founding fathers, if alive today, certainly would foment. I like to visualize George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine magically transported to this time, then setting off for Washington, DC in a red Cadillac convertible with a road map in one hand and a bazooka in the other. However, I cannot espouse violent revolution, folks. First, it goes against my basic, non-violent nature. Second, it is illegal and would get me arrested in a heartbeat. Just how much good would I be able to accomplish from a jail cell?
Used to be, I advocated change within the system. Then, when it became apparent, during the Bush administration, that such change was impossible, I began to advocate preparing for the inevitable collapse, both financial and, possibly, militarily at the hands of those that we have offended internationally (which includes everybody else in the world by now). Picking up the pieces was my new strategy for New America, which I envisioned rising, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of a fallen America.
While I still believe in preparing for the worst, I have become hopeful of a new avenue: secession on a state-by-state basis. Call it wishful thinking, if you like, but secession still strikes me as a viable alternative to simply waiting for the coming apocalypse.
Yes, Lincoln seemed to foreclose the possibility of secession with his War of Northern Aggression (you may know it as the Civil War), wherein he oversaw the wholesale slaughter of brothers by brothers in pursuit of his unconstitutional objective of "preserving the Union," which didn't then deserve to be preserved, as proven by the manner in which the North manhandled the South during the period we laughingly call "The Reconstruction."
I submit that today's Union - today's America - has lost its legitimacy even moreso than did Lincoln's and I call for a modern wholesale secession by the various States now making up the United States. I call for this to be an orderly, lawful and peaceful secession. A non-violent revolution of a sort, in fact.
The United District of America
Just imagine, for a moment, the result if all 50 states were to secede at once, leaving the Federal government to preside over merely the District of Columbia. The states then could recall all of their men in uniform from wherever posted, seize all federal property within their boundaries and demand that all federal employees either throw in their lot with the state or move to the District of Columbia. There literally would be nothing the Federal government could do about its well-deserved predicament, particularly with its major tax revenue sources cut off.
Secession is Our Legal Right
The Constitution certainly has the legal basis for secession still in place: It resides within the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states and the people all "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states." You see, because secession is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution or its Amendments, such power resides still within the states themselves and the people. This is a crucial fact that we must keep in mind at all times.
Similarly, the legal precedent for secession is laid out in America's Declaration of Independence: "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government ... 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."
It is the utmost in irony that none other than Abraham Lincoln, who did more single-handed damage to the US Constitution than, even, George W. Bush, rose up in Congress in January 1848 before he became President and stated: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right – a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit." Mind you, Lincoln meant even down to neighborhoods being able to secede from the Union.
The US Constitution: a Breached Contract
View the Constitution as a contract between us, the States and the Federal government. The Federal government has breached that contract in more ways than I have hours left in my life in which to recount its transgressions against all of us, both individually and as States.
For example, though its duties are few, the Federal government simply refuses to perform many of them:
Rather than "provide for our common defense," our Federal government initiates foreign wars without provocation and without congressional declaration - wars that actually heighten the danger of our being attacked from without. Similarly, it refuses to protect our southern border and declines to protect us from the de facto invasion by countries to our south.
The Federal government has abdicated its responsibility to "coin money (and) regulate the value thereof" by delegating to a private, foreign-owned corporation (the Federal Reserve Bank) that duty, which has managed to steal 98 cents out of every dollar issued since its inception in 1913. This single failing is responsible for the current financial catastrophe now befalling America.
Rather than "provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the Militia...reserving to the States...the appointment of the officers and the authority of training the Militia," the Federal government has done its best to destroy anything resembling militias in America, preferring instead to implement an unconstitutional and permanent "standing army."
"The privilege of Habeas Corpus" repeatedly has been suspended in direct contravention of the US Constitution.
Our system of lobbying, campaign funding and proven election fraud on the part of officials has robbed us of our constitutional guarantee of a "republican form of government," accountable directly "to the people."
We have installed as President a person who is not "a natural born citizen" and, quite possibly, not even "a citizen of the United States," incredible as that may be to contemplate, let alone comprehend.
Previously, I have written at length as to how each and every single element of the Constitution's Bill of Rights has been abrogated or abridged by unconstitutional legislation, ultra vires judicial decisions and by executive fiat. Very little remains of the original ten Amendments comprising the Bill of Rights. In particular, the Tenth Amendment has been stripped of its mandate that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Remedies for a Breached Contract
I could go on almost endlessly, but the foregoing list alone more than comprises the "substantial breach of contract" required by the law before the non-breaching party to a contract may suspend its own performance and proceed to elect a legal or equitable remedy.
Under prevailing law, an innocent party has a choice of remedies that it may enforce against a breaching party: monetary damages (including punitive), rescission (and restitution), reformation and specific performance.
Specific performance seems foreclosed to us, as we have tried unsuccessfully, both in the courts and by the ballot box, to force the Federal government to perform its side of the bargain. Its response has been to further oppress us and to continue to refuse to fulfill its obligations under the contract.
Reformation, or a simple rewording of the breached contract, similarly seems foreclosed to us, as that would require an agreeing and capable breaching party, particularly since we are lacking the judicial authority to supervise and then enforce such a rewriting of our contract. I think we all will agree that the Federal government will be anything but agreeable to our demands for a reformation of our contract and we certainly will not agree to its being reworded to reflect the current reality of our arrangement.
That leaves to us monetary damages or rescission. Since the Federal government has no independent means to pay us our considerable damages, our only effective remedy left is that of rescission.
Rescission refers to the cancellation of a contract and the return of the contracting parties to their pre-contract status. That means secession, folks. We have only secession on a state-by-state basis available to us as a remedy for the substantial and egregious breach of contract that our Federal government has foisted upon all of us.
A couple of years ago, I wouldn't have thought it possible. I still think it is a long shot. But, the various states' rights, or "sovereignty" bills introduced in a variety of states lately makes me think that a building movement toward secession not only is likely, but inevitable. Idaho is a bit ahead of the curve in that regard, being one of the few bastions of individuality and free thinking left in these "United" States of America. I have a clear vision of what New America looks like. While Idaho does not yet even approach that vision, you can see New America from here.
Our Own Private Idaho
Thinking of moving someplace relatively independent and free thinking? There's New Hampshire, but it just killed its own states' rights bill and, besides, it is surrounded by states firmly in the grip of socialists and communists. There's Alaska and there is much to commend it. There's Montana. There are parts of Texas and North Carolina and Arkansas. From where I sit, though, there is little else.
Though I generally discourage others from moving to Idaho, so as to preserve its relative lack of population and pristine condition, these are unusual times. Therefore, I hereby issue a call to all who are seeking somewhere else to live within the United States - a place with greater freedom: consider Idaho. We need you, your independent nature and your open mind. Tough times are coming for all of America. Come to Idaho for the freedom - stay for the adventure.
New Idaho - you can see New America from here.
My name is Edgar J. Steele. Thanks for listening. Please visit my web site, www.NickelRant.com, for other messages just like this one.
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