What currently scares me so about Barack Hussain Obama are his generic public proclamations of proposed economic and political change, which, of course, were responsible, along with his teleprompter oratory, for 54 % of the electorate putting him dubiously in the White House (his eligibility is still suspect). Every reasonable citizen wants change that is for the better, but Obama's ready acceptance of, and apparent adoration for, the federal Executive Branch institutions that have created, and are still creating, the awful problems which the United States republic inexorably faces, politically and economically are very frightening. Shortly after being elected, President-Elect Obama made a statement to the media concerning, among other things, the Central Intelligence Agency and other quasi-government organizations, which need to be closely scrutinized in light of accurate historical facts, of which Obama should be cognizant. He said, as reported in a recent "Washington Post" article, that he "admires the past achievements of the CIA and considers it an honorable intelligence organization, that the Federal Reserve is essential to the financial security of the United States, and that the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tri-lateral Commission are indispensable to the American government. Well, concerning the history of the Company (the famous nickname of the CIA), there have been quite a few polices, or laws, created and implemented unilaterally by the Executive Branch, via the CIA, which were quietly and covertly authorized, and not legislated, by the Congresses which convened during the twenty-or-so years immediately following the Second World War. These de facto laws, if you want to call them that, were then and even now unknown to most citizens of the American republic during what was known as the Cold War. Even if you had been regularly sitting in the galleries of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives during open floor deliberations of proposed laws and resolutions, between 1946 and 1966, there were Senate and House bills decided in closed select committees (those comprising a few privileged senators, representatives, and "appointed" executive officers) which were never openly debated, nor voted-on and passed, by the assembled general congresses, but which determined U.S. domestic and foreign policy. In many cases these "laws" and policies were also totally unknown to most of the senators and representatives composing the general Senate and House of Representatives.
One of these clandestine policies which was concocted and operationally planned by the CIA, then secretly authorized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and, lastly, described generically to only a few senators then constituting the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as a project authorized by Presidential fiat, was "Operation Ajax," the 1953 covert CIA overthrow of the democratically chosen Iranian government and its very popular Prime Minister, and the subsequent installation of the Shah of Iran as the pro-Western Iranian leader, all for the control of Iranian oil. Why would I describe this unilateral Presidential fiat as de jure law?
Well, take for example a proposition that a particular day to be set-aside as a public holiday throughout the United States, so that government employees might be compensated for their time-off spent on such an occasion. A law creating the holiday must, supposedly, be legislated by Congress in order for it to be an official holiday. All of this government legislative formality, in the formation of a law, is considered essential in the creation of a mere holiday. Yet, a federal government agency, supposedly controlled directly by the Executive Branch, covertly plans, organizes, and implements the overthrow (with the help of British MI6) of a foreign democratically governed nation-state without the consent of the general Congress, and the act, in and of itself, is not considered law? Well, that's not quite all. A quasi-legal presidential executive order, which is disseminated openly, has the same "traditional" authority as that of a statute. And what is, such, a statute if not a law created by one person having legislative, executive, and judicial authority residing jointly in his hands? If you care to recall, the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, which was executed through Executive Order of Franklin Roosevelt and implemented by the FBI and the domestic offices of the OSS, which later became the CIA, was never questioned as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court until after the awful tragic damage, arising from the order, had been done. Then it was, subsequently, declared unconstitutional. The way executive orders got started was that the 1st Congress declined questioning an order, or fiat, from George Washington creating a federal mint for the coinage of U.S. money. That quasi-legal proclamation became some sort of precedent which might have prompted Abraham Lincoln, know as the compassionate dictator during the American Civil War, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which was also, later, declared an unconstitutional; but not until the damage to the republic was done.
Another historical example of the CIA's apparent authoritarian power over the U.S. Congress was Ronald Reagon's illicit Iran-Contra effort to sell arms to Iran for money to wage an illicit war in Central America; and the bombing of the Honduran Harbor by, and through, the planning and project implementation of CIA paramilitary operatives, under the direction of CIA Director Wild Bill Casey. During the intense Congressional investigation that shortly thereafter ensued, in the last half of Reagon's last term of office, the Iran-Contra scandal was brought out into the open, especially through the journalistic efforts of writer Bill Moyers with his book, "The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis." What seemed incredibly ludicrous during the televised investigation was the fact that Vice-President George H. Bush, Dubya's daddy, the former head of the CIA, claimed total ignorance of the Iran-Contra activities, and so did Ronald Reagon. The only major actual difference between "Operation Ajax," of the 1950s, and the covert CIA activities of the 1980s in Central America, was that "Operation Ajax" remained an illicitly protected government secret for many years, and the Iran-Contra Scandal became public knowledge rather quickly. Yet, both were obviously authorized by Presidential fiat, funded by a select mini-Congress and planned and carried-out by the CIA covert services. The fact the no powerful U.S. senators were formally indicted for duplicity in the Iran-Contra scandal does not mean that they were not directly involved, for political power has its direct benefits.
The most damning historical aspect about the CIA, which most ignorant citizens laughingly consider in retrospect, was that the 58,000+ dead American GIs, from the bloody 12 year ordeal in Vietnam, resulted from an undeclared war inculcated, planned, and administered by that essentially self-governing organization. During that time, from 1963 until 1975, military commanders in Vietnam, Generals Westmoreland and Abrams, took orders from CIA paramilitary spooks (speaking for the National Security Council and representing the White House) in the ongoing planning and deployment of high casualty operations. I-Corps and MAC-V, headquartered in Saigon, were essentially controlled by a few GS-15 paramilitary CIA spooks (directly linked to the National Security Council), not military personnel. These utterly despicable people, who succeeded in getting thousands of GIs killed through their arrogant hubris and ineptness, deceitfully wore the uniforms of Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps field commanders.
Presently, the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the, supposedly, controlling Department of Homeland Security collectively comprise an autonomous shadow government that does essentially what it wants to do, as allowed by the infamous Patriot Act; and, for some esoteric reason, are continually funded with open-ended congressional appropriations, multi-billions of dollars of tax money, of which the senators and representatives haven't any idea how it is actually being spent.
Mr. Obama should realize these facts, and that the CIA, and probably the NSA and DIA, have been permitted by a few powerful politicians to covertly establish, and to buy, corporations with tax money. Today, probably twelve multi-national, supposedly private, corporations (some listed on the stock exchanges) are producing profits, which are routinely used to fund the U.S. intelligence community's illicit covert interventions into the affairs of foreign nation-states, when tax dollars are not available. Would it be possible for Congress, at this late date, to de-authorize the vast far-reaching covert operations and connections of the CIA? Well, the popular movie, "Enemy of the State," which fictionally depicted an unsanctioned movement within the federal government to neutralize congressional opposition to NSA covert surveillance, is, I believe, more of a reality than fantasy. I personally believe that directly after newly elected U.S. senators and representatives raise their hands to swear to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, they are led into some top-secret room in the Capitol Building and told the real story of how the political game is played, and how their very lives will depend on how they must cooperatively play the game. Perhaps the polemic discourses heard from such, supposedly maverick U.S. Representatives, such as Ron Paul and Dennis Kusinich, are designed to make the people believe that there are other serious schools of thought among our elected representatives. Such wouldn't surprise me.
If President-elect Barack Obama thinks that the CIA and its intelligence affiliates are doing a fine job of running the foreign policy of the republic, he must also think that the Federal Reserve System is the paragon of economic virtue. During his campaign for nomination, I presumed that he had, either, turned a blind eye to the serious existing constitutional problems, or was ignorant of their presence, when he said, more than once, that the economic, social, and political changes which would come through his presidency would be effected through the existing agencies, departments, and institutions of the federal government. Historically, the New Deal (National Recovery Act) of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which was passed as rapidly, and carelessly, by Congress as was the original Patriot Act of 2001, was at the sore expense of constitutional government. Most constitutional scholars, if they are worth their salt, will agree that Roosevelt's alphabet soup of a vastly enlarged federal bureaucracy was declared unconstitutional three times by the U.S. Supreme Court before the pragmatic President packed the court with justices who were politically aligned with his vision of an all-powerful federal government. Further, isn't it just a bit sinister that the quasi-federal Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Tri-lateral Commission (TLC) have held their policy meetings in secrecy, behind closed doors, and that certain powerful U.S. senators, representatives, all former U.S. Presidents, select federal bankers, and high-ranking federal agency officers comprise these organizations? The amount of information that has leaked out of their meetings has pointed to the tragic fact that the U.S. domestic and foreign policy that has been, supposedly, created in Congress has been first discussed and approved by the CFR and the TLC.
If Mr. Obama wants to change things for the better, he will, first, need to persuade Congress to repeal the Congressional acts and Constitutional Amendments (and their accompanying laws) which, like the Federal Reserve Act and the 16th Amendment have altered the basic sanctity of U.S. Constitutional government. The Federal Reserve Act has essentially destroyed the sound economic structure, based on a balanced budget, which was planned and deployed by the Framers to last through the ages. Congress was exclusively mandated by the U.S. Constitution, in Article 1, Section 8, to coin money and determine its value for the republic, not for a few privileged private bankers to create a system as a banking cartel. The Founding Fathers further presumed that the future Congresses would realize, and preserve, the great benefits derived from maintaining a viable gold and silver standard on which to base the sovereign value of the American dollar. Moreover, the First National Bank of the United States wasn't, and has never been, necessary (meaning essential) and proper to Congress' power to make laws in the execution of coining money and determining its value.
Moreover, the Federal Income Tax, created through the 16th Amendment, is an un-apportioned tax, which the U.S. Constitution eschewed in its original text. The Framers realized the fateful enigma attached to such a thing as an un-apportioned income tax, and that the power to tax is the ultimate power to destroy, or to create a creature of government worth destroying. If you think about it for a moment, the sovereign states which created the federal government, in 1789, could have easily imposed un-apportioned income taxes upon their citizens, if they hadn't realized the evil of an income tax, having reasonably realized that the people would not endure such a tax over time. This is why I believe that the 16th Amendment was fraudulently ratified by the states. Who in their right mind would have endorsed, and ultimately ratified, an un-apportioned federal tax on personal income? Don't you think that the will of the majority of the American electorate in 1913, regarding the sad effect of a federal income tax, would have immediately disposed from consideration such an amendment? The only real effects which have come from the googles and googles of tax dollars collected by the Internal Revenue Service since around 1915, have been the gargantuan growth and power of the federal government (along with the demise of state sovereignty), the exorbitant salaries paid to elected and appointed federal officers, and the development of a Romanesque military system that serves a sorely rabid foreign policy, which have made the United States the bully of the Northern Hemisphere, hated by billions of people around the globe.
I hope that when Barack Obama laid his hand on the Holy Bible during his inauguration, and swore to uphold, protect, and defend the United States Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic, he was doing it with a sense of honor and integrity; and that he fully remembered the text of the 10th Amendment, which, to my knowledge, is still a viable part of the Bill of Rights and of the Constitution. It states, "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." This means exactly what it says, that purely state issues, such as public education, are not a concern of the federal government. The only way that public education became a federal matter was through the deceitful remitting of income tax money to the states, which shouldn't have been collected in the first place, in form of federal block grants and revenue sharing. Instead of freely giving the money back to the states, which they rightfully deserve, the feds placed requirements upon the states in order to receive the money. The same has been done with highway funding, speed limits, and other limitations set by federa effort on intra-state commerce, which shouldn't be a concern of Washington DC politics.
In my opinion, the very first legislation passed by the U.S. Congress to determine the status of public education in the States should have been blatantly declared unconstitutional; for that first imposition into an area reserved totally to the States, or the People, was a dangerous precedent. Certainly the federally propagandized window-dressing of a proposed U.S. Constitutional Amendment really intended, for example, to strip the citizens of their inalienable 4th Amendment rights to privacy and protection from illegal search and seizure, might seem initially attractive as presented by media pundits to a scared and intimidated electorate. But after its implementation, such a constitutional amendment would cause the republic's citizens to awaken to the harsh reality of an evolved federal police state.
Very similarly, the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause essentially eviserated the sovereignty of the states, in its explicit overriding of the 10th Amendment right of the States to police themselves. Now, the federal government has reserved unto itself, by U.S. Supreme Court rulings, the power to tell the states what rights they have, and don't have. Very few people seem to remember that the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 before the Southern Confederate states were allowed to, again, join in the ratification of proposed amendments. The Amendment was adopted only by virtue of ratification subsequent to earlier rejections by those states. In other words, the Southern secessionist States were made, or forced, to ratify the Amendment. They did it under protest. This is probably why it took so long for the South to outwardly accept racial integration as the proper course of a productive society. This is also why, for over a hundred years after the American Civil War, the horrible conflict was scathingly referred to by most of the white people of the South as the war of Northern aggression. Though many supporters of the 14th Amendment will say that the law insured a "morally" just society, there are as many people who believe and assert that a nation cannot ever properly legislate morality. Consider "Brown v. Board of Education, 1954." Even though the U.S. Supreme Court declared in that case that intentionally segregated public schools were wrong and were to be dismantled, segregation remained a serious problem throughout the land for many decades after the decision. I, as well as quite a few prominent historians, believe that the Southern States would have voluntarily abolished slavery within a few years after 1860, and that racial segregation would have ended much sooner in the South had ravaging a civil war not occurred at the behest of Abraham Lincoln.
It would seem that most American citizens under the age of 45 have a fundamental misunderstanding about the basic cause of the American Civil War. It wasn't fought over slavery, but, instead, the right of the States under the 10th Amendment to police and regulate themselves. If the federal government really wanted to deny the States their 10th Amendment rights, why wasn't a constitutional amendment proposed to repeal the 10th Amendment, as the Prohibition amendment was repealed? If the 14th Amendment has actually denied the States their rights, as guaranteed in the 10th Amendment, why hasn't some federal official proclaimed that the 10th Amendment is no longer a part of the Bill of Rights? Common sense, and an understanding of pragmatism, dictate that that the federal government does not want the People, or the electorate, to believe that the 10th Amendment is not still in effect, even though it has actually been negated by the 14th Amendment. You might say that the 10th Amendment has been unofficially re-worded to say, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution (will be delegated as seen fit by the federal government), and will be prohibited, and/or reserved, to the States as the federal government deems necessary)."
I, nonetheless, would rather prefer to think of the federal government, and its power, as a creation of the sovereign States, not visa versa. I recall the words of the imminent scholar Judge Thomas J. DiLorenzo, in his well documented book "The Great Centralizer: Abraham Lincoln and the War Between the States," when he said, "(Thomas) Jefferson himself, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, stated in his First Inaugural Address, "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it". Jefferson believed strongly in a state's right of secession, although he did not necessarily think that exercising the right would be wise. If a state (or states) wanted to secede, "God bless them both and keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better," he said while president."
Perhaps Mr. Obama is not as much a constitutional scholar as he purports. By him being elected overwhelmingly by 54% of all white, black, Hispanic, and Oriental, Native American, and Middle-Easter citizen voters, the combined American electorate expressed a demanding consensus of desperation that political, social, and economic change must occur in order to positively affect the average citizen's quality of life. And this does not mean a common desire for the expansion of the federal government and its power. If the current attitude of 80 percent of the people of the State of Vermont is of any significant import, their common desire presently to secede from the Union, in order to re-establish the Vermont Republic, is a stirring indication that the federal government is doing very little with all of its money and power for the people of Vermont.
The symptoms of vile ravaging diseases are, in some cases, sadly mistaken for conditions less destructive to life and property, but only at the expense of those experiencing the dire effects of those diseases. Yet, strangely enough, political and economic disease is frequently created and perpetuated by powerful Machiavellian politicians and private financiers who stand to substantially gain from what will, in effect, destroy a basic and necessary quality of life for working and struggling middle-class and lower-middle-class citizens, the backbone of a republic of sovereign states. The American republic is such an example.
The governors of the 50 states should, today, be arduously working to make their states free from the controlling effect of federal purse strings. Instead of pandering to the federal government for tax money (returned to the states as revenue sharing and grants-in-aid) to improve education, roads, and the health and human conditions of the people holding state residency, the state legislatures should be collecting, and using, tax money in order to implement the mandate of the 10th Amendment, as the Framers intended. Had this happened during the 1920's, if, and only if, the Federal Reserve Act and the 16th Amendment had not been passed in 1913, FDR's immense federal bureaucratic agenda would not have been pursued. It wouldn't have been necessary, and the Great Depression of 1929 would, in all probability, not occurred, and the States would be doing everything for themselves today that the federal government is doing for them. How would this be so? If the States were able to get and use, by taxation, all the billions of dollars that are presently flowing into the federal coffers, the standard of living for the poorest state would be dramatically increased. Remember, again, that the States created the federal government. The federal government did not create the States. Of course, it would certainly be a slower-paced lifestyle, where the quality of life for the individual U.S. citizens, in the States, would be much more important than U.S. foreign policy and a behemoth ever-expanding federal bureaucracy. There probably wouldn't be 20 million illegal aliens in the country, and the States would be providing a basic standard of living and working for their people, unknown in federal circles.
Perhaps it's more a poignant dream of returning to the way American government should operate under the prevailing U.S. Constitution than it is a probability. Every day, the federal government expands, in some way, to regulate, more so, the lives of American citizens. The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations is a convoluted bunch of legal rules, much like the U.S. Tax Code, not actually legislated by Congress (but written by un-elected federal regulators), which cover every aspect of all citizens' daily lives. It is comparable to the convoluted rules set forth in the huge compilation of laws legislated by the Federal Republic of Germany. In that system of government, the various districts and provinces of the German nation are creations of the federal government, which is totally different from the federal system of the United States. Such a dream as I have mentioned must, however, be based on a continuing hope that the basic honesty and integrity of the common hard-working folk of the American republic will ultimately converge into a mighty back-lash of resentment against the federal government; for it is the ultimate right of the people, according to the Declaration of Independence, to alter, or abolish, any form of government contrary to the natural and inalienable rights conferred upon all American citizens by the Creator.
Norton R. Nowlin took M.A. and B.A. degrees in the social and behavioral sciences from the University of Texas at Tyler, studied law for one full year at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, in San Diego, California, and earned an ABA-approved advanced paralegal certification from Edmonds Community College, in Lynnwood, Washington. Mr. Nowlin has attended LaJolla, California's National University and Malibu's Pepperdine University to attain undergraduate and graduate credits, and advanced knowledge, in business management and economics. Mr. Nowlin also attained a Texas State Teaching Certification, in social studies, psychology, and special education from the University of Texas at Tyler. A paralegal, published essayist, former regular guest columnist for the "Seattle Times," poet, and free-lance fiction writer, Mr. Nowlin resides in Northern Virginia with his wife, the renown math tutor, Diane C. Nowlin, and their two very intelligent cats.
