Skip to content

Tag: police state

Donald Trump’s Nominee for Attorney General, William Barr

Published by scott lazarowitz on December 8, 2018

After all his criticisms of the “deep state,” the Mueller Russia-collusions “witch hunt” and rhetorically raking the Establishment over the coals, Donald Trump has nominated former Bush41 AG and CIA flunky the authoritarian statist William Barr to be the next attorney general. The reason Trump picked Barr is because Trump is impressed with someone with the credentials Barr has. (Hmm, Robert Mueller has good credentials, too. And Dick Cheney. And … James Comey, and…Hillary….Clinton…)

According to Wikipedia, Barr was with the CIA for four years. That in and of itself should disqualify him! During the George H.W. Bush administration, as an assistant AG Barr advised that the U.S. feds could invade another country to apprehend a suspect for extradition, such as invading Panama to grab Manuel Noriega, whose drug trafficking was excused by U.S. feds in exchange for his cooperation for the CIA in the CIA’s Latin America coups and regime change ops.

Really disgusting stuff, in other words. Further, as attorney general under Bush Sr., Barr advised that Bush pardon former Defense (sic) Secretary Caspar Weinberger, because a possible Weinberger trial involving the Iran-Contra scandal might have implicated Bush himself. (Bush has done worse, believe me.)

Barr is also anti-immigration, just like Donald Trump and former AG Jeff Sessions. If you’re going to be anti-immigration like these socialist clowns, should you really be in America? (How about these schmucks instead go to other countries that don’t have a Declaration of Independence or a Bill of Rights? Hmmm?)

Unsurprisingly, Barr is a drug fascist. Barr’s daughter Mary Daly is a DOJ official, in charge of drug policy, apparently. She and her father Bill Barr are supporters of the war on drugs. For them it is a criminal matter. People buying, selling, possessing or using certain drugs prohibited by the gubmint are criminals, according to these fascists. (But don’t touch the drug warriors’ precious booze, right? Right.)

According to WaPo, Barr sent a letter to U.S. Senators telling them not to reform the sentencing system, writing, “Our system of justice is not broken. Mandatory minimums and proactive law enforcement measures have caused a dramatic reduction in crime over the past 25 years, an achievement we cannot afford to give back.”

Clueless.

“Proactive law enforcement measures”? So pre-crime? Thus, not only does Barr believe that the government has the authority to prohibit this or that by law, like drugs, but he doesn’t believe in presumption of innocence and due process.

Presumption of innocence is: leave people alone who are peaceful and not suspected of harming others or violating the persons or property of others, and so on. But, Barr doesn’t get that.

And then I saw this. Law professor Jonathan Turley wrote that Barr is “one of the most brilliant lawyers I have known” and that Barr is the “perfect choice” for attorney general. More cluelessness, this. I think a lot of U.S. senators will obediently follow this line of thinking, and they will probably unanimously vote to confirm Barr as attorney general. I’m sure even Rand Paul will vote for him. No surprise there.

If confirmed, given his “law-and-order” authoritarianism the statist William Barr will probably rubber-stamp the police state: the drug war, asset forfeiture, all the unconstitutional post-9/11 policies including NDAA and indefinite detention, warrantless searches, warrantless wiretapping and warrantless spying, and more.

Even though Barr has expressed support for investigating Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, I still don’t believe that Barr will come to the side of transparency when it comes to the Mueller fishing expedition. I don’t think he will side with those in and out of Congress who have presented evidence against certain FBI and DOJ employees showing that they illicitly cleared Hillary Clinton from wrongdoing and these same FBI and DOJ flunkies then went on to conspire to frame Donald Trump in made-up Russia collusions involving the apparatchiks’ FISA abuses to spy on the Trump campaign (apparatchiks including, allegedly, Rod Rosenstein, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Sally Yates).

In the end, I believe, AG Barr will come to the defense of the national security state and all its criminality and corruption in regards to “Russia-gate” and the Mueller fiasco. I’ll be surprised if the outcome is otherwise, and if Barr actually encourages Trump to order the FISA warrants or FISA warrant applications declassified, and lets the truth be known to the general public, and if Barr actually demands that Comey et al. (including John Brennan as well) be indicted. And will AG Barr open a new investigation of the Clintons? I rather doubt it. Call me cynical.

On Questioning the Official 9/11 Narrative

Published by scott lazarowitz on December 8, 2018

One reason why many people dismiss skeptics of the official 9/11 narrative is because many people get their news mostly from mainstream news media, who mostly repeat what government officials tell them, i.e. the news media act as stenographers for the rulers.

Most people tend to not look into these matters further. If the Congress had a commission and “investigated” 9/11, then their conclusions are good enough for me, most people say. And then when others question or challenge the mainstream media and congressional committee’s conclusions, and even bring forth evidence which refutes such conclusions, then those challengers and skeptics are to be dismissed as “conspiracy theorists,” tinfoil hat wearers, and crackpots. That is the extent to which many people have obedient faith in their rulers and in government investigations of catastrophes that are mainly caused by government’s own actions especially abroad, and by government’s failures.

And that brings me to this extensive article by Elias Davidsson, in which he critiques a HuffPo article aiming to discredit a professor and others’ legitimate questioning of the official 9/11 narrative. The Davidsson article is quite extensive and gives quite a bit detailed information on the “investigation” following 9/11.

Davidsson is also the author of Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11: Counterfeiting Evidence. People with open minds should check these things out.

More on the Mueller Inquisition

Published by scott lazarowitz on December 7, 2018

Ray McGovern says that Donald Trump’s timidity is letting James Comey off the hook.

John Solomon on an FBI email chain that may provide the most damning evidence of FISA abuse yet.

Comey and the smirking FBI agent Peter Strzok let Hillary Clinton off the hook as well in her email illegalities, by changing the wording in Comey’s report to “decriminalize” her criminal actions. And then there’s Hillary’s corruption with her Clinton Foundation. Now, as John Solomon also reports, the feds received whistleblower evidence in 2017 alleging Clinton Foundation wrongdoing. Mueller has to investigate all these matters as well as the made-up “Trump-Russia collusions” fishing expedition, because it’s all related.

Prisoners of the National Security State And Corrupt Prosecutors

Published by scott lazarowitz on December 6, 2018

Law professor Jonathan Turley blogged about conservative investigative reporter Jerome Corsi’s being pursued by “special counsel” Robert Mueller, and noted that Corsi filed a “criminal and ethics complaint” against Herr Mueller for attempting to pressure Corsi to intentionally give false testimony.

Turley writes, “There is no strong legal basis for such a challenge.” Hmm, you mean it’s illegal to lie under oath, but it’s not illegal to lie under oath if the prosecutors threaten you otherwise? Is that what Turley is saying here?

Turley concludes, “Prosecutors and police will often push witnesses with accusations and demands. However, if the charge is based on independent grounds, courts are leery of speculating on motive. After all, if Mueller’s team truly believes that Corsi was a critical player with Wikileaks, they are allowed to press a witness on that theory.”

Some of the commenters wrote, “Come on Turley, if you had any reasoned compassion (or stones), you’d see the justice in hunting the wolf and the routine injustice done by federal prosecutors.” And, “Yep. Looks like Turley pulled back the curtain and gives inside baseball type look at our criminal justice system: if persecutors have theories then they can move with unfettered zealotry on potential witnesses with culture of defense attorneys and judges turning blind eye on this type of abusive behavior.” And, “The truly sad reality is how comfortable our constitutional scholar host is at describing how lawfare works without a hint of the injustice of it.”

Some of the commenters then go on to say that Turley’s initial description of Corsi might be biased.

I have a feeling that liberal progressive Turley could be more sympathetic to Corsi and less sympathetic to the prosecutors if Corsi were not a conservative. But I could be wrong. I probably am wrong, because Turley has generally been quite objective in defense of those who are the victims of government overreach or of prosecutorial misconduct.

On those issues, Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote about Trump campaign minion Paul Manafort and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and about Trump current lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s recent comments on the Mueller fishing expedition.

After summarizing Giuliani’s record as a sleazy, corrupt prosecutor in New York during the 1980s, and noting some of Giuliani’s grandiose and frankly deranged treatment of his victims at the time, Judge Napolitano then writes, “The courts have ruled many times that prosecutors, FBI agents and police may lie, cheat, threaten, intimidate, coerce and deceive to extract cooperation and obtain evidence from witnesses. This is the dark side of the criminal justice system. It requires a strong stomach. It can be used against even the president.”

And by “to extract cooperation and obtain evidence” he probably means obtain false confessions or false testimony against others in exchange for leniency, or based on threats of false prosecution, probably for made-up crimes such as “insider trading” or “process crimes,” such as “lying to prosecutors” for merely recalling something inaccurately.

Government judicial system apparatchiks use the system to go after someone they don’t like, or based on political differences, such as the Obama FBI and DOJ abusing already unconstitutional FISA spying authority to either find dirt on their political opponents of the Trump campaign or make it all up, such as with the Steele dossier. That is what this whole made-up “Russia collusions/hacking the election” is all about.

Government apparatchiks, with a monopoly over the administration of justice, also go after innocent people for reasons other than political ones, including advancing an agenda of bamboozling the public to accept more governmental intrusions into their lives and a police state. Such as the FBI infiltrating mosques to motivate young Muslim males to want to commit “jihad” in order for the FBI to thwart terrorist plots that the FBI themselves concoct.

Or the CIA using software to not only hide their own cyber “fingerprints” but to leave fake fingerprints, such as spoofed IP addesses, etc. to make it look like Russians or others did the hacking, phishing, or otherwise computer intrusions.

Or NSA stealing industry secrets, and NSA or Britain’s GCHQ in an “information ops” campaign to “manipulate, deceive, and destroy reputations,” using made-up stuff to discredit individuals and companies.

Sadly, because of our government’s apparatchiks exploiting what James Bovard has called “Battered Citizen Syndrome,” the people continue to blindly accept the criminal racket in Washington. Any one of us could be the next victim of bureaucrats’ political witch hunts and crusades.

The current national security state- and Democrat-led “witch hunt” fiasco is yet another example why letting our lives be ruled by elites with a monopoly in “justice” is not good. We should probably dismantle the whole thing.

More News and Commentary

Published by scott lazarowitz on December 5, 2018

Paul Craig Roberts comments on Meghan Murphy’s banishment from Twitter for writing that “Men are not women.” And, “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between men and transwomen?” Twitter called that “hateful conduct.” And this is what feminists get when they engage in extreme identity politics. So now, we are not allowed to say that someone who is a male is a male even though he insists he is a female even though he actually is a male. We’re just not allowed to say that. i.e. saying the actual, scientifically proven truth is “bad” now.

James Bovard says that George H.W. Bush was worse than Trump as far as trade protectionism was concerned, as well as obstructing a special counsel and escalating the fascist drug war.

Bush and Trump should have listened to Frank Chodorov when it comes to free will and the marketplace.

And Bill Sardi looks at the alarming rise in polio-like infections in children.

More Articles

Published by scott lazarowitz on December 4, 2018

The Daily Caller with an article on FBI raiding the home of whistleblower on Clinton Foundation. Typical.

Aaron Kesel on Amazon’s Facial Rekognition software.

Gary Barnett on selling murder as the greater good.

Christina England with an article on 20 million schoolchildren being prescribed psychiatric drugs known for causing suicidal thoughts.

Moon of Alabama on the Guardian fake news story proving that mainstream media can’t be trusted.

And Sheldon Richman on the cruel tear-gassing of asylum seekers.

Mainstream Media Whitewashing and Fawning Over War Criminal George H.W. Bush

Published by scott lazarowitz on December 2, 2018

Just as I had been predicting rather recently, the praises and whitewashing of George H.W. Bush are flowing from the mainstream media, and once again, the truth is to be swept under the rug. This is just like the Richard Nixon funeral in 1994, with the newscasters including Baba Wawa then not uttering a word of the Nixon war crimes in Vietnam or his other terrible criminal policies and impositions.

Later yesterday I heard Michel Martin on supposedly “liberal” NPR’s All Things Considered and this morning Lulu Garcia-Navarro was talking to Mara Liasson. And on other stations the news coverage with interviews of people talking about what a “decent” “gentleman” Bush Sr. was. No objective, thorough discussions, just cringe-worthy praise and fawning.

And I don’t expect to hear the truth from the conservative talk radio crowd. Certainly not Bush pal Rush Limbaugh, or Mr. Authoritarian Dennis Prager, who still defends the U.S. military’s bombings of Vietnam.

And I’m not even talking about “Read my lips — no new taxes” and then raising taxes stuff. It’s the Bush war crimes and the police state thanks to George H.W. Bush. We’re not hearing about any of that.

In the newscasts and on the discussion shows not a word about Bush’s starting a war of aggression against Iraq in 1991 that included the bombing and destruction of civilian water and sewage treatment centers which caused the Iraqi civilian population to have to use untreated water which led to skyrocketing disease and infant mortality rates. The U.S.-led sanctions and no-fly zones, which I wrote about recently, that were imposed on Iraq and enforced sadistically, prevented the Iraqi people from being able to rebuild those water and sewage treatment centers and the electrical service as well. And the sickness, deaths and suffering of the civilian population was intentionally caused by the U.S. military, as James Bovard and others have noted.

By the mid-1990s hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocent civilians because of the sanctions and no-fly zones imposed by George H.W. Bush that were continued by Bill Clinton, “liberal” Bill Clinton. Then hundreds of thousands more deaths by the year 2000. Bush Sr. also established more U.S. military bases in the Middle East, bases and military personnel that don’t belong in those areas! So such an invasion, bombings, and occupations were provocations of those Middle Easterners, those mainly Muslim people living over there.

The Nuremberg Tribunal determined that starting a war of aggression was in and of itself a war crime.

The Bush war in Iraq in the early 1990s brought on heavy blowback. There probably would not have been terrorist bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, or the bombing of the USS Cole in the year 2000, and, very likely wouldn’t have been a 9/11 had George H.W. Bush not started that war, destroyed civilian infrastructure and imposed sanctions and no-fly zones. The 9/11 terrorists had stated as part of their motivations that war and those sanctions.

And then there’s the police state that had already been building up since well before 9/11, but hugely escalated after 9/11. Much of the post-9/11 police state was planned since before 9/11. During the 1990s a Patriot Act-like major piece of legislation had been continuously voted down in Congress. The national security state needed some kind of excuse to finally get that passed, and they got their excuse.

So now, in addition to NSA, CIA, FBI, we have DHS, TSA, and a huge increase in Constitution-free zones on the borders, as well as the roads and highways.

Now as an aside, here’s something a bit of a “conspiratorial” nature. A possible Bush association with the JFK assassination. To most people that would sound really far-fetched. But I’m not too sure about that.

Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, had this 10-part article, on the possible Bush-JFK assassination connection. Baker gives a lot of detailed information to show that Bush may have been with the CIA (either formally or informally) long before he was its Director under Gerald R. Ford, and may have played a role in the JFK assassination. If Bush was involved with the CIA since the 1950s, could he have been involved in Operation Ajax, CIA’s coup that took down Iranian leader Mossadagh?

Regarding the JFK assassination, most people want to believe the Lone Nut conspiracy theory, which makes no sense. Given that Kennedy was starting to have peace talks with Khrushchev, something the national security state did not want, then why would an alleged communist and Soviet sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald want to kill Kennedy?

In fact, given how entrenched the national security state was in Amerikan life by the 1980s and ’90s, one can see how the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War would motivate the bureaucrats of the national security state, a.k.a. “deep state,” to try to find or create some new “enemy” to go after. The “Islamic threat” coming from the more primitive societies of Middle Eastern and Asian Muslim countries had already been built up by that time. In Iran following the CIA’s Operation Ajax, the CIA supported the Shah’s new Iranian SAVAK police state from the rest of the 1950s up to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. So, there was an ulterior motive in Bush Sr.’s starting his war on Iraq in 1991 and imposing sanctions as mentioned above. A whole new program of provoking Muslims to elicit retaliation against the Western regimes to justify further expanding national security state bureaucracies and their budgets, and so on. The Bureaucracy is the bottom line on that.

And George H.W. Bush was a True Believer in the national security state and the Bureaucracy. He was Mr. Bureaucrat, in my view.

And to those who are saying that being critical of someone on the occasion of his death is “dancing on his grave,” well, no, someone needs to point out the truth of who Bush was and what he actually did. The mainstream news media commentariat and pundit class will not do that, because the mainstream news media are an entrenched wing of the bureaucracy in Washington, including the national security state!

The truth is, rather than abolish the agencies of the national security state following the end of the Cold War because they were no longer needed, Bush criminally started a whole new scheme of conflicts and provocations and expanded the police state in Amerika.

George H.W. Bush Has Died

Published by scott lazarowitz on December 1, 2018

Charles Burris discusses the entrenched, “deep state” background of George H.W. Bush, his role in the savings and loan scandal, the 1980 “October Surprise” with Bush negotiating for Iran to keep the American hostages held hostage until after Reagan was elected, and the shooting of Reagan.

Robert Wenzel on Bush Sr.’s death, including Gary Johnson’s reaction.

And, here is my article from 2013 on the beginning of the Iraq War that George H.W. Bush started in 1991 and continuing.

“National Security”? Riiiiight…

Published by scott lazarowitz on November 28, 2018

Dave Lindorff has this exclusive at The Nation of the Pentacon’s massive accounting fraud.

George Neumayr with this article from the American Spectator on why British spooks don’t want Donald Trump to declassify documents pertaining to illicit FBI FISA Spying on Carter Page, et al.

Zero Hedge with an article on Jerome Corsi rejecting Mueller plea deal and planning to sue. (Not sure what to believe anymore regarding Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi, because now there’s conflicting information on this angle.)

And Gareth Porter says that the U.K. and Ecuador conspire to deliver Julian Assange to U.S. authorities. (Talk radio ditto-head conservatives side with Assange now because of DNC-gate, but when they see that Washington fascists want Assange because of the 2010 Bradley Manning Iraq War revelations, the ignorant talk radio ditto-heads will then go back to hating Assange.)

In the “Capitalism vs. Socialism” Debate, Freedom Is Found in Capitalism, Not Socialism

Published by scott lazarowitz on November 24, 2018

George Reisman has 13 illustrations of the benevolence of capitalism. It is a must read, in my view.

It is quite lengthy, but here are some excerpts that caught my eye:

(6) … in a market economy … private ownership of the means of production operates to the benefit of everyone, the nonowners, as well as owners. The nonowners obtain the benefit of the means of production owned by other people. They obtain this benefit as and when they buy the products of those means of production. To get the benefit of General Motors’ factories and their equipment, or the benefit of Exxon’s oil fields, pipelines, and refineries, I do not have to be a stockholder or a bondholder in those firms. I merely have to be in a position to buy an automobile, or gasoline, or whatever, that they produce.

Moreover, thanks to the dynamic, progressive aspect of the uniformity-of-rate-of-profit or rate-of-return principle that I explained a moment ago, the general benefit from privately owned means of production to the nonowners continually increases, as they are enabled to buy ever more and better products at progressively falling real prices. It cannot be stressed too strongly that these progressive gains, and the generally rising living standards that they translate into, vitally depend on the capitalist institutions of private ownership of the means of production, the profit motive, and economic competition, and would not be possible without them. It is these that underlie motivated, effective individual initiative in raising the standard of living.

…

(10 ) … capitalism is in actuality as thoroughly and rationally planned an economic system as it is possible to have. The planning that goes on under capitalism, without hardly ever being recognized as such, is the planning of each individual participant in the economic system. Every individual who thinks about a course of economic activity that would be of benefit to him and how to carry it out is engaged in economic planning. Individuals plan to buy homes, automobiles, appliances, and, indeed, even groceries. They plan what jobs to train for and where to offer and apply the abilities they possess. Business firms plan to introduce new products or discontinue existing products; they plan to change their methods of production or continue to use the methods they presently use; they plan to open branches or close branches; they plan to hire new workers or layoff workers they presently employ; they plan to add to their inventories or reduce their inventories.

…

Ironically … socialism, as Mises has shown, is incapable of rational economic planning. In destroying the price system and its foundations, namely, private ownership of the means of production, the profit motive, and competition, socialism destroys the intellectual division of labor that is essential to rational economic planning. It makes the impossible demand that the planning of the economic system be carried out as an indivisible whole in a single mind that only an omniscient deity could possess.

What socialism represents is so far from rational economic planning that it is actually the prohibition of rational economic planning. In the first instance, by its very nature, it is a prohibition of economic planning by everyone except the dictator and the other members of the central planning board. They are to enjoy a monopoly privilege on planning, in the absurd, virtually insane belief that their brains can achieve the all-seeing, all-knowing capabilities of  omniscient deities. They cannot. Thus, what socialism actually represents is the attempt to substitute the thinking and planning of one man, or at most of a mere handful of men, for the thinking and planning of tens and hundreds of millions, indeed, of billions of men. By its nature, this attempt to make the brains of so few meet the needs of so many has no more prospect of success than would an attempt to make the legs of so few the vehicle for carrying the weight of so many.

But as Dr. Reisman notes at the beginning of the essay, freedom is the essential element in free-market capitalism. So, I will add that besides economic freedom which is necessary to raise the standard of living for all, there also needs to be personal and political freedom as well. The freedom of speech and the Press, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to due process, and the right to be secure in one’s person, papers, houses and effects are important freedoms for a prosperous as well as free and civilized society.

In the U.S. we seem to be losing more and more of those personal and political freedoms, as well as the economic freedom that existed here prior to World War I and the imposition of the income tax-theft.

In Orwellian China, what they have now is some sort of “Social Credit Score,” in which almost everything the people do is monitored by the government. Their traveling behaviors, the trains they take or their behavior as a pedestrian following or not following the street lights, their social media expressions, and so on.

If they get a score of “untrustworthy,” those people are barred from trains and planes, and are “unable to move even a single step,” as the bureaucrats have stated. So I assume that the people of China are not or will not be able to “vote with their feet,” if they are not physically able to travel out of the country. How will they be able to travel out of such a tyrannical dictatorship hellhole? The former East Germany would shoot people trying to escape. Those trying to leave the former Soviet Union were considered deserters and traitors, according to Wikipedia.

Hmm, not being able to “vote with their feet” to leave tyranny reminds me of the uncapitalistic national socialist Donald Trump, except his restrictions and the government Wall he wants to surround his utopian closed society are presumably to keep people out and prevent foreigners from going to a better place as they attempt to flee tyranny. (But what will future Washington administrations use the Wall for, Donald? Hmmm?)

So, despite whatever capitalistic reforms China has attempted to make in recent years, it seems to want to become more like North Korea, rather than more like the U.S. (I want to say, “the former U.S.,” given how down the totalitarian drain Amerika has gone. Oh, well. We have the college campus craziness with the suppression of dissent from PC idiocy, and the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world who want to turn America into a socialist utopia, which, if you read the above Reisman article you will understand how such a utopia is literally impossible and historically always failed.)

If Donald Trump really wants to have the U.S. compete with China, he should dismantle all impediments to Americans’ freedom, especially economic freedom, not increase such impediments as he keeps threatening to do. Dump the tariff-taxes, get rid of the unconstitutional bureaucracies whose purpose is mainly to live high off the hog on the wealth those bureaucrats suck away from the workers and producers of society. Just as the area around Washington, D.C. is the wealthiest part of the country (because of all the parasites associated with U.S. government and all the wealth they siphon off the actual producers of America), the bureaucrats in China are also of great wealth.

As far as the increasing Orwellian government surveillance and molestation of the people and their private lives and movements in the U.S., what we need to do is have some sort of private agency, or agencies, to make government bureaucrats, including all lawmakers, law enforcers, judges, and executives like governors and Presidents, report all their activities and submit to 24-7 monitoring by the people, rather than the other way around. We really need to make it very uncomfortable and unprofitable for anyone to be a government official of any kind, which should help to ensure a freer and healthier society.