Sovereignty for 20 states that ionly leaves what 37

Demons & Dialog

Exposing hidden news, history, & the new world order

Lawmakers in 20 states move to reclaim sovereignty

leave a comment »

Obama’s $1 trillion deficit-spending ’stimulus plan’ seen as last straw

By Jerome R. Corsi, February 06, 2009

Oklahoma Republican state Sen. Randy Brogdon

NEW YORK – As the Obama administration attempts to push through Congress a nearly $1 trillion deficit spending plan that is weighted heavily toward advancing typically Democratic-supporte d social welfare programs, a rebellion against the growing dominance of federal control is beginning to spread at the state level.

So far, eight states have introduced resolutions declaring state sovereignty under the Ninth and Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, including Arizona, Hawaii, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington.

Analysts expect that in addition, another 20 states may see similar measures introduced this year, including Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nevada, Maine and Pennsylvania.

“What we are trying to do is to get the U.S. Congress out of the state’s business,” Oklahoma Republican state Sen. Randy Brogdon told WND.

“Congress is completely out of line spending trillions of dollars over the last 10 years putting the nation into a debt crisis like we’ve never seen before,” Brogdon said, arguing that the Obama stimulus plan is the last straw taxing state patience in the brewing sovereignty dispute.

“This particular 111th Congress is the biggest bunch of over-reachers and underachievers we’ve ever had in Congress,” he said.

“A sixth-grader should realize you can’t borrow money to pay off your debt, and that is the Obama administration’ s answer for a stimulus package,” he added.

The Ninth Amendment reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

The Tenth Amendment specifically provides, “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.”

Brogdon, the lead sponsor of the Oklahoma state senate version of the sovereignty bill, has been a strong opponent of extending the plan to build a four-football- fields-wide Trans-Texas Corridor parallel to Interstate-35 to Oklahoma, as WND reported.

Rollback federal authority

The various sovereignty measures moving through state legislatures are designed to reassert state authority through a rollback of federal authority under the powers enumerated in the Constitution, with the states assuming the governance of the non-enumerated powers, as required by the Tenth Amendment.

The state sovereignty measures, aimed largely at the perceived fiscal irresponsibility of Congress in the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, have gained momentum with the $1 trillion deficit-spending economic stimulus package the Obama administration is currently pushing through Congress.

Particularly disturbing to many state legislators are the increasing number of “unfunded mandates” that have proliferated in social welfare programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, in which bills passed by Congress dictate policy to the states without providing funding.

In addition, the various state resolutions include discussion of a wide range of policy areas, including the regulation of firearms sales (Montana) and the demand to issue drivers licenses with technology to embed personal information under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative and the Real ID Act (Michigan).

Hawaii’s measure calls for a new state constitutional convention to return self-governance, a complaint that traces back to the days it was a U.S. territory, prior to achieving statehood in 1959.

“We are trying to send a message to the federal government that the states are trying to reclaim their sovereignty, ” Republican Rep. Matt Shea, the lead sponsor of Washington’s sovereignty resolution told WND.

“State sovereignty has been eroded in so many areas, it’s hard to know where to start,” he said. “There are a ton of federal mandates imposed on states, for instance, on education spending and welfare spending.”

Shea said the Obama administration’ s economic stimulus package moving through Congress is a “perfect example.”

“In the state of Washington, we have increased state spending 33 percent in the last three years and hired 6,000 new state employees, often using federal mandates as an excuse to grow state government,” he said. “We need to return government back down to the people, to keep government as close to the local people as possible.”

Shea is a private attorney who serves with the Alliance Defense Fund, a nationwide network of about 1,000 attorneys who work pro-bono. As a counter to the ACLU, the alliance seeks to protect and defend religious liberty, the sanctity of life and traditional family values.

Republican state Rep. Judy Burges, the primary sponsor of the sovereignty resolution in the Arizona House, told WND the federal government “has been trouncing on our constitutional rights.”

“The real turning point for me was the Real ID act, which involved both a violation of the Fourth Amendments rights against the illegal searches and seizures and the Tenth Amendment,” she said.

Burges told WND she is concerned that the overreaching of federal powers could lead to new legislation aimed at confiscating weapons from citizens or encoding ammunition.

“The Real ID Act was so broadly written that we are afraid that it involves the potential for “mission-creep, ” that could easily involve confiscation of firearms and violations of the Second Amendment,” she said.

Burges said she has been surprised at the number of e-mails she has received in support of the sovereignty measure.

“We are a sovereign state in Arizona, not a branch of the federal government, and we need to be treated as such, she insisted.

Protectionism? payoffs and political pandering and our insuing economic demise

I thought this was worth passing on


Why on Earth---Is Protectionism Still Popular?

by Bradley Douset

One of the things economists across the political spectrum agree on is that protectionism is bad. It is clearly bad for foreign companies being excluded from domestic markets, but it is also bad for domestic companies using foreign inputs, and bad too for domestic consumers who must pay more for goods and services. Bad for everyone, in short, except the specific domestic industries targeted for special privileges. Oh, and the politicians who cater to those industries and can expect votes and contributions in return.

And yet, it is not simply a matter of special interest lobbying. In spite of being bad for almost everyone, protectionism is widely popular around the world. Despite some real progress, protectionist measures still exist everywhere, as shown by the stalled Doha round of trade talks. As economist Bryan Caplan tells us in his 2007 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, the trade liberalization that has taken place in recent decades has done so in spite of voter resistance.

Especially when times get rough, groupthink kicks in and we all seem to go tribal, wanting to secure jobs for our country, our region, our industry. We see only the short-term benefits of huddling close together with "our" people, and to hell with those people over there. This may have made some sense in humanity's evolutionary past. Back then, my survival was intimately tied to the survival of my tribe, which had the nasty habit of being in a near-constant state of war with all other tribes. However, one of the great discoveries of the modern world, though it has yet to be integrated fully, is that we are better off trading with our neighbors than killing them. Objectivism treats other people as individuals, and points out that we are best served in the long run when we deal with others based on voluntary interaction to mutual benefit.

Here We Go Again

The latest protectionist threat is a "Buy American" provision in the gargantuan $819 billion stimulus bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last week. As though all of these stimulus bills being passed around the world were not bad enough, robbing the productive and prudent in order to rescue the inefficient and reckless from consequences largely of their own making. (I say "largely" because governments actually promote reckless behavior by, for instance, giving economic actors every reason to expect to be bailed out.) Adding insult to injury, though, the "Buy American" provision blocks the use of foreign-made steel and iron from infrastructure projects funded by the stimulus bill. A Senate version of the bill would go even further, extending protection to manufactured goods as well.

History is filled with examples of expert consensus being shown to be wrong, but in their opposition to protectionism, the economic experts are right. Even as far back as 1930, when the profession was fiercely debating this or that aspect of what would come to be known as Keynesianism, over a thousand economists petitioned President Hoover not to sign the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill. Hoover ignored their plea and signed the tariff bill anyway. This led quite predictably to "retaliation" from other countries and a downward spiral in world trade that contributed significantly to the severity and duration of human suffering during the Great Depression.

Why the scare quotes around the word "retaliation"? Because fighting protectionism with protectionism is like shooting yourself in the foot as revenge for your neighbor shooting himself in the foot. But government leaders around the world in the 1930s were quick to pander to the tribal impulse-and there is every reason to believe they will do so again if the "Buy American" provision remains. In a hopeful sign, President Obama did finally say this past Tuesday, February 3, that he is opposed to "send[ing] a protectionist message" that would "trigger a trade war." Whether this will be enough to expunge the protectionist provisions from any final bill remains to be seen.

The Light of Day

The protectionist case has never held water, but it was neatly demolished over a hundred and fifty years ago by a brilliant French satirist named Frédéric Bastiat. In his famous "Petition of the Candlemakers," Bastiat sarcastically argues that everyone connected with the manufacture of lighting is faced with unfair competition from a "foreign" competitor who can produce light much more cheaply than domestic industries can. That competitor, it is soon revealed, is none other than the sun. The remedy Bastiat proposes is for all windows to be shuttered during the day, leading to a sure stimulus of the lighting industries-and to just as certain an impoverishment of the rest of the population, which would effectively be required by law to double or triple its purchases of candles and lamps, and thus have less to spend on all other goods and services.

What was true for lighting then is just as true for steel and iron today. Humanity's interests are actually in harmony, for every bout of protectionism makes us all poorer in the long run, and in the long run each one of us has a clear interest in free trade. But while the evils of protectionism have been well understood by economists for centuries, they continue to be poorly appreciated by the general public. The problem is that modern economic reality is complex, and understanding it requires careful thought, which does not happen automatically. Our default position is to focus solely on the immediate, narrow results of economic policies, on what we perceive directly before our eyes and feel in our guts, and to ignore the broader, more lasting unintended consequences of those policies, which cannot easily be seen or felt.

It does not have to be this way. We are slaves neither to our evolutionary heritage nor to our current cultural environment. We can choose, in any given moment, to turn on the light of consciousness instead of shuttering the windows of our minds to the practical benefits and to the moral rightness of treating other human beings as free individuals.

President Obama apparently still has work to do in this regard, however. Obama said he was against "sending a message that somehow we're just looking after ourselves and not concerned with world trade." His reasoning implicitly accepts the flawed notion that protectionism would be in a nation's interests if only others would not retaliate. Worse still, it implies that pursuing one's own interests is wrong. But it is precisely this, the right of everyone to pursue his own rational self-interest, that most needs to be affirmed-along with the fact that no one's rational self-interest is ultimately served by protectionism. Is it too much to ask for a President to understand this and to have the patience, the courage, and most of all the simple honesty to explain it to the public at large? Now that would be a change I could believe in.
-------
Bradley Doucet is a writer in Montreal, Canada, a contributor to Le Québécois Libre and to The New Individualist.

For further reading:

Edward Hudgins, Freedom to Trade: Refuting the New Protectionism. Cato Institute, 1997.



Posted by Bobby Eberle
February 3, 2009 at 7:34 am

>> Printer-Friendly Version

I thought the whole idea behind an economic "stimulus" was to provide a short-term "shot in the arm" to the economy. Isn't that what a stimulus is? Just like priming a water pump or hitting the choke on a cold lawn mower engine, a stimulus is supposed to provide a brief, kick-start so that the economy can get going again.

However, listening to the Democrats, you soon realize that "stimulus" is simply their catch-all, code word for liberal spending run amok. What's interesting to watch, and would be funny if this situation weren't so serious, is to listen to Democrats try to justify any new liberal intrusion as "stimulus." Take the fact that in the $819 billion stimulus bill, there is $140 billion in education funds.

That's right... $140 billion for, as Obama's people put it, "an 'investment' in America's future generations. Hello! We are talking about an economy that liberals say is in dire, dramatic, and desperate need of fixing. According to them, we must do something NOW in order to fix it. They say that if we do not pass this bill, which provides "urgently needed" help to the economy, we will all go down the toilet.

So, one might say that repairing a school is a nice thing to do, but it certainly has NOTHING to do with jump starting the economy. As CNSNews.com reports, "Conservatives and tax-limitation groups are raising concerns over whether the federal government should be reaching so deeply into what is typically regarded as an area left to state and local authority."

"This would be the most direct intrusion into fiscal policy making in education ever," said Pete Sepp, vice president for communications at the National Taxpayers Union. "There really isn't a precedent."

Now, here's where Arne Duncan steps in. Duncan is Obama's new education secretary... you know... the guy who oversaw some of the worst performing schools in the country while serving in Chicago.

"If we want to stimulate the economy, we need a better-educated workforce," Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Associated Press last week. "That's the only way, long-term, we're going to get out of this economic crisis."

Long-term? What is he talking about? A long-term fix to the economic crisis? I thought this was a "stimulus" plan. How does better-educated elementary, junior-high, or even high school students stimulate the economy? They don't. As soon as Duncan uttered "long term," we should all just tune him out. Clearly he doesn't know what stimulus is. He's just another liberal seeking to turn America from its very foundations.

"I don't think there's ever a right time for the federal government to expend hundreds of billions of dollars in education," said Neil McClusky, associate director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute.

"This stimulus package is just a . . . gargantuan version of what has happened for decades, which is politicians spending money in the name of children so that the politicians look like they care," McClusky said. "But it never has any positive academic effect."

We should oppose the stimulus bill at all costs. We need to let the economy work rather than having government officials step in seeking more power and control and spending more taxpayer funds. As added measure if the liberals don't even know the difference between "short term" and "long term," we should oppose the bill simply on the principle that it was drafted by idiots.

++ Click here to contact Congress. Urge your senators to vote NO on the stimulus bill.

added by tim:

The Public School system has been working to induct our children into the uber liberal / Socialist Idealist way of thinking for a generation or more, and with great success.

This current round of "stimulus packages" aimed at high powered socio political higher ups with no real trickle down to the man on the street. Seems to me little more than an opportunity for the liberals to pay back to the ones who are helping to give them their power and they are using it. The liberal ideal training of our education thought training system is right out of the communist manifesto and it is working just as they had intended. As we the taxpayers pick up the bill for more and more stimulus payouts usually to the very people most responsible for the necessity of a stimulus to the economy that this is less an attempt to help the recovery of the economy for the taxpaying amerikan and more a hostile take over of the economy ( Banking mortgage insurance) by the government and run by those who most helped to produce the current economic situation in which these industries wee ripe for the picking. The economy stands to gain the least from all this trillions of dollars and the officials running amuk look to gain the most. We the people need to look more closely at our hired help (elected officials) and at anything that stands to benefit them more than it does "we the people"

The constitution is under constant attack and is ridiculed more and more openly by those it was implimented to control. How is it that our students are being taught to admire people like che guevera? A man who was such a notoriously radical of inflamitory nature that at the end of his "glory days" even inflamatory radicals thought he was to inflamatory and radical? Stalin is widley respscted amongst the educational elite ( a man who made Hittler look like a boy scout) and whose failed ideals are constanly taught as the pinacle of human idealism.
The constant left slant of those who have profetionaly replaced intellect with education is obvious and disturbing to anyone who does not hold to the same ideals as the huddled hordes who just want to go do their jobs and unplug with the idiot box untill it is time to do so again and a new and unchanged day has arrisen. This is the "progressives" view of normalcy. To me it is more firghtening than any horror movie could ever be.

Sory to go off rambling I have my own distrations from this and they are many.