Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

by Jesse Mathewson | October 25th, 2011

Among the many repeated quotes from the time before this nation was a nation is the Patrick Henry quote, over time it has become an often misused quote for many. In our present day and age there is a looming potential for violent action, for myself I ask for peace.

            “…Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” – Patrick Henry on March 23, 1775

He gave this speech after combat had already been joined, though the first “military” action that occurred was later that year in Lexington and Concord there had already been several instances of bloodletting in which the British regulars had attacked groups of British citizens who were tired of taxation, rules from leadership that had no idea what they faced and above all were tired of paying to promote the imperialistic gains and movements of the then largest Empire on earth, Great Britain. The Boston Massacre had occurred almost 5 years prior to this “shot heard round the world” on March, 5 1770. There had been many other minor events of individuals and groups being accosted, families being evicted from their homes and more.  Was conflict a desirable outcome, did it have lasting results, and more importantly did this revolution result in long term freedom and liberty? No, is the resounding answer to all of the above. For it was a short ten years after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia and less than eight years after  the infamous Treaty of Paris in 1783 that congress ratified the “CONstitution”, and in a masterful stroke assured that their future generations would live on in the United States as chattel slaves as Chris Dates recently wrote here.

There are hundreds of thousands of not millions of Americans who are currently looking around wondering what has gone wrong. The numbers of unemployed and wrongfully imprisoned increase in leaps and bounds daily, the powder keg has been lit, but is bloodshed what is needed or wanted?

I argue that we are men* with far more available options than mere violent letting of blood. 

Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth noted that the major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns. (Why Civil Resistance Works, the Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict 2008) additionally others such as Gene Sharp have written similar works lauding the use of nonviolence as it applies to the success of the movement both during and after the revolution.

In my research I have discovered that of the violent revolutions waged over the past 300 years the large majority of “wins” has resulted in the eventual or immediate replacement of the prior “state” with yet a larger more complex, better organized version. A version 2.0 in geek terminology, it is those nonviolent revolutions that have succeeded in often times replacing the entire approach with something that has been actively better.

The question is why, is it that humans are tiring of conflict and with the advances we have made in our abilities both technologically and mentally we no longer have the desire for large amounts of conflict or is it that as Theo Zagtech at Occupy your Brain recently stated, “Humans continue to rebel against their governments, the scope of each getting smaller and smaller. As the scope gets smaller, the power gets smaller, and thus the people become stronger. Inch by inch we, as a species, are becoming more confident in our ability to achieve happiness and success without the protection of a ruler.”

Accomplishing a nonviolent revolution of the type many of us desire which is the complete removal of the state and its accompanying embellishments which result in millions of deaths, imprisonments and chattel slaves annually, will take time. It will also take the thoughtful presentation of facts, ideas and options as compared to what we have now. We must show others that a free society is a functioning one; we must show others that our business models work, that roads and “protection” is possible without the hand of the “state” guiding it.

 In a recent article on Occupy your Brain I wrote, “Do not attack others personal beliefs regardless of the reasoning we may have in doing so. Learn to support your arguments with more than media speculation or the idle chatter of others surrounding you. If you must protest then do so after first understanding the issue you are protesting. Be ready when the cameras get to you, so that instead of a stuttering vacant eyed fool you come across as a truly enigmatic, knowledgeable individual who possesses the knowledge and desire to change the world.” Above all this is the easiest way to launch a “nonviolent revolution” of the type necessary to ensure our future generations have a world to live in where they retain personal liberty.

 I would also add that we should work to assist our neighbors in all things that they may have need, reintroduce the idea of neighbors helping neighbors and simply being neighborly. Show others that the state is unnecessary by whenever possible building our own roads, engaging our own private fire departments, and working together in “civil” neighborhood watches to dissuade criminal activity.

Do not engage the “state” if at all possible in any way unless by so avoiding the state you cause a threat to yourself or your family from the state, in which case I leave that to each individual. Frequent farmers markets, swap meets and any other venues where you can operate in a fashion that reduces the amount of theft the state takes from you for transactions of which it has no moral right to avail itself of. Above all be prepared, as the “militias” pre-Revolutionary war were, train with your neighbors in “fire drills” that allow for the largest best response to potential criminal activity or natural disasters and more. I leave the specifics up to yourselves though a quick study of several (a short list will follow) “preparedness” books will allow you to better assess your needs.

I leave you all with the following thought, we can live in peace with our neighbors, regardless of religion (which is private), race (which is a non-issue for many) or any other commonly presented “issue” capitalized on by the state for the sole purpose of separating us and ensuring our docile nature of subservience. Strike the root, occupy your brain, liberty is a thought away.

Free your mind and you will free your body.

 *I am falling back on the classic term “men” and in fact mean all humans within the “borders” of the United States.

Starving the Monkeys, A highly recommend book of the mind and body for the liberty minded individual. See his blog here

Principles of Personal Defense, as a practitioner of the “art of the gun” I train in the steps of the greats, Jeff Cooper and more. Sadly Jeff Cooper is no longer with us though his methods live on.

How to survive the end of the world as we know it, though I am personally not a fan of Rawles’ incessant religionist approaches I am must grudgingly admit that he is a well written individual. See his blog here

Rogue Nation Eternal Militias Handbook 2, this is a great anonymous book specifically designed to guide people through the quagmire of potential “law enforcement” intervention as well as preparation.

IRA Green Book, directs your attention to the less palatable side of the nonviolent (or violent) activists life and interaction with state enforcers.

Is Democracy as We Know It on Its Way Out?

A decade ago, only paranoid alarmists would have posed that question.

 Today, it may be an expression of cold, brutal realism. 


By Frank Viviano, New America Media
Posted on August 17, 2011

Is Western democracy coming apart at the seams? A decade ago, only paranoid alarmists would have posed that question.



Today, it may be an expression of cold, brutal realism. 



On both sides of the Atlantic -- from the fires that raged in large stretches of London, to the political chicanery that brought the U.S. economy to its knees in early August -- the institutional framework that came to define modern democracy in the 19th century is in deep trouble. 



The principal organs of financial oversight and management are in tatters. Ferociously xenophobic political movements, an entire constellation of Tea Parties, now play important roles in nearly every European nation, as well as the United States. 



Faith in elected leaders and legislatures, the central and defining institutions of democracy, has never been lower.



According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of the U.S. public expressing trust in the federal government has fallen from just under 80 per cent in the late 1960s to barely 20 per cent today. 



A European Union poll last September found that only 29 per cent of voters in its 27 member-states trust their own national government. Less than 20 per cent believe that their elected representatives are capable of successful action "against the effects of the financial and economic crisis." 



A meagre seven per cent trust the United States, the West's political and economic giant, to address the crisis -- a resounding vote of no confidence a year before the disastrous U.S. Congressional budget struggle. 



These numbers, put bluntly, are staggering. 



Angry, violent civil disturbances, first in Paris and now in London, have revealed enormous tinderboxes of alienation. With the gap between rich and poor -- between philosophical democracy's matchless promise and contemporary democracies' transparent inequities -- expanding at a dizzying pace, more explosions are likely and perhaps inevitable. 



Abroad in the Middle East and Central Asia, and at home in its urban streets, the Western Alliance is increasingly unable to maintain its values or defend them. 



Murdoch affair -- another betrayal of trust



Two factors separate these developments from the periodic lapses that marred democracy's evolution in the past. The first is that they are intimately connected, a systemic malady. The second is that their strains are being felt not in one Western nation or even half a dozen, but in all of them simultaneously. 



The links were strikingly evident in the scandal that erupted over the operations of Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, the United Kingdom's largest-circulation newspaper. 



The story opened with what appeared to be narrow abuses of individual privacy, the hacking by News of the World reporters into the cell phone of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old British girl who vanished on the way home from school and was later found dead. 



Within days, the scandal grew into an expose of byzantine collaborations at the commanding heights of business and politics, leading not only to the firings and eventual arrests of Murdoch editors, but bringing down powerful figures in the British government and the nation's top law enforcement official. 



Then the storm crossed the Atlantic, setting off an FBI investigation and prompting the resignation of Les Hinton, chairman of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Both companies are also owned by Murdoch, as is the Fox News Channel, the chief broadcast voice of the populist American right.



A limited story about the callous treatment of a family tragedy had morphed into a full-fledged allegory on the cynical corruptions of business and politics, all in the name of "the people" -- the mostly lower-middle-class voters who are the principal audience of Murdoch's publications and broadcasts in Britain and America alike.



The tragedy is that their betrayal, which is precisely what it amounts to, is also a betrayal of their waning faith in democracy. 



A private survey released by the Brussels-based polling firm Burson-Marsteller in June, even before the Murdoch scandal broke, found that Britons' trust in their government had dropped by 51 per cent in just two years. 



Decline of the fourth estate



In the end, another of democracy's critical institutions, a reliable and vigilant press, blew the whistle on the Murdoch empire's shenanigans. The most damning evidence was hunted down by the investigative team at the Guardian, a British newspaper that stands at the opposite end of the professional spectrum from the tabloid sensationalism of News of the World (which Murdoch eventually shut down in an effort at damage control).



Voters need a dependable flow of facts, the kind the Guardian team chased down, to interpret events whose complexities are all too often lost in the braying of extremists. Without a well-informed electorate, democracy is a sham.



But like public trust in government, the mainstream press is caught in a precipitous downward spiral. In the brief span of four years since 2007, more than 25 per cent of all full-time reporters at U.S. newspapers have lost their jobs. In 2009 alone, the toll exceeded 6,000, the largest single year's cutback every recorded. 



The United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and Italy, with a combined population roughly 50 million less than that of the United States, laid off 6,500 reporters that same year.



Meanwhile, the sensationalist tabloids and their broadcast equivalents prosper, scandals notwithstanding, with the nihilistic right as prime beneficiaries.



There is no mistaking its impact. 



The European Union, an extraordinarily ambitious experiment in establishing democratic institutions across national boundaries, has brought six decades of continuous peace to a continent where history was defined by ceaseless wars among the French, British, Germans, Spaniards and their neighbors for two millennia.



Amidst a chorus of vapid nationalistic slogans on every side, the EU now stands perilously close to outright collapse.



In the once-solid heartland of western tolerance, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, extremist anti-immigrant parties have been voted into every national parliament and exercise decisive power in many. The rhetoric that seized the imagination of Anders Behring Breivik, and sent him on a bloody one-day rampage in Norway that took 77 lives, is heard daily in the very legislatures where social democracy was polished into the globe's most comprehensive health, job-creation and pension structure. 



In Italy, where I live, the most important coalition partner in the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is the Northern League, a party openly dedicated to the dismantling of the Italian state. The League's close American cousins, in spirit as well as in principle, are the Tea Party legislators of the U.S. Congress. 



It also demands the forced repatriation of immigrants, from a country that saw 25 million of its own people leave for abroad in the lifetime of my four grandparents, who were among them.

This Is What Resistance Looks Like

Monday, April 4, 2011 by TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges
The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil Disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

If you are among the one in six workers in this country who does not have a job, if you are among the some 6 million people who have lost their homes to repossessions, if you are among the many hundreds of thousands of people who went bankrupt last year because they could not pay their medical bills or if you have simply had enough of the current kleptocracy, join us in Union Square Park for the “Sounds of Resistance Concert,” which will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

We will picket the Union Square branch of Bank of America, one of the major financial institutions responsible for the theft of roughly $17 trillion in wages, savings and retirement benefits taken from ordinary citizens. We will build a miniature cardboard community that will include what we should have—good public libraries, free health clinics, banks that have been converted into credit unions, free and well-funded public schools and public universities, and shuttered recruiting centers (young men and women should not have to go to Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers or Marines to find a job with health care). We will call for an end to all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a breaking up of the huge banking monopolies, a fair system of taxation and a government that is accountable to the people.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

US Uncut, which will be involved in the April 15 demonstration in New York, carried out 50 protests outside Bank of America branches and offices on Feb. 26. UK Uncut, a British version of the group, produced this video guide to launching a “bail-in” in your neighborhood.

Civil disobedience, such as that described in the bail-in video or the upcoming protest in Union Square, is the only tool we have left. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One assumes the bank’s legions of accountants are busy making sure the corporation will not pay federal taxes again this year. Imagine if you or I tried that.

“If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, planned cuts of $1.7 billion in early childhood education, including Head Start & Title 1, would not be needed,” Zeese pointed out. “Bank of America avoids paying taxes by using subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. To eliminate their taxes, they reinvest proceeds overseas, instead of bringing the dollars home, thereby undermining the U.S. economy and avoiding federal taxes. Big Finance, like Bank of America, contributes to record deficits that are resulting in massive cuts to basic services in federal and state governments.”

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.