Liberty

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Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished | The Washington Post

By Barton Gellman

Snowden1MOSCOW — The familiar voice on the hotel room phone did not waste words.

“What time does your clock say, exactly?” he asked. He checked the reply against his watch and described a place to meet. “I’ll see you there,” he said.

Edward Joseph Snowden emerged at the appointed hour, alone, blending into a light crowd of locals and tourists. He cocked his arm for a handshake, then turned his shoulder to indicate a path. Before long he had guided his visitor to a secure space out of public view.

During more than 14 hours of interviews, the first he has conducted in person since arriving here in June, Snowden did not part the curtains or step outside. Russia granted him temporary asylum on Aug. 1, but Snowden remains a target of surpassing interest to the intelligence services whose secrets he spilled on an epic scale.

Late this spring, Snowden supplied three journalists, including this one, with caches of top-secret documents from the National Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor. Dozens of revelations followed, and then hundreds, as news organizations around the world picked up the story. Congress pressed for explanations, new evidence revived old lawsuits and the Obama administration was obliged to declassify thousands of pages it had fought for years to conceal.

Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations. One of the leaked presentation slides described the agency’s “collection philosophy” as “Order one of everything off the menu.”

Six months after the first revelations appeared in The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Snowden agreed to reflect at length on the roots and repercussions of his choice. He was relaxed and animated over two days of nearly unbroken conversation, fueled by burgers, pasta, ice cream and Russian pastry. Read more…

Source: The Washington Post

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Voluntary Governance | Thrive Movement

Picture_6By Foster Gamble

I imagine a world where each being is free to act according to his or her inner guidance, provided there is no violation of any other’s person or property.

Association is voluntary, not coerced. Exchange is by choice, not force. There is no involuntary taxation (plunder), so there is no involuntary governance (tyranny). Money is a medium of exchange based on real value (sound currency) rather than arbitrary “fiat” decree (counterfeit and fraud). There are no wars of aggression (mass murder). A truly free market has led to prosperity beyond current imagining, where people have the time and the resources to follow their passions and to care for one another, as needed, voluntarily.

Introduction

What if citizens were given a choice over the type of government they wanted? Or if they wanted a government at all? What if people were really to have a say in the decisions that determine the content and quality of their lives? Could we self-govern and create more resilient, peaceful, prosperous communities?

Today, involuntary governance is all that exists.  When you step back to look at what government really is, it basically comes down to a group of people who are granted more power than the rest of us.  They are able to make laws that we have to obey, they are able to charge us money in the form of taxes without our consent, they are able to put us in jail if we don’t go along with their self-proclaimed power, and they are able to go to war –with our money – without our approval.

It seems like voluntary governance is such a radical notion that it is common to reject it without really exploring it fully. We have chosen to examine our assumptions about government and are grateful that there are many great thinkers who have devoted their time and energy to exploring the problems and the solutions related to involuntary governance. People often say that government is necessary for protection. But governments have killed more of their own citizens and innocent civilians than any other institution in history – more than 200 million people in the 20th Century alone.  Would voluntary governance result in this kind of brutality and violence?  The fact that all current governments are involuntary – ranging from dictatorships to democracies – puts them at risk of being overthrown. Involuntary governments create state militaries not necessarily to protect the people, but to protect themselves. Are there more effective ways of optimizing our security, in a voluntary society?

dont_tread_on_meInvoluntary governments also require money to be funded, which is collected in the form of taxes. The people have no say in how taxes are spent but we are nonetheless required to pay them. Americans are terrified of the IRS. How is it that government can order us to fund their activities without us having a say in it? This economic dynamic doesn’t exist anywhere else. People in society make money by voluntarily selling goods and services or by receiving voluntary gifts. The government, on the other hand, collects money by force. Imagine if people had a say in where their taxes went. Would we be spending so much on the military? Would we have taxes at all? What if we only put funds toward services we wanted, and kept the rest of our money to support the businesses, inventions, educational opportunities and upkeep of our infrastructure that we valued? Could we create a more prosperous economy if involuntary governments didn’t collect a large portion of our income?

Making the transition to voluntary governance would obviously take a lot of work, but we believe it’s absolutely essential if what we are after are equal rights and true freedom – not as a philosophical ideal but as a reality.  As discussed in our Solutions Strategies article, Stage One of the transition will likely involve reforming current systems to make governments accountable while taking care of those most disenfranchised without increasing the government’s funding or power –  and at the same time empowering individuals and communities to organize on their own.  Some key areas to address to get the transition underway are election and campaign finance reform.

The good news is a lot of valuable thinking has already been done envisioning voluntary societies. (The Liberty Resource Tree at the bottom of this page is rich with decades of extraordinary ethical and practical thinking.)

Because such profound change cannot happen all at once, there are three overlapping stages of the solutions process: Stage One: Bringing integrity and healing to our current condition; Stage Two: limiting government control to the protection of individual rights and the commons; and Stage Three:  living solely by voluntary cooperation – rules, but no rulers.

This three-staged approach is a radical shift from most strategies. Rather than just trying to improve the status quo, it integrates traditional progressive, conservative, and liberty viewpoints, reconciling divisions that have long kept us separated.

Source: Thrive Movement

Henry-David-Thoreau

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

– Henry David Thoreau
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Sedgwick, Maine is first town to declare total food sovereignty, opposing state and federal laws | NaturalNews

By  J.D. Hayes

There is a food revolution taking hold all over America, whether it is in the form of demanding labeling of GM foods, the right to produce and sell raw milk and other commodities, or – in the case of Sedgwick, Maine – declaring all local food transactions of any kind free and legal.

According to the website FoodRenegade.com, Sedgwick is the first city in the U.S. to free itself from the constraints of federal and state food regulation. Published reports say the town has passed an ordinance that gives its citizens the right “to produce, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing,” regulations be damned. The ordinance includes raw milk, meats that are slaughtered locally, all produce and just about anything else you might imagine.

And what’s more, three additional towns in Maine are expected to take up similar ordinances soon, said the FoodRenegade.com.

Gee – good, ol’ fashioned buyer-seller agreements?

Observers of the Sedgwick ordinance say it is much more than just “statement” legislation. Writes blogger David Grumpert, at TheCompletePatient.com:

This isn’t just a declaration of preference. The proposed warrant added, “It shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance.” In other words, no state licensing requirements prohibiting certain farms from selling dairy products or producing their own chickens for sale to other citizens in the town.

What about potential legal liability and state or federal inspections? It’s all up to the seller and buyer to negotiate. “Patrons purchasing food for home consumption may enter into private agreements with those producers or processors of local foods to waive any liability for the consumption of that food. Producers or processors of local foods shall be exempt from licensure and inspection requirements for that food as long as those agreements are in effect.” Imagine that-buyer and seller can agree to cut out the lawyers. That’s almost un-American, isn’t it?

According to Deborah Evans, a Sedgwick citizen, the ordinance further states:

  1. Producers or processors of local foods in the Town of Sedgwick are exempt from licensure and inspection provided that the transaction is only between the producer or processor and a patron when the food is sold for home consumption.
  2. Producers or processors of local foods in the Town of Sedgwick are exempt from licensure and inspection provided that the products are prepared for, consumed or sold at a community social event.

For those questioning the legality of the ordinance – as in, it obviously circumvents state and federal food laws – she notes:

[W]e the radicals who concocted this mutinous act of infamy believe that according to the Home Rule provisions of our State Constitution, the citizens of Sedgwick have the right to enact an ordinance that is “local and municipal in character.”

‘It’s about time’

Many of the local farmers say the ordinance is just what is needed.

“This ordinance creates favorable conditions for beginning farmers and cottage-scale food processors to try out new products, and to make the most of each season’s bounty,” farmer Bob St. Peter told the website FoodFreedom.com. “My family is already working on some ideas we can do from home to help pay the bills and get our farm going.”

“Tears of joy welled in my eyes as my town voted to adopt this ordinance,” said Sedgwick resident and local farm patron Mia Strong. “I am so proud of my community. They made a stand for local food and our fundamental rights as citizens to choose that food.”

St. Peter, who is a board member of the National Family Farm Council, a food freedom advocacy group, notes that small farmers have a much tougher row to hoe, especially in today’s economy, so they need the ability to sell their products more freely.

“It’s tough making a go of it in rural America,” he said. “Rural working people have always had to do a little of this and a little of that to make ends meet. But up until the last couple generations, we didn’t need a special license or new facility each time we wanted to sell something to our neighbors. Small farmers and producers have been getting squeezed out in the name of food safety, yet it’s the industrial food that is causing food borne illness, not us.”

Sources:
http://www.foodrenegade.com/maine-town-declares-food-sovereignty/
http://www.thecompletepatient.com
http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com
http://www.nffc.net

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S510 – Illegal To Grow, Share, Trade, Sell Homegrown Food | Rense

S510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US. (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-510 )

“If accepted [S 510] would preclude the public’s right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes. It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God.” It is similar to what India faced with imposition of the salt tax during British rule, only S 510 extends control over all food in the US, violating the fundamental human right to food.” – Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower.

Monsanto says it has no interest in the bill and would not benefit from it, but Monsanto’s Michael Taylor who gave us rBGH and unregulated genetically modified (GM) organisms, appears to have designed it and is waiting as an appointed Food Czar to the FDA (a position unapproved by Congress) to administer the agency it would create without judicial review if it passes.

S 510 would give Monsanto unlimited power over all US seed, food supplements, food AND FARMING.

History

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton introduced HACCP (Hazardous Analysis Critical Control Points) purportedly to deal with contamination in the meat industry. Clinton’s HACCP delighted the offending corporate (World Trade Organization “WTO”) meat packers since it allowed them to inspect themselves, eliminated thousands of local food processors (with no history of contamination), and centralized meat into their control. Monsanto promoted HACCP.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton, urged a powerful centralized food safety agency as part of her campaign for president. Her advisor was Mark Penn, CEO of Burson Marsteller*, a giant PR firm representing Monsanto. Clinton lost, but Clinton friends such as Rosa DeLauro, whose husband’s firm lists Monsanto as a progressive client and globalization as an area of expertise, introduced early versions of S 510.

S 510 fails on moral, social, economic, political, constitutional, and human survival grounds.

  1. It puts all US food and all US farms under Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, in the event of contamination or an ill-defined emergency. It resembles the Kissinger Plan.
  2. It would end US sovereignty over its own food supply by insisting on compliance with the WTO, thus threatening national security. It would end the Uruguay Round Agreement Act of 1994, which put US sovereignty and US law under perfect protection. Instead, S 510 says: Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.
  3. It would allow the government, under Maritime Law, to define the introduction of any food into commerce (even direct sales between individuals) as smuggling into “the United States.” Since under that law, the US is a corporate entity and not a location, “entry of food into the US” covers food produced anywhere within the land mass of this country and “entering into” it by virtue of being produced.
  4. It imposes Codex Alimentarius on the US, a global system of control over food. It allows the United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the WTO to take control of every food on earth and remove access to natural food supplements. Its bizarre history and its expected impact in limiting access to adequate nutrition (while mandating GM food, GM animals, pesticides, hormones, irradiation of food, etc.) threatens all safe and organic food and health itself, since the world knows now it needs vitamins to survive, not just to treat illnesses.
  5. It would remove the right to clean, store and thus own seed in the US, putting control of seeds in the hands of Monsanto and other multinationals, threatening US security. See Seeds ­ How to criminalize them, for more details.
  6. It includes NAIS, an animal traceability program that threatens all small farmers and ranchers raising animals. The UN is participating through the WHO, FAO, WTO, and World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) in allowing mass slaughter of even heritage breeds of animals and without proof of disease. Biodiversity in farm animals is being wiped out to substitute genetically engineered animals on which corporations hold patents. Animal diseases can be falsely declared. S 510 includes the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), despite its corrupt involvement in the H1N1 scandal, which is now said to have been concocted by the corporations.
  7. It extends a failed and destructive HACCP to all food, thus threatening to do to all local food production and farming what HACCP did to meat production ­ put it in corporate hands and worsen food safety.
  8. It deconstructs what is left of the American economy. It takes agriculture and food, which are the cornerstone of all economies, out of the hands of the citizenry, and puts them under the total control of multinational corporations influencing the UN, WHO, FAO and WTO, with HHS, and CDC, acting as agents, with Homeland Security as the enforcer. The chance to rebuild the economy based on farming, ranching, gardens, food production, natural health, and all the jobs, tools and connected occupations would be eliminated.
  9. It would allow the government to mandate antibiotics, hormones, slaughterhouse waste, pesticides and GMOs. This would industrialize every farm in the US, eliminate local organic farming, greatly increase global warming from increased use of oil- based products and long-distance delivery of foods, and make food even more unsafe. The five items listed the Five Pillars of Food Safety are precisely the items in the food supply which are the primary source of its danger.
  10. It uses food crimes as the entry into police state power and control. The bill postpones defining all the regulations to be imposed; postpones defining crimes to be punished, postpones defining penalties to be applied. It removes fundamental constitutional protections from all citizens in the country, making them subject to a corporate tribunal with unlimited power and penalties, and without judicial review.

For further information, watch these videos:

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Vision for a New America

After twenty years as an author and educator in the sovereignty and freedom movement worldwide we’ve learned what we can and cannot do in these times to restore the true vision of America given the political, economic and legal climate of the US today.

This historic talk on “Independence Day” weekend will inspire and rock the very foundations of your preconceptions about America and the world.

  • Lecture (Audio)

John David Van Hove (aka Johnny Light/Liberty/Love) is an author, educator, researcher, business developer and public speaker extraordinaire in many topic areas including sovereignty, freedom, liberty, history, law, economics, money, leadership and the true nature of power.

John is available for keynote public speaking, leading seminars and workshops, producing audio or video courses, internet, radio and television appearances, business consulting, financial and health coaching. (800) 640-5947

Source: Liberty International

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CNN Poll: Majority says government a threat to citizens’ rights | Political Ticker

Fifty-six percent of Americans say the government poses an immediate threat to individual rights and freedoms.Washington (CNN) – A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.

The survey indicates a partisan divide on the question: only 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans say the federal government poses a threat to the rights of Americans.

According to CNN poll numbers released Sunday, Americans overwhelmingly think that the U.S. government is broken – though the public overwhelmingly holds out hope that what’s broken can be fixed.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted February 12-15, with 1,023 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the overall survey.

Source: Political Ticker

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Gaza Freedom March

By Yusif Barakat

I am in Cairo, as of December 24th, and will return on January 18, 2010 (see below).

During the “Reign of the Goddess”, the compassionate nurturer, and the procreator of life—there was peace.  When the Hebrews converted to the male God image (the warrior) we have had wars for thousands of years.  Throughout history women have promoted peace and at times refused conjugal favors until their men put down their weapons.  Unfortunately, modern women (especially American) have been conscripted and have bought into the male macho slogans: “might makes right” and “the end justifies the means”.

Fortunately, some women have remained true to the Goddess image and have maintained a vigil for Peace.  An example of this is the women who established Code Pink and are sponsoring the Gaza Freedom March.  For more information see www.gazafreedommarch.org.

There have been many men who have championed the Goddess concept as well and have promoted peace, such as, Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  One such person that I know personally is Father Peter Dougherty, who just won the International Gandhi Award.  I met Father Dougherty 20 years ago when I first got arrested for civil disobedience while protesting nuclear weapons at Williams International.

Father Dougherty is the founder of the Michigan Peace Team (formerly known as the Michigan Faith & Resistance Peace Team).   I served 10 years on the MPT Board and remain a trainer for their training in non-violent resistance in areas of conflict.   I am proud to be on a delegation from the Michigan Peace Team, along with 5 women to participate in the Gaza Freedom March.

Attached are two press releases, one from the national Code Pink and one from Michigan Peace Team.  We must break the death grip that Israel has on the Gaza Strip and all of Palestine!  View this 5 minute You-Tube video by Marice Jacobsen to see for yourself what is going on in Gaza and the Gaza Freedom March plans: www.vimeo.com/7956625.

Our intention is to raise awareness amongst the international community and inform Americans, who spend billions of dollars supporting the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

Please forward this e-mail to your friends and participate in any way you can to create a moral awareness around the death grip Israel has on Palestine!

Hubb Wa Salaam

Yusif

P.S. I’m also attaching an article about me, titled “Jogger”, which will give you an idea of my dedication & passion for peace, along with the 2 press releases.  Please excuse any duplication of this message that you may receive as a result of my amateur attempt at computer communication.

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Ron Paul Rocks on CNBC Squawk Box 11/13/2009

A basic truth is that we may only loan what we have. If we have a dollar, we may loan a dollar. Yet, under the fraud of fractional reserve banking, banks loan ten times the money they actually have.

Fractional reserve banking is a Ponzi scheme whereby banks create money out of thin air through fraudulent book keeping, loaning non-existent money out at interest. It is no different than counterfeiting. In collusion, factional reserve banks counterfeit up to 10 times the amount of money that they actually have deposited, and charge interest on it all. Since money represents labor, fractional reserve bankers are effectively robbing the value of everyone’s labor through this fraudulent scam.

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We The People Stimulus Package (Video)

Bob Basso author of “Common Sense” plays the role of Thomas Paine to ignite the fire of change in America. Patriotism and Pride for America lead Thomas Paine to help take back America!

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We The People Stimulus Package (Video)

Bob Basso author of “Common Sense” plays the role of Thomas Paine to ignite the fire of change in America. Patriotism and Pride for America lead Thomas Paine to help take back America (9,356,576+ views on YouTube)!