Will Grigg's Liberty Minutes
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Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 30, 2010

Why are police trained to be cowards? This question is raised by the arrest of 20-year-old California resident Melissa Greenfield when she refused to surrender her cell phone during a traffic stop.

Sgt. Jonathan Burke of the Delaware County, Ohio Sheriff’s Office asked Greenfield’s boyfriend for ID at a truck stop. Melissa produced a cell phone and announced that she was quite sensibly making a record of the event “for legal purposes and our own safety.”

Burke demanded that Greenfield surrender the camera. She properly refused that demand. So the armed stranger abducted Greenfield under color of supposed law by arresting her and charging her with “obstructing official business and resisting arrest.” She spent three days in jail.

Burke claimed that he feared Greenfield could have been carrying a cell-phone gun. After it became clear that the mysterious object was a common cellphone and not exotic Eastern European spy technology, it was returned to Greenfield, but the video record of the police stop had been erased.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 29, 2010

According to multiple eyewitnesses, the traffic collision that claimed the life of Brooklyn resident Aileen McKay-Dalton was a clear case of vehicular homicide.

The mother of three was driving a Vespa motor scooter when she was blindsided by a dark Ford Explorer driven by a man wearing a shoulder holster. Eyewitnesses told the police that the driver of the SUV ran a red light. Yet the police contemptuously dismissed those accounts and released the man without taking him into custody.

“You can stay or you can go, I don’t really care,” one witness was told by an officer when she offered to give her account.

Incredibly, the police initially claimed there were no witnesses to the crash. The NYPD also said the SUV is owned by the US Treasury Department – which helps explain the otherwise inexplicable police indifference to the killing. The assailant was a servant of the ruling elite, the victim a commoner. Nothing to see here – please move along.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 28, 2010

The LA District Attorney’s office recently conducted an armed raid on Rawsome Foods, a Venice, California restaurant that sells unprocessed dairy products and other unlicensed organic food.

Surveillance video of the raid shows four police with their guns drawn and pointed at employees. As described by the Los Angeles Times, the heroes in uniform “ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed potatoes and to step away from the nuts.” Those intrepid defenders of the public good will doubtless receive commendations for valor.

This incident was not an aberrant example of overkill; it is typical of the growing government crackdown on people who produce and consume such products as unpasteurized milk. Such people, reported the Times, prefer foods that have not been “run through a federally mandated pasteurization process….”

The government ruling us is willing to kill people in order to protect them from the risks of buying and selling unprocessed foods.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 27, 2010

According to the chairman of China’s largest credit rating agency, “The US is insolvent and faces bankruptcy as a pure debtor nation….”

For years, Beijing has bankrolled Washington’s deficit spending, including the trillions of dollars spent in recent years to expand the Homeland Security apparatus and pay for two useless foreign wars.

The previously quoted Chinese official makes a telling point when he observes that “the huge military expenditure of the US is not created by themselves but comes from borrowed money, which is not sustainable.”

If China dumps the dollar, the Regime in Washington and its quasi-private counterfeiting arm, the Federal Reserve, will have to monetize the debt, which will lead to Weimar-style hyperinflation.

Germany’s central bank began the radical expansion of its money supply in 1920, but the hyperinflationary effects weren’t felt until 1922. Ominously, the radical expansion of the monetary base by the Federal Reserve began two years ago.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 26, 2010

Lysander Spooner, the renowned 19th century constitutional attorney, drew a critical distinction between vices – “those acts by which a man harms himself” – and crimes – “those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.”

Unless that distinction is recognized,” there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property,” Spooner wrote.

Government efforts to enforce so-called laws against vice constitute one of the largest threats to life and liberty. This was recently illustrated in the death of 48-year-old DeFarra Gaymon of Atlanta, who was shot to death by an undercover police officer in a Newark, New Jersey park during a so-called “sex sweep.”

Gaymon, who was unarmed, allegedly engaged in what was described as a solitary sex act. Though immoral and disgusting, such conduct is a vice, not a crime. The real crime here was the lethal force used against Gaymon when he fled from the police – but state-mandated crimes are rarely punished.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 23, 2010

In a June 2007 opinion column, Joseph Farah, founder of WorldNetDaily, described Texas Republican congressman Ron Paul as “clueless about the nature of the threat we face from Islamo-fascism.”

While professing to admire Dr. Paul’s commitment to the Constitution, Farah wrote that he couldn’t support the congressman’s presidential bid because “America is under siege from Islamo-fascist enemies….This is no time to back down or even to appear to be weak. It would be disastrous if we cut and run now as Ron Paul suggests.”

Three years later, with a Democrat in the White House, Farah has endorsed the wisdom of cutting and running.

“For the life of me, I cannot begin to understand our objectives in either Iraq or Afghanistan,” he wrote on July 22. “[E] nough is enough. We have spent over $1 trillion on these two wars and spilled far too much American blood… What is the point?”

As Ron Paul understood years ago, those wars are pointless and should never have been fought.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 22, 2010

Lord Acton, who famously warned about the corrupting influence of power, shared another critical insight: “The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”

When allied with political power, banking establishments, Thomas Jefferson warned, are more destructive than standing armies. Neither Jefferson nor Acton would be surprised by the fact that banks bailed out with money stolen from taxpayers are refusing to renegotiate mortgages that desperate, upside-down homeowners simply cannot repay.

Bank of America, which received $25 billion in bailouts, is being sued over its refusal to comply with the Home Affordable Modification Program, supposedly designed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. The lawsuits allege that BoA employs delaying tactics -- such as conveniently misplacing critical paperwork – to avoid negotiating with debtors until the mortgages are in default.

Our current political system is servicing the banks and suffocating the people. That’s one of the most important reasons why it simply cannot survive.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 21, 2010

In a recent opinion poll, 45 percent of the professional class in Washington, D.C. said that the economy was heading in the right direction. This must reflect the fact that all of our wealth is being siphoned away from those who make it into the hands of those who take it.

As Politico notes, “The massive expansion of government under President Barack Obama has basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators and contractors for years to come.”

In fact, the dramatic increase in the size and expense of government began under Bush, whose term saw a radical expansion of both the Homeland Security State and domestic welfare programs.

While the tax-consuming class expands, the productive class is being annihilated. Nation-wide, the jobless rate is well into double digits: The authoritative ShadowStats economic report calculates the actual unemployment rate at 22 percent.

What will the takers do once they have driven the makers into extinction?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 20, 2010

In her study of Nazi totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt pointed out that those who committed officially sanctioned atrocities were often hindered by their conscience.

To overcome that divinely instilled moral impulse, secret police chief Heinrich Himmler taught his subordinates to re-direct their pity toward themselves. Instead of saying “What horrible things I did to people!” they would say, “What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!" observed Arendt.

A similar theme could be heard in the recently publicized May 26 Senate committee testimony of Judge Jay Bybee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. As a Bush administration official, Bybee signed off on memos ratifying the supposed presidential authority to order the torture of detainees.

Asked if he has any regrets, Judge Bybee lamented the professional and personal pressures he has experienced, and the “kind of attention [that] has been visited on me and … my family."

Judge Bybee has clearly mastered Himmler’s tactic of re-directed pity.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 19, 2010

Every time talk turns to the necessity of cutting budgets, headlines scream about the heartlessness and parsimony of those who would deny children school lunches, or shut down national parks.

As the depression deepens and revenues dry up, some police chiefs and sheriffs are employing a shockingly cynical version of this familiar tactic: They are literally trying to terrorize the public into supporting their budget demands.

Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts recently announced that because of budget cuts citizens shouldn’t expect police to respond to calls involving 44 kinds of crime, including burglary, grand theft, and other serious offenses.

In Sacramento County, the Sheriff’s Office published an ad depicting what appeared to be a sexual assault on a child. “Don’t let them cut deputies and put your family at risk!” screamed the ad copy.

The essential message here was: Give us what we want, or people will get hurt. How does this differ from terrorism?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 16, 2010

Many corporate leaders were eager to buy in when George W. Bush, and then Barrack Obama, sought partners to promote subsidized corporate bailouts. Some of the Leviathan State’s corporate supporters are feeling a twinge of buyer’s remorse.

John Castellani, former head of the Business Roundtable, eagerly supported the Wall Street Bailout and other corporate socialist ventures. In recent weeks, however, Castellani lamented what he called the “unintended consequences” of that partnership, such as onerous regulations inflicted on businesses under Obama.

Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner writes that the US Chamber of Commerce “boosted the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Detroit Bailout, stimulus, and cash-for-clunkers.” Chamber President Tom Donohue now assails the Feds “for killing jobs and entrepreneurship.”

Even GE CEO Jeff Immelt, who openly calls for a Euro-Socialist style corporate state, complains about the burdens of the federal regulatory state.

The corporate leaders who helped build our economic prison are tardily coming to realize that subsidies always come with a matching set of shackles.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 15, 2010

Someday soon the American Empire will die from accumulated debt and be buried in a foreign grave.

This is the urgent prediction of Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, an English scholar who has written extensively about the American imperium.

The collapse may come “within the next two years,” Ferguson declared in his keynote address to the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival. In fiscal terms, he continued, Washington “is very near the edge of chaos. And we’ve seen already in Greece what happens when the bond market loses faith in your fiscal policy.”

Both the Soviet and Roman empires experienced a sudden collapse when the cost of servicing debt exceeded the government’s military budget. “That has not been the case I think at any point in U.S. history,” Ferguson pointed out. “It will be the case in the next five years.”

As Ferguson told his audience, Americans are the “Redcoats” now – and national bankruptcy will be the price of playing that un-American role.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 14, 2010

Obamacare has yet to go into effect, yet as Wayne Hoffman of the Idaho Freedom Foundation notes, the government is already forcing doctors to “treat patients according to the government’s terms and conditions. If they protest, argue, complain, fight or plead, they will be pegged as part of a grand conspiracy and silenced.”

Orthopedic surgeons in Boise rebelled against government –established reimbursement rates .Exercising their right to assemble peacefully in order to seek redress of their grievances, the doctors communicated with each other to complain and organize. Scores of doctors announced they wouldn’t continue offering treatment under the reduced reimbursement schedule. Many of them reversed that decision once the rates were increased.

This refusal to accept government price controls was treated by the federal government – and the Idaho state government – as a criminal “price-fixing conspiracy.” The physicians were forced to accept a settlement that, among other things, would make it a criminal offense for a doctor to complain about price controls to his professional peers.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 13, 2010

Democracy is based on the morally unsupportable assumption that violence against the individual can be sanctified through the political state, and justified through majority vote. That’s why the American Founders abhorred democracy, choosing instead to create a constitutional republic.

Milton Friedman warned that democracies end in bankruptcy. Economic commentator Neil Reynolds observes that “Democracies have made people more dependent on the state than any humanitarian necessity required.”

A study published by Italy’s Sapienza University entitled Democracy, Debt and Disorder indicts John Maynard Keynes, the intellectual pontiff of the welfare state. Keynes “provided politicians with a rationale for borrowing money to buy votes,” notes that study. The political class redistributed wealth from the future to fund an orgy of corrupt spending in the present.

As the accelerating collapse of the welfare state demonstrates, that future has now arrived – one in which majority rule degenerates into undisguised mob violence, as seen in Greece and elsewhere.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 12, 2010

Indianapolis resident LaDonna Dixon was frantic to help her friend Ashley, who was having a seizure. While LaDonna retrieved Ashley’s medicine from her car, Officer Scott Childers arrived and took control of the scene.

When Dixon attempted to give Ashley her medication, Childers threw her to the ground, maced her, and then beat her into unconsciousness, despite the fact that she was in an advanced state of pregnancy.

As Childers beat Dixon, the father of her child arrived on the scene and pleaded with the officer to stop, to no avail. At this point, the father was morally justified in using lethal force against Childers in order to defend his family, had this been possible.

When Dixon awoke, she was in a holding facility. She was bleeding, and her face was burning from the mace. After her jailers refused to take her to a hospital, Dixon gave birth to a dead child – who was murdered through police abuse before taking his first breath.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 9, 2010

Every once in a while a member of the wealth-destroying class will abandon any pretense of civility and display the true nature of the state in its full malignant majesty.

The aptly named Michael Nutter, who afflicts Philadelphia by serving as its mayor, recently performed that disgusting but vital service while addressing city residents who have avoided Nutter’s tax shakedown.

“We want our damn money,” grunted Nutter. “You owe it, we want it, and I plan to collect it.”

Philadelphia Revenue Commissioner Keith Richardson promises to work with the DA’s office to identify and prosecute so-called tax scofflaws, who may be imprisoned for up to seven years for the supposed crime of protecting their earnings from Nutter and his criminal cohorts.

Taxes aren’t “owed”; they’re stolen. People who surrender them aren’t tax “payers,” but tax “victims.” And politicians like Nutter aren’t public servants; they’re officially sanctioned criminals who confiscate wealth at gunpoint. Brazen thuggishness of this kind will become increasingly commonplace as the depression inexorably deepens.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 8, 2010

When governments steal from the productive and lavish the plundered wealth on politically favored parasites, they call this corrupt activity “investment.” When productive companies seek to protect their honestly earned profits, governments call this “greed.”

A recent column by Fareed Zakaria of the Washington Post invited us to be outraged that America’s 500 largest non-financial companies have accumulated $1.8 trillion on their balance sheets.

In any recession or depression, it’s important to save cash rather than spend it. This is particularly important with the government directly seizing control of huge sections of the economy and regulating what remains into oblivion.

Consider the case of White Castle, the Ohio-based hamburger chain. Although that company has offered health insurance for employees since 1924, it stands to lose 55 percent of its net income thanks to “Obamacare” mandates. Rather than using its earnings to expand, White Castle is hanging on to what it can in order to survive as our rulers systematically destroy our economy.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

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Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 7, 2010

When police seek to enter private property, they can obtain a warrant, secure the consent of the owner, or enter without consent if they’re acting on probable cause in exigent circumstances.

Police and other officials in some jurisdictions are circumventing the constitutional impediments to warrantless searches by creating special teams composed of police and safety personnel. Under the guise of conducting safety inspections, the police gain access to apartment buildings – often with the help of landlords – and collect evidence to be used in prosecuting residents for various offenses, typically involving narcotics.

In Oakland, for instance, the police have created a unit called SMART – Special Multi-Agency Response Team – that includes two police officers, two building safety enforcers, and a fire inspector. For several years, SMART has conducted warrantless searches of apartments and other rental properties, sometimes thoroughly demolishing living quarters in search of drugs or other evidence.

This is the kind of thing that drove our colonial ancestors to take up arms against their government.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Willl Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 6, 2010

When he criticized the Obama administration’s recent escalation in Afghanistan, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele offended the entire War Party , which includes politicians and pundits from both sides of the narrow partisan divide who support an interventionist foreign policy.

Steele correctly noted that history illustrates the folly of getting involved in “a land war in Afghanistan.” Steele could, and should, have expanded that criticism to include Obama’s predecessor, under whose reign the Afghan mission morphed from one of supposed retaliation for 9-11 into a full-blown nation-building exercise.

In 1843, British Army chaplain GR Gleig, one of the few survivors of England’s Afghan war, described that conflict as “a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after much suffering and disaster … [that yielded] Not one benefit….” The same epitaph will be written for Washington’s misbegotten Afghan war.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 5, 2010

Amid a deepening depression, California’s Shasta County Sheriff’s Office has laid off ten percent of its personnel, scaled back nighttime patrols, and released scores of inmates from the local jail. Yet several months ago, Sheriff Tom Bosenko spent $340,000 to create special team to tramp through the local woods in search of marijuana plants.

That amount was spent in an effort to attract a half-million dollars in federal anti-marijuana subsidies.

The Wall Street Journal notes that federal subsidies have often skewed the priorities of local law enforcement bodies. Current budget crises “are enhancing this effect, and the result is particularly striking in California, where many residents take a benign view of pot but federal dollars help keep law-enforcement focused on it.”

While Sheriff Bosenko’s task force runs up overtime collecting pot plants, crimes against persons and property are on the rise in Shasta County. The same trends can be seen elsewhere as cash-starved police and sheriff’s departments become full-fledged affiliates of the federal Homeland Security State.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 2, 2010

The State of Illinois has begun the legal process of seizing private property for the supposed purpose of building a third airport to compliment O’Hare International and Midway.

This project is entirely unnecessary: A perfectly serviceable international airport already exists in depressed Rockford, Illinois, and the town would welcome an effort to expand it. But this would deprive the state’s patronage pimps of an opportunity to confer perks, payouts, and other politically useful graft of their favored constituents.

However, most residents in the targeted area aren’t willing to sell. With land values in an historic slump, the state government is moving quickly to condemn the land, grabbing it by force and fraud before the economy recovers and prices go up.

During the 19th Century, “Manifest Destiny” was the incantatory phrase uttered by the government as it gave itself permission to steal property belonging to Indian tribes. Today, the preferred conjuration is “eminent domain.”

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

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Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

July 1, 2010

In the late 1980s, Michael Milken made a fortune selling high-risk, high-yield “junk bonds.”

Milken’s success attracted the interest of an ambitious prosecutor named Rudolph Giuliani, who extorted a guilty plea by threatening to file spurious criminal charges against Milken’s brother and his elderly, ailing father. This would continue in perpetuity, even if each case were thrown out or resulted in acquittal.

Milken’s so-called “junk bonds” helped underwrite the modern high-tech economy. Since 2008, however, taxpayers have been forced to buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of utterly useless bonds and other assets through the Wall Street bailout. Bloomberg News reports that Fed Commissar Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner – in an unambiguous criminal act -- deliberately misled Congress and the public by describing useless bonds the Treasury bought from Bear Stearns as “investment-grade assets”

In a rational world, Bernanke and Geithner would be in prison, and Michael Milken would be their warden.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.