Hillary Clinton - Transparent Like a Brick Wall

Originally published by Voices of Liberty

[On May 10,] the Washington Post reported that a federal judge re-opened a case to go after some of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Reggie B. Walton, U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Columbia, agreed to a 2012 request for records. This request was filed jointly by the State Department and Judicial Watch.

Judge Walton has an impressive, balanced record of political neutrality. Though appointed by George W. Bush, the Judge didn’t spare the Bush Administration from justice. He even presided over the trial of Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby. Now the Judge is helping Judicial Watch go after Hillary Clinton.

According to Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, “It’s a significant development. It points to the fraud by this administration and Mrs. Clinton.” South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy said, “The State Department… cannot certify that it has turned over all documents responsive to the committee’s request regarding the former secretary’s emails.” Congressman Gowdy is still investigating other missing emails regarding Clinton’s colossal leadership failure which got U.S. diplomats killed in Libya.

In a nutshell, the great Clinton email scandal of 2015 is that Hillary, while serving as Secretary of State, knowingly used her private email account and private server to send and receive emails regarding official U.S. government business. Using her private account instead of her .gov account kept her untouchable by open-source and Freedom-of-Information-Act requests. This is simply another case of crooked career politicians acting like the Wizard of Oz, telling We the People to ignore the man behind the curtain.

The great irony is that Hillary Clinton has been campaigning and calling for more transparency. She seems to believe that We the People are too stupid to fact check her words against her actions. She said last month in Iowa, “We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all.”

This call to get rid of “unaccountable money” comes from the person whose Foundation received millions from foreign governments while they were trying to lobby the State Department during her tenure. The pro-Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA, continues to receive millions in “unaccountable money” to promote Clinton and tear other candidates down.

Now, while gallivanting around the country and blowing smoke of “transparency” in people’s ears, the self-appointed champion of transparency continues to hide her activities. She made a show of turning over 30,000 private emails to the federal investigation, but also deleted 32,000 other emails and wiped the server clean. She refuses to turn over the server for analysis.

Let readers consider this: After the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon was taken to federal court over 18 minutes of erased audio tape. Today, a current presidential candidate refuses to allow federal investigators to find 32,000 emails from an account used for official government business. That’s all that We the People need to know. The self-appointed champion of transparency is really as transparent as a brick wall.

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Both Hillary Clinton images courtesy of Voices of Liberty.

American Stalin — ‘Joe Steele’ book review

I’ve been a fan of Harry Turtledove’s writing ever since I picked up a copy of Great War: American Front back in 2009. Turtledove has the ability to weave the stories of numerous ordinary people together to make one large patchwork fabric of an impressive, epic tale.  Such is the case with his 2015 novel, Joe Steele.

Joe Steele is based on a short story of the same name written in 2003, and expanded in 2014 to be a long, standalone novel.  In this novel, the man who would become Stalin is an American, a Democrat congressman from California rather than a Georgian-born Communist Party bureaucrat in Russia.  Born and raised among farm laborers in Fresno, Joe Steele is a dedicated socialist and is militantly pro-labor.

The story follows the Sullivan Brothers, reporters both, over a twenty year period.  One will unwillingly become a propagandist for the regime while the other is deported to a labor camp and must later fight on the front lines to atone for his political crimes.  Our story begins at the height of the Great Depression.

When the nominating process at the 1932 Democratic National Convention comes to complete gridlock between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joe Steele, no one knows who will challenge Herbert Hoover for the Presidency.  The sudden death of FDR in a house fire leaves Joe Steele the uncontested nominee and the eventual landslide victor over Hoover.

President Steele immediately begins a series of economic reforms under the first Four Year Plan—an allusion to Stalin’s Five Year Plan but tailored to the President’s term in office—with makes FDR’s New Deal look like a children’s game.  The federal government begins confiscating property under eminent domain for large-scale collective farming.  The Supreme Court justices who rule the new policies unconstitutional suddenly find themselves in front of a military tribunal for a show trial, and promptly sentenced to death by firing squad.  Joe Steele then moves on to purge the military establishment and key political opposition (as well as purging loyal followers who pose a future potential threat to the regime).

J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover also plays a prominent role in the novel.  Joe Steele’s second term is when the Government Bureau of Investigation—an alternate-history play on the FBI but resembling Stalin’s NKVD and later KGB—sets up a system of labor camps in North Dakota, Colorado, and New Mexico where political prisoners work themselves to death for “political reform.”  These are an obvious take on the true-history Gulag concentration camps in the Soviet Union.

This novel shows America slogging through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War much the way it did in true-history, but with the frightening tones of an endless Executive dictatorship, one-party rule, and a police state.  It’s frightening to watch Norman Rockwell’s America descend into a totalitarian state.  While certain true-history events are changed—for instance, a ‘Japanese War’ kicking off the Cold War instead of the Korean War, or Albert Einstein refusing to design an atom bomb for Joe Steele—much of the novel is grounded in truth.

For starters, Turtledove proves his expertise in the field of U.S. history by using real case law from the Civil War that allows the federal government to try civilians by military tribunal rather than by jury trial.  And while Americans may sleep well today believing themselves safe from labor camps, current federal documents tell a different story.

President Obama signed a series of Executive Orders that essentially allow the federal government to create an America similar to the version in Joe Steele.  Free speech is nothing but a privilege as long as Executive Order 10995 remains in effect, allowing the government to seize and control all communication media.  Natural resources and utility companies aren’t safe from seizure while Order 10997 gives the government carte blanche over all electrical power, gas petroleum, fuels, and minerals.

A maximum security FEMA camp in Wyoming

Collective farms are made possible by Order 10999, giving the government authority to take over all farms and food sources.  Order 11004 gives the Housing and Finance Authority the power to relocate communities, build new housing, and transit large populations.

Even worse, labor camps are also made possible by President Obama’s Executive Orders.  Order 11002 allows the Postmaster General to watch the entire population by operating a national registration of all persons.  Order 11000 allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision in times of war or peace.

After reading what the federal government currently has the power to do, does Joe Steele still look like pure fiction?  This novel is highly recommended to any students of American and Soviet history, as well as anyone who values liberty.

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Joe Steele cover art courtesy of Turtledove Wiki. J. Edgar Hoover picture courtesy of The Guardian.  FEMA camp image courtesy of Popular Mechanics.  These images used according to Fair Use.

2 out of 3 are Liberty Candidates!

This article makes the assumption that Rand Paul will remain the frontrunner in the presidential race and be the Republican Party’s nominee on the November 2016 ballot.  No other Republican candidate will be good enough for a stalwart libertarian like me.

2016 will be a much better election year for the liberty movement than 2012.  Back then, Ron Paul had to claw and scrape his way to getting two minutes of speaking time out of two-hour-long debates.  Moderators and major networks never took him seriously, except for the times they’d briefly mention him to drive home how ‘crazy’ he was, or to remind themselves that he was ‘unelectable’.  Worst of all, the libertarian ideas Ron advocated were deeply misunderstood. 2012 wasn’t our year.

This time, our libertarian ideas actually have a shot at being heard and accepted.  Rand Paul is being taken much more seriously than Ron was.  This is due in no small part to Ron blitzing America like a kamikaze in 2012, with ideas like “end the Fed,” “end foreign aid,” and “legalize drugs”.  Because Ron took the full blast of heat in 2012, America in 2016 can find it more palatable when Rand pushes ideas like “let’s fully audit the Fed,” “we can start cutting aid to this list of countries,” and “let’s end the War on Drugs, which is really a war on the black community.”

To make a long story short, Rand Paul’s candidacy excites me.  Sure, he isn’t a pure libertarian like his father, but making that constant comparison is getting silly.  ‘Conservatarian’ Rand Paul will take mainstream America MUCH closer to libertarianism than Hillary Clinton, that’s for damn sure!

I’m also excited that Gary Johnson will be running for president again on the Libertarian Party ticket.  Though I’ve long-since agreed to actually cast my general election vote for Rand, I can see the importance of Gary’s candidacy.  Many in the liberty movement are concerned that Gary running against Rand will ‘divide’ the libertarian vote in America.

I disagree.

If there exists any 'division' within the liberty movement, it runs along these lines:

1. Most libertarians will ultimately swallow their pride and support Rand. They realize that, despite his ‘impurities’ he’s worlds above the other rabble playing the Ronald Reagan name card.
2. Libertarian Party members will vote for Gary Johnson because the Party needs to run candidates in order to function as a Party and not as a weekly tea social.  For some of these folks, Rand might not be ‘good enough’.  They have every right then to run a candidate that better represents them.
3.  Libertarians and libertarian sympathizers who don’t much care for either Rand or Gary will stay home and find creative life hacks that defy government regulations.  Their focus is on advancing liberty through action, not politics.

Judge Napolitano recently said, "I want Rand to win."

Frankly, the liberty movement needs all three groups of people.  We NEED Rand, we NEED Gary, and we even NEED a liberty-advancing alternative for those who are sick of politics.  In the long-run, people are already aligned for what they’ll do or who they’ll support in 2016.  Because libertarians are notorious for sticking to their principles, there'll simply be no arguing with these three groups.

I’m still incredibly excited just to know that I could be seeing Rand Paul and Gary Johnson both on the general election ballot.  Though the Libertarian Party is a smaller party, it’s still the third largest party in the United States.  This means that, of the three biggest American political parties on the November ballot, two out of three candidates will be liberty candidates.

I say again, two out of three general election candidates will be representing libertarian ideas and policy objectives.

Only the Democrat candidate, probably Darth Hillary, will be the candidate representing corruption, government surveillance, and corporate fascism.  The other two candidates will starkly contrast; their platforms will differ from tyranny and instead offer a mostly-libertarian option (Rand) and a super-libertarian option (Gary).

Absolutely nothing about the 2012 election looked like this, and I count all of our lucky stars that years of hard work and activism are finally starting to pay off.  I can only imagine one day in the future when libertarian ideas will have so deeply infiltrated politics, that all three parties’ candidates will be different shades of libertarian.

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ENTER the Rand Paul writing contest!

Images courtesy of aLibertarianFuture.com

Hillary Clinton: Champion of Wall Street

Originally published in April 2015 by Voices of Liberty

A month ago the Washington Post disclosed a juicy tidbit of information: the Algerian government made a contribution of half a million dollars to the Clinton Foundation.  This just happened to be at the exact time the Algerian government was lobbying Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State.

Other than the eyebrows it raises at first, this might not seem so scandalous if it weren’t for the fact that Americans get punished for the same thing.  In 2011 and 2012, multiple American companies were charged and heavily penalized under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  The corruption they were penalized for was making donations to foreign charities.

The Obama administration acted on the assumption that charitable donations abroad were meant to influence civil servants to take a more favorable stand towards the American businesses.  Therefore, American businesses get charges and heavy fines levied against them, but it’s alright when the beneficiary of foreign corrupt practices is a sitting member of the Cabinet.  And this isn’t the first foreign charitable gift the Clinton Foundation received during Hillary’s Cabinet tenure.

“The U.A.E. gave us money,” Bill Clinton said to the Miami Herald.  “Do we agree with everything they do?  No, but they help us fight ISIS.”  It looks like the former President would have us believe foreign corrupt practices are okay if foreign governments are helping America prolong the Iraq War…

One thing is crystal clear: when vying for Hillary Clinton’s loyalty, money talks.

Her top political contributors have historically included, and still include, big Wall Street firms like Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Time Warner.  These numbers don’t include any foreign or domestic groups that donated to the Clinton Foundation to sway the Secretary of State.

As a Senator, in her statement on the 2008 bailouts, she noted “the prevailing dynamic of corporate America, where the sole priority was the dividend, the inflated bonus and the quarterly earnings report…”  She clearly had words to say about “corporate America,” yet one can’t help but think this may have just been political theater.

Senator Clinton’s pro-working-class, pro-middle-class approach would have been a lot more credible had her top campaign contributors been anyone OTHER than corporate America.  And guess what!  She voted for what the WSWS calls “the largest single transfer of wealth to the financial elite in US history,” and it was financed on the dime of struggling families.

Hillary Clinton talks a good game about being for the interests of the working class and middle class, but that’s just another li from another politician.  Hillary may certainly believe in empowering women, the LGBTQ community, and ethnic minorities.  However, her actions show how she just wants some of those people to be among the ruling elites.

Hillary Clinton is with Wall Street, not Main Street.

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Hillary Clinton photo courtesy of the Munich Security Conference via CC BY 3.0 license.

Rand Paul Writing Contest UPDATE!

In light of Marco Rubio announcing his presidential candidacy, the Stand With Rand Writing Contest has a new category option for submissions.

Rand Paul supporters who want to be published in a book about Rand can choose to write on any of these six topics:

1)      Why Conservatives should vote for Rand

2)      Why Progressives should vote for Rand

3)      Why Independents and the politically homeless should vote for Rand

4)      Rand Paul is a better Republican candidate than Ted Cruz

5)      Rand Paul is a better Republican candidate than Marco Rubio

6)      Rand Paul is a better candidate for America than Hillary Clinton

Multiple submissions are allowed, but each one should be on a different topic.  Each topic will be its own individual book.  The eBook editions will be distributed free of charge.

If you do choose to submit your work for the contest, it would be published it under the Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license, so you still retain the rights to your work.  Not only are you allowed to re-publish your work, but the Creative Commons license gives you permission to independently re-publish the entire book!

Submit your work to politicalzachfoster@gmail.com with the subject line 'WRITING CONTEST'.  The final deadline is 11:59 P.M. Pacific, June 1, 2015.

See the full contest guidelines here.

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Picture courtesy of Politico and used according to Fair Use.

Stand With Rand Writing Contest

Four years ago I launched a special writing contest.  Contestants were to write an essay to any audience—liberals, conservatives, independents—about how Ron Paul best represents them and is the best candidate for the Presidency

The best essays were compiled into a campaign book in support of Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy, and it was written by We the People.  This book was published as VOICES OF REVOLUTION: Americans Speak Out for Ron Paul (download it for free).

Nearly four years later, I’m pleased to announce to you the Stand With Rand Writing Contest.

This time, we’re going big and we’re going long. We understand that the mainstream media will attack Senator Paul ceaselessly as he campaigns and spreads a message of individual liberty, sound money, and peace.  They’ll attack him on TV, on the Internet, and in print.

Our plan is to flood the eBook market with books that are pro-Rand and pro-liberty.  In order to do this, I’m calling on fellow patriots and lovers of liberty to put pen to paper and speak from the heart.  I’m calling on YOUR essays on why fellow Americans should vote for Rand Paul.

The essays can be any of these five topics:

1)      Why Conservatives should vote for Rand

2)      Why Progressives should vote for Rand

3)      Why Independents and the politically homeless should vote for Rand

4)      Rand Paul is a better Republican candidate than Ted Cruz

5)      Rand Paul is a better Republican candidate than Marco Rubio

6)      Rand Paul is a better candidate for America than Hillary Clinton

If you do choose to submit your work, it’ll be published it under the Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license, so you still retain the rights to your work.  Not only are you allowed to re-publish your own work, but the Creative Commons license gives you permission to independently re-publish the entire book!

Remember these guidelines to make your writing most effective:

·       Multiple submissions are allowed, but each submission has to be on a different topic.  The above 5 topics will be 5 different books.

·       Write from the heart. Don’t preach to strangers.  Tell them from the heart why a Paul presidency is important to you AND to the reader.

·       When writing to Conservatives, back up your arguments with Bible verses. Also mention Ronald Reagan and the “conservatarian” philosophy of Reagan and Barry Goldwater that Americans overwhelmingly supported. It wouldn’t hurt to mention Rand’s response to Benghazi, or Glenn Beck leaving the GOP in disgust.

·       When writing to Progressives, don’t forget to mention the damage inflicted on the black community by the Obama administration and Democrat Party policies.  Also stress the Establishment Left’s betrayal of the working class and abandonment of the LGBTQ community.  It’s also good to refer to Howard Zinn’s populist histories and tie Rand in with empowerment of the working classes.  Also, don’t forget that Bill Maher is a huge supporter.

·       If writing about Hillary Clinton, focus on every documented lie, half-truth, and cover up involving Hillary, especially her hawkish support for George W. Bush's, Dick Cheney's, and Barack Obama’s wars. Stress that Clinton represents a new type of imperial/colonialist America.

·       When making a factual claim or referring to something that happened in real time—a historical event, words someone said or wrote, etc.—back it up with a citation in a footnote.  At least provide a url to make it easier for your poor editor.

·       The deadline for submissions is 11:59 P.M. Pacific Time, June 1, 2015.  Even though that’s 6 weeks away, don’t sit on this.  The liberty movement NEEDS your contribution and I'm accepting submissions NOW.

Send submissions to politicalzachfoster@gmail.com

Every bit of VOLUNTARY grass roots activism counts.  Will YOU stand with me?

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'I Stand With Rand' banner courtesy of Latino Rebels.

Let’s Avoid Infighting in the UK Liberty Movement

I’m writing this to our brothers and sisters from “across the pond.”  This message goes out to both the big-L and small-l libertarians.  I see some of the infighting in the UK’s liberty movement, most notably between activists from the UK Independence Party and the Libertarian Party of the UK.

Brothers and sisters in liberty, I can tell you from experience, factionalism and needless infighting took A LOT of steam out of the liberty movement in America.  You would be way better off avoiding it.  In no way am I preaching to you.  Instead I’m using my experience, even the mistakes I made in the past, to help you folks steer clear of some bumpy roads in spreading libertarian thought.

Our biggest problem, especially in the US Libertarian Party, is when factions arise and say "So-and-So is not Libertarian; only WE are the true bastion of liberty. Join us, not them!" Believe me friends, it's counter-productive.

Frankly, if the UKIP proposes ANY ideas or changes that that promotes liberty in any way, shape or form--even if it's not as libertarian as we'd like--their activism is still important. Anything that moves the meter needle away from statism and a little closer to liberty, is important.

Just think where you were, politically, 10 or 15 years ago. Not everyone becomes libertarian overnight. They NEED an intellectual/logical stepping stone.  Even hardcore anarchists in the US are flocking to support the “conservatarian” Rand Paul; they know that his candidacy will be a big push in the direction of libertarian thought.  It's a golden stepping stone for millions of Americans, and we'd be foolish not to support him and build him up.  But Rand is just an example of libertarians and conservatives building coalitions within the liberty movement.

The BEST hope for success is to not put a negative spotlight on other groups we should be allied with, but instead put a spotlight on things you SUPPORT. If you REALLY want to differentiate yourselves from UKIP, put a spotlight on LPUK stances you SUPPORT (but stances different from UKIP's).

The most attractive feature of libertarianism is people who are alive, free, and HAPPY. 100% positivity is far more effective for recruiting than 90% negativity followed by 'Vote for us, we're your last choice'.

I truly pray that I live to see the day a libertarian party wins the majority in Parliament (and the freaking US Congress, too). Far off, maybe, but certainly possible within our lifetimes.

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British R3VOLUTION flag courtesy of the Advocates dot org.