On Thursday the House of Representatives is expected to begin debate on the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), leading to a vote next week. This is yet another bill similar to SOPA which is designed to limit privacy and individual liberty on the internet. Now is the time to take action to let them know you don’t want the government accessing and sharing your email and personal data.

CISPA would massively reduce the privacy and security of your online communications and personal data. It would give government agencies and many private companies access to your personal communications and financial information and would allow government security agencies like the National Security Agency unprecedented power to access your data including medical records, private emails and financial information – all without a warrant, oversight by any court or due process of law.

This access to your records would require no misbehavior on your part, not even an accusation of terrorism or criminal activity and it would take place without your knowledge or any opportunity to protect your information or your privacy interests.  That information could then be passed on to private companies or other agencies or used against you with no real rules or restrictions on who could access it or what hands it would end up in.

The Republican Liberty Caucus  joined with other concerned groups like the Liberty Coalition and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to promote “Stop Cyber Spying Week” last week, but now the real push is on to break down support for CISPA and send it to the legislative shredder as we did with SOPA a few months ago.

We urge you to email your representative  in Congress and urge them to oppose CISPA and keep government agencies out of our private online data and communications.

Given that the third and final day of ObamaCare Supreme Court oral arguments are now complete, I’d like to focus more on the political implications of what has occurred thus far rather than spending time analyzing the details of the case, which several others have done with far more of expertise than I could ever provide. I particularly recommend the Wall Street Journal live blogs (day one summary, day two, and day three), and the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s comprehensive coverage at PPACAction.com.

While we won’t know until June whether ObamaCare will be struck down, either in part or as a whole, it’s certainly safe to say there’s a chance that the individual mandate will be declared unconstitutional, thus creating chaos that will need to be addressed one way or the other. Justice Kennedy and others made note of potential impending disaster in that regard today, as reported by Brett Kendall at the Wall Street Journal:

“Several justices express concern about doing harm to insurance companies if the mandate falls but the rest of the law is left in place.  Justice Kennedy worries about imposing a ‘risk’ on insurance companies ‘that Congress never intended.’”

The Justices who made note of the trouble with striking down the individual mandate while keeping the law’s other provisions have a very good point. The entire aim of the mandate, in theory, was to avoid an adverse selection situation where only those who actively need insurance would seek it out while the healthy would then determine that remaining uninsured until they got sick was economically viable.

Given the chaos that could ensue if the law is partially upheld, which could certainly happen, means that Republicans need to be prepared to address either strike-down scenario – and in my humble opinion, a ruling that declares only the individual mandate unconstitutional (which the liberal Justices seemed to be pushing for today) would actually be worse, and absolutely destroy private insurance companies. Nevertheless, as I touched upon in my Day two analysis of the SCOTUS hearings over at my personal blog CorieWhalen.com, conservatives need to be very cautious in regards to declaring imminent victory in the event that the court does in fact declare ObamaCare unconstitutional; even as a whole. Winning a battle, important as it might be, certainly does not imply victory in an overall, extremely extensive war.

However, let’s assume for a moment that ObamaCare is declared unconstitutional in its entirety. The obligatory period of celebration will inevitably occur, but where will we really be as conservatives? Right back where we were when the left, during the Bush years and 2008 election, framed the narrative in a manner that convinced voters that Republicans had no solutions regarding this important matter. And honestly, is that premise even entirely inaccurate when Republican ideas regarding health care have in recent history been either virtually non-existent or only marginally less evil than the absurdities served up by Democrats? Republicans in the latter half of the 20th century, and particularly post-Reagan, have been incredible at screaming about Democratic proposals while inevitably compromising in the direction of further government growth – perhaps slowing the car headed toward the cliff down a few miles per hour, but in no way changing the vehicle’s direction.

Take, for example, the direction of the GOP after the defeat of HillaryCare. The ultimately ill-fated piece of legislation was killed just before the Republican Revolution of 1994 – but what did Republicans end up doing when they swept through the halls of Congress on the heels of their Contract with America? Regarding health care, at least, nothing of merit. The GOP at the time grew complacent and seemed to assume that staving off HillaryCare was a victory in itself rather than taking the opportunity to make pursuing decentralization and free market focused health care reforms a priority in their Contract with America.

This decision to not immediately play offense in a free market oriented manner regarding health care post HillaryCare eventually posed a massive political problem, because it led to the inference that Republicans were satisfied with the status quo, and ultimately aided in laying the groundwork for the onset of ObamaCare. And even worse than allowing Democrats to claim that Republicans were “doing nothing” on the issue of health care, the GOP fell into a left-defined parameter of “doing something” implying a federal, government-centric solution. This is where the Heritage Foundation’s flirtation with the individual health care mandate and Medicare Part D debacles come in.

As James Taranto wrote at the Wall Street Journal in October of last year in his piece, “ObamaCare’s Heritage:”

“Heritage did put forward the idea of an individual mandate, though it predated HillaryCare by several years. We know this because we were there: In 1988-90, we were employed at Heritage as a public relations associate (a junior writer and editor), and we wrote at least one press release for a publication touting Heritage’s plan for comprehensive legislation to provide universal ‘quality, affordable health care.’

As a junior publicist, we weren’t being paid for our personal opinions. But we are now, so you will be the first to know that when we worked at Heritage, we hated the Heritage plan, especially the individual mandate. ‘Universal health care’ was neither already established nor inevitable, and we thought the foundation had made a serious philosophical and strategic error in accepting rather than disputing the left-liberal notion that the provision of ‘quality, affordable health care’ to everyone was a proper role of government. As to the mandate, we remember reading about it and thinking: ‘I thought we were supposed to be for freedom.’”

And as for Medicare Part D, the legislation was introduced by then-Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) in 2003 (when Republicans held the House, Senate and Presidency, mind you). Officially named the “Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act,” it was supposedly created to address the issue of prescription drug costs that were hurting seniors on Medicare. While it’s great that Republicans wanted to address a critical issue, they went about it in all of the wrong ways when they had the numbers to exert control over the process. Instead of pursuing free market reforms, the MMA provided a subsidy for large employers aimed at discouraging them from eliminating private prescription coverage to retired workers. (In this instance, the Republicans kowtowed directly to the AARP).

The legislation was rife with new bureaucracy, and ultimately ended up costing far more than projected, as is typical of big government schemes. Initially estimated to cost $400 billion over ten years, only a month after the bill passed, it was calculated that the overall cost of program between 2006 (the first year the program started paying benefits) and 2015 would be $534 billion. And of course, to top things off, per a report by the Boards of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance and Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Funds in 2009, the projected net cost of the program over the 2006 to 2015 period was actually adjusted $549.2 billion. How fiscally conservative!

At the end of the day, Republicans rammed through a wishy-washy piece of legislation that attempted to address a problem, mainly with government solutions, but was too timid to go all the way, resulting in the perfect opportunity for Democrats to demagogue, claiming Republicans didn’t go far enough and more government was needed, creating the perfect narrative for the onset of ObamaCare. And how could Republicans really respond when they had already conceded that federal solutions are what should be pursued?

However, despite the miserable failings of past Republicans, I certainly don’t believe all is lost. In fact, I think now more than ever, due largely in part to grassroots pressure from tea party activists and other limited government advocates, that conservatives have an opportunity to reshape the debate by getting out in front post-ObamaCare and making a solid case for free market health care reforms. Over at the Cato Institute, there’s a lot of fantastic work laying out viable, liberty oriented reforms, and there’s plenty that can be done to get the federal government out of the business of distorting prices and continually tying basic care to insurance and insurance to employment.

Not only could many common sense reforms pushed by Cato be pursued, but conservatives on all levels of government should also embrace the Health Care Compact, which would allow states to enact their own health care legislation independent of federal intervention by banding together in an interstate compact. Ultimately, decentralization and free market reforms will be the key to fixing health care as our federal debt to GDP ratio continues to skyrocket past the 100% mark. Republicans need to do all they can to work toward the goal of reducing bureaucracy so individuals  can actually determine what the fair market value for the health services they seek are and can contract freely with their doctors.

Despite prior insanity, the potential failure of ObamaCare before the Supreme Court is ultimately a golden opportunity for Republicans. The GOP will be in a position to finally prove that it has learned its lesson about compromising in the direction of continuous government growth by providing a sensible alternatives to Democratic measures that actually shrinks government involvement in the health care industry.

As I noted above, it’s not as if there’s a dearth of policy work in this area; there’s plenty for the GOP to choose from – the party leaders just need to truly decide they’re actually for limited government and get their heads in the game instead of accepting as fact that government should continue to control our health care choices. Ultimately, what we as activists have to remember is that by expending energy fighting ObamaCare without a strong alternative free market plan to immediately implement legislatively means that as conservatives, we’ve given ground to the Democrats.

Make no mistake about it; the grassroots left is plotting their support of, in their wildest dreams, a single payer system, and at the very least, revisiting the public option idea as well as general Medicaid expansion. They will stop at nothing to define the parameters of the health care debate as inherently demanding a government-centric solution. This time, the Republican party cannot fall into the trap of being confined by that narrative. We can and will do better – and certainly, the more liberty Republicans you help us elect, the more up to this important task the party will be.

Corie Whalen is a political consultant based in Houston Texas. She currently serves as the national Secretary of the Republican Liberty Caucus.

As early as Tuesday afternoon, the House of Representatives is likely to vote on H.R. 1433 (PDF), the Private Property Rights Protection Act. This important act is designed to discourage the abuse of eminent domain power by municipalities by withholding federal funds if they exceed their reasonable authority and seize property for reasons other than genuine civic need.

This is an important protection for private property rights which have been weakened in this area by the growing practice of seizing land for the use of businesses and other interests who have political influence with local government. This bill to some degree counters the misapplication of the law in the notorious Kelo vs. New London decision in New Hampshire.

It is vitally important that you act today to email or call your Representative now and stay in touch for when the bill moves on to the Senate in the near future. An earlier version passed the House in 2005 but was blocked in the Senate.

For more information on this legislation read this article in the Washington Times.

There are legitimate uses for eminent domain, like building roads and schools, but taking property from citizens with no legal recourse and giving it to businesses for commercial development is an unacceptable abuse of the power and far too often the product of cronyism within local government. Please take action now to support H.R. 1433 and stop eminent domain abuse.

Use the form below to send an email.  It’s always a good idea to modify or replace the standard text with your own words, especially specific references to problems in your local area.

In a powerful example of the internet grassroots in action, a viral campaign through Reddit played a large role in stopping the passage of s SOPA and PIPA and that effort has now expanded into an movement to produce  alternative legislation which would address copyright concerns but also protect the rights of internet users and providers.

This collaboratively produced legislation is called the Free Internet Act.  It has as its stated goal:

“To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by preventing the restriction of liberty and preventing the means of censorship. FIA will allow internet users to browse freely without any means of censorship, users have the right to free speech and to free knowledge; we govern the content of the internet, governments don’t. However enforcements/laws must also be put into place to protect copyrighted content.”

The effort is ambitious, and goes beyond just proposing a law for the United States and includes the idea of an international treaty to address not just SOPA but also the European Union’s equally troublesome and unpopular ACTA legislation, effectively as a new international treaty on online copyright and free speech.

The proposed bill would make it more difficult for copyright holders to remove suspect content and limit the amount they could sue for, while still giving reasonable protections against piracy.  It provides guidelines for fair remedies to get content removed and gives site owners and uploaders a 30 day grace period to deal with problems and defend their content, addressing the concern that SOPA provided no remedies or due process for the accused. It provides for enforcement through the court system and suggests unspecified penalties for abuse of the process or efforts to intimidate content providers. It even provides the rough elements of a sort of internet bill of rights.

Right now the FIA is in rough form, produced through a collaborative process which is not efficient and not well suited to refining and focusing the language, but it’s an excellent starting point which includes sensible alternative proposals which address the legitimate concerns behind SOPA while also protecting civil liberties and the rights of internet users and businesses.

An online community like Reddit is great for getting the ball rolling on an effort like this but is not well equipped to take the subsequent steps necessary to produce a working piece of legislation and get it introduced in Congress.  The next step in the process is for the FIA to be taken up as a cause by advocacy groups which have been involved in this fight, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Republican Liberty Caucus, and from there pass it on to sympathetic lawmakers to be introduced in Congress, with a strong push from the internet grassroots.  In the process the language of the bill will need to be clarified and refined and brought in line with legislative standards.

Senators like Rand Paul (R-KY) and Congressmen like Justin Amash (R-TX) and Ron Paul (R-TX) who were outspoken in opposition to SOPA should have a natural interest in sponsoring such legislation.  A promise to introduce a version of the FIA migh talso be a powerful campaign issue for Richard Mack who is challenging SOPA author Lamar Smith (R-TX) in the Texas GOP primary.  Producing a resolution for inclusion in state Republican Party platforms endosing the FIA might also be a useful tactic.

The internet remains one of the strongest and most productive sectors of our economy with huge potential for future growth, but we cannot allow that potential to be stifled by unwise legistlation.  The benefits to individuals and to the nation of preserving a free and open internet environment are obvious to everyone except for big media and their lobbyists.  The internet grassroots have started a wave of change on Reddit and they’ve come up with a good start on a real solution.  It’s time to take the next step and make it into a real law.

(This article appeared previously in a slightly different form in Blogcritics Magazine)

As you may have heard, last week actor Sean Penn visited his buddy Hugo Chavez in Venezuela once again. Associated Press reported his comments on the 2012 presidential election as

“It’s never predictable what can happen in an American election, but we certainly believe at this point that it’s becoming increasingly clear to the American people that the policies of the far right are the policies of the rich, and that they are to the exclusion of the middle class and the poor, and that no society has a future on that basis.”

This is far from the most outrageous comments attributed to Sean Penn during visits to the socialist police state that is Venezuela. Furthermore, these are exactly the kind of statements conservatives and libertarians should expect to hear from Hollywood liberals during President Obama’s reelection campaign. Being unable to run on a record of great success, the president will have no choice but to turn to this divisive rhetoric to get reelected. Unless his opponent is Rick Santorum, whose rigid social conservatism will hurt him greatly in swing states like Ohio and Florida, and whose record on big spending is most outstanding when compared to his three competitors–an ex-Governor who balanced budgets, a former house speaker who oversaw a government shutdown shortly followed by nearly-balanced budgets (national debt went up during the Clinton “surpluses”), and a Texas Congressman who has never voted for an unbalanced budget or a tax increase–the President will have to actually debate the merits of his economic policy. And it is a debate he will likely lose.

Organizing for America, the Democratic National Committee under the offensive demagogue of a new chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and various mainstream media personalities have been attempting to capitalize on the greed and anger of the Occutards and have been running on a “Republicans are the party of the rich!” message–in spite of President Obama’s backing of and expansion of the bailout and stimulus policies of his predecessor George W. Bush.

No doubt at the front of Mr. Obama’s campaign will be the entertainment industry that helped him get elected in the 2008 primary and general election against seemingly impossible odds. This will include Sean Penn.

It baffles me how Sean Penn and his ilk have any credibility with the American people. I’ll admit that I even find a personal degree of disappointment in myself when I share articles on Facebook about celebrities endorsing my choice for 2012–Ron Paul. I do it because sadly enough, Americans care more about what these people think than say, what the veterans and members of the military think, or what the people out of work think, or what the successful small-to-medium sized business owners think. I don’t like the idea about taking advice from celebrities on anything. Most of them have zero understanding of individual liberty, economics or how the business sector operates, a minimal understanding of international affairs, and a hypocritical view on the fair share the 1% which they are a part of is allegedly not paying. Sean Penn is one such actor.

What I am also baffled by is that those of us on the other side of the political spectrum rarely fight back against these celebutards. We often take a “who cares what Hollywood thinks mentality”, failing to understand the power they have over influencing everything the average American says and does. Middle America doesn’t understand the lack of credibility these people have and we fail miserably to expose them for their hypocrisy. Reason is on our side, and we need to prove it, and we can do show by exposing the words of these people for their inaccuracies and logical inconsistencies. Will everyone listen? Of course not. But we don’t need every American to listen to us, we just need to get a few people at a time to wake up. Eventually, enough will do so that Hollyweird loses is significance in election cycles.

In 2010 I was working on a satirical book, entitled Mass Media Mindnumb, on what I had perceived to be the denigration of American pop culture. I have since lost interest in the subject and focused on more important things in my professional and personal life, but I kept the unfinished manuscript and sometimes reference it if I need some ammunition to fight back against Hollywood hypocrisy. My generation has proven to be the strongest victim of the cult of celebrity. I fear greatly what subsequent generations will look like as they come of age. America today faces a dichotomy. We will go down one of two roads. A road of European style socialism all the way to bankruptcy, or a restoration of the long forgotten free-market principles that made America great in the first place. There will be a generational shift that will soon show up in the political spectrum. My generation will either choose this European socialism, or adopt a libertarian-leaning conservatism. The dominionist [religious] right stands in the way of them adopting the latter, while the entertainment industry beckons them to the former.

I’ve spent enough time recently demagoguing the dominionists, so I’m gonna go after Hollywood, and I’ll start with Sean Penn.

In Mass Media Mindnumb I had written a scathing rant about Sean Penn’s hypocrisy. I’m going to release the contents of that rant in this article, while making some minor editorial revisions to reflect current events. Here is what I had written:

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I Am Sean

Sean Penn is one of several celebrities who has made enough an ass of himself that he gets his own subsection in this chapter. You probably think he’s a good actor. Really I can’t remember him outside of any movies other than Fast Times at Ridgemont High—where he played a disruptive stoner and I Am Sam—where he played the mentally challenged title character. Both decent movies; the actor is a different story.

Deceitful, left-wing, but most importantly the ultimate hypocrite—Sean Penn routinely criticized George W. Bush for taking away civil liberties during the beginning of the war on terror, but recently came out suggesting that people lose their right to free speech!

Let me break it down for you.

In 2002, he placed a $56,000 ad in The Washington Post out of concern for the upcoming war in Iraq and the PATRIOT Act. This letter was surprisingly eloquent, making some interesting analogies. He particularly wanted Bush to reconsider invading Iraq and the expansion of his federal power, to not “[diminish U.S. citizens] through loss of civil liberties [or] dangerously heightened presidential autonomy through acts of Congress.” His criticism of Bush would soon turn into anger, going so far as to call for Bush’s impeachment.

The criticisms—well, the early ones at least–were not entirely unfair, but what completely destroys Penn’s credibility as a political voice (pay attention here) is his ultimate hypocrisy. Some time in spring 2010, Sean Penn appeared on Bill Maher’s show Real Time. On the show, Penn made comments that completely destroyed his credibility for all his criticisms of George W. Bush’s infringements on our civil liberties.

I mentioned briefly the socialist leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, a man who has partially usurped control of the media in his country, all but guaranteeing political insuperability. Well, Penn is chummy with this guy and doesn’t exactly like people who bash him. The mainstream media, according to Penn, constantly lies about Hugo Chavez.

In reality, the mainstream media tells a lot of lies and skews many of their stories. But portrayal of Hugo Chavez as a socialist dictator isn’t one of their misleading notions—its cold hard fact. Penn’s allegations of this as a lie aren’t what make him a hypocrite. What makes him a hypocrite is the fact that he suggested a law which would outright violate the First Amendment—both violating freedom of the press and of speech.

“Every day, this elected leader [Chavez] is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media. There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.” — Sean Penn in 2010 on Real Time with Bill Maher

Excuse me? You want a bar that would send people to prison for speaking their mind? Even if they were lying about Chavez’s oppression and socialist policies, and they certainly are not, the media has a constitutionally protected freedom to say whatever they want and it is the responsibility of ‘we the people’ to do our homework and find out the truth. As a matter of fact, two of the earliest media outlets in this country were created for campaigning purposes when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson battled each other for the presidency. They each had their own outlet to demagogue each other, and it was up to the citizens to separate fact from fallacy.

If anyone is going to be locked up for false allegations by this bar that Penn wants to create, consider this scenario where the law becomes international and then subsequently be used to lock up Chavez.

According to a Feb 2006 piece from Reuters, Chavez was quoted as saying the following of then-President Bush:

“The imperialist, genocidal, fascist attitude of the U.S. president has no limits. I think Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W. Bush.”

Hugo Chavez compared a man who removed an oppressive dictator and kept his country safe, despite wasting lots of money and using questionable policing tactics in the process, to a man who systematically murdered 6 million Jews and invaded multiple countries not with the goal of liberating them but with the goal of ethnically cleansing and then occupying them. Under Penn’s proposed law, Chavez would be behind bars.

See what I did there, Seanny? Apparently free speech is okay for Sean Penn only if you agree with him. When George W. Bush tapped phone and email communications in an attempt to secure our country—albeit with potential to violate our 4th amendment rights—it’s oppressive and fascist; but a man who controls his country’s media to consolidate his own power is a democratically elected and transparent leader, and anyone who disagrees with that should be locked up!?

Pot-calling-the-kettle-black much? You can’t yell about someone infringing on the First Amendment, then subsequently suggest people lose their First Amendment rights because they disagree with you, and expect to have any credibility left can you? I would hope not. And I would hope you the reader make note of this and don’t take political advice from this guy. Ironic enough that his own proposed law of course would probably ensure his buddies Chavez and Ahmedinejad be locked up for their lies—Ahmedinejad especially for calling the Holocaust a myth. But what’s even more ironic is that Sean Penn wants to make laws that oppress people who disagree with him politically, when his own father suffered the same oppression.

Sean must have forgotten that his father, the late actor Leo Penn, was an actor during the Red Scare. He was a communist sympathizer, a supporter of Hollywood trade unions and refused to accuse his communist friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee and as a result was blacklisted—i.e. nobody would hire him because of his political leanings! But in Sean Penn’s hypocrisy, he suggests people should be jailed for their opinions (or FACTS) that Hugo Chavez is a power hungry socialist tyrant.

Sean Penn is a true celebutard; a politically inept hypocrite who should just stick to acting and stay out of politics! But as much as I detest him, I would never suggest he be locked up for his lies. I would most likely never suggest he be blacklisted. But I will suggest a boycott of him. I don’t think I’ll be watching his upcoming films.

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My views on Sean Penn’s hypocrisy remain the same to this day. I hope the readers of this article take these facts to heart and share them with others, particularly the ones regarding Leo Penn. The Hollywood left is losing its credibility but I can only hope it will lose it in time stop my generation from accepting this entitlement mentality present among Occupy Wall Street. The last thing I want is to wake up in 10 years to a repeat of the recent London riots: a bunch of spoiled 14 year olds throwing rocks and molotov cocktails at shops because mommy and daddy didn’t buy them that iPad they are “entitled” to. And if you believe for one second this hypothetical will never happen, I’ll refer you to the even more recent riots in malls all across the country over the new Nike Air Jordans. I don’t think you get a more accurate example than that of combining the “entitlement” mentality with the peer-pressure driven cult of celebrity, not to mention the general wussification of the American male when a bunch of guys in their teens and early-to-mid twenties are fighting over shoes as if they were the Sex and the City girls.

Its not too late to stop this from happening. Just as we managed to do with the temporary stoppage of the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act, libertarians and libertarian-leaning conservatives will have to take up arms against Big Hollyweird once again; this time over their lies, distortions, and political influence. Don’t be afraid to spend a little extra time attacking their hypocrisy and their logical fallicies and eventually they’ll lose credibility with some of the electorate.

As for Sean Penn, the characters of Spicoli—the dumb stoner, and Sam—the mentally challenged man—may actually be smarter than their portrayer, Sean Penn. Sean PWNED!

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Aaron Alghawi is finishing his B.S. in Economics at Texas A&M University; he is a board member and Director of Student Outreach for the Republican Liberty Caucus.

Following the pattern of other provocative statements about potential domestic terrorist threats from the Obama Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has issued a statement exposing the threat of “hundreds of thousands” of “sovereign citizens” who can turn violent “at the drop of a hat” during encounters with the police.

Citing three specific cases in three years and a trend of an increase in arrests of believers in individual sovereignty from 10 to 18 cases per year, mostly for non-violent crimes, the FBI declared law enforcement to be “inundated” with threats.

This may be the most exaggerated and offensive example of specious fearmongering to come out of an administration which has been promoting irrational fear of generally harmless groups of citizens for three years. The FBI is taking aim at a huge body of citizens who are increasingly angry about government abuse of power and irresponsibility and attempting to turn them into a movement of dangerous potential terrorists.

These dangerous “extremists” hold such horrific views as “outrage at tax collection,” defying environmental regulations and believing that “the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.” The FBI is identifying them as “sovereign citizens” and is defining them as a members of a movement, though they provide no evidence of organized or coordinated activity beyond just being angry with the government, a characteristic shared by about half the nation’s population.

I would say that the concerns over this threat were excessive, but that’s giving the FBI too much credit. Ridiculous is a more appropriate description. Statistically a three year increase from 10 to 18 cases of mostly non violent crimes associated with anti-government activists isn’t a crimewave. It’s not even large enough to qualify as a validly quantifiable trend. Given the hundreds of thousands of crimes committed yearly it’s far below the margin of error for crime statistics.

The FBI claims that they are “being inundated right now with requests for training from state and local law enforcement on sovereign-related matters.” This supposed demand for a response to a nonexistent threat probably would not be there at all had the FBI not been promoting the idea that average citizens are potential domestic terrorists for years. The FBI is creating bogeymen to justify their own actions and to distract from the government’s increasingly callous disregard for the rights of citizens.

The kinds of concerns which the FBI is using to identify these potentially dangerous citizens are not the hallmarks of dangerous extremism. They are mostly reasonable concerns over the current state of our government held by tens of millions of fairly ordinary citizens who have legitimate reasons to be dissatisfied with government. They are also the same kinds of extreme views which were held by our founding fathers. They are targeting Americans for the crime of being American and for holding to values of independence and self-reliance on which our nation was built.

The one genuine, unifying characteristic of all of these “extremists” is that they are not happy with a government which is spending beyond its means, taxing beyond our ability to pay and which encroaches more and more on our constitutionally guaranteed rights every day. In their statement the FBI is not actually identifying a real threat to public safety or to citizens, they are putting us on notice that public expression of justifiable anger at the government can get you labelled a dangerous criminal or even a terrorist.

This is a tactic intended purely and simply to intimidate and silence the public. They are sending the message that protest is a crime and speaking out against government will not be tolerated. The implications of this statement from the FBI are particularly ominous in the wake of efforts in the National Defense Appropriation Act, the PATRIOT Act and the pending Enemy Expatriation Act to empower the government to take away the most fundamental rights of citizens. As they did under Hoover, the FBI is categorizing people and making lists and if you don’t watch your step they’ll put you in a database and take away your rights.

The goal may be to intimidate critics of government, but they are also showing us why we so desperately need to take our government back before these threats of abuse of power turn into full-fledged tyranny.

A version of this article appeared previously on Blogcritics Magazine

Last night’s State of the Union address had a more positive tone than I had originally expected. But it still carried a hypocritical juxtaposition of calling on Americans to come together and adopt reforms that create jobs and lift the burden on businesses, improve our children’s educational opportunities, and achieve energy independence while also touting the divisive rhetoric that drives us against each other and drives us to blame the wrong causes for our current situation.

Much of what President Obama said tonight was true. It is true that mortgages were lent to those who could not afford them. It is true that companies are shipping jobs overseas and at the same time receiving tax breaks. It is true that with the death of Osama Bin Laden and numerous Al Qaeda leaders, America is much safer. And it is true that millions of new jobs have been created since he took office.

The positives may sound good when you phrase them as such. But the grim reality is that the problems America faces are so significant, that the good things that have happened under this administration are eclipsed. While these jobs were being created, millions of jobs were being eliminated. We still have fewer jobs than when the president took office. And whether he likes to admit it or not, his own policies have played a part in this anemic growth.

EPA regulations piled on by this administration have cost us over 5% of our GDP, and that’s just one federal department of many. The Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill will cost $30 billion that we don’t have. The Small Business Administration estimates that the compliance cost of our current regulatory environment is $1.75 trillion per year. President Obama alone cannot be blamed for this, as his predecessors and those in Congress passed many of these regulations prior to 2009.

The president failed to mention that government programs incentivized lending of mortgages to those who could not afford them. Federal laws demanded banks loosen their restrictions or face legal action. The Federal Reserve further incentivized banks to comply by offering them easy credit. They lowered interest rates causing investors to put their money into long term projects and many focused on residential construction.

With his re-appointment of Ben Bernanke to chair the Federal Reserve System, this inflationary policy of unnaturally and artificially low interest rates has continued. The Fed has injected trillions of dollars into our economy under this administration, money which is not backed by matching economic growth or a significant demand for US dollars. This has caused the value of our currency to drop, and commodities such as gasoline have jumped in price as a result of a speculative bubble.

President Obama could have partially alleviated this problem by promoting domestic drilling for oil and the construction of new refineries, while we wait for science to develop inexpensive renewable energy. Instead, he has chosen to stand in the way of domestic oil production, while we continue to send billions of dollars to the Saudi elite, and turn a blind eye as they send that money to violent, theocratic institutions all over the world. He turned down the Keystone oil pipeline which would run from our largest supplier of oil—Canada—to the world’s most high-tech refineries in Houston.

It would have created tens of thousands of new jobs, including many for union workers that support Obama enthusiastically. They have been denied this opportunity in favor of capitulating to a lobby of environmental zealots known for its dishonesty in promoting its agenda.

The president covered a topic that I have focused much of my attention on in recent years: education. While he briefly touted the importance of returning control to local communities and schools, the other solutions he proposed are not only wrong, but they would further damage a K-12 system that is already a miserable failure at meeting the needs of the 21st century economy.

The president proposed forcing students to stay in school until they are 18 and claimed this would improve overall education. With all due respect, this is dead wrong. We have to get out of this ‘everyone gets a trophy’ mentality and realize that some children just will not learn. By forcing them to stay in school they hold back those of our children who have the drive to succeed. It is sad and politically incorrect to mention this, but it is true.

It has been mentioned in the writings of Jim Blockey, a reform school teacher from Las Vegas, I’ve discussed it with Robert Mansfield of Pennsylvania; a man born to a drug-addicted mother who grew up on the streets of Philadelphia with nothing and who rose to success when he returned to school, got his GED and joined the Army where he rose to the rank of Sergeant.I have heard even more examples from my friends who attended failing government schools in the inner cities of Ohio.

Although early childhood education in this country is world class, by the time our children reach high school, students in European countries like Belgium beat us on a number of metrics. Students in Japan, South Korea and Singapore blow us out of the water. China isn’t messing around either. They are targeting their most skilled students and placing them into advanced programs. When those students come to our universities they trounce their American peers in mathematics and natural sciences, and then our broken immigration system forces them to return to China and use the skills that we taught them against us in the global economy. A better system would incentivize and enable them to become Americans, and grow our economy instead.

The Belgians and the Japanese emphasize on the importance of school choice and privatization of education. And the British and the Japanese both emphasize on the important of the individual. Their programs are customized to fit the abilities of each student. In Japan, education is mandatory till around 15 years of age, at which they get their equivalent of our GED. Their upper-tier secondary schools are optional, and yet over 95% of Japanese students continue their education beyond the mandatory requirements. These programs are customized as either vocational education or preparation for university.

And one third of these schools are private!

In Great Britain, when you are 16, you can stay in the system, go to a trade school, or if you are smart enough go straight to college. Some states have adopted similar programs right here in America, where gifted students can achieve associates degrees upon graduating. I propose that we don’t waste their time teaching things they don’t need in the career they want.

We need to take heed to what the Belgians, the British and especially our Japanese friends have done. We shouldn’t mandate education to 18; we should eliminate the high school diploma and require a GED at the end of what is currently 9th grade as they do in Japan. Then make tenth through twelfth grade a customizable and optional program. Let students have choices of vocational programs, college preparatory programs, and if they are skilled enough, let them go straight to college. Provide a system that can ensure our 18 year olds truly are adults by giving them the marketable skills they need to make a living wage instead of mooching off of mom and dad into their twenties.

The status quo is unacceptable! And it fosters this sort of environment. To those who are worried about the students who wouldn’t go to school beyond their GED, they can always take the unskilled labor jobs and then work their way up the ladder or choose to continue their education at a later time in life. What makes such a system work so well is that the market will determine what skills are needed and relevant programs will be supplied.

This one-size-fits-all everyone-needs-to-go-to-college mentality is causing us to fall behind the competition. It is creating an education bubble that will inevitably burst. Many of these college degrees are becoming useless, rendering starting salaries that are not significantly higher than a high school diploma. The focus must be on marketable skills. General education is never a bad thing and should be viewed as a virtue, but it can only go so far.

The best possible system we can provide for our children is a system of individual choice, with a supply of curriculum determined by the market economy’s demand. A system that empowers parents, rewards the best students, and the best teachers, and yes—a system that discourages and reprimands failure.

The president went on to claim that college tuition is too high, and if it continues to rise he will pull subsidies from those universities. He’s right to acknowledge the avarice of our university system: costing its students thousands in waste on unnecessary programs and fees that should either be privately funded or purchased a la carte at the individual level.

Yet, he fails to understand the prime reason why tuition has risen at twice the rate of inflation and four times the wage rate. The federal government’s guarantee of all student loans has given greedy academics and administrators an opportunity that they would not have in a free market. They have constantly jacked up their prices, knowing that the government would credit the money to them no matter what, and the students would get stuck with the bill.

In the state of today’s economy, no one between the ages of 18 and 22 with the exception of military, civil service and a few lucky kids who invested from their teen years would be able to apply for a loan at a bank to pay over $10,000 a year for full-time tuition and living expense financing unless they had either a parent or credit-worthy friend co-sign for them. I know because I borrow primarily from a credit union to finance my education. Without a co-signer I likely would not have been approved, and if I was approved, my interest rate would be over 10%.

But the government federally guarantees many financial options for students who have little to no credit history. This has allowed the universities to set their tuition and fees well above a true market rate. In a free market where the finance was out of pocket or credit-based, they could not do this. Their classrooms would sit empty at those prices, and they would go bankrupt. Ending the federal department of education would quickly slash tuition prices in half, and prices would finally begin to increase in conjunction with wages and inflation.

When my father went to college in the 1970s, you borrowed directly from the school. A full-time summer job was enough to cover a year’s tuition and much of your living expenses at a state university. My father came here a poor immigrant, went to a small private college, and worked part time as a manual laborer. He graduated on time and with two years of debt.

My generation has not been so lucky.

This achievement by my father is the American Dream that we should want for all of our children, and it is morally wrong to deny them the benefits of a free market where they have the power to control their own destinies.

The message of class envy is dividing us and acting against the interests of that dream. Claiming that a job creating class is not paying their fair share when the top 1% of earners pay nearly 40% of the income taxes and the top 10% pay 70% of income taxes is ludicrous. But loopholes favoring one business over another certainly must go.

Our country needs a fairer, flatter tax. We need low rates for all, but we need few to no deductions. Compliance with our current tax laws cost American businesses nearly half a trillion dollars every year. Corporate taxes only make up 9% of our federal revenue yet their punitive nature begs the question: are they really worth it? What if the economic growth that was unleashed as a result of their elimination put so many people back to work, that the income tax revenue increased not only to offset that 9%, but to surpass it?

President Obama mentioned that companies are receiving tax breaks while they offshore jobs, and he mentioned the importance of incentivizing them with tax breaks to bring those jobs back here. There are over one trillion American dollars sitting overseas because investors don’t want it to be taxed by both the foreign country and the United States upon its return. Presidential candidate Ron Paul, former candidate Herman Cain, and myself all support a common sense solution to this problem.

I call upon President Obama to eliminate taxes on all foreign money repatriated into the U.S. economy. Let these corporations and businesspeople know that if they use that money to create American jobs, they can bring it back tax free! This is something that everyone should get behind! One trillion dollars is a lot of money with the potential to create millions of new jobs. If the president and both parties in congress are serious about restoring this economy to greatness, then a bill will be brought up and soon eliminating the repatriation tax, and President Obama will not hesitate to sign it.

There is too much at stake here to play class warfare politics. If government stole the entire net worth of every billionaire on the planet, not just in the U.S., it would total up to $4.5 trillion. Under this administration, the national debt has increased by over $5 trillion . We have debt because we spend too much, not because we tax too little. Both parties are to blame. We cannot afford our so-called entitlement system as is and we cannot afford a foreign policy of being the world’s policeman.

Now that we are out of Iraq President Obama said he wants to take that money, spend half of it to pay down the debt and half to build our own infrastructure. What he failed to mention was that there are no actual savings from the end of the Iraq War. We borrowed and printed money to finance our operations there and continue to do so in Afghanistan. There is no sudden influx of revenue we can use to pay down the debt, there is only a smaller deficit.

The President must realize that this is a Now or Never moment to prevent our country from going the way of many great empires in history, destroying itself under massive debt from an affluent society at home and a thinly spread militarism.

Do not give up on bipartisanship, Mr. President. Despite the differences between you and the Republicans, you can still get started on these things. Take a look at the recommendations of the Erskine-Bowles commission. Find the things in there that you and the Republicans can agree on, and immediately pass them. It will not be the end-all-be-all solution, but it is far better than doing nothing.

We owe it to future generations to actually build them a future. I understand the pressures of an election cycle, Mr. President. But the best way to get reelected is to do right by the American people. Embracing the free-market, ending corporatism, foreign nation building, and unsustainable benefit programs is the only way to save the American Dream.

Thank you, and God Bless America!

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Aaron Alghawi is finishing his B.S. in Economics at Texas A&M University; he is a board member and Director of Student Outreach for the Republican Liberty Caucus.

As you all know, I’ve come out pretty strongly against these from the get go.  I have always been against “anti-file sharing” legislation. I blasted Kimba Wood for shutting down Limewire. And I’ve been warning about SOPA for months and PIPA for weeks. Now, the American people are finally waking up. And all it took was 24 hours without Wikipedia. First, let’s discuss exactly what this bill is. Corporatist [quasi-socialist] Hollywood executives, the California Teamsters Union, and greedy entertainers got together with their lobbyist friends and said “hey, get congress to write a bill that lets us make money every time someone so much as looks at us or listens to us, we deserve it!”. Intellectual property laws in this country predate the world wide web by decades, and the lobbyists knew it would be easy to manipulate them for maximum control.

Government also liked the idea. Those in congress that wrote and supported the bill up to this point saw it as an opportunity for unprecedented government power over an area–both an economy and a society in and of itself–that has remained extremely free: the internet. These statists had the ultimate opportunity now to monitor us, influence us, control us, and further consolidate their power as time goes on. That is what awaits us if these bills pass. Unprecedented power for the political class. All it takes is a few greedy people to abuse their power. Let’s go back to the entertainment industry and how they’ve abused IP laws over the years to make a dime every which way they can:

You can clearly tell the effect of Big Hollyweird lobbyists on the net worth of entertainers. Elvis was once at the top of the world. At his death, his net worth was $7 million (1977 dollars) which is anywhere from 18-25 million in 2010 dollars. (see inflation calculator: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/)

Now compare that to Katy Perry. She’s a top artist of today, but she’s not as popular today as Elvis was in his time. Her current net worth after about 5 years being mainstream (and the entire time during a recession) is $55 million.

Someone like Snoop Dogg with 20 years of fame may be a better comparison. His net worth is $150 million.

I’m not trying to single out Snoop as greedy or anything, he’s had a lot of time to invest. And of course there are exogenous factors like a more globalized economy. Powerful emerging economies of like Russia, Brazil, South Korea and Taiwan wouldn’t have been able to access American entertainment with such ease and in such high quotas prior to the fall of the Soviet empire and the advent of internet music. But that can’t possibly be the only cause of so much more wealth among musicians (not to mention actors, directors, crew, writers, etc) today. I’m trying to point out that Hollywood corporatism has amassed what is a disproportionate and most-likely unfair amount of money for entertainers. Why do you think they have lobbied so hard for SOPA and PIPA? They are trying to milk us for every dime they can.

In a true free market, they wouldn’t make half the money they do. File sharing like Limewire would still exist without limits on their content. Youtube would stream content. Nobody could do anything about it unless the person sharing or streaming was making money off of the “stolen” content (like those bootleg DVDs from China). You wouldn’t be put in prison for playing a pop music song in a home movie uploaded to Youtube…a song that pretty much everyone has heard because we live in the internet age. File sharing of songs obviously occurred because the market did not demand the music enough to pay large amounts of money for it. iTunes came along with a la carte music purchasing and over time, people would switch to one of the two as opposed to buying CDs. Did this really make entertainers poorer? NO! They got richer! And so did the film industry! In 2010, in a weak economy, Hollywood execs raked in more money than they did in 2007 when the economy was strong; right before the recession began its onslaught on our jobs and investments.

It’s also been very interesting to watch America’s unity against SOPA. This is going hard! Liberals, conservatives, moderates, libertarians; all coming out against Big Hollyweird. I love it! Al Gore and Ron Paul agreeing on something? I don’t think America has ever been more united on something in my lifetime other than killing Osama bin Laden. (Now, try to imagine the blowback of a hypothetical Santorum Administration shutting down the porn industry )

As for Nancy Pelosi and even some of my fellow Republicans that have come out against this in recent hours….I mean days….it’s clearly to save their own skin. Let’s take a good hard look at the people who wrote the bill and pushed it for so long. Make sure to be unforgiving at the polls (Lamar Smith, look out!)

I do want to say one more thing. It’s amazing what 24 hours without Wikipedia can do. They and the folks at Reddit shut down to get people’s attention. It WORKED! This is an example of what will happen if we continue this move toward socialism and continue to raise taxes and regulations on the entrepreneurial class. One day, they will say “enough!” and quit investing and creating jobs. When that happens, this recession we recently had will look like a boom by comparison. Wikipedia can just go back online tomorrow. Economies….not so much. I am confident that the House will strike down SOPA. Call your senators, and make sure that their equivalent–the Protect IP Act–is killed as well!

In Liberty,

Aaron Alghawi ’12

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Aaron Alghawi is a senior economics major at Texas A&M University, as well as an alternate board member and Director of Student Outreach for the Republican Liberty Caucus.

Once president Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) it appears that word went out to all of the Senators and Representatives who voted for it that the bill was fixed and they should write their constituents reassuring them that it the bill no longer authorized the indefinite detention of US citizens inside our borders by the military on presidential order and without due process of law.

So the reassuring emails were sent to all the constituents who had lobbied against the passage of the bill with the military detention provisions included, and a lot of them were pacified by these earnest statements from legislators who likely either did not read or did not understand the totality of the NDAA as it was finally passed. They were convinced that the addition of the statements “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens” (1021.e) and “The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States” (1022.b.1) actually fixed the problems with the bill.

What they failed to understand is that the first statement is meaningless because the authors of the bill and the president believe that they already had the power to detain civilians in military custody without due process even before this bill was passed, and that the second statement still uses the term “requirement” which means that while military detention of US citizens is not required in all cases as it is with foreign citizens, it is still an option if ordered by the president. The new wording may be less egregious, but the fundamental problem of military detention remains an issue.

All they had to do to actually fix this bill was change the phrase “not required” in the original language to “prohibited” when referring to the military detention of US citizens and all of the complaints would have been satisfied. That they did not do this when every expert had told them it was the simple and obvious solution and that they instead engaged in misdirection and false assurances, demonstrates a cynical attitude towards the intelligence of the outraged public which had been loudly lobbying against this aspect of the NDAA.

While reassuring letters from Congressmen may have won over some former opponents, they are not fooling civil liberties lawyers who have actually read the bill and looked at the final wording in context. You don’t have to take my word for the persistence of military detention in the legislation because plenty of legal experts are speaking out against it. Sadly they don’t have the platform or authority of a letter from your trustworthy hometown Congressman.

On Justia.com Professor Joanne Mariner, director of the Hunter College Human Rights Program and formerly with Human Rights Watch, writes of the NDAA:

“Notably, section 1022(b)(1) does not exempt American citizens from the more important provisions in section 1021, which allow the military detention of broad categories of terrorist suspects. It does not, therefore, improve on the status quo by extending any new protections to Americans.

“Moreover, the specific exemption for American citizens in section 1022 could be understood as suggesting, by negative implication, that American citizens are covered by section 1021. Potentially reinforcing this view is the fact that an effort to amend section 1021 to exempt citizens failed in the Senate. If, in the future, judges decide to refer to the statute’s legislative history to help ascertain its scope, the lack of such an exemption may be determinative.”

And she dismisses the supposed promise of protection for US citizens from changes in the law, writing:

“the provision’s reference to “existing law” begs far too many questions. It is precisely the scope of existing law that is subject to vociferous debate and continuing litigation. Under the Bush administration, the law was interpreted to allow the indefinite detention of both citizens and non-citizens arrested anywhere in the world, including the United States.”

Benjamin Wittes, who is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution and co-director of the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security, writes in his FAQ explaining the NDAA that our rights were already essentially gone in practice and that the NDAA just formalizes this situation:

“The NDAA is really a codification in statute of the existing authority the administration claims. It puts Congress’s stamp of approval behind that claim for the first time, and that’s no small thing. But it does not–notwithstanding the widespread belief to the contrary–expand it. Nobody who is not subject to detention today will become so when the NDAA goes into effect.”

Although he does write off most of the concerns with the NDAA as being based on its ambiguities and ultimately left up to determinations by the courts, he also raises the additional concern that “the NDAA could theoretically be said to expand detention authority involves people held on the basis not of membership in an enemy group but mere support for one,” validating the concern that the applicability of military detention could be expanded to include people with no direct involvement in any terrorist activity.

In its press release on the signing of the bill, the ACLU is much more definitive about its concerns, quoting ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero:

““The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.”

And stating that:

“Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again.”

What is clear from reading all of this analysis of the bill is that although the final revision successfully muddied the waters, it did not fix the basic concerns with military detention of US citizens. That the government believed they already had the power before the passage of the NDAA does not excuse the authors of the bill from responsibility for formally codifying this practice. What is also quite clear is that the reassuring letters from Congressmen are widely off-base, as nothing in the NDAA does anything to protect the rights of citizens.

It does to some degree reframe the debate, however. The argument is now much more basic, between those who believe that the NDAA should have been used as an opportunity to prohibit military detention and protect the rights of citizens, and those – like most members of Congress – who seem perfectly comfortable with giving the president the power to suspend foundational legal principles like Posse Comitatus and Habeas Corpus when even a hint of association with terrorism is involved.

This article appeared in slightly different form on Blogcritics Magazine.