Freedom Scribe Blogging on issues of Constitutional freedom.

Our grandchildren will look back on this past Sunday and realize it was the day when Americans sold the last shred of their freedom to the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Sold? No, you’ve bought – bought the bill of goods that the pharmaceutical and insurance companies were selling to you and to Congress, bought it hook, line and sinker – and you didn’t even have the common street sense to dicker. The price? Slavery. And payment is due in full by 2014.

It doesn’t break my heart in the least that Obama and our Congress critters have just committed very messy political seppuku, but it won’t make any real difference to America either. The GOP is crying about the corruption involved in this health care bill – but that’s only because they are in a perfect position right now to blame it all on the Democrats. When they are in power again – January, I should think, after this fiasco – the rhetoric will certainly change a little and our guns might even be a little safer from confiscation for a couple more years, but the ulimate outcome will be precisely the same. Unless a politician starts out extremely wealthy indeed, no one makes it to DC these days without winding up beholden to these corporations. It just cannot be done. And if your career has made you that kind of wealth, why would you even be willing to trade it for heartache and stomach ulcers in DC? Ron Paul did it all on his own dime, he’s dead honest and not beholden to anyone but his constituents, and you’ve seen how much serious attention he is given by the pundits and the media.

If this bill becomes law and takes full effect, you will be required to purchase medical insurance from a private insurance company or pay a hefty fine. You will become (as you probably already are) part of a huge medical database – and medical privacy will be forever a thing of the past. What treatments you will be allowed to receive under this system will be mandated by pharmaceutical companies and accountants trying to “keep costs down,” and the costs of the program will still spiral out of control. Did you know that if you have terminal cancer, it is already illegal to seek alternative treatments in another country? A number of people who have gone to Mexico for Laetrile have actually been jailed upon their return. I have no opinion on whether Laetrile works or not, but I have a powerful belief that you have the absolute right to try to save your own life in any way that you see fit! You can expect that situation to become even worse. A cancer treatment that is cheap, doesn’t make you literally sicker – and actually works – will cost the companies controlling your healthcare millions of dollars. Naturally it is illegal, and it will remain illegal for as long as the corporations control Congress.

Some folks are relieved to see that multiple states are gearing up to challenge this legislation at the Supreme Court level, and even more states are working on legislation to mandate lawsuits against the federal government if this bill is enacted. One figure I read recently was 37 states – if that is actually true, this is unprecedented in the history of the United States. Unfortunately, it is also doomed to failure before it even begins. The judges who would hear such lawsuits were appointed by politicians – like George W. Bush – who are heavily invested in the pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Before you can bring suit against the federal government, you first have to be awarded “standing” by such a federal judge – meaning that you must be judged by a federal court to have the legal right to sue. These suits, if they are filed, won’t even get that far, I am sure. And if any challenges are filed at the Supreme Court level, all SCOTUS has to do is refuse to hear the case. This is all a distraction, meant to keep us passive until it is far too late to do anything about this bill.

Or so they believe.

There is a ray of hope, actually, although it does not come from an expected quarter. My parents survived the Great Depression. During those years, back alley medicine was practiced by a large number of healers. Some were licensed physicians offering services in secrecy and off the books – like abortions when they were illegal. Others were perfectly competent physicians who had lost their medical licenses for little or no reason at all. Some were what we would call naturopaths today. Some were indeed crooks and charlatans, but as with any tradesman, the successful were those who gave good value for a reasonable price – either cash or barter – and entirely off the books.

This sort of underground economy is called “agorism,” and it is the only way to fight a behemoth like our government. You can’t win politically, and going head to head or toe to toe with an out-of-control government is just suicidal. But a medical underground for those folks who don’t want or can’t afford insurance – or who just don’t want their medical records to become public property – would be a very good thing. I foresee several things about such a medical underground:

1. Common sense would rule. Your family doctor wouldn’t be sending you for $10,000-12,000 in unnecessary medical tests because he is afraid of being sued, all when he knows perfectly well that you have a kidney infection and just need a round of antibiotics. Your doctor can’t really piss you off without going to jail, and you can’t really report him without going to jail yourself – and you sure as hell can’t sue him in open court. So both of you would behave like rational human beings.

2. Most likely you could get in to see your doctor within an hour or two, rather than waiting a month until he feels like taking new patients.

3. Some doctors, in the interest of acquiring and keeping patients, might even offer house calls. It’s far safer, when you are doing something illegal, to move around and not have an office that can be targeted.

4. Doctors would learn to diagnose again. A good doctor can tell far more with his eyes, ears, fingers and nose than an expensive CT scan or MRI is likely to tell him.

5. Folks wouldn’t be going to hospitals unless they were actually in real danger of dying. “Take two aspirin, drink plenty of water, and call me in the morning,” was generally wise advice for 90 percent of health concerns, but doctors forgot it somewhere along the line under the ever present fear of lawsuits.

6. More babies will be born at home, under the care of underground doctors or midwives, and both mothers and children will be safe from hospital infections.

7. Such a system will fight unemployment and help the economy. The old country gal whose granny taught her to treat Brown Recluse bites with sugar water, treat bronchitis or even Tuberculosis with raw garlic and who makes that hellacious linament for a sore back really deserves to get paid for her knowledge. She will now get paid – cash under the table, or a couple of chickens or even a pig – all of which will certainly go to feed her family and no part of it will help to support foreign wars or other stupidities of empire.

I am actually finding this quite amusing. Congress has definitely given us real health care reform, just not quite in the way that they or Obama intended.

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Politics, Uncategorized

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are always bad men.
Lord Acton

Seldom has anyone uttered a truer phrase, and if you believe it, it actually helps you to navigate the maze of politics.

For example: health care. If my government is truly powerful (and it is), do I want this powerful government (i.e., these powerful men) to take over control of my health care?

Absolutely not! My health care decisions are personal decisions, and I would far rather be unable to afford a doctor at all than have any government dictate those decisions to me – or even know the full state of my health or lack of it. Bluntly, that’s nobody’s business but my own – and it never will be. Government health care would simply mean that I could never again visit a health care professional in this country without having my privacy violated. And my privacy is important enough to me that this means that I could never again receive health care within the borders of the United States.

Actually, that’s not such a large problem for me personally. After my last doctor tried to kill me a few years ago, I’ve stuck with nutritional supplements and haven’t seen another MD. I don’t think very highly of the profession. If those supplements that keep me healthy are banned by an out-of-control government, I’ll be moving to Mexico in short order where I can get anything I could ever want over the counter for cash with zero record of the transaction. Dead simple.

But power corrupts should be remembered in other ways, too. I recently read Seymour Hersh’s remarks about Cheney operating an assassination program out of the White House. This shouldn’t surprise any student of human nature who actually watched Cheney, as he is a walking advertisement for clinical sadism and power corrupts. My conservative friends (all two of them) tell me defensively that this program was just great. It “kept us safe” from Al Qaeda (a CIA invention, anyway). They should remember instead that because power corrupts, it is no stretch at all from offing a jihadist here and there to offing your political rivals. My friends need to remember that forgetting that universal principle is not a survival characteristic.

So now it appears that Obama is pursuing many of these programs himself. I have to admit that makes me smile a bit when I think about my conservative buddies. Anything that increases the power of government will be abused eventually. We see this in action every single day, and now it’s their turn to sweat about it.

Why is this so difficult for Americans to understand? Because, by comparison with the rest of the world, our government did seem reasonably benign for many generations – or at least, it managed to fool us into thinking so. But no government is ever truly benign. Ever. Some are just better at secrecy than others.

Power corrupts! If you give any organization, public or private, power over your life, that power will, sooner or later, be abused. There are no exceptions.

The only possible way to slow this process (and you cannot stop it until you abolish government altogether) is to hold government to as nearly universal human moral standards as possible. The Christians think they have the only morality that is valid, but they are deluded. Hell, they can’t even define “adultery,” let alone the difference between “kill” and “murder.”

We need to look for points of agreement among pretty much all of us. We do nearly all agree that murder is wrong, so why do we allow our government to do it?

Don’t look at me! I haven’t got a clue. I personally believe that anyone who gave the order for an assassination right down to the poor bastard that pulled the trigger should be subject to immediate trial, and if convicted of murder, subject to the death penalty also. War is a little different if it is unavoidable, but war in anything other than self defense is murder also. Make no mistake about that.

We pretty much all agree that torture is wrong. Not only is it wrong morally, it is just plain stupid, because the victim of torture will tell you all kinds of lies to get the torture to stop. Torture is only good for one thing – getting folks to tell you what you want or need to hear. Like maybe getting Al Qaeda folks to confess to 9/11 when it was an inside job? I have that dirty suspicion, yes. What about you? Cheney is certainly capable of it. I suspect he actually enjoyed ordering torture and watching it. So why is it difficult to imagine those as his underlying reasons?

Until we get over our national reluctance to talk about basic morality in anything other than the framework of fanatical religion – which many of us reject out of hand – we’re going to have a government that is immoral and dangerous to all of us.

It might do every one of us good to remember the last successful anarchist society – the American “Old West.” Contrary to history’s lies and Hollywood fiction, blood did not run in the streets. There were only a few dozen high noon type gunfights on this continent over a span of a hundred years, and collateral damage was slight. Most folks never came within 1,000 miles of such a fight in their lifetimes. But no one ever questioned the carriage of arms, openly or concealed, and a woman could walk the streets at night without fear of kidnap or rape.

It was also the most generally prosperous society in history.

Would that really be so awful?

Posted under Uncategorized

Please note that my copyright notice is null and void for this post.  Anyone who wishes to borrow the text of this letter to use on behalf of Cele Castillo is welcome – and even urged – to do so.

The whole story, in Cele’s own words.

Please sign our petition here.

The Honorable Eric Holder

United States Attorney General

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Re: Prosecutorial Misconduct

USA vs. Celerino Castillo, III

SA: 08-CR-00193 (1) – WRF

No. 08- 51144 USA vs. CASTILLO

Dear Attorney General Holder:

I have recently read in the news media about your unprecedented reversal of conviction in the corruption case concerning Senator Ted Stevens, and I applaud your action.  It was very apparent that there was prosecutorial misconduct that did indeed take place in that case.

However, I have recently become cognizant of a similar – and quite possibly even a far worse – example of prosecutorial misconduct, and as an American citizen, I am urgently requesting your assistance in getting to the bottom of this ugly situation.

Mr. Celerino “Cele” Castillo, III, a resident of my own state of Texas, is best remembered for being a whistleblower during the Iran-Contra investigation.  Mr. Castillo submitted his testimony to the House Select Committee for Intelligence and went before a federal grand jury in Washington D.C, to testify to CIA involvement in murder, torture, drug trafficking, and arms smuggling.

After his retirement from the DEA, Mr. Castillo became an educator and an activist for several civil rights organizations, such as People for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace, and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

On March 06, 2008, Mr. Castillo was arrested by ATF agents in San Antonio, Texas.  The charges were filed by U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton for the Western District of Texas.  After eight months, Mr. Castillo’s charges were dismissed under Poke v. U.S.

However, prior to Mr. Castillo’s charges being dismissed, he was told that he was required to plead guilty to new charges of “Selling Guns without a License and Aiding and Abetting.”  ATF agents telephoned Mr. Castillo’s elderly mother on literally a daily basis, threatening this elderly lady with never seeing her son again, until Mr. Castillo pled guilty and was sentenced to 37 months of incarceration.  Such tactics on the parts of the ATF agents in question were at best, disgusting – and at worst, even criminal.  That is, said tactics certainly appear to be felony extortion in my personal view, and I cannot see any other interpretation at this time.

Mr. Castillo was initially ordered to surrender for his term of incarceration on March 05, 2009, but he discovered soon after his sentencing that his attorney, Robert “Eddie” de la Garza, had been under investigation by the state bar throughout his case – and Mr. de la Garza had failed to advise the court that he was in the process of being suspended.  There was a massive issue of conflict of interest on the part of Mr. de la Garza also, because the same agents involved in Mr. Castillo’s case were also involved with another case involving Mr. de la Garza’s son, Andrew de la Garza, who had been arrested by ATF a short time prior on quite similar charges to Mr. Castillo’s.

The judge in Mr. Castillo’s case has extended Mr. Castillo’s required surrender date until July 20, 2009, so that he may have ample time to prepare this case with his new public defender.

On April 10, 2009, Mr. Castillo and his new public defender filed nine counts of Prosecutorial Misconduct and Outrageous Government Conduct related to his case.  The complaints were filed with the Office of the Inspector General and the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and therefore should be readily available for your review.

I do strongly believe that the prosecutorial misconduct involved in Mr. Castillo’s case was even more severe than that which was involved in Senator Ted Stevens’ case, as I do very strongly suspect that Mr. de la Garza’s son’s predicament was actually used by the ATF agents involved in both cases to blackmail Mr. de la Garza, Mr. Castillo’s defense attorney, into giving Mr. Castillo the worst possible legal advice – in other words, pressuring Mr. Castillo’s attorney to advise him in the strongest terms to plead guilty even though it was never in Mr. Castillo’s best interest to do so.  Put still another way, this situation certainly does make it appear that this was felony extortion again, which I am sure you will agree is never acceptable conduct for anyone, let alone someone in the legal or law enforcement professions.

In light of these facts, I am respectfully requesting an immediate, thorough and very urgent inquiry into the manner in which Mr. Castillo’s case was prosecuted, and I also feel that time is of extremely crucial importance in this matter.  Cele Castillo is one of the last surviving credible witnesses to the government agency abuses that took place during the Iran Contra years, and as a former deep cover DEA agent, the very unfortunate reality is that he will be placed in extremely grave personal danger from the moment he enters the U.S. prison system on July 20th, 2009.

I hope to hear from you concerning this matter at your very earliest convenience.

Respectfully yours,

Kathryn A. Graham

Hooks, Texas

Please sign our petition here.

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice, Politics, Uncategorized

What happens when a law enforcement officer – especially a good one – goes to prison?

According to one anonymous prison nurse in Texas, the guards may not like everything that happens, but for the sake of peace, they will all look the other way.  There is an unwritten rule in all prisons that any cop is fair game.

How about a top DEA agent who put a lot of drug lords away and who subsequently has to spend some time at Club Fed?  Especially one who is not so young anymore and is in physically poor health?  How long will he live?  Five minutes?  Maybe ten minutes, if he’s very, very lucky?

Make no mistake – whatever they may call Cele Castillo’s sentence for buying and selling guns without a license at a Texas gun show (which, folks, happens to be completely legal), any prison sentence at all for this man is a sentence of death just as surely as if the judge had sentenced Castillo to the needle.

So what is Castillo’s real crime?  He has the goods – documentary evidence – to put the sitting president’s father away for a long, long time for his illegal smuggling activities during Iran Contra.  Unfortunately, Castillo also has a sense of honor – he just won’t keep his mouth shut.

Wow, some hardened criminal, huh?  Our streets surely will be safer when this guy is gone.

Worse, his aging mother is afraid he will go away for long enough that she won’t see him again before she passes on.  Clearly, she does not even understand that if Castillo even enters Club Fed, he is highly unlikely to be coming out at all.  It might be worthwhile to pull that sweet lady’s phone records.  Has she been getting pushy and scary phone calls lately?  She’d never tell her son, of course, but I surely wouldn’t bet against it.

Once Castillo chose to plead this case out, he was discredited in the eyes of the public.  Joe Q. Six-Pack and Jane Q. Soccer-Mom are so damned scared of firearms they won’t even bother to check the law.  The information Castillo has no longer has any value at all, unfortunately, but any of us with mothers are forced to understand why he has done this.

Who is Cele Castillo?  His full name is Celerino Castillo III, and he is an American hero and the descendant of other heroes from other wars.  Cele fought in Viet Nam.  He was on the front lines during the Drug War of the 1980s.  And as his web site says, his third and final war is proving to be the most dangerous – his war against his own government.

During the 1980s, Castillo was involved in DEA operations in Central and South America.  During this time, he became especially interested in the activities at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador.  Drugs were moving one way, to the United States, and money and guns were moving the other way, to the Nicaraguan Contras, all under the direct supervision of Lt. Col. Oliver North.  When Castillo tried to press his investigation, he was ordered to back off, as this was a black operation emanating from the White House.

Castillo became interested in Poppy Bush, then Reagan’s Vice President, after meeting him at a function in Guatemala and trying to tell him what he had seen – and Bush just walked away from him, looking for another hand to shake.  Castillo may have been barred from pressing the case further, but he could observe happenings at the airport, and he kept a daily journal of those years.  Do you understand the significance of this?  Who is the one man, probably the man who was ultimately most responsible for Iran Contra, who was never prosecuted?  I’ll give you a huge hint.  On the night of Barry Seal’s murder near New Orleans, whose top secret phone number was found in Seals’ wallet?

None other than that of George H. W. Bush.  And there is only one way Seals could have acquired that number – and that is if Bush himself gave it to him.

Barry Seals was the most prolific and the most successful drug smuggler in all of history.  And he was about to testify about Iran Contra when he met his death.

Cele Castillo is certainly talented when it comes to choosing his enemies, but maybe that’s why I admire him so much.

It’s too late to try to get Cele Castillo off completely.  For his mother’s sake, he has already been forced to admit his utterly non-existent guilt, and a judge will pass sentence on him this very afternoon.  If Castillo is to survive this experience, however, we must make his plight so public that he will become toxic to touch.

Please spread this article far and wide.  Visit his web site at Powderburns. Let your friends and lawmakers know that if harm comes to Cele Castillo, you will know beyond the slightest doubt who is responsible.

I am waiting to learn Castillo’s sentence as I write this.  Maybe this judge will be smart enough to give him only probation.  Somehow, though, I doubt it.  Compassion in a police state?  Who are we kidding?

Posted under Uncategorized

Many centuries ago, when my British ancestors were facing regular and bloody incursions by Vikings looking for bloody fun, non-consentual sex and profit (sometimes expressed as rape and pillage), some Vikings offered to leave particular villages or areas alone for that particular raiding season – for a price.  This price came to be known as Dane-geld, or I suppose it could be expressed alternatively as pillage without the rape.

There is a problem with Dane-geld, however, and it was beautifully expressed by Rudyard Kipling centuries later, when he pointed out in verse that once you pay Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.

In modern usage, Dane-geld has come to mean any form of blackmail from kidnap and ransom to terrorist threats, and Kipling is most often correct.  When you pay blackmail money, the blackmailer just asks for more.

The United States has suffered a coup, every bit as real as a third world coup accomplished at the point of a gun.  To be entirely honest, we cannot even be absolutely certain that guns were not involved.  One of the necessary prerequisites for a successful coup is the control of information, which means that you and I are unlikely to be in possession of the whole story.  I am not saying this was a violent coup – I am inclined to believe that it was not – but there is no way for me, or any other average citizen, to be certain.

Things have just gotten exponentially worse.  We have just paid Dane-geld, and that means we are going to have an incredibly difficult time getting rid of the Dane.  Most of our Congress-critters, and even our two major presidential candidates, are owned by their corporate masters – corporate masters who trade on Wall Street.  That is why they have betrayed us.  Now that they have managed to loot almost a trillion dollars from the U.S. Treasury – meaning from your kids and grandkids – you can be dead certain they are going to ask for more.  And more.

We must find a way to get rid of the Dane!

I am often asked why I am opposed to NAFTA and FTAA, when I am a libertarian free market capitalist.  I am opposed to them because they have nothing whatsoever to do with free markets.  So where did we go wrong?

Let’s get back to the roots of objectivism.  The roots of objectivism say that all group rights are individual rights.  Groups of people, and even governments, do not have more rights than individuals.  If you follow this idea to its logical conclusion, it also means that corporations are not people, and should not have the rights of individuals, let alone the right to pillage without consequence.

Theft is a crime, whether it is committed by an individual, a corporation, or a government.  See?  Dead simple and dead easy to understand.

In the last few decades, we have allowed corporations to amass enough power that they are now running our government.  They are free to pillage our treasury – and our individual futures – absolutely without consequence.  There is a word for this sort of corporatism.  It is called fascism, and it is not a pretty way to live.

We must change this!  We do not have a choice.  Believe me, the last thing in the world I want to see is civil strife in my country, but peacefully or not, we must change what has happened to us.  Corporations must return to what they were always meant to be – a group of individual business partners.  We must restore the checks and balances – and the civil liberties – embodied in our Constitution.  We must restore the accountability in government.

We do not have a lot of time to do this.  We are up against perhaps 5,000 folks with trillions of dollars they can spend to stop us.  Our one advantage is that there are 280 million of us, and we are becoming annoyed.  That is a juggernaut I hope they cannot stop, but only time will tell.

We became complacent.  We assumed that freedom and stability were ours by right.  Now we must pay the price for that stupidity.

Are you ready to stand up and be counted?

Posted under Uncategorized