Sunday, January 5, 2014

To Critics of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Written in January 2012
Originally published 1-23-2012



     On November 6th of this year, we will elect a representative to the U.S. House who will be paid 174 thousand dollars a year. Now, the Statutes of Frauds which are found in the legal codes of the various states provide that if two parties agree to sell goods worth at least a number well below 174 thousand dollars, that contract is unenforceable unless it is made in writing.
      But why should the requirements for contracts to provide the public services of government be any weaker?
      We have been led to believe that the secret-ballot-voting provisions in most of the states’ constitutions enhance democracy and protect our privacy. But – in truth – there is a more sinister reason why our voting is private, secret, anonymous, and unwritten; and why our elected representatives stand in a giant room in Washington speaking their congressional oaths instead of being required to sign a written oath to support the government and the documents upon which it is based.
President Kennedy once said that “[t]he very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society”, but the secret-ballot system protects our unduly-elected representatives’ privilege never to be bothered to provide written evidence proving that any particular person delegated his authority to them.
Although it has been suggested that to destroy the secrecy of the voting system would signify the abolition of civil society, the abolition of the secret ballot would in fact serve to augment its freedom and openness. Your revered secret ballot possesses the same type of freedom and independence held by the Federal Reserve Bank which brought on the current financial crisis; and that type of freedom is ownership.
      Our government agencies are contractually irresponsible to the people they control. This irresponsible, exclusive dominion has been described as “political slavery… identical to the right of private property”. What this means is that when we vote, we are being permitted to choose who owns us – who we must pay to control us – without ever being given the option of choosing not to be treated as other people’s property in the first place.
Let it therefore be said that voluntary action, free association, and written contracts are the basis for all just and legitimate governance.

      Since the current financial crisis began, our Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin has voted for a round of bailouts and restructuring that have cost our government an estimated 12 to 24 trillion dollars, which is equal to 80 to 160 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.
      Not only this, but the total unfunded liabilities projected over the next 75 years now number somewhere around 165 trillion, which is 11 times the Gross Domestic Product, and 10 percent larger than the planet’s annual earnings. Every 3 ½ years, the federal government’s unfunded liabilities double.
      Unfortunately, there is no legal safeguard against such excessive spending. In fact, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits anyone from questioning the validity of the government’s public debt. But the 14th Amendment also prohibits involuntary servitude, except as punishment.
      So now I ask: do we have the voluntary choice to either support and obey this government or not, or are we compelled to serve it involuntarily? Do we have free will and the right to our own bodies, or are we nothing more than political debt slaves being used as the whipping boys of the politicians who have stolen from ourselves and our children?
The current political system – inasmuch as it is a secret, closed, and unwritten system – is in fact the world’s wealthiest criminal gang, and that we the people – inasmuch as our associations remain free, open, and voluntary – are charged with the responsibility to bring charges and punishment against those who would provide aid, comfort, or material support to our treasonous, alien enemy the State.
      This debt that we are required to pay at the threat of being put in a tax prison; what is it more than restitution – that is, criminal responsibility and liabilities for having committed theft – being passed onto a group of people who never signed a single written document promising to pay the government’s generational debts?

      Set aside Citizens United and the railroad robber barons who wrote their privileges into the Supreme Court reports during the Industrial Revolution; if you want to talk about how corporate personhood is corrupting elections, let’s talk about another oft-overlooked legal fiction.
      The vast majority of us were made U.S. citizens and given Social Security numbers within our first year of life, at a time when we have no comprehension or awareness what is being done under our assumed consent.
      But once we come of the age of reason; are we given the option to renounce our citizenship and end our use of the public services provided by the established civil society, or are we told that we will be sued for over 100 thousand dollars if we do not agree to potentially kill and die for the government if and when asked?
      Why do we permit our government to assume our permanent consent, blackmail us into murdering foreigners, and limit our rights to privacy and to defend ourselves?

Wisconsin’s new Republican-supported Castle Doctrine law provides that if a home owner injures someone who breaks into his home trying to kill him, the home owner may be sued to pay that person’s medical bills, so long as the home owner was engaging in criminal activity at the time, or the victim was a peace officer performing official duties. Democrats objected that the bill would provide too much leeway to home owners assessing the threats against them.
What the Democrats failed to see in this issue was that the rest of the bill – in concert with federal legislation like the PATRIOT Act and the 2012 N.D.A.A. – would do nothing to stop a federal agent from unconstitutionally writing his own search warrant, breaking into your home, enter into evidence your glass bong and your hundred-dollar receipt that you gave to an overseas charity that the government doesn’t like, coming after you with a gun, suing you to pay for any injuries he sustains trying to prevent you from defending yourself, charging you with providing material support to terrorists, and asking the Secretary of Defense to allow military personnel to place you in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely and without due-process access to legal representation.
I repeat, this is the policy of the Democrats; Democrats like Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary and former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, who were recently grilled on the CIA / Homeland Security “Operation Fast and Furious”, which later became “Project Gunrunner”.
Imagine the American people’s surprise when they discover that these two Obama appointees conspired to assassinate Republican Federal District Court Judge John Roll and Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who were investigating the matter with a Congressman from West Texas.
While some have described President Obama as supporting gun control, murdering political figures while arming drug lords suggests an intentional relinquishment of control over weapons. But Democrats in the state legislature have been actively pro-gun-control.
When gun freedoms are too loose, a child may shoot his friend to death with his father’s shotgun, or a madman may shoot 30 people, and that is certainly very sad. But when gun controls are too tight, gun control proponents like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot may obliterate five percent of humanity, and that – my friends – is a tragedy.

It has been just under three months since the day a fifth of the unarmed audience of the Wisconsin State Assembly was arrested by armed security guards while their fellow audience members brandish plastic handguns in open mockery of their new-found temporary privilege to defend themselves, while Democrats failed to make the Republicans give up a little of the people’s leeway against criminals as well as the established, organized cadre of violent police and military agents that we call our duly-delegated sovereign.
The politician who votes to keep weapons out of any place – whether private or public – is sending a message to criminals that law-abiding citizens in such places will be guaranteed not to be able to defend themselves.
I will accept nothing less than my absolute freedom to defend myself against those who would seek to harm my person and describe my resistance as illegal competition against their exclusive monopoly power to force, compel, coerce, defraud, intimidate, and manipulate me.
The offender has made it clear that this is a battle based on power and strength; I have no delusions that giving up my right to stronger weapons and shields – whether real or symbolic – will inspire sympathy in him.

      But I mentioned the government’s monopoly force, an idea to which President Obama subscribes. This is the monopoly force of government that privileges the large, well-established, and centralized banks from fair competition with smaller, newer, and more community-oriented ones; that privileges large, well-established, and multinational companies from fair competition with smaller, newer, and community-oriented ones.
Despite their awareness of the roles of monopoly capital and monopoly government colluding to engineer the current economic crisis, most on the left have still neglected to examine the role of monopoly unionism in all this.

Gone are the days of dual- and multiple-unionism and wildcat strikes which were once the tactically-pure principles of the labor movement, uncorrupted by the desire of institutionalization and privilege conferred by coercive monopoly government.
This conflict was the reason for the 1924 split in the I.W.W., between those seeking political union privilege; and those who sought to refrain from using violence to compel others to accede to their demands, but instead to make employers and the public aware of and sympathetic to their concerns, and to spread information about the plight of the working man through peaceful discourse.
But the administration of the banker Franklin Roosevelt effectively ended this dispute; in 1935, his National Labor Relations Act outlawed wildcat strikes, and required management to negotiate with the agents authorized to represent their employees.
Certainly we can agree that when workers with more modest demands form their own rival union to compete with the established union in their workplace, this can undermine worker solidarity within that workplace. But when a more extreme segment of employees feel that the established union is being too modest, and desire to have a wildcat strike, the established union can bring charges against the more extreme workers, sacrificing their just demands in the name of getting things done.
Thus, we see the established unions undercutting the efforts of both the more modest and the more extreme workers, each group of which assuming the risks and responsibilities associated with their actions. It becomes evident that – primarily – the established unions seek not solidarity, but rather the entrenchment of their own exclusive power to represent workers; their monopoly power of representation.

To this day, the I.W.W. promotes dual unionism, and even goes so far as to recommend that non-unionized workers engage in solidarity unionism tactics, rather than to pursue, quote, “the legalistic strategies that have led us to the current mess”. Perhaps the I.W.W.’s humble anarchism explains why it claims just one-nine-hundredth as many members as the A.F.L.-C.I.O., one-fifth of whose members are associated with the public service and automobile industries which were bailed out under Bush and Obama.
Despite all his rolling-back of union privileges, Governor Walker has stated that he has no desire to use the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act to make Wisconsin a Right-to-Work state… and to the detriment of the labor movement. For history has shown that when and where union membership is optional and voluntary; union membership, employment, and wages tend to increase.
Now that we have discussed the dangers of using government force to grant monopoly privileges to oligarchical labor and capital, we are ready to understand how to undermine the very monopoly of force on which the government and its dependents rest.

The actions of the Obama Administration have shown an appeasing unwillingness to allow the governments and the states compete against the federal government to provide public services. The Administration has taken a similar attitude towards private enterprise.
I believe that the state governments, the private sector, and fledgling labor unions pose some of the most significant threats to the perception that the federal government is the most legitimate, moral, efficient, and qualified to provide public goods and services; and – as such – experimentation regarding their role competing against the federal government to do so should be encouraged. It is this competition that undermines the monopoly of government.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at a point in American political economy when the majority of leftists have deviated from their socialist roots and acceded to the power of the established centralized, federal social democracy; even – sadly – the Mutualists, who have exalted both the free-market principle of competitive capital and the anarcho-syndicalist principle of competitive labor.
But to the extent to which an embrace of Mutualist anarchism would solve the problem of monopoly labor and capital, the problem of competing against monopoly government – specifically, centralized monopoly government – remains to be addressed; in particular, the monopoly power that Governor Walker and the Republicans currently have the potential to wield over regulating the benefits and negotiation privileges of government employees providing public services.
Make no mistake; the Democrats constitute no real challenge to the current Republican power monopoly. In fact, most if not all Democrats actually desire to entrench the government monopoly; namely, through increased taxation which would provide for the expansion of government cooperation with both established unions and – quite often – established capital. We would be hard pressed to find a single Democrat in power who votes to encourage competition against both established monopoly labor and monopoly capital.

But replace Governor Walker with a Democrat if you must. Replace him with a Democrat who wants to– even further than the Republicans do – chip away at your right to defend yourself against those who would seek to threaten violence against you for rightfully asserting that you never knowingly entered into a contract promising to give them as much money and blood they please for the rest of your life.
Or instead we can bring charges against our state governments, compelling them to decide whether the Statutes of Frauds violates the secret-ballot provisions in the state constitutions, or whether the secret-ballot by its very design flies in the face of basic principles of the Anglo-American common contract law; essentially, getting the states to declare whether their authority comes from us voluntarily giving up the right to make some of our decisions, or else getting them to admit that they are only based on domination and force.
Instead we can abandon these spectres of secret, coercive, monopolistic government, capital, and labor; and instead provide public goods and services through open, legitimate, local government; through charity and religious organizations; through consumer- and citizen- advocacy agencies; through gift-giving, bartering, trading, and sharing; through the efforts of small and local private businesses seeking to undermine the strength of the established multinational corporations and state-sponsored enterprises; and through direct-action general and work-to-rules strikes, picketing, boycotts, and confrontation of management by freely associating and disassociating segments of mutually sympathetic workers; lest we consign ourselves to manipulation by big-labor leaders, corporate lobbyists, and corrupt, well-paid career politicians in the national government who until this moment have used us as pawns to entrench their own wealth and power.
Instead we can revive the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment – that the powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states or to the people – ushering in a new era, wherein the federal government’s grip on the affairs of the states and the people is loosened, permitting us to engage in political experimentation in which exalts participatory democracy and local governance over representative democracy and centralized governance, for only then may we learn to tolerate a diversity of administration of best practices, and come to discern for our own subjective purposes which combination of practices suits us best.
Let us require no teacher or health care worker to worry about his pay and benefits while toiling under the reign of a politician who doesn’t represent his political and economic interests. Let those who provide public goods and services – Republican or Democrat, libertarian or socialist – work to provide them in the way they see fit.
Achieve these goals, and you will have total liberty and equality of opportunity, without sacrificing a financially secure outcome for those who provide us safety, peace, and prosperity.



For more entries on elections and campaign finance, please visit:
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/why-voting-is-not-necessarily-evil.html

For more entries on government secrecy and N.S.A. surveillance, please visit:

For more entries on unions and collective bargaining, please visit:

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