Showing posts with label Wisconsin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wisconsin. Show all posts

Sunday, December 6, 2015

48-Point Platform for My 2012 Wisconsin Congressional Run



Written on December 2nd, 2012



1.      Establish peace and diplomacy with all nations, and a humble foreign policy without interventionism.

2.      Nullify and interpose the implementation and enforcement of the USA PATRIOT Act, its reauthorizations, and any and all NDAAs and AUMFs which violate 5th and 6th Amendment rights.

3.      Encourage and permit counties, cities, and municipalities to forego federal assistance in the provision of transportation security.

4.      Repatriate Wisconsin-based military infrastructure, personnel, and the economic industry of military personnel.

5.      Nullify and interpose the implementation and enforcement of all egregious federal laws, and emulate all appropriate federal legislation at the state level.

6.      Join other states to call for a convention to propose amendments to the federal Constitution.

7.      Call for a repeal of the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, restoring the influence of the state legislatures on the U.S. Congress.

8.      Urge other states to join Wisconsin in supporting dual federalism (co-equal sovereignty of the federal and state governments) over cooperative federalism.

9.      Sue the federal government for infringing on the autonomy of the state, and / or revoke the state’s consent to share co-sovereignty with the federal government.

10.  Expatriate Wisconsinites to Wisconsin from federal sovereignty and citizenship.

11.  Try representatives, government employees, and voters having participated in the perpetuation of federal supremacy within the state, for rebellion, insurrection, sedition, and / or treason.

12.  Ask the federal Government and the United Kingdom to re-affirm their recognition of the United States as “free, sovereign, and independent”.

13.  Establish embassies, consulates, foreign posts, and / or other diplomatic offices, for the purpose of conducting interactions with the foreign federal government.

14.  Issue passports on behalf of the state, urge and permit localities to issue passports on their own behalves, and accept the U.N. World Passport.

15.  Decline to pursue full U.N. membership for Wisconsin, and oppose the oligopolization of the United Nations Security Council.

16.  Lobby the international community to recognize Wisconsin as a free and independent nation.

17.  Pass legislation defining the provision of all government services as commercial, and invoke court precedent affirming the constitutionality of anti-trust laws in order to abolish the geographical monopoly jurisdiction of governments.

18.  Offer Wisconsin citizenship to persons in areas in which the logistics of the delivery of public services would be feasible and efficient, and offer Wisconsin citizens to become citizens of other governments under the same circumstances.

19.  Pass legislation criminalizing the diminution of choice from among governments based on location or residence.

20.  Promote geographical decentralization – from Washington, D.C. to the states, and from Madison to the counties and communities of Wisconsin – in decision-making.

21.  Pass legislation criminalizing the exclusivity of geographical and subject-matter jurisdiction.

22.  Promote greater and more direct citizen influence on – and participation in – government, including the removal of barriers to ballot access, and to the referendum process.

23.  Promote term limits and pay cuts for elected and appointed officials; initially through voluntary gubernatorial self-imposition, and urging other officials to take the governor’s lead.

24.  Support amendment of the U.S. Constitution to end the apportionment of representatives on the basis of population, favoring instead the basis of number of willing citizens.

25.  Combat partisanship in the state legislatures by applying developments in computer technology to the redistricting process, thereby eliminating the influence of political parties on the process.

26.  Pursue reforms to the consent of the governed, including by applying developments in political science to election systems, and by considering the implementation of ranked preferential voting.

27.  Promote the full information of the consent of the governed by ensuring the privity of contract between voters and public servants; require ballots and oaths of office to be written, signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, and acknowledged by all interested parties.

28.  Pass legislation permitting the public scrutiny of election results.

29.  Support amendment of the U.S. Constitution to criminalize the bestowal and recognition of titles of nobility and aristocratic emoluments by agencies of government.

30.  Increase criminal penalties for voter intimidation, and broaden the definition of voter intimidation to include pandering and other forms of coercive interference in the independence of voter choice.

31.  Promote the security of elections through supporting measures to require photo identification for voters, and to enact an identification provision system funded by taxpayers.

32.  Oppose efforts to end or increase regulations on same-day voter registration for elections.

33.  Support making Election Day a national holiday – or moving elections to a weekend – at the federal level, and a state holiday at the state level.

34.  Support amending Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in a manner which explicitly and simplistically defines the relationship of persons and their legal rights, privileges, and immunities to the state and federal governments.

35.  Support invalidating Section 2 of the 14th Amendment to – and Article I, Section 2 Clause 3 of – the U.S. Constitution to legalize the questioning of the federal public debt.

36.  Support an amendment invalidating Article I, Section 10, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution, legalizing the confederation of states.

37.  Promote the responsibility and responsiveness of elected officials, including by supporting amendment of Article I, Section 6, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution to revoke elected federal representatives’ privilege to refuse to respond to questioning.

38.  Support criminal justice reform, including by supporting amendment of Article I, Section 6, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution to remove elected federal representatives’ privileges from arrest.

39.  Support campaign finance reform, including through the nullification and / or interposition of the McCain-Feingold Act, and through the passage of prohibitions against the influence of foreign nationals and corporations on campaign finance.

40.  Support the polyopolization of all commercial markets and industries by invoking court precedent affirming the constitutionality of anti-trust laws.

41.  Pursue “corporate personhood” reform by restoring responsibility and responsiveness to businesses and other corporations, and through reforms to the charter system.

42.  Reverse the corporatization of the person and the commodification of human beings by pursuing informed-consent reforms to the birth certificate and Social Security account systems.

43.  Augment the rights of the accused by requiring the accused to be informed of their right to be presented with written evidence that some party claiming injury has a complaint against them.

44.  Augment the right to a fair trial, including through requiring judges to present written oaths of office and anti-bribery pledges, criminalizing the misinformation of juries by judges and the dismissal of prospective jurors due to awareness of jury nullification, and requiring juries to be informed about jury nullification.

45.  Oppose attempts to reinstate the death penalty in Wisconsin, and nullify and the implementation and enforcement of federal laws which carry the death penalty as a potential punishment.

46.  Oppose attempts to criminalize and / or increase penalties for recording public proceedings and the actions of civil servants, including police officers.

47.  Legally re-define the power of attorney to be separate and distinct from the powers of political representation, adjudication, and arbitration.

48.  Nullify and interpose the implementation and enforcement of the federal anti-drug laws, and pardon – and pursue the reduction of the duration of sentences of – all non-violent drug offenders in the state.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Is Scott Walker a Fascist?

Written on June 19th, 2012



   I read an article the other day that described Scott Walker as taking the first step towards libertarian small-government ends. Canadian liberty activist Stefan Molyneux said that even if Ron Paul or some other libertarian becomes president, since they want small government, it will inevitably involve cuts in government services, cuts in the pay and benefits of government employees, and cuts in the size of governments’ work forces. Molyneux’s point was that a libertarian taking charge of a monopoly government that stays monopolistic will appear to most people as a corporatist (fascism minus the theocracy) system.

   I’d say that the more socially tolerant the libertarian president or governor is, the less he would appear as a fascist. This is why more liberals like Ron Paul and Gary Johnson than do Scott Walker; Ron Paul and Gary Johnson – although they may be far from enthusiastically pro-choice when it comes to personal ethics, and although their abortion policy is guided by the principles of dual federalism (states’ rights) – are not actively trying to make abortion clinics dissuade people from getting abortions, unlike Walker and the Republicans in the Wisconsin state legislature. And since most people who oppose abortion oppose it on religious grounds, that puts the theocratic element back into corporatism, making Walker appear as nearly a fascist to most pro-choice labor rights’ advocates.

   The problem I think we’re overlooking is the problem of monopoly government. Which government controls us depends not on our choice from among a varied selection of alternatives, but on where we live. A government monopoly (on the legitimate use of power) can easily engender corporate monopoly (by threatening to use that power).

   We have a “corporate government” to an even greater extent than that to which we have a “pay-to-play” system full of corruption, corporate welfare, and wealth disparity; we have a “corporate government” because it has the potential to exist indefinitely (like corporations), and because its debt is shared by people who – through the legal-fiction paper representations of themselves – are never given the ability to resist their government, or given enough information to understand why they might have wanted to resist becoming a corporate person in their first weeks of life.

   But a monopoly government also engenders monopoly unionism. It can be very difficult to criticize the most visible problems with the labor movement without offending leftists. It took me a long time to figure out what’s to like about the labor movement and what’s not to like about it. But what appears clear to me now is that there needs to be a way for government employees to keep their jobs and benefits, for them to compete against the private sector to provide similar services, and for them to choose who is their boss (or governor, president, etc.).

   My solution – as clumsily as I might phrase it sometimes, like right now – is to simply submit to “private governance”. The founding fathers intended for the General Welfare Clause to mean that federal spending should benefit all or most people in the country. But most people in the country are very wealthy, nor are most people government employees. Those types of people want specific welfare, not general welfare.

   If Walker’s opponents would just admit that they want special benefits for union members, and if we just change things to that the current governments have to allow other governments to co-exist with them – and compete with them for citizens in the same territory – then we wouldn’t see things like the Walker controversy happening; Democrats would be governed by Democrats, Republicans would be governed by Republicans, union supporters would be governed by someone to the left of Tom Barrett, and we would be having a very different conversation.




For more entries on Wisconsin politics, please visit:

On Monopoly and the Scott Walker Recall Election

Written on June 5th, 2012
Edited in April 2014



   I posted the following in response to someone who said "Anyone who votes for Walker is on the wrong side of history.":

   This whole system is on the wrong side of history.

   People who like Walker should be able to choose to remain governed by Walker, people who like Barrett should be able to choose to be governed by Barrett, and people who like neither - i.e., probably everyone in this discussion - should be able to choose to be governed by someone else.

   Basic government services - that is, the provision of security, defense, protection, and insurance of person and property against those who would harm them and their utility - are commercial markets, just like health care, mail delivery, cell phones, or fried chicken.

   But KFC doesn't have to threaten to imprison people for not eating their chicken in order to stay at the top of the market. Similarly, you don't see Verizon, Samsung, and T-Mobile carving up plots of land, erecting border fences, and guarding borders with guns should their competitors try to break into their claimed consumer base. So why should government be any different?

   Any decent government - just like any decent company - will rise to the top fairly and naturally. Perfect consumer information and total competition in all industries and markets - including government services - will lead to the optimal outcome for all people, without sacrificing any liberty or freedom of choice in the process.

   This system has been called catallaxy (spontaneous order), agorism, polyarchism, functionally-overlapping-territorial-jurisdiction, national personal autonomy, and market anarchy. The idea of multiple competing governments has decades of testimony from libertarians and socialists alike.

   And it's not just a theoretical idea posited by suspected racists; it's a way of life that exists all around us in various forms, and a distilled, constrained, compromised form of it exists in the modern political institutions.

   Proponents of democracy - self-described Democrats and Republicans alike - claim to want more choice in political matters. Well, what system offers more political choices than total competition amongst governments?

   The legal basis for our corporate government goes way deeper than bank bailouts and the personal corruption of our politicians. So deep, in fact, that we may have to occasionally turn to people who understand the intricacies of the Constitution to undo the damage which we have recently seen.

   Google Lysander Spooner, Gustave de Molinari, Paul Emile de Puydt, Otto Bauer, and Roderick Long.




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 unions and collective bargaining, please visit:
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/social-policies-for-2012-us-house.html

For more entries on Wisconsin politics, please visit:

On the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Endorsement of Scott Walker in the Recall Election

Written on May 20th, 2012
Edited in April 2014



   The following is my response to a question from Ryan Haack: Are you going to say something about the Milwaukee Journal[-]Sentinel "endorsing" Walker.[?] ..."



   When Walker said he had no plans to make Wisconsin a Right-to-Work state, I wanted it to be an RTW state, but not just out of disagreement with Walker. That made me to the fiscal right of him.

   I changed my position to being against state RTW laws because I feel that they condition and inhibit contractual obligations for too large a geographical area and too many people. Walker came out in the last week or so saying he supported RTW laws, so now I disagree with him again, which makes my overall policy slightly more palatable to the left.

   Generally, I see the need for austerity and for cuts in government services, but I feel that it's more the federal government's fault than it is Walker's. I'm more likely to support austerity when the people decide it's the right time, not when governors have allowed the feds to bankrupt state and local governments.

   Arthur Kohl-Riggs said something to the effect of "any reasonable governor would have accepted that federal high-speed rail money". I disagree, and I commend Walker for rejecting it. High-speed rail that almost exclusively benefits Midwesterners does not promote the general welfare of all Americans, which I feel should be a necessary condition for federal spending.

   Besides, I think the private sector would do a more efficient and responsible job of constructing transportation infrastructure than the government, and there is less of a chance that that money would have been diverted to other spending projects and ending up in the pockets of politicians and lobbyists.

   Some might respond to the above by saying that the money would end up in the hands of CEOs and the like, and we all know how much Walker likes tax breaks for businesses and the wealthy. But Walker and I do not share the same economic or political philosophy.

   Walker is a corporatist technocrat who supports states' rights to some extent. I favor local communities' rights, and - under such conditions - taxation based on the creation of income disparity (but I also support introducing competition in governance, so that people can choose which fair and neutral party arbitrates disputes which they cannot resolve by themselves).

   In my opinion, Walker is not polarizing because he is farther to the right than people are used to. He is polarizing because – as with any politician, especially a governor or a president, under the current monopoly-government system – it’s Walker’s way or the highway. And that’s just the way it will be if Barrett wins.

   Nobody will be satisfied – and the “general (read: ‘universal’) welfare” clause will never be fulfilled – as long as people cannot vote “none of the above” in every election without having to vote again, and as long as people cannot choose to be governed by anyone other than the federal government along with its state and local subsidiary governments.

   The only politician who will not be polarizing is a candidate who lets people refrain from associating politically with people whose ideologies are nearly or completely irreconcilable with their own.

   Polarizing, extremist politicians are in-style in this political season. Scott Walker and Paul Ryan may be polarizing, but they are not extremist. But the most prominent extremists - people like Ron Paul and Gary Johnson – are somehow not polarizing; Paul has in fact been described as “transpartisan”.

   I feel that this shows that what we need is not “compromise, not capitulation” – as Democratic congressional candidate Mark Pocan put it – but “consensus, not compromise”, as independent congressional candidate myself puts it. This premise alone would satisfy the general welfare requirement.

   Fiscal sanity – not Scott-Walker-style soft money and tax breaks for businesses and the wealthy – helps the pocketbooks of all Americans. A humble foreign policy with a strong national defense – not George-W.-Bush-style interventionist military belligerence – makes all Americans safer.

   I am a Republican only in that republicanism is a means to an end. I respect extremists from both ends of the economic spectrum, because they have goals. All that polarizing, non-extremist, “pragmatic” Democrats and Republicans have to offer us is an all-or-nothing, “my-way-or-the-highway” mindset, and a political culture where an average of 49% of the people are dissatisfied and envious of those who are better represented.

   David Koch was the Libertarian Party Vice-Presidential candidate for president in 1980. Libertarians knew he wasn’t one of them then, and they know he isn’t one of them now. Libertarianism is not about corporate tyranny; it's about discovering to what extent any existing corporate tyranny is the fault of the State.The results of a (very in-depth, I must say) political quiz I recently took shows that libertarianism is nowhere near as all-or-nothing as the framed, false Republican-Democrat, "left-vs.-right" dichotomy. The quiz described me as a Libertarian Party sympathizer first, a Green Party sympathizer second, a Republican third, and a Democrat fourth.

   In conclusion, I am not voting in the recall election. I will vote in a Wisconsin gubernatorial election when and only when a candidate makes credible promises to start issuing passports; to advocate for the construction of consular offices with the purposes of establishing diplomacy with the foreign, alien federal government; and to re-assert the state's freedom, independence, and sovereignty, which is referenced in official federal government documents spanning from 1778 to just three years ago.

   Until that day happens, I urge my fellow (automatic, de-facto, default) Wisconsinites to vote "none of the above" if that is an option, and to remember to make as many qualifications as possible when making excuses for a representative of any agency at any level of one of the several governments to which we were presumed to have consented to delegate powers when we decided (without informed consent) to be born within the unnatural borders of a corporate State in proximity to the parent company which calls itself the United States Government.





For more entries on Wisconsin politics, please visit:


Critical Notes on Tammy Baldwin

Written on August 6th, 2011
Edited in April 2014



- Supported TARP / TALF, and nearly $¾T in 2009 stimulus

- Opposed Cut, Cap, and Balance

- Supported Obamacare

- Supported gun control measures

- Supported federal public funding for presidential elections

- Supported ineligible voters making campaign contributions

- Supported federal public funding for Planned Parenthood and ACORN

- Supported Cap-and-Trade; Supported Cash-for-Clunkers; supported energy efficiency tax credits; supported maintaining energy efficiency standards for incandescent lightbulbs; supported the non-renewable-resource-management bureaucratization of the Department of Interior; supported giving permission to the EPA to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions; and supported raising income taxes on ethanol producers

- Supported granting $2.46 B in 2006 military and economic aid to Israel

- Supported granting $2.48 B in 2006 military and economic aid to Middle-Eastern countries

- Supported granting $465 M to Mexico and Central America to combat drug trafficking

- Procured $200 M in pork to Wisconsin’s 2nd district over 7 two-year terms

- Supported expansion and financing of hate-crime legislation and prosecution; supported increased punishment of gender-based hate-crimes; and supported expansion of hate-crime legislation to include sexual orientation

- Supported granting $84 million to improve educational opportunities for blacks, Hispanics, and low-income students; supported the criminalization of unequal payment based on race, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability; supported the expansion of unequal-payment criminalization to include sexual orientation; and supported funding for salary-negotiation skills-training for women

- Supported granting $5.8 B for Louisiana (and $2.7 B for other states) for natural disaster relief and recovery; granted $1.5 B to states to support small business; and supported aid to states for Medicaid, teacher employment, and other purposes

- Supported establishing an Office of Congressional Ethics

- Supported the FDA imposing more stringent tobacco labeling and bans on additives

- Supported funding to discourage the use of the word “Islamist” and other words in the intelligence community

- Opposed the appropriation of funds to transfer prisoners out of Guantanamo Bay

- Supported the extension of unemployment benefits at least three times



For more entries on Wisconsin politics, please visit:


How to Fold Two Square Pieces of Card Stock into a Box

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