an unconstitutional presidency

A crisis looms; stormclouds are massing. Unless he can sell off his last holdings and put them all into a blind trust, the president-elect will on 20 January 2017, his inauguration day, violate the Constitution. Should he on that day run foul of the emoluments clause, he will have to be impeached immediately. It won’t make much difference, however, if his violations persist. America long ago abandoned the principles upon which it was founded: there is no clause that calls for the Ynki to act as the world’s policeman, doling out punishment or refraining from applying it as he sees fit; nowhere in the Constitution are provisions for a military industrial complex; nowhere does this nation’s supposedly most sacred text propose that America must be constantly at war for its economy to thrive; nowhere does our founding document indicate that non-human corporations should enjoy the same rights as flesh-and-blood people do, or that the wealth created by society as a whole should be given to a few affluent capitalists. We citizens of America have allowed these aberrations to stand; we citizens of America have allowed these violations to continue. As Americans, each and every one of us is responsible for the crimes and injustices our weapons of war visit upon the downtrodden peoples of this world - be they bombs dropped by us or ones loosed by a tyrannical client-regime.

As discussed in an earlier post, the American government now treats its citizens similarly to how we were treated by the British monarchy before declaring our independence. The rule of law applies to some of us, not all of us equally; armed agents of the state kill us without due process or punishment; taxes are imposed upon us without our consent; our seas lie plundered of their bounty, poisoned by industrial run-off; our coasts and forests sit ravaged, their diversity raped for short-term gain. The incoming president will violate the Constitution as soon as he is sworn in, and few of us will give a shit about it. Welcome to America - land of the greedy, home of the enslaved.

JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

freedom to choose

Some time ago, NPR aired a debate about whether or not Pennsylvania should sell off the liquor stores it owns and operates. During this debate, a woman advocated for the rights of consumers to have access to the best possible selection of booze, saying that choice is freedom and that freedom is the American way. (The author is paraphrasing here). Since 1971, the federal government of the United States of America has waged war on the right of every person under its jurisdiction to choose for himself which drugs to introduce to his body; since passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1971 (CSA), Liberty has been under constant and incessant attack from local, state, and federal government, the very agents who should have been protecting her, all along.

When the state makes some drugs illegal (weed, coke) while profiting from and promoting the sale of other drugs (alcohol, nicotine), it chooses sides, sending millions of non-violent persons to jail for wanting to do with their bodies as they saw best fit. The XIV amendment to the Constitution was designed to protect against just such governmental overreach, stating: “[no] State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law[.]” If a person should demonstrate an inability to handle certain drugs without posing a threat to himself or others, he should be banned from consuming those drugs. Individuals, however, who have not been banned by a judge from smoking weed should feel free to do so as often as they wish; no aspect of the Constitution gives any branch of our government the right to infringe upon the common freedom of all individuals living in America by passing a law as destructive to our inalienable and immutable rights as is the tyrannical Controlled Substances Act of 1971.

In the 42 years since adoption of the CSA, the business of punishing and incarcerating non-violent Americans for consuming and possessing their drugs of choice has become big business. Lawyers, judges, parole and police officers, wardens, jail builders, and drug warlords all continue to profit from the ban on certain drugs. We the People must make the right to choose inalienable once more and strike down the prohibitions currently in place; then, the individuals just mentioned would have to go out and get jobs of actual usefulness instead of being allowed to game a system that punishes freedom-loving Americans for pursuing their Happiness as they see best fit. A person's body is the only piece of property he cannot live without; he may do with it as he pleases so long as he is not infringing demonstrably upon the right of any other person to life, liberty, or property. To lock someone up for changing his brain chemistry by smoking weed is no different from locking him up for changing his brain chemistry by eating a large bowl of sugary breakfast cereal. Let us realign ourselves with this nation's founding principles and legalize the freedom to choose by ending the madness that has brutalized Liberty every day for the past 15,330 days. Fight tyranny; act freely; defend Liberty. Mahalo. 

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

from Common Sense, by Thomas Paine

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”