madmex2000 Report This Comment Date: December 20, 2007 02:30PM
Lakota Indians Withdraw Treaties Signed With U.S. 150 Years Ago
Thursday, December 20, 2007
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WASHINGTON — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United
States.
"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those
who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join
us,'' long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means said.
A delegation of Lakota leaders has delivered a message to the State Department,
and said they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the
federal government of the U.S., some of them more than 150 years old.
The group also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan
embassies, and would continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas
in the coming weeks and months.
Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North
Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.
The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living
there would be tax-free - provided residents renounce their U.S. citizenship, Mr
Means said.
The treaties signed with the U.S. were merely "worthless words on worthless
paper," the Lakota freedom activists said.
Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.
"This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article
six of the constitution,'' which states that treaties are the supreme law of the
land, he said.
"It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and
put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980.
We are legally within our rights to be free and independent,'' said Means.
The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a
declaration of continuing independence — an overt play on the title of the
United States' Declaration of Independence from England.
Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because "it takes critical mass
to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a
row,'' Means said.
One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a
non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples — despite
opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.
"We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by.
They continue to take our land, our water, our children,'' Phyllis Young, who
helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in
Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.
The U.S. "annexation'' of native American land has resulted in once proud
tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere "facsimiles of white people,'' said
Means.
Oppression at the hands of the U.S. government has taken its toll on the Lakota,
whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies - less than 44 years - in
the world.
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Today is my birthday .....nice gift.
Anonymous Report This Comment Date: December 21, 2007 05:51AM
It is refreshing to see that there are others that know
whats going
on..........
Four Types of Government Operatives: Bullies,
Muggers, Sneak Thieves, and Con Men
---
by Robert Higgs ---
Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the
animals themselves any richer – except, of course, for the pigs and the
dogs.
~ George Orwell, Animal Farm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything
you've always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it
is out to get you.
Sometimes government functionaries and their private-sector supporters want
simply to bully you, to dictate what you must do and what you must not do,
regardless of whether anybody benefits from your compliance with these
senseless, malicious directives. The drug laws are the best current example,
among many others, of the government as bully. Our rulers presently enforce a
host of laws that combine the worst aspects of puritanical priggishness and the
invasive, pseudo-scientific, therapeutic state. They tolerate our pursuit of
happiness only so long as we pursue it exclusively in officially approved ways:
gin, yes; weed, no.
Notwithstanding the great delight that our rulers take in tormenting us with
their absurdly inconsistent nanny-state commands, they generally have bigger
fish to fry. Above all, the government and its special-interest backers want to
take our money. If these people ran a store, they might aptly call it Robberies
R Us. Their credo is simple and brazen: "you have money, and we want
it."
Unlike the sincere street criminal, however, the robber in official guise rarely
puts his proposition to you in the blunt form of "your money or your
life," however much he intends to relate to you on precisely such terms.
(If you doubt my characterization of these intentions, test what happens if you
steadfastly resist at every step as the brigands escalate their threats: first
ordering you to pay, then billing you for unpaid balances plus penalties and
interest, sending you a summons, and ultimately beating you into submission or
killing you for resisting arrest. Your sustained, open resistance always ends in
the state's use of violence against you, in either your forcible imprisonment or
your removal from the land of the living, after which your memory will be
defamed by your designation as a criminal – governments never settle for mere
brutality, but always supplement it with unabashed presumptuousness.)
When I say "rarely," I do not mean that the authorities never carry
out their plunder blatantly. Throughout the land, for example, criminal courts,
acting as de facto muggers, strip people of great sums of money in the aggregate
by fining them for conduct that ought never to have been criminalized in the
first place – drug-law violations, prostitution, gambling, antitrust-law
violations, traffic infractions, reporting violations, doing business without a
license, and innumerable other victimless "crimes." The predatory
judges and their police henchmen care no more about justice than I care to live
on a diet of pig pancreas and boiled dandelions. They are simply taking people's
money because it's there to be taken with minimal effort. In this manifestation,
government amounts to a gigantic speed trap.
The more common way for government officials to rob you, however, involves their
seizure of so-called taxes, which take countless forms, all of which are
purported to be collected in order to finance – mirabile dictu – benefits
for you. Such a deal! You'd have to be a real ingrate to complain about the
government's snatching your money for the express purpose of making your world a
better place.
Sometimes the "political exchange" into which you are hauled kicking
and screaming rests on such a ludicrous foundation, however, that honesty
compels us to classify it, too, as a mugging. I have in mind such
compassionately conservative policies as stripping taxpayers of hundreds of
billions of dollars and handing the money over, for the most part, to rich
people engaged in large-scale agribusiness and, sometimes, to landowners who
don't even bother to represent themselves as farmers. The apologies that the
agribusiness whores in Congress make for this daylight robbery are so patently
stupid and immoral that the whole shameless affair resembles nothing so much as
the schoolyard bully's grabbing the little kids' lunch money and then taunting
them aggressively, "If you don't like it, why don't you do something about
it?" Every five years, when the farm-subsidy law expires and a new one is
enacted, a few members of Congress pose as reformers of this piracy, but truly
serious reforms never occur, and even the minor ones that come along from time
to time prove unavailing, as the farm-booty interests invariably suck up
"emergency relief" payments from the public treasury later on to make
up for any shortfalls from the main subsidy programs.
Government sneak thieves, in contrast, fear that they may occupy more vulnerable
positions than the agribusiness gang and similarly impudent special-interest
groups cum legislators, so they dare not taunt the little kids so flagrantly.
Instead, they specialize in legislative riders, budgetary add-ons and earmarks,
logrolling, omnibus "Christmas tree" bills, and other gimmicks
designed to conceal the size, the beneficiaries, and sometimes even the
existence of their theft. At the end of the day, the taxpayers find there's
nothing left in the till, but they have little or no idea where all of their
money went. Finding out by reading an appropriations act is next to impossible,
inasmuch as these statutes are almost incomprehensible to everyone but the
legislative insiders and their staff members who devise them and write them down
in a combination of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.
For example, for many years, a single congressman from northeastern Pennsylvania
– first Dan Flood and then Joe McDade – substantially enriched the
anthracite coal interests of that region by inserting a brief, one-paragraph
limitation rider in the annual appropriations act for the Department of Defense.
The upshot of this obscure provision was that Pennsylvania anthracite was
transported to Germany to provide heating fuel for U.S. military bases that
could have been heated more cheaply by using local resources. This
coals-to-Newcastle shenanigan was a classic sneak-thief gambit, a thing of
legislative beauty, but every year's budget contains thousands of schemes that
operate with similar effect, if not in an equally audacious manner.
Unlike the government sneak thieves, the government con men openly advertise –
indeed, expect to receive great credit for – certain uses of the taxpayers'
money that are represented as bringing great benefits to the general public or a
substantial segment of it. Surely the best example of the con man's art is
so-called national defense, a bottomless pit into which the government now
dumps, in various forms (many of them not officially classified as
"defense"
, approximately a trillion dollars of the
taxpayers' money each year. The government stoutly maintains, of course, that
all ordinary Americans are constantly in grave danger of attack by foreigners
– nowadays, by Islamic terrorists, in particular – and that these voracious
wolves can be kept from the door only by the maintenance and active deployment
of large armed forces equipped with ultra-sophisticated (and correspondingly
expensive) equipment and stationed at bases in more than a hundred countries and
on ships at sea around the globe.
Without dismissing the alleged dangers entirely, a sensible person quickly
appreciates that the threat is slight – just do the math, using reasonable
probability coefficients – whereas the cost of (purportedly) dealing with it
is colossal. In short, as General Smedley Butler informed us more than seventy
years ago, the modern military establishment, along with most of its blessed
wars, is for the most part nothing but a racket. Worse, because of the way it
engages and co-opts powerful elements of the private sector, it gives rise to a
costly and dangerous form of military-economic fascism. Lately, the classic
military-industrial-congressional complex has been supplemented by an even more
menacing (to our liberties) security-industrial-congressional complex, whose aim
is to enrich its participants by equipping the government for more effectively
spying on us and invading our privacy in ways great and small.
Worst of all, despite everything that is claimed for the military's protective
powers, its operation and deployment overseas leave us ordinary Americans facing
greater, not lesser, risk than we would otherwise face, because of the many
enemies it cultivates who would have left us alone, if the U.S. military had
only left them alone. (Yes, Virginia, they are over here because we're over
there.) The president routinely declares that the hugely increased expenditures
and overseas deployments for military purposes since 2001 have reduced the
threat of terrorism, but, in fact, terrorist incidents and deaths have
increased, not decreased. Although privileged elements of the political class
gain from militarism and neo-imperialist wars, the rest of us invariably lose
economic well-being, real security, and all too often life itself. In 2004,
people who said that security against terrorism was their top concern voted
disproportionately, by an almost 7-to-1 margin, for George W. Bush. They had
been conned.
Although the mugger, the sneak thief, and the con man are not the only types of
government operatives, they make up a large proportion of the leading figures in
government today. The lower ranks, especially in the various police agencies,
have a disproportionate share of the bullies. No attempt to understand
government can succeed without a clear understanding of these ideal types and
each one's characteristic modus operandi. With this understanding firmly in
mind, you will remain permanently immune to the infectious swindle, "I'm
from the government, and I'm here to help." The truth, of course, is the
exact opposite: I say again, the government – this vile assemblage of bullies,
muggers, sneak thieves, and con men – is not really on your side; indeed, it
is out to get you.
December 20, 2007
[
www.lewrockwell.com]
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