Archive for July 29th, 2010

Pioneers of American Freedom

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

“Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and Radical Thought in America is a book by the German anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker about the history of liberal, libertarian, and anarchist thought in the United States.”

“Rudolf Rocker, who had been strongly influenced by Benjamin Tucker, started work on Pioneers of American Freedom during World War II. Professor Arthur E. Briggs started translating the book into English from Rocker’s native German in 1941. He took over for Rocker’s previous English translator Ray E. Chase as he had died. The book was published with the help of the Rocker Publishing Committee in 1949.”

“The first part of the book consists of a series of essays on the American liberal thinkers Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Abraham Lincoln. Rocker emphasizes the importance these men assign to individualism, freedom, and the subordination of the state to the welfare of the individual. This, Rocker claims, is a great similarity between anarchist and liberal thought.”

Complete introduction plus link to an online text of this classic book @http://www.againstallauthority.org/?p=19

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A Police State You’d Better Believe In

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

“…when should a patriot oppose his government? One answer, which we may hope is obvious, is when his government is waging war on liberty. The trick, of course, is to recognize it as such, since the government will always claim to be defending liberty when waging war against it.”

“Thus it is that in the “war on terrorism” our government is building, brick by brick, a new police state, called “Security.” Consider, for example, this item from The Washington Post:

    The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

    The administration wants to add just four words — ‘electronic communication transactional records’ — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the ‘content’ of e-mail or other Internet communication.

    But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

“There now. Don’t you feel safer and more secure already? Or do you have that creepy feeling that somebody is looking over your shoulder?”

Full warning against the new police state by Jack Kenny @ http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/opinion/959-jack-kenny/4167-a-police-state-youd-better-believe-in

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