Oct 01

Pentagon price negotiator who saved taxpayers billions is abruptly fired

Lobbyists for so-called U.S. “defense” contractors often live lavish lifestyles. Many have mansions in Maryland or Virginia with swimming pools and iron gates.

The billions spent on government defense and intelligence generates powerful forces in Washington.

Now Yahoo News is out with a report that the Pentagon official who saved taxpayers billions of dollars on defense contracts, Shay Assad, was fired shortly after proposing a money-saving regulation in the Federal Register.

On Aug. 24, 2018, the proposed rule was published. The rule would pay many defense contractors 50% of their contracts until the contractors completed their contracts. Then the other 50% would be paid. (The current ratio is 80%/20%.)

Defense companies were outraged. Many pressured their congressmen.

Not long after, Assad was ordered by Pentagon superiors to delete all emails about the proposal (perhaps to immunize superiors from fallout).

“At the end of October, Assad was given an ultimatum: He could be demoted to a position within the Defense Contract Management Agency in Boston starting January 2019, or he would be terminated.”

Oct 01

Hong Kong government fires live rounds at protesters

Governments worldwide equate anti-government protests with violent military assaults. (The same governments will often treat pro-government protests with gentle reactions (or even support); witness the treatment in the U.S. of recent “climate strike” protesters–many of whom were openly allowed to be absent from government schools.)

In many cases, governments will position dozens of armored troops in open areas and then claim that protesters “charged” or “advanced” against them.

Today, on the 70th Anniversary of the brutal communist takeover of China, the Chinese-government affiliated government of Hong Kong opened fire on a protester, claiming the protester was advancing threateningly. See here.

The brave people of Hong Kong–one of the freest places on earth–have been protesting Chinese government encroachments on their liberties throughout the past month.

Sep 28

New blood test can detect 20 types of cancer with great accuracy

Invention and innovation has been a hallmark of free market capitalism for generations. It barely exists in government-controlled environments.

The United States were the world’s flagship of capitalism and invention for two centuries. Americans cured polio, eradicated smallpox, perfected heart, lung and brain surgery and drove tuberculosis to the edge of extinction.

But as government money and regulation have taken over an increasing proportion of the medical industry, rates of growth of medical innovation have slowed. (The U.S. still leads the entire world in medical innovation, however.)

Now a team of mostly private-sector doctors and researchers led by Dr Geoffrey Oxnard of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, part of Harvard Medical School, have developed a simple blood test which can detect some 20 types of cancer with great accuracy. See here.

Sep 27

Venezuela imposing Chinese-style ID cards upon its starving slaves

Reuters is out with a detailed story about the socialist government of Venezuela. The Venezuelan government now requires its starving subjects to obtain ID cards manufactured in China.

The ID cards, known as “fatherland cards,” give Venezuelan subjects access to government payments, voting, pensions, fuel subsidies and even food lines.

The cards are also quickly being linked to a social credit system in which subjects are ranked according to their loyalty to the government.

Those who refuse to accept the cards are demeaned as “right wing.”

Sep 27

Governments increasingly linking ID systems with “social credit” systems

Orwell’s famous book 1984 imagined a future world in which government identifies and monitors the behavior and lifestyle of every subject.

Increasingly, the world’s governments are implementing the very controls foreseen by Orwell.

The Chinese government, for example, is now implementing technology that will link facial recognition surveillance with the government’s “social credit” systems.

The social credit system seeks to identify and rank every person according to their loyalty to the state. Persons who obey and comply with every government command have the highest social credit, while those who defy or resist the state are ranked at the bottom.

The ranking system brings privileges for those who are considered most loyal to the government; while those considered less loyal find themselves last in line for housing, transportation and education.

Sep 27

Half of Californians hope to leave the socialist state

High taxes. Regulations imposed on everything. Cops everywhere. Millionaire government employees with golden pensions.

Now about half of California’s voters hope to leave the state.
1 in 5 Californians pay more than 50% of their income for housing. (Real estate is something of a rare tax haven in California, after voters approved Proposition 13 in 1978; consequently, demand for real estate has increased housing prices statewide.)

Sep 26

Democrats have almost never trusted media more; Republicans have almost never trusted media less

Major media institutions such as the New York Times, ABC, CBS and NBC have pushed a steady stream of pro-government and pro-socialist messaging in recent years. (And numerous investigations have found that these media institutions are often secretly government-funded.)

Now a shocking new Gallup poll shows that just 13% of Americans say they trust the media “a great deal,” and 28% “a fair amount.” In 1976, 72% of Americans said they trusted the media either a great deal or a fair amount.

Today, 28% say they have no trust at all in the media.

Among the most interesting findings of the poll is the growing split between people who identify as Republicans and those who identify as Democrats.

Just 15% of Republicans have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media, while an astounding 69% of Democrats trust the media. See here.

Sep 24

Please Join Us in Salt Lake City for the Sentencing of Rick Koerber on October 15

2:00 PM at the Federal Courthouse, downtown SLC

Rick Koerber, “the Free Capitalist,” was a keynote speaker at Lysander Spooner University’s “The Struggle for Freedom” symposium in downtown Las Vegas on December 16, 2017.

Rick gave a passionate lecture on criminal justice and government overreach. Rick had himself been facing multi-count criminal indictments for some ten years.

In spite of his own legal troubles, Rick was an invaluable member of the Bundy defense team (along with LSU founder Roger Roots and many others) who helped hand the U.S. Justice Department its greatest defeat in history. Between 2014 and 2018 the DOJ spent some quarter of a billion dollars trying to convict and imprison the Bundys and dozens of other courageous Americans for their constitutional stands.

Rick and Roger spent many hundreds of hours doing legal research and preparing memos and briefs to support the defendants. As of this date, not a single Bundy has been convicted of a single count, and only Todd Engel, Greg Burleson and Jerry Delemus remain incarcerated—with Engel and Burleson currently appealling.)

It was Rick Koerber who stayed up all night on the evening of October 25, 2016 drafting a motion to remove Juror #11 in the first Oregon Bundy trial after another juror slipped a note to the judge indicating that Juror #11 was biased. The motion was granted the following morning and an alternate juror helped secure acquittals for all defendants.

That verdict shocked the world.

Soon thereafter, federal prosecutors re-launched various tax and bank fraud allegations against Rick. The claims related to Rick’s decade-old real estate investment business in which Rick and other investors had invested in Utah’s burgeoning real estate market. The market collapsed in 2008 leaving Rick and others with losses. Rick was also a prominent libertarian radio host and his political enemies saw an opportunity to accuse Rick of wrongdoing.

By 2016, the charges against Rick had been effectively dismissed. But when federal prosecutors saw Rick working as a paralegal for the Bundy defense team in Oregon, prosecutors re-filed the same allegations. After a mistrial in 2017, Rick was finally convicted by a jury in July 2018. (Prosecutors had succeeded in getting the removal of Rick’s defense attorney Marcus Mumford.)

More recently, a federal judge ordered Rick detained until sentencing on ridiculously contrived grounds. Some observers see the move as a sign that the judge intends to sentence Rick to decades behind bars.

Please join us in support of Rick Koerber at the Salt Lake City federal courthouse on Tuesday October 15.

Sep 24

For centuries the spousal privilege kept government from compelling husbands or wives to testify against their spouses. The New Mexico Supreme Court just abolished this protection.

By Roger Roots, founder, Lysander Spooner University

The law means nothing; the State’s keys must unlock all doors.

Using arguments from the feminist movement, the New Mexico Supreme Court summarily struck down the spouse privilege on August 30, 2019 in a case entitled State v. Gutierrez. The Court did so without consultation with its own rule-making committees, and without much warning to the legal community, the parties or even the attorneys in the case. (The Court, mindful that its abrupt rewrite of New Mexico’s evidence code during a pending case violates long-settled principles of due process, declared that the ruling was “prospective”—for future purposes only—and did not apply to Gutierrez (whose conviction and life sentence for murder were upheld).)

The spousal privilege—like the attorney/client privilege, the priest/penitent privilege and the doctor/patient privilege—protects people’s most intimate and personal communications from the otherwise all-seeing eye of the state. Such common law evidentiary exclusions were established eons ago—when courts in the English common law system enshrined certain social institutions as having greater value than the value of governments knowing everything about everyone.

For more than three centuries, the spousal privilege was recognized in all English common law jurisdictions. Thus, courts in New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the United States all forbade prosecutors (and in many circumstances, civil-case opponents) from subpoenaing the husband or wife of a defendant and forcing him or her to be a witness against his or her spouse.

The spousal privilege existed as a rule of evidence since at least 1628, when Lord Coke wrote that a husband and wife are two souls in one flesh, “and it might be a cause of implacable discord and dissention betweene the husband and the wife, and a meanse of great inconvenience.” Thus the privilege pre-dates the American Constitution by at least a century and a half. As the law became increasingly published and codified, every Anglo-American jurisdiction added the privilege to its own statutes and rules of evidence (as did New Mexico).

Gradually, however, the privilege has been whittled away by court decisions. At common law, the husband or wife of a party in a case was not competent to give evidence for or against his or her spouse (so could not do so even voluntarily)—in either criminal or civil cases. But by the twentieth century, many courts allowed spouses to voluntarily testify against their spouses in civil cases. And increasingly, spouses could be compelled by courts to do so in proceedings actually brought by the other spouse, over matters of adultery or marital disputes.
In criminal cases, until recent decades, the common law long held that husbands or wives were not competent to give evidence against their spouses (i.e. for the prosecution), subject to the one exception that a spouse could give such evidence where his or her other half was accused of personal violence against him or her.

The long legacy of the spousal privilege was summarily brushed aside by New Mexico’s Chief Justice Judith Nakamura. Writing for the majority in Gutierrez, the Chief Justice cited feminist scholars who attacked the rule’s longevity as a “source of scorn rather than admiration” and derided these “sentimental relics” as patently incompatible with the modern and “changed social context” of present society.

Despite drastic changes in law and society since Blackstone’s day, “the spousal communication privilege perpetuates the role of male domination in the marriage because a husband usually invokes the privilege to prevent his wife’s disclosure of confidential communications, thereby benefitting men more often than women.” … “[I]n practice, marital privileges are more likely to protect male confidences than female confidences” and [there is] evidence that indicates that ninety percent of spousal privilege cases involve wives testifying against husbands ….
Marital privacy, according to Chief Justice Nakamura, operates as a “mask for inequality.” “The privacy and humanistic justifications [for the rule], when closely examined, seem little more than soaring rhetoric and legally irrelevant sentimentality.” wrote Chief Justice Nakamura.

Thus, because men may be more likely than women to benefit from marital privacy, the New Mexico Supreme Court abolished a rule of evidence which had protected families from government intrusion for more than 350 years. Today, in New Mexico, husbands and wives lay naked—equally—before the state.

Sep 20

Michigan government makes it harder for hospitals to offer new cancer treatments

Michigan’s government, like governments elsewhere, requires new clinics and hospitals to get government permission before opening or offering new treatments. The State’s “Certificate of Need” Commission determines if a new startup clinic might bring unfair competition to preexisting, entrenched hospitals. (And people wonder why health care costs are so high!)

On Thursday, Michigan’s government commission voted to bar new health care providers from offering new immunotherapy cancer treatments unless the providers go through an elaborate maze of procedures. Such treatments attempt to program the body’s own immune system to attack and kill cancer cells.

The government board imposed a rule requiring hospitals to go through unnecessary third-party accreditation processes before being able to offer CAR T-cell therapies. The rule “effectively means only large, wealthy, hospital-based cancer centers will be able to offer the treatments.” See here.