By Paul Van Eeden of www.paulvaneeden.com

When the crash dummies up on Capitol Hill see crude oil at $130 a barrel, they cry “Manipulation!” and start looking around for someone to blame. The funny thing is; they’re right. Manipulation is causing the oil price to soar…manipulation of the U.S. dollar. As for finding someone to blame, well, taking a stroll over to the Federal Reserve building might be a good place to start.

By increasing the supply of dollars the government devalues every dollar in existence by an equivalent amount. The impact of this inflation is not uniform through the economy or markets but, with time, it does filter through to everything. If we look at the price of oil in US dollars and simultaneously look at the inflation of the dollar we can see that oil has in fact not gone up in value at all - it is the dollar that has declined in value. So the manipulation is clearly evident, but it is not the supply of oil that is being manipulated, but the supply of dollars, to decrease the dollar’s value on the assumption that that would stimulate spending and economic activity. That is the cause of the rise in the oil price.

If we look at the exchange rate of the US dollar against the euro, and the twelve currencies that comprise the euro before its launch, we see that in January 1970 it took 1.151 “euros” to buy a dollar. Today it takes 0.644 euros to buy a dollar. For the sake of simplicity let’s use the euro-dollar exchange rate as a benchmark for the dollar’s devaluation on foreign exchange markets. From this exchange rate we can see that the oil price would have been 44% lower today were it not for the decline of the US dollar exchange rate. That would make the oil price, not $120 a barrel, but only $67 a barrel. In other words, the oil price is approximately 80% higher today than it would have been if the government was not so hell-bent on destroying the dollar.

For those who cannot fathom that it’s as simple as this, or that inflation of the money supply directly affects the value of the dollar, consider these words from Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, in a speech he made on November 21, 2002 before the National Economists Club in Washington, D.C.: “Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services.”

Aside from the fact that the assumption that inflation can create economic activity is entirely false, the idea that OPEC is somehow to blame for the rise in the oil price is absurd. Look at the chart below that shows the oil price in US dollars and the increase in the supply of dollars as measured by M3. We see that the oil price is trying desperately to catch up with the dollar’s inflation. In fact, if anything, oil companies and oil producers have been subsidizing American gasoline consumers for the past 22 years!

The manipulation is clearly in the dollar. By rapidly increasing the money supply and thereby decreasing the value of the dollar, the government is directly and solely responsible for the increase in the oil price.

On another front, a proposal was tabled in the Senate this week to mandate higher cash collateral for energy futures trading. The thought is that since energy speculators must be responsible for driving up the price of oil, the government should increase the cost of such trading, thereby making it harder for energy speculators to engage in futures transactions.

This proposal again demonstrates the complete lack of any fundamental understanding of how a market works, and will have exactly the opposite effect to what its proponents have in mind. Professional speculators are seldom the cause of unjustified price increases or decreases (although they can be). Quite the contrary — if speculators deem prices too low they will buy a commodity thereby preventing prices from falling further. Similarly, if they deem prices too high they will engage in short sales thereby mitigating price spikes. The end result is less volatility, not more volatility.

Now, I am not going to try and argue that speculators as a group are always right, or that they do not sometimes get carried away and drive prices too high or too low — they are still human. But when speculators make such serious mistakes they typically lose their own capital, or the capital entrusted to them, and so the market eliminates them or, at least, “educates” them to make better decisions in the future. However, taken over a longer period of time and across a spectrum of commodities, speculators as a group undoubtedly reduce volatility in prices. In the rare instances when speculators do drive prices far too high, or too low, it is usually the result of unsophisticated “retail” gamblers trying to get rich quick at the end of a market cycle.

In the case of oil, the incredible inflation rate of the US dollar, as measured by M3, is clearly devaluing the currency and causing the oil price, and many other commodity prices, to soar. By making it more expensive and difficult for speculators to participate in the market, legislators will achieve only an increase in price volatility and the loss of market share to foreign exchanges that do not impede speculators from doing their work.

Notwithstanding anything said thus far, the oil price had a good run and so in the short term a pull back in the price of oil should be expected. But this would merely be normal market volatility, as we are currently seeing in the gold price. Over the long term the price of oil is going up. The days of $50 or $55 oil are gone forever.

Blame the manipulators!…the ones with reserved parking spaces at the Federal Reserve.

Dear Reader,

Those were the words that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke used to describe the financial markets (and by extension the economy) these heady spring days when everybody else with a rostrum, it seems, has pronounced the so-called liquidity crisis contained. There’s a great wish for American finance to return to business-as-usual – raking in fantastic fees for innovating new modes of tradable paper, and engineering mergers and buy-outs that generate huge fees plus $100 million kiss-offs for corporate CEOs in the noble struggle to dismantle America’s productive capacity – but apparently events are still out of hand.

The Federal Reserve itself has been instrumental in promoting abnormality by doing everything possible to prevent the work-out of bad debts in the system. Since money is loaned into existence, and loans are debts, the work-out of bad debt suggests the discovery that a lot of money has disappeared – which is exactly the case. The Fed has postponed the work-out by sucking up truckloads of impaired, untradable securities in exchange for loans to giant banks who don’t have enough cash on hand to pay their janitors.

Personally, my theory has been that the specter of peak oil pretty clearly implies the inability of industrial economies to continue producing real wealth in the customary way. In the face of this, either consciously or at a more mystical level, the worker bees in banking recognize that, in order to maintain their villas in the Hamptons, money has to be loaned into existence some other way (than in the service of industrial productivity).

We’ve tried just about everything else. There was the so-called service economy, an attempt to replace manufacturing with hamburger sales. Then there was the information economy, in which work would be replaced with knowing about stuff. Then there was the tech thing, which was about bringing internet companies that existed only on the back of cocktail napkins to the initial public offering stage of capitalization – which allowed a few-hundred-or-so thirty-year-old smoothies to retire to vineyards in the Napa Valley, while hundreds of thousands of retirees lost half the value of their investment portfolios. Then there was the housing boom, which was all about the creation of more suburban sprawl under the theory that houses (or “homes” in the jargon of the realtors) represent an obvious sort of wealth, and therefore that using houses as collateral would allow humongous sums of money to be loaned into existence – along with massive fees for structuring the loans into bundles of bond-like thingies.

This has all failed now because the racket went too far. Every possible candidate for a snookering got snookered. Too much collateral for which there were no takers went into the ground. The insane run-up in house values made a downward price movement inevitable, and as soon as the turnaround happened, it fell into the remorseless algebra of a deflationary death spiral. More importantly, however, this society ran out of tricks for loaning money into existence and instead began to experience the pain of money thought-to-be-in-existence being defaulted into a vapor – and worse, these defaults led to logarithmic chains of money destruction in its places of origin, the investment banks that had created the racket.

The important part of this is that the money is gone. What makes matters truly eerie is that the “bubble” in suburban houses has occurred at exactly the moment in history when the chief enabling resource for suburban life – oil – has entered its scarcity stage.

The logical conclusion of all this is not what the American public wants to hear: we have become a much poorer society and are now faced with the unavoidable task of making major changes in how we live. All the three-card-monte moves at the highest level of finance lately amount to an effort to avoid the unavoidable, acknowledging our losses. Certainly the political fallout of all this will be awesome. But it’s not about politics, really. It’s about the entire society’s inability to form a workable new consensus of reality.

It’s hard to predict how long these institutions at the heart of our economic system can linger in the “far from normal” limbo of pretending that money has not been defaulted out of existence. Since the same process is underway in Great Britain and Spain, places beyond the control of Bernanke, Secretary Paulson, and the Boyz on Wall Street, and since actions and reactions there will affect the destiny of money here, its hard to escape the conclusion that we’re at most months away from the brutal recognition that Wall Street has managed to bankrupt itself (and, by extension, the United States). This is dark heart of the matter of which no one dares speak.

Meantime, on the ground, everyone in the land sees the gas pumps levitate beyond the $4 hash mark, and notes with bugged-out eyes the double-digit price stickers on common supermarket items, and feels the rush of blood from the extremities when some check-out clerk at the Wal-Mart declares that a certain proffered credit card is maxed out, and some strangers in overalls – the neighbors say – managed to hot-wire the GMC Sierra in the driveway, and took it away….

The candidates for president will have a lot to talk about. I wonder if they’ll dare to.

Regards,

James Howard Kunstler

Here’s another example of how those people who call themselves “government” care about your welfare:

Dear Reader,

Spongy degeneration of the brain – that’s what happens when cattle develop mad cow disease. And it appears that some USDA officials have developed a similar spongy brain problem with their strict policy that beef producers are not allowed to test their own animals for mad cow disease.

Now I’ll admit that mad cow disease (more formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy – BSE) is very rare. But if a meat producer wants to test his cattle, what’s the harm? Why would the USDA step in and prevent the testing?

Answer: Money + power = influence. Pure and simple. That’s what drives decisions about our food safety. And you really won’t believe the hilarious tortured logic that government lawyers use to justify this insanity.

——————————————–
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
——————————————–

On December 23, 2003, beef producers were blindsided by the discovery of a case of mad cow disease in the U.S. And Creekstone Farms in Arkansas City, Kansas, was particularly hard hit.

Creekstone is a high-end beef processor. For years, this large, modern operation has produced high quality beef that’s guaranteed free of antibiotics, growth-promoting drugs, and added hormones. By and large, Creekstone beef is a long step up from the typical beef product most consumers purchase at their local grocery.

With the 2003 mad cow scare, Creekstone’s business dropped off sharply, primarily due to loss of foreign sales. But Japanese meat buyers promised to start buying again if Creekstone executives could assure them that all their beef was tested for BSE.

This was a no-brainer. According to a 2004 New York Times report, Creekstone’s foreign sales accounted for $200,000 per day, while the total bill for testing the animals ran about $20,000 per day. So Creekstone started testing each animal, reopening the Japanese market.

Enter the USDA – to the rescue!

In April 2004, the agency ordered Creekstone executives to stop testing their cattle, reasoning that there was no scientific justification for testing the relatively young animals that Creekstone raises. And that’s a valid point. Only older cattle develop BSE. But that detail didn’t matter to Creekstone’s Japanese customers – they wanted guarantees that the animals were disease-free. So…what’s the harm in testing?

And that question brings us to tortured logic item number one: According to the Associated Press, the major meatpacking companies feared that consumer pressure might lead to a demand for every meat producing company to test all their animals.

And wouldn’t that be just too…safe?

I’ll bet the ranch that “consumer pressure” doesn’t mean you and me – it means Japan and other very lucrative foreign markets. And here was Creekstone, raising the bar on their highfalutin no-antibiotic, no-added-hormone beef, just further messing up business for ConAgra and Cargill and other meatpacking giants, dagnabbit!

——————————————–
False assurances, served fresh
——————————————–

So Creekstone execs did what they had to do – they sued the USDA. And they won. And what did USDA officials do? They just couldn’t help themselves – they appealed, further delaying Creekstone’s right to test.

Which brings us to a fine spring Friday afternoon in May 2008, when Creekstone attorneys and Justice Department attorneys appeared before a panel of U.S. Court of Appeals judges in Washington, D.C.

Creekstone lawyers argued that the company is not disobeying any law or regulation by testing their animals. Nice point.

And now for tortured logic item number two: The Justice Department attorney told the panel that Creekstone executives “want to create false assurances.”

Seriously – how do you make a statement like that without laughing? As if more testing creates false assurances, and less testing is somehow reassuring.

You want false assurances? Here’s a Grade A, USDA-inspected false assurance for you: The USDA used to test about one percent of all U.S. cattle for BSE. But earlier this month the Korea Times reported that the testing program has been reduced by 90 percent! And to absolutely assure that these testing levels stay low, the agency also blocks companies that produce BSE testing kits from selling their kits to Creekstone and other meat processors.

Why in the world is the USDA so doggedly committed to allowing as little BSE testing as possible? Connecting two simple dots might answer that question. Dot one: The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (representing about 27,000 ranchers) strongly supports the agency’s Creekstone ban. Dot two: The agriculture lobby is one of the most diverse and powerful players inside the Washington Beltway.

Money + power = influence, and logic takes a holiday.

So, you can imagine just how much they care about your financial well being. Maybe that’s why they turned it over to a private organization called the “Federal Reserve.”

The above article is from HSI. A free newsletter you might want to consider.

Jim

Dear Reader,

A few days ago my wife and I met a law professor from one of our local universities. After several minutes of conversation we learned that she’s involved in a free local tax assistance program. My mind instantly went to our dear friend that’s having the major problems with the IRS.

I began asking this law professor some questions.

The questions I asked involved the law, as its written, in the Code. My concern was and is, what does the law allow the IRS to do when collecting taxes and even more importantly, what does the law require the IRS to do before they can attempt to collect taxes. And most importantly, who does the law apply too?

Her answer should shock you.

She said she didn’t get involved in the law. She doesn’t question whether the IRS is doing its job legally or illegally. She presumes the IRS is complying with the law. She presumes tax laws apply to everyone alive. She relies completely on the RULES. The rules written by the IRS explaining how they interpret the law and how they require you to comply.

Her job is to help people comply with the IRS rules. If necessary, point out to the IRS where they may have made a data entry or mathematical mistake, and request the IRS correct it. She helps people negotiate a reduction in penalties and interest. But, never questions whether those penalties or interest charges are valid, let alone legal.

What really got my goat, she accused me of being a “tax protester.” According to her standards and her world (her words) anyone who questions the law and how the IRS administers it, is a tax protester.

This coming from a law professor. Someone who teaches people how to be an attorney at law. Someone who allegedly teaches “law.”

Later that evening, after giving some thought to our conversation, I looked at my wife and declared: I really feel sorry for the poor schmuck. She’s helping to ruin our world and her world and is to stupid to even know it.

Consider our history.

One night, a couple of hundred years ago, a bunch of men got together, dressed up like Indians and illegally boarded several ships belonging to someone else and threw the cargo into the harbor.

I don’t know if they still teach this in public school history class; but, this was known as the “Boston Tea Party.” It was American colonists protesting the increase in “TAX” on the tea imported into the colonies. This marked the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Our country was founded on and by “tax protesters.” Which puts me in pretty good company.

What little freedom you, me and this law professor still have is the direct result of the bravery these long forgotten “tax protesters” showed many years ago. The massive amount of freedoms we have lost over the years is due to the go along to get along, don’t rock the boat, which way is most profitable, attitude of people like our law professor.

I had another realization.

I have, for a long time, considered attorneys at law just lying, cheating, dishonest, traitors. That may not be entirely true.

This lady is a law professor. She teaches other people how to be attorneys. More than likely, all the other law professors are just like her. Don’t question the law, don’t question their world, they just teach people how to manipulate it for profit.

Which would mean that most attorneys at law aren’t necessarily stupid, they’re just ignorant. They don’t know any better.

Na….

When our country was set up, when the Constitution was written, the judicial branch was designed to be independent. Its sole purpose was to protect you and I from the power grabs of the administrative and congressional branches of government. The authors must have thought lawyers of their day were above the petty need to gratify their egos and a lust for power. That they would put the people and their country before the needs of a few. Two Hundred and Thirty years ago, this might have been true. It certainly isn’t today.

The members of the judicial branch, those alleged guardians of the law, have failed us miserably. And intentionally.

If you’re rights and freedom still have any meaning to you, you’ll have to protect them on your own. Todays attorneys at law don’t get involved in the law, rights, or freedom.

Jim

P.S.  Maybe this is why people who use our information are so successful in defending against law suits.  They are taught to use the law and facts.  Something attorneys at law seem to be unfamiliar with.

Some facts about our banking system:

“The regional Federal Reserve banks are not government agencies. …but are independent, privately owned and locally controlled corporations.”
- Lewis vs. United States, 680 F. 2d 1239 9th Circuit 1982

“The Federal Reserve bank buys government bonds without one penny.”
- Congressman Wright Patman, Congressional Record, Sept 30, 1941

“The modern Banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banks can in fact inflate, mint and unmint the modern ledger-entry currency.”
- Major L .L. B. Angus

“Commercial banks create checkbook money whenever they grant a loan, simply by adding new deposit dollars in accounts on their books in exchange for a borrower’s IOU.”
- Federal reserve Bank of New York, I Bet You Thought, p.19

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
- Frederic Bastiat, The Law

And guess what? We now have it.

Right now, even with being able to create their product out of thin air, the banks are still losing billions. To cover they’re incompetent asses, the Fed is lending them money – at an interest rate of 2%.

Here’s how this con game works.

The banks trade the Fed useless debt, that which shouldn’t have been made in the first place and was created out of thin air, for U.S. Government bonds. Bonds you have to pay for.

Now, with these bonds on their books the banks can now lend more money to you. This is usually done via credit cards.

Bottom line. The Fed borrows your money from the government for nothing. The Fed then turns around and lends it to the banks for 2%. These banks then turn around and lend your money back to you at a rate of 10% - 30%.

I’ll ask again. Just how smart are we?

Dear Reader,

“How are you feeling?” asked my friendly neurosurgeon Dr. Alex Gol as I lay in my hospital bed in the rehab hospital at 3:30 P.M. after a torturous day in therapy. I could not yet utter a single word after sustaining a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) at the age of 19. So I nodded as if to say, “OK.” Dr. Gol then calmly replied, “That’s nice,” and quickly left the room with a smile.

As he was leaving I thought to myself, “Dr. Gol…so nice…so calm…so peaceful.” I tried to reposition myself in my bed as the door closed behind him in order to get more comfortable, but something was not “right” in the hospital hallway as I heard a great commotion coming from there. (True, I could not yet speak; however, nothing was wrong with my hearing and there was plenty of screaming coming from the hall.) I wondered, “What was the problem?”

I soon found out the cause of the chaos: it was sweet, serene and calm Dr. Gol who was causing it.

As soon as he left my room he erupted: “WHO’S THE NURSE TAKING CARE OF MIKE? WHAT’S HE DOING IN BED SO EARLY? HE’S A 19 YEAR OLD VICTIM OF TBI, NOT A 95 YEAR OLD STROKE VICTIM! GET HIM OUT OF THAT BED, AND I DON’T WANT HIM BACK IN BED UNTIL HE GOES TO SLEEP!”

The nurses had never seen Dr. Gol act like that. In fact, they had never heard him raise his voice. They quickly got me out of bed and put me in my wheelchair until 9 P.M.

I was miserable. I wanted to get back into my comfortable bed - well, it was not so comfortable but it was much less uncomfortable than my wheelchair or any kind of chair, for that matter.

As I said, after therapy was over at 3 P.M. I wanted to get straight back in bed; however, throughout the following weeks and months the nurses did not want to face “the wrath of Dr. Gol.” Therefore, after therapy I remained in my wheelchair in my room until I went to sleep. Being in the wheelchair for so long was agonizing!

I hated Dr. Gol after that eventful day when he asked me that seemingly simple question while I was trying to relax in bed. However, years later I loved him as I realized Dr. Gol was only doing what was in my best interest.

When I returned to college after being out for so long, my professors, after learning what had happened to me and realizing that I could no longer read as quickly as before I was hurt, were more than happy to say, “Mike, it’s ok. Just read what you can and we’ll test you on that material.” However, one professor did not say that. Dr. Sheldon Ekland-Olson, a sociology professor, said, “Mike, I understand you have difficulty reading. I’ve had many students with many visual problems. For those students, I refer them to “Recording for the Blind.” They have access to many textbooks on cassettes. Here’s the phone number…”

I “hated” that statement as I wanted to take the “easy way out.” (My feelings of “hate” were very similar to those I had for Dr. Gol on that eventful afternoon in the hospital.) However, I have since learned that the “easy way” is quite often the “wrong way.”

Sometimes everyone needs a “push.” Even I, recently, had to be reminded to push myself as I had gotten “lazy” at the gym. However, a “stranger” reminded me to use my right hand. Even though it was difficult, I thanked him for the reminder.

I have learned that the difficult things in life are often the sweet things in life. One cannot experience “beauty” without experiencing “bitterness.” Remember, “push” yourself to “get through the thorns of the rose bush, to experience the beautiful flower of the rose.”

Every time I think of some difficult thing in life, I close my eyes, see Dr. Gol, and smile.

Michael Segal

Shot in the head during a robbery, Michael Jordan Segal defied all odds by first surviving and then returning to college. He then earned two degrees with honors, married his high school sweetheart, Sharon, and became a father to their daughter Shawn. Mike is a social worker at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston and an author (currently he has two book projects he’s working on: an autobiography and an anthology of his short stories). He also is a popular inspirational speaker sharing his recipe for recovery, happiness, and success. Please visit his site at: www.InspirationByMike.com

Dear Reader,

Life is just full of coincidences. Yesterday afternoon I received a news letter with the following information:

Of course, nobody is surprised that government employment went up by 9,000 employees to 22,385,000, which is up 224,000 over the last year.
In fact, there are now more people on Government Payrolls (22,385,000) than Goods Producing payrolls (21,618,000)!

No sooner had I finished reading this exciting news than I received an email from a dear, sweet, friend I’ve known for more than 30 years. She was letting me know that the Gestapo (IRS) was banging on her door. But not the front door like honest people. No, they’re sneaking in through the back door like common criminals.

This is not a sales letter. It is a beg letter.

I want to do everything I can to help this lady. And I think you ought to do the same. You’ve got everything to gain and absolutely nothing to lose, which I’ll explain later.

This is not just any ordinary lady. This is a special lady. Someone I wish I was more like. She always has a kind word for you. She always has a smile on her face. In the many years I’ve known her, I can’t remember meeting anyone who didn’t like her.

She’s not the kind of person you can just sit back and let a bunch of Nazi assholes destroy. No, you have to jump in and do whatever you can.

Let me go back a few years so you’ll understand what is happening and how un-American this whole disgusting episode is.

A few years ago, about 3, this wonderful lady was forced to retire. The company she had worked for for the past 30+ years was on the verge of bankruptcy. If she didn’t take retirement then, she risked losing her pension completely. Not something anyone wants to happen after 30 years of dedicated service.

By taking early retirement she ended up getting only half of her normal pension. But, it turned out to be a good decision. Since she retired the company has bankrupted and discontinued all future pensions.

Why is this important?

For two reasons.

Generally, when an employee sues his or her employer, the employer will either fire them or suspend them without pay. This tends to discourage people from standing up for their rights. Exactly what the executive morons want.

And just as importantly, they can argue that taking your money and giving it to the IRS is a condition of employment. Its part of their policy. Don’t like it, quit.

But, if you’re already retired, they can’t fire you and they can’t suspend your pension. Their strangle hold over your rights is gone.

And most importantly, we’re not talking about corporate payroll policy. In this instant, the pension funds are in a trust. The corporation and its executives are trustees. They have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the contents of the trust. And this is set as a matter of law.

This is where this lovely lady is. They’ve already taken half of what little pension she was getting. But they haven’t done their fiduciary responsibility. How do we know? Again, two ways.

First, for a couple of the years in question, the IRS is showing the amount of “wages” as exactly twice what she actually earned. They have screwed up and inputed data twice. This is why the law requires them to create a lawful assessment. To prevent these types of screw ups. But, if they ignore the law, they ignore their mistakes.

Second, if the trustees had done their due diligence, they would have caught this. But they didn’t.

But most importantly, if you read the law on tax levies, you find that the only people who are subject to this bullshit law are the 22,385,000 parasites mentioned above.

So why should you care?

How would you like to never have to face an IRS levy, for any reason, the rest of your life?

This lady can make it happen.

If you help.

Fighting a large corporation when they’ve levied your pension and garnished your bank accounts is tough. Not something most people can do alone.

See needs every honest American’s help.

If I had the means I wouldn’t hesitate to foot the bill. But, I don’t. But, I can offer everyone who is willing to help a little incentive. Everyone who donates $20 or more – and more would really be nice – will get 10 days of free access to our website. Log in, look it over, use what you like, no strings attached.

You can make your donation here: DONATE

Dear Reader,

The following article was published yesterday in an actual mainstream newspaper. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go far enough…

Judge’s order stifles a basic right
Wednesday, May 7, 2008 1:54 AM EDT

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And the government is finally running out of patience.

So it’s doing what government always does when it can’t take care of a pesky challenger through rational discussion, negotiation or litigation. It’s taking out its giant government sledgehammer and going for the kill.

And in doing so, it’s not only interfering with Mr. Schulz’s exercise of his right to free speech, but it’s punishing anyone else for simply listening to that free speech. Every citizen should be mad as hell about this unwarranted invasion of our rights.

Mr. Schulz’s latest tilt against the government windmill comes as he defends his right to distribute information on why he believes the federal government has no right to withhold taxes from our paychecks prior to our taxes being due.

His “tax termination package” — which he distributed for free at a variety of events around the country and also posted on his Web site — contains information that he believes businesses could use to legally stop the practice.

He wasn’t advocating a criminal act. He wasn’t telling anyone not to pay their taxes. He was just saying that he believes the government can’t take your money before it’s due, and he encouraged people to press their employers to find the law that says it can.

And guess what? He’s allowed to say that.

The distribution of any information, even false information, is protected by the Constitution.

Otherwise, 90 percent of the people who post on the Internet would be in federal prison right now.

As American citizens, we are free to say whatever stupid, wrong, ill-informed, offensive thing we want. We’re free to encourage others to join us. And the government has to let us.

It’s called Freedom of Speech, and it’s right there in the very first amendment to the Constitution.

But when it comes to speaking out about taxes, the government’s first reaction is to stuff the Constitution in your mouth and wrap your face with duct tape.

And that’s just what the federal government, through U.S. District Court Judge Thomas McAvoy, is trying to do. Judge McAvoy has taken the unusual step of trying to shut off Mr. Schulz’s information campaign by forcing him to provide the names, addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers of anyone who might have gotten this information.

This obtrusive action is designed not only to shut up Schulz, but also to make others think twice about even reading what he has to say.

The last thing any taxpayer in this country wants is to get themselves on the Internal Revenue Service’s radar, much less on its bad side.

If you thought the government could subpoena your personal information just for reading something someone else wrote, how likely would you be to even touch it?

To taxpayers, the message is: “If you listen to this guy, we’ll get you. We know where you live. We’ve got your Social Security number. And when we find out you didn’t really donate $50 to save the whales as you claimed on your last tax return, you’ll think a freight train ran over you.”

To Mr. Schulz, the message is: “Distribute this information, and your followers will be made afraid to listen to you.”

Without an audience, Mr. Schulz is merely another loud mouth in a nice suit that the government can easily ignore.

The government will try to justify its action by saying Mr. Schulz was selling his information, thereby making his packet “commercial speech,” subject to regulation against false claims. But that law is designed to protect consumers from being sold miracle drugs and crappy cars. Even if Mr. Schulz accepted donations for his information packet (which he says he didn’t), then he’s still only selling information.

People are free to ignore or act on that information as they see fit — just like anything you can look up on the Internet.

What we have here is a government that’s going too far to shut down a citizen’s right to exercise his right to free speech.

If they succeed in silencing people who speak out against their government, and succeed in threatening anyone just for listening, then who do you think they’ll go after next?

Local editorials represent the opinion of the Post-Star editorial board, which consists of Publisher Rona Rahlf, Editor Ken Tingley, Editorial Page Editor Mark Mahoney and citizen representative Michael Cruz.

What the editorial fails to point out – “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution;”

In other words, this judge took an oath to do exactly the opposite of what he’s doing. Which means, at the very least, this judge is a lying, cheating, black robbed piece of shit.

Personally, I think he qualifies as a traitor – and should be treated as one.

Dear Reader,

Last summer the Boston Globe ran a four part series on credit card debt.

One of the things they brought up was the ridiculously low price the collection agencies pay for debt. As low as 2.5¢ on the dollar.

But, if you read the ads from the consolidation companies, they only offer to get your debt reduced by up to 50 - 65 percent, max.

Why is it that the banks will discount your account as much as 97.5¢ on the dollar to a corporation but if you want to repay it – they will only discount it 40 – 50¢ on the dollar?

Could it be that this is as low as the consolidation companies are willing to go? After all, they get paid based on what you pay. The more you pay, the more they make.

Maybe these debt consolidation companies aren’t really representing you. Maybe they work for the banks?