Steve Scauzillo, Editor:
A question worth
asking before we entangle ourselves in a perpetual war against terrorism is, why doesn't
the U.S. government stop arming and training foreign terrorists and the dictators who
support them?
Adopting the
any-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend strategy, from the end of World War II through the
early 1990s, the U.S. government distributed more than $950 billion in foreign or military
aid to more than 100 nations, according to the Cato Institute.
Earlier this year,
Secretary of State Colin Powell gave $43 million to Afghanistan in exchange for declaring
that growing opium is "against the will of
God." That was just part of
$125 million in foreign aid the U.S. gave the Taliban this year, which makes The U.S. the
biggest sponsor of that virulently pro-terrorist regime.
The solution should
be obvious: A non-interventionist foreign policy, which will keep America safer by
reducing the number of nations and terrorist organizations with reason to hate us. Such a policy would also deprive potential enemies
of U.S. guns, money, and military training -- which they could later use to kill
Americans.
Consider the
admonishment of George
Washington's Farewell Address,
September
17, 1796:
"It
is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign
world... As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are
particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent Patriot…There can be no greater error than to
expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which
experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard..."
Waving the
flag has come to mean something other than what the Framers intended. Simply
translated, the stars and stripes now represent the architecture of the American Empire. ‘The New World Order’ as invoked by
their fellow travelers of the Council on Foreign
Relations, actually means the United Nations.
The voting citizen of the American
Republic must elect citizen-legislators that will no longer impose its will on any
portion of the foreign world. The citizen must resolve to return to the
peaceful foreign policy that America followed for its first century – until President
McKinley took the country into the Spanish-American War and down the road to empire.
Inexplicably,
Bojinka’ — ‘loud bang’
— the code name bin Laden operatives had given to an audacious plan to hijack 11 U.S.
airliners simultaneously and fly them into various targets in the U.S. was known to the
FBI and other federal agencies as early as 1995. With
the pretense of internal security vanquished by terrorists of our own making, we
deserve an apology from the U.S. Government for its arrogance, complicity and ineptitude as an accessory for this attack.
In the ashen debris on the streets of lower
Manhattan, lies the demopublican foreign policy of the American Empire. As hideous as this crime against our civilization
is, Americans should cleanse the apparatchiks of our own Foreign Policy Establishment
before they go
policing the Ottoman empire, with their legions of Islamic infidels nostalgic for the 14th
century.
The solution is a third party committed to the
virtue of the Constitution. Fortunately, the Libertarian Party already exists and is
well organized to restore our previously trampled freedoms and sovereignty. Get off
the sofa and help us. Time is running out...
Leland Thomas Faegre
Libertarian Candidate, 57th
Assembly District
http://www.ontopofacloud.com
"I personally think that he should refuse to stand down and I think it would be a
lesson to all the students to watch this unfold,
" said Lynn McCown, a history teacher at Hollencrest Middle
School.
It is a lesson for all parents with children in government schools, that an
entrusted employee of the state should encourage an elected officer to arrogantly
flaunt the law, however absurd.
With two counts of
felony perjury by declaration and two counts of filing a false declaration of candidacy brought by the District Attorney's Office, I find it appalling that tax dollars should have to be used to
prosecute such a ridiculous statute applicable to such a superfluous entity.
This neo-controversy can
be resolved in the same way that all education-related issues should be settled; in a
private sector marketplace administered by parental-purse accountability. Unless and until we can invest the fruits of our labor to make
our own educational choices, fungible educational money will be wasted on status-quo
bureaucracy.
In the words of Mark Twain, "In the first place
God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards."
Leland Thomas
Faegre
Libertarian Candidate,
57th Assembly District
http://www.ontopofacloud.com
D.A.R.E.
to deliver facts
Published Friday,
April, 13, 2001, San Gabriel Valley Tribune
Now that the good citizens of West Covina
have collectively ousted councilman Richard Melendez, is it not also the time to assist
his rehabilitation back to a worthwhile vocational purpose?
Although he never publicly acknowledged my Libertarian candidacy for the same 29th State
Senate seat that he also sought, Richard Melendez in his televised campaign commercials
claimed that candidate Assemblyman Bob Margett had voted against a ban on so-called cop
killer bullets, which have been illegal for over a decade. With file footage from the
North Hollywood shootout in the background, the televised ad also led viewers to believe
that Melendez was a participant in the famous event.
But Melendez is actually an officer of the D.A.R.E. program, an
unconstitutional $600 million-a-year program that may actually invite
experimentation.
Dr. Joel Brown of Berkeley-based Educational Research Consultants conducted the most
extensive evaluations of drug education programs to date. Brown's conclusions eloquently
articulated for him by the teens he interviewed were so disturbing that in 1995 the
California Department of Education, which funded Brown's study, buried the results. (The
findings only became public in March 1997, when they were published in the Educational
Evaluation and Policy Analysis journal.)
Research shows that kids who are taught that pot is as bad as heroin are more likely to
experiment with heroin if they tried marijuana and experienced few consequences. Those
kids suspect that if they were lied to about pot, then they were probably lied to about
hard drugs as well.
Studies conducted for the General Accounting Office, the Justice Department and the
California Department of Education received some coverage by the media. But the truth
about D.A.R.E. has been virtually ignored or dismissed by the
Democratic and Republican parties.
The solution? According to Dear Abby, "Just as bootleggers were forced out of
business in 1933 when prohibition was repealed, making the sale of liquor legal (thus
eliminating racketeering) the legalization of drugs would put drug dealers out of
business. An added plus: There would be far less crowding in our prisons due to
drug-related crimes. It's something to consider."
Having lost in his bid for the California Senate, Melendez loses his City Council seat and
as Americans discover that D.A.R.E. is a disastrous, ineffective
and expensive boondoggle, Richard Melendez may actually find himself in the unemployment
line. Maybe he will have to put on a bulletproof vest and fight real crime after all.
Leland Faegre
West Covina
It Takes One to Know One
Published
September 7, 2000, San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News
Gerald M. Plessner ought to know what a Country
Club Republican is; he "wrote the book" (Commentary, "Country Club
Republicans back in control of GOP," Aug. 4).
What caught my eye in his political sophistry was
his confusion about what he called, "traditional Republican ideals,"
citing the so-called "Gingrich revolution," whose [bloodthirsty]
"reign of terror" could not even disembowel the National Endowment for the Arts.
Plessner goes on to delirium as he describes how "Rush
Limbaugh and other talk show cheerleaders joined with the Pat Robertson campaign to
reshape the party into a radically conservative one, more aligned with libertarian
philosophy than with traditional Republican ideals."
Putting aside the hilarity of the "radical
conservative" hyperbole, The Contract with America actually preserved the
federal government's role in making, administering and funding the vast and varied array
of unconstitutional post-New Deal and Great Society domestic policies and programs.
The Libertarian Party was founded precisely
because the two modern parties have ignored the Constitution where, with the exception of
the judiciary and defense, no mention of a federal role for anything can be found.
The most successful third party in the 20th
century was the Socialist Party. While never winning any significant elections, their
small but growing vote totals were a threat to the Democrats. Thus the Democrats, and then
later the Republicans, adopted piecemeal every major tenet of the 1916 Socialist Party
platform.
In "The Encyclopedia of Fund Raising: Golf
Tournament Management Manual," by Gerald M. Plessner, the Abstract includes all
the information required to run a profitable golf tournament including: the care and
handling of celebrities, special equipment, post-tournament parties, committee
organization, scheduling.
Gerald M. Plessner must know that "Country
Club Republicans" have co-opted the socialist agenda from across the aisle, and
that traditional Republican ideals are not found on the links. Plessner is either a
political neophyte or an accomplice to the transformation of the American Republic to an
empire.
Leland Faegre
Libertarian Candidate
29th State Senate District
Karl Marx, Public Schools and the
Profligacy of Government Education
Published
March 18, 2000--San Gabriel Valley Tribune
"Free education for
all children in public schools."
---Communist Manifesto, published 1848
Establishment bellows to the contrary, as one can see by
the aforementioned quotation, government education is not uniquely American. More
importantly, it is the most historically efficient method of indoctrinating children; and
the educational method of choice for despots Hitler, Stalin and Mao who,
like contemporary educrats, were not school choice advocates.
Back in 1983, members of the Reagan-era National
Commission on Excellence in Education wrote that, "if an unfriendly foreign power
had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,
we might have viewed it as an act of war."
Little has changed since the commission’s report, A
Nation at Risk, was released. Despite a decade and a half of rhetoric about basics,
merit pay and standards, and a one-third increase in the amount spent on each
pupil in public school, it is by now familiar news that American high school seniors rank
19th out of 21 countries in math and science scores. Perhaps most alarming, Professor John
Lott of the University of Pennsylvania has presented evidence that across national
boundaries, increased expenditures on public schooling "are positively correlated
with levels of totalitarianism."
Here in West Covina, a $40 million General Obligation Bond
known as Measure G will raise property taxes ostensibly to renovate bathrooms, upgrade
classroom interiors and upgrade campus exteriors. Money is fungible -- money not
spent in one place can be spent elsewhere. We already pay enough for all the items in the
bond proposal. The problem is, the money is spent primarily on salaries for the education
establishment that far exceed what the marketplace would tolerate. Approximately $.50
cents of every education dollar actually gets into the classroom.
This bond measure is another attempt to free up EXISTING
funds so that they can be spent on salaries, perks, bureaucracy, busing, Goals 2000,
"prevailing wage" high construction costs and other unnecessary or even harmful
expenditures. Spending on K-12 education is up over 35% in four years, with per student
spending up almost 23%. And the figure does NOT include private donations.
Total public funding for education exceeds average private
school costs by over 50%. If we ever get serious about improving education and
dramatically cutting the cost, we'll need to adopt a voucher program, as a first step
towards private choice in education.
Here's what the profligate education establishment
doesn’t want you to know. Government education is AWASH in money! The latest state
budget included over a $3 BILLION increase for K-12 education, one of several major
increases planned. When lottery money is included, next year we'll spend over $7,500 per
student, far more than most private schools cost. In addition, a gigantic $9.2 BILLION
state education bond measure was passed in the last general election. Revenue is POURING
into education.
And now with Proposition 26, the education monopolists
seek to eliminate the 2/3-majority requirement for bond approval. For over a century, the
2/3-majority requirement for passing bonds has been in effect, and Californians have
managed to house and educate their students at relatively high levels.
By making it so easy to ramrod a bond through, taxes for
property owners would soar. The bond proponents are callously silent regarding the effect
that increased property taxes could have on struggling families, the elderly on fixed
incomes and those families who are paying twice for education because they
have already given up on the education monopolists. Is it at all fair, that someone
without children pay for the children of someone else?
It is entirely appropriate to place a 2/3-majority
requirement to levy a 25-year tax on property. GOVERNMENT BONDS, unlike private bonds,
cost far in excess of what is being stated on the ballot. In the private sector, FULL
DISCLOSURE of total costs over the life of the bond is required by law.
But in the public sector, politicians lie, and the media
ignores the full cost of proposed bond issues, including the fact that when bonds are used
for construction of public facilities, the further corruption of unionized prevailing wage
enters into the inefficiency (though not the bond principal) of a government approach to
solving a public need.
Perhaps most importantly, the government
education bureaucracy is prohibited from appropriating taxpayer money for the advocacy of
such a bond. California Education Code Sections 7053, 7054, 7056 18521, Penal Code Section
424 and Government Code Section 8314, all prohibit government advocacy in political
campaigns punishable by incarceration in State Prison.
We Libertarians have successfully sued in the past to stop
some of the illegal expenditures in other districts, but hundreds of thousands of dollars
have been wrongfully spent, including advocacy letters mailed en masse from
superintendents and elementary school principals. We should not reward such calculated
wrongdoing with a tax increase. What kind of message do we send our children when we
reward criminal behavior?
At the California Teachers Association’s Equity and
Human Rights Conference in 1998, Lee Berg, of the National Education Association’s,
Center for the Revitalization of Urban Education, discussed the internal campaign to swing
teacher union members away from support of Proposition 226 (which would have
required unions to annually obtain their members’ permission to use any portion of
their dues for political purposes). Mr. Berg warned the audience that if 226 should pass,
school vouchers and tuition tax credits would soon follow. He proceeded to alert everyone
to the dangers of vouchers. "When education is not public," he said, "we
no longer have the ability to control what is taught and what is not taught."
Exactly right Mr. Berg. We want to end the State Monopoly
on Education. Tomorrow would be nice...
Leland Faegre
Libertarian Candidate
29th State Senate District
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