Open Letter to The Kansas City Star

The editorial board of the newspaper The Kansas City Star recently shoehorned the Libertarian Party in with their story about how Joe the Plumber lost a lot of respect for John McCain after he came out in favor of the Wall Street Bailout. Here’s what was said:

… the nation’s largest third party also opposed appropriating $14 billion of taxpayer money to bail out the American automotive industry.
“It’s insanity,” said Libertarian Party spokesman Andrew Davis. Instead, the Libertarians favored letting the auto companies file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, taking down the U.S. economy with them.
Now, that’s sane.
The Libertarian Party — founded in 1971 as an alternative to the two main political parties — proudly stands for smaller government, lower taxes and more freedom.
The Buzz says the party also stands to lose just about every election its candidates run in.

As a self-respecting Libertarian, I can’t let these kinds of snide comments slide. Hence, I have written the following letter to the editorial board of the Kansas City Star.

To whom it may concern:

I read your “Buzz” commentary with concern regarding how you treated the idea of an auto industry bailout. Specifically, you dismissed it out of hand as somehow less than sane without explaining your reasoning. You then instead engage in an ad hominem attack of the Libertarian Party as being a party that is only capable of losing “just about every election its candidates run in.”

You have done a great disservice to your readership. First and foremost, you have not provided any information for your readers to consider regarding the auto industry bailout except that it will, somehow, ensure that the auto industry will “take down the US economy with them.”  Not so. An economy depends on industries that are able to profitably render goods and services that are needed by its people. If an industry cannot do this, as the US auto industry has been unable to for years, then losing the industry will not “take down the US economy.” Instead, it will free up the labor and resources used in an unprofitable industry and make them available to be put to work in a more profitable one. A process which economic Joseph Schumpeter labeled “creative destruction.”

The alternative is to hinder our economy by taking resources from other areas of the economy and use them to subsidize a failing industry. This has never worked. In order for the free market to allow for societies to most efficiently allocate its resources towards what consumers most want, businesses have to be allowed to fail. It is a painful but necessary process. Japan avoided this process to their detriment in the 1990s; the resulting “zombie companies” functioned as a drag, not a boon, on the overall Japanese economy and greatly contributed to what’s now known as their “lost decade.”

Now that I have provided a logical argument as to why the Libertarian Party was actually correct in its assessment, I would like to continue on and discuss how you treated it. As the Libertarian candidate for State Representative in 2008, I feel I know something both about the party as well as the function of the American political process.

The US Constitution set up a ‘winner takes all’ political process: the candidate with the most votes wins. This engenders a compromise-based, collation-building strategy towards gaining the necessary votes to win. Consequentially, many people see little difference between the two leading parties, Republicans and Democrats. Indeed, the last two Presidential Republican National Conventions showcased speakers Zell Miller (in 2004) and Joe Lieberman (in 2008) who were formerly prominent Democrats. The general flavor of the two parties is that the Republicans believe in free markets whereas the Democrats trust in the guiding hand of government, but this financial crisis has shown that, when the chips are down, there seems to be precious little difference between their approach to economic crisis. For most voters in the last two Presidential elections, Iraq seemed to be the only issue that divided them, and even that seemed a rather ephemeral difference.

Given that both parties provide very little real difference between them, third parties remain the only choice for people such as myself who refuse to compromise their principles in the name of victory. As such, you are correct in saying that we Libertarians are not in danger of overtaking American politics by storm anytime soon. However, this is not to say that our ideas are not worthwhile or shared by many Americans. In fact, political quizzes have shown that many Americans hold Libertarian views despite the fact that they vote for other political parties in an effort to chose the lesser of two evils.

That the numerous discussions I have had with ordinary Americans showcases their desire to vote for their traditional party, not because they actually believed in it, but out of fear of the other party winning the election, represents a failing of our political system. That both parties favored a Wall Street bail out that everyday Americans overwhelmingly opposed, has shown how unresponsive our political system (where 98% of all incumbents are reelected) can be to the true wishes of the people.

Such is the world that we all live in, and one would think that a newspaper would use the influence of its editorial board to rail against such injustices. I see that sadly, this is not so. What I have provided in this letter is a logical argument for my ideas that your infotainment-minded editorial board appears to lack. I feel this is yet another failure of the system our forefathers set in motion. Jefferson believed that a free press was the “fourth estate” that would keep the branches of government responsive to the needs of the people.

Were he alive today and in possession of your newspaper, I believe he would see that this was a naive belief.

Sincerely,

Preston Poulter (www.prestonpoulter.com)

Chris Martenson’s Crash Course

Mark, frequent blog reader, recently commented:

Preston,
I agree that these trillions that have been injected into the system are going to be a problem. But the real problem is the size of the debt that these new bailouts are being added to.

A great graphical representation is available at Chris Martenson’s, The Crash Course particularly Chapter 11, How much is a trillion, and Chapter 12, Debt.

To convey how huge a trillion dollars is, Chris compares a trillion dollars to a billion dollars. He shows that a billion dollars, if composed of a stack of one thousand dollar bills, would reach just 358 feet, a third the way up a giant skyscraper. But a trillion dollars is a stack of one thousand dollar bills 67.9 MILES HIGH !!!

Then, in Chapter 12, we see the national debt (10.6 trillion dollars a few minutes ago, not including future obligations like social security, medicare, etc.) plotted since 1950. We’re on the ascending slope of a geometric progression, the straigt up off the chart portion (we’ve all heard of the amazing potential of compound interest When it’s applied to debt rather than savings its just as amazing). This will screw the dollar and turn the US into a very different country than the one we grew up in. (Edit: You can see Dr. Martenson’s work here.)

Other than that, have a nice weekend! -Mark

 

Mark was also studious enough to let us know that the lowest rates and best transparency he found for gold bullion storage was at www.bullionvault.com. Thank you very much for bringing us this information Mark. 

I did some calculations on the size of the national debt for the last speech I gave. I have some pretty handy conversion factors, but I think we all understand how massive the size of the Federal Debt is. In fact, I was reflecting on the words of Henry Hazlitt this morning who said in his book The Failure of the New Economics that the relationship between expanding the money supply and expanding consumer prices is a complex one: when you first start to expand the money supply, consumer prices move by a far lower percentage, but as you add more and more money to circulation the consumer prices rise by greater and greater percentage. Eventually, the addition of small amounts of money (percentage wise) drive up consumer inflation more than you would expect. 

That’s why Obama is calling for a trillion dollar deficit in the face of this economic downturn. Since we already have a national debt that is trillions of dollars, we’d need to start going in debt an increasingly large amount in order to see any stimulus effect from deficit spending. Ludwig von Mises also talks about this in his book Human Action: A Treatise on Economics where he says that:

In all countries where inflation has been rapid, it has been observed that the decrease in the value of the money has occurred faster than the increase in its quantity.

I love von Mises’s writing. He seemed to understand what was going on, but one thing I think he got wrong was people’s willingness to accept inflation and fiat money. Mises (also in Human Action) wrote that:

Inflation can be pursued only so long as the public still does not believe it will continue. Once the people generally realize that the inflation will be continued on and on and that the value of the monetary unit will decline more and more, then the fate of the money is sealed. Only the belief, that the inflation will come to a stop, maintains the value of the notes.

He also wrote (although I can’t find the quote offhand) that a government can only succeed in introducing a fiat money by a gradual perversion of a commodity money such as we saw here in the United States. But we’ve seen time and again in countries such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe that people will accept a new fiat currency that is introduced to replace a fiat money that has lost its value.  

That people would willingly accept an inherently worthless money from the same people who provided them with the last money that has been show to be inherently worthless seemed an impossibility to Mises. I must say I can’t quite fathom it myself. When faced with the economic calamity that results from hyperinflation, would a people not demand a sound money? Apparently, they may want one, but will accept another fiat note issued by the same government that destroyed their last currency. 

And so it is regarding inflationary expectations. Mises wrote that people only accept inflation because they believe that it is temporary and that soon it will end, but these days we know the truth of just what people will accept. We all accept that the dollars of next year are going to buy fewer goods than the dollars of this year, and if that isn’t so, it’s viewed as a calamitous deflation. The central banks of the world have done a superb job of convincing us inflation is just a part of modern living and to just ignore it.

In fact, central bankers don’t even talk about controlling inflation anymore, instead it’s just peoples expectations of inflation that need controlling. In so doing, central bankers blame the victim by saying that the root cause of inflation is that people are expecting it and that these “inflationary expectations” are what causes people to ask for higher prices today. That the root of the problem might just be more and more money made out of nothing and injected into the system gets nary a mention except by economists such as Ludwig von Mises. 

It will be interesting to witness the collapse of the American dollar. Will Americans be as docile as Argentineans in accepting a new fiat currency issued by the same central government that bankrupted the last one? Or will they demand a return to sound money? I, for one, have and will continue to agitate people to demand sound money. I’m not surprised that people don’t pay much attention today, but I will be surprised if they don’t pay attention when faced with hyperinflation. Sound money has become one of those ideas such as personal responsibility and the free market: it’s an idea people like and politicians will therefore play to them, but no one seems to care that those same politicians do not carry out their promises of giving us sound money or free markets. And to witness American’s willingness to reject the notion of personal responsibility, we need look no further than the bailout of the auto industry.

A Sign of the Times

“Billboard improvement” is a colorful way to describe vandalizing a billboard in order to give the advertisement a totally different meaning. I recently ran across one such billboard improvement that I found rather hilarious. 

 

Improved Wachovia Billboard
"Improved" Wachovia Billboard

The thing is, I’ve always thought that when I saw these Wachovia billboards ever since they were sold to Citigroup with the “assistance” of the FDIC. At the time I thought this was the classic case of the FDIC guiding a weak bank on the verge of failing into a merger with a stronger bank, but not less than a month or so later and Citigroup was begging for a bailout less they would fail. 

In order to ensure the survival of our banking system, literally trillions of dollars has been injected into the American financial system. The ultimate effect of all this money creation will be to cause inflation, just as Ben Bernanke told us it would back in his speech on how to fight deflation. The other, somewhat temporary, side effect of all this money creation will be to drive down interest rates; anyone who wants to borrow money can get some of the newly created money that was just pumped into the banking system on the cheap. Lower interest rates will also offer people less reason to save, and that’s why I find that Wachovia billboard so hysterical.

In essence, Wachovia was a part of the banking system that reaped profits by engaging in making mortgage loans to people who couldn’t afford them and them repackaging the loans and selling them to Wall Street. We are now having to pay the price for the sins of the banking system and the Fed has decided the form that this price shall take: inflation and low interest rates. Yet they advertise that they will help “your little ones grow.” I have to say that this billboard was indeed improved. Now the billboard plainly says what Wachovia (and the entire banking system) will do to your money… And they say that there’s no truth in advertising.

Of course, these lower interest rates won’t last forever. Eventually people will come to understand how precarious the value of their money really is, and then they’ll start demanding higher interest rates. Not to mention, we’re going to see a much higher value of gold- the canary in the cole mine of the monetary system. Which is just what we’re starting to see. Gold moved from $764 at the start of the week to close the week at $808. Similarly, Barrick Gold has gone from $27.44 to $31.32. 

As an investor in Barrick Gold, I had a nice week, and I think we’re going to start seeing some nice moves in the gold sector over the next few months are markets realize that all of these deflationary fears are overblown. Bill Bonner is predicting that the system has one final bubble to blow and that will be government debt; that the price on government securities will go from overblown to in the tank as interest rates have to rise as inflation worries persist. I would have to agree. Going forward, gold is a very exciting place to be. As we goldbugs sit back and watch the financial system collapse, we will get to do as that old song by Everclear goes “Watch the World Die.”

Inflation Concerns Return to the Market

Barrick Gold finished up today 9.48%, a beautiful move. COMEX gold finished at 4.44% to close at $798 an ounce. Meanwhile, here are a couple of interesting headlines today: Fed Weights Debt Sales of Its Own and U.S. Treasuries Fall as Demand Drops at Three-Year Note Auction.  Both stories provide very tellings signs of the time. 

The first story is that the Federal Reserve wants to be able to issue bonds- a bizarre notion for an entity that can create as much money as it wants at any time. The reason a money creation entity such as the Federal Reserve would want to start borrowing money is because it’s worried that if it continues to run the printing presses to fund of its bailout programs then it would create excessive inflation. The later story says that yields are starting to creep into longer term US debt obligations because concern is developing that, as the article says, “the government will flood the market with securities to pay for a financial rescue.”

Put the pieces together, and what happened today is that the market started to react to inflationary expectations based on concerns about all of these bailouts and stimulus packages. Those inflationary expectations are causing bond yields as well as the price of gold. Hence, for today at least, inflation is replacing deflation as the investor watch word of the day. Gold, the traditional inflation haven, should perform very well if this investor mindset continues. For those who had the fortitude to buy into companies such as Barrick Gold close to the bottom (as I was fortunate enough to do) we have seen a 50% return (or more) in roughly six weeks. 

I have some cash to put to work in the market right now and Barrick Gold is a company that I believe will continue to do quite well. I took some profits today because the gold market should remain volatile and so it should bounce around quite a bit in both directions. Consequentially, I’d like for it to decline back to $25 a share or so before I buy more. Meanwhile, the profits I took will allow me to go Christmas shopping and pay off some debts. 

Incidentally, I’m working with some investment professionals to help investors protect themselves from the falling dollar. Interested parties are encouraged to contact me.

Till next time. Keep your powder dry.

Update: Genworth Financial Bonds

Previously, I wrote that the bonds of Genworth Financial were a tempting buy. Looks like some of you took my advice, because that bond is now trading at $.975 on the dollar rather than the $.86 it had been when I wrote about it.

That’s a tidy 13% profit on your money in less than two weeks.

I know my brother took my advice. Whether he’s going to get me a decent Christmas gift, though, remains a mystery.

What this is a greater sign of is that the money that the central banks are pumping into the financial system is bringing yields down across the board. In fact, the yield on T-bills (that’s a four-week note) has reached zero. That some of that money is finding its way into bonds that yield significantly better than zero, suggests that we may be seeing an end to the credit crisis that reared its ugly head in October.

Bill Bonner of the Daily Reckoning has described it as the start of the next great bubble: government debt. He predicts that this one will burst as all the others have, and with far worse results for Americans, since it’s likely to take our currency down with it.

Meanwhile, those Genworth bonds were a good buy. I’d suggest people take the profits from them, once matured, and invest in something that will survive the collapsing of the dollar — like gold.

Fire or Ice

Some say the world will end in fire; 
Some say in ice. 
From what I’ve tasted of desire 
I hold with those who favor fire. 
But if it had to perish twice, 
I think I know enough of hate 
To know that for destruction ice 
Is also great 
And would suffice.

– “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost

Cat, an old friend and new reader, recently posted this comment:

Hi Preston,

I read yesterday that Bush was moving into Preston Hollow in Dallas. Suddenly, I wondered, “What happened to Preston Poulter?” I was pleasantly surprised to see that you had a blog and had even run as a Libertarian for Texas Rep.

I enjoy this blog and the Libertarian perspective. You write plainly and with great focus. You write without much malice. It’s nice to find a blog that is about a person’s passion for betterment rather than an attention grab or a vehicle for invective.

I hope your find the Argentinian’s words interesting. He’s living the best he can in a world that went from prosperous to dangerous gradually. So that’s a mild blessing — economic collapses don’t often happen to an entire population overnight. You can kind of see them coming if you’re looking. This gives you time to spread your message about how to prepare for a period of increased self-reliance.

Aside from economic collapse, I am concerned about infrastructure collapse for various reasons. Avian influenza (H5N1) is probably on a collision course with mankind. It’s endemic in bird populations now. Every farmed chicken/duck/turkey that is raised and consumed is a living flu laboratory that is gradually mutating the virus into something that can potentially be transmitted to humans. Once that happens, we will likely see a global pandemic that cripples our import markets and results in critical supply shortages as people become reluctant to leave their homes.

This is a decent book to read about bird flu: http://birdflubook.com/toc.php Take note of his personal affiliations with animal rights groups as a potential conflict of interest. The science and history of pandemic influenza as he describes them are still sound (if a bit simplified). I found it to be a good primer. Everyone’s obsessed about the economy while this monster slumbers somewhere in the world.

Either way — economic collapse or influenza like in Stephen King’s The Stand, people have much to gain by preparation for harder times.

Thank you for the kind wishes. I hope my chatter isn’t clogging up your blog. I enjoy having intelligent people to talk to.

– Cat

 

I did not know Bush was planning on moving to the Preston Hollow division of Dallas, Texas but apparently it is so. As for my running for Libertarian State Representative in the last election, you can read about my experience here. As for the Argentinean’s experience with hyperinflation, it’s interesting to hear that gold jewelry became a currency and that all gold was treated as scrap gold on the black market.

In my book, “What Do You Mean My Money’s Worthless?”  I recommend that people purchase and keep a fair number of Silver Eagle’s on hand. They are each verified to become ounce of 99.9% pure silver which makes them a known quantity should we have to deal with a black market scenario and, as they have roughly comparable value to a $20 bill, they represent the right amount of wealth to go shopping.

As for your concern regarding Avian Flu, you aren’t the only one to be worried about that. In James Howard Kuntsler’s book, The Long Emergency he discusses the likelihood of a epidemic that wipes out a large portion of the population as well as the famines that he feels are inevitable given how expensive energy is going to be. Kuntsler’s hypothesis is that we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet and that we are going to start see the human population forced to shrink by various means in the next few decades. 

I don’t spend any time worrying about scenario’s like that. I feel that being a being a Wall Street bear takes up enough of my time, so I really don’t have time to worry about other scenarios such as disease wiping everyone out. And the real problem with that kind of thinking is that it seems there’s not much that can really be done about it. If the “Spanish Flu” really does make a come back, there’s not much that can be done about it. Being a Wall Street bear, on the other hand, means you can take steps to protect yourself and profit from market declines. Then you can make fun of permabulls like Ben Stein and Jeremy Sigel. 

Speaking of, the Dow finished down today 2.72% while the stock of Barrick Gold (ticker symbol=ABX) went up a good 1.83%. That’s what I like to see as a bear market investor: stocks down, gold up. That’s a trend I’d like to see continue. I talk about the ratio of the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the price of an ounce of gold in my book and how certain I am that that ratio is going to decline in the near future. When I wrote that book, the ratio was at 17. Today it’s roughly 11.3. In the next couple of years, we should see it decline all the way to three or lower, and that’s a lot of profit to be had. And making money off of economic downturns if far better than making them off of market upswings because it means you’ve got money when everyone else is broke, which is what we bears fantasize about.

The Not-So-Efficient Market

There is a theory in stock circles called the “Efficient Market Hypothesis.” It was first proposed by a student of famed mathematician Benoit Mandlebroit (who proposed Chaos Theory) named Eugene Fama. The theory is easy to understand; markets such as the stock market have so many players that it reacts instantaneously to process all known information about a given security. A corollary of this theory is that because all information about the market has already been “priced in”, that it’s impossible to beat the market because any actionable information about a given security is already reflected in its price. This theory was popularized in books such as A Random Walk Down Wall Street. It has been attacked in a number of books including Benoit Madlebroit’s The Misbehavior of Markets as well as my book, What Do You Mean My Money’s Worthless.

I’ve found that some of my biggest investing mistakes are caused by giving any credence to the notion that the market has priced in any information at all. Case in point, for much of this year I was an investor in the Prudent Bear Fund (ticker=BEARX) which is a mutual fund that is short the market, yet, despite many of my predictions of doom and gloom coming true, the stock market continued to hold its value in the face of more and more bad news. Then came October. Paulson and Bush announced that they were going to do a massive bailout of all troubled assets on bank balance sheets after allowing Lehman Brother to fail, and the stock market rallied strongly. 

At that point I lost faith that the stock market was going to decline. It seemed that the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury were simply going to inflate the problem away, and the market was responding in just such a direction. So the logical move to me seemed to be to invest in gold in order to protect from inflation and away from shorting. I figured that, with all the bad news that has come out, if the stock market was going to crash it would have already done so. I closed my short positions just before one of the most violent stock market collapses ever based on the belief that knowledge of the credit freeze and oncoming recession were already “priced into” the market. I’m still up on the year (which few people can say) but I missed out on a great opportunity to profit due to my putting ANY credence in the notion that the market was efficient. 

Now I’m realizing that the key to investing is not to predict the tomorrow’s headlines, but rather to figure out which of yesterday’s headlines will the have staying power to shape market movements in the future. That’s what I’m trying to do today. Call it the “Slow Market Hypothesis”- which significant piece of news will the market take the longest to get through its thick head? A question that is very much on my mind today. 

The headline that’s dominated the last couple of months has been that “Deflation is Coming. Run to Cash!” Call me crazy, but I think that headline’s played out now. The headline of today was that “Dollar slides as Obama vows stimulus.” Gold moved strongly up and Barrick Gold, my personal investment vehicle of choice, closed the day up 8.39%. I think that the headlines going forward are going to become more focused on inflation rather than deflation as markets react to the new ending stream of new dollars being cranked out by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Just today, it seems that Congress and Bush are dipping into the bailout goody bag for $15 Billion to loan the auto industry. The hard figures on M2 straight from the Federal Reserve says that our money supply has expanded by 7% over the course of year, which is not nearly as alarming as the “Adjusted Monetary Basis” (a measure which accounts for changes in the reserve requirements as well as changes in foreign exchange market intervention) which the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank publishes. Here, take a look at it yourself:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/BASE_Max_630_378.png
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/BASE_Max_630_378.png

That’s a rather astounding rise in the monetary base (1400% annualized), and it’s only going to get worse. The next stimulus package that’s being proposed by Barack Obama is roughly $1 trillion

The rise in the value of the dollar was caused because liquidation was forcing people to sell their assets in order to meet margin calls that were written in terms of US dollars, but that’s going to be a short lived phenomenon. As the full impact of these monetary shenanigans start to sink in, the market will seek a safe haven that isn’t being grossly tampered with, and that’s going to lead them back to gold. That’s my prediction anyway, we’ll see how it turns out.

The Peculiar Case of Jackass the Stalker

I sometimes say that I am a boring person who seems to be leading a rather exciting life. It seems strange to me that the same person who grew up reading comic books and playing role-playing games, grew up to lead a life that has so far included:

  • being sued by a large corporation bent on destroying me
  • looking down the barrel of a loaded gun and daring the person to pull the trigger
  • writing a book about the collapse of the American economy

Perhaps I’m a weirdness magnet or perhaps I am unconsciously seeking this drama out to spice up my otherwise boring existence. I’m not certain, but my life experiences do seem to make for interesting tales. My latest development involved getting a restraining order against one who is stalking my girlfriend. I thought I’d recount the experiences here to aid anyone who has to go through the process themselves.

The person in question was one of my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriends. Since he is not a “public person”, I will just call him Jackass to protect his privacy. Strangely enough, I actually met her through him, because we were friends at the time. And as my once-friend has recently threatened my life via gun and mail bomb, I guess this goes to show you that you never really know about some people.

But I’m getting ahead of things.

The relationship between Jackass and my future girlfriend was on-the-rocks at the time I came into the picture, and, while she now admits to there having been a developing attraction, it was never acted upon. Still, he could sense it, and therefore took steps to alienate himself from me. Ironically, the pretext he used for it was that I was somehow threatening to her, and he feared that I might take reprisal against her for perceived slights by him. It’s ironic given recent events, but he played himself up to be her stalwart protector and used that pretense to cease all contact with me. Eventually, there was a parting of ways between the two of them and myself. I expected that that would be that.

Life is never that simple.

At the start of the year, I heard from Taylor, a frequent commenter of this blog. He and Taylor had been one-time friends as well, and suddenly, Jackass had gotten back in touch with Taylor in response to viewing Taylor’s wedding album. I had been in attendance of the wedding, and this motivated Jackass to contact him to ask how he could still be friends with me given how horrible I had been towards his now ex-girlfriend. Yes, you heard that correctly: though she had recently ended the relationship, he was still casting himself as her stalwart protector against my evil transgressions. Taylor then contacted me and asked if there was any truth to Jackass’ numerous accusations against me. I assured him there was not. What I did learn from this exchange, however, was that those two had broken up.

Being nothing short of a love opportunist, I contacted her and suggested we get together. Soon, we were exclusively dating. You might have thought that after being the unwitting, ironic impetus for me to reach out to her, that his role in this particular tale would come to a close.

I should have known better.

You see, the bizarre behavior that he exhibited over the course of knowing him should have served as a warning that all was not well with the young man. Ordinary men do not fashion themselves their woman’s protector as a ruse to alienate a competitive interest, and they particularly do not maintain this ruse AFTER being dumped. While many of us might fail to move on just after the end of a romantic affair, it’s a very rare person who would attempt to maintain the facade that they are still fighting battles on the behalf of a now ex-girlfriend. Come to find out, there was an episode of battering during their relationship, which makes his claims of being her protector all the more bizarre.

Taken as a whole, all of this behavior is a warning sign.

Sure enough, around Thanksgiving we heard from him again. This time, via the Internet. He had been taking programming courses to try and better himself, and apparently decided to use his newfound powers of the computer for ill. It seems he was using an anonymized IP, and various aliases to send harassing messages to her through AOL Instant Messenger and phone texts. In addition, he would drop by this blog and make a pest of himself by posting all manner of harassing comments. He seemed to feel that because he was doing this harassment through the Internet via alias, that there was little we could do. In fact, in numerous messages he said that he was basically untouchable and that there was nothing the law could do about him.

A notion of which, I was rather anxious to dissuade him.

First, she and I engaged him in AIM conversation. He craved an audience and, basking in the power of his perceived anonymity, went on to give himself away several times by giving out information about the two of us that only he would know. In addition, she commented that the word choice and emoticons he used in several of his texts were exactly as she knew him to use. At one point, he even went so far as so say that she would be his “bitch” again and that he was “beyond taking no for an answer”. Comments like that greatly narrow the field of who we could possibly be dealing with, and show just how far gone the person is.

All very interesting, but can we actually take this circumstantial evidence to the courts? Furthermore, what could we, a couple in California, do about harassment from someone in Texas? Can the legal system protect us given this set of circumstances?

The answer is yes — it absolutely can.

  • The first step is to get a restraining order.

While the police are typically slow to move on complaints of cyberstalking, (as it remains a federal crime, in the jurisdiction of, not local police agencies, but the FBI) they are much faster moving regarding charges of violating a restraining order. The actual process of getting one varies from state to state; in California, it is quite simple. In fact, they even have a special department set up at the superior court to walk you through it. All the forms are in plain English (or Spanish) and are easy to fill out. You see a judge who will look over your evidence and authorize the restraining order — all on that same day. In our case, the judge looked over the numerous AIM texts where Jackass … er, someone who seemed a lot like our him — had his knowledge, grudges, and speech patterns — threatened to kill both my girlfriend and myself. He used language that was both colorful and graphic, which I’m sure helped the judge render his decision to authorize a restraining order after only ten minutes of reading.

Now, I’m sure some of you are asking if a California restraining order can restrain a Texas resident.

Again, absolutely, it can.

A restraining order, is a restraining order, is a restraining order, and it can be presented to the Texas police if he makes a pest of himself again, and they are obligated to investigate it just as they would an order that was authorized by a Texas court. In his case, the legal process is working to his detriment. Should he choose to present himself at the hearing, he would have to do so by taking a trip to California. Of course, he could just hire a California attorney, but he’s about to discover the joys of paying legal fees on a pizza delivery boy’s salary. (Yes, that is his profession).

The only thing we had to do next was get it served, which means that someone who was not named as a protected person had to present it to him in person. And you cannot direct-mail serve a court order. Of course, my girlfriend had a few friends who had been horrified by his treatment of her and were more than happy to present it to him … at work.

Which is exactly what happened.

Today, at roughly 7:30 PM Central Standard Time, he was served with California Superior Court Case Number S0003689, Temporary Restraining Order and Notice of Hearing. The court order itself has boiler plate language that prohibit him from owning a gun, and if he already does, he must either sell or turn it into the police within 24 hours of receiving the order.

The person serving it said she delighted in sarcastically wishing him a “Merry Christmas.”

I will continue to update this blog as to how the case progresses. It should be fairly straightforward because he no longer has his perceived anonymity of the Internet with which to issue idle death threats. As he has been told, everything he says, or instant messages, or texts, can now be lawfully recorded and used against him. Even if he does it anonymously, it is more evidence that the judge would weigh against him in this case, so I suspect that we may have heard the last of him. But, you never know. He does seem rather crazy, and he is going to be spending Christmas alone.

Fortunately, we’re going to be spending all of Christmas in California, so there’s less of a chance that he could ever actually carry out his threats — even if he got the mind to.

All in all, I’d say that it’s going to be a rather happy Christmas, indeed.

The Republican Blind Eye

In continuing our discussion, Taylor posted a comment on my most recent blog. There are some specific points from his comment that I’m going to further address in this post. First, in a continuation of my earlier post, Taylor’s arguments speak to his experience. For him, and other Republicans, the system works well. The police are there to protect his property from those who might want to take it. He seems to feel that his elected representatives have similar belief systems to himself (as long as they are Republicans), and that the only flaws in the system lay in that it takes too much of his money in taxes. 

It would also seem that one of the central planks in Taylor’s arguments is that the way the system works for him is the same way the system works for everyone, or, as he put it, “I don’t need to understand anything about ‘inner-city blacks’ experience because fortunately for me I live in a country where the same laws (criminal) apply to everyone equally.” This argument is ridiculous on it’s face. Never in the history of civilization have criminal laws applied equally to everyone. There has always existed a privileged class and those who are less privileged and to think that they would be treated exactly the same in the eyes of the law is merely a naive way of saying that the system works just fine.  

There are countless examples of people being treated differently under the law. One of the pernicious things about the structure of the American legal system is that every year more laws get added to the books, and this allows law enforcement officials to pick and chose which laws they want to enforce, against whom, and at what time. When Florida Greenpeace boarded a ship to check if it was trafficking in illegal mahogany, the Bush Administration used a law from 1872 to prosecute them. Never mind that that 1872 law was originally authored to stop people from boarding ships to lure away sailors to nights of booze and women, and that the last instance of its use was in 1890, let’s prosecute them for it anyway.

Speaking of old laws, poker players in South Carolina have been routinely harassed by police who are arresting them for the victimless crime of playing poker in a home game. The law they violated came into being in 1802 and prohibits anyone from playing “any game played with card or dice.” Yet I have a feeling the Monopoly players of the state, and probably the VTES players for that matter, can rest easy; it’s only the poker players they go after.

Both of these situations are examples of people in power wanting people brought down and finding some reason in the law to do it. The thing is Taylor, I feel I know you well enough to know that you don’t have a problem with the idea that Greenpeace was targeted with selective prosecution. I suspect it wouldn’t bother you in the least. You seem to feel that Greenpeace is part of the “they” that you feel opposes you, and whatever tools need to be used against it is just fine. I can understand this attitude, but please don’t be so hypocritical or naive as to say that we are all treated equally under the law. 

If you still aren’t convinced, I might ask you to consider the many elements of racism present in our “War on Drugs.” The penalties for drugs preferred by whites, such as powdered cocaine, are far less severe than the the drugs preferred predominantly by blacks such as crack cocaine. To quote an ACLU report, “distribution of just 5 grams of crack carries a minimum 5-year federal prison sentence, while for powder cocaine, distribution of 500 grams – 100 times the amount of crack cocaine – carries the same sentence.” That same report goes on to say:

The racial disparity in the application of mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine is particularly disturbing. African Americans comprise the vast majority of those convicted of crack cocaine offenses, while the majority of those convicted for powder cocaine offenses are white. This is true, despite the fact that whites and Hispanics form the majority of crack users. For example, in 2003, whites constituted 7.8% and African Americans constituted more than 80% of the defendants sentenced under the harsh federal crack cocaine laws, despite the fact that more than 66% of crack cocaine users in the United States are white or Hispanic. Due in large part to the sentencing disparity based on the form of the drug, African Americans serve substantially more time in prison for drug offenses than do whites. The average sentence for a crack cocaine offense in 2003, which was 123 months, was 3.5 years longer than the average sentence of 81 months for an offense involving the powder form of the drug. Also due in large part to mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, from 1994 to 2003, the difference between the average time African American offenders served in prison increased by 77%, compared to an increase of 28% for white drug offenders. African Americans now serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense at 58.7 months, as whites do for a violent offense at 61.7 months. The fact that African American defendants received the mandatory sentences more often than white defendants who were eligible for a mandatory minimum sentence, further supports the racially discriminatory impact of mandatory minimum penalties.

And let’s not forget the study described in Michael Brown’s book Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society that being black would statistically more than double the chances of being convicted of a cocaine related crime and add, on average, more than 40 months to the sentence holding all other things equal. 

Of course, I don’t expect you to pick up a copy of that book any more than I expect that you’d watch the movie of Rendition that explores a real-life case of abuses at the hands of President Bush, whom you consider a personal friend. The suggests that you consider material such as books and movies that are unsympathetic towards the Republican cause are meet with “I haven’t scene (sic) Rendition – I typically don’t use my money to fund liberal hacks.” Which just goes to show that you, and the other Republicans like you, are willfully ignorant. It’s not that information has not been offered to you to refute your assertion that the system works just fine, it’s that you have chosen to ignore it. I can only believe the reason is because you rather like the way the system works for you and would hate to see it changed to where it wold be more fair for everyone.

In my last blog I compared this to sort of willful ignorance to that of the Germans during the Second World War who were also willfully ignorant. You attacked this by saying:

These are some the scary fallacies you put forward. The difference is more than obvious. In the former 1) The persons actually committed crimes 2) Their possessions were not seized by a government 3) They were given a choice to fight or go to jail – they choose to fight. In the latter 1) They were falsely imprisoned 2) Their possessions were seized 3) Their labor was a means to an end in a dastardly program of genocide.

Are you seriously going to compare being given a choice to fight in a war with being systematically exterminated?

Taylor is ignoring that my original post also noted that blacks were disproportionately drafted into the army. Hence, there is a form of systematic extermination going on at the time that greatly bothered the civil rights leaders of its day such as Martin Luther King. In regards to my other point, that offering deferment to drug charges in order to get more (predominately black) people to fight a war they didn’t believe in, you seem to be suggesting that they have made an entirely free choice and should just accept the consequences, however fatal. 

Taylor is ignoring the coercive hand of government in this decision that was carrying out a policy of prosecuting people for the victimless crime of drug possession. Even if we buy Taylor’s later (and rather contrived) argument that drugs are not victimless, the racist execution of the war on drugs and its use as a tool for recruiting for the unpopular Vietnam war undermines his assertion of equal treatment for all.

Lastly, Taylor is making an extreme argument of personal responsibility here. In essence he says that people should be free to make decisions, such as fighting in Vietnam, that may prove fatal to them. If we accept this argument, then that means that we are all responsible for our own well being and that if we make decisions that ultimately lead to our death in a rice patty rather than serving out a prison term, then we should allow people to make these decisions. 

How ironic then that Taylor, and other Republicans, insist that blacks be free to make such harmful decisions as dying in Vietnam, yet they are NOT allowed to make the decision to damage their body with drugs. In essence, Taylor is saying that our bodies are the property of the US government to do with as it sees fit. If we chose to damage government property by taking drugs that would harm it, then it has recourse to instead use our bodies to fight wars. This is an argument of extreme totalitarianism, and the only reason anyone would make it is if there body in particular were not at risk. 

Taylor again argues that prostitution is not victimless because, “Prostitution is also not a victimless crime. I have a friend who works for a NGO involved with human trafficking – most of which is underage or barely legal women forced into prostitution. So again, don’t preach that jons are beyond reproach, they enable the problem.”  This argument does not fall far from the hypocritical tree from which it originated. Blacks are free to chose to allow their bodies to fight and die in Vietnam, but foreign women are not allowed to use their bodies to be engaged in the sex trade.  

I, for one, feel that our bodies are our own property to do with as we will. That includes destroying it at the time and method of my choosing if I so desire. Hence, drugs and prostitution are victimless. Furthermore, I feel that people should be allowed to spend and risk their money in whatever way they want. So I see no problem with home poker games in South Carolina. Any argument to the contrary says that the greater good of all must be considered in regards to how I spend my money and what I do with my body, and opening that bottle now allows the government to dictate whatever terms it wants in regards to laws and legislation that has the potential to extinguish liberty altogether. Anyone interested in reading more about Libertarian ethics is urged to pick with the book, For a New Liberty.

Ultimately the problem with Republican rhetoric is that is extremely inconsistent. It jumps from demanding personal liberty and freedom from the government in one case, and then demands government authority and virtually totalitarian power at other times. This is not new in history of human events, but is instead the telltale pattern of a powerful class using its influence to ensure that the government works, not only FOR them, but AGAINST others. This is the reason why, when the discussion of American politics comes up, I tend to start the discussion with, “The Republican party is all about power.” Lastly Taylor, I must apologize for my anti-Republican bias, but if I am forced to chose between which of the two American parties to oppose, the Facists or the Socialists, I’m afraid I have to oppose the Facists.

Answering Taylor’s Question

Taylor, longtime friend and blog reader, recently wrote this comment:

“I hate it when you do this. Not trying to be antagonistic, but that is hard to do when you make such fallacious statements throughout your blog. But here goes:
So what is the solution? I see a pattern in your blogs that criticize ‘x’: identify problem -> identify Republicans as instigator of problem -> offer no solution.
I read 1 stated complaint and 1 implicate:
Stated: private business profiting from high incarceration rates is bad
Implicit: ‘making stuff illegal and locking people up’ is a bad policy
I agree that if incarceration rates were not high there would be no reason for the market to respond with providing services. But to suggest that private prisons are killing off their inmates and the government is turning a blind eye is a bit far-fetched isn’t it? I mean, personally, I could care less. They are prisoners, and in my opinion, we should devise a zero-sum expense model to deal with them instead of pouring tax dollars into such a system. But, the liberals in the country will cry foul, so, oh, well.
As for the policy, let’s list who is incarcerated ( in no order ):
– murderers
– thieves
– rapists
– drug dealers
– Martha Stewart
Which of these categories of criminals do you suggest we set free? I assume you are not going to come forward with some radical policy like hang ’em all, and, I assume the Libertarian in you will say, ‘just set all those drug-dealing gang-bangers free.’
If that is your solution, put it forward for discussion.”

I hate to make an example of my friend, but he is bolstering my case by writing that: “personally, I could care less. They are prisoners”.

This is the attitude that typifies Republicans.

This speaks to Taylor’s experience. Presumably, he has never had any serious problems with the police, and so anyone who does must be a bad person. The notion that we are locking anyone up unnecessarily is viewed as preposterous, as is the notion that the prison system is anything but just.

I’ve heard many a Republican say that we are simply too soft on our prisoners. Prisons need to be harder. The time spent, tougher. As one-time Republican candidate for Texas governor, Clayton Williams said during his campaign, “We need to introduce our prisoners to the joys of busting rocks.” It’s an attitude I can understand. Republicans feel part of the system, so the system must work for them. Surely, any allegations otherwise must be “far-fetched.” Government would never stoop to the level of locking up people unnecessarily. That’s just crazy talk.

Unfortunately, this attitude is very naive.

I remember reading a story in the Wall Street Journal about the history of an Alabama mining town that used prison labor in the mines. Mining was a dangerous profession, so many prisoners would die. When the prison population got too low, the local sheriff would go out and arrest people so that the mine would have more workers. (Far from being far-fetched, Taylor, this kind of stuff is hardly uncommon.)

And, let’s take it from the local level of an Alabama town to the national one.

When the United States was fighting in Vietnam, Republicans seemed to have few qualms about the fact that drug offenders (who were mostly black) were being forced to fight — and die — for a war they did not believe in, merely to avoid jail time.

I find this kind of hypocrisy grossly unsettling.

I don’t see the material difference between the Americans who let drug offenders fight their war against Communism for them in the rice patties of Vietnam, and the Germans who let the Nazis falsely imprison the Jewish population so that their wealth could be confiscated and the state would have plenty of labor to fight their own war. Both are examples of a citizenry on the “right side of the law” allowing themselves to be willfully ignorant of the system’s darker side. I find it even more ironic that these “law and order” types are the very same people who want to make politics more religious and talk about Jesus’ love for everyone.

From my experience, religious faith challenges its believers to sympathize with the experiences of the downtrodden. In the Bible, does Jesus not ask his followers why they did not visit him in prison, and then go on to say that, “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” I understand the hypocrisy that is to call for a more holy nation while, at the same time, call for harsher prisons. I understand it, but I don’t have to like it. And so, I apologize to Taylor for using the pages of my blog as a pulpit to wage war against the hypocrisy of our nation, but that hypocrisy is the true root of our decline into a decadent empire.

If we would spend time with those who have a different experience of things, we can learn from them. If Taylor and the other Republicans calling for “law and order” understood the experience of inner-city blacks who many times feel that the police are part of the “They” that is out to get them, they might come to this discussion a bit differently.

If they had ever had a family member incarcerated for a victimless crime such as drug possession, and seen the hardships that the family had had to endure, they might come to this differently.

If they had known anyone who got drafted, or took prison deferment and died fighting a war they didn’t believe in, they might come to this differently.

Now, to come back off my soapbox, and answer Taylor’s question.

Our growing prison population is a symptom of our hopeless “War on Drugs”. Although I think it was obvious from my original post, if we would end our prosecution of victimless crimes such as drug offenses and prostitution, we would dramatically reduce the prison population, and with it, our need for prisons. And if we would but understand, as Jesus asks us to in the book of Matthew, that prisoners are still people and that they are worthy of our fair treatment and to still be considered people with rights, then I doubt we would allow these conditions to exist to begin with.

The Republican lies of “law and order” are merely an appeal for the state to gain more control over its citizenry.

Similarly, it was just a few short years ago, that the Republicans under the Bush Administration told us that the CIA and military intelligence needed to be allowed to torture people so that we could win the “War on Terror.” What I find so galling, is that Republicans like Taylor seem to swallow these arguments hook, line and sinker — and then turn around and tell me how much we need to get government out of our lives. I sincerely doubt they they have viewed movies, such as “Rendition, that highlight the abuses of such programs.

If they did, I sincerely doubt they would be comfortable with handing these powers over to the government under any circumstances.