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
Steve Scauzillo, Editor:
"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
D.A.R.E.
to deliver facts
Published Friday, April, 13, 2001, San Gabriel Valley Tribune
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 commissions 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 doesnt 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 Associations Equity and Human Rights Conference in 1998, Lee Berg, of the National Education Associations, 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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