Donald Hank Writes
The Obama administration has unleashed yet another scandal a la Solyndra.
I have drawn friendly fire from readers for calling acts of various officials a crime -- notably the TARP bailout and other bailouts to which Presidents Bush and Obama were party, along with most of Congress.
The argument is that to rise to the level of a crime, the actor has to be arraigned and adjudicated in criminal court or at least declared a criminal according to a set of strict rules established by government. But what about a government that has lost its legitimacy by cavalierly ignoring the terms of the Constitution? Since such a government abuses its authority to declare as legitimate acts that redound to the enrichment of its members but harm the interests of its constituents, does it still have the authority to define what is criminal and what is not? Is it not time for the people to take back the definition of robbery?
Let's take a common sense example: suppose a pickpocket robs me at the mall. I feel his hand in my pocket and see him hightailing it away carrying my wallet.
Am I remiss to shout "pickpocket" or "thief" in hopes that a security guard will apprehend the thief?
Because I have called someone a thief who has not been duly tried and found guilty. Am I wrong to use such a strong term?
Perhaps if you are a lawyer you will think so.
Perhaps another example will help show why the bailouts to banks were in fact criminal acts, even though they had the approval of Congress and two US presidents.
Suppose the president and the Congress and Senate approve a bill that enables FBI officials to rob people at gunpoint out on the streets and to do so legally, ostensibly for the purpose of distributing this money to big businesses that are failing for reasons of mismanagement.
Would that practice not be a crime, despite the fact that it had the approval of the "government"? I suspect that many Americans are so conditioned to abuse at the hands of cunning officials that they are no longer capable of recognizing criminality when it occurs openly in high places, and this criminality could continue to escalate indefinitely to the point of absurdity. We are being conditioned in the manner of Pavlov's dogs and the rules applied to us are canine rather than human. We now generally consider a person to be intelligent if he or she is smart enough to obey simple commands, as issued by the press, the professions, education and government.
There comes a point at which government loses its legitimacy, and this is a universally accepted concept.
Confucius wrote, around 500 BC, that an emperor who did not behave like an emperor was in fact not the emperor and the people had the right to dethrone him.
Bringing this back to our own culture, Psalms 58 is a condemnation of unjust rulers. King David himself committed a sin against God and God's people rose up against him.
A godly people would dethrone our rulers too, at the ballot box.
But we are like the people described in Jeremiah 5:31:
The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?
Indeed, what will ye do?
If the details supplied in the below report should prove accurate, I for one will apply the commonly accepted definition and call this unfair and unlawful bidding a crime on the part of the Obama administration. I literally believe that the people behind this crime must be tried in court and sentenced.
And I urge all who learn of such crimes in high places to do likewise. We the people own the language, not the lawyers.
Don Hank
Did you know that we buy about a half a trillion dollars more stuff from the rest of the world than they buy from us? The U.S. balance of trade is not only mind-blowingly bad - it is the worst in the world. It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit for 2011 will be 558.2 billion dollars. That would be an increase of more than 11 percent from last year. As I have written about previously, the United States is the worst in the world at a lot of things, but as far as the economic well-being of our nation is concerned, our balance of trade is particularly important. Every single month, far more money goes out of this country than comes into it. Tax revenues are significantly reduced as all of this money gets sucked out of our communities. 
