The Bill of Rights: Due Process of Law

One of the most deeply rooted principles in American jurisprudence is the concept of due process of law, which is enshrined in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Due process of law actually stretches back to the year 1215, when the great barons of England extracted an admission from their king that his powers over the citizenry were not unlimited but instead were limited by fundamental principles of fairness and justice. Included among the restrictions on power to which King John acceded in the Magna Carta — the Great Charter — was a prohibition against the exercise of arbitrary seizure of people or their property by government officials:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

Over the centuries, that phrase — “the law of the land” — gradually evolved into the phrase “due process of law,” the same phrase our American ancestors insisted be made part of the Constitution through the adoption of the Fifth Amendment.

Why government?

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson set forth the rationale for the establishment of government in a society: to secure the fundamental, inherent, and preexisting rights of the people. The idea was that the monopoly force of government was needed to suppress the likes of murderers, rapists, robbers, and other violent criminals. Government’s job would be to bring such malefactors to justice and impose punishment on them.

However, as Englishmen had learned throughout the centuries, both before and after Magna Carta, the matter of criminal justice was not so easy. For history and experience had shown that when government (i.e., the king) was vested with the unlimited power to arrest, incarcerate, and punish violent offenders, always and inevitably such power had been misused against the innocent, especially those who dared to criticize or challenge government policies or practices.

For example, without restrictions on power, the king would simply send his soldiers to the home of a government critic. They would then arrest him, incarcerate him, and punish him.

The idea behind the “law of the land” provision in Magna Carta, which has been described as the cornerstone of English liberties, was to require the king to follow certain procedures as a prerequisite to seizing and punishing a person for a crime he had supposedly committed.

Thus, over the centuries English and American courts gradually defined “due process of law” as a set of procedural rights or guarantees to which every person whom the government accused of a crime is entitled.

(Beginning in the late 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court began developing a substantive notion of due process, which blossomed during the Franklin Roosevelt regime but was finally abandoned in the late 1930s. See my series “Economic Liberties and the Constitution” in the June 2002 – May 2003 issues of Freedom Daily.)

Notice and hearing

The core procedural requirements of due process of law were “notice” and “hearing.” An accused had the right, the courts held, to be advised of the nature of the offenses for which he was being charged. That is, the government would be prohibited from simply taking a person into custody on mere suspicion that he was a criminal type or prosecuting him without formally telling him what he was being prosecuted for. Instead, the government would have to formally advise him of the specific charges against him, so that he would then be able to prepare his defense.

That’s the idea behind a grand jury indictment — to formally advise the accused of the exact nature of the offense against him. That’s why our ancestors incorporated that aspect of due process in the Fifth Amendment —

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury

— and the Sixth Amendment —

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall . . . be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.

The other essential part of due process was “hearing” — the right of the accused to be heard, which meant, in a criminal case, a trial. Not just any trial, however, because Englishmen had learned hard lessons from, for example, Star Chamber judicial proceedings that involved secret, arbitrary, and unjust verdicts and judgments.

Other due-process guarantees

The English common law gradually developed other aspects of due-process guarantees in criminal cases.

For example, if an accused was forced to defend himself against experienced government lawyers, obviously the trial could easily degenerate into a sham proceeding — that is, one that might have the trappings of a just trial but whose ending would be practically preordained owing to the unlikelihood that a layman in court could successfully defeat experienced prosecutors.

Therefore, to provide the accused with a reasonable chance to challenge the charges against him, procedural due process came to recognize the crucial importance of allowing the accused to retain a lawyer to fight government prosecutors on his behalf. That’s why the right to counsel was enshrined in the Sixth Amendment: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall ... have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

Other due-process protections were included in the Sixth Amendment. For example, the amendment guarantees the right of trial by jury, which protects the right of the accused to be judged by ordinary people in the community rather than by the judge presiding over the case. Also, government witnesses against the accused have to be brought into court to face the accused and subject themselves to cross-examination by the accused or his lawyer. The accused also has the right to use the subpoena power of the court (i.e., “compulsory process”) to force favorable witnesses to come to court to provide evidence on his behalf.

Other procedural protections became an integral part of due process of law even though they were not specifically enumerated in either the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. For example, in every criminal case the government has the burden of proof. What that means is that in the United States, unlike many other countries around the world, the accused is not required to prove his innocence; instead the government is required to prove his guilt by furnishing sufficient, competent, and credible evidence under oath that the accused actually did commit the offense.

How much evidence is the government required to furnish to substantiate a finding of guilt? Unlike civil cases, where the burden of proof on the claimant is a “preponderance of the evidence,” criminal cases require the government to prove a person’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Thus, at the conclusion of the trial, it is entirely possible that a jury could find a criminal defendant not guilty even if he had not introduced any evidence of his innocence whatsoever. The reason might be that the jury, after hearing and considering all the government’s evidence, might still not be convinced “beyond a reasonable doubt” of the defendant’s guilt.

A correlative due process right involves the “presumption of innocence,” which means that at the beginning of every criminal trial the accused is considered to be fully and totally innocent — and remains so until the government succeeds in convincing the jury of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

A related due-process protection included in the Fifth Amendment is the right of every person to remain silent in the face of a government accusation. That was to ensure that government officials would have to build their case against a person with independent evidence — that is, evidence that was not extracted from the accused, especially through force (e.g., torture).

What’s important to recognize is the underlying rationale behind due process of law — that is, why this principle was so important to Englishmen as well as to our Founding Fathers and the Framers: Given the enormous value they placed on people’s lives and liberty and given their recognition of the enormous power of the government, they wanted to ensure that as few innocent people as possible were executed or otherwise punished, even if that meant lots of guilty people went unpunished.

The role of habeas corpus

How are due-process rights protected? That is, what if government officials proceed to arbitrarily arrest and detain people indefinitely without charges or trial, as U.S. officials today are doing to people in Iraq? What if they attempt to punish, even execute them, in secret sham proceedings involving the denial of counsel or other due-process guarantees, as U.S. officials are today doing at their military installation in Cuba to foreigners accused of terrorism?

Our English and American ancestors understood that the only effective way to secure the release of people who were wrongfully detained was through a legal process known as habeas corpus, which stretches back to 1679, when Parliament enacted the Habeas Corpus Act and which the Framers later enshrined in the limitation on the powers of Congress in Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution:

The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

Habeas corpus is a process that entitles a person held in custody to file a petition in court formally requesting the court to summon the accused and his custodian to court where the custodian will be required to show the reason he is detaining the petitioner. If the court issues a “writ of habeas corpus,” a law-enforcement officer serves the writ (i.e., a formal court order) on the custodian, ordering him to bring the detainee to court and to “show cause” why he is being detained. If the custodian refuses, he is subject to a contempt citation, which means that the judge will order his arrest and detention until he complies with the order of the court. As a practical matter, the writ of habeas corpus forces government officials either to formally charge a prisoner or to release him.

Due process today

Given the government’s conduct in Iraq and Cuba, where criminal suspects have been arbitrarily arrested and detained indefinitely without charges; where detainees have been tortured, raped, sexually abused, and even murdered; and where U.S. officials have steadfastly resisted any attempt to observe the protections of due process of law in the criminal-justice process in those two countries; and given the increasingly secretive nature of judicial proceedings in the United States in the name of “national security”; and given the Pentagon’s attempt to arrest and indefinitely detain and punish American citizens accused of “terrorism,” every American should be enormously grateful that our ancestors enshrined due process of law in the Bill of Rights.

Jacob G. Hornberger, Posted March 9, 2005Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

This article was originally published in the November 2004 edition of Freedom Daily.

Reforming the UN the Bush way

Unfortunately, neither Wolfowitz nor any other neo-conservative of the Bush administration seems minutely disturbed by the flagrant discrepancies between international norms and their recipe for action, decried by German philosopher Jurgen Habermas as "the unilateral, world-ordering politics of a self-appointed hegemon" reducing the UN Charter to "a scrap of paper".

Whereas the first administration of US President George W Bush grievously undermined the United Nations organizationally, through its manipulation of the Security Council in its anti-Iraq crusade, the second administration is now gearing up to go one step further and subvert the UN theoretically, by infusing its unilateralist doctrine of "preemptive" warfare as a legitimate principle of the world's pre-eminent organization.

This much is clear by the energy and zeal with which US diplomats at the UN are nowadays pushing for the adoption of proposals for UN reform by a select "high-level panel", including the hawkish former US national security adviser Brent Scowcroft; if adopted, these proposals will seriously undermine the spirit of multilateralism and collective war-prohibition enshrined in the UN Charter.

A report by the panel, titled "The High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change", is comprehensive and introduces 110 recommendations that cover not only UN institutions, but also other international agencies affiliated with the UN. Focusing on the spectrum of threats, old and new, confronting the international community, the report identifies six clusters of threats and makes specific recommendations as to how to address each of these threats considered highly "interrelated". These are: economic and social threats, including poverty, infectious diseases and environmental degradation; inter-state conflict; internal conflict, including civil war, genocide and other large-scale atrocities; nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons; terrorism; and transnational organized crime.

Unfortunately, despite its keen analysis of the changing world milieu in the recent past, and the need to make the UN a more effective machine to fulfill its twin agenda of global peace and prosperity, the panel's report points broadly in the wrong direction in organizational and functional terms.

Case in point, the report seeks to revamp the notion of "collective security" by adopting a broad notion of security that covers poverty and development. Yet the principle of collective security, enshrined in the UN Charter as one of its prima facie roles and responsibilities, can only be actualized if there is a global consensus on the nature of threats and the proper remedies to address those threats.

The promotion of collective security in a situation of diverse, even polarized, threat perceptions cannot succeed in practice, particularly if the concept of security becomes vague and indeterminate, thus making it even harder for a collective response by the UN membership. The panel's securitization of health, human rights, economic and environmental issues and concerns, or its North-centric threat perception overlooking superpower militarism, is highly problematic, making collective security overly broad and indeterminate, whereas it must be capable of operationalization along a definite set of dimensions.

The expressed or tacit understanding of collective security in both the UN Charter and throughout its history coalesce around a diffuse but nevertheless clear conceptualization as a multilateral action stemming from the uncoerced and relatively horizontal relations among the member states. Contrary to the panel, there is no need for a new lens or paradigm on collective security, especially when what troubles the UN is more the lack of collective will and less the absence of consensus on what this will implies.

But by far the most troubling aspect of this report is its endorsement of the notion of "preemptive" warfare championed by the Bush administration. The panel tackles the vexing problem of "anticipatory" self-defense of states and argues that "according to long-established international law, a threatened state can take military action as long as the threatened attack is imminent".

But this is a brazenly dubious assumption as international law hardly confers an endorsement of this dangerous idea that, in all likelihood, will lead to greater resort to international violence by lowering the threshold for unilaterally determined contingencies that warrant acts of self-defense.

The UN Charter, Article 2.4, expressly prohibits member states from using or threatening force against one another, and Article 51 has clearly restricted the right to self-defense to the cases when an armed attack occurs, an interpretation upheld by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (1947): "Preventive action in foreign territory is justified only in case of an instant and overwhelming necessity for self-defense, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation."

Indeed, various international law experts, such as Ian Brownlie (International Law and the Use of Force by States, 1963), have clearly maintained that "an armed attack must occur across national borders to trigger Article 51". As Abram Chayes put it in the case of the Cuban missile crisis (International Crisis and the Rule of Law, 1974), "It is a very different matter to expand Article 51 to include threatening developments or demonstrations that do not have imminent attacks as their purpose or probable outcome."

Yet US leaders today boldly claim a new policy that openly repudiates these crucial provisions of the UN Charter. The 2002 US National Security Strategy adopts the doctrine of preemption and states: "We must adopt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries."

Repeatedly, President Bush has stated that "the US will, if necessary, act preemptively", that the US will resort to "anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack".

This approach represents a significant departure from previous conceptions of self-defense and gives a green light to the US, or any other power, to commence offensive military operations without first exhausting other means, including diplomacy, and, worse, without fulfilling the requirement that an actual or an imminent armed attack has occurred.

The experience of the illegal invasion of Iraq, under the false pretext of weapons of mass destruction, presents a strong argument for narrower, and more restrictive, acceptance of anticipatory self-defense, notwithstanding Pentagon deputy chief Paul Wolfowitz' admission in Vanity Fair (May 2003) that "for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on".

Unfortunately, neither Wolfowitz nor any other neo-conservative of the Bush administration seems minutely disturbed by the flagrant discrepancies between international norms and their recipe for action, decried by German philosopher Jurgen Habermas as "the unilateral, world-ordering politics of a self-appointed hegemon" reducing the UN Charter to "a scrap of paper".

Of course, the Bush administration has its own army of international-law "experts", for example, those who claim that the UN Charter "is long dead", as well as its American detractors, such as Harvard's Kennedy School dean, Joseph Nye, who has written that the US is finding it beneficial to seek to legitimate its preponderant power by building multilateral support for its own unilateral policies instrumentalizing the machinery of the Security Council.

Thus the question: why should the UN, currently debating the merits of the "High-Level Panel Report", narrow the conceptual gap between UN principles and the hegemonic outlook of a lone superpower that is intent on illegally meting out justice or democracy and openly contemplating military attacks against Iran, Syria and North Korea?

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has described the next stage in UN history as a crucial "fork in the road", yet few UN watchers doubt that a main challenge of the UN today is how to save it from the scourge of Washington warmongers.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political science at Tehran University.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.

UN APPROVES DECLARATION BANNING ALL HUMAN CLONING

PRESS RELEASE FROM UN PRO-LIFE AND PRO-FAMILY COALITION OF NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS

The UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration today calling on nations to enact legislation to `'prohibit all forms of human cloning." By a vote of 84 to 34, the Declaration received more support in the General Assembly than when it passed in the 6th Committee two weeks ago. The measure sets an international standard that humans should not be created through cloning for any purpose, placing human life as a priority over scientific experimentation.

The decision ends over three years of deadlock caused by countries seeking approval for cloning research. Belgium, the United Kingdom, Singapore and other countries that hope to profit from cloning humans opposed a total ban, and declared they would defy the international moral agreement.

The topic was originally introduced at the UN by pro-cloning countries to gain implicit international approval for so-called "therapeutic cloning" (creating human clones to experiment upon and kill). In 2002, these countries requested that a treaty be drafted to ban only so-called "reproductive cloning." The countries insisted that human clones are for research only and should not be allowed to survive.

The pro-cloning countries lost support as Costa Rica took the lead, along with the U.S. and pro-life groups, to educate countries that cloning would violate the human rights of both cloned embryos and women. The embryos would be created and destroyed at the whim of scientists. Women would be treated as commodities to harvest their eggs.

Additionally, adult stem cells, the use of which is ethical, are already doing what cloning only promises by providing near-miraculous treatments for patients with a variety of illnesses, such as Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, heart failure, cancer and blindness.

The Declaration, introduced by Honduras, also calls on Member States to introduce measures to "prevent exploitation of women." Delegates from developing countries feared that women from poor countries would be targeted as a source for the large number of women's eggs that would be needed to support these "egg farms." The procedure by which eggs are extracted from these vulnerable women is painful and dangerous to their lives and health.

An additional 6 countries stated that they supported the Declarationbut missed the vote.

The news was highly praised by pro-life groups internationally as a considerable breakthrough, uniting the international community incondemning human cloning as exploitative and unethical.


For more information contact:

Wendy Wright, Concerned Women for America ( http://www.cwfa.org) 202-497-9590

Lea Sevick, C-FAM ( http://www.c-fam.org) 201-407-0826

Thomas Jacobson, Focus on the Family ( http://www.famiy.org) 719-651-3366

Samantha Singson, Campaign Life Coalition - Canada 416-576-1494

Jeanne Head, UN Representative for National Right to Life at 212-741-2681 or
917-660-3136

The Way Tyranny Works

Opposing It Is Unpatriotic!

No one wants to be an outsider. When I was still a small child, I spoke mostly German because both my parents immigrated to America from that hapless post World War I/pre-World War II national morass. As a little kid knowing little English, I was shy, weak, and Protestant in a Catholic neighborhood in a nation at war with Germany. I frequently found myself on the outside looking in – and that was when the neighborhood kids weren’t taking turns beating me up!

Hitler offered that it was the German Jewish bankers who plotted and launched World War I, and then offered they did so to economically rape Germany. Everyone in Germany suffered under the oppressive and horrible sanctions imposed by the Versailles Treaty against that once prideful and fun-loving people. The nation was untouched by the fighting, but suffered a devastating inflation from the horrific burden of unjust war reparations collected through the bankers. And when Hitler demonstrated that it was that treaty, orchestrated and arranged by the Rothschild-Warburg-based German Jewish bankers, Hitler generated both the public outrage and momentum he needed to rise to power and “lead.” And never mind that these same bankers, through the Bush family’s lucrative connections to Brown Brothers Harriman, financed Hitler’s horrors as well.

His dehumanization of selected peoples did indeed start with the Jews, but as we all know, didn’t stop there. Generalizations are most useful tools to politicians, especially when used to hoodwink ordinarily moral and spiritual people. Peaceful, fun-loving people are whipped into a bloodthirsty frenzy and a genocidal fever that results in mass murder, destruction and poverty. This mayhem, almost always unjustified, is sanitized by the term “war.” The results are an “us-versus-them” mentality demonstrated by all such warmongering societies, which feed upon the false generalizations conjured up by the absolutely worst and most rotten dregs in a society.

Every tyrant known to Mankind has invaded other previously peaceful nations under the absurd pretext of “self defense.” That the invaded nation has never committed an act of violence against the invading nation, its government, or its people, is of absolutely no consequence to the bloodthirsty heads of state seeking to expand their power and immoral authority over a people at peace. Such invasion is always offered under the pretext of “preemptive action.”

All invading tyrants are totally immoral, criminal and sociopathic. They are all liars, as lying is a professional requisite in politics. Politics conveys and legitimizes the power to steal, kill, transfer rightfully-owned wealth and property wrongfully to others, and to kidnap and incarcerate those who oppose the “legitimate authority” of the corrupt politicians. All politicians are corrupt! It’s just that some of the corrupt are not as desirous of killing people as others; but that’s the only minor difference attributable to them all. And there are very few of those! And this generally insignificant positive trait varies inversely from politician to politician relative to the level of power they’ve acquired!

It was Hayek that offered that the political philosophy identified as “socialism” brings to the leadership level the worst of politicians. And as Hitler’s form of fascist socialism, Nazism, and Stalin’s form of socialism, Communism, and our fascist socialism, “Democracy,” we too are now experiencing that wondrous camaraderie of a people wronged seeking solace from our joint suffering. We harmoniously demonstrate total loyalty and patriotism to our devoted, dedicated and protective dictatorship.

Individual freedoms and rights are to be permanently suspended for the greater protection of all! Otherwise, we can be retaliated against by those in whose nations we have murdered the innocent as well as those armed in self-defense. We can be targeted by the relatives and offspring of those we have killed, butchered and mutilated. We can be attacked via a poisoning of our water systems, or our air, or our food supplies in precisely the same manner as we have done to those we’ve ruthlessly and unnecessarily attacked. And we can decry the nuclear armaments of others we fear, a fear we created worldwide by our distinction as being the only tyrannical, socialist, dictatorship that has ever deliberately attacked and wiped out entire civilian populations using such same weapons of mass human destruction.

And anyone that thinks we are in any way, shape or form, wrong in having carried out those totally unnecessary mass murders of entire civilian populations at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Fallujah, well then, such dissenters are disgustingly unpatriotic and should be deported! Not only must we rally around our flag and be loyal to our nation, the latter identified as the current regime of politicians in power, but we must “support our troops!”

No problem with that – what choice do we have? Our troops are the real people of our nation, the brave and misled sons and daughters of yet more real people, who have merely extended their desire to live and let live into not speaking out against our despotic, ruthless and cruel totalitarian regime. They are not the sons and daughters of our ruthless, corrupt politicians, who lied and continue to lie to us. But by remaining silently patriotic, we are also supporting a drug and alcohol stunted brain-fried cretin and his secret cabal’s warmongering loyalty to a foreign nation that wishes to embroil US in yet another war.

No longer is a real pretense to go to war necessary! And neither is a manufactured one either! Here’s history’s list of manufactured pretexts: Fort Sumter; the U.S.S. Maine; the H.M.S Lusitania; Pearl Harbor; the manufactured invasion of South Korea; the “invasion” of Kuwait sanctioned at first by Bush I; and most recently, 9-11. As regards the last, just consider the past. Would the state kill its own people if it thought the event justified? Evidence points to the usual “homeland” intelligence operation involving our own CIA/FBI contracting “the hit” to the intelligence arm of another “friendly” nation. That’s the way a “hit” on one’s own soil by native intelligence is usually arranged. Think of the two ethnic groups that were secretly and quickly spirited out of the country immediately subsequent to 9-11 by our own dutiful FBI. To the state, civilians and members of our military are always expendable, whether needed to start a war or to fight one!

The outrage and anger generated by the deadly 9-11 hoax manipulating and re-directing public anger at Iraq, will now be utilized to attack two more nations that have done no harm to either our government or people. Our totalitarian dictatorship and its religion of world domination through unjust imperial wars will now be conducted openly and without any pretext. The shock and awe of the truth necessary to educate the dumbed-down American populace into action needed to impeach and remove America’s worst tyrant ever, just isn’t there.

Americans would never think that badly of our government in order to confront it and remove it as both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution provide. And we will again wrongfully attack, kill and maim the people of two more nations in “self-defense,” just like Hitler! And we’ll do it not only by being repeatedly lied to by our own government as always, but we will invade with that very same “friendly ally” that has continually spied on US. We’ll do it with Israel, a nation that attacked, killed and maimed US military personal, re-sold secrets we gave them gratis for cash profits to a nation now purportedly our greatest future enemy, and with an ally that obtained its nuclear armaments and capability by stealing them from US.

But pointing this out makes you a Jew-hater! Pointing out that our politicians are war mongers and criminals, and seen as such by the whole world, including members of our own press and individuals at high levels within our own government, brands you as a traitor. It demonstrates that you do not support our troops! You are disloyal to those risking their lives for you.

But is that what they are really doing? Or are they merely dutifully serving the people of our nation by risking their lives and limbs for the worst form of life in God’s universe; namely, the worst of totalitarian socialist society that has risen to the pinnacle of political leadership? Aren’t they dutifully and professionally just following orders, especially those orders involving the mass carpet bombing of innocent civilian targets, torturing citizens, and machine-gun murdering whole families? This is guts and glory?

I’m sorry, but I’ve asked you to think. Please forgive my crassness in being disloyal to my “country,” the handful of criminals, traitors and mass murderers who rule the ground beneath US. I can see how this rant can not only be misconstrued as being unpatriotic and unwarranted, but also very disconcerting and distracting as well. Please, do not allow me to take up any more of your time.

Go on with what you were doing – wave those cute little flags and paste those ribbons on the butt of your SUV. Just don’t spend too much money buying those commercially available badges of loyalty and patriotism. Goin’ out tonight – French or, I’m sorry, Freedom or Italian? You should conserve your quickly devaluating dollars so you can save up for a gallon of gas, or maybe even a gallon of heating oil, or perhaps a bag of potatoes. Remember, democracy always comes at a price. And freedom ain’t free!

Ted Lang is a political analyst and freelance writer. Email - tlang1@optonline.net

Copyright: Theodore E. Lang.
03/07/05 "Information Clearing House"