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Monthly Archives

August 2014

From the Desk of Bob Barr

Uber Vs. The Status Quo

by Liberty Guard Author August 27, 2014
written by Liberty Guard Author

Police officials in the beautiful and historic South Carolina city of Charleston have identified a major new public safety menace requiring their immediate attention. This latest threat — being met by the authorities with an aggressive public awareness campaign and “sting” operations coupled with hefty fines in excess of $1,000 — is not drugs, gangs, or illegal immigration. The threat posed the good citizens of Charleston is: Uber!

Uber is a fast-growing, popular digital app for smart phones that provides consumers in Charleston and many cities across the country and around the world with an alternative to traditional taxi services. It is just one of many new digitally-based innovations having a major impact in the marketplace — entrepreneurial-based businesses creating new options for consumers in everything from online commerce (Bitcoin), to how you get around (Lyft), to where to stay on vacation (Airbnb). Even food trucks, a mobile spin on the concept of street food, have exploded with the formation of digital communities and communications.

So why is Uber seen as a public-safety threat rather than a benefit to consumers and businesses? Simple. Uber challenges the establishment; it is a threat to the status quo; it must be . . . regulated and controlled. And what better way to do this than through police power; in this particular case, the police power of the City of Charleston.

Welcome to the brave, new world that the Land once of the Free has become. Products and services like Uber are revolutionizing markets and marketing; shifting power long-dominated by large and powerful corporations and cartels, to individual entrepreneurs and start-up businesses. They are challenging the most powerful force in the universe – the force of the status quo.

Consumers are embracing these new technologies with open arms and open wallets; ready and willing to pay for new products and services that offer what they want, when they need it. But, in the same way that automobile manufacturers and dealers are fighting to keep upstart Tesla from competing against them on a level marketing playing field, government-empowered regulators whose mission is to protect the taxi industry from competition, are fighting Uber, and enlisting the support of the police to aid them.

The public rationale for this abuse of government police power is – of course – “public safety;” despite there being no evidence whatsoever that, for example, Uber poses any threat in that arena. It is not only Uber finding itself in the crosshairs of government agents and agencies. Regulators and law enforcement are targeting Lyft, mobile food trucks, and many other new products and services — also without any evidence that the public generally, or consumers specifically who wish to take advantage of such products and services, are threatened in their safety by doing so.

The lack of any credible threat to public safety – aside from inevitable and almost-always isolated incidents common to any business in any industry – illustrates clearly for anyone truly interested in free enterprise, what is going on here. For example, in the case of Uber in Charleston, police jumped to action only after meeting with local taxi companies. Similarly, Boston City Councilor Sal LaMattinarecently raised concern about Airbnb, where homeowners can rent their property on a short-term basis, after being “educated” by the local hotel industry as to the potential impact by this upstart business on that industry!

This unholy relationship between government regulators and the cartels of long-regulated industries is what business analyst Larry Downes refers to as “regulatory capture.” It occurs when regulators and industries are often the only two players interacting each other, which over time leads to a dangerous “customer-provider relationship” where each groups has “a vested interest in continuing the regulatory system long after the public interest benefits have been vastly outweighed by the anti-innovation costs.”

“The regulator becomes the industry’s cheerleader, and regulations shift subtly from protecting the public interest to protecting the status quo,” says Downes.

This increasingly prevalent display of government/industry cronyism seriously threatens innovation by creating regulatory barriers that prevent new technology from entering the market, even as they drive up costs, diminish quality and increase inefficiencies.

Uber, Airbnb, Bitcoin and other such services may not be perfect; and some almost certainly will be overtaken and ultimately replaced by competitors offering more efficient and responsive products. But this is precisely as it should be. Marketcompetition, not government-directed and law enforcement-protected regulation to skew the marketplace, is the time-proven process by which consumers enjoy lower prices and better products.

Any passenger stepping into a foul-smelling cab which he is forced to board by a government-licensed dispatcher at Reagan National Airport, for example, with a driver barely conversant in the English language, readily can attest to what a lack of competition can lead to in an industry. That same consumer just as readily can articulate why he is willing to pay a slight premium for a late-model, clean Uber vehicle, driven by an articulate, well-dressed driver who shows up within minutes of the customer activating his app and who knows exactly the best route to traverse.

Uber is not the threat; the status quo is.

August 27, 2014 0 comment
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From the Desk of Bob Barr

Have We Learned Nothing In The 23 Years Since The Rodney King Riots?

by Liberty Guard Author August 20, 2014
written by Liberty Guard Author

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the bloody “Rodney King” riots ripped through Los Angeles. In the years since those horrific events in 1991, police departments across the country have been faced with numerous racially-charged altercations – including many involving police shootings of civilian suspects. During that same time, American taxpayers at all levels of government have seen hundreds of billions of their dollars spent to improve law enforcement training, procedures, and equipment. But, have we learned anything?

If what is unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri following the August 9th fatal shooting of unarmed, black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer is any indication, all that training, money and equipment has been utterly wasted.

In less than one week, Ferguson transformed from a small and largely unknown St. Louis suburb into an occupied territory in the middle of a raging warzone. The act that initially sparked this unfortunate series of events — the shooting death of Brown – was quickly overtaken by an embarrassing series of missteps by political and law enforcement officials. The manner in which these bumbling officials issued conflicting and inconsistent statements and took similarly indecisive actions, serves as a lesson in how not to handle such an incident.

One of these factors, of course, is the danger posed by the over-militarization of civilian law enforcement. This highly problematic process moved into high gear with the 1993 ATF-Branch Davidian confrontation outside Waco, Texas, and accelerated rapidly after the 911 terror attacks. In recent days, many commentators and experts have focused on this very real and continuing threat to our civil liberties (I have written in the past about this alarming problem). Still, the infatuation many local and state law enforcement agencies have with whiz-bang military firepower, vehicles, clothing and mindset shows little sign of abating.

As serious as is the problem with over-militarizing domestic law enforcement in 21st Century America, in a broader sense it is a merely a symptom of an even more fundamental disease plaguing law enforcement organizations across the country and at all levels of government: the failure to understand, remember, and act upon the foundational principles on which our constitutionally-based federal republic was formed. These First Principles include, among others of course, that: ultimate authority in America resides in the citizenry, not government agents; government exists to serve the People, not vice versa; the Bill of Rights provides checks on government power rather than serving as a road map for government to erode individual liberty; and, federal government powers are defined and limited.

Occasional lapses in such understandings can be tolerated, but when married to the utter incompetence such as displayed by those involved in trying to control the discord in Ferguson, it is a situation guaranteed to worsen, to spread, and ultimately to feed precedent for further mischief by those always sniffing around for such opportunities.

When elected and appointed officials forget the Constitution and what it stands for, bad situations turn worse. The cast of characters reflecting this phenomenon now includes (among others) the mayor and police chief in Ferguson, and the U.S. Attorney General with his heavy-handed and premature move to seize control of the local situation.

It is said that “nature abhors a vacuum.” The modern corollary to that time-tested truism, however, is “government loves a vacuum” because it provides opportunity to step in and assert or take control. This is what happens time and again in these situations; Ferguson is but the latest example.

When local and state officials exhibited indecision and vacillation in their statements and actions in the immediate aftermath of Brown’s death, it created a vacuum. The national media, of course, rushed in to define and hype the situation to its benefit. This was followed closely by the usual “civil rights” champions elbowing their way to the camera banks — the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton, and the “New” Black Panthers. The unraveling of the situation accelerated quickly thereafter.

Even after it became obvious to even casual observers that initial comments and actions responding to the Brown shooting were mishandled, those same local and state officials continued to bungle their statements and actions; wavering between toughness and choruses of “Kumbaya,” and between detachment and forceful engagement. Not surprisingly, Uncle Sam recognized an opportunity to take control, and strode in with new directives, more “observers,” dozens of FBI agents, and the Attorney General himself. The feds claim to have taken the high moral ground; and, in so doing have once again diminished and pushed aside that authority which under our constitutional framework is supposed to be paramount – state and local government.

If we the People allow this inversion of constitutional power and federalism again to stand, it will confirm that we, too, have learned nothing in the past generation.

August 20, 2014 0 comment
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From the Desk of Bob Barr

Middle East Has Become Obama’s ‘Ground Hog Day’

by Liberty Guard Author August 13, 2014
written by Liberty Guard Author

“That’s my boy!” cheered one photo posted to Twitter this week by Australian Khaled Sharrouf — a terrorist currently fighting in Syria for the ISIS terror group. The photo featured his young son — holding in two clutched hands the severed head of a Syrian soldier.

Such are the macabre and deteriorating conditions in a part of the world on the verge of having been pushed to the side once the war in Iraq fell off the front pages of America’s newspapers. Unfortunately, while America’s attentions, including those of President Obama, turned to internal political squabbling, the ObamaCare fiasco, and other domestic problems, the terrorists of ISIS were hard at work. Finally, when ISIS officially captured the city of Mosul in early June, Washington realized the book on the Iraq War was not yet finished; “mission” still not “accomplished.” Now, nearly two months after ISIS launched its bloody offensive in northern Iraq, the group has its eyes set on Baghdad and on nationhood, committing grotesque atrocities in the process.

One might wonder how a relatively small group of militia fighters could, in a matter of weeks, erase more than a decade of hard-fought victories won with the sacrifices of body and blood by U.S. forces. It might be more easily comprehended if such gains had come in the form of a surprise attack from the shadows of the Middle East; however, such is not the case. According to the New York Times, ISIS in fact has been very public about articulating its goals in the region, going so far as to publish annual reports about its progress since 2006, when it was first established in Iraq.

Yet, in an Administration beset by systemic “intelligence failures,” with the President admitting time and again about reading of world events from news coverage, the virtually uncontested rise of ISIS is not really surprising. Nor is Obama’s delayed, haphazard response to the worsening conditions in the Middle East. Only now, after months of brutal killings of Christians, other ethnic minorities, and Iraqi military personnel at the hands of these Muslim fanatics, has Obama finally authorized limited airstrikes against ISIS targets; limited to the extent that even the Pentagon admits they will likely have little effect on the group’s overall strength now that it has become entrenched in the territories under its control.

Today’s frightening reality in Iraq is a failure shared by both major political parties here at home; and more specifically, both Republican and Democratic leaders who enabled back-to-back Administrations to engage in a dangerous game of nation-building that left America’s interests at home and abroad even more vulnerable than before. Despite spending hundreds of billions — if not trillions – of U.S. taxpayer dollars in Iraq removing Saddam Hussein and “rebuilding” the country’s infrastructure, we are left now with a humongous, hollow embassy complex (but one we still must defend), in a capital city under siege because of our withdrawal of virtually any way to protect our interests in the country plagued by long-simmering tribal and religious warfare.

Worse still — as the situation with ISIS proves — America is forced to defend these interests with a foreign intelligence capability that apparently remains unable to penetrate this part of the world. This deficiency exists despite a massive and expensive push to rebuild a foreign intelligence system that had failed to anticipate the fall of the Soviet Union a generation ago, was caught flat-footed more than a decade ago on 9/11, and dropped the ball again two years ago in Benghazi.

Because this intelligence network is so badly broken, there has developed a default position of blindly and repeatedly assuming “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This is why the Obama Administration’s answer to nearly every Middle Eastern crisis (which have come with increased frequency since Obama took office) is to arm the rebel group du jour – usually one that appears or claims to support American interests today, but works against us the next. Libya, Egypt, and Syria, come quickly to mind. At the same time, we have appeared strangely hesitant to openly and strongly support the one faction in that part of the world that consistently has been a friend to the U.S. – the Kurds.

Even Hillary Clinton has sloughed off her mantel as Obama’s former Secretary of State and jumped on the bandwagon — criticizing Obama’s recent foreign policy decisions and suggesting Obama erred in refusing to “build up a credible fighting force” within Syrian factions opposed to Bashir Assad’s regime. Of course, this would be the same factions the CIA covertly trained last year, and which now apparently have allied with ISIS in Iraq — supplying them with weapons, some of which almost certainly came from the United States.

Like the Bill Murray character in “Groundhog Day” – forced to relive that day over and over again – we seem to be caught in a similar time-loop of our own making. Unfortunately, unlike the movie, this Administration learns nothing to help us get off the merry-go-round with each new episode of violence in the Middle East. Even more tragically, this is real life, with real-world consequences for our inability or unwillingness to learn from past mistakes, to understand who our real friends are, and to comprehend the very real limitations on our ability to change societies in that part of the world that has resisted such efforts for millennia.

August 13, 2014 0 comment
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From the Desk of Bob Barr

CIA Oversight Needs Oversight

by Liberty Guard Author August 6, 2014
written by Liberty Guard Author

Mark Twain once quipped, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.” In Washington, D.C., the same thing can be said for the truth; in a flash, it will change — usually with a forecast of sanctimonious apologies.

The latest example of this phenomenon occurred just last week, when the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general revealed that the agency had in fact illegally hacked into computers used by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI); the body designed – ironically — to provide oversight of America’s intelligence agencies. True to Twain’s wry observation, it was only a few months back that such a claim was deemed “beyond the scope of reason” by none other than the CIA Director himself. John Brennan had huffed back then that, “Nothing [like that] could be further from the truth.”

One can reasonably assume Brennan had knowledge of his Agency’s cybercrime before piously denying any wrongdoing; after all, he is the director of the nation’s preeminent spy organization. In fact, this episode fits a well-established pattern by Intelligence Community officials of intentionally deceiving members of Congress, especially those tasked with overseeing their activities. Almost a year to the day earlier than Brennan’s denial, Director of National Intelligence James Clapperperjured himself in front of the House Judiciary Committee regarding illegal snooping by the National Security Agency; a “truth” for which he, too, later was forced to apologize.

For long-time watchdogs of the Intelligence Community, today’s culture of insulated arrogance and disdain for authority is disturbingly familiar. In the late 1970s, I served as Assistant Legislative Counsel at the CIA, and was involved in drafting legislation to provide oversight of our country’s Intelligence Community in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. Until that time, there was no real oversight of these agencies; a situation that fostered a mentality similar to that found in closed societies in which intelligence agencies operate with impunity.This sea-change resulted in a difficult period of adjustment, but things eventually settled down into a workable, if not completely comfortable relationship. Unfortunately, that system has over the years become largely unproductive.

It now has been more than a generation since America has engaged in a real conversation about the oversight of our intelligence agencies. Clearly, whatever safeguards the SSCI and its House counterpart — the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) – provided, are not working; at least not as intended.

Such is perhaps the inevitable evolution of the uncomfortable but essential need — even in a constitutionally-based free society – for the government to maintain a strong foreign intelligence capability. Maintaining that delicate balance between gathering and utilizing foreign intelligence with the secrecy such operations require, while ensuring accountability and adherence to our constitutionally-guaranteed rights, has never been easy. And the need to regularly and openly reevaluate and reform those agencies, those powers, and those individuals, has never been greater.

Since 9/11, America’s intelligence agencies have become even more powerful and insulated; with secret budgets far in excess of those in place just a few years prior. Advancements in digital technology have made them frighteningly potent — and creative — in how they gather and use the unimaginably massive amounts of information now accessible by them.

Information made public last year by Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency already possesses the ability to capture every single phone call made in an entire country. The addition of a $2.0 billion-plus NSA data center in Utah, now in the final stages of construction, ensures all of this data can be collected, data-based, stored in perpetuity, and analyzed as desired.

In spite of indisputable evidence that reform is overdue, Congress and the President continue to dawdle; permitting the agencies to continue to engage in ill-defined and at times illegal projects – masked by a virtually impenetrable veil of secrecy that even some members of congressional intelligence committees are blocked from piercing. Every recent attempt to enact meaningful reform is eithersabotaged from within, or rejected outright.

Having a strong and effective foreign intelligence capability is essential to America’s national security. However, by neglecting its morally- and constitutionally-obligated responsibility for setting clear boundaries for how these agencies operate, contemporary congresses have served as enablers for the type of behavior that culminated in this most recent, direct attack on Congress itself. Aside from some appropriate criticism of Brennan and his agency by at least some members of Congress, recent history affords us little cause for optimism that meaningful reform will result.

In much the same way as former President Bush awarded former CIA Director George Tenet the Medal of Freedom rather than firing him for failing to defend against the 9/11 attacks, Barack Obama effusively praised Brennan after it was revealed the agency he heads spied on the Senate and he then lied about it.

Removing Brennan from office should be but the first in a series of steps by the President and the Congress to conduct a thorough house-cleaning of this important arm of our government. Accountability – which our government rightly demands for Snowden – is and must be made to be a two-way street. A special prosecutor from outside the government should be appointed to oversee a criminal investigation of this latest and serious cyber-attack on the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of our government. And, until true oversight reform is implemented, Congress should use the power of the purse to cut off funding for programs and offices engaged in illegal and unconstitutional activities.

The time truly has come to end the too-cozy relationship between the watchers and the watched; it is time for oversight of the oversight.

August 6, 2014 0 comment
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