From schirado@lab.cc.wmich.edu Thu Oct 7 18:31:26 1993 Return-Path: Received: from grog.lab.cc.wmich.edu by mail.netcom.com (5.65/SMI-4.1/Netcom) id AA05937; Thu, 7 Oct 93 18:31:14 -0700 Received: by lab.cc.wmich.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA09194; Thu, 7 Oct 93 21:30:42 EDT From: schirado@lab.cc.wmich.edu (Schirado) Message-Id: <9310080130.AA09194@lab.cc.wmich.edu> Subject: Frog Farm #12 To: pazuzu@netcom.com Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1993 21:30:42 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 96010 Status: O Welcome to the twelfth installment of the Frog Farm. It's been a busy week here, and a rainy and cold one as well, but as I send this out, I'm seeing the last glorious sun we'll see in these parts for a good long time. I hope you're all looking forward to the onset of the new year, and experiencing success in all your endeavors. This installment contains: 1) Administrivia: FAQ changes, judgment proofing 2) Forwarded material from other Internet sources: the 9th and 10th Amendments, Commercial Liens and New York's Robert Schultz again 3) Excerpts from Thomas Szasz' _Our Right to Drugs: The Case For a Free Market_ 4) PC Kidnappers (originally published in _Heterodoxy_) 5) SPAWN: A Free Market Operating System! (from Michael Rothschild's _Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism_) ** Administrivia The proposed addition for the FAQ I published in the last installment has been added, with some minor changes. In addition, the subjects I discussed there, in combination with a lot of the mail I've been receiving lately, have led me to the conclusion that a new section must be added to the FAQ, namely, one entitled, "Judgment Proofing". Remember, your comments are welcome. I've added the section and have begun work on it, but without some serious help, it's not going to be the best it could be. Nevertheless, I hope to have the new version of the FAQ done in rough draft form by the time I finish up editing this installment. (I'm surprised I didn't get any comments on the proposed FAQ addition; are you folks POSITIVE it was perfect just the way it was? I doubt it! I'm just a novice at all this! Come on! How can I make it better?) On the subject of judgment proofing, we should all remember that I'm far from the best reference source on the topic; in fact, I'm going on the record now as stating that I have absolutely no personal experience whatsoever regarding it. Since it is such a crucial element of defending Rights, the information I decide to include in the FAQ should be of the highest possible timeliness and accuracy, and it is for this reason that I do not want to have to write this section myself, as it would fail miserably in these two regards. We'll see how it turns out. I'm also adding new case citations, and making sure that from now on, every one added has a YEAR on it... Well, it had to happen; I'm running low on archived material to share with the list. You will notice this installment is largely "sidereal" issues and views, and I hope that you find it entertaining and informative regardless. AS ALWAYS, please share any comments you may have! ** Forwarded material from other Internet sources >From Computer Underground Digest 5.76: [Begin forwarded message] >Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 23:53:38 PDT From: jkreznar@ININX.COM(John E. Kreznar) Subject: File 5--Question EFF yielding of crypto authority to NIST > Below is the text of the comments that EFF filed with NIST today. > > ... > > When the Clinton Administration announced the Clipper Chip, it > assured the public that this would be a purely voluntary system. We must > have legal guarantees that Clipper is not the first step toward prohibition > against un-escrowed encryption. Yet the Administration has not offered any > such guarantees, either in the form of proposed legislation or even agency > rules. Actually, they have issued such legal guarantees. They're in the form of the administration's vow to uphold the US Constitution. That document's 9th and 10th amendments preclude US Government denial or disparagement of the people's right to use cryptography (and a whole lot of others). The fact that these legal guarantees are being ignored simply illustrates that their tyranny is unbridled. By engaging NIST on this subject, the EFF is implicitly yielding to them authority which is not theirs to begin with. [end forwarded message] Forwarded from the ACT (Against Constitutional Terrorism) mailing list (original identifying headers deleted): >Subject: Use the system Despite my subject line -- the below article is being posted with a strong warning: DO NOT ATTEMPT THE TACTICS DESCRIBED IN THIS POST UNLESS YOU HAVE A VERY THOROUGH UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING. People who have tried this thing casually have had their asses handed to them. Notwithstanding the cavaet, the article does show that the very same people who have spent their careers twisting and perverting the "law" such that you and I end up behind the eight-ball, are VERY vulnerable to the "law" as they themselves have interpreted (warped) it. The point of all this being: It is possible to use the system, as badly bent as it is, to force compliance with the constitution, and as long as even a part of the system is still functional, I will use vigorously it to protect my freedoms and defend the principals inherent in the Declaration Of Independence. When there is no longer any remedy at law, then indeed there is no law of man's worthy of the name. At which time one must take up God's law and re-institute it here -- at the point of a gun if necessary. "... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." --Thomas Jefferson (letter to William S. Smith, Nov. 13, 1787) "Though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may AGAIN rally and recall the people; they fix to for the people the principals of their political creed." --Thomas Jefferson "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." --Thomas Jefferson "No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." --Thomas Jefferson, Proposed Virginia Constitution, June 1776 1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334 (C. J. Boyd, Ed., 1950) To wit: Commercial Lien Strategy: A "Presidential" Opinion by Alfred Adask In the last issue of the AntiShyster, we began to explore a new Commercial Lien Strategy (CLS) whereby common citizens, without the aid of lawyers or the courts, can induce government officials to actually obey the laws they have sworn to uphold. In brief, the Commercial Lien works like this: 1. Most people know that liens can be filed on another person's property based on a financial debt (if I owe you $10,000 and refuse to pay, you can file a lien on my property for the amount of that debt). However, few people realize that Commercial Liens can also be filed based on a contractual duty or obligation. (For example, suppose I contract to put a roof on your house, but fail to do so. Although I don't owe you any money, I do owe you a contractual duty to build the roof. Based on that duty, you could theo- retically file a Commercial Lien on my property as a device to compel me to complete my contractual duty/obligation to build your roof.) 2. When government officials take an Oath of Office to "uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States" (and/or Texas, New York, Utah, etc.), they enter into a specific performance contract with We the People. By virtue of their Oath of office, government officials assume a contractual duty of obligation to obey the law! 3. If a government official who has sworn (i.e., contracted)) to obey the law, breaks or ignores any law he's sworn to "uphold", common citizens can file a Commercial Lien on his property that will paralyze his ability to buy, sell or lease any property and ruin his credit rating until he corrects his breach of contract and once again obeys the law. For example, suppose a judge arbitrarily denies you some Right guaranteed in the Constitution he's sworn to uphold -- if he does, you can file a Commercial Lien on his property to compel his compliance with his contractual oath. Because the Commercial Lien is a non-judicial instrument, there is no judge or court involved in the filing procedure who could dismiss the lien and thereby protect government officials who have broken the law. Though we are still unable to sue city hall (and the crooks that reside there), it looks like we can nevertheless "lien on 'em". The Commercial Lien appears to be simple, inexpensive and nearly perfect for common people and pro se's. All they have to do is properly prepare a Commercial Lien against the offending government official, have it notarized, pay a modest filing fee, and file it with one or more County Clerks. With just a little time, a little research, and a little money, the average person is capable of compelling government officials to actually obey the law! It's almost unheard of. The last time the People successfully compelled corrupt government officials to actually obey the law was during the American Revolution -- and that was done at the point of a sword. The CLS may be similarly powerful, but it's done at the point of a pen. THE $64 QUESTION Clearly, if the Commercial Lien Strategy is lawful, it's ability to drive corruption and lawlessness from our government may be limitless. But that's the critical question: Is the Commercial Lien strategy truly lawful? The question's important because if the CLS is unlawful, any pro se who tries the strategy could wind up sanctioned, fined, or even jailed. The CLS certainly sounds lawful, and I know of several examples where the CLS has been used on government officials with apparent success. Still it's a new strategy, and despite the optimistic opinions of some very knowledgeable pro se's, it's too early to tell for sure if the CLS is really lawful. Part of the problem is that no matter how brilliant some pro se's may be, their legal theories are often flawed, incomplete, or absolutely wrong. If only we could get a competent licensed lawyer to give us a positive op- inion on the lawfulness of the CLS - then we might feel more confident about applying the strategy. But how could we get a truly competent lawyer to analyze the CLS on our behalf? Even if we could afford the cost, how could we trust a lawyer to give us an honest opinion concerning a strategy that might ultimately shake the whole government? The answer, of course, is that we (pro se's, etc) can't trust a lawyer's opinion on the CLS. But just because the lawyers might not be honest with us, doesn't meant that skilled lawyers might not offer honest opinions on the CLS to someone else like, oh, maybe some judges and government officials who've been slapped with the CLS. And guess what? That's just what's happened. SWORN & SUBSCRIBED How would you like to see a sworn opinion on the CLS from the president of the Florida bar? Sound unlikely? Sound impossible? Well, we got it. I haven't seen all the background documents, but it appears that Mr. Nelson E. Starr (a pro se litigant in Case No. 92-8051-CIV-RYSKAMP, US Dist. Ct. of the South. Dist. Florida) filed Commercial Liens on several top government officials and federal judges. Apparently, the defendants (government officials and judges) then asked Mr. Alan T. Dimond, president of the Florida Bar, to examine Mr. Starr's Commercial Lien and express his opinion of the lien's legality in a sworn affidavit. Someone sent me a photo-copy. In the first five paragraphs of his affidavit, Mr. Dimond outlines his con- siderable background as a lawyer. Then, in the last two paragraphs, he swears under oath that: "6. I have reviewed a document entitled "A Security (15 U.S.C.) Claim of Commercial Lien and Affidavit," recorded at Official Record Book 7358 [the last digit in this number wasn't quite clear in the photo-copy; it might be "7355"] at pages 703-705, in the Official Records of Palm Beach County,m Florida, on August 13, 1992. I note that the document names a number of public figures including the Attorney General of the United States, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service,... the Chief United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida,... [another] United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida, and others, at least one of whom is participating as counsel for the United States in this case." "7. I have been told by counsel of the United States that the Security Claim of Commercial Lien and Affidavit has no basis in fact or law and is a creation of one of the litigants herein. In my 24 years of experience, I have never seen or heard of any 'lien' such as those that were filed relative to this matter. Assuming the truth of the representation, and based on my experience in civic and bar activities and as a practicing lawyer and as president of The Florida Bar, it is my opinion that the document causes ir- reparable harm to the system of the administration of justice. While some of the harm may be compensable at law, no degree of compensation will adequately remedy the damage to the appearance of integrity of those named and of the system of the administration of justice. In my opinion, the filing of this type of lien is a direct attack in the justice system and on the general reputations of those named in the "lien". It may negatively impact on the financial credit rating of those individuals. It will probably have a nega- tive impact on their willingness to continue to serve as representatives of the United States. And, it constitutes an abuse of civil process that cannot be adequately remedied by an action at law." (signed) Alan T. Dimond; Sworn to and subscribed before me on the 7th day of October, 1992. He is personally known to me and did take an oath. Notary: H. Valdes. LINE BY LINE Damn. Dimond's affidavit was apparently intended to help defend the government officials, but if you stop to reread it, line by line, you'll see that one of the nation's premier lawyers (president of the Florida bar) pretty much says the Commercial Lien's got the defendants by the short hairs. But before you reread Dimond's sworn statement, consider some of the background information. First Mr. Dimond is a lawyer. His stock-in-trade are words. Linguistic precision is everything in law. Second, he was asked to provide an opinion in defense of several very powerful government officials and federal judges. Third, he was asked to present his opinion under oath. Conclusions: 1) Mr. Dimond's purpose was to prove the CLS was unlawful; 2) he should have done some considerable research into the CLS to prove it's unlawful; and 3) he must have chosen the words used in his affidavit very carefully: Point: If Mr. Dimond writes very carefully, we must read very carefully. For example, Dimond opens paragraph 7 with "I have been told by counsel for the United States that the Security Claim of Commercial Lien and Affidavit has no basis in fact or law..." ANALYSIS: Very strange. The defendant judges and government officials presumably sought attorney Dimond's personal affidavit because either 1) he's recognized as a legal genius whose opinions carry great technical weight, or 2) he's recognized as a legal whore who'll say anything for anyone (if the price is right) but whose opinion still carries great political weight by virtue of his status as Florida bar president. Curiously, lawyer Dimond does not say the Commercial Lien is unlawful -- he merely says he's "been told it has no basis in fact or law" by someone else. Hell, any first year law student can tell you his second-hand opinion is essentially hearsay and as such, is almost meaningless in court. Dimond continues, saying "Assuming the truth of this representation [that the lien "has no basis in fact or law"]..." Assuming? Are we to "assume" lawyer Dimond didn't bother to research the issue himself and prefers to base his sworn testimony, on behalf of some of the most powerful government of- ficials in the country, on nothing but hearsay? By attributing the opinion on the Commercial Lien's lawfulness to an unnamed "counsel" of the United States" and "assuming" that opinion is valid, attorney Dimond is ducking personal responsibility for a statement that implies (but never declares) that the CLS is unlawful. Under oath, Dimond sounds strangely unconvinced that the CLS is truly "without basis in fact or law". Dimond's evasiveness is telling. The powerful defendants must have sought Dimond's opinion because they expected him to rescue them with a brilliant denial of the lien's lawfulness. If Dimond didn't take time to analyze the lien's lawfulness and merely dashed out an affidavit on a moment's notice as sort of a "political favor" to the powerful defendants, why didn't he "go the distance" and swear that based on all his years of experience, he knew the CLS was absolutely worthless? The only reason I can imagine is that something in the CLS scares him more than the government officials who sought his help. (Could it be that he was scared that if he lied under oath, that someone would file a Commercial Lien on him?) On the other hand, if Dimond thoroughly analyzed the lien (as we can expect from a bar president handling a very hot issue for several very powerful government officials), why didn't he "go the distance" and swear under oath that he knew the lien was worthless? I can imagine only one explanation -- Dimond suspects the Commercial Lien strategy is lawful. Why else would Dimond base his affidavit on inadmissible hearsay and un- professional "personal experience", rather than hard professional research in a law library? Are we to believe that the president of the Florida bar, a member of a substantial law firm, a recognized professional in his field, didn't bother to crack open a single law book to find evidence that the CLS is unlawful? Six important federal officials (people who can play a serious role in Dimond's financial and political future) asked for his help, and the best he can do is vaguely recollect that "I ain' nevah seen nuthin' lahk it, nevah befo"? Pretty hard to believe. A more plausible scenario would be that Dimond did his level best to please the powerful defendants by digging through the law library for statutes and case law that proved the CLS invalid, but failed to find anything. If Dimond researched the CLS but couldn't prove it unlawful, he'd have to concede it was lawful. Perhaps he couldn't reference his own opinion under oath since, based on his legal research, he knew the CLS was valid. Therefore, Dimond could only support the defendants by skating around the issue with an af- fidavit based on hearsay and "assumptions" rather than facts and law. Next, Dimond notes that the CLS "is a creation of one of the litigants herein. In my 24 years of experience, I have never seen or heard of any [such] 'lien'..." ANALYSIS: Roughly correct, but irrelevant. The CLS is a recent innovation previously unknown to the lawyers and legal system. But labeling the CLS as a "creation" hints that its been spawned out of some twisted pro se litigant's delusions rather than the law, that the CLS is without legal and lawful foundation, and is therefore unlawful. But that's just Dimond's words. If I were spinning those words, I wouldn't say the lien's a new "creation"; I'd say it's a new "application" and thereby imply the Commercial Lien has a lawful foundations, and as such, is probably lawful itself. Further, just because Mr. Dimond has never seen such a lien in his "24 years of experience' doesn't prove a thing. How many lawyers had seen a law that blacks could ride in the front of an Alabama bus prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act? How many lawyers had seen a Constitutional "right to privacy" before the U.S. Supreme Court found it in Roe v. Wade? The law, as lawyers like to remind us, is constantly changing, growing, evolving. Well, on behalf of "We, the Mammals", I'd like to welcome "You the Dinosaur Lawyers" to a brand new wrinkle in the "theory of evolution": the CLS is about to render government corruption almost extinct. It's irrelevant whether Dimond's ever seen the CLS before. He hasn't seen the dark side of the moon, either, but it's there. The real point to Dimond's statement is that in all his experience, he's never seen one bit of evidence, precedent, statute, case law, or Constitutional prohibition to say the Commercial Lien is illegal. If he'd seen or found any evidence that the lien was illegal -- anything at all -- it would certainly have been cited in his affidavit. Instead, the sworn affidavit of the president of the Florida bar offers not one single citation to support his apparent hope that the CLS is illegal. OPEN SEASON According to the U.S. Constitution, all powers not specifically granted to government are reserved to the People. Which means that if the laws don't specifically say you can't do something, you can do it until the Congress legislates otherwise of the Supreme Court rules to the contrary. Which means, the "new creation" of the Commercial Lien is legal and lawful until law can be found or made to the contrary. Since Mr. Dimond didn't produce any previous law to prohibit the CLS, it appears there's no previous prohibition and the CLS should be lawful until some future date when Congress or the U.S. Supreme Court says otherwise. And that means, at least for now, it's open season on corrupt government officials. Lawyer Dimond seems to agree. He points out that the CLS, "... causes irreparable harm to the system of the administration of justice." Oh dear me, NO! Not "irreparable harm" to the "system of administration of justice" (not justice, itself). Oh, Pulleese! ANYTHING but that!! Why... why, the very thought of it is enough to jus' make me swoooon. Well, better stock up on smelling slats, Scarlet, cuz if lawyer Dimond's right about the paucity of defenses and remedies against the CLS, the entire government's about to pass out cold. Faced with the CLS's "direct attack on... the general reputations of those named in the 'lien'", and even though the CLS "many negatively impact on [their] financial credit rating," Dimond will only concede that "some of the damage may be compensable at law..." "Some?" "May?" Hardly the optimistic prognosis the defendants had hoped for. He's equivocating. Mr. Dimond's limp assessment of their chances to sue to recover damages caused by the CLS should scare every corrupt government official in the USA into packing his bags for Brazil. And it get words (or better, depending on your point of view). Even though Dimond claims the CLS is "an abuse of civil process" he nevertheless concluded that the Lien "cannot be adequately remedied by an action at law." Although Dimond does not absolutely say there's nothing government officials can do to protect themselves against the Commercial Lien Strategy, he comes pretty close. At minimum, he's warning the government defendants that they're in a losing proposition, and even if some kind of later litigation "may" generate compensation for "some" of their damages, that compensation will be, at best, inadequate. In short, they're going to lose more than they can ever hope to recover, which means they're gonna lose. Which means the Commercial Lien Strategy is solid. In fact, it appears so solid that Dimond predicts the CLS "will probably have a negative impact on the [corrupt government officials'] willingness to continue to serve [steal] as representatives of the United States"! Reader, do you understand what you just read? The president of the Florida bar has stopped just a few words short of saying the Commercial Lien Strategy is so powerful it will probably chase corrupt officials right out of government! It's one thing to read the theories an notions of paralegals, pro se's, and would-be writers like myself that fill the AntiShyster. We've shared some good ideas on the CLS but, still, it's hard to trust our judgement. But when the president of the Florida state bar implicitly agrees that the CLS is so strong that his best advice to government officials is "RUN, YOU MUTHA'S! RUN!!!", well, you gotta agree the Commercial Lien Strategy looks a whole lot more reliable. A word of caution: Although I interpret Mr. Dimond's remarks as a general commentary on the overall Commercial Lien Strategy, he was only talking about a specific Commercial Lien which I have not seen or published in the AntiShyster. Just because he was impressed by one Commercial Lien does not mean all liens (including those published here) are similarly formidable. No matter what I say, no matter what Mr. Dimond says, you must do your won research, and personally confirm the CLS before you start "liening on" government officials. A word of celebration: It's impossible to read Mr. Dimond's sworn opinion on the CLS without wanting to pass out the party hats and horns. One of America's premier lawyers is unable to declare that the Commercial Lien Strategy is illegal or unlawful, can't offer much hope that those who are "liened on' will be able to sue to recover for damages, and implicitly concedes that those who properly file Commercial Liens aren't likely to be sued for damages. It is too early to break out the champaign, but it looks like we've got a chance to take back our government. Cheers. Reprinted with permission from the "AntiShyster", POB 540786, Dallas, Texas, 75354-0786 - (214) 559-7957 - annual subscription $25. [...] >Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1993 11:27:00 -0400 From: kone@COURIER1.SHA.CORNELL.EDU Subject: News from the Empire: cracks in court To: Agian, Robert Schultz of the All county taxpayers alliance, has struck his blow agianst the state. From the UPI wire, 02 Oct, 8am: Albany-Robert Schultz, the man who has been challenging New York's borrowing practices in court, is now questioning the impartiality of the Judges who will untimately decide his case. Schultz has called on Court of Appeals Chief Judge Judity Kaye, to review the financial holdings of herself and her six colleagues, saying he does not think judges who own state or municipal bonds can impartially rule on his lawsuits over the state's borrowing practices. New York is also the only state in the Nation who is taxing information. It seems that in the middel of the night, just before the State legislature adjourned for the summer, passed a minium 5% surcharge on phone services that charge on time usage. This means that the local BBS, that charges .02 an hour has to collect a tax of 5%, while Prodigy has to collect a tax of 13.5% Although this tax only applys to usage of phone lines for "entertainment purposes" even a company like Prodigy can not addjust their softwear when they are informed about the tax the day before it went into effect. His Imperal Magesty, Mario Cuomo, had said "telecommunications is a key to New York's economic future" just before he signed the bill. According to the Imperal Tax Collector, James Wetzler, "I don't think this was something tha was thought through before it was enacted. That's what happens when you do it the last night of the legislative session." William Kone Kone@courier1.sha.cornell.edu ** Excerpts from _Our Right To Drugs: The Case For a Free Market_ by Thomas Szasz (c) 1992 ISBN 0-275-94216-3 Casting a ballot is an important act, emblematic of our role as citizens. But eating and drinking are much more important acts. If given a choice between the freedom to choose what to ingest and what politician to vote for, few if any would pick the latter. ... The trick to enacting and enforcing crassly hypocritical prohibitions, with the conniving of the victimized population, lies in not saying what you mean and avoiding direct legal rule making. Thus, the Founders did not declare, in so many words, "To justify slavery, in the slave states blacks shall be counted as property; and to apportion more congressional seats to the slave states than they would have on the basis of their white population only, black slaves shall be counted as three-fifths persons." ... ...There are three distinct drug markets in the United States today: 1) the legal (free) market; 2) the medical (prescription) market; and 3) the illegal ("black") market. Because the cost of virtually all of the services we call "drug treatment" is borne by parties other than the so-called patient, and because most people submit to such treatment under legal duress, there is virtually no free market at all in drug treatment. Try as we might, we cannot escape the fact that the conception of a demand for goods and services in the free market is totally different from the conception we now employ in reference to drug use and drug treatment. In the free market, a demand is what the customer wants; or as merchandising magnate Marshall Field put it, "The customer is always right." In the prescription drug market, we seem to say, "The doctor is always right": The physician decides what drug the patient should "demand", and that is all he can legally get. Finally, in the psychiatric drug market, we as a society are saying, "The patient is always wrong": The psychiatrist decides what drug the mental patient "needs" and compels him to consume it, by force if necessary. ... Naturally, drug companies defend the practice [of advertising]. "The ads," they say, "help educate patients and give consumers a chance to become more involved in choosing the medication they want." But that laudable goal could be better served by a free market in drugs. In my opinion, the practice of advertising prescription drugs to the public fulfills a more odious function, namely, to further infantalize the layman and, at the same time, undermine the physician's medical authority. The policy puts physicians in an obvious bind. Prescription laws give doctors monopolistic privilege to provide certain drugs to certain persons, or withhold such drugs from them. However, the advertising of prescription drugs encourages people to pressure their physicians to prescribe the drugs they WANT, rather than the drugs the physicians believe they need...Missing is any recognition of the way this practice reinforces the role of the patient as helpless child, and of the doctor as providing or withholding parent. After all, we know why certain breakfast food advertisements are aimed at young children: Because while they cannot buy these foods for themselves, they can pressure their parents to buy the advertised cereals for them. Similarly, the American people cannot buy prescription drugs, but they can pressure their doctors to prescribe the advertised drugs for them. ... If ever there were services that are fictitious or even worse, they are our current publicly financed drug treatment services. The wisdom of our language reveals the truth and supports the cogency of these reflections. We do not call convicts "comsumers of prison services", or conscripts "consumers of military services"; but we call committed mental patients "consumers of mental health services" and paroled addicts "consumers of drug treatment services". We might as well call drug traffickers -- conscripted by the former drug czar William Bennett for beheading -- "consumers of guillotine services". After all, Dr. Guillotin was a doctor, and Mr. Bennett used to teach ethics. ... Although it is obvious that the American drug market is now completely state controlled, most people seem at once unaware of this fact and pleased with it, except when they want a drug they cannot get. Then they complain about the unavailability of that particular drug. For example, cancer patients complain that they cannot get Laetrile; AIDS patients that they cannot get unapproved anti-AIDS drugs; women, that they cannot get unapproved chemical abortifacients; terminally ill patients in pain, that they cannot get heroin; and so on...Sadly, the very concept of a closure of the free market in drugs is likely to ring vague and abstract to most people today. But the personal and social consequences of a policy based on such a concept are anything but abstract or vague...the voluntary coming together of honest and responsible citizens, trading with one another in mutual trust and respect, has been replaced by the deceitful and coercive manipulation of infantalized people by corrupt and paternalistic authorities...helping politicians to impose their will on the people by defining self-medication as a disease... ... Ever since Colonial times, the American people have displayed two powerful but contradictory existential dispositions. THey looked inward, seeking to perfect the self through a struggle for self-discipline; and outward, seeking to perfect the world through the conquest of nature and the moral reform of others. [Any guess which of the two is morally reprehensible? You got it. If you want to change the world, change yourself first.] The result has been an unusually intense ambivalence about a host of pleasure-producing acts (drug use being but one) and an equally intense reluctance to confront this ambivalence, embracing simultaneously both a magical-religious and rational- scientific outlook on life. ... In 1914, Congress enacted another landmark piece of anti-drug legislation; the Harrison Narcotic Act. Originally passed as a record-keeping law, it quickly became a prohibition statute. In the course of the next seven years, by a curious coincidence of history -- if, indeed, it is coincidence -- in Rissua, the Soviet Union replaced the czarist empire, while in the United States, the free market in drugs was replaced by federal drug prohibition possessing unchallengeable authority. Excerpts from two key Supreme Court decisions quickly tell the story. In 1915, in a test of the Harrison Act, the Court upheld it, but expressed doubts about its constitutionality. "While the Opium Registration Act of December 17, 1914, may have a moral end, as well as revenue, in view, this court, in view of the grave doubt as to its constitutionality except as a revenue measure, construes it as such." Yet only six years later, the Court considered objection to federal drug prohibition taboo...In 1914, trading in and using drugs was a right. In 1915, limited federal drug controls were a constitutionally questionable tax revenue measure. By 1921, the federal government had gained not only complete control over so-called dangerous drugs, but also a quasi-papal immunity to legal challenge of its authority. ... Although we now shamefully neglect and obscure the differences between vice and crime -- and hence the differences between peaceful persuasion and government coercion -- these differences form the pillars on which a free society rests. Conversely, denying these distinctions (by metaphorical bombast, sloppy thinking or political propaganda making use of both) is the decisive step in transforming self-restraint into the restraint of others, temperance into prohibition, persuasion into persecution, the moral ideals of individuals into the immoral madness of crowds. All this [Lysander] Spooner saw clearly: No one ever practices a vice with any...criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty or property; no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and co-equal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property. ... During the first two decades of this century, several protectionist programs -- prohibiting alcohol, providing "pure" food and drugs, limiting access to certain pharmaceuticals -- converged and reinforced one another. Each of these programs was, of course, defined as a "reform". ruling out opposition. And each was based on the belief, rapidly gaining ground in the country, that the world was becoming too complicated for ordinary people to manage without the active support of the protectionist state, whose duty should be to safeguard people from the hazards of putting the wrong things in their mouths or bodies. With this view firmly planted in the American mind, an avalanche was loosened that no one could stop. It still has not hit bottom. As respect for the right to drugs diminished, enthusiasm for drug controls increased. Both Right and Left embraced Prohibition. The Left, intoxicated with anti-capitalism, discovered that alcoholism is a disease caused by the free market...the Right, intoxicated with religion, stuck to its theme that alcohlism is a sin. ... ...The more hopeless our drug problem becomes, the more stubbornly we clinhg to the myth that drugs pose a threat to every man, woman and child in the world, and the more certain we are of our duty to combat drug abuse by coerced traetment and criminal penalties at home, and by armed intervention and economic sanctions abroad. Truly, we are the redeemer nation, our centuries- old ambivalence toward alcohol seemingly entitling us to assume the role of moral savior not merely of our own people, but of people everywhere. ... Although there is no evidence that the American consumer ever complained about the free market in drugs, there is plenty of evidence that his self-appointed protectors complained bitterly and loudly. ... Franklin Delano Roosevelt is usually credited with two major achievements: 1) saving the country from its domestic enemy, big business, during the Depression; and 2) saving it from its foreign enemies, the Germans and the Japanese, during World War II. To fight big business, Roosevelt gave America big government; to fight the war, he gave it the atomic bomb. Overshadowed by these dramatic events, Roosevelt's role in the War on Drugs is all but forgotten. Yet the first business he set out to bust was the "monkey business" of merchandising medically "worthless" drugs. Of course, he failed to get rid of such drugs, but he succeeded in socializing the pharmaceutical market and undermining the legitimacy of self-medication. ...while free marketeers generally believe that "it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who was directly responsible for the abandonment of most of the principles of economic liberty on which this nation was founded," there is no agreement on why this happened, only on when it happened. Among the explanations usually advanced are the Depression and Roosevelt's personality -- both no doubt relevant. I would add another reason that is closely related to our present concerns, namely, the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition failed to prevent Americans from drinking, but succeeded in accustoming a whole generation to the criminalization of what, prior to 1920, had been an important and legitimate free-market enterprise. Although Prohibition, the law, was repealed, the *idea* of drug prohibition remained imprinted on the national consciousness and henceforth found expression in the progressive criminalization of self-medication. Generation after generation of Americans thus became inured to state supervision of their drug use, much as generation after generation of Soviet citizens became inured, after 1917, to state supervision of their economic affairs. ...Remarkably, some prophetic pessimists foresaw that Roosevelt's drug control laws -- ostensibly aimed at protecting the public [can you say, "Crunchy Frog?" ;)] -- were, in fact, "aimed at abridging the 'sacred right' of self-medication...People would have to visit a physician to get medicine they could otherwise purchase without a professional fee, at the local drugstore." Alarmed, a poor woman in North Carolina wrote to her senator, "If any one has a sick headache would it be a violation of the law to make a cup of thyme tea for relief? The poor can't have a Doctor for every minor scratch." But even the worst pessimists could not have anticipated that possessing and ingesting marijuana, which grew wild like mushrooms, would become both a disease and a crime. Clearly, the common people did not want drug controls and were never consulted. Who were the people who pushed for chemical statism and who *were* consulted? In addition to the muckraking journalists, support for federal drug controls came mainly from women's groups, the American Medical Association, and influential physicians such as famed Harvard neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, who was a personal friend of the Roosevelts. ... In 1939, emboldened by...successful efforts to increase the government's powers to restrict access to drugs, the FDA proposed banning saccharin. This gave rise to an amusing episode in the otherwise bleak and baneful progression of the politicization of drug controls. What the FDA did not count on was that Roosevelt was a regular user of saccharin, which was then the only noncaloric sweetener. "Anybody who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot," declared the commander in chief of the therapeutic state, and saccharin was safe. Today, the FDA is no longer so hamstrung by presidential preferences. ... The War on Drugs is a moral crusade wearing a medical mask. Our previous moral crusades targeted people who were giving themselves sexual relief and pleasure (the drives against pornography and masturbation). Our current moral crusade targets people who are giving themselves pharmaceutical relief and pleasure (the drive against illicit drugs and self-medication). Although the term "drug abuse" is vague and its definition variable, by and large, it is the name we give to self-medication with virtually any interesting and socially disapproved substance...because...we view it as both immoral and unhealthy. ...what Tuveson termed our collective striving for a "holy utopia" is the superglue that reconciles and unites in an intoxicating embrace of intolerance the diverse personalities and politics of Nancy Reagan and Jesse Jackson, George Bush and Charles Rangel, WIlliam Bennett and Ralph Nader. ... THE "DANGEROUS DRUG" AS SCAPEGOAT Suppose a social historian in the days when it was popular to accuse Jews of poisoning wells decided to study that phenomenon. Surely, it would have been a mistake for him to assume that the wells were, in fact, poisoned; that the culprits were invariably Jews; and that, in order to advise the authorities about how best to reform Jew-control policies, he would have to examine the "physiological and psychological efffects" of the poisoned waters. In fact, until modern times, water was a notoriously unsafe beverage, the source of water-borne infections, still unsafe in many parts of the world... ...The point is that -- just as, in medieval Europe, drinking water from *any* source was dangerous, and the matter had nothing to do with Jews -- so, now, the use of *any* drug is dangerous, and the matter has nothing to do with drug traffickers. Obviously, no drug is dangerous so long as it remains outside the body; and every drug -- even the seemingly most innocuous, such as aspirin and vitamin A -- is potentially dangerous, for certain persons, in certain doses. This simple fact is ignored by virtually all contemporary scholars and commentators addressing the subject of drug controls. ... Like all public health measures, drug controls tend to be regarded as unselfish, public-spirited legislation, their sole aim being the improvement of the health of the population. However, because self-interest is intrinsic to the human condition, this is, prima facie, an absurd assumption. It is also totally inconsistent with the historical evidence. For example, the 1906 Food and Drugs Act was actively supported by large food and drug producers -- not because they were interested in promoting public health, but because they wanted to restrict competition by cartelizing their industries. The story of margarine regulation is illustrative. Margarine, an artificial product made from processed vegetable fats, was invented in 1869 as a substitute for butter. It was (or could have been) cheaper than butter, tasted good, and gained immediate consumer acceptance. To protect their dairy industries, states with dairy interests undertook to counteract free and informed consumer choice: They imposed special taxes on margarine and banned coloring it yellow. By 1902, thirty-two states had banned coloring margarine, "the phrasing of the statutes conveying the clear impression that margarine was an unhealthy, low-quality imitation of butter". Discriminatory taxes on margarine remained in effect until the 1950's. ... The laws that deny healthy people "recreational" drugs also deny sick people "therapeutic" drugs. This is partly because some of the same drugs -- including our favorite scapegoat drugs, cocaine, heroin and marijuana -- have both therapeutic and recreational uses, and partly because certain drugs believed to be therapeutic for certain diseases (and sometimes available abroad) have not (yet) been approved by the FDA as both effective and safe. However, with enough political clout, special interest groups often prevail and determine both diagnostic and therapeutic policy. ... DRUG EDUCATION: THE CULT OF DRUG DISINFORMATION In 1979, when Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency, he did so as a Conservative with a capital C. The liberals were hippies who smoked marijuana, got abortions for their girlfriends and neglected their children. Such, at least, was the image into which conservative Republicans cast liberal Democrats. In contrast, Conservatives -- exemplified by Ronald and Nancy Reagan -- stood for morality, tradition and family values. These claims will, in my opinion, go down in history as the most transparent hypocrisies of the Reagan presidency. For whatever ugliness was committed in the name of drugs by President Reagan's predecessors, it was the Reagans who, through the repetition of a moronic anti-drug slogan, taught American children to spy on their parents and denounce them to the police. Reagan claimed that he stood not only for family values, but also for less government. As an abstract proposition, he surely would have agreed that a person's loyalty to his family is more important and should be more enduring than his loyalty to a temporarily expedient government policy. But talk is cheap. When the Reagans' vaunted family values were put to the test of practical politics, when old-fashioned allegiances came in conflict with the pursuit of personal self-aggrandizement, their noble professions were brutally belied by their ignoble policies. They embraced one of the most characteristic and most despicable practices of the great socialist states of the twentieth century: turning children against their parents in a holy war against enemies of the state. ... The merchandising of a new drug-detection device is illustrative. The kit, called DrugAlert, consists of three aerosol cans with which a parent can detect whether their child is "on drugs". To use this tool, the parent need only "wipe a piece of paper on a surface that drugs might have touched, then spray the paper with the chemicals," and -- presto -- cocaine turns the paper turquoise; marijuana, reddish brown. Does this kind of parental behavior invade the child's privacy? "Sure, it's an invasion of privacy," the manufacturer acknowledges, "but so is a thermometer...[P]arents need any tool they can get to protect their kids from drugs." [How about telling them the truth about them?] Unfortunately, this test is far from foolproof. It picks up over-the-counter antihistamines as cocaine. Too bad. But better safe than sorry. ... Most Americans are ignorant of the fact that the maniacal pursuit of "good drugs" -- expected to make us healthy and live forever -- and the maniacal persecution of "bad drugs" -- the cause of crime, disease and every other evil known to man -- are peculiarly American social phenomena...[but] it is important to note that the image of America as a nation of drug abusers is false. Actually, we are less given to self-medication (which we call "drug abuse") than people in many other countries. It is France that has apparently earned the dubious sobriquet of "the most tranquilized country on earth," making the French media ponder "the question...how the French can get hold of 3.5 billion mood-changing pills a year, or about 80 pills for every adult." Actually, the answer is simple: The French get their drugs by prescription, from doctors who are not persecuted by their government for prescribing all the Valium and Librium their patients want. These cultural differences bring to mind the adage, "Germans eat to live; the French live to eat." Mutatis mutandis, Americans feel it is morally justifiable to take pills to make oneself healthy, but not to make oneself happy; the French do not feel the urge for a sharp distinction between these justifications. ... I am neither black nor Hispanic and do not pretend to speak for either group or any of its members. There is, however, no shortage of people, black and white, who are eager to speak for them. Which raises an important question, namely: Who speaks for black or Hispanic Americans? Those persons, black or white, who identify drugs -- especially crack -- as the enemy of blacks? Or those who cast the American state -- especially its War on Drugs -- in that role? Or neither, because the claims of both are absurd oversimplifications and because black Americans -- like white Americans -- are not a homogenous group, but a collection of individuals, each of whom is individually responsible for their own behavior and can speak for themselves? ... Mainstream American blacks are Christian,s, who look for leadership to Protestant priest-politicians and blame black drug use on rich whites, capitalism and South American drug lords. Sidestream American blacks are Muslims, who look for leadership to Islamic priest-politicians and maintain that drug use is a matter of personal choice and self-discipline. ... Malcolm X wore his hair crew-cut, dressed with the severe simplicity and elegance of a successful Wall Street lawyer, and was polite and punctual. Alex Haley describes the Muslims as having "manners and miens [that] reflected the Spartan personal discipline the organization demanded." While Malcolm hated the white man...he despised the black man who refused the effort to better himself: "The black man in the ghettoes...has to start self-correcting his own material, moral and spiritual defects and evils. The black man needs to start his own program to get rid of drunkenness, drug addiction, prostitution." This is dangerous talk. Liberals and psychiatrists need the weak-willed and mentally sick to have someone to disdain, care for and control. If Malcolm had his way, such existential cannibals masquerading as do-gooders would be unemployed, or worse... ...Malcolm understood and asserted -- as few black or white men could understand or dared to assert -- that white men want blacks to be on drugs, and that most black men who are on drugs want to be on them rather than off them. Freedom and self-determination are not only precious, but arduous. If people are not taught and nurtured to appreciate these values, they are likely to want to have nothing to do with them. Malcolm X and Edmund Burke shared a profound discernment of the painful truth that the state wants men to be weak and timid, not strong and proud. ... The vile beauty of contemporary American anti-drug politics is that the authorities need no guidelines to recognize a drug malefactor. They know one when they see one. William W. Tucker, an internist and past president of the Sacramento-El Dorado Medical Society, said it well in this comment to MEDICAL ECONOMICS: "As the situation now stands, there are no clear lines. It's like being stopped for speeding. When the driver asks the patrolman just what the speed limit is, he answers, 'I don't know, but you were over it.'" ... The penultimate transformation of medical practice from a privately entrepreneurial activity to a publicly beauracratic one was brought about by the convergence of three critical economic and technological changes: 1) third-party payments for hospital and physicians' services and drugs; 2) new synthetic psychoactive drugs, such as Valium, replacing traditional "natural" drugs, such as opiates; and 3) computerized monitoring of doctors' prescription-writing habits and patients' prescription drug use. (I call this the "penultimate transformation" because we have not yet taken the ultimate step in this process: the formal nationalization of the country's health services.) [Eh? What was that about a Health Care Plan?] ... ...Dr. James Todd, executive vice-president of the American Medical Association, complains that "Americans are already the most over-self- medicated population." Todd's assertion exemplifies the confused equation of self-medication with drug abuse, and the mindless assumption that semf-medication is, a priori, undesirable. The same idea is voiced by Herbert D. Kleber, professor of psychiatry at Yale and one of the country's leading "substance abuse experts", who states approvingly, "Medically, abuse is often defined as nonmedical use." ... ...there is nothing particularly novel about our present drug problem. Nor is there anything particularly novel about envisioning a return to a free market in drugs. We need not reinvent the wheel to solve our drug problem. All we need to do is stop acting like timid children, grow up and stand on our own two feet. "It is ordered in the eternal constitution of things," wrote Edmund Burke, "that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Nor can men of infantile minds and childish habits be free. Their dependency -- on the state, not on drugs -- forges their fetters. ** PC Kidnappers by K. L. Billingsley originally published in _Heterodoxy: Articles and Animadversions on Political Correctness and Other Follies_, Volume 1, No. 8, January 1993 On the morning of May 9, 1989, eight-year-old Alicia Wade awoke complaining of pain deep in her midsection. Her father, 37-year-old Navy enlisted man James Wade, and her mother Denise, took the girl to the NAVCARE facility in San Diego, where initially she either couldn't or wouldn't explain what happened. The doctor found that the child's anal and vaginal regions had been torn in a sexual attack and would need to be surginally repaired. When informed of this, both parents showed great distress and began to weep uncontrollably. The NAVCARE doctor immediately called the local Child Protection Services. CPS immediately suspected family involvement for two reasons: the rapist, they believed, had not removed the child from her room, and Alicia did not immediately complain of pain. The CPS worker interpreted the hours the Wades had spent at NAVCARE as a delay in reporting the crime, and thus an additional sign of guilt. Though shaken by what had happened to their daughter and also by the hints of accusation they felt coming from authorities, the Wades cooperated fully in an interview with CPS. They could not hide the fact that they were overweight, which child welfare authorities often take as evidence of general neglect. They did not hide the fact that Denise Wade had been molested as a child and that James was a recovering alcoholic who twice blacked out while drinking in foreign ports. They did not know that they were waving "red flags" that further substantiated suspicions toward family involvement in the crime. They had no idea that authorities were already beginning to build a case against them and were taking particular aim at James Wade, who was a walking bull's-eye beacuse he was a white middle-aged male and a serviceman in addition to his other defects. The Wades were more interested in the facts. During an evidentiary exam at the Center for Child Protection, their daughter Alicia calmly told the physician that a man came through the window, claimed to be her "uncle", took her out in a green car and "hurt" her. They would have had a better notion of the ordeal ahead of them if they had known that on the space on the medical form for "chief complaint in the child's own words", the examining doctor ignored Alicia's testimony and wrote only that the child showed "total denial". Alicia provided a detailed description of the attacker's clothing, color of hair and eyes, even a pimple on his face. James Wade, a genial Missourian, cooperated fully with the police, who collected evidence including smeared fingerprints and a partial footprint outside Alicia's window. Wade submitted to a polygraph and a "rape test kit" which included a semen sample. He did not know enough about the murky legal realm he had entered to request that the sample be compared to Alicia's semen-stained panties, which police seized, but did not examine. After a long interrogation and numerous accusations by the police, James Wade said, "You're so sure I did it, but if I did it, I sure don't remember it." Child-welfare workers, who soon began to direct the examination of the Wades, repeatedly lifted this line from its context and construed it as an admission of guilt, not an expression of frustration, shock or anger. They were not interested in the fact that four of Alicia's friends who lived within a four-block area of the Wade home had also recently been sexually attacked and that, in each case, the attacker had entered through a bedroom window. Five days after the rape of Alicia, in another Navy housing project, five-year-old Nicole S. was abducted through a window and attacked. Some two weeks after the attack on Alicia, police confirmed that someone attempted to break through the bedroom window of the Wades' six-year-old son, Joshua. All these episodes notwithstanding, James Wade was the prime suspect in the rape of his daughter. While Alicia was being prepared for surgery, guards forcibly removed Denise Wade from the hospital. The surgeon was outraged that the mother was not present. Alicia was crying for her parents, but investigators from the Department of Social Services forbade the parents to speak to her. In spite of a request by the Wades, no one explained what was happening to the girl, whom social workers packed off to a therapist and placed in a foster home. In the argot of the child-abuse industry, what had happened to the Wades is called a "parentectomy". At this point, the Wades were unaware that their ordeal was part of a national syndrome which began in the 1970's with Walter Mondale's Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and has gained momentum in the last few years with the proliferation of feminist ideologies about the evils of patriarchy and politically correct thinking about the nuclear family as a locus classicus of sexual oppression and violence. Fueled by state monies, the child protection system has grown to immense proportions, like the monster Woody Allen describes in _Sleeper_ with "the body of a crab and the head of a social worker". In _Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse_, Richard Wexler examines the national child protection system and documents a number of horror stories. Parents have been charged with child abuse for being late to pick up their children at school, letting them eat breakfast at McDonald's too often, or for not letting them watch television after 7:30. In this Wonderland world, the operant principles have less to do with the Constitution than with the maxim of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's chief of the NKVD: "You bring me the man, I'll find the crime." Wexler shows how the statistics which assert the existence of a national epidemic of child abuse are based on reported cases in which some 60 percent are bogus, amounting to one million false accusations every year nationwide. In the police state atmosphere of child protection, informers remain anonymous, and the accused remains branded with a scarlet A even after they have been cleared of wrongdoing. It is a system rife with abuses and filled with the arrogance of power, yet the child police continue to assure us that child abuse is an "American tradition" for which the only remedy is massive, aggressive intervention by the state. The case of the Wade family fully magnified all the intrinsic defects of the system. The following account is based on original interviews with the victims, public officials, and some press accounts from an excellent investigative series in the _San Diego Union_. Its primary source, however, is a number of highly detailed reports by the San Diego County Grand Jury, which has been investigating the child protection system since 1988. All told, the jury received testimony from hundreds of witnesses from all areas of the system: the judiciary (Superior Court and Court of Appeal), defense bar, appellate bar, public defenders, Family Court, Center for Child Protection, District Attorney and a number of victims. The jurors also spent many days observing court proceedings, visiting "receiving homes" for children, and attending Juvenile Justice Commission meetings. The jury also received testimony from some social workers who wanted to blow the whistle on corruption. Such workers had to testify without notifying their superiors, lest they suffer retaliation. One institution in which the Wades found themselves enmeshed was San Diego's Center for Child Protection. The Director is Dr. David Chadwick, who has been described in the local press as a "definitive zealot" for a system ruled by politically correct thinking. Chadwick once told a state legislative committee that his organization performed evidentiary examinations, not in a disinterested search for the facts, but in order to "prove abuse". Reporters at the _Union_ found a number of instances where Chadwick's Center "diagnosed molestation when other medical authorities insisted there wasn't any". Through Chadwick's agency, the Wades learned the concept of "denial". In denying that James Wade had raped his daughter, the couple was seen, not as asserting innocence that could be adjudicated by a review of the facts, but rather, as being "in denial". And "denial", as the Grand Jury noted, is taken by the system as evidence of guilt, a tactic the child police share with the KGB and other professional witch-hunters. "Denial" is the child protection system's version of perpetual motion, an incantation that makes the presumption of innocence disappear. Richard Wexler records the following classic exchange between a caseworker and a woman named Susan Gabriel, whose husband Clark had been accused of molestation: CASEWORKER: We know your husband is guilty, you've got to force him into admitting it. GABRIEL: How do you know he is guilty? CASEWORKER: We know he's guilty because he says he's innocent. Guilty people always say they're innocent. GABRIEL: What do innocent people say? CASEWORKER: We're not in the business of guilt or innocence, we're in the business of putting families back together. GABRIEL: So why not do that with us? CASEWORKER: Because Clark won't admit his guilt. If, as was the case with Denise Wade, the wife should be so stubborn as to support her accused husband, she is adjudged to be co-dependent and "accomodating the denial". And if the child denies the charge, this is considered merely part of the "child-abuse protection syndrome". As the Grand Jury later reported, Alicia Wade's only "denial" was that her father was the attacker. The possibility that Alicia was telling the truth and that James was innocent never entered the minds of the child police. Once enrolled in the Kafkaesque Center for Child Protection, the Wades soon found themselves in the hands of social workers. Most members of the profession (about 70 percent in San Diego) are female and, according to both victims and longtime observers of the system, many come to the job seeing themselves as liberators, rescuing the innocent from an oppressive, male- dominated dungeon called the family. Social workers are not required to record their interviews, and their statements, often used in court, frequently include hearsay evidence and are not made under penalty of perjury. After sifting mountains of evidence,, the Grand Jury found that social workers "lie routinely, even when under oath". And there were "numerous instances" in which social workers disobeyed court orders. Everything is on the worker's side. They simultaneously acquire evidence for the prosecution and "provide services" to the family of the accused (which the accused end up partially or fully footing the bill for). Families enter the process eager to cooperate, but are soon horrified to find their statements distorted, taken out of context and used against them. In the Wades' case, for example, a social worker told the couple early on that if they showed any emotion (under the circumstances, a perfectly natural response) they would not be allowed contact with the child. When they complied, the same social worker then accused them of being "unconcerned" about their daughter, using this allegation in court. Jim Wade found himself "horrified by the absolute power over the lives and freedoms of an individual American that these individuals are allowed to exercise". All of the DSS reports about the Wade family failed to include anything positive. They did not mention that Wade's drinking was not a source of problems, and that he had not been drinking the day of the attack. There was no reference to his Navy record, which, except for his weight problem, was described as "superb". Reports also ignored Denise Wade's day-care business, which ran with no problems, and noone bothered to interview parents of the children she cared for. Reports further failed to mention that Alicia was an A student, who had just been named Student of the Month at her grammar school. There was no mention of family participation in community and church activities. In a videotaped interview, Alicia was asked with whom she would feel most safe. "My mom, dad, and brother," she answered. The transcript of the tape, however, chopped the reference to the father. A child-protection official later acknowledged that he never bothered to review the video. Feminist cliches and anti-family zealotry are not the only forces that drive the system. Here, as in political abuses, the Watergate rule applies: follow the money. Therapists who fail to back up the social worker's allegations can quickly find themselves out of lucrative court referrals. And referrals applying to military families are particularly lucrative, beacuse they are backed by the fathomless funds of the Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services (CHAMPUS). San Diego County pays court-appointed therapists $40 an hour, but CHAMPUS springs for nearly double: $78.60 for 45 minutes of psychotherapy. The Wades went to therapy twice a week. Alicia's therapist was Kathleen Goodfriend of the La Mesa Village Counseling Group, who worked on the case entirely without supervision. Like the social workers now pawing through the Wades' lives, Goodfriend ignored the evidence and assumed more or less automatically that Jim Wade had been the attacker, although his daughter continued to staunchly deny this in their sessions. Receiving more than $11,000 in state monies for this case alone, Goodfriend began relentlessly to brainwash Alicia Wade, now totally isolated from her family, pressuring her into naming an "acceptable perpetrator". That is, her father. The Grand Jury eventually subpoenaed Goodfriend's notes, which contained many comments about how Alicia "liked" her therapist. But Alicia's own testimony makes it clear that the child wanted only to go home. The Grand Jury was also alarmed that Goodfriend taught the child about masturbation "without any parental input or apparent interest by the child". While Goodfriend worked on Alicia's mind, the Wades' social workers were working on her future. They rejected Alicia's grandparents, aunts and uncles, the pastor of the family church and the father's attorney as possible custodians for Alicia because of their "allegiance with the parents". One social worker told Alicia's grandmother not even to waste her time coming to San Diego because her son James was guilty of raping Alicia, who would not be coming home to anyone in the family. Instead, they were sticking the girl in a foster home and the social worker and Goodfriend would be controlling all access to it. Children are put into foster homes as quickly as possible because that act opens the floodgates of federal funds. Foster parents receive $484 a month for a child from ages 5 to 18, almost twice the amount a welfare mother receives for her own offspring. Special care cases can bring up to $1,000 a month. And all funds are tax free. Some foster parents are concerned and caring, but others are entrepreneurs in what the Grand Jury called "the baby-brokering business". They depend on the goodwill of social workers to get and keep the little human beings who keep the government checks coming. Alicia Wade's second foster mother -- for unexplained reasons, the girl was traumatically removed from the first foster family where she was placed -- believed her story about a man coming through her window. She sought to testify that the child not only had no fear of her father, but desparately wanted to return home. This outraged social workers, who promptly yanked Alicia from that home and reported an "infraction" to the foster care licensing department. The social workers then placed Alicia in a third home. This one had a difference: the foster parents were trying to adopt a child through the "fast track" program. Alicia was offered as an obvious candidate. By now, the Wades knew they were in a hostage situation. To get their child back, they had to fully cooperate with accusatory bureaucrats who assumed their guilt from the start. James Wade willingly submitted to polygraph tests. One of these was inconclusive; he passed two others and the examiner found no intent to deceive. Then there were some 700 questions to get through, part of a battery of tests that includes the Thorne Sex Inventory, the Multiphasic Sex Inventory, the Sexual Attitude Scale, the Sexual Opinion Survey and the Contact Comfort Scale. Here are some of the 300 "true and false" questions: "I have occasionally had sex with an animal." "I get more excitement and thrill out of hurting a person than I do from the sex itself." "I have become sexually stimulated while feeling or smelling a woman's underwear." "I have masturbated while making an obscene phone call." "Younger women have tighter vaginas than older women." "Sometimes I have not been able to stop myself from fondling one or more of the children in my family." And then, near the end, a light touch: "I have fantasized about killing someone during sex." Virtually all men accused of child abuse in San Diego must then endure a stretch on the "penile plethysmograph". In this procedure, a therapist places the accused in a booth and shows him how to wire his penis to a mercury strain gauge. Then the therapist lowers the lights and starts a procession of erotica that can include child pornography, all the while watching dials that measure erection. During the video portion of the test, the operator stops the pictures, asks the subject how he feels, and waits until his organ "hits baseline" before continuing. (A San Diego social worker who administers the test has composed kiddy-porn audio tracks, with vignettes of fathers performing oral sex on their daughters.) At the conclusion of the test, the machine spits out a "phallometric score". Operating a penile plethysmograph is also a lucrative business, with some therapists charging $1,000 per session. Those backed by military insurance find themselves booked for more sessions than others. One tester claims to be able to use the device to provide "orgasmic reconditioning" to help the subject "learn to become sexually responsible". He is currently trying to talk the Navy into letting him treat the Tailhook offenders. Specialists are developing a version for women that measures the engorgement of the labia along with a gauge that takes the temperature of the vaginal area. Penile measurements are part of an inquisition that differs from the Salem witch hunts and the Moscow show trials in that the accused must pay cash upfront for the dubious privilege of being so degraded. The Wades found themselves required to accept all kinds of "services", such as counseling, therapy, parenting classes and "abusers groups". Though taxpayers shoulder much of the cost, the system bills many of the charges back to the family through a scheme called "Revenue and Recovery". The out-of-pocket costs to the Wades, before being billed for foster care, were $260,000, not the kind of spare change a Navy man keeps around. Some accused have insurance; some don't. Once stuck in the court system, moreover, the Wades found themselves at a constant disadvantage in trying to establish their innocence. Unlike the prosecution, they had no money to pay for "expert" witnesses. (Jim Wade later pegged his legal fees at $125,000, and his insurance did not cover these costs.) When the Wades realized the deep anti-family animus of the system, they struck a plea bargain by pleading no-contest to a charge of "neglect", part of a deal that would eventually return their daughter home. But after the bargain was struck, the county said that, based on the recommendations of Kathleen Goodfriend, Alicia would not be returning home. The Wades' attorneys argued that the parents should have moved to have the plea overturned and requested a jurisdictional trial. The DSS countered that if they tried that tactic, the DSS would also seize their son Joshua and put their family "further behind the eight ball". This threat constituted an offer the Wades couldn't refuse. Later on, as part of its review of the Wade case, the Grand Jury found that the entire juvenile system was characterized by "confidential files, closed courts, gag orders and statutory immunity" and had "isolated itself to a degree unprecedented in our system of jurisprudence and ordered liberties". Said former court referee William Burns: "Any time you have secrecy you have the seeds of corruption...the people who are behind closed doors can do any damn thing they want. And in Juvenile Court, they do." Evidence contrary to the system's position, the Grand Jury found, is "either excluded or ignored" and more than 98% of the system's petitions are granted. (During proceedings in the case at hand, for instance, the prosecution objected to Alicia's own detailed description of her attacker as "hearsay" and the court sustained the objection.) From October 1989 until June 1990, Alicia had no contact with her parents. While the court proceedings dragged on, devastating the Wades financially and emotionally, social workers determined that Alicia was "adoptable" and that a parental rights termination hearing was appropriate. All this time, the eager Kathleen Goodfriend was still interrogating Alicia. One of her therapeutic tactics was to say that that _she_ knew the father was the attacker, and that it was therefore "okay to tell". But the child persisted in her detailed story about the intruder. Alicia continued to speak positively about her father, saying, "I love my parents and I want to see them". As the date for a twelve-month hearing approached, Goodfriend stepped up her efforts, setting up a kind of tag-team system by ordering the foster mother also to pressure the child to "disclose". Thirteen months of isolation and brainwashing eventually took their toll. In late June of 1990, the nine-year-old girl succumbed. At a hearing later on, she said she couldn't hold out any longer. The record makes it clear that she did this to get the therapist off her back. After the "disclosure", all questioning of Alicia stopped. Goodfriend's "therapy" had achieved its goal. The foster parents immediately whisked Alicia away on a month-long trip to Disney World, an obvious reward for delivering the goods on her parents, as well as a diversion to keep her from recanting. At this point, Denise Wade, whose social worker had been pressuring _her_ to leave her husband, had to be hospitalized to prevent suicide. In December, James Wade was finally formally arrested on the charge of raping his daughter and found himself staring down the barrel of a 16-year prison term. The Torquemada in his inquisition would be Deputy County Counsel E. Jane Via, whose legal philosophy was summarized in the comment, made in another court case: "Just because we can't find evidence that this man molested that child doesn't mean that he is not guilty." Via had perfected one of the child abuse system's key strategies: winning by attrition. Her collaborators in social services farm out the children she is trying to extricate from their familes to pet foster parents, and delay "reunification" until the child "bonds" with the new parents. Then they use this testimony, backed by testimony from friendly therapists, to block family reunification and justify adoption. According to one investigator, the child police tell foster parents to take the children on long and frequent vacations. Then they turn around and accuse the natural parents of not seeing their children enough. It was Via who tried to justify removing Alicia's brother Joshua from the Wade home. Via's zealous pursuit of James Wade involved an irony which soon acquired crushing weight. Before handling the Wade case, Via was the Deputy District Attorney who prosecuted the man authorities now believe was the one who assaulted Alicia. Via was thus fully aware that Albert Raymond Carder had been molesting girls in the Wades' neighborhood, and that his modus operandi involved entering through a window, committing the crime and leaving without a trace. In the case of Nicole S., attacked five days after Alicia, the attacker drove a white truck, which was not consistent with Alicia's testimony about a green car. But it emerged that at the time of the attack, Carder did indeed drive a green car, which he reported stolen not long afterward. The stolen car report was never given to the detectives, who apparently never ran a vehicle check on Carder. Via ordered blood samples to be taken from Carder, whom she eventually tried and convicted. But later, when Via transferred to the office of the County Counsel and began to prosecute James Wade, she denied that she had ordered these blood samples and that there could be any connection between the cases of Nicole and Alicia Wade. (The jury found Via's actions incomprehensible, and recommended that the state investigate her for possible conflict of interest and ethics violations.) In the pretrial maneuvering, police finally examined Alicia's semen-stained panties two years after the attack and determined that they could be tested. It took months for DNA tests to be completed, but they finally confirmed that James Wade could not have been the man who attacked Alicia. It was a clear exoneration, but the D.A.'s office, where Via had previously worked, ordered that the tests be repeated, and the DSS continued to prohibit contact between father and daughter. Convicted sex offender Albert Raymond Carder, on the other hand, was in the five percent of the population whose genetic profile matched that of the stains. His shoe size matched the print taken outside Alicia's window. But even this powerful evidence was not enough. Once the child police could no longer deny third-party responsibility for the attack, the system marshaled its considerable resources to ensure that, however strong the evidence of Jim Wade's innocence, Alicia still did not return to her family. The Grand Jury later identified a "race against time to arrange for Alicia's adoption prior to the availability of the DNA results." When the result of the evidence was known, Jane Via strenuously resisted a defense motion to delay a hearing that would terminate the Wades' parental rights. Cooperating with Via, Court referee Yuri Hoffman showed himself willing to have Alicia adopted even when James Wade's innocence had been established. In November 1991, two and a half years after the ordeal began, the D.A.'s office dropped rape charges against James Wade. Then judge Frederic Link issued a rare "true filing of innocence" for the embattled Navy man, which prosecutor Cathy Stevenson unsuccessfully opposed in court. Wade petitioned the court to have the original neglect charge, which had been part of his desparate plea bargain, set aside to clear his name and free the way for Alicia's return. Wade said that the declaration of innocence was like getting out of jail. But his troubles were not over. As a result of his ordeal, Wade had become an outcast in the community and so had Alicia's brother Jason, one neighbor having forbidden his children to play with "the son of a pervert". There were what Wade later described as "sleepless night, accusatory stares, the unending tears, the strain on our family, the doubts planted in the minds of our friends". The legal fees, says Wade, "robbed me and my parents of our life savings". And, of course, there was the absence of their daughter during a crucial formative period in her life. But politically correct Jane Via did not believe that the Wades had suffered enough. Via argued that the finding of innocence for the parents "didn't matter" because the original petition was not sexual molestation but neglect, which still provided sufficiant grounds for Alicia's adoption. The Wades appealed to the Grand Jury for help, and it was only through their eleventh hour intervention that Alicia escaped being adopted away forever. On November 23, Alicia Wade was reunited with her family. The system that purportedly operated in her best interest returned the girl home using a medicine to which she was allergic, without the glasses she wore when she was taken from her parents and with no record of an opthamologist's checkup. Two days later, on Thanksgiving Day, Alicia turned 11. The Grand Jury found that the Wade case, which they said did not even need to be in the system, was far from unusual. In the San Diego area alone, the jurors found 300 cases with similar elements. No system could be without errors and mistakes, but the Jury was disturbed by the fact that rather than attempting to correct these problems, "the system appears designed to create or foster them, to leave them untested and uncorrected, and ultimately to deny or excuse them, all in the name of child protection." The jurors described the system as out of control, with no checks and balances. Faced with the overwhelming weight of the evidence, several agencies the Grand Jury criticized, including the DSS, admitted the problems and began to undertake reforms, including an emphasis on family reunification. The D.A.'s office was another matter. San Diego D.A. Edwin Miller is a board member of the Child Abuse Prevention Foundation, and the former head of his child abuse unit, now a local judge, is Harry Elias, married to Kee McFarlane, whose interviews with children were the basis for the McMartin preschool molestation case, the longest and costliest trial in American history. (See "Remembrance of Crimes Past", p.7) Miller's office justified its handling of the case and defended the vindictive Jane Via, but at least admitted that mistakes had been made. On the other hand, County Counsel Lloyd Harmon, Via's other boss, admitted no misconduct, nor even the possibility of injustice. Harmon's response to the Grand Jury, incredibly enough, maintained that the Wade case "was handled in a thorough and professional manner and with due concern for the rights and interests of all parties". While the child police circled their wagons, the Wade family languished in debt and tried to deal with the emotional fallout. Yet, except for Court Referee Yuri Hoffman, none of those who had attempted to ruin the Wades' lives stepped forward to apologize. No form of compensation was offered. And as far as can be determined, noone was fired or even severely disciplined over the Wade case. In December of 1992, more sophisticated DNA testing found a 100% match between the blood of convicted molester Albert Raymond Carder and genetic markers in the semen evidence in the Wade case. But as of January 1, 1993, the D.A.'s office had still not filed rape charges against Carder, probably because to do so would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of the suit James Wade had filed against the County. What happened to Jane Via? It was more business as usual, the tragedy of James Wade not having altered her attitude or procedures. In November of 1992, Via represented the DSS in the case of Gavin O'Hara, whose daughter had been seized by a social worker and placed in the care of the social worker's sister. O'Hara had been told that his being a Mormon and presumptive believer in patriarchy made it more likely that he would abuse the child. The social worker and her sister, testimony showed, had discussed taking the girl from him before she was even born. When Yuri Hoffman awarded custody to the natural father, Via went ballistic and petitioned for a new hearing based on the therapist's belief that the child was suffering "separation anxiety". It was the old attrition game that she had played with James Wade, but this time the court was having none of it. Judge Richard Huffman said that a "dumb system" had "brutalized" a child and sarcastically put Via down, to the undisguised delight of people in the courtroom. And the therapist/masturbation instructor, Kathleen Goodfriend? It would seem that brainwashing a child for more than a year to get her to accuse her father of a crime would at least disqualify someone from getting court referrals. But Juvenile Court is still providing Goodfriend with a steady supply of lucrative clients. When asked if Goodfriend's performance in the Wade case might merit some kind of censure, the official response was that a therapist was "innocent until proven guilty", precisely the presumption that had been denied to the Wades. Jim Wade retired from the Navy, and moved to his parents' farm in Missouri. There, he hopes to heal the wounds and build a new life among the people he grew up with. He has filed a suit against San Diego County, saying, "I just want to be able to pay my parents back the money they gave me to fight this thing." Slow to anger, Wade nonetheless tells anyone who asks that he believes the child protection system is filled with "pimps and parasites living off the miseries of others." Wade's ordeal was dramatic, but don't check the listings for a movie of the week. The story was optioned and shopped around Hollywood, but there were no takers. "The reason the networks turned it down," says Wade, "was that they didn't want to show anyone getting off [on a child abuse charge]. They got the wrong message, because that isn't what it was about." Jim Wade has also undertaken a mission to warn others about the system. He has appeared on the "Larry King Show" and other programs, but he cites the op-ed piece he wrote for the _San Diego Union_, right after his family was reunited, as best representing what he wants to say: "Take heed, citizens of San Diego and all Americans. There is a creature running amok in your midst which can steal your children, your financial future and, very possibly, your personal freedom, as it did mine." [end] Heterodoxy: The cultural equivalent of a drive-by shooting. Subscriptions are 25.00 US per year from: The Center for the Study of Popular Culture 12400 Ventura Blvd., Suite 304 Studio City, CA 91604 ** >From _Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism_, by Michael Rothschild: ...the ultimate example of market chaos is found not on the floor of a stock exchange, but in a computer lab in Palo Alto, California. Here, the Xerox Coporation maintains the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for the purpose of pushing information-processing technology beyond its present limits. Among other things, PARC's researchers have been responsible for the innovations that led to the personal computer and graphic dsktop interface that made Apple's Macintosh computer so popular. [An excellent history of PARC can be found in _Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer_, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (1988, William Morrow and Company).] Quite recently, a team of Xerox's computer scientists, led by Argentine-born physicist Bernardo Huberman, has been trying to make PARC's high-power computer network run more efficiently. Computer networks first appeared in the mid-1980's, soon after personal computers became commonplace business appliances. At first, the idea was to wire computers together so that a user at one machine could retrieve data stored in another one. But some computer users don't need access to remote files. Instead, they want lots of raw computer power. Crunching through the billions of calculations needed to run, for example, a weather model, can keep even a high-speed computer's central processor busy for hours. Since the scientists in Huberman's team all specialize in modeling chaotic systems, they often found themselves waiting for their computers to finish up. As in most offices, only a few people at Xerox's research center keep their machines fully occupied at any given moment. Most central processors sit idle, while others are only partially engaged in such light duty tasks as word processing. Huberman's team figured they could eliminate their waiting time if they could harness the wasted number-crunching capacity of the network's idle computers. The obvious solution was to write software that would manage the network. This control program would slice up computational tasks and dispatch the pieces to idle machines. When the calculations were done, partial answers would be reassembled into final results. In essence, the control program was an ultrasophisticated scheduler. This "command-and-control" approach had been tried a few years earlier at MIT, but it had never worked. There was no fair and simple way of assigning work priorities. Sometimes idle machines became busy again when their own users started a project. At other times, machines sat idle, waiting for results from calculations delegated to other computers. Because the workload on the network kept changing, the most efficient allocation of computing power couldn't be figured out in advance. Worst of all, the computers were spending more of their precious time communicating with the central controller than doing real work. In short, the solution became hopelessly bogged down by the costs of coordination. To solve these problems, Huberman's team did what all true innovators do: They turned the problem upside down. Instead of building a system with an even more sophisticated control program, they designed one without any central control. In its place, they created an internal market for computer time. This synthetic market was built atop a path-breaking piece of software called SPAWN. In essence, SPAWN is a useful computer virus - or, in light of its helpful properties, what programmers call a "worm". Copies of SPAWN code replicate themselves across the network under prescribed conditions. Before launching a new computational problem, the user assigns it a "dollar" budget. Then SPAWN subdivides the problem and its budget into smaller pieces. In effect, each problem component rides through the network piggy-backing atop a copy of SPAWN. Problem modules offer to "buy" slices of computing time with their "dollars" by broadcasting their bids on the network. Under SPAWN's open-auction system, idle computers respond by "deciding" individually whether to accept a particular bid. When a bid is accepted, the problem module moves over to that computer for the agreed amount of time. Both the problems and the computers constantly monitor "market prices". Problems must purchase enough time to get themselves completed, but they cannot overspend their budgets. The computers are programmed to maximize their revenues - that is, to squeeze the greatest possible results out of a limited amount of energy and resources. SPAWN works. Less than 10 percent of each machine's time is wasted in the bidding process. Without a central controller, a flexible and efficient use of resources spontaneously emerges from buying and selling among independent agents. In this self-organizing system, "dollars", rather than hormones, are the signaling medium. Auction prices fluctuate chaotically - but not randomly. When new machines are added to the network or more problems are run simultaneously, market prices respond appropriately. An increased supply of computing time lowers prices; a demand surge raises them. But the precise future path of prices cannot be predicted, because a healthy free market is intrinsically chaotic. [end of excerpt] See also: Waldsburger, Carl A., Tad Hogg, Bernardo A. Huberman, Jeffrey O. Kephart, and Scott Stornetta, "SPAWN: A Distributed Computational Economy" (Palo Alto: Xerox PARC Report, SSL-89-18, 1989) Waldrop. M. Mitchell, "PARC Brings Adam Smith to Computing" (_Science_, April 14, 1989, p 145) ** -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.3 mQCNAiuhO1QAAAEEAOuUGP0QKhow6Fao1yAZklOAoU+6sXt8978TaJYQQ+NTHMx7 zlnmG6d6LWarPgwIwyCyygEMU+2zAClde08YHOSI/zH+2rvLSaddgPcGJlf7V7+K uhu3nBJM6dhEBKY2P3UfO+CmQQemQ3Q8yR4m8HEpno1VRzUIh2QAFfmIg8VVAAUR tDNJYW4gTSBTY2hpcmFkbyA8aW1zQHRodW5kZXItaXNsYW5kLmthbGFtYXpvby5t aS51cz4= =WIMt -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----