Special Report Citizens group seeks to convene Continental Congress, part 3

By Susan Johnson

Copy Editor

We The People Foundation, an independent citizens group that wants to reclaim the U.S. government for its citizens, held an informational town hall discussion at 7 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 24, at Veterans Memorial Hall in Rockford. The panel discussion continues:

The illegal monetary system

Jonathan Cobb then asked the panel to discuss the bailout, the Federal Reserve, and the income tax in regard to this unprecedented spending.

Kurt Kallenbach said the Constitution has specific money clauses. “One says the federal government has the right to coin money and regulate the value thereof. The other says no state shall use anything other than gold or silver in payment of debt. But we are not doing this.

He referred to Article I, Section 8, which states what the government can do. All the powers are enumerated, the legislative authority. If it is not listed here, it is outside the Constitution.

The Federal Reserve is completely unconstitutional. Fiat currency is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court said so in the early case—only gold or silver is constitutional money. You can have paper receipts, but it must be backed by real money. The printed money is unconstitutional. Who cares about bailouts? They have no constitutional authority; it is completely criminal. Our government is committing a crime by printing it and handing it to their private buddies.

Bob Pfluger said that at first, the states were printing money, but it was not accepted from one state to another.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln told Congress, we are going to have one currency. It will be supported by the wealth of the United States, which was being dug up in California, Colorado, places out West. With gold and silver deposits, we were rich. When you look at the creation of paper money being supported by the nation’s wealth, that is correct.

But the federal bank—there have been several federal banks. The first one was started by Alexander Hamilton, who was one of the anti-Federalists. He wanted a king. But he was on George Washington’s cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury. Andrew Jackson changed it again. He shut down the Bank of the United States, moved it to another bank, and opened it up. This was a very good thing. This provided more access to money for the rural farmers of the day so they could get bread. When you look at existing federal deposits—the banking system—this was created because there was a need for it. That need was a huge Depression that makes ours look like a cakewalk. During the Great Depression, there was 60 percent unemployment, and it never got below 30 percent until the beginning of World War II.

But when you look at the first income tax bill passed by Congress in 1893, it was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court as unconstitutional. They wanted to put a 2 percent tax on only those people who made $4,000 or more. It was not until the Wilson administration in 1912 that the 16th Amendment was proposed and sent to the states to become an amendment—a federal income tax based upon how much every individual person made during the course of a year. The biggest scam after that was the federal excise tax—where they can dip into your pocket every six days. You don’t see it being taken away because you’re looking at the dollars.

Rick Wos said there was
nothing in the Constitution about taxing the individual American. The whole income tax dance of the early 1800s-1900s was to bring tax relief to the wage earner. But they slowly started turning the purpose around; you will find no support for an income tax being applied to a single individual in the 50 states. The courts have been completely corrupted. It is unconstitutional.

The pawnbroker procedure

Bob Pfluger said:
There are two important things to note: When our banking system got started, the traveling merchants had gold as a means of trade. They would give their gold to the pawnbroker, who would give them a receipt, and the people knew they could come in and get their gold. One of the pawnbrokers noticed that he always had gold in his safe. He began to issue phony receipts and loan them out for interest and became very rich. The people in town wondered if he was stealing their money, so they went to the pawnbroker and demanded their gold. If he didn’t have it, he went to the next town and borrowed some from another pawnbroker, who charged him interest. But if he had no gold, he was hanged.

The next thing we should consider is that Lincoln used greenbacks to pay his war debt. He didn’t borrow money from the pawnbroker; he had greenbacks printed on the faith and good will of the U.S. We could have had greenbacks printed up on the bank debt and the car manufacturers, and it wouldn’t have cost us any interest. But what we are paying to a private organization—the Federal Reserve—is ridiculous. Why should we pay them when they created the money out of nothing, just like the pawnbrokers did?

Jonathan Cobb said we are all
right-wing extremists,

according to the Department of Homeland Security. Does the Patriot Act have relevance to us being labeled as right-wing extremists? How do those two things work to take away our liberties even further?

Bob Plfuger asked,
Who is doing the labeling?

One man replied,
Left-wing extremists.

Pfluger said everybody gets upset about the Patriot Act. He did not like it,
but the left-wing patriots—what they’re after is a specific group of people who are going into very specific libraries and trying to find information about building a bomb or getting blueprints, which any one of us can do. The same left-wing people said, ‘Oh, they’re listening to our phone calls.’ Everybody is listening to our phone calls. There is a point where it is good [for instance, someone plotting to bomb a place], but what is the interpretation of what is good and what is bad?

Misdirected security measures

The panel members said the Constitution does not guarantee your right to privacy, but the people have the right to be secure in their persons, their papers, and their homes. Rick Wos said:
The members of Congress committed treason by voting the Patriot Act into law without even reading it. It took seven days to write.

After the actual intent, Wos cited the case of Marbury vs. Madison, in which anything that comes in conflict with the Constitution is null and void. It was established that the U.S. Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what is law.

Kurt Kallenbach observed,
They took something that was directed against international terrorists and turned it against the people of the United States.

He said the term
homegrown terrorism

is
the planned use or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.

[Source: H.R. 1955, which was brought up in the House on Oct. 24, 2007 and was passed on to the Senate]

Kallenbach told The Rock River Times in a later interview that Rep. Don Manzullo (R-16) voted for this bill, officially called the
Violent Radicalism and Homegrown Terrorism Bill.

The votes were 404—yes, 6—no, 22 not voting. The Senate version of the bill is S.B. 1959, and it has been referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Kallenbach further explained,
The term ‘violent radicalism’ under Subtitle J means ‘the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically-based violence to advance political, religious or social change.’

Rick Wos said the Patriot Act was an act against the American citizens, not against terrorists. (He related an instance when he was stopped by police and handcuffed to a pole and his van was searched.)

Kurt Kallenbach said this federal government has no authority to create things or change things.
Until people start standing up and demanding they show where the authority came from, they cannot have any authority that we didn’t give them,

he asserted.

Rick Wos referred to the book Constitutional Homeland Security: A Call for Americans to Revitalize the Militias of the Several States by John Edwin Vieira (Bookmasters, Inc., 2007). Vieira says there is only one place in the Constitution where it says something is necessary:
the right to keep and bear arms is necessary for the security of a free state.

Wos said:
The Second Amendment defends all the other amendments. The 1968 Gun Control Act was taken almost word for word from the one used by Nazi Germany. The government must disarm its citizens in order to enslave them. Arguably, every single gun control law on the books is unconstitutional.”

Bob Pfluger said the Second and Fourth amendments are the only ones that refer to the people’s rights to be free.

To be continued…

From the October 21-27, 2009 issue