Obama is angry about opposition to his anti-privacy crusade. Last week, he even slammed Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.; shown) by name, calling on the liberty-minded lawmaker to drop his “quirky” opposition to the administration’s controversial new “tax treaties” — agreements with foreign governments to further shred the Fourth Amendment-protected privacy rights of the American people. However, Paul hit back hard, telling Obama, publicly, that Americans’ unalienable privacy rights are not “quirky.” Privacy proponents celebrated Paul’s “courageous” stand.
By insulting and ridiculing Paul, Obama, a former “community organizer,” was relying on tactics popularized by the late community organizing guru Saul Alinsky. In his hugely influential how-to manual Rules for Radicals, which the radical pro-tyranny activist openly dedicated to Lucifer, Alinsky urges his disciples to mock those who stand in their way. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” Alinsky wrote. “There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.”
Obama, who spent years as a “community organizer” agitating for Big Government in Chicago, apparently learned the lessons well. “I’m calling on the Senate, in particular Sen. Rand Paul, who’s been a little quirky on this issue, to stop blocking the implementation of tax treaties that have been pending for years,” Obama was quoted as saying at the White House on May 6. “These treaties actually improve law enforcement’s ability to investigate and crack down on offshore tax evasion. And I’m assuming that’s not something that he’s in favor of.”
So, in short, in Obama’s view, because Senator Paul takes seriously his oath to protect the U.S. Constitution, he is “quirky” and might even be in favor of offshore tax evasion if he does not surrender, quickly. At least that is what Obama wanted people to think. But while the establishment media — particularly the Associated Press — did help telegraph Obama’s bizarre insults and ridicule nationwide, it also allowed Paul a chance to explain to Americans why he has been working hard to protect the rights of all Americans.
On Twitter, Senator Paul responded to a message quoting Obama, sent out by Tal Kopan, a Digital CNN Politics Reporter, with his own zinger. “Privacy and 4th Amendment rights are not ‘quirky,’” he told Obama in a response to the CNN reporter’s tweet. The response among Twitter users was overwhelming: Rand Paul is right to protect the privacy rights of Americans, and the Obama administration and its apparatchiks in the establishment media are wrong to demonize Paul and his defense of the Constitution.
But beyond sound bites and PR victories against Obama’s Alinsky tactics, Senator Paul has been almost single-handedly protecting what remains of Americans’ financial privacy from a rogue administration that appears bound and determined to put the final nails into the coffin of financial privacy — all while helping build a global tax regime with dangerous implications. From suing the IRS and the Treasury to putting a hold on new privacy-shredding “tax treaties” that trample the Fourth Amendment’s protections, Paul has been largely forced to go it alone. But his efforts are worthwhile, and have been fruitful, as evidenced by Obama’s quirky insults.
Late last year, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved what is known as the “Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance.” The radical measure would purport to mandate that the U.S. government collect and share with foreign governments and regimes — including brutal communist and Islamist dictatorships — a broad array of private financial information on accounts in the United States. It would also mandate that foreign governments and regimes collect information on Americans to share with Uncle Sam. All of it would be done without a warrant or any semblance of adherence to constitutional privacy guarantees. Also approved by the Senate Committee were privacy-crushing “tax treaties” with more than half a dozen foreign governments.
In recent years, with no constitutional or even statutory authority to do so, the Obama administration has been signing pseudo-treaties with foreign governments, pretending like it has the authority to do whatever it wants. It does not, of course. For the privacy-shredding schemes in question to come into effect legally, they have to be approved by the Senate. And thanks to Senator Paul, who placed a hold on the schemes despite the shrieking of Big Government mongers and the insults tossed out by Obama, the Senate has so far been unable to sneak the assault on the Fourth Amendment through the chamber.
Paul explained exactly why he is opposed to the unconstitutional agenda. In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sent in November, Paul, citing government snooping on e-mail and phone calls, noted that the federal assaults on the right to privacy were steadily growing. He explained that he does not support tax evasion. However, he also made clear that he cannot and will not support government schemes that threaten foreign investment in the United States, or the unalienable right to privacy. The measure pushed by Obama “punishes every American in pursuit of a few tax cheats,” Paul also warned, saying he would object to any request to pass the Obama-backed schemes through the Senate by “unanimous consent.”
The information being sought by Obama and foreign governments would reveal American’s most intimate personal data on their lives. “An individual’s bank account is the epitome of who they are as a private citizen,” Senator Paul told McConnell in the letter, noting that such information reveals everything from where people eat, shop, and travel to who their doctors are and what medicines they take. “At the very least, every American — whether at home or abroad — deserves to have their Fourth Amendment rights protected.” Apparently Obama thinks those rights and constitutional amendments are “quirky.”
In his scathing letter, though, Paul explained exactly what was wrong with the tax treaties being pushed by the Obama administration. Previous tax treaties, he said, focused on information related to specific suspicions of tax fraud, based on allegations supported by actual evidence. The new schemes take a much different approach, allowing governments to access people’s most private data “for hardly any reason at all.” That cannot be allowed to stand.
It also appears that the treaties could be a tool for Obama to implement the radical and totally unconstitutional Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which treats all Americans with accounts overseas as criminals until proven innocent, even while turning every financial institution into an unpaid agent of Uncle Sam in the shredding of privacy rights. This magazine and other sources have been exposing FATCA for years, along with the threat it represents to liberty, the devastating havoc it has unleashed on poor and middle-class Americans overseas, and how it is being used by globalists to impose a global tax regime on humanity.
As The New American reported last summer, the liberty-minded Kentucky senator, among the strongest advocates of constitutional protections in Washington, has also filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration on FATCA. In particular, Paul and others took aim at Obama’s privacy-killing pseudo-treaties with foreign governments and dictators signed in a bid to implement FATCA. Joining forces with the group Republicans Overseas Action, Paul is suing the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service in hopes of stopping the deeply controversial scheme.
In his letter last year to McConnell, Paul attacked the whole idea of collecting all private information and essentially abolishing privacy rights without warrants or anything else. “Bulk collection tax treaties are not a policy prescription to U.S. citizens conducting illicit financial transactions in a foreign country,” he said. “Most importantly, I cannot support a bulk collection tax treaty that has complete disregard for the important protections provided to every American by the Fourth Amendment.”
Indeed, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which Obama and everyone in Congress swore to uphold, clearly prohibits precisely the sort of mass data collection and sharing envisioned under the measures in question. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,” the amendment explains.
Paul is also getting outside support for his efforts among grassroots groups. “If the convention is approved, repressive states like Russia and China could use it to get information about political opponents who have investments or accounts in the United States and use this information to cause them or their families financial harm,” explained Neil Siefring, director of strategic initiatives for FreedomWorks. “In the process, information about American banking, businesses, and investors could be divulged, resulting in possible violations of the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans…. It will have been the United States government, which is charged with safeguarding Fourth Amendment rights, facilitating its degradation.” He called for the Senate to remove the treaties from consideration.
Far from being “quirky,” the Fourth Amendment, like other amendments in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, is an essential protection to the God-given liberties of free Americans. In fact, protecting those liberties is why governments are instituted to begin with, according to Declaration of Independence. The people of the United States and their elected representatives should be outraged that a man who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, with his hand on the Bible, calls parts of that Constitution “quirky” in his efforts to ridicule and demonize those who do take their oath seriously. And Senator Paul should be congratulated for standing firm in defense of his oath, the Constitution, and the liberties of all Americans.
Photo of Sen. Rand Paul: AP Images
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
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