"It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."

-Samuel Adams

The Rule Of Law Is Being Murdered In Cincinnati, And No One Is Saying A Word

The failure to sound the alarm-bells now means funeral bells will soon be ringing

ON MARCH 11, 2016, a panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision denying Doreen Hendrickson's appeal of her 2014 conviction on a single count of "criminal contempt of court". The decision upholds unprecedented orders compelling a government adversary in a legal contest to make government-dictated, government-benefitting false testimony.

Also upheld is an equally-unprecedented jury instruction relieving the government of the burden of proving a statutory element of a charged offense: "[I]t is not a defense to the crime of contempt that the court order that the defendant is accused of violating was unlawful or unconstitutional."

The charge in the case concerned orders made to Mrs. Hendrickson by a federal district court judge in 2007. The orders were written by, and issued at the request of, the DOJ in the context of a lawsuit seeking the return of purportedly "erroneous refunds" of amounts withheld from Mrs. Hendrickson's husband, Peter, during 2002 and 2003.

In fact, the refunds were not errors. They had been made by an unusually well-informed, eyes-wide-open United States, and only after a bit of resistance and a great deal of scrutiny. What's more, they had been made even while the DOJ was struggling in several courts around the country to suppress Pete Hendrickson's first book, 'Cracking the Code- The Fascinating Truth About Taxation In America', in which he reveals information about the income tax which the government does not wish to be widely known.

After losing in that series of earlier efforts, the DOJ tried to work around its lack of a legitimate and lawful way of suppressing 'Cracking the Code'. The "work-around" was a bogus "lawsuit" in which it falsely claimed the refunds it had made to the Hendricksons-- the first of their kind in American history, but by 2006 being routinely issued to tens of thousands of 'Cracking the Code' readers by the feds and dozens of state governments-- were just big mistakes made by an IRS that had been caught napping.

As a key part of its new book-suppression "work-around", the ruling written by the DOJ for the signature of the presiding judge in the lawsuit included false "findings" about the Hendricksons' tax liabilities for 2002 and 2003 based on a fictional IRS "examination report". The ruling also included false "findings" about what 'Cracking the Code' says about the tax*-- by a judge who never read the book, and didn't even hold a single hearing in the case before issuing these official "facts" as requested by the government.

Most importantly, the "work-around" signature-stamped ruling contained two orders to Peter and Doreen Hendrickson. The orders are designed to compel the Hendricksons to personally repudiate Pete Hendrickson's research into the true nature of the income tax, and to create for the government a fictional basis for the application of the tax to the Hendricksons' 2002 and 2003 earnings (which the government would then be able to treat as a retroactive validation of its fraudulent lawsuit).

It is these orders Doreen Hendrickson is accused of "criminally" violating in the contempt charge for which she was convicted after two trials (the first having ended in a hung jury), and which was the focus of her appeal to the Sixth Circuit.

ONE ORDER COMMANDS MRS. HENDRICKSON TO DECLARE-- over her signature and under oath-- that she believes her earnings during 2002 and 2003 as a private tutor, and those of her husband as a purchasing director of a private-sector property-management firm, qualify as "income" as that term is meant in tax law. Mrs. Hendrickson does NOT believe these earnings qualify, and has testified repeatedly to that fact.

The government also does not believe the Hendricksons' earnings qualify. If the government believed the earnings qualify, 26 U.S.C. § 6020(b) requires it to produce sworn returns of its own making this allegation (a fact about which both government prosecutors and the presiding judge lied during Mrs. Hendrickson's second trial).

The government has never made 6020(b) returns concerning the Hendrickson's 2002 and 2003 earnings, as can be seen on Treasury Department certificates of assessment and IRS Master File transcripts for those years. These official records not only show that no 6020(b) returns have been created, but explicitly show the government's agreement that nothing the couple earned for those years qualified as "income" other than the $28.34 in interest from a national bank which the Hendricksons had duly reported.

Nonetheless, the government asked that the Hendricksons be compelled to replace their sworn tax returns for 2002 and 2003 with new ones. The couple was ordered to list their tutoring and property-management earnings for those years as "income", and to sign the forms indicating, under oath, that they believe this characterization of those earnings to be true and correct to the best of their own knowledge and belief.

The couple was given a second order, as well. This one enjoins the Hendricksons from filing tax documents "based on the false and frivolous claims in [the book] 'Cracking the Code' that only federal, state and local government workers are subject to the income tax," even though, as noted previously, the book makes no such claims, and the judge issuing this order, which was based on a "finding" as to the book's contents, has admitted to never having actually read the book.

The practical effect of this second order is to compel the Hendricksons to declare any and all earnings to be "income" on any future forms they complete, and to declare their belief in the truth of this characterization, since any failure to do so will be alleged to be based on the falsely-ascribed "claims made in 'Cracking the Code'...", and thus, a violation of this second order. This false construct was, in fact, deployed in the charge against Doreen Hendrickson, which included an allegation of contemptuous violation of this second order for her failure to declare a belief that $65 she earned in 2008 from a day's work as a movie extra qualifies as "income".

PLAINLY, BOTH ORDERS DOREEN HENDRICKSON WAS CHARGED with a crime for disobeying attempt to take control of two Americans' expressions of belief. Both orders try to force these Americans to declare beliefs for the government's benefit, and more, things the coerced speakers believe to be false.

Plainly, both orders are transparent violations of the speech rights the government is prohibited from abridging by the First Amendment, and lack even a pretense of validity.

Both orders are plainly fraudulent, as well. As has been shown, the government admits that what it wants the Hendricksons to say they believe is untrue even in its own mind. Further, the second order is constructed of a false ascription of content to a book the order-issuing judge has never even read.

The Hendricksons have refused to obey these fraudulent, rights-trampling, transparently invalid orders, just as would any decent, law-abiding American. Nonetheless, in 2013, Doreen Hendrickson was indicted on a charge of contempt of court for her courageous exercise of her right to control her own expressions even in the face of this executive and judicial corruption.

In trial, the government requested, and the judge issued, an instruction to the jury that, "[I]t is not a defense to the crime of contempt that the court order that the defendant is accused of violating was unlawful or unconstitutional."  By this instruction-- which invokes a doctrine of generic character, equally applicable to any court order as much as to these particular orders-- government-requested court orders are elevated to the level of divine edicts, to be suffered without recourse no matter what they command.

This doctrine will equally shield from challenge and correction an order to confess to alleged child abuse as much as it shields these orders to commit tax-law perjury. This doctrine says, "It doesn't matter what the state commands you to do. The state can command anything, legal or illegal, authorized by the Constitution or in defiance of the Constitution, it doesn't matter. You must simply do whatever you're told. If you do not, you go to prison, period."

This instruction has never been made in any trial before in American history. But now it has, and it has been upheld by the Sixth Circuit in a decision originally unpublished, but now published on the government's motion and therefore a formal precedent which can be used to argue for the same instruction in every other case involving orders issued by any judge.

IN ITS DECISION, THE APPELLATE PANEL argues for exactly what I have just described. Refusing to address the question of the lawfulness of the orders involved, the panel spends several pages arguing that it need not conduct any such analysis, finishing with, "[T]he constitutionality of the underlying order is not at issue in this case." Doreen Hendrickson should have just done what she was told, the panel says, whether the orders were illegal or not.

Upholding the instruction keeping the question from the jury the panel "reasons" that if the jury were to consider "lawfulness" it would invade the authority of the court. Again, the argument is, orders of a court are not to be questioned by mere citizens.

If told to jump, all a citizen can say is "How high, m'lord?" The pretense of a jury trial will be conducted for the ostensible purpose of getting the People's agreement that a crime was committed, but, well... not really.

Perhaps recognizing the inanity of its own positions in this regard and as in its own refusal to strike down the orders, the panel then digs deeper still. It goes so far as to argue that "lawful" is not an element of criminal contempt anyway, despite its explicit inclusion in the statute under which Doreen Hendrickson was charged, 18 U.S.C. § 401(3):

A court of the United States shall have power to punish by fine or imprisonment, or both, at its discretion, such contempt of its authority, and none other, as--

(3) Disobedience or resistance to its lawful writ, process, order, rule, decree, or command.

The details of these arguments and positions of the appellate panel can be seen laid out in concise detail in this filed "Petition for En Banc Re-Hearing" of the appeal (or in this more accessible, and slightly warmer "journalist's version").*

AT BOTTOM, THEN, A FEDERAL CIRCUIT COURT has held that an American can be ordered to declare beliefs she does not hold. It has further held that when tried for disobedience her jury can be prevented from considering the unlawfulness of the orders, and an appellate court needn't consider that issue. In short, a federal circuit court has established a precedent upholding an unchallengeable judicially-administered tyranny.

This decision has been out there for more than three weeks now. And yet, there has not been a single word about it on any website other than this one, to my knowledge, and not a speck of media attention.

No one has expressed an opinion about the legitimacy of this decision, or about its deadly threat to the rule of law. No one has spent a pixel asking why the Sixth Circuit would resort to these absurd and unprecedented arguments in this particular case, why the DOJ sought these bizarre, plainly illegal orders in the first place, or why one district court judge went along with them back in 2007, and another went along with this prosecution in 2013 and 2014.

Instead, everyone is just standing there watching.

The rule of law is being murdered here, in an effort to cover up information critically-important to the preservation (or restoration) of liberty and limited government in America.

And so far, everyone is just letting it happen.

Has America become the land of the sheep and home of the knave?

I hope not.

I hope people will finally start raising their voices, before it's too late.

PLEASE RECOGNIZE WHAT IS AT STAKE in all this. I say without any hyperbole at all that the preservation of even a hint of liberty for you and your kids rests on immediate action. We must slam shut the new door to despotism pushed open by the Sixth Circuit in this barbaric decision RIGHT NOW!  

You know how this goes. If the state gets away with dictating Doreen's testimony in this case, it will soon be dictating the testimony and "admissions" of anyone it chooses to target for property-seizure, compelled waiver of rights or simple punishment. If the damning "testimony" is not made, trial for "contempt" follows, and the unlawfulness of the order will be off the table for the jury, just as in Doreen's trials. The only thing that will matter is that the false testimony was not made as commanded.

This ploy will be used to control testimony about others, or concerning matters of public policy, also. And the public will never know. One feature of Doreen's case was that she was ordered not only to swear she believes what she does not, but to conceal the fact that what she said was not her own testimony, and that she was forced to say it.

The potential for evil here is unprecedented. Please, PLEASE get involved in helping to publicize this outrage and demanding the overturning of Doreen's conviction, if not the impeachment of every judge responsible for the whole ugly affair.

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

Letters to the editor of your local (or favorite larger) paper would be great, too. So would letters and emails to lawyer's organizations and law professors across the country. Keep in mind that EVERYONE will recognize their own stake in this issue, if it is properly put to them.

A serious and sustained clamor right now might succeed in helping the en banc Sixth Circuit decide to do the right thing, being thus informed that what they do will not have the cover of darkness and public disregard. Please make that noise.

"A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."

-Thomas Jefferson

* As good as it is, the odds of the full court re-hearing the case per this petition are vanishingly small absent a hue and cry from the public. The courts in general have already shown their stripes, and even in cases not being managed by the DOJ there is an institutional disinclination against repudiating decisions once made.

This article is permalinked at http://losthorizons.com/Documents/SelectedCuts.htm#14

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Why Does The Government Lie About 'Cracking the Code'?

THE ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION is the key to the restoration of the republic and the rule of law in America. See it below. (NOTE: It's very important that the entire 24 minutes be viewed.)

This video can also be found on YouTube at https://youtu.be/hgzzYl-eeUI.

(Here are links to the two pages to which viewers are directed at the end of the film: http://losthorizons.com/Documents/SelectedCuts.htm#7 and http://losthorizons.com/Documents/The16th.htm.

The other two mentioned in the film are http://losthorizons.com/BulletinBoard.htm and http://losthorizons.com/EveryWhichWayButLoose.htm.)

PLEASE be a real activist about sending this link to every single person in your address book, and about sharing it through facebook, reddit, twitter, and any other distribution channel with which you are familiar. Send it to every journalist you can. It's time to really make something happen.

Accompany your emails and posts with with a strong admonishment to watch the film through, and that doing so will show the viewer an individual-empowering, state-restraining truth about the income tax which the government has been trying to keep hidden from view for 75 years and which that person really needs to know.

BY THE WAY, as is impossible to miss, I have neither the skills nor the tools to make even moderately good films. This is simply not my forte. Anyone able to do better is encouraged to talk to me about that.

As is ALSO impossible to miss, though-- even in my amateur production-- reader video testimonials have GREAT POWER. Send me yours.

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Some Observations Regarding Educated And Accurate Filing

Tim Kendrick has posted a video on YouTube regarding donations. I didn't know what to do about it to begin with; I don't do what I do intending for anyone to feel obligated in any way.

But of course, no one IS obligated. I will continue to make my work freely-available here, and in my books for only the cost of a cheap paperback.

Thus, even though I post it here below, Tim's very thoughtful personal resolution and encouragement to others is just an invitation for consideration by those who may not be conscious of the fact that I can't do what I do without support. No one is to feel any pressure from it; if it moves anyone to act let it be solely because it seems right.

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The Left Coast And The Other Left Coast Launch New "Minimum Wage" Assaults On The Underclass

This pernicious pestilence just keeps on dishing out damage

IN MOVES EQUALLY RICH IN IRONY AND HYPOCRISY, two self-proclaimed bastions of liberalism are poised to dramatically expand their long-running racist and discriminatory grind-down of the underclass by way of the "minimum wage". New York and California each plan to raise to more than $15 per hour the minimum level of labor productivity needed to find work in anything but the black market.

Cynically marketed as a benefit to the so-called "working class", the minimum wage scheme is actually a political mechanism by which politically-connected job-holders keep lower-cost competitors out of the market. This creates a semi-permanent underclass unable to get onto the first rung of the ladder at which basic skills are learned and productivity is increased.

The dynamic is simple: If everyone believes he HAS to pay $15.00 +$1.125+$X to have a worker perform for an hour (the nominal minimum wage proposed plus the company's share of FICA plus any [marginal] infrastructure expenses associated with having the worker, such as HR labor, tools and equipment, training, etc.), then any worker capable of producing only $16.125+X's-worth of output (or less) will never have a job.

In effect, minimum-wage regimes bar a certain class of inexperienced or poorly-educated or physically or mentally handicapped people, who are therefore low-skilled and low-productivity, from being allowed to work. With typically twisted political spin, this is done in the name of compassion.

The truth is, minimum-wage laws exist precisely in order to exclude inexperienced, lower-value or lower-cost workers from the labor market on behalf of established workers, who otherwise would find their pay levels under downward pressure from the less-expensive competition. Established workers in Northern-state-based unions lobbied for the first of these laws in order to prevent migrating black workers from the South, foreign immigrants and teenagers-- all of whom are willing to work for lower pay-- from competing for existing jobs during the Great Depression.

KEEPING THE AVAILABLE LABOR SUPPLY FROM CLEARING THE MARKET is a harm to everyone, of course. It is even bad for the protected workers.

Inevitably, those kept from working become a welfare class and a burden of one sort or another on those who are allowed to work. Previously, low-productivity workers had simply adjusted their expectations and consumption to the reality of their ability to provide for themselves, and used their low-paid worktime to improve their skills and habits in order to rise in pay. Now, they are wards of the state. Their expectations are a political issue, and their needs are met not only without any contribution from them at all, but at the additional expense of an army of government bureaucrats administering their welfare.

Further, maintaining the sizable portion of society idled by minimum-wage laws requires a thicket of regulatory impositions against liberty. These, in turn, require the corruption of American principles of law and Constitutional limitations on the state necessary to permit them-- fit company for the corruption of social comity, the erosion of the work ethic, and the assault on reason and everyone's innate sense of right and wrong also necessary to facilitate this pustulent political sop to a rent-seeking special interest.

At the same time, many of these idled Americans turn to the black-market as the only area in which they can find work and the satisfactions of productive activity. Thus, "minimum wage" laws expand parts of the economy in which legal norms and property-rights protections are uncertain at best, and violence and other social pathologies are inevitable.

FUTHER STILL, THE INABILITY OF YOUNG WORKERS to start in the jobs market at relatively high levels of productivity has led to a devolution of our educational institutions. Many American schools have shifted from a focus on the kind of general liberal arts programs needed to produce optimal citizens for self-government and the most fully-realized human beings into vocational programs geared toward job acquisition.

Schools now forego history, economics, meaningful civics and political science and other once well-represented areas of instruction in a futile effort to send every high school graduate out the door able to generate the minimum productivity needed to get a job. Since some students are simply incapable of high productivity for various reasons but the school systems are institutionally-obligated to try to square those circles nonetheless, what is offered to all students suffers in quality and is made more expensive.

Of course, the liberal arts exposure that is foregone in this devil's bargain is never recovered. The specialization that had once covered both work skills and general education has not simply switched between providers.

Schools may imagine themselves able to teach job skills (rightly or wrongly), and "minimum wage" laws have compelled them to make the attempt at the expense of other curricula. But the world of work will never deliver the history, art, music, economics and other areas of knowledge critical to high-grade thinking skills which has been pushed out of the schools.

In short, minimum-wage laws are a massive wrong-- morally, legally and practically. More, all of that is without even considering the direct adverse effects of the market's unstoppable automatic efforts to clear itself despite the unnatural imposition.

If labor is made unnaturally expensive by the imposition of pay-floors, what is being paid for it must perforce resume equilibrium. This can only happen by a cheapening of the value of the currency.

If the real market had found that an hour's worth of John Smith's work was worth the buying power of $7.50, once John is paid $15.00 for the same work that $15 must and will soon come to have no more than the buying power that once could be found in $7.50. Even an arrogant government can't fool or fight the laws of economics, and it won't even try.

Instead, that government will happily churn out the extra printed "money" needed to accommodate reality. Indeed, it has no choice, since it is now obliged to pay its own workers the higher rates, as well as the higher prices now having to be asked for everyone else's goods for which the labor-factor cost has doubled.

And guess what happens then, btw? John soon needs another raise in order to again suppress the unemployed lower-cost competition, and the whole ugly little cycle repeats.

FINALLY, THIS LITTLE ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY would not be complete without observing the evil effect of nature-defying schemes like the "minimum wage" on honesty in the statehouse and the academy.

Because policies like the "minimum wage" have beneficiaries, they inevitably have defenders and apologists, too. Defenses and apologias of the indefensible can only be managed with lies, and the "minimum wage" regimes have sucked many a venal politician and economists into unscrupulous and shameful mendacity.

On one level this lying is just a personal problem for these scoundrels. But of course, lies pollute everything around them, and as a society, we can't afford that any more than we can the economic distortions of the minimum wage. Tom Paine said it best, and gave us clear warning of which we should take heed:

"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."

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A Patriot Activist Talks About CtC

"McFloyd" on who got the tax wrong, and who gets it right

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The IRS and SSA Share A Nice Institutional Acknowledgement Of CtC

It's always gratifying when these agencies just come right out and admit the truth...

OVER THE 12+ YEARS SINCE CtC REVEALED the liberating truth about the income tax, government agencies have steadily issued acknowledgements of that truth to the real American men and women who have applied those revelations and upheld the true rule of law. These acknowledgements most commonly take the form of complete refunds of every penny taken from someone under the auspices of the tax.

But sometimes other forms of acknowledgement are presented. Today we're going to look at one of these more unusual varieties, an example of which was recently sent to one of those real Americans who are standing up to enforce the Constitution.

THE GOOD FELLOW WHO RECEIVED the unusual acknowledgement at which we're about to look is an accomplished upholder of the law. He has three proudly-posted victories to his credit so far since learning the truth about the tax a few years ago, successfully overcoming false assertions that his earnings were subject to the income tax, and recovering everything withheld from him in connection with that tax during each of those three years.

But for today, this gentleman's name is going to go unmentioned, because despite the IRS having faced the truth concerning his earnings for each of those other years (after subjecting each claim to the agency's routine rigorous scrutiny), for some reason the IRS employee that began to process this man's 2012 filing has been dragging his or her feet. A lawsuit is in progress, and what we're going to look at is relevant to that. Our friend doesn't want to show his hand too soon.

So, there is no name to show until this contest is over. But the chink in the tax agency's stonewall that was revealed a few weeks ago will be of great interest to all nonetheless.

WITHOUT ANY PROMPTING, and to our hero's considerable surprise, out of the blue and into the mailbox came a notice from the Social Security Administration announcing the IRS acknowledgment that our hero's earnings as a contractor in 2012 don't qualify as IRC-defined "self-employment income" (the kind of contractor pay that is subject to the tax). Our hero's educated rebuttal of the contrary "1099-MISC" assertions of his payer, on which the tax agency had been mindlessly relying, has prevailed.

This kind of inter-agency acknowledgement happens constantly. But for the filer to get notice of it is rare.

The SSA's accounting of taxable earnings used to calculate any benefits for which our friend might someday want to apply has been reduced accordingly, of course. But even if the gentleman hasn't already accumulated the maximum credit (as many folks of a certain age have done long since, over years of suffering the misapplication of the tax prior to learning the truth) I don't think he minds...

Here's the notice:

Isn't it nice when these bureaucrats finally give up on lying and stonewalling and just do the right thing? Frankly, I'm as happy for the one that found the right path to walk here as I am for our hero.

***

P. S. Want more? Click here to see some even more fascinating acknowledgements by the IRS of the complete accuracy of the liberating truth about the income tax revealed in CtC. If you've got what it takes to recognize "back-door" acknowledgements, read this page, too.

What's your answer?

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I Stand With Doreen

A New Story In The Tribune On Doreen's Case

ARE YOU JUST LEARNING ABOUT the crime against your rights and the rule of law by means of a heinous crime by which Doreen Hendrickson is being victimized? Get up to speed with this and this, and this film:

Free Speech On Trial: IRS v. Hendrickson

(Find and share this on YouTube at http://youtu.be/IagZzFIIymw)

The longer but much more comprehensive and question-answering backstory (the "why" history leading up to this unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and principles of due process) can be found here.

There's a good article on Doreen's ordeal here.

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DOREEN'S ADDRESS: Doreen Hendrickson 48564-039, FPC Alderson A-4, P.O. Box A, Alderson, WV 24910. She would love to hear your encouragement, uplift, appreciation and solidarity, and she can even be sent paperback books, as long as the envelope in which they are packaged has clearly written at the top: Paperback Book Enclosed.

Anyone wanting to send Doreen a few dollars for her commissary account (with which she can get better food, soft drinks, clothes and other amenities) can do so by mailing a money order made payable to Doreen Hendrickson 48564039. Mail to:

Federal Bureau of Prisons,

Doreen Hendrickson

48564-039

Post Office Box 474701

Des Moines, Iowa 50947-0001

DO YOU NOTICE THAT MESSAGE ON THE T-SHIRT being worn by the lovely model of the 'I Stand with Doreen' care-bracelet? It reads, THINK. It's not illegal yet!

But you know what? The charge against Doreen is an effort by the state to make it so.

Doreen was charged, remember, with criminally-refusing to cede control of her expressions to the state. Now, I'll grant you that technically her thoughts would remain her own, but if the state can dictate what everyone says, then pretty soon that atmosphere of controlled expressions will result in first influencing, and then ultimately controlling what everyone thinks.

If the State gets away with establishing the precedent that every written expression-- even just those on testimonial instruments-- can be required to echo the state's preferred view of things, the fate of free thinking and liberty is obvious (and it's not good).

Think about it, while you still can.

Click here for more on Doreen's ordeal and its assault on the rule of law.