America: Imagine the World Without Her Page #8

is that while they might

make a profit on Sunday,

they could be gone by Monday.

But Obama wasn't the only disciple.

Well, when Hillary was

still in high school,

she fell under the spell of

a Methodist youth minister.

And at that time Hillary

had been a Goldwater girl.

A conservative growing up in a perfectly

conventional American suburb.

But this very charismatic Methodist

minister drew Hillary sharply to the left.

Mr. Alinsky, this is Hillary.

- A pleasure.

- Nice to meet you.

- Are you enjoying your work back there?

- I am.

Well, you'll have a lot of it.

After high school,

Hillary met with Alinsky again

at Wellesley College,

where she invited him to speak.

Later, Alinksy would offer her a

job, but Hillary turned it down.

When she got to college,

she decided to focus

on Alinsky as her senior thesis work.

Hillary was looking

to Alinsky for a way

to put her existing leftist

ideology into practice.

But in studying Alinsky.

Hillary came to the conclusion

that Alinsky organizing could

never truly transform America

unless it somehow was

connected more deeply

To the core of the

American political system.

Alinsky always opposed tight relationships

between community organizers and politics.

So this is where Hillary decided to

take Alinsky in a different direction.

While Alinsky wanted the radicals

to pressure the government,

Hillary wanted the radicals

to become the government.

Why try to shame people

from the outside

when you can intimidate

them from the inside?

So I would say on ideology. Hillary is

closer to Obama than she is to Bill.

Hillary figured it out,

Obama is now carrying it out.

The IRS, EPA, DOJ, NSA

are all collecting information and

storing it on every American.

Welcome to the Panopticon,

a prison designed by philosopher

Jeremy Bentham in the 1800s.

His design gave the

guards a God's eye view.

Here, there's no privacy,

What Bentham envisioned for a prison

has now become the hi-tech Panopticon.

Nobody is listening to

your telephone calls.

The United States is not

spying on ordinary people

who don't threaten

our national security.

There's no question that the collection

of these huge amounts of data

gives the government the ability

to go after anybody and everybody.

The government will always use

as much power as you give it.

It will always go up to and

sometimes cross over, eh, the line.

That's a real problem,

particularly if we're looking at

everyone's Internet searches,

we're looking at what magazines

you read, what books you read,

and really a lot of your life.

Imagine how much of

your life is online.

If they can look at your

Visa bill without a warrant.

This program, by the way,

is fully overseen by the FISA Court,

a court specially put together

to evaluate classified programs

to make sure that

the executive branch

or government generally

is not abusing them

and that it's being carried out

consistent with the Constitution.

The FISA Court should not be

allowed to use the term "court."

It is not a court.

A court by definition means an

institution that hears both sides

of a case and controversy.

Due process is an open court.

Adversarial process on both sides of it.

But it's not in a secret court.

FISA, with nobody to advocate for the

individual that's being spied upon.

Judges should not be

allowed to wear robes.

They shouldn't be allowed

to use the word "judge."

They shouldn't be allowed

to use the word "court."

And it's misleading the public.

Many people will say,

"I haven't done anything wrong

"and so I don't really care

if they read my mail."

The problem with that is it's

a much different standard

than innocent until proven guilty.

It's that everything is open.

They come into your house and say,

"Oh, you've been sending

e-mails to someone in Lebanon.

"We suspect you of terrorism."

If they get in your house

and they find no terrorism,

you're not connected,

but they find you have paint

that you brought home from the office

that you bought with a business expense

and you were painting your office,

now you're painting

the inside of your house,

you've now committed a tax violation.

Or maybe they find you

have an unregistered gun.

Everything in America

now is criminal.

You can't practice commercial law

or real estate law, be in

the hedge fund business,

do a great many things without running

afoul of potential criminal statute.

Harvey, you've written a book

that has the remarkable title

Three Felonies a Day.

Now, how is it possible for an ordinary

guy to commit three felonies a day?

On a normal day,

the average reasonably engaged American

does at least three things that arguably

can be deemed federal

felonies by some ambitious

Department of Justice prosecutor.

The problem with most federal felonies

is that an average normal person,

even, I have to say,

a lot of my fellow lawyers,

wouldn't have a clue that

what they're engaging in

is arguably prosecutable.

Well, and consider it on

top of this IRS scandal

where it appears as if the government

is using the IRS for partisan reasons.

Maybe I'm not so, uh,

confident that I would want

all my phone records given to,

uh, the government

if it appears maybe I could be

targeted by the government.

I talk to people routinely now

who I don't think are paranoid,

who are saying, "I'm a little

worried about having my name

"publically associated with conservatives

or Republicans because I fear retaliation.

"I fear that I will be targeted

by the SEC or the IRS

"or different arms of government."

And I think it's a legitimate fear.

I think there's probably almost nothing

more fundamentally un-American

than using government to target

your political opponents.

Well, when the President does it,

that means that it is not illegal.

During the Nixon Administration,

I was audited four times.

I was audited because I was a very

vocal critic of the Nixon Administration.

We all pay taxes.

We all file tax returns.

And talk about a trap for the unwary.

They can get absolutely anybody.

They can bankrupt you just from

trying to defend against them.

And then the rest of the game is

are you going to avoid

a long prison sentence

and pled guilty for a short sentence?

There are a lot of people in

prison today based on guilty pleas

who could have won their

case had they litigated it.

But the risks of litigation are so

great that they can't afford to do it.

It was Lavrenty Beria

who told Stalin,

"Show me the man and

I'll find you the crime."

What the government did to our little group

in Wetumpka, Alabama, is un-American.

It isn't a matter of firing

or arresting individuals.

The individuals who sought to intimidate us

were acting as they thought they should

in a government culture that has

little respect for its citizens.

Many of the agents and agencies

of the federal government

do not understand that they

are servants of the people.

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