well go back to the big picture i'm tom arbonne coming up in this half hour thousands of american citizens break the law every day what are they doing and could anyone stop them also another state is intent on executing a prisoner who may have been wrongly convicted why are they refusing to reexamine

the case and internets dealy take republicans and want now want to make it really hard when you go to the bout you. made a mess of the rest of the news there are between one hundred thousand and a half a million americans who believe the united states government and its court system are completely illegitimate as a result these americans typically don't obey many laws sometimes drive without driver's licenses and don't pay taxes and no i'm not talking about general electric instead i'm talking about the sovereign citizen move it's a loosely organized group of americans from around the nation who for the most part operate under the radar and with numerous lawsuits against police and public officials and behavior sometimes outside our legal system sovereign citizens are becoming a real thorn in the side of local state and federal governments and now the state

of georgia wants to fight back republican state representative b.j. pac introduced legislation to disarm sovereign citizens of one of the most frequently used tactics the filing of lawsuits and liens to tie up public officials in costly legal battles the legislation would criminalize filing false liens with a fine of up to ten thousand dollars and jail terms of up from one to ten years so how will this bill affect the sovereign citizen movement and what exactly are they after joining me now is alfred ask sovereign citizen and constitutionalist as well as a talk radio host and the author of several books including the nature of money offered welcome tight i know it's a great to have you with us now if i understand this right what you call american common law has been hijacked by admiralty law which is why our birth certificates and driver's licenses are printed in all capital letters and when we're born our government creates a secret shell corporation using our name in all caps and keeps hundreds of thousands of dollars in that account is that

a reasonable description of your position it's not a reasonable description of my position but it's a reasonable description of a number of people specifically. i'm aware. there are a bunch of different theories and you know when you talk about people talk about sovereignty movement as if it was monolithic and it's not there are a large there's a large variety of people who have different slants on the sovereignty concept so and the one you're describing is embraced by some people but it's not embraced by oh ok so you said this isn't this isn't one that you particular embrace what then for you makes you a sovereign citizen as a you know as opposed to the person that i just described the declaration of independence if you understand sovereignty going to go back in history to begin to grasp the concept when you ted a king in england or a king in france or a king in spain they were sovereign the reason they were sovereign is because they went to a coronation ceremony in

a church the church declared them to be king and they gave them a crown where on their head and that crown was intended to emulate the corona you see around the heads of the christ and the saints in medieval paintings the idea was that the kings the sovereigns received their rights directly from god they had the divine right of kings and jefferson put that aside out he didn't just flip it upside down he destroyed it everyone in england the only person in england who was a sovereign was the king he got his rights directly from about all else were subjects because they did not get their rights from god now i get that when i and i totally get it you know what jefferson was saying is that we the people are the sovereigns in this nation but in the declaration of independence was written by a group of people who were occupied by a foreign nation and they threw off those occupiers will be through you know much like you know the people in iraq or afghanistan are trying to get rid of us i think . we are not to the best of my knowledge right now occupied by

a foreign nation we are occupied by us our government has nothing to do with whether you're occupied or not so. energy flows from god what people most people don't understand including people in the alleged sovereignty movement they don't understand that this is a spiritual concept this is not simply politics this is spiritual it's based on the idea what was i do think different alfredsson what would you make you different than from today's you know if a government if right now in the u.s. government recognition there's a case called chisholm versus georgia seven hundred ninety three the supreme court this is four years after the constitution was adopted seventeen years after the declaration of independence and i'm looking at it and i'm reading from it right now and it says in part they're talking about the situation in england and europe how it compared to it to a particular case and the court says the same few light is run through all their to europe's jurisprudence meaning the english jurisprudence and constantly remind us

of the stay so you think america is becoming feudalistic and the subject is becoming fascist ok it isn't it is it is a problem for you that you know ok let me read genesis this is important you can find this for yourself you look up the case choose them versus georgia seven hundred ninety three it continues a first to talk about feudalism where the prince is different from the subject the prince being the sovereign it says no such ideas obtain here at the revolution the sovereignty devolved on the people and they are truly the sub runs how is that different from today it's a absolute here's a different example auburn if i'm a sovereign the government is my public servant if i'm not a sovereign i'm a subject and the government is my master so and that is the fundamental conflict that's going on right now so you think that you shouldn't be able you should have to answer to a police officer is as you're speeding in that at all there are some people and they take that idea and they run with it the sovereign there are some people who claim that they are sovereigns and they don't have to obey any laws people aren't

sovereigns they are anarchists there's a completely different situation but what about the sovereign citizens who complain that america's getting less white more brown less question. more muslim an atheist and therefore it's not consistent with the founding thoughts on that i don't think that it's relevant to sovereignty declaration says all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that establishes we are all getting our rights from god it establishes that we are all sovereigns in same sense that the king of england was a sovereign because he had the divine right of kings high is our sovereignty and friends are gone by having to pay taxes no not necessarily not necessarily want what is inherent in our sovereignty on our individual sovereignty. well what is infringing on our individual sovereignty yeah whenever the government apply a lates the terms of the cons are sampson for example there's reason to believe that the income tax was designed to apply only within the territories of the united states so when the so the so the income tax then is

a violation of our sovereignty you know the income tax is legal within the territories but it may not be legal within the states of the union so it's legal in puerto rico but not here it's possible that it appears there's reason to believe that might be true all right and it's part of the reason why when people go to court and they complain about the constitutional constitutionality of a law the court will routinely decide in favor of the law is constitutional these data could be constitutional anywhere it's ok it's not us constitution now fred thanks so much for being with us i'm sorry we're flat out of time he did a brilliant job approval presenting your perspective thank you so much for joining us thank you now to hear from the other side of the sovereign citizens movement is mark potok senior fellow at the southern poverty law center mark welcome well great to be here once again we just we just heard from a sovereign citizen. didn't quite sound like a good guy you're characterizing the sovereign citizen movement as essentially

a group in fact i think you've used that term why. well no we don't call them hate groups and we've not list that was a cross is funny i've actually sat in our living room in the dallas area back on the days when i was reporting on the militia movement in the one nine hundred ninety seven and to be perfectly frank he's a bit of a nuts you know and i think that he was being a bit disingenuous in describing his own beliefs you know when he says that for instance the income tax may only apply in the territories that goes back to the origins of the sovereign citizen movement which in fact began with white supremacist groups now i'm not accusing operate at risk of being a white supremacist i don't think that's true but the reality is is that these i.p.o.'s originated in a group of posse comitatus in the one nine hundred seventy s. in the night. a he. sed it's.

i'll ask have to say they essentially are we that god gave america the right manner and therefore because it's relationship between god and man no man can kind of stand between that and test their idea for instance that the government can't tax you but the government can't tell you that you've got a driver's license and kinds of other things the government supposedly tend not to when in the old when a posse and a lot of sovereigns refer to work team amendment citizens which is a kind of core concept of sovereigns what they're really talking about is the idea that the map the people in america among others look black people were made citizens by the fourteenth amendment which is to say they were mate citizens by an act of man as so as to iraq as opposed to an act of cuts and what that means is that black americans having accepted citizenship from nan from an act of the

government they had essentially signed a contract and now have to do everything the government's house and they're and they're not the same kind of citizens as a white people is this what animates the whole obama birth certificate movement well no because the reality oddly enough is that means very racist origins of the right of the southern citizens will have been largely forgotten there are enormous numbers of black americans right now dabbling in soccer and fairs you know there's a whole theory that you mentioned about government keeping secret accounts and if you file the right documents and so on you can get millions of dollars but you know what it's like. punctuation for instance a lot of sovereign groups refuse to capitalize the new and united states they have odd ways of spelling their names and functioning their names when they put them down in government and then kind of official documents and the reason is they built

. if in some of this will document they capitalized that you and united states they are agreeing in effect that the government is real. and an entrant into a contract we can tell from an airport they too because just what a large it's not an all in three it sounds like what you're describing is paranoid it's a prayer or paranoia anyway well it's rather ironic on the one hand it's an amusing and amusingly kind of wacky set of beliefs that it does vary from place to place and sat inside says to the other people murder police officers from time to time we've seen a lot of conflicts between sufferance were pulled over by police officers who say you know you have no right to show the officer typically a made up kind of license or car registration you know on may twentieth of two thousand and ten or there's an infamous case in which a father son steamin saw forms up murdered to west memphis arkansas police officers

and cold blood and pulled them over simply as a trap mark up mark thank you we're we're we're out of time i'd love to spend a lot more time on this we will revisit this topic in the future thanks for dropping by tonight a pleasure. here i am the sovereign citizens are true believers and like the members of the iran cult and the libertarian cults are looking for new recruits. i meet on a daily take republicans are working as hard as they can to ruin your bathroom experience i'll explain if you. just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old to tell the truth. i am a contestant i am going to get a sense that i was driving hot is a pretty. but it was kind of yesterday.

i'm very proud of the will the belgian see its place. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so bleak you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here sees some other part of it and realized everything you saw you don't. charge welcome to the big picture.

are we about to execute another innocent man got in alabama questions are swirling around thomas arthur a man convicted of murder three decades ago he said to be executed in march since his conviction eight he witnesses recanted her testimony another man has admitted to the murders and others lawyers are calling for d.n.a. tests they could prove their client is innocent unfortunately the state isn't budging and is moving forward with the execution regardless of whether or not d.n.a. testing might exonerate arthur so why is that in will his or joins me now he is the

editor of think progress and justice an attorney and a policy analyst with the center for the american private sort of american progress is action fund always great to have you with sydney back bay has such great insights into these issues how much doubt is there surrounding this guy's conviction that there was certainly reasonable doubt certain surrounding his conviction i mean you. witnesses who testified against them were candid and then an recanted their testimony and then you had this we. you know it's likely that the murderer was wearing this we that was in police custody where the murder was committed and there's d.n.a. on this wig that probably belongs to the person who was wearing it while the murder was from it is the killer who right and all that mr arthur wants is he says look i will pay for the test for you it's not going to cost the state and all i want to do is provide me with the evidence i'll pay for the test and if it shows that i wasn't the one wearing the wig we can go from there this will cost the state nothing if he's guilty they can serve the they can execute the senate's and i did this it was

so fun hey for the first one why or why would his state why would the state of which we says all of its alabama why would the state of alabama be afraid of an innocent man demonstrating his innocence you know there's two very different theories of the constitution going on here and concerts that were once guaranteed to due process and i believe due process means that we should convict the guilty and we should set free the innocent but the supreme court unfortunately in the state of alabama have a different vision they say the due process means you got to check all your boxes you give them a trial you give them enough process this was a case just two three years ago this was the alaska case in two thousand and nine was very similar facts man was convicted in alaska he had there was d.n.a. evidence that could exonerate him he said i will pay for that yes just please let me just please let me have it and the supreme court said no you cannot pay for the to do the test that might prove if you are innocent it certainly seems inconsistent with the three amendments to the constitution it's really striking and it's

striking especially because it's happening in the death penalty contacts to you know where there's no possibility of appeal exactly you know once you're dead you can't is no way to take that phrase and so i think again the purpose of the justice system is convict the guilty set free the edison but in the death penalty context you better. shore and they're not in thanks so much for being with us tonight thank you this is scary case the death penalty costs more doesn't deter crime it's administered on evenly particularly across racial and socio economic lines and as long as it exists and the potential to execute an innocent person exists right alongside it there's no good reason it's still uses let's unplug the electric chairs empty the drug cocktails and clear out the gas chamber there's. just.

it's the good the bad and the very very. pro it was said the asli delayed the good bill gates gates told a crowd of energy entrepreneurs and scientists yesterday that it's a little crazy how are funding energy to have to use two years ago along with other members of the american energy innovation council meets also called in the federal government to investigate to invest sixteen billion dollars per year in research aimed at energy innovation over the government has fallen far short of that benchmark and gates is stunned. answer freshie to see that a member of america's corporate elite is actually fighting for clean energy innovation and investment rather than just be moaning it like the koch brothers the bad junior governor bob mcdonnell mcdonnell yes signed a bill yesterday overturning that state's landmark one gun a month law that was inactive back in the early one nine hundred ninety s. his decision to sign the bill came just days after he had spoken with families of

the victims of the two thousand and seven virginia tech shooting tragedy in the conversation with the families who were arguing against his signing that bill could offer no legitimate reason for why he was forty feel rather mcdonald just as just. to him. sure that sense and some completely preventable violence will continue to plague or genius in the rest of america and the very very ugly alabama state republicans since the state republicans in acted the extreme immigration law h b fifty six but you know children have been forced to stay home from school and been denied food stamps despite being born in the united states however a new report by the southern poverty law center documents far worse effects of the law in some cases public utility companies that cut off service to latino those who cannot provide proof of birth in the u.s. causing some families to be forced to live without water or electricity report also shows that alabama residents feel that they can now openly harass and intimidate

the latino population without fear of punishment alabama state republicans have succeeded in returning that state to the racial violence and intolerance of decades ago and that it's very very clear. imagine imagine a life with no water you wake up you can't take a shower you can't brush your teeth can't use the bathroom. can't cook can't clean you can't do laundry you can't really do anything and luckily this isn't really a problem facing most americans but it might be soon that's because it's not just our roads and bridges that are deteriorating across the nation it's also our water pipes

a new study by the american water works association reveals that america's underground water pipe infrastructure is rapidly deteriorating and needs to be revamped to the tune of one trillion dollars most water pipes were laid down more than fifty years ago and today after more than thirty years of star starve the beast reaganomics it didn't invest one dime in our infrastructure those pipes are past the end of most of their lifespans the study also called for replacement of waste water pipes which will cost another trillion dollars so here we are the richest nation on the planet with a rotting third world water pipes underneath us but that's not all our entire infrastructure from our roads to our schools to our dams desperately needs repair or replacement the american society of civil engineers puts out a report card on america's infrastructure and the latest grades are from two thousand and nine here they are right here. aviation d. bridges c. dams detouring water d. minus energy minus hazardous ways d.

in waterways d. minus levies d. minus parks and rec c. rail sea roads deeds cool if you notice in a pattern here the solid way see last transit and waste water d. and d. minus i mean this is america's infrastructure g.p.a. how did we get the estimated five year investment needed two point two trillion dollars with these abysmal grades the united states now ranks third team in the world when it comes to enter infrastructure investments so now what does all this mean it means it means we need to to take back those trillions of dollars at reagan bush clinton and bush even obama here's another way here's where we are with infrastructure way down here in this all these other countries germany singapore france were the red united kingdom the netherlands united arab emirates korea denmark canada spain sweden all of them are just beating us terribly so i know we

did we do take all of those tax cuts that were given by all as president obama gave to millionaires and billionaires and a giant transnational corporations in the form of historically low tax rates and once we get back to tax rates like we had during the truman eisenhower kennedy johnson nixon ford and carter years years by the way of the greatest growth and prosperity in american history we need to use that money to rebuild america which works really well because investments in infrastructure put millions of americans back to work building things like roads schools power plants high speed rail our commie is begging. unfortunately the republicans in congress are not budging rather than investments republicans want austerity at a time when the government has to spend money to make america competitive again they want the government to be a tight rope and once they can get in once they get

a phone call from their paymasters in the oil industry like the koch brothers or exxon mobil then of course rather than updating our water pipelines they want to build a new oil pipeline but generally speaking rather than renovate public schools they want to close public schools and they want to let for profit corporations make money educating our kids rather than fix seventy five thousand structurally deficient bridges that millions of americans drive across every day they want to give more massive tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires and last time i checked millionaires and billionaires are investing their fortunes in building bridges across america but most disturbingly beyond ideological politics of the role of government republicans are against these crucial infrastructure investments because they don't want the economy to improve they know they know that if they pass legislation to move america into the twenty first century with the new smart energy grid with new water pipes with new high speed rail systems and millions of

americans will be put back to work and our economy would boom and president obama would get the credit for that president obama getting the credit for it that's unacceptable to a republican party who has openly stated that their first objective is to make president obama a one term president so it's pretty simple we as americans need to ask ourselves what sort of infrastructure do we deserve in the wealthiest nation on earth we deserve a great deal infrastructure like we have. if so then yeah keep the republicans in charge of the purse strings in congress but if you think we deserve a great aid infrastructure like the rest of the developed world is building then it's time to hold those republicans in congress accountable is if we don't get serious. let's water. the lot down the water pipe.

as the big picture for today for more information on the stories we covered visit our website the tom hartman dot com free speech got organized. you can also check out our two you tube channels the links over time for this entire show is also available as a free video podcast on i tunes and you can visit our own dot com to download the audio podcast of our daily noon to three radio show and we have a free time when i phone or i pad app at the app store you send this feedback on twitter a tom underscore of in on facebook at some other score in our blogs message boards and telephone comment line and thom hartmann. and don't forget nothing happens until you show up the occupy movement today all across the country. pushing back on alec the american legislative exchange council pushing back on the attempt to suborn and subvert democracy you can be part of show up participate in marker seemed genuinely begins with you get out there and get active tag your seat.

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