On June 6, 2002, I appeared before Northampton County, Pennsylvania’s, council, the county’s governing body.

My purpose that evening was to declare war on the county, patterned after our federal government’s first insurrection, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791.

The rebellion was sparked by the new government’s imposition of an excise tax on the production and barter and/or selling of corn whiskey, or, as its known where I’m from, “white lightnin.”

(This was a product that had once inspired me to write an article on my www.billybytes.com Website parodying Northampton County and titled “The Still.”)
My declaration of war was against the county’s taxing policies, through such fiscal profligacy as the floating of multi-million general-obligation bonds.
The county was incurring debt that had to be repaid over a 30-year span by the county’s taxpayers, The indebtedness had reached the point of driving an alarming number of the county’s taxpayer out of their homes and onto the streets.

The latest of these extravagantcies was the county’s year 2001 floating of a $111 million megabond (which I have elsewhere dubbed the MOAB, after the U.S. Air Forces Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, but in the Northampton County context, the Mother Of All Bonds.

The county fused these fiscal BOMBS by creating an illegal device that proved to be just another of the county’s many “shadow governments - e.g., Industrial Development Authority; Higher Education Authority; Easton Hospital Authority, the city of Easton being the county’s seat; and, in league with neighboring Lehigh County, LANTA, Lehigh and Northampton Transportation Authority, and the LVIAA, or Lehigh Valley International Authority.

Now Northampton County, again in league with its neighbor to the west, is proposing what amounts to yet another “shadow government” billed as a regional health department - which, in fact, is nothing more than just another bloated bureaucracy.