Real Name: Hal von Luebbert Gender: male Member Since: June 25, 2008 Last Signed In: October 06, 2008 Profile Views: 155 Blog Views: 1073 SITREP - Things for a Thoughtless Nation to Think About. SITREP - "What Happened?!" Following the Historical Trail to a Disaster. SITREP - continued 9/22/08 SITREP, continued 9/19/08 Sitrep, September 2008 The First Days of September Are an Anniversary for Me, Too. "Exelon Announces" Where's the @#$%&! BEEF! June 08 July 08 August 08 September 08 October 08 
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The word comes that the sleaze of politicians on the Potomac has cravenly capitulated to Wall Street and all the lobbyists for big business, passing the seven hundred billion dollar ($700,000,000,000) legislative “bailout” package for them. This is as clearly unconstitutional as anything that has ever happened in the nation’s history, being a classic case of unlawful expenditure of tax monies. It is the biggest single swindle of the taxpayer since the swindle that was creation of the Federal Reserve itself.
This is more, even, than it appears to be where the fate of the nation is concerned, however. It remains to be seen how many citizens will call their lawyers in order to file a federal suit to stop this raid on their finances. Every citizen affected by this, the Congress latest attempt at destruction of his life, has the legal standing to bring suit. More, every citizen has the power and standing to file a pro se lawsuit in federal court, and at the cost of purchase of a couple of books from Nolo Press, http://www.nolo.com/index.c..., he can learn how to file the necessary papers.
It’s interesting that while this swindle will cost every U.S. family in excess of twelve thousand dollars, tax money stolen and spent illegally, and while anyone, were their twelve thousand dollar car destroyed by someone in government would sue, few or none will sue concerning this “bailout” theft of his money. Neither are seven hundred billion dollars nationally, or twelve thousand dollars family-wise, the only costs of this. Statistical analysis (my own) based on other similar actions – financing of things like the “War on Terror,” for instance – reveals that the total cost of the “bailout” to the individual citizen will be upwards of thirty thousand dollars.
Federal Inflation, as I explained in recent essays here, costs the wage-earner far more than the amount the government borrows. Borrowed money not only means interest, you know, it means costs magnified many times as the “funny” money circulates through the economy.
Failure of the nations’ citizens to react with more than sheep-like bleating will tell historians everything they need to know about reasons for the decline and fall of the United States of America.
My own, pro se, lawsuit will be filed soon.
The ludicrous Palin-Biden “debate” – there goes the meaning and sense of another word – is, mercifully, history. Only one thing could be learned from that celebration of half (or quarter) truth, outright falsehood and political posturing, of course – the simple fact that of why we are a nation in decline.
Biden, the male on stage, was obliged by the logically weird rules of our society to say nothing that in any way attacked or might otherwise offend Palin, the female on stage. The same society that a couple of decades ago insisted that women were fit for combat, able to do anything a man could do there, and, moreover insists still that she is the equal of a man in all and every respect, demands here that a candidate running for vice-president or president treat a woman as though she might be seriously injured by a word – or facial expression.
Palin, of course, will “win” this “debate” if she somehow manages to characteristically glittering generality and non sequitur her way to the end of the tawdry affair without double-talking herself into tongue-tied lingual convulsions. Or wetting – “having issues” in - her panties.
Since boyhood, regarding that last, I have detested jargonized, C.O.I.A.K (clear only if already known), solecistic language. But I fear bias. In fact, I am absolutely terrified of biased thought and behavior. That’s because there are few human conditions more crippling, both of the individual and the group. There are no biases more pernicious vicious and destructive than the religious and ideological-political variety, a kind of bias that results in the group equivalent of muscular dystrophy in the individual. This political campaign, last night’s “debate” an archetypical example, has been the most thunderous example of the spastic fecklessness to which mindless ideological and political bias leads.
Everything that is said is suspect and useless as effective communication. There is simply no need to ask what anyone ideologically and/or politically involved will say: simply learn with which ideology or political party he is identified, and you know what he will say. For the media to ask any of its parroting pundits, for instance, who “won” the “debate” makes for a rhetorical question only. For a nation asking for useful explanations, for data and material by which to make decisions or gauge the depth of the trouble we’re obviously in, the “leaders” and “experts” provide pontificating, bloviating, and vapid generalities so broad as to be continental. Or galactic.
That’s when they’re not lying outright (of course, bias is a lie internalized; and a lie is bias publicized).
Even more infuriatingly frustrating is the now publicized – long since - fact that the language we speak has been so bowdlerized, sanitized, politically corrected, castrated, and otherwise mangled as to become damned near useless for meaningful communication. Add that fact of today’s discourse to conversation with a public now largely comprised of people whose attention span is too short to internalize more than one or two – and, mind you, very simple – sentences, and you have a recreation of the Biblical Tower of Babel.
Of them all – another Mersenne number, it seems – no solecistic and/or jargonized torture of the language has resulted in a much spastic paralysis of ideas as the execrable Malapropism “issues.” Here, the only relief is comic, like Katie Couric recently telling a nationwide audience of her “issues in bed.” Or the nitwit on CNN another day talking about male “sexual issues.” And, of course, if these paragons of the marginal intellect we choose for public office these days are “on” for an hour, the hyper-hackneyed term “issues” will be repeated until the audience develops a psychological facial tic at every re-iteration. More, women and old men will promise to “fight” for this and that, recalling interminably how he or she has “fought” for this and that interminably.
Aaaargh!
If any of these pontificating popinjays were given any problem – no, not “issue;” problem – in the real word, there would never be a solution. That’s even more the case should race, gender, religion, or the like be a factor. There are simply too many words one dare not utter, too many subjects that may not be discussed.
Joe Biden may not ask Sarah Palin if she believes any of the fundamentalist Christian things she says she believes!
Barak Obama, a candidate for president of the United States, refuses to prove with a verifiable birth certificate that he is a legal citizen of the United States! What is more, no one may ask him that question on television, in the land of the free press.
I may not say “nappy-headed hoe” (or whatever the hell the word was), I may not say that someone (was it Barak Obama, and did his running mate for the presidency say it?) is articulate, honest, and whatever the hell else it was, because if I do that I have insulted everyone like him, and I may not object to the guy who is burglarizing my house or camped on my patio if he is a Mexican because my complaint means I’m racist.
If I recognize that a male human has been designed by evolution to impregnate, care for, and defend a female human being because she is . . . well, female and intended by nature to be impregnated, I am a “sexist,” and I will probably lose my job and means of livelihood – to say nothing of risk my life. We can’t, in short discuss race, even if the problem is race. We can’t discuss gender, even if the problem is gender. We can’t discuss religion, even if the problem is religion.
We can’t solve certain problems because it is against the law or otherwise societally forbidden to discuss them. What does that tell you about certain of our problems? What does that tell you about the state of our nation and its government?
We are about to accept as a candidate for the highest office in the nation on the same basis and for the same reason that we have imprisoned literally hundreds, even thousands, of men for rape they didn’t commit – because we are forbidden to question her claims and statements.
Think about it.
This morning, to a reader who wrote concerning my latest “SITREP,” I pointed out the U.S. has fallen victim to the same circular reasoning I see where many other matters and issues are concerned. “The nation’s economy improves on account of all the business generated by making lots of loans,” goes the asinine reasoning; “and since the economy is good, we can make as many loans as we like without fear of having to foreclose.” This form of a Ponzi scheme has always led to disaster historically, and here we are. The wonder of it all is not that the public is so stupid or ignorant of logic to recognize the Ponzi scheme, circular logic reasoning, but that it’s knowledge of history is so poor that it can’t remember the first time the banks pulled this Brobdingnagian bunco stunt.
No, I don’t mean the Savings and Loan swindles of a few years back. I mean formation of the Federal Reserve. In case reading is for my readers something as traumatic as it appears to be for the public at large, let me synopsize that “mother of all rip-offs”:
In 1910, the time of the now infamous meeting on Jekyll Island, the total national debt was $1,000,000,000 – one billion dollars. Half of that was owed to bank depositors and other creditors by the nation’s most powerful industrialists and bankers, men like J.P. Morgan and the like.
There was at that time no way for the government to pay its debt to the large corporations already incestuously related to the U.S. Congress. Neither was they any way for these same bankers and corporations to pay their creditors.
There was no income tax then, you see.
When agents of the federal government and the corporations had completed days of meetings on the island off the coast of Georgia, they had with the aid of a German banker named Paul Warburg created a Frankenstein Monster now known as the Federal Reserve (even the name was a ruse designed to conceal its intended purpose – and make the public believe the “reserve” would belong to the government and the nation’s people).
When the bankers and corporate giants had completed their next orgy of treasonous economic hanky-panky with the Congress, not only had the nation a new central bank (1910) and a new system of taxation (1913) – income taxation speciously authorized by the Sixteenth Amendment (if you think this deal had any integrity at all, read up on how that fraud on the public was supposedly ratified), but the bankers and the corporations were out of debt – they not only owed nothing, they owned not only all the money, but the economy itself.
Now, aware as I am of the dislike citizens of the U.S. have for reading – or much of anything intellectual at all, matter of fact – I will dare to add what follows: There is no way to understand what is going on today with the “seven hundred billion dollar bailout of the banks” (if you believe that’s all it will be, it may explain a lot about the fact that you don’t like to read), unless you know about this. Ignorance of history, you know, is like being blind – and having to drive a car, or fly a plane, even - to the bank.
The Frankenstein Monster created by the Jekyll Island bankers was a private banking cartel – a number of banks, that is - designed to take control of America’s currency and banking system. The fat cats knew they would never succeed in a monster gambling finesse like this one without the aid of Congress, the reason that among the swindlers on Jekyll Island that day there was a U.S. Senator (Nelson Aldrich), a representative of the U.S. Treasury (Assistant Secretary of the Treasury A. Piatt Andrew), and others.
On December 23, 1913, Congress enacted the Federal Reserve System Act. This treasonous – at least one reason for the cloak of secrecy that surrounded the whole affair – operation and enactment required that Congress delegate its Constitutional power (Article 1, Sec. 8 of the U.S. Constitution) to “coin and regulate money” to the bankers. Not only was that the case, but astoundingly, the “representatives of the people” agreed to pay interest on the money “the Fed” obtains from the treasury by printing it for the treasury.
You may want to read that again – go ahead, I’ll wait.
And where would Congress get money? Why, that’s where the income taxes came in. Presto! The Sixteenth Amendment - that treasonous stunt so cloaked in double talk and double dealing that then Secretary of State Philander Knox had to make himself guilty of an historically bald-faced lie, and what Thomas Jefferson called the “power to destroy” was created.
The lie, of course, was that the Sixteenth Amendment had been ratified by the constitutionally necessary three-quarters of the states – which it wasn’t.
Did I suggest deceit there? Consider, then, how it is that none of television’s experts discussing currently the banking “bailout” ever mentions the role of staggering income taxes in the public’s inability to own anything without buying it on credit (with debt – credit – money).
Consider too, that in the context of history, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in eight separate instances that the Sixteenth Amendment gives Congress no new authority to tax, but the U.S. Government – “that of the Nation of Laws” – has stubbornly ignored the court (to say nothing of the history of the amendment’s ratification). The Super Court, by the way, now refuses to take up any new tax case, effectively leaving the fate of the Swindle of 1913 and the Sixteenth Amendment up to the citizenry.
Notice that the matter of amendment’s ratification is in turn ignored by the courts. You can’t, in other words, plead in a tax case that there is no law requiring you to pay income tax just because it’s true.
Are you still wondering why no one seems to know what in hell is going on?
Suffice it to say that too few Americans understand why our founding fathers wrote into Article I of the U.S. Constitution that, “Congress shall have the Power to Coin Money and Regulate the Value Thereof.” That means Congress alone “shall have the power . . .” Anyone who doesn’t understand that at the bottom of our latest economic debacle is the Sixteenth Amendment, income tax, and Internal Revenue Service hasn’t a prayer of knowing “what’s going on.”
Citizens of the United States, supposedly – even today, we hear right-wing nut cases chanting their mindless litany to that effect - living in he richest nation on earth, are always short of money; and have, therefore, to borrow it. Everyone – even, I sometimes say whimsically, the dog - in a family must work nowadays. Women and wives are working in unprecedented numbers, husbands hope for overtime hours to earn more or take part-time or even full-time second jobs evenings and weekends, and children look for odd jobs from which to earn spending money. And, guess what? - the family’s debt climbs nevertheless higher and higher.
Not long ago, I read a psychologists’ report saying that “arguments over money” had overtaken and passed sex as a cause for quarreling and divorce.
Gee, no kidding – no one expected that?
Those who read my essay of yesterday will know that I discussed the essence of money, its raisson d’etre (reason for being). What is called “money” in the Land of the Free become Land of the Fee is in fact simply a claim on the life and person of another citizen. Its value has been created on that basis; and “created value” is exactly the correct expression. Nothing more, nothing less. It all happened on Jekyll Island, 1910. It is acted out and utilized again every day at the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury.
Money whose value other people must work to create is very cheap to make; more the people who “create” it make ethically and morally unconscionable profits. It costs literally pennies to print a one hundred dollar bill, you know. Of course, we are told that without the price of the high-tech paper that is a dollar, everything would come to a halt. Food would disappear, movement of goods would cease, etc, etc., etc. (read genius columnists – the guys who can’t tell you what’s happening with the “bailout” today - like Walter Williams and the like).
To a certain extent – one I happen to know how to calculate – it’s true. When the money supply shrinks, when the welfare checks stop coming, for instance, hungry people will plunder and kill to remain alive, and, if – or when – money disappears (or, to say it another way, becomes worthless) all government except family or gang will cease to function.
Funny, but for some reason – think about it; must I tell you everything? – none of that happened to me when IRS seized all my money (retirement accounts included) destroyed my businesses, prevented me from gainful employment, and by putting me out of house and home, drove me to a tent in the wilderness. If you don’t “get my drift,” read my last several essays and what I’ve written here again. If you don’t understand, at least you will have another insight – a sociological one - into the reason we’re in this mess, and “what’s going on.”
It would also be a good thing – I’d discuss it here, but the typical reader’s attention span is being stretched already – to read the history of the Great Depression. To put it in the nutshell it belongs in, the Great Depression happened because bankers – the Federal Reserve - refused to lend money to businesses, shops, farms, and ranches. There was – you have to know what I recently wrote concerning how a dollar becomes a dollar to understand – an inadequate supply of money, in other words.
If you’re too lazy to read about the Great Depression enough to understand it, you should again have real insight into why so many people made loans they can’t repay.
But cheer up: if you’re not in debt, if you have readily negotiable assets like gold and silver, you can clean up. When the bankers of the depression era withheld money from the public, they were able to foreclose on hundreds of thousands of ranches, farms, and businesses. People with gold and silver bought ranches, farms, and businesses for ten cents on the dollar.
NOW do you understand “what’s going on?”
NO? Then maybe you need to know that it was World War Two that ended the Great Depression. Those same bankers, those humanitarians who had no money for loans to build houses, businesses, or to buy food and clothing, suddenly has unlimited billions to spend on anything and everything military. A nation that didn’t have money for food and clothing, suddenly had billions to spend on tanks, warplanes, and warships.
And everybody suddenly had the job he couldn’t get before. What a miracle!
So you say, “why not just print the money – if we can be trillions of dollars in debt, why not make it whatever comes after trillions” (it’s quadrillions). Oh-oh – you forgot - it’s not our money, and not our economy, anymore. Oh, the money itself is ours, but we have to borrow its value from our great friends, the bankers.
And the bankers charge interest on that value. If you remember that we said – and proved – a minute ago that money is collateralized (given its value) by the work, talent, and person of a citizen, you realize that the banker holds you as property, property for which you have to pay a fee.
You’re paying for yourself (and, in case you missed it, we’ve just explained – in
real terms – “the national debt”)!
There’s even more to this hocus-pocus, but you like your information in summaries, one-liners, and short video clips. Let’s just remind you that the bonds the government issues to cover its debt become by sleight of hand and book-keeping wizardry “assets,” assets which are then used to borrow more money, and – well, you get the picture. Maybe.
And if you do, you have even more of an idea about “what’s happening.”
AND THERE'S STILL MORE! Besides the almost incomprehensible wealth provided them by this almost incomprehensible swindle and the almost unlimited usury being perpetrated, the Federal Reserve bankers have thereby the power to approve or disapprove loans to large and otherwise successful corporations. Refusal by the bankers to lend to a corporation means reduction in the price for which the corporation’s stock sells. When the stock’s price falls, the bankers buy it. When it’s bought its value increases, and the banker sells if for a profit (what do YOU call a swindle?) This “slick willie” trick is somehow (can you say fifty thousand lobbyists in the Bordello on the Potomac?) ignored by the “insider trading” laws and lawmakers, such that mere announcement of increase or decrease in “rediscount rates” will send stock prices up or down.
NOW do you understand “what’s happening?”
And there’s more you don’t want to read any more. But you have some insight . . . oh, never mind! You should understand by now why it is that one percent of the nation owns more than ninety percent of its actual and factual wealth.
Now, what’s going to happen next? Well, to know that you have to realize that with all that creation – printing – of money, and in all that wheeling and dealing, there is no money created by or for the interest on the money being borrowed by the government! Money, for example, borrowed at fifteen percent interest doubles every five years (and credit cards and other kinds of credit now demand interest as high as twice that)
Stated another way, if I borrow a thousand dollars for twenty years at fourteen percent interest and make equal monthly payments, I must pay interest almost double the amount I borrowed ($1984.44 – I chose the numbers to make them come out as Orwellian as all the rest of this is). At fifteen percent interest, a thousand dollars for twenty years costs twenty-one hundred sixty dollars ($2160.08).
Millions of Americans fall prey to this vicious scam every day. When a citizen goes to a banker to borrow $1,000 to buy something, the banker demands that the borrower agree to pay back the loan plus interest. At 14% interest for 20 years, the sucker must agree to pay $12.44 per month for a total of that $1984.44 I mentioned. The banker then requires the citizen to assign to the banker the right of ownership of the property if the borrower does not make the required payments. The banker then gives the borrower a $1,000 check (or credits the borrower’s checking account)..
The borrower then writes checks to pay for the desired item or work, and the person he pays, in turn, writes checks. A thousand dollars of new “checkbook” “money” is now added to the rest of money in circulation.
Paying attention? The only new money created and put into circulation is the amount of the loan, $1,000. Where is the money with which to pay the interest? Put it this way: In a poker game there are only so many chips on the table. The player who has run out of chips, and has to play the next hand “light” must either win the next hand, go into hock for something (strip poker, anyone?), or stop playing. There is no way to pay the debt – no money! The only way to keep playing the poker game is, to put it in the most brutal terms, slavery (and, yes, we’re right back where we started). Worse, the slavery is for not only you – you can’t possibly earn that much (unless you’re a pro basketball player, or the like – but, don’t forget, he’s the one who makes your labor, skill, and what have you worth so little) – it’s for your children and grandchildren. It’s for people yet unborn.
Every new loan anywhere in the nation puts the same insidious rocess in operation. Each individual who borrows money for anything adds a small sum to the total money supply when he borrows, but the payments on the loan deduct from the total money supply a much larger sum. It becomes inflation.
NOW do you see what’s happening?!
It bears repeating that there is no way the consumer – borrower - public can pay off the money-lender Shylocks (national debt or otherwise). As they pay the principal and interest, the money in circulation disappears. All they can do is struggle against each other, each generation of citizens borrowing more and more from the money-lenders. The bankers, non-productive people who produce absolutely nothing of value, slowly and inexorably gain a death grip on all property, and on present and future earnings of everyone in the productive – i.e., working - population.
Just a bit more (read the damned thing in two sittings – three, if you have to):
In 1910, the U.S. Federal debt was one billion dollars, about twelve dollars per citizen. State and local debts were all but non-existent.
By 1960, the Federal debt was two hundred, eight-four billion ($284,000,000,000) – sixteen hundred dollars per citizen. State and local debts were already near out of control.
By 1981 the Federal debt had passed a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000). If that weren’t bad enough, the mathematics of the matter now meant the interest on the debt was growing exponentially (remember how interest rates tripled and farmers and small businesses went out of bankrupt in droves?). Total state and local government debts exceeded the federal debt, and together with business and personal debts totaled over six and a half trillion dollars ($6,500,000,000,000), several times the retail value of all land and buildings in the United States.
Of course, this is what IRS and the neo-conservative, military industrial complex corporations government has wanted for years. Total control of money and the economy; which - need I remind you - means total, totalitarian power. No money, no economic freedom, at all – only a credit card by which the necessities of life may be purchased. And no freedom of choice where the purchase is concerned, either (can you say, “one, big Wal-Mart,” or “the GUM state store of the old Soviet Union?”).
And the value of a human being and what he can produce will be determined by government – the Supreme Soviet presidium of the super rich corporations. 1984 was twenty-four years ago, and that’s what’s happening!
To be continued . . .
Ed, a longtime friend, writes to say that what he thinks has happened to result in the latest “bailout” of a U.S. corporation is that when the U.S. demanded a “bailout” for the fat-cats in the money-changing industry – i.e., the bankers in one form or another - the Congress was ready to kiss *** as usual. Sixty thousand lobbyists in the Bordello on the Potomac aren’t there for a tour of our national monuments. Then, however, when the public outcry became threatening to their fat-cat jobs, the heroes of democracy suddenly got some “leadership” character. Ed thinks Wall Street has threatened to launch an attack on retirement funds, general investment media, and, I presume, entitlement programs in general. He warns that what follows will result further in Wall Street’s retaliation against mainstream U.S.A.
Ed was one of few people who agreed with me when I predicted years ago – almost a decade, in fact – what is happening today. I agree with him in this instance entirely. There will be, in other words, hell to pay.
Of course, none of it makes a bit of economic difference to me. I dropped out of the insane system that has produced this Lewis Carroll-ian dream more than two decades ago. I was never a “joiner,” and behaving like a jackass simply because a group of my kind was behaving like a jackass became anathema to me while I was still in high school.
‘’’But I don't want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
"’Oh, you can't help that,’ said the Cat: ‘We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.’
"’How do you know I'm mad?’ said Alice.
"’You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘otherwise you wouldn't have come here.’”
I didn’t “come here” – which is to say I dropped out. I’m no goddamned idiot and you can’t make a slave of me – I’ll die fighting you (and take my share with me). With what’s about to come down very near now, there may be those who wonder what I did in order to have survived to be able to be watching this re-enactment of Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole.
Does anybody believe that if the Congress and the public refuses to give the bankers and financial swindlers of corporate America what they want legally, they won’t go right ahead and take it on the sly and illegally, anyway? Are you serious? You believe the fact of fifty thousand plus lobbyists in Washington, D.C. means the congressional watchmen you trust to watch the treasury are trustworthy? If you believe that, you are the principle reason we’re in this latest “screw the taxpayer” orgy.
You’re one of the morons who will vote in this next election, then bray that you’ve done your patriotic duty.
A lesson in economics – truth politicians spend most of their time suppressing – is in order. First, what we call a “dollar” – and pretend is money - is not money; it is a U.S. Government I.O.U. It is backed – i.e., given value – by the sweat, skill, and talent of the productive people of the United States. “Productive” people, in case you’ve never thought about it, are those who actually produce something real – that is, make it or make it from what is taken from the planet upon which we live.
All money, all “wealth,” is incontrovertibly derived from the planet Earth. Capitalism by definition is the turning of the earth and its resources into capital – money. Any medium of exchange, or unit thereof, is therefore representative of an amount of something derived from the earth.
The I.O.U. dollar is merely what is called by Harvard scholar types a “medium of exchange.” What does that mean? It means something that represents – represents; not is - a real thing of value, something, a commodity, derived from the planet. That, unfortunately or otherwise, includes a human being or his skill, knowledge, or ability to do what another can’t or won’t do.
Understanding economics is most easily done when the earth and all its peoples are represented by an island, one with only a few people on it. A microcosm, in other words. With time, the “money” inhabitants of the island have printed or minted becomes representative of nothing as the natural resources available on the island are used up. In the microcosmic example I used on a talk radio show from KOIA San Antonio decades ago, that of an island where the only resources were bananas growing there, the bananas have all been eaten or used otherwise. The trees have died (it won’t be too hard, in today’s ideological state, to imagine that the islanders have so polluted their island, and refused to do the hard work of cleaning up and/or caring for the trees).
The islander’s money now represents only the skill, knowledge, and labor of the inhabitants. For those unwilling or unable to work, the “medium of exchange” money is, in fact, simply a claim on the life and person of another islander. That’s all. If there are one thousand “dollars” on the island, and one hundred islanders, then each islander is worth ten dollars. Eventually, of course, the people on the island will be obliged to eat one another. And those who have succeeded in acquiring money – control and right to the life and person of another – will sell their fellow to be eaten. For money.
On the immense island that is the United States of America, under the infantile economic system that is corporate capitalism, a professional baseball player is worth literally tens of thousands of times what a soldier, or teacher is. Where the currency that is human beings is concerned, an adolescent female who cavorts semi-nude while singing doggerel verse is worth - valued at - many, many times what a doctorate-degreed musician is.
In the fall of 1956, as I was returning from a mission into Hungary during the revolution there, and having accomplished a feat of arms I knew few men on earth could duplicate, I stopped at a shop in LaGuardiaAirport to buy a newspaper. The paper was still talking about the “heroics,” of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Bill (Moose) Skowron, and the Yankees pitching staff in the recent Baseball World Series. All of the Yankees would doubtlessly be making a lot of money next year, the paper said, and I recall calculating at the time that Mickey Mantle was being paid nearly twenty times what I was.
I sat staring at the ceiling for a long time, wondering what the future might be for a country with its priorities and perspectives having to do with money and personal worth – the product of its thought processes – so twisted that it would pay to play a children’s game twenty times what it would pay for risking of life and killing in combat. In the years that followed, as I watched the nation’s economic perspective grow more and more irrational, distorted and disproportionate, I became even more certain of the conclusion I drew then.
The conclusion? - just what has happened to result in this essay. There is, of course, a mathematical algorithm – for the reader who is a mathematician, a series – modeling what has been happening. Sometimes called “the Butterfly Effect,” the process is a chaotic one, meaning that a small and otherwise insignificant factor has staggeringly disproportionate results.
Let me digress – perhaps even further - for a moment. When I was a kid in high school, it occurred to me that there were two worlds. One was the world I lived in, where building things, producing, rearing, and husbanding real, weighty, ornery, resisting things was daily, perennial experience; and the second world was the world of language – rhetoric – wherein everything was a construct of mere words.
In the real world, every cause had an inevitable, often ineluctable consequence. Life was like my already then favorite sports, judo and wrestling. Make an error, you paid its prices. Nowhere to hide, no excuses, no escape. Most things were accomplished only with effort, sometimes great effort, and the rewards for effort were proportionate to the effort. Again, nowhere to hide, no excuses, no escape.
In the world or rhetoric, however, everything was entirely different. One could defeat the most skilled opponent simply with a turn of phrase, create a fight (the kind of “fight” politicians speak of daily) out of pure language, hide from his weaknesses behind a word blizzard smoke screen. One skilled with language could create anything he desired. I sometimes thought that the Apple in Eden was language, because with language man could rival even god – he could create.
Indeed, for those sufficiently astute, mere words are the medium of exchange representing reality – the planet. Like the U.S. dollar, they are a fiction, not a resource; they are a fiction, the ideated-only representation of a real thing. A person who accepts this ideated currency for anything he has produced with his labor, skill, or mind is a fool, accepting for something real and of the real world something that is an idea – a promise – alone.
In the world and virtual reality of language, that which was produced by the hands and mind of and individual is always worth the same kind of effort by and from another, no matter its effect in reality.
The value of a printed piece of paper is indeterminate and fickle as a nation who will pay a baseball player tens of thousands of times what it will pay one who teaches or guards his children.
It is as fickle as a nation who will arbitrarily and without study or any other kind of basis in fact simply decree that the value of a woman’s work is the same as that of a man, or that the value of work or product of an individual of one race is the same as that of an individual from any other race - or color, or creed, or clothing style – thusly depreciating in the same manner as the baseball player the teacher, soldier, or policeman the work, product, and person of everyone else.
It is as fickle and ripe for self-destruction as a nation that requires lending to certain people on the basis of their race, creed, or gender alone, thusly depreciating the value of credit in general – making it cost more and more - for everyone else.
It is as fickle as a nation that decrees in its educational establishment “no child left behind” – meaning that all children must stay behind.
It is as fickle as a society that will give its immature and unsophisticated children command of amounts of money sufficient to let them turn an otherwise pitiful clown masquerading as an artist or entertainer into a multi-millionaire, and let unscrupulous – corporate, of course – business prey upon the children’s immaturity.
Et cetera, ad infinitum – infinity now thunderously evident.
Of course, in addition to all of that feckless fickleness and in order to be able to steal at will from its productive citizenry, the government makes law that requires the productive citizen to exchange his blood, sweat, and tear, real-world product for a piece of paper represented by the baseball player’s product. The cold war warrior dueling with a handgun three AK-47 armed Soviet soldiers in LövérForest in western Hungary will be paid in currency valued in major part by a baseball player.
Money whose value has been inflated by the baseball player’s product and keeps the product of the farmer dirt cheap also keeps the public bewildered as to the value of anything. In a nation whose corporate government sings daily its “free market” litany, it is price-fixing at its most insidious, unseen, and vicious. The value – i.e., purchasing power – of “baseball player money” is being changed minute by minute as this or that profligate and asinine bargain or purchase takes place – that, in fact, while the productive person has no way to know what has happened or is happening to his money, his produce, or his value as a person.
The result today is that no one made available to the public by the news and information media, or by the government that controls them, can say what is happening or will happen. Joe Scarborough, host of this morning’s “Morning Joe” program, complains that no one, Congressman, Senator, President, Secretary of the Treasury, or political pundit is willing or able to say what has happened.
Of course not! How do you balance a checkbook on an account from which anyone can draw as much as he pleases and without recording the withdrawal, and the money being withdrawn has value which varies erratically from day to day?
Neither the average citizen nor the baseball player has any idea concerning how much President Bush’s war has cost him. The truth is, neither does anyone else, because there is no way to know! Even told, and an explanation given (the accuracy or utility of which, like the Heisenberg Principle, must be uncertain) he is unable to assess the effect of the theft until he can’t pay for things for which he once could pay and can’t borrow in order to pay for them, either. Eventually, however, everyone on the island that is our nation must borrow “money” – “money,” don’t forget, that has no certain value and whose repayment may, in fact, be impossible. The cost of everything on the island has been so inflated by the cost of things otherwise worthless, that all trade stops for re-negotiation of values and worth. What is true of the individual islander, of course, becomes eventually true for everybody on the island – or nation.
And that, Joe Scarborough – and John Q. Citizen – is what has happened.
To be continued (one solution) . . .
In my novel, “Jonatha’s Truth,” Fidel Castro observes, “The yanquis seem to have no trouble with socialism during a disaster, but once the socialism has dealt successfully with the trouble, they go back to letting the strong devour the weak.”
In the last several days, we have the Cuban leader’s fictional observation corroborated by events, and the mask ripped from the face of corporate U.S. capitalism. What could be more socialistic – more socialistic in the manner of the now defunct Soviet Union – than the “bailout” of corporate Wall Street and the Shylocks of American finance. The greatest capitalists of history want seven hundred billion dollars worth of socialism.
“Our entire economy is in danger,” says a sleaze on the Potomac lawmaker. Well, now – does that mean somebody will be punished? Sure. Does it mean that everyone’s business will be saved from the mess they made of it? Sure it does – when those proverbial pigs fly. Does it mean that all those CEO demigods of finance will be out in the street, living off the land – as I once was when Internal Revenue Service made me bankrupt (of course, the difference here was that everything I owned was seized, not frittered away on bad loans and investments)?
The history of this new form of socialism, of course, leaves a trail easier to follow than that a buffalo herd. It begins in the drugs-bewildered and mentally-deranged sixties with feminism demanding privileges including loans to people qualified for credit only by their gender. Concomitantly, the Kennedy-ian coinage of “affirmative action” reared its ugly and unconstitutional head. Loans for minorities – at first Afro-Americans, then virtually anybody – became a matter of law. The nation’s dream of equality began, in other words, morphing into the first signs of the utter contempt for law that is now national policy socially.
The first dominos had fallen, and by 1979, and the 1.5 billion dollar loan to Chrysler Corporation – fomented by and argued on largely using all the same conditions, reasoning, and – of course - rhetoric as today’s travesty on government and finance – the productive taxpayer found himself somehow a contributor to corporate welfare.
Of course, the bait on the hook then was jobs – “saving all those jobs.”
Those protesting this then state-of-the art rip-off said all the same things being said by victims of Congressional and White House lawlessness today. They were shouted down then by the media and its “analysts” just as the same media and analysts are forecasting impending doomsday and urging haste this time.
“Our entire economy is in danger.” Translation: if you don’t give us what we want, we will make it very hard on you. Where have we heard that one before? When do we ever hear anything else?
One of the current presidential candidates says it’s time to start asking some hard questions. “It’s time?!” Now it’s time?
I’ve got some questions – first, that is leadership? Friends of mine – Ed, Bill, Rita, and others - and I have been expecting this very thing to happen for years, amazed that it didn’t happen sooner. Maybe we should “lead?”
Even filing pro se legal action in the effort, I have been protesting matters like the proposed Wall Street Bailout and related congressional and presidential mis-behavior for literally decades, and the day before yesterday, I forwarded the following letter to the senators who represent Texas:
Senator, my wife and I are appalled and furiously angry concerning the proposed "bailout" of Wall Street and people who made loans they had only marginal chance of paying. This is, in every sense of the word, an outrage.
It would certainly have been nice when IRS destroyed my businesses and took steps to assure that I would never again be gainfully employed, had Congress "bailed" me out. Why should the executive fat cats on Wall Street not have to go to the streets and wildernesses for sustenance as I once did? Why are they better under the law than I?
Should we ever meet, don't expect me to shake your hand. No matter what you in the Congress may do to me next, I will always be better than that.
To Ron Paul, perhaps the only member of congress with the intelligence and integrity to have been decrying not only this latest example of colossal corporate swindle but the asininely humanistic and feministic practices that led to it, I wrote only a thank you for the superb way he represents us.
My letter to Senators Kay Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn will, of course, not even be read (a few years ago, when I wrote to the Senator Phil Gramm to include tape recorded proof of extortion to commit rape by an IRS employee, I received a response thanking me for my interest in the Savings and Loan crisis). With nearly sixty thousand lobbyists possessed of fat check books provided by the very people who are now after seven hundred billion dollars owned by people those same lobbyists disenfranchise to listen to, our “representatives” in government have scant time to read what we write or listen to what we say.
More, the Wall Street bankers latest, and – since the maneuvering that led to formation of the Federal Reserve – biggest swindle is being perpetrated so swiftly that I won’t even have time to draw up a Flast v. Cohen lawsuit aimed at stopping it. I can, however, point out, that Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83 (1968), was a United States Supreme Court case holding that a taxpayer has standing to sue the government to prevent an unconstitutional use of taxpayer funds.
If there was ever an example of an “unconstitutional use” of taxpayer funds, this is it.
But I have some more of the questions to which I referred a minute ago here: Why, for instance, is it that not one of the vaunted political pundits and analysts foisted upon the public by today’s media has mentioned Flast v. Cohen? Is the Fourth Estate, while babbling mindlessly and endlessly about what is euphemistically and obliquely being called a “bailout,” apparently totally ignorant of so obviously pertinent a Supreme Court ruling?
Why has no one (other, apparently, than one Robert Schultz of an organization called “We, the People” http://www.givemeliberty.or...) filed a legal action to stop this outrage of constitutional law?
It is all thunderously reminiscent of the way this same national media avoided like plague mention of Keyhole Satellite reconnaissance technology during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and has steadfastly refused to breath a word concerning it even now. These giants of journalism didn’t know about satellite reconnaissance? They didn’t want to know what satellites perched over Iraq had reported, were reporting, and are reporting to the president? Keyhole satellites (guess why they’re called “keyhole”) capable of reading a motor vehicle license plate didn’t know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? A decade of relentlessly flying over Iraq, snooping with the latest technological wizardry, didn’t know?
No one in the media thought to ask about inconsistencies and “smelled rats” like these?
More questions: If the journalists didn’t know about the Keyhole technology, why weren’t they informed by our representatives in congress? If there is so little communication between the media and members of congress, why should the public trust anything either of them say about purported financial conditions on Wall Street?
The questions, questions like these, go on and on and on. Specifically, why should the poor and middle class taxpayer “bail out” people who often pay no taxes whatever? Why, during all the years that IRS rampaged about the nation like the Frankenstein Monster, destroying individuals and small businesses alike, was the nation of Brobdingnagian corporations left unscathed, utterly sacrosanct?
The fact is that one purpose of incorporation is to insure that none of the people responsible for what has happened in any instance will actually lose a dime. The CEOs and other persons who are “incorporated,” in other words, have legally created a straw man who will assume responsibility and liability for whatever has occurred and been done. When the fat cat CEO has been caught in the swindling chicanery and conniving characteristic of his ilk, it is the straw man corporation that will answer and pay – nothing – while the CEO goes on his merry, rapacious, reiver way.
Successful in their appeal for seven hundred billion dollars, they will in all likelihood give themselves a congratulatory pay raise, and begin planning ways to steal as much of the new funding as possible.
How in the name of reason was a nation of people talked into committing a “hurry up and break you damned fool neck,” head-long rush like the invasion of Iraq? How did the already unconstitutional War Powers Act (purportedly intended, let’s remember, to forestall imminent danger to the nation) justify invasion, and why did no one in the media utter so much as a word of protest on that ground?
If the media was so untrustworthy regarding Iraq – what kind of moron believes supposed “troop surge” success means anything meaningful for progress in the Iraq war? – why should any reasonable person believe anything they say now? Why, moreover, should any source of information as abysmally erroneous and incompetent as the U.S. media has shown itself to be, be trusted about anything – much less seven hundred billions dollars?
Just having to do with Iraq alone, and ignoring hundreds of similar “stories,” have you ever looked at the media’s record of data, factual, and outcome error? – it is astonishing. These people “report” in a manner similar to the way one might expect a basketball team of the blind to play the game.
Why should a congress with the disingenuous, often criminal, and abysmal record where personal or group integrity is concerned of the U.S. congress be trusted with twenty dollars, much less seven hundred billion? Why should anyone pay taxes, when the persons charged with protection and defense of the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. public feel free to appropriate – create out of thin air – money the productive people of the nation will have to do without (and therefore, pay by means other than directly monetary)?
Why should anyone willingly support – with taxes or by any other means - those embezzling from his children and grandchildren, and condemning them to lives of virtual servitude to not only domestic enemies, but foreign ones?
Why should a citizen be required to pay for the ruin of his progeny’s lives? Why would any person of any kind of integrity expect that he do that?
Years, decades ago, I remember basketball great Bill Russell having noted that “Welfare for some little black kid isn’t your problem; welfare for the fat cat corporations is your problem.”
Amen, Bill Russell!
SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS! In a nation that trumpets to the world its “free market,” its “entrepreneurs” have, like their role models the banditos in the movie “The Magnificent Seven,” ridden down from the mountain of Wall Street to raid the villagers.
Except there are no Magnificent Seven left in the land of feminism.
Still once more, I’m reminded of that quote from J.S. Mill: “A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”
We’re in for it now, and I have mixed emotions. A couple of days ago, I added this to the home page of the Knight Errant website: “I want to see happen to the government and people of the United States what they caused to happen to me - simple justice. What happened to me made me come back far, far stronger than before, and I want that for my country, too. I'm going to enjoy watching you squirm, however. You deserve it (justice, again).”
That photo, incidentally, is the wound inflicted by a federal sniper shooting at me from ambush October 6, 1986. I thought that little dose of "land of the free" reality appropriate here.
It’s hard to feel sorry for a damned fool paying the price of his foolishness. In fact, it’s wrong. You do what you can to assure his folly isn’t fatal, but you know that for some, as a grandfather used to say, “The school of hard knocks is a damned poor place to learn, but a fool won’t learn in any other.” This fool will either learn from its pain, or it will die.
The odds provided by history indicated that the United States won’t die; they are actually, after all, a union of fifty nations whose loss of power over their own destinies was lost by way of perverted federalism (the “federal” government of today is the antithesis of the original theory of federalism) to a cabal of self-serving and therefore traitorous industrialists in the aftermath of two great wars. Avaricious and rapacious in a manner unprecedented in human history, the industrialists fat with the power provided by World War Two profits served what should have been notice to a nation made wise by the hardship of war, the notice that was their creation of an agency of government enable by law to spend without restraint even in the form of an accounting.
That, of course, was the CIA, in turn creator of a new war demanding continued spending, the “Cold War.” That no one, even today, seems to have realized what was occurring can only be attributed to another CIA operation, that of MOCKINGBIRD – co-option and eventual take-over and control of the nation’s thought processes otherwise known as the news and information media.
Included, of course, in the national hypnosis and resulting stupor was the federal operation that both gained control of education by politically-controlled financial means and infiltrated the school system at all levels. With foment of supposed movements like feminism, the takeover was completed and the nation effectively castrated. More and more, the Home of the Brave began to act for all the world like a female suffering premenstrual syndrome, a condition made no more apparent than by today’s Gracie Allen Checkbook economic practices.
Gracie Allen, some of us will recall, was the Vaudeville partner and wife of George Burns, and used to baffle her husband and delight audiences with her insistence that as long as her check book contained checks, her checking account must have money.
Neither can anything but feminism and effeminate humanism explain undeclared, cautious and restrained, “humane” wars like Korea, Vietnam, and “Desert Storm. “Now we have “Iraqi Freedom,” the ultimate demonstration of strategic and tactical military strategy degraded by emotion-governed female reasoning. Watching the U.S and its forces in Iraq is like watching a spastic wrestler, more likely to be defeated by his own inability to co-ordinate his limbs than by the strength and skill of his opponent.
And now, of course, this. Nearly eight thousand dollars for every individual taxpayer in the nation. That on top of an almost identically jaw-dropping figure for costs thus far of the war in Iraq. Both figures, of course, require multiplication by an operator taught by history concerning anything the federal government of the United States says. In instances like these, that multiplier is one, point three, meaning that the total cost of this latest swindle, together with the earlier one, will be 1.4 X 1012 times 1.3 ($1,400,000,000,000 times 1.3), which is: 1.82 X 1012 ($1,820,000,000,000) – One trillion, eight hundred twenty billion.
If there are, as IRS reports, 130,000,000 (one hundred, thirty million) individual taxpayers in the nation, that number representing this latest embezzlement and the cost of the Iraqi debacle means a cost for each taxpayer of fourteen thousand ($14,000), dollars. Anyone capable of accounting for a budget and faced with the costs of similar swindles like that being run presently by the oil company side of the industrial military complex corporate plutocracy, together with the staggering costs of illegal immigration being born by the consumer, and what it means for cost of living otherwise can see what is happening and an impossible future. In the same manner that robber corporations take control of a company, then gut it of finances and assets to cheat the company’s stockholders, the corporate interests who created the CIA and current federal government have gutted the United States of America and cheated its citizens.
But historians of the future will say that the U.S public has brought it all down upon themselves. I grew up among people who taught me that people who loaned money and the practice of borrowing money were inherently evil. The stock market was a swindle designed to bilk the wage-earner and productive person of his earned wealth.
In my entire life of seventy-two years, I purchased ONE thing on credit - my last car, that after IRS took everything I earned in my life and left me on the streets. Otherwise, I simply worked and saved until I could pay for it, and during my lifetime paid more than a million dollars in taxes - most of it spent on my mellow citizens who refused to do the same as I had done, or by pandering politicians in order to kill people elsewhere in the world.
It made me what I am today - angry, contemptuous of "our freedom," bullheaded, and nobody’s damned fool. There is a famous monologue speech in the movie Grapes of Wrath, and Bruce Springsteen paraphrased it like this:
Tom’s mother asks: “How will I know where you are? How will I know you’re okay?”
Tom said “Ma, wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy;
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries;
Where there’s a fight ‘gainst the blood and hatred in the air;
Look for me Ma, I’ll be there.
Wherever there’s somebody fightin’ for a place to stand,
Or decent job or a helpin’ hand;
Wherever somebody’s strugglin’ to be free,
Look in their eyes, Ma, you’ll see me, you’ll see me.”
I never surrender - not ever, and when the nation that was the United States begins to break up, there will be many like me. Events like these of the past few years have a way of bringing to the fore leaders – real ones, rather than the bloviating, effeminate, and – to be fair to those whom age and the vicissitudes have deprived of their former strength and virility – surrogates we tolerate, even support now.
For that to happen, of course, those who will survive the maelstrom and follow will have to be forced to do so by their own cowardice, moral weakness, and fecklessness in the face of events. We are where we are because of addiction to ease and perceived security, and the decadence it has spawned and engendered. One trains to fight - as I have since life taught me during youth that to live means a fight - in order to live able to maintain respect for himself. Feminist humanism has substituted for physical, muscular and more testicular strength a new, “spiritual,” ideological, and virtual respect, one based entirely upon rhetoric and arguing that mere existence and identity is not only prideful, but deserving of respect.
So it is that the member of the most ridiculous, backward, vicious and barely civilized culture or nation may both imagine pride and demand from others respect. Even in the United States, equality under the law has come to mean equality in fact, a distortion of logic which has led to the absurdly chaotic state of national reasoning - as I said a minute ago, a nation behaving like a woman suffering PMS.
It won’t do. The nation will probably divide first along lines dictated by evolutionary forces, the same forces that have “strung the ladder of life” as history has recorded it. For anyone using probability to extrapolate the future, there is, after all, the scoreboard of upon which the past is written. Africa is Africa on account of Africans, Mexico as it is on account of Mexicans, Latin America on account of Latin Americans. Et cetera around the world. The nation that was the United States will, therefore, break up first along cultural and ethnic lines.
The fragmentation will be rancorous, of course. Washington, D.C. and its corporate plutocracy will not yield without a fight its wealth and power by purchased legislation and court rulings. More, neither nouveau riche plutocrat nor indolent welfare recipient “poor” – both of whom have availed themselves of federal political pandering to rob the productive laborer and artisan - will surrender their free lunch gladly.
On top of that, cultures both within the country and without represent fairly the macrocosm from which the individuals come. Both illegal immigrants from Mexico and their government believe and say publicly that they have a right to what has been earned by the “anglo” populations of the U.S. “Black Americans” – persons of African descent living in the U.S. – rail about discrimination, prejudice, limited opportunity, and even the slavery of their ancestors, while totally ignoring social theory, science and technology, medical advances, art and literature, and far, far more – all contributions made to mankind by white cultures, contributions from which these same black Americans draw enormous benefit.
Neither group or culture, Mexican or African, would willingly go back to whence they came, witness the fact that illegal aliens from Mexico fight with ever tool at their command to avoid going back to the nation and culture they now brazenly (and, in my own view, incomprehensibly) celebrate and vaunt from a secure distance afar.
History will not be able to ignore the irony of the racism being charged as a daily routine by Hispanic and Afro-American people, people who in their own behavior and in the behavior of the cultures from which they come demonstrate the factuality of the “prejudice” against which they rail. Actions, it is said, speak louder than words, and at the risk of repetitiveness, Mexico and Latin America are as they are because of their peoples. If white America believes it is ethnically and culturally superior, it may be because it hasn’t been permitted to ignore the weaknesses and failings of its “minority” detractors.
The most powerful impulse toward disintegration of the union once preserved by the Civil War will therefore be that of culture and race. It will be closely rivaled, however, by economic forces. One more – a “once more” repeated continually and with increasing tempo and effect since the World War Two (and before, actually, but nowhere to the degree seen now), we are seeing middle income white America being blatantly ripped off in order to satisfy and surfeit the rich and powerful who use and exploit the staggering number of aliens having come to the Land of the Free turned Land of the Fee since 1964.
Prior to that time, the United States was overwhelmingly composed of white people of European descent – eighty-nine percent in 1965, with the only minority being Afro-American citizens (ten percent). It is incontrovertibly fair to say that these people made the U.S. what it was then. With enactment of the Hart-Cellar, INS Act of 1965, national origin quotas were abolished; and, you should pardon the expression, the proverbial **** hit the fan. The influx of aliens both legal and illegal has paralleled the decline of the nation, to put my homely phrase another way.
The latest swindle being called a “bailout” is a scam so patently obvious as to be laughable under any other circumstances. More, this form of corporate financier bunco has been repeated again and again since its first success with formation of the Federal Reserve. The money lenders, using the formation of the fed and earlier “bailouts” like that of Chrysler Corporation and the Savings and Loans for precedent, make as many bad loans as they can – an orgy of purported largesse and all in the name of race relations, gender equality, political correctness, and the demagogue-ing like – knowing full well that the working-class, productive taxpayers of the nation will ultimately be required to pay off the bad mortgages.
The infuriatingly insulting character of it all is stupefying. Everybody, we are always told, is served and should be happy; every body has benefited. Millions of illegal aliens, millions of the uneducated and poor, millions of Afro-Americans, and others who could otherwise never have hoped to own a house, car, and more are being assured “the American Dream” (strange how that expression always makes me want to puke). And, of course, the lending institutions (which include insurance companies, by the way) have been made healthy again – the better to serve “America.” They made billions, in other words.
Just one segment of “America” is unhappy – those left holding the proverbial bag.
Perhaps, parenthetically, I should have said “unhappy or should be” – most of those left holding the bag for this the latest “bailout will be too stupid and/or ignorant to realize what has happened. Betrayed, bewildered - behaviorally conditioned and addled, that is - by decades of state-of-the-art corporate propagandist television and information media, many of the taxpayers being enslaved won’t know it until the inevitable result of it all comes down upon them like an avalanche. Wall Street and financier U.S.A has thrown a decades long, sumptuous and Brobdingnagian party, and white, middle class U.S.A. are the ones who will pay the bill.
But they, the Germanic, Nordic, and Celtic people, will realize eventually. Don’t forget, gentle reader, that I’ve already been through it all. When IRS and the federal government took everything from me in order to hand it over to the same people who will now to be recipient of the new “bailout” money, realization came like a lightning bolt. While my fellows today will need longer to convince themselves that they have been robbed and raped, the realization when it comes will come like that same lightning bolt. They’ll be livid – angry like I once was.
And they will, I think, do the same thing – drop out. After a certain number of repetitions of the same insult, you know, the individual – especially the Germanic individual – knows outrage. “Fool me once, shame on thee; fool me twice, shame on me.” The form of rape in question here is a degrading, and humiliating one. To play the game that is the so-called “American Dream,” toiling the majority of one’s life – only to have everything taken virtually at the stroke of a pen – is, once realization comes, infuriating.
Realizing further that their representation in government holds them in the contempt this latest bailout trumpets to the wide world, they will withdraw. First to go will be the states most heavily peopled by Germans, the Nordic, and Celtic people – the Midwestern and middle states, that is. It may be that states whose populations are nearly as German and still ingrained with the famed Protestant Work Ethic of the Northern Europeans - the ranching states of the Rockies Front Range, that is - will go with them, leaving the populous, welfare-sucking states of the coasts east and west and their economic black hole cities to fend for themselves.
The Little Red Hen will have made her last cakes.
Those who have for nearly three-quarters of a century been segregated from the free market and forced to take instead penny-ante subsidies and what the purchasing public for their produce, the farm and ranch people will stop producing for anyone but themselves. It must be singularly galling to see an industry that was built largely on their backs and has lived off them now given hugely preferential treatment denied them in the same circumstances.
What will happen to the perennially stiff-necked southern states is another matter, driven by different dynamics. This is too long already, and we’ll talk about the “solid South” next time.
Assuming, that is, there is time. Events of late have occurred so swiftly – it is important when staging robbery and similar crime to attack with swiftness – that I have trouble writing fast enough to stay abreast of events I predicted years, even decades, ago. Watch out for the health care and energy matters: what worked for the financiers and mortgage lenders this time will work for the health care insurers and the energy people – I refer to the supposed (when you know a Jesse James government will steal for you what you need to recoup any losses you may have, one can hardly call you entrepreneurial) entrepreneurs who will ostensibly develop new sources of energy.
To be continued . . .
Continuing this SITREP from a senior citizen of seventy two years and ardent historian of sixty years, the nation is found in another economic crisis, that most noticeably having to do with recent bank bankruptcies like Lehman Brothers, an eighty-five billion dollar bailout of American International Group Insurance company (absurd on its surface – how does a government fifty-thre |
