How to Be a Prophet in the Land of the Free

January 11, 2006:

Oops - started another blizzard of knee-jerk "patriotism." I'm giving "aid and comfort to the enemy" because I point out how FUBAR we are as a nation, and criticize the system that made it happen. I mean, of course, the bastardized version of what the Founding Fathers gave us, the bastard having been born of incestuous liaison between federal government and the military industrial complex immediately after World War Two. I spoke of that earlier here, so I won't repeat myself. Have a look at my "blog" for December 4, 2005. http://www.judoknighterrant.com

Anyway, to argue that anyone who points out your weaknesses is aiding your enemy is like saying your team's coach is aiding your opponent because he tells you what you're doing wrong. If you're stupid enough to make an argument like that, don't expect an answer from me. "The only thing that will argue with a jackass," my grandfather used to say, "is a jackass." I don't discuss anything, much less argue, with a jackass. Besides, I seldom make statements that I can't defend. I've been an ardent student of tactics since I was a boy, such that when I make an argument, I've laid my defenses carefully beforehand. I know the subject and the proof of my contentions in that regard thoroughly. Disagree you may - as a matter of right - but you're walking into a trap when you do.

In witness thereof, a story. Today, my friend Bill sends me an excellent article from Harvard Magazine by Professor Elizabeth Warren, Ph.D. The essay, http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/010682.html entitled "The Middle Class on the Precipice," is a paraphrase - damned near verbatim - of what I started talking about in what I sometimes call "my infamous speech" at the University of Northern Iowa in 1972. I have repeated the essay's theme often during the last few (seven, at least) years, and it is printed in my book "Letters to Aaron" and its revised edition, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story. Several of the theories in the profesora's essay have been published here, as a matter of fact.

Note that I do not accuse Dr. Warren of plagiarism. What has happened - the history related by Dr. Warren - is as obvious and unmistakable as the fact that it would happen should have been all those years ago. I said so, and I went further to predict the massive avarice that would result in flight by corporate mega-business to greener pastures, together with wholesale "outsourcing" of jobs to foreigners, even enemies of the U.S. I predicted the enormous influx of "migrants" from Mexico and Latin America spurred by conspiracy and encouragement of illegal immigration by a desperate middle class and its less powerful corporations. During the time a presidential candidate, Ross Perot, predicted the "giant, sucking sound" that would punctuate NAFTA, I said the sucking sound had already started, created by the vacuum being formed as the middle class here evaporated - we just weren't able to hear it amidst all the bull-roar lying emanating from capitalist America and its corporately-owned federal government. I said it, all over the U.S., and a lot of people will remember.

I said it, and like the S.W.A.T. team concept I first propounded in 1956, then again in 1967, the idea was scoffed at. I was labeled a lunatic, and libeled as a fraud and an imposter. I was also right.

I was right then as I am now. And just like then, having become apparent as the Rocky Mountains, everybody knew I was right. In fact, it was their idea all along. They invented it.

The sad - an however deflating - fact is that any damned fool should have known. The question is why didn't they? I everybody saw it coming, why was nothing done? In the instance of S.W.A.T. (it was first dubbed "The Mongoose Tactic") concept, it took having a man named Whitman shoot dozens of people from a tower at the University of Texas to gain acceptance - and credit for somebody else. Of course. Surprise!

In the instance of our FUBAR economic state, the evolution of what came to be called "capitalism" was subject to laws so absolute, so apparent and universal as to resemble gravity. Neither can it be argued that no warnings, no clues, no parallel forces existed. "Power corrupts," Lord Acton said. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton, Emmerich Edward Dalberg, First Baron of Aldenham, English and German historian born 1834 and died 1902, studied the effect of politics and power on individual and social behavior. He also reported famously - not so in this country, of course, it not being a popular theory - “It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.” That the two dicta are obvious restatements of one another is also not something you would expect to be promulgated loudly in the Land of the Fee, either. The majority wouldn't like it.
So power has corrupted. Surprise (again). Exactly what anyone reasonably well informed and/or well-versed in "American" - need I point out yet another time that there are thirty-four other nations in the hemisphere? - capitalism, "American" government and politics, and "American" law would have expected has happened. While the mega-corporations "earn" stupendous profits, and make ready to move on to new colonialist vistas, the population living in poverty soars apace (surprise - again), and the middle class bulwark the nation was built on in the first place disintegrates. The "great, sucking sound" has grown to a hurricane roar. Sur . . . oh, never mind!

As I said, any fool could have seen it coming. Those grown sufficiently rich from the then universally accepted exploitation of the poor went on to seek more wealth - and, in a society and nation predicated upon that kind of mores and life view - power. With many times the access to government, the rich soon did just that, and a vicious cycle - one even more insidious in its nature - started. With more wealth, the rich acquired from government more and more prerogatives. Eventually, with purchase of the courts' favor, the rich rid themselves even of responsibility by means of what was called "incorporation." Wealth became a person, with all the rights and prerogatives of an individual, but without liability for its misdeeds. All profit, no responsibility. Incredible? Un-American? You'd have thought so.

The power of wealth grew, and grew. Eventually, it purchased by bribery the monetary system of the nation itself. That was called the Federal Reserve Act, and I've discussed it here already. As a famous French nobleman and financier, Baron Amsel Rothschild, said, "Give me control of a country's money and I care not who makes her laws. I will have no need to be king." The principle is so simple a child can understand it, and I have spoken often of it, using this parable: "Imagine," I say, "that you and I form a company. You control everything: hiring, firing, product, location - everything. I control only one thing, the money. Who is running the company?"

Of course. And the United States of America - it's people, that is - have borrowed, borrowed, and borrowed in order to feed a Brobdingnagian monster government, pay the taxes of the equally colossal corporations who own the government, and provide for a military that beggars description or understanding (try $15,000,000,000,000 since World War Two, and $760,000,000,000 per year). Anesthetized and rendered functionally brain-dead by the most relentless and exhaustive mind and opinion control propaganda ever levied against the mind of man, and having spent funds in amounts inconceivable by anyone but skilled mathematicians, "Americans'" country and nation is now owned lock, stock, and barrel by bankers both domestic and foreign. The gross domestic product of the U.S. - everything it is able to produce and earn, everything it owns of value (and that set by the wealthy who otherwise own the public) - will no longer pay the interest on its debt to the bankers and financiers who effectively - and legally, incidentally - own it. All of that has come to pass while "America" continues to believe it is free, ruled by the democratic majority.

In witness of the absolutely astonishing power of the propaganda campaign levied by the wealthy and powerful against their country and countrymen, consider a few examples from the article by Dr. Warren (and I quote):

"The one-two punch of income vulnerability and rising costs has weakened the middle class, at the same time that the revision of the rules of financing delivers a death blow to millions of families each year. Since the early 1980s, the credit industry has rewritten the rules of lending to families. Congress has turned the industry loose to charge whatever it can get and to bury tricks and traps throughout credit agreements. Credit-card contracts that were less than a page long in the early 1980s now number 30 or more pages of small-print legalese. In the details, credit-card companies lend money at one rate, but retain the right to change the interest rate whenever it suits them. They can even raise the rate after the money has been borrowed—a practice once considered too shady even for a back-alley loan shark. When they think they have been cheated, customers can be forced into arbitration in locations thousands of miles from home. Some companies claim that they can repossess anything a customer buys with a credit card.
Credit-card issuers are not alone in their boldness. Home-mortgage lenders are writing mortgages that are so one-sided that some of their products are known as “loan-to-own” because it is the mortgage company—not the buyer—who will end up with the house. Payday lenders are ringing military bases and setting up shop in working-class neighborhoods, offering instant cash that can eventually cost the customer more than a thousand percent interest."


How about that?! Incredibly, an "American" will not only borrow money without knowing what he is going to pay for it, he will buy a house, or car, or whatever under the same conditions!

Surprising? No, not when you realize that he has done the same with his country and government. And the result, as I've just related, has been the same - The mortgage company has wound up with the house. AND NO ONE SEES THE PARALLEL!

When the President lies bald-faced - a lie certainly archetypical of Hitler's "Big Lie - "American" see no parallel, and nothing happens. When he violates the Constitution and repudiates his oath of office, no one see a parallel, or does anything. It goes on and on. Stupidity. Childish and immature distractions of every conceivable kind, while the really critical issues of living are left to the corrupt, greedy, and power-mad known as "politicians." While, for instance, tens of thousands are being killed in two wars being waged for personal and corporate gain by the super wealthy and the power-mad, the public manifests its decadence in anticipation, preparation, adulation, and the rest having to do with football "Bowl Games," and the Super Bowl. Men and women doing battle with tanks, guns, planes, ships, and firearms are somehow (I sure as hell have no idea) less interesting and emotive - less heroic - than men playing FOOTBALL!

That while the twenty or thirty a month death toll of the nation's troops is relegated to the rear pages in the paper and the "flow strip" at the bottom of the TV screen, and patriotism otherwise is a yellow ribbon sticker on trunk lids and bumpers.

Oh, yeah - and "support our troops." B-a-a-a-r-f!

If that weren't enough, we also have the heretofore inconceivable spectacle of the United States Senate intensively grilling a Supreme Court nominee in an effort to assure that he will continue the court and federal government's sniveling complicity in what a relatively small segment of the populace chooses euphemistically to call "abortion." That while a hideously murderous and internecine war rages, and the White House branch of government and its now private military insists upon a right similar in moral character to that of "abortion." I speak of the right to torture of prisoners of war. With the nation staring at murderous environmental pollution, a staggering economy, un-impeded, even widely abetted and supported, illegal immigration of hordes of criminals from Mexico, the threat of a crippling bio-chemical or nuclear attack by terrorist, and a host more, the nation's feminists' most pressing concern is "the right to choose." If that doesn't portray the state of the nation's mentality and character, nothing will. Obviously, we have few people left who remember to "ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country. Stick a yellow ribbon on your trunk?

AND YOU WONDER HOW WE CAME TO BE IN THE F.U.B.A.R. STATE WE'RE IN?