An Orgy of Stupefying Nonsense - Reflections on the Weekend News

1. On NPR January 17, we have a Moslem woman speaking of Moslem women who “want to preserve their dignity as Moslem women.” Huh? Lady, is that an oxymoron? How does a woman keep her dignity and remain a Moslem (a religion and culture that hold her in less esteem, with less human rights, than a horse?!) What do you mean by “dignity?”

2. Canadian diplomats have been using a "torture awareness" manual that lists the United States and Israel among states “where torture might occur.” The manual includes information on the legal definition of torture and tips on how to tell if Canadians being held as prisoners outside the country's borders have been abused, The Toronto Star reported.

Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Guantanamo Bay, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United States are listed under "possible torture/abuse cases."

The Foreign Affairs Department prepared the guide, "Torture Awareness Workshop Reference Materials," because of the case of Omar Khadr -- a Canadian citizen who was arrested as a teenager in Afghanistan, where he had gone with his family, and held in Guantanamo.

The United States (the nation that brought the hemisphere the “School of the Americas” and whose C.I.A. publishes manuals explaining torture techniques and technology) says he has been treated well there, but Khadr claims extreme abuse, including being used as "a human mop" and being chained up for hours.

3. Friends in Pahrump, Nevada report that political caucuses there were a shambles - first disrupted, then taken over and controlled by Clinton forces. I wrote back to observe that anyone expecting anything else of the Clintons were like those who now express dismay at the plundering bully our corporate government and nation have become. “Those who do not learn from history,” said George Santayana, “are doomed to repeat it”

4. NPR also airs an interview with one Bob Sullivan author of a new book entitled “Gotcha Capitalism.” Like the myriad of cynical euphemisms with which we are inflicted in the nation that never tells it like it is and demonstrates its contempt for the truth in relentless fashion, “gotcha capitalism” means larceny in its sneaky fraud form, things like having to tolerate four dollar fees for ATM transactions, cell phone contracts you can’t get out of with a crowbar, paying outrages fees for insurance you don’t need on a rental car, and twenty dollars a day for wireless internet services advertised as free.

Every day, Sullivan reports, the public (I started to say “we,” but I don’t use any of these “services”) uses banks, cell phones, and credit cards, book hotels and buy airline tickets that are loaded with hidden rip-offs.

• You didn’t fill up the rental car with gas? Gotcha! The fill-up will cost you seven dollars a gallon.
• Your bank balance fell below one thousand dollars for one day? Gotcha! That’ll be twelve dollars – a “service charge.”
• You miss one payment on that 18-month “same-as-cash loan?” Gotcha! That’ll be a five hundred and twelve dollar “penalty.”
• You’re one day late on that electric bill? Gotcha! All your credit cards will now have a thirty percent interest rate (actually, my son-in-law in Lubbock, Texas recently learned that paying his electric bill on time also meant a fifteen dollar penalty – even though no notice of any such thing had ever been published).

“Gotcha Capitalism” (there’s another kind?) is a worthwhile read, I’m sure.

Another book come across in researching that one is entitled “If Americans Really Understood the Income Tax: Uncovering Our Most Expensive Ignorance.” In it, author John O. Fox details a number of the scams I uncovered and wrote about during my decade-long covert operations against the federal government When I provided proof of many of these, proof in the form of records, tape-recordings, and statements, to U.S. Senators, Congressmen, and all the major news networks, guess what happened (think about it . . .) Nothing – absolutely nothing!

The two authors, moreover, write about “capitalist” behavior I encountered repeatedly during my years of survivalist coping with the “corporate America.” In learning to live on literally pennies a day, I discovered time and time again “service fees” that were merely a verbal cover for outright theft. No service was done or even contemplated, and no quid pro quo ever intended. Cell phone companies charged me for phone calls made on phones that had been disabled and were locked in a drawer at the time the calls were supposedly made. A telephone tap at a certain bank revealed the practice of deliberately replenishing ATM machines’ twenty dollar bill supplies with bills throughout which ten dollar bills had been seeded in order to “maximize profits.”

When, the second time (Woodforest National Bank, Port Lavaca, Texas) I was shorted ten dollars, I complained. Guess what happened? I should complain to my bank (Border Federal Credit Union, Del Rio, TX). Think about that, too, by the way. When I complained to Border Federal, guess what happened. You got it.

Repeatedly (perhaps the most frequently and openly so fraud in Texas) while still traveling for the U.S. Judo Association and buying gasoline (eventually, upon leaving the NJI, I would stop gasoline consumption altogether, to begin riding a bicycle exclusively), I would first fill a gallon jug, All but invariably, the pump would register as much as ten percent more fuel than the gallon jug could contain. Curious and adding the data to my research project of the time, I would complain to the corporate employee in attendance at the place. What happened? Of course. The minimum wage, corporate employee at the business would – and probably truthfully – state that he had no power to do anything except demand the money. When I eventually experimented further by daring the clerk to call police when I handed over payment for the actual quantity of gasoline being purchased, I was – for what I assume are obvious reasons - never once reported to authorities.

The corporate oil companies aren’t, in other words, satisfied with ripping the public off with millions in congressional theft like “oil depletion allowances” and pump outrageous pump prices resulting in billions of dollars in soaring oil company profits, they must resort also to cheap, short-change swindle.

I leave to the reader to compute the millions of dollars of corporate theft from accomplished by that one simple device alone (hint: five to ten percent of total gasoline sales - $474,368,000,000 - nationally).

I can’t resist mentioning here – the story provides for the reader a means by which to assess the integrity and honesty of the federal government, together with a multiplier with which to estimate the size of federal fraud and larceny - that during my years of travail at the hands of the federal government, supposed “interest and penalties” (once a bankruptcy court had forced IRS to say – the tax men had to date resolutely refused to do so - how much I supposedly owed) on thirteen hundred dollars amounted to one hundred thousand, thirteen hundred dollars. That was during a supposed period of three years – a “penalty,” in other words, of thirty three thousand, three hundred thirty three dollars a year on thirteen hundred dollars.

Now do you perhaps understand Halliburton, Iraq, the vanishing weapons of mass destruction, and the “news” surrounding it all? A national debt of eight trillion dollars? How about a federal tax code incomprehensible even by expert accountants, courts, and IRS officials . . .

An amateur mathematician, I have caught banks and financial institutions in fraudulent computations again and again. In 1989, while doing the books for the National Judo Institute and United States Judo Federation, I discovered interest overcharges on the adjustable interest rate (tied to the national prime rate, of course) mortgage resulting in a thirteen thousand dollar refund. More, re-computation of taxes demanded by the state, city, and county tax assessors resulted in several hundreds (can’t remember, actually – it’s been a while) of dollars refund.

The Prime Interest Rate, incidentally (when, in 1989, I asked citizens across the country to explain the term, I found that an average of three per hundred could tell me – all said they had adjustable rate mortgages on their homes) is the interest rate charged by banks to their most favored borrowers (not you and I).

When that same year I computed social security benefits due a client veteran, I discovered thirteen (that number seems to come up a lot in my affairs, doesn’t it?) thousand dollars in underpayment. When the Social Security Administration paid the money, they calculated the interest erroneously (and never did pay the shortfall). For a time, it seemed I might be able to sell my services with a calculator; actually, I probably could - were "Americans" bright enough to suspect how often and for how much they are being ripped off each and every day. They'd rather know about Britney Spears latest escapade.

In 1978, investigating malfunction of a radar gun alleged by police officers of a small Midwestern city, I discovered that inaccurate speed-measuring equipment had resulted in hundreds of citizens having paid fines for speeding they probably hadn’t committed. When I confronted the city attorney with incontrovertible proof, not only was nothing done, but I learned the city had known of the defective speed analyzers defective condition for months.

In my novel, Jonatha’s Truth, Johanna, the heroine, observes that one can never trust a capitalist because everything is for sale. That includes the individual and his government, it seems.

In short, I have been an ardent researcher and discoverer of fraudulent schemes since boyhood. That included the political “bait and switch fraud” that all elections during my lifetime have been. The latest is, without the slightest danger of being gainsaid, the highest example of the bunco technique I’ve ever encountered.

“Bait and switch.” Something tells me I need to explain (obviously, anyone who puts even a little credence in the presently on-going campaign for the nation’s presidency is unfamiliar with this old fraud). In the industry of retail sales, a “bait and switch” is a form of fraud in which the retailer putting forth the fraud lures customers by advertising a product or service at a very – even unprofitably - low price. Then when the promise of “a steal” has lured resultingly greater numbers of customers, the crook tells the customers that the advertised product or service is no longer available – they sold out, of course – but a better product is. For a greater (much, usually) price, one very profitable to the retailer, of course.

The sucker purchases the higher priced item – which in most cases he wanted only because of the bargain price – because he is too stupid and/or lacking in self-control to do otherwise. Does that remind you of anything? Like voting for a candidate because they guarantee a national health care plan, lower taxes, troop withdrawal from Iraq, only to discover that it all covered for the fact that the candidate intended all along to permit uncontrolled illegal immigration and hand you the bill for everything the “undocumented” steal, destroy, and siphon of taxpayer-supported welfare programs?

How about voting for a candidate only because she is a woman, or because he is Afro-American – to learn that neither of them controls anything in which the industrial military corporations and their allies have an interest?

Read up on the "Bait and Switch" swindle – at least you’ll know with whom you should be pissed off. Should you become sufficiently learned, you will recognize the "Bait and Switch" ruse everywhere in politics and legislation. You’ll see "caption bills," legislation which purports to propose minor changes in law, all the while intending the ultimate objective of substantial changes in the wording later. The original proposal is “the Bait,” while the later “presto - change-oh” chicanery is “the Switch.”

Try for an instance the “Patriot Act”: read the title, then read the law. See if you can recognize “the Bait” and “the Switch.” That one was also an example of still another congressional hocus-pocus designed to hornswoggle the electorate and taxpayer. Once the public had come to realization of what had been done to perhaps the one law they can understand, the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, the White House and Congress weren’t yet done.

House and senate procedure rule changes were at the outset also proposed – that’s “the Bait” – that in order to meet legal requirements for public notice and public hearings mandated by existing law. Then, with everyone set up for the swindle, different rules were proposed at a supposed final meeting. That was the maneuver known as “the Switch.” Result?” Bypass of public notice and public discussion on the rule changes governing how the final vote would be made. No one but guys like me read this stuff (not even your congressional “representatives,” matter of fact), but all the maneuvering had the political objective of getting rules and resulting legislation passed without negative public reaction that might later prove embarrassing at election time.

You not only got screwed because, even if you were bright enough to see through the “Bait and Switch,” you’ve been rendered so brain-dead and trained monkey responsive to intellectual chicanery and distortion of what otherwise would be obvious - like that peddled by FoxNews and the MOCKINGBIRD media generally - that you’d buy it all just because the salesman was a woman or an Afro-American.

The people stealing you blind in Washington, D.C. don’t even need “Bait and Switch” any more. That one requires of the sucker a functioning intellect.

Yesterday, I watched with family the testimony before congress of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. (Shalom) Bernanke. I’ve been, as I’ve remarked, an ardent observer of fraudulent operations for decades. I seldom – never, in fact - see anything really new. This was amazing nevertheless.

Bernanke was repeatedly, and breathtakingly, close to blurting out the actual truth. Each time – probably the result of waved warnings off camera, or scowls on the faces of the thieves supposedly interviewing him – he swerved rhetorically to avoid the self-made trap.

Let’s first remind ourselves of a quote, from one Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777-1836), who once said: "I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply." The absurdity of a nation of people who believe their elected representatives rule while someone else – someone over whom neither they or their representatives has any control - controls the money supply and the economy has always been mind-boggling for me.

Anyway, Bernanke controls “the puppet,” and if you watched him “testify” the other day, you know we’re about to see the “Bait and Switch” tactic still another time.

“Never trust a capitalist,” Johanna grated – “everything is for sale.”