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.”

"Somebody should DO something . . ."

If you watch the evening news, you probably know that Jack McClellan is a pedophile. He is the guy in California (where else?), who not only admits stalking children, but posts an Internet website in which – to quote a lawsuit by Santa Clarita, California parents for an injunction preventing his activities – “The activities of McClellan are undertaken for the purpose of promoting, advocating and undertaking lewd and lascivious conduct with non-consenting minor children, ranging from arousal by virtue of so-called legal 'cuddling' and 'touching' to inter-generational sexual contact for the purpose of McClellan's sexual gratification and the sexual gratification of those engaging in similar practices."

McClellan provides other pedophiles with data intended to help them share in his odious pursuit and activities.

The police, however, are powerless to do anything about McClellan. According to Santa Clarita Police Captain Joe Gutierrez, "We have no active criminal investigation involving Mr. McClellan. I can only say we are aware of his Web site. We have visited his Web site and determined it does not rise to the level of a crime."

Of course, many who read this will share the sentiments of Richard Patterson, one of the attorneys representing the Santa Clarita parents:

"Here's the problem from my perspective," said Patterson, who has five daughters and three granddaughters. "With impunity, this guy lets you take his picture, put it on the front page and tells people 'I'm coming to take a picture of your little girl and I'm going to put that picture on a Web site and I'm going to let other sick people look at it.'

"My primary concern here is that we have: A. a person who is psychotic and, B. he's a drug user and, C. he's acting out his prurient fantasies," Patterson said. "It doesn't take much of a psychology degree to know what happens next - that what he assumes is harmless action usually, quickly, escalates to physical action."

I predict nothing will come of the civil suit. This is California, let’s not forget, home of the functionally demented Ninth Circuit Court and others like it – “others” including a socially-paralyzing segment of the society. It is in California where the U.S. flag had been, and is being, flown upside down under that of Mexico, and where Mexican criminals parade brazenly in public. California – the San Joaquin Valley - is also the home and base of operations of columnist Ruben Navarette, the columnist who wants not only to leave the border open to his people from Mexico, but to legalize illegal immigration.

In short, again, Jack McClellan and his pedophile brethren and Ruben Navarette and his illegal alien brethren from Mexico are both thumbing their noses with impunity protected by the U.S. Constitution at the U.S. Government and the people of the United States.

Neither does the analogical and microcosmic comparison(s) stop there. In Washington, D.C., another safe harbor for those thumbing contemptuous noses as the rest of the nation, another group of sneering reprobates operates in like manner. These, of course, are the conspiracy of criminals who rule the United States, that being now as brazenly openly as the Jack McClellans and the Ruben Navarettes.

I remind the reader regarding the latter that to suborn or misprision a crime is a crime equal to the crime being suborned or misprisioned. Ruben Navarette is, therefore, a criminal.

Most archetypical of the ilk is none other than the un-impeached – the proper documents are absent, in other words – President of the United States, George W. Bush. The three elements and their archetypes have much in common. All hold in contempt and flaunt the law and the society it protects. McClellan, Navarette, and Bush – together with all those who support their evil activities – suborn and misprision criminal activity, crime against even the people who support them. Bush and Navarette encourage, support, and ignore illegal immigrants and the depredations of the latter against the citizenry of the U.S.

All of this is incontrovertible logically or legally. Yet, we the people of the United States, the victims of the people in question and their ilk, are told by court, lawyer, political pundit, and media expert that we can do nothing – except wait until the obviously inevitable happens. Then, we are told, the law will act.

Sure. We’ve seen the law “act” all over the @#$%& place. It’s the reason that a week or so ago, two men with criminal records as long as both your arms broke into a home, murdered three women and beat their husband and father nearly to death, before setting fire to the house. Operation of the law is the reason that that very sort of things happens again and again. Dru Sjodin (remember?) and literally hundreds like her were raped and murdered by rapists and murderers released from prison by the law. And on, and on, and on. Ad Nauseam. Ad fury.

That’s what the law will do when the inevitable where Jack McClellan is concerned happens. Will the law hold McClellan responsible when someone he has encouraged by way of his hideous website rapes and murders a little girl? What do you think (spend some time on the Internet or at the public library, read up on the history of such matters)?

While you’re thinking, ask yourself if the law will hold Ruben Navarette or George W. Bush responsible when one of the one hundred and twenty three hardened criminals arriving over the border from Mexico daily does his thing? Remind yourself, since it’s kidnapping, and the rape and murder of children and women we’re talking about, that Mexico is the breeding and nurturing ground of the worst crime rate on the planet having to do with that very sort of thing.

Shaking his head in what seemed to me to be bewilderment, the second attorney for the Santa Clarita parents said, “Someone’s go to do something.”

Hmmmmmm! How many times have we heard that one of late regarding illegal immigration? The hideous tactics and death toll in Iraq? A president who more than seven hundred times during his term of office has arrogated to himself the power to not only ignore the law but to publicly flaunt it?

As many as eighty percent of the public detests the president and his hatefully bellicose policies toward Islam and Iraq – to say nothing of the asinine tactics he has presided over in the latter. About the same number of people detest the president’s criminal policies concerning illegal immigrants and immigration. Co-incidentally, about the same number of Americans would imprison for life or execute those who rape and murder children.

Isn’t it weird, parenthetically, that as many as twenty percent of the public holds some kind of sympathy for pedophiles? You think I exaggerate? Have you considered the Northeast, where several states and their judges openly encourage pedophiles with light sentences and early release after conviction?

Perhaps pedophile Jack McClellan can be driven to one of those sanctuaries for the criminal pedophile. Now that I think of it, illegal aliens are also being given sanctuary in the Northeast . . . A judge in Pennsylvania, as I mentioned recently, has ruled in a manner encouraging illegal immigration – and all that it entails.

Judge James M. Munley, like Ruben Navarette, George W. Bush, and the U.S. Congress, knows full well that illegal immigration means immigration of tens of thousands of Mexican criminals.

“Somebody should do something.” When has that not been true - ever? Of course, somebody should do something! The parent of a child who is raped and murdered should damned well have done something. The father, brother, husband, fiancé or boy friend of a young woman like Dru Sjodin, who was taken by someone like Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr. (the fifty year old registered Level Three sex offender who had already raped one woman at knifepoint and pled guilty to the rape of another) should damned well have done something, too.

The people of the United States should have “done something” when it became clear that George W. Bush had deliberately and willfully lied in order to convince the people and their representatives to attack Iraq. Somebody should have done something before more than four thousand, four hundred and seventy of our soldiers, and more than six hundred, fifty thousand Iraqis were killed, and the nation of Iraq torn to pieces.

The Congress of the United States should have done something, too. They, like the American people, should have done something when atrocities being committed by Americans in the name of the American people and at the order or with the complicity of the president of the United States were discovered.

And, of course, it all goes on; and for the Congress to hold feckless hearings, for the media and its asinine analysts to hold forth with their absurd bloviating on the various “issues” in question, is not “doing something.”

If you’ve been reading my essays, you know what that “something” must be. Like I once was when the United States rewarded my long life of law-abiding civic responsibility – including military and clandestine special operations service – with treasonous treachere, you have been, and are being, HAD. The law – and morality - of the United States is now de facto law – that of the corporate mind. President Bush and his eminence gris, Dick Cheney, practice the new, corporate, version of law.

The corporate form of law? You know it – you know it all too well. It must be familiar to all who have lived for a time in our country. That law is the is the Ford Pinto Rule. The Ford Pinto Rule says go ahead and do it, see if you can get away with it, then practice “damage control” if and when you don’t.

That, moreover, pedophile Jack McClellan practices a variant of that same law and morality demonstrates how prophetic were the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis when he said, “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

McClellan, Navarette, and Bush won’t stop until they are stopped, and there’s only one way – guerrilla law.

Suppose that the pedophile were to have a “vigilante” “tail” everywhere he went, that he residences and associates should come under relentless, twenty four/seven surveillance. Suppose that everyone and anyone who did any kind of business, or hired him were to suffer immediate downturn in business - picketing, even. Suppose that the mailman should one morning deliver to his house or hole tens of thousands of lawsuit papers? Fear, you know, is “injury,” and actionable. Suppose that his website, including his pictures – as many as possible – were to label him with his own statements a pedophile and spread everywhere on the Internet. Suppose his picture were published - not only on the World Wide Web, but in each and every newspaper edition in town – for as long as he persisted there?

Of course, the public is entitled to treat the same way judges and others who encourage the Jack McClellans of society. Judges and public officials – parole officers included – who are responsible for the realise or molly-coddling of known, admitted, and convicted crimes against society must be held responsible. Newspapers who publish the criminal writings of journalism’s Ruben Navarettes should be shunned. A Congress and the political parties who have stood by since March 20, 2003 while the President and the military industrial complex corporations he serves represents killed hundreds of thousands should be shunned – totally. A vote, for anybody in either major political party, is subornation and misprision of the crime being committed in Iraq

“Somebody should do something.”