Swan Song

So, we’ve all been required to invest in the stock market and banking industry, whether we like it or not and to the tune of $20,000 for each paycheck taxpayer. All of it, of course, is on account of the same thing as Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a score more before them – national security. This isn’t unprecedented, of course; there was Chrysler Corporation, and, of course, the $100,000,000,000 we invested in the oil companies by way of “oil depletion allowances” and the odious. Put those with the hundreds of billions military industrial complex corporations are permitted to steal, and you have a good idea why a home that cost $20,000 dollars in 1960 costs $200,000 today.

The stock market is climbing; of course: where’s the risk when you know the government will hold someone up in order to assure that you don’t lose. Buy whatever you choose on even bad credit – the government will make your neighbor pay what you can’t.

And right and left wing extremists alike are telling themselves this isn’t a socialist country. How blind stupid can you get?!

The two presidential candidates are promising to cut taxes (every damned election since 1960, the same litany of lies regarding taxes, and people continue voting – incredible!) by printing more fiat money and spending more, and the morons who play the children’s monopoly game of politics go on . . . is there an echo in here?

Anyway, this is my swan song to the Internet and the discussion of it all there. I started my website and conversation with the public as part of a research project having to do with a proposed socio-economic thesis (for a PhD I now realize I need like I need a new hairstyle), an effort to learn how well the U.S. public thinks, and why that might be – the effects of Operation MOCKINGBIRD, in other words. The effort, which included nationwide travel, teaching in a Texas High School, and the Internet discourse and debate to which I had reference a minute ago, has had results I couldn’t have anticipated at the outset. Together with the federal swindle to which I had reference at the outset here, it has resulted in wife Rita’s and my own determination to begin preparation for what must now come soon, the swift decay and ruin of the nation.

Operation MOCKINGBIRD, the effort of the military industrial complex brainchild that was the CIA, has succeeded eminently, probably far beyond its most hopeful imaginings at the time of its creation. Conceived as the total takeover and control of the nation’s thought processes in the form of the news and information media, MOCKINGBIRD has reduced the U.S. public to a state so reminiscent of the “proles” in George Orwell’s prophetic book, “1984,” that almost no rational and original thought can be expected. An example is an electorate that believes contradictory nonsense like that being promulgated by today’s supposed (indeed, that anyone believes real an absurd charade like the current presidential campaign is evidence of intense behavioral conditioning and resulted dementia) political parties. It will demonstrate to future historians the fact of CIA and military industrial complex coup d’etat leaders’ MKULTRA mind and opinion control science success.

An electorate supporting with its finances and vote candidates like those we have today is like a rape victim cheering on her attacker. Your government, after all, has decided that you need to assure the success of the people who have daily been stealing you blind – corporate America, Wall Street, the bankers, and the nations financiers otherwise – and the government has gone to the bank (much the way IRS did when it decided to take all of my money), and it has taken from your account $20,000.

And many of the people who have been burglarized – people so blinded and behaviorally conditioned by the nation’s Fourth Estate and their MOCKINGBIRD propagandists that they are unaware of what has happened - are cheering the burglars.

In the last several years, almost all of it during the execrable George W. Bush Administration, the U.S. public has lost most of its Constitutional rights. All telephone, computer, and private discourse is subject to governmental invasion. Across the Land of the Free turned Land of the Fee, police break into homes without warrant, summarily murdering the people there. Unarmed citizens continually go down in a blizzard fusillade of bullets, or are shot down and electrocuted in public with a hideous device called a TASER (hardly anyone would find that surprising, in a nation whose congress and chief executive foment, condone, and practice torture). Law-abiding citizens are nevertheless stopped without reason on the nation’s highways, to be given a “warning ticket” for no other reason than “snooping” by the authorities.

Under the staggering burden of taxation, both by enactment, by printing press, deficit spending inflation, by staggering corporate theft, and by outright IRS thuggery, the wage-earning citizen has been reduced to Henry David Thoreau’s “quiet desperation.” The latter, together with federally-fomented ideological movements like feminism and homosexualism, has destroyed the basic social unit which is the family, with the further result that a critical portion of our children have become mindlessly ignorant savages, uncontrollable by teachers and school authorities and terrorizing the streets of our cities.

Even more signally meaningful where the nation’s youth are concerned, perhaps, are governmentally-inflicted social programs which provide for the inclusion among normal children in our schools of the mentally deficient (“challenged”), mentally deranged, and emotionally disturbed. A story in our local paper concerning an autistic child in a high school class is an example, and a microcosm of the nation and its swiftly deteriorating societal structures.


The common occurrence of acts of savage brutality like the immolation while living or savagely beating to death of the homeless and the aged, together with the further fact that large numbers of officials nevertheless work mindlessly to disarm prospective victims of such violence, are symptomatic of a society gone utterly insane.

And, of course, there is more – much, much more. Mathematical extrapolation of data having been published during my lifetime argues incontrovertibly that the North American continent will not be fit for human habitation by the dawn of the twenty-second century. The Mexican bandit – peasant villager, Magnificent Seven drama, that is despoiling reiver corporations like Uranium Resources and Exelon versus ranchers, townspeople, and local citizens currently being acted out in the area where I live is an example of the reasons the environment will kill anyone and anything foolish enough to attempt life here.

The history of nuclear energy and related research is utterly unmistakable, a trail of misery and destruction of fearsome proportions to those who will make the effort necessary to uncover it from where it has been hidden among the camouflage arrayed by the corporate powers in question and the media they own or control. While anyone with a Geiger counter or dosimeters and willing to do the necessary travel of, for instance, the state of Texas, will realize the extent of damage to the environment done by previous uranium mining – all of it despite cynically impassioned protestations to supposed state regulators concerning “clean-up” and other environmental protections – corporate influence in a nation already ruled by corporate influence of an apathetic and/or sheep-like populace will finally prevail. Those who persist in self-defense will be beaten into submission, either by legal mayhem or otherwise.

Were the continent's inhabitants to somehow save it from fatal contamination and corruption, continuing federal governmental policy having to do with deliberate support of illegal immigration - including hundreds of thousands of hardened criminals - from Mexico means inevitably and inexorably the conversion of the U.S. into a national parallel of that paragon of national virtue, Mexico. I need not recite evidence of what Mexico thunderously is, nor is it necessary to say again that a nation is what it is on account of its people. That, too, is self-evident.

The situation nationally, together with its parallel in the recent “bailout” of corporate Wall Street, of corporate predatory lenders (housing and otherwise), and of stock market corporations generally, tells a tactician like myself everything he needs to know. The Land of the Free has inexorably become the Land of the Fee, where money and political power derived from money – money created out of thin air by the very same corporate powers – rule. It’s time to begin fighting a tactical withdrawal and rearguard action.

I have begun converting our vehicles in order to make a large proportion of their fuel hydrogen (a process with which I have experience, having done the same in 1972 and again in 1981), and I am designing a system like that with which I once made a ten acre farm completely energy independent (anyone can do this: so much for protestations concerning the need to live next to a potential nuclear bomb and on land contaminated with the waste inevitably resulted from the same bomb and operations necessary to feed it).

To those with whom I have become favorably acquainted here on the Internet, I bid fond adios. To those with whom acquaintance has been not so favorable . . . well, you will probably respond with the same mindlessly knee-jerk and programmed diatribe, invective, and ad hominem lack of logic as usual. I thank you, however – you have taught me much of what I needed to know concerning the dim future of the nation for which I once loved enough to fight, kill, and be wounded.

Adios!

SITREP - Things for a Thoughtless Nation to Think About.

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.cfm, 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.

"What Happened?!"

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 ass 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 LaGuardia Airport 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 Lövér Forest 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) . . .

SITREP - Following the Historical Trail to a Disaster

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.org/revolution/) 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!

SITREP continued 9/22/08

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 shit 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 . . .

SITREP - continued 9/19/08

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-three trillions of dollars in debt bail anyone out – but more about that in a minute), and a collapsing stock market leaving everyone on Wall Street having those “issues” we hear about so much today – the issues being in their shorts.

Of course, the propagandist media shilling for the capitol’s criminal gang commonly known as congress, has begun its now patented and patent blizzard of bull issue, that in order to put the public even further in the dark than it already is, and prevent a run on banks and/or the end of investments in the archetypical capitalist swindle known as the stock market.

That’s easy, of further course, because the U.S. public knows next to nothing about economics or money, that due principally things like the fact that nowhere in the nation’s elementary or secondary education system can anyone learn anything about either subject. The only subject concerning which there is a similar prohibition is law. Nowhere in elementary or secondary education can a student learn anything about the law under which he must live. Think about that one.

Why, in a republic, would the government go to such lengths to assure the people are ignorant of the law?

Think about the economic issue – or rather, the lack of issue – where any information at all concerning money or the nation’s economy is concerned. The public is totally ignorant, meaning they must turn to journalists and news media pundits in order to learn what is happening. Some years ago, while touring the nation for the United States Judo Association, I indulged a penchant of mine, that of doing private surveys in order to learn the state of the nation and the public discourse. I have continued the practice here on the Internet. One of my surveys has to do with the public’s knowledge of fiscal matters, economics, and money.

I interviewed during my travels over a period of two years more than five hundred people, to learn that one person in five hundred could say how a dollar comes into being, and why. Ten people in five hundred knew what “national debt” means, and two people in five hundred person identified terms like “futures exchange,” “Bank of International Settlements” (which, by the way, has just ordered the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury to call in all bonds and debt paper issued overseas – an obvious effort to stop the U.S. from taking the rest of the world down the economic toilet with it), “hedge fund,” or the like. Neither did anyone know what the term “derivative” means, nor how derivatives affect money, credit, et cetera. Terms like “swaps,” “forward rate agreements,” “forward contracts,” “credit derivatives” and the like drew shrugs or blank states.

Neither did a single person know how to compute the interest on his car or home loan, or know how to ascertain that he was paying the interest he believed he was paying. Asked how one might compute the payment on a new car purchased while still making payments on his trade-in, people merely laughed as though I were talking about rocket science.

For anyone wondering how we’ve come to be in the economic mess we’re in – especially as respects sub-prime home mortgages – there is no need to look further. The U.S. public has about as much business doing credit business as a high school kid with a learners permit has in the Indianapolis Five Hundred. To expect the U.S. public to know what an eighty-five billion dollar bailout of AIG, or that of the savings and loan institutions some years ago, or of bankrupt creditors in today’s housing market, means is ludicrous – as ludicrous as it is to believe the same people know the merits of what the current presidential candidates are saying concerning any of the supposed political issues.

Had any of the people I interviewed while doing my surveys known anything whatever about money, had their elementary or secondary education taught them anything about money or economics, they would know first that since creation of the Federal Reserve – an act of hocus pocus not unlike the creation by fiat of currently circulating U.S. money – the dollar has lost ninety percent of more of its purchasing power. The dollar’s vanishing purchasing power accelerated when the Nixon Administration repudiated the Bretton-Woods Treaty, the agreement wherein the U.S. promised the world that we would back our money with gold.

“Never trust a capitalist,” says Johanna, the heroine of my novel, “everything is for sale.”

One result of the dollar becoming nothing more than a claim upon the nation’s productive people has been the ruination of anyone’s chances of secure retirement in old age. With the cancerous erosion of individual wealth savings, most of it due staggering inflation by government (things like welfare for the military industrial complex corporations, the latest bailouts, and the like), it is impossible to retire securely and social security has been made a cruel joke, an albatross around the taxpayer’s neck, a political whore bankrupting and bleeding an already scrofulous and tubercular economy to death.

A fiat U.S. dollar backed “by the full faith and credit of the United States” is in fact guaranteed and collateralized by nothing more than the labor, skill, and talent of the productive individual. “Productive” means producing something real - an artisan, a farmer, a rancher, a carpenter, or the like. Lawyers, as a U.S Supreme Court Justice recently observed, are not “productive.” Neither are teachers, policemen, soldiers, and their like. All money is collateralized – given value - by the planet, and what the planet provides. In short, and by inescapable syllogistic logic, fiat money is a form of slavery. It forces someone to work for someone else without compensation by anything of value. The productive get nothing but a dollar whose value is derived from their toil, and together with income taxation, fiat money is the principle tool of government desirous of keeping the poor in poverty and the middle class in constant peril of joining the indigent. Together with income taxation, fiat money is in fact, a principle tool of tyranny, a way to increase the power of government inexorably.

Look around – how else do you explain the Brobdingnagian size of the federal government or its Frankenstein Monster behavior?

That, I should remind us all, is the reason the founding fathers and their. constitution forbid income taxation, fiat money, and the creation of a central bank. Currency collateralized, for instance, by gold or silver is not only always worth something because gold and silver will never be worth nothing, it is a powerful tool by which to restrict the size of government and control it.

Let’s realize, just for one example of that among hundreds, that had our U.S. version of Hitler been obliged to spend something other than fiat money – money behind which there was a quantity of gold and/or silver – he could not have invaded Iraq.

And, parenthetically, persons smart enough to heed my recommendation at the time of the savings and loan crisis in 1990 to buy gold have nearly quadrupled their money. In the future, stalked by government irresponsibility like the Iraq war and other forms of massive welfare for the military industrial complex corporations - things like the S&L bailout, the AIG swindle, and all the rest - gold will reach thousands of dollars an ounce, as a matter of fact.

A couple of days ago, writing on one of the internet websites other than mine, I made the following observation: “Get ready to experience what I experienced more than two decades ago. One morning you will awake, to learn that you have no money. That’s NO money. None! Nada. Nichts. Zip. Bupkis. More, you will lose your house and your car will be repossessed. No bank or lending institution will talk to you (in my case, IRS had called concerning me, and made threats; besides, no one will lend money to someone beset by the government).

There will be no jobs (in my case, the government took effective steps to assure that I would never again be gainfully employed, steps including threat of retaliation against prospective employers).

People who have been indoctrinated in capitalist ideals – meaning that the poor are that way because the want to be or because they are too lazy to be otherwise – will despise you. Friends, probably including your wife (the U.S. female is a venal, material creature, you know), will desert you in droves.

And watch those street people (there’ll be millions more of them, of course, people like you and your neighbors): once their welfare checks have stop coming, and turning to government with street demonstrations and marches avails them of nothing, they’ll be hungry. Hungry bums can be really mean (almost as mean as the super rich industrialists and financiers who made them that way in the first place).

Do I digress? No, not actually – this is a situation report, after all, and that’s the situation. I know because I lived it.

In case, however, I’ve talked anybody into believing that by buying gold and silver he can avoid the loss of everything when the government announces that his money has been devalued to one tenth of its face value (anybody ever read about the Great Depression?), we need to know a few things: first, you may starve to death before being able to use gold or silver as money. The public, you see, is ignorant about such things – the government is very, and obviously, desirous of that, after all – and has no way to know how to transact business in what amounts to barter fashion. You can’t put gold in a coin machine, or buy gas in gold or silver. No one with whom you do business – the clerk at Wal-Mart, for instance – is the person with whom you are actually doing business, and he will have no way or no authority to accept your payment in gold or silver. Indoctrinated and addicted to paper money, too lazy to go through weighing, haggling over the value of the gold or silver, etc, they won’t do business in anything but dollars until having to take a wheelbarrow full of paper money to Wal-Mart becomes too onerous and far too time-consuming for checkout clerks to count it.

Then, too, there is the fact that the government has taken steps to assure that you use their money – and, of course keep them all-powerful. The fiat dollar is legal tender, and must be accepted in all but very few monetary transactions. First, if you have a dispute, contractual or otherwise with someone over a transaction done in gold, silver, or the like, any court you repair to for settlement will settle the matter in Federal Reserve paper. You’ll lose any way you look at it.

Next, people use U.S. currency for the same reason that a person discovering that he has a counterfeit bill either passes it on by buying something or he loses whatever the face amount of the bill is. If he takes it to the police, he loses it – gets nothing in return. If he takes it to the bank, the same thing happens. People use worthless U.S. fiat money because once “stuck” with it, the only alternative is to lose whatever it bought from them or its value, usually their hard work or something they’ve worked hard to in order to acquire. The few people who have enough understanding of economics save only money that says on its face that it is a silver certificate, gold and silver coins whose real value is many times their face value, or the like. Anyone who saves paper money – counterfeit or fiat Federal Reserve notes - is a fool saving something absolutely worthless.

Look up Gresham’s Law. Oh, and by the way again: while you’re thinking about using gold and silver in order to stay off the streets, look up the history of the Commodity Barter Association. These folks were an association of people who not only traded goods, but backed their U.S. fiat money with gold owned by the association (exactly as the founding fathers intended our nation’s economy to run, you may notice). You’ll be interested in what happened. Remember about fiat money and the power it gives government.

Finally, when you go to buy gold or silver, you will be required to pay a sales tax. Think about that one: do you have to pay a tax on the money you get when you cash your paycheck? How about when you break a twenty into two tens or four fives? When you change a dollar for four quarters? On top of all that, you will be required to pay a capital gains tax on the gold you purchase. The increasing value of gold means that the money you’ll use to pay the tax has decreased in value, but you have a capital gain.

Now do you understand the reasoning, for instance, that we’re in Iraq and staying there? How about the way our oil companies are making unprecedented profits, but the price of gas keeps going higher? Good – now you understand how losing money represents a gain in capital, and why a nation of people having been made poor by the rich keep voting the rich into office – so the rich can keep doing . . . oh, never mind!


It’s something right out of Lewis Carroll, and Alice in Wonderland. With a nation nine trillion dollars ($9,000,000,000,000 – I get a kick out of seeing the number) in debt, and a society fifty-three trillion ($53,000,000,000,000) dollars in debt, the nation (our “leaders”) proposes to borrow from the society another eighty-five billion ($85,000,000,000). To get us out of economic trouble.

“’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, ‘or you wouldn’t be here.’”

Will somebody please put out that @#$%&! Cat?

Sitrep, September, 2008

For the uninitiated, “sitrep” is a military communications abbreviation for “situation report.” This, then, is a situation report concerning the United States of America, as observed and reconnoitered during seventy-two years of living here, serving in its military, and having survived assault by its courts and government otherwise.

As I wrote this, news of the beginning of the economic disaster I first forecast nine years ago was announced by the nation’s news media. I have, as a matter of recorded fact, been able to make accurate predictions repeatedly concerning the nation – a fact I have further stated repeatedly over the last decade, both in my books and other writings and on the Internet. Not only does no one challenge me concerning this, by scores of people have written to acknowledge the accuracy of prognoses that began in 1972 with a public speech wherein I predicted unerringly events now unfolding and having unfolded of late.

It isn’t hard and there’s no Nostradamus-like mysticism about it. Anyone using a little logic and scientific method and observing events carefully and without bias (read that last again; it makes all the difference) could do as well. This is a society that can be read like a book – a psychology book.

As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

It is also my private opinion that the rise and fall of nations is due the fact that they inevitably go insane. The United States of America will serve as an object example of that fact of history. It was none other than a President of the United States, John Adams, who observed that “Democracy never lasts long . . . it is always a suicide.”

The U.S. is now near that final drama.

To learn the science of prediction, one must first learn science. It is science, after all, that imposes upon any theory criteria which include that used to make accurate predictions. One begins in much the manner that a tracker following potential prey does: like Sherlock Holmes, he first observes small things. Here’s an example:

Yesterday, a friend sent me a video concerning “Skidboot,” a dog who before his demise in 2007 made more money - much more money - than his owner, one David Hartwig, a Texas cowboy who shoes horses – ie., works hard - for a living. “Skidboot,” as a matter of fact, was able to make more money than most semi-skilled laborers, policemen, teachers, or middle class people in general. The dog, you see, is perhaps the most intelligent of his kind, ever. He has as a result appeared on a number of high visibility televisions programs like the Oprah Winfrey show (that right there, incidentally, would tell you a great deal were you an analyst hoping to know the future of the nation). .

Let me say it again: a dog made more money than most United States citizens.

What does that tell you about what has happened to the Land of the Free turned Land of the Fee and its future? Let’s see if I can help. Among those people who make less than a dog are people most critical to the future of the U.S. In fact, just about – almost without exception - every person who will ultimately decide the survival of the country is paid less than was “Skidboot.” If that weren’t insane enough, most U.S. citizens today celebrate facts like this one, having somehow – “somehow” translated “massive information media and educational system propaganda” - been convinced that ability and hard work (the Horatio Alger Story, anyone?) can prevail over forces as capricious as those which raise a dog to prestige, power, and prerogative.

The economic system – it is more an urge or drive than a system; “system” implies thought or planning – known as capitalism regularly produces individuals like Skidboot, persons like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, George W. Bush and their purportedly arch-capitalist like. People like these invariably would have you believe they “earn” their massive incomes; in fact, to dare think otherwise is anathema to their ideology and secular religion. These – in their minds – great ones asseverate that they are rich because they deserve to be rich, that on account of their surpassing intelligence, skill, talent, and beauty – or their great effort.

The “less fortunate” – none of their conservative capitalist like believe for one minute in good fortune where they are concerned – are so “less fortunate” because they are less skillful, less intelligent, and less valuable to society and nation. The wealthy are so simply because they are worth more.

Just like “Skidboot.”

The hunter who desires to follow the prey that is accurate anticipation and prediction of something like the latest economic mess – Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, for instance - must understand that an ideology like that of the rags to riches, Horatio Alger Myth, forms also a schema – a pattern, algorithm, or mathematical equation. Like a mathematical series, an ideological system that provides for a canine earning more than humans, a Sean Combs “rapper” more than a mathematician, and a football player more than a college president – just three examples of an absurd microcosm – also provides for ineluctable results.

I will digress long enough here to make in an elucidating manner a pointed prediction: now that corporate capitalism has done what it invariably does, capitalists both corporate and individual will do what they always do – go looking for as much socialism as they can find. The socialism, of course, will amount to little more than a disguise, camouflage to hide the colonialism that historically always precedes capitalism. Using their irresistible access – they will call in all their “markers” and IOUs – to congress and the bureaucracy, the “free market” captialists will obtain and use legislation to again colonialize the marketplace and return to exploitation of the public.

The “Skidboot” capitalists will use their corporate buddies in Washington, D.C. to recover what all that surpassing intelligence, skill, talent, and beauty have lost. The fruit of their Herculean labors, in other words.

One schooled in a logical Taylor and Maclaurin Series like Skidboot Capitalism expects – at the very least, is not surprised by - things like the rise of presidential candidates of the caliber of Barack Obama and John McCain. Anyone astutely familiar with political history since World War Two actually expected the vice-presidential nomination of a Sarah Palin (or the presidential candidacy of a Hillary Clinton). It’s Skidboot politics. It’s Skidboot economics. It’s Skidboot national security.

In Skidboot ideology, you see, the way to promotion and pay is, in fact, not excellence or competence; it is mediocrity and incompetence. In the effeminate world that has spawned the Skidboot ideology, the competent and ingenious are more than anything else a threat (when has feminism ever demanded competition on a wrestling mat, a level playing field, or any kind of fair contest – rather than competition in a court of rhetoric and emotion). Like the corporate executive or the military commander who is promoted once he has failed or the politician or political appointee who is protected once having been caught in graft, in illicit sexuality, malfeasance, or staggering mismanagement (if FEMA directors after Hurricane Katrina don’t come to mind, you’re too far gone to understand all this) a religion, ideology, or movement like that of feminism cannot be decried, much less denounced. Even though its miserable failings and effects are everywhere evident in a nation fairly disintegrating before our eyes, feminism has the politically almighty blessing of pitiable incompetence, of feminine failure (to demand more is, after all, “sexist”) and its therefore popular appeal (in a nation like this one, far more people identify with the “red neck” than with the rocket scientist).

In the Skidboot, feminist society, one rises to stardom, to wealth, position and power because he is a member of a minority, female (especially a well-built female), able to perform some wondrous feat like throw a ball through a hoop, make music, or the otherwise insignificant like. Have failed miserably in some large endeavor is also a major political asset in a society where all success is in some form political success.

Oh, and by all means, he must be a “team player.”

So here we are. Right where anyone able gather the data, construct the logical or mathematical model, and to do the necessary computation would expect:

The nation is fifty-three trillions of dollars in debt, a major portion of which is to a creditor in whose distrust and outright hatred we were for decades schooled and propagandized – “Red” (remember that term?) China. How insane is it to continue trumpeting that we won the cold war, while we are billions and billions and billions of dollars in debt to one cold war enemy, and being made to appear a feckless laughingstock to the rest of the world by another?!

I said “sitrep.” Well, here it is:

Our economic system, one dependent entirely upon being able to hornswoggle the ignorant into working for and spending fiat money whose only real value is the hope that people will continue to work for and spend it, is a beached whale; our cold war enemies either hold mortgages on our economy or enjoy watching us slowly destroyed by our addiction to what they possess and hold in massive proportions.

The World Bank for International Settlements has ordered the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Treasury Dept. to call in all foreign-issued bonds and debt paper. They are, in other words, trying to assure that the U.S. and its Skidboot “free market” economy doesn’t take the rest of the world down the tube with it. There will be those who remember that I predicted years ago that the rest of the world’s nations would one day realize that we are a cancer growing on the planet, a great black hole, that unless they stop us, will destroy them. It seems now that they may have “realized.”

Our educational system, long the prostitute exploited by a pimp government, has long since ceased to be capable of producing the kind of intellects that would almost certainly have invented alternative sources of energy; and our Skidboot form of capitalism continues to assure that obvious alternative energy technology will be smothered by legislation, or deprived of funding by legislation (having all one’s capital, capital for use in building alternative sources of energy, confiscated by taxation).

The corporate “free marketers” will make damned sure that no free market answer to high prices at the gasoline pump occurs, in other words.

While we are being bled white by corporate capitalist greed in the form of Shylock turned Gracie Allen lending practices together with the effeminate humanist’s insistence that everybody should buy whatever they feel like “owning,” the rich man the nation elected in order to protect the poor goes on with his own version of profligate borrowing and spending, the Iraq war.

Gracie Allen, parenthetically, was famed and now deceased comedian George Burns’ wife, and as part of their Vaudeville act used to say she believed that as long as her check book had checks, her account had money.

Have I mentioned my theory that the rise and fall of nations is due the fact that they go slowly insane? Yeah, I think I did.

Continuing our “sitrep,” and related to that last concerning our educational system, still another study reports that our male children are in dire straits. That’s both scholastically and psychologically. FUBAR is the most succinct way to put it, and no one who is, as I am, a teacher, has any doubt of it. That J.S. Mill quote that I use so often concerning a nation that dwarfs its men has proved to be true where its boys are concerned, too.

But, of course, as with everything demonstrating that the chickens of feminism have begun coming home to roost, feminist both female and merely effeminate have responded in exactly the manner one would expect – with blizzards of “it’s true because I say it is” recrimination. Maybe I should reiterate that quote, in case there remains anyone with enough intellect left to profit from looking around:

“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.”

I trust the description is one too vivid to mistake, once you’ve had that “look around.”

And not that boys are alone. As I remarked recently – and as I remark frequently, anymore – men nowadays behave like the adolescent boys of my youth. “Wouldn’t make a pimple on a man’s ass,” as a grandfather was wont to say. You may be too young to recognize it – feminism reared its Medusa head four or five decades ago, and its FUBAR effect on the public consciousness was immediately apparent – but the Congress, degraded as it is by women – behaves these days like nothing so much as a sorority, an old ladies knitting circle, or kaffeeklatsch gossip society.

That same U.S. Congress spends like it has Gracie Allen’s comically infamous checkbook.

Next, in case you somehow have the idea that we might use our much-vaunted military to regain ascendency in the world, it is now clear that the nothing-costs-too-much war machine of our society can’t beat anybody. While that may have been clear to some after Korea (anybody know about that one? – it was 1950-ish, so you have to have read some history), it became thunderously clear in Vietnam when little men in black pajamas and armed mostly with small arms and B-40 rocket launchers fought our nothing-costs-too-much army to a standstill, then took over after we had our first look at bankruptcy by welfare for military industrial complex corporation.

In 1959, during a conversation with Major General Tom Van Natta, I made the observation that no nation in its right mind – or with any mind – would oppose in conventional manner our spend-more-than-the-other-guy and bury him in war machinery and soldiers’ bodies army. They would have to fight us, of course – capitalism is what it is and says it is – but they would wage guerrilla war and “death of a thousand cuts” wars of attrition. We, I said, would eventually spend ourselves to death. I remember, too, saying that our military was in such condition that were the local girls school to stage an insurrection, I doubted that we could put it down.

And now we have an Army whose combat commands are enormously degraded by women. And we’re back to fighting guys dressed in outlandish clothes, armed with AK-47s and B-40 rocket launchers. What was it – March, 2003, that we invaded Iraq? When was “mission accomplished” declared – May, 2003?

And, voila! Here we are living in one of my first – 1959, I remind you - prognostications.

Elsewhere in bedlam known as the Land of the Free Market – where nothing military is too costly – we have new intelligence satellites being built not because we need them for intelligence, but because the military industrial complex corporations keep up the pressure to build more. You’d expect that, inasmuch as that’s the same formula that has resulted in a military more costly by many times than the next ten militaries on earth.

And for all that Brobdingnagian spending, we are less safe from our enemies than ever before. While apparently distracted sorts like the FoxNews “personalities” I made mention of a minute ago continue to pontificate that another 9-11 attack hasn’t occurred (and illogically assuming, one must believe, that another must have been scheduled or intended), few persons with any knowledge of history can have any confidence in such reasoning. Our ports and borders remain open to anyone who wants to enter – as literally thousands are doing across our border with Mexico.

If someone is more desirous of delivering a nuclear bomb than kidnapping for ransom or the slave trade one of our women or kids, the missing on the wall at Wal-Mart won’t be due kidnapping or having run away, it’ll be because they were vaporized by a nuclear explosion, or killed by some bacteriological or chemical (or other) “terrorist” weapon.

Come to think of it, the “War on Drugs” yields just about the same results as the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Or as did the war in Vietnam. Few palpable results except higher prices, higher taxes, more political posturing and promises, lots of death and misery, and no end in sight.

Good for the “free market,” of course.

To be continued . . .