FedUpUSA

Archive for September 1st, 2011

The ancient Roman rhetoricians developed rules for their oratory. They began with “the exordium,” an emotional or ethical appeal to put the audience in a receptive mood. The “narratio” followed, a narrative of the events leading to the situation to be discussed and an explanation of their manner of treatment.

The main body of their speech delivered the proof of their argument, confirming their conclusions and refuting their opponent’s claims. They developed techniques called “the praemunitio” and “the amplificatio,” which cleared away obstacles and amplified their case with a rhetorical flourish. They concluded with another appeal to the sympathies of their audience.

These rules have been used throughout subsequent history. Today, the majority of our citizens no longer require proofs from our political class. They applaud any slogan that stirs their emotions, and they conveniently forget when a promise is not fulfilled. This has enabled our political leaders on either side of the spectrum to continue the policies and spending that undermine our liberties and our economy.

Public education has been instrumental in the dumbing down of political speech. Beginning in the late 19th Century, our industrialists used their wealth and power to methodically dismantle traditional education and replace it with a progressive system based on the Prussian model. Rather than enlighten, education was redesigned as job training, a system to raise compliant citizens who always looked to the experts for answers. This schooling would become the central feature of their planned society with its planned economy, both necessary for our industrialists to maintain and multiply their wealth and power.

Using the experiential discoveries of psychology, it’s taken a century to perfect today’s public indoctrination system. The unthinking emotionally-driven perpetually-dependent products of this schooling attest to the success of their method. Our politicians are the beneficiaries and no longer need sound arguments to justify their positions.

Our political class also enjoys the advantages of a two-party system, which divides the people in two opposing camps, the “haves” and the “have-nots,” terms verbally engineered into the common vocabulary by the Left.

On its simplest level, the Left appeals to the have-nots with promises of increasing governmental assistance to ease their sufferings under Capitalistic inequalities, while the Right appeals to the haves with promises of less taxes, less government, and more liberty. Each side has a receptive core that readily applauds when their emotions are aroused through simple sound bites and slogans. And when the promised benefits are not delivered, each side points the blame at their conniving opponents, arousing anger, further dividing our country, while engendering sympathy for their tireless benefactors.

These techniques have been setting up the final solution. After we’re irrevocably divided, we’re ripe to be conquered.

This false left right paradigm has successfully served each side over the years, as our government’s bureaucracy and power have continued to grow unchecked, and the inequalities between the haves and the have-nots have increased unabated. That is, until a few small groups on the Right no longer applauded. Rather than accept the status quo of continual broken promises, these tea-partiers and libertarian groups like the Campaign For Liberty have demanded accountability. They demanded a return to sound government not in the fairy tales of their fraudulent speeches, but in a reality darkened by a fiscally irresponsible federal government that continues to reach into all aspects of daily life, as it gobbles more power and throttles liberty.

Yet, these small movements have been demonized from the start and are now blamed for bringing us to the brink of insolvency, something they alone seem concerned with preventing. In this respect, the rhetoric of the mass media is similar to that of our politicians – the truth is inconvenient to their agenda. Without the safeguards of an objective press, the status quo in Washington continues. Our debt gets deeper, our economy more mired, and our liberties more threatened. It matters little whether the Right or Left is in power. Our country continues along the path to insolvency and moral bankruptcy.

The recent Debt Crisis illustrates the false paradigm. It was engineered under a Republican President with a massive bailout of big business, and it continued under the current Democratic Administration. These opposing camps have become hired mouthpieces without the will or inertia to do anything but the bidding of those who keep them in office, the international banking elites. If left unchecked, the US Dollar will continually weaken until it is replaced as the world’s reserve currency, which will ruin our economy and facilitate our merger into one-world-government.

Amazon.com photo

And still, the underlying causes of our debt crisis have not been addressed. We have both a spending and an entitlement crisis, as an unsustainable debt piles up. Yet, we hear the same rhetoric echoing from the halls of Washington. Both sides claim the other side won’t compromise and allow an equitable solution. While the Right wants to punish the poor with spending cuts and reward the rich with no new taxes, the Left wants to soak the rich with massive taxes and aid the poor with more spending. The so-called solution was demonized as a tea-party victory. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, these patriots didn’t celebrate because it is a mirage with the appearance of spending cuts in the face of massive spending increases.

In 1966, the historian Dr Carroll Quigley thought the international bankers were too powerful to oppose when he published his smug exposé, “Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time.” He wrote, “The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy … either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same policies.”

Future historians will wonder why we neglected to educate ourselves about a world dominated by an international elite, and why we never learned our lessons about our political class, who do their bidding with baseless rhetoric.

The Moral Liberal Contributing Editor, Robert F. Beaudine, has written authoritative articles on public education, the financial crisis, and the myth of global warming. He’s also the author of the life-affirming novel, “Based Upon a Lie,” a theological conspiracy thriller. He resides in the upstate of South Carolina.

Gulag Bound

The list gets longer on those schools that I deem to issue worthless degrees….

Don LoCicero of Allentown is an author and a professor emeritus of Cedar Crest College.

One of the hallmarks of intelligence is the ability to keep an open mind when having a discussion with someone whose viewpoint is diametrically opposed to yours. However, while it is true there are at least two sides to every subject, it doesn’t necessarily follow that each side deserves consideration. Often, the two sides are a right one and a wrong one.

The author goes on to list monstrous events of proven evil, such as the Holocaust and the Norway shooting.  In fact, of eight paragraphs, he uses the entire top half of his op-ed to set up this sort of straw-man fallacy.

Being a professor, this is not an accident.

There’s a saying in both business and the law: When the facts are arrayed on your side, you use them.  When they’re not, you pound the table, scream and shout and hope your opponent doesn’t realize you’re bullshitting him.

The operative theory here is to use intentional logical fallacy as a means of cutting of actual debate, lest the truth of your position come to the fore and you lose that debate.  The author of this hack job then says:

Discussing our financial crisis, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, wrote: “No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.”

One doesn’t need to have won a Nobel Prize in economics to come to the same conclusion as Mr. Krugman. One side, composed of the majority in the tea party and their Republican allies, insists that America should solve its deficit problem by cutting education, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This wrong side would cut funding for environmental control and the rebuilding of our infrastructure, as well as for other vital programs. They adamantly refuse to consider the opposing side’s reasons for being unwilling to make drastic cuts in those programs, or their demand that millionaires, billionaires and huge corporations share the burden by paying their fair share of taxes.

Really?  Entirely one-sided?  Who, pray tell, authored and signed Medicare Part D?  Who put forward Medicare in the first place?  Was that “one-sided”, despite the known fact at the time that there was a demographic time bomb already in existence that would guarantee the outcome we now stare down?

Who, pray tell, refused to get tax policy under control when they had not only the White House but also both houses of Congress and thus could pass whatever the hell they wanted? 

The facts are this:

• You could tax the income of everyone who made over $1m at an incremental rate of 100% and not close the deficit.  Never mind that doing so would be immediately responded to by nobody making over $1 million, since there’s no reason to work hard enough to earn something when you will get to keep none of it.
• The “tax preferences for oil companies and corporate jets” are a minuscule part of the problem.  We’re talking about tens of billions of dollars annually and the problem is $1,700 billion.  That is, it’s a single-digit percentage of the deficit.  Those are convenient leftist talking points but any claim that closing them would provide a solution is a bald and intentional lie.  Yes, we should close those loopholes simply to deny the left these talking points, but any argument that these changes would be material to the outcome is an intentional and public fraud.
• Likewise, “corporate taxes” is a lie because all taxes are paid by people.  Since the four lowest quintiles make up 80% of the population (by definition) and you need about $150,000 in income a year to get into the top quintile, if you raise corporate taxes you’re going to effectively raise taxes on the four bottom quintiles as well as the top one, since those costs will simply by passed through.

The “wrong side” has correctly identified the problem: The Federal Government has never managed to collect more than about 18% of GDP in taxes on an “all-in” basis.  That’s $2.7 trillion predicated on a GDP of $15 trillion.  We’re spending a trillion more than that right now.

Yes, we can (and should) fix the tax code.  Chief among those fixes are guaranteeing that everyone have skin in the game – if you have income, you pay taxes – somehow.  This means that “voting for a living” becomes unprofitable because everyone gets assessed for the programs you vote for.

If you have a system that doesn’t conform to this maxim then some group of people will forever attempt to steal more and more from everyone else since there is no check and balance against them doing so.

Perhaps the people will pay for these programs and perhaps they will not.  That’s a decision for society to make.  But what we cannot do is continue to spend more than the government taxes – that is, more than it takes in.

You either pay for every program you want or you don’t have the program.  That’s the only sustainable path forward and we either do it voluntarily or we will do it on an involuntary basis.  What this clown is in fact arguing for is the involuntary option – that is, he is in fact arguing for civil and political unrest, and perhaps the collapse of our government.

Pat Buchanan has an outstanding article out.

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

“Lenin was certainly right,” John Maynard Keynes continued in his 1919 classic, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace.”

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

Keynes warned that terrible hatreds would be unleashed against “profiteers” who enriched themselves through inflation as the middle class was wiped out. And he pointed with alarm to Germany, where the mark had lost most of its international value.

Well, Keynes was certainly right about that.  Too bad these words of wisdom are not what he’s remembered for.  Now all the ‘mainstream’ economists widely quoted in the press do nothing but advocate more spending and more printing, crediting Keynes with the idea.  Of course they leave out the pertinent part of Keynes’s theory, which was that you save during times of prosperity and it is THAT savings that is used in times of economic contraction.  Since the first part of Keynes’s theory has never actually been done, it’s hardly fair to credit (or blame) Keynes for the idiotic monetary policies our government is implementing.  Spending without first saving is not anyone’s monetary theory but their own.

What should be done to high officials of the U.S. government who consciously set out to dilute and destroy the savings and income of working Americans? What should be done to those who have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution and then steal the wealth of citizens by secretly manipulating the value of the currency, the store of wealth upon which those people depend?

Is inducing inflation — debauching the currency, the systematic and secret theft of the savings of citizens — a legitimate policy option for the Federal Reserve? Has Congress authorized official thievery?

Who do these economists think they are?

Inflation rewards debt — and erodes savings. It is legalized counterfeiting, the deliberate creation of money with nothing to back it up.

 What indeed.