FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘political hypocrisy’ Category

More than once in the past few months someone or other has lamented the barrages of criticism the GOP candidates have launched against one another. They have bandied about words and phrases like “cannibalism” and “circular firing squad”, admonishing the Presidential aspirants to concentrate their fire on Obama and stifle criticisms that hurt the GOP’s chances of victory.

This would be all well and good if the purpose of election campaigns is simply to win power at any cost. But what if the main purpose is to make sure voters who care about their country have what they need to make a choice that truly serves the common good? What if this is an especially appropriate goal in a Presidential election? Once upon a time it was commonplace to remember the common sense arguments made for free and unrestricted debate, as in this observation from On Liberty by the English reasoner John Stuart Mill:

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it.

In this thinking we need only substitute the phrase “a true representative” for each reference to truth itself to see how Mill’s reasoning applies to participation and debate in the electoral context.

This perspective on the subject gives rise to the suspicion that the ostensibly good natured promoters of peace and mutual restraint in political debate may (intentionally or not) be doing a disservice to voters. Let’s say that fellow partisans agree to observe an unspoken agreement not to criticize one another, but to focus instead on those rascals in the other party. What becomes of the rascals in their own party whose similar deportment is thus obscured from the voters? Voted into office on account of blind partisanship, these rascals covertly bring to it the same deficiencies their Party has loudly denounced. Voters who sought something better are fooled into perpetuating the deficiency they sought to remove which, on account of their support or acquiescence, becomes even more damaging than it was before.

Perhaps voters whose foremost care is for their country are best advised to be less concerned about what candidates do to one another, and most concerned about what each of them has done, is doing or proposes to do to the nation. It may be true that the shots they aim at one another harm the partisan interest they share. But what if, in their zeal to defeat one another, the brawl reveals them in stances that would otherwise be left obscure, stances that make it clear that, from one perspective or another, each of them has been firing shots aimed in the same general direction as the Party all of them profess to oppose;and that those shots are likely to prove fatal to the character, security and liberty of the country as a whole.

From the perspective of the common good, the real problem isn’t that the GOP candidates have been criticizing one another. It’s what those criticisms have revealed. Ron Paul’s backers criticize Gingrich’s fondness for Alvin Toffler’s elitist rejection of the form of government, of by and for the people (not the elites), the Constitution requires. Forces backing Gingrich and Santorum warn against Congressman Ron Paul’s isolationist, “blame America”, rationale for neglecting threats from anti-American fundamentalists in the Islamic world. Meanwhile, the Paul enthusiasts inveigh against Gingrich’s complicity in the elitist rape of America’s income, credit and economic wherewithal. Santorum’s criticism of Romney makes clear the Governor’s duplicity on issues like abortion and gay marriage. Romney’s criticism of Santorum unveils the Senator’s record as a “big government” conservative, willing to go along to get along even when it involves spending for causes (like Planned Parenthood’s pro-abortion agenda) Santorum decries as fatal to the character of the American people. Santorum notes that Romney was for Obama’s approach to health care before he was against it. Romney points out that Santorum was for Romney’s Presidential bid before he was against it, even though the Senator knew of the socialist characteristics of Romneycare in Massachusetts. And so it goes.

Where voter information is concerned, it appears that Mill was right. In a verbal free for all, “truth will out.”(Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 2) The GOP’s self-serving leaders and partisan media bobbleheads (heads bobbing yes to whatever follows the Party Line) may blather on about how all this allegedly defamatory backbiting only hurts the Party’s chances next November. But against the charge of defamation, truth is a defense. Before voters give in to the prodding of these elitist partisans, they need carefully to consider the evidence that suggests that much of what these warring camps are saying about one another is true.

They should do this even if they are shortsighted enough to believe that the only thing that matters is to end Obama’s usurpation of the White House. For if good evidence supports the mutual recriminations of the GOP’s Presidential aspirants that fact becomes the basis for an Obama faction election strategy that will be hard to beat. Anyone the GOP nominates will have to run against the views and policies the Obama faction has advanced. But in every major area of policy, when the GOP nominee slams Obama’s approach Obama or his supporters will be able to cite one or more of the GOP aspirants who has advocated, signed off on, or voted for the same or similar approaches. In this way Obama will run the GOP against itself, neutralizing their intended criticisms with prominent examples from their own ranks.

The clincher, however, lies precisely in the much vaunted show of “unity” that is supposed eventually to replace the GOP’s current bickering. All the GOP aspirants have made it clear that they will support whoever their Party nominates, on the arguable grounds that any one of them is better than Obama. Logically this implies that no GOP aspirant is fatally flawed; that none of them takes a stand or advocates policies that will be fatally damaging to the nation. But this means that, for any given policy he has pursued, Obama can point to the fact that one or more of the GOP candidates supported the same or a similar approach. Why should a policy tolerated by the GOP in a Republican they consider fit for the Presidency be considered a fatal flaw when pursued by Obama?

There will be no lack of Obama faction hacks ready to imply that the answer must have more to do with Obama’s features than with his policies. The GOP is already setting itself up for this Judo like strategic overthrow by defaulting to an election strategy based on the assumption that voters will rally to any GOP nominee in order to remove Obama from office. They assume the opposition which Obama’s policies generate will lead voters to overlook the growing body of evidence which suggests that the elites in both Parties “are all socialists now”; that they all live in the shadow of a materialist world view that rejects the moral and spiritual sensibilities which inform the common sense of many Americans.

The GOP’s anti-Obama strategy relies upon mobilizing highly personalized animosity against him using rhetoric that pretends to see Obama as an especially deadly threat to America’s life and liberty. But Obama can defuse this strategy, and turn it against the GOP Republicans by asking a simple question “Why is essentially the same policy good when some Republican pursues it, but bad when I do?” With that question hanging in the air, the Obama faction’s spokespeople and Democrat Party media bobbleheads will charge forward.  They will trumpet the accusation that, behind the GOP’s alarmist rhetoric, is a cynically ruthless and divisive plan to exploit what they will claim is the still vibrant reality of racism in the United States, particularly among the nationalist, constitutional, and religious forces the GOP seeks to rouse.

The GOP is vulnerable to this counterattack because of the impression made by its preemptive capitulations; its unwarranted retreats; its outright collaboration with Obama’s anti-constitutional expansion of government dominance. This saps credibility from the notion that there is any starkly fateful difference between GOP Republicans and Obama faction Democrats. If there’s a dime’s worth of difference between them, it’s sandwiched between one broken GOP promise and another. That’s hardly the wherewithal to support the claim that America’s survival hangs in the balance as voters choose between them.

Tragically, America’s fate does hang in the balance, but not across the fictional partisan divide that separates the GOP Republican and Democrat Parties. They are opposite wings of the same elitist faction, flapping in unison as socialism takes flight. Neither represents what was the distinctive feature of the American republic before representative government in this generation failed; and the key to America’s strength and leadership in the world. I mean the nation’s dedication to the proposition on which it was founded- that the Creator God of nature designed us by his might, and destined all for equal liberty as long as we do right.

In an effort to rally support from the true conservatives who revere it, the GOP uses rhetoric that purports to respect this founding principle. But true conservatives will not only espouse the principle of right and liberty. Using sound reasoning and common sense, they will apply and implement it in all their political choices, policies and actions. Yet for the past twenty years the GOP elite has been unwilling consistently to validate candidates who refuse to abjure or abandon the founding principle in any area critical to our strength and survival as a free people. As I have said elsewhere, to “make their bones” the politicians the elitists prefer must fatally compromise the founding principle either in moral conception (on issues like abortion and homosexual marriage) or in material consequence (by accepting dependency spawning socialist approaches that eclipse liberty and discourage individual self-discipline and responsibility.) So the GOP ends up forcing true conservatives to “take one for the team” (as Senator Santorum put it), by backing these candidates, these “lesser evils”, even though their stands and policies include some fatal flaw that departs from what is needed to sustain and perpetuate Constitutional, republican self-government.

But for every public official in America, as indeed for every citizen who understands and takes seriously the privilege of authentic self-government, doesn’t the real team consist of those who uphold the Constitution and the Creator endowed rights and blessings it is intended to secure? If “taking one for the team” means disserving these objectives, then aren’t you playing for the wrong team or, in this case, two teams gone wrong? We need to quit them both. We need to remember that, as a free people, we owe our identity first to the Creator and then to our common commitment to abide in the right He created us to see. Reaffirming that identity, we need to join together on a new team, one that is willing to give its all to serve God and our true liberty; one that inclines toward no party except America itself. Uniting as many willing to give, we will renew this one nation, under God. We will retake the path of its exceptional destiny; acting not just for ourselves but with and for all people of good conscience, wherever they abide, who are willing to share the journey.

Alan Keyes

What do you do when an entire nation begins to lose the capacity to think rationally?  Many Americans spend a great deal of time criticizing the government, and there is certainly a lot to complain about, but it is not just the government that is the problem.  All over America, people appear to be going insane.  It is almost as if we have been cursed with stupidity.  Sadly, this applies from the very top of our society all the way down to the very bottom.  A lot of us find ourselves asking the following question much more frequently these days: “How could they be so stupid?”  Unfortunately, we are witnessing a complete collapse of common sense all over America.  Many people seem to believe that if we could just get Obama out of office or if we could just reform our economic system that our problems as a nation would be solved, but that is simply not true.  Our problems run much deeper than that.  The societal decay that is plaguing our country is very deep and it is everywhere.  We are a nation that is full of people that do not care about others and that just want to do what is right in their own eyes.  We hold ourselves out to the rest of the world as “the greatest nation on earth” and an example that everyone else should follow, and yet our own house is rotting all around us.  The words “crazy”, “insane” and “deluded” are not nearly strong enough to describe our frame of mind as a country.  America has become a sad, delusional old man that can’t even think straight anymore.  The evidence of our mental illness is everywhere.

The following are 20 signs that we are witnessing the complete collapse of common sense in America….

#1 According to Wired Magazine, FBI agents have been taught that they can “bend or suspend the law” as they pursue criminals and terrorists.  But when they break the law they become criminals themselves.

#2 A TSA manager (not just an agent) at Dulles International Airport was recently discovered to be running a prostitution ring out of a local hotel room.  TSA agents have been charged with crime after crime after crime and yet we continue to allow them to be in charge of airport security.

#3 CBS News is reporting that approximately 200 pieces of luggage a day are being stolen by employees at John F. Kennedy International Airport and authorities still have not been able to stop it.

#4 Visitors to the United States must now pay $14 to complete an online form that asks them a series of really bizarre questions.  For example, one of the questions asks visitors to the U.S. if they ever “collaborated with the Nazis”.

#5 The U.S. military is buying huge amounts of electronic parts from China (mistake number one) and a government investigation has uncovered the fact that a large percentage of these parts are counterfeit.  Yet the U.S.military continues to buy huge amounts of electronic parts from China (mistake number two).

#6 A high school senior in Indiana was recently expelled from school for cussing on Twitter.

#7 Police in Chicago apparently believe that our “First Amendment rights can be terminated” at their discretion.

#8 Americans are becoming very cruel to one another.  This is especially true when it comes to the weak and the elderly.  For example, two “caregivers” down in Georgia were recently charged with waterboarding an 89-year-old woman that had been entrusted to their care….

Police charge two caregivers at a Jonesboro facility with waterboarding an 89-year-old woman.

Clayton County police said Jermeller Steed and Cicely Reed held down Anna Foley after an argument that started over ice cream.

#9 An increasing number of American families are taking out student loans in order to pay for their children’s kindergarten tuition.

#10 One town in Massachusetts plans to distribute free condoms to children as young as 12 years of age.

#11 Children in America are exposed to enormous amounts of sexual material on television these days, but we are always so shocked when they try to act out on it.  The following is one very disturbing example that happened recently in Ohio….

Authorities in southwest Ohio have charged a 13-year-old boy with raping a 5-year-old girl at a McDonald’s play area.

The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office said Monday that the alleged assault occurred Oct. 29 at a McDonald’s in the Cincinnati suburb of Anderson Township. Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Barnett says the girl’s grandmother was nearby in the restaurant at the time.

#12 The following is another example from Indiana of how our sexualized society is affecting our young children….

Fishers police said an 8-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy were caught in a sexual act on a school bus.

The girl’s parents are now trying to determine if the February incident was a rape or molestation.

In a statement, police said a bus aid caught the girl and the boy “trying to have intercourse,” and that the “bus aid immediately separated the juveniles and informed the bus driver.”

#13 According to Natural News, the Michigan state government intends to raid private farms and kill pigs that have “the wrong hair color” even though some of these farmers have been raising these pigs for decades.

#14 An executive order recently updated by the Obama administration would give the federal government complete control over all food, all energy, all health resources, all transportation resources and “all other materials, services, and facilities” at the discretion of Barack Obama.  The wording of the executive order has been changed so that this can now be done even in “non-emergency” situations.  Very few Americans seem concerned by this.

#15 These days many Americans are very hesitant to get involved with helping out anyone else.  For example, an 86-year-old World War II veteran living near Detroit was recently brutally carjacked in broad daylight at a gas station.  He could not walk after the attack because his leg was shattered so he began to crawl across the concrete pavement to get help.  Sadly, many people walked past and drove past as if he was not even there.

#16 At one airport in Hawaii, TSA agents recently required one new mother to go to a public restroom and fill up the empty baby bottles she was carrying with her own breast milk before they would allow her to get on to her flight.  The following is how one local news station described the incident….

She claims agents told her she couldn’t take the pump on the plane because the bottles in her carry-on were empty.

“I asked him if there was a private place I could pump and he said no, you can go in the women’s bathroom. I had to stand in front of the mirrors and the sinks and pump my breast in front of every tourist that walked into that bathroom. I was embarrassed and humiliated and then angry that I was treated this way.

When the bottles were full, she was allowed back on the plane.

#17 Massive brawls have been erupting at Chuck E. Cheese restaurants all over the nation.  Police responded to violence at one particular Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in Pennsylvania 17 times in just one recent 18 month time period.

#18 Thieves in New Jersey have become so desperate for scrap metal that they have started breaking into churches and ripping the copper piping right out of the walls.

#19 Tide detergent has become an alternative form of currency on the streets of America and there has been an epidemic of Tide thefts all over the nation.  The following is from a recent article in The Daily….

Theft of Tide detergent has become so rampant that authorities from New York to Oregon are keeping tabs on the soap spree, and some cities are setting up special task forces to stop it. And retailers like CVS are taking special security precautions to lock down the liquid.

One Tide taker in West St. Paul, Minn., made off with $25,000 in the product over 15 months before he was busted last year.

“That was unique that he stole so much soap,” said West St. Paul Police Chief Bud Shaver. “The name brand is [all] Tide. Amazing, huh?”

Tide has become a form of currency on the streets. The retail price is steadily high — roughly $10 to $20 a bottle — and it’s a staple in households across socioeconomic classes.

#20 New federal rules will severely restrict the kind of work that children can do on farms in America.  Kids will be banned from doing many of the most basic kinds of farm chores under the new regulations.  Perhaps the children can just sit inside and watch television while the adults do all the work.

As mentioned earlier, what America is experiencing is not just an economic collapse.  The truth is that our entire society is collapsing.

For many years our great prosperity masked much of our decline, but now our great economic strength is rapidly fading and it is becoming very difficult to deny how far we have fallen as a nation.

You can find more examples of how American society is decaying right here and right here.  Anyone with half a brain can see what is happening to the United States.  It really is sad, because America was once a truly great nation.

So is there any hope of a recovery?

Not if we keep going down the same path.

In the end, the choice is up to you America.

The Economic Collapse

The people out there that believe that the U.S. economy is experiencing a permanent recovery and that very bright days are ahead for us should have their heads examined.  Unfortunately, what we are going through right now is simply just a period of “hopetimism” between two financial crashes.  Things may seem relatively stable right now, but it won’t last long.  The truth is that the financial crisis of 2008 was just a warm up act for the economic horror show that is coming.  Nothing really got fixed after the crash of 2008.  We are living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and it has gotten even bigger since then.  The “too big to fail” banks are larger now than they have ever been.  Americans continue to run up credit card balances like there is no tomorrow.  Tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs continue to leave the country.  We continue to consume far more than we produce and we continue to become poorer as a nation.  None of the problems that caused the crisis of 2008 have been solved and we are even weaker financially than we were back then.  So why in the world are so many people so optimistic about the economy right now?

Just take a look at the chart posted below.  It shows the growth of total debt in the United States.  During the financial crisis of 2008 there was a little “hiccup”, but the truth is that not much deleveraging really took place at all.  And since the recession “ended”, total credit market debt has gone on to even greater heights….

So what does this mean for the future?

Well, if a small “hiccup” in the debt bubble caused so much chaos back in 2008, what is going to happen when this debt bubble finally bursts?

That is something to think about.

Sadly, most Americans seem oblivious to all of this.

If you go out to malls in the wealthy areas of America today, people are charging up a storm.  In all, Americans charged a whopping 2.5 trillion dollars on their credit cards during 2011.  Way too many people have already forgotten the lessons that we all learned back in 2008.

Of course some Americans pay off their credit cards every month, but way too many Americans are not doing that.  Today, Americans are carrying 793 billion dollars in revolving credit balances.

And student loan debt is an even bigger bubble than credit card debt is.  As I have written about previously, total student loan debt in America is rapidly approaching a trillion dollars.

So it looks like U.S. consumers have not learned to stay away from debt.

That is not good.

Well, what about the banks?

Has the financial system learned any lessons since 2008?

No, not really.

Sadly, the “too big to fail” banks are now even bigger than ever.  The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011.  If they were to fail today, they would be even more of a threat to our financial system than they were back in 2008.

And our major banks continue to be very highly leveraged.  In fact, major banks all over the world are absolutely swamped with debt.

The following statistics come from Zero Hedge….

The U.S. banking system is leveraged 13 to 1.

The Japanese banking system is leveraged 23 to 1.

The French banking system is leveraged 26 to 1.

The German banking system is leveraged 32 to 1.

These are insane levels of leverage, and they are just inviting another major financial crisis.

Do you all remember Lehman Brothers?  The fact that they were leveraged so highly is what did them in back in 2008.  When the value of their holdings declined by just a little bit they were totally wiped out.

Well, during this next financial crisis large financial institutions are going to be wiped out all over the world.  Major banks all over the globe are going to be crying out for more bailouts when things take a turn against them.

They are making the exact same mistakes that they made before, and they are going to be expecting more government handouts when things go bad.

Will we ever learn?

So obviously the banking system has not learned any lessons.

What about the federal government?

Well, if you follow my blog regularly, you know that I love to write about how horrific U.S. government debt is.

Unfortunately, over the past four years things have gotten so much worse.

Back in 2008, the U.S. national debt crossed the 10 trillion dollar mark.

Just recently, it crossed the 15 trillion dollar mark.

So now we are in a much weaker position financially to respond to another major financial crisis.

Just check out the chart posted below.  This is a recipe for national financial suicide….

During fiscal 2011, the Obama administration stole close to 150 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour.

At the moment, the legacy of debt that we are passing on to future generations is sitting a grand total of $15,351,406,294,640.49.

But keep in mind that it is going up every single hour.

Meanwhile, our ability to service that debt is declining.  We are rapidly getting poorer as a nation.

During 2011, the amount of money that left the United States exceeded the amount of money that entered the United States by more than a half a trillion dollars.

This gap is called a trade deficit, and it is absolutely ripping our economy to shreds.

For a moment, imagine Uncle Sam standing next to a giant pile of money on a map of the United States.  Then imagine a half a trillion dollars being taken out of that pile every single year.

So why haven’t we totally run out of money yet?

Well, it is because we borrow those dollars back.  In order to maintain our false standard of living, our federal government, our state governments and our local governments have to go out and beg the rest of the world to lend us our dollars back.

Sadly, our government schools have “dumbed-down” the population so much that most of them don’t even know what a “trade deficit” is anymore.

Meanwhile, our economic infrastructure is being gutted like a fish.

Look, I know that I go over this point over and over and over, but it is absolutely imperative that we all understand this.

The half a trillion dollars a year that leaves this country every year could have gone to support businesses and jobs inside the United States.

But instead it is going to support businesses and jobs on the other side of the world.

The consequences of this are absolutely devastating.

According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day closed down in the United States during 2010.  Overall, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have shut down since 2001.

Even many so-called “American companies” have been bought up by the rest of the world.  The following comes from a recent article posted on Economy In Crisis….

RCA is now a French company, Zenith is a Korean company. Frigidaire is a Swedish company. IBM’s Personal Computer Division—with its 500 patents—is now a Chinese company. Westinghouse Nuclear Energy’s major shareholder is Toshiba—a Japanese Company. Lucent Technologies, a former research division of AT&T, along with all the patents acquired from the beginning of the phone system, is now a French company. In 2008, Brazilian-Belgian brewing company InBev purchased the iconic American brewer Anheuser-Busch, makers of Budweiser. With the sale of these manufacturing companies, the future profit and technologies all belong to foreign entities.

We once had the greatest economic machine in the history of the world.

Now it is being dismantled and bought up by foreigners.

When America’s economic infrastructure declines, that means that there are less jobs available for all of us.

As I wrote about the other day, the employment situation in this country is not getting better and we have never even come close to recovering from the recession that started back in 2008.

During 2008 and 2009, the U.S. economy lost millions of jobs.  Since the beginning of 2010, the percentage of the U.S. population that has had a job has remained very stable….

Normally, when a recession ends the percentage of Americans that have a job bounces back pretty dramatically.

So considering the fact that the employment situation has never recovered from the last financial crisis, what is going to happen when the next financial crisis hits?

And most of the jobs that have been “created” during this so-called “recovery” have been low income jobs.  In fact, if you look closely at the employment numbers that were released last Friday, you will find that the vast majority of the “new jobs” were part-time jobs.

But you cannot pay a mortgage and support a family on a part-time job.

Sadly, the truth is that median household income in America has been steadily dropping over the past several years.  Tens of millions of American families are deeply struggling and more Americans than ever are falling into poverty.

Back in the year 2000, about one out of every nine Americans was living in poverty.  Today, about one out of every seven Americans is living in poverty.

All of this is causing a great deal of anxiety in America today.  Large numbers of Americans know that something has fundamentally changed, even if they don’t understand the specifics.  That is one reason why sites such as this one have become so popular.  People want some answers.

And once people get some answers about what is really happening, they tend to want to prepare for the hard times that are coming.

In a few days, a new series on National Geographic entitled “Doomsday Preppers” premieres.  The mainstream media is starting to take notice of the growing “prepper” movement in America today.  It is estimated that there are at least 2 million “preppers” in the United States at this point.  Of course people are “prepping” for a whole host of reasons, but the number one concern among most groups of preppers is the economy.

As the economy crumbles, more Americans than ever have decided that it is not a good thing to be 100% dependent on the system.

Back in 2008 and 2009, millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs.  Because they did not have any finances stored up, large numbers of them also lost their homes.  Many went from being solidly middle class to being out on the street in a matter of months.

That doesn’t have to happen to you.  Instead of blowing your money on frivolous things, do what you can to set something aside for the difficult times that are on the horizon.

A lot of those “in the know” are quietly making their own preparations.  For example, legendary film director James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic and Terminator) has purchased more than 2600 acres of farmland in New Zealand and he is getting out of the U.S. for good apparently.

Unfortunately, most of us do not have the resources for something like that.  But what most of us can do is we can change our priorities and start focusing on the things that will help us survive the hard times that are coming.

So are you ready?

The Economic Collapse

If most high profile Republican leaders and officials, salaried or not, do not shed their political arrogance and narcissism soon, 2012 November elections may be a repeat of why a high percentage of California Republican middle class voters refused to vote for many Republican candidates last two major election seasons. If any candidate’s only relevance to our lives is their Republican registration – not good enough, not any more.  But the message remains elusive to local, state and national Republican Party officers and leaders suffering a severe handicap of arrogance, narcissism, and many lacking in social and people skills outside of impersonal blogs, websites and podium speeches.  Federal prisons are full of dishonest lawyers and corporate executives which justify us more streetwise middle class voters to remain cynical and distrustful even of our own GOP leaderships.

Every time the majority of elected Republican leaders, local, state or national display condescending attitudes, arrogance, greedy self-serving agendas, and elitist demeanor toward whom they consider economic and intellectually inferior on the basis of modest incomes, they are further alienating an inevitable diversity of voters with potential common shared issues.  Many of us, with the ability and the backbone to confront internal Party deficiencies and push for leadership reforms, are frequent targets of verbal assaults by titular Republicans with delusions of being earthly deity.  God forbid if virtues of speaking truth and accountability are not just confined at Democrats.  It remains the GOP (as in Going Old Party) tradition to discourage us plebiscites from openly (instead of some “quiet room”) exposing ineffective leaders; or to probe into some Republican candidate’s credibility by connecting the dots between current campaign rhetoric to his/her past performance.  Embellishing resumes to expediently fit a believable profile of public leadership has not escaped intelligent voters’ observations. A demon is a demon regardless of partisan labels or religious claims which are no assurance of their personal integrity and humanity.

It takes profound intellect and expansive sociological sophistication, seemingly lacking in sufficient numbers within current traditional Republican ranks, to develop solutions of realistic substance.  The Democratic Party is not alone in being inundated with intellectually hollow whiners.  Attending state GOP conventions are bastions of mind numbing sound bites – stale, archaic, simplistic and lacking in public relations hospitality and other social skills to which the organizers seem totally and repeatedly oblivious, but then consider the sources.

Every political leader should be judged for re-election on the basis of how much legislation and policies have given benefit to the mass numbers of their constituents, not to a small percent of their deep pocket donors.  Not all corporate titans give a damn about helping to preserve and improve the integrity of U.S. patriotism, as most have legally sanctioned privileges to protecting their profits by stashing their monies offshore; low wage overseas job outsourcing; and our U.S. military protecting corporate overseas assets. Legislative offices, supported by middle class taxpayers as well, are visited most frequently by corporate lobbyists, whose fees are a business tax deduction unavailable to us middle class.  In fact, economic treason is a legitimate allegation to launch against many Republican and Democratic congressmen,  U.S. Senators and their corporate donors.  Isolating the ills of this nation just on Democrats alone is wearing thin, given the facts of bi-partisan complicity in playing us middle class voters and taxpayers like human yo-yo’s.

The problem why our GOP presidential candidates are not believable is that Newt Gingrich comes across a capricious and ego driven moral and ethical hypocrite whose criticism against Mitt Romney seems  self-serving.  On the other hand, Mitt Romney believes himself to be an American aristocrat whose rhetoric alone should be sufficient to justify voters’  support.  Romney’s offensive references to “envy” and that tax policy disagreements be confined to “quiet rooms” among other verbal Freudian slips were not just poor choice of words, but reflective of how he defines us not of the elite.  In his mindset, failing to achieve super rich status is the only value which passes his litmus test of intelligence.  Rick Santorum is too culturally and socially unsophisticated to lead a nation where many admitted Christians, including Catholics, prefer government and legislative agendas be confined within secular boundaries. Ron Paul is just a magnet for Libertarian type advocating a anarchy.

News media have no idea the number of scams, deceit, lies and exploitation passing for GOP’s version of gratitude, respect and morale reinforcement to many of us grassroots active uncompensated Republican volunteers in California and beyond.  Our first Bay Area regional Korean American Republican elected as GOP state senate nominee, Doo Sup Park, had to file a police report for a seemingly deliberate act of larceny committed on him last year by Luis Buhler sanctioned by his CAGOP allies, as the case remains ignored by the California Republican Party officers (all white Caucasian and most are social rednecks).  However, such breaches of integrity and respect are prolific, mostly the rule, not the exception. We are no longer electing from high standards of public leadership qualifications, but out of desperation to lure candidates with disposable campaign cash, insatiable egos and under the delusions that simply attacking  Democrats  is synonymous with actual leadership performance.  Unless we grassroots Republicans assert our mandates for higher standards, we will be stuck with the whims of some Tea Party movement; and politically ambitious individuals mistaking narcissism, aloofness and arrogance as social class. Maybe an acting course can help many of them effectively pretend to have charisma. Too many overpriced Republican campaign consultants and spin doctors seem to do a lousy job.

The problem is that many Republican official representatives and leaders, even at county levels, believe their role to just pontificate rules of behavior for others. They believe to be divinely or aristocratically immune from the need to exemplify role model behavior or be held accountable. Talking at us, not with us is a typical Republican tradition which is sowing Republican middle class warfare conflicts.  It is the arrogance of many Republican officials, salaried or not, to presume that blind allegiance to the Republican Party ideals must transfer even to defective Party leaders. We have a moral and ethical right to support the ideological merits of being Republican without being crucified for refusing to pay homage to a growing number of politically ambitious Republicans whose only public leadership qualification lies in their embellished or fictional resumes.

Gail E. Neira
Lifelong conservative Hispanic American active Republican
San Francisco native, past publisher, managing editor, diplomatic embassy aide

Grassroots Republican Pantry

The Pampas of Argentina or the backwaters of Paraguay were the preferred location for those who openly professed their reprehensible loyalty to the Führer principle. However, do not blame all those ex-Nazis for selecting the shores of the Americas for their new domicile, their seeds were planted long ago in the offices of Wall and Broad Streets. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will saga shares more, than what one wants to admit, about the dark side of American History.

From the beginning of the Republic, the Federalists conspired for the illegal passage of their central government constitution in order to form a competing world empire with their British cousins. Their leader was Alexander Hamilton, who championed making individual states subservient to the original crony capitalists. When the Father of our Country, George Washington admonished about the dangers on entangling alliances, the world was warned that the drive towards independent liberty was compromised under this new Federal system.

When Andrew Jackson rallied frontier populism against the establishment elites of his era, you had an opportunity to restore some of the former glory of the Revolution of 1776. The conflict over the abolishment of the National Bank symbolizes the eternal struggle that continues to this very day.

The Manifest Destiny of the U.S.-Mexican War demonstrated just how far the country strayed from the fundamental concept of independence from England. The expansionistic campaign had more in common with the Crown than the Boston Tea Party.

The early 19th century fascists looked to their next defender Abraham Lincoln, the lawyer for the railroad corporatist cabal and the worst of all despotic presidents, to complete the task.

Myth #1: Lincoln invaded the South to free the slaves.

Myth #2: Lincoln’s war “saved the Union.”

Myth #3: Lincoln championed equality and natural rights.

Myth #4: Lincoln was a defender of the Constitution.

Myth #5: Lincoln was a “great humanitarian” who had “malice toward none.”

Myth #6: War was necessary to end slavery.

The significance of the War of Northern Aggression is that the principle of independent sovereign states under the precepts of constitutional law died. With the prevention of secession, the liberty of a voluntary union was betrayed for the rule, under a loyalty oath, to an Amerikan Reich.

The next False Flag excuse was the Spanish-American War and the “Remember the Maine!” slogan that pushed the country into a “Pacific Imperium“. Those NeoCons, like Senator John McCain, who revere Theodore Roosevelt as a model for imperialist jingoism, draw their psychopathic lusts from the same bloodline as Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler.

World War I produced the infamous Woodrow Wilson internationalist treason. No longer will America be a society governed by elected representatives. The only coup to come out of his administration was won by the banksters. The fate of a proud people, sealed with the creation of the Federal Reserve, the establishment of the income tax and the permanent foreign military intervention abroad is the basis for the final destruction of the country and the horrors that befell our nation in the last century.

World War II inflicted the Franklin D. Roosevelt curse that guaranteed the imposition of socialism on the American people. How ironic that the Hitler bogyman’s regime, the scourge of Western Civilization and the reason for defending democracy, ultimately lead to similar collectivist policies, now adopted in the United States.

Just look to the ignominious involvement of Prescott Bush’s involvement with the funding of Adolph Hitler. Even FAUX news cannot hide the relationship in Bush’s Grandfather Directed Bank Tied to Man Who Funded Hitler.

“Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp., a New York investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the Thyssen family, according to recently declassified National Archives documents reviewed by The Associated Press.”

So what can and should a “reasonable man” conclude from these examples from history? The essential lesson is that the pristine fairy tale of the federal government’s noble role as defender of righteousness, that politicians want to accept and often die for, is a fictional myth.

Power politics always serves the interests of the banking elites, who control the political process, own the financial capital and manipulate the media viewpoint of events. This reality is pure fascism. You live under this system, so grow up, and admit it . . . it is the lamentable truth.

The Fourth Reich did not originate with Operation Overcast, the initiate name for Operation Paperclip. The classic book Fourth Reich of the Rich, by Des Griffin deserves another read.

“Some 150 years ago, in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln acknowledged the fact that “no foreign power or combination of foreign powers could by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.”At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.”

Are we committing national suicide? Webster’s Dictionary (1828) defines suicide as: “Self murder; the act of designedly destroying one’s own life.” For that to be true on a national scale, the decisions leading up to our national self-destruction would, of necessity, have to be made by those who govern the country Congress, or “the government.”

Much of the German population was captivated by Hitler. The “presstitute” Goebbels’ media holds out Obama as a shining example. His manners are a composition of every tyranny to grace the scorched earth of despotic government. Will the America public come to their senses and make war against this Amerikana version of the Fourth Reich? You need not look for the Boys from Brazil to find today’s Nazi’s. They do their business in New York City, run their international institutes from London and order their bombing from Washington, DC.

Sieg heil! to the New World Order is the modern definition of national suicide.

SARTRE

Chief executive officers from eight of the largest US banks receiving government aid testify at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, DC, 02/11/09 (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg)

I’ll be damned.

As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved. Bank balance sheets still reek. Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole, with matter from the periphery being sucked toward the center until the vortex itself collapses. The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government’s fault. This time, however, I don’t think the argument that “Washington ate my homework” is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street’s head – and about time, too.

….

Over the next year, I expect the “what” will give way to the “how” in the broad electorate’s comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of “Tobin tax” on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.

But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ‘em go!

Hoh hoh hoh.

Michael Thomas is right, you know.  I’ve been trying to get purchase for draining the swamp and punishing the wrongdoers among the various political classes in DC and elsewhere for a long time, in some cases dating back to the 1990s.  My stock in trade is mathematics — that irrespective of the money flowing into the coffers of campaigns and lobbying offices what’s being attempted cannot work and as a consequence we are choosing between doing the right thing now and having it suck and doing it later by force and having it suck more.

Why appeal to people in this way?  Well, what else do you have when the base case — that you should do the right thing because it’s right — no longer has any currency?  In a city (DC) and nation (America) where bribery and corruption have become a way of life, where lies told to the electorate as a means of buying votes has become the degenerate set that’s left of what used to pass for law and order, you can no longer appeal to people’s “better virtues.”

All that’s left is trying to appeal to their desire to survive what’s coming, whether that survival is political or at rather-more-fundamental level.

This isn’t the sort of thing that anyone wants to talk of openly, of course, but we must, because just like mathematics it is inevitable on the path we are on.  The idea that one can “throw money from helicopters” as Bernanke has put forward is an intentional fraud.  Diluting the currency base of course simply makes everything more expensive you need while attempting to bail out those in debt at the same time.  For the common man in debt nothing happens.  For the poor who never had access to credit at a material level they literally starve and thus civil and political order is threatened.  The wealthy, for their part, simply skim off more and more to “protect” their capital.   That a man who runs this sort of crap manages to get reconfirmed after intentionally averting his eyes to the bubble being blown as a consequence of his policies is an outrage.  It speaks to the high corruption of public process and public life, but it is not an isolated incident or uncommon in the world of today.

The IMF’s Lagarde talks of Europe being “everyone’s problem”, as if Germany and France decided to con the world with hinky Greek derivative deals.  Perhaps some French or German banks did so (along with American ones), but France and Germany themselves?  No.  But now, having happened, it suddenly is someone else’s problem to bail out, and oh by the way, it’s not just Greece.

At its core the problem is both simpler and more complex than it first appears.  The complexity is intentionally used as a foil by various pundits and others who argue that we must support the “financial innovators” lest it all go somewhere else.  But Paul Volcker, hardly a dummy, has said in public that the only real “innovation” in the financial industry in the last 30 years was the ATM!

He’s right, you know.  Ginning up some debt deal and selling it to rubes, knowing full well that it was crap and destined to eventually blow up, is nothing new at all.  A column over at Interfluidity argues that the bankster model is not only old hat but has driven much of innovation through the ages.  To that argument I call bull.

Simply put the question being put forward in the latter article proceeds from a false premise.  The idea that we gain some sort of “societal benefit” from these misallocations of capital is trivially proved to be false using nothing more than basic analysis and mathematics.  All you have to do is look here:

Notice how the outstanding debt increase, quarter by quarter, exceeds that of output.  The premise run by Interfluidity is that the societal good in terms of Nash Equilibria is therefore false, as it is not adjusted for the claims made against the future.  This of course is exactly the sort of lie the banksters and politicians have run as their stock in trade for 30 years, and it is not surprising at all that Steve would fall into the trap.  After all most of us alive have spent the majority of our lives in this lie.

If I can falsify the premise from which you proceed then the remainder of your argument goes in the ashcan.  Sorry Steve.

The smartest guys in the room (that would be the banksters) always believe they can get away with it, of course.  Some of them are delusional, many for the same reasons.  A number of those who are considered “respectable” even subscribe to idiocies like “MMT”, believing that somehow the government causes economic growth through deficit spending.

But the graph above does not lie.  As I have repeatedly commented these beliefs are much like perpetual motion in its various forms; there is always someone who claims to have figured it out.  But the laws of thermodynamics say perpetual motion is impossible, and ultimately once again the person running the scheme is proved to be wrong — usually intentionally so when their hidden energy source is discovered.

The choice is not between a modern economic system that favors growth and living in caves.  It is between economic progress that is sustainable and funded from economic surplus and one that is built on debt bubbles, lies, and ultimately must and does collapse.

The former is an economy that grows through actual innovation and improvement in productivity, where debt is a tool to liquify transaction flow rather than pyramid upon the shoulders of the people.  The latter is the lie we’ve lived for 30 years, and which is now reaching its mathematical conclusion.

We face a time when in the present we have a choice of becoming adults and accepting what we’ve done, along with what we must do, or continuing to pound on the table like a petulant child demanding another bar of chocolate.  The latter path has been the road of the last 30 years, but now the supply of chocolate is exhausted.  There is food to be had outside in the form of strawberries, ears of corn and even a rabbit or three, but to obtain the latter we must get off our collective asses and pick the strawberries, cultivate the corn or shoot, skin and cook the rabbit.  We are choosing now between recognition and personal effort, along with acceptance of the harm we’ve done by eating all that chocolate (we’re all 100lbs overweight!) or literal starvation through laziness.

The old political and bankster ways are out of gas folks.  There is no path forward on the road we’ve been traveling — the bridge is out and our choice is to either stop before we reach the edge or take the plunge onto the rocky cliffs below.

Choose wisely.