Empire Dusk

How the marketplace contributes to the prison industrial complex.

2011-05-24T13:14:00.000-07:00

The United States has the highest population of prisoners in the world, yet it's touted as "free." One must understand the statistical significance, however. There are over three hundred million people in the U.S. It's too easy to get into trouble because it's such a free country.

I was watching a documentary on human trafficking in the U.K. and noticed that the Brits have color high-definition video surveillance equipment, where as U.S. police have horrible grainy black-and-white, low resolution video equipment for their patrol car dash-cameras and other surveillance equipment. What is up with that?

Well first it guarantees a higher frequency of arrests in the U.S. because with a grainy image, you can pick up any similar-looking homeless person and send them to prison, as long as a jury can be convinced, which should be easy because homeless people can only afford public defenders, and what good are they? If the homeless people who look like the perps in the security video aren't noticed as missing, the state will get a certain amount of federal funding for the warm body.

One might even be able to use the same video twice in two different court-rooms for two different trials. why not? Dead people vote in this country, why should we expect anything better?

Why would the U.K. splurge on high quality video surveillance equipment? They must have different incentives. They probably look at criminal behavior as a psychological or neurological issue that should be treated, so they go to the trouble of actually finding the real perpetrator and treating him or her, rather than just caging criminals up for show in America like a zoo, then the captors puff up their chests, strutting and bragging about how great they are at catching "bad guys."

The marketplace does not like to pay taxes, yet they create cheap crappy surveillance equipment because the government won't spend the money for the good stuff. State and local governments like the better odds of arresting someone, anyone so they can get more federal dollars for their prison population.

If the marketplace would stop making crappy grainy black-and-white video surveillance equipment, and start making only high definition full-color video equipment, the government would be forced to use it to find the actual criminals. This would drastically reduce the prison population, reducing the flow of tax money to the prison system, and divert some money to actually figuring out why people commit crimes, so they can be properly treated.

Ultimately, taxes should go down and government should shrink.

Obama frightens Rachel Maddow!

2011-04-23T19:00:00.001-07:00

Why a Saudi King Might Want the US to Attack Iran

2010-12-01T02:18:00.000-08:00

Senate Bill S510 Makes it illegal to Grow, Share, Trade or Sell Homegrow...

2010-09-27T18:29:00.000-07:00

Illegal Immigrants may become military conscripts in the U.S. military.

2010-09-21T19:25:00.000-07:00

Under the guise of "earning citizenship" illegals may become conscripted into the U.S. military to server for at least two years.

The military is facing a severe shortage of volunteer soldiers and have lowered the recruiting standards to include some people with criminal backgrounds and high school dropouts. Imagine an entire batallion made of of the "Dirty Dozen."

The DREAM Act allows young people to become legal U.S. residents after spending two years in college or the military. It applies to those who were under 16 when they arrived in the U.S., have been in the country at least five years and have a diploma from a U.S. high school or the equivalent.
-- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/21/ap/national/main6889276.shtml

I served in active duty military and my ranks gradually filled up with unscrupulous scum, thieves, body-building steroid psychotics, and gung-ho sociopaths with little to no regard for diplomacy, behaving generally aweful in the foreign countries they visited. It was pretty much disgusting.

Now the U.S. Military will take nearly anyone. When the U.S. military had a draft, it included intelligent well-rounded individuals as well as the "stone-killas." It's been twenty years since I served in the military. What is it like now?

True News 5: The Truth About Voting

2010-07-18T03:03:00.000-07:00

End of Democracy

2010-01-22T05:42:00.001-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Sheriff Sale 2010

2010-01-07T08:05:00.000-08:00

Well, it's another property that was seized because they couldn't pay their newly increased property taxes. It's up for grabs. The sheriff is having an auction today.

"Any buyers?"

"Anyone?"

"No?"

"Why won't anyone buy this property from the county?"

"I don't get it! How can anyone pass up this prime property!?"
"What the hell is the county going to do with this property if nobody is willing to buy it? All you have to do is come up with the back-taxes due and it's yours!"

"Look! The county had no choice but to keep raising taxes because there are fewer and fewer property owners from which to collect taxes so the county government can keep operating! PLEASE! I GOT KIDS TO FEEEED!"

History Re-Forgotten

2009-09-27T05:45:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a government agency that failed to prevent a major terrorist attack because they ignored the warnings by one of their field officers.

They set out to be more preemptive in their efforts and they were given permission by their glorious leader to listen in on every citizen’s conversation instead of just foreigners.

One day they overheard a conversation about blowing up the tallest building in the nation. The agency infiltrated the group and got to know the members. Notes were made of their habits and travails.

The agents decided one day that they heard enough and arrested the terrorists. When the case went to trial it was discovered that these terrorists didn’t have the money to even buy combat boots.

Frustrated, the agency decided that they would create a false terrorist network and branch out across the country posing as the kind of boisterous disgruntled citizens you see at public protests. They created false members for every type of organization surrounding various conspiracy theories.

The only difference is this time they would provide real information and material support up to the last few minutes in order to turn the penniless disgruntled citizens into real terrorists they could arrest and actually convict.

The problem is that this kind of tactic didn’t work so well with Ruby Ridge, Waco and other previous incidents, but they appear to be a new generation that forgot about those incidents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge

North Korea Nuclear Test

2009-05-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

Kim Jung-Il startled awake in the middle of the night. His bed shaking. An Earth Quake! Just what they had been hoping for! The memos had already been printed and were actually beginning to yellow with age. The one flaw they overlooked, and yet to be tested by the forensic experts: the age of the paper and ink used in officially reporting a successful underground nuclear test.

What's really happening to America

2009-04-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

The same thing that happens to local municipalities.

The businesses move out of town, build factories in other locations, and still sell their products in-town to people who don't have good paying jobs anymore. The flow of money out is a swollen river, while the local income in low wages is a trickling stream.

This is the cause of the housing crisis, the credit crunch, bankruptcies, etc.

This is happening to most of the developed countries on a global scale. the money is flowing into East Asia from Oceania. It looks like George Orwell will be correct after all, and very shortly.

New link added - Cryptogon.com

2009-03-12T05:31:00.000-07:00

A link at the blog has been added. Cryptogon.com has a watchful eye on things, so my sidebar now has a link for it.

The list of watchdogs grows very slowly here as my other work takes most of my time. America has little time left. Since the creation of this website and blog, we have a new president with what we thought might be a new agenda.

I have little doubt that there will be NOT much latitude for President Obama to change the official behaviors of those holding the highest offices in the land. He can't be blamed immediately because the opponents of the bureaucracy he inherited are still in action, and there are still officials from the Bush administration populating the lower echelons.

President Obama's new world

2009-02-08T17:50:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I stop looking for work.
There are countless like me, and countless we will remain.

There once was a town.

2008-11-23T06:55:00.000-08:00

There once was a town where all the farmers gathered and sold their crops. Along a river in the middle of a vast stretch of land flat from horizon to horizon...

*Hmm... Where am I going with this? I don't like it. I'll do the short version.

There were local businesses and local banks. Money stayed in the area...

*I'm tired of this. Most people have figured out by now that they are losing their shirts because they put money in big-name multinational banks that are bankrupt or they bought a house for two hundred thousand dollars that's now worth one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars, but they bought their two hundred thousand dollar loan with a variable interest rate that just doubled so they can't afford the payments.

If they tried to sell their house they would still be in the hole for seventy five thousand dollars, but now there is nobody who wants to buy their house anyway.

Everyone's home values have dropped. Cars are in the same situation.

Before the September crash, the Census Bureau has released a report to the Press titled "Household Income Rises, Poverty Rate Unchanged, Number of Uninsured Down"

The report states "Among the race groups and Hispanics, black households had the lowest median income in 2007 ($33,916). This compares to the median of $54,920 for non-Hispanic white households. Asian households had the highest median income ($66,103). The median income for Hispanic households was $38,679."

The Census Bureau also reports income for Springfield, Illinois median income was $39,388 in 1999, a wage of around $18 per hour. According to Census, The national median income is close to the level of such careers as Illinois State Legislators, Engineers in various fields, Actuaries, Architects, and so on.

Currently the available skilled labor that is most in surplus is minimally skilled non-union workers that line up every day to fill out applications at retail and fast-food businesses that pay the minimum wage of $7.50 per hour.

I've been searching online trying to find a file that contains a job description, the exact number of people in that job, and exactly what they get paid for that job. But that information is kept separated and buried so deep as to make someone frustrated enough to give up.

I was able to find it in 2003, but it's been moved and buried even deeper. If there is anyone out there who can give me the appropriate information I would appreciate a comment on this blog about it.

VP Heart Flutters at Hague Mention

2008-10-15T08:39:00.000-07:00

Vice President Dick Cheney is having what appears to be heart problems, but may actually be hyperventilation at the mere mention of being swept up with Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Gonzales, Ashcroft, Rove, and others, to stand trial in the World Court at the Hague for crimes against humanity, then make restitution for every life lost in the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Demand that the Bailout Legislation Be Rejected

2008-09-24T08:30:00.001-07:00

We are witnessing a bankers' coup d’etat. In the name of saving the economy from a crisis created by their own greed and immense profits, the biggest bankers have taken a country and a people hostage.

“Give us your money and tear up what’s left of your Constitution or we will sink your economy,” is the message from Wall Street and the Bush Administration. “Give us the power and money we demand or you will be left jobless from a new economic depression."

Under the pretext of the banking crisis, the Bush Administration is changing the way this country operates. This is not simply taking trillions of dollars from the people and giving it to the richest bankers to do with as they see fit.

VoteNoBailout.org

The Biggest Show On Earth brought to you by Industrial Oligarchs

2008-08-21T04:41:00.000-07:00

When World War I broke out, the industrialists in the United States watched as nearly all the people in Europe sacrificed all of their resources and personal belongings to fight each-other.

The Industrialists later watched the population as an economic depression hit. They realized that the masses had only a few sources of information and were therefore easily convinced with propaganda, so the industrialists built an information system with central controls.

The Industrialists studied human behavior and found that personal privilege was more powerful than ideology, and easily crossed the boundaries between Monarchy, Communism and Democracy, to reach the few at the top of each form of government with an important message:

"If we can convince our masses that our nations hate each other, they will sacrifice to us, nearly all they have to defend themselves, and we will become very rich."

So the leaders of the world and the industrialists sat down at a table with a map of the world, and went to work making their own families richer by the blood of their workers and patriots.

They easily falsified conflicts internal and external that generated justification for spending more money on "weapon systems" and "bureaucracies."

The richest of them all are American Industrialists, the Russian Oligarchs, and business leaders (Not the visible leaders) of the European Union.

Taxes, wages and blood were sacrificed for the alleged "good of the country" and the Industrialists set in motion an automatic money machine that made a handful of people collect eighty percent of the world's wealth.

The money gets siphoned away from the world economy to such a degree that periodic depression occurs, but the same families are unaffected.

Back then it was very easy. The majority of the population was illiterate, but illiteracy was shrinking.

There were only a few national news organizations, a handful of national radio stations, and only three major television networks with less than ten people telling all of the world the information handed to them by their editors and producers. They were all easily controlled.

Then came cable television and the Internet.

Today, there are less than seventy five people on television in the United States conveying information to a population of over three hundred million. Newspapers across the country are cutting budgets or closing shop altogether.

The Internet is superseding the main-stream news media, and the Industrialists have missed it nearly altogether. They must have thought that the Internet would confuse the masses. Wrong!

Now they are severely threatened because their ideas are fading into a tide of truth, and revolutionary ideas from people who never before had a means of conveying information to the entire world.

The descendants of Industrial Oligarchs for example include the Kennedys, one of which is being supported by Michael Moore of all people, in his open letter to Caroline.

The Industrialists are now fighting to take over and control the information superhighway.

For more information, visit:
http://www.savetheinternet.org

DEBTOR EQUITY

2008-02-09T06:13:00.000-08:00

The truth about the subprime mortgage industry

I’m sure you heard about being able to get loans with bad credit. It was all the rage after the Enron and Worldcom scandals. The banks and money lenders were getting paid anyway, if not by the people who borrowed the money, then by the tax payers.

Does anyone remember the Lincoln Savings and Loan Scandal? Remember Senator John McCain’s involvement in that? That little steaming nugget will be dredged up soon enough; it’s not the story right now.

Lending money to people who are known not to afford it has been reported in the news as a “disaster”, reported as a “mistake,” and journalists and pundits alike have been scratching their heads wondering why it was done. Why were all those poor people allowed to borrow money they couldn’t pay back? What were those bankers thinking? Were they stupid?

No. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were investing in living, breathing people who would be forced to sweat and toil to pay them back, plus interest of course, as long as they lived, and if they didn’t, it would be their children’s burden.

It’s like switching investments from stocks to bonds or gold during hard-times. You can switch your investments from manufactured commodities to entire living, breathing families to pay you back, because it’s the law.

Another word for it is indentured servitude. If you have a credit card, a mortgage, a car loan, or are mandated by your state to get car insurance, or you pay rent, you qualify as an indentured servant if your expenses exceed your savings.

Debt Equity is the possession of the living breathing entity (in this case, multiple generations of families) that pays the money, not the money itself.

Banks and other lenders can track you down anywhere in the country with the help of their police (you don’t have any police.) because you need money to try and emulate the so-called “American Dream” as taught in public schools. As comedian George Carlin said “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

This is the dirty little secret of the “free market economy” that republicans desire so much. They keep complaining that regulations are keeping down the power of the free market. Regulations are the products of lessons learned from deaths and disasters. Just pick up a book by John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, or Mark Twain and you can read about what it was like when the economy was really free.

Lauryn Hill sums it all up.

2007-12-25T06:50:00.000-08:00

It's all here.

Iran compliant

2007-11-18T05:44:00.000-08:00

According to a leaked report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran is being compliant with its nuclear energy program, however, the report is being subjectively interpreted and distorted for political agendas.

Impeachement too late

2007-11-09T16:45:00.001-08:00

Impeachment may be too late to reverse America's downward spiral.

War Made Easy

2007-10-07T13:11:00.000-07:00

It's time to wake up.

Empire's End Begins

2007-09-04T18:55:00.000-07:00

Dick Cheney is Right!

2007-08-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

This is absolutely amazing!

House and Senate on Summer Break

2007-08-07T05:16:00.000-07:00

Our U.S. Senators and Congressmen are on their August break. You might see them around your district. We, the people expected change after the 2006 election, and the rumors going around are that the Democrats have rolled over and have not been effective since they have become a majority.

But, we, the people rolled over. We only gave the Democrats a simple majority, not an overriding majority. For the Democrats to be effective against the onslaught of warmongering predatory capitalists, an overriding majority is needed, a better than two-thirds majority that can override a Presidential veto or some other arcane parliamentary procedure.

So we have nothing to complain about but our own inability to elect an effective majority of legislators different from those who dominated our government for the last six years.

Should the Republic be Restored, or Abandoned?

2007-06-25T06:48:00.000-07:00

I just discovered the website www.RestoreTheRepublic.com and found hundreds, if not thousands of people struggling to bring back the idealized government created by our founders and promoted as an equitable democracy in our history books. What has been neglected in our history books is the emphasis that our founding fathers were themselves wealthy land owners, many with slaves and indentured servants. They were seeking severance from tax indebtedness to the king of England.

Now some Americans are seeking severance from tax indebtedness to whoever is in charge of their lives on U.S. soil. Who that is remains to be determined. The problem is there is no new world to which those who seek independence can travel physically, so they must endeavor to change the existing system, an insurmountable task. What is the point of fighting for a piece of rotten pie? Why not throw it out entirely and start fresh?

Restore the Republic is being used as a forum for the election of Republican Candidate Ron Paul for President of the United States. The platform is build on the following issues: Identity and privacy; public education about the U.S. Constitution; the Federal Reserve Bank; the New World Order and global power consolidation.

The driving force behind the issues here is fear of oppression by a potentially abusive and arrogant authority. The operative implication is that there is a hidden shadowy authority that operates on its own agenda despite the populist rhetoric of elected officials.

The industrial complexes at the heart of the problem with our government are those of Military, Energy, Medicine, and Finance.

Market Research

2007-05-24T10:44:00.000-07:00

We see the Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, and other major stock market averages going up and down, but what does it mean and where do they get the information?

Recently there was a report about February Consumer spending. That report came out in the middle of March and represents a delay of about six weeks from the time of the event. This means that somewhere there are very few people gathering a large quantity of information from corporate quarterly reports submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Recent financial scandals such as over or under reporting sales and wholesale purchases, revenue from the sale of gift cards, the allowance for vague definitions that allow accountants to shift assets and liabilities into and out of various categories, and the back-dating of stock options for individual benefits, has raised the idea that perhaps there are far fewer people working in the accounting departments at major corporations, and if there are, they are probably fall-guys in the making.

To gather industry information and do research yourself takes a lot of time, and the information in quarterly and annual filings can be daunting. What should we look for?

We should begin by looking at a model corporation. One that you know well, like MacDonald’s. It’s good to know the full history of how it began to get an idea about how most other corporations were started and flourished.

MacDonald’s started as a small burger outlet. The owners had decided to start serving milkshakes and they ordered, or were shown, Milkshake mixers by Ray Croc, who had been moving around the country selling the mixers. Legend has it that Ray fell in love with MacDonald’s, and bought it, but Ray had an advantage then that is still overlooked.

By gaining access to the kitchens across the country, Ray learned about all the ways that restaurants were operating and used it to his advantage. Just as Andrew Carnegie used his job as a telegraph currier and errand boy to see how various industries operated from within, something that the customers and public never see.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has a website where they publish the reports from various publicly traded corporations: http://www.sec.gov. This kind of information was never available to the likes of Ray Croc or Andrew Carnegie. This kind of information is also extremely boring to the average citizen. Why?

It’s the way in which we are taught that causes us to avoid some information and be attracted to other information. In school we are taught that there is more value in sports than in math, science or history.

There is some debate about whether or not this is deliberate, but ancient history shows that novelty of experience has a higher value for humans than does the more important value of utility.

The public schools over the years have evolved into places where students compete for social status and are rewarded for competing among themselves with what little their potential will allow at a fixed developmental stage within the preconceived expectations of teachers and administrators.

The reason I can see this is that I spent my freshman year of high school at a private military academy, one of the most prized military academies in the U.S. by diplomats from around the world. For financial reasons I was forced to spend the rest of my high school years in a rural public school in Northern Indiana.

The differences were astounding. Highly valued information at military school was at public school considered the realm of the “Nerd” or the “Geek”. Anyone even remotely showing an interest in science or math was picked on or bullied until they became obedient followers of the Jocks, and then dropped Typing and Home Economics for Shop Class and P.E.

So there are two types of teaching occurring in school. Values, and Values. First, you are taught just enough to make you literate enough to read only your indigenous language and count things most people assume should be counted. Next, you are gradually conditioned to value certain things as more important than others, until those other things are so reviled that you reject them out of hand and never think about them again, like History, or Broccoli.

But I digress. Back to Market Research. At www.sec.gov, you’ll find the quarterly filings of nearly every corporation in existence. The goal here is to find the right corporations to research as leading economic indicators toward the business type you might be interested in starting.

You will see profits and costs. Some stock tracking programs and websites provide financial information trends over long periods such as www.fool.com and www.bloomberg.com, but they usually provide only the value of the company stock. But what influences the value of a company’s stock?

The Stock Exchange has become dependent upon statements issued by the Secretary of the Treasury about Prime Lending Rates, the price of gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, and other fuels, and the availability and price of raw materials and crops. Other aggravating factors are internal strife among board members who have become celebrities for their wealth.

The main outside variable is consumer spending. Since everyone is a consumer of one thing or another, this value has become one of the most important to which attention is paid by traders and fund managers.

Problems occur when consumers are goaded into purchasing things they can’t afford. They buy on credit and then can’t make the payments. Most consumers don’t understand that interest rates change. Interest rates are one of those things I like to call a “Gotcha!”

Humans used to pay attention to pennies when they bought a lot, but pennies are now the scourge of sock drawers and vacuum cleaners everywhere. It won’t be long before nickels follow suit. The only thing holding back the tidal surge of nickels are parking meters and vending machines.

The human perception of value shifts depending on changing influences in the environment. It has been called “drifting normalcy” by military officers in Iraq, who see how local populations wade to the marketplace through puddles of blood on their daily chores.

This means there is a threshold of perception below which changes gradually occur. Sometimes its called “happening below the radar.” Usually such occurrences are midnight legislative sessions of Congress where they give themselves raises or give loopholes to interested political financial supporters. But the news media catches wind of such simple stories and they are easily reported.

Then there was the sale of US Shipping ports to Dubai Ports World, a foreign company headquartered in the Middle East. What happened was very sloppy because the company that was selling the shipping ports was a publicly traded company. They won’t make that mistake again, so now Private Equity Firms are buying up publicly traded companies so the information can no longer be accessible to the public through the Federal Trade Commission.

The foreign countries from which American companies borrowed money to inflate their stock values are calling in their loans. These corporations are now hiding their “Sheriff Auctions” by laundering the transactions through private equity companies.

You probably pay a mortgage or rent to a foreign country. If you are a shareholder of anything, you might want to just cash out right now.

America Fooled, tens of thousands dead for no reason.

2007-05-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

An exerpt from Bill Moyers interview with Carlo Bonini, author of
"Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror" available at Amazon.com

CARLO BONINI: Then they talk to the Italians. And the Italians say, "Oh, you had a confirmation from the British?" Rome talks to London, "Hey, you got a confirmation from Washington?" So the same piece of junk obtained in 48 hours, two different confirmations. It's a mirror game. I can say briefly when US intelligence received the informations from the Italians, they - I mean, the CIA urged the DGSE - the French intelligence, the French CIA - to check the informations because Niger is a former French colony. There's no better intelligence agency than the French one to double check a story like this. They worked hard on the information, and they came back saying there is nothing. This intelligence you received is simply junk intelligence. There is no evidence of such a deal between the Niger government and the Iraqi government.

BILL MOYERS: They told this to Washington.

CARLO BONINI: Yeah.

(http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05042007/transcript1.html)

Why keep the machine going?

2007-03-16T16:13:00.000-07:00

Multinational corporations with roots in the United States have no honor or sense of patriotism. They just keep the machine going for the sake of profit.

They manufacture and sell weapons and weapon-related materials, mine raw materials they know their father’s enemies need and gladly sell to their father’s enemies. It’s not a cold war between good and evil, just marketplace competition between two groups of industry that vilify each other, calling each other “evil” while they call themselves “good.”

They say “Business is business, let the rest of the world go to Hell in a hand basket.” One day someone did the math and discovered they could make a profit from the world going to Hell in a Hand basket.

Instead of leaving politics alone, they used an assassination of an individual as an excuse to start World War I. They even used a boiler explosion as an excuse to start the Spanish American War. The War with Mexico was probably the earliest war started on false pretenses, but it, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident that started the Vietnam war were both faked.

So, what’s the use of patriotism if those few elites who control the raw materials and means of production have no patriotism? If you want to be patriotic, stop using your credit cards. I did and I’ve gotten along just fine.

If they continue to operate with no social, moral, or environmental compass, the only thing they will be worried about will not be how fast they can build prisons, but how high they can build the walls around their own gated communities.

The Disappearing American Consumer

2007-03-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

The American Consumer is driving the economies of all the developing countries around the entire world. Americans, however, are losing their high paying jobs and their medical insurance. Americans are paying ever increasing fuel costs for transportation and energy.

One example is the banking industry. In order to keep the housing market flush with cash, banks relaxed qualifications for mortgages, and even created interest-only flexible rate mortgages when the interest rates were very low. This was popular with low income families who wanted a home.

The banks and lenders then sold those mortgages to large pension funds and other big institutional investors. But now the interest rates are going up, and all those poor people suddenly see their monthly mortgage payments going up; many of those people have stopped making their mortgage payments.

The three-fold effect of gas prices, mortgage rates, and wage and job cuts will result in what the News Media will call “The Housing Tsunami” or “DEPRESSION”

Are you in the Democracy Club?

2007-02-21T19:20:00.000-08:00

Edie Miller’s letter Wednesday in the Illinois State Journal Register about the ERC (Evening Republican Club) is perfectly, horribly typical of most organizations.

Let’s say that you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, Green, or Whatever. You join a local club because the other members most likely will understand you. You discover, quite by accident because someone slipped their tongue, that your club has a secret board of directors with special privileges.

Members of this mysterious board of directors often talk about their extravagant vacations, dress better than other members, have more expensive cars, or other things that the rest of the club members can only dream about.

No one else is allowed to join the Board of Directors, but the club members continue to pay their dues. They can’t stop paying their dues because they would be accused of being disloyal or “unpatriotic.”

Most of the club members either don’t realize or don’t care that they are being deliberately excluded from the luxurious benefits of the dues and profits from fundraiser for the very club to which they belong.

If you complain to the board, they would probably look askance at you and say “So start your own club. Pull yourself up by your own boot-straps.”

It fits into the definition of Fiefdom, but we’ve been pretending for the last two centuries or so that it’s a Democracy. Dream the American Dream!

Trade Deficits

2007-02-20T11:53:00.000-08:00

Even on C-SPAN they talk of a trade deficit with China. There are goods being manufactured in China for consumers in the United States. Goods were once manufactured in Mexico for the United States too.

A Mexican Ambassador once said that most of the companies in Mexico are American companies. It was the first and last time something like that was ever again said on television.

The trade deficit with China is a lie. The companies in China are American companies. The one truth is, however, that the money is going to China, but then it goes into the bank accounts of those who were once American, but now can globe-trot and thumb their noses at the citizenship rules by which the rest of us live.

They are the global entrepreneurs who have shed themselves of any sense of loyalty to their childhood nation. When Leona Helmsley said “only the little people pay taxes,” her biggest mistake was living in the United States when she said it.

So let’s think about it for a moment. If they are doing it, why shouldn't the rest of us? Why should we be hindered by the rules of patriotism shirked by those who control all of our natural resources?

I worked hard, like the dutiful Kamikaze pilot who celebrated his final flight with rituals and parties, but when his engine didn’t start, he walked off the runway to his superiors who previously proclaimed they would soon follow him, and he discovered that they had no such plan to die that day, or any day.

There was no reciprocal loyalty at work when I was laid off at AT&T. They paid me a wage so they didn’t have to consider my intrinsic value as a human being.

So, what makes you so sure that all your hard work will win the hearts and minds of those who are forced by law to pay your wages, taxes, health insurance, and other benefits?

Never assume that you have job security. Always look over your shoulder. It’s a cold hard world in America.

End of the world as we know it.

2007-02-10T11:07:00.001-08:00

We have given ourselves to our leaders. Why do they lead? We follow them because they appear to have everything we desire.

They have engineered our culture so that we may never have what they have. By creating and enforcing laws that prevent us from ever achieving their successes, they quietly sweep away their footprints and cover their trails behind themselves, and have made themselves gods in the eyes of the masses. Masses that believe, through their religions, that their loyalty will be rewarded.

The masters are enlisting the most oppressed among us to wage war against the rest of us. Those who were masters of the most slaves have found a bountiful resource of loyalty among the decendants of those they whipped, chained, and buried beneath the steel and concrete structure they themselves built with their own blood, sweat, and tears of their children.

The princes and dukes that solicit loyalty among the most oppressed, are themselves fearful of the consequences of their own cruelty.

Meet then, the end of Western Civilization. The fading into the shadows, of the once powerful who now cower behind the rubble of their palaces. Witness again the rotting from within the foundation, Like that of greater Sumaria, Phoenicia, Babylon, and Rome.

The Unites States of America. An Empire Dusk.