The program to erase the individual
Jon Rappoport
“The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government [taking more power for itself], is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844)
“If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being…there would be no danger that liberty should be undervalued.” (John Stuart Mill, 1859)
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” (Henry David Thoreau, 1854)
“Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.” (Oscar Wilde, 1891)
I could have added a number of other countries to those in the title of this article. In those I mentioned, there was once a tradition of the free and independent and unique individual. That tradition has faded like a photo on an old postcard.
The individual is now considered a) a criminal by definition, or b) a member of a group defined solely by ethnicity, color, religion, gender, or c) either in the 1% or the 99%.
But the individual is not considered to be himself/herself. Certainly not. Anything but.
In any of these countries, go back through the speeches of recent presidents and prime ministers and try to find a significant, positive, extensive mention of the individual. Good luck.
These days, mention “private property” and “individual” in the same sentence, and if you’re understood at all, chances are you’ll be labeled with some slur—because public-everything is supposed to be the utopian answer to humankind’s ills.
At one time, it was believed that a centuries-long struggle to liberate the individual from both church and king was meaningful. It was where history was heading. It was about more than economics. Freedom of thought and expression had something to do with it. Of course, the individual had to have an operating mind, if his independent thoughts were to add up to anything.
The power of the individual. That phrase carried a message. It was well-received. The idea that government existed in order to enforce a basic minimum of laws which would support the individual; that idea made sense.
The idea that innovations were made by the individual, not the committee. That notion had currency.
But this trend stalled and reversed.
It reversed, for example, in the hands of people suddenly called social scientists. These were bloviating academic analysts of societies, who were unleashed to pontificate opinions as if they had been confirmed by laboratory experiments.
One of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), coined the phrase “collective consciousness.” Durkheim insisted there were “inherent” qualities that existed in society apart from individuals. Exposing his own absurd theory, he went so far as to claim suicide was one of those qualities, as if the “phenomenon” were present beyond any individual choice to end life.
He wrote: “Man is the more vulnerable to self-destruction the more he is detached from any collectivity, that is to say, the more he lives as an egoist.”
In other words, according to Burkheim, the individual who rejects the norms and conformity of society must be wrapped up in himself in some morally repugnant way. There are no other alternatives. He’s either part of the collective or he’s tinged with criminality.
In his book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893) (wikipedia), Burkheim spun moral conscience in the following fashion: “…Make yourself usefully fulfill a determinate function.” He cited this as a kind of command issued by collective consciousness. This is the presentation of the individual human as machine-cog.
From the mud of sociology’s beginnings, the long sordid history of the academic discipline brings us to something like this. Peter Callero, of the department of sociology, Western Oregon University, has written a book titled: The Myth of Individualism: How Social Forces Shape Our Lives (2013, 2nd Ed):
“Most people today believe that an individual is a person with an independent and distinct identification. This, however, is a myth.”
Staggering. But as public relations and propaganda experts have learned, hauling a really huge lie in front of the public gives you a better chance of being believed than telling a small lie does.
When Callero writes “distinct identification,” he isn’t talking about ID cards and Social Security numbers. He’s asserting there is no significant difference between any two people. There aren’t two individuals to begin with. They’re a group.
This downgrading of the individual human spirit is far from accidental. It’s launched as a sustained propaganda campaign, the ultimate purpose of which is top-down control over the population.
Here’s another gem:
“The cold truth is that the individualist creed of everybody for himself and the devil take the hindmost is principally responsible for the distress in which Western civilization finds itself — with investment racketeering at one end and labor racketeering at the other. Whatever merits the creed may have had in the days of primitive agriculture and industry, it is not applicable in an age of technology, science, and rationalized economy. Once useful, it has become a danger to society.” (Charles Beard, 1931)
Beard, a celebrated historian, sees no difference between individual racketeering and the individual freely choosing and living his own life. In making this judgment, he becomes an intellectual/propaganda racketeer of the highest order.
One more:
“British empiricist philosophy is individualist. And it is of course clear that if the only criterion of true and false which a man accepts is that man’s, then he has no base for social agreement. The question of how man ought to behave is a social question, which always involves several people; and if he accepts no evidence and no judgment except his own, he has no tools with which to frame an answer.” (Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values, 1956).
Bronowski is quite sure that hearing other people’s evidence and then keeping one’s own counsel is wrong. One has to accept that evidence on its face. This is sheer idiocy. Individuals are capable of deciding, on their own, what social agreements to enter into. They aren’t permanently enmeshed from birth.
Even more to the point, Beard and Bronowski were both high-achieving individuals—who then turned around and celebrated the kind of society that would try to flatten and level the individual to an average.
The world has many such experts. They rise high enough and then they preach collectivism. They become social meddlers. They believe they have the tools to plan what kind of world we should live in—since they are not part of that world anymore.
Freed from the obligations with which they want to bind us, they can scheme and fantasize about social, economic, and political constructs in which The Group is all.
This is elitism par excellence.
What is the primary power of the individual? It is the power to create. If that idea seems shop-worn or vague, it is only because the creative force of the individual has been purposefully downgraded from a hurricane to a drizzle. The force is now viewed with a blank stare of non-recognition—or it has been transferred over to used car salesmen and other hustlers who have rebranded themselves as self-improvement gurus, who reduce their proclamations to the language of infomercials.
Cheapening the most profound human impulses and energies is part and parcel of engendering a civilization that looks, sounds, feels, and tastes like a cartoon. We live in it. It is often vicious and painful for many people, but it is a cartoon. Intellectually, it imitates life with shortened perspectives and short-circuited ideas.
But…the individual does not have to buy any of this. The individual can refuse. He can take up a different position. He can invent from the platform of his own freedom.
He doesn’t have to play the part of idiot or slave.
He can reject the collective and the group. He can pursue the unlimited space that opens up when he is launching his best future.
The tradition of the individual, in the nations where it once existed, where it was fought for, may be dead; but the individual himself is not dead.
He can find his way. He can return to the center. He can live through and by his own imagination, come hell or high water.
He can walk away from every fungus-ridden collectivist scheme and invent his own destiny.
He can stop prostrating himself before the billion possible little phony gods the salesmen are selling.
The endless volleys of contemporary criticism aimed at “the human species” and its desecrations, crimes, and insanities do not distinguish The Group from the individual. They attempt to bury the individual, but they fail.
You are not everyone else, and everyone else is not you. That absurd prescription is glazed, re-fried, many-times-boiled, and sold-on-a-stick “ancient Asian wisdom,” in modern-mall “spiritual centers” of the West. It has been recycled to conceal its collectivist message.
The individual, no matter how hard he tries, can’t rid himself of his independence, creative-force, power, or freedom. He can induce amnesia, but somewhere within himself, he knows what he is doing.
Dedicated slaves are a dime a dozen. But there was once a tradition in some nations, and it stood for the unique individual. It was real. It was never perfect; far from it. But it existed. That tradition was hijacked and turned inside out.
As the battle for individual freedom and independence gained ground, education was seen as the means to teach boys and girls what it meant to be a citizen in a limited Republic. That was a major purpose of schooling.
But as education was turned into a quacking duck, as too many students refused to learn, as too many teachers refused to teach, as too many citizens didn’t care, as government slyly expanded its reach and size and control, the public education experiment went down the drain. And so did limited government.
The resurrection of the individual by the individual is now the course. It can only be understood by those who know that “average” and “normal” aren’t the objectives.
There are many, many people who are living half-blind, while believing that they can see clearly, and that everyone else should see on this level. That is another feature of the cartoon.
Don’t buy the cartoon.
The group has no creative power or imagination. It merely pretends it does. It passes a gross imitation from hand to hand…and if it ever stops, it will find dust, only dust…
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-program-to-erase-the-individual.html
Thursday, August 13, 2015
It's all part of the plan, folks...
EPA, FBI, DOJ, FDA, CDC, ATF: Nearly every government agency routinely plots and carries out false flag operations to justify its own existence
by Mike Adams
Yesterday I posted an article asking for American citizens to send me water samples from the Animas River that the EPA has now heavily contaminated with toxic heavy metals. I want to test the water in my elemental analysis laboratory to expose the EPA's pollution.
The EPA used to prevent corporations from polluting the rivers, but now the EPA has become the polluter, the liar and the cover-up cartel. In that story, I pointed out the total absurdity of our sickening, corrupt government, where private citizens now have to conduct the science to expose the pollution of the EPA.
That got me thinking... hey, wait a minute. Almost EVERY federal government agency is now functioning as a rogue entity. Nearly all of them routinely carry out false flag events in order to justify their own existence (and increase their budgets).
In a very real way, U.S. government agencies have become mafia-style cartels carrying out domestic terrorism across America in order to justify their own existence.
Consider these extraordinary examples, and when you're done, buy the book Battlefield America by John Whitehead. Or read his extraordinary essay entitled, "Don't Be Fooled by the Political Game: The Illusion of Freedom in America." It says everything you really need to know about the total con game racket being run on the American people by a corrupt, criminal government gone rogue.
Consider how the following government agencies carry out false flag attacks against America:
EPA intentionally pollutes Animas river to demand more funding
From Geologist predicted EPA would intentionally pollute Animas River to secure federal funding:
A July 30 letter to the editor of a local newspaper from a retired geologist appears to have predicted the Environmental Protection Agency's disastrous chemical spill into a major Colorado River tributary that happened just days later.
...days before the incident, retired geologist Dave Taylor wrote to the editors of the Silverton Standard & the Miner newspaper that he believed there would be an intentional breach with ulterior motives behind it.
"Based on my 47 years of experience as a professional geologist," Taylor wrote, "it appears to me that the EPA is setting your town and the area up for a possible Superfund blitzkrieg."
FBI stages domestic terrorism events to "catch" the patsies they recruit
From FBI halts terror plot dreamed up by the FBI, then claims victory against terrorism:
According to NBC News, FBI agents have arrested an Ohio man who allegedly was attempting to set up an ISIS cell in the United States and planning an attack against the U.S. Capitol Building. However, U.S. officials also told NBC News that there was never any danger because the government set up the whole thing.
CDC invents fake pandemics to spread fear and create demand for vaccines
From Expert who massively exaggerated Ebola outbreak predictions under fire on claims (Daily Mail)
Meltzer has a lot of critics who say he and his CDC colleagues have a habit of willfully ignoring the complexities of disease outbreaks, resulting in estimates that over-dramatize how bad an outbreak could get - estimates that may be skewed by politics. They say Meltzer and company also overestimate how much vaccine is needed and how beneficial it has been.
The CDC, working in obvious conspiracy with vaccine manufacturers, routinely overestimates pandemics for the express purpose of creating fear. Many observers have even stated the likelihood that the CDC could have intentionally spread measles in Disneyland, followed by an orchestrated (and outrageous) national media fear campaign to push for mandatory vaccines.
DOJ runs guns into Mexico to generate gun violence and call for more gun control
How can we all forget Operation Fast and Furious? From Fast and Furious scandal blown wide open by Univision:
In a bombshell investigative report broadcast Sunday, one filled with scathing details and grim, grisly video including security-cam footage of actual execution-style murders and blood-soaked rooms (there's your warning, for those of you who might be a little unnerved by that kind of real-life graphic violence), the network said it discovered that in January 2010, drug cartel hit men annihilated students with guns the U.S. government allowed to flow to them across the border into Mexico.
Essentially, the DOJ (under Eric Holder) openly allowed guns to fall into the hands of drug cartels, hoping those guns would be used in a wave of violence that could be invoked to call for nationwide gun bans.
FDA refuses to ban dangerous drugs, ensuring widespread medical injuries that sell more medications
For its false flag, the FDA routinely allows dangerous drugs like Vioxx and Rezulin to remain on the market long after the dangers to patients are well documented, knowing that they will cause severe biological damage to medical patients.
This damage, in turn, results in yet more medications being sold to "treat" the symptoms caused by the first drugs.
Rezulin, for example, causes liver damage. Chemotherapy causes permanent brain and kidney damage, leading to recurring sales of dialysis services and dementia drugs.
Antidepressant drugs cause diabetes, and once a patient has diabetes, they are prescribed more drugs to control blood sugar. This, in turn, often leads to obesity, heart disease and a long list of other symptoms which are also treated with drugs.
The FDA, by the way, receives tens of millions of dollars in year in funding directly from drug companies.
ATF staged the Waco massacre to win budget increases to fight "radical extremism"
If you don't yet know that the ATF staged the David Koresh Waco raid in order to justify its own budget increases, you need to study up on real history.
Everything about the Waco "compound" (i.e. a campus) and David Koresh was a fabrication by federal agents. All the claims of child abuse, for example, were utterly fabricated by the feds in order to justify an armed raid on private property. It was called a "compound" by the lamestream media because the term "compound" sounds more militaristic than "building" or "campus."
Read The Holocaust at Waco by Gary Null, or read this description of the Waco massacre.
DEA runs the drug trade in America
I'm not even going to bother explaining this section in much detail. If you don't yet know that the DEA runs and controls the illicit drug trade in America, you're so far out of the loop on reality that you'll probably never wake up.
The entire "War on Drugs" was designed from the very start to keep the DEA in power -- to create a cartel-like enforcement monopoly so that government agents could control the flow and distribution of illicit drugs while profiting from that trade.
Read CONFIRMED: The DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico's Most Notorious Drug Cartel" (Business Insider) which says:
An investigation by El Universal found that between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels.
Similarly, New American reports U.S. Government and Top Mexican Drug Cartel Exposed as Partners:
For over a decade, under multiple administrations, the U.S. government had a secret agreement with the ruthless Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed it to operate with impunity, an in-depth investigation by a leading Mexican newspaper confirmed this week. In exchange for information and assistance in quashing competing criminal syndicates, the Bush and Obama administrations let the Sinaloa cartel import tons of drugs into the United States while wiping out Sinaloa competitors and ensuring that its leaders would not be prosecuted for their long list of major crimes. Other revelations also point strongly to massive but clandestine U.S. government involvement in drug trafficking.
When will Americans wake up and realize their government is already at WAR against them?
How long will it take for Americans to wake up and realize the federal government is actively waging warfare and domestic terrorism against the American people?
I can't recommend this book strongly enough: BUY and READ Battlefield America by John W. Whitehead (with a foreward by Ron Paul).
This book will forever change your understanding of the real world and how the federal government now behaves exactly like a criminal regime waging a war against the People of this nation.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050774_government_agencies_false_flags_Battlefield_America.html#ixzz3ihZMj191
by Mike Adams
Yesterday I posted an article asking for American citizens to send me water samples from the Animas River that the EPA has now heavily contaminated with toxic heavy metals. I want to test the water in my elemental analysis laboratory to expose the EPA's pollution.
The EPA used to prevent corporations from polluting the rivers, but now the EPA has become the polluter, the liar and the cover-up cartel. In that story, I pointed out the total absurdity of our sickening, corrupt government, where private citizens now have to conduct the science to expose the pollution of the EPA.
That got me thinking... hey, wait a minute. Almost EVERY federal government agency is now functioning as a rogue entity. Nearly all of them routinely carry out false flag events in order to justify their own existence (and increase their budgets).
In a very real way, U.S. government agencies have become mafia-style cartels carrying out domestic terrorism across America in order to justify their own existence.
Consider these extraordinary examples, and when you're done, buy the book Battlefield America by John Whitehead. Or read his extraordinary essay entitled, "Don't Be Fooled by the Political Game: The Illusion of Freedom in America." It says everything you really need to know about the total con game racket being run on the American people by a corrupt, criminal government gone rogue.
Consider how the following government agencies carry out false flag attacks against America:
EPA intentionally pollutes Animas river to demand more funding
From Geologist predicted EPA would intentionally pollute Animas River to secure federal funding:
A July 30 letter to the editor of a local newspaper from a retired geologist appears to have predicted the Environmental Protection Agency's disastrous chemical spill into a major Colorado River tributary that happened just days later.
...days before the incident, retired geologist Dave Taylor wrote to the editors of the Silverton Standard & the Miner newspaper that he believed there would be an intentional breach with ulterior motives behind it.
"Based on my 47 years of experience as a professional geologist," Taylor wrote, "it appears to me that the EPA is setting your town and the area up for a possible Superfund blitzkrieg."
FBI stages domestic terrorism events to "catch" the patsies they recruit
From FBI halts terror plot dreamed up by the FBI, then claims victory against terrorism:
According to NBC News, FBI agents have arrested an Ohio man who allegedly was attempting to set up an ISIS cell in the United States and planning an attack against the U.S. Capitol Building. However, U.S. officials also told NBC News that there was never any danger because the government set up the whole thing.
CDC invents fake pandemics to spread fear and create demand for vaccines
From Expert who massively exaggerated Ebola outbreak predictions under fire on claims (Daily Mail)
Meltzer has a lot of critics who say he and his CDC colleagues have a habit of willfully ignoring the complexities of disease outbreaks, resulting in estimates that over-dramatize how bad an outbreak could get - estimates that may be skewed by politics. They say Meltzer and company also overestimate how much vaccine is needed and how beneficial it has been.
The CDC, working in obvious conspiracy with vaccine manufacturers, routinely overestimates pandemics for the express purpose of creating fear. Many observers have even stated the likelihood that the CDC could have intentionally spread measles in Disneyland, followed by an orchestrated (and outrageous) national media fear campaign to push for mandatory vaccines.
DOJ runs guns into Mexico to generate gun violence and call for more gun control
How can we all forget Operation Fast and Furious? From Fast and Furious scandal blown wide open by Univision:
In a bombshell investigative report broadcast Sunday, one filled with scathing details and grim, grisly video including security-cam footage of actual execution-style murders and blood-soaked rooms (there's your warning, for those of you who might be a little unnerved by that kind of real-life graphic violence), the network said it discovered that in January 2010, drug cartel hit men annihilated students with guns the U.S. government allowed to flow to them across the border into Mexico.
Essentially, the DOJ (under Eric Holder) openly allowed guns to fall into the hands of drug cartels, hoping those guns would be used in a wave of violence that could be invoked to call for nationwide gun bans.
FDA refuses to ban dangerous drugs, ensuring widespread medical injuries that sell more medications
For its false flag, the FDA routinely allows dangerous drugs like Vioxx and Rezulin to remain on the market long after the dangers to patients are well documented, knowing that they will cause severe biological damage to medical patients.
This damage, in turn, results in yet more medications being sold to "treat" the symptoms caused by the first drugs.
Rezulin, for example, causes liver damage. Chemotherapy causes permanent brain and kidney damage, leading to recurring sales of dialysis services and dementia drugs.
Antidepressant drugs cause diabetes, and once a patient has diabetes, they are prescribed more drugs to control blood sugar. This, in turn, often leads to obesity, heart disease and a long list of other symptoms which are also treated with drugs.
The FDA, by the way, receives tens of millions of dollars in year in funding directly from drug companies.
ATF staged the Waco massacre to win budget increases to fight "radical extremism"
If you don't yet know that the ATF staged the David Koresh Waco raid in order to justify its own budget increases, you need to study up on real history.
Everything about the Waco "compound" (i.e. a campus) and David Koresh was a fabrication by federal agents. All the claims of child abuse, for example, were utterly fabricated by the feds in order to justify an armed raid on private property. It was called a "compound" by the lamestream media because the term "compound" sounds more militaristic than "building" or "campus."
Read The Holocaust at Waco by Gary Null, or read this description of the Waco massacre.
DEA runs the drug trade in America
I'm not even going to bother explaining this section in much detail. If you don't yet know that the DEA runs and controls the illicit drug trade in America, you're so far out of the loop on reality that you'll probably never wake up.
The entire "War on Drugs" was designed from the very start to keep the DEA in power -- to create a cartel-like enforcement monopoly so that government agents could control the flow and distribution of illicit drugs while profiting from that trade.
Read CONFIRMED: The DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico's Most Notorious Drug Cartel" (Business Insider) which says:
An investigation by El Universal found that between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels.
Similarly, New American reports U.S. Government and Top Mexican Drug Cartel Exposed as Partners:
For over a decade, under multiple administrations, the U.S. government had a secret agreement with the ruthless Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed it to operate with impunity, an in-depth investigation by a leading Mexican newspaper confirmed this week. In exchange for information and assistance in quashing competing criminal syndicates, the Bush and Obama administrations let the Sinaloa cartel import tons of drugs into the United States while wiping out Sinaloa competitors and ensuring that its leaders would not be prosecuted for their long list of major crimes. Other revelations also point strongly to massive but clandestine U.S. government involvement in drug trafficking.
When will Americans wake up and realize their government is already at WAR against them?
How long will it take for Americans to wake up and realize the federal government is actively waging warfare and domestic terrorism against the American people?
I can't recommend this book strongly enough: BUY and READ Battlefield America by John W. Whitehead (with a foreward by Ron Paul).
This book will forever change your understanding of the real world and how the federal government now behaves exactly like a criminal regime waging a war against the People of this nation.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050774_government_agencies_false_flags_Battlefield_America.html#ixzz3ihZMj191
Why do neocons want to kill these people???
#EverydayinIran: Country's residents try to change preconceptions of life in Middle Eastern state with a set of stunning images
Founders of Instagram account EverydayIran are hoping to help change the stereotypical view of their country
Provides a fascinating insight into a place which is more readily associated with religious control and nuclear threats
Pictures include a cleric doing the weekly shop with his children, women learning to weld and traditional celebrations
By Flora Drury For Mailonline
Think of Iran, and images of oppression and executions, a downcast people and rugged mountains or dry deserts immediately spring to mind.
But a group of passionate Iranians have captured stunning images of their day-to-day lives - with some truly eye-opening insights into a country which people in the West associate with a religious dictatorship, watching their every move with an iron rod held aloft and ready to strike at any infraction.
Indeed, even Ali Kaveh, one of the founders of EverydayIran, claims he has found himself surprised at the pictures emerging from his home country.
Read more and see images here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3187128/EverydayinIran-Residents-Middle-Eastern-country-try-turn-preconceptions-life-head-set-stunning-images-s-not-hanging-nuclear-warhead-sight.html#ixzz3ihWkYi5m
Founders of Instagram account EverydayIran are hoping to help change the stereotypical view of their country
Provides a fascinating insight into a place which is more readily associated with religious control and nuclear threats
Pictures include a cleric doing the weekly shop with his children, women learning to weld and traditional celebrations
By Flora Drury For Mailonline
Think of Iran, and images of oppression and executions, a downcast people and rugged mountains or dry deserts immediately spring to mind.
But a group of passionate Iranians have captured stunning images of their day-to-day lives - with some truly eye-opening insights into a country which people in the West associate with a religious dictatorship, watching their every move with an iron rod held aloft and ready to strike at any infraction.
Indeed, even Ali Kaveh, one of the founders of EverydayIran, claims he has found himself surprised at the pictures emerging from his home country.
Read more and see images here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3187128/EverydayinIran-Residents-Middle-Eastern-country-try-turn-preconceptions-life-head-set-stunning-images-s-not-hanging-nuclear-warhead-sight.html#ixzz3ihWkYi5m
Natural Alternatives to Fluoride...
The 5 Best Natural Alternatives to Fluoride
Dr. Edward F. Group III
Fluoride has been a known endocrine disruptor for a while now, and there is some evidence surfacing revealing just how destructive it can be. Unfortunately, it’s still used in many dental products to this day. While it can benefit dental health, the overall health issues associated with consumption just aren’t worth it. Nowadays, there are so many other things you can use for a healthy mouth and bone protection.
Natural Alternatives to Fluoride
Protecting your teeth and gums requires time, commitment, and the right tools to get the job done. Brushing your teeth, flossing, and limiting sugar intake are all great methods. Fluoride may provide topical benefit, but beyond that, it’s doesn’t hold a candle to natural alternatives. Here are five supplements you should consider adding to your oral health regimen.
1. Neem
Neem is nothing short of amazing. One study suggests a neem mouthwash could even outperform a traditional dental product when it comes to reducing plaque! [1] Other studies suggest it has almost miraculous properties when it comes to approaching gingivitis. [2] If you want to check it out, one easy way is to look for fluoride-free toothpaste with neem leaf extract.
2. Coconut oil
Coconut oil already has antibacterial properties and is much safer than the endocrine-disrupting triclosan found in many fluoridated toothpastes. You can even use coconut oil as toothpaste if you like! Research suggests it can actually slow the growth of some bacteria that can lead to tooth decay. [3] Another study suggests oil pulling–or oil swishing–with coconut oil can also lead to a significant decrease in overall plaque. [4]
3. Ozonated Olive Oil
Olive oil has long been hailed for its moisturizing benefits, and this type actually takes that one step further with a process called ozone injection. This process bubbles ozone into the liquid for quite a while before it even gets to you. Ozonated olive oil is just one way we can use dental ozone therapy. One study even suggests this therapy could be more effective than traditional dental methods, so why not try the best of both worlds with a product like O2-Zap paired with a fluoride-free toothpaste. [5]
4. Oregano Oil
Often used to fight infection in the body, oregano oil can be highly beneficial for dental issues and can be used to soothe toothaches, abscesses, and mouth sores. Because of its potency, though, always be sure that you dilute it with something like olive oil. You can even use it like a mouthwash, spitting it out after you’ve swished it around your mouth.
5. Myrrh
Used to combat bad breath, myrrh can be found in some fluoride-free toothpastes on the market. You might wonder exactly how it works. Well, one of the compounds in myrrh is actually toxic to all the things that can cause bad breath. And, like many of the supplements listed here, it could also help with gum health. Research shows it’s effective in fighting periodontal disease. [6] A high-quality product, like Fresh Mouth, not only contains myrrh, but also a blend of other ingredients to support a healthy mouth.
How Do You Protect Your Teeth and Gums?
With all the options out there, there’s absolutely no reason that you have to use fluoride anymore. Myrrh, coconut oil, and neem are just as effective, if not more, and present relatively little side effects. Other things you can do is to drink plenty of water, avoid high-carbohydrate beverages like soda and juice, and brush your teeth twice a day with fluoride-free toothpaste. In addition, be sure you are getting plenty of vitamin D, because this vitamin can be helpful for supporting teeth and gum health.
What do you use for fluoride-free dental care? Tell us all about it in the comments below!
Link:
http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/the-5-best-natural-alternatives-to-fluoride-2/
Dr. Edward F. Group III
Fluoride has been a known endocrine disruptor for a while now, and there is some evidence surfacing revealing just how destructive it can be. Unfortunately, it’s still used in many dental products to this day. While it can benefit dental health, the overall health issues associated with consumption just aren’t worth it. Nowadays, there are so many other things you can use for a healthy mouth and bone protection.
Natural Alternatives to Fluoride
Protecting your teeth and gums requires time, commitment, and the right tools to get the job done. Brushing your teeth, flossing, and limiting sugar intake are all great methods. Fluoride may provide topical benefit, but beyond that, it’s doesn’t hold a candle to natural alternatives. Here are five supplements you should consider adding to your oral health regimen.
1. Neem
Neem is nothing short of amazing. One study suggests a neem mouthwash could even outperform a traditional dental product when it comes to reducing plaque! [1] Other studies suggest it has almost miraculous properties when it comes to approaching gingivitis. [2] If you want to check it out, one easy way is to look for fluoride-free toothpaste with neem leaf extract.
2. Coconut oil
Coconut oil already has antibacterial properties and is much safer than the endocrine-disrupting triclosan found in many fluoridated toothpastes. You can even use coconut oil as toothpaste if you like! Research suggests it can actually slow the growth of some bacteria that can lead to tooth decay. [3] Another study suggests oil pulling–or oil swishing–with coconut oil can also lead to a significant decrease in overall plaque. [4]
3. Ozonated Olive Oil
Olive oil has long been hailed for its moisturizing benefits, and this type actually takes that one step further with a process called ozone injection. This process bubbles ozone into the liquid for quite a while before it even gets to you. Ozonated olive oil is just one way we can use dental ozone therapy. One study even suggests this therapy could be more effective than traditional dental methods, so why not try the best of both worlds with a product like O2-Zap paired with a fluoride-free toothpaste. [5]
4. Oregano Oil
Often used to fight infection in the body, oregano oil can be highly beneficial for dental issues and can be used to soothe toothaches, abscesses, and mouth sores. Because of its potency, though, always be sure that you dilute it with something like olive oil. You can even use it like a mouthwash, spitting it out after you’ve swished it around your mouth.
5. Myrrh
Used to combat bad breath, myrrh can be found in some fluoride-free toothpastes on the market. You might wonder exactly how it works. Well, one of the compounds in myrrh is actually toxic to all the things that can cause bad breath. And, like many of the supplements listed here, it could also help with gum health. Research shows it’s effective in fighting periodontal disease. [6] A high-quality product, like Fresh Mouth, not only contains myrrh, but also a blend of other ingredients to support a healthy mouth.
How Do You Protect Your Teeth and Gums?
With all the options out there, there’s absolutely no reason that you have to use fluoride anymore. Myrrh, coconut oil, and neem are just as effective, if not more, and present relatively little side effects. Other things you can do is to drink plenty of water, avoid high-carbohydrate beverages like soda and juice, and brush your teeth twice a day with fluoride-free toothpaste. In addition, be sure you are getting plenty of vitamin D, because this vitamin can be helpful for supporting teeth and gum health.
What do you use for fluoride-free dental care? Tell us all about it in the comments below!
Link:
http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/the-5-best-natural-alternatives-to-fluoride-2/
Endless war...
Think Tank Warns of NATO-Russia Clash
By Stephen Lendman
The London-based European Leadership Network (ELN) focuses on defense and security issues. Its new report is titled “Preparing for the Worst: Are Russian and NATO Military Exercises Making War in Europe more Likely?”
It warned about war games making a clash between the world’s dominant nuclear powers more likely. “Each exercise is seen as provocative by the other side and feeding a dynamic of distrust and unpredictability,” said ELN’s Ian Kearns.
“Everyone is focusing on the deterrent value of big exercises, but there is a downside and that is the risk factor. Politicians have to show political judgment and restraint about when is the right time to scale down what could be a spiraling sequence of exercises.” More on ELN’s report below.
Washington keeps upping the stakes for direct confrontation. Provocative military exercises near Russia’s borders risk the unthinkable. So does America’s empire of bases in areas where it doesn’t belong – notably encircling Russia and China.
US-dominated NATO threatens world peace. Lunatics in Washington intent on regime change up the stakes for possible nuclear war perhaps like never before.
Orwellian Alliance statements like the following on August 12 conceal what going on, saying:
“NATO military exercises are intended to enhance security and stability in Europe. All NATO military activities are proportionate, defensive, and fully in line with our international commitments.”
False! NATO war games near Russia’s borders are provocative – preparing for offense. Moscow holds its exercises defensively on its own territory – threatening no one.
NATO: The Alliance “has made repeatedly clear that we not seek confrontation with Russia. For over two decades, we have tried to build a cooperative relationship with Russia. But Russia has changed borders by force, continues to support separatists in Ukraine and threatens to base nuclear missiles close to Alliance borders.”
False! Washington makes NATO policy. It imposed multiple rounds of lawless sanctions on Russia. It pressured European nations to impose their own – harming their economies.
Hostile actions by US officials show America seeks confrontation, not cooperation. Russia changed no borders by force. It’s gone all-out to resolve conflict in Ukraine. It intends whatever defensive actions are necessary to counter US aggressiveness.
NATO lied saying it “increased its presence in (Eastern Europe) to enhance collective defense.” US-dominated NATO from inception has been an alliance for offense, not defense.
Its aggressiveness represents the greatest threat to world peace. Russia goes all-out to preserve it. Moscow doesn’t threaten or attack other countries.
America wages endless wars of aggression against invented enemies threatening no one. It prioritizes violence and instability. It spends more on militarism and war-making than the rest of the world combined.
ELN’s report absurdly accuses Russia of instigating “dangerous brinkmanship which has resulted in many serious close military encounters between (its forces) and NATO…over the last 15 months.”
Fact: Provocative NATO exercises near Russia’s borders elevate brinksmanship to a dangerously high level. Washington bears full responsibility for heading things toward possible direct confrontation. Russia responsibly readies defensive measures to implement if necessary.
On the one hand, its top priority is maintaining world peace, avoiding war. On the other, it’ll do whatever is necessary to defend its homeland.
ELN is right saying “Nato is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia.” It’s wrong implying Moscow wants conflict with Alliance countries.
It wants world peace and stability, cooperation among all nations, and none interfering in the internal affairs of others – a US specialty in blatant violation of international law.
Accusations of Russia saber-rattling are polar opposite hard facts. Claims about its military threat are pure fantasy.
America, in contrast, is a global aggressor, a bully of historic proportions – permanently at war in multiple theaters, planning others to advance its imperium, risking global war, possible nuclear confrontation able to end life on earth.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/stephen-lendman/is-nato-going-to-war-on-russia/
By Stephen Lendman
The London-based European Leadership Network (ELN) focuses on defense and security issues. Its new report is titled “Preparing for the Worst: Are Russian and NATO Military Exercises Making War in Europe more Likely?”
It warned about war games making a clash between the world’s dominant nuclear powers more likely. “Each exercise is seen as provocative by the other side and feeding a dynamic of distrust and unpredictability,” said ELN’s Ian Kearns.
“Everyone is focusing on the deterrent value of big exercises, but there is a downside and that is the risk factor. Politicians have to show political judgment and restraint about when is the right time to scale down what could be a spiraling sequence of exercises.” More on ELN’s report below.
Washington keeps upping the stakes for direct confrontation. Provocative military exercises near Russia’s borders risk the unthinkable. So does America’s empire of bases in areas where it doesn’t belong – notably encircling Russia and China.
US-dominated NATO threatens world peace. Lunatics in Washington intent on regime change up the stakes for possible nuclear war perhaps like never before.
Orwellian Alliance statements like the following on August 12 conceal what going on, saying:
“NATO military exercises are intended to enhance security and stability in Europe. All NATO military activities are proportionate, defensive, and fully in line with our international commitments.”
False! NATO war games near Russia’s borders are provocative – preparing for offense. Moscow holds its exercises defensively on its own territory – threatening no one.
NATO: The Alliance “has made repeatedly clear that we not seek confrontation with Russia. For over two decades, we have tried to build a cooperative relationship with Russia. But Russia has changed borders by force, continues to support separatists in Ukraine and threatens to base nuclear missiles close to Alliance borders.”
False! Washington makes NATO policy. It imposed multiple rounds of lawless sanctions on Russia. It pressured European nations to impose their own – harming their economies.
Hostile actions by US officials show America seeks confrontation, not cooperation. Russia changed no borders by force. It’s gone all-out to resolve conflict in Ukraine. It intends whatever defensive actions are necessary to counter US aggressiveness.
NATO lied saying it “increased its presence in (Eastern Europe) to enhance collective defense.” US-dominated NATO from inception has been an alliance for offense, not defense.
Its aggressiveness represents the greatest threat to world peace. Russia goes all-out to preserve it. Moscow doesn’t threaten or attack other countries.
America wages endless wars of aggression against invented enemies threatening no one. It prioritizes violence and instability. It spends more on militarism and war-making than the rest of the world combined.
ELN’s report absurdly accuses Russia of instigating “dangerous brinkmanship which has resulted in many serious close military encounters between (its forces) and NATO…over the last 15 months.”
Fact: Provocative NATO exercises near Russia’s borders elevate brinksmanship to a dangerously high level. Washington bears full responsibility for heading things toward possible direct confrontation. Russia responsibly readies defensive measures to implement if necessary.
On the one hand, its top priority is maintaining world peace, avoiding war. On the other, it’ll do whatever is necessary to defend its homeland.
ELN is right saying “Nato is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia.” It’s wrong implying Moscow wants conflict with Alliance countries.
It wants world peace and stability, cooperation among all nations, and none interfering in the internal affairs of others – a US specialty in blatant violation of international law.
Accusations of Russia saber-rattling are polar opposite hard facts. Claims about its military threat are pure fantasy.
America, in contrast, is a global aggressor, a bully of historic proportions – permanently at war in multiple theaters, planning others to advance its imperium, risking global war, possible nuclear confrontation able to end life on earth.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/stephen-lendman/is-nato-going-to-war-on-russia/
The end is near...
Peter Schiff Says Impending U.S. Dollar Collapse should be Getting Attention, not China’s Devaluation
By Andrew Moran
Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital and bestselling author of “Crash Proof,” believes the impending collapse of the United States dollar should be getting the attention of investors and news outlets and not the devaluation of the Chinese yuan.
Speaking in an interview with Newsmax TV on Tuesday, Schiff explained that the U.S. economy has an abundance of problems but China’s monetary policy (SEE: Donald Trump on China’s Devaluation: ‘They’re just destroying us’) isn’t one of them.
The contrarian investor stated that China’s economy isn’t experiencing a freefall and the current devaluation is minuscule. He noted that the yuan’s value has substantially increased over the past several years compared to the U.S. dollar.
“So this move was motivated not by the exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar, but between the yuan and all the other currencies because the dollars is in a bubble right now,” he said. “The dollar is very overvalued … and the dollar is a bubble. This dollar bubble is going to burst.”
He added that the U.S. economy is in a much worse situation right now than the Chinese. This is something, Schiff says, the Federal Reserve will have to admit. He also averred that the Fed won’t raise interest rates this year (SEE: Federal Reserve rate hike could cost indebted consumers $9 billion per year) and will have to do another round of quantitative easing.
“That’s going to sink the dollar and then the Chinese are going to have to revalue their currency much higher in the future against the dollar and it’s the dollar collapsing that’s going to hurt the US. Not this recent move by China,” Schiff posited.
The reasons why the U.S. dollar has been trading well since the financial crisis is because of hope, hype and speculation.
Schiff alluded to the immense trade deficit with China, and how China is producing all things the U.S. consumers and can’t produce. On the other hand, however, the U.S. doesn’t produce anything the Chinese want to consume.
Overall, Schiff asserts, the Chinese economy is “far more powerful” and “far more dynamic” than the U.S. economy. This is why the U.S. suffers from massive deficits.
“But people believe in the myth of this US economy, they believe that this bubble is genuine, they made the same mistake in the late 1990s, they made the same mistake right before the financial crisis of 2008. They’re making a mistake again,” said Schiff.
“We’re on the verge of a much worse financial crisis than the one we went through in 2008 and it’s going to take the form of a currency crisis. You’re talking about currency wars. American is going to win the currency war, which is a race to the bottom, and you don’t want to win a currency war because a currency war is different from most wars in that the object is to kill yourself and unfortunately, we’re going to succeed.”
At the time of this writing, the Dow Jones has fallen more than 200 points, while the Shanghai Composite Index has hiccuped just 40 points.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/no_author/the-dollar-collapse-is-coming/
By Andrew Moran
Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital and bestselling author of “Crash Proof,” believes the impending collapse of the United States dollar should be getting the attention of investors and news outlets and not the devaluation of the Chinese yuan.
Speaking in an interview with Newsmax TV on Tuesday, Schiff explained that the U.S. economy has an abundance of problems but China’s monetary policy (SEE: Donald Trump on China’s Devaluation: ‘They’re just destroying us’) isn’t one of them.
The contrarian investor stated that China’s economy isn’t experiencing a freefall and the current devaluation is minuscule. He noted that the yuan’s value has substantially increased over the past several years compared to the U.S. dollar.
“So this move was motivated not by the exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar, but between the yuan and all the other currencies because the dollars is in a bubble right now,” he said. “The dollar is very overvalued … and the dollar is a bubble. This dollar bubble is going to burst.”
He added that the U.S. economy is in a much worse situation right now than the Chinese. This is something, Schiff says, the Federal Reserve will have to admit. He also averred that the Fed won’t raise interest rates this year (SEE: Federal Reserve rate hike could cost indebted consumers $9 billion per year) and will have to do another round of quantitative easing.
“That’s going to sink the dollar and then the Chinese are going to have to revalue their currency much higher in the future against the dollar and it’s the dollar collapsing that’s going to hurt the US. Not this recent move by China,” Schiff posited.
The reasons why the U.S. dollar has been trading well since the financial crisis is because of hope, hype and speculation.
Schiff alluded to the immense trade deficit with China, and how China is producing all things the U.S. consumers and can’t produce. On the other hand, however, the U.S. doesn’t produce anything the Chinese want to consume.
Overall, Schiff asserts, the Chinese economy is “far more powerful” and “far more dynamic” than the U.S. economy. This is why the U.S. suffers from massive deficits.
“But people believe in the myth of this US economy, they believe that this bubble is genuine, they made the same mistake in the late 1990s, they made the same mistake right before the financial crisis of 2008. They’re making a mistake again,” said Schiff.
“We’re on the verge of a much worse financial crisis than the one we went through in 2008 and it’s going to take the form of a currency crisis. You’re talking about currency wars. American is going to win the currency war, which is a race to the bottom, and you don’t want to win a currency war because a currency war is different from most wars in that the object is to kill yourself and unfortunately, we’re going to succeed.”
At the time of this writing, the Dow Jones has fallen more than 200 points, while the Shanghai Composite Index has hiccuped just 40 points.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/no_author/the-dollar-collapse-is-coming/
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
"...the US rate of unemployment as of July 2015 is 23%..."
The US Economy Continues Its Collapse
Paul Craig Roberts
Do you remember when real reporters existed? Those were the days before the Clinton regime concentrated the media into a few hands and turned the media into a Ministry of Propaganda, a tool of Big Brother. The false reality in which Americans live extends into economic life. Last Friday’s employment report was a continuation of a long string of bad news spun into good news. The media repeats two numbers as if they mean something—the monthly payroll jobs gains and the unemployment rate—and ignores the numbers that show the continuing multi-year decline in employment opportunities while the economy is allegedly recovering.
The so-called recovery is based on the U.3 measure of the unemployment rate. This measure does not include any unemployed person who has become discouraged from the inability to find a job and has not looked for a job in four weeks. The U.3 measure of unemployment only includes the still hopeful who think they will find a job.
The government has a second official measure of unemployment, U.6. This measure, seldom reported, includes among the unemployed those who have been discouraged for less than one year. This official measure is double the 5.3% U.3 measure. What does it mean that the unemployment rate is over 10% after six years of alleged economic recovery?
In 1994 the Clinton regime stopped counting long-term discouraged workers as unemployed. Clinton wanted his economy to look better than Reagan’s, so he ceased counting the long-term discouraged workers that were part of Reagan’s unemployment rate. John Williams (shadowstats.com) continues to measure the long-term discouraged with the official methodology of that time, and when these unemployed are included, the US rate of unemployment as of July 2015 is 23%, several times higher than during the recession with which Fed chairman Paul Volcker greeted the Reagan presidency.
An unemployment rate of 23% gives economic recovery a new meaning. It has been eighty-five years since the Great Depression, and the US economy is in economic recovery with an unemployment rate close to that of the Great Depression.
The labor force participation rate has declined over the “recovery” that allegedly began in June 2009 and continues today. This is highly unusual. Normally, as an economy recovers jobs rebound, and people flock into the labor force. Based on what he was told by his economic advisors, President Obama attributed the decline in the participation rate to baby boomers taking retirement. In actual fact, over the so-called recovery, job growth has been primarily among those 55 years of age and older. For example, all of the July payroll jobs gains were accounted for by those 55 and older. Those Americans of prime working age (25 to 54 years old) lost 131,000 jobs in July.
Over the previous year (July 2014 — July 2015), those in the age group 55 and older gained 1,554,000 jobs. Youth, 16-18 and 20-24, lost 887,000 and 489,000 jobs.
Today there are 4,000,000 fewer jobs for Americans aged 25 to 54 than in December 2007. From 2009 to 2013, Americans in this age group were down 6,000,000 jobs. Those years of alleged economic recovery apparently bypassed Americans of prime working age.
As of July 2015, the US has 27,265,000 people with part-time jobs, of whom 6,300,000 or 23% are working part-time because they cannot find full time jobs. There are 7,124,000 Americans who hold multiple part-time jobs in order to make ends meet, an increase of 337,000 from a year ago.
The young cannot form households on the basis of part-time jobs, but retirees take these jobs in order to provide the missing income on their savings from the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy, which is keyed toward supporting the balance sheets of a handful of giant banks, whose executives control the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. With so many manufacturing and tradable professional skill jobs, such as software engineering, offshored to China and India, professional careers are disappearing in the US.
The most lucrative jobs in America involve running Wall Street scams, lobbying for private interest groups, for which former members of the House, Senate, and executive branch are preferred, and producing schemes for the enrichment of think-tank donors, which, masquerading as public policy, can become law.
The claimed payroll jobs for July are in the usual categories familiar to us month after month year after year. They are domestic service jobs—waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks, transportation, warehousing, finance and insurance, health care and social assistance. Nothing to export in order to pay for massive imports. With scant growth in real median family incomes, as savings are drawn down and credit used up, even the sales part of the economy will falter.
Clearly, this is not an economy that has a future.
But you would never know that from listening to the financial media or reading the New York Times business section or the Wall Street Journal.
When I was a Wall Street Journal editor, the deplorable condition of the US economy would have been front page news.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-us-economy-continues-its-collapse.html
Paul Craig Roberts
Do you remember when real reporters existed? Those were the days before the Clinton regime concentrated the media into a few hands and turned the media into a Ministry of Propaganda, a tool of Big Brother. The false reality in which Americans live extends into economic life. Last Friday’s employment report was a continuation of a long string of bad news spun into good news. The media repeats two numbers as if they mean something—the monthly payroll jobs gains and the unemployment rate—and ignores the numbers that show the continuing multi-year decline in employment opportunities while the economy is allegedly recovering.
The so-called recovery is based on the U.3 measure of the unemployment rate. This measure does not include any unemployed person who has become discouraged from the inability to find a job and has not looked for a job in four weeks. The U.3 measure of unemployment only includes the still hopeful who think they will find a job.
The government has a second official measure of unemployment, U.6. This measure, seldom reported, includes among the unemployed those who have been discouraged for less than one year. This official measure is double the 5.3% U.3 measure. What does it mean that the unemployment rate is over 10% after six years of alleged economic recovery?
In 1994 the Clinton regime stopped counting long-term discouraged workers as unemployed. Clinton wanted his economy to look better than Reagan’s, so he ceased counting the long-term discouraged workers that were part of Reagan’s unemployment rate. John Williams (shadowstats.com) continues to measure the long-term discouraged with the official methodology of that time, and when these unemployed are included, the US rate of unemployment as of July 2015 is 23%, several times higher than during the recession with which Fed chairman Paul Volcker greeted the Reagan presidency.
An unemployment rate of 23% gives economic recovery a new meaning. It has been eighty-five years since the Great Depression, and the US economy is in economic recovery with an unemployment rate close to that of the Great Depression.
The labor force participation rate has declined over the “recovery” that allegedly began in June 2009 and continues today. This is highly unusual. Normally, as an economy recovers jobs rebound, and people flock into the labor force. Based on what he was told by his economic advisors, President Obama attributed the decline in the participation rate to baby boomers taking retirement. In actual fact, over the so-called recovery, job growth has been primarily among those 55 years of age and older. For example, all of the July payroll jobs gains were accounted for by those 55 and older. Those Americans of prime working age (25 to 54 years old) lost 131,000 jobs in July.
Over the previous year (July 2014 — July 2015), those in the age group 55 and older gained 1,554,000 jobs. Youth, 16-18 and 20-24, lost 887,000 and 489,000 jobs.
Today there are 4,000,000 fewer jobs for Americans aged 25 to 54 than in December 2007. From 2009 to 2013, Americans in this age group were down 6,000,000 jobs. Those years of alleged economic recovery apparently bypassed Americans of prime working age.
As of July 2015, the US has 27,265,000 people with part-time jobs, of whom 6,300,000 or 23% are working part-time because they cannot find full time jobs. There are 7,124,000 Americans who hold multiple part-time jobs in order to make ends meet, an increase of 337,000 from a year ago.
The young cannot form households on the basis of part-time jobs, but retirees take these jobs in order to provide the missing income on their savings from the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy, which is keyed toward supporting the balance sheets of a handful of giant banks, whose executives control the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. With so many manufacturing and tradable professional skill jobs, such as software engineering, offshored to China and India, professional careers are disappearing in the US.
The most lucrative jobs in America involve running Wall Street scams, lobbying for private interest groups, for which former members of the House, Senate, and executive branch are preferred, and producing schemes for the enrichment of think-tank donors, which, masquerading as public policy, can become law.
The claimed payroll jobs for July are in the usual categories familiar to us month after month year after year. They are domestic service jobs—waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks, transportation, warehousing, finance and insurance, health care and social assistance. Nothing to export in order to pay for massive imports. With scant growth in real median family incomes, as savings are drawn down and credit used up, even the sales part of the economy will falter.
Clearly, this is not an economy that has a future.
But you would never know that from listening to the financial media or reading the New York Times business section or the Wall Street Journal.
When I was a Wall Street Journal editor, the deplorable condition of the US economy would have been front page news.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-us-economy-continues-its-collapse.html
Tell this to the statists..."If the state as an edifice no longer exists, then it can no longer be exploited by evil people."
Freedom and central planning can never coexist
by Brandon Smith
The average person is a statist, whether he realizes it or not. It is important that liberty activists recognize and accept this fact because the truth of our limitations as a movement determines the kinds of solutions into which we should ultimately put our time and energy. The fantasy of a final grand march of an awake and aware majority on the doorsteps of power is just that: a fantasy. Some people might argue that given more time, such an event could be organized or could happen spontaneously. But what these people seem to forget is the immediacy of crisis inspires awareness and cuts the bindings of complacency for a certain percentage of any given population. With “more time” often comes more complacency.
So history becomes a kind of balancing act, with crisis generating the necessity of intelligent and moral action in some people but rarely, if ever, in most people (even during the American Revolution, in which patriots represented a stark minority). The reason that the culture of freedom consistently plateaus and remains stuck at underdog status is because human beings are obsessed with the idea that governments should retain prohibitory and administrative power over the public. As stated earlier, the average person is a statist.
Not all people necessarily “love” their current government, but many citizens tend to see the idea of government as an inevitability of a stable society. They assume pre-eminence of the state because they have never known anything else. Not only that, but as people separate into political and ideological factions, often based on false paradigms (such as the false left/right paradigm), they covet government as a kind of tool or weapon that can be used for “the greater good” if only their side had total control of it. Very few people in this world want to shrink government down to a manageable size comparable to that which existed just after the American Revolution, and even fewer would entertain the idea of erasing central governments entirely. The allure of the state as a means to impose ideological control over others is intoxicating.
At bottom, the only viable purpose of any central government is to safeguard individual liberty. All other claims and supposed benefits are irrelevant. Infrastructure, food and water, health, education, public security: All of these issues can be provided for at a local level by common people without the aid of a central authority. In a culture where vigilance is encouraged rather than labeled paranoia, in a culture where productivity is enabled rather than obstructed, in a culture where free thought is treated with interest rather than disdain, government holds no value.
The only people who understand the true nature of government and still value the existence of an overreaching state are the people who would like to exploit the unchecked power such a state affords. We often call these people “elitists.” They often call themselves elitists. Big government serves only the interests of these elites. Everyone else is either a hapless victim of it, a useful idiot in service of it or a revolutionary opposed to it.
When a government becomes a power mechanism for a select few, it has lost all relevance. When a government like ours here in America violates the tenets of individual liberty despite its constitutional mandate in the name of “protecting” individual liberty, that government no longer serves any purpose. Even further, when a government’s policies are designed only to ensure its own continued dominance rather than the freedom and prosperity of the citizenry, that government becomes separate from the people and is, by extension, an enemy to the citizenry.
Governments and the elites behind them retain control over populations through the use of central planning. Central planning is essentially a bureaucratic structure that bottlenecks productivity, resources, academia and ideas until all progress and expression require approval. That is to say, central planning is a machine that turns rights into privileges. It also sets up bureaucracy as the final arbiter of who is considered an authority in any particular field and who is a “layman.” These designations are not based on individual ability, intelligence or accomplishment. Rather, they are based on subservience and the level of blind faith in the establishment each person is willing to display in order to attain professional status.
Some of the most ignorant people in any given field or profession are often those deemed “experts” by establishment institutions, from politics, to law, to medicine, to economics, to science, to history, etc. The sad fact is mainstream experts are rarely the most knowledgeable, but they are the most indoctrinated.
As central planning gains ground, it moves away from more subtle institutional dependencies into full-bore tyranny. The line between permission and despotism is razor-thin, and this is where we in the U.S. stand today. Most nations around the globe are socialized nations, with central planning as the very foundation on which their societies stand. For the most part, these cultures are disarmed and servile with a modicum of perceived freedom that is treated as a privilege granted by the state rather than an inborn right of natural law. Yes, many societies have “freedoms,” as America does; but the difference is that these societies can have their freedoms confiscated at any given moment on the whim of the political elite. They have no recourse to obstruct such an action and no power to remove the offending system that rules over them when they finally get fed up.
In the U.S., central planning is surely prevalent and socialization is on a fast track. But Americans still retain the ability of independent response — as we saw at Bundy Ranch, for instance, or in the defense of shopkeepers in Ferguson, Missouri, despite threats from government. We will lose our advantage of independent action if we allow the following changes to occur within our culture.
Disarmament
A disarmed population is utterly useless, philosophically and organizationally impotent, and easily ruled. Take a look at simpering weakling societies like the U.K., which prohibits anyone under the age of 18 to purchase plastic knives and punishes victims of crime for physically defending themselves. Governments that seek to undermine personal liberty always disarm their respective populations if they can get away with it. In America, the only reason we have not yet been disarmed is because the establishment understands that revolution would immediately follow any attempt and that revolution would be seen as justified. I believe ultimately that disarmament in the U.S. will not be fully attempted until a national crisis has been triggered.
Centralized health standards
The real purpose of Obamacare was not to provide universal health insurance. Such a task is utterly impossible in an economic system that is in the midst of decline with an aging population and reduced profit opportunities for the young. Socialism works only as long as there is someone from whom to steal money and resources. No, the purpose of Obamacare was to bond the healthcare industry to government in such a way as to make it an appendage of the state.
Already, we have seen the push for the use of doctors as government informants, the issuance of forced vaccinations regardless of religious orientation or philosophical objection, increased taxation in the name of “harmonization” of care, etc. The system must continue to perpetuate its own usefulness. And I have no doubt that one day we will see such things as mandated health appraisals of individuals up to and including psychological health, as well as restricted care based on age, life habits or even ideological orientation. If the state can have your flight status restricted merely for your political beliefs, then why not one day have your access to medical care restricted?
Population planning
We have heard it said many times that people should be required to attain a “license” before they are allowed to have children, but who gets to decide who is eligible for the “privilege” of children? Well, the state and its central planners do, of course. And what makes such people so ethically competent as to deserve this power over the right to family? Not a thing. In many cases, bureaucrats are the most psychopathic and unintelligent people in any given society.
Some people might argue that this kind of development is unthinkable in America and not a legitimate concern. But already in the U.S. we have seen instances of Child Protective Services abductions of children belonging to parents with political conflicts with the existing establishment and living habits outside of the mainstream. We also live in a system in which many parents are forced by law to hand over their children to state-controlled schools for half of every weekday (and home-schoolers are attacked as aberrant child abusers). We are only a short step away from a world in which having a child invites as much government intrusion and restriction as rearing a child.
Overt militarization of police
Yes, many people would claim that overt militarization of police has already occurred. I would say that they haven’t seen anything yet. We do not yet live in a country where jacked out cops with armor and M4 carbines stand on every street corner 24/7, but it won’t be long before this becomes our everyday environment. With politicians openly suggesting extreme measures to combat “lone wolf terrorists,” up to and including internment camps for “disloyal Americans” (thanks for at least being honest about your intentions, Wesley Clark), all it would take is one large-scale attack to inspire enough confusion in the population to provide cover for a full-blown police state. Central planning survives and thrives through fear. Fear is defeated through preparedness, planning and mindset.
Resource management
A person cannot plan or prepare for crisis if he is not allowed to manage his own resources. In Venezuela today, the government has locked down all food production and is rationing out necessary supplies through sophisticated electronic tracking due to economic crisis. Make no mistake, America is just as vulnerable to financial disaster as any Third World nation, if not more so. Resource management will be the inevitable result. In fact, the Obama administration has already positioned itself for resource management through the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order. Government officials will call preppers “hoarders” and argue that no one person should be allowed to have more than he needs. Again, it will be state bureaucrats who will decide what amount of resources is too much.
Centralized economy
We already have a centralized and socialized economy for the most part, but private trade and production are still possible. Central planning is designed to wipe out alternative forms of trade and subsistence so that all people can be made dependent on the singular state. As in Venezuela, we should expect that economic declines will be used as a rationale for a clampdown on individual trade. The only way to fight these kinds of measures is for average people to become avid producers and be willing to fight back physically against confiscation and government-controlled rationing.
Beyond trade controls, centralization will culminate in economic “harmony” through multilateral currency schemes, ending in a one-world currency. A single currency system by default calls for a single economic authority, and this by default calls for a single political authority. A one-world currency is not only a fiscal coup for central planners; it is also a stepping stone toward world government.
Cashless society
A cashless system is a kind of unholy grail for central planners because it allows for total control of economic trade. Electronic-based currency systems can be dictated from the comfort of a computer, and savings can be erased or limited arbitrarily. Cashless systems also allow banking structures to operate without the normal consequences of supply and demand fundamentals. Today, even in our massively corrupt financial system, one cannot get around the concrete effects of diminishing demand, endless debt obligations and criminal fiat creation. We are seeing these effects vividly so far in 2015, just as we saw then in 2008. In a completely cashless system, though, debts can vanish, capital can be stolen and shifted away from the public in a more precise manner, taxes can be excised without waiting for taxpayers to comply, and demand can be artificially generated with digital fiat directed to the correct accounts without any trail to follow.
Of course, there will be damages. But those damages will be foisted upon the general public incrementally until Third World living standards become normal, and no one will be the wiser after a couple of generations. Control of the population would be absolute, while any dissent could be met with immediate financial reprisal, as activists are sentenced to starvation.
The examples listed above may be measured as extreme, but every single one has support within our existing government structure either legally or through actual programs already being implemented. The speed at which they might occur is an unknown, but the desire for them by central planners is absolutely certain. There is no good or benevolent form of central planning. There is no scenario in which the system will not be abused because such power concentrated in the hands of any group of human beings invites abuse. Therefore, the only prudent course, the only solution to the absolute terror of complete state power, is to reduce government down to a shell of its current size or to remove its existence entirely and focus on localized systems and independent trade and infrastructure development. If the state as an edifice no longer exists, then it can no longer be exploited by evil people.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/freedom-and-central-planning-can-never-coexist/
by Brandon Smith
The average person is a statist, whether he realizes it or not. It is important that liberty activists recognize and accept this fact because the truth of our limitations as a movement determines the kinds of solutions into which we should ultimately put our time and energy. The fantasy of a final grand march of an awake and aware majority on the doorsteps of power is just that: a fantasy. Some people might argue that given more time, such an event could be organized or could happen spontaneously. But what these people seem to forget is the immediacy of crisis inspires awareness and cuts the bindings of complacency for a certain percentage of any given population. With “more time” often comes more complacency.
So history becomes a kind of balancing act, with crisis generating the necessity of intelligent and moral action in some people but rarely, if ever, in most people (even during the American Revolution, in which patriots represented a stark minority). The reason that the culture of freedom consistently plateaus and remains stuck at underdog status is because human beings are obsessed with the idea that governments should retain prohibitory and administrative power over the public. As stated earlier, the average person is a statist.
Not all people necessarily “love” their current government, but many citizens tend to see the idea of government as an inevitability of a stable society. They assume pre-eminence of the state because they have never known anything else. Not only that, but as people separate into political and ideological factions, often based on false paradigms (such as the false left/right paradigm), they covet government as a kind of tool or weapon that can be used for “the greater good” if only their side had total control of it. Very few people in this world want to shrink government down to a manageable size comparable to that which existed just after the American Revolution, and even fewer would entertain the idea of erasing central governments entirely. The allure of the state as a means to impose ideological control over others is intoxicating.
At bottom, the only viable purpose of any central government is to safeguard individual liberty. All other claims and supposed benefits are irrelevant. Infrastructure, food and water, health, education, public security: All of these issues can be provided for at a local level by common people without the aid of a central authority. In a culture where vigilance is encouraged rather than labeled paranoia, in a culture where productivity is enabled rather than obstructed, in a culture where free thought is treated with interest rather than disdain, government holds no value.
The only people who understand the true nature of government and still value the existence of an overreaching state are the people who would like to exploit the unchecked power such a state affords. We often call these people “elitists.” They often call themselves elitists. Big government serves only the interests of these elites. Everyone else is either a hapless victim of it, a useful idiot in service of it or a revolutionary opposed to it.
When a government becomes a power mechanism for a select few, it has lost all relevance. When a government like ours here in America violates the tenets of individual liberty despite its constitutional mandate in the name of “protecting” individual liberty, that government no longer serves any purpose. Even further, when a government’s policies are designed only to ensure its own continued dominance rather than the freedom and prosperity of the citizenry, that government becomes separate from the people and is, by extension, an enemy to the citizenry.
Governments and the elites behind them retain control over populations through the use of central planning. Central planning is essentially a bureaucratic structure that bottlenecks productivity, resources, academia and ideas until all progress and expression require approval. That is to say, central planning is a machine that turns rights into privileges. It also sets up bureaucracy as the final arbiter of who is considered an authority in any particular field and who is a “layman.” These designations are not based on individual ability, intelligence or accomplishment. Rather, they are based on subservience and the level of blind faith in the establishment each person is willing to display in order to attain professional status.
Some of the most ignorant people in any given field or profession are often those deemed “experts” by establishment institutions, from politics, to law, to medicine, to economics, to science, to history, etc. The sad fact is mainstream experts are rarely the most knowledgeable, but they are the most indoctrinated.
As central planning gains ground, it moves away from more subtle institutional dependencies into full-bore tyranny. The line between permission and despotism is razor-thin, and this is where we in the U.S. stand today. Most nations around the globe are socialized nations, with central planning as the very foundation on which their societies stand. For the most part, these cultures are disarmed and servile with a modicum of perceived freedom that is treated as a privilege granted by the state rather than an inborn right of natural law. Yes, many societies have “freedoms,” as America does; but the difference is that these societies can have their freedoms confiscated at any given moment on the whim of the political elite. They have no recourse to obstruct such an action and no power to remove the offending system that rules over them when they finally get fed up.
In the U.S., central planning is surely prevalent and socialization is on a fast track. But Americans still retain the ability of independent response — as we saw at Bundy Ranch, for instance, or in the defense of shopkeepers in Ferguson, Missouri, despite threats from government. We will lose our advantage of independent action if we allow the following changes to occur within our culture.
Disarmament
A disarmed population is utterly useless, philosophically and organizationally impotent, and easily ruled. Take a look at simpering weakling societies like the U.K., which prohibits anyone under the age of 18 to purchase plastic knives and punishes victims of crime for physically defending themselves. Governments that seek to undermine personal liberty always disarm their respective populations if they can get away with it. In America, the only reason we have not yet been disarmed is because the establishment understands that revolution would immediately follow any attempt and that revolution would be seen as justified. I believe ultimately that disarmament in the U.S. will not be fully attempted until a national crisis has been triggered.
Centralized health standards
The real purpose of Obamacare was not to provide universal health insurance. Such a task is utterly impossible in an economic system that is in the midst of decline with an aging population and reduced profit opportunities for the young. Socialism works only as long as there is someone from whom to steal money and resources. No, the purpose of Obamacare was to bond the healthcare industry to government in such a way as to make it an appendage of the state.
Already, we have seen the push for the use of doctors as government informants, the issuance of forced vaccinations regardless of religious orientation or philosophical objection, increased taxation in the name of “harmonization” of care, etc. The system must continue to perpetuate its own usefulness. And I have no doubt that one day we will see such things as mandated health appraisals of individuals up to and including psychological health, as well as restricted care based on age, life habits or even ideological orientation. If the state can have your flight status restricted merely for your political beliefs, then why not one day have your access to medical care restricted?
Population planning
We have heard it said many times that people should be required to attain a “license” before they are allowed to have children, but who gets to decide who is eligible for the “privilege” of children? Well, the state and its central planners do, of course. And what makes such people so ethically competent as to deserve this power over the right to family? Not a thing. In many cases, bureaucrats are the most psychopathic and unintelligent people in any given society.
Some people might argue that this kind of development is unthinkable in America and not a legitimate concern. But already in the U.S. we have seen instances of Child Protective Services abductions of children belonging to parents with political conflicts with the existing establishment and living habits outside of the mainstream. We also live in a system in which many parents are forced by law to hand over their children to state-controlled schools for half of every weekday (and home-schoolers are attacked as aberrant child abusers). We are only a short step away from a world in which having a child invites as much government intrusion and restriction as rearing a child.
Overt militarization of police
Yes, many people would claim that overt militarization of police has already occurred. I would say that they haven’t seen anything yet. We do not yet live in a country where jacked out cops with armor and M4 carbines stand on every street corner 24/7, but it won’t be long before this becomes our everyday environment. With politicians openly suggesting extreme measures to combat “lone wolf terrorists,” up to and including internment camps for “disloyal Americans” (thanks for at least being honest about your intentions, Wesley Clark), all it would take is one large-scale attack to inspire enough confusion in the population to provide cover for a full-blown police state. Central planning survives and thrives through fear. Fear is defeated through preparedness, planning and mindset.
Resource management
A person cannot plan or prepare for crisis if he is not allowed to manage his own resources. In Venezuela today, the government has locked down all food production and is rationing out necessary supplies through sophisticated electronic tracking due to economic crisis. Make no mistake, America is just as vulnerable to financial disaster as any Third World nation, if not more so. Resource management will be the inevitable result. In fact, the Obama administration has already positioned itself for resource management through the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order. Government officials will call preppers “hoarders” and argue that no one person should be allowed to have more than he needs. Again, it will be state bureaucrats who will decide what amount of resources is too much.
Centralized economy
We already have a centralized and socialized economy for the most part, but private trade and production are still possible. Central planning is designed to wipe out alternative forms of trade and subsistence so that all people can be made dependent on the singular state. As in Venezuela, we should expect that economic declines will be used as a rationale for a clampdown on individual trade. The only way to fight these kinds of measures is for average people to become avid producers and be willing to fight back physically against confiscation and government-controlled rationing.
Beyond trade controls, centralization will culminate in economic “harmony” through multilateral currency schemes, ending in a one-world currency. A single currency system by default calls for a single economic authority, and this by default calls for a single political authority. A one-world currency is not only a fiscal coup for central planners; it is also a stepping stone toward world government.
Cashless society
A cashless system is a kind of unholy grail for central planners because it allows for total control of economic trade. Electronic-based currency systems can be dictated from the comfort of a computer, and savings can be erased or limited arbitrarily. Cashless systems also allow banking structures to operate without the normal consequences of supply and demand fundamentals. Today, even in our massively corrupt financial system, one cannot get around the concrete effects of diminishing demand, endless debt obligations and criminal fiat creation. We are seeing these effects vividly so far in 2015, just as we saw then in 2008. In a completely cashless system, though, debts can vanish, capital can be stolen and shifted away from the public in a more precise manner, taxes can be excised without waiting for taxpayers to comply, and demand can be artificially generated with digital fiat directed to the correct accounts without any trail to follow.
Of course, there will be damages. But those damages will be foisted upon the general public incrementally until Third World living standards become normal, and no one will be the wiser after a couple of generations. Control of the population would be absolute, while any dissent could be met with immediate financial reprisal, as activists are sentenced to starvation.
The examples listed above may be measured as extreme, but every single one has support within our existing government structure either legally or through actual programs already being implemented. The speed at which they might occur is an unknown, but the desire for them by central planners is absolutely certain. There is no good or benevolent form of central planning. There is no scenario in which the system will not be abused because such power concentrated in the hands of any group of human beings invites abuse. Therefore, the only prudent course, the only solution to the absolute terror of complete state power, is to reduce government down to a shell of its current size or to remove its existence entirely and focus on localized systems and independent trade and infrastructure development. If the state as an edifice no longer exists, then it can no longer be exploited by evil people.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/freedom-and-central-planning-can-never-coexist/
The Nazi Neocons...
Neocons: the Echo of German Fascism
By Todd E. Pierce
Exclusive: The “f-word” for “fascist” keeps cropping up in discussing aggressive U.S. and Israeli “exceptionalism,” but there’s a distinction from the “n-word” for “Nazi.” This new form of ignoring international law fits more with an older form of German authoritarianism favored by neocon icon Leo Strauss, says retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce.
With the Likud Party electoral victory in Israel, the Republican Party is on a roll, having won two major elections in a row. The first was winning control of the U.S. Congress last fall. The second is the victory by the Republicans’ de facto party leader Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s recent election. As the Israeli Prime Minister puts together a coalition with other parties “in the national camp,” as he describes them, meaning the ultra-nationalist parties of Israel, it will be a coalition that today’s Republicans would feel right at home in.
The common thread linking Republicans and Netanyahu’s “national camp” is a belief of each in their own country’s “exceptionalism,” with a consequent right of military intervention wherever and whenever their “Commander in Chief” orders it, as well as the need for oppressive laws to suppress dissent.
Leo Strauss, an intellectual bridge between Germany's inter-war Conservative Revolutionaries and today's American neoconservatives.
William Kristol, neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard, would agree. Celebrating Netanyahu’s victory, Kristol told the New York Times, “It will strengthen the hawkish types in the Republican Party.” Kristol added that Netanyahu would win the GOP’s nomination, if he could run, because “Republican primary voters are at least as hawkish as the Israeli public.”
The loser in both the Israeli and U.S. elections was the rule of law and real democracy, not the sham democracy presented for public relations purposes in both counties. In both countries today, money controls elections, and as Michael Glennon has written in National Security and Double Government, real power is in the hands of the national security apparatus.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership role in the U.S. Congress was on full display to the world when he accepted House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address Congress. Showing their eagerness to be part of any political coalition being formed under Netanyahu’s leadership, many Congressional Democrats also showed their support by attending the speech.
It was left to Israeli Uri Avnery to best capture the spirit of Netanyahu’s enthusiastic ideological supporters in Congress. Avnery wrote that he was reminded of something when seeing “Row upon row of men in suits (and the occasional woman), jumping up and down, up and down, applauding wildly, shouting approval.”
Where had he heard that type of shouting before? Then it came to him: “It was another parliament in the mid-1930s. The Leader was speaking. Rows upon rows of Reichstag members were listening raptly. Every few minutes they jumped up and shouted their approval.”
He added, “the Congress of the United States of America is no Reichstag. Members wear dark suits, not brown shirts. They do not shout ‘Heil’ but something unintelligible.” Nevertheless, “the sound of the shouting had the same effect. Rather shocking.”
Right-wing Politics in Pre-Nazi Germany
While Avnery’s analogy of how Congress responded to its de facto leader was apt, it isn’t necessary to go to the extreme example that he uses to analogize today’s right-wing U.S. and Israeli parties and policy to an earlier German precedent. Instead, it is sufficient to note how similar the right-wing parties of Israel and the U.S. of today are to what was known in 1920s Weimar Germany as the Conservative Revolutionary Movement.
This “movement” did not include the Nazis but instead the Nazis were political competitors with the party which largely represented Conservative Revolutionary ideas: the German National People’s Party (DNVP).
The institution to which the Conservative Revolutionaries saw as best representing German “values,” the Reichswehr, the German Army, was also opposed by the Nazis as “competitors” to Ernst Rohm’s Brownshirts. But the Conservative Revolutionary Movement, the DNVP, and the German Army could all be characterized as “proto-fascist,” if not Fascist. In fact, when the Nazis took over Germany, it was with the support of many of the proto-fascists making up the Conservative Revolutionary Movement, as well as those with the DNVP and the Reichswehr.
Consequently, many of the Reichstag members that Uri Avnery refers to above as listening raptly and jumping up and shouting their approval of “The Leader” were not Nazis. The Nazis had failed to obtain an absolute majority on their own and needed the votes of the “national camp,” primarily the German National People’s Party (DNVP), for a Reichstag majority.
The DNVP members would have been cheering The Leader right alongside Nazi members of the Reichstag. DNVP members also voted along with Nazi members in passing the Enabling Act of 1933, which abolished constitutional liberties and dissolved the Reichstag.
Not enough has been written on the German Conservative Revolutionary Movement , the DNVP and the Reichswehr because they have too often been seen as victims of the Nazis themselves or, at worst, mere precursors.
The DNVP was the political party which best represented the viewpoint of the German Conservative Revolutionary Movement. The Reichswehr itself, as described in The Nemesis of Power by John W. Wheeler-Bennett, has been called a “state within a state,” much like the intelligence and security services of the U.S. and Israel are today, wielding extraordinary powers.
The Reichswehr was militaristic and anti-democratic in its purest form and indeed was “fascist” in the term’s classic definition of “an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.” Mussolini merely modeled much of his hyper-militaristic political movement on the martial values of the Reichswehr.
German Army officers even had authority to punish civilians for failing to show “proper respect.” In its essence, the viewpoint of the DNVP and the Conservative Revolutionaries was virtually identical to today’s Republican Party along with those Democrats who align with them on national security issues.
These groups have in common a worshipful attitude toward the military as best embodying those martial virtues that are central to fascism. Sister parties, though they may all prefer to be seen as “brothers in arms,” would be Netanyahu’s “national camp” parties.
German Conservative Revolutionary Movement
The Conservative Revolutionary Movement began within the German Right after World War I with a number of writers advocating a nationalist ideology but one in keeping with modern times and not restricted by traditional Prussian conservatism.
It must be noted that Prussian conservatism, standing for militaristic ideas traditional to Prussia, was the antithesis of traditional American conservatism, which professed to stand for upholding the classical liberal ideas of government embedded in the U.S. Constitution.
Inherent to those U.S. constitutional ideas was antipathy toward militarism and militaristic rule of any sort, though Native Americans have good cause to disagree. (In fact, stories of the American conquest of Native Americans with its solution of placing them on reservations were particularly popular in Germany early in the Twentieth Century including with Adolf Hitler).
Historians have noted that when the German Army went to war in World War I, the soldiers and officers carried with them “a shared sense of German superiority and the imagined bestiality of the enemy.” This was manifested particularly harshly upon the citizens of Belgium in 1914 with the German occupation. Later, after their experience in the trenches, the Reichswehr was nearly as harsh in suppressing domestic dissent in Germany after the war.
According to Richard Wolin, in The Seduction of Unreason, Ernst Troeltsch, a German Protestant theologian, “realized that in the course of World War I the ethos of Germanocentrism, as embodied in the ‘ideas of 1914,’ had assumed a heightened stridency.” Under the peace of the Versailles Treaty, “instead of muting the idiom of German exceptionalism that Troeltsch viewed with such mistrust, it seemed only to fan its flames.”
This belief in German “exceptionalism” was the common belief of German Conservative Revolutionaries, the DNVP and the Reichswehr. For Republicans of today and those who share their ideological belief, substitute “American” for “German” Exceptionalism and you have the identical ideology.
“Exceptionalism” in the sense of a nation can be understood in two ways. One is a belief in the nation’s superiority to others. The other way is the belief that the “exceptional” nation stands above the law, similar to the claim made by dictators in declaring martial law or a state of emergency. The U.S. and Israel exhibit both forms of this belief.
German Exceptionalism
The belief in German Exceptionalism was the starting point, not the ending point, for the Conservative Revolutionaries just as it is with today’s Republicans such as Sen. Tom Cotton or Sen. Lindsey Graham. This Exceptionalist ideology gives the nation the right to interfere in other country’s internal affairs for whatever reason the “exceptional” country deems necessary, such as desiring more living space for their population, fearing the potential of some future security threat, or even just by denying the “exceptional” country access within its borders — or a “denial of access threat” as the U.S. government terms it.
The fundamental ideas of the Conservative Revolutionaries have been described as vehement opposition to the Weimar Republic (identifying it with the lost war and the Versailles Treaty) and political “liberalism” (as opposed to Prussia’s traditional authoritarianism).
This “liberalism,” which offended the Conservative Revolutionaries, was democracy and individual rights against state power. Instead, the Conservative Revolutionaries envisaged a new reich of enormous strength and unity. They rejected the view that political action should be guided by rational criteria. They idealized violence for its own sake.
That idealization of violence would have meant “state” violence in the form of military expansionism and suppression of “enemies,” domestic and foreign, by right-thinking Germans.
The Conservative Revolutionaries called for a “primacy of politics” which was to be “a reassertion of an expansion in foreign policy and repression against the trade unions at home.” This “primacy of politics” for the Conservative Revolutionaries meant the erasure of a distinction between war and politics.
Citing Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Herf, a professor of modern European history, wrote: “The explicit implications of the primacy of politics in the conservative revolution were totalitarian. From now on there were to be no limits to ideological politics. The utilitarian and humanistic considerations of nineteenth-century liberalism were to be abandoned in order to establish a state of constant dynamism and movement.” That sounds a lot like the “creative destruction” that neoconservative theorist Michael Ledeen is so fond of.
Herf wrote in 1984 that Conservative Revolutionaries were characterized as “the intellectual advance guard of the rightist revolution that was to be effected in 1933,” which, although contemptuous of Hitler, “did much to pave his road to power.”
Unlike the Nazis, their belief in German superiority was based in historical traditions and ideas, not biological racism. Nevertheless, some saw German Jews as the “enemy” of Germany for being “incompatible with a united nation.”
It is one of the bitterest of ironies that Israel as a “Jewish nation” has adopted similar attitudes toward its Arab citizens. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently proclaimed: “Those who are with us deserve everything, but those who are against us deserve to have their heads chopped off with an axe.”
Within Israel, these “Conservative Revolutionary” ideas were manifested in one of their founding political parties, Herut, whose founders came out of the same central European political milieu of interwar Europe and from which Netanyahu’s Likud party is descended.
Ernst Junger
Author Ernst Junger was the most important contributor to the celebration of war by the Conservative Revolutionaries and was an influence and an enabler of the Nazis coming to power. He serialized his celebration of war and his belief in its “redeeming” qualities in a number of popular books with “war porn” titles such as, in English, The Storm of Steel, The Battle as an Inner Experience, and Fire and Blood.
The title of a collection of Junger essays in 1930, Krieg und Krieger (War and the Warriors) captures the spirit of America in the Twenty-first Century as much as it did the German spirit in 1930. While members of the U.S. military once went by terms such as soldier, sailor and marine, now they are routinely generically called “Warriors,” especially by the highest ranks, a term never before used to describe what were once “citizen soldiers.”
Putting a book with a “Warrior” title out on the shelf in a Barnes and Noble would almost guarantee a best-seller, even when competing with all the U.S. SEALS’ reminiscences and American sniper stories. But German philosopher Walter Benjamin understood the meaning of Junger’s Krieg und Krieger, explaining it in the appropriately titled Theories of German Fascism.
Fundamental to Junger’s celebration of war was a metaphysical belief in “totale Mobilmachung” or total mobilization to describe the functioning of a society that fully grasps the meaning of war. With World War I, Junger saw the battlefield as the scene of struggle “for life and death,” pushing all historical and political considerations aside. But he saw in the war the fact that “in it the genius of war permeated the spirit of progress.”
According to Jeffrey Herf in Reactionary Modernism, Junger saw total mobilization as “a worldwide trend toward state-directed mobilization in which individual freedom would be sacrificed to the demands of authoritarian planning.” Welcoming this, Junger believed “that different currents of energy were coalescing into one powerful torrent. The era of total mobilization would bring about an ‘unleashing’ (Entfesselung) of a nevertheless disciplined life.”
In practical terms, Junger’s metaphysical view of war meant that Germany had lost World War I because its economic and technological mobilization had only been partial and not total. He lamented that Germany had been unable to place the “spirit of the age” in the service of nationalism. Consequently, he believed that “bourgeois legality,” which placed restrictions on the powers of the authoritarian state, “must be abolished in order to liberate technological advance.”
Today, total mobilization for the U.S. begins with the Republicans’ budgeting efforts to strip away funding for domestic civilian uses and shifting it to military and intelligence spending. Army veteran, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, exemplifies this belief in “total mobilization” of society with his calls for dramatically increased military spending and his belief that “We must again show the U.S. is willing and prepared to [get into] a war in the first place” by making clear that potential “aggressors will pay an unspeakable price if they challenge the United States.”
That is the true purpose of Twenty-first Century Republican economics: total mobilization of the economy for war. Just as defeated German generals and the Conservative Revolutionaries believed that Germany lost World War I because their economy and nation was only “partially mobilized,” so too did many American Vietnam War-era generals and right-wing politicians believe the same of the Vietnam War. Retired Gen. David Petraeus and today’s neoconservatives have made similar arguments about President Barack Obama’s failure to sustain the Iraq War. [See, for instance, this fawning Washington Post interview with Petraeus.]
What all these militarists failed to understand is that, according to Clausewitz, when a war’s costs exceed its benefits, the sound strategy is to end the costly war. The Germans failed to understand this in World War II and the Soviet Union in their Afghan War.
Paradoxically in the Vietnam War, it was the anti-war movement that enhanced U.S. strength by bringing that wasteful war to an end, not the American militarists who would have continued it to a bitter end of economic collapse. We are now seeing a similar debate about whether to continue and expand U.S. military operations across the Middle East...
Read the rest here:
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/27/neocons-the-echo-of-german-fascism/
By Todd E. Pierce
Exclusive: The “f-word” for “fascist” keeps cropping up in discussing aggressive U.S. and Israeli “exceptionalism,” but there’s a distinction from the “n-word” for “Nazi.” This new form of ignoring international law fits more with an older form of German authoritarianism favored by neocon icon Leo Strauss, says retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce.
With the Likud Party electoral victory in Israel, the Republican Party is on a roll, having won two major elections in a row. The first was winning control of the U.S. Congress last fall. The second is the victory by the Republicans’ de facto party leader Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s recent election. As the Israeli Prime Minister puts together a coalition with other parties “in the national camp,” as he describes them, meaning the ultra-nationalist parties of Israel, it will be a coalition that today’s Republicans would feel right at home in.
The common thread linking Republicans and Netanyahu’s “national camp” is a belief of each in their own country’s “exceptionalism,” with a consequent right of military intervention wherever and whenever their “Commander in Chief” orders it, as well as the need for oppressive laws to suppress dissent.
Leo Strauss, an intellectual bridge between Germany's inter-war Conservative Revolutionaries and today's American neoconservatives.
William Kristol, neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard, would agree. Celebrating Netanyahu’s victory, Kristol told the New York Times, “It will strengthen the hawkish types in the Republican Party.” Kristol added that Netanyahu would win the GOP’s nomination, if he could run, because “Republican primary voters are at least as hawkish as the Israeli public.”
The loser in both the Israeli and U.S. elections was the rule of law and real democracy, not the sham democracy presented for public relations purposes in both counties. In both countries today, money controls elections, and as Michael Glennon has written in National Security and Double Government, real power is in the hands of the national security apparatus.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership role in the U.S. Congress was on full display to the world when he accepted House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address Congress. Showing their eagerness to be part of any political coalition being formed under Netanyahu’s leadership, many Congressional Democrats also showed their support by attending the speech.
It was left to Israeli Uri Avnery to best capture the spirit of Netanyahu’s enthusiastic ideological supporters in Congress. Avnery wrote that he was reminded of something when seeing “Row upon row of men in suits (and the occasional woman), jumping up and down, up and down, applauding wildly, shouting approval.”
Where had he heard that type of shouting before? Then it came to him: “It was another parliament in the mid-1930s. The Leader was speaking. Rows upon rows of Reichstag members were listening raptly. Every few minutes they jumped up and shouted their approval.”
He added, “the Congress of the United States of America is no Reichstag. Members wear dark suits, not brown shirts. They do not shout ‘Heil’ but something unintelligible.” Nevertheless, “the sound of the shouting had the same effect. Rather shocking.”
Right-wing Politics in Pre-Nazi Germany
While Avnery’s analogy of how Congress responded to its de facto leader was apt, it isn’t necessary to go to the extreme example that he uses to analogize today’s right-wing U.S. and Israeli parties and policy to an earlier German precedent. Instead, it is sufficient to note how similar the right-wing parties of Israel and the U.S. of today are to what was known in 1920s Weimar Germany as the Conservative Revolutionary Movement.
This “movement” did not include the Nazis but instead the Nazis were political competitors with the party which largely represented Conservative Revolutionary ideas: the German National People’s Party (DNVP).
The institution to which the Conservative Revolutionaries saw as best representing German “values,” the Reichswehr, the German Army, was also opposed by the Nazis as “competitors” to Ernst Rohm’s Brownshirts. But the Conservative Revolutionary Movement, the DNVP, and the German Army could all be characterized as “proto-fascist,” if not Fascist. In fact, when the Nazis took over Germany, it was with the support of many of the proto-fascists making up the Conservative Revolutionary Movement, as well as those with the DNVP and the Reichswehr.
Consequently, many of the Reichstag members that Uri Avnery refers to above as listening raptly and jumping up and shouting their approval of “The Leader” were not Nazis. The Nazis had failed to obtain an absolute majority on their own and needed the votes of the “national camp,” primarily the German National People’s Party (DNVP), for a Reichstag majority.
The DNVP members would have been cheering The Leader right alongside Nazi members of the Reichstag. DNVP members also voted along with Nazi members in passing the Enabling Act of 1933, which abolished constitutional liberties and dissolved the Reichstag.
Not enough has been written on the German Conservative Revolutionary Movement , the DNVP and the Reichswehr because they have too often been seen as victims of the Nazis themselves or, at worst, mere precursors.
The DNVP was the political party which best represented the viewpoint of the German Conservative Revolutionary Movement. The Reichswehr itself, as described in The Nemesis of Power by John W. Wheeler-Bennett, has been called a “state within a state,” much like the intelligence and security services of the U.S. and Israel are today, wielding extraordinary powers.
The Reichswehr was militaristic and anti-democratic in its purest form and indeed was “fascist” in the term’s classic definition of “an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.” Mussolini merely modeled much of his hyper-militaristic political movement on the martial values of the Reichswehr.
German Army officers even had authority to punish civilians for failing to show “proper respect.” In its essence, the viewpoint of the DNVP and the Conservative Revolutionaries was virtually identical to today’s Republican Party along with those Democrats who align with them on national security issues.
These groups have in common a worshipful attitude toward the military as best embodying those martial virtues that are central to fascism. Sister parties, though they may all prefer to be seen as “brothers in arms,” would be Netanyahu’s “national camp” parties.
German Conservative Revolutionary Movement
The Conservative Revolutionary Movement began within the German Right after World War I with a number of writers advocating a nationalist ideology but one in keeping with modern times and not restricted by traditional Prussian conservatism.
It must be noted that Prussian conservatism, standing for militaristic ideas traditional to Prussia, was the antithesis of traditional American conservatism, which professed to stand for upholding the classical liberal ideas of government embedded in the U.S. Constitution.
Inherent to those U.S. constitutional ideas was antipathy toward militarism and militaristic rule of any sort, though Native Americans have good cause to disagree. (In fact, stories of the American conquest of Native Americans with its solution of placing them on reservations were particularly popular in Germany early in the Twentieth Century including with Adolf Hitler).
Historians have noted that when the German Army went to war in World War I, the soldiers and officers carried with them “a shared sense of German superiority and the imagined bestiality of the enemy.” This was manifested particularly harshly upon the citizens of Belgium in 1914 with the German occupation. Later, after their experience in the trenches, the Reichswehr was nearly as harsh in suppressing domestic dissent in Germany after the war.
According to Richard Wolin, in The Seduction of Unreason, Ernst Troeltsch, a German Protestant theologian, “realized that in the course of World War I the ethos of Germanocentrism, as embodied in the ‘ideas of 1914,’ had assumed a heightened stridency.” Under the peace of the Versailles Treaty, “instead of muting the idiom of German exceptionalism that Troeltsch viewed with such mistrust, it seemed only to fan its flames.”
This belief in German “exceptionalism” was the common belief of German Conservative Revolutionaries, the DNVP and the Reichswehr. For Republicans of today and those who share their ideological belief, substitute “American” for “German” Exceptionalism and you have the identical ideology.
“Exceptionalism” in the sense of a nation can be understood in two ways. One is a belief in the nation’s superiority to others. The other way is the belief that the “exceptional” nation stands above the law, similar to the claim made by dictators in declaring martial law or a state of emergency. The U.S. and Israel exhibit both forms of this belief.
German Exceptionalism
The belief in German Exceptionalism was the starting point, not the ending point, for the Conservative Revolutionaries just as it is with today’s Republicans such as Sen. Tom Cotton or Sen. Lindsey Graham. This Exceptionalist ideology gives the nation the right to interfere in other country’s internal affairs for whatever reason the “exceptional” country deems necessary, such as desiring more living space for their population, fearing the potential of some future security threat, or even just by denying the “exceptional” country access within its borders — or a “denial of access threat” as the U.S. government terms it.
The fundamental ideas of the Conservative Revolutionaries have been described as vehement opposition to the Weimar Republic (identifying it with the lost war and the Versailles Treaty) and political “liberalism” (as opposed to Prussia’s traditional authoritarianism).
This “liberalism,” which offended the Conservative Revolutionaries, was democracy and individual rights against state power. Instead, the Conservative Revolutionaries envisaged a new reich of enormous strength and unity. They rejected the view that political action should be guided by rational criteria. They idealized violence for its own sake.
That idealization of violence would have meant “state” violence in the form of military expansionism and suppression of “enemies,” domestic and foreign, by right-thinking Germans.
The Conservative Revolutionaries called for a “primacy of politics” which was to be “a reassertion of an expansion in foreign policy and repression against the trade unions at home.” This “primacy of politics” for the Conservative Revolutionaries meant the erasure of a distinction between war and politics.
Citing Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Herf, a professor of modern European history, wrote: “The explicit implications of the primacy of politics in the conservative revolution were totalitarian. From now on there were to be no limits to ideological politics. The utilitarian and humanistic considerations of nineteenth-century liberalism were to be abandoned in order to establish a state of constant dynamism and movement.” That sounds a lot like the “creative destruction” that neoconservative theorist Michael Ledeen is so fond of.
Herf wrote in 1984 that Conservative Revolutionaries were characterized as “the intellectual advance guard of the rightist revolution that was to be effected in 1933,” which, although contemptuous of Hitler, “did much to pave his road to power.”
Unlike the Nazis, their belief in German superiority was based in historical traditions and ideas, not biological racism. Nevertheless, some saw German Jews as the “enemy” of Germany for being “incompatible with a united nation.”
It is one of the bitterest of ironies that Israel as a “Jewish nation” has adopted similar attitudes toward its Arab citizens. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently proclaimed: “Those who are with us deserve everything, but those who are against us deserve to have their heads chopped off with an axe.”
Within Israel, these “Conservative Revolutionary” ideas were manifested in one of their founding political parties, Herut, whose founders came out of the same central European political milieu of interwar Europe and from which Netanyahu’s Likud party is descended.
Ernst Junger
Author Ernst Junger was the most important contributor to the celebration of war by the Conservative Revolutionaries and was an influence and an enabler of the Nazis coming to power. He serialized his celebration of war and his belief in its “redeeming” qualities in a number of popular books with “war porn” titles such as, in English, The Storm of Steel, The Battle as an Inner Experience, and Fire and Blood.
The title of a collection of Junger essays in 1930, Krieg und Krieger (War and the Warriors) captures the spirit of America in the Twenty-first Century as much as it did the German spirit in 1930. While members of the U.S. military once went by terms such as soldier, sailor and marine, now they are routinely generically called “Warriors,” especially by the highest ranks, a term never before used to describe what were once “citizen soldiers.”
Putting a book with a “Warrior” title out on the shelf in a Barnes and Noble would almost guarantee a best-seller, even when competing with all the U.S. SEALS’ reminiscences and American sniper stories. But German philosopher Walter Benjamin understood the meaning of Junger’s Krieg und Krieger, explaining it in the appropriately titled Theories of German Fascism.
Fundamental to Junger’s celebration of war was a metaphysical belief in “totale Mobilmachung” or total mobilization to describe the functioning of a society that fully grasps the meaning of war. With World War I, Junger saw the battlefield as the scene of struggle “for life and death,” pushing all historical and political considerations aside. But he saw in the war the fact that “in it the genius of war permeated the spirit of progress.”
According to Jeffrey Herf in Reactionary Modernism, Junger saw total mobilization as “a worldwide trend toward state-directed mobilization in which individual freedom would be sacrificed to the demands of authoritarian planning.” Welcoming this, Junger believed “that different currents of energy were coalescing into one powerful torrent. The era of total mobilization would bring about an ‘unleashing’ (Entfesselung) of a nevertheless disciplined life.”
In practical terms, Junger’s metaphysical view of war meant that Germany had lost World War I because its economic and technological mobilization had only been partial and not total. He lamented that Germany had been unable to place the “spirit of the age” in the service of nationalism. Consequently, he believed that “bourgeois legality,” which placed restrictions on the powers of the authoritarian state, “must be abolished in order to liberate technological advance.”
Today, total mobilization for the U.S. begins with the Republicans’ budgeting efforts to strip away funding for domestic civilian uses and shifting it to military and intelligence spending. Army veteran, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, exemplifies this belief in “total mobilization” of society with his calls for dramatically increased military spending and his belief that “We must again show the U.S. is willing and prepared to [get into] a war in the first place” by making clear that potential “aggressors will pay an unspeakable price if they challenge the United States.”
That is the true purpose of Twenty-first Century Republican economics: total mobilization of the economy for war. Just as defeated German generals and the Conservative Revolutionaries believed that Germany lost World War I because their economy and nation was only “partially mobilized,” so too did many American Vietnam War-era generals and right-wing politicians believe the same of the Vietnam War. Retired Gen. David Petraeus and today’s neoconservatives have made similar arguments about President Barack Obama’s failure to sustain the Iraq War. [See, for instance, this fawning Washington Post interview with Petraeus.]
What all these militarists failed to understand is that, according to Clausewitz, when a war’s costs exceed its benefits, the sound strategy is to end the costly war. The Germans failed to understand this in World War II and the Soviet Union in their Afghan War.
Paradoxically in the Vietnam War, it was the anti-war movement that enhanced U.S. strength by bringing that wasteful war to an end, not the American militarists who would have continued it to a bitter end of economic collapse. We are now seeing a similar debate about whether to continue and expand U.S. military operations across the Middle East...
Read the rest here:
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/27/neocons-the-echo-of-german-fascism/
"The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests."
Don’t Be Fooled by the Political Game: The Illusion of Freedom in America
By John W. Whitehead
“The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country’s equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas.”—Journalist Lewis Lapham
Being a citizen in the American corporate state is much like playing against a stacked deck: you’re always going to lose.
The game is rigged, and “we the people” keep getting dealt the same losing hand. Even so, most stay in the game, against all odds, trusting that their luck will change.
The problem, of course, is that luck will not save us. As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the people dealing the cards—the politicians, the corporations, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, the bureaucrats, the military, the media, etc.—have only one prevailing concern, and that is to maintain their power and control over the citizenry, while milking us of our money and possessions.
It really doesn’t matter what you call them—Republicans, Democrats, the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that while they are dealing the cards, the deck will always be stacked in their favor.
Incredibly, no matter how many times we see this played out, Americans continue to naively buy into the idea that politics matter, as if there really were a difference between the Republicans and Democrats (there’s not).
As if Barack Obama proved to be any different from George W. Bush (he has not). As if Hillary Clinton’s values are any different from Donald Trump’s (with both of them, money talks). As if when we elect a president, we’re getting someone who truly represents “we the people” rather than the corporate state (in fact, in the oligarchy that is the American police state, an elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots).
Politics is a game, a joke, a hustle, a con, a distraction, a spectacle, a sport, and for many devout Americans, a religion.
In other words, it’s a sophisticated ruse aimed at keeping us divided and fighting over two parties whose priorities are exactly the same. It’s no secret that both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.
Most of all, both parties enjoy an intimate, incestuous history with each other and with the moneyed elite that rule this country. Don’t be fooled by the smear campaigns and name-calling. They’re just useful tactics of the psychology of hate that has been proven to engage voters and increase voter turnout while keeping us at each other’s throats.
Despite the jabs the candidates volley at each other for the benefit of the cameras, they’re a relatively chummy bunch away from the spotlight, presenting each other with awards (remember when Jeb Bush presented Hillary Clinton with a Liberty Medal for her service to the country), attending each other’s weddings (Bill and Hillary had front-row seats for Trump’s 2005 wedding), and embracing with genuine affection.
Trump’s various donations to the Clintons (he donated to Hillary’s Senate campaigns, as well as the Clinton Foundation) are not unusual. Remember, FOX News mogul Rupert Murdoch actually hosted a fundraiser for Hillary’s Senate reelection campaign back in 2006 and contributed to her presidential campaign two years later. In fact, FOX News has reportedly been one of Hillary’s biggest donors for the better part of two decades.
Are you starting to get the picture? It doesn’t matter who wins the White House, because they all work for the same boss: Corporate America. In fact, many corporations actually hedge their bets on who will win the White House by splitting their donations between Democratic and Republican candidates.
We’re in trouble, folks, and picking a new president won’t save us.
We are living in a fantasy world carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy. It used to be that the cogs, wheels and gear shifts in our government machinery worked to keep our republic running smoothly. However, without our fully realizing it, the mechanism has changed. Its purpose is no longer to keep our republic running smoothly. To the contrary, this particular contraption’s purpose is to keep the corporate police state in power. Its various parts are already a corrupt part of the whole.
Just consider how insidious, incestuous and beholden to the corporate elite the various “parts” of the mechanism have become.
Congress. Perhaps the most notorious offenders and most obvious culprits in the creation of the corporate-state, Congress has proven itself to be both inept and avaricious, oblivious champions of an authoritarian system that is systematically dismantling their constituents’ fundamental rights. Long before they’re elected, Congressmen are trained to dance to the tune of their wealthy benefactors, so much so that they spend two-thirds of their time in office raising money. As Reuters reports, “For many lawmakers, the daily routine in Washington involves fundraising as much as legislating. The culture of nonstop political campaigning shapes the rhythms of daily life in Congress, as well as the landscape around the Capitol. It also means that lawmakers often spend more time listening to the concerns of the wealthy than anyone else.”
The President. With the 2016 presidential election shaping up to be the most expensive one in our nation’s history, with estimates as high as $10 billion, “the way is open for an orgy of spending by well-heeled interest groups and super rich individuals on both political sides.” Yet even after the votes have been counted and favors tallied, the work of buying and selling access to the White House is far from over. President Obama spends significant amounts of time hosting and attending fundraisers, having held more than 400 fundraising events over the course of his two terms in office. Such access comes with a steep price tag. It used to be that $100,000 got you an overnight stay at the White House. Now it will cost you $500,000 for four meetings a year with President Obama. Yet as Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig asks, “[H]ow does a man, as a person, run the nation when he’s attending 228 fundraisers? And the answer is not very well. It’s pretty terrible for your ability to do your job. It’s pretty terrible for your ability to be responsive to the American people, because—let me tell you—the American people are not attending 228 fundraisers. Those people are different.”
The Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court—once the last refuge of justice, the one governmental body really capable of rolling back the slowly emerging tyranny enveloping America—has instead become the champion of the American police state, absolving government and corporate officials of their crimes while relentlessly punishing the average American for exercising his or her rights. Like the rest of the government, the Court has routinely prioritized profit, security, and convenience over the basic rights of the citizenry. Indeed, law professor Erwin Chemerinsky makes a compelling case that the Supreme Court, whose “justices have overwhelmingly come from positions of privilege,” almost unerringly throughout its history, sides with the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful. For example, contrast the Court’s affirmation of the “free speech” rights of corporations and wealthy donors in McCutcheon v. FEC, which does away with established limits on the number of candidates an entity can support with campaign contributions, and Citizens United v. FEC with its tendency to deny those same rights to average Americans when government interests abound, and you’ll find a noticeable disparity.
The Media. Of course, this triumvirate of total control would be completely ineffective without a propaganda machine provided by the world’s largest corporations. Besides shoving drivel down our throats at every possible moment, the so-called news agencies which are supposed to act as bulwarks against government propaganda have instead become the mouthpieces of the state. The pundits which pollute our airwaves are at best court jesters and at worst propagandists for the false reality created by the American government.
The American People. “We the people” now belong to a permanent underclass in America. It doesn’t matter what you call us—chattel, slaves, worker bees, drones, it’s all the same—what matters is that we are expected to march in lockstep with and submit to the will of the state in all matters, public and private. Through our complicity in matters large and small, we have allowed an out-of-control corporate-state apparatus to take over every element of American society.
Our failure to remain informed about what is taking place in our government, to know and exercise our rights, to vocally protest, to demand accountability on the part of our government representatives, and at a minimum to care about the plight of our fellow Americans has been our downfall.
Now we find ourselves once again caught up in the spectacle of another presidential election, and once again the majority of Americans are acting as if this election will make a difference and bring about change—as if the new boss will be different from the old boss.
When in doubt, just remember what comedian and astute commentator George Carlin had to say about the matter:
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.
They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork…. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. …The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice…. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on…. It’s called the American Dream, ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/john-w-whitehead/dont-be-fooled-by-the-political-game/
By John W. Whitehead
“The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country’s equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas.”—Journalist Lewis Lapham
Being a citizen in the American corporate state is much like playing against a stacked deck: you’re always going to lose.
The game is rigged, and “we the people” keep getting dealt the same losing hand. Even so, most stay in the game, against all odds, trusting that their luck will change.
The problem, of course, is that luck will not save us. As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the people dealing the cards—the politicians, the corporations, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, the bureaucrats, the military, the media, etc.—have only one prevailing concern, and that is to maintain their power and control over the citizenry, while milking us of our money and possessions.
It really doesn’t matter what you call them—Republicans, Democrats, the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that while they are dealing the cards, the deck will always be stacked in their favor.
Incredibly, no matter how many times we see this played out, Americans continue to naively buy into the idea that politics matter, as if there really were a difference between the Republicans and Democrats (there’s not).
As if Barack Obama proved to be any different from George W. Bush (he has not). As if Hillary Clinton’s values are any different from Donald Trump’s (with both of them, money talks). As if when we elect a president, we’re getting someone who truly represents “we the people” rather than the corporate state (in fact, in the oligarchy that is the American police state, an elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots).
Politics is a game, a joke, a hustle, a con, a distraction, a spectacle, a sport, and for many devout Americans, a religion.
In other words, it’s a sophisticated ruse aimed at keeping us divided and fighting over two parties whose priorities are exactly the same. It’s no secret that both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.
Most of all, both parties enjoy an intimate, incestuous history with each other and with the moneyed elite that rule this country. Don’t be fooled by the smear campaigns and name-calling. They’re just useful tactics of the psychology of hate that has been proven to engage voters and increase voter turnout while keeping us at each other’s throats.
Despite the jabs the candidates volley at each other for the benefit of the cameras, they’re a relatively chummy bunch away from the spotlight, presenting each other with awards (remember when Jeb Bush presented Hillary Clinton with a Liberty Medal for her service to the country), attending each other’s weddings (Bill and Hillary had front-row seats for Trump’s 2005 wedding), and embracing with genuine affection.
Trump’s various donations to the Clintons (he donated to Hillary’s Senate campaigns, as well as the Clinton Foundation) are not unusual. Remember, FOX News mogul Rupert Murdoch actually hosted a fundraiser for Hillary’s Senate reelection campaign back in 2006 and contributed to her presidential campaign two years later. In fact, FOX News has reportedly been one of Hillary’s biggest donors for the better part of two decades.
Are you starting to get the picture? It doesn’t matter who wins the White House, because they all work for the same boss: Corporate America. In fact, many corporations actually hedge their bets on who will win the White House by splitting their donations between Democratic and Republican candidates.
We’re in trouble, folks, and picking a new president won’t save us.
We are living in a fantasy world carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy. It used to be that the cogs, wheels and gear shifts in our government machinery worked to keep our republic running smoothly. However, without our fully realizing it, the mechanism has changed. Its purpose is no longer to keep our republic running smoothly. To the contrary, this particular contraption’s purpose is to keep the corporate police state in power. Its various parts are already a corrupt part of the whole.
Just consider how insidious, incestuous and beholden to the corporate elite the various “parts” of the mechanism have become.
Congress. Perhaps the most notorious offenders and most obvious culprits in the creation of the corporate-state, Congress has proven itself to be both inept and avaricious, oblivious champions of an authoritarian system that is systematically dismantling their constituents’ fundamental rights. Long before they’re elected, Congressmen are trained to dance to the tune of their wealthy benefactors, so much so that they spend two-thirds of their time in office raising money. As Reuters reports, “For many lawmakers, the daily routine in Washington involves fundraising as much as legislating. The culture of nonstop political campaigning shapes the rhythms of daily life in Congress, as well as the landscape around the Capitol. It also means that lawmakers often spend more time listening to the concerns of the wealthy than anyone else.”
The President. With the 2016 presidential election shaping up to be the most expensive one in our nation’s history, with estimates as high as $10 billion, “the way is open for an orgy of spending by well-heeled interest groups and super rich individuals on both political sides.” Yet even after the votes have been counted and favors tallied, the work of buying and selling access to the White House is far from over. President Obama spends significant amounts of time hosting and attending fundraisers, having held more than 400 fundraising events over the course of his two terms in office. Such access comes with a steep price tag. It used to be that $100,000 got you an overnight stay at the White House. Now it will cost you $500,000 for four meetings a year with President Obama. Yet as Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig asks, “[H]ow does a man, as a person, run the nation when he’s attending 228 fundraisers? And the answer is not very well. It’s pretty terrible for your ability to do your job. It’s pretty terrible for your ability to be responsive to the American people, because—let me tell you—the American people are not attending 228 fundraisers. Those people are different.”
The Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court—once the last refuge of justice, the one governmental body really capable of rolling back the slowly emerging tyranny enveloping America—has instead become the champion of the American police state, absolving government and corporate officials of their crimes while relentlessly punishing the average American for exercising his or her rights. Like the rest of the government, the Court has routinely prioritized profit, security, and convenience over the basic rights of the citizenry. Indeed, law professor Erwin Chemerinsky makes a compelling case that the Supreme Court, whose “justices have overwhelmingly come from positions of privilege,” almost unerringly throughout its history, sides with the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful. For example, contrast the Court’s affirmation of the “free speech” rights of corporations and wealthy donors in McCutcheon v. FEC, which does away with established limits on the number of candidates an entity can support with campaign contributions, and Citizens United v. FEC with its tendency to deny those same rights to average Americans when government interests abound, and you’ll find a noticeable disparity.
The Media. Of course, this triumvirate of total control would be completely ineffective without a propaganda machine provided by the world’s largest corporations. Besides shoving drivel down our throats at every possible moment, the so-called news agencies which are supposed to act as bulwarks against government propaganda have instead become the mouthpieces of the state. The pundits which pollute our airwaves are at best court jesters and at worst propagandists for the false reality created by the American government.
The American People. “We the people” now belong to a permanent underclass in America. It doesn’t matter what you call us—chattel, slaves, worker bees, drones, it’s all the same—what matters is that we are expected to march in lockstep with and submit to the will of the state in all matters, public and private. Through our complicity in matters large and small, we have allowed an out-of-control corporate-state apparatus to take over every element of American society.
Our failure to remain informed about what is taking place in our government, to know and exercise our rights, to vocally protest, to demand accountability on the part of our government representatives, and at a minimum to care about the plight of our fellow Americans has been our downfall.
Now we find ourselves once again caught up in the spectacle of another presidential election, and once again the majority of Americans are acting as if this election will make a difference and bring about change—as if the new boss will be different from the old boss.
When in doubt, just remember what comedian and astute commentator George Carlin had to say about the matter:
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.
They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork…. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. …The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice…. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on…. It’s called the American Dream, ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/john-w-whitehead/dont-be-fooled-by-the-political-game/
The socialist statist...
The Sanders-Republican Checklist
By Laurence M. Vance
Bernie Sanders is an Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats. He is a self-proclaimed socialist. He is a Democratic candidate for president. He is many things, but a Republican he is not.
Yet, even though most people think there are many differences between Sanders and the typical Republican member of Congress and between Sanders and the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, there are not as many differences as most people think.
It is because Sanders and Republicans support so many of the same things that I have prepared this Sanders-Republican checklist.
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Head Start:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on farm subsidies:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Medicare:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Medicaid:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Social Security:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on food stamps:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to provide the refundable Additional Child Tax Credit:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to give students Pell Grants:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on the Community Development Block Grant Program (CDBG):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on the National School Lunch Program (NSLP):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Supplemental Security Income (SSI):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers to provide the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (ETIC):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to pay unemployment benefits:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fund Section 8 rent subsidies:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fund community health centers:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and funding federal job training programs:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Women, Infants, and Children (WIC):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Clearly, Republicans are incorrigible welfare statists just like Democrats, and just like the “socialist” Bernie Sanders.
As if being such supporters of the welfare state that FDR and LBJ would be proud was not horrible enough, Republicans are just like Sanders when it comes to many other issues as well. Enough to continue the Sanders-Republican checklist.
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fight the war on drugs:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers to operate the National Instant Criminal Background Check System:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on foreign military interventions:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and giving it to NASA for space exploration:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and giving it to foreigners and their governments:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to enforce federal gambling laws:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fund the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fund the departments of Health and Human Services, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Energy:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fund the FTC, EEOC, FCC, SEC, NEA, NEH, EPA, FHA, ATF, and TSA:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Just like welfare spending, all of this spending is unconstitutional.
These issues I have raised are serious ones that involve billions of dollars of government spending. No one is saying that because Sanders likes chocolate and the majority of Republicans like chocolate that they are two peas in a pod. The similarities between Sanders and Republicans are real and significant.
All of the Republican talk about believing in the Constitution, fiscal conservatism, free markets, and limited government is just a bunch of hot air. They no more believe in these things than Bernie Sanders does.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/laurence-m-vance/bernie-sanders/
By Laurence M. Vance
Bernie Sanders is an Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats. He is a self-proclaimed socialist. He is a Democratic candidate for president. He is many things, but a Republican he is not.
Yet, even though most people think there are many differences between Sanders and the typical Republican member of Congress and between Sanders and the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, there are not as many differences as most people think.
It is because Sanders and Republicans support so many of the same things that I have prepared this Sanders-Republican checklist.
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Head Start:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on farm subsidies:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Medicare:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Medicaid:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Social Security:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on food stamps:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to provide the refundable Additional Child Tax Credit:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to give students Pell Grants:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on the Community Development Block Grant Program (CDBG):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on the National School Lunch Program (NSLP):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Supplemental Security Income (SSI):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers to provide the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (ETIC):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to pay unemployment benefits:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fund Section 8 rent subsidies:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fund community health centers:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and funding federal job training programs:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on Women, Infants, and Children (WIC):
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Clearly, Republicans are incorrigible welfare statists just like Democrats, and just like the “socialist” Bernie Sanders.
As if being such supporters of the welfare state that FDR and LBJ would be proud was not horrible enough, Republicans are just like Sanders when it comes to many other issues as well. Enough to continue the Sanders-Republican checklist.
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fight the war on drugs:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers to operate the National Instant Criminal Background Check System:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and spending it on foreign military interventions:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and giving it to NASA for space exploration:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and giving it to foreigners and their governments:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to enforce federal gambling laws:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fund the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fund the departments of Health and Human Services, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Energy:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Supports taking money from U.S. taxpayers and using it to fund the FTC, EEOC, FCC, SEC, NEA, NEH, EPA, FHA, ATF, and TSA:
[√] Bernie Sanders [√] The majority of Republicans
Just like welfare spending, all of this spending is unconstitutional.
These issues I have raised are serious ones that involve billions of dollars of government spending. No one is saying that because Sanders likes chocolate and the majority of Republicans like chocolate that they are two peas in a pod. The similarities between Sanders and Republicans are real and significant.
All of the Republican talk about believing in the Constitution, fiscal conservatism, free markets, and limited government is just a bunch of hot air. They no more believe in these things than Bernie Sanders does.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/laurence-m-vance/bernie-sanders/
"Western values of liberty are under ruthless attack by the academic elite on college campuses across America. These people want to replace personal liberty with government control; they want to replace equality before the law with entitlement."
Academic Fascism
By Walter E. Williams
George Orwell said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” If one wants to discover the truth of Orwell’s statement, he need only step upon most college campuses.
Faculty leaders of the University of California consider certain statements racism and feel they should not be used in class. They call it micro-aggression. To them, micro-aggressive racist statements are: “America is the land of opportunity.” That is seen as perpetuating the myth of meritocracy. “There is only one race, the human race.” Such a statement is seen as denying the individual as a racial/cultural being. “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” That’s “racist” because it gives the impression that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.”
These expressions don’t exhaust the list of micro-aggressions. Other seemingly innocuous statements deemed unacceptable are: “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” “When I look at you, I don’t see color,” or “Affirmative action is racist.” Perhaps worst of all is, “Where are you from or where were you born?” For more of this, see a document released by The College Fix (http://tinyurl.com/ne8ckqn) titled “Diversity in the Classroom,” UCLA Diversity and Faculty Development.
This micro-aggression nonsense, called micro-totalitarianism by my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell (http://tinyurl.com/nxulxc), is nothing less than an attack on free speech. From the Nazis to the Stalinists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, and why is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. Free speech is a basic tool for indoctrination, propagandizing, proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses.
Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, writes about the campus attack on free speech and different ideas in his article titled “Obama Unleashes the Left: How the government created a federal hunting license for the far left” (http://tinyurl.com/mp5x428).
He says that in the Harvard Crimson, an undergraduate columnist wrote: “Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice. When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.” The student was calling for the suppression of the research of conservative Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield.
Oberlin College proposed that its teachers be aware of politically controversial topics such as “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, capitalism and other issues of privilege and oppression.” The presumption that students must be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.
Last year Vassar College faculty and students held a meeting to discuss the school’s movement to boycott Israel. Before the meeting, an English professor announced the dialogue would “not be guided by cardboard notions of civility.” That professor’s vision differs little from Adolf Hitler’s brown-shirted thugs of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party in their effort to crush dissent.
Azusa Pacific University “postponed” a speech by political scientist Charles Murray to avoid “hurting our faculty and students of color.” Brandeis University officials rescinded their invitation to Somali writer and American Enterprise Institute scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose criticisms of radical Islam were said to have violated the school’s “core values.” Brandeis officials claimed that allowing her to speak would be hurtful to Muslim students.
Western values of liberty are under ruthless attack by the academic elite on college campuses across America. These people want to replace personal liberty with government control; they want to replace equality before the law with entitlement. As such, they pose a far greater threat to our way of life than any terrorist organization or rogue nation. Leftist ideas are a cancer on our society. Ironically, we not only are timid in response, but also nourish those ideas with our tax dollars and charitable donations.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/walter-e-williams/academic-fascism/
By Walter E. Williams
George Orwell said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” If one wants to discover the truth of Orwell’s statement, he need only step upon most college campuses.
Faculty leaders of the University of California consider certain statements racism and feel they should not be used in class. They call it micro-aggression. To them, micro-aggressive racist statements are: “America is the land of opportunity.” That is seen as perpetuating the myth of meritocracy. “There is only one race, the human race.” Such a statement is seen as denying the individual as a racial/cultural being. “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” That’s “racist” because it gives the impression that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.”
These expressions don’t exhaust the list of micro-aggressions. Other seemingly innocuous statements deemed unacceptable are: “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” “When I look at you, I don’t see color,” or “Affirmative action is racist.” Perhaps worst of all is, “Where are you from or where were you born?” For more of this, see a document released by The College Fix (http://tinyurl.com/ne8ckqn) titled “Diversity in the Classroom,” UCLA Diversity and Faculty Development.
This micro-aggression nonsense, called micro-totalitarianism by my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell (http://tinyurl.com/nxulxc), is nothing less than an attack on free speech. From the Nazis to the Stalinists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, and why is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. Free speech is a basic tool for indoctrination, propagandizing, proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses.
Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, writes about the campus attack on free speech and different ideas in his article titled “Obama Unleashes the Left: How the government created a federal hunting license for the far left” (http://tinyurl.com/mp5x428).
He says that in the Harvard Crimson, an undergraduate columnist wrote: “Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice. When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.” The student was calling for the suppression of the research of conservative Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield.
Oberlin College proposed that its teachers be aware of politically controversial topics such as “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, capitalism and other issues of privilege and oppression.” The presumption that students must be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.
Last year Vassar College faculty and students held a meeting to discuss the school’s movement to boycott Israel. Before the meeting, an English professor announced the dialogue would “not be guided by cardboard notions of civility.” That professor’s vision differs little from Adolf Hitler’s brown-shirted thugs of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party in their effort to crush dissent.
Azusa Pacific University “postponed” a speech by political scientist Charles Murray to avoid “hurting our faculty and students of color.” Brandeis University officials rescinded their invitation to Somali writer and American Enterprise Institute scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose criticisms of radical Islam were said to have violated the school’s “core values.” Brandeis officials claimed that allowing her to speak would be hurtful to Muslim students.
Western values of liberty are under ruthless attack by the academic elite on college campuses across America. These people want to replace personal liberty with government control; they want to replace equality before the law with entitlement. As such, they pose a far greater threat to our way of life than any terrorist organization or rogue nation. Leftist ideas are a cancer on our society. Ironically, we not only are timid in response, but also nourish those ideas with our tax dollars and charitable donations.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/walter-e-williams/academic-fascism/
Monday, August 10, 2015
They know your every move...
“Smart Cities” to Spy on You in Ways Orwell Never Imagined
Written by Alex Newman
The Orwellian cities of the future being designed and imposed right this instant all over the world — so-called “Smart Cities” — will be watching you. In fact, they already are watching you. And unless humanity takes action soon to rein in its would-be omniscient rulers, the technological dystopia being erected all around you will ensure that governments and dictators know virtually everything about everyone — perhaps more than individuals know even about themselves. The plot to create the total surveillance state under the guise of making cities “smart” will cost taxpayers trillions of dollars, too. But the price tag in terms of lost privacy and liberty will be far higher.
As the concept of “smart” cities continues to evolve with technology, countless definitions and terms to describe the scheming have been proposed. Discussing a planned “smart” city in South Korea, Frederic Ojardias, Ph.D., at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of International Studies said the concept is simple. “The city is filled with sensors and cameras at every corner (monitoring temperature, traffic, electricity) that are all interconnected and linked to a central ‘brain’ that computes all this information in real time in order to optimize the management of the city, minute by minute,” he said to describe the vision.
According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, “smart cities” bring together technology, government, and society to enable a smart economy, smart environment, smart living, smart governance, and more. There are also a number of technologies associated with smart cities. Among them: “Intelligent lighting; Smart building controls; Wireless charging for automobiles; Facial recognition; Wind turbines; Intelligent Buildings; A connected self-aware environment;” and much more.
And that is just the beginning, with tech giants coming up with new technology every day that could be used to improve lives — or destroy liberty and privacy. Already, the former head of the NSA and CIA has been boasting that “we kill people based on metadata.” With “smart” cities providing unfathomable amounts of data to authorities, Americans can expect the lawlessness to continue accelerating if nothing changes.
Of course, “smart” technology is already ubiquitous, from so-called “smart” phones that double as portable espionage devices to “smart” meters used (when they are not exploding at least) to spy on people’s water and electricity use. Smart TVs now spy on their users, too. Schools are doing it as well. According to news reports, in London, data gathered from cameras is cross-referenced with government lists of people who have paid their driving fees, allowing violators to be identified and punished. Authorities in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Stockholm, and other cities are also openly and purposely trying to become “smart.” In South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, fully “smart” cities are being designed and built from the ground up.
With facial-recognition software now extremely advanced, and billions of people around the world posting their data and pictures online through social-networking services, hand-held “smart” technology has already created potentially totalitarian tools far beyond anything George Orwell could have imagined in his worst nightmares. Even years ago, U.S. cities were exposed rolling out so-called “Intellistreets” streetlights that double as Big Brother espionage tools to listen in on conversations. Entire smart cities are the next logical step, and the establishment is going all out to promote them as it works to abolish cash and shift everything online at the same time.
During a recent visit to India, for example, Obama pledged some $4 billion in U.S. taxpayer “investments and loans” to help Indian authorities build infrastructure, including $2 billion for the government there to create “smart cities.” Speaking to a large crowd, Obama said America was committed to the “smart cities” concept, linked to United Nations “sustainability” programs such as Agenda 21, and would help the Indian government pay to build them. To start with, 100 Indian cities are going to be made “smart.”
“We are ready to join you in building new infrastructure … roads and airports, the ports and bullet trains to propel India into the future,” Obama told Indians, without offering any hints on where the debt-riddled federal government would get the funds to propel India into the future or why U.S. taxpayers should fund it. “We are ready to help design smart cities.” Critics lambasted the scheme from all angles, pointing out that the U.S. government is already drowning in debt and that the whole “sustainability” theme behind the radical “smart cities” agenda represents a major threat to liberty, markets, and more.
Around the same time, arch sustainability profiteer (and self-styled inventor of the Internet) Al Gore joined with former Mexican President Felipe Calderón at the World Economic Forum to demand that all cities worldwide be made “smart.” For a mere $90 trillion (as a starting point), the two globalist crusaders against carbon dioxide explained, every city in the world could be made much denser — a so-called “smart city” in which citizens would be packed in like sardines, and hence, easier to control.
Under the Gore-Calderón vision, personal transportation such as cars would be phased out as the “smart cities” of the future force everyone to either walk or rely on government-run transportation to get around. Ironically, perhaps, more than 1,700 private jets descended on Davos for the confab so its occupants could plot new ways to reduce the CO2 emissions of the unwashed masses as they are corralled into their "smart" cities (often at gunpoint). Of course, the plan to pack humans into tiny cities is not new, and has been advancing under UN “Agenda 21” and other schemes for more than two decades. And the UN has been promoting “smart” cities since at least 2009, when UN chief Ban Ki Moon called for “better, more equitable urban planning” and “new ideas from smart cities around the world” to guide “sustainable urbanization.”
Alleged benefits of the interconnected ecosystem of data-gathering technology, such as better traffic management, catching criminals, and a smaller “carbon footprint” for city residents, are being shouted from the rooftops by those seeking to push the agenda — governments, profiteers, futurists, and others. Businesses, too, will be able to harness the gargantuan amounts of data being produced to target individual consumers. The darker side of the shift toward intelligence-gathering everything, everywhere, however, has been largely buried from public discourse — not to mention the dangers of combining all of the information with emerging “artificial intelligence” technologies.
In a recent puff piece promoting the potential benefits of “smart cities” in the Wall Street Journal, CEO Mike Weston with the “data-science” consulting firm Profusion offered some terrifying insight into the awesome powers that will be available to the rulers of these future Orwellian cities. “In a fully ‘smart’ city, every movement an individual makes can be tracked,” Weston observed, noting that governments and municipalities from Boston to Beijing were pledging billions of tax dollars to the plot. “The data will reveal where she works, how she commutes, her shopping habits, places she visits and her proximity to other people.”
While Weston focuses largely on the profit opportunities surrounding all of that data for marketers, and ethical concerns for businesses, the same data will also enable authorities to compile unimaginably detailed profiles of every single individual. “By analyzing this information using data-science techniques, a company could learn not only the day-to-day routine of an individual but also his preferences, behavior and emotional state,” the CEO explained. “Private companies could know more about people than they know about themselves.” And, of course, so could governments, hacker spies working for the regime in Beijing, and even private-sector criminals with access to the surveillance data.
Weston claims that a smart city “doesn’t have to be as Orwellian as it sounds.” That is true. But considering governments’ track records on snooping — think NSA, KGB, Stasi, and so on — the likelihood of smart cities not ending up as Orwellian as they sound is probably slim to none. With the added “smartness” of emerging technologies, and with some two thirds of humanity expected to live in cities within a few decades, the possibilities for controlling and oppressing mankind in previously unimaginable ways are almost endless. Rulers will soon, if they do not already, be able to know more about the individuals they rule than those individuals know themselves.
Of course, technology, in and of itself, is not the problem or the threat. Instead, the threat comes from totalitarian-minded governments, globalists, politicians, dictators, and bureaucrats anxious to further oppress the public and further empower themselves. From the UN and the World Bank to the Obama administration and the European Union super-state, the establishment is planning to bring “smartness” to a city near you in the near future. Based on their track record so far, however, it should be beyond clear that the “smart” cities are a dumb and dangerous idea — especially if you value liberty and privacy.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/computers/item/21313-smart-cities-to-spy-on-you-in-ways-orwell-never-imagined
Written by Alex Newman
The Orwellian cities of the future being designed and imposed right this instant all over the world — so-called “Smart Cities” — will be watching you. In fact, they already are watching you. And unless humanity takes action soon to rein in its would-be omniscient rulers, the technological dystopia being erected all around you will ensure that governments and dictators know virtually everything about everyone — perhaps more than individuals know even about themselves. The plot to create the total surveillance state under the guise of making cities “smart” will cost taxpayers trillions of dollars, too. But the price tag in terms of lost privacy and liberty will be far higher.
As the concept of “smart” cities continues to evolve with technology, countless definitions and terms to describe the scheming have been proposed. Discussing a planned “smart” city in South Korea, Frederic Ojardias, Ph.D., at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of International Studies said the concept is simple. “The city is filled with sensors and cameras at every corner (monitoring temperature, traffic, electricity) that are all interconnected and linked to a central ‘brain’ that computes all this information in real time in order to optimize the management of the city, minute by minute,” he said to describe the vision.
According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, “smart cities” bring together technology, government, and society to enable a smart economy, smart environment, smart living, smart governance, and more. There are also a number of technologies associated with smart cities. Among them: “Intelligent lighting; Smart building controls; Wireless charging for automobiles; Facial recognition; Wind turbines; Intelligent Buildings; A connected self-aware environment;” and much more.
And that is just the beginning, with tech giants coming up with new technology every day that could be used to improve lives — or destroy liberty and privacy. Already, the former head of the NSA and CIA has been boasting that “we kill people based on metadata.” With “smart” cities providing unfathomable amounts of data to authorities, Americans can expect the lawlessness to continue accelerating if nothing changes.
Of course, “smart” technology is already ubiquitous, from so-called “smart” phones that double as portable espionage devices to “smart” meters used (when they are not exploding at least) to spy on people’s water and electricity use. Smart TVs now spy on their users, too. Schools are doing it as well. According to news reports, in London, data gathered from cameras is cross-referenced with government lists of people who have paid their driving fees, allowing violators to be identified and punished. Authorities in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Stockholm, and other cities are also openly and purposely trying to become “smart.” In South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, fully “smart” cities are being designed and built from the ground up.
With facial-recognition software now extremely advanced, and billions of people around the world posting their data and pictures online through social-networking services, hand-held “smart” technology has already created potentially totalitarian tools far beyond anything George Orwell could have imagined in his worst nightmares. Even years ago, U.S. cities were exposed rolling out so-called “Intellistreets” streetlights that double as Big Brother espionage tools to listen in on conversations. Entire smart cities are the next logical step, and the establishment is going all out to promote them as it works to abolish cash and shift everything online at the same time.
During a recent visit to India, for example, Obama pledged some $4 billion in U.S. taxpayer “investments and loans” to help Indian authorities build infrastructure, including $2 billion for the government there to create “smart cities.” Speaking to a large crowd, Obama said America was committed to the “smart cities” concept, linked to United Nations “sustainability” programs such as Agenda 21, and would help the Indian government pay to build them. To start with, 100 Indian cities are going to be made “smart.”
“We are ready to join you in building new infrastructure … roads and airports, the ports and bullet trains to propel India into the future,” Obama told Indians, without offering any hints on where the debt-riddled federal government would get the funds to propel India into the future or why U.S. taxpayers should fund it. “We are ready to help design smart cities.” Critics lambasted the scheme from all angles, pointing out that the U.S. government is already drowning in debt and that the whole “sustainability” theme behind the radical “smart cities” agenda represents a major threat to liberty, markets, and more.
Around the same time, arch sustainability profiteer (and self-styled inventor of the Internet) Al Gore joined with former Mexican President Felipe Calderón at the World Economic Forum to demand that all cities worldwide be made “smart.” For a mere $90 trillion (as a starting point), the two globalist crusaders against carbon dioxide explained, every city in the world could be made much denser — a so-called “smart city” in which citizens would be packed in like sardines, and hence, easier to control.
Under the Gore-Calderón vision, personal transportation such as cars would be phased out as the “smart cities” of the future force everyone to either walk or rely on government-run transportation to get around. Ironically, perhaps, more than 1,700 private jets descended on Davos for the confab so its occupants could plot new ways to reduce the CO2 emissions of the unwashed masses as they are corralled into their "smart" cities (often at gunpoint). Of course, the plan to pack humans into tiny cities is not new, and has been advancing under UN “Agenda 21” and other schemes for more than two decades. And the UN has been promoting “smart” cities since at least 2009, when UN chief Ban Ki Moon called for “better, more equitable urban planning” and “new ideas from smart cities around the world” to guide “sustainable urbanization.”
Alleged benefits of the interconnected ecosystem of data-gathering technology, such as better traffic management, catching criminals, and a smaller “carbon footprint” for city residents, are being shouted from the rooftops by those seeking to push the agenda — governments, profiteers, futurists, and others. Businesses, too, will be able to harness the gargantuan amounts of data being produced to target individual consumers. The darker side of the shift toward intelligence-gathering everything, everywhere, however, has been largely buried from public discourse — not to mention the dangers of combining all of the information with emerging “artificial intelligence” technologies.
In a recent puff piece promoting the potential benefits of “smart cities” in the Wall Street Journal, CEO Mike Weston with the “data-science” consulting firm Profusion offered some terrifying insight into the awesome powers that will be available to the rulers of these future Orwellian cities. “In a fully ‘smart’ city, every movement an individual makes can be tracked,” Weston observed, noting that governments and municipalities from Boston to Beijing were pledging billions of tax dollars to the plot. “The data will reveal where she works, how she commutes, her shopping habits, places she visits and her proximity to other people.”
While Weston focuses largely on the profit opportunities surrounding all of that data for marketers, and ethical concerns for businesses, the same data will also enable authorities to compile unimaginably detailed profiles of every single individual. “By analyzing this information using data-science techniques, a company could learn not only the day-to-day routine of an individual but also his preferences, behavior and emotional state,” the CEO explained. “Private companies could know more about people than they know about themselves.” And, of course, so could governments, hacker spies working for the regime in Beijing, and even private-sector criminals with access to the surveillance data.
Weston claims that a smart city “doesn’t have to be as Orwellian as it sounds.” That is true. But considering governments’ track records on snooping — think NSA, KGB, Stasi, and so on — the likelihood of smart cities not ending up as Orwellian as they sound is probably slim to none. With the added “smartness” of emerging technologies, and with some two thirds of humanity expected to live in cities within a few decades, the possibilities for controlling and oppressing mankind in previously unimaginable ways are almost endless. Rulers will soon, if they do not already, be able to know more about the individuals they rule than those individuals know themselves.
Of course, technology, in and of itself, is not the problem or the threat. Instead, the threat comes from totalitarian-minded governments, globalists, politicians, dictators, and bureaucrats anxious to further oppress the public and further empower themselves. From the UN and the World Bank to the Obama administration and the European Union super-state, the establishment is planning to bring “smartness” to a city near you in the near future. Based on their track record so far, however, it should be beyond clear that the “smart” cities are a dumb and dangerous idea — especially if you value liberty and privacy.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/computers/item/21313-smart-cities-to-spy-on-you-in-ways-orwell-never-imagined
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