Pridger vs. the New World Order

FOOTNOTE ON GOD AND COUNTRY

"Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants." William Penn

William Penn was right, of course. The federal and state governments have long ago thrown off the constitutional fetters that once mandated "limited republican government, by consent of the governed." That circumstance has effectively left government answerable to God alone (for the people have remained silent and accepting of more and more government power). If the notion of God above can be successfully eliminated from the official political culture, the Almighty State will be upon us in all its destructive and tyrannical glory. In truth, it is already upon us. But for some important references in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution (which is still acknowledged as the Supreme Law of the Land — even by the ACLU), state tyranny is all but an officially established fact.

The desired elimination of all religious reference and official acknowledgement of God in the halls of government power may appear a matter of simple and unimportant semantics to the average humanist — and even some Christians. But there's more at stake here than they can possibly realize — otherwise there could be no call for the official elimination of God from our political mask regardless of religious belief, or lack thereof.

Has God favored our nation and the fifty states and their peoples? Do men (and women, too, of course) — as opposed to governments and multi-national corporations — possess "God-given," unalienable rights? Or shall we accept what the almighty lawyers at the ACLU and in the federal courts seem to wish to mandate — that the state has no power above it, and is, itself, the nearest thing to a heavenly father we can ever hope to have?

Ironically, the Constitution is acknowledged as the Supreme Law of the Land by the ACLU. But the Constitution is null and void without official acknowledgement of God, for it is predicated upon, and given validity by, the Declaration of Independence which preceded it. The Declaration of Independence (and, of course, the brave God-fearing men who fought the American Revolution), established the right to form a new nation, independent of the mother country, invoking Divine guidance and officially establishing (for the first time in the history of governments), the unalienable God-given rights of men. If those references to God are officially discounted today, that makes the whole document and all that has proceeded from it (including the Constitution and national government itself), a huge, two century old fraud.

If there is an Almighty God, it is imperative that men and their governments acknowledge subservience to Him. If there is no God, it's even more imperative to keep government fettered and constrained by an official fiction that there is. Else tyranny has a broad and unimpeded path to follow.

John Q. Pridger, 11 February 2004

JOB OUTSOURCING

"If we lose top level knowledge work -- architecture, engineering and IT -- to offshore then our economy is in real trouble." (Brandon B. Read, in the April, 2004 issue of the "Call Center Magazine")

The economy was in real trouble the moment the national leadership committed to globalism and began using taxpayers' money to the subsidize the export of American factories and industrial jobs.

The economy was in trouble long before that, of course. It was in trouble as soon as Congress forgot what "limited government" and "balanced budgets" were. It was in trouble when Congress forgot what "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" was.

But now that "knowledge workers" are seeing their jobs heading to the four points of the compass, articulate people are beginning to complain loud enough in the right quarters, and are beginning to be heard.

Others are beginning to make themselves heard too. On January 23, 2004 the federal budget signed by president Bush contained an amendment preventing the outsourcing of "new federal contracts." This seems like a somewhat good idea, of course. Imagine if all federal agencies began doing contract outsourcing of all their lower and mid-level desk jobs! Pridger wouldn't put it past our national planners to encourage such a thing.

No telling how many federal contracts had already been outsourced to save tax dollars. Presumably the IRS staffers are still in the various Internal Revenue Service Centers rather than in India or the Philippines.

Apparently, our politicians and elected officials are beginning to think. Obviously, they're trying to head off any future movement to outsource "their" jobs.

One of the wonderful things about having exported such a large percentage of our good, high-paying, industrial jobs, and the outsourcing of knowledge workers jobs, is that none of the workers filling the new offshore jobs have to pay any income tax. This not only thwarted the intents of "trickle-down" economics, but all attempts to balance the budget on the backs of labor. This has had its downside, of course -- mainly by having having gutted the national economy of the benefits of millions of "good jobs." The up side is that labor no longer pays the lion's share of the costs of government that it once did, back in the good bad old days before globalization.

While Joe Six-Pack was losing his good job, and the great middle class was shrinking and getting poorer -- and the poor classes getting poorer and much bigger -- the last three decades produced an awful lot of millionaires and a considerable number of billionaires. After all, what would have been the wages of all the down-sized workers had to go somewhere -- and not much of it went to the new $.50 to $2.00 per hour offshore workers.

In spite of all the tax cuts for the rich, and all the additional tax breaks they continue to enjoy, the rich now pay more of the costs of government than ever before in our nation's history. There has apparently been a total reversal of the classes that pay the major costs of government. The rich pay more and the poor pay less. The working poor (at least those who still have fairly decent jobs), still pay too much.

JOHN KERRY'S "JOBS" CREATION PROGRAM AND THE ABCs OF ECONOMICS

John Kerry has revealed how he is going to save and create American jobs. A president Kerry would stop subsidizing American corporations willing to move their production overseas! He doesn't believe American workers' ought be be forced to pay companies for exporting their jobs, as they have been doing for a couple of decades or more.

Well, so far so good. American workers should not have to pay to encourage their employers to go elsewhere leaving them with an empty bag. Unfortunately, few Americans (even at this late date), realize they have been doing this.

Neither political party has advertised the fact, nor has the media spent much time telling the American people how they are being abused by the "free trade" policies promoted and passed by both Democrats and Republicans.

The left hand of government (the Democrats), thought it was a good idea to build up the international competition in poor countries so that their poor peoples would have more and better employment opportunities. The right hand of government (the Republicans), thought it was a good idea to give American Corporations a competitive advantage by helping them move offshore where they could cash in on the bonanza of cheap labor and much higher profits. Together, they decided that it would speed things up considerably to pay American corporations to move offshore. They both considered that this made good economic sense.

Kerry would free the taxpaying public from having to pay to send jobs abroad. This is how he would "save" and/or "create" ten million American jobs. To help make this more palatable to corporate America, he's also going to cut corporate income taxes by 10%.

He is not proposing to do anything to actually bring industry back to America, or to really discourage companies from moving offshore. That would be anti-free trade and anti-free market -- globalistic heresy. He thinks they ought to have the right to move offshore to gain the benefit of cheap labor -- that's business as usual, as it ought to be in a free market -- but he would force corporations that do move offshore to move at their own expense, rather than requiring the taxpayer to pay the fare.

So Kerry has promised to address at least the most malicious aspect of the job export problem. At least that's more than the Republicans have as yet proposed.

"Economics is a lot simpler than economists and ideologues would have you believe. Capitalists are motivated by greed. End of story. To change their harmful behavior, you have to take away from them the only thing they care about -- money." (Charley Reese)

In the arena of international trade, protective tariffs (and even punitive tariffs when appropriate), together with rational levels of regulation of capital, are the only rational way to stop capital depredations in their tracks and insure a sustainable economy and prosperous America.

You don't pay capital to move production abroad so it can take advantage of cheap labor. It will do that anyway if it is in the least more profitable to do so. The only solution to the problem is to make it prohibitively expensive for capital to betray both the flag and American labor.

American workers have not only been required to stand helplessly aside while their own government betrayed them, but to purchase the bullets with which capital (and their own government), has been assassinating them.

We must not forget that the real costs of our free trade policy, and all those inexpensive imported consumer goods, are even now becoming exponentially higher in terms of what the taxpayer is being required provide in subsidies. Bringing Homeland Security to the global arena of international trade, including our seaports and maritime assets, is coming with a mind-boggling price tag -- none of which will ever show up at the Wal-Mart checkout counter. Nor will they do anything for Wall Street, except maybe eventually help deflate it.

WHAT PROTECTIVE TARIFFS DO IN A NUTSHELL

If an American factory, with American workers, can produce a pair of shoes for $10.00 and the shoes sell for $25.00 at the Wal-Mart checkout counter, and...

If a foreign factory, because of cheap labor, can produce an identical pair of shoes for $5.00, and sold at Wal-Mart for $25.00, then...

A $5.00 tariff on the importation of each pair of imported shoes produced for $5.00 brings the price to $10.00.

The $10.00 "cost" then is equal, whether at the American factory door, or at the the seaport warehouse door.

Price parity has been achieved at the point where the pair of shoes begins its march through domestic trade channels, enroute to the Wal-Mart shelves.

This is what "protectionism" does for American factories and American workers. It is an equalizer with an added bonus. The $5.00 tariff becomes government revenue which means that $5.00 will not have to be extracted from American labor through income tax.

Before 1913 there was no income tax. Tariffs and duties were two significant means by which the federal government was financed. Ah, but those were simpler, more rational, times!

All modern day economic arguments against protective tariffs are made by and on behalf of international capital, though the consumer is always used as the supposed beneficiary of their free trade agenda. It is said that to engage in protectionism is to deprive the consumer of the full array of potential bargains the international marketplace would otherwise offer. But in the arena of consumer markets, prices always rise to what the market will bear. That's an immutable law of business.

The only time when this "law" of business does not apply is when competing businesses underbid one another in an attempt to gain market share, dominance, or monopoly. This is referred to as healthy competition.

When imports from cheap wage countries are allowed to compete for market share in a high wage country, domestic production will be knocked out every time. Once domestic production has been forced from the field, normal pricing law reasserts itself, and the price will be set at what the market will bear.

The American standard of living has not increased for anybody (except, perhaps, the most affluent fifth of the population), during our era of free trade. For most of us, it has actually decreased, though we may have a lot more electronic gadgets and diversions than before. Under trade protectionism we would have got those gadgets anyway, except they would have been evidence that more Americans were productively employed than ever before.

Back in the bad old days when Americans made just about everything that they bought and consumed, things were cheap. Just as cheap (in real adjusted terms), if not even cheaper, than they are now. And the quality of American made goods was consistently high. "Made in Germany" perhaps meant higher quality in some items, but German imports were more expensive, and rightly so.

Before the era of globalism and capital deregulation, protectionism was called for by American business. It was American industry that our government was called upon to protect. Industry has for a long time had more voice than workers or people. That protectionism also happened to protect workers and jobs was merely auxiliary to that national imperative. Now unleashed, and integrated into the global marketplace, major business interests no longer want protection. Without it they can make much higher profits.

In fact, if American business was once again required to be loyal to America, and had to survive paying exclusively American wages to American workers, it would go into paralytic withdrawal. It simply can't be done cold turkey -- but it MUST be done by careful and deliberate degrees if "We the People" are to ever regain any semblance of control of our nation, and regain the full benefit of national stakeholdership.

THE CAMEL'S HEAD IN THE DOOR -- FIRST MAJOR CRACK IN OUR ECONOMIC ARMOR

Japan was the first major "cheap labor" nation to be given carta blanc to penetrate the American market after World War Two. Initially, "Made in Japan" usually meant "junk" to most Americans. But quality soon got better -- much better. Before anybody realized what was going on, the Japanese were able to dominate the American market in many electronics fields, with high quality products. Some of America's most groundbreaking innovations, such as VCR's, never even had a chance for production in America. Then we began to completely lose radio and TV production industries and more.

We exported billions of tons of dirt cheap scrap steel to Japan, and pretty soon the Japanese came along with quality automobiles that many Americans preferred to the large domestic models. The price of gasoline was on the rise, and Japanese cars were smaller and more economical than American cars. Since then, the Japanese have continued to produce an increasingly large share of America's cars and heavy machinery.

The major inroads that Japan made into our markets were accomplished while Japan was still a relatively "cheap labor" country. They had some great advantages. Japan was already an industrialized nation, though recently almost totally devastated by war. And it was a country full of smart energetic people determined to overcome their recent national humiliation. But most of all, with regard to its penetration of the American market, Japan was given privileged access as a form of "war reparations for the defeated."

No nation other than America had ever been so generous to a recently defeated former enemy. It seemed only right after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And so it may have been. We were big enough to absorb a great deal of Japanese production without undue economic consequences. At least, that's what we thought.

Little did Americans suspect that the penetration of the American market by the Japanese was only a pilot project for bigger things to come -- that the American market was soon to be similarly opened to cheap labor countries around the world which (utilizing the tremendous advantages only America's own capital and taxpayers could provide), would drive American production away from its own shores in the whole array of consumer market products. America, the greatest production engine of all times, was about to serve a New World Order as a large consumer market, actively undermining its own productive industrial base.

Pridger has always thought it nothing less than "funny" that we have often expressed our national displeasure that Japan has never been eager to buy American cars. We accused them of "protectionism" and "dumping," and refusing to "Buy American!" But why would the Japanese buy American when they can produce whatever they need? They only need raw materials, not finished products, and they have always been ready and willing to buy them from us as cheaply as we are willing to sell. We dumped a lot of scrap metal on them, and they thanked us. Why wouldn't they "dump" their products on the American market? That's business. That's how market share is gained.

For some odd reason, the Japanese have continued to run their nation as if they had their own national interests foremost in mind. How peculiar!

THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR TWO

Germany and the other nations devastated by World War Two were given plenty of help too, of course. But there was a significant difference. Europe rebuilt itself with our help by producing first for its own continental consumer markets, quickly restoring and exceeding their pre-war living standards. The pre-war living standards in Japan had never been very high in Western terms. So Japan rebuilt itself by producing first for the American market, and only secondarily upgrading the wages and living standards of the Japanese people.

Both the Japanese and German economic models proved to be miraculously successful. In an ironic twist of history, both nations were to soon to become America's chief creditors. Thirty years after the war a detached observer, with no knowledge of previous events, looking at economic strengths, might have thought it had been America that had lost the war. And Great Britain? The observer would clearly see that it had lost the war, for its great empire was gone. Clearly, the winners had been the Soviet Union, Japan, and Germany.

PRIDGER'S HOME TOWN -- A HEARTLAND MICROCOSM -- AND AN ECONOMIC MIRACLE

Pridger hasn't done any scientific or statistical studies on his home town of Hurtsburg (the name has been changed to avoid embarrassing the residents or giving away the proximity of Pridger's Retreat), but it's easy to see that there is an economic miracle underway. Of course, Pridger views town from a distance, ensconced as he is, at Pridger's Retreat with his own forty acres and mule in the hills some fifteen miles from the maddening crowds and bustling rush. He goes to town often enough, however, to poke around Wal-Mart for any surviving "Made in America" merchandise, or purchase salt, nails, or shotgun shells -- and to marvel at the continuing growth and obvious prosperity of the place.

The town of Hurstburg (a "city" of some 9,000 some odd people), has transformed itself from a somewhat charming and sleepy agricultural and coal mining center, with a nice traditional business district around the courthouse square, into a modern wonder-town with all of the trappings of modern suburbia. It's new commercial strip is now out on the highway, complete with all the popular fast food restaurants, several large supermarkets, two shopping centers with the full array of popular corporate chains, including Wal-Mart and Radio Shack and all the others. Even some local merchants have managed to survive by abandoning the square and joining the big boys out on the Strip. The city boasts of half a dozen stop lights, maybe more, and has even sprouted some a stretch of four-lane hard-road.

About the only things Hurtsburg doesn't have is a opera house and casino. But, of course, it's too small a place to expect many of the trappings of high culture. Nonetheless, evidence of wealth and prosperity are to be seen everywhere! The place has a nice hospital, a pretty good sized state prison facility, a nice big new county jail (right on the square where local merchants used to trade), and a large banking community.

All of this prosperity and growth are rather surprising, however. Fifty years ago, before the growth and prosperity started, the city had a population of some 11,000, a still booming coal mining industry and about ten thousand of farmers in the surrounding countryside. Between these two major sources of raw materials production, and the many businesses and smaller industries that supported them and were supported by them, the many merchants around the town square were kept busy, and most of them modestly wealthy. The outlaying city neighborhoods all had their own little mom and pop grocery stores. Like almost all farming towns of similar size throughout the heartland, Hurtsburg was a thriving little community, a hub of commerce thriving with business activity, and it really produced something. It was, in short, a real little city with all the requisites to make it a valuable and productive part of the American landscape. Yet it only had one stop light (as of about 1960), and hadn't known what a real traffic jam was since the days when a thousand horse drawn farm wagons had converged on the town on each Saturday morning.

Now almost all of what originally made Hurtsburg a thriving little city is gone. The mines are gone, and most of the farmers are gone. There are maybe a couple thousand active farmers left in the county, so there are some productive people who bring a little business into town. Most of the businesses that supported them and which they supported, are also gone. The railroad is gone, the bus service is gone, and almost all the mom and pop businesses are gone. The square stands desolate and decimated -- a victim of the wreckers' ball. Where four dozen local merchants once traded, stands two banks, a tavern, plenty of parking space, and a very tastefully designed jail house -- the pride of the city.

Just about all of Hurtburg's business activity has shifted over to the Strip. And urban sprawl has taken the place by storm. All the big boys moved into town, bringing their multi million dollar businesses into the community. Hurtsbug, in spite of an slowly declining population and almost nonexistent industrial base, has experienced astounding commercial growth and urban sprawl. And there seems to be ample money. New banks have opened, the retail businesses are busy, the roads and parking lots are crowded with a great abundance of new cars. There are large automobile dealerships which apparently do well. There are probably more jobs in retail sales or service than ever before, but almost none in any kind of production. There are only very few non-franchised independent businesses, except for lawyers, doctors, dentists, and a few other professions.

The problem Pridger has been having trouble figuring out, is just what is driving all this business activity? Where is all the money is coming from? The two thousand farmers, and maybe six hundred small factory workers, who comprise the county's only "real wealth" producers, try as they may, certainly cannot support it. The businesses cannot be the source of the apparent prosperity of the place. They can only reflect it and exploit it. At least ninety percent of the businesses are merely branches of large corporations based elsewhere. They certainly shovel much more money out of town than they pay into it -- otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place. Of course, many residents have jobs elsewhere, bringing their paychecks home from other distant towns. But these can't account for nearly enough money to explain Hurtsburg's prosperity.

Of course, Hurtsburg boasts of many citizens who are in fact independently wealthy, whose wealth is shared by the community at least to some extent. But this still doesn't account for urban sprawl and continuing commercial expansion, in a shrinking, largely stagnant community.

To be perfectly frank, Pridger has come to the conclusion that the town's prosperity is a totally false and illusory. Only one thing can explain it. Money is shipped into town by the buckets full on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis from elsewhere. Much of the money comes in in the form of the payrolls of public employees, civil servants, teachers, city and county and federal administrators, etc., There is undoubtedly a fairly sizable impoverished population that gets welfare and food stamps and subsidized housing. And there are probably twice as many retired people as there are employed people, receiving pension checks, social security, and supplemental security income payments. Undoubtedly there are a large number receiving unemployment compensation at any given time. There are undoubtedly many other "income streams" for the city and county, from various federal and state subsidies.

Of course, there are undoubtedly a lot of other things in the economic mix that Pridger hasn't considered. But it nonetheless seems fairly certain that the city is an economic basket case, and would never would have even come into being under present circumstances. There is no viable economic rationale for the city to exist as anything except for a pared down version of what it was fifty years ago. It could still be a nice little place. But there is no economic rationale for its present great prosperity. It is the prosperity of a city somehow made rich by de facto welfare. As great as it is, at least half of the wealth is compliments of government largess -- tax money and compounding state and national deficits and debt. Money to be paid by our grandchildren and great grandchildren, at least in some form.

This miracle is the prosperity Pridger's home town enjoys. Ten thousand other towns enjoy the same kind of prosperity. All our large cities do too, to one degree or another. The whole nation does. Pridger wonders if there is a city left in America that really still earns its keep. And we all troop down to Wal-Mart to buy things made in far off places. The things that we used to make for ourselves when our prosperity was not of a false and dangerously deceptive nature.

REPERCUSSIONS OF 9/11 AND WAR IN IRAQ

911 is a number that all of us had learned to associate with "emergencies" long before it became emblazoned in our memories as a result of the events of 9/11/01. Since then, both mystics and "Trivial Pursuit" types have made much of both the date and the number.

James Carroll, of "The Boston Globe," on the first anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, pointed out that it was on 9/11/90 that George H. W. Bush made his momentous and explicit declaration of a "new world order" to Congress. "Exactly eleven years later," Carroll wrote, "the suddenly mystical date of 9-11 motivated his son to finish what the father began. A year ago this week, Bush the younger launched a war against the man who tried to kill his dad, initiating the opposite of order."

The opposite of order, of course, is disorder. Many of us have referred the wonderful new world as the New World Disorder all along. So what would we have if the New World Disorder is thrown into disorder? That seems to already have happened, but Pridger won't attempt to answer right now.

In all irony, it does seem that the "New World Order" is either doomed or being reinvented as the result of our Iraqi invasion. Many of us do not yet know what to think of it. The global "order" (that the United States government seemed to be so meticulously fashioning, and even apparently making itself subservient to, since the very formation of the United Nations), now seems to be in total disarray. The very "viability" and future of "globalism" is now being called into serious question as the result of the unilateral actions of the Bush administration.

Our domestic vulnerability to a rag-tag bunch of Islamic extremists was tragically and graphically demonstrated on 9/11/01. Whatever one thinks of Bush's initial response to that event, with the declaration of war against terrorism, and the invasion of Afghanistan, at that point we enjoyed the greatest degree of international sympathy and solidarity, and international cooperation since the end of the Cold War. Almost all nations at least provided some degree of encouragement and moral support in the War on Terror, even if they had some misgivings at the threatening rhetoric of the Bush administration's initial pronouncements and the nature and scope of his proposed military solutions.

This was a situation that might have furthered both the "globalism" and New World Order that had already become an institutionalized "given" in the mainline international community of economically interdependent nations -- which had also appeared to have been the centerpiece of America's broader foreign policy goals for half a century. It also offered the opportunity for the United States to continue to assert itself as the undisputed leader in a globalized world, both on economic and military terms.

Most of the world was ready to help us "stamp out terrorism," and this would have further enhanced America's military leadership status. Our traditional European allies shared the same fears of Islamic terrorism that we had finally come to know. Many other nations had their own domestic "terrorists" to stamp out, and were eager for America's moral backing.

It might have even been the golden opportunity, if that were the intention, to actually establish the processes by which the United States, together with its many committed globalization allies, might end in an American led de facto military protectorate over the world -- and do it (under the color of war against international terror), with a great degree of international cooperation.

In light of all of this, our invasion of Iraq seems totally inexplicable, except to those many Americans who have bought everything the Bush administration has fed them. Almost all of the international goodwill we initially had has already been squandered, in spite of the impressive array of flags of the remaining coalition. Most are flags, and little else. And you can bet that the owners of many of those flags will be seeking to withdraw them as time goes on.

As the result of the recent al Qaeda terrorist attack in Madrid, even one of our staunchest supporters and strongest allies in the invasion of Iraq is planning to pull out. The new Spanish president, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, stated, "Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush must do some reflection -- you can't organize a war with lies," and referred to the war in Iraq a "fiasco." This was a very low blow indeed, and is probably an indication of more bad news in the making.

Of course, wars can be (in fact, most often are), organized with both lies and ulterior motives. All indications are that the Iraq War was just such a war. Obviously, the war was not started for the reasons given by the Bush administration. The motivations at least "seemed" transparent from the very beginning to most observant and half-way knowledgeable observers. Since then, they have seemed to have become "very" transparent to almost everybody but Bush flag-bearers. Any possible "mistake" or miscalculation wasn't due to a failure or breakdown in our intelligence gathering agencies. The Iraq War had obviously long been planned, and the War on Terror was taken as the most likely golden moment of opportunity.

Pridger would characterize the war as being the result of four things: (1) Most importantly, it appears to be the result of a near total breakdown in the level of "intelligence" and statesmanship of the political material routinely elected to high office and appointed to the highest national policy planning positions. (2) The Iraqi war was planned because it is deemed critical for the world's only superpower to have a commanding and permanent military presence in the oil-rich Persian Gulf region. (3) The security of Israel is deemed to be even more critical to American politicians and policy makers than the security of the United States. (4) The international financial markets, and the vulnerabilities of the American economy, are such that a "major" war at this time was considered a national imperative to avoid an imminent reckoning.

Most likely, the Bush administration's war in Iraq was, among other salient things, the opening salvo of an attempt to reinvent the "New World Order" (preventing financial collapse) rather than to intentionally totally destroy it. If this is the case, Bush, and the powers behind his administration, have taken a bold move that could very easily become a losing high stakes gamble.

It is difficult to imagine why any administration would take such a huge gamble. Bush's crew has broken so many of the meticulously constructed conventions of the international body of law to which every American administration since World War Two have been so devoutly committed, that one can only assume that we must be making a play for total military hegemony. How else could we ever hope to come out of this thing whole? This cannot really be a serious attempt to bring stability to world order.

Unfortunately, it is becoming apparent that the powers behind the Bush administration may have blundered badly. Even now a Bush reelection is beginning to look less and less probable. Though he can "claim" success in Iraq, fewer and fewer people are being convinced of it, and the specter of public opinion being swayed to the idea that "maybe the war was a mistake after all" is looking more and more likely. The press still seems to be wavering in which way it will herd the sheep, or to what degree it will allow the flock to take its own head.

Any way one looks at it, America and the world stand at a critical juncture. Is globalism doomed, or is it merely taking on a new face? As Pridger has said many times before. Our generation is destined to live in interesting times.

MORE ON GOD AND COUNTRY

Another of those popular anonymous emails hit Pridger's inbox the other day, reminding him of a few things that still need to be driven home. But to begin, here is the the text of the email:

"As you walk up the steps to the Capitol Building which houses the Supreme Court ...you can see near the top of the building a row of the world's law givers... and each one is facing one in the middle who is facing forward with a full frontal view - it is Moses and the Ten Commandments!

"As you enter the Supreme Court courtroom, the two huge oak doors have the Ten Commandments engraved on each lower portion of each door. As you sit inside the courtroom, you can see the wall, right above where the Supreme Court judges sit... a display of the Ten Commandments!

"There are Bible verses etched in stone all over the Federal Buildings and Monuments in Washington, DC.

"James Madison, the fourth president, known as "The Father of Our Constitution" made the following statement: "We have staked the whole of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.."

"Patrick Henry, that patriot and Founding Father of our country said, "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ."

"Every session of Congress begins with a prayer by a paid preacher, whose salary has been paid by the taxpayer since 1777.

"Fifty-two of the 55 founders of the Constitution were members of the established orthodox churches in the colonies.

"Thomas Jefferson worried that the Courts would overstep their authority and instead of interpreting the law, would begin making law ... an oligarchy--- THE RULE OF FEW OVER MANY.

"The very first Supreme Court Justice, John Jay, said: "Americans should select AND prefer Christians as their rulers."

"How, then, have we gotten to the point that everything we have done for 220 years in this country is now suddenly wrong and unconstitutional?

"p.s. Please forward this to everyone you can. Lets put it around the world and let the world see what this country was built on!"

---------------------------------(End of email)------------------------------

Pridger would add that almost all State Constitutions (at least in their original forms), allude to God in their preamble. They, too, must all be wrong and unconstitutional..

The irony in all of this fervor over the "Wall of Separation" between church and state, is that the Constitution itself is cited as "The Law of the Land" -- the very fountainhead of legal authority for the arguments the ACLU, ADL, and federal court justices use to impose their interpretations as to what is and is not constitutional.

Perhaps we should step back a notch and ask just where the Constitution got its high and mighty authority? If it is the Law of the Land, in which all the high and mighty "constitutional law experts" put so much "faith" and legal capital -- just how is it that it packs so much alleged authority and power in the first place? Clearly, in the eyes of the "experts," it is the Constitution that matters, and the Constitution that retains sacred authenticity and authority -- God (pardon the expression), be damned!

Just how sacrosanct is the Constitution anyway? God didn't write the Constitution. God isn't even alluded to in the Constitution. Men wrote the Constitution, and agreed that it would be the Law of the Land. But by what authority was it made the Law of the Land? Was it just the vote and signatures of those who attended the original Constitutional Convention and approved it, or the states that ratified the document and the Bill of Rights, including the all-important First Amendment, that gave the Constitution its authority?

As any law student can tell you, all laws are created by drawing upon legal historical precedent and accepted norms of "Common Law" usage, for their legitimacy. The Constitution is no different. Basically, it was written and made the Law of the Land by men who believed they had the "God-given right" to do so -- further supported a very important previously validated declaration of law.

The sole, direct, definable, and indisputable, source of authority for the Constitution's acceptance as law, of course, was none other than the Declaration of Independence of 1776. It was the Declaration of Independence (preceded by the Articles of Association of 1774), itself, given final ratification and legitimacy through the blood spilled during the Revolutionary War, that made American Independence both possible and final.

The British, having been militarily defeated, finally had to agree that the Declaration of Independence was a binding document, and that American Independence would be respected. However reluctantly gained, the Declaration of Independence became law even to the British Monarch. The rest of the world eventually recognized it in the same way, if not somewhat more enthusiastically. The Declaration of Independence has remained undisputed from abroad until this day.

The Declaration of Independence became the authority and basis for both the establishment of the United States of America as an independent nation among nations, as well as all laws thereafter enacted in its name.

Now, if it can be proven that the "national charter," the Declaration of Independence, is actually a fraudulent, and thus invalid, document, then the nation established under its authority, and all laws enacted in its name, can be proven to be null and void -- the products of a fraud. Apparently all the high and mighty constitutional lawyers now embroiling the nation in an array of apparently fallacious legal battles with regard to mention of God, have overlooked this salient fact. Or, perhaps, some of them have not overlooked the fact, but are avoiding mention of it for reasons that could only be interpreted as treasonous. Perhaps they have more in mind than merely undermining the religious character of the nation.

Any student of law knows that any contract, covenant, charter, law, or statute, that can be proven to be based on fraud, is invalid as if it had never been enacted or ever existed.

Our national charter invokes the authority of "Nature's God" in order to justify the cause, and validate the right, to secede from the British Empire, and to establish a new nation under the laws of men who possessed the God-given right to take such action on behalf of their fellow citizens. There are no less than four references to God in the Declaration of Independence, i.e., "nature's God", "Creator", "Supreme Judge", and "Divine Providence."

That most important of all America's founding documents begins with the assertion that people have the right to "...the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them...", and "...that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." And the document concludes, "with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

These few clear words, my friends, comprise the sole authority upon which the legitimacy our present Constitution, and the nation that acknowledges it as its indisputable "Law of the Land," stands or falls.

If there is no such thing as Nature's God from which to draw strength, resolve, and protection; if there is no such thing as unalienable rights with which men are endowed by their Creator; then "We the People," and the whole world, have been sorely defrauded, and have lived a fiction for over two centuries!

What's more, even if we do have unalienable, God-given Rights (which we most certainly do!), but somehow allow a few avaricious "legal minds" with their talking heads, to convince us that it is illegal to officially admit or acknowledge such fact (even if those minds and heads be enthroned upon the Supreme Court); then those very same legal minds, and the forces they represent, will not only have destroyed the very "Law of the Land" upon which they themselves have based their "legal" arguments, but essentially ascended to the status (at least in law) that our founders reserved to God alone! For they will have established "under the color of law" that "We the People", in fact, have no rights at all except by their leave and however they chose to enact or interpret such laws that they decree.

Our founders, of course, with all their misgivings as to the frailty and prospects of the new nation they were founding, and the ability of the people to preserved the liberty they so fervently tried to enshrine forever, never dreamed that a day would come when the Source, and Divine Nature, of human rights would ever come into serious question.

This is perhaps the most important point that Pridger has to make. All else, no matter how seemingly important or grandiose, is subservient and small compared to this most basic matter.

The American people must stand, as they have never stood before, on the principle that this is indeed, "A Nation Under God." For if it is not that, and is not strongly and freely acknowledged as such in the public forum to "prove it," then the nation we thought we had is doomed. If it is not, then the case can be made in a court of law, and made relatively easily, that we are still British subjects, after all.

"Under color of law" there are many groups and organizations, as well as prominent members of our own federal court system, who are seeking, finding, or manufacturing, every excuse to remove God from the national identity, and thus the national identity from the nation. They would remove the very founding legitimacy of the nation. We all know who the biggest names are, but we're not so sure who or what all of them represent. But most of us, ("most" certainly still constituting a large majority of the American people, of whatever race, creed, or national origin) can be fairly confident that they do not represent "us".

Nor can they in any way, by any stretch of the imagination (aside from their own, perhaps) represent anything that could be construed as "American interests." Though they universally characterize themselves as seekers of "justice," they short-change Truth. And there is no Justice without Truth.

At best, they are simply "spoilers" with private, but supposedly public service, agendas -- some to placate certain individuals or groups (Such as the individual atheist who complained that whenever he hears the word "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, feels he has personally been slapped in the face by the nation he otherwise so dearly loves).

At worst, they are the active and agents of the very "They" we conspiracy buffs so enjoy referring to, and are seeking, under the color of law, to subvert the national culture, if not overthrow the Republic itself. Indeed, if the Declaration of Independence can be proven a fraud (and it can, at least in a court of law over which they preside, if they get their way), the Republic HAS effectively been both subverted and overthrown.

These, my friends, are important points to ponder.



A FOOTNOTE TO A PREVIOUS POST

Pridger would like to add a footnote to the recent post about our economic vulnerability to the Peoples' Republic of China.

Mao Tse Tung, the father of the Peoples' Republic of China, had the following things to say about the United States.

"U.S. imperialism has not yet been overthrown and it has the atom bomb. I believe it also will be overthrown. It, too, is a paper tiger...

"It is the spirit of internationalism, the spirit of Communism, from which every Chinese Communist must learn... This is our internationalism, the internationalism with which we oppose both narrow nationalism and narrow patriotism." Then, "In another forty-five years, that is, in the year 2001... China will have... become a powerful socialist industrial country..."

"The United States has set up hundreds of bases in many countries all over the world. China's territory of Taiwan... and all military bases of the United States on foreign soil are so many nooses round the neck of U.S. imperialism. The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses round their own necks, handing the ends of the ropes to the Chinese people, the peoples of the Arab countries and all the peoples of the world who love peace and oppose aggression. The longer the U.S. aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become."

"Riding roughshod everywhere, U.S. imperialism has made itself the enemy of the people of the world and has increasingly isolated itself. Those who refuse to be enslaved will never be cowed by the atom bombs and hydrogen bombs in the hands of the U.S. imperialists. The raging tide of the people of the world against the U.S. aggressors is irresistible. Their struggle will assuredly win still greater victories.

"If the U.S. monopoly capitalist groups persist in pushing their policies of aggression and war, the day is bound to come when they will be hanged by the people of the whole world. The same fate awaits the accomplices of the United States.

"But we must be modest — not only now, but forty-five years hence as well. We should always be modest. In our international relations, we Chinese people should get rid of great-power chauvinism resolutely, thoroughly, wholly and completely."
"There is a Chinese saying, 'Either the East Wind prevails over the West Wind or the West Wind prevails over the East Wind..."

The above quotes are from Pridger's copy of Chairman Mao Tse Tung's "Little Red Book of Quotations" (1967 edition, Foreign Language Press, Peking).

Interestingly, Pridger purchased that "Little Red Book" in a Red Chinese department store in Hong Kong when it was against American law for "free" Americans to do such an "unpatriotic" thing. Pridger was guilty of "trading with the enemy" -- and how greatly that preyed upon his conscience! Yet that little book ought to be required reading for all Americans and especially for presidents, Congressmen, and Senators.

Though much has changed in forty-five years, Mao Tse Tung's above quotes are as relevant today as when he wrote them, and much has remained the same. What has changed is that "the spirit of internationalism" has miraculously gone from being strictly "the spirit of Communism" to the spirit of global capitalism. Now the spirit of international capitalism has changed places with the spirit of international Communism, and it is much more powerful than international Communism ever was. But Communist goals remain the same, now identical to those of international capital. With them we "oppose both narrow nationalism and narrow patriotism" to bring about a New World Order.

Communism is nothing but "state" capitalism, where the state held the monopoly on the means of production and distribution. Today's global capitalism, disguised as "free enterprise," is just as collective in the long term as Communism, and ultimately just as enslaving. The only real difference is that Communism, however flawed in execution and practice, at least possessed a humanistic ideology aimed at serving the proletariat. Capital is constrained by no such ideology, and is strictly predatory. It's only purpose and goal is embodied in the bottom line -- profits. It's only god is Mammon.

This said, Pridger must not be read as being anti-capitalist. American Capitalism, properly channeled, regulated, and held to a "national purpose", produced our great industrial miracle, and delivered up the greatest nation of all time, with the broadest based level of popular prosperity ever seen in the history of mankind. In other words, we were getting things right for a while.

Pridger suspects that Chinese goals have not changed during the last forty-five years -- only their methods have changed. Their goal is not, and never has been, global conquest. Their goal is a great China, and in reaching their goal, America may soon be required to eat a little crow. No overt aggression on the part of China will be required. The Chinese appear to remain perfectly satisfied to allow us to continue to play that role -- just as we were doing forty-five years ago when Chairman Mao wrote the above word. Then we were striving to save the world from the threat of international Communism and men like Mao Tse Tung. Today we are striving to save the world from Islamic terrorism and men like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and are perfectly willing to expend as much or more on this new fight as we expended on the Cold War.

But some very important things have changed in America in forty-five years. While we may remain the world's greatest superpower, we're no longer economically independent, and (among many other equally disturbing things), we are dependent on the "good will" and economic support of Peoples' Republic of China to a degree that was not only unimaginable, but would have seemed utterly impossible, only forty-five short years ago. Red China, mind you, whose leader once said, "The raging tide of the people of the world against the U.S. aggressors is irresistible. Their struggle will assuredly win still greater victories... If the U.S. monopoly capitalist groups persist in pushing their policies of aggression and war, the day is bound to come when they will be hanged by the people of the whole world. The same fate awaits the accomplices of the United States."

History is definitely not one of the strong points of our national leadership. Short-sightedness seems to be one of the major prerequisites for high office in American politics. And "nationalism" itself has become a bad word among them. The role of our government no longer seems to be the preservation and building of an even greater America, though there is much rhetoric in that line. Apparently our leaders are confident that work has already been done and no longer needs any serious attention. All the work needs to be done elsewhere, while merely tightening security at home, and maybe exporting a little more. The chief role of our national leadership today seems to be to bring about a greater world -- as they have come to believe the world ought to be -- regardless of what the rest of the world thinks, and regardless of how much of it we alienate in the attempt. We seem to be a superpower intent on making a world free of want, and free of war -- and we intend to do it using any amount of military force necessary, no matter what the costs may be in terms of towering debt, human life, and suffering. Although this has seemed to be our national purpose for a long time, it took 9/11 to really re-galvanize our resolve and redouble our efforts.

(End of footnote)

Some things that come up in the alternative press challenge even the average conspiracy nut's ability to swallow whole. For example, The March 15th issue of the "American Free Press," ran an article by John Kaminski, revealing some very startling allegations made by a former Pentagon arms salesman, retired Col. Donn de Grand Pre. De Grand Pre is the author of three books on the events of 9-11. His claim is that the 9-11 terrorist attack was an "inside job", triggered by an otherwise "unstoppable worldwide financial collapse, which can only be prevented temporarily by a major war, perhaps to become known as World War III" -- that there were no terrorists aboard the planes that hit the Twin Towers or aboard plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field -- that the latter was shot down by the U.S. military -- that the passengers and crew of all three aircraft were probably rendered unconscious shortly after take-off -- that the planes were being piloted under remote control -- that the "plane" that hit the Pentagon was more likely a cruise missile or Global Hawk -- and many more seemingly outlandish assertions. His books, "The Serpent's Sting", "The Viper's Venom", and "The Rattler's Revenge" ought to make for some interesting reading.

According to de Grand Pre, our national civilian and military leadership is in a state of critical disarray, and that many top military leaders are on the brink of revolt -- against the "neocons." He called 9-11 "an administrative coup d'etat" by neoconservatives.

De Grand Pre is quoted as saying on Jackie Patru's "Radio Sweet Liberty" web cast: "The so-called terrorist attack was in fact a superbly executed military operation against the United States, requiring the utmost professional military skill in command, communications and control. It was flawless in timing, in the choice of selected aircraft to be used as guided missiles, and in the coordinated delivery of those missiles to their pre-selected targets."

Certainly there are many pieces of the 9-11 puzzle that do not seem to fit, or are still missing. No doubt 9-11 was a "superbly executed military operation." And there is little doubt that the global financial markets are in serious enough trouble to make war appear the only means of avoiding imminent collapse. But many of de Grand Pre's allegations sound so unbelievable, that they verge on the totally absurd. It seems to Pridger that de Grand Pre could be some sort of peculiar agent provocateur attempting to set the more gullible far-out fringe conspiracy alarmists on a fantastic and self-discrediting trail.

Yet, Pridger would say, file the information somewhere in the back of your mind, and await future developments before totally dismissing everything that de Grand Pre alleges. Often the pieces of a puzzle do not come together until decades after most people have forgotten about the difficulties they once had making two and two equal four. The only thing Pridger does believe with some certainty is, when it comes to the politics of war, nothing is ever quite as it has been made out to seem.


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Only conspiracy theorists would believe that many computer viruses might tend to be the natural products of computer viruses software company stockholders.

That obsolescence in all sorts of consumer products is planned even though there is no model year associated with the product.

That the ladybug plague hitting parts of the mid-west is the result of another government program gone haywire.

That the War on Poverty intentionally institutionalized and "empowered" a growing "poverty class."

That the Civil Rights struggle was used to stifle the will and spirit of the majority and institutionalize new forms of oppression, frustrating true democratic processes.

That the Drug Wars have intentionally stimulated drug use. That "open borders" and "free trade" intentionally encouraged illegal immigration and the drug trade.

That the War on Tobacco, intentionally encourages alternate, illicit vices.

That the radical right-wing militia group or neo-nazi site you visit on the web is likely to be a government or ADL decoy and trap.

That the government probably operates child porn sites in hopes of snagging unwary sex surfers.

That it is no accident that the whitehouse.com web site is (or still was, the last time Pridger checked), a portal to the cyber world of pornography; and that it is no accident that the American government has not taken all the high-handed measures at its disposal to gain ownership of that particular domain name.

That it was no accident that pornography very quickly became the number one Internet business.

That it is no accident that pornography and virtual sex are secretly considered the greatest thing since all nature of "illicit" and "deviant" sex were officially outlawed or suppressed.

That the AIDS epidemic was no accident of nature.

That it is no accident that computers are quickly becoming acknowledged necessities of life for both the rich and poor, for business and pleasure.

That it is no accident, even aside from pornography, that computer games and virtual reality, are becoming new powerful opiates of the masses, and most particularly for children and young people.

That the "starling revelation" that pornography is so universally compelling and has become so "popular" was really no great surprise.

That children are being encouraged to utilize computers and the Internet at very early ages as a means of social indoctrination rather than meaningful education.

That it is no accident that computers have become indispensable tools of "liberation" while at the same time becoming the primary instruments of societal control and enslavement, and governmental ability to spy upon, categorize, list, and target every any and every individual or group that it may have reason to focus upon.

That the "modernity" engendered by computers and cyberspace, is being foisted upon all of humanity, even in regions that do not yet have flush toilets or connections to a power grid, as a means to future control and exploitation rather than intellectual liberation.

That all of this is not strictly the unintended result of "free market forces" at work in an increasingly borderless world and the world of cyberspace.

That the concept of "birth control" was aimed more at further retarding white population growth than black and Third World reproduction habits.

That the Cultural War was meticulously planned and didn't "just happen."

That all wars are the result of careful advanced planning, and are seldom fought for any reason closely resembling the reasons the public is given to believe.

That the New World Order, though given the national and international hard-sell by Washington, was in fact the very old brain child of subversive forces which remain difficult to pin down.


Pridger, for one, would feel pretty seriously handicapped if he were deprived of the full and unfettered use of his computer and the Internet. Computers and the Internet have become a whole new global reality, for better or worse. And almost all of us are hooked in one way or another, whether as an invaluable tool or vice.

The "subversive forces" referred to above, are the great "They" of both the conspiracy theorist and the paranoid conspiracy alarmist. Whether "they" are an illusive, yet powerful, "principle" at work, or can be pinned down to specific individuals or groups with avaricious goals remains the primary study goal of conspiracy "research." Many conspiracy theorists have pointed the finger at specific people, shadowy groups and organizations, and have followed what appear to be clearly definable threads of an ongoing core conspiratorial program, with it's several splinter threads, over a period of more than two centuries.

The "program" always seems aimed at some sort of global hegemony through subversive means, and only one thing remains consistently clear. That point of clarity is the consistent success the alleged conspiracy itself has continued to enjoy. This, in spite of repeated exposures and the apparent fact that, once exposed, any such conspiracy would appear to be doomed by what might be called simply the collective "common sense" of fairly well educated democratic societies and their political processes -- attributes and processes with which our nation and the "advanced world" seem to have been abundantly endowed throughout the history of the alleged conspiracy. Yet the conspiracy seems to meet with almost uncontested success at every major juncture of history. This might prompt the religious to view, and thus dismiss, the conspiracy as simply part of God's plan for mankind -- perhaps the trials before the final tribulation as outlined in the Bible. For others, it appears no more than part of the inevitable and unstoppable march of progress.

Significantly, the history of modern scientific and industrial progress and growth have almost exactly coincided with the parallel history of the alleged conspiracy. This span of history, going back just over two centuries, also almost exactly spans the history of the United States of America -- assuming, of course, that the famous "Illuminati," formally organized in Bavaria, in 1776, was the beginning of the thread leading to any present day conspiracy. Material human progress during this period has been such that society has been in a continuing state of rapid change, preventing anything like the stability that would be required for anything like "public common sense" to fully assess the forces at work around it. We have never really known anything like an extended period of stability since the founding of America. So the "public mind" has never been able to adjust to, or focus on, just what it is that moves events around it. It merely reacts to new realities as they miraculously come about.

The separation of any alleged conspiracy from obvious progress, and which causes and effects might be attributable to either, has made the job of the dedicated conspiracy theorist a nightmarishly difficult and thankless task. No college or university has yet offered comprehensive courses of study in conspiracy theory. And if any accredited institution of higher learning every did offer such a course, no self-respecting conspiracy theorists would take it for anything less than another disinformation program authored by the conspirators themselves. That's why the serious pursuit of conspiracy theory as a study remains the exclusive field of very few accredited scholars and many renegades, rebels, and political misfits.

While it is possible for an accredited scholar to focus on this or that appendage of the elephant, without being packed off to a padded cell, it is professional suicide to try to get a focus on the whole beast. That's why some intellectual eccentrics like Naom Chomsky are able to run at large and retain their accreditation and employment, while others are not. While Chomsky (who certainly wouldn't characterize himself as a conspiracy theorist), has boldly ventured to discomfit many serpents, apparently he has yet to overly annoy the dragon, and presumably knows just where to draw the line to avoid doing it.




During the years since the Russian Revolution, and until the demise of the USSR, the idea of national central economic planning had a distinctly Marxist ring to it. Communist states engaged in central planning. Democratic societies didn't -- in America, "central planning" was unAmerican. We called them "Command Economies," and free nations neither "commanded" their peoples, nor their economic activities.

As a young nation, having won our independence from England, we allowed and encouraged the development of a free enterprise system in which the national economy became largely self-regulating. To a large degree, the free market ruled. This was part of our goal of self-government and national independence. Initially, we were largely an agrarian nation -- a nation of farmers and small shopkeepers. While we depended on Europe for some time for many of our manufactured goods, before long American industries developed to the point that the United States became economically independent of the Old Countries. It did this primarily through trade protectionism -- the closest thing we had to a national economic plan.

As the industrial revolution advanced, we developed a mixed economy that promised an ever-increasing degree of broad-based prosperity. As American capitalism gathered steam, however, it became apparent that something had to be done to break up giant industrial monopolistic corporations. Capital was being gathered up into fewer and fewer strong hands. Various "anti-trust" laws were passed to deal with the problem, with varying degrees of success. Problems continued to arise, however, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration did a considerable amount of central planning, in response to the national crises known as the Great Depression. It was called the New Deal. While many people thanked FDR for the jobs he had provided, many called it a raw deal. Many of us still thank Roosevelt for Social Security, but many are now calling that a raw deal too. After Roosevelt's great war (which finally brought the depression to an end), with Truman in the presidential office, central economic planning was again abandoned -- except in the agricultural sector of the economy and with regard to international trade which continued to be protectionist.

During World War Two, the Roosevelt administration's Brain Trust finally got some things right. His farm policy, for example, finally got the American farmer into a working parity with the industrialized sector of the economy. At that time the agricultural segment of the population was still about 40%. But after the war, as the economy was again transformed by Truman and his successors, the baby was thrown out with the bath water. The American farmer was set on a permanent road to ruin.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, formed to "help the farmer out," had a stern message for him. The message was, "Get big or get out." Of course, it's unlikely that anybody at the USDA had any particular axe to grind with small farmers. The real thinking and planning, of course, had already been done by others, and the agenda and certain goals simply laid down for them to meet. From the USDA's standpoint, their job would be much easier if they had far fewer farmers to deal with -- and the nation much better off too. Larger, mono-cropping, farm operations, they knew, would be much more "efficient" and productive than the current patchwork of traditional farms. There was also a technological revolution under way, and petro-chemical based agricultural practices were aimed at a modern efficient farming model, presently forthcoming.

Most of the vast agricultural hinterlands are still there, with ever-larger waving fields of grain, under the control of a few strong hands, but the people are largely missing from the scene. And thousands of small cities and towns throughout the heartland have imploded, with many all but disappearing, along with the once vibrant rural farming communities which they once served. This heartrending rural scene was to be repeated even in the hearts of our most vital industrial cities, when other shoes began to fall. The axe finally came down on the industrial workers of the nation, as it had on the independent family farmer, and now even "knowledge workers" are beginning to feel threatened.

The American family farmer was only one of the first targets of the revolutionary process that we may refer to as the grand conspiracy. The citizen farmer (as a broad and numerically significant sector of the population), owning his own land, and providing for his own family's sustenance, as well as that of others, was simply far too independent a personage to be allowed to survive. Additionally, the nation's farmers were numerous enough to possess considerable political clout, and their feet were firmly planted in American soil. The self-reliant American farmer essentially had to be removed from the scene before the rest of the nation could be successfully transformed. The USDA became the agency by which this mission was carried out. The mission was accomplished, of course, without many at the USDA actually suspecting that they were doing anything but modernizing American agriculture for the benefit of both farmers and the nation.

The industrial worker with a "good job," never missed the farmer. In fact, it was good riddance, since farmers had demanded so many subsidies duly deducted from his own paycheck. And, of course, the supermarkets remained full of relatively cheap food.

The white collar "knowledge worker" didn't miss the factories or industrial labor jobs that had been disappearing over the last twenty-five years. In fact, it was good riddance. Factories polluted the air and degraded the environment. And those were dirty jobs anyhow. Nobody really needed them. There were better jobs to be had with a little retraining. And, of course, the stores were now even more resplendent with an ever-greater variety of inexpensive quality manufactured goods.

Who's left to worry about or miss the "knowledge workers" now being supplanted? Nobody but a very few "real" knowledge workers, and the very same politicians who have been responsible for delivering up this New World Order in the first place.

Our elected representatives and civil servants have not yet been threatened by job export and outsourcing. But, in Pridger's opinion, they ought to be. Pridger sees no reason to believe that the representation that Americans have received over several decades would be any worse had those jobs been outsourced to Israel, China, or India. In fact, from all appearances, our "representation" may just as well have come from those very sources.

Pridger is an agrarian distributionist. At the same time he believes in both the necessity and good of well regulated large capitalist enterprise. In other words, Pridger believes that the nation's agricultural lands should be in the strong hands of as many family farmers as possible, and that commercial enterprise in general should also be in as many strong hands as possible -- rather than fewer and fewer strong and grasping hands.

Big capital must necessarily have its place in a modern world, but certain economic activities should not be monopolized by, nor even a major playground of, big capital. While our present multi-layered "seamless" solutions have delivered us into what many still feel is a wonderland, it's a wonderland fraught with dangers which are only now beginning to loom large on our economic horizon. Having all of our economic eggs in only a few very big baskets, should not be a comforting situation. The agricultural basket is particularly critical to the welfare of the nation.

Agriculture is any nation's first, foremost, and most important, economic enterprise. Without the food and fiber produced by farmers (the very wherewithal of life sustenance), nothing else is possible. Though fewer and fewer Americans today can relate with agrarian roots, Pridger's generation can relate to the time when we had a large and largely prosperous agricultural economy firmly in the steadfast hands of millions of family farmers. The American family farm, as an institution, was the economic foundation and balance wheel of the economy.

All successful nations, whether modern or ancient (other than "city-states" such as Singapore), have started first with a strong agricultural foundation, in terms of both productive land and population. But when it is forgotten that any economic foundation is really based in productive people and not just productive land itself, that nation is on the way down, though it may take some time for politicians to figure out why.

As Thomas Jefferson once said: "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds."

Divorce the citizen from the soil, and the soil will eventually fail to bring forth its willing abundance, and the citizen will not know why he should defend the ground on which he stands.

During the Great Depression, our last really great period of economic hardship in this country, the American agricultural machine was still in the hands of millions of relatively small, diversified, family farm operators. It was very fortunate that this was the case when seemingly half the nation was unemployed. Millions of Americans were still down on the farm, and able to make a living as the rest of the nation suffered from lack of work and hunger. Millions of the unemployed still had the option of going back home to the farms of their parents or other relatives, where they were able weather the Depression -- poor but otherwise well fed and able to work when opportunity presented itself. Millions of others had access to farmers' markets, or could find part time work on farms.

If we had an economic upheaval today of the magnitude of the Great Depression, the hardships would undoubtedly be much worse. Our agrarian infrastructure is almost gone. The land is still there, and much of it still under cultivation, but the relationship with people is largely gone, along with the diversification that once insured that a balanced array of foodstuffs were produced on every farm. If transportation and food distribution systems break down, and power grids begin to waiver, we'll be in a bad way today. We have many more millions of people now, but only a handful can now go back to the farm to ride out hard times. The rest will have to depend on Archer Daniels Midland, et. al., and government run soup counters.

Throughout the depression years, American agriculture, in spite of plenty of troubles, produced everything the nation needed to give its people an abundance to eat. One of our alleged farm "problems," in fact, has always been one of overproduction -- even during the Depression. Yet many people went hungry during the Depression because markets and distribution had broken down, or because people simply lacked the money to purchase food that was available. Many more will go hungry if there is ever again anything to compare with the Great Depression.

Agriculture is the "sod and dirt" foundation of any viable national economy, and it makes simple horse sense that anything as important as agriculture be as diversified as possible, and in the hands of as many people as possible. The American population today is split between about 98% urban, and 2% rural farm producers. This kind of population "balance" is a literal national disaster. The agricultural segment of the population in an industrial nation such as ours should never have been allowed to decline to less than about 25%. Ten percent would probably still be workable. But 2% is tantamount to living on the edge of possible future famine.

Yet few Americans today have ever given it any thought at all. All we know is that American agriculture is still the wonder of the world, our supermarkets are always well stocked with an unbelievable variety of good things to eat, and we have an abundance of agricultural commodities to export abroad.

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Laissez faire and free markets are fine and dandy as long as the two parties to trade are on more or less on an economic par with one another, and monopolists or some cabal have not combined to rig the markets.

The American economy itself has been the world's greatest example of what free markets can do. That is, when the forty-eight or fifty states were a huge free trade zone within the protective walls of our economic borders. This, in fact, is the rationale for doing the same with the world. If it worked in America, why won't it work for the entire world? Experts have rationalized and calculated that it will, but Pridger begs to differ. When America had its horses hitched to its own economic wagon, and both business and labor confined to the national economy, the system worked wonders. But unloose that economic wagon and hitch it to the world, American horses find themselves unemployed, and their economic wagon in the hands of others.

If the American marketplace is not carefully protected and operated for the benefit of the American owner/operators, the benefits accrue to others, elsewhere. Before we took the international free market bait (hook, line, and sinker), big capital had already gained ownership of most of the national economic pie -- Wall Street being its public repository. But as long as American capital was obliged to employ American labor in a closed economy, it continued to pay American workers well. American workers remained stakeholders, and everything continued to work pretty well. But when capital was freed from the tethers of national regulation, it did exactly what might have been expected. Ownership of the American economy is still largely vested in Wall Street, but the American worker (the vast majority of the population), has lost his stakeholder status.

A national economy can be likened to a tub of water, the sides of the tub being the economic border or trade barrier. Given abundant natural resources and industrious citizens, the water level (which represents both national wealth and living standards), rises relative to other nations. Successful nations enjoy a rising water level, while less successful nations don't. A carefully controlled amount of trade may be carried on with the rest of the world as needed, but it should never be such to significantly undermine any part of the wealth generating machinery of the nation. But if free international trade is declared, it becomes like opening large breaches in the side of the tub, and the water flows out, from the wealthy nation to the less wealthy nations. When trade barriers are breached, the water seeks the lowest level it can find.

Needless to say, it's a big world out there, and most of it relatively poor. So, under free trade, American wealth, i.e., money, industries, and jobs, flow out into the lower levels of the rest of the world. This may raise the tide slightly in the rest of the world, but it won't raise it much. And it will ultimately drain our nation of most of its wealth. And this has demonstrably been happening.

The idea of unregulated trade between a nation where workers are paid 50 cents an hour, and a nation where workers make $16.00 an hour, is absurd. The law of the marketplace would dictate that all production be shifted to where wages are the lowest and sold in the nation where wages are highest. Obviously this won't work for long. Pretty soon there would be no jobs in the high wage country, and the low wage country would have nobody to purchase its production -- unless, of course, that production was something they could use themselves and afford to pay for.

Ideally, and all else being equal, wages would rise in the low country and decline in the high country, until workers in each nation were paid exactly the same thing, and each had the same levels of consumption. They would then produce for each other and consume each other's production. This wouldn't make much sense, however, if both nations were endowed with the same essential raw materials and worker skills. It would make much more sense for each nation to be self-sufficient -- produce for itself, consume its own production, and save considerably on shipping and handling costs.

The worker who is used to making $16.00 an hour, would be hard pressed if he had to take a job at only $8.00 an hour. Of course, the 50 cent an hour man would be very pleased at the prospects of $8.00 an hour.

But what if there are ten workers working for 50 cents an hour in the low country for each one working at $16.00 an hour in the high country? The the median wage becomes weighted downward even further. The global wage gravitates toward more like $2.00 an hour rather than $8.00 per hour.

The median Global Village wage will not come soon, because the major profits in free international trade are in essentially in wage price disparities. A concerted effort has been made to institutionalize low wages in poor exporting nations. When capital can no longer short-change labor, the biggest trade game is over.

Capitalists love the wage differential game, and traders naturally depend on wage and price disparities in order to profit. As Benjamin Franklin, pointed out, there's no profit in trade unless someone is getting cheated. So who gets cheated when profits are made at both ends, and every stage, of trade? Labor, of course, has to take the short-fall. First it is the slave, then the fifty cent an hour labor, who is cheated out of his just due. The $16.00 an hour worker gets cheated too. He loses his job, and is lucky to get another for half the wages. When everybody is making $2.00 an hour we will have arrived at the promised land.

With serious wage and price disparities, anything approaching balanced and fair trade is almost impossible.

To put this in perspective, if we trade a million tons of wheat for a million tons of some sort of ore with the same market value, we have engaged in what might be called a fair and equitable trade. There have been no losers or profiteers. Transportation costs for shipping are added costs the traders are willing to incur in order to get what they need. Profits will come later, as the commodities enter domestic trade channels, are processed, and finally retailed to the consumer. When trade becomes a case of rich countries "purchasing production" from poor countries, the rich countries gets the goods and the poor countries get the money. But it is the country that gets the money, it's the corporate stockholder.

But when Americans purchase a million dollars' worth of manufactured goods from abroad, Americans get the goods, but the manufacturing nation, along with an array of middle men, gets the money. What does labor get? Maybe $.60 an hour in China, $2.50 in Mexico. Labor has been cheated, because the value of the product is determined in a high wage country, but labor valued in a low wage country. The profits this allows capital are considerable, even after transportation across oceans.

Rhetoric against building a wall around the nation is little more than that -- rhetoric. It's also a scare tactic, aimed at a people ignorant of American economic and trade history. There has never been a day in American history when there was any sort of literal economic wall around the nation. All we ever had was a very reasoned degree of trade protection to good purpose. America has always carried on a robust and healthy trade with most of the rest of the world. Tariff protection is not not a wall, but a selective regulatory filter and leveler. It was also once a very important source of revenue for the federal government, before that government finally decided that the American people "...must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds..." (Thomas Jefferson).

Trade is not the key to national wealth that our trusty leaders claim to believe, and are intent upon making us believe. Trade neither creates wealth nor adds value to anything traded -- it only adds costs. Profits that are finally realized are not the result of any form of wealth creation but cost additions borne by the final consumer. Wealth creation took place as the raw materials were mined or harvested, and as value was added through human labor in factories or processing plants -- and that wealth creation stopped at the factory door. From then on, until the product is finally purchased by the consumer, the trade channels have added cost after cost -- all borne by the final consumer of the product -- and by short-changed labor.

Commerce, in general, of course, is a great and necessary activity to any civilization. It both primes the pumps of production, stimulates wealth creation, and churns the mix. It is the ebb and flow of commercial activity, and this includes all manner of trade. But do not be fooled into thinking that commerce in itself is the creation of wealth. Commerce is merely the distribution of wealth already created. Wealth creation is more more fundamental. Basic wealth is mined from the earth, harvested from the forests and soil, fished from the sea by man (labor), with other inputs compliments of God.

Nature itself, of course, is generous provider, but there are nonetheless costs which are seldom calculated into cost/earnings balance sheets. Though Nature's bounty is considered free, the costs of raw materials extraction through the agency of labor are the first costs encountered in wealth creation. So nothing has been gained, unless labor is first paid at the raw materials stage of production -- and thereafter at every stage of commercial activity.

The farmer has had to feed himself as well as the miner, fisherman, oil worker and timber jack. Provided this has been done, and raw materials delivered into trade channels, raw materials next enter into the value-added processing and fabrications stages, once again through the agency of labor. Capital enters the equation of wealth creation, initially as purely an organizational force somewhere in the extraction or value-added processes, taking its share of the wealth that was extracted and created by the agency of labor.

Wealth creation is a function of labor, not trade. Capital enhances and directs the productivity of labor, so it too is a factor in wealth creation. But never forget that labor (humanity), predates capital, and existed very well without "big capital" for untold millennia. Capital, on the other hand, could not draw breath without labor. Yet wealth, though created by labor, tends to accumulate and accrue to capital rather than labor. The average laborer, working for capital, is barely able to provide food and shelter for himself and his family.

Wealth, created solely by labor, and consumed and traded locally, nationally, and globally, is only a small portion of the moneyed wealth that today ricochets around the world. But in the final analysis, all the wealth that exists was the result of the initial extraction, processing, and fabrication inputs of labor. Labor sustains and underpins the whole upper hampers society. "Above" labor are layer upon layer of bureaucracies, merchants, entertainers, and professionals -- many necessary or worth while to varying degrees, and many strictly parasitical -- that complete the landscape of modern economic activity and civilization.

Only at the individual primeval level can labor, as its own master, rise above a station of servile dependence. The yeoman farmer particularly, and also the small shopkeeper or tradesman was the model for individual independence during our nation's early years. And he remains the model, though already almost totally driven from the national scene by Capital empowered far beyond what would be permissible in a properly "planned" economic where the true interests of the people really mattered.

But our national leaders have not planned anything like a "proper" economic balance for our nation. The only plans on which they have acted with anything like determination are summarized in one word -- globalism -- a word that has no correlation whatsoever with "representation" of "We the People."

American Capitalism did a fine job on behalf of the people, when it was subject to national regulation and kept loyal to the nation and beholden to American labor -- and government did its job to protect the American marketplace on behalf of its citizens. Even dispossessed farmers could go to the city and find "good jobs" until relatively recently. But now labor has been sold out, and Capital given license to return to the predatory practices that originally prompted Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to write the "Communist Manifesto" in 1848.

WARNING AND DISCLAIMER:

Pridger, of course, is an admitted conspiracy buff, but no scholar or "expert." He holds no PhD, nor ever been in any position of corporate or political power. Nor is he a prophet, with a direct channel to any mystic repository of wisdom or knowledge. He isn't independently wealthy, and has no magic money-making formula, system, or newsletter, to sell. He doesn't really "know" anything at all, though he "suspects" quite a lot. However, he sometimes writes as if he thinks he knows something.

Pridger feels that it is only fair to advise his readers of these things, even though the FDA, USDA, and Department of Homeland Security do not yet require warning labels on free speech.

To paraphrase Will Rogers, Pridger "only knows what he reads in the papers," hears on the radio, or sees on TV. He also "thinks" -- or at least engages in some facsimile thereof -- in an attempt to put things in their proper contexts. He takes all this "stuff" and tries to make heads and tails out of it in his own mind, attempting to separate the wheat from the chaff. Then he writes down the results, due to some seemingly unreasoned compulsion that seems to drive him. There is absolutely no profit motive involved, thus the exercise seems totally without any sane purpose. So, though these posts may be the most important thing you ever read, Pridger cautions the reader to take them with a grain of salt. He only asks that the content be read and taken into consideration, and that the reader do his own thinking.

Unlike the stereotypical conspiracy oriented American "patriot," Pridger is not armed and dangerous, and is not a member or leader of a cult. Nor is he really paranoid -- yet. And he won't get paranoid until he starts receiving visits from men dressed in dark suits; strange traveling junk dealers coming around to see what he might have to sell; spots heavily armed camouflaged troops lurking about in the nearby woods; black, ninja-clad, figures gathering just beyond the compound gates; black helicopters hovering over or circling the compound; or unlikely numbers of Jehovah's Witness visits.

Of course, just because Pridger isn't paranoid doesn't mean that he isn't being followed. In fact, he hopes he is. But he still holds out the hope that his followers (few though they may be), are primarily made up of truth seekers and the simply curious -- rather than people seeking to encourage him to take up the possibly more profitable activity of fiction writing, or perhaps even to bring him some sort of "justice."

He apologizes for not taking the time to carefully cite all his sources, or provide scholarly or statistical backup, for some of his assertions -- what he considers either facts, truths, or probabilities (or simply the fruits of his wild, paranoid, imagination). Time is too limited, and Pridger has to make a living during the margins time allows. These posts do not purport to be scholarly works. They are simply intended to be, if not enlightening, at least food for some thought. So...

READ AT YOUR OWN RISK! THIS IS NOT GOOD NEWS!

The Cultural War has been the left-handed means of making the American people ripe and amenable to the Global Village -- a borderless, multi-cultural, social Utopia. George Bush, Sr., called the village a "New World Order," and his party's mission is that of the right-hand -- to make sure that the Global Village is also a Utopian playground for international Capital interests.

Before the economic side of the New World Order could be foisted upon the American people, two critical things had to be accomplished. First the American public had to be softened up. This, in large part, has been accomplished through the Cultural War -- pursued by the left hand of government, and the multi-cultural, "global village" people. Civil Rights, the white counter-culture movement, and the debasement of educational standards, have all been parts of the program.

The primary champions of the global village have been the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, with the helpful input of socialists and communists fellow travelers -- staunch supporters of the United Nations, multi-culturalism, and internationalism all -- and all advocates of the subservience of national sovereignty to those worthy ends. Few of them realized they were playing right into the hands of capitalistic forces they most detested, and paving the way for the global hegemony of international capital -- the very imperialistic capitalistic forces that the Soviet Union had spent its entire history warning the rest of the world about.

The second thing that needed to be accomplished was to fulfill the promise of the U.N. General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), and usher in a global free market system, and international free trade. To do this, it was necessary to somehow bring the United States and the Soviet Union together. The left hand had it's own long-held agenda for bring the two superpowers together. This was by making the United States more like the Soviet Union. The right hand, while yielding to the left hand on almost every domestic social issue, held to an anti-communist, confrontational policy, calculated to force the USSR to come to the table on "capitalist" terms.

The Reagan administration pushed hard, calling the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire." The surprising result was, "constructive engagement," Glasnost, perestroika, and sweeping political reform within the USSR. Finally, Reagan stood grandly on the western side of the Berlin Wall and demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, take that wall down!" Much to everybody's surprise, not only did the wall come down, but the entire Union of Soviet Socialist Republics came crumbling down. With that (though the total break-up was itself somewhat of a set-back in some ways), the foundation for a "new international economic order," which president Reagan had announced and helped launch, was complete. It was finally possible to crown Capital king, and make the world its undisputed fiefdom.

All that was needed to give Capital its final crown and wings was a little "deregulation" -- easily sold to an unwary public as "getting government off the backs of the people." Free markets and free trade ("free" anything being one of the most powerful of sales pitches known to man), followed, with "supply side" and "trickle down" economics promising prosperity for all in a world without economic borders.

Ironically, the term "Voodoo economics" was given its debut, compliments of presidential candidate George Bush, Sr. (in derision of Reagan's tax-cut/balanced budget plan and trickle-down theory), just before Bush joined the Reagan team as vice-president. And Voodoo Economics were subsequently duly institutionalized as national economic policy -- alive, well, and expanding, to this day. Business boomed and the stock market soared as a result. Unbelievable fortunes were made. The GDP, along with the deficit (which didn't really seem to matter any more), soared. Everybody was happy -- except a few unfortunates who were beginning to see their jobs evaporate, and few perennial conservative malcontents, who never quite "get it."

The Reagan administration started doing "our duty" to the "South," with the much acclaimed Maquiladora initiative, and the groundwork for NAFTA was firmly laid into place. The first hints of a "great sucking sound" were heard only by a perceptive few -- mentioned later by Ross Perot.

Clinton thought he heard something else, and dutifully shoved the vacuum into high gear with the final approval of NAFTA. The results, though they entailed much pain and suffering for quite a few, were dutifully proclaimed a resounding success for everybody concerned. Disaster (in the form of Peso devaluation and big bailout for troubled investors), soon followed the initial body-blows to labor. But that, too, was pronounced good for everybody concerned.

The stock market continued to soar. Now, in spite of clear warning signals based on recent and current history, the hope is that we can progress on to even bigger and better things which will encompass the entire western hemisphere with even more 'AFTAs.

The economic boom was initiated during the Reagan years. Then it gathered steam during the first Bush presidency, and lasted throughout the Clinton years. The Democrats were quick, pleased, and proud to take credit. The economic euphoria was so great that Clinton, in spite of all the shame and embarrassment he brought to the Oval Office and the nation, was reelected to a second term.

Free trade had very broad appeal to almost everybody. (With the exception of a few conservatives on the right wing fringe, who not only recognized the dangers of international communism, but had long also been acutely aware of the very real threat that unbridled international capitalism posed. "Whackos," they were called.) Both the left and the right saw great hope and prospects in trade liberalization. Both the left and the right saw the "great potential" for lasting world peace through "international economic interdependence."

The left saw it as world peace by sharing our wealth to raise up the world's impoverished masses, while the right saw the prospects of American capitalism finally being unleashed to show the world just what it could do. Those few on the right, who actually knew what was going on, and were a party to it, also saw a giant golden rainbow forming, with the pot of gold landing right smack in the middle of Wall Street, and their own investment portfolios. The stock market bubble was accepted as ample evidence of the success of the new international economic order.

The unwary left, under the hypnotic spell of a socialistic Global Village, were pleased to know their Utopia would be largely funded by big capital, rather than strictly by First World taxpayers. The unwary right was under the hypnotic spell of free market economists who said free markets are both self-motivated and self-regulated engines of wealth creation. They believed the "free markets must reign" if the full potential of freedom is to be realized. Between the two, a happy joint venture was about to solve the world's most pressing social and economic problems.

But the wealth distribution, nonetheless, seemed to be a little out of balance. The rich got much richer, and the poor worked harder in both at home and abroad -- mostly abroad, as America's "good jobs" were exported in ever increasing numbers. Workers, both at home and abroad, were producing more than ever before, but the money was increasingly going to stockholders rather than into the pockets of labor. "Trickle-down economics" worked, but Capital had contrived to develop such large and deep pockets that precious little actually trickled down.

Not all conservatives were fooled, of course. There have always been a few right-wing, populist, constitutionalists types around who could see what was going on. They wrote and published books and shouted continuously into the wilderness. But nobody but the like-minded, listened. Instead they were relegated to the official "loony" bin. They were "isolationists", "protectionists", and "nationalists" (all of which had become dirty words), and they saw "dangers" and "conspiracies" everywhere. They saw a "vast left-wing conspiracy" and a "vast right-wing conspiracy." They appeared to be separate conspiracies to many, but some finally concluded that they had been working together from the beginning (like the good cop and the bad cop), and they conspired to deliver up a New World Order. Conventional wisdom (which is usually first fashioned, then "determined," by the major mass media under the direction of the experts), said they simply couldn't be trusted. No way!

True enough, many conspiracy theorist authors have only seen and described this or that part of the elephant. But some, Pridger believes, have managed to get at least somewhat of a focus on the whole beast. Yet the larger public and their public officials, carefully coached in what to think, consider the beast they described far too outlandish to be in the least believable. If there was a New World Order conspiracy, the conspirators certainly weren't about to admit it -- the public would only find out about it when it was a done deal. -- and it would be proclaimed "very good." Presto! We are in a New World Order! Now everybody clap together!

Only the "professional" experts can be trusted. Experts, both seen and unseen, had been doing the thinking for our elected government officials for some time. They inhabited the halls of academia, the board rooms and inner office suites of large corporations and financial institutions, Wall Street, and contributed their brain trust to various political "think tanks." They were of both the left and right, and they controlled the agenda of the complimenting left and right hands of the elected government. They had the academically certified expertise, and both the persuasive talents and clout only money can provide. And they could make themselves heard and perfectly understood in the hallowed halls of power. Naturally, the political leadership has eagerly responded to them.

If you don't believe this, then the entire blame for our present and future predicaments must be upon the shoulders of our duly elected representatives. We know, however, that a whole bunch of them are perfectly fine representatives, and there are many true conservatives among them. In spite of this, they must share in the blame to a large degree, though they did neither the thinking nor planning. They merely put the official American stamp of approval on the agendas of the experts.

During the Reagan years, due to an increasing divide between the president's initial pristine "conservative message," and what was being served up by his administration, some conservatives began waking up to a harsh reality. The dearly beloved conservative, and great hope of all true conservatives, was either powerless to deliver on important issues, or he had sold out. As a great admirer of Reagan and his bold and conservative rhetoric, Pridger personally chooses to believe it was powerlessness, and not avarice, that made the Reagan conservative revolution fall short.

Presidents are selected for both by their public appeal and for reasons of political expediency. A Republican conservative was required after the liberal Carter administration, and Reagan was the perfect conservative for the job. Someone had to stand up to Soviet Russia. And someone had to either save the Iranian hostages, or teach Iran a lesson. (The liberals were busy painting Reagan as a dangerous man, the Iranians got the message, and the hostages were freed just before he took office.)

Most of us were not even aware of what "neo-conservatives" were in those days. But the neo-conservatives, under the false colors of true conservatism, had already claimed the Republican party and were in control of the right hand of government. They are the "conservatives" that are in power when the Democrats are not in power. They are in power now -- the compassionate conservatives, given credit as the "intellectual arm of conservatism" -- the experts.

True conservatives have become a toothless, largely irrelevant, third force in politics -- permanently removed from the mainstream. They mainly survive as a relative few right-wing critics of everything the American government has come to stand for. "Paleo-conservatives," they are now called -- ancient throw-backs to another era. They are now the "far right," and out of touch -- just this side of the rabid right-wing radicals. They, of all things, lament the decline of constitutional American republicanism, limited government, and fiscal responsibility, etc. They don't think foreign entanglements are in the best interests of the nation. Rest in Peace oh great republic of our founders!

Two generations of Americans have now come to age not knowing what true American conservatism really is. True conservatives continue to complain of the continuing leftist bias of the press and mass media -- while liberals increasingly complain that conservatives have taken over the media. It has been neo-conservatives that have so successfully caught the public ear -- not true conservatives. The left, naturally recognize neo-conservatives as fellow travelers in many respects, but "conservatives" all the same. Few voters, however, know why there now longer seems to be a nickel's worth of difference between policy goals of Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans.

It is Pridger's humble opinion that national policy decisions have already been made, and administration goals carefully planned, long before a presidential candidate is nominated. It makes no difference whether he is Democrat or Republican. When he gets to office he is allowed to do only those things which do not interfere with those long-established, unchangeable "national" policy goals. Any president that balks is likely to get the Nixon treatment, or exit in the manner of Lincoln and Kennedy.

President Reagan had a rather serious brush with assassin's bullet. Whether or not the attempt was anything but the act of a "lone, girl-crazed, gunman," it was bound to have been a sobering experience for the president. Undoubtedly, Reagan toed the line a little more carefully thereafter. Even president Clinton had an uncomfortable brush with impeachment, something which would probably never have been carried nearly as far as it was (if Hillary hadn't mentioned that the Palestinians deserved to have their own nation), if Clinton had been a little more timely, regular, and generous with his bombing of Iraq. Once Clinton started a large bombing campaign in Iraq, the press eased the pressure considerably, and the Senate could see which way the winds were blowing. They voted not to impeach, and Clinton went on to bigger and better things, including reelection, wearing his House impeachment as a badge of honor.

Never fear! The Experts are in charge, not the president. Yet, the experts, in their various sundry think tanks, have delivered us into such an economically and strategically precarious national position that it taxes the imagination to figure out just what they must be on when they affix their thinking caps and bend the ears and pulled the strings of our national Congresses and administration policymakers.

Iraq, and the general War on Terror, for all their dire present and long-term implications and costs, are not our most serious problem, though serious enough. They are only serious distractions with which our national attention is presently successfully being diverted.

The real problem today is our overall national economic, trade, and military security position. In other words, the problem is not only serious, but covers almost everything we hold dear. Our problems, across the board, however, are of our own making, either by act or omission. That is, they might easily have been avoided if our elected government officials and administrations had stuck to national government and national independence, rather than global village building and seeking international interdependence. Had our representatives done their own thinking we might (just might), have done a little better than we have under the supposedly competent control of the un-elected experts. They certainly couldn't have done much worse.

Some Democrats seem to be doing a little of their own thinking now, though it is probably just an illusion. A few presidential candidates have even ventured to raise the "P" word (protectionism). Significantly, of course, not the candidate that got the nomination. Protectionism is not even an option, and the candidates who played with the idea were duly weeded out -- lucky to have been able to get their moment of fame on network TV. Most never actually mentioned the "P" word. If they had, they wouldn't have even made it to the primaries. But it makes very little difference what a presidential candidate says -- it's what his administration does when he gets into office that counts.

President Bush says that the answer to our economic problems is not, "to build a wall around the nation!" He reiterates the transcendental truth that trade protectionism would be criminal, if not suicidal.

While it is now political suicide to mention or seriously propose it, trade protectionism was indisputably one of the traditional national policies that made us into a great and prosperous industrial nation. Bush is right, however. We can't afford to start building a wall around our nation now. When we tore our economic borders down, we opened ourselves to such economic vulnerability that we have lost our former options.

Our great nation is already an international free trade junky -- hooked so bad, and for so long, that we can't get back to sanity without such serious withdrawal pains that the nation would be totally incapacitated during the recovery period, and economic chaos would result. The drug is international interdependence, which our own national leaders have been pushing like a dope peddler on a city street corner. The result of our addiction is total dependency on the drug we have been foisting on the rest of the world. We're now helplessly hooked, with no sane option but ever-increasing does of the same drug.

Oh, it isn't really all that hopeless. We could start cutting down the dose of the drug that has hooked us, and perhaps eventually get our act back together. We're still a great nation with all the resources we need for true national independence. It wouldn't even be all that painful, if we did it in careful degrees, before the roof finally caves in and forces rehab. But nobody is seriously considering that option. No real addict ever admits he has a serious problem until some sort of real catastrophe strikes. He won't listen to reason, and when the catastrophe strikes he ceases to function rationally a all. Then, it's usually up to others to see that he is put into rehab.

Right now we are seriously distracted by the "other" catastrophe that struck on 9/11/01, and the continuing catastrophes that seem to be in the offing as a result of our much acclaimed response. We need to be cautious with our military solutions, for we are running out of economic solutions for a growing national ailment.

We are no longer an economically independent nation. Not even close. And we are not nearly as politically independent or militarily unassailable as most Americans continue to imagine. We are no longer the masters of our own national destiny, for we have willfully sacrificed the independence we once had on the combined altars of free trade and internationalism -- that, and the altar of Mammon. Today, the only real hope our leaders are able to see remains in perpetuating the monster we've created, and intimidating the world into continuing to go along with our program and not pulling any of our increasingly precarious, foreign controlled, economic props.

Things are bad enough, and certain to get worse, however. Frankly, the former "land of the free and home of the brave" is over a barrel. It would take brains, careful planning, and true statesmanship, to prevent another catastrophic dunking.

Let's just take a look at our national position with regard to just one other large nation -- one that is a relative Johnny-come-lately to the world of capitalist commerce. I speak of none other than our late great enemy, but now great friend and fellow capitalist comrade-in-arms, China. A.k.a., Red China, Communist China -- the "yellow peril" of yesteryear.

Pridger remembers when it was illegal for an American to walk into a Red Chinese department store in Hong Kong or Singapore and purchase a communist Chinese made trinket. Now it's becoming almost impossible for Americans to survive without Chinese made goods. Wal-Mart and Wall Street would crash if the China trade were cut off. But our growing dependence on Chinese manufactured goods is only part of the problem. We are increasingly beholden to China's continued "good will" for continued economic viability. We kid ourselves when we find security in the notion that China needs us as much or more than we need them.

What would China do if it lost the American market? It would experience some serious withdrawal pains, of course, but nothing to compare with we would have to contend with. For one thing, they might be forced divert more profits into the pockets of their own labor force, and develop their own domestic consumer market. China is in a position to be almost totally economically independent, as they have been in the past -- and politically independent as they have never ceased to be. All of Asia is the potential Chinese economic hinterland, and Asia is capable of feeding and providing for itself. And China is already an unacknowledged superpower in military terms, and will soon be capable of seriously challenging our Far Eastern forward position.

We are very vulnerable to China and, chances are, it's only a matter of time before we will be obliged to eat at least a little very embarrassing humble pie. The only question is, will China continue to "support us" and help us look good, or will it soon begin to apply some pressure? If they do the latter, will it be gradual, like the Chinese water torture, or will it be applied it in large measures? And what about military pressure? What about the status of Taiwan, and our supposed commitment to that island nation -- the "Free China" we have continued to provide with moral and military support and protection? These are serious questions that we should have been asking ourselves long before we ever became as dependent as we now are on the China trade and Chinese good will.

The following relevant tidbits of information are quoted from a recent issue of Gary North's "The Daily Reckoning Investment Alert" email newsletter. Gary warns that China is waging an economic war against the United States, and that the war could devastate the American economy, calling it "Guerilla Economics."

Pridger would characterize it quite differently. The United States has been waging economic war against itself for decades. China's superior position is the result of our own willful national economic and trade policies. In other words, "We have met the enemy and the enemy is us!" China, on the other hand, is doing exactly what it thinks is best for China.

-------------------------(Begin quotes form "The Daily Reckoning")------------------------

"The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden." (Col. Qiao Liang & Col. Wang Xiangsui China's People's Liberation Army, and co-authors of Unrestricted Warfare)

Has there ever been a rising power, in the pages of history, that has picked up economic momentum... packed on military might... and then decided not to flex it's muscles? The answer, as you well know, is that there hasn't. Power is power. The nations that have it chomp at the bit to use it. Which is exactly what China is doing now. But you don't have to take my word for it.

Roger W. Robinson, Jr. -- head of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission -- gave this testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives back in October 2003. He laid out the Chinese blueprint for undermining the U.S. economy:

First, they devalue their currency by as much as 40%
Then they issue tariffs on foreign goods
They cut foreign firms off from local marketing channels
They chaperone and handpick partners for international joint ventures
They give preferential loans to their own factories from state banks
Chinese companies get privileged listing on the Chinese stock market
Chinese companies get special tax breaks not available to foreigners

"All Beijing has to do is to mention the possibility of a sell order going down the wires. It would devastate the U.S. economy more than any nuclear strike." Asia Times, Jan. 23, 2004

"We are beholden to the Chinese by our Treasuries. That worries me." Carla Hills, Former U.S. trade representative

"America's growing reliance on high quality, low-price Chinese imports eventually might undermine the U.S. defense industrial base." US-China Security Review Commission Report


"...The top 100 richest people in China now have an average wealth of $230 million. Another 10,000 or so more Chinese are worth at least $10 million so far. And that's up from zero millionaires in China as recently as 1979.

"...most of the companies listed on the Shanghai exchange are still state-owned. The top 14 Chinese car-makers are state owned -- with bloated bureaucratic budgets. But that doesn't matter -- in 2003, U.S. investors poured millions and millions of dollars into China Brilliance Automotive shares -- and it's stock shot up 232%!

"For all appearances, it looks like China has cracked the code of Western capitalism.

"Three years ago, for instance, China didn't manufacture a single laptop. NOW they make 40% of all laptops sold worldwide! They're also ranked as the world's biggest maker of computer hardware... consumer electronics... even steel (remember when that used to be Pittsburgh?).

"China cranks out 38% of the world's cell phones. And half of the world's shoes. Plus most of the wooden furniture, video games, and televisions in the United States.

"But guess what happens when you take a look at the other side of the coin...
"Here in the United States, American Metal Ware had made nearly 2.5 million pots in their Wisconsin factory... before they had to shut it down. Chinese manufactures stole the design and cranked out copies at half the price. To compete, Metal Ware had to move over to China.

"Levi's were the all-American brand. They once had 63 U.S. plants. They just closed the last two and fired all the workers. Levi's will be made in China now.

"Walt Disney was an all-American success story. But Disney's "Winnie the Pooh" dolls are made not here, but in the same place as Dr. Scholl's sandals and Foster Grant Sunglasses -- China.

"How about Wilson tennis balls or Black & Decker drills? Silk flowers, sneakers, wood furniture, and hand-held "Game Boy" video games? All sold here, but all manufactured in... China.

"A mind-blowing 80% of all the toys, bikes, and Christmas tree ornaments sold in the Unites States came from China. Along with 90% of the sporting goods and 95% of the shoes.

"Motorola spent over $1 billion moving operations from the US to China. Thousands lost their jobs -- replaced by 10,000 Chinese workers in four new plants on the coast of the Yellow Sea.

"...A New Hampshire radio show made a public dare: "Take $400 an hour at Wal-Mart. Buy as many 'Made In America' goods as you can." Two listeners took the challenge. An hour later, they hit the checkout line with a basketful of 40 items. Guess how many actually were made in America? Just 10. It's no wonder. Sam Walton, Wal-Mart's founder, wrote an autobiography called "Made In America." But today, Wal-Mart alone imports a mind-blowing $12 billion of goods from China every year...

"That's more than China's trade with either Russia or the United Kingdom! How did this happen?

"...Crush the Competition With Slave Labor !

"Chinese workers average 61¢ an hour. US factory workers average $16 an hour. In other words, US workers make more in two weeks than most Chinese laborers make in a whole year! Nobody outside of China can compete with that. China gets an endless supply of labor for just pennies. And there's a waiting list nearly 200 million people long to take over those jobs when the current workers drop from exhaustion (they work 12 hour days, 7 days a week).

"Moral or not, Beijing's slave-labor strategy does exactly what they hoped it would... It's sucked the life out of America's more costly industrial complex!

"Just check out the numbers: Over 450 U.S. companies are based in China. That's more than 10 times the number of U.S. companies there in 1990. They've got combined annual sales of $23 billion. And more than 250,000 employees. In fact, U.S. investment in China is now a record $33 billion a year!

"...Nearly 2,250 American manufacturing jobs here in the Unites States have disappeared... every single day! That's a not something new... it's been the trend day in and day out, over and over again... for 40 months straight!

"What are the Chinese up to? They learned this trick from the Americans. Especially mega-rich superstars like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and J. Pierpont Morgan.

"It's the genius strategy of any savvy monopoly maker: First, move in and CRUSH the competition with cutthroat pricing. Then... take away his business and leave him high and dry!

"Thanks to slave labor, Chinese companies can crush U.S. competition with lots of cheap goods that USED to be made right here in America. In exchange, they not only get our purchases... they get our companies, when they're forced to pack up and move over to China so they can take advantage of the same cheap labor strategy.

"What's more, China also gets to send a whole new kind of export to America... Chinese STOCKS! And in return for that, they get billions more in investment capital. Straight from the trading accounts of private U.S. investors. Imagine.

"We're literally paying Beijing to "rip the heart" out of the U.S. heartland! But it gets even better. Because that's only the FIRST dirty strategy engineered and overseen by Beijing. Here's the second...

"...Bait the Trap With Treasury Notes!

"Another fallout from Beijing's supercheap labor strategy is America's massive trade deficit with China. It just keeps exploding... it's already passed a gap of over $120 billion. That means we actually BUY $120 billion more in goods from China than we manage to SELL to them. A household can't get rich... or stay rich... if it spends more than it takes in. Neither can a nation.

"Yet, no matter what we try to do to stop the gap from growing... weaken our dollars, create trade tariffs, perfect production and slash costs... America just can't keep up.

"The trade deficit is now exploding $1.5 billion per day. Putting that in perspective... that means we spend an additional $1 million on Chinese products... every single passing minute!

"But that's not the worst part. Guess what China is doing with all that money?

First, the money we send China gets reinvested in the PLA, China's massive military. (New reports say China has just built low-profile military bases on several disputed reefs in the Philippines!).
Second, it goes back into funding more huge Chinese factories. With 200 million Chinese looking for jobs, China needs to build places for them to work! It also needs to buy HUGE stockpiles of raw resources to keep the factories running.
Third, and most dangerous of all, the Chinese government uses a lot of their extra exporting income... to pile up an absolutely SICK number of U.S. Treasury bonds!

"That's right. China spends nearly $7.8 million an hour... or $187 million a day... snapping up US Treasuries and dollars. The movers and shakers in China now hold the U.S. hostage to over $120 billion in Treasuries!

"If it's obvious that U.S. interest rates have nowhere to go but up... if it's obvious the U.S. dollar has nowhere to go but down... and if it's obvious that Washington right now is literally spending America into oblivion...

"Why would the Chinese government sock so much faith in U.S. treasuries? Simple. It's not a vote in America's future at all. Instead, it's Beijing's way of backing America into a corner! Think about it.

"The Feb. 5, 2004 Wall Street Journal has already reported that other Asian countries -- who altogether with China and Japan included -- hold an eye-popping $1.9 TRILLION in U.S. foreign reserves -- are starting to dump U.S. debt.

"Korea and Thailand dumping is one thing. But when a massive holder like China stops buying U.S. debt and starts dumping, it's a much, MUCH bigger deal. Pressure on U.S. bond yields will skyrocket. Other foreign investors will run from dollar-priced securities in a panic. Long interest-rates will jump. And U.S. consumers, businesses, and investors will get crushed in the jaws of a very powerful "Treasury Trap"!

"It won't take more than a whisper - "sell." And that's your signal. I promised earlier to show you how to protect yourself from exactly this kind of disaster. And that's precisely what you'll discover in your FREE e-mail report "Total Profit Protection From the Coming China Crisis! "

"But before we dig into all that, let me share with you just one more piece of this sinister puzzle...

"...Lock the U.S. Dollar in a Death Struggle

"To finance all its foreign debt, the United States has to spend a breathtaking $55 million per hour... or $1.3 billion per day... just to keep enough liquidity in the system to cover overseas interest-payment obligations. Washington treats the Federal Reserve like a money machine: Walk up, punch the buttons on the printing press, and out comes the cash! Why? Because the more dollars there are, the less they're worth. And the less they're worth, the easier it is to cover those interest obligations without wincing.

"Trouble is, no government -- not even one as large as America's -- can keep up with that kind of program. Especially when you're overextended on your own personal spending budget by nearly half a trillion (with a "t") dollars! So just by holding U.S. Treasures, Beijing already has us trapped. But they haven't stopped there.

"China has ALSO hoarded piles and piles of ever-cheaper U.S .dollars. They've now got more than $310 billion in U.S .dollar reserves! Again, you have to ask: If U.S. dollars are backed by an overextended federal government... and if other major governments worldwide are already talking about switching reserves to gold and euros... if America's money isn't worth the paper it's printed on...

"Why would China want to keep so much of their newfound wealth in the U.S. dollar, a currency that's already down more than 50% since October 2000?

"Again, it's simple. Since 1995, the Chinese currency -- the yuan -- has been pegged to the dollar at the weak exchange rate of 8.28 to the dollar. No matter how low the dollar goes, the yuan goes with it. So no matter how low the dollar goes... it's virtually impossible to close any currency-related trading gap we've got with China! It's like seeing how long two enemies can hold their breath under water. Whoever can withstand having a dirt-cheap currency the longest wins. But so far, judging just by the trading deficit, it looks like China is winning. And the U.S. is running out of options.

"Could a stronger dollar shake loose the yuan's death grip? Not at all. This is how the sinister yuan strategy works. If the dollar rises, the yuan rises in lock step. If the dollar drops, so does the yuan. China's trading advantage never disappears... but we risk popping our own real estate bubble, slashing trade with Europe, and knocking the legs out from under stocks and bonds.

"Meanwhile, China still has $310 billion in dollar reserves... which it can trade for euros or gold at any time... and use to throw the dollar into a final death spiral.

"When Beijing starts dumping, what follows could be worse for dollars than anything since Nixon broke with Bretton Woods in the 1970s..."


-----------------(End of quotes for "The Daily Reckoning")------------------

The Chinese are a very ancient civilization. They had a highly refined culture when Pridger's ancestors were still doodling on cave walls. Though the Chinese were technologically on a par with Europe when Marco Polo made his famous trek in the latter part of the 1200s, internal problems, including repeated invasions by Mongolian hoards, and China's vast size, seem to have held the Chinese civilization in check for centuries, and a few centuries yet to come. The gunpowder that the Chinese had invented, but only used for festivities, soon helped European nations go on a global colonization rampage. Meanwhile, China slept.

We often hear that America was once guilty of being an isolationist nation. But our so-called isolation was nothing compared to China's largely self-imposed, centuries old, isolation. When western nations were establishing colonies in the East, Chinese Emperors had their hands full just keeping their own borders policed. In any case, they didn't need colonies, because China had everything it needed and wanted. China engaged in some commerce with the rest of Asia, and some commercial colonies were established, but China refrained from colonial conquest.

When the great Western colonial powers came calling, wanting Chinese goods, China wasn't receptive. But the big guns of the west crashed the gates and penetrated the Chinese market, forcing trade that the Chinese Emperor didn't want. Trade concessions were finally formalized through what later became known as "gunboat diplomacy." Then the British hit on the idea of under-mining the Chinese will to resist by introducing them to opium. The Opium Wars followed. When China finally shut down the foreign concessions in some major ports, England established a defensible redoubt at Hong Kong. The Portuguese did likewise in nearby Macao, making those enclaves crown colonies right on China's door step.

America joined in the melee of forcing China's reception to foreign trade as soon as it was big enough to participate, and particularly after the Spanish American War which made us the colonial master of the Philippines. American marines joined with the British and other foreign commercial interests to put down the Boxer Rebellion (against foreigners and foreign commercial interests in China) about the turn of the twentieth century, and our gunboat diplomacy continued well into the twentieth century.

One of the great arguments in favor of free trade is, "If trade doesn't cross borders, then armies will." We are an example of that. China didn't want our trade, but we wanted theirs. It has always been the international bullies of commercial imperialism that have sent their armies and naval forces to force reluctant markets open. Though China was never totally conquered militarily, or successfully colonized, by western powers, it was invaded, drugged, and humiliated by the west, including the United States.

Then, after World War Two, we found our horse hitched to the losing side in China's internal struggles. Here was another ironic twist to the outcome of the great war. The Chinese Communists, with the help our our great ally, the USSR, forced our Chinese friends, the Nationalists, out and onto the island of Taiwan. Then the "Reds" held the line against us in Korea. Next, they helped insure our national humiliation in Vietnam. Now we're in a rather difficult and embarrassing situation indeed. We are still militarily committed to the defense of Taiwan, though we were finally forced to ceased recognizing it as "The Republic of China" -- (Free China, we called it) -- as the legitimate government of the mainland. China, of course, considers Taiwan as a rebel province, and intends to bring it to heel eventually. And now, to top the cake, we are economically wed, and frightfully dependent, upon our former enemy, the "Peoples' Republic of China" (the ones we used to call "those terrible Reds!").

To make all of this even more unfathomable, we not only brought a still backward and slumbering communist giant to full wakefulness -- and did it unnecessarily -- we set them up in business as a capitalist competitor. But for our help, China may have taken another century to become an economic and military superpower. But we helped produce the Chinese economic miracle of the last two decades. We've shared, either directly or by proxy, some of our most sophisticated technology and military armaments. Not only is China a nuclear power, but we've helped make sure it could quickly develop intercontinental ballistic missiles to aim at the West Coast of the good old U.S.A. So today China has the capability to attack us militarily and inflict massive casualties on American cities without even mobilizing their army. In the event that we should be foolish enough to try to invade the Chinese mainland, the Red Army is already fully mobilized (the largest military establishment in the world), and we're it's paymaster. And the Chinese military/industrial complex is quite different than ours. The Red Army actually owns most of the industries that support it, along with many of the industries that now support us! If we cut off the Red Army's paychecks and the trans-Pacific trade, we're sunk, not them. Wal-Mart and Wall Street would collapse, and where would we get all our stuff?

We've apparently forgiven and forgot a great deal, but China probably hasn't. It has a long memory. It has many old axes to grind with us. It hasn't forgotten the humiliations that it has suffered at the hands of the West. They remain "recent history" to the Chinese -- you can be sure of that. Communist China, in fact, may "still" be at war with the "American Imperialists and their running dogs," without even mentioning it -- a polite war. After all, "War is deception."

But our leaders are apparently able to overlook such possibilities in their haste for quick riches for their paymasters on Wall Street. China has plenty of time and patience, and a whole array of interesting options. Meanwhile, our options are rather limited. We can hope that China will continue to be polite and play us along for some time to come. We can hope that China doesn't call our hand with regard to Taiwan any time soon.

Did China put us into this awkward and terribly vulnerable position? Or have we done it to ourselves? Pridger may be wrong, but it seems obvious to him that we've done it to ourselves -- and gone a long way out of our way to do it, too. And if we did it to ourselves, why have we done it? Just who were the experts -- the thinkers and planners who pulled the strings of our leaders -- that delivered us up into these narrow rocky straits?

President Bush is right. We can't afford to put up a wall around our nation. We don't really own it any more. It would deprive the world of it's biggest market, and us of all of our goodies. Nobody could stand it. Americans would be rendered almost helpless. We might even find out what hunger and destitution are really like. And China, in particular, would probably laugh and carry on -- with itself, and the whole of Asia, as its market. The Islamic terrorist networks would laugh too, of course -- as would many other undeclared enemies.

America really would have to repair to "Fortress America" (sooner, rather than later), and get its act back together in a hurry. That would be the worst nightmare of all. It would be a real difficult thing to accomplish on short notice. Where would we get all our stuff?.

So the Chinese have learned the lessons of Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and J. Pierpont Morgan. Pridger would be sorely disappointed in the Chinese if they are not studying the lessons of Abraham Lincoln and Henry Ford right now. If they get those lessons down, China has the clear potential of becoming the unassailable master of the planet in another half century -- without even the necessity of rattling a sword or invading another nation.

Well, Pridger doesn't like to dwell on doom and gloom. So, this will be it for a while. Anyway, maybe America has an ace in the hole that we haven't been told about. Maybe we have weaponry that will bring China and the rest of the world to its knees when the time is right -- a military blackmail hole card. Some people think so. "When the going gets tough, the tough get going," they say. But somehow, that doesn't seem all that happy a prospect either.

Who knows what God's plan is? Certainly the Almighty had enough forethought to have a pretty detailed plan. But what if he just set the top in motion and will simply watch it wobble until it falls over? Then picks it up again for another spin? Christians, and most others of religious faith, have a somewhat comforting view of what God's Plan is. They believe that mankind has a special relationship with God and that man himself, made in God's own image, was God's crowning success. They have the comfort of knowing that both salvation and eternal life are within the reach of every man and woman of faith.

Pridger claims to be a Christian -- and is, to the best of his ability, at least in his own pitiful way, given his numerous human failings. He has plenty of faith in God, and puts a great deal of stock in the earthy teachings of Jesus. Yet, he's not at all convinced that God's Universe revolves around the human race. Most mainline Christians, of course, would put this down as evidence that Pridger is on a one way road to damnation and eternal Hell-fire, somewhere down in the earth's molten core. Maybe so, but if Pridger himself actually believed that, he would have undoubtedly already gone out of his way to get Baptized, regularly dowsed with holy water, and been reborn at least once, to insure his passage to a better world. Pridger, in spite of his faith in God, has the sneaking suspicion that we're already in Heaven, but have somehow failed to realize it, and are failing to properly tend the garden.

Okay, so Pridger isn't exactly what most Christians define as a Christian. But he nonetheless gives God credit for careful forethought and planning, and thinks that men should give the subject careful attention too. Not that men should attempt to out-think God and materially improve on His plan. Pridger suspects his kind is inherently incapable of doing that. But what men should do is engage in the careful cultivation of the earthly manifestation of God's bounty, and plan for a sustainable future right here on Earth.

We, as a race, have undoubtedly been allotted our time on Earth, and been given the faculties of analytical thought, imagination, and the free will to fashion our own human-friendly environment and destiny. There is little doubt in Pridger's mind that Earth itself is a God-given Paradise -- a literal Garden of Eden -- with which mankind has been gifted, along an uncanny human ability to make it into whatever he choices during his allotted time. Heaven or Hell -- mankind seems to be pretty much left to his own devices to determine which it will be. Whether or not God, in all His mercy, compassion, and foresight, has reserved another place for us (in the event that we really screw things up here), remains to be seen. It's a pretty big Universe out there -- so there is hope. But for the time being, we've got to make do with the wonderful planet that He has given us in the here and now. Just how much time we have left to either get things right here, or prepare ourselves for settling another planet somewhere, is anybody's guess.

That there are limits, would seem fairly obvious. The Earth itself, along with the Sun and solar system, undoubtedly have but a mere moment of existence in cosmic terms. Creation probably isn't over, but (for all our learning), we haven't got the foggiest idea whether we're still in the beginning or end of the seventh day. Whether mankind is the final word in Earth's evolutionary development is far from clear. Scientific evidence points to the probability that in the morning of the seven day Creation process of Genesis, Earth was the realm of several other geological and biological epochs, in which man did not even figure. We naturally tend to believe that we are the last word in God's Creation -- but, as they say, "God only knows" for sure.

But what we do know is that the "here and now" is "our time," and that there appears to be no fixed limit to our future. Both "now," and the future, are our only opportunity to shine as a truly positive force on Earth. And we have been trusted with the opportunity and responsibility of determining what is positive and what is not. With this wonderful opportunity, mankind must take an active part in his own salvation -- and if this world is ever to be the Garden of Eden that it should be, the whole of mankind must share in the labor.

God has handed down some rules. Some of them are pretty hard and steadfast, and man has thus far proven incapable of violating them. These are the laws of "nature" which are still believed to be beyond man's ability to alter or transcend. Mankind has categorized and defined some of them under the general heading of the laws of physics. Though man cannot alter them, he is free to apply and use them, within certain bounds, for his own comfort and benefit. With this unique human facility to "manipulate tools," also comes the ability to misuse them and abuse what might be termed the Holy Trust. The laws which govern man's use of these tools, and interact with his fellow beings, have also been handed down, though they are not nearly as difficult to violate as the laws of physics. One such set of laws, which are increasingly the subject of controversy in the Western World, is what we refer to as the Ten Commandments.

One of the problems with the Ten Commandments today is that men have differences of opinion as to who or what handed them down -- and how relevant and binding they are in an age which is crammed with a lot more scientific knowledge than in ancient times -- when it was generally believed that God could and would write, and then entrust his messages to mere mortals, such as Moses, to post. After all, Moses didn't have a PhD in theology or anything else. There weren't even any accredited institutions of "higher learning" in his day. So how seriously can those laws be taken in a day when such institutions crank out PhDs by the car-load? The other major "law-givers," purported by the faithful to be messengers from God, suffer from the same contemporary doubts and lack of faith, especially in the hallowed corridors of academia and the predominate halls of political power. Today, civil law is considered sufficient to replace any alleged Divinely Inspired Law. But, perhaps this is merely God's Will as it translates to our more enlightened, scientific age. It certainly suites most of our elected officials, capital interests, and the trial lawyers.

Man is continually pushing the envelope of scientific knowledge -- so far, in fact, as to really begin tinkering with God's handiwork at the most elemental levels known to man, in both biological and physical realms. Science can now perform miracles that man once never even dreamed of, much less read of in the Good Book. Startling medical achievements, weapons of mass destruction, and Dolly the cloned sheep come to mind. The actual "creation of life" now seems to be within the capabilities of modern science.

There is an irony in the continuing revelations of man's scientific achievements. The scientific mind was the first to suspect, then proclaim, that God had been created by men in their own image, rather than the other way around as the Bible said. But even scientific men continue to be surprised, baffled, and amazed at God's handiwork. And (speaking in generalities, of course), they have increasingly (most without giving the slightest credence to the actual existence of God), imagine themselves to be just a step or two away from that rank themselves. The closer they look at the mysterious mechanisms of nature, pealing away mystery after mystery, the more they recognize something resembling their own brilliance and handiwork. The gene, and DNA, for example, is beginning to appear to be something like an extraordinarily complex computer program -- something that could have only been devised by some really advanced "human-like" intelligence. Some scientists have even become religious, swallowing some of their professional pride, and deciding that it now makes scientific sense to call that Supreme Intelligence God. Others continue to doubt a Supreme Intelligence and hold out for the promotion themselves.

Modern telescopes pear into space, not only from the Earth's surface, but from deep space orbit. Sophisticated scientific machinery has been sent to examine the noon and planets. Men have even walked upon the moon, and have places to put footprints on Mars and other heavenly bodies. But our view of the Universe is still just that -- a view outward from a very tiny place, into what is a much bigger place than we can ever hope to see. But that doesn't prevent the scientific mind from purporting to measure it's timelines and define its limits, even as new mystery after new mystery is revealed, and previous assumptions and conclusions are amended. At some point the Universe is bigger even than the scientific mind is capable of affixing a description and limit to. Even the "ultimate" nature and truth of the "Big Bang" theory itself is now being considered possibly short-sighted in nature. The "Big Bang" did look pretty big from our perspective, but maybe it was just a single bubble in a bubble bath. Whatever the case, it is probably pretty safe to assume that we are light-millennia away from any conclusive answer as to any "Ultimate" cosmic answer to our scientific curiosity.

By now some readers who have read this far may be asking, "Okay, Pridger, what's the point?"

Maybe the point is that when one begins a blog post, with something specific in mind, he can, by way of introduction and lengthy pontification, get off on a tangent and completely lose sight of what the originally message was intended to be. Maybe making a case that God exists, and can actually co-exist with the revelations of the natural sciences, was the point. Maybe it was that experts, no matter how learned, do not possess a monopoly on all the answers.

Seriously, the point is that men as well as God must have a plan. Men, are endowed by their Creator with the very same survival instincts as the entire array of lower creatures, and much more to boot. They have the responsibility to think beyond tomorrow, both for themselves and collectively as a society. Not just for the sake of their own survival, but their personal and collective "salvation."

The paramount question in this day of globalism, is "Just who has done, and is continuing to do, our thinking and planning for us?" And aside from that, is it the "right" plan for the long-term preservation of the nation, the world, and mankind as a whole? Or is it a plan to insure the safety, security, and continued profits, of certain powerful moneyed interests at the expense of the rest of humanity and the global environment?

The only thing that most of us can be quite certain of, is that "We the People," (of America and the world) didn't do the planning, nor did we cast any vote on the direction our nation and world are now taking. As Americans, we can also rest assured that today's New World Order did not sprout from our own national charter, nor any "original intent" on the part of the founders. That charter, invoking "the laws of nature and nature's God" as its sole higher authority, established a new republic in which the representatives of the people, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," declaring independence from what had been the ruling colonial power.

The two houses of Congress, and the executive branch (collectively assumed to be the sole official representatives of the people), are still supposedly in charge at the national level, but they have voted to integrate American into a New World Order -- something which they had absolutely no legitimate authority to do. Their collective goal no longer appears to be simply representation of "We the People," in constitutional republic constrained in its powers by the Constitution of this republic. Their role, and apparently their collective mission, is now much grander -- transcending anything our founders intended or imagined. And, though no Congress, an no president, did much, if any, of the thinking or planning behind the New World Order, it has nonetheless seen fit to cast the necessary votes in our behalf to get us to where we are today -- no longer the masters, by any stretch of the imagination, of our own national destiny. In short, the National Trust has been broken -- and is probably irreparably broken.

The explanation and justification, of course, is that things have changed. All of a sudden it's a new world out there, and we not only have to keep up to avoid falling behind, but as the world's only remaining superpower, we must lead it too! That is our new "manifest destiny," regardless of what the American people want or think. Problem is, not enough Americans were tipped off in advance in order to be able to do much thinking about it. And, if they had been tipped off, they would have first been overwhelmed via mass media by the PR people promoting the idea. In fact, they have thus far supported the idea, always after the fact, for exactly that same reason.
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Americans supported the United Nations, partly because they were told that it was "an idea whose time had come," in the wake of World War Two. Before the end of the war, and before the United Nations had been officially chartered, our leaders had already begun referring to the Allies as the "United Nations," so Americans had already been conditioned to think that it was a wonderful thing. They believed the UN was thought up in America by brilliant Americans, "Made in America," and would serve American interests while fooling the rest of the world into thinking it was organized to serve them. Americans thought the United Nations was merely the tail by which we would wag the world. They think the same thing of the new international economic order. It's an American creation, so it has to be good.

Twenty years after president Ronald Reagan announced a "new international economic order," and pronounced that America was "advancing" into a post-industrial era to become a "service economy" -- almost fifteen years since president George Bush actually brought the "New World Order" right out into the glare of the Iraqi sun, during Iraqi War Number -- more than a decade after NAFTA was enacted under the administration president Bill Clinton -- and now with president George Bush, Jr. engaged in the War on Terror and Iraqi War Number Two, to make the world safe for democracy -- the various flocks of chickens are coming home to roost in such large numbers that some people are beginning to crow.

But GATT (The UN's General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs -- the father of NAFTA and other free trade agreements) almost dates from the inception of the UN, and was always part of the plan. But the plans were laid decades before. President Woodrow Wilson's supposed brain-child, the League of Nations, was born of World War One, and the basic plan (which we may as well call a plan for world government) had already been carefully crafted at that time, with free trade a major plank. The League of Nations was effectively still-born, because the Senate of that day was still sufficiently nationalistic, and representative of the people, to refuse to relinquish any American sovereignty to any kind of international organization. By the end of World War Two, however, the mood of Congress had changed. Apparently it had been made to see the light, and it has dutifully seen the light from then on.

Free trade was not the only wooden nickel that had to be sold to the American people. There was a lot more to it than that. But it was a key part of it. Significantly, the larger part of the free trade agenda was held in check for some decades, due to the Cold War. Capital could not truly spread its wings, nor could it be unleashed upon the unwary "free world," without the cooperation of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union, so much a part an older new world order vision, was not in a mood to cooperate. Because of this, capital had to be kept in check through it's traditional regulatory bonds and trade protectionism, so American corporations were retained in service of the American people -- beholden to them for both markets and labor.

Of course, some large American corporations had long before gained their wings, and were the multi-national pioneers. But they were mostly into subservient Latin American nations, providing Americans with bananas, coffee, and sugar, etc. Big Oil has long been out there too, of course. Other American multi-nationals became America's commercial Cold Warrior firms in the employ of the Defense Department, acting as agents of our wide-spread strategic foreign policy aims. They were in Vietnam and other hot spots, projecting the military/industrial complex abroad. They are in Afghanistan and Iraq today, having won contracts through long and profitable association with the U.S. government.

Ironically, only with the collapse of the late great USSR, was the full range of GATT, and its international free trade agenda, finally fully unleashed upon the peoples of the world. There was a great euphoric feeling in the world at the time. With the deadly threat of international communism's superpower finally laid to rest, it really could be a free world. And free international trade, free markets, and freedom for everybody, was an extraordinarily easy sell. The public took the bait, hook, line, and sinker.

The long-term (though never mentioned), goal of global governance, was the parliamentary wing of the New World Order plan, embodied in the United Nations. But most of the work had to be done in the United States. The entire demographics of the nation had to be overturned and the public and Congress weaned of thru "nationalististic" spirit. The Cultural War was a great part of it. Free trade is part of it. But utopia for international capital (which is mostly what the New World Order facilitates) was not only goal.

Of course, Pridger has read fairly widely in an effort to get a grasp upon what is really going on in the world, and what seemed most particularly seemed to be going wrong in the nation. One book in particular opened his eyes to a very significant aspect of the plan. This was "RIO -- Reshaping the International Order." Unlike most of the books Pridger had read, which sounded the alarm and cited sources, this was an official "Report to the Club of Rome," published in 1975, by E. P. Dutton, of New York, after being submitted to the United Nations. It was, in fact, in response to the "Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States" and resolutions adopted by the Sixth Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly. Undoubtedly, it is only one of many such works which has helped shape what the New World Order is supposed to be destined to become.

Pridger won't get into this in detail, but in essence, the report, citing international statistics, simply said that the prosperous nations of "the North," meaning the western industrialized nations, had a "duty" to accomplish two main imperatives: (1) Share their wealth liberally with the Third World to bring third world standards up, and (2), Greatly reduce the consumption patterns (living standards), of their own peoples. The consequences of not doing these things (to put it in simple terms), was that the Northern nations would soon be overwhelmed and delivered its comeuppance by the desperate and hungry hoards from the South. Something like what we now see on our southern border, but on a much grander scale -- in SPITE of (and partly because of), our generous Maquiladora plan and NAFTA. Our living standards are going down, but not nearly fast enough to keep the South at bay.

We have often heard of the first duty from our own leaders, but they never mention the second. Yet the report was clear -- the earth cannot sustain it's present population, much less a billion more expected in the near future, on anything approaching the then present economic standards of the advanced western nations, circa 1975. This economic leveling has been under way now for over two decades. It's part of the plan we see obviously unfolding before our very eyes today. The way to facilitate it was ingenious and made very attractive to the American "consumers," who have always been told they were going up the river toward greater prosperity rather than being sold down the river. In fact "cheap imports" give us the motivation, as consumers, to vote ourselves down the river as working and prosperous producers. The plan was more than just ingenious, and it has worked thus far. But alarm bells are beginning to go off in unlikely places.

Before getting off this touchy subject of how racial injustices of the past and present figure into the "Culture War," Pridger would like touch on the subject of racial stereotyping.

When he brought up the subject of our burgeoning prison population in the previous post, and stated, "yet most of the criminals are still on the loose, roaming the streets, and terrorizing inner city neighborhoods," what images were brought to mind?

Did those images include prisons disproportionately populated with sulking black convicts, black street gangs and drug dealers, and groups such as the "Crips" and the "Bloods," and their deadly turf wars? Was it also visions of black single mothers and their innocent children terrorized and almost held hostage in their "fortress apartments" in government-provided low-income tenements?

If those images came to mind it is because you happen to have, however involuntarily, a certain black "stereotype" fixed in your mind.

Of course, there's a lot more than just black thugs on the loose. There are plenty of white ones, too -- many of them white collar types. Then there are the "organized crime" racial stereotypes, the Italian Mafia, the Cuban Mafia, the Russian Mafia, the Latino and Asian gangs, etc. They are well represented, of course, but they don't just jump to mind when the prison population, street gangs, and drug dealers are mentioned. You get the picture, I'm sure. The vision of black thugs tends to jump to mind, together with images of the continuing hopeless plight of so many perfectly innocent African-Americans.

Today, stereotyping of minority races is considered to be extraordinarily politically incorrect. But we unavoidably have racial stereotypes fixed in our minds, based on what we have seen, experienced, have read or heard, or what we know of various races. Basically, stereotyping tends to be involuntary, and we all do it whether we actually want to or not. If the stereotype presents a positive or flattering image, it's politically correct to bring it up in conversation and print. But if the stereotype is negative and unflattering, it's best to keep it to yourself and pretend that your subconscious mind is incapable of indulging in such racial injustice.

Historically, racial stereotyping has often become institutionalized, as was the case in America before the Cultural War, and before minority racial stereotyping became politically incorrect. It's a perfectly natural phenomenon -- the majority stereotyping minorities -- and the minorities stereotyping the "oppressive" majority. But "official" stereotyping was the prerogative of the majority in "democratic," if not absolutely just, societies.

The institutionalized stereotype is usually in the form of a harmless and unthreatening figure. Though usually based on real racial or cultural attributes, as well as predominate occupations, the "official" or "popular" stereotype is usually expressed in various "funny" or "likeable" characterizations. This was the case before blacks gained more than just political equality. The black stereotype was manufactured, "protected," and perpetuated in the "popular mind," by the white establishment.

Before the final emancipation of our black minority, most whites, when visualizing the "Negro," conjured up mental images such as the big white-toothed smile of a black child perusing a huge wedge of watermelon; Little Black Sambo partaking of an impossible stack of hot buttered pancakes; the beloved and cheerful domestic servant or gardener; or loyal black valet; hard working families making a great time of the chore of picking cotton; a matronly Aunt Jemina; A jubilant Uncle Remus, telling his Brier Rabbit tales; and the hilarious exchanges between the "Two Black Crows;" and the antics of Amos and Andy -- lovable images all. These were the images that once came mind when white Americans thought of "their colored folk." Now most of these stereotypical images are politically incorrect.

Of course, the "old America" also had negative racial stereotypes of the black race. The black man was not always pictured with as a lovable figure by any means. It would be grossly unfair to neglect pointing this out. There was always various sinister images of the "black threat" in the back of the white mind, and many would say for good reason. Additionally, of course, there were a relative few whites who were maliciously racist and really despised the black race for no other reason than their color. And, admittedly, there was the nearly universal belief among whites that the black race was inferior, and thus must be kept in its place. This, of course, included a large percentage of those whites who went the extra mile to fight for Civil Rights out of a sencere desire for a just society (though they could never be induced to admit it). But, except among avowed and closet racists, the more negative images of blacks were always kept in the background. By in large, white people neither feared nor hated the black man, largely because they were not forced to confront or deal with him. Most whites felt compassion for blacks, while very much desiring to keep them in their place.

It must not be forgotten that discrimination and segregation were not confined to the old Confederacy States. It was nation-wide. The South was much more up front about it, with many petty "separate but equal" laws and separate facilities for blacks, but the North was almost equally segregated "in fact," by both natural social forces and less visible legal mechanisms. Northern acceptance of blacks was less than skin deep, and every northern city had its "colored town" just as southern cities did. In fact, in much of the south blacks and whites were on much "friendlier" (if not quite as equal), terms than blacks and whites in the north. And northerners shared the very same racial stereotypes with southerners.

Some of the old stereotypes have survived. Aunt Jemima is still around, somewhat slimmed down, lightened up in complexion, her smile toned down, her features slightly "anglicized," and her head bandana abandoned. Amos and Andy radio and TV shows are still available, but not without considerable controversy. But others are considered so politically incorrect that "having them" (whether in mind or in evidence) is considered evidence of racism and bigotry, to the point of almost being a hate crime. Not even a black man can open a restaurant chain named "Sambo's" (It was tried, was initially very successful, but quickly put out of business, because the name "Sambo" was SO offensive). And, of course, associating blacks with picking cotton, domestic service, or any menial labor at all, is out. Walt Disney's wonderful classic "Song of the South" is out too, because it depicted happy black slaves on a southern plantation. The Two Black Crows are also out, and it's a wonder that Disney's "Dumbo, the Flying Elephant" hasn't been pulled off of the market due to it's funny "black crow" sequence. Even some white commercial icons have been changed in deference to minority sensitivities. While Aunt Jemima was modernized to make her appear more "flattering" to her race, blond, blue-eyed, Betty Crocker benefited from a remake in the opposite direction. She now has dark hair, brown eyes, and an olive complexion -- to reflect the present American "realities."

Since we have supposedly progressed so far in race relations during the last half century, and African Americans now enjoy the full array of rights enjoyed by all other races, one would think that the broader public, and whites in particular, would have a much more positive mental picture of the black man than those images which once predominated. Sadly, this isn't the case.

When the average white man conjures up mental images of the black man today, he seldom thinks of George Washington Carver, or any of the many other blacks who have contributed constructively to the welfare of their race and our national history. They don't think of the hardworking black sharecropper family, or the exuberant jazz man. They don't think of the classic Rhythm and Blues artists, and the true pioneers of "rock" music. Nor do they conjure up the soul-grasping sounds of Negro spiritual music. Images of Nat King Cole and Ray Charles don't loom large in our present day image of the black race. Those notables, images, and sounds of what was once an important part of the "soul" of Black America, are all far in the background, except in the hearts and minds of a former generation of both blacks and whites. And, of course, there continues to be an endless array of excellent black talent and professionalism in every walk of life. But, lamentably, they do not constitute the contemporary black stereotype.

Images of Clarence Paige, Tony Brown, Clarence Thomas, or Colin Powell don't come to mind. Most whites don't even think of Martine Luther King as a stereotypical black. These are the rare, though still numerous, "exceptions" -- not the rule -- and certainly not the racial stereotype in the "popular mind."

The new racial stereotype of the black man is a dark sinister figure, not very much different than the old negative stereotypes, but much more threatening and dangerous -- and much more "up front" in the subconscious mind, though artificially suppressed and unmentionable. Even many black sports stars come across as threatening figures. Certainly extraordinarily popular rap artists do, rapping out lyrics that tell us exactly how they feel.

In spite of the fact that there is a growing black professional and middle class with whom most whites are perfectly comfortable, if the truth were known, the white race in general now truly fears the black man as a class and political and "cultural" power -- but must act as if it doesn't. Politicians certainly fear the power of the black and minority vote. Fear, in both the long and short term, is the father of hate. And suppressed hate on a large scale is the seedbed and germ of violence and retribution.

But what else could be expected when justice for the black minority took the form of injustice for the white majority by federal decree? In the wake of forced integration, white city dwellers were forced to vote in the only means left open to them -- with their feet -- abandoning the once great cities for the safer suburbs. Forced bussing, to attain proper integration of the public schools, among other things, contributed significantly to a precipitous decline in educational standards for all, severely impacting the future prospects of both backs and whites for generations to come. This was not the road to justice and racial harmony, though that was supposedly the intention of the do-gooders and the courts that mandated it. Something had gone woefully wrong, and that something was not simply the result of good intentions. There had been carefully calculated plans, devised and laid out long before, to make these things happen the way they did, under cover of "justice" and "good intentions."

In his own defense, the white man has adopted the emboldening bravado that only "my language is just as strong as your language" could provide. But he's deathly afraid to articulate certain "forbidden words" -- forbidden to him alone. He rationalizes all of this as his "genuine desire" for racial harmony and justice. He allows the opposition to call the shots, and is required to grin and bear whatever they hold for him. Those few gutsy enough to speak their minds on race in no uncertain terms, are relegated to the far-right fringes, more criticized and ostracized in our society today than the urban gangs with blood on their hands as a matter of manly pride.

White youth attempts to "empower" itself by emulating black behavior and "cultural innovations." They can rap too, and wear baggy pants, and do these things with great pride. But the kid with a Confederate battle flag on his t-shirt is considered poison. Large areas of the inner cities (once vibrant and relatively safe), are places where whites fear to tread. Vast public housing tenements, and once white neighborhoods, are the new ghettos, but more dangerous and forbidding than any "colored town" ever thought of being -- but not just for hapless whites who turn the wrong corner, but even more so for the residents themselves.

The "colored town" is gone, along with the entire "colored establishment" that once existed -- a parallel society of black-owned properties and businesses, black shopkeepers, black professions, black cultural and sports organizations and events. These were blacks' own "place" -- a place that might have been "second-class" to the white establishment, but was nonetheless fully as rich in every way (save economically, of course. And some would say richer, in some ways) as "white society." But forced integration destroyed this place and the society that blacks once had. Conventional wisdom says "good riddance." It was unjust. And, so it was on some levels. But the colored town of yesterday was a much happier and more vibrant place than most "modern black ghettos" of today. There are many blacks still living who are acutely aware that, in gaining the justice they had desired and deserved, they also lost something that was both essential and irreplaceable.

This didn't have to happen as it did, of course. Justice might have been much less destructive of both black and white society. The essence of "enlightened conservatism" is to seek real progress, without the destruction of all that has proven good in the past. This sometimes means change in measured and palatable doses. But the bully forces of "liberalism" were in charge. They are less discriminating, hence much more destructive. They sought change in big doses, forced down the public throat without thought of the consequences of an overdose.

But for a white man to point this out, with reference to something as untouchable as Civil Rights, is about as politically incorrect as one can get. It's almost as bad as allowing that some black slaves could have been happy on the ante bellum plantation. Blacks can be nostalgic about what they once had, even as they were the subjects of institutionalized discrimination, but whites cannot.

Pridger would like to make his own position on race perfectly clear. No point in pretending to be Mr. Perfect, pontificating from some high and mighty mountaintop. Pridger is a white Anglo-Saxon male, of Protestant religious heritage (though now a "protestant" in many other contexts). As such (and disregarding any accomplishments of DWM), he figures the white race is superior to all other races. He figures America would have had better long-term prospects if the black race had been left in Africa, Mexicans were happy and prosperous in Mexico, and all the Asian countries had managed to get their political act together before so many of them fled to American shores.

That said, however, Pridger would be sorely disappointed if every every member of every other race didn't have exactly the same high regard for their own race as Pridger does for his. This goes for culture as well as race. If Pridger happened to have been born a Massai or Zulu tribesman, he believes he would possess the very same high regard for his race and culture as he does in his present incarnation with his white hide and library of DWM literature. In fact, Pridger probably has a higher regard for other people, other races, and other cultures, than 90% of the bleeding heart multi-culturalists who preach co-mingling of the races, cultures, and nations to the point of obliterating the rich and wonderful human diversity with which our planet was so favorably endowed.

Racial pride aside, Pridger is well aware of his own failings as well as many of those of his race. He's aware of the chain of injustices throughout history, but nonetheless doesn't believe that any race has any better record than his own Anglo-Saxon race in the fields of both justice and humanity and injustice and inhumanity to man. There are many who would argue the point, of course. Naturally, the most successful nations and peoples tended to do of more of both on larger scales, but few have ended up with as "just" a civilization as the one we inhabit today, in spite of its numerous shortcomings, past and present.

But the fact is, the United States of America was the result of the cumulative successes (with many failures and much tragedy), of the march of western European civilization, with plenty of significant historical input from previous civilizations, such as the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. And more. Other races and cultures were both crushed and recruited to conquer, settle, and build this great nation, yet it is one of the freest and just nations the world has known. For those fortunate enough to live in it today, it would be wise to take stock of how we got to where we are today. Equally important, we need to take stock of where we're going, and which way we should be going as a nation.

America became a great country, and (if the number of immigrants that continue to flock to its shores is any gauge of desirability), one of the most attractive immigrant destinations the world has ever known -- in spite of (and because of), the indisputable fact that, for better or worse, the founding racial stock managed to cobble it together, starting from a group of Anglo-Saxon dominated, British colonies. Not only do most of us continue to speak English, but English is the lingua franca of the entire modern world, and the trade language of international business. This didn't happen strictly by accident. It happened because the Anglo-Saxon race must have done something right, or at lease something important, on behalf of modern civilization.

Of course, there's been a lot of water under the bridge since the time when America was the largely homogeneous nation the founders undoubtedly intended to create. And now that we are a multi-racial and multi-cultural nation, we've got an important choice to make. We either stand together as Americans, or we eventually literally fall apart as a nation. This means we are, or we ought to be, brothers in citizenship in this nation, regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin. As in Martin Luther King's "dream," we must judge individuals by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, march ahead together as one nation. But, sadly, we are a nation divided as never before. We're increasingly a nation of bickering minorities and pressure groups, missing the big picture almost entirely. The big picture, as Pridger sees it through his mud-splattered glasses, is that all of us are being sold down the river.

We are increasingly divided, of course, on racial lines, with minorities empowered by special "victim-class" dispensations. And we are divided on political lines -- Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, etc. Liberals are divided into ideological camps. Conservatives are likewise divided, with true conservatism being overpowered by neo-conservatives. We're divided by sex, with the traditional "weaker sex" given "more equal" victim-class status. We even have a "new" sexual category and division with a surprisingly powerful political base. Then, of course, there is the great and increasing economic divide, between the haves and have-nots, which is opening the avenue to class warfare. And the divisions are increasing, with certain ones becoming more and more powerful, and wealth more concentrated -- out of all proportion to their numbers.

The old military saw that goes "divide and conquer" comes to mind. Are we "being" divided with a purpose? Are we being conquered without even knowing it, by some unseen and unknown force? To the conspiracy minded, the answer would be a resounding, Yes! But who -- or what -- is the enemy?

It must be an organized force to accomplish what would otherwise seem impossible. Yet most people think it is simply "progress" and "happy happenstance."

The subject, of course, cannot be adequately covered in a hundred dozen posts. And Pridger would particularly very much like to get off of the subject race. Our race problem is but one of the symptoms of a larger whole. Contrary to what many might think, given the above treatment of stereotyping, Pridger is not in any way trying to denigrate the black race, nor have any desire to roll history back to the time when blacks where artificially held back economically and kept in line through fear of the white establishment. What he would like to point out is that race relations have not improved in real terms over the last half century. It is by no means a positive development that whites fear blacks and blacks no longer fear whites. The black leadership establishment, trades on both that fear and the sanctity of minority victim-hood, and they haven't forgiven whites for slavery or past discrimination. Segregation hasn't disappeared, it has merely taken a new and even more hopeless form. The black leadership is working on getting reparations for former slavery. In fact, it still aggressively affirms that their race continues to be institutionally discriminated against by the still white-dominated establishment.

An observant reader called Pridger on his recent reference to Michael Jackson as being "free, white, and over twenty-one," reminding him that Jackson is really black -- adding that, in any case, it shouldn't make any difference in a society where everybody is supposed to be entitled to equal justice under the law.

Less than half a century ago being "Free, white, and over twenty-one" was still the requisite for full membership in American society. Those over fifty-five or so can undoubtedly remember when the races were not exactly "equal," but supposedly "separate but equal." The differences between equal and separate but equal were significant, of course, but unavoidable. I say "unavoidable" because America, since its founding, had been universally acknowledged as a "white man's country," and everybody, including racial minorities, understood that.

The fact that we did still have some institutionalized injustices a half a century ago, is used today by many of our social engineers and cultural apologists as evidence that we are now a much better country than we were back then. Pridger agrees that some things are better now, of course -- but a whole lot more is a whole lot worse and going down hill fast. The advent of equal justice under the law, without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin, for example, was real progress. But the overall state of what passes for American culture is appalling.

Not that "American culture" was ever all that great. What little we had was inherited from Western Europe, and from what are now derisively termed "dead white men" -- and, of course, we left most of it in the Old Country. Still, America was developing its own unique culture for at least the first century and a half of its history. Along with this, justice was on the march too, though many refuse to acknowledge that today. But now we presumably have a much more just nation than ever before. In fact, when one tallies the present prison population figures, one is tempted to think that maybe we have even more justice than we can handle -- yet most of the criminals are still on the loose, roaming the streets, and terrorizing inner city neighborhoods.

This is, at least in large measure, thanks to the Culture War. The "opposition" gathered in its allies -- with minority organizations, liberal do-gooders, the white counter-culture, Hollywood, leftist academia, feminists, the mass media, and homosexuals, all on board to reinvent what had thus far developed and made America what it had been. The motivating impetus for overturning the culture was that "American culture" obviously stood for institutionalized injustice -- starting from the initial colonial settlements and proceeding through the unjust conquest of the entire continent, through the "robber baron" era of capital development, and right up until America had become the greatest, freest, most prosperous, most economically and militarily powerful nation the world had ever known. It was the envy of most other nations, and the most powerful immigrant magnet in the history of human civilization. Clearly, it was time for a radical change. The culture of the past (the culture invented by DWM), was to be replaced with a youth-oriented "Pop-Culture" which would bring unbound freedom for all, end of all injustice, and (here comes a hint of the capitalist connection), be good for business.

Since the early 1960s, an awful lot has changed. We've become a multi-racial nation with equal rights and treatment under the law for everybody. In fact, not only have we completely eliminated all of our previous unjust laws, we've gone the extra mile to insure that racial minorities have certain "advantages" that whites do not enjoy -- this, to make up for past discrimination. "Free, white, and over twenty-one" is not only an anachronism, but actually carries with it a social stigma -- something bordering on being a curse. It's almost a badge of shame and guilt that the majority is fully expected to wear in perpetual penance and self-punishment.

We've gone much further than just the extra mile to insure a multi-cultural society and nation. Official immigration policy was changed in the early sixties, too -- apparently to insure that whites will eventually become a racial minority in America -- and the sooner the better, as far as dedicated multi-culturists are concerned. Non-white immigration has been encouraged and and continues to flourished, while potential immigrants from our own (white) "Old World" countries have encountered a "You need not apply" sign.

Today, "black pride" is much more politically correct than white pride. In fact, "white pride" is almost considered criminal -- and any overt expression of it evidence of (at least latent), racism, bigotry, and hate. If a white man wants to express any pride at all, it has to be carefully tailored not to offend any minority leadership or run afoul of the guide-lines of the white liberal standard-bearers of political correctness. It's okay, for example, to delved deeply in to "pre-American" ethnic or tribal connections. It's okay for a white man to be proud of his ethnic or cultural heritage, as long as the focus does not have any pointy racial connotations. It's alright to express pride in being an "Irish-American," an "Italian-American," a "Polish-American" or a "Celt," but not simply a "White American" or "Anglo-American." Even being proud to be a generic German-American or British-American is much more acceptable than being proud to be of a Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon race.

None of these politically correct restrictions apply to non-white races, however. Any brand of Latin-American, Asian-American, African-American, or Native-American, can take great pride in both their race and their native culture without the slightest fear of public censure. In fact, such pride is more than welcome in America today. It's celebrated!

Even our national history is being rewritten to reflect the "New America," and why and how it became great. But I won't get into that here. I will venture this, however. If an alien from outer space happened to drop into America, he would probably quickly get the impression that the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., must have been the father of the country. Then he'd be amazed at how well white aliens seem to be doing, and wonder how they have been able to wrest so much political and economic power from those who were obviously the founding races.

The African-American of today, especially, is actively encouraged by both the "black leadership" and the "white liberal establishment," to take great and unapologetic pride in being black. No need to go back to any specific African race, culture, or tribe. Color alone is sufficient cause for pride.

Forgive me. I have digressed somewhat -- but this brings us back to Michael Jackson.

To the astonished wonder of his fellow African-Americans, and not just a few whites, Michael Jackson has gone the extra mile to become white. This is construed by many to be a slap in the face, and Jackson viewed as a "race traitor." Pridger couldn't care less, but couldn't resist bringing the matter up as an opening to the above comments. The "Free, white, and over twenty-one" quip was but a half-way lame attempt at "off-color" humor -- the joke being at the expense of both whites and blacks -- equally. So why would Jackson want to be white? Pridger doesn't really know, of course, but he suspects that it is very simple. Peter Pan was white. So was Alice in Wonderland. And so (probably), are most of the kids that flock to Jackson's "Never Land" (or is it "Wonderland"?) Ranch.

With elections coming up this November, Pridger would like to explain why he agrees with Jim Hightower's view that if God intended for us to vote, he'd provide us with worthy candidates. Pridger is neither Democrat nor Republican, Libertarian or Socialist. Independent is the closest that might describe him, but good Independent candidates are difficult to come by and, and never even get close to the presidency. If there was any such thing as an ideal candidate for Congress or the presidency, he would be a conservative democratic libertarian, steeped in constitutional republicanism. He'd be an American Jingo, jealously protective of American sovereignty and willing to do what's best for "We the (American) People." He'd be a practical economist who would mind the national store, and protect the national "marketplace" for the owner-operators, knowing that only a free, prosperous, and continuously successful America can provide leadership to the rest of the world through both example and charity when occasion calls for it. In short, he'd have to be a philosopher/statesman, with an iron constitution and nerves of steel. His iron constitution and steel nerves, however, would have to be well tempered with true Christian righteousness of thought and purpose, Buddhist compassion, or Confucian wisdom, or some rich combination thereof.

There simply ain't no such animal running for office. Not even close. And if there was such a candidate (who, by some miracle, happened to consent to run, and had gained a sufficient following to be a real threat to the establishment), the press would undoubtedly destroy his reputation long before he'd had a chance to expose the public to any common sense. If, by some miracle, such a candidate were ever elected, there wouldn't a bullet-proof vest thick enough, armored presidential limousines impenetrable enough or fast enough, nor Secret Service protection strong enough, to prevent his eventual political, if not actual, assassination.

So, the conventional wisdom is always that we must to go with whatever ends up on the final ballot in November, and vote for the lesser of two evils. That's fair enough, but determining the lesser evil isn't all that easy when every major campaign is run by the best professional ad and PR men that each party is able to buy. One who knows "the system" has to be aware that both looks and advertising are often very deceiving, often to the degree of downright fraud. The candidate who is made to appear to be the least evil, may in fact be the most evil, but the one the powers behind the throne have already singled him out for the job. Those powers, however, are careful to allow for voter anomalies, and are thus careful to insure that both final presidential candidates will be acceptable to their purposes. Both will be either their willing agent, or sufficiently pliable to do their bidding in spite of conflicting convictions.

The Democrats (once the "war party"), seem to be mounting an increasingly popular anti-war and "fair trade" platform. Democrats, having had sufficient time to test the winds of their "democratic opinion base," are beginning to seriously challenge the righteousness of Bush's aggressive, preemptive war in Iraq. Though they initially jumped aboard the war bandwagon in the name of the war on terrorism, they are now trading upon a growing ground-swell of public opinion that the war with Iraq was a mistake -- that they, along with everybody else, had been "hood-winked." This said, however, the major Democratic candidates have sufficient political savvy to know "we must stay the course" in Iraq -- at least until the international community (UN), can be lured or bribed into taking the job over.

President Bush and the Republicans seem to be sticking tenaciously to "fair" but free trade; tax cuts; traditional family values; Christian morals; "God and Country"; and, of course, the righteousness of aggressive, preemptive, war. Bush has the advantage of being able to trade on his, still much admired, firm and unwavering response to the events of 9-11; the overthrow of two rogue governments; the successful capture of Saddam Hussein; and the miraculous transformation of Iraq into a new and democratic member of the international community of nations. The time-table of hope in Iraq is that our "democratically installed" constitutional government will hold at least until after the November election. After a Bush electoral victory, the UN can perhaps be lured or bribed to step in to be in a position to take the fall when things begin to crumble. Concurrently, the bulk of the American war machine, now tied down in Iraq, will be freed up to move on to other unfinished business, and bigger and better things.

On the Democratic side, Dean, whose campaign started off like a rocket with his strong anti-war message, and very favorable "poll" ratings, was the first major contender to crash. Pridger didn't pay too much attention to what else Dean stood for initially, but began to take an interest when he announcing that he wanted the votes of "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." That meant he was actively out to get Pridger's vote. But that was an unforgivable sin for a Democrat in this enlightened age. The Democratic party isn't the dixiecrat party any more, and courting the vote of Rebels, red-necks, the proud sons and daughters of the Confederacy, and other white conservatives, is considered about as "un-Democratic," and as un-cool, as a Democratic candidate can get. As might have been expected, it was political suicide. Apparently Dean hadn't read the Democratic Party's Manual on Political Correctness. The next thing Pridger heard about Dean was that his campaign was going down in flames faster than a papier-mâché cross in Hades. So much for the Dean campaign. Clearly, Pridger won't be able to vote for Dean, because Dean is out.

Representative Kucinich, of Ohio, and Rev. Sharpton, were both on the right side (meaning left), on social issues and political correctness. But Pridger gives them credit for having the intestinal fortitude to put the future of the Republican "new international economic order" right on the front line chopping block. Scrap NAFTA, pull out of the WTO, and abort CAFTA, was the major thrust of their bold messages. They both knew they didn't have a realistic chance at the nomination, but at least they got the opportunity to briefly articulate their growingly popular ideas on national TV. Hopefully, their message will begin to incubate in the minds of a growing number of people who still wonder why the wonderful new world of free trade hasn't yet provided Americans with the promised number of highly paid "knowledge-worker" jobs. Clearly Pridger won't be able to vote for Kucinich or Sharpton, because they are out. Of course, Pridger wouldn't have voted for Reverend Sharpton anyway, because he has made it clear that he thinks Pridger, and his kind, are about a rung or two lower than Nazis, and the Confederate Battle flag an "American swastika." Needless to say, Pridger isn't overly fond of that characterization, as politically correct as it may be in the Democrat Party's Manual.

Senator Edwards, with the boyish charm, and the "made for media" charisma of a televangelist, looked pretty good for a while. He skillfully hedged his words, but to no lasting avail. Somehow he either missed a cue or was suspected of being a terrorist in disguise. He talked of "a new approach to trade agreements that will protect American jobs," a "new tax on unearned income for the top 1 percent," and "new tax cuts to 95 percent of Americans." And he talked of energy independence. All serious business -- too serious for a presidential candidate. Though he was sufficiently vague as to how he would proceed to do these things, there was apparently considerable fear that, if nominated and elected, he might actually attempt to keep his campaign promises. He was far too smooth and articulate to take a chance on. He was probably considered a loose cannon. Pridger might even have taken a chance and voted for Edwards, as a possible candidate for the lesser of two evils. Though Pridger isn't overly fond of televangelist nor car salesmen types, in this day and age any politician with any real political insight and backbone is a fool to reveal his hand before getting elected. It could have been that Edwards held some good hidden cards. Pridger admits he has not gone to the trouble of checking Edward's congressional voting record, but would have if he ended up the nominee. But, never mind, Edwards was discarded and John Kerry catapulted toward the nomination.

As of now, it appears that Senator John Kerry will be the Democratic flag-bearer this time around. Kerry brings to his candidacy, something for almost everybody. He is both a war hero and war protester. While he voted for war in Iraq, it was only because he had "trusted" the administration's assertions that Iraq was an active part of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, at least partly responsible for the 9-11 attack, and that Saddam Hussein was probably on the verge of passing out weapons of mass destruction to all of America's most deadly enemies. But he has since seen the light, and now believes the war was an unfortunate and expensive mistake. Kerry would like to see the rich pay more taxes, and the poor, at least for the time being, locked in at their present level. He would expand the child tax credit and extend it to poor families, where it would do the most good. The primary key to his successful nomination, however, can probably be attributed to his declaration, "I support free trade..." Although he added some qualifiers, a commitment to free trade is the prime qualifier for an American president. In the final analysis, the war in Iraq is but a mere side-show to New World Order building. Free trade is the central and most essential ingredient.

The qualifiers that Kerry appends to his commitment to free trade are typically Democrat. Of course, he wants to save American jobs, by making American industry competitive in the international marketplace so we can sell our products abroad. Republicans say that too. But Kerry wants "all trade agreements to ensure that our trading partners are living up to their labor and environment obligations." He promises, "I won't sign any new trade agreements unless they contain strong labor and environmental standards."

In other words, Kerry would work toward saving American industry and jobs primarily by making sure foreign nations protect their environments and that foreign labor gets a better deal than it is getting now. These, of course, are wonderful and generous goals. We'd all like to see the global environment protected (we all live here), and we'd all like to see the lot of Third World labor upgraded as well. But the inference that this will, in any significant way, save American industry and American jobs, and significantly benefit America and working Americans, is pure smoke and downright deception. Third world labor will continue to grossly under-bid American labor in the international marketplace for a long time -- at least until American labor costs and living standards have declined to a comparable level, and a somewhat broad degree of global labor parity is finally attained.

The lot of the American worker, as bad as the prognosis presently is, still has a long way to go down before the target of global Utopia can become reality. In the mean time, as America does strive to become more and more like a Third World country, the natives will undoubtedly become increasingly restless. There will be considerable, and increasingly severe, contraction pains. Both Democrats and Republicans will continue to assure us that they are actually just growing pains. But, to paraphrase one of our greatest presidents, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." All sorts of national and international distractions can be counted upon, of course, to keep the public eye on every ball but the most important ones. The global geopolitical shell game continues, uninterrupted, under very skillful hands.

So the choice between the lesser of two evils seems to have boiled down to a choice between Kerry and Bush.

Pridger tended to like the public image that George Bush brought to the presidential trail and White House. He had somehow (apparently by growing up in rural Texas), acquired the mannerisms, speech, and sense of humor of a semi-red-neck, but somewhat polished, southern country gentleman. His heart appeared to be in the right place with regard to several key conservative issues -- (traditional family and marriage, the right to life, preservation of the nation's Christian heritage and identity, etc.). To Pridger, he seemed somewhat like "home folk." Besides being a likeable man, Bush also proved to be a firm and resolute Commander-in-Chief when confronted with the events and aftermath of 9-11. Bush's primary flaws were of the variety that tended to further endear him to his conservative following, as Democrats (naturally), never missed a beat in exploiting them.

Pridger has some real serious problems with the Bush presidency and its administration, however, and had serious reservations even before his election. In spite of his rural America imagery, Bush was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He's a member of, and heir to, about the closest things we now have to a American "royal family" (perhaps even a distant kinship to the Queen of England herself). His "down home on the old Texas ranch" appeal notwithstanding, his personal fortune is tied to big oil and an array of multi-national corporate interests. He's the son of a president (an eastern Yankee), who was once the head of the CIA. He became governor of the great state of Texas before becoming president, and one of his brothers is the governor of the state of Florida. His family connections, and the doors they opened to him, make his ascendancy to the presidency appear more "dynastic" than populist and republican.

While none of this, perhaps, is sufficient to pass judgment on George Bush, Jr., the man, it certainly gave us hillbillies, and some others, sufficient cause to at least reserve judgment, and wonder just what it is that really makes him tick so successfully. To put it lightly, George Bush's family pedigree and associations, his extensive corporate credentials, and up-front profession of being a born again Christian, all combined to prompt Pridger to refrain from voting for Bush as the probable lesser of two evils in his year 2000 contest with Al Gore. Thought Al Gore was a pretty good and insightful candidate, he carried so much negative Democratic baggage -- including, but not limited to, his White House lawn declaration (on the occasion, I believe, of Clinton's narrow escape from impeachment), that he thought Clinton would go down in history as one of our nation's best presidents -- that Pridger had no choice but to reject any possibility of helping him make it to the coveted presidential chair.

While Pridger is solidly behind the notion of a "Christian America" (and believes this is, or ought to be, "One Nation, Under God"), he's always suspicious of politicians who come to the electorate seeking high office with solemn declarations of "devout" or "born again" status. And, though a "truly" Christian president would be ideal, it's very difficult to believe, in this day and age, that any man could approach the presidency without being either a complete devotee of Mammon or otherwise anointed and propelled toward the regal position by some powerful anti-Christian lobby. Aside from this, Pridger's feared that, if Bush was indeed a Christian as he claimed, he would turn out to be one of those peculiar anomalies (which have nonetheless been a very common phenomenon throughout the Christian era), who are "Old Testament Christians." Thus (though still reserving judgment), Pridger withheld his support, based mainly on "overall doubts."

The most hopeful thing president-elect Bush articulated, in Pridger's view, was his intention to refrain from using the nation's military for "national building" adventurism. He was going to start bringing some of the troops home, where they belong. That was the closest any presidential candidate in recent memory had come to saying he intended to start untangling some of the nation's many, and ever-swelling and ever festering, foreign entanglements. This almost, but not quite, convinced Pridger that Bush was the probable lesser of two evils. But Pridger chose to withhold his vote. then, when the election results teetered so precariously, Pridger felt a little guilty. Had he voted for Bush, maybe the election would have been a great deal more clear-cut and a national electoral fiasco avoided.

When Bush finally immerged the clear winner, by some sort of Supreme Court fiat, Pridger wasn't comforted, however. It appeared that Bush was intended to be president, and when the electoral process broke down, duly "appointed" to office in spite of considerable confusion. Nobody thought the public would elect another Democratic administration in the wake of the Clinton presidency. Apparently the "powers behind the throne" had mis-calculated the public's infatuation with the Clinton legacy. As a result of the way Bush was seated in office, Pridger had the sneaking suspicion that Bush had an important presidential mission assigned to him. One that Gore, perhaps, could not be explicitly trusted perform. This, of course, was pure "conspiracy think," a failing in which Pridger takes a humble degree of pride.

The 9-11 attack negated president Bush's campaign promise to begin "disengaging." That tragic day literally cried out for firm and decisive presidential action. "Something" had to be done -- even if it was wrong. Bush measured up admirably, taking the reins with a firm hand and plunging the nation and world into the war on terrorism. The "mission" had become clear. Even Pridger had to admire the way president Bush rose to the challenge and handled himself in the wake of the tragedy. At the same time, however, the very first words from the mouth of the president after the attack left Pridger with the distinct feeling that we (the American people), had been "had" in a big way. The fact that Bush immediately put the nation on a "war" footing, without even pausing to "think" or trying to find out just who was actually responsible for the attack, tended to confirm Pridger's worst doubts about Bush. When Bush used the word "war," it was not in any figurative sense. He was even then mobilizing the full military might of the world's only superpower for a global conflict against the forces of terrorism. Pridger's very first thought was: They've finally done it! "They" have finally found the perfect "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" scenario.

A rag-tag bunch of Islamic terrorists had not only wounded the Pentagon, and brought down the Twin Towers, but literally set fire to the world, changing it forever. (Or so we are supposed to believe.) Talk about magnifying events and multiplying and insuring the fall-out! As tragic as the terrorist attack was, President Bush's response was out of all proportion to them. Of course, the public was duly, and rightfully, outraged by 9-11, and global war was an easy sell.

Once again, debate in Congress was unnecessary to place the nation into a war situation. The obvious parallels with Pearl Harbor were many, and highly troubling. The swiftness with which the president began mounting our initial offensive spoke volumes. We not only "knew" who had attacked us (and had undoubtedly been expecting and awaiting the attack for a long time), but the war in Afghanistan had already been minutely planned. In time, we would also find out that another war with Iraq had already been planned, with distinct indications that Iraq had been the real target of the planned war from long before 9-11. Another thing became clear. If president Bush is a Christian (and Pridger has little doubt of that), he is a classic example of an "Old Testament Christian."

Bush has already made an indelible mark on history. His presidential legacy is assured, but only in the fullness of time will the greater public fully realize what it has been. Pridger doesn't believe Bush has either made the world a safer and better place, nor preserved freedom and liberty here at home. The opposite seems to be evident. The war cry in this war has not even been close to "Give me liberty or give me death!" It has been more like, "Give us safety and security at any price!" Masses of the American people have shouted it, and (conveniently), that's what international capital wants too.

This has only been the primary highlights of Pridger's view of the Bush presidency. His opinions of the present state of the Republican establishment will have to await future posts. Needless to say, Pridger isn't about to vote to reelect president Bush.

The main point here is that both Democrats and Republicans have assumed a much larger mission than our founders and Constitution intended for the leaders and elected representatives of the people of the United States. The New World Order, in spite of abundant high-sounding idealism and articulated motive, is a peculiar result of "representation" at the national level. Every elected official takes an oath of office binding them to defend and protect the Constitution. And, true enough, the original Constitution remains protected, framed and under glass, in the nation's capital -- still officially enshrined as the Law of the Land. But that's as far as the protection has gone.

How did it ever come about that it is the "G-- given" right and duty of the American president and the American Congress is to remake the world and shepherd it along in the first place? The national charter certainly didn't do it. All constitutional restraints and notions of "limited republican government, by consent of the governed," has had to be abandoned. The answer is pretty complex, but a lot can be summarized in a relatively simple manner. Crown capital king; anoint free market capitalism as the holy savior; and build a national shrine to Mammon. Give the people sufficient cake and circuses to blind them to political realities and the economic processes taking place around them. Selectively make the lessons of history seem irrelevant in the modern world. Internationalize American business through deregulation and free trade, in accordance with the almighty law of free markets. Subsidize and empower the competition to give the whole a semblance of "free market competition" among equals. Make it an altruistic humanitarian imperative to spread the tentacles of American capital throughout the world -- giving everybody the hope of having a McDonalds and Wal-Mart on every corner. Substitute "American interests" for the interests of "We the People," and (Presto!), American economic and national security interests have miraculously become the foundation and building blocks of globalism and a New World Order. The American president, and the American Congress no longer represent the interests of "just" the American people (considering the stakes involved, they are now only a relatively minor consideration), but the world, personified by multi-national corporations, global financial markets, and securities exchanges, which have become the true constituency and paymasters of our elected officials.

The earmarks of tyranny are easily discernable in both the arrest of Michael Jackson on child sexual abuse charges and the recent prosecution and conviction of Martha Steward. Michael Jackson certainly gets little sympathy from the average American conservative. Pridger is certainly no fan of his. He is a literal icon of a debased and twisted culture in Pridger's humble opinion. But Jackson is free, white, and over twenty-one. As such, he is entitled to respectful treatment in the court of justice.

The spectacle of Michael Jackson being marched into police headquarters with his hands cuffed behind his back -- after he had meekly and voluntarily surrendered himself -- speaks volumes about the present state of "justice" and presumption of innocence under our increasingly Gestapo-like police procedures. Jackson is not accused of a violent crime. Nobody suspects that he might have actually physically harmed the boy he is alleged to have abused. He merely expressed his "love" for the child in his own way. But this is beside the point -- the boy was "under age" and thus it is a crime to love him beyond a certain ill-defined point.

Of course, there were many who were pleased to see Michael Jackson cuffed like a dangerous maniac, but the only possible reason to hand cuff such a person can be nothing short of a desire to degrade and humiliate. It is highly unlikely that the authorities would fear that he might flee, or strike and officer. The most basic notions of justice, legal decorum, and the official presumption of innocence, require that unnecessary degradation and humiliation at the hands of the authorities at least await conviction. Speaking of convictions...

In the case of Martha Stewart, the federal government was perhaps right to investigate a possible insider trading violation. And, even though the original charge was dismissed, one can hardly fault federal authorities for taking serious exception to Ms. Stewart knowingly lying to federal investigators. But the idea that a serious felony charge would result from an individual's attempt to avoid serious charges -- something that can only be construed as a mere act of trying to avoid self-incrimination -- seems ludicrous.

Even the original, more serious, charge of insider trading is difficult to see in the Martha Stewart case. She wasn't dumping her own company stock and leaving her stockholders to reap the whirlwind as true insiders have done all too often. She simply got a tip that some stock that she owned was probably going to take a dive, and she sold. After all, cutting personal financial losses, and "taking profits," by selling off stock one suspects will go down in value is a very legitimate part of the stock market game. Who, but a true insider (which Martha Stewart apparently wasn't in this case), would go the extra mile (and willingly incur financial loss), to examine the source of his or her tip because it might have originated from an inside source? In any case, her crime (if it really was a crime), probably did not materially effect the value of the stock in question. It was going to go down anyway, because the real insiders were getting out -- taking their profits, and cutting their losses.

Martha Steward wasn't convicted of insider trading. She was convicted of telling what amount to "little white lies" to help her case. Lying to federal prosecutors, no matter how petty those lies might be, isn't such a good idea, and few would say that she should be allowed to get away with it. But what really is troubling is that such attempts to avoid self-incrimination should be construed as major felonies with five year prison sentences, and fines of up to a quarter of a million dollars attached to each minor incident. Had Pridger been on the jury, he would have voted to acquit. Not because she wasn't guilty of lying, but because the potential punishment is grossly out of proportion to the alleged crimes -- so much so that a conviction could amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

Aside from that, one is hard-pressed to see how anybody could be guilty of "obstruction of justice" (if that was the reason for the final prosecution), in an alleged "crime," where apparently no prosecutable alleged crime had even been committed. The original crime was apparently a fiction, and anything contingent on it, such as lying about a non-crime, could hardly be called a criminal offense. In this matter, "jury nullification" was clearly called for, and it is the only way for juries to prevent the government from railroading people into lengthy prison terms or outlandish fines on what appears to be frovilous charges.

For her conviction on four counts of what seems a relatively minor offence, Martha Stewart faces up to twenty years in prison and a million dollar fine! Forget who Martha Stewart is, this would be cruel and unusual punishment for anybody. That kind of jail time is appropriate only for murderers, rapists, bank robbers, and such. The fines, on the other hand, are no problem for someone in Martha Stewart's financial situation. Few would feel sorry to see her have to pay up. But any jail time at all is not only excessive, but, in real terms, counter-productive.

One of the jurors quipped that the convictions were a victory for the "little guy." But the convictions will hurt many little guys, including those who own stock in Martha Stewart's various enterprises, work in her several companies, and otherwise have their personal fortunes tied to Martha Stewart's success.

Pridger is not familiar with Martha Stewart's biography. But from what little he has heard, she is apparently the very epitome of the classic rags to riches success story. She pulled herself up by her own boot straps and, in the tradition of Sam Walton, ended up on top of the world. Personality traits aside, such success often results in considerable jealousy and envy. The fact that Stewart is a woman, probably magnified that envy and jealousy among the hearts of many of her own sex. Some feminists, for example, didn't like the way she stressed "traditional" household work skills. Whether this had any bearing on why she was apparently picked out for this particular prosecution (in a very large arena of much bigger financial fraud offenders), Pridger does not claim to know.

Apparently Martha Stewart has many powerful enemies, and the aggressive manner in which the federal prosecution proceeded in this case almost has the appearance of some sort of a vendetta. As successful, rich, and powerful, as Martha Stewart may be, she was the "little guy" in this case. The fed went after her, and if the feds ever have cause to focus on you, they can get you on something, even it is nothing more than self-defense or maneuvering to avoid self-incrimination. Openly "Claiming the Fifth" is looked upon as an open admission of guilt by many, so white lies are the first resort of many who find themselves ensnared in our judicial jungle.

And this is Pridger's point. Not only can "they" get you (and states are often as bad as the federal government), but they can take a relatively minor offense and prosecute as if it were an extraordinarily important case. Any federal case is automatically considered a major case. And no matter how petty the actual alleged crime is, it can result in lengthy prison sentences that amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

Chances are, the government did not have any sort of vendetta against Martha Stewart, but "they" had either been interested in her for some reason, or must have been tipped off by somebody. Of course the fed may automatically know when someone has broken a federal law. Maybe it was merely a matter of the federal justice system taking its course. Prosecutors today seem to be much more interested in obtaining convictions than the very principle of "justice" they are supposed to serve.

With more and more crimes of all sorts being federalized, that course of "blind justice" is broadening its sweep. Additionally, with the increasing overlapping of jurisdictions, the Fifth Amendment principle outlawing of "double jeopardy," has suffered an ignoble death, along with most of the rest of our Bill of Rights. Can we really call this evidence of justice? Or would it possibly be more accurately interpreted as evidence of a heartless federal tyranny on the rise?

The Culture War -- from whence did it come? We children of the forties, fifties, and sixties can remember what it was like before the initial onslaught that overturned the world that our parents and grandparents had known. We can remember the first broad-sides. The older generation was generally outraged at rock and roll when it made it's debut. Those who were blatant bigots called it African-Americanized music, only they used a term that the white men can now only very gingerly refer to as the "N" word. A few outraged disc jockeys broke rock-n-roll records in protest like some people now burn flags. Most of us young'uns thought rock-n-roll was wonderfully, even spiritually, up-lifting and liberating -- and most of us still like some of it. As young men and women, when our hormones were becoming overly active, we also thought the idea of free love and cohabitation was pretty cool, and the pill came along just at the right time to help the idea along. Parents and conservatives couldn't restrain us. It's time had come, and finally rock-n-roll was accepted even by the establishment. After all, what was it but great fun? While few of us old codgers of today can stomach hard rock, heavy metal, acid rock, or rap, many still fail to recognize that the "rock revolution" was part of the opening major salvo of an ongoing Culture War.

The explicitly lewd "pelvic thrust" made the migration from the strip-tease stage, to center-stage America, courtesy of such popular artists as Jerry Lee Lewis. It was recently revealed to Pridger for the first time, via an enthusiastic celebrant of Black History month, or week (or the MLK national holiday), on Public Radio, that before the revolution, the phrase "Rock and Roll" itself was black slang for "having sex" (as Sunday school teachers would put it today). So was the term "balling," a word most white people associated with a formal dance or "ball," or simply having a good time. But nobody told us that back then, when rock-n-roll became the rage of American youth, and young girls were going into mass frenzies over their singing idols. It was a good joke on the white liberal establishment (which, of course, was the first to embrace this freedom of expression), as well as the rest of us. Had we teenagers of the day only known, we would have undoubtedly thought it was a great joke too.

By the time hard rock and heavy metal came around (on the heels of the hippy era, forced integration, a broadening drug culture, and hay day of the race riot), many of us began to awaken to the fact that something was going awry with the culture. Popular music lyrics went from innocence through various stages of increasingly degrees of sexual innuendo -- liberating, but still all good clean fun we tended to think. Then we started hearing apparently innocent "sound-like" words in musical lyrics -- words such as "funk", and "funky," tailored to sound like the the worst of the "forbidden words" without actually saying those forbidden words. It was all in fun, of course, and if you complained about it sounding like the wrong thing, it was because "your mind" was in the wrong place.

Sexual innuendo in certain types of popular music became increasingly blatant, and family entertainment bedroom scenes more heated, until what was only a shade shy of explicit sex in movies and TV finally became common. Finally Hollywood gained total "artistic license," (abandoning the common decency "Codes" which had long held its artistic prowess in check) and full-fledged pornography finally hit the big screen in a big way. A new multi-billion dollar industry was born and given the official national blessing by our liberal federal court justices. The public was ready for it, there was a market for it, and market had been crowned king.

Concurrently, the actual "F" word was marched out for everybody to hear repeatedly -- until now we have elementary school kids whose language would make soldiers and sailors blush. It was first unveiled, in all its glory, as a popular entertainment hook by various "comedians," of the class which had always traded on "off-color" humor. Soon rock stars, and rappers and their marketing agents, with the eager assistance of major recording labels, were selling vocal smut to the kids. Money was made, and the markets satisfied. Professionally produced pornography, shown on the big-screen, inexplicably became not only legal but fashionable. Foul, obscene, and vulgar language was redefined as "adult language" and pornography was redefined as "adult entertainment."

Many of us didn't like it, but somewhere along the way the culture had been turned inside out. To complain would be to invite vicious attacks from the self-appointed guardians of "freedom of expression," such as the ACLU. The cultural sensitivities, and standards of common decency, still valued by the great majority, no longer seemed to matter. It mattered not how many of the majority was morally outraged or insulted, but "Dare not insult or outrage any minority!" Freedom of speech took on a whole new meaning and a life of its own. Anybody who objected was shouted down as a narrow-minded, bigoted, or prude. The majority, and majority values, effectively lost its voice in what is still called a democratic society.

Our parents had warned us, but we didn't listen. We weren't about to pass up "liberation" and all the goodies it had to offer. So now the culture has been liberated and turned upside down and inside out. Every verbal vulgarity imaginable, is now mainline. Obscenities cascade in great profusion from the mouths of our cultural icons (movie and sports stars), from college professors, and our fellow citizens. Two generations of children have grown to maturity, and millions of immigrants welcomed to our shores and integrated into society, believing that the "F" word (and all the other formerly "forbidden words"), along with professionally produced big-screen pornography, have always been central to American culture. And this tide cannot easily be stemmed. Can anybody wonder why whole nations of Moslem fundamentalists consider us the great Satan, try to opt out of our New World Order scheme, and vigorously resist our declared intention of making their societies just like ours?

This has been but one aspect of the Culture War that we continue to lose. As the "war" analogy would indicate, this downward cascade in popular culture didn't happen by accident. As Sun-Tsu pointed out a long time ago, "War is deception." As with the abandonment of national economic independence, the abandonment of cultural and common decency standards must have had the benefit of careful forethought and long planning. Large minorities of the people were, and continue to be, unwittingly recruited and used as the "democratic" forces of change. Not coincidentally, national public educational standards, especially in the areas of geography and history, have been in decline during the same period, and the greatest minds of our own western culture -- the ones who paved the way to our greatest achievements, in literature, arts, the sciences, and technology -- are often derided simply as "dead white men" (or simply DWMs).

The black man takes a lot of heat and blame from certain quarters, though it is extraordinarily politically incorrect to point a finger at him or any other powerful minority. Only radical right-wing bigots and neo-nazis have the guts to point it out that our national cultural decline dates from the black civil rights movement. But the black man has not only endured a great deal of wrongful discrimination, but makes an excellent and obvious target to take the blame for all that has gone wrong, or been done, in the name of civil rights. Clearly, he has been set up, and a few are beginning to realize it. Certainly, there were a lot of things wrong with our country and society circa 1950s and 60s, and a lot needed to be fixed. Though the institutionalized injustices were repaired as the result of the Civil Rights struggle, other injustices were institutionalized, and both blacks and whites find themselves worse off today in many ways. We are just about as racially segregated as before, with a lot more racial tension than ever (but of a more suppressed and dangerous variety), destroyed families, cities, lives, and prospects. Though there have been many winners in the game, the losers have been both black and white, but democratic principles decree that the blame (though it remain largely unspoken, and unspeakable), will fall disproportionately upon the minority.

Most of the formerly forbidden words are "popularly" believed to have been the very essence of black vernacular (the "spice" of Black English, as it were). After all, it apparently took black liberation and black comedians to force most of them out of seedy dives, military barracks, and stag-party environments, and into the arena of popular entertainment and the school yard -- first in the dives, then swanky white night clubs, and finally the silver screen and cable TV. It took blacks to popularize really rancid and violent gangster rap lyrics -- for to deny then "freedom of expression" (in their own unique way), and access to the most lucrative markets, would be discriminatory, and reek of white bigotry and an attempt to resume oppression of the formerly oppressed, but now liberated.

But don't cast blame at the black man. He simply didn't do it -- certainly not all by himself. He is still a relatively small minority. He, was merely a convenient and willing tool and pawn of others -- as most of us have been and remain. The black man couldn't resist liberation any more than we could. Unfortunately, liberation among many blacks, as well as many more whites, meant much more than equal rights under the law and the repeal of unjust laws. It evolved into the destruction of traditional societal restrictions on personal behavior. It ultimately meant the trashing of a whole culture.

It took much more than the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to make white men sit obediently and laugh at Honky jokes and other insults flippantly thrown in their face by fun-loving men in black skins. For one thing, it took federal troop to finally cow any lingering spirit of the South, and the North and West had to kiss the hand of "justice riot" soon after it celebrated the second reconstruction of the old Confederacy. But it was much more than that even. It was a general demoralization of the American people through the moral debasement of the culture at large -- this by experts (almost exclusively white), trained and long experienced in the social sciences and the arts of "critical theory" and mass psychology. This, coupled with constant propagandizing by the major media, and decree after decree handed down by the Supreme Court, thwarting the best efforts of Congress to make "gridlock" work. These were some of the major agents of change at the working reinventing the nation.

The white counter-cultural movement -- sort of an un-civil rights movement, which roughly coincided with the black civil rights movement -- did much more damage than civil rights ever thought about doing. Not only did the white counter-culture intentionally and enthusiastically embrace vocal vulgarity and visual obscenity in its protest against the "establishment," (and a whole array of what it considered cultural anachronisms), it was permeated with people with a powerful political agenda. Yet, the "warring masses" of the counter-culture were little more than gay youth unleashed (before the word "gay" was perverted). Their largely peaceful "flower-child" rampage was hardly more than a rather large but innocent (to use the word loosely), orgy of self-indulgence and endless slumming and partying. It was the epitome of "liberation," and white and black liberation went hand in hand with a common purpose that few of the participants ever really suspected. They didn't care. Liberation was good.

The beat generation, the hippies, and their various off-shoots, however, all had close ties with leftist academia at the highest levels. This is why the white counter-culture movement was so much more damaging to the dominant culture than black the civil rights struggle. The agenda of the "counter-culture" emanated from above, and was encouraged, by a very influential cadre of leftists in both high and low places. The counter-cultural movement was our version of China's "Cultural Revolution," but it was not initiated by a Chairman Dictator, it was made to happen by an unlikely coalition of social and political engineers with an alien ideology. It was youth oriented, numerically youth dominated, and it was powerful enough, for example, to deliver "juvenile suffrage" (the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, 1971) to wayward youth at the very time youth was in the act of trying to destroy the "establishment," dodge the draft, and flout as many of the nation's laws as it was humanly possible to do and survive. Eighteen year olds (most of whom certainly did not want to go to go to Vietnam and get their heads shot off just to make the other side of the world safe for democracy), were given the voting franchise while we were in the midst of the most unpopular war in our history. This was a peculiar development, indeed -- a warring government giving the vote to anti-war demonstrators and draft dodgers. Was this anomaly just another thing whose "time had come," as we were given to understand? (It was a Democratic Congress under a troubled Republican presidential administration, of course.)

Martin Luther King, and other civil rights leaders had similar ties to leftist academia, of course. The liberal left whole-heartedly embraced the fight for equality and justice for blacks and made it its own cause. While King and many of his fellow leaders in the civil rights movement were undoubtedly sincere in merely seeking equal rights and justice under the law, their movement became another major piece in the chess game of overturning not only unjust laws, but the culture as a whole. The very society and culture to which the blacks were seeking admittance and full membership was being destroyed -- and in the end they would be made the scape goats. King was, and still is lambasted for his communist ties, but Pridger doesn't fault him for that as many conservatives do. Where else had he to turn for help circa 1960 but the far left? He and his followers, in many respects, were like many former colonial nations seeking ways to get out from under the colonial yoke, or free themselves from dictators who served the interests of multi-national corporations. They had only one great power to turn to, and that was the late great USSR and, if not its communist ideology, at least its geopolitical leverage. Circa 1960, the USSR had a large and growingly powerful cadre of devotees and fellow travelers within the United States, and they were eager to destabilize both the United States and derail the whole of Western civilization. These were not black men and women. They were white, and in the wake of the destruction of Senator Joseph McCarthy (of "witch hunt" fame), they had a wonderful new lease on life and many doors open to them.

The national leadership, for some odd reason, began to increasingly respond to the voices of leftist blacks, leftist Hispanics, leftist feminists, and homosexuals, and ceased being responsive to the still essentially conservative majority. In fact, since the end of McCarthy's "reign of terror," the "right" has seemed incapable of offering any resistance to a leftist takeover of our culture. Not all liberals were leftists, of course. Most, perhaps, sincerely desire a "just society," (even most leftists probably do), but they nonetheless hitched their wagon to what Pridger would define as destructive forces which would not only deliver up more social injustice for all, but economic injustice for all as well.

How has all of this been possible? And how is it that a leftist takeover of the culture has meshed so perfectly with the agenda of the supposedly "right-wing" forces of international capital? How is it that apparently diametrically opposed ideologies have delivered up a New World Order exquisitely tailored to both the forces of the "progressive left," and the materialistic needs profit-driven, capital interests? This, of course, is the grand riddle which continues to baffle the wise, and both confuse and "comfort" the rest. Many of our best thinkers remain puzzled and powerless, though many on both the right and left have realized they have been, and continue to be, betrayed.

Pridger has described our two party system as being made up of "global village" liberal Democrats, and "new economic order" neo-conservative Republicans. Between the two parties (each with its own agenda and mission, and equal input), "We the People" have been gifted a New World Order that nobody in their right mind would have voted for. We, and the America our founders envisioned, have been betrayed. This wonderful new world is the result of both legislation and political slight of hand, either intentionally pursued or unwitting approved, by acts or omission, of by our trusty Congresses over a period of several decades under both democratic and republican administrations. What they have delivered up violates literally everything our elected representatives are sworn to uphold. The rulers of America, have a "larger vision" than the Constitution mandated for any body of elected representatives -- a design that encompasses the world -- and they aren't letting the Constitution stand in their way.

The "powers that be" now worship at the altar of free market economics, and the majority of the public has not yet fully discovered that it has been sold down the river. Many still believe that turning the national destiny over to "market forces" is an extraordinarily good deal. Market forces, we have been given to understand, should be allowed to rule not only our own economy, but the world. We've been assured that labor benefits along with the almighty consumer, though labor must obviously endure some short-term growing pains. In any case, consumers will out-vote labor every time, because literally everybody is a consumer, but only about half the people can be construed as labor. (And many are receiving various government entitlements that discourage the activity.) And even labor (whether employed or not), can be counted upon to vote "consumer" rather than "labor."

Let me explain why the unbridled international free marketplace is the deadly enemy of labor. It should be obvious, of course, but apparently isn't.

When capital is king, and international free markets are its realm (over which it holds monopolistic power), it not only controls and manipulates markets to its own benefit, but defines the rules of every aspect of the game. Where the law of markets rule, labor (American labor included), becomes nothing but another international commodity, where the workers who will accept the lowest pay get the jobs. Americans have failed to see the full devastating implications of this -- though the results have already gutted the nation of millions of good jobs.

Capital's definition of a "good job" is a job where labor is paid more than what it is worth -- thus, it follows that good jobs must be eliminated. The law of the markets dictate that jobs in which labor is paid more than it is worth, are freakish economic anomalies and thus unsupportable. American labor, however, over the course of the first two thirds of the twentieth century, got used to good jobs and continue to imagine that they are its birthright.

When our government defended America's economic borders, and protected American industry in a closed national marketplace (through trade protectionism and regulation of capital and big business), good jobs became plentiful in America -- and America became the economic and industrial wonder of the world. Millions of good jobs were created where labor was generously rewarded for its productivity. The American industrial wage, employee benefit packages, overtime pay, vacation packages, health insurance, and good retirement packages, developed economy wide. These were the earmarks of "good jobs," and the working middle class became prosperous. Not only did American labor prosper when good jobs were becoming more and more plentiful, but capital also flourished and profited throughout our "protectionist" history.

Through deregulation and the adoption of an increasingly deregulated international marketplace, both internationalizing and empowering capital, American labor was placed in direct competition with all foreign labor. The American style "good job," was put on a collision course with capital's idea of what a "good job" ought to be. Naturally, American workers were demonstrably far overpriced in the international labor marketplace. As a consequence, good American jobs began to disappear, and continue to disappear in increasing numbers. The value of industrial labor is no longer determined in a protected national marketplace, it's determined wherever labor is the cheapest -- in such places as Mexico, China, and Bangladesh.. Literally all jobs in America which provide what once was known as the American industrial wage and benefit packages, and the wherewithal for labor (both skilled and unskilled) to enjoy the American dream, are grossly overpriced by international standards.

When our government did its job, and protected the American marketplace, organized labor functioned as a counterbalance to the power of large corporate employers, insuring that workers were justly rewarded, and paid much more than merely a "living wage." Large corporate employers were kept "loyal" to the nation and beholden to American workers, by protective regulations which served them as well as labor. This is no longer true in the private sector of the economy where all real wealth is created. American capital has been given license to produce for the American market elsewhere -- bypassing American labor.

Many fail to realize that all labor in the country (whether unionized or not), including that of service industry workers, and all public sector workers, such as civil servants, elected officials, teachers, college professors, scientists, etc., rose upon the coattails of organized labor. "Union scale" became the benchmark toward which all labor was at least indirectly pulled upward. None of this would have been true, however, had we not had a nationally protected marketplace. Without a nationally protected market, America could not have developed into the world's greatest industrial nation with the world's highest and broadest based living standards.

All of this has been reversed under globalism and free trade policies. Ironically, today, as the fortunes of skilled and unskilled productive and service industry workers continues in precipitous decline, only the public sector is holding, and the only strong unions we presently have are those whose jobs cannot be easily exported. Elective officials, bureaucrats, civil servants, teachers, college professors, the military, etc., (who owe their prosperous situation to protectionism no less than productive labor once did), have thus far remained relatively immune to the vagaries of the new international economic order.

Significantly, most of these still (unofficially) protected jobs are beholden to the public purse, and increasingly strapped taxpayers, for their continued good wages and benefits. In short, most of the good jobs that remain are funded by the taxpaying public rather than by wealth producing industries. It is problematical that the large majority of the ramaining good jobs in the courtry are jobs which do not add a single penny of new wealth to the economy. And a large percentage of that majority, in fact, consume taxpayer dollars and/or contribute the the national debt.

The policy of national trade protectionism can be defined as simply "minding the national store," which is (or was, and should have continued to be), a large owner-operated marketplace. That marketplace includes productive capital as well as the markets wherein the products of that production are sold. The owner and operator are the producers and consumers of the nation, comprised of both the individual and corporate citizens of the nation. But if the national marketplace is not protected, and corporate citizens are divorced from the individual (consumers and labor), and given license and incentives to internationalize the scope of operations, the notion of an owner-operated nation marketplace becomes a fiction, and the primary stakeholders, i.e., the "We the People" stand betrayed. True ownership becomes increasingly internationalized, and "We the People" become the peons of international capital interests. In such case, the government has either grossly failed in its duty to protect the nation on behalf of the best interests of the people, or it has actively and intentionally betrayed the people.

Today, even many of those who imagined themselves immune to corporate downsizing and job export are suffering a rude awakening. The awakening could become much more rude as time goes on. And eventually almost everybody will (as Thomas Jefferson predicted), "...wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied." Too many Americans listened to the Siren songs of the free traders as they assured us that America would continue to lead the world in creating an abundance of good, high paying jobs in emerging high technology fields. But it should have been obvious to all that both high technology, and the jobs in all related emerging fields, would be much more easily exported than heavy industries and nuts and bolts production jobs.

Still, few enough get the point, and still believe that free markets are God personified on earth. The key word, of course, is "free" -- one of the most powerful ad words in the marketing arsenal.

A century and a half ago, when railroads were first being being built from sea to shining sea, president Abraham Lincoln instituted a policy that assured that the project would not only help bridge the nation, but stimulate a great expansion of American industry. The American steel industry was still in its infancy then, and steel rails could have been purchased more cheaply from England and Europe than from American firms. But Lincoln said (to paraphrase), "If we purchase rails from Europe, we will get the rails, and Europeans will get our money. If we purchase the rails from American businesses, we will get the rails and the money too." And, in doing so, we also ended up with steel industries that eventually put Europe to shame, and put tens of thousands of Americans to work in a high paying industry. That policy, of course, is known as protectionism.

The same situations that Lincoln was confronted with are occurring every day. But our trusty leadership now opts to send our jobs and wealth to the competition so that the almighty consumer can enjoy cheap imported consumer goods in the markets. Thus far, the real, and soaring, costs of these ongoing policies have been totally ignored at the policy level. The national mood is "do it while it feels good" (and remember, the consumer vote is much more powerful than the labor vote). Let future generations deal with the accumulating real costs. If the train is on the wrong track, all we have to do is stoke the fires and push harder on the throttle.

Almost a hundred years ago, industrialist Henry Ford shocked the capitalist world by giving his workers the first modern "industrial wage," so that they would be able to purchase Ford automobiles, and he cut the work week to five days, so his employees would have the leisure time to enjoy their newly purchased Ford cars. Such a thing had never been done before, and fellow industrialists considered Ford an industrial crank and spoiler. Ford's employees appreciated it, and the Ford Motor Company prospered as never before. Soon, with considerable nudging by organized labor, every major industry in America had to follow suit. And American industry prospered. Even the stockholders were happy, though labor was enjoying "good jobs."

Ford's wisdom has been lost. Today's economists and policy wonks would say he had unnecessarily made his workers into very real stakeholders in Ford Motor Company, and needlessly raised their expectations, at the cost of the stockholders. It would have been better if he could have kept their wages low and working hours high in hopes of selling Ford cars abroad. And if he'd been allowed to move his factory to Mexico or China, all the better. Americans would have been able to buy cars cheaper that way. But our national leadership had not yet been enlightened in those days, and Ford was unable to send production to China. Raising the wages of labor and cutting their working hours merely caused a temporary, artificial, prosperity which would be doomed when Washington finally got smart.

In those days Washington was still making an effort to tame the robber barons of capitalism in order to enhance the prospects of citizen national stakeholdership in the capitalist system. Back then, most of our elected leaders still believed in American economic independence and increasing prosperity for the working classes. Protecting the American marketplace on behalf of both capital and the people was still considered a valid function of government. Oh, how misguided and primitive a notion that was!

By the late 1950s, American industry was unassailable, and American workers were doing so well, and were so productive, that it appeared that a five hour work day and three or four day work week were inevitable. Health insurance benefits were being added to employees' wages, and it appeared that in time almost everybody in the nation would enjoy employer paid health insurance benefits.

Then, as if by magic, starting in the 70s (though the new international economic order was already long planned, with GATT patiently waiting just beyond the curtain), all the economic lessons of our own history were totally forgotten, and they remain forgotten. We slipped from a perpetual trade surplus position into a perpetual and growing trade deficit position, as millions upon millions of jobs, factories, and entire industries, were sent packing overseas, and we began purchasing our every need from abroad. We went from being the world's largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation. Simply put, the greatest nation in the world had (through the good offices of our mis-representatives and brain trust in Washington), decided on national economic suicide. And they have continued to this day to pronounce it an "extraordinarily good deal."

Now the ten and twelve hour work day is returning in many remaining American factories (many of which are now foreign owned), and employer paid health insurance benefits are disappearing. President Bush hopes to eliminate overtime pay for many workers in order to make them just a little bit more competitive in the international labor market. National, taxpayer paid, health care coverage is in the works, but the taxpayer is not being told that this is just another cost of our free trade policy and globalism. The costs won't show up at the Wal-Mart checkout counter, but they will show up, very sneakily, each April 15th, and in ever-higher national debt ceilings (Congress's only way of dealing with deficits). But this is just another cost of free trade, and cheap imports.

As the New World Order road becomes more and more rocky, and people complain about job losses, we are told that all America has to do to solve its problems is to export more American produced goods. Few stop to ponder the proposition of the richest nation in the world hawking its goods to a much poorer world. Sometimes we literally have to send money to the competition in order to give them the wherewithal to purchase our goods. The only way to make American products more competitive is by cutting the economic legs out from under the American worker. Not out from under our elected officials, bureaucrats, teachers, and civil servants, of course, but only out from under productive, hard working, labor -- the ones who are responsible for creating the wealth we have enjoyed. This makes absolutely no economic sense.

In an exporting economy, labor is not the consumer of its own production, it's merely an added cost to be held down or cut at every opportunity. The products are for others, elsewhere, and they must be sold at the prices others will pay. In the case of a high economy selling into the lower economies of the world, those prices have to be fire sale prices, and the resulting economic superhighway is all down hill.

Most Third World nations have developed from former colonies with plantation economies developed to favor the mother country -- and labor has remained at sub-poverty levels in most of them -- to the point of being almost slave labor. Almost all are "classic" examples of what it means to be an export-based economy. The anti bellum South was a prime example of an "exporting" economy right here in the U.S.A. The primary export was cotton, and the labor it required to make a profit was slave labor. The north was highly protectionist, and this was the real conflict between North and South. The Confederaty needed free trade to prosper. The North wanted a protected marketplace. The North won, not because of any altruism, but because it had become an industrial powerhouse.

Does anybody wonder why such things as bananas are so cheap in American supermarkets? They come from exporting economies where peon labor is only a notch or two above slave labor. Their "wages" are held down precisely because their leadership has never learned the lessons of Lincoln and Henry Ford and American "domestic" capitalism. Often, their national economies are themselves enslaved by American and other multi-national corporations.

But today, Third World nations are being industrialized and are going high tech, usually subsidized by First World taxpayers, and their industries built and "owned" by multi-national corporations. They nonetheless remain plantation economies, producing for others elsewhere, their peoples always deprived of the real fruits of their own labor. Labor still gets the shaft, while multi-national corporations, Wall Street stockowners, and corrupt local politicians, enjoy the profits.

Here's something few people ever stop to think about. American style capitalism was sold to the rest of the world for one reason only. It worked! And it worked only because American workers produced for themselves. The American producer and the American consumer were one in the same person. America produced and consumed its own production -- and it produced a surplus.

Throughout our so-called isolationist and protectionist period, we carried on a robust trade with the rest of the world. We had plenty of products, both agricultural and industrial, to sell or give away to the rest of the world. The difference was that we traded only as a matter of mutually beneficial purpose with the welfare and protection of the American people and American marketplace foremost in mind, importing only those few things that we did not have and could not easily produce with our own natural resources. Most imported manufactured goods were luxuries, available to those who could afford them. But everything that was essential to our well being and living standard, with very few exceptions, was produced right here by American workers.

For those bleeding hearts (with overstuffed bellies, large bank accounts, brimming stock portfolios, and guilty consciences), to whom globalism and free trade are a means of uplifting the poor, the under-nourished, and downtrodden -- and allaying their own feelings of guilt, by making their own compatriots into mirror images of the peons of Latin America, or poor masses of Asia, I have little admiration. If we would uplift the world, we would not do it by committing economic and strategic suicide. We'd maintain our own prosperity and the economic strength of our own great nation, so that we could actually "afford" to help others in a meaningful and sustainable way -- as we once did to some extent (though we seldom actually got it right). Yes, we should help them, but not by handing them a fish, or enslaving them in nice modern foreign owned sweatshops. We'd help them by teaching them the lessons that made this into a great nation -- what this country learned during its greatest years -- the lessons taught by such men as Lincoln and Ford.



One of those anonymous emails, forwarded by an old friend, reminds Pridger that Alexander Tyler (Sometimes rendered Tytler), ought to be remembered on this Blog. The email adds some relevant contemporary comments by a Professor Joseph Olson. It goes:

At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler - a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinborough - had this to say about "The Fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship...

The average age of the world's greatest (democratic) civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."


Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the most recent Presidential election:

Population of counties won by: Gore 127 million; Bush 143 million; Square miles of land won by: Gore 580,000; Bush 2,427,000; States won by: Gore 19; Bush 29; Murders per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Gore 13.2; Bush 2.1.

Professor Olson adds, "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax-paying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off government welfare..."
Olson believes the U.S. is now somewhere between the "apathy" and the "complacency" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy; with some 40 percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.
And, Olson adds, the last gasp of any country has been when marriage and the family have taken a back seat to other sexual interests - as witness Rome - one of the greatest and most-wide spread governments. Another sign of the end, he says, is the lack of true spiritual interest where the God of the Bible and His ways are replaced by man's thinking and his own way.
The bell is tolling...

(end of email -- value of the information... Priceless!)

Another astute gentleman from the Mother Country opined about American civilization. This was Thomas Babington Macaulay, another British historian, who, in a letter to an American friend in May of 1857 said:

"I have not the slightest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here (in England)... Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish, or order and property would be saved by a strong military government and liberty perish... I have long been convinced that institutions purely decmocratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilisation, or both... Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand; or your (American) republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the Twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the Fifth -- with this difference... that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions."

There are several ways of looking at post colonial American civilization. The white man's two centuries started in 1787 and ended in 1987. The Black man's two centuries began in 1862 and will be up in 2062. No telling to whom the next two hundred years will be awarded.

Amendments to the Constitution, and the increasing frequency that new amendments are added, tell us a lot about the state of "progress" of our civilization.

Amendments 13 through 15 dealt with post Civil War adjustments due to the abolition of slavery, and were aimed at justice.

With the next amendment, however, the 16th Amendment, adopted in 1913, all pretext at "limited government" was effectively abandoned. This, of course, was the income tax amendment -- and, in the long term, it meant the repeal of freedom as our founders had envisioned it.

Another sea change took place in 1920 with the adoption of the 19th Amendment, when women got the voting franchise. This was by far much more significant than anybody realized at the time, or realizes today. (Good or bad, I shall refrain from stating an opinion.)

Oddly enough, even before the 19th Amendment, women had already gained enough political power to help ramrod the 18th Amendment through. This, of course, was Prohibition, and was our very first patently absurd Constitutional Amendment -- a sign of the times and real progress (banning a fundamental, and most irrepressible, right).

In 1971 the 26th Amendment was proposed and adopted in record time. This was the Juvenile Voting franchise -- extending the vote to wayward, naive, untutored, and politically immature, youth. This could perhaps be considered the second patently absurd constitutional amendment, but more are on the way.

There's been a push for an amendment to give women even more equal rights (!!!???) than they already have, and an amendment to prohibit flag burning. And now President Bush is proposing an amendment to constitutionally define the word "marriage." Pridger is with Bush on this, as absurd and ridiculous as it is. Unfortunately, "American civilization" is becoming so ridiculous that maybe another ridiculous amendment has become necessary to wake another group of people up.

Imagine the implications of such frivolous amendments! If anti-American protestors aren't allowed to burn the flag, maybe we ought to adopt a preemptive amendment to prevent malcontents from burning facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, the White House, Congress, or effigies of the president! Maybe we need an amendment to prevent terrorists from driving airplanes into buildings. Why don't we just pass an amendment to make any kind of political protest or any kind of terrorism unconstitutional and be done with it?

To prevent overburdening the Constitution with the definitions of words, why not an amendment referencing an authoritative dictionary of the English Language, or Black's Law Dictionary? The definition of marriage shouldn't be all that much of a problem.

The left hand of government has found that votes can be earned by handing the hungry a fish, but desires to keep the activity of "fishing" a mystery. It was no accident, of course, that the image engraved on the face of federal "Food Stamps" was of a famous painting of our founders signing the Declaration of Independence. The message, naturally, was that Welfare and Food Stamps make poor people "independent" through dependence on the federal government for their sustenance -- a blatantly Orwellian twist of the meaning of the term.

The right hand of government continues to preach self-reliance (fishing), while at the same time insuring that multi-national corporations are gifted a monopoly on both fishing equipment stores and the fish markets.

Democrats and liberals represent the left hand of government, and Republicans and (neo) conservatives, represent the right hand of government. And between the two hands of government, dependency, servitude, and tyranny are being refined. The left hand courts the votes of the increasing numbers of the dependent and economically disenfranchised, and the right hand courts the votes of remaining core of conservatives, along with the influence and power of the moneyed classes, and Wall Street capital.

The people (and thus, the votes), are pretty evenly divided, between the have-not dependents and the still-haves (who still have either good jobs or at least hope). In the end, elections are decided by which side either has the most money or best propaganda apparatus. The left traditionally has the favor and benefit of the best major media propaganda artists, and the right traditionally has the favor and benefit of the major moneyed interests. But peal off the superficial layers and both parties stand for about the same thing -- a wonderful new world that doesn't in the least resemble anything our founders envisioned, or what many Americans continue to believe their nation stands for.



Here's another email that plopped into Pridger's inbox recently.

In this one, the Democratic National Committee (www.democrats.org), (the left hand of government) is spreading the word that, Rod Paige, the Bush Education Secretary, has called the the nation's teachers (or at least the three million or so that belong to the National Education Association), "terrorists." Here's part of a DNC email:

Title: "Teachers Are Terrorists, Says Bush Education Secretary"

"Dear Subscriber,

"This week, Bush's Education Secretary Rod Paige shocked the nation when he compared America's teachers to terrorists. In a closed-door meeting with the nation's governors, Secretary Paige referred to the National Education Association, which represents 3 million teachers, as a "terrorist" organization.

"The shocking comparison came as the Bush administration struggles to defend its broken promises to fully fund the No Child Left Behind Act. State governments, faced with education budgets that are stretched to the limit, are revolting against the administration for abandoning our children.

"In Utah and Virginia, Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed (by wide margins) resolutions to opt out of No Child Left Behind if President Bush continues to break his promises to America's families. And those are just two of the growing number of states worried that they can't afford to meet the stringent requirements of NCLB if Bush continues to underfund the law in his budgets...

"Secretary Paige crossed the line when he compared the nation's teachers to terrorists. The administration is trying to shift the blame for its failures and broken promises, but our children deserve results, not excuses.

"Would Paige Put Nation's Teachers on Terrorist List?

"The State Department keeps a list of foreign terrorist organizations, the worst criminals in the world. Current members include al Qaeda, Hamas, Shining Path, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

"Would Secretary Paige add the names of 3 million teachers of America's children to that list?"


This is typical political mud-slinging (and typical of left-wing propaganda), and Democrats are pretty good at it. Saying that Paige said "teachers are terrorists" because he referred to the National Education Association in an off-hand way as a terrorist organization, is like saying Moslems are terrorists because al Qaeda and Hamas are a terrorist organizations -- or that American patriots are terrorists because some radical militia group advocates "taking our country back" through force of arms.

The intent, of course, is to inflict damage on the incumbent Republican administration, whether or not the gist of what has been said is true. Both parties are guilty of such tactics, naturally, but the left has elevated this sort of thing to a fine art and high science. The left harbors within its genes the very same propaganda talents and propensities that the late great USSR and its supporters for so long successfully managed to scare and mislead half the world.

"Critical Theory" and manipulation of voters through mass psychology are the most powerful tools of the left, while the "establishment right" still depends on rather crude carrot and stick methods of manipulating voters.

Any strong (non-capitalist coddling) organization is apt to be labeled terrorist at this point in our socio-political development (at least under Republican administration). All labor unions would be candidates, except that most have become too weak to threaten either international corporate interests or anything of value to either major political party. Since it would be extraordinarily awkward and impractical to send our schools and classrooms abroad (in fact, nobody has even suggested it yet), we still have to employ American teachers to teach in our public and private schools (this, without the need for any official protectionist policy). Thus there are still a lot of American teachers, and their union is not only still strong, but growing and getting stronger -- much to the chagrin of neo-conservative Republicans who are much more dedicated to "private" enterprise, than "public" enterprise.

Teachers still enjoy American pay scales, very generous benefit and retirement packages, and wonderfully long vacations -- and they fully intend to continue to increase their take during the years ahead. The administration finds this lock on the American dream troubling. As in the case of our elected representatives in Washington, and their millions of bureaucratic administrative helpers, outsourcing has not even touched their profession yet. Thus the National Education Association is a force to be reckoned with -- especially, since it got its own "federal" Department of Education. To Democrats that's good -- since the leadership of teaching professions tend to be heavily weighted to the left side of the political spectrum. To Republicans, and conservatives in general, it's a little problematical.

As for "our children deserve results, not excuses," Pridger wonders why eight years of Clinton didn't fix anything (except, perhaps, sowing confusion as to what the meaning of "is" is). If the "No Child Left Behind Act" (which, from what I've read, is very long on bureaucratic testing rules and incredibly shy on any sort of credible educational standards), didn't do it, and has remained an apparently under-funded federal mandate that states are having trouble with, what could President Bush do with a few additional billion dollars?

One of the problems the Republicans have with the National Education Association is that it (like any union), always demands more money to do its job -- more federal taxpayer money, and that's always difficult to rationalize when you want to cut taxes and balance the budget. The NEA also demands more federal involvement in various "educational programs." Yet more and more money, and more programs, have been thrown at "education," with little or no effect over a period of many decades. In fact, the history of the decline of educational standards in this country has been the history of the federal government getting intricately involved in education under the tutelage of both Democratic and Republican administrations. Since the establishment of the federal Department of Education, and a great increase in federal funding to public school education, we have gone from being one of the world's most literate nations, to a very sorry position indeed. We now have a widely acknowledged educational crises on our hands, and the specter of functionally illiterate high school graduates who require remedial education to enter college or the military. And this boon has come at ever increasing cost! Fifty years ago, with very little federal involvement in education, our public schools were still doing a pretty good job. No high school graduate was ever functionally illiterate. The only functionally illiterates we had then were those who dropped out in the third grade. Even many of them could probably best many of today's high school grads in an achievement test.



Not to change the subject, but back when it was fairly common for children to drop out of school in the third grade, most of them went off to work for a living, and many (if not most) did very well -- and we didn't have to import laborers from Mexico. The functionally illiterate male got a job wherever he could (even if it was pumping gas), and married a functionally illiterate woman who knew how to cook, keep house, and train the children to be good and useful citizens. Those children usually did even better than their parents when they grew up -- finished high school and got a good job somewhere. This began to break down as the Democrats went the extra mile to raise up the down-trodden, poor, and disadvantaged. I understand that many of our welfare mothers and fathers are functionally illiterate high school graduates. Some are even college grads. Many fully literate high school graduates cannot hope to find work without a college degree, and even a lot of highly educated college graduates are packing the unemployment roles.

Little wonder that we have to import labor from Mexico. The core of the menial labor working class was put on permanent paid vacation by the Democrats back in the early sixties. The jobs that they might have once filled, through economic necessity, quickly became "beneath their dignity." Now neither Democrats nor Republicans can find Americans willing to do their chores without the "necessity" of importing Mexican workers. Meanwhile domestic labor (both of the menial variety and the highly trained, but downsized) is patiently waiting on the "knowledge workers" jobs promised by both Democrats and Republicans. But we don't need them any more, in spite of the apparent need and rosy promises -- Indian, Irish, Chinese, and Bulgarian labor can do the jobs just as well at a fraction of the cost, and we don't even need to import them to our shores. Democrats and Republicans have combined to bring these wonders about.