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Wednesday, 28 February, 2007

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE – REMEMBERING WHEN

One of those emails that goes around quite frequently these days hit Pridger's inbox again the other day. It concerns what it was like growing up before we became the sophisticated and cosmopolitan society that we are today. It's headed: "To all the kids who survived the 1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's". Pridger, as a child of the 40s and 50s, has added some of his own comments.

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then, after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags – sometimes standing up in the passenger side of the front seat. Nobody had ever heard of seat belts and baby seats things.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or locks on cabinet doors. We never had to help our grandparents open their medicine bottles.

Going barefooted during the warm months of the year was a privilege most of us enjoyed, rather than a sign of poverty.

When we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, and we rode them everywhere we could go and still get home by dark.

As teenagers, hitchhiking was one of our regular ways of getting around. Yes, the world seemed that safe back in those bad old days before so much social progress set in!

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the tap or garden hose and NOT from a bottle – and never thought anything about it.

At the old family farm, everybody drank water from the same galvanized drinking bucket, from the same tin dipper, and the water was from an open well. And the old folks lived to ripe old ages.

The old outhouse was certainly not the most sanitary facility, but it served its purpose even though it didn't smell like a rose garden.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits, and few enough stitches, from these accidents.

We ate ants, tasted worms, and nibbled at mud pies and survived.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back before dark. Nobody knew where we were and nobody was able to call us – and, though our mothers sometimes worried, they knew we'd be okay. And we were O.K.

And we almost always got home on time, because we knew we'd be in trouble if we didn't.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no "private" TV, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound, CD's or Ipods, no personal computers, no Internet or chat rooms, no cell phones, and no credit cards!

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

One of the first tools a boy of Pridger's generation learned to use was a jackknife. We learned to whittle and carve things, and it was something that most boys wouldn't be without. It was always in our pocket, including when we were at school. Today, a child found with a jackknife in school would probably be in serious trouble. Adults can't even carry a jackknife on an airplane or into a courthouse.

Our hobbies were making things, and our pastimes consisted of doing things. Watching TV, when it became available, wasn't doing anything. Though it provided some entertainment, we knew it wasn't an "activity."

Cartoons were a Saturday morning treat. But after watching the magic, it was outside to play – winter or summer.

If weather kept us in, there were indoor projects. The Erector Set, the little microscope, the electric train set, the drawing tablet, came out. Or the latest model we were building would occupy our time. And for those who had brothers and sisters, indoors was a great place to play hide and seek or even a subdued version of cowboys and Indians.  

There were so many things that we didn't have, but WE HAD FRIENDS – and we went outside and found them! We walked or rode our bikes to our friends' homes. We'd knock on the door or ring the bell, or just walked in in many cases. When we were smaller, we'd simply stand in the front yard and just "call."

"Roooooby! Can you come out?" If Roby couldn't come out to play, he or his mother would come to the door and let you know, and we'd simply go to another friends house and call there.

We played cowboys and Indians, pointing cap guns and toy rifles at each other and shooting to kill. Nobody worried about us pointing toy guns at one another and pretending to kill and be killed. Everybody knew they were only toy guns and that we were just playing.

We were given BB guns for our 8th or 10th birthdays and although we given some brief safety instructions and turned loose. And we didn't put out very many eyes.

Some of us got our first "real" gun (perhaps a single shot .22), for our 12th birthday. But we had already been taught the difference between a toy gun and a real weapon – and very few of us who received guns at an early age ever became criminals.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and just about anything we could find. We built huts, forts, tree houses, and model planes.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

Television began to intrude and play an increasing role in children's lives in the 1950s. Besides the cartoons, Howdy Doody, and Captain Kangaroo, we loved westerns. But he most violent westerns we watched all had a positive message to convey about what it was to be good and bad. They were all about good triumphing over evil. The heroes were all "good guys" and, despite the violence involved in the fight for justice and the American way, they were all moral role models.

There was absolutely nothing on the television or in the movie houses that was calculated to contribute to the delinquency of minors or instill bad habits. Even in the movies there was very little to hint at illicit sex and nothing to instruct us in the use of profanity and what has become known as "adult language."

As a child, Pridger had thought obscene language was strictly the language of juvenile delinquents and a few old reprobates. But this was before we experienced so much social progress.

Even most men prone to use bad language had enough social decorum to respect women and children, and avoided it when in their presence. This antiquated custom was once known as "common decency."

As hard as it may be to believe today, some of us never heard any "adult language" until we grew up a little and began running with the wrong kind of "kids" – or joined the service.

About the only "bad language" we were likely to hear from "loose" adults was much more likely to be what were religious blasphemies than obscenities. It was called cussing or cursing. But such language was still always "shocking" – as when movie goers were shocked to hear Clark Gable utter the words, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!" in the movie Gone With the Wind. Today such language is considered quite juvenile while the worst obscenities, vulgarities, and expletives, are considered "adult."

At school, we had to Pledge Allegiance to the flag and recite a simple prayer of thanks before lunch. Nobody sued. And not even us young heathens (and children of atheists and agnostics – which were very few), were offended or outraged at this. If we didn't like it, we had nonetheless been taught to respect the views and religion of others. We sat or stood in respectful silence. And IT DID US NO HARM!

We sometimes got spankings if we misbehaved at home or school, and we survived them without lasting psychological problems. We learned that it was better to be good than bad, and we learned the difference. 

If we ran afoul of the teacher or principle and got a spanking, we could be quite certain of a stern rebuke, if not another spanking from our parents, when we got home.

If we fell into bad company and ran afoul of the law, the idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law! And, provided the transgression was not too serious, the law would generally deliver us to our home rather than jail or reform school. And we would be punished.

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever! The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

We knew the magic of childhood, before too much gadgetry, too many fears and rules, and a pure entertainment culture had intruded.

We never imagined ourselves to be as smart as, much less smarter than, adults. We were not taught that we were little adults, and teachers never attempted to undermine the authority of our parents. And children's entertainment didn't teach us to believe that kids were equals of adults or wiser than adults.

Almost all of us had a natural admiration and respect for adults and especially elders – even when we were in rebellion as teenagers.

We knew there were bad adults, of course, but we learned how to deal with that reality by avoiding them when possible and being diplomatic when it wasn't.

Childhood had its many limitations, and that made the world so big, mysterious, and fascinating to us! It was a world of wonders big and small, and life had so many surprises that none of us had time to feel sorry that we didn't yet know it all.

Yes, we heard fantasies over the radio and then saw them on TV and at the movies. But then we went out to create fantasies of our own – in both play and in serious endeavors. We saw many mysteries around us and went out to discover or experience them for ourselves. We saw wonders everywhere, and experienced many on a personal basis.

If YOU are one of those who survived those bad old days – CONGRATULATIONS!

For those that prefer to think that God is not watching over us....go ahead and delete this.

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky [in two contexts]) their parents were.

The quote of the month is by Jay Leno:

"With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, Are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?"

Pridger is sure thankful that he had the privilege of growing up and experiencing the magic of childhood in a somewhat free society.

Perhaps we can congratulate ourselves for having experienced and survived childhood in another era. Maybe we can also pat ourselves on the back a little for the accomplishments of our generations. But obviously the world our generations have managed to create is far from perfect!

The generations of which we speak (including Pridger's generation), have undoubtedly become a big part of the problem subsequent generations are facing. In trying to provide better conditions and a better future for our children, we have often deprived them of the many opportunities, experiences, and limitations, that served previous generations of children so well.

Much of the magic of childhood is gone today. Children are exposed to so much so young, yet are so overly protected and sheltered from realities, that they grow up being disappointed rather than amazed at the realities of life. Almost nothing comes up to their expectations – nothing in real life seems quite as big, colorful, and wonderful as on the big screen TV. Except, perhaps, a few places like Disney World.

John Q. Pridger

Tuesday, 20 February, 2007

WHAT WE STOOD FOR

“We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the earth. Our government has no power except that granted to it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.” Ronald Reagan

Those were fine words, and well spoken. Pridger has little doubt that Reagan was sincere in his belief in what he said – that his intentions were good (but, who really knows? He was also an actor). There is no doubt that his words reflected the intents our our founders and adhere to the letter and spirit of what was expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and what was supposedly facilitated by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But the fact that those words were spoken by a president who held office for two terms shows just how little "consent of the governed" intrudes on the operation of big government.

If a right minded, articulate, president cannot make any inroads into the growth of big imperial government in eight years, what good is all our punditry? What hope does the voter have? What good does it do to "vote the rascals out"? What good does it do to point out that government has grown beyond the consent of the governed? Obviously, absolutely none!

That's why Pridger has always been somewhat of a cynic and is tending toward fatalism in all that is political. It seems the song had it right, "Que sera sera! Whatever will be will be will be. The future's not ours to see..." We have no control of the future and no way of seeing it ahead of time because the planners are not the ones who have been elected to national office. Those who are elected to office seem to cave to a larger agenda than that of representing the American people. What is even more disheartening is that we have little enough vision as to what the future "should" look like beyond broad and vague pastel shaded images in of "peace on earth and prosperity at home."

No matter how we vote, or whether we vote, or who is elected, really matters very little. The best we can hope for is a new face, some different window dressing, a new backdrop, and perhaps a little pork belly if we're lucky, but the hidden plan and agenda will remain the same. Democracy is strictly superficial, farcical, and little better than an elaborate hoax. Perhaps it has always been an illusion.

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people – government by "consent of the governed" – has finally perished from the earth. It vanished some time back while most of us weren't watching. While appearances are carefully manipulated to obscure the reality of the situation, by maintaining "democratic forms and institutions," we have come to be micro-managed by government and other forces that are shaping our political and economic landscape. On the other hand, since we still have it pretty good, why complain? And why pretend that we can fix things? They're obviously out of our hands, and have been for a long while.

There have been many pivotal points in history where we might have made a fatal turn and lost our bearings. One ironic point could have been the Civil War itself. Though it saved the Union and resulted in the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing a whole race of people; and though it was on the very occasion of victory (at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863), that Abraham Lincoln said, "...It is... for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Could it be that the war that prompted that memorable speech effectively signaled the demise of the Constitutional Republic – the very point from which "government of the people, by the people, for the people" actually began to perish from the earth?

No doubt, the Civil War was the most pivotal point in our national history. But because the Union was preserved, and we are now all of that Union, we tend to forget what that war was really about. Pridger isn't referring to the economic or social issues that divided the nation and fomented it, but the final fact of the war and what it represented. Abraham Lincoln called it simply a war of rebellion. To the seceding Southern States, however, it was a bid for independence and national self-determination.

If the United States Declaration of Independence has (or had), any enduring relevance and meaning at all, the Confederate States had every bit as much right to declare independence from the United States as the English Colonies had to declare independence from England. To the English king, of course, the American Revolutionary War was nothing other than a war of rebellious colonists – subjects of the crown.

The deciding factor in the end, of course, as in all wars, is the outcome. The victor gets to define what the war was all about, write the history, and insure that the righteousness of the victory is firmly understood by all of posterity. Unlike the colonial rebels who ended up with their own independent nation, the Confederate rebels simply ended up subjects of the Union in which they had formerly been sovereign citizens.

Although self-style "American patriots" like to talk a lot about sovereign citizenship, the Civil War effectively ended anything like a quasi-official national recognition of such a breed. Federal citizenship was a product of the Civil War, where State citizenship had formerly been the more appropriate designation. And, of course, federal citizenship has naturally devolved into "subject" status.

Both big government and big capital came of age as the result of the Civil War, and the powers of both have exponentially expanded since. And the private money power, upon which both would thrive, also came into power at the result. In other words, limited government died during the Civil War. And when limited government died, government of the people, by the people, and for the people also began to perish – in spite of Lincoln's eloquent words.

There have been many other major turning points and significant events since the Civil War, but that was the real defining point of American history that paved the way for all that was to come. The Spanish-American War, the Federal Reserve Act and the Income Tax Amendment, The First World War, The League of Nations, the Prohibition Amendment, the Women's Suffrage Amendment, the Great Depression and New Deal, the Social Security System, World War Two, the birth of Israel, the United Nations, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Great Society, Civil Rights, the Counter Cultural movement, increasing Supreme Court activism, the Cuban missile crises, the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the Great Society, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the new international economic order, the Collapse of the U.S.S.R. and end of the Cold War, increasing military interventionism, the First Gulf War, the War on Terror, the Iraqi War, the Office of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot Act, to name most of the high and low points. Each, in its own way, and to a greater or lesser extent, have been nails in the coffin of government of the people, by the people, and for the people – and by the "consents of the people."

Most of those defining points in our history (with a several glaring exceptions, of course), were (and still are), hailed as great moments of national triumph. Even the Iraqi War has had its brief moments of triumph: The conquest of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein; the euphoria and honor of having freed a nation from a tyrant, and the privilege of bringing American style democracy to a previously oppressed people; the killing or capture of many of Saddam's henchmen; The capture of Saddam Hussein himself; and trial and hanging of Saddam Hussein; to mention the few that come to Pridger's mind.

These have been our brief moments of national triumph in Iraq. Even when viewed through the rosiest colored glasses, they are hardly anything for a great nation to brag about – a nation that once thought of itself as a Christian nation (but has since been corrected). Are these the sort of accomplishments we wish to stand for now?

Speaking of being corrected, could it be that we have been so corrected – that we have become so good and nationally so self-righteous and infallible – that we've become good for nothing? Could it be that all that we do as a nation (always with nothing but the best of intentions), is destined to cement the figurehead of a "Great Satan" on our national bow where the Lady Liberty once stood? Has our motto "In God We Trust," become a mockery of all that what we once aspired to as a nation?

There is hope left. Though we have been barreling down the wrong tracks for a long time, this indisputably remains the greatest and most successful nation in the world. And this nation retains the ability to positively influence the course of human history. But the only way we can do this, in Pridger's humble view, would be to refocus on getting our own national house into order.

But getting our own house into order is impossible as long as we continue on the present course where international interdependence – making our nation into a dependent nation – is considered much more important than national independence, self-reliance, and self-determination. While we do have a great national interest, and even a national duty, to help make this a safer and better world, the current plan, methods, and goals of globalism are so seriously flawed that we are serving up a devil's stew that threatens not only the future of this nation, but mankind as a whole.

The New World Order is being forced down our throat by global planners who claim to have world peace and prosperity for all peoples as their prime motives. Though it is a plan for the world, our so-called representatives in Washington are either actively on board or passively letting it happen, despite their oaths of office.

By now, however, it should be apparent, even to the most detached observer, that it's really about something else entirely. The real program is is a grandiose capitalistic scheme solely about markets and money. It's about control of all the world's markets and human productive labor by transnational corporations. It's about the exploitation of natural resources and human labor on wholesale basis – on a global scale only made possible by modern transportation systems owned by multi-national corporations. It's about the facilitating the corporate capture, development, and exploitation of all the markets of the world, and controlling the world's farmlands and food production. And it's about exploiting the wage and price differentials of different nations and regions to facilitate and insure perpetual corporate profits and corporate growth.

All of this being so, it is also very much about the destruction of all local, regional, and national self-reliance and self-determination. It's about destroying local agriculture and local economies. That's what "international interdependence" is all about – it's about the destruction of of national independence, economic and otherwise, everywhere. It's about relegating the nation-state system itself to the dust bin of history – supposedly for world peace, but actually for secure corporate bottom lines.

It's supposed to be a seamless solution for all the problems facing mankind. The supposed high motive behind it all is that by making all nations and peoples of the world so interdependent that war would become unthinkable, if not impossible. The only alternative to the nation state system, of course, is world government – and that's where we're being led like sheep to greener pastures, and (who knows?), perhaps the slaughter. None of the movers and shakers are yet honest enough to lay put the truth before any public.

Nobody actually wants a world government other than the elite who have devised the seamless solution and have been busily making it all happen. But we are already tasting world government. It's a done deal, but nobody has been told about it. The New World Order, as far as most people are concerned, is still an abstract idea and ideal – something that really doesn't concern them and is certainly beyond their control, or anybody's control. But they are mistaken – world government is here. It is a new kind of governance based on corporate power over an integrated global marketplace, coordinated by men in corporate boardrooms. And if it isn't under control, it ought to be brought under control.

Perhaps we no longer live under a government of the people, by the people, or for the people. We don't even have the luxury of living under a government by the "consent of the governed." But because we do live under a government made up of mostly good and well intended people, we could, and should, still have government that governs on behalf, and in the interests, of the people. And if we had good government working in the interests of the people, we could hardly avoid returning to being a good nation. People still matter – they matter a lot. And in the final analysis, people still ultimately hold the reins of power. Mass movements can change things. All that is required is that enough people wake up and get a focus on what is actually happening and demand change.

Not much danger of that, of course. So why even bring it up? One reason is that Pridger still actually believes that miracles can and do happen. Many would say there is a Greater Power at work in the world, and every once in a while positive things happen.    

John Q. Pridger

Monday, 19 February, 2007

PRESIDENTS' DAY

This is the special day Congress has set aside to honor all past and present presidents – from Old Number One to BILL CLINTON and George Bush. From the guy after whom our nation's capital was named, to the one that freed the slaves, to BILL CLINTON and, of course, even George Bush.

The nation will not soon forget Bill Clinton (Democrat). He's the president who popularized the presidency and briefly brought it up to an X rating. He was a Rhodes scholar, and a real swinger too! He did things admiring commoners could relate to. He beat an impeachment attempt, and confounded his persecutors with such brilliant legal rejoinders as, "That depends on what the meaning of is is." "Is is!" Talk about profound and downright cool! Such wit got him reelected. He was also a pretty good saxophone player.

We aren't likely to forget George W. Bush (Republican), either. He's the one that boldly looked the Axis of Evil in the eye, took on the world of terror, and memorably said "We'll get 'em!" And he went on to preserve the American way of life in the beltway and elsewhere by bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan (We say this for posterity's sake, of course).

The rest of the presidents, of course, are history. In any case, rightly or wrongly, they each on gets exactly as much federal holiday recognition as Bill and George.

The irony of President's Day is that it doesn't honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., father of the country, who should have been at least given an honorary presidency. The title "Father of the nation" is still officially attached to a dead white guy. As if that were not injustice enough, history still credits somebody else for freeing African-Americans too.

Of course, Congress has somewhat atoned for these wrongs with a separate but equal national holiday for Dr. King. Nobody has yet condemned this separate but equal status, because, as separate and equal as it is, MLK enjoys 43 times more holiday recognition than Clinton or any number of bushes, and the recognition of King increases with each presidential administration.

In spite of this, our presidents are well worth remembering, honoring, and even celebrating anyway, and each new administration brings us nearer to the Promised Land.

John Q. Pridger

SPEAKING OF THE PROMISED LAND

Pridger, in his own small and narrow way, still admits to being an admirer of our nation's first president. In spite of his conservative leanings and antiquated biases, Pridger is both a pragmatist and a progressive. He knows progress when he sees it. He, like any pundit worth his salt, is capable of being totally objective. So, in the spirit of objectivity, modern rationalism, and simple social justice, isn't it about time we admit that it's somewhat of an embarrassment to have a capital city named after a wealthy, slave owning, dead white man?

Now that the nation has progressed beyond its former bigoted, Eurocentric white man biases, isn't it time to give our capital a more fitting name – one that would be much more appropriate for a socially progressive and multi-ethnic nation? Having a capital named "Washington" is a slap in the face to a growing number of Americans and the overwhelming majority of Washington residents.

There is, of course, little doubt who the capital should be named after. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., of course. There's nobody else even in the running, at least not unless Barack Obama should capture the presidency. But even if Obama becomes president, it will be some time before he could hope to displace Dr. King as the nation's preeminent national savior figure. He would not only have to at least approximate Dr. King's stature, but outdo George W. Bush's legacy as well.

Pridger isn't suggesting that we rename the capital King, D.C., Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, D.C., or MLK, D.C. As fitting as the King name is, those variation somehow don't sound right for a national capital. But the new name should nonetheless do fitting justice to Dr. King's memory and legacy.

Something else suggests itself. On several occasions, Dr. King spoke very eloquently of his vision of a Promised Land. But Promised Land doesn't ring well either as a name for our capital. But it does have significant merit.

The "Promised Land" speaks of promise, and our nation's capital should speak of promise too – not only of the Promised Land Dr. King allegorically spoke of, but the Promised Land in Palestine as well, and, of course, the promise of the New World Order.

This suggests another name – the very heart of the Promised Land itself – Jerusalem. Perhaps Jerusalem, or the New Jerusalem, would be the most fitting name of all for our nation's capital.

John Q. Pridger

THE OBAMA CANDIDACY

Of the major declared presidential contenders of either major party, Barack Obama is shaping up as the least tarnished and most thoughtful and honest. Those attributes are not requisites for the office of the presidency, of course, but they won't hurt any. His race tends to compensate for his lack of experience. A white candidate, male or female, with the same record and qualifications, and the same lack of experience, wouldn't have a chance at the nomination.

Beside a natural and large black constituency, there is a large class of white people who are not only honestly ready for a black president, but really anxious to help elect one. To do so would make them feel racially cleansed, and perhaps partially forgiven for their centuries of racial crimes, and at least half a century of racial self-loathing. And, of course, the major media will be ecstatic getting behind an Obama candidacy, if Hillary gets out of the way.

Hillary has the experience of having already been co-president for two terms, and senator for several years since. And if not quite as untarnished as Obama, and maybe not quite as thoughtful, she's plenty shrewd and plenty articulate.  

Of course, some of the same advantages Obama enjoys will come into play with Hillary Clinton. Polls seem to indicate that the nation is as at least as ready for a woman president as a black one. The collective guilt of umpteen millennium of a male dominated civilization has begun to take its toll on at least a small minority of American males – and females are the natural majority of the electorate. So, if Hillary becomes the presidential candidate, she ought to have a decisive natural majority of the electorate in her corner. However, not all women are ready for a woman president, and some simply aren't ready for Hillary.

Another factor on Hillary's side, however, is that, as a nation, we're way behind in electing a female head of state, behind the United Kingdom and such state pillars of feminism and gender equality as India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, to mention only a few. Many find this obvious shortfall in progressive national politics rather embarrassing.

At this time Pridger tends to think the next administration will be a Democratic one – probably Hillary or Obama. The Republicans have fouled their nest so badly over the last two administrations that their chances are slim unless they find a man with a plan. Right now the prospects seem pretty bleak.

Not even a Bob Dole could win, in spite to the meteoric rise in the popularity of Viagra and other male enhancement products. Pridger wouldn't troop off to polls to vote for any Republican that didn't totally repudiate at least the last twenty years of Republican "accomplishments," and disown the House of Bush, both Junior and senior. In addition to that, he'd have to have a credible plan to return to true conservative principles and governance – and he would also have to have a "progressive" plan for getting the nation back onto the right track. Little hope of this.

Voting Democrat is pretty much out of the question for Pridger too. Even though many liberals and Democrats show some signs of waking up to the destructive nature of the New World Order steamroller that has overtaken the nation and the world under both Republican and Democratic administrations and congresses, they're still mostly waking up in left field.

Neither the Democrats or Republicans have a national economic plan. Both have been actively deferring to globalist solutions and selling national prospects down the river. Both are equally hooked on the international interdependence doctrine. The Republicans have been steadily selling our national birthright out to international capital. The Democrats have been doing the same while articulating slightly more altruistic motives. Both, for their own motives, have been actively frittering away our national sovereignty as a way to their end – the end being a New World Order.

The Republican New World Order plan is strictly a business affair, driven by capital interests for the profit motive. The Democratic New World Order plan is a bit more warm and fuzzy. Mostly fuzzy.

Now that increasing numbers of Democrats are seeing that globalization is not working out satisfactorily, they would most likely do more of exactly the wrong thing – relinquish even more and larger chunks of national sovereignty to United Nations regulators, thereby further foreclosing on our national ability manage our own national economy in the interests of the American people.

John Q. Pridger

Friday, 16 February, 2007

THE FAMILIAR IRONY OF THE IRAQI QUAGMIRE

Talk about a quagmire syndrome! Even those who no longer support our war, and admit that the invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake from the onset, are supporting our current troop surge. They are saying that we can't afford to simply give up and leave Iraq in the mess we've created – that our policy has consequences and those consequences will be worse if we don't make at least one last concerted effort to stabilize the nation.

There are passionate pleas asking, "Is freedom no longer fighting for? Is it not worth sacrificing a little more for?"

Those people are signaling to the enemy that the present troop surge is our last great effort of bring order to chaos. They are effectively saying that we won't cut and run now, but we will probably cut and run after one more half-hearted effort to gain victory.

Our televisions show us troops in the field expressing pride in their work and the importance of their mission, "I'm glad to have the privilege to fight for our freedom over here, so we won't have to do it at home."

But we don't even know what victory in Iraq would mean. Our original vision of victory (or success), is now totally out of the question. What would constitute a victory now? Apparently any sort of stability would constitute victory now. Maybe even just a stable Baghdad would do. But there is one thing that is fairly certain. There will be no political stability in Iraq while American troops occupy the country. And there will be no stability for quite some time after we leave. It's already obvious to our enemies that we have failed, and all they have to do is wait.

We can't even define what getting out of Iraq will mean now. We've invested so much in "permanent" military bases that we clearly never intended to get out of Iraq at all, even "after we leave." We're building a billion dollar American embassy. Do we build billion dollar embassies in nations we intend to leave in peace and prosperity to handle their own affairs?

Of course, we've done it all before – leaving hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of improvements, destruction, and weaponry, for the enemy. After Vietnam, we said "We'll never do that again!" But here we are again.

Things are slightly more complicated in Iraq than they were in Vietnam. Few Americans had ever heard of Vietnam until we got heavily involved, and as far as American economic interests were concerned prior to getting involved, Vietnam scored less than zero (meaning it was costing much more to support the French position there than anything we could expect in return).

Walking away from Iraq will be more difficult, and have many more consequences, than walking away from Vietnam did (in spite of the fact that our investment isn't nearly as large in terms of dollars and lives lost). Iraq is a keystone in the oil producing heart of the world as well as the heart of the Moslem world. And if Israel isn't satisfied with the situation, we've got that to worry about too.

Iraq is the mother of "damned it you do, and damned if you don't" situations. Very early in the game (long before the invasion), former Secretary of State, Collin Powell, cautioned Commander-in-Chief Bush, "If we invade, we've bought it." How right he was! We've bought it, and now it's our tar baby! It may be a super-glue baby.

If we can turn loose of it, it is almost certain to become a much more hostile nation to our interests and ideologies than it ever was before. This points to other ironies. Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was one of the most westernized secular nations in the region. That phenomena has been totally disrupted, probably for all time.

While Iraq never threatened us, Iran was the big Islamic extremist bugaboo in the region before – governed by those who deposed our friend the Shah and had seized our embassy and held its staff hostage for umpteen months. Now, though we would very much like to attack Iran and fix it, it appears that the government we've installed in Baghdad is eager to reach an accord with Iran in hopes of stabilizing things in Iraq. As for the hoped for war with Iran, our troops are too bogged down occupying Iraq to seriously contemplate anything but a bombing campaign. We don't have enough troops to do the job Iraq. So, in a sense, our "national defense mechanism" is as occupied with Iraq as Iraq is occupied by our troops.

The only real solution Pridger can see, would be to admit our mistake, quit and withdraw as gracefully and quickly as possible, and apologize for the damage we've done. After all, we meant well. We could then send the Iraqis a note saying, "Just send us the bill after you've got things sorted out and settled."

And maybe we should return to minding our own business on a more or less full time basis. We've got a pretty big country to run right here, and our government ought to get back to the job it was originally instituted to do – "by consent of the governed." Doing all the things in the world that we are now doing, or trying to do, is not what our American government was supposed to be about.

The New World Order has never been endorsed by "consent of the governed" – of this or any other nation. Nor has any other facsimile of world government or American Global Empire enjoyed such a endorsement.

It's time for our politicians, "thinkers", and policy makers, to reread the founding documents, Federalist Papers, and other writings of the founders, and try to reconnect with what their jobs are. They should also read a little history – even American history – and try to discern where we got things right as a nation, and where we have gone wrong.

What! Turn our back on the world? No, not turn our back on the world, but tend our own store, and let others tend theirs. "Peace and friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none!"

Freedom is worth fighting and sacrificing for, but it is not the job of our government or our armed forces to fight and sacrifice to bring freedom and democracy to "others elsewhere." Our duty is to preserve freedom in America, and defend America from foreign invasion – whether it be of a military, import, or immigrant, in nature.

We should be pretty tough on terrorists that attack us too, of course – "Search 'em out, find 'em, flush 'em out, and get 'em!" wherever they may be. But if we had been minding our own business these past sixty years, there wouldn't be any serious terrorist threat, because we'd have never earned the reputation of being the Great Satan. And starting a major global war because a couple dozen religious zealots pulled off a major coup, was about as brilliant as swatting a fly on one's forehead with a nuclear bomb.

John Q. Pridger

COVERING YOUR ASSETS

The dollar is in trouble. It has been for a long time, and things promise to get worse as mega-spending on war and other things go on, and our balance of trade deficit continue to soar. Talk about "inflation money" the American dollar has become the all-time mother of inflated and inflating currency! The world is literally wading ever-deeper in dollars as the money supply continues to expand exponentially. This means that all prices will rise much faster than the incomes of 95% of Americans, and many times faster than the interest paid by bank savings accounts.

Real estate is always tended to be a sound investment. The problem now is that most of it in "desirable areas" continues to be way over-valued, thus hardly an attractive investment. Many people in high market areas purchase with no money down and interest only payments – which means they really aren't buying it at all, but gambling on equity appreciation. So far it has remained a good bet in most areas, but that doesn't change the fact that you never own your house and never get it paid for. The scary thing is that we obviously have a real estate bubble that threatens to burst and correct this situation somewhat. But when it bursts, a lot of people will be badly burned.

Euros look better than dollars these days. But Euros are tied to the very same banking machinery that the Federal Reserve Note is tied to, so ultimately it is the same sort of boat as the dollar over the long haul. But, in the short to intermediate term, Euros will probably remain a better bet than the dollar for holding value.

The stock market is always a place where money can be made – and lost. It's a big gambling casino where a few win big, many hold their own or even gain a little, and many lose out. Still, short of a major "correction" or crash, the broader market tends to hold its own and gain some. But there are no guarantees in a market recognized as considerably overvalued and probably still full of impressive bubbles of the Enron and WorldCom variety.

The only recommended solid investment continues to be precious metals – mainly gold and silver. The value of both have more doubled in the last few years, and they are bound to do it again in the next few. And in the likely event of a serious divestment of dollars by our foreign beneficiaries at some point in the future, gold and silver prices will probably skyrocket. 

Unfortunately most of us Americans aren't all that comfortable buying little pieces of gold or silver for what already seems ridiculously high prices. Almost $700.00 for a one ounce bullion gold coin! Almost $20.00 for a one ounce silver "dollar"!

Us old timers know that an ounce of gold should only be worth $35.00, and silver about a sixteenth of that amount. Pay $700.00 for a $35.00 ounce of gold!!?? That's a pretty tough psychological barrier to break! But damn! If Pridger's retirement fund, IRA, and Social Security had only been invested in gold and silver rather than stocks and bonds, or government administered "mis-trust funds," retirement might have been much more rewarding than has become the reality.  

As for putting personal savings into gold and silver, apparently few Americans bother to save any more. We've become credit card junkies instead. As a nation (and supposedly still a very prosperous one), we have gained the distinction of attaining a negative savings rate. And this is a very startling development. More than just that – it's an ominous leading economic indicator.

Speaking of credit-card debt, it would be interesting to know how many Americans have used it in an effort to make it big in the stock market – and how most of them are doing. 

John Q. Pridger

MAIL BAG - "VETO THE PRO-U.N. AGENDA"

Pridger has received his petition from the National Committee Against the U.N. Takeover. It includes "A Petition to President George W. Bush" asking him to "VETO the pro-U.N. Agenda."

The petition is accompanied by a letter from the National Committee Against the U.N. Takeover's President, Cliff Kincaid, warning of the threat posed by the "Citizens for Global Solutions" and that organization's democratic allies in the United States Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid; Senator Hillary Clinton; and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Add to these, just about all liberal Democrats in both houses, and probably a few left leaning Republicans.

Citizens for Global Solutions, of course supports everything the United Nations stands for, but this petition includes the following "Where-ases":

1. Citizens for Global Solutions – a radical group whose members are dedicated to a United Nations one-world government, the end of U.S. sovereignty and U.N. Global Taxes – claims that 91 percent of the cadidates it endorsed were elected to Congress in the last election;

2. ...(it) proudly declared that it was their grassroots efforts that forced pro-American U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton to resign;

3. ...(it) supports the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty, U.N. Global Taxes and the U.N. International Criminal Court;

4. ...(it) has liberal leaders in Congress... to do their pro-U.N. bidding;

"Therefore, the undersigned citizen does hereby respectfully request that you protect the American people form the United Nations and veto any pro-U.N. legislation passed by Congress. Thank you."

All the "Whereases" mention "Citizens for Global Solutions" so it appears to be an anti-DGS petition as well as an anti-U.N. petition.

As an American constitutionalist, and a warrior arrayed against the New World Order, Pridger's opinion of the United Nations would be fairly obvious. 

Pridger got his primary education on the United Nations from the book The Fearful Master, A Second Look at the United Nations, by G. Edward Griffin, published in 1964 by Western Islands Publishers of Boston and Los Angeles. The overleaf quotes George Washington:

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

Congressman James B. Utt wrote the introduction. He said:

"The Fearful Master... sets forth the double standard which guides the UN through its devious and treacherous path toward world domination... giving the people of the free world a picture of what has happened, is happening, and will happen in the very near future – if we continue our course of strategic surrender to to international forces.
     ...(Griffin) meticulously outlines the grand design for surrender, and likens it to a jigsaw puzzle. The chief designer is well aware of the ultimate picture, but an individual working on an indiscernible piece of that puzzle does not know exactly what he is doing or where it will fit into the picture. When all of the pieces are put together, however, the finished grand design will be that of a one-world government maintained by forces against which resistance by any nation will be futile.
     ...(it) is a book which is long overdue, but I prayerfully hope that it is not yet too late to awaken the American public..."

The book didn't wake very many people up. Forty-five years later the United Nations is still at its task. Of course, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since Griffin's book appeared. The Soviet Union and international communism conspiracy that played a major role in the world of 1964, are no longer such an obvious threat.

Perhaps due to Griffin's work, and the voice that the U.S.S.R. and its satellites had in the UN, the U.S. Congress remained fairly protective of American national sovereignty for some time. As long as communist state capitalism vied with western capitalism as the global model, Congress was careful not to sign us up for every single UN program, and when it did it was careful to stipulate that nothing signed would supercede the Constitution or U.S. law.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, that has changed, and our trusty mis-representatives have been signing away chunks of our sovereignty piece meal ever since. The New World Order, which most conspiracy theorists had taken to be a communist plot developing under UN auspices, surprisingly appeared as if a new baby during the administrations of conservative Republican Ronald Reagan and internationalist Republican George H. W. Bush.

Many conspiracy theorists had noticed, however, the peculiar degree of largely backdoor support the Soviet Union had received from some of the world's largest capitalist movers and shakers – both before and after World War Two. And that war itself constituted the Soviet Union's greatest leap forward, and at our expense.

As another leading indicator of the ties between the great capitalists and the U.S.S.R., David Rockefeller (the namesake of the "Rockefeller" branch of the Republican Party), remained an important liaison between the two Cold War antagonists until that period's end.

A few perceptive conspiracy theorists actually figured out that the New World Order would end up being very much a capitalist affair, in spite of it's heavy leftwing "idealist" United Nations following. Communism, it seems, served largely as a diversionary stage and period in the plans of the One World designers.

The United Nations remains the parliamentary representation of an emerging world government. This fact is proven by it's continuing emergence as an international regulatory body through such agencies as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and International Maritime Organization (IMO), and a host of others. The United States has already signed our sovereignty over in those two major areas of regulation. Congress continues to drag its feet in other areas.

In other areas, however, the United Nations has proven incapable of serving as a perfect embryo of world government. The New World Order machinery is thus still very much in other hands and will probably stay that way. The United Nations is still a long way from ruling the world, but it's agencies are regulating the world under the auspices of International Laws.

Those who actually rule are elsewhere, and are not under any UN constraints. The global money power, for example, is still carefully insulated from the United Nations – and the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF), though nominal UN appendages, operate totally independently without any real UN oversight.

Though the UN has a small "Peace keeping" force, the military power of the New World Order is not the UN Peacekeeping Force, but is very much vested in the United States military and NATO. And in the matter of global economic policies, the G-7 or G-8 industrialized nations have much more say than the entire United Nations General Assembly.

The United Nations itself, before its official charter, was composed of the World War Two allied powers. Upon its charter most non-enemy, mostly Western, nations became charter members. The U.S.S.R. was a permanent member of the Security Council, along with the U.S., U.K., France, and China, from the beginning.

After the Cold War erupted, the Soviet Union played a minimal role, and the UN more or less became the tail by which the United States wagged the (free) world. 

The Korean and Vietnam wars were both "UN police actions" against "communist aggression" which the Soviet Union (the bastion of international communism), for very good reasons, chose not to veto. The main reason was that the U.S.S.R cared very little for either the Korean or Vietnamese communists (or the Chinese communists either, for that matter), and was very pleased to see the United States and its allies spinning their wheels in distant war zones. It had actively fomented the Korean war partly to this end.

Pridger wouldn't do away with the United Nations, however. He'd merely demote it to a an international debating society, cut 91 percent of its American funding, and send it packing over to Europe where it rightly belongs.

Wednesday, 14 February, 2007

COSBY'S COMPLAINT
REMEMBERING BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Pridger had just about forgotten to celebrate Black History Month, until the following email hit his inbox. It's a recap of what entertainer Bill Cosby has been telling Black audiences recently, (reformatted for this post):

CAN'T BLAME THE WHITE PEOPLE
by Bill Cosby

They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk:

Why you ain't, Where you is, What he drive, Where he stay, Where he work, Who you be...

And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk.

Everybody knows it's important to speak English... except these knuckleheads. Mushmouth is what they speak!

You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.

People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads throwing that all away. The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids. $500 sneakers for what? And they won't spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics. I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.

Where were you when he was 2? 
Where were you when he was 12?
Where were you when he was 18?

And, how come you didn't know that he had a pistol? And where is the father? Or who is his father?

People putting their clothes on backward: Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong? People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn't that a sign of something?

They're walking around with their nasty underwear showing, and holding onto their pants to keep them from falling to the ground! Or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up?

Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up to her panty line, and got all types of needle piercings going through her body?

What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail.

Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different 'husbands' -- or men or whatever you call them now.

We have millionaire football players who cannot read. We have million-dollar basketball players who can't write two paragraphs.

We as black folks have to do a better job. Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids saying... you are hurting us.

We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.

We cannot blame the white people any longer. It is not for media or anyone of this time anymore to say whether I'm right or wrong.

It is time, ladies and gentlemen, to look at the numbers.

Fifty percent of our children are dropping out of high school.

Sixty percent of the incarcerated males happen to be illiterate. There's a correlation.

Tell the media to stop asking me what I think about people who don't believe what I'm saying or feel that I'm too harsh or feel that I'm just running my mouth because I'm old.

Seventy percent of the teenagers pregnant happen to be African American girls.

Don't ask me to soften my message.

Bill Cosby

While Pridger certainly agrees with Cosby, and is glad he has begun to speak out, he wonders why it has taken so long for a Black entertainer of Cosby's stature to speak out so candidly and so poignantly on the issue at hand – an issue that has been all too apparent for at least forty years.

The Tragedy is not only in the Black community. It has spread to the white youth, if not the adult population. Pridger has seen them wearing their hats backwards or sideways, their super-baggy pants down lower than the hip, crotch below knee level, and legs cut off at just inches above the ankles. They are mimicking what they consider Black culture in hopes of being perceived as cool as Black hipsters, or whatever they call them. Some of them can break dance and rap too, or talk jive.

The irony of Black History in America is that, by in large, the Black minority had progressed socially and economically somewhat steadily from the Civil War era onward, in spite of institutionalized injustices and second class citizenship. "Separate but equal" public education and communities, while not quite as equal as they should have been, were at least working to a degree that was producing positive results for those willing and able to succeed within that society. In fact there was a whole parallel Black cultural and economic universe that, while not as materially rich as the white counterpart, was nonetheless rich and progressive.

After all the major Civil Rights laws were passed, and forced integration instituted with the aim of improving the lot of Black America, that parallel cultural and economic universe collapsed. Affirmative action enabled a large number of able Blacks to succeed and successfully migrate into the mainstream middle class, but the social and economic trajectory of the Black community as a whole started to trend downward from the Civil Rights era onward.

Blacks in general no longer tried to emulate whites and white culture as they had before. They began looking toward their African roots and an African identity. Many looked to the Moslem religion as an alternative to "white" religious culture. "Black was Beautiful" and white cultural institutions, after all, were the legacy of "dead white men" – and the white race had a long and bloody history of conquest, exploitation, and oppression of other races.

Shortly after the Civil Rights revolution, Pridger remembers the board of a newly Black inner city school seriously debating mandatory classes in "Black English." After all, that was their language, and it had been pretty much agreed that anything Black was just as good as anything White.

The city was Pontiac, Michigan, and Pridger was visiting relatives there after several years overseas. It was the year that race riots had made nearby Detroit into a battleground – a "Black day in July" and "Motor city madness." Pridger had rode a Greyhound bus from Illinois, but the bus couldn't make it within five miles of the station in downtown Detroit where he was expecting to change buses and go on to Pontiac.

Pridger had to make his way to Pontiac on a series of city buses. It was then that Pridger first learned that things had become so bad that bus drivers could no longer safely carry change. Pridger didn't have sufficient change to make the fare, so he had to get off and find a business establishment that would break some bills.

It was then that Pridger first realized the profound changes that Civil Rights had brought, even to northern cities. He found Pontiac in a heartrending state of transition. It was no longer the thriving city Pridger remembered as a youth. Pontiac was the county seat for Oakland County, but all the county offices had abandoned the city and moved to a new complex about three miles out of town. Only a few years before the grand old white stone Courthouse had been spruced up to look like new. Now is was gone, and in it's place was a parking lot.

The Pontiac Press moved too, and had been renamed the Oakland Press.

In the 1960s, Professor Carrol Quigley, in Tragedy and Hope, noted that America's white youth culture was already becoming Africanized. This was part of the tragedy, and while Quigley held out some hope, it has been deferred.

Monday 5 February, 2007

A LUDDITE COMPLAINT

The steam roller we call the New World Order has progressively taken a toll on America's production jobs, undercutting labor – the backbone of America's great and prosperous middle class. The story of the decline of American labor reads like the famous story about the Nazis – "First they came for the Jews... I didn't object, because I was not a Jew... and then they finally came for me – and there was nobody left to object."

The rise of the New World Order (which we also call globalism), was both camouflaged and lubricated by great technological advances. Everything having to do with globalization was easily mistaken for simple, inevitable, progress. Globalization was characterized as modernity and progress personified. Anyone who vocally opposes globalization has been categorized as either a conspiracy theorist or a Luddite.

First they came for the small independent family farmer – a class of people who were always a threat to "progress" because it was a very large, self-reliant, and independent class, firmly established on productive lands throughout the nation – lands it owned.

The farmer as a class had three major weaknesses: (1) Because to be a good farmer, husbandman, and steward of the soil, did not require a high degree of formal education, the class as a whole was any easy target for more sophisticated classes to upstage and undermine; (2) His independence and individualism, combined with his relatively isolated lifestyle, meant that it has always been difficult for farmers to effectively organize as a political voting block; (3) The farmer has never had any control over the markets for his products, thus he has always not only been at the mercy of the natural market and weather cycles, but the manipulation of market prices by organized urban marketing concerns. And, because of this, the farmer often had to borrow money, or even mortgage the farm, in order to make a crop or overcome a bad crop season.

The sophisticated opposition to an independent agrarian class did not fully coalesce until the the mid twentieth century. Government itself, recognizing the obvious importance of the independent farmer from the very birth of the nation, tended to favor farmers until about the same time.

The American farming community progressed and prospered to a greater or lesser degree at least until the Great Depression – and then again during the Second World War and until about the 1950s. A system of parity price supports was instituted during that period to level the farmers' playing field somewhat and insure that most farmers received an adequate opportunity to prosper at a par with the industrial sector of the economy.

Then, with the advent of chemical fertilizers and larger and more efficient farm machinery, sophisticated professional planners entered the picture, and the independent farming class was doomed. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was supposedly formed to help the farmer, but the reality evolved into something quite different. Efficiency, through emerging chemical technologies and methods, endorsed by a new agricultural academia, became the holy grail. In conjunction with growing petro-chemical based agricultural "support" industries, hybrid seed companies, the big meat packers, and major commodity traders, the message to the farmer became "get big or get out." 

The rest, of course, is history, though little enough understood by the average American or the former farmers of America. Where at one time an eighty acre diversified farm on decent ground could support a large farm family using only horsepower or a small tractor, now several hundred to a few thousand acres are required to support such a family, and a toxic stew of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and hybrid seed are required to do that. Today, bio-engineered seeds and animals are being added to the witch's brew.

On the acreage that once amply supported perhaps fifty farm families, perhaps one family remains, and the once vibrant farming towns and villages that once existed throughout rural America (having lost their reason for existence), have fallen into precipitous decline, if not total extinction.

Nobody spoke up for the farmer. It seemed to the majority of people that progress dictated that he should move over and allow the big boys to take over so things could be done right – according to the dictates of agricultural scholars in the pay of movers and shakers – how else could we feed an increasingly hungry world?

There were a lot of good industrial jobs in the large metropolitan areas for displaced farmers in the booming industries of the post World War Two era. Most displaced farmers were able to find decent factory work for a long time.

But then they came for the industrial workers. Having destroyed the independent farmer as a class, it was time to bring the increasingly prosperous working class to heel. Most living Americans of mature years are vaguely aware of how this has "progressed." Most displaced factory workers are acutely aware of it, and it's a work still very much in progress.

As President Reagan put it, the American economy was destined to become a service economy, and a "new international economic order" was at hand.

As Pridger's old Pappy observed, "A service economy is where everybody makes a living by taking in each other's laundry." In a service economy, most workers are servants – this by definition. And when everybody is a servant of one kind or another, we are bound to eventually discover what the term "servitude" means. When institutionalized at low wages, the words serfs, peasants, and peons, have historically been used for such a class of people.

Only production can build an economy. Only production can build economic self-reliance and liberty – and only production can produce wealth. A service economy may churn money, but it produces nothing to generate the wealth that money represents.

This is not to say that everybody must be a productive farmer or factory worker, but its the producer that produces the wealth necessary to pay the freight of the companion service sector of any productive economy. A service sector cannot stand alone, any more than a car salesman can sell cars if there are no cars to sell.  

At about the same time industrial production workers came under concerted attack, the independent mercantile class became a further sacrificial lamb. The local merchant and Mom & Pop began succumbing to progress in the form of the onslaught of giant corporate chain stores that both displaced them.

And the corporate chains, freed by deregulation of civic responsibility or loyalty to the nation, increasingly bought their merchandise directly from overseas sources.

This points to the fact that an increasing amount of "our wealth" is produced by others, elsewhere – and we end up owing for it. The wealth that we once would have produced for ourselves, and which would have really been ours, is no longer being produced in sufficient quantities to pay our bills.

The great transitional takeover of retailing by large corporate entities was conveniently facilitated by other things taking place on a different, apparently unrelated, level. Our great cities began self-destructing in the 60s as the result of the resolution of "social issues" – mainly in the guise of remedying racial injustice and eliminating poverty. As a result, white flight from the cities remade the urban landscape. Suburban sprawl took on a whole new life and meaning, and a whole new commercial infrastructure was required. Corporate America rose to the occasion and provided it.

The nation was literally reinvented during the decades of the sixties and seventies. Corporations largely replaced individuals as the nation's merchants. Malls and fast food restaurants grew like popcorn in a pan. People (able to zip around in automobiles and shop wherever there was sufficient parking space), loved it – so nobody spoke up for the small merchants who were being supplanted.

In fact the old commercial and merchant middle class had always been slightly resented by many of the working class, so when they were being driven out of business, and replaced by slick corporate establishments, many gloated on the the local mercantile "aristocracy" being knocked off of its pedestal. They saw it as "progress," provided a feeling of gain rather than loss.

The transition from an industrialized economy to a service economy has progressed rather smoothly. Though it had begun long before 1980, it was President Reagan who had the dubious honor of announcing it to an trusting and unwary public. But it was not until the collapse of the U.S.S.R. that the internationalization of the process went on steroids, with the final opening of the global marketplace.

Free market economists like Milton Friedman had done a snow job on the Reagan conservatism wing of the Republican party. And it took a while for many of them to wake up and sort out the differences between Rockefeller internationalist Republicanism, and fiscal, social, cultural, and nationalist conservatism.

Friedman was a major Judas Goat for the One World movement, bringing many naive "conservatives" into the globalization movement alongside liberal and Democratic internationalists. The allure of globalized free market economics was in the key word, "free." Anything with that word in it had to be good. Libertarians certainly bought it and still do – and so did mainline Republicans and Democrats.

Pridger must say, however, that some Democrats and the left have awakened and are speaking out on the evils of globalization and the touchy subject of injustice in Palestine. On the other hand, most Republicans and neo-conservatives remain either totally in the dark or are still overcome by self-interest. And they remain totally committed to support of Israel, right or wrong. True conservatives (as Pridger defines the term), are hardly politically relevant any more. 

In line with free market economics, President Reagan also championed the cause of "deregulation" and "trickle down economics." Almost all conservatives thought it was a good idea to "get government off our backs" and, after all, businesses and entrepreneurs have to make money before money can trickle down to workers. Anybody could see that. So nobody complained – it all sounded so much like progress.

But what was slated for deregulated were the very corporate entities that most needed continued government oversight. Without enlightened regulatory oversight, the full predatory nature of capital was unleashed and able to manifest itself on an increasingly global scale. And, as for trickle down, capital fashioned incredibly large pockets for itself, with fewer and fewer leaks, while at the same time increasingly sheltering American workers from the trickle stream.

Though many formerly well employed workers have experienced rude awakenings as progress began taking its toll, few have realized what was going on during the process – and few have yet figured it all out yet. Most have thought the squeeze was just the unavoidable and inevitable manifestation of progress. And the "new order" of things had so many "obvious benefits" that most felt no serious inclination to protest. They seldom suspected that the "pink slips" were in any way related to all of the wonderful developments taking place around them. The inconveniences of job loss, we were told, were just temporary. New service jobs and jobs in high tech industries would soon materialize.

More recently they have come for the white collar, clerical, and high tech workers, as electronic outsourcing has provided a handy means of furthering the benefits of the global economy.

When a frog is in a pan of water destined to boil him, he goes through progressive stages of increasing comfort and self-satisfaction. First the water was uncomfortably cold. Then, in time, pleasantly warm. By the time the water becomes unpleasantly warm, he has rationalized that progress unavoidably entails a few periods of unpleasantness. Long before the water becomes unbearably hot, the frog has already decided he's in heaven. He doesn't jump out of the pan because its the only thing he knows.

John Q. Pridger

PROGRESS AND JOB LOSS IN THE MARITIME INDUSTRY

Let's take a look at progress in the maritime industry – something Pridger is personally familiar with. Circa 1960 the United States had the largest merchant marine fleet in the world. This was appropriate since it was (and remains), by far the largest trading nation in the world.

Hundreds of American owned, manned, and flagged merchant ships carried the nation's waterborne commerce alongside many foreign flag ships. But that has all changed radically. Today the great United States of America has a private merchant fleet of a size that would hardly do honor to a landlocked banana republic. About 95% of our much enlarged and rapidly increasing foreign trade is carried in foreign ships. Of the 5% of the remainder, which are American flag ships, about 90% of them are in fact owned by foreign corporations.

What this means is that almost all of the imported stock on our consumer shelves is delivered in foreign ships. About 98% of the freight revenues generated from our huge and growing volume of foreign trade is paid over to the foreign competition. Even many of our port facilities are operated by foreign companies today. This cannot be the result of enlightened economic or strategic national planning. But it is considered very progressive in terms of globalization.

Now let's take a look at how "people" have been cut out of gainful employment by increased efficiency in shipping. When Pridger cut his teeth as a seaman (in the 1960s), few cargo ships were of more than 10,000 gross tons. Most were in the 5,000 to 7,000 ton range. Most of today's cargo ships are containerships of from 50,000 tons to more than 100,000 tons and increasing in size all the time.

In order to keep calculations simple (and extremely conservative), we'll say the average old ship size was 10,000 gross tons, and the present ship size averages 50,000 gross tons. (Gross tonnage is a cubic measure rather than a weight measure, but the correlation of cargo carrying capacity is all we're concerned with here.) A 50,000 ton vessels obviously carries five times more freight than a 10,000 ton vessel.

The crew size on those 10,000 ton vessels averaged about 40 men. The average crew size on a modern 50,000 ton container ship is about 20 men. In other words, in terms of cargo moved, twenty seamen now effectively do the work that required 200 before.

We can look at this evidence of progress and efficiency in two ways. (1) Due to modern economics of scale and other efficiencies, one sailor now delivers the same amount of cargo that ten had delivered before – very good! Or (2) we might say that 90% of the potential seafaring jobs have simply vanished, depriving hundreds of thousands of seamen a means of making a living – not necessarily so good. 

This great decline in seafaring jobs has particularly impacted American seamen. Since the American fleet, in terms of the number of ships, is about a tenth of what it was forty or fifty years ago, 90% of all American seafaring jobs in foreign trades have simply disappeared. Those workers now have to find employment elsewhere, at a time when good jobs are disappearing in every other industry as well.

What is particularly ironic and appalling about this amazing decline in seafaring opportunities for Americans, is that it has occurred during a period of tremendous growth in the industry itself, along with almost exponential growth in the volume of trade crossing our docks.

Maritime unions have been powerless to stop this juggernaut of job loss because the government, which once favored a domestic merchant marine and American organized labor in general, had abandoned labor in favor of One World goals – something totally at odds with the concept of government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

This is definitely progress. The question is, is progress that displaces so many jobs really good progress, or should a line be drawn somewhere to preserve jobs – even if it means sacrificing efficiency?

The shepherds of industry, of course, say that every worker cuts into profits, so the fewer workers the better. And, in the globalized economy, the shepherds of industry (not the people), are in the driver's seat and have both the ear and representation of Congress.

Our government itself has become an agent for international capitalist interests, with the dual reassurance that, "It's all about the greatest good for the greatest number of people" and "the ends justify the means."

The greatest number of people, of course, live outside the United States, and the end is a global system to control markets and people (those pesky little things!).

American seamen, of course, cut into industry profits a lot more than, say, Filipino or Greek seamen. So, it makes absolutely no economic sense at all for any globalized shipping company to employ any American seamen at all. And, looking at the larger picture, the same thing can be said of all globalized industries – it makes no economic sense to employ any American workers if there are others in the world who can do the job at a fraction of the price.

In fact, if it were not for the fact that our representatives in Washington still recognize that an American merchant marine is important to national security (which now includes more "American interests abroad" than the interests of Americans at home), the American flag fleet and American seamen would have already totally disappeared from the high seas completely.

In the 60s there were still a great number of American shipping companies. The Vietnam War was the last boom time for American ship owners and the American merchant marine. The American merchant marine, as a significant factor in the national economy, was doomed after that.

As it is, most of the great old American shipping companies have already totally disappeared (and that happened before globalization had its full head of steam). With a very few exceptions, the remaining "American" companies are owned by foreign corporations, for which the "American flag" is a mere feather in their corporate hat – and, of course, it is also a profitable inside track to defense cargos and collecting maritime security ship subsidies.

Maritime labor unions are in the ironic, and somewhat embarrassing, position of having to support foreign ownership of American ships – simply because, without foreign ownership, there would hardly be any American flag ships or seagoing jobs left at all!

During our industrial era, American shipping companies had always needed government subsidies to compete successfully against foreign companies in international trade. This is because we had American companies, with American industrial input costs, high taxation, and regulatory burdens competing directly with foreign ship owners with very low costs.

The subsidy that leveled the playing field was called an "Operating Differential Subsidy." The subsidy paid the difference in costs between operating American flag ships and foreign ships. Most foreign flag ships had always had the advantage of lax regulations, low taxes, and cheap, Third World, crew wages. The subsidy allowed American ship owners to compete and make a profit.

As the era of globalization progressed, operating differential subsidies came under attack from both home and abroad. The anti-business political left called them corporate welfare that needed to be ended. The pro-business political right said they were anti-free market – not only were subsidies against free market principles, but we were also subsidizing business inefficiency.

Of course, once the World Trade Organization (WTO), was fully implemented and empowered by the hand of our mis-representatives, it naturally sided with our political right and left, with regard to the merchant marine. It effectively decreed (on behalf of the global competition), that it is illegal for the American government, or any government, to favor its own industries with subsidies in order to give them either a chance, or competitive advantage, in the global market. Doing so is unfair.

The only acceptable rationale for a merchant marine subsidy is "national defense." The WTO does not yet have the power to prevent subsidies for business property which is categorized as a national defense asset. But we're no longer allowed use subsidies for any national economic purpose, such as trying to level the economic playing field so the American flag can compete with the Liberian and Panamanian flags on the high seas.

Today the government subsidizes 60 U.S. flag, "militarily useful commercial ships" – our so-called "Maritime Security Fleet" – to the tune of $160 million dollars annually, or $2.67 million per ship per year. Because of a lack of vision, and failure to consider the total economic implications of not having a viable merchant marine – most of that money now goes to foreign ship owners that operate American flag ships.

On the other hand, the cost of our foreign transoceanic trade (the money we pay foreign ship owners for delivering the goods for Wal-Mart, etc., and taking our agricultural commodities to the hungry masses of Africa and elsewhere), runs into the multiple billions of dollars a year. This money is totally lost to the American economy.

A realistic subsidy level that would make possible a viable sized merchant fleet (one owned, manned, and operated, by Americans), might cost a billion dollars a year – but it would stop the hemorrhaging of multiple billions from the domestic economy.

As for WTO rules and regulations, we certainly ought to have retain enough national sovereignty to manage and regulate our own maritime industry and assets. If we can invade Iraq without UN approval, we can certainly support our maritime industry without its approval..

We don't hesitate to spend a hundreds of billions dollar on foreign destruction, reconstruction, and democracy building abroad – not to mention more tens of billions in foreign aid directly subsidizing the foreign competition – but we won't subsidize one of our most critically important industries. In fact, we're not allowed to – the WTO says so.

None of this means that corporate welfare and subsidies for American businesses have ended however. Not by a long shot! But now we only subsidize "globalized" industries for the alleged purpose of developing global markets! And the corporations that are subsidized for this purpose (with the full approval of the WTO, of course), are profitable businesses. That is, they were profitable domestic corporations that didn't need subsidies by any stretch of the imagination. The subsidies were (and are), to assist them to move production offshore so they could profit even more by dumping American workers. This is what is known as "developing foreign markets."

Ironically, our leadership is perfectly willing to ignore the United Nations and its mandates when it serves their purpose (such as in invading Iraq), but not when it serves the purpose of the American people or American workers.

Our trusty leaders have eagerly gone along with UN mandates to regulate our seamen and ships. U.S. merchant marine personnel (along with all other seamen in the world), are now very much under the heavily regulatory thumb of the United Nations' International Maritime Organization. American seaman can no longer work on even American ships in foreign trade unless they are effectively "licensed" (certified professionally competent), by the IMO.

Naturally, when we come to the point in our history when our government can no longer favor our own industries and American workers over foreign industries and foreign workers, it's easy to understand why President Reagan said the American economy was going to go post industrial and become a service economy. The orders had come down from somewhere above, and Reagan's job was to merely make the announcement of an unfolding reality. 

But getting back to job loss in the maritime industry alone, let's take a look at longshoremen. Remember, we are speaking of both causes and effects here, and job loss has been one of the major effects of globalization. In the case of the loss of longshoreman jobs, most the the loss is due to increased industrial efficiency, and only partly related to globalism.

The old 10,000 ton freighter had perhaps six cargo hatches. Each hatch could be worked by two 12 man longshoreman gangs, meaning that 12 gangs may be used to load and unload the ship at one time – totaling 144 men. But, on average, maybe only half that number would be used at any given time, so we'll say that 72 men worked to load and unload the average cargo ship, not counting those on the dock.

The modern 50,000 ton container ship may have twelve or more container bays, and perhaps six bays can be worked at any one time – each requiring only a crane driver and one man on the ship. A lashing gang of maybe 12 men may be required during most of the cargo operations, so we may have, on average, 24 men involved in discharging and loading operations either on the crane or on the ship.

Containerization efficiency now has 24 men doing the job that once required 360 men – fifteen longshoreman jobs lost for every one retained.

This, of course, is the maritime equivalent to shore side factory automation.

The questions are, (1) where do all of the displaced seamen and longshoremen go to find equally good employment? and (2) Is the industry "really" saving money by displacing all those workers? Is it really a healthier industry now that it can operate without all those people?

We, if you ask industry, it would of course tell you that "people" are not only costly, but troublesome as hell – that it makes sense to do away with as many as possible. In fact, most would probably admit that whether or not there is any savings, they'd much rather deal with fewer employees than with more – and you can't really blame them for that.

Modern ship's captains would say the same thing. A crew of twenty men present less than half the headaches of a forty man crew. But an old time ship's captain had more helping hands with administrative chores. The ship's purser did most of the paperwork. But the purser is long gone. The radio officer was often a big help after the purser disappeared. But the radio officer is gone, too, on most ships. Most ships had three watch standing mates in addition to the chief mate, so the chief mate was able to help with administrative work too. Now the chief mate still has to help with administrative work, but it requires at least four hours of involuntary overtime a day.

This efficiency factor billed as progress, entailing the loss of millions of good jobs, is the major story in all our once thriving industries, not just the maritime industry.

But, after all is said and done, does it make any real economic sense for the nation and the national economy to cut so many people out of the economic loop? And in larger sense – is it good national business to sponsor the run away flag?

Since containerization has revolutionized the international shipping industry and eliminated hundreds of thousands of maritime jobs – and containerization was put on the map by an American company – one would think that company would be on of the survivors in the global economy. Actually, it did very well until globalization came on the scene. That company, Sealand Services, Inc., prospered without subsidies, and outlived all the other companies that collapsed or sold out foreign when the operating differential subsidies were withdrawn. It literally remade the maritime world with its innovations in marine transportation efficiency.

But where is Sealand today? It was bodily absorbed by Maersk Lines, a Danish company, just as Lykes Lines and American President Lines, and many others have been absorbed by other foreign corporations. Maersk is the world's largest shipping company, and it still operates several ex-Sealand ships under the American flag. But the Sealand name has simply disappeared from the high seas.

Our mis-representatives in Washington, of course, gauge the performance of the national economy strictly by GDP and Wall Street – and the lack of riots in the streets. Since any savings in labor costs tend to show up elsewhere in the economic mix, as CEO salaries and perks, corporate profits, stock dividends, etc., they don't look at the welfare of workers as an important economic factor. As far as they are concerned, globalization, along with downsizing and outsourcing of jobs, are working wonders for the economy.

"Penny wise and pound foolish" is the way Pridger sees these developments. A wholesale gutting of the "real" economy of the nation, in favor of multi-national corporate profits and a critically flawed world order that cannot be sustained for long – at least not if we don't want riots in the streets as the true costs begin to take their toll – as they most certainly will in the fullness of time.

But, in actuality, it should be remembered that globalism has very little to do with the American economy, and much to do with global control of all economic systems. At present, and for the near future, the American economy is seen as nothing more than the world's largest consumer market.

John Q. Pridger

CONTROL IS A MAJOR GOAL OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

How are people controlled? The old fashioned idea of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, largely depended on the self-control possessed by a righteous and self-governing populace.

As has become readily apparent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the old system no longer seems to function. Mass populations, sprawling and densely packed urban areas, and a wholesale loss of the cultural and religious constraints among the citizenry (the things that made self-government possible), have made the dreams of our founders obsolete.

Without really noticing the change, the American people have evolved into some of the most heavily regulated people in the world – and the process has been under way for a long time. We're regulated by such a huge volume of restrictive laws, regulations, zoning ordinances, etc., that it would boggle the mind of anybody who had been born and raised in the freedom of which we once so proudly sang.

We still imagine that we are the freest people in the world, and that the United States is the freest nation in the world. Perhaps we are in some ways. At least we can still speak our minds (to a limited degree), and write and publish our thoughts rather freely. But try functioning without a driver's license, or at least some sort of official identification card. Try to rationalize that the fruits of your labor (your income – even that gained through honest toil), actually belongs exclusively to you. If you are taxed 50% of your income, you are at least half slave – and probably a good deal more than that.

Naturally, being taxed at 50% percent of income is much more burdensome to the working man with a decent income, than to the multi-millionaire or billionaire, with a seven digit yearly income. But it is the multi-millionaire and billionaire most likely to gain the ear Congress and obtain tax relief.

Of course, all of this was true a long time before globalization struck home. So what does globalization have to do with it?

It was Meyer Rothschild, I believe, who said (to paraphrase), "Give me control of currency, and I care not who makes the laws."

It was recognized a long time ago that money and credit were the means European bankers used to control kings, governments, and national economies. This is what prompted Thomas Jefferson to assert that "Bankers are more dangerous to the Republic than standing armies."

During our Civil War it was recognized by some perceptive men of influence (including Abraham Lincoln), that European financiers, in alliance with the American eastern banking establishment, wished to exercise control over the United States government – and there was much discussion, and much written, about it. And they wished to control, among many other things, American labor.

They ended up with that control, of course – ironically as part of the package that brought us the "greenback" which Lincoln is alleged to have hoped would free us. As Ezra Pound put it, "The United States was sold to the Rothschilds in 1863." Exactly half a century later, the official establishment of the money power in America was complete. And, though the Federal Reserve, its chairman, and board of governors are Americans, the New World Order is founded very much on an international system of finance. That we still have dollars, pounds, euros, and yen as major currencies in no ways lessens their control – it merely makes for slightly more complicated bookkeeping.

As Thomas Jefferson warned, "If the American people ever allow the banks to control issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied."

The bankers were awarded control of issue of our currency by our trusty representatives, specifically to manage and control inflation and deflation "for the greater public good." And that's what the Federal Reserve has been doing ever since. 

Most of us aren't old enough to know that we now have a four cent dollar in terms of the dollar's purchasing power at the turn of the twentieth century. But even Pridger is old enough to have observed 90% of the dollar's purchasing power evaporate during his working life time.

And the corporations that have grown up around the banker money system have finally outgrown the continent of our fathers and have been unleashed upon an unwary world. As for awakening to reality, that hasn't happened yet. The reality is a great deal different than most people imagine.

The super rich don't have to worry too much. Discount one of their billions by 99% and they still at least have ten million, which would likely see him through hard times. A relatively poor man with only a hundred million dollars would at least still have a million in pocket change. But discount a wage earner's weekly take home pay by 50% and he'll likely loose his house and car.

Who usually gets blamed for inflation? Not the Federal Reserve. It manages the money supply as best it can. Congress never gets the blame – we all know how carefully it manages the government's budget. No billionaire or millionaire has ever been blamed for inflation, at least to Pridger's knowledge. No, it's the working man most likely to get the blame – especially if he is unionized, getting a decent wage, but demands a little more.

It's the working man's greed that causes inflation. If he gets his pay raise, it leads to a wage-price spiral – and that's how establishment economists like to define inflation and its primary cause.

Now it has been a good many years since we've heard a whole lot about wage-price spirals. That's mainly because the problem has largely been solved. Working men and women don't get pay raises much anymore. For over twenty years they have been more likely to get pay cuts or pink slips. Organized labor has been beaten down to so far that membership drives have become their main pastime – attempting to organize janitors, fast food chefs, Wal-Mart employees and public servants.

The industrial base has been downsized so far that well paid union industrial workers are too scarce to have any bearing on the overall economy. And unions have to be pretty careful about making wage or benefit demands these days, lest they force another plant flee to Mexico or China where labor is a lot more considerate.

The New World Order is finally bringing American labor under control. And henceforth American workers will be as much under control as Mexican and Chinese workers. A prosperous working class is considered undesirable, since the only way it can become prosperous is by cutting into corporate profits by taking too much pay home and getting too many paid holidays and fringe benefits, such as pensions and health care insurance.

The working man is under control only if he is not allowed security. He should not be able to save money and accumulate wealth. The ideal working man makes just what he needs to survive. His function is to show up at work every day and do what he is told.

Of course, there's a lot more to globalism than meets the eye. It has its altruistic side. Every good industrial job lost provides a job for somebody elsewhere – and there are many eager takers willing to work for just enough to maintain body and soul.  

Saturday, 3 February, 2007

LINES DRAWN IN THE SAND

By going on record with what is effectively an ultimatum, i.e., "We will not allow Iran to become a nuclear power!" we seemed to have boxed ourselves into a dangerous or embarrassing corner. Now, if Iran goes ahead and becomes a nuclear power, our national credibility will plummet from about zero to absolute zero.

Few self-respecting Americans (whether Scientologist or Moslem), want that any more than they'd like to see Iran armed with nuclear weapons. So, we're in very tight corner indeed. This being so, the prospects for some near-term facsimile of Armageddon still seems to be in the cards. Not many of us really want that either, but there are a few Evangelicals who can hardly wait for Armageddon, in hopes of being able to scratch and claw their way aboard the Rapture express.

As a self-respecting Christian Super-Power, the only honorable thing to do would be to nuke Iran – just to show that our orders are to be obeyed, and carry even more weight (or force), than anything written in the Bible or the Koran combined.

How this totally imbecilic devil's dance is going to play out is still up for grabs. At this point it doesn't appear that Iran is taking our orders too seriously. Hopefully the administration can be delayed in nuking Iran long enough to get a new administration installed. Maybe a new administration can rationalize the permissibility of a nuclear Iran in the same manner previous administrations rationalized a nuclear Israel, India, and Pakistan – all of which acquired nuclear weapons clandestinely against our wishes and the wishes of the larger international community.

In the case of Israel, we had plenty of leverage to stop the acquisition of nuclear weapons, but chose to ignore it instead. And, once Israel got the bomb, everybody in the neighborhood, naturally wanted one too. The American middle-class phenomena known as "keeping up with the Jones" is actually fairly universal.

Of course it would be much better if none of those nations had acquired nuclear arms. In fact, it would be nice if the nuclear genie could be put back into the bottle. But that's clearly impossible.

Since the nuclear genie cannot be put back into the bottle, it is also impossible to prevent other states from acquiring such weapons. This being so, nuclear weapons can serve as a deterrent to war when there is a near parity between potential adversaries, as existed between the United States and the U.S.S.R. (Now Russia), and now exists between India and Pakistan, and will exist between Israel and Iran (as a representation of the Near East Muslim World).

The United States will not be immediately threatened by a nuclear armed Iran, and won't be for a long, long time, if ever. Iran can gain nothing from either threatening the United States, or even allowing its nuclear arsenal to be used by terrorists who might strike in the United States. To do so would be nuclear suicide for the regime, and a lot of other things, in Iran.

Iran feels perfectly justified in gaining nuclear weapons as an Islamic counterbalance to a nuclear armed Israel. Even though the Iranian regime has had some harsh words for Israel, it also knows that a nuclear attack on Israel would also be nuclear suicide for the Iranian regime and people. In addition to Israel's own response, there would likely be a response from the United States too. But there is no reason to believe that the Iranian people are any more suicidal that we are.

So the only likely result of an nuclear armed Iran will be a heightened level of anxiety in Israel and the region in general, and little else.

If this assessment is wrong, and Iran literally tries to wipe Israel off the map, that's the time to respond to the problem – not before. If nuclear war is to be the destiny of mankind, then let us not be the ones to cast the first stone.

If anyone is to second guess the situation, and launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike, it should be Israel and not the United States. After all, it's Israel that is most threatened, and Israel doesn't operate under any "turn the other cheek" and "good will toward men" religious constraints. We don't either, of course, but (though the White House seems to be occupied by an Old Testament breed), we still have a goodly number of citizens who would prefer to adhere to Christian values. Even many American secularists, still think the Golden Rule ought to apply to foreign policy as well as personal relations.

For the United States to launch a preemptive war against Iran, whether conventional or nuclear, would be even less cool and forgivable than our preemptive invasion of Iraq. 

If the United States should launch a preemptive nuclear attack, we shall have permanently and irrevocably forfeited any and all lingering sympathy and respect among the nations and peoples of the world. We would be lucky to retain any allies at all, beyond Israel and maybe England, as the world once again girds its loins for the unspeakable possibilities of total war. And, if there is another total war, it will be very unlikely that Americans will be spared the inconveniences of mass hunger and privation, if not a small measure of nuclear devastation.

Imagine what would happen if Wal-Mart was forced to close down for a few weeks! And that would be just the tip of the ice-berg. Wall Street would likely belch and break wind in a most unbecoming manner if the China trade was suddenly curtailed for any length of time, or if oil tankers were forced to curtail deliveries. Imagine the plight of all those anxiously awaiting deliverance of the Rapture! 

To say the least, being the world's greatest and strongest nuclear superpower has some serious responsibilities. One of the biggest is to avoid war (aggressive war), and especially nuclear war – and certainly not be the one to start any such war. If the United States starts a nuclear war, or one that becomes nuclear, all who have for some time considered it an arrogant global super-rogue state will be amply vindicated.

On the other hand, if Iran starts a nuclear war against Israel, and we retaliate in defense of Israel, at least we won't be seen in quite as bad a light. It will be bad enough, of course, but not as bad as if the United States or Israel started it. In either such case, we would be viewed as the culprit by most of the world, since the United States and Israel have come to be viewed by most of the world as agents or proxies of one another.

All of this makes one wonder where we spent the "Peace Dividends" after winning the Cold War?

John Q. Pridger

WHERE ARE THE LUDDITES WHEN YOU NEED THEM?

In early nineteenth century England, when the industrial revolution was beginning  in earnest, a group of handicraftsmen who worked in the textile industry (led by a man named Ned Ludd), rioted and attempted to destroy the new machinery that was displacing them and threatening the livelihoods of a whole class of artisans and textile workers.

Of course the English mill owners and authorities knew how to deal with recalcitrant subjects in those days. Though the Luddites were careful to only destroy machines and not hurt anybody, they brought down the full wrath of early capitalism upon their heads. In 1812, the year following their first depredations, several Luddites were shot down on the orders of a textile mill owner (who was himself taken out as a consequence). Sever repressive measures were taken by the government and a mass trial was held the following year. Several Luddites were hanged, and the lucky ones were transported to the colonies.

So the word Luddite came into our language, meaning "One who is opposed to technological progress and change."

Naturally, to be considered a Luddite is not considered much of a progressive.

As the story goes, the English textile mills thrived after the introduction of labor saving machinery, and eventually more workers were employed than ever before. The moral of the story, of course, is that Luddism is bad and all technological progress and labor saving machines are good.

Labor unionists were sometimes accused of being Luddites when they objected to automation technologies that sent them and their jobs packing. Sometimes the unions were strong enough to resist some change, and the phenomena of "featherbedding" survived for some time in certain jobs – such as retaining a fireman in addition to an engineer on a diesel railroad locomotive.

Of course, soon high speed trains will race between destinations with no engineer, fireman, or train crew at all. Naturally, when this degree of progress takes place, we can rest assured that many new jobs have been created with which to make it all possible.

But! The fact is, if progress and technology in the realm of labor-saving machinery were allowed to be carried to it logical conclusion, about a tenth of humanity would be employed while the rest would be unemployable.

The perfect farm would cover a thousand square miles and be operated by one man with a computer and joy stick. The same for all factories.

Teachers still feel rather secure in their profession, but there's really no longer any compelling reason to have a flesh and blood teacher in the classroom. The technology to replace them has existed for a long time. Now that large screen flat panel TVs are available, perhaps the time is approaching when the expense of employing teachers in the nation's classrooms will finally be curtailed.

A large school or college could be administered and classes taught by computer, with perhaps one man or woman "principle" present in the control center to push the buttons. All administrative chores and academic score keeping could be electronically outsourced to India or Ireland.

The only personnel that might still be needed might be concerned with discipline and security. A large school that now employs perhaps two hundred teachers and maybe fifty administrative, maintenance, and other personnel, might only need one administrator, an electronics technicians, a couple of councilors and a psychologist, some building maintenance people, and a small squad of security police. Think of the savings!

Think of the savings if we were to apply the same level of technological progress to government itself! Today it's all technologically possible!

Only Luddites would object.

Under such progressive conditions, the educational system would churn out just as many scholars as it does today with its armies of teachers and administrators. The cream of the student crop would readily find gainful employment in the various professions, as technicians and administrators in every field, or computer programmers. Some of the rest would find work as data entry functionaries or in security and policing fields.

As always, of course, there will be entrepreneurs who will actually conjure up their own gainful employment – maybe even doing something useful.

The rest, which would probably comprise about 90% of the population, need only become entertainers, sports stars, poets, artists, philosophers, novelists, "TV real life" impersonators and service personnel.

Those who cannot find a job need only invent their own avocations – or more or less become knowledge workers without portfolio. This, of course, will be the single largest population group, and the only problem will be figuring out a rationale and means by which to pay them at least a living wage. But this should present no problem in the ultra-modern era of Voodoo Economics.

Those who do not fit in, and cause problems, can simply be warehoused in the prison system as is already done today.

Welcome once again to the "Brave New World."

John Q. Pridger

THERE OUGHT TO BE A BETTER WAY

Even under modern circumstances, and no matter how technologically advanced we become, there ought to be an economic and social "Golden Mean" – a mean in which social, economic, and ecological equilibrium can be maintained. This, of course, should include full employment of the working classes in productive, or at least useful and fulfilling, occupations.

Such a golden mean should be the predominate purpose and goal of government of the people, by the people, and for the people – so that those people might enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in peace and security. In fact, something to that effect has already been written somewhere with regard to the purpose of government.

Such a socioeconomic goal and system could be pursued without junking the obvious advantages of the capitalist system that has produced so many obviously beneficial wonders. The main requisite would be "planning for a sustainable, human friendly, future" – as E. F. Schumacher said in his Small is Beautiful, "Economics as if People Mattered."

In order to have effective planning, however, intelligent and insightful planners are required. And therein lies the great problem we face. Effective and enlightened representation in government has become very difficult to come by. And the national debate seldom, if ever, touches upon the real issues that ought to addressed, or even the purposes for which our government was formed. The machinery is all still there (plus an awful lot of excess baggage), but the brains are either totally missing or devoted to something else entirely.

In the absence of quality leadership qualified to forge national policy, most of our leaders depend almost exclusively on non-governmental think tanks to do their thinking and planning. Unfortunately, all of the predominate think tanks that help formulate nation policy are on the payroll of every imaginable financial and corporate organization that eschew equilibrium and balance. Though the present system wants stability of growth in corporate profits, this goal is not compatible with either equilibrium or sustainability. Predominate corporate profits depend on dis-equilibrium and shifting ground.

And speaking of dis-equilibrium, free international trade is attractive to commercial interests precisely because so many wide economic disparities exist – and it is in their interests that those disparities continue to exist.

Politicians pay attention to think tanks, a few "anointed individuals," and listen and respond to special interests lobbyists. Unfortunately, the American people as a whole are not represented by anybody.

Corporate business is now in the driver's seat when it come to the global economy, and they tend to divide humanity into two major classes – the producers "over there" and the consumers "over here."

We need planners who realize that producers and consumers ought to occupy the same country, and that all countries should have their own producers and consumers.

But if we were to be able to get some real representation, and they were able to get a planning committee together to come up with a model of the society we should have and the economic system required to nurture and sustain it, that would be wonderful.

But don't hold your breath – all of our leaders are busy working on Iraq and Afghanistan right now, and are thinking more about Israel, Iran, and Syria than of solving our own national problems (and, by extension, the world's). They don't have either the time nor inclination to plan the re-establishment of the land of the free and home of the brave "over here."

John Q. Pridger 

THE WONDERS OF FREE TRADE

A few weeks ago, president Bush visited the Caterpillar tractor factory (U.S.A. Division), and pronounced it one of our greatest companies and one of our great hopes for exporting American products to the world.

Well, Caterpillar is a great American manufacturing company, and one that still maintains a large American production plant. But it, like John Deere, International Harvester, and many others, they are actually importing more production from overseas than they are producing in the United States.

Pridger (in his incarnation as a merchant mariner), remembers his own surprise when, way back in 1985, his ship called at Yokohama where it loaded a cargo of nice, bright yellow, Caterpillar tractors and other machinery for import to the United States. It looked like we were loading American products in Japan for import to the United States – and we were!

They were "American Products Produced Abroad." And when American products are produced abroad, American workers have been cut out of one of the most fundamental and essential benefits of what the American economy is supposed to be all about – good jobs for Americans.

On the same voyage the ship loaded several fast transit rail cars in another Japanese port. The rail cars were destined for the Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority in Georgia.

Imagine all that heavy machinery being imported into the United State from the other side of the wide Pacific Ocean! And imagine that it can be done at a profit to everybody concerned! It's simply amazing. 

Often, the factories that produce these import products are subsidiaries of American corporations. The Caterpillar tractors certainly were. The Atlanta bound train cars had probably been built by a purely Japanese company.

Japan, at that time, was already a prosperous re-industrialized nation. Yet the companies that produced those Caterpillars and rail cars had to purchase and import almost all the raw materials needed in their construction. Much of it was probably imported from the United States. And they could still produce and sell those products cheaply enough to undersell any American competition in spite of the huge shipping costs!

Not only are we importing most of the nation's farm tractors and much of the heavy equipment used in construction in this country, but we now import even the huge container cranes that load and unload the cargo containers in our seaports. Most now come from China. This is truly amazing!

How can any of this make any economic sense at all? The short answer is that it does not make any economic sense at all. But the truth of the matter is much more complicated – and economic sense is made out of it by the application of trade and economic policy that distort the global economic landscape to the degree necessary to make it profitable for all parties concerned.

But the hidden costs are truly astronomical. And the hidden costs are not all monetary or economic. They go to very core of national security in that we are becoming dependent on foreign production for our most basic and essential economic machinery and productive infrastructure.

So while President Bush can whoop up the state of American industry and the robustness of the American economy, he's merely laying a heavy smoke screen over the real facts of the case. Those facts are revealed on the deficit side of the national economic ledger books.

John Q. Pridger

Friday, 2 February, 2007

OUR PRESIDENT'S WAR RECORD

Since President Bush is under such pressure over his Iraq War policy, Pridger would like to reiterated his admiration for President Bush's war record. He continues to prove that he's a Commander in Chief of courage and perseverance, if not vision. He seems to be just the sort of president we'd need in a real war to defend Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Too bad he had to go out and start a war to prove it, trashing truth,  justice, and the American way, as he did so. Too bad he started the war for the wrong reasons in the wrong place. And, as for time, the time for war is never right for the wrong reasons in the wrong place.

But starting the war has certainly made him a war president – and considering what a mistake it was to go to war in the first place, and how terribly disastrously the war is turning out, one cannot help but begrudgingly admire his determination and stick-to-itiveness – and maybe feel a little pity for a man who meant so well.

The Bush war legacy will undoubtedly be unique in the annals of American history, and he'll stand out as a one of a kind president – the first and only president to literally get everything wrong while doing a good job at conquering and totally destroying a once halfway viable nation.

There's little doubt that there are some hidden justifications for the war that remain closely guarded secrets. Perhaps we'll find out some day that we have the war to thank for our present prosperity and booming stock market. Other positive things can be attributed to the war as well, such as the refreshing surge in immigration from Iraq and Afghanistan.

And Pridger hasn't even mentioned that other theater of war, much less the overall War on Terror – the one that is supposed to go on forever. In fact, we have a whole domino game going over in the Middle East. We've knocked two over, and thrown them into violent chaos, and are looking at other opportunities.

Even if we manage to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan (and if we can stay out of Iran, Syria, and North Korea), we've still got the War on Terror to keep the economy perking. This is the kind of war that can be escalated or de-escalated at will, as the economy demands, no matter what the cost.

Funny that many people have been pointing out that one can't have war against a tactic. (Like having a war against guns or drugs when the actual problem is crime and criminals.) Of course, Pridger recognizes that the War on Terror isn't a war on a simple tactic at all. It's a war against terrorists – and the bottom line to that is that every man, woman, and child in the world is a potential terrorist, and every gun owning patriot a potential illegal combatant.

Speaking of the Bush presidential legacy, Cruel and Unusual, Bush/Cheney's New World Order, by Mark Crispin Miller, has a provocative title, as does his The Bush Dyslexicon. They sound like good reading. "...passionate expose of the right-wing threat to American democracy and freedom... we are living in a state that would appall the Founding Fathers... exposes the Bush Republicans' unprecedented lawlessness, their bullying religiosity, their reckless militarism, and their apocalyptic views of the economy and the planet." (from the Daedalus Book catalog ad).

President Bush may yet become the nation's most celebrated war president of all. He's the first one to start an open-ended global war without a definable enemy. Bush is the first president to to attack and occupy a non-belligerent nation, and go the extra mile to make his own nation into an international pariah. He's the the very first American president to actively manufacture enemies on a wholesale basis, while totally destroying the remnants of the nation's reputation as a champion of peace, truth, justice, and what was once called "the American Way" – and do it all with the expressed purpose of "preserving the American way of life."

We cannot but be reminded of enduring wisdom in Thomas Jefferson's passionately warning of the dangers of standing armies.

John Q. Pridger

THE PROBLEM WITH GLOBALISM

There are a lot of problems with globalism from Pridger's perspective. One of the biggest ones, of course, is the belief that all local economic problems (both real and imagined), can be, and should be, addressed on a global scale with transnational corporations in the driver's seat.

It is already quite apparent that colossal tasks can be successfully undertaken simply by giving such corporations a free hand in a free international marketplace. The process has become more or less automatic. Give businesses a free reign, and they will soon find a market solution for every problem.

This isn't all bad, of course. But production and markets should be kept as localized as possible, especially when it comes to food and most other consumer necessities. If American corporations were essentially held to a national market base, for both production and marketing (as they once largely were), local and national market solutions would be found for all of our economy and consumer requirements (as was once the largely case).

The globalization model that our nation and much of the rest of the world has signed up for is working! And that's why our several recent presidents, and most of our so-called representatives, are "so proud" of what they have done. So, if it's working, what's wrong with it?

There is a place, of course (as there always has been, and a big enough place it was), for international trade and multi-national corporations. But the primary role of American businesses should not be to take the tasks and rewards of production away from American labor and give them to others elsewhere while making all Americans dependent on others elsewhere for all of their primary needs. To do this is to set the stage for future disaster.

The idea is that a single globalized marketplace brings all of the world's raw material resources, farm lands, labor resources, industrial productive capacity, and consumer markets under one roof where each can be utilized in the most efficient and productive manner possible through corporate organizations.

This vast corporate machinery is already showing what it can do. With an increasingly seamless transportation systems the goods can be delivered to any part of the world from any other part of the world in a matter of days, if not hours.

But take a look at what is really happening. First, the ultimate goal is that every single morsel of nourishment, and every single consumer item, will eventually have to be purchased through corporate trade channels that bear no relationship to any specific locality.

At the same time, of course, this means that all local economies in the world, and capabilities of local self-reliance, are targeted for destruction. If the global corporate machinery ever breaks down for some reason, and transportation systems cease to work like a well oiled clock, this will leave almost everybody vulnerable to hunger and deprivation.

Even if all systems continue to work properly, the global economy is eating up irreplaceable natural resources at an alarming and accelerating rate while contributing to the conditions believed to be causing global warming. And things won't get any better, since the articulated goal is to make everybody in the world as conspicuously and wastefully consumptive as Americans.

With all production, including food production, in the hands of non-accountable corporate entities, science and rationalization are harnessed to make humans into guinea pigs. With larger corporate profits in view, as well as intellectual property rights, our food is becoming more and more the exclusive product of corporate monopolies.

Though nobody yet knows the long term effects of genetically altered and bio-engineers foods which few Americans realize they are already obliged to eat, we already know some of the long-term consequences of corporate sized, chemical based, agricultural can do for us. The rise in various cancers and other degenerative diseases since the assault on family sized farms (and traditional organic growing methods), first took place in the United States, is undoubtedly no mere coincidence.

Of course, our foods are not the only probable cause of these new illness epidemics. In addition to contaminated foods, our air is contaminated with a whole raft of chemical residues, almost all of which has been caused by rampant corporate industrialization.

The fact that we have allowed corporate industries to shift much or "our" production to places like Mexico and China has merely meant that those industries won't have to clean up their act for several more years – thereby insuring that we won't get a handle on air pollution or global warming as soon we might under local industrial systems.  

Globalization, which is a code word for the New World Order, is a type of industrial and agricultural collectivization that puts communism to shame. It combines collectivization with a kind of self-perpetuating capitalism that knows no rational limits. Rather than putting all economic planning and means of production in the hands of inefficient bungling government bureaucrats, it puts them in a few very strong hands of efficient corporate managers who are driven by the dual need for perpetual growth and perpetually growing profits.

Of course, the laws that govern both physics and global ecological systems say that such perpetual growth is an impossibility.

The conventional wisdom is that growing populations make this growth of corporate business and globalization necessary, but in the final analysis, it amounts to a doomsday a race to deplete the planet's natural resources, destroy global and regional ecosystems. At the same time, it serves to raise all expectations of the good life to levels that will not be possible to satisfy, but may well end in total calamity somewhere in mid-program.

There are many other problems with globalism besides the fact that it is a race to totally deflower the planet. Naturally, the vast majority of the people are destined to become good corporate citizens and employees (corporate subjects would be more accurate), and everybody is a consumer adding to global corporate bottom lines.

Transnational corporations are now becoming our de facto rulers, and the world is becoming a vast corporate plantation. But the global plantation now includes literally all facets of industrial production. Not only has is new plantation system industrialized, but it has gone high tech. There is no advantage to this for Americans in either the long or short term, and no advantage to anybody in the long term.

The only advantage to Americans is in terms of the present availability of cheap foreign labor which facilitates cheaper consumer prices. But the true cost of this dependence on cheap foreign labor and cheap consumer prices is incalculable.

Meanwhile the big corporate profit Bonanza in globalism is in the marked wage differential between poor producers in some areas and wealthier consumers in others. This wage differential will progressively narrow as poor producers demand higher wages and living standards, and relatively wealthy consumers increasingly have to compete on a more equitable basis – until they discover they are no longer relatively wealthy).

Since the wealthy consumers (we Americans), have not continued to be producers (which was what made us relatively wealthy in the first place), they will cease to have the means with which to maintain their standard of living. In this sense, the economic rationale for globalization, is destined to become self neutralizing. When this plays itself out, the profits of trade will no longer be available on the basis of wage differentials. The entire globalized trade structure will have to operate strictly on a value added, or commission, basis without a rational source for the monies.

As Benjamin Franklin observed, there can really be no profit in trade unless somebody is being cheated. Right now the poor workers supplying our consumer markets (from Latin America, Asia, etc.), are being cheated out of the wages and full range of benefits their production should provide. At the same time, American workers are being cheated out of the production jobs they need in order to maintain their own living standards.

And all of this has been done without anybody being given the facts up front, much less the opportunity to vote on the proposition by any sort of ballot.

We do vote for it, however, every time we patronize large corporate globe-straddling businesses, including chain stores and fast food restaurants. We do it – usually without so much as a second thought – because it feels good, prices are still pretty cheap, and many of us can't afford anything better.

Our vote, along with our ignorance and apathy, is all it takes – that and some pretty carefully laid plans on the part of several generations of "insiders." As a nation of mega-consumers we've given our vote without realizing that we are paying with not only the loss of our jobs, but perhaps the lose of our nation. We have voted for globalism without realizing that we are voting for a future wrought with almost unimaginable dangers.

Meanwhile, we are told that globalization is the best thing that's every happened to us since sliced white bread. 

John Q. Pridger

KNOWLEDGE WORKERS DON'T HAVE TO WORRY

As the steamroller of globalization was gathering its first few heads of steam back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Americans were told they didn't have to worry about job loss. We were to become the world's "knowledge workers" as our trusty leaders allowed globalized corporations to send those dirty old undesirable production jobs to our poorer brethren overseas.

American workers would have the honor of helping to uplift the poorer peoples of the world while at the same time cashing in on whole new arrays of high tech jobs and clean, easy, knowledge work available to those who had clerical computer skills. All that was required was a little extra job training.

Many people, especially in the 80s, were able to cash in. A whole new array of money-making business opportunities did present themselves. But those "many lucky people" were a small fraction of the working classes receiving pink slips. Most were already members of the entrepreneurial class. They were able to capitalize on the changes taking place as the new economy began to evolve.

Of course, most professionals in the medical, legal, and financial sectors of the new economy have done well too. And public sector workers (government officials, all levels of civil service, educators, and the military, etc.), all of whom live off of the tax payments or deficit spending of the government, have continued to do well too.

But the vast majority of disenfranchised industrial workers who had had good paying jobs found that the "new" jobs, no matter how nice and clean, paid about half as much as they had formerly earned. $20.00 an hour production workers, found that their new training usually qualified them for a $10.00 an hour job – usually without the health and retirement benefits they had once depended on.

Additionally, in competition for those same jobs, there have been millions of former welfare recipients newly retrained for the unfolding opportunities the new economy provides.

Those who are lucky enough, simply retired. The rest do the best they can under the circumstances of their downsized paychecks. All are thankful for the cheap imports now available in the consumer market place.

A large and growing sector of the working class has found that minimum wage work is the only great opportunity available in the new economy.

With the national economy still hemorrhaging production jobs, factories, and whole industries, whole classes of existing and formulating "knowledge worker" jobs (including clerical, administrative, accounting, billing, and computer related jobs), became subject to electronic outsourcing to low wage countries, foreclosing on the hopes of millions of aspiring, and often recently retrained, knowledge workers.

Appallingly, even government agencies have begun to utilize outsourcing jobs in order to "save the taxpayers" some money!

So, where are all the American knowledge workers now? – the ones that are still employed (usually self-employed), and making a good living? Oh, there are still plenty of them, but generally speaking, they are a pretty small and exclusive class.

This has always been the case. And the numbers of knowledge workers, service providers, and government employees, cannot rise above a certain number in any viable economy. And no such number of workers can sustain a consumer economy. It's simply impossible.

Only production workers (farmers, fishermen, factory workers in both large and small businesses, individual producers, etc.), producing tangible wealth, can sustain a viable economy.

Now that we have come to depend to such a large degree on foreign producers and outsourced labor, we have an economy that can no longer sustain itself.

"Well then," you may ask, "How is it that our economy is not only being sustained, but is obviously so robust? How is it that so many Americans are still living the good life?" The answer is fairly simple. Credit. Americans, and the nation itself, are literally in hock to the gills.

Now, if we could somehow elect enough brilliant "knowledge workers" to high public office, maybe they could figure out a way to get us out of the mess our mis-representatives have brought about over a period of half a century.

Not much danger of that, of course.

John Q. Pridger 

Thursday, 1 February, 2007

MY HOW SENSITIVE WE HAVE BECOME!

Pridger's old Pappy used to say, "Some people have become so good that they're good for nothing." Similarly, sometimes our sensitivities devolve into a serious lack of good sense. Just look how sensitive we've become! 

Senator Joseph Biden had no sooner officially entered the presidential race when he stepped right into the race mud pie by venturing to make some "racially insensitive remarks" in reference to fellow democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

Among the offending words were "articulate," "bright," "clean," and "nice-looking" – each of which has been construed by somebody to be either offensive or patronizingly condescending in context.

But the biggest uproar was caused by the fact that Senator Biden preceded those offensively patronizing adjectives with "...the first mainstream African-American who is...".

While Obama himself is probably big enough to let such instances of insensitivity pass gracefully, the remarks have caused one-time presidential hopeful, Jesse Jackson, to sit up and take offense – both personally, and on behalf of all African-Americans.

Jackson, of course, is plenty bright and articulate, and is perhaps the predominant national spokesman for Black sensitivities. In fact he's probably the nation's preeminent Black sensitivities sounding board – (perhaps even more than the NAACP itself), the ADL of the Black victim-hood establishment.

Not only does he consider that Biden's remarks were a put-down of all African-Americans, but a personal slap in his own face. Is Reverend Jackson not also clean and nice-looking?

We all know how articulate Jesse is, and to imply that he might not be articulate and bright, or clean and good looking, was an unforgivable personal affront. Moreover, as Jesse sees it, Biden's remarks implied that the whole extensive list of Black notables, past and present, were not bright or articulate, clean or nice-looking.

As articulate and sensitive as Reverend Jackson is, he's stepped in the mud a couple of times himself. For example, he once referred to a Jewish neighborhood in a quaintly colloquial way. No offense intended, of course, but offense was nonetheless taken.

Of course, anybody with a spoonful of brains knows exactly what Senator Biden meant by his remarks about Senator Obama. Simply put (the way Pridger sees it), Biden was saying that Obama has all the requisites to be the unblemished darling of anybody and everybody eager to see an African-American ascend to the presidency. And he was saying that Obama is the first African-American to run for president who doesn't have any burdensome "racialist" affiliations (Jesse Jackson), or crippling "conservative" political credentials (Allen Keyes).

One-time presidential hopeful Ross Perot stepped into the same sort of mine field by simply using the words "you people" when addressing a Black audience during his campaign. He was implying that his audience was comprised of some sort of "group apart" – like maybe a group of African-Americans. Wow! What insensitivity!

Perot was immediately nailed to the wall by the combined forces of the liberal and the Black victim-hood establishments. Had he used the same words before a mixed audience, nobody would have been offended.

"You people" is offensive to touchy, super-sensitive, people who engage in "group think." Ironically, "you guys" would have been much more socially acceptable – unless the audience happened to be a lady's political action committee.

This ridiculous degree of super-sensitivity is actually crippling the political processes in our nation. It means that every word of any high profile candidate for office must be carefully scrutinized and sanitized by a bevy of censors before a politician can open his mouth. This is usually done by a carefully selected public relations team highly schooled in political correctness.

Among other things, this insures that the public never really knows what a candidate might actually stand for, or what he might say if left to his own devices. And, of course, that means we seldom get what we think we are voting for.

John Q. Pridger