Sunday 31 March 2007
STOCK TIP REVEALS HOW TO "PLAY" THE
MARKET
The Stock Market has been a speculative game for
well over a century. In the early years it was the exclusive domain of
financiers, industrialists, institutional investors, and a relatively small
number of high-rolling individual investors. Now it's a game that anybody can
play like a fiddle for a price. It's become both a money making toy and a
den of thieves. You can make money if you play it right, and you can loose money
if you don't.
Hot stock tips now circulate on the Internet like
multi-level marketing chain letters (directed at "opportunity seekers"
mailing lists), used to circulate through the mails. But, since sending emails
are cheap, the new opportunities are much more democratic. "Subject:
CNNMoney: Bush hits Democrats on Iraq Deadline | Video Video." That's the
subject line of the latest hot stock market tip to hit Pridger's inbox. The
totally irrelevant subject is a trick, or "hook," to get you to take a
look at a moneymaking opportunity. The message reads:
Are you aware of the biggest Wave Sweeping the Telecom
industry right now? It's called VOIP and it's taking the
sector by Storm. We are bringing you an Amazing Play that
is Right in the Thick of the business.
This winner is Peopleline Telecom (PPTM). As with all Tech
plays it's about Catching that Rising Star on the Ground
floor and riding it Up.
PPTM is in just such a position. Trading at around 30
cents with Astounding news on the way, this is one play you
can't afford to miss! The Upcoming news and Promotion is
going to see this one at around $1.00 in no time!
Pridger hasn't investigated PPTM. It's probably a
legitimate stock and maybe even a legitimate company. Otherwise there would be
no point in sending out such an email to a large mailing list. As stock
"trading at 30 cents with Astounding news on the way" sounds pretty
attractive. Perhaps "this is one play you can't afford to miss!"
At $.30, a block of a 10,000 shares would only
cost $3,000.00. When (and if) it reaches the $1.00 target price, those 10,000
shares would be worth $10,000.00. The profit potential it $7,000.00 on a
$3,000.00 investment in a matter of days! The math is that simple.
Here's how it works. (1) Purchase, or otherwise
acquire or construct, a large email list. Even a random email list system will
do. (2) Pick a likely small startup "penny stock" company that is
being traded on the exchange. It should be in an attractive field,
such as the telecommunications industry. (3) Purchase as large a block of stock
as you can afford. (4) Start your email campaign. If you are in this with
several other people who will be coordinating with you, all the better. (5)
Watch the stock start going up as the gullible email recipients start buying.
Others will follow as the price starts up, kicking it up faster. (6) Sell just
before the target price is reached and take your profit. When you sell, the
stock the price will likely begin to collapse. (7) Start the process over with
another stock.
It's a wonderful system. The whole stock market
spikes and dives on rumors and comments by such luminaries as the Chairman of
the Federal Reserve. Individual stocks of small companies are more susceptible
to individual manipulation with or without the collusion of the company
itself. Actual collusion by the company would be a prosecutable crime, but
manipulations by outside investors "playing the market" seems to be acceptable
it's all part of the game.
As in the example above, the "market"
means nothing. A stock can be bid up or down by "investors" where or
not the company is good, bad, or indifferent. The company could be no more than
a shell and the same thing can happen. The larger market, which is a major gauge
of national prosperity and economic health, really bears no relationship to any
reality. It's a national or international casino game.
Gas prices reflect the same sort of
irrationality. Gas prices go up in response to rumors or minor events in the
Middle East and elsewhere when absolutely nothing has yet happened with regard
to the actual supply and demand situation. It has become a game the oil
companies play with consumers to grossly enhance their bottom lines.
John Q. Pridger
Tuesday March 20, 2007
THE RE-CONQUEST OF THE united STATES OF
AMERICA
The illegal alien problem in the United States is
much more serious than most Americans realize. Of course, the main reason it is much worse
is that the fundamental plan of globalization is not only about free trade but
open borders as well, where labor is free to cross borders as freely as trade
goods. In fact, the New World Order is all about erasing national borders and
the nation-state system itself. Illegal Mexicans are looked upon by the One
World planners as nothing more than free-roaming labor. Naturally, getting upset about Mexicans coming to the United States
(legally or otherwise), is
antithetical to the whole program of globalization.
All of this was planned a long time before
President Reagan first publicly announced the "new international economic
order" and President Bush, the 1st, announced the "New World Order." The
United States of America has effectively been gifted to the world as the first
step to accomplishing the ultimate goals of globalization. As the present
President Bush has said, America is not a place, it's an ideal. And as President
Reagan might have said, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"
Of course, Pridger hasn't read all the literature
available on the "great plan," but he's read enough to get more than
just the general drift of things intended to come. For those who are shy of
conspiracy literature, Pridger recommends reading such works as; Socialism and
International Economic Order, by Elisabeth L. Tamedly (1969, the Caxton
Printers, Ltd., Caldwell, Idaho); RIO, Reshaping the International Order,
A Report to the Club of Rome (1976, E.P. Dutton, New York); "North-South,
a Program for Survival, The Report of the Independent Commission on
International Development Issues und the Chairmanship of Willy Brant (1980, MIT
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts).
Those are only three of many semi-official
works produced by those who have helped define the rationale and
"socio-economic imperatives" behind the great New World Order plan.
They reveal the genesis and intents behind the United Nations and the
"later advent" of socio-economic globalism.
An autographed copy of One World, by
Wendell L. Willkie (1948, Simon and Schuster, New York), is another work that
happens to be in Pridger's library. Willkie, of course, was Franklin D. Roosevelt's
opponent in the 1940 presidential election. He had been against FDR's New
Deal program (first as a Democrat, then a Republican), and prior to World War
Two he had been a non-interventionist, against war with Germany. Later he
supported Roosevelt's programs which resulted in our entry into the war and the
war effort itself.
Willkie was not one of the major players in the
creation of the United Nations (he died in 1944). Significantly, however, he
referred to the WWII allies as the "United Nations" throughout his One
World book (as did FDR and Winston Churchill). The book was undoubtedly very influential in promoting the "One
World" idea, particularly from an industrialist's standpoint. This is
significant in that the real powers behind globalism have not been the
socialists, liberals, and academic Utopians who have been so strongly behind the
United Nations and the idea of a New World Order, as much as financial capital
and multinational corporate interests. These have been the real muscle, and
prime profit-making beneficiaries, of economic globalization.
The United States of America, as the linchpin and
spearhead of globalism, must lead, at least in part, by example. The opening example has been to
open our markets to all nature of foreign produced goods, both natural resources
and manufactured products. We began by opening our markets to the
re-industrializing post-war nations most significantly Japan, which proceeded
to totally absorb and supplant many of our emerging electronics industries, and capture a
huge share of our auto market.
The free trade idea was merely the big foot in the door
the camel's head under the flap of the tent. The ultimate program, at least from
America's standpoint, is totally open borders. "From
America's standpoint," because no other major industrial nation has given
up its markets to the degree we have. For example, American products have not significantly
penetrated the Japanese market and probably never will. And now we see Chinese
goods on just about every American consumer shelf. But China does not import
many American goods, other
than raw materials, money, and whole industries, which are going to China.
It's almost certain that the "Made in
America" label won't penetrate the Chinese
markets. But that isn't to say that
American capital isn't cashing in on China's big economic boom. Wall Street is
being looked after, but American labor has been totally cut out of the loop.
In fact, we
have been actively de-industrializing, and thus increasingly unable to produce
for others elsewhere even if we could be competitive. Not only can we not
compete because of the high cost of American labor, but because we've also
managed to get rid of the industries that produced the goods.
Cheap imported foreign oil, automobiles,
electronics, and other consumer goods have been an easy sell with American consumers.
The American public has literally been a pushover for such things, and
"stores" like Wal-Mart have become so popular that they have been
allowed to rearrange the national commercial landscape with hardly a peep of
protest from the public. Consumers love it, and "Super-Wal-Marts" are
now popping up around the nation like corn in a virgin field.
Freeing up immigration has been going on a bit more
stealthily than free trade usually accomplished as the result of various, apparently
unrelated, geopolitical events. Such "events" have conveniently contributed major surges of immigration, to soften us
up and make us a multi-cultural nation without any effort. Wars
and related instances of foreign imperialism have played the major role. The
Spanish American War opened the doors to Caribbean, Philippine, and other
immigration. This was even before the current metamorphosis of the New World
Order plan was solidified and adopted as a national policy goal in the
decades after World War Two.
Since the solidification of the of the
present genesis of the New World Order plan, we've had a major liberalization of
immigration policy. That change conveniently coincided with with Civil Rights
movement, and was even demanded by it. We no longer favored the immigration of
kindred peoples from Europe and began welcoming all comers from the Third World.
Since the communist takeover of Cuba, we've had massive
immigration from Cuba, which transformed southern Florida. And we've had large numbers
of immigrants from such poorly run nations such as Haiti. The tragic conclusion of the
equally tragic Vietnam War resulted in a massive and ongoing surge of immigration from Vietnam
and Asia. Every other small war has resulted in surges of immigrants by
displaced persons and political refugees. The Cold War caused considerable
political turbulence everywhere, including Latin America, which have resulted in large
numbers of South and Central American immigrants, not to mention the large
numbers of Russians and Eastern Europeans that began to immigrate to
America.
Perennial turbulence in Africa has resulted in a
steady stream of African immigrants. The ongoing strife in the Middle East has
caused large numbers of Arabs and others to immigrate to the United States.
India and the Asian subcontinent have provided
large numbers of immigrants. Indian doctors and other professionals have become
common throughout the nation. Many came to study in the United States under
various government subsidy programs, and they simply stayed because "we needed
them" (it ain't easy for an American to become a doctor), and this is where the money is. And it seems that the low-end
hotel-motel industry has mysteriously been ceded to Pakistanis and other Asians.
The advent and growth of the Welfare State,
combined with Civil Rights and immigration policy liberalization, conveniently provided a huge incentive for further immigration. Since the Civil
Rights era, whole generations of poor Americans found they didn't have to work
for a living. A large percentage of the American working under-class was
effectively put on paid vacation for more than a generation, and many mothers
with dependent children are effectively paid to stay home and mind their
children. Naturally, our welfare system also resulted in a huge growth in the
numbers of unmarried mothers with dependent children.
When huge numbers of poor Americans were no longer obliged to take
just "any job" to make a living, we began to import a whole new
laboring underclass, mostly from Mexico "our" most conveniently
situated Third World country.
While the welfare benefits were a great
draw that considerably lessened the risks of immigrating, the overwhelming
majority of the new immigrants from poor countries came to take the jobs poor
Americans no longer needed. As the natural result of this increased influx of
labor, wages have been bid downward in
several industries, making jobs in those areas less attractive to
"regular" Americans, and a further draw to immigrants.
Mexicans have been arriving to take those jobs
ever since, and the opportunities and incentives to immigrate are still
expanding. The numbers have come to be of major significance and don't
show any signs of abating. This massive immigration of a new laboring underclass
has been very effectively encouraged by our "world oriented" government. As part of our national
New World Order agenda, the national economy has been actively transformed into
a service economy which creates more and more low paying jobs that appeal to
immigrant labor but not most "traditional" Americans. At the same
time, good jobs, factories, and whole productive industries, have been exported
to Mexico, China, and elsewhere.
This immigration "problem", of course, was never
addressed, because it was really part of a greater agenda that has never been
revealed to the general public, and it has been
self-feeding.
Naturally, aside from being part of an active (though unspoken),
policy, politicians are deathly afraid of massive minority voting
blocks. When the black population was finally firmly enfranchised, it totally
changed the way our politicians viewed the voting public. The
Mexican/Hispanic block of the population has finally exceeded the black voting
block.
Though some of our politicians now say they are
concerned with illegal immigration (with estimates of as many as 12 million illegal Mexican
immigrants already here), they are much
more worried about the many times more millions of the friends, relatives, and
supporters of those illegal immigrants because these are already fully qualified citizen voters.
Politicians must be more concerned about the catering to minority voters than
with the shrinking, ineffective, unorganized, and divided majority because the minorities can easily make the difference between
their ability to attain and retain political office.
At the apex of our political system, with much
more power than the other supposedly "co-equal" branches of
"representative" government, are the presidential administrations. And the powers behind the
executive branch (who care not which party is in power, or what the president
may personally stand for), have been committed to a New World Order at least
since the Wilson administration.
Since World War Two, no president has managed
to buck the powers behind the throne to any significant degree. Kennedy
perhaps tried, and look what happened to him. Nixon probably tried, but was
forced out of office. Reagan might have tried, but he nonetheless went along with the program
set out for him. A brush with assassin's bullet (whether by a "lone
gunman" or otherwise), can be pretty persuasive.
Since the Reagan administration, all of our presidents have been unequivocally
committed to the New World Order. Bill Clinton (though a bona fide New World
Order man who pushed NAFTA through), went through a period of conflict
with some of the powers behind the scenes and had a brush with serious scandal
and impeachment but he finally saw the light (signaled by a vigorous bombing
campaign in Iraq), and came off wearing his impeachment experience as a badge of
honor, and was even re-elected!
Ironically, our national commitment to the
defense of Israel seems to trump even the New World Order to some degree.
Perhaps not, however. Though it seems that edifice of the New World Order has
been somewhat shaken by our present War on Terror and in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the aims of those wars besides insuring Israeli security are clearly to
bring recalcitrant "rogue" nations particularly the oil-rich ones
to heel to the NWO agenda. We can't
have the "free world" the corporate powers want if some of the nations insist on a serious degree
of independence.
The "free world" is about having a
world in which capital is unfettered by any notion of national independence or
sovereignty. And it is about a world where labor is also free to go wherever the
best jobs seem to be. Thus our Mexican immigrants (legal and otherwise), are
merely doing what they are expected to do.
The North American Union is very much
intended to facilitate open borders between the United States, Mexico, and
Canada, and the Pan American Union would do the same for the entire hemisphere.
These programs are being methodically pursued in semi-secrecy by the
administration and our un-elected shadow government. The Council on Foreign
Relations and the Trilateral Commission are two domestic organizations that
comprise the movers and shakers of the shadow government. There are several
others in the form of both liberal and conservative "think tank"
organizations.
Once the trilateralization of the world is
complete, with the European Union, American Union, and Asia-Pacific Union
solidified, the stage will be set for the placing the final cap-stone on a
single system of World government.
The growing issue over illegal immigration in the
United States is an acute embarrassment to the "free world" agenda. It
isn't that the powers behind globalization care in the least about labor
(Mexican, American, or otherwise)
they only care about capital and profit but the New World Order agenda could never have
been sold to liberals and academic social visionaries unless it was a program
"for the people" (not the American people, of course, but the
people of the world). To them, that's what it is supposed to be (One World), as in Hillary's It Takes a Village. The liberals and academic
visionaries (and the whole establishment of the left), have been a major
component and tool of the One Worlders since the very inception of the great
plan.
In fact, this has constituted a very convenient
cause for much of the confusion that has played into the hands of the powers
behind globalism. Most of the conservative right thought the New World Order was a
communist plot throughout most of its history, when it was really very much a
capitalist plot the whole while, with considerable accommodation for the whole
leftist political spectrum.
Ironically, as it is being instituted, the New
World Order comes much closer to Hitler's vision of a new order than the
communist-socialist model. It bears absolutely no resemblance to the individual
free enterprise system of the American Republic, or even the pre-1960s
"American capitalism" and is certainly far divorced from any lingering notion
of "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." What
we effectively have is a global form of National Socialism a system of world
fascism, with financial and industrial capital, rather than any government, in the driver's seat.
The Mexican illegal problem is beginning to
awaken and anger some Americans. Few enough recognize the larger agenda for which
mass immigration to the United States plays a significant role. But when the
majority peoples begin to wake up to the fact that a very
real invasion of the nation is taking place right in front of their eyes, and
the government is not doing anything about it, there are bound to be increasing
problems. This is happening in the case of Mexican immigration.
Significantly, the supporters of illegal immigration have become
bold enough to demonstrate in a very offensive and "in your face"
manner, laying their agenda right on the line for everybody to see for the first
time. The reconquista has been under way for quite some time, and it has
enough confidence to come out of the closet. This isn't in the New World Order
plan, of course, and in fact threatens the prospects of the American Union. Some
South American leaders are also becoming a little recalcitrant.
The push to subvert and destroy our nation has
been going on for a long, long time and so few seem to care that anything
like a united front against it has not only failed to materialize, but seems
totally impossible. The patriot movement that appeared to be forming up prior to
Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City bombing more or less sputtered out as
the federal government got tough and started killing and imprisoning people,
with the full apparent consent and endorsement of the overwhelming majority of
the population. The silent majority remains silent. Both patriots and
"conspiracy theorists" have continued to be portrayed as crazies by
the establishment media, which is fully in charge of (and are very good at),
molding national public opinion.
Since this has become a multi-cultural nation
with huge and powerful ethnic voting blocks, traditional nationalist patriots
can now easily be shouted down as xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic,
protectionist, isolationist, paranoid crazies, and a host of other bad things.
In other words, if a strong potential national leader ever appears, he is
certain to be shot down (literally or otherwise), on any one or combination of
those scores, long before he has a chance to ascend to national prominence.
The ability of the media to form public opinion
continues in spite of the fact that growing numbers of Americans (perhaps even a
small majority), no longer believe what the media tells them. Though they don't
believe it, they have lost hope and are without direction. We have no American
leadership to which to turn, and no way of getting any such leadership. This is
why dictators tend to rise like meteors when a certain point is reached in a
nation, just as Hitler rose in Germany.
Don't say it couldn't happen here. It can
just as 9/11 happened. President Bush isn't the man. His usefulness is just
about ended his intended mission apparently in chaotic disarray. Hitler had
plenty of help from a lot of unlikely sources when the time became ripe for him
in Europe, just as the Bolsheviks, enjoyed plenty of help when their time had
come.
The Oklahoma City bombing, which took the lives
of many innocent men, women, and children soured the public on
"patriots." Few have come to realize that there was much more behind
that incident than just Timothy McVeigh and a few deluded, overzealous,
patriots.
9/11, and the ongoing wars that have followed,
have refocused the nation on external threats and further empowered those intent
on destroying this nation obscuring the real threats, and where the real
fight for national security lies. It's almost as though Osama bin Laden and his
bunch were still on the CIA payroll.
There is much more to 9/11 than most people know.
There are many wild conspiracy theories that are gaining currency, and indeed
(mixed in with the wild stuff), there are many perplexing, unanswered questions. But what we can be fairly
certain of is that it didn't just happen as out of the blue because of a few
radical Muslim "liberty-haters" as the administration claims. Of that
we can be certain.
Some people are beginning to wake up to the
threats posed by illegal Mexican immigrants. The big pro-illegal demonstrations
actually woke up a few sleepers. Most importantly, some true, very vocal and
articulate, activists for the American cause have been awakened. They have
recognized that the immigrant invasion is much more than just a lot of Mexicans
coming to the United States to seek jobs. It is literally a foreign invasion
with a well articulated political goal the goal is literally the re-conquest
of the
American southwest, and more!
As mentioned, Pridger doesn't think this is part
of the script, but it will be used in one way or another to convince Americans
than a North American Union will be in our best security interests.
The administration in Washington, along with the
media, have naturally played all of this down. In fact, the administration is
still openly pushing for amnesty, a worker program, and the American Union! In
other words, the administration, and our Washington representatives in general
are, and have been for a long time, on the wrong team! But the negotiations for
such things as the American Union are largely being done secretively by
non-governmental organizations. Our legislative branch isn't even in the loop.
As in most other "free trade" agreements, they are merely expected to
put their stamp of approval on it as a "done deal" after the
agreements have been "finalized" by the executive branches of the respective nations
involved.
The North American Union is supposed to enhance
our security by pushing our "security perimeter" out to the extents of
North America. In other words, Mexico will become part of the security zone. Mexico is going to become part of our national security team. And, of
course, the Union would be economic too. That means the free flow of goods and
services across the boarder, including labor. You can't have a fence at the
border in that case it would make no sense whatsoever.
Meanwhile, some courageous Americans are not only
speaking up, but doing things. Private citizens have organized and are
patrolling our southern border much to the embarrassment and chagrin of the
powers that be in Washington and Mexico City. They have been able to do this
because a large and growing segment of the American population is in their
corner. Enough Americans are beginning to feel threatened that our democratic
processes are actually beginning to function again in a limited way in the
border areas. Even some politicians are beginning to grow backbones.
If enough of the American public ever get the
right message and figure out what is going on, a lot more politicians would grow
backbones, and we could get some real representation. The fact is, as
dysfunctional and perverted as our political system has become, our
representatives can only be as firm and dedicated to American freedom and
liberty as their constituents. If the people don't stand up and demand
representation, and do it in significant and vocal numbers, they won't get it.
Politicians tend to represent those who put them
in office and keep them there. The people may do the voting, but if they are
merely choosing between two agents of an alien agenda, they are merely putting a
democratic face on a subversive agenda disguised as the way to freedom,
prosperity and security.
If businesses, multi-national corporations, and
internationalist foundations, fund them, set the agenda, and make their election
unavoidable, those are the forces our elected officials will represent. If the
people who finally elect them by voting don't have any idea of what needs to be done, and
do not give those representatives some solid direction, they have assuredly
elected mis-representatives. And that's what most of our so-called
representatives are today mis-representatives, doing the bidding of the New
World Order power structure.
The North American Union, economically
integrating Mexico, the U.S., and Canada, is part of the New World Order agenda,
just as NAFTA was, and the WTO is, and the American Union will be, if the North
American Union is successfully instituted.
There is little wonder that the Bush
administration is dragging its feet on immigration reform and any attempt to
solve the illegal immigration problem. All such attempts are totally out of sync
with the real agenda that Bush and the New World Order insiders are actually
working toward. Total economic integration is their goal. And open borders. Not
just in the Americas, but globally.
Father Bush announced the New World Order and
George W., has gone the extra mile and admitted that "American is not a
place, but an ideal." That effectively means that the American people are
no longer in
possession of their own land. America belongs to the world, and the World is
supposedly going to become a mirror image of what people like the Bushes think
"American" (as the embodiment of the New World Order), should be.
The
ideal is a borderless world where everything runs on an assured profit basis
according to dictates of corporate planners. People shouldn't be artificially
divided into nationalities, races, or cultures but merely members of the same
corporate family, with the full benefits of secure corporate employment.
The New World Order is intended to turn the world
into a corporate civilization. And it is intended that the Global Village will
be a big company town that provides everything for everybody, with full
employment.
But there are troubles brewing on the ground.
American is the key to the whole program and some courageous Americans are
beginning to stand up and make themselves heard. Not in Congress, of course (at
least not very much yet), but on the streets of San Diego, California and
Tucson, Arizona.
There are signs that there is a gathering storm,
with indignant Americans actually getting out there on the front lines and
confronting the ongoing invasion from Mexico. They are confronting police at the
barricades, lecturing city councils, and stirring up trouble trouble that is
already here, but ignored and played down by both politicians and the press. It
could be the beginnings of a movement that will not only stop the re-conquest of
the American southwest, but re-take our nation from the forces that now command
the loyalty of most of our most powerful politicians.
The gathering storm on our southern border is
only once facet of our national malaise, but it is an exceedingly important one.
Consider this email Ross Dove and check out the
YouTube links:
>From the desk of Russ Dove ~ dove@adfasb.com
~ 520 591-4588
Founder, Americans Defending Freedom At Sovereign Borders
ADFASB/Russ Dove 3661 N Campbell Ave #383 Tucson, AZ 85719
Folks, I don't know how you feel about the social changes that are being forced around and upon us; the increase in lawlessness inside and outside the system and the increasing need to be armed in our own neighborhoods? I for one have had enough!
Now, if you are satisfied with the non-conformational Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) of the many MinuteMen projects (MMP) watch and report, but don't confrontjust report. Report to who; our own government, it is the one most responsible, by their inaction, for this problem and do nothing when we report an invasion crime. If you think that sending the MCDC $25.00 to put an American Flag on the little over one-mile of fence they have built, which anyone can dig under in less than 4 minutes, than please go to
https://secure.responseenterprises.com/mmflags/?a=762
and put an American Flag on the border. You have several other MMP groups to choose from; all seem to have "politically correct" passive SOP's. Don't get me wrong anything is better than nothing and the MMP's have increased the awareness of the American people; still 20,000 illegal aliens came across the border last night. 20,000 is a daily average, so that means that 13,800,000 illegal's have entered this Country since the first MMP muster in April of 2005. What changed? As for me, I'm having a real problem in understanding how a "politically correct" passive SOP is going to overcome the obstacles listed below. I have many problems with the, co-opted by a corrupt system, leadership of the MMP's that I may cover in a later email.
The Nation of Aztlan - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIW-BZ8oLrk
Aztlan Rising - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCCVUot-hBo
La Reconquista Manifesto - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VSDiiRJMcg
The Aztec Al-Qaeda - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc1XAQc8hS8
MEChA de Notre Dame - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fOqnt979TE
Aztlan is mytho-propaganda used to pump up the peons who make up the majority of illegal aliens from Mexico and South America in America today. Peon's are more willing to suffer if they have a cause. According to three retired Border Patrol Officers, with over 112 years service combined, it was agreed that as much as 80% of the illegal's from Mexico already in Country or crossing illegally had Aztlan leanings. Why not, this is what they are taught in Mexico's government operated primary schools, equivalent to a 6th grade education. The very same Aztlan mytho-propaganda is being taught right here in most of America's schools through MEChA. This plan has been advanced by at least the last four presidents of Mexico. Their plan is to dislocate us with poverty, drugs and crime; so as to re-take our land by colonization. And, for the last 29 years our last four American presidents have done everything to help and nothing real to stop them, on our dime.
At the rate I am watching their escalation we had better do something now while we still have standing, or we will be required to use deadly force to protect ourselves later. By vote or by violence is the motto used in
declaring their claim to ownership of American Soil. In 2004 American's in The Great State of Arizona, passed Proposition 200 which started the end of their vote fraud plans and although never properly enforced; far to many Americans are watching now for them to continue on with their plans to occupy US with out force; via the vote. If these people fully intend to follow through with their plan of action laid-out in their motto; their only option remaining is violenceby their own words, promises and threats of violence over the last 20 years. By the way Aztlan, MEChA, La Raza, LULAC, MALDEF and the whole host of anti-American invasion/overthrow-Freedom/occupation fronts are supported by the corporations and Our own government. I have a real big problem with the fact that part of the money my government takes from me and the money that the corporations take in profits from me; are being used to fund the destruction of Freedom in America today!
Smuggler War - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTfKqG4d_Cc
Pro-illegal Mentality - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVnefuNYEkQ
Border violence is increasing with wars between American Border Law enforcement and several factions of the Mexico infrastructure; drug lords and human traffickers. Small towns all across America are having their lawful government stolen out from under their apathy and fear by drug lords; creating a safe haven for the distribution of drugs, contraband and humans. Violence, crime and drug abuse is growing in the streets of EveryCityTown, uSA, exponentially to the growth of the illegal alien population.
Communists Declare War pt1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PyWjOFWkUw
Communists Declare War pt2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jhf89SG1kU
Without getting into a long story; I have spent most of my life watching the increase of socialism/communism as it advances through all of America's Institutions. I was taught of the dangers of communism and the values of a Constitutional Republic from a very young age and have kept a vigilant watch for those Russian's to attack US, as did most of America. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the government of Mexico was using pages out of the Communist Handbook to invade America and our government was helping them. This is what my translator had to say about the characters in this video-log, "I hope everyone gets to see/read what the commie revolutionaries are saying about mental borders and the Border Patrol. Also, the guy with the black hat had EZLN written on it. EZLN stands for Zapastita Army for National Liberation. They are a commie rebel army on the south part of Mexico. They are Che Guevara and Fidel Castro lovers!" Don't think it can't happen here; 140 years ago China was occupied by a God Fearing people living under a Republic form of government; we now know them as Communist Red China. It is happening here already!
Occupied America - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQTksbT7rPA
Christy SDPD Corruption pt1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXo38DGJ5Uc
Christy SDPD Corruption pt2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BUIPSITg3Q
Americans are being segregated by color, discriminated against and arrested based on racial profiling; on behalf of the Mexican government. The video highlighted in the first clip shot by Christie Czajkowski is what brought the wrath of the Mexican government and its occupying agents of the San Diego government down on her. That they, under color of law, stole her livelihood, all of the evidence she had against the corrupt system and her ability to continue to video-log their criminal activity is what gives Christie standing in the Federal Courts. How do I know that the Mexican government had something to do with this, you say. Christie was investigating the corrupt SDPD's connection to the Mexican drug lords and through her video-logging was exposing the corrupt occupation forces in the same manner in San Diego, Ca, that Roy Warden and I are doing here in Tucson, AZ. I know for a fact that the in-land-puppets-of-Mexico are directly responsible for the action against Roy and I. As San Diego is nearly completely occupied with a little over 10% English speaking only population remaining; there is no question who is responsible for the actions against Christie!
The "political correct" passive SOP may work on the border, to avoid conflict; it will not work in our cities! Now I'm not yet ready to advocate offensive violence or necessarily violence of any kindexcept in self-defense. The fact is, violence is upon us now; with 9,000 Americans killed last year alone and over 140,000 sex related crimes committed against our women and children in that same time period; all at the hands of illegal aliens. I am however advising that you quickly take a strong physically armed (Second Amendment) defensive position to stand against their increasing advances. I am advocating that you make full use of your Soapbox and every legal standing that can be brought before the local, county, state and/or federal Court systemif you don't you will be forced to use your Ammo Box later or surrender. I am also advocating that you take a very strong legal activist position; find a problem; focus on it and regularly complain to someone in your local government and make public your complaint and their response. Go in to your downtown area during lunch with a bullhorn, the bigger the better, and let your voice be loudly heard, while standing on your Soap Boxthis is proving to be very effective. As for the courts; Roy Warden has proven that a clear understanding of the law and the proper application of it works. That using legal action through the courts is a powerful legal weapon against this illegal invasion/occupation of American soil.
The fact is every time you bring a bag full of Truth into a room full of liars; you will have a room full of angry offended liars. The only way to avoid conflict is to surrender, go along to get along and hope that today by chance conflict does not find you and that if it does you can successful run/hide from it. Where would we be today if our Founding Father's and all who came before us who paid the ultimate price of Freedom had this passive non-confrontational attitude?
We Put Tucson On Notice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LqHtgk6Jbo
We Put Tucson On Notice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozqIL3ijtzw
We Take The Protest Downtown - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wayrzN7mNUY
These are some video-log's that show legal offensive activism. Just showing up with half-of-an-idea of what is going on makes the enemies' of Freedom in America uneasy. We must create lawful resistance to this invasion/occupation and the only way I know how to do this; is to stand armed in the public square, everywhere the invaders are and tell them NO! I am starting to believe that the enemies of America really don't have a working/workable plan to meet resistance, thus even a small amount of resistance has crippled them. A large show of resistance is all that we may need to show and put a stop to thismaybe not. I would rather do something now while we have a fighting chance than to wait until we have no chance at all. If we do not resist them we will lose for sureit is a choice now; later, not so much!
Three American's have standing too advance this border/invasion/occupation battle into the Federal Court System; we need your help! If we lose these legal actions that are already being processed in the court system; precedent will be set and the next court battle may not be winnable. We could all use continuing sponsorship; however, only Christie requires your assistance NOW! You can learn about Christie's situation at
A Case to Establish the Christie Czajkowski Defense Fund
http://adfasb.com/adfasb/christie.html.
By helping today; you will be empowering yourselves to a victory tomorrow. Do nothing and when this battle arrives at your door step, and it will, you won't have enough resources to fight it because the court's rulings (precedent) will have already been set against you; because we lost these early court cases. A little today or everything tomorrow; take a month off of the end of your retirement and invest it today for a Free Country to retire in--think about it. Pick some luxury you enjoy each month and sacrifice it, that while we still have standing, we may be victorious in these court battles. This is not a long time need; within two years the judgements awarded to us against the enemies of Freedom in America will be more than enough to cover our living costs. It is a choice; choose to HELP CHRISTIE TODAY and please send this message to everyone on your email list.
If you havn't already figured it out; we're not asking for help to make a living off of the problem, no, we are asking for help to live while we solve this problem! For 30 years a lot of people have made a lot of money living off of this problem; this too, I am very tired of. How about you?
One resource Christie and I are out of is system Hard Drive(HD) space video-logging the invasion/occupation/corruption uses a lot of HD space. I have over a TB of video and am down to maybe 50GB HD space remaining and Christie has enough to operate her computer remainingno room for new video-logs. If you have any 100GB or larger IDE hard drives laying around we could sure use them; new 500+ GB HD's would be real nice too! New Mini-DV tapes are in short supply also. Please send all hardware/supplies to me at the address at the top of this message.
Please send all checks or money orders to:
Christie Czajkowski/Defense Fund
1687 Jeremy Point Court
Chula Vista, CA
truthbrigade@hotmail.com
Or you can visit the Donation Page [PayPal] -
http://www.adfasb.com/#donate
Thank you for your time and for your consideration of this request,
s/Russ Dove
TiANews.com
ADFASB.com
YouTube.com/Sov777
Christie Czajkowski is one of those dedicated
activists who seem to be irrepressible. We have frequently seen her type on the
left on the wrong side of issues (on the anti-American side) but seldom
on the right, on the right side of such issues as Christie is.
Russ Dove is just as dedicated and just as much
on the right side of the issues at hand as Christie. And there are many others
heating up the debate over illegal immigration. With men like Russ on the front
lines, more and more Americans are bound to begin to wake up to what is
happening to our country, in spite of inevitable attempts by the media to blank
out their message and portray them as crazies.
We have come to a point where people like
Christie, who is a single mom, and Russ, who looks a lot more like a biker than
a politician, are the only ones with enough guts to stand up and make themselves
heard literally, with bull horns, confronting police and
illegal alien groups in the streets, and politicians in their chambers (and by
publishing their message and video footage where it will do the most good in
today's video based web community). They are evolving into about
the only leadership capable of commanding attention on some of the most
important issues facing the nation today. Most mainline politicians (even those who
would like to), are afraid to speak out and champion the national cause of the
majority, because of the power and threat of large ethnic voting blocks.
Behind their radical form of activism and outspokenness,
there is an abundance of solid reason and common sense. Russ is a particularly
gifted and articulate spokesman on a broad spectrum of political issues. He's a
true American patriot who believes in the nation our founders sought to create.
We need many more like him.
Russ, Christie, and their friends, have Pridger's
admiration and support, and maybe through the dedicated efforts of people like
them, a few politicians will begin to grow backbones of their own. At some point
they may begin the
process of stopping the demise of the American Republic and begin putting America back
together again.
That's a lot to hope for under such dire and
depressing conditions as we have in our nation today. But people who speak up
and make themselves heard have the power to energize large groups of followers,
and therein lies our only hope of gaining worthy leadership within our presently
very anemic representative system of government, wherein special interests with
alien or corporate agendas routinely trump the majority.
John Q. Pridger
Wednesday, 14 March, 2007
WOMEN'S WORK
Another of those jokes that circulate on the
Internet prompts Pridger to do a little pontification. Here's the joke:
A man was sick and tired of going to work every day while his wife stayed home. He wanted
her to see what he went through so he Prayed:
"Dear Lord: I go to work every day and put in 8 hours
while my wife merely stays at home. I want her to know what I go through, so please allow
her body to switch with mine for a day. Amen.
God, in his infinite wisdom, granted the man's wish.
The next morning, sure enough, the man awoke as a
woman. He arose, cooked breakfast for his mate, awakened the kids, set out their
school clothes, fed them breakfast, packed their lunches, drove them to school, came home and picked up the dry cleaning,
took it to the cleaners and stopped at the bank to make a deposit, went grocery shopping, then
drove home to put away the groceries, paid the bills and balanced the checkbook. He cleaned the cat's litter box and
bathed the dog. Then it was already 1 P.M. and he hurried to make the beds, do the laundry,
vacuum, dust, and sweep and mop the kitchen floor. Ran to the school to pick up
the kids and got into an argument with them on the way home. Set out milk and
cookies and got the kids organized to do their homework, then set up the ironing board and watched TV while he did the
ironing.
At 4:30 he began peeling potatoes and washing vegetables for salad,
breaded the pork chops and snapped fresh beans for supper. After supper, he
cleaned the kitchen, ran the dishwasher, folded laundry, bathed the kids, and put them to
bed.
At 9 P.M. he was exhausted and, though his daily
chores weren't finished, he went to bed where he was expected to make love,
which he managed to get through without complaint. The next morning, he awoke and immediately
knelt by the bed and said:
Lord, I don't know what I was thinking. I was so wrong to envy my wife's
being able to stay home all day. Please, oh please, let us trade back."
The Lord, in his infinite wisdom, replied: "My son, I feel you have
learned your lesson and I will be happy to change things back to the way they
were. You'll just have to wait nine months, though. You got pregnant last
night."
Voted Women's Favorite E-mail of the Year!
If you agree, send it to all your friends who would
enjoy this! And thank your wife, and then thank God for her! Amen?
The message is a positive one. For one thing,
there are apparently still enough "traditional households" in the nation for
an email of this nature to find a circulation. Some women have not abandoned the
home and the most challenging, complex, and important job of all that of
caring for a home, husband, and (most importantly), children.
In spite of concerted efforts and frequent
efforts obituaries, traditional
family and gender roles have not yet perished from the national landscape. At least not
completely. But it has become
increasingly difficult for some women to feel comfortable in their God-given
role. There are tremendous societal pressures to "denature" gender
roles.
Unfortunately many traditional housewives, of even happy marriages, labor under
the impression that their role somehow relegates them second class citizenship and
they are thus unable to rise to
their full potential. But, given the requisite of a happy marriage, the job of
being a housewife and "homemaker" is not only potentially the most
fulfilling of occupations, but arguably the nation's most important one.
Of course, this iteration may be discounted as
the mere opinion of a male chauvinist warthog. As a male, Pridger admittedly has a
great deal of capital invested in his own male ego and his presumed role in the
world. That role, of course, is rather complicated but it essentially boiled down to settling down to the job of marrying, having children,
protecting home, hearth, and providing for his family.
Young men, of course, tend to linger in a state
of immaturity, and are still usually somewhat empty headed when they emerge from
their secondary schooling. Even Pridger was like that. So they make the best (or at least most
appropriate), risk takers, dare devils, and soldiers. Most go through a period of adventure
seeking and the "sowing of wild oats." If they join the service,
they'll go
out, do what they are told by their superiors, and fight and die, if need be,
for the nation or any other thing that happens to be on the agenda. ("Theirs is not to wonder why, but merely do and
die.") It remains
for older, more experienced, and hopefully more educated, men to seriously
ponder the reasons why, lead the followers, and to defend both the culture and the Constitution.
Young women, generally mature faster than men.
Nature has decreed that they be prepared to assume their biological roles, and
society once assigned their cultural role. Though they may have the same urge to seek adventure and sow
some wild oats, there has traditionally been considerable social pressure on
them to be much more socially responsible earlier than their male counterparts.
Traditionally, they marry earlier
in life than men, and they usually marry
slightly older men of broader experience and (hopefully), superior learning
settled men capable of providing them with a secure home in which to rear their
children.
Men, naturally remain boys for an extended period
of their lives. Some remain boys until they die. But girls become mature women
early in time to carry out their most sacred and important roles. Generally, they soak up
early education much more readily than boys, so they will become competent to
nurture their children and begin their education as soon as they are receptive to learning.
Good wives and mothers, in the protective environment of a secure home, are the
key to producing quality, well adjusted, and properly prepared children who will
go on to serve the same roles in the following generation.
This is the natural order that has served mankind
well since long before the dawn of civilization. But things have been changing
breaking down.
Modernity, being what it
is, has tended to radically alter this model simply because we imagine (as a
society), that we have totally conquered nature and have risen above the former imperatives
of any "natural order" or God-given roles of the sexes.
Women now seek to be the equals of men, and do
the empty headed things that young men have always done. They want to be bread
winners. They want to go off to war. They want to lead. They want to abandon
their most important roles, and leave the children (if there are any), to be
mothered by men or the state itself. And they are doing it. The state itself is
conforming becoming the maternal state with nanny police powers.
Yet, we've run into innumerable problems with our
new social order problems that have become much more than just obvious as
they become more and more intractable. They
spread far beyond the problems we now see in families, or the disintegration
thereof. The entire nation is in trouble, spiritually, culturally, politically, and
economically. The nanny police state is extraordinarily expensive.
Gender roles are stamped upon children by both
nature and society, but these fundamental roles are things that we have attempted to repudiate in our march into our present brand
of modernity. We now have an increasing problem with gender confusion. Often
boys are not taught to be boys, and girls are not taught to be girls.
Still, however, boys tend to be boys and are likely
grow up (these days), wanting to be like Rambo or the Terminator rather than, say George
Washington, or Hopalong Cassidy. In light of the cultural war against maleness,
it is somewhat ironic that strong mean men (good or bad), are the modern role models
rather than strong, well mannered, and considerate, men. And increasing numbers
of women want to be Rambos too.
It had always been a man's world this since
the first man found he was physically able to overpower a woman and make her do
his bidding. But civilization, religion, and learning, gradually encroached on
barbaric ways of our forefathers and gave women special protections against male barbarians. In
time, they found themselves in an enviable position in societies like ours on a pedestal in many
cases, and certainly co-equal in many ways. In this country the harried and henpecked
husband became much more common that the wife abuser.
Wife beating was frowned upon in our society. But
now that women have finally been liberated, girl-friend beating is more common
than wife beating, and women drink and do drugs just like their fallen male
counterparts. And increasing numbers of women have become truck drivers,
longshoremen, and warriors.
This reminds Pridger of the lady longshoremen
gangs in Vietnam during that war. Smaller than men and weaker than men, they
could do the backbreaking work, and they had to work harder than men to do it. Of course, those Vietnamese women weren't there
because they particularly liked the work, or because of any feminist agitation for better paying jobs for women. They were
there because the fighting, bloodletting, and mayhem, was considered strictly men's
work, and the war's use of men resulted in a labor shortage on the waterfront.
Men no
longer have their traditional exclusive places of refuge the military being only one
significant example. There is no longer much remaining in the establishment
dedicated to reinforcing the idea of being a man and developing masculine
instincts, in spite of some of the male stereotypes that roll out of Hollywood.
The
divide between the sexes is maintained in the field of most professional sports,
however but even there upstanding, decorous,
sportsmanship has gone by the wayside in favor of juvenile displays of anger
when losing and childish exuberance, jumping up and down, and
self-congratulatory "power salutes" upon winning. This has become true in both men and
women's sports.
Everything else that men have the privilege of
attending these days is co-ed, whether he likes it or not, and men are required to suppress
their male instincts in order to avoid sexual harassment or "hate
charges." There is no longer such a thing as a "man's
army," or "this man's navy," as Pridger knew it. There are
no longer any male only military academies. Only women can have exclusive colleges if they want
them, but not men. Exclusively "men things" discriminate against women, thus they
are no longer allowed.
In short, society is being transformed into one
where there is no longer supposed to be any reason for men to take pride in being a men. Though
few men have ever had a desire to wear dresses or skirts, women wear pants or
dresses at their pleasure. There's nothing men can do that women cannot also do and more and more
women are insisting on doing them. Of course, many women can do them just as well or
better than men. But if they can't, men are expected to make all necessary
allowances, overlook their deficiencies, and certainly not reveal any sexual
attraction to them in the co-ed workplace or military.
Women, on the other hand, can not only take
abundant pride in being women (in whatever role they chose to take on), but
increasingly take pride in being able to usurp all the former natural
prerogatives of men including crashing men's exclusive "private"
clubs. Men no longer have any special prerogatives and are socially being neutered while women are
increasingly being empowered.
This, of course, is a natural result of "democracy." Our founders chose a constitutional republic as our federal form of
government because it meshed with the natural order of things in light of our
civilization and the then current
society. The federal and state governments were not intended to be pure
democracies, but representative republics. Democracy is something that can only work at local levels, where
state and federal representatives (who are supposed to be chosen by the people), are
elected.
Most people in this "democracy" would
be surprised to know that nobody has a specific constitutional "right to
vote" at all. The federal Constitution is as absolutely silent on the
matter as it is on the right to an abortion. Amendments dictate that the
"right to vote shall not be denied" on the basis of race, sex, or
previous state of servitude, but the actual right to vote is not thereby
granted. That is a state prerogative. Significantly, however, the inalienable
God-given right to life, was proclaimed in the second paragraph of
the Declaration of Independence, along with the right to "liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness."
The peoples' only directly elected representatives
were their locale elected officials, state representatives, and federal congressmen. The senatorial branch
of the House of Representatives was originally intended to be composed of
representatives of the states governments themselves, elected by state
legislators. The idea of a full and direct democracy at the federal level didn't
come into force until 1913, with the adoption of the 17th Amendment to the
Constitution, which provided for direct popular election of senators by the
people.
This, of course, was merely a further
centralization of federal government power in the guise of producing a more
complete federal democracy. As for voting for president, that still remains a
state right, vested in the electoral college system. The popular vote for
president, as shown in the election of George W. Bush, is little more than a
ruse democratic shadow boxing. In this sense, we retain a federal republic
of republican states.
With universal suffrage (including irresponsible youth, the dim-witted,
the ill-educated, the completely ignorant, and illiterate), we have developed the worst kind of
pseudo-democracy. Political candidates slated for election are actually selected
and financed by business interests or other well-healed men of influence, whose
hands are seldom shown. And, of course, the great body of the voters themselves are
so easily manipulated by the mass media that the very idea of a national
democracy is nothing but a joke.
And, as H. L. Mencken observed, "Wherever
universal suffrage, or some close approach to it, is the primary axiom of
government, the thing know as 'freak legislation' is a constant evil." This
statement has been proven out over the decades. Women didn't even have the vote when the
18th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1919, yet Prohibition was
nonetheless an instance of freak legislation demanded by women who were also
demanding the voting franchise. And when women actually did get the vote a year
later (the 19th Amendment), unusual things were bound to start happening in the fullness
of time.
Women, it must be remembered, comprise a natural
majority of the population, and thus the electorate. For this reason, there will
never again be a Congress able to stand up to the women, or any women's lobby. And while women are very
happy to gain the same, or more, political power as men (even if it is mostly
smoke), they are also very eager to preserve, expand, and vigorously enforce, all the special protections our society has provided for women.
Naturally, women would wish to curtail all the powers men had traditionally exercised
over women, but they will never relinquish the natural powers women have always
had over men. Of course, with women thus politically empowered, still enjoying
special considerations (with all elected representatives obviously beholden to
them), women have become, as Orwell's pigs in Animal Farm, a little more equal
than others.
Fortunately, in spite of all this, most women are still
women, and take
pride in their appropriate roles, whether in the home or at work. They tend to
share the values and political views with their parents or husbands. (But this too,
is changing, of course.) The real
political power (or abuse thereof), coming from their voting franchise (as is the case with any advocacy group), emanate from
"their" activists. Most minority activists, however, tend to be the most radical and atypical of the
class they purport to represent. They seldom stand for what the majority of
their supposed constituents themselves stand for. Thus, the "women's
agenda" is more likely to be that of radical feminists than the
majority of women.
In spite of the fact that our democracy is
somewhat of a travesty, voters do have considerable power, and representatives
(who are popularly elected), must have all due respect for it. But since policy
agendas always emanate from either entrenched power or "activists"
with narrow agendas, only those agendas get voted on by the supposed
representatives of the people. Congressmen and women may respond to the squeakiest wheels
among their constituents, but that's about as close as we actually get to
representative democracy.
As the
German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, writing on the subject of "democracy" said (to paraphrase), in a democracy men become more
like women, and women become more like men. Gender confusion becomes generalized
social confusion and spiritual confusion. The rising political
"power" of homosexuals, and the peculiar advent (and even acceptance),
of such travesties as same sex marriage, is ample evidence of this. Laws
favoring same sex marriage, or even "unions," cannot but come under
the general category of freak legislation.
Homosexuals have a natural ally in women. Effeminate
men, of course, often want to be women, and usually have their sympathy. And
assertive and masculine women, while wanting to be men in most every way,
are the primary power behind the feminist movement, and new laws designed to
"liberate" all women. They want to put man into his place, and his
place is becoming less clear every day.
We have had to learn that men make just as good
of mothers as women. So we also have stay at home "Mr. Moms," with the
mother being the family breadwinner. And, of course (we're learning?), that same
sex couples make just as good parents, and can provide just as good a home life,
as heterosexual couples.
Equality of the sexes, as we have come to know
it, has had a tremendous, but widely ignored, impact on the national economy in
addition to its devastating overall impact on our national morals. We try to
ignore these things, because we have come to view equality of the sexes as
fundamental social justice. But the moral fabric of society is demonstrably
collapsing, at least in part to this cause. And, though it cannot be blamed solely on women voting habits or
women entering the
workforce, our economy (both national and global), has become a house of
cards built on shifting sand.
As for morals, it isn't that women are any less
moral than men. In fact, it seems fairly obvious that even liberated women tend
to be more moral than men. Men still have a near monopoly on organized crime,
white collar crime, and crimes of a violent nature. Murder, rape, and burglary
are almost exclusively male activities. Literally all mass murderers have been
men.
The inconvenient truth, however, is that women
simply cannot be the equals of men if their natural God-given role is to be
fulfilled. No woman can be considered equal to a man if she can be forced to
carry a pregnancy to term. To remedy this, feminine political pressure has
resulted in Roe vs. Wade, and legal, easily obtained, abortions. Since this
landmark Supreme Court ruling, a literal mass genocide has been underway in this
country, and women are the primary perpetrators.
Women are no longer morally bound by the
necessity of giving birth when a child is conceived, and they are no longer
bound to the household or the nurturing and training of children. That would be
discriminatory and crippling.
Now women enjoy "freedom of choice."
They can choose to be Christian women with a reverence for life, in and out of
the womb, or they can choose to be the killers of their children in order to
compete with men in the marketplace. "Why not?" they say, "they're the bosses of their own
bodies aren't they?" They've got a point there, and any little life within them is little more than
so much bodily waste, to be
discarded at will.
How can they be faulted? The highest court of the land says its okay. No unborn child
has a "Right to Life" according to the men and women on the highest
court in the land. In today's way of thinking, it's "right to life"
only comes in the event that he or she manages to make it to certifiable birth
and not a moment before. There is little wonder that it has become a nation
political imperative to squash the idea of the United States being a Christian
nation.
If abortion can be termed a form of infanticide
(which it most definitely is), then women have been guilty of millions of more
murders than men. Infanticide has become a woman's right, and such murders are
un-prosecutable. For women, they simply aren't crimes in the eyes of the
increasingly all-powerful state. They are merely a
necessary convenience that permits women equal to men.
If men cannot be impregnated and forced to bear
nine months of pregnancy and the pains of bearing a child, followed by a few years of nurturing the young, why
should women be forced into such things? That is the reasoning, and the Supreme
Court has thus ruled that infanticide of the unborn is not punishable. It has
become a simple means of birth control, actively encouraged forcibly in some countries.
Naturally, to kill their unborn children,
requires a total repudiation of Christian religious moral precepts. But
thousands, if not millions, of professing Christian women troop off to the
abortion clinic whenever an unwanted pregnancy occurs. For their own convenience
they allowed the Supreme Court to determine what is and is not moral. So they
can have the equality they have come to see as their right. Women, in their
quest for equality can now be just as promiscuous as drunken soldiers and
sailors in fact they can now also be soldiers and
sailors.
Women, once spared the horrors of having to
participate in the gory spectacle of war, insist on doing their rightful share
of the bloodletting. They want to be warriors, and want to do their duty in
defending the nation against all enemies considering this a higher calling
than staying home and nurturing children. If women are still a little weak in
hand-to-hand combat, at least they can shoot rifles, launch missiles, and drop
bombs on enemy peoples which almost always results in the killing of
innocent men, women, and children.
Taking part in the killing of innocent men,
women, and children has never been a great ambition for most women. But today,
such things can be done by literally anybody. No remorse is required in this
kind of killing. It's easy and there is an excitement involved that used to be
the sole prerogative of men. So why not women? If
they are to be equal, they've got to share in the carnage of war. It becomes
their duty. It's a moral
obligation that exceeds that of childbearing and nurturing. Why should they be
exempt from the glory business of war? And the guilt? (If there is any.) The death, and the debilitating and
crippling wounds?
There are
increasing numbers of women who want a part of it all of it. Being nurses
and pencil pushers behind the lines or homemakers and mothers at home is
no longer good enough for many women.
They want to draw blood in more exciting environments than in hospital wards and
field hospitals.
They are now marching off to war
alongside their male counterparts. The military has come to a point where it
couldn't function without the ladies regardless of all the additional
troubles and expense this has inevitably caused (after all, most women are still
women, and most men are still men even in the military).
Today we see the heartrending specter of young
mothers leaving their husbands and small children to go off to fight and die in foreign
battlefields. It's now just as natural for men to be left at home, widowers to mother
and raise small
children. Pridger finds this totally both bizarre and
gut-wrenching. But we are supposed to struggle with our native gender
consciousness, and consider this to be the new normal order of things.
Aside from all this, women entering the workforce in large numbers,
and taking many jobs that once were considered part of a "man's world"
have had a much great impact on economic development that most imagine.
Technology and automation were already taking good jobs away from men. Now women
are moving in to take even more jobs away from them.
Women, of course, want equal pay for equal work,
which is only fair. But what really happens is that when more people enter the
job market, wages are bid downward. New hires usually get lower wages, of
course. With more women entering the workforce, employers intend to bring men's
wages down to those of new hires, many of which are now women.
Where once a thousand families required only five
hundred good breadwinning jobs, now a thousand jobs are required, if not more. This, in terms
of economics, is a much bigger deal than at first meets the eye. All of a
sudden, at a time when the population is mushrooming, we need twice as many jobs
in relation to the population. As mentioned
above, wages (at least in terms of purchasing power), were bound to be reduced as women flooded the workplace.
And this began to happen at a time when factory jobs real wealth producing
jobs were destined to begin disappearing, first through automation and then
through "free trade."
The natural result is that more and more
frequently we find both parents
must now work in order to make ends meet. Long before women received the voting
franchise, perceptive individuals foresaw all that has been happening.
Nietzsche, among others, pointed out
that should women invade the labor marketplace, the inevitable result would be
that soon it would require two jobs, rather than one, to support a family. We
find this to be the case today in many, if not most, remaining
"traditional" families.
This transformation, from the single breadwinner
middle class to a two breadwinner middle class, has occurred in Pridger's
working lifetime. Now that our trusty leaders are leading us into a post industrialized
economy, low paying jobs, economy-wide, are becoming the pattern of the future.
This is totally reasonable. A post-industrial economy produces
much less tangible wealth and cannot afford to pay labor high wages. So now both
parents must work and somebody else has to look after the children, while others
elsewhere make all the things required to make life bearable at home.
Not only does the dual breadwinner family require
two jobs, but two cars to get both workers to their separate workplaces. This
has required many more workers to make cars (though mostly elsewhere), and has
also nearly doubled the pollution of auto-exhaust, and greatly increased our
dependence on foreign oil.
Just as common as two breadwinner families, are single mother
households. Since women have been empowered, many men have felt absolved of their
natural responsibilities, and can continue to be boys. Often the boys try to
gain wealth without a real job, and end up in the penal system. Children grow up without
fathers, and usually without discipline, direction, or positive male role
models. And seldom have single mothers who choose this path for their children
become prepared to give their children the sort of early education they need to become
receptive to formal education or productive citizens.
Single mothers either require government support,
and/or need to find work themselves. Both single and married working mothers
leave us with a big and growing
problem how to care for young children with working parents unable to care
for them?
The only "logical" answer is a massive
pre-school "child-care" industry, where once the "natural
order" automatically took care of that problem. In fact, it wasn't a
problem at all when families were whole and only one breadwinner sufficient.
This new problem and remedy, of course, subjects children to government indoctrination through
professional child-care practically from the cradle onward, making sure they grow up with the prescribed degree of social
sensitivity without sex roles or traditional family values being impressed on them.
Mothers used to be our child care providers. And
mothers were about the most important person in the world for most of us who had
the privilege of growing up in traditional family environments. We admired and
often feared old dad, but almost all of use admired and loved our mothers. What
would we have done without them? We're finding out now in the lives of the
younger "degeneration" (as Pridger's old Pappy used to call it).
John Q. Pridger
Sunday, 4 March, 2007
WHAT KIND OF A PRESIDENT WOULD AL GORE MAKE?
There is increasing speculation that Al Gore
could slide into the Democratic presidential lineup some time before the
election.
Pridger, it might be noted, has descended from a
long, unbroken, line of Democrats that goes back at least to the Civil War when
his ancestors (at least those Pridger is aware of), were known as "peace
Democrats" or copperheads. But the chain of Democratic party affiliation
was broken when Pridger (a child of the rebellious 50s), became the
first totally apolitical spawn of the family.
Though Pridger got some interesting lessons in
politics in the early 60s, but didn't actually begin to become very politically aware
until the early 70s, as both the political and social landscape had already
undergone radical change. Neither major party looked good to him when he began his
awakening. Like many youth with the challenges of adulthood and responsibilities
staring him in the face, he naturally tended to be a bit liberal. Then, when he
finally reconciled himself to working for a living, he tended more toward being
a conservative first of a libertarian bent, then a
nationalist-constitutionalist persuasion. Neither party seemed to be getting
things right, but the Republican party seemed much more right than the Democrats
(before the Republicans gained power). Reagan gave us some hope after the Carter
administration, and momentarily enhanced the image of the Republican party in the
1980s. But
that turned out to be a false hope, so Pridger has continued to have absolutely
no party loyalties.
Both parties have consistently beaten up on the
Constitution the Democrats being the left hand of big government and the
Republicans the right hand of big government, in a good cop, bad cop, charade and both are
now obviously joined
at the hip as internationalist New World Order parties. Both parties have been
instrumental in progressively selling the nation down the river. Third parties have been the only hope for any
meaningful change, and precious little hope at that. The president is going to
be either a Democrat or a Republican, and that's that.
Still, Pridger had always considered the
Republicans the lesser of two evils at least until the first Bush
administration. This mainly because the Democrats tend to consistently fall on
the wrong side of the divide in the cultural wars and Republicans at least
somewhat consistently continued to give some lip
service to some of the values Pridger holds dear. The present Bush
administration, however, has just about wrecked any hope that the Republicans
have a Constitutional, or truly Christian, bone left in their body politic.
Clinton was Pridger's idea of the worst possible
president imaginable, and held that title until the eleventh of September, 2001,
when Bush II, saw his opportunity to assume the title.
This being so, Democrats may have apparently become
the lesser of two evils, in spite of any and all empty rhetoric on both sides.
So maybe we have to look to a Democratic victory this time around, provided
Hillary doesn't end up being the anointed one.
Although Pridger has always liked something about
Al Gore's personality, his long association with the Democratic party and his previous loyalty to Bill Clinton have been sufficient to prevent a Pridger endorsement
for a Gore presidential administration. Gore shot himself in the foot badly, in Pridger's opinion, when he stood up beside
President Clinton (after Clinton had been acquitted of impeachment proceedings),
and said he thought Clinton would go down in history as one of the nation's
greatest presidents.
In Pridger's book, that remark was about as close to
political suicide as a presidential aspirant could get. Needless to say, Pridger
isn't a Clinton fan (Bill or Hillary). And Pridger harbors about as
much continuing distrust for the Democrats as he's gained for the
Republicans, despite growing evidence of populist sentiments in the Democrat
party.
Barack Obama is the nice guy Democratic hopeful,
but he seems to lack any real vision for meaningful change. He may be outspokenly
against the war in Iraq (which is significant in itself), and otherwise relatively flawless, but he doesn't seem
to stand for very much besides his own apparent common decency. Of course, he
may merely be wise enough to avoid tipping his hand before getting nominated or
elected. If he is really a good man for the job, it would kill his
chances to reveal his agenda. But if it turns out that he become the
"anointed one" for the job, he'll merely turn out to be another New
World Order yes man.
How are we to judge? Unfortunately, we can't, and
that's the wonder of democracy in America. Gore is a little different. He has a
strongly articulated mission in the world. He stands for something a cause
that he really believes in.
Pridger has always had a great deal of respect
for Gore's concern for the global environment. At least Al Gore stands for
something and stands firm
and it is something of importance to everyone. And a firm stand on anything
has become a very unusual attribute in presidential candidates. So, if
we can ignore or forgive Gore's former loyalty to Bill Clinton (after all Clinton was his
boss then), maybe he's worth a second look. Nobody else in either the major Democratic
or Republican lineup seems to stand for very much.
Having recently viewed Gore's
documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Pridger took Gore's 1992 book, "Earth
in the Balance, Ecology and the Human Spirit" down off the shelf
to read a little more thoroughly than he had before.
The book sheds considerable light on Gore the
man, and what he believes in and thinks of aside from strictly environmental
concerns. Among other things, Pridger found some rare and valuable insights in
Chapter 10, "Eco-nomics: Truth or Consequences" worth quoting.
He points out some inconvenient truths that Charles Walters of Acres
U.S.A. has been attempting to shed light on for several decades.
Walters points out that there is
only one free source of power on the earth, and that happens to be the sun
itself. The earth itself is a mere captive satellite of the sun, and thus part of its
own greater being. The sun is the source of everything that we depend on for
life. Everything that we use has had input from the sun
literally every resource that we use was, or is, created compliments of the sun,
from the
hydrocarbons we extract to the crops that feed us, are the result of past and
present photosynthesis, a primary, ongoing, and sustainable, creative life process.
Both Walters and Gore point out that our system
of economics is fundamentally flawed because in the calculations from which we
derive such empirical data as gross national product (GDP), we fail to account
for the expenditures of natural resources, many of which are irreplaceable in
any number of human lifetimes. Thus all of our economic measuring sticks are seriously
deficient when it comes to measuring economic reality. This means our capitalist
system is running on many false and deceptive assumptions. Gores says:
"Free market capitalist economics is
arguably the most powerful tool ever used by civilization...
"...But capitalism's recent triumph over communism
should lead those of us who believe in it to do more than merely indulge in
self-congratulation. We should instead recognize that the victory of the West
precisely because it means the rest of the world is now more likely to adopt
our system imposes upon us a new and even deeper obligation to address the
shortcomings of capitalist economics as it is now practiced.
"The hard truth is that our economic system is
partially blind. It 'sees' some things and not others. It carefully measures and
keeps track of the value of those things most important to buyers and sellers...
and indeed, money itself. But its intricate calculations often completely ignore
the value of the other things that are harder to buy and sell...
"...The first step (in addressing our
shortcomings), is recognizing that economics, like any tool, distorts our
relationship to the world even as it gives us impressive new powers...
"Much of what we don't see with our economics
involves the accelerating destruction of the environment... In calculating GNP,
natural resources are not depreciated as they are used up. Buildings and
factories are depreciated; so are machinery and equipment, cars and trucks. So
why, for instance isn't the topsoil in Iowa depreciated when it washes down the
Mississippi River after careless agricultural methods have lessened its ability
to resist wind and rain? Why isn't that loss measured as an economic cost of the
process by which our grain was produced last year? If the rate of topsoil loss
is high enough in a given year, the nation may end up poorer, even when the
value of the grain produced is taken into account. Meanwhile, our economic
reports will assure us that, to the contrary, we are richer for having grown the
grain, and richer still because we didn't spend the money required to grow it in
an ecologically sound manner and thus keep the topsoil from washing away. ...we
have (already) lost more than half of all the topsoil in Iowa.
"...the heavy use of pesticides may ensure that
the grain we grow achieves the highest possible short-term profits, but the
careless and excessive use of pesticide poisons the groundwater reservoirs
beneath the field... And largely because we have failed to measure the economic
value of clean, fresh groundwater, we have contaminated more than half of all
the underground reservoirs in the United States with pesticide runoff and other
poisonous residues that are virtually impossible to remove. ...GNP treats the
rapid and reckless destruction of the environment as a good thing! ...
"Classical economists... presume to know all the
facts surrounding their choices, even if marginal errors of judgment are
allowed...
"...But every production process creates waste;
why isn't it accounted for?...
"Indeed, improvements in productivity the
single most significant measure of economic 'progress' are currently
calculated by a method that embodies yet another absurd assumption: if a new
technique has both good and bad consequences, it is permissible, under some
circumstances, to measure only the good and simply ignore the bad.... But what
if the clever new process result not only in the increased production of good
things but also in an even larger increase in the the number of bad things?
Shouldn't that count? After all, it may cost a lot of money to deal with the
consequences of the extra bad things.
"And the absurdity doesn't stop here. Later, when
expenditures are required to clean up the pollution, they are usually included
in the national accounts as another positive entry on the ledger. In other
words, the more pollution we create, the more productive contribution we can
make to national output. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William
Sound, and efforts to clean it up, to take one example, actually increased our
GNP.
"Classical economists also fail to account
properly for all the costs associated with what we call consumption. Every time
we consume something, some sort of waste is created, but this fact is
conveniently forgotten by classical economists."
So we can see that Al Gore has a handle on some
of the most fundamental flaws in our capitalist system as we have come to know
it, and its system of
economic planning and accounting. These are large issues that
go far beyond environmental concerns. In Chapter 9,
"Self-Stewardship," Gore asked, "...how did we make so many poor
choices along the way?"
"Aside from its uninspired response to the
environmental crises, our political system itself has now been exploited,
manhandled, and abused to the point that we are no longer making consistently
intelligent choices about our course as a nation. For one thing, the way we
make political choices has been distorted by the awesome power of the new
tools and technologies now available for political persuasion.
"...why present genuine ideas and true character if
artificial ones are more effective in the marketplace of power. And nowhere is
this lack of authenticity more of a problem than in our political dialogue.
'Get it while you can; forget about the future' has been enshrined as the
political ethic of the age. It is not so much the easy lies we tell each other
as the hard truths that are never told at all... Somehow, we have convinced
ourselves that that we care far less about what happens to our children than
about avoiding the inconvenience and discomfort of paying our own bills. So
instead of accepting responsibility for our choices, we simply dump huge mountains
of both debt and pollution on future generations.
"It is increasingly difficult to avoid the
conclusion that our political system is itself is deep crisis... And the
resulting frustration is intensified because so many people feel our
civilization's deepening crisis in their bones and want to see it addressed.
...candidates promise bold leadership but after the election run with the
pack. And as voters lose faith in the ability of their elected leaders to make
a difference, they inevitably lose faith in their own ability to make a
difference. At that point, it becomes clear to everyone that the political system is simply not
working."
Cognoscente that the political system is
in deep crises and the capitalist economic model that we are now following is
seriously flawed, Gore says:
"...the political imagination of Western
civilization has been focused on the New World, the place where hope has a
second chance... self-government is one of the most sophisticated technologies
ever created... the Constitution is a blueprint for an ingenious machine that
uses pressure valves and compensating forces to achieve a dynamic balance
between the needs of the individual and the needs of the community, between
freedom and order, between passions and principles... a point best illustrated
by the fact that despite today's dizzying pace of change, a document written
more than two hundred years ago is still universally recognized as the world's
most forward-looking charter for self-government.
"...America's hold on the imagination of all
humankind has grown steadily stronger. More and more people everywhere have
come to believe that the United States, for all its mistakes and excesses,
holds the key to important truths about the future of human civilization.
"...Now that the human community has developed
into a truly global civilization, we have a choice: either we search for the
means to steer the changes shaping our new common history or we will be
steered by them randomly and chaotically. Either we move toward the light
or we move toward the darkness."
Unfortunately some of these ideas might already
seem somewhat dated. In Pridger's modest opinion we have been moving toward
the darkness for quite some time including the period when Gore was
vice-president. But obviously Gore still sees America's potential to make a
difference in the world, based on its founding ideologies. Pridger agrees. The
question is, what would an Al Gore presidency do to get us back on the right
track toward the light? Could he make a difference if he were elected
president?
Gore obviously sees a lot of the big picture
perhaps more than any major party hopeful. Yet when Gore expresses the
typical opinion that "isolationism and protectionism" are no longer
an option for the United States, and says, "I have therefore come to
believe that an essential prerequisite for saving the environment is the
spread of democratic governments to more nations of the world," Pridger
begins to have a few reservations, though Gore probably wouldn't dream of
instituting democracy in foreign nations by force of arms as the current
administration is trying to do.
Does Gore think democracy is working here? Or
is our system in deep crises, as he said? And,
whether or not democratic governments in more nations of the world would help
save the environment, our first job is to get it right here before we entertain the
thought of getting it right elsewhere.
Gore, in spite of his studies into the causes of
global warming, seems to have omitted at least one of the major causes. As the
editor of Acres
U.S.A. pointed out in an interview with Richard Heinberg ("The Future
of Agriculture" in the March 2007 issue), "...carbon dioxide, of
course, is a global warming gas that's running amok. You know that we have taken
agriculture to high nitrogen use, not only in the United States, but worldwide,
and this nitrogen is mostly wasted because it goes off into the air
especially anhydrous, less so with natural nitrogens where it locks into the
oxygen and becomes one form or another of nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide, in turn,
is 183 to 212 times more polluting in terms of global warming than carbon
dioxide. Yet we find that Al Gore doesn't even mention it in his film, An
Inconvenient Truth." Heinberg responds, "That's right... That's
yet another reason why we have to reform our entire food system, and very
quickly."
"(W)e need to reform our entire food
system." That's a big issue! In Earth in the Balance, Gore did mention
the problem briefly:
"Fertilizers, too, demand that we make a
difficult bargain... widespread use of nitrogen fertilizers can stimulate
oxygen deprivation and cause the soil to produce excessive methane and nitrous
oxide. As it happens, concentrations of both methane and nitrous oxide in the
atmosphere are increasing and together now account for more than 20 percent of
the cause of global warming... the use of nitrogen fertilizer is now considered
one of the major causes of increased emissions..."
Though Al Gore may may not have the whole
picture, and whole solutions, exactly right, he obviously has many times more relevant
issues in focus than any other potential candidate for the presidency who has
come forth as a contender. Al Gore
both thinks and stands for something rare commodities in presidential
politics. For this reason he is probably unelectable and probably will not be
drafted. A Gore presidency would threaten too many powerful vested interests.
We, in all our supposed wisdom and power, have
managed to get the whole world going right down the same ecologically and
economically disastrous path that we have foolishly taken in all of our presumed
wisdom.
In a very short-sighted attempt to "clean up our environment" we have
sent our dirt industries elsewhere, and have managed to help China and other
countries start down the very same wrong paths we have taken
over-industrialization, and conversion to chemical based, industrial scale,
agriculture.
Gore, being a Democrat, would likely attempt to
find global solutions, through the United Nations and the Kyoto treaty process,
rather than concentrating on getting our own national house in order first as
quickly as possible with comprehensive national solutions. It's too bad that we've gone to such lengths to get the
rest of the world to follow our unenlightened example. But,
though it is important to continue to work within the international community to
effect change, we must begin where we have the most influence and ability to
effect positive change the most quickly at home. We should work on our own
house first, and get it right (because that's where we live), and, once we get
it right, then we can righteously expect the world will follow.
John Q. Pridger
Saturday, 3 March, 2007
THE STOCK MARKET HAS THE HICCUPS AGAIN
Some investors are getting a little nervous again
as well they should. It can probably be safely assumed that the stocks in
general are still substantially overvalued, and a grossly overvalued market is a
weapon of mass destruction poised to go off without notice.
The stock market was not actually established to
be a massive gambling operation, but that's what it has nonetheless become. It's
a huge casino where people win and lose by buying and selling stocks for profit.
The difference between winning and losing is getting out in time. Most of those
who don't sell quick enough become losers.
Originally, the idea was to make it possible for
the public to purchase an ownership stake in corporate stocks. If the company
did well, it would pay dividends to the stockowners. That was the original hope
of gain in owning stocks. Generally speaking appreciation of stock value was not
a company function, though if a company did well it's stock prices would
naturally be bid upward by buyers as the company was presumed to be worth more.
The company could gain the benefit of these increases by issuing new stock to
the public at the higher rates the market dictated.
The stock market evolved into a gambling casino
well over a century ago. There was a basic value-cost ratio formula for
determining a basic fair value of a company's stocks to determine whether
any given stock might under or overvalued. But more and more frequently in
recent times the market price of stock goes up or down on the power of the
bidding process on the strength of rumors or market impulses. Sometimes stocks
go up without any connection to any sort of reality. Now ownership of companies
is hardly a major consideration in acquiring stock. Who cares about the company,
as long as the stock seems to be a good bet? And bet is the correct term.
Most individual investors today look at the
market as something to "play." They play the market in hopes of buying
low and selling high. Value of the company is secondary. Dividends have become
secondary. Some companies don't even bother any more. They prefer to reinvest
gains and ad value in order raise stock values so they sell new stock at higher
rates, rather than to make distributions to stockowners who couldn't care less
about the company.
Stock values are bid upward by the market more
often, and more regularly, than value is gained in the company itself. With the
advent of individual computer trading, more and more investors are of the
"day trader" variety, buying on an up trend and selling as soon as a
clear profit is to be taken.
The entire market is subject to mass psychology
and hysteria. A word from the Chairman of the Federal Reserve can send stock
prices up or down. A mere rumor can do it. These things are at work with
individual stocks as well as with the entire market. And, since the financial
and stock markets are now global, a hiccup in the Chinese or European market can
be telegraphed into the American market overnight, resulting in the sort of
"corrections" we've experienced in the past week.
Everybody is edgy because the markets are
actually a lot more volatile than we like to think. Stability is a facade
buoyed by hope and, more and more frequently, desperate behind the scenes maneuvering
to is used to prevent or retard massive sell offs.
We have a global problem on our hands and it is
called the American dollar. We live in a global economy that is tremendously
inflationary. It's almost impossible for the Federal Reserve to do anything
about it but continue to inflate. To fail to continue inflationary policies
would be to invite a catastrophic crash in the markets. But continuing to
inflate will insure that the value will continue to leak out of the dollar at an
accelerating rate.
Unfortunately, the market is not significantly
under the control of the Fed or anybody else. The Fed can only tinker a little
by manipulating prime interest rates, and must do it very cautiously. Beyond
that, (along with the Treasury Department and maybe the Department of
Homeland Security), it probably has some emergency machinery in place to try to
stop a major crash by purchasing massive amounts of stock with new dollars (more
inflation). But, in the final analysis, markets always tend to be
self-correcting, and they can make the correction on their own, and probably in
spite of any safety value gimmickry. Both the dollar and the markets survive on
public faith something that was once reserved to the religious faithful. If
and when those levies of faith are broken, a massive, perhaps unstoppable, selling
panic is bound to follow.
The up side of a catastrophic stock market crash
(if you could call it an upside), is that it's about the only way to effect a
serious deflation of the currency. Such an event would sorely hurt everybody
whose wealth is directly or indirectly invested in the stock market (which is
most of us). But a crash would help save some of the value represented by
"cash" and deposit dollars by simply evaporating all the dollars
represented in the market losses. A crash could effectively wipe out hundreds of
billions of what is effectively false wealth restoring the vitality of remaining
dollars. This would leave holders of cash, and especially hard assets such as
gold, in an enviable position
(provided they can find something to eat).
John Q. Pridger
IF PRIDGER WERE ELECTED PRESIDENT
The first order of the day would be to pull our
troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We've done about as much damage in that part
of the world as we ought to permit ourselves for the time being. We'd apologize as best we
could and tell the Iraqi's and Afghanis to send us a bill when they've got
everything sorted out and added up. We'll send the money, provided the amount is
reasonable, just as soon as they have settled down and learned to rule
themselves again. Lord knows we've given them enough lessons. Now it's their
turn to get their house back into order.
Of course, we might reason that we've already
paid for all the damages once, but since about $12 billion in cash have simply
disappeared, the fault is not with the Iraqis nearly as much with the ones who
shipped the cash over there in the first place.
Most importantly, it's high time we started getting our house
back into order. Our leadership should have recognized that a long time ago but
have failed to recognize that we have a serious problem that requires insight,
dedication, and a lot of hard work.
Pridger's New World Order plan would be to go
back to the drawing board with a clean sheet of paper then leave the paper
blank for a while. Under a Pridger administration the United Nations would no
longer anything having to do with American citizens, American industries, any
piece of American real estate, or how we conduct our trade. We'd protect our
own markets to the extent they should be protected to insure control of our own
national economic destiny and security.
We would cooperate with the United Nations on
problems concerning the global environment and perhaps several other areas such
as discouraging aggression and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but no
United Nations "Law" or "Regulation" would be applicable
within any United States jurisdiction, or with regard to our ships on the high seas.
This said, the United States should be the
international leader, not a follower, in solving global environmental and
economic problems. It should lead by example, without arrogance. And, while
jealously guarding the interests of the American people, be receptive and
cooperative when "good ideas" come from any other nation or the body
of the UN itself but never relinquish an iota national sovereignty or allow
itself to become legally fettered by UN mandates.
This is not crawling "back into an
isolationist and protectionist" shell, but merely reasserting the right of
national self-protection the right of every sovereign nation has to be
secure within its own borders with a national economy calculated to
nurture the conditions conductive to the "right of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness."
Under a Pridger administration, there would no
longer be any call for us to answer charges of international military aggression
or human rights abuses. We'd return to being the global champion of what was
once known as "Truth, justice, and the American Way." Nobody would
have call to lecture us on human rights or consider us a Great Satan.
While we would reserve all of our rights as a
nation, we would be first and foremost in exercising those rights with utmost
responsibility and consideration to and for the global community of nations.
Perhaps a time would evolve when we might once
again consider ourselves a Christian nation, and no longer have cause to be
ashamed of such recognition. If not that, at least be considered a "good
nation" once again.
Pridger
would issue an executive
order mandating that all of our legislators and top officials, including federal
judges, re-examine the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Federalist
Papers, and the writings of our founders.
Then, they would be strongly encouraged to
scrutinize American history and attempt to determine what led to our success as
a nation what we did right, and what we have done wrong.
Pridger, as president, would present Congress
with a comprehensive national plan essentially a national economic plan
as a rough guideline to what a sustainable, environmentally friendly, national
economy should look like, and how to begin moving in that direction. It would
combined agrarianism refocused on the family farm system; distributionism, with
regard to individual free enterprise activities, including mercantilism and all
nature of small business enterprise; and national capitalism for a productive
and sustainable industrial sector. It would also include a plan for a new
national monetary system, separate from, and independent of, international
finance.
The goal would be to reestablish national
independence with a productive and sustainable economy that would serve as an
example to all other large and viable nation-states.
Pridger's New World Order would be one where
national self-reliance in food and consumer goods, rather than international
interdependence in such things, is considered the predominate imperative. We
cannot help but be internationally interdependent in many ways in a modern
world, so Pridger doesn't advocate that nations build brick and mortar walls
around themselves, but merely that all nations try to take care of their own
ballywhacks for the benefit and security of their own citizens, while engaging
in trade with other nations on a truly mutually beneficial basis.
To illustrate what whet wrong we might begin with
a look at the following simple illustrations:
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200 years of economic,
industrial, and financial progress. |
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Do we want our nation
to stand upon a broad and firm human and economic foundation as from
1800 through about 1950, or to
resemble a top spinning out of control? |
The two illustrations above show Pridger's idea of
economic progress we've seen as a nation the most solid economic structure on the left, and a dangerously inverted
economic structure on the right. We experienced our most stellar, and still very
stable economic development from the early 1900s through about 1950. This period
is represented by the barrel shape captioned 1900. In the
latter half of the twentieth century, be began to develop some serious economic
imbalances.
In the illustration directly above, the green
colored areas represent the agrarian sector of the economy the
economic foundation of any nation. The yellow
areas represent the private industrial and service sector of the economy. The
red area represents the degree our economy depends on foreign trade. The orange
areas represent
the public sector (government, etc.). The colored areas are not scientifically
accurate, but are close enough to make the point intended. The shapes (pyramid,
barrel, top), indicate degrees of stability, equilibrium, and sustainability.
When the nation was young it was largely agrarian
with a strong base of family farmers that insured a secure and abundant food
supply for the nation. Wedded to the ground, they were the base and substance of
the national economy. The rest of the economy was largely tradesmen, artisans, and
merchants. We were dependent on foreign trade for many of our manufactured
goods, and government was relatively small.
By our middle years our agrarian base had shrunk
somewhat in terms of people involved due to progress in farming methods and
machinery, but production had increased and continued to produce a food surplus.
But the agrarian sector was still large enough to provide a solid and
sufficiently broad base. We had
developed a huge and growing industrial sector, and our dependence on foreign
trade was much smaller than it had been earlier. In fact, we were almost totally
industrially independent, exporting much more manufactured goods than we
imported. We had actually overdeveloped industrially, which soon made the
theretofore unnoticed problems of industrialization apparent. Government had
grown too, of course, and has grown steadily throughout our history.
Presently, we see the original pyramid shape
again, only inverted. Our agrarian sector, in terms of people involved,
relatively self-reliant family farms, and diversified farming practices, is just
about gone. Though corporate sized farms and agribusiness continue to produce
more than sufficient food, the industry is no longer self-reliant nor
sustainable. It depends on huge, unsustainable, mono cropping operations and
equally huge chemical inputs, and on literal factory farm "meat"
operations.
Our agricultural base now depends on so many non-farm inputs that it would collapse without
them. And it may collapse anyway because it is vulnerable to many other things,
such as plan and animal diseases that can take a swift and devastating toll over
such large numbers of crops and animals. This is not conductive to national food
security.
The industrial sector has shrunk considerably, too, as the new
international economic order has taken its toll and we have become evermore
dependent on foreign trade and foreign producers to provide our consumer goods,
and even an increasing amount of our food. This effectively renders us (despite
our vast wealth), no longer an economically viable nation.
The global economy
seems to work fine now, but it is not sustainable. Government has continued to
grow until it is now so large that it is consuming a significant share of the
wealth the nation produces. It is the nation's largest employer and requires
much more money to function than it is able to tax from the rest of the economy.
Thus we have increasingly leveraged our national wealth by using foreign credit,
putting our whole economy into a very unstable condition.
Pridger sees our nation as being like a top. As
long as sufficient spin continues, it will maintain equilibrium. It spins on
foreign energy inputs, lopsided foreign trade, and debt expansion. When the spins
slows, it will wobble. Before it stops, it will tumble.
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Positive Illuminism or
dark Illuminism? |
The Great Seal of the United
States shown on the left above (being the reverse of the seal), is symbolic of
something our founders had in mind. It was adopted as a symbol of the nation
literally at the time of it's birth. Though most Christian American patriots
view the symbol (which they attribute to the Order
of the Illuminati
[founded in Bavaria, Germany in 1776]), as a
symbol of evil incarnate, Pridger (who describes himself as a "Jeffersonian
Christian"), takes a slightly different view. And, of course, he loves to
play with symbols.
Illuminism can roughly be translated as
"enlightenment," but as in all things, even enlightened are divided between
good and evil, and all the shade in between. Those of us who consider ourselves
Christians would consider Jesus as the very epitome of enlightenment. The period of history known as the Enlightenment, of course, spawned
both good and evil men of enlightenment (in the contexts of knowledge and
understanding). In the political and revolutionary realm, one
version brought a new enlightened form of government to the new United States of
America a New Secular Order in the New World.
The other seems to have engineered the bloody excesses of the French Revolution.
Good illuminism true enlightenment is embodied in the teachings of
Jesus, Who Was (to Christians) the bearer of light and illumination (wisdom, and salvation). On
the other hand, evil illuminism perhaps looks to Lucifer as the bearer of light.
Pridger, of course, wants to make it clear that
he is not a member of any secret esoteric, or any other exclusive, society. Nor
does he have any "special knowledge or insights" supposedly claimed by
or associated with such groups. It may even be true that the symbolism of the
Great Seal was a device of the infamous Illuminati, but the interpretations given here are merely his own
insights and views, based on a modest amount of study, personal observations,
and a little thought. Pridger uses these symbols to make what he believes are some important
points.
One such point is that illumination means "light," and there
are enlightened men who are both good and wise and there are others who are
"brilliant" but not necessarily good or wise. Intellectual brilliance
is to be found on both the light and dark side of every human issue.
There is nothing wrong with the idea of a
"New Secular Order" (literal translation of "Novus Ordo Seclorum"),
in the New World (or anywhere else for that matter). Nor is there any reason to
believe any of our founders envisioned a new secular order for the World as
a whole. There is every reason to believe they intended to build an new order in
the New World, and the called it the United States of America.
This said, however, there is little doubt that
Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Illuminati Order (which was German in
origin), did indeed have such a vision, and we might well consider those who
have brought us the New World Order are the direct intellectual descendents of
that Order of the Illuminati.
As for a secular order of
government for the new United States, it merely meant there would be no divisive religious sectarianism incorporated
into the
new government no built-in errors of religious doctrine, dogma, or superstition no coercive
hypocrisies as institutions of government, and no "tyranny over the minds
of men" (as Jefferson stated it), by any officially recognized priesthood,
clergy, church, or (hopefully) government.
Our founders came from a variety of religious
backgrounds, all of which were Christian based (from the Puritans to the
Unitarians). Some were deists, but literally all
recognized the profound value of "true religion" and the central and essential Christian message of
morality and good will toward men.
There was another major thing which all of our
founders recognized beside the imperative of a strictly secular government. That
was that God had favored what they had undertaken in declaring independence from
England and
fighting the Revolutionary War and the seal proclaims, "He (God) has favored our
undertaking" (the translation of "Annuit Coeptis").
Nonetheless, a secular "government of the
people, by the people, and for the people" (as Lincoln later summarized it), if
made up of Christian peoples, could not help but be a Christian government. And
this is how American government was always considered, and presumed to be, a
Christian government and the nation a Christian nation at least until relatively recent times.
Pridger is
not saying that a government based in the religious teachings of others (Buddha,
Confucius, Mohammad, etc.), could not be just as good. On the contrary, pure
religion of almost any variety ought to produce an enlightened and good society.
But the American government just happened to have stemmed from Christian
civilization and (for this and perhaps other reasons), it demonstrably produced the most materially successful and
prosperous nation in the history of mankind.
Good plans, however, do sometimes go awry, as
they obviously have in our great nation. The national leadership became increasingly infected
with brilliant men who were neither wise nor necessarily good (in Pridger's
modest opinion). Since that
process began, everything has been turned upside down, as illustrated on the
right hand side of the illustrations above.
The New Order in the New World was, for some
time, an example of good government and stellar economic and industrial progress
and success.
Though always far from perfect (and there were some terrible bumps on the way),
the nation essentially remained on a fundamentally positive trajectory until the
early twentieth century, and reached it's productive apex after mid-century and
still retains its military might and global economic influence.
When the focus changed from government of the
people, by the people, and for the people, to One World, things began to change
rapidly and they have been changing for the worse in spite of all the positive
reports to the contrary.
The pyramid, as evidenced in the Great Pyramids
of Egypt, is the most enduring and stable structure ever devised and constructed
by man. Compare its longevity, for example, to that of the Twin Towers of the World Trade
Center, or any other man made structure. And imagine what would have happened had those jet airliners been driven
into the side of the Great Pyramid! So it
was an appropriate symbol for the New Order which was to be represented by the
United States of America which was intended to be as permanent and stable as the
Great Pyramid.
All human organizational and economic structures
are pyramidal, especially all organizations such as governments. In every case,
the broad base represents the multitude of the people and the small region near
the top represents the leadership.
The symbol shows the pyramid without a cap,
indicating that completion and perfection remain goals. And small triangle above
symbolizes the fact that the true source of ultimate leadership is reserved to
the Grand Architect of the Universe that which most of us call God.
The "All Seeing Eye" of God is
represented above the pyramid in the small triangle, denoting our faith in God as a
nation and a people. Naturally,
all sorts of Satanic meanings are attributed to this symbol by some Christians
(and particularly by fundamentalist conspiracy theorists), but Pridger (a conspiracy theorist
himself), prefers to see this as a graphic symbol of God's omnipresence in the
Universe and above all the positive works (and failures) of mankind. After all, these are just
symbols not idols, and meanings may vary according to the eye and heart of the
beholder, no matter who or what originated the imagery.
Probably the only place most of us have seen the
image of the reverse of the Great Seal is on the U.S. one dollar bill. This
circumstance is quite significant from a symbolic perspective when we consider
what our government should be, and what our money should represent. Just as
significantly, the dollar (and all of our money), displays the motto, "In
God We Trust."
Most of us were taught somewhere along the line
that "money is the root of all evil." Though we later learned that it
was not the money itself but the "love of money" that was the root of
all evil, money is still associated with evil, even as we unabashedly strive to
earn or "get" more and more of it. We love the things that money can
buy, including security, if not love.
But money can be an evil thing if it is not what
it purports to be. And this brings up something else Pridger would do if elected
president. He'd apply maximum pressure to institute an honest monetary system.
What we have today is the credit dollar. Credit, of course, is a good thing when
properly used, but when money itself represents credit, and hidden interest
costs, it does not constitute an "honest dollar." In spite to the
symbols on our currency, what we have today is a "skinner" dollar, by
which we are all being skinned.
The nation needs an honest national currency to
served the exchange needs of the people and the commercial needs of domestic
industry and commerce. Another system or medium is probably needed to satisfy the
requirements of international commerce where barter trade is not feasible.
What's wrong with credit dollars? Here in a nutshell is what is wrong with debt
currency like our Federal Reserve Note. Such money can only come into existence as
notes representing outstanding public indebtedness.
First, let's pretend that we're the very first
person to express a need for money. And let's also assume that the machinery is
there to satisfy our needs. So we borrow a million dollars, and that's all the
money there is in the world. Furthermore, we managed to borrow the whole amount at an
amazingly low rate of one percent annual interest.
Suppose we save every penny and pay the lender
back right on time a year later. The trouble becomes obvious. Though we've
repaid the entire amount we've borrowed, we still owe that measly one percent interest
$10,000.00! But there is no other money in existence with which to pay. Being
unable to pay, we'd be bankrupted and have to forfeit any collateral we had
pledged against the loan.
Of course, in the real world of debt money there's
always as much
money as there are uses and borrowers and there's always more where that
came from, provided the collateral is there. But an interest bearing debt is created with every single dollar
created, making it obvious that debt will always exceed the money supply. That's the
the sticky trick in
the money system we have.
Though the government has the sole sovereign
power and right to issue money by fiat, and could do so interest free at great
savings to the nation, it doesn't do that any more. It goes through other
channels to make the transaction "legitimate" and ends up putting its
stamp of approval on money that is just as fiat as any paper money has ever
issued, but is also "debt instruments" that it has to borrow at interest before it can put it into
circulation.
When the government needs money, it only has two
ways to procure it, by taking it from the people in taxes, or borrowing it.
Increasingly it borrows it. And if it needs $10 billion it doesn't have, it
incurs up to $20 billion in debt in order to procure it. This is totally irrational,
though it has become more than just routine it's the only way it can be done
under our system!
As the old argument for greenbacks went, if the government can
print a bond that serves as collateral against a loan, it can just as easily
print dollar currency in the amounts necessary to satisfy its needs. And,
indeed, this is true. The government could print and issue national
money in as unlimited amounts as it now borrows and it wouldn't owe interest
on any of it.
The classic argument against government issued
fiat money (U.S. Note "greenbacks" [yes, we used to have some honest money]), is that
such money is "inflation money." And, yes, if you print and issue money in
unlimited amounts, it is inflationary. But we are doing that right now with Federal
Reserve money. But we're borrowing it at high interest rates. It makes
absolutely no sense. Debt money is just as inflationary as honest money, only
much worse because of interest liability.
To demonstrate that, if the Treasury issues a
million greenback dollars and spends it into circulation, it has both incurred
and discharged a debt with those same acts. They cancel one another out, and the
money is still in circulation serving its real purpose.
But under the Federal Reserve System, the
government issues a bond to cover the money it needs plus interest (this
effectively serving as collateral, representing printed evidence of the full
faith and good credit of the nation). This can be done internally, or the bonds
may be of the type sold to the public or foreign governments which it "sells" it at a large discount meaning it may sell a
$2 million bond for $1 million. Then it spends the money into circulation.
But this act doesn't cancel the debt, it merely makes it official and binding on
the American people. The debt is not satisfied until the bond is redeemed in
full.
Why not just cut all the bologna and issue
greenbacks and spend them into circulation? The bankers who control the Federal Reserve and
other central banks (the general global "money power"), don't like
those sort of ideas. For one thing, it would totally upset the global financial
status quo upon which the New World Order has been built. Thwarting the bankers
has been tried
before. For example, both Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson both successfully
unseated the aims
of the bankers long before they were as powerful as they are today and Lincoln
and maybe John F. Kennedy tried to regain a modicum sovereign control of the
monetary system. The bankers managed to consolidate their control during
Lincoln's administration, and really sowed it up with the Federal Reserve Act in
1913.
If Pridger were elected president, he would try
too. Of course, he would probably be assassinated. Maybe that's why Pridger
isn't campaigning too hard for election. And maybe that's why none of our
elected representatives never bring the subject up.
John Q. Pridger
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":
-
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;
-
...(it) proudly declared that it was their
grassroots efforts that forced pro-American U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John
Bolton to resign;
-
...(it) supports the U.N. Law of the Sea
Treaty, U.N. Global Taxes and the U.N. International Criminal Court;
-
...(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
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