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Saturday, 28 February, 2009 "ENDGAME" ARE WE CLOSE YET? Pridger often checks certain radical web sites just to see what the fellow "crazies" are talking about more or less to compare notes. Pridger takes a lot of what he reads with a grain of salt. Some of them descend into the downright bizarre, and some seem hell-bent on stirring up more trouble than we really need. We've already got all the trouble we need. Nonetheless, many of them provide some interesting leads and insights that are seldom found elsewhere. Take the matter of the Department of Homeland Security entitled "ENDGAME." We've been aware of the FEMA CAMPS for a long time, of course. And Pridger was writing about our Orwellian future back in the early 1990s, speculating that if you are on the mailing list of "politically incorrect" alternative news publications, your address label may someday serve as your bunk card in a government concentration camp. See where the Camps are located. (Read more here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/...7763) Yet, the code name "ENDGAME" seemed too bizarre, and so obviously Orwellian, that Pridger was inclined to to write it off as an exaggeration or fabrication of the paranoid. No government program would have such an obviously ominous name. But, unfortunately, it's real. The following are excerpted from an article by Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg that appeared a year ago in the San Francisco Chronicle. (Emphasis added)
Of course, everything depends on how "government" defines such terms as terrorist, extremist ideology, etc. Pridger observed in the wake of 9/11 that every man, woman, and child on the planet is a potential "terrorist." Every ordinary constitutionally armed American citizen is a potential "illegal combatant" or "enemy combatant." All that is needed to pack any one of us away to a concentration camp is a "government definition" of terms to include any targeted group or individual. What all of this makes frighteningly clear is that, in the final analysis, the United States Constitution is only a piece of paper, and government is potentially nothing more or less than naked power and force. And ultimately, throughout human history, might makes right. Our founders realized this and, through the Constitution, sought to produce a small federal government, very limited in both size and power with strict balances of power within that government. The States were (and are, if they assert it), independent republics in their own right, with rights and powers the federal government could not constitutionally infringe. They made sure the populous would remain armed and capable of fighting for its rights if either federal or State governments should devolve into tyrannies. Since the Civil War the federal government has been steadily expanding it's size, scope of operations, and power beyond anything the Constitution intended. With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, Congress unconstitutionally gave a banking cartel the monopoly on money issue along with the power to manipulate the economy at its whim. The income tax amendment made sure the growing debt would be serviced. With the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, expansion of government took a quantum leap. With the Second World War, and throughout the Cold War, this expansion of the federal government went onto steroids. With the end of the Cold War, and the promise of a peaceful world, it was already too late government remained on steroids and willfully acquired several additional addictions. So, here we are, with an ongoing War on Terror and an very opportune economic collapse to insure that government has plenty of excuses to broaden it's powers and totally remake the political and economic landscape. It has the excuse it needs to engage in the rapid development of new programs. We the People might not like some of these programs. That might make a great many of us radicals and potential domestic terrorists depending on the secret government definitions of those terms. The idea of "thought" as "crime" has already been legitimized in our legal lexicon. The list already had 775,000 names on it a year ago. If 20,000 names are added every month, the list is well above a million by now. When push comes to shove, however, should We the People happen to be the ones defined as domestic terrorists, there is always a possibility that the Armed Forces of the United States, and the State National Guards, or significant portions thereof, could be on the side of the people and the Constitution. Already several States have taken steps to declare their Constitutional prerogatives under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the Constitution. For better or worse, we seem destined to live in very interestingly troubled times. John Q. Pridger Wednesday, 25 February, 2009 THE MODERN INQUISITION There was a time when the Church required heretics, whether Jew or Gentile, to recant. Jews were persecuted for denying the divinity of Christ. Today another kind of heretic is being persecuted and ordered to recant. The present example is Bishop Richard Williamson. Bishop Williamson's sin is that of being a Holocaust denier. He doesn't quite believe that six million Jews were gassed by the Nazis during World War Two. Being a Holocaust denier or anti-Semitic are about the only cardinal sin these days. The bishop was expelled from Argentina because he still believes what he believes to be truth. Imagine that! From Argentina? Under pressure from the Pope Benedict XVI (and the Zionists of the world), Bishop Williamson apologized for his views.
But, of course, that isn't good enough. Apologies for political incorrect views on this particular subject simply won't do. He has to totally recant. In other words, he has to betray his own mind and conscience, and become a liar to the degree that he will swear on a stack of Bibles that he believes what he does not believe. This is what Jews were once required to do during the Spanish Inquisition. They had to profess and convert to Christianity "or else!" It would seem the shoe is on the other foot today. There is nothing absolutely nothing in the non-Moslem world, more important, and absolutely required, than towing the "conventional wisdom" line on the Holocaust. Now Pridger doesn't really know whether 300,000 of Jews died in Nazi concentration camps from starvation, disease, and "other" (as Bishop Williams apparently believes), or whether six million were intentionally gassed to death by the Nazis. The evidence is unclear and incomplete, and free and open inquiry is against the law for all intents and purposes. Question the details of the Holocaust and you are a marked man far worse than an infidel. There's one thing, however, Pridger knows for certain and only because it is made so extraordinarily clear every day. For some very odd reason, free thought on, and inquiry into, the subject of the Holocaust has been decreed an absolute taboo. There's no room for any shades of doubt on this subject. Either you have faith, you falsely profess faith, or you are suspected of being some sort of a hateful fiend like Hitler. It's okay to disbelieve, doubt, or deny literally anything else, but not the Holocaust. There's no freedom of expression on the matter. This would seem to indicate that the Jews, for some odd reason, are the most powerful people in the world. Otherwise, how would genocide against the Jews be more important than all the other many genocides that have taken place in history? Even equally recent history? Even now and ongoing? Why are Jews, as a people or a nation, alone exempt from criticism in the West? Why did America and its leaders have to grin and avert their collective gaze during the recent barbaric Israeli attack on Gaza as they did during the equally barbaric Lebanon invasion in 2006? Why has successive American administrations ignored the plight of the Palestinian people since long before the formation of the State of Israel? And, if the Jews are as powerful as they seem to be, how in the world did they get that way? Could they really be God's Chosen People of the Bible destined to rule not only Palestine and the United States, but the world? Well, as one old westerner used to say, "damifino." It's quite inexplicable. And if anyone should be able could explain it, it's deemed best for him to keep his mouth shut, because earthly damnation and hell-fire will descend upon his head. Pridger is a natural skeptic. He tends to doubt things that are forced on us (by whomever, or whatever almighty authority), as the only true religion, or the only possible truth. But this is one subject Pridger won't touch with a ten foot poll. This is one power that is so great that half the world has succumbed to. The United States has succumbed to it. Western Europe has succumbed to it. Most of the fundamentalist Protestant churches have succumbed to it. Argentina has succumbed to it. The Catholic Church has succumbed to it. Who is Pridger to question this great power? So let Pridger put it on the line, "It is an inalienable truth that Six Million Jews were systematically exterminated by gas by evil Germans, and that's the most important lesson of history. That was the turning point of the history of mankind. And we'd better not forget it!" (This is Pridger's Kol Nidre oath for this season). This said, Pridger still laments the passing of the United States of America in his own time the constitutional principles that it once stood upon, the truth and justice that were once the national goal, and the Christian values it once espoused and was intended to cling to. John Q. Pridger
The issue of the Holocaust is to World War Two, what the issue of slavery was to the Civil War. The Civil War was not fought for the benefit of the slaves any more than World War Two was fought for the benefit of the Jews. But... Abolitionists did influence and inflame the sectional divide that led to secession of the Confederate States, of course, making war unavoidable to save the Union. In the end, modern Civil War mythology uses the slavery issue as the primary purpose of, and justification for, the war. By the same token, there was a lot of Jewish influence brought to bear on Franklin D. Roosevelt to maneuver the United States into World War Two. International Jewry had effectively declared war on Germany as soon as Hitler came to power by proclaiming an international boycott almost a decade before the war. The same influences had been brought to bear on England to draw a line in the sand with regard to German expansion on the Continent in Poland. The same influences had gained a commitment from the British to reward the Zionists with a Jewish Homeland in Palestine as the spoils of war. The same influences (with the aim of gaining a Homeland in Palestine), had helped maneuver Woodrow Wilson into involving the United States into World War One. As anyone who studies the history of the twentieth century can see, those "Same Influences" were used an awful lot when it came to major great powers warfare. It should be remembered that the Zionist headquarters was originally in Germany. It was the promise of a Homeland in Palestine if England won the war, that prompted them to remove their headquarters to London. By the same token, the Zionists were effectively declaring war on Germany at that time. Previous to this Jews had been just as comfortable and prosperous in Germany as in any other European country. And this de facto declaration of war against Germany in World War One, paved the way for the Hitler blowback, World War Two, and the Holocaust. But rescuing the Jews from Nazi Germany was the last thing on the agenda of the Allied powers. The Holocaust wasn't even really discovered until the war was over, though it was known that massive numbers of Jews and other "enemies of the state" had been interned in concentration camps. The Holocaust didn't even become a major post-war issue of significance until some time after the conclusion of the war. In fact, the general consensus, even among Jews, was that they had brought the Holocaust on themselves. But, today, all of that has changed WWII mythology has the Holocaust front and center as the real purpose of, and justification for, the war. At this late date, however, we find that we didn't really win World War Two. At first it appeared that the Soviet Union was the only real prime beneficiary of the Allied Victory. It gained half of Europe, including Poland (on behalf of which the "larger" war was begun by the British), and half of Germany plus the Japanese Kuril Islands. Great Britain ultimately lost its Empire as the direct result of WWII. The United States gained a lot of glory and post-war prestige, but was stuck with the bill and the costs of rebuilding Western Europe and Japan. It gained no territory nor any other material benefit. The title of "world leader" or "leader of the free world" sounded pretty nice, but it entailed a lot of obligations and expense and little or no rewards. There was a clear and lasting winner of World War Two, however. Not to sound anti-Semitic, but was the Jews. The Holocaust was their battle, their great loss, and their horrible sacrifice. But they came out of it with enough survivors and enough power to dominate the Western World using the Holocaust as both their bludgeon and banner. John Q. Pridger Tuesday, 24 February, 2009 DEAR CHINA HELP! Imagine us the bastion of freedom, democracy, and capitalist productivity (the nation we knew only a few short decades ago) the global anti-communist savior going cap in hand, as a humble and desperate supplicant, to formerly backward, poverty-stricken, Communist China to help support our vices! Talk about change! Talk about the fruits of the "new international economic order" our leadership insisted on creating! That's exactly what our national leadership has done to our country! Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has gone to China in hopes of getting the Chinese to keep sinking their savings into U.S. Treasure bonds. "We're in this together," she told them. Fortunately, China probably will help us out but only as long as it is in its own best interests. Being both our largest creditor and manufactory of consumer goods, gives it a huge advantage over us in many ways. And as long as we continue to strive to keep Walmart shelves stocked, China isn't going to run out of money to loan us. In the mean time, you can be sure that China will being doing all it can to re-focus more and more of it's production to it's own vast developing market. The Chinese market can easily absorb everything it now sends to the United States. The Chinese consumer market it four times larger than ours! In a sane world we would not be trying to peddle our debt instruments to China so we could get the money with which to buy Chinese products and/or bail our our own banks and industries. That should be unthinkable! It's evidence of the national madness that has engulfed us for several decades. In a sane world, we'd produce our own products, and if they produced an excess of national income, then we might think about buying a few needed products from elsewhere. WE'VE THROWN TRADITION ON ITS EAR Traditionally, bank robbers robbed banks because that was where the money was. Banks are traditionally the most purely profitable businesses in the world. They make money by sitting back and collecting interest, at no risk to themselves, while everybody else does the work. It's practically a fool proof system, where they have all the institutional advantages. Today the government is stealing from the people in order to give the biggest banks in the country money to fill their flagging balloons. Insurance is another of the most profitable businesses in the world. Their actuary tables guarantee unfailing profits. Yet the biggest insurance company in the world has received a multibillion dollar government bailout again, by robbing the people and selling their progeny into perpetual servitude. The banks and big insurance companies, as well as Wall Street hucksters, manufactured huge bubbles of phantom wealth in order to reap much larger profits than would be possible under sound business practices. They weren't satisfied with merely good profits that were certain under traditional business practices. They wanted more. Lots more! So they figured out evermore cleaver ways to "leverage" themselves into astounding levels of profitability. They turned to a form of mushroom farming. Still not satisfied, they employed smoke and mirrors to make those mushroom boxes appear to be in infinite arrays. Now the government is effectively making the taxpayer responsible for making those crimes of deceit and fraud good. The taxpayer is being required to fill the empty bubbles before their criminal enterprises totally collapse saving the big crooks that have been deemed "too big to be allowed to fail." We are being required to fill not only the mushroom boxes, but make all the phantom boxes real. And this is an impossible proposition. On the larger stage, our trusty leaders have been busily producing a "hollow economy" for many years. Now they express shocked amazement to discover the results of their criminal policies shocked that our economy cannot carry its own weight. Yet they continue working feverishly to make good on the promise of a "Wonderful New World" by charging it to current and future generations of taxpayers. The home mortgage melt-down was the elephant that tripped the wire and sent the economy into a tailspin. In a sane world, this would have been totally impossible. In a real free market economy, based on sound business practices, home mortgages would be between individual home buyers and their local banker. But our leadership, in its devotion to banker gods, devised a way that home mortgages have made the global economy the GLOBAL economy, mind you! to stumble and fall on its face. This is totally incredible! Our trusty leaders steadily pursued "trade policies" especially designed to insure that our real wealth producing industries would migrate offshore, leaving us dependent on others elsewhere for everything we need for the much ballyhooed "American Way of Life." Folks, our own government has done this to us. And we sat and watched, happy to be able to troop off to Walmart to buy cheap imports. We are now beginning to get a hint as to just how expensive those cheap imports really were. And we haven't even begun to pay the real price yet. We're just beginning to get a hint. The home mortgage, banking, and financial crisis are just a few aspects of the crisis we are facing. That's only the smoke and mirrors part. Wait to we get to the nuts and bolt part. What is happening to the Big Three automakers is part of the nuts and bolts part. If Americans don't have jobs, they can't buy cars. If they can't buy cars, the Big Three will fail. If the Big Three collapse, millions more nuts and bolts jobs will disappear. It's an unstoppable downward spiral. And if something fundamental isn't corrected soon, we'll end up with no cars to buy except for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese cars and that only if the Chinese, Japanese, and Saudis loan the government enough of "our own money?" to permit sufficient national cash flow to facilitate it. Of course, we will be indentured to our creditors, and you can bet they will end up owning more of the United States of America than Americans do. China is not going to continuing underwriting our debt without some solid collateral. And that collateral is our nation's physical estate. It's almost too late, but it's time to re-declare our national independence. And the only way to do that is to start printing and spending our own money. Having to borrow every penny of it is total madness! If we have to borrow it, it isn't ours, it's theirs. If we would ever recover and "have" our own country, we've got to have our own money. When will the administration and Congress get that through their thick skulls? Unfortunately, they aren't supposed to get that through their thick skulls. National Independence, and "our own money" aren't even on the back burner anymore. "Our own money" is still universally recognized by our politicians as "establishment heresy." Our leaders are afraid to reclaim the sovereign power of the nation. They are marching to the drums of the money changers and the wreckers. The national "leadership" is still on the already obviously discredited New World Order path to national receivership and doom. They are committed to national suicide! Dennis Kucinich is the only congressman who has proposed an enlightened form of monetary reform as far as Pridger knows. Ron Paul, a strict constitutionalist, is on the right track in even a more comprehensive way, but, on the money issue, he has been blinded by the gold of the Austrian School of economics. He fails to see that a gold standard has always been the bankers' game. DOWNSIZING THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE Our living standards are certain to decline precipitously in the coming years. There's no way to avoid it, because our trusty leaders have fumbled the ball so badly these last decades that we don't have the manufacturing base to recover with. Even if we get our own house in order (which we probably won't), we'll have to rebuild our industrial base. It can be done, of course. Nazi German did it during the 1930s after reaching an economic nadir much worse than what we are presently facing. At least we hope we won't face the economic hardships that Germany suffered in the wake of World War One. There are no guarantees on this score, however. If our government continues to do everything wrong, as it appears determined to do, we may hit absolute bottom before waking up. But there's a lot more to the "New World Order" plans than meet the eye. So far, it appears that it was intended to be a perpetual orgy of capital expansion with abundant cake, circuses, and glut for all a frenzied quest for a global super-consumption. This was the banker and capitalist dream. But there was something else that many have forgotten about. The global capitalist feeding frenzy based on perpetual growth and capital accumulation was destined to fail from the outset. The world's entire population cannot become as conspicuously and wastefully over-consumptive as Americans and the Industrialized West had become. It's clearly an impossibility. Yet that has apparently been the goal of globalism. That has been the sales pitch. But it was a fraudulent sales pitch, just to get us hooked. Rewind to the 1970s and read the literature of the global establishment with regard to the purpose of the "new international economic order" that was being planned. Pridger has a few books which spell out the problems and the proposed solutions. These aren't works by conspiracy theorists, but establishment works. One is Socialism and the International Economic Order, by Elisabeth L. Tamedly (1969). Another is RIO, Reshaping the International Order, "A Report to the Club of Rome, which was submitted to the United Nations" (1976). Another is North-South, "A Program for Survival The Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues under the Chairmanship of Willy Brandt" (1980). These are just a sampling, of course. But they illuminate the real long-term goals of the New World Order from the "reputable establishment" perspective. To put it in a nutshell: (1) World Government and a borderless world, (2) Radically downsize the consumptive habits of the "haves" of the prosperous nations of the "North" and "West," (3) Enforced equitable sharing of the wealth with the "have nots" of the "South" and "East." In other words, in spite of the corporate feeding frenzy of multi-national capitalists of the last few decades, the goal is global government and an end to the conspicuous consumption that we have come to know as the "American way of life." What these sources do not reveal is the real powers that will rule under a global government. They seem to intimate that there will be something democratic about it the United Nations being both the executive and parliamentary arms of world government. Yet, it is obvious that whatever changes occur in the way nations and the world are governed, there is always one thing that will remain unchanged. The money power and the central bankers. They will still be there in the same capacity they are now, dictating how money, credit resources, and ultimately all resources, are allocated. The banking money power will not be alone of course. There will still be those international corporations that have grown up around it. And these corporations will not only provide their own form of global governance, but they will provide everything we need for survival every life-sustaining morsel of food, and every little tinker toy we require. They will, as they already do, provide the mega-systems that sustain us and make life bearable, no matter how low our collective living standards must decline. John Q. Pridger Sunday, 22 February, 2009 THE DEBT SNOWBALL IS THE BIGGER PROBLEM Today's debt snowball is tomorrow's inflation snowball. Everybody seems to know this, but our so-called representatives don't seem to have any idea as to how to stop either one. Right now cutting taxes is a great imperative to stimulating the economy. The only perceived solution is to flood the economy with more debt dollars, more debt, and to get credit flowing again, in order to get businesses working and people spending as profusely and unwisely as possible. Nothing could be any more irrational than to create larger debts in order to buy our way out of what is essentially already a bad debt crisis. This is fixing the economy today by killing it tomorrow, using the same poison that got us into the present fix. Debt service payments aren't going to come due a hundred years from now, they're already here. We make installments on it on a pay as you go basis, always borrowing more to make the payments. Ongoing service of the the public debt was essentially the rationale behind income tax in the first place. As we grossly expand the principle with deficit spending, the interest due expands, and interest on the public debt is one of the few non-discretionary items in the annual budget. And it will soon surpass our ability to pay it. It will consume every tax dollar and more. Yet our leaders are cutting taxes as they are piling on more debt! This simply won't work! In other words, we're still on a trajectory toward total financial melt down. Pridger wonders when the Obama administration and Congress will wake up to the fact that you can't put a fire out with oxygen and gasoline. John Q. Pridger SPEAKING OF "HOPE AND CHANGE" When Obama was land-slidded into office on the slogan of "Hope and Change," few had any ideal what he meant by "change" or what, exactly, his "hope" was. He never really told us. As Pridger has pontificated often enough, presidents are "chosen," by forces not readily apparent, for a reason. Somebody had a plan, and Obama was the man (one of the too final contenders), they figured could be trust to preside over the changes they intended to make. Immediately, because of his appointees, we found that Obama was not for the sort of change we'd hoped he might bring. In fact, it became clear (as some of us knew all along), that we really didn't know who Barack Obama really is, or what was behind his meteoric rise to national prominence. Events, of course, have taken charge. And like president Bush before him, Obama has been placed into a position where he is forced to take drastic measures that he may not have previously imagined. The crisis is so acute, that there is no time to think carefully or reflect. No time to attempt to figure out the root causes. Something major must be done at once NOW right or wrong. Obama, like Bush, had to DO SOMETHING! Even if it's wrong! And do it NOW! This isn't the time to think! Once the action is taken, there's no turning back. The president is committed. He may end up a great hero, or he might end up like president Bush. But the machinery continues in the direction in which it was massively launched, for better or worse. Obama came into office in a financial crisis, and the roadmap to salvation was immediately placed before him. Secretary of Treasury, Paulson (banker), had mapped a strategy out for Bush and the "bankers" at Treasury and Federal Reserve are still doing the mapping. Not the representatives of the people. Not statesmen, or men of political science, but bankers. All an eleven hundred pages of spending need from Congress is a rubber stamp. And that's what they do as they did with the previous TARP (spell that TRAP) bill. $350 Billion immediately evaporated in the twinkling of an eye soaked up by bankers. Where did it go? The bankers aren't telling. The public might find it disturbing. It's like a crude joke, "Gotcha covered! With the TARP! And, later, "Gotcha! In a TRAP!" Ha, ha, ha! The first item at hand, of course, was to save the big banks and other financial interests institutions that had already demonstrated their criminally negligent nature. But it had to be done. There's little doubt about that, because our whole economy is predicated on a crooked financial, banking, and monetary system. To do anything else but support it at this critical time would spell total and immediate disaster. Nobody wants to crash right now. Better glide on and maybe have a soft and safe landing in the middle of the Hudson River. Miracles like that aren't likely to repeat themselves. The conspiracy theorist, of course, must ask, "Did this economic crisis actually arise by accident or oversight? Or was it made, or allowed, to happen to facilitate certain radical "changes" certain forces "hope" to implement? Maybe something like a "global solution" which would finally fulfill their (not our), long held aspirations for world government a more seamless, easily controlled, New World Order than what had thus far been cobbled together? It's pretty difficult to believe that the smartest people in the world didn't see the crisis building and stop it at a safe distance from the brick wall. A lot of other people have seen it coming and have been warning of it for decades. Why were these many timely warnings totally ignored if not by careful design? If the world's great powers are as smart as they certainly must be, we cannot avoid seeing evidence of some very perverse "intelligent design" in what is happening. As FDR once famously said, "Nothing in politics happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
Obama didn't come to office by accident. Though McCain certainly was in the running and amenable to the powers that run the world, Obama got the prize. He got the prize because he was the favorite of the two, and conveniently caught the public's fancy. Look at all the money that miraculously came into his campaign. Look at the extraordinarily favorable media coverage he enjoyed. Look at the crises that arrived "just in time." Pridger suspects that this train wreck we're in was a carefully orchestrated act of sabotage, and Obama (who is otherwise blameless), is marching obediently to the right drummers. But we're only in the first act of this particular play. A lot of things could happen. We can still hope for a less than totally disastrous and tragic end to the show. John Q. Pridger
Saturday, 21 February, 2009 RACE RELATIONS IN AMERICA AREN'T SO GOOD Ironically, with our first African-American president and attorney general firmly installed in office, the nation is just as far from inter-racial harmony as it has ever been. The professional Black "victim-hood" leadership stands ever-ready to spit in Whitey's face at less than the drop of a hat. "Whitey," of course, is the one who (in spite of strong lingering racial biases and prejudices, which he is generally eager to suppress in the name of justice, and a hope for harmony), had not only finally extended to the black race the benefits of full citizenship and true equality under the law. In fact, Whitey went on to give the black man generous welfare subsidies and special Affirmative Action programs, to give him a leg up. Whitey even helped elect the nation's first black president. Blacks have learned a lot from their (former?) Jewish friends, who helped organize the NAACP (established in 1909), and shepherded the Civil Rights movement. One of the most important lessons Black leaders have learned is that the best defense in a social battle or a cultural war, is a vigorous offense. The idea is to pick up on the least hint of a bias or racism and attack the messenger with a vengeance. Thus Al Sharpton's hoopla over the New York Post's recent chimpanzee cartoon. The Bolshevik and Frankfurt School "system" known as "critical theory," is at the heart of this tactic, and collegiate "political correctness" is a child of all of this. The ACLU (established in 1917) is an allied civil rights organization which carries on a cultural war at various levels within the United States, including being "influential in the evolution of Constitutional law." The art of the smear is an effective critical theory tactic. The press and major media is usually readily amenable to lending itself to this end always in as "objective" and "unbiased" way as possible. The smear entails either subtle or harsh criticism of the messenger and carefully deflect attention from any possible "truth" or "value" in the message. The idea is to intimidate, humiliate, and cow the opposition not just the offending individual or "group" but the entire race (white race, in this case). Both of these civil rights organizations (NAACP and ACLU), have accomplished a lot of good things during their history, but overall, their goal has been less about defeating institutionalized injustice than the wholesale transformation of what might be called American social and political culture itself, along with the de facto negation of the will of the majority on several levels beyond matters of civil rights and justice for all. The danger, in what has been happening in our society in this respect, is that there is a large and growing, and increasingly angry, "silent minority." And this silent minority actually represents the majority. The danger is that, in the fullness of time, there is always reaction to action. Of course, there is also a not-so-silent minority that insists on venting the full extent of its resentment, anger, and outrage. And this segment of the minority is the explosive element that will probably trigger the inevitable blow-back, once there is widespread distress, suffering, and fear in the broader society, whatever the cause. This element, naturally, is evident in a variety of "radical organizations" of both the political right and left but mostly the right, since the broader "liberal left" is generally part of the problem they see and seek to address. These groups and organizations (never as well organized as the "legitimate left"), on multiple web-sites usually of the variety that are categorized by the left as "hate groups." The most active and effective of these are the under careful scrutiny of such organizations as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which maintains a "watch list," which can be found on its web site at: http://www.adl.org/, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), also maintains a roster of "hate groups" with a nice interactive map to assist you in finding a group near you. These so-called hate groups include everything from neo-nazis, KKK groups, to simple white nationalist groups such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, where no hate is articulated or intended. But there are many individuals throughout white society who do not belong to any "group" who do not hesitate to vent their anger and frustration. An example is seen in the post below, found on a regional forum based in Pridger's neck of the woods. Apparently the writer lives in the New Orleans area.
The "black Preacher" mentioned was probably the Rev. Al Sharpton, in reference to the NYP cartoon controversy mentioned in the previous post below. One such Forum post by one unhappy camper undoubtedly represents the "true," but suppressed, feelings of thousands of others. For every person who is outspoken on such subjects, a thousand cheer in the dark background. In other words, a potential race war is simmering right alongside the boiling economic crisis. This is truly lamentable, since harmony is always better than conflict. But conflict, in the form of blow-back, is building. And, equally lamentable, is that the economic conditions in this country are threatening to get ripe for serious social unrest. Everybody seems to sense it. President Obama has painted a surprisingly bleak picture with regard to the economy and our banking system, which the Stock Market (for one), has not found very reassuring. Fear is building like a snowball beginning to roll down hill and there is a growing public perception that our present efforts at economic recovery are wide of the track, if not 100% off track. There is a relief value available that could defuse the growing, double pronged, crisis (i.e., social and economic). Honest, interest free, government issued, money. Obama has floated the "nationalization of banking" balloon. It didn't fly. But he has yet to mention "nationalization of the Federal Reserve System" and our own money supply. That should be the first step toward national sanity. No matter how inflationary massive issues of fiat greenbacks (U.S. Notes), might be, it would be nothing compared to the ultimate results of issuing Trillions of DEBT dollars. What is happening now with the issue of Trillions of Federal Reserve money and it's companion "debt-plus-interest" whipping tail, is nothing short of criminally obscene certain to lead us to total economic collapse. John Q. Pridger Thursday, 19 February, 2009 CHIMP CARTOON OUTRAGES THE BLACK WHITE-BAITERS The New York Post has been forced to apologize for Sean Delonas' seemingly tasteless cartoon, associating the architects of the Obama's Stimulus package with a chimpanzee.
Does the chimp in the above cartoon look like President Obama? Or does it more closely resemble the predominately white Democratic Congress, which has "viciously attacked" the taxpayer with a monster pork bill masquerading as an Economic Stimulus bill? (This in the context of recent news stories) Al Sharpton thinks it looks like Obama. Shame on you Al! The uproar over this cartoon demonstrates just how touchy and ready to pounce the black-victimhood leadership is when it comes to petty matters of simple poor taste and bad judgment. Al Sharpton didn't hesitate. He jumped with joy and apparent outrage, taking to the national stage to declare, in no uncertain terms... What? That he and many of his race associate themselves and Barack Obama with the chimpanzee! It jumps right out and grabs them. It's obvious! They have taken up the faded drum of the otherwise fairly well forgotten "monkey" racial stereotype jab. How many times have you seen caricatures of George Bush that resemble a monkey's face? Plenty. But there has never been an outcry. We merely chuckle at them. The chimp in the above cartoon doesn't in the least resemble a human much less President Obama. It resembles the pet chimpanzee that had, a day before, viciously attacked a lady and was then shot by police officers. The message is that the "Stimulus package" (written by white Democrats), is perceived as a viciously attack against taxpayers. Apparently this is the way the Stock Market sees it too! Everybody gives Obama an 'A' for his concerted heroic effort to get "something big" passed. We won't know for some time whether Congress succeeded in making a monkey out of him too. One would have thought Al and his cohorts (if they were actually about racial harmony), would have been further ahead by simply laughing it off for what it was, rather than rushing onto the offensive. The Post, its editors, and the cartoonist, clearly should have known better run this cartoon. It was a dumb thing to do at this point in our history. But the fact is, they probably actually imagined we were beyond this sort of "extreme" racial stereotyping foolishness. Had they seen the same racial context that Al Sharpton does, they would not have dared to run the cartoon. They would have known it would bring Al out onto the warpath, causing them much embarrassment. The Post may be a tabloid, but it isn't a politically courageous tabloid. It wouldn't have run the cartoon had the editors had the least thought it would offend African-Americans. But, to put it harshly, they simply didn't think. They were blinded by their own cleverness. They obviously imagined that we, as a society, had finally grown up enough to see this cartoon in the light it was undoubtedly intended. The New Yorker Magazine had a very similar experience with one of their covers some months ago. The whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, but nonetheless it points out the fact that we are a long way from living together in total multi-racial harmony. The Post fell into the Don Imus trap. You can't (at least white people can't), joke about things that could in any way be considered racially touchy. Even if you are white, you've got to see things as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would see them. Familiarity breeds not only contempt, but vigorous attacks over trifles. In other words, the message to whites is, "be a coward," and cow-tow avoid anything that can, by any stretch of the imagination, be construed as offensive to very, VERY, SENSITIVE parties and those individuals who make their living by being sensitivity attack dogs (NOTE: Not intended as a racial slur, nor a disparagement of man's best friend!) So there is little wonder that most whites can be perceived as cowards when it comes to racial matters. Not being totally cowardly invites charges of insensitivity, if not crass racism or some other sort of phobia. Evidence of the least bias is dangerous. Racial pride is taboo for whites. It's considered evidence of racist hatred. So, the divide between the races especially whites and blacks continues unabated even though we've installed the nation's very first black president and attorney general. Don Imus got in trouble by trying to talk about backs like blacks do about themselves. Ouch! A public speaker can't address a minority audience as "you people" without being put down as a racist. Pridger raised the ire of a black shipmate once by exclaiming, "Boy! You did a great job on that!" The black guy, a literal "gorilla" of a man, glowered threatening and replied, "Who you calling 'boy' motha'f----r?" He was conditioned by the black victim "paranoia cadre" to find the word "boy" offensive. Pridger wasn't calling him "boy," of course, but merely using the common exclamation, meaning "gee!" or "wow!" Pridger should have said, "Man! You did a great job on that!" Or, to be perfectly adult and contemporary (in language he could have appreciated and positively identified with) "Shee-it man! You did a motha'f-----n' great job on that!" Speaking of shipboard life we once had something called a "niggerhead" on the anchor windless and cargo winches. That had been its name for a hundred years or more. We had to revert to the alternative name, "gypsyhead." But that was judged politically incorrect too. So, we started simply calling it a "winch." Then we started getting female seamen, or sea-ladies, on the ships, and it turned out they were offended when we used a word that sounded like "wench." Now we simply call it, "that thing we wrap lines or wires around to pull in or take a strain with." Unfortunately, this is the "group identity" that black "pop culture" has actively cultivated with the active help of white liberals, recording companies, and the entertainment industry, of course. This negative culture has developed and multiplied itself times ever since the "Civil Rights" era. So much so that large segments of white youth are attracted to the culture in order to be "cool." And, surprisingly, responsible blacks have been very slow to criticize and stem the floods that have produced the "new" loud, and in-you-face, yet unarticulated, negative racial stereotypes. The cowardice, of which attorney general Eric Holder has spoken, isn't so much actual cowardice as a simple and understandable desire to live within a comfort zone without fear of inadvertently offending anybody, or be offended by anybody else. And Black leaders like Al Sharpton take care to make sure "blacks" are the most easily offended people imaginable. And if they are offended, they are "expected" to speak up loudly, whereas whites are expected to bite their lip and be cool. That's why we, whites and blacks, continue to "voluntarily segregate" ourselves. Amazingly enough, there are still a lot of ordinary white people that don't like to have their children and families around groups that talk loudly and place "Shee-it" or "motherf-----r" in every sentence. They don't like to hear them calling one another by the "N-word" especially since that word has been adjudged a taboo "hate word" for them. The traditional old Anglo-Saxon pejoratives and blasphemies were quite bad enough. At least they were usually spaced out in such a way as to make them more powerful when used. But that isn't the only reason, of course "groups" always segregate themselves. That's simply what groups do. And it doesn't matter whether the groups are racial, religious, national, sexual, or members of sports teams. That's just how the world works, and always will. Not only does the lamb refrain from lying with the lion, but the lion tends to group into "prides" that do not infringe on the territory of other prides. Lions don't associate with tigers either. Horses run in herds of horses rather than cattle and buffalo. After all is said and done, Al Sharpton and his friends are demanding stringent "self-censorship" of the media, when it comes to anything that might potentially offend blacks. This is the very same sort of irrational little "freedom of expression" fire-storm that was set off by European newspapers publishing cartoons satirizing the Prophet Mohammad. John Q. Pridger THE RACIAL CONUNDRUM Referring to American African slaves, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote:
These "indelible lines of distinction" between the races obviously remain to this day, in spite of the monumental strides we've made toward equality under the law. The only thing that has changed in this outlook since 1791 is that Jefferson was proven wrong, we have no choice but to live in the same country, under the same government. Clearly, we're all here together for the duration. Either we live in harmony or in continuing discord. Harmony is far superior to discord. But there can be no harmony when only African-Americans (and other minorities), can be racially sensitive and white Americans, who are still the majority, have to adapt to it or else! There has never been a nation in the history of the world where minorities did not have to adapt to, or somehow accommodate, the majority culture either by culturally assimilating or by segregating themselves, or some combination of the two. From the Emancipation Proclamation through the Civil Rights era, the former slaves and their descendents sought to assimilate into the culture of the nation in which they found themselves. The overwhelming majority of them sought to behave well and get ahead as best they could. And many of them did do very well. Though many struggled on in the most dire poverty (as did may whites), literally all of them knew the dignity of at least earning their own way in the world. In fact, as a race, the black people succeeded admirably well, throughout the entire period of institutionalized discrimination and Jim Crow, through their very own efforts, raising their own businesses, industries, and institutions. There was a whole parallel black society and culture with the unique cultural attributes that perhaps made it richer in many ways than the mainline, increasingly materialist, culture of the white folks. It was both less materialistic, and necessarily less prosperous, and thus viewed as "second-class" citizenship. But those finally became known as the "bad old says." Ironically, things changed for the worse, rather than better, with the advent of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the positive influences of such men as George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington began to be displaced with the culture of victim-hood. After that such men increasingly became known as "Uncle Toms." But the culture of victimhood did not become complete until the Civil Rights era.
The entire purpose of the Civil Rights movement was to eliminate institutionalized discrimination so that African-Americans could begin to integrate into the broader society and compete on more equal terms. From the Civil Rights era on, when they had finally attained full citizenship, suffrage, and equality under the law, a whole new black culture began to evolve, setting it increasingly apart from and alienating more and more of the white mainstream. The phenomena of blacks abandoning Christianity for Islam became a significant symptom of this. This was open rebellion against everything "culturally" American. The concurrent advent and ascendancy of the welfare state, and race-based Affirmative Action laws, greatly exacerbated the trend, insuring inevitable and increasing divide and increased resentment on both sides of the color divide. To be fair, this abandonment of culture was not confined to the black community. The white counter-cultural movement, which developed just about the time of Civil Rights, set a bad example to both white and black youth. Heavy metal and acid rock music were aesthetically more atrocious than the rap that black gangsters have come up with. But the hate-filled language of the latter has shocked us all, prompting us to ask ourselves, "What on God's Earth has been unleashed?" Some good, and some bad, came of both movements. But most of the beatniks and the hippies that followed in great numbers (who didn't get rich at it, or at least find a way to make it pay), grew out of it in time, and returned to a (much loosened), cultural fold whereas a discouraging percentage of blacks have continued to stray toward the proverbial jungle. Two Americas remained, with worse overall relations than before. At same time black culture broke down and essentially broke in two those who made it, eventually producing the first black president, and those who not only stayed behind, but have been sinking lower. There are perhaps more black single mothers than married ones. Thus an alarming percentage of black children are raised without fathers. Nonetheless, black women are doing much better educationally, and financially, than their men folk a third of whom, it is said, are either in prison, going to prison, or on parole. John Q. Pridger THE LYNCH CULTURE The lynching of blacks by whites is a stain on our history that almost equals that of the era of chattel slavery itself. We're rightly repentant about both barbaric practices. But a second look at things may put those "bad old days" in perspective. Lamentably, may innocent blacks were lynched, but most were probably guilty. But worst of all were those that were ritualistically barbaric and cruel public vengeance, whether the condemned were innocent or guilty of a capital crime. There can never be any justification for such things, yet humans of all races have been guilty of equally atrocious behavior throughout history. Of course, we cannot omit the fact that whites lynched whites too, and a lot more of them than blacks during some periods. Most of them were probably guilty too. But enter the inconvenient and uncomfortable truths about our more civilized present. Whites no longer lynch blacks or whites either one. But the crimes of murder and rape are at all time highs. And who is doing most of it? We frequently hear of white on black "hate crimes" that sometimes includes rape and murder, but there is many more rapes and murders of whites by blacks (black on white crime), than the other way around. Whites are hardly in the running. But, by far, the lion's share of murders and rapes in this country are black on black crimes. The annual numbers of combined lynchings and murders of blacks and whites in the "bad old days" pall by comparison with today's shocking numbers. In other words, when we look at the crime statistics of both races today, it becomes clear that we're all in a lot more danger of being murdered, and women being raped, than in former, more "lawless" times. Whites are in more danger of being killed or raped, and blacks are at several times more risk than whites and much more at risk than were their ancestors in the hay day of lynching. Blacks are killing blacks at rates many times higher than whites ever killed blacks. But mention of black on white crime is more or less politically incorrect, and seldom treated as a hate crime. "What we can't say about black-on-white crime," By Selwyn Duke © 2009 Posted: December 11, 2007 (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/...ARTICLE_ID=59129) This is a sad story. John Q. Pridger "A NATION OF COWARDS" HERE WE GO AGAIN! Eric Holder, our first black attorney general, has signaled that his Justice Department will be more active on civil rights issues as if that needed to be the first issue to bring up as the first black "top cop" in the first black presidential administration. Holder seems to have the same sort of foot-in-mouth problem that our nation's first black surgeon general, Joslyn Elder, brought to her office. Some of her early constructive suggestions included her belief that children should be taught to masturbate and encouraged to experiment with alternate sex acts styles. Dr. Elder also weighed in on such health issues such as gun control, saying that we needed make "safer bullets." Speaking of safer bullets, a bill to require federal firearms licensing has been one of the first rattles out of Obama's box. This opening salvo in a war against American gun owners. is: H.R. 45: Blair Holt's Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009, introduced by Illinois Democratic Congressman, Bobby Rush. Well, if we wondered what kind of change an Obama administration would bring, we're beginning to get a few hints. It's beginning to look like another Clinton presidency complete with Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State. Ironically, Clinton was frequently referred to as our "first black president." Bill Clinton, of course, was the president who actually did a little alternative sex experimentation right in the Oval Office. It was "alternative" enough to provide cover for his claim that he "did not have sex with that woman," posing such legalistic conundrums as "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." We recall one of the most significant escapades of Clinton's Justice Department, staring Janet Reno the very first lady attorney general. That, of course, was the classic paramilitary attack on the Branch Dividian church compound outside of Waco, Texas resulting in the deaths of some ATF agents, and the incineration of some eighty men, women, and children.
It appears Holder isn't satisfied with the progress this nation has made with regard to race relations, and would like to see whites and blacks putting racial quotas on all their social activities, and perhaps hugging each other up in true loving brotherhood on any and all occasions. Equally under the law, in the work place, and in the public domain are not enough. We need to be prompted, or perhaps required, to get together socially a lot more than we do. We're cowards if we don't. Perhaps black and white families should be required to exchange children at birth in order to shore up our social courage and shed our racial biases. Perhaps spouses should be exchanged more too, to facilitate similar ends. It seems Holder, who is light enough to "pass" for an Egyptian, must have suffered from acute feelings of racial exclusion during his life. Maybe he wasn't invited to all the birthday parties of his white playmates, or to all the parties and weddings of his business and political associates. Perhaps Holder simply wishes he was white. He can't exactly become white, but at least, as attorney general, he hopes to be able to make a difference, transforming national social cowardice to profiles in courage. Pridger admits that he must not only be a coward, but a coward of the first degree. There's not a single black man, woman, or child in his whole family. There isn't any on the farm or even in the neighborhood. Pridger, though he has associated with blacks professionally, and even had a couple of black friends at a couple of points in his life, at this point in time doesn't even know any black people. He's even neglected to try to find any black friends to invite over on social occasions. That might make him a craving coward. In fact, the whole county Pridger lives in must be populated with cowards, since there's only about two or three black families to be found in the entire county. And he has a sneaking suspicion that most of the people around here don't go out of their way to invite blacks to their social gatherings. Most are as cowardly as Pridger. What's more, if Pridger moved to a city, he'd probably seek out a safe "white" neighborhood. And he'd do this even if there were "safe" black neighborhoods. He'd want his children to go to predominately, or preferably "lily white," schools. If he went to church, he'd probably go to a "white" church. He is a drinker, so Pridger would definitely patronize mostly white drinking establishments.
Pridger has more confessions to make. He didn't vote for Barack Obama, and one of the reasons was that it appeared that he was getting a huge, mysterious, and grossly unfair, leg up in the campaign "simply because he was black." A white carbon copy of Obama, perhaps with a name like Thomas Jefferson, wouldn't have got to first base much less one with a name like Adolf Schmitt. Of course, Pridger wasn't about to vote for McCain either, but race had nothing to do with that. Now that the Obama is installed in the White House, and his administration has taken shape, it has become much more obvious than during the campaign that he does not represent the kind of change this country needs. He may seem like a very nice guy, but he has obviously packed his administration with the wrong kind of people to bring positive change most particularly to the domestic political and economic landscape. He might be a few degrees better than a President McCain, but it certainly appears that he isn't going to be good for the nation. At least not the one we wanted to restore. With an attorney general who obviously has some heavy racial blocks on his shoulders, and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, we're in for plenty of trouble. One of Obama's very first appointments was Rahm Emanuel, as chief of staff. That was a very good leading indicator of what the Obama administration had in store for us. These are shade of the change we can expect in the future. The Obama Nation is already looking frightfully like an abomination. John Q. Pridger Wednesday, 18 February, 2009 TOTALLY MISSING THE POINT One thing our current economic problems should make obvious is that there are some fundamental flaws in the current industrial and financial capitalist model. But almost nobody in Washington is addressing them yet.
No sooner had President Obama signed the $787 Billion "Economic Stimulus Package" legislation to save and create jobs, than the auto companies announced job cuts as it petitioned for a few more billions. General Motors and Chrysler need another $14 Billion to carry them for a couple more months. General Motors proudly presented a restructuring plan that includes cutting some 47,000 jobs and eliminating five North American plants. This 47,000 represents 19% percent of GM's 244,000 workers. Five plants represent 13% percent of its present 38 plants. It seems to Pridger that this would be the time to cut back rather than cut out. The government's goal is to save jobs not cut them at this crucial time. The auto companies may need to downsize because of the present lack of demand for new cars, but it shouldn't be cutting back on workers. This is the time to go, at least temporarily, to the four day work week. This would effectively be a 20% reduction in both capacity and labor costs. Cutting workers' pay by cutting their work week from 40 to 32 hours would be much better than laying off 47,000 workers. It would also cut production proportionately. The big "problem" of modern industrial capitalism has always been one of overproduction. Both speed and efficiency have been the gods of industrial capitalists since before the mass production line was first invented. The goal of productive efficiency has always been the elimination of workers rather than just the elimination excessive labor per worker as it should have been. There should have been a happy medium which would have provided jobs for the maximum number of workers at the least possible "labor" balanced, of course, against the need for profitability of the business owners and the potential of the market for the products. As long as machinery and production technologies helped ease the burden of workers without eliminating most of them, they were beneficial to the overall good of the nation. But when automation began eliminating too many workers, there came a point where modern efficiencies become destructive to the overall body of the people. Of course any arguments in favor of less efficiency in order to preserve jobs in order to approximate a goal such as "full employment," is derided as totally counterproductive, backward, Luddism. But full employment is clearly more desirable than high unemployment, and high employment in actual wealth production is better than higher employment in government and service jobs which do not produce wealth. After all, the ultimate in modern efficiency for an automaker like GM would be realized when each of its huge factory complexes could be operated by a couple of technicians sitting at computer consoles 76 technicians, and armies of robots, doing the work of 243,998 former workers. This should not be the model or goal of any large industrial corporation. And it would be totally counter productive in the end, for 76 technicians and those armies of robots would not buy very many new GM cars. Nor would 243,998 unemployed workers, or even that many hamburger flippers. Of course, tooling up with massive computerized systems and robots doesn't come cheap, and would hardly be economically feasible under the "pay as you go, and expand on savings," business model which once constrained business expansion. But under our financial capitalist system, where easy and cheap credit is almost infinitely available for big corporations, these systems can be easily financed and amortized and depreciated over a relatively short period of time as long as the financial system and economy are working well, of course (which obviously isn't the case right now!). The traditional illusion has been that for every job lost to factory automation and innovation, another job would be created in the technical and "smart" sectors of the economy. And, of course, somebody has to build the computer systems and robots. But modern business practice, aided and abetted by errant government policy, programs, and subsidies, has generally opted to have most of the productive work done elsewhere. As a matter of fact, in the 1980s, because of our government's free trade, New World Order, policies, we embarked on the de-industrialization of the economy. We were to transform into a "service" and "knowledge worker" economy. And nobody (at least not in Washington), thought to ask who was going to pay them, provide them with health insurance, and with retirement packages. Incredibly, in the face of today's economic crisis, there are still "experts" and politicians warning against an attempt to become economically self-reliant again, saying our future is in our expertise and knowledge rather than nuts and bolts production failing to ask that same question. Who pays the help, and how? The residual industrial producers were supposed to become more export oriented. This was a cruel "hope joke." Export industries are generally "cheap labor" industries. The workers are not the consumers of their own production, thus their wages and benefits are costs to be cut at every opportunity, as efficiency is maximized. This is doubly the case where a high market, such as ours, exports into poorer global markets. Global pricing of both production and labor become governing factors in export industries. In the modern industrial capitalist economy, it became very easy for industrialists to forget that providing jobs for workers is just as important as finding buyers for their production. Our own government played a major role in helping to obliterate the connection between the worker and the consumption of his production as being part of the same body of economic machinery. In this, we have missed the point so wide, and for so long, that putting our economic Humpty Dumpty back together again will now be a real problem. And it will be impossible if we don't get the underlying fundamentals fixed, i.e., through monetary reform, and the adoption of some sort of cohesive, American-friendly, national economic policy. John Q. Pridger
OBAMA OFF TO A BAD START Stop the Democratic Suicide, by Michael Lind
Will Obama listen to people like Michael Lind and Dennis Kucinich? Not if his staff, cabinet, and most trusted advisors, have any say in it. Oh, hum. The train seems to continue on track for a great train wreck. If Democrats are committing suicide, it's because they see that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel and are intend on getting there. And when the train wrecks we'll all be in it. John Q. Pridger Tuesday, 17 February, 2009 THE SLIPPERY SLOPE OF SOCIALISM In the wake of the various bailout and stimulus packages, many observers are warning that the nation is "in danger" of entering onto the slippery slope of Socialism. But we first got on that slippery slope during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. We got much higher on the slippery slope with the advent and expansion of the welfare state during the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. The growing nanny state was on autopilot during the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations. It appears to be going onto steroids under Barack Obama. We've been slipping down at an accelerating clip for a long time. Now we are merely reaping the whirlwind of decades of irresponsible public policies that essentially required Congress to totally abandon both Constitutional governance and fiscal responsibility. It would be impossible to have a viable, functional, and sustainable socialist form of government under our Constitution. The Constitution had to be largely ignored in order to get us to where we are today. And here we are. This said, there is nothing absolutely evil in Socialism itself. It's merely incompatible with our concept of "limited government," and the notion that "government is best that governs the least." A "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" can just as easily be socialist as strictly benign and strictly limited in scope. But socialism cannot function or be viable under the type of monetary system that we have today either. No system can long survive under the monetary system we have today. It's literally impossible. And this goes for capitalism too. Neither system no system at all! could work for very long having to borrow every single dollar of money used to fund it from bankers. It's totally absurd to even contemplate it. Just as Soviet Communism was bound to collapse, so is our capitalist system bound to collapse. The slippery slope is not socialism. It's compounding debt! Regardless of what kind of a political system a nation has, it will fail if it has to borrow to exist, borrow to grow, borrow to expand business, borrow to expand social services, borrow to survive, and borrow to pay the debts incurred by all the borrowing. This is only common sense. John Q. Pridger
CAN WE TRUST OUR GOVERNMENT TO MANAGE OUR MONEY SUPPLY? The answer that question is an emphatic "NO!" of course. Our so-called representatives, have proven over and over again, for a hundred years, that they cannot be trusted to run either the country, come up with rational economic policy, or balance a budget. They went out of their way to relinquish their most important responsibilities to the people when they passed the Federal Reserve Act, leaving a private banking cartel to issue our currency and manage the nation's credit for its own profit. Then, our so-called representatives, once they were finally convinced that debt and credit could be infinitely expanded forever, and they had become "comfortable" with it, proceeded willy-nilly to bankrupt the entire nation, screwing up the rest of the world on the way. Not a very good track record. But now that government the very one that has made such a mess of everything is charged with the grand task of "rescuing the national economy." And it is attempting to do so through a monumental expansion of our already monumentally obscene debt. This is an impossible thing on the face of it. Yet, nor can we trust bankers, as our so-called representative have been doing "completely and implicitly" since 1913! And look where it has got us! We can't ride herd over the bankers. We can't inspect their books, scrutinize their plans, nor vote them out of office. Amazingly, not even Congress can do these things. We, as citizens, literally have no recourse against the international bankers nor the Federal Reserve System to which they are firmly wed. So, in the end, we are back to putting our faith in our so-called representatives in Congress. If this is either a democracy or a constitutional republic, this remains the only rational option, in spite of the long history of betrayal we have seen. We've got to ride herd over them and watch them like hawks again, and demand that they actually act in the public interest something they haven't done in many decades. Of course, there isn't much hope. Our leaders seem to be totally committed to the bankers. So much so that no questions are being asked about those particular bankers who have managed our money and credit for the last 94 years. And the first "businesses" to be bailed out by their extraordinary TARP program were the most crooked, cooked book, big bankers, "hedge fund" managers, and a crooked insurance giant. TARP was a program engineered by bankers for bankers. It wasn't done by the so-called representatives of the people. Congress merely allowed itself to be bullied and rushed into rubber-stamping it. The same in the case of Obama's economic rescue plan, which he signed this morning, though this one is more of a political plan rather than a banker plan. We're looking at at least a half a dozen Trillion increase in the national debt as the result of these various "bailout and recovery plans." Half a dozen isn't a very large number, of course. But obviously we're getting to that stage where, when we refer to Billions, we're talking of dozens and when we speak of Trillions, we speak of them in the half dozens. This stage of our national "economic development" cannot be anything less than a significant threshold, beyond which is some sort of doom. All of these Trillions are money that will be dumped into the global economy by one means or another. That, naturally, spells inflation with a capital "I". Unlike the Revolutionary "Continental Currency," Federal Reserve money is "protected" by the bankers. It's their own baby. So the phrase, "Not worth a Federal Reserve Note" will never be popularized. If we are going to have to bail out the nation at a cost that would buy it, we certainly can't afford to do it on a credit card. Trying to do so, as the Obama administration is, is nothing less than insanity! We have no choice but to start using our own money. This requires trusting Congress to make it happen and to manage the money supply. If they blow it, we can at least vote them out of office and elect a new batch. John Q. Pridger Monday, 16 February, 2009 PRESIDENTS' DAY George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the "Father of the Nation" and the "Great Emancipator" respectively, were once commemorated by two separate national holidays on their birth dates as was appropriate. Despite their most significant roles in the two most crucial periods of our nation's history, they no longer rate the national hero treatment and their wisdom is totally ignored. Our greatest presidents have been trumped, and their holidays bumped, by Martin Luther King, Jr. Any alien visiting from another planet would have to conclude that Martin Luther King, Jr., must have been both the father of the nation and the great emancipator, and thus the nation's greatest hero. So our two most esteemed presidents now enjoy 1/44th of a holiday each year sharing equal recognition with the likes of Bill J. Clinton and George W. Bush, our first "X-rated" president and our first "torture advocating" president, respectively. Having debased and down-graded the presidency over the last four presidential terms, and our own history and greatness over at least as many decades, it might be best that we set a special day aside in honor of at least our two greatest presidents, so school children will have occasion to hear their names at least once a year. Alternatively, at least reorient Presidents' Day to honor only our greatest presidents. It could be called Mount Rushmore Plus Day adding Adams, Madison, and Jackson to the names on that monument (Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln). Some would add Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, to those mentioned above, but there are problems with all of these widely celebrated presidents which takes them out of the class of those presidents mentioned. Of course, the jury has just been seated in the case of Barack Obama. He hasn't got much of a pre-administration track record to brag of, but he definitely happened onto the scene at a critical time in our history. It's certainly more critical than that which faced Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and on some levels the challenge may be similar to the one that Abe Lincoln faced particularly in the area of the need to institute monetary reform and get cash moving. He may actually have the opportunity to save the Union again and be the first great president of the 21st century. We hope he's up to the task. He'll either pull us through, or leave us in a gapping abyss. Unfortunately, so far, he's obviously responding to all the standard (wrong), string pullers right up and down the line. John Q. Pridger THE STRUGGLE AGAINST BANKS The struggle with banking interests began decades before the birth of the Nation. The Colonies had been under the thumb of the English Monarch, Parliament, and the Bank of England which denied them the right to circulate their own currency. This economic strangle hold of the Mother Country over the colonies constituted a great deal of the "taxation with representation" rationale for the Declaration of Independence. Parliament had outlawed home grown Colonial Scrip (bills of credit), which had successfully served several colonies as a medium of exchange, and without it, commerce and mercantile activity was forced suffer for a great lack of exchange. During the Revolution, of course, the Continental Congress issued and used the "bills of credit" known as Continental Currency. Unfortunately, the Continentals are most remembered today in association with the phrase, "Not worth a Continental!" a phrase banking powers have kept alive to this day as evidence that government is incompetent to create and manage its own money. It's true that Continental Currency is known best for its great loss of purchasing power during the war for Independence. But it is equally true that the war could not have been won without it. The colonists possessed precious little gold or silver, and certainly could not procure much British currency from the enemy, so Continental Currency was the only option they had. We're told that inflation ate up their purchasing power. But while it is certainly likely that the Continental Congress issued too many of them, we are seldom reminded that one of the primary causes for the flood of Continental currency was that the British government was printing and using them too. They were counterfeiting them and flooding the markets with them. It is conceivable that they printed more than the Continental Congress did. This helped them in two obvious ways. First, the British army was able to use spurious Continental Currency notes to purchase supplies from the Americans in occupied areas. And, secondly, it undermined the Continental Congress and its army's ability to purchase supplies for themselves. As more counterfeit currency was introduced by the British, the the notes lost their purchasing power. Prices rose steeply, requiring the Continental Congress to print and circulate even more Continentals in order to provide the necessary purchasing power for itself and its armies. So, "Not worth a Continental" is a deceptive measure of the success or failure of the Continental Currency. The very fact that the colonies won their freedom is more of a measure of their success of their currency. After Independence the bankers made an immediate play to capture control of the issue of money and credit. Alexander Hamilton wanted to pattern the American banking and monetary system after the English central banking system. In the mean time, the government adopted the Spanish Dollar, the Reale (also know as the "piece of eight"), as the American Standard dollar. Bankers, of course, issued their own bank notes, based on the gold and silver coin in their vaults. The power of the bankers manifested itself during the Constitutional Convention. The didn't want the government to be able to "emit bills of credit," i.e., paper currency based on the credit of the nation. The wanted gold and silver to be the only recognized money. But the loyal opposition rightly insisted that it would be absurd for the government to deny itself the sovereign right to emit bills of credit. After all, they said, all other nations retain that right, whether they use it or not. There might be times when it becomes a necessity. So there was a compromise. Congress was given the right to "coin money and regulate the value thereof, and the value of foreign coin...," States were forbidden to, "coin Money, emit Bills of Credit; Make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts..." The Constitution was totally silent on the matter of Congress's ability to emit Bills of Credit. Congress was, however, given the right "To borrow money on the credit of the United States." Security, however, for such borrowing would have to be evidence by some sort of a bond or "promise" to pay the lender. Such a bond, is in effect nothing less than a "Bill of Credit" by another name and for another purpose. As we've quoted Thomas Edison several times in the recent past, "If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good, also." The banks gained control over currency and credit nonetheless, with a few ups and downs, but always in control. But the financial emergency prompted by the Civil War was when the nation finally started emitting what were essentially Bills of Credit for the first time. These, of course, were Lincoln's greenbacks, United States Notes, which were Treasury notes essentially the same thing as a Treasury Bond, but bearing no interest, and printed in small denominations specifically to be circulated as currency. Did it cause inflation? No! In spite of everything the bankers did to undermine them, the issue of greenbacks never caused any inflation, despite much argument to the contrary. The only things that ever happened to the greenback, including it's discount against gold in the government's own dealings with bankers, was done by the bankers in their effort to totally control money. And there was never anything done that the bankers didn't manage to profit handsomely from in the end. Yet, though the managed to profit from them, they hated them, because they couldn't control their issue nor command direct interest from them. And the bankers did all they could to make sure greenbacks did not survive after the war. In spite of Lincoln's bold effort to institute a permanent honest national fiat currency, the bankers triumphed over that effort in 1863 with their National Banking Act at the very time that greenbacks were saving the Union. And they finally triumphed totally in 1913 with the Federal Reserve Act (though, under the gold and silver standards, other paper currencies, besides Federal Reserve Notes, continued to circulate for several decades longer). They didn't succeed in totally eliminating the greenback until about 1969. At that time Federal Reserve Notes finally became the only circulating paper currency being issued. The gold standard had to be abandoned in 1971, and the Federal Reserve Note became a totally fiat currency one much more toxic in nature than even a grossly mis-managed fiat greenback would have been. The Federal Reserve System has been a cancer on our economic and political body. We have now come to speak of "toxic assets," "toxic bonds," and "toxic investments", and there is no better way of describing Federal Reserve money than toxic currency. John Q. Pridger Sunday, 15 February, 2009 NUMBERS THAT BOGGLE THE MIND. FISCAL WIPE OUT? Federal obligations exceed world GDP
In other words, the TRAP we're in is mega-times worse than we have generally been led to believe. And that trap is now biting not only at our tail, but much closer to our neck. Our entire money supply is "monetized" debt all of it even during the best of "normal" times. But our present "perfect economic storm" is forcing the Fed to do the unthinkable print debt money for which there are no borrowers of the underlying Treasury bonds. Apparently the Treasury is sending the bonds to the Fed because buyers for them cannot be readily found and the Fed is creating the money anyway. In other words we are loaning bonds to our own banking agents (the Fed), and they are issuing money based on them. The technical term for this is "Monetizing the debt," which is only a little different from what we do anyway. As Mr. Corci says:
Our foreign creditors are getting nervous. And as we continue to print money in ever-greater amounts, they will undoubtedly get much more nervous. Actually, it appears we're getting pretty close to printing non-debt bearing fiat money, since interest rates have just about reached zero. Unfortunately, however, we are still obliged to carry them on our books as debt, because we are still going through the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve bankers will get their cut. Now, since we are already effectively doing the unthinkable, why not do it in an honest, forthright, and constitutional, way one that will not leave the public liable to debts that have to be repaid to the bankers? Why isn't the Treasury simply printing greenbacks and so Congress can spend them into circulation? And, of course, we could then begin satisfying government debt obligations without always incurring more and higher debt in the process. As Edison so aptly said, "If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good, also." John Q. Pridger AMERICA IS FOR SALE EXPO 2009 BEIJING, PEOPLES' REPUBLIC OF CHINA Yep! The world's largest debtor nation is up for sale to the highest bidder, and has been for a long time. But with the busted real estate, and tens of thousands of bank repos now on the market, it's boom time for those who have the money. And the Chinese have plenty of it. The Chinese are going to come over here and begin snapping up bargain real estate assets, right and left. They know there isn't a better place to put their excess American dollars than American real estate and other American assets. Check it out at http://www.aifsexpo.com/! No! It's not a sex site! It actually stands for "America is For Sale Exposition." And it's no joke. This is so incredibly ironic that it's literally laughable, considering what our relations with Communist China were just a few short decades ago. Just think of the multiple billions of dollars, and tens of millions of lives, squandered during our "Cold War" battles with the communist giant of Asia! Support for Chang Kai Shek's anti-communist Nationalist Government; support and ongoing defense commitments to Taiwan; the Korean War, with a continuing commitment there; and the Vietnam War (which we abandoned in disgrace). And, of course, our Red China bashing went on long beyond the time our politicians the American people down the river, making it possible for China to exploit our markets utilizing our American capital, American know how, and American technology including a lot of American tax subsidy dollars. Our own politicians, in their rush to enroll us into a global village, made it possible for us to quickly became dependent on that nation for an embarrassing percentage of everything we need to maintain the "American life-style" of super-consumption. China did so well it became our government's number one creditor loaning us our ow money so we could remain the world's greatest consumer nation. In short, outsmarting our alleged "best and brightest" every step of the way! If you want to indulge in perhaps a bitter laugh or two, read "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung", popularly known as Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. Though Mao didn't see the future very accurately especially with regard to the future rapprochement with the West much of what he said seems so prophetic that it might have been written just last year.
Pridger still has the copy of the Little Red Book he bought in a Red Chinese "emporium" in Hong Kong, some forty-five years ago at a time when making such a purchase, or even entering such a store, was against American law for American citizens. Pridger, as an American sailor, felt downright wicked making that purchase. But Pridger wasn't nearly as wicked as our own traitorous brain trust has shown itself to be in the years since. Now China is free to buy up American real estate and other assets on American soil. As the "America is For Sale Exposition" site testifies, the Chinese are organizing to do so in a big way! Some time ago, of course, China began surrounding us with strategic assets. When we gave up the Panama Canal Zone, China moved right in to fill some of the vacuum. It is encroaching into South and Central America, and the Caribbean region, with many commercial enclaves. Pridger recalls Nikita Khrushchev (then Premier of the USSR), standing up before the United Nations General Assembly and violently banging his shoe on the rostrum for emphasis proclaiming that they (the Soviets and international communism), would bury them under their own system (capitalist imperialism). While the USSR failed to make good on the threat, it just might be that the Chinese have the brains, the will, and the resources, to succeed. It's already almost there thanks, in large part, to our own Washington brain trust and the international financial capitalists that pull its strings. It was our sterling leadership that took great pains to facilitate and accelerate Chinese industrial and military development, while at the same time (Oh, so brilliantly!), de-industrializing the United States and undermining both our domestic economy and national security position. All in the name of a New World Order, of course, made to order by the predatory money changers. It might best be said that we are successfully burying ourselves with our own system. After all, when power started going to our heads after World War Two and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union our brilliant leadership began burying us in our own debt using the rationale that through that debt we would somehow be the dog that wagged the world as our tail. But it appears we are going to end up discovering that we're the tail that tried, unsuccessfully, to wag the dog. Moscow is now giving our leadership some good advice on Afghanistan. Get out before we make a bigger fool of ourselves. John Q. Pridger THE BIG CONUNDRUM. HOW CAN THE WORLD DUMP DOLLARS? We hear about the dangers of foreign nations dumping dollars and rendering them worthless. There are only two ways to dump dollars. The first is to sell them. But if they are worthless and nobody wants them, who are they going to sell them to? If everybody wants to shift to Euros or Yen, where will sellers be found who will sell them for the dollars nobody wants? This brings them to the second option to merely dump them into the ocean or incinerators and landfills. This, of course, would be acknowledgement that the United States is totally bankrupt and its currency not worth a Weimar Republic Mark. And it would mean their own dollar reserves are worthless. The second solution would actually help us, but wiping out just that much of our national debt. What if we went to a gold standard, pegging the dollar at $2,000.00 an ounce? Our gold at Fort Knox (if it's really there, and really still ours), would be gone in less than a week, and we'd immediately have to suspend the gold standard again, and issue fiat currency. And that's what we should do in the first place merely shift to Treasury issued fiat greenbacks and carry on. John Q. Pridger Thursday, 12 February, 2009 LINCOLN'S LOST MESSIANIC MESSAGE Today, on his 200th birthday, the 16th president is being remembered as one of our greatest presidents. Some consider him our greatest president of all. Certainly his accomplishments were great. After all, he saved the Union and freed the slaves. But he did those things at great cost! Yet, few are remembering him for one of his most important contributions one which played a key role in his ability to save the Union while keeping the war debt to a minimum. The Legal Tender Act of 1862 established the United States Note (the Greenback), the first paper currency in United States history. This was done to increase the money supply to pay for the war, without the necessity of borrowing it at high interest from bankers and other financial interests. Had he borrowed all the money he needed, he would have sunk the nation while attempting to save the Union. This great omission, and a continuing effort on the part of establishment economists, historians, and banking interests, to ignore or downplay the importance of the Legal Tender laws and the greenback, is lamentable. Yet Lincoln's roll and intent in getting them passed is one of his greatest achievements. The significance today is that greenbacks could once again be used to save the Union. Yet nobody is talking about this means of solving our current economic crisis. Rather than using our own money to finance economic recovery, we are attempting to buy our way out through massive expansion of debt a certain and obvious formula for disaster. On the eve of the Great Depression, Lincoln admirer and Canadian historian and politician, Gerald Grattan McGeer published The Conquest of Poverty, a significant work which fully explores Lincoln's greenback policy. He advocated such a policy for Canada to cure the ills that were soon to develop into the decade long Great Depression. Also see: Lincoln, Money, Greenback, JFK, Kennedy, Edmund D. Taylor. Lincoln's greatest accomplishment of all was saving the Union and the nation itself. He financed the war with the help of fiat greenbacks, and thus avoided mortgaging the nation to bankers and sending it spinning down the tubes. Unfortunately, the significance of what Lincoln did seems to be lost on our Washington brain trust today, as they attempt to save the nation by selling the American people into perpetual debt slavery borrowing every penny that we use to get ourselves out of a financial abyss. Ironically, the greenback was readily available to Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression, and (as a fiat currency), could have given the New Deal the teeth it required to effect an economic recovery. Unfortunately, the greenback was no longer a fiat currency it had been "nailed to the cross of gold," and limited in issue, by the Resumption Act of 1878. So FDR apparently felt he had little choice but to attempt to finance national recovery with a combination of expenditure of American gold and expansion of the national debt. Rather than going off of the gold standard and seeking Congressional support for more issue of fiat greenbacks, as the emergency at hand should have suggested, he (in a very radical and bold initiative), called in all American gold and devalued the dollar, in terms of gold, by about one third. Today we no longer have that problem. We're on a purely fiat money system no longer nailed to the cross of gold. All that is required to solve our debt and finance problems is to get rid of the Federal Reserve System and fractional reserve banking, and go to a greenback system. Wake up America! John Q. Pridger AN HONEST MONEY WON'T SOLVE ALL OUR PROBLEMS Our debt money system is at the core of our economic and financial problems, but the problems go much deeper than the need for monetary reform. We need a return of competence and integrity in government, industry, and finance. The Federal Reserve debt scam might have lasted another century had Congress not totally abandoned all pretences at fiscal responsibility after the gold standard was dropped. During the last fifty years, we've progressively become a dysfunctional nation in economic terms. It appeared to work, but it was really just moving us more and more speedily toward catastrophe. As Congress progressively lost all moral compass and fiscal sanity, it was selling the productive, real wealth generating, sectors of the economy foreign, making us a consumer nation incapable of supporting itself through income. Since our nation is no longer a very productive one, debt has been increasingly substituted for income by both government and individuals. Exacerbating the whole all along the way, of course, was the rise of the welfare state. President Johnson, under color of extending generous monetary relief to the poor, was attempting to deflect criticism from the unpopular Vietnam war and, incidentally (it was hoped), at the same time effectively buying millions of votes from appreciative newly enfranchised welfare recipients. By that same device, large segments of our domestic working and non-working underclass were effectively put on permanent, taxpayer funded, paid vacation. Naturally this led to the "necessity" to begin importing a whole new working underclass mostly from Mexico to take the jobs that poor Americans no longer wanted or needed. This has pushed the cost of our combined social spending up so far that it now far exceeds the costs of the national defense establishment, even as we have two major foreign wars going. Government and financial services were the primary growth industries during this period. Besides those, things such as gambling casinos, the public and private prison industries, "tourism," theme parks, and the porn industry were also growth industries. And, of course, with the steady increase of corporate fast foods and other franchised chains, low paying service jobs proliferated. But real wealth producing industries and jobs have been in steady decline. Corporate collectivism gobbled up most of the competition in the real economy as they shipped jobs and factories south of the border or overseas. The path to survival even for many surviving businesses was to move offshore, outsource work, and generally abandon their American workers. The almighty retail giant, Walmart (just one corporation!), which has literally displaced tens of thousands of small Main Street retail businesses, was probably second only to the U.S. government in encouraging companies to move production offshore. It is a very perverse system in which this could "naturally" occur through anything called the "laws of free markets." It was made to occur through the carefully crafted policies sold to our so-called representatives by the self-serving captains of financial capital and their greedy corporate followers. The advent of a few, though still too many, giant financial corporations, of sundry varieties, have somehow been rendered "too big to fail" lest the national economy collapse. Then, being too large to fail, they miraculously became downright irresponsible. How could this have been the result of enlightened national economic policy? The answer is that it couldn't, and wasn't. Our national government has been in the pocket of high finance far too long and far too deep. All of this was facilitated by both government subsidy and the illogical availability of credit on a massive scale, which our financial system made available to favored industries. This all led to an increasingly perverted economy, where credit on a grand scale was channeled into too many unproductive sectors of the economy, and into businesses that totally abandoned all pretense of responsibly to community or nation. Huge mal-distribution of resources was thus facilitated, making it possible to exploit both human and natural resources without regard to any local or national peoples or any notion of sustainability. The cost has been great and it is reflected in the national public and private debt, which continues to rise. As of now, our public debt is rising more like a rocket than a jet plane taking off and gaining altitude at a steeping rate. That is what globalism and "free" trade has also facilitated. And what is the natural and planned result? A situation where everybody in the world depends on everybody else for everything they need to sustain their lifestyles or mere subsistence existence. Or, to put in more precise terms, where everybody depends on the smoothly functioning mega-systems proved by mega-corporations. Every mouthful of nourishment must come through lengthy corporate channels. Where individual, family, local, regional, and national, self-reliance are not only undermined, but eventually rendered impossible. So what happens when these smooth working, well timed, mega-systems begin to fail? BIG problems. Bigger than we've ever seen before. And we're there now. Naturally, they were bound to fail at some point, because they were actually just houses of cards built on shifting sands? There can never be such a thing as perpetual rampant expansion of all big business systems that our credit financial systems demanded. Unlimited growth is impossible in a finite world with dwindling resources. There is a middle way, of course a sustainable middle ground that can provide comfort and modest prosperity for everybody. And now is the time to start planning for a more sustainable, people-friendly, future. The present economic crisis is a global problem, of course. But the only way we can get the world back onto the right track is to put ourselves on the right track. We don't rule the world as our leaders have aspired to do. We can, and should, work in cooperation with the rest of the world in a number of ways, of course. But we can only lead the world the world by example, by getting our own house into order first and foremost. And yes, this does mean turning inward somewhat. We should have nationalism positive inward nationalism in the form of policies that reflect an enlightened nation purpose. We have assumed far too many international commitments. We need to reassess them and determine which ones are really in our own national interests given a return to first principles and our own national charter. We need monetary nationalism and trade protection, but with a generous spirit of friendship toward all other peoples and nations. We need to protect our own markets for the benefit of the proper owner/operators, workers and consumers, i.e., the American people. We need an honest and stable national currency that serves the people rather than keeps them in debt bondage one which we can control, that isn't subject to manipulation by international money changers or the fortunes and misfortunes of any other nation or monetary power. We need to protect our borders, and regain a unifying national political culture within them not with high brick and mortar fences and impossible tariff barriers, but enlightened policies that serve the people. In other words, we should reclaim the natural advantages that we once had, based on the fundamental wealth of our land and resourcefulness of our people. We should begin extricating ourselves from the "international interdependence" traps we've made for ourselves and everybody else and we should encourage all other nations to cultivate their own gardens as we should cultivate ours. Then we can face the world, engaging in friendly relations and trade on a basis of both mutual benefit and respect without a dagger at each other's heart. Only as an independent and prosperous nation, as we once were, will we once again be in a position to actually help others when and where it is needed. We need to bring our military personnel home and base them once again on the soil they are dedicated to defending. We should keep our big stick, but stick mostly to our own business. And get that business right. Our motto, "In God we Trust" has worn rather thin in the last few decades. Powerful forces have been hard at work to remove what was once universally understood that we are a Christian nation. That is, we are a nation of predominantly Christian peoples, under a strictly secular government that asks no questions with regard to spiritual matters. One wherein freedom of religion, expression, and the press, are held equally important including freedom of the mind a truly Christian nation where there is love and tolerance for all, regardless of religious beliefs or lack thereof. Who would argue that we should not promote personal and national policies that reflect the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would be done by"? This should be the principle for conduct of both our personal and national policies. We must reject the creeping tendency we have had to evolve into a belligerent and vengeful, "Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" "Never forgive, never forget" nation. John Q. Pridger HEY! THIS IS CHARLES_DARWIN'S 200TH BIRTHDAY TOO! Charles feared he might be the destroyer of religion, so he waited over twenty years after returning from his five year voyage on the HMS Beagle (1836) to publish his seminal work On the Origin of the Species in 1859. While he didn't destroy religion, his theories on natural selection (Evolution), have certainly caused plenty of controversy between the religious and those of scientific mind. Actually, he had merely gained an insight into how God does things and the fact that Creation is an ongoing process. But this certainly hasn't lessened the conflict very much. As science gains more and more understanding of how things work, the more it appears that there was an Intelligent Designer within or without the Universe. Of course most scientists prefer not to call it God, since that would imply there is an Entity possibly even more intelligent than they are. So they study natural phenomena and the various laws of science. As far as fundamentalists are concerned, the Biblical story of Creation is good enough, and the laws of God are considered all-encompassing. And, really, on a cosmic level, the difference between the total knowledge of science and that of fundamentalists is about as significant as the value of their arguments are in terms of cash or getting to Heaven. Science is supported by the deep pockets of government and industry, whereas religion is supported by faith and the collection plate. As for the various sundry chains of evolution, there are so many missing links that it's a stretch to call them chains at all. This doesn't invalidate the theories, of course, it merely means science still has a long way to go. There is one thing for certain, however. While science has made it possible to save and improve lives, it has also made it possible to destroy them on such a massive scale that it far surpasses anything that could be called a Biblical scale (that is, in terms of human activity). And they may yet manage to inadvertently totally destroy this pleasant Garden of Eden. There's no religious group capable of doing that. John Q. Pridger Wednesday, 11 February, 2009 THE END OF NATIONAL CURRENCY? The monetary reform that Pridger and many others advocate probably will not come to pass. The reason is fairly simple because we no longer have representative government. At least the representation is not of the American people, but rather for international financial capital. The singular aim of the establishment (the internationalist movers and shakers), is global government. This is what the United Nation, globalism, free trade, GATT, WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, etc., interdependence, and abandonment of national independence have all been about. The proponents of globalism reject all types of nationalism, including monetary nationalism and trade protection. Their arguments and solutions are all global. But there is a battle going on, and the current global economic distress has many nations eyeing the potential advantages of bailing out of the New World Order and going a more nationalist route. For an internationalist establishment point of view, there is no better place to look than Foreign Affairs the organ of the Council on Foreign Relations. "The End of National Currency," By Benn Steil, From Foreign Affairs , May/June 2007 is a good place to get a handle on their take on things in the realm of money.
All Foreign Affairs articles, of course, are very well written, and very convincing, provided you already see things in internationalist terms. From a nationalist standpoint, however, it will become apparent that most of the arguments are fundamentally flawed due to the flawed premises from which they flow. After all, the CFR, whether it comes right out and says it or not, is the preeminent advocate for the forces of both international finance and world government. For example, "globalization and monetary nationalism are a dangerous combination" is premised on the belief that globalization is an inherent, and unquestioned, good. From the nationalist point of view, of course, most of the concepts and rationales supporting globalization are way out in left field. Globalization is patently not good from a nationalist's perspective, and our present global economic meltdown is ready evidence of this fact. The fact is, without a national currency, controlled by national governments, those national governments lose the fundamental advantage of sovereignty the ability to protect their their nation from international predators. Of course, there are many nations that are simply incompetent to be sovereign nations in the first place. In former times, these nations, or unorganized regions, were naturally suited to foreign conquest and exploitation, as colonies of more competent nations. Often these colonies benefited, even prospered modestly, from colonial associations and administration. Many that became independent, have gone down hill ever since. Under globalism, as it is presently being being pursued, these kinds of nations remain exploited colonies not of traditional empires, however, but corporate and financial empires. Yet, though economic colonies, exploited by foreign powers, most do not benefit from any competent domestic or colonial political administration. John Q. Pridger CONFUSION ON MONETARY NATIONALISM Lincoln, Gold, and Greenbacks, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, gives an alternative view of Lincoln and the greenback issue one that departs from Pridger's take on things in that particular regard.
Abraham Lincoln was not the hero that popular myth gives him credit for. In fact he became a literal dictator in order to save the Union. He took leave of the Constitution and left the Union he saved a much transformed nation. On many levels, it was no longer the nation bound by its Constitution as it had been before. Among other things, the very "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" he proclaimed saved Gettysburg, began to whither. He did, of course, accomplish some good. Emancipation of the slaves can only be viewed as a positive development. Even saving the Union, though done at such astounding human cost, is now almost universally considered a major plus. With the Civil War, the federal government became more of a seat of empire, and the States subservient colonies rather than independent Republics in their own right under the Federal Constitution. With power came a marked spike and acceleration of the inevitable march from small to big government. One of the things that Lincoln did was to provide the nation with a uniform national currency. Or, rather, almost a uniform currency. Actually he gave the nation two currencies greenbacks and national bank notes. The first was a valiant attempt to free the government and people from the bankers, and the second was a triumph of the bankers. The first literally saved the Union, and the second began the fifty year march toward another privately owned central bank. The first was the result of the "Legal Tender" acts of 1861 and subsequently, and the second was the result of the National Banking Act of 1863. These two distinct sets of legislative acts, though passed during the Civil War under Lincoln, are as different as night and day, yet many are understandably confused by them. The "legal tender" laws produced greenbacks a publicly owned currency (United States Notes), and the National Banking Act produced "federalized" private bank notes, known as "National Bank Notes." Though National Bank Notes were legal tender just like greenbacks, they were bank notes issued by specially chartered private "National Banks." It was the National Banking Act that destroyed the local currencies of State and independent banks, by taxing the issue of State bank notes out of existence. The bankers hated the greenback and did everything they could to both limit their issue and later to discredit and devalue them. They naturally favored National Banking Notes, from which the bankers made a profit. Gold was a factor in all of this, of course, since the gold standard was the game of the bankers. Convertibility of all bank paper currency for gold was suspended during the Civil War, and wasn't resumed until the Redemption Act of 1879, at which time both greenbacks and National Bank Notes became redeemable in gold. John Q. Pridger Tuesday, 10 February, 2009 DO IT NOW! OR FACE CATASTROPHE! Do what? Pass President Obama's $800 billion stimulus package, and do it NOW! It sounds pretty grim the way the president frames the situation. The snowball is rolling and we must stop it before it moves another inch! Once it gets too big, there will be no stopping it.
Things aren't looking very good when the President stands up on national TV and tells the people they must borrow and spend nearly a trillion dollars (immediately!) to stimulate the economy, while admitting that it's just a temporary fix that will hopefully "save or create" three or four million jobs. But we've got to do it or face catastrophe! The situation is undoubtedly just as grim as the picture the president paints. In all reality, we've never been here before. There are major stark differences between now and 1929-1939. But the scariest thing is that we are being pushed to spend money we don't have. We'll have to borrow it, at interest, from bankers, using the same Ponzi system that has got the country into this mess in the first place. It's like the pressure applied at a crooked real estate closing. Sign the document now you can't afford to hesitate! You can worry about the details, and the matter of payments, later. You need this house! That's how a lot of people ended up buying real estate they couldn't afford. There is, of course, a need for timely action. The financial capitalists have really messed up big time, and the economy, based on their credit flows, and toxic "securities," is in free-fall. So the real pressure for immediate action is being applied by the bankers at Treasury, the Fed, and elsewhere. They know this is a very critical time for them. At any moment their hay wagon could burn, and somebody wake up to real reality. They don't want Congress to take time to think first and act later. The last thing they want is for anybody to come up with a convincing argument that, that maybe we need some fundamental monetary reform before we sign on the dotted line and spend this astounding amount of money. They want us to borrow it, of course. In short, they (the financial capital people) NEED to be NEEDED. They need to survive in order to continue to dominate the world. If they were not needed, their game would be up. They intend for us to borrow every penny we need to rescue our economy and borrow it from them. If we don't, they will be washed up. They are frantic to get the commitment now! Heaven forbid, if somehow Congress remembered that it has the power to instruct the Treasury print our own money to spend. That would save the people, but be catastrophe for the bankers. If the government merely spent money it created, all our problems could be miraculously solved. The money could be spent to revive economic activity, put people back to work, and we wouldn't have to worry about repaying it twice over. It's value would be invested in the nation, and that's where it would stay. All of a sudden, people would awaken into a new world, and realize that practically the entire financial sector had always been a totally unnecessary expense and drag on the real national economy. Unfortunately, it would take a miracle for Congress to become conscious of such a possibility. It sounds too easy. Common sense would have to be employed and economic sophistry abandoned. Yet, it's been done before. The blueprint is there. The model is there. The record of success is there. There are still some remnants of it left in circulation. They are dollars that were legal tender long before anybody ever heard of a Federal Reserve Note. Lincoln save the Union that way. Obama could do it again. Even more unfortunately, the quality of our elected officials and representatives is not what it once was. The very mystique and mystery of money, bankers, high finance, and their organized POWER, have our politicians overawed and cowed like a pack of Cub Scouts facing an armored battalion of hardened troops. THEY'RE LISTENING TO THE WRONG PEOPLE (OF COURSE) If Obama and Congress would work as hard delivering up honest money to spend, as they are in trying to plunge us into Trillions of more debt, we'd soon find our way out of the mess. As Thomas Edison said:
Perhaps without really realizing it, the president and Congress are much more concerned about bailing out the financial system the big bankers, including our Federal Reserve System than they are about solving the problem and helping the American people. So they will naturally listen to bankers before they listen to people like Pridger, who would like to see an independent United States of America with a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." We suffer under much more than just a double whammy. Because we have been the leader of the "Free World," the key proponent of "the new international economic order," globalism, free trade, interdependence, and the provider of the world's reserve currency and since we have become the primary consumer of much of the world's production, we're expected to not only bail our own economy out, but do it without leaving the rest of the world in the lurch. The world expects too much of us, of course, but this still gives us considerable breathing room and a distinct advantage. The rest of the industrial world, whatever they may think of us, and however they may blame us for their own economic woes, want us to solve our problems quickly. They perceive that their own survival depends on it. Because of this, the other nations of the world are not yet ganging up on us and declaring their own independence from the American market and the Yankee dollar. Too much of their own economies are vested in them. They fear or supposedly fear that America might "turn inward." And this should tell us something beyond the initial appearances intended. It means that there is a fear that America could do without the rest of the world. But, even more than our neighbors and trading partners, it is the bankers who fear that America might turn inward. For turning inward just might devolve into "solving our national problem" without following their dictates, and answering the needs of the international bankers our financial system's partners in crime. TREASURY SECRETARY TIMOTHY GEITHNER UNVEILS PLAN Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has submitted his new $1.5 trillion financial bailout package to get credit flowing again once again reiterating we must do it, do it now, and do it big, before the sky falls in on us! A rush into unfathomable levels of additional debt. Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Read his speech here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content... Time to resurrect the greenback, and do it now! John Q. Pridger BASIC LESSON IN U.S. MONEY
The difference between the above two five dollar notes is much more remarkable than the similarities in appearance would indicate. Both have green backs (not shown). Both are "American" currency. Both are imprinted with the message, "This note is legal tender for for all debts, public and private." Both are fiat money, without any gold or silver backing. Both are "promises to pay." Both gain their legal tender status by "fiat" (or decree), of the government. Both are printed by the Treasury's Bureau of Engraving. But one is a bank note, and the other is a Treasury note. That's a big difference. The top one is the familiar Federal Reserve five dollar note that we use today. It represents $5 worth of purchasing power in the marketplace, and also $5 in public debt, which will have to be repaid (to bankers and bondholders), plus interest. Federal Reserve Notes are "obligations" of the Federal Reserve System, a private central banking cartel, given special status by Congress. But obligation, in this case, is a rather deceptive term. All the obligation is actually on the taxpayer. The lower one is an United States Note (the Lincoln greenback). It represents $5 worth of purchasing power in the marketplace. Period. Nothing has to be paid back to anybody simply because it has been issued. It serves the people as currency. The greenback satisfies its own "promise to pay." U.S. Notes are obligations of the Treasury (i.e., the American people). More accurately, they are printed and spent into circulation to satisfied the government obligations. When spent, that obligation has been satisfied and discharged. Both kinds of notes serve exactly the same function as currency. But Federal Reserve money additionally indebts the nation and United States Notes do not.
In order to come into being, the Federal Reserve Note requires that a bond be issued by the Treasury and deposited with the Fed. The bond is a "security" against debt to be incurred. The Federal Reserve can then issue "money" to the government as a loan a building block of the national debt. The Treasury's "security" bond (collateral), is secured by the "full faith and credit" of the nation. The United States Note is the "dollar bill" of which Edison wrote. It is a Treasury note, issued without interest, to serve as currency. "The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good too," i.e., "the full faith and credit" of the nation. As the label implies, it is a Treasury Note, which is essentially the same thing as a bond. Federal Reserve Notes are banker debt notes masquerading as "our" money. United State Notes are simply "our" national currency (if we'd only resume using them). Now does it make any sense at all for the government to have to borrow its own money in order to acquire and circulate it? Or would it make more sense to merely issue it's own money which it can then spend into circulation? This is actually a classic "no-brainer." There's nothing difficult about it. There is no great mystery to it. It's not as if the Greenback is a new and exotic idea. We had greenbacks long before we had Federal Reserve Notes. That's why we still call the Yankee dollar a greenback. Federal Reserve Notes were made to look like greenbacks so the public would readily accept them. Greenbacks were an active part of our money supply from 1862 through about 1963, a period of 101 years and there's still a few in circulation. And they are worth just as much as Federal Reserve dollars. We've only had Federal Reserve Notes since 1913, a period of 96 years, and are now suffering the full, inevitable, results from them an $11 Trillion dollar national debt, not counting the additional Trillions that are now being manufactured by our bankers and politicians. The current Trillions of dollars being spend on the economic bailouts will add more Trillions to the national debt than the actual moneys spent. If we were funding these bailouts with U.S. Notes, the money spent, would merely be the amount spent (satisfying all debts and obligations in the process, with no need to pay it back to anybody or any Thing) and they would then continue to circulate as currency at no cost.
John Q. Pridger Monday, 9 February, 2009 IS THERE HOPE AFTER A TOTAL ECONOMIC COLLAPSE? What happens if our financial system and the dollar totally collapse? Has this ever happened in an advanced industrial nation in the West? Yes! Indeed it has! If our economy is laid flat, and the dollar becomes worthless through hyperinflation, we'll be in just about exactly the shape Germany found itself in soon after World War One. The Weimar Republic is a perfect example of what we could possibly experience if our whole financial system tanks.
But, ironically, what happened next in Germany also shows how a nation can pull itself up by its own bootstraps and rise like a Phoenix from the ashes. Have you ever wondered how Germany, a pariah state (both for losing WWI and then for bringing Adolf Hitler to power), managed to prosper and build itself back up during the very period that America and the rest of Western Europe were suffering through the worst depression in their histories? And have you ever wondered how a dictator such as Hitler, whom we have been told was a great oppressor, could be so widely admired and loved by so many of the German people? While Hitler certainly isn't one of our national heroes, he was a pretty smart man and astute visionary. He knew the international banking powers were the enemy of the people. So, what did he do? He took a lesson from old Abe Lincoln (who IS one of our national heroes), and printed non-bank legal tender currency just as Lincoln did!
But our history books do not teach us anything about this. In fact they go out of their way to totally miss several salient points.
This is from an article entitled "Thinking Outside the Box: How a Bankrupt Germany Solved its Infrastructure Problems," dated August 9th, 2007, by Ellen Brown, author of Web of Debt. Read the whole article at: http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/bankrupt-germany.php What caused the Weimar Republic's financial melt-down sounds suspiciously like what has caused our present economic problems and those possibly still to come. Hitler is known not only to have been an admirer of the United States (at some levels), but also our great industrialist, Henry Ford. Like his contemporary, Thomas Edison, he also knew that our financial and monetary systems were the primary cause of our economic problems. Among other things, Ford knew the formula for prosperity in an industrial economy. The formula for prosperity was a relatively simple one, i.e., see that you pay your workers well, so they can be the primary consumers of their own production. Much to the alarm of many industrialists of the day, Ford did the seemingly irrational. He radically raised the pay of his production workers so they could buy Ford cars and he shortened working hours and the work week so they had the leisure to enjoy them. And after he had made sure his workers prospered, the Ford Motor Company continued to prosper too. Before long, this became the model for most enlightened American industries. As a result, for the first time in history, the "working class" became the basis for a new, and increasingly prosperous, middle class. Of course the rise of organized labor played an important role in this too, making sure that workers gained a fair share of the fruits of their labor. But Ford hadn't needed the prompting of labor unions to start the ball rolling. Later, Ford came into conflict with organized labor himself. But there were perhaps reasons for this that we won't try to sort out here, though we will hint at it below. In any case, this new model for industrial prosperity survived until our national leadership became sufficiently intellectually debased, and so economically and ideologically challenged, that they decided the time for a New World Order had finally arrived. Not to get off the subject, but it should also be noted that Ford also knew the importance of a strong and healthy agrarian sector of the economy, based on the family farm and that it was important that the farming sector should be justly compensated for its production, and needed protection from financial predators. Hitler was taken down, of course. So had Lincoln been taken down, along with many others along the way. A few with "great prejudice," and others through the arts of ridicule and smear tactics. Though Henry Ford lived a long and productive life, and prospered on a grand scale, he had his troubles. He had gone to great lengths to point to the source of our national financial woes and the financial troubles yet to come. Perhaps he was somewhat indelicate in his warnings so, of course, he was branded as an anti-Semite for his troubles. So you can bet President Obama will be very cautious when it comes to "discovering the obvious solutions" to our present economic problems. Chances are, they'll totally, and conveniently, allude him. Right now he is obviously being railroaded at brake-neck speed, right down the track that has been set before him into the dark tunnel, with a light dimly gleaming at the end, just a little further down the line. John Q. Pridger MYSTERY PRISON BUSES IN THE DESERT? More from Ellen Brown, January 22, 2009:
Interestingly, Ms. Brown points out that Wackenhut, begun in 1954 as a domestic "prison guard service" company, is no longer an American company. It is owned by the Danish corporation G4S. (Group 4 Securicor) Yet it has become one of our Department of Homeland Security's major para-military contractors, and has been employed as a contractor by the Department of Defense to help provide "security" for our forces and diplomats abroad and in the War on Terror. This is in keeping with globalism and is an alarming trend within our defense establishment as well as a whole raft of other supposedly "domestic" industries many of which are key to our national security. John Q. Pridger Sunday, 8 February, 2009 TAX SPELLED BACKWARDS SPELLS "XAT" Pridger has recently bumped into an interesting website http://www.xat.org the, apparently U.K. based, "Peaceful Revolution Network." Besides promoting its own "peaceful revolution" (which is also very interesting), it provides a valuable resource for information on the history of money, including pointing out that Lincoln's GREENBACK (OUR very own greenback!), was, and is, the model for HONEST MONEY. This is what Pridger has been pointing out for a long time. Too bad so few Americans are aware of this salient fact. Too bad President Obama seems to be oblivious to it. Would printing greenbacks be inflationary? It never has been, because no more were ever printed than would have otherwise had to be borrowed. Whereas printing Federal Reserve Notes IS borrowing!
By this very same token, if our present economic stimulus efforts were paid for by tax-free, interest-free money (greenbacks), it would mean that we would not have to incur debt in order to use our own money. It would not, in itself, be inflationary since it would merely entail printing and spending money that we are already committed to spending. Printing money, they say, is inflationary. But only printing more money than in needed is inflationary. And printing banker debt money, as we are doing, is shear madness, because it all represents debt which will have to be repaid, plus interest. The American greenback circulated in our economy from the Civil War forward. They ceased being issued circa 1969, and apparently officially died as late as 1994. But our "legal tender" laws, and the greenback, could easily be resurrected. All it would take would be an act of Congress. If Congress was in the act of issuing $800 billion in greenbacks to buoy up our economy, rather than perversely pledging to borrow that amount to spend, we'd end up several time that amount richer. Borrowing our own money, which is created out of nothing, is totally ridiculous. The money may be created out of nothing, but when "borrowed" it lives on as a growing debt burden on our entire society and economy. This is what had brought us to our present crisis. And by continuing as we are, we are merely throwing gas on the fire we are supposedly trying to put out. Congress should do something constructive for the people it represents at this critical juncture in our history. But rather than bailing the people out a huge mess the financial capitalists caused, their first act was to bail our financial capital! Now, they are supposedly going to help the people by further indebting them. It is the epitome of ironies, and undoubtedly THE crime of many centuries, that poor taxpayers and their children and grandchildren, are being called upon to plunge themselves into unfathomable debt to bail out the richest people in the world, so they can essentially borrow money from these self-same rich people. We are told that we have to give the bankers money so they can loan us some of it. And that is exactly how our entire monetary system works! Are we totally off our rocker? Is it our fault, or is it Congress? Maybe Congress is stupid. Either that, or they are simply serving other masters, and otherwise happy with their own lot. Bankers control Congress, our nation, and our national destiny, while the people, through their Congressional representives, should be in control. It's time to declare our independence again! Good reading at the following links if you're interested: THE AMAZING GREENBACK DOLLAR http://www.xat.org/xat/economics.html HISTORY OF MONEY, PART ONE: http://www.xat.org/xat/moneyhistory.html John Q. Pridger Saturday, 7 February, 2009 SPEAKING OF CHANGE... The present economic crisis has been described as a third Pearl Harbor. Things always change after Pearl Harbors, so Barack Obama just happened on the scene at exactly the right time, as George Bush II did. 9/11, of course, has also been described as another Pearl Harbor. There is always an enemy involved with Pearl Harbors. Imperial Japan and al Qaeda, in the case of the first two and, by extension, Hitler's Germany in 1941, and the world of radicalized Islam in 2001. So who's the enemy this time? Could it be our own financial system? The Federal Reserve System, and the global financial oligarchs who make up the global "establishment"? Probably. It's difficult to imagine that our on-coming depression was not planned in advance for a specific purpose. It may be difficult for most people to accept this. It may seem too far fetched for most to follow. But all the signs are there, and have been for a long time. The "general public" certainly had no idea that the crash of 1929 and the depression that followed, constituted a Pearl Harbor. They'd never heard the term. Allen Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, however, has admitted the Fed's culpability in both the crash and the Depression. The Federal Reserve caused and effectively nurtured the Great Depression. And, of course, vast amounts of wealth changed hands during that period. The movement of wealth was from both the poor and the formerly rich, to the still rich insiders who got much richer. Vast amounts of wealth were transferred as the result of our recent stock market crash too. And, since then, more vast amounts of wealth have been, and are continuing to be, transferred from taxpayers and their progeny to the oligarchs. This is happening a little differently than what happened in the 1930s. It's a different world. We are a different nation now. But the source and cause are still the same. And the desired end is still the same. Wipe out 98% percent of the world's artificial wealth, and what do you have? You have a lot of impoverished and desperate people, but you still have the same oligarchs in charge of money and credit, but in a much stronger position (which includes possession of two thirds of the world's monetary gold supply). If the dollar shrinks to 2% of its value, the purchasing power of a worker's $40,000.00 yearly income effectively becomes only $800.00. But the the oligarch's $50,000,000.00 income only shrinks to $1,000,000.00. He can still eat, and he's still going to be in control. If he is the one issuing both money and credit, as he is, nothing has changed except his relative position has been greatly strengthened. Again! This 98% devaluation of the dollar has happened once already. The dollar has lost about 98% of its purchasing power since 1913, when the Federal Reserve System came into being to provide for an elastic currency, prevent depressions, and stabilize the economy. Of course during the latter part of that period, until a couple of decades ago, workers' wages were climbing almost as fast as inflation, thus his yearly wages effectively went from $800.00 to $40,000.00 during that period (with some radical downs along the way, of course). After World War Two, with payroll withholding in place, the process was called "bracket creep." In 1913, and for a long time after that, workers didn't pay any income tax to speak of. Today they pay about 30% of their wages out in a whole array of taxes. Our enemy is never who we are told it is. The enemy is our own financial system, which is under direct Federal Reserve control, which in turn grew out of the international banking establishment of Europe. They, individually and collectively, are dead against American economic and monetary independence, and have thus far remained powerful enough to have their way. John Q. Pridger WHY WE CAN'T ADMIT WHO THE ENEMY REALLY IS? The main reason the real enemy cannot be acknowledged is really very simple. Mention "International Bankers" in a disparaging way, and you have wittingly or unwittingly crossed that line that makes you an intolerant hate monger. You see, attacking the "International Bankers" (which are the personification of the "money power" and our economic woes today), has historically been considered as evidence of anti-Semitism or latent anti-Semitism. And to be labeled anti-Semitic is to be categorized as being downright hateful and even Hitler-ish. Being anti-Semitic has become our society's worst, still un-prosecutable, offense or sin. It doesn't matter how good, kind, and tolerant of other peoples you are, or even how much you may genuinely admire or love Jews. If you speak out forcefully against the "International Bankers," you will be labeled anti-Semitic. "International Bankers" is considered a "code word" for "Jews." This is more than just convenient for the International Bankers (whether they be Jewish or Gentile). It sort of makes them untouchable and bullet proof. They cannot be criticized, thus they cannot be dislodged from their positions of power and influence. Nobody in any position of authority or responsibility can speak out against Jews, Zionism, International Bankers, or the state of Israel, without risking both their reputation and livelihood. Not even Jews! If a Jew speaks out against any of these things he is labeled a "self-hating" Jew, and a traitor to his people. There's great irony in all of this, since the Jews represent such an abundance of intelligence and talent in our midst. How wonderful it would be if they (meaning the most powerful and influential of them), were really on our side. But, unfortunately, while the overwhelming majority of Jews are wonderful people, and would by nature be on our side, their lot is always, almost unavoidably and often unintentionally, cast with those who are the perennial enemies of the greater body of people. Any threat to the money power and the private central bankers, by some convolution, will be made to seem a threat to all Jews through the threat of virulent anti-Semitism. This broadly promoted defensive attitude with regard to anti-Semitism is carefully nurtured by a whole raft of influential organizations. In fact this defensive attitude is attained by continuous and unremitting offensive tactics designed to quell the least criticism of everything remotely associated with anything Jewish. As it has always been said, the best defense is a vigorous offensive (and, coincidentally, we see that graphically played out time and again in Israel itself). So, though it is not the Jews as a people who are our enemy, the enemy clings tenaciously to them for its own cover, and its own protection. The enemy does not mind sacrificing any number of people in order to gain or maintain its power. It matters not whether those sacrificed are Jews or Gentiles. The Holocaust, of course, is the hammer of guilt held over our heads. It is drummed into our consciousness on a continuous basis. To be critical of anything associated with Jews is to be a dangerous bigot and suspected Holocaust apologist. The enemy (through it many surrogate organizations), continuously invoke the Holocaust in its defense effectively bragging that the six million Jews died for and because of our sins. And, of course, one cannot ask prying questions about the Holocaust without risk of being called a "Holocaust denier." We are supposed to continually feel guilty about the Holocaust, and teach our children about it so they, too, will feel that we are guilty. Otherwise, we're supposed to keep our mouths shut on the matter. A lot of this may seem unrelated to matters of monetary policy like bringing potatoes into a discussion about oranges. No connections are supposed to be made, at least not right out in the light of day. This is the reason we don't hear monetary reform seriously discussed why it has essentially become a taboo subject in America. And when it is discussed, critical things are carefully left out lest too many Jewish names come into focus in association with banking and monetary issues. The reason is that the money power, the credit power, and the other financial powers, are all fundamentally associated with central bankers, "International Bankers," who happen, in turn, to be associated with specific Jewish bankers. If we have an enemy, and know what it is and where it is, but cannot acknowledge it, how can we defeat the enemy? The short answer is that we probably cannot, though we are right now at a very opportune moment in history. For too long most of us have taken our financial system for granted, assuming there could be no better. The financial system and the bankers behind it, including the Federal Reserve System, possess an impenetrable mystique that we are not supposed to pry into. Yet our current economic crisis has shown very clearly that they are the real enemy. The enemy does not have any particular ethno-religious identity it is comprised of many parts and many types and kinds of people. It is a system, and that system needs to be vanquished once and for all, at least as far as the national stage is concerned. There may be a continuing constructive role for international bankers on the global stage, but every nation should have it's own national independence in economic and monetary affairs, unhampered by professional usurers and money changers. But we clearly cannot trust bankers. Looks where they have taken us! Ad if we didn't fully realize that before, look at the first $350 billion of the TARP bailout money. The bankers both Paulson and Bernake needed it NOW! Not time to lose! It was spent, but only the bankers know how or where. Apparently not a single member of Congress, or the president, have the foggiest idea how it was spent. And they are letting the bankers get away with it. The bankers had essentially told them, and the American people, "Trust us, we've put it where it will do the most good. Ad it's doing what it was supposed to do." And they add, mentioning more or less in passing, "If we reveal where and how the money was used, public confidence would plummet and undo the good it has done." This is totally incredible. It should also be totally unacceptable. But the new Treasury Secretary is suggesting setting up an so-called "bad bank." Our problem is already far too many bad banks. Let them be the bad banks, and let them remain bad and take their losses. What we need are some good banks and some real representation in Washington. Rather than taking this opportunity to change and correct the system, our leaders in Congress cannot afford to they dare not provoke the financial capitalists or the money power. So, of course, we're presently bailing the enemy out first and foremost. However, only time will tell how things are going to play out. John Q. Pridger THE POWER OF ZIONISTS In America and western Europe, the power of Zionist organizations rival the power of the bankers. This is made abundantly clear by the fact that (for the first time in our history), both American presidential candidates effectively had to swear allegiance to Israel as a right of passage toward the presidency. Even the once mighty Catholic Church is being made to bow, scrape, and cow before the power of global Zionism, as evidenced by the present fire-storm over the Pope reinstating an excommunicated priest who happens to question some aspects of the Holocaust. It is coming to pass that Holocaust denial "must be made" a cardinal sin in the Church. Nor can Catholics claim that Jews killed Christ. Apparently it can only claim that it was People who killed him. If those people weren't Hebrews, then perhaps the Bible needs to be revised. Jesus himself was a Hebrew, and the Bible tells us that the Roman authorities were inclined to have mercy upon him. Fellow Hebrews held a harder view. Imagine if an organization of, say, white supremacists, became so powerful that "lynching denial" became an issue, and it could no longer be claimed that white people used to lynch black people. Suppose they decreed that it is henceforth inexcusable and illegal to claim that whites lynched blacks? "People" lynched blacks. SPEAKING OF POWER, could there actually a subterranean correlation and collaboration between the power of central bankers and the power of Zionists? The degree of power of both seem to have no logical explanation in either case. Could each somehow reinforce the power of the other? The thought, of course, would undoubtedly be taboo and evidence of anti-Semitism. Coincidently, the spike in power of both groups date from essentially the same period. Modern political Zionism was born in the 1890s, and the supreme ascendancy of the bankers was cemented in place in the United States only a decade later. Not so coincidentally name of the English Rothschild bankers figure both in the history of western central banking and the ascendance of Zionism including the advent of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The very thoughts, though settled history, are taboo. John Q. Pridger ENTER THE ABOMINABLE PROTOCOLS There are few Americans today either curious enough, or brave enough, to read the so-called Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. If one is interested enough to read that text, he will automatically be suspected of being anti-Semitic hate-monger. It's a work our Jewish friends would just as soon everybody associated exclusively only with ignorance, bigotry, and intolerance only of interest to radical right-wing conspiracy nuts. Essentially, the Protocols purport to outline an organized Jewish plot (already in execution when written), to destroy Christendom and establish Zionist control over the world, using (interestingly enough), such sundry devices as their financial and superior intellectual prowess. The manuscript supposedly surfaced in France in 1895 (Just prior to the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897), and was first published by Sergius Nilus in Russia in 1901, and in the United States in 1920 (by Henry Ford who later also authored and published the equally objectionable The International Jew). It has, since it's initial appearance, been suppressed in most nations. While available and still in print in the United States and several other nations, it is nonetheless considered somewhat of an underground publication. Pridger has always been of the opinion that it should be required reading for everybody most especially for Jews. For then, having read it, everybody would know just why the Jews figure so large in conspiracy theory. But the most influential of our Jewish friends would ban the book if they could, as would most of their Gentile friends. And they would assure you that everything contained therein constitute the epitome of rabid absurdity. They consider it a patently dangerous book, and you'll see why if you read it. The Protocols are generally officially condemned as a forgery among "all men of reason and good will," and it may indeed be a forgery. It is said to have been the work of the Czarist secret police, and this could very well be true for Czarist Russia, coincidentally, happened to be at odds with both Jewish revolutionaries and the international money men (and the Bolshevik Revolution duly followed). With possible relation to alleged Czarist conflict with the international money men, it is interesting to note that the Czar was willing to go to war with England if it threw its lot in with the American Confederacy during the Civil War and attacked the the United States. At that time the Lincoln administration was in conflict with the money men himself, because of its issue of greenback currency. Regardless of its origin and authorship, however, the Protocols remain a remarkable and extraordinarily interesting book for anybody who is seriously interested in gaining an insight as to what seems to be happening to us today. Pridger's purpose in bringing the subject up is to reveal a historical basis of understanding of what is obviously an ongoing program in the world, whether authored and engineered by Zionists or Gentile pretenders seeking to deflect blame to innocent parties. Henry Ford was alarmed at the fact that the "program" had appeared to be unfolding as outlined in the Protocols in amazing degrees of detail. This was in 1920, and his sounding of the alarm unleashed a firestorm not only of criticism of Ford himself, but in the form of public distrust of what became perceived as a "Jewish conspiracy." Since then, the program (whatever its source), has obviously progressed steadily with inevitable modifications as changing circumstances dictate. But Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust, have since intervened, effectively rendering Jews, Zionists, conspiracy, and the Holocaust, literally untouchable with regard to critical scrutiny at least by "reasonable individuals of good will." And, of course, to the degree this critical scrutiny is considered taboo, so has the power of "The Lobby," on all socio-political levels, increased. That much is irrefutable yet it is considered extremely impolitic to mention it. Today, Henry Ford's reputation remains stained because of his publication of what he considered a necessary warning to thwart what appeared to be a successfully ongoing conspiracy of financial interests. He is even accused of being considerably responsible for the Holocaust itself a blame in which all western Gentiles are expected to feel partially guilty. The edition of the Protocols pointed to in these links contain much additional material, in the way of both background history and subsequent developments up to the time of publication. Surprisingly, it's available from Amazon.com, along with a lot of other books with similar titles, many of which are probably disapproving of the Protocols. The "real thing," as far as Pridger knows, is the one with "no cover image available," by Nilus, translated by Victor E. Marsden. But it is also available on the web at many sites, one of them being: The Protocols of Zion, by Nilus & Marsden: http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/przion1.htm. The International Jew is also available from Amazon.com. John Q. Pridger Friday, 6 February, 2009 CHANGE SEEMS TO BE IN THE OFFING! IS IT HOPE, OR A DESIRE FOR CHANGE,
PROMPTING SEVERAL STATES TO RECLAIM THEIR SOVEREIGNTY 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." 10th Amendment - Powers of the States and People: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Not since the Civil War have States had the guts to assert their Constitutional rights in the face of an increasingly Imperial central government. The Civil War conquered, and Reconstruction further demoralized, the Southern States. During the Civil Rights era, they were demoralized once again by federal troops. Northern states tasted the same bitter fruits of de facto subjection with the federal government wielding the carrots and sticks of "Federal Dollars." And the Federal Government has usurped the rights of the States with impunity ever since, essentially (and quite unconstitutionally), rendering the governments of the States pandering agents of the Federal government. Of course, the States (both north and south), fell, pretty willingly, into lockstep with the central government, following its dictates like so many puppies. Like everything else, they were effectively bought and paid for by federal tax dollars. The federal ability to do this, of course, was facilitated by the Federal Reserve System. But something has changed now. The economy is tanking, and everybody knows who and what has caused it. And the public instinctively knows that the present course of action to "save" the super-bankers and the "filthy" rich and "simulate" the economy, is the "solution" by and for the big-boys rather than them it's a bail out for the very ones who have caused the crash. And it is going to destroy the value of the dollar in the fullness of time. It is fairly well known that the federal government is poised to assume totalitarian powers and invoke marshal law. In such case, the States may wish to declare their independence of action to save themselves on an individual basis, rather than succumbing to dictatorial federal rule. It is conceivable that the Union could be dissolved by the several States. At any rate, several states have taken the first step to recover their sovereignty. The include:
Are we seeing a trend? http://www.taxtruth4u.com/eight%20states.html There was a period during the 1990s when similar resolutions
were being considered by various State Houses. For example, Georgia apparently
did so in 1995_96. Pridger's own state of Illinois is apparently dragging its feet it has had other problems to focus on lately. However, the state motto is "State Sovereignty National Union." with "State Sovereignty" significantly placed ahead of National Union. Perhaps "State Sovereignty" will once again become a central focus. John Q. Pridger DISSOLVING THE UNION? Last November Professor Igor Panarin, a top Russian political analyst, predicted that the United States is heading for collapse and will divide into six separate regional State federations of some sort. Canada, Mexico and the U.S. will adopt the Amero currency, and China and Russia will regulate world markets.
Ironically, the last time the Union was threatened by the attempted secession of several Southern States, Civil War was utilized to prevent it. The government in Washington was willing to plunge the whole nation into war to prevent the secession. It's unclear what Washington would, or could, do if several states from every part of the nation declared independence at the same time as the result of a financial melt down. During the Civil War, the financial crisis materialized as the result of the war a crisis almost as critical as the financial crisis we are facing today. The Union needed a lot of money very quickly, just as it does now. Abraham Lincoln was confronted with a critical decision. Borrow the money from the banking establishment, at cripplingly usurious interest rates, or declare independence from the bankers. Lincoln opted for issue of the nation's first fiat national currency the greenback dollar. Perhaps the Union could be saved again using greenbacks. The bankers and the Federal Reserve System stand exposed as the cause of our present problems exposed and discredited as never before in the history of nations. Their system is bankrupt and has bankrupted the nation. This is the time to declare our independence from the bankers by resurrecting the greenback dollar. So far, the solution has been to pour more gas on the fire by expanding the nation's debt at an astounding rate which is what President Lincoln refused to do when he funded the Civil War with "American" legal tender that did not add to the nation's debt. It's unlikely that President Obama will follow the example of Abe Lincoln. He probably hasn't even thought of it. It's probably too much to expect that he will see the light any time soon. But at some point, as the crisis deepens, the idea is bound to come up. Rather than trying to buy our way out of debt problems with more debt, why not just use our own money? That's only common sense. We can't dig our way out of a hole by digging the hole deeper. The first step in getting out of a hole is to quit digging. The way to put a fire out is to throw water on it. Of course, the goal of the bankers and their shadow government is to end this crisis by re-firing their monetary Ponzi scheme on a new, One World, global basis, instituting an international monetary system which will amount to debt ownership of the entire world and de facto world government. Perhaps the State governments are now preparing to resist this scenario. Maybe "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" will reassert itself as individual States declare independence with the full sovereign rights to emit bills of credit as currency, based on their own authority as fully independent Republics. Perhaps regional Unions of States will emerge out of the chaos, and the full Union eventually resurrected as a Union of independent Republics. Fortunately, these American States are not the only States coalescing to do battle with the global money power. Other nations have been resisting it for some time. And there will be more, for all have suffered at the hands of the international monetary powers. John Q. Pridger SPEAKING OF STATE SOVEREIGNTY Speaking of State sovereignty, states can be tyrannies too, you know. We must not forget that. But the closer government is to the people, the more likely it will be responsive to the people. The individual's vote means more in local and state elections than it does in national elections. Take gun laws for example. While most of the hoopla over gun control laws takes place at the national lever, it is the Second Amendment of the Federal Constitution that thus far has protected citizens' gun rights when State legislators have often sought to abridge those federally protected rights. In Pridger's home state of Illinois, for example, the state still gets away with charging residents $5.00 a head for their Second Amendment right to own firearms. $5.00 is what it costs for a Firearms Owner's Identification card (FOID), in order to have abridged firearms ownership "privileges." If you haven't got a card, you simply don't have the right to keep or bear arms as far as Illinois is concerned. If you own a gun anyway, you are automatically an un-apprehended felon. As for the right to "bear" arms, you don't have those even if you've been properly FOIDed by the State Police Power. The State Constitution guarantees the right "to keep and bear arms" but qualifies that with "subject to the Police Power," i.e., the State's "Police State Clause." And the "Police Power" statutes are written in such a way to make it impossible to carry firearms for self defense, or saving the lives of damsels in distress unless the need happens to arise at home, or when hunting with a duly issued hunting license (only in hunting season, of course). If you are FOIDed, and walk everywhere you go, or maybe ride a horse or bicycle, it might be possible to do a little "open carry." But only until you happen to run into a police officer. Then you'll be lucky not to be charged with something. They can always charge you with something in order to change your habits. Another attempt is being made to pass an Illinois "concealed carry" law, with all due restrictions, licensing and training requirements. That would be better than being considered a felon for carrying an equalizer. But you've still got to be properly licensed. Remember, nothing that requires licensing, or a special ID card, can be construed as a right. If those things are required for an activity or privilege, they are illegal unless you are granted such special privilege by the state or other issuing authority. Of course, on the other hand, as sovereign citizens of the United States of America, we have the right to own and carry weapons, either openly or concealed anyway. No red-blooded American would deny that, regardless what the State says. And it's much easier to get away with carrying a concealed weapon than carrying on openly. If criminals can do it, we certainly can too. Trouble is, it's against State law. State law, and you can go to jail for it if caught U.S. Constitution, and God-given rights, be damned. Pridger has carried in the past but not much. It's like drinking and driving. If you are caught, the State will make you wish you'd stayed home that day. And if one ever gets into a situation where that weapon comes in handy for self-defense, you may as well hold fire and let the armed assailant stab or shoot you, just to prevent the law from taking full revenge on you for harming or killing an assailant or even for just scaring him away. John Q. Pridger Thursday, 5 February, 2009 MONETARY REFORM WHO WILL BELL THE CAT? That's the title of an excellent article on monetary reform by by Zahir Ebrahim of Project Human Beings First. Zahir Ebrahim grew up in Pakistan, studied at MIT, was an engineer in high-tech Silicon Valley, and then turned to other pursuits. He is a researcher and writer on contemporary geopolitics, and a justice activist, His maiden 2003 book was rejected by six publishers and can be read on the web at http://PrisonersoftheCave.org. (But this is totally off our present subject.) Unfortunately, the prognosis for real monetary reform any time soon is not good, because the vested interests are so overwhelming. The mystique of the Federal Reserve System and other central banks is still too great and too shielded from scrutiny. and the real agenda is still totally overlooked by the vast majority of the people. That agenda is, of course, is what it has always been one world government under the hegemony of private central bankers, the end game design of free trade, globalism, and the New World Order. In other words, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" will remain little more than quaint words uttered by Honest Abe some 144 years ago. To top things off, though there are many who see the problem with our present system, and there is no shortage of proposals for "honest money" (at least outside of the establishment), many proponents of monetary reform are inexplicable stuck on the false and dangerous notion that money can only be gold or silver that "honest money" can only be in the form of gold and silver, and that these are the only kind of money our Constitution allows. But this is a trap, because "gold and silver as money" has always been the game of the banking classes usurers, and moneylenders all. Their possession of these precious metal assets was the basis of the credit they were able to extend. It was their game when the world was on the gold standard, and though their game today is the fiat debt money system, it will be their game again if get conned into a return to a gold standard. For they are the great moneyed interests, thus they have command over the lion's share of the world's monetary gold stocks. The following are a few salient quotes excerpted from "Monetary Reform Who Will Bell the Cat?" by Zahir Ebrahim. There isn't much of Ebrahim in the tracts below mostly the lead-ins to "quotes" he has provided. Ebrahim's article is a long and scholarly one which makes the common sense case for monetary reform, and also tells why we probably won't get it. Please read his whole article at http://humanbeingsfirst.org, (Emphasis added):
Zahir Ebrahim reminds us that many people have warned of the perversities, even absurdities, of our private central banking system every step of the way on the road we have followed since 1913 (and even long before that). They have shown us, in both simple and complex terms, the way to an enlightened, honest, monetary system. But the central bankers in general, and the Federal Reserve System in particular, with the support of bought and paid for politicians, mass media, and the corporate environment that has grown up around them, have successfully thwarted any inroads into their monopoly on the issue of money and credit issue. It is interesting to note that Zahir Ebrahim is of Pakistani origin. More and more frequently, we are finding that we need imports for survival. Olde tyme Americans no longer seem to have it when it comes to such issues as monetary policy and plan old horse sense applied to governance in general. We've become like the old USSR, which was often portrayed (as on one cover of Time or Newsweek magazine some years ago), as a country ruled by clumsy, blundering, incompetent, idiots, who don't know which end of the wrench fits over the nut. We must depend on more recent immigrants to clear the smoke from our shrouded eyes, articulate common sense, and show what is needed to return to a sane course. The quality of American "thinkers" has become as debased as our currency. We no longer have men like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln in government. Nor even like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, or Jack Kennedy. We no longer have thinkers such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford at the head of major industries. It isn't that we don't have people with brains out there, it's just that most of the "best and the brightest" have been mal-educated from kindergarten up. Those who have gained the knowledge, insight, and wisdom to guide and rule in an enlightened fashion are excluded from positions of importance. They simply don't fit in. The establishment that has evolved during the last century has become very exclusive. The establishment, which selected both Barack Obama and John McCain for us, left us with a clear choice. If the American people wanted any hope for change, the choice would have to be Obama. Obama = change. McCain = more of the same. Some choice! So we have elected Barack Obama as president. The people instinctively know that we are in dire need of "change," so we have elected a neat guy who promised hope and change. But, though Obama knows we need change, and has promised change, he has yet to articulate a real idea. He's a blank slate, and has had no choice but to surround himself with a cadre of the "best and the brightest" government and the banking interests have to offer all of whom stand for politics as usual, without a real idea among them. Obama has come into office at an extraordinarily critical point in our history. He's confronted with multiple MAJOR problems. He literally had to hit the ground running at top speed, without having had time to find his feet or feel his way. He probably hasn't had time to get a clear idea as to what is really going on at least from the perspective of the high position he finds himself in. When he finds his feet, he may reveal himself as a great leader. We sincerely hope so. But a lot of irreparable damage can be done in the interim, no matter how brief. John Q. Pridger Wednesday, 4 February, 2009 INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC INTERDEPENDENCE NOT SUCH A GOOD IDEA! "When the rich countries of the West get a cold, China gets the flu. And when China gets the flu, the rest of the region gets pneumonia."
When the complicated interwoven trade mega-systems start to break down, millions suffer from the snowballing effects the effects of just downright bad global trade policy where "everybody is making everything for others elsewhere rather than for themselves." This is a mega-system that should never have been built in the first place. Our present international trade patterns have become impossibly intricate, multi-layered, jigsaw puzzle patters that require computer-perfect planning, timing, coordination, transportation systems, and swift and dependable wholesale and retailing all of which required steady and unremitting consumer buying and consumption. These intricate chains require sustained, uninterrupted function in order to work. If one part of the chain breaks, multiple dispersed, but connected, mega-systems jam up and start breaking down. And it's all unnecessary. Probably over 50% of global trade is both unnecessary and ultimately counter productive to the well being of all nations concerned. At best with all systems working like clockwork the system is ultimately unsustainable. This from both an environmental impact and resource availability standpoint. In a rational system, all nations would do for themselves whatever they can do, and conduct trade only in the areas, commodities, and products, that they need and cannot otherwise produce domestically. Things like "parts jobbing" among several nations is ridiculous a system where critical parts for products assembled and exported from one country are manufactured and shipped in from a dozen others. The Journal of Commerce has recently reported that some 225 mega-ships 5.5% of the world's container shipping fleet have been laid up. Some 675,000 shipping containers (TEUs) were stacking up, empty and idle, in major ports. This, according to AXS-Alphaliner, a French maritime consulting firm. Inventory is stacked up in massive backlogs in congested ports, warehouses, and freight yards. Factories are shutting down and workers being sent home in scores of countries. We've found out what happens when banks and financial institutions deemed "too big to fail" begin to fail. The whole system of mega-systems begin to fail too. All of these systems are too big to fail. But they are failing anyway because they became too big to support their own weight ultimately too big to succeed. It's a massive international pile-up. Fiascos of unfathomable proportions! "Chickens coming home to roost." It's time world leaders read "Small is Beautiful" and learn that the true sustainability comes from real diversity rather than a single great hodge-podge wrapped up in corporate mega-systems driven by the profit motive of a very few owners. We once again need systems built on human scales, that recognize that people matter, and regions matter, and nations matter and, like individuals, they should maintain individuality of purpose, with real natural instincts off self-reliance, self-defense, and the desire for survival individually as well as collectively. Our global economy has tried to deny the value of localism and the value of local self-reliance and sustainability, in an effort to make the world function as if it were a village. The world isn't a village, it is, and should continue to be, a rather large and exquisitely diverse place. Our interconnectedness and interdependence is dictated by the planet that we inhabit. We're all residents and citizens of the same natural mega-system that is our Earth. Nature's own mega-systems rule our lives and supply our bounty. But there should be reasonable limits to the size and complications of the corporate mega-systems of men, lest we find ourselves... well, for one thing, in the very situation that we now find ourselves in trapped by our own mega-systems and their inevitable failures trying to spend and buy our way out of our self-made crisis utilizing the capital resources we hope our children and grandchildren will be able to repay. John Q. Pridger LOU DOBBS IN THE CROSS-HAIRS Perhaps Lou Dobbs is the most courageous talking head we have in the mainstream news media. He stands alone as a voice against a whole array of things that most news commentators are afraid to touch things such as NAFTA, free trade, and illegal immigration. Pridger stumbled upon him some years ago and wondered how his brand of news and commentary was "allowed" to survive on the CNN airways. He's the only newscaster around who reflects an "American" point of view, taking on the politicians, corporate oligarchy, and the forces of political correctness. Naturally, he's attacked from almost every quarter. And that makes it all the more baffling just how he survives. Often he's attacked as a racist. And if Lou Dobbs ever makes a mistake on quoted facts or figures, you can be sure that the political correctness police will be all over it like flies on a week old caribou carcass. Right now he's getting the third degree from some of the touchy-feeling politically correct crowd by spinning the words "cotton picking" into some his homilies as in (to make one up), "It's high time for our cotton picking politicians to wake up and do something for their country for a change." There is no more innocuous adjective to use in such a case. But the super-sensitive, politically correct, purveyors of race victimology, consider those words, "cotton picking" to be a racial putdown much worse than the ordinary expletives that lace most of their own "ordinary" vernacular, which routinely have to be bleeped out of their own righteous rants when aired in the media. Pridger finds this sort of laughable. In fact, except on daytime broadcast radio and TV, the standard expletive, "Mother F----r" (and all the other F-word derivatives), is considered to be much more polite, and certainly more race-neutral, than "cotton picker." Ironically, much of the white community in this country (and all countries of the English Speaking world), has whole-heartedly adopted the popular "black vernacular" but is no longer supposed to say such things as, "Cotton picking this," and "Cotton picking that," or "Damn that cotton picking truck!" This is not cultural progress my friends at least in Pridger's humble opinion. It seems Lou, in reference to some statement Condoleezza Rice had said, started to say "cotton...". The word "cotton" came out before he caught himself, realizing what the liberal establishment and minority race baiters would make of the words used in the context at hand. But it was too late. Everybody knew what Lou had started to say. Time for a roast. Traditional racial stereo-types have become taboo even the most innocent and amiable ones. So what stands in their stead? What has replaced the image of Little Black Sambo, or the happy kid with the big slice of watermelon in the public mind? The threatening dark figure. The crack-head, the con and the ex-con, the rabid rapper, the pimp and his "hos," the violent. Those are the images that have replaced the old stereotypes. This, in spite of all the positive black role models and the fact that the majority of blacks do not resemble the stereotypes. AMERICA'S GREAT BIRTH DEFECT Pridger agrees with a lot of what Lou Dobbs says and stands for, but not everything. Lou's comments on that occasion were in response to something Ms. Rice had said about America having been born with a "birth defect" meaning African slavery. Apparently Lou took exception to that. Pridger agrees with Ms. Rice on this matter. The way Pridger sees it, this country certainly was born with a serious birth defect the very one to which Ms. Rice referred. And that birth defect is causing us trouble to this very day. The very fact that Lou Dobbs is being called a racist for articulating words like "cotton picker" or "cotton picking" is ample evidence of that. Condoleezza Rice knows it, as most of us know it and Pridger feels Lou is being a little disingenuous in claiming to be slightly aghast at Ms. Rice's mention of it. Had this country not been born with the birth defect that "peculiar institution" of imported African slavery we would have escaped a lot of major problems we've experienced throughout our history. Today, those problems are ongoing, perpetuated by both black and white complainers, crybabies, and malcontents. But we have to cope with it. We have come a long way, however. The fact that Condoleezza Rice was George Bush's Secretary of State, and Barack Obama is now the president of this nation, shows that we have made it passed some of the problems. But we'll never make it past all of them. That's just the way the world works. Racial difference will always be apparent, and skin color is our most obvious racial trait. There will always be some raced base discrimination and bias. It's unavoidable. We need to get real and accept it. We white and black Americans will never be welcome as immigrants to most Asian nations. Not because we are hated, but simply because we are not Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, or Vietnamese, etc. We don't condemn those nations for wishing to maintain their own exclusive, yet still rich and diversified indigenous races, within their borders. America came into being as a nation of English and other western Europeans. Obviously, it was intended to be, and to remain, a nation of and for those and other racially related peoples. That is quite obvious to all. True equality under the law, as promised in our national charters, came hard and slow for non-white minorities. But reality was bound to assert itself in time. It proved impossible to excise the defect and we have finally come to accept it as an asset extending uniform treatment and protection under the law for all races. Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Africans, and even Native Americans, can now all be full-fledged American citizens with the full array of rights promised by our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. An African-American can even become president. John Q. Pridger Tuesday, 3 February, 2009 SMOOT HAWLEY SCARE INVOKED AGAINST AMERICA The free traders, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are upset over the "buy American" provision in the proposed economic stimulus package. Buying American would put a crimp in their style and their style is corporate internationalism. Free traders have absolutely no loyalty to this or any other nation. "They" are saying that any "Buy American" requirement smells of "protectionism" and "Smoot-Hawley," referring to the Smoot-Hawley_Tariff_Act of 1930, which free traders falsely credit with helping to bring on the Great Depression. Smoot-Hawley did no such thing. It merely sought to help American manufacturers and their workers by protecting them from low priced foreign competition. At that time, we had developed an excess of both industrial agricultural production. The American thing to do was to protect those industries and the hundreds of thousands of jobs they represented. We didn't need imports competing with American industry, especially in the time of economic crisis. We didn't need to send any of our money abroad when our problem was a lack of sufficient money at home*. It would have had the fully positive effect intended had the Federal Reserve not initiated a sustained contraction of the domestic money supply. That is what exacerbated the after-effects of the stock market crash and brought on the Depression in the United States. It was the lack of monetary liquidity in the economy, not a lack of imports or anything else, that brought on the Depression. If Smoot-Hawley had any negative effects, it is because it was perhaps a little precipitous, and caused hardship to some of our trading partners. At that time America was both a solvent and industrially self-sufficient nation, with a favorable balance of trade. We had everything we needed to recover from the stock market debacle with measured grace, but the bankers (through our Federal Reserve System), were pulling the the teeth out of any potential recovery by withholding money and credit. Some American export industries may have been hurt by the fallout from Smoot-Hawley, of course, but at that time, both exports and imports accounted for only a relatively slim slice of the American economy. Its aim was to protect the overall economy. But both it's positive and negative effects are overblown. Large industrialists like the otherwise populist Henry Ford, being heavily engaged in international trade, didn't like the tariff, calling it "an economic stupidity." The free traders and internationalists, including some exporters who were hurt by retaliatory protective measures by some other nations, have been claiming that Smoot-Hawley and "protectionism" were a major factor in creating the Great Depression. They have been using it in their speeches and arguments promoting free trade, international interdependence, and the "new international economic order," ever since we first began losing our way literally! Add to the traditional list of enemies of protecting our markets the whole array of corporate business interests that have since become involved in international trade, offshoring, job and factory export, out-sourcing, union busters, labor importation, mega-retailers of imports, and those producing "American Products Produced Abroad" (APPA) not to mention the mushrooming international financial services and exotic investments sector, and offshore assets protection syndicates. All of these are eager to protect their own markets and profit streams, but not "ours." Our Great Depression, like the one at our door step today, was fully "made in America" by bankers, speculative financial traders, and politicians who conveniently didn't see it coming. We're in our present extraordinarily vulnerable economic position today because we have neglected to protect our own markets, as love of country and simple common sense should dictate in a rational world. By abandoning protectionism (which is one of few constitutional functions of the federal government), we have frittered away our great industrially productive position of strength in the world. We have literally lost our independence. Those who effectively work against our national interests, and in favor of free trade, have destroyed our economic position in the world by convincing us (or at least our sleeping leadership), that our economic strength is in consumption, at the cheapest available global prices, rather than in production. Protectionism is nothing more than protecting our own owner/operated industrial plant and marketplace for the benefit of those citizen owners first and foremost. Protectionism is to "import invasion" what the defense establishment is to foreign "military invasion." Both types of protection are legitimate functions of the federal government, which no viable great nation can survive very long without. A "viable" nation is one that can feed and otherwise support itself on the basis of it's own human and natural recourses. Not all nations can be viable nations. And some that are not, can even be prosperous. But no nation can be great without first being viable and to remain great, any nation must remain viable. Free trade policy has not only perverted and undermined our economy it has also helped undermine our strategic position in the world, and thus pervert and weaken our national defense. Thus, today we find our defense establishment fighting for the freedom, democracy, and natural resources for and of "others elsewhere." For it isn't protectionism that causes war, as the free traders continuously propagandize what causes war is the coveting the property and resources of others elsewhere and forcing markets open through the barrels of guns. If we had never had access to cheap oil from others elsewhere, we would have long ago solved the problems of both "clean coal technology," renewable energy, and many of the other problems associated with our propensity to over-consume natural resources. Those in Congress who are favoring the "Buy American" stipulations in the current economic stimulus package are the ones who are beginning to wake up, at least a little bit. Of course, there are other things wrong with the proposed economic stimulus package. But the "Buy American" provision is not a problem it is made out to be by the agents of international trading interests. *The lack of massive currency and credit creation during the Depression was not wholly the fault of the Federal Reserve itself, except in that it was an agent of the gold standard "money power." One of the main reasons Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress were reticent to spend more on the various recovery programs in the 1930s was due to the nation being on the gold standard. Keynesian deficit spending policy was hampered by the fact that dollars were supposedly as good as gold, and the fear of unconscionable levels of debt that would have had to be repaid in gold denominated dollars. Both the president and Congress were as afraid of a purely fiat currency as they were of gold denominated debt. John Q. Pridger MOST OF OUR TRADE MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL As Ben Franklin said, "Nobody profit from trade, unless one or the other is cheated." Who is being cheated by our free trade policy? America workers first and foremost. This includes all of those who have lost their former employment, whether they were "good" jobs or not, plus all of the rest who are otherwise "downsized" in both pay and benefits. They are also being deprived (robbed), of the ability to be productive citizens. Secondly, everybody else who is not directly profiting both here and abroad. Most Mexican and Asian workers are being cheated by being underpaid and/or forced to work in unhealthy work environments. In many cases import invasions of such things as American grain is also destroying their ability as societies, regions, and nations, to be self-reliant and food self-sufficient. Shipping manufactured goods of almost any and every nature across broad oceans, is totally counterproductive. International trade does not add value, it adds shipping costs big ones. All profits gained by manufacturers, shipping companies, land transportation companies, wholesalers, retailers, and corporate owners are strictly due to one thing wage differentials between countries of origin and the market targeted. Though all of these interests obviously profit, the real costs don't even enter into the bookkeeping equation. They are both human costs and monetary costs, as mentioned. And a great deal of the monetary costs don't show up at the Walmart checkout counter. Not even close! They show up on the statistic known as the national debt. As our current trade deficit and balance of payments deficit readily show, "free trade" isn't paying its own freight by a long shot. Americans don't realize it, but in addition to losing their jobs, they get to pay a small installment on the outstanding debt balance every April 15th. Mixed in with our government's huge operating revenue deficit, is the real cost of all of those cheap foreign imports. Of course, it makes sense to trade with foreign nations for such things as raw materials or exotic specialty products that are not available in one's own country, but it doesn't make any sense to trade for any of the things that can be as readily produced in one country as another. And this is where we have gone wrong, and why we are being cheated out of the natural right to produce our own wealth, and profit from the effort. When international trade is carried on in strictly on the basis of human labor alone, which is what we are doing, the deficits in human terms are not quantified on anybody's balance sheet. In the end, Chinese labor and American labor (in a rational world) are worth exactly the same things. The Chinese can produce the same things for themselves with the same amount of work that they now produce them for us. And they should be producing them for themselves, rather than for us, just as we should be producing the things we need for ourselves. Only when workers are essentially producing for themselves, or for their own people within their own society, economy, or nation, can they ever reap the full benefits of their labor. This is a fundamental truth, and it ultimately makes the difference between free men and men bound to work strictly for the benefit of others elsewhere. John Q. Pridger Monday, 2 February, 2009 NEW HAMPSHIRE SENDS MESSAGE TO WASHINGTON The "Live Free or Die" state of New Hampshire is living up to its motto. The State House has proposed a resolution which is getting a lot of attention all over the country. And it is bound to get the attention of Washington whether or not it passes and it certainly should pass. This is the most refreshing proposed state legislation to come down the pike in a long, long, time. And it's high time for it..
Of course, if the Constitution of the United States of America is no longer in force, the various States have the right to assume full national sovereignty in their own right they have the very same God given rights that the North American English colonies had when they originally declared independence from England in 1776. But Washington cannot afford to come out and say that the Constitution of the United States is no longer in force, for every single elected official in Washington has sworn a "sacred" oath to support and defend that Constitution. They have absolutely no defense against New Hampshire's bold assertion of State's Rights.
This is powerful stuff! And hopefully it will arouse a critical mass our leaders in Washington wake up and smell the roses. They have abused the Constitution and made light of their sacred oaths of officer for far too long! They've gone too far, and appear to be ready to go much further in the wrong direction. Read the proposed Resolution in it's entirety below, as taken from an Official New Hampshire General Court web site (some red emphasis added in longer paragraphs):
If this Resolution passes, Washington should begin to get the message. New Hampshire with 1.1 million people and only 8,992 sq. miles of real estate (41st in the nation in population, and 44th in size) will have been the "Mouse that Roared" Hopefully, the other 49 States will gain enough intestinal fortitude to send Washington the same message. Our message to Congress and the president is, and ought to be: "These People reserve the right of resistance to tyranny." John Q. Pridger Sunday, 1 February, 2009 THE IRONIES OF POWER From the standpoint of our political-financial leadership, our greatest weakness would become our greatest strengths. But reality is beginning to assert itself. When the American dollar, a pure debt instrument, became the world's reserve currency, the seeds were finally sown for our economic destruction. Historically, we had been economically strong. Until the early circa 1980, we had been the world's greatest creditor nation. But that wasn't the cause of our strength, it was one of the symptoms of our strength. Our real strength was in our production our ability to produce wealth. When we became the world's largest debtor nation, our leadership opted to reverse the rationales of strength. They began to believe in the strength that debt could convey to the largest and richest nation on earth. Why not go whole hog, they seemed to say. The leadership had heard the story that goes. "If you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank owns you. But if you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank." So the Washington brain trust decided to plunge us into such phenomenal debt to the rest of the world that we'd literally own it. We'd own it and rule it, because, even if we cannot even pretend to pay off our debt, the rest of the world would be hostage to it. Since the dollar was the world's only reserve currency, the rest of the world had no choice but carry ever-greater dollar reserves. Even if American eventually defaults on its debt obligations, what could the rest of the world do? Dump American debt? Dump dollars? Dump them for what? And to whom? When the dumping starts, the dollar effectively becomes worthless. Who would accept dumped dollars then? There would be nowhere to dump them. Who would want them? They may as well just burn them. And all those debts? They too would be worthless. The debts could and would be paid off with worthless dollars. And the debts generated in the debt payment process would be just as worthless as the debts they were paying. A circular route to nowhere. So, we're in a fix and the world is in a fix. But the brain trust in Washington really isn't all that bright, and isn't reacting any more rationally than they've led the nation for thirty years or more. While they were busily buying the world, in reverse, they were also denuding the nation of its ability to function as a productive, self-contained, economy. While they were busy constructing a debt-hostage global "free trade" Empire, they were going the extra mile to kill their own goose the one that had once laid all the golden eggs. Our creditors are beholden to us to purchase their products and keep their own economy going, and most of the underdeveloped world is beholden to us because we are their creditor they are bought and paid for. America's industrial plant (our real wealth creation ability), was methodically transferred to Japan, Mexico, China, Korea, India, and a few other places*. Our supposed ace in the hole was that they were creating wealth for us, (freeing up American workers so they could become "knowledge workers"), and we were buying their production with American dollars as fast as they could produce.
Naturally, those new industrial centers needed American super-consumers to consume their production. They needed us, thus were caught in a trap. In fact, they needed us so badly that the smart, most successful ones (such as China), would gladly loan us the money with which to purchase their goods. Our leaders actually believed this arrangement made us indispensable to the rest of the world. And most of the rest of the world believed it too*. A Wonderful New World was developing a New World Order.
So we became a nation of consumers while the rest of the world became the producers in effect, our reverse debt slaves. The capital of Empire consumes the wealth produced by the rest of the Empire. Though this was reversed debt slavery, our leadership saw noting incongruous about this arrangement. After all, the world economy functioned on the American dollar, and there was no other market in town to compete with the consumptive capacities of the greatest, richest, and most powerful nation in the world. But the game went too far. Greed and haste for quick and abundant profits overcame all reasoned discretion. "Toxic" assets came to the fore and exposed our weak and fraudulent underbelly. The system played itself out in Ponzi scheme fashion, revealing itself as a massive scam. Still, the world is hostage to the dollar the collapsing dollar. So what now? There is a massive array of brilliant bankers, economists, think tanks, university men, and politicians in every advanced and developing nation who don't want to admit they have been scammed. And they certainly don't want to admit they had been willing or even eager parties to it, with overpowering incriminating vested interests. Naturally, the money power is not going to relinquish its hard earned power. Though it stands starkly exposed, naked and discredited, it is still in charge. The TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), which was really another "TRAP" (Troubled Rip-off Assistance Package), was jointly devised by the global banker, Henry Paulson, who headed the Treasury Department and the global banker, Ben Bernanke, who heads the Federal Reserve. Our political leaders were merely charged with rubber-stamping their plan a bailout for the financially criminally insane members of their own club. "Do it! And do it in a hurry!" they were told. The Trillion dollar Obama stimulus plan will be under the purview of the same shepherds of the money supply that got us to where we are, with monetary inflation continuing to going off the charts. And the overwhelming proportion of money Obama intends to spend will be aimed at non-productive non-wealth creating sectors of the economy. After all, real wealth production is something the government has been fighting for thirty years and more. That's something Red China does now, and we don't take our lead from China. But the dollar will still collapse globally. It's reign as the world's reserve currency is probably over. It's practically* inevitable. The rest of the world is compelled, with no particular credit to themselves, to wake up and make other arrangements. The question is, will dollars still be good in this country, or will we find ourselves in for another German post-World War I inflationary debacle?
The solutions will probably be devised and dictated by the international bankers. No telling what they'll come up with but you can bet it won't be good for us or anybody else but them. In the mean time, each nation has the ability to establish and use its own domestic currency (Hey, they do that anyway??!!), even if the bankers don't like it. We could do it, too, simply by going back to our tried and true national, internal, greenback system. But this would require some insight, common sense, and brilliant acts on the part of Congress, however. So, naturally, this remedy is highly unlikely. The old bankers' truism, that government bureaucrats and elected representatives of the people are incompetent to manage national monetary issue will stand even though it's become evident that bankers can't be trusted either. Internal "national" currency is all that is needed to fire up and keep the internal real economy working. Let the private central bankers and the flim-flam men stew in their own juices for a while. When the real economy takes off, maybe even the flim-flam men will be able to find real jobs. Otherwise, what is needed to restart the regular Ponzi scheme, is a dose of massive debt forgiveness across the board. It has become bad, un-payable, debt. But who would want to forgive America's debt, both key and cause of the whole thing? Why should rich, spoiled, and still overfed, Americans be forgiven for the folly of their disastrous leadership in both war and peace? Any such forgiveness will be a very hard sell. John Q. Pridger A WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITY FOR THE CHINESE US TOO! Our leaders are so stupid that they actually believe China needs us just as much as we need them. They think China needs our market as much or more than we need their production. This is actually laughable. Here's why. Simply put, the Chinese have a billion or more people who stand ready to buy everything that we're buying from them right now. All they need is the money. And the Chinese government has both the money and a command economy. Suppose the Chinese are as smart as they appear to be. What if they read American history and found out just what it was that make the United States such a successful nation (Once upon at time). Suppose they just read of Henry Ford's business philosophy. The main lesson was: "Pay the workers well enough to be the consumers of their own production!!!" Presto! What if China started doing that? China already has the technology, and has developed and built the industry required to begin to satisfy it's own domestic market. All that is required is to start putting sufficient purchasing power into the hands of their own workers. They don't need to be dependent on exporting their production elsewhere certainly not as dependent on it as they are now. They have a rich and diverse landmass as large as the United States, and a population that is four times as large! Those people are eager to consume considerably more than they do now. We should encourage China to turn its production inward and really start to satisfy its own vast domestic consumer market. Done in a paced manner, as it would have to be done, it could help the United States too by giving it time to re-industrialize and become industrially self-reliant again. We would slowly but steadily curtail our industrial dependence on China as China developed it's internal markets, and as we re-tooled and begin to produce for ourselves to satisfy our own internal market. It would be a win-win situation. And the way Pridger sees it, it's the only sane thing to do. We need to make some kind of a deal. John Q. Pridger All quotations and excerpts are based on non-profit "fair use" in the greater public interest consistent with the understanding of laws noted at http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html.
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