The powers-that-be are trying to distract us from the looting of our wallets by the big banks by creating a left-versus-right, us-versus-them drama.
You know, the old divide-and-conquer schtick.
Americans from across the political spectrum are furious at the financial elite who have robbed us blind, and their enablers in government.
While at the moment, conservatives are getting more press, those on the left are just as angry. For example, leading progressive Glenn Greenwald wrote an essay entitled "The virtues of public anger and the need for more" cheering the fact that Americans are starting to get in touch with their righteous anger at being ripped off.
Liberals have launched their own version of the tea party protests calling for the big banks to be broken up.
And many leading economists and policy experts have thunderously railed against Obama's continuation of Bush's cover-up-the-truth, too-big-to-fail, stick-it-to-the-taxpayers approach to the economic crisis.
On the conservative side of the aisle, Ron Paul's media coordinator said that the mainstream Republican party has tried to hijack the tea party movement and has "co-opted" its message. He warns against letting the movement be diverted:
It's important the people at the grassroots level stick to our guns and say no when they try to co-opt our message....And as Michael Rivero has written:
Bringing in someone like Gingrich takes away from the message. Newt Gingrich enabled George W. Bush, he enabled the big spending...
Beware this "left wing versus right wing" dichotomy. This is an attempt to trick us into arguing with each other instead of uniting against the common cause of our problems...To my friends on both the left and the right, I urge you to remember that folks on the other side of the aisle are not the problem. As honest people on both the left and the right agree, the real problems are:
The only real divide is the one mentioned at the very top of this article. The one percent that owns it all against the 99% of us being driven into poverty. The poor against the oligarchs.
- Lack of honest disclosure about the shenanigans of the financial giants
- Failing to prosecute the criminal actions of those companies and their big wigs
- Failing to break up zombie insolvent companies
- Slipping trillions of dollars into the hands of the richest and most powerful companies under the table
- Gaming the numbers
- And continuing to pursue failed economic policies even after they've been proven counterproductive
Bravo!
ReplyDeleteI used to be a staunch democrat, NO MORE!
I voted for Obama b/c I was sick of Bush and his lies.. and I was beyond pissed at Bush/Paulson's 750Billion bailout
I spend so much time campaigning for Obama thinking he would clean up this system or at the very least not continue it.
I cannot tell you how disgusted I am with Obama! And I regretted my vote as soon as I saw he hired the same jerks who caused this 10 years ago.. the Rubin cabal -- summers, geither.
I am now registered as an Independent after being a Democrat for over 20 years. Both parties are corrupt, all this time I thought only the repubs were corrupt.
I will now vote only for those I believe will work for America and Americans NOT THEIR POLITICAL PARTIES! --- political party affiliations no longer matter.
I wanna thank you for this post, you have renewed my faith a little that there are still Americans who are not just political ideologoues, who will put what is best for the country and its citizens over any political party.
-- a newly registered independent
I totally agree! This whole thing has shown us one thing that I began to realize about 8 years ago: The Repbus and Dems are heads of the same snake!
ReplyDeleteEnough is enough.
ReplyDelete911 was an agonizingly apparent false flag, part of an ongoing American criminal policy.
This piece is not too long, but Texas has now cast the die by invoking the tenth Amendment and we need to get a move on because the Basic Arguments for a Legitimate American Revolution apply even more so now, so please read this.
There are many revolutionary strategies but these are the two basic strategies for legitimate revolution, one already started by Texas governor Rick Perry (an the Oklahoma senate) affirming the sovereignty of those states (and counting): “I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state,” Gov. Perry said. “That is why I am here today to express my unwavering support for efforts all across our country to reaffirm the states’ rights affirmed by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our Union.” (google his speech at: http:www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LHrIxc-QyE
***
“Work is the basis for all well-being, while monopoly and cartels are obstacles for the beneficial processes.” – Adam Smith, ‘The Wealth of Nations’ – 1776 (The year Congress declared the United States of America independent.).
There are two peoples in America today: We the People, and the people running the illegitimate regime called the federal government, illegitimate because it does not represent us, the People.
Those two peoples need to separate from one another.
The current illegitimate American government is carrying on its illegitimacy with the money from your work using your money to wage imperialistic, materially beneficial wars instead of directing it toward your well-being where it belongs for the simple reason that it is your money.
The material benefits of your work are going to the companies (the monopolies and cartels) that make the products and systems used for war – tanks, guns, planes, weak body armor, all through monopolistic no-bid contracts to cartels and so on – but not for your well-being.
Your money was not used to maintain the New Orleans levees. Your money was not used to clear out the California underbrush now burning and so devastating that state.
Your money has not been used to maintain your roads, schools, bridges, and medical schemes.
Your money is not being used for your well-being.
You can change that by holding your money back until it is spent on your well-being – After all is said and done, it is your money!
And you can legitimally, constitutionally, withhold it by not paying taxes that are not used for your benefit.
There is an interesting legal doctrine that covers this, with historical precedents.
Ask your firm to pay for your work in cash that you can put directly toward your well-being.
Put the cash under the mattress, buy (and learn how to use) a gun to protect it – you still have that Constitutional right to bear arms thanks to the present Supreme Court.
But you may soon have to protect those rights and other rights once guaranteed by your Constitution.
TAXES ARE ILLEGAL
The Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was never properly ratified (ignore Wikipedia) and therefore there is no legal imperative or obligation to pay taxes to the federal government. See, Tax protester constitutional arguments
So basically, you do not legally have to pay taxes. The reason you think you do is because you believe your money has been spent on your well-being for all these years, looking after you and your interests and your family’s interests and your country’s state and regional interests.
You have been paying taxes because you believe that.
But your money is not going toward your benefit; it is going toward the benefit of another country’s interests, and then to the interests of the monopolies and the cartels of Big Business, Big Government, Big Armament and Big Pharma (which, as you have no doubt heard, is murdering you and your children for your money – The single biggest cause of death in America is the ‘Health Care’ system!)
It’s a sad state of affairs, but it makes the present sitting government illegitimate not only in terms of it not working in the interests of your well-being, but also of it saddling you with ‘Odious Debt’
What if all this global debt was illegal and we, the people, can prove it and get out of it profitably by invoking the Doctrine of Odious Debt?
NEVER ENDING DEBT EQUALS SLAVERY AND IF WE ARE FORCED TO BUY INTO IT – IT IS DEBT BY COERCION AND THEREFORE ODIOUS..
Let’s start with the legalities of usury, which is compound interest, which Albert Einstein said was “the most powerful force in the universe."
Usury has been against the laws of every society from biblical times to the Roman Empire, after which the laws seem to have disappeared because they raise the legal concept of ‘Odious Debt’.
Odious Debt is a powerful legal doctrine, which holds that debt incurred by a regime for purposes that do not serve the interest of the nation, or the people of that nation’s ruling regime, should not be enforceable, as the debt was not incurred by the nation or its people, but solely by the interests of the regime.
I cannot buy something in your name for my own use and make you pay for it.
Such debts are considered by this doctrine to be personal debts of the individuals running the regime that incurred them and not debts of its peoples.
This concept is analogous to the invalidity of any contract signed under coercion or any confession taken under torture.
In 1824 Barings Bank signed a deal with Argentina’s first president, Bernardino Rivadavio, which ended after the ratification of debt as an economic policy in 1979 by a military dictatorship, in the financial collapse of one of South America’s richest countries after almost two hundred years of impoverishment and debt.
The debt was used to control the country’s finances, enrich the country’s bankers and empty the country- which means its people - of its wealth, much the same as that which is happening in the former, now ‘debt-ridden’ African colonies, Europe, England, America and most of the western world.
Debt is an avoidable curse.
Today, America’s sub prime borrowers, as well as ordinary, everyday, 20-year mortgage (death cage) borrowers across the planet, former tenants of the huge empty office and mall shop spaces are in the grip of Odious Debt.
Regardless of monetary theories, results can be taken as fact: Usurious indebtedness as a financial, political and economic policy needs the collusion of the leaders of those sectors of society which produce generations of politicians, technocrats, bureaucrats (and bankers) who favor banks and international institutions over the people – those individuals who are the producers of commodities, their work, which should be to their benefit.
After the Viet Nam war Argentina was somehow $53b in debt, half of which was owned by multinational corporate private enterprise, the other half by banks.
Who borrowed the money? The people?
No. The illegal Argentinean regime contracted the debt. Must the people (along with their grandchildren) pay back an Odious Debt not taken out knowingly by them?
No. But I think that today, we the people need a global representative (and a platform) to argue for the peoples of this stolen planet against any further odious debt and the abrogation of any such debt so far illegally incurred.
“If the public does not benefit, then there is no public debt.”
The doctrine was formalized in a 1927 treatise by Alexander Sack, a Russian emigré and legal theorist. It was based upon 19th Century precedents including Mexico's repudiation of debts incurred by Emperor Maximilian's regime. But, the best legal precedent was the denial by the United States of the Cuban people’s liability for debts incurred by the Spanish colonial regime. Such nice irony.
According to Sack: "When a despotic regime contracts a debt, not for the needs or in the interests of the state, but rather to strengthen itself, and to suppress a popular insurrection, etc, this debt is odious for the people of the entire state.
”This debt does not bind the people of the nation; it is a debt of the regime, a personal debt contracted by the rulers, and consequently it falls away with the demise of the regime.“
The reason why these Odious Debts cannot attach to the territory of the state - the people, you and I - is that they do not fulfill one of the conditions determining the lawfulness of State debts, namely that State debts must be incurred, and the proceeds used, for the beneficial needs of and in the interests of the peoples of the State - you and I, the taxpayers.
Odious Debts, contracted and utilized for purposes, which, to the lenders' knowledge, are contrary to the needs and the interests of the peoples of the nation, are not binding on those peoples – when it succeeds in overthrowing the government that contracted them – unless the debt is within the limits of real advantages that these debts might have afforded if they were in the interests of the advancement of the people and not the banking and military industrial elites.
Those lenders have therefore committed a hostile act against the people of the regime to which they lend money, and cannot afterwards expect a nation’s people, which has freed itself of a despotic regime to assume these Odious Debts, which are the personal debts of the former rulers - but we, The People must first free ourselves from this regime in order to argue this Doctrine.
The African Third World debt is, to me, completely odious.
Very simply, the predatory lending we all know about now was spread across the Third World, indebting its people, through mostly illegal regimes (which also benefited from the theft of the wealth people created by their work, which should have been used to their benefit, but was in fact stolen through Odious Debt.)
Patricia Adams, executive director of Probe International (an environmental and public policy advocacy organization in Canada), and author of Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption, and the Third World's Environmental Legacy (from which came much of the content herein), has stated that there is a solution:
“…by giving creditors an incentive (Jail would be a good one) to lend only for purposes that are transparent and of public benefit, future tyrants will lose their ability to finance their armies, and thus the war on terror and the cause of world peace will be better served.”
In other words, it should be illegal for anyone to sell me something to me for my use to buy it in your name and expect you to pay for it.
On the other hand, she adds, “If the repayment of interest on legitimate, non-odious debt was applied to a reduction of the original capital (i.e. non-usurious interest) by national, federal or international law or other regulatory lending system, the problem would at the very least be minimized, depending on the regularity and amount of capital recovered as part of interest payments.
”Also, if ‘pooling’ or accumulation of non-working capital were limited and an excess of earnings or profit be forced into use as in corporate social consciousness programs, the processes involved in the alleviation of poverty could be far better served than they are now.“
My own theory that the embedded ‘growth requirement’ of modern capitalist business arose from a postindustrial population expansion which eventually slowed down and is now stopped at what has become known a Zero Population Growth (ZPG).
An understanding of this ‘embedded growth’ could also have some positive applications if the ‘embedded growth’ requirement is removed and sustainability is substituted.
That Capitalist driver, population expansion, is gone.
First World Populations are stabilizing. We are now in a situation where fair, not odious, financial balance must be sought.
I said there were two strategies for legal, Constitional revolution:
The next level of revolution is from the individual states, like Texas, invoking the Tenth Amendment and another law that once protected us, called the Posse Comitatus Act is brought back to the people.
The Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act substantially limited the powers of the federal government to use the federal military for local or state law enforcement – and a legitimate revolution with legitimate grievances against a government more and more perceived to be an illegitimate one will, of course, be against that illegitimate government’s‘ recent new laws and the removal of traditional Constitutional protections and that regime will act against any action which may be perceived to threaten its legitimacy.
So it could get pretty hectic, with maybe some shooting unless the individuals in the military can be persuaded that the people have legitimate grievances.
In other words, if you revolt against a United States government that you consider illegitimate, that government cannot Constitutionally use its armies to put down your revolution. But the Bush regime changed that, to you, the people’s detriment.
It will in all likelyhood, with the construction of prison camps all across this wonderfull land try to stop us. But this Constitutional right of ours to also simply protest against a government perceived to be illegitimate and therefore criminal is enshrined in the Posse Comitatus Act, which gives power to the State Militias to protect your tax revolt against the armies of an illegitimate federal government.
If an illegitimate federal government tries to put down a popular revolution or insurrection, the governor of your state has a local standing army in place (the State Militia) to protect you from that illegitimate government’s use of your own troops against you.
No longer, except for the process which Texas has begun.
Your Constitutional right to a local Posse Comitatus (State Militia) to fight an illegitimate federal government has been taken away from you.
It has come to that.
The next step should be a referendum calling for all states’ governors to ratify amendments to state Constitutions reinstating the Posse Comitatus Act state by state and, like Texas, declare sovereignty from the United States Government.
As Americans, We the People are now extremely vulnerable, but legally in the right, which is an American tradition. We are the Good Guys.
And right now, no one on this planet believes that.
We need the basis of our well-being, the benefits of our work, returned to us.
Unless we take back the basis of our well-being, the work that we do and make sure that it once again serves us and not monopoly or cartels, we are slaves.
Here’s the key:
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Another key is that we all have to act together.
And soon.
I used to be out of the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party. I held my nose at the polls many times. Under Bush II I felt my party had left me. I ran for state rep as a Democrat on a platform that was, as it turns out, a lot like Teddy R's back in the day. Well, I could not vote for Obama and I could not vote for McCain. I voted for Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party) for President, Bob Alexander (Democrat) for House of Representatives, Scotty Bowman (Libertarian) for Senate, Paul Opsommer (Republican) for State Rep, and split my votes on down the line depending on what I knew about them as individuals. I am beyond party. I will never vote for the lesser of two evils again. If I can't vote for somebody worth voting for, I will just leave that blank on the ballot.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations are in order, both to this blog's author, and to Tim, for breaking free of the R/L paradigm.
ReplyDeleteToo true.
ReplyDeleteI used to go to luncheons which featured Ron Paul as the speaker. A nicer and more honest politician you will not find anywhere.
ReplyDeleteIt was impossible to tell the Dems from the Repubs from the Indies in the luncheon crowd. Without the RedTeam-BlueTeam cheerleading demagogues to divide us, we were one in seeking freedom and Constitutionally-limited government.
We are Americans above all else.
ReplyDeleteI think today...more than ever before, many of us are out here trying to find truly qualified folks to run for office, local, county, state and on up the chain, the person that will follow and obey The Constitution. It is not perfect...but it is the envy of every country in the world. We need to protect it while we still can.
ReplyDeleteOnce you understand that it (The Constitution) should rule ALL votes on All bills, laws, etc., it becomes so very simple. If we were to elect folks that will truly obey their oath to do so...then only then can we MAYBE begin to get our (We the People's) country back.
I vote across all parties seeking to find the person...not....the party.
Look to your left, right, behind, and in front of you......tap the person's shoulder....talk with them. You will find that you are NOT alone in your anger at what is being done to all of us.
So many folks have worked so hard for equality, blacks, women, gays,latinos, etc. Now we have watched as both Bush's, Clinton, and NOW Obama are dedicated to one thing. They are endeavoring to lead us ALL back into slavery by taxation. Not just us...but our future generations.
EVERYONE, each and everyone of us need to wake up and realize what is REALLY happening and find your voice and speak out loudly.
I guess the comment rules won't allow me to point out the religious affiliation of a good share of Obama's and previous economic controllers in WH and Fed...........
ReplyDelete