The “Majority Opinion” Is An Illusion

If there is one concept on Earth that has been the absolute bane of human existence (besides global elitism), it would have to be the concept of the “majority opinion”.  The moment men began refusing to develop their own world views without first asking “What does everyone else think?”, they set themselves up for an endless future of failures.  We are, of course, very social beings, and our natures drive us to seek those of like mind and spirit in what some might call a “tribal imperative”.  However, this imperative to organize is often manipulated by those who understand the psychological mechanisms behind it.  Oligarchs and tyrants abuse and exploit the inherent social natures of the people in order to fool them into abandoning their individuality for the sake of the group, or some abstract and dishonest ideal.  When successful, the organization of a culture becomes bitter and twisted, changing from a tribe or a community of sovereign individuals, into a nightmare collective of soulless sheep.

Human beings desperately want to belong, but, they also desperately want to understand the environment around them.  Often, the desire to belong and the desire to know the truth conflict.  In some societies, in order to be accepted, one must give up on his search for truth and avoid eliciting the anger of others.  This causes a severe mental and emotional disturbance within a population.  In order to reconcile their conflicting needs within a system that does not nurture their quest for transparency, they tend to unconsciously cling to the “majority view” as if their very existence depends on it.  The idea of the majority view or the “mainstream”, gives people the sense that they are a part of a group, and at the same time, gives them the illusion of being informed.

Their rationale is:

If most of the population believes something to be true, then, by “statistical law”, it most likely is true.  Those who do not share in the majority opinion are therefore in opposition to statistical law; meaning they are behind the times, social deviants, or just plain crazy.. 

The problem is, history has shown that at pivotal moments in a society the “majority opinion” is usually WRONG.  Any progress we do enjoy as a species is almost always due to the actions of tireless aware minorities, or even a lone man or woman who saw what the rest of us could not.

The greatest discoveries and truths have always been the product of individual thought and effort; numerous individuals working on parallel paths to generate new pieces of knowledge or more balanced and principled methods of living.  There has never been such a thing as a collectivist realization, or a collectivist truth, and there never will be. Collectives do not think creatively or honestly.  Their only concern is the survival of the system at all costs, and usually this requires a foundation of lies.

As a nation or culture edges towards collectivist tyranny, the battle-cry of the “majority opinion” will drown out all other reasonable voices.  It has happened before, and unfortunately, it will happen again.  In America today, I believe we are nearing the moment where the mass view becomes the only acceptable or legally sanctioned view.  With the 2nd Amendment issue alone, the most common argument by anti-gun proponents is that “the majority opinion is on their side”.  I’m here to point out that the “majority opinion” is, in fact, an illusion, and completely irrelevant.  Here is why…

Most “Majorities” Are Fake Majorities

A recent poll on gun rights touted by Reuters stated that over 74% of the American public supported new and stricter gun laws including a ban on “automatic” (do they mean semi-automatic?) weapons:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/17/us-usa-guns-poll-idUSBRE90G1B120130117

Reuters pretends as if the poll is a sweeping vindication of anti-gun advocates, but what is the deeper story behind the poll?  Reuters waits until the very last line of the article to mention that only 559 people participated, which hardly seems like a large enough pool to determine the overall position of the entire American public.  Who were these people who were polled?  Where were they polled?  What questions were they asked and how were the questions posed?  All of these factors can be manipulated during polling to produce a desired end result.

In April of 2012, a similar poll stated a somewhat similar case, but also relented that a “majority” of Americans supported most pro-gun positions, including conceal carry, and the need for civilians to intervene during a criminal event:

http://www.ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=5586 

What the polls do not outline is the fact that many people are undecided on a number of details, and that there is no clear “majority” on any of them.  Polling methods are indicative of the mainstream farce.  In most cases, when a mass of people are presented as a “majority”, we do not know exactly how that conclusion was arrived at.  Who decided these people were of the same mind and how?

Beyond this problem, those people who claim to be a part of the majority are sometimes ill informed and do not have all the facts at their disposal.  If there is indeed such a thing as any majority, it could only be the majority of people who do not know what to think!  So, instead of the gun issue, for instance, being a fight between a “majority” of anti-gun advocates versus a “minority” of pro-gun advocates, we are actually looking at a fight between two educated MINORITIES, pro-gun and anti-gun, pro-liberty and anti-liberty, with an uneducated and oblivious public in-between.

To gun control propagandists I would point out that being able to lie to the unaware and con them into parroting your talking points is not the same as “having the majority on your side”.  There may be some utility to retaining an army of bleating sheep, but in the end what do sheep really do beyond bleat, except eat, sleep, watch, and wait to see which way the winds blow…?

In A Republic The Majority View Does Not Matter

America was established as a Republic, not a Democracy, and in a republic the natural and inborn rights of the people, as embodied in the U.S. Constitution, are not subject to the mood swings of the masses.  Each individual has certain rights, including the right to firearms and self-defense, REGARDLESS of what the so-called mainstream believes.  That is to say, even if 99.9% of all people decided tomorrow that the right to free speech should be abolished, this would still be unconstitutional.  The .1% who retain the right to free speech are not required to adhere to such law.

The same rule applies to the 2nd Amendment and gun ownership.  When shills for gun control like Pierce Morgan claim that the majority supports them, what they don’t seem to grasp in their collectivist fervor is that even if this were true, it is a meaningless sentiment.  Our rights as Americans are not allowed to be held hostage by 51% of the population (or any other claimed percentage).  This is not how a republic operates.

Regardless of what is decided in the near term on gun control, we as citizens, protected by the legal shield of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, are not morally required to comply, even if the “majority” says we are.  Mob rule is no rule.

The Majority Is Usually Wrong

As stated previously, the majority of people are generally ill-informed until the fight for a particular issue is long over.  Only when the dust has settled do the masses take a side (usually the side of the winner).  When the day finally arrives where we live within a system that nurtures free individual thought and our political leadership no longer seeks to manipulate the people in subversive fashion, then, perhaps, the situation will change.  However, for now, the “majority” cannot be trusted to determine the course of the future for every single one of us.  They are too open to exploitation, and too easy to sway.

While many see being a part of the mainstream as a safe method for remaining “in the know”, the opposite usually holds true.  The mainstream is instead a place where people go so that they don’t have to think, and such an environment rarely finds its foundation standing firmly on truthful grounds.

If the majority was really a legitimate deciding factor in the course of history, then the first American Revolution would have never occurred in the first place.  That fight was won by a minority of men and women who knew they were right in the face of a malicious world power structure supported by an ignorant subsection of the populous.  Generations to come would be influenced by a small group of people who stood on honor and principle in the face of the tyranny of the “majority”.

Our True Enemy Is An Elitist Minority

Elite oligarchies are notorious for using the masses as a shield for their criminal behavior.  Whenever an atrocity is committed, the elite claim it was for the “greater good”.  That it was done in the name of “national security”.  That the “majority” is in agreement with their methods.  They do this in order to artificially inflate the size of the obstacle in our path and make us feel as though we stand against “the whole world”.  They do this to make us imagine that we are too small to make a difference.

This tactic is also designed to redirect our energies away from the oligarchs and towards a nameless faceless mob of people who may or may not be aware that they are being used as cannon fodder.

As much as Liberty Movement proponents and 2nd Amendment guardians may despise the naïve prattle of the so-called “Left”, and the fact that their propaganda seems to be spreading like a malignant tumor across the country, from gun grabbing to socialized nanny government, we must remember that they are not who we are really at war with.  They are merely spectators in the arena, and though their chanting against us might make us feel as though our opponent has won favor, in the end all will be decided by force of will between the two gladiators, and the bread and circuses will matter little.

The fight for liberty ultimately has nothing to do with awakening a “majority of people”.  Rather, our goal should be to gather a tireless and courageous minority that can weather the coming storm.  If we endure the crisis and remove the anti-liberty minority from the picture, the dumbfounded masses caught with their pants down from the very beginning will in the end simply follow along as they always do.

I have heard it argued recently that the gun control issue in particular is one of wider social implications.  That pro-gun advocates are too “selfish” to see the big picture, and that we do not care about the safety of our nation as a whole.  This is the collectivist methodology at work, utilizing the false “majority” as a tool for oppression.  The fact is, Constitutionalists are the ONLY people in this country today that see the big picture, and the only people who are not thinking merely of themselves when it comes to the safety of our society.  The average anti-gun socialist is acting not out of reason as they pretend, but out of fear.  They want us to relinquish our rights so that they can retain the illusion of safety.

Behind this drive for a deluded sense of mainstream “compassion” and “compromise” is a concerted effort by the establishment to destroy the last barrier to overt centralization; the armed citizen.  The language for this is already being carefully implanted:

We are a “fringe element”.  We are “narcissists”.  We are “barbarians”.  We are clinging to the last vestiges of an archaic philosophy which no longer applies to our modern and “civilized” age.  The vast “majority” is against us, and we should shut up, comply, abdicated the fight, and take our seat at the collectivist table while one still remains open to us.

Okay…so we’re barbarians.  We’re not interested in a “seat at the table”.  We are not interested in participating in the lie.  We are not interested in playing a bit part in the grand faux theater of the “global community”.  If the majority of Americans really do believe that the death of the Constitution is the best course for our culture, then the majority has gone clinically insane, or pathetically soft, and has abandoned all conscience.  We will remain in our little “minority”, and we will put a stop to the progression of collectivized despotism without them, and they can do what they please in the meantime, as long as they stay out of our way.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Totalitarian Society

If someone were to ask you for an example of a “totalitarian society”, how would you respond?  Most Americans would probably think of horribly repressive regimes such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, East Germany or North Korea, but the truth is that there is one society that has far more rules and regulations than any of those societies ever dreamed of having.  In the United States today, our lives are governed by literally millions of laws, rules and regulations that govern even the smallest details of our lives, and more laws, rules and regulations are constantly being added.  On January 1st, thousands of restrictive new laws went into effect all over America, but most Americans have become so accustomed to the matrix of control that has been constructed all around them that it does not even bother them when even more rules and regulations are put into place.  In fact, a growing number of Americans have become totally convinced that “freedom” and “liberty” must be tightly restricted for the good of society and that “the free market” is inherently dangerous.  On the national, state and local levels, Americans continue to elect elitist control freaks that are very eager to tell all the rest of us how to run virtually every aspect of our lives.

According to Merriam-Webster, the following is one of the ways that the word “totalitarian” is defined: “of or relating to a political regime based on subordination of the individual to the state and strict control of all aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation especially by coercive measures”.  And that is exactly what we are witnessing in America today – nearly all aspects of our lives and of the economy are very tightly controlled by a bunch of control freaks that just keep tightening that control with each passing year.  We still like to call ourselves “the land of the free”, but the truth is that we are being transformed into a totalitarian society unlike anything the world has ever seen before.  Where will we end up eventually if we keep going down this road?

If you still believe that America is “free”, just consider some of the things that are illegal in America today…

-Starting on January 1st, it is now illegal to make or import 75 watt incandescent light bulbs anywhere in the United States.

-In Oregon, it is illegal to collect rainwater that falls on your own property.

-In New Jersey, it is illegal to have an “unrestrained” cat or dog in your vehicle while you are driving.

-If you milk your cow and sell some of the milk to your neighbor, you could end up having your home raided by federal agents.

-In Miami Beach, Florida you must recycle your trash properly or face huge fines.

-All over the United States, cops are shutting down lemonade stands run by children because they don’t have the proper “permits”.

-Down in Tulsa, Oklahoma one unemployed woman had her survival garden brutally ripped out and carted away by government thugs because it did not conform to regulations.

-Over in Massachusetts, all children in daycare centers are mandated by state law to brush their teeth after lunch.  In fact, the state even provides the fluoride toothpaste for the children.

-At one public school down in Texas, a 12-year-old girl named Sarah Bustamantes was arrested for spraying herself with perfume.

-A 13-year-old student at a school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was arrested by police for burping in class.

-All over the United States cities have passed laws that actually make it illegal to feed the homeless.

With each passing year, the number of decisions that we are allowed to make for ourselves gets smaller and smaller.

This includes some really fundamental things such as basic health decisions.

For example, the CDC will soon be recommending that nearly every single American be vaccinated for the flu every single year.  The following is from a recent Natural News article…

An advisory panel to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that every person be vaccinated for the seasonal flu yearly, except in a few cases where the vaccine is known to be unsafe.

“Now no one should say ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’” said CDC flu specialist Anthony Fiore.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 11-0 with one abstention to recommend yearly flu vaccination for everyone except for children under the age of six months, whose immune systems have not yet developed enough for vaccination to be safe, and people with egg allergies or other health conditions that are known to make flu vaccines hazardous.

These “recommendations” are often made into mandatory requirements by school districts and employers all over the country.  Will employers all over the nation soon require all of their employees to take these vaccines each year based on these CDC “recommendations”?  This is already happening in the healthcare field.  Hundreds of healthcare professionals all over the nation are being firedfor refusing to take certain vaccines.  It doesn’t matter that there is atremendous amount of evidence that many of these vaccines are dangerous.  Many health professionals today are being faced with the choice of either submitting to the “recommendations” of the “experts” or losing their jobs.

We see this kind of “creeping totalitarianism” in the business world as well.  As I have written about previously, small businesses all over the country are being absolutely suffocated by mountains of laws, rules and regulations.

One of the biggest changes that small businesses will be dealing with in the next couple of years is Obamacare.  Many small businesses have been cutting back hours in an attempt to get around the new requirements contained in Obamacare.  The following is one example from a news story that was published earlier this week…

Around 100 local Wendy’s workers have learned their hours are being cut. A spokesperson says a new health care law is to blame.

“Thirty-six to 37 hours a week.” That’s how many hours T.J. Growbeck works at the 84th and Giles Wendy’s restaurant. The money he earns helps him pay for the basics, but that’s not the case for all his co-workers. “There are some people doing it trying to get by.”

The company has announced that all non-management positions will have their hours reduced to 28 a week. Gary Burdette, Vice President of Operations for the local franchise, says the cuts are coming because the new Affordable Health Care Act requires employers to offer health insurance to employees working 32-38 hours a week. Under the current law they are not considered full time and that as a small business owner, he can’t afford to stay in operation and pay for everyone’s health insurance.

But the IRS has announced that it is going to make it very hard for employers to avoid these new Obamacare regulations.  According to new IRS rules, all firms that “have at least 50 full-time employees or an equivalent combination of full-time and part-time employees” will be required to provide healthcare for their employees and their dependents.  The following is from a recent New York Times article…

Under the rules, employers must offer coverage to employees in 2014 and must offer coverage to dependents as well, starting in 2015.

The new rules apply to employers that have at least 50 full-time employees or an equivalent combination of full-time and part-time employees. A full-time employee is a person employed on average at least 30 hours a week. And 100 half-time employees are considered equivalent to 50 full-time employees.

Thus, the government said, an employer will be subject to the new requirement if it has 40 full-time employees working 30 hours a week and 20 half-time employees working 15 hours a week.

So conceivably an employer could have only part-time employees and still be required to provide healthcare coverage under Obamacare.

Of course many small businesses will not be able to afford to do this, so expect to see a significant number of them shut down or to try to survive with skeleton crews in 2014 and 2015.

As the number of laws, rules and regulations that govern our lives continues to multiply, the control freaks that run things will continue to try to use technology to watch us all and make sure that we are obeying their rules.

One way that they are doing this is with automated traffic cameras.  Of course much of the time the performance of these cameras is terribly flawed.  Just consider the following example which recently appeared in the Baltimore Sun…

The Baltimore City speed camera ticket alleged that the four-door Mazda wagon was going 38 miles per hour in a 25-mph zone — and that owner Daniel Doty owed $40 for the infraction.

But the Mazda wasn’t speeding.

It wasn’t even moving.

The two photos printed on the citation as evidence of speeding show the car was idling at a red light with its brake lights illuminated. A three-second video clip also offered as evidence shows the car motionless, as traffic flows by on a cross street.

But even though technology sometimes fails, the control freaks that run things seem absolutely obsessed with using it to monitor us.  After all, there are so many of us and watching all of us is a very big job.

For example, did you know that listening devices are being installed on public buses all over the United States?  The following is from a recent Wired article…

Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.

The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.

According to the article, some of these systems are incredibly advanced and pair the audio that is being recorded with video that is being taken at the same time…

In Eugene, Oregon, the Daily found, transit officials requested microphones that would be capable of “distilling clear conversations from the background noise of other voices, wind, traffic, windshields wipers and engines” and also wanted at least five audio channels spread across each bus that would be “paired with one or more camera images and recorded synchronously with the video for simultaneous playback.”

But that is just one example of how the surveillance of the American people is rapidly growing.  For many more examples, please see my previous article entitled “29 Signs That The Elite Are Transforming Society Into A Total Domination Control Grid“.

If America continues down the path that it is on right now, the United States will eventually be transformed into a “Big Brother society” that is far more restrictive than anything George Orwell ever dreamed of.

We need a fundamental cultural revolution in this nation.  We need a revival of the principals of liberty and freedom that were so important during the founding days of this country.  We need to teach people that even though liberty and freedom may be unpredictable at times, such an environment is greatly preferable to a society where all of our decisions are made for us by a tiny elite.

Please share this article with as many people as you can.  Time is running out, and we need to wake up as many as we can while there is still time.

Source: The American Dream

Preppers, Patriots And Pirates

Now that the prospects of a second Obama administration are hitting home, the pace of a rapid deterioration are confronting all thinking Americans. The radical transformation that is centrally planned for the economy and authoritarianism administrated by the statists that are part of the most tyrannical regime in memory, is taking place before our eyes. Falling off the cliff is more like descending into the abyss of martial law contrived to eliminate the last remnants of independent citizens. Advocating for civil liberties is treated as a criminal act and the gun culture is looked upon as the preview of a terrorist cell.

Several decades ago, the label of being a survivalist painted a prepared person as odd if not deranged. Today the “prepper” is demeaned as an enemy of the state. The Obama dependency society demands that government is the dispenser of all wants and needs. The threat to the state from a prepared population has become a primary target of the New World Order minions.

So what is so perilous about the Prepper Nation? The overt resistance to arbitrary authority is a fear that any beholden bureaucrat abhors. Combating the grievous culture, which is the federal ruthless and tyrannical government, is a crucial concern of the beltway elitists. Thus, the prepared individual is a dangerous agonist that ignores, if not resists, the best-laid plans for a controlled society.

The American Dream presents a perceptive analysis and alert in Why Are Preppers Hated So Much?

“In fact, it has been estimated that there are now approximately 3 million preppers in the United States alone. So now the mainstream media has decided that mocking the movement is the best strategy, and lots of “critics” and “skeptics” out there have picked up on this trend. Instead of addressing the very real issues that have caused millions of Americans to prepare for the worst, those criticizing the prepper movement attempt to put the focus on individual personalities. They try to find the strangest nutjobs they possibly can and then hold them up as “typical preppers”. The goal is to portray preppers as tinfoil hat wearing freaks that need to be locked up in the loony bin for their own personal safety and for the good of society.”

The mainstream mass media is a state endorsed first account of history writing and propaganda machine. Entertainment is now defined as a process to marginalize any movement that seeks to deal with fundamental problems in a common sense response.

Daisy Luther writes in The Psy-Ops War on Preppers.

“The National Geographic program Doomsday Preppers also has had a lot to do with the demonization of preppers – it’s a full-court press propaganda attack against preppers. The program finds the most outrageous examples of preparedness possible and edits to make them look foolish. An article on the American Preppers Network explains the modus operandi:

The show severely skews Preppers in an effort that can be summed up as “making good television”. This is evident not only through viewing the show itself, but through the format they have built the show around.”

Again in decades past the “Patriotic Cause” was smeared for its emphasis upon advocating a constitutional law application to the ills of excessive government. The current “Liberty Movement” need not require being a card carrying Libertarian to advance the natural rights of individuals. Such protagonists risk the wrath of Obama mania in the era of dictatorial edicts. No more grievous offense can be registered against the establishment than to champion the wisdom of the Founding Fathers.

John Adams wrote in a letter to H. Niles, February 13, 1818.

“But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was affected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.”

Those changes in principles are a foremost hazard in an age of international globalism. Patriots originally defended the spirit of the American Revolution. The meaning of limited government was understood in the hearts and minds of the ordinary populace. Now despotic technocrats act with impunity and violate the most basic precepts of common law.

Anyone who articulates the fundamental separation of powers that curtails outright totalitarian collectivism is no longer heralded as patriotic, but is viewed as a menace to the ruling cabal. The uniqueness of defiance from the “shot heard ’round the world” is captured in the Ralph Waldo Emerson poem, Concord Hymn.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept

Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,

We set to-day a votive stone;

That memory may their deed redeem,

When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare

To die, and leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Emerson appreciated individualism, self-reliance and intuition. Under the Obama dictatorship, patriots like Emerson, would be degraded into submission as treacherous antagonists to the sociopaths that wear a state tiara. The British Crown is not embodied in a King. The Crown is a system of financial and servitude dominance.

In order to understand the nature of this enslavement scheme, the piracy of individual independence is a crucial element necessary to maintain state supremacy.

When buccaneer Henry Morgan was the scourge of the Spanish Main, he was a successful privateer for the British Empire. His appointment to admiral and then to the title of Sir was a reward for his pillaging and plunder. His eventual fall from grace brought down the anger of the English lords. The mechanism used by the ruling class to establish and maintain their power was based upon looting and force.

While initiative demonstrated by pirates that seized ships of treasure was protected as long as the spoils were shared with the Crown, the practice of keeping individual booty risked a hanging offense. The state is always the master robber.

Piracy is the largest business on the planet. Governments routinely make up the rules as it serves the interests of those who wage war to hold onto their power. Legitimacy of any regime is suspect at best and most governments act as criminal syndicates.

The Prepper intuitively comprehends this reality. The need to discredit the preparer of survival subsistence becomes a priority to the thieves that run the social plantation. Preppers are threats because many are practicing patriots. The establishment breeds compliant fools that eagerly support state tyranny as the price of being a ward of the dependency and entitlement society.

The purging of the essence of the American Revolution in the hearts and minds of the population is a betrayal of the John Adams legacy. As the federal behemoth, governance continues to destroy any lawful authority; the pirates of subversion destroy any legality remaining.

The Butchered Law sums up the dilemma.

“When ‘Truth’ is abandoned, ‘Justice’ is denied. Civilization is created and maintained through an arbitration of disputes that respects the ‘Rights’ of ALL Individuals. The ‘Law’ is the guide to settle and judge adherence to criterion of conduct. But it is left to the realm of morals, ethics and values to establish those principles. ‘Equity’ suffers not a right without a remedy, is based upon moral standards of conduct and ethical codes. The ‘Law’ is NOT meant to make those mores, but to apply them. Judges are the umpires of the rules. Lawyers are the presenters of the evidence. And the Jury is the determiner of guilt.”

Those remaining Patriots need to practice the Bill of Rights. Preppers need to share their personal preparation planning with open-minded neighbors. Both must defend the inalienable right of self-defense, especially against the pirate bandits that are planning military force to coerce you to walk the plank.

The article Have Gun, Will Travel puts the piracy perspective into context.

“The State is an entity that results from the organization of society among varied interests, to rule the public. Your natural rights are never transferred to a non living creation of those who have achieved power over others. Citizens cannot negate their own rights, through a process of delegation and consent to any State. But what we have is a chronicle throughout all history of governments telling citizens that their rights are a result of government authority. If you accept this fraud, you can and mostly likely will, gladly accept the pronouncement of civic administration that restrict your ability to preserve your own existence.

Gun ownership is a sideshow to the real struggle. But guns represent a real threat to corrupt masters and their institutions. You already know the terminal consequences that happen to any population that surrenders the means to protect themselves. The record is clear – the society is at a greater risk to their own government, than domination from a foreign intruder.”

Teachers – It Is Time To Arm Yourselves Regardless Of The Law

There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding teachers and teaching in America, one of them holds that in order to be a public school teacher; you are required to become a progressive dolt.  This, however, is not necessarily true.  While the mainstream educational system is engineered to encourage socialism and dependency in our children, it also has a tendency to condition staff and administration with a collectivist mindset as well.  For those who seek out teaching positions, it may feel like joining in with the socialist / globalist ideal makes life in our federalized educational system far easier to cope with.  After all, teachers who stray from the establishment curriculum and who break conventions by offering individualist and anti-state views are very often subject to in-house persecution.  This peer induced conformity creates a Petri dish of inbred thinking, but ultimately, the final decision of what to believe falls to the teacher and no one else.

While some educators might feel that gun ownership is counter to the yuppie culture they have immersed themselves in, and may fear standing out as the “lone conservative nut” at their workplace, they are going to have to accept that there are far bigger concerns than being a part of the herd.  As the events in Newtown, Connecticut reveal, teachers need to start considering their own survival and the survival of their students.

The shooting in Newtown by itself is not the primary issue.  The event will be forgotten within a few weeks by a majority of people, just like the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and the Aurora Theater Massacre.  That might sound cold, but it is reality.  The tragedy itself will only stay with the victims and their families.  The debate over what to do in the aftermath of the tragedy, though, will plague the rest of us for quite some time, and perhaps this is the root of the problem…

Establishment politicians (Neo-Lib and Neo-Con) and the useful idiots they employ have drawn out the debate on practical solutions beyond all reason.  What they have done, time and again, is to exploit the deaths of innocents in order to push the political agenda of control, rather than looking at the hard facts and implementing a strategy that would truly work.  If you want to actually fix a problem, you look at the fundamentals and apply what works, not what you WISH would work based on your biased worldview.  To get to this point, we have to be willing to admit to those methods which DO NOT WORK.  In the wake of the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, what do we know about the environment on the ground and how it was exploited by the gunman?

1)  Federal Laws Guaranteed A Gun Free Zone For The Attacker

Federal laws, including the Gun Free School Zones Act and the Gun-Free Schools Act, prohibit the possession of firearms within 1000 feet of school grounds (some states allow carry with the possession of a CCW, but this does not stop schools from firing teachers who do decide to carry if discovered).  The Gun-Free Schools Act imposes a federal requirement on school districts to adopt a gun-free schools position that demands zero-tolerance policies and minimum one-year expulsions from school for gun possession in exchange for federal funds for district schools, meaning, the Feds are paying off school districts to entice them to go along with gun regulation:

http://smartgunlaws.org/federal-law-on-guns-in-schools/

Of course only law abiding citizens care about this regulation, and so, in the midst of an attack by a criminal element, teachers, staff and students will be the only disarmed people present.  Most violent and mentally disturbed perpetrators still have a deep desire to live, which is why they rarely if ever go on a rampage at a gun range, or a federal building with armed guards, or an NRA convention.  These men don’t want to die, at least not until they have finished their heinous act, and so it only makes sense that they would choose movie theaters in cities that have laws against conceal carry or elementary schools that are filled predominantly with progressives who are going to avoid gun ownership and yield to federal dictates.  A school is an easy target, nothing more.

2)  None Of The Teachers Were Armed 

As stated above, people who lend themselves to the educational field have a tendency to gravitate towards so-called “leftist” philosophies of disarmament and dependency.  The released information so far indicates that none of the staff present at Sandy Hook were armed.  The gunman had free reign to do what he pleased unimpeded by anyone.

3)  Quick Police Response Was Meaningless

Initial reports claim that law enforcement arrived on the scene within minutes, perhaps the fastest police response I’ve ever heard of in such incidences.  And yet, the quick arrival of law enforcement served no purpose.  The gunman had already accomplished a vast number of murders and had apparently committed suicide before they could put boots on the ground.  This is the case in almost every mass murder this country has ever seen.  When it comes to defending citizens against such mayhem, the police track record is abysmal, and these instances prove that they cannot be counted on to save lives.  They appear to be more like janitors who clean up the mess afterwards rather than guardians.

4)  Teachers And Staff Were Willing To Defend Themselves

Again, according to early reports, Lanza was charged by staff who attempted to disarm him before he could open fire.  There is also no indication that these teachers had any formal self defense training whatsoever.  And yet, they were willing to put their lives on the line for their students.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9747832/Teachers-tried-to-stop-killer-to-protect-pupils.html 

A common argument by anti-gun advocates against the idea of self defense is that most people will be “too frightened, undisciplined, or incompetent” to react anyway, and so arming them is “useless”.  As Newtown shows, though, this is absolutely false.  Had any of the teachers who did fight back actually been armed and equipped to fight back, the massacre may have never occurred.

These are the facts of the situation on the ground at Sandy Hook as reported.  Now, the solution being offered by the establishment is, of course, to create more stringent gun laws, and perhaps even disarm everyone.  New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has suggested that President Barack Obama institute “executive action” to enforce his own gun prohibitions, bypassing Congress and the Constitution:

My question is, why is the solution of the elites always to remove people’s ability to defend their own lives?  Why do they insist that gun control will solve the problem when it never has before?  Here are several realities that derail the anti-gun position:

1) They’ll never get all the guns, let alone all other weapons.  Criminals always find a way.  This is made concrete by the recent attack by a knife wielding man in central China on an elementary school, resulting in injuries to 22 children and one adult:

http://www.courant.com/sns-rt-us-china-stabbingsbre8bd065-20121213,0,5592318.story 

The idea that one day the establishment will be able to ensure that no one, not even criminals, are able to obtain a means to harm others, is absurdly childish.  If the state is incapable of removing all weapons from a highly controlled environment like the prison system, then what makes gun grabbers think they can sterilize all weapons from the entire country?

2) The authorities are not and never will be in a position to “make you safe”.  Safety under the wing of government is an illusion.  Governments enact laws and then enforce punishment, but rarely do they ever actually “protect” anyone.  Law enforcement will never be able to reduce response time to the point in which they would be a superior option to you defending yourself.  You will always be there when the trouble occurs; they will most likely not show up until you are dead.

3) If gun free zones are such an effective method, then why doesn’t the Obama Administration suggest a gun free zone in the White House?  Surely, he can put his money where his mouth is and grab the guns away from his Secret Service protection first, right?  What about Bloomberg?  When is he going to fire his cadre of armed bodyguards, since he has such an aversion to guns?

Obviously, Obama and Bloomberg won’t adopt this policy because they both believe armed people on site act as a deterrent to possible attacks!  So then, why wouldn’t armed people on site at an elementary school act as a deterrent to possible attacks?  How can the White House and its lackeys claim that further disarmament of the law abiding public makes them safer when they don’t believe this themselves?!

It is clear to anyone with any common sense that there are massive gaping holes in the theory that gun control and disarmament helps protect the citizenry in the slightest.  Even with more strict regulation, it is inevitable that another attack like the one in Connecticut will take place.  That said, in the face of this information, what do we do?

My Solution – Teachers Must Break The Law And Arm Themselves 

Numerous people have in the past suggested a change in federal law meant to allow teachers to conceal-carry on school property (some states and municipalities even have loopholes that make this possible), but I can say with general certainty that this is not going to happen, at least not for many years to come.  When a law is unconstitutional or puts innocent people at physical risk, the only option left is nullification by the citizenry.  If federal law is preventing teachers from saving their own lives and the lives of their students, then they have two choices:  tempt fate, gamble on death, or break the law, defy school policy, and carry a weapon.

The establishment will claim that teachers are not capable of entering into a combat situation with an armed perpetrator because they “lack the training”.  Yet, anyone in this country can take self defense or combat gun courses that surpass military and law enforcement standards if they have a little money and a little time.

The establishment will claim that teachers entering into a combat situation with an attacker would put innocent bystanders and schoolchildren at risk with stray fire.  First of all, if a murderer is being shot at, wouldn’t his attention be on taking cover, rather than killing children?  Does this not reduce casualties?  Isn’t this what the police are supposed to do?

I would respond by asking the people in Newtown whether they would, in retrospect, go back and arm the teachers at Sandy Hook?  Is there a risk of stray fire?  Absolutely.  But survival is often about odds and increasing the odds in your favor.  By disarming teachers, the death of many children during an attack is guaranteed because there is no chance of the attack being thwarted.  By arming teachers, the odds of the attack being stopped become much higher.  With effective training on the part of the teachers, and with the knowledge that this training is taking place, the potential attacker may never risk violence at all.

Anti-gun quasi-hippies will claim that the very presence of firearms is “evil”, and that it “invites” catastrophe, like some kind of half-assed karmic voodoo.  I’m sorry, but subscribing to this nonsense does not make you safer.  Disarmed people are assaulted and killed far more frequently than armed people, by murderers, and sometimes their own governments.  That is life.  Debating the unseen metaphysical mechanics of the universe did not save the children of Newtown, and suggesting that a gun, an inanimate tool, attracts the dark forces, is an incredible waste of time.

Frankly, I’m tired of hearing the pundits and the politicians argue about what must be done for three weeks after every gun related calamity.  It’s getting tiresome and I believe it is actually hurting this country far more than helping it.  They never discuss that which is concrete.  They never suggest that the right path may well be in the hands of average people, instead of government.  They purposely avoid the topic of self defense, and drive the debate towards questions of regulation.  This is not about regulation, folks.  This is about you and the man with a weapon pointed at your face.  To teachers I say:

Forget the law.  If you’re not armed, you won’t get them before they get you and the children around you.  That is all you need to worry about.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

Gun Patriotism or Hypocrisy?

Puzzling me for a long time is the inconsistency between two claims by gun and Second Amendment supporters.  One is that what they worship is critically needed to defend themselves against a government that they would view as oppressive and unacceptable.  The other is their belief that the US government has already become awful, stealing their liberties.

Why then, I keep asking myself, have we not seen a violent uprising among the untold millions of Americans owning guns to take back their government?  Why do we not see what goes on in European nations, namely violent public uprisings against governments?

There is more private gun ownership in the US than any other nation.  We have a far right part of the population with considerable public presence and power.  FOX News, the Tea Party movement, and countless groups and think tanks angrily attacking the mainstream media, liberals, and leftist politicians as well as just about everything done by President Obama.

So, why hasn’t the massive number of gun lovers who worship the Second Amendment actually done what they claim is exactly needed, what the Second Amendment was created to give them the right to do, and what their massive gun power supposedly gives them the means to accomplish?  Especially when they lose major elections, when their Republican and conservative politicians fail to deliver to them?

Are the paranoid doom and gloom gun lovers waiting for things to get a whole lot worse before they actually implement the grand plan to use their guns to overthrow what they see as an evil, unconstitutional and oppressive government?  Or, do they just invoke the Second Amendment as a convenient rationale for fighting all attempts to better control guns?

From their perspective, how much worse does the government have to become before they finally get the courage to use their guns and restore American democracy and liberties?  Do they think elections will save their nation?

After all, on a number of recent occasions, such as the election and reelection of President Obama, gun and ammunition sales have skyrocketed, despite an already historic level of gun and ammunition ownership.  Yet still these millions of gun-happy constitutionalists do not act.  What is going on?

Is it rational to explain all this by seeing the gun crowd as being incredibly patient?

Is all their talk and high-minded claims to be the last hope to save the country just a bunch of empty rhetoric, camouflage for fighting better gun control?

Here is what I think explains this remarkable contradiction.  In truth, the gun crowd that see themselves as the ultimate patriots, like the original revolutionaries that fought the British and created the USA, is itself conflicted by self-interests.  That is, most gun owners are receiving so many economic benefits from the existing government and economy that they are unwilling to risk all of them by a massive disruption of the whole USsystem.  Just like we saw incredible numbers of protesting Tea Party people looking old enough to be collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits, the overwhelming majority of gun nuts are also feeding off of the national system they keep attacking.  They keep buying more expensive guns and ammunition, gold and hordes of long-lasting survival foods to satisfy their paranoid thoughts.  They keep giving money to right wing causes.  They listen all the time to right wing radio and TV pundits.  They have enough wealth to afford lots of things, especially expensive guns.  Yet they do not ACT.  They do not REVOLT.  Even when their favored politicians lose.

Most of us do not equate the gun crowd with the plutocracy run by the richest Americans and corporate interests that aligns itself with Republicans and conservatives.  The plutocrats, however, have no desire for a revolution that tears down the whole US political and economic system that they so benefit from.  What the plutocracy has accomplished, against all logic, is to manipulate the gun crowd into supporting political causes that maintain the status quo that allows the upper rich to get richer.  We have far more economic oppression than political oppression.

In other words, keep spending your discretionary money on guns and ammunition and all the other things so heavily marketed to the most paranoid people as evidenced by all the advertisements on right wing stations for gold and survival foods.  Keep thinking that you need guns to combat criminals, except there is no evidence that crime has actually been curbed by the massive gun ownership rather than other factors.

But by all means keep listening and spending rather than actually REVOLT and bring down the system.  Enjoy your guns.  Just don’t take any risks and use them as defensive political tools.  Don’t do what so many angry Europeans have always done; actually go to the streets to bring down governments.  Or what we see Egyptians doing.  Of course, all those angry citizens do not have guns.  Still, they put their lives on the line.

The bottom line is that the whole gun Second Amendment movement seems like just another aspect of conspicuous consumerism that keeps the US economy humming.  When I see millions of these right wing gun enthusiasts give up their Social Security and Medicare benefits I will start to take them more seriously.

CNN has recently reported important information, including: US gun owning population is on the decline with those gun owners stockpiling more firearms; 20 percent of the gun owners with the most firearms possessed about 65 percent of the nation’s guns; the US with 5 percent of the world’s population owns 50 percent of the world’s guns; the number of households owning guns has declined from almost 50 percent in 1973 to just over 32 percent in 2010.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation reported the economic impact of firearm sales — a figure that includes jobs. taxes and sales — hit $31 billion in 2011, up from $19 billion in 2008, an increase of 63 percent despite the economic recession.  Fighting gun control has paid off for the gun industry.

There are good reasons to support better gun control laws, but fearing political revolution and violent overthrow of the government because of massive gun ownership may not be relevant.  Democrats will likely keep fearing any emphasis on gun control even though the majority of their supporters favor gun control over gun ownership.  As pointed out this year before the election: “Figures provided by Michael Dimock, Pew’s associate research director, show that the biggest shifts toward opposition to gun control have come among the same blue-collar whites who have displayed the greatest alienation to Obama across the board.”  Also, note that Pew found 72 percent of Republicans said it is more important to protect the rights of gun owners, compared to just 27 percent of Democrats.

As to the roughly, at most, 100 million American gun owners, keep fighting more gun control laws.  Keep buying even more guns, keep the multibillion dollar gun industry thriving.  Keep screaming about your Second Amendment rights.  Keep voting for Republicans.  Keep listening to Limbaugh and Hannity and all the other idols that are among the richest Americans.  Keep deluding yourselves that you are the only hope for the nation.  Don’t face your hypocrisy.  Delusion is the opiate of the right.

I agree with Sanjay Sanghoee “The belief that we need to stockpile guns of every kind to protect us from our own government is a sign of deep paranoia and madness. And to the people who think that way, let me ask you this: do you really believe that if the U.S. government decided for some reason to direct all its military might against you, you would stand a chance against them?”  Of course not, this is why all the adoration of the Second Amendment is a smokescreen for fighting better gun control.  Gun lobbies protect their business, not freedom and liberty.

The key conclusion is this: Though we need a constitutional path to major political reforms other than elections, even a Second American Revolution, the best path is not through the Second Amendment but rather through what the Founders gave us in Article V, namely a convention of state delegates with the power to propose constitutional amendments.  The nation would benefit from transferring the passion for Second Amendment gun rights into support for using the Article V convention strategy.

Paul Krugman Discovers Marx (And Misses The Point)

In his recent New York Times op-ed piece, Princeton professor and regular columnist for The New York Times Paul Krugman observed:

“The American economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But corporate profits are at record high. It’s simple: profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.”

And then he adds with almost shocked incredulity: “Wait – are we really back to talking about capital versus labor? Isn’t that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of date in our modern information economy?”

This is exactly the conflict that Marx identified as the fundamental, inescapable contradiction of the capitalist system that would eventually create the conditions of its downfall: there is a tendency for the owners of businesses, the capitalists, to accumulate ever-vaster wealth while the people who work for them experience a declining standard of living.

Marx supported this conclusion by offering a description of the fundamental operating mechanism of capitalism. Capitalism is based on the principle of private ownership and competition. Private businesses compete with one another for customers, and those who fail to attract a sufficient number eventually perish. But in order to attract customers, businesses must maximize the quality of their product while minimizing its price. If two products embody the same quality but one is cheaper, customers, in pursuit of their self-interest, will purchase the cheaper version, all other factors being equal.

This means that capitalists must constantly attempt to minimize the price of their product simply for the sake of their own survival. If a business devises a way to lower costs, it can capture the market. But, as Marx pointed out, labor costs are a huge factor in determining the price of a product. So those businesses that minimize labor costs can prevail in the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism. For this reason, a downward pressure on wages and benefits is always operating to one degree or another.

But Krugman made no reference to this aspect of Marx’s analysis and instead identified two other factors that contribute to the growing inequality in wealth between capitalists and workers, both of which are discussed by Marx.

The first factor involves the introduction of technology into the labor process, i.e. “labor-saving” technology. In other words, machines replace workers or reduce the amount of skill required in the labor process. To give a current example, software has been developed that analyzes legal documents at a fraction of the time it takes lawyers while costing much less. Accordingly, many well-paid lawyers lose their jobs to such software. Living during the industrial age, Marx supplied many such examples.

Krugman referred to his second explanatory factor that increases inequality between capitalists and labor as the “monopoly power” of large corporations where “increasing business concentration could be an important factor in stagnating demand for labor, as corporations use their growing monopoly power to raise prices without passing the gains on to their employees.” Here Krugman is approaching the heart of Marxist theory.

Krugman is basically arguing that large corporations use their power to override purely economic trends and simply demand that their employees work for less. But this is precisely the point of Marxism, although from the other direction. Marx persistently argued that capitalism could not function without the willingness of the working class to perform the work. When workers organize and engage in collective action by withholding their labor, the balance of power shifts in favor of the workers who can then demand higher wages as a condition for their return to work, as the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) recently did on the West Coast and the teachers did in Chicago.

Amazingly, Krugman never mentions the decline of organized labor as a huge factor explaining the decline of the standard of living of working people, adding that there has been so little discussion of these developments. But others, especially former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, have discussed these trends and identified the decline of labor as a major factor.

In the 1930s when labor unions were tenaciously fighting for working people, huge gains were made in terms of salaries and benefits. They conducted militant sit-down strikes and mobilized tens of thousands of people from the community to support labor’s struggles. Their successes were to a large degree responsible for the emergence of the so-called middle class that thrived in the 1950s and 1960s.

Workers who are organized, acting both collectively and forcefully, can change the economic landscape. But once organized labor becomes complacent and relaxes its guard and ceases to struggle, the laws of capitalism ineluctably grind down their gains and the growing inequality returns until workers again rise up.

Marx argued that eventually workers would see the futility of this repeating cycle, reject capitalism altogether, and begin to construct a socialist society built on entirely humanistic and democratic principles.

In a recent New York Times article on unionizing workers at the bottom of the pay scale, a union organizer was quoted as saying, “We must go back to the strategies of nonviolent disruption of the 1930s.” Currently organized labor is all but dying out. Strikes are like an endangered species. Rather than engaging in militant struggles, union members are urged to elect Democrats who then call on workers to accept sacrifices.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has called on working people “to fight like hell” to resist cuts to Social Security and Medicare. But these are just words. To this date, the unions have failed to mobilize their members to stage massive demonstrations across the country against cuts to these popular social programs – demonstrations that could culminate in hundreds of thousands of working people descending on Washington, D.C. to make their demands clear to the Obama administration and the rest of the politicians. Without the unions taking the lead in this struggle, there is little individual workers will be able to accomplish. And if the unions refuse to return to their more militant roots but remain invisible, economists like Paul Krugman will continue to ignore their existence and overlook their current historic failure to defend working people.

Preppers Who Make Surviving The Apocalypse Even Less Fun

Being forced to endure and survive a catastrophic macro event like a monetary or social collapse is perhaps one of the worst experiences I could imagine.  Such a crisis leads to just about every crime and inhuman action in existence, and, the time required for a culture to right itself and rebuild is severely protracted.  A hurricane or earthquake or tidal wave; these calamities are short lived and easy in comparison.  The point is, as survivalists who are preparing to make an economic end-game scenario as “comfortable” to live through as we can, it is incumbent upon us to consider the kind of company we keep during the gambit.  Some allies will make that mad world bearable; others will bring the madness to your doorstep

Many preppers are aware of the dangers inherent in our progressively deteriorating nation.  Unfortunately, some of them are completely unaware of the dangers inherent within themselves.  Building a solid community of people to rely on during a collapse is absolutely essential, and the larger the group of liberty minded neighbors the better.  But, if certain ground rules are not established from the very beginning, a rainbow of personal issues and character flaws could very well destroy years of effort.  Care must be taken by all parties involved to ensure that internal conflicts remain at a minimum, and when they do arise, that each person is wise enough to resolve issues in an adult manner.

I hate to say it, but you will inevitably run into some folks that are beyond compromise and beyond hope.  Working with them is like pulling teeth…shark’s teeth…from your jugular.  Here are just a handful of powder keg personalities that will make the apocalypse more than a living hell for you and your friends if they manage to latch onto or take leadership in your survival watch…

1) The Self Assumed “Leader”

The “Assumed Leader” is not actually a reliable or practical leader; he just thinks he is, and reminds everyone loudly whenever he can find occasion.  He does not generally do this by screaming “I AM YOUR LEADER!”  Instead, he attempts to micro-manage every aspect of the survival group and shows early signs of control issues.  The Assumed Leader will first make forceful suggestions to test the waters, scoffing angrily whenever people do not strictly follow his advice.  If he gains traction, his suggestions turn into orders, and he begins to act as though he is somehow in a superior position to the rest of the community.

He seems to have an answer to every question or concern, which would be nice if he actually knew what he as talking about half of the time.  Usually, this is not the case.  He may have expertise in a certain field, like farming, or building, or engineering, or even defense, and this is indeed valuable.  However, his mastery of one area of knowledge has inflated his ego to massive proportions and he now pretends as if he is some kind of hyper-educated elitist potentate.  When approached with alternative options and methods, he will respond with ridicule as if you have no clue what you are talking about.  When his ideas are criticized, he will react with fury, and try to remove dissenters from the community entirely.

The best way to avoid these people is to discover them early in your prepping project, and to make certain that NO ONE becomes a De facto dictator.  Every person with particular expertise within the community should be given respect in that specific field, but not given authority over all decisions.  The experienced farmer should offer leadership when it comes to farming, but step aside when it comes to defense and defenders, and vice versa.  It is best to keep in mind that the most effective leaders always ask those around them for aid and advice before coming to any conclusion.  The worst leaders already assume they know everything.

2) The Feudal Lord

The Feudal Lord is an Assumed Leader who has managed to lure other preppers into a Commune, rather than a Community, and there is a considerable difference.  He is often a well-off survivalist who has suddenly realized that for all his money and land and supplies, he is basically defenseless, and needs an organized group to protect his bounty.  He entices other preppers into the fold with ideas that he is building a legitimate and fair community, and with land already available, many take interest.  The problem is, the Feudal Lord believes possession of the land that the group is defending automatically makes him Grand Poobah, and that those people are not equals, but servants and serfs.

I have found that Feudal Lords also have a tendency to charge people “fees” for the right to join their communes.  They will argue that this is designed to “vet” candidates and see if they are truly “serious” about survival prepping.  In the dark corner of their minds, however, they actually believe that they are OWED a tithe from anyone who wishes to earn the “privilege” of becoming a permanent installment on their property.  From the very beginning they go into the project with almost no sincere regard for the people they are working with.

The reality is, the Feudal Lord’s land and supplies are utterly meaningless without security and without aid.  His survival riches can be taken in an instant by a mere handful of looters, or even one experienced raider.  Without other people, treated as equals in survival and ready to lay down their lives to protect each other and him, he has nothing, and is foolhardy to think otherwise.

This is not to say that all landowners who try to centralize a group on their property are seeking to become mini-kings of a mini-kingdom.  If rules and agreements are made early on, and everyone understands their role, then such an arrangement could work.  But, if the landowner purposely avoids set agreements, appoints roles to people without asking them, changes the plan regularly to suit himself, and tries to leech money out of participants, then it’s time to walk away now before it is too late.  Eventually he WILL use his position as landowner as a means to dominate, and will threaten to cast people out who disagree with his methods.

The best way to avoid these characters and the commune situation altogether is to not centralize on a single piece of land, but to organize in a neighborhood fashion, where everyone maintains sovereign control of what they do and all aid is voluntary.

3) The Moral Relativist

There is, sadly, a small subsection of survivalists out there who do not plan to live off their own preps; they plan to confiscate the preps of others by force and solve every problem at the barrel of a gun.  In their mind, a crisis situation calls for the abandonment of conscience and the application of a “survival of the fittest” mentality.  They believe that morals are all well and good when civilized society remains, but a source of weakness during catastrophe.  Their philosophy is: Only the strongest of men will be able to set aside principle and “do what needs to be done”.  That is to say, they believe you must become the monster to defeat the monster.

In fact, only men who are able to hold onto their principles during the worst moments are strong.  Weak men run away from conscience, using the excuse that times are “different and difficult”.  They are not survivalists, they are terrorists in every sense, and they will only hurt our ultimate goal of rebuilding a free, prosperous, and individualistic society.

These people should be avoided like the plague.  They will make enemies wherever they go, ask you to do highly questionable things, and push your community into annihilation.  Eventually, somebody is going to put them out of their misery, and it’s best to not be around when that happens.

4) The Obsessive

The Obsessive is a person whose drive is initially impressive but also ultimately destructive.  His entire life revolves around survival prepping and impending doom.  Certainly, it is better to be extra concerned about the economic crisis on the horizon than to be utterly oblivious.  A smart man over-prepares.  But, there is such a thing as overkill, even in the world of survivalism.

No one can ever do enough fast enough in this person’s eyes.  He will whine constantly about how he is the only one taking preparations seriously, and how everyone else is a lazy bum.  He will become frantic on a daily basis, admonishing the group or community on their lack of urgency.  In a leadership position, this person is a nightmare, creating constant waves of tension and panic, instead of calmly offering solutions or constructive criticism.

Obsessives are generally unimaginative people with little talent or intelligence who use their prepping lifestyle as their only means to feel superior to others.  They tend to become legends in their own minds, dreaming of the day when everyone will desperately cling to them and their remedial survival know-how.  They fantasize about all the people who “wouldn’t take their advice” (usually smug advice), crawling in squalor begging them for help one day.

The Obsessive’s motto is:  “Let me tell you why you are wrong and how you are lazy!”  Instead of: “How can I help you fix this?”

We all need a break once in a while from the horrors we know are waiting for us.  To step back and enjoy what we can of a beautiful day or good friends is not the same as being a freeloader or a backslider within your prepper group.  Survival is about more than sustaining the body.  It is about more than chopping wood, stockpiling ammo, and slaving over a piece of land from sun up until sundown like a mindless drone just to get by; it is also about sustaining the heart and the mind.  Otherwise, what is the point of living?

5) The Ulterior Motive Drama Queen 

The Drama Queen is a man or woman who is loosely interested in survivalism, but wants to join your community for other reasons, and these reasons may cause many members dismay.  The opposite of The Obsessive, you’ll notice a strange non-involvement on their part or lack of interest as far as participating in survival discussions and decision making.  They will often hand over all their survival preparation plans to another person or persons, while hovering like a gnat around the community searching for that special something.

They may be looking for friends and social recognition.  They may be afraid of collapse and simply trying to lock into ANY group regardless of whether they fit, becoming disenchanted later.  They may enjoy the excitement of feeling like they are involved, and are living vicariously through the accomplishments of others.  They may just be looking for a date.  Ultimately, their primary objective is not to build a working community, but to get something out of the community beyond safety.

If they do not get what they want, they raise hell, using whatever excuse happens to be handy without ever admitting their real motivations.  They will deliberately start unnecessary drama, attempt to create divisions, focus on one person as the cause of all their troubles, or blame the whole group for the heartache in their life.  They will attempt to draw everyone into their personal soap opera in the hopes of becoming the focal point, sharing strange and extremely private issues with anyone who accidentally offers to listen.

Eventually, they will be seen for what they are and will lose the ear of the other preppers, who obviously have better things to worry about, but not after wreaking some havoc in the process.

6) The Zealot 

The Zealot has a perfect picture in his mind of how his survival community is going to look.  Absolutely perfect.  The problem is, all people are imperfect and all have different conceptions of life, and this disturbs and disrupts the Zealot’s fantasy.  It is one thing to be careful in whom you associate with when assembling a prepper organization, but it is entirely another to hold everyone to insane standards that even you cannot meet.

The Zealot usually wants to be in charge so that he can vet and control each member of the group, but this is not always the case.  Zealots are also sometimes highly anti-social, showing interest in a group for a short time and then suddenly walking away as if no one is up to par.  He may base his zealotry on a misplaced religious fervor or philosophical inflexibility, but he will not be happy until everyone sees the world the way he does, or until they meet his grandiose brand of moral flawlessness.  For him, it is not enough that the community around him shares a love for liberty and a disdain for tyranny, they must also be “spiritually pure” in his eyes.

One mistake or disagreement by a member of the group earns them a black mark on the Zealot’s list which he never forgets.  From then on, that member is the enemy, and the Zealot will engineer conflict after conflict until the person gives up and goes away, or until he can convince the group that person is more trouble than they are worth.

The great dilemma for any survivalist is to balance personal freedom and a peaceful home life with the reality that they will not last long without relying on a group.  Other people bring talent, friendship, and safety to our lives, but they also bring baggage.  The key is to work with those who know how to manage as much of their own baggage as possible, who are aware of themselves and are willing to police their own quirks, and who have not swan dived off a cliff into extreme disturbia.  No survival community can withstand the savage assault of national collapse otherwise.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

Are Black Friday Riots A Preview Of The Civil Unrest That Is Coming When Society Breaks Down?

If Americans will trample one another just to save a few dollars on a television, what will they do when society breaks down and the survival of their families is at stake?  Once in a while an event comes along that gives us a peek into what life could be like when the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is stripped away.  For example, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey there was rampant looting and within days people were digging around in supermarket dumpsters looking for food.  Sadly, “Black Friday” also gives us a look at how crazed the American people can be when given the opportunity.  This year was no exception.  Once again we saw large crowds of frenzied shoppers push, shove, scratch, claw, bite and trample one another just to save a few bucks on cheap foreign-made goods.  And of course most retailers seem to be encouraging this type of behavior.  Most of them actually want people frothing at the mouth and willing to fight one another to buy their goods.  But is this kind of “me first” mentality really something that we want to foster as a society?  If people are willing to riot to save money on a cell phone, what would they be willing to do to feed their families?  Are the Black Friday riots a very small preview of the civil unrest that is coming when society eventually breaks down?

Once upon a time, Thanksgiving was not really a commercial holiday.  It was a time to get together with family and friends, eat turkey and express thanks for the blessings that we have been given.

But in recent years Black Friday has started to become even a bigger event than Thanksgiving itself.

Millions of Americans have become convinced that it is fun to wait in long lines outside retail stores in freezing cold weather in the middle of the night to spend money that they do not have on things that they do not need.

And of course very, very few “Black Friday deals” are actually made in America.  So these frenzied shoppers are actually killing American jobs and destroying the U.S. economy as well.

The absurdity of Black Friday was summed up very well recently in a statement that has already been retweeted on Twitter more than 1,000 times…

It has gotten to the point where it is now expected that there will be mini-riots all over the country early on Black Friday morning each year.  The following are a few examples of the craziness that we saw this year…

-”Fights break out when stores open on Black Friday”

-”Black Friday madness at Georgia Wal-Mart”

-”Black Friday Frenzy: 2 Run Down in Washington, Man Pulls Gun in Texas”

-”Black Friday 2012: Rush at Victoria’s Secret Pink at Oak Park Mall in Overland Park, Kan.”

-”Black Friday shoppers smash door at Urban Outfitters”

-”Black Friday Shopping Hysteria From Around The Country [PHOTOS]”

-”Disturbance leads to scare at Westroads Mall”

-”Teens In Custody After Woodland Mall Fight”

-”Boy Robbed During Black Friday Shopping At Arundel Mills”

-”Shoppers Were So Obsessed With Black Friday Deals They Left Their Infants Unattended”

Fortunately, many Americans are starting to get fed up with Black Friday.  In fact, one activist named Mark Dice actually went out and heckled Black Friday shoppers this year.  I found the following You Tube video to be very funny, and I think most of you will too…

In the end, it is not that big of a deal that people want to fight with one another to save 50 dollars on a cell phone.

But this kind of extreme selfishness and desperation could become a massive problem someday if society breaks down and suddenly millions of extremely selfish and desperate people are scrambling for survival.

With each passing day our economy is getting even weaker, and the next wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching.  What are people going to do when the next spike in unemployment hits us and nobody can find work?

To get an idea of where things are headed, just look at Europe.  In both Greece and Spain the unemployment rate is over 25 percent and civil unrest has become almost a constant problem in both of those countries.

So what kind of riots will we see in the United States when the economy gets much worse than it is now?

Already there are signs of social decay all around us, and most Americans are completely unprepared for what will happen if a major disaster or emergency does strike.

Sadly, the reality is that most Americans live on a month to month basis.  Most families do not have any emergency savings to speak of, and one recent poll found that 55 percent of all Americans only have enough food in their homes to survive for three days or less.

To me, that is an absolutely insane number.

We just came through a summer of extreme drought and global food supplies have dropped to a 40 year low.  Our world is becoming increasingly unstable, and the global financial system could fall apart at any time.  Most of us just assume that there will always be huge amounts of very cheap food available to us, but unfortunately that simply is not a safe assumption.  The following is from a recent article in the Guardian…

Evan Fraser, author of Empires of Food and a geography lecturer at Guelph University in Ontario, Canada, says: “For six of the last 11 years the world has consumed more food than it has grown. We do not have any buffer and are running down reserves. Our stocks are very low and if we have a dry winter and a poor rice harvest we could see a major food crisis across the board.”

“Even if things do not boil over this year, by next summer we’ll have used up this buffer and consumers in the poorer parts of the world will once again be exposed to the effects of anything that hurts production.”

When I watch my fellow Americans trample one another to get a deal on a television or a video game, it makes me wonder what they would be willing to do if they went to the store someday and all the food was gone.

Desperate people do desperate things, and someday if there was a major economic breakdown in the United States I think the level of desperation in this country would be extremely frightening.

Source: The Economic Collapse

Election 2012: How The Winner Will Destroy America

After all the hollow and uninspired elections that this country has suffered through over the past several decades, one might think that at some point long ago the American public would have finally struck a plateau of disenfranchisement; that we could sink no further into despondency, that there is a saturation limit to the corruption of our voting process.  Unfortunately, there has been no such luck.  I have to say that in all honesty I have never seen more people gut jumbled and disgusted with our electoral system than I have in 2012.  Sure, there is still a hyper-gullible segment of the populous that continues to play the game, but even those idiots are beginning to admit that the choices offered are dismal at best, catastrophic at worst.  The fog of the false Left/Right paradigm is starting to lift, and all that lay in its wake is a hoard of lost wide-eyed flabbergasted followers without a coattail or a talking point to cling to.  Sudanese refugees have a better chance of survival than these people do…

Even in the more obvious of fraudulent past elections there was at least an attempt by the establishment to present a pageant of conflicting ideologies (George W. Bush vs. John Kerry comes to mind).  There has always been the Democrat who pretends to be anti-war, or the Republican who pretends to be small government, or the Democrat who pretends to defend our right to privacy, and the Republican who pretends to be pro-2nd Amendment.  But in 2012, even the theater of rhetoric has disappeared.  Both primary party candidates seem to be sharing the same intestinal tract and the same teleprompter, and now, the average American is asking a new set of questions.  They do not wonder how these men will change things for the better.  Not at all.  Instead, they wonder which one will do LESS DAMAGE while in office.  This is the terrible reality we have come to understand in our society today.  It is a sad awakening, but a necessary one.

As you read this now, the new President of the United States is being “chosen” or has been chosen.  Whoever the “winner” happens to be is ultimately irrelevant.  They do not count.  They are mascots.  Middle management cronies running through the motions to distract the masses while enacting the policies of their superiors.  They are fry cooks serving greasy overpriced democracy with no real sustenance.  What does matter, though, is what comes next.  I’m sorry to say that the idea that one man will do less damage than the other is a naïve sentiment.  Democrat?  Republican?  Obama?  Romney?  The crimes and calamities wrought will be exactly the same.  Take a look into my crystal ball and see the future.  Here is how the winner will destroy America…

1)  He Will Continue The Policy Of Dollar Devaluation 

Neither candidate has expressed any interest through the election or even before it to protect the value of our currency, and both candidates have supported steps towards quantitative easing and fiat printing in order to delay an inevitable national debt crisis.  Both Romney and Obama have sung the praises of Ben Bernanke (Romney changed his tune just in time for his campaign, but who’s buying that?) and the private Federal Reserve despite the consistent failures of that despotic institution to produce any tangible economic results with their Keynesian methods.

The dollar will see a vast devaluation during the term of this candidate and a loss of world reserve status, leading to stagflation (a combination of the worst elements of deflationary and inflationary crises in the same event).  Skyrocketing prices and crumbling unemployment will be the highlights of his presidency, because he will never take measures to reign in or dismantle the primary root cause of the problem; the Federal Reserve itself.

2)  He Will Continue Extreme Government Debt Spending

Neither candidate has offered a practical or operable solution to the $16 trillion official national debt problem we now face, let alone the tens of trillions of dollars in entitlement obligations that the Treasury Department never talks about.  A nation can only live off food stamps and credit for so long before it implodes like a wet paper sack. And this is exactly what we have become; an entire culture of debt addicts and money hounds searching for our next fix of foreign or central bank cash.  The fact is, both Obama and Romney would INCREASE spending while using fiat injections to buttress an ever weakening economy in the name of “stability”.  The new president will claim that if spending cuts are initiated, it will send the U.S. financial system into a tailspin and a “return” to recession conditions.  This will of course be a lie.  We have not left recession/depression conditions since 2008.

3)  He Will Support And Expand On Wars In The Middle East

There is no such thing as a mainstream “anti-war candidate” in 2012.  Not even a fake one.  Obama’s measures of state violence and complete lack of respect for the sovereign internal matters of foreign nations surpass the madness of George Bush Jr.  He has even gone so far as to assert that his office has the right to assassinate American citizens without trial, evidence, or due process of the law.  Not only has he asserted the right to this power, he has used it!  Romney’s position, hilariously, is that Obama has not gone far enough!  Either way, the winner in 2012 is going to leap like a vile locust into new countries and unleash a plague of laser guided death.  The next president WILL be a war hungry president.

4)  He Will Lock Down The Web And Limit Internet Speech 

Both Romney and Obama have expressed a desire to establish cybersecurity measures which include vast new governmental authority over the functions and operations of the internet.  The ultimate goal?  To gain legal precedence for the right to dictate web content, up to and including the ability to label any website a subversive threat to national security or a recruitment tool for “extremists”.

With the establishment spreading completely baseless accusation of cyberthreats coming from every corner of the globe (but mostly from Iran) it would seem that they are conditioning the public for a future encounter with a cyber event, and telling them who to blame when it occurs.  The problem is, the most prominent cyber security threats to the internet in the past few years have come not from the Middle East, or Russia, or China, but the U.S. and Israel (Stuxnet anyone?).  Keep this in mind when our new president blames the next cyber attack on a convenient political target and then uses the event as an excuse to regulate the web.

5)  He Will Erase American Civil Liberties 

This president will find a reason, or he will create a reason to diminish Constitutional protections including our right to trial and due process.  Both candidates have offered unflinching support for the National Defense Authorization Act and its provisions for indefinite detainment.  Neither man has ventured any sincere concerns over the broad nature of the language involved in the labeling of “terrorists” and “extremists”.  Literally anyone can now be categorized as an enemy combatant and a threat to national security for almost any reason, and this appears to be the way Obama and Romney like it.  That is to say, they both want totalitarian powers, or at the very least, they have made no effort to turn them down.

It is important to note that there has never been a government in history that sought out such powers and did not actually use them.  Only a fool would assume his favorite elitist candidate in 2012 will not utilize the extreme authorities now amassed for the executive branch over the past decade.

6)  He Will Embrace A Globalist Dynamic And Abandon American Sovereignty 

Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are surrounded by “advisers” who are also members of the Council On Foreign Relations, an institution which openly calls for the dissolution of American sovereignty on a regular basis and the creation of a centralized global system dominating the financial, social, and political life of every nation in the world.  With the economic stability of the U.S. on the verge of oblivion, it is very likely that a historic crisis will ensue during the first term of the next president, and that he will in response suggest a new global system as the solution.

This system has already been created, in part, by the IMF and World Bank in concert with member governments and revolves around the issuance of a new world reserve currency (Special Drawing Rights) as the centerpiece.  I can guarantee with absolute certainty that the next president, regardless of who he happens to be, will promote an IMF rescue package coupling the dollar to the SDR and turning over full economic control of America to an international body.  He will make it sound rational, reasonable, and even advantageous, but in the end, he will be selling the globalist snakeoil he was conscripted to sell before his election campaign ever started.

In 2012, it will not be about voting.  It will not be about “winning”.  It will not even be about getting to the next election.  It will be about survival.  As big a joke as the 2012 elections have become even to the generally unaware, I am not laughing.  I do not need to look at the promises of either candidate.  I do not need to weigh their half-assed quick fix policies.  All I have to do is look at the current downward trend and understand that the president, whoever he may be, will continue it.  If anything is to truly change, it will be because we as Americans finally walk away from the game, enacting our own solutions and our own opposition instead of handing over our power to sniveling errand boys wrapped in flags and expensive suits and self-rightousness every four years.  2012 is going to be the beginning of upheaval and renewal, for better or for worse, and it is certain that the guy in the White House into 2013, Republican or Democrat, is going to be a part of the problem, nothing more.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

A Multicultural Society Is Not Logical Or Workable

“A multicultural society is a physical and sociological impossibility.” Satoshi Kanazawa, college professor.

One look around the globe shows that religious and cultural factions fight and kill one another with accelerating violence as they come in closer competition for water, energy, land and food. One look at Lebanon, United Kingdom, Holland, France, Norway, Iraq and many other countries where cultures co-exist—amply illustrates Kanazawa’s contention.
Another look around the world shows that cultures compete for dominance in every country where cultures attempt to co-exist. It doesn’t work in Canada or Mexico. It’s not working in the United States of America.

Racial and cultural unrest checker every year of every decade of America’s existence. It smolders and simmers under the surface in 2012. The more incompatible cultures imported into America, they will boil over and scald many in the years ahead.

What is culture?

Edward Tylor said that culture is, “That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Of course, it is not limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor’s time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology.

“Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon,” said Tylor. “It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists cannot dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns–they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.”

In 2012, many western countries like Canada, France, Norway, Sweden and others find their own cultures being usurped if not destroyed by mass immigration.

Can cultures co-exist in the same country? Answer: no!

“When I used to teach “Introduction to Sociology” at the University of Washington, I had back-to-back lectures during the first week on culture and society,” said Kanazawa. “I explained to my students that culture and society were two sides of a coin; one cannot exist without the other. Culture needs society (and its inhabitants) to sustain its existence and initiate its change, and society needs culture to hold it together and survive. Just as there is no such thing as a coin with only one side, there is no such thing as culture without society or society without culture. It is physically impossible to construct a coin with only heads without tails or a coin with only tails without heads. It is equally impossible to have a culture without society or a society without culture.”

When any society begins to speak multiple languages via immigration, it begins to fracture as to communication among its citizenry. Once communications and “similar thinking” fragment, balkanization and separation ensue. Today in America, Muslims cannot and do not assimilate into American culture or any Western cultures. They enclave. The same holds true for Mexicans in America. They separate into their own barrios. It’s not racist; it’s biological; it’s tribal.

“As an integral aspect of human culture, language cannot exist without a society of speakers speaking it daily and interacting with each other,” said Kanazawa. “Nobody disputes these truisms about culture and society from the social sciences, yet the same people also claim that we now live in a “multicultural society.” If you think about it for a moment, you’d realize that the notion of “multicultural society” is a logical and physical impossibility. It is similar to a coin with only one heads but several tails. It is physically impossible to construct such a coin.”

Kanazawa exposes the obvious. Competing cultures cannot and do not work within a country. It goes against millions of years of human activity.

Can multiple societies exist within a civilization? Can one coin possess one head and two tails? Answer: no!

“That culture needs society to sustain its existence means that multiple cultures require multiple societies,” said Kanazawa. “That society needs culture to hold it together means that multiple societies require multiple cultures. There must be exactly the same number of cultures as there are societies, just as there must be exactly the same number of societies as there are cultures. In any bag of coins, regardless of how many coins there are, there are exactly as many heads as there are tails, and vice versa. One culture, one society. “Multicultural society” is a physical (and sociological) impossibility.”

If the United States and Canada or Western Europe hope to survive in the 21st century as viable and cohesive societies, they must curtail mass immigration from incompatible cultures. If they fail to take action, they will face endless strife for their citizens as well as the immigrants. Multiculturalism doesn’t work on every level of human interaction.

As resources diminish, food grows scarcer and energy depletes, we will witness more clashing cultures within all Western countries that imported large numbers from incompatible cultures.

Samuel Huntington, author of Clash of Civilizations, said it rather logically: “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

Capitalism’s Two Step Survival Plan – Austerity And Structural Reform

The coast is clear, the media tells us; economic disaster has been averted. The Euro Zone is finally stable and the U.S. economy is recovering. Whew!

Why, then, are government policies internationally still pursuing extremist measures? In the U.S., a third round of excess money printing —called Quantitative Easing — began recently in which banks are directly profiting by unloading their toxic mortgages on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet (another backdoor bailout paid by taxpayers).

After the U.S. presidential election, both Democrats and Republicans are committed to different versions of historic cuts to social services, education, Medicare, unemployment benefits, and very likely Social Security. This bi-partisan plan is often referred to as a “grand bargain,” the details of which both parties are still haggling over.

In Europe things are no better. After the Euro Zone central bank promised investors its full backing to bailout all Euro Zone members — by printing money — the world economy sighed a heavy relief. But still the Euro Zone — along with the U.S. — is pursuing a two-pronged solution for an extreme economic crisis: austerity measures and the less-discussed “structural reforms.”

What are these policies? Austerity is simple enough: government cuts to social spending, health care, education, pensions, etc. — to balance heavily indebted public budgets (at the expense of working people, rather than taxing the rich and corporations). Austerity can also be achieved through privatization, where once publicly run programs/facilities are sold cheaply to private firms to make a profit, thus taking the cost off the government’s budget.

Structural reforms on the other hand are meant to boost economic (corporate) growth, by government intervention in commodity markets — most commonly the labor market. It’s called structural reform because markets are usually relatively stable. For example, the labor market is deep-rooted in powerful social forces — wages, benefits, and working conditions are heavily influenced by unions, who use their organization and strike threat to pressure corporations and governments to pay living wages. Non-union workers benefit directly by the unions’ ability to alter the national labor market, since non-union companies have to compete with union companies for workers, who naturally go where wages are higher. Professional, higher-paid workers benefit too, since society expects them to get higher wages than, say a carpenter.

In Europe, structural reforms targeting the labor market — alongside austerity measures — are rousing the unions and broader community into the streets with massive demonstrations: Spain, Portugal, Greece, and other countries are fighting reforms that politicians are euphemistically calling “labor market flexibility.” This simply means that unions will be undermined by their inability to protect workers’ jobs, making firing easier (“flexibility”), which results in compelling workers into accepting lower wages and benefits.

The pro-corporate Economist magazine reports about Portugal:

“With his decision to finance a reduction in company [corporate] costs through a sharp cut in workers’ take-home pay, Pedro Passos Coelho, Portugal’s prime minister, appears to have taken reform past the limit of what is deemed acceptable by large sections of the electorate.”

And France:

“… [President] Hollande has given union leaders and bosses until December to negotiate [anti-union] labor-market changes. On the table are various options, including making it possible for firms [corporations] to reduce hours and salaries in a downturn against a guarantee of job security, along the lines introduced by [Germany's prime minister]… in 2003.”

And Spain:

“… the new [labor] law makes it easier and cheaper to lay off workers. For most firms, maximum lay-off payments [unemployment benefits] will be reduced from 42 months’ pay to 12 months… it will hugely boost business confidence.”

Reducing unemployment benefits is a very popular labor market structural reform for the 1%, since it makes workers more desperate for work, and thus more accepting of low-wage jobs — consequently lowering workers’ power in the labor market overall, as wages are lowered nationally.

And while Europe’s austerity and structural reforms are on the front page of international media — due to the giant protests and general strikes against them — the exact same policies have been pursued by the U.S. with barely a murmur. Were it not for the labor upsurges in Wisconsin and more recently Chicago, these policies would be completely off the public’s radar.

The Wisconsin uprising was in response to a labor-market structural reform pursued by Republicans, denying unions bargaining rights — effectively destroying the union. Democrats, however, are pursuing anti-labor structural reforms — weakening unions — as national policy also, though less directly, by demanding that unions across the country take massive concessions in wages and benefits — a slower, yet more effective form of labor market restructuring.

The teachers in Chicago went on strike against another form of anti-labor structural reform pursued by both Democrats and Republicans. The media-hype around “firing bad teachers” is really a labor-market reform in disguise; the real intention is to bust unions, who are only able to stay strong by their ability to protect the jobs of their members (of course there already exists ways to fire bad teachers).

Teacher merit pay is yet another labor reform measure aimed to weaken unions, since it effectively lowers wages by preventing raises (there is zero evidence that merit pay raises education standards, or that charter schools outperform public schools). It means that every teacher’s salary is negotiated individually, and it allows management to punish its critics by denying them merit pay raises.

The teachers are especially targeted in the U.S. because they are the strongest union in the country, due to their numbers, organization, and connections to the community. If they are forced to give “structural” concessions, other unions will be heavily pressured to do so, and thus the labor market will be altered to the benefit of the corporations.

The labor reform attacks — combined with austerity budget cuts — are happening in different forms on a city, state, and federal level with the full backing of the Democrats and Republicans (there is no “debate” in the presidential election about education policy). Thus, if not for the Wisconsin and Chicago struggles, there would be little social consciousness around these issues.

The reasons that austerity and structural adjustment have not produced a Europe-like movement yet is because most labor unions have increasingly accepted these concessions without putting up a real fight. Many labor leaders would simply rather accept these policies, since fighting them would put them in conflict with their “friends,” the Democratic politicians pursuing these anti-labor policies.

Hopefully, the post-Occupy movement can show the labor movement the way forward. On November 3rd there will be protest demonstrations against austerity in a number of cities across the country. These protests are targeting the ongoing state by state cuts — and federal post-election cuts — to education, transportation, health care, social programs, and public-sector workers. The protests are challenging the very concept of austerity, as working people refuse to pay for the crisis created by the rich and corporations. There is a potential for these protest demonstrations to teach the American public the word “austerity,” assuming they are large enough and connect with the broader community that directly experiences these policies.

Regardless of the results of November 3, demonstrations about the austerity issue in the U.S. will inevitably continue, since even mainstream economists mostly agree that there will be no return to the pre-recession economy. The policies of austerity and structural reform — along with war — are long-term survival strategies of capitalism, which is evolving to survive a global-wide crisis of corporate growth rates by creating a “new normal” of social expectations: lower wages and fewer social programs.

The first step in fighting these measures is mobilizing working people and the broader community in massive Europe-like demonstrations. This tactic educates the whole nation about the issues, which would otherwise remain in the dark. Once the 99% is in the streets together screaming collective demands with a united voice, the movement will decide how best to act, whether it be the general strikes or new political parties that have emerged in Europe.

The U.S. post-election austerity surprises will give new opportunities for millions of people to get into the streets. They will no longer be able or willing to remain ignorant about the nation’s new normal.

http://www.economist.com/node/21563352
http://www.economist.com/node/21563303
http://www.economist.com/node/21547831

Syria, The Story Thus Far

“Today, many Americans are asking — indeed I ask myself,” Hillary Clinton said, “how can this happen? How can this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated, and at times, how confounding the world can be.” ¹

The Secretary of State was referring to the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya September 11 that killed the US ambassador and three other Americans. US intelligence agencies have now stated that the attackers had ties to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.²

Yes, the world can indeed be complicated and confounding. But we have learned a few things. The United States began blasting Libya with missiles with the full knowledge that they were fighting on the same side as the al-Qaeda types. Benghazi was and is the headquarters for Muslim fundamentalists of various stripes in North Africa. However, it’s incorrect to claim that the United States (aka NATO) saved the city from destruction. The story of the “imminent” invasion of Benghazi by Moammar Gaddafi’s forces last year was only propaganda to justify Western intervention. And now the United States is intervening — at present without actual gunfire, as far as is known — against the government of Syria, with the full knowledge that they’re again on the same side as the al-Qaeda types. A rash of suicide bombings against Syrian government targets is sufficient by itself to dispel any doubts about that. And once again, the United States is participating in the overthrow of a secular Mideast government.

At the same time, the Muslim fundamentalists in Syria, as in Libya, can have no illusions that America loves them. A half century of US assaults on Mideast countries, the establishment of American military bases in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and US support for dictatorships and for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians have relieved them of such fanciful thoughts. So why is the United States looking to forcefully intervene once again? A tale told many times — world domination, oil, Israel, ideology, etc. Assad of Syria, like Gaddafi of Libya, has shown little promise as a reliable client state so vital to the American Empire.

It’s only the barrier set up by Russia and China on the UN Security Council that keeps NATO (aka the United States) from unleashing thousands of airborne missiles to “liberate” Syria as they did Libya. Russian and Chinese leaders claim that they were misled about Libya by the United States, that all they had agreed to was enforcing a “no-fly zone”, not seven months of almost daily missile attacks against the land and people of Libya. Although it’s very fortunate that the two powers refuse to give the US another green light, it’s difficult to believe that they were actually deceived last spring in regard to Libya. NATO doesn’t do peacekeeping or humanitarian interventions; it does war; bloody, awful war; and regime change. And they would undoubtedly be itching to show off their specialty in Syria — perhaps even without Security Council blessing — except that NATO and the US always prefer to attack people who are exceptionally defenseless, and Syria has ballistic missile capabilities and chemical weapons.

It’s likely that the American elections also serve to keep Obama from expanding the US role in Syria. He may have concluded that there are more votes in the Democratic Party base for peace this time than for waging war against his eighth (sic) country.

The propaganda bias in the Western media has been extreme. Day after day, month after month, we’ve been told of Syrian government attacks, using horrible means, almost invariably with the victims described as unarmed civilians; without any proof, often without any logic, that it was actually the government behind a particular attack, with the story’s source turning out to be an anti-government organization; rarely informing us of similar behavior on the part of the rebel forces. In May, the BBC included pictures of mass graves in Iraq in their coverage of an alleged Syrian government massacre in Houla, Syria. The station later apologized for the pictures saying that they had been submitted to the BBC by a rebel group. ³ On June 7, Germany’s leading daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, citing opponents of Assad, reported that the Houla massacre was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants, and that the bulk of the victims were members of the Alawi and Shia minorities, which have been largely supportive of Assad.

According to a report of Stratfor, the private and conservative American intelligence firm with high-level connections, many of whose emails were obtained by Wikileaks: “most of the [Syrian] opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue.” They claimed “that regime forces besieged Homs and imposed a 72-hour deadline for Syrian defectors to surrender themselves and their weapons or face a potential massacre.” That news made international headlines. Stratfor’s investigation, however, found “no signs of a massacre”, and warned that “opposition forces have an interest in portraying an impending massacre, hoping to mimic the conditions that propelled a foreign military intervention in Libya.” Stratfor then stated that any suggestions of massacres were unlikely because the Syrian “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario … that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds.”⁴

Democracy Now — long a standard of progressive radio-TV news — has been almost as bad as CNN and al Jazeera (the latter owned by Qatar, an active military participant in both Libya and Syria). The heavy bias ofDemocracy Now in this area goes back to the very beginning of the Arab Spring. The program made some unfortunate choices in its mideast news correspondents, seemingly only because they spoke Arabic and/or had contacts in the region. Where have you gone Amy Goodman? RT (Russia Today) has stood almost alone amongst English-language television news sources in offering an alternative to the official Western line.

Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research, notes that “Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now Syria are but a sequence of stops on a global roadmap of permanent war that also swings through Iran. Russia and China are the terminal targets.” When the Syrian government is overthrown — and in all likelihood the Western forces will not relent until that happens — the al Qaeda types will be dominant in the Syrian version of Benghazi. The American ambassador would be well advised to not visit.

Can you believe that I almost feel sorry for the American military?

In Afghanistan, the US military has tried training sessions, embedded cultural advisers, recommended reading lists, and even a video game designed to school American troops in local custom. But 11 years into the war, NATO troops and Afghan soldiers are still beset by a dangerous lack of cultural awareness, officials say, contributing to a string of attacks by Afghan police and soldiers against their military partners. Fifty-one coalition troops have been killed this year by their Afghan counterparts. While some insider attacks have been attributed to Taliban infiltrators, military officials say the majority stem from personal disputes and misunderstandings.

So the Afghan army is trying something new, most likely with American input: a guide to the strange ways of the American soldier. The goal is to convince Afghan troops that when their Western counterparts do something deeply insulting, it’s likely a product of cultural ignorance and not worthy of revenge. The pamphlet they’ve produced includes the following advice:

• “Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you.”
• “When Coalition members get excited, they may show their excitement by patting one another on the back or the behind. They may even do this to you if they are proud of the job you’ve done. Once again, they don’t mean to offend you.”
• “When someone feels comfortable in your presence, they may even put their feet on their own desk while speaking with you. They are by no means trying to offend you. They simply don’t know or have forgotten the Afghan custom.” (Pointing the soles of one’s shoes at someone is considered a grievous insult in Afghanistan.)
• The guide also warns Afghan soldiers that Western troops might wink at them or inquire about their female relatives or expose their private parts while showering — all inappropriate actions by Afghan standards.⁵

Hmmm. I wonder if the manual advises telling Afghan soldiers that urinating on dead Afghan bodies, cutting off fingers, and burning the Koran are all nothing more than good ol’ Yankee customs, meaning no offense of course.

And does it point out that no Afghan should be insulted by being tortured in an American military prison since the same is done at home to American prisoners.

Most importantly, the Afghan people must be made to understand that bombing them, invading them, and occupying them for 11 years are all for their own good. It’s called “freedom and democracy”.

I almost feel sorry for the American military in Afghanistan. As I’ve written about the US soldiers in Iraq, they’re “can-do” Americans, accustomed to getting their way, habituated to thinking of themselves as the best, expecting the world to share that sentiment, and they’re frustrated as hell, unable to figure out “why they hate us”, why we can’t win them over, why we can’t at least wipe them out. Don’t they want freedom and democracy? … They’re can-do Americans, using good ol’ American know-how and Madison Avenue savvy, sales campaigns, public relations, advertising, selling the US brand, just like they do it back home; employing media experts, psychologists, even anthropologists … and nothing helps. And how can it if the product you’re selling is toxic, inherently, from birth, if you’re ruining your customers’ lives, with no regard for any kind of law or morality, health or environment. They’re can-do Americans, used to playing by the rules — theirs; and they’re frustrated as hell.

In case you’re distressed about the possibility of a Romney-Ryan government, here’s some good news:

There are many people in the United States who are reluctant to be active against US foreign policy, or even seriously criticize it, because a Democrat is in the White House, a man promising lots of hope and change. Some of them, however, might become part of the anti-war movement if a Republican were in the White House, even though pursuing the same foreign policy. And we can be sure the policy would be the same for there’s no difference between the two parties when it comes to foreign policy. There’s simply no difference, period, though each party changes its rhetoric a bit depending on whether it’s in the White House or on the outside looking in.

Similarly, the movement for a national single-payer health insurance program has been set back because of President Obama. His health program is like prescribing an aspirin for cancer, but the few baby steps the program takes toward bringing the United States into the 21st century amongst developed nations is enough to keep many American health-care activists content for the time being, especially with Obama facing a tough election. They are satisfied with so little. With a Republican in the White House, however, there might be a resurgence of a more militant health-care activism.

Moreover, if the Republicans had been in power the past three years and done EXACTLY what Obama has done in the sphere of civil liberties and human rights, many Obamaites would have no problem calling the United States by its right name: a police state. I mean that literally. Not the worst police state in the history of the world. Not even the worst police state in the world today. But, nonetheless, a police state. Just read the news each day, carefully.

Sam Smith, editor of the Progressive Review, has written: “Barack Obama is the most conservative Democratic president we’ve ever had. In an earlier time, there would have been a name for him: Republican.”

Oh but there’s Social Security and Medicare, you say. Can Romney be trusted to not make serious cuts to these vital programs? His choice of running mate, Paul Ryan, is practically a poster child for such cuts.

Well, can Obama be trusted to not make such cuts? Consider this recent comment in the New York Times: “[Obama] particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security.” ⁶

As somebody once said, the United States doesn’t need a third party. It needs a second party.

The only important cause that might significantly benefit from a Democratic administration is appointments to the Supreme Court, if there is in fact an opening. But does this fully override the benefits of Obama being out of office as outlined above?

Dear Reader: I truthfully do not want to be so cynical. Despite the quips, it’s not really fun. But how else can one react to the Republicans and Democrats given their behavior at their recent conventions? If they can so obviously ignore the wishes of their own delegates, what can the average American citizen expect? Have a look at these remarkable scenes caught on video or read this account of the voice votes at the recent conventions.

How many voters does it take to change a light bulb?

None. Because voters can’t change anything.

So what to do?

As I’ve said before: Inasmuch as I can’t see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn’t quite match the government’s firepower, not to mention its viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial beast other than this: Educate yourself and as many others as you can, raising their political and ideological consciousness, providing them with the factual ammunition and arguments needed to sway others, increasing the number of those in the opposition until it raises the political price for those in power, until it reaches a critical mass, at which point … I can’t predict the form the explosion will take or what might be the trigger … But you have to have faith. And courage.

Some further thoughts on American elections and democracy:

Richard Reeves: “The American political system is essentially a contract between the Republican and Democratic parties, enforced by federal and state two-party laws, all designed to guarantee the survival of both no matter how many people despise or ignore them.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): ”In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from one side to the other, thinking they will be more comfortable.”

Alexander Cockburn: “There was a time once when ‘lesser of two evils’ actually meant something momentous, like the choice between starving to death on a lifeboat, or eating the first mate.”

U.N. Human Development Report, 1993: “Elections are a necessary, but certainly not a sufficient, condition for democracy. Political participation is not just a casting of votes. It is a way of life.”

Gore Vidal: ”How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It’s the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It’s been 200 years at it. It’s superb.”

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: ”The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.”

Michael Parenti: ”As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.”

Notes

1. USA Today, September 12, 2012
2. Washington Post, September 28, 2012
3. BBC News, May 29, 2012
4. Huffington Post, December 19, 2011
5. Washington Post, September 28, 2012
6. New York Times, “Obama Is an Avid Reader, and Critic, of the News“, Amy Chozick, August 8, 2012

Fire Congress, Vote Out Incumbents

For politicians to do what is right, first citizens must do what is right.

Of all the many, many stupid things that most Americans do, nothing is more insane than the ritual every two years of reelecting incumbent members of Congress.  Countless opinion polls find that the public has incredibly low levels of positive regard for Congress.  Just one in 10 Americans approves of the job Congress is doing, according to a Gallup poll released a few weeks ago, tying the branch’s lowest approval rating in 38 years.

Yet this year as in past years, unless Americans take back control of their country, voters will again reelect nearly all incumbents.  Often, some incumbents do not even have any significant opposition.  For example, in the 2000 election cycle, out of 435 House seats, 64 members had no major-party opponent, and in 2008 every House race in Arkansas was uncontested by a major party according to the Center for Voting and Democracy.  Political redesign of congressional districts, gerrymandering, is widely done to ensure reelection of incumbents or one party.

The main way that incumbents get removed from office these days is when they lose in a party primary election, or die, or get themselves into a sex or corruption scandal.  Primaries often replace the incumbent with someone else from the same party who will, in time, become an incumbent.  That replacement is often a more extreme partisan than the previous incumbent.

The usual rationale for this survival of incumbents given by political analysts and writers is that although the public correctly sees Congress as a whole as incompetent, dysfunctional and incapable of serving critical public interests, they somehow think that their own Representatives and Senators are worth reelecting.  This, of course, makes no sense.  If this had validity, then cumulatively and nationally it would make sense to keep incumbents in office and Congress would get better and better with each election.  In fact, Congress has become worse and worse with each election.  This holds true in a genuine bipartisan sense, as nearly all incumbents, regardless of party, do not deserve to be reelected.

If Congress as a whole stinks, which it clearly does, then it is only logical to believe that this bleak condition must result from nearly all incumbents contributing to the mess.  The exceptions are not defined by simply being the ones on your ballot.

How can a democracy function and have any deserved credibility when the electorate stubbornly refuses to act honestly and appropriately to get rid of the elected representatives who have proven themselves incapable of governing with competence and honor?

There must be better explanations.

Here is a likely one.  Most Americans have become beholden to one of the two major political parties even if they are not officially members of them and may even consider themselves as uncommitted or independent.  Moreover, a majority of people find themselves living in places where their favored party has predominated.  When election time rolls around they cannot get themselves to vote for the candidate from the “other” party and they refuse to vote for third party candidates.  Or they are so fed up with an awful government and political system that they do not vote at all, or not for congressional races.

Another contributing factor might be related to the lesser evil mode of thinking.  The incumbent loser that you know is, somehow, thought to be better than the competing candidate you do not know, especially one from the “other” party.  Reelecting incumbents is like some form of hallucinatory fantasy deemed the safer choice as if keeping them in office will magically turn out to be different and better than in previous times.  They have seen the light, gotten the message, turned the corner, become what they once promised to be, and so on.  Nuts.  Congressional experience is not to be rewarded; it must be penalized for rotten performance.

Third, incumbents almost always have the most money because they have already been corrupted by money. More money means more advertising and more lies.  Lies work.  Especially for the many information-poor voters that are easily swayed by campaign propaganda.  The big popular lie of omission these days is staying completely away from their congressional record.  No incumbent wants to be seen as an experienced Washington insider.  If you failed on the job, why would you?

In our country effective representative government is crucial.  To keep reelecting congressional incumbents that nearly always deserve to be fired is unpatriotic, subversive and antithetical to the ideals of our constitutional republic.

This year ten Senators and 42 Representatives are not running for reelection.  Odds are that far fewer incumbents will be voted out of office, if historic trends continue.  For House elections from 1982 to 2008 only one in three voters did not vote for a winning House representative and 73 percent of House races were won by landslide margins of at least 20 percentage points.  The power of incumbency reduces much needed political competition which a healthy democracy requires.

If the royalty of incumbency does not stop there is no hope whatsoever of putting the nation on a much better track.  It does not matter who is elected president.  In the end, if the fractured Congress we have witnessed for years perseveres the US is doomed to join the list of once great global powers that went down the toilet.

Flush congressional incumbents out.  Now.  Or be complicit in the death of American democracy.  Stop making excuses, rationalizing.  Throw incumbent turds out of office.  Even more important than not voting for the challenger or incumbent from the “other” party is not voting for the incumbent of your party, even if it threatens party control of the House or Senate.

If you do not help fire Congress, then you deserve to suffer personally from what the federal government does or does not do.  Make you voice really heard this year.

We Have Breached The First Tipping Point

Two critical tipping points have been breached. This is the critical moment in an evolving system when feedback becomes strong enough to continue on its own without any further input. The tipping point is that moment when a gradual increase becomes unstoppable because the feedback maintains its own momentum. There is nowhere to go under these circumstances, and nothing can be done to prevent it continuing. It is the point when an everyday infection turns epidemic.

We have now breached the edge from two events. One is a remarkable collapse of summer sea ice in the Arctic with enormous consequences, especially on the Gulfstream, which is driven by the flood of cold water that emerges from under the Arctic ice. Now that summers are going to be more and more ice-free the permanent disruption of the Gulfstream becomes more likely. With it will come, inevitably, a change in temperatures and weather in North America and Europe. It may herald an ice age, but it is more likely, according to current thinking, to create even more dangerous weather patterns than we have experienced hitherto.

The other event is the extraordinary growth of methane being exhausted into the air, especially in Siberia that has gained more heat than anywhere else. Some is from clathrates under the ocean floor, and some from the melting of the permafrost. These emissions are now many many times greater than science had expected, and it is feared that they have reached a point where they are feeding back on themselves and are becoming unstoppable.

Together they have brought us to the first tipping point, and this will set off more.

As methane is some 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in heating the planet, further heat is now expected to proceed at an extremely fast rate. It is likely that from here on the consequences of what we have been doing will impact on our lives more severely every year. Larger hurricanes, catastrophic fires, burning temperatures, endless droughts and fierce storm surges are to be the norm.

Together, the feedback loops now in place in the Arctic and in Siberia will inexorably build on themselves. The time when we could have curtailed this disaster has passed. Hanging on to a 2oC limit was a mistake. Thinking of limits when feedback cuts in is ridiculous. Some will continue to argue that we can still do something. Politically, socially, and militarily this is highly unlikely.

If we had listened to the science ten years ago we may not now be in this fix. In 2006 on the PlanetExtinction website my banner said “we have eight years to stop …”, only eight years to end the use of fossil fuels and reverse the trend. It seems that I was over optimistic. We had six.

We are not going to stop the juggernaut of greed that is determined to destroy this beautiful earth, all for the sake of profit, so what can we do under the circumstances? The end-game will be played out in its own time, and will be dealt us by Gaia. But we, the ordinary people, need to protect our lives and our children and what we can of our heritage. There are many schemes and proposals such as Transition Towns, and of these we may take our pick.

Essentially we need ways to increase our personal and social resilience while coming into communities that are dedicated to preserving what matters most. It means training ourselves from today onwards in the ancient trades of farming and clothing, of healing and shelter.

At the same time we need to consider the moral issues, for they will determine how we will react in stress. We need to discuss our options in advance of the coming catastrophe. For example, a sea rise of some metres in Australia would create more than a million refugees. In shock, destitute, desperate for food and lodging, how would any community that has set out to preserve itself handle such an influx? Governments would be compelled to maintain order with reflexes that are likely to be draconian, and political bullies would take advantage of the panic for their own ends.

How does a Morality of Survival deal with this and many similar situations? If not publicly aired, and quickly, our ability to respond is likely to be overwhelmed by events.

Ideally, governments should take the lead, and provide nurture and guidance where it is needed. Frankly, I think this is highly unlikely. It therefore comes down to us, as individuals and as communities, to find our way through the mess that is coming.

We cannot hide our heads and pretend there is still time left to change this world into a better place. From here on we will be more and more at the mercy of the grim forces we have unleashed.

If we continue to direct our efforts towards modifying the rush to insanity, we will have wasted our time and will be thrashed by the outcome. It is now time to become Survivors.

Rewarding Idiots With Democratic Totalitarianism

Now that the Democrat Party convention concluded their class warfare rally, those with saner minds are left with the task of identifying the magnitude of the sociopathic disease that infects the vast mindset of the worship government sect. The rhetoric of the Left has little trouble with identifying the ills of the world, but when the collectivists start to rattle off their measures to make the world safe for democracy, the ugly fascist face of totalitarianism emerges. The bond among statists, span all ideological spectrums. Commies and Nazis share the same gene. In Amerika, that same defiled DNA proliferates in all the half-wits that still believe that government is or can be a force for good. Essentially, the people are a herd of corruption enablers.

Maybe the most ridiculous spin out of the mouths of the entitlement strivers references a CNN report, that a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that 0 percent of African American voters intended to support Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama. On face value, this claim is absurd. However, by digging deeper into the attitude that the mainstream media characterizes for the black community, the only conclusion a reasonable person can draw, is that the true racism resides in the controllers of the popular culture and its perverted message.In order to appreciate the linkage between bigotry and subservience, the role of stupidity needs acknowledgment. Multitudes of all races share idiocy, often in the same way, by the institutional levers of control. The inference that any particular people would give consent to a betrayer of individual rights, based upon the shared color of their skin, is an insult to everyone.

The executive order practices of the Obama administration are inherently authoritarian. The coercion used by the State to enforce the power of the ruling elite is integral to the survival of the regime. The ridiculousness that gives fake relief and promises phony rewards, is often called – democracy.

This subject, seldom analyzed in a vacuum, takes on the persona of the ideologue. Richard Lichtman provides one such example, in an essay, Totalitarian Democracy, which cites the work of Sheldon Wolin.

“Since the time of the Civil War and the formation of the American colossus and its dual economy of corporate domination and social remainder, the course of capitalist domination has been set. Whatever further “progressive” change has been achieved has forfeited its full potentiality to the tendencies of an expanding corporate control. In this process, democracy has been more and more corrupted, as Sheldon Wolin notes in “Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,” a work that has been blatantly ignored.

The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed. This has come about not through a Leader’s imposing his will or the state’s forcibly eliminating opposition, but through certain developments, notably the economy, that promoted integration, rationalization, concentrated wealth, and a faith that virtually any problem from health care to political crises, even faith itself – could be managed, that is, subject to control, predictability, and cost-effectiveness in the delivery of the product. Voters are made as predictable as consumers; a university is nearly as rationalized in its structure as a corporation; a corporate structure is as hierarchical in its chain of command as the military. The regime ideology is capitalism which is virtually as undisputed as Nazi doctrine was in 1930s Germany.”

This topic, examined in more detail in the essay, Inverted Totalitarianism and the Corporate State, is worth a review. Mr. Lichtman being the “Predictable Progressive” concludes his remarks with a stunning attitude that perverts the natural order of the meaning of individual liberty.

“The Tea Party and other such calamitous confusions will eventually come to the sort of end that has destroyed all those who do not understand just who is the master and who the servant. But a great deal of suffering can be visited on the nation while this defeat is being enacted. Now is the time for all of us to engage in the intellectual activity of understanding what forces are in play and the practical task of forcing back and destroying the monstrous army of these protofascist directors and retainers.”

Ivory tower utopians march in the ranks of statist totalitarians by choice. Many seek to lead the charge. The “rank and file” that digs the ditches, usually lacks the skills to think independently for their self. Nonetheless, they are usually the first to rally to the cause of their sanitized Führer that preaches hope and change, with every loss of freedom. No one political theory has a monopoly on despotism. Yet the “peaches and cream” slogans of fairness and equality, that come from the ultra extreme wing of the Democratic Party, out does the worst of the GOP civil libertarian destroyers.

Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest is the end product of the collectivist education system that indoctrinates impressionable brains with reverence for the dependency society. Mush minds come out of this corrosive process. Voting for entitlements and the expansion of the democratic totalitarianism becomes the norm.

 

The short DNC Video: “The Government Is The Only Thing We All Belong To“, is an anti-intellectual message that appeals to government thugs and parasites. The underprivileged are permanent wards of the state. Those that lack self-esteem are usually products of government school pedagogy.

The Democratic Party Platform is just as immaterial as that of the GOP. However, the DemocRATS are more adapt at pushing the most collectivist policies that consistently strip away the last remnants of a constitutional republic. Democracy for the progressive statist translates into direct democracy, because they are the most adamant about open borders.Do not deduce that RepubliCANTS are protectors of traditional values or states rights. The fusion of the despots is systemic because both power structures rely upon a false dialectic, while both just wear different style uniforms.

 

One of the trademarks of the presidential imposter is viewed in the YouTube, Obamas Domestic Army? Recruiting new legions of mercenaries for domestic social control, from the gangs of idle hoodlums awaiting their “just due”, typifies the abnormal mindset of democratic despotism.Watching the culture of prerogative democratic diatribes, advocating the entitlement society, could never take root unless the peasants were conditioned to demand their total cradle to grave guarantees. The pandering is intolerable. The trade off enslavement that is conditional for receiving benefits goes unnoticed to most of the bottom feeders. What little rationality and critical thinking remaining on the Progressive Left, erodes with every election cycle.

The remorseful lesson that the majority of voters fail to admit is that the election pageant never provides the alternative to rid the country of collectivist politicians. The obvious reason is that the dependent masses crucify any candidate that dares champion the principles of liberty and personal responsibility.

The Democratic Party is especially adept at pimping for the welfare state. The utter failure of the crazy schemes, self-indulgent programs and social benefits, at taxpayers’ expense; has primed the public for surrender. Sacrificing individual dignity is a small price to pay for a place in the government check queue. The dire net results from the “Great Society” are all around us. It resembles the conditions that gave rise to Charlie Chaplin’s, The Great Dictator.Ironically his egalitarian political views, lent criticism that he was a Commie. From Chaplin’s famous speech, his words run amok, when applied to the requirements of the Democratic Totalitarianism that now engulfs every aspect of the Obama version of socialism.

“Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate – only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers – don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty.”

What kind of conduct should you expect from a Reich that wants to field an AmeriCorps, civilian national security force. This is the Obama standard for pledging your “Good AmeriKan” credentials for a national socialist passport. Have we not learned from the European experience? The oath to the psychopathic beloved leader is creating our own domestic holocaust.

The idolization of Hitler is reminiscent of the flaunting over Barack Hussein Obama in 2008. Today, there are no excuses for not knowing that this demigod is a tyrant or that his plan is to enslave the nation. Pride in America the Stupid is a badge of admission to the Democrats Delusional Worldview. The Democrat convention of 2012 is just as pathetic as that of the GOP. The language and emphasis may seem to differ, but when you strip away all the empty words, you have a phony competition to head up the omnipresent corporate state.The ruling class and the suck-ups that pledge their allegiance to a State adoration, despise the defense of liberty. The metaphysical question of our age is, Why are we here? How will you answer this eternal and political question? It is evident how the useless-idiot will respond.

Obama’s Vision Versus Economic Reality

It took less than 24 hours for Obama’s “inspiring” convention speech to be smothered by the reality of the job crisis. The August national jobs report showed that the U.S. economy failed to create enough new jobs to keep up with population growth. More importantly, in August 368,000 Americans completely dropped out of the labor force, meaning that they’ve given up looking for a job (this ironically “lowered” the unemployment numbers, since demoralized workers aren’t counted in the official rate).

Most of the jobs created in August were low paying, such as retail, hotel, and restaurant jobs. Higher paying manufacturing and government jobs were once again cut by the thousands. These statistics are in line with Obama’s tenure as president and will continue if he is re-elected. In fact, they are the result of a conscious policy that he is pursuing in the interests of the profits of big business, who are demanding lower wages from workers. As Obama has repeatedly said, the government is not in the job-creating business.

According to a study performed by the National Employment Law Project, 58 percent of all new post-recession jobs come with hourly wages between $7.69 to $13.83. A worker would need two of these jobs just to afford rent, food, and other basics.

The New York Times commented on the “new normal” of low wage jobs:

“The disappearance of midwage [living wage], midskill jobs is part of a longer-term trend that some refer to as a hollowing out of the work force, though it has probably been accelerated by government layoffs.”

This “hollowing out” of the workforce is — along with high unemployment — the most striking feature of the “new normal” of the American workforce. A new generation of youth entering the labor market is not finding secure jobs and decent wages but unemployment and wage slavery. Republicans and Democrats are completely silent on this all important subject because they agree that it is necessary.

The Democrats attack on public employees confirms that this dynamic is being purposely done: over 600,000 public employees have lost their jobs since 2009. Most of these workers were paid a living wage and had health care and pension plans. Their private sector replacement jobs that Obama boasts about pay peanuts and more often than not have no additional health or retirement benefits. The Obama administration understands perfectly well that these public sector layoffs could have been prevented by government action, but undermining employment and the wages of public employees is one way to drive down wages for everyone else. Together these trends lower the need for taxes and raise corporate profits.

The attack on unions is yet more proof that the low wage syndrome is a self-induced illness: Democratic Party governors across the country have demanded major wage and benefit concessions from public employees. And while the Democrats blame the Republicans for being “anti-union,” the concessions demanded by the Democrats drastically weaken unions to the point that Republicans can finish them off. For example, the Democrats in Chicago are presently preparing to smash the Chicago Teachers Union, if they can, by demanding massive concessions. The teachers will have to fight, not only for their standard of living, but for the survival of their union.

One of Obama’s proudest achievements — “saving” General Motors — is yet more proof that the Democrats have a conscious plan to lower wages. The administration’s Auto Task Force helped in the layoffs of 35,000 autoworkers while slashing the wages of the new hires by half as well as deepening the cuts in health care and pension benefits. This action created a precedent that other corporations were eager to copy in order to remain “competitive.”

Another example of Obama’s push to lower wages is his purposeful lack of action to solve the unemployment crisis. Obama is perfectly aware that he could — like FDR before him — massively invest in a national jobs program rebuilding U.S. infrastructure, putting teachers back to work, and ideally transitioning to green energy sources. President Obama hasn’t done this, in part, because doing so would raise the wages of all workers, and it would need to be funded by the people who fund his campaign the most, the rich, since they are the only ones with money to spare.

The labor market works like every other market, according to the rules of supply and demand. When there is high unemployment the supply of workers outstrips the demand, and thus workers’ wages drop. The administration is using unemployment as a hammer against the wages of U.S. workers. Lowering the wages of public sector employees works the same way: if public employees have higher wages, the private sector must compete with the public sector by attracting workers with similar wages.

When unions are strong and demand higher wages, they are able to alter the national labor market so that it acts more favorably towards workers: non-union companies must compete for workers by raising wages. When the labor movement is weak — as it is now — the exact opposite dynamic takes hold.

Why is President Obama hell-bent on lowering wages for the U.S. workers? He was very clear about this in his acceptance speech, with his repeated reference to increasing U.S. exports for the world market. The rub, however, is that China, India, and other low wage countries also compete on this same world market, and the workers in those countries make horribly low wages. But in the last four years the U.S. corporations that aim to compete with these low wage nations have made spectacular “progress” in driving down the wages of their workers. Thus Obama can brag about his “achievement” of increasing U.S. exports.

Democrats and Republicans agree that no national jobs program should be implemented, that unions should be weakened or destroyed, that the public sector should be slashed and its workers’ wages cut. Both parties want U.S. corporations to compete better on the world market, requiring that U.S. workers make lower and lower wages. This is the fundamental economic issue being ignored in the mainstream media.

Workers must fight back in massive demonstrations to demand a federal jobs program and a consequent strengthening of the public sector, lest their issues be completely ignored in a national election that is promising them nothing. They should insist that taxes on the rich be raised, given that the rich are continually becoming richer while the rest of us are losing ground. They should demand no cuts to Social Security and Medicare and that the attack on public workers and their unions stop immediately. Workers can accomplish all this and more if they stop waiting and hoping for help from the Democrats and begin to build their own independent movement to fight for the interests of the majority.

http://www.nelp.org/index.php/content/content_about_us/tracking_the_recovery_after_the_great_recession\

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/business/majority-of-new-jobs-pay-low-wages-study-finds.html

« Previous Page — Next Page »