Exorcising Election 2008 Demons
Author's Note -- This is an expanded version of "No Fighting Chance" (DD Revival, 14 May 2008 -- Populist Party, 16 May 2008).
Against the backdrop of our privatized and gutted electoral system -- now little more than a superrich-controlled selection based on (1) the HAVA-invoked, politician-protected, and easily-hacked vote-counting software from Diebold, ES&S, and similar fascist corporatism thugs, and (2) the Republican-party mass squelching of opposition voters, using many criminal tactics at the states level -- Election 2008 will be a criminal sham several orders of magniture greater than the criminal sham of Election 2004.
The horrendous lawlessness and criminality of the Bush Regime, Congress, and the federal bench -- principal violators and accessories-after-the-fact of unconstitutional acts, anti-law felony conspiracies (i.e., passage of unconstitutional statute laws), blatant felonies against standing laws, and obstruction of justice -- will go unprosecuted. Clearly, none of the 2008 candidates of either major party has any intention of altering the govt's lawlessness and criminality.
The American Constitutional republic/democracy is ended. We need it back. Details count. Part 1 -- Soldiers and Politicians
"Are the citizens called on to march out to war? They pay soldiers for the purpose, and remain at home. Are they summoned to council? They nominate deputies, and stay at home. And then, in consequence of idleness and money, they have soldiers to enslave their country, and representatives to sell it."
--Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, circa 1762, Chapter 15, "Of Deputies Or Representatives".
From the beginning, Rousseau's 1762 book was part of American predator elitism's understanding, cultural shaping, and social engineering.
Yes, the American elites of the 1770s to 1790s studied political history intensly -- to make sure that they would forever control the American people. They were true to their class, not to the new nation's Declaration Of Independence principles. Since ancient Rome, every freedom held by ordinary people has reduced the profits and power available to the predator elites. In political history, Rousseau's 1762 book is another outline of how predators can defeat freedoms -- while telling the lies that point off and sucker in the ordinary people.
Predator elites have understood the distinction between citizen and professional armies since ancient Rome. Citizen armies, owing their allegiance to the nation's constitution, help keep the politicians tied to the nation's freedoms. Professional armies, owing their allegiance to the generals who are commanded by the politicians -- and to the politicians themselves -- are simply co-opted to become morally blind, wealth-building tools.
Roman Consul and General, Marius, formed the first Roman professional army about 110 BCE. He took their allegiance for himself and away from the Senate, People, and Constitution of Rome. The Republic was all downhill from there, ending in the professional armies loyal to Ceasar. On the Ides of March, 44 BCE, Republic-loving senators murdered Caesar. The Republic hit the wall. Anti-Republic Roman elites, with the world's best professional armies out front, took over everything -- ending citizen lawmaking as a part of any nation's politics for about 1200 years.
(Citizen lawmaking's comeback in the 1200s happened in the tiny alpine confederation of Switzerland. Non-predator elites and ordinary people leaders brought together mountain-bound remnants of three nations. The Swiss were egalitarian citizens and fearless citizen soldiers when being those things was a universal death sentence. In their common cause against predator elites all around, they confederated across ancestral divisions to incorporate speakers of four different languages. The Swiss have been under steadily increasing economic, sophistry, and propaganda attacks by predator elites around the world for 800 years. Discrediting Swiss democracy and the Swiss people is a part-time job for every locus of predator elitism. Predator elites know that they cannot afford to have Swiss democracy spread to even one more nation. Under these attacks, the Swiss might have lost a step, they might seem discredited, but they are still a force of nature in the citizen lawmaking that benefits ordinary people. They are among the best of those few nations that are both socially and economically successful -- a very difficult tandem to achieve. In any fair comparison-contrast of social and ecoomic success, they make the US look mentally ill. Start with national healthcare -- NOT national health INSURANCE, but straight-up national healthcare. Go to CBR warfare (chemical-biological-radiological) and natural disaster preparedness -- in which every Swiss resident has an underground shelter -- all 7.5 million of them. Continue on through a very long list. We're not the ones who have democracy right. They are.)
American draft gone, we've lost our citizen army. The civilian population has a much smaller fraction now of military-trained individuals who retain their truth-seeking moral compass. Work-places have fewer duty-driven workers with military-based self-discipline, practiced "tone of command" verbal skills, illegal-order handling skills, and can-do attitudes -- co-existing in those same men and women with the belief that active and ex-military should defend and be loyal to the Constitution and the laws, no matter what illegalities the slime-bag politicians, generals, and admirals demand.
Across the society, there are now fewer who stand fast when given an illegal order, threatening to undo whatever evil they're facing. It is one of the rudders that citizen veterans give to their society. Professional soldiers are not trained to distinguish between legal and illegal orders, and so the professional veteran does not stand fast against the evil of those who give illegal orders.
We've lost what Rome lost when their professional armies took over. We've lost a principle-driven population within civilian society. Long after their military service, citizen veterans work to protect ordinary Americans and our principles against fascist corporatism and predator elitism.
We need to re-think the draft. It was, and could be again, a multidimensional contribution to our national well-being.
Supporting combat soldiers does not mean agreeing with the lies told by politician and predator elites. More harshly, it does not mean aggreeing with the soldiers' own misinformed and delusional rationales for being at war.
Our professional army is knee-jerk locked to all the lies that got us into the Iraq war. Their generals and admirals, repeating the lies ad nauseum, give our professional soldiers little choice.
Like the USMC sniper team of Bob Lee Swagger and Donnie Fenn in the opening action of the film, Shooter (Paramount, 2007, with Mark Wahlberg as Bob Lee Swagger), our Iraq War For Oil combat veterans have little or no understanding of the financial, political, and anti-Constitutional realities in which they participate. Their patriotic beliefs have been used against them to sucker them into allowing the global predator elites to grab obscene profits and power over the dead bodies of US soldiers and the anguish of their families and friends.
Kissinger to Nixon, 1973: "Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy." (See the Woodward and Bernstein 1976 book, The Final Days.) Kissinger has been a Bush war advisor from the beginning in Afghanistan. Success aainst the Taliban allowed Bush's big oil buddies to immediately begin work on the $4 billion, 950-mile-long, "Baku-Ceyhan", Caspian Sea Oil Pipline, which the Taliban had been blocking for years. That pipeline today delivers crude to a conglomerate's station that fills up ships on the Mediterranean and delivers obscene profits.
Supporting combat soldiers means honoring their sacrifices to protect friends under fire. It means seeing inside and emphathizing with 'kill or be killed'. It means understanding and aiding battlefield skills that help keep them alive, both while their are in combat and after they return to civilian life. It means wishing and praying for their individual safety, honoring their wounds seen and unseen, and not accusing them of being policy-makers in aggressive war. It means admiring their personal courage and getting them out of war before they've made and seen too many corpses for the human mind to bear. It can include demanding exit from Iraq and and Afghanistan. It can mean criminal prosecution of the co-conspirators in the unconstitutional and felonious murders of our dead soldiers.
Support of our combat soldiers and a simultaneous demand for justice under our laws is all a seamless spectrum of citizen patriotism to the nation, its rule of law, and its people. The nation is all the people -- not just the anti-Constitutional fascist three-branch despotism posing as our national govt -- not just the anti-Constitutional and fascist corporations -- not just the anti-Constitutinal and fascist superrich-controlled Federal Reserve, Business Roundtable, and global secret societies.
We are not taking care of our nation. We are not taking care of our own. We are taking care of our lying politicians and our corrupting superrich.
Bush Regime propaganda continually compares our professional soldiers to the citizen soldiers of WW2, who justly overthrew the murderous aggressors of Hitler Germany, Mussulini Italy, and Hirohito Japan. In reality, away from the Bush Regime propaganda, our professional army is a murderous aggressor army under the command of Constitutional-violating generals.
Our professional soldiers are blocked from understanding the Iraq war's illegitimacy under national and international law. They're blocked from the legal reasoning that makes every soldier's death in Iraq a felony murder. Those felony murders, now over 4000, are a massive US govt and military leadership felony conspiracy against citizen rights.
Our soldiers were deprived of the right to be sent to war only after a declaration of war by Congress, in accord with the Constitution. The unconstitutional declaration of war by Bush is a blatant violation of Title 18, USC, Section 241. Bush is a felon-in-waiting.
Under the Constitution -- and clarified by the famous 1935 SCOTUS decision in Schechter Poultry, 295 US 495, in which Congress is barred from delegating any of its core powers -- no president has, or can ever have, the authority to declare war. Under the Constitution, war powers are purely a legislative function.
Presidential declaration of war is unconstitutional and automatically part of a felony conspiracy against soldiers' rights in violation of 18 USC 241.
With the first invasion-related death of an American soldier -- a felony murder under 18 USC 241 and punishable by life imprisonment or death -- Usurper Bush and all of his co-conspirators in the executive branch, Congress, and the federal bench became subject to indictment and criminal prosecution for capital crimes.
It makes no difference that Usurper Bush is a sitting president. Felony forfeits all immunities -- executive, legislative, and judicial. We can't bring civil suit against him while he's in office, but criminal prosecution for a felony or felony conspiracy is a whole 'nuther deal. Felony prosceutions are to go forward immeiately after the felony, no matter what the elected status of the suspect. And -- there is no statute of limitations for any co-conspirator in felony murder, no matter what his/her station in life.
We have the all the law we need. The criminal Bush Regime, criminal Congress, and criminal federal bench cannot obliterate the law. What we don't have is justice. The criminal Bush Regime, criminal Congress, and criminal federal bench do, in fact, obliterate justice every day, 24-7-365.
Criminal Congress. Our professional soldiers are blocked from understanding that this horrendous felony conspiracy to commit aggressive war in Iraq began in the illegal October 2002 votes of 373 members and senators in Congress. Those votes unconstitutionally and illegally gave Usurper Bush his very own war powers. All 373 are unindicted co-conspirators in the felony murders of all soldiers killed in Iraq. Felony forfeits all immunities -- executive, legislative, and judicial. If convicted, all 373, under the specification given in 18 USC 241, can be sentenced to life imprisonment or death. At best, their only proper place is in federal prison, stripped of their political, economic, and social power.
Pushing away the problems of publicly debating and justifying the declaration of a war of aggression, Congress dredged up the unconstitutional war powers given to Nixon. They said, see, this is old-hat stuff -- we're just doing again what's already been done -- as if two unconstitutinalities could equal something right and proper.
Usurper George Nazi Bush and his professional generals and admirals were off to the sure-thing fight of Gulf 2.
Oh my God, it is so perfect to spend other people's money and other people's lives to get power and profits for yourself. It's the natural law of getting and holding wealth that out-ranks all constitutions. It's the natural law of the right people surviving under Social Darwinism. It's the neocon law.
'The reservation' is the bedrock of our Constitution and laws.
Our professional army is off the reservation. Most soldiers don't know or understand.
The 3-branch fascist despotism masquerading as our national govt is off the reservation. Most politicians down through county level and most judges up through SCOTUS know and understand.
The demons will still be off the reservation, November 2008. We need to bring them in and send them off to their own hell.
Clearly, it can't be done with the computer fraud of Election 2008. With Diebold fraud and a fascist govt, voting cannot change anything.
We need an exorcism. We need the Mayan-predicted apocalypse of 2012 or something similar. We need something like the subtle wisdom of, for, and by the ordinary people that's due in the Mayan 5th Sun.
Any lesser exorcism is postponed on account of elites-driven social engineering and elites-driven cognative dissonance. What would we do without our fascist corporations to employ us and our major political parties to glue us together in the one true heaven of progress and economic growth? What would we do without our medieval belief systems to distort the facts of our anti-Constitutional realities?
We'll just have to wait for the excorcism.
With all the safety valves for change shut off by the elites, and with the heat cranked up to maximize middle-class destruction in the shortest possible time, there's only one thing that can happen to this pressure cooker. It will blow up -- 2012 apocalypse or no.
($700 billion pubic-money bailout of criminal financial corpoations for defrauding American families and the world with sub-prime deriviatives? There are approximately 112,000 American households. We could give every American household a million dollars for a total expenditure of less than $115 billion. This would bail out the Americans who have been victimized by the criminal financial corporations, as well as providing a solid stimulus to the national economy. Then the criminal financial corporations would be held closer to responsibility for their actions, held closer to court-room accountability for their legal wrongs, and more directly suffer the admonishments of a revitalized market place. Additionally, they will not be given hundreds of billions of dollars to play with any which way they please -- including one of their obvious goals in crashing derivitives into everybody, the killing of competition. Hello? Lights are on. Anybody home?)
Never forget. GW Bush is not a president. He is a presidential usurper. He was appointed by five fascist corporatism thugs masquerading as SCOTUS judges while they perpetrated one of the most heinous felonies against citizen rights in American history -- the appointment of a president not elected in accord with the Constitution. In addition to being a Constitutional usurpation, Bush's presidency is also a felony conspiracy as defined in federal statute 18 USC 241. As with all usurpations, Bush's presidency is, under age-old constitutional law principles, null and void from the moment of inception. Every action that he and his representatives have taken under color of law is null and void as well as criminal. Shut it down, delete everything since 20 January 2001, and begin the criminal prosecutions.
We've all the excorcism ingredients for figuratively killing off the predator demons in an American version of the French Revolution -- without the bloodshed and without having to make up the law as we go along. We can just strip the fascist corporatism rat bastards and rat bitches of their social, economic, and political power, giving them their due places in American history and American federal prisons.
Welcome to the coming exorcism.
Part 2 -- Social Justice Needed
ECHOING NO SOCIAL JUSTICE
In the US, post-WW1, 1919 to 1929, the three Republican presidential administrations -- Harding, Coolidge, Hoover -- were the Repub anti-social-justice spearhead. "The business of government is business", chirped predator elitist Cal Coolidge. The criminal Congress violated constitutional citizen rights wholesale. SCOTUS anchored the Repubs' assault on social justice, caging women and children in sweatshops without relief to set the paradigm of rich against poor. The superrich got richer and the poor got the proverbial nothing.
Throughout the 1920s, homegrown US fascist corporatism -- the competition-crushing combination of government and superrich oorporations -- learned from German industrialists, chiefly Krupp, how to secretly move money through international corporate mazes. The German industrialists' impulse to re-arm Germany for a bigger and better WW2 was matched by the US predators' greed for cash.
Fascist corporatists, in and out of the Republican-controlled US govt, began wiring down safety valves and the traditional self-correcting mechanisms. They held power and no panty-waist liberals need apply. Hate-hate-hate. Changes in American politics were verbotten.
Throughout the period's Repub literature, there's the scary assertion that not changing anything will allow "trickle-down" from the superrich to benefit those who are suffering. In reality, then and now, 'trickle-sown' is just another lame subterfuge thrown up by the greedy, by the greedy's parasites, by those who don't get it. Still, seeing the absurd 'trickle-down theory' appear in early 1930s writings is erie. Over and over, the historical failures of greed teach no lessons to the greedy.
Despite the horrendous suffering and anguish of millions of Americans, 1920s Repubs would hold the system rock-solid against change for three years into the Depression of the 1930s.
The first generation of predator elites, Hamilton and his gang, had closed off many avenues of possible change in the predator-controlled rep-govt-only system with their propaganda and sophistry bible, The Federalist Papers. But the Realpolitic (policy based on power and greed rather than on egalitarian ideals) of the 1920s Repubs moved far beyond the quaint sophistries of Hamilton. No changes allowed.
Now, with the resurgance of Repub Realpolitic, and with SCOTUS re-packed to 1920s wholesale criminality, every freedom and 14th Amendment right that reduces superrich profits and power teeters on the brink. Many freedoms and rights -- hallowed in the Constitution -- have already disappeared. Private property rights disappeared into New London, and no state law can overturn SCOTUS' federal law precedent, despite slime-bag politicians' revolution-quelling lies to the contrary. The superrich can have anybody's private property they want. Medical privacy is daad and gone along with communications privacy -- victims of govt convenience and outright wiretap criminality. The war on drugs has obliterated medical marijuana, keeping the pharmaceutical death industry's profits and power up. Aggressive war is SCOTUS-protected and can be used anywhere that will bring the Empire sufficient profits, regardless of squandered soldiers and squandered public monies. And on and on.
The long list of freedoms lost to superrich profits and power is nauseating. We need sweeping changes that result in a large injection of social justice.
CRASH
Republicans all around Hoover didn't get the Great Depression. From the stock-market crash of October 1929 to FDR's take-over in March 1933, Repubs refused to change anything, The murderous hardships spiraled tens of millions of ordinary Americans into their living hell. The Repubs still didn't get it.
When FDR labeled his 1932 reform proposals the "New Deal for the forgotten man", the Repubs didn't get it. They immediately and passionately accused him of playing the demagogue. After FDR's 57 to 40 percent win, November 1932, Hoover had the remarkable stupidity to invite FDR to an international conference at which he, FDR, could renounce about 90 percent of the reforms he'd promised in the run-up to election. The Repubs just didn't get it.
Repubs were irrational about the Great Depression from the beginning, and they became more irrational as FDR's try-anything practical politics improved the American situation. Repub descriptions of what FDR was doing were as disconnected from reality and as loaded with irrational hatred as any insanity has ever been.
Repubs haven't changed. They don't have enough imagination to change. They bring new cunning to cover their deeds, but they just keep echoing and re-running the same old greed tactics to financially rape everyone -- decade after decade after decade.
They don't get the coming depression that the subprime mortgage frauds have kicked off. They don't get how their version of "free markets" is so transparently a make-over of their pre-1933 laissez faire failures. They don't get how throwing out the anti-depression controls of the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933, and replacing it with the no-controls of the Gramm-Leach Financial Modernization Act of 1999 put us out over the abyss without a safety net.
Roughly 5,000 banks were crushed before Election 1932. Glass of 1933 had bank-saving devices. Gramm of 1999 does not. The Repubs don't get it.
They seemingly don't get how their wealth- and power-grabbing for the past seven years has fatally weakened the country. Although, clearly, those powerful predators at the very top could easily consider the nation as colateral damage in their war against all for profits and power.
Power and profits they get. The arrogance of power and the retrenchment of hereditary elites they get.
However, they don't get -- as R.H. Tawney so humanly argued -- equality, its base of minimal and equal education, its rule of law, and its culture of civilized dignity.
It's the equality bedrock needed by everyone, no matter how humble, no matter how rich, no matter whether they rise or not. Every society's well-being depends on the equalty bedrock. Take away the equality bedrock, get catastrophe. History shows, there's no more elites-lethal power in the world than simple human dignity sufficiently violated over time. Can you say, "40,000 French elites killed by French commoners in the French Revolution"?
Repubs of the predator elitist stripe just don't get it. They insist that clever acquisition of economic, social, and political power equals 'superior' and even 'deeply intelligent'. Clever and corrupt acquistion of such powers certainly equals many things criminal, but nothing superior, and nothing deeply intelligent.
And now, of course, the psychopathic superrich have bolstered the psychopathic Repubs with amazing numbers of psychopathic Vichy Democrats who also don't get it.
If you have a psychopathic personality, you have no conscinece, no concern for how your decisions harm others. Psychopathic personalities have found their way into the upper reaches of predator elitism since ancient times. Since WW1, they've been promoted by the worst of the predator superrich to fill corporate and govt hierarchies. For Election 2008, they're an army of demons -- soldiers for the superrich in the war against all for profits and power.
Give the psychopathic predator elites an inch and they will race a mile to crash and burn. Big echos from the early 1930s. It would be ironic and entertaining if it were not for the fact that the crashes of predator elitism tend to damage and anguish millions of innocent-bystander Americans. Who do we see about that?
Oh -- us?
BUSH USURPATION -- ECHO OF THE 1920s
Aside from the global depression in the early 1930s, and the subsequent FDR-called time-out from 1933 to 1945, ordinary Americans have had no break from, no fighting chance against, fascist corporatism since the end of WW2.
And now, with the Bush Usurpation -- a blatantly criminal presidency that has been null and void from its inception 20 January 2001, because SCOTUS violated the rights of all Americans to have a president elected in accord with the Constitution -- the predators seem to have closed off every remaining avenue of possible change.
Most members of SCOTUS are unarrested, unindicted, and unprosecuted co-conspirators in violation of 18 USC 241, felony conspiracy against citizen rights. This includes especially Scalia, the mouthiest of the felonious five who illegally sat Usurper George Nazi Bush into his presidential usurpation with the felonious decsion in Bush v Gore. No, Scalia, we don't need to get used to your criminality, and we don't need to change the Constitution. You and most other SCOTUS judges are clearly guilty of multiple counts of felony conspiracy against citizen rights in violation of 18 USC 241. Felony forfeits all immunities -- legislative, executive, and judicial.
We have enough law in place to indict, prosecute, convict, and imprison you and your fellow judicial felons for a very long time. We need only the justice and rule of law denied to us by the Bush Regime, Congress, and SCOTUS. Are we clear?
From the one-eyed fascist corporatists of Congress and SCOTUS, to executive agencies blatantly owned by the fascist corporatism they're suppoed to control, to elections openly privatized by HAVA and defrauded by Diebold flip-flop programming and computer hacking, to the co-opting of the Democratic party "leadership" into the anti-law Bush Regime -- those safety valves for change, those traditional self-correcting mechanisms of rep govt, are lost to us.
Stupidly, as they did across the 1920s, the predators keep turning up the heat on their no-safety-valve pressure cooker.
Illegal and unconstitutional war rages on in Iraq. Felony violations of citizen and POW rights multiply expoentially and go unpunished. The Department of Justice obstructs justice for anyone aiding the Criminal Usurpation or gouging millions out of American society (see Ken Lay run around for years). There's wholesale rape of the public treasury every day for the benefit of the superrich (see the unconstitutional Federal Reserve and its usurous, fraudulent, felonious, and unconstitutional "fractional reserve lending"). Bush's super-voo-doo economics cuts off monies to needy ordinary Americans. It's Bush's amped up version of Reagan's milquetoast voo-doo economics. After war expenses, corproate tax breaks, refusal to enforce corporate taxes, and corporate welfare greater than Reagan's by several orders of magnitude (see especially the $700 billion public-money bailout of criminal financial institutions who've defrauded American families and the world with subprime swindles) we have no money left for needy, ordinary Americans.
"Whatever the traffic will bear" makes great profits and power for the predator elites. But, with a hot fire and no safety valve, the pressure cooker can only blow up. This could get ugly.
Part 3 -- Demons vs. Americans
FACIST SECRECY, TWISTED RICHES, AND DEATH
The 3-branch fascist despotism pretending to be a US national govt keeps us ignorant of many things. To mention a few, there's (1) the amount in circulation of their unconstitutional and ever-increasing money supply, (2) the ownership by other countries of our staggering national debt (forget the smoke and mirrors of annual deficit), and (3) the wide spectrum of earthquake data at the Yellowstone and Long Valley calderas -- data that could prepare us for the worst.
To mention another few, there's a remarkable lack of truthful data concerning (4) our international military deployments, (5) the unconscionable amount of public money pumped into the back doors of corporate welfare (e.g., the Veterans Health Admin's research divisions and teaching hospitals to benefit the medical, pharmaceutical, and healthcare products industries with gobs of public money while veterans' healthcare stands still and slides backwards, fabricated and distorted metrics to the contrary), and (6) fascist corporatism's surge to the secret and deep planning for the North American Union and its currency conversion to the Amero, obviously designed to financially, socially, and politically rape all three North American nations in one fell swoop.
We do know exactly how much preparation our fascist despotism has created to safeguard our population in the event of a supereruption from either of our western states' supervolcano calderas -- ZERO. True, a supereruption might not happen for another thousand years. But also true, it might happen today. Those things are volcanoes.
FEMA tells us to tune in to an emergency radio station and follow the order to evacuate. Right. Evacuate to where?
'Evacuate' would be great preparation, if we could instantaneously transport to central Europe.
One minimal supereruption -- from Yellowstone or Long Valley -- would gut and/or bury about two-thirds of the US.
Inside the 600-mile kill radius of a minimal supereruption from Yellowstone, about 20 million unprepared Americans could be dead in the first days. A thousand miles away, ash fall -- tiny shards of volcanic glass, electrically conductive and very heavy when wet -- could be at the six-foot depth in a few more days, fatally burying more tens of millions of Americans. The follow-on volcanic winter could be five to ten years long, shutting off sunlight to the surface, transporting radiation and more mundane toxins around the world, and killing off most everything that can't get underground -- song birds, rhubarb, kelp, and more Americans included.
New Zealanders know that it only takes about 3-4 inches of wet, super-heavy volcanic ash to collapse residential roofs and structures. In fact, if we could have the preparedness discussion, New Zealand experience with volcanoes would be invaluable.
But we've by God got the American economy cranking out heavily-doctored reports of growth, progress, and max profits to keep the market's confidence up. We take damn good care of the billionaires so they'll be comfortable in their off-shore bunkers and offshore corporate production facilities. Every penny held by ordinary Americans actually belongs to the global billionaire cult, and the middleman commoner is mighty damned inconvienent.
In the meantime, the fascist despotism hides caldera earthquake data from us so that we cannot even have a discussion of the nearness of the inevitable, unstoppable supereruptions. Discussion and development of a prioritized list of preparedness objectives? Oh, hell no. They've got their hearts and shoe fashions set on Katrina-New-Orleans times millions.
Of course, we do know how close we are to having a national healthcare system to rival every other industrialized nation on the planet. We're about a million miles away, wasting our human resources and precious human life to insufficient healthcare and malpractice with premium price-tags.
ELECTION 2008
And now we come to Election 2008. Safety-valve for change? Don't be ridiculous. It's demons deluxe. The slime-bag politicians have used HAVA to privatize elections into the Great Sham Diebold Selection. That's the superrich's 49-51 percent flip of any recorded votes, in almost any race, in almost any state. It's billionaire happiness through glitchy-kludge-hackable, vote-counting software that no ordinary American is allowed to review or monitor. Its the safety valve of fair elections wired down and eliminated by greed-driven superrich predators, in and out of govt.
The Great Sham Diebold Selection will name our next president, no matter your stupid beliefs in how elections should work. Reality check on how govt actually works: Michael Parenti's 2077, eighth edition, of Democracy For The Few. How our system should work doesn't count anymore. You can't get "from the ought to the is" (Spinoza's well-turned phrase). And the do-nothing American people haven't done jack-spit to take away the billionaires' Diebold selection toys, despite the very loud din of electoral chaos from 2002 to now.
Hillary Clinton's compulsory healthcare INSURANCE might give her a win in the Diebold Selection of 2008. It's a horrendous piece of corporate welfare that will out-do the Repubs' Medicare Part D racket -- and it won't ruffle one feather of the American Medical Industry's death grip on the American society and economy.
Still, Hillary's scam cannot rise to the level of the responsible and comprehensive national healthcare systems recently done in Germany and Taiwan.
Catching the spirit, here? We've stuck with stupidity, in stupidity, on stupidity -- and dancing with demons. After nearly a decade of near-zero social justice, it's like the late 1920s all over again. It's complete with predator fascism's gouge-money-out-of-everything, but without the electoral system safety-valve.
FDR ECHO--THE FIGHTING CHANCE
We'd have to shut down the Great Sham Diebold Selection for this to work, but, as we had in 1932 in FDR, we do have one social justice champion in the field of candidates for 2008.
Ralph Nader has been a social justice champion for ordinary Americans all his life. He's now that most precious of American inventions: the genuine candidate.
Every other candidate -- with the possible exception of Ron Paul -- is little more than a cookie-cutter copy of Usurper George Nazi Bush. Other than possibly Ron Paul, not a one of them gives a hang about the rule of law, the Constitution, or the hallowed principles of the Declaration Of Independence. If they did, they'd be thundering for indictments and criminal prosecutions of all our govt's criminals. The other candidates don't want the standing laws applied. They want little else than to be above the law with little Georgie.
Ralph Nader is an FDR echo. He's a social justice advocate, and he apparently wants to do it all inside the rep-govt-only system, just as FDR did. Whether he would remain a status quo guy if elected President remains to be seen. He's certainly street-smart enough to know that the status quo has got to go.
Sorry, Nader, staying inside the system is a no-go. Everything in there is perfectly controlled by the predator elites. You can't be elected and we can't get our Constitution back from inside the status quo system. Any antiquated notion you might still hold of a 3rd-party candidate's value being in the coercing of the major parties to consider new options is too inappropriate, too auto-marginalized, for us to support. The national emergency forced onto us by the predators won't wait for such niceties.
If Nader or any other social justice champion were elected President and stayed inside the rep-govt-only system, could he reform anything in the massively corrupt environment of Congress, the Courts, and the out-of-control, lawless, and extremely powerful executive agencies? Oh, hell no.
If you think he might have a chance by reshaping the executive agencies against the corporations who now own them, you just haven't dug deeply enough into Jimmy Carter's crash against the agencies. The footnotes in James Bamford's 1982 book, The Puzzle Palace, tell the story. Those footnotes should be put into a separate volume and titled, How Jimmy Carter's Presidency Was Lost.
Want a fighting chance? Want justice and the rule of law back? Tens of millions of us will have to get outside the system's corruption box. We'll have to crush the Diebold Selection fraud. We'll have to take Ralph Nader or someone very much like him with us. We'll need Nader's understandings of how to eliminate greed-driven corporate power.
We need an updated system adapted from the corruption-fighting of the early 20th Century's Reform Era: direct democracy, marshalling the people into their rightful sovereign citizen lawmaking to correct the rep govt legislatures when they go wrong; protective, history-recording citizen institutions, paralleling those of the rep govt's legislatures; top-to-bottom non-partisan rep govt, with political parties barred from all govt matters, and with a regional-to-national presidential primaries system replacing the predators' presidential conventions and "electoral college" corruption machines.
It's an All-American legacy packed into the early 20th Century's Reform Era -- with the added fillip of Nebraska's 1935 non-partisan legislature (still a substantial success after 73 years). The legacy is buried in 24 state constitutions, covered over with about nine decades of myriad state govt felonies. But the legacy is there, legal, waiting.
It can be done. We have the technology.
Nahhh. The do-nothing American people don't get it. They just don't get it. Some are blinded servile, with political beliefs wrapped in reality-defeating cognative dissonance. Most love pop culture and their liesure time above everything. They see govt as boring, unimportant, and something one must not expect too much of. Others see govt through ancient religious belief systems, expecting that the out-rushing Constitution will be matched by an in-rushing end of days and Rapture, despite the endless historical failures of self-fullfilling prophecy. They cheer the death of the Constitution and rule of law.
Nahhh. There's no fighting chance. There's too little critical thinking. Grin real big for the bosses. Wrap your cognative dissonance around your inappropriate belief systems. Block out reality. Shrivel up and die to the really great beat of the really loud music.
Still, some of us remain principle-centered and reality-driven. We see that exorcising the demons can be done. We see millions of Americans grasping at American principles, freedoms, and rights ineffectually. We keep hope.
------------------------
Last revised Wed 24 Sep 2008, about 10;40am CDT
An earlier version was published on the DD Revival and Populist Party web sites as "No Fighting Chance".
© 2008 by Stephen Neitzke
AAIGMBTY
No Fighting Chance
"Are the citizens called on to march out to war? They pay soldiers for the purpose, and remain at home. Are they summoned to council? They nominate deputies, and stay at home. And then, in consequence of idleness and money, they have soldiers to enslave their country, and representatives to sell it."--Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, circa 1762, Chapter 15, "Of Deputies Or Representatives".
1762. Rousseau's book was part of American predator elitism's understanding, cultural shaping, social engineering -- from the beginning. Predator elites have known since Republican Rome that professional armies have helped slime-bag politicians end free societies and maximize wealth. Every freedom reduces predatory wealth and is the enemy.
Consul Marius formed the first Roman professional army about 110 BCE -- taking their allegiance for himself and away from the Senate, People, and Constitution of Rome. The Republic was all downhill from there, hitting the wall at Caesar's murder on the Ides of March, 44 BCE.
American draft gone, we've lost our citizen army. The civilian population has a much smaller fraction of military-trained individuals. Work-places have fewer duty-driven workers with military-based self-disipline, practiced "tone of command" verbal skills, can-do attitudes, and the belief that active military should defend and be loyal to the Constitution -- as their military oath demanded of them -- instead of giving away allegiance to the slime-bag politicians -- as professional soldiers are conditioned to do. And there are fewer who stand fast when given an illegal order, threatening to undo whatever evil they're facing. Professional soldiers are not allowed to distinguish between legal and illegal orders.
We've lost what Rome lost when their professional armies took over. We've lost another clump of principle-driven population who worked to protect ordinary Americans against fascist corporatism and predator elitism. We need to re-think the draft. It was a solid contribution to our national well-being.
Additionally, cashing in on some chunk of their own nation has been a primary road to wealth for slime-bag politicians since pre-modern societies.
In the US, post-WW1, 1919 to 1929, SCOTUS anchored the Republican party's assault on social justice, caging women and children in sweatshops without relief. The three Repub presidential administrations of the 1920s were the Repub anti-social-justice spearhead. "The business of government is business", chirped predator elitist Cal Coolidge.
Global fascist corporatism -- the competition-crushing combination of government and superrich oorporations -- learned from German industrialists, primarily Krupp, how to move money undetected through corporate mazes to feed the rearming of Germany and themselves. Fascist corporatists also began wiring down the safety valves that might allow for change in American politics and the newly birthed and unconstitutional monetary system fronted by the Federal Reserve.
The first generation of predator elites, Hamilton and his gang, had closed off many avenues of possible change with their propaganda and sophistry bible, The Federalist Papers. But the Realpolitic (policy based on power rather than on ideals) of the 1920s Republican party hacks moved far beyond the quaint sophistries of Hamilton, while publically making Hamilton their hero and idol.
Aside from the global depression in the early 1930s, and the subsequent FDR-called time-out from 1933 to 1945, ordinary Americans have had no break from, no fighting chance against, fascist corporatism. And now, with the Bush Usurpation, a blatantly criminal presidency -- in which every act taken under color of law has been null and void from its inception -- the predators seem to have closed off every remaining avenue of possible change, from criminal Congress and criminal SCOTUS, to elections defrauded by computer hacking, to co-opting the Democratic party hierarchy.
Stupidly, the predators keep raising the heat on their no-safety-valve pressure cooker. Illegal and unconstitutional war rages on. Felony violations of citizen and POW rights go unpunished. The Department of Justice obstructs justice for anyone aiding the Criminal Usurpation. There's wholesale rape of the public treasury for the benefit of the superrich. Super-VooDoo economics (after war expenses, we have no money left for all these nuisance entitlements) cuts off monies to needy ordinary Americans.
Whatever the pressure cooker will bear makes great profits and power for the predator elites. But, with a hot fire and no safety volve, the pressure cooker can only blow up. This could get ugly.
And now we come to Election 2008. Safety-valve for change? Don't be ridiculous. The slime-bag politicians have privatized elections into the Great Sham Diebold Selection. You know, the superrich's 49-51 percent flip of any recorded votes, in any race, in any state. It's billionaire happiness through glitchy-kludge-hackable, vote-counting software that no ordinary American is allowed to review or monitor. The Great Sham Diebold Selection will name our next president, no matter your stupid beliefs in how elections should work. You still can't get "from the ought to the is" (Spinoza's well-turned phrase). And the do-nothing American people haven't done jack-spit to take away the billionaires' Diebold selection machine.
Catching the spirit, here? We've stuck with stupidity, in stupidity, on stupidity. It's like the late 1920s all over again, after a decade of zero social justice and predator fascism's gouge-money-out-of-everything.
The Republicans all around Hoover didn't get the Great Depression. From the stock-market crash of October 1929 to FDR's take-over in March 1933, Repubs refused to change anything, while the murderous hardships spiraled ordinary Americans into their living hell. When FDR labeled his 1932 reform proposals the "New Deal for the forgotten man", the Repubs immediately and passionately accused him of playing the demagogue. After FDR's 57 to 40 percent win, November 1932, Hoover had the remarkable stupidity to invite him to an international conference at which he, FDR, was to renounce about 90 percent of the reforms he'd promised in the run-up to election. Repubs just didn't get it.
Repubs haven't changed. They don't get the coming depression that the subprime mortgage market has kicked off. They don't get how their wealth- and power-grabbing moves for the past seven years have weakened country and resolve. They don't get how their version of "free markets" is so transparently a make-over of their pre-1933 laissez faire failures. They don't get how throwing out the anti-depression controls of the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933, and replacing it with the no-controls of the Gramm-Leach Financial Modernization Act of 1999 put us out over the abyss without a safety net. And they still won't get it as the spin-down from subprime promises to crush even the big banks.
Roughly 5,000 banks were crushed before Election 1932. Glass had bank-saving devices. Gramm does not. The Repubs don't get it. When their private monies can't save their asses in the subprime-begun avalanche, they'll start grabbing public monies.
Temporary power and profits they get. The arrogance of power and the retrenchment of hereditary elites they get. However, they don't get -- as R.H. Tawney so humanly argued -- equality, its base of equal education, and its culture of civilized dignity; needed by everyone, no matter how humble, no matter whether they rise or not.
Repubs just don't get it.
And now, of course, the superrich have bolstered the Repubs with amazing numbers of psychopathic-personality-impaired Vichy Democrats who also don't get it.
The 3-branch fascist despotism pretending to be a US national govt keeps us ignorant of many things. To mention a few, there's (1) the amount in circulation of their unconstitutional and ever-increasing money supply, (2) the ownership by other countries of our staggering national debt (forget the smoke and mirrors of annual deficit), and (3) the wide spectrum of earthquake data at the Yellowstone and Long Valley calderas -- data that could prepare us for the worst.
To mention another few, there's a remarkable lack of truthful data concerning (4) our international military deployments, (5) the unconscionable amount of public money pumped into the back doors of corporate welfare (e.g., the Veterans Health Admin's research divisions and teaching hospitals to benefit the medical, pharmaceutical, and healthcare products industries with gobs of public money while veterans' healthcare stands still and slides backwards, fabricated and distorted metrics to the contrary), and (6) fascist corporatism's surge to the secret and deep planning for the North American Union and its currency conversion to the Amero, obviously designed to financially, socially, and politically rape all three North American nations in one fell swoop.
We do know exactly how much preparation our fascist despotism has created to safeguard our population in the event of a supereruption from either of our western states' supervolcano calderas -- ZERO. True, a supereruption might not happen for another thousand years. But also true, it might happen today. Those things are volcanoes.
FEMA tells us to tune in to an emergency radio station and follow the order to evacuate. Right. Evacuate to where?
'Evacuate' would be all the preparation needed, if we could instantaneously transport to central Europe.
Inside the 600-mile kill radius of a minimal supereruption, about 20 million unprepared Americans could be dead in the first few days. A thousand miles away, ash fall -- tiny shards of volcanic glass, electrically conductive and very heavy when wet -- could be at the six-foot depth in a few more days, fatally burying more tens of millions of Americans. The follow-on volcanic winter could be five to ten years long, shutting off sunlight to the surface, transporting radiation and more mundane toxins around the world, and killing off most everything that can't get underground -- song birds, rhubarb, kelp, and more Americans included.
New Zealanders know that it only takes about 3-4 inches of wet, super-heavy volcanic ash to collapse residential roofs and structures. In fact, if we could have the preparedness discussion, New Zealand experience with volcanoes would be invaluable.
But we've by God got the American economy cranking out heavily-doctored reports of growth, progress, and max profits to keep the market's confidence up. We take damn good care of the billionaires so they'll be comfortable in their off-shore bunkers and offshore corporate production facilities. Every penny held by ordinary Americans actually belongs to the global billionaire cult, and the middleman commoner is mighty damned inconvienent.
In the meantime, the fascist despotism hides caldera earthquake data from us so that we cannot even have a discussion of the nearness of the inevitable, unstoppable supereruptions. Discussion and development of a prioritized list of preparedness objectives? Oh, hell no. They've got their hearts and shoe fashions set on Katrina-New-Orleans times millions.
Of course, we do know how close we are to having a national health care system to rival every other industrialized nation on the planet. We're about a million miles away, wasting our human resources and precious human life to insufficient healthcare. Hillary Clinton's compulsory healthcare INSURANCE might give her a win in the Great Sham Diebold Selection of 2008 -- it's a horrendous piece of corporate welfare that will out-do the AARP's and Repubs' Medicare Part D racket -- and it won't ruffle one feather of the American Medical Industry's death grip on the American society and economy.
Still, Hillary's scam cannot rise to the level of the responsible and comprehensive national healthcare systems recently done in Germnay and Taiwan.
We'd have to shut down the Great Sham Diebold Selection, but -- as we had in 1932 in FDR -- we do have one social justice champion in the field of candidates for 2008. Ralph Nader has been a social justice champion for ordinary Americans all his life. He's now that most precious of American inventions, the genuine candidate. Every other candidate is little more than a cookie-cutter copy of Usurper George Nazi Bush. Not a one of them gives a hang about the rule of law, the Constitution, or the hallowed principles of the Declaration Of Independence. Every damned one of them wants little else than to be above the law with little Georgie.
As things stand, can Ralph Nader be elected? Oh, hell no. If he were elected, could he reform anything in the massively corrupt environment of Congress, the Courts, and the out-of-control, lawless, and extremely powerful executive agencies? Oh, hell no.
If you think he might have a chance by reshaping the executive agencies against the corporations who now own them, you just haven't read and understood the footnotes in James Bamford's 1982 book, The Puzzle Palace. Those footnotes should be put into a separate volume and titled, How Jimmy Carter's Presidency Was Lost.
We can't get back to 1932 or the self-correcting mechanisms that saved us then. Ordinary Americans don't have a fighting chance. Well -- not as long as they stay inside the corruption box.
Want a fighting chance? Tens of millions of you will have to get outside the system's corruption box. You'll have to take Ralph Nader with you -- and I'm not sure he's willing. You'll have to ban political parties and make top-to-bottom, non-partisan government fit into direct democracy's citizen lawmaking. It's an All-American legacy packed into the early 20th Century's Reform Era -- with the added fillip of Nebraska's 1935 non-partisan legislature.
It can be done. We have the technology.
Nahhh. The do-nothing American people don't get it. They just don't get it.
No fighting chance. Grin real big for the bosses. Shrivel up and die.
------------------------
Last Revised Thu 15 May 2008, about 7:40pm CDT
© 2008 by Stephen Neitzke
AAIGMBTY
