thenewliberator.com

A QUICK SUMMARY OF PAST ARTICLES

2011-12-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

A QUICK SUMMARY OF PAST ARTICLES
(Google the title to read}

One of my articles "Why is Capitalism Failing Us? appeared on June 14, 2008.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/06/why-is-capitalism-failing-us/

Then on November 20, 2008 there was my "Quacking on the Eve of Disaster."
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/11/quacking-on-the-eve-of-diasaster/

On November 22, 2008 they published my "The Undiagnosed "Cancer" that Killed Capitalism."
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/11/the-undiagnosed-%E2%80%9Ccancer%E2%80%9D-that-has-killed-capitalism/

On November 29, 2009: “Why the Jump Start will not Restart Capitalism”
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/11/the-wall-street-bailout-will-not-jump-start-our-capitalism/

January 26, 2009 “Three Underlying Systemic Defects in Our Political Economy”
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/three-underlying-systemic-defects-in-our-political-economy-that-must-be-dealt-with/

February 7, 2009: “President Obama: Nationalize the Fed and Issue Our Own Money”
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/02/president-obama-nationalize-the-fed-and-create-our-own-money/

On February 28, 2009 they published my “The Special Danger from Obamamania”
See http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/02/the-special-danger-from-obamamania/

On March 28, 2009 Dissident Voice: http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/03/wright-patmans-prescription-for-healing-the-cancerous-us-banking-system/

On April 4, 2009 DV published my treatise on the filibuster: http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/mobilizing-with-pots-and-pans-to-reverse-a-bloodless-coup/

On April 6, 2009 DV published my urgent concern about Obama and Wall Street Banks, and the urgent need for him to change direction: http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/is-obama-even-more-dangerous-than-bush/

On April 23,2009 Dissident Voice published my article The Fall of the American Empire,,,The connection between torture, Wall Street Bank profits, and our descent into poverty at
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/the-fall-of-the-american-empire/

That is what this article is about. My friend Bill Fletcher is the editor of http://www.blackcommentator.com/index.html and he published my article about the filibuster In the November 13, 2008 issue. This is important because some Senators will use the filibuster to block Obama's stimulus package also.

OBAMA IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN BUSH

2011-12-07T09:44:00.001-07:00

OBAMA IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN BUSH
A Republication of an article from Dissident Voice dated April 7, 2009
December 7, 2011

INTRODUCTION

69 Million of us voted for President Obama because he promised hope and change from the disasters of the Bush Administration. Countless millions of human beings around the planet joined us in our relief and our elation when he was elected. An unthinking uncritical “Obamamania” among most of his supporters continues to prevail so far. This is dangerous for them, for President Obama and for all of us. Without critical analysis and pressure from his millions of fans, Obama will stumble into disaster.

We have carefully watched the new President’s first 100 days and we are appalled. We find that Obama has continued Bush policies affecting the abuses of Wall Street banks, and allowing Wall Street wrongdoers to manage our economy and the “recovery.”

Forget the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, the prosecution of Eliot Spitzer for his sexual indiscretion, and Bernard Madoff’s little Ponzi-scheme. What about prosecuting those bankers who profited from the most massive fraudulent swindle in human history?
Reputable commentators such as Michael Whitney, John Paul Roberts, Professor Michael Hudson, and now Professor William K. Black have spelled out the details. The CNBC TV Documentary “House of Cards” (Google the title to view) explained in detail with surprisingly candid on camera, guilt free admissions of fraud by the wrong-doers. They explained how this swindle worked at each level from the borrowers and mortgage salesmen in Los Angeles to the top CEOs of Wall Street and to the Fed. These wrongdoers who had admitted their fraud even said that they would do it again. These sources of our information have been relatively diplomatic in tone. It is time to name names and cite the fraudulent acts of those responsible, and the specific violations of law.

As we evaluate all of this, keep in mind what William K. Black said on Bill Moyer’s April 3 program about making risky loans where the ability of the borrower to repay a loan is not vetted: “We know that will produce enormous fraud under economic theory, criminology theory, and two thousand years of life experience.” Both Democrats and Republicans, hand in hand with Wall Street Bankers, by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, and by enacting The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 specifically to preclude regulation, caused the current extraordinary depression and crisis by ignoring and acting contrary to this accumulated human wisdom. Think of this when you evaluate whether their acts were knowing and intentional and whether they are guilty or innocent.

THE INTENTIONAL FRAUD OF THE WALL STREET BANKERS AND RATING COMPANIES AND THEIR CONGESSIONAL ENABLERS

The legal elements or requirements of the crime or wrong of fraud known to every first year law student are:

1. An intentional misrepresentation of facts or a false promise
2. Knowledge of falsity
3. Intent to deceive
4. Justifiable and actual reliance on the truth of what was represented or promised
5. Resulting Damage

President Obama is a brilliant lawyer, top of his class at Harvard Law, and a ten year professor of Constitutional Law. His roots are in Chicago politics. President Obama clearly knows the elements of fraud.

We know the factual details of the wrongdoing from CNBC’s video “House of Cards” where those involved in the fraud at each level made surprisingly candid admissions of what they had done. At each level, the CEOs involved felt no guilt or responsibility. They would not have changed their conduct in retrospect. Each said he had to do what he did to stay in business and to compete with others who were doing the same thing. This was the “justification” at every level from LA mortgage salesperson, to the bankers, the creators of layers of derivatives and credit default swaps to the raters who gave the derivatives that they knew or should have known were not worth their stated values, AAA ratings. All of this was happening in the context of congressionally granted exemptions from regulation, and NY Fed President Timothy Geithner’s failure to supervise and to regulate.

The Wall Street bankers deliberately made and palmed off to others loans that they knew were really bad. They made them because they were so profitable. Among themselves, they called them “liar’s loans” because they did not care if borrowers were unqualified and they encouraged them to lie about their incomes. They created the layers of derivatives based on these pools of liar loans, knowing that they were extremely risky. They pressured the rating companies to give them AAA ratings, and the rating companies complied “because the competition was doing it” when they knew or should have known that the “securities” were really not of AAA quality.

Foreign investors, domestic pension fund managers, and foreign governments and banks justifiably relied on the Wall Street banker’s sales pitch and the AAA ratings. The AAA rating satisfies the obligation of “due diligence” in checking the risk of an investment. These innocent but sophisticated investors had a right to assume that NY Fed President Timothy Geithner was doing his duty of supervising and regulating.

All of these investors were damaged when the house of cards collapsed. The investors have been damaged. We the citizens and voters and generations of our offspring have suffered almost incalculable damage…damage totaling many trillions of dollars that will plague us for generations.

This is the massive Wall Street fraud that President Obama inherited, and is now covering up, and possibly attempting to restart.

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS NOT FAITHFULLY EXECUTING THE LAW REGARDING UNDERCAPITALIZED BANKS IN VIOLATION OF HIS OATH

President Obama now has the sworn Presidential duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Thus he must “faithfully” prosecute financial wrongdoing, avoid conflicts of interest, and specifically, take certain prompt action against wrongdoing Wall Street banks as mandated by the Prompt Corrective Action Law that was enacted just following the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. This law is found in Title 12 United States Code beginning at Section 1831. There is no exception in the law for “banks that are too big to fail,” and no exception for criminal enterprises even if they are large.

Instead of bailing out wrongdoing banks with Trillions of dollars of our money, President Obama is required by federal law to appoint a receiver for the bank within 90 days after it becomes critically undercapitalized. He must prosecute those bankers who were paid salaries or bonuses while their banks were undercapitalized. There is no question that they are undercapitalized because they require Trillions just to make them function, without complying with legal standards. If “they are too large to fail,” they have seized way too much private “mafia-like” power over all of us. President Obama can and must follow the law.

OBAMA’S CHOSEN FINANCIAL AND ECONOMIC ADVISORS KNOWINGLY DEREGULATED SO AS TO ENABLE THE FRAUD, AND THEN PARTICIPATED IN THE FRAUD AND PROFITED FROM IT

Obama’ Chief Economic Advisor, Larry Summers one of Clinton’s Secretaries of the Treasury, and Robert Rubin along with Republican Senator Phil Gramm lead the lobbying effort to repeal the Glass Steagall Act thereby enabling Wall Street Banks to invest in derivatives, hedge funds, and credit default swaps, and permitting Wall Street insurance companies to engage in banking.
Then the same three men, Summers, Rubin, and Gramm together with Alan Greenspan lead the effort to persuade Congress to pass a law in 2000 without debate in either the House or the Senate prohibiting the regulation of these newly enabled Wall Street financial giants. It is known as The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, and is found in Title 7 USC Section 2. The exemptions from regulation are found in Sections 2 (g) and 2(h). President Clinton signed the new law on December 21, 2000.

Obama’s Chief Economic Advisor Larry Summers and his Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner both pushed for the enactment of this law which enabled the ensuing fraud involving mortgages and the layers of derivatives that were known to be risky and worthless.
Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner, President of the New York division of the Fed where all of the major Wall Street banks are located had the following duties according to its own mission statement found at http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/introtothefed.html:
“It is responsible for
• formulating and executing monetary policy,
• supervising and regulating depository institutions,
• providing an elastic currency,
• assisting the federal government's financing operations, and
• serving as the banker for the U.S. government.”
In addition to paying his own taxes, Timothy Geithner had a public responsibility and duty to all of us. Timothy Geithner, the man chiefly responsible for avoiding what has happened, instead facilitated the fraud. He did not supervise and he did not regulate. As Professor Black said to Bill Moyers, he, along with every one else involved in the fraud, ignored the FBI’s public 2004 warning that there was “an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle.”

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS KNOWINGLY AND INTENTIONALLY REWARDING CRIMINALS AND IS COVERING UP WALL STREET BANK CRIMES AND FRAUD

It is a felony for any person including the President of the United States to cover up a crime. 18 USC Section 4 states:

“Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

Such a cover up is also criminal fraud as defined in 47USC 1001.

Such a cover up when done by a President, Vice President or a Secretary of Treasury is also a “high crime and misdemeanor” warranting impeachment under Article II, Section 4 of our Constitution:

“The president, vice president and all other civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of…high crimes and misdemeanors.”

President Obama has also taken the Presidential Oath that he will faithfully execute this cover up avoidance law as well, and not to violate it himself.

80% of the American people, according to a recent poll believe that Wall Street is crooked and is responsible for our current Depression.

Obama, in a recent speech to Wall Street CEOs telling them to “cool it” about justifying their contract rights to bonuses, said

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

So what is he saying to the 80% of us potentially holding pitchforks who voted for him?

In effect, he is saying in his vague, charming, persuasive and hypnotic way: “I know of no crimes. I want to look to the future I will not prosecute the bankers. I will hire them as advisors. We have nothing to learn from their mistakes. We together will try to restore lending, and restart the economy as it was.”

What are President Obama’s own lawyers, Dawn Johnson Chief of the Office of Legal Counsel and Attorney General Eric Holder advising him? Are they, like John Yoo and Michael Mukasey who advised Bush that he could torture, advising Obama that he has the power to ignore the law created exactly for the purpose of dealing with failing banks because of an economic emergency? What is brilliant lawyer Obama advising himself? Where is there indication of Obama’s own integrity and inner moral compass?

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES FOR US IF OBAMA’S MUTI-TRILLION BAIL OUT OF WALL STREET “SUCCEEDS?”

The most immediate, pressing danger is that it will not work at all. Obama may not discover this until it is too late to try another solution. The reason is Obama seeks mainly to restore the lending ability of the Wall Street banks. That will work only if we are willing to fund our purchases by more borrowing. We are not. We will not borrow. We are too frightened. The great danger is of a total breakdown of civilized democratic society.

Even if it “works,” Obama’s plan will never succeed for us. The reasons are:
• Obama and his advisors see capitalism as a stable system that only got a little off track due to unfortunate lack of regulation. It is in fact in deep trouble even aside from the banking problem due to an overproduction of goods and services that can be produced at a profit. This is the underlying “systemic defect.” Failing to recognize this defect, Obama does nothing to solve it.
• Obama aims mainly toward providing more credit, restoring the Wall Street banks’ ability to lend money.

Obama fails to deal adequately with restoring the purchasing power of consumers from our earned labor. Taken together, Obama and Bernanke are committing $12.8 Trillion to bailing out Wall Street compared to only $900 Billion to stimulating the real economy, a ratio of 14 to 1.

The inevitable result for us will be a vast inflation of our dollars, so that each dollar buys less and less. We will be like frogs placed in slowly heating water. We will notice nothing at first. The “water” will heat slowly until it kills us. It may ultimately “succeed” for the wealthiest 1% in that they will own all of the land, gold, platinum, silver, and commodities and live in guarded gated castles. Those of us who survive will do so as feudal serfs who are permitted to share-crop their land. The result for Obama is that he will lose his bid for re-election in 2012 due to the massive despair and disillusionment of voters.

WHAT COULD OBAMA DO THAT WOULD WORK?

Although his window of opportunity is very short, if Obama changed course promptly before he has put us many trillions further in debt, there are sound, historically tested things he could do. They are bold. They involve a profound change in his analysis of our problem. He could:

• Cause our government to be the sole creator of our money supply, our silver coins, our dollar bills, and our “check book” money. Lincoln did this in 1860 to finance the Civil War. The state of Pennsylvania did this successfully for 50 years prior to 1789.

• Instead of borrowing from private banks and other governments, our government could create and issue money to meet government, business and individual needs, including rebuilding our infrastructure, education through college, and universal health coverage, and to pay our government’s obligations on existing bonds as they fell due.

• Prohibit “fractionalized reserve banking,” the practice of private bankers lending from 10 to 90 times the asset-reserves they hold. Allow banks only to loan on a 1 to 1 basis, from the dollars they have on deposit.

• Impose a top limit on interest that could be charged say 8%.

• Allow the Wall Street banks to go into bankruptcy, but retain enough of the needed staff employees to implement the new way of supplying money where needed.

• Repeal the Federal Reserve Act and install the needed functions of the Fed as a division of the Treasury Department.

• Enable local banks and businesses to continue to function as they now do.

Dated: April 7, 2009

Doug Page

FELLOW WAGE SLAVES: LET'S MOBILIZE AND ASSERT OUR CREATIVE COOPERATIVE POWER

2011-07-17T09:05:00.001-07:00

Fellow Wage Slaves: Join our Wage Slave Association. Sign up below. Now! Send this message to 10 of your friends. Let’s mobilize and fight back before the “economic royalists” take it all. If you are like me, you are totally dependent on your pay check. Even the tenant farmers in the Great Depression of the 1930s had more security and political independence than we do. They could grow food and butcher a hog and struggle along. Now if one or two of our pay checks stop, we are out in the street and hungry. It does not matter what color or race or religion or political preference we are, whether we are salaried or paid by the hour, and whether we are union, non-union, publicly or privately employed. We are frightened, desperately dependent on our pay checks, vulnerable, and immobilized. Even if we are self-employed business or professional persons, but dependent on wage slave customers for our income, we are in the same boat with everybody else.

The economic royalists are out to get us; to take our jobs, our savings, and our retirement benefits; and to take our homes. Unfortunately the economic royalists never think they have enough money or land or political power. The want more and more and more. They are maintaining a secret class war against us for their benefit, while causing their well paid spokesmen like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck; constantly to accuse us of class war.

Who are the economic royalists? They are the very few persons at the very top levels of wealth who own and control the big banks, the CIA, the military, the armament manufacturers, and the big corporations, the media (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, movies, advertising agencies) most churches, the charitable organizations, the academic elites and the universities. They even control the high salaried union bosses. They run our government by using their money to buy, and control the candidates they allow us to vote for. This includes our President. They cause every facet of our political economy to serve them only. They cut taxes on themselves and put the burden of taxation on us. These economic royalists control what we do, how we live, and how we think, even what we think about. They want our every human need to be privatized, so as to provide a profit making opportunity for them. They want every human need to be met either by borrowing money from them or by working for them. If neighbors work together to meet a need, they label it “socialism” or “communism.”

The economic royalists seize every possibility to eliminate our jobs. They take our jobs to Mexico to India or China, or wherever else labor costs are less. They create machines and computers to do our jobs. They take their profit making enterprises all over our planet, then use the US military to fight those residents of foreign countries who resist them, the so-called “terrorists.” This creates immense profits for them and poverty for us. We join the military services to get a job and “benefits,” then they send us overseas to fight those who resist their plunder abroad. We are kept in a perpetual state of war, and some of our dead and maimed bodies are sent home every day.

The economic royalists plunder our planet; pollute our air, water and environment all for their short term profit with contempt for conservation.

They propagate false economic neo-liberal trickle down economic theories of immense benefit to them and tell us that we have no other choice.

We try to live with all of this by becoming lonely couch potatoes, eating fast food, watching explosions, fires, rapes, and murders on TV. We think we are politically participating when we watch talking heads arguing over political “strategy” on TV, knowing full well that our votes are meaningless...

Of course we are scared. What will happen to us tomorrow? Next week? Next year? How will our children and grand children survive? So far, we dare not march, we dare not protest, we dare not speak out, we dare not join with others to enhance our power and our ability to protect ourselves.

We have only one way to stop all of this so that we can work together to do what needs to be done without being a wage slave of somebody who seeks only to make a short term profit from our work. We can avoid killing and being killed in foreign wars. We can preserve our healthy planet home. We can have safe healthy lives. We can create a banking and money system that serves us only. We can fairly tax those who have a thousand times more than they need. We can use the strategy and discipline of active non-violence against the economic royalists, just as the Blacks did in the civil rights struggles.

This is not to say that it will be easy or that it can all be done safely. It will not be. We have no other choice. We choose to live. We choose not to be wage slaves, serfs, or tenant farmers of the economic royalists. We choose to live moral, healthy lives, cooperatively helping each other, and caring for each other. This will require a vast change in our life styles, our material expectations, and an advance in our knowledge of the lies we tell ourselves and others. It will require a change in what we consider and how we measure “progress.”

Like the person addicted to alcohol who can become sober and well only by publicly admitting to himself and others that he is an alcoholic, we can become safe, healthy and well only by admitting to ourselves and others that we are wage slaves, that we are powerless by ourselves, and by working together.

To avoid being fired from your job simply for joining our Wage Slave Association, you may join using a fictitious name, or your grand mother’s maiden name and your grandfather’s first name, if you want. There are no dues. Form local Wage Slave Associations in your neighborhood, in your community so that you can meet, discuss what is going on, validate each other, and give aid and comfort to each other. From local voluntary monetary donations and contributed letters and articles, give your support to a Wage Slave Association Newsletter so that we can communicate with each other via e mail. All races colors sexual preferences and creeds are welcome.

It seems to me that human needs, human capacities, and the needs of our planet home dictate what some of the guiding concepts of the Wage Slave Association must be, but they are all up for discussion:

• We openly admit that we are wage slaves, that we are individually powerless, and commit ourselves to overcoming our plight.

• We acknowledge that we have lost our political power via the ballot box.

• We commit ourselves to active non-violence, and to learn the discipline required.

• We commit ourselves to treat each other human on the planet as we wish to be treated.

• We commit ourselves to cooperate with each other to meet our mutual needs, to care for each other and to give and to accept help from each other. We subordinate our competitive greedy selfish impulses.

• We create new standards and measures of “progress”

• We will grow as much of our own food as possible, buy food locally, and support local small food growers. We barter and we create a local currency

• We acknowledge that our planet lacks sufficient remaining resources and cheap energy to maintain the current population of humans on our standards of living, and we therefore support family planning, birth control and education of women.

• We do whatever is necessary to maintain a civilized sustainable life for all humans.

• We try to be aware of our fear, and of the jingoistic manipulation of our fear by the economic royalists.

• We refuse to serve in the military, and we refuse to fight to maintain wage slavery abroad.

Dated: July 13, 2011

Doug Page http://thenewliberator.blogspot.com/

To Join the Wage Slave Association, send an e mail to dougpage2@earthlink.net setting forth the city or town where you live, your chosen name for action purposes, and your consent for me to share your e mail address with others in your location so that you can meet with others. Blog experts, please volunteer to create a Wage Slave Association Blog.

ISRAEL HAS FORFEITED ITS RIGHT TO EXIST

2011-07-13T07:51:00.001-07:00

ISRAEL HAS FORFEITED IT’S RIGHT TO EXIST

At long last, I have come to the conclusion that Israel has forfeited its right to exist as a State for Jews only.

The UN reflecting the horrors of the Holocaust and the guilt of nations of the world for the pogroms of the past, and their refusal to give endangered Jews a place of refuge from the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis, granted the Jewish people a parcel of land within a geographical area known as Palestine in 1947. This parcel was located on the East shore of the Mediterranean Sea and extended about half way to the River Jordan. Thus the UN grant did not include the West Bank of the River Jordan over to the West to the Eastern border of the UN grant to Israel.

This fulfilled the longstanding political (not necessarily religious) dream of some Zionists, that all Jews would at long last have a land of their own and a place of safe refuge for any Jew facing persecution anywhere on the planet.

Not all Jews are Zionists. There are many kinds of Zionism. Here, we are discussing the very aggressive brand of Zionism that has dominated Israel for the last 64 years from 1947 to date. It is a political doctrine that seeks ever more land for persons who have a Jewish mother. It seeks land by fair means or foul and has an immense group of spokes-persons around the world who are poised to defend its captures by logic, spinning of facts, falsehoods, and ad hominem attacks.

These Zionists have been the governing political force in Israel since 1947. Their central objective and policy became publicly evident when the during the 6 day war in 1967 with Egypt and Syria. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were innocent bystanders not attacking anyone, but Zionist Israel seized the opportunity to capture and occupy the West Bank. The Zionists in control of Israel did not withdraw its military occupation of the West Bank after its quick victory, but instead have continued their military occupation of the West Bank for the 44 years from 1967 to date. Some Jews objected at the time and urged withdrawal. The Zionists overruled them. Unfortunately, most Jews in the US continue zealously to support and to finance Zionist Israel no matter what it does.

From 1967 to date, no matter what the verbal justifications of Zionist Israel, Israel has steadfastly “established facts on the ground” to make its military occupation of the West Bank permanent. Following this obvious strategy for the past 44 years, Zionist Israel has uprooted the olive orchards of the West Bank Palestinians, established lavish settlements for Jews only, built separate highways for Jews only, and captured most of the water supplies for the Jewish Settlers and Israel. It rationed the remaining water for Palestinians to a meager amount per day.

The Zionist Israeli strategy in peace negotiations has always been to insist that West Bank settlement building continue during negotiations, and that every issue between Palestinians and Israelis be the subject of “negotiation” only between the impoverished weak Palestinians and the wealthy, powerful, nuclear armed state of Israel. Israeli negotiators then “negotiate” endlessly taking care never to reach agreement. Israel happily accepts the $3 Billion per year from the US, but insists that the US and every one else in the Western World stay out of the negotiations. The political reality now is that the Jewish Settlements in the West Bank are so large and well established, that the “two state solution” is now impractical. There is not enough land left for the Palestinians to create a viable state.

In any case, the nations of the world made a huge mistake in granting a parcel of land to Zionists in 1947. There are many reasons that become more glaringly apparent with each passing day that Zionist Israel continues to exist.

1. Zionist Israel demands rights, privileges and material benefits for Jewish people only, defined as a person with a Jewish mother, a “benefit” unique for Jewish people only with no similar benefit for any other people.

2. Zionist Israel, like the UN in 1947, simply ignores the culture, feelings, farms, and means of livelihood of the non-Jews who have lived in the same land in the Middle East for at least 2000 years.

3. Zionist Israel was never satisfied with the 1947 UN grant of land and has obtained ever more land by threats to the inhabitants, forfeiture, purchase, and by military capture. Zionist Israel, in insisting on “Israel’s right to exist,” has never stated what the boundary lines of this “Israel” are.

4. Zionist Israel’s aggressive taking of ever more land is apparently based in part on the Old Testament Bible that Jews were God’s “chosen people” and that God gave the “promised land” of Biblical Israel to the Jews. The Biblical “Israel” consisted of all of the land from the Mediterranean Sea to Iraq’s Euphrates River. This of course is a religious belief for which there is no independent secular evidence. It is a religious belief similar to the legend celebrated in the Seder that the Jews were once enslaved by the Egyptians and were liberated by God acting through Moses. There is simply no archeological or historical evidence that the Jews were ever in Egypt.

5. Zionist Israel, being a religious state, violates the brilliant insight of the Founding Fathers of the US Constitution that there must be separation of church and state. Our Founding Fathers were aware of the centuries of bloody wars fought between peoples of differing religious beliefs.

6. Zionist Israel defines Jewish people in part as “victims” of those are claimed to hate Jews irrationally, such as millions of Arabs. This stance ignores the historical evidence that Arabs and Jews have lived peaceably together for Centuries prior to the establishment of Israel. It ignores the fact that 36000 Jews live peacefully with Arabs in Teheran, Iran and refuse to move to Israel, and the fact that the pogroms of the past were in countries that were mostly Christian. .

7. Zionist Israel’s aggressive seeking of more land for Jews only unavoidably creates resentment, envy, resistance and hatred among those whose land, water, olive groves and means of livelihood are taken. Zionist Israel creates more and more anti-Semitics throughout the world daily, by its policies and actions.

8. Zionist Israel has demonstrated a regressive evolutionary dynamic of ever increasing militarism, armaments including nuclear weapons, and increasing disparity between the very wealthy Jews and the poor Jews. Zionist Israel has mutated very far from the socialist egalitarian democratic ideals of the early refugee Jewish people who moved there.

9. The wealthy powerful Zionists who now control Israel have linked themselves with the wealthy powerful elite “economic royalists” that control the US President, the Congress, the multi-national banks, the media, academia, and Hollywood, so that the policies and objectives of Zionist Israel have become almost identical with the policies and objectives of the “economic royalists” of the US . If we are ever again to establish effective democracy in the US, we will simply have to deal with Zionist Israel and with our own wealthy elites... These elites are poised to take military action against Iran for example, no matter what US voters want.

10. The savage brutality, illegality, lies, and half-truths of Zionist Israel are demonstrated by events daily over a long period of time:

• The unprovoked torpedo attack on a US Naval vessel, the USS Liberty in International waters in June 1967 killing 34 sailors and officers and injuring 170 others. From today’s vantage point, it appears this was Zionist Israel’s effort to divert attention from its illegal military capture and occupation of the West Bank.

• Zionist Israel’s paying a Zionist Jew, American Naval Intelligence officer with the very top security clearances, Jonathan Pollard in the early 1980s to spy for Israel and to transmit a large quantity of very highly classified information to Israel. Israel then passed some of these stolen secrets on to the Soviet Union at the height of Cold War as a trade for the Soviet Union’s release of Jewish residents to become settlers in the West Bank. Israel lied about its acts for 12 years and even assisted in the prosecution leading to the life imprisonment of Pollard. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during his recent visit to the US, brazenly requested the release of Pollard.

• Zionist Israel’s callously causing a driver of a large Caterpillar Tractor to drive over and crush to death a young American Jewish woman, Rachel Corrie in 2004. She was making a conscientious non-violent protest against the destruction of the homes of Palestinians.

• The incessant ad hominem attacks of the famous lawyer and Harvard Constitutional law professor Alan Dershowitz against fellow academic Norman Finkelstein and the power of the Israel lobby in denying him tenure at Northwestern University and in preventing any college or university from hiring him.

• Zionist Israel’s acts and policies of collective punishment and torture of those who resist Israel.

• The cold banishment of South African Jewish Judge Goldstone who wrote a UN report criticizing the conduct of the Israeli Army in the West Bank, so that he could not even attend the Bar Mitzva of his own grandson.

• Zionist Israel’s armed attack on the Turkish vessel, Mavi Marmara in international waters in May 2010 killing 19 persons and injuring many others. Zionist Israel then took the people on board who were attempting to bring food and medicines to the people of Gaza, to jail and confiscated all of their cameras and luggage.

• Zionist Israel’s current “full-court” press including diplomatic, commercial and probable sabotage to prevent the sailing from Ireland, Greece and Turkey of a flotilla of vessels manned by Christians, Jews, and Arabs committed to non-violence who seek to bring medicines and supplies to the people illegally trapped in Gaza. Sad to say, our own President Obama is doing all he can to aid Zionist Israel in this effort.

• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public rejection, and defiance of President Obama when our President re-stated our long standing policy that the US supported a State for Palestinians based on the 1967 borders with agreed boundary adjustments.

• Zionist Israel’s incessant pressure aided by the “Senator from Israel,” Joseph Lieberman, (I, Conn) on the US to take military or covert action against Iran, and the threats of Zionist Israel to attack Iran itself, despite the absence of evidence of military uses of nuclear energy. Many of us consider Zionist Israel with its stash of nuclear weapons and demonstrated aggressive posture, to be a far greater threat to peace and stability of the planet than Iran, as well as being hypocritical in refusing to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

The Holocaust taught a lesson for all human kind that there is a latent Nazi in each of us that can emerge under the requisite stress and circumstances and that it is the constant task of all civilized people to prevent its re-emergence. Zionist Israel seems unaware of this lesson and claims the memory of the Holocaust for Jews only to defend and justify its Zionist transgressions that sometimes seem somewhat similar to those of Nazi Germany.

It is time for us all, Jews, Christians, Arabs, and Hindus to avoid the regressive fundamentalist aspects of our religions and instead to emphasize the common theme in each that in one way or another proclaim the concept that we are to do to others as we would have them do to us, and to emphasize the spiritual foundations for what became the legal concept of equal protection of law. It is time to cease our support for the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine and to support one state, a United States of the Middle East where every person is guaranteed the equal protection of the law.

July 5, 2011

Doug Page dougpage2@earthlink.net

PRESIDENT OBAMA: NATIONALIZE THE FED

2009-05-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

President Obama: Nationalize the Fed and Create Our Own Money

by Doug Page / February 7th, 2009

We are all full of anxiety these days. How bad will the depression be? Will the bailout work? How will we (and our children and grandchildren) be able to pay for the massive bailout of the Banks and our massive public debt?

The new book, The Web of Debt, by Ellen Hodgson Brown, Stephen J. Zerlanga’s proposed American Monetary Act, and Paul Grignon’s 47 minute video Money and Debt present a persuasive case for the United States to exercise its sovereignty by creating its own currency, and for the nationalization of the Federal Reserve System. The fact that Wall Street banks are “too big to fail,” is a compelling reason, among many others, why they should be nationalized. These authors present interesting solutions for our current anxiety. They propose a way to abolish our Ponzi-like private banking system and to curb banker fraud.

Here are some shocking little-known facts from the sources here reviewed:

* The Federal Reserve Bank is a private institution owned and controlled by private banks. It is a private bank that enriches its private owners.
* The US Mint does not create our money. It creates about 3% of it in the form of dollar bills and coins. The rest is generated through computerized bookkeeping entries by the private banks.
* Banks do not make loans only from money they have on deposit… Through what is called “fractional reserve banking,” They loan well over ten times the amount they have on deposit. This is how our money is created. It is created out of thin air.
* All debt of the US, all corporate debt, and all individual debt are owed to private banks.
* All money is debt.
* Over 20% of our taxes are used just to pay the interest on our government debt
* Banks are no longer limited to loaning money to make their profit. The 1999 abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act allows them to gamble in the stock market, the commodity exchanges, the foreign currency exchanges, collateralized debt obligations, and to buy and sell other banks and businesses.

AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE WAY THE PRIVATE BANKING SYSTEM MAKES HUGE PROFITS OUT OF THIN AIR

Let’s use $10,000 as an example to understand the process.

The Federal Reserve Bank buys $10,000 of US debts called Treasury Bills from the US. Where does the Fed get the money? The Fed creates it out of thin air. This is the first bit of magic. This is authorized by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and is a questionable delegation by Congress of its own power to “coin money and regulate the value thereof. It is the ultimate in privatization. It is an authorization for the Fed and the banks to counterfeit actual hard money. Other federal laws make this counterfeit money legal tender for the payment of all debts and taxes.

The Fed then loans this $10,000 to a bank and requires the bank to pay the current federal funds rate as interest. This $10,000 becomes a “liability” of the bank, but the bank immediately loans this money to a borrower, but in double entry bookkeeping, this $10,000 loan becomes an “asset” of the bank from which the bank can make further loans. Here is where the second bit of magic occurs called “fractional reserve banking.” The reserve is not gold or any other hard asset. The “reserve” is debt.

The bank is permitted by the Fed to loan 90% (or more) of that $10,000 loan to make a second loan of $9,000 which also becomes an “asset” of the bank from which the bank can make a third loan of 90% or $8100 and continuing to a maximum of 10 times the first $10,000 or $100,000.

The bank “earns” interest on this magic $100,000 created out of thin air which is the source of the bank’s immense Ponzi-like profit. A bank can earn more profit by borrowing more from the Fed and loaning it. This explains why the banks are so eager to give us credit cards.

By federal law, this money created out of thin air is “legal tender” and must be accepted in the payment of debts and taxes. The backup security is not gold, but “the full faith and credit” of the United States.

All of this is made clear and understandable by the video “Money and Debt.”

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PRIVATE PONZI-LIKE SYSTEM OF CREATING OUR MONEY?

* The power to create money is immense private power that exists parallel to our governmental power. This private power generates tremendous private wealth that is then used to control, dominate, and thwart our government and our right to govern ourselves.
* The power to create money gives the private banking system the power to control our money supply. By curtailing the money supply, the banks can cause a deflation. By increasing the money supply the banks can cause inflation. As we now see, they can also cause a depression.
* This private power is used solely to make a profit for the owners of the private banks. There is no public control. There is no enforceable obligation of the banks to serve the public interest or to meet public needs. We have allowed our entire existence to be dominated and controlled by those few individuals who control the banks that create our money.
* It makes short term profit making the dominant influence on all of us and negates 2200 years of the moral wisdom of our civilization: “When gold argues the cause, eloquence is impotent;” “One cannot love both God and Mammon;” “Money is the mother’s milk of politics;” “Follow the money.”
* More than 20% of our taxes is used to pay the interest owed to private bankers on the U.S. debt.

OUR GOVERNMENT SHOULD CREATE OUR MONEY

Professor Michael Hudson on January 30 in Counterpunch gave us a hint of what we could do:

“Bank credit is created freely. Governments could do the same. Indeed, this is what the U.S. Treasury did during America’s Civil War, when it issued greenback credit.”

There are many successful historical and current instances where sovereign governments have created their own currency.

King Henry I in England in 1100 A.D. created England’s money by simply dictating that England’s currency was to be solely wooden sticks called “tallies” with varying notches to indicate the denomination. The sticks were then split in half and one half was held by the King to prevent counterfeiting. The other half was used by his subjects to buy and sell goods. The King required all taxes to be paid with these sticks. This tally system financed the British Empire successfully for 700 years.

Prior to our Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania issued money for 50 years because England limited the supply of its money in the colonies. The King’s edict prohibiting the colonies from issuing their own money was a cause of that War.

The American colonies financed the Revolutionary War by issuing paper money.

During the Civil War the Northern Banks would loan President Lincoln money to finance the Civil War only at interest rates of 24-36%, so Lincoln caused the Congress to authorize the Secretary of the Treasury to issue Greenbacks, paper dollars that were U.S .legal tender. These Greenbacks successfully financed the Civil War and remained in circulation for decades thereafter.

Stephen J. Zerlenga has drafted a proposed American Monetary Act.

This proposed Act is very useful concrete example of how the U.S. would create its own money, how it would work, and the surprising array of public benefits that could be obtained.

The proposed Act begins with a finding:

(1) The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 effectively ceded the sovereign power to create Money delegated to Congress by the Constitution to the private financial industry.

(2) This cession of Constitutional power has resulted in a multitude of monetary and financial afflictions, including an uncontrollable national debt, excessive taxation of citizens, inflation of the currency, drastic increases in the cost of public infrastructure investments, excessive un- and under-employment, and erosion of the ability of Congress to exercise its Constitutional responsibilities to provide for the common defense and general welfare.

The Secretary of the Treasury, following targets established by a 9 member Monetary Authority appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall directly issue all money, called United States Money, the nominal unit being the U.S. Dollar. This money shall be legal tender, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.

The Act stops the creation of money by private banks. Fractionalized Reserve Banking is prohibited and banks can loan only the United States Money they actually have on deposit.

The Federal Reserve System (but not the local banks) is nationalized as a Bureau within the U.S. Treasury.

The United States would no longer borrow money. The Secretary of the Treasury shall issue United States Money as needed in lieu of public borrowing.

All existing money shall be exchanged for United States Money.

U.S. Money can be loaned to local banks which can continue to loan United States Money but with maximum charges not to exceed 8%. Banks can loan only U.S. Money.

The U.S. shall pay off the principal and interest of the national debt as they came due with directly issued United States Money.

The U.S. would use directly issued United States Money to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure.

The United States could loan United States Money interest free to states and local governments.

It is contemplated that in the future United States Money would be issued to finance Universal Health Care and an Education Funding Program that would at least put the United States on par with other developed nations.

CONCLUSION

President Obama and his economic advisors can be encouraged by the fact that famous and influential economist Milton Friedman supports the idea of abolishing the Fed. For at least 300 years, the private banks have used their wealth and power to persuade governments to allow them exclusive control over money. They have relentlessly and vigorously battled every single effort of governments to create currency. The author Ellen Brown does not expressly claim that banks have resorted to actual assassination, but she does note the strange sudden deaths of many of the reformers such as President James Garfield who urged public creation of currency. The political power of Wall Street banks is currently illustrated by their ability promptly to get billions of dollars of bailout money with no serious debate. The banks due to their own greed and ineptitude are now near bankruptcy and collapse. They are more vulnerable now to nationalization than they ever have been. They have brought all of us to the brink of economic disaster. This is a strategic political time for the U.S. to create our money. The awesome political power of private banks driven by the quest for huge profits would be curbed. Public control of the money supply would unleash the government to meet our legitimate human needs as it has done in the past in our own history. If the private banks can create money out of thin air, there is no reason why the government could not do it. We would all escape our excessive debt and tax burdens due to the interest owed to private banks. If interest must be charged, let it go into the public treasury.

THE FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

2009-04-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

THE FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
The Connection between Torture, Wall Street Bank Profits and Our Descent into Poverty
We who are watching President Obama carefully observe that he has betrayed us. For unknown, hopefully innocent and unknowing reasons, he has chosen an economic policy based on a massive falsehood, and advisors who have enabled Wall Street Banks to earn rich profits in the short run based on that falsehood. Obama has committed $12.8 Trillion to bailing out crooked Wall Street Banks, fraudulent by the public admissions of their own CEOs, and attempting to make them whole, a ratio of 14 for Wall Street Bank crooks to 1 for our Main Street economy. Obama continues the idiotic policy through massive bailouts of Wall Street crooks by trying to restart the unregulated real estate bubble, specifically including unregulated derivatives, credit default swaps, and hedge funds.
Instead of hope and change from the policies of the Bush Administration that some of us expected, every single policy regarding the maintenance of an aggressive economic empire abroad has been retained or expanded. We are all concerned about the depression that now confronts us, our loss of jobs and our loss of our homes in foreclosure, and the loss of our old age security. We had somehow assumed that Obama would deal with that directly and effectively by taking steps to restore purchasing power. An obvious first thing we expected was that he would enlarge and lengthen unemployment benefits. This has not happened. President Obama has not clearly explained how his present bail out priorities will help us. He has announced no alternate strategy if the present strategy does not work. Our disillusion was capped off by an article in the Wall Street Journal on April 18, 2009 reporting that Obama was considering secret retention of the right of the CIA to torture. We get no explanation of this from the mainstream media, nothing from the Democratic Party and nothing from the Republican Party. Even Marxists seem unconcerned about Wall Street Banks. It is left to us citizens and voters to try to find answers to these perplexing questions from non-mainstream sources and from economists and analysts who are not beholden to Wall Street’s status quo. We thus have a massive job of self-education and education of friends and neighbors. As Professor Michael Hudson suggests, we might copy a small European nation where labor unions called a one day general strike for the purposes of educating citizens. In the United States, we may need a one week general strike, probably more than one.
Since so large a proportion of public money is devoted to crooked Wall Street Banks, and to the ;maintenance of the aggressive spread of American investment opportunities in foreign lands, it seems appropriate to examine the dynamics of the Wall Street Banking system.
THREE PRELIMINARY DEFINITIONS
By “Wall Street Banks,” we mean about 10 dominant leading international banks of the United States, Europe and Japan, the main ones being based in the United States, and the major firms that they lend money to in defense industries, manufacturing and industrial businesses, agri-business and transportation. The term includes the Federal Reserve System, the WTO and the IMF. We do not mean the local independent banks that serve us in our local communities.
By “capitalism” we mean the political-economic system in which the Wall Street Banks and the firms they finance including their control over the governments where they operate. Capitalists are thus those within the operating complex of Wall Street Banks who have access to the means of producing goods and services, and access to the Wall Street Bank loans to do so. We citizens and voters whether employed or self-employed are not “capitalists.” because we have control of and access to nothing but our own labor or brain power which we sell or rent to employers or clients, patients and customers. The car dealers, professionals and independent businesses in our local communities are not capitalists in the sense here used. We non-Wall Street citizens and voters have very different moral values, ethics and interests than Wall Street Banks.
By “the massive falsehood,” we mean the culture wide dominating falsehood promoted by Wall Street Banks and its politicians and advisors and, so far, accepted by President Obama. It is this lie:
“The economy can flourish indefinitely by increasing the supply of goods and services and loaning people money with which to buy them. It is never necessary to increase the wages and purchasing power of employees. Wages and salaries can be cut, jobs eliminated, and production transferred to low wage countries without harming our stable economy."
Current events now graphically demonstrate the falseness of this proposition as does simple logic. Imagine an economic system where all of the work is done by unpaid slaves. The slaves could buy nothing, having no earned income. So who is left to buy? Banks might loan slaves money with which to buy, but how would slaves repay the loans? That is now our plight. Wall Street Banks hate unions and hate high wages and salaries for employees. Wall Street Banks hate giving citizens more money and security. Our jobs were transferred overseas where workers earn too few pennies to buy much of anything. Too many of us are unemployed or employed only part time at a wage where we can not even buy enough food, much less support our huge, but very fragile economy.
THE PRIVATE FORTUNE BUILDING MACHINE: HOW THE FED AND PRIVATE BANKS CREATE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR AND THEN PROFIT BY LENDING IT TO US
The Wall Street Banking System is private. It exists to make a profit for its investors and owners. Congress in the 1913 Federal Reserve Act granted a franchise to private banks to create money and to regulate interest rates. This franchise today is exclusive for all practical purposes since most money is “check book” money and not coins and dollar bills.
The Federal Reserve Board is not a public institution. Although the President selects the 12 board members for staggered terms, by law, they must be selected from a pool of private bankers. The Federal Reserve Bank and its 12 member branches are also private banks, owned by the member private banks. We have no accurate way of knowing the profits of this system because, by law, it may not be subjected to public audit.
The Federal Reserve Board creates money out of thin air, simply by writing a check, with no back up reserves or deposits and then allows a member bank to “create” 10 times more of that initial check book money. Our government backs this magic money as “legal tender” for the payment of all debts and taxes. For example, if a member bank has applications for loans, say $1000, the Fed simply writes a check for this money out of nothing and lends it to the member bank. Then a second bit of magic money making occurs: Each such loan by a member bank becomes an “asset” or a reserve so that the member bank can loan 90% of the first “asset” to a second borrower, and 90% of the second borrower to a third borrower and so on, to a maximum of $10,000 based on the initial $1000. This is called fractional reserve banking” It is a fabulous way to create a permanent and growing “critical mass” fortune due to the compounding of money loaned at interest over time. It is the hidden secret of private banking that has existed at least since Rothschild in the early 1800s. The banks charge us interest on money they create out of thin air. The private fortunes that this system generates over the decades are beyond belief. These private banking fortunes must have multiplied many times. The total private banking fortunes of Bank investors and heirs of investors must now be as large as the entire planet’s GNP. We have no way of knowing how much. This then is the operational underpinning of the private banking system. If we had known in time, we all should have started banks. Foreign banks and individuals, probably including Rothschild heirs, own stock in our private Wall Street Banks, but again we have no way of knowing how much. Because it generates so much money, it generates dominant power over our government. In fact it was this already existing private bank lobby money and power that “persuaded” congress to delegate its power to coin money and regulate the value thereof to private banks in 1913. Keep this secret, magic, profit generating system in mind as we examine how the private banks have used this power since 1913. Think also of the statement attributed to the legendary European banker Amschel Mayer Rothschild who allegedly said in 1838: "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

HOW THE WALL STREET BANKS HAVE COMPOUNDED THEIR POLITICAL POWER AND PROFITS FROM 1913 TO DATE.
Wall Street Banks have persistently striven to place themselves at the center of every human transaction so as to make money, and to expand their profit making opportunities and their power.

In 1944 the Wall Street Banks met at a ski resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.Voters and citizens in the US were fighting WWII in the armed services, riveting airplanes, welding tanks and ships, and buying Victory Stamps arranged as corsages for their dates. Millions of ordinary citizens were putting out this massive effort to secure the Four Freedoms, Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech, and Freedom of Religion. The Wall Street Banks had a very different objective. They were meeting in Bretton Woods to plan how to maximize their profit and power following WWII. England, France, Germany and Japan were physically and financially devastated by WWII. The United States escaped WWII relatively unharmed. Wall Street Banks seized the opportunity to dominate. Wall Street Bankers hatched a plan to make the dollar backed by gold the dominant currency for the planet and to breach national barriers so as to foster dominant lending and investment opportunities throughout the world for Wall Street Banks. The dollar dominance created by Bretton Woods was backed by the US guarantee that it was “legal tender,” and the promise to pay in gold if demanded, the “gold standard.”
By 1971, The US debt and inflation due to the Viet Nam War caused Europeans to demand payment of debts in gold. This was exhausting our gold supply so President Nixon unilaterally abandoned the gold standard and adopted a “floating dollar standard” relative to other currencies. The US dollar dominance was strong enough by that time that the dollar remained the dominant currency of the planet, aided by a Treaty with Saudi Arabia that all oil it sold would be paid for with dollars.
After a time a domestic crisis occurred in the operation of this Wall Street Bank capitalism. There would be overproduction: more goods produced than earned wages could purchase, and still yield a profit. Wages stagnated. Wall Street Banks found insufficient profitable places to loan money. The Wall Street Banks quickly adapted using the IMF and the WTO which the private banks controlled. They exported their Wall Street Bank crisis to poor countries. They made large loans to foreign governments often to their Dictators, to “help them develop.” Wall Street Banks were not being charitable or benevolent. They imposed harsh conditions on these loans:
1. The borrowing country had to open its borders so that Wall Street Banks could invest in that country.
2. The country had to privatize many of its public works such as water works, abandon “socialism,” and adopt a market economy so that Wall Street Banks could purchase or invest in that country without restriction.
3. The country had to cut its social welfare programs (which had the intended effect of compelling workers to accept lower wages, or starve.)
4. Taxes had to be raised on the workers so that the IMF loans could be repaid.
This was the Wall Street Bank salvation formula that was imposed on the Soviet Union, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Indonesia, among others.
By 1980, poor nations became unable to pay and Wall Street Banks were desperate to find still other ways to make profit. Wall Street Banks adopted the policy of “Financialization.” This meant that instead of trying to loan money for the production of goods and services that human beings needed, and could pay for, Wall Street Banks would buy and sell each other’s companies, invest in hedge funds or bets that a company or commodity would go up or down. The profits for Wall Street Banks were immense, much more than Wall Street Banks had ever made before. Wall Street Banks used its new money to persuade Congress to abolish the Glass-Steagall Act and to pass a law prohibiting regulation of these “securities.”
This new absence of regulation enabled Wall Street Banks to become crooks, to engage in fraud. Wall Street Banks made “liar loans,” risky loans that Wall Street Banks knew from decades of banking experience, the borrowers were unlikely to repay. Wall Street Banks begged local mortgage brokers to sell such liar loans to unqualified buyers of houses, urging them to falsify their income. These liar loans were made sometimes to unlearned first time home buyers and sometimes to speculative individuals who thought they saw a way to make money without working from the appreciation in house values.
Wall Street Banks then bundled these loans, and issued layer upon layer of bonds “secured” by these “liar loans.” Wall Street Banks then pressured the rating agencies like Moody’s to give these very risky bonds an AAA rating. Wall Street Banks then sold these bonds to state pension funds, wealthy foreign individuals, to foreign governments, and even to a tiny town in Northern Norway, all of whom justifiably relied on the AAA rating. The profits for Wall Street Banks created many new billionaires and millionaires. These Financial Assets grew to about 425% of U.S. Gross National Product The total fortunes now accumulated by the families invested in Wall Street Banks are probably enough to control the entire developed world.
It is these crooked fraudulent Wall Street Banks, stock holders and CEOs that Obama is now bailing out with a commitment of $12.8 Trillion of public money. Further than that, President Obama has retained as his main advisors the same persons and the same crooked fraudulent practices that created our current depression and difficulties.
THE WARS AGAINST TERROR, AIDED WHERE NECESSARY BY TORTURE AND ASSASSINATION, ARE CRITICALLY NECESSARY TO THE MAINTENANCE OF THE POWER OF THE WALL STREET BANKS.
Any person or group within a foreign country who actively opposes imperialistic Wall Street Bank looting or dollar domination is labeled a radical, a communist, a socialist, or more recently a terrorist. Terrorists are often loyal to their cause and to each other and will not talk when captured, so Wall Street Banks find it necessary to torture them so as to identify and capture other terrorists. This will not seem so strange or unusual to those who know that US employers, to protect their profits, have historically resorted to hired thugs, beatings, and murder of those employees who engaged in a work stoppage and union organizing. Employers did not see this as immoral or uncivilized. Such striking employees were “terrorists,” outlaws, hooligans, and radicals, so far as employers were concerned. Wall Street Banks apparently see those who oppose their policies abroad in the same way. According to Professor Michael Hudson, Wall Street Banks say in effect: If you oppose our dollar domination, we will kill you.” William Blum in his 1995 book, Killing Hope gave us the details of 55 foreign countries in which our military or CIA had been involved in killing operations after WWII up to 1995! (The “hope” that Wall Street Banks killed was the hope of the citizens of these countries for a better life.) Since 1995, we have the additional examples of Yugoslavia-Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan.
CRIMINALS HAVE CAPTURED OUR GOVERNMENT
We can make sense out of what is happening only by seeing Wall Street Banks for what they are: Criminals with far more power and capacity for evil than the mob or the mafia. These criminal Wall Street Banks, unlike the mafia, have control of our national government, with its larger military capacity than all of the other nations put together. These criminals have at their disposal, 800 military bases in 70 countries, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, the CIA, most academic persons, the main stream press, and the support of the major religious faiths. They have the tools of modern advertising and PR to create diversionary fears, to create “false flag disasters,” and to manipulate our thoughts and our votes.
Wall Street Banks are now exercising their power over our government to restart the crooked bubble without regulation. Michael Hirsch in an April 10, 2009 Newsweek article entitled “Wall Street Digs In” writes:
“At issue is whether trading in credit default swaps and other derivatives - and the giant, too-big-to-fail firms that traded them - will be allowed to dominate the financial landscape again once the crisis passes. As things look now, that is likely to happen. And the firms may soon be recapitalized and have a lot more sway in Washington - all of it courtesy of their supporters in the Obama administration. With its Public-Private Investment Program set to bid up and buy toxic assets, the administration is handing these companies another giant federal subsidy. But this time the money will come through the back door, bypassing Congress, mainly via FDIC loans. No one is quite sure how the program will work yet, but it's very likely going to make a lot of the same Wall Street houses much richer at taxpayer expense. Meanwhile, the big banks that still need help will almost certainly get another large infusion once the stress tests are completed by the end of the month.
The financial industry isn't leaving anything to chance, however. One sign of a newly assertive Wall Street emerged recently when a bevy of bailed-out firms, including Citigroup, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, formed a new lobby calling itself the Coalition for Business Finance Reform. Its goal: to stand against heavy regulation of "over-the-counter" derivatives, in other words customized contracts that are traded off an exchange. Companies like these kinds of contracts, which are agreed to privately between firms, because they allow them to tailor a hedge perfectly against a firm-specific risk for a certain time period. But in order to preserve its right to negotiate these cheaper private contracts, Wall Street is apparently willing to argue for the same lack of public transparency and to permit the systemic risk that led to the crash.”
EVEN THOUGH THE CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE CANNOT FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING ON, WHAT CAN WE CITIZENS DEDUCE CONCERNING OUR OWN WELL-BEING?
Elizabeth Warren, the head of the Congressional Oversight Committee, tells us that she cannot get answers from Wall Street Banks about their strategy or what they have done with the bail out money they have already received. However it is clear from the evidence that Wall Street Banks are attempting to subject us ordinary citizens to the policies that they imposed on the poor nations of the world. We ordinary US citizens are destined to become like the citizens of “underdeveloped” nations. Wall Street Banks are trying to “kill our hope.”
• We have to accept “free trade” meaning the exporting of our jobs to foreign nations where labor is cheaper, unregulated capitalism, and police wiretap power over our thoughts and records.
• We have to endure privatization of our public works such as water works, freeways and prisons, abandon “socialism,” and avoid joining unions
• We have to accept cuts in our social welfare programs (which have the intended effect of compelling us to accept lower wages, or starve.)
• We have to pay higher taxes to repay the bail out debts, while the wealthy get tax cuts.

Wall Street Banks well know of the culture wide lie that they have propagated. They know that the jig is up, that our wages and salaries have been so depleted, and our borrowing so maxed out, that the system is about to fall. Lending us more money, will no longer work.
Professor Michael Hudson says that the crooked Wall Street Banks know that the debts now being incurred by us taxpaying citizens can never be repaid. They know that this will cause China and Saudi Arabia to stop buying our Bonds, Bonds that finance our wars and bases that encircle and threaten those countries like China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia who now buy our bonds. Wall Street Banks know that their own acts and policies will inevitably bring our political economy crashing down. As bankers, they well know that creating a lot of “check book” money (fiat currency) will cause massive inflation so that each of our dollars will buy less and less.
So the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the human owners of the Wall Street Banks are grabbing all of the Trillions of dollars that they possibly can, while they can. They will quickly convert their dollars to a stable foreign currency if there is one, to land, oil, gold, diamonds, plutonium, and commodities, and live in residential castles behind guarded gates. They will buy or obtain by foreclosure all available food producing land. Those of us that survive will be reduced to feudal serfs allowed to work a parcel of land for the economic nobles who own it, and to retain a small share of food, wool and cotton for ourselves. We will become share-croppers at best, and dead at worst.
SO HOW DOES OBAMA FIT INTO ALL OF THIS?
Is Obama the hypnotized, drugged, programmed puppet of Wall Street Banks?
Is Obama afflicted with the psychological disorder of two or more personalities, one magnificently promising us hope and change, and the other delivering starvation, serfdom, and death?
Is he simply innocently ignorant of the real dynamics of our political economy and respectful of his Harvard academic advisor like Lawrence Summers, University of California advisor Christina Romer and Wall Street Banker, Secretary Geithner who themselves have built their careers on the lie?
Does he have the ambition of the top law school graduates of rising to the top of the “legal pecking order” by serving the legal “needs” of the very largest private institutions?
Is he a very bright man who does know of the lie, but also knows the political limits, within which he can operate, and, somewhat like Lincoln, is waiting for Wall Street Banks to fall even further, become even more weak and bankrupt, before he can act on our behalf? If so there are neither plans on the shelf, nor knowledgeable persons to implement it.
We have no way of knowing what motivates Obama. How do you see him? What is your strategy given the circumstances? I am “beating pots and pans” as loudly as I can, and writing articles like this in my effort to arouse others to participate in massive protest marches whose objective is to make the politicians meet our needs. I invite you to do the same. As a fall back position, I am buying a small parcel of land with my remaining retirement dollars where I can grow food and keep a goat.
Dated: April 22, 2009
Doug Page

IS OBAMA MORE DANGEROUS THAN BUSH?

2009-04-25T16:20:00.002-07:00

IS OBAMA EVEN MORE DANGEROUS THAN BUSH?

INTRODUCTION

69 Million of us voted for President Obama because he promised hope and change from the disasters of the Bush Administration. Countless millions of human beings around the planet joined us in our relief and our elation when he was elected. An unthinking uncritical “Obamamania” among most of his supporters continues to prevail so far. This is dangerous for them, for President Obama and for all of us. Without critical analysis and pressure from his millions of fans, Obama will stumble into disaster.

We have carefully watched the new President’s first 100 days and we are appalled. We find that Obama has continued Bush policies affecting the abuses of Wall Street banks, and allowing Wall Street wrongdoers to manage our economy and the “recovery.”

Forget the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, the prosecution of Eliot Spitzer for his sexual indiscretion, and Bernard Madoff’s little Ponzi-scheme. What about prosecuting those bankers who profited from the most massive fraudulent swindle in human history?
Reputable commentators such as Michael Whitney, John Paul Roberts, Professor Michael Hudson, and now Professor William K. Black have spelled out the details. The CNBC TV Documentary “House of Cards” explained in detail with surprisingly candid on camera, guilt free admissions by the wrong-doers how this swindle worked from the borrowers and mortgage salesmen in Los Angeles to the top CEOs of Wall Street and to the Fed. These sources of our information have been relatively diplomatic in tone. It is time to name names and cite the fraudulent acts of those responsible, and the specific violations of law.

As we evaluate all of this, keep in mind what William K. Black said on Bill Moyer’s April 3 program about making risky loans where the ability of the borrower to repay a loan is not vetted: “We know that will produce enormous fraud under economic theory, criminology theory, and two thousand years of life experience.” Both Democrats and Republicans, hand in hand with Wall Street Bankers, by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, and by enacting The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 specifically to preclude regulation, caused the current extraordinary depression and crisis by ignoring and acting contrary to this accumulated human wisdom. Think of this when you evaluate whether their acts were knowing and intentional and whether they are guilty or innocent.

THE INTENTIONAL FRAUD OF THE WALL STREET BANKERS AND RATING COMPANIES AND THEIR CONGESSIONAL ENABLERS

The legal elements or requirements of the crime or wrong of fraud known to every first year law student are:

1. An intentional misrepresentation of facts or a false promise
2. Knowledge of falsity
3. Intent to deceive
4. Justifiable and actual reliance on the truth of what was represented or promised
5. Resulting Damage

President Obama is a brilliant lawyer, top of his class at Harvard Law, and a ten year professor of Constitutional Law. His roots are in Chicago politics. President Obama clearly knows the elements of fraud.

We know the factual details of the wrongdoing from CNBC’s video “House of Cards” where those involved in the fraud at each level made surprisingly candid admissions of what they had done. At each level, the CEOs involved felt no guilt or responsibility. They would not have changed their conduct in retrospect. Each said he had to do what he did to stay in business and to compete with others who were doing the same thing. This was the “justification” at every level from LA mortgage salesperson, to the bankers, the creators of layers of derivatives and credit default swaps to the raters who gave the derivatives that they knew or should have known were not worth their stated values, AAA ratings. All of this was happening in the context of congressionally granted exemptions from regulation, and NY Fed President Timothy Geithner’s failure to supervise and to regulate.

The Wall Street bankers deliberately made and palmed off to others loans that they knew were really bad. They made them because they were so profitable. Among themselves, they called them “liar’s loans” because they did not care if borrowers were unqualified and they encouraged them to lie about their incomes. They created the layers of derivatives based on these pools of liar loans, knowing that they were extremely risky. They pressured the rating companies to give them AAA ratings, and the rating companies complied “because the competition was doing it” when they knew or should have known that the “securities” were really not of AAA quality.

Foreign investors, domestic pension fund managers, and foreign governments and banks justifiably relied on the Wall Street banker’s sales pitch and the AAA ratings. The AAA rating satisfies the obligation of “due diligence” in checking the risk of an investment. These innocent but sophisticated investors had a right to assume that NY Fed President Timothy Geithner was doing his duty of supervising and regulating.

All of these investors were damaged when the house of cards collapsed. The investors have been damaged. We the citizens and voters and generations of our offspring have suffered almost incalculable damage…damage totaling many trillions of dollars that will plague us for generations.

This is the massive Wall Street fraud that President Obama inherited, and is now covering up, and possibly attempting to restart.

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS NOT FAITHFULLY EXECUTING THE LAW REGARDING UNDERCAPITALIZED BANKS IN VIOLATION OF HIS OATH

President Obama now has the sworn Presidential duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Thus he must “faithfully” prosecute financial wrongdoing, avoid conflicts of interest, and specifically, take certain prompt action against wrongdoing Wall Street banks as mandated by the Prompt Corrective Action Law that was enacted just following the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. This law is found in Title 12 United States Code beginning at Section 1831. There is no exception in the law for “banks that are too big to fail,” and no exception for criminal enterprises even if they are large.

Instead of bailing out wrongdoing banks with Trillions of dollars of our money, President Obama is required by federal law to appoint a receiver for the bank within 90 days after it becomes critically undercapitalized. He must prosecute those bankers who were paid salaries or bonuses while their banks were undercapitalized. There is no question that they are undercapitalized because they require Trillions just to make them function, without complying with legal standards. If “they are too large to fail,” they have seized way too much private “mafia-like” power over all of us. President Obama can and must follow the law.

OBAMA’S CHOSEN FINANCIAL AND ECONOMIC ADVISORS KNOWINGLY DEREGULATED SO AS TO ENABLE THE FRAUD, AND THEN PARTICIPATED IN THE FRAUD AND PROFITED FROM IT

Obama’ Chief Economic Advisor, Larry Summers one of Clinton’s Secretaries of the Treasury, and Robert Rubin along with Republican Senator Phil Gramm lead the lobbying effort to repeal the Glass Steagall Act thereby enabling Wall Street Banks to invest in derivatives, hedge funds, and credit default swaps, and permitting Wall Street insurance companies to engage in banking.
Then the same three men, Summers, Rubin, and Gramm together with Alan Greenspan lead the effort to persuade Congress to pass a law in 2000 without debate in either the House or the Senate prohibiting the regulation of these newly enabled Wall Street financial giants. It is known as The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, and is found in Title 7 USC Section 2. The exemptions from regulation are found in Sections 2 (g) and 2(h). President Clinton signed the new law on December 21, 2000.

Obama’s Chief Economic Advisor Larry Summers and his Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner both pushed for the enactment of this law which enabled the ensuing fraud involving mortgages and the layers of derivatives that were known to be risky and worthless.
Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner, President of the New York division of the Fed where all of the major Wall Street banks are located had the following duties according to its own mission statement found at http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/introtothefed.html:
“It is responsible for
• formulating and executing monetary policy,
• supervising and regulating depository institutions,
• providing an elastic currency,
• assisting the federal government's financing operations, and
• serving as the banker for the U.S. government.”
In addition to paying his own taxes, Timothy Geithner had a public responsibility and duty to all of us. Timothy Geithner, the man chiefly responsible for avoiding what has happened, instead facilitated the fraud. He did not supervise and he did not regulate. As Professor Black said to Bill Moyers, he, along with every one else involved in the fraud, ignored the FBI’s public 2004 warning that there was “an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle.”

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS KNOWINGLY AND INTENTIONALLY REWARDING CRIMINALS AND IS COVERING UP WALL STREET BANK CRIMES AND FRAUD

It is a felony for any person including the President of the United States to cover up a crime. 18 USC Section 4 states:

“Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

Such a cover up is also criminal fraud as defined in 47USC 1001.

Such a cover up when done by a President, Vice President or a Secretary of Treasury is also a “high crime and misdemeanor” warranting impeachment under Article II, Section 4 of our Constitution:

“The president, vice president and all other civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of…high crimes and misdemeanors.”

President Obama has also taken the Presidential Oath that he will faithfully execute this cover up avoidance law as well, and not to violate it himself.

80% of the American people, according to a recent poll believe that Wall Street is crooked and is responsible for our current Depression.

Obama, in a recent speech to Wall Street CEOs telling them to “cool it” about justifying their contract rights to bonuses, said

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

So what is he saying to the 80% of us potentially holding pitchforks who voted for him?

In effect, he is saying in his vague, charming, persuasive and hypnotic way: “I know of no crimes. I want to look to the future I will not prosecute the bankers. I will hire them as advisors. We have nothing to learn from their mistakes. We together will try to restore lending, and restart the economy as it was.”

What are President Obama’s own lawyers, Dawn Johnson Chief of the Office of Legal Counsel and Attorney General Eric Holder advising him? Are they, like John Yoo and Michael Mukasey who advised Bush that he could torture, advising Obama that he has the power to ignore the law created exactly for the purpose of dealing with failing banks because of an economic emergency? What is brilliant lawyer Obama advising himself? Where is there indication of Obama’s own integrity and inner moral compass?

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES FOR US IF OBAMA’S MUTI-TRILLION BAIL OUT OF WALL STREET “SUCCEEDS?”

The most immediate, pressing danger is that it will not work at all. Obama may not discover this until it is too late to try another solution. The reason is Obama seeks mainly to restore the lending ability of the Wall Street banks. That will work only if we are willing to fund our purchases by more borrowing. We are not. We will not borrow. We are too frightened. The great danger is of a total breakdown of civilized democratic society.

Even if it “works,” Obama’s plan will never succeed for us. The reasons are:
• Obama and his advisors see capitalism as a stable system that only got a little off track due to unfortunate lack of regulation. It is in fact in deep trouble even aside from the banking problem due to an overproduction of goods and services that can be produced at a profit. This is the underlying “systemic defect.” Failing to recognize this defect, Obama does nothing to solve it.
• Obama aims mainly toward providing more credit, restoring the Wall Street banks’ ability to lend money.

Obama fails to deal adequately with restoring the purchasing power of consumers from our earned labor. Taken together, Obama and Bernanke are committing $12.8 Trillion to bailing out Wall Street compared to only $900 Billion to stimulating the real economy, a ratio of 14 to 1.

The inevitable result for us will be a vast inflation of our dollars, so that each dollar buys less and less. We will be like frogs placed in slowly heating water. We will notice nothing at first. The “water” will heat slowly until it kills us. It may ultimately “succeed” for the wealthiest 1% in that they will own all of the land, gold, platinum, silver, and commodities and live in guarded gated castles. Those of us who survive will do so as feudal serfs who are permitted to share-crop their land. The result for Obama is that he will lose his bid for re-election in 2012 due to the massive despair and disillusionment of voters.

WHAT COULD OBAMA DO THAT WOULD WORK?

Although his window of opportunity is very short, if Obama changed course promptly before he has put us many trillions further in debt, there are sound, historically tested things he could do. They are bold. They involve a profound change in his analysis of our problem. He could:

• Cause our government to be the sole creator of our money supply, our silver coins, our dollar bills, and our “check book” money. Lincoln did this in 1860 to finance the Civil War. The state of Pennsylvania did this successfully for 50 years prior to 1789.

• Instead of borrowing from private banks and other governments, our government could create and issue money to meet government, business and individual needs, including rebuilding our infrastructure, education through college, and universal health coverage, and to pay our government’s obligations on existing bonds as they fell due.

• Prohibit “fractionalized reserve banking,” the practice of private bankers lending from 10 to 90 times the asset-reserves they hold. Allow banks only to loan on a 1 to 1 basis, from the dollars they have on deposit.

• Impose a top limit on interest that could be charged say 8%.

• Allow the Wall Street banks to go into bankruptcy, but retain enough of the needed staff employees to implement the new way of supplying money where needed.

• Repeal the Federal Reserve Act and install the needed functions of the Fed as a division of the Treasury Department.

• Enable local banks and businesses to continue to function as they now do.

Dated: April 7, 2009

Doug Page

WRIGHT PATMAN'S SOLUTION FOR OUR CANCEROUS BANKING SYSTEM

2009-04-25T16:11:00.001-07:00

WRIGHT PATMAN’S PRESCRIPTION FOR HEALING THE CANCEROUS U.S. BANKING SYSTEM

I am scared. We all are scared. Our Wall Street obedient leaders who claim they are struggling valiantly to “solve” the banking crisis seem to meander uncertainly and ideologically, while they spend unimaginable Trillions of Dollars of our public money. All of this is using public money that we have borrowed, and we worry how we and our children will ever repay it. We worry that the Bail Out will do nothing for us.

Forty five years ago in 1964, Wright Patman had answers and solutions for our banking problems which he left for us in his Congressional Reports, in transcripts of Congressional Hearings, and in his speeches in the Congressional Record.

Wright Patman was an extremely well qualified expert on our side. He was a lawyer, a former District Attorney, a former Representative in the Texas Legislature, and a long time Congressman. Wright Patman served as a Congressman from the North East corner of Texas for 47 years beginning in 1929 and ending in 1976. He was Chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency until 1975. He was an avid New Dealer. He served in Congress on the banking committee at the time of the 1929 Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, the New Deal recovery efforts, financing World War II, and the post war boom period. Unlike current Representatives and Senators, he was not taken in by private Wall Street Banks for one second and he fought to expose Wall Street Banking evils and power.

Patman from his long experience with our banks provides evidence that Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 view of private banks was accurate:

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

Luckily for us, Patman summarized his long experience with Wall Street Banking in his 50 page report, “A Primer on Banking” published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1964. It was his gift for us, his warnings, and his suggested reforms that are very relevant today even though our banking problem has gotten many times worse.

WHO CREATES MONEY IN THE UNITED STATES?

Patman approvingly quoted Lincoln who said:

“Money is the creature of law, and the creation of the original issue of money should be maintained as the exclusive monopoly of the National Government. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, it is the Government’s greatest opportunity.”

Our Constitution provides that Congress shall have the power “To coin money and regulate the value thereof.”

Unfortunately, under heavy lobbying by private bankers, Congress delegated the power to create money to a private group of bankers with the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and its 1934-35 Amendments. About this, Patman said:

“In the US today, we have in effect two governments. We have the duly constituted government, then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve, operating the money powers which are reserved to congress by the Constitution.”

We still have two such governments today in 2009. We have

1. Our “We the People” Constitutional government of by and for the people. Our governmental powers are exercised for us by our elected representatives.

2. A government by a private oligarchy of 12 bankers which creates our money, regulates the amount in circulation, regulates the interest rate at which money shall be loaned to us, to businesses and to our government, whose sole legal obligation is to make as much profit for bankers as possible.

What is wrong with this?

It gives this tiny private bankers’ oligarchy dominant control over our government, our economy, our level of well being. The oligarchy can refuse to finance reforms and programs enacted by our constitutional government. The oligarchy can and does lobby congress extensively; it finances the re-election of those who favor it, and finances opponents of those who vote against its wishes.

Patman quotes a once famous British Chancellor of the Exchequer who said of private banks:

“They control the credit of the nation, direct the policy of the governments, and hold in their hands the destiny of the people.”

This mirrors the statement attributed to the legendary European banker Amschel Mayer Rothschild who allegedly said in 1838: "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

This oligarchy in effect plans our economy, not to benefit us or our general welfare, but to earn the maximum private profit for them. Thus, for example, we can get health coverage for everyone only if it we pay 31 cents of every health care dollar for interest on loans, HMO profits and CEO salaries and bonuses. We cannot have Single Payer health coverage financed by the government by progressive income taxes.

It is undemocratic. These 12 bankers are responsible to no one. They are appointed every 12 years by the then sitting President on staggered terms. The law compels that the appointees be selected from a pool of bankers, and thus no appointees representing labor, the consumer, the voter or academic experts can be selected. The Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950 section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters.”[1] According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. We apparently can not find out the actual profits of the Fed.

The oligarchy by increasing the amount of money in circulation can cause inflation. By decreasing the amount it can cause a recession and leave millions jobless. It can cause “bubbles,” and it can also cause depressions, whichever will earn the maximum profit for them.

Patman summarizes it this way:

“What may appear, then, to be a simple decision to rein in the money supply and raise interest rates is, in fact, a simultaneous decision about the whole range of economic life—the prices people pay, the incomes they earn, the level of prosperity and the dynamic thrust of the economy is permitted to develop. The fallout extends even further. As interest rates rise, a transfer of income also takes place—to the large holders of liquid assets and the large financial institutions. It is no accident that rising interest rates are accompanied by a boom in the market for the stocks of banks and life insurance companies. The major owners of these institutions—certainly concentrated among a tiny minority of families in the United States—receive gratuitous additions to their personal wealth as the value of their stock increases. This only reflects the fact that there has been a shift of income away from interest payers—all of us in our role as consumers—toward the substantial interest receivers—only a relative handful.”

WHAT IS MONEY?

Patman has a very clear and accurate concept of money. Money is not real wealth; it is only a claim to wealth. While barter can be useful, it is far more convenient to have a medium of exchange that people agree has value. This need not be gold and it need not be any substance of real value. It can be shells, beads, notched sticks or printed paper greenbacks. The selected medium of exchange must be backed by the law and the courts in that it must be legally acceptable in full payment of debts and taxes. It adds to its stature to have it backed by a government guarantee and to have a tax system in place so that the government can make good on its guarantee if necessary. There are many advantages if the government is the sole creator of money. Letting private bankers create money creates a lot of problems, particularly if banks are not regulated.

HOW IS MONEY CREATED?

A government, whether a royal monarchy or a democracy, can simply print and issue greenbacks, or give recipients a government check. The government would incur no debt to anybody if this method were used, and if interest was to be charged, the government would get the interest. Our Constitution authorizes this method for us.

Under the exclusive franchise to manufacture money that we have delegated to the 12 bankers, these private bankers can simply “write a check” with absolutely nothing to back it up. They can create money out of thin air, loan it to us, to businesses, and to our government, and make a private profit from the interest charged. This private money manufacturing process is backed by our law that makes this money legal tender, and it is guaranteed by our government and hence by us taxpayers. It is magic money making scheme that makes private bankers wealthy beyond imagination. It is far better than all the casinos on the planet for making money. Patman did not use this description, but it is in fact a massive fraud on the public in that banks are loaning money that they do not have.

Bankers and their controlled mainstream media do not like to reveal their lucrative secret. As Patman says:

“…some of those who do understand the workings of our monetary system seem to feel they are in possession of secrets which cannot be safely revealed to the public…..For this reason, it has been traditional for bankers and other private managers of money to cloak the working of the money system with a mantle of secrecy…..These officials seem very partial to the turns of phrase that imply that the supply of money—and interest rates—are subject to powerful economic laws over which men have no control.”

Patman lays out the workings of this private money making franchise in a way that we all can understand.

It all began with the gold smiths of the late middle ages who held gold for wealthy persons who did not wish burden or the risk of carrying it around. The gold smiths issued receipts for the gold. People found it convenient to use these receipts as a medium of exchange rather than withdrawing gold, paying it to the creditor, with the creditor then depositing the gold with the gold smith. The gold smiths made loans based on their deposits. Then, since depositors rarely came at one time to withdraw the gold, they began to make loans of up to 10 times the amount of the actual gold on deposit. Nobody was any the wiser and the gold smiths got very rich. The gold smiths were creating money, ten times the amount of money they had on deposit. Banks now do the same thing. It is called “fractionalized reserve banking.” They loan a lot more than they have on deposit. What they have on “deposit” and call an “asset” for the purposes of the ratio will surprise you.

In 1964, there were at least 2 components of our money supply in circulation:

20 % was Coins and dollar bills minted and created by the U.S. Mint

80% was “Check book money” being money created by private commercial banks and by the private Fed simply by writing a check

"In 2005, the check book money, now generated by computer entries and not actual checks, was calculated to be 97.6% of our money supply. ("Money as Debt," Helen Hodgson Brown, 2008, Third Millenium Press, Baton Rouge, page 26)"

Supposing a local bank had loan applications, but had no money. Where would it get it to loan? The local bank would borrow money from the Fed. Patman used $1,000 as a ridiculously low example simply for purposes of explanation. So the local bank borrows $1000 from the Fed. Where does the Fed get the money? It simply writes a check for it, although the Fed has no reserve deposit. “It creates money purely and simply by writing a check.”

In addition to the magic power to write a check out of thin air, there is a magic multiplier:

Each loan that a bank makes is considered a new addition to its “reserve” for the purpose of calculating the fractional reserve ratio. Thus it can loan 90% of the first $1000 loan or $900 to a second borrower, and 90% of that or $810 to a third borrower and continuing until it has loans outstanding of 10 times the $1000 created out of thin air or $10,000 drawing interest to profit the bank and its shareholders.

When we consider the Trillions of Dollars of debt now owed to private bankers, it becomes clear that Wall Street and its banks are collecting huge sums in interest. This magic process creates unimaginable hidden wealth for banks and their shareholders.

There is always a danger that frightened cash depositors will gang up on a bank and demand the withdrawal of their cash deposits. The Fed stands ready as the “banker’s bank” to make loans to the besieged bank to meet the threat. So long as the threat is local and confined, the whole magic system continues to function and to earn profit for the bankers.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM PATMAN THAT WOULD HELP TODAY?

Since Patman wrote his Primer in 1964, the powers and activities of banks have compounded the wealth generated for the bankers and their shareholders. This is due to de-regulation, relaxed regulation, and the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act so as to permit banks to venture outside mere money lending. Banks could now invest in new ventures, invest in the stock and futures markets, in hedge funds, in various collateralized debt obligations, all with the sole legal imperative that they make profit for their shareholders. They still had no legal obligation to serve the public interest. While it lasted, this bubble made bank shareholders very wealthy. This tiny group of wealthy individuals uses its wealth to enhance its political power over elected officials. As we see from recent Bail Out events, this power over our government has become dominant. The powers of our government have been captured and used solely to benefit this tiny group, the top 1% of the wealthiest people in our nation.

Despite this vast mushrooming, Patman’s analysis of the underlying banking dynamics remains accurate and his remedies even more effective. Patman would recommend:

That the Federal Reserve Act be repealed and the legitimate functions of the Fed be made a division of the Treasury Department.
That the U.S. Government be the sole “coiner” of money and that it simply issue Greenbacks as needed to make the economy flourish, and to pay for public projects.
That fractionalized reserve banking be abolished. Local banks would be permitted to loan only on a 1 to 1 ratio of what they had on deposit and then only for a low rate of interest.
That local Banks be regulated again.

These reforms would halt the cancerous existing practice where all money rests on somebody’s debt. This would stop the endless U.S. policy of borrowing ever more money from the private banks and from foreign nations. We and our grandchildren would not have to pay off a crushing national debt. Our dollar would not be inflated.

We could finance our recovery from this depression. We could avoid going into an even deeper depression. Our local banks and businesses would function as they now do, but in a stable sustainable way. If the money supply of the U.S. was stabilized, it could lead to the U.S. dollar again becoming the world’s currency standard, the planet’s stable reserve currency. Lincoln’s “greatest opportunity” for our government would be realized.

President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Republican Paul Craig Roberts seems to agree with Democrat Wright Patman. In Counterpunch on 3-26-09 in an article entitled, “Is the Bail Out Breeding a Bigger Crisis,” Roberts wrote:

“Could this huge debt issue be avoided if the government took over the banks and netted out the losses between the constituent parts? A staid socialized financial sector run by civil servants is preferable to the gambling casino of greed-driven, innovative, unregulated capitalism operated by banksters who have caused crisis throughout the world.

Perhaps the Federal Reserve should be socialized as well. The notion of an independent, privately-owned Federal Reserve system was never more than a ruse to get a national bank into place. Once the central bank is part of the state-owned banking system, the government can create money without having to accumulate a public debt that saddles taxpayers and future budgets with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual interest payments.”

There is one startling difference between what Wall Street banks wanted in Patman’s day and what they want now. Wall Street banks used to be overly concerned about inflation of their dollars. Our market economy was then fairly stable and the wealthy wanted the purchasing power of their dollars preserved. They restricted the creation of money and raised interest rates, a “tight money” policy. Now, strangely enough, Wall Street is going all out to inflate dollars beyond measure. This must mean that Wall Street has secretly given up on our market economy, and now seeks to siphon off as many dollars as it can as quickly as it can. The wealthy can then invest their dollars in land, gold, silver, platinum, oil reserves, and in gated castles for themselves. They can thus reduce those of us who survive to the level of feudal serfdom where we eke out an existence by working their land.

Wall Street’s plan to rescue itself is a covert class war by the top 1% against the rest of us. Wall Street seeks to solve the problem of the huge public debt to China by inflating the dollar so that each of our dollars buys less and less. This will put us into poverty. China is well aware of this Wall Street strategy which involves cheating China also. China would be repaid with inflated dollars that will buy less and less. Strangely enough, we have a common interest with China in stopping this sly anti-social Wall Street scheme.

Dated: March 27, 2009

Doug Page, Tucson, AZ

[1]  (b) Under regulations of the Comptroller General, the Comptroller

General shall audit an agency, but may carry out an onsite examination

of an open insured bank or bank holding company only if the appropriate

agency has consented in writing. Audits of the Federal Reserve Board and Federal reserve banks may not include--

        (1) transactions for or with a foreign central bank, government

    of a foreign country, or nonprivate international financing

    organization;

        (2) deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy

    matters, including discount window operations, reserves of member

    banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, and open market

    operations;

        (3) transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open

    Market Committee; or

        (4) a part of a discussion or communication among or between

    members of the Board of Governors and officers and employees of the

    Federal Reserve System related to clauses (1)-(3) of this

    subsection.

PRESIDENT OBAMA; TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE WALL STREET DISASTER

2008-12-27T14:08:00.002-07:00

PRESIDENT OBAMA: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE WALL STREET DISASTER TO BRING US STABLE SECURE LIVES

We Will Do Everything in Our Power to Help

President Bush in an interview just this last week said that on September 28, 2008 his own Secretary of the Treasury came to him in great alarm and said: “the credit markets are frozen! If we do not give them a massive bailout of cash, we may face a depression, a greater depression than the Great Depression.” This was the Phi Beta Kappa, Republican, former head of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs talking, not some radical Marxist, and it was our first main stream signal that something was drastically wrong with our capitalism. With full support of our entire political and economic leadership, Congress quickly voted $700 Billion and gave $350 Billion to Secretary Paulson to spend immediately. What he did with it, he refuses to say, but the fact that we can all observe is that it did nothing to help us or to help the economy. The additional Billions that were given before and since have not helped either. Millions and millions of us are facing the pain of economic downturn and nothing has helped us. All of us are scared. We wait breathlessly for January 20 when President Obama can do something to help. Today he promises to spend $400 Billion to create 4 million jobs although many more than that have already been laid off.

The entire main stream political and economic establishment including the departing President and the incoming President and his main stream advisors are desperately seeking to get things going as they were before September 2 8, to restore the fragile bubble economy that then existed. Although Obama promises some direct aid to the unemployed, poor and hungry, Obama’s main strategy as suggested by his choice of advisors is to restore our trickle down economic system

Even Paul Krugman wrote in the NYT on December 22:

“The prosperity of a few years ago, such as it was — profits were terrific, wages not so much — depended on a huge bubble in housing, which replaced an earlier huge bubble in stocks. And since the housing bubble isn’t coming back, the spending that sustained the economy in the pre-crisis years isn’t coming back either.”

Even some in the labor movement do not want a new bubble:

NYT columnist Bob Herbert wrote on December 20:

“As Andy Stern, president of the huge Service Employees International Union, told me on Friday: ‘We’ve had a 25-year experience with market-worshipping, deregulating, privatizing, trickle-down policies, and it has ended us up with the greatest economy on earth staggering, and with the greatest amount of inequality since the Great Depression.’”

Our capitalism is not just “staggering.” It has crashed and nobody can rebuild or restore it. It has mutated into its final terminal stage as capitalism. It can further mutate into an authoritarian government joined with a system to benefit the powerful, but not as capitalism.

MONETARISM WILL NO LONGER KEEP CAPITALISM GOING

So far as we can tell, all of the current mainstream advisors, including those that Obama has chosen, are monetarists, being intellectual disciples of Milton Friedman. Monetarism has produced fabulous profits for the very wealthy, but it has served the rest of us poorly even before September 28. Since the crash of capitalism, it will not even serve the very wealthy in terms of keeping capitalism going.

Monetarism has at least 4 basic express ideas:

1. Capitalism is basically a stable economic system that serves all of us rich and poor.
2. The occasional ups and downs of capitalism can be handled by adjusting the interest rate and the money supply.
3. A really serious down turn can be controlled by a massive injection of public money into this stable capitalism, supplied by us taxpayers.
4. There are no structural or systemic defects in capitalism.

There are also some implied assumptions that do not fit the real world:

1. A rising tide lifts all boats with substantial fairness
2. There are no irreconcilable conflicts of interest between the rich and the poor, between capitalism and democracy or between the interest of employers and the interests of employees.

Now that a major crash is upon us, one that threatens to drop us into a “depression worse than the Great Depression,” the Wall Street strategy to avoid this disaster is, guided by the monetarists, to give more an more money to the major banks with the idea that these banks and their subsidiaries will then extend more credit to employers who will create more jobs, paying existing or lower wages, so that after all of this trickle down, employees will have enough purchasing power, augmented by their own new loans and credit cards, to start another bubble. Wall Street loves bubbles. Bubbles make Wall Streeters very rich so long as the bubble works. The main product of Wall Street banks is credit…to fuel the economy with loans bearing interest paid back for the enrichment of Wall Street banks. Hence, Wall Street seeks to restart capitalism with some sort of a new bubble. Due to Wall Street’s massive contribution of dollars to our elected officials, no other strategy is being considered. The trouble is there are no new bubbles on the horizon. We do not want a new housing bubble, a Silicon Valley stock bubble, or a bubble that would have Detroit turning out more massive SUVs. We do not want to increase the already massive disparity of income between the very rich and the rest of us. Another trouble is that the amount of actual purchasing power that trickles down is too little, and too late.

The mainstream monetarists are very bright. The problem is neither lack of intelligence nor stupidity by mainstream advisors. Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, and Henry Paulson are each members of Phi Beta Kappa. The mainstream economic advisors have chosen to use their intelligence to keep existing capitalism going and to make themselves rich by devoting their lives to serving the interests of the very rich. They have chosen to deny the existence of structural defects in capitalism.

CAPITALISM HAS ALWAYS HAD A STRUCTURAL OR SYSTEMIC FLAW, THE CAPACITY TO SELF-DESTRUCT IN ITS MATURE STAGE.

Capitalism has always had this fatal flaw that some are now calling a “systemic defect.” This is the defect noted by capitalist Henry Ford in the 1920’s and first enunciated 150 years ago by Karl Marx. Capitalists do not pay their employees enough salaries and wages so that employees can buy the products that they produce. Capitalism is thus inherently unstable. The necessary purchasing power can be maintained temporarily by foreign investment, government purchases for defense, wars, and Homeland Security, by borrowing and credit card financing, but we have reached the limit. Neither we, nor corporate businesses can borrow more. We cannot pay higher taxes so as to further fund a fragile capitalism that has died for want of purchasing power.

The main stream has applied every possible “band-aid” to capitalism, and it is still trying find other props. Most of us have supported those efforts. Most of us knew of no alternative. The difficult truth is that the inner dynamic of capitalism in its mature mutation, has caused its terminal illness, its final crash. Neither All the King’s men in “Humpty Dumpty,” nor President Obama will be able to put it together again. The reason is that nobody in the political and economic main stream has yet publicly acknowledged this systemic defect. Nobody is publicly dealing with it, or even hinting at its existence. Everybody recognizes that our capitalism depends for its survival on consumer purchasing power, but few want to face up to the systemic defect that causes the absence of purchasing power. Painful and disagreeable though it may be we must face up to and deal with this systemic defect.

Capitalism, our “mother” also has much influence on us now. It feeds all of us. Every one of us is dependent on capitalism for our survival. We think we have no other choice. Whether we are employees of business, non-profits, the media or universities, we are fed by this “mother.” Even if we are self-employed, we are dependent on the income of employees for our income. We are not and can never again be hunter-gatherers, or self-sufficient farmers. We are as dependent on the current mutation of capitalism as a new born baby is on its mother. When our “mother” no longer nurtures us, we become very scared. We become so scared that some of us deny that anything is wrong; some of us assume that it is our own fault, and some of us emphasize other causes like crooked businessmen, crooked politicians, or false advertising; and some assign blame to inner psychology, even to a Jungian collective unconscious. We turn to anything and everything to avoid facing the real problem. Just as we desperately need and want the love of our real mothers, we similarly cling to our capitalism, and we find it very difficult to analyze or criticize either one. Those who hugely profit from capitalism naturally encourage us not to blame capitalism. Their media treats discussion of capitalism’s defects as a taboo subject. They reinforce our own dependent reluctance.

There is more and it is related to the vast disparity of incomes between the capitalist class, employers and those who invest with employers, and the rest of us. By its dynamic of paying employees as little as possible, and seizing as much as possible of the increase in wealth our work produces, the capitalist class has accumulated a staggering almost unimaginable stash of wealth. The capitalists have used this wealth to purchase a controlling share of our political power. Wall Street Banks have so far bought off the Democrats, who then lie and tell us that they are trying to enact reforms for our benefit. They just never get around to doing it. As Lou Dobbs reported on December 20 on CNN, Democrat Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee has his own reform bill and another competing reform bill pending in his Committee. This powerful Democratic Chairman simply cannot find the necessary support to bring either bill up to the full Senate. Senator Dodd received $4 million dollars in his last election from the Wall Street banks he says he would like to regulate. Similarly, VP Biden representing the credit card issuers fostered a draconian Bankruptcy Bill that haunts us now. Ironically, President Obama on Saturday before departing for Hawaii appointed this same VP Biden to head a task force to try to meet the needs of the middle class. Do you suppose that Biden will recommend the cancellation of his recently sponsored awful Bankruptcy Bill? We must enlighten Senator Dodd, Vice President Biden and the other Democratic elected officials who receive money from Wall Street.

Our strategy is founded on this: Our widespread recognition that capitalism has died and cannot be revived will necessarily cause President Obama, Senators, Blue Dog Democrats, academic advisors, Wall Streeters of honest good will, and everyone except those who seek to survive by theft, to deal with our real human needs and stop using our money in a vain attempt to restart a dead capitalism. Therefore our most important task is to understand that multinational capitalism has died, why it has died, why it cannot be restarted, and to communicate that truth to everyone we know.

This is not to say that our way forward will be easy or pain free. We have to deal with capitalism’s terminal gasps that may lead some frightened persons turn to fascism. We have to face the ferocious, possibly violent reaction of those who have immensely profited from bubble capitalism as they seek to defend and preserve their wealth. The truth is that a great depression, greater than the Great Depression, may come upon us very soon. A bright European observer, Franck Biancheri speaking on the archived KPFA program “Guns and Butter” that aired on December 10 predicted this disastrous and painful crash at the multinational level by July 2009.

Reflect for a moment on what we could face as early as next summer:

• The nation’s food delivery truck fleet shut down for want of profit making opportunity.

• Empty food stores

• Wal Mart and other big box stores shut down because China stopped shipping stuff to the US and decided instead to improve conditions for the Chinese

• 30 million people out of work and hungry

• Hospital emergency rooms flooded with sick and injured people

• Charitable soup kitchens and charitable food suppliers overwhelmed and non-functional

• No food to buy with the dollars that we have..

So maybe, just maybe Franck Biancheri is wrong. This may not happen by next summer. It may not come until 2010. The point is that this greater than the Great Depression will soon happen unless we all face up to and correct the systemic defect in our political economy. It is inevitable. The advent of fascism will not stop the pain that is coming.

To survive the immediate pain, we would all be well advised to put in a store of emergency food. We should also persuade the new Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to stop making ethanol from corn and accumulate an emergency supply of corn and wheat.

We can each resolve to avoid panic, selfish choices, and false solutions.

We humans working together in our human community can solve this systemic defect and meet our reasonable needs. Multinational capitalism, the Federal Reserve Bank, Wall Street and their investment banks, money and credit schemes will not survive, and should not. We have the following advantages to meet the crisis and to create a new political economy:

We have needs, we each have skills and abilities to meet needs of others, and we are all willing to work.

The business capitalism in our local communities, our banks, car dealers, hardware stores, and food stores and clothing stores need not be much affected. Our local lives will go on, but much better than before when Wall Street siphoned off the lions share of our productive wealth for the very rich.

We now realize that all of us humans are interdependent and interconnected in our common needs for affordable housing, public health, clean water, adequate food, and medical care.

We each have the capacity to care for others and the capacity to receive the caring of others.

We have vast national resources.

We have a fallen global market economy with formerly arrogant, aggressive, defiant gung ho capitalists now on their knees, dispirited and begging for our help.

We have a new President with a towering intellect, oratorical skills, leadership skills, a strong will and a compassionate heart, who promises to act pragmatically.

• We can use the experience from WWII and set up something like the War Production Board, staffed by bright pragmatic people, to guide us in what should be produced to meet our needs and what should not be produced.

• We can set up a new Federal Loan Bank and create a new currency using the Constitutional power given to Congress “To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin.” We may choose to support the American Monetary Act now being introduced by Congressman Dennis Kucinich and supported by Professor Michael Hudson. http://www.monetary.org/amacolorpamphlet.pdf

• We can demand that our government be our employer of last resort, supplying as many jobs as may be necessary. We can demand that public expenditures be made for our direct and immediate public benefit and not for Wall Street or its investment banks.

• We can demand that Congress make “all laws which shall be necessary and proper…in order to from a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity…”

• We may not be able to afford wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we may have to bring our troops home.

We are in the most exciting times since 1776 when the fall of multinational capitalism compels and allows us to organize new ways of working together to meet our needs founded on caring for each instead of fearfully exploiting and competing with each other.

Dated: December 27, 2008

Doug Page

.

VP BIDEN: TAME THE SENATE FILIBUSTER

2008-12-13T20:12:00.001-07:00

DOUGLAS R. PAGE
6063 E. Rosewood
Tucson AZ 85711
Phone 520 514 7836 Fax 520 514-7088
Cell 520-400-5905 dougpage2@earthlink.net

December 13, 2008

Edward Kaufman, Chief of Staff
Office of Senator Joseph R. Biden
201 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-0801

Regarding: Senate Rule XXII and President Obama’s and Vice President Biden’s promise of hope and change

Dear Mr. Kaufman:

Congratulations!!! You are soon to be a Senator yourself. That is why I, a resident of Arizona, and I claim a Sovereign Citizen, am writing to you. You are also very close to Senator Biden and that is another reason. I will soon be a constituent of VP Biden, and I have always considered that I am a constituent of all Senators. I trust that you also will recognize a duty to all of us and not just the voters of Delaware.

I am the outraged voter-citizen who filed the suits challenging the constitutionality of Senate Rule XXII in the 1990s when the filibuster was used to thwart our majority will and Bill Clinton’s proposed stimulus package. We are again confronted with the same problem: Certain Senators are sure to use the filibuster to thwart political and economic solutions to our imminent second Great Depression. The filibuster can and will be used to thwart control of global warming, regulation of Wall Street, and a sustainable energy policy. Just as the filibuster was used for 100 years after the Civil War to prevent enactment of a law against lynching, the filibuster now can and will be used to drive many of us into the economic law of the jungle and possibly starvation. It will surely be used to impede pragmatic legislative solutions and experiments in a wise way to see what really works to deal with our problems.

It makes good sense to require 60 votes or even 67 votes to confirm Judicial appointments when such nominations require the advice and consent of the
Senate, and when these Judges serve for life and can only be impeached or removed by a 2/3 vote.

It is simply a “bloodless coup” for the Senate to require more than a simple majority of those Senators present to enact political and economic reforms or anything else that can always be done away with by the next Congress.

I ask, I beg that you and Vice President Biden face the many crises that we all face and implement our majority will as voters by using the “constitutional option” aka the “nuclear option” to implement our majority will.

I am writing to you now so that you and Vice President Biden can carefully plot your strategy, enlist the support of a majority of Senators, and draft Vice President Biden’s ruling now that would end unconstitutional use of the filibuster.

You could move and VP Biden could rule, when the necessary “option” motions are made to avoid the filibuster, something like the following:

“The Chair rules that when legislation or appointments are proposed that can be cancelled or reversed by the next Congress, the Constitution compels Senate Rule XXII with its 60 vote requirement to close debate to be unconstitutional. For such legislation, the Chair rules that the Constitution compels action by vote of a simple majority of a quorum of those Senators present and voting. The Chair rules that Senate Rule XXII with its 60 vote requirement insofar as it applies to judicial appointments for the life of the nominee which can be undone only by a 2/3 vote of impeachment, is constitutional.”

I hope that you and Vice President Biden will exercise the leadership necessary to do this successfully.

Sincerely,

DOUGLAS R. PAGE

PRESIDENT OBAMA!! WALL STREET IS ROBBING US

2008-12-13T19:51:00.001-07:00

PRESIDENT OBAMA!! WALL STREET BANKS ARE ROBBING US BLIND

President Obama: You have set up a web site and invite comment from your supporters. Here is something we are profoundly concerned about. We your loyal sovereign supporters and voters are being robbed blind by Wall Street. Professor Michael Hudson tells us that Two Trillion Dollars have been given to 15% or so of the wealthiest banks on Wall Street, investment banks like those that Robert Rubin, Senator Charles Schumer, Senator Chris Dodd and Vice President Biden and many other Senators have long supported. Our money is still being poured out to Wall Street. There is no end in sight. The phony rationale has been that we all will fall into a deep economic depression unless we make it possible for these banks again to extend credit, to make loans. First off, they are not doing this. These banks are, according to Professor Hudson, hoarding the money so that they can deal with their huge, but as yet unaudited, liabilities on collateralized debt obligations, credit default stops and the like. The Bank of America even used bailout money to buy a bank in China. Moreover, the stated objective makes no sense. No sane person wants to jump start the real estate bubble, the Silicon Valley bubble or any other bubble. Yet, that is the stated objective. These few banks seek to “solve” the real problem of our insufficient purchasing power in an awkward indirect tickle down way by transferring public money to the top 1% in the hope that the top 1% will find profit making opportunities and lend, invest, create employment, pay existing or lower wages, and thus finally “restore” our purchasing power. If these Wall Street banks mean what they say, this “solution” was not working before the crisis, has not worked since 1980, and especially will not work now. If these Wall Street bankers are spinning the facts to cover an outright theft of our money as appears to be the case, they should be prosecuted. These banks should be allowed to fall into bankruptcy, and a more direct, creative and effective use should be made with our bailouts.

President Obama, we, being some of your sovereign voters who gave you campaign money and who elected you want you to know that we have come to a startling realization: Our national market economy, our capitalism has “blown its engine.” No new inputs of oil or fuel or cash will jump start this blown engine. We must meet the immediate need of getting survival cash in our hands, then analyze why the engine failed, and then fix the defect. There are many among us who because of habit, obliviousness or temporary advantage have not yet accepted the fact that our national capitalism has permanently stalled beyond anybody’s capacity to restore it. We all soon will.

Have you noticed the spin on the real cause of the depression we now face? The main stream media incessantly label it as a “credit crisis,” and a “liquidity crisis” of Wall Street. Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson were the first users of these words when the investment banks stopped lending because of their vast liability exposure in collateralized debt obligations. The use of these words as obfuscating spin continues inaccurately and inappropriately now that we are in a full blown depression. Their analysis is faulty. They either have not examined the dynamics of capitalism or they find it advantageous not to deal with the dynamics in public. Our diminishing or non-existent paychecks are the cause of Wall Street’s crisis and of our own crisis. Millions of us cannot afford to buy what multinational capitalism produces and attempts to sell at a profit. Naturally, high unemployment does not help. Stephen Lendman reported in http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/the-global-economic-crisis-bad-and-worsening/

“Economist John Williams corrects it (official statistics) by including what BLS leaves out, and through November reports unemployment at 16.5% or more than double the manipulated government data.”

There is suddenly an “overproduction” of houses that can be sold at a profit although millions are homeless. We do not need more credit in order to buy. We need much more adequate salaries and wages and we need full employment. In capitalism’s gigantic siphoning of money from the production process in the form of CEO salaries and perks, dividends, and interest, capitalism has created a small wealthy group of about 33,000 of us who have as much income and wealth as the bottom 300,000,000 of us. It has left the rest of us with insufficient wages and salaries to buy the houses and cars that capitalism produces. There is a limit to the number of houses the members of the top 33,000 very wealthy want, so their purchases do not keep capitalism going.. Five or more mansions spread around the planet for each of them is enough. The Wall Street spin, if honestly presented seeks to preserve the profit making opportunities, salaries, perks, dividends, interest, and power of the top 1%, and for the wealthiest investment banks of Wall Street. We emphasize: This strategy will not work even for Wall Street capitalists because it does nothing directly to restore our employee purchasing power upon which capitalism is so desperately dependent.

Our tax money is thus contributing to the continuation of the very dynamic that caused the crisis and blew up the economic engine we call capitalism. The bailout is not made on condition that employees be paid more so that they can buy what is produced. There is no condition imposed that the profit CEO salaries, perks, dividends, or interest of those who receive this public bailout be curtailed or eliminated. It is analogous to pouring more and more oil into a blown engine of an Indy race car. Pouring more and more oil will not start this blown engine and put it back in the race.

It is significant that the Wall Street spin studiously avoids suggesting an immediate direct solution to our real crisis: the quick transfer of public money to those who will quickly spend it, such as generously enhanced unemployment pay and a negative income tax. It is sad that even the UAW is part of the spin and is marching to Washington offering benefit concessions while forgetting Henry Ford’s dceision that he had to pay his employees more generously so that they could buy the Model Ts that their labor produced on the assembly line. With UAW concessions and support of the “credit crisis,” Ford employees will not be buying many Fords.

These observations are neither left nor right. They are simply observations of Wall Street acts and Wall Street’s stated purposes as communicated to us by the Wall Street owned media.

What underlying truth is this obfuscating spin hiding? In the case of the bailout of Wall Street investment banks and insurance companies, it may be a case of the top 1% getting all of our money they can “while the getting is good,” and hiding it away in their personal accounts overseas before we wise up. The Wall Street spin may conceal the largest theft of public funds we humans have ever experienced.

The rationalizations and justifications for national capitalism have been totally discredited. National capitalism is neither meeting human needs nor its own needs. It is not efficiently managed. It is not innovating. Any economic system whose normal dynamics can take us into the dark ages must be abolished. It is the height of stupidity to support an economic system that creates a few persons with the power to destroy our well-being.
Is capitalism providing society with good efficient management in its search for profit? Robert Rubin, Secretary Paulson and other top bankers of Wall Street were not very efficient in getting us into the subprime and collateralized debt obligation mess, and in their failure to deal with the core defect of inadequate purchasing power that has been with us since 1980. The management of capitalism’s best and brightest in the auto industry has brought the auto industry to bankruptcy.

Is American capitalism providing society with innovation in its relentless search for profit? Certainly not in the auto industry or in the housing industry. What about new products like hydrogen fuel cells? So far as I have been able to find, the main source of innovation is the University of California at Irvine where a public employee, Professor Scott Samuelsen is a world wide leader of hydrogen cell research and applications. Unfortunately for us, Wall Street capitalism has innovated and ineptly managed a large number of ways to make a short term profit without producing anything we need. This management has brought capitalism to its knees and begging for public bailout. Innovation and good management? What about Bear Stearns and Citibank? What about AIG? Lehman Brothers? The coal industry is spending millions in false advertising and PR to sell “clean coal” when no such thing now exists and is not predicted to exist for at least 2 decades. We are experiencing unthinking greed by our brightest national capitalists and not good management and innovation.

The point of all this is not to pick on human beings, misled and oblivious as they may be. Ben Bernanke is a brilliant human being with an IQ far above most of us mortals. He is moral and civilized. Capitalism did not self destruct for the want of human intelligence. The point here is to analyze and recognize the inevitably self destructive dynamic of capitalism itself. Former capitalists and present defenders and revivers of capitalism, Ben Bernanke, liberals like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, and most importantly our elected Senators must face the facts. Capitalism has now destroyed itself at least at the national and global levels. National capitalists have successfully demanded that we turn over the management of our economy to them. “Privatize” and “let the market handle it” they said. They asked for freedom to invest abroad. We met their demands, loosened regulation, and provided billions and billions of public money to stimulate capitalism. We gave them unfettered freedom to invest and take their production facilities anywhere on the planet Despite this capitalism and capitalists have totally failed us. There is no point in trying to revive this blown economic engine at the national level.

We, through our democratic government, led by our new President Obama must take over the overall management of our national economy and our currency away from the market, away from Wall Street and away from the Federal Reserve Bank. We must use our public money much more directly and efficiently to solve real problems. For example, to meet the tragedy of those whose pensions are now vastly diminished in value, we must use public money to meet legitimate expectations. We must tax the wealth of those who “made out” during the bubbles and bailouts to fund what needs to be done

Our local capitalism in our local communities should not be much affected. A Federal Loan Bank can supply local auto dealers, hardware stores, and grocery stores with routine business loans for innovation. This Federal Bank could supply us with affordable housing loans. We are apparently not ready as citizens and voters to manage our local economies. Local capitalism should continue in our local communities. The civic impulse in us Americans seems to be in relatively short supply. We can barely manifest enough civic energy to vote periodically. Most union members do not attend union meetings. We so far do not have enough civic energy or interest to manage our local businesses through employee ownership and management. If bursts of civic energy should emerge to challenge capitalism on the local level, employees and voters can form Mondragon co-operatives so that they can be owner-managers of local business.

We challenge any and all remaining defenders of capitalism to show precisely how this analysis is wrong. If President Obama’s official advisors, or any one thinks that it is, put forth what you believe to be a more accurate analysis of the inner dynamics of capitalism.

December 13, 2008

Doug Page

WALL STREET BAILOUT WILL NOT JUMPSTART CAPITALISM

2008-11-30T03:36:00.000-07:00

THE WALL STREET BAILOUT WILL NOT JUMP-START OUR CAPITALISM
A PLAN B

Despite all of the talk and promise of hope and change, it is now apparent that President Obama plans to try to restart capitalism as it was prior to August 2007. He proposes to try to restore the status quo just prior to the present crisis. He also plans to use public funds, our tax money, “as much as is necessary” for this purpose. The total already promised is $7.3 Trillion for Wall Street. This is $28,000 of debt for each one of us, our children and grandchildren. If Obama goes ahead with his proposed stimulus package for Main Street, it is estimated that will cost at least $7 Trillion more. That will be a debt of $56,000 for each of us. Obama promises to help both Wall Street and Main Street, both the wealthiest 1% and the “middle class,” a classification that contains ever diminishing numbers. Those of us who are not a part of the wealthiest 1% are typically economically insecure, worried, poor, and getting poorer in terms of medical care, housing, and even adequate nutritious food, and the new taxes necessary to pay off this tremendous debt. There is an irreconcilable conflict of interest between the top 1%, Wall Street and the very rich, and the bottom 95% consisting of Main Street, the Middle Class, the poor, the homeless and the destitute. Obama now seems to be a servant of Wall Street. We hope that he is a wise prophet with secret future plans, when he promises that we are all united Americans with a common need and a common goal.

President Obama does not now acknowledge how very sick and fragile our capitalism was in August 2007. We were overburdened with credit debt. The economy was kept going by tempting us into more debt by issuing multiple credit cards, and by selling us overpriced subdivision houses with mortgages that we could not afford. As we shall show below, the subprime mess was a natural mutation of the dynamics of our capitalism.

However, most of us continue to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. We have no other choice. We hope and we pray that he, like Lincoln, is making every possible effort to harmonize profoundly conflicting ideologies and levels of wealth, and that he will ultimately do what is right and possible for mankind and fulfill our yearning for hope and healing change. We hope that he will do this without another Civil War, and without the loss of our liberty.

All we can do right now is to raise questions: Will Obama’s present plan to give Wall Street $7.3 Trillion without effective conditions really stimulate the whole economy? Will Obama’s efforts, priorities, and huge bailouts rescue Wall Street and the top 1% so that capitalism will be jump started for them and for all of us?

President Obama’s selection of University of California Professor Christina Romer as his head economics advisor gives us a hint of what he plans. She, so far as we can tell from her writings, has never studied nor even acknowledged the existence of capitalism’s inner dynamics. She seems to assume that capitalism if left to itself, will work smoothly and permanently with full employment. The insight that we now have as to her interests and beliefs comes from her entry on “Business Cycles” in the Library of Economics and Liberty at http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/BusinessCycles.htm
As to the causes of business cycles, recessions and depressions, she writes: “…there is no reason why business cycles have to occur at all. The prevailing view among economists is that there is a level of economic activity, often referred to as full employment, at which the economy could stay forever….If nothing disturbs the economy, the full employment level of output, which naturally tends to grow as the population increases, and newer technologies are discovered, can be maintained forever.” She seems to believe that our capitalism can be controlled simply by tweaking the money supply and the interest rates. If these cycles cause pain among us, she writes: “The advent of unemployment insurance and other social welfare programs means that recessions no longer wreak the havoc on individuals’ standard of living that they once did.”In her view of our capitalism, “Everything is grand in Kansas City. Everything is good as it can be.”

Although she is said to be a specialist in the causes of the Great Depression, Her academic work and writings seem to reflect her interest in simply uncritically and non-judgmentally observing capitalism, and measuring its external movements and tendencies. She assumes capitalism is at least potentially a stable, socially useful system for all of us. She seems to assume that only minor tweaking is needed to keep it going. She does not show interest in the inner workings of capitalism, its tendency toward monopoly, overproduction, and imperialism, in its creation of a tremendous disparity between the rich and the poor and the resulting political power, and its longstanding need for ever increasing public expenditure to avoid economic depression.

She thus assumes a capitalism that has never existed anywhere, at any time. No manipulations of money supply and interest rates have ever made capitalism work with full employment. Born in 1958 and coming of age in 1978, she has never personally experienced or witnessed the pain of the Great Depression. She has apparently not been much influenced by John Steinbeck’s book, Grapes of Wrath whose main character Tom Joad says regarding our capitalism: “There is food to eat and people to eat it, but them two cannot get together. There is work to do and people to do it, but them two cannot get together either.” Professor Romer thus deprives herself of much relevant data, insights, and actual experience of the real workings of capitalism during strikes, on the picket line, in the legislative halls, among the victims of industrial pollution, with the sick whose only source of care is the hospital emergency room, and among the homeless, unemployed and underemployed. She apparently has not read Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent book, “Nickel and Dimed” about a woman’s unsuccessful effort to survive in our real economy. She also deprives herself of those who have studied the real inner workings and dynamics of capitalism, or she finds it professionally advantageous to ignore them. (No capitalist business or corporation has ever provided grants to professors or graduate students to study the defects of capitalism.)

The point of all of this is that neither Professor Romer nor President Obama can devise remedies and solutions for the great crisis of our capitalism unless they know the real causes of the crisis.
Feeding more hay to a sick elephant will only make it sicker if the elephant has cancer in its digestive tract. The evidence shows that our capitalism has “cancer of its metabolism.” The evidence shows that ever since 1980, capitalists could not make a profit producing things that people really need. The fact that capitalist employers draw out tremendous salaries and dividends from the production our labor creates and the fact that investment banks draw out more in interest, leaves us employee-consumers with insufficient wages and salaries to buy the goods our labor has produced. So the employers have “overproduction.” We still have needs, but there is no profit for capitalists in meeting our needs. They fire us and move on to some other activity where they can make a profit, first overseas in economic imperialism by hiring employees to produce there, at even lower wages. When even imperialism produced more goods that could be sold, capitalists turned in 1980 to what has been named Financialization. Desperate for new sources of profit, capitalists began to buy and sell each other’s companies using the easy credit from investment banks to do so rather than their own accumulated profits or issuing stock. (Interest is tax deductible, while dividends are not.) They also began to invest in subprime mortgages, and then in the many levels of collateralized debt obligations based on these new mortgages. These three or more levels of collateralized debt obligations provided quick Ponzi scheme type profit for Robert Rubin and his investment banks, but produced absolutely nothing that human beings needed. This is how capitalism actually has worked during recent history. This illustrates the inner dynamics of capitalism. As we see, capitalism was very sick even in 1980 in that there was insufficient profit making opportunities in producing what people needed. Every year from 1933 to date, capitalism has needed tremendous contributions of public money to stay out of depression. Capitalism has never been robust on its own without public money. It has always been fragile. Our capitalism’s mutation from one level to the next is set forth in detail in my previous article, “Why is Our Capitalism Failing Us?” published in Dissident Voice at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/06/why=is=capitalism-failing-us/

There simply is no credit crisis. There is a demand crisis, a crisis among us voter consumers consisting of our inability to buy what we need. We need more credit like we need a hole in the head. We are already maxed out on credit. The real problem is that people do not earn enough from their labor to buy what capitalism cam produce. There is an “overproduction” of things that can be sold at a profit, but there simply is not an overproduction of things we really need. So it is a pure criminal theft of our money to give $7.3 Trillion to investment banks, their CEOs and shareholders in the hope that they will again make credit available. This scandalous gift of public funds is aimed at a problem that does not exist and will do absolutely nothing to solve the problem that does exist. A policy that is aimed at providing profit making opportunities for investment banks on Wall Street will not even produce profit for them. It does absolutely nothing to increase our purchasing power or our earnings or our well being. If we were eagerly ready to pay for more cars and houses, you may be sure that Wall Street banks would find a way to finance them. We are not. We cannot. We have no earned money with which to buy. THAT is the problem. The current strategy involves spending $7.3 Trillion in an outright gift to bankrupt ineptly managed investment banks and insurance companies to relieve them of the liability of now worthless collateralized debt obligations. It is then hoped that they will again extend credit. This is not working, it could work for us if at all only by trickle down, and it cannot work even for Wall Street. Even if the banks are forced to lend money to businesses and credit card holders, there is no way to force anybody or any company to borrow. There is no way this trickle down will create adequate purchasing power among those with needs. It does nothing to solve the inner sickness of capitalism. There is absolutely no reason why we the public should bear the cost of Robert Rubin’s stupidity and take over the massive liabilities of the investment banks in these worthless collateralized debt obligations. In order to qualify to invest in those, one had to be a sophisticated wealthy investor. Let Robert Rubin and other investors like him bear the loss of their stupid investments. It is idiotic to let Robert Rubin and his protégés now influence the policy of bailing them out when they are responsible for the problem.

With an accurate and realistic analysis of the dynamics of capitalism, one can then fashion pragmatic reforms or substitutes as circumstances demand, a Plan B.

We have plenty of humans willing and anxious to work. We have immense human needs, many of them unmet. We have thousands of businesses ready and willing to meet those needs, although some needs like medical care cannot and should not yield a profit. What is missing is a source of earned purchasing power. Instead, to get things going why not set up a Federal Loan Bank and provide the necessary credit at low interest rates directly to local healthy banks so that they can function normally? These local banks can then meet the routine needs of business for flooring loans, seasonal loans, and other normal long and short term loans. Spend the $7.3 Trillion on extending and increasing Unemployment benefits, in retraining, building new sources of energy, and rebuilding our bridges and levees. Let’s spend it for Universal Health Care. If necessary let our government be the employer and the lender of last resort. Let Robert Rubin’s investment banks go bankrupt. With any luck, Wall Street’s corrupt political power over our elected officials will then be weakened. Once things are going, we can then consider further steps to solve capitalism’s inner sickness. For those human needs that capitalists cannot meet adequately and still make a profit like universal health care, our government can become the employer of last resort. For example, our government can hire doctors, nurses and physician’s assistants. It can place a physician’s assistant in a drop in clinic in the corner of drug stores to provide immediate health care. We can then relieve our employers of the expense of providing health care and Worker’s Compensation Insured medical care for job injuries.

Since our government is not choosing direct solutions, it is apparent that this is a class issue. Wall Street, Robert Rubin and the top 1% naturally prefer that the $7.3 Trillion be given to them to compensate them for their stupid investments. We do not need to yield to these outrageous demands. Our President and our government are so far demonstrating that they are subject to the control of Wall Street. Our alternative is to let the investment banks go bankrupt and not us. They created their own problem. There is no sense in letting them take us down with them.

It is also obvious that President Obama, at least for the present, is adopting as his very own, and trying to refuel, the already existing class war of Wall Street and the very rich against the rest of us to convert every minute of our existence into a profit making opportunity. This is obvious from his priority of helping Wall Street first, asking absolutely nothing substantive in return and the promptness with which he gave his support. It is obvious from his support of the Wall Street policy of helping investment banks and insurance companies, but not Ford Chrysler or GM. The Wall Street policy is to let the auto companies go through bankruptcy to escape their union contracts and health insurance commitments. Wall Street will then help these companies after bankruptcy. The current policy will not work. A Great Depression will soon be upon us. We hope that brilliant, pragmatic, compassionate, non-ideological President Obama and his economic advisor Professor Christina Romer will then stop listening to Robert Rubin’s and Wall Street’s “solutions.” We hope that President Obama will then use our public money to solve the inner sickness of capitalism, and to meet our needs. We will then be truly united Americans with common needs, dreams, and more equal political power. We will then have more fully achieved a government of, by, and for the people.

Dated: November 29, 2008

Doug Page dougpage2@earthlink.net

THE UNDIAGNOSED CANCER THAT HAS KILLED CAPITALISM

2008-11-22T04:39:00.001-07:00

In the 1920s, Henry Ford perceived a fundamental flaw in capitalism and when he suddenly started paying his auto workers the then extremely generous sum of $5 per day. A unilateral raise of this magnitude was shocking at that time. Ford did this so that his employees would have enough money to buy his Fords. Ford had recognized a fundamental fatal defect of capitalism: It inevitably produces more than can be sold.

Capitalist Employers throughout the capitalist market can not pay their employees enough so that employees are able to purchase all of the products that capitalism can produce and still make a profit. Without profit there can be no capitalism.

Since we have an economic system, capitalism, where almost all humans are employees, who, if not employees, will purchase capitalism’s products? Hunters and gatherers? Self employed farmers? What group in society has cash to purchase what capitalism produces? Are there enough money lenders and capitalist employers with enough profit and earned interest to purchase all of the production? Experience now clearly demonstrates that there are not. We now have tremendous unused capacity to produce. Capitalism is destroying itself. This is not a left-right problem, nor a conservative- liberal ideological problem. It is simply a fact. It is an inevitable, unavoidable result of the core dynamic of capitalism. That core dynamic is:

A person with money hires a person with little or no money for the lowest possible wage to earn as much profit as possible for the person who already has money.

It is this profit generating dynamic over decades of time and repeated by hundreds of employers that has created the immense disparity of wealth and power between the top 1% of our nation and the 95% of us at the bottom. This top 1% has as much wealth and income as the bottom 95% of us. http://lcurve.org/ The purchasing power of the bottom 95% of us would be vastly enhanced if the wealth of the top 1% was spread more equitably among us all. The fatal defect of capitalism would be substantially reformed. We employees could then purchase much more of the products that our labor produced.

So we have many millions of us on the planet who have legitimate needs, and we are willing and anxious to work. Why can’t we work together to meet our needs? Because capitalism will not let us! Capitalism gives us only one way to meet our needs. We must go to work for somebody who can make a profit on our labor. This fundamental flaw of capitalism perceived by Henry Ford is now causing our capitalism to implode, to destroy itself. Henry Ford was unique among the planet’s employers in perceiving this flaw and acting to correct it within his own company. (He could do this because of his revolutionary assembly line and standardization of his Model T Ford product enabled him to pay high wages and still compete with other auto manufacturers who paid lower wages.)

So why don’t all employers follow Ford’s example? One reason is that the competition by those employers who continued to pay the lowest possible wage would quickly drive the generous employer out of business. Another reason is the simple greed by capitalists to get as much profit as they can as quickly as they can. Employers as a group would have to act together cooperatively for a long time, and all of them would have to pay enough wages so that employees could buy capitalism’s products. However even if all employers cooperated and paid high wages, capitalism would implode sooner or later because of the large sums drawn out by private employers in the form of profits, CEO compensation, and dividends, and the large sums drawn out by private money lenders for interest on the money loaned for the production process. It is interesting to note that the very successful Mondragon Co-ops of Basque Spain have sustained themselves and expanded over the last 40 years in part because the workers are the owners and they limit the pay of the top managers ordinarily to no more than 3 times the pay of the production workers. The Mondragon Co-ops also have their own Co-op bank to meet their individual and business credit needs.

Capitalism can easily produce far more than can be sold at a profit. Capitalists therefore shut down periodically or close plants altogether. There remain millions of people with legitimate needs who are anxious to work, but there is no work, because there is no profit to be made. For example, the world wide auto industry has the capacity to produce far more cars than can be sold at a profit. This defect of capitalism existed long before the current mortgage bubble and crisis. Auto plants around the world were operating at less than full capacity because there was not a demand by buyers for all of the cars that could be produced. We have some human needs, for example health care that simply cannot be adequately met by capitalists and still make a profit. If there is no profit to be made, capitalists will simply not provide health care.

This fundamental defect of capitalism that has caused it to implode is a truth that is totally suppressed in our capitalist culture. We do not learn of this truth in Econ 1 or even in Econ 101. We do not learn of this truth from our capitalist media.

Given this truth, and the culture wide failure to diagnose the problem we must look at the false solution that capitalists select for us.

Secretary Paulson, Fed Chairman Bernanke and our elected Democratic leaders identify the problem as a “credit crisis,” or a “liquidity crisis,” and they propose that we employees tax ourselves so as to pay billions of dollars to the bankrupt Wall Street investment banks in the hope that they will again extend credit to capitalist employers and liberal credit cards to consumers. They seek to supply the credit to enable capitalists to seek profit making opportunities. (The fact that the Wall Street investment banks have not chosen to use the gifts of our tax money for this purpose so far, while criminal, is irrelevant to the larger problem.) That larger but totally ignored problem is Henry Ford’s 1920s problem. That problem is that there is insufficient sustainable demand for all capitalists can produce at a profit. There is tremendous overproduction. Human wants are insatiable, and if we humans had the money to buy, credit would flow like a quickly melting glacier. Lenders are always anxious to lend if there is interest on the loan to be earned. The bailout solution is putting money in the wrong place in the production process, because the problem has not been accurately diagnosed. The proposed solution does nothing to provide jobs and wages, and nothing therefore to create demand for capitalism’s products. The problem of overproduction remains unsolved. If we were not so scared, we consumer employees might borrow more money for a short time and thus be able to buy products, but this could not go on very long. Most of us are already maxed out on credit. Sooner or later we have to pay the borrowed money back. Moreover, we have a concern that such ongoing bubble production does no destroy our planet with pollution and global warming.

Wall Street and our Democratic elected officials are vainly trying to rejuvenate a dead system. Lending or giving the dead system more money simply does not solve the fatal defect. The fatal defect is hidden behind a culture wide taboo so that it cannot be discussed in the main stream.

Capitalism cannot solve the dilemma identified by John Steinbeck in his 1939 book, Grapes of Wrath: “there is work to do, and people to do it, but them two cannot get together, and there is food to eat and people to eat it, but them two cannot get together either.” Even Franklin Roosevelt failed to diagnose this fatal flaw of capitalism in his New Deal when he sought to save capitalism with its profit making opportunities while providing temporary “band-aid” type remedies for those who had no work.

We human being can work together to meet our needs, on a small scale by simply bartering. We can meet our sustainable needs on a larger community scale with Mondragon style Co-ops and on a nation wide scale by causing our government to act solely in our interest to be our lending bank at little or no interest, to supply co-ops, small businesses, partnerships, and self employment, and as our employer of last resort. We can no longer afford profit making employers and money lenders who siphon off the increase in value that our work creates. Because of this fatal defect, our capitalism can be thought of as a huge tornado which having sucked us dry, then dies itself. Or it can be thought of as a cancer that kills those of us who are its workers and consumers, and having killed its host, and then dies itself.

Dated: November 22, 2008

Doug Page dougpage2@earthlink.net http://www.thenewliberator.blogspot.com

QUACKING ON THE EVE OF DISASTER

2008-11-22T04:05:00.000-07:00

Lame duck President Bush speaking recently about the economic depression we now face said: “We must save capitalism,” “Government is not the total solution,” “Capitalism is the only way,” and “The key is sustained economic growth with free trade within the US and with other nations.”

Most of us realize at long last that unregulated capitalism is in fact a total disaster for the human race. We have given capitalism all possible monetary support and freedom to display its worth. President Carter deregulated the airlines. President Reagan broke the union movement. The two Bush Presidents and Clinton gave capitalism full military support for its imperialistic expansion abroad. President Clinton, advised by Robert Rubin, gave Wall Street everything it wanted: The safety net was abolished, so as to drive more desperate people into the work force who would take whatever wage was offered. Capitalists were given full legal and military protection to invest abroad. President Bush installed capitalists who should be regulated to do the regulating, and abolished or weakened regulations that in any way inhibited capitalist investment. For more than 50 years, we have primed the capitalist pump with “military Keynesianism.” We have tried capitalist ideas and ideologies of “trickle down economics,” and “neo-liberalism.” Despite all of this, capitalism has failed us.

The truth is that capitalism has destroyed itself and imposed extreme risk and danger of planet wide economic depression and actual starvation on all of us. The truth is that further “economic growth” and “growing the economy” following the failed capitalistic way will destroy the planet.

So far President-elect Obama and the Democratic leadership seem to be doing a bit of quacking of their own as capitalism implodes. President-elect Obama wants the government to bail out the big three auto makers in Detroit, and seems to want to get things going again the way they were before August 2007. Do we really want to finance Detroit to build more locomotive sized SUVs and Humvees? Do we really want to stimulate the construction industry to build more over-priced housing subdivisions that require 50 to 60% of a buyer’s income to finance on long term loans? Do we really want to restore the real estate bubble? The Silicon Valley bubble? Do we really want to give public money to Wall Street’s investment banks to encourage them again to loan money? Loan money to do what? Use the money to do what? Do we want to give Wall Street public money with no conditions, no oversight, and no real controls whatever? President-elect Obama and the Democratic leadership have done exactly that. The fact is that capitalism was obviously in deep trouble prior to August 2007.

There are no constructive creative ideas for dealing with the current crisis coming from the left either. For example the editors of the respected socialist journal, Monthly Review, write in a November editorial: “It is not our job to fix their (capitalistic) system.” So, Monthly Review editors, whose job is it? Who will come up with the ideas that will get us from where we are to where we need to be for a sustainable civilized existence?

We still have the necessary building blocks to maintain a sustainable civilization:

In President Obama we have a towering intellect with inner security, calm pragmatic judgment and a compassionate heart as the new leader of the free world.

This President has the enthusiastic support of voters in the US and people everywhere on the planet.

Although the implosion of capitalism has eliminated many of our jobs and will eliminate many more, we are all anxious and willing to work.

We all have human needs for health care, housing, clothing, a stable food supply, energy, safe bridges and levees, truthful sources of information, and leisure time.

We care about each other. We are willing to work cooperatively together, and to care for each other, to meet our needs.

We are willing to petition, march, rally, and organize between elections to support true leaders and to make sure that our needs are met.

Given that capitalism has imploded, what ideas can we rally around? What can we demand of President Obama?

We can demand a permanent public planning agency something like the War Production Board of World War II staffed with pragmatic, non-ideological, public spirited, bright persons who are willing to direct lending and production to those sustainable human needs that we share. If Detroit should not make SUVs, what should it make?

We can demand that our government provide us with security that we will all have nutritious food no matter what. Many citizens do not now have that peace of mind and some are buying guns to protect themselves from hungry mobs. Although we hope and pray that farmers will continue to grow food at a profit, and truckers will distribute the food at a profit, there may be a total collapse of the profit system, as some economists predict. Hence, we demand that our government have an alternate plan to hire farmers to grow food and to hire truckers to deliver it if necessary. We must terminate our unthinking worship of capitalism. We must not make the mistake of Franklin Roosevelt who ordered the killing of pigs when thousands were hungry in order to restore profit making for farmers.

We can demand that the government stop relating to us as if we were only consumers, and meet our deep need to be producers and creators with a decent share of the income from our production.

We can demand that our government become our bank, our lending agency of last resort, to finance small businesses and cooperatives that produce products and services that meet our needs. We can demand that the Federal Reserve Bank, controlled by private bankers, be abolished.

We can demand that our government become our employer of last resort. If, for example there are no doctors willing to meet our health needs at a price we can afford, let our government subsidize medical schools and hire doctors and physician’s assistants to serve us.

We can demand that our government make available to us radio and TV frequencies so that we can discuss our needs and solutions with each other and with our elected representatives, and so that our President has a means free of the dead hand of capitalist ownership to report to us about how he is implementing our demands and our needs. We can reinstate the “fairness doctrine” and implement the true purposes of the Federal Communications Act to foster public enlightenment, and to provide the complete and accurate information that we need to govern ourselves.

We can and should tax the extreme wealth and income at the very top of our society. It is the only source of funding available to do what needs to be done. It is not only because “it is unjust for some people to have more than they need when others are needy,” but because the wealthy have hugely profited at our expense because of recent policies. We should studiously avoid bailing out the wealthy and their failed institutions and ideas. David Chandler, a California Quaker and businessman has calculated the wealth now held by the top 1%: It is as much wealth as all that we at the bottom 95% own. Most of us do not know about the immense total wealth held by the wealthiest 1%. It is a well kept secret. It is at least $13 Trillion, and that estimate is conservative and does not count secreted wealth. This $13 Trillion is held by 30 thousand people. These 30 thousand hold as much wealth as 300 million of us. If we stack up $100 bills, $1,000 stack would be a stack between ¼ inch and ½ inch high. A million dollar stack would be 39 inches high. A billion dollar stack would be 3280 feet high or 6/10 of a mile. A trillion Dollar stack would be 621 miles high. $13 Trillion would be a stack over 8000 miles high. See http://lcurve.org/

Free of the propaganda coming from the top 1%, we can evaluate the power and numbers of “terrorists,” and make a determination as to whether there are less expensive and more effective ways such as effective police work and negotiation, to deal with them rather than a permanent planet-wide war.

We must halt all public financial support of capitalism and capitalists. Let capitalists stand or fall on the true principles of capitalism without public subsidy, and without “socialism for the rich” or “military Keynesianism.” We need not let capitalism take us humans and civilization down with it.

November 20, 2008

Douglas R. Page, Tucson, AZ

dougpage2@earthlink.net http://www.thenewliberator.blogspot.com/

PRESIDENT OBAMA NEEDS OUR HELP

2008-11-09T12:16:00.003-07:00

REVERSING THE SENATE'S ARROGANT POWER GRAB

A Focus for a March to Save Ourselves from Disaster

INTRODUCTION

President Obama cannot do it all by himself. He needs our organizing ability and help to accomplish what he has promised.

In 1993 under far less dangerous circumstances, Republicans and Wall Street used the Senate filibuster to block President Clinton’s proposed Economic Stimulus Package. With the even more bitter partisan divisions and profound ideological conflicts now existing, President Obama and we voters will again have to deal with a filibuster by Republican Senators trying to defeat such a stimulus package. There can be no relief for us, no change, and no reform so long as the Senate filibuster requiring a supermajority of 60 votes remains.

THE SENATE FILIBUSTER UNCONSTITUTIONALLY OBSTRUCTS OUR SOVEREIGN VOTING POWER

The Senators themselves do not deny that their maintenance of the 60 vote supermajority requirement is unconstitutional. In 1993, when the Senate first used the filibuster as a partisan tactic to defeat President Clinton’s Economic Stimulus Package, I filed suits in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against all 100 Senators seeking a Judicial ruling that the maintenance of this Rule by the Senators violated my sovereign voting rights in that it unconstitutionally diluted my fractional share of sovereign voting power, and the voting power of the majority of sovereign voters in the US of which I was a part.[1] I relied on the great “one man, one vote” decisions of the Warren Court.

This was the response of the Senators:

1. The 100 Senators unanimously directed the Senate Legal Counsel to oppose my claim. In practical effect, the Senators arrogantly denied that voters were sovereign, and by implication, claimed that they the Senators were sovereign. Not a single Senator dissented.

2. The Senate Legal Counsel filed a written response in the District Court and did not deny my claim that Senate Rule XXII was unconstitutional. This is significant because of the legal doctrine that a fact set forth in a Plaintiff’s claim that is not denied shall be deemed admitted by the Defendant Senators. So the Senators themselves admitted that Senate Rule XXII requiring a supermajority of 60 Senatorial votes was unconstitutional.

3. Our elected agents, our 100 Senators successfully and arrogantly defended the Rule on the narrow procedural ground that neither I nor even a majority of sovereign voters had “standing” to make such a claim against them in the Courts. The Senators relied on a Supreme Court case written by Justice Antone Scalia, Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife,[2] that set forth new conservative restrictions on sovereign voting citizens who sought relief in the courts against unconstitutional governmental action. The case is a right wing device to maintain the status quo and to enfeeble voters. It also violates our First Amendment right to petition the government (and hence the Courts) for a redress of grievances. Thus I was barred and we are barred from the courts from seeking validation of our own sovereignty in the governmental process.

The unanimous maintenance of Senate Rule XXII by the Senators constitutes the overthrow of our constitutional governing pattern and an overthrow of our right to govern ourselves and to guide our destiny through our elected representatives. It is a bloodless coup by the Senators, as effective as a military coup in a banana republic. Given even the normal disagreements among humans, it is impossible to muster and maintain political support for legislation or for reform by a majority of the Members of the House, the support of the President, and in addition the votes of a supermajority of 60 Senators. This Rule stands as an effective obstruction to any reform, any hope of change, and any effective governmental relief from the effects of an economic downturn.

THE SOVEREIGN VOTER CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT SET FORTH IN OUR CONSTITUTION COMPELS GOVERNING BY MAJORITY VOTE BY OUR AGENTS

Every school child knows from the Gettysburg Address, that our government is of, by, and for the people. This is not a philosophical fantasy or idealistic dream. This concept of our government received the stamp of validation by the great Chief Justice Marshall in an 1819 Supreme Court Decision.[3] We have no sovereign King. Our President is by no means sovereign. We voters are the sovereign Fourth Branch of government in our Constitutional governing process.[4] We are the bosses of our elected representatives. The elected are our agents. The Constitution expressly provides that in both the House and the Senate that “a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business.”[5]

The House of Representatives, bound by the same phrase in the Constitution, has no such filibuster rule and has functioned by vote by simple majority for over 200 years. The Senate can and should also do its business by majority rule.

Our Constitution, with its cumbersome requirement that a bill be approved by a majority of the House of Representatives, a majority of the Senate, and the signature of the President, presents difficult obstacles to any change in the status quo, and to any reform. Unfortunately we sovereign voters have this further unconstitutional obstacle. The filibuster authorized by Senate Rule XXII requires a supermajority, the affirmative vote of 60 Senators to pass any legislation,[6] and not merely a majority of a quorum.

WHY DO OUR ELECTED SENATORS MAINTAIN THE SUPERMAJORITY 60 VOTE RULE?

Senate Rule XXII gives each individual Senator immense political power to block legislation or appointments. Under Senate practice at least since 1993, there are no long speeches, no long debates, and no speeches at all.[7] A single Senator simply asks his party leader to put a “hold” on a pending proposal. The party leader and the rest of his party honor this individual request. If the proponents wish to proceed despite the opposition, the proponents must muster the support of 60 Senators. The Rule also gives overwhelming power to “special interests,” a drug company that wishes to oppose Single Payer Health Coverage, a Wall Street firm that wishes to prevent reform or an ideologue who wishes to maintain capitalism as totally unregulated. These unelected “special interests” initially need to “persuade” only a single Senator to stall the legislation, and only 41 Senators to block our majority will as manifested in the 2008 election.. This accounts for much of the gridlock in Washington. Senate Rule XXII makes it easy for unelected “special interests” to maintain the status quo even when an overwhelming majority of voting citizens vote for and desire change. While Senate Rule XXII makes it practically impossible to enact reform legislation.

All 100 Senators support Senate Rule XXII because it gives each of them immense individual power, and it provides them with campaign contributions from powerful wealthy “special interests” to finance their re-election campaigns. The Senators routinely betray a majority of the sovereign voters, violate their oaths to support and defend the Constitution, and accept money from the special interests. Even newly elected Senators support the Rule, even if they may secretly oppose it, because of their belief that they must go along with Senate tradition if they have any hope of getting the support of more senior Senators for their own proposals.

The contempt for voter sovereignty by the Senators becomes even clearer when one realizes that the Vice President and a simple majority of Senators themselves can change the rule any time they wish. This precedent was established in 1975 by Senator Mondale and other Democratic Senators following the bitter battles over Civil Rights Legislation. So frightening is the prospect that a simple majority of Senators could end the rule, that the Senators now call this possibility the “nuclear option.” The Republicans recently used this threat successfully against the Democratic Senators to persuade them to confirm extreme right wing judicial nominees.

Meanwhile those Democratic Senators who pretend that they support main stream America and the interest of “the little guy,” are really wolves in sheep’s clothing serving the interests of Wall Street... Thus Democratic Senators Schumer, Dodd, Feinstein, Biden can and other Democratic Senators can vote loyally for their Wall Street benefactors while betraying the interests of the voters who elected them.[8] Democratic Senators energetically seek to preserve the illusion among Democratic voters that Democratic Senators represent the interests of the voters and not the big banks, drug companies, and armament manufacturers.

THE LEGITIMATE ANGER AND OUTRAGE OF VOTERS ABOUT THE BAILOUT OF WALL STREET RATHER THAN MAIN STREET AND THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN PROVIDE AN OPPORTUNITY FOR EFFECTIVE ACTION

Millions of us voters are understandably angry and outraged about the Democratic Senators’ uncritical support of Wall Street and their betrayal of voters and Main Street. We have no opportunity to change things via the ballot box because both parties support the filibuster so as better to serve their Wall Street benefactors.

We voters, President Obama, and all Democratic elected officials must be empowered to deal with the effects of a serious economic downturn on all of us.

We all need to organize and lead a million man march armed with symbolic pitchforks on both the local and Washington offices of Democratic Senators, and to keep marching as long as is necessary. There are millions of angry voters near local Senatorial offices in New Jersey, Manhattan and Connecticut, Washington DC and in California’s San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. We can march against the local Senatorial offices of Senators Dodd, Schumer, Biden, and Feinstein with a focused demand:

That when the Republican Senators filibuster this badly needed legislation, that the Democratic Senators and newly elected Vice President Biden pledge to use the nuclear option to eliminate the filibuster and restore constitutional legislating by majority vote in the Senate once and for all.

That the Senators halt the useless bail out to the very interests in Wall Street that created the problem.

That the Senators support legislation that will immediately and directly help voters and Main Street without making things worse...

That the Senators pledge to fund the costs of the Stimulus Package and other necessary rebuilding by a wealth tax on the wealthiest 1%.

In order to collect the new taxes, that the Senators pledge to require IRS to use the powers of the Patriot Act and DOD and CIA computers to locate that wealth wherever on the planet the wealthy may have hidden it to achieve the following objectives:

a. To heal the damage that Wall Street has created.

b. To fund Single Payer Health Coverage for every American, to fund alternative sources of green energy, and to rebuild the infrastructure

c. To curtail the overwhelming antidemocratic political power that the wealth of Wall Street and the top 1% affords them.

Most of us do not know about the immense total wealth held by the wealthiest 1%. It is a well kept secret. It is at least $13 Trillion. How much is that? It is as much wealth as all that the bottom 95% own. This $13 Trillion is held by 30 thousand people. These 30 thousand hold as much wealth as 300 million of us. If we stack up $100 bills, $1,000 stack would be a stack between ¼ inch and ½ inch high. A million dollar stack would be 39 inches high. A billion dollar stack would be 3280 feet high or 6/10 of a mile. A trillion Dollar stack would be 621 miles high. The $13 trillion total wealth of the top 1% would be a stack of $100 bills 8073 miles high.[9] The wealth of this top 1% must be taxed in order to help us build a stable functioning community as authorized by the 16^th Amendment to our Constitution. . We have no alternative. We ordinary citizens cannot afford further taxes during this economic downturn.

A further source of funds is a stock transaction tax. A tax of one dime on every purchase and sale of stock on our exchanges would raise $52 billion per year, assuming trades of 2 billion shares per day and 260 trading days per year.[10]

We are motivated by our own need, and the desperate need of our human community. We seek Justice. As the moral philosopher Ronald Dworkin has written: “It is unjust for some to have more than they need when others are needy.” Our community is very needy and we the people must recapture our voter sovereignty.

Dated: November 5, 2008

Doug Page, Tucson, AZ dougpage2@earthlink.net

http://www.thenewliberator.blogspot.com/

[1] Page v. Robert Dole et al, DCDC No. 93-1546; Appealed to CA DC circuit No. 94-5292

See also, Page v.Robert Shelby et al DCDC No.1:97CV0068; Appealed to CADC circuit No. 98-5093

In filing and maintaining these suits at my own expense, I was encouraged by the fact that one of Washington D.C.’s most respected constitutional lawyers Lloyd Cutler had written an Op-Ed in the Washington Post setting forth the legal and constitutional reasons that Senate Rule XXII was unconstitutional. See, Lloyd Cutler. “On Killing Senate Rule XXII.” Washington Post, 3 May 1993: A19

[2] Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992)

[3] McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat 316, 403 (1819)

[4] Meikeljohn, Alexander, Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government, Harper, NY, 1948; See the Preamble to the Constitution, “We the people …do ordain and establish; See also Amendments 9 and 10, reserving powers to the people.

[5] U.S. v. Ballin, 144 U.S. 1, (1892); I.N.S. v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919, 948 and 956 (1983)

[6] Senate Rule XXII, the filibuster rule, can be found at http://rules.senate.gov/senaterules/rule22.php

[7] Bill Dauster, “It’s Not Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Washington Monthly, November 1996, page 34

[8] For example Senator Schumer recently defied the Democratic Party position and opposed and defeated a tax on stock transactions that Wall Street opposed. Senator Biden vigorously supported and still defends a draconian unfair bankruptcy bill that the big banks of Wall Street wanted.

[9] See http://lcurve.org/ created and maintained by David Chandler.

[10] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/washington/30schumer.html

ON BEING AN EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATOR OF THE TRUTH

2008-10-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

ON BEING AN EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATOR OF THE TRUTH

My Austrian born law professor Albert A. Ehrenzweig told us long ago that he could design a perfect legal system, but it would be useless unless some human community accorded it a minimum of acceptance.
This insight is especially relevant for those of us who look for root causes, who are willing to examine the defects of capitalism, or for those of us who wish to understand and act in the civic area on the principles of our spiritual traditions. Few persons wish to enter into such a discussion unless they are already knowledgeable, and in such cases one is preaching to the choir.
Holders of the truth should be neither angry nor impatient nor imperious with their truth, nor should they give up on such a human community.
A truth holder can be effective, if at all, only by being an active, visible, participating part of the human community, including family, neighborhood, church, local government, places of play and leisure, and national government. No one will ever hear his truth if he becomes a goat milking hermit.
A truth holder must keep constantly in mind a concept that E. F. Schumacher in A Guide for the Perplexed called “adequatio.” By this he meant that a truth holder can impart only so much of his truth as the listener is ready and willing to receive. Until the listener is ready and willing, no imparting of the truth is possible.
A truth holder should be confident and secure in his truth, but he must be magnanimous, caring, and understanding with those in the human community who are not yet willing to listen, and he must patiently remain a participating part of the human community. He should be self-questioning. He must be aware of his own motives and defects and his Enneagram or psychological type. He must be open to the fears, needs, biases, bigotries of others in the human community, and willing to listen, really listen! He must remain sensitive to their concerns and to their probable Enneagram types. He may be most effective by quietly raising questions instead of making dogmatic doctrinaire assertions. Truth is of no value whatever in the human community unless holders of the truth remain as available beacons to teach and to guide when people are ready to listen.

Dated: October 17, 2008

Doug Page dougpage2@earthlink.net

CURRENT POLITICAL REALITY

2008-09-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

MONEY-CONTROLLED TOTALITARIANISM POSING AS DEMOCRACY

INTRODUCTION: This observation about our current political reality was inspired by two new recent books and is my brief summary of them: Alexander J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power,The End of American Exceptionalism, and Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporate, Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. I am indebted to retired Lawrence Livermore physicist, Manuel Garcia, Jr for the concept of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex that was outlined in his article in Counterpunch on August 8, 2008 entitled “Oiling the War Machine,” http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia071112008.html

We in the US now have “totalitarianism posing as a democracy” where we voters and our political parties are allowed to have our votes and conventions, but have no power. Our belief that our “voting for the lesser evil,” may do some good about our economic problems is a naïve delusion. Liberals may be able to live with this delusion, but ordinary working class voters cannot. For them, the truth is graphic and obvious: Democrats will invariably betray them. Republicans at least let them keep their guns and their religion.
It is a delusion to believe that we govern ourselves in a government of, by, and for the people. Ours is a government of by and for corporations. The constitutional concepts of “separation of powers,” “checks and balances,” and “a nation of laws,” have been nullified by the arbitrary power of MICC as presided over by the President.
We are ruled by the MICC, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.
MICC selects, controls, and funds all elected officials including all members of Congress, the Fed and the President, including Obama and McCain. MICC just spent hundreds of billions of public money without any vote of Congress and without any votes of the taxpaying people.
The function of Congress is to provide our tax money to fund MICC, and to get its incumbent members reelected. To do this, Members, especially Democrats have to lie and promise that they will represent the little guy. Democrats invariably vote as MICC compels and betray the little guy.

Democrats can therefore not appeal to and build on the legitimate resentment of voters that their needs are not being met…can make neither a class appeal nor a so-called populist appeal. The capitalist taboo underlying the MICC prohibits that. MICC would cut off Democrats re-election money if they even spoke of this.
Since the resentment of voters is real and legitimate, the Republicans can successfully make a phony populist appeal and use code words such as calling the Democrats “elitist” and out of touch with the real problems of workers. This is the truth. Democrats are out of touch! Sarah Palin is a more authentic populist than Barack Obama!
The best example of Democratic betrayal is this: Democrats have been promising Health Coverage ever since Truman. When they do get power, their plans always include much profit for the insurance companies, and even those are not enacted. Another example is that even after 2006, Democrats continued to fund MICC’s Iraq War despite the fact that a voting majority wanted them to stop.

The function of the President is to act as CEO for MICC, the more powerful the better for MICC, MICC demands the suppression of popular will through repressive devices because
MICC seeks perpetual war and preparation for war, imperialism, and expansion of American Empire and domination of the planet as a matter of ideology and economic imperative. For those who want the economic foundation, it is through “Military Keynesianism,” public money, that MICC profits. It is also capitalism in the late stages of mutation. This domination of the planet causes deep anger and resentment among those who are dominated, and among those who do not profit. MICC thus needs repressive and invasive tools like FISA. This may account for Obama’s sudden strange support of FISA,
We voters have zero power to get the things we want through our votes. Our voting wishes are always trumped, thwarted, and negated by the bribes MICC gives back to Members of Congress for their reelections.
Every single Senator insists on maintaining the unconstitutional filibuster rule so that a 2/3 vote of the Senators is required to pass anything that the voters may want. MICC loves this because it vastly increases its power over the law making process. In reality, MICC often has to bribe only one Senator to stop legislation. Not one single Senator wishes to abolish this.
MICC owns and controls all of the mainstream media and also the liberal journals and sources such as PBS, NPR, The Nation Magazine and The New Republic. The media loyally and steadfastly supports everything that MICC wants or does. We have no sources where citizens and voters can get information that they need to govern themselves. Our meager information sources are no possible match for the powerful bullhorn of the mainstream media. MICC funds Academia through grants, endowments and jobs. Academia therefore also fails to enlighten us.

Dated: September 22, 2008

Douglas R. Page dougpage2@earthlink.net

WE MUST CROSS EXAMINE CAPITALISM OR WE FALL

2008-09-20T15:42:00.000-07:00

The powerful culture wide taboo against discussing or analyzing the dynamics of our market economy will lead to the fall of our democratic civilization. UCLA Professor Jared Diamond studied four civilizations that perished and three that survived. The civilizations of Greenland Norsemen, Mesa Verde Native Americans, Central American Mayans and Easter Island perished. The Norse settlement in Greenland perished after 400 years partly because Norsemen could not overcome their taboo against eating seal meat and fish.[1] Diamond listed two choices that those societies which adjusted and survived made while those that failed did not:

· Willingness to reconsider and change core values

· Long term planning

Our mainstream nation abides by a culture wide taboo against mentioning or analyzing the social adequacy of capitalism and its offspring of imperialism and empire. The taboo stifles discussion of a positive role for public planning. We are therefore unable seriously to reconsider and change our core values or long term public planning. We choose three current examples for the purpose of illustrating this taboo and demonstrating the danger that the taboo presents to all of us.

Retired West Point Colonel Alexander J. Bacevich, now a professor at Boston University has a new book, The Limits of Power: the End of American Exceptionalism,[2] that is an insightful analysis of the current sad state of our American democracy. A conservative, Bacevich says that we American citizens with our wish for endless consumer goods purchased on credit are the root cause of an imperial presidency and American empire that aggressively pursues the War on Terror and imperialism abroad with the uncritical support and funding of a one party congress. He says that Congress’ function is to provide the funding for this imperialism while at the same time insuring the re-election of incumbent Members.[3] Our government he says is broken and dysfunctional, and is using ineffective inappropriate military power against criminal terrorists that can only be controlled by effective police work.

Princeton professor of political science emeritus Sheldon Wolin has a very persuasive new book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianismin [4] in which he shows how the United States is becoming, if it is not already, a totalitarian state posing as a democracy. He says that corporate and state power are now one, and that we voting citizens are politically uninterested, infantilized, obedient, distracted, and divided, effectively controlled by our corporate masters, as they pursue imperialism. He says that both the media and academia are “self-pacifying” and thus are not critical of their corporate masters or our trend toward totalitarianism.

Former Vice President Al Gore has his alarming book An Inconvenient Truth [5]where he documents the current state of global warming and the danger that we are fast approaching the point of no return.

A citizen who wishes to be informed should read each of these books. They show that our planet is in peril and that our ballot box democracy is very nearly dead. Taken together, these authors give us desperately needed observations about our current environmental danger and the peril to our democracy. Each writes as if we citizens had sovereign governmental power and that we could control our politics and our environment if only we had the wisdom and the will to do so. Bacevich says the root problem is our own weakness, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled desire for consumer goods. Wolin says simply that we will have to get smarter. Wolin very accurately describes the current corporate rule and corporate control of our votes and thoughts without dealing with the dynamics of capitalism. Gore argues that we can control global warming within our market economy and still maintain material “progress.” Each writer fails to ask how we got into this condition. Each ignores root economic causes. Each falls into the trap of analyzing politics and political science separate from economics, when our plight compels that they be considered together as political economy. The analyses of these writers are typical American social science under the iron grip of the powerful taboo against public planning and criticism of our market economy. Because of this taboo these authors could not survive professionally in mainstream America if they were to talk about the root economic causes of our imperialism and our American Empire. Because of this taboo, Professor Wolin had to give a rather passive strange name to his book, “Inverted” Totalitarianism when the context suggests that he really means” Money- Controlled” Totalitarianism, or Capitalistic Totalitarianism.

Vice President Al Gore, Professor Bacevich, and Professor Wolin give us only half-truths when they fail to “follow the money,” namely to deal with the increasing wealth, power, and devastation that is generated from things as they are. Wolin’s journalists and fellow professors “self-pacify” for an important reason: They want to keep their jobs and their paychecks. Bacevich does not ask why Americans are addicted to consumer goods and credit. It of course has largely to do with incessant advertising, outsourcing of jobs, and inadequate pay. Gore does not talk about the powerful economic interests that must pursue short term profits and cannot survive by limiting carbon emissions. Each fails to ask: What caused us to get to our present plight? Who gets money and power from things as they are? Who has the money and power to prevent any reform by us voters? Who is thwarting and trumping our voting power to end the Iraq War right now? What is the effect, if any, of the vast disparity of wealth and power in the United States?

The fact is that we can understand and deal effectively with our problems only by analyzing both politics and economics, by “following the money.” As California Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh proclaimed years ago, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” For several centuries, lawyers have ferreted out the truth during cross examination of a witness by showing that he/she was “paid off,” that he/she received payment for his/her testimony. We voters, citizens, journalists, and professors must “cross examine” our market economy, our capitalism to see who is “paid off” and who thereby derives overwhelming political power. We must not allow ourselves to be deterred by hysterical charges that we are “communistic” or “socialistic.” It is not evil for members of our human community to think, plan and work together cooperatively. It is anti-intellectual simple mindedness blindly to leave our problems to the “market” for a “solution,” especially when the capitalist market is the root cause of our problems. If we are to maintain a civilized democracy and a sustainable planet, we simply cannot avoid analyzing the dynamics of capitalism. Vast institutions of wealth and political power have created and now profit from the status quo. We cannot control or curtail this anti-social power unless we know what creates it. To understand what is going on, why corporate totalitarianism is creeping over us, why we are losing our jobs and our houses and why global warming seems out of control, we must understand how our market economy works and how it interacts with our government.

Capitalism, the accurate name for our market economy must constantly move and grow, with a dynamic something like a tornado or a fast growing cancer. There never has been and there never can be a sustainable stable capitalism, since capitalism thrives on competition testing who can be the greediest and most socially irresponsible. We have never voted to choose capitalism. It is a human creation, but it grew like a fast growing cancer side by side with our self-governing political process without any input or control from the vast majority of us.

At the root of capitalism there is

PRIVATE HIRING: A private person with money hires a person without money for the lowest possible wage in order make as much profit as possible for the person who already has money. The core axiom repeated over the decades by thousands of private employers, created a small very rich and politically powerful elite group of employers[6] while it produced millions and millions of employees who remain relatively poor with no wealth or power. The employers’ imperative to get employees at the lowest possible wage lead to the closing of productive jobs in the US and the outsourcing of those jobs and production to Mexico, then to China, and then to India. We did not vote or choose to stop being producers. We do not choose or vote to become a nation of consumers... We did not vote or choose to create global warming. The dynamics of capitalism make the choice for us, and for our employers. The profits of the capitalist employers give them means to make campaign contributions to our elected officials and to lobby them so as effectively to control them. The meager wages of employees gave us at most the right to vote which capitalist money and power then trumps. Democrats are especially guilty of lying to us when they repeatedly promise to protect the “the little guy” and give him health care and then invariably vote as the drug and insurance companies demand.

This private hiring twists into

MONOPOLY: Competition among capitalist-employers inevitably leads to the elimination of small employers, to price fixing, and to a monopoly of a few large firms, with capacity to produce more than they can sell at a profit. Henry Ford recognized this characteristic in the 1920s when he unilaterally raised the wages of his employees so that they could buy his Fords. Almost all other employers pay us employees such low wages that we cannot afford to buy what we have produced. We would lose our jobs and economic depression would result if nothing was done Capitalism thus needs public money to provide the necessary purchasing power to consume the products of capitalism. We never voted that our economy based on private hiring and competition should change into monopoly.

Monopoly then swirls to

AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND CAPITALIST EMPLOYERS: Capitalism badly needs our tax money to keep going. Our Government becomes a critical component of capitalism and to an ever increasing degree, capitalism and capitalist employers control the government. We employees have less and less voting power to get what we need from our government because of the increasing power of employers’ money over our elected officials. Capitalist employers get more and more of what they want such as tax relief for the wealthy and cutting social spending for us so as to make more and more of us desperate to work for ever lower wages. We never voted for this alliance.

This moves into

IMPERIALISM: When profit making opportunities dwindle at home, capitalists, using the Government, the CIA and the Military go abroad to seek new profit opportunities, new resources, additional customers, and employees willing to work for lower wages. Capitalism at home tends to move inevitably toward capitalism abroad: an American Empire, Imperialism and sometimes War. We have never voted to send or protect capitalism in other countries.

At the same time capitalism destroys our planet home by

USING UP OIL AND RESOURCES, POLLUTION, AND GLOBAL WARMING: In its relentless search for profit, capitalist employers devour oil, minerals, timber, soil, and water, and dangerously pollute the earth and atmosphere. Good places to live, and to fish and to hunt are ruined. Al Gore fails to recognize that the dynamics of capitalism compel capitalist employers to seek profit as their sole motive lest they perish in the competition with other employers. We have never voted to plunder the planet.

Voracious capitalism moves yet again to

FINANCIALIZATION: The capitalist elite, finding too few profit making opportunities making things that humans need began increasing investment in speculation by buying, selling, and spinning off existing companies to produce the short term profit upon which the survival of capitalism depends. Capitalism, in this phase thus produces nothing new: no jobs, no food, no medical care, and no highways. It produces nothing except more profit and more political power for capitalists. We never voted for this innovation of capitalism.

Capitalists use this money and political power to create

CORPORATE STATE CAPITALISM: Capitalism mutates so as to merge corporate power with state power so that we now have corporate state capitalism whose powers are exercised solely to create socialism for the global elite at the expense and starvation of the rest of us. As we now see from the bailouts, the elite causes the government to print massive amounts of paper money to rescue the businesses of the elite. It does nothing for us except to impose the burden of taxation and inflation on us employees. We suffer the loss of our jobs, houses and things we need cost more and more, due to uncontrolled inflation. We live in a constant state fear. We are approaching what Wolin calls “totalitarianism posing as democracy.” We certainly have never voted for this.

During all of this, in order to control our thoughts, Capitalists have been creating

THE PROPAGANDA ARM OF THE CORPORATE CAPITALIST STATE: The power elite control the main sources of information that we citizens and voters need wisely to govern ourselves. They will tell us nothing about the features of capitalism that destroy both our planet and our democracy. The capitalist elite own and control all the major print and electronic media, public relations and advertising agencies. The mainstream media is owned by those who profit from things as they are, and provide uncritical support of war, imperialism, and all activities that contribute to keeping things as they are. This includes the NYT, Washington Post, PBS and NPR as well as TV and radio. The media have the power to inflame, to manipulate, to fail to cover, to deny and to ridicule. The capitalist elite thus impose the ideas, ideology and taboos that benefit the elite upon us. Through research grants and endowments, corporate capitalism controls universities and college professors and what they research and teach. It controls reporters and journalists. It controls even what we citizens think about. We thus get no information analyzing capitalism and its effects on us. We never voted that the media should have this power. The market economy at this stage makes us employees powerless, frustrated, restless, angry, and unhappy. Lacking the truth about the causes of our plight, some of us employees turn toward racism, bigotry, jingoism, evil enemies and other false solutions. There is a risk that we employees would act negatively toward the capitalist elite.

To preserve its power and privilege the Capitalist Elite moves toward

CONTROL OF ELECTIONS, DECLARATION OF MARTIAL LAW, and FASCISM WITH A FRIENDLY FEMININE FACE: The power elite entertain and divert us with a non-serious circus-like election process. The government and the capitalist elite can then ignore the plunder of our planet home, ignore our lack of jobs, ignore our hunger, ignore our illnesses, and ignore our needy old ages. We employees are in effect placed into wage slavery if we have any jobs at all. If we riot, we are placed in detention camps. If we starve nobody in control cares. If we march and protest at political conventions, we are arrested as terrorists.

THE UPSHOT OF ANALYZING POLITICS AND MONEY POWER TOGETHER

We are not yet in the final state of capitalism’s mutation, but as Bacevich and Wolin show us, we are very close. We have never voted for any of these changes in our market economy. No political movement exists to stop this final mutation. Our belief that we are governing ourselves is totally illusory. Our democracy is nearly lost. Nobody is taking any meaningful effective steps to deal with global warming. The dynamics of capitalism are ongoing. The great danger is that it will mutate into fascism. The point of following the money, and of evaluating politics and economics together is to make certain that we understand and permanently eradicate the causes of our imminent fall.

As Professor Rick Wolff wrote:

“The egalitarian… society envisioned by social democracy cannot be secured so long as it leaves in place a group of people with incentives and means to prevent that.” [7]

The “means” that Wolff is talking about is simply the profits, the money that we allow capitalists to accumulate under capitalism. The tremendous disparity between the wealth of the elite and the relative poverty of the rest of us has political consequences that we now observe. We must find a way to curb that wealth and power. Shocking as it may seem, we may have to prohibit private hiring by large employers altogether. Our democracy and our civilization cannot survive otherwise. The money of the power elite nullifies our voting power. The dynamics of capitalism are devastating our fragile planet of finite resources. Our planet simply cannot support vast accumulations of wealth and power by the few unless millions of us are to be left to starve. We must learn from; the mistake of President Franklin D. Roosevelt who brought us “band-aid” solutions for the pain of the Great Depression, but left in place an economic system founded on short term greed, and small elite with the wealth power and incentive to repeal all of his reforms. Our civilization, like the civilizations of Rome, Norse Greenland, Mayan Central America, and Easter Island will fall unless we comprehend the causes of our difficulties and expose the unrecognized dynamics of capitalism. Once we do this, we will be free to re-examine our core values like material “progress” and we can begin to plan for realistic sustainable civilized alternatives.

Dated: September 12, 2008

Douglas R. Page, a retired lawyer for unions and their members dougpage2@earthlink.net

1. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or to Survive, Viking Adult, 2004

[2] Alexander J. Bacevich, The Limits to Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. Metropolitan Books, 2008; Also discussed in interview with Bill Moyers on August 15, 2008 at http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:9NKN7uF4QWAJ:www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08152008/transcrip

[3] The vital role of Congress in supplying the funding for the American Empire is so important that Manuel Garcia Jr. calls it MICC, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. See Manuel Garcia Jr., “Oiling the War Machine,” Counterpunch, July 11, 2008, at http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia07112008.html

[4] Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, 2008, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J; See also Paul Street, “Totalitarianism: It can Happen Here,” Dissident Voice, August 23, 2008 at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/totalitarianism-it-can-happen-here/

[5] Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, Rodale Books, 2006

[6] The word “employers” should be understood to include those who invest money in the firms of employers. We consider the emphasis by some on “corporations” as the source of our trouble to be misleading in that capitalism would function much the same if corporations were abolished and all the hiring was done by individual employers or large partnerships of employers.

[7] Rick Wolff, “Today’s Haunting Specter (or What Needs Doing),” MRzine, June 6, 2007, http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/wolff060607.html

WE VOTERS CAN BREAK THE POWER OF AIPAC

2008-08-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

Recently each of the candidates for President of the US went before AIPAC, the unregistered lobby for a foreign government, Israel’s lobby in the US, and each stated that he/she would give Israel total support as a favored ally and almost anything else Israel asked for.

The spectacle each of our Presidential candidates promising to yield to the wishes of a foreign power becomes especially alarming to those of us who want peace and withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the Palestinian West Bank when one examines the past and present policy positions of Israel:

· Israel lobbied to get the United States to attack Iraq in the Gulf War in 1990

· Israel lobbied to persuade the United States to invade Afghanistan in Iraq in 2002.

· Israel lobbied to persuade the United States to invade Iraq in 2003

· Israel is at this instant lobbying to induce the US to bomb or invade Iran

· Israel lobbies against any cut in funding for the Iraq War.

· Israel lobbies against any cut in US troops in Iraq and against any timetable for withdrawal.

· Israel continues the steady addition of new Jewish settlers in the West Bank, even during peace negotiations, and after “agreements.”

· Israel opposed every two state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict so far proposed.

· Israel lobbies for ever more monetary aid, loan guarantees, and armaments for Israel

· Israel urges and compels the US to veto all UN Resolutions that require Israel to comply with International Law

· Israel opposes peace groups in the US and labels them naïve

· Israel opposes any US brokering, intervention, or even handed mediation of the conflict with Palestine

American Jewish voters do not support these objectives, but when AIPAC tells them to vote for or against a particular candidate, these Jewish voters then tend to vote as AIPAC suggests. We therefore must inform ourselves about the true extremely hawkish objectives of AIPAC. We voters who seek peace will have to investigate Zionist candidates for public office very carefully. The power of AIPAC is eroding. Time Magazine writer Joel Klein is now challenging AIPAC and its goal of attacking Iran.

We seek here to unravel and confront the complicated influences of Israel on voters. We hope voters will consider our analysis. We also seek to immunize our selves against the inevitable and false charges that we are “anti-Semitic” or that we are“self-hating Jews.”

In taking these extreme hawkish positions, Israel is politically allied in the United States with the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, the Christian Right, the Neocons, the Republicans, and Bush and Cheney. A candidate or office holder or voter thus cannot be heard to say that he/she opposes the policies of Bush and Cheney, when that same person supports Israel.

WHAT IS THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND WHERE DOES IT GET ITS POWER?

The Israel Lobby for purposes of this discussion is AIPAC, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, although there are many other satellite Jewish groups with which it works in tandem that constitute the Lobby. AIPAC is controlled by a “Gang of Four” being 3 conservative Republican hawks, Robert Asher, Edward Levy, Meyer Mitchell, and Larry Weinberg, a conservative Democrat. AIPAC’s Director is Howard Kohr, a conservative Republican. AIPAC is mainly funded by very wealthy Wall Street lawyers, stock brokers, heirs to family fortunes and real estate developers, including at least one on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans.

AIPAC gets its power by using the money of very wealthy right wing Zionist American Jews to elect or to defeat candidates for public office. In the last 25 years AIPAC has been responsible for the defeat of the following Members of Congress and Senators because they suggested even-handed treatment of Palestinians, failed to support AIPAC sponsored resolutions, or were critical of some of the acts of Israel: Senator J. William Fulbright; Senator Charles Percy; Congressman Roger Jepsen; Congressman Pete McCloskey; Congressman Paul Findley; Congressman Earl Hilliard; Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. When Adlai Stevenson III ran for Governor of Illinois after serving as U.S. Senator until 1981, AIPAC worked actively to defeat him. Elected officials are thus terrified of AIPAC. Criticism of Israel or sympathy for Palestinians has become the “third rail of American politics.” The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles in a series of articles about AIPAC dated 10-28-05 raised the question: “Who is afraid of big bad AIPAC?” and answered: “Nearly everybody.” In Congress, every person, Democrat or Republican, with one or two exceptions votes the way that AIPAC requests. AIPAC drops its financial support and supports an opponent of any elected official who seeks to oppose illegal settlements, or who seeks an even handed brokering of peace, or who supports a viable state for Palestine.[1]

Since the votes and the power of American Jews who follow the recommendations of AIPAC now affect the safety, peace and security of every human on the planet, how and what American Jews think, believe and vote becomes the business of all of us. We hope that American Jewish Voters, recognizing the failure of current policies to bring peace and security for any of us, Israelis included, will consider this analysis and critique it.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A JEW?

There are Jews of all races, and skin colors, so the Jews are technically not a race. There are atheistic Jews, so Jews do not all have the same religion. The Bible and the Torah speak of Jews as a “tribe.” Some Jews speak of themselves as a “clan.” Jews are a group of people, spread around the world, who share the following attributes:

· A Jewish mother (or a Jewish maternal grandmother)

· A shared fear, (according to Gilad Atzmon) imbedded in ritual and belief, existing for over 3000 years that Jews as a group, tribe or clan, will not survive. (Note this fear is apparently not just a fear of individual death. It is a fear that the Jewish tribe will cease to exist.) Thus to maintain the group, Jews oppose marriage with non-Jews, and keep Kosher, eating only prescribed foods and not eating forbidden foods.[2] This fear was graphically compounded by the Holocaust that added a nightmarish current reality to this long standing inner fear.

· A group memory and history of Christian hatred of Jews ever since the Crusades and of pogroms where Christians slaughtered Jews, mirrored in many Jews by a secret reciprocal hatred of Christians.

· Jews love Israel. Thus no matter what Israel does, an overwhelming preponderance of Jews love Israel. This love of Israel is at the inner subjective level of faith and of non-debatable religious belief. It is like super-patriotism. (and thus subject to easy manipulation) The maintenance of Israel has become a powerful secular religion, reinforced religiously by right wing fundamentalist Jews, by Zionists, and by those Jews who greatly profit from the market economy. This manipulation makes use the fear that Jews may not survive. It is also rooted in flat out prejudice:

· Jews believe that they are God’s “chosen people.” Thus they are “one up,” exceptional, better than, superior to, all other people on the planet. It follows that Jews tend not to believe the secular political axiom that all men are created equal nor in the religious concept that God created all people and loves all people equally.

Important comment on the foregoing characteristics of the tribe of Jews:

While it is not technically correct to call Jewish people a race, the above tribal characteristics, discrimination on the basis of tribe membership is just as evil. These discriminations are: the belief of Jews that they are chosen and superior, the evils of love of self, prejudice against others, privileges and a State for Jews only, and abuse of others such as Muslims. The very core of racism is the denial of equivalent humanity. It is thus accurate to view Israel as racist and accurate to state that Israel maintains apartheid regarding non-Jews. Israel does this as a tribe and not as a race. Many Jews do not see Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims as equally human.

THE INNER PSYCHOLOGY OF JEWS IN ISRAEL AND OUTSIDE OF ISRAEL

Someone said: “Psychology is the study of lies that we tell ourselves and others.”

Israel, AIPAC, and most Jewish people tell themselves a host of lies and Israel uses many techniques to impose these lies on us in the Western World as well.

Joel Kovel, a Jew, a former psychoanalyst, and author of many books including Overcoming Zionism[3] provides the insights that follow: Jews who love Israel inevitably have an inner conflict of the following, perhaps repressed truths:

· The basic true purpose of Israeli Zionism was and still is the capture of ever more land to be held only for Jews. This is Israel’s real policy today. It has always been governed by Zionists with this objective.

· The basic beginning truth about the state of Israel is that the land was stolen by Zionist Jews from Palestinians who had occupied the land for centuries, often using terror. Despite the ongoing Jewish obsession with being the victim of Nazi terrorism, three of Israel’s first prime ministers were themselves terrorists in the sense of having commanded major military and paramilitary operations in Palestine whose purpose was to sow a climate of fear and panic among Palestinian civilians so as to cause them to flee. These three are Menachem Begin, Ytizhak Shamir, and Ariel Sharon. These terrorists are honored by Jews. The captured land that resulted from this terror is gratefully accepted and even worshipped.

· The Jewish people accurately see themselves as having a powerful and honorable ethical tradition of loving kindness, compassion, and a “universalist” caring for all humans, not just Jews.

Most Jews thus have an inner conflict that Kovel calls a “Bad Conscience.” It is locked within, unexamined, and denied, and therefore all the more powerful. This Bad Conscience exists because of unsatisfactorily resolved conflicts in the minds of Jews.

Kovel says:

“Broadly, we see on the one side, the powerful ethical component to Judaism, and on the other, the commission of dreadful crimes, and the honoring of those who have done so. These incompatible elements need to be arranged so that the national project (of building and maintaining a Zionist Jewish State) can go forward….”

Zionist Jews “patch over” these incompatible conflicts by various untruths: lies about the origin of Israel, outright denial of historical facts, claims that the Palestinian land was unoccupied, claims that the Palestinians are evil, subhuman and undeserving, claims that God gave the land to Jews as God’s chosen people, claims that maintaining Israel is an implementation of God’s will, claims that the Holocaust justifies this permanent special treatment of Jews, claim that Jews are innocent victims of Palestinians, and a claim by Rabbi Lerner’s that the Palestinian people did not welcome Holocaust victims as they should have.

These “patch overs” do not really relieve or heal the inner conflict. The pressure and the pain of the conflict is temporarily relieved by aggression, hate, lies, denial, thinking of the victims as sub human and evil, and thinking of them as fit only to be exterminated or taken care of by Muslim nations. With these “patch overs,” there can be no mutual recognition of common humanity, no reconciliation, no forgiveness, and no “making things right.” Instead the unresolved bad conscience moves in the opposite direction toward hatred and aggression and makes things constantly worse. It creates more and more millions of Muslims and Arabs who hate Jews and hate Israel. It leads to the repetitive cycle of retaliatory suicide bombings by young women and by massive retaliatory collective hate and collective punishment by Jews

These attitudes and beliefs of human beings become especially dangerous when they are imbedded in the policies of a nation-state, Israel with its attendant flag and patriotism, a modern army, F-16 Jets and a store of 200 nuclear bombs.

Kovel says:

“Since we are talking about a moral dimension here, it is important to identify this patchwork as a species of collective conscience, that is to say a device to define, organize and guide the morality of a nation state, with its needs for legitimacy.”

Israel is desperately anxious to be seen as a legitimate democratic state at least in the eyes of its ally and patron, the United States. Its “legitimacy” is founded on lies. The United States right wing shares the same lies, so there is little hope for right winger voters. However we voters in the US who are not right wing fanatics are simply brainwashed. Israel is no more a legitimate democratic modern state that South Africa was before the end of apartheid, and no more a legitimate democratic state than was the Confederate States of America before and during the Civil War. We are also intimated by the unremitting false charges of that we are anti-Semitic and that we are self-hating Jews.

MANIPULATING FEAR IS THE MOST POWERFUL TOOL IN POLITICS

The actual processes involved in manipulating fear were brought to our attention by Thandeka who is associate professor of theology at Meadville Lombard Theological School. She wrote an article entitled ‘The Confidence Man” that appeared in the magazine Tikkun in the May/June 2004 issue. According to Thandeka, three scholars, including W. Russell Neuman, conducted studies to determine which emotional attitudes are the most powerful in politics. They found that anxiety was the most powerful determinant of how a person would vote. These three scholars wrote a book, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment published in 2000 by the University of Chicago. One of the scholars, W. Russell Neuman became an advisor to President Bush and works on information and security technology policy at the White House. According to Thandeka, it works as follows:

A controlling elite group:

1. Takes an issue that causes anxiety among some voters (Note: Like “terrorism,” 9/11 or “fear that Israel will be driven into the Sea” or fear of anti-Semitism)

2. Amplifies and augments this fear turning it into a high anxiety issue for most voters

3. Presents a candidate who guarantees hope and who promises that he will end the threat by massive military power

4. Gains new political capital from voters because of this new confidence in the leadership ability of the politician to end the threat

5. The candidate of the power elite wins the election but the candidate does not reduce the threat. He augments it because it serves him and the power elite. He then privatizes public works, give tax relief to the rich, and in all ways serves the interests of the power elite.

It is a con game on all of us played by the powerful elite.

It is apparent from the right wing manipulation of 9/11, terror, anthrax threats, airline security threats, the true facts about the Iraq War and the like that this technique is very successful in the United States. It is also apparent that right wing, fundamentalist, wealthy elite groups in Israel and the US manipulate and augment the fears of Jews to gain votes for pro war candidates in both Israel and the United States.

PRESENT DAY ISRAEL DOES NOT MERIT THE SUPPORT OF ANY PERSON WHO SEEKS PEACE

Thousands of Jews choose to leave Israel each year.

Israel is no longer a promising democratic paradise of Kibbutzim, socialist enterprises, and a state that benefits all Jews:

Education and health care have been privatized.[4]

One in three children is hungry.[5]

State owned enterprises have been privatized and nineteen very wealthy families now control Israel. As Roni Ben Efrat wrote in Challenge on May 28, 2008, Mammon now dominates Israel.

“Mammon in Zion

What’s happening today is Marx’s revenge. Marx taught us that ideologies often serve as a superstructure camouflaging the real issues. Today there is no more camouflage. Mammon stands before us nakedly proclaiming: ‘I am thy God, O Israel!’”

This is not a citation from a leftist visionary, but rather from Israeli attorney Yaakov Weinroth, interviewed by Gidi Weitz in Haaretz on May 9, 2008. Weinroth, an orthodox Jew and self-proclaimed Zionist, is famous for defending powerful figures accused of corruption. Is Zionism too, we wonder, an ideology camouflaging other interests? The evidence is now in the affirmative.

Zionists claim that Israel arose in order to provide the Jewish people with a national home. But decade by decade, it has become ever clearer that Israel is not a state of, by and for the Jewish people. It is rather a state of, by and for a sprinkling of families, 19 in all, whose income amounts to $70 billion — 88% of the national budget.

This budget is a stumbling block to the poor. All levels of education have been devastated. On the books there is universal health care, but many can’t afford to buy medicines. Israel’s socio-economic inequality, as measured by the UN Development Program’s Gini Index (0.0 = perfect equality), has worsened steadily from 0.222 in 1982 to 0.392 in 2005, making it the most unequal of Western democracies with one exception: the United States (Gini = 0.408).

Poverty is no longer confined to the jobless. The government has lowered the unemployment rate, indeed, to 7.6%, but there is a trade-off: working people make up 37% of the nation’s poor. The country’s much vaunted economic growth is way off kilter. It is high in high-tech, which supports very few, but scarce in traditional industries and services, where most people work.

This steady impoverishment of the population has not just “happened.” It has happened because of laws and decisions that sold the country’s assets to the 19 families at bargain-basement prices, all in the name of the free market. As Weinroth said to Weitz: ‘Power is no longer a separate entity. Money is power. Money rules all, it flows through every hidden vein of the society.’”[6]

CONCLUSION

The point of all of this is that Israel, like the United States, is now dominated and controlled by a tiny, wealthy, hawkish, Zionist power elite. Both countries are in the grip of an unregulated, out of control, market economy and an armaments industry. The resulting acts and policies of the United States and Israel are not in the best interests of most people. The power elite in both the United States and Israel uses its media power to augment our fears and manipulate our love of country and our patriotism so as to cause to vote for persons who will serve this wealthy power elite in both countries. Naturally, the power elite in Israel is allied with the power elite in the United States. So Israel is now very much like the United States. In both countries there once was the promise of democracy, but there is little now to “love.” Both countries seek to dominate lands outside their borders. Both countries rapidly create more and more terrorists by their acts and policies. Both countries officially and illegally use preventive war to implement their policies. Both countries use illegal torture as the cutting edge of their policies. Both countries are making millions of human beings desperately miserable. Both countries are actively increasing the danger of World War III. The truth is that Israel is not a safe haven for Jews. Israel is a lighted fuse that at worst will set off World War III, and at best will create millions of anti-Semitic Muslim terrorists who will be active for decades.

It is our hope that all of us can speak the truth about our plight and act together to solve our problems. Obtaining peace requires that we first deal with truth and with justice.

The key to all of this is that American Jews and all of us who are brow beaten and intimidated by charges of “anti-Semitism” and “self-hating Jew” must be wary of those who would manipulate our fears, must be realistic about what Israel is and what Israel is not.

We must encourage our elected officials to ignore AIPAC’s demands. We must encourage our elected officials to be even handed and creative about seeking a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. We must stand behind our officials who dare to take a position that AIPAC opposes, like Representative Jim Moran of Virginia. We must vote against AIPAC’s candidates at the polls when they try to defeat an elected official who is doing what is right.

Dated: August 2, 2008

Douglas R. Page dougpage2@earthlink.net This article can also be found on Doug’s
Blog at http://www.thenewliberator.blogspot.com/

[1] Nathan Jones, “National Capitol Insiders Vote AIPAC, Israel’s American Lobby, Second Most Powerful Interest Group in Washington,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Jan-Feb 1998, 65-66

Ari Berman, “AIPAC’s Hold,” The Nation, August 4, 2006

[2] Gilad Atzmon, “From Esther to AIPAC,” Counterpunch, March 3-4, 2007

http://www.counterpunch.org/atzmon03032007.html

[3] Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism,2007, Pluto Press, London

[4] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/975290.html

[5] http://www.israelnewsagency.com/israelpovertychildrenyomkippur4831210.html

[6] Roni Ben Efrat, “Mammon in Zion,” Challenge, May-June 2008 http://www.challenge-mag.com/en/article__211

CONNECTING THE DOTS: CONGRESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR WAR

2008-07-26T11:26:00.000-07:00

We expected a resistance and defunding of the war from the Democrats after 2006. Instead, Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, representing one of the most liberal and secure Congressional Districts in the nation, took impeachment off the table, fully funded the war meeting Bush’s every demand, and passed FISA. Despite our wishes to get out of Iraq, our “peace” candidate Barack Obama wants to make additional war in Afghanistan as well as to maintain it in Iraq. We are again betrayed, impotent and frustrated. We have no power whatever over the powerful forces that insist on more war. On Sunday in an interview by Tom Brokaw, Al Gore made the urgent point that we must do very significant things to stop Global Warming within the next decade or we will be past the point of no return. Al seemed to assume that we could do something about Global Warming, and that we somehow have effective power. We clearly do not.

There are obviously forces influencing elected Democrats that are far more powerful, influential and effective than any ballot box force that we as voters can muster. What are those forces? I for one do not wish to be victim of the “fool me once…fool me twice…” syndrome.

The clearest analysis of our current impotence was written by retired UC Lawrence Livermore physicist, Manuel Garcia Jr. in a recent Counterpunch article entitled “Oiling the War Machine.”[1] His analysis is a great starting point to connect the dots that result in our voting impotence. Garcia’s own summary which he presents as a “thesis, without any claim of proof,” is:

“A military-industrial-congressional-complex (MICC) owns the US government and runs it as a mechanism of self-aggrandizement, as evident by the proportion of tax revenues that flow into military accounts

The self-serving purpose of the MICC’s militarized foreign policy (i.e.,war) is to expand its degree of control over all others, to achieve hegemony by the US, which is simply a vehicle for this clique.

The strategy for maintaining hegemony has 3 goals: 1, to secure hydrocarbon fuels for the US military;[2] 2, to control the access to hydrocarbon fuels by all others; 3, to control the economics of energy commerce.”

This is my own augmentation of the ideas of Garcia’s thesis summary:

· MICC includes Wall Street, the mainstream media including NYT, Washington Post, PBS and NPR, the Intelligence Agencies, and Academia, since all of these institutions support the complex, almost without question.

· MICC’s purpose is perpetual war, not only to maintain itself, but to maintain our fragile capitalistic economy that is in constant danger of depression and extensive unemployment.

· Congress is a critical part of the complex since congress must fund the MICC with the needed tax money obtained from us voters.

· By “the economics of energy commerce,” Garcia is talking about capitalism and the imperative need to maintain the dollar as the dominant currency of the world. He says that maintaining the dollar as dominant currency, is in effect like owning a casino and being able to take a cut of the action.

Garcia is writing about the real workings of present day capitalism as he observes it:

“How The Racket Is Set Up.

The owners of the dollar capitalist system use the power of the US government to extract wealth from the world.

The purpose of US military power is to keep other nations in the economic corral defined by the US dollar capitalist system. The military achieves this purpose by controlling as many of the source regions and trade routes of the fossil hydrocarbon fuels trade as possible. Control can be exerted by posing a credible threat: subsidizing Israel, Navy task forces in the Persian Gulf, overseas military bases and carefully placed missile defense radars; and control can be overt, as with the occupations of Iraq and Okinawa.

The economic cycles within the US corral are constructed to produce profits to the owners of the dollar capitalist system. Nations and populations that seek to leave the corral and cycle their natural wealth through non-dollar and non-capitalist economic cycles, to further their own domestic development, are seen as losses to the wealth extraction expectations of the MICC, and worse still as bad examples that could incite further rebellion, inspiring other client states to leap over the corral fence. These "bad apples" are subjected to threats (of increasing severity as they are decreasingly powerful), and in some cases overt aggression, in efforts to return them to their assigned roles in this system of wealth extraction.

The US dollar is a fiat currency backed by the threat of military force. Our Legions roam the Earth and everywhere our paper is accepted in exchange for tribute in the forms of natural resources and debt forbearance. The Arabs send us oil, the Central Americans send us coffee and bananas, the Chinese absorb our war indebtedness and shelter it as their savings account. Those who deny value to our currency do so at their peril, witness Iran, and recall the hostility to the former Communist bloc. Some imagine China has power over the US because it holds such a large quantity of US dollars, the stored monetized equivalent of the collective output of a vast and deeply exploited labor force. These dollars were exchanged for the gargantuan torrent of goods poured down the maw of American consumption. But it is China that is bound. If they were to withdraw their endowment of value to their US paper, by dumping US dollars on currency markets, they would only precipitate a collapse of the US dollar and thus simultaneously wipe out their own savings (and their prime export market). The Chinese people have had enough of a taste of money these last thirty years, even if at a modest level for most, that they are not prepared to go back to an agrarian Third World national lifestyle just to accommodate the political gesture of bankrupting the US currency. They would revolt, and this is far too great a threat to the Chinese Communist Party, the MICC of China, to risk provoking. So the US MICC is reassured that its bastard, American war debt, will be lovingly nurtured in its Chinese foster home.

… So, is the Iraq War a Peak Oil war, a resource-grab because of diminishing supply?, or is it a "favor to Israel" war engineered by an Israel Lobby, which must then be assumed to have controlling power in the US? The Iraq War is neither a simplistic "oil war" nor a simplistic "favor to Israel war." It is both an oil war and a favor to Israel because each of these is a contributing factor of this particular war to the larger purpose, the expansion of US MICC control over global energy resources and trade. The Iraq War is an attempt to increase political control over economic rivals by exercising superior military power.

Military control, over global energy resources and energy commerce, creates political power over economic rivals.

…. Within the MICC, the 2008 election is a contest between Barack Obama of the Democratic Party, and John McCain of the Republican Party, to determine who should take over the management of the unchanging prime directive. Each of the two potential executives will try to convince members of the MICC that they have the better business plan to achieve the goal they all agree upon: MICC world hegemony. Here, the Israel Lobby is seen as a constituency within the MICC. Because the management of the public mind for social control is now one of the major assignments of the national chief executive, and Barack Obama has demonstrated a flair for this, …, Obama is presently favored by popular opinion within the MICC. …”

(Emphasis Added by Doug Page. Obama is fully controlled by MICC, as is Congress, as is the Democratic Party.)

HOW DOES MICC MAINTAIN ABSOLUTE CONTROL OVER OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS NO MATTER WHAT A MAJORITY OF US VOTERS WANT?

MICC maintains its grip on Congress by bribes, euphemistically called “campaign contributions.”

The profits from oil, arms manufacture are immense. We know that money is “the mother’s milk of politics.” MICC gives members of Congress enough money to induce them to overlook the wishes of voters.

Our market economy is extremely fragile, vulnerable to a major depression, and is the source of our jobs for which we are totally dependent for our survival.

Despite tax breaks and concession, little or no regulation, and massive public spending, Capitalism is extremely weak and fragile, on the precipice of a major depression. The domination of our paper currency is maintained by existing and threatened military force. Forcing capitalists to halt CO2 emissions would bring us into a deep depression. Already existing levels of joblessness would become much worse. The fact is that we are in big trouble under existing status quo assumption and ideology, and there is neither political knowledge nor political will to change them. There are no plans on the shelf for sustainable, stable alternatives. Nobody wants to face the fact that capitalism is in death throes. Every individual, every culture and nation is the Western World is dependent for daily survival on the existing status quo and war. We cannot risk any change that might cause the loss of our jobs.

Senate Democrats, in secret contempt of voters, and in violation of the Constitution, intentionally maintain Senate Rule XXII thus making it impossible for Congress to implement majority will of the voters.

The Senate maintains a formal rule, Senate Rule XXII that requires the votes of 60 Senators, far more than the “majority of a quorum” to end debate and bring a nomination or proposed legislation before the full Senate for action.

There also exists in the Senate a procedure and a precedent for bringing a matter up for vote by the full Senate by vote of a simple majority of a quorum to end a so called “filibuster.” This procedure nullifies Senate Rule XXII. Most recently, it was the Republicans who threatened to use this Nuclear Option. The Democrats wanted to maintain the rule requiring 3/5 of the full Senate or 60 votes to cut off debate and to bring a matter up for hearing so badly that they yielded to Republican demands. Senate Rule XXII requiring the affirmative vote of 60 Senators to bring a matter up for hearing by the full Senate violates the Constitution which states in Article I, Section 5:

“…a majority of (the members of the Senate) shall constitute a quorum to do business.”

The House, governed by the same provision, has always cut off debate by vote of a simple majority. Senate Rule XXII thwarts majority rule in the United States, and requires a supermajority of 60 Senators to stop debate so as to be able to pass legislation. Our nation is polarized, almost equally divided on most issues. Because of this Rule, voluntarily maintained by all Senators, the will of a simple majority of voters cannot be implemented by Congress. We cannot get peace. We cannot stop funding the War. We cannot get fair taxes. We cannot get health care. This rule makes it far easier for MICC to control Congress and to ignore majority will of the voters. Ordinarily MICC thus has to bribe one Senator to stop legislation,[3] and if there is much public concern about particular legislation, MICC has only to bribe 41 Senators.

In 1993, Senate Rule XXII was used by Republican Senators, for the first time in Senate history, as a partisan tactic to obstruct majority will.[4] This writer, a retired lawyer, acting as a voting citizen and seeking effective voting power for his vote and the votes of other Democrats, filed suits against all 100 Senators seeking a formal Declaration of the federal court that Senate Rule XXII was unconstitutional.[5] All 100 Senators, including my own two California Senators, on two separate occasions, voted to have the Senate Legal Counsel appear in Court to defend the Rule. The Senators did not deny that the Rule was unconstitutional, and simply relied on an arbitrary rule established by Justice Scalia that the federal courts could deny “standing” to a voting citizen to bring such a suit. Under this standing rule, the Court can arbitrarily decide what it will hear and what it will not hear. So the United States Supreme Court as well as the Senate is determined to thwart majority rule of voters in the United States and to support MICC.

The MICC controlled major media that fully support MICC and deprive American voters of alternate views, real analysis, and the truth.

I consider this point to be self evident to those interested in the rest of this analysis. We need only remember the recent history of the New York Times in its enthusiastic, uncritical, un-analytical reporting of the War in Iraq.

E. AIPAC and the votes of most American Jews support MICC.

Israel is MICC’s largest military base in the Middle East. For reasons associated with the Holocaust and a form of post traumatic stress syndrome, American Jewish voters love Israel. They deny or ignore the fact that MICC uses Israel, Israelis, and American Jews as its capo. Jews world wide are vulnerable to hawk stimulated PR that the existence of Israel is threatened. The real rulers of Israel are right wing hawks, allied with right wing hawks and MICC in the US. Israel uses its Lobby, AIPAC to corral the votes of 5 million American Jewish Democratic voters to support MICC.

F. The influence of dope profits resulting from military operations covertly laundered into our economy and used for campaign contributions.

We remember from the days of Iran Contra and Oliver North that dope running and dope sales were an important component of our involvement in Nicaragua. Vice President Cheney and other persons involved then, are in power today. We know that profits from heroin and cocaine are immense. Who gets that money? Where does it go? We know that that money is laundered and invested somewhere. We can know little else for certain. There are some important clues:

According to Peter Dale Scott, where ever the US has gone for oil whether in Indo China, Columbia, or Afghanistan, the US has also been covertly involved in the dope trade.[6]

Reuters reported on June 26, 2008:[7]

“Narcotics supplies have increased sharply in parts of Afghanistan and Colombia where insurgents are in control, helping them fund their activities, the United Nations said on Thursday.
While cultivation of the opium poppy stabilized or dropped in many parts of Afghanistan, five southern regions controlled by Taliban militants produced enough poppy to double the world's opium output between 2005 and 2007, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in its World Drug Report 2008.

On the other side of the world in Colombia, coca cultivation rose by 27 percent in 2007, though coca leaf and cocaine production were concentrated in just 10 of the country's 195 municipalities, the Vienna-based UNODC said.
Afghanistan remained the world's top heroin producer last year while Colombia was the foremost producer of cocaine.”

Afghanistan produces 95% of world’s opium as of 2007[8]

UN Report shows Western Europe cocaine use is high.[9]

Michael C. Ruppert wrote in 2004:

“From 1994 to1999, during US military intervention in the Balkans where, according to the Christian Science Monitor and Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Kosovo Liberation Army controls 70 percent of the heroin entering Western Europe, Cheney’s Brown and Root made billions of dollars supplying US troops from vast facilities in the region. Brown and Root support operations continue in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia to this day.”[10]

G. Democrats lack a sufficient majority since many Blue Dog Democrats are really hawkish Republicans

We have forgotten that the Democratic Party has always included hawkish right wingers, some of them racists. We used to call them “Southern Democrats,” but not all of them were in the South. The racists have left the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans. We are left with Blue Dog Democrats who steadfastly vote with the Republicans in support of MICC.

H. The total absence of a moral compass in American politics.

The MICC has manipulated and exaggerated the dangers in the world so as to increase our fear, reduce our capacity for calm and moral judgment, and has unleashed the hate of others, the patriotic nationalism, the lies, and the suppression of dissent that constitute “the dogs of war.” It is now inconceivable that the US could hold a War Crimes Trial as we did following WWII. It is the US that is now guilty of war crimes. The US and its ally Israel now torture captured individuals and engage in preventive war as a matter of course. The US no longer pretends to care about people outside its borders nor the poor and middle class people in the US. We no longer attempt to put ourselves in the shoes of others. We do not believe that all men are created equal. We no longer care about the moral axiom that it is wrong for some to have more than they need when others are needy. “Evil is the absence of empathy.”[11]

HOW DID CAPITALISM AND OUR DEMOCRACY GET OUT OF CONTROL SO AS TO MUTATE INTO A PERPETUAL WAR MACHINE?

Capitalism is fundamentally in conflict with voter controlled democracy. Capitalism’s power depends on its money to bribe elected officials, whereas democracy’s power is dependent on majority will of voters. The explanation starts with private hiring for the lowest wage possible in order to make as much profit as possible. This leaves some people unemployed without money to buy. Even in periods of full employment, employees are not paid enough to be able to buy all that capitalism produces. So capitalists shut down production periodically and a depression results. Capitalists tend to join together in monopoly to keep prices up. This makes things worse. Meanwhile, the accumulating money of the employers and those who invest with them, results in more and more political power and capitalists are able to get more and more public tax funds to keep things going in building highways and dams or in producing armaments. Capitalists then venture overseas seeking profit making opportunities, cheap labor and resources. They run into conflict with other capitalists from other nations seeking the same things. They call on the government for more armaments and for use of those arms abroad. Capitalists get richer and richer and use their money and power over the government to get more and more armaments and more protection abroad. Meanwhile, voter employees are staying even just surviving with their votes. Capitalism mutates into corporate state capitalism and finally into a political economy dominated by MICC whose purpose is perpetual war.[12]

Dated: July 26, 2008

Douglas R. Page, Tucson, AZ dougpage2@earthlink.net

[1] Manuel Garcia Jr, “Oiling the War Machine, Counterpunch July 11, 2008 http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia07112008.html

[2] Maintaining fuel for the military is apparently a top Bush policy. Bush until recently continued to purchase 750,000 gallons of oil per week for the Elk Hills military oil storage facility. Bush did this despite the escalating price of gasoline and Bush also ignored pleas to release some of the stored oil to hold down prices. Michael Hudson, “How Bush has Pushed up Oil Prices,” Counterpunch, June 16-30, 2008, page 1.

[3] A single Senator can now place a “hold” on a nomination or on proposed legislation. His political party then backs him, and blocks a hearing without long speeches. “No longer does a Senator hold the floor for long impassioned speeches. Now they log their filibusters with the leadership, and the Senate pretends to hold them. Bill Dauster, “Its Not Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Washington Monthly, November, 1996, p.34.

[4] 51 Congressional Quarterly 907,908 (April 10, 1993)

[5] Page v. Dole, Civ. Action No. 93-1546 (JHG)(D.D.C. August 18, 1994)

Page v. Shelby, Civ. Action No. 1:97CV00068 (D.D.C. January 13, 1997)

[6] Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 2004,, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc, Oxford, England

[7] http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USN25191109

[8] http://www.dawn.com/2007/08/21/top15.htm

[9] http://209.85.215.104/search?q=cache:F4uaHppHy0EJ:www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2006/unisnar264.html+afghanistan+cocaine+dollars&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=firefox-a

[10] Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, New Society Publishers, 2004, page 71

[11] Ernest Partridge, “Evil as the Absence of Empathy,” Counterpunch, July 26, 2008, who apparently got this idea from Dr. Gustav M. Gilbert, a psychologist hired by the US to study the minds and motivations of Nazi War Criminals.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/evil-as-the-absence-of-empathy/

[12] For more complete analyses of the dynamics of our market economy, see the author’s blog at http://www.thenewliberator.blogspot.com/

A SHORT VERSION OF WHY CAPITALISM IS FAILING US

2008-07-23T16:16:00.000-07:00

To understand what is going on, and why we are losing our jobs and our houses and why global warming seems out of control, we must understand how our market economy, also called capitalism, works and how it interacts with our government.

As Doug Page, a retired union lawyer sees it:

Capitalism, the accurate name for our market economy, is constantly moving and growing, with an inner dynamic something like a tornado or a fast growing cancer. There never has been and there never can be a sustainable stable capitalism, since capitalism thrives on competition among those who can be the greediest and most socially irresponsible.

IT STARTS WITH THIS:

PRIVATE HIRING A private person with money hires a person without money for the lowest possible wage, in order make as much profit as possible for the person who already has money. The core formula, repeated over the decades by thousands of private employers, creates a small very rich and politically powerful elite group of employers while it produces millions and millions of employees who remain poor and never get wealth or power.

This twists into

MONOPOLY. Competition among capitalist-employers inevitably leads to the elimination of small employers and to a monopoly of a few large firms, with capacity to produce more than they can sell at a profit. They pay us employees such low wages that we cannot afford to buy what we have produced. We would lose our jobs and economic depression would result if nothing was done. Capitalism thus needs public control of monopoly and public money from taxing employees for stimulation to get things going again

This swirls into.

AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND CAPITALIST EMPLOYERS. Capitalism badly needs our tax money to keep going. Our Government becomes a critical component of capitalism and to an ever increasing degree, capitalism and capitalist employers control the government. We employees have less and less voting power to get what we need from our government.

This moves into

IMPERIALISM. When profit making opportunities dwindle at home, capitalists, using the Government, the CIA and the Military go abroad to seek new profit opportunities, new resources, additional customers, and employees willing to work for lower wages. Capitalism at home tends inevitably toward capitalism abroad: Imperialism and sometimes War.

At the same time capitalism is destroying our planet home by

USING UP OIL AND RESOURCES, POLLUTION, AND GLOBAL WARMING. In its relentless search for profit, capitalist employers devour oil, minerals, timber, soil, and water, and dangerously pollute the earth and atmosphere. Good places to live, and to fish and to hunt are ruined.

Voracious capitalism moves yet again to

FINANCIALIZATION. Around 1980, The capitalist elite began increasing investment in speculation to make profit by buying, selling, and spinning off companies to produce the short term profit upon which the survival of capitalism depends. Capitalism, in this phase thus produces nothing that humans need, no food, no medical care, and no highways; It produces nothing except more profit and more political power for capitalists.

Capitalists use this money and political power to create

CORPORATE STATE CAPITALISM. Capitalism has mutated so as to cause the merger of corporate power with state power so that we now have corporate state capitalism whose powers are exercised solely to create socialism for the global elite at the expense and starvation of the rest of us. The elite causes the government to print massive amounts of paper money to rescue the businesses of the elite. It does nothing for us except to impose the burden of taxation and inflation on us employees. We suffer the loss of our jobs and things we need cost more and more, due to uncontrolled inflation.

During all of this, in order to control our thoughts, Capitalists have been creating

THE PROPAGANDA ARM OF THE CORPORATE CAPITALIST STATE. The capitalist elite owns and controls all the major print and electronic media, public relations and advertising agencies. The capitalist elite thus imposes the ideas and ideology that benefit the elite upon us. It controls even what we think about. We get no information analyzing capitalism and its effects on us.

This market economy at this stage makes is employees restless, angry, and unhappy. There is a potential that we employees would act negatively toward the capitalist elite. To prevent this, the Corporate Capitalist State moves toward:

CANCELLATION OF ELECTIONS, DECLARATION OF MARTIAL LAW, FRIENDLY FASCISM, WITH A DICTATOR. Thus the government and capitalism can ignore the plunder of our planet home, ignore our lack of jobs, ignore our hunger, ignore our illnesses, and ignore our needy old ages. We employees are in effect placed into wage slavery if we have any jobs at all. If we riot, we are placed in detention camps. If we starve nobody in control cares.

July 19, 2008

Douglas R. Page, Tucson AZ dougpage2@earthlink.net