Salvaging the American Spirit from the Smoldering Ruins
Salvaging the American Spirit from the Smoldering Ruins
The still, deep-running waters of the American Spirit should somehow be kept flowing beneath the surface, so that there survives a reservoir of ideas for future generations to draw upon when the time comes for them to pick up the pieces and try again
[See also, Baltimore B-Note at Reality Sandwich]
For all my fiery, unheeded oratory about why there was a good reason not to vote, I ended up with a ballot in my hand anyway. My car has a history of driving me places without my consent, and it drove me to the polls on election day. I suppose I was hoping I'd find an Independent running for dog-catcher or something but, alas, there were no local races, only statewide offices up for grabs, featuring nothing but the usual, hermetically-sealed Demopublican action figures. So I wrote in Green Mel Packer for U.S. Senate, Republican Sam Rohrer for Governor, and myself for Congress and State Representative.
There was, finally, a Democrat called Tom Conners running against the disease-riddled "Shuster dynasty" for Congress. Apparently, Conners went to all the trouble to get his name on the ballot, only to have it appear a week later on an FBI missing persons list, where it remains to this day. There wasn't even a Democrat running against Republican State Representative Todd Rock. Oh well, that's politics, Pennsylvania-style. I would run for State Rep myself in 2012, but with my checkered past, foul mouth, and the near universal disdain people have for me and my opinions, it would probably be a gigantic waste of time. I might do it anyway, just for shits and giggles.
I would, at this time, like to congratulate Tea Party imposter Pat "Stick It" Toomey forshaving off avictory over Democratic Congressdroid Joe Sleazestack in the U.S. Senate contest. As it turns out, Joe's hypogonadism in forcing Mel Packer off the ballot didn't really pay off. As I suspected, he didn't need Packer on the ballot to lose, he just needed himself. Don't let it get you down, Joe. Just pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go get that corporate lobbying job that's waiting for you on Wall Street. I'd also like to congratulate Tom Corbett, the other half of the 2-for-1 Tea Party Imposter Set,for his veritablefive-finger death punch onDemocratic embarrassmentDan Onorawhatever, in the race to replace outgoing Governor Edward G. "Fast Eddy" Rendell.
In all fairness to Big Ed, he ranks pretty high on my list of the Top Ten Least Pathetic Democrats because he does, on the rarest of occasions, sneak a decent move in under the radar, such as his recent public expression of exasperation over the revelation that state law enforcement officials included Ron Paul supporters and people who utter the phrase "U.S. Constitution" on a watchlist of potential home-grown terrorists. I hope Rendell gets that all straightened out before he vacates 2035 North Front Street, otherwise I have a cot with my name on it at Guantanamo.
It's been over for quite a while now, but this seems as good a time as any to announce the official death of the First American Experiment. For one election too many now, the American electorate has chosen to ignore the fact that their entire political system--hopelessly and utterly poisoned by private money and useless ideologies--is an abjectly corrupt and wholly-owned subsidiary of the global loan sharking industry. In addition to bringing us one illegal and undeclared war-for-profit after another, the most glaring side-effect of this dark reality is the U.S. national debt.
The GAO's laughably low estimate of $13.5 trillion is, at 60% of GDP, probably already unpayable in any conventional monetary terms. If I read my Econ 101 book correctly 27 years ago, this means that if the foreign-owned banks who enable our militarized corporate welfare-state decided to call in a balloon payment this very moment, America would be forced to relinquish six-tenths of its productive capacity--labor, resources, and physical plant--to them. How any rational person can look at the GAO's (absurdly underestimated) debt assessment without suffering at least the initial pangs of vertigo is beyond my comprehension.
But, of course, the official figure is a joke. Besides undoubtedly being a consummate example of creative accounting in and of itself, it doesn't make any allowances for our future obligations to Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements for an aging population. More importantly, it also doesn't encompass any projected costs for all the "stimulus" packages, corporate bailouts, Federal Reserve "quantitative easing," and wars that are certain to come. When all these factors are injected into the debt quotient, the real amount that American taxpayers and their children will owe the global banking syndicate is virtually incalculable, although I've seen figures as high as $200 trillion.
Speaking of "quantitative easing," the Federal Reserve Bank of the U.S., the American branch of Loan Sharks International LLC, has just announced its intention to purchase $600 billion worth of new U.S. Treasury bonds between now and next summer, allegedly to keep interests rates low and encourage more lending, thereby allegedly jump-starting the stalled alleged recovery. Of course, most mainstream news reports make it sound like the Federal Reserve is doing us all a big solid, but what they fail to clarify is that it is 600 billion more dollars that American taxpayers now owe the counterfeiters at the Federal Reserve. Just tack that on to the $13.5 trillion, or don't bother. It makes little difference at this point.
But while the mockingbirds in the corporate-owned media are not adequately representing the bond purchase for what it really is, even initial Associated Press reports openly question the reasoning behind such a move, given that interests rates are already at historic lows, and real bank liquidity at historic highs thanks to the bailouts, without having spurred any increase in lending. When even the press release regurgitators at AP doubt the efficacy of this lastest round of "quantitative easing," then it's reasonable to speculate that the Fed's decision has some far less noble motivation than rescuing America from of its eddy down the proverbial economic shitter.
In addition to setting the Federal Reserve up as saviors from the very mess they and their kind purposely created, it has the added benefit of convincing middle-class Americans to keep pumping their life savings into Wall Street, where it will be siphoned away again by the financial elite in the next engineered crash. America's financial markets remind me of the last days of Leonid Brezhnev, whose acolytes had to prop him up before throngs of dead-eyed Soviet citizens with two-by-fours. The Fed's $600 billion Treasury bond purchase is just another two-by-four.
The way it works (really!) is that the privately-owned, thoroughly un-American, and completely unfederal Federal Reserve-- to whom the U.S. Congress illegally abdicated it's constitutional duty to coin currency and direct the nation's monetary policy almost 100 years ago--creates money out of thin air, with no collateral necessary and at absolutely no cost to themselves, then lends it to the American people at interest. Because the Federal Reserve is the nation's supreme banking authority (or just the supreme authority period)--answerable to no American governing body, including the White House and Congress--creating new money is literally as simple as the Fed instructing one of its humble database developers to add a few zeros to its own balance and click the Submit button.
Since the newly-minted digital money is counterfeit, the Federal Reserve has everything to gain and nothing to lose by lending it to you and me at amounts they know we can never pay back in kind, secure in the knowledge that they'll get their pound of flesh in far more lucrative and insidious ways. If not you, then your children will eventually have their 401ks and IRAs confiscated, be forced to work for pennies on the dollar with no benefits or safety assurances, and have their meager wages devoured by all manner of taxation without representation (income, payroll, sales, carbon, oxygen, VAT, and any other kind of tax the warlocks of international finance can conjure up in their cauldron of economic terrorism). It's the most elementary, and yet unquestionably the most brilliant, scam in human history. And you and I have spent our lives bent over screaming to these anonymous money masters, "Thank you sirs, may we have another!", because we've been successfully indoctrinated to believe that in order to have "a life," one must have "stuff."
Today's national debt probably lurks somewhere between $14.1 trillion and $200 trillion, but however you slice it, the United States of America is, per capita, the most bankrupt country in the Milky Way. We cannot pay the transnational bankers what we owe them in the same fashion a credit-worthy borrower would--in reliably consistent monthly installments that steadily reduce the balance. We will, instead, have to pay them the same way the Third World pays them, and the Europeans will soon have to start paying them--in blood, sweat, and tears. The only reason the U.S. isn't already swimming in the same soup with the Greeks and the French is because the U.S. dollar is still the world's reserve currency. Without that protection, America's precarious AAA credit-rating would be burnt toast. And with the cries from China, Russia, Brazil, and the Eurozone for a new world reserve currency growing ever louder since 2008, it appears an end to our preferred-borrower status is well-nigh upon us.
Thomas Jefferson forewarned us about our current predicament when he said, "If the American people ever allow private banks to control issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
James Madison concurred with, "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance."
Abe Lincoln put in his two pennies with, "Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people [God, gays, and guns] until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Even the original Traitor-in-Chief, Woodrow Wilson, lamented after having signed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world, no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
So let it be written, so let it be done.
When I say that the First American Experiment is dead, I don't mean that there will no longer be a geographical region that calls itself the United States of America. That geopolitical aberration will probably continue thrashing about in its feverish, pre-mortem desperation for decades to come, leaving as much human agony and carnage in its wake as it possibly can as the world's premiere Corporate Mercenary-for-Hire. What I do mean, in the simplest possible terms, is that the U.S. debt is now so astronomically high that there is no conceivable means of making good on it that would allow us to continue to have a truly sovereign, independent government.
In lieu of payment, our executive and legislative branches will be forced to concede their decision-making powers on all the most crucial economic and foreign policy matters to the dons of the global banking mafia who lured us into this bottomless fiscal pit. The White House and Congress will officially be what they essentially already are--nothing but smokescreens between the American peoples' delusions of autonomy and self-determination, and the foreign lenders to whom we've mortgaged away our once-great nation's economic and political destinies.
This week's elections, evidenced by our continued inexplicable willingness to vote for corporate-owned Democrats and Republicans, indicate that Americans still have little capacity or desire to protect themselves from their true enemies. As I see it, then, given the lateness of the date and the country's coordinates relative to the Point of No Return, the First American Experiment has only two possible outcomes left. Neither is pleasant, in my opinion, and both spell the end of our liberty.
1.) The U.S. will steadily evolve into a giant gulag of compliant, glassy-eyed indentured servants who are afraid to say anything that breaches the boundaries of acceptable discourse in polite society, for fear of losing the few remaining comforts afforded them by their unseen and untouchable financial overlords. Currently faced with the very real prospect of foreclosures and the loss of jobs and health care benefits, I can already see this happening.
2.) The American middle class will suddenly awaken from its hypnotic REM state, probably because someone from the bank came and started undoing the wall screws on their 50" HD TVs, or rifling through their belongings looking for the keys to their $40,000 gas-guzzling RVs. Feeling somewhat put upon, they'll lash out in public protest which, incited by government-paid agents provocateur, will turn violent like the ones in Europe, and which will be squashed like a stinkbug under the jackboot of the national-security apparatus erected by the Clinton and Bush administrations, and perfected by the Obama administration. This middle-class "uprising" will probably be accompanied by resistance from the growing legions of militiamen, constitutionalists, state sovereignty advocates, and others who refer to themselves (in many cases, rightly so) as "patriots," but which will be equally futile simply because the enemy has more and bigger guns, and can count the hairs on their heads from orbiting satellites.
The challenge--for those of us who refuse to believe that things such as physical comfort, social status, and other artificial constructs of the fear-based, scarcity-obsessed human psyche are the Alpha and Omega of existence--is no longer how to salvage the First American Experiment, but how to lay the groundwork for the Next American Experiment. Because few, if any, of us will see such a thing come to fruition in our lifetimes, efforts toward that goal will have to be largely self-sacrificial and almost purely altruistic. But I think the still, deep-running waters of the American Spirit--which once imbued the USA with such historically unprecedented potential, but which has since been intentionally rendered comatose and waiting for the plug to be pulled by the corporate media--should somehow be kept flowing beneath the surface, so that there survives a reservoir of ideas for future generations to draw upon when the time comes for them to pick up the pieces and try again.
This is all assuming, of course, that the U.S. Army doesn't release some sort of toxin into the atmosphere that turns us all into insatiable flesh-eating zombies, at which point any discussion of Spirit becomes moot. We've already got the "insatiable" and, judging by recent election results, the "zombie" parts down cold. Now all they have to do is convince us to start eating each other. Hell, if we're gullible enough to keep voting for Republicans and Democrats, a biological contaminant may not even be necessary. A few Super Bowl PSAs might do the trick.
All kidding aside, though, I thought I detected the barely discernable pulse of the American Spirit in a story I read yesterday about the Hampden subdivision of inner-city Baltimore, which has introduced its own neighborhood currency called the "B-Note." It's a form of alternative citizen-money exchangeable in, but independent of the doomed US dollar, and designed specifically to serve the practical daily needs of Hampden residents, rather than the greedy appetites of big banks and corporations. According to the article, the happy denizens of Hampden are taking to it like a hot fudge sundae. Food for thought.
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