Pridger vs. the New World Order

Sunday, March 26, 2006

THE DANGER OF BANKS AND STANDING ARMIES

Some Unforgettable Jefferson Quotes

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."

"If the American people ever allow the banks to control issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied."

"I am for relying, for internal defense, on our militia solely, till actual invasion, and... not for a standing army in time of peace, which may overawe the public sentiment; nor for a navy, which, by its own expenses and the eternal wars in which it will implicate us, will grind us with public burthens, and sink us under them."

"I am for free commerce with all nations; political connections with none... And I am not for linking ourselves by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe; entering that field of slaughter to preserve their balance..." 

"Cultivator of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds."

"The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body."

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there."

"...to preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mis-managers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers..."

- Thomas Jefferson

Too bad the majority of our national leadership has either forgotten Jefferson, or take his wisdom -- as they do with both our Declaration of Independence and Constitution (and their oath of defend it) -- with less than a grain of salt.

Jefferson's words remain as applicable today as they were when Jefferson penned them. But our situation is much more hopeless now than it was as a young nation.

Bankers control the issue of our currency, and the corporations that have grown up around them have largely accomplished the task of depriving the people of their property, until most Americans are landless (if not totally homeless), on the continent their ancestors conquered and occupied.

The independent farming family, once the foundation, anchor, and balance wheel of the nation and its economy, has now disappeared as a significant percentage of the population -- replaced by corporate scale farming operations which are anything but independent or sustainable. And, of course, the overwhelming percentage of the population is now piled into huge megalopolises, crying out for federal, state, and local police protection (and evermore, bigger, tougher, and expensive government) -- and more paternalist government policies. And, of course, more prisons.

Though we still live in material profusion (thanks to an ungodly witches brew of stored social capital, modern technological efficiency, and the ability to attain truly obscene levels of public and private debt), we are taxed in our meat and our drink, in our necessities and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and the residue of our very "rights." Thankfully, we only have to labor about an hour and a half out of every eight to pay "our share" of the government's expenses and debts -- the greatest share being inconsiderately and immorally reserved to our children and posterity.

Though we still have sufficient time to think, few think beyond the personal sphere of their own lives. Why bother thinking when we obviously have no means of calling our mis-managers to account as we hire ourselves our (if we are so lucky), to rivet the chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers. In fact, the security of warm government wrapped around most of us has become rather comforting. Hopefully the chains and shackles will not become too uncomfortable or burdensome in OUR lifetime.

We are entangled in such a complex mass of global foreign entanglements that escape seems not only impossible, but even undesirable. In fact, the ball of yarn that ensnared our nation at its very core, was proudly "Made in America" by people who hold our founders' wisdom in disdain and consider all "original intent" highly anachronistic.

The concept of free commerce with all nations has been distorted, debauched, and debased to mean economic subjection to the vagaries of free international markets, dominated and manipulated by by and for the gain of huge multinational corporations with. "International interdependence" (dependence), rather than independence has become our national goal.

As a young nation we struggled (very successfully), to become both politically and economically independent from England and the other nations of Europe. Though we never managed to totally sever our monetary bonds to English and European bankers, we are much more beholden today to Asian creditors and trading partners than to any combination of European creditors.

National policy now glorifies in the goal of becoming increasingly, and totally unnecessarily, dependent on trade with other nations. And today we stand more dependent on trade with Asian nations than we ever were with any nation of Europe. Standing armies and a globe-straddling navy have overawed the public sentiment since the Second World War, and global warfare continues to sink us ever more deeply into foreign entanglements and  unpayable debts.

The private money power has been entrenched since the Civil War, and officially so since 1913. It officially controls the issue our currency (and that of the world), and first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that have grown up around them have just about deprived the people of all property -- though many have not yet discovered it. And when they wake up, they shall find themselves landless debt slaves on the continent their grandfathers and great grandfathers occupied.    

While Jefferson held that bankers are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies, he definitely held that standing armies also pose a considerable threat to our liberties. And, of course, the above quote tends to indicate that the two dangers are somehow tied together.

And that is indeed the case. Passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 was in fact part of the prelude to, and preparation for, World War I and the century of global conflict and and cold war that followed. Wilson was elected to replace a popular incumbent (Taft), because he enjoyed the support of the eastern bankers (and, in that election, Teddy Roosevelt played the spoiler by running as a third party candidate). And though Wilson was re-elected during World War One because "he kept us out of the war," his real mission was apparently to get us into the war.

Since the beginning of World War II, we have never really ceased being on a war footing, and, of course, since we have become so bound by the very kind of foreign entanglements that both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson warned against, our standing army has become much more than just a national fixture -- it's deployed in about a 120 different foreign nations, and three relatively major wars at the present time -- grinding us with public burdens, and sinking us under unpayable debts.

We dove into the quarrels of Europe in two World Wars, and into similar entanglements in Asia in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. In the new international economic order, our leaders have managed to conjure up, or otherwise fall for, the mother of all foreign entanglements from which there will be no easy escape.

We have gone far beyond "free commerce with nations" and are totally crippling ourselves, both economically and strategically, with free trade and visions of a New World Order Utopia which is fatally flawed at its core, and almost at the point of unraveling like a loaded spring.

Our armies are in Iraq, Afghanistan, and over a hundred other foreign countries because of previous entanglements, international free trade, and the mere fact that "we can do it." We can do it because we have the means (the military might of a superpower), and thus the "duty" to do it under our present notion of international obligations. And these international obligations have come about because of foreign entanglements and a military-industrial complex given wings by the corporate culture that has grown up around our central banking system.

Our national defense establishment ensures perpetual warfare to establish perpetual peace, while the very notion of defending our own borders has come to be considered selfish isolationism, protectionism, and xenophobic nationalism.

Freedom and liberty at home are being actively curtailed because of the threat of international terrorism (which we ourselves, in spite of ourselves, have been foremost in creating and nurturing over a period of over half a century). Yet, while our own freedom and liberty are being eroded, we supposedly fight to bring liberty and democracy to others, elsewhere.

Our battle cry in this war is "Give us safety and security at any price," rather than Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty, or give me death!" And in the end we will have neither security nor liberty.

Friday, March 24, 2006

BACK TO BASICS

After spending several posts on such exalted subjects as monetary reform, economic reform, political reform, national security reform, and new international economic order reform -- problems and subjects on which Pridger (being a semi-illiterate hillbilly), is totally unqualified to preach on, it's time for Pridger to get back to basic principles. By basic principles, Pridger refers to the foundation of his belief system. This, in itself is a rather complex subject, so here he will only grapple with one or two of its handles.

Basically, Pridger believes in personal, community, state, and national self-sufficiency and self-reliance under the umbrella of republican state and national government. Total self-sufficiency in the modern world, of course, is pretty near impossible to attain, but it should always be a goal, and should be practiced to the degree possible or at least practicable and practical. A nation that is incapable of feeding itself or otherwise being economic independence to a significant degree is not an economically viable nation. Most nations are capable of much more economic independence than is practiced today. Some, of course, have no choice but to rely on trade to meet their most basic needs -- food, energy, and the wherewithal for national survival.

Pridger believes in republican principles of government with democratic institutions at the local government level, and a "mixed economy" built from the ground up. He believes in:

1. Agrarianism
2. Distributionism
3. Individual sovereignty, as the fundamental unit of self-government  
4. The "traditional family" as the basic, organic, socio-economic political unit
5. Limited government held strictly accountable by and to the people
6. An honest national monetary system
7. Individual liberty, limited only by responsibilities to self and the broader society
8. Individual free enterprise
9. A national free market system
10. Capitalism regulated to serve the public and national good
11. International trade only as an economic auxiliary -- not a national economic imperative
12. International "free trade" in ideas, information, and technology

By agrarianism, Pridger doesn't mean going back to the stone age or communist style forced relocation programs. It means that the nation's food supply should not be entrusted to corporate monopolists, whether foreign or domestic. It should be protected and insured by the largest practical degree of agricultural land distribution, and as large a number of small and medium sized producers as possible. In other words agricultural production should be in the hands of a significant percentage of the population in the form of the family farm operations.

Agriculture is not just the cornerstone of all economic activity, but the very foundation of any economy, and requisite for all other economic activity. Farm units should generally be small enough for families to work without the necessity of huge, oil-dependent machines, or the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Sustainability of quality food production should be the goal, rather than a combination of technological efficiency and a narrowing corporate ownership base. Each family farm should be as close to being a fully self-sufficient socio-economic activity as possible, and provide the family with a viable monetary income comparable to the wages of industry.

Our present system is wonderfully productive and efficient, but it is neither sustainable nor producing healthiest foods. That our food production is now accomplished by only about 2% of the population may be evidence of an amazing degree of efficiency, but it's also very scary when one considers its many technological dependencies, not the least of which is the necessary distribution systems now required to get it to the nation's consumers. A breakdown in the oil supply and/or transportation system could leave 98% of the people hungry.

But agriculture is much more than just food production. It's the economic balance wheel of any nation, and the initial and most basic source of wealth production. Literally everybody requires food and fiber for basic survival. Without it no other economic activity would be possible -- in fact, life itself would be impossible. It's the nation's largest, most essential, industry. It literally covers and uses almost all of the nation's arable land. As such, it only makes common sense, that the industry and land ownership should be as broad-based as possible.

If most primary wealth comes from the soil in the form of agricultural production, our secondary source of wealth comes into being as that production is sold, traded, processed, distributed, resold, and consumed to benefit the rest of society. This commercial activity combines wealth creation (in the form of processing and fabricating as value added activities, with services to generate income.

Along with the idea that as many people as possible should be productively engaged in farm ownership and agricultural production, the markets for most foodstuffs (including processing and redistribution), should be as local as possible, so food supplies are not subject to long petroleum based transportation chains. This is simply common sense in anything other than a world in which large corporations, aided and abetted by the government, are in control of all economic development.

Almost everybody would agree that the nation's wealth should be distributed as equitable as possible. And this is the key definition of distributionism. What goes for agricultural activities also goes for other commercial activities. The nation's businesses should be owned and operated as small proprietorships by as many individuals as possible, rather than by large corporate collective chains. This would take in sales, services, and small factories. Only local control can insure that money is both made and re-circulated in local communities.

The nation should still be a nation of farmers and shopkeepers. Not to the degree of the early nineteenth century, perhaps, but certainly to the degree this nation was still endowed in the first half of the twentieth century. And all of these individual commercial activities are what is meant by individual free enterprise and local and national free market system.

Free enterprise should not be confused, or equated, with capitalism itself. Capitalism speaks to and of corporate collectivism. Capital and corporations, when unrestrained by government regulation, naturally accede to greater and greater ownership, power, influence, and dominance in the marketplace -- all in the quest for greater profits, of course.

Unrestrained by enlightened regulation, capital's only job is to follow the dictates of its naturally predatory metabolism -- that is, to crush the competition and maximize it's own profits by whatever means it is capable of devising. We can easily see what it is doing in the nation and world today. And one reason that it is seemingly unstoppable is because the competition has largely already been crushed or put at an acute and permanent disadvantage by a government that has betrayed the people and attached its loyalty to international capital.

Capital has neither heart nor soul. And though corporations have been given rights that go beyond those of mere natural persons, capital has no national loyalties, sense of civic duty, or community spirit. And what would be said of a national government that would bestow more rights on corporations than on its own citizens?

All of this notwithstanding, Pridger is a capitalist. That is, he at least allows the necessity of many large corporate enterprises in the modern world. And capital, when confined to the flag and national borders and markets, has proven itself a very generous employer and wonderful benefactor of society. But there should be an appropriate balance between broad-based individual free enterprise and large corporate enterprises within a national economy.

Everybody knows that it takes corporate business organizations to mass produce automobiles, farm machinery, ships, and railroad locomotives, not to mention extract valuable natural resources from beneath the earth's surface. But corporate enterprise should not be absolutely dominant in the national economic landscape.

Mining the minerals and pumping oil from the earth, of course, are other forms of initial wealth production, and, together with the further refining, and/or fabrication produce real wealth which provides the masses with both necessities and incomes. And most companies that do these things should appropriately be corporate in nature.

Here Pridger might point out the distinction between the two major sources of natural raw materials, i.e., new wealth coming into the national marketplace. Agriculture, which is best suited to individual free enterprise (for the protection of both environment and humane animal husbandry, in addition to the reasons given above), produces and harvests perpetually renewable resources, complements of earth and sun -- human labor being the final catalyst in the process. The fisherman and hunter also harvest food products from a sustainable base, as long as harvests are governed by conservation requirements to insure that sustainability.

Mineral and oil extraction, which are best accomplished by large business concerns, bring "free" wealth to the surface and into the marketplace. (The new materials may be free in the earth, but it costs plenty to find, develop, and extract them -- thus the necessity of wealthy business organizations to do the work.) But this free wealth is not renewable or really "free" at all. Like agricultural raw materials, they may be there "gifts" of earth and sun, but only from very lengthy processes of former geological ages. We cannot plant more iron, copper, or oil and expect it to grow in place of that that is being extracted.

So, if one considers the earth itself as the common inheritance of mankind, then mankind is being invisibly debited for these resources provided by Mother Nature. Those mineral resources taken today will not be there for future generations. So this sort of wealth creation for the present generation is concurrently being made more scare for subsequent generations. The moral implications of this are often lost in the corporate scrabble to exploit global resources. In the name of conservation about all we do today is to require corporations to return the land to at least a state that will support wildlife and maybe some cultivation, but they are not required to open a savings account for future generations -- especially for those in Third World Countries who are currently having their natural resources developed by foreign corporations for use and consumption by the more fortunate elsewhere.

Even corporate activity should be as broad-based and diverse as practical, employing as many people as cannot find their livelihood as farmers, merchants, or service workers. In other words, rather than only a few mega-corporations, there should be multitudes of small and medium sized corporations doing the work that only a few do today. This, of course, may be less efficient, but would serve the public interest much better. The public interest isn't only served by the "competition" that would result (which is often very debatable), but the natural conservation and increased sustainability made possible by diminished economies of scale.

Efficiency and the supposed economies of scale both tend to foreclose on conservation and sustainability. Mega-corporations, most especially international ones, have no place in a society that aspires to be democratic and egalitarian.

And as far as regulation is concerned, no "American" corporation should be allowed to simply move its production to Mexico, Asia, or any other place (or otherwise outsource jobs), in order take advantage of cheaper labor elsewhere. Nor should foreign corporations be given license to undermine American companies or American workers by selling into our domestic marketplace at prices below domestic production prices. Prices should be equalized at the waterfront or border through import tariffs.

Administering the world as a single global market makes all of this impossible, and merely gives advantage to international capital and it's owners at the expense of labor (and future generations), whether it be in the advanced nations or impoverished ones.

Of course, this is not to say that it shouldn't be a free world for corporations as well as individuals. If an American corporation wants to move to Mexico, it should have that right to do so, provided Mexico is receptive. But the production that corporation does in Mexico ought to be directed the Mexican market rather than the American market. If Mexicans can't afford to purchase the products, maybe the company should raise its wages so they can.

There is an old saying in the country that goes, "Good fences make for good neighbors."  No farmer wants the neighbors' stock trampling over his wheat or garden. Nobody wants his door to be open to strangers at all times of day and night. Beside privacy concerns, there are security and safety concerns. Nobody would like to have an uninvited stranger to come into his house and make it his own home. This is as true for nations as well as individuals.

Of course, no nation should have to put physical brick, mortar, and razor wire fences along its borders. If that ever becomes necessary, there is something fundamentally wrong with the relationships between the adjoining neighbors. But every nation should be able to patrol and defend its borders, enforce its own immigration laws, and regulate its trade with foreign nations on behalf of its citizens.

All people, of course, should be free to travel anywhere in the world they wish to go -- provided they have the means to do so. But every nation should have the right to pick and choose potential immigrants (yes, the right to discriminate), and do so without being accused of xenophobia or "discrimination" as if discrimination is a crime. It isn't a crime, it's a natural right. Individuals as well as nations have the right to individual or national biases, including racial or even religious bias. Of course this is heresy today -- and because it is, we are in for some serious problems further on down the line. In fact we've already got plenty of problems -- problems that have already been allowed to get grossly out of hand, and probably beyond remedy. Yes, the chickens are already coming home to roost in this as well as several other "progressive" European nations that have opened their immigration doors too wide for two long.

While Pridger is against "free trade" (i.e., giving unlimited license to commercial interests to play the international wage differential game), foreign trade is, and always has been, an important component of this and most other national economies. Foreign nations provide markets for excess production. But no foreign nation should be forced to open its markets to us just because we may have something to sell. Nor should we be forced to open our markets to foreign products.

Trade should only be carried on when it is mutually beneficial to both parties -- and the "parties" are the people of the nation, rather than nation-less corporate interests. We shouldn't be buying products from abroad that Americans can produce just as well, just because workers elsewhere have a lower living standard than ours and work for less. This merely undermines American labor and our own national independence, with serious short and long-term national economic and security implications.

Naturally, individuals or corporation should be able to purchase foreign imports without any restriction. But they should have to pay an American wholesale price at the dock's edge. To do otherwise is to undermine the American economy and American worker.

Foreign trade should only be a very small percentage of our national economic activity -- an auxiliary outlet for our own excess national production, and a means of trading for or purchasing things not easily found or manufactured by Americans. It should never be pursued as an economic imperative in and of itself. There is no real profit in trade. Trade is not an engine of wealth creation -- it adds shipping costs, not value, to the items traded.

Pridger does wholeheartedly believe in one variation of free trade and globalism. That is in the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and useful technology (short of those specifically for war-making capabilities). There should be no artificial borders in the realms of knowledge. Cultural exchanges are great too, but Pridger is for the preservation of local cultures as well as local agriculture and economic activity -- not just here in the USA, but all over the world. Culture cannot be "traded" without delusion or some degree of loss. At some point such loss becomes extinction.

A properly balanced economic system would perhaps be divided roughly into fifths, each representing approximately a 20% of the population.

20% Education, government Civil Service, military, elective and other government officials  
20% Finance and other service industries, individual, corporate, and small business
20% Corporate industry and corporate employees engaged in mining and manufactory
20% Farm and domestic labor, food processing and distribution
20% Farmers, and commercial proprietorships

 

THE CULTURE WARS

Pridger's son brought another movie home the other day. It was called Million Dollar Baby, starring Clint Eastwood. "Good movie," he said. He had actually purchased the movie for his mother rather than yours truly. He knew she would like it. The woman of the house is not the prude that Pridger is, and Eastwood is one of her Hollywood favorites. 

The DVD cover label made it clear than it was about a woman boxer, and Pridger is not a boxing fan. And, as a natural born male chauvinist warthog, Pridger takes a dim view of women in combat -- whether in war or the boxing ring. 

The movie had more against it than its women's fighting equality theme. There was a time when Pridger enjoyed many of Eastwood's early macaroni westerns. But, after maturing into a Hollywood superstar, Eastwood began demonstrating a willingness, and apparent desire, to promote use of the "F" word on the big screen. When that became evident, Pridger lost his admiration for Eastwood and has since generally avoided watching his movies. In fact, he boycotts R rated movies in general.

Pridger's wife, being foreign born, accepts American culture as she found it (though she still thinks of it as pitifully inferior to her own). Like Pridger's son, she considers obscene language and explicit sex scenes in movies just red, white, and blue Americana, and has difficulty understanding Pridger's dislike for such entertainment. They don't know of a time when things were any different.

Of course, Pridger isn't really all that much of a prude. He's rather open-minded, but clings to the double standards of old -- when there were places for everything, but the broader cultural goal was toward upgrade rather than the gutter -- when broad-based morality and common decency both in the home in the larger mainstream social arena were considered an important requisite to an advanced state of civilization. Under the earlier model of double standards, one could go out and root with the hogs if he wanted to, but it was nice not to have to live with them all the time.

Million Dollar Baby, however, was rated PG-13, so Pridger agreed to watch to see whether it could hold his interest. The "F" word came within the first ten minutes of the start of the movie. So did the "N" word -- put into the mouth of a harmless white dimwit who hung around the training gym apparently as the resident clown. (The black co-star heroes of the film overlooked it with pitying condescension and admirable tolerance.) The movie thus had racial overtones, probably as as a monument to Eastwood's own effort of promote racial harmony and tolerance. But the main thrust was undoubtedly to demonstrate that through sheer in-your-face determination even a poor disadvantaged white woman can become a boxing champion.

At least that's how Pridger assumes the movie played out. Pridger walked out about the time trainer male chauvinist Eastwood softened in his resolve not to take the poor gal under his wing and make a boxer out of her.

As a navy veteran and career merchant mariner, Pridger is pretty used to foul language. But he laments the fact that "cursing like sailor" is no longer considered shocking or out of place among elementary children -- that it is in fact being taught nationwide by Hollywood, one of the most pervasive trend-setting forces in the world.

Oddly enough, sensitivity training is now a requirement training subject for seamen as well as military men and women. The term "Gypsyhead" was long ago substituted for the "niggerhead" on the anchor windless. Then, gypsyhead was dropped in deference to possible Gypsies in the crew. Now we simply call it a "winch drum," or simply a "winch". Sooner or later that will undoubtedly lead to some sort of a sexual harassment law suit, and another change in nomenclature will be required. Imagine what a lady crew member think when someone yells, "Stop the winch!" Her response would likely be, "You g-- d----d m----- f----r"!!! Did I just her you calling me a f-----g wench??"

Pridger often wonders what co-ed military boot camp is like these days. How is sensitivity training invoked in that once all male environment? Certainly recruits can no longer be degraded as a bunch of "little girls" or pussy cats as in days of yore. Being a warrior is no longer the exclusive domain of men -- and women are very sensitive beings.

When a young female cadet signed aboard one of Pridger's recent ships, he wondered if it would have a cooling effect on the conversation around the officers' dinning table. Surely, he though, his colleagues would tone down their vulgarities and sexual innuendo with a young lady present present in their midst.

Well, they did in a way. The jokes and stories of sexual adventures in foreign ports were toned down or avoided in her presence. But not the "F" word as frequent punctuation in ordinary conversation! The young lady was decent enough to avoid using the word herself, it was not considered too indelicate a term in her presence by the older graduates of the fabled maritime academies where sensitivity training must constitute at least significant part of the classroom agenda. In fact the word was used with the usual abandoned without fear of giving offense (apparently to make the cadet feel comfortable -- that she was really one of them now). Pridger found this a little surprising, as well as disappointing. He had hoped that some old fashioned common decency would manifest itself in the presence of a lady.

Obviously, use of the "F" word is no longer officially considered an affront to decency in the presence of women -- not even in a traditionally male workplace. The "F" word has been rendered so common place in our national workaday lexicon that it is no longer considered in the least indelicate or offensive.

Well, Pridger is just getting old. Time has passed him by, and the world is a different place. What a few short decades can do! It was once fairly common to see signs like "No vulgar language!" posted in waterfront seamen's bars. And usually the sign was respected, at least when women were present. If not, the lady behind the bar might just come out from behind the bar with a baseball bat and start censoring the conversation.

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Blogging ain't easy for everybody. Pridger, for example, has difficulty working in literary sound bites of the size and nature that might hold most readers' attention for the second or two needed to read them. Inevitably, when Pridger starts writing on a small, single, simple, subject, the subject seems to start taking on multiple personalities, growing additional appendages and warts. The short and sweet article goes into unplanned explanatory tangents and these tangents begin growing appendages of their own. There's seldom just a simple explanation for anything -- especially anything political.

Behind both the "old orders" and the New World Order, there is an ancient and fabled thread of conspiracy... many overlapping, competing, changing, and continuing, conspiracies... There were many empires and imperial dreams of old... there was exploration and discovery, conquest and exploitation, development of the limited liability company, colonialism and revolution, imperialism and communism, and the communism vs. capitalism... the great contest between East and West and the modern North-South problem... the ideological divide between left and right, right and wrong, weak and strong, rich and poor, black and white, us vs. them... religious and cultural strife... and always wars with multiple causes and purposes... and always there has been the the "problems of money" -- what it is and what it should be... hard money or soft money -- gold, paper, or credit money... the money power itself, and whether it should be publicly or privately wielded...  a lot more than all of this... There are multiple layers of recorded history, causes and effects of political events that sometimes remain almost totally hidden from public scrutiny. The great pot of subject material always runeth delightfully over, and the plot always spreads and thickens.

So it is very difficult to tackle one problem or subject without running afoul and tripping over several others. The big Dubai Port World flap was one of those. There's much more than simple national security concerns involved. And what good is it to solve a security problem and find that security wasn't the real problem at all? Same for income tax reform. Effective income tax reform would mean little without monetary reform. And monetary reform would require a whole new mindset at the national leadership level. On such subjects it is very difficult to find either a proper starting or stopping place -- and each juncture in the course of investigation always opens additional avenues that provoke further investigation -- and each minor tangent screams out for a full volume of its own.

Brevity is called for in a blog post, but brevity is usually very difficult to attain when something approaching enlightenment is the goal. The media sound bite is brevity personified, and we literally swim in incomplete and fragmented "revelations." But Pridger struggles on, usually being as short on brevity as on comprehensive illumination. Clarity suffers or becomes impossibly elusive. Most of the time, Pridger ends a post simply because it's getting too long, whether or not he's managed to get all the loose ends tied together. Most such loose ends would otherwise flesh out into dragons -- and the post would drag on to far beyond the attention span of likely readers.

In spite of attempts a brevity, some of Pridger's posts may often take on the complexion of diatribes, or the famous "rambling" (hopefully not totally incoherent), statement that scholars and other critics love to denigrate.

Needless to say, this isn't good journalism. But Pridger isn't here because he's a good journalist or anything approaching a certified scholar of any stripe. He's here because he's driven -- driven to write by the appalling sense that a great nation (and the world that surrounds it), is being betrayed and sold and down the river by the leadership. And there is a lot of territory to travel to get the whole story out -- even if Pridger knew anything like the whole story.

Unfortunately, as Pridger sees it, there's little hope of fixing things. But if hope is ever totally lost, all would be lost, sure enough. Just attempting to define the problem is such a daunting task that getting to solutions is very difficult. There are solutions, of course, however unlikely that they will be applied -- and every once in a while Pridger does try to slip a suggestion or two into the box.

Fortunately, Pridger isn't alone in this endeavor, and there are a lot more articulate and gifted writers than he disseminating the information and insights Pridger tries to impart. But it remains his belief that each and every voice added to their cries in the the wilderness enhances the chances of the message being heard. It's a thankless task, of course, and sometimes Pridger feels like simply quitting and taking up full time hoeing.

FEED BACK AND EGO RELIEF

Pridger's blog, and his other web pages, gets very little serious feedback. Almost none at all, to be perfectly honest. This is partly because these pages are neither published nor promoted in a business-like fashion. (Or could it also be that almost nobody finds them either interesting or informative?) Sometimes weeks or months will pass without a post. Sometimes it seems that there simply is nobody out there -- that Pridger writes only to himself -- so why bother?

Yet once in a great while there comes a supportive email that indicates that maybe the effort is not totally in vain. Here are two of Pridger's favorites:

I have one question for you, why spend so much time doing what you are doing? There is a lot more to do out in our world, than sitting behind a computer and ticking out these pages, I do agree with your philosophy, but, you can better enact change thru getting out in the open and telling it, there is a wider variety of media out there, and I'm sure you won't be crucified over telling what you feel to be right.

Now how's that for encouragement? "(W)hy spend so much time doing what you are doing? There is a lot more to do out in our world, than sitting behind a computer and ticking out these pages..." Why, indeed! (Perhaps because "it" is there! The Internet, the computer, compelling subject to explore, problems to illuminate and solve, etc.) The writer at least says he agrees with Pridger's philosophy, but apparently figures Pridger's purposes would be better served by getting out in public and evangelizing -- perhaps on national TV. It's reassuring that the writer is sure Pridger wouldn't be crucified for telling what he feels is right.

Pridger's response was, "Why not do it?" The Internet is a public soapbox available to everyone, and it's the only soapbox available to the solitary recluse who seldom ventures off the saw weed plantation. Of course, Pridger does other things too -- like hoeing in the garden and keeping the fences in repair -- not to mention the fact that he actually does go out into the cold cruel world from time to time to make an honest living working fo' de man. Pridger, he is sad to say, is neither evangelist nor business entrepreneur. Nor would he make a good politician. One should at least become a good citizen first -- and Pridger hasn't yet managed that, though he does try to be law-abiding and halfway decent in public. At best Pridger is a polemicist armed with a computer and good intentions.

The following email remains Pridger's all-time favorite:

Pridger:

I'm tempted to write a very long email explaining, detailing, expounding on all the reasons I feel like I just found the last honest person on the planet. But I won't, because the truth is, I don't know enough about any of this to know if you're just like them (she says exposing her paranoid sensibility). However I do know this: I've never heard/seen such an all-encompassing, thorough, logical, simple (for lack of a better word) view-of-the-world as yours. And it scares me that it's all so obvious, but at the same time so unbelievable. 

I won't ask you what I can do to help your cause, because I'm not sure you have one other than to inform, and to provoke. And even if you did have a cause you wanted help with, I would probably be too suspicious of your motives to take any action.

But I want to thank you for your courage and insight. I pray daily for the scales to be lifted from my eyes, but slowly, slowly...

Peace. 
Yoko

The last honest person on the planet! Now that puffed Pridger up some. What a statement -- and what a compliment! If Pridger received more messages like that one, there would never be those intermittently recurring gaps in Pridger's blog. His motivation to continue doing what he is doing would never flag. But perhaps Yoko's email was merely a fluke -- the proverbial pearl somehow misdirected toward swine. Yet Yoko had Pridger pretty well pegged in one sense. If he has a "cause" it is merely to inform and provoke. His ability to inform may be severely limited, but he very much would like to provoke a quest for enlightenment and thought.

And Yoko was right to be too suspicious to take action. Without doubt there are many of "them" out there, all too eager accept support. Pridger's email response was woefully inadequate and sorrowfully lame -- "Thanks for making my day Yoko!" He probably wouldn't know what to do with "support" anyway. He don't know what one are.

But thanks again, Yoko, if you are still out there -- whoever you are. Pridger intends to print your email out on a gold framed certificate, frame it under glass, and hang it on the wall over his desk. It is the best tribute he has ever received. An excerpt from it might make a fitting inscription on his headstone some day. "The last honest man on the planet."

Friday, March 10, 2006

As Pridger once again prepares to make his annual voluntary income tax contribution to the IRS, once again he is appalled at the complexity of the tax code, and angered to be forced to participate in such an ungodly abomination. But, really, he has nothing to complain about. He isn't really "forced" to participate, since filing and paying income tax is strictly voluntary. In truth, the only reason Pridger bothers with it at all is to get his "refund" -- and, of course, avoid such potential inconveniences as being charged and prosecuted as a non-filer, or the possible seizure of his pitiful bank account and pickup, not to mention possible incarceration. The IRS is pretty adept at scaring citizens into voluntary compliance.

Lord knows Uncle Sam needs lots of money. So, of course, paying taxes is a patriotic thing to do. It helps to bring democracy to Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, and lots of other places. It helps pay the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and South Korea and Japan and Germany and about a hundred other countries. It helps Israel, Pakistan, and India develop and build nuclear weapons. It helps feed hungry Africans. And it even helps little Johnny learn to read and be fearful of terrorists and tobacco products. It helps fight drugs, drug lords, and poverty everywhere. It helps the United Nations. In short, it helps in so many ways and in so many places that I can hardly list them or get my 1040 form filed fast enough.

What particularly appalls Pridger isn't so much the amount he has to pay (after all, it's just money, and Pridger intentionally overpays to give the government an interest-free loan every year), but the fact that his return contains 15 pages when one should do! The volume and complexities of the tax code are truly mind boggling! Though all of those pages are strictly voluntary, it takes all of them to prove that he has paid everything he owes, and to get his hands on any amount he has overpaid. While Pridger is patriotic as hell, and wants to help Uncle Sam in every way he can, he doesn't want to pay much more than the law of voluntary compliance actually demands.

One other thing that perturbs Pridger about the income tax is that it is so totally contrary to the clearly stated intents of the Constitutional. Not only that, it's totally unnecessary. Oh yes, the 16th Amendment (if it was truly properly ratified), supposedly makes the income tax Constitutional, but the tax clearly puts the lie to everything else that the Constitution supposedly stood for. The idea of limited government, for example. And what about the Emancipation Proclamation and the prohibition against involuntary servitude except at the result of the conviction for a crime? Today the working taxpayer with a decent job involuntarily serves the government for about three or four months a year! That's involuntary servitude. And this latter day slaver is mainly just to pay interest on the national debt!

In other words, the time is fast approaching when American taxpayers' months of involuntary servitude will no longer be to satisfy the operational needs of an obese and hungry government, but rather the interest demands of hungry private bankers, international investors, and other fat cats that provide Uncle Sam with his unlimited credit.

As for the need for taxation, clearly the government (with its unlimited credit), has the ability to borrow all the money it needs and more. Congress can raise the debt ceiling to any height it wishes. Thus taxation of the public is clearly unnecessary. As for deficit spending, economists tell us that the national debt is good, and never has to be repaid. But apparently some professionals are becoming slightly concerned. For example, the following quote came from someone at the Bank for International Settlements, in June of last year:

"Growing domestic and international debt has created the conditions for global economic and financial crises.”

The Senate has just done it's patriotic duty and once again raised the debt ceiling -- this time to $9 trillion dollars. Nine trillion dollars is a lot of money. There are only about 6.5 billion people on the whole planet, so that means our debt limit is equal to about $1,400.00 for every man, woman, and child on earth. On Earth, mind you! Our leaders claim not to be too concerned at this level of debt because it's only a small percentage of our GDP. Pridger suspects that one of the troubles with this assessment is that the GDP itself is mostly smoke. This hunch seems to be backed up by the people at http://www.economyincrises.org. Most of it is debt creation personified and fraudulently passed off as wealth creation and commercial exchange. Pare it down to reality and even the most optimistic voodoo economist would probably have to express at least a modicum of concern and foreboding.

"Economists claim... (GDP) growth is a sign of our economic strength...This is an anachronistic statistic... 
   "...70% of GDP is consumer spending and much of what is purchased is now made by foreign owned companies. The faster GDP grows... the worse off we actually are. This trend has been growing unabated for the past 30 years, and we now fund foreign coffers with and unprecedented $1.25 Million per minute...
   "These losses return not to buy US made goods or services, but to buy title to our irreplaceable strategic wealth producing assets...
   "All of our wealth producing assets... have already been sold...
   "...plastics/rubber: 47%, financial svcs: 36%, chemicals: 30%, transportation equipment: 27%, publishing: 21%, cement: 81%, motion pictures: 69%, consumer television / electronics: nearly 100%...
   "...General Motors could be... 100% acquired for less than 2% of the $1 trillion US currency held by Japan -- and GM, ...is available for sale now on the open market...
   "... In the past 17 years, the US government has reviewed 1,500 of the thousands of foreign takeovers and rejected only 1.
   "... In 2004 99% of the US Federal Deficit was financed by foreign loans, up from 70% in 2003. Our global competitors are now our bankers... We are always forced to negotiate from a very weak position.
   "... GDP has been growing around 4% per year over the past 10 years, the trade deficit is growing at 25% per year...
   "We Have Economically Lost Control Of Our Country
"Japan now holds US dollar reserves of $1.0 Trillion, China has $600 Billion, and South Korea about $200 Billion. We have no plan to address our vulnerable conditions and mistakenly use measures like GDP to delude ourselves.
   "If present trends continue unchecked, we will face conditions we never could have imagined and our future will certainly be nothing like our past."

Discover more at:  http://www.economyincrises.org

In other words, in building the new international economic order (whether intentionally or not), our leaders have made sacrificial lambs out of the American people.

Thank God for small favors, our current national debt is only about $8.3 trillion. That's about $27,700.00 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.A. Big enough by some standards, but not nearly as big as it is going to get. Check the Debt Clock at: http://www.brillig/debt_clock

The debt situation is so out of hand and hopeless that the Congress might as well raise the ceiling to a hundred trillion, borrow all the money it needs, and forget about nickel and diming the public to death with income taxes and gobs of tax forms? The system is going to crash, and we might as well make it as resounding as possible.

Limited government? Forget that! The debt tells a story of limitlessness that has far surpassed anything like self-control. The behemoth is on auto-pilot and rushing toward a gaping precipice. Our leaders, mistaking the great con for the glimmer of gold, see light at the end of the tunnel. So, without even taking the slightest note as to which way the tracks have been laid, they stoke the economic boiler fires, to get to the Land of False Promise as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Yet long before the debt and economic affairs of state got totally out of hand, government had assumed nearly limitless powers -- far beyond anything that could in the least be considered constitutional. A government big enough, and all-powerful enough, to have its hands in every citizen's pocket book, and insist on being privy to everybody's personal and financial affairs, cannot be considered "limited." And what would you call a government with seventy or more separate police agencies? Perhaps at least the embryo of a police state? (This, because almost every federal regulatory agency has been transformed into a de facto "law enforcement" agency -- some of them armed and very dangerous.)

Enter, of course, the U.S. Patriot Act, and the Department of Homeland Security and Orwell's vision of 1984 is recognized as valid prophecy. But it's even worse than anything Orwell imagined.

A government that calls itself a superpower and has the ability (and coercive will), to send its armed forces all over the world to fight for freedom and democracy for others, everywhere, cannot be considered limited. A government big enough to do these things is neither republican nor democratic. Nor can a government that consistently spends billions and maybe trillions much more than it taxes, with no clear exit strategy from that debt burden, be considered a government that has the long-term welfare of the people in mind.

The debt began really getting out of hand when we assumed the white man's burden -- i.e., became the self-appointed custodians of the post colonial world in the decades following World War Two period. The dam really broke when the dollar was released from its former restraining chains to gold in 1971. And the adoption of free trade and globalism have merely rubbed salt in the wound and added hyper-active drugs to the debt machinery. Prior to the Reagan Administration it was theoretically possible to balance the national budget and start paying down the national debt.

Ironically, the debt really started escalating during the Reagan years. Reagan, a fiscal as well as a social conservative, was elected on a balance the budget platform. But the debt curve had already spiked, and tax and spend congresses (and social spending programs on auto-pilot), made a joke of Reagan's balance the budget promise. Equally ironically, it was under the administration of the tax and spend party, under President Clinton, that we supposedly saw a balanced budget for the first time almost in living memory, and a projected budgetary surplus. Almost -- but not really. The debt never stopped growing, and nobody seriously entertained the idea of paying down the national debt with the alleged surplus. Both parties concerned themselves with other ways of spending the money -- such as on national health care or saving the looted Social Security Trust Fund. In other words, there was never going to be a surplus -- not even maybe. There was no surplus, and once Bush got into office and 9/11 happened, it wouldn't have mattered anyway. We're fighting a totally unnecessary, multi-faceted, open-ended war strictly on credit.

Would Gore have gone to war over 9/11? Maybe not -- and that's probably why he wasn't allowed to become president. Bush was the man for the job.

The debt grows on its own, of course -- balanced budget or not. Today it's growing at the rate of over $2 billion per day! There's not a fiscal scenario anywhere (certainly not in Washington D.C.), that can appreciably slow that natural growth, much less reverse it.

THE DEMOCRATIC INCOME TAX

Everyone should pay his fair share of the costs of government. That's the democratic byline justifying the income tax. Yet the idea of the original income tax was anything but democratic. For one thing, it was one of the proposals made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto. The purpose of Marx and Engels was the destruction of private capital and the moneyed classes. In the United States the purpose was almost the opposite, while at the same time appearing to curb the predatory excesses of the great capitalists and force the very wealthy to appropriately underwrite a greater share of the costs of government. One of the rationales that sold the idea of income tax to our Congress was that it wouldn't place a burden on the working classes, only the rich, and prevent the accumulation of the nation's wealth into the hands of the few.

Since the income tax didn't initially pinch the people very hard (and if it did, there was a major war in the offing that needed financing), the people didn't squeal.

The income tax has clearly failed to do everything that it was supposedly intended to do. And now that all working men and women pay a good portion of their income to the IRS, income tax receipts barely cover the interest on the national debt. Soon government income tax revenues will no longer cover that interest, and the entire actual federal budget will consist of borrowed funds. So why tax the people? Just borrow all the money the government needs in the first place. And threaten to nuke any nation, bank, or miser that threatens foreclosure.

Of course, our problem is much larger, more fundamental, and much more serious than the income tax system itself. Income tax is merely one leg of the beast. It's even more fundamental than legislators who simply cannot say no to taxing and spending future generations into poor house. The underlying monetary system itself (which, coincidentally, was solidified in the same year as the income tax amendment), is the main source of the problem. Many people besides Pridger are, and have been, aware of this. A long and distinguished line of them sounded the warnings, made speeches (often enough, before Congress), and they wrote many books. Voices in the wilderness, all. On the very crest of a major national economic divide, Henry Gonzales, the legislator from Texas, had the guts to stand up and lecture the House on the the Federal Reserve anomaly. At that time, the rest of our trusty representatives showed their concern and interest by allowing him to speak almost exclusively to empty chairs. Nothing has changed.

We do have a new Chairman at the Federal Reserve, however. The outgoing chairman got out while the getting was good. The Chairmanship position is one which has acquired an importance of mythical proportions. The most powerful man in the world, some would say. The Chairman's pontifications swing the world by the tail. Ouch!

Not a single dollar ever comes into existence or circulation without more than a dollar's worth of debt being created to conjure it up. Thus, there can never be enough money to pay the public debt -- even before the first penny is spent. Our money and its creation are the very embodiment of debt itself. Money creation IS debt creation, and the debt supply naturally exceeds the money it magically creates. Congressional spending isn't even necessary for debt to come about. The debt lives on its own, without any hope whatsoever that it will ever be paid off. This is bad enough. But when the government, already taxing the public to the limit, borrows money to carry on its routine business, there is little hope that anything like fiscal sanity and economic equilibrium will every again visit the land of the free and home of the brave.

Much worse, since the U.S. dollar, or Federal Reserve Note, became the international reserve currency, neither Congress nor the Federal Reserve itself, has any meaningful control over it. The job of the Federal Reserve Chairman is now strictly damage control through interest rate manipulation and little else. The Fed is little more than a huge credit/debt management agency upon which has been bestowed the right to issue currency into the global economy.  In fact a great deal of today's "credit money creation" is done without the slightest Fed oversight or supervision. The entire U.S. government is a debt machine, but lacks access to any control mechanisms.

Our liquidity comes from something even more abstract than money creation out of thin air. It comes from credit creation out of thin air too. In other words, nothing is made from nothing to create "real" debts which are collateralized by individual and/or communal property. The ratios may be unclear, but the ingredients are two layers of debt to one layer of debt cash money. The debts are "real" debts, of course, and translate directly into real obligations and claims against real assets.

In spite of our increasing financial and economic vulnerabilities, the dollar's global hegemony seems to give our leaders a sense of international economic empire. But our leaders seem to fail to realize this empire is not theirs or "ours," and they have much less control over it than they would like to imagine. In fact, they have no control at all, and in the end it will be the system that brings our great nation to its knees.

President Bush is for tax cuts. They're good for the economy, he says. He' right, of course. But our economy is not just a proverbial false economy, but very much a real, dyed-in-the-wool, false economy. He says tax cuts are good for business. Right again! Tax cuts are good for everything and everybody lucky enough to enjoy them. And revenues have never suffered due to tax cuts, as far as Pridger knows. That the deficit and national debt continue to rise has little to do with it. It would rise even if payroll withholding was mandated at 100%.

Raising taxes -- which is the only solution the Democrats and other "pragmatists" can ever think of -- won't help either. Our economy and our debt are beyond such remedies. Higher taxation will merely help stifle business and cause taxpayers to spend less. They've already quit saving, and many have already quit working in high paying jobs (or they've been pink-slipped out of them). And, naturally, the underground economy is on the rise.

Of course, Pridger recognizes Democratic concerns with the structure of our present graduated income system. The tax cuts for the rich are one such issue. Though we've all enjoyed tax cuts, the wealthiest strata of taxpayer have enjoyed them much more. The top income tax bracket for the truly rich has decreased from about 91% to about 36% (or something like that). 91% did seem a bit high. For instance, people who make about ten million dollars per year would have to scrounge around and make do with only $900,000.00 in take-home pay. What self-respecting movie star, singing idle, professional ball-player, or corporate CEO should be subjected to such financial hardship as that?

The poor working man who is lucky enough to have a $30,000.00 a year job, and falls in the 15% tax bracket, has to struggle with only $25,500.00 in take-home pay. (Serves him right, some say, for not being a little smarter or more industrious!) Most manage to make do with varying degrees of grace. But then, insult is added to injury when the poor man has to pay just as much for food staples and traffic fines as the multi-billionaire.

Many of the poorest are kept locked up these days, and others are maintained on permanent paid vacation of sorts. This all costs money, of course. Shouldn't the lucky working people pay higher taxes? And shouldn't the rich pay even higher taxes yet?

Being a poor man, Pridger favors high income tax rates for the the truly rich and no taxes at all for the working poor. That a few gifted individuals can be "worth" as much as several billion dollars, while most of the working class are lucky to have a paid up place to live is and a partial paid for automobile is ludicrous. Then there are many millions in our society (some of them hard working), who enjoy a negative net-worth.

So Pridger is for a graduated income tax -- even under an honest money system -- but against any taxation of labor at all. The reason is fairly simple and straight-forth. First, the wages of labor (i.e. actual work at fair pay), should not be considered taxable "income." Wages -- money for work -- are an equal exchange or trade. No "profit" is realized. Certain classes of people (either by chance or by smart hard work), have an unfair advantage in society by gaining much more that their rightful share of wealth -- and the capitalist system tends to increasingly reallocate money from the working classes to the owners of capital. Additionally, compound interest, favors the rich whether they are deserving or in any way productive at all.

Of course, many of those who have made the grade (such as Rush Limbaugh, for instance), contend that it is wrong to tax excellence and success any more than bumbling stupidity and dumb work are taxed. Taxing excellence and success, they say, is to unfairly penalize and discourage the most talented and brilliantly productive among us.

Under an honest money system, the main purpose of an income tax would not be to raise revenue for the operation of government. That would be unnecessary. It's purpose would be to prevent inordinate amounts of wealth from accumulating into fewer and fewer fortunate hands while progressively diminishing the livelihood of the working and small mercantile and entrepreneurial classes -- those satisfied with making no more than a decent living for themselves and their families.

THE DANGERS OF EASY CREDIT

Almost everybody knows what credit cards can do to the hapless spendthrift. First self-indulgence, then financial distress and debt slavery -- often followed by personal bankruptcy.

On a larger scale it can do the same to a business, a large corporation, or a nation. We can see it happening every day before our very eyes.

But the wise use of credit can work wonders, and has. But sometimes apparent wonders are not all that good.

Sorry Sam (rest his soul), but Pridger is going to pick on you and Wal-Mart again. Sam and Wal-Mart make a great whipping boy for illustrative purposes, simply because they have become such a stellar example of what pure capitalism can do when unleashed from anything related to community civic mindedness or civic duty. And it can be done under the very banner of "serving the people" and giving them what they want -- such as cheap prices.

Sam Walton had plenty of good business sense and good credit. He also knew how to make money, and he built the largest commercial merchandising empire the world has ever known. Wal-Mart is truly amazing to behold.

Sam Walton (allegedly almost alone, and of his own volition), accumulated enough credit, and resultant capital to put half (and probably more), of America's small town mom & pop stores out of business, and literally remake the landscape in rural and small town America. All of the other corporate chains, from K-Mart to McDonalds, have helped too, of course, but none have quite had the impact of Wal-Mart, especially in small towns.

Sam wasn't satisfied with becoming a well-to-do small town merchant, or ever a very rich one with stores in half a dozen small towns. Yet he might have been satisfied had there been a limit to the credit he had at his disposal. But, just to make sure his credit didn't play out, he bought his own bank so he could manufacture his own credit line. He went on to outdo even the biggest of the big time national merchandising chains, and this has made him a cult hero.

Wal-Mart is still growing, and now doing the same in other countries as it has done in the United States -- putting small men out of business and pumping profits out of impoverished nations. But, as in the United States, people are buying, and that's all that matters to the purely capitalist mentality.

The point Pridger is trying to make is that easy, almost unlimited, credit made it possible for one man to put millions of small businessmen out of business and severely cripple many more. Sam and Wal-Mart are but one illustration. Large business corporations, with access to huge amounts of credit are doing the same thing all the time -- and they were doing it before Sam Walton came onto the stage.

Credit bubbles are wonderful things for everybody except for those left holding the bag in the end.

EASY CREDIT AND HOME OWNERSHIP

Easy credit also helps people become homeowners. It has helped people become homeowners for a long time. But everything in our system tends to lead to excess -- first convenience, then excess, and finally collapse and bankruptcy. Take the current housing and real estate boom in many of our larger urban areas, for example.

Inflation of housing and real estate costs in many of our urban areas has made tens of thousands of millionaires. More are being made every day. In California, for instance, it isn't unusual for a modest home, purchased for say $20,000.00 fifty or sixty years ago to be worth hundreds of thousands today. Unfortunately, real estate taxes go up with that value. So many homeowners are now paying real estate taxes that resemble rent -- and many homeowners have been forced to sell because they could no longer afford to live in their own homes, especially after retirement.

New housing is so expensive in many markets that few working couples can even hope to make a down payment on a home. But, the credit market has accommodated them, and people are being encouraged to take on impossible levels of debt. And doing so is said to be wise investing. Here's how amazingly wonderful it can be, and how you too can become a millionaire:

1. Buy a $500,000.00 house with no money down.
2. Make monthly interest payments only. No need to pay on the principle
3. In a year or so the market value of the house may be $600,000.00.
4. Take out a second mortgage and get a $100,000.00 benefit.
5. Why not buy another house. Rents are high, they can pay for themselves.
6. If things get tough, sell one of the houses at a significant profit.
7. Buy another house. It's a win-win situation.

The only problem with this is that this isn't home ownership at all -- it's gambling at high stakes. One never owns his home, he merely rents from the bank while (hopefully), gaining in equity. If the housing boom goes bust (and it inevitably will), bankruptcy and hardship are the certain results.

The lending institutions are gambling too, of course. But they have a tremendous advantage. The credit they extend is effectively free to them. They loan you $500,000.00 in the form of "credit" effectively created out of thin air -- but from that moment on, they actually own title to the house. The credit they have loaned actually becomes "monetized" by the house. Though you occupy the house, you still owe the whole purchase price. The interest you pay every month is gravy to the lender, and does absolutely nothing to reduce your debt. If you default on the loan, they lose nothing, and they have the house to sell. They can turn around and sell it again either at a profit or a loss. But even if they sell it for pennies on the dollar they still come out way ahead, and you may still owe them the difference.

This sort of consumer gambling is very dangerous. And regrettably, it is very wide spread. In the event of a serious downtrend in housing markets, you will end up paying interest on a $500,000.00 debt, on a house that is worth much less than at the time of purchase. If your job happens to be exported or outsourced, you're in a bad fix in any case.

WONDER STORE HAS IT ALL - BUT BEWARE OF THE SEAMLESS SOLUTION

Organisms, of whatever nature or species, sometimes tend toward self-destruction. Sometimes they self-destruct individually or in small groups, and sometimes in massive numbers. Natural self-preservation tendencies, however, usually predominate over the self destructive ones. Our present drug addiction problem nicely illustrates how sometimes something comes along to throw the natural self-preservation mechanisms out of kilter. Otherwise healthy people are first seduced to give it a try. It's great! they are told. Then they become willing victims of self-destructive habits. Credit abuse is another illustration in the economic sphere. Not everybody uses credit to build a profitable business empire, or even a modestly profitable small business. Some self-destruct on it.

Sometimes dangerous drugs are not recognizable, and people get hooked on something that is not only legal, but highly lauded as, say, the latest "wonder drug" or perhaps the "trend of the future" -- or progress. Thus when Wal-Mart first began coming to small towns, the people were very receptive. After all, Wal-Mart wasn't the first. K-Mart and the grocery and fast food chains had already paved the way, and people were eager to buy anywhere cheaper prices and novel trappings were offered.

To take poor old Sam and Wal-Mart off the docket, let's call them collectively "Wonder Store." Wonder Store is the retail branch of the capitalists' seamless solution for all that ails society and the world. But beware of the seamless solution as a panacea for all that ails you. It night just be snake oil (or worse), in a bigger, more attractive, package -- and promoted by the best professionals money can buy.

The big hook at Wonder Store is that it has everything you could conceivably need at the lowest possible price. This is enough to hook Mr. Consumer, who always shops for the best prices. Mr. Consumer is easily hooked on Super Store and becomes a dedicated customer.

The downtown shopping district closes down and crumbles. But Mr. Consumer doesn't care, since Super Store is here.

The only problem with the scenario is that when Mr. Consumer goes home and puts on his work cap, he is Mr. Producer -- breadwinner for his family. Without knowing it, he has been hooked on a drug that will sooner or later foreclose his productive capabilities, or at lest downsize them considerably. If he is lucky enough to retire with Social Security and a pension, and remain an able consumer, he is lucky indeed. If he is too young to retire, maybe he can get a job at Wonder Store. Maybe his children will also be able to find employment at Wonder Store. But as a species, he is on a path of self-destructive. The Mr. Consumer in him eventually has to struggle to continue his consumption habits, because the Mr. Producer in him (which originally made him a very conspicuous consumer), has been downsized or outsourced.

Super Store, of course, in order to bring in the consumers, has very diligently arranged to purchase it merchandise, and as many services as possible, from other Mr. Producers, elsewhere. And, of course, in order to keep prices low enough so as not to alarm anybody, Super Store pays its employees as little as possible. Not only does Super Store want to keep it's prices low, it must also make as much profit as possible, and reward it's corporate owners handsomely. After all, that's the purpose of business in the first place.

Fortunately (and seemly by magic), there continues to be an abundance of Mr. Consumers in spite of the death of Mr. Producer. Thank God for the continuing boom in Federal and State civil service employment, the medical and hospital boom, the gambling and prison industries boom. And thank God for Social Security and other federal and state entitlement programs, and for those pension funds that haven't yet collapsed. Thank God for food stamps, and ADM. and thank God for Super Store!

Pridger's home town makes a good example of a Wonder Store community. The town has been experiencing an amazing amount of growth and commercial expansion in recent decades.  The town used to sport a population of some 10,000 people, a high percentage of them producers or small merchants and their employees. During this period of amazing commercial growth, the population has declined to about 9,000. Small industries and mom & pop businesses of every kind have all but disappeared. The old business district has been almost totally torn down -- about two dozen businesses, and half that many classic buildings, replace by a nice new jail and some extra parking for two banks. Coal mining, once the main stay of the economy (along with farming), is gone. The farms in the surrounding environs are still there, but most of the farmers are gone. In short, the town and those in it produce almost nothing. A couple new banks have been built, so I guess the town is some sort of a banking center.

The town's daily newspaper is still published, and seems to be doing well -- under the ownership of a foreign multi-national corporation, of course. All the new stores and restaurants out on the strip seem to do a booming business. Those corporate businesses must cart their profits away every few days, but nonetheless there seems to be plenty of money in the community. Mr. Consumer is there in a big way.

Only credit on the scale available to large corporations was capable of funding such growth in what had been a sleepy little farming town. And those corporate businesses can only employ a small percentage of the people. So where does Mr. Consumer get all of his spending money? Well, Pridger can only guess. It's likely that most of it comes from government checks of one kind or another, whether for active employees or pensioners. In other words, a great deal of it comes from the taxpayer or government borrowing. The town is now an artificial financial Mecca, like most other small towns in the Heartland, with no identifiable excuse for existing other than a corporate means of milking government money our of the recipients -- and the pure habit of the people (who, after all, have to live somewhere).

The country-side is about like town. Few country folk farm anymore, even if they live on a farm. Most just live on small country plots because they prefer the country life over that of town. Some have jobs in distant places to which they commute every day -- like maybe to Wonder Store, the new jail, or one of the prisons or youth camps. Others are retired and, like their town counterparts, receive monthly checks in the mail.

The land is still productive, as well as the remaining farmers who work it. Those who got big enough, and had a good business head, are doing well. The others are struggling. 

 

THE SOLUTION TO THE MONEY PROBLEM AND UNFAIR TAXATION

Do we have a money problem? Ask outgoing Federal Reserve Chairman Allen Greenspan. In fact back in February, 2000, Congressman Ron Paul did ask a similar question: 

Greenspan replied, "... We have a problem trying to define exactly what
MONEY is...the current definition of MONEY is not sufficient to give us a
good means for controlling the Money Supply..."

Congressman Paul asked "Well, if you can't define Money, how can you
control the Monetary System?"

Greenspan replied "That's the problem..."

March 31, 2000

(Quoted from "ALAN GREENSPAN'S REMARKABLE ADMISSION - Underlines His Dilemma as Chairman of the Federal Reserve" - Stephen Zarlenga, Director of the American Monetary Institute)

Read more at: http://www.monetary.org/greenspandilemma.htm

The solution to the money problem is so simple that almost nobody believes such a solution is even remotely possible. 

The solution? The government should declare monetary sovereignty (reclaiming its sovereign prerogatives), and start using United States Notes for currency rather than Federal Reserve Notes. It's that simple.

To see one seriously proposed plan, follow the following link at
The American Monetary Institute
http://www.monetary.org/American_Monetary_Act_version_10_feb_06.htm

A century and more of propaganda, along with whole schools of economic scholarship, have promoted false notions that "prove" this is not possible -- that "national money" would would be a ghastly mistake. The "proof" is mainly accomplished by ignoring common sense and making a complicated and "dismal" science of money and economics under the false assumption that debt money is the only workable money, and that the only way for money to exist is to borrow it from private parties and institutions at interest -- i.e., those who really know how to do it.

Naturally, the most compelling argument against national money is embodied in the empirical question, "Do you trust your government?" That, particularly in this day and age (as our government is showing us just what it is capable of), is enough to cause people to leave well enough alone. But is "well enough" good enough? We'll address this in other posts.

Rather than borrowing and taxing the public in order to get its hands on the money required to fund government obligations, the government should simply print it's own interest free currency and spend it into circulation. This has been tried before, of course, and it worked to the extent that it was tried, though the trials were always sabotaged by banking interests. United States Notes (Lincoln era greenbacks), however, helped win the Civil War.

Of course, a declaration of monetary sovereignty would also probably mean the necessity of nationalizing the Federal Reserve -- and making arrangements to accommodate international obligations.

A true "U.S. dollar" should not, in fact could not, serve as international money. It cannot be the world's reserved money as our Federal Reserve money is today. To allow this is simply to willfully relinquish effective national control over the nation's circulating currency, as is the case today.

The role of the American dollar should be to serve the public and commercial needs of the nation -- not the world. It should provide a stable circulating exchange medium within our own national boundaries.

International obligations and payments should be in the form of a distinctly separate international money, whether it be gold or Special Drawing Rights based on gold or some other measure of value. We would have to devise a means by which to pay our legitimate foreign obligations without seeming to cheat our once necessary creditors. But the public should not be asked to pay for the past follies of their so-called representatives in Washington -- at least not directly.

An obligation is an obligation, and the government would have to raise sufficient foreign exchange (international money), to satisfy them. This foreign exchange should be tackled in the time honored way -- by taxing foreign trade. This would mostly be in the form of import tariffs which would be gradually implemented and increased so as not to disrupt and curtail international trade too quickly.

Taxing imports, of course, would tend to reduce the volume of our foreign trade. But we trade altogether way too much anyway. No, it isn't really that we "trade" too much -- we seldom trade, but simply "buy" too much from our foreign competitors. We buy much more than we can afford and the present and growing dollar value of our trade deficit is clear evidence of it.

Cutting the volume of our international trade, of course, is considered heresy by our presently national leadership. They want us to trade a lot more. They think Americans should buy everything they need for survival and comfort from foreign countries, and that American workers should in turn provide everything everybody else needs.

It's clear by now, however, that this system isn't working. American companies are either abandoning the flag or being bought foreign. Others elsewhere are producing more and we are producing less even as we consume more. Ford and General Motors aren't producing automobiles for Europeans, Mexicans, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese -- at least not unless they open up shop in those countries. In fact as major national manufacturers both Ford and GM are on the brink of domestic collapse.

Our leadership, of course (along with their court economists), continually tells us that doing for ourselves, and not buying all that foreign production, would be "selfish," and detrimental to American consumer interests. But this is merely smoke. American consumers need good jobs if they are going to continue to be able to maintain their current living standards. And Mexican, Chinese, and Bangladeshi workers should be producing for themselves and bringing up their own living standards, rather than producing for the American market.

The cheap labor that is now being "used" to produce for the American market is being cheated out of most of the wealth it is creating through its productive labor, while by the same processes American workers are being deprived of the industries that once provided the jobs that made them members of a relatively stable and increasingly affluent society.

We are supposedly richer today than ever before, but those riches are increasingly at risk as the basis for wealth creation is removed from the national economy and replaced with debt and smoke. We're in a huge economic bubble in an increasingly hollowed out economy, with an overhanging debt that threatens to collapse the present system upon which we have come to depend.

Repudiation of our present "free international trade" policies is essential to curing the nation of its present malaise -- for it is by those very policies that we, as a nation, are currently literally losing our shirt. "Protectionism" is not only a sovereign national right, but a very legitimate obligation of any representative government -- just as the provision of military defense and a sound national currency are. Protection is what government is all about in the first place -- or is supposed to be about -- and trade protectionism is just as important to the people as protection against invasion of foreign armies. While this is considered political and economic heresy at this point of our history, it was once considered mere common sense.

For a rich nation such as ours to literally ruin itself on the altar of free trade and corporate internationalism is preposterous. National suicide is not what representative government is supposed to be about.

Trade, as Ben Franklin once pointed out, is not a wealth-building activity. Unless one or the other party is getting cheated, it's an exchange of goods supposedly of equal value. Trade does not add value to products, it adds shipping costs. Some trade is good (even necessary), of course, but unnecessary trade can be (and usually is), destructive, as everybody should be seeing by now. 

Dependence on the foreign competition is obviously not in our national interest. Oddly enough, we (again), seem to be waking up to that fact with regard to our dependence on foreign oil. Will it take a rocket scientist, promoted to economist, to discover that what is true for oil is also true for everything else we need for survival and the "good life?" Things like food, clothing, automobiles, electronics, and the whole array of consumer goods that we require for our "American way of life" are just as important as oil.

The idea of energy independence is just as "protectionist" and anti-globalist as any other brand of industrial and economic independence. The only thing different is that people are already saying "Ouch!" at the gas pumps. But what if Wal-Mart closed it doors for a few days or weeks? What would they say then?

We are now experiencing high oil and gas prices, and people are feeling the squeeze. They feel inconvenienced and threatened as prices go up and they are reminded that energy independence is going to be very difficult to attain. Are we going to require a food crises, clothing crises, or a computer equipment crises in order to discover that we have become dependent on foreign producers to provide our every necessity and luxury?

Tariffs on imports (as was the case during most our our history), encouraged American industry, and American workers, to produce for the American marketplace, and reduce dependence on others elsewhere to produce for us and provide for our material well being. We should provide for, and insure, our own well being. And we should do this before shortages and crises develop.

This means that we need somebody somewhere in the governing establishment to actually "PLAN AHEAD!" This used to be considered simple common sense. Does it make sense to export our natural resources at bargain basement prices and have all the value-added production processes done elsewhere so we can buy it back while Americans workers lose jobs and the nation loses the independence our ancestors fought so desperately for in the Revolutionary War?

America and Americans need to go back to work, in a broad-based productive way. In order to to that, the government must once again become a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Government isn't a business in the contexts that many of today's political leaders seem to believe and desire. It isn't a multi-national corporation. If it is a corporation at all, it should be a national one with national goals.

National goals mean working for, and maintaining, national independence to the degree possible. We need to quit the idea of an international commercial empire built on other people's money, other people's work, and other people getting the goods to us. We have the land and resources within our national boundaries to be economically independent in every significant way. The so-called New World Order, and globalism, is really an "international protection racket" -- protecting not Americans or the American economy, but international capital interests. It's actually a fascist scheme, but with the reigns of power in the hands of global financiers and capital rather than government. But a sufficient number of so-called representatives are significant beneficiaries of the system to pull on it's behalf rather than on behalf of the people. Our government is supposed to be a constitutional scheme for protecting Americans' right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The hue and cry for global egalitarianism through increased international interdependence is a Siren song calculated to woe an unwary public everywhere. For the Third World it is supposed to be a call to modernity and prosperity. For the rest of us it is suicide pact attractively wrapped in the attractions of cheap imports.

Of course, the world and its peoples are unavoidably interdependent in many respects to varying degrees, but why use this as an excuse to abandon any and all pretense at national independence? Many nations are inherently incapable of economic independence. These nations, such as Singapore and Japan, must thrive on trade or die. But the United States isn't one of these. In fact most major continental nation-states are capable of economic independence to a significant degree. They owe it both to themselves, as well as to the rest of humanity to be as productively independent as possible.

They (and most especially, WE), should not depend on the Middle East to satisfy our energy needs. Nor should we depend on nations like Indonesia -- a nation that will increasingly need its own oil resources. We pride ourselves at having helped develop their oil potential and providing a ready market for it. But will they have it for their own energy needs when they need it? We should not depend on China for our consumer goods. China might decide to do something we don't like. And it can potentially redirect its production inward, and undoubtedly intends to do so at some future time. Even now China has the power to destroy the American economy, and probably will at some point, if we don't do it to ourselves first. China has this power not because of any evil or aggressive intent on the part of China, but because our own national leadership has aggressively pursued a policy of national economic suicide for far too long.

In spite of our economic and military superpower status, it seems nobody has really seriously considered that economic dependence is also strategic folly. Even in the face of our present global war on terror, this apparently hasn't dawned on the national leadership. For they have continued to cultivate national policies that allow the sale of our national assets to the highest bidders. The near take-over of six major port terminals by a United Arab Republic company woke a few people up partially. But the security threat posed by an Arab company managing American strategic assets on the Homeland is nothing compared to the fact that our flag, and everything under it, is literally up for sale to the highest bidder.

Not only have our national leaders repudiated "protectionism," they're allowing the whole American marketplace to be sold off piece meal. The marketplace they are piecing out is our nation -- once an owner operated national enterprise. Along with the markets go our production facilities, our merchant ships, our ship yards. If they aren't purchased foreign and moved offshore or south of the border, they remain here under foreign ownership, with the profits facilitated by American labor going to the foreign competition.

Beside ample arable land mass, mineral resources, and recognizable borders, there are two main requisites to national independence: (1) the ability and act of being food independent, and (2) monetary independence -- an honest and stable currency. From these flow all of the other requisites, such as energy independence and industrial independence.

One of the most fundamental requisites for national independence is a national monetary system that provides a circulating medium of exchange

Unfortunately, this is a very important matter that was not sufficiently addressed in our Constitution -- mainly due to a lack of understanding of money and credit issue by the founding fathers. However, this omission was quickly understood by several of them, though never successfully implemented as national monetary policy. We almost got it right once, and the greenback (our first national "legal tender"), remains a model for possible future monetary reform.

The greenback failed to become national monetary policy for three main reasons: (1) The banking interests were very much opposed the national money, and remained in effective control of national credit in spite of the greenback. (2) Neither the American public, nor a sufficient number of legislators, ever became familiar with the issues. And, of course (3) Money talks -- and there have always been a sufficient number of legislators up for sale to the highest bidders (which always happened to be banking interests).

In spite of this "failure" of the greenback to become permanent, it served the nation well during the Civil War, and in a limited way for many decades thereafter (until totally withdrawn as recently as the late 1960s). But the greenback could and should be revived to not only save the nation, but play a significant role in saving (at least to the extent it should be saved), what has become a very shaky global economy.

United States Notes would be issued by the treasury and spent into circulation through federal civil and military payrolls and pensions, Social Security payments, welfare and other entitlements, military procurement and R & D programs, strategic industry subsidy programs, and federal public works programs, such as highway construction and maintenance. In short, all money that the government spends should be money the government has authorized and issued.

These include the major costs of government which are pushing our present national debt into the stratosphere. There would be no need to tax the public to fund these government functions. Doing so is absurd. The Federal Reserve System, as it presently functions (as a private monopoly over money issue holding the entire nation, if not the world, hostage), is absurd.

Modern money is simply a bearer note accepted in the national marketplace in exchange for either goods or services. Why should the government have to borrow a from a bank to get that bearer note when it is the very authority that give it legal status of money in the first place?

Under a sane monetary system government prints dollar note, stamps it "legal tender" and spends or loans it into circulation. One dollar becomes one dollar's worth of obligation.

Under our present insane monetary system it works more like this: Government borrows dollar, providing collateral in the form of a bond note it has printed, obligating it to pay two dollars at a future date. Government then prints dollar note, stamps it "legal tender" and spends or loans it into circulation. Then, because that dollar incurred two dollars worth of obligation, it must tax the public to get a dollar to pay part of the obligation. Then, the dollar being insufficient to pay the piper, it must borrow another dollar, providing collateral with another bond note, obligating it to pay two more dollars at a future date. And so on...

The government bond represents money the government's promise to pay -- money that it doesn't have -- but promises to get through taxation or future borrowing. The worth of the bond is backed by the "full faith and credit of the nation."

Why isn't the full faith and credit of the nation sufficient to merely print and stamp dollar notes and forego the expensive excess debt obligations? Oh! It simply can't be done! Who says so? Apparently a power far greater than that of government. No, it isn't God. God isn't behind the scam. It's the great combination of ignorance and and well organized avarice.

Thursday, March 9, 2006

Apparently the Dubai Port World ports has has been defeated by concerned congressional leaders. And they are supposedly going to take a careful look at foreign ownership and managerial control of U.S. ports and other sensitive or strategic assets.

But let's wait and see who and what are behind any "American" companies that come into the picture. They may only be American in name and official registry, but not true ownership.   

Saturday, March 4, 2006

PERHAPS THE DUBAI PORT FLAP WILL WAKE SOMEBODY UP YET -- but don't hold your breath.

The following is quoted from the Wheelhouse Weekly, the email newsletter of the International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots union (an AFL-CIO affiliate)

PORT DEAL SHINES LIGHT ON FOREIGN OWNERSHIP OF US SHIPPING

The controversy on over the purchase of operations of six major Atlantic and Gulf ports from British owned P&O to United Arab Emirates (UAE) owned Dubai Port World continues to rage through the halls of Congress and numerous state houses...

...As the storm over foreign ownership over the control of US port assets has intensified, it has started to shed some light on other foreign owned shipping operations, including the US-flag merchant fleet.

One of the most-comprehensive accounts on the status of foreign-ownership as it concerns the US-flag maritime industry appeared in the March 1st edition of the International Herald Tribune as reported by Don Phillips. It contains a historical perspective not being covered by other news outlets as well as a concise analytical presentation on the current status of foreign-owned shipping operations within the US. Here are some excerpts from that article:

"The US maritime industry has all but disappeared in the past three decades, at the very time that shipping to and from the United States has experienced remarkable growth. With a tiny number of special exceptions, every ship that once proudly flew the US-flag has been sold to a non-US company and now flies a foreign flag.

Literally thousands of US merchant sailors were put out of work with hardly a political whimper. In fact, only ships that engage in traffic from one US port to another, like tankers engaged in hauling Alaskan oil to California, must be US-owned and operated with US crews.

In general, US ports are US-owned, but many of them are leased to foreign operators in exactly the same manner as in the current proposed lease of six US port operations to a Dubai-based company, DP World.

While the Dubai port issue has become a political football, hundreds of ships enter US ports every day flying a "flag of convenience" that masks their true ownership. Panama is the main flag of convenience, but clearly many of those ships are quietly owned by countries hostile to the US.

The intense interest now among members of the US Congress in who controls operations at US ports is remarkable mainly because the same people now pounding the table and protesting the lease of port operations to the Dubai-based company said almost nothing as US ocean shipping slipped away to foreign control over the past few decades. There is an irony in the differing attitudes toward differing forms
of transportation.

During the time that the merchant marine fleet was slipping away, the United States maintained a strong and longstanding ban on majority ownership of US airlines by
citizens or airlines of other countries.

This seems to follow a pattern: the public is strongly interested in the things that carry people, but the public pays almost no attention to the important conveyances that haul almost everything we eat, wear and use - ocean freight shipping, freight trains, trucks and pipelines - unless they are involved in a disaster.

"A number of people associated with the shipping industry wonder what has taken so long for someone to make this a major issue," said Ed Wytkind, president of the
Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, the largest US labor organization.

The issue now at hand is new in only one way. This appears to be the first time that a country in the Middle East, even one whose government is allied with the United States, is trying to do something that has become common in the past few decades: the lease or sale of some unit of the US ocean shipping industry to a foreign company. However, this is not a matter of suddenly replacing thousands of US workers with low-paid third world workers.

As has been reported, the Dubai company would mainly handle loading and unloading of ships and would generally leave security to the US Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Agency. In addition, all current port workers would remain on the job, and Dubai has even said it would keep current management.

So why get upset with Dubai? One obvious reason is that Dubai is in the Middle East and therefore is viewed with suspicion by many Americans. In addition, Dubai would have access to some US security information. But there seem to be other reasons that have almost nothing to do with Dubai.

In addition to the mishandling of the issue by the White House, many in Congress now understand that the vast majority of transportation security money has been spent on airports and airlines, while ships, trucks and trains pass in or near all major cities with the ability to haul a disastrous load of explosives or germs.

Despite major efforts by those industries to spot dangerous goods, it simply isn't possible to check even a majority of freight. "We need to just say 'time out' and rethink this security matter maturely and prudently," said a top transportation security official who asked that neither he nor his specific industry be named, fearing a backlash from the US government."

PORT AND CARGO SECURITY AND THE US-FLAG MERCHANT MARINE

Maritime TV released a white paper entitled "Port and Cargo Security and the American Flag Merchant Marine." This article contains an in-depth presentation of the many legal complexities found in the foreign ownership of port, cargo and shipping assets in the US-Flag maritime industry.

Maritime TV has been instrumental in highlighting video content that has attracted national attention about maritime security issues in the past, including the 2004
report that cited the homeland security threat from the lack of US-flag shipping and crew presence in US ports.

Sources at Maritime TV have confirmed that the Internet TV channel is preparing to produce a nation-wide video webcast forum featuring industry experts on the issue, with more details to be announced shortly. To view a copy of the "white paper" or for more information go to http://www.MaritimeTV.com .

Of course there are security implications to a state-owned Arab company taking over the operation of U.S. port facilities. That seems to be fairly obvious to everybody. But the security threat posed by an United Arab Emirates company presence on our waterfront is no more serious than, say, a Red Chinese company's presence. In fact there was a similar outcry a few years ago (though without the War on Terror backdrop), when the Chinese were first poised to take control of the area formerly occupied by the U.S. Naval Shipyard on Terminal Island in the Port of Los Angeles. The deal was slowed down until the public's attention was sufficiently averted. Then the Chinese were quietly allowed to establish their commercial presence and they have been in Los Angeles harbor ever since. We all lived happily ever after -- until an Arab company came on the same stage set.

In the end, the real security threat is not the fact that it is an Arab company, a Chinese company, an English company, or a Danish company – rather it is the fact that our government allows any foreign ownership or managerial control over any national security asset, or any national asset that constitutes the natural birthright of the American people. Our seaports are such properties. When these commercial properties are leased out to foreign interests, a great deal of the revenue generated by them is siphoned out of the U.S. economy to what is effectively the foreign competition.

Naturally, we have little of which to complain. American multi-national companies, with the full backing of the United States government, have been investing in foreign countries for well over a century. American companies have both developed and dominated many national economies in the underdeveloped world – especially in Latin America. In the post World War II era, American economic imperialism mushroomed globally, and many American multi-national corporations became major instruments in American foreign policy during the Cold War.

We effectively wrote the book on foreign investment in the post-colonial world. The communist block hated Yankee imperialism, preached against it, and championed the causes of those peoples who wished to free themselves of American commercial domination. Few did free themselves, with the notable exception of Cuba. But in the end, with the collapse of the Soviet block, the methods of Yankee imperialism became the commercial model for the way the new international economic order would be foisted upon an unwary world.

One of the few really "new" things about the New World Order, was that America laid its own markets wide open to foreign commercial penetration by all corporate comers. Of course, foreign commercial investment in the United States is nothing new. Many European corporations have been here for a long time, albeit usually with a low profile. English investment in America resumed with the end of the Revolutionary War, and many major corporations and brand names that we think of as American as apple pie, are in fact European companies and brands. We eventually even got used to the major penetration of American markets by Japanese auto and electronics firms. When it appeared that Japan was selling too many cars in America, our government's response was to encourage Japanese companies to open factories here. But the idea of the post Cold War "New" World Order (new international economic order, and free international markets), long in the planning and already far along in development, was universal commercial reciprocity tailored, of course, to the needs of international capital interests.

Nobody objected when commercial port facilities were leased to and managed by companies like British owned P&O. But when we started finding out that China had the same privileges, many Americans became concerned, at least temporarily. Now that P&O has been sold to Dubai Port World, Americans find it shocking that a state owned Arab company can purchase a British company like as sack of potatoes and become a major player on the American waterfront.

Naturally, if we block the Dubai port deal, we'll be exposed as hypocrites and internationally condemned as corporate xenophobes. After all, the New World Order is supposedly our own enlightened solution to the world's problems. Economic interdependence, without national bias, is the name of the game. The bill of goods that we've sold to the world is merely coming home to bite us – or at least temporarily alarm the American public. And the bite foreign companies are taking out of America are significant cause for concern.

Americans will sooner or later come to realize that in instituting the New World Order, our national leadership has sold the birthright of all Americans on the international market – i.e., sold us down the river. The benefits of the new international economic order focus on capital, not people. Yet the American people have been successfully bought off by the supposed benefits of having their every need satisfied at attractive prices by international corporations – corporations given license to exploit the world in quest of perpetually growing profits.

Will Americans wake up? Well, not for a while yet. And when they do wake up, it will undoubtedly be in an acute state of distress, hunger, and confusion. Their awakening will probably do little good, for it will be left to the the government, and the very same international machinery responsible for getting us to where we are now, to save the day and put bread back into our mouths. FEMA will do the best it can, of course, but the nation is much bigger even than the Katrina stricken Gulf Coast.

---

THE PROFITS OF TRADE

Once it was considered a matter of common sense that a favorable balance of trade was much more desirable than a trade deficit. And throughout most our our history, the United States enjoyed a favorable balance of trade. Today, however, our trade deficit is vying with the national debt itself in eliciting wonder and amazement. But we have economists, think tanks, and national policy wonks who swear that deficits are good for the economy.

Ben Franklin once pointed out that there is no profit in trade unless somebody is being cheated. He also pointed out that the mercantile class was stateless, having nothing resembling national loyalty

Franklin's two points are as true today as they were when he penned them. But in Franklin's day, trade between to nations more closely resembled barter than it does today. In the simplest terms America simple traded X dollars worth of its production for the same amount's worth of, say, manufactured goods from England. There was no profit to either nation, though obviously the merchants doing the trading were able to profit in their respective markets.

Of course, during colonial times, America was always effectively cheated in its trade with England, because all the prices and terms of trade were dictated by England, and English imports to the colonies that were not traded for American production or natural resources, had to be paid for in other commodities – gold or silver coin.

Today international trade seldom resembles barter between two trading nations. Increasingly we buy from abroad, paying in money or credit, and sell abroad on the same basis.

Everybody knows that a lot of money is being made in international trade today – otherwise it wouldn't be such a large and growing factor in our national economy. But who is making the money and who is getting cheated?

Obviously, the manufacturers of trade goods, merchants (such as Wal-Mart), the sea and land shipping companies, are all making money. And, undoubtedly, the the American economy is dependent upon trade. "Benefit" is one thing, "dependency" another, however. Can we really benefit by being significantly dependent on any other nation? One Worlders, and voodoo economists seem to think so.

Singling out China and Wal-Mart for purposes of simple illustration, Wal-Mart purchases massive amounts of manufactured goods from Chinese manufacturers. American consumers purchase these goods. Wal-Mart pays its employees, extracts its profits, and then pays its Chinese suppliers. Everybody is happy.

Wal-Mart and a ever-larger percentage of the American domestic marketplace depend on China. American consumers depend on China. And America itself, and its entire economy, increasingly depends on China.

Though we call this trade, it's really a simple purchase. American consumers get the goods, and China gets dollars in return. The goods are "consumed" by the American public. But the Chinese manage to end up with a lot more dollars than are needed to manufacture and export more similar goods. Their profit is an increasingly large dollar amount – and each and every dollar is a claim on the assets of the United States.

What we, as a nation, sell to China is largely in the form of raw materials and agricultural commodities, and not all that much of either of them. (And the "great hope" that we will ever break into the vast Chinese consumer market with American manufactured goods is little more than second hand smoke.) Not only are raw materials inherently cheap in comparison to the things that can be manufactured out of them, but their prices are set by global, rather than American, markets. Often we sell at less than the cost of production. Billions of tons of agricultural commodities have simply been given away over several decades.

By far our most significant exports to China and elsewhere over the past few decades, has been American jobs and whole industries.

This brings us to a hint as to who is getting cheated under our current trading structure. American workers, and many American businesses that would prefer to remain American. But not just American workers. Chinese workers are underpaid. Not just by American standards, but by any standards. They are being cheated too (as has historically been the lot of labor, whether under feudalism or capitalism), but not nearly as badly as American workers. This, because the Chinese economy is on the rise, and the lot of Chinese workers are improving. The lot of American productive workers are deteriorating. What they once had, and was their birthright as Americans, is being taken away from them. Not by the Chinese, mind you. The Chinese are merely taking advantage of the opportunities our government has thrust upon them.

Americans as a whole are being cheated in other ways too, with respect to our foreign trade. Almost all of it is carried in foreign ships. Even most of the few remaining "American" flag ships are foreign owned. Thus the freight we pay for all of those foreign made goodies in all of our stores go to the foreign competition. As for the revenues generated by our ports, the various port cities get their due, of course. But since many, if not most, of their container terminal operations are leased and managed by foreign companies also, much of the dockage in our own ports also goes to the foreign competition. We don't even make the huge cranes that handle the cargo containers, or the cargo containers themselves. They are made by others, elsewhere, and shipped half way around the world. So the American economy, the American worker, and even the happy, complacent, American consumer, are getting ripped off at every major juncture of our foreign trade. Only the displaced worker feels it, but where does he go to do his shopping? Like everybody else, he shops wherever the merchandise is the cheapest, of course!

Nobody is likely to take up the cause of displaced American workers. Even American labor unions are now severely handicapped in that endeavor. What American labor is suffering from today is the direct result of policies initiated and pursued by our own government in Washington D.C., with the able assistance of global capital interests. Nobody feels sorry for what's happening to American labor – least of all, the leadership in the nation's capital. To most of the rest of the world American labor, and the great American middle class, is like a spoiled, bratty child. Anything that brings him down is welcome – and (thanks to our government's foreign policies – including efforts to fight international terrorism and remake the world in our own image), anything that might help bring the nation itself down is applauded by at least three quarters of humanity.

In spite of voodoo economists telling us otherwise, the compounding national debt and the growing trade deficit are the most significant leading economic indicators of all. They are much more significant and telling than the bellwethers our government uses to report on how well the economy is doing – i.e., the GDP and Wall Street securities markets. Not that Wall Street is doing so well at the moment, but at least the balloon is holding at its current level of inflation after having let out a lot of hot air earlier this decade.

In the long run, both debt levels and our trade imbalance are death-knells to the American economy. Not only is there no remedy in sight, but in spite of the fact that some people have taken note of the problem, there isn't the slightest indication of a plan to fix it. The only remedy ever put forth is "more and bigger doses of the same poison" from which the nation suffers.

So the take-over of a few American container terminals by Arabs is the least of our worries. The big worry ought to be the national policy machinery that has been erected to allow such things to happen. 

Friday, March 3, 2006

FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

Our leaders tell us that we cannot turn our back on the world -- that isolationism, protectionism, and taking care of our own are cardinal sins in the new global economy. We need foreign investment, they say -- and in this give and take world of globalization, the Bush administration apparently believes there's little difference between an United Arab Emirates corporation and a British corporation. That Dubai Port World happens to be a state-own enterprise is of little consequence. The important things are that a significant amount of money is changing hands, and the U.A.E. is a darned handy strategic ally in the Persian Gulf -- both in light of our present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our eye toward possible future conflict with Iran. And there is probably even more to a deal than has yet met the public eye.

With any luck, Michael Moore will make another movie and tell us all about it. But without waiting for the whole story, one interesting coincidence is that president Bush seems to have already appointed David Sanborn, a Dubai Port World executive, to become the next head of the U.S. Maritime Commission.

To be sure, it's unlikely that David Sanborn is an Arab terrorist. But it seems a little strange that someone working for a state owned Arab company (and one that just happens to be poised to become a major player on the American water-front), would be tapped for the position that heads the agency that oversees U.S. maritime affairs. If it weren't for the fact that President Bush claims he had been unaware of the pending "port deal" (between the British P&O company and "DP World"), one would almost be inclined to think there was some sort of connection.

This is more than just significant. If the obvious dots go together, it would appear that the U.S. Maritime Commission is not really the "U.S." Maritime Commission at all, but rather some sort of global maritime commission operating from an American base. Already, over the past several decades the Maritime Commission has overseen, and approved of, the decline and near extinction of the U.S. Merchant Marine and America's major merchant shipbuilding industry -- hardly the originally intended role of the Commission.

In light of our exponentially increasing dependence on foreign trade and ocean-borne commerce, this sort of development would seen totally contrary to anything resembling common sense. But this kind of activity has become the very earmark of American government policy, i.e., promoting globalism rather than anything that could distantly be called "Americanism" or American economic independence.

It has become a truism among our national leadership that America now needs foreign investment in order to survive in the new international economic order. And it doesn't matter whether that investment comes from the "mother country," Arabs, Chinese, or Patagonians. The color of the money is all the same.

A SHORT HISTORY LESSON IN FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN AMERICA

The story of foreign investment in the United States began long before the Declaration of Independence. The British colonies in the New World were themselves the antecedents of foreign investment. After all, prior to independence, the American colonies were assets of the British crown. Most of the colonies were initially organized as private companies licensed by the crown. Great Britain, however, did not become "foreign" until the American Revolution severed the official political ties. Once independence was achieve, one of the primary missions of our national government was to