Chage the World or Just Ourselves?

Hello everyone. I just got done watching Zeitgeist 2, and I have a few things I would like to get off of my chest. This is going to be a long bitch session and I hope you will bear with me.

1. Our monetary system.

I am so sick of hearing about how screwed up our system is and the corruption that goes along with it, in movies and here on the forum (prison planet), yet there seems to be no one who is willing to take the necessary steps to rectify the situation. I hear all the time, how the Federal Reserve act of 1913 was unconstitutional because, per the constitution, congress does not have the authority to redistribute the responsibility of printing money to any other organization, private or public.

Well, if this is the case, then why is it that not one case has been presented to the US Supreme court on the constitutionality of said act? At least to my knowledge none have. We have thousands on the forum (prison planet) and millions across the world who are part of the freedom movement, yet there are no lawyers willing to present the most important case to the Supreme Court in our history? This brings a sickening feeling to my heart, as I am not a lawyer and have only a basic understanding of law, as it were.

This is only one of many ideas on how to fix this problem, yet this is the only one that I can think of that is 1. Legal, and 2. Something we can do as average citizens. I understand the devastation to our economy if such an event were to actually be achieved; yet the long-term benefits will severely outweigh the short-term difficulties. Not to mention that the long term consequences of doing nothing are, in a word, unacceptable.

There are those who do not live in the US, which are thinking, “This does not affect me because it is the Americans that let this happen to them." To you, I urge you to take a good long hard look at your nations own economy and I will promise you that the corruption and control is, if nothing else, equal to our own.

2. Our Energy Independence

There is a massive amount of information out there dealing with the topic of alternative energy, yet there is no massive amount of progress towards utilizing said information. Lets take a look at some of the alternatives to coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear.

A. Geothermal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power

Using mother earths own heat generation to power our lifestyles is not only smart, it is clean. I have not seen, though, any information as to environmental impacts due to the extraction of planetary heat, thus leaving the earth cooler. (Probably not an issue due to the shallowness of the wells drilled.)

B. Wind turbine.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/sources/renewable/wind.html

Although this is a totally renewable resource, it does have its impacts on the environment. From massive amounts of land needed for a location to the more important bird killing aspects of the turbines. I do think that the amount of birds killed by a wind turbine a many, many fewer casualties than the number of animals killed in the use of oil.

C. Solar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy

The technology in solar energy collection has been around for decades and should be getting amazingly better everyday. The hindrances of old solar farms should be a thing of the past now.

D. Tidal and Wave energy.

http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/technology/hydro/tidal-power/ http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/technology/hydro/wave-power/

This is a new on to me. I am not all that sure how it will work; yet it does seem like an unending supply of energy.

E. Thermal Depolymerization.

http://www.thermaldepolymerization.org/

This is a very interesting concept that no one talks about except for a few, non televised scientists. This is easily the best way to obtain independence from foriegn oil without a total and complete destruction of our nations wilderness preserves and overhaul of our livelyhoods. This needs to be given more attention.

So, there are a few of the thousands of ideas for alternative energy. Lets face the facts. The oil companies will not help change the way we live because it will affect their bottom lines, and we cannot do it with the current government operations. We must take control of our government and change the way our country operates. This is an important task because, if we control our government, WE can control the companies by removing their control of us. It is all about what do we want. And what are we willing to pay. If this were to take place, the ramifications will be loud and harsh. Our economy will be destroyed (only to be rebuilt in a manner that we want), our lives will be turned upside down (only to be rebuilt in a manner that we want), our national security will be tested time and time again (but if we ban together we can retain our freedoms).

3. Politics

I hear all the time, how the political process in the US is a farce. Well, all I have to say about that is “Who’s fault is that?”

Well, the answer is simple. It is all of our faults. We allowed the system to be altered, and in doing so, allowed the system to break. For when the power to print money shifted from the elected officials to a bank that charges interest on our own money we borrow, the elected officials, for all intents and purposes, lost all of their power. Once the elected officials lost their power, the people lost their power to control said officials. The result was an economy that has twisted the population into a slavery hybrid requiring an individual to work in order to pay for the things needed to survive. The implementation of the social security system further turned the focus away from the government by instilling a sense of provider and defender to the government causing people to not want to “bite the hand that feeds you”.

So, how do we change the broken system? Well, the answer is in the question. WE do it. WE need to become the elected officials. WE need to work toward change. We need to do, whatever is necessary to bring about the alterations to our government instead of sitting at our keyboards bitching about what they did, or didn’t do now. We all know the presidential election is a joke, so we must start at the lower level governments.

Think about it. When the time comes for a military dictatorship to be declared, what level of government is going to be most important anyway? It is going to be the town councils, the town mayors, and the sheriff departments. These are going to be the one expected to go on the streets and quell any uprising. Not the military. And if the federal government does push the military into your town, wouldn’t you want the mayor, sheriff and town council members to be on your side against the military? They are our first line of defense, and should be our first point of attack.

I do not promote crime nor violence, yet I am, with every strain of my being, promoting a revolution of epic proportions, using their own techniques against them.

Imagine if in six years, the Federal Government decides to declare martial law in the US. The State governments are asked to activate the National Guard and round up citizens. The Mayors, Police, Sheriffs, Councils, State officials and National Guard members rise up against the unlawful Federal Orders instead would send a message of undeniable unity and an end to the tyranny in place.


Thank you for bearing with me and I welcome any comments with open arms.

Dan

PS. I know that I have mentioned some of this before, so this should show how strongly I feel about it.

A new reader

Well, I would like to take this time to thank the newest reader/commenter on this blog. You have chosen to join a "large" group of individuals (Rich and Sarah) who read and post on my rants.

Thank you for taking the time, and thanks to you other two for sticking with me.

Dan

Easier for you to read.

Hello Sarah,

Thanks for still reading. Interesting comments.

From WIKI:

Nonintervention or non-interventionism is a foreign policy which holds that political rulers should avoid alliances with other nations and avoid all wars not related to direct territorial self-defense. A similar phrase is "strategic independence".
Isolationism is nonintervention combined with economic nationalism (protectionism). Proponents of non-interventionism distinguish their polices from isolationism. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson favored nonintervention in European Wars while maintaining free trade and cultural exchange.

So there is a difference between the two. Simply put, Isolationism totally breaks us away from the rest of the world, while non-interntionism simply isolates us into a strictly self defence minded military force.

I would strongly recomment that anyone that wants to learn about our governmets “dirty secrets” pick up a copy of Ron Pauls book, “Revolution: A Manifesto”. I learned more about how our economy works by reading that book, than any thing else I have read. Also, if anyone wants to get pissed off, watch the HBO special called “Iraq for Sale”. It talks about the defence contracts in place for Iraq and the dirt behind the ears, so to say.

Also, talking about the bailouts, we must take into consideration what is taking place. In the bank bailouts, Congress was pushed to act quickly to “save” the economy. An overwhelming majority of the population disagreed with the idea and shut down the DC telephone and email switchboards the day of the vote with massive amounts of voter interaction with their representatives. In other words, so many people called and emailed their congressmen that the lines were overloaded. Yet they pushed it through. Now they are asked to do it again with the Auto makers. I think that they are a little more hesitant now because the bank one did not work.

As far as the jobs being saved? I can easily argue that the amount of jobs lost if the largest of the banks were to fold would be astronomical compaired to the Auto job losses. GM was stated that if they closed their doors, it would affect 2.5 million jobs over night. I can easilly see that number to be close, but if the banks were to fail, then it would be at least ten times that. The banks are what is keeping the industry running nowendays because of credit.

As pointed out in R.P.’s book, The way the banking industry works is this:

By law, a bank must have a certain percentage of its total deposits on hand ready to issue if needed. (i.e. people withdrawing money from their accounts) What happens is the banks will, through lending and spending, find themselves with a lower than allowed percentage of funds. The only way for them to return to the proper percentage is to borrow money from another bank or sell bank bonds. It is easier to borrow. Now the issue is that there is not enough money in the banking industry for them to borrow from another bank. They therfore cannot meet the required percentage and must start calling in loans and cutting staff to gain the required funds. They are now in a downward spiral that will end in their demise. The Federal Reserve Bank, a privatley owned bank, sees this problem and decides to buy bank bonds from the bank needing the cash. This injects money into the banking industry and the interest rates lower. This is how the Fed “cuts interest rates”. They have no control over any mysterious interest rate genie. They just print more money, not backed by anything except their word of its worth, and inject it into the market. This frees up money to be spent and pockets are loosend so interest rates go down. The problem with that is the more money you have in circulation, the less each piece of money is worth. This is the definition of inflation. The original definition of inflation meant the increase of the money supply. This increase, in turn, caused an increase in the price of goods. That is why most people define inflation as prices going up, instead of prices going up BECAUSE of inflation.

Anyway, I am going to go now. I think this makes sense. Get the book people. Read it. It is like, Government Corruption for Dummies”.

Any questions, please feel free to ask.

Good night.

Dan

It is about time

Hello all

I know that I haven’t posted in a very long time and some of the one of you may not be reading this anymore, but I need to vent about our economy and these f’in bail outs.

First things first, about our wartime economy.

I completely understand that we need a strong military in order to protect ourselves. No problem. My point is that the actual waging of war is far more costly than anyone can even begin to imagine. An increase in the National Debt of 5 Trillion dollars in a matter of 5 years is incredible. 5 Trillion. That is $5,000,000,000,000.00 in 5 years. That equates to 2,739,726,027.40 a day. As an increase to the National Debt!!!! How does the government gain this money? From taking loans from the, not so federal, Federal Reserve and selling government bonds to foreign investors (including other countries governments such as China). China now holds the most US government bonds in the world. If China were to start to sell the bonds they have, our dollar will begin to devalue at a rate never before seen in US history. Go back to my post about the German economy crashing pre-Nazi and you will get a taste of what would come. In September or October of this year amidst the crazy ramblings of the Bank bail out BS, the congress quietly passed the Pentagons 2009 budget. It included a 40 Billion dollar increase. $40 Bill increase? What the hell is the total number of the budget if they were able to grab a $40 Bill increase without the media reporting it? If you remember the week before 9-11 happened, Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference in which he stated that, through an audit, they found that there was a portion of their budget that had been lost and therefore the money had not been accounted for in the amount of 1 trillion dollars. Too much money floating around without the people really knowing what is going on.

Now, lets look at what we have done with our money over the last thirty years. Rich brought up a good point. “If we do not spend on our military, that would leave the door open for someone else to pass us as world leaders of military strength.” (Paraphrase)

This is not true. Look at what we did during the cold war. We were easily bankrupting ourselves in order to maintain a military supremacy over a tactically inferior opponent. We could, if we wanted to, maintain the strongest, best-trained and able military in the world on a fraction of its current budget. We would have to look at a restructuring of the armed forces, but it is easily planned out. Also, the money we could save would easily cover the rebuilding of our crumbling infrastructure which in its current state, could not handle the increased demand of electricity if the auto makers were to perfect the electric car, nor is the rest of the public service infrastructure any better. Bottom line is…….Post WWII and Pre Iraq, we were the bad asses on the planet. No one wanted to F with us. (Korea and Vietnam were our fault. We went there instead of minding our own business.) Iraq happened so well the first time because no one knew what we had. Now everyone knows what our capabilities are and how to fight us. We are stretched thin and we cannot win a building-to-building battle. We will not fight that way. It is too uncivilized. What about war is civilized though. Anyway, we need to adopt a position, not of isolationism, but of non-interventionism. That means that we do not interfere with other people’s issues as long as they do not affect our people and/or our soil DIRECTLY!!!!

Anyway, about the bailouts. It is no surprise that I was against the bank bailouts and it should come as no surprise that I oppose the automaker bailouts. Once the government starts to get involved, everything gets worse. Look at what happened after the bank bill passed. The government said that it would stabilize the stock market. That day it dropped 5 hundred points? And it has dropped 5 thousand points since. The auto bill will be no different. All this is allowing to happen is it is giving the government leverage against the largest of the large businesses by either allowing them to buy up interest in the company or by issuing loans with the requirement of government oversight. That is a pretty way of saying “monetary black hole”. Once you bail out the auto industry, what about the computer industry? We cannot live without computers now. And the farming industry? The oil industry? The textile industry? Where does it end? It doesn’t. Not without us stopping it before it begins. That is why I am including this website with the contact information of all of the congressmen and women in DC and the local offices. Call them and voice you opposition to saving the rich while the middle class is failing.

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/

or

http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/

Just follow the instructions.

Good day to you all.

Dan

Off Topic

I got this email from Ron Paul today. It is a great depiction of our current financial situation. I urge everyone to read this and then re-read my post here about how the german economy tanked and the powers that be allowed it to happen to get rid of debt.

Enjoy.


Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,




Ron Paul

The Economy

"The foundation of Hitler's success in the first years rested not only on his triumphs in foreign affairs, which brought so many bloodless conquests, but on Germany's economic recovery, which in party circles and even among some economists abroad was hailed as a miracle."

"Unemployment, the curse of the Twenties and early Thirties, was reduced, as we have seen, from six million in 1932 to less that a million four years later."

"All of Schacht's admitted wizardry in finance was put to work to pay for getting the Third Reich ready for war. Printing banknotes was mearly one of his devices. He manipulated the currency with such legerdemain that at one time it was estimated by foreign economists to have 237 different values. He negotiated amazingly profitable(for Germany) barter deals with dozens of countries and to the astonishment of orthodox economists successfully demonstrated that the more you owed a country the more business you did with it. His creation of credit in a country that had little liquid capital and almost no financial reserves was the work of genius, or--as some said--of a master manipulator. His invention of the so-called "Mefo" bills was a good example. These were simply bills created by the Reichsbank and guaranteed by the state and used to pay armament manufacturers. The bills were accepted by all German banks and ultimately discounted by the Reichsbank. Since they appeared neither in the published statements of the national bank nor in the government's budget they helped maintain secrecy as to the extent of Germany's rearmament. From 1935 to 1938 they were used exclusively to finance rearmament and amounted to a total of twelve billion marks. In explaining them once to Hitler, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the harassed Minister of Finance, remarked that they were mearly a way of "printing money.""

"In September of 1936, with the inauguration of the Four-Year Plan under the iron control of Goering, who replaced Schacht as economic dictator though he was almost as ignorant of business as was Hitler, Germany went over to a total war economy. The purpose of the plan was to make Germany self-sufficient in four years, so that a wartime blockade would not stifle it. Imports were reduced to the bare minimum, severe price and wage controls were introduced, dividends restricted to 6 per cent, great factories set up to make synthetic rubber, textiles, fuel and other products from Germany's own sources of raw materials, and a giant Hermann Goering Works established to make steel out of the local low-grade ore."

"Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending "special contributions" to the party, the businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler's regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned."

"Laws decreed in Oct. 1937 simply dissolved all corporations with a capital under $40,000 and forbade the establishment of new ones with a capital less than $200,000."


The purpose for this post is to point out that Germany had a booming economy based on a wartime philosophy. The money made and the employment gained at this time made it very easy for the Nazi government to gain total economic control over the people. Those who had been struggling now had jobs and those who were running the big business received large amounts of profit from all of the new business. When people make money, they do not complain. Money cannot buy happiness? Well...true....but it sure can make the days and nights easier to deal with and a lot more comfortable.

We here in America do not realize that our economy is a war based system. The entire structure of our country is based on war time efforts and when not at war...getting ready for the next war. The nations largest companies realized this in the early years of the 20th century. Look at our war history since then:

WWI 1914-1918
WWII 1939-1945
Korea 1950-1953
Vietnam 1960-1975
Bay of Pigs 1961
Grenada 1983
Panama 1989
Perisan Gulf 1990-1991
Bosnia 1995-1996
Afghanistan 2001-Present
TERROR 2001-Present
Iraq 2003-Present

That is twelve military involvements in 94 years, consisting of 50 years of actual war. That leaves only 44 years of peace.
Anyone still believe that America does not run off of a wartime economy? The most lucrative time in American business was at the height of WWII. Look at the largest companies in America today.


1. Wal-Mart Stores
2. Exxon Mobil
3. Chevron
4. General Motors
5. ConocoPhillips
6. General Electric
7. Ford Motor
8. Citigroup
9. Bank of America
10. AT&T

Now do a little research into what companies are subsidiaries of these large corporations. You will find mostly all of the large military defence contractors listed here.

Just think of what we could achieve if half of the Iraqi war budget had gone to alternative fuel research? Or cancer research?

Anyone?

Dan

Next Last Post

Okay, so the last one wasn't the last one. Maybe this one will be. There is a lot of stuff that I wanted to write about, although I haven't really made examples of similar instances in today's world. I am hoping that you will make comments as to what you think the link is.

Pg 248

"To such a mindless man (Bernhard Rust)was now entrusted dictatorial control over German science, the public schools, the institutions of higher learning and the youth organizations. For education in the Third Reich, as Hitler envisaged it, was not to be confined to stuffy classrooms but to be furthered by a Spartan, political and martial training in the successive youth groups and to reach its climax not so much in the universities and engineering colleges, which absorbed but a small minority, but first, at the age of eighteen, in compulsory labor service and then in service, as conscripts, in the armed forces."

""The whole education by a national state," he had written, "must aim primarily not are the stuffing with mere knowledge but at building bodies which are physically healthy to the core." But, even more important, he had stressed in his book the importance of winning over and then training the youth in the service "of a new national state"--a subject he returned to often after he became the German dictator. "When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' " he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, "I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already..What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.' ""

Pg. 252

"The cost of such failure was great. After six years of Nazification the number of university students dropped by more that one half--from 127,920 to 58,325. The decline in enrollment at the institutes of technology, from which Germany got its scientists and engineers, was even greater--from 20,474 to 9,554."

That is all I have on that. Next maybe will be on the Economy, Labor, and Justice.

Till then.

Dan