Blackstone, China, and the end of the world as we know it: Get Ready

America is now poised for an event that has happened elsewhere in the world but never, for living Americans, here on US soil. That event is a hyperinflation that will destroy our savings, milking Americans dry. Those who planned this event have been in charge of the monetary system, and in charge of every branch of government. While occupying those positions of trust they have profited mightily. Now, many of those who believed they were 'insiders' will face a reality that confronts them with the fact that they, too, have been had. Their employers have used them to immunize themselves as they prepared to move off shore, convert their stolen assets into Swiss Francs, hard money, and commodities, hunkering down to ride it out as they slurp champagne.

The mortgage market is draining away one portion of American savings while the Securities and Exchange Commission finalizes the enabling of hedge funds and limited partnerships like Blackstone Group, to suck out the pensions and secured savings that elderly Americans thought would carry them through to the end of life, leaving a nest egg for their children and grandchildren. Those in power did not forget other kinds of savings, including those intended to educate our children. It was all up for grabs. To protect yourself and those you love you need to see the world, not as they present it to us, but as it appears to them.

We are the bees. They control our hive.

The Corporate Greedy, BigOil, think they have won; they did all within their power to convert our form of government from a representative republic made up of independent states to a serial monarchy/oligarchy. They busily changed the meaning of words, for instance converting the word, “Conservative” to Big Government Federalist for a start.

You may also still believe that communism was a real threat to America instead of another boogie man intended to keep us in line. You may still believe that a tiny insane cabal of Muslims, individuals who had been marginalized in their own countries, are a threat to us. It is time to lose your illusions.

Iraq is about the oil; The only surge those in power really care about is the one being carried out by the Security and Prosperity Partnership and the other forms of control for installing what they hope will be the militarized ground they intend to turn into one large plantation that they call the North American Union. Think of it, and us, as their long term investment strategy.

The hyper inflation now beginning is intended to make us helpless, unable to resist, focused on stark survival, as they staple in place a new, overt form of government on the savaged bones of our Constitution.

Those plans, as reflected in the words, “Security and Prosperity Partnership” are about just that. For their own children they want not prosperity but the culmination of their own fantasied, a guaranteed, unending flow of money and security. The Partnership is for the Corporate Greedy only.

You and I are not to be the beneficiaries of that flow. Our purpose in their eyes is to either produce the wealth, be consumed, or conveniently die.

The Corporate Greedy have been eating us alive for generations. By doing so they worked to provide for those future generations of trust fund brats with no character, morals or clue about the work ethic; more George W. Bushes, more little Murdochs and Rockefellers. For that purpose they have driven America into bankruptcy using all of the institutions we paid for and thought were intended to provide security for us, the real Americans, and our families.

Like the movie, “The Matrix,” it is very simple when you understand.

This hyperinflation cycle is the corporate beekeepers harvesting the hive. They are now harvesting America, making room for those of us who survive, to produce more. At the same time they are looking at which bees are likely to give them the best return. They intend that the 'useless eaters,' the elderly, the lowest income people, the inconveniently political, die.

After they finish harvesting America will be a third world country. The North American Union will be in place to act as their conduit for rebuilding on very different lines, smugly expecting us to be grateful for the opportunity to simply survive and serve.

Hyperinflation is one of their tools that shows you what is about to happen. It has been used before. Stan Mikhalsky experienced the hyper inflation that took place in the Soviet Union. Here is his story.

by Stan Mikhalsky

“It started in November 1985. The Soviet Union had been shaken by a tsunami of deaths as one after another, starting in 1982, Party leaders died in office. First Brezhnev, then Andropov followed by Chernenko. Never had the Soviet Union seen so many deaths just in three years.

Then, suddenly, a new guy, younger, eager, and unexpected... Gorbachev, came into office.
The 70s in Soviet Union had been marked as years of prosperity and peace. Ordinary people had prospered. Then, in 19 , we found ourselves at war in Afghanistan and the world changed.
When I stepped on American soil in 1996 I had the same feeling of those fat, happy years of the 70s in the Soviet Union. Yet in the back of my mind I wondered. I was worried because I knew how that time of peace and prosperity had ended. Putting that aside I figuratively rolled up my sleeves and got to work; good times mean profits and there was much I wanted for my family, much they needed after the trauma we had survived in the Ukraine.

Those fat years of the 70s in the Soviet Union had been followed by a long nightmare, one I see beginning here in America.
Gorbachev had been in office just a couple months when he ratified a new bills exchange. A bills exchange means exchanging the currency then in use for different money.

Well, you could ask, that is normal in many countries, right? Normal? Maybe. But the outcome was like they had pumped us dry of savings. Going through it was torture, seeing the savings of a life time drained in days, weeks, or months.
Current denominations of fifties and hundreds could be exchanged for new bills for only three days and only 500 Rubles could be exchanged at one time. So, what is a big deal?

Many honest people in the Soviet Union had escaped scrutiny, moving into the burgeoning middle class, by keeping their profits in cash. For example, at the time there were many 'underground milliners' whose enterprises were not in sync with ruling Communist Party. These were "illegal activities" though they harmed no one.

Gorbachev had decided, alone or based on advice, to kill these people as a class. And that action -- bill's exchange -- killed a segment of the middle class in Soviet Union.
The artificial currency exchange ratio (at the beginning of the Gorbachev tenure) was 69 kopeek (lowest USSR currency) for 1 US Dollar. It wasn't real, of course. In reality there were people who dealt with foreigners, buying from them and then selling to the general population (jeans, for example). These entrepreneurs were called "farcovshiki". Farcovshiki were risking their lives to support their families. The penalty for these activities were up to 15 years in prison, the same sentence that was applied by criminal law to rapists and killers.
To live in the Soviet Union was to live with danger. To be in business we needed to have a real currency, real US Dollars and Deutsch Marks. The new exchange rate had risen to 3 Rubles per US Dollar.
In the wake of these events, people were literally hiding their money under pillows, afraid to put their funds in the bank. The biggest USSR Savings Bank loomed as a threat to all savings. Instead those funds were kept close at hand, buried in a backyard or hidden in the attic. Imagine what shock we felt when it was announced the new bills would be valid and old ones void in three days!

Just like in the United States, there are always people who worked hard to build businesses and support their families. In the Soviet Union we called those people, who were like my parents, "hard working communists." Like all law abiding citizens they kept their hard-earned money in the USSR Savings Bank. At that time they had enough money in the bank to support them in comfort in their retirement. So, in a sense, these money were US 401K plans equivalent."

1985, everything changed. They figured out how to reach into the places we had used to hide the money we hoped would give us security.
The 'free market' overwhelmed formerly Soviet Union citizens. Overnight the world had changed, some for the good and some not. Now we, ordinary people, could say what we wanted, not just in own kitchens but out loud in public. Our world grew larger. Freedom gave us the ability to see beyond the borders of the USSR. Now we saw the world as it had appeared to to Party leaders, the Military Elite, and their friends. We could see R-rated movies and read different opinions.
However, with this new freedom brought with it hyper inflation, gangsters, and crooks.
Inflation was no longer controlled as it had been before. Because Gorbachev said that the "Free Market" was subject to any forces that came by 1989 the Ruble had fallen to a value only 1/6^th that of the US Dollar.

By 1991 the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and Ukraine had become independent.
That led to more instability and new rounds of inflation through currency manipulation.

As an independent nation, the Ukraine decided to have its own currency. That 'currency, ' which we called, 'coupons,' was printed on low quality paper and was easily reproduced in basements using Xerox machines. Counterfeit currency became a reality, dooming the Coupons. Rubles were highly valuable in exchange because Russia had a strong infrastructure.

The Ukraine, on the other hand, had and has today, an economy based largely on agriculture.
There, Russia and Ukraine found a common ground. Ukrainians carried their bags of farm food to Moscow, where Muscovites bought with pleasure. Moscow, without a strong agricultural economy, was suffering from a reliable food supply. This was a win-win outcome for both with Moscow getting their food and Small-Russia, the name often given to the Eastern Ukraine, receiving Rubles for radishes.
However, trade and the possibility of profit stopped in August 19, 1991. The coup in Moscow severed these connections with the Ukraine.
Inflation was like an avalanche, a tsunami that destroyed businesses and savings. Before long the Ukraine announced a new currency and, on paper, everyone in Ukraine became a millionaire as the value of our Coupons plummeted to 200000 to 1 against the US Dollar. Money in your pocket was worth less every moment. We lived in a state of perpetual uncertainty and shock.
Half-legal currency exchange became a very profitable business. You could go to special a market and exchange your life savings, packaged now in packs of coupons with rubber bands, for crispy "greens." Greens were US dollars. Most prized were crispy new greens; This bias tremendously helped counterfeit US currency to conquer our shaky post-Soviet market.

Some of you may wonder why we needed US dollars in a first place? Well, because borders were much more open than before; many entrepreneurs started trade with other countries and former Soviet Union Republics, making the dollar the only currency we could use to trade. All of us were having the same problems with currency.
Then, in the end of 1995, a new Ukrainian currency arrived. That was the Grivnya. It was a better quality banknote that exchanged elsewhere in ratio 1 Grivnya = 100000 Coupons. It brought some stability for a short while. Far from perfect, the new currency was again counterfeited; these then flooded the markets. Inflation continued to escalate.
During the 1996-2001 period the Grivnya continued to lose its value until the US Dollar itself began to slip. What had been 1 US Dollar to 6 Grivnyas became 2 Grivnyas per Dollar.

Today, it is finally stable and the dollar is losing its luster. And there begins the warning I need to share with you.

There are parallels in those years I lived through in the Ukraine with what I see and sense with the current US market situation.

The law of "survival of the fittest" is still in power. You need to prepare yourself for what may come from uncontrollable US inflation and staggering political instability. Do as many of us, having survived through so many rounds of instability learned to do. Do not hold on to currency. Instead, buy and hold raw products and commodities.

In all countries that painted the map of the Europe after Soviet Union and later, Yugoslavia separation, the oligarchy raised their wealth on these natural products. Some of the oligarchs came from banking industry but in general – oil, gas, colored metals, and media. I am pretty sure that this pattern will apply to any future independent states with economics in turmoil.

Get ready. It will happen here.”

The problem that we face in America at this minute is what Stan and other citizens of the Soviet Union faced, but for us that is only a part of the story. After the inflation we will be facing a new world, now being created to control us by the same people who are harvesting the hive of American wealth as I write.

To survive and provide the softest landing possible for Americans we need to take action as follows.

At the local level you need to get out of debt. If you can't pay off your credit cards to big corporations don't feel bad; their grid has been one of the conduits for stealing placed intentionally to put Americans into their control. The reason they changed the bankruptcy laws was because they knew where they were taking us. Pay off your mortgage if possible or find the means for at least lowering your exposure by moving to a fixed interest rate loan.

Get ready to look for the investment opportunities that will soon be available to ordinary people for lower cost alternatives in energy, transportation, and other off-grid technologies. They are coming. Every home that gets off their grids strikes a blow for freedom. Look at all the grids, energy, transportation, water, food, credit, insurance, medical. Understand how they bind you; there are solutions to each of these. You can break free.

Look at where you live. Can you grow your own food? Look into starting a coop, bringing in locally grown farm food. Join with those around you; this will build a community of cooperation that will bring both security and provide the means for local control.

Growing and eating locally will reduce your exposure to reliance on food that is shipped in from off shore, perhaps bringing in with it diseases or toxic substances, and also mean more security for you and those around you in a steady, clean, supply of food.

Growing your own food has many other benefits; many generations of Americans did just that. Learn more about what you can do along with others in your community. Local food, vegetables and meat, taste better and do not carry the additives that we are slowly learning have had drastic physiological impacts on our health.

Make sure you know what your children are learning. Schools now routinely turn out students who are functionally illiterate, suited only for the kinds of jobs they envision for our posterity. Dumbing down was part of their agenda.

The planning for that began in California with the Reagan Administration with his election as governor there. Examine what you think you know. We were all conned, often and early.

The best indicator for future success in life is how early you have your first job, not how many degrees you accumulate; education has become about symbols over substance. Tesla had no degrees and never attended college. This generation of children will be finding out what it means to work the hard way. Nothing about the policies that have extended childhood far into the twenties have been about protecting children; those policies are about control

At the same time you need to come together with others in your community to take back control. Use persuasion; true community is about including and caring for everyone voluntarily.

Look at your local police. You pay their salaries. If they are focused on a militarized agenda, converting you and other citizens into criminalized targets, ignoring your Constitutional rights under the coloration of 'gang control' you need to take action. The Constitution is for all of us.

The individuals hired as police need to understand that the militarized agenda for control will not be tolerated. Deliver the message.

We need to take back control of our courts. Understand the bait and switch that took place and study the common law that is America's real heritage for enacting justice and lowering the transaction costs of conflict and crime. A crime has not taken place if there is no victim.

The Sheriff in your County is the highest Constitutional law enforcement authority. If you can't trust him, remove him and elect someone who will be willing and able to tell the Feds to stay out. Expect them to move rapidly on their agenda to assert control over regional areas and state governments. Be ready to react accordingly.

One of the victims of the Blackstone ploy, recounted in my last article, was stripping China of the hefty investment they had made in that company. China was conned. They lost billions of dollars and they are justly angry.

China today outspends us on military infrastructure. That was not a smart move on the part of the Corporate Elite. China is not one of them and we may all pay for the con game played out there.

Lastly, start thinking about the many ways that same Corporate Elite has conned us, manipulated us continue their predatory behavior. Through the stock market, through the mortgage industry grab, through the continued rackets they run in every place they touch our lives.

Count up what they have cost you, when, where and who. Make a record. Gather together all of those accounts that show how they have stolen from you, done all within their power to suck you dry. .

There will be an accounting and you need to be ready.

Phyllis Schlafly Exposed - as a NeoCon

Now, our subject for today: Phyllis Schlafly and her well paid work over the last 40 years. Her career was founded on, “A Choice, Not an Echo.” The book, well written and researched, itself turned out to be the persuader that focused attention on Schlafly's potential to feed a disinformation campaign that has gone on for decades.

BigOil found Phyllis hanging around the John Birch Society in the mid 60s. Schlafly was ambitious, looking at a cultural reality that denied to women the opportunities available to men in professions. The Glass Ceiling was still intact. Someone, doubtless made her a lucrative offer, perhaps even William F. Buckley, Jr. They needed a mouth to inject disinformation, persuading women they wanted to stay second class citizens.” Phyllis grabbed the job with both hands.

Her alternatives were bleak. Ads for jobs in the paper were still listed in two categories, “MEN,” and “WOMEN.” Intelligent women who had worked to earn graduate degrees were routinely offered jobs as typists.

It was understandable; her background was not strong on any familial work in social justice; her family had never contributed to any of the movements that created the wealth of America in social consciousness.

Intelligent, driven, and entirely focused on doing the job for which she had been hired, Phyllis blossomed.

The biography written by Donald T. Critchlow, titled, “Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism,” was reviewed favorably by the Horowitz organ, Front Lines Magazine, October 12, 2005. That interview by Critchlow holds some interesting insights into Schlafly and events along with crediting Schlafly with phenomenal success in subverting the agenda for women's rights.

“Critchlow: It is certain that ERA would have been ratified. It defeating ERA, Schlafly tapped into a new constituency that GOP conservative strategists realized could revive the party: Christian evangelicals. This was a constituency waiting to be mobilized. Traditional minded Christians, as well as Jews, felt that they were under attack by the secular left. Since the banning of prayer in public schools in 1962, evangelical Christians had been simmering. Then in the late 1960s came further assaults on tradition and custom through the liberalization of abortion on the state level, feminism, sex education, and the spread of pornography. Schlafly mobilized evangelical Christian women into the STOP ERA campaign, and in doing so, helped revive the conservative movement and the GOP, shifting it to the Right. She showed that social issues was the key to unleash a conservative revolution that began in the midterm elections of 1978 and continued through the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.”

BigOil had gone after the Conservative Movement using William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and employing the wiles of Bush Senior and his paid political operative, Karl Rove. They had subsidized the work of Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson in remaking the demographics of the GOP. Hiring Phyllis a natural continuation of the same strategy. The first goal was extinguishing the real agenda of Conservatism as enunciated by Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater while continuing to shake the boogie man of Communism.

It worked. But looking back we can see that it was always a ruse.

The analysis of United Republicans of California, the group who had gotten Reagan the governorship of California in 1968, Ronald Reagan was never a Conservative. His administration had laid the groundwork for a shift to centralized control that was unprecedented in California history. Changes included state control of education, promotion of regional government, institution of sex eduction in schools, guidelines for redress of racial imbalance in schools, a sharp decrease in personal property rights, Income Tax Withholding, a move towards gun control, and other acts that caused the group to “oppose Ronald Reagan' as candidate for President or Vice President, and urge Americans Nationwide to carefully scrutinize his record.”

An educated woman who had known Barry Goldwater and was well informed, Phyllis Schlafly would have had to be well aware of the disconnect between two philosophies that were diametrically opposed. Schlafly consistently ignored the ideas of Conservatism, selling the repackaged ideas of the newly rising wave of Evangelicals from Southern denominations then being urged to become political and active in the Republican Party. This wave of membership was very different than the activists who had supported Goldwater.

The Republican Party shifted not to the Right, the traditional direction of individual rights, small government, and low taxes, but to burgeoning Federalism that used government as the accepted means for coercing personal behavior. Phyllis helped create that shift; she profited and gloried in her success.

When an intelligent, articulate woman undertakes a clear agenda that in no way conforms to her stated goals it is well to take the irrefutable actions as leading straight to the truth of the matter.

Schlafly herself came from a home where her mother, Odile Dodge, the daughter of the moderately successful attorney, worked as a librarian and a school teacher to support her own family and that of her parents. Schlafly herself was forced, due to the family's financial straits, to begin working early to put herself through college.

Why would Schlafly work to deny to other women the opportunities she took for herself?

The obvious is that this strategy made possible a prominence and prosperity that otherwise would have been impossible. Schlafly was motived by a fierce desire for money and social prominence that also propelled her into the Daughter's of the American Revolution.

Opposing the Equal Rights Amendment was a job, nothing more. The arguments she carefully honed each shared that they were posed in heavily charged emotional terms, threatening dire changes in the culture. In each case she made sure that the objective facts were not available to legislators actually making the decision to vote for or against the ERA. That has remained her strategy ever since.

It is true that Phyllis Schlafly was personally responsible for the derailing of the ERA; what was missed was the fact that the ERA was needed to make the torturous process of trying to simulate equality through the intrusion of government at all levels unnecessary.

In vilifying the women she dismissed as 'feminists' Schlafly ignored for her own benefit the generations of women who had endured a reality that refused them the rights that preexist all government, as promised in America's Mission Statement, the Declaration of Independence.

Schlafly understood what she was doing and for whom she worked. That work made her wealthy and fed the hunger for prestige in her. We all paid. The time has come to see her for what she is and deliver justice. Women, right and left, want to leave a better world for all of our children. Let's come together and make it happen despite the Schlaflys.

How The Rockefeller Republicans Raped America: Part 1: William F. Buckley, Jr.

“When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (E. Howard Hunt, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President." He thought this amusing, and that is all that it was, under the aspect of the heavens”.

In 1951 the CIA recruited Yale graduate William F. Buckley, Jr., who wrote the paragraph above, into their ranks as a “deep cover agent.” Yale supplied most of the early agents for the CIA and many of these individuals went on to placement high up in government or in multinational corporations. It was an exclusive fraternity, serving the interests not of Americans but of the corporations. Through their lives they took with them loyalties and a world view that was very different than that of ordinary Americans, uninvested in those very special interests.

There is a case to believe that William Buckley remained in that service. It was not so much service to the CIA as it was to those who had come to control government, the collation of multinational corporations that today have given up trying to hide their intentions with the very public and obvious moves now underway.

Among these are the North American Union, or Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, The driver's licenses, ready for use, show their logo of the whole of North America; the insistence by the Feds on a Real ID that asserts absolute Federal Control; the LESO program that is now converting control of local law enforcement into Federal property. These prove what they denied for years. You can try to go to the LESO site but if you do a block comes up. You can read more about it on the Rockwell site; Lew is not usually an alarmist.

These are the end times, but not in the way Evangelicals have imagined; many who had bought into the Rapture are horrified at the bankruptcy now facing America, brought on by these same interests.

In the name of furthering the agenda or corporations America has justified torture, endless war, covert ops carried out routinely on all of us, and more. We are watching as the markets collapse and as people lose their homes in steadily increasing numbers, as the vital resources that belong to all of us, including the air ways themselves, are sold off along with the water we drink. The only cheering note is the report that 'they' are now preparing to destroy the evidence of this in Washington D. C., so perhaps Bush intends to leave after all, failing to finish what his grandfather Prescott Bush planned in 1943, the military take over of the US government.

Those working on this are relatively small in number. Buckley is one of them.

William Buckley was trained and paid by the CIA as a covert agent; he admits this as a matter of simple fact. If you look closely at his actions between 1951 and now there are many reasons to conclude he never left that job; all that changed was his assignment and perhaps how he was compensated.

To control the direction of America it was essential to limit the ideas in politics, especially movements that changed the framing regarding the power of government and the rights of the people. At that point in time there was only one movement that worried them.

Between the mid 50s and the 70s Buckley did all in his power to become Mr. Conservative. But there is no reason to believe he was, in fact, a conservative. He is identified with the Rockefeller wing of the GOP; his actions agree with the agenda of that political faction by his own contemporary quotes. His presence as a self-declared Conservative was founded on intense intellectual masturbation that ignored the unifying issues from which the Conservatism of that movement had derived.

Buckley did not win identification as a Conservative by enacting the ideas of Conservatism, he did so by simply repeating over and over that he was a Conservative, introducing microanalysis of issues that ignored the foundation for those ideas in the works of Locke and in the Declaration of Independence. Baffle with Thy Bullshit should be engraved on his forehead.

When that proved to be less than compelling to people looking for the truth Buckley changed tactics, destroying the people who lead and had created that movement. Their lives and actions tell us they were Conservatives; the records of their lives clearly prove that they understood the principles of limited government, individual rights, and adherence to the Constitution.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and lays duck eggs, it is a duck. Goldwater, Ayn Rand and Robert Welch were ducks. Buckley was a turkey trying to quack convincingly. William Buckley was no Ronald Reagan.

In the years following the Second World War American government, in collusion with corporations, was making war on the right of Americans to organize and restructure all they perceived as wrong with government. As that new movement began, dedicated to the ideas of limited government, individual rights, and the Constitution, corporations in collusion with the CIA, took up a covert war. To carry this out those who wanted to instead extend the power of corporations through government created the boogie man of Communism and recruited agents.

Children cowered under their desks to perpetuate that boogie man.

Many of those men involved in the planning stages of the Cold War had had dealings with the Soviet Union as they had had with Nazi Germany; those interests were purely financial. Living in a world of their creation, driven by money, they saw the world through the lens of corporations. They therefore owed allegiance to no nation; they were above such considerations, coming to view the issues of America as less weighty than of maintaining their own profits. Profits depended on an unending supply of oil.

All of the actions taken from then until now point to the goal of acquiring the oil reserves of which Everette Lee DeGolyer, the singular guru of oil they regarded as the preeminent world expert, had said, “No such galaxy of fields of the first magnitude over such a wide area has been developed previously in the history of the oil industry.” DeGolyer had returned from a survey of the Middle East.

The corporate interests, now merged with government in the US, were following through with a strategy intended to lower the costs of corporations in obtaining oil. Oil was the life's blood that pumped through their veins. The fact that Communism was no threat was irrelevant; the corporations needed a threat so they could continue to justify control just as they do today with threats of extremist Muslims.

The individuals who then were organizing to oppose them were gulled by the threats of Communism; they believed the people who they thought of as fellow Americans. The real Conservatives were naive but honest. They included men like Taft and Barry Goldwater; Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises. They came from diverse background but they shared a belief in the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the free market that America had never really had. They believed in individual freedom and the sovereignty of the individual before the existence of government. They dreams of freedom.

To men like Buckley, operating in the 50s and 60s, it must have been like stealing candy from a baby. Buckley's motives went deep. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., had been an oil man in Venezuela whose interests were truncated by the move in that country to take control of that resource.

Buckley had very personal motives.

Now it is clear that all of those closely associated with the small group who worked to eviscerate the role of the United Nations, manicure the political environment in the United States, and weld the corporations to government had ties to Big Oil. The small group included George H. W. Bush, Sr., Maurice Strong, and Robert O. Anderson. Big Oil understood how much they had to lose if Americans had real choices. This period is also marked by the disappearance of various better carburetors and other innovations that improved gas and oil efficiency. These patents were typically bought up by oil companies and never used.

Communism was a distraction that kept the eyes of Americans off the ball and allowed for the continued plundering of oil reserves in the Middle East – and elsewhere as they were discovered.

Back home, Buckley made sure that the use of the military as an adjunct for corporate leveraging against other countries continued by destroying the potential objections from within the Conservative Movement.

Using government in this way gave rise to a very different attitude about their own mis gotten wealth and about people who lived simple, decent lives. You see the fully developed attitude in this Straussianism, which expressed this as, “if you are destined to rule then you may rightly ignore the rules made for lesser men.” This is self serving and ugly and it is possible that the hyper intellectual rationalizations used by Buckley and the others came from their unconscious knowledge that their actions were morally and ethically bankrupt.

Many of Buckley's fellow CIA recruits shared his affiliation with Skull and Bones, where who you know and how, provides yet another layer of artificial elitism. Members of that fellowship guaranteed a lifetime of easy times paid for by those whose long term associations have made them rich at the expense of ordinary Americans. Few are inclined to bite the hand that holds the caviar.

Those who employed Bush, Buckley and their cronies are the descendants of the mercantilists either by genes or by practice.

No matter where they come from they share that they are the inheritors of the devious practices of those who see government as an extension of their power. Today we know them as Corporatists, Oil Barons, the 28,000 Elite. Their moral ancestors were the ship owners who ignored the disgust of other New Englanders, making their services available to slavers and dealing in slaves themselves.

Earlier generations knew them as the people who moved in on the profits to be made from the Civil War, a war fought to establish a more powerful Federal State and not to end slavery. A generation later John D. Rockefeller would establish his own line of avarice using the same techniques.

William F. Buckley was never a Conservative any more than Monica Lewinsky was an innocent virgin when she met Bill Clinton. And examination of his actions over a life time reveals no nuance of action that affirmed the principles of Conservatism. His stock in trade was deceptive rhetoric. Debunking the ideas of Conservatism by his failure to defend them over and over again, he continued to claim the mantle. He could never have accomplished that if he had not gone after the real leaders of that movement.

Buckley's 1957 attack on Ayn Rand came in the form of a bizarre review of “Atlas Shrugged,” her most prominent novel, put out under the imprimatur of National Review. National Review would follow the strategy of later publications that are used in serial to excoriate individuals and reframe issues while continuing to carry enough unexceptional material so as to keep philosophical adherents oblivious to the real agenda, puzzled but not moved to attack.

Also essential was to control the youth. In 1960 Buckley used his estate in Sharon, Connecticut for the founding meeting of the Young Americans for Freedom. This did not work out as planned. The group immediately broke into two factions, reflecting two viewpoints that continue to drive politics today. The Rockefeller wing was a simple political extension of corporatism. The Conservative wing eventually dominating, representing the principles of small government, individual rights, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. These had been the principles of Robert Taft, who Buckley sought to displace in the minds of young Americans by promoting the candidacy of Barry Goldwater.

Credited with supporting the candidacy of Goldwater through National Review in 1964, Buckley gave public support to that candidacy because Goldwater's platform, rather than taking the clean non-interventionist viewpoint of Alliances with None, instead promised only to end the draft as soon as possible, according to Rockwell in his essay, “Before the Storm.”

War was essential to the successful prosecution of the corporate agenda; the other issues would have been largely irrelevant at that point in time. Buckley's later attitude towards Goldwater was dismissive. His support at the time had provided invaluable credentials and deflected resistance to the War in Vietnam. Providing very public support to a candidate who the loses badly is perfect positioning for the take over of the resulting political movement.

Those attacks included the devastating assaults on Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society for the shocking crime of saying, in 1965, that the Vietnam War was immoral and unconstitutional because Congress had not declared war. In those attacks Welch was characterized as, “just a candy maker from Connecticut.” A curious commentary from someone whose very accent lies.

The agenda was war for the profit of oil, pure and simple.

Most people believe because of that accent William F. Buckley, Jr., is the scion of old Eastern money, probably New England. In fact, he is the son of William Frank Buckley, Sr., a Texas oil baron whose fortune was made wildcatting in Venezuela and Mexico. Their descent is Swiss-German and they are Irish Catholics.

I have come to think of this as Buckley's personal addition to the war of ideas, waged against opponents who had accepted him as a friend.

Even today most members of what we generally call The Freedom Movement, have not noticed the larger strategy used with the publication of bifurcated support on issues that leaves the reader uncertain of the real principles involved. Today we also must deal with the misdirecting websites used to deflect a clear understanding of issues also using this strategic approach.

For real Conservatives and the Libertarians who followed them, government should remain strictly limited and local; the rights of individuals are respected. The people do it for themselves; Government is best that governs least. That is Conservatism.

Buckley knew how to exude the rhetoric, leading the mind down into a sink of nuance and mincing fantasy, never the reality. For Buckley, who never encountered reality himself, and for his fellow privileged CIA James Bond wannabes, reality was what they wished to believe it to be.

He wrote this in 1952 in an article for Commonweal.

“We have got to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. … And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington—even with Truman at the reins of it all.”

In recent years Buckley has often gloated over his success. Growing older he lives in a world of privilege gained through betrayal and lies. It was probably a lot of fun; a career of profitable work that was great for the ego and pocketbook simultaneously. He was probably laid frequently. Evidently when you have no conscience the only truth that matters is written in dollar signs.

That is the first part of the series. More coming soon on those who subverted freedom.

Getting Reality in Pundits and Presidential Candidates

As the Bush – Rove Meltdown continues the pundits and other well paid operatives who have been providing services to the NeoCons on a long term basis are left looking wildly around for opportunities that offer them lucrative exits from the perception they have been, well, operatives. Forget loyalty, the only allegiance they swear to has dollar signs. One of these, John Fund, has recently been busy distancing himself from the NeoCon Cabal, edging away like an overweight crab. His attempts are boorishly obvious and so deserve a slight drubbing, which we here provide.

Fund took the opportunity to distance himself from former long time friend and drinking buddy John Doolittle in his trudge 'on the Trail' of politics with, “Doolittle, Too Late,”How a Reaganite idealist lost his way.” Admitting his long relationship with Doolittle Fund takes Doolittle to task for Doolittle's lavish grazing in the folds of such lobbyists as Jack Abramoff. These recently causes the Doolittle home computer to be carried off by authorities; According to Fund, “two months after taking office, the ostensible reformer (Doolittle) teamed up with Democrat Maxine Waters, a left-liberal firebrand with whom he'd served in the Legislature and who went to Congress in the same election as he did. Together, the two proposed a wish list of new perks that would make even European Union bureaucrats blush.”

Fund goes on to say, “When word of the Doolittle-Waters memo leaked to the papers, the freshman Republican reacted with indignation that Democrats in the House leadership had blown his cover. But Mr. Doolittle continued to behave like a perkoholic.”

Indeed. One wonders why it took so long for Fund to notice. Fund continues on, denouncing his erstwhile friend as a “Reaganite Idealist.” That is probably indicative of what Fund thinks of as an 'ideal' job, that being making lots of money by selling phony rhetoric and eating lunch in the Congressional dining room. Doolittle did that; and doubtless also made more lucre than Fund. Dragging Reagan into the mix is a shabby attempt to hide behind the Reagan mystique, something that NeoCons are likely to do since some of us are still squeamish about throwing things at dead people.

Note: John Fund was NOT invited to the Reagan Funeral. There were reasons for that.

Doolittle is a blatant thief who has been busy lining his own nest for years. Fund could hardly have been unaware of this for the last many years. But now outing Doolittle could be used to say, “See, I can out my own!” Who is dim enough on the Left to believe that remains to be seen.

For someone who spread stories about the strange tattoos located on the Clinton anatomy in the early 90s it is even more indicative of the growing desperation of the NeoCons that Fund said about Bill and Hillary Clinton on Good Morning America on the 23rd.

"What makes Bill Clinton special is he wouldn't just [be] viewed as the the spouse of a president, he would be viewed as a…former world leader in his own right," emoted the Fund.

Wow! A kind word for those demonic Clintons from the guy to lead the charge in Project Arkansas and bragged about inciting Vince Foster to suicide. Major hopes for amnesia on the part of those on the Left. That does spell desperation time. The source of that desperation comes from the lackluster field of Republican candidates for President, making the Clintons look good to Fund.

The following snippet shows just why the Fund is despondent – and why one should be careful about what one says in public. “”Overheard... John Fund

“WSJ columnist John Fund was talking very loudly on his cell phone this morning on his way to the Rosslyn Metro.

He spoke of Mitt Romney: "Looks good, gives a great speech... But he's terrible in a crisis. Look at the Massachusetts health care plan."

Romney can't be counted out, according to Fund. Neither can Fred Thompson.””

Fund knows that McCain would not be welcoming to him. Fund is the operative who spread the rumor that McCain had a black love child in 2000, destroying McCain chances of the Republican nomination. McCain hunted him down and offered to kick his butt at the WSJ offices in New York.

Well, if those wannabe presidential types all look bad to Fund for various reasons (They look bad to us, too, but for different reasons!) Fund might be desperate enough to inch in towards a Democrat who acts enough like a NeoCon for him to feel at home. That would describe Obama and Hillary, Edwards and several others.

Fund would be happy to spend time on the minority side looking for opportunities to be useful to yet another round of NeoCon types, replacements for the present cadre of Big Oil and Big Greed Corporations who are running America into the ground. Money, after all, remains green no matter who writes the check and pundits such as Fund certainly will do whatever is possible to continue on the payroll. But why would Americans find this whole set up attractive?

Why, for gosh sakes, are we letting these turkeys set the rules? American voters are supposed to do the hiring and the firing. Which of us did not have to fill out a job application? Have a background check? Professionals – and presumably anyone who wants to be President of Vice-President is a professional – are normally BONDED.

Perhaps Americans should get smart and take a long hard look at the applicants before primary day. Get Reality, in fact, get the Reality Caucus. It's about time.

George Will and Phyllis Schlafly: Tools of NeoCon GREED

April Fool's Day saw two jokes played through the Internet, one funny one not. The first announced that Homeland Security had closed Buzz Flash. Funny. The other April Fool's joke, the one by George Will, was not funny; it was ugly.

Why is it that on April 1^st all of these NeoCons simultaneously began attacking the Equal Rights Amendment? The ERA is not a feminist issue; it is about freedom and what it means to be a real American. Their actions have their own logic. Pundits as Will and Schlafly oppose the ERA to obfuscate the historic bait and switch that allows all of us to be chopped up like liverwurst for the profit of the corporate state.

Obviously marching orders were issued. We know how that works. The White House Briefing goes out; operatives such as John Fund, Matt Drudge, and Robert Novak call those further down the power chain. Articles slamming the ERA appear at nearly the same moment. Steve Frank's Capitol News, is one example of that. Frank, an old friend of Fund's probably chatted with John Fund directly. Will might have talked with Novak. Or those instructions could have come through those special briefings Fund is so proud of receiving from the White House.

You can't manipulate public opinion without inserting opinions; to make that work you use operatives to let those 'on salary' know the issue so they can produce their specialized spin. So George Will sat down to construct his hit job on the the Equal Rights Amendment. He used a front end of sneering and demeaning comments,“dolled up in love beads and bell-bottomed trousers.” He followed with an argument that has been worn threadbare but never really examined that insists the ERA is redundant. Will cited, without naming it, a decision by the Supreme Court in 1971. There were reasons he did not want those examined too closely. There were two relevant decisions rendered that year and between the two is a world of difference.

Those two decisions tell a story that the NeoCons can't afford to have known. Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp affirms the right of the State to intrude into the private affairs of individuals, effectively canceling our inherent rights, the other, Reed v. Reed, and with a salutatory 7-0 decision, says, “the Court struck down an Illinois law giving preference to a male seeking to administrate an estate over an equally entitled female. This case concerned a set of separated parents whose adopted son had died without a will. Both sought to administrate the deceased's estate; following the law, a lower court had placed the father in charge. The Supreme Court ruled that men and women could be treated differently only when there was some reasonable and relevant cause for doing so; while the Illinois law simplified judicial proceedings, arbitrarily giving preference to men over women was "to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

It must have annoyed them that the two decisions came in the same year.

That is one part of the obfescation Will, Schlafly, and other NeoCon operatives routinely use. The other one is ignoring the lower standard used on gender issues by the Supreme Court. According to those standards women are second class citizens and the NeoCons oppose the ERA because they are hoping to reduce even the consideration of 'Intermediate Scrutiny' cases of gender discrimination have now. Cute how Will glosses over that, isn't it? You can just hear him say, “Stupid women should shut up and be glad we let them wear shoes now.”

After that vague reference to 1971 Will moves on to his finale. There, he rather neatly segues again, unintentionally affirming the corporate connivance between government and megacorporations by citing as accepted fact the right of the State to make determinations on insurance questions. Success for the megacorporations and for people like Will depend on constantly reinforcing the idea government and corporations are not violating our rights every time they assert the power to regulate.

In a free market the state would have no such role. Until after WWII the State had no role there. Fraternal Orders had been providing for the needs of Americans for nearly a century by then. They made no profit, seeking only to provide security for their members. All kinds of fraternal orders were growing briskly and providing for those needs when FDR, himself a member of the Elks and Redmen, suggested with the best of intentions, a voluntary insurance plan available to Americans. Until it became obvious how profitable selling insurance could be all commercial purveyors of insurance were viewed as conmen, which of course they are.

Voluntary. Limited. Money held in trust.

That was, of course, Social Security. It took less that 20 years for Democrats to convert it into a tax imposed by law on all. Notice who benefited, megacorporations. Who made it possible? Congress. How was it accomplished? By ignoring the fact that such decisions are clearly outside the purview of government. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

George Will is not going to talk about unisex bathrooms or be caught saying that passage of the ERA will put women in combat. He knows his audience. But he did his best to deliver the goods for his NeoCon cronies that makes his posh lifestyle possible.

Unisex bathrooms, military service for women, and other such silliness are Phyllis Schlafly's ideas. Afew days ago at a forum in Maine Schlafly also said about rape, “By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape." Let's not think about her fantasy life. It is amazing that today she can still deliver her lines with a straight face. One wonders what she would do if her husband decided his needs had to be met while she was at the podium. If she is consistent she would probably just assume the position.

The Equal Rights Amendment has never been more essential because if action is not taken America will become a corporate plantation with us as the slaves. It is not the freedom of women that is most on point but the freedom of all Americans.

To understand you need to revisit a moment in time; you need to taste and breathe in the vision a people who hungered for freedom.

Those people began a Revolution; that war is not finished. America has an unrealized Mission Statement, the Declaration of Independence. Mission Statements define the goal and motivate those whose pay in blood, sweat, and tears, to achieve that goal.

The Declaration enunciated a spiritual truth to a people not yet free in July of 1776. The violence and sacrifices that would come were supported by men and women who believed that each of us possessed rights granted by God. Of the four major cultures that founded the colonies two were fully committed to the idea that each human being is born possessed of spiritual autonomy that gives each of us control of our own souls. The physical corollary is our control over out own persons, property and destiny. Descendants of Quakers and Puritans understood and provided most of the labor and capital for the War. The Revolution was at one time both a political revolution and spiritual epiphany; their spiritual relationship to God would be mirrored on Earth.

That Revolution began in 1775 with Lexington-Concord. It will not be finished until the inherent rights of women are affirmed in the Constitution. Laws are only privilege, rescindable at the touch of a pen.

Allowing legislation to limit and mandate personal choice is the ggggggg-grandchild of the mistake made by the Founders to ratify the Constitution by compromising the principle that government has no right to change, alter or modify the rights each of us bring with us into life.

By allowing blacks to remain slaves so they could achieve a political goal they set us up, destroying the moral basis for the Constitution. They thought the compromise would be of short duration and their act justified in the interest of national security. They were wrong. Seemingly small exceptions that allow the greedy unearned power, sex, and wealth, are never willingly given back. A centralized federal government that allowed its state members to use legislation to limit the economic and legal options of women transferred wealth and power from women to men. Women had expected freedom, they received serfdom. Legislators, corporate interests, and others who had come to view legislation as a tool for their own enrichment wanted the transferability of unearned wealth to continue.

That is what happened.

The arguments for refusing women dominion over their own lives were endless, demeaning and disgusting. Through eight generations women worked. They struggled to be educated; worked as teachers for 1/3 the wages paid to men. They endured and persisted. No one gave them anything. Finally, through dent of hard and unremitting struggle they achieved a semblance of those rights in the late 20^th Century. At the same time the State and such idea mongers as Phyllis Schlafly and George Will and their now deceased cronies, have been busy attacking that simulation because it is a chink in the justification used by the corporate-state to continue to steal. To enhance their profits corporations would like to discriminate while ensuring that women have no recourse. They are near to accomplishing their goal.

If you are going to have a feudal State then you must build its walls of ideas that keep the people quiescent.

The greedy from all parties love power; all have been working to obfuscate the real issue. They have screamed about abortion, gay marriage, the family, our borders, and National Security. The first issue has always been individual, inherent, rights, the rights that government should never have touched; was sworn to protect.

No one has a right to require action from anyone else. Our Rights are the natural,human ability to act, using those opportunities life offers. The appropriate means for social progress is persuasion, not force. Government is constrained. The people are not.

I cannot demand equal outcomes, neither can I can be limited by laws that deny me the right to start any business or make the life decisions I choose. Those are only limited by my ability, my circumstances, and my inclinations. As long as we do not lie, coerce or use violence we can do what we will - within the confines of life's absolute accountability.

The NeoCons - and those who have become accustomed to shackling us through statute – work diligently to disguise their real intentions, which is to install a 21st Century Feudal State. To do that they must continue to smother the truth before it can be born. Traditional political parties only argue about what part of our freedoms they are going to consume first by selling control to this or that agency or corporation.

Protecting our inherent rights remains the original and only true Mission of America; government is just a tool; a contractor, providing those services the people cannot provide for themselves. We are each of us sovereign, that is the truth of America. Government should be reduced to the size it was in 1787 - or smaller since the Post Office is clearly incompetent to do that job. For foreign policy listen to Cousin George Washington. Bring all the troops home.

The confusion would never have arisen if the Founders had not made that unholy compromise and instead said, "OK, since we can't ratify because doing so would compromise those inherent rights which we have no power to modify we will instead be 13 small countries who each compete to get people to come to us as the best supplier of governmental services." (The South lost a half a million in population after the Revolution when it became clear that slavery was going to continue; decent people were opposed to slavery.) Failing to do the right thing always costs you in the end.

If that had happened we would have saved the expense of the Civil War, which was not fought about slavery anyway; it was all about the right to tax. That would have pleased my ancestors, making their volunteer work in Abolition and Women's Rights unnecessary.

Women are born with the same rights, granted by God, as anyone. Ratifying the ERA cements that forever in front of everyone. Then we can rescind the kludge of legislation that was passed in the unending attempts to simulate a real freedom. Women want the real thing; the real thing for freedom is the ERA; simple justice long ignored.

Ratifying the ERA tolls out the doom of the Corporate State. The time for both freedom and an accounting has now arrived.

Libby. Coulter. John Fund. DeLay: Are the NeoCons finally Toast?

I read Mary MacElveen's article this morning, sent to me by three different buddies who knew I would be interested because of the linkage to John Fund. Just so Ms. MacElveen knows, as does the rest of the world by this point, CNN has no intention to employ Tom DeLay. Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal called and ascertained that directly and duly informed me of the fact hours ago. He knew I would want to know right away.

It is important to remember that John Fund is not a journalist. He is a NeoCon Operative. His work requires simulating the appearance of being a journalist but facts are manufactured wholesale by those employed by the Rovian Cabal. If Fund had been a real journalist he might have thought to call CNN to confirm what DeLay had told him over dinner. Just a thought.

Today, after church, it was restful and comforting to get so many bulletins from old friends as I settled into the chair in front of my computer. I had been forced to listen to the still persistent regurgitated propaganda of NeoCons at the fellowship hour after the service. Listening to the persistent mythology wholesaled by the NeoCons coming out of the mouths of just plain folks is horrifying. I understand, but it is still disturbing. In the Ditto Ghetto Libby is innocent and deserves a pardon, which is sure to come soon. Clinton's sex life was again brought up. Evidently the jury was provably made up of frothy mouthed Liberals obsessed with 'getting' nice, kindly people like Bush, who is a father to us all. Scary stuff.

I learned about the NeoCons from personal experience. I found out to my chagrin that Liberals are totally clueless, eating their own with great gusto and unable to strategize their way out of Kindergarten. It was a real OMG moment when the truth dawned on me.

So everyone I know generously keeps me informed on all John Fund sightings and other NeoCon happenings, which service I sincerely appreciate. I hear when he makes an appearance in a obscure and rural part of Arizona and when he emerges from his apartment in Jersey City. Sometimes I get pictures!

There was a time when I considered John Fund an old friend. That was before he seduced my daughter, persuaded her to abort my grandchild, slandered and libeled me up and down the globe, colluded with my former husband to steal me blind, etc. Friendship only goes so far. I try to be Christian and forgiving but since I am also a strong advocate of the right of self defense (and the 2^nd Amendment) action needed to be taken. My side, the side of Motherhood and Freedom, has taken some hard blows, but we, me and others who have since joined me, are still fighting the forces of NeoCon Darkness.

That is why John Fund is less visible now than he once was. You can thank me by donating at my blog. I will keep outing NeoCons until they pry my cold dead hands off the key board anyway, but any help you can provide is much appreciated. Also check out my cafepress store. Buy the John Fund Briefing Mug. That is especially popular though many also like the Impeachment Emporium.

At one time, in the late 90s, Fund was marked by his NeoCon cohort for Big Things. Fund was supposed to get an appointment in the Bush Administration as a Speech Writer, payment for years of faithful service in such ventures as Project Arkansas and driving Vince Foster to suicide. The NeoCons appreciate work well done.

It has been a saga of a kind, my discovery of what Fund and his friends were all about. Not the sort of thing you want to know, more like finding out that your saintly grandmother was actually a child molester. But I have never been the kind of person who could ignore the evidence of my own experience, so there you are.

John Fund was placed at the Wall Street Journal by Robert Novak around 1982. He had worked for Evans and Novak for a while; between payments for producing copy for the National Enquirer. That was probably the best experience he could get for the work alloted to him by his real employers.

Before that, Fund was still living with his Mom near Sacramento, CA. There, he hung out with younger people still in college and performed unpaid services for Edward H. Crane,III, who soon after began to be well known for his own big profit venture with Koch Industries in retailing rhetoric to move what we once referred to as the Freedom Movement into a support service for extremely large corporations. Through the 80s they worked on destroying the Libertarian Party, which had escaped their control in 1983 at the New York Convention.

Tracing the gains of NeoConservativism through the media tells its own story. Someday I might write up the details, after I finish some other more pressing projects. For now what you need to remember is that NeoCon operatives may look funny, they may have disgusting habits, but if Machiavelli were alive today he would be taking notes.

This latest pre-report on DeLay is best explained as a miscalculation, probably from DeLay. He is doubtless in for a tongue lashing from Rove. Their problem is what to do with a valuable operative like DeLay when he is side lined by doing his duty. They may be discovering that their previous level of influence is somewhat deteriorated. We can hope. Witness the reaction to Coulter last weekend at the CPAC Conference in D. C.. Someone should do some more research on DeLay. Look at the money he makes from those 'foster homes' he owned – and how the kids get there.

I predict that this will eventually be viewed as the moment when the power of the NeoCon Cabal clearly went into decline, however. The folks from church understand the price of gas at the pump and have no problem correctly identifying how that happened. Connecting them to Bush and Co., will just take a little more time.

Libby. Coulter. Fund. Three is a charm. DeLay is icing on the cake. On to the Impeachment Ball! I will wear red, just for the hell of it.

Civility is for the civil, not for criminals: No question is out of line for Dick Cheney

Babies are a good thing; they are the hope of the world, the perpetuation of the human adventure; the soul healing delight that transforms girls into mothers.

And while we cannot fault Dick and Lynn Cheney for their expressed delighted that their daughter is about to give birth to a child their own movement would characterize as an abomination the recent exchange between Wolf Blitzer and Dick Cheney does point to the contradictory practices and standards of those we know as NeoCons. Their actions send a message about their real agenda; that is what has been operating under the cover of rhetoric since Dick Cheney was a high school cheerleader, courting his far more political girl friend, Lyn.

Why should Blitzer have allowed Dick Cheney to determine what questions Cheney, a public employee, should have to answer? Cheney and Bush are not our employers, nor does their behavior give them a right to deference.

The assertion that Cheney or Bush or any of those who we know as NeoCons should be accorded respect continues a mistake Americans have been making for a long time. It is time to change that. According respect to individuals who occupy positions of power through deceit empowers deceitful behavior. Instead of respect they should be shunned. The mistake of according such deference itself is a continuation of the mistake we made in extending the trappings of 'aristocracy' to such as Bush.

Bush is no Aristocrat; he is the offspring of generations that made their living from sucking the tit of government.

America is a nation established to refute the idea of elitism; the Revolution was in large part capitalized by people who rejected the idea of a 'natural aristocracy' or one established through the acquisition of wealth when that wealth was not viewed through a lens that judged how it was accumulated. We are not British. America's mission statement affirms the absolute ideal of equality.

Americans do not bow or curtsy to kings. Each of us is in our own right sovereign, holding that standing not by government but as enunciated by Thomas Jefferson in America's Mission Statement, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —“

Americans should accord respect only to those whose actions affirm accomplishment by means that extend the cultural capital of cooperation through doing the right thing. No Robber Baron deserves our respect; no PR agents for Robber Barons do either.

The slow, steady displacement of respect accorded to those who accomplished financial well being and social justice through going right, replaced with just how high the dollar signs are piled, has taken its toll of American culture. Today, behavior that would make barnyard animals blush is excused in celebrities of all kinds. Today, wealthy Mafiosi are accorded respect; money in large amounts is all that matters. Bill Gates is courted to donate to charities although most of us know that his wealth came from the worst kind of predatory behavior, carried out by skirting the law and ignoring simple decency.

The same pattern played out in the aftermath of those earlier generations of Robber Barons. Taking money and favors from the Federal government, these opportunists risked not their own wealth but the wealth entrusted to government by the people. The tendency to see wealth entrusted to government as up for grabs has been going on for a long time. The Big Four, and their Eastern cronies, including Rockefeller, were despised by people whose own values reflected a belief that wealth earned by deceit, corruption, and violence carried with it no social credit. When met with social ostracism they bought their way in. That was not their mistake, it was the mistake of those who let it happen. That the names of Stanford, Doheney, Mulholland, Carnegie, and others carry a patina of aristocracy is a mistake that has proven to be more expensive than we could have imagined.

Today both Left and Right in America cozy up to those holding ill-gotten gains, in obvious hopes that the ooze of stolen money will rub off on them. It is a sad sight and continues the deterioration of real American values.

Cheney's wealth is the accumulation of money 'earned' through carrying out the agenda of large corporations, whose income stream depends of limiting the market choices of Americans, keeping them on the grid of dependency. The correct way to treat him is to turn your back and ignore his presence. Treating him with deference is itself despicable and offensive. Cheney is an employee of the American people. He deserves no more respect than an auto mechanic who does phony repairs on your car. In justice, the auto mechanic is less toxic and does not usually expect us to bow or curtsy.

This Cheney grandchild is being born within a lesbian relationship and outside of marriage. Personally, I would not judge mother or child. It is Mary Cheney's life and choice. But Lynn Cheney raised her children in a home environment where she wrote about lesbian sexual behavior while emoting the rhetoric of living a very different life. This positioning profited Cheney and his fellow NeoCons to the tune of billions, if not trillions of unearned dollars. Those dollars were not created, they were stolen from real people, many of who will die as a result.

Mary Cheney's baby will live a life of comfort and privilege while Iraqi children die horribly, their deaths an adjunct to the lies told by this baby's grandfather.

"BAGHDAD, 29 Jan 2007 (IRIN) - The Iraqi government, the United Nations and NGOs have condemned an attack against a girls’ school in Baghdad that left five students dead and more than 20 injured on Sunday. Parents, students and teachers were left horror-struck after the incident."

An eleven year old boy in Baghdad would doubtless have something to say to Dick Cheney about his life.

“BAGHDAD, 29 Jan 2007 (IRIN) - "I’m 11 years old and an only son. I’m a pupil at Mansour Primary School in Baghdad. Lately, I have been feeling very lonely in my class. This week, I was the only student in class because all my classmates didn’t come to school for various reasons.

“Since last September, three of my classmates have been kidnapped and two have been killed. One was murdered with his family at home and the other was a victim of a bomb explosion a month ago.”

This is one of the things Cheney and Bush have bought with the money stolen from Americans.

The Cheney baby is not the issue; long life and health to the unborn child, no matter what its gender and despite the deceitful and disgraceful behavior of its grandparents.

The only mistake Blitzer made was to accord Dick Cheney a respect he does not deserve. Americans need to examine how wealth is accumulated; that is what matters. It is past time for Americans to reassess and take action.

The State of the Union, Precarious: What matters and what doesn't.

Get the tee-shirt on our cafepress site!

(A little bird in Karl Rove's Office might have heard this)

Mr. President, have you read over the speech? (pause) I know. It doesn't matter if Congress believes it. (pause) Of course the public will swallow it. (pause) Your friends will understand that you have to say you support alternative energy. Anyway, you already have the donations in for the Library. (pause) Health care is an issue, try to read those briefing papers. (pause) I do think it is a nice piece of work, yeah, I like the new typeface. Just make sure you don't say her name that way Tuesday night. (pause) Keep working at it. If you find any other words you don't understand just call back.

Tuesday night a man got up and gave a speech. The focus of the world was on every word he uttered even though they knew what he was going to say. Today a rally is taking place in Arkansas. One event matters, the other does not in the long run.

Wording of the Equal Rights Amendment
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Today all of the Constitutional officers for the State of Arkansas, mostly in office for the first time, attended a rally held at the State Capitol along with two hundred enthusiastic supporters for the ERA. Mike Beebe, the new governor, stepped up to the podium to announce his support of a measure that, pro and con, was one of the dividing points in the gubernatorial election last November, according to Zack Wright, Communications Coordinator for the Governor. Wright added that Beebe's position is that ratification is long overdue.

A few months ago the widower and children of Marjorie Rudolph called Lindsley Smith, Representative for the 92^nd District of Arkansas, at her office and put into her hands the ERA bracelet their wife and mother had cherished since 1972. Marjorie, they said, had always hoped the ERA would be ratified. They asked Ms. Smith if she would accept the bracelet since she had introduced the ERA for ratification in their home state of Arkansas. Ms. Smith accepted; she told them she would be wearing the bracelet when she dropped the bill in the box and when it is passed. Ms. Smith expects this will happen very soon, perhaps in just a matter of days.

After the rally Ms Smith said, “It was wonderful; people were crowded into the Rotunda and hallways. I knew that we were taking a stand; doing the right thing – acting on principle. Knowing that was happening here, in Arkansas, made me proud.”

America's women have waited since July 1788. When the Declaration of Independence was read aloud to those assembled in July of 1776 it said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In this way the mission statement for America was established. All are equal; the rights exercised come not from government, but from God. Women believed and labored mightily in the cause of freedom, as they would in all the wars that followed.

Women poured their lives into activism. Generations of women have died waiting to know that their rights were affirmed under the Constitution. As women talk today they share the stories of mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and great-great-grandmothers, who fought for their freedom and died knowing they had failed. It is a sad heritage for a country founded on the idea of individual freedom.

In 2000, 212 years after the Constitution was ratified and women were excluded as people, a retired executive, Dr. Jennifer Macleod, gave a presentation to a group of Girl Scouts on the Equal Rights Amendment. The excited girls asked if Dr. Macleod could help them do a project on the ERA. The Doctor, an expert in survey research, prepared a simple poll and showed the girls how to conduct it. Later, Macleod would admit that she expected that the poll would reflect mixed opinions to the idea of equality for women. She was wrong.

There were three questions. Jennifer expected the Girl Scouts, polling their classmates, teachers, and parents, to find a range of opinions on equality for women. Instead, they found close to unanimous support for the idea that all of us are born possessed of inherent rights, as recognized in the Declaration of Independence. Dumbfounded, Jennifer Macleod arranged for a national survey professionally conducted in July 2001, among American adults all across the country. The findings? 96% answered "yes" to the question, "In your opinion, should male and female citizens of the United States have equal rights?"; 88% answered "yes" to the question, "In your opinion, should the Constitution make it clear that male and female citizens are supposed to have equal rights?"; and, demonstrating a public lack of knowledge, 72% mistakenly answered "yes" to the question, "As far as you know, does the Constitution of the United States make it clear that male and female citizens are supposed to have equal rights?" The results were similar for both men and women, and in all age groups, educational levels, regions of the country, racial categories, and household composition. The results were the same. While the legislatures of 15 states had refused to ratify the ERA Americans had done so in their hearts and minds.

In this way a new wave of activism for ratification began, erasing the sense of hopelessness left in the wake of the failure of the 70s. In Arkansas today women wept tears of joy. At this moment Representative Smith says that the measure has 67 co-sponsors in the House, including the Speaker, Benny C. Petrus.

When the newly passed ERA was sent to the states from Congress in 1972 everyone believed that it would be ratified by the required 38 states quickly but instead it became a political football linked to issues that have nothing to do with simple equality. Women like Phyllis Schlafly have made careers of opposing the equality that was promised to all Americans in 1776. The final blow to the effort came when Ronald Reagan took the ERA out of the Republican Platform, despite the pleas of scores of Republican Women, including his own daughter, Maureen. For women, the promise of equality receded into the distance.

Instead women were forced to rely on a series of laws that assert 'fairness', many passed on the state level. Such laws can be rescinded by simple legislation.

Today women still hang their trust that their rights are protected by privileges conferred by legislators . Without the clear and specific backing of the federal Constitution all laws improving women's rights and opportunities can be overturned. For women in America freedom is provisional. If you ever doubted the need for ratification the crew just booted from Congress should have demonstrated to you just how fragile these rights can be. Consider the present make up of the Supreme Court; Consider the moral fiber demonstrated by an Administration that rescinded the 4^th Amendment and used torture and deceit. Simple justice long overdue is also desperately needed. Securing it need not be difficult.

Three State Strategy

The Constitution, in setting forth how amendments can be made, said NOTHING about any time limits on ratification by the states -- although, as was the case for several amendments, a time limit can if desired be included in the body of a proposed amendment. The 1972 Congress, in passing the ERA -- which, fully intentionally, contains no mention of any time limit -- chose to attach a 7-year ratification time limit separate from the amendment itself. Then, when the 1978 Congress extended the time limit by 3 years, that set the precedent such that any Congress can legitimately vote to change such a time limit.

How could equality ever fail to be relevant? In an era when women are serving in the military in roles that expose them to combat, the arguments that they are frail and must be protected fail to persuade Americans. It was not women's weaknesses that moved men to deny them their inherent rights, it was the habit of control.

In addition to Arkansas, vigorous ratification drives are well underway in Illinois (which came very close to ratification in 2004), Florida and Missouri, while many of the other not-yet-ratified states, including Arizona, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, and Georgia are building support for their own ratification drives. Perhaps the legislators in three of these states now understand just how important our rights are. Now that we have seen a Congress and President commit the treason of negating the 4th Amendment the time to be patient is over. Now we can demand action from Democrats and the Republicans who are now distancing themselves from the corrupt Bush Administration.

The states that are not yet ratified are:

Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.

By the time you read this Arkansas may proudly be the 36^th State to ratify.

Two events took place this week. One man talked; a coalition of women and men, united in defense of real freedom, took action. It is doing the right thing that matters, no matter how long it takes.