Before Godzilla eats New York - Ratify the ERA

In the wake of the Alito confirmation the Left is in shambles, unfocused, unbalanced, and unable to act. They are not alone.

Large sections of those who identify themselves as republican or libertarian or independent are living through a deer in the headlights moment; they know that the executive mandate now poised like a sovereign anointing over the head of George W. Bush is the last thing they want. But their tools for organizing political protest, the Republican Party and the Libertarian Party, are lost to them, swallowed up by the NeoCons who so suavely converted their labor and lives to cold hard cash in NeoCon pockets. NeoCons are no more Republican than they are Democrats.

The 'game' of politics has turned into a reality as frightening as Godzilla arising from the Hudson River to eat New York.

That is the bad news. The good news is that the means are within our grasp to drive a wedge in the machinery of tyranny now poised to roll over the rights and lives of Americans. It is time to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and to get serious about a common understanding of our rights, where they originate and who has them.

That will surprise most people in the republican-libertarian camp. It surprised me when I realized three years ago I had been sold a bill of goods by my own movement. I had spent all of my life as a libertarian and a republican. I had been told that the ERA was about privileges for women, in effect, about entitlements. Wrong. It is about nothing more than recognizing for women the original package of rights envisioned by our founders for everyone.

When, after many generations of struggle women were unable to secure the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment most women settled for privileges and hoped it would work. They were wrong to have done that. Never settle when it is your rights that are at issue.

Ironically, it was Republican women and the Republican Party who had originally championed the battle for rights for women as an extension of their right to vote.

That long history had forged the largest political organization in the world, and arguably the most effective for most of its history, the National Federation of Republican Women. In 1980, when the ERA was struck from the platform of the Republican Party a generation of women who had poured their lives into the Republican Party went through the same deer in the headlights moment now being experienced by so many non-NeoCon libertarian-republicans. In one moment they had been betrayed, losing their political home and the investment of their time and money made over long life times.

That was one in a series of actions that converted the Republican Party into the NeoCon tool it is today.

The NeoCons are a minority, a small powerful minority, we need to remember that.

96% of all Americans from all ethnic groups, both genders, and all parts of the country have already affirmed in their hearts equality for all and the equality of women under law. (see link at ERACampaign.net, Newlstter No. 6)

Most us want to do the right thing. We have been divided and confused by a highly sophisticated campaign of disinformation designed and implemented by those we know now as NeoCons.

The mission statement of America has always been clear. Our rights are not granted by government; they preexist any government we choose and cannot be altered. But instead of securing those rights to everyone our Founders made a profound mistake. All too human, they failed to sunset slavery, leaving blacks in servitude. They failed to secure to women their right to control their own lives and property.

It was a failure that has haunted us ever since.
That failure is the basis of the conversion of all rights to privileges to be granted or withheld by government. This is why libertarian-republicans should sit up and take notice.

If our Constitution affirms the original Mission Statement then we have ground on which to stand and reverse the conversion of basic rights to privileges controlled by government. And by so doing a common ground will have been created for cooperation, right and left, so that the unceasing attrition of our liberties can be opposed successfully.

It is the right thing to do, and it is time for Progressives, Democratic moderates, and Liberals to deliver. Women have been the heart and power of the Democratic Party for generations. That party has failed over and over again when it had the control of state legislatures and the Congress to secure to women their proper rights under the Constitution.

They, too, preferred to grant privileges instead of the absolute security of rights. It is time to put aside other issues and do what should have been done generations ago. The leadership of the Democratic Party has ignored and compromised away the essential acknowledgment of rights for women that would have provided exactly the protection we now so desperately need.

But it is not too late.

The ERA today stands just three states short of ratification. There is no time limit on the need for the amendment; securing those rights are as relevant today as they were in 1776. Active campaigns exist in most of those states and together the non-NeoCon segments of the republican-libertarian wing of American politics and the Left possess enough clout and money to do the job if they choose to do so.

Women from all parties and persuasions should keep watch.

The outline of the campaign is simple.

We need a website to apply to the legislators in each of the unratified states the scrutiny and encouragement they need to ensure ratification. We need money to lobby them. We need to communicate and to network, watching for the ugly tactics that will come from the NeoCon camps.

The NeoCons think they have won. They set up this scenario in 1980 with the removal of the ERA from the Republican Platform. They set out Phyllis Schlafly to tell women that the ERA would diminish their womanhood. Today the idea promoted by Schlafly that women had a 'right' in the "Christian tradition of chivalry to be supported and protected by men" sounds like text from a harlequin romance.

Women dying for their country in Iraq, raped while serving there, or left homeless by no-fault divorce law understand the reality that Schlafly, who profited so richly from her work, was really selling.

Allowing government to convert rights to privileges is making slaves of all of us.

Business and Professional Women, a major leader in the earlier efforts for the ERA, is once again putting ERA high on its action priority list. Now, every day, women are working and organizing.

It is time for all of us to come together, right, left, libertarian and independent.

If freedom is not for everyone then none of us are truly free.

With the ERA in place Alito can could still damage our freedoms, but the ERA will built a buttress against the predators he represents.

Ratify now.

Government is broken: Time to reboot

Alito is in. If it hadn't been him it would have been one of the clones lined up to take his place provided by the Federalist Society. When the opposition controls both the ball the field and both the teams you cannot win. Now is time to take a hard look at our approach and examine, with egos deactivated, how this happened.

The Supreme Court is now totally iced, frozen into compliance with the view that America's checks and balances are no longer in force. We discovered a week ago, beyond doubt, that the NeoCon strategy is working. It works so well that the Congress is in effect a one party legislature and that party is not Republican but NeoCon. Make no mistake, the two are not identical. Expect to see independently minded Democrats to go the same way as the independently-minded Republicans did, starting in the late 80s. Therefore changes and reforms that necessitate Congressional action will fail. Protests and call-in campaigns are a waste of time until the voting system has been changed.

The way to change the voting system is through action at the state and local level and demanding only paper ballots and radically reforming the registration process. Other specific reforms must also be instituted from the local and state level. Until then attempts to influence Congress are a waste of time.

Congress no longer works as a balancing power as envisioned by the Constitution.

The present make up of the Congress is a product of electoral fraud. The NeoCons placed the programmable means for producing the outcome that would keep them in power and used it beginning in 2000. Before then they had relied on removing independently minded Republican candidates in the primaries. If you doubt this see the history of Republican primaries in California starting in the late 1980s. Managing election results through voting machines facilitated the process but the idea had been present for a long time.

The voting machine manipulations have been documented in studies that went over the numbers in exhaustive detail. Read Mark Crispin Miller's book, Fooled Again, for more on that.

A huge group of concerned Americans used every traditional means to get legislators to do what is right; they failed. Alito will now move against the reforms that give women some of the autonomy guaranteed originally by our Constitution to men. He will help affirm an executive branch that is in effect a monarchy. It will be a serial monarchy, with presidential elections having all the reality of pro wrestling.

The recruitment of attorneys for placement on federal benches took place through the Federalist Society, created by the NeoCons for just this purpose.

The whole nomination process carried a double agenda. It was both a ploy to distract attention from awareness of Bush's views on executive privilege and placed Alito to advance that agenda. It worked smoothly.

So what will happen when cases heard in lower courts move up to appeal for hearing at the Supreme Court, for instance, the Fitzgerald effort? That effort to bring the NeoCons to justice will be stalled and then hit the barrier of the Supreme Court, another of the balancing powers hijacked by the NeoCons.

This is what we can expect along with the routine use of executive privilege to justify anything the present resident of the Oval Office wants done.

When you are in a maze with no way out you better get the hedge clippers. We must accept that the system is broken and cannot be fixed using traditional means. There are other means, we need to use them.

The first tool we need to accomplish the goal is a real coalition, right, left, and other. We need to awaken the sleeping mainstream of Americans by moving past the divides of political prejudice. That done, we can start rebooting the system and returning governance to the people. That is what our Founders intended, that a people exercising their inherent rights govern themselves; it is time to do the job. We can build out a structure for governance the NeoCons can't control while at the same time cleaning up the environment. It can be done.

The Fantasy Life of NeoCons: Alito and his clones keep coming, and coming.....

The NeoCon Fantasy becomes Reality: Alito and his clones are coming, coming, coming......until Bush's Moving Day


As the shrill voices of various factions line up across the country urging a filibuster to stop this Bush pick for the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito Jr., one of the most damaging effects of the NeoCon strategy evidences itself, ignored by activists from all factions.

As could be expected, the Left focuses on the likelihood that with this man empaneled, individual choices in life style and the right to abortion for women will be under fire immediately. Libertarians and conscience aware Republicans are beginning to realize that Alito's attitude on presidential authority, enunciated perfectly by Harvey Silverglate in his opinion piece published yesterday morning in the Boston Phoenix, will provide the means for increasing the attacks on those checks and balances still remaining to us.

Both sides make the mistake of ignoring the back story. While they recognize that this looming event has distracted most of us from the use of presidential prerogatives to listen in on our conversations, they continue to put the strategic significance of that on the back burner. Using new issues to distract is a well used NeoCon ploy. We are in the last few acts of a play that started when Vietnam was still being fought; then cooperation existed among opponents of the war, right and left. Today it is different. The lack of effective communication between the Left and Right did not come about accidentally. That disconnect was intentionally encouraged and deepened by the NeoCons. As long as Left and Right do not talk changing America's direction is impossible.

Dividing us was one of their strategies. Just one of them. War has been made on Americans and on freedom and few noticed. Complacency and wallowing in your own limited assumptions can be deadly.

The French were complacent just before Rommel flanked the Maginot Line, buoyed up by what they thought they knew. They were wrong. They did not realize that because of the oil shortages in Germany Rommel had constructed the blitzkrieg to minimize his use of petroleum products; they assumed that there were absolute defenses from attack; that they knew enough to be safe. They were wrong.

Active cooperation, right and left is an essential tool to countering the NeoCon threats to all of us. Together, we know enough and can take effective action.

Bush, Rove and their minions have been planned this scenario in detailed, loving contingencies for many years. Each component and element has been thought out, discussed, and alternatives, seven deep are provided for.

Alito has five more understudies, all whom will do the same job for the NeoCons. When the focus on any other issue gets too hot for those in power yet another threat like Alito will be trotted oout to dissipate the heat. While we filibuster we must focus on the larger game and be grateful for the advantages remaining to us.

Not one of those numbering themselves as NeoCons has even a shred of the real innovative genius possessed by Rommel, Patton or Mitchell. They have used the same strategies over and over again. Recognizing those strategies allows you to be prepared.

Those we know today as NeoCons have a lot in common. Each began with a deep wish, grounded in their own individual emotional inadequacies, to exercise power over others. Each feels that they are entitled to a place in an aristocracy. From that and the impulse of greed they have worked tirelessly to own us and the world. It would be funny if they were still on the school playground; but instead it is a fantasy that may well kill us.

This story really begins nearly 40 years ago with the successful take over of the environmental movement. Bush Senior orchestrated that with two of his old time oil buddies, O. R. Anderson and Maurice Strong using contacts they had made during the early years of the United Nations. Their manipulation of the rules, individuals and the organizations became one of the sources for the strategies Rove would soon be using.

Those early environmental activists who would be displaced by the Bush-Strong take over clustered around Margret Mead; they were inspiring people, determined to do the right thing. But they were also credulous and easily manipulated. They refused to believe that such a take over could happen, and by people who they knew to be venal and self-serving. But it did.

Using just a few hundred thousand bucks Bush and his buddies, working through hired minions, erected a phony movement in front of the leadership of the real one thus ensuring that solar energy would be marginalized as an alternative and their profits would continue to pump. It worked. The possible attrition on the demand for petroleum was forestalled. Many solar patents, then coming on the market, were bought up by the same companies; the oil companies sat on them.

If you celebrate Earth Day in April you were among the majority that were conned by the Bush front group.

Bush Senior soon hired a pimple faced young guy named Karl Rove because he had proven so capable of cheating his way into power in the Young Republicans. Bush Senior recognized the right stuff when he saw it. Rove studied the job done on the environmental movement with excitement and respect. He made copious notes and used them.

At nearly the same time a tiny group of hyper-intellectual guys, able to use obscure intellectual and economic arguments to justify anything that profited them – or their friends – joined the Republican Party and came to the attention of the group around Bush Senior. The senior partner in this 'family business' was Irving Kristol. This is the group that provides us with the appellation, NeoConservative that now applies to the group as a whole.

This group used the bizarre and esoteric blatherings of Leo Strauss to create the justifications for consciously transitioning America from a Republic comprised of states to a centrally organized federal state they could control in perpetuity.

Straussianism is the faith based philosophy on which their cadre depends for justification.
The NeoCons are determined to win no matter what. Strauss had a lot to offer them. He told them that, in a most circularly satisfying manner, that as the self-elected aristocracy of the Coming Age they could do anything needed to make that happen. So lying, cheating, and ignoring the Constitution were actions that were entirely justified. If your prophet ways it is OK then you do not let yourself be worried over the details. Therefore they lie with ease, only angry if called on it.

They know what they are doing and they are not going to stop.

Most people continue to assume that eventually they will be forced to play by the rules that most of us recognize as right. Don't make that mistake.

As is the case with Rove, many of them have been studying politics and applying the rules of strategy relating to war since they were literally in grade school. Karl Rove and John Fund, for instance, were collecting profiles of politicians when they were each around 12. These addicts to power are politically savvy and analyzed the unmistakable trends in voting populations going back to the 50s. They understood the chains of causality; they were prepared to reverse the flow of social progress then taking place.

Women had finally gotten the vote in 1921 and over time this was transforming America. There were problems stemming from the collectivist policies of Progressivism but most people, from all parties, were willing to change when they saw better solutions. Progress had been slow as women moved into the marketplace and continued to work for full emancipation; it was not until 1953 that a married woman in California had the right to her own paycheck. In the 50s the transforming message of Ayn Rand, Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane and the candidate who relit the beacon of individualism in the Republican Party, Barry Goldwater, excited a new generation to political activism. The message of Goldwater was one of real freedom for all of us. That message changed the Republican Party, bringing in many young people.

Times change, however. By the 70s Nixon's Wage and Price Controls had caused thousands of Republicans to leave the Republican Party, founding the Libertarian Party in December of 1971.
At nearly the same time Bush and his friends were considering how to ensure their profits, now protected for the time being by the hijacking of the environmental movement, kept flowing. They needed a political party.

They did not care which party they used. It was an accident of circumstance and the clever Kristols that made them Republicans.

The Democratic Party had erected draconian bylaws making it impossible to manipulate. At that point in time the two political parties both used privileges enacted through political means to ensure loyalty; both had come to use rhetoric to lie to their voters and to assume that was justified.

However, there were real functional differences. The Republican Party was far less sophisticated, having lived through less internecine warfare. They had suffered a loss in membership through the founding the the Libertarian Party, too. They were vulnerable. In the 1970s one of the reasons for their weakness was the fact that while they endorsed the passage of the ERA the structure of the Republican Party had functionally denied a role to women in their leadership.

It was probably Rove who did the in depth analysis, looking at the probable and possible voting blocks across the country and delivered the bad news. They could control the Republican Party but the cultural changes then transforming the country would make it impossible for them to continue to win elections. They had to replace women as a voting block.

They were nothing if not resourceful. A plan was formulated with both short range and long range goals.

First they had to stave off the changes then taking place and assume control of their chosen tool, the Republican Party. Then they had ensure that through that tool they could control the country. To do that they needed to subvert the checks and balances still in place while ensuring that the State continued its lock on the power of privilege.

In short order Rove and his minions had created out of the low end evangelical churches a cadre of voters who received their orders from the pulpit on Sunday and voted reliably on Tuesday and donated all the time for any of a short list of issues. This took advantage of the obvious appetite of this population of church members to credulously hand over heaps of money to preachers who were obviously corrupt. Most of them came from poor southern, white backgrounds. They continued in their belief that women should remain barefoot and pregnant when not chopping wood.

The Republican Party had championed the passage of voting rights for women in the 20s. As a result the largest, strongest and most powerful political tool ever produced had been forged. That was the National Federation of Republican Women. But times had changed. Younger women were not joining and their membership was aging because women in the Republican Party were treated as second class members with the exception of a few 'house girls' kept around as window dressing.

The NFRW had brought home the bacon for generations. In election after election it had provided the volunteers, grass roots support and a healthy chunk of the cash that put Republicans in office. But the best and brightest of them were growing restive, unwilling to continue their support without finally securing their own rights and the rights of their daughters. They had waited and worked for the passage of the ERA as their great-great grandmothers had worked for suffrage and for abolition.

But if women secured their rights through act of Constitution then the chink in the armor of the privileges provided through government would be breeched. That could not be tolerated and this the NeoCons understood.

Rights, understood as enunciated by Thomas Jefferson, belong inherently to each of us, preceding government. Privileges are granted by government and can be rescinded at will. Ignoring the mandate of the original Revolution had put America into moral bankruptcy in 1799 with its failure to secure the rights of blacks and women. The continuing compromises and justifications had made America vulnerable to the just anger of those whose proper rights had been denied.

If the people understand that each of them brings to life absolute rights that cannot be modified by government then the system of selling privileges instead of rights cannot continue and the gravy train produced through the alliance of corporations and government is threatened. The oil companies understood.

Having secured the Republican Party as a tool their next steps took place within that Party. The ERA was stricken from the Republican platform and a long term contingency plan was put in motion to ensure Republicans could continue in power while work continued on other elements of the plan.

With a bolstering of votes from churches, careful manipulation of ideas, placed through a chain of outlets called, 'think tanks,' the use of individual pundits to recalibrate discourse and work as political operatives the plan began to take form. The media was studied and stock acquired to allow editorial pressure to be brought on formerly independent publications. In a later round Fox would be launched to further skew the popular market in news.

Most people involved with think tanks and policy did not see the big picture; they do not see it today. They can't afford to. They are firmly tied through the salaries that make their life styles possible. Think of this as the 401K Syndrome. Most people will turn down the volume on their conscience when their paychecks are on the line.

Phyllis Schlafly was chosen to persuade women that the ERA was bad for them; that rights would make them less 'womanly.' She defeated the ratification most assumed would be easy. Rove studied her campaign, too. Building specious arguments and using an organization to sell it through your personal contacts with many other organizations is a strategy also used by NeoCons today.

Women like her, living the life of privilege and comfort, had attempted to do this before the granting of voting rights to women as well, delaying the franchise for women for many years.
In the late 80s the Kristols, now well acquainted with Bush and Rove, began a quiet campaign to find the brightest minds willing to swallow the specious nonsense opined by Strauss, that a small self-identified aristocracy was destined to rule in perpetuity.

They took suggestions from men like Robert Novak, who in this way first hired and placed John Fund; first at Evans and Novak in 1983 and then almost immediately into the editorial staff of that other NeoCon tool, the Wall Street Journal. Being a NeoCon was the easy road to riches and fame.

Fund went on to play a significant role in identifying useful individuals within the then hardy Libertarian Party whose ambitions could be trusted to outrun their consciences. Many of these found careers in the NeoCon world.

It was Fund who pointed out how policies intended to increase the power of citizens could be recycled into NeoCon use. Privatization, outsourcing, deregulation, all became standard tools to increase the flow of money to both corporations and government agencies.

The rhetoric of freedom, spoken by Goldwater and then by Libertarians was converted into another NeoCon tool. Bush misuses it nearly every time he opens his mouth.

The political operatives, working in think tanks, as journalists, and as media personalities talked, recruited, wrote, and networked. Organizations were founded. The New World Order came into focus. The fantasy of power born in minds riddled with greed and self-doubt was coalescing.

One of the essential elements for making the plan work had been ensuring that rulings from all levels of federal benches could, with careful placement, bring about the cases that would provide the raw material for overturning the laws based on legislatively mandated privileges. The Federalist Society, one of the organizations birthed to carry out the work of the New American Century, continues today to provide both the arguments that remake law and the candidates to occupy those judicial seats. It provides the arguments in its seminars and uses the prominence of its members as further authority.

All human action listens to the success stories of power. Human action is all too human when privileges are mistaken for rights.

By the late 80s the Republican Party had became a place where the Religious Right, sticking in their toes and sniffing around, could be comfortable. Their welcome was founded in the need for their votes; the NeoCon leadership is, for the most part, agnostic. Prayer Breakfasts became the order of the day. This also worked well to burnish the authority of NeoCon spokesmen who could be tapped to conduct prayer breakfasts and then continue their work as political operatives.

Each issue, identified and used to change the shape and direction of social policy also provided cover and divided the people into smaller and smaller niches as privileges replaced rights. On top of this, through the carefully planned use of the tools provided originally by idealistic Libertarians, government programs and agencies were converted, in many cases, into profit centers. Today the Federal Government takes more money out of Yosemite than it puts in. It is a cash cow, maintained only through the volunteer efforts of organizations like the Yosemite Fund and the Yosemite Association. In ways sometimes too horrible to contemplate, the services our nation owes veterans are also limited. The list is seemingly endless.

The NeoCons had been busy and it is easy to find their work. Through layers of websites and nonprofit organizations the carefully orchestrated manipulation of the New World Order has been delivered. Rove learned the lesson of Earth Day well and it has been repeated countless times in every imaginable application.

The field on which the next round would be played out was ready. The privileges substituted for rights could now be challenged at the highest court in the land; and according to the game plan of the New World Order all rights are privileges.

As Bush, Junior said, the Constitution is just words.

Privileges can be revoked through the Courts even after they are passed by the people. Disappointed and frustrated, the women's movement had settled for privileges instead of rights, raising a generation of women who did not recognize the shell game that had been played right out in the open, under their very noses.

The next round, beginning in 1999, was predicated on ensuring that elections could be fixed in advance. All levels of elections were targeted. The make up of Congress needed to be reliably NeoCon in persuasion. As they knew when devising their plan, impeachment must be impossible.

For the next phase they needed some computer wonks. If you have a back door into the programming that is undetectable then you can control the voting as long as it takes place through computers and through a politically centralized system or registration and vote counting.

In 2002 Fund was released from direct work on the WSJ to take one of the 'recuperative leaves' mandated for those who have let the heady use of power lead them into public scrutiny and scandal – and to write a book on electoral fraud that due to unforeseen circumstances did not work out as well as the NeoCons hoped it would. In that book Fund proposes that people be able to check their vote on line; a double set of books, letting the voter see 'their vote' would have no relationship to the electoral outcome. When Fund planned his book in 2000 that was the reassurance the NeoCons believed would quiet the questions of the American people.

The final answers to what happened to our voting system lie in the identity of those who wrote the original code for the programs that shifted the world from the last century to this one. The deeper the back door the better. Someday we may know. For now we need to stop trying to fix something that contains fatal flaws.

Today with the nomination of Alito we face one problem with devastating ramifications. While fighting that battle we can not afford to overlook the much larger picture. Alito is a tiny shard of ice floating on the surface of a sea filled with ice burgs larger than those that sunk the Titanic.
We must establish new direction. Stopping this appointment is not enough. Defensive war is losing war. To win this war we need to renew the vision of freedom enunciated by Jefferson. We must come together as one people, abandoning our identification through political parties. This time the vision must become reality.

Most Americans ignore politics; it has proven to be a pointless sink for time and money. Most Americans spend their time making sure people are fed, that the Little League field is mowed; that those in need have shelter through the storms life brings.

The real solutions are created through local action. Our focus must be to take governance back directly to the people. Traditional reform will only substitute one group of grasping liarsfor another. We have allowed the divisions of right and left to divide us so that it has become impossible for us accomplish common goals, thanks again to the NeoCons. Our divisions have helped make the NeoCons fantasy a reality.

We need to create a common understanding of the facts as well as the problems; we must affirm individual rights for all and reject all assumptions of privilege for anyone. We need to fix our justice system; justice is, after all, a service lowering the cost of human conflict; it is not a religion; judges and attorneys are not barons but contractors providing a service.

People of good will from all parties need to start talking – and listening across those chasms of understanding and build bridges of trust founded in facts. We need to forge a common agenda and that agenda must include local control of voting and verifiable, paper ballots. We need to get off the grid of power, off the grid of petroleum, and back into our communities. Let politics as we know it today return to the playground.

Stop believing the simplistic stereotypes we all too often accept about the labels each of us carries around. Ideology, gender, race, ethnicity, religion; where they divide us they become problems; where they give us common understanding they affirm our essential, and shared, humanity. Unquestioned beliefs shackle the future we can leave to our children. All human tools have to be properly used to yield appropriate results. Always check your facts twice and make sure you know all sides of any question; remember what credulity has done to our electoral system.

If you are a Democrat go shake hands with a Republican. If you are a Republican hug a Democrat. If you are a libertarian or other faction hug them both.

The vision of America, equality, dignity and freedom is still waiting for us. Its time to make the dream real.

Operation Gas the Earth: A NeoCon redevelopment project

How Bush, Senior helped Rove become a better thief using environmentalism.
You can buy the tee-shirt on line at: www.cafepress.com/stopneoconning





When we think of Karl Rove and his cadre of cronies and clowns
we forget the Karl Rove who started as the chubby little nerd on
the play ground, scared of the bullies but determined to win by
other means.

Now, when it looks as if George W. might be going down it is
doubly important not to take for granted that they'll depart
gracefully.

Consider what they are willing to do to hold on to power.
Losing may not be just leaving office;
but also facing prison time.

Someone like Rove, who sees contingency in terms of layers
upon layers, secrets within secrets, has had years to plan his game.
You will witness the introduction of those contingencies, seeing
how they float, the abandoning those that don't, and a keen focus
on those that play well in Peioria.

Slight-of-hand Rove will pull out every trick he has ever learned,
while relying heavily on the network of political cronies who he
can trust because he owns them. Old J. Edgar's files of nasty facts
look like a child's trivia compared to what Rove has assembled.

Get ready to really find out who these people are.

Consider every facet of government and the corporate world that
is aligned with Rove and Company, and consider how it can be
controverted to other purposes. Team Turd Blossom will apply
the lessons of life in ways that would turn any decent American's
stomach. Remember, these are the experts, true professionals
at playing dirty.

Who and what the NeoCons are is a continuation of grade
school on steroids. They did not grow up, they simply lost
their hair and plumped out. So it is time to consider again
in more detail the Rules for NeoCons.

Rove was an eager learner, observing the schemes and
ploys of those he got to know who were successful. Rove
was first hired on, still spouting a full fledged case of teen
aged acne, by George H. W. Bush in the early days of
Watergate. What were Rove's skills that attracted the
Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mr.
Bush? It was because of young Rove's promise as a
political trickster. Rove had successfully stolen a
Young Republican election and boasted about trashing
a locallegislative race to favor the Republican.
Papa Bush recognized rookie talent.

Rove therefore had a front row seat in studying the
clever machinations ofPapa Bush at first hand. That
was the early 70s and Papa Bush was then putting the
finishing touches on his take over of the Environmental
Movement, a move he, Maurice Strong and OR Anderson
had planned to stave off the ominous threat of alternative
energy thus ensuring thatthe bottom line of oil profits
stayed burnished for many happy years to come.

Bear in mind that it was Bush W.'s father the good Senator
who first introduced America to Richard Nixon of Watergate
fame back in theearly 1950's.

Just picture in your mind, Rove, his eyes alight with excitement,
making note of how to hijack a movement by quickly building an
alternative in its place to deflect credit, interest and income.
Adding this sneak attack to his growing book of dirty tricks
must have sent shivers of delight down his soft spine.

And they probably conned you, too - remember Earth Day?

If you celebrate Earth Day in April you were conned by the
people who did so much to teach Rove his trade. The real
Earth Day takes place at the United Nations on the Spring
Equinox with the ringing of the Peace Bell. The commercialized
Earth Day takes place on April 22nd the anniversary of the
McCarthy/Nixon televised hearings on the infamous 'Red Scare'.


The original Environmental Movement, focused on educating
people to the on viable alternative energy options they could
use to replace oil fizzled out like a wet fire cracker. Most of the
Left accepted the ploy and sent checks to support Earth Day
April 22. You can't give them any credit for discernment.

They had been raped and haven't even noticed.

Rove finished his schooling under the masters and went on to apply them elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Rove not being too creative himself always endlessly recycles the tricks he has learned.

That is what happened. If you are, like me, a Republican dedicated to the ideas of freedom and justice you will start to see how our movement was also subverted. You heard it here.

Our next lesson will be on Rove's use of political operatives, Yammering for Fund and Profit: 102.

Best Sellers as NeoCon Bullets aimed to deceive

Now that the Patriot Act is just barely behind us, the ink still drying on the pages of the Congressional Record, an early Christmas present all Americans should appreciate, it is time to consider how the NeoCons, managed to suborn the system for their fun and profit. It was well planned and executed though they have now hit some rocky spots on their carefully planned road to a real American Serfdom for us and the establishment of an American Baronage for them; an amazing accomplishment.


No one can deny that they are ever so clever and we should not fail to give credit where it is due. Karl Rove's finger prints are all over the globe.

One of those answers lies in the perusal of used book stores. I noticed some time ago but had not put the parts together until recently.

To feed my addiction to the printed word I spend a lot of time in used book stores. The piles of nearly new books by such NeoCon Blogscreechers as Ann Coulter gave me pause. The time between purchase and deposit in the used bin hardly seemed long enough to allow the books to be read. And most of the ones I thumbed through did not appear to have been 'used,' for that matter.

It gave me pause for thought. Thought lead me to the ever ready websites that touted these books along with their authors. Not surprisingly, most come out of the same publishing houses. Three Rivers Press, Crown Forum, Regnany. A brief perusal of their authors reveals other interesting insights. The NeoCons live in a very small world.

The authors of these books, along with acting as spokespeople for the range of points necessitated by the policies on which rest the NeoCon POV also provide other valuable services. Along with the white males there are tokens of otherly ethnic and gendered persons. If you put together the right graph you can see how they all fit in, promulgating opinion in those areas that were essential to their larger strategy. Examined, it is actually rather simple minded. But it worked.

With the right message you have to have the right messenger and so we fill in those little places on the graph. There are links from those sites to a mass of sites that are NeoCon clubs, for instance the Heritage Foundation. Having attended some of the functions at similar organizations associated with the folks from NeoConland I now know that these organizations push books and often will give them away to loyal supporters who are attending expensive conferences that allow them to hear first hand what they are supposed to think; opinion pronounced by those same authors.

The degree to which each opinion maker knows how their opinion is being used would vary, of course. For some it would be a little like being discovered in the coffee shop in Hollywood and advancing immediately to the big leagues with a contract for three movies. Some books by their regular cadre of political operatives, for instance John Fund, would have been planned and assigned in advance.

What if to accomplish your political ends you knew, say 20 years ago, you would need to produce the appearance of public support? One relatively cheap way to accomplish that would be to identify and fund a cadre of writers representing the 'points' of your political agenda and ensure that the books they produced, flowing from their eager fingers like guano from a gull, would register big time in sales.

Wow, the media would say, these people have their fingers on the pulse of America. Interviews and respect would automatically ensue. Media people respect anyone who can manage to be paid for talking or writing.

This simulated public presence also translates into a real presence because so many people interested in politics want to go with the 'winner' in this case the one whose books are selling and who are on the screen talking to America about their shiny new ideas. It is also a clever way to pay off the writers, who are in effect political operatives paid through royalties.

The publishing house makes money selling the books; the authors make money; and the public, curious about what is being said, also buy many more books than would otherwise have been the case. Book tours result in more media and allow the authors a far more active dating life than would otherwise have been possible.

Additionally, your opposition goes out and buys the books to respond. Those might be the most satisfactory sales of all to Karl Rove.

This is supposition on my part, of course. I went in less than 20 books stores in three states checking out the stacks. But it is very possible for us to find out if this is true. All we need is a website, free on yahoo, that lets folks list how many books they found on what day in which stores. Outing them on this would be delicious. I am really hoping that some interested Internet savant does just that.

The cleverness of the whole has Karl Rove stamped all over it.

Now, how to respond to this strategy.

These books sell cheap, needless to say; many book store owners repined that they are impossible to sell so removing them from inventory saves space, usefully recycling them to a higher purpose is therefore both a public service and a necessity. So in the spirit of charity and the season such books could be made available to low income people living in areas that are experiencing the sharp rise in heating bills and used to generate some real heat in their fireplaces.

I can just see St. Nick coming down on a pile of crackling Coulters. That will warm his old heart.
The thing about the Rove strategy, and this was a component of their ongoing war on America and Americans, is that it may not make sense at the time but in retrospect you see what was really happening.

Visit your local used book store and clean out your fireplace for use this Christmas Season. You will be glad you did.

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." Thomas Jefferson; Sept. 28, 1820




How the NeoCons – and the Dems – sunk the Ship of State





As bad as things seem now, it can get worse. This is the conclusion one comes to after reading E.J. Dionne’s commentary in last Monday's edition of the Washington Post.

Dionne urged Democrats to find a vision. Perhaps Dionne simply should paint Senator Kerry as the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz and sing ‘If Kerry only had a brain.’ The fact is, the visionary and moral leadership offered by such stalwarts of the DNC remain the best hopes of people like Karl Rove. There isn’t a vacant deck chair on the “D.N.C. Titanic” during this Democrat cruise.

Whatever happened to the refrain, “Bush stole the election”? Several days ago John Kerry made a hasty retreat from what he had once openly stated to Mark Crispin Miller, (author of “Fooled Again”) that Bush had in fact stolen the 04 elections. The silence is deafening. No one has uttered a peep about vacancy in John Kerry’s trousers these days. This is the man who wanted to be President? The NeoCons who occupy the White House must rejoice daily that Providence has provided them with the current Democratic leadership.

Forty years of Democratic neglect allowed the NeoCons to rise to power through the subversion of the Grand Old Party. So void of ideas has the DNC become, that if they offered voters an equivalent to the Contract with America it would be titled “We’ll Steal Less!”

This would at least hold the virtue of honestly. When Joe Conason penned “Big Lies” he hit the nail square on the head; they stole less than the snorting hoard of NeoCons who marched into Washington on hobnailed boots following the 1994 elections.

While such as John Kerry peer into the abyss of their souls the image of GW Bush peering under his desk for his phantom WMD’s in the Oval Office gives Americans whiplash.

For the Democrats to find leadership means they first must have a vision, and that requires eyes wide open, confronting reality. Vision is not propaganda, but a reality that empowers. Americans are fed up. A recent CNN online poll found that 88% of the country’s voters would gladly leave their political party if only someone offered them a vision – along with the reality to achieve it.

Americans are ready, ready to take power from the leadership of political parties and the their corporate sponsors and put it back into the hands of the people themselves. This is how our Founders intended it to be; that is the vision of America.

Stealing less, might slow the nightmare but it is not a vision.

The sole purpose of government is to do that which the people cannot do individually for themselves. Nothing more.

Americans must take back control of their lives. The worn out rhetoric, propaganda and marketing of fear of the past half century has been used to the death of all we hold sacred as a people. It must stop. We stand poised on the threshold of a change more substantial than the fall of the Berlin Wall. That is the wall between the freedom God meant us to have and a perpetual serfdom to government.

The truth is that Americans are only an idea away from real freedom. Now that they see the reality behind the curtain of Oz they need only take the future into their own hands.

We face cannot trust our elections. Therefore we need to return control to our neighborhoods, both for voting and for registration, there we know who we can trust.

Petty bureaucrats who presume to dictate to us in all parts of our lives ooze with the assumption of authority. These same petty officials also categorically reject all personal accountability for their failures. Therefore we need walk away from the bankrupt services government produces.

Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that there is nothing they can do to change things. But we can.

We can take back control by returning to a government that does only what the people cannot do for themselves.

We must get off all grids created for us by government. These grids; social, economic, utility and otherwise were created by government to serve big government and not us.

Some grids are created by government, others by large corporations such as petroleum and credit card companies. These stakeholders in the game are bedmates. Their sole purpose is to insure our compliance in making them wealthy and powerful.

Grids, the means for centralizing ownership of Americans, send the wrong message about how we organize our lives. Grids teach us to look to 'authorities' rather than looking to each other to solve our problems as people and as communities. Grids teach us to wait for someone else (corporations or government) to come to our rescue. Instead we should be rescuing each other.

There are other grids as well. As individuals we can detach from all of them if we choose. Woody Guthrie wrote a song once, and it went something like this; “… one man’s hands can’t tear a prison down. But if one and one make a hundred, we’ll see that day come round.” The day has come.

Doing it ourselves as individuals and with our neighbors is the vision the Founders knew. A vision; Something neither political party seems to understand. As long as we keep playing their game the music will not change.

Perhaps you do not hear leadership from those who rule over us for the simple reason that it might destroy their power to sell us into economic slavery in the land our fathers and mothers died to create.

E.J. Dionne closed by citing FDR’s memorable speech before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in which he asserted, that the task of government was to intervene, but not hamper individualism, to protect it from the abuses of the powerful.

Now we know, as Roosevelt did not, that the ability of government to protect rights vanished in the potential for profits to be made in selling us out. Dionne then goes on without a bobble to say that rights are not enough, that we need to consider 'service'. He should remember that service is slavery if it is not undertaken freely. Each of us know when we are serving and when we are slaves.

Start organizing locally so that elections are controlled by those we know. Get off the grid of dependencies. Look into the eyes of your neighbor and find hope, because hope is the vision we need today.

The ERA - Now Pending, a real Revolution in the Making

The ERA – NOW pending

by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, ERA Campaign Network California Coordinator

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.

You may think that the Equal Rights Amendment is dead; however, you would be wrong. It has never been more alive and ready to become law.
On October 19^th Representative Arthenia Joyner of Florida filed a bill in
the state legislature there calling for ratification. The bill, (HCR 8005) will be considered in the 2006 Legislative Session.

For some years now a small but determined group of women have been
pursuing ratification of the long overdue ERA through a strategy they call the Three State Strategy. The ERA was passed by Congress in 1972, and sent for the required ratification by at least 38 (three-fourths) of the 50 states. Although the 1972 Congress had stipulated a 7-year ratification time limit, the 1978 Congress extended the time limit 3 more years, to 1982 -- by which time 35, not 38, states had ratified. In spite of common assumptions that the ERA was therefore "dead," more recent legal analyses conclude that the time limit could be extended again, or even eliminated, so that ratification by just three more states would complete the process and add the ERA to the Constitution.

This time we need to make sure it happens – we can and must. The comment
by then-candidate for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on the standards applied to gender issues as opposed to other issues of equality sent chills down many spines in the last months.

The newly passed ERA was sent to the states from Congress in 1972 and
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. Many institutions and powerful people who benefit from keeping women second class citizens, including Phyllis Schlafly, have made careers of opposing an equality that is essential to women – and to our culture as a whole.

What happened instead was a series of laws that assert 'fairness', many passed on the state level. On these women hang their trust that their rights are protected. Without the clear and specific backing of the federal Constitution, even the best laws improving women'srights and opportunities can (and often are) weakened, poorly (or never) enforced, or even overturned. Without the ERA, women cannot count on the Supreme Court to prohibit that from happening.

The ERA Campaign network and those involved in the active campaigns now underway in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Georgia, and Arizona need help to ensure that three more state ratifications are achieved. The other states that have not ratified are:/Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.


There are organizations in nearly all of these states that are working and need help.

You can help make it happen. You probably noticed that most of the unratified states are southern, Many of us now living in other parts of the country have connections to those states. We may leave our state but we keep our friends, school chums and family. With help from the Internet former southerners are creating a network to build understanding and support for the ongoing effort.

Many of us have connections of other kinds to the unratified states; our families might have come from there, we might have gone to school there, we might have friends who have moved there. Or our favorite novel might have been set there. The threads of connection are weaving new patterns for women across the nation, connections that will ensure that girls growing up now will have
their rights secured to them as individuals. Many of us have had the experience of 'adopting' a child in absentia and sending money or presents to a family in need in another country. You can 'adopt' a state as a member of that state's ERA Caucus and help by letting your friends and family know about the ongoing efforts and by donating yourself to your adopted state and by getting your friends and
family and associates to do the same.

In this way we can forge new connections between women and all fair minded people throughout the country, connections that can last even after we have finished the work of ratification.

The women who have poured their lives into this work come from every kind of background; what they have in common is a sense of humor (you have to have one of those to keep on trucking) and the raw determination to see equality a reality in their lifetimes.

There are friends waiting to get to know you!

Help make the ERA a reality in our life times. Adopt one of these states as your own and donate, organize support and keep updated. Your daughter and granddaughters will be glad you did!


Coordinators for unratified states


Alabama: Elizabeth Crandall, eac3000@hotmail.com
, 334-663-1861
Arizona: Kathie Kelly, ERACampaignAZ@aol.com, 602-690-1038, or Joan Meacham, SusieQ3@cox.net, 480-471-7792

Arkansas: Berta Seitz, BSeitz@fayar.net ,
479-442-6256

Florida: Sandy Oestreich, RatifyERA@cs.com, 727-393-0932, www.RatifyERAflorida.net

Georgia: Coordinator declines to be named.

Illinois: Gayle Guthrie, ERAillinois@cs.com, 773-477-0164

Louisiana: Sandra Hufstetler, era.Louisiana@LA-4-equity.us
, 985-345-3001

Mississippi: Terri Elliott Mason, jacknterri@comcast.net
, 601-584-8546

Missouri: Shirley Breeze, SBreeze@mindspring.com
, 314-831-5359

Oklahoma: Leona Evans, ERACampaignOK@msn.com
, 580-536-4434

Virginia: Donna King, bioasys@usa.net ,
703-203-4500.


Coordinating organizations
http://www.ERACampaign.net/
http://www.4ERA.org/


See Florida's bill's text below, which is identical to SCR 204 we
referred to in our previous message, and with brand new Whereas-es.
Senate bill is referenced now only to two committees, but one is Senate
Judiciary. Current FL Sen. Rod Smith, gubernatorial candidate,
co-introduced SCR 204.

ERA bills' wording 2006:
HCR 8005

1

House Concurrent Resolution


2 A concurrent resolution ratifying the proposed amendment
3 to the Constitution of the United States relating to equal
4 rights for men and women.
5

6 WHEREAS, the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced in
7 Congress in 1923 and was filed every session thereafter from
8 1923 to 1972, and
9 WHEREAS, the Equal Rights Amendment was finally approved by
10 Congress in 1972 and sent to the states for ratification with a
11 7-year deadline, and
12 WHEREAS, in 1978 Congress extended the original
13 ratification deadline for 3 more years, and
14 WHEREAS, Congress placed a deadline of June 30, 1982, on
15 the ratification process for the Equal Rights Amendment for men
16 and women and 35 states ratified the proposed amendment before
17 the deadline, and
18 WHEREAS, Congress submitted the Madison Amendment to the
19 states as part of the proposed Bill of Rights on September 25,
20 1789, which relates to the timing of Congressional pay raises,
21 but it was not ratified until 203 years later in 1992, making it
22 the Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution
23 and establishing a precedent such that the Equal Rights
24 Amendment is sufficiently contemporaneous and therefore remains
25 viable, and
26 WHEREAS, in 1998 Florida voters, by a margin of 65 percent
27 to 35 percent, approved a similar amendment to the Florida
28 Constitution when they approved Revision 9, which added and
29 clarified that "all natural persons, female and male alike, are
30 equal before the law," therefore clearly indicating that
31 ratification of the federal Equal Rights Amendment would be
32 fully consistent with the will of the majority of voters in this
33 state, and
34 WHEREAS, Article V of the United States Constitution allows
35 the Legislature of the State of Florida to ratify this proposed
36 amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and
37 WHEREAS, the Legislature of the State of Florida finds that
38 the Equal Rights Amendment for men and women is reasonable and
39 sufficiently contemporaneous and needed in the United States
40 Constitution because while women enjoy more rights today than
41 they did when the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced in
42 1923 or when it passed out of Congress in 1972, hard-won laws
43 against gender discrimination do not rest on any unequivocal
44 constitutional foundation and the laws can be inconsistently
45 enforced or even repealed, and
46 WHEREAS, elements of gender discrimination remain in
47 statutory and case law, and courts have had difficulty applying
48 a consistent standard to gender classifications which are not
49 inherently suspect or comparable to racial or ethnic
50 classifications under equal-protection analysis, and
51 WHEREAS, the Equal Rights Amendment for men and women is
52 necessary in order to have a clear constitutional guarantee that
53 gender is considered a suspect classification and entitled to
54 the same strict scrutiny that courts reserve for race, religion,
55 and national origin, NOW, THEREFORE,
56

57 Be It Resolved by the House of Representatives of the State of
58 Florida, the Senate Concurring:
59

60 That the proposed amendment to the Constitution of the
61 United States set forth below is ratified by the Legislature of
62 the State of Florida.
63

"Article ____


64 "SECTION 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be
65 denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on
66 account of sex.
67 "SECTION 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce,
68 by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
69 "SECTION 3. This amendment shall take effect two years
70 after the date of ratification."
71 BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that certified copies of the
72 foregoing preamble and resolution be immediately forwarded by
73 the Secretary of State of the State of Florida, under the great
74 seal, to the President of the United States, the Secretary of
75 State of the United States, the President of the Senate of the
76 United States, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of
77 the United States, and the Administrator of General Services of
78 the United States.

America is off course - Time for a change.
Protect the rights of Americans - Elect another kind of animal for President

At the close of the First World War the Elks wrote a check for $1,000.000.00 so that America's Veterans could have a hospital for the first time. That is how it happened. Hardly anyone knows that today.
Beware of government, it takes credit for what it did not do - and it blames us when it fails.

Elections were on all of our minds when I went to Elks that Tuesday, but the questions that became the central focus of our discussion. lead us in unusual directions.

My friend Robert Crouch, a professor of economics who teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara, asked me what I had been doing with myself over the summer. A long conversation ensued that included the happy announcement that I had finished writing my second book of the year, titled GREED: The NeoConning of America.
No discussion with an economist can begin without some defining of terms so amidst the discussions of football, Lodge politics, and the greetings and meetings of those assembling, we did a little of that.
Robert is not your normal academic. He likes playing poker and has in fact written a book on the subject. He is a former surfer, sidelined by his knees, who spends every summer scrolling through his memories in the first person while touring through the lush and lovely landscape of England, his native soil, in a sedan.
I like Robert. He is always jolly and very complimentary, filled with insights and interesting stories about his past. I would like him even if he were not a dedicated economist of the free market variety. But he is.
I asserted that there were serious problems with issues impinging on the 1st Amendment in that a relatively small cadre of powerful individuals in America today, namely the NeoCons, can make it impossible to publish for some people, in this case me. Robert asserted this was not true. Hence, this opinion piece that will take up three distinct issues melding them together to formulate a short study of why NeoConism worked and how they have impacted our essential institutions.
I begin at the beginning. How do the assumptions of the 2nd Amendment apply to the present understanding of secrecy, privacy and confidentiality, a right ‘discovered’ only in 1890?
That ‘right of privacy’ was derived from a corollary of the 4th Amendment in 1890. This ‘right’ was originally asserted as a protection from libelous coverage of the press in a case occurring in Boston that year. A family was suffering under the publishing of what we are assured were libelous assertions. While we can sympathize with the family in question they had at their disposal the means for protecting themselves, namely the existing laws on slander and libel. If the statements were untrue they could sue. Libel and slander remained specific to falsehoods. What was inadvertently created with this precedent was a right of privacy that was later used to protect falsehoods.
By creating this formulation of ‘privacy’ a tool was created that became a weapon wielded against freedom as envisioned by the Bill of Rights.
The ‘right of privacy,’ as the tool for deception it became, takes its present form when applied during the Twenties to the right of criminals to ‘privacy’ to continue their felonious careers. These related to the imposition of Prohibition on Americans, a limitation on freedom.
Clearly, this is not what the Founders had in mind. But neither could they have imagined the need that drove its application.
Each of the significant cases in which the principle is applied asserts the ‘right of privacy’ as a tool to protect freedom, not from other individuals, but from the government.
Along with ending the production, trade and consumption of alcohol statutes were being used by government to force sterilization of the genetically unfit, to prevent individuals from engaging in homosexual behavior, to keep people from killing themselves, and to limit their right to make reproductive choices for themselves. Instead of challenging the government’s use of statute to limit freedom civil libertarians retreated to this convenient but specious concept of privacy.
The government had ignored their most elemental right, namely freedom. The response of civil libertarians was to create a specious ‘right.’ The correct solution would have been to ensure that government not interfere in the personal or commercial lives of Americans by rescinding statutes.
To tie the issue of freedom to privacy is to use a hammer to file your nails. Why this happened is obvious. At that point in time civil libertarians were faced with the growing specter of the various forms of collectivism that were to blight the forward progress of the twentieth century, powered by the growing unrest caused, ironically, by having ignored the injustices flowing from the government’s original failure to make freedom available to all. The poor, women, blacks and minorities were inferior in constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Women were the muscle of the movement for social justice in the early years of the past century, moved by the failure of the Founders and subsequent generations to recognize their rights to self determination. Their cause was just. The tools they chose were unfortunately collectivist. Those who spoke the verities of individual rights had ignored their plight and the use of statute was adopted as a justifiable means for doing what freedom adherents had failed to do.
Failing to do the right thing has down stream consequences. Now, we should learn the lesson.
Therefore the present understanding of privacy should be rethought as follows. Confidentiality is a contractual relationship, mutually agreed to, such as exists between physician and patient, attorney and client. Within that covenant behavior and unpalatable truths are protected. The asserted ‘right to privacy,’ as a means of avoiding the truth regarding undeserved reputation does not exist. Facts are private when they are not known to others. No ‘right’ to privacy exists through the Bill of Rights. Privacy, as a means of evading the disclosure of unpalatable truths does not exist outside the contractual agreements limiting the actions of consenting parties.
We will now relate this line of argumentation to the 1st and 2nd Amendments.
The 2nd Amendment would appear to be about ‘the right to keep and bear arms.’ But in actual fact it has a broader application, that being the right to self defense, the expression of that being at the time it was written entirely bound up in the possession of weapons which were technologically adequate to the needs of the people to revolt against oppression in the year 1776.
This is incomplete. All tools for the protection of the individual should properly be included within our understanding of the 2nd Amendment. Truth is a tool, a weapon of appropriate defense in the hands of the innocent, and cannot and should not be limited by the use of ‘privacy.’ Further, its use should not be limited by the abuse of power by other individuals, the court system or by government.
We are not used to thinking of truth as a weapon, but it is.
The Founders thought they had taken care of the issue of free speech as a tool for self defense. The example of Zenger, the printer who ran afoul of the Royal Governor of New York in 1735, and so established the concept of the right of jurors to rule on the law as well as the facts, was clearly within the purview of their experience. This is the principle of jury nullification.
Zenger broke the law according to the statutes. He was found innocent because the law was unjust. His right to speak the truth was superior to all statutes. The truth was not to be abridged. Clearly, the Founders understood the potential for statutes to void the rights they protected within the Bill of Rights. Statute is always inferior to rights secured by the Bill of Rights and the natural rights of humankind.
This previous example refutes the creation of a ‘right of privacy’ from the 4th Amendment.
The truth was seen by the Founders as a weapon of social correction and self defense.
The NeoCon Cabal today continues the bad precedent created by civil libertarians who feared government, using the tool of ‘privacy’ and ‘executive privilege’ to protect deceit. Government has been lying to us for a good long time but the NeoCons have taken this to a new level. The use of lies is foundational to the philosophy of NeoConservativism as emoted by Irving Kristol and by Leo Strauss, the philosophical mentors to this administration.
First, make sure your ugly behavior does not become known. Then find the means to have your own deceits accepted as truth.
The NeoCons saw the potential to use the media for their own purposes. They had learned from watching others do the same on a smaller scale and brought with them the Trotskyite methods of their origin in the left.
The fourth estate, the media, with traditional newspapers, writers of subjects relating to politics and policy, and now radio and television, are no longer a reliable means for ascertaining the truth. Instead they have morphed into a form of entertainment at best and at their worst the public relations arm of political parties and the primary owners of political parties and corporations. Depending on who owns them they line up to produce and so be paid.
Corporations are the third part of the story.
The Founders lived in a world where wealth was held by individuals. The first such corporation was East India Company. Founded by Royal Charter in 1600 the first limited liability corporation, gradually assumed the form of a government, enabling and justifying the take over of India by the British Crown.
This early limited liability corporation was enormously profitable to its investors and the British Crown. But this wealth was not created but transferred from producers. Governmental heads of the various sultanates in India traded access to the markets and merchants residing therein in exchange for advantages accruing only to themselves. The East India Corporation was therefore a middle man, taking from the producers but supplying no value in exchange. In 1670, through five acts of Parliament, the East India Company was granted rights that made it, effectively, a nation in itself, exercising rights of dominion over millions of Indians who had no recourse or choice in the matter.
So the tendency for corporations to become quasi-governmental entities, reaching for and asserting rights reserved to governments and individuals is of long standing. Corporations are now invested with an artificial personhood that makes them potentially immortal. They are not vulnerable to the impact of strict liability or social ostracism as are individuals. While the majority of businesses engaging in commerce are owned by the individuals who run them there remains a class of corporation that has worked to enjoy the benefits of citizenship while evading the balancing accountability. That class of corporations ignores the issues of informed consent, benevolent outcome, and individual autonomy.
Discriminating between the uses of the form of incorporation is an essential element for ensuring humanity moves in positive directions. Incorporation is a tool of human devising; it is not natural. Corporations should not be protected under the Constitution.
In the world of the Founders, the corporation, as we understand it today, did not exist. Wealth brought power but the power of wealth was limited; individuals holding great wealth died. Their heirs usually dissipated the accumulation of wealth over a few generations. It was a small world and reputations were not subject to the spinning all too familiar to us today. The truth was not as much at risk because the tools of truth and the right to enforce those tools remained very much within the control of the people as a whole. It was a small world and reputation mattered.
The Founders did not imagine that entities like corporations as we know them today would ever exist and could not therefore defend against them.

It was only in the 1960s that corporations succeeded in assuming personhood. Since then the irresponsible and grasping subset of corporations have been working at supplanting government. They are succeeding. The dynamic thereby produced is both complex and simple. The means used to control and steal are many, the formula remains the same. Lie. Distract. Take. Do it again.
Having formulated a powerful set of tools, the ‘right to privacy,’ the means for broadcasting disinformation, and then the means for displacing the original vision of American government through a collation of corporate entities, the pieces were in place for turning the representative republic originally visioned by the founders into a federal empire.
Thomas Jefferson said that we should have another revolution every twenty years, that being the maximum time that a government could remain free of corruption.
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Americans should listen to the words of their founders and consider carefully what actions seem best.
Corporations have come to exercise rights superior to those of individuals. Each of these is a conversion of an existing institution of American life; paid for by the people, but used by those who are building the federal empire we now see taking shape. It could not have happened without generations who ignored the essential issues of freedom.
Using the military, Social Security, the department of Social Services, education, disasters, the court system and the wistful hopes of a Nation those in change continue to steal. For most of them it is the only job they have ever held. While this is going on the series of mistakes made by wishful civil libertarians, hoping that band-aids will fix the problems, continue to accumulate.
It is time for real answers and we can only hope it is not too late.
Elect an elk as president. They are quick of eye, keen of perception, swift of foot - and tasty when roasted over a slow fire; a much better deal than the bunch in office today.

How the NeoCons murdered New Orleans:
Another in the continuing series.

Mr. Bush said on "Good Morning America" that the United States could fend for itself. "I do expect a lot of sympathy and perhaps some will send cash dollars," the president was quoted as saying of foreign governments. "But this country's going to rise up and take care of it."
As indeed we should. Americans are courageous and they will do what must be done. But that is a different set of actions than envisioned by George W. Bush and his cohort.

Fourteen billion dollars sounded like a lot of money in 1998, too much money for the Feds to commit to Coast 2050, the plan agreed on by the governor's office, the state's Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and all 20 of the state's coastal parishes for restoring coastal Louisiana.

Relief for New Orleans is costing you and me a half billion each day now; that does not count the costs of rebuilding.

New Orleans had a wake up call in the form of Hurricane Georges in September of 1998. Faced with a wall of water 17 feet in height that threatened to surge into Lake Pontchartrain and flood their city they came together.

New Orleans saw what was inevitable. So did most of literate America. In an article published in Scientific American in October of 2001 titled, Drowning New Orleans by Mark Fischetti,


the dangers were spelled out. In less than six pages it laid out what was going to happen, why it was inevitable, how New Orleans found itself a storm away from death and destruction, and what was proposed to stop it.

In October of 2001 all Americans understood well that disasters can happen here. You would have thought that the present administration would have listened. The NeoCon Administration did have a response. It cut funding to FEMA for the maintenance of the system of levees. Perhaps most Americans do not read Scientific American. But more of them read National Geographic, which last year again laid out the same grim prognosis.


People often lie when they talk. What they do is always true.

If you dig into the article in Scientific American and understand the human choices that left New Orleans vulnerable you see that those responsible, for the most part, were not in the line of fire. They did not lose homes, property, lives. They are not now living in fear of lawlessness and curling up hungry and parched with thirst, smelling death all around them. We have all seen the pictures.

Those who set up the Big Easy to die actually put money in their pockets and will continue to benefit. Those two parties are this NeoCon Administration and their core constituency, certain purveyors of products of the petroleum kind.

The NeoCons lied, the Big Easy died.

New Orleans had been buffered from disaster by the deposit of silt and sand built up from the deposits made by the Mississippi River. These were the source of the bayous, a fertile extension of delta land extending into the ocean, creating a wetlands where life teemed and many ordinary people make their livings. That started to change when the levee system began at the behest of Congress in 1879. Quick fixes that ignore the nature driven dynamics of systems too complex to be entirely understood have long term consequences. The people who originally made those choices didn't know better. They are now all dead of old age. At least that generation of Congress had less costly public funded perks.

When this happens due to ignorance we are forgiving. When it is due to deceit and greed action must be taken to ensure that the behavior is extinguished absolutely. This missing component in America's societal tool chest, retribution for those who abuse the most potent trusts, must be rebooted. Since we are human all such rules exist exclusively in human custom. We can change it if we decide to do so.

New Orleans was buffered by wetlands. Wetlands can absorb enough water to knock down the height of water surges as high as 20 feet – at a rate of one foot of water for every four miles of wetlands. You can do the math yourself. If you can't do the math and you went to a public school you know who is responsible for that, too.

New Orleans was left vulnerable by the congruent action of government and oil companies.
In his article in Scientific American Fischetti comments that the wetlands just outside of New Orleans is still lush. But the landscape changes as he journeys down to Port Fourchon, closer to the tides and turmoil of the ocean. There, the intrusions of saltwater are killing the grasses that maintain the wetlands, aided by the miles of corridors cut into that buffer by petroleum companies. Fischetti reports seeing abandoned trailers and buildings, lost to the encroaching ocean. Port Fourchon loses 40 to 50 feet of beach a year, the highest rate in the country and perhaps the world.

One third of the buffer that protected New Orleans was stolen by the same companies that immediately raised the cost of gasoline at the pump to over $5.00 a gallon although the gas then being pumped had cost them nothing more. If a store owner raised the price of water to double we would recognize it as price gouging enforced by the desperation of the consumers.

The cheapest means for putting in drilling is to float a barge out to the location, digging a canal that is then abandoned; this is what such companies and Exxon-Mobile have done and continue to do despite knowing the potential costs.

All of those who profited knew the risks.

At this moment you can rest assured the Karl Rove and Brain Central in the White House are working feverishly on how to turn their own profit by spinning these events to their benefit.

Their concern is more than just money. It is how to continue to control Congress in the '06 election if, as may well happen, Americans manage to retake control of the electoral system and ensure the first honest election in ten years. I can almost see the light bulb glow over Rove's head. “That's it! We will bring the troops home from Iraq because we have to make New Orleans relief a priority. We will also have to institute the draft to continue that work. Then after the '06 election we can invade Iran. That gives us two more years before we need to think about finding a stand in for BushBoy. '06 will be a breeze. We will actually be popular again!”

Rove is such a clever guy.

But I have a different proposal.

What is missing in this morass is that essential American value of accountability. You may know that while they were dredging those oil companies were also busy buying Congressmen to ensure that their potential liability was nil. So we need to inject some good old fashioned cause and effect. Who was bought, how much did the Petro Elite pay for them? Indict them all.

Here is the plan for enforcing accountability on those who are used to evading it.

Those petroleum companies who cut into the buffer will be held accountable for the damage done, both for restoring the impacted wetlands and to the thousands and thousands of individuals their calloused acts impacted. The National Association of Trial Attorneys can offer pro bono services to bring them to justice on behalf of those who lost property, life, and hope in New Orleans. It is in the interests of the law profession to prove to Americans that at least some of they can be trusted. And the payments will not be configured just in cash but in the transfer of property as well.

Those petroleum companies own facilities now dedicated to the production of oil based products. They will pay for these to convert to hydrogen and the stations they own now selling hydrocarbon based fuel will be converted to hydrogen. Ownership will be transferred to a trust that will see that restitution is made. I would nominate the Yosemite Fund and other like nonprofits who have struggled to maintain America's environment in the face of government's rapacious takings to oversee this trust.

In the interim the US government will encourage the production of gasohol and other alternative fuels that can be utilized by simply adjusting the timing on those automobiles now in use. No American will be forced to change; regular fuel will continue to be available – as long as it lasts.

Those impacted, now destitute, without jobs or hope, will have the money to restart their lives – some of them may end up owning their own pumping station for clean fuel.

Congress will lose its perks. If they want a dining room let them buy a MacDonald's franchise. Liability against those who made these choices, cutting funding for the levees, will be exacted personally. Those who act under color of authority can and should be denied the protections of authority. The law allows us to take this action. Those responsible should lose their private islands, their lavish life style and be destitute. But I am sure they will be able to get a job at WalMart or McDonald's.

For the NeoCons the charges for malfeasance for New Orleans will be added to those pending in Chicago against those indicted from the administration already. Perhaps instead of preparing to celebrate Mardi Gras by profiting from death those now occupying those dishonored positions of trust can be fitted for very different kinds of costumes.

America will also get something it desperately needs, clean fuel and a cleaner environment. The bayous were once places of fragile beauty; most Americans have only glimpsed this world from a boat in the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland.

We need a tangible, visceral message the greedy cannot ignore. Americans can take care of the problem once they correctly identify what the problem really is.

Those harmed will have been made whole; the wetlands will no longer be endangered. That is what justice should be about.

America needs to take stock, reflect, and act to save our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. We had to do it once before. We can do it again.



Melinda Pillsbury-Foster is presently working on a book titled, Revoking the License to Steal: How Americans can govern themselves. The book calls for accountability in every facet of life and the true establishment of individual rights for all Americans through the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. She uses the original philosophical tools of America's Founders, the market, justice, and individualism. She is a registered Republican, a member of the National Federation of Republican Women, a committed Libertarian, and a life-long environmentalist.

She runs an organization to preserve the legacy of her grandfather, Arthur C. Pillsbury. The website is at: acpillsburyfoundation.com