Life in the USSA

[eyer]

al Qaeda Santa:

http://static.infowars.com/2011/12/i/article-images/INFOWARS_Santa_Claus_TSA_patdown.jpg


Yes, it's that time of year again, citizens...

...so let's be really, really, really careful out there.

And remember:

See Something, Say Something...

...and a Happy New Year!

 

[eyer]

Obama And The Failure Of Capitalism

December 13, 2011 by Robert Ringer

Oops! The Presidential pretender went and did it again. A lot of red ink has passed over the socialist dam since he unthinkingly told Joe the Plumber that he wants to “spread the wealth around.”

Or since he told Charlie Gibson that “It’s a matter of fairness” when Gibson repeatedly asked him to explain why he would want to raise the capital-gains tax when the historical evidence proves that higher capital-gains taxes actually decrease government revenues.

Of course, there have been endless not-so-subtle clues as to Obama’s impeccable collectivist credentials since then, but, on the whole, he tends to choose his words carefully so as not to awaken the sleeping frogs. One must always be mindful not to let the water get too hot.

But last week Obama let it all hang out in a speech at a Kansas high school when he said, “[T]here is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, ‘Let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. The market will take care of everything,’ they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger.”

Moving in for the kill, he went on to say, “And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. … I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory. We simply cannot return to this brand of you’re-on-your-own economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country.”

That’s right, folks, capitalism had nothing to do with the United States becoming the most prosperous country in the history of the world. It had nothing to do with millions of ambitious people starting with nothing and becoming millionaires and even billionaires. And it has nothing to do with the fact that “poor people” (as defined by the Census Bureau) in the U.S. live better than middle-class people in most other countries.

When Obama says that cutting taxes and regulations doesn’t work, what in the world is he talking about? Everything works. The question is, for whom does it work, and how well? Collectivism works exceedingly well for politicians whose chief objective is to stay in office, but it destroys the lives of millions of people on the dole who might otherwise become productive citizens.

True to his favorite tactic of turning the facts upside down, when Obama says “it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory,” it sounds as though he’s referring to communism rather than capitalism. Communism has been tried throughout the world — from Cuba to Russia, from North Korea to China — and it’s worked wonderfully for guys with names like Castro, Stalin, Kim Jong Il and Mao. But for the masses it has consistently delivered poverty, loss of freedom and death.

Capitalism, on the other hand, has worked for the masses — whenever and wherever it has been tried. Even in its impure state (i.e., not laissez faire) it has delivered spectacular wealth and a high standard of living to all those who are willing to work.

“You’re on your own economics” is a cute catchphrase — the kind of dismissive ridicule the left loves to employ — but the truth is that being “on your own” is a good thing. When the government leaves people alone, it makes it easier for them to innovate and create wealth. And when wealth is created, it accrues to everyone’s benefit, whether it is reinvested, spent on goods and services, or saved (which adds to capital formation and, in turn, spurs economic growth and job creation).

But what about those who are truly unable to care for themselves; e.g., quadriplegics, the blind and the mentally ill? What would happen to them in a truly free society? Fortunately, the Western way of life is based on a code of ethics and morality that motivates Americans, in particular, to be remarkably charitable.

No civilized person wants to see those who are seriously health challenged or mentally challenged suffer, so the question is not whether or not such people should be helped. The question is, who is best equipped to help them — politicians, whose chief aim is to perpetuate their own power, or free individuals, who have a genuine desire to be charitable to those who are incapable of fending for themselves?

If the scam of politicians taking from those who produce and giving the stolen loot to those whom they deem to be “in need” worked, the poverty rate would not be about the same today (14.3 percent) as it was when the Great Society was launched back in 1965. What Lyndon Johnson’s “generosity” proved is that it doesn’t matter how much of other people’s money you give away, it does nothing to lift people up. The hard evidence shows that it is government’s redistribution-of-wealth policies that have not worked.

The far left has succeeded in perpetuating a cult of dependency that keeps career criminals like Chuck Schumer, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in power. And, unfortunately, those who claim to be in favor of capitalism — primarily Republican career politicians — have consistently gone along with welfare programs that have bankrupted the country and stripped millions of people of the motivation to tap into their true potential and better their lives.

If one assumes that a community organizing ne’er-do-well like Barack Obama — who has never built anything in his life — sincerely wants to help the middle class, he would have to simultaneously believe that Obama’s an ignoramus.

How does increasing America’s debt by $4 billion a day help the poor?
How do more than 40,000 pages of tax regulations — regulations that take time and money away from job creators — help the poor?
How does an $800 billion “stimulus bill” — which turned out to be nothing more than a wish list of political pork — help the poor?
How do regulations that prevent oil drilling and coal mining — activities that could create a massive number of jobs and reduce our dependency on foreign oil — help the poor?
How does destroying the housing market through government-created failures like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac help the poor?

Yes, we do need to be on our own. More regulation is the last thing in the world we need. The greatest regulator is, and always has been, the marketplace. Those of us who have engaged in entrepreneurship know that the marketplace is a brutal, unforgiving regulator. But how in the world can you expect a community organizer to know that when he’s never started or operated a business? You have to experience the brutality of the marketplace, firsthand, in order to appreciate just how well it works.

Maybe Obama and his supposedly sincere leftist pals should study Galveston, Texas and try to understand why opting out of the Social Security system has worked so well for its citizens. Or why job-creating companies are stampeding out of anti-business, high-tax States like New York and California and escaping to business-friendly States such as Nevada, Florida and Texas that have no State income taxes.

The truth is that, throughout history, the vile left has never been interested in lifting people up. Instead of focusing on income inequality, their focus should be on setting people free — to be on their own! — to go as far as their talents and hard work will take them.

Sorry, Barack, but your socialist and communist mentors — from papa Obama to Frank Marshall Davis, from Saul Alinsky to Jeremiah Wright — had it all wrong. It is collectivism, in all its ugly incarnations, that doesn’t work. So-called trickle-down economics, on the other hand, does work — and always will. It’s built into the system.

Barack Obama would do well to listen to a once starry-eyed collectivist named Bill Clinton, who recently said, in an interview with Newsmax’s Chris Ruddy, “We don’t have a lot of resentment against people who are successful. We kind of like it, Americans do. It’s one of our best characteristics. If we think someone earned their money, we do not resent their success. That’s why there’s been very little class conflict in American history.”

We’re less than a year away from finding out who is right in his assessment of the average American — Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.

http://www.personalliberty.com/cons...nt/obama-and-the-failure-of-capitalism/?eiid=

 

[eyer]

Roughly 40 years ago, the United States was the largest creditor nation in the world...

...no more:

http://financialranks.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/top-5-creditors.JPG

But...

...we have become the largest debtor nation in the history of the world:

http://financialranks.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/top-5-debtors.JPG

http://financialranks.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/cab.JPG

From largest creditor the world had ever known (at that point)...

...to largest debtor in world history.

All within a couple of long generations...

Production/Income

vs

Consumption/Spending

Welcome to the USSA today...

 

[JBCorbell]

Bob Livingston, Republican lobbyist on behalf of the military complex. How accurate can anything from him be?

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

 

[eyer]

Pretty stark visual of our debt situation as it topped $9 trillion...


http://financialranks.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/history.gif


...but it only illustrates through 2007.

Since then, in 4 short years, we've piled-on another $6 trillion...

...to put us over $15 trillion - and exponentially compounding each and every day.

 

[eyer]

http://static.infowars.com/2011/12/i/general/christmasdrones.jpg

 

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http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/pics/Republinazi_Democommie.jpg

In today's debate, the illusion of opposites has become a myth of gigantic proportions. On one side - supposedly the Left side - we have Leftists, Communists, Socialists, Marxists, Neo Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, Liberals, Progressives, and (in The U.S.) Democrats. On the other side - supposedly the Right side - we have Rightists, Nazis, Neo Nazis, Fascists, Conservatives, Neoconservatives, Reactionaries, and (in the U.S.) Republicans.

http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/freedomcontent.cfm?fuseaction=left_right

 

[eyer]

http://www.wnd.com/files/2012/03/free-speech-274x275.jpg

On Monday, February 27, 2012, the House of Representatives of the United States of America almost unanimously passed the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011 (HR 347), 388-3...

...Ron Paul and two other Republicans voted against the bill.

On Thursday, March 1, 2012, the United States Senate unanimously passed the bill...

...and it now awaits President Obama's signature to become law.

You can read the bill first-hand here (just click on #7 - that's the final bill as passed by Congress; it's a PDF):

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.347:

And here's a news story of the event by a liberal publication (remember: not one single Democrat in Congress voted against this bill):

New Anti-Protest Bill Flies Through Congress – Both Parties Stage Nearly Unanimous Votes to Outlaw Protests Against Government

http://obrag.org/?p=55812&cpage=1

Meanwhile...

...Both Democrat Reid and Republican McCain are working together on cybersecurity bills that would charge the Department of Homeland Security with overall regulation and policing of the Internet in America.

Keep cheering for your Party, hacks...

...as they both strive to cement statist rule over every individual.

 

[eyer]

If you can criticize the government, but it refuses to hear you, does your exercise of the freedom of speech have any value?

When the framers of the Constitution wrote the First Amendment, they lived in a society in which anyone could walk up to George Washington or John Adams or Thomas Jefferson on a public street and say directly to them whatever one wished. They never dreamed of a regal-like force of armed agents keeping public officials away from the public, as we have today. And they never imagined that it could be a felony for anyone to congregate in public within earshot or eyesight of certain government officials. And yet, today in America, it is.

Last week, President Obama signed into law the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. This law permits Secret Service agents to designate any place they wish as a place where free speech, association and petition of the government are prohibited. And it permits the Secret Service to make these determinations based on the content of speech.

Thus, federal agents whose work is to protect public officials and their friends may prohibit the speech and the gatherings of folks who disagree with those officials or permit the speech and the gatherings of those who would praise them, even though the First Amendment condemns content-based speech discrimination by the government. The new law also provides that anyone who gathers in a “restricted” area may be prosecuted. And because the statute does not require the government to prove intent, a person accidentally in a restricted area can be charged and prosecuted, as well.

...This abominable legislation enjoyed overwhelming support from both political parties in Congress because the establishment loves power, fears dissent and hates inconvenience, and it doesn’t give a damn about the Constitution. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent, and only three members of the House voted against it. And the president signed it in secret. It is more typical of contemporary China than America. It is more George III than George Washington.

The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to assure open, wide, robust, uninhibited political debate, debate that can be seen and heard by those it seeks to challenge and influence, whether it is convenient for them or not. Anything short of that turns the First Amendment into a mirage.

CAN THE SECRET SERVICE TELL YOU TO SHUT UP?

by ANDREW NAPOLITANO

http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/can-the-secret-service-tell-you-to-shut-up/

The Congress and President of the United Socialist State of America in blatant, unconstitutional action...

...and the lemmings go marching on.

 

[eyer]

http://cbswashington.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/obama.jpg?w=300

One Nation Under Socialism
by
Jon McNaughton​

 

[phrodeau]

"When the framers of the Constitution wrote the First Amendment, they lived in a society in which anyone could walk up to George Washington or John Adams or Thomas Jefferson on a public street and say directly to them whatever one wished. They never dreamed of a regal-like force of armed agents keeping public officials away from the public, as we have today. And they never imagined that it could be a felony for anyone to congregate in public within earshot or eyesight of certain government officials. And yet, today in America, it is."

That is totally wrong. The British kept a pretty tight rein on things. America followed suit fairly quickly, and it has been ever thus.

For unrestricted access to national leaders, you would have to go back to Eden, and that's just a myth.

 

[eyer]

Move along, Playgrounders...

...and all other lemmings who've become so statistly complacent after 150 years of "unconstitutional American empire".

Rethinking America’s Supreme Judicial Dictatorship

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

"The War between the States established . . . this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers."

~ Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, p. 178

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jeffersonians warned that if the day ever arrived when the central government became the final judge of its own powers, Americans would then live under a tyranny. The government, they believed, would inevitably proclaim that there are in fact no limits to its powers. That day came in 1865 when citizen control over the federal government ended along with the rights of nullification and secession. Not surprisingly, a warmongering, imperialistic megalomaniac like Woodrow Wilson would then celebrate this fact several decades later, as the above quotation attests.

The so-called system of checks and balances is a farce and a fraud; the reality is that all three branches of the federal government work together to conspire against the taxpayers for the benefit of the state and all of its appendages. As Judge Andrew Napalitano wrote in his book, The Constitution in Exile, the Supreme Court failed to rule a single federal law unconstitutional from 1937 to 1995. The Court is essentially a political rubber stamp operation with all of its black-robed ceremony being nothing more than part of the circus that is employed to dupe the public into acquiescing in its dictates.

There is no such thing as an "American union." The original union was a union of the free, independent, and sovereign states. If that union still existed, then Wisconsin, Florida, Massachusetts, Alabama, and all the other states would have at least a say in the current discussion in the Supreme Court over whether or not the American system of healthcare should be Sovietized. They do not. Every television and radio talking head is feverishly awaiting the Pronouncement from Upon High from the black-robed deities of the "Supreme" Court on this issue.

Did Thomas Jefferson, who penned the words, "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," really think it was a good idea to place everyone’s liberty solely in the hands of five government lawyers with lifetime tenure? Or perhaps even one single government lawyer with lifetime tenure, i.e., the "swing vote" on the Supreme Court, thought by many to be one Anthony Kennedy? Not likely.

Now with perfect timing comes a great book that asks Americans to rethink the federal/judicial monopoly that is a primary source of their servitude to the state. Just published by Pelican Publishers is Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century, edited and with an introduction by Donald Livingston. It is a collection of essays by such authors as legal and constitutional scholar Kent Masterson Brown; Yours Truly; constitutional scholar Marshall DeRosa; philosopher Donald Livingston; Kirkpatrick Sale, author of the book, Human Scale; economist Yuri Maltsev; and Champlain College Professor Rob Williams.

A major theme of Rethinking the American Union is stated in Professor Livingston’s introduction where he quotes Thomas Jefferson as writing on August 13, 1800 that: "Our country is too large to have all its affairs conducted by a single government." Such a vast country detaches the people from their political representatives, which "will invite the public servants to corruption, plunder & waste," he wrote. In 1800! If "the principle were to prevail," Jefferson continued, "of a common law being in force in the U.S., (which principle possesses the general government at once of all the powers of the State governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated government) it would become the most corrupt government on earth" (emphasis added). This of course is exactly the kind of government that has been existence since 1865, when all states, North and South, became mere appendages of the central government in Washington, D.C. This relationship was cemented into place in 1913 with the advent of the income tax and the creation of the Fed, which gave the federal government the ability to threaten and bribe all individuals and all state governments to acquiesce in its dictates. As Frederic Bastiat sagely observed in his classic, The Law, "democracy" can become indistinguishable from socialism if it is characterized by governmentally-coerced uniformity, whether it is for socialized healthcare or anything else.

What could "the public good" possibly mean in a nation of 305 million people, Livingston asks. Well, it is what it is: "Washington could not be anything other than a scene of frenzied pork-barrel spending, waste, inefficiency, corruption, and special-interest patronage for the politically well connected." As your author has often said, the purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not.

The essays in the book are a response by a proposal by the late George Kennan who, late in his life, proposed limiting the tyrannical proclivities of American government by dividing it "into a dozen constituent republics."

Nationalism was the ideological cornerstone of all of the evils of government during the twentieth century and beyond, from National Socialism (Nazism) to communism and welfare/warfare statism. Devolution of power and the denationalization of government as an antidote is the subject of the essays.

In his essay, "Secession: A Constitutional Remedy that Protects Fundamental Liberties," Kent Masterson Brown, a Lexington Kentucky trial lawyer and legal scholar, writes of how secession was – and is – a remedy that evolved over the centuries as an essential ingredient of contract law. If the Constitution is an agreement or compact, he writes, then the states that are a party to it have a right of rescission. "[T]he equitable remedy of rescission in the law of contracts was one of the most important concepts applied by the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution . . ." Brown’s essay is a careful, lawyerly history of the right of secession, its role in American constitutional history, and of how it was undermined by statist politicians even prior to 1861.

Yours Truly contributes an essay on how, from the very origins of the American republic, such nationalist politicians and government bureaucrats as Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Justice Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln toiled mightily to rewrite American constitutional history in such a way that would have made the propagandists of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany blush. Indeed, the latter characters might well have learned their tactics from their fellow nationalists in America generations earlier. Hitler himself did in fact quote Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in Mein Kampf to make his case for centralized governmental power and the abolition of states’ rights in Germany.

Marshall DeRosa exposes the fatal flaw in the current Tenth Amendment Movement, namely, that it relies on the judgment of the Supreme Court as to whether nullification is constitutional. This "servile posture" to the central state has been so ingrained in the American mind by generations of government "education" that most "Tenthers" do not seem to realize the absurdity and futility of what they are doing. If they are serious about the devolution of power away from Washington and back to the people of the states, writes DeRosa, then they must realized that "there is neither divided sovereignty, an oxymoron if there ever was one, nor an imperium in imperio. Each of the several States is sovereign, and as sovereigns they have the prerogative to inform the national government that it has exceeded the grants of its authority. Whether that is by nullification (or interposition) via blocking national policies or a complete withdrawal from the onetime voluntary union of the States via secession is for each sovereign State to decide."

Of course, that would take principled courage on the part of any "Tenthers" who would not be intimidated by the state’s usual tactic of smearing all advocates of decentralization as racists who would like to bring back slavery or segregation. In utilizing this particular smear tactic the state relies on the "rational ignorance" of American history by almost all Americans these days, and believes that it can censor all discussion of its unconstitutional and tyrannical behavior by mere name calling.

The Tenthers must also realize that the Supreme Court is nothing more than "a facilitator of the national ruling class’s hegemony over the constitutional rights of the States." They must "be prepared to bypass the U.S. Supreme Court." DeRosa’s essay includes a scholarly history of how Jefferson’s cherished Tenth Amendment was destroyed by nationalist politicians, lawyers, and bureaucrats over the generations.

Donald Livingston presents the kind of essay that he has long been known for: a deeply scholarly effort that spans philosophy and history. He surveys the idea of republicanism going back 2,000 years in which it was always thought that republican government was only possible in relatively small polities. This is the history that informed Thomas Jefferson when he commented that the American polity of 1800 was too big to be governable by just one government. Over half of the states in the world today are not the massive mega-states like the U.S., but have populations of less than 5 million people, Livingston points out.

Kirkpatrick Sale revives the Aristotelian argument that everything in nature has a natural or efficient size beyond which it becomes dysfunctional. He makes the case that relatively small states of 3-5 million population have superior performance compared to large states in such areas as prosperity, crime, human rights, healthcare, literacy, and a general sense of well-being. He proposes a "Law of Government Size" that contends that "Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation."

Yuri Maltsev applies Austrian economics to explain the failure of the Soviet Union. Without the institutions of private property and free market prices, there was never any chance that socialism in the Soviet Union (or anywhere) else could work as an economic system. Maltsev explains why in detail, in a fine primer on some of the basic principles of Austrian economics. He also explains why, in realizing that socialism could never work, "Kremlin leaders realized from the first that the only way of managing an economy under socialism was . . . with direct government coercion based on mass murder and forced labor." The only people in the world who still believe in socialism, Maltsev writes, are academics, especially American academics, who always strut about their campuses posing as Keepers of the Moral High Ground despite the fact that the system they associate themselves with is inherently based on mass murder and forced labor or slavery. "We should all be thankful to the Soviets that they proved conclusively that socialism does not work," Maltsev concludes.

The final essay by by Rob Williams is a history of the most active secession movement in America, the Second Vermont Republic. Vermont was an independent country from 1777 until it joined the American union in 1791; hence the name. The state’s propaganda organs, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, have attempted to smear those associated with the Second Vermont Republic, but their attempts have been ludicrous. Claiming that these mostly liberal Democrats who are disgusted with both the national Republican and Democratic parties, are somehow part of a racist conspiracy to bring back Jim Crow Laws by advocating their independence from Washington, D.C. is only something that someone with an I.Q. of around 35 could believe. That is apparently the audience – and a major target of fund-raising appeals – of such repulsive race-hustling rackets as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the federal politicians who support them. Unlike most "Tenthers," the people of the Second Vermont Republic hold no delusions that the central state’s "Supreme" Court will someday dismantle the unconstitutional American empire that it has spent the past 150 years constructing.

http://lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo228.html