The Education Boondoggle

The Education Boondoggle

“Teenagers have been warned they are becoming unemployable because they use a vocabulary of just 800 words…. The majority of teenagers should have developed a broad vocabulary of 40,000 words by the time they reach 16.”  Source:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1242056/Teenspeak-youngsters-unemployable-limited-vocabulary.html#

Most western nations’ deliberately implemented government funded education programs to guarantee that our kids would never acquire essential skills for economic success or promote lifelong learning or even the most basic of communication skills for social and business interaction.  Government views children as nothing more than a herd of cattle than can be controlled and manipulated for the benefit of the plantation owners. 

The American public education system has degenerated to the point where it is nothing more than a propaganda machine for statism and totalitarianism.  Besides guaranteeing that our kids are chronically dumbed down zombies incapable of behaving like anything more than a herd of brainless cattle, the evils inflicted upon a nation that made the conscious decision to sacrifice its kids on the altar of “government is god” is so morally reprehensible that it constitutes the worst forms of human depravity. 

Ever since the federal Department of Education was created by Jimmy Carter in 1979, the quality of education in America has been spiraling downward.  Curriculums  focus on bolstering self esteem, communitarian ideology, rain forest math, social justice, victimology, revisionist history and just about everything else that avoids math, science, literature, biology and all the core subjects that once gave a high school graduate more than adequate skills to function in the workforce and/or enter college.

But these days, America is no longer the great place to build a plant and hire workers and engineers.  A few years ago, Toyota caught some headlines because it made the decision to build a new plant in Canada despite several U.S. states offering huge incentives.  The reason?   Canadians with a high school diploma are far better educated and far more literate than Americans.  Apparently, training factory workers in America was a Herculean task requiring pictorials because folks simply could not read training manuals. 

Although the government is fully committed to dumbing down Americans of all races, nowhere is the disaster more heavily and painfully pronounced than in African American and Hispanic communities.   The dropout rates are horrific according to CNN:

Researchers for the study analyzed the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Surveys, household data from the Current Population Survey, national data on GED certificate awards and other official sources to examine the problem at the national level and in the nation's 12 largest states: California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.

Men and blacks and Hispanics of both genders are among those particularly prone to dropping out of high school.

"As these data show, this dropout crisis is disproportionately affecting America's communities of color," said Marc Morial, president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League. "Youth from all communities deserve an equal chance at educational success."

Among the findings in the report, "Left Behind in America: The Nation's Dropout Crisis:"

  Nearly one in five U.S. men between the ages of 16 and 24 (18.9 percent) were dropouts in 2007.

 Nearly three of 10 Latinos, including recent immigrants, were dropouts (27.5 percent).

More than one in five blacks dropped out of school (21 percent). The dropout rate for whites was 12.2 percent.

The education statistics on African American and Hispanics are appalling and if anybody has had an up close and personal glimpse into the education system, the American decline in education is no longer a mystery.  Because our schools are nothing more than statist indoctrination factories the results are entirely predictable.  Still, Caucasians and Asians perform much better than African Americans and Hispanics, even in the worst of the schools and that’s largely attributable to the fact their families are more intact and stable. 

The colossal failures of the U.S. education system are frequently analyzed by an assortment of think tanks, media folks and anybody else who wants to chirp in with a well reasoned, articulate and well thought out opinions. 

John McWhorter, an African American, a Berkeley linguistics professor and author of Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America has extensively addressed the agonizing issue of the failure of African Americans to succeed and the total lack of measurable progress.  McWhorter inflamed many when he concluded that the failures of African Americans are directly attributable to its culture of rap and disdain for education.  Education is apparently considered a white man’s endeavor that African Americans should avoid at all costs. 

Larry Elders, an African American Libertarian radio talk show host and attorney has written several best sellers that discuss a variety of race related issues.  His book Showdown “demonstrates how the nation would be better, stronger and safer with less government intervention and how individuals would not only cope but thrive without the so-called social safety net.”

Elders makes an excellent point because building a culture of dependency absolutely creates a totalitarian state wherein “Big Brother” can only operate with legitimacy by forcefully zapping people of their ability to think, to reason, to produce, to flourish, to succeed  and to have a boundless intellectual curiosity.  A nation of independent free thinkers poses the greatest threats to the state, its operatives and its liberty crushing powers.    But despite the best efforts of government to indoctrinate its citizens into accepting perpetual serfdom, there still beats a weak but alive antidote within the human condition because throughout history humans have longed to be free of shackles. 

In the modern world, shackles are far more subtle than the historically visible shackles of ruthless brute force like Stalinist gulags and the slave trade.  These days, totalitarians of all stripes have discovered that brute force isn’t necessary, yet, because validating the voluntary submission of the multitudes to the ruling elites only requires control of the education system and democracy.  Dumbed down citizens are far too intellectually incapacitated to pay any attention to how their congress critters vote.  Nor are they capable of even analyzing issues. 

American kids continue to fall behind other first world nations and even third world nations when it comes to education. 

Fifteen-year-old students from the United States rank 25^th out of 30 advanced nations in math and 24^th in science, according to The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

“The longer kids are in school and the more money we spend on them, the further behind they get, says Walter Williams in “Nation needs major reforms in education.”

 Source:  http://www.examiner.com/x-1393-Education-Examiner~y2009m6d11-US-students-rank-behind-other-countries

The glaring failures of the education system significantly impacts our economy and vastly contributes to the reduced ability of Americans to be entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, doctors, inventors and high achievers  etc.   The impact on our future will be devastating.

The education mafia that rules the failed U.S. education system with an iron fist is also a world class terrorist organization.  Even Rod Paige, a Bush 43 appointed Education Secretary, agrees; he bluntly called the National Education Association (NEA) a “terrorist organization” and Paige is African America.   Meanwhile, the educrats continue to demand more and more money to pour down the education rat hole and they manage to always avoid accountability for the gargantuan sums of money they extort from taxpayers.    Despite spending more on education than any nation on earth, we have nothing to show for it and the results continue to decline at an alarming rate.

According to the Wall Street Journal, teachers in America are the highest paid teachers in the world and the average public school teacher earns on average $34.06 per hour.   

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school teachers earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, 36% more than the hourly wage of the average white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty or technical worker.

In the popular imagination, however, public school teachers are underpaid. "Salaries are too low. We all know that," noted First Lady Laura Bush, expressing the consensus view. "We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more." Indeed, our efforts to hire more teachers and raise their salaries account for the bulk of public school spending increases over the last four decades. During that time per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled; overall we now annually spend more than $500 billion on public education…

It would also be beneficial if the debate touched on the correlation between teacher pay and actual results. To wit, higher teacher pay seems to have no effect on raising student achievement. Metropolitan areas with higher teacher pay do not graduate a higher percentage of their students than areas with lower teacher pay.

In fact, the urban areas with the highest teacher pay are famous for their abysmal outcomes. Metro Detroit leads the nation, paying its public school teachers, on average, $47.28 per hour. That's 61% more than the average white-collar worker in the Detroit area and 36% more than the average professional worker. In metro New York, public school teachers make $45.79 per hour, 20% more than the average professional worker in that area. And in Los Angeles teachers earn $44.03 per hour, 23% higher than other professionals in the area.

Source:  http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009612

   Ednews.org is an organization devoted to education issues and it produced a startling report titled “Special investigation: How a generation of illiterate, feral youths who idolize drug dealers and rappers live lawlessly outside civilized society”.   Although the study focused on youths in Britain, it could easily have focused on American youth and the results would have been the same. 

Our miserable education failures extend into higher education as well.  A Washington Post article states “Literacy experts and educators say they are stunned by the results of a recent adult literacy assessment, which shows that the reading proficiency of college graduates has declined in the past decade, with no obvious explanation”.

"It's appalling -- it's really astounding," said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and a librarian at California State University at Fresno. "Only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it”. That's not saying much for the remainder.

Dolores Perin, a reading expert at Columbia University Teachers College, said that her work has indicated that the issue may start at the high school level. "There is a tremendous literacy problem among high school graduates that is not talked about," said Perin.."

James Quinn, a financial analyst and social commentator wrote an amazing piece in Financialsense.com and his analysis of the U.S. education disaster is totally laid out in an article that prints out to 13 pages that’s packed with data and keen observations.   It pretty much tells you everything you need to know about American education and how it is a recipe for the proliferation of poverty.   Quinn’s anger and disgust are clearly apparent:

According to the CDC, 66% of adults over the age of 20 are overweight or obese. That is approximately 140 million adults. Somewhere between 15 and 20 million Americans can be classified as alcoholics. As many as 50% of those on welfare are alcoholics. There are 225 million people over 18 years old and 32 million of them do not have a high school degree. There are 32 million adults or 14% who are illiterate (23% in California, 22% in New York, 20% in Florida, 17% in New Jersey). The United States’ spending per pupil in public schools at $9,266 is in the top 5 in the world. New York and New Jersey spend $14,000 per pupil and one-fifth of their adults are illiterate.

Forrest Gump, when asked “Are you stupid or something”, responded “Stupid is as stupid does”.

Educational attainment is the single biggest determinant of lifetime income. As of 2008, 14% of Americans over 18 years old haven’t graduated high school, 31% have achieved a high school degree, 27% have earned a bachelor’s degree, and only 9% have earned an advanced degree. The median household income in the U.S. is $46,326. The median household income of Asian households is 24% higher at $57,518. The median household income of Black households is 35% lower at $30,134. Asian households have a fantastic educational achievement, with 49% of Asians achieving a bachelor’s degree or higher. Black households have a higher percentage with no high school degree (18%) than they do with a bachelor’s degree or higher (17%). Hispanic households have even more dreadful levels of educational attainment with only 12% achieving a bachelor’s degree or higher, while a full 37% of Hispanics have not graduated high school. Even though 69 million Americans have attained a high school degree, many are functionally illiterate as our public school system has just matriculated them through the system.

The dumbing down of America has allowed the intelligentsia to retain power and increase their control over the country. Lack of educational achievement doesn’t automatically mean you are easily manipulated, but it sure increases the odds. If you weren’t motivated enough to do well in school, you are unlikely to take your civic duties of voting, understanding national issues, and getting involved in your community seriously. The saddest part is that an enormous quantity of even the college educated is so intellectually lazy that they choose to trust their leaders without question. With 100 million, ignorant, non-thinking, non-questioning, and intellectually lazy zombies occupying space in this country, continued domination by a few thousand highly educated elite remains quite easy. A highly educated citizenry would endanger their power. By socializing public education, encouraging mediocrity, and not rewarding excellence, government bureaucrats insure that the masses remain ignorant and pliable. Those in power know that by keeping the ignorant masses sedated with socialist goodies like welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, and easy credit, they can stay in charge. For them it is fabulous, for the country it is a disaster. Winston Churchill summed it up succinctly:

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

Quinn’s conclusions are dead on accurate.  America was once a nation that bred the best and the brightest in everything.  Now we have become just another global cesspool of miserable mediocrity. 

Much of our education decline is directly attributable to the Federal Department of Education, a tax dollar guzzling organization staffed with arrogant and overpaid bureaucrats fully dedicated to the dumbing down of America.  The DOE must be abolished because it’s an albatross that is choking us to death by defining education as social justice indoctrination sprinkled with rain forest math.  An acquaintance described his young child’s math education as “they tell the kids that Johnnie has 5 apples but Sallie only has 1 apple, is that fair?”. 

Equally important as abolishing the Department of Education is breaking up the legal monopoly of the educrats by allowing a voucher system.  Some European nations with highly successful education results use vouchers and this creates tremendous competition in education because parents who have choices will search for the best performing schools for their kids.   In America, there are no choices except expensive private schools and home schooling. 

John Stossel’s outstanding piece on education titled 'Stupid in America' is another not so shocking expose’ of our failed education system.  Stossel directly attributes failed education to a lack of choice and a lack of educational competition.  Education is an issue that is near and dear to Stossel’s heart and he covers it extensively.  He interviewed a principal of an alternative charter school in Oakland, Ben Chavez.  Chavez has had remarkable success with troubled students and spends far less money per pupil.  Stossel writes “Since he took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among the worst in Oakland to being the best. His middle school has the highest test scores in the city.

"It's not about the money," he said.

He's confident that even kids who come from broken families and poor families will do well in his school. "Give me the poor kids, and I will outperform the wealthy kids who live in the hills. And we do it," he said. ”

The courageous and astute Mr. Chavez had a lot of experience in the public school system and his extensive knowledge highly qualifies him as an educator with real solutions to real problems.  Even though Chavez spends less per pupil than public schools, his teachers earn more than public school teachers. 

Until educators like Mr. Chavez are freed from the shackles of the NEA and DOE imposed standards of mediocrity for teachers and students, America is doomed.  We cannot thrive as a nation that marginalizes and disavows inquisitive minds hungry for knowledge.  Like any cesspool, it needs periodic cleansing and cleaning out the worthless bureaucratic parasites and teachers in the composting education cesspool should be a starting point.   

Mr. Chavez in Oakland, CA isn’t the only extraordinary natural resource in America producing education miracles.  In inner city Chicago, a man named Paul J. Adams has been operating a low cost private school called Providence St. Mel for 30 years.  And for the last 30 years, 100% of its students have been accepted into college.  Ronald Reagan raved about the school in the 1980’s and Oprah Winfrey gave the school $1 million gift.  What is the cause of Mr. Adams’ remarkable success?

There's no magic formula to explain why the school is doing so well, Adams tells Scott Simon.

"I think we have very intelligent people teaching [the children]," he says. "We have people that understand our mission. Our mission is to send our children to college. We think those critical analytical skills need to be developed early."

But Adams says a key component of St. Mel's mission — "we believe in the creation of inspired lives" — takes plenty of work.

"You have to earn the right to dream," he says. "You have to pay your dues. That is something that sticks with our youngsters as they go off to college and are now adults. They talk about that mission statement. In times of need and when times are difficult, they can always go back to that mission statement."

Work Not Done

Adams says there's a positive energy at the school.

"We celebrate learning," he says. "We celebrate success. We have honors assemblies that resemble pep rallies, where children are applauding that you're on the honor roll."…

Extended school weeks make a difference, he says.

"I think one of the misnomers is that we have some kind of miracle going on. We spend more time teaching," Adams says. "We're in school six days a week. If I could figure out a way to raise enough money, I'd have it seven days a week. Students are in the building from 7 a.m., sometimes even earlier, to 5 and 6 and 7 o'clock at night."

Source:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113683847&ft=1&f=1013

Of course, the goons and thugs who run the public school system have nothing but utter contempt for Mr. Adams and Mr. Chavez and their highly successful teaching methods.  Such models in education excellence will never be adopted by liberal bureaucrats who are addicted to crushing the potential of a child’s mind.   It’s what government does best. 

 A nation of lobotomized idiots should be unacceptable for Americans and our children are cheated under the weight of a failed education system.  But we’ve accepted it for so long that we scarcely have any memories left of what our education system once produced before the federal government and the educrats destroyed another one of America’s crowning achievements. 

The Civil Liberties Boondoggle

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking and writing.  John Adams

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.  Benjamin Franklin

Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom’.  Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), American author, philosopher

The Civil Liberties Boondoggle

Of all the horrors going on in America that attack liberty and prosperity, and there are many, by far one of the most egregious is that attack on civil liberties.  The very same liberals and Democrats who were so rightfully outraged over Bush and Republican assaults on civil liberties are now quiet.  However, even among liberals, Democrats and their traditional organizations, dissent is rapidly surfacing as they are forced to face the stone cold reality that Obama is worst than Bush on civil liberties and that his administration is just building on Bush era civil liberty infringements. 

The Patriot Act that was passed by Congress within weeks after 911 is a civil liberties slashing horror that effectively negated the 4^th amendment by allowing warrantless searches.  The government now has the right to invade our privacy, e-mails, telecommunications, financial records, phone conservations and much more – all without obtaining a valid warrant from a judge and showing probable cause.  As far as the Constitution is concerned, knowledgeable observers understand full well that the Patriot Act violates the 1, 4^th, 5^th and 6^th amendments known as the Bill of Rights. 

While Democrats and civil libertarians objected to the Patriot Act along political lines because it was a perceived as a Republican initiative, few are even willing to admit that the roots of the Patriot Act go all the way back to Bill Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, another civil liberty slashing piece of legislation that followed the Oklahoma City bombing. 

According to the website historycommons.org on April 25, 1996 “President Clinton signs the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which the New York Times calls “broad legislation that provides new tools and penalties for federal law-enforcement officials to use in fighting terrorism.” The Clinton administration proposed the bill in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing…. In many ways, the original bill will be mirrored by the USA Patriot Act six years later…. Civil libertarians on both the left and right opposed the legislation. Political analyst Michael Freeman called the proposal one of the “worst assaults on civil liberties in decades,” and the Houston Chronicle called it a “frightening” and “grievous” assault on domestic freedoms…”

Source: http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?civilliberties_patriot_act=civilliberties_patriot_act&timeline=civilliberties

Civil libertarians of all political stripes were totally horrified when Obama and the Dems renewed the expiring Bush era Patriot Act without even attempting to cure some of its numerous flaws.  Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional attorney who writes extensively about civil liberties and who is well respected by civil libertarians on the right and left, has been consistently critical of the Patriot Act as well as Obama continuing the policy of Bush to murder US citizens abroad without any evidence and just the mere suggesting that they are “terrorists”.  Greenwald said “Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”  They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.  Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution.  Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?.... As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death.  What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist…Can anyone remotely reconcile that righteous proclamation with what the Obama administration is doing?  And more generally, what legal basis exists for the President to unilaterally compile hit lists of American citizens he wants to be killed?”

But Glenn Greenwald is far from the only person to chirp in on the government’s civil liberties abuses and advocacy for murder of anybody the government deems a terrorist.  The John Birch Society (JBS), a very conservative organization that advocates for constitutional rule, said “Surveillance, torture and detention without jury trials have long gone hand-in-hand throughout all of human history. The Soviet KGB reputedly had listening devices everywhere they could, brought people for beatings and torture to the infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow and then “disappeared” its prisoners to the gulag. The Nazi Gestapo also had an all-pervasive intelligence network, engaged in torture, and sent millions of detainees to concentration camps without trial.

That's why constitutionalists have opposed the Patriot Act from the beginning. It is a stepping stone to a far more brutal form of government than Americans have historically known.”

The Washington Post is a notorious statist rag that is typically the cheerleader in chief for all the evil perpetrated by our government, Congress, the military industrial complex and the CIA.  But shockingly, WP’s Dana Priest and William M. Arkin did an outstanding piece of journalism titled “Monitoring America” that exposes the expansive size and scope of our national security state.  The piece states “the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators….The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington….This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America….Today's story, along with related material on The Post's Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11.”

4,058 federal, state and local organizations all creating a centralized command and control police state is very disturbing indeed.  Even more surprising is that this stuff has been going on for years/decades and that only 935 of these organizations were created since 911. 

Folks tend to believe that ideological left and right groups are polar opposites on issues but this is far from true.  Many groups on the left and the right oppose a lot of the same things, especially the assault on civil liberties, the thieving Federal Reserve and the military industrial security complex that keeps us at war.

The John Birch Society has actually praised efforts by the left to question Obama’s civil liberties record “Some leftist civil rights organizations such as the ACLU and People for the American Way have petitioned Congress not to renew these provisions of the Patriot Act. But most of the political left have simply rolled over now that “their man” is in charge.”

And that’s precisely a huge part of the problem.  Everybody rolls over on big issues, issues that politicians campaign on and forget once they are elected. 

Libertarian organizations like Reason, Cato, Lew Rockwell and anti-war.com have been exposing the assaults on civil liberties for years. 

But apparently, Obama and his Gestapo styled goon machine is attempting to out-Bush Bush on civil liberty assaults. 

Obama Demands Access to Internet Records, in Secret, and Without Court Review

The Obama administration is seeking authority from Congress that would compel internet service providers (ISPs) to turn over records of an individual’s internet activity for use in secretive FBI probes….

Under cover of coughing-up information deemed relevant to espionage or terrorism investigations, proposed changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) would greatly expand the volume of private records that can be seized through National Security Letters (NSLs).

Constitution-shredding lettres de cachet, NSLs are administrative subpoenas that can be executed by agencies such as the FBI, CIA or Defense Department, solely on the say so of supervisory agents.

The noxious warrants are not subject to court review, nor can a recipient even disclose they have received one. Because of their secretive nature, they are extremely difficult to challenge.

Issued by unaccountable Executive Branch agents hiding behind a façade of top secret classifications and much-ballyhooed “sources and methods,” NSLs clearly violate our constitutional rights.

The fourth amendment unambiguously states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Source:  http://inteldaily.com/2010/08/obama-demands-access-to-internet-records-in-secret-and-without-court-review/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+inteldaily%2Ffeeds+%28Inteldaily.com%29

So many Fedzilla power grabs are in the process of being legislated and/or implemented by our increasingly Nazified Police State that it’s difficult for Americans to even grasp what is being done to them, their liberty and their privacy. 

Another civil liberty slashing horror is the emergence of “Fusion Centers”, a Fedzilla initiative that merges local police departments with the military and the Feds, all in the name of national security of course.  Civil libertarians have been all over the fusion center issue and grassroots groups have been formed to fight them. 

One civil liberties information group dubbed them an “American Stasi” in an attempt to explain the fusion centers. The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported on July 25 that "there are 72 fusion centers around the nation, analyzing and disseminating data and information of all kinds. That is one for every state and others for large urban cities."

What is a fusion center?

The answer depends on your perspective. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, it is a federal, state, local, or regional data-coordination units, designed to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism and anti-crime data in order to make America safer. If you are privacy or civil-rights advocate, it is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people and so makes Americans less safe from their own government. In that respect, the fusion center is reminiscent of the East German stasi, which used tens of thousands of state police and hundreds of thousands of informers to monitor an estimated one-third of the population.

The history of fusion centers provides insight into which answer is correct.

Fusion centers began in 2003 under the administration of George W. Bush as a joint project between the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. The purposeis to coordinate federal and local law enforcement by using the "800,000 plus law enforcement officers across the country" whose intimate awareness of their own communities makes them "best placed to function as the 'eyes and ears' of an extended national security community." The fusion centers are hubs for the coordination. By April 2008 there were 58.

The growth has continued under the Obama administration. Indeed, Obama has also continued Bush's concealment of domestic intelligence activity by threatening to veto legislation that authorizes broader congressional oversight or review of intelligence agencies by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). As a result of that threat, the GAO provision was removed from the Intelligence Authorization Act..”

Source: http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=31577

The ACLU has expressed seriously valid concerns regarding the fusion centers, especially since they operate without any congressional oversight and/or accountability by an increasingly shadow government that operates in secret.  The ACLU said “New institutions like fusion centers must be planned in a public, open manner, and their implications for privacy and other key values carefully thought out and debated. And like any powerful institution in a democracy, they must be constructed in a carefully bounded and limited manner with sufficient checks and balances to prevent abuse.  Unfortunately, the new fusion centers have not conformed to these vital requirements.”, and went to highlight some specific concerns:

• “Ambiguous Lines of Authority. The participation of agencies from multiple jurisdictions in fusion centers allows the authorities to manipulate differences in federal, state and local laws to maximize information collection while evading accountability and oversight through the practice of "policy shopping."
• Private Sector Participation. Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector corporations into the intelligence process, breaking down the arm's length relationship that protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of these companies, and increasing the risk of a data breach.
• Military Participation. Fusion centers are involving military personnel in law enforcement activities in troubling ways.
• Data Fusion = Data Mining. Federal fusion center guidelines encourage whole sale data collection and manipulation processes that threaten privacy.
• Excessive Secrecy. Fusion centers are hobbled by excessive secrecy, which limits public oversight, impairs their ability to acquire essential information and impedes their ability to fulfill their stated mission, bringing their ultimate value into doubt.

 The lack of proper legal limits on the new fusion centers not only threatens to undermine fundamental American values, but also threatens to turn them into wasteful and misdirected bureaucracies that, like our federal security agencies before 9/11, won't succeed in their ultimate mission of stopping terrorism and other crime.”

On a more frightful level, local police departments are beginning to resemble paramilitary organization complete with military grade weapons and equipment.  The use of heavily armed SWAT teams used to be very rare and were only utilized under extreme circumstances such as terrorism and hostage rescue.  But these days, SWAT teams are used as Nazi styled storm troopers for all kinds of police activities and with such regularity that Americans are becoming desensitized to living in a police state.  The federal government has been loading up local police departments with military grade weapons and equipment for decades.

A lot of civil liberty organizations on the left and the right have been documenting the growth and abuse of the emerging paramilitary state.  Cato.org actually keeps a data base on botched police raids and the casualties resulting from such violent incursions into the homes of ordinary American citizens; the data base is available at http://www.cato.org/raidmap/.  From 1985 to 2010, you can scroll through data state by state and year by year on: death of an innocent, raid on a non-violent offender, raid on an innocent suspect, other examples of paramilitary excess and even unnecessary raids on doctors and sick people. 

Radley Balko of Cato.org actually testified in 2007 before a House Subcommittee on Crime and his testimony was titled “Our Militarized Police Departments”. 

Balko said, in part, “I’m here to talk about police militarization, a troubling trend that’s been on the rise in America’s police departments over the last 25 years.  Militarization is a broad term that refers to using military-style weapons, tactics, training, uniforms, and even heavy equipment by civilian police departments.

It’s a troubling trend because the military has a very different and distinct role than our domestic peace officers. The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. The police are supposed to protect us while upholding our constitutional rights. It’s dangerous to conflate the two.

But that’s exactly what we’re doing. Since the late 1980s, Mr. Chairman, thanks to acts passed by the U.S. Congress, millions of pieces of surplus military equipment have been given to local police departments across the country.

We’re not talking just about computers and office equipment. Military-grade semi-automatic weapons, armored personnel vehicles, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, and all manner of other equipment designed for use on the battlefield is now being used on American streets, against American citizens.

Academic criminologists credit these transfers with the dramatic rise in paramilitary SWAT teams over the last quarter century.

SWAT teams were originally designed to be used in violent, emergency situations like hostage takings, acts of terrorism, or bank robberies….

These violent raids on American homes, when coupled with the imperfect, often ugly methods used in drug policing, have set the stage for disturbingly frequent cases of police raiding the homes not only of recreational, nonviolent drug users, but the homes of people completely innocent of any crime at all….

800 times per week in this country, a SWAT team breaks open an American’s door, and invades his home. Few turn up any weapons at all, much less high-power weapons. Less than half end with felony charges for the suspects. And only a small percentage end up doing significant time in prison.

Mr. Chairman, I ask that the Congress consider ending the federal incentives that are driving this trend, and that the Congress reign in the copious use of SWAT teams and among federal police agencies.”  Source:  http://reason.com/archives/2007/07/02/our-militarized-police-departm/1

Also, among these 800 times a week  SWAT team busts into somebody’s home in America, frequently the police have the wrong address and terrorize and/or kill innocent civilians. 

The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act was passed to ban the use of federal troops as civilian police.  However, Posse Comitatus has been much abused and some of Fedzilla’s brazen abuses of the law are well documented. 

The New American reported in July, 2010 some very disturbing actions by the federal government.    “Within one month of the November midterm elections, a specially tasked unit of the United States Army will be on alert and ready to deploy within the borders of the United States to quell “civil unrest”… The subordination of such an outfit, known as the Consequence Management Response Force (CCMRF), under the command of US Army Northern Command (NORTHCOM) was documented last year by this writer in The New American. Lest any suppose that such an overt act of tyranny be the product of our current President’s fertile fascist imagination, that account related how President Barack Obama was simply carrying out the historic reassignment implemented by President George W. Bush, who in 2008 claimed that as commander-in-chief, the President was authorized by the Constitution to use the armed forces as he saw fit, congressional opposition notwithstanding. 

In response to the Bush administration’s pronouncement, the Cato Institute published a warning of the dangers of using a brigade of the United States Army as a domestic police force. The Cato Institute article reported that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team would be brought home from Iraq and combined with 15,000–20,000 other soldiers to form the new unit. NORTHCOM’s website claimed the size of the unit composed of servicemen from all branches of the military would not exceed 4,700 personnel.” 

Source:  http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/politics/3415-american-military-unit-set-to-impose-order-in-american-towns-in-time-for-november-elections

Some civil liberties commentators have sarcastically noted that the US military is merely practicing on foreigners on foreign soil to sharpen their skills for implementing a militarized police state in America.

In the arena of civil liberties, America is definitely crossing the Rubicon and taking a flying leap in the direction of an authoritarian police state more reminiscent of the Nazi Gestapo, the East German Stasi and other equally horrifying police states.  The Feds won’t stop and they have plans on the drawing board so extensive, so pervasive and so utterly draconian in their application that only a revolution can halt their power mad dementia and quest for absolute power.

The only thing that can possibly stop what Fedzilla has planned for us is for nullification and 10^th amendment movements to become powerful enough in the states to launch a successful challenge to federal powers.  Only the states can take back their constitutional sovereignty that truly holds the roots for the restoration of liberty.

The Government’s Cost of Living Lies

            The Government’s Cost of Living Lies

The cost of everything is rising but the government never reports in its phony baloney cost of living statistics increases in food, fuel, energy and other necessities that are driving our cost of living out of the stratosphere.   As the government continues to publish low cost of living increases, we are scratching our heads in bewilderment.   We intuitively understand that the government is lying. 

So what gives with the governments lies about the cost of living?  Well, the government has a vested interest in lying because preservation of raw and unaccountable power trumps “We the People” and their interests.  However, we need to understand how and when the government started distorting its cost of living statistics.

In an article by Martin Weiss for Moneyandmarkets.com titled “The Greatest Scam of All Time”, Weiss references the work of economist John Williams who does nothing but study and expose government financial lies.  Williams runs a highly technical economic website and newsletter (www.shadowstats.com) but many savvy analysts, like Weiss, shift through the stuff and reduce it to plain English.   Weiss states:

The first major push for inflation-distorting reform began with the Clinton Administration. Until then, the inflation measure was based on an essentially fixed basket of goods.

Example: The basket included an 8-ounce steak. And no matter what, they tracked the same steak through time.

The Clinton Administration, however, argued for a variable basket of goods. If the 8-ounce steak got to too expensive, they argued, the typical consumer would simply substitute hamburger. So the government should do the same.

That wouldn’t be a measure of the cost of living. It would be a measure of the cost of survival. Yet, according to Williams, a series of complex mathematical changes in how the Consumer Price Index is calculated — giving less weight to higher priced items — essentially achieves the same goal as the variable basket of goods.

Add that to a series of other distortions in the Consumer Price Index ... and you’ve got a measure that’s so far removed from reality, it’s a joke. Instead of the 3.8% announced last week, the true inflation rate could be well over 7%.

The biggest victims of this hoax: Anyone collecting Social Security benefits. According to Williams, if the Consumer Price Index were calculated today the same way it was during the Carter Administration, the payments would be 70% larger!

Source: http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/press.asp?rls_id=427&cat_id=6

The Bush Administration continued with Clinton’s policies to deceive Americans by supporting a Consumer Price Index (CPI) based on absolutely nothing except what the government wanted it to be.

Jarret Wollstein in an article titled “Towards Liberty” further clarifies the point:

According to official government statistics, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) – the mostly widely used measure of inflation – is running a very low 2.2% a year.

But if inflation is so low, why is the price of everything you buy going up so fast?

How do you reconcile 2% inflation with 10% to 20% annual increases in housing prices . . . 25% to 40% increases in heating bills during the past winter . . . and double-digit increases in the price of nearly everything you consume, from gasoline, to food, to movie tickets?

The simple answer is that the official inflation rate is virtually pure fiction, and has been for decades.

What we have is a situation of government induced inflation that is buried under a mountain of government lies.  Americans surely feel the severe impact of inflation because they understand that the cost of necessities that they buy, like food, fuel and healthcare, keep rising and have been rising for a longtime.

Americans are also paying a lot more for health care, another item not covered in the government lies or its consumer prices index.  According to the Employment Policies Institute, the cost of employer provided health care has risen an astounding 59% since 2000 (more on health care costs later).

The real culprit of rising prices is monetary inflation and government protectionist regulations that benefit corporate insiders.   Simply stated, inflation is the highest tax inflicted upon us.  Inflation is the direct result of obscene government spending that essentially reduces the value of our currency to that of fiat status and a banana boat republic.   Government is the driving force behind inflation, which is precisely why the government lies about it.   The government consciously and deliberately debases our currency with deficit spending and the non-stop running of government printing presses that churns out more and more worthless greenbacks.

What about your wages?  Where are they going?

John Williams of Shadow Stats reported in 9/09 that “Real Median Household Income in 2008 Fell Below 1973 Level”.

But you say that your wages have gone up to compensate for runaway inflation.   However, inflation always outpaces wage increases, which further erodes purchasing power.  How much you earn isn’t relevant at all – what matters is the basket of goods you can buy with your take home wages.    The American middle class is stuck in the pinchers of rising inflation and declining wages and this has been going on since the 1970’s when the U.S. government started engineering the impoverishment of the American middle class.  More horrifying, we are also being taxed into acute impoverishment as our tax burden keep rising while our real wages are heading south and the cost of everything is going up. 

What is Wealth and How is it Created?

What is Wealth and How is it Created?

What is wealth and prosperity?  We all want it because nobody wants to be poor, suffering and impoverished.

It sounds like a simple question.  It is and the answer is astonishingly simple.  However, it’s our deviation from the principles that accrue wealth and prosperity to the greatest majority of people that got us into deep dodo.  Wealth is simply excess production.  A corn farmer sows his seeds, lovingly tends to his crops and harvests the product of his labor.  What he doesn’t need to feed and sustain his own life is wealth or savings.  What does the corn farmer do with his wealth?  He could trade his corn for meat or eggs or shoes or clothes and other things he might want.  But - no matter what the corn farmer does, he absolutely must produce and must save enough seed to plant again or he will starve and suffer.  That’s a law of economics that cannot be altered, modified or otherwise tampered with without negating the entire wealth building mechanism of human survival. 

Human survival has always been based on the principle of working in some capacity to produce something of value to sustain life and create excess production for the purpose of exchanging it for other goods and/or to save for the future. 

Along the way, money was developed as a medium of exchange as a matter of sheer convenience because of its portability.  That’s all money was and ever should be – a medium of exchange.  Money has been many things throughout history (furs, spices, salt) but whatever was deemed to be money at any given time was consistently valuable, scarce and highly prized.  In time, the preferred money became gold and silver because of its consistent high value based on rarity and the fact that gold and silver are easy to melt into portable coins to carry and/or store. 

But the burning question should be:  Why did some human societies flourish and prosper while others languished in misery, slavery and totalitarian hell?  It’s a valid question that nobody ever wants to address.  Again, the answer is simple. The most prosperous societies throughout history have always been the freest societies that vigorously defended property rights through the rule of law and its code of civil contract law.   There can be no liberty without strong property rights and there can be no property rights without the strong enforcement of contract law.

America created the world’s first fully vested citizens and rejected the time honored concept that humans were subservient “subjects” under the rule of a thieving and oppressive aristocracy.

Our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, laid out the legal blueprint for the first truly free human society because humans were deemed to have God given inalienable rights that no government could usurp, diminish, withhold or withdraw.  It was the promise of liberty that was the calling card for immigrating folks to suffer misery, deprivation, starvation and death for the promise of a better life in America.   And they were willing to work their fingers to the bone to survive in a raw and harsh new nation just for the hope of liberty and prosperity for their posterity.  And they didn’t have Medicaid cards, food stamps, public housing and a supply of welfare checks.  Wild America was no place for freeloaders or the lazy.  Surviving wild America was tough and brutal.

These are the folks who toiled to build America and transform America from a raw wilderness into an incredibly vibrant land of abundance and achievement.  These are the folks who shocked and startled the world as the workers of Communist proletariat paradises around the planet took notice of the workers in capitalist societies who were amassing wealth, building homes and acquiring creature comforts that they could only dream of. 

Everybody wanted to come to America or at least they used to because America was a place where hard work and thrift were rewarded and property rights were protected.  The idea that anybody could rise and succeed and not be permanently relegated to a social and economic status conjured up by class obsessed elites was so utterly appealing that folks risked their lives and everything they had just for the opportunity to live free and breath free and know that what they toiled for was theirs and nobody could take it away from them.  These days, America has lost her liberty and these days, America is no longer a place where hardworking freedom minded folks want to be. 

What’s gone wrong with America and Europe for that matter? 

Government is a vulture that is eating America and Europe alive, it’s eating our property, it’s eating our ability to produce, it’s eating our bank accounts, it’s eating our present and our futures, it’s eating our liberty and government is eating alive all that we once held sacred – economic liberty, political liberty and property rights.  By taking the plunge in into collectivism, we are now forsaking everything that took Western Civilization a millennium of bloody struggles to achieve. 

Government and its tooth fairy economics is the Grinch that stole jobs, paychecks, savings, pensions, and financial security.  Government today is all about soaking the unwashed masses and fleecing the lobotomized sheeple. 

Americans delude themselves into believing that they are still free.  They even toss out terms like communism, oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, socialism, monarchy etc. and say “hey, America isn’t one of those nasty countries”.    While anybody can debate the finer points of definition of any of these terms of economic/political order but in essence they all mean the same thing – a handful of powerful ruling elites control everybody and everything and all for the sole benefit of enriching themselves.   The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class is systematically wiped out.  In the modern context I call it an emerging industrial feudalism. 

As America barrels toward economic collapse at breakneck speed in a race to becoming a third world collectivized totalitarian cesspool, the pundits and politicos are screaming “CAPITALISM HAS FAILED”.  Capitalism is supposed to represent free and open markets which in its ideological purest sense is nothing more than the voluntary activities of free peoples making and trading their widgets and whatever else they produce that they want to trade.  While it is true that America has never really had a pure capitalistic economy, America did substantially adhered to the basic principles of capitalism until it started to radically change in 1913.    The creation of the Federal Reserve forever changed our hopes for peace, liberty and prosperity because it resulted in the vast growth of liberty slashing federal powers, powers that immediately started growing exponentially and waging wars of empire. 

But Capitalism isn’t the problem or even the cause of our immense and agonizing economic woes these days.   In fact, when property rights were secure before the age of government confiscation, crony capitalism, cartel capitalism, protectionism and fascism, capitalism was the most prosperity inducing of all human activities simply because the motivation to work and produce was extraordinarily high.  Capitalism motivated sane values like self-sufficiency, thrift, savings, a strong work ethic and building communities that respected the property of others.

Going back to our corn farmer who freely trades the product of his labor among other producers with sound money backed by something of value, the person who works hard and saves tends to accumulate real and enduring wealth over time.  Wealth is savings and being the excess of production above consumption needed for survival, wealth is typically stored in a bank or is invested in something that will yield a return.   It’s precisely the savings from production that spawned the capitalist system.  Capitalism is an economic system based on capital or savings.  To have savings, one must produce.  These savings are the engines that drive economic activity and prosperity.  It’s also how America became the wealthiest nation on the planet – it had an abundance of hardworking folks who energetically produced and saved their money that was used as capital to fuel future economic activity and prosperity.

The modern corporation is nothing more than a legal mechanism to pool savings to invest in land, plant, equipment machinery etc. with the goal of producing something that people want and will buy at a price that will produce a profit or a return on investment. 

America once proudly boasted a huge mix of entrepreneurs consisting small, medium and large businesses because the instinct of a human being to be “the captain of their ship and master of their fate” is just overwhelmingly powerful and the alternative of the last resort is working for wages. 

Capitalism isn’t evil, capitalism is nothing more than the legal ability to produce, to trade and to benefit from your labor as well as having the ability to keep your savings or profits for future needs.   However, when “profits” earned from productive labor are vilified as targets for tax collectors and redistributionist schemes, then the system of economic liberty is thrown into violent turmoil.   Capitalism only becomes evil when it becomes crony capitalism wherein the rich and powerful buy legislators to give them protections against competition and free trade.  But that’s not capitalism, that’s the fascist marriage of big business and big government that destroys productive wealth building capitalism with graft and public corruption.

Small business owners need profits as a savings cushion for future personal and business needs.  Large corporate businesses also need their profits to fund future growth and to maintain financial solvency.  So whether one is a small business or a large publicly held corporation, the same principles apply but just on a different scale.

Despite some nasty events, like the Great Depression, America purred along as relatively free nation wherein wealth was shared and acquired across a broad spectrum of the population and the middle class flourished and prospered.  What was America doing back then to achieve wealth and prosperity for the multitudes?  America and Americans were producing and saving, just like the corn farmer who knew he had to produce and save a portion of his production for the future or he would starve.   Agriculture is the sanest method to explain economics because it involves two principles that cannot be violated without dire consequences:  Producing and saving seed for your next planting/harvest and using excess production to acquire other things and save. 

But what happens to the farmer when the government invades a “man’s castle” and violates his ability to produce and save by seizing his production, his property and/or limiting his capacity to produce and save? 

He starves and goes begging to his new master for his sustenance. 

This has been the trajectory of America for nearly 50 years.  As government power grew, it stole the production of producers, it stole their wealth, it stole their seeds for future growth and it stole their savings that are plowed back into a productive economy.  Government used to be considerably more honest about how it acquired their plunder and throughout most of history they would simply send in armies, kill folks, steal food, cart the conquered off to slave markets and/or and leave folks destitute and starving.  But government and its armies were never anything more than massive plundering machines.

These days, government does the same thing with taxation and conning us into believing the greatest lie ever told – “Trust me, the government will take care of you and your family”.  We aren’t talking about small but reasonable taxes to fund legitimate functions of government We are talking about the government at all levels consuming so much of the nation’s wealth that the nation can no longer produce wealth and prosperity.  We are talking about expropriation of the nation’s ability to survive and prosper and the seizure of our savings and productive capital.  Government doesn’t produce wealth; it only consumes the wealth produced by citizens.  Every dime the government seizes goes down the black hole of corruption, special interests, crony capitalism and the military industrial complex.  Government is growing so fast and consuming so much that there isn’t much left for our economy to even sustain itself let alone grow for the benefit of future generations.  And it’s not just the Federal government that is eating us alive, it’s all government at all levels that grows and grows at the expense of our liberty and prosperity.

Federal spending has grown from 3% of the economy (pre New Deal) to 13% in 1940 to a whopping 27% in 2008 and that number will only continue to grow because the economy is shrinking and public spending is on steroids. 

Every dollar the government sucks out of the economy is a dollar that is no longer available to plough back into our once extraordinary private economy that produced real wealth, real jobs, real prosperity and real savings – savings that were once recycled as capital that funded factories and business expansion, as well as a thriving middle class and many small businesses.  Government and taxation has absolutely drained the capacity of the private economy to flourish and deliver middle class prosperity, wealth and savings.  Tragically, the private economy is massively shrinking. 

Long ago America approached the point where there isn’t much left for the government to loot and plunder.  The federal government only has 3 ways of funding its schemes 1.  Tax the folks into poverty (we are already there) 2. Borrow from idiot nations who are sufficiently stupid to loan us money (that’s slowing down as nations are quietly unloading our debt) and 3. Print gargantuan amounts of fiat currency that will reduce us to a banana boat republic (it’s being reported that the Fed is printing money and buying Treasuries because foreigners are no longer lapping them up at auctions). 

So long as the public sector continues to grow, the private economy will shrink.  There is no possible way for the government to create the necessary conditions for a flourishing private economy because the government specifically legislates to increase its own power at the expense of the power of “We the People” to produce and prosper. 

More to the point, the economy will never recover for the middle class until government shrinks at all levels – Federal, State and Local.  Only then will circumstances exist for the entrepreneurship of citizens to once again produce and prosper.  So long as government at all levels is consuming our liberty and prosperity like ravenous gluttons, expect the situation to get worse – a whole lot worse.

If we think we are suffering now, we have only just begun to reap the poison harvest of a statist economy because the real misery has yet to hit us.  When it does, the pinchers of the totalitarian state will really start snuffing out life ruthlessly and brutally.  The totalitarian nations wallowing in Marxism/socialism/oligarchy/fascism/statism will always resort to the same tactics as Stalin and Mao who snuffed out 100,000,000 folks during the 20^th century alone.

I keep saying over and over that the only difference between the economies of Mao/Stalin that wiped out 100 million folks and the so-called soft socialism of the West is that the former never had the luxury of a wealthy and productive economy to loot and plunder.  Soon enough though, we will be fully plundered. 

Meanwhile, the American people are drinking copious amounts of “Koolaid” as we cling to the delusion that government is the cornucopia of plenty.  The lion’s share of the plunder generated by the governments looting machine only accrues to a few elites and insider power players.  The rest of us are lucky if they toss us a few crumbs and those crumbs are dwindling.