Battle Lines Are Being Drawn with Individual Freedom as the stakes.
IPFS
‘Revolution’: The First American Tradition By Barry Hess
Written by Barry Hess Subject: Revolutions, Rebellions & Uprisings ‘Revolution’:
The
First American Tradition
By Barry Hess
“We need a bloody revolution every twenty years, just to
keep government honest.”
For a very long time these words of a colonial patriot
puzzled me. Why would a diplomat and
statesman who had risked everything, including his life, to establish a
sovereign entity like no other in the Earth’s history, be talking about
revolutionary cycles as the only means to keep that new entity ‘honest’?
Now, with a few
years and many miles under my belt, I think I understand. He had studied human
nature, and knew that it was inevitable that people of ill intent would find a
way to use the brute force of government to control and profit from the vast
majority of these new ‘Americans’. He
also understood political cycles.
Thomas Jefferson was not given to using words loosely or
imprecisely so a significant question we need to ask is how ‘bad’ people might
come to control a population when that very population is solely responsible
for the maintenance of its government?
It would appear that the populace became corrupt and
drunk on money. More precisely, money
that came from nowhere…it literally never had an owner before. Just ‘poof’, and there it was.
More and more people are coming to understand how the Federal
Reserve Bank notes thing works. They’ve
managed to put two and two together even though burdened by the deficiencies of
government’s “free” educational welfare system.
Let’s see…. if all visible taxes combined cover less than
half of what the government spends…where’s the rest coming from? Nowhere!
It ‘just appears’.
In the simplest of terms, Congress goes to its
sub-contractor for money, the, ahem, privately-owned “Federal” Reserve. The Federal Reserve snatches brand new money
right out of the air every time it fires up its printing presses. The Federal Reserve Company (hereinafter referred to as ‘ FedCo’.) is
kind enough to “sell” these snatched dollars at face value, to Congress…and at
interest, of course.
What does this have to do with the impending
revolution? Everything, as will become
very clear as we stumble along the path of political evolution.
How does this affect you? Well, for the sake of clarity, let’s say there are an hundred
individual people, total, participating in the entire economy. And let’s say there are 1,000 single unit….
ah…er, uh, “dollars” in the total economy.
Let’s say you make $10/hr and worked a whole hour. And finally, let’s say you saved all of it,
either by putting the paper under your mattress or reducing it further still to
being a computer credit in your bank account.
Okay, so far, so good.
Here’s the lesson: Each Congressmen has his or her own
special interest group(s) whose voting numbers assure their re-election. Special interest support has a cost. Their special interest voting block must get
very special benefits (on-going, big dollar government contracts are very
popular these days) to keep the relationship mutually beneficial. Then, deals are made between the lawmakers
themselves for mutual support for each other’s spending projects. The problem is, there are lots of Congress
People! Add it all up and without
exception you will get a budget that is bigger than all the money earned by all
the working people in the economy. My
assumption is that the reader was already aware of such established
realities.
So what’s a Congress to do? Raising visible taxes on the working people would not be well
received and could be politically fatal.
Humm, a dilemma. Why not, have
FedCo print up another 1,000 units? Of course!
That was easy. Problem solved.
How this affects you is pretty serious. The ‘money from nowhere’ didn’t add any
value to the economy. All it did was
add more units of trade to the marketplace—twice as many as were before. Remember how proud you were of your fancy
$10/hr job? Well since Congress and
FedCo just doubled the amount of money in the entire economy to purchase the
same amount of products in the market—you end up with a 50% pay
cut--retroactively. Since the money supply
doubled, but marketable products stayed the same—the producers of products are
forced to double the price of their goods just to keep the real spendable value
the same. Your $10.00 went to $5.00,
then the prices of goods and services doubled.
You are now down to one quarter the spending power of what you actually
earned. Still proud of your now
$2.50/hr job?
The vast majority of Americans are content to simply
whine and mutter about how everything is just so expensive these days. In an ironic twist, if you were a good
thrifty ‘saver’, you lose—but those who rush out to spend all they earn get
more actual value for their time and currency, than you. Does this sound like a stable economy to
you?
The people and companies that benefit from this circumstance
call it “inflation”—I call it theft.
They don’t want to alarm you—I DO!
When your pay goes up in dollar numbers, you end up losing ground
(unless it doubles) because it takes twice as many dollars to buy the same
goods and services.
To illustrate what this means in real terms, let’s use
the value of what was still a “dollar” in 1963, when we were still on the gold
standard and a “dollar” was defined by specific weights of gold and silver (you
may want to glance at the national charter for precise weights). Today’s “dollar” is barely worth 2, yes two
1963 cents! In sum, you have to earn 50
times the number of today’s dollars your parents did—just to maintain the same
standard of living.
How’s that workin’ out for ya?
Sooner or later the general public will understand that
when it sees the Dow Jones Stock Index push skyward, it’s not because a whole
bunch of stocks suddenly ‘gained’ some real value in the marketplace, it’s
because it takes more dollars to buy them.
It takes more dollars to buy them because the dollar is worth less than
it was yesterday.
The fun begins when the public realizes it can no longer
ignore the accelerating costs of…everything.
If you don’t stop it now, there’ll come a time when taxes, fines and
fees consume every dollar you earn, so politicians can give it to people of
their choosing (remember those ‘special’ interests?)—before you can feed your
own family.
Money is only ‘time’ memorialized. I mean ‘Time’, as in the number of minutes
we each have on Earth. Your personal
number of minutes is the only limited commodity any of us will ever know. They
are therefore the only possible benchmark in determining anything’s value.
When people realize that the value of their hard earned
dollars was stolen right out of their pockets, and their minutes sucked right
out of their life, the fireworks will begin.
When the people start asking “who?” stole their money—the guillotine
line will form to the rear.
Hopefully I have laid the necessary foundation to present
an interesting quote, and to bring this diatribe back to its intended theme.
“If the public knew how money works in America, there’d
be a revolution by morning”, Henry Ford.
Why did I preface this political/social observation with
money? Because underlying the decline
of America is the loss in value of our money.
Historically, the debasing of a nations currency always
leads to the collapse of social welfare (special interests), chaos, mass
hunger, unemployment, desperation, then anarchy and social stabilization of
civil interaction through formalized structures of administration. Hopefully, when that scenario unfolds on
American soil again, the People will have the common sense to re-implement our
original Constitution—fixing only the parts pertinent to recognizing all
Citizens, as sovereign equals under the law.
Have the once-proud American People lost their collective
minds? Do they not understand the
basics of economics? Can it be that
they are now conditioned to think that government can give everybody everything
without anybody having to produce anything?
We will most certainly see, in the very near term.
I’ve heard what every self-described ‘political insider’
has said “IS going to happen” in regard to presidential politics and oddly
enough, none of them paint the same picture.
So now, with your permission, I’ll take my shot at it.
There’s never been a time in American history when there
has been a greater confluence of ‘official threats’ to public health; safety
and welfare then there are right now.
All of them seem to be coming to a head at the same time and something’s
gotta give. This is one of my, “Vuja
de” moments in history. Translated, it
means, ‘We have NEVER been here before’.
What happens from here on out should be interesting at the very least.
A glossing overview of unfolding circumstances would have
to include the economics of a very serious ‘correction’ (de-valuation) in the
housing and stock markets along with record home foreclosures, record
repossessions, record arrests because of an increase in crimes of desperation
and record detainments of Citizens ‘on suspicion of this or that’, by
government—to protect the public, of course.
Then there’s global warming and government surveillance of its
owners… That’s all before we talk
about the effects of Methamphetamines on the family, HIV, TB, Bird Flu, teen
pregnancies, child molesters, gay marriage licensing, heterosexual marriage
licensing, overseas out-sourcing, the destructive social effects of children
being subjected to indoctrination under the guise of ‘education’, blatant vote
fraud, the rise of “terrorism” (all against ‘you’, because you’re an
American…or “free”), an administration that spits on our Constitution and our
individual rights daily, corporate warmongers profiteering from their munitions
products by selling the People on war and, Lord don’t get me started on
immigration, gas prices or drunk drivers.
That’s a lot of stuff for the average person to keep in
mind every minute of every day, even while they must work to feed their
families. You need to sleep with one
eye open and have a few in the back of your head just to keep up.
A very simple change in policy would completely nullify
virtually all of the threats to our personal safety, so the governmental
administration could focus on finding a way to make nice with, or at least be
polite to all other nations of the world.
We need only respect the natural, and constitutionally
reserved right of each individual to defend themselves from all comers. See? A minor change would make all the
difference in the world. That’s why
it’s puzzling as to why these so-called ‘women’s rights’ groups always want to
disarm everybody else. How it might
make sense that to disarm 80% (this excepts criminals, terrorists and the
police) of the People somehow makes anyone ‘safer’, is well beyond my humble
abilities. The very idea that a person
confronted with violent harm, should wait until a guy with a gun comes to
‘protect’ them from a guy with a gun, is patently absurd on its face.
Either by discouragement or demise—the bad guys go away
when the common man is armed and able to protect himself. The People are going to have to decide if
they want to stop criminal activity, or just keep focusing on brutalizing and
punishing criminals.
Have you noticed that in every instance where government
forces are introduced onto the scene (think ‘9-11’, Katrina, or any of hundreds
of other instances) it does the same thing?
Without exception the first official instruction to victims is to do
whatever the ‘authorities’ say to do.
The first comforting notice is that you’re on your own until they can
line up their friends with bloated contracts to provide relief for you.
So what about the revolution? Thanks for asking. It’s
about ‘tipping points’ and the weight of all of the aforementioned concerns
that has finally pushed America to the brink.
Whether we welcome it, deny it, or vainly attempt to head it off—a real
live revolution is still inevitable.
The first signs of revolution actually appear as cracks
in the façade of a concept we call ‘government’ itself. What people see are the leaks, lies, in
fighting, open hostility, personnel turnovers, and endless failures. Along with these things comes the
realization that no government ever has or could actually protect its Citizenry
from all the hobgoblins they create. Of
course, if you haven’t seen them yet, you may want to pull your head out of…ah,
er, uh, the sand.
What I see happening unfolds in five sequential stages,
each shorter, faster moving and more emotionally intense than the last.
These stages begin with, ‘The Rumble’, building to, “The
Roar”, “The Rage”, “The Revolution” and finally, the one no one wants to talk
about-“The Retribution”.
“The tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of
patriots and tyrants, and frequently.” (Thomas Jefferson)
Like so many others, I don’t fear revolution. Given our current police state
circumstance—I embrace it. Still,
Jefferson’s strong, clear words are not all that encouraging, or conducive to
solace when you realize it may well be your turn to water the tree.
“America” holds a unique place in world history. She is founded on the notion that all
individuals are actually “free and equal” and own both their government and
their private property. What makes
America so incredible is the inherent righteousness in these principles on
which she was founded. There has never
been another nation in all of world like America. Not one.
While none of us has an ‘obligation’ to do anything--each
of us definitively does have a responsibility to leave the next generation the
only legacy of any value---their individual freedoms, rights and liberties.
And that’s the point.
It’s not even a secret that our own government has been directly
responsible for bringing individual freedom and privacy to their knees, and for
irresponsibly exposing us—the very Citizens it was set up to serve—to greater
harm from foreigners than ever before.
Even being mindful of the Civil War, the 1929 depression
and the war in Vietnam, the conditions conducive to a Citizen’s revolt have
never been more real in America than they are today.
Frederick Douglas is said to have uttered words to this
effect: “The limits of tyranny are defined by the endurance of the oppressed.”,
what I find absolutely amazing is the extraordinary extent to which the limits
have already been stretched. It must be
true that sheep have to be cornered before they will finally defend
themselves. Lions don’t.
You don’t really have to look very far to see the first
cracks. When Congress and the President
have respectively set new record lows in public confidence, the declining value
of the Federal Reserve’s ‘Dollar’ is openly discussed, the legitimacy of
elections is compromised and 70% of the American public wants us to get out of
this undefined war, we surely have arrived at a ‘tipping point’.
This happens to be a presidential election year, and as if
drawn in by a political vacuum, a man of impeccable integrity and credibility
is all but ‘called’ to fill the void.
Amazingly, he hails from the tainted midst of the Republican/Democrat
Party. That singular and separate man
is Ron Paul.
Viewed from the outside, America must certainly resemble
the manifestation of George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’. We like to say we are ‘free’, but we are ruled by our
servants. We like to say we are a
democracy, but our constitution rejects such a system and specifically demands
a republic. We like to say we have free
speech, but we allow the president to prescribe ‘zones’ for such dissent. We like to speak of the ‘almighty’ dollar,
but we sit idly by as our own politicians destroy its value.
By the same token, the lone potential president who speaks
of constitutional adherence, individual rights and responsibility, is
systematically ignored by the old media—as if they can still control public
perception as to which candidates are ‘viable’. Fortunately, they can’t.
Probably the single greatest oversight by those who relish power over
the masses is, YouTube.com®. For the
first time in human history individuals have the advantage of instantaneous
communication amongst themselves, and in video! No longer could the old media shape news events. Now it has to
compete with actual footage of the event.
The ‘rumble’ stage is the longest in the progression
usually lasting 6-7 years. It is
characterized by government officials who arrogantly seek to perpetuate their
power by ignoring the dictates of their Constitutional authority and
outrageously nibbling away at the very essence and rights of the individuals
they were hired to ‘serve’. This stage
definitively began with the discouraging election controversy of the current
federal administration in 2000.
In one fell swoop, the general public was introduced to
the reality that elections, the very basis of our Democratic Republic could be
and likely were literally stolen. The
continued political protection this administration has afforded the electronic
vote tabulating process has only served to feed public skepticism and distrust,
as has the ‘accidental’ destruction of thousands of ballots the courts had
ordered preserved in Ohio.
Josef Stalin is quoted as saying that the one counting the
vote determines the out come—tell me he didn’t know exactly what he was
saying. The Diebold brothers, who
garnered the contracts to count over 80% of all of the votes—without any
effective or outside verification, have steadfastly refused to reveal their
source codes. Isn’t that a little bit
of an anathema to the Constitutional dictates of fair, open and public
elections?
The problem the bad guys face is Dr. Ron Paul’s
message—it’s not just the messenger. He
speaks of the principles on which America was founded, and the message sells
itself.
The ‘rumble’ is widespread. It smolders just-under-the-surface. Public anger, angst and quiet discontent is solidifying against
the institution of government itself. One thing that is certain is the more the
old media excludes this lone defender of the constitution—the more his
freedom-loving supporters push him out front.
A quick glance at his Internet supporter sites, the tens
of thousands of videos on YouTube® and similar sites, a thousand supporter
‘meet up’ groups (another 400 have sprung up in other countries), his
commanding wins in 15 out of 19 Republican straw polls, his having the third
fullest campaign coffers, his dominance and virtual sweep in on-line post
debate polls should make it obvious that the common folk are starting to smell
the crap in government and its propaganda wing; the old media.
This has got to be a frustrating point for these long-time
collaborators. Oh, to be a fly on the
wall when at one of their monthly control-the-world meetings, someone suggests,
“The common folk are no longer under our (their) control or influence”—tell me
that wouldn’t be a hoot. These would be
the same folks who believe that anyone not under control is out of
control.
The fires of revolution are being fanned by the efforts of
the very people trying to put them out.
Thanks to the blatant media efforts to limit public exposure to all the
facts and choices, there naturally grew a general sense of curiosity about what
was being kept from them. As an
offshoot, we’ve all witnessed the proliferation of alternate news source sites,
drawing a substantial numbers of people completely away from the old media. Effectively, by their heavy-handed attempts
to quash alternate news and opinion sites they rendered themselves
irrelevant. I have a friend who likes
to say, “Newspapers are sooooo last century”.
Makes sense to me.
Where the control-minded people went awry is in their
failure to even comprehend the idea of ‘voluntary support’ for a
candidate. Indeed, the ‘Ron Paul
Revolution’ is all about grassroots.
Activist supporters have effectively created a new kind of publicity,
and media. Ironically, the old media
continue to fuel the flames that will no doubt consume them even as they
attempt to turn back the tide of true popular support this country hasn’t seen
since the days of Teddy Roosevelt.
My thoughts of our current administration and its old
media cohorts always go back to the drowning guy who is drowning only because
he won’t let go of the bags of gold in his hands. In this case, the ‘gold’ is the power of perceived authority.
It is probably prudent to remind the reader that there are
no rules for revolution, so every option left to the oppressed masses is on the
table. Keep your eyes open and your
head clear. It could get dicey.
Mahatmas Gandhi is often quoted as having said: “First
they ignored us, then they laughed at us, then they fought us—then we
won.” In the Ron Paul example, the
stages Gandhi spoke of are perfectly proven.
There was a murmur of discontent among the masses. And it was ignored. The murmur became the ‘rumble’, and it was
laughed at. The ‘rumble’ stage is the
general public’s response to encroachments on the privacy, property and rights
of the individual…all for the ‘greater good’---whatever that is.
Free speech zones, curfews, fake safety intrusions on
traveling, denial of self-protection, devaluation of currency, brutal
retribution against political dissent and forcing every Citizen to depend on
government for their sustenance are all signs that the people in office have
effected a coup and stolen the People’s government.
The volume went up and the popular movement grew. We now find ourselves witnessing a critical
transition into the ‘rage’ stage. This
is the stage that draws the bad guys out into the open and humor is nowhere to
be found.
The ‘Rage’ moves quickly and delivers much more than just
an amplified outcry from the ‘Rumble’.
As the rage intensifies, the groundswell cannot be
ignored. The power mongers are forced
to acknowledge the movement’s existence, but do so in ways they think are as
clever as the old ‘left-handed’ compliment—they attempt to minimize or marginalize
the human urge to be free. They attempt
to make light of the movement, but its not so funny and the result is
inevitably a dramatic hardening of the resolve of the insurgents.
A major component of this move toward all-out revolution
is the growing public awareness of the illegalities involved in the imposition
of the income tax. No longer is it just
the ‘fringe-ers’ who are willing to take first arrows for simply demanding the
IRS produce the actual law that makes the average individual liable. The more the IRS (which is in reality just a
collection agency for FedCo, and not a part of the American government) refuses
to produce the law, the more people realize that there is no such law—nor could
there be.
The problem FedCo and their collection agency cannot
overcome is that more and more common folks are learning the Truth.
The late movie producer, Aaron Russo’s film, “America—From
Freedom to Fascism” is (thanks to Google video and $1 DVDs) spreading the Truth
to all corners of society. To quote an
old axiom: “You can’t un-learn the Truth”,
and there’s the rub. The Truth, like
the desire to be free, is naturally magnetic and attractive to human beings and
no amount of force can diminish it for long.
On a much smaller scale, America witnessed a false start
when the National Guard was used to brutalize demonstrators at the Democrat’s
national convention in 1968, and to kill students at Kent State. That movement failed because there was no
principle that the common folk could gravitate toward, cling to or even
identify.
Our current social circumstance is just the opposite. Today the movement is based on a simple idea
that ALL human beings are to be treated by government as exact equals---and
everyone involved understands it. The
nerves, emotions and determination of the growing body of activists that refuse
to kow-tow to the brutal force of government are hardening.
The stakes in every confrontation between the people who
just want to be let alone, and those who won’t leave them alone, have risen
dramatically.
The ‘Rage’ is the culmination of the frustrations realized
when protests are ignored and laughed at by government. I like to say that the 2nd
Amendment to the American constitution was purposely placed as ‘back-up’—in
case the 1st Amendment didn’t get the job done.
The ‘Rage’ is exemplified not only by large-scale
resistance to government impositions and demands, but by outright confrontation
as well. The more government tries to
quell the masses, the more hardened is the resistance. The more common government abuse of its
Citizens becomes, the more popular counter measures become.
Outlaws become good guys when the laws are bad. Think of Al Capone and John Dillanger’s
popularity with the public.
When government realizes the inherent weakness in their
forcible control over the superior numbers of the general population has been
exposed, their desperate actions to fend off the inevitable, will lead to their
capitulation.
An armed and determined population cannot be
conquered. Proving the wisdom of
America’s founders one more time. It
was their forethought that circumstances such as we see today might come to
pass, that led them to demand the enumeration of the right of the individual to
defend themselves against all comers.
Thomas Jefferson said it well: “A true patriot must be
willing to stand, to fight and if called upon—to die in defense of his
country…even against its own government.”
The ‘Revolution’ stage of political evolution is the
relinquishment of power. It is the
shortest and most unremarkable of the stages.
Fortunately, Americans have a solid framework on which to re-build their
nation. A simple return to the original
constitution (modifying only those parts that distinguish between individuals
to make it clear that ALL individuals are equal) solves all the accumulated
problems of the past 218 years since its original inception.
In my view, the only scary or unsettling stage of the
cycle is the ‘retribution’. That’s when
we’ll see the war crimes tribunals, and punishment for those who perpetuated
the theft of American values. Ernest
Hancock refers to this stage as “the guillotine line”. It won’t be pretty.
As espoused in the Declaration of Independence, the
founding fathers made it clear that our government was formed solely to protect
the rights and property of the individual.
When government deviates from that singular assignment, it is the right
of the People, to alter or abolish it.
I rest my case.
Standing up and fighting for individual freedom is the original American
tradition. Viva La Revolution!