Uncle Sam Wants You

I ran oligarchic British rule from America. I replaced it with rule "of, by, and for" the people.

I am not a man. I am the soul of America. I am the spirit of 'We the People'.

I want you, the good people of America, to recognize me. I am dying.

I want you to demand freedom of speech; all speech.

I want you to demand freedom of religion; all religions.

I want you to demand the end of wars for plunder and profit.

I want you to never invade or dominate the people of foreign lands. I want you to never stoop to the level of cowardly and aggressive tyrant; to not defend yourself unless you are actually under attack.

I want you to recognize that the greatest threat to freedom is the timid and cowardly need to wrap our nation within a bubble of security. I want you to burn the Patriot Act and anything that looks like it.

I want you to demand and use freedom of assembly; to protest and organize.
I want you to demand that the state not arrest or detain or harass anybody unless they are involved in an identified crime.

I want you to demand that no person is deprived of life, liberty, or property, without fair opportunity to defend himself.

I want you to demand that all people are granted their natural liberty unless a fair trial deems them a threat to others.

We are no longer a bastion of justice; a standard other nations aim to be. The State is raising itself above rule of law. We are losing governance by rule of law and giving way to a state of arbitrary lawlessness and laws of convenience. The Spirit of America has not only been corrupted. It is being been savagely ripped to shreds. America is its own nemesis.

I want you, the people of America, to be under full volitional control of your labour and your resources. This is where prosperity is born and this is where it flourishes. To be prosperous again, 'we the people' must resume control of our wealth. Our nation has been commandeered by privateers; privateers that have sold our wealth and our birthright for fast profit. Our wealth and prosperity, our work ethic, has been replaced by an ethos that worships scheming and manipulating for individual gain.

Don't despair. My Spirit is not dead. It is immortal. And it is not limited to or owned by America. It is fundamental to human beings everywhere and always has been. It is the spirit of humanity. It is as unstoppable as life itself.

It is here: " True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

It is there: "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky

It is everywhere: " When there is state there can be no freedom, but when there is freedom there will be no state. -Vladimir Lenin

The Threat to America

Security is a relative concept. We can never be absolutely safe. The greatest cause of death is birth. Once that happens, its unavoidable.

We can choose to live in a secure society. Perhaps we'd choose a totalitarian society where neighbour watches neighbour for the state. Or maybe you'd be more comfortable with a cleric, watching to ensure that you and everybody else stays on the right path.

In societies like this we don't have to worry about our partners infidelity or our neighbour stealing our grocery money. The price is too high. Conventional crime is rare and the state's response to it is severe.

But then there's America. America means (or has meant) more than just the name of a country. It touted itself as 'the' bastion of freedom. And in a free society we can't arrest the criminal before he commits the crime. We have to wait for the act. And in a free society you can say what you want, support and speak to whomever you wish whether they be branded terrorists or Nazis. In a free society we must suffer the paedophile on the street until he actually does something. We must live with a measure of insecurity if we are free. A free society is a messy society, the trains don't run on time, and there are strikes.

Of course America has touted itself as the bastion of freedom and democracy but the genesis of and realization of these principles date back to the Magna Carta and beyond. But we get the idea. We are free.

Not anymore.

Things look more or less the same in everyday life but history books will show that the Bush era has fundamentally changed the nature of the modern state once the owl of Minerva flies off. The tyrants have not started to bust down the doors of leftists and radicals but if you are Muslim, you are suspect. The fascification of America is being achieved through incremental changes and the vast majority don't seem to notice.

The Bush era has seen to it the freedoms we had taken for granted are no longer taken for granted. And this has occurred not only in the USA but in the UK, Canada, Australia and many other free societies.

For generations Americans (and the rest of us) have fought and died for freedom and the basic principles that have evolved from rational arguments in courts, in universities, and in parliaments. This was the holy grail that Americans learned to be proud of. They even sport gung-ho license plates that whack us with 'Live Free or Die'.

The important point being that we live with and under rational principles that are the bedrock of our real security. As long as we live with these principles we can rest easy knowing the state or anyone else can't abuse us and get away with it. Life is unpredictable yes but predictable where it counts. We know we won't be jailed for political deviance and we know when we see injustice, we can fight back.

Not anymore.

Obama is keeping the Bushite template of state tyranny in place after portraying Bush and the Bush era as a period of dangerously uncontrolled folly into the realm where tin-pot dictators and large scale fascists do as they wish; unfettered. Obama is flirting with the idea of allowing preventive detention in the United States as a security measure to make up for the closure of Gitmo. As horrible as Guantanmo Bay is in terms of slamming a hard blow to the principles of freedom, crossing the line further into allowing the state to jail people domestically who are perceived to be a threat would be a fatal blow. Once that happens the pretence is over. We have already swallowed the kool-aid.

So then, where do we see change once we avert our collective gaze from the decor of the oval office and the charisma of Obama?

Much has been said and much has been done to mitigate the threat to America since 9-11. Ironically, the greatest threat to America is Americans; the Americans that cower under their beds waiting for the terrorists to strike providing tacit support for draconian laws and murderous aggression by the state. These 'Americans' are not only Bush and Obama and Cheney and they are not only Americans. The greatest threat to America is you and me and our collective cowardice.

Go Stimulate Yourself

The idea of stimulus is to put money in the pockets of consumers who will spend, creating demand for goods and services and as a result, stimulate the economy.

But America is a religion that worships the rich. They believe that wealth comes FROM the rich and 'trickles down' to the rest of us. They also believe that the rich know best and should be held in some paternal role in society.

These are irrational notions. Religious-like.

Stimulus bailouts to the rich are symptoms of that mentality. The rich are not going to spend any significant portion of that money. They will use it to secure, prop up, and increase the capital that they have.

It looked as if Obama was on the right track as far as stimulus goes with his homeowner affordability plan. But we can see now that it is just another gimmick to further bolster Fortress Twit Class.

The plan does nothing to decrease the principal on what people owe. With plunging house prices, many still owe more than their home is worth.

If you look at it, you can see that it is carefully designed to ensure that the money lenders carry none of the weight of the crisis whatsoever. It is just another scheme to move billions of tax dollars into the hands of America's elites.

The basic idea of Keynesian demand side economics is to give money to the average Joe so he can buy things. Henry Ford had the same idea. The stimulus packages have done the opposite. They have taken wealth from the average Joe (for a long, long time) and gave it directly to the very rich.

Why?

How is this supposed to help the economy?

The idiots trucked and shipped manufacturing jobs to where wages were cheap over the past 30 years to increase their profits. They are not patriotic Americans. They are moved only by wealth. They sold out America. They have done far greater damage than Bin Laden or a plane load of Bin Ladens could have done. They have been far more subversive than any communists, socialists, or anarchists could be. They have stole America's wealth and shipped it away - to themselves.

And now they are being paid large chunks of tax dollars for their efforts.

They have been eroding away the standard of living for decades and printing phony capital to make it look as if nothing is wrong. In one season, all the chickens have come home to roost. The big lie is over.

The most important lesson in all this is that the rate of profit generally decreases through time. One hundred years ago it was easy to make profit from a unit of labour. But now, capitalism has matured and for that reason, strategies that are obviously contrary to the citizens best interests are the only ones available to them.

Manufacturing is simply a necessary evil in the process of developing capital. If the capitalist can make capital without it, he certainly will.

And he certainly did in recent years. He did it through criminal leveraging and manipulation of other people's money. The phony housing bubble was the last kick at the can in efforts to pretend the American standard of living has mystical powers. It doesn't. Except maybe for the ultra rich who are still raking it in through stimulus packages and bailouts.

That well will also run dry.

Watch now for that class, with all its wealth, increase its control over the American state.