A Dictator Goes to War in Syria

I am not talking about Assad.   I am talking about Barack Obama.   Despite the media-mis-information blitz, only 9% of the American people support getting involved in the civil war in Syria.  Nor are people buying the story that Assad's regime ordered the attack - they were already winning the war, it was the rebels- who have already used poison gas- who had every motivation to frame Assad.  The Dictator, Obama, has not even bothered to ask Congress for permission to do this, as is required under the Constitution.  Dictators have no need to regard either legislatures or constitutions.

Former President Jimmy Carter correctly observed, "We are no longer a functioning democracy."   We have evolved into a sort of revolving dictatorship.   The men behind the curtain change who gets to wear the big hat every four or eight years, but the main policies do not change.    As General Smedley Butler even in the 1930s observed in his book "War is a Racket", once large American corporations figured out that they could get a higher return on their dollars in foreign nations than at home, the dollars went overseas and our military went overseas to protect their dollars.   Our military has often been abused and turned from its righteous purpose of defending our nation and constitution.   It has been mis-used as corporate muscle.

Notice that there is no "opposition party" to American military adventurism on behalf of the global corporate interests which control our former Republic.   Bush ran on "a more humble foreign policy" than Clinton.  He was elected and went on a global rampage, including a war in Iraq even though they had nothing to do with 9-11.   Over time, people got sick of the ongoing wars and occupations of foreign nations and turned control of the legislative branch over to the Democrats in large part because they promised the peace.    Bush pushed on regardless, so people elected a Democrat President who promised peace.  In 2007 Candidate Obama said in an interview with Charlie Savage ...

Obama:  The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

The two party cabal has spent the last twenty years taking turns sending the American people candidates who get elected by lying to us about their desire to avoid war and about their beliefs on their own authority to initiate it.

Despite Obama's Nobel peace prize, the policy of dropping bombs and intervening all over the world did not change.   So will going back to the Republicans again change it?    Of course not.  Peace is not an option for the regime which really controls our nation, regardless of what the people want.  We no longer have a functioning Democracy (or Republic), remember?    The two parties are merely a front to prevent most people from realizing this.  Heck, the "leadership" in Congress is not even really trying to stop Obama from launching war against Syria.

Nor is going to war the "moral" thing to do, even in the off chance the Syrian government was stupid enough to order the gas attack.  Humility is a moral virtue too, and Americans have exercised too little of it when we assume we can go take over countries and successfully re-order societies of which we are almost wholly ignorant.  Where have we really helped the people of any of these nations we have warred on and occupied?  Where have we brought anything but debt, death, and disfigurement?   Have we set them free, or only exchanged their masters for radical Islamist crazies?

Since it is far from clear that our past interventions have been a blessing either to our children or theirs in any of these nations, why do we charge into yet another misguided moral crusade, on the flimsiest of evidence?   And even if the evidence is true, what to people care if their families are killed and maimed by chemical weapons or drone strikes?  Is one really so morally superior to the other?

And of course, none of these people who are calling for war in Syria are calling for their taxes to be raised to pay for it.  That is also a part of the moral equation- loading the next generation with more debt to sooth some vague desire to say we "did something".    We have already immorally loaded the next generation with debt in order to pay for the present consumption of our government.  Bankers win every war, because the debt both sides tend to use to finance it swells the asset side of their balance sheets.

When it is time for America 2.0, and many consider that time is coming, let's remember the lessons taught in Localism, A Philosophy of Government.  Let's arrange our political system so that power cannot be concentrated in two national parties, our Executive so that it cannot ignore the legislative, and our military so that even if a President finds a way to do so they simply cannot unilaterally position our forces for an foreign military intervention, and our financial system so that neither the bankers can not profit when we do so.

And the Bankers Shall Inherit the Earth

The book "Localism, A Philosophy of Government" says that "The American Middle Class finds itself working harder, but is being systematically stripped of its wealth by a financial system which was designed for that purpose."

It's a bold claim, but no less true for its boldness.   If one looks at the big picture, the present financial system can have no other outcome than this: The big banks and entities closely connected to the government will own the entire world, leaving the rest of us with nothing but the debt they used to acquire it.

When economies were booming, such booms being amplified by easy-credit, the banks leveraged to the moon, 30-1, 40-1, even 100-1.  This allowed them to buy up massive amounts of financial assets.  Leveraging 100-1 is a powerful way to increase one's wealth so long as asset prices are rising.  The risk of course, is that if those prices ever fall, the leveraged person or institution will be wiped out.   This is just what happened, except that under our present financial system, the bad assets were off-loaded onto the books of the taxpayers at above-market prices.   This process is ongoing in the current "QE". At least half of all QE's to date have gone to foreign-owned banks.

In our debt-based fiat system money is created, and a debt instrument is used to back that money.  In boom times it is loaned to the banks who then leverage to the moon and buy up assets.   The only thing that restrains them is the thought that if they over-leverage then the slightest decline in asset values leaves them insolvent.   That restraint has now been removed from the system for the large "too big to fail" banks.

Now in bust times, the government does two things with the newly-created money.  One thing it does is "stimulate" the economy by directly spending money into that economy.   Of course this does nothing on the net.  All it does is take future consumption and move it into the present, subtracting out potential future growth in order to try and get growth now.

That strategy seems to work, until the "future" becomes the present.  Each time that trick is tried it has less effect because at some point any "gain" from the stimulus must immediately be consumed by paying off old debt, either in interest payments or reduction of principal.  It therefore does not produce any new growth into the economy.  This is sometimes referred to as debt "overhang".  Since government spending is dictated by politics, not market realities, the spending by government is always less efficient than private interests spending their own money.   That loss of efficiency represents capital destruction at each cycle of the loop of government borrowing for "stimulus".

Where does this policy eventually lead?  To an economy where government spending is the prime mover.  The money is created via debt and spent into the economy by government action, benefiting most those persons and entities most directly connected to government.  The government becomes the economy as the private economy, the one driven by the reality of market forces, is first deformed and then sucked away by the phony government-created economy.    In the end people will be paid by the government, and then pay the government.   The economy will be compacted into an ever tighter circle.

But the ones who do best in this system are the big banks.   In a debt-based fiat system each time the central bank issues new debt, it is purchased by someone, often the "primary dealers".    Due to QE, when the Fed is not buying the big bank's bad debt, they are buying back the U.S. government debt which they just sold the banks- at a small profit for the banks on each iteration of the cycle.   The government creates the debt, sells it to the banks for a price, but then buys it back from them at a higher price sometimes only a matter of days later.

This is a proxy for the out-right printing of more money, which is done in a non-debt based fiat currency system.    In our system the banks get to stand in the middle and take a risk-free cut of the new money that is effectively being created.  The faster we buy back our own debt the faster the banks make money.  The big banks simply can't lose in this system, nor can, on average, the rest of the economy not connected to the government win.    Over time, they will own everything.  The rest of us will own nothing.  

But you may be thinking, "well I see that the big banks do get an essentially endless supply of free money in this system, which must be at the expense of the rest of us because their new dollars suck value from our old ones, but it is still possible for the big banks to lose if they invest foolishly.   If they leverage 50-1 then only two percent of their investments must go bad in order for them to be wiped out.  Because of that, you can say that they system is designed to help them, but you can't say that they can't lose or that over time they will have everything."

You might be right if the Fed was not also committed to bailing out the big banks when they invest foolishly.   But they are committed to it. That is what the QE's are all about.   They will lay as much debt on the taxpayers as is necessary in order to buy the bad bets that the banks made at above-market prices, while the banks keep all the winnings from their good bets.  Why is the government doing this?  The official reason this is being done is on the grounds that the banks are "too big to fail".  That is, if they collapse then everybody they owe money to will also collapse, leading to a chain reaction of collapses in an over-leveraged system.

Let me be clear, the solution to leverage that threatens the world economy is to limit leverage, not implement moral hazard as policy by rescuing the over-levered from the consequences of their own greed.  And the solution to a bank that is 'too big to fail" is not to bail it out, it is to break it up into pieces that are not too big to fail.    Since these same banks own both parties, you have not even heard a murmur about this option.   I can remember when "Ma Bell" was broken up because the government decided she was a monopoly in telephone service.   If that was a threat big enough to break up a company, how is it possible that these banks, which are essentially holding the taxpayers hostage, should not be broken up?

If they can leverage to the moon and keep the profits from their acquisitions when things go good, but get bailed out by the taxpayers when things go bad, why not keep leveraging, and keep gambling?    When the stream of essentially free money they get from debt and debt buybacks gets bigger when government spends more, why shouldn't they encourage government to spend more?   Again, our present financial system can only have one outcome:  The big banks and entities closely connected to the government will own the world.  They will own everything.   You and your children will own only the debt they created to buy it all.   In a debt-based fiat currency, the citizens are the collateral.   We will either change the system to one more like that proposed in "Localism, A Philosophy of Government", or we will become a nation of serfs.   Once one sees the big picture, this becomes less a prediction and more a simple statement of fact.

Military-Industrial Complex Looks to Grow Domestic Market

The Military Industrial Complex has made a lot of money in the war in Iraq. It has cost about eight million dollars per Iraqi killed (many of whom were non-combatants). If the goal of the war was to kill terrorists, it has been a costly failure.  But maybe that was not the real purpose of the war. From the MI Complex's view, the point of the war is not to kill people, its to make the Military Industrial Complex money.   The point is to transfer wealth from the taxpayers into the pockets of the MI Complex.

By that standard the Iraq "war" is an overwhelming success. Killing a few hundred thousand Iraqis and a few thousand Americans was simply an unfortunate by-product of all the motions they had to go through to get one trillion dollars from your pockets to theirs. That's why I and others call it a "zombie war".  So what if the lifetime earnings of 50 Americans was consumed for each "enemy" casualty inflicted? Low numbers of enemy killed per dollar spent was not a problem, because the killings were the excuse, not the point.

All this time we never really got a clear idea of what the goal of the war in Iraq was. It now looks like the goal of the war was to make the MI Complex money. Gee. Why didn't they just say so?

But looking forward, the MI Complex is bumping up against an export growth problem. We are already everywhere. The United States has sent so many armed forces to so many parts of the world that the MI Complex does not have good long term growth prospects. I mean sure, they are trying to engineer a war with Syria and Iran, but that is very near term. What is their business plan for how they are going to continue to grow their sales five and ten years down the road?  When you are that big, you have to take the long view.

I believe they have hit on a solution that they are in the initial stages of right now: grow the domestic market of the MI Complex by transforming the United States into a militarized police state. They have invaded the world, now they will invade us. All that spending here can be used to make us "safer", and poorer, by transferring additional trillions of dollars from our pockets to theirs. It has the added advantage of having body guards in place for the ruling class, who by now realize that they have crashed the economy.

The MI Complexes' new job won't be to fight them over there so we won't have to fight them over here.    Instead, they will be over here, in our streets,  protecting the master criminals in the ruling class from the peasants rioting once they realize how badly they and their children have been looted. No longer will we have a chicken in every pot, our chickens and perhaps even our pots, will have to be sold to pay for the check points at every corner. But it is a sacrifice we will have to make, or face arrest.

This explains why the senate was so anxious to pass a defense authorization bill which contains provisions which will make the 4th amendment null and void.  They are laying the legal (but not constitutional) groundwork to do for the "Homeland" what they have done abroad. If they are very efficient in the process of transforming American into a permanent militarized police state they can have their perfect "zombie war." They will make trillions of dollars outfitting troops to run this way and that, search here and there, break down a few million doors, stash "traitors" in "detention camps".  All that activity and maybe very few will get killed.  Like I said, the perfect zombie war.   I think you are gonna love it, or face arrest.

A Disproportionate Threat : Terror from Islamic Radicals vs. Terror from Fascism at Home

Eisenhower: The original conspiracy theorist?

"No state ever benefited from prolonged warfare" - TsSun Tzu

"All warfare is based on deception." - Tzu

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I have many good friends who share my values that don't share my take on "the War on Terror." Fueled by a government-encouraged media-frenzy, they are so fearful of the threat of radical Islam that it is eclipsing other factors which they used to care about deeply when they made political choices. Or check that, they still care about those other things deeply, but have not resolved the conflict between those other things and the so-called "War on Terror."

Sun Tzu correctly noted that no state ever benefited from prolonged warfare. Unfortunately, modern technological states have a military-industrial complex which, like a parasite, does benefit from prolonged warfare- at the expense of the finances and the liberties of the actual nation. That is exactly what President General Eisenhower warned us about in 1961. Please listen to his chilling warning.

When this organism gains inordinate political influence, the tail can wag the dog. Instead of a nation's war machine existing to protect the people and their rights, it can become twisted so that the nation and its people exist only to keep the war machine growing. At that point, instead of protecting the rights and property of the people, the war machine becomes the biggest threat to them.

During the Cold War, it was obvious why we needed the War Machine, and world-wide bases, and a global spy network, and investigations here at home too. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the War Machine floundered for a bit, searching for a threat it could hype enough to justify its continued growth. 9/11 changed that.

Contrary to the sloganeering, 9/11 did not "change everything." It did not change the Constitution. It did not change the Rights with which all men have been "endowed by their Creator" despite the tyrannical demands of the state. And it did not change the military-industrial complex. If Eisenhower warned us that they needed watching before 9/11, lest they threaten our liberties, then they still needed to be watched afterwards. Unfortunately, like a skillful magician, the ruling elites kept the eyes of the people, especially conservatives, directed elsewhere whilst the real trickery occurred within their own government.

The elites understand how badly they have misruled us. They know how many deceptive stratagems they have employed to short circuit all citizen efforts at true reform. The political class is sucking the nation dry, and sooner or later they realize that the illusion will shatter and the common people will figure it out. The security state they are currently erecting with break-neck speed is not to protect us from Islamic terrorists- it's to protect them from the American people once it becomes clear how they have robbed us blind.

Consider the facts. How many Islamic terrorists have there been, both actual and would be, on American soil each year since 9/11? The average is a paltry 16 per year. That average includes 2009 where they caught 17 would-be's in a single incident. In the vast majority of these cases, government informants were not just providing information, they were essential to the execution of the act of terrorism. The government asset would, for example, be the source of the weapons to be used in the attack. In many of these cases it is very likely that no terrorist attack would have ever gone down without the involvement of the government asset. IOW, the police state is producing would-be terrorists to provide ongoing justification for it's increasingly intrusive war on terror.

This is not to say that there are no terrorists out there, or that some precautions are not in order. Of course they are out there, because our own government is funding them in places like Libya and Syria.  But let's be rational here. Let's be proportional. For 16 actual and wanna-be terrorists a year, most of whom could not have followed through without assistance from a government asset, it make no sense to re-shape a free society of 310 million people into a police state.

For 16 men a year, many mentally ill like one of the two captured in the recent Seattle scare, it makes no sense to allow the government to search without a warrant and without probable cause, all your credit card records, your bank records, your emails, and your phone records. It makes no sense to restrict your travel, set up road blocks, and grope your wives and daughters at airports (and now at other mass transit points). The Feds are watching all of us more closely while at the same time letting hordes of new Muslims into the country. None of that makes any sense. That is, it makes no sense if the real goal is to stop Islamic terrorism. If the real goal is to keep profits flowing to the war/security industry and subjagate the American people to a police state then these actions make perfect sense.

I call on my conservative friends to be wise and favor allocating resources to threats in a rational and proportional manner. To me, that means less focus on defeating "Islamic Terror" and more focus on rolling back the domestic police state. Washington D.C is a more immediate threat to our freedoms and prosperity than Mecca.

Lower Tax Rates for Corporations Than People

For those on the right reading this, please don't latch onto the fact that it is Democrat Barack Obama who is presently proposing to reduce the maximum income tax rate on corporations to 28% while leaving the maximum income tax rate for individuals at nearly 40%.   It was not originally his idea.   The same thing has been proposed by people from both sides of the aisle, which just goes to show you how, when you follow the money, the aisle really doesn't mean much.

Why would a money-hungry big tax and spender like Obama want to cut the tax rates for corporations below that of individual persons (and many small businesses)?    Because he has decided that 28% of something is better than 40% of nothing.  You see the big guys have options to escape taxation, so whatever their rhetoric, looters loot whoever they can loot.  It is the upper middle class and barely rich, those with enough wealth to be an attractive target to prey upon but not enough mobility, options, and resources to escape predation, which will be victimized the worst in our current system.  Of course that practice throws up an effective barrier to entry for those of us below the upper middle class who would hope someday to enter it.

As it presently stands, U.S. corporations with assets and earnings overseas are not taxed in the United States for money they make elsewhere unless and until they bring that money back home.    As a consequence, they have not been bringing the money home.  They have been leaving it overseas and expanding overseas facilities with the money.    Ironically, this tax policy results in subsidizing the practice of American corporations investing in infrastructure, and thus jobs, overseas in preference to domestically.

One of the seven "lessons of history" from "Localism, A Philosophy of Government" concerns "corporate persons" and the limits which must be placed on them in order to prevent government and political power from becoming centralized to the death of a Republic.   While some might think the changes proposed are so big as to be unrealistic, what is more unrealistic is to expect a Republic to endure without these changes.   Unless our laws change to align much closer to the ideas espoused in localism, we will see continued crazy policies like the one Obama proposed being put forth.

In fact, we have already seen worse policies.   We have for a long time.  General Smedley Butler, two-time winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor described a wicked process in his book "War is a Racket".   In that book, he said that the corporate giants in this nation discovered they could either invest their earnings at home and get a six cent on the dollar return, or send it overseas and get a twelve or fifteen cent per dollar return.    They chose to send the capital overseas for the higher return.  And they then used their influence with the U.S. government to send our military overseas in order to protect their property.

Do you want to end most of these foreign interventions which are bankrupting the treasury, costing us the very life-blood of our young soldiers, and earning us enemies around the globe?  Then implement Localism's precept which bans both corporations chartered here from also operating overseas and bans corporations which are chartered overseas from operating here.  Insist that corporations only be owned by natural persons, not other corporations.  

There is no other way to maintain national sovereignty.    There is no other way to retain a Republic.   When corporations which are global have more access to our elected officials than we do, it will be they which determine the policies of our government rather than us.   We have seen this already.  When corporations are "trans-national" so too will be the economies which they dominate.     Let them instead form "sister companies" in each nation either owned by the same persons, or not as the case may be.  

In that way, no corporation could be come bigger than the nation in which it operates.     At some point, more size is of no advantage in serving the consumer through increased economies of scale, but rather the size is only useful in lobbying government to use the force of law to advance some policy in their favor.   The only way to stop this from happening is to implement the precepts of localism, under which corporations are not too small to serve, nor may they get "too big to fail."

Captured Institutions and The Collective

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"Who dares despise the day of small things....?" Zechariah 4:10

The Boy Scouts of America's Executive Board recently announced that they would reverse policy and accept openly homosexual young men into the ranks of the Scouts.  Most members of the BSA, parents of the campers, opposed the change.You may agree with that, or you may disagree with it, but it is their sons we are talking about here, not society's. In this case though, as with many others, dissenting views of any sort are being pushed to the fringes in favor of the narrow set of viewpoints authorized by our ruling class in the name of The Collective.

Many parents are pulling out of Boy Scouts, and some have started an explicitly Christian alternative.   Some praise this move, others, like a friend of mine who has a long tradition of scouting, were aggravated by it. He wanted the Christians to basically "stay and fight" for the BSA instead of leaving and starting their own group. He favored trying to re-infiltrate and "take back" the leadership of the BSA. He suggested it was "dumb" to retreat into a marginalized subculture and "abandon the institutional momentum, large capital holdings, and financial investments that they have built to their oppressors."

This is a recurring theme between us. He favors staying in large institutions in order to try and capture them, or re-take them depending on the perspective. My view is that each individual should do what they think best for their own family and the market will sort it out. This is especially true when the institution involved has a large effect on one's children. I am not willing to send them into institutions which hold beliefs antithetical to my own in some missionary effort, much less a clandestine effort to take it over. I am no good at intrigue, and have no interest in it at any rate. I could never out-use the users, and honestly neither can my friend.

My friend then complained that the left has a good grasp of, and uses, Alinsky-style tactics very effectively. He described them like so..

Tactic on the BSA approval of homosexuality... use Alinsky Rule #12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.) Find everything you can find that reflects negatively. Be relentless, ruthless, personal. Don't forget rule #5 “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Ridicule the target mercilessly.

He was complaining that the homosexual activists targeted the staff of BSA personally. This was in addition to efforts to get big corporations to cut off donations to BSA. Eventually, to reduce this pressure, the staff caved. They concocted a bunch of phony polls to give themselves cover (I say phony because they included members and non-members to get their results when it was clear the members themselves were against the idea of taking in open homosexuals). The professional staff caved to the pressure.

My reply was that large centralized institutions always get a life of their own. The entity develops its own interests, which are separate and apart from the purpose for which it was formed. The advancement and prosperity of the entity itself becomes the goal, rather than whatever purpose which the entity was originally founded to advance.

My friend wanted to find some way we could engage in enough intrigue to keep the institution true to its original values (for example the "morally pure" part of the scout oath). But you can't do that.   Once the institution gets big enough, with a professional staff who draw their lifeblood from the growth of the entity, then like gravity that institution will be pulled away from strictly doing whatever advances the cause for which it was founded, and instead begin doing whatever is needed to prosper the entity. The first cause and calling of every successful bureaucracy will be its own well-being.

With regards to the BSA, suppose he and his friends were able to slip a couple of people onto the staff. When it came time to make the decision, the other side would just throw them under the bus once the pressure started. "You are costing us a million dollars a year in lost corporate donations and another million in bad publicity." they would say.  They would leak dirt to the papers. And remember that Alinsky tactics are not bound by the truth. They would make up whatever lies they had to say about the hold-outs in order to isolate them.  Not even the rank and file members on the ground, whose interests our hypothetical plant is martyring themselves to protect, would know what to believe about this person. In that way, the good guys would be eliminated one by one.

No my friends, in an environment when there is a mad push for sameness, anyone who wants to retain their personal sovereignty and freedom must take a different tack. My friend wanted a strategy we could use to keep large centralized organizations true to, if not the desires of their Founders, at least the desires of their current members. I tell you that in this present environment, where the centralizers have a magic money machine and control of the corporate media, such institutions are indefensible.

What my friend is suggesting is sending more and more people into a fight that they will lose in the current environment. The great Sun Tzu said that the wise general will know themselves, their enemies, and the conditions of the field of battle. The conditions on the field of battle are such that we cannot at this time win a fight like that, therefore we must pursue a different strategy. Large centralized organizations are very subject to institutional leverage, and are an attractive target for collectivists as well as an indefensible position for us.

We must shift to guerrilla tactics if we hope to win. Just as the north Vietnamese did not have to match the United States in tanks and planes to win, we don't have to match the bad guys in dollars and media to win. All we have to do is create so many local institutions that the bad guys cannot capture them all, and if one is captured, it will be easy to replace with a new local institution. Such places will be refuges for people who want to resist the push to the collective. Refuges which will be relatively immune to capture by the tactics of the centralizers as described above.

You can not win the war for your personal independence by expending your limited resources fighting to keep large, centralized organizations accountable, whether they are the BSA, political parties, or churches. If they are large, centrally controlled organizations, they will all be captured and used to push their members towards the goal of the collective, rather than protecting their member's interests. The very affection you might hold for these institutions will be used against you, leading you to stay in them and support them long past the time they quit serving your interests.  

Not that isolationism is the answer either. Isolated people are perhaps the most vulnerable to being targeted and demonized by the collective, even if their turn will come toward the last. We should reach out and connect to others. Humans are social creatures. That is one of the things which is used against us, but it need not be.

The answer, you might not be surprised to hear coming from me, is to make a deliberate decision to create, participate in, fund, and otherwise help build more local, decentralized institutions. If your church is of the sort where the property and funds are controlled by the local body, then fight to keep it that way. If you find yourself in a church where all that is controlled and owned at national headquarters, then realize the day will come that you will either have to accept a corrupted church or seek another one and plan accordingly. The same thing goes for political involvement. The more national and centralized some group you are participating in might be, the less confidence you should put in them.  Instead, seek out local alternatives who don't even want to be huge, but rather want to fill a need where they are well.

That is why I say that the solution is much analogous to switching to guerrilla warfare tactics.They can't stop us all by knocking out central headquarters, because there is no central headquarters. There will be no leadership hierarchy to "capture" and drag the rest along.  Big Media is too big to be used effectively as a weapon against such a foe. They need us all lumped together with one easy-to-smear label. There is no high value target for them to focus on. Rather, we will be like a swarm of bees, generally acting in concert to protect our values, but at the same time our own creature.

Such groups will stay lean. They won't tend to have any paid staff and by design they won't have much overhead.  If the bad guys use their size and power to crush one of these mini-institutions, then the people involved simply go off and form a new one. There will be no "large capital holdings, and financial investments" to hang around and fight over. Those resources will mostly be in the form of property of individual members.

A recent example of the process I am talking about can be found in the story of my own County Tea Party  I was one of the three people most responsible for getting it started by uniting a number of city groups. In a rare act of nobility, I deliberately arranged things so that I could not be elected Chairman, or any other "big" office. Unfortunately, it was almost immediately "captured" by the local Republicans, and the new team was more interested in hob-nobbing with politicians than holding them accountable to the precepts of limited government and upholding their oaths of office.

What happened over the next three years happened automatically, organically, and beautifully. As the new County Tea Party was merely an appendage of the local county Republican Committee, it had no real function other than that which was better done in the Republican Committee itself.  It became afraid to take a stand on any issue because there were always some Republicans who would take the wrong side of any issue. Even though there were well over one hundred patriots in the room the night it was founded, and it grew for a while after that,  over time its numbers began to dwindle. The Tea Party in the next county down stayed true to its function of Watch Dog instead of settling down to the comfortable but dull life of a Lap Dog. More and more patriots from my county drove the extra distance to attend the Tea Party in the adjoining county until at present half its board and membership are made up of persons from my county!

Finally and most recently, the so-called "Tea Party" in my county collapsed on its own uselessness.   The "Executive Committee" that ran it into the ground declined en mass to stand for re-election because no one else wanted to play anymore.   An enterprising friend of mine encouraged a few of his friends to sign up, seeing this coming, and got himself elected Chairman and his friends on the board.  Now, I am re-joining and I  suspect many others will too.This is the beauty of small institutions. In our current environment, big institutions are indefensible against the push of the collective, but small institutions resist it almost automatically. Adam Smith's invisible hand of the free market is our secret, and powerful, Ally.

Americans are not used to thinking this way. We have been conditioned to think the reverse, that local efforts are a waste of time, too trivial to bother with, and it is better that we become a tiny drop in some national ocean of a movement. A movement run by some person we have never even really talked to but whose face is on television. I am convinced that the collective will attempt to herd Americans off in a direction which many of us do not wish to go. If we were asked in small groups, almost all of the groups would refuse, but that is not the plan. The plan is to push us all where we do not wish to go by using institutional leverage to capture the organizations and entities we care about and using that pressure against us. Plan your life accordingly.

Eminent Domain Tables Turned in California

The national government of the United States, to a through depth in all three branches, has been captured by global (not merely national) corporatist interests.     Those who would think to deny this statement should explain to you why a third of QE I and almost all of QE II actually went to the U.S. branches of foreign owned banks, and from there the money was quickly transferred overseas.   The new money did not goose our domestic economy because it did not enter it.   It was about bailing out Europe's banking system.  Your children are expected to work in order to pay off the debt created to accomplish this.    If the American people and not global corporations control the government of the United States, how did this happen?

The entities which effectively control our national government are not even of our nation, therefore it is little wonder that this government's (I do not say "our" government) policies on foreign affairs, immigration, education, trade, banking and economics, and essentially every other major issue is globalist in outlook.    Minding our own business and doing things our own way while allowing others to do the same is not an option valued in either dominant political gang.  The reason? Because global corporations find it easier and more profitable for them to do business when rules, and therefore governments, are "harmonized."

Domestically, this grinding corporate oppression takes many forms.  From mandates from government that we purchase and use their products (even dangerous products like some vaccines) to various subsidies and advantages written into the law to suppress free-market competition.   The number of ways the laws were changed to enhance the looting of the population exploded as the ruling class noticed there was very little push-back from the population no matter how outrageous their actions.    People continued to plod along, locked in the Red- Blue facade, and completely trusting their team color of choice to look out for their interests and protect their liberties even though they are funded by the same people doing the looting.

The abuse of eminent domain has been added to the list of ways giant corporations have used the government to transfer wealth from private citizens to their pockets.   The Courts, through the Kelo decision, solidified the practice of a local government using eminent domain to transfer property from one private owner to another.    It forced people out of their homes who did not want to leave, or who wanted a higher price, in order to turn (for example) the land into a strip mall.    Using the government to transfer the ownership of private property from one private entity to another is considered by Localists and many others to be an abuse of eminent domain.

Recently, the town of Richmond, California introduced a new twist to the by now too-familiar practice of abusing eminent domain for private-to-private transfers.    They want to use it to take underwater homes away from banks and sell those homes back to the owners at a steep discount.  The local government would pocket some of the difference in the price that they would force the banks to take for the property and the price they would re-sell it to the home owner for.

Imagine a home mortgaged for $400,000 that was only worth half that.   The city would take it from the banks at 80% of true value and issue a new mortgage to the "owner" at 90% of true value.   The banks would go from having a $400,000 loan on their books (backed by a home worth $200,000) to $160,000 in cash.  Well, technically, since these mortgages were all repackaged and sold from the original lender what would happen would be that the value of the Mortgage Backed Securities which owned any income from the mortgages would take a big hit.   The banks are outraged, and are counter-suing.

This news brings conflicting feelings.  On the one hand, one is tempted to think what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.    On the other hand, whether the rich are using government to loot the rest or the rest are using government to loot the rich, it is still looting.    When the corporate giants first started this abuse of government, they should have realized that there would be unintended consequences to perverting the rule of law.   There always is.   The stratagems they use to undermine property rights in order to defraud others can be used by others to defraud them.

Richmond California, if they are permitted to follow through on their plan, will find that there are unintended consequences as well.     It will be harder for other people to get home loans in that jurisdiction.    More people will want access to the scam, leading to costly legal battles.   Once the genie of government theft is out of the bottle, it is hard to tell where it will end up.

And that is the real trouble with government theft.  That is what must happen once government abandons its true calling of protecting private property rights and becomes the enforcer for redistributing the same.   We will all spend less and less of our time, energy and effort serving one another and thereby generating new wealth.  Instead, we shall spend more and more of our time, energy, and effort lobbying government to protect what we already have from looting, and loot others of what they have.   This turns us from one another's mutual servants to one another's rivals and pillagers- with the effect on civility which we have begun to see.    In the long run, abandoning the rule of law, respect for private property rights, and if I may say so the Tenth Commandment of God, is a recipe for poverty and oppression.