The Gauntlet We Face

The American Action Report began as a blog with a single purpose: to drive the rats out of Congress. Once I began tugging at that thread, I found, as the ancients discovered, that “…all things work together….”
If we succeed in driving the rats from Congress, we mustn't assume that their successors will not also be rats, or will become rats through exposure to Congress. As many people already know, the system itself is a rotten barrel that spoils the apples. How do we gain by making room in Congress for other rats?
I'm reminded of the writer who said, “Nobody ever reads what I write. I continue to write because I want to know what I think.” The more I wrote and discovered my thoughts, the more I realized that a whole-systems approach was needed. I also discovered that I make a poor newsman and probably a worse rabble rouser because I think too much and too deeply, and I have too many ideas.
No, with my nimble fingers tickling the keyboard, the American Action Report is more appropriate as a political guidebook and reference book. If it ever becomes an honest-to-goodness book, made with real paper formed from trees that have been assassinated expressly for the purpose of giving people something to hold as they read, perhaps the name should be changed.
Perhaps then it should be titled The John Book of American Politics. In book form, each article would be about two pages long. That length is perfectly suited for bathroom reading. One can learn more about attending to his constitutional responsibilities as he attends to his constitutional. Already, I'm convinced that neoconservatives (previously known as Trotskyites) and other authoritarian types have found that reading these articles has helped to relieve their symptoms of irregularity.
As for solutions to our political woes, I'm not a bit optimistic. I've never believed in optimism. Optimism is the madness of maintaining that everything will turn out well simply because we want them to turn out well.
No, I'm a possibility thinker. There's a difference.
There are far more ways that things can go wrong than right. For that reason, I believe that things naturally go wrong; and they seldom go right except by planning and effort. If we sincerely want to “take our country back,” we'd better have a plan as to what we're going to do with it; and we'd better be willing to accept that responsibility. If we don't, we'll lose it again. Worse still, for each demon we drive out of Congress, seven more will take his place, and the situation will be worse than before. The rotten barrel must be cleaned before they can spoil the fresh apples we put in it as replacements for the incumbents. This calls for fortitude.
I've also observed that there's very little that anyone can do about anything. Opportunities to affect things for good are few and fleeting. Here's the good news: The difference between a person (or group) that is effective and one that isn't is the alertness to recognize those opportunities as they arise (or anticipate them before they arise) and make the most of them before they can get away. This calls for prudence and vigilance.
The members of Congress will never be better than the American people. If we want the blessings of peace with other nations, we must learn to be at peace with one another. We can't always understand each other. We can't always like each other. We can and should always care for one another's well-being even when we don't understand one another.
If we want the blessings of prosperity, we need to respect one another's property and hold government leaders to the same standards.
If we value the right to life, we must respect the lives of others.
If we want the blessings of liberty, we must respect the rights of others and demand the same of government. That includes the recognition that people in far-off lands, who are no threat to their neighbors, have a right to be left alone.
If we want a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, then We the People must become more closely involved in it.
Sending an honest person to Congress, we send him out as a sheep among wolves. If ethical behavior were always simple, there would be no decisions to make. Many corporations have divisions devoted especially to guiding their employees in doing the right thing. We the People have offered no such guidance for our Congressmen.
A careful study of the major acts of legislative embezzlement and shredding of the Constitution over the past ten years will reveal systemic failures that the voting public have failed to address. The demonically evil people guiding various embezzlement bills and human rights violations (the USA PATRIOT Act, the bailouts, and the “healthcare” scam, to give a few examples) through Congress followed certain patterns. They systemically cut congressmen off from their sources of guidance, lied incessantly, offered them a choice between two appalling evils, and pushed them in the direction of the decision the government gangsters wanted them to make.
Many of them, having already signed away their souls, eagerly embraced these atrocities against their constituents. Others went along with the evils because We the People were not there to offer them the guidance they needed. When our congressmen are faced with choices between two evils, We the People can't always expect them to have the wisdom to find a third way. We the People must take that responsibility.
The damage is done. We must clean up the mess we helped to make, bring about a rebirth of freedom, and take steps to keep from making a mess of things in the future.
Congressmen who failed us must be replaced for the same reasons that a sick patient sometimes must be removed from the source of his ailment. If they're returned to Congress two years after being removed, they’re likely to return as better representatives. Congressmen who are willfully corrupt must be removed for the same reasons one might remove an alcoholic from his job as a bartender or a pedophile from his job at a day care center. Scoundrels such as they should be cast into outer darkness and never returned to any position of public responsibility. In all probability, criminal investigations of dozens of congressmen should be carried out.
Sweeping the rats out of Congress, then, is not a cure-all. It won't be enough to drive the money changers from the temple. A clean-up from top to bottom and from inside out is needed. Much of that clean-up must take place within the lives of each voter. Figuratively speaking, our bones have been broken partly because We the People have repeatedly gone astray. If a proper cleansing takes place and the right spirit is renewed in us, then the bones that have been broken may rejoice.
I pray that the American Action Report—admittedly, one of many blogs written by many bloggers—will, in its small way, serve as a reference and guidebook toward that end.

Pray for wisdom in the 2010 congressional elections.
Click here: Light a Candle Endeavor

The True Story of Civilization, Part 2

(Or “How Civilization Really Works”)
In part one of this article, I described the beginnings of government thousands of years ago. I also described how the age-old struggle for liberty has been a struggle between mentally healthy people and the psychopaths who run things. The question arose, “Do psychopaths control governments even in contemporary times? I pointed to Hitler as an object lesson.
There seems to be an immutable law of the Internet that, if an Internet argument runs long enough, someone will mention Hitler. I believe there are two reasons for this—one unreasonable, one reasonable.
The name Hitler has become a trigger word. Knowing that the name has the power to get people excited, excitable people often bring up the name when they run out of facts or reasonable arguments to bolster their cases. In short, it’s a cheap shot intended to circumvent the logical process.
The other reason is that the lessons of Nazi Germany are well known, well explored, and—to use a popular metaphor for such lessons of history—written in large, easy-to-read, easy-to-understand letters. To introduce a metaphor of my own, the history of Nazi Germany is like a For Dummies book on political science.
Hitler’s motives were clear: He was criminally insane and hated anyone whom he thought didn’t measure up to his ideas of lives worth living. He hated Gypsies, Slavs, labor unionists, communists, homosexuals, handicapped people, and many others, but most of all Jews. Just to make sure that he got his point across, he wrote a popularly selling book called Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in which he said that, if he gained control of Germany, he’d kill all of them. Almost everyone agrees—and I assume so do you—that Hitler was a sick puppy.
If it were just Hitler, I seriously doubt that he could have killed more than thirty people before he was caught and put away. If you’ve read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or some other book that details the history of Nazi Germany, I’m sure I don’t have to convince you that Hitler managed to attract hundreds if not thousands of criminal psychopaths to form a government.
That much shouldn’t be surprising. Like attract likes; and, as the economists like to say, people respond to incentives. In the Third Reich, psychopathic behavior was rewarded. The Nuremberg trials established that very many of the perps willingly committed these acts and were even proud of them.
Now we’re no longer talking about just one madman. We’re talking about thousands of them running one of the most advanced countries in the world.
Where did an underemployed paper hanger get the money to run for the nation’s highest office and win? No, he didn’t get it from angry people who were impoverished by rampant inflation. What about the Holocaust itself? In the closing months of the war, Germany was economically and strategically blockaded. How did Hitler get the materials necessary to manufacturer gas chambers, gas ovens, and Zyklon B gas? With fuel famously in short supply, where did he get the means to operate the gas ovens?
For the answers to all those questions, we have to look beyond Germany.
The Zyklon B gas was manufactured by I G Farben, the world’s largest chemical manufacturer, with branches in Germany and the United States. (The U. S. branch was a wholly owned subsidiary of the German company.) I G Farben was established with help from J. P. Morgan’s New York City Bank (the precursor of today’s Citibank). None other than James Paul Warburg sat on the U.S. board of directors. Warburg was a banker, an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies. He was famous for saying to Congress in 1950, “We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest."
In Germany, his brother Max Warburg sat on the board of directors.
Notwithstanding Hitler’s insane hatred of Jews, I G Farben donated RM400,000 to Hitler’s 1933 campaign for chancellor of Germany. Throughout the Holocaust, as six million Jews and three million others were rounded up and killed in Hitler’s death camps, I G Farben manufactured the gas that killed them. Throughout the Holocaust, Max Warburg, safely in the United States, remained on I G Farben’s board of directors.
Without the help of I G Farben and Wall Street, Hitler could not have gone to war. To see just how much I G Farben contributed to the German war machine, click here. Not one person in Germany or the U.S. resigned from I G Farben’s board of directors—not while their products were killing Americans, nor when the Holocaust they were supplying was in full swing. Do they sound normal?
After the Nuremberg trials were over, a second round of Nuremberg trials began. All but one the top officials of the German branch of I G Farben were tried for war crimes and most were found guilty. The only member who was not brought to trial was Max Warburg.
What about Wall Street and the American branch of I G Farben? Their participation in the Holocaust was conveniently dropped down a memory hole.
I mention I G Farben as only one example of collusion between Wall Street and Hitler. In point of fact, dozens of top Wall Street banks and other businesses were indispensable to the rise of Hitler and to the Holocaust. (Click here.) One of the co-conspirators was Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush.
In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein uses the term disaster capitalism in connection with government policies that cause disasters which, in turn, bring huge profits to disaster-related corporations and to government officials with investments in those corporations. The term shock doctrine refers to the principle that only a major shock can cause people to accept radical changes in their lives such as preemptive war on a nation that’s no threat to us, a surveillance society, or a host of other radical changes wrought by the Bush-Obama administrations. She points out how Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Bush administration multiplied their wealth as a result of investments in the War in Iraq, in domestic surveillance, flu scares (Rumsfeld’s investments in Tamiflu increased eightfold in value while he was in government “service,”) and other profitable disasters.
She also demonstrated how government service has become, in her words, a reconnaissance mission to become familiar enough with the workings of a government agency to leave government “service” and start a consulting business built around gaining contracts from that agency.
Before Bush unilaterally ordered the invasion of Iraq, his own chief arms inspector told him that Saddam Hussein no longer had any weapons of mass destruction. The invasion of Iraq was ordered after Saddam Hussein had indicated that he was going to make an oil export agreement with Russia, effectively cutting off American oil companies. Naomi Klein indicated that that was the real reason for the invasion that has killed more than a million Iraqi civilians and made millions of others homeless. Don’t forget that Bush and Obama have also caused the deaths of thousands of Americans in Iraq.
Contrary to what we’ve heard from Bush, and now Obama, people in Iraq don’t hate us for so flimsy a reason as “our freedoms” (which we have less of now than before 9/11.) They hate us because the U.S. government started a war with them when they were no threat to us, because our military hit mainly civilian targets with 30,000 bombs and 20,000 precision-guided cruise missiles in just five weeks; because over a million Iraqi civilians (out of a population of 25 million) have been killed and several million others have been made homeless. They hate us because, every day, they see foreigners who have become wealthy or wealthier by looting the Iraqi economy. They hate us because the war on them has raised their unemployment rate to 67%. While 17 Iraqi cement plants and countless workers lie idle, cement and workers are being imported at ten times the expense it would take to do the jobs locally. There’s no incentive to keep costs down because it’s all either looted from the U.S. taxpayers or looted from the Iraqi economy.
Does all this sound like the sort of things mentally healthy people would do?
From reading the newspapers over the past few months, we read how Goldman Sachs, a heavy contributor to the 2008 Obama campaign, was rewarded for betting on disasters. Even as they were advising people to make risky housing loans, they created a financial instrument for betting that the housing market would fail. Only one day before the British Petroleum blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, Goldman Sachs “bet short” on BP stocks.
We also learned that Halliburton (of Dick Cheney infamy) had the contract for BP’s blowout valves, and they had installed them only a few days before both of them blew out. More recently, newspapers reported that Halliburton had heavily invested in oil spill cleanup equipment. It’s worth asking how much of a profit they’re making from the oil spill.
Whether you call it disaster capitalism or, as Congressman Michele Bachmann calls it, “gangster government,” the history of Wall Street at least as early as 1910 has been a history of Wall Street insiders capitalizing on disasters. In some cases, such as the sinking of the Lusitania, leading to America’s involvement in World War I, or the looting of Iraq, or the collapse of the housing market, insiders caused the disasters and then profited from them. In others, such as the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” which was used as a pretext for ratcheting up the War in Vietnam, and the flu “pandemic” scares, the disasters or threats never existed; but the American people were told that they had.
On spurious grounds, we went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, we’re now engaged in a secret war to destabilize Pakistan, and the disaster capitalists are trying to push us into a war with Iran over their non-existent nuclear weapons program. Does that sound like the policies of mentally healthy people?
The psychopaths who now run the U.S. government have at least one Achilles heel: amoral congressmen, whom the psychopaths have bought with campaign contributions. The overwhelming majority of our congressmen and senators have voted to loot the U.S. Treasury and borrow trillions of dollars against our future after accepting massive campaign contributions from such gangsters as the health insurance racket, Big Pharma, the military industrial complex, and Wall Street banksters.
[Note: For more information on political ponerology (the study of psychopathy as a source of political evil) click here.]
To see whether your congressman represents you or the gangsters, click here and go to one of the sites listed. They include OpenCongress.org, which tells you where your congressman gets his campaign contributions and other income; Project Vote Smart, which tells you how various interest organizations rate your congressman, and other information you’ll need to sweep the rats out of Congress this November 2.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Congressman

Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was inspired by the true story of a man who was a respected doctor by day and a highwayman by night. It could just as easily been inspired by approximately 400 true stories of men and women who enjoy highly respected images in the public eye but become shocking monsters lurking the halls of Congress. Innocent voters are duped into voting for Doctor Jekyll but wind up getting Mr. Congressman.
John McCain is just such a Jekyll/Congressman creature, though we can’t say he didn’t warn us. You’ve probably seen the movies in which someone warns the leading character of the movie, “Don’t trust anybody,” and it turns out that the person who gave the warning was the one who should not be trusted. When McCain calls himself a maverick, we can take that as a warning.
Originally, a maverick was a cow that had no brand on it; thus, it supposedly didn’t belong to anyone. Well, the word anyone means anyone. McCain’s supporters and constituents correctly take that to mean that McCain considers independent of conservatives and the Republican Party, but it also means that he considers himself independent of his supporters and constituents.
Let’s look at some of the bills he has sponsored, or is now sponsoring, in Congress.
Along with Senator Dorgan (D-ND), who doesn’t have to face the voters in this year’s election, McCain has sponsored a bill to have the FDA regulate the sale of vitamins and food supplements as though they were drugs. The official designation of this travesty is (S3002).
In case you’re thinking that this should make food supplements safer and more reliable, think again. Regulators for the FDA tend to come from the pharmaceutical industry—not from Mother Earth News. As such, they’re more interested in regulating things that are good for you—and may be competition for Big Pharma—than candy, soft drinks, and other things that are bad for you. Some of you remember when apples were temporarily taken from the market because they had minute traces of alar (which may cause cancer in rats, but only if the poor rodents are waterboarded with the stuff), but when was the last time they recalled processed sugar, which causes obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay?
In 2002, McCain joined with Russ Feingold (D-WI) to limit freedom of speech with the infamous McCain-Feingold Act. You’ve probably heard a great deal about the recent Supreme Court decision ruling much of it unconstitutional, and much of the complaining pertained to corporate contributions to political campaigns. In point of fact, corporate CEO’s were still able to establish political action committees (PAC’s) and strong-arm their employees to donate.
The McCain-Feingold Act went much further, however, by limiting the political speech of individuals and of non-profit groups that focus on specific issues. Let’s say a candidate is in favor of “XYZ,” and you’re against it. Under the McCain-Feingold Act, your ability spend money to promote your views during the campaign would be limited. The McCain-Feingold Act could also have been called the Incumbents Protection Act, because that’s who benefited most from it. Mercifully, the Supreme Court has taken a stand for the First Amendment.
Have you noticed that every major travesty that comes from Congress is called a reform?
The First Amendment isn’t the only provision of the Bill of Rights that McCain seeks to curtail. John McCain and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) threatens your and my right to a trial by jury. If the McCain-Lieberman Bill passes, United States citizens can be dubbed “enemy combatants” and denied civilian trials and other constitutional protections for the accused. Even Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who usually serves as a catamite for neocons, has spoken against this assault on the Sixth Amendment.
In case you think that this doesn't threaten your rights because you're a loyal American, think again. The FBI has distributed a brochure to police chiefs all over America, telling them how they might recognize "domestic terrorists." If you voted for a third-party candidate in 2008, if quote America's Founding Fathers, or if you're concerned about your protections under the Bill of Rights, the FBI says you should be suspected of being a domestic terrorist. Here's a photo of the brochure, front and back. Does the FBI regard you as a suspected terrorist?
Maybe John McCain really is a maverick. Maybe he doesn’t serve as a hired gun for Big Pharma. Maybe he doesn’t fall down and worship anyone who can take him to a high mountaintop and show him the kingdoms that can be his. (How ironic and sad! In 2008, the kingmakers took him to a high mountaintop and pushed him off.) One thing’s for sure: John McCain doesn’t belong to the American people, who value freedom.
Oh, did you know that he’s running for reelection this year? On November 2, he can be swept out of Congress with the other rats.

Officeholders and Avatars

Even when we dislike them, we like for our officeholders to be larger than life—especially congressmen and Presidents. People who cause major problems for us, the thinking goes, must be major figures.
Thus, Nancy Pelosi and her ilk are transmuted into legendary and even mythological beings. In the minds of some, she's Queen Pelosi or Marie Antoinette. One commentator wrote, “The last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on Macbeth." I'm surprised that no one has compared Pelosi to Medusa.
We can view congressmen in a more objective light if we de-mythologize them. The reality is, many of them are sub-ordinary. The real Nancy Pelosi can be more accurately compared to the late Tammy Faye Bakker—a greedy wretch who is likely to stir in us an admixture of pity and disgust.
Let's not get congressmen confused with their campaign materials. We're all familiar with the idea of the images people generate as their online personalities. It's quite common for pimpled, skinny geeks to represent themselves online as popular, chic, and a lot of other things they never were and never hope to be. They may even use images called avatars to represent themselves, and some of these images are cast in the mold of legendary or mythological beings.
That's what the public versus public images of most congressmen are like. Voters may naively elect the avatar, but we end up getting the person as he really is.
Let's take one example of a sleazy mediocrity who reached the Senate by betraying everyone who trusted him—including the prisoners of war in Vietnam—while presenting himself as the exact opposite of the person he really was.
His father, Admiral John McCain, Sr., pulled strings to get his son into West Point. McCain, Jr., finished 894th out of class of 899.
Aboard the USS Forestall, McCain earned the dubious nickname, “Wetstart” McCain. Wetstarting is a term used for (loosely, in layman’s terms) causing a fighter plane to backfire into another pilot's face aboard a ship. Yes, it was a dangerous practice.
On one occasion, McCain's plane wet started (deliberately, some believe), causing missiles to dislodge and explode. Some 27 people died and over 100 injured in the deadliest peacetime disaster in U.S. naval history. Admiral McCain's boy was quickly transferred from the Forestall before any investigation could be held. He was the only crewmember to be quickly transferred after the Forestall fire.
On the day McCain was shot down over Vietnam, he broke his arms by not following the correct procedure in ejecting.
For McCain, Hanoi Hilton was more like the Hilton Hotel than a prisoner of war camp. There, he was called Songbird” McCain. Watch the video interview with a former Vietnam POW. According to some prisoners of war, McCain always wore a clean shirt, and he'd disappear for days at a time. Whenever he returned from these unexplained absences, he looked none the worse for wear—unlike many POW’s who returned bearing signs of torture.
You may have seen the made-for-television movie In Love and War, telling of Carol McCain’s heroic struggle for humane treatment of American POW's in Vietnam. Unlike When Hell Was in Session, the story of Jeremiah Denton's imprisonment at Hanoi Hilton, In Love and War said little about John McCain. That's because there was nothing much to tell that they'd have wanted to repeat.
How McCain got the money he needed for his election to the United States Senate was another act of treachery. While his wife was confined to a wheelchair, John McCain made regular trips to Hawaii for an adulterous relationship with Anheuser-Busch heiress Cindy Lou Hensley. After Cindy agreed to marry him, McCain divorced his wife. It was Cindy's money that got him elected to the Senate on a platform that included family values.
If McCain would prefer not to have his women a la carte, it's his business. I mention this scandal only because it fits a pattern of betrayal in John McCain's life.
Once in the Senate, McCain continued his pattern of betrayal. You may know that, in the Paris Peace negotiations formally ending the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger privately agreed that the U.S. would pay war reparations to Hanoi in exchange for prisoners. Congress wasn't told of this secret agreement until years after the war. When Congress balked at war reparations, Hanoi kept at least 600 Americans they had not yet released. “Songbird” McCain has consistently blocked serious investigations of Americans still held in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Click here to see a video of McCain, as chairman of a committee on POW/MIA affairs, abusing the leader of a POW/MIA families group who had lost her brother in Vietnam. Notice how he misrepresents her actual words. Members of the POW/MIA Committee accused McCain and government officials of blocking the investigation.
McCain co-sponsored the McCain-Feingold Act, which was designed to make it more difficult for incumbents to be challenged for re-election. During the 2008 Republican primaries, however, McCain violated his own law and was not prosecuted. He accepted federal matching funds in his campaign and won several primaries by that system. Once his campaign contributions and spending exceeded the legal amount, he opted out, as he was allowed to do. His violation was that he didn’t return the matching funds, and he didn't release the delegates he had previously won, as the law he'd co-sponsored required him to do.
There are also serious questions regarding election fraud, but I'll address that in an article on the Diebold vote-counting machines and other easily-rigged electronic voting devices.
McCain’s current act of betrayal is his sponsorship of a bill to treat American dissenters as “enemy combatants.” At the determination of the President, anti-war activists and other dissenters can be deemed enemy activists and be subject to the type of “aggressive interview” techniques found at Guantanamo. Please write a polite letter to your congressman and ask him to vote against this assault on the Constitution.
When we consider a candidate, we should look beyond the public image the campaign has presented. We don't elect the image; we elect the person.

What's Wrong with the 28th Amendment? Part 1

(This is the first of a two-part series.)
Not a month goes by that I don't receive an email urging me to urge twenty other victims of a chain email to urge Congress to pass a proposed 28th Amendment to the Constitution and submit it to the states for ratification. At least three“28th Amendments” have been proposed, supposedly to reign in the out-of-control federal government and—what's that catchphrase, now? Oh, yes: “Take our government back.”
The problem with all three proposed constitutional amendments is that they're presented as convenient excuses for voters to avoid responsibility for their government. Do we really want to “take our government back” and expect matters to take care of themselves without further effort on our parts? Do we seriously expect a constitutional amendment to do the job for us?
The three “28th Amendments” are term limitations, balanced budget requirements, and an oddly worded amendment to require congressmen and real people to follow the same laws.
Let's look at the most recent quick fix: "Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives, and Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.”
I urge you to carefully read the second half of the proposed amendment. The first half of the measure is the bait; the second half is the hook. I'll address the hook first.
For starters, congressmen are subject to certain reasonable laws that don't apply to the citizens at large.
Congressmen, for example, have to make public declarations of assets and the sources of those assets. If the proposed 28th Amendment passes, each of us would have to make public declarations of our assets and declare the sources. It's understandable for a public figure, such as a congressman, to give up this degree of privacy; but do you want your financial records open to public scrutiny? Under the proposed 28th Amendment, that's what would happen. This is only one area in which the proposed 28th Amendment would deprive you and me of essential liberties.
Another problem with this proposed amendment is the wording. Under the Constitution, congressmen enjoy a monopoly on passing federal laws. Under the proposed amendment, the people must also vote on them. How many private citizens have the time and inclination to study all the bills before Congress and vote on them? If the Congress is voted a pay raise, would that also apply to everyone else in America? The wording of the proposed amendment is a legal minefield that only a lawyer could love.
At the same time, the proposed 28th Amendment would do nothing to harness congressmen's tendency to exempt themselves from laws they make for the rest of us to follow. The email message on this proposed 28th Amendment incorrectly tells us that congressmen don't pay into Social Security. The truth is, they began paying Social Security taxes a few years ago; however, it makes no difference to them because they know they don't have to depend on Social Security. They can word laws so that members of Congress meet certain conditions that no one else can meet. Remember, there are a lot of lawyers in Congress, and they know how to do that sort of thing.
I'll give you an example of how federal law can be manipulated to help only one person. Many years ago, a man established a tax-exempt foundation to provide college scholarships to young men of Norwegian descent living in the Naples, Florida, area and who were the only offspring of clergymen. The wording of the conditions met federal requirements that the scholarship be open to any member of the public meeting the proscribed qualifications. In fact, though, it applied only to the son of the person establishing a tax-exempt foundation. Think about it: If an obscure Lutheran minister can come up with that one, what can the lawyers in Congress do?
Congressmen notoriously ignore constitutional limitations that they find inconvenient. If you want to sweep the rats out of Washington, don't expect a quick fix that probably came from Washington in the first place. Keep yourself informed on the issues and on what your congressman is doing and how he's voting. Liberty is not to be regained and preserved by quick fixes but by eternal vigilance.

Towards a New Paradigm, Part 1

Probably all of you have seen the outmoded political spectrum that puts all voters at some point along a straight line. Reading it from left to right, we see communists, socialists, liberals, moderates, conservatives, fascists, and Nazis. One of the major problems is that the spectrum presumes that all political behavior is based on political philosophy; but most people aren’t political philosophers. It also presumes that all people are motivated by the stated rationale for political positions rather than attitudes about freedom.
In recent years, the sort of grid you see below has come into vogue. For simplicity, I've left out the numbers and lines that are supposed to show—based on how you answer a set of questions—where you fall on the grid.

This grid is an enormous improvement on the straight line because it more realistically addresses the attitudes that citizens have concerning the government’s place in their lives. It’s still lacking in one area in that it labels the people in the center of the grid as populists. This label presumes political motivation for a group that is noted for its lack of political interest.
The classic explanation of the word populist is, “Us against them.” Owing to a lack of political interest, most people who are considered political centrists can't be called populists or moderates.
Most of them are politically oblivious until a couple of months before an election. Then they listen to the rhetoric and vote for the candidates who offer the best rhetoric. Never mind that everything a candidate says may be a lie; they don’t know it because they haven’t bothered to look for the facts. Never mind that candidates may completely contradict themselves by, for example, describing themselves as fiscal conservatives and social moderates (government actions cost real money regardless of how they’re packaged.) They’re like thin reeds that sway with every gusty speech and are often most influenced by who most recently spoke to them.
The illustration below more accurately identifies the voter in the middle of the illustration.

According to the paradigm we’ve heard all out lives, pandering to swing voters is the key to winning elections. In my opinion, pandering to swing voters is the main reason that freedom has lost out in the overwhelming majority of elections.
Think about it in terms of Game Theory. Everyone has some understanding of Game Theory even though very few people call it that. Most voters view each election as a one-time, zero-sum game. Understandably, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians would rather give up some of what they’d wanted in order to avoid losing all of what they’d wanted. As a result, voters occupying each position choose the centrist candidates just to keep the other two groups from winning.
That's why authoritarians gain ground with each election. For one thing, there will be other elections. For another, the position defined as the “moderate” position—“centrist” is more accurate—is a lobster trap that moves the electorate closer and closer to the authoritarian position.
The authoritarian strategy is a combination of “The Prisoners' Dilemma” and good cop/bad cop. Two suspects are kept apart and each is given reasons to suspect the other of ratting on him. Although each prisoner knows that it’s to the benefit of both prisoners to remain silent, each incriminates the other in order to get what he's told is a better deal.
The good cop/bad cop scenario is played out like this: “Conservatives” get elected and deprive the people of some of their personal freedoms. “Liberals” loudly oppose the move. Swing voters and everyone else are offered false alternatives. Instead of voting for a principled liberal, the liberals settle for someone who is considered "less conservative." Why? The “less conservative” candidate is presented as most agreeable to swing voters;thus, he's said to be most likely to win. If the “conservatives” lose power, the “liberals” come into office and do nothing to change the injustices wrought by “conservatives.” Instead, they deprive the people of some of their financial freedoms, which the “conservative” officeholders ratify when they get into office.
The old paradigm of the swing position being used to play liberals, conservatives, and libertarians against each other—to the benefit of the authoritarians—has caused all three groups to lose their liberties. What we need is a new paradigm in which liberals, conservatives, and libertarians unite against the authoritarians.
There are three major challenges to that idea. The three groups aren't communicating with each other, and I see no reason to hope that they'll learn to do so in time for the 2010 congressional elections. The three groups don't trust each other, and I don't expect that situation to change any time soon. Lastly, each group realizes that, in cooperating with each other, the gains and losses will not be equally distributed among the three groups.
How do you coordinate three groups that aren't communicating, don't trust one another, and see an uneven distribution of rewards and costs coming from cooperation with one another? I'll answer that question in my next article.

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