Clueless Leadership and Political Pandering

To Selfish Interests Yields Unintended Consequences

One blessing and the curse of having a 157 IQ is that problems which seem unsolvable to most appear to have very simple and obvious solutions to me.

 I’m sure others find it quite tedious and insufferable to listen to my frequent corrections and rantings upon the mental deficiencies of our leaders, but I pray just once you could all view the long tragedy of man’s existence upon this planet thru my eyes.

Born into a garden, we’ll not stop to think until we have turned it all into desert.

After 2000 years of Christianity, we should know how we cause our own problems.

After 232 years of liberty in self-determination thru a brilliantly designed republican system of governance, we should have no problems left to solve.

After 9/11, I had great hopes that Americans were ready to return to the Protestant Christian ethic that gave to all mankind this great nation, this beacon of light and hope in a world full of darkness, despair and destruction. That love fest sure didn’t last very long! Now, we are back to the same selfishness and petty partisan political squabbling that has kept man from making any real progress for the last two millennia.

The ultra-liberals want us to make war on the dirty capitalist rich, take their money, make us all support those who contribute nothing but unruly babies to society, give free health care to those who won’t even care for themselves, and keep those evil oil companies from drilling, or even exploring, anywhere, at all cost; ultra-conservatives would have us ignore every ill that pure greed gives us, subsidize a nuke power plant or auction off.an oil drilling lease even on the White House lawn.

Can’t we find some sensible common ground in between these extremist positions?

Just like the ‘greens’ were wrong about the Alaska pipeline hurting the wildlife it has actually proven to help, they are wrong about clean, modern directional oil drilling technology’s likely effect upon the ecology of ANWR. It is public land, so we can dictate exactly how careful the oil companies must be in exploring and exploiting this public resource, and where that oil must go when it is pumped out (Asia has been the only beneficiary of our investment in the Alaska Oil Pipeline). They also say it would be 10 years till we see a drop of that oil, and that’s what they have said for 21 years!

They are also wrong about the effects of opening these reserves to exploration – they say there is not enough oil there to make a significant difference, but in their infinite wisdom and religious-like zeal they have continually blocked even complete exploration of the area. So how do they know this, are they also prophets? Yet, the opening of just the known oil reserves in ANWR would immediately drive many speculators out of the market (who selfishly added $60 to a barrel of crude over actual demand in recent months), driving down the price, taking money away from terrorists, and saving the global economy from a very sure and painful depression.

Of course, the left is right that more oil is not a cure for our oil addiction. There is no one cure for such a huge problem. We must take every sensible action to keep this economy alive while effecting the cure to our foreign oil addiction, now!

We need exploration and exploitation of all of our own fossil energy resources, construction of pipelines and clean refineries, as well as more efficient and more flexible personal and mass transit schemes, conservation of all kinds, conversion to alternative and renewable energy resources wherever possible, and, most immediately, to install clean hybrid coal and biomass burning technologies on new and retrofit powerplants.

No more partisanship, no more refusals to compromise, and no more excuses!

 

Everbody Has An Opinion

Americans are world-famous for all having opinions on subjects they know little or nothing about, so much so that the Canadians made a very successful TV show entirely dedicated to laughing at this peculiar flaw in us.

Listening to the 3 remaining presidential and other major party candidates bloviate upon every subject in their political quivers reminds me of that comedy show.

None of these ‘court jesters’ have a clue of what has caused all of the problems we have facing us today, and nearly every change they propose would only make matters worse.

The Health Care proposals of all remaining candidates seem farcical to anyone, like myself, who has lived both in countries with Socialized Medical Care, and with ‘free markets’ in pharmaceuticals. I can tell you that a truly ‘free’ market solves problems, and government causes problems. If Americans ever get Socialized Medicine, they will surely wish they never had, but it is hard to get rid of once the mistake is made.

Now, John McCain and Hillary Clinton are both committing themselves to a federal gas tax “holiday”, which is one more example of perfect political pandering to all the ‘little people’, but will accomplish absolutely nothing of value to anyone.

Obama wants to borrow more money from the Chinese, so he can give you one more rebate check, and then you can buy one more Chinese TV from Walmart, or three more tanks of gas from the Arabs.

Almost all Democrats, and their presidential candidates, want a windfall profits tax on oil companies, which has been tried before, was an absolute disaster, and would be again.

What was that definition of insanity, again?

It reminds me of what Thoreau said, “For every one of man’s problems, there are a thousand men chopping at the branches for every one chopping at the roots.”

These ‘weed pruners’ need to spend time walking a bean field or cutting thistles in a pasture to learn the basics about cause and effect in the real world!

Most “environmentalists” also need this kind of reality-based educational experience to learn that the way that might seem right to the untrained eye often causes more problems than it solves, and that every human is not the ‘enemy’.

Farmers were the first biologists and the first ecologists. For over 5000 years, they have been studying Nature and helping her everywhere they can to make life better for all.

For 30 years the liberals, tree huggers and carrot killers have whined for renewable fuels, while they continued to buy petroleum at the pump and ungratefully cuss the oil companies - blaming them for providing what we all demand. Now that tax credits have finally given us ethanol and biodiesel, they don’t like either anymore, because now all of us can’t afford bread, tortillas, milk, meat, or cooking oil.

High food prices hurt poor folks, and people living on fixed incomes, the worst.

By the way, rice, wheat, and every other starchy grain can just as easily be used to substitute for corn in ethanol plants, or in animal feeds, which is just one reason they have all been going up in price, together, but the farmer’s share of that $4 box of corn flakes is still only about 10¢. The package costs about 3 times that. The cost of shipping “sugar-coated puffed air” great distances across the country is highly significant, as well as the profit required to pay company executives millions in salaries and bonuses.

More subsidies to top-heavy big businesses are not a good answer. Recent ethanol over-development should show us that big business is the most self-serving and the least responsive to the actual needs of our society and small business creates more jobs per dollar invested. Though we would still have no wind power today without those heavy government subsidies to big business, it is not because wind won’t pay in small scales, but because utilities have too much power and politicians won’t buck them. They don’t like wind, and they control the price!

Wind is fickle and doesn’t come in the peak demand hours when they want it.

Nothing can change that; we must force the utilities to offer the same price to all small producers that they pay each other for power, change the REA Charter to allow local REC’s to purchase power directly from members, as well as their regional provider, and learn to match off-peak demand to use the wind when it comes!

Wind comes later than peak demand, so you transmit the excess to the West. Wind increases wind chill and air exchange from buildings, so it is a perfect match for space heating, and some cooling. Wind increases plant transpiration, animal perspiration and evaporation, so it is a perfect match for water pumping; it also often comes at night, which is the right time to irrigate. Many other automated high energy demands like chemical fertilizer manufacture, hydrogen fuel production and carbon sequestration can be turned on, or increased, automatically when the wind comes.

We don’t need hundreds of huge wind turbines owned by big utilities, anyway, we need millions of small ones owned by all of us. When one out of a million is struck by lightning, or ripped out of the ground by a tornado, nobody notices, but when one out of a hundred goes down that’s an immediate 1% cut in production. The use of small, low-technology wind turbines has proven viable on these plains for 150 years.

Changing the REA Charter would also make it possible for thousands of farmers to install millions of small hydroelectric plants, biogas/electric generators, and biomass co-generator systems, as well as wind turbines, under profitable conditions.

Saving Us From Ourselves

The best way of saving fuel, reducing your food bill, and breaking the power of big business over every facet of our lives, immediately, is to refuse to buy from them, but instead, buy what is produced locally. There is nothing Iowa soil and Iowans can’t produce for ourselves.

If any of our leaders, including co-op leaders, had any visionary grasp of our problems, they would have built mills here to add value to our grain crops, milk, meats and eggs decades ago. We cannot turn back time, but we can reinvigorate the cooperative spirit that conquered the plains, and do now what we should have done then.

If we had real leadership in this country, all of our ethanol plants would be wet milling plants to produce sugars, starches, celluloses, alcohols, oils, plastics and other valuable nutritional and chemical components, built to feed CO2, waste heat and water to adjoining greenhouses, alongside matching dairies and beef feedlots to consume the by-products and feed manure to a biogas generator, which, in turn, feeds nutrients, energy, waste heat and CO2 back to the greenhouse.

We did not need 60 giant ethanol and biodiesel plants in Iowa, consuming more corn than we produce, but 400 smaller plants integrated with 400 small dairies and 400 small feedlots, with 400 biogas generators, along with 400 small milk, meat and egg plants and 400 cereal, flour, bread, cookie, cracker and corn chip plants, in the hands of Iowans, would have solved many more problems for our society. Better late than never!

The ‘greens’ also now belatedly claim that it takes 2.5 Btu’s of energy to provide a car with 1 Btu of ethanol, counting every Btu from harvest to harvest thru distillation to the gas pump, but what they don’t tell you is that it has always taken 3 or more Btu’s of energy to bring your car just 1 Btu of gasoline. So grain ethanol alone can boast a 17% increase in thermal efficiency over current oil cracking technology.

Increasing ethanol fuel blends to 20% would save us 3.5% in energy over gasoline. With an existing multi-fuel system that GM refuses to sell in America, we could burn all E85 that would save us 14% in energy over straight gasoline. No small potatoes, even if we do not attach some value to the cleaner air that burning ethanol gives us!

If we made ethyl alcohol from sugars of sweet sorghum, Jerusalem artichokes, sugar beets and sugar cane instead of starches from grains that savings would be greater yet!

The mere connection of current dry milling grain ethanol plants with a cattle operation and a biogas generator has proven to change the plant energy equation from a positive 1 Btu energy input to 1.3 Btu ethanol output to a vastly improved 1 Btu energy input for every 43.67 Btu’s of ethanol produced!

It is foolhardy meddling in the marketplace with tax and regulatory policies pushed by those ‘true believers’ in government power that has caused the inequitable and unsustainable development of the ethanol industry from 1791 to today.

I wish we could just eliminate all taxes and regulation, today, and expect the free market to return to normalcy, but far too many extreme inequities have developed from the foolish application of the coercive power of government. These will not rectify themselves without more taxes that will undo the damage. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle!

All of this should serve to teach us one fundamental and irrefutable truth; if you want to discourage something, tax it; if you want to encourage something, cut taxes on it.

When our leaders say there is nothing we can do about the market price of oil, they only prove that they are either too corrupt, or too inept, to deserve our vote.

If we want to lower the price of oil, we need only to eliminate speculation by placing a 70% punitive tax on purely speculative earnings, this would not hurt, but only help, any legitimate, productive business, and would cut oil prices in half, over night.

Of course there would be a great outcry from the likes of George Soros and T. Boone Pickens, but these filthy rich parasites have caused enough suffering to all in this world already, and they will have no problem finding other legitimate investments.

There would be many economists speak against it, most just trying to justify their own speculative investments, others merely confused as to the true utility of the “liquidity” they claim that speculation serves to add to markets. They will all soon realize that we never lacked “liquidity” in these markets, in the first place. It is impossible to lack liquidity in a market for commodities essential to all humans.

If we want to completely solve our food and energy problems, we must put an end to welfare for wealthy land owners and paying for non-production in the farm bill. These programs have not added stability, but only more volatility, to the farm markets. We should limit all welfare for farmers to no more than $50,000/yr. We should restrict all government subsidies for business only to corporate entities that are open to the public and governed by one man, one vote, essentially, open co-ops. We should eliminate the ethanol blender’s tax credit on grain alcohol, but keep it on for cellulosic and sugar ethanols to encourage the conversion of our excess grain ethanol production capacity to more sustainable feedstocks. We must reduce taxes and import duties on all clean, renewable energies and augment taxes and import duties on dirty fossil fuels and all petroleum derivatives according to their carbon content. We must institute high export duties on all energies and highly progressive taxes on gas guzzling vehicles and energy hog appliances, decreasing as energy efficiency increases. We must create a luxury tax on conspicuous consumption and a revolving loan fund for small businesses and the working poor to purchase energy-efficient vehicles and appliances with progressively decreasing down payments and interest rates for increasing efficiency ratings.

I would be happy to explain exactly how and why each of these actions should be taken, if anyone has a further interest in understanding the logic.

Listening to the ‘greens’, now that they have changed their minds about ethanol, would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Government pandering to some of these mental midgets with a professed passion for preserving all things “natural”, but with a demonstrated hatred for all things human is the problem, not the solution.

I am as dedicated to the protection of God’s Creation as anyone on Earth, but humans are an integral part of that Creation; unless we are willing to start killing humans, then we had better figure out how to control our environment, raise more food, and transport it to feed the 6.5 billion people on this planet, and those billions more to come.

The increased CO2 and other ‘greenhouse’ gases in our air that we blame for global warming have also increased crop yields to help us feed more humans than have ever lived before till now, whether we add more, or natural forces do, those same gases could take us over the brink of an ecological collapse that might threaten the existence of the human race, as well as nearly every other animal on this planet.

Luckily, there are no real problems without real solutions, but all require planning and preparation to effect!

I am holding a Patriot’s Picnic on the Aden Family Trust Farm at 2694 180^th Street, near Nemaha, from May 30 thru June 1, for all of us to discuss what can and should be done to elect good leaders and develop real solutions to cure our very real problems.

You may find more information by logging on to www.wecansolveit.org/page/event/detail/jwc, or call me at 712-636-4490, or e-mail me at lmaden@frontiernet.net, if you intend to attend this gathering and join us in taking steps toward real change in our local communities, our beloved country, and our beautiful planet.

I invite all concerned citizens to come, listen, and express your viewpoint.

Nothing good will come from sitting around and blaming the other guy for the what we are all guilty of – living, breathing, eating, drinking, and going to work!

We surely are our own worst enemies, but we are also masters of our own destiny!

Let’s do some mastering!

Tho’ I am sending this invitation to our brothers all over the Americas who speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Ketchwa and Tupy/Guarani, I will write it in the universal language of trade and transport, English, so that all may understand the essence of this call to arms, and save me some time.

 Whether you believe humans have caused global warming, or not, we humans are all far too dependent upon petroleum, and the greedy, power-crazed men who control that resource.

Our brothers in Brazil have made great progress in breaking their oil addiction with ethanol, but no other government has heard the people’s cry for mandates to force the auto manufacturers to provide us with the appropriate vehicles to use it.

The Midwestern U.S. has also made some progress with ethanol, biodiesel and straight vegetable oil (SVO), tho’ we are far from curing the problem, as the people control less and less of the production each year, and we have few vehicles designed to make use of these pure renewable fuels, or even significant percentage blends of them.

If we are ever to solve this problem, the people will have to band together in a cooperative effort to provide ourselves with affordable transportation solutions.

We have waited since the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 for Detroit to provide solutions, but they refuse to even provide us with cars that have better fuel economy than the Model A Ford had eighty years ago (about 25 mpg). In fact, we had higher gas mileage cars from the Japanese and Germans in the late 1970’s than they are supplying today!

Thirty years of the consumer’s cry for affordable transportation have fallen on deaf ears!

In the late 1990’s, I had the great honor to work with one of Argentina’s most-renowned automotive engineers, Heriberto Pronello, on promoting the Mini Auto Popular (MAP), a cooperative effort of 30 to 40 after-market auto parts manufacturers in Argentina.

This beautiful little car was nearly ready for production when the politics of big business killed it by cutting off the government funding which had brought it that far.

Such a waste of taxpayer’s money we usually think only happens in the U.S., but the tentacles of this monster encompass the globe and make this a global struggle to liberate all of humanity from the stranglehold of the petrochemical industrial complex.

In this case, man’s liberation could never be effected by bullets, but must be done by the common man joining with his neighbor in a peaceful effort to finish bringing this little Coop commuter car to production in every country on Earth.

To move our auto technology forward, the X-Prize Foundation and Progressive Insurance have recently teamed up to provide a $10 Million Dollar prize for the first viable production vehicle to achieve 100 Mpg!

We can do this, and we can win this prize, if we are willing to work together, just like our forefathers shared their field work and scarce farm equipment to build everything we have today. We have the brains, the brawn and the material, all we need is the will!

The Creator has provided everyone with some useful talent that we could use in this struggle to beat the big money boys to this goal. We will turn down no one’s help.

Let OPEC eat their oil!

They say Lady Justice is blind. Well, if she is blind, then she is also deaf to the man who cannot afford to hire the best lawyer; but her tactile senses are just fine, as her greedy little fingers have no trouble discerning who has the largest stack of dollars.

As always, this is our own fault for sending ‘statist’ nitwits to our legislatures, and to the bench, to chip away at our “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as prescribed by our first Founding Document, the Declaration of Independence, and to set ridiculous and dangerous precedents that subvert the intent of the Founding Fathers.

Whether the question is loud music, “unsightly” views, tobacco smoke, the smell of livestock, chemical run-off, or spray drift crossing a property line, nuclear power, radioactive waste storage, drug side-effects, medical malpractice, ingredient or country of origin labeling, or any other consumer product liability question, our representative government must not be allowed to use its coercive power and taxpayer dollars to deny the legitimate ‘rights’ of any American citizen to the necessities of life (i.e. clean air, pure water, wholesome food, direct sunlight and adequate space in which to exist), to yield to the petty ‘desires’ of anyone over the ‘rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ of another, nor to shield anyone from their own liability.

What is right and just is not a mystery that must be left to be deciphered by lawyers and lawyers-made-judges, but the common sense of natural law.

There is no conflict between the legitimate “rights” of men. The ‘right’ of any man to extend his arm in ‘liberty’ stops just shy of the next man’s nose. No man can ‘physically’ affect the life of another without incurring a corresponding liability.

Notice that word ‘physically’! No, you do not have a right to go thru life without ever smelling something unpleasant, seeing something ‘unsightly’, nor hearing someone say something that makes you feel ‘uncomfortable’. You have no right to tell your neighbor what color to paint his house, when to cut his grass, what words he can speak, what music he can listen to, who he can associate with, what substances he can ingest, nor what enterprise he can or cannot engage in upon his own property, unless the repercussions of his ‘activity’ cross his property line onto yours and cause some ‘unnatural’, ‘physical’ effect that ‘adversely’ affects your life, liberty, or the ‘pursuit’ of your happiness.

Notice that you are also not guaranteed happiness, but merely the ‘pursuit’ of it.

If you cannot stand to look at your neighbors purple house, or the tall prairie grass in his yard maybe you should look the other way, or not live close to other humans.

If you cannot stand to wade in mud, smell livestock and fertilizer, or inhale pollen, perhaps you should not buy an acreage downhill or downwind of a farm. But, if that property is emitting any unnatural (as in GMO) pollen, toxic chemical run-off or drift, anyone receiving that emission should be due reparations, and the government has no business shielding the perpetrators of such pollution from their legal liability.

But our current ‘unconstitutional’ laws do shield biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and agrichemical companies and the professionals who use their products according to the labels from their just liability, and our un-justice system has allowed these laws to stand.

Now, I have wonderful neighbors who are systematically converting their land over to organic production, tho’ I wish they would convert their fields adjoining me first, as the Law permits them to overspray chemicals onto my organic land, as long as they are following the label, and forces me to lose money on a thirty foot strip between my organic production and their chemical production.

I have a small farm and cannot afford to lose one foot of production, let alone thirty.

If both fields were organic, I would not be forced to leave that thirty foot strip.

I am not the one spraying toxic synthetic chemicals around, so why am I being forced to suffer a loss for the actions of another person? Where is my government’s protection of my ‘equal rights’? Why does Monsanto have more ‘right’ to sell a toxic chemical than I have to live free of it. And, why can’t I get legal redress for such an obvious injustice without even more loss of my hard-earned money?

Those who use chemicals, or GMO crops, should have to keep them on their own property, or leave an adequate strip without these on their side of the fence.

Those who wish to build new livestock production facilities of unnatural animal densities should merely be forced to build biogas generators, or other sealed manure treatment, to abate the associated volatile gas and leach-able chemical production problems.

Those who wish to build nuclear power plants should be free to do so, as long as they can find liability insurance to cover all the risks that the reactor, the radioactive waste and the half-life storage of that waste present, without taxpayer money (by the way, even the Government could not afford to build them, if they were exposed to that liability).

Nobody has a right to pollute the environment we all depend upon to sustain life.

Our Courts should do the job the Constitution charges them with and strike down such obviously unconstitutional infringements upon the rights of Citizens before they even take effect, instead of waiting for somebody with sufficient money to contest them.

If justice must be purchased, it is only available to the rich, then, it is not justice!

The recent flight of speculators, with their massive capital funds, to and from the commodities markets has driven the price of nearly every commodity from soybeans to a barrel of crude oil up to new record highs, and then down the limit several days in a row.

Most of these speculators are just common people, or their mutual funds, like lemmings following the pack to their own doom, having far more money than brains, and even less scruples, some have even borrowed against their own homes to reinvest in speculation; this is exactly what happened to bring us the Great Depression in 1929!

The rest of these parasites are the big fat rats that lead the pack in every direction, arriving first, leaving first, eating the major portion of the cheese, and leaving the little people in the pack to fight and cannibalize each other over the crumbs.

Because the housing bubble already burst, they can no longer support their greedy, lazy and non-productive lifestyles by outbidding poor young families for their very own house to live in. So they have led the pack to greener pastures, where they will ruin the lives, dreams and years of hard work for other good people by outbidding everyone for the food they need to feed themselves and their children, and the fuel they need to get to work.

There is no greater threat to the stability of our economy than this useless, yet self-serving, speculation. Due to far too favorable tax treatment as legitimate capital gains, it has become pervasive, and wrongly legitimized, within the investment portfolios of the common man’s retirement funds, as well as the market mavens of Wall Street.

Speculation serves absolutely no useful purpose in the marketplace; it creates no wealth.

All new wealth entering any earthly economic system in any given period of time is purely the result of sunlight striking the surface of our little biosphere and, through some thermo-chemical or thermodynamic process, being stored as useful energy in some other ethereal or material form. All real capital is just stored sunlight, and we have control of it when we harvest it from the fields, forests, mines, atmosphere and waters of the Earth!

For the lazy parasites of Wall Street to acquire this new wealth without Super-human intervention, it is necessary to devise elaborate schemes by which they steal it from those who legitimately produced it without offering a fair market exchange of equal value.

Speculation in the commodities markets is the ultimate tool in this thievery scheme.

The commodities market speculator never takes possession of their purchase; there is no need, as they never had any intention of using the stored energy to accomplish useful work for society. They never add any value to it by making it more useful to other humans, like grinding grain into flour, or baking it into bread. They never even move it from one place where there is a surplus to another where people need more supply of it.

The only possible, and universal, effect of all speculation is to tend to drive down prices for the producer, and to drive prices up for the consumer. It forces all legitimate bidders (who want to use or improve the commodity) in the marketplace to play the same sick game and widen their profit margins to avoid their own bankruptcy and compensate for this illegitimate extraction of wealth from the production system, without fair exchange.

Only by enacting punitive taxes upon speculative earnings can we ever hope to stabilize our economy, level the playing field for the producers, and assure fair value to end users.

In a world with finite food reserves and over 6 Billion people to feed, nobody has a right to hoard all the food they can afford to buy, leaving millions of other people to starve.

We would not permit such a thing with a gun; neither should we allow it with a market call order. For the human with the empty stomach, the effect feels exactly the same.

After last week’s letter, I received many inquiries from Citizens willing to take the bitter pill of our own responsibility in the poor state of our beloved Republic. Most asked how we as Citizens, and as a Society, could and should proceed to elect good representatives and what must be done to recoup the loss of our leading position in this world.

Space precludes me from answering these questions completely in one post, but I will attempt to address, in general terms, what we should do as the first small steps to take back our government from the pernicious and surreptitious forces which have taken over it from the smoky back rooms of corporate, union and political party machines.

First, reject every mental bias and subconscious sense of loyalty to any political party; these are nothing but mafias that will tear our country apart to achieve their own power.

Both Thomas Jefferson and, especially, George Washington were adamantly opposed to the development of organized political parties and the derision that they create. We must vote for people who are willing to break the stranglehold that the two major parties have on political discourse in this country. Every election law they have ever written has insured their advantage over all other parties, persons and ideas at the polls; these laws must be removed from the books to allow the People free access to all alternatives.

We need Representatives with good ideas, not politicians with “good” connections.

Vote only for great statesmen who will not promise to give you something for nothing.

Reject the pandering promises of professional politicians, and the lies they tell:

If any candidate ever refers to our “Democracy”, or “our two party system”; DO NOT VOTE FOR THEM! That candidate is either a cunning liar or knows absolutely nothing about our Constitution. There is not one reference to Democracy or political parties in our Constitution. The Founding Fathers never created, nor ever intended that we should have, a Democracy; they gave us a more stable and sustainable Representative Republic.

All Democracies end shortly in the same tragic way – in bloody civil war! Thomas Jefferson said, “Democracy is 51% of the people oppressing 49%.”, and Benjamin Franklin said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner. Liberty is a very well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”

When we have Statesmen elected, we must insist that they:

1. Restore the entire world’s confidence in the US Dollar by restoring the Constitutional Gold Standard; remove the Dollar from the control of a freshly audited Federal Reserve.

2. Remove collection of direct taxation from the IRS and return it to the townships, as the Founding Fathers intended it should be when they said, “We should never put the guns and the purse strings in the hands of the same people.”

3. Reform our tax codes to severely penalize speculators in the marketplace, establish Reciprocity as the ultimate standard in the application of import duties on foreign trade, encourage Americans to save and invest in their own country and Gold-backed currency, encourage primary production, prohibit sales taxes on any basic necessity, and treat all legal entities (private or corporate persons) equally with a Flat Rate Gross Income Tax.

4. Reform Social Security to stop the legalized theft by this Ponzi scheme, and attach to:

5. Reform of our Farm policy to store up food to conform to the Biblical principles of the Tithe system, as prescribed for the proper care of Society’s less fortunate.

I will further elaborate on the particulars of these reforms in later posts.

“A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation.”  ~James Freeman Clarke, Sermon

Every ill of our rural depopulation, falling dollar, failing economy and declining influence in the world is a direct result of our poor choices in electing our representatives for our own short-term selfish gains. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

It is much like Will Rogers said when asked by another newspaper reporter, “Mr. Rogers, is it true that our government is full of thieves and scoundrels?” “W-e-l-l, y-e-s, but I believe it’s a good cross-section of the American People!”

Now, I wouldn’t put it quite that way, because I have seen the evidence of what an awfully cruel and ugly world this would be without the American Miracle and all those Great Americans who have done so much to serve the cause of saving his fellow man from himself. But, then, who will save us from ourselves?

We could just resign ourselves to the concept that our 200 year run is up, like every empire before us, slip into oblivion, and let the world slide back into the Dark Ages.

Or, we could wake up and smell the apple juice, chokecherry jam, cornbread, bacon, eggs, milk and honey (I don’t have a single neighbor that raises coffee) and get back to what we are good at – using what God gave us and being thankful for it, producing food, developing new technologies to make higher quality products that yield a better quality of life, and sharing it all with a planet still very hungry for some semblance of sanity!

There has never been anything more worthy of keeping alive than the American Miracle!

Every failure of our government and industry has really been a missed opportunity. Our recent efforts to force our ‘Genetically Modified’ (GMO) crops upon a world demanding ‘Organic’ food is just one more in a long list of perfect examples of this.

The 217 year history of the Federal Government meddling and muddling in the ethanol industry is another. All those ill-advised and unjust government interferences in the marketplace have retarded ethanol technology development at least 100 years, caused thousands of businessmen and farm families irreparable harm, driven them from their land, damaged the environment, funded organized crime, and is presently setting us up for another catastrophe with more far-reaching effects than the 1980’s Farm Crisis.

When poor economic policy is piled upon poor farm policy upon poor tax policy from all political sides for 22 decades, we could see farm land prices pushed to the point where only the wealthiest absentee landlords will own all the productive land and the people who work that land will be no more than feudal serfs, and old serfs at that, as no young American might ever again seek to enter into the farming profession.

When there were four farm families on every section, all of our rural small towns and cities were thriving and growing. If you really want to see tragedy in our rural communities, just let a few corporate farmers farm all the land for even fewer wealthy, speculating, absentee landlords, and we will all travel this road to serfdom, together.

Price stability is much preferable to high prices that cannot be sustained. We can manage for profit at any price by adjusting inputs, but we cannot buy high-priced land, fuel, fertilizer, seed, labor, and equipment, only to end up selling low-priced grain again when we have destroyed the livestock industries that we have always had as our baseline market to add value to our grains, and, then, millions of hectares of grasslands and forests all over the world have been put to the plow to get in on the ‘energy farming’ windfall.

We have better options, but we need Great Statesmen, not professional politicians that will tell us anything we want to hear, just to get elected and fill their own pockets!

 

I think there is but one thing that all Americans can agree upon in this time of political division, that we are all sick and tired of the proverbial “politics as usual”.

 

We should all recognize our own part in this, as it seems to be purely human nature to hold ourselves blameless, while always vilifying our opponents.

We see it even in the pages of our local papers over immigration, neither side willing to see the logic of the other, and trading accusations of “bigotry” and “political intrigues”.

We should all recognize that we need immigrants to do jobs our own spoiled children will not do, but we should also realize that immigrants must pay their dues by serving this society in the same way they always have – starting at the bottom and working their way up.

They must not be permitted to drive down our wage rates by competing with American citizens for work in any business, or any job covered by minimum wage laws.

Their purpose is to serve American society, not to subsidize the rich with cheap labor to tend their children, houses, gardens, limousines and factories.

We need them to pick lettuce, not to make it more difficult for all of us to afford lettuce!

Exemption of any job from minimum wage laws must be predicated upon the employer’s participation in some form of primary production subject to commodity market pricing. Any company who sets the price of their own product in the marketplace has no legitimate need of any form of subsidized labor, or exemption from wage laws.

Likewise, for America’s limited needs, we must allow only the best and brightest from all over the world to emigrate here, not only those who find it easiest to steal across our borders and shamelessly break our laws!

That is a very poor way of getting started paying their dues and convincing the rest of us that they deserve to be citizens.

A Swedish student or a Ukrainian doctor should have the same opportunity as any Mexican to come here and pick lettuce until they earn the right to citizenship.

I spent over 12 years doing volunteer work for my Latino brothers and sisters all over the Americas, and I resent being accused of bigotry by people who have never invested more than a short vacation in Latin America.

I know that most Latinos will make wonderful American citizens, if they are willing to put forth the effort to obey our laws and assimilate to our society; if they are not, they have no business being here.

We have no need to become the same kind of Third World economy that they are trying to escape from.

I would hope that the far left cares more for their country, and its legitimate citizens, than to give their blind support for unfettered Latino immigration purely to buy votes.

But, with the immigration policies they currently espouse, they hurt the workers and the poor people that they have always claimed to be fighting for, and help only those who have already proven they have no regard for our laws, and the wealthy people and corporations that simply do not want to pay Americans a living wage. The very people that they have always railed against!

What more are we to ascertain from this?

 

Something has been stuck in my craw for some time now.

What part of illegal don’t the illegal aliens, the apologists for illegal aliens, and the people who hire illegal aliens, understand? What does “knowingly” hiring an illegal have to do with the fact that the law is being broken? Who is protecting ‘legal’ workers in this country?

Our politicians are fond of saying that we are a “nation of laws”, if that were true then they would be enforcing those laws that we already have on the books to protect American Citizens from the unfair job competition, undue entitlement costs and social degradation that illegal immigrants have unjustly foisted upon our citizens.

We are not a “nation of laws”, but a nation of men, like every nation in human history.

Like any other nation, our laws are no better than the men who make them.

Men who write “knowingly” into laws are either corrupt or inept, or both, and definitely neither competent nor moral enough to represent the People in the Legislature of our State, or of our Republic.

Words like “knowingly” have no place in law, nor in any serious discussion of legal matters. Any law using such a word is no law at all.

Ignorance of the law has never been an acceptable defense under our legal system.

Ignorance of whether the person you hire is legal to work here is no excuse, either.

The ‘responsibility’ to find out the legal work status of a potential employee is assumed when one decides to exercise the ‘right’ to hire one. If businesses do not like the tools that the government affords them to determine that status, then they should force their politicians to address that problem, rather than lobbying for the insertion of wording that subverts the intent of the law.

The use of “knowingly” is just a way of gutting the law to make it totally ineffectual in enforcement against any unscrupulous company that intentionally recruits illegals to avoid fair wages, but can afford good attorneys to get them out of paying the fines when those illegals are caught working for such companies, yet guarantees that the honest small farmer or businessman who was forced to hire an illegal to help him get his lettuce picked, a ditch dug, or a septic tank pumped will bear the full weight of the law.

Where is the “equal protection under the law” that our “Citizens” are guaranteed under the 14^th Amendment?

Larry M. Aden, Nemaha, Iowa

 

Recent weeks have shown Bill Clinton is a narcissistic sociopath, on a par with OJ Simpson and Drew Peterson.

He truly believes that he is so irresistible that he can not only do whoever, but also say whatever, he darn well pleases, tongue lash anyone that calls him on it, and rewrite his own history, at will.

His post-gaff harangues remind me of - “Who you gonna believe, me, or your lyin’ eyes?”

Now, as a general rule, I despise liars more than any other type of moral degenerate.

But, what really burns my hide more than anything else about Bubba is when he has the unmitigated gall to make such a prevaricated pronouncement as “The American people don’t care about that!”

Well, Slick Willy, you may be able tell your own Kool-Aid drinking party minions what they should and should not care about, but that is a small minority of Americans.

Bubba, you don’t speak for me, nor any sane person I know!

And now, even those in your own party are starting to see you for what you really are.

Rest assured, William Jefferson Clinton, when the history is finally written, you will go down as the cheap piece of white trash that brought dishonor upon the highest office in our beloved land, and George W. Bush will be recognized as one of the greatest Presidents of modern times.

GW is worthy of taking his place alongside Teddy Roosevelt, General Dwight Eisenhower, and Abraham Lincoln, as a man of faith, integrity and resolve.

We may all be slightly disappointed with GW on one issue or another, but we should all thank God for this Great American, who has kept us safe, and has been strong enough to stand up for what he thought was right, against all odds.

May God continue to bless this Great Nation with leaders like George W. Bush.

By the way, you gave a great State of the Onion address, GW, and I am sure that Warren Buffet is writing that check right now!

God Bless You, Mr. President!

 

What the Florida Primary and the South Carolina Primary Should Show US

 

It is hard to believe that South Carolina was so naïve and gullible as to fall for the weak arguments in favor of John McCain last week.

In defense of Republican South Carolinians, what is certain is that McCain did not win with native Republicans, only with idiot Independents, parasitic military retirees, and guerilla Democrats voting in the Republican primary.

As The New York Times’ endorsement of McCain clearly shows, Democrats want to run against this Senator, because they know it is the only way they can win.

A Senator running against a Senator guarantees that the American people will be forced to do what they historically never like to do - elect a Senator; and they will elect the junior Senator, with less-compromised votes, of their two choices.

Though, in the past 40 years, 7 out of the last 10 elections, the Dems have nominated a Senator and failed to get him elected all 7 times (a 100% failure rate), they are not smart enough to change their insane modus operandi, but would rather attempt to subvert the Republican nomination process to also get a Senator, that they can beat, to run against.

Republicans must wise up, about history and human nature, or we will lose this election.

If we nominate McCain, we will surely lose nearly 100% of the far-right traditional Republicans and a solid 100% of the Republican Liberty Caucus to support Ron Paul as the mutual independent candidate of the Constitution Party and the Libertarians.

 

Only the neo-con Republican Party insiders will remain committed to McCain in the General Election!

 

When asked, this week, how the Republican base could possibly back her son, McCain’s rather endearing, and irascible, 95 year old mother, Roberta, said “I think, holding their nose, they’re going to have to take him.”

 

With all due respect, Dear Lady, we do not HAVE TO TAKE anyone forced upon us by an unholy alliance between Democrats and the Washington Republican Establishment!

 

As his Mother, you may have to love John, but we don’t, you hold your own nose, we will spit him out!

 

What should be obvious to all of us is that, this weekend, those same spoilers that gave McCain his dubious victory will undoubtedly be finding ways to vote, again, in the S C Democrat Primary, just like illegal aliens vote across this land, Dems voted as many as five times in one day in Milwaukee in 2000, and Liberal Snowbirds continually vote once in person, and once by absentee ballot, across the South, and in their own home states.

South Carolina alone should illustrate to any sane person why our unsystematic federal elections and state primary elections process is in dire need of national standardization.

Add to it that a large delegate state like Florida is trying to horn in on the beginning of the process, which influenced Giuliani to totally ignore every smaller state before it.

It is true that this strategy does not appear to have worked very well, for Rudy, but that won’t stop the trend, and it is illustrative of what would happen to every one of the smaller states, if this trend were allowed to become prevalent.

States like Idaho, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming never see hide nor hair of the Presidential candidates, unless they are vacationing in the mountains; poor North Dakota loses out completely on that one, too.

I am a native Iowan and a Libertarian at heart, but I am willing to give up our beloved first-in-the-nation Caucus, which I hold in high regard as a basic instrument of our form of popular representative republican governance, if we could get a universal system of nomination and election that would ensure free and fair access of, for, and by the people, to all seekers of political office, in every state and territory, regardless of either party affiliation (or total lack thereof), or the population of the electoral precinct, without taking up two years of our national life, nor condensed into one day.

 

We must have a National Primary and General Election System that:

 

Requires, above all, a verifiable permanent physical record of the votes cast.

 

Makes vote fraud a civil rights felony, punishable by permanent loss of that right.

 

Mandates proportional assignment of party convention delegates to all candidates.

 

Requires voter presentation of a valid Citizen Identification Card, issued at birth.

Loosely based upon, and in replacement of, the current National Social Security Card, the number on this tamper-proof card could be logged into a federal database to prevent any illegal voting. It would also put an end to illegal aliens receiving citizen entitlements, to employers claiming they can’t tell who is a citizen, legal to work, and who isn’t, and to innocent citizens being unnecessarily inconvenienced during travel in North America.

 

Permits no more than 6 months of campaigning before the General Election.

If the next election campaign starts the day after the last election is held, when is it that the People’s business gets done?

 

Starts with the least populous Territories, and ends with the most populous States. This is imperative to guarantee access of the entire electorate to all of the National candidates.

 

Mandates one exclusive date for each individual State/Territory Primary Election.

 

Mandates grouping of primaries in contiguous, or nearby, States and Territories of roughly comparable populations.

 

Guarantees every candidate, presenting petitions, with any valid voter signatures equal to .1% of the electorate of that State, seven days prior to the vote, a place on one single, vote-for-one-candidate-per-office, all-party ballot.

 

This system should ensure equal, free and fair access of all candidates (regardless of party affiliation, or total lack thereof) to the electorate of each State and Territory, and of all citizens to the candidates!

ECONOMIC STIMULUS

 

As of today, it is apparent that we are going to get an economic stimulus package, whether we really need one, or not!

 

Republican legislators have joined in an unholy alliance with the mollycoddling Liberal Democrats to buy the voter’s temporary approval again!

 

Everyone who earns less than $75,000 per year will get a check for $600 along about May, we will all race out and spend it on a Chinese television, Walmart will have one slightly improved quarter, and our children will pay for it.

I am sure glad we elected all those highly-responsible erudite scholars of economy to Congress to work their wizardry upon our miserable souls.

I am probably one of the few bloggers on the net that actually does need the money, and Lord knows I will rush out and spend it. I will probably be paying overdue energy bills from the winter with it. So the Arabs will get mine, instead of the Chinese.

I would really like to be buying an American-made hybrid subcompact commuter vehicle with it, to reduce my daily expenses and our dependence on Arab oil, but it would not come close to making a down payment on the vehicle Detroit refuses to make for me, anyway.

I am sure that I am not alone in believing that, if we are going to go farther in debt to stimulate consumer spending and prop up our slowing economy, we should not be enriching the Chinese, the Arabs, or any other foreign economy in the process.

 

We should be trying to keep our money in this country, supporting American industry!

 

I know this is a concept that violates the god-given right of the Clintons and our Congress to sell their influence to the highest foreign bidder, and surely hasn’t entered anyone’s mind in Washington since the 16^th Amendment opened the bidding for them, but I think it novel and it might better fit the original constitutional mandate of our Congress. 

 

Borrowing more money from the Chinese to stimulate a greater negative balance of trade with China is like paying Coolies to raid Fort Knox and ship our entire National Gold Reserves to our only formidable enemy on this Earth in exchange for a few plastic and pot metal baubles.

 

A tax rebate in the form of vouchers that could only be used to buy American-made, energy-efficient big ticket items, and then could be returned to the federal government by retailers or manufacturers in payment of their tax obligations, would stimulate our economy, support American industry, reduce our energy dependence, cost us no cash - no more foreign debt, and would keep our money here.

 

There are many tax reforms also needed to stimulate prudent consumer spending, employment, savings and investment in this country that I will address shortly.

But, call me crazy, I think this makes more sense than writing Billions in rubber checks, and, in my bid for President of the Universe, is definitely part of my stimulus package.

An Open Letter to All Republican Voters:

 

We are facing the most important election of modern times…

For the future of our children and our country, we cannot afford to lose!

Once again there is no Ronald Reagan in this race, we must face that fact.

We must also face the fact that none of our Republican leaders are Great Communicators, most are corrupt and inept nitwits, or they wouldn’t have lost both Houses of Congress in the last election. We should take no instruction from the party establishment.

In fact, we are faced with a large slate, crowded with professional politicians, nearly any one of which would still be much preferable to ‘Billary’ or “Osama Obama”.

However, every one also has some seriously fatal flaw that precludes me from wholeheartedly supporting them.

So, for the sake of our country and our children, let’s lose the emotion and be pragmatic.

Who could form a Republican ticket that is the most electable, nation-wide?

 

Fact: Historically, the American People do not willingly elect Senators!

The couple of times it has happened, those elections were highly tainted with fraud.

The Founding Fathers designed the Senate for elder statesmen, having no further political aspirations, to compromise their principles with each other in order to achieve a minimum 60% consensus to accomplish anything for the good of the Nation.

Thus, the longer one is a Senator, the more compromised votes he has made, and the more votes everyone can find to distrust him over.

In a free and fair election, we are bound to win against any of the Democrats, all Senators, unless we make the same mistake, and nominate a Senator, also.

In which case, the man who has been most compromised, i.e., in the Senate the longest, will most definitely lose.

So, both John McCain and Fred Thompson are out from the start, even if they weren’t divorced cheaters, and McCain is a proven, consistent traitor to our conservative cause, and his fellow POW’s in the “Hanoi Hilton”.

I do not wish to denigrate McCain’s military service, none of us can say for sure that we could have resisted the same torture, but he is not a “hero”, the NVA tortured all prisoners, but they found the weakness in John McCain.

Time and again, when the goin’ gets tough, McCain gets goin’ over to the other side!

 

Fact:  Historically, the American People do not elect divorcees, or known cheaters!

Ronald Reagan was the only divorced man America has ever elected (I believe, only because Jane Wyman left him for political reasons and he wasn’t a cheater), and none of these characters are the Great Communicator.

A very wise man once told me, “Never do business with a man who cheats on his wife; if he lies to his best friend on this Earth, there is no one he will not lie to!

The most devout Christian nation on Earth, Americans love to vote for a man who still loves and honors “the wife of his youth”. We love a happy ending, and to see a life-long happily-married couple is the ultimate happy ending!

Character does matter to us.

 

That narrows the field to four: Huckabee, Hunter, Paul, and Romney.

Fact: The American People do not elect people with strange names.

Every President freely and fairly elected had an English, or Scotch/Irish, name, with the sole exception of General Eisenhower, whose German name was slightly Anglicized, and who was the ultimate war hero, on a par with General George Washington.

Italian names are the kiss of death, due to subconscious association with the Mafia.

All of these remaining four have English names, though most would consider Huckabee to be a little strange, and some also find it a little strange for people to have two first names, like Ron Paul, though either is marketable.

In today’s “War on Terror”, Duncan Hunter definitely has the most marketable name, though Mitt Romney is also marketable.

 

Fact: American Women will decide who will be elected as our President.

Women are the majority of the electorate, and the influential heads of more families.

Most women do not vote on logic, just emotion. They vote for security for their children, but they judge that on looks.

Most women do not trust another woman to provide that security for their children, as they know she will have their same bias toward her own kids, but they expect it of a man.

The most desirable man, and President, to a woman’s eye, is young, tall, rich, handsome, and faithful to his mate; a full head of dark hair shows his youth, virility and vitality.

Mitt Romney wins this one, hands down!

 

Fact: Americans vote their pocketbook! Always have, always will!

Most Americans trust a business man, more than a professional politician, to hold their purse strings. Businessmen and fiscal conservatives love Romney.

We should all appreciate his managerial talents, and his message for Michigan that we do not have to accept the loss of our high paying industrial jobs, in favor of McCain’s idea that we can re-educate half our workers to flip hamburgers for the other half.

 

Only Duncan Hunter is stronger on rebuilding American industry than Mitt Romney.

If Duncan Hunter was a supporter of the Flat Tax, instead of the Fair Tax, I would walk on hot coals to carry his banner, nearly the same exact problem with Mike Huckabee.

If Ron Paul would stop making wild claims about thinking we can put the genie back in the bottle in Iraq, I would walk on those coals to the ends of the Earth for him.

 

I know that our nitwit Republican leadership is trying to foist either McCain, or Giuliani, upon us, but we must resist.

 

We have proven here in Iowa that we, the people, still own the process.

We nominated the man who could not afford to buy us, but, we must not hate the rich man who can, we’ll need his money to win the general election.

 

So, pragmatically, I realize that our candidate must be Mitt Romney, hopefully, with Mike Huckabee so close on his heels going into the convention that Mitt is forced to take Mike as his VP to amass their delegates to keep McCain and Giuliani off of our ticket.

 

In Liberty, Larry M. Aden