Tag Archives: Government debt

The Dire State of Our Nation (What You Won’t Hear from the Politicians)

Posted on by
2

Unknown-18

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

No matter what the politicians might say about how great America is, the fact is that the nation seems to be imploding. Consider the following facts:

Our government is massively in debt. Currently, the national debt is somewhere in the vicinity of $18 trillion. More than a third of our debt is owned by foreign countries, namely China and Japan.

Our education system is abysmal. Despite the fact that we spend more than most of the world on education ($115,000 per student), we rank 36th in the world when it comes to math, reading and science, far below most of our Asian counterparts. Even so, we continue to insist on standardized programs such as Common Core, which teach students to be test-takers rather than thinkers.

Our homes provide little protection against government intrusions. Police agencies, already empowered to crash through your door if they suspect you’re up to no good, now have radars that allow them to “see” through the walls of your home.

Our prisons, housing the largest number of inmates in the world and still growing, have become money-making enterprises for private corporations that rely on the inmates for cheap labor.

We are no longer a representative republic. The U.S. has become a corporate oligarchy. As a recent survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen.

We’ve got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world compared to other western, industrialized nations.

The air pollution levels are dangerously high for almost half of the U.S. population, putting Americans at greater risk of premature death, aggravated asthma, difficulty breathing and future cardiovascular problems.

Despite outlandish amounts of money being spent on the nation’s “infrastructure,” there are more than 63,000 bridges—one out of every 10 bridges in the country—in urgent need of repair. Some of these bridges are used 250 million times a day by trucks, school buses, passenger cars and other vehicles.

Americans know little to nothing about their rights or how the government is supposed to operate. This includes educators and politicians. For example, 27 percent of elected officials cannot name even one right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment, while 54 percent do not know the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war.

Nearly one out of every three American children live in poverty, ranking us among the worst in the developed world.

Patrolled by police, our schools have become little more than quasi-prisons in which kids as young as age 4 are being handcuffed for “acting up,” subjected to body searches and lockdowns, and suspended for childish behavior.

We’re no longer innocent until proven guilty.  In our present surveillance state, that burden of proof has now been shifted so that we are all suspects to be spied on, searched, scanned, frisked, monitored, tracked and treated as if we’re potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.

Parents, no longer viewed as having an inherent right to raise their children as they see fit, are increasingly being arrested for letting their kids walk to the playground alone, or play outside alone. Similarly, parents who challenge a doctor’s finding or request a second opinion regarding their children’s health care needs are being charged with medical child abuse and, in a growing number of cases, losing custody of their children to the government.

Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family.

Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately.

Americans have no protection against police abuse. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later.

If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities.

Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police. As police forces across the country continue to be transformed into extensions of the military, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield.

Now these are not problems that you can just throw money at. As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, these are problems that will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things.

For starters, we’ll need to actually pay attention to what’s going on around us, and I don’t mean by turning on the TV news, which is little more than government propaganda. Pay attention to what your local city councils are enacting. Pay attention to what your school officials are teaching and not teaching. Pay attention to whom your elected officials are allowing to wine and dine them.

Most of all, stop acting like it really matters whether you vote for a Republican or Democrat, because it doesn’t, and start acting like citizens who expect the government to work for them, rather than the other way around.

While that bloated beast called the federal government may not listen to you, you can have a great impact on your local governing bodies if you’ll just take a stand. This will mean gathering together with your friends and neighbors and, for example, forcing your local city council to start opposing state and federal programs that are ripping you off. And if need be, your local city council can refuse to abide by the dictates that continue to flow from Washington, DC.

All of the signs point to something nasty up ahead. The time to act is now.

How to End the National Debt

Posted on by
1

military_industrial_complex_by_party9999999-d55z8r1

One solution is to stop the war machine. At Boiling Frogs there’s a great recent post from Sibel Edmonds called “What National Debt? US Taxpayer Dollars Continue to Flow to the World’s Despots, Torturers & Human Target Practice Fields”. Among her findings:

Afghanistan gets around $7 Billion= $7,000,000,000. Now, don’t mistake this for our money spent on our war in Afghanistan. That’s in the trillions of dollars. That’s a separate deal. No, this money goes to Afghanistan’s government – known for being crooks, criminals, heroin dealers, and terrorist breeders. They take the money, and misplace it- so the money, some of it, ends up with the guys we are supposedly bombing and waging war against. Then we point at those guys and say, hey, you see these armed terrorists, and then we go bomb the hell out of them. They take the money and invest it in some highly lucrative poppy fields and heroin production, so that we can spend billions of dollars pretending to destroy those poppy fields and production centers.  And then we give more money to these government guys, so that we can go and bomb them some more, and target more poppy fields … and the cycle continues, and continues. Trust me, it makes sense …Not necessarily to you and me, but it makes lots of sense to our fat war-profiteers here at home. After all, who gives a damn if things make sense to the people-since when have they counted?

Of course Israel gets quite a lion’s share. That goes without saying. They get nearly $3 billion=$3,000,000,000, in military aid and another large sum as financial aid for …well, let’s put aside all the diplomacy and political correctness and call a duck a duck: They get all the military and foreign aid so that they can turn around and spend those dollars through their powerful network and lobby here, to make sure we are all screwed up in developing and implementing our foreign policy. Does that make sense? Just think about the billions of dollars, directly or indirectly, spent by the Israel lobby to form and control our foreign policy, aka war-war and more war. They get all those billions of dollars in foreign and military aid, come over here, get us into wars so that we go spend trillions of additional dollars in wars and screwing up the world … and ourselves… and then give Israel more in foreign and military aid. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Of course not, It’s not supposed to make sense, dude!

Egypt gets its $1 billion of our tax money for … for what? Thank God it’s been in the news lately so even the mass ignoramus population in our nation is able to have an idea: guns and bullets to kill political dissenters, tanks and tear gas to be used against civilians, helicopters to fire at civilians below … bring about a coup de tat, and then bring about another one …Okay, so that one we get. We know what they use our money and military equipment for. No brainer. As to why we would shower Egypt with all this money and military power? Why in the world do we end up giving all these dollars to the side that gets in via a coup, and to the side who takes out those who brought about the coup and gets in with its own coup … and another coup after that, and many dead … Why? Well, duh. It’s because that’s what we do. Since when has our government been in the business of providing reasons and justification to its people? Since when do they worry about having to make sense to their lowly people? Maybe, referring to the paragraph above, maybe it’s because of the billions of dollars we gave Israel, which came back here and were spent so that our government would put together this policy of giving billions of dollars to many different sides in Egypt – so that they would continue coups and butcher their people.

Pakistan gets more or less $1 Billion. They get military aid to make sure they create desirable conditions so that our military can send its drones out there and bomb the hell out of them every day. Makes sense. No? All right, try this: How else do we give these drones and our other killing machines a real-life test run? See! Like shooting ranges, our government needs to go out there, pick countries (and their inhabitants), and make them viable war-practice fields.  Call them Human Target Practice Fields. You haven’t heard?! Nothing like a real test drive. Of course these things ain’t free, so of course the money has to be spent, thus, our foreign aid to countries like Pakistan. Why is the price so high? Because Pakistan is dangerous, and it has nuclear weapons that we made sure they would get, and that makes Pakistan kinda expensive.

Those are just the largest recipients. For the complete list read the full article here: http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/10/08/what-national-debt-us-taxpayer-dollars-continue-to-flow-to-the-worlds-despots-torturers-human-target-practice-fields/#more-24922

Another way to end the national debt is to switch to government issued debt-free money. Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse Blog describes what the process might look like:

#1) The U.S. Congress votes to take back all of the functions that it has delegated to the Federal Reserve and begins to issue debt-free United States Notes.  These United States Notes would have the exact same value as existing Federal Reserve Notes, and over time all existing Federal Reserve Notes would be taken out of circulation.

#2) The U.S. Congress nationalizes all debt held by the Federal Reserve.  That would instantly reduce the national debt by 1.6 trillion dollars.  In fact, there are a few members of Congress that have already proposed this.

#3) A Constitutional amendment is passed limiting future U.S. government deficits to a reasonable percentage of GDP.  Any future deficits would not be funded by borrowing.  Rather, future deficits would be funded by newly created United States Notes.  Therefore, the federal government would never again accumulate another penny of debt.

And it would be important to inject new money into the economy from time to time.  When existing money is destroyed or when the population grows it is important to inject a certain amount of new money into the system in order to avoid deflation.

#4) The existing national debt would be very slowly paid off with newly created United States Notes.  The U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars on interest on the national debt during fiscal year 2011, and over time this expense would go to zero.

If the national debt is paid off slowly enough, it would not create too much inflation.  I believe that it could be paid off gradually over 50 years without shocking the economy too much.

Read the full article here: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/debt-free-united-states-notes-were-once-issued-under-jfk-and-the-u-s-government-still-has-the-power-to-issue-debt-free-money

Such a solution may seem simple, but the obvious obstacle would be overcoming the immense political and economic influence of the central banks. The only U.S. presidents who challenged the central banking scheme were John F. Kennedy, James Garfield, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. Kennedy, Garfield and Lincoln were assassinated in office. Jackson would have been assassinated in an attempt in 1835 were it not for two guns miraculously misfiring. Jackson later famously stated:

The Bank is trying to kill me – but I will kill it!

…If the American people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system – there would be a revolution before morning.