Sunday, July 30, 2017

It's another wonderful day in our nuclear neighborhood....

The Nuclear Genie Is Out of the Bottle,
and It's America's Fault
by Pastor Paul J. Bern
To view this in any browser, click here! :-)





On July 16th, 1945, the 'Trinity' nuclear test – the first-ever nuclear bomb – was detonated in New Mexico, at the Alamogordo Test Range, plunging humanity into the Atomic Age. Less than a month later, the first nuclear bomb ever used in wartime was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, and a second one was dropped on Nagasaki less than two weeks after that. In the first blast at Hiroshima, well over 100,000 people were instantly vaporized in the initial explosion, and the death toll at Nagasaki was tens of thousands higher. Over the following month or so, over a million more individuals died from the aftereffects of radiation poisoning. But, what is generally not known – especially here in America with its propaganda machine otherwise known as our “free press” – is that the US use of nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War 2 was unnecessary. Let's not forget that the winners of wars are the ones who write the history books, and the US is no exception. The fact of the matter is that by the summer of 1945, Japan had already been bombed back to the stone age. In point of fact, Japan was already attempting to start negotiating for peace. But the Japanese wanted to do it secretly, so as to not alarm the Japanese people (sound familiar?), and US military leaders wanted the announcement to be public. And so the die was cast, and the rest is history.



In the late 1940's Russia's leader and dictator Josef Stalin acquired an atomic weapon through quite a lot of espionage and outright theft, much to the discredit of America's “intelligence” community. As a response, the US supplied England and France with the technology and experience needed to build a few bombs of their own. By this time it was the 1950's, and within just a few years Communist China similarly developed their first atomic weapons. By the 1960's, other countries such as Israel, India and Pakistan had nukes as well. The genie was out of the bottle, and there was no putting it back. It was too late. Fast forward to the present day and we find America's latest nuclear adversary to be North Korea, who just tested their first nuclear-capable ICBM. And it all started with one nuclear test in the New Mexico desert in 1945. I have been studying up on this as of late, knowing that we are living in the End Times, and that the world as we have known it is drawing rapidly to a close. The first verse I have found that corresponds to these times and the accompanying nuclear proliferation can be found in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament, chapter 7 and verse 7, which reads as follows: “After that, in my vision at night I looked, and there before me was a fourth beast – terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had large iron teeth; it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. It was different from all the former beasts, and it had ten horns.”



To put this into context, Daniel had a vision in chapter seven where he saw four “beasts” come up out of the sea. The sea in Bible prophecy usually always symbolizes all the peoples of the world – that is, humanity more so than nations. The first “beast” was like a lion, but it had eagle's wings. What country uses a lion as its symbol? Great Britain. The eagle's wings, then, represent America, whose symbol is an eagle, and who is an offshoot of the former British Empire. OK, so what's the second one, you ask? The second beast Daniel saw in his vision looked like a bear. What country uses a bear as its national symbol? Russia. And Daniel's third beast looked like a leopard, which symbolizes Germany. The fourth beast which is unlike all the rest could only be the United States, since it has the most powerful military force in human history. But what do the ten horns represent? Could they be nuclear powers? To find the answer to this question let's go to the Book of Revelation chapter 18.



The first 3 verses read as follows: “After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his splendor. With a mighty voice he shouted, 'Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a home for demons and a haunt for every evil spirit, a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird. For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. The kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.'” Who or what is “Babylon the Great”? Some say it was the Roman Empire, still others the Ottoman Empire since it was intertwined with Islam, still others say it's the Vatican, and I even saw a video on You Tube a while back that suggested it represents the British Monarchy (I took that one with a grain of salt). But upon closer imagination we find the answer further down in the Scriptures, and I quote: “For her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes. Give back to her as she has given; pay her back double for what she has done. Mix her a double portion of her own cup. Give her as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself.



Now we're narrowing it down by a good bit! Could this be Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, or Mao's China? Or maybe the Kim family of North Korea? One thing is certain, whoever or whatever this represents is a really bad actor on the world stage. Also, since the Book of Revelation was written in (approximately) 90 A.D., these words were meant for a people or a country from far into the distant future. You know, like about 2,000 years give or take? Let's move on to the next verses to find out for sure. “In her heart she boasts, 'I sit as queen; I am not a widow, and I will never mourn.' Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her. When the kings of the earth who committed adultery with her and shared in her luxury see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her. Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry, 'Woe! Woe, oh great city, O Babylon, city of power! In one hour your doom has come!'” (Revelation 18, verses 5-10)



The use of the pronoun 'her' suggests that the apostle John was referring to a country, not a person. Moreover, death, mourning and famine symbolize waging war. Isn't that what America has been doing for most of the last 75 years, since the end of world war two? This passage of scripture implies that everything the US has done overseas for the last 75 years is going to come back around and bite us in our backsides, and at the worst possible moment. To top it all off, all this will happen in a single day. Now let's ask ourselves, couldn't this be some other country besides the US? Don't we call ourselves, 'the land of the free and the home of the brave'? America is, among other things, a bastion of democracy throughout the whole planet. So why does our text read, “Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her”? There are many who would argue that the USA is not guilty of any such charges.



But isn't it/she? Since 1950 the US military has slaughtered a combined total of 2.5 million innocent civilians while it waged its wars overseas. This parade of victims came from a wide variety of countries and their inhabitants, such as (from the oldest to the most recent) North Korea during the Korean war, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, and Syria has yet to be stabilized. This does not count all the 'black ops' that have been happening for decades on a regular, consistent basis which have killed untold hundreds of thousand more. Naturally, the Lame Stream Media isn't permitted to talk about this here in the US because their paymasters, the elite 1%, won't allow it. America cannot continue to do these things with impunity indefinitely! What goes around comes around, and it's about to be America's turn. Not because it's what I think – never mind that – it's what's in the Bible, which is the Divinely inspired Word of God! But look what Revelation tells us next: “



She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.” What kind of fire will this be? We only need to look down one more verse: “When the kings of the earth who committed adultery with her and shared in her luxury see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her. Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry, 'Woe! Woe, oh great city, O Babylon, city of power! In one hour your doom has come!” In one hour, wait a minute, is that right? That would be one monstrosity of a fire! The only thing we have today that resembles this scenario is a nuclear attack, and that in point of fact is America's ultimate fate. The USA is going to get nuked!! Where is this “city of power” located? Nobody knows for sure – so beware of those who claim to know – but if the Great Babylon is the United States it fits perfectly with this part of Revelation 18. The “great city” is likely either New York or Washington, the 'cities of power' contained in this example of Biblical prophecy. It is also written in Psalms 46: 9, “He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth, he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire.” This is what the prophet King David said would happen to all forms of warfare in the End Times we live in. This is why America stands judged, because of her incessant warfare!



According to a 2016 report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), nine nations — the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — possess approximately 16,300 nuclear weapons in total. This is an obscenity because it's enough atomic power to blow up every city on the planet several hundred times over. But it's even more than an obscenity, it is utter madness and insanity to even consider creating such destruction and loss of life! But still, that's only nine countries that have nukes, so who's the tenth one, the one that completes the symbolism of Daniel's ten horns that he saw on the fourth beast? It has got to be Iran, there is no other explanation that I can think of, at least for now. No other country is as close to developing a bomb as Iran, everybody knows that. But this is a prophecy that has yet to come to pass.



But you can all be sure that this will be happening in the near future, no doubt about it! And once it does, Daniel's prophecy about the beast with the ten horns will be fulfilled. Since the British Empire and two world wars that were initiated in part by Germany have come and gone, this is the only part of this prophecy that has yet to be fulfilled. Once that happens, once Iran gets its hands on its first nuclear weapon – which is only a matter of time – the prophecy will be fulfilled and the stage will be set for world war three, which will be a brief but exceptionally deadly nuclear exchange (more on that in a separate message later). If it involves Iran and Israel as I suspect, then surely America and Russian will become involved sooner or later. And that's when world war three will really get started. It's all getting very close now. Prepare yourselves accordingly if you have not yet done so. We are just about out of time. Watch out and pray continuously!

Friday, July 28, 2017

Catherine Austin Fitts: HOW TO SAVE OUR NATION & OUR LIVES BEFORE IT'S T...

Free book excerpt from "Occupying America" by Pastor Paul J. Bern

Occupying America: book contents plus free sample


Table of Contents

Chapter One
A Commentary On Modern Revolutions ---------- page 3

Chapter Two
The Occupation Chronicles ------------------------ page 27

Chapter Three
A Documentary of a Broken System ------------- page 56

Chapter Four
Capitalist Implosion: The Warning Signs -------- page 94

Chapter Five
Class Warfare: The Attack of The Elites On The 99%
-------------------------------------------------------- page 128

Chapter Six
Counterattack: The Second US Civil War ------ page 168

Chapter Seven
Ways to Replace a Broken System -------------- page 211

Chapter Eight
The United States of America: Under New Management
-------------------------------------------------------- page 249


Book Excerpt

Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.

Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. It is nothing but a legalized Ponzi scheme, and all Ponzi schemes eventually implode.

When the history is finally written, though, it's likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritizing of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side. As I see it, if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favor anyone possibly can.

The Wall Street protests must grow and spread across this country because they are the only realistic hope for change remaining for the 99% of Americans falling behind in this broken economy. Sad to say, but democracy in the land of the free and home of the brave simply no longer works. Big corporations and the wealthy have hijacked the political system for decades with their hefty donations to various political campaigns. Their contributions guarantee that bought-off politicians pass laws and tax breaks to their benefit. It is no secret, everyone is aware of how the system works, and it must be called for what it is: legalized bribery.

With traditional democratic political methods useless, what recourse do ordinary Americans have left? We are now witnessing the only real avenue left: ordinary citizens taking to the streets and demanding change to the rigged economic system that leaves 99% of them behind. It is only a start, but a vital one. Every day more people are awakening to the stark realization that the political and economic system in this country is stacked against them and getting worse.

During the Vietnam era, because they were directly affected, young people took to the streets to protest the war. America's young males were subject to a draft, and the prospect of being shipped off to die in a war they didn't believe in angered them a great deal. And so the war planners wised up and did away with the draft, but look at what has replaced it. America now has perpetual wars for oil, using a "volunteer" military, many of whom have enlisted due to lack of other opportunities. Seemingly unaffected by post-Vietnam wars, students and other young people have been politically inactive since the early 1970s.

But that is coming to an end. Young people are finding few if any jobs awaiting them when they get out of college (that's assuming they were fortunate enough to afford the high tuition). They graduate with no income coming in, but years of student loan debt to pay back. Those without a college or high school degree are even worse off. All of them see the sad reality, that the American Dream is only for the privileged few. If these demonstrations and protests continue to grow and expand, both here and abroad, the big banks, oil companies, billionaires and politicians will have to pay attention and give some ground. Either that, or face the prospect of violent revolution.

To get a print copy just click here; also available in audio format here
For digital format (phones, readers, tablets) please click here! Many thanks to all.....

Sunday, July 23, 2017

The Science of Marijuana PBS Documentary

The News Media, Jesus and the Truth

Twenty-Four Gross Injustices That The
Mainstream Media Still Won't Discuss
by Pastor Paul J. Bern
To view this in any browser, click here! :-)


During the days of Nazi Germany from the early 1930's up to the mid-'40's, there was a branch of the government called "The Ministry of Propaganda" that dished out a torrent of profane distortions about Jewish people, and later the outcome of the war itself. It was headed by a guy named Joseph Goebbels, who committed suicide at the end of the war rather than face capture, which would surely have been followed by a death sentence at the Nuremberg Trials. Today in America, we have a similar position within the White House staff that we call the Press Secretary, who can be seen regularly on the evening news. He serves the same function, and his/her job is to spoon-feed the media the information du joir of the day. Everybody knows that the media is told what to say and how to say it, and yet there a few protests about it, giving me a feeling of dismay at times. Today's message, in light of the recent events involving still more police shootings of unarmed Americans, is my small contribution towards demanding some truth from our news sources. No more US Government propaganda please, uncle Sam, we have all had a belly-full already!



For decades, the mainstream media in the United States has been accustomed to being able to tell the American people what to think and how to think it. Unfortunately for them, a whole lot of Americans are starting to break free from that paradigm and think for themselves, and the reason can be summed up in two words – information technology. A Gallup survey from 2014 found that over 60 percent of all Americans “have little or no trust” in the mainstream media. That number now exceeds 80%. More people than ever are realizing that the mainstream media is giving them a very distorted version of the truth (“Truth? You can't handle the truth!!”). But now thanks to the Internet, the “alternative media” has exploded in popularity. People want to hear about the things that the mainstream media doesn’t really want to talk about. They want to hear news that is not filtered by corporate bosses and government censors. They are hungry and thirsty for some real truth, and they know that they are not getting it from the mainstream media. If only they knew Jesus as I do! They wouldn't be hungry and thirsty any more, because he said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. (Matthew 5: 7) This is one of the primary reasons why people are doing away with cable TV! It's not just the money saved when they unsubscribe, it's the fact that everybody knows everything we are watching is a load of B.S., and we're sick and tired of all the lies and distortions!



We are watching a media revolution happen, and many in the mainstream media today are totally freaking out about it. In fact, some in the mainstream media have even begun publishing articles that mock the American people for not trusting them. For example, a recent CNN article entitled “Still ‘Paranoid’ After All These Years” portrayed Americans that don’t trust the media as paranoid conspiracy theorists that have left rationality behind. Welcome to 21st-century America. Look around. Trust is hitting historic lows. Less than 15% of Americans have a favorable view of the federal government, a decline of 31% since 2002, according to the Pew Center for People and the Press. Gallup has Congress’ approval rating down in the low teens, after nearing single digits in 2013 and staying there for over a year. And the news media aren’t much better off. “Negative opinions about the performance of news organizations now equal or surpass all-time highs on nine of 12 core measures the Pew Research Center has been tracking since 1985,” a Pew report said last summer. The article goes on to make it sound like it is very irrational to not trust the media, but in this day and age that mistrust has become mandatory! Blindly trusting someone else to do our thinking for us is very dangerous and very dumb!



Anyone that does not acknowledge that the mainstream media has an agenda is either not being honest with themselves, or they are complicit with the powers that control it. The mainstream media presents a view of the world that is very favorable to their big corporate owners and the big corporations that spend billions of dollars to advertise on their networks. The mainstream media is the mouthpiece of the establishment, and the world view being promoted on the big networks is going to be consistent with the economic, financial, political and social goals of the establishment. The mainstream media loves to talk about things that fit with that agenda, and they don’t like to talk about things that suggest that there is something wrong with that agenda. And so here are 24 facts that the mainstream media really doesn’t want to talk about – period, and in no particular order of importance (because they're ALL important!):



#1) The mainstream media doesn’t really want to talk about the fact that gun sales are absolutely skyrocketing all over America. Is it any wonder?
#2) They also don’t really want to talk about the fact that disarming the population has resulted in some of the most horrific massacres in human history.
  • 1911 – Turkey disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1915 – 1917 they murdered 1.5 million Armenians.
  • 1929 – Russia disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1929 – 1953 they murdered 20 million Russians.
  • 1935 – China disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1948 – 1952 they murdered 20 million Chinese.
  • 1938 – Germany disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1939 – 1945 they murdered 16 million Jews.
  • 1956 – Cambodia disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1975 – 1977 they murdered 1 million educated people.
  • 1964 – Guatemala disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1964 – 1981 they murdered 100,000 Mayan Indians.
  • 1970 – Uganda disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1971 – 1979 they murdered 300,000 Christians.
#3) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that a bill allowing for the “indefinite military detention of US citizens on American soil” has already been passed by the U.S. Senate and signed into law by president Obama. Never mind that it's completely unconstitutional (see US Constitution, Bill of Rights, 4th Amendment).
#4) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that volcanoes all along the Pacific ocean's Ring of Fire are roaring to life. It seems like a new eruption is being reported every few days now. In fact, a red alert has been issued by the USGS for a massive volcano that sits along the border between Chile and Argentina, as well as for the super-volcano at Yellowstone National Park. An eruption there could devastate much of North America, killing millions.
#5) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the use of genetically engineered seeds has caused on explosion of new “super weeds” that are incredibly difficult for farmers to kill.
#6) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that renowned trends forecaster Gerald Celente has been predicting a “financial disaster” somewhere between September 2017 to as late as May 2018, but no later and more likely sooner.
#7) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that it is easier to get into Harvard than it is to get a job as a flight attendant in America today.
#8) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that nearly 400 TSA employees have been fired for stealing from travelers since 2003. Our tax dollars hard at work. Nice.
#9) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that giant corporations such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft are funneling gigantic amounts of money through offshore banking havens such as the Cayman Islands in an effort to avoid taxes.
#10) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the U.S. dollar is in real danger of losing its status as the primary reserve currency of the world. It's no longer a question of if this might occur, but when. China and Russia are buying up all the world's gold and silver reserves. What does that tell you about their view of the US dollar?
#11) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the mainstream media always complains about what the president does or doesn't, when in actuality they should be doing a much better job keeping track of Washington lobbyists, Wall Street speculators, their bankers, and all their filthy lucre.
#12) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that there are government websites that give immigrants instructions about how to come over to our country illegally and then apply for SNAP benefits while formerly middle class American workers and their children starve for lack of work. Yes, America has always been a nation of immigrants, but never before at the expense of any of its citizens. Something is very wrong here (BTW, I don't blame the immigrants. They are economic refugees from the third world).
#13) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the U.S. economy has lost millions of jobs to nations where it is legal to pay workers slave labor wages. The mainstream media is totally married to the one world economic agenda that their corporate owners make so much money from, and so they say nothing as a steady stream of businesses and jobs continue to leave America.
#14) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that hunger and poverty are absolutely exploding in the United States at the same time that they are telling us about the “economic recovery”.
#15) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that North Korea now has a three-stage rocket with enough range to potentially hit the western United States.
#16) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the United States Postal Service is losing 25 million dollars a day and is on the verge of financial collapse.
#17) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that our biggest oil supplier in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, still kills people for changing religions. They also continue to ignore the fact that all but 2 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals.
#18) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that political correctness has taken over America. The truth is that the media does not see any problem with that at all.
#19) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that nearly half a million employees of the federal government are making more than $100,000 a year.
#20) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the birth rate in the United States has fallen to an all-time low. The elite are absolutely thrilled that fewer babies are being born. Fewer of us means less competition for them.
#21) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that many major U.S. cities are seeing violent crime totally spiral out of control.
#22) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that America's election system is rigged from top to bottom.
#23) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that during the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. national debt grew by about as much as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office.
#24) They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the Federal Reserve created the conditions for every financial crisis since our country's inception, and their mismanagement of the economy has now brought America to the verge of another horrible economic downturn. Maybe the Federal Reserve should be nationalized so that printing and coining money returns to the auspices of the US Treasury like our Constitution specifies. All the US top-tier leadership needs to do is return to the original Constitution. It's the perfect way to wipe out the so-called national debt. Because America's so-called “national debt” has been manufactured by the same entities who are its lenders. Our “national debt” is fake news.

Saturday, July 22, 2017

Here's another book sample from Pastor Paul J. Bern, "Cannabis Legalization and the Bible: Compatible or Not?" links at bottom

 Six Ways That Cannabis Criminalization

Defies All Reason and Logic

[1. Pot smokers punished more than sex offenders] Drugs are so reviled in the US and many other parts of the world that using them is considered worse than any other crime. If you commit violent crimes – arson or rape, for instance – a judge will determine all the facts of the case and consider your criminal record, if any, in sentencing you to prison or not. But if you are caught selling or growing marijuana, there are mandatory minimum sentences involved at the federal and most state levels that take the power of sentencing out of a judge’s hands and turns it into a Chinese take-out menu – a marijuana plant from Column A, within 1000 feet of a school from Column B, that will be 10 years with no parole. Next!

Still don’t believe drug use is considered worse than violent crime? Then why does our federal government pay a bounty for drug arrests, but no other arrests? These monies are called Byrne Grants and they are awarded to local police department for the express purpose of fighting drug crime. In actuality, they incentivize police to go after low-level drug offenders for the easy stat-padding drug arrest, rather than the tougher-to-catch-and-prosecute drug kingpins or the actual violent criminals out there. Still not convinced? Then explain how the Supreme Court could find the death penalty unconstitutional to punish the raping of a child, but there still exists on the books a federal death penalty for growing 60,000 marijuana plants? Or how a serial raping arsonist in Montana gets less time than a guy who merely rented space to a medical marijuana dispensary? Or how a guy who pleads no contest to sodomizing a four-year-old in Oklahoma gets a year behind bars but a college student with a dorm room stash could get life in prison? Or why there are more arrests for marijuana possession almost every year than for all violent crimes combined?

[2. The separation of church and weed.] Even an American educated in one of our fine public schools knows our Constitution recognizes freedom of religious expression. You can be Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, or have no religion at all, and that right is so important our Founding Fathers made it part of our First Amendment. You may practice your religion any way you choose, so long as you don’t violate other laws. But even then, our courts have given believers some latitude to violate laws in the name of religion. Nowhere is this more evident than in the use of drugs as a sacramental rite. A parent allowing their seven-year-old child a gulp of wine at the Olive Garden might earn a visit from Child Protective Services, but the same gulp at the cathedral is acceptable for children when it symbolizes the Blood of Christ. Our Supreme Court ruled several years ago that the use of an illegal Schedule I drug can be allowed for adherents of a South American religion using ayahuasca tea, a powerful hallucinogen that is considered a sacrament by their believers. Our Congress even went so far as to pass a Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to protect such use when the Supreme Court allowed the State of Oregon to deny unemployment benefits to two Native Americans who were fired over sacramental peyote use. So it seems in the case of drug laws, the compelling state interest is preventing you from using drugs. Very few people use ayahuasca tea or peyote, it doesn’t grow everywhere, the religions that find them sacred are well-established in historical tradition, and the sincere adherents are easily identifiable. So allowing a few native religious believers their powerful psychedelic sacraments isn’t going to seriously hinder any efforts to prevent you from using those drugs. But your herb stash? That’s different, because there are 26 million Americans who are toking at least once a year and pot grows like a weed. In that event, trying to stop anyone from using, buying, growing, or selling pot would become nearly impossible.

[3. A patient on one of side of the border and a criminal on the other.] It is easy enough to find examples where differing state laws make you a criminal on one side of an imaginary line but not on the other. That applies to the numerous states that have passed medical marijuana laws and their non-medical marijuana neighbors. But what people don’t realize about medical marijuana states is that most don’t recognize each other. Only Arizona, Delaware, Maine, Michigan, and Rhode Island of the currently 17 states that recognize medical marijuana will accept the cards/recommendations from other medical marijuana states. So California and New Mexico patients who cross the border into Arizona would be safe, but Arizona patients who cross into California or New Mexico could be arrested for marijuana possession. Nowhere is it more absurd than the case of the Pacific Northwest medical marijuana states, Oregon and Washington. Both states have virtually the same list of qualifying conditions for medical marijuana. Both states allow patients to cultivate more than a dozen cannabis plants. Both states allow patients to possess up to a pound and a half (680 grams) of usable medicine. But if a Portland patient crosses the Columbia River into Vancouver with 40 grams of pot, he’s a felon. If the Vancouver patient crosses into Portland with 28 grams of pot, she’s a felon. Lesser amounts get you a 24-hour mandatory minimum jail stay in Washington but only a ticket and loss of driver’s license (even if you weren’t driving) in Oregon. Can you imagine if getting your driver’s license was something you had to do for each state you wanted to drive through? Now imagine that instead of a driving license, we were talking about licensing whether or not you would be able to eat today and not suffer bone-wracking pain and spasms, and you had to renew this license at full cost every year.

[4. Fine line between legal gardening and a felony.] In those 17 medical marijuana states, trying to determine which pot smokers are healthy enough to deserve a cage and which ones are sick enough to protect from arrest is bound to lead to logical absurdities. Fourteen of the states allow patients or their caregivers to tend a garden to grow their own medicine. To deter large-scale growing operations, some states have implemented limits on the number of marijuana plants a patient may grow. In a state like Washington, this is simple enough, as the state has specified fifteen as the total number of plants allowed. But in Oregon and some other medical marijuana states, a distinction has been made between “mature” and “immature” marijuana plants. Oregon’s limit is the most generous, allowing six “mature” and eighteen “immature” plants, to accommodate the fact that patients have to keep a continuous cycle of plants coming into maturity in order to maintain a steady supply of medicine. However, the law completely abandons horticultural science in defining what a “mature” marijuana plant is. In nature, a mature plant is one that is producing flowers, or in the case of cannabis, the buds that patients are putting into bongs, vaporizers, and brownies. But in the Oregon Revised Statutes, a “mature” plant is one that is greater than 12 inches in any direction or is producing buds. So your thirteen-inch pot plant vegetating in the closet is “mature”, even though it is weeks from being mature. It would be like setting the limits of sexual consent based on how tall a child is. This has led to situations where growers are diligently following the law, tending six flowering mature plants and the next three sets of six plants in three stages, only to have one set shoot up from ten inches to fourteen inches over a weekend growth spurt. Now the grower has twelve “mature” plants, even though only the six mature plants can produce any marijuana, and he’s no longer a patient, he’s a felon.

[5. Feds denying that marijuana is medicine at all costs.] The government’s intransigence on the medical utility of cannabis is the most stubborn and hypocritical federal policy ever. The feds will tell you, with a straight face, that marijuana is a Schedule I substance and as such has no recognized medical value within the United States, even as seventeen states expressly recognize its medical value. Now if you complain about the 17,000 peer-reviewed research papers sitting in the federal 'PubMed' database that demonstrate medical use of cannabis, you’re barking up the wrong tree. This is a federal government that itself has patented the medical utility of cannabis and still tells you it is not medicine. As if that weren’t hypocritical enough, the US government maintains a pot farm at the University of Mississippi. This is the one legal weed grow in America, expressly allowed under the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs for the production of cannabis for research purposes. In 1975, a glaucoma sufferer named Robert Randall sued for the right to use marijuana, lest he go blind, and won. This decision led to the development of the compassionate, investigative new drug program that produced and delivered medical marijuana for Randall.

Shortly thereafter, more patients sued to get access to medical marijuana, expanding to a few more federal medical marijuana patients. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, AIDS activists began marshaling thousands of applications for HIV+ gay men who found marijuana to help combat the symptoms of their disease. So rather than expand the compassion to thousands who would have benefited, the Bush Administration in 1992 closed the program to new applicants and the Clinton Administration in 1999 declared it would not be reopened. However, the program was not closed to the patients who had already been approved. Today there are four remaining federal medical marijuana patients who receive a tin of eight or more ounces of pre-rolled federal medical marijuana from the federal medical marijuana farm every month. But, federally speaking, there is no such thing as medical marijuana.

[6. The Drug Enforcement Administration forbids cultivation of a non-drug.] Nothing is more absurd in the war on marijuana than the ban on industrial hemp. If you don’t know, hemp is also cannabis, but cultivated differently as to produce a seed and fiber crop that is exceptionally low in any drug value. It takes anywhere from 2% to 4% THC content (tetrahydrocannabinol, the “high” ingredient in pot) for someone to cop a buzz off weed. Some of the finer medical marijuana varieties may top 15% THC content. By law and international agreements, industrial hemp must be produced at less than 0.3% THC content. It’s safe to say that there is a greater alcohol concentration allowed in a “near-beer” than THC concentration in hemp. There’s more THC in my bloodstream as I write this than is found in a field of industrial hemp plants. But even though there is absolutely no way one can use hemp as a drug, its cultivation is banned by the Drug Enforcement Administration, because it contains any amount of THC. If this standard were applied to other drugs, you’d never have another legal poppy seed bagel, because they contain trace amounts of opium. SWAT teams would be raiding your grandma’s house for the decorative poppies in her backyard garden, as they could actually be processed into heroin. This is even more maddening when you realize how keeping hemp illegal works against the DEA’s stated goal of reducing outdoor marijuana cultivation. Though some cops seem to think hemp would allow pot growers to hide their illegal crop, cross-pollination of hemp into marijuana makes both crops worse. The marijuana becomes less “druggy” and the hemp becomes less “industrial”. The last thing a marijuana grower wants next to his prized plants is a hemp farm.

What is the most dangerous activity you can engage in? If you guessed doing illegal drugs, you would be wrong. Extreme sports like big wave surfing, base or bunjey jumping, cave diving, white-water rafting and mountain climbing all have a higher rate of risk to life and limb. Yet the question of a ban on these behaviors beloved by "adrenaline addicts" is viewed as ludicrous, even when the risk of death, say, in climbing Mount Everest once (until recently, about 1 in 3) is greater than the annual risk of dying from heroin addiction (around 1% to 4%). Or consider mundane activities like driving: Car accidents are responsible for 1% of annual deaths nationwide. Cigarettes and alcohol do at least as much, if not more, harm to each user than heroin or cocaine. Alcohol, cocaine and heroin have a 3% to 15% rate of addiction, depending on how it is measured—and tobacco's rate is much higher. Yet the risks don't align well with their legal and social status, especially when you consider that marijuana is safer than any of the legal drugs. The reasons for this inconsistency around risk are complicated. Driving has huge personal and economic benefits. Risky sports are seen as noble challenges that foster the human will toward exploration, adventure and growth. When it comes to non-medical drug use, however, discussion of benefits tends to be either dismissed as delusional or simply stifled. 

I don't mention these facts to promote drug use – not at all! That I feel compelled to immediately include such a disclaimer underlines my point: Our values shape our perception of risk and the way we make drug policy. If we recognize only the risks and ignore the benefits, we fail to understand that the real problems are addiction and harm — not the substances themselves and the people who use them. For instance, when we talk about the “epidemics” of Oxycontin, methamphetamine or heroin, we rarely acknowledge that the majority of users never become addicted. Over the course of a lifetime, only about 10% to 15% of regular users ever get hooked for an entire lifetime. That risk is not insignificant: Few people would fly on a plane that crashed every tenth flight. But focusing on use as the main factor in addiction obscures what is actually at stake. There are, decade after decade, headlines about the fall of one drug and the rise of another. Yet the overall rate of people with addictions remains fairly constant. Although population differences and other variables make the numbers hard to compare exactly, a large national survey in 1990 found a 3.6% rate of illegal drug problems (such as abuse or dependence) in people ages 15 to 54 during the previous 12 months. The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which includes people from age 12 to those in their 80s or older, found a 3.5% rate of abuse or dependence in 2014, the latest year such stats are available. While that rate may not seem much lower, the difference is probably due to the later survey’s inclusion of people over 55, who are numerous and had a 2011 addiction or drug misuse rate of a mere 0.8% or less. It is worth noting that 1990 was the peak of fears about a non-ending crack epidemic; by contrast, today, while there are concerns about growing prescription opioid addiction, the actual rates have been steady since 2006.

Print edition available online from my website
Or, get it on Kindle, in Audio format, or view more titles on my Amazon page. Many thanks to all!

Friday, July 21, 2017

Anonymous How Can Anyone Ignore These Warnings?

Another free book excerpt from Author and Pastor Paul J. Bern

"Sole Survivor" by Rev. Paul J. Bern

A free sample from the book's author!

Watch the video at http://youtu.be/5Bxi7x0nUc0

Available in print, digital or audio formats on Amazon, Kindle, Nook, Apple and Goodreads. To learn more, go to www.pcmatl.org/books-and-donations 





From that day forward, the relationship between my adoptive father and myself was continually adversarial.

My parents both became nearly impossible to please, and I absolutely hated school anyway, so there we were at an impasse. They were always insisting that I get better grades, and I would respond by doing just enough work to get a passing grade. So every so often I would get another whipping with a belt, particularly around report card time. Sometimes it was because I had a lot of behavioral problems at school, other times it was for an unsatisfactory report card, and once for going over to the house of someone I knew from church to listen to their Beatles records (the Beatles were a very big deal during this time). I remember one day I just sat in my room after enduring yet another beating – I don't remember what it was for but that no longer matters – and cried to the point of sobbing uncontrollably about my whole situation. I was saying, “Why me, Lord? Why does it always have to be me that gets beat with a belt? Is my whole life going to be like this? Is there no way it can get any better?” It was at just that point that I heard what seemed like a soft, low voice. Although not audible in the human sense, it was just barely audible deep down from within me, and it said, “You can't possibly imagine the things I have in store for you”. I did not realize it at the time, but I had just had my first encounter with the true God. Although I understood the words well enough, I failed to grasp their meaning because I was only about eight years old. But I have always remembered what happened when I was alone in my room that day.

The next time I had an encounter with God – which interestingly enough never occurred when I was in church – was about a year later. By this time the abuse that had been going on had gradually gotten worse. The animosity between my parents and myself had grown a lot right along with it, and the beatings had become more frequent. I remember hating not just my parents, but my entire family situation as well as detesting school. Quite frankly, I was bored nearly to the point of insanity with school. Second grade was a rehashing of first grade, third grade a rehashing of the second, and so on, as if we needed to learn everything twice in order to grasp its meaning. I have heard some talk and read on the Internet about the “dumbing down” of America primary and secondary schools. Well, this has been going on ever since the 1960's at least, and probably even before that. It's just that no one noticed it at first because it began so gradually. To this day, education reform has been one of the causes I have undertaken in my adult life.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Biblical history mirrors current events -- again!

History Repeats Itself, Even in the Bible
by Pastor Paul J. Bern
To view this in any browser, click here! :-)




One of the hot-button issues facing the entire world, and particularly in the US, is that of economic inequality. We find ourselves in an intractable and intolerable situation where 99% of the country's wealth is concentrated into the hands of an elite few. As this situation is ongoing, the American people find themselves compelled to pay for the most expensive health care, higher education, and housing prices on the entire planet! Plus, we find ourselves taxed to death by a federal income tax whose legality is open to question, and hemmed in both politically and economically by an unconstitutional curtailment of our rights, all while having the world's largest prison population! This would be ridiculous if it weren't so serious. For this week's message, then, I want to share a passage of scripture that closely resembles our current situation, so go to your Bible app or open your Bible to the Book of Nehemiah chapter 5, verses 1-13, and I quote:


Now the men and their wives raised a great outcry against their Jewish brothers. Some were saying, 'We and our sons and daughters are numerous; in order for us to eat and stay alive, we must get grain.' Others were saying, we are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards and our homes to get grain during the famine.' Still others were saying, 'We have had to borrow money to pay the king's tax on our fields and vineyards. Although we are of the same flesh and blood as our countrymen and though our sons are as good as theirs, yet we have to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. Some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but we are powerless, because our fields and vineyards belong to others.'” (Nehemiah 5, verses 1-5)


To put all this in its proper context, the Old Testament Israelites had been conquered by the ancient Assyrians and had been in exile for many years. With Israel's first period of exile ending, they had begun to return from Assyria where they had been enslaved, and a great rebuilding process had begun in and around Jerusalem. There was, unfortunately, also a great famine going on at that time because there had not yet been a harvest, and this was creating a lot of problems. The above passage of scripture has striking similarities to what is happening throughout much of the world today. People don't have enough to eat. They have trouble meeting their financial obligations because prices are impossibly high. Back then they had to give away their sons and daughters as slaves – presumably sex slaves – because they had no other way to pay their debts. Today, some of our sons and daughters are still taken as sex slaves. It's just that they are taken by force and not by barter. The rest of us are slaves, too. It's just that the world is a lot more subtle about it than back then. We work our jobs – if we're lucky enough to have one of those – for pay that is oftentimes pathetic. Many younger workers don't realize how drastically wages have been cut in the last 15 years or so. So, there are striking parallels between the time of Nehemiah and today. Now, let me go on with the second half of today's scripture, beginning at verse 6.


When I heard their outcry and these charges, I was very angry. I pondered them in my mind and then accused the nobles and officials. I told them, 'You are exacting usury from your own countrymen!' So I called together a large meeting to deal with them and said, 'As far as possible, we have brought back our Jewish brothers who were sold to the Gentiles. Now you are selling your brothers, only for them to be sold back to us!' They kept quiet, because they could find nothing to say. So I continued, 'What you are doing is not right. Shouldn't you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of your Gentile enemies? I and my brothers and my men are also lending the people money and grain. But let the exacting of usury stop! Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the usury you are charging them – the hundredth part of the money, grain, new wine and oil.' 'We will give it back', they said. 'And we will not demand anything more from them. We will do as you say.' Then I summoned the priests and made the nobles and officials take an oath to do what they had promised. I also shook out the folds of my robe and said, 'In this way may God shake out of his house and possessions every man who does not keep this promise. So may such a man be shaken out and emptied!' And the whole assembly said, 'Amen!' and praised the Lord. And the people did as they had promised.” (Nehemiah 5, verse 6-13)


There are striking similarities between what was going on in Israel during the time of the first rebuilding of the wall around Jerusalem and what is occurring in America today. Everything is financed. Nobody pays cash for their cars much anymore, and everybody uses credit cards to make purchases from a flat screen TV all the way down to a week's worth of groceries. We are forced to pay interest on everything we need – even the food we eat. This situation has gotten completely out of hand, and unless the government steps in and stops it the American people will find themselves forced into conflict with the government, the outcome of which could lead to another American civil war. In the first civil war, it was fought over ending the slavery of Black people. The second one will be a fight to end the enslavement of us all, and there are going to be casualties, so you may as well start getting used to that idea. This is what was occurring during the time of the prophet Nehemiah.


Nehemiah then told the authorities, “What you are doing is not right. Shouldn't you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of your Gentile enemies? I and my brothers and my men are also lending the people money and grain. But let the exacting of usury stop!” Nehemiah and his brothers and enlisted men were helping those in need as best they could, but they were charging no interest for their services. They did it for free because they realized they were in a crisis situation that called for emergency measures to make sure everyone got their basic needs met. Their compatriots, on the other hand, were guilty of price gouging and criminal exploitation against their own countrymen, and in some cases even their own families. So Nehemiah told the nobles and officials to give it all back, very similar to an executive order issued by the President. Notice too, in verse 11, they were charging 1% interest, far less than what is being charged today (on the best of terms, 30 year mortgages are currently at just over 2.5%).


Imagine the uproar if such an executive order were issued today! I can almost see it now – president Trump giving a direct order to the banking and financial industries that all single family home loans were to be canceled immediately – would that be fun to watch or what? One thing is for sure – the American people are overburdened with excessive housing costs, combined with stagnant wages in the face of other rising living expenses like groceries. “We will give it back', they said. 'And we will not demand anything more from them. We will do as you say.' Then I summoned the priests and made the nobles and officials take an oath to do what they had promised.” Wouldn't it be awesome if we could do that today? Actually, we could, it's just that there is still insufficient political willpower among the American people. A national strike could be called – a mortgage strike. Everybody stopping their mortgage payments all at once would be the same as slaughtering the beast by starvation! But first, we should do a dry run using student loans as the pariah that this debt crisis has become. Then we call a meeting via social media, and make the powers that be promise to give us all some badly needed financial relief! Either that or we take to the streets and shut down entire cities.


I also shook out the folds of my robe and said, 'In this way may God shake out of his house and possessions every man who does not keep this promise. So may such a man be shaken out and emptied!' And the whole assembly said, 'Amen!' and praised the Lord. And the people did as they had promised.” The above example is what it looked like to issue a law that had some teeth to it back in those days. I can practically visualize president Trump calling his senior leaders into a conference room and telling everybody that everyone's mortgage, their student loans plus all unpaid medical bills will be canceled immediately and without preconditions. All the Wall Street bankers would have heart attacks, and debt collectors would have to go and find a new profession – just like myself. I was once a well-paid senior IT professional, but my career evaporated after the dot-com crash and I wound up working as a courier contractor for a local delivery company. I survived the changes I went through, and so will they because actually we are not so different after all. In closing let me also say those noblemen and government officials repaid those people they had exploited out of fear of the consequences from God. That fear of the Lord is largely absent here in modern times, but soon it will return, and then everyone will know exactly who God is.

Sunday, July 9, 2017

More on last week's message about the retaking of America (by popular demand)

A Follow-up to Last Week's Commentary


Last week for the July fourth holiday break, I published a warning stating that unless the American people organize and begin a campaign of passive resistance against the twin evils of Oligarchic capitalism and the Deep State that has enslaved us all (yes, I mean past tense), both ourselves and our children, plus and their children will find ourselves permanently enslaved. We will not be enslaved by the government because the government is little more than an arm of law enforcement whose paymasters are the mega-rich elite. And it is this Bilderberger elite who controls all the banking, which in turn funds the world's economies, who have hoarded 99% of the world's wealth, leaving us to scrap and skirmish for the remaining 1% of the leftovers. It is the super-rich elites who are the government's paymasters. It is with that thought in mind that I am posting this supplemental to last week's message, which you can find here or here. As you can see, this is an excerpt from my first book, which I published back in 2011. It is now in its third edition, which you can get on Amazon by clicking here.


The Battle Cry of the American People
(excerpt from, “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto” by Rev. Paul J. Bern)




When in the course of current events the constituency of the United States finds itself oppressed and hemmed in by that which governs us, and when the working people of this great country which I love so much finds itself with its backs against the wall due to circumstances and situations which are beyond our control, it naturally becomes the patriotic duty of every concerned American to stand up to and to oppose that which suppresses and restricts the God-given freedoms spelled out in our US Constitution. Moreover, we find ourselves forced to draw a line in the sand that guarantees the health, wealth and prosperity of us all against the ruling elites and their associates and family members, who are the real force behind all government funding including police, military and intelligence gathering. As peaceful and law-abiding citizens, we have been governed by the rule of law which is summarized in a document that working Americans continue to hold in highest esteem, the Constitution of the United States, in keeping with the time-honored traditions passed down to us by our founding fathers. But lately our sacred Constitution has been bastardized and prostituted not only by those in power within the federal government, but more directly by the armies of corporate lobbyists who have invaded Washington and seized control of our executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, for the sole express purpose of engineering a bloodless coup de etat that is being carried out not by bullets but by vast sums of money that are at once immoral, illegal, and a veritable avalanche of green and greedy corruption. The sole express purpose of this financial warfare is to forcibly liquidate the middle and working classes in this great country of ours. This is being done deliberately and with sinister calculation by the wealthiest Americans from Wall Street to a myriad of corporate boardrooms all across America, orchestrated by the unconstitutional Federal Reserve and its minions, for the sole express purpose of focusing and concentrating all available wealth into the top 1% of income earners and big business owners all across America. In fact, I further submit and assert that this is all being done at the expense of the US middle and working classes, the result of which is to force an ever-increasing number of working Americans from all walks of life into ever-increasing poverty from which there is no escape.



With mass unemployment, a veritable storm of foreclosures, increasingly unaffordable health care, and higher education rapidly becoming ever further out of reach for the US middle class and particularly for the poor and minorities, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the middle class and working people here in the good old USA finds themselves surrounded and besieged by an army of the usurpers of power in our country. As a direct result more and more working Americans, the people who are the backbone of the US economy, are forced into moving in with friends, family members and even strangers to stave off what would otherwise be a pandemic outbreak of homelessness and despair. And it's all because people can't find jobs.



In point of fact, the are now more college-educated people living in homeless shelters, under bridges or in their cars – if they are lucky enough to still own a vehicle – than at any other time since the Great Depression of the 1930's. And that is a social injustice and a moral outrage tantamount to class warfare! Indeed, the circumstances and situations that the middle and working classes in the US find themselves today are a series of gross social and economic injustices that demands a sharply focused and well-coordinated response from the entire populace, a rebuttal and decisive counterattack designed and intended to right, correct and re-balance US political power back into the hands of the overwhelming majority of American citizens to whom it rightfully belongs. There can be no doubt that class warfare has been declared in the US, perpetrated by the wealthy against the middle and working classes, for the sole express purpose of eliminating from society the constitutional majority of working Americans, with the end result being the complete and merciless liquidation of middle and working class wealth, general prosperity, and even our health. This has been accomplished by the largest transfer of wealth in all of human history, and it has been manifested in four different ways.



First, the employment of American workers has been decimated by closing down manufacturing facilities and shipping jobs overseas to the third world for pennies on the dollar. The result of this has been mass unemployment of many millions of American workers, and those jobs in the American manufacturing sector which was once the world's largest, and whose direct result was victory in World War Two, are very likely to never return. One direct effect this has had is the gradual elimination of labor unions in this country, and the US labor movement is now on life support as a result. All the wages of the blue collar sector of the US economy are now redirected into the pockets of the top 1% of the American populace in terms of net wealth, not to mention the benefits and retirement pensions of these same people who made these corporations into the mega-companies that they are today.



Second, the retirement savings of the middle and working classes have been severely compromised or even liquidated altogether by the crooked and devious manipulations of Wall Street bankers, the World Bank and the IMF, plus all the market speculators, hedge fund managers and corporate boards of directors who engineered the largest swindle in human history back in 2008. This criminal act resulted in the US government bailout known as TARP, an $850 billion bank robbery of the US Treasury conceived and carried out by the same Ponzi schemers who ran the US economy into the ground in the first place, with the Federal Reserve conveniently stepping up with a solution at just the right moment. The cost of this bailout has been put on the backs of the middle and working classes, their children and grandchildren, and has generated a federal government budget deficit that has exceeded $20 trillion dollars as I write this, a staggering sum that threatens to bankrupt the country and destroy the formerly good credit rating of the United States.



As a matter of fact, in only one generation our great country that I love so much has been transformed from the world's greatest lender to its greatest borrower, with the majority of this debt being financed by China and Japan. One of these days China is going to get tired of lending us money and will at that point call in the debt, which America will likely not be able to repay, particularly if China refuses to accept US dollars as a form of repayment – which is entirely possible. If the value of the dollar were to collapse for any reason, that is exactly what would occur. I shudder to think of what would happen next, with China taking large chunks of American collateral to satisfy this crushing debt load. This could even lead to Chinese troops on our western shores occupying whole cities in a worst case scenario. The final collapse of the US economy would inevitably follow, descending into another American civil war that will make the current conflicts in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Libya look like a day care center in comparison.



Third, the largest transfer of wealth in human history is being enforced by runaway prices for food, utilities, housing and transportation, not to mention tuition for higher education. These tuition increases are being deliberately engineered by wealthy elitists for the sole express purpose of putting higher education financially out of reach for an increasing majority of Americans. And those who do make it into colleges or universities are finding themselves buried under an overwhelming pile of student loans, some of which are so huge that they end up well into six figures, larger even than some home mortgages. Some of these student loans are so enormous that an increasing number of graduates find themselves moving back in with their parents, or sharing living quarters with friends and acquaintances, when they finally do graduate. These same hard-working graduates are now increasingly finding that they can't find suitable employment upon graduation, or are winding up in menial jobs that pay so poorly they can't repay their student loans. This ruins their credit ratings, making it even harder for them to find employment. What good is a four-year degree if you wind up flipping hamburgers, selling shoes or digging ditches? Meanwhile, the best jobs, the best educations, and the best incomes are reserved for the top 1% wealthy and their families.



Fourth, the largest transfer of wealth in human history is being further reinforced by a health care system that has become so outrageously expensive that over 24 million Americans can no longer afford health insurance as I write this. An increasing percentage of working Americans are one accident or catastrophic illness away from bankruptcy, and all without remedy, even with Obama-care in force. Worse still, the average cost of medical care for US senior citizens from the time they retire until their death is $260,000.00 based on a report published in Money magazine. As more and more US workers find themselves unable to afford long-term health coverage, an increasing number of people are putting off doctor and/or dental visits and not refilling needed prescriptions for purely financial reasons, and the physical and mental health of these hapless and impoverished individuals slowly erodes away as a direct consequence.



There are tens of millions of formerly middle class people just like me all across the country who find themselves in similar circumstances to varying degrees of severity. Many have not been as fortunate as me. They have lost jobs or entire careers like I have, been forced out into the street due to the ongoing epidemic of foreclosures throughout America, had their cars repossessed leaving them with no way to get to work assuming that they are lucky enough to still have jobs, and are hounded by collection agencies for debts great and small. Too many still have no access to health care except to show up at the local emergency room with no way to pay the bill, putting them even deeper into debt than they already are. They have watched their pensions and their retirement savings evaporate due to market manipulations by unscrupulous “financial managers” who earn obscene bonuses whether they succeed or fail, and all at the expense of their clients. Either that or they have spent their savings during interminably lengthy periods of unemployment after their jobs were downsized or out-sourced overseas to the third world, never to return again.



The same goes for the best health care, the nicest cars and boats and even airplanes, not to mention the best retirement plans. All of this and more are systematically being procured by the top 1% income bracket at the expense of everybody else. It's steak for them and beans for the rest of us, and the portions for the remaining 99% are getting ever smaller each day. There is no question whatsoever that class warfare has been declared by the rich, powerful and well-connected, and all at the expense of over 99% of the rest of America. I think it's time to fight back, and that is why I began researching this topic back in 2010. My books, blogs and website are the new voice of protest and dissent in middle America. It is not right-wing nor is it from the left, but rather it is written from from the standpoint of middle America and from the vantage point of the oppressed multitudes who are crying out for relief and rescue from the perilous circumstances and life-threatening situations that working Americans from all walks of life find themselves in.



This book is a wailing civil defense siren ringing out across the land that I love. It is a warning buzzer on the basketball court of life signifying that a new American team of endless depth is now taking the court, sending the wealthy and powerful to the showers so that the stench of corruption can be washed from them, since they so desperately need it! It is the national anthem of true American patriotism being played before the start of a baseball game signaling that the new expansion team from middle America is about to take the field. This book is an air raid siren sounding out across the land of the rich and powerful as a warning that the middle and working class counterattack is about to commence. (My next book, “Occupying America: We Shall Overcome”, takes up where the first one left off, and predicts mass civil unrest in America in the near future.)



No more will we stand and stare or sit and grumble about having our houses, jobs, cars, savings, health, higher education and our retirements forcibly taken away wholesale while an ever greater portion of American wealth is concentrated into the hands of a small minority of multimillionaires. It is time for the middle and working classes to put our collective foot down and say “no more”! The time has arrived for us to take back our country by any and all means necessary. It is time for political power to be taken out of the hands of corporate America and their invading hordes of lobbyists and Wall Street bankers who would presume to take over our country by means of economic warfare, and to place it back into the hands of “we the people”, the true owners of this great country of ours. And we will do so knowing that history and our founding fathers are on our side, because they left us with a sacred document known as the Constitution of the United States that guarantees us that right. Our free speech and freedom of expression that are guaranteed under the First Amendment, as well as our right to keep and bear arms and to form militias that are guaranteed under the Second Amendment, will not be compromised or trampled upon. We will demonstrate in the streets, we will besiege government buildings, we will bombard our congressmen and women with phone calls and emails, we will form new political parties, we will organize and build new labor unions and worker-owned cooperative businesses, we will blockade wealthy neighborhoods, we will organize peaceful public events and non-violent sit-ins, we will call general strikes and consumer boycotts, and we will not stop until the balance of power in this country undergoes a paradigm shift back into the hands of hard-working Americans, particularly those who want full time jobs and can't find any.



We will fight from the highest mountains, from the lowest valleys, from the rooftops of buildings, we will fight in the cities and in the countryside, from the Jersey shore to the beaches of California, and from the Canadian border down south to the border with Mexico. We will not stop until we get our country back, and we shall never surrender. If the abusive government authoritarians label us as domestic terrorists, which we most certainly are not, then we will “remind” them that we are freedom fighters and American patriots. We shall fight with non-violent civil disobedience, we shall – so far as it is possible – demonstrate and march peacefully throughout the land, until we get our country restored to us, the workers of America, to whom it rightfully belongs!

Let there be no mistake – America is past being overdue for mass civil disobedience, and it is ripe for outright revolution if political and economic power are not restored to the people. If our First Amendment rights continue to be taken away, then we will fight back using our the Second Amendment rights instead. The conditions and circumstances in which the US middle and working classes find ourselves has become intolerable. President John Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful protest impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. Those words will soon come true, and the American people to whom this country rightfully belongs will make them so!



Personally, I am a very patient and thoughtful man. I work hard each day to be slow to speak and quick to listen because I know from experience that there is much wisdom to be derived from living my life this way. But by the same token, I am a Christian man and an angry minister whose patience is at its end. Just as surely as Jesus preached against the political and religious establishment of His day, in like manner I will do the same in the present day in order to emulate the man I regard as my personal Savior. So, if you truly care about the deteriorating state of our nation, if you are really concerned about the issues that we are faced with collectively as a people, and if you want to make a stand against social and economic injustice and outrageous inequality, then you owe it to yourself to join this movement and to read these books. It is my sincere hope that you will be inspired to take decisive action against the rich and powerful who have nearly finished enslaving us all.