An Emergency Message to the American Electorate

Four Good Ways to Turn the Tables on Tyranny

by Rev. Paul J. Bern

In the wake of America's latest tragic example of how our voting system simply does not work, many of us are left scratching our heads asking, “What kind of democracy is this?” Well, simply put, it isn’t a democracy at all. It’s a tyrannical oligarchy of the worst kind; one that’s disguised as a democracy and hidden behind the smoke and mirrors of political propaganda. Just because governmental decrees are no longer issued by royal fiat but are instead issued by lobbying and propaganda, doesn’t make it any less tyrannical. It is nothing more than inverted totalitarianism. And it is our responsibility, if we would be proactive citizens, to stop this totalitarianism in its tracks. The 99% – that's us – must turn the tables on the top 1% or we will simply not survive as a species on this planet. That's how serious the American people's predicament has become! It’s as simple as that. Our strategy should be not only to confront the American empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. How? With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. “Resistance to tyrants”, Thomas Jefferson once said, “is obedience to God”. I think even the atheists would agree with that one, or at least up to a point. Here are four ways that I believe we can turn the tables on the tyrannical plutocracy that our government has descended into.

1.) Mock Plutocracy Warren Buffett once said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Wake up to the fact that the plutocrats have created their own economic apartheid. Money is the illusory carrot being dangled between you and the truth. The way the current oligarchy maintains its vice-grip on power is by making the people believe that it’s all okay because greed is good, and making money is very important, allegedly because with enough money comes the freedom to do what you want – like buying the rules made by government and funding lobbyists who significantly contribute to the laws that Congress writes and passes. While the world goes through the motions of getting poorer and poorer the moneyed elite are getting richer and richer, to the extent that it is costing people their lives. We must be able to muster the courage to put our foot down and draw a line in the sand. A people's declaration of emergency is needed. Mass civil unrest is clearly called for in this situation in which we find ourselves, and the summer of 2016 is only halfway done!

One way to put our foot down is to mock the plutocratic entities that have a monopoly on power and to ridicule the cult of personality. Shame is a very powerful psychological motivator. The sooner we make them realize that they have to be morally responsible with their power, the sooner we will be able to bring balance to the world. And the way we make them realize it is through the stultifying effect of shame. Like Confucius said, “In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.” And have no illusions, countries the world over are badly governed. Through a healthy mockery of their power we will forcefully get power over the entrenched powers that be, and turn the tables on the power dynamic.

2.) Defy the Police State No longer do police act in the capacity of peace officers. Now they are simply hired thugs of a government that no longer has the best interest of the people at heart. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world. Like George Orwell said, “The capitalist society is a police society where the number one goal is the protection of upper class property.” While the governments of the world have been taken over by corporate interests, bankers and special interest groups, our country have been turned into a police state, with the rest of the world soon to follow. Systems of control vainly attempt to keep everything the way it is, inefficient with a controlled obsolescence, so that “We the People” keep buying things we don’t need so that the rich can keep auctioning elections and buying laws to keep the poor suppressed.

Like Stefan Molyneux said back in 2014, “To efficiently control the human farm, you need a majority of broken, self-attacking, insecure, shallow, vain and ambitious sheep, forever consumed by inconsequential things like weight, how good our abs and those of celebrities are – and a minority of volatile, angry and dominant sheepdogs, which you can dress up in either a green (military) or a blue (police) costume and use to threaten and manage the herd.” Black-booted police state beware, your fascist violence is no match for our creative freedom, and your worship of financial gain is no match for the Son of God in whom we place our trust. The so called “herd” is methodically being populated with wolves in sheep's clothing, and we will bite if we’re cornered. We can turn the tables on the police state by mocking it like Pussy Riot mocked Putin, and like Anonymous mocks power.

“History does not repeat itself,” wrote Mark Twain, “but it does rhyme.” And we’re here to bring an updated healthy rhyme to your outdated dissonant rhythms. Your watchdog heart and brainwashed brains don’t stand a chance against our compassionate hearts and open minds. Your days are numbered. Civil disobedience has always been a game-changer and the game is about to change. You might as well just toss those badges in the trash for all they’ll be worth. Better yet, join us. The thin blue line is an illusion at best. 

 

3.) Ridicule the NDAA “The NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) is not about protecting us. It is about protecting the state from us. That is why no one in the executive or legislative branch is going to restore our rights. The new version of the NDAA, like the old ones, provides our masters with the legal shackles to make our resistance impossible. And that is their intention.” – Chris Hedges, Pulitzer prize-winning author and writer

When Adolf Hitler was in power in Germany he was quoted back in 1934 as saying, “What good fortune for governments that the people do not think.” Don’t be an unthinking citizen easily influenced by the likes of Hitler. Become a self-aware proactive citizen instead. Like Frederick Douglas wrote, “Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” Indeed, the more we know, the more capable we are of remaining free men and women. As it stands, The National Defense Authorization Act is the most diabolically authoritarian law to ever come down the governmental chute. It’s anti-freedom in the name of security, the most deceptive kind of law. The NDAA is a greater threat to our national liberty than the terrorism from which it claims to protect us from! It unconstitutionally impinges on legally guaranteed First Amendment rights and lacks sufficient protections to meet the requirements of due process. Simply put, it is an instrument for the government to restrain the people. The constitution used to be an instrument for the people to constrain the government, but with legislation like the NDAA and the Patriot Act, the instrument of the Constitution is useless and no longer holds true.

It’s past time that we, the American people, get out there to protest and litigate against the NDAA (could I please get a few attorneys to help out with this?). We must ridicule it. We must scorn it to the 'nth' degree. Blaspheme it in the face of the president if need be. Inform people about how corrupt it really is. People will remain ignorant as long as we allow them to be. Let’s not allow them to be; not only for the sake of their freedom but for our own, as well as for the freedom of our children and our children’s children. People are born to be free. Ridiculing acts like the NDAA, and attempting to abolish them, are ways of safeguarding such freedoms.

4.) Challenge the Mass Surveillance State Beginning with the adoption of the Patriot Act in 2001 (The government’s backbone-less, scared-stupid response to 9-11), the floodgates opened for covert government surveillance not only for the NSA, FBI, CIA and Homeland Security but for hundreds of municipal and state governments – a green light to infiltrate and spy on millions of American citizens without cause! Now FISA is a dead horse that’s been beaten beyond recognition, because it has been morphed into a vehicle of covert means shielded from effective oversight through countless amendments by the Bush and Obama administrations. And now congress itself is hung-up on the fear-mongering tactics of the War on Terror.

It is now up to us, “We the People”, to challenge this surveillance state, unless we inadvertently become what George Orwell warned us against in his novel, “1984”. Leaking information has become the civil disobedience of our age. The late historian and activist Howard Zinn described the act of civil disobedience as “the deliberate, discriminate violation of law for a vital social purpose… Such acts become not only justifiable but necessary when a fundamental human right is at stake and when legal channels are inadequate for securing that right.” Even Thomas Jefferson realized it, writing, “If a law is unjust, a man is not only correct to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.” Snowden, Manning, Assange, Jeremy Hammond, the late journalist Gary Webb, and the late Aaron Swartz have all continued the tradition of civil disobedience by revealing the details of global mass surveillance programs. It’s time to change the tune. It’s time to interrupt their corrupt dance. It’s time to challenge the powers that be. Nothing short of the survival of the human race is at stake. If we are going to proclaim ourselves Christians, then we have a responsibility to oppose that which is corrupt, unjust, unfair and which poses a clear and present threat. Evil must at all times be resisted with good. Not through some imaginary fist-fight between good and evil, all that is just so much Hollywood 'BS'. I'm talking about resisting evil in the Spiritual realm through prayer, faith, love and good works whenever possible. Passive resistance works as well in the Spiritual world as it does in the physical, so use it whenever possible. “The prayers of good and sincere men and women”, wrote the apostle James, “are powerful and effective”. If you're not praying for this country, and for God to show you a way to fight back without killing cops from a sniper's nest, right now would be a very good time to start. Let's take back our country, and let's do it peacefully if at all possible. Oh yes we can!!!

Survival of the Finest, Not the Fittest

The Only Way to Survive is By Taking Care of One Another

People everywhere are crying the blues about their financial situation, and with just cause to say the least. People lucky enough to still be in the work force are being forced into low-end service jobs, many of which pay below the poverty line. It's not the people's fault that they can't find jobs. The job market is rigged, and so are the political and economic systems we are currently stuck living under. I found myself forced out of my profession (computer/IT) when I hit my 50's due to what I saw as obvious age discrimination, plus having a low credit score at the time. Your credit score, it seems, can disqualify anyone applying for any job at any time for any reason. The level and concentration of injustice against unemployed older workers is a social injustice, and I will always stand against social injustice!

So how can we fix the system without tearing everything down and starting over on a clean sheet of paper? We must redefine the capitalist economic system in 21^st century terms. There are two social injustices going on in our modern capitalist system, and they are the reason the system is broken. The first is the grossly unfair and lopsided distribution of wealth to the top 1% of those deriving their income at the expense of the other 99%. The second is the world's exploding population, meaning there are more and more people in a world of shrinking resources, meaning new methods of redistribution and allocation. We’ve got to redefine everything starting with democracy itself.

If you want to solve a problem, start from the top down. We have been stuck in concepts of representative democracy for 235 years, as well as shareholder ownership in business as opposed to worker-owned or co-operative enterprises. We believe that progress is getting other people to do more things for us, when quite the reverse is true. And I think that we’ve reached the point now where we’re stuck with a whole lot of unworkable concepts, so that when Michael Moore speaks about the number of people who make all this money and other people who don’t, it sounds as if we’re struggling for equality with them. Who wants to be equal to these guys? I think we have to be thinking much more profoundly, such as being on a higher plane of existence.

Actually, if you go back to what Marx said in The Communist Manifesto over a hundred years ago, when he was writing about the constant revolutions in technology, he ended that paragraph by saying, “All that is sacred is profaned, all that is solid melts into air, and men and women are forced to face with sober senses our conditions of life and our relations with our kind.” We’re at that sort of turning point in human history.

And I think that, talking about recovery, talking about democracy, we too easily get sucked into old notions of what we want. So we’re expecting protest. I don’t mind protests, and I encourage them at times. But what happened in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, when people gathered to say another world is necessary, another world is possible, and another world is happening, I think that that’s what’s happening. I was there in October 2011 for the commencement of “Occupy DC” in Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, and I felt honored and humbled to have been privileged to be a part of that historical event. It inspired me to write my second self-published book, “Occupy America: We Shall Overcome” that winter and spring. I have also since been involved with Occupy Atlanta here in my home town off and on as time permits. It is imperative that we take matters into our own hands. Don't trust your government, they have already been lying to all of us for decades. Take the initiative! Take a look over your shoulder and you will notice that there is no one standing behind you to do anything or to take care of any business for you. It's all on you, and it's all on all of us.

People are beginning to say the only way to survive the early 21^st century is to batten down the hatches. So they are building underground bunkers and stocking them with non-perishable foods, water, firearms and ammunition. In so doing they have voluntarily devolved as human beings. Don't forget what Christ said about that, “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword”. Otherwise all our time will be wasted by a mad scramble of those who compete with others instead of co-operating with them. All our efforts must instead be devoted to taking care of one another by recreating our relationships to one another. Let me point out a few examples.

In the first place, the US is the only developed country in the world that has no national health insurance and no family leave for workers. That's right, nobody but us. The very people who call these two basic human rights “socialism” are the ones who are profiting off the existing system the most. Thomas Jefferson once said, “The first and foremost duty of any government is to see to the needs of its people.” I think that sums it up perfectly.

The second example are wages, which are downright pathetic. Having been an IT professional for over 20 years, I clearly remember how wages began falling around 2000-2001 around the time of the dot-com crash. By the time I had left the business 2 years ago, the bottom had fallen out as far as wages were concerned. Jobs that paid $20.00 an hour were going for $12.00, and older workers like myself found ourselves shut out of the tech job market for good. Today as I write this, the minimum wage remains at at a paltry $7.25 cents per hour. And what are these pitifully poor people supposed to do with that last 25 cents an hour? Buy lollipops? The minimum wage works out to a take-home pay of about $875.00 per month after taxes and Social Security, not counting state taxes. Go try to live on that for a month or even a week! Many thousands of American families are being forced into doing just that due to circumstances beyond their control. In short, they are exactly where the government wants them: powerless! Take away every available resource they have and they're helpless.

The solution is a realistic minimum wage that will also serve to jump-start America's economy again. Based on the cost of living for a family of four, which would include housing, utilities, internet access, transportation, clothing and medical care, that would work out to about $12.00 an hour for bare essentials. This should be something people are out protesting in the streets about. We want a living wage, now!!

As you can see, our problems can be fixed without having to re-invent the wheel. You don't have to be an economic genius – if indeed there is really such a thing – to figure out some basic, common sense solutions to get America's middle class back to work. Otherwise I fear that too many more formerly middle class Americans like so many of us will fall into the cracks in the sidewalk and disappear.

The Beast Called Capitalism

The Beast Called Capitalism

by Paul J. Bern

(selected from chapter 4 of his latest release, "Occupying America: We Shall Overcome")

Why is it so untouchable and radical to even suggest auditing the Federal Reserve to those in charge of it? In my research I found that many believe that if our Government dared to audit the Federal Reserve (as you would naturally do with any business that handled huge flows of your money) its books would be so horrifyingly off that they would have to be shut down. Clear back in June 2009 CNBC did an interview with Jim Grant, editor of Grant Interest Rate Observer. He essentially told them that the Federal Reserve couldn't possibly withstand the scrutiny of an audit and it would have to be shut down if the money discrepancies and disaster were known.

It has been known for some time that the Fed is not part of our Government, but a private corporation we did stupid business with back in 1913. Lately, we see them making all kinds of money on our out-of-control “national debt” (a loan-sharking scheme if ever there was one), paying off big banking friends with back door deals and simply growing our debt that they and their cronies are making tons of money off of. Think of the orgy of delight they have going. No audit since 1913. I can think of several reasons are clearly stated as to why the Federal Reserve is at the heart of our economic meltdown. Just a few of these include:

• The Fed is a debt based financial system.
• The Fed has a monopoly on the creation of this debt based money.
• The power of money creation and debt creation is in the hands of private individuals, not the US Government, according to the US Constitution.
• The Federal Reserve itself is not much of a profit – making institution. Rather it is a tool that enables others to make obscene amounts of money.
• The Federal Reserve has decided to play bizarre games of questionable legality with our money.
• The Federal Reserve is undemocratic while it runs an American economy based on democracy. Calling this a conflict of interest is putting it mildly.

All the branches of Government – including the allegedly “private” company of the FED must be audited and held accountable to the American people or be shut down. There needs to be national and constitutional reasons to even keep Federal departments open, such as the Dept. of Energy, Dept. of Education and a whole host of others. I want to know if they are doing their jobs or duplicating the work of states. Regarding the Dept. of energy, hmmmm – after decades, are we energy independent yet? Do we have more nuclear, oil and natural gas infrastructure? Have we been able to disengage from OPEC and start exporting energy? No, no, and no. It is time to shut them all down.

The final example of counterfeit wealth that I will cite in this chapter is that of the collapsing US real estate market. It is apparent to all who have been keeping track of this collapse that this has all been by design. Wall Street and the banking sector, combined with real estate and mortgage brokers who were too smart for their own good, have run American property values right into the ground for their own enrichment. In the process, the US middle and working classes have seen their single biggest investment that they will ever make – their homes, vacation homes and other investment properties – continue to lose resale value like a troublesome car that needs an expensive repair. It costs more to keep either of them than regular working folks can afford. Housing prices are likely to keep falling the rest of this year, and probably won't show much improvement in 2013 either, according to a survey of economists. A CNNMoney exclusive survey of 27 economists showed the battered US housing market is facing myriad problems and won't turn around anytime soon. The median forecast was for a 3.9% decline in the second quarter compared to a year earlier, and a 2.9% drop in prices over the course of the full year. I firmly believe that there will be further significant declines in home prices in order to set a true bottom for the market. To put it succinctly, the bottom of the housing crash is yet to be determined. Homeowners and lenders alike are justifiably apprehensive about the possible outcome and its repercussions.

One definite outcome will be the death of American suburbia, or at least as we have known it. For decades, Americans have consumed more energy, built bigger houses, and driven more miles with each passing year, but not anymore. Along the way, there were three inexorable trends at the base of the societal pyramid. First, we plowed more energy into our homes each and every year. We cooled and heated our houses more (sometimes wastefully, sometimes not), brought in more and more appliances, added televisions and computers and phones. Per capita electricity shot up from about 4,000 kilowatt-hours per US resident in 1980 to over 13,000 kilowatt-hours by the 2000s. Second, we needed more electricity because our houses got huge. The median home size shot up from about 1,500 square feet in the early 1970s to more than 2,200 square feet in the mid-2000's. Third, we drove more and more miles every year to get around and between our sprawled-out cities. Back in 1960, Americans drove 0.72 trillion miles. By 2000, that number had reached 2.75 trillion miles. In 2007, the last year this data is available as of this writing, vehicle miles traveled hit 3.02 trillion.

The beast called capitalism is so consumed with its own greed that it has started feeding on itself. The interest that is accruing on the money it lends is adding up faster than the principals can be repaid. Capitalism constantly tries to fill its belly, craving to soothe a spiritual hunger that it has mistaken for physical needs and wants. Capitalism has the whole world, from developed countries like the US, Canada and Europe to third world backwater nations, drowning in endless debt. It is similar to someone who is “upside down” on a home loan or a car note, owing more on the home or vehicle than it's worth. It is also noticeably similar to what is happening with student loans, with the interest accruing faster than the principal can be paid down due to the income limitations of the recent graduates – assuming they have any income at all. Interest on the national debts of other developed countries is also adding up faster than their debts can ever be repaid. Therefore big banking effectively “owns” those countries. Why conquer a country when you can just buy one by burying it with debt? Nice people.

But lately I have observed that things have reached a tipping point, and there is a real possibility that some countries could be forced to default on their own obligations, ruining their credit ratings and making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to borrow additional funds to pay off their previously incurred debts. In other words these countries, especially the US, are taking out loans to pay off other loans, and there is no practical way this practice can be continued. It's all just a great big Ponzi scheme, and it will come to an end, as all Ponzi schemes do. And when that happens, you better look out. But even if all this turns out to be a false alarm, there are 4 other ways that America's economy can be seriously disrupted, but which will not affect the top 1%.

[1] Another war, and America is preparing for exactly that. So are Russia, China and the Arab countries, in case you didn't notice. The other Asian Muslim countries such as those in southwestern Russia and Pakistan would also be included. There are also the wild card countries of Israel and North Korea. If either of those countries goes to war, particularly Israel, take cover immediately or go home and stay there until it's safe, because the nukes will definitely be flying. This is not a drill.

[2] A natural disaster, which is inevitable sooner or later, particularly within the USA. For example, a category 4 or 5 hurricane hits the Houston, Texas area where the majority of America's oil refineries are located, disrupting US fuel supplies for weeks. In that event, gas prices would go to between $5.00 and $7.00 per gallon, if any fuel can be had at all. Another example: earthquakes. From what I know about American earthquake fault lines, having studied the matter in my spare time, is that anyone living on the US west coast or along the upper Mississippi river valley should seriously consider moving starting right now. Ditto for floods, particularly in the upper Midwestern US, parts of Louisiana, and south Florida. You are free to disagree with me on any or all of these points, of course, but those who choose to ignore me do so at their own risk.

[3] An oil embargo or blockade, with particular focus on Saudi Arabia and Iran. America imports over one fourth of its petroleum from Saudi Arabia. Although it is considered an American ally, it has much closer ties to the Islamic republics and dictatorships of the Middle East than Washington would like you to think. If Saudi Arabia were to turn against us in a future Mideast war, it would result in immediate gas rationing here at home. Then there is the wild card of Iran and its proximity to the Strait of Hormuz where the Arabian sea empties into the Indian ocean. Fully 20% of all the world's oil flows through this narrow stretch of water. If Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, the world's economy would go into a tailspin. Here at home, if either one of these scenarios were to play themselves out, we will see gas prices well in excess of $6.00 per gallon. As in the second possibility listed above, the price of gallon of gas could spike to in excess of $7.00 per gallon. Either of these occurrences would plunge the entire world into an economic depression, and into a third world war as well.

[4] A large-scale terrorist attack anywhere in the world and especially here in the US, with the most likely scenarios being chemical, biological, or nuclear in nature. Another possibility is the release of an Electromagnetic Pulse, or EMP, that would disable Internet, wireless, aviation, TV and radio communication for days or weeks, maybe even months in a worst-case example. In that event, the majority of our electronic equipment would have to be replaced, from our computers to our telephone and utility networks. Even the on-board computers in our cars and trucks would have to be replaced, meaning our engines will not start and our GPS devices would be useless. The avionics in many modern planes, including military aircraft, would cease to function, grounding all of them. In other words, an EMP would shut down the entire country, or at least parts of it, depending on how close to the source one may be. As in the examples above, economic and social pandemonium would result. The only two good things that I see that could come from that particular event is that it would destroy capitalism, since big banking and Wall Street's infrastructure are heavily dependent on computer technology, and it would destroy or render useless much of the military hardware currently in existence, making waging war impossible.

As the capitalist economic system continues to implode in slow motion like the twin towers of 9-11, the top 1% have become acutely aware of the fact that they are almost out of time. They are rushing to patch up the system just a little bit longer so that they can continue to milk America's economy and assets dry. By the same token, they are worried about the rise of the Occupy and 99% Movements, and rightfully so. The wealthy and well-connected top 1% see these movements as a threat – and well they should – and I am proud to be affiliated with them both. They are concerned that America's people might decide to take back what was taken from them, which is the Constitutional ownership of this great land of ours. And so the top 1% are waging an economic and class-based civil war within the boundaries of the United States against the remaining 99% of us, the true-blue and red-blooded backbone of America. We the people, as our Constitution says, are the true owners of this land of ours because that's what our laws say, and we are a nation of law-abiding and mostly peaceful people. As it is written in the Declaration of Independence, “In order to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men and women, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, to such an extent that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it becomes the right of the American people to alter or abolish it” …

Based on these words written by Thomas Jefferson, 21^st century Americans of all races, nationalities, religions and backgrounds have a moral obligation and a spiritual duty to alter or abolish the US government in its current form for the primary purpose of crafting a replacement, even if it means calling another Constitutional Convention – something that hasn't happened in too long a time. Who knows what the future might hold – only God knows. But if we unite together as one American people, we most definitely do have the power to change its outcome.