America's Debt Issues and the Bible

The USA Crosses the Forbidden 666 Barrier

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

To view this from my website, click here :-)

The 2017 fiscal year for the budget of the US government just ended late this past summer, and the results are in. The Lame Stream (sorry, I meant 'main stream') media and various other “presstitutes” are dutifully reporting what they're told to report, while not having the slightest inkling as to the Biblical meaning and spiritual significance of what they publish and report on. And yet despite all that, the headline on Saturday morning's CNN's website reads, “Deficit for 2017 hits $666 billion”! Now just to be clear about this, CNN is not exactly my favorite news source, but Fox and all the other old mainstay networks are even worse IMHO. But the fact that the federal budget deficit (not to be confused with the 'national debt') is the same number as the “mark of the beast” from Revelation 13, verses 11-18 has gone unnoticed – THAT is what surprises me a great deal. But in another way, this occurrence doesn't surprise me at all. My reason here is simply that it seems like the whole world is going in that direction.

The similarities between the economic monstrosity known as 'debt' and the moral monstrosity of the Antichrist and the number 666 are striking. Both fly in the face of God because they are devoid of any love or compassion, and because they challenge the Supreme authority of God. There is plenty of scripture to back this up. Let me start in the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament and work my way forward from there, and I quote: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest. If you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else would he sleep in? When he cries out to me, I will hear him, for I am compassionate.” (Exodus 22: 25-27) As you can see, it is not a sin to borrow money or lend it at interest provided the terms are affordable and reasonable enough. I can remember being taught as a child that it was a sin to borrow money. All the adults in my life at that time were proud of the fact that everything they owned – excluding the lots their hand built houses were built on – was bought and paid for. They built the houses themselves, and even their cars were paid for. It was a world that simply no longer exists.

The CNN article goes on to say, “The deficit reached 3.5% of the size of the economy, or GDP. In 2016, the deficit was 3.2% of GDP. The deficit reflects the gap between how much the government brings in and what it spends. Accrued deficits over the years contribute to the country's debt held by the public, which in 2017 rose to $14.667 trillion. But as a share of the economy, it actually fell slightly to 76.3%, down from 76.7% in the year-ago period. (Those figures don't include the money owed to government trust funds like Social Security.)“ At this rate, and if nothing is done – a frightening possibility considering the current state of the US Congress – the interest on America's 'national debt' would exceed 20% of GDP by 2030 if the CNN figures are accurate, and I should hope they are! But if we set that aside and look beyond all these things, we can find the real underlying causes of America's indebtedness problems.

For this, we'll stay in the Old Testament and skip over to Deuteronomy chapter 15, verses 1-11, and it reads as follows from the NLT Bible: “At the end of every seventh year you must cancel your debts. This is how it must be done. Creditors must cancel the loans they have made to their fellow Israelites. They must not demand payment from their neighbors or relatives, for the Lord's time of release has arrived. This release from debt, however, applies only to your fellow Israelites – not to the foreigners living among you. There should be no poor among you, for the Lord your God will greatly bless you in the land he is giving you as a special possession. You will receive this blessing if you carefully obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today. The Lord your God will bless you as he has promised. You will lend money to many nations but will never need to borrow! You will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you! But if there are any poor people in your towns when you arrive in the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. Instead, be generous and lend them whatever they need. Do not be mean-spirited and refuse someone a loan because the year of release is close at hand. If you refuse to make the loan and the needy person cries out to the Lord, you will be considered guilty of sin. Give freely without begrudging it, and the Lord your God will bless you in everything you do. There will always be some among you who are poor. That is why I am commanding you to share your resources freely with the poor and with other Israelites in need.”

OK, let's take this from the top since there's so much in this one paragraph. “At the end of every seventh year you must cancel your debts. This is how it must be done. Creditors must cancel the loans they have made to their fellow Israelites.” So right off the bat we see the entire US mortgage industry has compelled an entire country into sin. After all, this certainly applies to all nations, not just Israel. In America, we either pay interest for 30 years or we rent, that's how dwellings and commercial buildings of various types are bought and sold. So, we are faced with the choice of paying, say, $200,000.00 or more for a new basic model 3 or 4 bedroom house here in Atlanta where I reside, or renting. With interest figured in, the total price for that house over 30 years would be approximately $333,000.00 dollars. So, the Bible is telling us that a good-sized portion of that excess $133,000.00 in interest on our hypothetical $200,0000.00 mortgage is sinful, meaning it's sinful to charge people that much interest or to make that much profit on one stinking' house! This, my dear readers, is why capitalism as we have known it is unsustainable. Capitalism is unsustainable because it's sinful! This is the Scriptural 'proof of the pudding' right here in Deuteronomy.

“They must not demand payment from their neighbors or relatives, for the Lord's time of release has arrived. This release from debt, however, applies only to your fellow Israelites – not to the foreigners living among you.” So this time of forgiving of debts is called the “time of release” in my NLT Bible, and my NIV calls it “the Lord's time for canceling debts”. At the time this was written, the ancient Hebrew nation was at the latter stages of their 40 years of wandering in the desert, but prior to the time of taking possession of the land the Lord was going to give them, since Moses was still alive at this time. As this was applied to the Hebrew nation from the time of Moses, so it remains with modern America. If it were against the law for any loan to be of more than 7 years duration, there wouldn't be any poor or homeless people. But the rich would lose most of their ill-gotten gains, and the entire mortgage industry would have to be extensively restructured. Now you know why nothing ever changes.

The only way to stop this gross injustice – which amounts to legalized loan sharking – is to refuse to go along with the system. Passive resistance can be a very effective tool in forcing change to come about at the societal level – that is, nonviolent resistance. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a master of this very thing, which freaked out the FBI and the “Department of Justice” to such an extreme they enlisted the aid of the CIA to have King killed. So how do we take an cue from Rev. Dr. King's playbook? One of the most effective things we could do today about our rigged economic system would be for everyone to boycott their student loans. If we stop paying on our homes and our cars, the bankers and finance people foreclose and repossess. But with the student loans – and other unsecured loans like your credit cards – if we walk away as a united people, there's nothing for them to take back. It would be tantamount to a national strike, and we wouldn't even have to leave our homes!Wow, wouldn't THAT be something!! Moving right along....

“There should be no poor among you, for the Lord your God will greatly bless you in the land he is giving you as a special possession. You will receive this blessing if you carefully obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today.” Just as God Almighty gave what was then known as the “Land of Canaan” to the Hebrew nation – or Israelites, they mean the same thing – during the time of Moses, I am certain that God gave what become North America to the early settlers “as a special possession” too. The Bible even spells out the payoff for following the commands and tenets of the Lord Almighty in this regard: “The Lord your God will bless you as he has promised. You will lend money to many nations but will never need to borrow! You will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you!” Isn't that the position America was in up until the 1980's or so? Weren't we the largest money lending nation in the world? Look at us now! We're the largest debtor nation. We've gone from one extreme to the other! And it's all because of America's sins! What sins, some may ask? We're the world's largest arms maker and exporter. We're the largest producer of pornography, the largest consumer of illegal drugs, and we have the most people in prison of any other country in the world – by more than triple the #2 nation, which is Communist China. Until America repents of these things by getting to the root cause, her problems will continue to get progressively worse!

“But if there are any poor people in your towns when you arrive in the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. Instead, be generous and lend them whatever they need. Do not be mean-spirited and refuse someone a loan because the year of release is close at hand.” God despises anyone who despises the poor! Sometimes when I'm in downtown Atlanta at the main train station waiting on a bus to take me out to my neighborhood, I sit and watch the homeless people – and Atlanta has plenty of them because wages are extremely low – beg for money. I give them all my spare change if they ask for it, and I have been known to buy people sandwiches who are in need. But the vast majority of the passers-by won't even acknowledge them if approached, and will even step up their pace to get by the beggars faster. This is one reason I have never cared for the meme “conservative Christian”. It's because they seem to be consistently too conservative to give. They all seem to be too busy 'conserving' to have a single ounce of human compassion. Such individuals risk being judged harshly by the Lord, and some will be condemned.

“If you refuse to make the loan and the needy person cries out to the Lord, you will be considered guilty of sin....That is why I am commanding you to share your resources freely with the poor and with other Israelites in need.” This means if someone who is in a position to help people fails to do so, even if it's nothing but loose change, and the homeless man or woman cries out to God against that individual, they will have committed sin against God. Sin is defined as breaking God's commandments. Therefore, all sinners are essentially lawbreakers. I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't want to spend my life as an outlaw. I want to follow God's precepts in order to obtain my eternal reward that awaits me. Since America is collectively in sin, as I already explained, the repentance will have to start with each individual. Those at the top – America's top 1% when measured in wealth – are certainly not going to repent of their sins. They're making too much money to want to repent, and their end will be eternal judgment. But the rest of us can collectively stop these practices of financial corruption, one person at a time. We can make up our minds to live debt-free. And yes, it can be done. Like former president Obama said, “Yes we can!”

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.

Our capitalist economic and tax systems are breaking down. Maybe that's not so bad.

America's Tax and Monetary Systems Are Broken

Excerpts from the book, "Occupying America: We Shall Overcome"

by Rev. Paul J. Bern

Wall Street has gotten completely out of control when it comes to the salaries, and especially the outrageous bonuses, being paid to top management, sales and other executives. This problem has been ongoing for a long time, and it continues to get worse. The scenario usually works out something like this: A global financial catastrophe occurs a la 2008. An outraged public shakes pitchforks at the corporate culprits. Lawmakers respond by proposing some new BS laws that appear to require corporations to more fully disclose what they’re doing. Corporate America, sensing encroachment on their hunting territory, goes ballistic. Sound familiar? We’ve seen this story play out before. In fact, we’ve seen this story play out after almost every grand corporate catastrophe over the last 80 years.

For example, back in 1933, with the nation still reeling from the 1929 stock market crash, newly-elected President Franklin Roosevelt pushed for legislation that required firms to register securities trades and provide basic financial information. That act eventually passed despite fanatical Wall Street opposition. A more modern example? In 1984, a Union Carbide chemical leak killed thousands in Bhopal, India. U.S. lawmakers had to battle relentless industry opposition before they could pass a right-to-know law on toxic emissions.

Runaway executive pay played a key driving role in the run-up to the Great Recession. Executive pay excesses, as President Obama once put it, “have contributed to a reckless culture.” By attempting to avoid the issue, it seems clear that corporations simply want to avoid embarrassment and public outrage, not to mention the attention of investigators outside the scope of Wall St. such as the Office of Management and Budget and the US Attorney General's office, among others. If we are going to be successful in reversing this trend for the purpose of redirecting America's cash flow from the top 1% back in favor of the rest of us, the remaining 99% of Americans – that's us – will have to forcibly take back what has been shamelessly stolen from us. Political and economic power is never surrendered voluntarily, so forcibly retaking it is the 99%'s only option as of now. Is this too much to ask of ourselves? I think not! In fact, I made up my mind a long time ago that this would be a cause that I would always believe in, the cause of social and economic justice for all.

Outrageous pay packages, research indicates, encourage outrageous executive behaviors that range from high-risk investing gambles to outsourcing jobs while firing long-time workers without cause, to cooking the corporate books for the aggrandizement of upper management. The wider the pay gap between the guy in the top floor corner suite and everybody else, the lower the workforce morale and the higher the employee turnover. In other words, the more cash we let corporations stuff in executive pockets at their employee's expense, the less competitive our corporations become. Is this any way to run the richest country in the world? Whose lame-brain idea was this to begin with?

Is it any wonder that the US economy has been run into the ground when we find such egregious examples of inexcusable mismanagement, criminal malfeasance and offensive buffoonery? It is abundantly clear to me that the system has been abused so badly that it is no longer functional. Allow me to present a couple of examples taken straight from the Web on what happens when abusive people who also happen to be exceptionally greedy take control of our country's entire governmental system. Vast sums of money are being quietly diverted from the wallets, pensions, banking and investment accounts of the American public just by changing the tax laws to favor the ultra-rich.

In my example #1, tax cuts for the wealthiest five percent of Americans cost the U.S. Treasury $11.6 million every hour, according to the National Priorities Project. America’s top earners got an average tax cut of $66,384 in 2011, while the bottom 20 percent will get an average cut of $107. These enormous tax cuts are weighing on the national debt. The non-partisan Center for Budget and Priorities found that the Bush tax cuts costs about the same as the shortfall from Social Security in the ten years after they were signed into law. If the U.S. reverted to Clinton-era marginal tax rates, the U.S. Treasury would net an additional $72 billion annually, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. In addition, increasing taxes on the wealthy could also help to narrow the widening wealth gap. In 2012 when this book was first written, the net worth of the bottom 60 percent of U.S. Households – about 100 million households – was lower than that of Forbes 400 richest Americans. Tax cuts for the wealthy provided Americans making more than $1 million with a $128,832 benefit, while Americans earning from $40,000 to $50,000 got an $860 benefit on average. This disparity has since gotten still worse. As of this summer 2014 update, the entire Walton family of Bentonville, Arkansas, the six sons and daughters of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, now have roughly the same wealth as America's “bottom” 100 million people, as if one's net worth correlated somehow with the measure of a man, or of a woman. This is how twisted and distorted capitalism has become, and economic inequality doesn't happen by accident.

Besides the broken tax system, as if this set of problems were not enough, I offer our broken monetary system as my second example. The US Federal Reserve was created on December 21^st, 1913 and given a 99 year lease to print America's money. This lease was given to an organized group of nameless, faceless investors who formed a private holding company that is the de facto sole proprietorship of the Federal Reserve. (The Federal Reserve Bank is not a public entity, and never was). That 99-year lease expired on December 21^st, 2012, but the Fed is still there occupying that real estate and those reserve banks. Legally, that makes the Federal Reserve and all its employees nothing more than mere squatters on US Government property, and I think they should be treated as such.

What many people don't realize is that the US Constitution gives the right to mint money to the Department of the Treasury, which makes the Federal Reserve Bank in its current form completely unconstitutional, as it has been right from the start. To make matters worse, in all the time the Federal Reserve has been in existence it has never – ever – been audited until fairly recently. Nobody in Washington, not even the president, knows the exact true state of the Federal Reserve as I write this, although I have no doubt that many in DC will claim they do and a few will even believe it. For that reason senator Bernie Sanders, an independent US senator from Vermont with (thankfully) no party affiliation, sponsored a bill calling for an audit of the Federal Reserve system that was made public in the summer of 2011. He published a blog post regarding this first-ever Fed audit that was widely cross-posted on the Web, and I offer a short excerpt of what the senator wrote.

“The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. 'As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world,' said Sanders. 'This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else. Among the investigation's key findings is that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland, according to the GAO report. No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the President. One thing already is abundantly clear. The Federal Reserve must be reformed to serve the needs of working families, not just C.E.O.'s on Wall Street'...”

The so-called “national debt” is nothing more than the indebtedness of the US Government to the Federal Reserve for the money it prints for our government. For example, when former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke initiated what he called “QE3” (for quantitative easing), what actually occurred was the need for Washington to borrow more money. This necessity was met by having the Fed print what we now know was $16 trillion dollars in order to flood American markets with liquidity. Unfortunately for the American people, there was a price tag to be paid in the form of interest on the money that the Fed printed. And so it turns out that the United States has to borrow to print its own money, an arrangement whose legality is highly questionable and whose very existence is contrary to the best interests of the United States.

I'm not a politician and have no plans to become one, but if I were President I could solve America's national debt problem in one afternoon. On my first day in office, I would send certain platoons of US Army soldiers to seize control of the Federal Reserve Banks in Washington DC and all other locations throughout the country, along with federal agents and local SWAT teams, to arrest all the directors and managers along with anyone else who opposes us. They will all be charged with treason for ruining the financial health and general welfare of the US, or with being accessories to the same, and they will be prosecuted. The Federal Reserve will be immediately nationalized, with the authority to manage and oversee returned to the Department of the Treasury where it belongs, pursuant to Article 1, section 8 of the US Constitution, which says this: “Congress shall have the power... to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and to fix the standards of weights and measures”.... One thing would happen for sure: it would be 'bye bye national debt'! In fact, maybe the Federal Reserve banks across the US should be “occupied” until they are returned to the rightful owners, the American people. Now THAT would be something to see! Who is with me today?

No More MSM Deception: How About Some Truth in 2013?

25 Pertinent Facts That The Mainstream

Media Wouldn't Discuss in 2012

During the Hitler dictatorship in Germany from the 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, he just has a far more innocuous title than "Propaganda Minister". This person's job -- and I have noticed regular personnel changes -- 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. Today's message is my small contribution towards demanding some truth from our news sources. No more US Government propaganda please, we have all had a bellyfull already!

For decades, the mainstream media in the United States was 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. A Gallup survey from earlier this year found that 60 percent of all Americans “have little or no trust” in the mainstream media. More people than ever are realizing that the mainstream media is giving them a very distorted version of “the truth” and they are increasingly seeking out alternative sources of information. In the United States today, just six giant media corporations control the mainstream media. Those giant media corporations own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many prominent websites. But now thanks to the Internet the mainstream media no longer has a complete monopoly on the news. In recent years 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 want “the truth” and they know that they are not getting it from the mainstream media. That's also one of the primary reasons why people are doing away with cable TV as I have. It's not just the money saved from unsubscribing to cable TV, it's the fact that everybody knows everything they are watching is a load of BS.

We are watching a media revolution happen, and many in the mainstream media 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. Ever have the feeling you’re being lied to by the news media, the authorities, the corporate world? That somebody — or something — is out to get you? You’re not alone. Welcome to 21st-century America. Look around. Trust is hitting historic lows. Just a third 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 is in the low 20s, after nearing single digits last summer. 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 this past summer. The article goes on to make it sound like it is very irrational not to trust the media, but in this day and age it is imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves. Blindly trusting someone else to do your thinking for you is very dangerous.

Anyone that does not acknowledge that the mainstream media has an agenda is not being honest with themselves. 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 worldview being pushed 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. The following are 25 facts that the mainstream media doesn’t really want to talk about right now:

#1 The mainstream media doesn’t really want to talk about the fact that gun sales are absolutely skyrocketing in the aftermath of the horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

#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 – Guatamala 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” was passed by the U.S. Senate on Friday. Never mind that it's completely unconstitutional (see the Bill of Rights 4th amendment, among other places in the US Constitution).

#4 They don’t really want to talk about the fact that volcanoes all along the 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 just been issued for a massive volcano that sits along the border between Chile and Argentina.

#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 is predicting a “financial disaster” in 2013.

#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 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 danger of losing its status as the primary reserve currency of the world. If this were to occur -- and it might -- financial calamity would surely follow.

#11 They don’t really want to talk about the fact that president Barack Obama has gone off to vacation in Hawaii while the rest of the nation hopes for a fiscal cliff deal to get done. Of course the mainstream media has to mention that he is on vacation because they always keep track of what the president does, when in actuality they should be doing a much better job keeping track of Wall Street speculators, their bankers, and all their filty 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.

#13 They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the U.S. economy is losing millions of jobs to nations where it is legal to pay workers slave labor wages. Actually, this process is already started in the US as well, due to the fact that no one can live on a minimum wage paycheck. 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 the country.

#14 They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the recent tax increase is causing large numbers of wealthy individuals to consider moving out of the state of California.

#15 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 that the economy is “recovering”.

#16 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.

#17 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.

#18 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.

#19 They don’t really want to talk about the fact that political correctness is taking over America. The truth is that the media does not see any problem with that at all.

#20 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.

#21 They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the birth rate in the United States fallen to an all-time low. The elite are actually absolutely thrilled that less babies are being born.

#22 They don’t really want to talk about the fact that violent crime in the United States increased by 18 percent in 2011 and that many major U.S. cities are seeing violent crime totally spiral out of control.

#23 They don’t really want to talk about the fact that Barack Obama received more than 99 percent of the vote in more than 100 precincts in Ohio on election day.

#24 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.

#25 They don’t really want to talk about the fact that the Federal Reserve created the conditions for the last financial crisis and their mismanagement of the economy has now brought us to the verge of another horrible economic downturn. According to the mainstream media, the Federal Reserve is “above politics” and should not be criticized. 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.

Why Is America's Monetary System Broken?

The Monetary System is Broken

Excerpt from "Occupying America: We Shall Overcome"

by Rev. Paul J. Bern

Another area where the movers and shakers on Wall Street have gotten completely out of control has been salaries, and especially the outrageous bonuses, being paid to Wall St. executives. This problem has been ongoing for a long time, and it continues to get worse. The scenario usually works out something like this: A global financial catastrophe occurs a la 2008. An outraged public shakes pitchforks at the corporate culprits. Lawmakers respond by proposing some new bullshit laws that appear to require corporations to more fully disclose what they’re doing. Corporate America, sensing encroachment on their hunting territory, goes ballistic. Sound familiar? We’ve seen this story play out before. In fact, we’ve seen this story play out after almost every grand corporate catastrophe over the last 80 years.

For example, back in 1933, with the nation still reeling from the 1929 stock market crash, President Franklin Roosevelt pushed for legislation that required firms to register securities trades and provide basic financial information. That act eventually passed despite fanatical Wall Street opposition. A more modern example? In 1984, a Union Carbide chemical leak killed thousands in India’s Bhopal. U.S. lawmakers had to battle relentless industry opposition before they could pass a right-to-know law on toxic emissions.

Runaway executive pay, almost all analysts now believe, played a key driving role in the run-up to the Great Recession. Executive pay excesses, as President Obama has put it, “have contributed to a reckless culture.” By attempting to avoid the issue, it seems clear that corporations simply want to avoid embarrassment and public outrage, not to mention the attention of congressional investigators, the Office of Management and Budget and the US Attorney General's office, among others. If we are going to be successful in reversing this trend for the purpose of redirecting America's cash flow from the top 1% back in favor of the rest of us, the remaining 99% of Americans will have to forcibly take back what has been shamelessly stolen from us. Political and economic power is never surrendered voluntarily, so forcibly retaking it is the 99%'s only option as of now. Is this too much to ask of ourselves? I think not. In fact, I made up my mind a long time ago that this is the very purpose for which I have been born.

Outrageous pay packages, research indicates, encourage outrageous executive behaviors that range from high-risk investing gambles to outsourcing jobs and cooking the corporate books. The wider the pay gap between the guy in the corner suite and that guy’s workers, the lower the workforce morale, the higher the turnover. In other words, the more cash we let corporations stuff in executive pockets at employee expense, the less competitive our corporations become. Is this any way to run the richest country in the world? Whose lame-brain idea was this to begin with?

Is it any wonder that the US economy has been run into the ground when we find such egregious examples of inexcusable mismanagement, criminal malfeasance and offensive buffoonery? It is abundantly clear to me that the system has been abused so badly that it is no longer functional. Allow me to present a couple of examples taken straight from the Web on what happens when abusive people who also happen to be exceptionally greedy take control of our country's entire governmental system. Vast sums of money are being quietly diverted from the wallets, pensions, banking and investment accounts of the American public just by changing the tax laws to favor the ultra-rich.

Tax cuts for the wealthiest five percent of Americans cost the U.S. Treasury $11.6 million every hour, according to the National Priorities Project. America’s top earners will get an average tax cut of $66,384 in 2011, while the bottom 20 percent will get an average cut of $107. These enormous tax cuts are weighing on the national debt. The non-partisan Center for Budget and Priorities found that the Bush tax cuts costs about the same as the shortfall from Social Security in the ten years after they were signed into law. If the U.S. reverted to Clinton-era marginal tax rates, the U.S. Treasury would net an additional $72 billion annually, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. In addition, increasing taxes on the wealthy could also help to narrow the widening wealth gap. The net worth of the bottom 60 percent of U.S. Households – about 100 million households – is lower than that of Forbes 400 richest Americans. Tax cuts for the wealthy provided Americans making more than $1 million with a $128,832 benefit, while Americans earning from $40,000 to $50,000 got an $860 benefit on average.

Besides the broken tax system, as if this set of problems were not enough, we have a broken monetary system. The US Federal Reserve was created on December 21^st, 1913 and given a 99 year lease to print America's money. This lease was given to an organized group of nameless, faceless investors who formed a private holding company that is the de facto sole proprietorship of the Federal Reserve. (The Federal Reserve Bank is not a public entity, and never was). That 99-year lease expires on December 21^st, 2012. What happens after that is anyone's guess, but you can be sure there will be some kind of power grab made by either US government or corporate entities, or more likely a combination of the two. What many people don't realize is that the US Constitution gives the right to mint money to the Department of the Treasury to begin with, and that the Federal Reserve Bank in its current form is completely unconstitutional and has been from the start. To make matters worse, in all the time the Federal Reserve has been in existence it has never – ever – been audited until just recently. Nobody in Washington, not even the president, knows the true state of the Federal Reserve as I write this, although I have no doubt that many in DC will claim that they do. For that reason, senator Bernie Sanders, an independent US senator from Vermont with (thankfully) no party affiliation, sponsored a bill calling for an audit of the Federal Reserve system that was made public in the summer of 2011. He published a blog post regarding this first-ever Fed audit that was widely cross-posted on the Web, and I offer a short excerpt of what the senator wrote.

“The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. "As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."

Among the investigation's key findings is that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland, according to the GAO report. No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the President. One thing already is abundantly clear. The Federal Reserve must be reformed to serve the needs of working families, not just C.E.O.'s on Wall Street....”

The so-called “national debt” is nothing more than the indebtedness of the US Government to the Federal Reserve for the money it prints for our government. For example, when current Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke initiated what he called “QE2” (for quantitative easing), what actually occurred was the need for Washington to borrow more money. This necessity was met by having the Fed print what we now know was $16 trillion dollars in order to flood American markets with liquidity. Unfortunately for the American people, there was a price tag to be paid in the form of interest on the money that the Fed printed. And so it turns out that the United States has to borrow to print its own money, an arrangement whose legality is highly questionable and whose very existence is contrary to the best interests of the United States.

I'm not a politician and have no plans to become one, but if I were President I could solve America's national debt problem in one afternoon. On the first day I am in office, I would send certain platoons of US soldiers to seize control of the Federal Reserve Banks in Washington and all other locations throughout the country, along with local police SWAT teams to arrest all the directors and managers along with anyone else who opposes us. They will all be charged with treason for ruining the financial health and general welfare of the US, or with being accessories to the same, and they will be prosecuted. The Federal Reserve will be immediately nationalized, with the authority to manage and oversee returned to the Department of the Treasury where it belongs, pursuant to Article 1, section 8 of the US Constitution, which says this: “Congress shall have the power... to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and to fix the standards of weights and measures”.... Bye bye national debt! In fact, maybe the Federal Reserve banks across the US should be “occupied” until they are returned to the rightful owners, the American people. Now THAT would be something to see!

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.