A prophecy against America's leaders unless they stop what they're doing

A Word of Warning From the Lord For All Who Read This

I'm going to do something that I've never done before on this website; exercising one of the chief gifts of the Spirit as taught by the apostle Paul, gift of prophecy. First, let me point out that prophecy doesn't mean being able to foretell the future. That's called divination, which is based on sorcery, which is essentially Satan worship. Prophecy, on the other hand, simply means affirmatively declaring the Word of God, or of conveying the will of God and letting it be known with precision. For example, if I say, “Jesus will return on Christmas Eve”, that's a prediction of the future, and in this case a pretty bad one. But if I say, “Everyone act, think and live as if Jesus will return this Christmas, because it is the Lord himself who reminds you to keep yourself ready for His return, for He will return at an hour when many do not expect him”, then I have prophesied the Word of God by allowing myself to be used as a vessel for God's Word to mankind, or as a conduit for God's awesome power (which is beyond all human imagination). And so allow me a few paragraphs and yourself several minutes to relate what I believe is this important Word from the Lord God Almighty through his Son, Jesus Christ, the Lamb that was slain and yet lives.

As it was in the times of the prophets of old, so it is today – my people perish due to a lack of knowledge. America's days as a superpower, both militarily and economically, are just about over. Do my children not see what is happening all around you? Your government is printing money at maximum speed to keep your rigged capitalist economic system, a system based on greed that is a laughingstock both here in heaven and down in hell, from imploding. It is as plain and bright as the daytime sunshine I created that your pyramid-shaped economic system has run its course. It will soon be exactly as it was written by my beloved son and apostle John, “In her heart she boasts, 'I sit as queen, I am not a widow, and I will never mourn'. Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning, and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her. When the kings of the earth who committed adultery with her and shared her luxury see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her. Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry, 'Woe! Woe, oh great city, O Babylon, city of power! In one hour your doom has come!'” (Revelation chapter 18, verses 7-10, NIV)

Is there anyone who still doubts that this passage of Scripture was written about our country, the United States? Go back and read that again, or better yet, read Revelation chapter eighteen in its entirety, it's all right there in black and white. So how else is the US government sinning against God? Our dollar, or more accurately the rate they are being printed, makes a major devaluation of your form of currency likely, possibly even in the near future. If the US does not repent of this egregious sin and get its house in order, God will punish our country with more economic hardship, natural disasters and plagues. I know there are those who will not take my warning seriously, but I remind you that the future of our country is at stake. I do not speak for myself, but I speak for the Lord through Jesus Christ his Son.

We have taken the earth that God created and ruined it. Everything is polluted, even our own bodies. Oil residue still exists on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and western Florida, the seafood is contaminated with mercury, our livestock are catching deadly new strains of the flu, and our IQ's become ever more diminished due to ingesting fluoridated water for decades. Autism, once thought to have originated from childhood vaccines, is now being more correctly understood as having environmental rather than medical causes and origins. We're doing it to ourselves.

Hard times are coming, of that we can all be sure. God has shown me that gas rationing and food rationing are both on America's horizon. Poverty will increase by leaps and bounds, creating a permanent underclass of Americans who will become the spearhead of a Second American Revolution. Civil unrest is coming, the likes of which haven't been seen since the 1960's. Rioting may occur in (hopefully) isolated areas, and people will stay barricaded in their homes and apartments for days and weeks at a time. With 70% of America's economy dependent on consumer spending, this is ominous to say the least. If and when the dollar collapses – a frightening possibility – all these things will be much worse (God forbid). The Bible warns us that “a day is coming when no one will be able to work”.We have been taking our privileged lives for granted for too long. God is a patient and loving God who is slow to anger but swift and sure regarding his punishment for those who willfully disobey. When we take a look around us, we see our neighborhoods, subdivisions, schools, churches, businesses, and industries, and all the infrastructure associated with them. Yet I am warning you all that even the tallest tower – which here in Atlanta is just over 52 stories – will not be left standing upon the arrival of the great and dreadful Day of the Lord. It is only then, when the arrival of Christ Jesus splits the Mount of Olives in two, that every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord. You children of mine are just about out of time.

Happy anniversary to "the 99%" and Occupy wall st.

Happy Belated 2nd Anniversary, Occupy Wall Street

While I was rebuilding my computer and repairing my Internet connection these past few days, and as fall begins, I found myself reflecting on the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and the fifth anniversary of the financial collapse induced by Wall Street and the mortgage industry. I was there for the first three days of Occupy DC at Freedom Plaza in October 2011, and again later that month for a day of Occupy Atlanta in Woodruff Park in the heart of downtown, and I have some fond memories of being part of something much bigger than myself or the sum of my experiences.

There are reasons to celebrate Occupy, as well as the loosely affiliated “We Are The 99%” Movement which is also still ongoing, despite continued economic stagnation and growing debt. The culture of resistance in the US is here, it’s having an effect, and it's growing slowly but steadily. There are cracks in the pillars of power, they're starting to get a little bigger, and it’s up to us to pry them the rest of the way open and shine the light on the lies and corruption that have been used to steal our future. I look back over the events of the past two years and feel cautiously optimistic, because I see a movement that is steadily building momentum. As we met at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, on Oct. 6^th, 2011 there was a strong sense of suspense in the air. Some said that Americans weren’t feeling enough pain, that we hadn’t reached the tipping point. Similarly, the organizers of Occupy Wall Street acted out of anticipation. They staked out a place in the heart of the monster and held it. At first there were only a few hundred, but by holding that space courageously, more people were inspired to join them. Excitement and wonder were in the air. Could the people really take on Wall Street? Obviously Wall Street thought so because they ordered excessive and constant police protection. They must have seen something brewing because Wall Street firms had donated unprecedented millions to the NYPD over the previous year. It was police aggression towards peaceful protesters that grabbed public attention and sympathy. A few weeks after the start of Occupy Wall Street, an amazing 43 percent of Americans supported Occupy, a figure that remains largely undiminished to this day.

Two years later, the physical encampments are gone, but the Occupy Movement remains. Occupying public space was a tactic, not an end in itself. It was a way to make the issues visible, a place for people to gather, a model for a new way of doing things based on respect, mutual aid and democracy and a metaphor for claiming what has been taken. The ‘public’ is disappearing, not just public space but also public services, research and resources have been privatized, expropriated for the profits of a few. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, there was an expectation that the government would respond appropriately to stabilize the economy and that we simply had to weather the storm. What we saw instead were massive bailouts of the industry that caused the crash and greatly inadequate steps to secure jobs, housing and health care. This turned some already catastrophic financial crises caused by runaway private speculation into an immense source of private gain for the same very financiers responsible for the catastrophe to begin with. Even worse, it made those catastrophes so much more catastrophic than they really needed to be in the first place.

As a result of all this mess, we’re not heading toward greater income equality. We’re not building up the middle class or supporting unionization. We’re not eradicating poverty and hunger. We’re not expanding educational opportunity. We’re not rebuilding infrastructure. Nothing we’re doing looks anything like the society we built from the New Deal through the 1960s. We’re not doing any of the things that would lead to a more stable and just economy. In fact, we’re doing just the opposite, which means the billionaire bailout society will become even more firmly entrenched. This means that if left unchecked, the trends towards greater inequality and suffering will not only continue, it will accelerate as well. But the billionaire bailout society went too far. According to a Stanford study, “animosity toward the financial sector reached its highest level in 40 years in 2010” which probably fueled the Occupy and 99% Movements, and anger remains high. A majority of Americans believe that “not enough was done to prosecute the bankers.”

When drowning in so many crises it is sometimes hard to see above the surface of the water, but the anti-globalization movement and its offspring, the Occupy and “the 99%” Movements, are having an effect. Since 2000, the World Trade Organization has been unable to advance its agenda and 14 free trade agreements have been stopped by public pressure. The Trans-Pacific Partnership and its sister the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership known as TAFTA, are being negotiated in secret as a way to pursue the WTO agenda through the back door. A recent study found that the TPP will reduce wages for the bottom 90 percent of people in the US while significantly increasing the wealth of the top 1 percent. The AFL CIO passed a resolution opposing the TPP and Teamster President James Hoffa wrote, “Workers on both sides of the deal get screwed while corporations rake in record profits. Like low-wage workers in the fast food and retail industries, workers must join together to let Congress know that the TPP is not the right path for the U.S.” A broad coalition of groups have come together to stop the TPP. At the Occupy Wall Street protests recently in New York, the TPP was a top theme. In addition to marches and teach-ins focused on the TPP, the Money Wars street theater group performed its epic battle of Princess Laid-Off and the rebels against the TPP Death Star, Emperor Pipeline and Dark Banker. Actions are taking place this weekend and next week in Washington. If we are successful, this will be a huge victory against transnational corporate power.

There have been a number of wins recently against top corporations. The Nez Perce tribe and their allies took on General Electric and won a case to stop truckloads of tar sands from crossing their land in Idaho. Exxon was charged for illegally dumping toxic fracking waste in Pennsylvania. And JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon admitted that the bank broke the law. Another important win that is inspiring many in the US took place in Colombia where farmers went on a prolonged strike to win back the right to use their own seeds. The anti-Monsanto and anti-GMO movement is strong here. Thousands of people marched this week in Kauai for a law to protect themselves from pesticides. And, despite an outpouring of money, a vote to label GMO products in Washington State is still holding strong. And stopping the imminent attack on Syria was a win for people everywhere and a loss for the military industrial complex. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin in particular were set to make hundreds of millions from it. We must be vigilant though because the current diplomatic path could be used to justify an attack in the future.

It is important to recognize these wins and to build from them. It is also important to remember that we never know how close we are to achieving significant change. The occupy movement spawned the “idle no more”, workers’ rights and climate change movements. Our eyes are open and we can’t ignore what we now see; we know that it is the plutocratic system, not individual inadequacy that is causing poverty in America. We know that the $1 trillion given by the Federal Reserve to private banks could have created 20 million desperately-needed jobs. We know that the 400 richest people in the US have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries like Canada and Mexico. And we know the names of those who control the wealth and exploit people and the planet for it. We no longer expect “leaders” to create the change we need. We are all leaders and change depends on our actions and ours alone.

The culture of resistance necessary to create the kind of world we want to live in is here. Actions are taking place daily in the US and around the world. You won’t hear about most of them in the mass media. This week alone, more than one hundred women, most of them undocumented, were arrested in Washington, DC to protest the ways that immigration policies harm their families. Dairy workers in New York protested their abusive working conditions. Protesters in Vermont, ages 65 to 94, chained themselves to the entrance of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant to demand its immediate closure and Marylanders protested outside an ‘arms bazaar.’ The Cascadia Forest Defenders scaled the capitol building in Oregon to drop a huge banner to protest clear-cutting.

Resistance is not all protesting, it also includes building alternative systems to meet our basic needs. Many who are active in OWS have been hard at work at this since the physical occupation was shut down. This week the Occupy Money Cooperative announced its launch with a fund raising campaign. They will provide low-cost financial services to the millions of Americans who are unbanked and under-banked and who are preyed upon by banks, check cashing services and payday lenders. It will be an opportunity for all to opt-out of big finance. Just as OWS created the infrastructure that was used to organize Occupy Sandy and continues to provide services to those affected by Superstorm Sandy, occupiers in Colorado responded to the needs of people in the Boulder area who were hit by massive flooding.

Hard work is being done every day to take on entrenched corporate power and create a new world based on principles such as mutual aid, community, equity, solidarity and democracy. It is appropriate to stop and celebrate this work and what has been accomplished so far. Things are changing. Justin Wedes of OWS writes, “Sure, we face an uncertain future, but we embrace the chaos that defines our time. Because, there is no alternative but to challenge the status quo of ever-increasing debt, shrinking job opportunities and disappearing civil rights.” We can’t say what the outcome will be or whether we will live to see the world we hope to create. Can there even be an endpoint? Perhaps the most important piece of social transformation is not a goal but rather is the process of living in a way that is consistent with our values. We live in the culture of resistance which requires constant nurturing to bend the arc of time towards justice.

I can think of at least seven reasons not to attack Syria

The Insanity of Another Mideast War

In 1939 and 1940, Hitler conquered the great majority of Europe. You will no doubt recall from your high school history classes that he did very well in his military excursions, or at least at first. Austria and Czechoslovakia fell first, then Poland, followed by Holland, Belgium and France. By that time Spain and Italy were already aligned with Hitler's Germany. Then, Hitler attacked Great Britain but failed – twice – and things started going downhill from there for Nazi Germany. Failing to conquer the British Isles got Hitler flustered. So, by the summer of 1941, Hitler decided to attack Russia, a country more than ten times the size of Germany, whose military prowess was more than a match for the German armed forces. That December, Japan attacked the US at Pearl Harbor, which got America involved in WW2. Germany then declared war on the US, and vice-versa. So, Germany found itself fighting a war on 2 fronts: one East of Germany with Russia, the other West of Germany with America. Germany ended up getting obliterated when it took on more military opponents than it could handle.

I find it more than a little disturbing that our country's military is in the process of making the same mistake Hitler made over 70 years ago. We have troops and so-called “contractors” – a barely concealed pronoun for “black ops” mercenaries – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, plus the Balkans and Germany in Europe, and that's not counting more than 100 countries globally. As of this coming week, president Obama is going to take his case – or more accurately that of the US military-industrial complex – to Congress and to the American people. Speaking as a person who is opposed to waging warfare, and having concluded long ago that war is obscenely immoral, I am vehemently opposed to any so-called “limited” engagements with Syria. President Bush and his advisers either didn’t know or didn’t care about the probable consequences of their decision to invade and occupy Iraq back in 2003. This resulted in the following:

• Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 4,000 Americans dead;
• Millions of Iraqis and Americans wounded physically and psychologically;
• Legions of young men of the region now experienced in warfare and for hire moving from Iraq to Libya to Syria;
• The Iraqi “democratic” government, which is evidently unable to control the whirlwind of sectarian violence that is now killing and maiming hundreds each week.

Although the U.S. invaded and occupied Afghanistan under a different rationale, it is very important to acknowledge the tens of thousands of Afghan citizens who have been killed or wounded in the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The further consequences of the Afghan war was several thousand Americans dead and tens of thousands maimed, wounded or injured. Let's now fast forward to the present day, where President Obama has not spelled out the possible consequences of a military attack on Syria, but U.S. military leaders are repeatedly warning about the risks. In a letter to the Senate Armed Services committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey wrote last month said, “As we weigh our options, we should be able to conclude with some confidence that use of force will move us toward the intended outcome.” “Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.” General James Mattis, who retired recently as head of the U.S. Central Command, said last month at a security conference that the United States has “no moral obligation to do the impossible” in Syria. “If Americans take ownership of this, this is going to be a full throttle, very, very serious war.” That's right, general. An all-out brawl in the Middle East which could easily trigger World War Three. We can make some educated guesses of what the “unintended consequences” could be:

1. Syrian anti-aircraft batteries will fire their rockets at incoming U.S. missiles.
2. Many Syrians on the ground will die and both the U.S. and Syrian governments will say the deaths are the fault of the other.
3. The U.S. Embassy in Damascus will be attacked and burned, as may other U.S. Embassies and businesses in the Middle East.
4. Syria might also launch rockets toward the U.S. ally in the region—Israel.
5. Israel would launch bombing missions on Syria as it has three times in the past two years and perhaps take the opportunity to launch an attack on Syria’s strongest ally in the region – Iran.
6. Iran, a country with a population of 80 million and having the largest military in the region untouched by war in the past 25 years, might retaliate with missiles aimed toward Israel and toward nearby U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, Turkey, Bahrain and Qatar.
7. Iran could block the Straits of Hormuz and impede the transport of oil out of the Persian Gulf.

“What is the political end state we’re trying to achieve?” said a retired senior officer involved in Middle East operational planning who said his concerns are widely shared by active-duty military leaders. “I don’t know what it is. We say it’s not regime change. If it’s punishment, there are other ways to punish.”

Could there be an underlying reason to attack Syria that is being concealed from the American people? There sure is. Let me give you the short version of what's being done and why. In an August 2013 article titled “Larry Summers and the Secret ‘End-game’ Memo, columnist, journalist and blogger Greg Palast posted evidence of a secret late-1990s plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. The cynically named “end-game” would require not just coercing support among World Trade Organization members, but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. As of this writing, the only one of those four countries still standing is Iran. In most Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned, and usury – charging rent for the “use” of money, hence the name – is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen. Not all these countries were Islamic. Forty percent of banks globally are publicly-owned. They are largely in the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — which house forty percent of the global population. To make the world safe for usury, these rogue states had to be silenced by other means. Having failed to succumb to economic coercion, they wound up in the cross-hairs of the powerful US military. In this August 22nd article, Greg Palast posted a screen shot of a 1997 memo from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then Assistant Secretary of International Affairs under Robert Rubin, to Larry Summers, then Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Geithner referred in the memo to the “end-game of WTO financial services negotiations”.

The game then in play was the deregulation of banks so that they could gamble in the lucrative new field of derivatives. But the plan required more than just deregulating US banks. Banking controls had to be eliminated globally so that money would not flee to nations with safer banking laws. The “endgame” was to achieve this global deregulation through an obscure addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization, called the Financial Services Agreement. Palast wrote:

“Until the bankers began their play, the WTO agreements dealt simply with trade in goods–that is, my cars for your bananas. The new rules ginned-up by Summers and the banks would force all nations to accept trade in "bads" – toxic assets like financial derivatives. Until the bankers' re-draft of the FSA, each nation controlled and chartered the banks within their own borders. The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives "products." And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives. WTO members were induced to sign the agreement by threatening their access to global markets if they refused”.

That was the fate of countries in the WTO, but Palast did not discuss those that were not in that organization at all, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. These seven countries were named by U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.) in a 2007 “Democracy Now” interview as the new 'rogue states' being targeted for take down after September 11, 2001. He said that about 10 days after 9-11, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq. Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. What did these countries have in common? Besides being Islamic, they were not members either of the WTO or of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That left them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland. Other countries later identified as 'rogue states' that were also not members of the BIS included North Korea, Cuba, and Afghanistan. Does everybody else reading this see the pattern that has developed here as clearly as I do? I am sure of it! There was a nonfiction book published a couple of years ago titled, “War Is A Lie”. As you can see from the above facts I have gathered, that is absolutely true.

This leads to a loaded question, maybe even literally. Having learned what the American public is currently learning about all of the above, the endless wars, the NSA spying, the unauthorized military actions overseas, and the inescapable fact that our entire government has been bought and paid for by corporate America as well as Wall Street (even to the point that our country is becoming dysfunctional?), could opposition by a war-weary American public to US involvement in Syria lead to another series of antiwar protests such as what America experienced from the mid-60's until the early 70's? When we add to this mix the multitudes of unemployed, or grossly underemployed, American workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas for pennies on the dollar, the millions of pensioners who got cheated out of their retirement savings when their former employers closed down, and still more multitudes of unemployed young adults, some with Masters degrees, who are stuck living with their parents while trying to pay off student loans costing more than a typical mortgage, then you have a recipe for civil unrest of the highest magnitude. The March on Washington in August 1963 would seem like child's play by comparison. To those who may disagree, I would only tell you to look around you, and check out what's been happening since the 2011 Arab Spring. What started in Tunisia spread east to Egypt, and then north across the Mediterranean to Greece, and then west to Spain. During the Movement's crossing of the Mediterranean, some embers fell over Syria, and that entire country has become engulfed, and it has been burning out of control for quite some time now. The exact same scenario is poised to play out here in the US. All of the identical ingredients are already there. The only remaining question is, what will be the spark that sets it off? If not another war that nobody wants, then it will be something else that is currently not foreseeable. But you can bet the very shoes on our feet that it will.

Americans will have to decide for themselves who will represent them once they recognize and accept that both major parties are in the employ of the corporate interests that fund their campaigns. We may as well include the possibility that we may start all over again, with just the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights as the framework upon which it will rest. When they do, they will abandon the myth of the two-party system and realize that solving the problems threatening the viability of the American experiment in democracy is more important than ideology. How one wants to describe the system of government will be unimportant if we hand complete control of it to a police state that operates exclusively in the interest of the economic elite.

Events are conspiring that seem to be leading inevitably to the kind of awakening among average Americans that we have been working towards since it became obvious that the Anglo-American Empire is no longer afraid of public opinion in the US or anywhere else. Just as the power of the banks was revealed by the immunity for the crimes they committed that crashed the US and world economies, the threatened assault on Syria is leading to outrage throughout the majority of the American public. The lies are so transparent that even the Washington Post began to refer to the "alleged" use of chemical weapons by the Syrian military in a story about the decisive defeat in Parliament of a vote to support an illegal, non-UN-sanctioned US attack.

It is becoming easier to help newly alert citizens to connect the dots that have been obvious to some of us for some time. The furious reaction to the revelations of NSA spying have interrupted the ongoing partisan nonsense of pundits representing the two sides of the corporate duopoly long enough for them to agree that the abridgment of civil liberties has gone on long enough, prompting even Congress to act. The furor resulted in the near-passage on a bipartisan vote of the 'Amash amendment' that would have restricted NSA spying. Such resistance to Presidential overreach of authority to strip Americans of basic constitutional rights would have been unthinkable even six months ago. It is only a matter of time before Americans collectively grasp the idea that war abroad, economic disaster, and suspension of civil liberties at home are all symptoms of the same problem: corporate control of the US government. When they do, they will be ready for the solution. The only question remaining here is, will the top 1% give back the huge chunks of America that they have taken over the years, and will governing power be peacefully returned to “we the people”, or will we have to take it by force? Remember the wise words of President John F. Kennedy who once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.

There is no doubt that corruption of the US government by corporations and wealthy individuals is at the root of the problem. There are many proposals to do something about it, but the one with legs is the movement to pass a constitutional amendment to effectively reform campaign finance and abolish corporate person-hood. When America has the discussion about why we need such an amendment and what form it should take, we will be ready to elect representatives who are willing to cosponsor and vote for it. It is not hard to see that the mood of the country is shifting away from helpless acceptance of the theft of what they have assumed is our democracy. Surely a politician as brilliant as Obama can see it. That raises the interesting question. Is it possible that he knows that we will not "be the change" he told us we have to be in 2008 unless things get so bad that we finally have no choice but to act? Is that why he seems to be doing nothing to counter the trend toward fascism in America? We can always hope that those we have accused of blind faith might have been right in claiming that Obama is playing three-dimensional chess with a bunch of checker players. Only time will tell, and only if the movement to take back America for the People continues to grow. For more info visit http://www.sandlministries.org/political_activism and http://www.sandlministries.org/national_strike_movement

Back by popular demand, and in honor of Labor day and the striking restaurant workers, I offer "Battle Cry of the American Worker"

The Battle Cry of the American Worker

(excerpt from, “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto” by Rev. Paul J. Bern)

When in the course of current events the constituency of the United States finds itself oppressed and hemmed in by that political body which governs us, and when the working people of this great country which I love so much finds itself with its backs against the wall due to circumstances and situations which are beyond our control, it naturally become the patriotic duty of every concerned American to stand up to and to oppose that which suppresses and restricts the God-given freedoms spelled out in our US Constitution, and to draw a line in the sand of civilization that guarantees the health, wealth and prosperity of us all. As peaceful and law-abiding citizens, we have been governed by the rule of law which is summarized in a document that working Americans continue to revere, none other than the Constitution of the United States, in keeping with the time-honored traditions passed down to us by our founding fathers. But lately our sacred Constitution has been bastardized and prostituted not only by those in power within the federal government, but more directly by the armies of corporate lobbyists who have invaded Washington and seized control of our executive, legislative and judicial branches of government for the sole express purpose of engineering a bloodless coup de etat that is being carried out not by bullets but by vast sums of money that are at once immoral, illegal, and a veritable avalanche of green and greedy corruption. The sole express purpose of this financial invasion is to forcibly liquidate the middle and working classes in this great country of ours. This is being done deliberately and with sinister calculation by the wealthiest Americans from Wall Street to a myriad of corporate boardrooms all across America, orchestrated by the unconstitutional Federal Reserve and its minions, for the sole express purpose of focusing and concentrating all available wealth into the kleptomaniac-like hands of the top 1% of wage earners and big business owners all across America. In fact, I further submit and assert that this is all being done at the expense of the US middle and working classes, the result of which is to force an ever-increasing number of working Americans from all walks of life into ever-increasing poverty.

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

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

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

Second, the retirement savings of the middle and working classes have been severely compromised or even liquidated altogether by the crooked and devious manipulations of Wall Street bankers, market speculators, hedge fund managers and corporate boards of directors who engineered the largest swindle in human history back in 2008. This criminal act resulted in the US government bailout known as TARP, an $850 billion bank robbery of the US Treasury conceived and carried out by the same Ponzi schemers who ran the US economy into the ground in the first place. The cost of this bailout has been put on the backs of the middle and working classes, their children and grandchildren, and has generated a federal government budget deficit that has exceeded $17 trillion dollars as I write this, a staggering sum that threatens to bankrupt the country and destroy the formerly good credit rating of the United States. 

 

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

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

Fourth, the largest transfer of wealth in human history is being reinforced by a healthcare system that has become so expensive that over 54 million Americans can no longer afford health insurance. This has left an increasing percentage of working Americans one accident or catastrophic illness away from bankruptcy, and all without remedy. Worse still, the average cost of medical care for US senior citizens from the time they retire until their death is $250,000.00 as of 2012, the latest year for which these statistics are available. As more and more US workers find themselves unable to afford health coverage, an increasing number of people are putting off doctor and/or dental visits and not refilling needed prescriptions for purely financial reasons, and the physical and mental health of these hapless individuals slowly erodes away as a direct consequence.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Let there be no mistake, America is past being overdue for mass civil disobedience, and it is ripe for outright revolution. If our First Amendment rights continue to be taken away, then we will fight back using our the Second Amendment rights instead. The conditions and circumstances in which the US middle and working classes find ourselves has become intolerable. President John Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful protest impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.

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

Remembering the speech that changed the world for the better

I Dare To Dream

(excerpt from “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto 2^nd Edition” by Rev. Paul J. Bern)

The march of economic inequality, from which springs the source of racism, poverty, crime, violence, and lack of access to healthcare and higher education, has become the new civil rights issue of the 21^st century. (I like to call it Rev. Dr. MLK, Jr. 2.0.) King's dream of unconditional equality throughout the country can finish becoming a reality when the economic barriers that we all face on a daily basis finally come down for good, like an economic Berlin Wall circa 1989. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to the masses during the 1963 civil rights march on Washington and said, “I have a dream...”. By writing and publishing these words it is my intent to help take up where King's Dream left off, and to do anything I can to help finish the job that he started. And so let me slightly change that to, “I dare to dream”.

I dare to dream of a world in which the gap between rich and poor is gone forever. We all deserve to live in a world where wealth has been redistributed in a peaceful and orderly manner and not by the barrel of a gun. I dare to dream of a country where wealth has been redistributed in 4 ways. First, every worker earns a living wage so poverty can be eliminated. Second, free higher education and vocational retraining must be available to every worker for life, including daycare available to all, that would be based on the worker's or student's ability to pay on a sliding scale, because everyone has the right to better themselves at will. Third, I envision an America where quality health care is available to every worker at nominal cost for life. Single-payer healthcare based on the current Medicare model must not be reserved only for those who can afford it, but it must be a fundamental human right for all ages. I dare to dream of an America where there will be no such thing as someone without health insurance, where every citizen will have lifetime healthcare and prescription drug coverage without qualification, and where there will be the fewest sick days for American workers and their children of any country in the developed world. Fourth, “we the people” demand the abolition of the federal tax code, including elimination of the despised federal withholding tax, which would give every American worker or business owner an immediate 18% pay raise. 

 

I dare to dream of a new America with a robust and viable economy. That is why I have been insisting on a $12.00 per hour minimum wage since 2010. I dare to dream of a new America where education will be subsidized from the cradle to the grave so that the US develops the most formidable work force the world has ever seen. I dare to dream of an America where all workers have the right to organize, to a flexible work week and to paid family or maternity leave. Most other developed countries already do this. The US is the only exception and that has got to change. The only remaining question in my mind is whether we can accomplish this peacefully or otherwise, and it looks more and more to me like it will be the latter.

I dare to dream of an America where affordable housing is the law of the land, where home ownership becomes a right and not a privilege so we can wipe out homelessness, and where the price of a house is limited to the sum total of ten years income of any given individual or household purchasers. I insist on a country where home ownership isn't part of an exclusive club with the highest “credit scores”. It is, and must become, a basic human right. Even the cave men lived in caves of their own!

I dare to dream of a country with new public works programs that put an end to unemployment forever so the USA can have full employment all the time. America's infrastructure needs to be rebuilt, and its inner cities are in dire need of an overhaul. What a better way to accomplish this!

I dare to dream of a new America with an all-new public school and university system that has an Internet-based curriculum that can be updated at will, and that is second to none in the developed world, with a new and more intensive school year, and that has viable replacements for standardized testing, and where class size is limited by law. I dare to dream of a country where teachers make what their Congressional representatives make, and vice versa.

I dare to dream of a new nation where unconditional equality is the law of the land for every citizen without exception, and this will include economic equality. I dare to dream of a new America where there is no more income tax, no capital gains tax, no alternative minimum tax, no estate tax, no self-employment tax, and where families and businesses can have a tax free income unless they are very wealthy. In its place would be a national sales tax, such as a Consumption Tax, where everyone pays proportionately the same tax rate on only what they consume, plus an “excess wealth tax” for persons with annual incomes exceeding $3 million, and for businesses with annual proceeds exceeding $300 million, so America's budget can be balanced and fair.

I dare to dream of a better USA where personal privacy is the law of the land, where identity theft is a thing of the past, and where it will be illegal for employers to obtain the credit files or credit scores of any job applicant.

I dare to dream of a more compassionate America where children have the right to a challenging and progressive learning environment, and where kids will be legally guaranteed freedom from hunger, sickness and violence, and where all God's children will have the right to safe adoption, foster care and day care.

I dare to dream of an all-new voting system, including the abolition of the elitist Electoral College, that is Internet-based, paperless, and that can be accessed from any location using any computer or wireless device, instead of wasting our time and fuel and losing work time going to polling stations, and instead of using unreliable and unsecured voting machines.

I dare to dream of an America of integrity where all of the dirty corporate money and all the filthy lucre is abolished from our political process. I dare to dream of an America where the Wall Street shysters who crashed the US economy are brought to justice, and where the keys to all of the fraudulently foreclosed homes are returned to their rightful owners.

I dare to dream of the end to America's sinister war on drugs, where all convicted nonviolent drug offenders can qualify for alternative sentences for their offenses so they may obtain early release, and where all the currently illegal drugs are legalized, regulated and taxed by appropriate legislation.

Finally, I dare to dream of a world in which all this is easily financially achievable because all the money that is being wasted currently on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Pakistan, Libya and elsewhere will be redirected towards all these dreams that I have just mentioned. The money is already there, its just being budgeted in all the wrong places. Let me tell you why.

If the US military took all the money it spends occupying Afghanistan for just one day and put it into an interest-bearing account, there would be enough money available to send every American school kid from the first grade up to senior year in high school through 4 years of college fully paid for, including tuition, dorms, books, food, access to the Internet and to public transportation. Here's another example: If the US government took all that money set aside from one days worth of military expenditures in Afghanistan alone, there would be enough money to build a 2,500 square feet house, fully furnished and stocked with groceries, with all the utilities already turned on, for every homeless person in the US including all the homeless kids. That's how easily we can end homelessness in the richest country in the world.

Just as surely as there was an Arab Spring beginning in 2011 that is still ongoing in Egypt, Algeria, Yemen and Syria, to name a few, uprisings of the people throughout North Africa and the Middle East that toppled one dictator after another, so I am telling you that there will be an American Spring no later than 2014. Beginning in 2011 with the start-up of the “Occupy” and “99%” Movements, of which I am proud to be a part, this uprising of the American people against the top 1% will explode like an atomic mushroom cloud over the American political and economic elite, obliterating them all without anyone having fired a single shot so that the remaining 99% of us can peacefully take back what has been stolen from us over the last 100 years. We can only accomplish this by uniting together as one and acting as one body to break free from the shackles of oppression that have us all enslaved.

You have just read the end of chapter 9 of my book, “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto” (Salt of the Earth Publishing, 470 pages, $14.95) To order your copy, go to www.sotepublishing.com. Thanks so much. Shalom!

"Occupy America", arguably one of the best books yet on the Occupy and 99% Movements, gets reduced to $9.95 with free shipping!

”Occupying America: We Shall Overcome”. Written in the style of an investigative reporter, this 290-page book is simply the latest, most exhaustive and most comprehensive book about the growing “Occupy Wall St.” and “We Are The 99%” movements. It offers the clearest explanation to date about what these movements are trying to accomplish and what they stand for, and it ends with a prediction of mass civil unrest in the US and other developed countries for the remainder of 2013 and beyond due to extreme economic hardship and what amounts to enforced austerity. This is the definitive book on the state of American political dissent in the early 21^st century, and it ends with a prediction of mass civil unrest (dare I say revolution?) in the US and other capitalist countries due to the extreme concentration of wealth in favor of the top 1%. Learn more

My government is treating me like a mushroom, and I'm fed up

Our Leaders and Our Media Keep Us

in the Dark, Living in Fear

The civil unrest and rioting in Egypt has been in the headlines all week. The Obama administration and the Lame Stream Media are finding themselves in a lose-lose situation. If they choose to back the democratically elected president Morsi, they risk Egypt turning into a Muslim fundamentalist state. In that event, Morsi's government stands to inherit a stockpile of military weapons like jet fighters, tanks, machine guns and a whole host of advanced hardware like cruise missiles supplied by none other than the United States. So the Obama administration's next move could be to cut off all aid to Egypt, including military aid, in a frantic effort to keep these American weapons from being used against innocent civilians. Unfortunately for Obama and the US military, the proverbial cat is already out of the bag in this regard. If the Muslim Brotherhood gets their hands on those weapons, it will be civil war for sure. If they don't, or are prevented from reaching them, then they will be slaughtered by the Egyptian military. Either way, American weapons will be used. Shame on us for not standing up to Congress and the President, and for not voicing our outrage soon enough.

I also watched a video on my computer this past week where the news reporter referred to the Egyptian and Syrian rebels as ‘freedom fighters’. It led me to ponder why so many people were willing to accept at face value the agenda in the current US administration as well as the British government. It also led me to conclude just how easy it has been to manipulate ordinary people into backing imperialist ventures abroad, which are fought on behalf of rich people's interests. At a time of biting austerity in Europe (or its American code word, 'sequestration') and attacks on workers and the middle class, billions of dollars of ordinary people’s money was used to fund the illegal bombing of Libya, the Syrian civil war, and the ongoing drone attacks of America's clandestine wars.

The justification sold to people for such militarism is that dictators are bad. The justification sold to people for attacking or destabilizing countries resulting in mass death is that democracy must therefore be forced through by the barrel of a gun. Isn’t it terrible, the politicians and media say, that Syria's Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator who is preventing democracy by putting down the rebels? The Assad regime undoubtedly has its faults, but nothing is ever said by the corporate media about the authoritarian ruling clique in Saudi Arabia, which has even given its name to that country (House of Saud). Nothing is ever said about a western backed dictator in Bahrain who has been in power for 52 years. Nothing is ever revealed about the brutal ongoing crackdowns on protestors and dissenters in those countries. When Bahrain used Saudi troops to put down uprisings in 2011, the resultant death toll was proportionally much larger than was the loss of life in Egypt during the uprising there. In fact, if the death toll in Bahrain were taken as a proportion of the population, the equivalent death toll for Egypt would have been 12,000.

Where was the outrage from the US and its client states? That’s right, there was none. The King of Bahrain was even invited to attend Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee celebrations at Buckingham Palace. As it did in Libya, repressive Saudi Arabia is playing a big role in facilitating the rag-tag rebels in Syria to destabilize a sovereign state that stands in the way of NATO and Israeli interests. And far away, back in Britain and the US, the public is being fed a pack of lies by politicians and the mainstream media about the situation in Syria, just as it has been over other military adventures over the past decade. The majority of westerners don’t have much of a clue about what is really happening. They are unaware that Syria forms part of the greater game in the region. They fail to see the links between Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, which are all part of a Washington-led wider geo-political strategy hell-bent on global domination, controlling the world’s mineral resources, its pipeline routes, and lining the pockets of western financiers and oil, armaments and logistics companies. Too many remain confused or ignorant thanks to duplicitous politicians and the compliant corporate media.

The public cannot know the reality. They will not be allowed to know, or at least for as long as the powers-that-be can get away with it. We are being kept in fear and in the dark and deceived by politicians and the media that churn out increasingly tired-sounding clichés about a war on terror or humanitarian militarism to justify murderous brutality. And the result is that too many people accept the lie that rag-tag forces made up of vicious, faction-ridden fighters, illegally armed by NATO terror governments and unelected regimes in Saudi and Qatar, are fighting for freedom and democracy. Those forces and nations wouldn’t know about freedom and democracy if they were hit in the face with it. Sorry, my mistake, they would and they do. That’s why they seek to crush it out of existence as soon as it appears. And that applies whether it appears within the borders of the US, Britain or Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere in places that are of strategic importance to them. The US track record of crushing democratic governments is well documented by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges and historian William Blum. And look no further to see the attacks on WikiLeaks or the Occupy Movement to see how democratic movements are treated at home. Look no further to see how democratic workers’ movements that took hundreds of years to build in Britain and elsewhere, and for the last 100 years here in the US, and in Europe are under sustained attack. Giving the people the opportunity to vote every four or five years, while in the meantime deceiving, misinforming and lying to them, has no more to do with democracy or freedom than what is happening in Syria right now.

If more ordinary folk were to turn their attention away from glossy sports events, cheap Sunday morning political debate, reality shows, talent contests or all other forms of comatose infotainment on our TV's for one minute, they might well realize that the billionaire criminal elites that take their taxes and dictate national and foreign policy are in many cases a good deal worse than any number of the regimes they seek to demonize.