by Carol Warner Christen
(Swans - October 8, 2007) The enthusiasm, after the defeat of the British on our soil, eventually led to disillusionment by the North and the South straying from the common belief in the equality of persons in the United States. Panic in the form of the War Between the States resulted. This led to a perpetual search for the guilty on one thing or another, often culminating in the punishment of the innocent. Lavish praise and honors were heaped upon the non-participants high enough in the hierarchy to manipulate the political landscape solely for their own benefit, as they still do.
The Founders enthusiastically pledged their lives and their sacred honor to create a nation with a constitution. One hundred twenty years later, disillusionment began with a court clerk's ridiculous message on a case before the Supreme Court. The clerk wrote on the outer jacket of the legal suit that corporations were persons, although the court did not hold that in its ruling. No actual panic occurred and the search for the guilty culminated by the court tacitly giving permission to create a form of pseudo-person with all the rights of an actual human person.
This, in turn, punished the actual human because the power of one is not the power of the articles of incorporation creating an inhuman one of the many. Of course, the praise and honors for the incorporated passed on in perpetuity with the non-participants gaining in global power one hundred eleven years after the fact of this scribbling on court papers by one uninformed human being. The mere human person usually dies in less than seventy years of adulthood. The corporation lives on and on and on for eternity, enriching the few above the many.
Up until the clerk's error, the People created wealth in many ways: most of it small, local, and providing a livelihood from myriad small endeavors. A period of great enthusiasm for life grew creating local banks and local prosperity. This activity did not sit well with certain persons, disillusioned that profit went to their inferiors, rather than to they who deserved to reap the benefits of everything. They panicked and searched for ways to stifle the guilty ones who took away the profits that the "innocent" always felt belonged to them alone.
Within seventeen years, the very richest non-participants in the general welfare met secretly on an island, and came up with the idea of the Federal Reserve Bank, that is to say, a bank that took the Treasury's duty to manage the nation's monies, onto its incorporated self. The genius of that idea gave the rich alpha males of the times the United States Treasury. All they had to do was print money and charge the taxpayers for the printings. The payment for printing the monies disillusioned, panicked, and punished the People, eventually culminating in the crash of 1929, when money became worthless to the point that many committed suicide over their losses. Speculators thrived and survived; one member of my family jumped to his death over it before I was born.
Many years ago, Thomas Jefferson issued a dire warning about banks and debt:
If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless. I sincerely believe the banking institutions (having the issuing power of money) are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies. My zeal against these institutions was so warm and open at the establishment of the Bank of the United States (Hamilton's foreign system), that I was derided as a maniac by the tribe of bank mongers who were seeking to filch from the public.
Enthusiasm sprung anew when it was realized that war generated huge profits. Weapons manufactured by those incorporated entities made money, lots of it. Armies squandered the bullets with abandon to prevent panic amongst the troops and to prevent disillusioning the generals and the political reasons for war. A search for enemies began and it has punished the innocent to this day -- two hundred thirty-one years later -- as war after war on the planet goes on aided and abetted by the need for profit and for resources. Russia was forced to give up as her economy was not set up to profit from war as is ours. Our leaders are praised and honored and not one of them participated in war as individual humans. War is so profitable that no one wants to impeach the perpetrators lest the golden calf be melted into scrap.
James Madison, April 20, 1795, stated clearly the truth about war:
Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these come debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Two hundred thirty-one years later, our enthusiasm for war outweighs the disillusionment of the poverty that creeps up on ninety percent of the citizens of the United States in a age of hegemony, hubris, arrogance, and the pretence of empire. Some are panicking because our work, our jobs, our livings have slipped their moorings here with global corporations; corporations we permitted to become Frankensteins, brainless, and ordered about by the few.
Our work has left our shores; all we have left are jobs for fast food, cleaning up after our "betters," or no work at all. The Congress has seen to it that programs instituted for the benefit of all have been gutted, changed, and down-graded as health care, the use of Social Security monies for war debts. Adding insult to injury, the Congress in collusion with the executive branch removed "rights" not theirs to take without our agreement.
Yet, we shop enthusiastically, disillusioned. We panic and search for the guilty, finding them in the newly created masses of the poor. We call them names without knowing them; we denigrate them without ever visiting them to see for ourselves why their behavior is not middle class. We punish them by taking away the meager funds of the injured or the unemployed, which is due solely to our mismanagement of our corporate structures and of our bogus ideas of humanity.
We praise God who is not, I repeat, not, a Participant in this nonsense. This is a social and environmental scam manipulated to pass itself off as religious truth. Some of We, the People, want all the resources on the planet because we've been warned by scientists that the resources cannot be sustained for long by six to ten billion people all wanting to drive gasoline-powered vehicles rather than using their legs. Gasoline engines are so popular that the highways of China are now full of them; and, they want more. Imagine that! Where will all the fuel be found? Not here. Over there across the seas are relatively defenseless peoples we can steal oil from by bombing their ancient livelihoods out of existence along with humanity's oldest artifacts. In the wings, wait other formidable countries hoping for oil, too, and for praise for obtaining it "for free."
Humans on any site situated over oil are fair game. Here it is a capital crime to kill even one of us. At least, that's what our country set up to establish justice so far. If martial law were to appear on American soil, that, too, would be gone along with all the other rights our citizens permitted our Congress to remove since 9/11. "What fools these mortals be."(A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare)
When I worked as a mechanical design drafter and supervisor of water and wastewater projects, we had a small list called: "Six Phases of a Project:"
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Punishment of the Innocent
6. Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants
It seems to me that our national life, as it were, is also somewhat regulated this same way as you might have noted the use of the phrases interspersed above in the text. The events on September 11 propelled this country into all six phases in the space of five years after the Republicans enthusiastically elected one of their own president, which disillusioned the rest of us, especially since the Supreme Court decided to elect him after the shenanigans in Florida and the disenfranchisement of citizens without good reason. The country allowed a corporation to count votes with machines designed to be hacked. No one was permitted to make any headway on this corporate taking of citizen votes.
The 9/11 disaster at the towers in New York City created a huge shocking panic amongst the People. The firefighters and others, however, were cool, calm, professional, and wonderful even when the authorities claimed there was no danger from the dusts; there was serious danger now coming to light. The Pentagon and other planes were involved while the Air Force was out to sea on the vice president's orders. The search for the guilty did not involve forensics as it had in the past. The debris was shipped immediately overseas for melting, which destroyed any and all evidence. The guilty were found to be nineteen, mostly, Saudi Arabians with the claim that they all died in the disasters even when some have been found alive overseas. Strange how events work out, isn't it?
Thus, instead of bombing Saudi Arabia, we attacked the countries of Afghanistan, and then Iraq, culminating in the punishment of the innocent, which continues to this day. Who gets the praise and honors without participation? The Executive Branch and the members of the neo-conservative group, the infamous PNAC: "Progress for the New American Century," the weapons manufacturers, and all the other large, bloated corporate persons doing a huge worldwide business on this punishment of the innocent Iraqis. The amount of money shifted from another innocent group, our citizen taxpayers, who know not what they do in the name of war, is obscene.
American infrastructure is failing; technology is going overseas, the middle class has shrunk, while the non-participants get very rich since their taxes have been abated. The way I see it is that we will leave this planet a mess after we ruin it and after we create die-offs on a scale not seen since the dinosaurs. The pampered ones hiding now behind obscene amounts of money and profits will inherit the earth. They will have to live within "spacesuits" because the damage they have done will make the planet unfit to enjoy. How you say? Depleted uranium dust is good for 4,500,000 years at the very least. Of course, I expect them to evolve and look somewhat like the tiny babies we have already deformed by making sure our bombs polluted our own soldiers, too. Death is a very evil way to increase profits.
Humanity has wondrous abilities with the attention span of a gnat about the larger considerations of life. We have in our enthusiasm for a paycheck allowed the non-participants to define life from seven in the morning till six at night (travel time for those who thought it was merely an eight-hour day). We have given up unions to protect ourselves for two reasons: some union leaders disappointed us by being as corrupt as the owners who panicked us by cutting wages, hours, benefits, and sending our worthwhile work to the world. As we search for the guilty, we blame everyone but ourselves for our short attention spans. Meanwhile, we run up bills, take our equity to pay for the higher costs of everything, and punish anyone we can think of to explain the mess we refuse to undo and to really think over. Do we want what we have wrought?
Meanwhile, the chattering classes pose and advertise their good fortune on every media available since we gave up on honest news since the wild days of the hippies. The non-participants have been closing the noose ever since on such enthusiastic displays of real humanity because, otherwise, where would they profit? Freedom is damned if it's for anyone else except the non-participants in real life; it is the posing life, an imposition on reality: unreal for us, real for them.
How bad does it have to get before we panic and search for the guilty among our elected lawmakers and presidents before we realize they have sold us out? How much punishment will we, as a people, take as our debts become so enormous we cannot service them for wars and food? Who will you hold responsible when the gasoline for your car is beyond your ability to pay for it to get to work? Or, who will you praise when there is no health care for your family and the emergency room is closed? Is martial law just another word for punishment (of the innocent) to you?
The news says our country's corporations are now for sale to international conglomerates because the dollar is so low on the monetary totem pole. If we refuse to admit human "illegal" immigrants anymore, will you enthusiastically welcome corporate immigrants to direct your livelihoods? Will you praise the emir of Dubai?
The guilt lies not in our stars, it lies within ourselves for our greed and our lack of care about our constitutional republic which, although it lies in ruins nationally, still abides in many states of the union and in the hearts of those who have always honored rights and laws for the good of the people. The Preamble still points the way; the Bill of Rights still exist in most of our hearts; the Constitution has been dishonored by many who swore to uphold it, but it still is our Constitution. Take back habeas corpus and throw the greedy non-participants in human reality a curve ball they cannot hit again against we, the People. Undo bad and excessive laws; let's start anew with fresh enthusiasm for what our ancestors left us as their only real legacy: equality.
Then, the final praise and honors will go to our progeny for inheriting actual freedom.
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