SUBHEAD: Celebrating the 4th of July—that revolution that gave birth to our nation by exerting people power.
By John Schettler on 01 July 2009 in The Writing Shop -
http://www.writingshop.ws/html/rocket_s_red_glare.html
It’s that time again, as the second quarter fizzles out and Americans reach the mid year fest we call the “fourth”—Independence Day, the commemoration of the founding of our nation by a group of daring dissidents, yes, a bunch of free thinking liberals from the Northeast, who dragged along their Southern colonial compatriots by compromising on the issue of slavery.
image above: Francis Scott Key coined the phrase the "rocket's red glare" after the British fired rockets against the U.S.
They huddled in a humid courthouse in Philadelphia, in a slow, grinding debate before they finally reached consensus and penned their names to a declaration. These United States would no longer be beholden to the King of England, but would declare themselves to be a free and independent nation.
After asserting those “unalienable” rights of mankind, our declaration then labored to define government as the creation and agent of the people. The entire second paragraph of the declaration cemented this idea, and made it abundantly clear that should government ever fail to deliver on its primary charge of securing our rights and wellbeing it was the privilege and mandatory responsibility of the people to correct that situation.
“To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government…when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
These assertions were not made as mere justifications for what the Founding Fathers were about to do in separating from the British Crown, they were also meant as both a warning and clarion call to future generations, urging them to be mindful of what government does and cognizant of whom it serves.
This year the 4th of July will be strangely quiet, at least in my region of the country, (California). Budget strapped cities and towns have all cancelled their fireworks displays to save much needed funds. Fire danger has led to the banning of smaller fireworks one often hears popping and crackling on the streets, or along the beaches. As the 8th largest economy in the world, California is at the leading edge of this bank induced Recession/Depression that has gripped the nation in its icy fist. In lieu of the traditional fireworks, my town is rolling out a barbecue, also an American tradition on the 4th, and they are holding a little town play in a park where actors will play at Franklin, Jefferson and Adams.
How odd to think that when one quotes the words of these great men, or references passages from our own declaration of independence or bill of rights, there is a segment of our government out there that is quietly disturbed by this, and takes notice. In some ways they might see this as seditious behavior! Quote Jefferson and you could be flagged as a potential threat to “the state.” Such words were, after all, framed in the minds and spoken on the lips of dissidents, revolutionaries, upstarts. They were men who had the insight and moral strength to see wrong, oppose it, and courage to make that opposition a real and tangible action. Indeed, they flat out ended the governance of Great Britain over the American colonies, and started over.
Americans get all gushy on the 4th of July. They display flags, don their old military uniforms, hold parades and fire off those rockets—but this year we will be a humbled and chastened nation as we celebrate our founding. We look at ourselves, after generations of largesse, and wonder what our future holds now .
What would Franklin, Jefferson and Adams think of our nation today, I wonder? How would they view an organization like the “Federal Reserve,” private bankers with the power to issue credit and create currency at their whim—by the trillions. How would they view the allocation of more dollar resources in a single year to banks and financial institutions than our government has spent in all its previous history? For what? To pay off broken investment deals made by the wealthy—that top 1% who control nearly 50% of all financial resources in this country now.
And worse, to pay off shadowy foreign wealth centers, foreign banks and sovereign funds. And what would the Founders think to learn that while this tremendous allocation of funds was being made by a largely unregulated Federal Reserve, with the government complicit, all across the nation people were having their homes seized by banks after the explosion of rigged mortgages, seeing banks cut and freeze their access to credit, impose usurious interest rates of 30% or higher.
They would see how the financial “services” industry has choked off business credit lines as well, while millions and millions of Americans lose their jobs and join the ever swelling ranks of the unemployed. They would see a nation that has become the biggest debtor in the world, relying on daily loans from places like China and Japan to simply make the interest payments on this debt. They would see the hunger in America, the homelessness, the lack of adequate health care for over 40% of our citizens. And while this is going on, what would they think of the fact that our nation has built over 700 military bases on foreign soil, and has the bulk of its armed forces deployed abroad in a vast archipelago that costs us over half a trillion dollars each year to sustain?
Quite frankly, I believe Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and all their cohorts, would plainly see the reality of what we have become—a nation no longer “of the people, by the people and for the people,” but a complex system of financially engineered power structures that exist solely to serve the moneyed interests of the banks and the wealthy investor class. These institutions, deemed “too big to fail” are now liberally and brazenly supported by the federal government, and the “Fed” to the tune of over $13.8 trillion dollars, (some say much more). They would see this in a heartbeat, know it to a certainty, and there would be no “spin” in what they chose to say or do about it were the matter given to their able hands, hearts and intellects once again.
I have little doubt that Jefferson’s pen would be busy as before, urged on by Franklin and Adams to lay out a list of offenses and transgressions that required redress. The ire of their hearts and minds would not be vented on the King of England, or even the government in Washington, but first against the dark heart and soul of what we have become—a nation mortgaged to Citibank, BofA, JP Morgan Chase and manipulated by a royal financial caste bred in the lavish halls of Goldman Sachs.
This is truth. This is reality. Any sense you may have that we have free and fair elections and a government that exists to secure our rights and needs is pure theater, a fiction spun out by media centers that are again wholly owned by powerful corporations and wealth centers. The eloquent clauses that opened our original declaration would be invoked again, and incisively pointed at the heart of these money centers, the brokers of phantom securities, swaps, and derivatives, in a never ending flow of dark finance that few, if any, really understand. Do you doubt it?
We gave into the hands of these wealthy men the solemn charge of securing the wellbeing of our future—and they have botched the job. The funds allocated thus far to bailing out their malfeasance and greed have already consumed the future of generations of Americans yet unborn. So I ask you, what would Franklin, Jefferson and Adams say and do were they to witness our situation today as a nation? I have little doubt that the first order of business would be to take a horse whip to anyone in government beholden to banks and financial institutions.
They would abolish the Federal Reserve in a heartbeat, and restore the power to create currency to the government where our construction says it must reside. They would properly re-allocate our financial resources for the sole benefit and wellbeing of our citizens, and not the wealthy few who command so much and who have failed us so badly. They would recall our vastly dispersed armies on foreign soil and scale down deployments at home. They would forbid moneyed interests to lobby our Senators and Representatives, effectively buying their votes, and ruthlessly drum out corruption in the people’s chambers. They would work feverishly to re-establish and support a press that was free of control by corporate masters. And this would just be their starting point.
But it is really fruitless to ask, as I have here, what Franklin, Jefferson and Adams would do?The question is: what will we do? Where are the good men now? In what humid rooms do they meet to organize opposition to the power centers that have largely bought and mortgaged away our government and our future? And are you one of them?
Such thoughts and expressions might be permitted still under our constitution, but would certainly be deemed “revolutionary,” by the powers that be and the Orwellian organizations that have been spawned in recent years with names like NORTHCOM, FEMA, and our beloved Department of Homeland Security. They would be seen as the words of dangerous dissidents, terrorists in the making, who dare oppose generations of invested wealth, and the accumulation of real power into fewer and fewer hands through the “miracle of compounded interest.” The dollar itself was once called “almighty.”
Consider now the power of men who can create dollars at their whim. It is they who now run this nation, quite openly, and at the very highest levels. They come from Wall Street investment houses and large private banks and they staff our Treasury Department, who’s job it is now to look to the wellbeing of those very same banks. No president gets elected in this country without their monetary support and their willing consent. You though your vote decided that, last November and brought “Change.Gov” to the White house.
Instead you got Summers, Geithner and Rubin—all in league with Bernanke and the Fed, and the beat goes on. Paulson is writing his memoirs and waiting for a book deal. The faces may have changed, but the policy remains the same—look to the interest of the wealthy power centers—the banks. This is the end the resources of America now serve—now no longer rooted in real assets of value, but simply pixilated dollars conjured into being by the Federal Reserve.
What we need now is a new miracle, and one that properly restores and re-defines the reason we called ourselves a new nation dedicated to securing the rights of all “equal” men. Sounds a tad like a communist manifesto now, doesn’t it--Equal men and women? Oozes with leftist socialism, this strange idea that a nation’s resources and wealth should be directed to the wellbeing of all its citizens, not its banks and investor class. We have learned, in so many ways, (as Orwell put it), how “Some animals are simply more equal than others” in our society. Dat’s da way it is.
So the rockets red glare will not be gleaming in the skies this fourth of July, with so many of our cities and towns grown dark and silent, struggling to find resources to simply provide basic services like water and trash and police/fire protection now. There is no money for schools, health care, job programs, business, and certainly no more money for you to finance that new car—your FICO score just won’t do any more, tisk, tisk. There’s no money for food programs, affordable housing, clean water, renewal of our roads, rails, bridges, power systems. Yet there were trillions of dollars readily made available to all the big banks at the stroke of a pen, at the push of a digital keystroke, amen
This is the America we let happen all around us while we busied ourselves with the blue light specials at K-mart. This is the America we bought at 29.99% interest at home depot, and then re-financed in an interest only Option ARM rigged to explode like an IED. This is the America we delivered to the hands of the wealthy so they could chop it up and sell it off as a “security,” and all while we watch American Idol and Survivor on our wide screen plasma. The “you want it, you got it” society we built here on credit created from nothing has made us comfortable, but we have paid much more than a high interest rate for the life style we enjoyed so long. Just ask Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams. They will tell you what you paid, if you do not already know it.
Now what will you do about it? Blogger Karl Denninger offered up his idea in a recent post. He advised consumers to go on a strike, buying nothing but essentials until our demands are met. The list of demands was spot on: Round up all the fraudsters and prosecute, restore Glass-Steagall to regulate the financial industry, stamp out insider stock trading, withdraw all government bailout of financial institutions and let insolvent banks fail, audit the fed, jail government officials in collusion with banks, stop deficit government spending.
To this I might add: purge all bank and Wall Street insiders from government posts, end the securities & derivatives trading game, abolish the Federal Reserve and restore money creation to the Government, restore the gold standard to back up our dollars, impose a limit of two terms for all Representatives and Senators (ending the “Senator for life” game paid for by big corporate donations), make lobbying a Senator or Representative a crime, prohibit campaign donations of any kind and have all elections paid for by a government fund. (If we can toss off billions for banks without blinking , we can do this easily enough), restrict imposition of interest on any loan to a ceiling of 10%, reform the mortgage industry to create fair affordable lending, severely regulate Wall Street, abolish short selling on the markets, (you only make money when a company stock goes up—not down—ending the stock casino trading games.) Severely regulate banks and the credit card industry—now, not a year and a day from now.
The inability of people to afford anything but necessities may soon make this consumption fast a de facto occurrence. Denninger’s heart, and head, are in the right place, but I’m afraid it may take a good deal more than a collective Ghandi-inspired consumption strike to accomplish even a fraction of those demands. He saw this consumption strike as a lawful means of exerting people power, but re-read that declaration again—the United States is not the Federal government, it is the people, and it is in the will of the people that all lawful power resides in this country. If the people were to rise and demand all the above, and our government tried to pull an Ahmadinijad and set troops against the people, that government would be perpetrating a high crime against the United States—the people, and not the other way around.
Is this revolutionary talk? Not in the slightest. It’s just how America was founded, and it’s what we’re supposed to be celebrating every 4th of July—that revolution that gave birth to our nation. Will it come to revolution again if Change.Gov doesn’t start really delivering on what it promised?
