by Jim Karger The Dollar Vigilante
Previously by Jim Karger: Mexico Joins the US and Others in Implementing Capital Controls
This piece started with a note:
"Karger, they want to make Obama the King (officially) by rescinding the 22nd Amendment. Sounds like a legal issue to me. You want to take it on?" ~ Berwick
Not really, I thought.
The fact that some dim-wit Congressman from New York wants to enshrine Obama by making him eligible for a third, fourth, fifth or tenth term, would require support of both Houses of Congress and three-quarters of the States.
Odds of success: 0.0
America is certifiably insane, but that doesn't make "we the people" agree on much, and at least 48% of voters, based on the results of the last election, didn't want Obama for a second term, much less for a lifetime.
That said, whether or not the Constitution is amended to provide for a King, that once seminal document has become irrelevant, having been folded five ways and shoved up the bung-hole of America mostly by an out-of-control Executive branch with full support of a weak-kneed legislature. And that fact has not been lost on the general public who rate Congress less popular than lice, Brussels sprouts, colonoscopies, and root canals. Really.
What is surprising, or at least profoundly disappointing, is that the same general public who would apparently like to stomp Congress like a bunch of narcs at a biker rally, continues to elect the same low-rent ho-ho's every two years which is another story for another time. However we got here, we are here, and where we are is inside a full-bore totalitarian State.
The examples are myriad, but here are a few:
If you milk your cow and sell some of the milk to your neighbor, you could end up having your home raided by federal agents. I know. We had a TDV couple visit us in San Miguel de Allende a few months ago who were selling award-winning cheese in the State of Washington until the Feds came in with a SWAT team sporting automatic weapons like the kind you already can't buy and scared their children into the woods. The armed thugs then announced to them that it wasn't a good idea to sell their cheese across State lines, and proceeded to destroy more than $100,000 of their product and shut down their business. They came to Mexico looking for a new beginning since the federal government had already provided an old ending.
All over America today if you don't recycle, you face draconian fines. If your kid sets up a lemonade stand, one or both of you may be going to jail if it wasn't properly permitted, and, as one kid found out the hard way, don't burp in class because your next burp may be in jail.
Don't even think about organic gardening, at least not if your neighbor can see it, and no good deed will go unpunished if that deed is feeding the homeless in many cities.
In Seattle, where the sun never shines, it may soon be illegal for employers to do a criminal background check on a potential employee. After all, we wouldn't want to discriminate against dangerous felons, now would we?
ObamaCare is about to heel-crush small business nationwide. And those who think they are going to escape the largest government wealth transfer in history by turning their full-time employees into part-time employees to avoid being covered by the new legislation are going to get a rude awakening, with a shovel, by the IRS, who have no compunction changing the rules mid-stream so that virtually no business of any size will escape except by shutting down, which many will.
So detached from reality has government become that more than one official has suggested that the US take care of its debt problem by minting a trillion-dollar coin. Yeah, that should do the trick. "Here, take this coin. It is worth, uh, a trillion dollars." Ignored is the fact when a government tries to create demand by disseminating money, all you get is a failed currency, falling GDP, soaring debt levels, and inflation. Remember Japan? Apparently, most don't.
And, in a final in-your-face rejection of the most fundamental right of a citizen, which is the right to no longer be a citizen, government has announced ceremoniously that no one can leave the US (permanently) until they pay the piper what is called an "exit tax", calculated using the fiction that one sold all one's property on the day one turned in one's passport and dutifully pays the tax on the phantom gain. Oh, and there will be a $495 charge to cover the cost of the administrative handling of your former passport.
Perhaps we shouldn't expect more. Public servants, to use an wholly inappropriate term, are mostly felons now. Think Eric Holder and “Fast and Furious”. He is hardly alone. A recent lawsuit filed in a federal court in California alleges that National Labor Relations Board member Richard Griffin was complicit in a scheme to cover up embezzlement at his union by terminating employees who attempted to expose the effort. Just the kind of guy we need deciding national labor policy, hey?
The Federal Reserve can't go unmentioned, what with their printing and lending and holding interest rates at zero. I got an email from American Express today asking me to open a "High-Yield Savings Account" which pays, get this, 0.90% annually. I am sure this works just swell for a retiree who has saved all his life and has a couple of million dollars, knowing he can earn a whole $18,000 a year in interest, live in a slum, eat cat food, and wait for a Medicare appointment while having his nose rubbed in it by government for committing the sin of being "rich."
We have a President who weeps over twenty kids who get wasted by a freak show in Connecticut while he himself kills that many in a good week with his own drone attacks over a half a dozen countries, yet he misses the irony completely. He has doubled down on the lunatic fringe that was George Bush, upping the ante on warrantless wire-tapping, proxy detentions, Guantanamo, indefinite detentions and drone warfare. Unlike George W. who was a pathetic fool and a malaprop, Obama is a pathological, unapologetic narcissist. He is not stupid. He is evil. Which might explain he may go down in history as our least merciful president. During his first term, this self-promoting hypocrite has granted fewer commutations (shortening prisoners' sentences) and fewer pardons than any President in recent history.
Which leads here: I have not run out of vitriol, but I have run out of room. Obama won't be King because of the rescission of the 22nd Amendment. He will be King because he is already King, just like George W. was King, all because most people really want a King, want to be ruled, if only because they are too lazy and too disinterested to rule themselves.
Reprinted with permission from The Dollar Vigilante.
Jim Karger is a lawyer, and frequent contributor to The Dollar Vigilante, who has represented American businesses against incursions by government and labor unions for 30 years. In 2001, he left Dallas and moved to San Miguel de Allende in the high desert of central Mexico where he sought and found a freer and simpler life for he and his wife, Kelly, and their 10 dogs. Karger’s website is www.crediblyconnect.com.
