First and foremost, in American elections, the presidential candidates of the major parties are hand-picked by the financial elite that runs the country, so that the new "reform" President follows the same policies as the previous "traditionalist" President. By this pretense of choice in candidates, our rulers can appear to conform to the popular will without having to compromise their agenda.

The Iranian democratic experience shows that paper ballots can be efficiently counted by hand in mere hours, but in America we use complicated ballot counting machines which often malfunction and confuse election results for weeks on end, until finally the Supreme Court flips a coin. This heightened sense of drama is useful because it creates the emotional impression in the public mind that it really makes a difference as to who recites from the presidential teleprompter.

In the name of election reform, America is now transitioning to voting computers that produce no paper trail whatsoever. In a world that made sense, such complete lack of accountability would trigger universal accusations of intent to rig elections, but the fraudulence of the candidates cancels out the fraudulence of the voting machines and so there really isn’t much to complain about.

If despite the sanitization of election results our sleepy citizenry should wake up and decide to publicly protest, they will be confined to cramped holding pens known as "Free Speech Zones," where they are protected from the danger of being noticed.

What if protest crowds in America burst out of confinement onto the streets and become unruly? Then the police are authorized to use tasers, which can be just as lethal as guns but are officially declared "non-lethal," which means that if you are harmed by excessive shock it’s never the cop’s fault and you must have really been asking for it. Since tasers are bloodless, they provide little opportunity for martyrdom photo-ops.

Speaking of media, American government is far ahead of Iran in terms of filtering the news. In America, the police routinely confiscate the cameras and cell phones of bystanders in the vicinity of an act of police brutality. This is technically illegal, but any show of resistance will bring charges of "’interference" with police business.

As for Twitter, the phone companies (guess who controls them) will happily comply with government "requests" to monitor personal phone communications so that Homeland Security can take appropriate action against troublemakers. Such surveillance is illegal, but that simply means the government issues amnesty and promises not to break the law again unless it feels like it.

I don’t know the status of civil rights in Iran, but here in America the regime creates a disincentive for anti-government protests by infringing upon certain minor constitutional rights, such as the right not to be tortured into making false confessions. That the Iranian regime recently released a foreign journalist whom it accused of being a spy — rather than waterboarding her until she confessed to being a spy — indicates that Iran has a long way to go before its human rights record matches that of the United States.

These examples are just a brief summary of some of the many techniques that our ruling elite employs here in America to maintain the illusion of democracy while blatantly operating the biggest empire the world has ever seen. To be sure, the recent protests in the streets of Tehran are a distraction, but in keeping with the lessons of modern American democracy, there’s nothing wrong with Iranian democracy that a shipload of tasers and waterboards can’t fix. With a little hard work and a lot of hypocrisy, the mullahs can make over Iran’s democracy into just as much an admired sham as is America’s.

Of course, the Iranians will still have to exchange their increasingly valuable oil for our increasingly worthless dollars, or our government will find an excuse to bomb them back to the stone age no matter what they do. Admittedly, that’s not much of a choice, but you hardly need Dick Cheney to tell you that if democracy could actually affect government policy, it would be un-American.

Joe Schembrie [send him mail] is a science fiction fan who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

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Libertarians must question these claims.

If Globalism brings universal prosperity, why are so many national economies burdened with crushing debt? Why have millions of middle-class Americans lost their jobs to overseas competition? Why is the global economy in the worst economic crisis in history?

These are typically leftist-populist complaints that blame the free market, but maybe it’s time that libertarians questioned the premise of the debate. Is Globalism a genuine manifestation of the free market, or just another guise for government intervention?

That answer is easy. Just look at the expanse of public institutions required to support Globalism: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, NAFTA, the European Union, the G-Pick-a-Number Summits, and the not-so-hidden hand of the Federal Reserve — with the United States Armed Forces aggressively acting as World Policeman.

Globalism is simply imperialism with a "progressive" face, and the unmasking of its hypocrisy is why it’s failing — and why the real world is turning once more to economic life on a more personal, localized level.

Globalism’s failure has become glaring with the collapse of the world financial system. The central bankers promised stability but have wrought a planet-wide inflationary bubble instead.

Now the world’s finance ministries are seeing that global bubbles lead only to global crashes, and any nation which breaks inflationary ranks to independently pursue sound monetary policies will escape destruction and prosper as investors rush to its door. Globalism’s centerpiece ideology of central banking may survive this crisis, but it can no longer pretend superiority over localism.

Nonetheless, still in denial, Globalists are attempting to salvage the dollar as world reserve currency. Technology itself is working against them, however. Today the dollar is used as world reserve currency only because oil is traded exclusively in dollars, an unnatural but quite intentional consequence of US military occupation and intimidation of oil producing nations. In the future, alternative energy sources will render the oil economy obsolete, and the reign of the petrodollar will follow into extinction.

Indeed, someday archaeologists will marvel at the abandoned artifacts of our globe-straddling oil economy — the derricks, pipelines, tankers, refineries, power plants, and distribution networks of gas stations that will rust across the landscape as the ruins of a lost empire. Instead of relying on a global supply chain maintained at gunpoint to meet their energy needs, future households will simply plug into their rooftop solar panels.

That will be localism’s technological deathblow to Globalism. And good riddance, for Big Oil has caused enough human misery through its imperialist wars and puppet tyrannies to rival the evils of the slave trade.

Yet Globalists bemoan the passing of the petrodollar, claiming that nothing can effectively take the dollar’s place as an international medium of exchange. Of course there is gold, but the Globalists despise gold because it won’t allow them to inflate.

Also, unlike fiat currencies, gold doesn’t require the bureaucratic overhead of a lavishly subsidized aristocracy of pseudoexperts — bureaucrats, academics, consultants, lobbyists, militarists, quasi-public corporate executives, etc. — to sustain the illusion of intrinsic value. Unlike Globalism’s Special Drawing Rights, which are accessible only to an arcane priesthood of financial technocrats, the international gold standard can be accessed by any ordinary person who visits a neighborhood coin shop.

With the restoration of gold as the primary medium of international exchange, Globalism once again falls to localism — because that’s what the market wants.

Globalism’s vision of a world forced to be hyperdependent on dollar-denominated international trade is doomed, if only because the Chinese won’t take IOUs forever. The future will still have international trade — tourists will still go to Europe and bananas will still come from South America — but once the dollar devalues, the practice of dispatching freighters halfway around the globe to fetch tee-shirts and running shoes will cease to be cost-effective. Globalists may then suffer unemployment, but millions of middle class Americans will benefit when manufacturing jobs come home.

To bring manufacturing back to America, we don’t need tariffs. We need to end the Globalist interventionist policies that distort economic incentives into driving away the bulk of our manufacturing base.

When the Globalist Dollar Bubble has its final pop, there will be hard times. But then the economies of the world will at last be able to evolve naturally in accordance with true free market principles. And on more local foundations, we can build a genuine prosperity to celebrate the end of the Globalist Empire.

Joe Schembrie [send him mail] is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

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Many science fiction writers openly identify themselves as libertarians. There’s Robert Heinlein, regarded as the greatest science fiction writer of the twentieth century. There’s David Brin, who has won the Hugo Award, science fiction’s highest literary award. There’s Poul Anderson, James P. Hogan, Vernor Vinge, and L. Neil Smith and a host of others as well. Even if libertarians aren’t the dominant voice in science fiction — and frankly, I suspect we are — we are nonetheless a voice that is too loud to ignore.

In what other genre are you going to find such a strong libertarian showing among its writers? Mainstream fiction, whose writers almost always are left-wing statists? Mystery writers, who unilaterally portray cops as heroes and capitalists as villains? Adventure writers, whose heroes are invariably suave government agents who are quick to torture and murder in the name of the State?

Let’s face it: you’re just not going to find a better display of pro-libertarian writers as you are in science fiction.

Perhaps you’re thinking that, sure, some writers that few people ever heard of may be libertarian, but by the time Hollywood gets through with it, science fiction is nothing more than warmed-over neo-Marxism. Anyone who thinks that hasn’t been watching movies recently — or at least not the movies that everyone else is watching.

Modern science fiction films are frequently and vehemently anti-government. Take Star Wars, in which ragtag rebels battle against an evil interstellar empire. Take X-Men, in which government leaders conspire to control and then exterminate mutant individuals who wish only to live their lives in peace. Take the Terminator series, in which the US Military builds a supercomputer which promptly seeks to exterminate mankind, and a mother and her son fight against it in their capacity as private citizens.

It’s nigh impossible to go to a science fiction movie these days and not witness the classic libertarian theme of Individual versus State. This is not something new. Even many older films have anti-government aspects. In 2001: Space Odyssey, the government so badly botches an attempt to contact extraterrestrials that the spaceship computer kills the crew. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens turn from government attempts to contact them and instead embrace a group of private citizens. In E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, government agents and scientists prove to be far less competent than children at dealing with an alien encounter.

These are not minor films. These are the biggest box office grosses and most critically acclaimed science fiction films of their time. Libertarianism may be shunned by mundane society, but among science fiction fans the politics of individual freedom is a dominant concern — so much so that even the statist corporatocracy of Hollywood recognizes it is mandatory that every science fiction film include at least one government conspiracy.

Why do science fiction writers feel compelled to tell libertarian stories? Well, maybe it’s just the natural inclination of people to root for the underdog. Moreover, when you tell a story that is set in the future and thus stripped of today’s divisive labels such as "Republican" or "Democrat" (or This Nationality versus That Religion), the audience instinctively sides with the individual against the state. To be popular, science fiction must follow the same libertarian paradigm.

With that in mind, let me give one piece of advice to any would-be libertarian science fiction writers out there: DON’T PREACH! There’s a place for preaching, but it ain’t a novel or a movie where the audience expects to be entertained. When you tell a story, just make it the best you can — and if the internal logic is plausible, the tale will naturally lead to a libertarian conclusion.

Let the writers of Star Trek jump on their special-effects soapbox and preach the Social Gospel and see how many yawns it gets them. If their stories are successful, chances are the phaser blasts drowned out the message anyhow. Libertarians don’t have to worry about that, because stories set in science fictional settings are inclined to favor personal liberty by their very nature.

In its battle against the Individual, the State has many powerful weapons — but we have the Future on our side. The reason why so many science fiction writers, movies, and fans are libertarian is because, according to science fiction, The Future is Libertarian.

That’s good to know — because if there is any prediction of science fiction that no one disputes, it’s that the Future is getting closer all the time.

Joe Schembrie [send him mail] is a science fiction fan who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

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Yes — and so now is the best time to buy an RV.

In the next few years, an RV could be a vital part of your plan to survive the economic catastrophe which the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and the federal government have unleashed. Whether the RV industry thrives or not, the RV itself is positioned to ride the economic storm.

True, with respect to the economics of recreation, an RV costs more than a lifetime of trips to Disney World. But the cost is typically an order of magnitude cheaper than a home, and that’s how you should think about it: an RV is an emergency back-up home.

People who think they don’t need an emergency back-up home don’t realize how bad the current crisis is. We face economic collapse, and survival may soon depend on being prepared for a desperate world where food, clothing, and shelter are scarce commodities.

Many libertarians are aware of the danger of hyperinflation, and how money could become worthless, reducing society to barter and food riots. They respond by stockpiling staples. All well and good — but wouldn’t you also rather be a moving target than a sitting duck?

That’s why you need an RV, trailer, camper, or utility van. Consider the havoc of economic collapse. If rioters set your town on fire, will your neighborhood be spared? Will firefighters be on strike, will hydrants have pressure? When a wall of smoke approaches your street, a back-up home on wheels will seem like an investment in gold.

If the economy collapses, cities could turn unlivable. You’ll need to move into the countryside. How will you transport all of the non-perishable food that you amassed? Do you intend to live in your car for the years it may take the economy to recover?

Living out of a car soon feels intolerable, but even a utility van can be accessorized for survival with style. For a few thousand dollars you can mount solar panels on the roof to provide electricity for heat, cooking, refrigeration, a computer and widescreen TV. Add a stuffed chair, and a lot of guys could happily live in there now.

Modified hybrid vehicles can be propelled on batteries charged from rooftop solar panels. The daily charge is only enough to drive a few miles, but that will seem like a lot when gasoline becomes unobtainable.

Some people will gasp at the thought of living for perhaps years with only a van as home. But consider the alternatives: to be caught in the crossfire of civil unrest, to painfully die of exposure. Economic Armageddon won’t be pretty.

Even if society doesn’t revert to savagery, a back-up home on wheels can make a big difference in tough times. Suppose you lose your job and miss the payments on your house and you’re evicted. Suppose that having the foreclosure listed on your credit report prevents you from renting an apartment. What then? Sleeping in a mobile home beats a homeless shelter or tent city.

What if there are job openings in another region of the country? You can hop in your van and arrive while they’re still hiring. If that job is only temporary, you can then drive somewhere else just as readily. Living in a van means you can immediately go wherever the jobs are.

Sure, you could establish a refuge in the wilderness, but federal forces have a proclivity toward confronting the "fortress mentality" — for example, with snipers at Ruby Ridge and troops at Waco. For Galt’s Gulch, they’d probably call in air strikes. So let’s leave the barricaded compounds to the cultists.

The feds won’t hassle RV owners as much, because most people don’t think of an RV as a sign of "survivalist nutterism." Stacking soup cans in your broom closet may arouse suspicion, but purchasing an RV usually makes people think only that you’re going on vacation.

That the vacation may encompass the downfall of civilization is not necessary to mention to friends, neighbors, or government agents. When the time comes, just get in and drive away. And if the time doesn’t come, make sure you bought the vehicle used so that it retains resale value.

Today, investing in the RV industry doesn’t look wise. Investing in one vehicle, however, is a bargain as economic collapse insurance. A van may help you avoid becoming a permanent victim of the escalating economic crisis.

So get yourself a mobile survival machine — and keep the gas tank full.

Joe Schembrie [send him mail] is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

Joe Schembrie Archives

I instinctively sensed this loss, because I grew up in the 1960s and was keenly interested in "The Future." I was a precocious science fiction fan, when science fiction was about optimism and hope in the advances of science and technology. After going to the Moon, what couldn’t we do?

The decades up until the 1970s had shown tremendous progress. In twentieth century America, living standards skyrocketed. Automobiles, indoor plumbing, electric lighting, telephones — the list of marvels was endless. Average life expectancy increased by fifty percent. We did indeed sense a momentum that would carry us to the stars.

Popular culture envisioned this as straightforward economic extrapolation. The cartoon The Jetsons portrayed a "typical" twenty-first century family living in a spacious fully-automated home with a flying car, robot maid, and four-hour workday. The movie 2001: Space Odyssey had a hotel in orbit and city on the Moon.

But then something happened, and it happened around 1971. Being fifteen at the time, I had no idea it had to do with the abandonment of the gold standard. I merely noticed the optimism had suddenly vanished.

Suddenly my dad, who ran a successful construction business, started wondering aloud about how he was going to put food on the table. He and my mother got into arguments about where to buy hamburger for the cheapest and we kids were sharply scolded for leaving the lights on.

Inflation and unemployment reached double-digit levels in what was called "Stagflation." Some national commentators warned that even economic collapse was in the offing.

Then, after more than a decade in the wilderness, the economy finally stabilized. Government economists congratulated themselves for "fixing" the business cycle.

But — where was the future?

True, by the official econometric indices, the economy of the 1980s was booming as before. Unemployment and inflation were low, and Gross Domestic Product growth had returned to the levels of decades earlier. Officially, everything was getting better and better . . . except the middle class knew different.

I had graduated from college and was working as an engineer by then. Going by the historical trends of recent decades of American economic progress, I expected to live better than my parents, who had lived better than their parents. Instead, my salary was barely keeping up with inflation.

I had grown up among other middle-class families but now I looked at housing prices and realized that I could barely afford to buy a home in the community where I had been raised. Living better? No, despite paper-GDP growth, the economy was running backward for the middle class.

By the late 1990s, my generation had come to realize that the promises of the twenty-first century had been broken. We couldn’t afford flying cars. Instead of robot maids, mothers had to work overtime to keep roofs over their families.

The future we lost was about more than gadgetry. Less poverty, less drudgery, greater health, abundant energy — our progress has been slower than anticipated. And now, rising fuel prices and declining life expectancy threaten us with being dragged back to the barbarous past.

How did abandoning the gold standard lose the future?

In theory, a fiat currency can function indefinitely, so long as the monetary printing presses are restrained. In practice, once the discipline of the gold standard was abandoned, the banksters immediately became profligate. And the greatest damage wasn’t the boom-and-bust cycle, it was the effect on economic growth.

Even an annual monetary inflation rate of a few percent will erode the savings of successful businesses, which must then borrow to finance capital investments. Interest costs then eat profit. That curtails re-investment and R&D, stifling innovation and stunting economic growth.

But can businesses even acquire loans? In what amounts to a giant money-laundering operation, the government-enforced banking cartel prefers lending its printing-press dollars to select cronies in the financial industry. Interest rates on those loans are kept artificially low by inflating away the savings of productive enterprises. Our manufacturing base is bankrupted so that financial speculation can be lavishly subsidized.

Today, burgeoning Federal-Reserve-induced debt causes America to falter from lack of value-added investment. Once-impoverished China fills cities with skyscrapers, while we can’t afford to fill potholes. Now even the computer industry staggers under the ravages of Keynesianism Unleashed.

To bring the future back, first find where it went. To do that, follow the money.

Joe Schembrie [send him mail] is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

Joe Schembrie Archives

Certainly a full-blown civil war would be hellish. With modern weapons the casualties could exceed all our other wars. The disruption of food production and distribution chains in our specialized economy could trigger famine. To be imperially dominated by other nations could well mean the loss of our civil liberties.

However, our political establishment is playing a rhetorical game when it strives to link secession and civil war. There won’t be a civil war if we the people support a constitutional amendment to allow the fifty states of the United States to peacefully become fifty independent nations through voluntary disunion.

And why should we do that? Because unlike Alexander Hamilton in his parlor-game speculations known as The Federalist Papers, we’ve had generations of firsthand experience with the defects of federal government. We see today that every alleged benefit that Hamilton hypothesized for federal government has been perverted in practice.

Hamilton proposed that a federal government would resist foreign domination. In reality, our politicians prostitute our superpower military at every sufferance. We fought one world war to make the world safe for Imperialism and another to make it safe for Communism. Today our politicians bow to Israel, tomorrow possibly China.

Hamilton’s strength-in-numbers argument failed during the Cold War, when our military stockpiled thousands of nuclear weapons yet still feared a first strike attack. What if, though, Massachusetts had seceded with only ten warheads? Wouldn’t the Soviets have refrained from attacking sovereign Massachusetts for fear of losing ten of their cities?

Disunion would protect the planet from thermonuclear destruction. By consolidating our vast arsenal of nuclear overkill under federal command, however, we equip a lone fallible human to destroy civilization — a power we would not want in the hands of the wisest saint, and wise saints aren’t elected President.

We witnessed the crippling weakness of centralized command in the 9-11 attacks, when the Commander-in-Chief was too busy hiding to bother with scrambling interceptors. And if it can’t protect its own headquarters from airline hijackers, what does a superpower military protect us from?

Moving to economics, Hamilton warned in The Federalist Papers that if the states remained independent, they would enact high tariffs that would cripple prosperity. A federal government, he asserted, would promote free trade. That myth, of course, didn’t survive the first session of Congress.

With Congress as battlefield, every state wages perpetual economic warfare against every other state. Our representatives legislate national tariffs (and regulations, subsidies, and import quotas) to benefit producers in their home states by afflicting consumers in other states, and then compete for "pork barrel" appropriations that loot the national treasury.

As one observer remarked, the attitude of the Michigan automakers in seeking a federal bailout is, “You won’t buy our crummy cars, so we’ll make you pay for them anyway.” Under federal subjugation, the citizens of forty-nine other states must endure such exploitation with little recourse except vengeful reciprocity.

Hamilton also claimed the national debt would encourage the wealthy to "Invest in America." Instead, politicians "invest" in their patrons at the country’s expense. Raise taxes to pay off debt, and politicians borrow more. Hamilton called the national debt a "blessing," but aren’t state and local debts "blessings" enough?

Today’s federal government infringes citizen rights far more than did the British Crown of Hamilton’s time. Hamilton’s fantasies about the benevolence of an all-powerful central government may be excused as historical navet, but today anyone who insists the federal leviathan is other than maliciously imperious is either blind or bribed.

How can anyone not recognize the monster is uncontrollable, when governors must resign over petty corruption but a President deceived us into war and bankrupted the nation yet stood divinely unimpeachable — as if the ancient pagan ritualism that equated kingship with godhood never went away.

An America of sovereign states, whose governments are more human-sized, will dismiss egomaniacs who proclaim that a citizen’s "glorious duty" is to sacrifice in "full measure" to the Federal Imperium. Let’s abolish the Cult of Federalism, before our wannabe-caesars can extract more of that kind of blood-drenched "glory" from us.

Today it is our corrupt federal government that drags us toward collapse. Disunion will help us become more secure and prosperous, and affirm the ideals of liberty for which the American Revolution was fought. To accomplish this won’t require civil war — just a constitutional amendment, and common sense.

Joe Schembrie [send him mail] is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

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There’s no aspect of private life that Progressives won’t regulate. Andrew Napolitano has said, “The air you breathe, the water you drink, the size of your toilet tank, the water pressure in your shower . . . are all regulated by federal law.”

"Progressives" always call for more regulation of the free market, and the current crisis is no different.

Yet, for nearly a century, the Federal Reserve System has escaped the Progressive regulatory impulse. Progressives decline to subject Federal Reserve policy to even an audit. Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul observes, “Congress, although not by law, essentially has given up all its oversight responsibility over the Federal Reserve.”

The Progressive neglect to oversee the Federal Reserve might be ideologically consistent were the Fed a non-profit agency, but the Fed is a cartel of commercial banks consisting of the very crony-capitalist interests that Progressives normally oppose. Libertarians are outraged because government grants the Fed a monopoly to counterfeit — and shouldn’t such political favoritism outrage Progressives too?

With the ten-trillion dollar-plus money supply inflating prices at five percent annually, the Fed creates at least five hundred billion dollars a year in new money. The value diluted by those billions belongs to citizens but goes to cronies. There ought to be Progressive outrage. Where is it?

Progressives fume over the "obscene" profits of the oil industry, whose top-ten revenue companies have a combined profit of only $90 billion. Michael Moore’s Sicko rampaged against the drug industry, whose top-ten profit is only $50 billion. Progressives even demand anti-trust action against Microsoft, whose profit is only $18 billion.

The profits of these productive enterprises are far less than the wealth misdirected by the Fed, which produces only inflation. Yet Progressives, who see capitalist conspiracies under every rock, are blind when the Fed exploits openly.

Much of the Fed’s inflation is absorbed by economic growth, so the Fed’s annual expropriation of public wealth could run into the trillions. If we knew the rate of monetary expansion, we would know the extent of the Fed’s thievery, but as Dr. Paul laments, “We get less and less information regarding the money supply each year.” Shouldn’t Progressives care about this unconstitutional cover-up?

Maybe they’re busy fussing over petty partisanship like Alaska’s "Bridge to Nowhere," which cost less than half a billion dollars — that is, less than one thousandth of what the Fed steals every year. Not that the bridge wasn’t political pork, but the Fed hogs enough to build cities of bacon. Where is the outrage?

Instead, Progressive leaders rally to the Fed. William Jennings Bryan, Godfather of American Progressivism, infamously compared the gold standard to a "Cross of Gold," but then supported the creation of the Fed, which has pilfered over 95% of citizen wealth — a wasting financial disease that the gold standard inoculated against.

Today’s Progressives continue the tradition of condemning the free market but never the Fed. For example, Paul Krugman’s criticism of the Fed during the current crisis is that it didn’t regulate the market enough.

Speculation bubbles aren’t inflated by lack of regulation, they’re inflated by too much money, coming from too much credit, caused by keeping interest rates artificially low. In our not-so-free market economy, interest rates are controlled by the Fed — a fact acknowledged incessantly in the financial news media. How can Progressives overlook the Fed’s fingerprints on the money pump?

Perhaps sincere Progressives should evaluate whether their movement has been misled by shills for the Fed.

For example, PublicEye.org (“Researching the Right for Progressive Changemakers”) declares it a "myth" that the Fed has never been audited — but admits there is no audit of “deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters.” Why is that okay? “To insulate the central bank’s monetary policy functions from short-term political pressures.”

Huh? Progressive leaders protest when private interests allocate private funds in confidence, but the Fed’s private bankers allocate public funds in absolute secrecy and Progressive leaders approve. If you’re a Progressive, shouldn’t that contradiction unsettle?

If you wonder where the outrage is, libertarians can show the way.

Joe Schembrie [send him mail] is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

Joe Schembrie Archives

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The Federal
Reserve System’s bailout of American International Group will cost
$85
billion. After the expense is apportioned among three hundred
million American citizens, your personal bill for AIG’s bailout
will be $280. If you have a family of four, their share is $1100.

Do you feel
that you’re getting your money’s worth from this bailout? Has the
AIG bailout been a rewarding experience for you and your family,
well worth a thousand dollars subtracted from the college funds
of your children so that a CEO
who crashed his company can afford a mansion in the Caribbean?

Here’s another
way of looking at how much the AIG bailout has cost you. The average
commuter uses about six
hundred gallons of gasoline a year, and gasoline has gone up
about a
dollar a gallon this year, for a total cost increase of $600.
Yet that’s only roughly half the cost per family of the AIG bailout!

Strangely,
the public seethes over gas increases but yawns over bailouts. Maybe
it’s the lack of visual impact. Maybe people would react more if
they had to pull into a "Federal Reserve Station" and
watch their life savings pumped into the tank of a corporate bailout.

They might
react even more strongly when they see that the line at the money
pump is growing. Only months ago the Federal Reserve provided the
investment bank of JP Morgan with $30
billion to bail out the investment bank of Bear-Stearns. At
least the math was easy: thirty billion dollars divided by three
hundred million people is $100 for every man, woman, and child in
America, or $400 for a family of four.

Hey, aren’t
the antics of the investment bankers every bit as entertaining as
the internet access you’ll have to cancel in order to pay for them?

Besides becoming
more frequent, the bailouts are swelling. Now the government is
"rescuing" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage industry
corporate giants whose "official" bailout cost rose from
$100
billion to $700
billion in a year, and in reality could cost $2.5
trillion. That’s over $8,000 for every American — $32,000
for a family of four!

The pretext
— er, justification — for the bailouts is that these mortgage-financing
companies help families buy homes. Really? This may come as a shock
to millionaire presidential candidates, but when the government
slaps on a $32,000 bailout surcharge, middle class families find
it harder to budget for a monthly mortgage payment.

Anyhow, there’s
something fishy about the government mortgage-guarantee game in
the first place.

Say that two
prospective home buyers want to buy the same home. The bank gives
them each a line of mortgage credit of $400,000. Not surprisingly,
they bid against each other until the selling price of the home
reaches $400,000.

Now, suppose
the government "helps" them by giving each a "government-guaranteed"
line of mortgage credit of $500,000. They bid again — until the
selling price of the home happens to reach $500,000.

Say the government
"helps" again, and their lines of "government-guaranteed"
mortgage credit are increased to $600,000. Where does the bidding
stop now?

Do government-guaranteed
mortgages help home buyers? I can see how sellers are helped. I
can see how bankers get an extra special helping. But it sure looks
like the buyers are being "helped" into a sub-prime meltdown.

In a free market,
mortgages help families afford homes. But when we underwrite mortgages
with public funds, we leave the free market behind and enter the
realm of the welfare state. Worse, the "welfare checks,"
so to speak, are given to the middle class only to be immediately
endorsed over to the real estate industry.

We’re told
that allowing Freddie and Fannie to fail would be economically devastating,
but what about the economic impact of a bailout that costs $32,000
per family? For a middle class family, that kind of income loss
is like enduring a severe recession. Except that if you were unemployed,
you wouldn’t be slaving overtime to pay for an incompetent financial
manager’s yacht.

Politicians
claim the financial industry needs
more regulation, but when I’m being robbed I don’t want the
cops to subsidize the robbery and I don’t want them to "regulate"
it either. I want them to stop it. When they don’t, I smell a payoff.

The call for
regulation is, of course, just a dodge to avoid public debate that
might challenge the philosophy of government intervention on behalf
of the Friends of the Fed. The goal is to keep billing the citizens
no matter the cost. For while in the eyes of politicians these companies
are "too big to fail," you and I aren’t too big to fleece.

September
23, 2008

Joe
Schembrie [send him mail]
is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

DIGG THIS

American foreign
policy is corrupted by a powerful influence so arrogantly reckless
it endangers the human race. This influence isn’t Big Oil or Zionism,
which are merely tools of the real power. The real power that controls
US foreign policy is Big Money — the central banking institution
known as the Federal
Reserve System.

The ultimate
in corporate welfare, the Fed is a government-supported banking
cartel which creates trillions of dollars from mere bookkeeping
entries. The $123 billion in Big Oil profits last year is trivial
in comparison. In political clout, Big Money is the driver and Big
Oil is only along for the ride.

Likewise, Israel
is also but a passenger. True, US foreign policy is dominated by
neoconservative ideologues, but the neocons are politically powerful
because of their lobbies, and their lobbies get their money from
financiers who get their money from investment bankers who get their
money from the central bankers of the Federal Reserve. The neocons
may sincerely believe in their own agenda but they have power only
because the central bankers need them to feign a patriotic/nationalistic
smokescreen so that citizens will sacrifice and soldiers will die
for a foreign policy whose real purpose is to enrich the central
bankers.

No wonder the
neocon narrative has plot holes. For example, if the neocons favor
democracy, why support Saudi Arabia, the most repressive regime
in the Middle East? Why attack Iraq, which had no connection with
terrorists and no weapons of mass destruction, and why support Pakistan,
which has both? Why so eager to immediately attack Iran, which is
years from developing nuclear weapons? And most bizarrely of all,
why did the neocons push Georgia into a hopeless war against Russia?

None of this
protects the US or Israel from "Islamo-Fascism." Instead,
the neocons defer to the key foreign policy objective of the central
bankers, which is: Keep
the Dollar Strong. A strong dollar will dominate as the world’s
reserve currency and serve as the international medium of exchange,
and as the global economy grows, demand for reserve currency increases
and the central bankers reap enormous wealth by trading their otherwise
worthless little green pieces of paper for the world’s resources.

Unfortunately,
the central bankers are too greedy. Over-inflating the money supply,
they undermine the dollar’s value. In desperation, to keep the dollar
as world reserve currency, the Fed pressures its oil-producing vassal
states — especially the US puppet regime in Saudi Arabia — to accept
only dollars in exchange for oil. As oil is the world’s most essential
commodity, the world must trade in dollars to survive.

Thus the neocons
show fealty to the Fed. They ignore Saudi repression, because Saudi
oil keeps the dollar strong. The neocons attacked Iraq because it
was a major oil producer that dared sell in currencies other than
the dollar. The neocons want to attack Iran now for the same
reason.

The neocons
would also love to attack Russia, the world’s second largest oil
producer, for it too refuses to bow before the Almighty Petrodollar.
However, Russia really has weapons of mass destruction, and so the
neocons pursued indirect confrontation by encouraging
their puppet regime in Georgia to attack South Ossetia, a Russian
ally. The Russians predictably retaliated, and frightened
Europeans are pulling investments from Russia and questioning
their reliance on Russian oil. End result: the dollar rules on.

The neocons
knew Georgia couldn’t beat Russia. Localized military defeat for
global financial victory was the game plan. As neoconservative Jeane
Kirkpatrick revealed
during the Cold War: “Russia is playing chess, while we are playing
Monopoly.” And so Russia loudly stakes out a square while the Fed
quietly buys up the board.

Very clever
— but in provoking a deadly confrontation with a nuclear power,
did the central bankers let greed go too far? To dilute our currency
at a cost of thousands of dollars a year per citizen is criminal,
but to risk the annihilation of civilization is depraved.

Dismissing
feeble altruistic rationalizations, we see the Federal Reserve’s
power to create unlimited amounts of money at whim has caused our
monetary overlords to lose touch with humanity and wage war against
the human race. Such unbounded egomania is a natural consequence
of being insulated from economic, political, and moral accountability
during the Fed’s century-long reign of corruption.

For our freedom,
prosperity, and survival, the Federal Reserve scam of the central
bankers must be abolished — before more wealth is dissipated by
their parasitical monetary system, or another life is lost to their
vampirical foreign policy.

September
9, 2008

Joe
Schembrie [send him mail]
is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

DIGG THIS

Is Big Government
necessary for Big Energy? The zealots of Big Energy claim that if
we wish to keep the lights from going out, we must accept mammoth
public utilities, mandatory
conservation measures, and even imperialist
military conflicts. We are told that to receive more electrical
power, we must surrender more personal freedom.

Contrary to
the politicians, however, the reality is that we are in the midst
of a Solar
Revolution, in which the free market is answering our energy
needs through technological improvements in photovoltaic
solar panels. With investments made on a local and household basis,
solar panels offer a personalized form of energy that is independent
of Big Government.

Yet the ideologues
of Big Energy won’t give up, and are fighting against the Solar
Revolution by resorting to demagogic propaganda. One of their most
common lies, for example, is that sunlight is "too
dilute" — implying that even if we covered the entire Earth
with solar panels we would still not capture enough sunlight to
power our civilization. But let’s run the numbers, shall we?

At present
photoelectric conversion efficiency and under typical seasonal cycles
and weather, a solar panel one square meter in area produces about
.5 kilowatt-hours
of energy per day. Since a barrel of oil contains 1700
kilowatt-hours of energy, it would take 3400 square meters of
solar panels to produce the equivalent energy of a barrel of oil
per day. The equivalent energy of projected world oil consumption
in the year 2030 — 120
million barrels per day — could therefore be met by 400,000
square kilometers of solar panels (=120 million barrels x 3400 sq.
meters/barrel). That’s only 0.3% of the world’s
land area!

So much for
the nightmare of a world covered with solar panels. Now back to
the reality of a world covered with fossil fumes.

After the "diluteness"
argument, the most disingenuous assertion against solar power is
that it is too expensive to replace conventional energy sources.
This once was true and might have remained true for some time, but
the Big Energy zealots themselves have brought us to a tipping point
through their own heavy-handed government intervention, the Iraq
War.

To see this,
let’s compare sunlight with oil — and add the cost of war.

Currently,
Iraqi oil fields produce 2.2
million barrels a day. To match this output with sunlight, we
would need 7500 square kilometers of solar panels (= 2.2 million
barrels x 3400 sq. meters/barrel). At a market price of $600
per square meter, the total cost of replacing Iraqi oil-produced
energy with sunlight would be $4.5 trillion — approximately $410
million a day when amortized over a thirty year hardware lifetime.
The equivalent cost in terms of oil-derived energy would then be
$190 per barrel.

Expensive,
yes, but the official cost of occupying Iraq is $400
million a day, which means that we are already paying a "war
subsidy" of $180 a barrel for Iraqi oil!

Moreover,
while rooftop solar energy flows directly into our homes, consumers
of oil energy also pay the market price. Add the war subsidy ($180/barrel)
to the market price
(+$100/barrel), and the total cost for "War Oil" is more
than $280 a barrel. Most people are oblivious to the true cost of
War Oil because it is being inflicted upon the entire economy via
the inflationary agency of federal budget deficits, but if the Iraqi
misadventure was financed instead by a direct "War
Tax" on consumer heating and power bills, solar panels
might soon be ubiquitous upon the roofs of American homes.

Technological
improvements are strengthening the Case for Solar. This year alone,
the cost of manufacturing solar electric panels could decline two-fold,
and oil will have to sell for under $100 a barrel to remain competitive.
It was always immoral to pretend that "our" oil was under
"their" land, but it is already not worth the effort of
going to war over it, and soon it may not be worth the effort of
pumping it.

While warriors
and politicians have failed to deliver a secure source of cheap
energy, scientists and business people have been doubling
solar energy production every two years. That our politicians
remain mired in the energy technology of the nineteenth century
has nothing to do with the diluteness of sunlight, or its relative
cost. Instead, they seem so enamored of the political power that
comes with the ideology of Big Energy that they would destroy the
economy in the name of saving it.

Fortunately,
the Solar Revolution has too much momentum to be stopped by any
government, even a superpower. Our personal liberation from the
tyranny of Big Energy is coming one roof at a time, and no army
can stop it.

April
30, 2008

Joe
Schembrie [send him mail]
is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

DIGG THIS

John McCain has declared
it will be "fine" for US troops to stay in Iraq for a
hundred years. The financial numbers, however, indicate that this
is strictly bluster. As President, he will either pull out and call
it a victory well before his first term ends — or else preside over
the bankruptcy of the United States of America.

At $120,000 per family of four, the nine
trillion dollar national debt is already forcing Americans to
make hard choices between health care, mortgage payments, retirement
savings, and college tuition — not to mention gas and food. Imperial
war, bequeathing additional trillions
of debt, has become one more luxury we can’t afford.

Most Americans have barely noticed the financial bite up to this
point, because they’ve fallen into the psychological trap of ignoring
the total debt so long as they can make the interest payments. At
current low interest rates, the cost of interest payments on the
national debt is "only" $400
billion a year, "merely" $1300 per citizen. So if
the impact of the total debt is so "minor," why worry
about the "increment" caused by war?

Well, unlike the politicians who pose as far-seeing visionaries,
we should take a longer view than just to the next election. In
twenty years, for example, those debt payments will accumulate to
over $100,000 per family of four. Parents complain about the financial
burden of raising children, but the national debt will never move
out and get a job.

Moreover, the current federal deficit adds a half
trillion dollars to the national debt annually, so that within
twenty years, the national debt will double. Then the average American
family will pay over $10,000 a year in interest payments — on top
of their regular taxes.

To avoid this slide into national impoverishment, we need to balance
the federal budget by curbing social spending and cutting waste,
but unless we also scale back on neocon imperial ambitions, we will
soon say good-bye to the American Dream.

Interest rate volatility could change that "soon" to
"very soon." As the national debt swells, rising demand
on the supply of lending capital drives up interest rates. The higher
the rates, the higher the payments, the more temptation for the
government to inflate its way out of debt — and the financial markets
will compensate for that risk by charging even higher rates. With
that kind of runaway feedback, financial collapse (the day we can’t
make the payments) could come any time.

Perhaps the classic model for the impending crisis is the US economy
in the 1970s and early 80s, when the spending binges of the Great
Society and Vietnam War triggered an era of debt monetization (i.e.,
inflation) that pushed the prime
rate and even internal
Federal Reserve interest rates to over twenty percent. Such
increases today would bury the average family under tens of thousands
of dollars a year in interest payments. That would not only be good-bye
to the American Dream, but maybe also good-bye to America.

Following the "Vietnam Analogy," how long before today’s
financial squeeze crimps the current imperial adventure? Well, the
peak of the Vietnam deployment occurred in 1968, and most of the
troops were out by 1973. That five-year span indicates, given
that the Iraq War’s "Surge" occurred in 2007, our withdrawal
must be largely complete by 2012. That is, during President McCain’s
first term.

Neocons will counter that the Vietnam Analogy doesn’t apply, and
they are right. Things are much worse now. At the end of the turbulent
1970s, the ratio of national debt to GDP was only thirty-three
percent; today, we start our Time of Troubles with a debt ratio
twice
as high. And in the 1970s, it was unthinkable that the US would
lose its triple-A credit rating; today, it’s under
solemn discussion. Given how much closer we are now toward insolvency,
we don’t have the luxury of taking anywhere near as long to get
out of Iraq as we did in getting out of Vietnam.

True, in his presidential campaign, McCain’s strategy has been
to pander to the warmongering impulses and imperialist lustings
of the neoconservative base with the promise of perpetual aggression
no matter the cost. Once McCain is President, however, he must quickly
submit to economic reality, and that means: Pull Out And Call It
A Victory.

What if McCain stubbornly decides to "stay the course"
in Iraq regardless of the impact on the US economy? Again, the Vietnam
Era offers a lesson.

Like our Unitary Executive today, Richard Nixon was perceived as
an Imperial President above the law. Then came high unemployment
and double-digit inflation. When public rage exploded, Nixon was
hustled from office on a legal pretext that in more stable times
would have been readily overlooked. Nixon, by the way, for the most
part did get us out of Vietnam — just not fast enough to save his
presidency.

As President, McCain will either learn that lesson, or repeat it.
Either way, pay no attention to what Mister Straight Talk says,
because it has absolutely no bearing on what he must do.

March
26, 2008

Joe
Schembrie [send him mail]
is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

DIGG THIS

The
‘What’s Next’ Series

Until Super
Tuesday, many Ron Paul supporters believed his efforts to win the
presidency were best served by remaining within the Republican Party.
They believed the primaries would end in a brokered convention from
which Paul could emerge as the "compromise" candidate.
Proponents of this scenario argued that Paul must remain a Republican,
for history tells us that third-party candidates have no chance
of winning the presidency.

The results
of Super Tuesday, however, tell us that Paul now has no chance of
winning the GOP nomination. Even if front-runner John McCain doesn’t
lock up the nomination, a brokered convention of neocon delegates
will choose Joe Lieberman ahead of Ron Paul.

Winning the
GOP nomination would be a hollow victory anyhow, for the Party hierarchy
has shown itself willing
to undermine Paul’s candidacy. The already-faltering GOP fundraising
machine would be unlikely to shower corporate donations upon a candidate
who opposes pork on principle. And given that millions of Americans
have become so outraged at this Administration that they have sworn
off voting Republican forever, the nomination could be more drag
than lift.

Running as
a Republican had benefits. The campaign generated media attention
and organized followers. But now it’s plain that wresting control
of the GOP from the neocons for this election cycle is a lost cause.

Everything
changes once Ron Paul goes to a third party, however. He would no
longer be an "Also Ran," he would be "The Spoiler."
As with Nader in 2000, the establishment parties could ignore him
only at their peril. Even if he never rises above single digits
in the polls, his ideas would continue to gain a public hearing.

But a third-party run wouldn’t be just about education. There is a good chance
Paul could win that way. Yes, historically third parties have failed
in presidential elections, but in the past third parties have always
represented fringe viewpoints – whereas today, the major parties
represent fringe viewpoints, while Paul’s views harmonize with those
of most Americans.

For example,
most Americans want
the Iraq War to end. The major-party candidates, however, hold
the fringe view that we should continue the war through the next
presidential term. In a three-way race, Ron Paul would be the only
candidate who agrees with the majority that we should leave Iraq
now.

Likewise, most
Americans oppose illegal immigration. The major-party candidates,
however, hold the fringe view of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants.
In a three-way race, Ron Paul would be the only candidate who agrees
with the majority that we should stop illegal immigration.

The biggest
issue in the election is the economy, and yes, unfortunately, most
Americans think the solution to the current economic crisis is "more
stimulus." However, in a three-way race, the economic ignorance
of the major-party candidates would soon be exposed, while Ron Paul
has the expertise to coherently explain the interrelationship between
spending, deficits, and inflation, and impress the public that he
is the only one who engages in analysis rather than pandering.

Thus, in a
three-way presidential race, Ron Paul would be the voice of moderation,
while the major parties would be seen as hijacked by socialist and
imperialist fringe factions. Once this truth sinks in, most Americans
will find that Paul is not a "fringe candidate" but instead
the only candidate who champions their concerns. (No, Beltwayites,
the Constitution is not a "fringe issue!")

It was good
that Ron Paul ran as a Republican, but now let’s move on. There’s
no point crying over Paul’s failure to win the Republican nomination,
as corruption has alienated so many voters that the GOP is in danger
of extinction anyway. Better to run as the candidate of a third
party, than of a doomed party.

True, history
says that third-party presidential candidates can’t win. But long
ago, a certain group of revolutionaries contemplated that no colony
had ever successfully rebelled from its mother country. Nonetheless,
they went ahead with their enterprise, which by all accounts has
been successful. Apparently, they were living in one of those major
turning points in history for which the old rules do not apply.
And you know, they didn’t even have the Internet.

February
7, 2008

Joe
Schembrie [send him mail]
is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

DIGG THIS

On May 3, 2007,
MSNBC hosted a debate for the GOP presidential candidates at the
Reagan Library in California. Near the end of the program, moderator
Chris Matthews asked the candidates, “I’m curious, is there
anybody on the stage that does not agree, believe in evolution?”
Three hands went up, one of them belonging, naturally enough, to
Mike Huckabee. Ron Paul, however, kept his hand down.

At a November
1 meeting of the Spartanburg (SC) GOP Executive Committee, Ron Paul
was asked about this incident. Here’s a
link to his reply. Speaking as an evolutionist, Andrew Sullivan,
who has a well-read blog at The Atlantic, wrote
of Paul’s response, “I want to look away.”

But the truth
is that Sullivan never had the opportunity to look in the first
place. His link went to the page of an atheist writer, whose video
of Paul’s remarks was heavily edited. Here is the full transcript
of Congressman Paul’s remarks, with the deleted sections in brackets:

“Well, at
first I thought it was a very inappropriate question, you know,
for the presidency to be decided on a scientific matter, and I
think it’s a theory, a theory of evolution, and I don’t accept
it, you know, as a theory, but I think [ it probably doesn't bother
me.   It's not the most important issue for me
to make the difference in my life to understand the exact origin.  I
think ] the creator that I know created us, everyone of us, and
created the universe, and the precise time and manner, I just
don’t think we’re at the point where anybody has absolute proof
on either side.  [So I just don't . . . if that were
the only issue, quite frankly, I would think it's an interesting
discussion, I think it's a theological discussion, and I think
it's fine, and we can have our . . . if that were the issue of
the day, I wouldn't be running for public office."]

As you can
see, half of Paul’s words were censored.  His real message
was, “We’re fighting for freedom and can’t afford to be split over
a debate about fossils.”  The purpose of the censorship
was obviously to encourage exactly such a split.

With the prospect
of such a split in mind, now might be a good time for all of us
who care about freedom to remember what the Ron Paul Revolution
is all about. Certainly, it’s about stopping a war that has killed
over a million innocent people and has destroyed America’s reputation
throughout the world. Certainly it’s about gaining control of our
national finances before we become impoverished. Yet more important
than the war and the economy, the dominant issue of our age is the
question of whether America will continue to be a free country,
or will it descend into tyranny. As anyone who follows the news
knows, the trends are against liberty.

The worst example
of the deterioration of our rights is in that we now live in a country
where torture is accepted as standard interrogation procedure. In
defiance of the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual
punishment, the President claims the right to arrest anyone — not
just foreigners — and hold them indefinitely, and torture them as
he pleases. Clearly, the intent of this initiative is not just to
allow FBI agents to beat the truth out of terrorists so as to keep
cities from being vaporized in the next ten minutes, because people
have been tortured for years now though not a single city has ever
come close to vaporization. Clearly, what the President cares about
is not the safety or security of American cities, but that the Unitary
Executive have the supreme power to torture anyone for any reason,
and never have to account for his actions. There is only one purpose
for that policy, and it’s not to catch terrorists. It’s to intimidate
dissidents through the practice of state terror against the citizenry.
To combat a handful of foreign terrorists, the government will create
an army of domestic terrorists, bankrolled by your own taxes, and
given bonuses and promotions based on how well they frighten you
and your fellow citizens into silent compliance with presidential
edicts.

Extrapolating
the trends of the past few years, it’s not hard to imagine a nightmare
vision of America over the course of the next Presidential Administration.
It begins with the issuance of national ID cards and proliferation
of government security cameras everywhere. Then one day a government
agent appears at your door, asking questions which indicate that
your private e-mails and phone calls have been monitored. Then you
make a nervous joke — perhaps about how the government spends too
much time going after innocent protestors and not real terrorists
— and next thing you know, you’re arrested.

Why? They don’t
need to tell you. Habeas corpus has already been suspended. They
don’t even have to tell anyone that you have been arrested. You
are now what is known in totalitarian regimes as a "non-person."
You will learn over the long period of your incarceration, non-persons
don’t have rights. And then one day, they lead you into a room where
screams have been coming from, and inside you see a board and a
jug of water . . . am I being sensationalist here, or am I paraphrasing
sworn testimony made before Congressional Committees?

You would think
that the prospect of imminent tyranny would scare some sense into
libertarians and make them realize that we have to stay united.
For now, though, certain Christian and atheist libertarians would
rather have the pleasure of bashing one another. Internet flame
wars must be powerfully addicting, given
that one of Sullivan’s readers abandons all moderation to write:
“Ron Paul’s religious AND constitutional fundamentalisms are anti-historical,
and consequently anti-literate, as all forms of fundamentalism are.”
Hmm, now how did a certain obstetrician get through medical school,
let alone deliver four thousand babies, if he can’t even read? Oh
well, forget facts or logic — what matters is that we have our little
coffee house debate, as heatedly as possible, while outside the
paramilitaries gather and charge their tasers.

I’m not trying
to choose sides here, but I’m puzzled that any atheist libertarian
in America can possibly think that he can combat omnipotent government
without the help of Christians. Polls
show that eighty-five percent of the American people believe in
God, and over fifty-one percent disbelieve the theory of evolution,
so how do atheist libertarians think they’re going to win an election
if they openly mock Christians?

Maybe it’s
time we asked ourselves, “What would Thomas Jefferson do?”

In forming
a coalition between libertarian-minded deists and Christians for
the fateful presidential election of 1800, the secularist Thomas
Jefferson wrote in a
widely publicized letter: ” . . . for I have sworn upon the
altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over
the mind of man.” He was a literate man who was indeed concerned
with the ideas that people put into their minds — but note, his
stated oath was to fight first for the right of minds to be free.

Though a sincere
Christian, Ron Paul has expressed that sentiment many times now.
It’s something that both Christians and atheists should agree with
as well, for while the debate over origins is important, there won’t
be any debate at all if tyranny comes, for tyranny will shut down
all such metaphysical debates, demanding instead that all worship
be directed to the State. Christians and atheists alike should ask
themselves, whose mind and soul will be saved then?

January
4, 2008

Joe
Schembrie [send him mail]
is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

We could divide $210 billion by 300 million Americans. That would
tell us that the war has cost $700 for every man, woman, and child
in America.

(How about you? Do you personally feel that you have received seven
hundred dollars worth of freedom and security thanks to all the
bombs we’ve dropped in Iraq?)

We can also divide the $210 billion by seventy million American
taxpayers. That tells us the war has cost $3000 per taxpayer. Are
those taxpayers satisfied with the ‘freedom’ from life and limb
that our weapons have brought to so many Iraqi children — or would
those taxpayers have preferred to ‘selfishly’ spend the money on
college tuition and health care for their own children?

But maybe Americans don’t count. President Bush says we will do
‘whatever it takes’ to help Iraq, implying that he’d even sacrifice
America to save Iraq. Assuming we all agree with that sentiment,
what have the Iraqis received — aside from demolished cities —
for our $210 billion dollars?

Well, they haven’t received enough to eat. A visit to a supermarket
will confirm that microwave meals can be purchased for a dollar
each, and so it is possible to provide a person with three square
meals a day for only three dollars a day. The twenty-five million
people of Iraq could be fed on $75 million a day, or $27 billion
a year. That’s only a small fraction of the $210 billion we’ve spent
on Iraq. Yet, amid the ruins created by our violent occupation,
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children are malnourished. Apparently,
not even fifteen percent of our money is going toward nation-feeding
— let alone ‘nation-building.’

Nor has anywhere near the bulk of the spending on the Iraq War
gone to our soldiers. Divide $210 billion dollars by 160,000 American
soldiers in Iraq, and you see that we’re spending $1.3 million per
soldier. These are the same soldiers complaining about no air conditioning
in 110-degree weather, poor medical care, the lack of body armor,
the need to scrounge junkyards for vehicle armor, and a shortage
of ammunition. None of our soldiers seem to have even $1300 worth
of camping gear, let alone $1.3 million worth of high-tech equipment.
And they sure aren’t receiving $1.3 million apiece in pay.

(Maybe all those pro-war folks with those ‘Support Our Troops’
signs should wave them at the Oval Office. That’s where their message
needs to sink in.)

Perhaps you think that the $210 billion dollars went toward offensive
military capability. But it is estimated by President Bush himself
that the US military has at most killed only thirty thousand Iraqi
insurgents, and if you divide $210 billion dollars by that number,
you see that it is costing us $7 million to kill each insurgent.
If George Washington had wasted $7 million in logistics to kill
each Redcoat, the Continental Congress would have stripped him of
command and regarded him as more damaging to the Patriot cause than
Benedict Arnold! Today, however, the Bush Administration awards
medals to generals who have achieved that astounding level of inefficiency
in the Iraq War.

We’re assuming, though, the money actually went toward fighting
the war. Or does the word ‘misappropriation’ come to mind?

The Bush Administration admits it may have misappropriated a billion
or two in Iraq because of accounting errors. But the scandal is
far bigger than that. What about willful, conscious misappropriation
— into a swollen federal bureaucracy, Congressional pork-barrel
programs, and all those no-bid contracts for corporate political
donors? Such practices might be perfectly legal, but still they
have the whiff of corruption, do they not?

They also have a whiff of a deeper evil, considering that so many
innocents have died for the prosperity of the unscrupulous. And
we do have more important matters on which to spend the money —
such as, say, a manhunt for real terrorists (Osama, remember him?).

Two hundred and ten billion dollars is a lot of money to spend
with nothing positive to show for it. And the Bush Administration
has nothing positive to show for the Iraq War. Not in making America
safer, not in making Iraq better.

So just exactly where did the money go? It went where taxpayer
money dedicated for ‘idealistic’ purposes often goes: down a fiscal
black hole. And thanks to our current leadership, with our national
debt already above sixty-five percent of GDP, America itself is
rapidly accelerating toward the same event horizon.

For though we have squandered nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars
on Iraq, there is no end in sight — unless, it is the end
of America itself.

December
17, 2005

Joe
Schembrie [send him mail]
is an engineer and writer living in Washington.

Politicians
are already talking about two hundred billion dollars for the net
expenditure. Some say it will go much higher.

Two
hundred billion dollars! Does anyone in the federal government
realize how close this comes to paving the streets of New Orleans
with gold?

The
appalling political cynicism of this relief effort is revealed with
a simple arithmetic calculation. Just divide two hundred billion
dollars in reconstruction money by the one million residents of
the city, and you get two hundred thousand dollars for every
man, woman, and child in New Orleans!

For
a typical suburban family of four, this means an expenditure of
eight hundred thousand dollars. You could not only rebuild their
home – but raze it and rebuild it, raze it and rebuild it –
and then, raze it and rebuild it. And still you would have money
left over!

It’s
easy enough to understand where the floodwaters went, but just where
is this flood of money going?

Let’s
pretend that we’ve mutated into socialists and our sense of guilt
compels us to upgrade everyone’s living quarters. But come on –
million-dollar homes for welfare mothers with four children? Even
the looniest Swedish Social Democrat wouldn’t go there!

So
will the money be invested instead in the infrastructure of the
streets outside the homes?

Well,
here’s one truly ‘golden’ way of picturing it.

If
you allow that an ounce of gold can cover a square foot of pavement,
and that gold is currently costing about four hundred dollars an
ounce, then for two hundred thousand dollars per person, you could
cover five hundred square feet. This is twenty-five feet of suburban
street front. A family of four would be accorded a hundred feet
of street front. That would be enough to span the street frontage
of a typical suburban home lot.

Thus,
by asking for two hundred billion dollars, President Bush is coming
within an order of magnitude of literally paving the streets of
New Orleans with gold.

If
paving with gold doesn’t impress you, how about high-end consumer
products? For two hundred billion dollars total and thereby two
hundred thousand dollars per person, and at a cost of $25,000 per
vehicle, you could buy every man, woman, and child in New Orleans
not just one but eight SUVs! So forget gold; for two hundred billion
dollars, you could pave not only the streets but the entire city
with SUVs!

Are
we to believe that a thin layer of asphalt would be more expensive?
And you thought the price of oil had risen excessively under Bush!

Two
hundred billion dollars is a lot of money, even to rebuild
an entire city. Just where is the money going?

Will
the people of New Orleans now receive two-hundred-thousand-dollar
debit cards? Hardly.

Will
they live in palatial estates and luxury condos? Ho ho!

Will
they walk on streets paved with gold? Snort!

If
you followed what happened to ‘nation-building’ in Iraq, you know
what will happen here as well. The impoverished locals will see
next to nothing of the largesse. After deducting the cost of bureaucratic
(mis)handling, most of the ‘reconstruction funds’ will be sucked
into a financial black hole of corporate political campaign donors,
courtesy of no-bid contract awards. Based on what we’ve witnessed
in Iraq, we can call this federally-subsidized disappearing act,
‘The Halliburton Effect.’

For
two hundred billion dollars, the federal government could almost
pave all the streets of New Orleans with gold. But the public would
see the waste and be outraged. So instead, the federal government
will pour the gold into the pockets of political cronies. And without
a picture to fixate on, the visual-minded public will merely yawn
when the bill for this blatant corruption is tallied to the federal
deficit.

And
if you dare to protest the absurdity of the cost – why, you
must be a racist!

When
you’re done shedding a crocodile tear for the golden folk of New
Orleans, how about weeping for the American taxpayer? Two hundred
billion dollars divided by seventy million taxpayers equals approximately
three thousand dollars per taxpayer. Politicians are saying the
final cost could run much higher . . . and so a cost of five thousand
dollars per taxpayer is not unlikely.

Unrealistic,
yes. Unlikely, no.

So
if you’re a middle-class American taxpayer, say good-bye to that
trip to Europe. Or your kid’s college education. Or maybe the mortgage
payments on your own home.

And
if the streets of your own city become paved with potholes, you’ll
know where the tax money went. And it wasn’t to pave the French
Quarter with streets of gold.

September
22, 2005

Joe
Schembrie [send him mail]
is an engineer and writer living in Washington.

That
occurred on June 22, 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia. The campaign
proved to be so ill-conceived that it soon toppled his empire. The
tale merits scrutiny, as the Bush Administration is duplicating
Napoleon’s hubristic errors in its imperial misadventure in Iraq.

As
with Bush and the invasion of Iraq almost two centuries later, all
seemed well at the beginning for Napoleon and his Russian campaign.
His Grand Army of 675,000 outnumbered Tsar Alexander’s army, almost
three to one. However, Napoleon failed to adequately plan the logistics
of the campaign. Within weeks, his army melted away from starvation,
exposure, and sickness. Napoleon reached Moscow with barely a hundred
thousand survivors. His logistical bungling had destroyed four-fifths
of his army even before engaging the enemy.

Likewise,
in its occupation of Iraq, the Bush Administration has dismissed
logistical details and so our military resources are hemorrhaging.
The occupation costs a hundred billion dollars a year, more than
half a million dollars per soldier deployed, but our troops lack
armor and spare parts and receive pay so low that their families
qualify for food stamps. As did Napoleon, Bush believes that personal
vision transcends grubby bookkeeping.

Another
of Napoleon’s errors was manifested when he entered Moscow, confidently
expecting the Russian opposition to collapse with the seizure of
its greatest city. But at the time, the capital of Russia was in
Saint Petersburg; Napoleon in his smugness had attacked the wrong
target, leaving the Tsarist regime unscathed and the war far from
over.

Bush
has made a similar blunder in the War on Terror. Our enemies are
al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but Bush — claiming God’s wisdom —
attacked Iraq and Saddam Hussein instead. And so our real enemies
in the War on Terror remain free and unharmed, while the US entangles
itself in an exhausting sideshow.

Napoleon
compounded his errors by refusing to admit mistakes. He "stayed
the course" in occupying Moscow, lingering for weeks as winter
approached. When he finally allowed retreat, it was too late. Freezing
cold added to hunger and killed more of his soldiers. Of the 675,000
who entered Russia in June 1812, only ten thousand escaped in December.

Similarly,
Bush’s pride refuses to acknowledge that the War on Terror was derailed
by the invasion of Iraq. So the occupation continues, adding a hundred-billion-dollar-a-year
burden to an already threatening US federal deficit.

Given
these parallels between Napoleon and Bush, what can we expect from
America’s misbegotten intervention in the Middle East? A final parallel
offers a disturbing warning.

When
the Russians captured one of the coaches from Napoleon’s retreating
army, they found maps of India and China. This presciently echoes
the Bush Administration’s rumored plans to invade Iran and Syria.
Imperialist hubris knows no limits — other than overreach and collapse.

Napoleon’s
imperial overreach into Russia soon cost him his empire. In June
1815, almost exactly three years after entering the Russian quagmire,
the Emperor met his ultimate defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. He
commanded only 74,000 soldiers on the field that day; if Napoleon
could have brought 675,000 more, Wellington would have undoubtedly
retreated in undignified haste. Instead, having squandered so much
of his manpower upon Russia, Napoleon could no longer defend his
own national borders.

If
Bush continues on Napoleon’s imperial path, America will follow
the fate of Napoleon’s empire. Regardless of the Bush Administration’s
vainglory, the United States cannot afford hundred-billion-dollar-a-year-each,
manpower-stretching occupations of Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and protect
itself as well. Eventually, financial reality will set in, and the
United States must withdraw from the Middle East or risk its own
survival.

Our
real enemy (Osama — remember?), who so far has remained untouched,
will then step into the power vacuum which the Bush Administration
has created in the Middle East.

Is
this any way to conduct a War on Terror? No, but as the parallels
with Napoleon in Russia illustrate, it is exactly how hubris-afflicted
leaders overreach their empires.

April
12, 2005

Joe
Schembrie [send him mail]
is an electrical engineer in Washington.