Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
Friday, August 10, 2007, 4 pm PST
This Week's Show
Guest: John Judge
On this day, August 8, 2007, America is at a tipping point. We arrived here through a series of incidents and actions taken by people. Our tools were law and institutions, tools we generally believe provide stability and order. Growing numbers of Americans now realize that those we trusted have used those tools to enrich themselves. We are faced with the compelling need to change government because of the deceit and unbridled greed of those who used our trust to steal.
Greed is a long-understood human failing. Greed harmed America by using our institutions in ways that were deceptive. Those deceptions were created by people who stood to profit in a variety of ways. This did not happen as a conspiracy; it happened because when one person comes up with an original way to steal, it will be copied and applied to other circumstances to achieve the same purpose.
A blow dryer is a small appliance used to dry and style your hair. Dropped into the bathtub of someone you want to eliminate, it is a murder weapon.
Blow-dryers and institutions of all kinds are just tools. Individuals entrusted with those tools are responsible for how those tools are used. There are many tools we need to rethink, including how we organize locally.
Our monetary system was intended to provide the means for exchange, to securely hold money, and to provide a way to measure what money is worth. It has become a weapon in the war to steal the wealth of people around the world. Fractional banking is a monopoly license to print money, issued by Congress to the Federal Reserve System in 1913. This system has stolen the wealth of five generations, while reorganizing us to make stealing ever easier. (For alternatives to the current monetary system, read Money, Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender by Thomas H. Greco, Jr., Chelsea Green Publishing, ISBN 9781890132378.)
We have learned that the greedy are never satisfied. Constructing institutional means by which they could continue to steal was easy. We trusted them; they made sure their actions were covert, and then redefined the terms. They worked diligently to make sure that all the institutions eliminated choices that did not profit them. They did this for electricity, transportation, for all financial dealings, for insurance, and for all government services including the police and military. They have been re-calibrating the police and military to control us when deceit finally fails, which it is now doing. (To lower your electric bill, see the website of Forbish Energy Systems, Inc. coming soon.)
How they carried this process is also fascinating.
They knew that we would eventually notice. To put off the day of reckoning, they rooted around and found justifications for their actions. We know those justifications by many names. Among them are Communism, Socialism, The True Faith (fill in your favorite), The Free Market, Spreading Democracy, Fighting Terrorism, Straussianism, Progressivism - the list is endless. Some of these are complex sets of ideas that are logical - when reality is ignored. All are dressed up in pretty and inspiring rhetoric that paints a picture that either can't work, given the facts of human nature, or was never intended to work.
The greedy have huge piles of stolen money and continuously buy new idea sets that persuade people to accept their latest installation of yet another sucking machine. American history is full of the names of people who made smaller piles of money by supplying these justifications. Look at our think tanks and notice where their funds originate. Start with the American Enterprise Institute and Aspen Institute, then move on to others.
The constant tendency of organizations to become bureaucracies only helps this process. In even the best and most noble organizations, paid staff gradually replaces volunteers. The paid staff focus on their own best interests, often voiding the original charter of the organization. Volunteer organizations can be reformed by making sure that the management are always volunteers of long standing and the staff positions are only functionaries. Computers have reduced the need for large infrastructure in any case.
By contrast, government grows and spends with unbridled enthusiasm, and there are no controls. Everyone involved is invested in making it grow. I call this the 401K Syndrome.
By artfully redefining words like 'is' and 'privatize', they can justify anything. Just slather on lots of rhetoric that evokes emotions but is completely disconnected from what the words mean, and you have those streams of income firmly in place. Add politicians and courts funded by the corporations and, voila! Government as it exists today.
If you are an activist in America today you probably have your own set of ideas that includes some that they sold you. Get ready to rethink those ideas. They are artful in taking good ideas that could make us free - and converting them into ideas that enslave.
One current exemplar is the word 'privatize,' which used to mean giving control back to the individual. Right and Left are both guilty of subverting its meaning. If you instead read 'corporatize,' you will have a much more accurate idea of what is happening.
Federal government was a bad idea in the first place, because it removes the services people are paying for into remote hands. Transparency is completely lost. That was one problem. A worse problem was the constant redefining of terms and the essential basis for American government.
Government is just a contractor hired to fix our collective toilet. Government cannot be sovereign: the only sovereignty exists in individuals, those whose rights are referred to in that far more useful and meaningful document, the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. б That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -----”
This form of government, with power collected at the Federal level, created an infrastructure that was outside the form originally accepted even by the Founders. The final message: it did not work.
So, that is the back story, where we are today.
Now the question is what to do about it.
First, you can trust them only if you can see exactly what they are doing at all times. That is what is meant by the term 'transparency'.
Second, individuals must be able to give smack-downs to uppity contractors, directly and immediately. All government employees are contractors, as are all those whom government hires to provide services.
Third, government needs to be returned to its original form, with the people deciding how to organize at the most local level. The mandate from the Declaration reads:
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But 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.”
This time, let us do a better job. If the last 200 years was the beta test, it is time to do a Reboot - and learn from our mistakes.
To Reboot, we need to get off the grids they set up to contain and control us; we must focus on local sources for all our needs; we need to strengthen community; me must assert accountability through common law courts.
On my show tomorrow, The Spiritual Politician, we will be talking with John Judge, formerly with Representative Cynthia McKinney, about each of the issues that hold us on the grids and how to build exits that all of us can use. John is a mine of information. There is a lot of information out there already about how to exit the grids. We are going to put all that information up here for now. We are now working on a wiki to make all Exit Points, be they how to organize for local disasters, how to grow food, how to organize a food cooperative, how to stop using Grid Electricity, how to transition to a non-fiat local economy and you get the picture. If you want to help, get in touch. The most revolutionary thing about this effort is that we will build a network: no centralization of power allowed.
Freedom: You don't have it until you give it away to everyone. Off the Grids to Freedom - that is the agenda. Let's get started now.
To Hear the Show go to BBSRadio.com
What the Show is about and being a Spiritual Politician
Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:
The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.
That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.
When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.
Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.
This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.
Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.
Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.
We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.
So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.
Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.
Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.
To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.
Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation
Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:
How the NeoCons Stole Freedom
Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry
Greed: The NeoConning of America
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