IT'S HAPPENING HERE!

The real Social Security crisis may not be privatization, as the media is reporting (although doubtless that would be controlled--the Feds would still determine for us where we can put our money) but internationalization!

We absolutely must take this country out of the hands of these globalists!

SOCIAL SECURITY: AMERICANS ONLY - PLEASE!

Phyllis Spivey
April 28, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

Bewildering, isn’t it, that with the entire nation focused on the solvency of the Social Security system, the press continues to ignore a Bush Administration plan that by itself could break the bank? No, we’re not talking privatization; it’s the Mexicanization of Social Security that’s getting neither ink nor sound bites

Political opponents apparently intend to spare George Bush the embarrassment of having to explain why, while trying to edge Americans off Social Security, he’s putting Mexicans on it. Even the American Association of Retired Persons, so stridently opposed to private accounts, is mum on the plan to extend Social Security benefits to Mexicans who work, or have worked – even illegally – in the U.S.

News of the plan broke in December 2002, when articles began appearing in major newspapers. In September 2003, Congress conducted hearings on it, where projected costs for the plan went as high as $345 billion over ten years. The same month the General Accounting Office (GAO) released a study faulting the Social Security Administration (SSA) for its deeply flawed analysis of the proposal and describing costs as highly uncertain due to unknowns about the "size, work history, earnings, and dependents of the unauthorized (read that illegal) Mexican population."

But just when related news, e.g., President Bush proposing quasi amnesty for illegals and dire warnings about the financial condition of Social Security, should have shoved the social- security-for-Mexicans scheme into the headlines, the issue all but faded from view. Even the accelerating presidential campaign failed to restore media interest.

Then, on June 29, 2004, SSA Commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart and her Mexican counterpart quietly signed the proposed agreement, committing U. S. taxpayers to a one-sided contract of which few Americans were aware and on which there had been no public debate, despite its huge ramifications for a retirement system already in trouble.

The Center for Immigration Studies put things in perspective with its September 2004 release of an eye-popping study, predicting the plan would:

permit partial payment of Social Security benefits to Mexicans who work in the U.S. as little as 18 months;

permit Mexicans to return to Mexico and collect benefits, including disability pensions and survivor benefits;

cover not just Mexican workers, but their families as well, even if they have never lived in the U.S;

eventually compel the U.S. to pay billions in benefits to Mexicans for credits acquired while using fraudulent Social Security numbers prior to obtaining legal status.

In September 2004, Rep. J. Hayworth, Arizona, proposed legislation to block benefit payments to Mexicans, but the House of Representatives quietly defeated it, 178-225, California Republican Congressmen Dreier, Issa, Lewis, and Thompson, voting "no." Throughout the presidential campaign, John Kerry remained silent, ignoring an issue that might well have made him president.

Today, a SSA web site still carries the June 29, 2004 press release announcing: "United States and Mexico Sign Social Security Agreement. Another site states, "... the President will submit the agreement to Congress where it must sit in review for 60 session days. If Congress takes no action during this time, the agreement can move forward."

Meanwhile, the SSA – its numbers thoroughly discredited by numerous public and private groups, including the Government Accounting Office – continues to minimize the financial impact of the agreement, passing it off as just another of the 20 plus "totalization" agreements the U.S. has been racking up since 1978. The totalization countries include Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Norway, Canada, United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, France, Portugal, Netherlands, Austria, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Greece, South Korea, Chile, Australia and most recently Japan (expected to take effect in late 2005).

The SSA describes totalization as "international social security agreements that coordinate the U.S. Social Security program with the comparable programs of other countries." Critics, however, say Mexico's retirement system is in no way comparable and that the actual goal is to force U.S. taxpayers to subsidize the corporate hiring of cheap foreign labor to replace American workers. Particularly galling is that foreigners are getting social security benefits on far better terms than U.S. citizens, even where there is no totalization agreement.

In July 2003, for example, author Phyllis Schlafly told of a report in The Economic Times of India. It indicated the Bush Administration had assured India that its citizens coming to the U.S. to work on H-1B visas would receive Social Security benefits in six years, instead of the ten required for Americans. It’s unlikely this policy applies only to India.

Despite a lack of publicity on the accord with Mexico, opposition is growing, and it’s led by Congressmen from the President’s own party. In February, Rep. Virgil H. Goode, Jr., Virginia, announced plans to introduce a resolution asking the President not to submit the agreement to Congress. If the President goes ahead, Rep. J.D. Hayworth, Arizona, has promised to block it with another resolution.

And, according to the Washington Times, the Seniors Coalition, a seniors advocacy group, has joined the opposition with 387,000 petitions from angry members. "It’s a double cross that they do not understand ..." a spokesman asserted in the February Times report

Did they say "double cross?" Consider this: The U.S. already has an active agreement with Canada; the deal with Mexico would give the U.S. totalization deals with both of its North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) "partners." But now the Bush Administration is pushing congressional action on another open border trade pact --the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which includes the countries of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.

Once CAFTA is approved, how could the U.S. possibly deny social security benefits to CAFTA countries, having already put Third World Mexico on the social security take?

Preposterous, yes. But the facts suggest that social security is not just being Mexicanized; it’s being internationalized. Only Congress can stop it. Contact your Congressman at 1(877)762-8762 (toll free). Demand that he (or she) oppose the social security agreement with Mexico and support Congressman Ron Paul’s H.R.858, which would reserve America’s social security system for Americans – Americans only! What a novel idea.

© 2005 Phyllis Spivey - All Rights Reserved

Phyllis is a researcher and freelance writer specializing in political analysis. She has been published in Lew Rockwell’s Rothbard-Rockwell Report, The Welch Report (on-line), The Orange County Register and is a regular contributer to NewsWithViews.com, The Sentinel Weekly News, Corona, California. She holds a Christian worldview and writes primarily on trade, economic, education, environmental, and immigration issues.

E-mail: SPIVEY2@infostations.com

There are a number of signs that a civilization is in decline. One of them is loss of control over its borders, so that there is either a mass exodus of the best and the brightest for elsewhere--or mass colonization from the outside, diluting and finishing the job of destroying the once-dominant culture. Another sign is growing disdain for the rule of law as embodied in the civilization's own government, replaced by burning resentment against policies that place the once-dominant culture at a clear economic disadvantage.

I WILL NOT GO QUIETLY INTO THE NIGHT

By Frosty Wooldridge
April 28, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

“At the current rate of invasion of three million annually, the United States will be completely overrun with illegal aliens by the year 2025. I’m not talking about legal immigrants who follow US law to become citizens. In less than 20 years, if we do not stop the invasion, ILLEGAL aliens and their offspring will be the dominant population in the United States,” said Jim Gilchrist, director of the Minute Man Project.

According to US Border Control, “Illegal aliens will have made such inroads into the political and social systems that they will have more influence than our Constitution over how the U.S. is governed. The ugly consequence of an ignored U.S. Constitution is already taking place.”

“I am a 47 year old American who lost my job to outsourcing,” said Ken Boettger from Ellensburg, Washington. “I have spent the last of my retirement and am at my wits end. And I will tell you what, I WILL NOT GO QUIETLY INTO THE NIGHT!”

“If those in government think they can control us, like Iraq, they better think again,” Boettger said. “The new microwave systems, sonic amplifiers and more will be turned against them. Hackers, engineers, physicists and others are ready to respond to the call. WE are the ones they have abused. And just as was with Oppenhiemer, Einstein and others in their days, so too it will be in our days to come.”

“Bush, and those giving him his direction, continually overstep their competency and their understanding of the will and capability of the American people,”

Boettger said. “I believe, in the end, they are going to get similar treatment they gave to Saddam. I had no love for Saddam, but I will tell you what, my dislike for George Bush is tangible and far worse. His father and those who work behind the scenes in controlling this nation are worse than the son. Their arrogance and pride will only make things worse for them in the end. I am in front and will likely fall, but there is a very large wave behind me. As Einstein said, Hitler’s fault was that he turned the whole world against him. SO TOO BUSH and the elite in this country!”

How many readers find themselves betrayed by this president that refuses to honor his oath of office? How many stand in unemployment lines while Bush struts about his Washington parties? How many see their jobs outsourced? Why has our national language been usurped by illegal aliens? Why have our schools been overrun? What has happened to our health care? Who isn’t affected by the migration invasion?

“They are such idiots in their blind greed and lust for domination and power,” Boettger stated.

“I wrote an article about my experience in Boeing as a consultant with green carded Chinese,” Boettger said. “Boeing looked the other way. They did not give a damn as long as they had cheap labor. I say Boeing, but it was actually corporate. It was the corporate elite in this country. No different than the elite in other suppressed nations. No different than the Third Reich (GOP).”

“The corporate elite have a corporate nation that has no geographical boundaries,” Boettger said. “They have set up shop outside the US to survive the great fall. And so it is apparent it was premeditated. It is a corporate world government that exists right now and they don't give a damn about US sovereignty, US soil or the American people. They only care about corporate sovereignty that is in direct conflict with the people and the US Constitution. They hold to no holistic principles, care nothing about the environment, and would sell their own daughters and grandmothers to sexual slavery if they could make a profit. They have NO morals.”

Boettger added, “China is in bed with the corporate elite. It was set up from the beginning. It is time to give that alarm. I am the one of the front runners to give that call. Whatever role I play, I am committed to giving my life for what this nation ONCE was. Even if that implies standing against the current government! It looks like some in power are starting to take the lead... and I WILL be there for them. And so I probably will not be around to see the end of it all. But this I hope and I pray.”

This Congress, and Bush need to be chased into their old age for what they did to America. “Absolutely everything should be taken away from them,” Boettger said. “They should be forced to live in poverty without medical aid. Their kids should be forced to attend schools where no one speaks English. They should suffer the crime, drugs and diseases they perpetrate on Americans with this illegal invasion. God forbid and while I know this is un-Christian like, as I am a Christian, I hope God has absolutely no mercy upon their souls. God forgive me for wishing that upon them. Because if that proves to be true, as I believe it is, they will be terrorized for eternity. Bush invites this illegal alien invasion on my country and children and my fellow Americans, but he better know this--I will not go quietly into the night.”

© 2005 Frosty Wooldridge - All Rights Reserved

Frosty's new book Immigration's Unarmed Invasion


Frosty Wooldridge possesses a unique view of the world, cultures and families in that he has bicycled around the globe 100,000 miles, on six continents in the past 26 years.

He has written hundreds of articles (regularly) for 17 national and 2 international magazines. He has had hundreds of editorials published in top national newspapers including the Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post, Albany Herald and Christian Science Monitor.

His first book, "HANDBOOK FOR TOURING BICYCLISTS" by Falcon Press is available nationwide. His second book "STRIKE THREE! TAKE YOUR BASE" by the Brookfield Reader published in January 2002. His bicycle books include "BICYCLING AROUND THE WORLD."

His latest book. ‘IMMIGRATION’S UNARMED INVASION—DEADLY CONSEQUENCES.’

Frosty Wooldridge has guest lectured at Cornell University, teaching creative writing workshops, magazine writing at Michigan State University, and has presented environmental science lectures at the University of Colorado, University of Denver and Regis University. He also lectures on "Religion and Ethics" at Front Range College in Colorado.

Website: www.FrostyWooldridge.com

E:Mail: frostyw@juno.com

Most people likely to be reading this probably know the difference already, but it never hurts to review some basics occasionally--especially in an era when both globalist politicians and intellectuals have all gone crackers over democracy. At one time, as the material below observes, this was the Federal Government's own conception of the difference between a democracy and a republic. This friendly reminder comes courtesy of John Adam.

REPUBLIC vs. DEMOCRACY

Many of you have seen the reprint of this document. If you have, it's worth reading again. If you have not, it is worth reading, studying, and reciting to your friends, family, and neighbors. It is copied from Training Manual No. 2000-25 that was published by the then War Department, Washington, D.C., November 30, 1928.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Official Definition of DEMOCRACY

NOTE

Here are four (4) facsimile section reproductions taken from a 156 page book officially compiled and issued by the U.S. War Department, November 30,1928, setting forth exact and truthful definitions of a Democracy and of a Republic, explaining the difference between both. These definitions were published by the authority of the United States Government and must be accepted as authentic in any court of proper jurisdiction. These precise and scholarly definitions of a Democracy and a Republic were carefully considered as a proper guide for U.S. soldiers and U.S. citizens by the Chief of Staff of the United States Army. Such definition stake precedence over any "definition" that may be found in the present commercial dictionaries which have suffered periodical "modification" to please "the powers in office. Shortly after the "bank holiday" in the thirties, hush-hush orders from the White House suddenly demanded that all copies of this book be withdrawn from the Government Printing Office and the Army posts, to be suppressed and destroyed without explanation. This was the beginning of the complete red control of the Government from within, not from without.


-------------------

Prepared under the direction of the Chief of Staff.

CITIZENSHIP

This manual supersedes Manual of Citizenship Training The use of the publication "The Constitution of the United States," by Harry Atwood, is by permission and courtesy of the author.

CITIZENSHIP Democracy:

A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of "direct" expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic--negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether is be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demogogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy

CITIZENSHIP Republic:

Authority is derived through the election by the people of public officials best fitted to represent them. Attitude toward law is the administration of justice in accord with fixed principles and established evidence, with a strict regard to consequences. A greater number of citizens and extent of territory may be brought within its compass. Avoids the dangerous extreme of either tyranny or mobocracy. Results in statesmanship, liberty, reason, justice, contentment, and progress. Is the "standard form" of government throughout the world. A republic is a form of government under a constitution which provides for the election of

(1) an executive and (2) a legislative body, who working together in a representative capacity, have all the power of appointment, all power of legislation, all power to raise revenue and appropriate expenditures, and are required to create (3) a judiciary to pass upon the justice and legality of their government acts and to recognize (4) certain inherent individual rights.

Take away any one or more of those four elements and you are drifting into autocracy. Add one or more to those four elements and you are drifting into democracy.

Atwood: Superior to all others.--Autocracy declares the divine right of kings; its authority can not be questioned; its powers are arbitrarily or unjustly administered. Democracy is the "direct" rule of the people and has been repeatedly tried without success. Our Constitutional fathers, familiar with the strength and weakness of both autocracy and democracy, with fixed principles definitely in mind, defined a representative republican form of government. They "made a very marked distinction between a republic and a democracy * * * and said repeatedly and emphatically that they had founded a republic."

"By order of the Secretary of War: C.P. Summerall, Major General, Chief of Staff. Official: Lutz Wahl, Major General, The Adjutant General.

WHY DEMOCRACIES FAIL

A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of Government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that Democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a Dictatorship."

(Written by Professor Alexander Fraser Tytler, nearly two centuries ago while our thirteen original states were still colonies of Great Britain. At the time he was writing of the decline and fall of the Athenian Republic over two thousand years before.

"Did I say "republic"? By God, yes, I said "republic!" Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, miscegenation, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive."

Westbrook Pegler: New York Journal American, January 25th and 26th, 1951, under the titles- Upholds Republic of U.S. Against Phony Democracy, Democracy in the U.S. Branded Meaningless

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,
it expects what never was and never will be."
Thomas Jefferson, 1816.

Over the past several weeks since dropping his long post in here I've continued to follow James Howard Kunstler's writings, especially on what he believes is a looming energy crisis. I certainly foresee obtaining a copy of his book The Long Emergency when it comes out next month. If he is right, Western civilization will have a disaster on its hands. The American masses will not have seen it coming, especially as America's masses excel at keeping their heads buried in the sand and avoiding anything that commits them to extended periods of deep thought. I do not know if Kunstler is right about how heightened gasoline prices will mean a curtailing of Americans' dependence on the automobile to where those of us forced to commute to different cities and towns to work will have either to move or give up those jobs. Too soon to tell. Most likely, skyrocketing gas prices will just be added to the total indebtedness to which America's masses have allowed themselves to become accustomed. Be this as it may, Kunstler's latest blog entry struck me as particularly apt even though it deals with a different subject: the takeover of American college and university campuses by political correctness. It is time to stop being patient with this nonsense! When Hans-Hermann Hoppe was called onto the carpet last year, he fought back, although it took a toll on both his personal and professional life. Standing up to power and intimidation always exacts a price, however (look at me, the most published philosopher in South Carolina, and working as an adjunct at two universities, teaching the equivalent of a full load of classes for part-time pay).

The real questions that began to motivate me to look deeper at society and what I now call either the "real matrix" or the "grand convergence" back in the mid-1990s: why have the various guises of political correctness proven so immune to attack, so impervious to criticism despite the abundance of devastating criticisms (everywhere today from books to blogs)? The answer: because political correctness serves the purposes of the globalist elites as one of several forms of mind control, one of the forms that kicks in for those for whom government schools haven't done their job of destroying their ability to think as individuals.

It is time for all of us to start putting the sensitivity fascists in their place, and then going to that next level of exposing their fellow-traveling role in the growing edifice of control slowly encircling every area of this society. It is time to stop apologizing profusely for every "insensitive" remark, or every outburst of political incorrectness. If Americans continue to put up with this crap, then they will deserve the de facto slavery gradually coming their way.

In any event, here are James Howard Kunstler's remarks from his blog (warning: off-color language at least implied!).

A Bitch-Slap Upside the Head
by James Howard Kunstler (from his Clusterf*** Nation Chronicle)
April 25, 2005

I was at the University of Wisconsin last week, doing Q and A after a lecture, when somebody asked me what it would take for the American public to start paying attention to the grave energy issues coming down at us. I answered, speaking figuratively, a bitch-slap upside the head. At once off to the side of the big room, a young woman thrust up her hand. I called on her and she said that she was offended by my remark. I was then duly upbraided for my choice of language and my attitude toward women.

This is not the first time I have encountered a reaction like this. A similar thing happened to me at Princeton last month. I remarked that Modernism had succeeded in removing all feminine qualities from architecture, in particular ornament and curves, and a wrathful female student hastened to chastise me for expressing the idea -- to which, it seemed to me, any genuine feminist ought to be sympathetic.

After much pondering and prayer, I conclude that the faculties of the America's great universities have forgotten what free speech means, namely that even if expressions make us feel uncomfortable we are obliged to tolerate them so as to assure our freedom to express ideas that might make somebody else uncomfortable.

What's obvious is that these students have been carefully trained by their teachers to behave this way, conditioned to rise up on cue in censorious indignation to smack down ideas that "offend" them. Who are their teachers? A lot of the tenured ones are fellow members of my own Woodstock Generation (and many of them are women). It's awfully ironic that an intellectual trend that started with the Berkeley "Free Speech" movement in 1965 has now mutated into a widespread impulse to censor free speech on the grounds that it "offends."

This was the case earlier this year when the president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, remarked at a conference that in light of the overwhelming representation of males on the science faculty perhaps there was something innate in the difference between men and women to account for it. Summers was pilloried for his remarks. The faculty went so far as to organize a formal no confidence vote against him. He has refused to step down, though he has issued many obsequious apologies in the aftermath.

What is most amazing about the Harvard incident is that it formally established the faculty's position as being officially against free inquiry and free expression -- and, of course, that it happened at the supposedly highest level of academia.

I would go so far to say now that this has all happened precisely because of differences between men and women and the fact that women have come to dominate some college faculties, especially the so-called humanities (where expression is supposedly taught). They've implanted the idea that somebody's (anybody's) personal feelings are more important than the substance of any expression, and that somebody's (anybody's) hurt feelings are grounds for shutting down the expression, and the discussion that goes with it. The implicit narcissism is also fantastic.

I regard this behavior on the campuses as pernicious f****** nonsense. It is just another thing (along with the widespread belief that it is possible to get something for nothing) that is turning America into a fourth-rate culture, a nation of cravens and cretins. And it will lead us right into the grip of the law of perverse outcomes, which states that people get what they deserve, not what they expect.

Again I depart from what has been the norm on this site, posting articles by others with short commentary, in order to relate a bad experience that happened to me earlier today in order to pose a query.

The experience: while driving home from work on I-85 in the center lane and approaching my exit (54) I prepared to change lanes and found a car about the size of mine right in my way. Whoever this person was, I was far enough ahead that he had to see me flashing. I attempted to slow so that he could get ahead of me, and I would swear on a stack of Bibles that whoever it was slowed down as well, as if to block my lane change! We were approaching the exit rapidly, and a huge truck was bearing down on top of me! Finally he went ahead of me, and fortunately no one was coming in his lane.

I got up behind this idiot and could see that the driver was black--I could not tell if the person was male or female. The license plate said, "U.S. Government." That figures too. And so I come to my query: what is the Federal Government doing to promote "cultural diversity," pulling these idiots off the street?

This comes courtesy of David Herndon (South Carolina Libertarian Party). File under: not everything government does is by definition evil; and not everything that goes on in the private sector (what is left of it) is by definition good.

IF YOU WANT TO SAVE MONEY READ TO THE END.

Please note: forwarded message attached

Subject: An EYE Opener

Prescription Prices

The following is incredible. Make sure to keep reading to the bottom where it discusses Costco, Sam's Club, etc. The women who wrote this email and signed below are Federal Budget Analysts in Washington, DC.

Did you ever wonder how much it costs a drug company for the active ingredient in prescription medications?

Some people think it must cost a lot, since many drugs sell for more than $2.00 per tablet. We did a search of offshore chemical synthesizers that supply the active ingredients found in drugs approved by the FDA. As we have revealed in past issues of "Life Extension," a significant percentage of drugs sold in the United States contain active ingredients made in other countries.

In our independent investigation of how much profit drug companies really make, we obtained the actual price of active ingredients used in some of the most popular drugs sold in America.

The chart below speaks for itself. Celebrex 100 mg Consumer price (100 tablets): $130.27 Cost of general active ingredients: $0.60 Percent markup: 21,712%

Claritin 10 mg Consumer Price (100 tablets): $215.17 Cost of general active ingredients: $0.71 Percent markup: 30,306%

Keflex 250 mg Consumer Price (100 tablets): $157.39 Cost of general active ingredients: $1.88 Percent markup: 8,372%

Lipitor 20 mg Consumer Price (100 tablets): $272.37 Cost of general active ingredients: $5.80 Percent markup: 4,696%

Norvasec 10 mg Consumer price (100 tablets): $188.29 Cost of general active ingredients: $0.14 Percent markup: 134,493%

Paxil 20 mg Consumer price (100 tablets): $220.27 Cost of general active ingredients: $7.60 Percent markup: 2,898%

Prevacid 30 mg Consumer price (100 tablets): $44.77 Cost of general active ingredients: $1.01 Percent markup: 34,136%

Prilosec 20 mg Consumer price (100 tablets): $360.97 Cost of general active ingredients $0.52 Percent markup: 69,417%

Prozac 20 mg Consumer price (100 tablets) : $247.47 Cost of general active ingredients: $0.11 Percent markup: 224,973%

Tenormin 50 mg Consumer price (100 tablets): $104.47 Cost of general active ingredients: $0.13 Percent markup: 80,362%

Vasotec 10 mg Consumer price (100 tablets): $10237 Cost of general active ingredients: $0.20 Percent markup: 51,185%

Xanax 1 mg Consumer price (100 tablets) : $136.79 Cost of general active ingredients: $0.024 Percent markup: 569,958%

Zocor 40 mg Consumer price (100 tablets): $350.27 Cost of general active ingredients: $8.63 Percent markup: 4,059%

Zoloft 50 mg Consumer price: $206.87 Cost of general active ingredients: $1.75 Percent markup: 11,821%

Since the cost of prescription drugs is so outrageous, I thought everyone I knew should know about this. Please read the following and pass it on. It pays to shop around. This helps to solve the mystery as to why they can afford to put a Walgreen's on every corner.

On Monday night, Steve Wilson, an investigative reporter for Channel 7 News in Detroit, did a story on generic drug price gouging by pharmacies. He found in his investigation, that some of these generic drugs were marked up as much as 3,000% or more. Yes, that's not a typo .. three thousand percent! So often, we blame the drug companies for the high cost of drugs, and usually rightfully so. But in this case, the fault clearly lies with the pharmacies themselves. For example, if you had to buy a prescription drug, and bought the name brand, you might pay $100 for 100 pills. The pharmacist might tell you that if you get the generic equivalent, they would only cost $80, making you think you are "saving" $20. What the pharmacist is not telling you is that those 100 generic pills may have only cost him $10!

At the end of the report, one of the anchors asked Mr. Wilson whether or not there were any pharmacies that did not adhere to this practice, and he said that Costco, Sam's Club and other discount volume stores consistently charged little over their cost for the generic drugs. I went to the discount store's website, where you can look up any drug, and get its online price. It says that the in-store prices are consistent with the online prices. I was appalled. Just to give you one example from my own experience, I had to use the drug, Comparing, which helps prevent nausea in chemo patients. I used the generic equivalent, which cost $54.99 for 60 pills at CVS. I checked the price at Costco, and I could have bought 100 >>pills for $19.89. For 145 of my pain pills, I paid $72.57. I could have got 150 at another discount store for $28.08. I would like to mention, that although these are a "membership" type store, you do NOT have to be a member to buy prescriptions there, as it is a federally regulated substance. You just tell them at the door that you wish to use the pharmacy, and they will let you in.

I am asking each of you to please help me by copying this letter, and passing it into your own email, and send it to everyone you know with an email address.

Sharon L. Davis, Budget Analyst, US Department of Commerce Room 6839 Office Ph: 202-482-4458; Office Fax: 202-482-5480 Email Address: sdavis@docgov

Mary Palmer, Budget Analyst, Bureau of Economic Analysis Office of Budget &Finance; Voice: (202) 606-9295

Diane Foster, Contracting Officer VA Detroit (313) 576-4281 Diane.Foster@med.va.gov

What follows is a departure from the pattern established in previous posts, as rather than post articles by others with a brief introduction this is a rough transcription of my notes, with appropriate commentary, on William F. Jasper's talk to a group assembled here in Greenville the other evening (April 21, 2005) on why it is necessary to oppose and defeat the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Jasper's talk was entitled "The Free Trade Trap."

The year 2005 could well be a Year of Decision--much as 1917 was. This is not Bircher speculation; it was decided in 1994, the year of the Miami Summit of the Americas was held, launching a ten-year effort to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The projected completion date for the FTAA: 2005. It would need 218 votes. The FTAA could be voted on and defeated--which would be a major setback--or not sent to the floors of Congress for a vote if it was clear that its advocates didn't have the necessary votes. Both North and South Carolina are battleground states, since both lost huge quantities of jobs courtesy of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which went into effect in 1994. Since we are talking about gradualists--people who advance their bids for power in stages rather than try and take it all at once--an intermediate step seemed necessary. This intermediate step is called the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Its purpose is to extend NAFTA to six more nations: the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Guatemala. A no vote on CAFTA would delay both it and the FTAA for at least two years, since 2006 is an election year and most politicians will not risk having voted for trade pacts that cost Americans jobs being thrown in their faces during an election year.

The purpose of the FTAA is far greater than CAFTA. It sets out to integrate the Americas and the Caribbean--the North and South American continents, plus everything in between--into a single "trade bloc" on a par with the European Union (EU). The EU nations have given up their currencies and control over their economic destinies, and are gradually losing their sovereignty as independent nations in the face of the emerging quasisocialist megastate, ruled over by internationalist bureaucrats. Is this what we want to happen to the United States of America, once a Constitutional republic? The real issue with NAFTA, CAFTA and the FTAA is not merely lost jobs and a diminished standard of living for hundreds of thousands of Americans (although that is a valid issue in its own right) but whether the U.S. will continue to survive as an independent, sovereign nation. Or will it follow the fate of European nations, absorbed very gradually into a supra-American megastate? The latter would mean integration and convergence: first economic and then political and social, with the FTAA at the center, effectively replacing whatever is left of Constitutional government in the U.S. Unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats would be in charge, operating at an international level. The FTAA would expand NAFTA to encompass all 34 "democracies" in the Western hemisphere.

Both Democrats and Republicans have embraced CAFTA and the FTAA (as they did NAFTA). Bill Clinton supported them. President George W. Bush supports them today. Advancing the cause of the FTAA is central to Bush's foreign policy with respect to the other nations of this hemisphere--an important reason why his Administration has done nothing to control the influx of illegal aliens across our Southern border with Mexico. Business leaders also support these agreements. CEOs of major multinational corporations expect to profit handsomely from outsourcing more jobs for cheap Central American labor. (Even Hispanics are worried that the operations that moved from the United States to Mexico following NAFTA will move further south as corporations search for still cheaper labor.)

Mr. Jasper's discussion converged on four key points that must be kept firmly in mind when assessing and evaluating CAFTA and the FTAA--and explain why these trade agreements ought to be scuttled rather than embraced.

(1) These agreements are frauds. They have nothing to do with genuine free trade. They will introduce megaregulations and supersized international socialism.

(2) They are traps, designed to snare Americans and bring American enterprise under the control of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations (UN).

(3) They are processes--constantly changing, with add-ons and new stipulations, so that there are no checks and balances, no ways to contain the increasing power of globalist bureaucrats.

(4) They are treasonous. They would effectively abolish the U.S. Constitution, rendering Constitutional government obsolete. This is treasonous because our President, each of our Senators and all our Representatives presumably took an oath when he assumed office--to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.

Expanding on each of these:

(1) What, precisely, is free trade? The activity of mutual, agreed-upon exchanges of goods and services between individuals, one the seller and one the buyer. To say this activity is "free" is to say it can take place without government-imposed barriers. There is no need for huge international "agreements" to ensure that free trade can take place. All that needs to be done is to ensure that "no government-imposed barriers will exist between prospective traders in nations A, B, and C," other than perhaps common horse sense legal barriers against force and fraud, and legal mechanisms to punish those who violate these legal barriers. None of this describes NAFTA and the WTO, or CAFTA and the FTAA. The final version of NAFTA was 1,700 pages long. The document that created the WTO was 23,000 pages long! These documents have grown by thousands of pages, none of them discussed or debated on the floors of Congress, much less voted on by the Americans they may directly effect! NAFTA created international tribunals capable of overruling America's courts (even the U.S. Supreme Court!). The FTAA has been called NAFTA on steroids! It would create still more internaitonal agencies, and they would cover not just trade but myriad other activities including property and land management, transportation, health care, education, and so on. These agencies would be inculcating socialism throughout the Americas. Our largest trading partner under the FTAA would be Brazil--run by an essentially Communist regime, that of Luis de Silva, who also sponsored the Sao Paulo Forum, a meeting ground for terrorist groups including Al Qaeda. All such governments obviously favor the FTAA, because it would transfer to them from the U.S. (i.e., from U.S. taxpayers) hundreds of billions of dollars. The FTAA, although a document still in progress, already contains thousands of pages of regulations, to be interpreted at an international level. Americans would be subject to the direct authority of globalist bureaucrats.

In 1998, the Chile Summit of the Americas added hundreds more pages to the FTAA, including materials promoting "cultural values" (presumably including "diversity" and such).

(2) CAFTA and the FTAA are traps, as were NAFTA and the WTO. With these earlier agreements this may have not been evident to the naive. But there is no excuse this time, now that we now that NAFTA (Chapter 11) set up tribunals arrogating for themselves the authority to arbitrate trade disputes involving U.S., Canadian and Mexican firms. Jasper cited an article from the Sacramento Bee entitled "NAFTA Court is Law of the 3 Lands" (April 18, 2004). This is all flying "under the radar screen," as law professor Peter Spiro observes approvingly (see also an article from him in the 2000 volume of Foreign Affairs, the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations which has been advancing the cause of world government since its founding by globalists in 1921).

Henry Kissinger--archglobalist globe-trotter--said of NAFTA, that it is "the most creative step toward a New World Order" (this was before the Miami Summit of the Americas).

In The New Republic (January 17, 2000), Robert Wright wrote in his Continental Drift column, that "world government is coming. Deal with it." He begins by observing that the so-called "conspiracy kooks" are turning out to be right, as power and resources have begun to flow from national to international agencies and entities. Wright, like Kissinger and Spiro, approves, sees the emergence of world government as necessary.

The Founding Fathers essentially believed in free trade but did not see it as trumping every other consideration. It should be noted again that free trade is not what we are looking at here. We are, rather, looking at trade micromanaged and controlled by an elite element including people in our government, in business (politically well-connected multinational corporations), and in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) attached to the UN.

(3) CAFTA and the FTAA are processes. Jasper observed that the FTAA isn't a single agreement. It includes all the materials from the various Summits of the Americas, without the kinds of checks and balances characteristic of Constitutional government, and full of the brand of open-endedness characteristic of those who cannot say for sure (or are unwilling to say for sure) how these agreements will play out in practice, allowing new powers to be given to international agencies. This almost guarantees that globalist bureaucrats will use every means at their disposal to increase their power without accountability either to Americans or to the citizens of any of the other countries involved. Doubtless the most power-hungry in the growing bureaucratic class will rise to the top of the globalist food chain.

This model follows that of the EU, which was sold to Europeans originally as a "six-nation free trade zone" but now includes 25 nations. There are two terms to watch out for, given the European experience: broadening and deepening. Broadening involves geographical expansionism. In this sense, CAFTA is a broadening of NAFTA, and the FTAA is a proposed broadening of CAFTA. Broadening, that is, means horizontal regional integration (a term the documents employ quite openly). Then there is deepening. Deepening includes vertical integration beginning with economies and rapidly moving to cultural and finally political systems. The European nations gave up their indigenous currencies and adopted the euro. Deepening then proposes to integrate policies ranging from property and land management, agriculture, transportation, health care, education, and so on. Under the FTAA, these would be applied to the entire Western hemisphere including the U.S.

Both George W. Bush and Mexican president Vicente Fox have come out in favor of making the FTAA akin to the EU.

It goes without saying that the FTAA includes components regarding immigration. If the U.S. Congress signs onto the FTAA, the problem of illegal immigrants will be solved by "fiat": a policy of entirely open borders will allow anyone to migrate anywhere else!

Among the consequences will be the completion of the destruction of America's middle class that arguably began with NAFTA. Millions more Americans will go pinwheeling over the economic cliff as their country becomes a third world nation, as native-born Americans will be unable to survive competing with Hispanics willing to work for pennies on the dollar!

Leaders in America's business community support this monstrosity! No doubt, many CEOs see themselves getting richer (and no doubt those who control the media will announce that "the economy is booming," as they did in the late 1990s when CEO salaries skyrocketed to the point where they actually began to skew the statistics). Robert Bartley, in a revealing Wall Street Journal article, proposed a Constitutional Amendment (possibly tongue-in-cheek): "There shall be open borders." Elsewhere he has stated his belief that "the nation-state is finished."

How long has this been in the works. Above we mentioned the creation of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations in 1921. It was created in response to the defeat of proposed U.S. membership in the first attempt at creating an incipient world government in Europe, the League of Nations.

One can go back further, to the Cecil Rhodes Round Table groups that began in 1891 following Rhodes's own will which reserved part of his fortune for the creation of a "secret society." Rhodes advocated recreating the British Empire and retaking the U.S. by economic means.

Or one can go back still further, to the British Fabian Society, a socialist group founded in 1883, was instrumental in assisting Rhodes in making contacts throughout England to build up his secret society. Arnold Toynbee, British historian and member of the Fabian Society and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (the British equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations), said in 1931: "We are at present working ... with all our might to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local states of the world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands."

The elites have no moral scruples about lying to the public--although they are quite open about their intentions in their own writings, which they can assume that the sheeplike masses will never read.

Richard N. Gartner, a former UN ambassador, wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1974 of "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece ..."

In other words, this scheme aimed at undermining U.S. sovereignty did not happen overnight. Unfortunately, this probably means it cannot be stopped overnight. If it can be stopped at all.

(4) CAFTA and the FTAA are treasonous. They involve the dismantling of our Constitutional system of government involving checks and balances by those who swore an oath upon taking office to uphold and protect the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution was written by men who did not trust power--including their own. This loss of mistrust of power has been eroded over the past two and a quarter centuries of time, until our elites see more and more centralization and central planning as the solution to everything.

Not to mention the effects on America's pocketbooks. We are looking at specific mechanisms here than can be identified.

Enrique Iglesias--President of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)--has stated that billions of taxpayer dollars have been funnelled through its mechanisms to support NAFTA's initiatives. CAFTA and the FTAA will increase these, building up infrastructure in Central and South American nations--roads, highways, bridges, buildings, etc., until their towns and cities begin to look more and more like ours. We will see a transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. to Central and South America ($450 billion a year is the projected amount from the U.S. to Latin America). Look for phrases like infrastructure development.

Then, with that infrastructure in place and an abundance of cheap labor, the corporations will move their operations to those regions en masse! The "marketplace" will take over. Hundreds of businesses in the U.S. will be simply wiped out overnight--including every business that does not outsource its jobs to Central and South America for cheap labor.

Americans will be lucky if they can find jobs delivering pizzas. Eventually, if this scheme plays out, most Americans will be unable to afford pizzas!

Yesterday the conclave meeting in the Vatican selected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new Pope--who will now call himself Pope Benedict XVI. This may turn out to be an excellent choice, although circumstances being what they are, the new Pope will have his hands full. Do we have a potentially very powerful ally in the struggle against the New World Order's continued efforts to consolidate power? I would like to think so! The Pope is powerful not in the sense of commanding armies but in the sense that he has masses of followers who will be loyal to him (and to the Church and to God) rather than to politicians and others whose own loyalties are only to money and power. Imagine what could be accomplished to derail the train heading for world government if Pope Benedict XVI were to issue a papal encyclical condemning it as evil and satanic!

Dennis L. Cuddy offers this comment on the current state of affairs. It could be very significant that Cardinal Ratzinger chose the papal name that he did.

"LORD OF THE WORLD"

By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
April 20, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

The Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church have just elected Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as their new Pope, and he has taken the name Benedict XVI. While many will disagree with him on various religious issues, it is worth noting how his papacy will view the "new world order" and Socialism.

On February 8, 1992 Cardinal Ratzinger delivered a speech at the Catholic University of Milan that was critical of President George H. W. Bush's "new world order." In the speech, Cardinal Ratzinger recalled Robert Hugh Benson's 1907 book

LORD OF THE WORLD and said it described "a similar unified civilization and its power to destroy the spirit. The anti-Christ is represented as the great carrier of peace in a similar new world order."

Therefore, a closer look at Benson's book is in order. Not only was Benson prescient in terms of writing about "the Volor" (a fast silent aircraft that could hover), but he also wrote: "In 1917...Communism really began....The new order began then....(After 1989) the final scheme of Western Free Trade....Esotericism is making enormous strides---and that means Pantheism....Humanitarianism is becoming an actual religion itself. It is Pantheism....Patriotism has been dying fast....(There is) this European parliament....(They believe) cooperation is the one hope of the world....(There will be) the alliance of Psychology and Materialism....With the Release Act in 1998...(there were) the ministers of euthanasia....Julian Felsenburgh (Lord of the World) had a magnetic character...rising out of the heaving dun-coloured waters of American Socialism like a vision....Felsenburgh's running the whole thing now....It will mean free trade all over the world....(His) speech consisted of a brief announcement of the great fact of Universal Brotherhood....The new era has begun....Party must unite with party, country with country, and continent with continent....Felsenburgh was called the Son of Man...the Savior of the World....Persecution was coming....It involved all the stupendous force of Socialism directed by a brilliant individual....America was powerless: the balance of power was overwhelmingly against her....This appearance of peace has deceived many....The press was engineered with extraordinary adroitness....The world is one now, not many. Individualism is dead. It died when Felsenburgh became President of the World....For any one to say that they believe in God---it is high treason....The Humanity Religion was the only one. Man was God....No actual point of light breaking the appalling vault of gloom."

Note how in 1907 Benson correctly described the Communist movement coming to the fore in 1917, the final scheme of Western Free Trade in 1989, and ministers of euthanasia (e.g., Dr. Jack Kevorkian) in 1998. Note also that Benson referred to "the stupendous force of Socialism," and that is why Cardinal Ratzinger's choice of the name Benedict XVI is of interest. The last Pope by that name, Benedict XV, on July 25, 1920 delivered an encyclical BONUM SANE, in which he warned: "The coming of a world state is longed for, by all the worst and most distorted elements. This state, based on the principles of absolute equality of men and a community of possessions, would banish all national loyalties. In it no acknowledgment would be made of the authority of a father over his children, or of God over human society. If these ideas are put into practice, there will inevitably follow a reign of unheard-of terror." Pope Benedict XV then went on to warn of the contagion of Socialism.

Look at how many other things about which Benson wrote have come to pass: Esotericism making enormous strides (the New Age), a European parliament, an engineered press, the death of Individualism, the Humanity Religion (John Dewey's humanism or "common faith"), and "point of light" (President George H. W. Bush's famous term). John Dewey was the "father of progressive education" and a member of the American Society for Psychical Research, as were other notables such as President Theodore Roosevelt, William James ("father of American psychology"), author Mark Twain, attorney Clarence Darrow, and environmentalist Clifford Pinchot (a member of Skull & Bones). Robert Hugh Benson's father was the Archbishop of Canterbury whose second wife was Mary Sidgwick, sister of Henry Sidgwick, who was Bertrand Russell's tutor and a co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research in England with prominent members such as Prime Ministers William Gladstone and Arthur Balfour, John Ruskin (Cecil Rhodes' mentor), as well as Lord Alfred Tennyson (who desired a Parliament of Man in the Federation of the World) and famous author Lewis Carroll.

Could it be that Robert Hugh Benson wasn't just amazingly accurate in his predictions in LORD OF THE WORLD, but rather he was relating what he had heard these powerful and influential members of the Society for Psychical Research discussing when he was just a young boy---the power elite's plan for a World Socialist Government? John Dewey in his 1929 book, INDIVIDUALISM, OLD AND NEW, predicted: "We are in for some kind of socialism, call it by whatever name we please, and no matter what it will be called when it is realized."

In Dewey's A COMMON FAITH (1934), the year after he co-authored the first HUMANIST MANIFESTO, he expressed his desire for the "surrender of the conception of the basic division (the saved and the lost) to which supernatural Christianity is committed." In other words, the teaching of Christ should be ignored ! This is one reason the reaction of the liberal media and press to Cardinal Ratzinger's election is so revealing. Almost all of them upon hearing of his election expressed grave concern because in a paper titled "Dominus Iesus" (2000), he claimed other faiths were "deficient." Why the shock and horror? A Baptist or a Muslim chooses to become a Baptist or a Muslim precisely because they believe other faiths are lacking something (deficient). This is unless the media and press, like John Dewey, believe in a humanistic "common faith" comprised only of values upon which all can agree. In other words, the "engineered press" and media are facilitating the "Humanity Religion" with "Man as God" as predicted by Robert Hugh Benson.

The liberal press and media prefer Man as his own god, humanistically determining what is right or wrong for himself based upon situation ethics, rather than the judgmental God of THE HOLY BIBLE. That is why Cardinal Ratzinger is so disliked by them, because he dared to say communion could be denied to politicians (and their supporters) who support abortion rights, contrary to Biblical teaching. Just wait and see. The liberal press and media along with their leftist allies in the Catholic Church as well as in academia will immediately begin a campaign to undermine the new Pope, just as they have been waging war against fundamentalist Protestants in the U.S. and around the world.

© 2005 Dennis Cuddy - All Rights Reserved

Order Dennis Cuddy's new book Cover-Up: Government Spin or Truth?

Dennis Laurence Cuddy, historian and political analyst, received a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (major in American History, minor in political science). Dr. Cuddy has taught at the university level, has been a political and economic risk analyst for an international consulting firm, and has been a Senior Associate with the U.S. Department of Education.

Cuddy has also testified before members of Congress on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice. Dr. Cuddy has authored or edited twenty books and booklets, and has written hundreds of articles appearing in newspapers around the nation, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and USA Today. He has been a guest on numerous radio talk shows in various parts of the country, such as ABC Radio in New York City, and he has also been a guest on the national television programs USA Today and CBS's Nightwatch.

Occasionally I should "blog / archive" my own contributions to the ongoing drama. My piece on CAFTA, the FTAA, and the behind-the-scenes push for "regional integration" (stepping stones to the full-fledged New World Order) has been published.

CAFTA and FTAA: regional integration, not free trade
The Greenville News
Tuesday, April 20, 2005
By Steven Yates

http://greenvilleonline.com/news/opinion/2005/04/19/2005041962924.htm

When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in the early 1990s we were told it would create jobs in America by opening up American markets to Mexican and Canadian goods as well as opening their markets to ours.

What happened was a mass exodus of jobs and portions of entire industries (textiles is an example) outside our borders for cheap labor. As plants closed and went to Mexico leaving thousands of Americans out of work, local businesses that depended on those workers' having money to spend also closed. Once thriving communities became veritable ghost towns. South Carolina was especially hard hit.

Today, the folks who brought us NAFTA are attempting to sell Congress on a new brainchild: the Central American Free Trade Agreement and Dominican Republic (CAFTA-DR), which is a stepping-stone to the granddaddy of them all, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

CAFTA-DR builds on NAFTA by incorporating Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic into a single trade bloc. In February of this year The AP reported that "CAFTA is the most significant multilateral pact for the United States since (NAFTA) more than a decade ago. It is seen as crucial to the greater goal of establishing a free trade zone for all the Western Hemisphere." According to CAFTA's own preamble, one of its purposes is to "contribute to hemispheric integration and provide an impetus toward establishing the Free Trade Area of the Americas."

The FTAA has been described as "NAFTA on steroids!" It would pull in the remainder of Central and South America into a single trade zone under a single supranational authority! According to a recent Congressional Quarterly, both houses are about to begin hearings on CAFTA. A vote could come as soon as May. It has the support of both major parties and politically well-connected multinational corporations who stand to profit handsomely from the continued outsourcing of jobs.

It is opposed by organizations such as the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) who rightly sense a disaster in the making. Among NASDA's objections is that CAFTA would grant the six foreign nations immediate access to U.S. markets, while U.S. producers would have to wait years for reciprocal access. In other words, argues leading CAFTA critic William Norman Grigg, CAFTA is a foreign aid bill disguised as a free trade agreement. It places Americans at an obvious disadvantage. The hemorrhaging of jobs that followed NAFTA would only be the beginning!

Also, CAFTA contains hundreds of pages of regulations which bespeak not of "free" trade but control over local economies leading to regional integration both economic and political. Those in charge would be unelected bureaucrats overseeing the supranational agencies the agreement created.

Indeed, it is doubtful that "free" trade is the desired result of CAFTA-DR or its intended successor, the FTAA. The text of these agreements suggests strongly that their real intent is to create an incipient mega-state, modeled on the European Union (EU). The EU was sold to Europeans as a "free trade zone." Today, the various nations' control over their own economic destinies is gone, their national currencies are gone and the nations themselves are losing their sovereignty.

In both the finalized CAFTA and the proposed FTAA texts, the parties that sign on to the agreements commit to meet obligations determined by United Nations agencies such as the World Trade Organization and the International Labour Organization — not the U.S. Congress as is clearly called for in our Constitution (Article I, Section 8).

While some may wish to think these legal documents will not be binding on a country as powerful as the United States, they should investigate beyond the Orwellian advertising employed in naming these schemes "free" trade agreements.

Please visit the official Web sites for CAFTA and the FTAA and study them for yourself. Then join with others in contacting our senators and representatives in Congress. Urge them to oppose these agreements.

Some may have seen large billboards around the area asking, "Have you lost your job to outsourcing — yet?" Or stating, "If NAFTA hasn't crushed you, the FTAA will." If these agreements become law, we can kiss more American jobs goodbye. But more importantly, we will also see the erosion of constitutional government and our nation's independence from unelected supranational authority.

Steven Yates, Ph.D., teaches philosophy at the University of South Carolina Upstate and the University of South Carolina Union, and is on the board of the South Carolina chapter of the Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA. He can be reached at syates2@bellsouth.net.

Another good contribution to our ongoing documentation of the rapidly developing New World Order, and more evidence of matters coming down to the wire faster than we could have imagined even five years ago. With the amount of information now available, even if most of it is on the World Wide Web, one really must have one's head buried in the sand not to realize that a Great Convergence, as one might call it, really is taking place: a convergence bringing together Sustainable Development, trade agreements such as CAFTA and the FTAA (on the heels of NAFTA and GATT), the increasing centralization of education (via No Child Left Behind), its headlong lurch into pure vocationalism (School-To-Work, Workforce Investment, etc.), and finally political correctness (mind control--to produce a "diversity" of slaves).


THE SPP: ANOTHER SUMMIT SELLOUT

Phyllis Spivey
April 19, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

"Border Talks Called Disturbing." So read the headline over the report of a meeting of trinational leaders considering "a raft of bold proposals for an integrated North America." According to a "confidential internal summary," the group discussed ways to merge key policies of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

The article might have been describing the March meeting in Texas of the leaders of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, but it wasn’t. The border story ran February 17 in the Toronto Star, dateline Ottawa. The meeting participants were academics, trade experts, former politicians and diplomats from Canada, the United States and Mexico, all sponsored by the New York- based Council on Foreign Relations.

"What they envisage is a new North American reality with one passport, one immigration and refugee policy, one security regime, one foreign policy, one common set of environmental, health and safety standards ... " said Maude Barlow, chairperson of the Council of Canadians.

Barlow’s group is described in the article as fearing that "business leaders and the politically connected are concocting plans to cede important areas of sovereignty at the behest of American business interests."

"Totally wrong," scoffed Thomas d’Aquino head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and one of the task force’s vice chairs. Barlow, however, said the discussions had added weight because the group included such political heavyweights as former federal finance minister John Manley.

It’s not hard to guess what Barlow thought a month later upon reading accounts of the Texas summit. There they were, all those "important areas of sovereignty," sacrificed on the altar of a new North American union, just as the confidential summary had indicated. And there was John Manley, describing the cozy confab as "an opportunity to be architects of the future."

When President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin emerged from their March 23 summit, they announced the establishment of the Security and Prosperity Partnership for North America, the SPP. Their joint press conference oozed sugary expressions about close relationships, sharing, integration, cooperation, working together, a common this and a joint that.

The key word, however, was "partnership" and in one form or another was used at least 28 times to describe a new, trilateral union intended to set an example for other hemispheric countries, they said, and advance the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Bush stressed that he had asked Congress to approve CAFTA this year.

President Bush was effusive, describing Canada and Mexico as "the neighborhood." "I will continue to push for reasonable, common-sense immigration policy with the United States Congress . . . We need a compassionate policy . . . (workers) will be able to come and work from Mexico in the United States, and be able to go home – back and forth across the border in a legal fashion."

Canadian Prime Minister Martin was big on sharing and working together, but meager with details. Nevertheless, he was firm that the new security partnership did not mean Canada would be "working together" on missile defense. Reporters didn’t question, nor did he mention, the report that Canada will soon be announcing retaliatory trade measures against certain U.S. products.

President Fox, in his comments, seemed fixated on partnerships, "a partnership for security and a partnership for prosperity, a partnership that is based on human capital (that’s you!)." The ever- petulant and meddling Mr. Fox is a litigious partner, having sued the U.S. in the world court . He’s also on the way out.

Uruguay just elected the sixth left-leaning leader in the region, which puts a majority of the region’s people under leftist, i.e., socialist governments. When asked by a reporter about the possibility of Mexicans choosing a leftist leader to replace Fox, which has been predicted, President Bush made the startling statement that every country in the hemisphere is a democracy except Cuba.

"The choice as to who will lead Mexico . . . is the choice of the Mexican people," Bush said.

Right, but must we be partners? And would someone please ask Mr. Bush for his definition of democracy?

All three leaders expressed their determination to insure a speedy flow of goods, services, and people across secure (sic) borders, but when a reporter asked President Bush about keeping a national security policy in place with a border terrorists breach at will, President Bush simply reiterated his plans to push for his temporary worker (amnesty) plan.

But if the objectives were described at the joint press conference in general terms, the implementation will be specific and sweeping. Each nation will establish 12 working groups that will take the general objectives set by the trilateral "partnership" and turn them into concrete ideas, configured and consolidated within 90 days because, according to Fox, "all of us have a sense of urgency."

The idea is to implement common strategies on virtually all public policies: business, financial services, energy, technology, infrastructure, transportation, aviation and maritime security, education, public health, water, the environment, border security, border facilitation, agriculture, trade, national security, intelligence, the food supply, and manufactured goods.

U.S. policies, merged with Canadian and Mexican policies, will become North American policies. If the U.S.Congress has any part in this sovereignty-killing North American agenda, except to play dead, White House, State Department, and GOP fact sheets on the summit omitted all mention of it.

Instead, the working groups will "set specific, measurable, and achievable goals and implementation dates," reporting back to the three heads of government with their initial report in June 2005, providing semi-annual progress reports thereafter.

U.S. working groups will be headed up by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. But one week after the conference, the new U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – darling of La Raza, the nation’s largest Hispanic un-civil rights group – beat it to Mexico to discuss law enforcement policies with Fox.

Unquestionably, the SPP constitutes a declaration of interdependence. Building on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it puts the U.S. closer to openly-open borders and a European-style Western Hemispheric union. And make no mistake: the end of the nation state means the end of individual liberty in America.

© 2005 Phyllis Spivey - All Rights Reserved

Phyllis is a researcher and freelance writer specializing in political analysis. She has been published in Lew Rockwell’s Rothbard-Rockwell Report, The Welch Report (on-line), The Orange County Register and is a regular contributer to NewsWithViews.com, The Sentinel Weekly News, Corona, California. She holds a Christian worldview and writes primarily on trade, economic, education, environmental, and immigration issues.

E-mail: SPIVEY2@infostations.com

The ever-succinct and straight-shooting Fred Reed offers this comment; thanks to Porter Davis (Red Pill Dispatch) for bringing this to my attention.

Democracy, Birds, And Snails
Oh...Hell

April 7, 2005
http://www.fredoneverything.net/ItAin'tBurundi.shtml

I wonder whether liberal democracies do not follow an ordained trajectory into the muck, ripening like fruits, having their arteries harden, and falling, plop, to be eaten by birds and snails. (That was a two-animal medico-vegetative ballistic metaphor, not so much mixed as homogenized, almost colloidal. Patent applied for.) I note that the English-speaking countries are doing to themselves exactly what the United States is doing, and the Europeans, though better educated and more cultivated, follow. Maybe there is a pattern.

Now, any time I refer to the United States as a democracy, I get mail, from people vaguely remembering high-school civics, who tell me that the US is not a democracy but a constitutional republic. In fact it is neither. A democracy is of course any governmental system in which ultimate power rests with the people; direct democracies, parliamentary democracies, and constitutional republics are all examples of democracy. In America, the people are nearly powerless, in large part without knowing it. The trick has been done by giving them furiously fought elections that don’t mean anything. This distracts them and gives them a sense of participation, while maintaining their proper role as consumers.

The United States is not the country it thinks it is. It moves fast toward a curious comfortable despotism. This is of course precisely what people want. A few observations:

America does not have a free press. The media are big business and speak for those who own big business. They lie and distort and always have. Now, however, they all lie and distort identically; here is the rub. Their function is to herd the sheep. The public knows only what it is allowed to know, except for the tiny few who go to the internet. “Political correctness” is not an annoying fad. It is a deadly serious means of preventing public discussion of things that those in power do not want discussed (for example, race, affirmative action, illegal immigration.)

In the words of the great political philosopher Fredwitz, democracy is communism continued by other means. Pretty much, anyway.

Though it may run counter to intuition, the press itself has little interest in freedom of the press; this is why freedom is so easily denied. Journalism is first a job. It is second a job with rich perquisites: A reporter travels abroad, attends exciting events, enjoys privileges unheard of among mere citizenry. It’s a racket. Only a cantankerous few would risk these wonders for the sake of telling the truth. They are soon weeded out.

The will of the people? Hardly. Americans do not determine any policy that matters. (E.g., regarding race, affirmative….) The techniques for guaranteeing an unnoticed helplessness are simple but brilliant. First, people are never permitted to vote for policies, but an only for one of two essentially identical presidential candidates who prate identically about Getting the Country Moving, and No Child Left Behind. The results determine not policy but patronage. Second, power is concentrated in remote anonymous bureaucracies, rendering policy impervious to attack. Third, there is the federal tactic of taxing the states and returning the money in exchange for obedience.

The people do not rule. Nor do they have freedoms inconvenient to the government. But then, they do not want freedom.

We are seeing I think that letting people govern themselves doesn’t work. I don’t say that it is undesirable, but merely impractical. (Letting them think they have power, however, is splendidly sensible, as it keeps them quiescent.) More succinctly, democracies aren’t stable. They tend toward well-fed dictatorship. Why? Because the bright, grasping, and conscienceless inevitably rise.

The people lack the intelligence to govern any entity larger than a very small town. Particularly in the United States they read little, think less, know almost nothing of history, geography, the nature and politics of the world beyond the borders. They are thus easily swayed, frightened, enraged, gulled, and led into dog-pack patriotism by those, far smarter and more aware, who understand the levers of power. They so quickly give up liberty to those who offer to protect them. They are eager to do it. Look around you.

I have seen it said that the national character of the United States safeguards the country against despotism. I doubt it. National character may exist at a given moment, but it is easily changed. A spirit of hardy independence, of “Don’t Tread On Me” and so on, cannot outlive the independence itself. America is no longer a nation of rifle-toting frontiersmen or self-sufficient farmers. It is a nation of employees. On average they are heavily indebted, imprisoned by the retirement system, unable to farm, fish, hunt, defend themselves, change their spark plugs or build a shelter. They cannot live without the state, which leaves…who in charge?

A curious phenomenon, of uncertain provenance though I have heard many theories, is the national promotion of psychic weakness as a virtue. Some of it surpasses parody. I see that teachers are eliminating red pencils for grading papers because the violence of the color might shock the sensibilities of the students. There is much of this. Presumably the effect, and perhaps the intention, is a cowering race of pitiable and self-pitying weaklings unable to withstand, well, much of anything. A red pencil, for example. Dreadful things, those pencils.

People want neither freedom nor democracy. They want a soothing mother domestically and an outlet, preferably overseas, for anger.

While political democracy does not exist, cultural democracy does. It can exist because it does not threaten those who govern. The common run of humanity has no interest in learning anything or in any sort of intellectual betterment. They resent anything they see as indicating superiority in others, though, and want assurance that, as kids used to say in Alabama, “you ain’t no gooder’n me.” The degradation of the schools serves to eliminate obvious distinction, improve docility, avoid unwanted study, and make people consumers of witless amusement provided from above, as for example terrible music and awful movies.

All of the foregoing I believe serve to make the public a somnolent mass paying taxes, buying things, and directing little attention to larger matters. The only freedoms most want are the freedom to drive nice cars, watch 300 channels on the cable, drink beer, and take an occasional vacation. Freedom matters to intellectuals. For most, prosperity suffices.

A friend recently returned from China and told me, “As long as you don’t screw with the government, it doesn’t screw with you. It’s not Burundi. I hate the bastards, but the economy is getting better and people go along. It could be lots worse.”

Convergence.

Fred Reed writes scurrilous commentary primarily on his own website, www.fredoneverything.net.

Since today is Tax Slavery Day, I've elected to post the best piece I've read recently about the need to get rid of the Marxist progressive income tax which has fed the explosive growth of government since 1913. Whether we can do it by supporting a third party, I don't know. As Nelson Hultberg observes himself, ours has become a system driven by factions, none of which want to give up their government freebies or political connections. It will be as necessary to defang these factions as it is to shrink the size and scope of federal power.



How to End the Income Tax and the IRS
by Nelson Hultberg
Americans for a Free Republic
April 15, 2005
http://www.afr.org/Hultberg/041505.html

Imagine for a moment America without an income tax. No more tedious record keeping of all our expenses. No more April 15th deadlines. No more insufferable complexity and exasperating forms. No more nasty audits, legal loopholes, and intrusive IRS agents. It would no longer be government's business how much money we earn and what we do with it. Such a reform would dramatically change the lives of every one of us for the better.

Could such a spectacular reform really be brought about? Yes, it certainly could. But before I explain how, first a brief analysis of some of the philosophical and psychological roadblocks that need to be confronted in laying the groundwork for totally abolishing the income tax and the IRS from our lives in America.

Feeding the Factions

The nature of 21st century American politics is that our office seekers win continual re-election, not by preserving the peace and protecting people's basic rights as the Founders advocated, but by granting privileges, subsidies and pork barrel programs to favored segments of the people.

This is known as the "big tent" philosophy of governing. It means that political parties win elections by gathering numerous disparate factions of voters in under one large tent. They do this by promising to grant all of the factions something that they want: welfare payments for lower income groups, loans and price supports for corporations, subsidies for farmers and artists, revenue sharing for obedient governors, pork barrel bills for local communities, ever-increasing funds for educational, energy, housing, and commerce bureaucracies, etc. Since government has no money of its own, it taxes the necessary money from society's productive citizens in order to become the grand benefactor of all its favored factions.

This is the modern game of social welfare politics. Our politicians basically buy their office and power. Both Democrats and Republicans play this game in order to be elected and re-elected. And no one ever challenges the game's fundamental premise -- that government has the right to confiscate some people's earnings to gratify other people's needs and desires.

This is why Republicans talk about reducing government on the campaign trail but never do any reducing in office. They are afraid to challenge this fundamental premise of social welfarism. Thus, they end up contesting the Democrats only as to where all the confiscated wealth is to be spent, never on the premise of "wealth redistribution" itself.

Noted scholar Thomas Sowell once pointed out a very useful analogy that clarifies this dilemma: If a man enters your yard and begins digging up all your daffodils and replacing them with geraniums, you don't rush out and argue with him over which of the two flowers you prefer. You argue with him over whose yard this is.

Our problem today is that Republicans refuse to challenge the Democrats about whose yard is being dug up, i.e., about whose money is being confiscated unjustly. Republicans muster only a challenge over what kind of programs the confiscated earnings should be spent on (in other words, over which flowers are more preferable), while the Federal Government grows more and more intrusive and tyrannical with its confiscation policies.

First Step in the Process

If we are ever to rid ourselves of the income tax and the IRS, then there must be a genuine reform of this corrupt and grandiose game of buying votes with wealth transfers. A viable political party must come forth to publicly ask, "Whose yard is this?" The operating premise of liberal welfarism has to be challenged -- that government has the right to utilize progressive tax rates to redistribute people's earnings. A uniform tax rate system must be proposed, fought for, and enacted into law. Until this is done, the social welfare game of "tax and spend, elect and re-elect" cannot be reformed. Ever-expanding, centralized government cannot be stopped.

As I have pointed out in previous articles, the reason why abolishing progressive income tax rates is so important is because there would then be no incentive for voters to try and gain their life's status by relentlessly increasing government spending, i.e., by redistributing wealth from the pockets of their neighbors.

Progressive tax rates are the major cause of explosive government spending because they create large constituencies of voters that pay zero taxes and equally large constituencies that pay next to zero taxes. Thus, they spawn a "something for nothing" voter mindset. An irresponsible electorate then evolves to demand a steady expansion of government services. This is one of the cardinal laws of economics. If government benefits are free (or nearly free), demand for them will be infinite.

In order to overcome this infinite demand for government spending, we must eliminate the "something for nothing" aspect of our tax system. In other words, we must end all deductions, special breaks, loopholes, and rate progressivity. This will necessitate the adoption of a uniform tax system that does not convey favors to anybody.

Since voters would then have to pay for all government subsidies and pork barrel programs proportionately out of their own pockets, they would lose their overwhelming desire for such subsidies and programs. Voters would then begin to favor politicians who advocate "reduction" of government instead of its "constant expansion" because this is the only way they could get their own taxes reduced and more freedom into their lives. All kinds of Ron Pauls would begin to appear in congressional elections every two years because the electorate would demand it.

A uniform tax rate is thus the only way to restore a responsible electorate and legislature. And as we will soon see, it is the first crucial step to total eradication of the income tax and the IRS.

Forbes-Armey Tax Ignorance

So far, Republicans have shown little indication that they grasp the importance of such thinking. Their love affair with the Forbes-Armey flat tax plans shows either that their true motive is merely more centralized government, or that they are frightfully ignorant about the requisites of genuine reform. This is because the Forbes-Armey flat tax plans actually increase the rate progressivity of our income tax system. This they do by dramatically increasing personal exemptions for the taxpayer. A family of four's total exemptions leaps from $16,700 under our present system to $34,000 under Armey's version of the plan and $36,000 under Forbes' version.

According to the Dallas based Institute for Policy Innovation's calculations (UPI Impact, November 1997), the bottom 25% of the population in America presently pays zero taxes. This means they get their government services free, which means their demand for those services is infinite. According to the IRS Statistics of Income Division, the next 25% tier pays only 3.97% of total income tax revenues. This means that they get their government services almost free, i.e., for pennies on the dollar. Thus 50% of the American electorate pays zero or next to zero taxes, which creates infinite demand for government services among these voters. This guarantees that, except for rare contrarians like Ron Paul, all politicians that come before the voters every election year are going to be pushing more and more programs and handouts. That 50% block of voters, hungry for free services, is a beast that cannot be ignored.

The Forbes-Armey flat tax plans will greatly exacerbate this problem because, by dramatically increasing personal exemptions for the taxpayer, they will greatly increase the 25% segment of voters who receive government services free. This, of course, must increase the segment of voters who possess infinite demand well above its present 50%. Surely any reasonably intelligent human can see that this will make an already rapacious government grow even faster and produce even more intrusive bureaucracies. It will firmly entrench the centralized mega-state in Washington for decades to come!

If we truly wish to reduce government, then we must truly abolish progressive rates and move toward a genuine uniform rate system for everyone rather than away from it as the Forbes-Armey plans do. This is an unalterable law of political and economic reality that must be faced instead of evaded or circumvented.

Challenging the Establishment Tyranny

Naturally the liberal establishment raises quite a squawk over any mention of tax uniformity. "Would it be wise," they ask, "to radically change our tax system so as to tax all Americans the same percentage of what they earn or what they spend? We believe that the present tax code is fundamentally more fair than a one-size fits all system."

Liberals imagine themselves as being idealistic and just on this issue, but in reality their defense of our present arbitrary tax system is motivated by that natural human desire to protect the power base that feeds one politically, ideologically, and financially. The liberal establishment's massive power base in this country is fed by the progressive income tax code. God forbid upsetting such an elastic, arbitrary system of privileges and favors that can buy so many votes so easily.

In answer to the liberal defense of today's tax system, it is very instructive to examine the fundamental principles for which our nation stands. What wisdom on this issue can we glean from the Founding Fathers and other salient intellects throughout our history? Did they approve of a tax code that was arbitrary, progressive and privilege based? Or did they support UNIFORM rates because uniformity was the only way to avoid the evolution of class war, factions, and the tyranny of centralized government?

Thomas Jefferson astutely summed up the essence of the tax issue when he wrote, "The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen, in his person and property, and in their management." 1

Alexander Hamilton firmly denounced the use of arbitrary (i.e., unequal) rates: "Whatever liberty we may boast of in theory, it cannot exist in fact while [arbitrary] assessments continue." 2

Philosopher David Hume declared, "The most pernicious of all taxes are the arbitrary. They are commonly converted, by their management, into punishments on industry.... It is surprising, therefore, to see them have place among any civilized people." 3

In the early 19th century, renowned Scottish economist John Ramsey McCulloch wrote, "The moment you abandon the cardinal principle of extracting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or of their property, you are at sea without a rudder or compass, and there is no amount of injustice or folly you may not commit." 4

Later in the 19th century, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field wrote, "If the Court sanctions the power of discriminating taxation and nullifies the uniformity mandate of the Constitution...it will mark the hour when the sure decadence of our government will commence." 5

The reason why the Founders and all the prominent intellects of our history opposed a progressive income tax is because it violates the principle of "equality of rights under the law," which is dramatically enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as the fundamental axiom of our nation's existence. Because different classes of society are assessed different rates under a progressive tax system, American citizens are denied an equal right to the disposal of their property (i.e., their income) and thus denied equal protection under the laws of the land.

In light of the above, it should be obvious that a progressive income tax is incompatible with "equality under the law." It is therefore unconstitutional and unjust. It goes contrary to everything our country stands for. It has no moral justification, and it has no practical ground upon which to stand.

The Naivety of IRS "Reform"

This then is the first requisite for our leaders in Congress -- to face up to the unconstitutionality of progressive rates. But equally as important, our legislators must also stiffen their spines against the bete noir of all taxpayers -- the IRS. Republicans have always been sensitive to the people's growing unrest over the IRS, but as in the past, they approach the issue in a typically naive and superficial manner.

"Yes, the IRS is known to get out of control," GOP legislators exclaim in tones of appropriate urgency. "But we intend to rein in IRS abuse." Sure. Like a coterie of schoolgirls will rein in mafia lords stomping through its neighborhood. Like massage therapy will rein in cancer.

Republicans are living in a dream world if they think they are going to "reform" the IRS in any meaningful way. The nature of the IRS and its role dictate that it will always be what it is. It must be intrusive, tyrannical, and ruthless in order to perform its job of feeding the tax devouring Gargantua that the Federal Government has become.

Consider this law of life: The nature of an entity and the nature of its role in existence dictate its personality and its methodology. Therefore, one does not sit children down with cobras as if they were Teddy Bears to be hugged. One does not try to experience a hurricane like one contemplates a sunset. Rocks cannot be transformed into orchids. And the IRS is not going to be made into a group of smiling federal receiving clerks to help us solve life's vicissitudes.

Congressional Republicans now imagine that they can somehow tame this Frankenstein they have so cavalierly built over the past 40 years. They are deluding themselves.

Trying to "rein in" the IRS with tax reforms such as the Forbes-Armey approach will be about as effective as trying to rein in a snorting rhinoceros with kite string. The IRS is out of control because the Federal Government is out of control. It operates above the law, and in an intimidatory manner, because that is the only way it can perform its job of collecting enough money to pour down Gargantua's gullet in Washington.

The answer to this tyrannical mess is clear: Forget about "reining in" the IRS and eliminate this Orwellian agency! But to do so, we must eliminate the income tax itself. And the only way to eliminate the income tax is to reduce government spending to a low enough level so that it can be funded by flat income tax rates in the neighborhood of 7%. At this level, a national sales tax could then be substituted for the income tax and collected by the state sales tax agencies. The IRS could then be disbanded because under a national sales tax, the state sales tax agencies (already in place) can collect all tax payments and forward them to Washington.

A national sales tax is not salable at this time because it requires a 15%-23% rate at today's government spending level. So spending needs to be reduced dramatically first. The American people would readily vote for a 7% national sales tax, but they will continue to balk at a 15%-23% national sales tax. It's just psychologically too much to overcome.

The first step in gaining this goal is to eliminate "infinite demand" for government services. And as we have seen, the only means to accomplish this is to enact a true equal-rate income tax, which means no exemptions for anyone. This will effectively reverse the culture of spending in Washington and begin a steady reduction of government.

How to Handle the Establishment Backlash

As I have pointed out in previous articles, liberals and me-too conservatives will naturally attack any genuine equal-rate tax as unfair to the poor people. So if a floor is to be established under which no one will have to pay the tax, i.e., an exemption for those under the poverty level, then a provision should be included in any equal-rate tax bill stating that those who are exempted from paying are also to be excluded from voting. After all, we deny children the right to vote. Why do we do this? Because they are not mature enough to vote responsibly. The same principle applies to men and women who are exempt from taxes; they will never vote responsibly. They will possess "infinite demand" for government services.

Liberals will, of course, protest vehemently upon hearing such a proposal; but if one thinks the issue through, he will see that it is really the only solution if a large segment of voters is going to be exempt from paying taxes. There is no other way to stop infinite demand for government services unless everyone who casts a vote has a stake in doing it responsibly.

Both logic and history provide ample justification for societies to decide who among their members are to receive the franchise. All nations throughout the history of democratic governments have always determined according to certain criteria who should, and who should not, be allowed to vote. Never does any nation allow EVERYONE to vote.

For example, we stipulate that all those who are under 18 years of age cannot vote. We also say that all those who are mentally unbalanced cannot vote. So we the citizenry decide who can and cannot vote. And our decision is based upon who we feel will be responsible. Reason and experience, if used judiciously, are very good guides as to who this should be. Why then cannot we the citizenry redefine from time to time our conception of what constitutes "responsible?"

Societies have always done such defining and redefining. In 1787, the Founders required voters to be male and to own property. That, of course, is too extreme according to our way of thinking today. Women are obviously capable of voting responsibly, and so are non-property owners. The requirement of property ownership was gradually rooted out of the system over the decades by the state governments; and the states of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah led the way for women's suffrage by granting voting rights to women in the 1890's. This culminated in 1920 with the 19th Amendment to the Constitution to allow all adult women to vote throughout America. Again in 1971 we re-evaluated our conception of responsibility when we lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. (Unfortunately this latter reform was a mistake. We should have raised the age to 25 years old; but that's another argument for another day.) The point is that we, as a society, have the right and the duty to define just who can and who cannot "vote responsibly." Our modern intellectuals and politicians have egregiously defaulted on this by allowing everyone to vote even though they don't pay anything to support the system. This must be corrected.

The major roadblock to overcome here is that we have all been taught that unlimited democracy is some sort of nirvana, and that everyone must vote in order for us to have a just, civilized society. Thus any policy to the contrary will be a tough idea to embrace. But embrace it we must, or we will collapse into dictatorship over the next two decades. Think of it this way. Is it rational to continue creating "infinite demand" for government services among 50% of the people, while attempting to reduce government? No, it's not. Just like it's not rational to try and put out a bonfire with buckets of water while tolerating a massive fire hose pouring kerosene into the fire.

The dictatorial powers that are developing in Washington today have come about because 50% of the citizenry possess "infinite demand" for government services. This demand is the kerosene hose that is allowing the fire of government to relentlessly expand. We the producers of America are becoming slaves to these tyrants and their ever-expanding fire. Continuing to go up against such an inferno with little water buckets of pseudo tax reform (such as the Forbes-Armey "flat" tax plans) is senseless and embarrassing to anyone who can think clearly.

In this writer's opinion, the ideal solution to this problem of infinite demand among the voters is to provide no tax exemptions at all, and simply require everyone to pay a 10% flat tax no matter what their income is. This would comport best with the principle of "equality under the law." Everyone pays proportionally, i.e., the same rate. Thus, the law treats everyone the same, and no one's vote would have to be denied. Such a policy would quite quickly bring about a dramatic reduction of government, and as a result, a substantial reduction of taxes. We could probably have a flat tax of 5% within a decade or two. Is it too much to ask a man who makes $5,000 in a year to pay $250 to support the government that protects his rights and preserves domestic order for he and his family? I don't think so.

If this is too horrifying to contemplate for the advocates of "compassionate conservatism," then such conservatives need to seriously rethink what has to be done to save our country. Is not the underlying source of all government growth today the fact that we have become a nation of voters and legislators who are living irresponsibly and totally out of control? Thus our paramount concern must be to RESTORE A RESPONSIBLE ELECTORATE AND LEGISLATURE. But this cannot be done if voters get their services free. The only way voters will act responsibly is if they are contributing proportionately to the cost of government. This is not rocket science; it is simple, basic, observable human nature. To blind ourselves to this truth (as liberals have done for 90 years) is inexcusable.

To all pundits throughout America who profess to favor a free society, if you are too squeamish to demand eradication of the primary source of exploding government, then our society is doomed. You might as well fold up your tents and head to the local pub to wallow in inebriation every day, rather than to your computers and printing presses to try and influence your fellow man as to the true meaning of our country. If you can't bring yourselves to tell the truth to the people, then you have no business presenting yourselves as educators, writers, galvanizers. You have fashioned a make-believe world and are merely playacting as patriot intellectuals.

Four Steps to Ending the Income Tax and the IRS

Radical tax reform is the great unifying cause that can break the stranglehold collectivism has over our country's politics. Americans are ready to scrap the income tax. Yet this monumental policy reform will not happen unless conservatives, libertarians and independents unify behind the only viable path to that goal. The path is constructed of four steps:

1) We must truly end progressive rates by enacting an equal-rate tax for everyone. It would start at a revenue-neutral rate somewhere between 10%-15%. 2) This reform will allow us to then dramatically reduce government spending to a level that can be funded with 7% rates and lower. 3) This will allow us to then substitute a national sales tax for the income tax. 4) This will allow us to then abolish the IRS because the state sales tax agencies can collect all payments and forward the money to Washington. Voila! No more income tax, and no more IRS. The federal Leviathan would be stopped. A constitutional amendment could then be passed prohibiting the Federal Government from taxing the incomes of the American people in any way whatsoever.

History is strewn with the wreckage of societies whose leading pundits and politicians locked themselves into an erroneous mindset and refused to budge from their flawed perspective in moments of great crisis. Let us hope that will not be the case with America on this issue. The times we live in call for bold, innovative leadership, not misinformation and business as usual. Our present tax reformers on both the left and right are putting forth nothing but dreadful plans; and the Leviathan is chortling with glee at their imbecility. America needs a Patrick Henry and a Samuel Adams to come forth. She needs clarity and a principled stand, not the pusillanimous ambiguity that oozes today from our wishy-washy solons on the Potomac.

Notes:

1. Letter to S. Kercheval, 1816. Saul K. Padover, ed, Thomas Jefferson On Democracy (New American Library, no date), pp. 34-35. Emphasis added.

2. Harold Syvelt, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. III (New York, 1962) p. 104. Cited in Charles Adams, "Our Income Taxation: The Darker Side," Manassas, VA: Citizens for an Alternative Tax System [no date], p. 6.

3. David Hume, The Philosophical Works, vol. 3 (London, 1882) pp. 356-360. Cited in Adams, Ibid, p. 6.

4. J.R. McCulloch, Taxation and the Funding System (London, 1845), pp. 141-143. Cited in Charles Adams, For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes On the Course of Civilization (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1993), p. 365. Emphasis added.

5. Justice Stephen J. Field, Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust Co., 157 U.S. 607 (1894). Cited in Adams, Ibid., p. 370.

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