Milestones….

Sometime last night, one of you – probably from a part of the world where it was light — pushed me over the 400,000 mark (right now, it sits at 400,004*).

It’s been a long journey – or so it seems; we’ve shared happy things and sad ones; events both large and small, and solved the world’s problems from this modest ‘stage’ in the blogosphere.

I never intended to become a ‘rock star blogger’ – I’m glad you were supportive of me through that time, and hope I kept the promise I made to never forget my readers.

I still haven’t forgotten you.

Yahoo still has me listed as one of their ‘interesting pages’ – and I’m hoping that in coming here and finding that I’ve Moved On, you won’t be disappointed.

You’ve all been incredibly good to me, you know — you’ve listened to an old fellow up on a hilltop in Portland, Oregon, who may or may not have had anything important to say.

However, it’s become abundantly clear to me that this forum is a little long in the tooth — most of you have either moved on or found other interests; my own situation has gotten busier of late, and I’m thinking that it’s time to close a curtain here, at least until they roll out Whatever Comes Next….

For those who have stumbled on this page — welcome! You’ll find some archives to read, and some things to ponder – and, because of the fine people who’ve frequented this page, the comments are in some (all right; most) cases better than the posts.

The page is open. Feel free to leave a note.

– Will

(*If any of you would like to read my comments when I hit 300,000, go here. They still apply. And again – thank you; each one of you!)

The Fourth of July – A Perspective….

“America is a whorehouse where the revolutionary ideals of your forefathers are bartered and sold on the altar of capitalism.”

— Cmdte. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (“Che”); to the United Nations (1961)

No. This isn’t going to be fun. If you want fun, go here.

I don’t suppose I have to tell you that America is in a mess. I wonder, however, if you know just how bad that mess happens to be.

In 2000, the dollar was worth more – 25% more – than it is today. Put another way, if you’re making $20.00 an hour, and your salary hasn’t changed, you are now making $15.00 in real purchasing power – and the cost of everything has gone up, not down, which has further eroded your buying power.

This erosion of our currency is mainly due to the practice started by the Neocons in the ‘80’s.

Saint Reagan (I use his Neocon reverential here) began the practice of ‘supply-side economics’ – in other words, he made a bet with the nation’s treasury that if he cut real tax rates, the ‘trickle down’ effect of giving all that money back would create a stronger economic base – and hence generate the taxes through economic growth.

Problem is, it didn’t work out that way.

What really happened was this – and it’s an altogether too scary rendition of the final years of the Roman Empire.

(Constantine, and then Diocletian, tried similar measures – what happened was that financial power wound up in the hands of a few – in the outlying provinces, individual landowners were far more powerful than the Imperium; having raised their own armies, levied their own taxes, and rather taken matters-in-hand themselves – hastening the demise of the Imperial economy and leading in turn to feudalism).

The wealthy (to whom most of these tax-breaks went) squirreled it away in places where the government couldn’t touch it. As a result, the ‘trickle down’ effect didn’t work – jobs weren’t created; taxes weren’t created – money was put in places where taxes couldn’t reach it (can’t blame anything but human-nature here) – and the people who had benefited before (people whose services were cut in the name of ‘supply side theory’) just had to make-do.

I learned this one first-hand when I buried my father, a war-veteran, in 1984. Cutbacks in the V.A. made it necessary that I fund a good portion of my father’s funeral out of my own pocket – seems that some of the cutbacks were aimed at that part of the V.A.’s budget which took care of burying veterans.

With the tax-revenues gone, the only thing the Reaganites could do was to quietly go about ‘printing’ money – only what they did, rather than engage in the process directly, was to sell bonds first to the Arab nations; then to the Chinese.

This process continued on Bush the First’s watch; then Clinton’s – and the press has really cranked up to speed under Bush the Second.

Shrubby has done his work well – instead of shoring up our currency against the ravages of inflation, he went and did something else – he bought us a shiny new war.

Now, we’re in a bad way. The shit-train has finally pulled into the station – or, as Hunter Thompson once said, “…the chickens are coming home to roost; only they’re really mutant buzzards bent on eating us alive….”

If we’d only paid attention to things and shored up our currency’s value, gasoline would be somewhere between $2.25-2.90/gallon – because oil is valued in dollars – and that primarily due to the perceived stability of the American currency.

Here’s a wake-up call: The dollar isn’t stable any more, and the clock is ticking. The Euro has proven out to be a far more stable currency, and it’s only a matter of time before the oil-producing nations begin to view America as a liability.

(You can get another lesson here – I like Becky’s approach to the topic; I wish she’d use some different illustrations, which some of you – myself included – find in questionable taste; however, if you can get past that, her logic and facts are sound).

Next, we come to our civil liberties.

I’ve written about all of this recently here. The first time I published this piece, I was told my over 20% of my readership that I was ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’ (which proved, as far as I was concerned, the abysmal state of American education). That alone should cause some fear and loathing, but no matter.

We now have a president who learned a vital l
esson from FDR – if you can’t get your way with Congress, start writing Executive Orders.

FDR’s most-infamous was #9066 – the one which ordered all persons of Japanese ancestry interned. This, of course, led the way for largely white landowners to confiscate their property – and while we officially ‘apologized’ some decades later and offered token remuneration, the damage had already been done, in spades.

If Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes make LBJ look like a tightwad-by-comparison, then Bush the Second makes FDR look like a boy-scout – and Lincoln’s revocation of habeus corpus during the Civil War an administrative detail.

You can read my article here – but in recap, we now have:

• The Patriot Act – allowing broad-reaching wiretapping and other surveillance.

• The Military Commissions Act – allowing non citizens and citizens alike to be interned in military-run camps outside the reach of American law (Gitmo and the like).

• Proclamation 7463 (a ‘Proclamation’ is different from an Executive Order, but carries most of the same weight) – this one allows for the President alone – not Congress – to freeze military pay-grades, retirements, and to deploy troops for the duration of a conflict – as defined by the President. (Note to everyone: This is dictatorship. Just sayin’….)

• Executive Order 13438 – this one allows the President to declare anyone, citizen or not, a ‘threat to the stabilization of Iraq’, and seize their person and property.

• Directive 51 (a ‘Presidential Directive’ also carries much the same weight as an Executive Order) – this one allows the President to take complete control (‘guidance for continuity’) using, among other things, the entire U.S. military for direct intervention in the event of a ‘national emergency’ or ‘catastrophe’. (You guessed it – the President now has the power to decide when – and what – those events entail or are defined).

Sum it all up – -and we have a dictatorship.

Or, if you prefer, an Imperium much like Rome – -the Senate still has ‘power’, but the Emperor is in charge – and if you have any question, please do step out of line so he can make an example of you to prove it.

The Emperor has taken away your rights as a citizen. He’s debased your currency. He’s spent your birthright. He’s mortgaged your future to the highest bidder.

To date, no one has sufficiently pointed out that he has no clothes. That’s up to us.

I’ll leave you with another quote; this time from a man named Thomas Jefferson:

“A little revolution every now and again is a good thing.”

Happy Fourth of July….

–“Astra”