Obama's Tyranny Against the Media

Back in 1987 I graduated from a night school course in digital electronics from the DeVry Institute of Technology which had a campus in Lombard, IL at the time. While attending night school in the two years prior I had a chance to talk with a couple of technicians who worked for AT&T at the time. They were continuing their education which was being paid for by their company because technology back at the time was in a state of flux and they needed to keep up with the latest as AT&T was transitioning from old relay style switches to digital circuitry. Seems they're always transitioning from something to something newer.

I had occasion at the time, perhaps as early as 1985, to discuss with these gentlemen some of the more interesting aspects of their jobs. On at least one occasion that I can remember I was told of a switching room in the Oakbrook facility where one of the federal alphabet agencies kept some equipment. I was told this equipment could listen in on any phone conversation passing through that facility, and that facility handled millions of calls at least monthly, if not weekly or daily. They might not have called it PRISM back then, but the idea was very similar. At the time, I didn't think much about it. I thought it was strange that the feds might want to cast such a wide net, but I had other things to worry about. I was a new father trying to take care of a family and was on my way to getting a good paying job in the lucrative field of circuit board repair. I didn't give much thought to the implications of what I heard for myself or my children or the future of this nation.

Think about that for a second. It was 1987 at the latest. Ronald Reagan was still president. The Internet was not yet available to the general public. PCs were just barely making inroads into the marketplace. There were very few in private homes. Cutting edge technology at the time would have been something like a 10 megabyte hard drive and 250K RAM. Running computer programs often times meant swapping out floppy disks quite often. Windows 3.1 hadn't even hit the market yet. People were still complaining about DOS. 9/11 was years away. Waco and Ruby Ridge were just small dots on the map no one had ever heard of. Already, 26 years ago, the seeds for the current police state were being planted.

There I was, nobody special, just some guy looking to make a better life for myself, and I'm exposed by circumstance to a story that would some 26 years later become one of the most talked about stories of the day. I have to wonder, why wouldn't some reporter have heard about this? I knew about it and I was just a classmate with some low level technician. It seems to me that some reporter somewhere was friends with someone higher up at AT&T who should have known about this. How has this remained so quiet for so long? Why wasn't this broadcast far and wide decades ago?

People talk. The alphabet agencies install their equipment in a private company and people have to know. They have to tell the people who repair the equipment to leave it alone. They have to warn the low level technicians not to touch anything that belongs to them. Those people aren't going to remain silent. They have lives. They go out drinking with their buddies on the weekends. They talk to their spouses at night and let them know how their day went. They tell people what they know. They aren't out to leak government secrets. They aren't trying to expose government wrong doing or abuse of power. They are simply explaining an aspect of their work that they have to deal with. It has never been a huge secret. It seems to me that just about everyone has known for a very long time now that the government has been listening, that they've been overreaching. Why did they wait so long to report it and to bring the debate to the public square?

One might wonder what would have happened if this had been seriously reported on 26 years ago. Would that have stymied the oppressive surveillance state? Would there have been arrests made and precedent setting court rulings? Would our privacy have been honored by government agencies? Would we be safer now and feel more secure that our rights were being respected, or would terrorists have managed to hatch secret plots that would have killed most of us? It's all just speculation because it wasn't reported on enough to bring it to the forefront of American consciousness all those years ago.

So why now? Because Edward Snowden publicly spoke out? Who is Edward Snowden anyway? Is he any more credible than my classmate who told me all those years ago about what he'd seen? Could my classmate be more credible since he was not involved with a government spying agency, he was talking to someone who was not involved (at the time) with any news organization and he had no way of knowing his revelations would come out in some obscure blog some 26 years later? Blogging wasn't even a remote concept back then. Is this some sort of strange psychological operation put into motion to get the American public to accept NSA spying as a normal fact of life? Are the powers that be desperately trying to gain the ability to openly rule the world instead of having to do it from behind the scenes? Is there something else going on that they don't want us talking about so they bring this to the forefront of our national debate? I don't have the answers to these questions and apparently the mainstream media remains reluctant to investigate such matters, but it seems to me that there's more here than meets the eye.

Perhaps the so called mainstream media has finally started to pay attention to this story because it has finally, for them, come home to roost. It wasn't too long ago that it was revealed the NSA has been spying on news agencies. It has been spying on specific news reporters. It has been intercepting and reading emails and such. Now, suddenly, the news agencies are paying attention. Did they think they were going to be immune to the spying? Did they think that if they kept quiet about it and just went along with what the government wanted they'd be able to keep operating like it was business as usual? Does that sound maybe a bit to conspiratorial to you?

Even in my own experiences I have come to see just how deep this spying goes. In the last half a year or so, I have had trouble with my Internet connection every time I try to publish one of these articles. When I go to add pictures to the article, suddenly I can't access my server and the connection times out. When I called my web hosting service they told me that the server was fine, that the connection was being interrupted somewhere between the server and my computer. I will wait a half hour or so, and suddenly there is no problem. This has yet to prevent me from publishing an article, but who knows what the future holds? Are they watching us? What other conclusion am I supposed to draw? I'm just a small time blogger expressing a freedom oriented opinion. I am peaceful and have never advocated violence. Why should they watch me? I pose no threat to anyone, but they seem to think I do. They are wasting my time and your tax dollars. It needs to end. Our right to privacy needs to be honored.

Well that's nothing compared to Michael Hastings' death. Here was a reporter with a long history of taking on the establishment who had apparently been in touch with some other news sources and was claiming to be pursuing a huge breakthrough story. Strange how he should somehow end up dead not long after, before he could make his huge story public. I wonder what he found. Strange, too, that he should die in such a bizarre manner. Well, I suppose dying in a car accident isn't so strange, but the way in which this car accident took place, it's almost as if they wanted people to believe he was murdered. It's as if someone was sending a message to other journalists, a message like "if you don't want to end up dead, you'd better not stick your nose where it doesn't belong." I know it's just speculation, but it's kind of like the old Soviet Union where reporters would mysteriously die just as they were about to expose some kind of ongoing government misdeeds. Coincidence? I think not. There's been an awful lot of "coincidences" lately that keep moving neocon and new world order agendas forward.

The question that I ask when I hear about something like what happened to Michael Hastings is, "Who benefits?" It's a question that not enough reporters ask anymore. Who benefits from Michael Hastings' death? If the answer is no one, then I would be more inclined to believe that it was, indeed, an accident. If the answer is someone, but that someone didn't have the means or the motivation to create such an accident, then I would still be inclined to believe that it was an accident. If the answer is someone else, and that someone else does have the means and the motivation to create such an accident, then things start to look a little suspicious to me. If what is said about Michael Hastings is true and he was about to break a huge story about spying on Americans, and I have no reason to doubt that it is true, then the intelligence gathering agencies within the United States of America would benefit from his death and had the means and the motivation to create a fatal accident for Michael Hastings.

So yes, I am a little conspiratorial. I'm a little tired of people claiming that conspiracies don't exist. I'm a little tired of hearing people say those who believe in conspiracy theories are crazy nut jobs in tinfoil hats. I'm especially a little tired of people saying conspiracy theories involving government should be treated with derision and not investigated. Of course conspiracies happen, do you really think things like political assassinations, bombings, planes flying into buildings, etc. happen without two or more people plotting them? Do you really think that elements within the government wouldn't plot to increase their power and influence? Does it make someone crazy simply because they ask "who benefits?" Does it make someone crazy because they can see the obvious answer to that question and they point it out even though it might destroy the childlike fantasy we have that government is good and watches over us, or are so called "conspiracy theorists" called crazy simply because so many don't want to face the reality that we've been had by the establishment and we are no longer free and independent as we were meant to be?

The Obama administration has taken to tyrannizing the media. They obviously don't want the truth of what some agencies in the federal government have been doing to come out, especially the spy agencies. They have a war on whistleblowers going on and now they have extended that war to the media. How long before that war is extended even further, to maybe anyone who says anything bad about any federal government agency? How long until we are living in the dystopia that is George Orwell's "1984?" Some would say we're already living it, and I would tend to agree.

This op/ed piece was not approved by the ministry of validated opinions.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

Free Markets, Central Planning and the Family Budget

Recently a Facebook friend of mine commented on a story about austerity not working and made a statement to the effect that therefore Hayek was wrong and Keynes was right. I was quick to race to the defense of Hayek and free markets. I pointed out that we haven't had a truly free market ever and that Keynesian policies had been in place since before Keynes even became a famous economist. I told him that if he was going to give Keynesianism credit for all the good that's come from economic policy, he needed to blame it for all the bad repercussions also. We haven't been vacillating between Keynesianism and free markets, we've been steadily but incrementally becoming more and more a Keynesian economy since at least the inception of the Federal Reserve and the institutionalizing of a fiat fractional reserve central banking system.

Since my friend leans toward the liberal side of things, I even included some quotes from Hayek to show he was firmly against austerity measures. It seems Hayek was not the cold hearted libertarian many historians paint him as, nor was he as staunch in his belief of the free market's ability to take care of every humane need as some might suggest. Of course, being that he was in academia and therefore likely heavily influenced by bureaucracies of some form or another, seeing him acquiesce to some points is almost to be expected. If he hadn't, I wonder if history would even remember him at all. But I digress.

Not long after airing my defense of Hayek, I read an article that contained an explanation of why the government's budget is not like a household budget, said that comparing the two was fallacious and offered an opinion as to why the deficit is a good thing. These explanations even seemed to make sense and I could see why the uninitiated would be easily fooled by the reasoning. It said, in short, that the government needed to keep spending up so that the economy wouldn't go into a death spiral, so that unemployed people could continue to collect unemployment and spend money at the grocery store so that grocers didn't go out of business, and basically to keep things going until the private sector got back on its feet. It needed to do this even if it had to borrow far beyond its limits and that eventually the deficit would be paid back.

This got me to thinking. I have used the household budget example in the past, particularly when talking about debt and the fact that piling on debt upon debt does not get one out of debt, it gets one deeper in debt. The author of that article dismissed that argument out of hand because, well, government debt and your personal debt are two different animals, to coin a phrase. So, I wondered, where is the disconnect? Perhaps these economies of scale aren't understood not because the comparison is invalid, but because it is a case of the seen versus the unseen. Moral issues notwithstanding, this is another area where it takes a little more critical thinking and a little imagination to understand what has never been.

What is it that we've never seen? Well, for one thing, I don't think in the history of the world we've ever seen a truly free market, except perhaps for a time in the so far distant past that it is long forgotten and archeologists find it hard to fathom. There's almost always been some kind of government intervention into the market system where someone powerful has used that power to bully people into doing things their way, usually revolving around taxes or the form of currency used to make transactions or some such thing. It is therefore fallacious to blame free markets for market failures. A closer look at failures will likely show that the intervention itself is to blame, either through corruption of the supposed objective of the intervention, through abuse of power that comes when intervention is turned to law, or through unintended consequences that inevitably occur when such interventions take place. What we've never seen is the power we as individuals would have to exercise if we lived in a truly voluntary society with a truly free market economy.

To demonstrate this, I will use the well worn example of the family budget versus the government's budget, only this time I'm going to try to put a little twist on it. Let's begin by looking at the family budget as it exists in this reality, in modern times. There are a few things you're going to need money for every month. The top priorities are of course going to be housing such as mortgage or rent, food, utilities such as electricity, heat, and maybe water and sewer, communications such as telephones and Internet access, transportation expenses such as gasoline, car payment, and automobile maintenance, insurance payments, etc. All these are your responsibility. It's up to you to figure out which is most important to pay and how much you will need every month to pay these things.

What this means is that you have the power to determine your lifestyle. Maybe you want the bigger, fancier home, so you have to drive a smaller car, or a used one. Maybe you don't need or want a large home, so you get a smaller one or rent so that you can afford the nicer car. Maybe clothes are important so you give up something to afford the really nice name brand suits. Maybe you want the latest in electronics, or the best food, or whatever, so you live more frugally in one area so that you can splurge in another. Maybe you just want to save your money so you have a nest egg so you live more frugally in all areas. The point is, it's your decision. You decide how the budget will work. You also decide which companies you want to do business with and which you don't. This gives you quite a bit of power as companies compete to give you the best deal so that they can obtain the dollar you budgeted for their product.

Of course, if you run a business, budget priorities are different from that of a household, but the same principles hold true. It's your business, your decisions to make. Whether you succeed or fail depends on your ability to determine how much money will be coming in, where the money is best spent to help increase or maintain profit levels, and how well you can adapt to competition in a changing market. It also depends on how happy you can keep your customers so that they keep coming back.

When government creates a budget, they don't have to worry about earning the money they get. They don't have to worry about keeping customers happy. They claim and have the authority to tax. They get their money no matter what. Why should they care if you're happy or not? If you don't pay your taxes you will lose your home, or your business, and they will sell it for the taxes you owe. They will use force to make it so, if necessary. You would think that would make government budgets the easiest to manage, for they should know how much they'll be getting year after year and how much they need to spend. Yet, somehow, it always seems like governments have the most difficult time sticking to a budget. It seems they just can't stand the thought of sticking to constraints. No matter how much money flows into their coffers, it never seems to be enough.

Now, let's suppose for a minute that government was unable to just extort your money in the form of taxes and needed to compete against other organizations offering the same services they offer. In this case, every cent you ever earned would be yours to decide what to do with. All of a sudden you'd find yourself faced with more decisions to make and you'd have to think quite a bit more about what's important to you. On the national level, you'd have to think about how much each month (or year) you'd like to spend on things like the armed forces, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), and a myriad of other national agencies that every year clamor for more tax dollars and bigger budgets claiming they need more to do their jobs properly.

On a more local level you'd have to think about how much per month you'd want to pay for education services, both for your family and your community, for police services, fire protection services, roads, libraries, parks, etc. Some of you would have to think about things like water, sewer and garbage services while others already have private wells and septic systems and a private company to haul away garbage. Yes, it might be a little more work. You might have to plan a little more for your children's future. You might even have to get a little more involved with your community and talk to your neighbors a little more often. You might have to take time to do some actual organizing or set up alternative organizations to field competing ideas. But just think what you could do with all the money you'd have if you didn't have to pay property taxes. Just think of the good you could do if you and others decided how that money would best be spent rather than a bunch of control freak politicians.

Some people do this partially anyway. People already shop for a home in a neighborhood with good schools, some choosing to pay more in taxes because of the school district. Some people choose to dish out additional money to send their kids to private schools. A few may look for a neighborhood with good policing criteria, or may put out the extra money to live in a gated community. People donate freely to police and fireman benevolence charities. I remember once when the fireworks event in a community I lived in was going to be cancelled, but it went on that year better than ever because the park district asked for donations by putting jars out in the neighborhood grocery stores and people gave freely to the cause.

Can you see the point I'm trying to make by using the example of the family budget? This all isn't merely about spending money, it's about power. It's about your power to decide what your future will look like. It's about taking your power away from you and entrusting it with someone else. It's about trying to make you believe that you're entrusting that power to some nice, well meaning politician when, in fact, that politician is most likely lying to you and the real power resides in the corporations paying for the politician's campaign. When you give away your power to a group of bureaucrats, whether those bureaucrats live in your neighborhood or in Washington, DC, your future is at least partially being decided by them. It should be obvious by now that they don't have the same vision of the future that you have. It should be obvious that their priorities are quite a bit different from yours. In fact, judging by the way things are going these days, it seems to me that they are the paranoid, delusional ones, not the common folk. It seems that the crazy people have all ended up in so called leadership positions and the sane folk are too frightened of them to do anything except obey.

This is how they really maintain control, not through politics, not through political actions, not through their ordinances, not through their regulations and oversights, not through the laws they pass, but through economic means. Through the budget. Through not only telling you how much you should be spending on certain things, but by making you to pay that much through bullying and force of law. Through keeping you from even thinking that perhaps you should have a say in such matters. Through making you believe that they know better than you how to spend your money. Through making you acquiesce to their theft of your earnings. They are the biggest bullies of all. They are the mob. If you were able to withdraw not only your consent to be ruled, but your funding of their efforts to enslave you without fear of retribution, then it would be they who would have to change their way of thinking or suffer dire consequences. As it is right now you are the one who has to think the way they want you to think or you will suffer at their hands. This is what fundamentally needs to change.

It's strange to think that usually I'm the one who's trying to simplify things. Usually I'm the one who's pointing out the obvious. When it comes to budgeting, I think it needs to become a little more complicated for the common folk. For too long we have shunned our responsibilities. For too long we have delegated our power to politicians just so we wouldn't have to think too much. If we want freedom, we will have to take responsibility for our actions, and for our economy. We will have to claim personal responsibility for our spending practices and will be expected to use this power to hold poorly run companies accountable for their foibles. Then we will live in a truly voluntary society.

I cannot guarantee that a true free market society would be a better society, but evidence of past performance suggests it would certainly be a more prosperous one. I cannot guarantee that all our problems would be fixed by a free market economy, but it certainly makes sense that a myriad of solutions being tried at the same time is more likely to find the best solutions than any one size fits all solution based on force that government agencies might come up with. I don't promise that having a free market would lead to utopia because I am not a politician and I don't make promises that I don't intend to keep like they do. I simply believe that if we want to make a more fair and honest world we need to stop making excuses for and allowing practices akin to theft and extortion at any level, for any reason. After all, how can we have a fair and honest world when the basic fundamentals of our governing systems rely on unfair and dishonest principles?

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

Monsanto and the Ron Paul Syndrome

A few days ago millions of people in hundreds of cities worldwide participated in protest marches against the Monsanto corporation. Were you aware of that? If you're reading this then chances are you were, for most people that read blogs like mine are already aware of the freedom agenda that the powers that be are trying to keep hidden. But there's a problem in that there are still far too many people who insist on getting their news and information from the so called mainstream media. These people have no idea what reality is, for they actually continue to believe the propaganda they see on CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and all the networks and that they read in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The LA Times, and all the other so called trusted mainstream media newspapers.

The so called mainstream media, the media owned by the same corporate elite who own the political elite who deign to rule over you, have refused to report on the March against Monsanto. I guess they don't consider this event important enough to report on. Funny, it was important enough for millions of people to participate in, but they felt it wasn't important enough to inform their viewers that this was going on. They want to keep as many people as ignorant as possible about what is really happening. They want to create the reality you see. They want to control your mind so that their masters can control your wealth. They don't like to see the masses waking up and doing something about the reality we live in, and so they do all they can to keep as many people as possible asleep.

This is just further evidence of who really owns the media. If they don't make the news, they don't report it. If the news sheds bad light on one of their corporate masters, they don't report it. It kind of makes one wonder about the validity of the news they do report. It kind of makes one wonder about what they're not telling us.

It's no secret that I was a big supporter of Ron Paul and an advocate of his run for the presidency. As such, I noticed a similar phenomenon when he was campaigning. The same mainstream media that now refuses to report on the March against Monsanto refused to accurately report on him. They refused to show his true popularity. They refused to report on the wins he had. They refused to investigate the reported cheating done by the GOP hierarchy to minimize his impact. This has apparently become a syndrome. When the media doesn't want the people to know how popular something has become with the masses, minimize it by not reporting on it, or by spinning it. It's dishonesty at its most disgusting level.

Why would they do this? I believe it's because something like this is a uniting issue. No one wants to be a guinea pig in an experiment involving the very food we eat. Just about everyone wants to know that the food they're eating is safe. Just about everyone wants to be able to decide for themselves what is safe to eat and what is not by knowing what their food honestly contains. Just about everyone can see the inherent evil in allowing a company to patent natural processes. It doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, a tea partier or an occupier, when it comes to food and its consumption there is much we can all agree on.

The message of freedom is just as unifying, and Ron Paul was all about the freedom message. But it seems the mainstream media doesn't want a unified electorate. Or, rather, the powers that be don't want a unified populace. They want to keep us divided, that way we're easy to control. They want to keep us fighting amongst ourselves so we won't unify to fight against them. That's why they don't want to report on Monsanto. They are Monsanto. They are the corporate elite, the corporate cartels. They don't care how many people are getting sick or dying because of their products, they just want your wealth and they don't want to honestly compete and provide a healthy product to get it. And if you get sick eating their GMO foods, well then you'll just have to spend more of your wealth going to their corporate controlled medical cartel who will prescribe drugs from the corporate controlled pharmaceutical cartel which will be paid for in part by the corporate controlled insurance cartel that you were forced to buy into by law. The mainstream media sources don't want you knowing about this, they certainly don't want you investigating it and they're most definitely not going to do that investigating for you.

Just about everyone would be able to see the inherent flaw in the thinking that organically grown plants contaminated with GMOs somehow violate the patent holder's property. And yet there's already been many family farms that have gone out of business because Monsanto sued them when the GMOs have contaminated the natural crops. Were you aware of that? And the courts have sided with Monsanto! The courts, which you may have thought were there to protect the individual, are protecting the corporate interests! The corruption, the evil of this is unfathomable. That's become the mainstream media's job these days, to make sure the evil goes unreported and that those who perpetrate evil are left unaccountable.

It's great that millions of people are trying to hold Monsanto accountable for their crimes against nature. It's wonderful that so many are waking up to this issue and are doing something about it. But it's not enough to just march against Monsanto. We need to also hold accountable those who enable Monsanto. We need to hold accountable the media. Stop watching corporate news. Stop reading corporate newspapers. Tell everyone you know to stop doing so, and tell them why. Keep up the social networking posts and tell everyone you know how you feel about this issue. It is an important issue. Point out the politicians who enable Monsanto, including Barack Obama who in March of this year signed into law what has come to be known as the "Monsanto Protection Act." No more excuses. The corporate influence in politics has become too dangerous to be ignored. It is up to you, now. You are the new media.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

Hard Work and Savings or Financial Thievery

I work hard for a living. I've worked hard all my life. I think most of us have. When I've had work, I've done my best to become the best at the job I've done. When I haven't had work, I've done my best to keep busy and tried to make the most of my time by writing, doing odd jobs, and trying to get along as best I could. I used to make a lot less money, but then a dollar bought a lot more back then. I was taught that hard work led to great reward. I was lied to.

Don't get me wrong, I believe hard work can lead to great reward. Sometimes hard work is reward in and of itself. In fact, I think that hard work should be the way one becomes successful. Unfortunately, that's not the reality of this world. I also believe that hard work can lead to poverty when that hard work gains one nothing except a currency that loses its buying power over time. This is what happens when a criminal element gains a monopoly on the creation of currency in a society, whether that society is local or worldwide. It's called fraud, and when an extremely small faction of the world's population is able to dictate to the rest of us what medium of exchange to use for our transactions that small faction will garner immense wealth and power, enough to put itself above the law.

Herein lies the problem. Hard work and savings are not rewarded in our society mostly because we operate on a fractional reserve fiat currency that has lost much of its value over time. Fraud and corruption are rewarded, however, as those responsible for issuing and distributing that currency are not held accountable for their errors or their criminal behavior. They are rewarded because they are able to legally steal the wealth that you and I have worked hard to obtain. This is done through taxation. This is done through inflation, which is inflating the money supply. This is done through indebtedness and artificially keeping the price of things so high that it becomes prohibitive to save for most large purchases and so one is forced to borrow.

You own nothing. Your family is not secure. So long as you have debt, your property is in jeopardy. So long as you are forced to pay taxes you are the property of the system, of the government, of an elite ruling class answerable to no one except the corporations that pay for them. The second you can no longer afford to pay for their excessive policies and social programs they will swoop in and take everything you thought you owned in order to satisfy back taxes. The courts are not there to protect you, they are there to take everything you own from you and give it to the banksters and politically connected the second you trip up, get sick, make bad financial decisions, or otherwise find yourself unable to keep up with the mortgage, or the car payments, or the business expenses, despite the fact that you may have already paid off the original value of the property two, three, four or more times. People worry so much about those who might go bankrupt due to medical expenses, and yet they just seem to shrug their shoulders and not care about those in danger of going bankrupt due to excessive interest rates or property taxes.

What's it like to find yourself in your later years with nothing to show for it? Perhaps you know, perhaps you don't. Perhaps you realize the precarious position the vast majority of us seem to be in, perhaps you think you're doing well for yourself and your wealth is secure. Don't be fooled. No one is untouchable. The criminal class at the top want control of all the wealth. Laws can be changed at any moment. Taxes can be raised. The economy can be trashed. So long as the politically powerful remain unaccountable for their actions, can garner support from the masses, can use the force of law to condone what would otherwise be obvious criminality, and command an army of mindless, unquestioning enforcers to silence any opposition or questioning of their authority, your wealth, your property, your life and liberty are in severe jeopardy. Remaining silent now will not help you in the future should they decide to come after you and yours.

And yet, maybe we're all just a little greedy. Maybe we tolerate financial thievery because as a society the vast majority of us engage in it at least a little bit. Many want a little something from the government. Everyone wants their subsidies. We let them take money from everyone so we can pay for our military, our roads, our schools, our trains, our buses, our courts, our hospitals, to help the poor, to help the farmers, to go into space, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Whatever your favorite government program, no one considers that you are forcing others to pay not through a legitimate charge for usage, but through force of law, mostly tax law. You are forcing those who don't use the service to pay for those who do use it so that those who do use it can pay less. That's theft. No one asks for donations. No one tries running these services as businesses for profit. They just take your money and do as they want with it. How can you compete with an organization that claims the authority to take from everyone to service a few?

Then we sit there and piss and moan about corruption and waste in the public sector. What do you expect? They don't have to tighten their belts when times get rough, they just raise taxes. Can't afford your property taxes? Too bad, they'll just take your house. Can't afford your income taxes? You'd better or they'll throw you in jail, and the law be damned! You don't like the wars, or the torture, or the drones? Too bad, so sad. That's their money, not yours, and just try to withhold taxes as a protest and see where that gets you. Complain all you want, as long as you pay your taxes they couldn't care less.

Of course the system is corrupt, the very concept is criminal in the first place. And so those who learn to play the system are financially rewarded. Free enterprise in this nation died nearly a hundred years ago when the federal government sold out the people of this country by implementing a privately owned, quasi-public, central bank known as The Federal Reserve System. From that point forward, only the corporate interests with the right connections were able to truly win the game.

How do we correct this problem? Well, clearly doing what we've been doing for the past century hasn't worked. Clearly trying to regulate this behemoth with corrupt and corruptible politicians is not working. Maybe we should try something different. Maybe we should allow a system based on competition where you decide what kind of currency you'd like to use for exchanging goods and services. I may be wrong, but I'd venture a guess that under such a system honest money, money exchangeable for some kind of commodity, like precious metals maybe, would soon be in greater use than all the debt based fractional reserve currencies in the world. Maybe that's why modern day central banks work so hard to prevent such a thing from happening. They know that if they were forced to actually compete against such honest money they would soon lose all their wealth and power.

We have a choice. We can continue to accept the Federal Reserve System and the theft and corruption it represents, or we can demand an end to the Fed and a return to a legalized, honest monetary system. We might have to give up some convenience, but the prosperity that would come from it would be well worth giving that up. Imagine a world where you worked and saved and when you bought something it became yours to keep. You wouldn't have to worry about losing it due to sickness, or injury, or some other unfortunate mishap. You could hide your money away for years and when you decided to spend it it would still have the same purchasing power. You could plan for your retirement using simple math instead of trying to guess how much you'd need your money to grow in order to survive. I'm not saying it would be perfect, but it would certainly be better than the uncertainty we have today.

The Federal Reserve with their monopoly on the creation of currency have their hands on the levers of power. These levers affect not only every American, but nearly every person on the face of this planet. By taking these levers away we take the economic fate of the many out of the hands of the few and give this power back to where it belongs, to the people that earn the money through hard work. And we should have that power, for we are the ones who produce. If you want to see growth, if you want to see more production, then it behooves us all to reward those who honestly produce reality rather than those who fraudulently create illusion.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

Incompetence Rewarded or Malicious Intent?

Ask yourself this, what would happen to you if you were incompetent at your job? What would happen to you if you were in management and people you supervised were constantly making poor decisions? What would your boss do to you? Would you still have your job? How many times would you be able to use the excuse that you just didn't know what some underling was doing? I bet it wouldn't take long before some disciplinary action was brought against you. It's likely that sooner or later you would be held accountable. If only it was that way in politics.

Back when W was president he used to like to use the incompetence excuse also. I spoke out against it. He told Brownie he was doing a helluva job even after the Katrina debacle. He claimed his intelligence agencies had no way of knowing about the 9/11 attacks even though several other intelligence agencies had sent warnings. He spoke of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none. Time and again he claimed incompetence or no knowledge when handling events that they should have been better prepared to handle. I felt back then he should have been held accountable, and I feel now that Obama and his administration also ought to be held accountable for their incompetence and seeming inability to keep the president in the loop.

The thing is, you had the left running cover for the right and now you have the right running cover for the left. Back when Bush was president, I believe it was Nancy Polosi, one of leaders of the left, who said that impeachment was off the table. Why would someone on the left say that of Bush? Why would these supposedly staunch philosophical opponents remove their strongest weapon for keeping the powerful in check? The answer is simple. They already knew that one day their guy would be in power, this time sooner rather than later. When that happened, they wanted their guy to be able to get away with the same bullshit the other guy got away with. In the political game, they know it's power that matters, not principle.

I don't expect Obama to be held accountable for his administration's foibles, much as I'd like to see that happen. Of course, I would have liked to have seen the Bush administration held accountable for their misdeeds also. The fact that they weren't is one reason why I don't believe the Obama administration will be either. None of these people are ever held accountable, not unless you count Richard Nixon being forced to resign, and he hardly did anything as reprehensible as these past few administrations. But then, he did put an end to American involvement in the Vietnam conflict which had to anger the powers that be to no end.

In the world of politics and public bureaucracies, it seems that incompetence is almost always rewarded rather than punished. The incompetent don't get fired, they get more money for their department's budget as if throwing more money at them will make them more competent. Powerful representatives don't get booted out of office by the electorate, but the overwhelming majority of incumbents are re-elected even when they've been incompetent, usually because he or she seems or is portrayed as the least incompetent choice of those running for office. It's the devil you know versus the devil you don't syndrome. In such an environment, is it any surprise that the system breeds incompetence? In such an environment, is it any surprise that people seem to almost strive to be as incompetent as possible? Or is there some malicious intent behind the scenes that wishes to create an illusion of incompetence to see how much they can get away with, how much control they can command before the common folk sit up, take notice, and begin to deny their consent to be ruled.

Perhaps that's been the problem all along. Perhaps there really is a secret elite class that controls all the politicians. Perhaps this has been their plan all along. Perhaps there is a conspiracy to centralize all the power of human activity and commerce into the hands of a few people at the top who will be able to dictate to the rest of us what to do so that they can engineer a society based on their vision of what humanity should be rather than everyone else's. Perhaps they don't even care about building a consensus anymore, although they'd like you to think they do so that if you disagree you'll think you're in a minority and that you can change things simply by convincing others to accept your point of view.

If there is a cabal working behind the scenes than maybe the puppets they control aren't so incompetent after all, maybe they're just following orders. After all, Obama seems to be a fairly intelligent guy. Even Bush seemed quite intelligent and articulate before he became president when he suddenly became a caricature of a southern bumpkin. How can men who seem so intelligent suddenly become so incompetent after being elected president? Is it more likely that there is some sort of malicious intent at work here? Is it more likely that there is a secret agenda being implemented? Could there be forces at work trying to manipulate the masses of humanity into accepting some form of authoritarian world government? Or is our political system such a failure that we are destined to forever elect incompetents into the supposedly most powerful office in the world?

Whatever the case, incompetence, malicious intent, or both, the recent scandals have shown that the system is beyond broken. How can we continue to accept a president who consistently doesn't know what those under his supervision are doing? How can we accept a president who doesn't seem able to appoint high level staff who are capable of operating within the parameters set down for them by law? How can we continue to reward incompetence by giving those who prove incompetent even more power? How can we continue to give more trust those who consistently abuse or mishandle the trust they have already been given?

The time has come to reduce the power entrusted to the administrative branch of the federal government. The time has come to enforce the limits of power on the federal government as set down in the Constitution. The time has come to investigate the incompetence and to determine whether malfeasance is involved and where it has come from. It is not enough to simply accept that low level bureaucrats who take their marching orders from above were somehow so incompetent that they couldn't do their jobs correctly. Somehow, someone at the top was involved. It's long past time that those at the top were held accountable for what those below them do.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

The Fed and the War on You and Private Property

The word "war" has changed over the decades. It used to mean the militaries of different nation states battling each other for dominance over certain territorial claims and the peoples living in those territories. Nowadays, because of the complete bastardization of the English language, it has come to mean a battle against anything the state wants to control but can't. It's come to mean the attempt of an elite ruling class to gain control of all the wealth, property and power in the world versus rising middle and lower classes who wish only a small portion so that they can live their lives and raise their children in relative comfort. It is a war of those who would be lords of all versus those they wish to make into serfs.

This war is being fought in secret and without the shooting, the explosions, the mayhem and the gore of past conflicts. In order to win, the lords need to keep the serfs from realizing that a war wages all around them. They need to prevent the masses from understanding who the real enemy is. They need to keep their serfs from realizing that they are slaves and maybe even get them to love their servitude. They need to get people to believe that they are free even as they become more and more indebted to their masters, and to do all this they need to redefine what freedom is. They may even try to redefine what it means to be human in the process.

They need weapons to carry out their plans. I would call these weapons of mass mind destruction. They own the government. They own the education system. They own the major media outlets. They use these to infuse their ideals, their vision of what the world should be, into the population. It is a vision where they are in complete control and you are nothing but their livestock, something they own and so can do with as they will, when they will it. The casualties of these weapons aren't broken, dead bodies and human beings dismembered and maimed to the point of helplessness, they are those who have lost the ability to think critically, who accept as gospel what they are told by mainstream media or government sources, parrot what those sources tell them, argue for government violation of natural rights and are unable to imagine a world where solutions are developed from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

I have come to believe that the head of this war machine is the owners of the central banks across the planet, the most powerful of which is the Federal Reserve System of The United Stares of America. Even if I'm wrong and some higher power controls the central banks, they are at least the heart of the operation.These people, for all their talk and propaganda about providing jobs, growth and prosperity, have done everything they've done not for the benefit of mankind, but for their own damn benefit and for the benefit of their friends and allies who would help them grow and maintain their power, wealth and control. They have created a monopoly, debt based currency system not to help grow and stabilize the economy, but to help solidify the control they have over all of us. They control us through controlling the issuance of currency, expanding and contracting it as they see fit.

They can use this power to manipulate the markets however they please. They pump their funny money into the areas of the economy they wish to inflate, wait for the mice to come after the cheese, and then remove their funds when their profits are high enough bursting the bubbles and leaving the small investors wondering WTF happened? If you think you can see where market demand is going to be and make investments based on this analysis, you'd better factor in whether or not such demand is going to benefit the elite. Guess right and align yourself with the elite and you'll benefit along with them, but guess wrong and you'll be left holding an empty bag as they run off with all your money, laughing. Markets have become big gamboling casinos where the house always wins in the end. This is how they wage war, by cheating your ability to evaluate, cheating your ability to prosper, and hence making it more unlikely that you will ever be able to challenge their economic hegemony.

So how can we win? How can mankind become free from these seemingly all powerful masters of manipulation who hold all the cards? Well, I don't know for certain, but there are some things I know. It won't happen through apathy. It won't happen through blissful ignorance. It won't happen if we all give up. And it won't happen through violence. It can happen when enough of us realize that we have been played, that we are really just serfs working for the benefit of the elite, and then we begin to take steps to dismantle the institutions that have helped ensnare us into this web of indebtedness. It can happen when we begin to unlearn what the elite have taught us through their public schools and relearn what it means to be free and independent people and how that can lead to prosperity.

This last step comes through certain realizations. The first is that you own yourself. God does not own you, for he gave you the gift of freewill. The government does not own you. Everybody does not own you. Nobody does not own you. You own yourself. The energy inside you that animates your flesh owns that flesh. Anyone that tries to convince you otherwise is trying to sell you on some collectivist scheme that is a direct path to some type of slavery. Your body. Your decisions on what to do to that body. It is wrong for someone to force you to do something with your body that you don't want to do of your own volition.

The second is that everyone else owns their own selves. You do not own them. It is wrong for you to force them to do something with their body that they don't want to do of their own volition. It is wrong for you to hire someone else to force them to do something with their body that they don't want to do of their own volition. All interactions with each other need to be voluntary. This includes business interactions as well as personal interactions. Of course, there is the caveat that one not harm nor defraud another.

The third realization is that, if each one of us owns our own bodies, then it comes to reason that we also own the product of what we decide to do with those bodies. We own the fruits of our labor. It is wrong for anyone to force anyone else to give up any portion of those fruits in an involuntary or coercive manner. It is wrong for anyone to lay claim to another's property when that property has been bought and paid for by voluntarily exchanging those fruits for said property. It doesn't matter whether it is a single person doing these things, or a group of people calling themselves a corporation, or a group of people calling themselves government, or a majority of people voting to take away someone else's property. Theft is theft even when it's called by another name, like taxes. Coercion is coercion even when those issuing the threats were voted into office by a majority of voters. Force is force even when those carrying out the force wear uniforms and claim to be simply upholding a law or simply following lawful orders. As long as one has not harmed another and has obtained his property through honest means by providing a voluntarily paid for product or service, one should not have to worry about losing his property, or his freedom.

The Federal Reserve has endeavored to change how we think about freedom. They have endeavored to make people believe they are entitled to another's property. They have endeavored to make people believe they have the right to steal products and services from others so long as a majority says it's so. They have endeavored to remain hidden from view, to pull the strings of as many people as they can so that we remain divided amongst ourselves and pay no attention to them. They are in control. They are the manipulators. They are the men behind the curtains and if they have their way they will own you and all the property that exists in this world. They are the ones that are waging the wars. They are warring against you and your private property and until you realize this you will not know who to struggle against. When enough people gain this knowledge, however, and decide to do something about it, the struggle will become easier.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

The Forgotten Reasons for Advocating Freedom

As I watched the beginning of the Boston Red Sox game, the first baseball game played in Boston since the tragic events of 4/15/2013, I was flabbergasted by the propaganda that was taking place before my eyes. Thousands of people applauding the police who had shut down their city in an attempt to find one unarmed, wounded 19 year old. Thousands of people applauding the martial law that had come to their city. Thousands of people applauding the disintegration of The Bill of Rights and welcoming the armed men who could remove entire families from their homes at gun point without warrant and without, in my humble opinion, just cause. All for one lonely, isolated teen accused, not proven, of doing something evil and already judged guilty by the masses.

The scene was surreal. It reminded me of those other collectivist nations of the past, where the populace lined the streets and joyously applauded as their so called leaders who had brought martial law down upon them paraded by. They welcomed the tyranny. They welcomed the evil. It was only years after the fact, when the truth was able to come out, that humanity understood the suffering that authoritarian collectivism causes. Are we in the United States of America to tread down that same path? Are we to wake up decades later to discover the mistakes we made, or are we to learn from others and forego the suffering they went through? Have we so easily forgotten what our ancestors knew? Is it so easy to disregard what the founding fathers taught us? Will history remember us as those who reached the pinnacle of human potential, or as just another society who forgot history and so repeated it?

Can we remember what it was like before mankind took the first tenuous steps toward a free society? It really wasn't that long ago that royal families ruled all of Europe. They lived in opulence while the common folks lived in squalor. While it is true that there are none alive today that experienced such tyranny, enough people of empathy left record of that time for us to imagine the horrors they saw and suffered through. At first those who would be free agreed to give authority to a few elite for their protection, but soon the elite were protecting them not from outsiders who threatened physical harm, but from those within who questioned the wisdom of the authorities. People feared the authorities because authority wants fear to spread. Authority feeds on fear. Those who question authority aren't a threat to the common folk, they are a threat to the power structure.

We have more to fear from those who would lead us than we do from those who would attack us from without. Those with power over us have more to gain from terrorizing us than the outsider with no influence over our society. When we are frightened we have a tendency to rally around our so called leaders and abdicate our rights without challenge in the vain hope that we will be protected. As this progresses it always ends the same. Secrecy and corruption grow as power is centralized and the ruling elite become greedier and more entrenched in their positions of power.

Freedom for all allows for more transparency. It allows for more accountability. It allows for more personal responsibility, even in the realm of security. It allows for a more open society. It allows for more closely knit communities based on love and trust rather than doubt and fear. In short, the principles of freedom and liberty allow for all that most of us dream about. It even allows for more security, or at least it allows for us all to choose the level of security we wish to have and the level of risk we wish to take. I think that the fear generated by recent events have clouded our thinking and caused us to forget the very things we should be most conscious of, the very things the people of the United States of America should hold most sacred.

We are supposed to be the land of the brave. We are not supposed to tremble and cower in our locked down homes in fear every time some mad bombers show up in our streets, let alone some misguided kids who, from what I've been able to gather from mainstream sources, cooked up some hair-brained scheme. The real terrorists are laughing at us. We are supposed to be a fiercely independent nation of rugged individualists. How did we come to be so dependent on the state for our security? How did we come to be a nation of meekly obedient sheep who so easily defer to the "authorities" whenever some small time troublemaker acts out? The real terrorists are taking advantage of us. We are supposed to be a nation of freedom loving people. How did we come to be a nation of livestock begging to be tyrannized simply because we have discovered that the world can be a dangerous place? How can we give up that which is most precious to us when we are supposedly afraid to lose it? The real terrorists will be happy to take it from us.

I feel for the people of Boston. I feel for those who lost their lives and limbs and innocence on April 15th. It was a terrible tragedy, a horrible thing to go through, but the reaction was worse. Will we go after those who failed? Will anyone from law enforcement be fired? Will anyone from law enforcement be implicated in the bombing and/or be held accountable for negligence? I doubt it. They never are. Perhaps a more important question is: why do these events always seem to take place when some drill is going on? Maybe it's time to take a look at how these drills are run. Maybe we should try to find out how terrorists seem to know when they're going to happen. In a society with a more open government the answers to these questions would more likely be forthcoming.

We, as a society, seem to have forgotten what it means to be free and independent. We have come to depend on the government power structure so much that we have forgotten what it takes to find our own way in life. We have forgotten the pride one gets from working hard to create a better life for one's self and one's family. We have forgotten the immense personal sense of satisfaction one gets from knowing that what you've accomplished you've accomplished through your own efforts, not through some government largess.

It's time we rediscovered what freedom is about. True freedom brings peace. True freedom brings brotherhood. True freedom brings about security. We have tried giving power to a few elite, and they have failed. We have tried their centralization schemes and they have proved catastrophic. It's time to decentralize. It's time to strip the federal government down to its constitutional size. It's time to demand they obey the law that is the Constitution of the United States. It's time to stop cowering, step out and show that martial law is unnecessary no matter the circumstances. If we don't honor freedom in the face of terrorism, then history will not remember us as a free and independent people, but the people of the future will instead shake their heads and ask how we could not see what was coming and how it was we let the evil grow.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti