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The Road to Tyranny

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by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | May 8, 2015

Ben Franklin

Ben Franklin

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” old Ben Franklin –with his balding head, pot belly and a penchant for the fairer sex– was leaving the Constitutional Convention at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, when a lady walked up to the good doctor and asked him: “Well Doctor what have we got here, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A republic . . . if you can keep it.”

Independence Hall BTW, is where both the United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were debated and adopted. Though today the words democracy and republic seem interchangeable in the popular media, they are very different. (Note: If you want to discover the weighty difference between a republic and a democracy read the ClearNFO link HERE.)

Independence Hall

Independence Hall

In 1951 Robert Hutchins writes in the preface of the Great Books of the Western World: “We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot understand and cannot form an independent judgment upon any matter; they cannot be educated, in the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm or propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves.”

Robert M. Hutchins, page xiii
December 1, 1951
Preface to the Great Books of the Western World.
The Great Conversation

So, here in America, we have prospered in our ‘democracy’ –which in fact was never a democracy but a republic– and round about this miracle of human history and achievement, icons like Apple Pie, Patriotism, Baseball, white picket fences and hometown America have emerged implanting themselves permanently into the collective psyche of generations of Americans. We have proud visions of brave young men going off to war risking death, physical and psychological injury to protect our precious America; and I for one, still believe in these ideals. However, at some point we must reconcile our ideals with the massive amount of documented evidence, and start to confront the facts as they exist; thereby leaving the false comfort of what has become a perpetuated myth of the old America. Since Benjamin’s conversation at Independence Hall in 1787, the republic has been under constant assault by those who would be her King. After decades of cloak and dagger finagling and wrangling, a private group of men were finally successful in placing themselves at the pinnacle of America’s power in 1913; thereby subverting the protection of the republic crafted at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. This was no accident, but a carefully planned and executed ambush by very powerful and determined men who schemed in secret. The artifacts that testify to the truth of this ambush and successful coup can be found in the Federal Reserve Act and the 16th Amendment. The planning, execution and the historical details of this coup have been meticulously documented in G. Edgar Griffin’s ‘The Creature from Jekyll Island’.

From 1913 forward, we see President Wilson’s fears that he had ruined America with the Federal Reserve Act and the power bequeathed thereby to these men made manifest to the observant world in geopolitical events, murder and assassinations that followed.

From the unannounced 1913 American Coup, The Federal Reserve Act and the 16th Amendment were created; born of lies and subterfuge and from the enormous power this granted to a handful of private men ushered forth the following sequences of events:
• They lied about the Bolshevik Revolution – America created the Soviet Union from the ashes of the Tsars with their hand-picked and financed agents Trotsky and Lenin. (See Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution.)
• They lied about WWI – We were lied into WWI (See Antony C. Sutton; Carrol Quigley and the Lusitania)
• They lied about WWII – We were lied into WWII (See Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler and The Anglo-American Establishment)
• They lied about the assassination of John F. Kennedy
• They lied about Vietnam – Gulf of Tonkin incident and resultant Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which took the lives of 58,000 American boys and millions of Vietnamese.
• They lied about 9/11 and presaged the buildup to 9/11 with PNAC: They caused or allowed the attacks of 9/11 and irrefutably covered up the facts
• They lied about Osama Ben Laden and Al-Qaeda: They gave Osama Ben Laden $3 billion to fight the Russians in Afghanistan and created the myth of Al-Qaeda
• They gave us The Patriot Act which has shredded our Constitution and Bill of Rights
• They gave us NAFTA which has decimated the middle class enriching those in control
• They gave us Open Borders which will damage what is left of the working folks and burden our troubled economy
• They are negotiating treaties like the TPP and others in secret that not even our Congress can see, yet nothing is done to prevent these treasonous acts.
• They have bailed out the banker’s crooked deals with the taxpayer’s money and good credit leaving the average American with the bills to pay
• They lied about the invasion of Iraq
• They lied about the invasion of Afghanistan
• They lied about the invasion of Libya
• They lied about the invasion of Syria
• They lied about the US Takeover and violent putsch of Ukraine

Today’s America is not the republic we were given back in 1787, but a fascistic tyranny in the service of a few evil men.

Opus 016: Do we have a democracy or a republic?

Opus 003: Communism and the Tyranny of Good Intentions:

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karl-marx-155733_640

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | SEPTEMBER 06, 2012

Most of us are familiar with the story of Laissez-faire capitalism and the resulting abuses unleashed during Europe’s Industrial Revolution (1750 to 1850).  To correct these horrific insults to humanity, Karl Marx and his pal Friedrich Engels took it upon themselves to identify the problem and offer a solution…not realizing they would unleash a theoretical construct that would be used to murder, torture and  enslave most of humanity.   Their solution was Communism.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848.  Little did they know that these ideas (hatched in an arm chair in a library) would be used to enslave billions of people and responsible for hundreds of millions of agonizing deaths from starvation and cruelly at the hands of the masters it spawned.  The popular culture in today’s America cannot fathom this since they have not been educated to the evils contained in these well-intentioned ideals still proffered by our Progressive Democrats.

Unfortunately, Marx and most of our fellows today are caught up in labels and thus cannot discern the common elements in man’s inhumanity to man.  Bottom line is that if one man or group of men has unconstrained power over another, there will necessarily be abuse no matter what trendy label happens to suit your needs.

Mr. Marx believed that unconstrained capitalism was evil and it was and remains so today.  He described the class struggles between the haves and the have-nots (Bourgeois and Proletarians).  He also believed that the natural evolution dictates that democracy yields to socialism which in turn yields the final Utopian end state of Communism.  Democracy => Socialism => Communism. You can find this same theology in many of today’s progressives.

Mr. Marx also wrote another book called Das Kapital meant to expose the economic laws of capitalism and how it was the precursor to socialism.

If you’ve ever experienced the mental gymnastics and pain of reading Das Kapital you can appreciate the difficulty Mr. Marx had in explaining central planning of an economy and the socialist mode of production.  You should at least try to read a few chapters to get a sense of its morbid complexity.  What this book and Soviet Central Planning taught me is that central planning of an economy is a fool’s errand and that these decisions should be left in the hands of the individual whose work and toil created the value in the first place.  I think of it as a distribution of power model rather than a distribution of wealth model. When we remove the decision making from the individual who created the value, we create in its place malfeasance, abuse and inefficient allocation or resources not fair allocation as Marx would have us believe.  One example, I remember a friend going to a Russian shoe store to buy a pair of shoes only to find they had only left shoes…no right ones.  This would never happen in a free market, only by way of central control by a ridged, bloated bureaucracy.  Marx also missed the concept of individual motivation and how that impacts supply and demand.  Here again we can turn to our Soviet friends who had very cheap food prices as dictated by the authorities but when you went to the grocery store all the shelves were empty.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs)” is a slogan popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.

In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist society will produce; the idea is that, with the full development of scientific socialism and unfettered productive forces, there will be enough to satisfy everyone’s needs. Sound familiar?

The old systems of Feudalism, Monarchies and the newer Laissez-faire capitalism were flawed and needed to be replaced with a well-thought out system to provide the most good for the most people.

Feudalism was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. Monarchies were based on hereditary and unconstrained capitalism– while demonstrably more efficient– did not protect the masses from the abuse of the powerful.

The world has never known a communist government to date. The Soviet Union was not Communist. It was a centrally controlled government run by the powerful few corporate officers. China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos are the same. The cheat of Communism is that it seduces the masses into the belief that they will get something for nothing. Once the idea of communism takes hold in the minds of the masses, it has been used by the few to seduce the uneducated into slavery. Hugo Chavez’s takeover of Venezuela’s democracy is a recent case in point.

Were Karl Marx and Fredrick Engles evil doods? Nah. They were just a couple of well-intentioned do-gooders out to save the world.

So what’s better than communism?  A free market economy regulated by a government whose power over the individual is constrained by a constitution which places value on individual rights and freedoms.  As Ben Franklin said…”It’s a republic, if you can keep it.”