Should We Kill The Politicians Before They Kill Us?

“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” William Shakespeare, Henry the Sixth

That was four hundred years ago, long before lawyers would come to hold most elected offices. 41% of the current congress are lawyers, six times the rate of the general population. The greatest concentration of lawyers is in Washington, D.C., and that is turning out to be a very bad thing.

This could well be the most sinister article I have ever written. We are sitting ducks. Easy prey. We are naive and easy to manipulate.

Groggy and sloggy on high fructose corn syrup. Corpulent and congested by pink slime beef and other toxins marketed as food, we ain’t gonna put up much of a fight.

Even if we could, they are ready and waiting for us. With their LRAD noise cannons, drones, armored vehicles, chemical weapons, Active Denial Systems and all of the right stuff to start offing citizens in large numbers.

To illustrate, I found this in Top 10 Future Law Enforcement Technologies by Amy Miller. As you read this, remember that this was three years ago.

“Has a chicken breast ever gone into a microwave oven without an absolute massacre being the end result? The ADS system (Active Denial System) aims to do the same thing to pesky rioters, high risk threats, and otherwise heavily shielded and protected targets.

High frequency targeted microwaves are projected at an offender sparking a reaction in the water carrying molecules and fatty tissues, causing the target to heat up from the inside out. Immediately, the target is unable to continue in the same fashion as before, they are in immense pain, and too uncomfortable to continue as a threat. It provides a biological reaction in the body, incapacitating the target and rendering them effectively useless for a longer period of time than other non-lethal methods.”

Non-lethal? Maybe, but the first degree burns it produces make it the modern day equivalent of pouring burning oil on them. Does hell have a special place for people who think this stuff up? A chicken breast in a microwave? That’s all we are to them.

I guess the Occupy movement is cooked.

But wait, there’s more…..

Homeland Security just bought 450 million rounds of .40 caliber ammunition. That is not a typo—450 million rounds. That is enough to shoot every American 1.5 times. These, we are told, are to protect us from a very large, well organized threat for which no plausible evidence exists.

Further, due to the destructive force of the expansion of the bullet, hollow-points are prohibited in international warfare, so they can only be used on us.

There are just us and them…and a few Middle Eastern crazies, straight from central casting, that they trot out from time to time to try to make us believe that all of this is for our own good.

The truth is that the only well-armed organized terrorists preparing to come into our communities will be sent by our politicians. If this is how they plan to handle unemployment and poverty domestically, it is hard to envision a time when any sort of even modest global accord could be achieved. Peace on earth? Yeah, good luck with that.

Meanwhile, they’ve been fine tuning the Constitution more to their liking by eliminating the first, fourth, fifth, and fourteenth amendments with the argument that times have changed and surely our founding fathers would want us to bring this quaint, pre-terrorism list of suggestions up to date.

I think that the only thing our founding fathers might have wanted is for us to have fought harder. Now it might be too late.

On New Year’s Eve, while nobody was looking, the president signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, which for the first time in American history, makes legal the practice of apprehending and detaining, without writ or warrant, any American citizen, indefinitely, without trial.

It is based on a relatively new concept in law that all that is needed is the mere suspicion that an individual is thinking about breaking the law in order to arrest and detain them. I recently heard a government official defend it by asking the rhetorical question, “Well, if we think a crime is about to be committed, you would want us to prevent it?”

Never mind the Constitution, the presumption of innocence, or the right to due process.

As more and more Americans are discovering, if you try to stand up against the system in even a civil matter, you can wind up being jailed.

Except for a handful of brave judges, the vast majority of the judiciary has sold out. They, too, go on to great paying jobs with the law firms they favor in their rulings.

So, if one of those 450 million DHS hollow points doesn’t find you, than you might be one of those intended for a FEMA camp or a jail cell.

Meet the prison industrial complex; possibly the greatest single benefactor of our trumped up war of terror. Just ask Wells Fargo, a major investor. They know a sure thing when they see it.

Politicians keep telling us that crime is down, so who are they putting in all these prisons?

In 1980, there were two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.

Remember the old saying, “You get what you pay for”? The education a child gets determines their fate. If we spend way more on prisons than we do on education, the results are predictable and the results speak for themselves. We are “Prison Nation”.

The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the worlds incarcerated. Either we are some seriously bad-ass, mother-fuckers or something is very, very wrong. Ironically, the US also has 66% of the world’s lawyers serving 5% of the world’s population. I’m not sure what that suggests.

The prison business approaches a community desperate for jobs and commerce, and offers to build and operate a prison with local resources; but, there’s just one little catch—the community has to keep the prison full.

Recently, Corrections Corporation of America offered to buy and operate existing state prisons. Their offer requires the states to guarantee 90 percent occupancy.

Now, anyone and everyone is a potential customer for the local gray bar motel.

Within the last year, four different people I know were arrested and jailed while appearing in court on civil matters—not criminal, but civil.

Last year 40,000 new laws were passed in the US. Can you list them all? See how ridiculous it is becoming? That’s what you get when you have two thirds of the world’s lawyers.

FEMA camps, for real or paranoid lunatic nonsense?

All that I can verify is that the “emergency camps” have been put out to contractors for bid.

On February 24, 2012, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) posted the final draft solicitation for what they are calling a National Responder Support Camp (NRSC).

You can read it for yourself. My general impression is that particulars of the camps, as defined in the request for bid, are intended to have two separate groups residing at the camps for a long period of time. Ten percent of the group will live in additional secured quarters and receive better amenities than the other ninety percent of residents.

That scenario would suggest more of a prison environment than a short-term aid facility operated by members of the community. The camps would need to be operational in 72 hours. Though the request for bids suggest staffing with local labor, it concedes that under such short notice, local residents might not be able to respond so staff would be brought from other areas. They’ll be the ones in the crisp, brown shirts.

The locations of the camps have already been picked. Awesome! It appears that our ever forward-looking leaders already know where the next big disasters will be. Comforting, very comforting.

Meanwhile, a devastating disaster is already upon us and no one is responding to that.

For people who lost their homes to crooked banking schemes or a natural disaster, the result is the same.

This, despite the fact we spend a fortune on Governments who do little more than act as a conduit for the syphoning off of middle class prosperity.

They submit a budget, and then they overspend it.

Given unrestricted ability to do whatever they want without any interference from citizens or fiscal restraints you would think they must be doing a great job for us, but exactly the opposite is the case.

They suck. They are absolutely terrible at what they do. There must be a requirement to work in the government that you have absolutely no common sense whatsoever.

Take a look.

In the years since 9/11, we have learned that the attacks might have been prevented if US “intelligence” agencies had shared information.

Experts had issued urgent warnings about the levees protecting New Orleans years before Katrina.

The very name Katrina has become synonomous with “cluster-fuck”, because of the incompetence of FEMA’s response, and the fact that little has improved in New Orleans since.

The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have been grim reminders of why we should not go to war.

Marked by general implementation failures by U.S. agencies and evidence of massive corruption, Iraq and Afghanistan will be this generations Vietnam, right down to the lingering social costs including drug abuse and homelessness.

Military procurement systems are, according to retired military leaders, so broken that they now jeopardize national security. According to them, the U.S. is buying armaments that are overpriced, unneeded, and technically defective.

What about the economy? How has lowering taxes and eliminating or failing to enforce regulations benefited the economy? Well, the rich got way richer and the middle class got wiped out.

Let’s take a moment to evaluate and grade the performance of some important agencies.

1. The Government Services Administration, GSA

Since they are currently in the news, I thought why not start with them. The GSA is an important agency because it is the procurement arm for the entire Federal Government except the military. They buy stuff; lots of stuff. Everything you could imagine and some stuff you couldn’t.

Obviously, there is a potential for relationships to develop between vendors and buyers. Budda-bing, budda-bang, budda-boom, if you get my drift.

Why, heck, if you didn’t have the right people in this agency they could be buying $900 toilet seats, taking kickbacks, and wasting the tax payer’s money on themselves in a manor so lavish and arrogant that it would create corruption in all directions.

So, when news surfaced of the GSAs Caligula like event in Vegas, it struck me as rather ironic that these are the people responsible for booking all government travel, so this goes to the very core of what they do.

GSA Grade: F

2. The Food and Drug Administration, FDA

When it comes to public health and safety, no agency is more vital than the agency responsible for protecting Americans from the potential dangers of bad drugs and poisonous food. Everyone eats food, and in this country, almost everyone takes prescribed medication.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that contaminated food products are so common that Americans suffer 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5000 deaths every year. That frightening number means that one of every four Americans will suffer a food-related illness in the next 12 months.

Do not put that in your mouth. Salmonella in the sushi, E-coli in the chicken, pink slime beef.

The agency did not require any testing of Genetically Modified Organisms GMOs before approving their sale to the American public.

Irradiation is now a common method of extending shelf-life. It destroys a large proportion of the nutrients in food, a problem that is compounded as food sits out its increased shelf-life. Cooking escalates the problem further still. The end result is empty-calorie food that could actually increase nutritional deficiencies. No wonder everybody is fat and hungry.

So much for the food, what about the drugs?

Vioxx, Bextra, Baycol, Zellnorm and 27 other drugs have been withdrawn since 1980 due to serious, often fatal side effects.

The abuse of prescription medication is America’s largest and among the most costly of our health problems.

FDA Grade: FF

3. The Environmental Protection Agency, EPA

Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air. The medications are now showing up in ever increasing quantities in our drinking water.

On April 8th, the EPA rejected a petition to ban the sale of the 2,4-D pesticide, a major ingredient in the Vietnam-era defoliant 'Agent Orange'. Dow Chemical, is hoping to receive approval to sell genetically modified corn seeds that will dramatically increase the usage of 2,4-D.

In defending its decision, the EPA pointed to a study conducted by Dow. That’s good enough for me.

The Center for Food Safety said this, "This novel corn will foster resistant weeds that require more toxic pesticides to kill, followed by more resistance and more pesticides - a chemical arms race in which the only winners are pesticide/biotechnology firms."

So who is right? We need look no further than Monsanto’s GMO corn which is experiencing massive crop failures and developing mutated and resistant insects as a result of its widespread usage. Innocuous as this may seem, it is irrefutable evidence of the potential for worldwide crop failure if we keep tinkering with Mother Nature.

Meanwhile the FDA has become the primary foe of organic growers and natural food co-ops.

And, you were worried about Al Qaeda.

EPA Grade: FFF

4. Agencies Policing the Financial Services Industry

There are a host of agencies policing the financial services industry including, but not limited to, the SEC, the OCC, the FTC, the IRS, the FBI and the DOJ.

Under their watchful eyes, banks morphed into global money sucking machines that vacuumed up every dollar they could while all of the above stood around and said “duh.”

Not a single one of them sought to find out why Credit Default Swaps had soared from nearly zero in 2000 to an estimated $60 trillion in 2008, or how Derivatives, investments that have no value of their own, could grow to six times the value of everything on the planet.

SEC, FBI and all the financial watchdog agencies are the Mr. Magoos of law enforcement.

Grade: FFFF

5. The Department of Health and Human Services

Our system for financing the costly federal health care system subsidizes the overuse of advanced technologies while underfinancing highly effective and lower-cost public health measures. Here again, the results speak for themselves.

More money per person is spent on health care in the USA than in any other nation in the world, and a greater percentage of total income is spent on health care in the USA than in any United Nations member except for East Timor. Is there a West Timor?

Yet, The Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States last in the quality of health care among similar countries. The USA is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported that a record 50.7 million Americans—16.7% of the population—were uninsured in 2009.

The consequences are real. We are 48th in life expectancy, below most developed nations and some developing nations. The World Health Organization (WHO) ranked the U.S. health care system as the highest in cost, 37th in overall performance, and 72nd by overall level of health among 191 member nations included in the study.

A 2009 Harvard study estimated that 44,800 excess deaths occurred annually due to lack of health insurance.

Fifty percent of all bankruptcies are due to medical expenses.

Department of Health and Human Services: Grade: FFFFF

6. Department of Energy

Some of the most profitable of all corrupt activities involve energy. Remember Dick Cheney’s secret energy meetings? Those led directly to electricity deregulation scams, corporate welfare for energy producers, fracking, the BP oil spill, gas pipeline explosions, high gas prices, faulty nuclear reactors, and an unreliable grid.

7. Department of Housing and Urban Development

One word…Detroit.

More and more American cities are starting to look like Detroit.

This is what our money bought. Our infrastructure is in desperate condition. Roads, bridges, rail, water, sewage systems, and many dams are in dangerous disrepair around the country. Large sections of New Orleans remain wrecked and highly vulnerable.

The DOJ sells guns to Mexican drug cartels, and launders their money while aggressively pursuing the cartels competition.

What we have today is what they want us to have. So, we get prisons, not schools. We get war, not peace. We get poverty, not prosperity. We get genetically modified organisms, not food. We get wealth for a few and misery for the masses. We get oppression, not freedom. Who did it? The politicians.

You can’t vote them out because they are fungible, and the system itself prohibits most honest candidates from competing for funds. Podunk mayor and council races generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign spending for jobs that pay $12,000 a year.

Money now owns the system at every level.

It really is too late for voting. We still must vote or we send the message that we just don’t care at all, but that won’t change anything.

We have seen the enemy and we see them arming for a fight and a post-fight occupation.

Maybe you read the tea leaves differently. Maybe you think they have good intentions but really poor execution.

I read 450 million hollow points for Homeland use, an explosion of prison populations, a corrupted court system and poison everywhere as a potential threat to my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

When they see you as a chicken breast, you know your vote matters little and your life even less.

George W. Mantor The Real Estate Professor Founder, American Foreclosure Resistance Movement http://www.realtown.com/gwmantor/blog