messianicdruidism

Friday, March 6, 2015

There be gods Many “For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,)” 1Corinthians 8:5 What is Paul talking about when he says there are “gods many”? People today who believe in a superior being that has brought about creation use the term to reference the creator of mankind. Besides the New Testament we can see that in the Old Testament, ancient history, and even modern language the term god often referred to a man. “And Joseph said unto them, Fear not: for [am] I in the place of God?” Genesis 50:19 Here in Genesis, Joseph asks if he is in the place of a god? He had the power of judgment, but left that judgment to God the Father and forgave his brothers. In the Old Testament, the words “gods” and “God” are both translated from the single Hebrew word elohiym, defined “rulers, judges” and “applied as deference to magistrates” according to the Strong's Concordance. Elohiym is even translated judges. In Exodus 21 “if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master” and choose to serve him, “then his master will bring him unto the judges”. We also see in Exodus 22 that Moses uses it when he is talking about men judging matters of guilt and innocence in cases of robbery of personal property.1 Even in 1st Samuel 2:25 we see the word elohiym translated judge when speaking about men judging other men. “If one man sin against another, the judge shall judge him: but if a man sin against the LORD, who shall entreat for him? Notwithstanding they hearkened not unto the voice of their father, because the LORD would slay them.” The word was used by the Israelites to refer to men amongst their own people, men that had the right to judge certain matters of guilt and innocence. Were other men called gods? Joshua gives a choice in chapter 24 verse 15, “‘And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that [were] on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. And the people answered and said, ‘God forbid that we should forsake the LORD, to serve other gods.’” What are or who are those gods? No one serves stone. Stone statues were just the symbol of men who were the ruling judges of other men. Men who exercise authority over the service of others, making rules. Exodus 22:28 tells us that, “Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people.” In the New Testament, the words “God” and “gods” is translated from the Greek word theos, which figuratively means “a magistrate.”2 The word “god” specifies an office and means a “ruling judge”. It was a title used to address men who have a right to exercise authority or judgment in courts of law. To realize that, at the time of Christ, you would address a judge in a Hebrew, Roman, or Greek court as god should change the entire way you read your modern Bibles. This is why there are “gods many.” “But to us [there is but] one God, the Father, of whom [are] all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom [are] all things, and we by him.”3 The Kingdom of God is unique because, having one God, Jesus told us: “...The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve.”4 His appointed government did not force the contributions of the people, but as Paul said, was bound together by charity according to the perfect law of liberty. “Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” John 10:34 What He is saying is that each of us is a god, or ruling judge, of our own choices and action, but we are not gods of other men or our neighbors. We should not rule over men, nor should we make men rulers over us, but we should remain free souls under God, The Father. If we do the things Jesus says and obey God’s commandments, then we shalt have no other gods ruling over us.5 But, if we make covenants,6 swear oaths7, pray to other fathers on earth to obtain benefits8 or break God’s laws,9 then we will go under the powers10 of the gods of men and their rulers. “For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,)” 1 Corinthians 8:5 In the days of Jacob and Egypt, Joseph's brothers delivered their brother into bondage as a result of their own selfishness, envy and covetous hearts. Had they not done this Joseph's relation with God would have revealed to them the coming events and they, not Egypt would have prepared for the famine. The sons of Jacob would have become wealthy among nations. Instead they cast the source of their own salvation into a pit. Because of their straying from the righteousness of God they were delivered into bondage. This bondage grew until the powers of Egypt through the subtleties of the state brought heavy burdens on their bondage. They weren't slaves as we often think of slavery but 2.5 months out of the year they labored for the government of Pharaoh. This would be called a corvee system of statutory labor. It was an excise or tribute tax upon the sweat of men's brows. All the gold and silver was in the treasuries of the government which meddled heavily into the family life of Israel, abortion was encouraged. The people only had a legal title to their land, animals and labor. God eventually arranged that Moses was able to redeem the people and bring them out of this bondage. They were given the gold and silver [an honest money system] replacing their interest bearing scarabs. They got their animals and families back and once they learned the ways of the God they obtained some land of their own. Today, the average laborer in the United States works to pay off his corvee obligation to the government. Through the graduated income tax, crafts of state, this amounts to more than 5 months of labor out of each year. The people no longer actually own their land, having a mere legal title, and pay a annual use tax just to remain in their homes. All the gold and silver is in the hands of the civil and commercial powers and the people use a fluctuating system of interest bearing notes. “Then shall the cities of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem go, and cry unto the gods unto whom they offer incense: but they shall not save them at all in the time of their trouble.” Jeremiah 11:12 How did all this happen and what is the hope of our redemption? Can we learn anything from history of Rome at the time of Jesus? They were very good at borrowing from other nations, including Egypt. Rome had been a Republic, it also had strong commercial interests which had come to power after their major civil war. Rome was doing much the same as Egypt after it had been invited into Judea by two brothers fighting over the kingdom. Rome had not conquered Judea, not yet, but they were spreading their commercial influence, civil methodology and system of corvee through commerce and trade. Rome had formed sort of an international peace keeping force to maintain order. Their presence in Judea was mainly to resolve civil and political disputes concerning who would be King. Their strong commercial interest, which always requires stable government and a compliant population, supplied their incentive. Rome recognized Jesus as King and Jesus as king redeemed the people from their Roman involvement, if they would learn his ways. Jews and others who prescribed to the perfect law of liberty established by the government of servants appointed by Jesus became known in history as Christians while those who denounced Jesus as King and continued in apostasy were conquered and destroyed at the fall of Jerusalem. An exodus took place at the destruction of Jerusalem and during much of the persecution of the followers of Christ. These people who we call Christians were mostly Jews and Israelites as well as others who formed the political Kingdom of Jesus and therefore God on earth. His Kingdom was unique in history because it is not like the Kingdoms of the Gentiles or Nations. It is often over-looked because few know what the Kingdom of Heaven looks like. And there are factions that would not want you to truly understand God's Kingdom on earth and therefore they choose to keep it a “Mystery”. In Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, he praised "the union and discipline of the Christian republic." He also pointed out that "it gradually formed an independent and increasing state in the heart of the Roman Empire." Romans knew what a republic was having formed one in 500 BC after they drove our the Tarquinian Kings. They fashioned it after the early patriarch of Israel. The word Republic comes from the Latin idiom Libera Res Public, Free from Things Public. Republic vs. Democracy But alas as history repeats itself they too eventual went under a king type dominion. In 29 B.C. Gaius Octavianus marched into Rome as the savior of the Republic and was given the title of Augustus by the Senate. He was then legally granted the position Emperator, under constitutional forms and limitations by an electoral college composed of the Senate, the Conscripted Fathers, or Conscripti Patres. Emperator means the 'commander in chief' [Emperator, emperatoris m. commander in chief Collins L.E. Dict. '62.] of all military and naval forces, for a period of ten years. He could set foreign policy and establish treaties. Each year he could also be elected consul (chief executive officer, Principas Civitas, the First Citizen or President, His wife was Principa Femina, the first lady). By this office Britannica calls him the President of Rome ["Thus the republic was restored under the presidency of its 'first citizen' (princeps civitatis)."11 The third office he requested was ApoTheos (literally the beginner of gods which means the appointor of magistrate ). Each of these offices required swearing another binding oath of office. Augustus as Emperator had dropped his position of Consul of Rome for almost 18 years while he settled disputes as a sort of combination N.A.T.O, U.N. and U.S. military force all rolled into one. He kept banking, trade and commerce prospering throughout the world and received great praise and adoration for the accomplishment. Today, the president of the US is the Commander in Chief of the military, the Emperor. As first citizen he is the chief executive officer called the President. He also can appoint federal justices throughout the federal empire, who then sits as theos or judges or gods of its citizenry. “'Civil Law,' 'Roman Law' and 'Roman Civil Law' are convertible phrases, meaning the same system of jurisprudence.”12 Welcome to Rome, again. In the Old Testament the words "gods" and "God" are translated from the single word 'elohiym in the plural. 'Elohiym is defined "rulers, judges" and "occasionally applied as deference to magistrates" while in the New Testament the word God is translated from the Greek word theos which figuratively means "a magistrate." Check your concordance. To realize that at the time of Christ you would address a judge in a Hebrew, Roman or Greek court as god should change the entire way you read your modern Bibles. The emperors were often referred to as gods using the words Apo Theos. This was not because any one believed that they created heaven and earth but because they were the chief magistracy and ruler of the people appointing judges throughout the empire. The president of the United States is also granted this office or title. We do not always read it in its Greek form but we can. It is not so strange to think of the Roman Emperors as gods when you realize that George Washington himself was deified in the ceiling of the Capital dome. "Across the Dome's eye, 180 feet above the floor, spreads a gigantic allegorical painting by the Italian artist Constantino Brumidi. The painting depicts the 'Apotheosis,' or glorification, of George Washington. Surrounding Washington in sweeping circles are delicately colored figures--some 15 feet tall. They include gods and goddesses [among them Ceres, Vulcan, Mercury, Neptune, Minerva and 13 State goddesses] pictured as protectors of American ideals and progress."13 Even a government website references this painting as raising Washington to the "rank of god".36 The statues of Augustus honored him as a national icon but it was when they gave him the power to appoint the ruling judges in imperial courts that he became a god over the gods many. So, the dog does return to the vomit and the pig to the mire and history repeats itself. Jesus came to redeem us spiritually and in truth. “Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last [state] of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.” Matthew 12:45 History has repeated itself again and you are delivered into bondage. The redemption of Jesus still stands in the world today both in spirit and in truth but one must knock and the door shall be opened. "Redemption is deliverance from the power of an alien dominion and the enjoyment of the resulting freedom. It involves the idea of restoration to one who possesses a more fundamental right or interest. The best example of redemption in the Old Testament was the deliverance of the children of Israel from bondage, from the dominion of the alien power in Egypt."14 Consider the word god now that we see it as an office and men can choose or not to have other gods before them. If men make such foolish choices, then God may hold them accountable to the gods they have chosen for themselves. “Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people.” Ex 22:28 The Greek word for "god" may appear as Theos, Theon and Theoi. Greek and Latin are inflected languages and have different endings depending on how they are used in the sentence. That does not change the meaning of the word. The case of the word or a different grammatical role within a sentence will produce a different ending to the word. "The God" tells you something, but I could be saying "the God" of the Amalaks or "the God" of Abraham. You can add articles or create phrases, but again the word's meaning remains the same which is "ruling judge". It was used every day in the Bible to denote a person who had the power to judge good and evil for you. We should not make gods of men but we often do by making covenants with men and their “ruling judges” usually for granted benefits or protection, and by application, oath, and participation in schemes of social welfare. The “gods of the city” “In which time Moses was born, and was exceeding fair, and nourished up in his father's house three months: And when he was cast out, Pharaoh's daughter took him up, and nourished him for her own son.” (Acts 7:19, 21) What do they mean exceeding fair? Fair is from the word asteios which in the original form was astu (a city). Here it is a form that mean "of the city" or civil authority of government. The word is only used in reference to Moses in the Bible, but it is another Greek word found in the text which is a key to understanding the author in this context. Of the over 1300 times it appears in the New Testament this word is translated "God" or “gods”. Yes, Moses was a god and had the power to rule over his brothers with executorial judgment as a god of the city. All god or gods means is that he had the right to judge and rule according. Theos means ruling judge and was used every day through out the empire as an address for the appointed judges of Rome. The same can be said of the judges of Israel at the time of Jesus who were addressed also as god. Moses had the right to judge, but did not want to take it for he despised the force that is required in such power and fled from it as Lemech and Cain should have done. The same could be said for Jesus and of course Peter and the husband and wife who lied about the land they sold. It was their money but they lied and were punished by the Holy Spirit, not Peter for he could not act as the princes of the Gentiles would if you cheated on your income taxes. Moses too showed this holy restraint in the case of Dathan and Abiram who could have been judged by Moses but he left judgment to God the Father for vengeance is mine saith the LORD. In god men may trust, but we must always ask which god for there are gods many. “But to us [there is but] one God, the Father, of whom [are] all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom [are] all things, and we by him.” 1 Corinthians 8:6 We should 'accept no substitute' god or father upon the earth, but God the Father who is in heaven. Yet, men do pray to other men for their salvation. Those are the men who often rule the people. “The people always have some champion whom they set over themselves and nurse into greatness... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”15 These protectors often call themselves benefactors and by their welfare they snared back into some form of servitude where the people become human resources to be used up for the whim of the despots and tyrants. These benefactors become the gods of our society where we pray to them for our civil and temporal salvation. Since their benefits are provided at the expense of our neighbor by the exercising authority of these gods our souls are soon altered by our rejection16 of God's way of charity and love and we are returned to the bondage of Egypt. It has been the practice of men to invent religions, surround them with mysterious rituals and complex doctrines for the purpose of justifying our selfishness and sin. While we covet our neighbors goods through the agency of governments we create with our own hands we ourselves are delivered into the net17 of our own making. Salvation is not dependent upon hollow professions of faith, self serving designer doctrines or dissembling adoration. Our verbal or melodic praises do not impress God. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” Matthew 7:21 Christ and His apostles were doers of the word. Their faith gave them spiritual motivation. To understand how Christ, His apostles, and His Church were turning the world upside down, may require us to turn some of our modern religious beliefs upside down---or throw them out all together. “...certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.” Jude 1:4 What is Proverbs 23 telling us when it says, “When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what [is] before thee: And put a knife to thy throat, if thou [be] a man given to appetite. Be not desirous of his dainties: for they [are] deceitful meat”? What did Jesus mean when he told us to pray (apply) to our Father in Heaven and “call no man father upon the earth”? Why did Paul in Romans 11:9 repeat David's warning from Psalms 69:22, “...Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, and a stumblingblock, and a recompense unto them:”? David knew “that which should have been for their welfare, [would] become a trap”? The kingdom of God binds men together by faith, hope, and charity.18 The apostles, like Gideon,19 would not rule over the people. Moses led the people out of bondage, to a place where there were no kings who exercised authority one over the other. Ministers of God are titular leaders of a peculiar people. They are not like Nimrod or Caesar. Edward Gibbon praised “the union and discipline of the Christian republic” in his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and explained that the Church "gradually formed an independent and increasing state in the heart of the Roman Empire."20 The Christian state was different. Christians were told to “Obey the government, for God is the one who has put it there. There is no government anywhere that God has not placed in power.” then why were Christians persecuted by governments? Why were they accused of saying that there is another king, one Jesus?21 God instituted the government of the apostles, man instituted the government of Caesar. “Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute [is due]; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour. Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.” Romans 13:7,8 Why do you owe Caesar at all? How is it that you are under tribute, when we are told that, “The hand of the diligent shall bear rule: but the slothful shall be under tribute”? (Pr 12:24) Governments of men are created by men. The righteous power of government to tax the people comes from the people by consent. When the voice of the people called for a leader who could rule over them in the days of Samuel, the election of the people was a rejection of God. The people had lived without such authoritarian benefactors for centuries,22 but they were now doing evil and rejecting God, because they were tired of taking on the responsibility of protecting one another, of loving their neighbor as themselves. When the people called to the prophet Samuel to swear in a ruler to appoint judges, make laws, and to lead them in battle, that was an evil thing because God said they were rejecting Him. Before that the welfare of the people was attended to by the people and for the people through the charity and hope of the people.23 Churches were a part of this system of daily ministration to the needy of society. This was the pure religion24 of loving your neighbor as yourself. “The real destroyers of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations, and benefits.” Plutarch. Mankind has repeatedly been snared by his own wantonness and appetite, his own greed and lust for power over his neighbor. When John Wycliffe introduced his translation of the Bible in 1382 he wrote, “This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.” He was often treated as a heretic, his followers were arrested and after his death his body was dug up and burned. “He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the hunter before the LORD.” Ge. 10:9 The word hunter is from tsayid which is more often translated ‘provision, food, food-supply, or victuals’. This verse would be better translated to the effect that Nimrod was a mighty provider instead of the LORD. This concept of benefactors who exercise authority would be in line with testimonies of David and Paul, John and Jesus about praying and eating at the tables of rulers and being snared by those tables that should have been for our welfare. “For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.” (Ephesian 5:5 ) Today, we are taught that it is a good thing to apply to the authoritarian benefactors who force the contributions and sacrifices of the people, even though when Saul did that he was called “foolish” by Samuel and a violator of the commandments of the LORD thy God.25 Have we made covenants with other gods, and bowed down to them waiving our rights endowed by God the Father of our creation? Have we been snared in service to these gods who rule us and our neighbors because we desired the social welfare of their offered benefits at the expense of our neighbors? By denying the ways of God have we made gods of men? “Yet ye have forsaken me, and served other gods: wherefore I will deliver you no more. Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen; let them deliver you in the time of your tribulation.”26 All this reference to other gods and gods many and gods served comes into a new light when we are willing to admit that these other gods are ruling judges who we give power to because we swear oaths and apply for benefits from them. This is not a new idea as we have seen but some desire more proof. “In an old Hebrew vocabulary, by William Robertson of Edinburgh, Eloah is rendered God; while some, it is said "not without ground, interpret it to signify properly a judge (from Alah to swear,) because it belongs to a judge by his office to bind others by oaths; and hence the name is attributed to God; as the greatest and most glorious judge of all the world; thus Ps. 82: 1. Elohim (God) judgeth among the Elohim (gods or judges), who are called gods, i. e. judges because they represent God upon earth, as his deputed ministers and officers among men.”31 “Meaning of Elohim and Theos” “inferred that the being or beings referred to by that name, were supposed to possess qualities and attributes which led their votaries or dependents to worship and revere them. Hence, he says, it was applied to kings, magistrates, judges, and others to whom reverence is shown, and which are regarded as representative's of the Deity upon earth.”32 “It (Elohim) should seem to be second in dignity only to the name Jehovah : — as that name imports the essential being of the Divinity, so Elohim seems to import the power inherent in Deity ; or the manifestation of that power on its relative subjects."33 “The Jewish grammarians, conceiving that the word Elohim is used in Scripture for men in power and authority, particularly for judges, connect this sense with the root Alah to swear, by observing that it is the particular office and prerogative of judges and magistrates to administer oaths. This power they make the first principle of judicature or magistracy.” “Hence they say Elohim signified judges or magistrates generally, and by pre-eminence God ; as the first of all judges, to whom all other judges are subordinate, and from whom they derive their authority.”34 The term Elohim “appears to be attributed in a lower sense to angels, &c. — Kings who have greater power than their subjects: magistrates who have greater power than those who come before them to obtain decision of their suits and application of the laws ; and princes or men of rank, whether in office or not, who possess power and influence by their wealth,"35. The Covenants of the gods http://www.hisholychurch.org/study/gods/bookgods.php gods Many SS Video Series 9-10 9:45 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr1SBMbK5Aw Footnotes: 1Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever. Ex 21:6 and If the thief be not found, then the master of the house shall be brought unto the judges, to see whether he have put his hand unto his neighbour’s goods. For all manner of trespass, whether it be for ox, for ass, for sheep, for raiment, or for any manner of lost thing, which another challengeth to be his, the cause of both parties shall come before the judges; and whom the judges shall condemn, he shall pay double unto his neighbour. Exodus 22:8-9 2Strong’s Concordance. 31 Corinthians 8:6 4Luke 22:25, Matthew 20:25, Mark 10:42.. 5“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3) 6“Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods.” (Exodus 23:32) and Deuteronomy 7:2 7Matthew 5:34... :James 5:12 8After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.” (Matthew 6:9). “And call no [man] your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.” (Matthew 23:9) 9“If ye love me, keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) 10“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.” (Romans 13:1) “All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.” (1 Corinthians 6:12) 11Encyclopedia Britannica Vol 2, p. 687, '53.. 12Black's 3rd p 332. 13"We, the People" "The Story of the United States Capitol" by the United States Capitol Historical Society, Washington D.C., Library of Congress catalog number 65-20721. 14Zondervan's Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible. 15Socrates quoted by Plato from The Republic, bk. 8, sect.. 565: 16“And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” (1 Samuel 8:7) 17“My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not... Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse:.. For their feet run to evil... in vain the net is spread ... they lay wait for their [own] blood; they lurk privily for their [own] lives.” (Proverbs 1:10-18) 18“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these [is] charity.” 1 Corinthians 13:13 19“And Gideon said unto them, I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD shall rule over you.” (Judges 8:23) 20Rousseau and Revolution, Will et Ariel Durant p.801. fn 83 Heiseler, 85. 21Acts 17:6, 7 22“In those days [there was] no king in Israel, [but] every man did [that which was] right in his own eyes.” (Judges 17:6) 23Then John Wycliffe introduced his translation of the Bible in 1382 with the words, “This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.” 24“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, [and] to keep himself unspotted from the world.” Ja. 1:27 25“And Samuel said to Saul, Thou hast done foolishly: thou hast not kept the commandment of the LORD thy God, which he commanded thee: for now would the LORD have established thy kingdom upon Israel for ever.” (1 Samuel 13:13) 26Judges 10:13-14 31The Proper Mode of Rendering the Word God in translating the Sacred Scriptures into the Chinese Language, Walter Henry Medhurs, the Mission Press 1848 32The Proper Mode of Rendering the Word God in translating the Sacred Scriptures into the Chinese Language, the Mission Press 1848 33Calmet's Dictionary of the Bible, edited by Charles Taylor, Vol. I. page 484 34The Proper Mode of Rendering the Word God in translating the Sacred Scriptures into the Chinese Language, Walter Henry Medhurs, the Mission Press 1848 35The Proper Mode of Rendering the Word God in translating the Sacred Scriptures into the Chinese Language, Walter Henry Medhurs, the Mission Press 1848 36http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/murals/apotheosis-washington

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Doomed by the Myths of Free Trade: How the Economy was Lost

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS The American economy has gone away। It is not coming back until free trade myths are buried 6 feet under।America's 20th century economic success was based on two things। Free trade was not one of them। America's economic success was based on protectionism, which was ensured by the union victory in the Civil War, and on British indebtedness, which destroyed the British pound as world reserve currency। Following World War II, the US dollar took the role as reserve currency, a privilege that allows the US to pay its international bills in its own currency।World War II and socialism together ensured that the US economy dominated the world at the mid-20th century। The economies of the rest of the world had been destroyed by war or were stifled by socialism [in terms of the priorities of the capitalist growth model: Editors।]The ascendant position of the US economy caused the US government to be relaxed about giving away American industries, such as textiles, as bribes to other countries for cooperating with America's cold war and foreign policies। For example, Turkey's US textile quotas were increased in exchange for overflight rights in the Gulf War, making lost US textile jobs an off-budget war expense।In contrast, countries such as Japan and Germany used industrial policy to plot their comebacks। By the late 1970s, Japanese auto makers had the once dominant American auto industry on the ropes। The first economic act of the "free market" Reagan administration in 1981 was to put quotas on the import of Japanese cars in order to protect Detroit and the United Auto Workers।Eamonn Fingleton, Pat Choate, and others have described how negligence in Washington aided and abetted the erosion of America's economic position। What we didn't give away, the United States let be taken away while preaching a "free trade" doctrine at which the rest of the world scoffed।Fortunately, the U।S।'s adversaries at the time, the Soviet Union and China, had unworkable economic systems that posed no threat to America's diminishing economic prowess।This furlough from reality ended when Soviet, Chinese, and Indian socialism surrendered around 1990, to be followed shortly thereafter by the rise of the high speed Internet। Suddenly American and other First World corporations discovered that a massive supply of foreign labor was available at practically free wages.To get Wall Street analysts and shareholder advocacy groups off their backs, and to boost shareholder returns and management bonuses, American corporations began moving their production for American markets offshore. Products that were made in Peoria are now made in China.As offshoring spread, American cities and states lost tax base, and families and communities lost jobs. The replacement jobs, such as selling the offshored products at Wal-Mart, brought home less pay."Free market economists" covered up the damage done to the US economy by preaching a New Economy based on services and innovation. But it wasn't long before corporations discovered that the high speed Internet let them offshore a wide range of professional service jobs. In America, the hardest hit have been software engineers and information technology (IT) workers.The American corporations quickly learned that by declaring "shortages" of skilled Americans, they could get from Congress H-1b work visas for lower paid foreigners with whom to replace their American work force. Many US corporations are known for forcing their US employees to train their foreign replacements in exchange for severance pay.Chasing after shareholder return and "performance bonuses," US corporations deserted their American workforce. The consequences can be seen everywhere. The loss of tax base has threatened the municipal bonds of cities and states and reduced the wealth of individuals who purchased the bonds. The lost jobs with good pay resulted in the expansion of consumer debt in order to maintain consumption. As the offshored goods and services are brought back to America to sell, the US trade deficit has exploded to unimaginable heights, calling into question the US dollar as reserve currency and America’s ability to finance its trade deficit.As the American economy eroded away bit by bit, "free market" ideologues produced endless reassurances that America had pulled a fast one on China, sending China dirty and grimy manufacturing jobs. Free of these "old economy" jobs, Americans were lulled with promises of riches. In place of dirty fingernails, American efforts would flow into innovation and entrepreneurship. In the meantime, the "service economy" of software and communications would provide a leg up for the work force.Education was the answer to all challenges. This appeased the academics, and they produced no studies that would contradict the propaganda and, thus, curtail the flow of federal government and corporate grants.The "free market" economists, who provided the propaganda and disinformation to hide the act of destroying the US economy, were well paid. And as Business Week noted, "outsourcing's inner circle has deep roots in GE (General Electric) and McKinsey," a consulting firm. Indeed, one of McKinsey's main apologists for offshoring of US jobs, Diana Farrell, is now a member of Obama's White House National Economic Council.The pressure of jobs offshoring, together with vast imports, has destroyed the economic prospects for all Americans, except the CEOs who receive "performance" bonuses for moving American jobs offshore or giving them to H-1b work visa holders. Lowly paid offshored employees, together with H-1b visas, have curtailed employment for older and more experienced American workers. Older workers traditionally receive higher pay. However, when the determining factor is minimizing labor costs for the sake of shareholder returns and management bonuses, older workers are unaffordable. Doing a good job, providing a good service, is no longer the corporation's function. Instead, the goal is to minimize labor costs at all cost.Thus "free trade" has also destroyed the employment prospects of older workers. Forced out of their careers, they seek employment as shelf stockers for Wal-Mart.I have read endless tributes to Wal-Mart from "libertarian economists," who sing Wal-Mart's praises for bringing low price goods, 70 per cent of which are made in China, to the American consumer. What these "economists" do not factor into their analysis is the diminution of American family incomes and government tax base from the loss of the goods producing jobs to China. Ladders of upward mobility are being dismantled by offshoring, while California issues IOUs to pay its bills. The shift of production offshore reduces US GDP. When the goods and services are brought back to America to be sold, they increase the trade deficit. As the trade deficit is financed by foreigners acquiring ownership of US assets, this means that profits, dividends, capital gains, interest, rents, and tolls leave American pockets for foreign ones.The demise of America's productive economy left the US economy dependent on finance, in which the US remained dominant because the dollar is the reserve currency. With the departure of factories, finance went in new directions. Mortgages, which were once held in the portfolios of the issuer, were securitized. Individual mortgage debts were combined into a "security." The next step was to strip out the interest payments to the mortgages and sell them as derivatives, thus creating a third debt instrument based on the original mortgages.In pursuit of ever more profits, financial institutions began betting on the success and failure of various debt instruments and by implication on firms. They bought and sold collateral debt swaps. A buyer pays a premium to a seller for a swap to guarantee an asset's value. If an asset "insured" by a swap falls in value, the seller of the swap is supposed to make the owner of the swap whole. The purchaser of a swap is not required to own the asset in order to contract for a guarantee of its value. Therefore, as many people could purchase as many swaps as they wished on the same asset. Thus, the total value of the swaps greatly exceeds the value of the assets.* [See footnote.)The next step is for holders of the swaps to short the asset in order to drive down its value and collect the guarantee. As the issuers of swaps were not required to reserve against them, and as there is no limit to the number of swaps, the payouts could easily exceed the net worth of the issuer.This was the most shameful and most mindless form of speculation. Gamblers were betting hands that they could not cover. The US regulators fled their posts. The American financial institutions abandoned all integrity. As a consequence, American financial institutions and rating agencies are trusted nowhere on earth.The US government should never have used billions of taxpayers' dollars to pay off swap bets as it did when it bailed out the insurance company AIG. This was a stunning waste of a vast sum of money. The federal government should declare all swap agreements to be fraudulent contracts, except for a single swap held by the owner of the asset. Simply wiping out these fraudulent contracts would remove the bulk of the vast overhang of "troubled" assets that threaten financial markets.The billions of taxpayers' dollars spent buying up subprime derivatives were also wasted. The government did not need to spend one dime. All government needed to do was to suspend the mark-to-market rule. This simple act would have removed the solvency threat to financial institutions by allowing them to keep the derivatives at book value until financial institutions could ascertain their true values and write them down over time.Taxpayers, equity owners, and the credit standing of the US government are being ruined by financial shysters who are manipulating to their own advantage the government's commitment to mark-to-market and to the "sanctity of contracts." Multi-trillion dollar "bailouts" and bank nationalization are the result of the government's inability to respond intelligently.Two more simple acts would have completed the rescue without costing the taxpayers one dollar: an announcement from the Federal Reserve that it will be lender of last resort to all depository institutions including money market funds, and an announcement reinstating the uptick rule.The uptick rule was suspended or repealed a couple of years ago in order to permit hedge funds and shyster speculators to ripoff American equity owners. The rule prevented short-selling any stock that did not move up in price during the previous day. In other words, speculators could not make money at others' expense by ganging up on a stock and short-selling it day after day.As a former Treasury official, I am amazed that the US government, in the midst of the worst financial crises ever, is content for short-selling to drive down the asset prices that the government is trying to support. No bailout or stimulus plan has any hope until the uptick rule is reinstated.The bald fact is that the combination of ignorance, negligence, and ideology that permitted the crisis to happen still prevails and is blocking any remedy. Either the people in power in Washington and the financial community are total dimwits or they are manipulating an opportunity to redistribute wealth from taxpayers, equity owners and pension funds to the financial sector.The Bush and Obama plans total 1.6 trillion dollars, every one of which will have to be borrowed, and no one knows from where. This huge sum will compromise the value of the US dollar, its role as reserve currency, the ability of the US government to service its debt, and the price level. These staggering costs are pointless and are to no avail, as not one step has been taken that would alleviate the crisis.If we add to my simple menu of remedies a ban, punishable by instant death, for short selling any national currency, the world can be rescued from the current crisis without years of suffering, violent upheavals and, perhaps, wars.According to its hopeful but economically ignorant proponents, globalism was supposed to balance risks across national economies and to offset downturns in one part of the world with upturns in other parts. A global portfolio was a protection against loss, claimed globalism's purveyors. In fact, globalism has concentrated the risks, resulting in Wall Street's greed endangering all the economies of the world. The greed of Wall Street and the negligence of the US government have wrecked the prospects of many nations. Street riots are already occurring in parts of the world. On Sunday February 22, the right-wing TV station, Fox "News," presented a program that predicted riots and disarray in the United States by 2014.How long will Americans permit "their" government to rip them off for the sake of the financial interests that caused the problem? Obama’s cabinet and National Economic Council are filled with representatives of the interest groups that caused the problem. The Obama administration is not a government capable of preventing a catastrophe.If truth be known, the "banking problem" is the least of our worries. Our economy faces two much more serious problems. One is that offshoring and H-1b visas have stopped the growth of family incomes, except, of course, for the super rich. To keep the economy going, consumers have gone deeper into debt, maxing out their credit cards and refinancing their homes and spending the equity. Consumers are now so indebted that they cannot increase their spending by taking on more debt. Thus, whether or not the banks resume lending is beside the point.The other serious problem is the status of the US dollar as reserve currency. This status has allowed the US, now a country heavily dependent on imports just like a third world or lesser-developed country, to pay its international bills in its own currency. We are able to import $800 billion annually more than we produce, because the foreign countries from whom we import are willing to accept paper for their goods and services.If the dollar loses its reserve currency role, foreigners will not accept dollars in exchange for real things. This event would be immensely disruptive to an economy dependent on imports for its energy, its clothes, its shoes, its manufactured products, and its advanced technology products.If incompetence in Washington, the type of incompetence that produced the current economic crisis, destroys the dollar as reserve currency, the "unipower" will overnight become a third world country, unable to pay for its imports or to sustain its standard of living.How long can the US government protect the dollar's value by leasing its gold to bullion dealers who sell it, thereby holding down the gold price? Given the incompetence in Washington and on Wall Street, our best hope is that the rest of the world is even less competent and even in deeper trouble. In this event, the US dollar might survive as the least valueless of the world's fiat currencies.

http://www।counterpunch.org/roberts02242009.html

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Quotes

Napoleon Bonaparte
“When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”
Niccolo Machiavelli
“For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”
President James Madison
“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control of governments by controlling money and its issuance.”
President Abraham Lincoln
“The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy.”
President James A Garfield
“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”
The Rt. Hon. Reginald McKenna – Chancellor of the Exchequer
“I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money. The amount of money in existence varies only with the action of the banks in increasing and decreasing deposits and bank purchases. Every loan, overdraft, or bank purchase creates a deposit and every repayment of a loan, overdraft or bank sale destroys a deposit. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.”
Sir Josiah Stamp – Bank of England
“Banking was conceived in inequity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the costs of your own salary, let them continue to create deposits.”
President Woodrow Wilson
“A great Industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world – no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.
“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.”
(President regretted signing into law the Federal Reserve Act)
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter
“The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes.”
Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of Banking & Currency Committee
In 1932:
“The truth is the Federal Reserve Board has usurped the Government of the United States. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks government at will …”
In 1933:
“Roosevelt has brought with him from Wall Street James P. Warburg, son of Paul M. Warburg, Organizer and first Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve System…”
In 1950:
“This same Warburg had the audacity and arrogance to proclaim before the U.S. Senate: ‘We shall have World Government whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by Conquest or Consent’.”
Senator Barry Goldwater
“Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money-lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.”
Henry Ford
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
The above is the truth laid bare before your eyes and which the shadow money-lenders have spent billions over the years for the control of the global mass media, and paid handsomely specially cultivated economists, historians and politicians to disseminate lies, divert attention and to cover up their hidden agenda.
The next quotation will shock most of you and will change your perspective of many global issues. It is written by a courageous Jew to another courageous Jew.
Benjamin H. Friedman
Letter to Dr. David Goldstein dated October 10, 1954
“The history of the world for the past several centuries and current events at home and abroad confirm the existence of such a conspiracy (to destroy Christianity and obtain global power). The world-wide net-work of diabolical conspirators implements this plot against the Christian faith while Christians appear to be sound asleep. The Christian clergy appear to be more ignorant or more indifferent about this conspiracy than other Christians … It seems so sad.”

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Mission

The Church as a whole has a different mission from the overcomers. The Church's mission is to get saved and then get other people saved in order to get more membership. It is to empower the Church (i.e., leaders) so that theoretically the whole world would become Catholic, or Baptist, or Pentecostal, etc.
This eventually translates into political power, as we see from a study of Church history. The goal is to give political power to men while presuming that those men (leaders) are submitted to Jesus Christ. The problem, as King Saul's example shows clearly, is that as men gain political power--even Christian leaders--they tend to act like King Saul and assume ownership of that which is God's.
Kings are supposed to find out the will of God and then implement it as a steward. But kings inevitably become corrupted by power, regardless of their religious affiliations. They usurp power by taking the place of God and ruling by their own will, expecting God to rubber-stamp their decisions. Such behavior is justified on the grounds that "God made me king." In other words, since God made me king, He has given me the right to do as I please, and He will back me in all that I do.
Or, as Nixon would say, "If I do it, that makes it legal."
This is how King Saul acted, even though he prophesied as an Old Testament Pentecostal. It is how the popes of the Roman Church acted very soon after coming into power. Their moral corruption is well documented by many cardinals and bishops throughout the centuries who wrote histories of the Church.
The mandate of the Overcomer is different. First, I do not believe that God will empower the Overcomers in an in-the-world manifestation until they are perfected. That is, they must fulfill the Feast of Tabernacles before they are fully qualified to rule the earth. Otherwise, it would only be a matter of time before they too would succumb to the temptation to move from steward to usurper.
Yet there is much to be done in the present time. Obviously, we are to teach people about the Feast of Tabernacles in order to understand the true path to perfection. We must understand that the Feast of Passover is insufficient in itself. Likewise, the earnest of the Spirit given through the Feast of Pentecost is insufficient. Only Tabernacles can give us the fullness of the Spirit by which perfection comes.
Secondly, we must recognize that the time will come, as Daniel tells us, that the saints will be given the dominion (or "adjudication") over the earth. Dominion will be transferred from Babylon to the Overcomers (Dan. 7:27). The (Stone) Kingdom will then grow until it fills the whole earth (Dan. 2:35). The Roman Church believes that it will fulfill this prophecy, but it was established under the administration of King Saul and Pentecost, not David and Tabernacles. So the Roman Church proved to be the extension of Imperial Rome known as the "little horn" of Dan. 7:8, 20.
The key problem to understand here is about usurping the throne of God. A usurper is an "antichrist," one who rules in place of Christ in the sense of a usurper, rather than of a steward. And this has to do with rulers doing their own will, instead of seeking to do the will of God.
When we speak of "the will of God," we cannot separate this from His law (Rom. 2:18). Whatever God says to do is a law, whether we call it that or not. God's law is the expression of His character, often with the added feature of teaching and training. It is not unlike the house rules of a parent, who is responsible to teach the children right from wrong and instill in them a sense of responsibility for their actions.
Laws are not given as an end in themselves, but as a training mechanism to renew our minds (our thinking) and to bring us to the place of obedience. One cannot separate law from obedience, for law demands obedience, and whatever we obey is a law by definition. We cannot claim to be obedient to God without compliance to some law that has expressed His will.
Immature children are given laws because their own wills naturally want to rule their lives. Children are not born compliant to the will of a parent. They must be trained to be obedient. As long as the child's will differs from that of his parent, he needs a law, and that law goes against the child's sense of personal freedom to do his own will. Only when the child's will becomes one with the parent does the child no longer need a law to tell him what to do. This is the point where the child reaches spiritual maturity and does the will of the parent, not because of any external law, but because the law is written on his heart.
This is precisely the purpose of Passover and Pentecost. Passover puts the believer (by faith) on a journey from "Egypt" to the Promised Land. Pentecost keeps a person on the right path as he hears God's voice, learns His will (law), and learns obedience as he is led by the Spirit. Pentecost is the big training ground that brings us to spiritual maturity.
An overcomer is ultimately one who goes beyond Pentecost into Tabernacles, where God no longer needs to command him to do this or that, because the overcomer does the will of God by nature, and no longer by command. This is the point where he/she is fully qualified to speak the will and law of God and to expect obedience from the rest of mankind. In other words, overcomers are called to rule (Dan. 7:27) and to judge the world (1 Cor. 6:2).
That does not mean the overcomers are called to condemn the world, but to establish the standard of righteousness and define unrighteousness, injustice, and sin (crime). The world has had its own standard, based upon the will of man, but the overcomers are called to know the will of God and to establish that new standard. It is called the law of God.
The law will remain the standard of right and wrong until mankind no longer needs it. When all men do the will of God by nature, they will no longer need to have the law imposed upon them. They will be spiritually mature. As Isaiah 26:9 says,
"When the earth experiences Thy judgments, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness."
The Overcomers are to prepare themselves by life experience, study, and prayer, to know the will of God, so that they may present it or clarify it to the rest of the world. To know His will, one must live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God (Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4). One must know the law, the prophets, and the royal records, as well as the New Testament Gospels, Epistles, and the book of Revelation.
The mission of the overcomers is to bring the will of God into the earth, so that injustice is first restrained and finally eradicated and replaced by God's love. There is much that can be done even during the time of Babylonian jurisdiction, but for the most part God has been using the opposition of Babylon as a training tool for the overcomers.
Babylon was given jurisdiction because of the sin and rebellion of our forefathers, as the prophets clearly tell us. But we are now approaching the time of Babylon's fall, where the whole system is falling under its own weight of sin and financial unrighteousness. Seeing this, we ought to be alert and to prepare ourselves with diligence for the work in the Age to come. A new administration is coming, and with all due respect, it has little to do with Mr. Obama or his cabinet of Babylonian experts.
We must understand, however, that becoming a believer does not qualify anyone for rulership--nor does a Pentecostal experience (however valid)। God is looking for a man after His own heart. He is looking for the few who know His heart, His will, His mind, and know how to apply it as Jesus would.

Mission

Friday, February 22, 2008

Crusade

by Manuel Valenzuela / February 20th, 2008
Homeland Born and Bred
Sojourn into the outer recesses of a nation bordering on madness, into a land deeply disturbed and emotionally bewildered, a world of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, of fanaticism and fundamentalism, entering a case study into fantasyland and escapism, taking a pilgrimage into realms both of purposeful ignorance and blindness, of electing lifelong incompetents based on wanting to have a beer with them, walking through the dark valley of indifference, climbing the monolithic mountain of hubris, finally reaching the hallowed halls of smoke and mirrors, a place where only the blind lead the blind and where the deafening roars of death and destruction are easily suppressed in delusion and denial. Journey, if you will, into a nation that lost its moral compass inside the dungeons of fear and hatred.
Enter what fascists call the Homeland, what patriots used to call the United States of America, now named, simply, and appropriately, Amerika, a place where corporations enjoy more rights and protections than the People, where corporations — through their products and policies – help kill hundreds of thousands of human beings every year in the name of profit over people, making them mass murderers on a scale reserved only for humanity’s worst; a land controlled by the military-energy-industrial complex, with war the engine for unimaginable profits; a nation now without a Constitution, nor a moral standing; a country that has developed a thirst for human blood and an appetite for destruction; a land of Manifest Destiny leaving death, suffering and destruction in its wake; a sadist entity that develops and refines its crimes against humanity it inflicts upon the people of the world by first practicing them on its own citizenry.
It is inside the bowels of the Homeland that the malignant cancer that afflicts the country can be seen. The inner tumor inflicting constant pain can be seen through the eyes of a people so psychologically damaged by the never-before seen pressures on the human mind caused by capitalism run amok — conditioned to live to work and not work to live, thinking that work will set them free — that no nation on Earth has more citizens taking anti-depression and mind-numbing drugs in order to bandage an otherwise perpetually open gash. It can be seen through a people so internally despondent that only escapism through hours of fantasy-television watching or ceaseless consumption of materialistic goods, a modern version of bread and circus, can alleviate the stress and the pressures and the fatigue and the frustration and the anger developed in the pursuit of empty promises, of fictional dreams, in a world of the unreal.
Crisscross the land of the free and the home of the brave to see those who serve and protect abuse the people they serve. Tour Taser Nation, a land where authorities routinely inflict electroshock torture on the People, pulling the trigger first, asking questions later, as always enjoying inflicting pain and suffering on both innocent and guilty. Students, suspects, the infirm, the handicapped, pregnant women, motorists, the elderly, those asking questions, those protecting their rights and yes, now even children, all can be electroshocked into submission in a legalized form of torture that seems to grow by the day.
Taser Nation has become Torture Nation, zapping one unsuspecting citizen at a time, conditioning the population towards the new normal of police brutality and state-sanctioned intimidation. Welcome to the Land of the Brownshirts, a place where respect for human rights and loving your neighbor as yourself is now frowned upon, a place where bullying, intimidation, harassment and a budding police state are the new normal.
Take an excursion into the vast hinterlands of the Empire’s prison system, a network of concentration camps holding over two million human beings, most imprisoned for petty drug violations, most black or Latino or working class white, many suffering serious mental health problems, many trapped in a vicious circle of indigence, unemployment, incarceration and oppression at the hands of the state. Ostensibly designed to rehabilitate, these jails do the opposite, exacerbating mental anguish, frustration and anger, easing the transformation of human beings into rotting manifestations of lives lost and altered. It is here where Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib find their genesis.
These prisons, these cages of solitude and loneliness and madness and survival and violence, are where American society discards itself of the unwanted, the undesirable, those not comporting to the mores of Puritanical code. America’s vast prison system is where those fated from birth to the lower echelons of society’s caste system end up, those millions tattooed with the shackles of American society’s perpetual enslavement, destined to forever live in ghettos, inner city reservations and Bantustans, devoid of opportunity and a future, forced to dwell upon the realities of metaphysical imprisonment, desperate to survive either by illegality or escapism, oppressed and subjugated by authorities, marginalized by society, discriminated against by the state.
It is here, in these rotting machinations of rusted iron, metal bars and decrepit institutionalization, of fetid squalor and sadistic reality, where America’s brigade of automatons makes its problems disappear, creating an entire state and privatized prison-industrial complex dependent on crime, guilt, sentencing and prisoners. It is inside these penal institutions that America’s sadists and authoritarian personalities work, brutalizing and torturing inmates, oppressing and exploiting individuals, fomenting racism and hatred.
It is here where America trains her torturers and her malevolent warriors, her “bad apples” and her fascist enablers, exporting lessons learned abroad, infecting the innocent of occupied lands with the cruel and inhuman punishment that is as American as apple pie. It is here, in these creations of human hell, that crimes against humanity are perfected. It is inside the gates of hell that experimentation becomes indoctrination and where brutality becomes legalized torture.
Rise of a New Crusade
Enter the periphery of the Empire, where fear and hatred together form silent acquiescence to myriad crimes against humanity, where indifference and unconcern leads to war crimes going unpunished, where ignorance of the outside world leads to ignorance of forgotten occupations, where ballots cast help ease into power corruption and criminality and mass murder, where the two headed hydra of the Corporatist Party colludes to condemn millions in Muslim lands to premature death and wretched suffering, where critical thinking is shunned and backwardness embraced, and where progressive, humanist ideals find castration by the knives owned by those living inside the bubble of primitive and extinct days long since passed.
Traverse a nation conditioned to hate the Arab and Muslim world — a land of a billion strong — with its corresponding depravity of jingoism and xenophobia boiling beneath the surface, ready at a moment’s notice, or upon the happenstance of new Pearl Harbor events, to explode in searing anger, for a populace injected with the venom of fear and ignorance easily unleashes its wrath on the chosen dark-skinned scapegoats of the undeveloped world. Programmed fear and molded hatred born of inside jobs and false flag events have unlocked the flames of bigotry from the inner demons of the Empire, creating sub-human scapegoats whose only crime is inhabiting lands the vampire of hegemony needs in order to satiate its ceaseless craving for power and control. Thus, in the lands where black blood flows and the devil’s excrement spills you will find the Empire’s dripping, black stained fangs.
Enter, if you will, the land of Christian soldiers and born-again leaders, a terrain belonging to the army of Jesus and to the vengeful, disastrous deity of Old Testament belief, marching off to victory with a cross in one-hand and an M-16 in the other; a nation of bible camps, bible conventions, bible thumpers and Bible Belts; of mega-churches, mega- proselytizers and mega-hypocrisy; of fanaticism and fundamentalism; of illogical — and damaging — belief in the myth of creationism and the delusions of abstinence; of agents of intolerance, thirst for conversions and theocratic fantasy; of protection and respect of life only if life is that of a zygote, not an actual human being caught in war, terminal disease or endemic suffering; a place where belief in myth and fable and of the never seen is given prominence over reality and reason and modernity’s treatises; of blind faith trumping sound science; of a nation self-professing and monopolizing blessings by humankind’s archaic and historically grossly incompetent divinity; of extremist theism, evangelical psychosis and reactionary emotion; and of evangelical sheep being led to pasture by wolves dressed in shepherd’s clothing.
Indeed, enter the eye of the Middle East storm, the creator of hatred and blowback, the father and mother of the fictional war on terror, the epicenter of the crusade of surge and siege, the fulcrum of Christian extremism, the home of the American Taliban, the disseminator of the self-fulfilling prophesy of a so-called clash of civilizations. From the Cathedrals of Consumerism to the Enormous Edifices of Evangelism, from the Hubris of Imperialism to the Arrogance of Righteousness, it is the Empire itself, holding debauched neoliberal capitalism in one hand, the mutated, distorted principles of the Cross on the other, that has birthed this latest of Crusades into the lands of ancient history.
For it is America, through military might and the power of its weapons, though financial intimidation and market colonialism, that has proclaimed itself heir to the throne of Western imperialism, arrogantly declaring itself the next in line, of humankind’s great historical powers, to reach the apex of Empire. And so, as the maker of mankind’s new reality, as the molder of human destiny, the Pax Americana, through its legions of neoliberal capitalists, religious extremists, corporatist stooges and delusional neocons, has created a collision all its own making, a vicious cycle of hatred born and vengeance sought, of cause and effect, of boomeranging blowback, of making an enemy where none existed, of declaring war on an entire region of the planet.
Thus the fictional war on terror builds the momentum for it to invariably become real, for one billion Muslims — the vast majority peaceful and moderate — to see, and firmly believe, that a Crusade of Surge and Siege has thus been thrust upon them by Christian and über-capitalist Amerika. By this method the fictional war on terror feeds itself, growing from an invention of fascist Amerika in search of enemies into a mature manifestation of anger and hatred, a true, and artificially engendered clash of civilizations gorging on the boiling animosity of East versus West.
Through momentum that has been building since September 2001, the architects of creative chaos, the designers of bogeymen, the fathers of shock capitalism, and the makers of artificial fear have coalesced into an amalgam of malevolence, planting the seed they hope will sprout a perpetual battle between Muslim and Christian, America and Middle Easterners. In the desert landscape of Muslim lands they have found an oasis from which to plant and grow a modern day crusade, not to reclaim the Holy Land, but to simply claim the vast fields of the Devil’s Excrement; not to rain freedom and democracy on uncivilized people, but to firmly plant permanence in strategic lands; not to bring Christianity to barbarians, but to violently force neoliberal capitalism down the throats of the Muslim world. Such is the method to the madness of the Crusade of Surge and Siege.
First they came for the Muslims…
Navigate from coast to coast, witnessing the persecution of Arab and Muslim groups, most set up by the same government that later concocts charges and smears against them in the usually unsuccessful attempt at maintaining the illusion of insecurity within the greater population. The state propagandists realize that in order to maintain the chimera of an enemy, that in order for the idea of terror to coagulate in the minds of the people, the illusion must be maintained that indeed an enemy exists. It must be made to look as though the enemy lives among us, that it is domestic as well as foreign, that it is planning to attack our way of life. This, of course, also creates the fantasy that the state is our protector, and that in order to protect us, we must sacrifice even more rights and freedoms for security.
The use of scapegoats, in this case the use of naïve, oftentimes incompetent, illiterate, indigent and sometimes even mentally deficient groups of Arab or Muslim men, usually with no political power and no financial resources, is part of a formula of fear designed inside the rubble of the Twin Towers that has been used to terrorize the American people into submitting to a fascist, despotic state. With every persecution of Arab and Muslim groups charged with planning terrorist activity, usually with little or no proof, usually later found innocent by a court of law, the state further cements the fiction of fear and the illusion of perpetual insecurity in the citizenry. Propaganda makes bogeymen of scapegoats and scapegoats make obedient cowards of us all.
Of course every new persecution is met by a thunderous manifestation of corporate media coverage, bombarding the airwaves with the fictions and illusions of the charade that is the war on terror. There are enemies in our midst, we are told, dreaded bogeymen intent on killing us, trying to shoot up a mall, or blow up a building, or murder our children. Yet, as usually happens, when the alleged plot is discovered for the lie that it is, when the state is forced to drop charges, when a court of law throws out the case, when the innocent’s voice is validated and the condemned are once again free, there is not one camera or reporter or journalist ready or willing to bombard us with the truth. The blitzkrieg of guilt is suddenly replaced with the utter silence of innocence.
The damage, however, has already been done, for in the eyes of tens of millions the parade of fictions and the presumption of guilt that has so readily been beamed by the corporate media have already established the fear and insecurity that America is under siege by the barbarian horde and its evil religion. The illusion has thus been established, the excuse to erode yet more liberties has been successful, and the scapegoat has again been made the object of growing hatred. The people have again been manipulated, conditioned to hate the very idea of a Muslim or an Arab. The enemy has again been vilified, dehumanized and ostracized, the very term “Muslim” becoming denigrated, its practitioners and believers made to wear an invisible crescent moon on their breasts, becoming in many eyes unwelcome pariahs in the land of immigrants and the home of freedom.
Every new so-called uncovered plot, every new so-called uncovered threat, every new depiction of evil incarnate is, of course, used by the Ministry of Truth to validate the belief that the state is protecting us, that our sacrifice of freedoms and rights, that our submission to a police state has been of great service, that it is indeed working and must therefore continue, no matter how intrusive it becomes, no matter how much it destroys the Constitution and no matter how large Big Brother continues to grow. In the end, the formula of illusion, of imaginary enemies, of chosen scapegoats, works to create a harmonious narrative of terror abroad and terror at home, of a war on terror that must be perpetual and ceaseless, of a state working diligently to secure our freedom, our way of life, the American way.
The formula creates a submissive, compliant and acquiescent citizenry, one that does not blink at the mass murder of millions in the Middle East, at innumerable war crimes, at the use of torture and the creation of gulags. The scapegoating of Arab and Muslims by the state and the corporatist media has succeeded in fomenting a xenophobic hatred and anger against those people emanating from and residing in the Middle East. The mission has been accomplished, for the masses, thinking that the shredding of the Constitution has not affected them because they are not terrorists and have done nothing wrong, have voluntarily eviscerated their own rights and freedoms, for eventually, the crimes and horrors and human rights violations and erosion of liberties committed against the scapegoat class inevitably is imputed onto the majority. In a proto-fascist nation such as America, it is only a matter of time.
First the state comes for the chosen scapegoats, using them as the key to unlocking the rights and freedoms of the masses. The scapegoat is the excuse, the mirage to eviscerate the Constitution in the shadows, with the masses blinded to reality, and creating a new normal of fascism and tyranny. Thinking they are safe from the claws of the state, the masses eagerly give up more power and freedom and liberty in the belief that only the enemy is being targeted. Eventually, before the blink of a collective eye, the masses themselves are being eavesdropped, spied on, surveilled upon, interrogated, harassed, controlled, tortured and disappeared. Eventually, it is their rights and freedoms and liberties that no longer exist.
Told today’s eavesdropping and illegal wiretapping by the state is to spy on the few Muslim terrorists, and that immunity for state and corporations is needed for our vital security, we later learn that all Americans have been illegally spied on, that Big Brother is watching and listening and monitoring us all and that we have no recourse to halt or file suit or seek accountability against the same companies doing the spying. Thus yesterday’s malfeasance and criminality become the present’s new normal, and the closer we approach the precipice of despotism.
The formula works every time authoritarian entities are determined to destroy the fabric of a free and democratic people. It is written in humankind’s history books, yet it remains ignored and unlearned by those who refuse to know the history of man. It is in our history that our tendencies are deciphered. It is in our past that our patterns can be anticipated. In the end, compliant Americans become good Americans, freedom is replaced by tyranny, rights and liberties are usurped by a police and surveillance state and a constitutional past becomes a new normal of authoritarianism and corporatism.
This is what happens when the majority ignores the plight of a scapegoated minority that is powerless to fight the claws of a despotic state। This is what happens when the first signs of smoke over the horizon are seen and ignored, only later realizing, much too late to escape its wrath, that a raging inferno enveloping everything in its path has arrived. First they come for Muslims, then they come for us all.

Hear No Evil, See No Evil
Americans’ ever-enduring, catatonic sleepwalk through the Empire’s vast array of bread and circus, as always produced by the Ministry of Truth and the Department of Propaganda, better known as the corporatist media, has succeeded in the creation of an ignorant, incurious and dumbed down populace completely bereft of knowledge of what is done in its name. With no concern for or understanding of geography, cultures, history, alien societies, the outside world and of the imperial aspirations of the Empire, Americans have proved easy targets to the manipulations and deceptions of the corporatist world. Seemingly unwilling to gain knowledge of anything outside American Idol or the weekly NASCAR rat race, the soldier ants and worker bees of the Empire are content to circumvent the horrors of war and the myriad crimes against humanity committed in their name in order to maintain their beautiful minds at peace.
Indeed, the corporatist media has triumphed in completely erasing America’s two disastrous occupations of Muslim lands from the peoples’ conscious and concern, in effect shifting the ongoing debacles away from the daily reality of Americans and towards the abyss of a most cavernous memory hole. Methodically and systematically, the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, with all their inconvenient truths, with all their disturbing realities, with all their corresponding death, suffering and destruction, have virtually vanished into a vacuum of nothingness, transported by the corporatist state into a clandestine and secretive reality, making of these disasters non-existent nightmares that vanish upon the waking of a new day.
This propaganda by omission, this “out of sight, out of mind” machination has virtually erased from American reality the disasters unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan, thus guaranteeing in the public mind a complete ignorance in or understanding of a barbaric continuation to occupations stuck in the quicksand of fierce resistance and never-ending guerilla warfare. Thus, America’s aggressive wars, its imperial occupations, its crusade of surge and siege that has done so much harm to millions of people, not to mention to the moral standing of the nation, have become non-existent memories under cover of fog and haze.
To the American people, the hegemonic occupations now descending further into quagmire have become invisible creations that only surface in the rare instance that a branch of the corporate media goes off script and produces footage of death, destruction or suffering. Otherwise, the war against West Asia remains a figment of our imagination, a reality when our beautiful minds want it to be, an inconvenient truth that becomes fiction the moment we decide it is so.
As such, having been conditioned through the corporatist media’s ceaseless dehumanization propaganda to believe Arabs and Muslims sub-human enemies, having been manipulated into hating America’s new enemy and having the corporatist media erase Iraq and Afghanistan from the memory hole, the American people have developed a disturbing, almost criminal indifference for the millions of human beings dying, suffering or otherwise being affected by the Empire’s wars and occupations. To a vast majority of Americans, the malignant tumors that are Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, together with what they represent, are as hazy and as far removed from reality as last week’s episode of a favorite sitcom. These cesspools of immorality rarely, if ever, register in the beautiful minds of most Americans, only bothering the conscious when photos, video or whistleblowers surface to incriminate torturers, leaders and patsies. Only then are we forced to confront one of the myriad number of inconvenient truths the red, white and blue does across the globe.
When truth does not surface, however, we revert back to willful ignorance, aided by the fictions of television and the comfort of consumerism, for deep down, inside the dark recesses of our mind, we know exactly what is done in our name, though we chose, willfully, to erase it from memory, to suppress the reality of American criminality. Using denial and delusion in conjunction with conditioned brainwashing and manipulation, we have decided that crimes against humanity do not exist if those crimes are done to sub-human enemies. Thus the barbarian horde at our gates becomes undeserving of human rights and international laws protecting human beings because they do not fit our definition of human.
Thus, never do we seek to know the ugly realities of places like Guantanamo, nor how America’s gulags, with their brutal methods and tactics, will inevitably affect our way of life, or question why they exist in the first place. For us, America’s black sites are reserved for the evildoers wanting to destroy our way of life. Little do we realize, though, that our way of life is being eroded at these very same sites, one right at a time, done not by terrorists, but by those managing our descent into the breadbasket of despotism. Remaining passive, obedient, silently acquiescent and possessing the attention span of a gnat, hundreds of millions of Americans thus concern themselves only with what new toy they can add to the family collection, or what new product they can obediently purchase next, or what new reality show will entertain them the most. After all, we must preserve our “way of life”.
If Guantanamo and what it stands for does not directly affect us, if torture and perpetual suffering and dehumanizing conditions and sadistic treatment and the destruction of habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights only affects the dreaded dark skinned Arab or Muslim, then America’s beautiful minds need not concern themselves or have empathy, they need not contemplate the inflictions of wickedness on their fellow human beings, they need not realize the crimes done in their name, nor the evisceration of American morality, nor the new normal being established, nor the precedence beings set, nor the trial and error being conducted, nor the techniques being experimented and refined, nor the machinations of tyranny being perfected.
Thus, through our transcendental customs, our American “way of life,” of methodically following the exploits of celebrities dead or dying, of aimlessly producing and consuming, as always becoming hypnotized by modern day court jesters, jousters, gladiators and chariot races, as well as exhibiting idol-worshipping, messianic-like followings and tendencies over the Corporatist Party’s current crop of presidential contenders, we have chosen to ignore the plight of the innocent — for most prisoners are — in Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and other places of ill-repute. We have thus chosen to be good Americans, seeing no evil, hearing no evil, mistaking ashes for snow, and pretending the evil done in our name does not exist.
Reincarnation of the Habitual
To look inside one of America’s gulags is to look back at dark history, to times of brutality and primitiveness, using the tunnel of hindsight to peer at the dungeons of the Roman Empire and of the Middle Ages, with their chained and caged collections of dissidents, enemies and scapegoats, their persecuted and tortured, and their sadism and thirst for blood; it is to step back in time to days of Inquisitions and torture chambers, to eras of witch persecutions and heretic trials, of silencing threats to power and spawning a black cloud of fear and intimidation throughout society.
It is a return to days when humans had no right, to nights of barbarism, to the depravity and indecency of our mammalian past, to the possession of the human mind by the wicked demons inherent in man. Looking inside America’s gulags helps us remember that over and over, for as long as humankind has walked the plains of Earth, when authoritarians rise, as always carried high on the shoulders of fear and insecurity, morality, integrity and human rights become lost in a sea of tyranny. These institutions of immorality help us see beyond the veneer and the hypocrisy that those espousing freedom and liberty propagate, helping erase the fog of deception those claiming to be defenders of human rights engender.
America’s archipelago of gulags proves, once again, that the “western” mantra of values, modernity and morality is nothing but an empty shell built on self-adulation, delusion and echoes of ethnocentrism and exceptionalism. This hollow and cynical vociferation falls flat upon the challenge of evolving human rights, for in its claim of moral superiority, hiding behind the theoretical wonders of Judeo-Christian tradition, supposedly progressing away from the primitiveness of our past, the “western” tradition has been one of continuous mass murder, repression, tyranny, oppression, exploitation, suffering and destruction, most aimed directly at the peoples of the “south,” most directed at people not possessing the genetic mutation that turned skin color pale.
American gulags and its system of extraordinary renditions, green lighted at the very top of the food chain, proves to anyone not blinded by delusions and propaganda that America is not now and has never been morally superior to the rest of the world. From the very beginning of the republic, morality has given way to imperialism. Whether done through proxy, by puppets or by America’s own hands, control over the peoples of the world has usually involved some form of tyranny, as always dependent on the vast funding, financing, political support and training of the Empire. However, where once hidden under the veneer of democracy and freedom, under the ruthlessness of puppet dictators, America’s sordid, though clandestine, past has come to the surface thanks to the exposure of its methods and techniques, becoming an open acknowledgement of past indiscretions and present malfeasance.
From the School of the Americas, to research into psychological and physical torture at McGill University, to perfecting the art of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” to support of every tin pot dictator and junta in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, to the training of their thugs, enforcers and torturers, America has always possessed the wickedness of human malevolence. Its claims of being the defender of human rights is and has always been hypocritical at best and farcical at worst. Today we can see the real America at Guantanamo and its extension of gulags and torture chambers, the America the world entire has known for the last century but that Americans are just now waking up to. For today’s gulags are evolved creations of yesterday’s criminality, just as they will be the inspirations for tomorrow’s tyranny.
Entrapment
Guantanamo, with its cages and sensory deprivation and barking dogs and dehumanization and its stress positions and forced feeding and extremes of cold and hot and its isolation and its medical/psychological experimentation and its waterboarding and its darker, more sinister methods of torture yet to be exposed magnifies American tyranny and her hypocrisy, her injustice and depravity, her criminality and arrogance. It exposes, more and more, the charade that the war on terror is, how the purpose of Guantanamo is not the imprisoning of terrorists, for most there are guilty only of bad luck, persecution, retribution and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, but the methodical evisceration of the Constitution.
For Guantanamo, and its siblings, are a culmination of desperation, an attempt to rationalize the supposed existence of Arab and Muslim evil, an attempt to validate a fictional war on terror by incarcerating people falsely labeled “terrorists.” It is as much a torture center as it is a public relations and propaganda institution, a way to manipulate the American public both that Arab and Muslim terrorists exist, and that the American government is succeeding in bringing the terrorist threat to justice. It is a Hollywood-style set with its corresponding fictions and illusions of reality, a scam to convince Americans that a war that is concocted is indeed real, that it is being won.
The reality of the gulags exposes how an initial hunger for vengeance immediately after 9/11 has led to the imprisonment, suffering and torture of thousands, and how, knowing the falsity of charges and the innocence of men, America steadfastly continues shackling injustice, deciding to stage-manage the illusion of guilt as well as sacrifice the innocent to the continued myth of the so-called war on terror.
Kidnapped, traded in for money, picked up by a giant net of vengeance and imprisoned thanks to false accusations by rivals, the men at Guantanamo have become patsies in a world unconcerned for their rights. They are caged in a land of limbo, lost to the outside world, made to disappear, their lives practically an empty shell of their former selves. They are the scapegoats of American mendacity, labeled “terrorists” so that we can feel secure and protected, so that we can believe that evildoers hate us for our freedom, for our way of life. They are the poster children that grant the military-industrial complex a perpetual stream of blood money, a ceaseless parade of war, an endless flow of propaganda. They are, quite simply, the bread that gives authoritarianism sustenance, the wine that makes drunk with joy the enablers of fascism. They are, for all intents and purposes, dead men walking, ghosts without closure, phantoms forgotten by humanity.
Innocent of criminality, these individuals have been subjected to brutal and sadistic torture, as always leading to false confessions, their barbaric imprisonment and systemic dehumanization more a manifestation of American culture than of their resistance and human spirit. Many have been physically tortured, yet it is the more corrosive damage of psychological torture that has destroyed their minds and their lives. Many will never return to normalcy, for what their minds have surely been subjected to no human brain should have to endure. Many have become the guinea pigs of psychologists and doctors experimenting with various methods of torture, trying to make torture more effective, more efficient.
Many have quietly, and conveniently, under cover of darkness or media blackout, been returned to their native countries, their innocence confirmed by their release, and by the silence of America. Forced to sign papers preventing them from speaking of their horrors, or from suing their torturers, they return a shell of their former selves, damaged beyond repair, scarred for life, forever to relive the horror they experienced in their nightmares and flashbacks. Yet many remain, shackled to American propaganda, held hostage to the illusions of the war on terror. As long as the fiction lives their guilt is assured, their imprisonment guaranteed. As long as tyrants fear persecution and imprisonment for criminality, they will live in cages. As long as they are used as the meat feeding the dogs of tyranny, they will remain encaged. As long as the authoritarian leadership seeks the continued erosion of the Constitution, and of our rights and freedoms, they will linger in perpetual purgatory, becoming the rotting carcass fed to the vultures of fascism.
Guantanamo’s cages cannot yet be opened and made empty, for to do so would be to expose the fictions, the charades, the method to the madness, the sheer immorality of the Empire. It would be to acknowledge injustice of innocence, the depravity of liberators, the criminality of leadership. Guantanamo’s gates cannot yet be closed, for the Crusade of Surge and Siege must continue, the enemy must exist, profits must remain, our rights and freedoms and liberties must be destroyed. New precedents of American legality must be established, kangaroo courts must convict, enemies must be punished, propaganda must manipulate and the innocent must be executed in order to increase leadership popularity, to refresh propaganda, to feed fear and to politicize elections.
America’s leadership is fully aware of the innocence of the vast majority of prisoners, yet cannot force itself to act against its own inhumanity. For to do so would be to admit mistakes, acknowledge criminality, condemn policies and destroy the authoritarian dream. Closing Guantanamo would expose the façade, the hall of smoke and mirrors, ending the subtleties of fear and intimidation being built around the American public. Perhaps more than anything, freeing the innocent and closing America’s torture centers would confirm the monstrosity of what America has become, destroying the foundations of a new normal being developed, maybe even shattering the bubble of manipulation cast over the population.
As long as Guantanamo remains the motives of fascists will survive, and the indifference of the American people will be assured. As long as its cages are occupied, as long as its torture rooms resonate with the screams of agony and suffering, Guantanamo will be the symbol of a new Amerika, one at war with the Arab and Muslim world, an Amerika at war with its people, and itself. As long as it remains a stain on humanity, America’s clandestine past and her immediate present will be exposed to more and more people, thereby freeing truth and knowledge, liberating the brainwashed and emancipating the manipulated.
Inside America’s gulags the future of the nation is being determined, one malevolent policy at a time, one sadistic interrogator at a time, one tortured soul at a time. It is here where our way of life is being altered, perhaps forever, not by terrorist evildoers hating us for our freedoms, but by fascism’s enablers doing the work of those domestic evildoers that hate us for our freedoms, for our way of life. In this Crusade of Surge and Siege, the Arab and Muslim victims have become a bridge of precedence set and normalcy born reaching out towards America, becoming the scapegoats and patsies granting access, and an omnipresent reach, to tyranny rising over that city on a hill once known as the United States of America.

Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at: manuel@valenzuelas.net. Read other articles by Manuel, or visit Manuel's website.

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