Politics? What politics?

As I write, the "Big Contest" between Trump and Biden is less than a month away, and has seized The National Attention (along with the Covid-19 pandemic, which has sadly become a political issue).

Emotions run high: hyper-partisans on "each side" proclaim that if the "other one" wins, it will mean The End of America As We Know It.

In 2016, I participated in this madness in my usual iconoclastic manner, before I revived this blog (in May of 2019). I tried to be "realistic," and chose a candidate in the primary who was both a member of a "major party" and reasonably close to my own views (Bernie Sanders). After he won (by all rights) the Democratic nomination and then had it stolen from him by the DNC, I switched to a candidate whose views were even closer to mine, Dr. Jill Stein (Green Party). Most Americans believe that any "third party" choice is worse than futile, it is "a vote for (the worse of the 'two candidates')". I was not, and am not, convinced that this view is correct, given the facts that "third parties" (a peculiar term when there are a total of eight) usually get, combined, no more than two or three percent of the vote, and that about 47% of eligible voters don't vote at all. I adopted an unrealistic expectation that Jill could actually win, on the basis of two unlikely scenarios: getting potential voters to look at the website "isidewith.com" where, instead of preselecting the R or the D candidate, you enter your preferences and views without reference to any candidate, and the website matches those preferences with the one candidate who most closely represents your views.

While using isidewith.com to choose which candidate to vote for might be ideal, the dominant paradigm lurks deep inside us all: that there are really only two "viable parties" in this country, and that choosing a candidate from a "third" party constitutes "throwing away your vote" at best and "helping the wrong candidate win" at worst. This view is reinforced by both the "duopoly parties" and the educational and media establishments ever since before Lincoln was elected.

Other countries have other systems, and one radical change in our system might completely eliminate the fear engendered by our established "2-party duopoly:" a system (with several variations) called "ranked-choice voting." It's actually been adopted by in a few states for state elections. Every voter ranks all the candidates by number, their most-to least preferred, freeing them to vote for the candidate closest to their views without the fear that such a vote will "not count." When the votes are counted, the "losing" candidates are eliminated and those votes are transferred (for each voter) to their next-lowest-ranked choice until only two are left. Since no voter can read the minds of all the other voters, they have no way to assume that others don't also share their number-one choice, putting all the candidates on an even, fear-free playing field. No one's vote will be "thrown away" or "undercut" the votes for duopoly (R/B) candidates. Naturally, the duopoly will fight efforts to enact rank-choice voting tooth-and-nail.

On the basis of what could happen, given that four parties were on the ballot in almost every state (R, D, Green and Libertarian), I cast my ballot for the Green candidate, Jill Stein (isidewith gave me a 95% match with my views). After my electoral-system experience in 2016, despite all the rationality I demonstrated in "voting my conscience," I decided to "hold my nose" and support a duopoly candidate, fully recognizing that this approach is not a long-term solution to the "political problem" in a country which has no politics, only political theater. (Hint: it's the "challenger.") On the surface, it should be obvious to any American that "the will of the voters" has almost zero influence on what happens in Washington, or anywhere else in America. It's official: "...two professors from Northwestern University took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all" (Source: https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem).

Even if there was a strong correlation between public opinion and legislation (and the behavior of politicians), there's the matter of electoral fraud (not "voting fraud," which statistically is almost non-existent). The best, scariest and most entertaining documentation of such fraud can be found at https://www.gregpalast.com. This fraud is a symptom of the desperate and corrupt grip of the kleptocrat .01% on our "politics." Unless you're a member of their club, it's "heads they win, tails you lose."

From my experience as a voter in 2016 and my expectations of what will happen this year, you might think I'm in despair about the future of (real) politics in this country. You are mistaken.

My tale of woe above dates back to 2016, but since then, I've come to see a bigger picture, thanks to the work of a grandmother in Alaska and the team she has put together to fix our broken system. (Please refer to my previous post, "Not everything I knew was wrong" and the links near the end of that post.)

The bigger picture includes my fairly-recent realizations that not only is our "politics" not politics, our "money" is not money, but our "government" is not our government. Discovering what is false and what is real can truly set us free. While I believe that the worst American crises in recent history can be partially alleviated by removing President #45 from office, his inevitable replacement will not prove to be much of an improvement (compared to what could happen if the program outlined here is implemented). Please, if you have not already done so, go there and judge for yourself. This new paradigm will take time and effort to absorb and accept, but the rewards for doing so are immense.

The electoral reforms I wished for in 2016 (like ranked-choice voting and using a website like isidewith.com) are still good ideas, but the new paradigm presents a whole new ball game. The only way to win a rigged game is not to play. Time for a new "game." Discover what this new "game" is all about at theamericanstatesassembly.net.

Not everything I knew was wrong.

The title of this blog is an homage to the Firesign Theater, the "Beatles of Comedy," and their album (originally only available as a vinyl LP—remember those?), "Everything You know Is Wrong!" (now on YouTube (https://youtu.be/YKZtt2yEwfs and https://youtu.be/thVDjdSR7SA).  At the end of the record, the narrator (Happy Harry Cox) states, after he discovers that one of his "revealed truths" is wrong, declares "I was right! Everything I knew was wrong!

It recently occurred to me that I should make explicit the implied contradiction in my blog's title, in light of the contemporary insanity I see all around me on the net (and in "real life," whatever that is).

Let me reiterate: not everything I knew was wrong. What did I get right in, say my first 45 years?

The short list of what I got right, in bullet points:

• The scientific method is a reliable way to accumulate accurate information and trustworthy theories, but relying on the "establishment" to provide those things is not. 
• Mere input from the five senses is not, by itself, "reliable information."
• There will never be an end to scientific discoveries or the expansion of human knowledge.
• We are not the only intelligent life in the universe, and (on a trivial level) "UFOs are real."
• "Conventional wisdom" is an oxymoron and most people carry a huge burden of falsehoods.

Regarding the first two bullets, I have commented on the phenomenon of the lack of consideration of scale (relative size) on the part of the more intelligent and less-gullible believers in the "Flat Earth Theory" (and there are a few) as partial explanation for their misperceptions. (See https://everythingiknewwaswrong.blogspot.com/2020/07/do-you-believe-earth-is-flat-heres-why.html) Sadly, in an era when over 90% of this planet's knowledge is at the fingertips of everyone with a smartphone, many folks (including most of the flat-earthers) get their talking points by siding with their preferred "tribe," who deride anyone who disagrees with them as "one of the sheeple," making the error of assuming that, because many establishment "authorities" habitually bombard us with self-serving lies, that everything coming from an "establishment" source must be a lie. It's futile to dissuade these folk from their new, adopted "truths," since their beliefs are unencumbered by the thought process. As Sam Clemens once wrote, "you can't reason someone out of a belief which they weren't reasoned into." I wrote the post linked above for those few people who have fallen into the twin traps of disbelieving everything "establishment" and believing in the unanalyzed evidence of their five senses. Neither can be taken at face value, but must be analyzed properly according to current knowledge and the scientific method.

The "wrong" parts:

Here are a few things I thought I "knew" which proved to be among those self-serving establishment lies (followed by brief summaries of why they were wrong):

• America is an "exceptional" nation, so different in its national character that it stands alone above "lesser" nations, "number one" in its championing of "democracy, freedom and social justice." 

This paradigm died a gruesome death on November 22, 1963. Before the Warren Commission had delivered its verdict, it was obvious to me (among many others) that the official story, with more holes than Swiss cheese (which the Commission was tasked to reinforce), was designed by what became known later as the "National Security State" to deflect attention from the real perpetrators inside "our government." Later, RFK and MLK, Jr. (and others) would be taken out by members of the same teams. I was a personal witness to the intense propaganda campaign designed to brainwash the American people into accepting the Commission's verdict, or (if that campaign failed to convince everyone) agreeing to pretend that "the unthinkable" (assassins within the government) could never be spoken aloud, lest "we" lose our standing as "leaders of the free world." Saying such things aloud, it was said by our "loyal" press, was tantamount to putting the truth above "national security." Anyone daring to question the Commission's official story was branded a "conspiracy theorist," subject to social sanctions, putting their jobs and perhaps their lives and the lives of their families at risk. (One member of Washington's inner circle, jaded by the CIA's series of liquidations of troublesome leaders abroad, on hearing of the assassination, instantly reacted with the unguarded exclamation, "What have we become, a banana republic?") As a skeptic, I felt the personal sting of such "conspiracy theorist" accusations, and (at age 17) wondered: if the President of the United States was not safe from an official bullet, how safe was I? Much to my shame later in life, I stopped speaking out against that Military-Industrial Complex that Ike warned us about. It's been said that JFK was the last US President who believed he was the president, and all presidents who came after him were made aware of the limitations imposed on their authority by that Complex.

Regarding those "Banana Republics;" as a teenager, my take on that characterization was that these poor countries were poor because they were under-industrialized and the victims of their own corrupt leaders. Now that I've read several editions of the book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," I see the situation differently. Their current states are largely creations of our own "governments."

• The "Conservative" worldviews, such as that our nation has limited resources, taxes fund government expenditures (which must be minimized with "balanced budgets"), that safety nets must not be too generous lest they promote lazy and immoral behavior, and that the "national debt" must eventually be paid down, among other "common-sense" things that "everyone knows" (and that "liberals" seem to ignore). Some of this "knowledge" of mine persisted into the 1980s.

• The beliefs and policies of contemporary "liberals" are built on a foundation of sand, since they eventually (as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were fond of saying) "run out of other people's money."

• American politics functions under a "two-party system," where Democrats (mostly on the "left") and Republicans (mostly on the "right") govern the nation. Persistence: into the '90s.

The dissolution of these three bits of "knowledge" can be discussed together. As for "conservatism:" taxes do not fund our "governments." All discussions about money, taxes, our "national debt" and budgets are fantasies based on "facts" which are demonstrably complete fictions. Since at least 1918, when the "Federal Reserve System" was created, we stopped using money. Since then, our "monetary" system has been a system of credit and debt, double-entry bookkeeping, where every debt is balanced by an equal credit. Quantitatively, since the Reagan era, all federal income tax goes to pay the interest on the debt. "Government" is financed entirely by borrowing, through a complex process where funds are created from thin air (ie, borrowed into existence); the Fed (a consortium of private banks) prints our "money" as IOUs called "Federal Reserve Notes," backed by nothing but "the full faith and credit of the US government." (Not quite an accurate description, covered later in "Who Owns The Credit.") The Fed then sells the money they print (or simply create as "money of account" as bookkeeping entries in a computer) to the "government." (I'll later explain why I persist in putting quotes around that word.)

Back to the three bullet-points above: "limited resources" are not so much a fact of nature as they are a way of reinforcing the ideology of scarcity, supported by most Western churches, economists, and "governments." We are ingrained by our societies to think of macroeconomics as if they were fully analogous to household budgets, where a finite income must be managed to provide for that family's needs and support (ideally) some savings. Macroeconomics is an entirely different paradigm.

The "conservative" views about economics are at variance with reality; in addition to a misunderstanding (real or purported) of our actual economic system, conservatives blame economic hardship on the victims of this system, claiming that if these victims would just work harder (and longer), and live within their means, they'd be fine. Observe that it's literally impossible for one to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps. The "liberals," as viewed by the "conservatives" (in the parody-cliches above), are focused on using "government" as a tool to level a playing field so tilted by the kleptocrats that the "money" rolls downhill, into fat-cat pockets. The actual liberals (actually neoliberals) focus on alleviating the misery of the poor by using government funding (without ever challenging our wonderful "capitalist" system). Because liberals accept (and thereby reinforce) the fiction that taxes provide this funding, they fight a losing battle. The real (as it functions) economic system bears no resemblance to this model.

As I write this, we are about 50 days out from the next presidential election. Let's peek at that third bullet point: our "2-party system," where Democrats and Republicans (apparently) compete to control our national and local politics. Problem: there is no such system. We have no real "politics." 

What we have instead is political theater, an intramural game where two teams (the Rs and the Ds), both privately-owned corporations, function as lobbyists (paid largely by the same set of kleptocrats). Two wings, one bird, one pile of guano (with slightly different flavors). Note that when the Berniecrats sued the DNC for the primary-election fraud of 2016, the DNC's legal team's defense was that, as a privately-held corporation, they had no obligation to follow their own rules and could nominate whoever they wanted, regardless of the wishes of the elected delegates. (This is on the public record, folks.) That's why Bernie's team lost. 

(Fun research: look up the corporate status of our "two political parties" in Dun & Bradstreet. Also see The Problem | RepresentUs, where you will find this: "The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. One thing that does have an influence? Money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a “statistically non-significant impact,” economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence.")

"American politics" (as well as most politics worldwide) is usually framed in terms of "left versus right," or "liberals versus conservatives" (or, if you're an ideologue, "communists versus fascists"). In light of who is really in charge of "politics," the kleptocrat class, I propose another paradigm: this club of the .01% manages our political theater by the classic method of molding these purported ideologies so as to control the dialogue, as the apparently-different sides "battle" each other, to achieve the desired outcomes: keep the two teams in a showman-like pitched battle against each other, expending the energy and wealth of their supporters, while keeping themselves, the kleptocrat fight managers, out of sight, out of mind and out of danger. If I was in that club, that's what I would do. Why leave such a high-stakes game to chance? We're talking Quadrillions here. (Inflation, you know.)

Regarding what's real and what's not: I already touched on the peculiar fact that what we regard as "money" is actually nothing of the sort; it's been replaced by a system of credit and debt. We are trained to believe that all the debt is on our shoulders, and the credit is somehow owned by the banks. In reality, the exact opposite is true. In our current system, we use Federal Reserve Notes, or their equivalent in checkbook accounts (computer ledger entries), in place of real money. A Note is actually a certificate of debt, that is, an IOU, a promise to pay in the future. What difference does it make, if our "money" is actually IOUs, if everyone accepts it as money? We shall shortly see.

"Government."

I was in my 60s when I first heard the assertion that what we thought of as "our Federal government" was actually a corporation. I scoffed. Then I gradually started doing my own research. Funny thing, when I looked in the Dun & Bradstreet listings of corporations, there they were. Corporations cannot be sovereign governments, and sovereign governments cannot be corporations.

Holy ****!

However, sovereign governments can, and do, create corporations and delegate specific functions of specific kinds to those corporations. Our Founding Fathers did this. They knew what they were doing; it's unfortunate that we forgot this fact. 

I am indebted to a grandmother in Alaska who goes by the pen name of Anna von Reitz (and who also uses "Anna Reitzinger"). She has several books out, a Facebook page, and several websites. The primary link for the body of her work is annavonreitz.com. While I don't endorse everything she writes or share all her opinions, I believe that the core of her most important work is right on the money. (See this link for my caveats.) She recently established a new website to concentrate on the primary solution to restoring our actual government (as opposed to the corporate impostors which now pretend to be our sovereign governments), theamericanstatesassembly.net. Don't take my word for it, you must look at the evidence and decide for yourself if her analysis is correct. My confidence in that analysis was bolstered recently by my experience in court.

Rather than try to condense her work into a few bite-size pieces, I encourage you to visit the websites above, and make your own evaluations. I'm working on another post, a cautionary tale of how dangerous it is to depend on the opinions and advice of "thought leaders," without keeping a constant eye on their feet (which are invariably caked with, if not made of, clay, my own included). "Let the buyer beware." Topical (as we are approaching the 2020 general election), its working title is "Politics? What politics?"