The recent flight of speculators, with their massive capital funds, to and from the commodities markets has driven the price of nearly every commodity from soybeans to a barrel of crude oil up to new record highs, and then down the limit several days in a row.

Most of these speculators are just common people, or their mutual funds, like lemmings following the pack to their own doom, having far more money than brains, and even less scruples, some have even borrowed against their own homes to reinvest in speculation; this is exactly what happened to bring us the Great Depression in 1929!

The rest of these parasites are the big fat rats that lead the pack in every direction, arriving first, leaving first, eating the major portion of the cheese, and leaving the little people in the pack to fight and cannibalize each other over the crumbs.

Because the housing bubble already burst, they can no longer support their greedy, lazy and non-productive lifestyles by outbidding poor young families for their very own house to live in. So they have led the pack to greener pastures, where they will ruin the lives, dreams and years of hard work for other good people by outbidding everyone for the food they need to feed themselves and their children, and the fuel they need to get to work.

There is no greater threat to the stability of our economy than this useless, yet self-serving, speculation. Due to far too favorable tax treatment as legitimate capital gains, it has become pervasive, and wrongly legitimized, within the investment portfolios of the common man’s retirement funds, as well as the market mavens of Wall Street.

Speculation serves absolutely no useful purpose in the marketplace; it creates no wealth.

All new wealth entering any earthly economic system in any given period of time is purely the result of sunlight striking the surface of our little biosphere and, through some thermo-chemical or thermodynamic process, being stored as useful energy in some other ethereal or material form. All real capital is just stored sunlight, and we have control of it when we harvest it from the fields, forests, mines, atmosphere and waters of the Earth!

For the lazy parasites of Wall Street to acquire this new wealth without Super-human intervention, it is necessary to devise elaborate schemes by which they steal it from those who legitimately produced it without offering a fair market exchange of equal value.

Speculation in the commodities markets is the ultimate tool in this thievery scheme.

The commodities market speculator never takes possession of their purchase; there is no need, as they never had any intention of using the stored energy to accomplish useful work for society. They never add any value to it by making it more useful to other humans, like grinding grain into flour, or baking it into bread. They never even move it from one place where there is a surplus to another where people need more supply of it.

The only possible, and universal, effect of all speculation is to tend to drive down prices for the producer, and to drive prices up for the consumer. It forces all legitimate bidders (who want to use or improve the commodity) in the marketplace to play the same sick game and widen their profit margins to avoid their own bankruptcy and compensate for this illegitimate extraction of wealth from the production system, without fair exchange.

Only by enacting punitive taxes upon speculative earnings can we ever hope to stabilize our economy, level the playing field for the producers, and assure fair value to end users.

In a world with finite food reserves and over 6 Billion people to feed, nobody has a right to hoard all the food they can afford to buy, leaving millions of other people to starve.

We would not permit such a thing with a gun; neither should we allow it with a market call order. For the human with the empty stomach, the effect feels exactly the same.

After last week’s letter, I received many inquiries from Citizens willing to take the bitter pill of our own responsibility in the poor state of our beloved Republic. Most asked how we as Citizens, and as a Society, could and should proceed to elect good representatives and what must be done to recoup the loss of our leading position in this world.

Space precludes me from answering these questions completely in one post, but I will attempt to address, in general terms, what we should do as the first small steps to take back our government from the pernicious and surreptitious forces which have taken over it from the smoky back rooms of corporate, union and political party machines.

First, reject every mental bias and subconscious sense of loyalty to any political party; these are nothing but mafias that will tear our country apart to achieve their own power.

Both Thomas Jefferson and, especially, George Washington were adamantly opposed to the development of organized political parties and the derision that they create. We must vote for people who are willing to break the stranglehold that the two major parties have on political discourse in this country. Every election law they have ever written has insured their advantage over all other parties, persons and ideas at the polls; these laws must be removed from the books to allow the People free access to all alternatives.

We need Representatives with good ideas, not politicians with “good” connections.

Vote only for great statesmen who will not promise to give you something for nothing.

Reject the pandering promises of professional politicians, and the lies they tell:

If any candidate ever refers to our “Democracy”, or “our two party system”; DO NOT VOTE FOR THEM! That candidate is either a cunning liar or knows absolutely nothing about our Constitution. There is not one reference to Democracy or political parties in our Constitution. The Founding Fathers never created, nor ever intended that we should have, a Democracy; they gave us a more stable and sustainable Representative Republic.

All Democracies end shortly in the same tragic way – in bloody civil war! Thomas Jefferson said, “Democracy is 51% of the people oppressing 49%.”, and Benjamin Franklin said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner. Liberty is a very well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”

When we have Statesmen elected, we must insist that they:

1. Restore the entire world’s confidence in the US Dollar by restoring the Constitutional Gold Standard; remove the Dollar from the control of a freshly audited Federal Reserve.

2. Remove collection of direct taxation from the IRS and return it to the townships, as the Founding Fathers intended it should be when they said, “We should never put the guns and the purse strings in the hands of the same people.”

3. Reform our tax codes to severely penalize speculators in the marketplace, establish Reciprocity as the ultimate standard in the application of import duties on foreign trade, encourage Americans to save and invest in their own country and Gold-backed currency, encourage primary production, prohibit sales taxes on any basic necessity, and treat all legal entities (private or corporate persons) equally with a Flat Rate Gross Income Tax.

4. Reform Social Security to stop the legalized theft by this Ponzi scheme, and attach to:

5. Reform of our Farm policy to store up food to conform to the Biblical principles of the Tithe system, as prescribed for the proper care of Society’s less fortunate.

I will further elaborate on the particulars of these reforms in later posts.

“A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation.”  ~James Freeman Clarke, Sermon

Every ill of our rural depopulation, falling dollar, failing economy and declining influence in the world is a direct result of our poor choices in electing our representatives for our own short-term selfish gains. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

It is much like Will Rogers said when asked by another newspaper reporter, “Mr. Rogers, is it true that our government is full of thieves and scoundrels?” “W-e-l-l, y-e-s, but I believe it’s a good cross-section of the American People!”

Now, I wouldn’t put it quite that way, because I have seen the evidence of what an awfully cruel and ugly world this would be without the American Miracle and all those Great Americans who have done so much to serve the cause of saving his fellow man from himself. But, then, who will save us from ourselves?

We could just resign ourselves to the concept that our 200 year run is up, like every empire before us, slip into oblivion, and let the world slide back into the Dark Ages.

Or, we could wake up and smell the apple juice, chokecherry jam, cornbread, bacon, eggs, milk and honey (I don’t have a single neighbor that raises coffee) and get back to what we are good at – using what God gave us and being thankful for it, producing food, developing new technologies to make higher quality products that yield a better quality of life, and sharing it all with a planet still very hungry for some semblance of sanity!

There has never been anything more worthy of keeping alive than the American Miracle!

Every failure of our government and industry has really been a missed opportunity. Our recent efforts to force our ‘Genetically Modified’ (GMO) crops upon a world demanding ‘Organic’ food is just one more in a long list of perfect examples of this.

The 217 year history of the Federal Government meddling and muddling in the ethanol industry is another. All those ill-advised and unjust government interferences in the marketplace have retarded ethanol technology development at least 100 years, caused thousands of businessmen and farm families irreparable harm, driven them from their land, damaged the environment, funded organized crime, and is presently setting us up for another catastrophe with more far-reaching effects than the 1980’s Farm Crisis.

When poor economic policy is piled upon poor farm policy upon poor tax policy from all political sides for 22 decades, we could see farm land prices pushed to the point where only the wealthiest absentee landlords will own all the productive land and the people who work that land will be no more than feudal serfs, and old serfs at that, as no young American might ever again seek to enter into the farming profession.

When there were four farm families on every section, all of our rural small towns and cities were thriving and growing. If you really want to see tragedy in our rural communities, just let a few corporate farmers farm all the land for even fewer wealthy, speculating, absentee landlords, and we will all travel this road to serfdom, together.

Price stability is much preferable to high prices that cannot be sustained. We can manage for profit at any price by adjusting inputs, but we cannot buy high-priced land, fuel, fertilizer, seed, labor, and equipment, only to end up selling low-priced grain again when we have destroyed the livestock industries that we have always had as our baseline market to add value to our grains, and, then, millions of hectares of grasslands and forests all over the world have been put to the plow to get in on the ‘energy farming’ windfall.

We have better options, but we need Great Statesmen, not professional politicians that will tell us anything we want to hear, just to get elected and fill their own pockets!

 

I think there is but one thing that all Americans can agree upon in this time of political division, that we are all sick and tired of the proverbial “politics as usual”.

 

We should all recognize our own part in this, as it seems to be purely human nature to hold ourselves blameless, while always vilifying our opponents.

We see it even in the pages of our local papers over immigration, neither side willing to see the logic of the other, and trading accusations of “bigotry” and “political intrigues”.

We should all recognize that we need immigrants to do jobs our own spoiled children will not do, but we should also realize that immigrants must pay their dues by serving this society in the same way they always have – starting at the bottom and working their way up.

They must not be permitted to drive down our wage rates by competing with American citizens for work in any business, or any job covered by minimum wage laws.

Their purpose is to serve American society, not to subsidize the rich with cheap labor to tend their children, houses, gardens, limousines and factories.

We need them to pick lettuce, not to make it more difficult for all of us to afford lettuce!

Exemption of any job from minimum wage laws must be predicated upon the employer’s participation in some form of primary production subject to commodity market pricing. Any company who sets the price of their own product in the marketplace has no legitimate need of any form of subsidized labor, or exemption from wage laws.

Likewise, for America’s limited needs, we must allow only the best and brightest from all over the world to emigrate here, not only those who find it easiest to steal across our borders and shamelessly break our laws!

That is a very poor way of getting started paying their dues and convincing the rest of us that they deserve to be citizens.

A Swedish student or a Ukrainian doctor should have the same opportunity as any Mexican to come here and pick lettuce until they earn the right to citizenship.

I spent over 12 years doing volunteer work for my Latino brothers and sisters all over the Americas, and I resent being accused of bigotry by people who have never invested more than a short vacation in Latin America.

I know that most Latinos will make wonderful American citizens, if they are willing to put forth the effort to obey our laws and assimilate to our society; if they are not, they have no business being here.

We have no need to become the same kind of Third World economy that they are trying to escape from.

I would hope that the far left cares more for their country, and its legitimate citizens, than to give their blind support for unfettered Latino immigration purely to buy votes.

But, with the immigration policies they currently espouse, they hurt the workers and the poor people that they have always claimed to be fighting for, and help only those who have already proven they have no regard for our laws, and the wealthy people and corporations that simply do not want to pay Americans a living wage. The very people that they have always railed against!

What more are we to ascertain from this?