4Horsemen
06-17-2007, 03:13 PM
Here's a good read about some the BS that's taken place that's ruining our country!!
Without further ado, here is the promised (nonetheless incomplete) litany of tactics pursued by the oligarchy of power brokers:
* Systematic subversion of the property rights of the populace through market and currency manipulation, through casual government property seizure, through regulation transferring control from the nominal owner to the government, and through property taxes
* emplacement of state-as-babysitter arrangements, so that the state has a pretext for wanton interference in private affairs, and so that rebellious impulses tend to be channelled into self-destructive and self-defeating conduct
* Accumulation of a staggering, numbingly vast national debt, the mere servicing of which is a substantial proportion of the federal budget (and these interest payments are transferred almost entirely to banking titans)
* Onerous income taxation paralyzing the populace but leaving unscathed the strategic investment foundations controlled by the establishment, donations to which are also tax-deductible. The tax system allows big capital to be translated into social control with no encumbrance, but the translation of small capital into subsistence assets and commodities (housing, transportation, food, water, etc.) is encumbered with income taxation, and often sales, excise, and property taxes. The Canadian government, in a drive to convince its wealthy residents to stay in Canada, reported that the average Californian loses 48% of his income to taxes, compared to slightly over 50% for a sample Canadian locale.
* Laws which provide rewards for delegating control over one's money, particularly, tax-deferred mutual funds
* Public stock markets that allow people who add near zero (or negative) wealth to the economy, to increase their monetary holdings with near zero effort, and at a high proportion of ownership, exert decisive control over companies.
* A system of patents and copyrights that creates unshakeable state-enforced monopolies on whole families of products and means of production, and information that is in commun circulation in the culture, often controlled by corporate intellectual property barons who contributed nothing material to the creations they monopolize. More generally, the patent system creates an impenetrable intellectual logjam, so that complex technological innovation cannot possibly be realized without waiting for scores of patents to expire - the logistical, legal, political, and financial overhead of collecting all the required licensing arrangements is simply prohibitive, not just for individuals but even for large corporations. The copyright system similarly creates an intellectual logjam, by making it impractical to the point of impossibility for historians, analysts, artists, and indeed ordinary people, to collect, arrange, and present the very substance of their culture without breaking the law.
* Hate crime laws that encourage the impression that crimes against uncovered people (specifically, healthy white heterosexual males) are less serious than crimes against covered people.
* A galaxy of investment firms that create no wealth, but seduce many of society's best and brightest to work in fund management and market model design and maintenance. The compensation packages (and here, compensation is a particularly apt term) offered by investment firms are so liberal that firms outside the investment business can seldom compete on that basis. Society is thus largely robbed of the wealth these recruits might otherwise create.
* An extensive infrastructure of excise taxes, levied variously as sales taxes, income taxes, property taxes, duties, and miscellaneous taxes, by which the government directly molds the economic patterns of the public
* A cult of employment in which universal full time specialized occupation under the command of a manager is considered to constitute economic success. Under the influence of pseudofeminist propaganda, women enter the common work force en masse, increasing the supply of labor, reducing wages, so that in a typical family both parents must work, so that they must relegate their children to the care, custody, and control, of people whose full time specialized occupation is mass child care, making child rearing part of the regulated, monetized economy, substantially eroding the natural institution of the family, facilitating indoctrination of the children with the tenets of collectivism in general and socialism and statism in particular. Full time, specialized, managed employment is onerous on its face, of course, since it leaves no time or energy for personally motivated autonomous inventive pursuits.
* Extensive disclosure requirements for tax-exempt (“501(c)(3)”) organizations, in which the IRS acts as an intelligence-gathering organization. Those privy to its secrets can monitor the activities of foundations, and those foundations that attempt to conceal completely legal activities in order to forestall confrontation with political adversaries are exposed to prosecution.
* Use of zoning law as a weapon of economic and political control, as by Rudy Giuliani in Manhattan and Jan Jones in Las Vegas
* “Order-out” zones wherein zero tolerance for certain vice-type activities is aggressively enforced in neighborhoods of a developed region selected arbitrarily by local authorities in pursuit of their own political and financial interest
* A lumbering, partly for-profit prison system, holding a greater proportion of the nation's total population than does the prison system of any other nation on earth. More than half of this nation's prison population is serving time only for petty drug offenses. The huge prison infrastructure can be recruited instantaneously to incarcerate several million political prisoners (though of course most of those imprisoned for petty drug offenses are, in fact, political prisoners).
* A labyrinthine system of weapons laws which vary by city, county, and state, from effectively total bans on private carrying of firearms, to no-permit concealed carry, and everything in-between. The construction of these laws makes it nearly impossible for those whose work involves travel over state lines, and for many whose work involves travel over city lines, to carry a firearm for self-protection. Moreover, federal laws enacted in 1934, 1968, and 1986, are prima facie (and severe) abridgements of the right to keep and bear arms. In short, the second amendment of the US Constitution has been and continues to be grossly, flagrantly, and routinely violated by local, state, and federal authorities.
* Government and corporate policies and practices that profoundly erode individual privacy
* A property tax assessment procedure in which the government insists on a thorough walk-through of one's residence and business, in order that it can decide how much to steal from the owner
* Building permit requirements in which even simple refurbishing or finishing of basements and attics by owners, visible only to residents, is held hostage to government approval and hence to political interests
* Allocation of vast sums of tax money for IMF-coordinated “bailouts” of distant nations often ruled by profoundly abusive and dictatorial governments. These “bailouts” are in practice bribery by which the recipient nation is made to abdicate its sovereignty, and in many cases they are little more than massive transfers of wealth from taxpayers to the establishment.
* Direct taxpayer-funded bailouts of ailing corporations. This is simply a transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the establishment, as directed by the establishment, so that the establishment can perpetuate their corporate empires.
* A statutory infrastructure so vast and obscure that essentially everybody breaks at least several laws every day. The oceanic system of federal, state, and local regulations also serve as a barrier to entry and to success for small businesses, protecting existing vast corporations (with their armadas of lawyers) from potential competition
* Seatbelt and helmet laws that mandate individual behavior that is of no consequence whatever to the safety of others. Laws such as these imply that the public consists of slaves who are obligated to adhere to government-mandated measures of self-protection in order that they will be able to continue to produce for their employers.
* Universal exposure to civil litigation: everyone is liable to be bled bone dry in stupid suits, and only those who are politically favored - either individually or as a class - can expect to escape. Citizen juries are rigged by social engineering to implement the will of the establishment.
* Routine acquittal of plainly guilty defendants by obscure technicalities, and routine parolling of those who should clearly not be parolled, to produce among the public and particularly among those in the executive branch - especially, police officers and prosecutors - a disdain for an apparently ineffective rule of law. This makes them more likely to accept and serve a totalitarian oligarchy.
* A citizen jury system in which those with moral objections to the law are systematically culled, resulting in juries that are populated with obedient statists
* Marginalization of acting as one's own attorney at trial, placing Bar Association lawyers in critical positions. Defense lawyers are required, essentially as a matter of law, to defend individuals they cannot in right conscience defend. Thus, those who remain defense trial attorneys are to a man, immoral, and the marginalization of the defendant-attorney results in the injection of immorality into all viable defenses - with the result that the public is now familiar with such maxims as acquittal of guilty defendants being more routine than acquittal of innocent ones. Another crucial effect of must-defend laws and the general lawyer ethos of jousting and bravado is that victory in court becomes a matter of how expensive a lawyer (or set thereof) one can afford, and not of the merits of one's case, since lawyers practice at winning cases with poor prima facie merits.
* A parole system in which sentences are capriciously shortened, predicated directly on an admission of guilt and expression of remorse by the prisoner - who may be falsely imprisoned
* Incipience of facemask operations and deployment of high-tech less-lethal weapons among domestic police forces, creating psychological distance between police and policed, and encouraging casual use of force.
* The transformation of sexuality into a breeding ground for litigation. Utterly perverse regulations have been enacted on college campuses requiring, for example, specific verbal permission for each action in an intimate setting. Sexual harassment law has become a vicious affront to reason and social harmony.
* Centrally controlled dating services and “psychic” hotlines that constitute direct instruments of social engineering (for an interesting twist, see TheraDate, in which psychiatrists make the decisions behind closed doors)
* Institutionalization of the nursing home, to which the aged are relegated. Those who have gained the wisdom of age are thus separated from society, and their corrective common sense influence removed from the community. They are also made a captive, dependent, marginalized population targetted with tailored campaigns to gain their votes en bloc.
* Franchises burgeoning like kudzu vine, inexorably choking independent operators to the brink of extinction. A franchisor is an incorporated entity that owns a trademark, and under that trademark, markets a set of products that its franchisees produce according to a uniform business model. Franchisors bind franchisees to a contract under which any prolonged or serious deviation from the business model and associated standard operating procedures and schedules results in revocation of the right to use the trademark under which the franchisee built his business. In particular, franchisees typically have little or no control over product offerings and prices, and often must purchase supplies from suppliers chosen by the franchisor. Thus, it is a miniature command economy. The arrangement, in toto, constitutes an engine of microeconomic homogenization, and centralizes control in the hands of the small group of people who control the franchisors. A franchisor typically has no property, or only incidental property for its headquarters, and in particular seldom owns the means of production, storage, or distribution. It is an institution of control, not of ownership, and it is made of managers, analysts, and lawyers. It has no critical geographic center, and is sometimes entirely virtual.
* Co-option of child custody as a weapon by which the establishment enforces compliance with its agenda. Custody decisions are often extra-judicial, or based on factors other than compliance with law and provision for the child's welfare proper. Children are regularly stolen outright by the state from people whose views or lifestyles threaten or offend the establishment.
* A culture of lengthy commutes by private automobile, in which commuters spend one or more hours a day subject to numbing congestion and frequently inane and stringent traffic laws (red lights with no one using the green, highway speed limits far below actual safe speed, etc.), and the caprices of frequently crabby and discriminatory traffic police. Car painted red? Bumper sticker piss off the cop? Hair too long? Attractive female? Unusual car? Racial minority? Racial minority in a suit? Racial minority in an expensive car? In fact, unusual in any way? You're a target! To quote Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, “Arrest, v.t. Formally to detain one accused of unusualness.” This time spent in a nearly freedom-free zone habituates the population to powerless queueing and government tyranny and caprice, and profoundly instills conformism. On most highways, you can be pulled over at the whimsy of a cop regardless of your speed, since travelling the speed limit makes you a danger and travelling the speed of other cars makes you a speeder. The differential expense of commuting by private automobile, compared to mass transit, is obvious - and is of immense benefit to the petroleum and automotive corporate titans, and to a degree, to the medical industry, the construction industry, the insurance industry. and of course, the bureaucrats who operate such friendly, competent, cooperative, responsive organizations as the DMV. In Connecticut, a new law, Public Act 98-215, has gone into effect which makes uninsured motor vehicles subject to forfeiture by the state, meaning one essentially rents one's car from a pact consisting of the government and the insurance industry, on their non-negotiable terms.
* A culture of overconsumption, overbuying, and overeating. Americans are the fattest people in the world. They eat too much. They buy all sorts of crap they don't really want. They buy so much of it that they must make periodic donations of the detritus to “charitable” organizations - sometimes donating whole cars! Overconsumption is probably the result of decades of advertiser carpet bombing (psychological warfare), which was motivated by the desire to sell more to increase revenue to enable corporate growth. The physical unfitness of the populace is probably seen as a net benefit by the establishment, since it impairs ability to work in a corporate environment only slightly, but greatly increases fidelity to the status quo, because of reliance on the reign of order to provide them an environment they can survive and which protects them. The combination of physical unfitness, and the effective bans on private handgun carry in major urban centers like New York City, Los Angeles, Denver, etc., create an artificial demand for police officers. Also, the heaps of unneeded products collected in households are thought of, perhaps often only subconsciously, as a cache to be protected, increasing fidelity to the status quo.
* Urbanization and suburbanization, with corresponding shrinkage in the amount of rural land available for private occupation and use, in order to place as great a proportion of the population as possible in a situation in which basic subsistence can be maintained only by conformity with the corporate/state economic system
* A culture of perpetual personal debts, and particularly of perpetual mortgages (or rents), which tethers employees to their jobs on pain of bankruptcy, homelessness, and starvation
* State and regional lotteries operated by the government, which encourage the public to view wealth as something one achieves by dumb luck, without any benefit to society, and by which the government enables addictive, compulsive behavior among the public, creates disgraceful spectacles, annihilates the constructive, and embraces stark hypocrisy (a private citizen operating a lottery is breaking the government's own laws). Also, the state justifies the lotteries by spending a portion of the proceeds on so-called education and so-called remedial programs for gambling addicts. This is a web of wackiness. Most odiously, lotteries create situations where people with great influence are directly and utterly reliant on the perpetuation of the status quo for that influence, and because the influence is wholly unearned, feel beholden to the establishment for having visited this unearned bounty upon them. The fact of having won a lottery reveals absolutely nothing about the character of an individual, but that individual nonetheless thereafter wields substantial influence. These people constitute a kingdom of the ordinary.
* Mindless confrontation and humiliation shows, like Howard Stern's and Jerry Springer's, in which (respectively) guests volunteer to be disgraced by a shameless, abusive, repugnant buffoon, or are paid to air their private or imaginary grudges and engage in violent altercations. At least as loathsome are talk shows like Jenny Jones in which an audience of banal least-common-denominators stand in righteous indignation of those who are not similarly banal and common. These shows are just conduits for other tactics in this catalog.
* A culture in which most individuals have too little spare time, too little sleep, and too little energy left to pursue private interests of intellectual consequence and originality. Between slavish work, grueling commutes, the mundanities of maintaining household and family, and the proper social appearance and rituals (yard maintenance, church attendance, parties and restaurants, health clubs and book clubs and social clubs and chorales and group excursions and conferences and on and on), there is time and energy only for sitcoms and a nap before it all starts again. America now has the highest per-capita GDP of any nation in the world - more than the Japanese who were advertised as perverse workaholics in the 1980's. In order to achieve this, Americans have had to sleep less, surrender the last vestiges of their private time (the time equivalent of disposable income), and work harder for their masters. Why do they do this? Social engineering, employee competition (because of the social engineering, there's always someone else who will work the hours on the employer's terms), a decline in real wages facing off against the same towering mortgages and rising rents, and increasing corporate consolidation resulting in a nowhere-else-to-go mentality for workers in many industries.
* Promulgation of misleading and corrupting benchmark economic indicators, such as so-called GDP and so-called unemployment, which encourage practices, and serve as ostensible justifications for policies, which are detrimental to quality of life, to the environment, to the economy (in real terms), and to national security. Consider that every trip to the emergency room, every toxic discharge cleanup, every piece of equipment wrecked through indifference or incompetence and replaced, and every degrading, mindless office or factory or retail job, are registered by these inane indicators as improvements.
* Environmental policies that needlessly micromanage many basic activities of the citizenry, abandon sovereignty, and regularly place higher priority on the comfort of animals than on the liberties of man. Many policies also onerously burden individuals while leaving unscathed industries whose destructive activity in the same or similar areas is many times greater than the total harm done by individuals in their private capacities.
* Sterilization of public areas through police harassment and brutalization of panhandlers, homeless people, street peddlers, posterers and street stencilers, street performers, and even simple loiterers, leaving nothing but dead streets people hurry from, and the mindkilling uniform omnipresence of government and corporate images.
* A centrally controlled and pervasive mass media by which public perceptions are extensively manipulated, and which is used to marginalize (and in some cases, criminalize through lobbyist-prompted legislation and regulation) small, independent, non-compliant minority media. The mass media machine also allows the coordinated and generally unperceived incremental shifting of culture at a rate far more rapid than occurs naturally, as directed by the establishment.
* Movies and television programs which present and romanticize examples of criminality and marginalized behavior, particularly murder, destructive mayhem, and criminal conspiracies of every ilk. The conflicting pressures of cigarette-smoking, drug-using role models in entertainment programming (and real life), and authority figures (and some role models) poo-pooing tobacco and other drugs in public service announcements and appearances, is inherently destructive. Shows such as Chris Carter's “X Files” also exhibit paranoid, irrational thought as though it is reasonable, and intermingle fragments of genuine scandals and conspiracies with unadulterated crap about extraterrestrials, psychokinesis, mythical monsters, and a bevy of quacky odds and ends. The effect is to produce in the viewer an association between the legitimate and the quacky, and subvert the viewer's capacity to reasonably distinguish one from the other. An endless stream of hyperviolence in the media also fosters violence in society, and this violence in society is then used as an excuse for disarmament of law-abiding citizens, and for highly intrusive police policies.
* A democratic system in which typically no one on a particular ballot is actually congenial for most of the voters to whom it will be presented. The mechanics of this system were established by the original US Constitution, and this dreadful consequence is somewhat intrinsic to the system and somewhat the consequence of political and sociological evolution. The most dire outcome is that the voter is forced to vote for a candidate with which he disagrees on critical issues (this is profoundly demoralizing) or to “throw away his vote” by writing in the name of someone he actually finds congenial. In Sweden, Mickey Mouse has won at least one election, as effectively disenfranchised voters wrote in their discontent. The solution is a new system in which all ballots are exclusively write-in, and a voter can cast his ballot for anyone who has declared candidacy. <kaz@freedom.usa.com> has written a brief essay on democracy that is germane.
* A system of selective voter emboldening and alienation in which those who are likely to vote as the establishment intends are encouraged to vote, and those who are likely to vote contrary to the intentions of the establishment are discouraged from voting. This is achieved through marketing both by private interests (MTV ”Rock the Vote” etc.) and through state or semi-state actions. Voting regulations and procedures are also designed to favor those who are more likely to vote as the establishment intends; for example, those who travel or relocate frequently find many barriers to participation in elections. Only 24% of eligible voters voted for Bill Clinton in 1996; this cannot reasonably be construed as a popular mandate.
* Perpetuation of the two-party system, principally through statutory barriers to ballot inclusion, and in the mass media, systematic blackout or, occasionally, positive marginalization of alternative parties. The two politically subsidized parties are, to a large degree, centrally controlled political apparatuses who thanks largely to the corporate mass media largely control who can and can't occupy elected office. This article from Boston Review details the odious results of the system itself. <kaz@freedom.usa.com> has written a brief essay on the two-party system that is germane.
* Fabrication and amplification of divisive, emotionally charged political issues, to distract the masses from serious issues and keep them waging wars of words (and sometimes bombs, as with the abortion issue) with each other rather than expending their energy in pursuit of actual self-interest (the dictates of popular self-interest conflict with the objectives of the establishment). This tactic mates with the two-party system tactic to produce a political environment in which no candidate is desirable. As a consequence of this, the voters' decisions are easily guided by the (centrally controlled) mass media, since the voters perceive no real, compelling reason to prefer either candidate.
* Corruption of the immigration process, admitting great numbers of poor, illiterate, non-English-speaking immigrants without checking for criminal backgrounds, then interning or expelling some of them as directed by non-Constitutional secret courts positioned to implement arbitrary political agendas.
* Staging of so-called “government shutdowns” to shock the economy and society (this procedure is detailed in Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars)
* A system of censorship administered by the Federal Communications Commission, which extirpates government-identified cuss words and other types of speech the government has determined are indecent, to stigmatize key biological activities and systems helping to manufacture guilt and alienation centering thereon, to accustom the population to frivolous government abridgement of freedom of speech, to lead the population to the false conclusion that government has a proper role in preventing people from being offended, and to serve as a ubiquitous reminder of the power of government (every time you hear something bleeped, hear someone falter or hesitate while reading something containing forbidden language on the air, that is the government exerting its power over ordinary speech). Note that, in the absence of these government-imposed restrictions, the market itself will drive many media outlets to extirpate the same material currently prohibited by the FCC. Also, note the rising enforcement of municipal ordinances that outlaw pronunciation of government-defined offensive language in public places - including public parks in New York City. The governments' motivations here are similar, and the effect is obviously more stark and direct.
* Campaigning for digital radio and digital television broadcast systems, particularly those transmitted from orbiting satellites, to squeeze out small operators, render the receiver systems insensitive to cheap, accessible terrestrial transmitters, and reduce the variety of usable signals accessible to a particular receiver (directly reducing programming choices)
* Transformation of the economy from predominantly industrial to predominantly service, making the nation more reliant on foreign nations to maintain its economy and hence its national security
* Export of factory jobs overseas or to Central and South America, often destroying some of the last bastions of social capital and industrial self-reliance
* Bankrupting of small independent farmers, resulting in consolidation of farm land and agriculture into titanic corporations whose holdings are tended by modern-day serfs
* Wholesale destruction of social capital, through the systematic undermining of the bases for trust, and direct and indirect subversion of the family and local community. This is achieved through manipulation of legislation and the economy, through control of the educational system, and through manipulation of culture using the centrally controlled mass media. In particular, many children are being left parentless for most of the time during their formative years. Destruction of family cohesion and loyalty also means that those who are penniless and incapable of working - in particular, many of the elderly - must turn to the government to meet their subsistence requirements. This population of government dependents will always vote for the status quo and incumbents, or for authoritarian communism.
* Enactment and enforcement of laws that mandate racial and gender discrimination, while simultaneously tending to effectively favor those of lower aptitude over those of greater aptitude for the task at issue. The primary effects of such policies are to breed resentment, distrust, and hate, in copious quantities, and to erode national strength, critically in some areas.
Without further ado, here is the promised (nonetheless incomplete) litany of tactics pursued by the oligarchy of power brokers:
* Systematic subversion of the property rights of the populace through market and currency manipulation, through casual government property seizure, through regulation transferring control from the nominal owner to the government, and through property taxes
* emplacement of state-as-babysitter arrangements, so that the state has a pretext for wanton interference in private affairs, and so that rebellious impulses tend to be channelled into self-destructive and self-defeating conduct
* Accumulation of a staggering, numbingly vast national debt, the mere servicing of which is a substantial proportion of the federal budget (and these interest payments are transferred almost entirely to banking titans)
* Onerous income taxation paralyzing the populace but leaving unscathed the strategic investment foundations controlled by the establishment, donations to which are also tax-deductible. The tax system allows big capital to be translated into social control with no encumbrance, but the translation of small capital into subsistence assets and commodities (housing, transportation, food, water, etc.) is encumbered with income taxation, and often sales, excise, and property taxes. The Canadian government, in a drive to convince its wealthy residents to stay in Canada, reported that the average Californian loses 48% of his income to taxes, compared to slightly over 50% for a sample Canadian locale.
* Laws which provide rewards for delegating control over one's money, particularly, tax-deferred mutual funds
* Public stock markets that allow people who add near zero (or negative) wealth to the economy, to increase their monetary holdings with near zero effort, and at a high proportion of ownership, exert decisive control over companies.
* A system of patents and copyrights that creates unshakeable state-enforced monopolies on whole families of products and means of production, and information that is in commun circulation in the culture, often controlled by corporate intellectual property barons who contributed nothing material to the creations they monopolize. More generally, the patent system creates an impenetrable intellectual logjam, so that complex technological innovation cannot possibly be realized without waiting for scores of patents to expire - the logistical, legal, political, and financial overhead of collecting all the required licensing arrangements is simply prohibitive, not just for individuals but even for large corporations. The copyright system similarly creates an intellectual logjam, by making it impractical to the point of impossibility for historians, analysts, artists, and indeed ordinary people, to collect, arrange, and present the very substance of their culture without breaking the law.
* Hate crime laws that encourage the impression that crimes against uncovered people (specifically, healthy white heterosexual males) are less serious than crimes against covered people.
* A galaxy of investment firms that create no wealth, but seduce many of society's best and brightest to work in fund management and market model design and maintenance. The compensation packages (and here, compensation is a particularly apt term) offered by investment firms are so liberal that firms outside the investment business can seldom compete on that basis. Society is thus largely robbed of the wealth these recruits might otherwise create.
* An extensive infrastructure of excise taxes, levied variously as sales taxes, income taxes, property taxes, duties, and miscellaneous taxes, by which the government directly molds the economic patterns of the public
* A cult of employment in which universal full time specialized occupation under the command of a manager is considered to constitute economic success. Under the influence of pseudofeminist propaganda, women enter the common work force en masse, increasing the supply of labor, reducing wages, so that in a typical family both parents must work, so that they must relegate their children to the care, custody, and control, of people whose full time specialized occupation is mass child care, making child rearing part of the regulated, monetized economy, substantially eroding the natural institution of the family, facilitating indoctrination of the children with the tenets of collectivism in general and socialism and statism in particular. Full time, specialized, managed employment is onerous on its face, of course, since it leaves no time or energy for personally motivated autonomous inventive pursuits.
* Extensive disclosure requirements for tax-exempt (“501(c)(3)”) organizations, in which the IRS acts as an intelligence-gathering organization. Those privy to its secrets can monitor the activities of foundations, and those foundations that attempt to conceal completely legal activities in order to forestall confrontation with political adversaries are exposed to prosecution.
* Use of zoning law as a weapon of economic and political control, as by Rudy Giuliani in Manhattan and Jan Jones in Las Vegas
* “Order-out” zones wherein zero tolerance for certain vice-type activities is aggressively enforced in neighborhoods of a developed region selected arbitrarily by local authorities in pursuit of their own political and financial interest
* A lumbering, partly for-profit prison system, holding a greater proportion of the nation's total population than does the prison system of any other nation on earth. More than half of this nation's prison population is serving time only for petty drug offenses. The huge prison infrastructure can be recruited instantaneously to incarcerate several million political prisoners (though of course most of those imprisoned for petty drug offenses are, in fact, political prisoners).
* A labyrinthine system of weapons laws which vary by city, county, and state, from effectively total bans on private carrying of firearms, to no-permit concealed carry, and everything in-between. The construction of these laws makes it nearly impossible for those whose work involves travel over state lines, and for many whose work involves travel over city lines, to carry a firearm for self-protection. Moreover, federal laws enacted in 1934, 1968, and 1986, are prima facie (and severe) abridgements of the right to keep and bear arms. In short, the second amendment of the US Constitution has been and continues to be grossly, flagrantly, and routinely violated by local, state, and federal authorities.
* Government and corporate policies and practices that profoundly erode individual privacy
* A property tax assessment procedure in which the government insists on a thorough walk-through of one's residence and business, in order that it can decide how much to steal from the owner
* Building permit requirements in which even simple refurbishing or finishing of basements and attics by owners, visible only to residents, is held hostage to government approval and hence to political interests
* Allocation of vast sums of tax money for IMF-coordinated “bailouts” of distant nations often ruled by profoundly abusive and dictatorial governments. These “bailouts” are in practice bribery by which the recipient nation is made to abdicate its sovereignty, and in many cases they are little more than massive transfers of wealth from taxpayers to the establishment.
* Direct taxpayer-funded bailouts of ailing corporations. This is simply a transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the establishment, as directed by the establishment, so that the establishment can perpetuate their corporate empires.
* A statutory infrastructure so vast and obscure that essentially everybody breaks at least several laws every day. The oceanic system of federal, state, and local regulations also serve as a barrier to entry and to success for small businesses, protecting existing vast corporations (with their armadas of lawyers) from potential competition
* Seatbelt and helmet laws that mandate individual behavior that is of no consequence whatever to the safety of others. Laws such as these imply that the public consists of slaves who are obligated to adhere to government-mandated measures of self-protection in order that they will be able to continue to produce for their employers.
* Universal exposure to civil litigation: everyone is liable to be bled bone dry in stupid suits, and only those who are politically favored - either individually or as a class - can expect to escape. Citizen juries are rigged by social engineering to implement the will of the establishment.
* Routine acquittal of plainly guilty defendants by obscure technicalities, and routine parolling of those who should clearly not be parolled, to produce among the public and particularly among those in the executive branch - especially, police officers and prosecutors - a disdain for an apparently ineffective rule of law. This makes them more likely to accept and serve a totalitarian oligarchy.
* A citizen jury system in which those with moral objections to the law are systematically culled, resulting in juries that are populated with obedient statists
* Marginalization of acting as one's own attorney at trial, placing Bar Association lawyers in critical positions. Defense lawyers are required, essentially as a matter of law, to defend individuals they cannot in right conscience defend. Thus, those who remain defense trial attorneys are to a man, immoral, and the marginalization of the defendant-attorney results in the injection of immorality into all viable defenses - with the result that the public is now familiar with such maxims as acquittal of guilty defendants being more routine than acquittal of innocent ones. Another crucial effect of must-defend laws and the general lawyer ethos of jousting and bravado is that victory in court becomes a matter of how expensive a lawyer (or set thereof) one can afford, and not of the merits of one's case, since lawyers practice at winning cases with poor prima facie merits.
* A parole system in which sentences are capriciously shortened, predicated directly on an admission of guilt and expression of remorse by the prisoner - who may be falsely imprisoned
* Incipience of facemask operations and deployment of high-tech less-lethal weapons among domestic police forces, creating psychological distance between police and policed, and encouraging casual use of force.
* The transformation of sexuality into a breeding ground for litigation. Utterly perverse regulations have been enacted on college campuses requiring, for example, specific verbal permission for each action in an intimate setting. Sexual harassment law has become a vicious affront to reason and social harmony.
* Centrally controlled dating services and “psychic” hotlines that constitute direct instruments of social engineering (for an interesting twist, see TheraDate, in which psychiatrists make the decisions behind closed doors)
* Institutionalization of the nursing home, to which the aged are relegated. Those who have gained the wisdom of age are thus separated from society, and their corrective common sense influence removed from the community. They are also made a captive, dependent, marginalized population targetted with tailored campaigns to gain their votes en bloc.
* Franchises burgeoning like kudzu vine, inexorably choking independent operators to the brink of extinction. A franchisor is an incorporated entity that owns a trademark, and under that trademark, markets a set of products that its franchisees produce according to a uniform business model. Franchisors bind franchisees to a contract under which any prolonged or serious deviation from the business model and associated standard operating procedures and schedules results in revocation of the right to use the trademark under which the franchisee built his business. In particular, franchisees typically have little or no control over product offerings and prices, and often must purchase supplies from suppliers chosen by the franchisor. Thus, it is a miniature command economy. The arrangement, in toto, constitutes an engine of microeconomic homogenization, and centralizes control in the hands of the small group of people who control the franchisors. A franchisor typically has no property, or only incidental property for its headquarters, and in particular seldom owns the means of production, storage, or distribution. It is an institution of control, not of ownership, and it is made of managers, analysts, and lawyers. It has no critical geographic center, and is sometimes entirely virtual.
* Co-option of child custody as a weapon by which the establishment enforces compliance with its agenda. Custody decisions are often extra-judicial, or based on factors other than compliance with law and provision for the child's welfare proper. Children are regularly stolen outright by the state from people whose views or lifestyles threaten or offend the establishment.
* A culture of lengthy commutes by private automobile, in which commuters spend one or more hours a day subject to numbing congestion and frequently inane and stringent traffic laws (red lights with no one using the green, highway speed limits far below actual safe speed, etc.), and the caprices of frequently crabby and discriminatory traffic police. Car painted red? Bumper sticker piss off the cop? Hair too long? Attractive female? Unusual car? Racial minority? Racial minority in a suit? Racial minority in an expensive car? In fact, unusual in any way? You're a target! To quote Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, “Arrest, v.t. Formally to detain one accused of unusualness.” This time spent in a nearly freedom-free zone habituates the population to powerless queueing and government tyranny and caprice, and profoundly instills conformism. On most highways, you can be pulled over at the whimsy of a cop regardless of your speed, since travelling the speed limit makes you a danger and travelling the speed of other cars makes you a speeder. The differential expense of commuting by private automobile, compared to mass transit, is obvious - and is of immense benefit to the petroleum and automotive corporate titans, and to a degree, to the medical industry, the construction industry, the insurance industry. and of course, the bureaucrats who operate such friendly, competent, cooperative, responsive organizations as the DMV. In Connecticut, a new law, Public Act 98-215, has gone into effect which makes uninsured motor vehicles subject to forfeiture by the state, meaning one essentially rents one's car from a pact consisting of the government and the insurance industry, on their non-negotiable terms.
* A culture of overconsumption, overbuying, and overeating. Americans are the fattest people in the world. They eat too much. They buy all sorts of crap they don't really want. They buy so much of it that they must make periodic donations of the detritus to “charitable” organizations - sometimes donating whole cars! Overconsumption is probably the result of decades of advertiser carpet bombing (psychological warfare), which was motivated by the desire to sell more to increase revenue to enable corporate growth. The physical unfitness of the populace is probably seen as a net benefit by the establishment, since it impairs ability to work in a corporate environment only slightly, but greatly increases fidelity to the status quo, because of reliance on the reign of order to provide them an environment they can survive and which protects them. The combination of physical unfitness, and the effective bans on private handgun carry in major urban centers like New York City, Los Angeles, Denver, etc., create an artificial demand for police officers. Also, the heaps of unneeded products collected in households are thought of, perhaps often only subconsciously, as a cache to be protected, increasing fidelity to the status quo.
* Urbanization and suburbanization, with corresponding shrinkage in the amount of rural land available for private occupation and use, in order to place as great a proportion of the population as possible in a situation in which basic subsistence can be maintained only by conformity with the corporate/state economic system
* A culture of perpetual personal debts, and particularly of perpetual mortgages (or rents), which tethers employees to their jobs on pain of bankruptcy, homelessness, and starvation
* State and regional lotteries operated by the government, which encourage the public to view wealth as something one achieves by dumb luck, without any benefit to society, and by which the government enables addictive, compulsive behavior among the public, creates disgraceful spectacles, annihilates the constructive, and embraces stark hypocrisy (a private citizen operating a lottery is breaking the government's own laws). Also, the state justifies the lotteries by spending a portion of the proceeds on so-called education and so-called remedial programs for gambling addicts. This is a web of wackiness. Most odiously, lotteries create situations where people with great influence are directly and utterly reliant on the perpetuation of the status quo for that influence, and because the influence is wholly unearned, feel beholden to the establishment for having visited this unearned bounty upon them. The fact of having won a lottery reveals absolutely nothing about the character of an individual, but that individual nonetheless thereafter wields substantial influence. These people constitute a kingdom of the ordinary.
* Mindless confrontation and humiliation shows, like Howard Stern's and Jerry Springer's, in which (respectively) guests volunteer to be disgraced by a shameless, abusive, repugnant buffoon, or are paid to air their private or imaginary grudges and engage in violent altercations. At least as loathsome are talk shows like Jenny Jones in which an audience of banal least-common-denominators stand in righteous indignation of those who are not similarly banal and common. These shows are just conduits for other tactics in this catalog.
* A culture in which most individuals have too little spare time, too little sleep, and too little energy left to pursue private interests of intellectual consequence and originality. Between slavish work, grueling commutes, the mundanities of maintaining household and family, and the proper social appearance and rituals (yard maintenance, church attendance, parties and restaurants, health clubs and book clubs and social clubs and chorales and group excursions and conferences and on and on), there is time and energy only for sitcoms and a nap before it all starts again. America now has the highest per-capita GDP of any nation in the world - more than the Japanese who were advertised as perverse workaholics in the 1980's. In order to achieve this, Americans have had to sleep less, surrender the last vestiges of their private time (the time equivalent of disposable income), and work harder for their masters. Why do they do this? Social engineering, employee competition (because of the social engineering, there's always someone else who will work the hours on the employer's terms), a decline in real wages facing off against the same towering mortgages and rising rents, and increasing corporate consolidation resulting in a nowhere-else-to-go mentality for workers in many industries.
* Promulgation of misleading and corrupting benchmark economic indicators, such as so-called GDP and so-called unemployment, which encourage practices, and serve as ostensible justifications for policies, which are detrimental to quality of life, to the environment, to the economy (in real terms), and to national security. Consider that every trip to the emergency room, every toxic discharge cleanup, every piece of equipment wrecked through indifference or incompetence and replaced, and every degrading, mindless office or factory or retail job, are registered by these inane indicators as improvements.
* Environmental policies that needlessly micromanage many basic activities of the citizenry, abandon sovereignty, and regularly place higher priority on the comfort of animals than on the liberties of man. Many policies also onerously burden individuals while leaving unscathed industries whose destructive activity in the same or similar areas is many times greater than the total harm done by individuals in their private capacities.
* Sterilization of public areas through police harassment and brutalization of panhandlers, homeless people, street peddlers, posterers and street stencilers, street performers, and even simple loiterers, leaving nothing but dead streets people hurry from, and the mindkilling uniform omnipresence of government and corporate images.
* A centrally controlled and pervasive mass media by which public perceptions are extensively manipulated, and which is used to marginalize (and in some cases, criminalize through lobbyist-prompted legislation and regulation) small, independent, non-compliant minority media. The mass media machine also allows the coordinated and generally unperceived incremental shifting of culture at a rate far more rapid than occurs naturally, as directed by the establishment.
* Movies and television programs which present and romanticize examples of criminality and marginalized behavior, particularly murder, destructive mayhem, and criminal conspiracies of every ilk. The conflicting pressures of cigarette-smoking, drug-using role models in entertainment programming (and real life), and authority figures (and some role models) poo-pooing tobacco and other drugs in public service announcements and appearances, is inherently destructive. Shows such as Chris Carter's “X Files” also exhibit paranoid, irrational thought as though it is reasonable, and intermingle fragments of genuine scandals and conspiracies with unadulterated crap about extraterrestrials, psychokinesis, mythical monsters, and a bevy of quacky odds and ends. The effect is to produce in the viewer an association between the legitimate and the quacky, and subvert the viewer's capacity to reasonably distinguish one from the other. An endless stream of hyperviolence in the media also fosters violence in society, and this violence in society is then used as an excuse for disarmament of law-abiding citizens, and for highly intrusive police policies.
* A democratic system in which typically no one on a particular ballot is actually congenial for most of the voters to whom it will be presented. The mechanics of this system were established by the original US Constitution, and this dreadful consequence is somewhat intrinsic to the system and somewhat the consequence of political and sociological evolution. The most dire outcome is that the voter is forced to vote for a candidate with which he disagrees on critical issues (this is profoundly demoralizing) or to “throw away his vote” by writing in the name of someone he actually finds congenial. In Sweden, Mickey Mouse has won at least one election, as effectively disenfranchised voters wrote in their discontent. The solution is a new system in which all ballots are exclusively write-in, and a voter can cast his ballot for anyone who has declared candidacy. <kaz@freedom.usa.com> has written a brief essay on democracy that is germane.
* A system of selective voter emboldening and alienation in which those who are likely to vote as the establishment intends are encouraged to vote, and those who are likely to vote contrary to the intentions of the establishment are discouraged from voting. This is achieved through marketing both by private interests (MTV ”Rock the Vote” etc.) and through state or semi-state actions. Voting regulations and procedures are also designed to favor those who are more likely to vote as the establishment intends; for example, those who travel or relocate frequently find many barriers to participation in elections. Only 24% of eligible voters voted for Bill Clinton in 1996; this cannot reasonably be construed as a popular mandate.
* Perpetuation of the two-party system, principally through statutory barriers to ballot inclusion, and in the mass media, systematic blackout or, occasionally, positive marginalization of alternative parties. The two politically subsidized parties are, to a large degree, centrally controlled political apparatuses who thanks largely to the corporate mass media largely control who can and can't occupy elected office. This article from Boston Review details the odious results of the system itself. <kaz@freedom.usa.com> has written a brief essay on the two-party system that is germane.
* Fabrication and amplification of divisive, emotionally charged political issues, to distract the masses from serious issues and keep them waging wars of words (and sometimes bombs, as with the abortion issue) with each other rather than expending their energy in pursuit of actual self-interest (the dictates of popular self-interest conflict with the objectives of the establishment). This tactic mates with the two-party system tactic to produce a political environment in which no candidate is desirable. As a consequence of this, the voters' decisions are easily guided by the (centrally controlled) mass media, since the voters perceive no real, compelling reason to prefer either candidate.
* Corruption of the immigration process, admitting great numbers of poor, illiterate, non-English-speaking immigrants without checking for criminal backgrounds, then interning or expelling some of them as directed by non-Constitutional secret courts positioned to implement arbitrary political agendas.
* Staging of so-called “government shutdowns” to shock the economy and society (this procedure is detailed in Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars)
* A system of censorship administered by the Federal Communications Commission, which extirpates government-identified cuss words and other types of speech the government has determined are indecent, to stigmatize key biological activities and systems helping to manufacture guilt and alienation centering thereon, to accustom the population to frivolous government abridgement of freedom of speech, to lead the population to the false conclusion that government has a proper role in preventing people from being offended, and to serve as a ubiquitous reminder of the power of government (every time you hear something bleeped, hear someone falter or hesitate while reading something containing forbidden language on the air, that is the government exerting its power over ordinary speech). Note that, in the absence of these government-imposed restrictions, the market itself will drive many media outlets to extirpate the same material currently prohibited by the FCC. Also, note the rising enforcement of municipal ordinances that outlaw pronunciation of government-defined offensive language in public places - including public parks in New York City. The governments' motivations here are similar, and the effect is obviously more stark and direct.
* Campaigning for digital radio and digital television broadcast systems, particularly those transmitted from orbiting satellites, to squeeze out small operators, render the receiver systems insensitive to cheap, accessible terrestrial transmitters, and reduce the variety of usable signals accessible to a particular receiver (directly reducing programming choices)
* Transformation of the economy from predominantly industrial to predominantly service, making the nation more reliant on foreign nations to maintain its economy and hence its national security
* Export of factory jobs overseas or to Central and South America, often destroying some of the last bastions of social capital and industrial self-reliance
* Bankrupting of small independent farmers, resulting in consolidation of farm land and agriculture into titanic corporations whose holdings are tended by modern-day serfs
* Wholesale destruction of social capital, through the systematic undermining of the bases for trust, and direct and indirect subversion of the family and local community. This is achieved through manipulation of legislation and the economy, through control of the educational system, and through manipulation of culture using the centrally controlled mass media. In particular, many children are being left parentless for most of the time during their formative years. Destruction of family cohesion and loyalty also means that those who are penniless and incapable of working - in particular, many of the elderly - must turn to the government to meet their subsistence requirements. This population of government dependents will always vote for the status quo and incumbents, or for authoritarian communism.
* Enactment and enforcement of laws that mandate racial and gender discrimination, while simultaneously tending to effectively favor those of lower aptitude over those of greater aptitude for the task at issue. The primary effects of such policies are to breed resentment, distrust, and hate, in copious quantities, and to erode national strength, critically in some areas.