Here’s How Your State Ranks On Credit Card Debt Per Household

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As parents all around the country wake up this morning and instantly regret adding $1,000’s of dollars to their credit cards over the holidays (at a 30% interest rate nonetheless) so that little Johnny could have the latest iPad, gaming console and sneakers, here is a list of the states where consumers have racked up the most revolving debt.

Ironically, when color coded based on political preference, with the notable exception of Alaska, Democratic-leaning states seem to carry higher credit card debt balances than conservative states.  Imagine that, conservatives expect their government to run budgets the way they run their own households.

Credit Debt by State

 

Meanwhile, as MarketWatch points out, in the worst states it would take the average family over a year and a half to pay off their credit debt if they contributed 15% of their median income to debt repayment.  But who wants to pay down credit card debt anyway?  We can’t very well have economic growth if people are unwilling to borrow all the way up to the point that they can no longer afford the minimum payment…right, Janet?

Credit Cards

 

According to ValuPenguin, millennials carry an average credit card balance of $5,800 while, shockingly, even those American’s past retirement age are carrying credit card balances over $6,000 well into their 70’s. 

Credit Debt By Age

 

And, of course, the more you make the more you borrow…because why not?

Credit Debt by Income

 

Meanwhile, Experian’s State of Credit 2016 report highlights the top/bottom 10 cities in the United States based on credit score.  Minnesota and Wisconsin absolutely dominate that the top 10 list while California, Texas and Louisiana account for 8 out of the 10 worst cities.

Credit Ratings

 

Oh well, at least little Johnny will love the new Xbox and sneakers for at least a week and it made for a great Facebook pic!

As Obama accomplished policy goals, his party floundered


From the Associated Press By LISA LERER WASHINGTON (AP) — In boasting about his tenure in the White House, President Barack Obama often cites numbers like these: 15 million new jobs, a 4.9 percent …

Source: As Obama accomplished policy goals, his party floundered

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Letter from Jesus about Christmas — Fellowship of the Minds


It has come to my attention that many of you are upset that folks are taking my name out of the season. How I personally feel about this celebration can probably be most easily understood by those …

Source: Letter from Jesus about Christmas — Fellowship of the Minds

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Happy Birthday, Jesus! — Fellowship of the Minds


Luke 2:8-12 Now there were shepherds in that region living in the fields and keeping the night watch over their flock. The angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around …

Source: Happy Birthday, Jesus! — Fellowship of the Minds

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How Americans Spent Their Money In The Last 75 Years (In 1 Simple Chart)


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Consumer spending makes up a large percentage of the United States economy. We all have bills to pay and mouths to feed, but where do Americans spend their money? Here is a breakdown of how Americans spent their money in the last 75 years…

In the chart above, spending is broken into 12 categories: Reading, alcohol, tobacco, education, personal care, miscellaneous, recreation & entertainment, healthcare, clothing, food, transportation and housing. Each category is further broken down into spending by year, from 1941 to 2014, and each category is given a unique color. The data were collected from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The data is adjusted for inflation and measures median spending of all Americans.

Unsurprisingly, housing expenses have almost always been the largest area of spending in America for over 70 years. The only exception is 1941, when spending on food averaged $8,311, whereas spending on housing came to $7,537. However, in 1941 the government included alcohol in the food spending category, which inflates the food spending data for that year. In the other years, alcohol was given its own category. In every other year measured, spending on housing outpaced every other category.

Another interesting trend is the downward slope of spending on clothing. Americans spent the most on clothing in 1961 for an average of $4,157. In every year measured since 1961, spending on clothing fell, even when accounting for inflation.

At the same time, Americans began spending more on education, transportation and healthcare. Spending on education has increased far more than any other category, jumping from $242 in 1941 to $1,236 in 2014. Education spending increased at a particularly fast rate between 1984 and 1994 and onward. While spending on healthcare increased between 1941 and 2014, overall spending dipped between 1973 and 1984, but then began rising rapidly thereafter.

Between 1941 and 2014 Americans spent money on most of the same things, with a few changes. Housing has persisted as a large area of spending for Americans, as has the food category. However, spending on food and clothing has fallen when adjusting for inflation while spending on education and healthcare has risen quickly.

Source: HowMuch.net

KOMMONSENTSJANE – IS OBAMA THROWING A PITY PARTY FOR THE DEM’S – STINKIN’ THINKIN’


Excellent words to read and listen too!

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Is Obama Throwing a Pity Party?

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If your theme song has become “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to,” you need to get a new song.

by Michelle Medlock Adams
Mar 16, 2015

Are You Throwing a Pity Party?

pity

My mama was a hoot. You might say, she called ‘em like she saw ‘em–especially when it came to her children. She was an encourager and a cheerleader, but when we needed tough love, she wasn’t afraid to dish out a big helping. And I needed a helping from time to time.

Whenever I would get down about something or start saying negative things, she’d listen and encourage for a bit. Then she’d say, “Listen, Poor Pitiful Pearl, nobody wants to come to your pity party.”

As much as I hated to admit it, she was right. The only ones showing up at a pity party are…

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Obama Quietly Signs The “Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act” Into Law


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Late on Friday, with the US population embracing the upcoming holidays and oblivious of most news emerging from the administration, Obama quietly signed into law the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which authorizes $611 billion for the military in 2017.

In a statement, Obama said that:

 Today, I have signed into law S. 2943, the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017.” This Act authorizes fiscal year 2017 appropriations principally for the Department of Defense and for Department of Energy national security programs, provides vital benefits for military personnel and their families, and includes authorities to facilitate ongoing operations around the globe. It continues many critical authorizations necessary to ensure that we are able to sustain our momentum in countering the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and to reassure our European allies, as well as many new authorizations that, among other things, provide the Departments of Defense and Energy more flexibility in countering cyber-attacks and our adversaries’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles.”

Much of the balance of Obama’s statement blamed the GOP for Guantanamo’s continued operation and warned that “unless the Congress changes course, it will be judged harshly by history,” Obama said. Obama also said Congress failed to use the bill to reduce wasteful overhead (like perhaps massive F-35 cost overruns?) or modernize military health care, which he said would exacerbate budget pressures facing the military in the years ahead.

 But while the passage of the NDAA – and the funding of the US military – was hardly a surprise, the biggest news is what was buried deep inside the provisions of the Defense Authortization Act.

Recall that as we reported in early June, “a bill to implement the U.S.’ very own de facto Ministry of Truth had been quietly introduced in Congress. As with any legislation attempting to dodge the public spotlight the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 marks a further curtailment of press freedom and another avenue to stultify avenues of accurate information. Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”

Also called the Countering Information Warfare Act of 2016 (S. 2692), when introduced in March by Sen. Rob Portman, the legislation represents a dramatic return to Cold War-era government propaganda battles. “These countries spend vast sums of money on advanced broadcast and digital media capabilities, targeted campaigns, funding of foreign political movements, and other efforts to influence key audiences and populations,” Portman explained, adding that while the U.S. spends a relatively small amount on its Voice of America, the Kremlin provides enormous funding for its news organization, RT.

“Surprisingly,” Portman continued, “there is currently no single U.S. governmental agency or department charged with the national level development, integration and synchronization of whole-of-government strategies to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.”

Long before the “fake news” meme became a daily topic of extensive conversation on such discredited mainstream portals as CNN and WaPo, H.R. 5181 would task the Secretary of State with coordinating the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to “establish a Center for Information Analysis and Response,” which will pinpoint sources of disinformation, analyze data, and — in true dystopic manner — ‘develop and disseminate’ “fact-based narratives” to counter effrontery propaganda.

In short, long before “fake news” became a major media topic, the US government was already planning its legally-backed crackdown on anything it would eventually label “fake news.”

* * *

Fast forward to December 8, when the “Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act” passed in the Senate, quietly inserted inside the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report.

And now, following Friday’s Obama signing of the NDAA on Friday evening, the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act is now law.

* * *

Here is the full statement issued by the generously funded Senator Rob Portman (R- Ohio) on the singing into law of a bill that further chips away at press liberties in the US, and which sets the stage for future which hunts and website shutdowns, purely as a result of an accusation that any one media outlet or site is considered as a source of “disinformation and propaganda” and is shut down by the government.

President Signs Portman-Murphy Counter-Propaganda Bill into Law

Portman-Murphy Bill Promotes Coordinated Strategy to Defend America, Allies Against Propaganda and Disinformation from Russia, China & Others

U.S. Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) today announced that their Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act – legislation designed to help American allies counter foreign government propaganda from Russia, China, and other nations has been signed into law as part of the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report. The bipartisan bill, which was introduced by Senators Portman and Murphy in March, will improve the ability of the United States to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation from our enemies by establishing an interagency center housed at the State Department to coordinate and synchronize counter-propaganda efforts throughout the U.S. government. To support these efforts, the bill also creates a grant program for NGOs, think tanks, civil society and other experts outside government who are engaged in counter-propaganda related work. This will better leverage existing expertise and empower our allies overseas to defend themselves from foreign manipulation. It will also help foster a free and vibrant press and civil society overseas, which is critical to ensuring our allies have access to truthful information and inoculating people against foreign propaganda campaigns.

“Our enemies are using foreign propaganda and disinformation against us and our allies, and so far the U.S. government has been asleep at the wheel,” Portman said. “But today, the United States has taken a critical step towards confronting the extensive, and destabilizing, foreign propaganda and disinformation operations being waged against us by our enemies overseas. With this bill now law, we are finally signaling that enough is enough; the United States will no longer sit on the sidelines. We are going to confront this threat head-on. I am confident that, with the help of this bipartisan bill, the disinformation and propaganda used against us, our allies, and our interests will fail.”

The use of propaganda to undermine democracy has hit a new low. But now we are finally in a position to confront this threat head on and get out the truth. By building up independent, objective journalism in places like eastern Europe, we can start to fight back by exposing these fake narratives and empowering local communities to protect themselves,” said Murphy. “I’m proud that our bill was signed into law, and I look forward to working with Senator Portman to make sure these tools and new resources are effectively used to get out the truth.”

NOTE: The bipartisan Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act is organized around two main priorities to help achieve the goal of combatting the constantly evolving threat of foreign disinformation from our enemies:

  • The first priority is developing a whole-of-government strategy for countering THE foreign propaganda and disinformation being wages against us and our allies by our enemies. The bill would increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China as well as non-state actors. The Center will be led by the State Department, but with the active senior level participation of the Department of Defense, USAID, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the Intelligence Community, and other relevant agencies. The Center will develop, integrate, and synchronize whole-of-government initiatives to expose and counter foreign disinformation operations by our enemies and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests.
  • Second, the legislation seeks to leverage expertise from outside government to create more adaptive and responsive U.S. strategy options. The legislation establishes a fund to help train local journalists and provide grants and contracts to NGOs, civil society organizations, think tanks, private sector companies, media organizations, and other experts outside the U.S. government with experience in identifying and analyzing the latest trends in foreign government disinformation techniques. This fund will complement and support the Center’s role by integrating capabilities and expertise available outside the U.S. government into the strategy-making process. It will also empower a decentralized network of private sector experts and integrate their expertise into the strategy-making process.

* * *

And so, with the likes of WaPo having already primed the general public to equate “Russian Propaganda” with “fake news” (despite admitting after the fact their own report was essentially “fake“), while the US media has indoctrinated the public to assume that any information which is not in compliance with the official government narrative, or dares to criticize the establishment, is also “fake news” and thus falls under the “Russian propaganda” umbrella, the scene is now set for the US government to legally crack down on every media outlet that the government deems to be “foreign propaganda.”

Just like that, the US Ministry of Truth is officially born.

This Is How The US Government Destroys The Lives Of Patriotic Whistle-blowers


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Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

We live in a time and within a culture where the best amongst us are thrown in jail, demonized or destroyed, while the worst are celebrated, promoted and enriched. Nothing more clearly crystalizes this sad state of affairs than the U.S. government’s ruthless war on whistleblowers who expose severe constitutional violations by those in power. This war knows no political affiliation, and has be waged with equal vigor by the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama.

Earlier this morning, I read one of the most enlightening articles on the subject to-date. It was published back in May, and should be read by every single American citizen. We need to admit to ourselves what we have become before we can make changes.

What follows are excerpts from the Guardian piece, How the Pentagon Punished NSA Whistleblowers, but you should really take the time to read the entire thing.

 If you want to know why Snowden did it, and the way he did it, you have to know the stories of two other men.

The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising his concerns through official channels. And he got crushed.

Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged with crimes that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially and professionally. The only job he could find afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban Washington, where he remains today. Adding insult to injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA’s surveillance program were largely ignored.

But there is another man whose story has never been told before, who is speaking out publicly for the first time here. His name is John Crane, and he was a senior official in the Department of Defense who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake – until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well.

His testimony reveals a crucial new chapter in the Snowden story – and Crane’s failed battle to protect earlier whistleblowers should now make it very clear that Snowden had good reasons to go public with his revelations.

During dozens of hours of interviews, Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake’s identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge.

“Name one whistleblower from the intelligence community whose disclosures led to real change – overturning laws, ending policies – who didn’t face retaliation as a result. The protections just aren’t there,” Snowden told the Guardian this week. “The sad reality of today’s policies is that going to the inspector general with evidence of truly serious wrongdoing is often a mistake. Going to the press involves serious risks, but at least you’ve got a chance.”

“None of the lawful whistleblowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless surveillance – and Drake was far from the only one who tried – had any success,” Devine told me. “They came forward and made their charges, but the government just said, ‘They’re lying, they’re paranoid, we’re not doing those things.’ And the whistleblowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified all the evidence. Whereas Snowden took the evidence with him, so when the government issued its usual denials, he could produce document after document showing that they were lying. That is civil disobedience whistleblowing.”

Crane’s testimony is not simply a clue to Snowden’s motivations and methods: if his allegations are confirmed in court, they could put current and former senior Pentagon officials in jail. (Official investigations are quietly under way.)

But Crane’s account has even larger ramifications: it repudiates the position on Snowden taken by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – who both maintain that Snowden should have raised his concerns through official channels because US whistleblower law would have protected him…

Within weeks of the September 11 attacks, Drake was assigned to prepare the NSA’s postmortem on the disaster. Congress, the news media and the public were demanding answers: what had gone wrong at the NSA and other federal agencies to allow Osama bin Laden’s operatives to conduct such a devastating attack?

As Drake interviewed NSA colleagues and scoured the agency’s records, he came across information that horrified him. It appeared that the NSA – even before September 11 – had secretly revised its scope of operations to expand its powers.

Since its inception, the NSA had been strictly forbidden from eavesdropping on domestic communications. Drake’s investigation persuaded him that the NSA was now violating this restriction by collecting information on communications within as well as outside of the United States. And it was doing so without obtaining legally required court orders.

Drake’s descent into a nightmare of persecution at the hands of his own government began innocently. Having uncovered evidence of apparently illegal behaviour, he did what his military training and US whistleblower law instructed: he reported the information up the chain of command. Beginning in early 2002, he shared his concerns first with a small number of high-ranking NSA officials, then with the appropriate members of Congress and staff at the oversight committees of the US Senate and House of Representatives.

Drake spent countless hours in these sessions but eventually came to the conclusion that no one in a position of authority wanted to hear what he was saying. When he told his boss, Baginski, that the NSA’s expanded surveillance following 9/11 seemed legally dubious, she reportedly told him to drop the issue: the White House had ruled otherwise.

John Crane first heard about Thomas Drake when Crane and his colleagues at the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General received a whistleblower complaint in September 2002. The complaint alleged that the NSA was backing an approach to electronic surveillance that was both financially and constitutionally irresponsible. The complaint was signed by three former NSA officials, William Binney, Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, and a former senior Congressional staffer, Diane Roark. Drake also endorsed the complaint – but because he, unlike the other four, had not yet retired from government service, he asked that his name be kept anonymous, even in a document that was supposed to be treated confidentially within the government.

Binney, Wiebe, Loomis and Roark shared Drake’s concerns about the constitutional implications of warrantless mass surveillance, but their complaint focused on two other issues.

The first was financial. The whistleblowers contended that the NSA’s surveillance programme, codenamed Trailblazer, was a shameful waste of $3.8 billion – it had been more effective at channelling taxpayer dollars to corporate contractors than at protecting the homeland.

Of course it was.

Second, the whistleblowers warned that Trailblazer actually made the US less secure. They acknowledged that Trailblazer had vastly expanded the amount of electronic communications NSA collected. But this avalanche of raw data was too much – it left NSA’s analysts struggling to distinguish the vital from the trivial and thus liable to miss key clues.

Drake had discovered a shocking example while researching his postmortem report on the September 11 attacks. Months beforehand, the NSA had come into possession of a telephone number in San Diego that was used by two of the hijackers who later crashed planes into the World Trade Center. But the NSA did not act on this finding.

As Drake later told the NSA expert James Bamford, the NSA intercepted seven phone calls between this San Diego phone number and an al-Qaida “safe house” in Yemen. Drake found a record of the seven calls buried in an NSA database.

US officials had long known that the Yemen safe house was the operational hub through which Bin Laden, from a cave in Afghanistan, ordered attacks. Seven phone calls to such a hub from the same phone number was obviously suspicious. Yet the NSA took no action – the information had apparently been overlooked.

Incredible.

 The Bush administration’s mass surveillance efforts were partly exposed in December 2005, when the New York Times published a front page article by reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, which revealed that the NSA was monitoring international phone calls and emails of some people in the US without obtaining warrants.

Eight years later, that story would be dwarfed by Snowden’s revelations. But at the time, the Bush White House was furious – and they were determined to find and punish whoever had leaked the details to the New York Times.

According to Crane, his superiors inside the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s office were eager to help. Henry Shelley, the general counsel – the office’s top lawyer – urged that the IG office should tell the FBI agents investigating the Times leak about Drake and the other NSA whistleblowers.

This Shelley character is a particularly heinous cretin in this entire saga.

 After all, the NSA whistleblowers’ recent complaint had objected to the same surveillance practices described in the Times article – which made them logical suspects in the leak. Crane objected strenuously. Informing anyone – much less FBI investigators – of a whistleblower’s name was illegal.

After debating the matter at a formal meeting in the personal office of the inspector general, Shelley and Crane continued arguing in the hallway outside. “I reached into my breast pocket and pulled out my copy of the Whistleblower Protection Act,” Crane recalled. “I was concerned that Henry was violating the law. Our voices weren’t raised, but the conversation was, I would say, very intense and agitated. Henry [replied] that he was the general counsel, the general counsel was in charge of handling things with the Justice Department and he would do things his way.”

There the disagreement between Crane and Shelley stalled. Or so it seemed until 18 months later. On the morning of 26 July, 2007, FBI agents with guns drawn stormed the houses of Binney, Wiebe, Loomis and Roark. Binney was towelling off after a shower when agents accosted him; he and his wife suddenly found themselves with guns aimed directly between their eyes, the retired NSA man recalled.

Crane smelled a rat. The investigation that his staff had conducted into the whistleblowers’ complaint had been highly classified: very few people could have known their names, and they would have been inside the IG’s office. After the raids, Crane confronted Shelley and demanded to know whether the IG’s office had given the names to the FBI. Shelley refused to discuss the matter, Crane says.

The battle soon escalated. Four months later, FBI agents stormed Drake’s house in an early morning raid, as his family watched in shock.

After Drake was indicted in 2010, his lawyers filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain documents related to the investigation Crane’s office had conducted into the claims of the NSA whistleblowers. According to Crane, he was ordered by his superiors in the IG’s office to delay releasing any documents – which could have exonerated Drake – until after the trial, which was expected to take place later in 2010.

Crane alleges that he was ordered to do so by Shelley and Lynne Halbrooks – who had recently been named the principal deputy inspector general (in other words, the second-highest ranking official in the IG’s office). Crane protested but lost this skirmish as well. (Halbrooks did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)

Crane was at once alarmed and revolted. The complaint from Drake’s lawyers seemed to confirm his suspicion that someone in the IG’s office had illegally fingered Drake to the FBI. Worse, the indictment filed against Drake had unmistakable similarities to the confidential testimony Drake had given to Crane’s staff – suggesting that someone in the IG’s office had not simply given Drake’s name to the FBI, but shared his entire testimony, an utter violation of law.

Drake’s complaint demanded investigation, Crane told Halbrooks. But Halbrooks, joined by Shelley, allegedly rejected Crane’s demand. She added that Crane wasn’t being a “good team player” and if he didn’t shape up, she would make life difficult for him.

But there was even worse to come. As Drake’s trial approached in the spring of 2011, Crane knew that the law required the IG’s office to answer the retaliation complaint filed by Drake’s lawyers. But, Crane says, Shelley now informed him it would be impossible to respond – because the relevant documents had been destroyedLower level staff “fucked up”, Crane said Shelley told him: they had shredded the documents in a supposedly routine purge of the IG’s vast stores of confidential material.

Crane could not believe his ears. “I told Henry that destruction of documents under such circumstances was, as he knew, a very serious matter and could lead to the inspector general being accused of obstructing a criminal investigation.” Shelley replied, according to Crane, that it didn’t have to be a problem if everyone was a good team player.

On 15 February, 2011, Shelley and Halbrooks sent the judge in the Drake case a letter that repeated the excuse given to Crane: the requested documents had been destroyed, by mistake, during a routine purge. This routine purge, the letter assured Judge Richard D Bennett, took place before Drake was indicted.

“Lynne and Henry had frozen me out by then, so I had no input into their letter to Judge Bennett,” Crane said. “So they ended up lying to a judge in a criminal case, which of course is a crime.”

With Drake adamantly resisting prosecutors’ pressure to make a plea deal – “I won’t bargain with the truth,” he declared – the government eventually withdrew most of its charges against him. Afterwards, the judge blasted the government’s conduct. It was “extraordinary”, he said, that the government barged into Drake’s home, indicted him, but then dropped the case on the eve of trial as if it wasn’t a big deal after all. “I find that unconscionable,” Bennett added. “Unconscionable. It is at the very root of what this country was founded on … It was one of the most fundamental things in the bill of rights, that this country was not to be exposed to people knocking on the door with government authority and coming into their homes.”

We are now becoming a police state,” Diane Roark said in a 2014 television interview. Referring to herself and the other NSA whistleblowers, she added, “We are the canaries in the coal mine. We never did anything wrong. All we did was oppose this programme. And for that, they just ran over us.”

“They’re saying, ‘We’re doing this to protect you,’” Roark’s fellow whistleblower William Binney told me. “I will tell you that that’s exactly what the Nazis said in Special Order 48 in 1933 – we’re doing this to protect you. And that’s how they got rid of all of their political opponents.”

These are strong statements – comparing the actions of the US government to Nazi Germany, warning of an emerging “police state” – so it’s worth remembering who made them. The NSA whistleblowers were not leftwing peace nuts. They had spent their professional lives inside the US intelligence apparatus – devoted, they thought, to the protection of the homeland and defence of the constitution.

They were political conservatives, highly educated, respectful of evidence, careful with words. And they were saying, on the basis of personal experience, that the US government was being run by people who were willing to break the law and bend the state’s awesome powers to their own ends. They were saying that laws and technologies had secretly been put in place that threatened to overturn the democratic governance Americans took for granted and shrink their liberties to a vanishing point. And they were saying that something needed to be done about all this before it was too late.

Let’s all make a resolution to do whatever we can to alter this situation and restore constitutional values to the land. Let’s also give thanks to all the incredibly courageous American patriots who have been relentlessly and despicably persecuted by their government.

KOMMONSENTSJANE – HOW WILL WE REDUCE THE DEBT?


There is no doubt that we have a very serious problem facing us especially with the boomers retiring.

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With the advent of the inauguration and all of the talk of saving money by trying to reduce the costs of planes, one thing PE Trump needs to also set up is a “piggy bank” to pay off the debt.  Hannity talks about the penny plan.  Will PE Trump set up a plan to also reduce our debt?

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Technocracy the new Progressive Utopia


Part One

Barack H. Obama ran a Presidential campaign in 2008 based on Hope and Change which his supporters both White and Black assumed would be a new peaceful world without conflict and that there would be good jobs for everyone: and Obama got the Nobel peace prize just for the promise of that perfect world. Thomas More in his 1516 book on a perfect society called that kind of perfect society Utopia, which was also the name of the book, and that word has stuck ever since.  Eight years later we have no “real” jobs, society is in total disarray and we are on the brink of war with Russia; how could this be?  I would suggest that the result we actually have today is exactly what Obama and his supporters wanted to happen after he was elected President in 2008.  Remember he never did tell us what he was going to do, he only promised that he would fundamentally change the country.

Obama has been accused of being Muslin based on his early background and many of his actions while president and that could be true. However, more importantly he is also a Marxist/Communist, at heart, whom in their modern form are the global elites who are smart, educated and very, very wealthy and prefer to be called progressives. In Technocracy Rising a book published in 2015 and written by Patrick M. Wood who explains in great detail how the new world order (NWO) has formed from the ashes of three previously failed concepts which are: Communism, Socialism and Fascism. One could also add Islamism to this as well since all four isms require a very powerful central federal government to manage each of their visions of Utopia. Angelo M. Codevilla wrote an excellent book on those that want to rule us titled the Ruling Class which was publishing in 2010.

Although the vision of a Utopia is powerful, it is an illusion no different than a belief in a Heaven although at least Heaven can only be obtained after death by those that lead a good and moral life; while Utopia can be obtained in the here and now if only we would believe in our leaders who are our betters by their demonstrated superior abilities. Unfortunately this concept of Utopia is not possible since mankind is human and therefore by definition not perfect and worse we are very easily corrupted. Niccolo Machiavelli wrote probably one of the best works on those that desire power in The Prince published in 1513. Therefore to strive for Utopia is a fool’s game or worse a game played by only by those that want to rule but not be elected; the European Union (EU) was their first experiment in the NWO of technology based rule. The ruling body of the EU in Brussels is composed entirely of appointed people (best and the brightest) and not a single person that governs the EU is elected by the people. Perhaps this is the return to an aristocracy (monarchy) as discussed in the four stages of government in book VIII of the Republic written by Plato around 380 BC; so perhaps not much has changed in the past 2,400 years of human history.

Obama and his planned successor Hillary were the handpicked minions of the world cartel of the rich and powerful, i.e. George Soros and Bill Gates both documented members of the Technocracy. It was their task to complete the process of eliminating the U.S. Constitution and replacing it with a governing body similar to that installed in the EU. This was required because they needed total control of everything to make their vision of Utopia work and those that desired this had been at this task in earnest since the end of WW II through organizations such as the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and their workhorse the Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) which were all established along with many other agencies in the last half of the twentieth century. Hillary, the closer, was picked to complete the transformation of the European and North American counties into the NWO started by Obama the good guy.

The transformation to a NWO might have worked if the cartel members were as smart as they thought they were but since their motives were more for personal gain then a true Utopia (they knew that Utopia was not possible) the personal motives drove the transformation too quickly and their transformation started to break down after 2009. This transformation process was actually predicted in the book The Fourth Turning published in 1997 by William Strauss and Neil Howe as the result of the Boomer generation, those born between 1946 and 1964, comprising about 76 million babies who started the process of retiring 60 some years later around 2006. This generation caused a great deal of conflict as they progressed through their lives and according to Strauss and Howe the views of the Boomers would totally change America, however what was left unsaid in the book was whether that change would be good or bad. What happened just as the Boomers started to enter college in the mid 60’s was to shape them forever and their legacy will be what happens as they become the elder statesmen/women of America and what path they put the rest of us on.

Before we can continue, this discussion we need more background specifically on Karl Marx and his work in trying to develop a better political system; unfortunately for hundreds of millions who have since died trying to implement his theories he forgot one thing, human nature. Marx was obviously a very intelligent person and saw injustice in Europe as the industrial revolution transformed society in the Nineteenth Century. His theory was that all value came from “labor” was valid but was also incomplete; this was not his fault as no one back then saw the technology revolution that was to come in the twentieth century. Marx wrote almost 3,000 pages explaining his theories in Capital Vol. I, Vol. II and Vol. III but he left out the most important part which is how his system would be governed, the actual form of the government system required to support Marx’s concept was never developed by him.

Those that followed Marx focused on the means to achieve Marx’s workers’ paradise, Utopia but were never able to establish a government that wasn’t a dictatorship to manage that Utopia and so every attempt at doing this has in the end failed. Focusing here, on America, the Boomers were strongly influenced by the progressive movement (those that believed in Communist principles) in the first half of the twentieth century and one in particular was Saul D. Alinsky who wrote Rules For Radicals published in 1971 which became the bible for the progressive movement after World War II. Alinsky developed the concept of Community Organizing of which Barry Sorrento later after he left Indonesia to become Barack H. Obama followed in Chicago on his path to the US Presidency

Another important concept was developed by two progressives Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven both at Columbia University which Obama was to attend prior to Harvard. The ideas of these two progressives was to become known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy first published in a May 1966 article in the liberal magazine The Nation titled “The Weight of the Poor:” In essence the strategy was to use the laws of society to bring society down so it could be remade using progressive principles. The idea was used very successfully in the early 70’s which almost bankrupted New York City in 1975 by getting everyone entitled to “welfare” to enroll in the available programs.

The last element to be used to try and fundamentally transform America was the takeover of the Environmental movement by the progressives after the U.S.S.R. (Soviet Union) was dissolved on December 26, 1991. Prior to the 90’s there was a legitimate cause to protect the environment from “real” pollution; however, in the early 90’s the progressives took over and changed the movement into protecting us from “imaginary” pollution using the Cloward-Piven Strategy to create a strawman war against Carbon Dioxide the very key to all life on the planet.

World Climate is a variable and always has been as anyone that studied the subject prior to the late 70’s early 80’s understood; further Carbon Dioxide which has now been ruled a pollutant by the U.S. Supreme Court first in 2007 and then again in 2009 is however an absolute requirement for life to exist on the planet and more is beneficial to life rather than less, further the current Carbon Dioxide levels in the Holocene geological epoch, which is what we are in now, are well below geological averages.

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Part Two

On November 22, 1963 our President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas by those I now believe were the people that were to become the New World Order (NWO) movement 20 some years later. The movement was actually formally started by President George H. W. Bush who signed UN Agenda 21 in 1992 for the United States and referred to it as the One World Government OWG. Then in 1993 President William J. Clinton signed Executive Order #12852 to create the President’s Council on Sustainable Development and with that order the progressive transformation of America was started.

Of course back then we couldn’t know any of that and it seemed the assassination was either from the mob or the Communists’ as we were led to believe by the media. But now looking back at that period what happened in 1963 when Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), Kennedy’s VP, became President after Kennedy was assassinated was a series of events that would have dire consequences for the United States. These events started with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 which immediately escalated the low level conflict in Vietnam to a full scale war and which eventually caused the deaths of almost 60,000 American soldiers and gave us over 300,000 wounded to somewhat care for and forget, I was one of them. It also split the country into warring factions for generations.

Decades later when I read David Habersham’s The Best and the Brightest published in 1972 I first realized that intelligence alone was insufficient to make a good ruler and in fact could be an actual hindrance. The sad thing was we got nothing for this war except a lot of disillusioned citizens; so was this escalation in Vietnam only a distraction for what was to come next in 1965? When LBJ rammed through the U.S. Congress 87 pieces of legislation that were to totally change the makeup of the country, and not all for the good, as all the problems that we have now stemmed from what happened in 1964 and 1965.  The LBJ agenda designed to change America for the better contained four related but different objectives.

  • The first was called the “Great Society” with legislation upholding civil rights, public broadcasting, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, the arts, urban and rural development, and public services.
  • The second was the “War on Poverty” which contained Civil rights bills that banned racial discrimination in public facilities, interstate commerce, the workplace, and housing.
  • The third was the “Voting Rights Act” which banned certain requirements in southern states used to disenfranchise African Americans.
  • Lastly was the “Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965” where the country’s immigration system was reformed and all racial origin quotas were removed (replaced by national origin quotas).

All of these programs had some or maybe even a lot of merit but there were also consequences, some of them major, which were all ignored. The bottom line was this was way too much to do absorb at one time and so it went very bad over the next 50 years. The question that comes to mind now is how all could this major work could be put together in only a few months while LBJ was simultaneously assuming the office of the president and then having to run for election an additional few months later. Eighty Seven major pieces of legislation conceived written and passed in 1965. That is something that had never been done before or after.

Looking back we can see what the plan was, a total remake of our society, but back then it wasn’t obvious or we would have stopped it.  The devil that was in these programs was the fracturing of the single American culture into multiple sub cultures and as any student of history and political thought understands that is never good and is often fatal for those countries that try doing that. Montesquieu explains in his 1748 book The Spirit of the Laws the problems with multiple cultures or sentiments as they were then called within a single government. Further he implied that to change the form of the government the culture would need to be changed first. The progressives knew this and have done a very good job which maybe irreversible of changing American culture so they could get their NWO.

This was done primarily through two means that became prevalent in the early 90’s which were Political Correctness (PC) and Multiculturalism; although other destructive factors were also in play. The result was we eliminated the differences between good and bad so that no one would be hurt; there were no differences between people, sexes or cultures so no one was better than any other one. And at the same time we were told that we were not American’s we were White Americans, Black Americans, and Hispanic Americans etc. etc. which was very strange since this was the exact opposite of the teaching that we are all the same.

As bad as all this cultural change was it was not all that was being done to us as economists and politicians who thought they knew how everything worked (the best and the brightest) came up with what was obviously a Ponzi scheme that we could have an economy where everyone was college educated and blue collar work was almost eliminated and this could be done by shipping the dirty nasty blue collar work off to other places in the world for others to do the dirty work while we enjoyed the all benefits.  Besides being a totally insane concept how they ever thought this would work just shows just how twisted the thinking was of those in power, like George Soros who’s self-proclaimed best moment in his life was turning his fellow Jews into the German Nazi’s who were over running Europe during the early stages of WW II. This twisted man made billions by shorting counties currencies and causing them economic distress for his personal gain. He is now one of the driving forces in the NWO to include heavily financing the Democrat party and other groups including many Republicans’.

The economists and politicians’ that concocted this scheme based the logic on the early stages of the industrial revolution where we transitioned from agriculture to production which created the middle class. After WW II and the Korean conflict technology was taking off and what was envisioned was a “service” based economy where, in essence, everyone was to be employed as white collar college educated. There is no way this was ever possible and I even wrote my economics theses in collage on this subject in 1965 which was that as technology advanced there would be a dislocation in the work force as fewer and fewer people would be able to do the complex tasks. Therefore, work needed to be provided in proportion to those able to do it or fewer and fewer people would be supporting more and more people, that didn’t or couldn’t work, which is the Ponzi scheme they created. It all sounded good as the U.S. Government financed the shift of manufacturing to Japan, China and India by selling them U.S. Government securities creating a trading system by which they send us cheap goods and we send them the jobs (means) to make them. I’m sure you the reader can see how well that worked.

United we stand, divided we fall used to be what we were about in America and the country grew by assimilating a diverse range of people that came here to be free, work and raise their families, without any federal assistance. And prior to the changes instituted by LBJ in 1965 we were much more one culture than multiple cultures and the result was that we were the shining light on the hill or maybe more the ones that went to the moon and back in 1969 a feat still not equaled 47 years later. But while we basked in our accomplishments we didn’t understand that our very roots, what it meant to be an American, were being chopped up and destroyed on the altar of equality of outcome and income redistribution which are the very heart of progressivism.

The result of this insanity was that by 2015, fifty years after being started by LBJ, every institution that had been built and rebuilt over 5,000 years of progress by mankind had been totally destroyed and the country was collapsing both culturally i.e. marriage and family and economically i.e. fewer good jobs mounting debt and the loss of much of our national sovereignty. Watch this U-Tube video from Bill Whittle for what the progressive politicians’ did to the city of Detroit, Google THE MOST SHAMEFUL INJUSTICE as an example of what I’m saying here.

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Part Three

In the book the Fourth Turning the greed of the Boomers, they were first called the “me generation”, was likely to cause a second American civil war as they bankrupted the country with their plush retirement programs. Government employees at all levels along with teachers and some Police and Fire in certain states retire with pensions worth more per year than they were making before their retirement. Of course this is not all of them but it is a big enough group that it is a serious national problem today, and not limited to America as the EU has the same problem and it’s even more serious there than here.

The next two generations that follow the Boomers, Generation X and the Millennials’ were left far behind as the Boomers ran rough shod over the economy and society taking everything they could for themselves. Wall Street which financed the Boomers that broke up the manufacturing base and shipped the ‘good’ jobs to Asia did that for personal gain, the large contingent of boomers that used drugs established the drug lords in Mexico to supply them, the boomers running today’s business want cheap labor so they want open borders. But the worst of them went into politics and both Democrats and Republicans (the best and the brightest), conspired to create either an Oligarchy or possibly even a Monarchy in which they could rule the rest of us. The Boomers that went in this direction like the Clintons and the Bushes knew that they had to change the culture. The work of President Johnson in 1965 gave them everything that they needed and as the Boomers graduated from college many of them went into teaching and so by the 90’s they had coopted a large portion of the education system and were helped by the newly created Department of Education in doing so with federal funds that were available only if federal rules were followed.

In the U.S. Constitution the federal government was specifically banded from direct involvement in the states by the Tenth Amendment; but the federal government could tax the people so that increased taxes could then be used to bribe the states to follow rules they could not dictate directly with the peoples own money. There are only a few colleges left, i.e. Hillsdale that have resisted this process which means only the wealthy can go there. What happens now is that whenever a state balks at a federal regulation the federal government tells them they will stop highway funds or education funds or any of the other funds the feds supply. The power of the purse!

Those that betrayed us reside mostly in Washington, the 100 Senators, the 435 Representatives, the President, the Vice President and the 9 Judges of the Supreme Court and they decided they wanted to be rulers, not elected officials, beholding to we the citizens.  These traitors don’t work for us they work for and get their power from those with the real power of huge wealth and money, the special interests. Those super elites are like Bill Gates that are multi-billionaires and to be in the top ten you need to have more than $40 billion while the other 1,816 with only a mere billion to $39 billion mostly don’t even count. These are the NWO people that want to rule us.

Donald Trump understood what was happening to our country and knew that we were at a turning point in history as predicted by Strauss and Howe in their book The Fourth Turning and he saw that if Hillary got elected the result would be very bad and so he decided to stop the change or at minimum control the change. Trump knew this because he could see what was happening in the 2010, 2012 and 2014 elections as there was an obvious movement building for change as the public no longer trusted the politicians. This was not just in American movement it was all of Western Civilization as the BREXIT election in England showed and so trump declared his candidacy and joined the movement. Those of us that had formed the movement first as the Tea Party immediately adopted him as the leader of the movement as we could see that he understood us.

Trump ran a campaign targeted at the movement Tea Party plus  and used the media to reach us despite the all-out effort to stop him by the Democrats, many Republicans, the national media and the Federal Government and since he had won the citizens he was not beatable. Is trump perfect, of course not, he is human, but as I see it none of the others even see the problem and further are not capable of making changes even if they wanted to.  The reason they are not capable is that to make any major change requires legislation be passed in the US Congress and since neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have the votes to do this it will require a super negotiator which means Trump who is the best in the country.  So I voted for him as did enough others that he is going to be the next president since he is the only one that actually seeks to put all of the broken pieces of America together again and has the necessary skill set to do it for us.

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