America is on the decline - The Dirty Dozen

by

       George Sontag

      How has the last century of creeping Democratic Socialism (a.k.a. Progressivism) done in the United States? - A report card.

1. Median wealth per adult

       Rank of U.S.: - 27th out of 27 high-income countries

2. Education and skills

       Rank of U.S.: - 16th out of 23 countries

The US ranked near the bottom in a skills. The US placed 16th in adult literacy, 21st in adult numeracy out of 23, and 14th in problem-solving.

3. Internet speed and access

       Rank of U.S.: - 16th out of 34 countries

The cost of internet is among the highest ($0.04 per megabit per second in Japan, for example, versus $0.53 in the US).

4. Health

       Rank of U.S.: - 33rd out of 145 countries

When it comes to its citizens’ health, in countries that are home to at least one million people, the US ranks below many other wealthy countries.

5. People living below the poverty line

       Rank of U.S.: - 36th out of 162 countries, behind Morocco and Albania

Officially, 14.5% of Americans are impoverished — 45.3 million people–according to the latest US Census data.

6. Children in poverty

       Rank of U.S.: 34th out of 35 countries surveyed

When UNICEF relative poverty – relative to the average in each society—the US ranked at the bottom, above only Romania, even as Americans are, on average, six times richer than Romanians.

7. Income inequality

       Rank of U.S.: - Fourth highest inequality in the world.

The most severe inequality can be found in Chile, Mexico, Turkey — and the US.

8. Prison population

       Rank of U.S.: - First out of 224 countries

More than 2.2 million Americans are in jail. Only China comes close with about 1.66 million.

9. Life satisfaction

       Rank of U.S.: 17th out of 36 countries

10. Corruption

       Rank of U.S.: 17th out of 175 countries.

Special interest groups are gradually transforming the United States into an oligarchy,

11. Stability

       Rank of U.S.: - 20th out of 178 countries.

The Fragile States Index considers factors such as inequality, corruption, and factionalism. The US lags behind Portugal, Slovenia and Iceland.

12. Social progress index

       Rank of U.S.: - 16th out of 133 countries

A broad measure of social well-being, the index comprises 52 economic indicators such as access to clean water and air, access to advanced education, access to basic knowledge, and safety.

      The Progressive movement, which started around the turn of the 20th century, has thwarted  the exceptional contributions to humankind that our Constitutional values have generated. With the tendencies of the past few years, we can only expect these figures to worsen.

The Real Party of the Rich in Today's America

 by

       M. Richard Maxson

      Fifty years ago, Republicans had a big financial advantage, and few rich people backed liberals. In the 21st century this is not the case. Democrats have become the party of the rich.  Most of today’s rich love Barack Obama—so much so that Washington D.C. area airports ran out of space to handle all of the private jets flying in the well-heeled for both of his inaugurals and high cost parties. Democrats now control the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats. This new political demography holds true in the House of Representatives, where the leadership of each party hails from different worlds. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, represents one of America's wealthiest regions. Her San Francisco district has more than 43,700 high-end households. So please, enough of this about Democrats being the party of the little guy.

     In 2012, Barack Obama carried eight of America's 10 wealthiest counties.  He carried the majority of the richer rich, those making $200,000 or more per

year.  These rich Democrats level of wealth is different, and how they earn it is different. They live in rich social enclaves. They live on the two coasts, and have a different value system.  They are not religious.  They are not family oriented and they are determined to "change" America. The most famous example would be in the entertainment industry, where star-studded events have become a significant part of Democratic fund raising culture.  These “elite” group of liberal “millionaires and billionaires” is pumping money into an elaborate network of groups to influence the country's policies, even using “shady” donations from foreign companies to fund their efforts.

      There is argument over the definition of what is rich. Mainstream media supports Democrat propaganda by defining rich as households that earn more than $75,000.  In today's world, seventy-five thousand for a two-income household is not rich. The unbiased Pew Report states that the median wealth for the middle class was $96,500.  A review of the 20 richest Americas found that 60 percent affiliate with the Democratic Party…Among the richest families, the Democratic advantage rises even higher, to 75 percent. 

      This falsehood of fighting against those "rich Republicans"continues to be pushed as a main driving force of the Democrats and the mostly uneducated people in this country consider it as truth. The real truth is that it is the education levels that prove that Republicans are the party of America’s middle and working class, while Democrats are the party of the extremes.  People who vote Democrat haven’t graduated from high school or else tend to have post-graduate degrees. The majority of high school graduates, people with some college, and people with a college degree are Republican.  Education largely determines class in this country. The educated can plainly see the "big lie" but judging by the last few decades election results, many cannot. 

       If the media would ever check Democrat talking points, the evidence that Democrats are the party of the rich is easy to find. There are now more Democratic millionaires in Congress than Republican ones. Of 534 current members of Congress, at least 268 were millionaires, according the Center for Responsive Politics’ review of financial disclosure reports filed last year. The Democratic party is that the party is increasingly ruled by the “new oligarchs.” In his review of The New Class Conflict, by Joel Kotkin, a lifelong Democrat, George Will explains that there is a “growing alliance between the ultra-wealthy and the instruments of state power. The bigger the government, the easier it is for the increased power to be abused by moneyed interests. Growing the government doesn’t change that fact; it only changes the people who become rich. In Hollywood and high tech, there is a sudden jump into wealth. The very richest of these are Democrats.

       Yes, but haven’t many of the leading plutocrats, such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, embraced higher income taxes? Yes, they have, but one important fact has escaped notice: higher income tax rates will not touch the bulk of the fortunes of today’s plutocrats, for the simple reason that the great bulk of the accumulated wealth of Gates, Buffett, Silicon Valley and Wall Street consists of appreciated asset values—not ordinary income. Few seem to be aware that most of this wealth has never been taxed, and in the case of Buffett and Gates, who are taking advantage of the charitable foundation laws, will never be taxed. Rich Leftists are not stupid, but maybe we Americans still are.

      

The First Amendment and The Rise Censorship in America

By

       George Sontag

 The left's assault on the First Amendment---from free speech to religious liberty---is total. Nothing is exempt from the tyrants of tolerance.”

                           - Gary Bauer - End of Day report (3/11/16)

      Four in 10 young Americans have no idea what America is. That's the conclusion of a new Pew Research poll showing that 40 percent of Americans aged 18-34 say that the government should be able to prevent people from making "statements that are offensive to minority groups." In a democracy, citizens must be able to criticize their leaders. It's a reason America's founders put free speech in the Bill of Rights.

      The Left uses “rights” agendas to wrap itself in the mantle of righteousness and seize the supposed moral high ground, tactically putting us on the defense in the process. They encourage censorship in the name of "tolerance,"but they couldn’t care less about the actual issue except in its ability to facilitate their path to power. They do this to force people to accept what they don’t agree with. It's a double standard on the part of liberals when it comes to this issue. “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

      Perhaps the biggest censorship of all by liberals

comes in the form of political correctness which is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.” It is censorship before the fact. Censorship in speech not even yet given. Censorship of perceived thoughts. 

      Their attempts to destroy the first amendment can be seen on the college campuses today as......... 

• Leftists shout down unpopular ideas or simply forbid nonconforming views from being heard there in the first place. 
• Declared academic freedom an “outdated concept." 
• Declaring that freedom is oppressive and that they should not be expected to tolerate ideas that they do not share. 
• They have violently assaulted students studying in libraries and assaulted student journalists with whom they disagree. 
• They are demanding mandatory ideological indoctrination sessions for nonconforming students. 
• They have staged dozens of phony hate crimes and sexual assaults as a pretext for persecuting unpopular organizations and people....
• …...and the list goes on.

      For the past several decades, government public schools and nearly all colleges have touted socialism’s principles of redistribution, racialism and class envy while declining to make the connection between socialism and tyranny, which the lost lives of hundreds of thousands of souls in the twentieth century attest to. It’s no wonder that so many young people have a rosy view of Socialism when it’s depicted as the epitome of compassion and “fairness” instead of for the passive slavery which it imposes.

      If the First Amendment can be challenged this way; if a certain group’s “rights” can trump the U.S. Constitution, and if the Supreme Court can actually issue an edict making it so, then the entire Constitution has become meaningless. This is the Left’s true agenda and it always has been. The goal for them has always been destroying the country's identity in order to impose Democratic Socialism -- with them in charge, of course. In order to do that they have to strip America of its culture, its traditions, and most importantly, the most important law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.

A Search for the Truth Concerning Islam

As told to:

       George Sontag*

       I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much more than I had been told in the media. I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in terrorist attacks were Muslims and that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.

       This seems like a complete contradiction yet we are being bombarded with this narrative constantly. I wanted to find out the truth. Not only what is really happening but also why it happens. Being in law enforcement I had access to many of these jihadists. What I have found is that their claims of religion of peace are false.

       I was able to talk to an Imam who is the leader of the terror cell. Our government was portraying him as a ruthless killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. That was not the case. He turned out to be a globally renowned scholar, a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from a Cairo University.  His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law. There is no doubt that he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell but was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was telling?

       As he was an expert I had no chance in debating what I knew of Islamic law with him but I did think that if what we were saying as a government was true—that he was perverting or radicalizing Islam—then there should be obvious contradictions that I could use to trip him up. What I found was alarming: whenever he quoted the Koran or other sources of Islamic scripture, he quoted them accurately. When he said the scriptures command that Muslims strike terror into the hearts of lslam’s enemies, the scriptures backed him up. When he said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad until Islamic law was established throughout the world, his scriptures backed him up. When he said Islam directed Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as their friends, his scriptures backed him up. 

       One could counter that there are other ways of construing the scriptures, however, is that what you’d be arguing is an interpretation, not the text. It is the jihadists who seem to be making sense because they have the words of scripture on their side. The fact is that the summons to jihad was rooted in a coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He was not perverting Islam- he was, if anything, shining a light on it. 

       I came to the conclusion that Islam is not a religion of peace. There are ways of interpreting Islam that could make it something other than a call to war but even these do not make it a call to peace. Verses such as “Fight those who believe not in Allah,” and “Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war,” are not peaceful injunctions, no matter how one rationalizes.

       Moderate, peaceful American-Muslims may not be terrorists yet when questions about Islamic doctrine are discussed such as, —“What does jihad mean?” “What is sharia?” “How might sharia apply to a certain situation?”— these moderate, peaceful Muslims explained that they were not competent to say. In other words, for the answers, you’d have to turn to Islamic scholars like the Imam. In the minds of these moderate, peaceful Muslims, they were claiming to be too ignorant to be rendering authoritative opinions on the meaning of the core tenets of their own, so-called, religion. 

 

       It is not as if Western civilization had no experience dealing with Islamic supremacism—what today we call “Islamist” ideology, the belief that sharia must govern all societies. What about Islamic law? Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non—Muslim. It makes no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so. 

       A report to the government in 1955 by Robert Jackson, FDR’s attorney general, justice of the Supreme Court, and chief prosecutor of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. Here is what he concluded: 

"The law of the Middle East is the antithesis of our Constitution and Western law. The problem was not the people, he concluded. It was the doctrine". 

      Sixty years later the world still calls this cult, a religion, and it is the mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. When videos of beheading or other atrocities surface, American and European politicians can't get to microphones fast enough to insist that these had nothing to do with Islam. Yet when the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded people for various violations of sharia—the law that governs Saudi Arabia, there is silence. It is absurd to claim—as President Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. Even if only ten percent of all Muslims believe this it means there are 2 million Islamic terrorists world-wide. Why is it that they can’t say two plus two equals four when Islam is involved?

       The reason is simple: being unwilling to deal with the true reality of Islam, our leaders have constructed an Islam of their very own. Are we not all tired of hearing the robotically repeating of the phrase, “Islam is a religion of peace,” every time radical Muslims murder someone because of their religion. We know these radicals are murdering people because of their religion since they go out of their way to tell us this. This triumph of willful blindness and political correctness over common sense and obvious truth is a dangerous course we are taking in the west.. We have an obligation to our national security and our children's future to understand our enemies for what they truly are - and are not.

* Many thanks to the insights of Andrew McCarthy

    

Democratic Socialists Continue to Attack the First Amendment

By

       M. Richard Maxson

     The FIRST AMENDMENT:

"CONGRESS shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,

or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

or abridging the freedom of speech,

or of the press;

or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,

and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

      An appalling undercurrent has sprung into the current political scene. It is as anti-American as the Socialist-Progressive-Communism from which it has sprung. We have seen it this week as roads are

blocked to deny fellow citizens their rights. We have seen it in political rallies where Leftists, bent on stopping free speech that they don't agree with, are disrupting these events in an attempt to affect the coming election. In the name of "tolerance" it is being allowed to unfold and patriotic Americans are powerless to stop it. The "IT" is the destruction of the First Amendments guarantee of Freedom of Speech. 

      We are watching the coming of age for a new generation. An anti-American generation of youth molded in closet Communism in our own schools and universities and led to believe that these ideals are fair and moral when nothing could be further from reality. They are becoming a generation of sound-bites, mis-information, and intolerance.  A generation schooled by Marxist ideology that will one day shutdown free speech completely. A generation that will purge dissenting viewpoints. A generation that will shutter our churches and burn our books. We are watching the generation that is destroying America.

      Free speech has never been, in the history of our Republic, more comprehensively, aggressively, and dangerously threatened than it is now.  University campuses are supposed to be a place for an open exchange of ideas, but liberals on many college campuses are no longer willing to hear both sides of the conversation. Student groups across the country have decided that a free exchange of ideas is no longer a welcome quality on college campuses—unless they agree with all the ideas being exchanged.  There is a belief that the First Amendment is a mistake and that the real right people have regarding speech is the right to avoid speech.  On our campuses there has never been more intellectual ingenuity devoted towards rationalizing the disappearance of the First Amendment. Its an attack on the theory of freedom of speech. It is an attack on the desirability of free speech.

      Our nation's public universities are now breeding grounds for anti-American and un-Constitutional beliefs as a new survey from the Pew Research Center reveals that a shocking number of Millennials support curbing free speech. According to their findings, 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 believe the government should be able to ban any speech that is offensive. The Leftist Progressive party has already attempted to legally dismantle this Constitutional right. Every single Democrat in the United States Senate voted to repeal the essential guarantee of freedom of speech by voting for Senate Joint Resolution 19, a constitutional amendment introduced by Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.). Thank goodness it failed, but had it passed and been ratified as part of our Constitution, the words “Congress shall pass no law” would have been blotted out of the First Amendment!

      Many pundits have done a tremendous job documenting the methodical way in which our public institutions, our political parties, and our media have been turned against us and our Constitution. Those who do not agree with the rampaging mob of anti-free speech protesters have been threatened,  ridiculed, and minimized– their voices silenced. We, as all true Patriots and Americans, cannot and must not be silenced.

President Harrison's Death - Not What It Appeared

by

       Zeno Potas

       The 9th President of the United States, William Henry Harrison,

was born FEBRUARY 9, 1773. He was the son of Benjamin Harrison, signer the Declaration of Independence, and he was the grandfather of Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd President. 

      He was one of the first men running for the office to have a  campaign slogan which was "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." This refereed to his days as a military officer who was the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, and the Battle of the Thames in 1813, recovering Detroit from the British and their Indian allies led by Shawnee chief Tecumseh. He gave the longest Inaugural address, 8,445 words, but served the shortest term, only 32 days. He was the first President to die in office. As we now know, the true nature of his death was falsified. This has given rise to the suspicion that his demise was perhaps - arraigned.

      Elected as a Whig, he was surrounded by Jacksonian Democrat holdovers from the previous administration. This faction of the Democratic party, the Jacksonians, were in disagreement with the traditionalists within party itself. Previously Andrew Jackson's attempt to expand the power of the presidency while diminishing the role of the elitist bankers was stated in his veto of the bank charter renewal. In what has been called one of the most "popular and effective documents in American political history", Jackson outlined a major readjustment to the relative powers of the government branches. "The executive branch, Jackson averred, when acting in the interests of the American people; was not bound to defer to the decisions of the Supreme Court, nor to comply with legislation passed by Congress. Further, executive power was no longer limited to suppressing clear violations of the Constitution – it could be asserted on social, political or economic grounds.

      This was a subversion of the Constitution to Harrison. In his

inaugural address he railed against the powers in and behind the government that were attempting to change what the Founding Fathers had in mind for separation of powers as laid out in the Constitution. His concern that the presidency could be turned into a quasi-dictatorship was his message to the country. In his address, written with help from Daniel Webster, President William Henry Harrison warned, March 4, 1841:

      "The great danger to our institutions does...appear to me to be...the accumulation in one of the departments of that which was assigned to others.... Limited as are the powers which have been granted, still enough have been granted to constitute a despotism if concentrated in one of the departments.... particularly...the Executive...The tendency of power to increase itself, particularly when exercised by a single individual...would terminate in virtual monarchy..."

      Harrison continued:

      "Republics can commit no greater error than to...continue any feature in their...government which may...increase the love of power in the bosoms of those to whom necessity obliges them to commit the management of their affairs...When this corrupting passion once takes possession of the human mind, like the love of gold it becomes insatiable."

       "It is the part of wisdom for a republic to limit the service of that officer...to whom she has intrusted the management of her foreign relations, the execution of her laws, and the command of her armies and navies to a period so short as to prevent his forgetting that he is the accountable agent, not the principle; the servant, not the master..."

       Harrison warned:

      "The great dread...seems to have been that the reserved powers of the States would be absorbed by...the Federal Government and a consolidated power established, leaving to the States the shadow only of that independent action for which they had so zealously contended...There is still an undercurrent at work by which, if not seasonably checked, the worst apprehensions of our anti-federal patriots will be realized...Not only will the State authorities be overshadowed by the great increase of power in the Executive department...but the character of that Government, if not its designation, be essentially and radically changed.....as it is...the never-failing tendency of political power to increase itself...."

      The other burning issue of the day was the reintroduction of the National Bank Bill. His possible assassination may have been approved by the elite of the day as the fight for a new Bank of the United States began to warm up again with his inauguration. His warnings on the control of the nation's currency were made very clear that day.

      "It is not by the extent of its patronage alone that the Executive department has become dangerous, but by the use which it appears may be made of the appointing power to bring under its control the whole revenues of the country...The first Roman Emperor, in his attempt to seize the sacred treasure, silenced the opposition of the officer to whose charge it had been committed by a significant allusion to his sword...I know the importance...to the divorce...the Treasury from the banking institutions...It was certainly a great error in the framers of the Constitution not to have made...the head of the Treasury Department entirely independent of the Executive....It is in periods like this that it behooves the people to be most watchful of those to whom they have intrusted power..." That wisdom still rings true today and may have given reasonable fear to the elites who made their profits in banking.

       With his death  John Tyler, Harrison's successor and a former Democrat, abandoned the Whig agenda, effectively cutting himself off from the party and giving control of the government back to the Democratic party while continuing the un-constitutional ideas of his predecessor that the president should set policy instead of deferring to Congress. As the clouds of Civil War began to form in the chaos that was the pro-slavery Democratic Party he was marginalized by both parties and became ineffective. He became the first president to have his veto's overturned by Congress.

      The query is: After his two hour inaugural address in which he clearly laid the groundwork for a change in the unconstitutional drift that he felt the country was in, was he deliberately poisoned with enteric fever? Was it the bankers for his views on a new national bank or was it the Jacksonians who wanted more power to their president? We do know that he became ill three weeks after his address so the story of a cold turning into pneumonia is false. We may never know the real truth.

Why We Are Not Defeating ISIS?

by

       Phillip Todd

      The truth coming out of the mid-east is chilling as ISIS continues to grow(despite false news reports) and it appears that the United States is aiding them.  What is going on here? Who is really in control? People from within the system have been raising these concerns for a long time. Some fearless politicians have been warning us about the secret government, the power that is found in big corporations and big banks. Bernie Sanders also admitted something many people were already feeling: that it doesn’t matter who is elected, because the power the elitists hold over US policy is too well established to be challenged by any one person.(see JFK) The war on terror is being purposefully prolonged for the benefit of the many powerful people who maintain vested interest in that prolongation — the people for whom profit is derived from conflict. Below are quotes from those on the ground and in the know who are risking their lives to tell the truth.


      As Canadian economist and Ottawa’s Emeritus Professor of Economics stated  the International Conference on the New World Order, which was organized and sponsored by the Perdana Global Peace Foundation, 
 “We are dealing with a criminal undertaking at a global level … and there is an ongoing war, it is led by the United States, it may be carried out by a number of proxy countries, which are obeying orders from Washington … The global war on terrorism is a US undertaking, which is fake, it’s based on fake premises. It tells us that somehow America and the Western world are going after a fictitious enemy, the Islamic state, when in fact the Islamic state is fully supported and financed by the Western military alliance and America’s allies in the Persian Gulf."
 -   Link: Professors & Politicians Gather To Warn Us About The New World Order


       ".....there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.”
                                                                             - Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook

        "... the US had provided terrorists in Beiji with their military hardware and ammunition. “The military hardware and weapons had been airdropped by the US-led warplanes and choppers for the ISIL in the nearby areas of Beiji.”  Al-Zameli said that reports come in every day to the government in Baghdad claiming that the US is airdropping weapons and supplies for the terrorists. He also claims that the most prominent reason for the ongoing survival of ISIL is the result of this very support.
                     -  Head of Iraq’s National Security and Defense committee, Hakem al-Zameli 

        In June Aaron Klein, writing for World Net Daily, reported that members of ISIS were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials. The CIA has shipped weapons to al-Qaeda affiliated groups in Syria since at least 2012, a fact revealed by The New York Times.

         This is proof that the US and the international coalition are “not serious in fighting against the ISIL organization, because they have the technological power to determine the presence of ISIL gunmen and destroy them in one month.”
               - Iraqi Parliamentary Security and Defense Commission MP Majid al-Gharawi  

        Why is this happening? One reason is clear to Iraqi MP Majid al-Gharawi,  "the US is trying to expand the time of the war against the ISIL to get guarantees from the Iraqi government to have its permanent bases in Mosul and Anbar provinces." The powers that be want new bases near the Iranian border to keep tabs and continue in their attempt to destabilize that country. In addition they are a stones throw away from the Russian border, the ultimate prize and the continuation of the proxy war against them.

       So far, Putin outwitted Obama in Syria, effectively challenging his dirty game. He’s determined to eliminate the scourge of terrorism and keep it from spreading, especially to Central Asia and Russia. A proxy state of war between America and Russia now exists – a hugely dangerous situation, risking possible direct confrontation between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Expect Putin to go all-out to avoid it. Put nothing past neocon lunatics in Washington – willing to risk destroying planet earth to own it.

 *Phillip Todd is the overseas correspondent for The American Constituitonalist.