Joe Kress -- Barbarians not only outside the gates

BARBARIANS NOT ONLY OUTSIDE THE GATES

By Joe Kress

February 4, 2007

NewsWithViews.com

Mr. Mike Retze, Republican National Committee Secretary in the first paragraph of his solicitation letter to me stated: �I don�t want to believe you�ve abandoned the Republican Party, but I have to ask�have you given up?

The answer is that the Republican Party has abandoned me and yes, I have given it up for the America First Party.

George Bush has become one of those Born-Again Christian fanatics that follow the Dispensationalists loonies of Darbyism who concentrate on the �Last Days� and saving Israel until the battle of Armageddon. This new twist on the Christian Bible was brought into being around 1878. Its followers now in the millions have transformed the United States into a stooge for Israel�s interests.

This country is tail-wagged. Prime Minister Sharon made a statement to the Knesset in 2003, ��not to worry about the U.S. congress, we control it.� Men like Wolfowitz, Perle, Bill Kristol and a long line of Zionists within congress, the Pentagon, the Department of State and the President�s own cabinet were strumming the drums of war against Iraq on the Sunday morning talk shows and at every other opportunity immediately before and after 9-11. It became patently obvious to me, at least, that Iraq was only a threat to the �mini-state� and American lives were to be lost to protect the real cause of the disruption and reciprocating vengeance between Moslem and Jew in the Middle East. �The friend of my enemy is my enemy� is the axiom iterated throughout Islam. It is a truism that is just as applicable to the Arab world as it is to the statement of: �Either you are for us or against us,� to those who wouldn�t support George W�s war cry. Because of such hubris, friends of the United States declined to participate.

Thomas Freedman, the well-known columnist, in a recent article made this profound statement: �With the conflicting factions at each others throat within Iraq, it is likely that the United States will be the new Saddam to control them.�

We may have beaten down Iraq as a threat to Israel, but the U.S., in some sort of a messianic mission, is on the verge of attacking Iran and maybe Syria besides facing off Afghanistan. The continuing, failed policy where our strategic endeavor was siding with the Shiite against the Sunni in Iraq was close to madness. Now, this new policy by the wizened wizards of war are going to have a mixed force of American military troops and brigades of mixed Sunni and Shiite combat troops who are supposed to shoot their own relatives as part of their duties.

That kind of stupidity ties down our capability to disembark graciously from what is now on-going chaos. Thus, feather merchant leaders are duplicating what happened to the Roman Empire that was stuck in a quagmire of our president�s (emperor�s) own making. The military and the ruinous cost of constant missions to defend remote areas against hostile barbarians, Rome�s emperors, like W. Bush, didn�t bother to ask for declared wars of conquest, and routinely ignored the self-serving, complicit senate in its useless sterile debates. Rome�s emperors for three hundred years got away with false dreams of empire that finally broke the Roman treasury and the people�s will to defend even themselves. After a thousand years of glory, the dark ages quickly followed.

We as a nation have been in existence 218 years, and now the seeds of a crumbling empire have been firmly implanted. Since the middle of the 1970s, we began the abandonment of our borders to hoards of illegal aliens, drug dealers, and possible terrorists. The Bill of Rights is also in the process of abandonment. The nation�s top sheriff, the Attorney General of the United States who just so happens to be of Hispanic decent whose parents were illegal aliens and who sides with the illegal alien hoard, is not enforcing laws.

The president and his prior two predecessors followed the failed policy of George W�s father and Bill Clinton in promoting open borders, NAFTA, free trade and a goal for world government that is now turning out to be a disaster for the American blue collar workers. Their pensions are gone, life and medical benefits are gone and incomes cut in half because of loused up free trade policies and inflation.

How many civilians still receive cost of living increases coupled with increases to their pension plans? Government workers are the rare elite breeds that are immune to what is happening to the rest of this nation�s middleclass work force. The military is a part of the government enclaves. They also receive cost of living increases, albeit not as much as civilian government employees. Our illustrious congress receives an automatic COLA pay increase every year tied also to their pensions. The 2006 COLA increase for members of congress amounted to $3,100 raising their pay to $165,000. Each raise adds to their pension benefit. Even the civilian government employees cannot claim that kind of relative increase in their COLAs. A government worker making $60,000 per year who receives a 3 percent COLA increase receives an additional $1,800 less Social Security and FICA deductions. The congressional representatives receive two and a half times more than the $60,000 a year worker who lives in Washington and must cope with the same high costs of living.

This is what the editors of the Charleston Post and Courier had to say about this outrageous self-serving practice: �Since Congress started giving itself automatic cost of living increases there have been spoilsports who have insisted � quite properly, in our view - that the automatic hikes are inappropriate.� (The least that they can do to have a modicum of decency is to have a recorded vote on the pay hikes.) �Those efforts have been quashed by the majority, through some teeth- grinding about having the issue raised and published in the press, not to mention the news releases of those few congressmen who bring it up. But a provision recently approved in the Senate would have any senator who suggests such a notion automatically lose his pay hike, whether his efforts are successful or not.� The most thought provoking aspect of this is that the provision is included in the senate�s ethics bill.

It is almost impossible to express my personal disgust in their effort to secure continued COLA increases. The least they could do is stand up to be counted whether they are for or against the measure. Consider the perquisites benefits: steam baths, masseurs, private gym privileges, weekend transportation expenses; three day work weeks; housing allowances; useless boondoggles to resort areas using military aircraft accompanied by wives whose fares are a fraction of a commercial ticket; add their special dining room facilities with taxpayer-paid waiters to meet their epicurean needs. Especially disturbing is their specially priced meals prepared by government employed chefs; and of course, free franking privileges to propagandize their great deeds in pork dispensing to impress their constituents.

To top it all off, they have a special passage to employment when leaving office provided by the very same firms that lobbied them while in office, donated to their campaigns, and then pay them four or five times their congressional salaries. It�s no secret why so much money and so much effort is made to be elected to our congress when one can enter as a middle class wage earner or as a small business owner or a moderately successful lawyer and come out a millionaire, sometimes, many times over.

What have these birds accomplished during their stints in office? Have they solved the Social Security problem? No. Have they solved the Medicare problem other than to propose a plan similar to Canada�s failed health universal welfare plan as an example of government's inability to do anything right - where Canadian patients wait a couple of years for an operation? No. Have they solved our illegal immigration problem, other than proposing that all illegals can stay here and receive free benefits, including subsidized college educations? No. Have they secured our borders? No. Have they even attempted to cut the pork from the budget, which is now out of control? No. Have they placed emphases on new fuel options, other than Ethanol that can�t be transported through pipes, but must be moved using ground transportation and will cause a disruption in our food supply that is dependent on corn, thus raising prices and making us dependent on foreign suppliers? No.

The U.S. Congress is following the path of the ancient Roman Senate. It has abandoned its duty to monitor trade negotiations and granted near-dictatorial powers to the president regarding Homeland Security.

The lobby representing retailers had reason to cheer at the expense of workers in the textile industry. The United States signed an appeal agreement with Vietnam giving a generous package of clothing quotas to the country that was a site of one of the U.S. military�s most humiliating retreats.

The textile agreement allows Vietnam to double its apparel exports to the United States and then grow steadily as it implements a complicated but often flexible system of quotas. The agreement went into effect May 1 2003.

The textile industry has lost 200,000 jobs since President Bush took office in an economy that has shed some two million jobs in the first two years while he was in office. In a scant two years, Vietnam has grown from almost nothing to become the sixth largest supplier of apparel to the U.S. market. The country exported $49 million in apparel in 2001 and $950 million in 2002. The agreement allows Vietnam�s apparel exports to the United States to grow to $1.7 billion this year, followed by a 7 percent increase annually. There is evidence that Vietnam was cheating already on exports by shipping Chinese-made apparel in boxes that said �Made in Vietnam.� This practice is illegal under the rules of world trade. But a meeting between U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick smoothed over Commerce�s objections to the pact, according to industry sources.

The fact is America has lost its industrial capacity to other nations that can produce goods using cheap labor without health, safety or retirement benefits. Since the New World Order was announced by Bush Sr., followed by the Clinton era that was a slight of hand debacle, the American standard of living has been on a slow spiral downward. The American dollar, as of May 1, 2003 was 20% discounted to the euro. In January 2007, it is 35% discounted to the euro. Our debt expected to climb from $6.5 trillion in 2003 is now, in 2007, 8.3 trillion climbing to the predicted $16 trillion in the next seven years. When that happens, it will be long past the point that any other country will invest in our bonds or consider the dollar as a secure currency. With such a record of total stupidity or worse� using the Hegelian philosophy, where out of chaos synthesis comes� seems to be the road that this president and the congress are perusing.

The Bush neocon Republicans and the Democrats� solution are to open the floodgates of cheap labor and cheap votes to solve unemployment statistics and change the demographics for future generations. Low paid, taxpaying, dumbed down, mostly illegal immigrants, can be expelled at any time they become a burden to the welfare system. That type of political solution now appears to appeal to both sides of the aisle. The aftermath of this road to perdition means that the Caucasians will be in the minority; that English will be a second or third language and the middle class prosperity once the pride of this democratic republic will only be a memory to be envied.

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When will the legal American citizens wake up or are they so dumbed down because of a government established public education system, where even the private schools are subjected to the same reading matter as those in the public schools and, as a result, the present generation is now universally being brainwashed?

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The "Curmudgeon", Joseph H. Kress, Lt. Col. USAF (Ret) obtain a B.S. in Business Administration, with a major in economics and minor in accounting.

He served in England and Viet Nam where he received the Bronze Star during the TET Offensive, then he was appointed Chief of Supply for two state-side assignments; the DOD's Defense Disposal Agency where he was chief of disposal operations for all of Southeast Asia, based at CINCPAC Headquarters in Hawaii. He retired from Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio as chief of supply with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel at the age of 52, and now he and his wife reside in Summerville, S.C.

Since leaving the military, he was involved in political campaigns, writing articles for the local papers, and as a realtor.

E-mail:�kressretired2000@yahoo.com

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