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Loeffler Articles:
John Loeffler
September 8, 2003
NewsWithViews.com
�Oh my, Caesar, wasn�t that the Rubicon we just crossed?� Call it a paradigm shift, a worldview revolution or a sea change but today�s America is a totally different creature from the America of yesterday. All of the changes � political, social, economic, global -- are interconnected and they are most likely irreversible.
These paradigm shifts were 20-50 years in the making, driven largely by elitest academics, and easy for any sober prophet to predict -- but it is breathtaking to see it all finally arrive at last. Indeed the years 2000 to 2003 will most likely be remembered by history as pivotal years but for now most of those little guys crossing the Rubicon just don�t understand what�s happening.
The Run-up Years
The 1990s were run-up years to our current location. They began with the stalemate of Gulf War I even if we convinced ourselves we had won it. Besides it had been a test for President Bush, Sr.�s New World Order of coalition forming, which he couldn�t exactly describe but kept insisting we were setting a marvelous precedent. The Berlin wall was down and who could possibly be our enemy now? No need for national defense. Oslo�s Mideast peace process was well underway and as long as no one tried to resolve those pesky hardcore issues (Jerusalem, borders, right of return), the Israelis and Palestinians basked in a state of no-war, terrorism was held at bay, and we could Chamberlain ourselves that peace in our time was a reality.
Anti-big government sentiment that began under Ronald Reagan peaked in the 1994 elections, despite the installment of a Democratic president. Enough people had been burned that they were pushing for hard-core reform and President Clinton�s administration was in trouble from the start.
Educrats were pursuing their radical agenda to completely remake education along the lines of the psycho-social agenda, that had been determined at the 1989 national governor�s conference on education.
Meanwhile, the stock market, which really peaked in 1989, was given an artificial burst of life by the dot.com revolution and Alan Greenspan�s magic-like ability to pump liquidity into the money markets.
Beware the Ides of 1995
Boom! On April 19, 1995 the first explosion in the paradigm change blew up the Murrah Office Building in Oklahoma City and things began to go south. Despite the substantial evidence for Middle East terrorist connections, President Clinton blamed everyone on the right � even home schoolers -- and the �atmosphere of hate� created by �hate radio.� Suddenly being anti-big government was unpatriotic and everyone scrambled to look �moderate.�
NAFTA � a treaty masquerading as an agreement � had been passed by a lame duck congress and the flow of jobs offshore and drugs from Mexico onshore began. As the effects of NAFTA took hold, President Bush�s term �new world order� was getting bad press so it was retired in favor of �global governance.� Anyone still referring to the NWO was a right-wing �extremist.� Parents began to smell a rat in education agendas and the move toward private and home school grew phenomenally.
The Pivotal Months
By 1999 the stock market and the economy had gone flat, although you never would have known it from the electioneering. The dot.com revolution became the dot.gone revolution. Job losses were climbing but underreported, and the Fed�s efforts to inflate the money supply weren�t working. The hard issues of the peace process finally made it to the table and weren�t doing well. Anti-big-government sentiment was on the rise again.
September, 2000 to September, 2003 will most likely be remembered as pivotal months. By September of 2000, the peace process had collapsed and the �spontaneous� intifada set the stage for September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center was attacked. The US responded by accusing Usama bin Laden and then using the old bomb-and-switch maneuver, focused on Saddam Hussein, which brings us to where we are now.
Double Double, Toil and Trouble
The twenty-year effort to achieve limited government finally died. Conservatives failed to reduce the size of government, reduce taxation and give control back to the little guy. There will not be another window of opportunity anywhere in the near future for such a revolution in Washington.
Neo-cons hijacked the Republican agenda and are now off on their quijotesque vision of a globalist pax Americana, actually a remake of the original New World Order but along Cecil Rhodes�s dream of an Anglo-American alliance that would dominate the world. The old coalition partners of Daddy Bush � BB Ghali and Kofi Annan (UN) as well as Javier Solana (EU) and the French have been outed, at least for a while as global dialectics go. But just watch, they'll be back.
In the US the difference between Socialist Party (R) and Socialist Party (D) grows increasingly miniscule with each passing day. Both believe in glutted, sprawling, unaccountable government, only differing as to how GSUG government should be used, given that real power today is held by a faceless bureaucracy that outlives every election.
Meanwhile liberals, bless their emotionally-driven hearts, are distraught about everything the administration is doing, thinking butter to be better than guns as long as someone else pays for the butter, but they�ve failed to recognize the neo-con shanghai for what it really is.
To their credit, liberals are getting it right in many areas, even if for the wrong reasons. They understand the fake nature of the Iraq adventure but they think it�s just about oil. They also understand the clear and present danger to civil rights the Patriot Act and Homeland Security are establishing, by setting precedents that can and will be applied against US citizens in the near future as America�s day of crisis develops. Recall twenty years ago we were promised that RICO statutes would only be applied to drug traffickers but within a short amount of time law enforcement was busy seizing property for all sorts of crimes, and the same is happening with powers given to the Justice Department under the anti-terror laws.
Republicans are confused. They can�t understand why their long-term goals are all failing, not being achieved and a lot of them are wondering why the Pres can�t answer the hard question such as, �Why are we fighting in Iraq, Daddy?� But they�re afraid to attack their President because getting Bill out was so hard and � on no � Hillary could be next!
Why is all this? Because the name of the game is not left vs. right but a radical transformation of our society at every level from free-market where everyone has a chance to a managed economy where everyone is monitored in his place, like it or not.
So tell us, O Prophet, where are we headed?
(1) Whether big government is used for guns or butter, we are headed towards a day of horrible economic reckoning. All the promises of government since the New Deal will come crashing down, notably Social Security.
(2) The Fed has signaled it is pumping liquidity into the money supply until we burst, and will dump cash out of helicopters if necessary. The Fed is meddling in virtually all the markets, especially manipulating the price of gold and silver. While cooing that inflation isn�t bad, prices at the pump and the shelf are already climbing steadily.
Meanwhile, the national debt rises more than a half-trillion dollars per year and even though the economy is in a small rally right now, it will not endure. The name of the game is to keep the little guys soaking in the markets so the big guys can fleece them. There�s no partisan politics here. They�re all guilty.
(3) While Enron and Worldcom were bad, nothing has been done to prevent the same problems from occurring again. The R&D politicians can�t afford to offend their cash cows.
(4) If you think debt is bad, the exposure of banks to the derivatives markets is staggering. J.P. Morgan/Chase alone is reported to have a 6:1 ratio of derivative investments to customer deposits, meaning one bad day could wipe the bank and it will have to be bailed out by already over-burdened taxpayers
(5) As federal tax cuts attempt to revive a moribund economy, states are doing their best to nullify them by raising taxes in every quadrant and �feeing� their citizens to death. Taxing, feeing, borrowing and inflating constitutes a horrible combined levy upon the populace, which is difficult for those paying the fare to identify and easy for politicians to deny but it all lugs the worker down. The rich are not being soaked; the little guys are.
(6) The manufacturing sector is almost extinct (Hail GATT!) and the service sector jobs we were promised would prosper (Heil NAFTA!) are going offshore. Unemployment is much higher than official figures. Thus saith the prophet: All government numbers are bogus and cooked, designed to achieve predetermined public behavior rather than represent truth.
(7) As reality breaks upon politicians, they will thrash about attempting to avoid accountabililty for the mess they have created. Governments will waffle on the benefits and economic promises they have made, finding more and more reasons to deny them to their citizens as governments follow the time-honored tradition of reneging their economic promises.
(8) As citizens attempt to defend themselves against the economic onslaught, politicians will demonize them for having had the foresight to see what was coming. Attempts will be made through various mechanisms to seize their money and property in the name of the �public good.� Thus surveillance and confiscation measures prosecuted under the War on Terrorism will be handy for monitoring citizens, who are trying to hold onto what they have left. As the stress between citizens and plundering government increases � with tax dodging and possibly worse -- we will begin hearing more and more about �domestic financial terrorism.�
(9) On the international scene things will become much more chaotic, politically, economically and geopolitically. The US has excited an Islamic hornet�s nest that will not go away easily. The peace process is no further today than in fall of 2000 when the intifada erupted. The war on terror is not going well nor is the war in Iraq and they are not the same thing. Each day Iraq becomes a thickening quagmire. The US is pursuing a covert policy of de-stabilizing Iran and Syria, while hinting we may have to �Iraqicide� them. Watch the UN be brought back into the equation as we need someone to watch Iraq while we�re off taking care of other axis of evil nations.
(10) As the issues become more and more confusing to the eyes of those trying to see them through the old left-right filters, rather than the new globalist paradigms, we will see strange alliances between groups of former antagonists. Issues will indeed become very confusing and interlinked in a way that makes it hard to discern what is truly happening. Beware the dialectic! Ignore back and forth arguments and watch key indicators and trends. Above all watch what politicians and media types do, not what they say. That will alert you to our ultimate global destination.
(11) As globalism progresses, law is being re-written with increasingly broader paint brushes and vaguer definitions. This means laws can be arbitrarily enforced and allows governments the latitude they need to pursue their goals, especially when it comes to defending themselves from their own people. They will need to do this in the near future as their promises collapse and people reject the new paradigms.
Floating law can be seen all the way from the International Criminal Court down to Homeland Security. The concept of authority and jurisdiction so essential to establishing stable government is a thing of the past, especially with judicial activism. Law doesn�t mean what is says. Thus it becomes easy to prosecute people when necessary, since no one knows what the law clearly says. In the same vein, since political lines and positions become ever more blurry, we will find states oftentimes at odds with significant sections of their populations and increasing conflicts among population sub-groups.
(12) In the social line, government educrats have put in place a system to control the lives of their citizens from womb to tomb by imposing a web of interaction between education and business, disguised by nice names such as �lifelong learning.� Under �No Child Left Behind� the entire structure for cementing lifelong control of what and how people think was finally locked in place. Education was converted from academic emphasis to an emphasis on preparation for the job place. Student preparation will now be aligned with needs in the job place not based on what students would like to achieve. They will be tracked through their education career and into the job place for their entire lives. Remediation will be required of those who don�t go along with their pre-assigned place in life. Here again surveillance has a role in that the entire system depends on being able to monitor who does what.
(13) As secularism with its consensus-driven dialectical thought process is now the controlling worldview of the West, governments and certain religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam are on a collision course, although they may not recognize it yet because it has not played out to its fullest extent. Despite the claims of tolerance and diversity, there is not enough diversity to go around to handle all the worldview conflicts. It�s clear someone�s views are going to have to go, by force if necessary.
We are moving into a very unstable political and economic time in which constantly changing relative attitudes values and beliefs will be enforced not by religion but by faceless government, which will use its surveillance powers over the education and job place to compel compliance in those beliefs. Previously existing rights and guarantees will no longer exist in fact, even if they are still on the books, simply because they will have been defined out of existence. People of faith will not be left alone as governments become the new arbiters of attitudes, values and beliefs.
Bottom line: The day of the private individual/entrepreneur is almost over and everyone will be assigned his place. It�s a new world we must bravely face.
� 2003 John Loeffler - All Rights Reserved
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John Loeffler is host of the weekly syndicated talk show Steel on Steel, which can be heard at www.steelonsteel.com. Online subscriptions to the show or by tape are available. John also produces and co-hosts The Financial Sense Newshour with Jim Puplava at www.financialsense.com. He can be reached at (800) 829-5646 or (208)765-8337. These articles are published at www.newswithviews.com.
"In the US the difference between Socialist Party (R) and Socialist Party (D) grows increasingly miniscule with each passing day. Both believe in glutted, sprawling, unaccountable government"
