ISN'T THIS THE LAND OF THE FREE?

ISN'T THIS THE LAND OF THE FREE?

J. Croft

America, land of the Free-no it isn't if you judge our public servants by their actions instead of their words.

Every time some Bush crony speaks he's either droning about some "threat" or salivating over taking away more of our freedom. Come to think of it, it was the same with that male slut Bill Clinton. If we're the land of the free, how come we let ourselves be "led" by those who by their actions have no respect for freedom?

Every time you step to a govt. beaurecrat(or more likely, they step to you) you're toe to toe with someone who'd otherwise be a small, petty person who'd normally be shunned. Should be shunned and your Kids encouraged to harass to the point they leave your community.

But they work for the GOVERNMENT. That clerk behind the DMV counter, that traffic cop, that building code inspector, that federal bureaucrat; they all exude the rank arrogance that comes from unbridled power unaccountable to the average "taxpayer". Taxpayers-US-getting up to HALF our pay stolen from us by seven trillion dollars a year. To pay for this "freedom" of theirs-more niggling rules, less freedom-and they just love their jobs. They get off imposing all these rules on us, that we pay seven trillion dollars a year for.

What the hell does SEVEN TRILLION DOLLARS buys us beyond the most pervasive, most massive government in history? How much freedom does seven trillion buy?

Actually, it seems that seven trillion/yr more like takes it away. If you try to honestly pull yourself up to a better life, open and above board, you're faced with taxes, code inspectors, osha, health inspectors, agents-a legion of small petty bureaucrats trying to justify their jobs at your expense. You say "aw, the hell with it" you won't be earning so much. And being properly taxed, you're more on the margins than a entrepeneur.

You can lose your health-and between the HMO and the government saying money's tight, you can lose what little you got and be homeless. Do you know what bureaucrats are most likely to deal with people who can't secure shelter or regular places to shower or change their clothes? The cops. A lot of them are on a straight power trip(admit it) and get a kick out of harassing bums-it beats going after criminals posing as public servants or otherwise powerful people who can literally buy whatever legislation they desire-that become our laws… which they enforce. Without thinking about it because they're on that power trip.

Power trips. And they're jealous of their power! Try to fix a problem on your property yourself without "permit" and a "official" comes down on you for it. Recognize the police have no mandate to guarantee your personal protection-and take personal responsibility for your own safety-and you'll get some thug cops swarming you, and the criminal justice system will see your sorry ass as just another excuse for their gulags. And America has the largest prison system in the world-to go along with the largest body of law in the world. For the land of the Free.

Sounds like a lot of rambling, right? All over the board, field or whatever metaphor you like? No. The problem is systemic. It's the entire system that is at fault and it has been building to this juggernaut for two centuries. Two hundred years-and nobody has yet to successfully check it. Because nobody has realized that the problem is the system.

The system is the problem. The problem of why we are not free in the land of the free.

And too many of us have been cowards in this supposed home of the brave to do what we all knew and know needed to be done. And it's out of hand. It's all out of hand. I wonder if Ken Royce(Hologram of Liberty)* is right and it was rigged that way. It's a scary thought.

We used to be taught that we were a free people and that our prosperity is a byproduct of that freedom. The point of America is to be free to be prosperous. Where the hell is either of them? What the hell did we do? Did we by our silence give consent to giving up our freedom for prosperity? Well, I don't see us being very prosperous today! Never mind what the networks and cnn and foxnews and the govt. and that jackal Greenspan say, you drive around some factories, some steel plants, some downtown skyscrapers, guess what? THEY'RE EMPTY! Did by our silence and consent did we agree to prosper our traitorous corporations to move them to Mexico and China, and take away our prosperity… and by doing so making us struggle and focus on survival so much we haven't the energy or the time to act on our FREEDOM. Freedom to find out why our prosperity has been stolen from us. Freedom to take the time off work and that otherwise trivial game on tv to hold those traitors who institute the destructive legal and monetary policies responsible for taking away our prosperity-our means of sustinance. Our futures, people.

If we're not free to defend our freedom, we certainly cannot and by judging the actions of today's "americans" WON'T defend our right to a enviroment and society where one can sustain himself and a family. That's right; on top of unctous bureaucrats and politician buying, traitorous corporations there's the brutal impact of their enviromental gangrape of our land. I will mention the following because I hold that to be free also means to be able to have the freedom to breath clean air, drink clean water, and eat foods clean of poisons and pathogens.

MTBE a fuel additive supposed to clean up automobile exhaust is making our water poisonous. Our farmland is being literally washed down the Mississippi River because corporate agriculture finds it too difficult economically to actually take care of the land.** Contaminated foodstuffs are being passed along to us, and on top of that the corporations load up with hormones and chemicals that actually damage us. Our very infrastructure, our way of life is not geared to be efficient-it's incredibly wasteful with the distance between markets and communities demanding the car. And they're gashogs. Cities are trashed so developers can hype the latest subdivision made from farmland. Farmland we're gonna need when oil production wanes and there's not enough to fuel our wasteful cars, our power grid, and make fertilizers. Our consumption, this consumerism is a money pit. A resource pit. It's a false prosperity you're literally mortgaging your futures on that's not going to last past the next few years.

And these policies, to so totally screw ourselves, our children, our nation and our world-did we vote on them? Did we approve of the courses this once free nation has taken? Of course not.

And yes; it's all interconnected. Because who made these decision? Us?

No.

It was a CEO. It was a politician, a bureaucrat that took that payoff, that budget increase to implement the policies that allow these crimes to flourish. And we're free? To what? Have half our labor stolen by these people so they can poison us, take our livelihoods away and make us slave for half the effective pay we made thirty years ago. Strung out on debt SLAVERY so much we have to work twice as hard for a illusory taste of what the "american dream" was.

The "american dream"; I thought it was to be free. I guess it's an illusion to get you to give your money to some bureaucrat or corporation.

Well, you're supposed to be free, right? Free to do this, or that as long as you don't go out to harm someone else. Then, act free-be free.

Take back your freedom. Use your freedom of action to give your tv chair a rest, and rediscover what freedom is. You'll have to do that first because I'll bet this article's the first exposure you've had to any real notions of what that is. Educate yourself. Then find a issue that pisses you off, and take back your freedom.

Find others like you and do the taking together. For some reason the freedom-haters can't stomach a more evenly matched opponent. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that they're bullies and cowards; bullies for imposing their tyrannies on us, and cowards for pushing their violations of our freedoms behind closed doors, or disguising it as for "public safety", "for the enviroment", "homeland security", and "for the children".

Time to knock their teeth out for Freedom. Time to do it now while we still have SOME freedoms left!

*Ken Royce is a regrettably obscure Libertarian writer who wrote Hologram of Liberty back in the nineties. It's a frightening book that surmises that the Constitution was deliberately sabotaged by the elites of that time to eventually produce… what we pretty much have today.

**Farming was once a family affair in America, but corporations like banks got suckers hooked on easy loans to expand production during the seventies, and then pulled the rug from under them during the eighties. Those farming families were denied credit despite A1 ratings, and they were foreclosed on. The lands and equipment were scooped up by… more corporations and by the nineties corporate agriculture was washing our topsoil(where the roots are) down the river, and foisting their frankenstein genetically engineered seeds onto the enviroment.