Villainized as a leftist terrorist, USA needs a Hugo Chavez in the White House

by Bob Taft
In recent days there has been a lowly Louisiana US Rep indicted or at least investigated for receiving a measly $100K in a cash payoff ... William Jefferson, sans Clinton (darn!) is his name. This is chicken feed. Someone had it in for him.

There isn't a member of the US Congress, and to a slightly lesser extent a state legislature, who isn't on the take. That's how their system works.af

The political parties exist on graft and patronage ... the individual politicians exist on selling their votes to the highest bidders, though if they'd dare admit it, each in the higher Congress is under written contract to one or more guarantors of their stay in Congress, as long as their vote stays bought.

I knew a man back in the fifties who was a field organizer for the R national committee. At that time graft and patronage in many of our western states was insufficient to keep a party structure in place in between bi-annual national elections. So this fellow would come in and build a state party from the ground up (he did Montana in '52 or '54). I'd imagine today there is plenty of plunder available to eliminate the need for such services by either the Ds or the Rs. Anyway, in between elections this man was what was, and still is, an unregistered lobbyist. There were only 50-60 registered ones back then, today there are over 35,000 registered vote buyers in Washington city alone. More in the state capitols. But still the serious ones are the unregistered ones.

This man showed me a shoe box one time, half filled with business cards, one for each job he'd done for some entity, corporate or otherwise. Each card would have his name, followed by the words "Special Vice-President." There was no office, elected or not, where he wasn't welcome with his cash in exchange for some vote or favor.

This is how modern government runs, and it has been this way since our 1787 US Constitution destroyed any chances of ever having a true republican FORM of government.

Corruption has become so blatantly in-your-face in recent years, in the US and most elsewhere, that much of the public has been anesthetized to its effects. The Defense Department as an example, says it has "misplaced" something like $2.3 trillion. I don't know just what constitutes grand theft, but this has to be grand to an exponential degree. That's why I say $100K is chicken feed. The spin-off USGov lending agencies, Freddie Mac and Fannie May may have bookkeeping errors in the hundreds of billions, but their chief executives get millions in salaries and retirement benefits. The recently retired head of troubled United airlines got a $400 million retirement package, while their workers were getting pay cuts. On May 25, 2006, the former heads of ENRON got the book thrown at them for plundering their failed energy monopoly which broke thousands of employees and investors.

But please bear in mind that none of this funny stuff with other people's fortunes and futures could ever be done without the legal collusion of our duly-elected thieves in our legislatures, especially the Congress.

It is at a point where those who condone and legalize all this thievery are now considered as "patriots," while real patriots in a few countries who are attempting to turn the tide in another direction ... as in Venezuela, are villainized as leftist terrorists, or whatever catch word is currently popularly applied to trends considered politically incorrect.

It is true they are "leftist" ... but on the political scale of enforced irresponsibility they are so closely to the left of those now considered as on the right that it is almost impossible to tell any difference, as in the United States of America.

The aim of the corporate fascist is corporate ownership of anything that can produce a profit, with unrestricted right to those profits without the inconvenience of covering the losses, as has been granted them by legislative edict.

The aim of the pure collectivist is state ownership of everything, but I see these new promoters of state ownership, like Chavez, as somewhere in between. Such statesmen (as opposed to mere politicians) are standing up for the rights of everyone in their countries, not just the vote-buying super-rich. They are seeing that the various energy sources, without which any society cannot function, should not be monopolized by a select few, but should belong to everyone.

This is anathema to many in the political United States of America but it must be admitted that the monopolistic private ownership of all our energy vehicles, starting with money, has been horribly abused by those in control.

Of course bureaucracy over time also abuses anything entrusted to them. Maybe we need to go back to the principles of our real Founding Fathers, of the Algonquin Confederation, who answered abuse of public trust by public clubbing to death of any such abusers. It was the Algonquin Confederation that inspired our original Articles of Confederation of 1777 under which America became independent until that independence was nullified by the 1787 Constitution so wrongly revered by superficial students of America's early years.

So what does the near future promise?

It could well be a complete backlash as unwelcome as what we are now being subjected to. We could be carried too far away from private ownership, and too far into public ownership where no one takes any real responsibility for anything. I hope not.

We might on the other hand emulate Venezuela and other countries brave enough to assume control of their energy monopolies for the benefit of all their citizens. They are already in process of avoiding dollar hegemony in favor of other currencies. It must be remembered that the US dollar is not only under private ownership and exploitation by the Federal Reserve, but that that "Federal Reserve" ownership is not even US but is under the same consortium that runs the money scam worldwide.

• From money to oil to electricity is but a logical extension of economic interests that need to be wrested from the hands of the greedy few and given back for the use of all. There was a time when my capitalistic background would have stopped me dead in my tracks for thinking such thoughts.

There are still unlimited areas for honest free-enterprise endeavor, hopefully without the concept of "limited liability" as an unethical crutch, without attempting to monopolize the basic energy sources that grease the wheels of commerce and industry.

The changes they are coming because the present leadership has bankrupted America and most all capitalist dominated countries. The US switched from being the world's greatest creditor nation, to the world's greatest debtor nation overnight, about 1979, under the second-to the last GATT agreement which destroyed America's industrial might. We have gone no where but downhill ever since.

There is only one way that we can ever reverse this trend towards economic oblivion and that is to take back control of America's economic destiny through publicly controlled energy media: money, oil/gas, electricity. Such control would even allow more viable alternatives to the uses of crude energy forms which are presently prevented by the monopolizers of such forms.

One thing for sure, democracy is no answer to our economic and political woes. We may have to get the clubs out.