Comment: Recently it seems that many Americans are unaware of the disintegration of our property rights, amongst just a few, via contracts and the limitations these documents put on our constitutional rights (this includes the corporate HOAs you join when you sign the rights to your home away via a vendor's lean). Common in business but now they impact almost every aspect of our lives, including our homes and families and even the very neighborhoods we choose to live in. This article by Craig Harfoot seems to sum it all up quite well from the Georgia Homeowner News (see below).
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Corpocracy, Constitutional Feudalism
The gangs of corporations known as the Chambers of Commerce are behind inflation, eminent domain, job loss, illegal immigration, and energy price inflation.
Recently I was having a conversation with a retired gentleman wearing a hat which he did not remove indoors. We were talking about a very common topic these days, the high energy prices and the mild weather. Our conversation came to deregulation of natural gas and the part Southern Company and the Chamber of Commerce had in its passage in the state legislature.
I stated whether he believed that we had a democracy or a republic it didn't matter. The nonpartisan Chamber of Commerce funds or reimburses all winning candidates debt or personal expenditures. I stated we were seeing an oligarchy. He disagreed. His reply was one I have never heard voiced before. He stated we did not have a republic or a democracy. He called it a Corpocracy, the rule of corporations. I believe he hit the nail on the head.
I have been aware for some time now that makes no difference which party is in power. First they divide us then the winner rules from the middle as corporations grow more powerful. Everybody gets it when eminent domain is used to bestow an individual's property to developers. The Chambers of Commerce fund the elections of the winning candidates. I learned this by going to the election office and reading the financial disclosure forms of political candidates. The leadership hierarchy reveals the biggest most powerful corporations control the agenda of the Chambers of Commerce.
The evidence is everywhere. The antitrust laws do not seem to affect the continuing consolidations of corporations on a daily basis. CBS, Disney, Sony, GE, Time Warner, CNN, AOL and Turner South are just a few of the corporations in one conglomerate today.
Less than a hundred years ago we had thousands of local independent banks. The margin call by J.P. Morgan precipitated the run on the small banks making them insolvent. He was able to buy up their assets for pennies on the dollar. Control of the supply of money by a few caused the great depression. Booms and busts are controlled by those who control money and those savers and borrowers who are preyed upon by these financial manipulators. The banking lobby gutted the predatory lending law passed under Governor Barnes in Georgia. Since the great depression independent banks have been swallowed up after constriction by acquisition merger.
Right here in Atlanta BOA, Bank of America has gotten so large that they started paying below par rates on IRA's to drive money from their bank. They have more than the allowed percentage of assets on deposit as a result of their last merger. I asked an investment manager at the bank were they loaning money to the real estate high rise speculators in Atlanta. He said no, they were investing heavily in China as they were receiving double digit returns on their money. I asked if my IRA money was being used for that. He stated no, it was the bank shareholders money that was being used. I asked if I could transfer my IRA's to Treasury Bills directly. Three month T-bills are paying higher interest than the bank is for longer term IRA's. The answer was no. Only a non guaranteed principal T- Bill fund managed by the bank was available.
I am a saver for retirement but in the last five years the interest on my savings shrunk to 1% while the bank loaned it out at over 5%. During the same time many banks loaned the artificially low interest money with little or no equity. It was the fuel driving rapid residential growth at inflated prices. Banks continued to approve loans on inflated home prices on interest only loans and 40 year mortgages. Those sale prices were used as the basis to raise our property taxes. Lenders robbed the savers and buried the borrowers in debt using adjustable rate mortgages. The labor used to build all the homes was predominately illegal for the last ten years. Still after 9/11 we have permeable borders.
Now we hear that the savings rate of Americans is as low as the time leading to the Great Depression. Shelter prices, food, and heating are the basics. How are Americans to save in an economy when basic necessities prices are now inflating due to energy prices? During this inflation of housing prices banks were more willing to loan amounts over $100,000 on a refinanced home than amounts less than $100,000 when the bankers knew people were using the equity to put in the stock market. How many offers do you continue to get each day to refinance?
The building boom repeated itself in the Sun Belt from Florida to California, and the targeted fuel of choice to power the new construction was natural gas to fuel gas fired turbine generators. These turbines are very much the same as a jet engine and could burn petroleum or methane. Power plants using steam turbines can use geothermal, coal, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear energy or any thing that will transform water to steam. All the demand pressure was shifted to deregulated natural gas by Enron, Mirant, Southern Company, the entire power generation sector. Local transit authorities such as MARTA and Cobb County Transit converted their buses to natural gas.
Our leadership gives lip service to energy conservation but we were motivated to war for secure oil supplies. War continues to keep oil prices high. The constant corporate agenda is world corporocracy, business without borders. Governments whose elected leaders serve global corporations goal of one world under control of merged corporations. Inflation is how they finance that never ending war as they tout world peace as the stated objective.
At a CEO conference in Atlanta Erik Vonk set out the vision of replacing the American worker with the human resource unit. We all see that in play now, illegal immigration, pension loss and healthcare costs rocketing out of reach. The government has done nothing to address any of the problems in a positive way. Ford and General Motors are closing plants. They are following the path of the natural gas burning fertilizer plants, and foundries that have already shut down after natural gas prices just began to increase years ago.
Production operations moved to China financed with our money by American banks. Balance of trade is predicated on manufactured exportable goods or natural resources. When America used her resources to produce finished goods our house was in order and we were a creditor nation. When we exported our colonial raw materials times were not so good. Our credits were squandered on war. J.F. Kennedy wrote that while he was a Senator in 1953 we gave France one billion dollars to fight the Vietnamese. In the same time frame we were fighting in Korea. The outcome was a divided Korea.
Prior to the Civil war our national debt was 64 million dollars at the end it was 2.8 billion dollars owed to the British and Europeans who financed it. Some historians assert that the British helped instigate the war. The resulting debt was acknowledged and paid by constitutional amendment.
We were taught why the US civil war was fought in school. Abolish slavery/ preserve the Union from the northern perspective. The Southern view was unfair taxation of slave states due to changing representation in the House and Senate as Free states were added and the states right to succeed from the Union. My biggest question is how did they get Northern Christians to kill Southern Christians over money? What message was the Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, ministers preaching to their congregations on both sides of the Mason Dixon line? Were there Constantine's of the day saying it was gods will to go to war and kill your brothers? What happened to Christ's message contained in the "sermon on the mount" also known as the beatitudes?
We were not taught that the same amendment which freed the Southern slaves but not the Northern slaves has ever been expanded to give the constitutional rights of actual living men to created entities, corporations. You can be sued by a non living entity, a creation of the state known as a corporation. This door was opened in the Georgia legislature in 1798. The legislature gave the Grand Lodge of Georgia a non living entity legal standing as living person that could sue its members for nonpayment of dues. A Frankenstein, made up of living or dead persons' assets that can live forever.
Corporations can now grow to bigger than goliath stature and crush any adversary and somehow enjoy the constitutional privileges as "WE THE PEOPLE" through their deep pockets and legion of lawyers cloaked in the corporate veil. The corporations control has evidently reached the Supreme Court in light of their ruling on the use of eminent domain by developers. Their latest ruling on eminent domain supports sustained development a chamber objective.
Corporations now want protection from class action law suits from living people. The lobbying scandals in Washington and the Enron trial are related. The lawyer connected corporate monster is the zombie that is being fed real people and their assets with the aid of the government. Lawyer lobbyists and corporate connected elected lawyers; have co-opted the people's government to be the corporation's servant. Public service now means feeding the people and their assets to the corporate monsters. The prescription drug plan is an example.
We were taught about American Liberty as the ideal Icon complete with green statue goddess of liberty. Does it really matter who wins if both candidates serve the corporate agenda? Our children are sacrificed to the goddess and they spend what we have not yet produced to wage war to bring the all of humanity under their global corporate fiefdom.
We all seem to work for corporations today. The corporate veil of governmental protection is sought by developers and others to give them personal immunity from creditors and financial loss by their own misdeeds. In Georgia consumers "we the people" have no protection from the corporate veiled predators. Buy a million dollar house and its buyer beware. We have portable debt through credit cards that the minimum payment has just been raised. Welcome to the global company store. We are witnessing and living constitutional feudalism and exporting it to the rest of the world through every war we fought and have financed with our national debt and tax money.
Karl Marx a British Free Mason started the socialist version and it was financed with five million dollars from J.P. Morgan and other capitalists to eject Russia's Czar the richest king in the world at that time. Many other lesser kings were deposed in WW1. Of late we are seeing the merger of these supposedly competing ideas of communist socialism and capitalism and the one shared value of both is the control of religious people, or their eradication. Their tool of choice is the corruption of truth propaganda.
Do you think Gorbechev took down that Berlin wall because Reagan told him to? The communist boogieman was replaced by the Muslim religious terrorist boogieman. The most recent media instigation involves insulting the Muslims of the world. A group that doesn't have "turn the other cheek" and "forgive you enemies" as a core principle. The Danes could have sent their paparazzi to photograph the Amish. It is against their religious belief prohibiting the making of graven images as spelled out in the ten commandments of the Old Testament Bible or Torah. Mohammed a student of Christianity and Judaism borrowed it with other laws and incorporated it into what he taught in the sixth century. He organized the fight against the Roman emperor Constantine's version of Christianity conquering the world with the sword and his soldiers not afraid of death. The Amish would not riot and kill due to the photographic transgression but they would shun the perpetrators.
Everybody gets to this question. What are you going to do about it? What Can I do about it? The answer is do not support what you know to be wrong. Live the truth. Don't be trapped by your own greed or fear. Use the system we have to get people who will represent you in office not mega corporations whose agenda is business without borders.
We will "discover" the "visa" to new world order "master" on the American express is portable debt till death. Mortgage is from Latin it means debt gauged till death. This debt will be increasingly harder to pay off. Inflation of basic necessities will continue to outstrip wages especially as plants are closed and salaries are cut. We the people can not continue to allow the corporations to manipulate us by divisive issues. The winner rules from the middle of those never to be resolved issues, while they continue to grant corporations and themselves money that we and our children have not yet earned or produced through debt. The constant revenue stream that funds their global business without borders agenda is supplied by we the people and our choices. The same agenda drives sustainable development as we are witnessing here in Metro Atlanta.
Craig Harfoot
