America is in the Grips of Special-Interest Blackmail!

POLITICS IS A HIGH-STAKES POKER GAME

by Ron Ewart, ©2011

(Feb. 20, 2011) — What do Greece, England and the rest of Europe have in common with Wisconsin and all states who don’t have the right to work outside of a union?  They are all in the grips of Union blackmail.  Whose fault is that?  It is the direct fault of the politicians who give in to the demands of the public employee unions on the threat of strike, but also in the hopes of garnering loyal votes for the next election.  It is also the fault of the politicians who abdicate their duty to make law and negotiate contracts and hand that duty over to the unelected arbiters of binding arbitration.  And whose fault is that?  It is the direct fault of the people who would allow politicians to squander their hard-earned tax money and give in to the demands of union mobsters, or any other special interest group, that demand that they be able to “dip” their hands in the public till.

The sad thing about this deteriorating condition of American exceptionalism is that the people are and love winners.  But the government rewards blackmailers, losers and those with the most money.

Politicians have a unique responsibility to relentlessly guard how the people’s tax money is spent.  It is called a fiduciary.

“A fiduciary duty is a legal or ethical relationship of confidence or trust regarding the management of money or property between two or more parties.” (to learn more about a fiduciary, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary)

“Confidence”? “Trust”? Really!  So who are the green-shaded knuckleheads who did the actuarial figures on how to pay for government employee pensions and other benefits of unionized government employees to comply with union contracts?  We read somewhere that in one state it takes 19 firemen working to pay for one fireman’s retirement benefits.  Who came up with that formula and thought that the money was there from current or future tax revenue to pay for it?

And why are some states not fully funding their retirement benefits reserve fund, or transferring some of the reserve funds to the general fund to pay for their profligate spending?  This is exactly what the Federal Government has done with Social Security funds and now they have to borrow the money to pay the Social Security fund back because the FEDS (that’s you and me) are broke.

When government “suddenly” discovers it’s broke and can’t pay for all those benefits and decides to renege on the union contracts, the union workers go on strike and in some cases, violently protest government’s miraculous discovery of economics 101 ….. you can’t pay out more than you take in and you can’t balance the budget on the revenue from future generations.  But in their bubble of the rules of insane politics, they think they can, that is of course, until they run out of other people’s money.  History has proved that they are wrong every time.

If government commits grand theft from one group of people, under the color of law, and takes what they have stolen from the first group and hands it over to a second group of people, the first group is eventually going to get mad and say NO MORE, and the second group is going to say, YOU HAVE BROKEN YOUR PROMISES and we are going to make you pay for it by striking, or by withholding our votes at the next election.  Politicians quiver and equivocate at the prospects.

On the one hand government commits the crime of grand theft and the beneficiaries of the grand theft commit the crime of blackmail in order to preserve their ill-gotten gain.  All this criminal activity is sanctioned and condoned by government through the process of extorting money from the public treasury that they don’t own but have a fiduciary responsibility to manage.

What all this political insanity boils down to is that you can’t violate the foundation of freedom and the principals of economics, without suffering unintended consequences and the unintended consequences usually result in bankruptcy, civil unrest and ultimately riots and uncontrolled violence.  Just ask the EU.

This propensity for government to meddle in places where they have no constitutional authority, doesn’t stop at giving into union demands and sending our financial stability into economic oblivion by capitulating to those demands.  Government meddling also extends deep into social and environmental blackmail as well, that has turned the principles of freedom and liberty on their heads.  Besides robbing the public treasury to meet union demands, it robs the public treasury to placate the less fortunate, or the so-called “victims” among us, in return for their party loyalty and their votes.  Hitler was very successful at this tactic and overran the communists with it.

Blacks and Latinos vote in a block for Democrats because Blacks and Latinos have been bought off by Democrats with promises of special treatment and handouts from the public treasury.  Blacks and Latinos represent a significant share of the electorate and can swing an election their way with their block votes.  Senior citizens vote as a block as well, on social security and medical issues, because they too have been bought off by promises from their generous government, by raiding the public treasury.  These elders can also swing an election their way too.  Talk about a gross conflict of interest.

But the government goes even farther into unconstitutional madness by giving into the demands of national and international radical environmentalists.  They have been so successful as to have rendered one of the pillars of our freedoms virtually non-existent and that is the pillar of constitutionally protected property rights.  (Does anyone remember what the 5th Amendment says?)

Environmental protection now supersedes any vestige of constitutional property rights.  Urban dwellers are under the scourge of Agenda 21, smart growth and sustainable development, while their rural cousins are being forced to bear almost the entire burden of environmental protection.  Private land is being condemned under eminent domain for wildlife corridors, using the power, wealth and political influence of environmental groups, like The Nature Conservancy, who receives millions of taxpayer dollars to buy up private land, either directly, or by control through conservation easements.

City dwellers have been brainwashed (public schools) into believing that environmental protection is sacrosanct and has a higher priority in law, than property rights.  They elect politicians who believe as they do.  After all, city dwellers have nothing to lose from environmental protection other than some small taxes to pay for it.  They often refer to rural lands as “their” lands and they think that they have every right to dictate to the rural landowner for environmental reasons.  Not so the rural landowner. They have their lifestyle, livelihood and their property to lose from draconian environmental protection.

The attack on rural landowners by government and environmentalists is so vicious as to require an equal and opposite response by landowners.  But rural landowners are disenfranchised and un-represented in the political process.  Urban inhabitants have most of the votes.  And rural landowners have no electoral college to prevent the mob of city dwellers from overwhelming their votes.  How then does the rural landowner counter this unequal protection under the law?  They have three choices: 1) capitulate to government edicts; 2) hire a lawyer and take their case to the courts; or 3) try to beat government through other, more direct, in-your-face, means.  At best, it is a stacked deck for rural landowners, as the government has passed the laws that give them the authority to run over landowners at every turn.  We’ve heard hundreds of landowner stories that reflect this condition, from all over America.

This does not mean however, that the landowner is powerless against government ….. a government that is being blackmailed by the flawed ideology of the national and international radical environmentalists.  If landowners have the courage, they can use the law and the power of the many to thwart government from its eventual goal of absolute power over every aspect of our lives.  Our organization (NARLO) has established a program to assist rural landowners in taking on the government, without having to hire an expensive attorney and being subjected to the corruption and never-ending rules of the American judicial system.

At almost every turn, government is being blackmailed by and giving into the demands of special interest groups, whether they be the unions, corporations, bankers, socialists, radical environmentalists, or the one-world-order crowd.  If the American people succumb to this blackmail, they can expect a continual raid on their tax money, a continual increase in their tax obligation, a continual invasion into their private lives and a continual assault on their freedoms and liberty.

But there is one more thing Americans had better get used to, if they decide to capitulate to government abuse, negligence and arrogance.  As government tries to rein in government spending, it is going to break promises to many constituent groups in the process.  As each constituent group starts seeing cuts in their favorite charity, themselves, they will start to grow uneasy and then angry.  Then they will start to protest in large, noisy crowds, as they did in Wisconsin last week.  After that these different constituent groups will start to riot and violence will become ubiquitous in America, just like it is now erupting all over the planet, however, not necessarily for the same reasons.  All we can say is if that happens, you had better stock up, arm yourself and hunker down, with the hopes that you can ride out the storm without being caught up in, or damaged by it.

Of course their is another alternative.  Take back your government from those that have corrupted it and are blackmailing it.  We’ll tell you how in our next article.

Politics is a high-stakes poker game

Where only the powerful get to play,

Where the rules change by the day,

Where the taxpayer gets to pay,

But the taxpayer has no say.

Don’t you think it is about time

That the taxpayer said, NO WAY?

So politicians beware of what you do and say,

Before we decide to take your money away.

— Ron Ewart

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Ron Ewart is President of the National Association of Landowners (NARLO)