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Lately there have been many comparisons made of current events with troubling historical events such as Ancient Roman times, the Dark Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, or any number of historical events in which a supposedly civilized society lost its conscience or sense of morality. No historical event illustrates this more than the French Revolution. While it began with the noblest of motives, it quickly degenerated into one of the bloodiest and most reprehensible events in human history. Sadly, what’s happening in our modern and enlightened society seems to bring to mind events that transpired in France in the year 1789.
Then as now, the people were taxed mercilessly by a government that was all about
rewarding the privileged few at the expense of the majority of the population. In 1789 France, this privileged few were the aristocrats that ruled France. The taxes that supported their lavish lifestyles were borne by the majority of citizens that did not enjoy these lifestyles, nor could they enjoy much of the fruits of their own labors as most of what they earned was confiscated by tax collectors. Add to that, the national economy was in shambles due to rampant overspending by the King and the ruling classes in supporting not only their lavish lifestyles, but also in supporting and funding our own revolutionary war against Great Britain.
Then, as now, reports of lavish lifestyles and wasteful spending by the privileged
aristocracy angered and enraged the population. While they starved in the streets, the Royals and aristocrats lived well, dined gluttonously, spent lavishly, and average citizens were paying for it with their taxes. Add to that frustration, a famine that devastated the country’s grain crop resulting in extremely inflated prices for the most basic staple of the common french man’s diet, bread, and you have a powder keg of pent up rage and frustration ready to blow. That’s exactly what happened on July 14, 1789 when the enraged citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille prison fortress, overpowered the few guards on the premises, slaughtered them and the governor of the prison, freed the prisoners, and demolished the structure with their bare hands.
To be fair, the French Revolution started out like ours did, with noble intentions to make life better for all French citizens, not just the privileged few in the aristocracy or clergy. When the French Assembly convened in the tennis courts of Versailles and took the now famous “tennis courts oath” resolving not to disband until France had a Constitution and Bill of Rights of its own, they could not have foreseen the carnage that was to follow in the name of the new France. Likewise, they could not know that their experiment with liberty, equality and fraternity would end in utter failure, and with a return to oppressive dictatorship under a gent named Napoleon Bonaparte. If they had, maybe the whole revolution would not have taken place, for who in their right mind would consent to such bloodshed and brutality if there were nothing to be gained on the other side of it?
How then did the noble experiment spin so wildly out of control and become the horror
show we know today as “The French Revolution?” The answer is not a simple one, but
it can be explained as follows: A select cabal of elitist ideologues seized control of a country from the elected legislature by creating a climate of crisis, fear, panic, and blind anger and used the “will of the people” excuse to justify tyrannical behavior. This same elitist cabal then used a complicit media to keep the people in a frenzied “lynch-mob state” and used that mob to enforce its will on an entire population. Sound familiar? It should because it’s happening right in front of our very eyes. Thankfully, we haven’t yet regressed to the mob violence or the class genocide, but we’re moving in that direction at a frightening pace.
In eighteenth century France, the populace driver was an underground newspaper
called ironically enough, “L’Amie de Peuple” (translation: The Friend of the People).
This paper was run by a professional malcontent by the name of Jean Paul Marat. Mr.
Marat had been living in the sewers of Paris before the revolution as he had failed at every commercial endeavor he had undertaken. To be fair, it wasn’t always possible to rise on one’s own merit in the feudalistic social order of pre-revolutionary France, but this man was nothing more than an angry, hate-filled, zealot who saw his opportunity for personal power and glory in the climate of the revolution. He was like the Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken of his day and he rose to national pre-eminence like Andy Griffith’s character in “A Face In The Crowd.”
He used his new found power to wreak havoc on the french population. His rants
resulted in multiple acts of barbarism, including murder, rape, pillage, and other crimes which would have met with severe punishment in a civilized, law abiding society. His word alone was enough to send hundreds of innocent people to the guillotine. As a direct result of one of his rants, the citizens of Paris raided a french prison where there were prisoners awaiting their so-called “trials” and executions, and basically committed wholesale rape, robbery, torture, and murder in the name of the revolution. Ironically, the barbarism was conducted in a large cell that had a mural of “The Rights of Man” as codified by the French Assembly at the beginning of the revolution. As if in homage to the term “poetic justice,” Marat was murdered by a woman who concluded that the country she loved would be better off without him. She paid for her crime gladly, and today she’s considered a hero in France. Her name is Charlotte Corday.
Contrast that to the way the modern media, both the so-called “legitimate” press, and
the less revered blogosphere has been ginning up anger and hatred against the
executives and employees of AIG. I remember just a few short years ago that AIG ran
an ad campaign touting themselves as “the biggest insurance company in the world you
never heard of.” In many ways, I wish that were still a true statement. How then do a
bunch of homeless, disheveled malcontents end up protesting on the front lawns of AIG
executives’ homes in Connecticut? Answer, the media, in conjunction with self-serving
politicians, ginned up a mob mentality that not only led to such protests in the streets, but also empowered unscrupulous congressmen to pass a law designed solely to
confiscate wealth. This law is a violation of the very Constitution they took an oath to support, but they were bolstered in this effort by the lynch mob mentality that boosts its’ approval ratings (albeit temporarily), and if the law is later struck down as unconstitutional, they can tell the voters that it’s not their fault.
This makes the very real (unfortunately) Barney Frank more like the character of
Madame DeFarge from Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.” He sits at the foot of
the guillotine knitting while his victims lose their heads and complains when the mob
makes too much noise causing him to drop a stitch messing up his knitting. Never mind
he is one of the causes of this misery, he’s’ only TOO happy to lead the charge against those he can point the finger of blame towards keeping it away from himself and othersof his ilk.
The bloodiest carnage of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, was the brainchild of an Avatar class of elitists led by Maximilian Robespierre, and they had the audacity to call themselves “The Committee for Public Safety.” Using the pretexts of a looming war with other European monarchies, together with the economic crisis that was threatening to topple the fragile government, these committee members effectively suspended the new constitution and took absolute power unto themselves, ostensibly just until the crises had abated. Ironically, this committee saw to it that most of its former colleagues in the full assembly were declared enemies of the new republic and sent them straight to the guillotine. In point of fact, very few of the men that took the “Tennis Court Oaths” lived to see the government they had envisioned become a reality.
I would hate to have been one of those French politicians that had to stroll the streets of downtown Paris and see all the blood soaked into the street stones from the guillotine scaffold only to realize that he was responsible for that. I would hate to have a been a French politician that had to look into the faces of children in the orphanage in Paris and realize that he was responsible for making those children orphans.
So maybe you politicians in Washington can take a lesson from what happened in
France those many years ago. When you pander to the mob, you empower and
unleash that mob, and then you bear responsibility for the consequences of that
decision and of the mob’s actions. A mob is not a sentient body. It does not think, it does not reason, it runs on pure unadulterated emotion, usually anger or fear. Once unleashed it cannot be controlled effectively and very often turns against those who unleashed it in the first place. Such was the case in the French Revolution. Every member of the Committee for Public Safety met an unnatural end, most on the
guillotine to which they had consigned so many others.
Likewise, the members of the media, both the “legitimate” press, and the blogosphere
might want to consider their responsibilities as well. It’s easy to spew venom and vitriol from the virtual safety of the internet and then disavow all responsibility for what ensues. But just as we enjoy the privilege of freedom of speech (for now, anyway), we also have a responsibility to use that speech judiciously. We cannot legally scream “Fire” in a crowded theater and escape the consequences of that action. Yet that is what many so-called journalists and bloggers do every day. What happens when the wife or child of one of these AIG executives gets hurt by a protestor? Even if the harm is not intended, how are we going to feel if it happens? I would like to think we’re all human enough to say that we would feel terrible if someone actually got hurt. If that is the case, then we need to think before we write. If that is not the case, then keep doing what you’re doing and cheer loudly when the guillotine gets erected in Times Square.
The following article is being presented as if it were a criminal case being presented to a Grand Jury to secure and indictment against the defendants believed by the police and prosecuting attorney to have committed that crime. When a crime is suspected or has occurred, most citizens react by calling this police. Police work and crime detection are as much about luck and hunches as they are about actual physical evidence and the proverbial “smoking gun.” It is no wonder they sometimes get it wrong. That said, I firmly believe that MOST police officers and honest well-intentioned public protectors, but like any other human group, you got good ones, and corrupt ones. This is exactly why it takes more than a cop hunch to put someone in prison or to death. That’s what jury trials are for. But before you can get to a jury trial, a charge has to be filed with the court. That charge can be based on a prosecutor’s affidavit or an indictment by a Grand Jury which means that a panel of ordinary citizens has concluded that a crime was committed, and that the accused defendant probably committed it. It is that proceeding that I’m going to replicate today. I will be the prosecutor, and you Dear readers will be my Grand Jury.
My burden will be to prove that our economy was, in fact, the victim of a crime and that>the crime charged is attempted murder. It is only attempted murder at this time because our economy is not dead, contrary to liberal media opinion. It has been grievously injured and could possibly die, but as of now it’s very much alive if not well. Most states define attempted murder as the commission of an act with the unlawful intent to deprive the victim of his life. It would also be desirable for the accused to have failed in that attempt so that the does not get increased to murder in either the first or second degree.
My subsequent burden will be to show that the person or persons against whom this indictment is sought had to motive, opportunity, and criminal intent to commit the crime charged, and to present evidence to show that they, in fact, did commit the crime charged. In assessing culpability, the grand jury *you, the readers) are not required to find guilt or innocence, only probable cause that the crime was committed and that the accused could have committed it.
Could the economy have been Murdered, or was the economic decline just a result ofnatural market forces? There are compelling arguments to be made for both sides, but one of the more compelling arguments supporting foul play is the overwhelming benefit to one of the accused from the economic tsunami. The ONLY beneficiary in all of this is the Democratic Party. No private enterprise, private citizen, or public entity other than theDemocratic Party and its candidates benefit from this economic malaise. But the Democrats are not the only ones accused here.
To understand why both Republicans and Democrats stand accused, you have to first understand how the economy was injured. We can all agree the tsunami, for lack of a better term, occurred in mid September of 2008, but that wasn’t the first potentially fatal blow. The first potentially fatal blow to this economy occurred shortly after the election of the Democrats to majority in the House and Senate. They passed a law that reinstated the mark-to-market accounting rule that had been removed ironically by the Roosevelt administration to help bring about recovery from the Great Depression. This was done in response to the Enron collapse, but it had the unintended (or intended) consequence of setting up the financial sector of are economy for fiscal Armageddon.
The longest occurring and most lingering assault on the economy has been a verbal one by Democratic politicians and their allies in the media. Democrats or their surrogates and sympathizers have been trying to talk down the economy since before the 2006 midterm elections. They first tried a frontal assault on the economy, telling us that the economy was not good. This flew in the face of record high indices, free-flowing credit, and all appearances to the contrary so it failed. Not to be discouraged, the Democrats resorted to a classic from their play book, class warfare. They changed the premise from a bad economy to an unfair one in which only the rich were benefitting. Even this failed and the Democrats were left with no other strategy than to lie to the voting public and promise that if they were put in power they would end the war in Iraq.
This was disingenuous at best, and an outright LIE at worst. Any one who was taken a high school civics course knows that only the President of the United States to order our armed forces to engage in or withdraw from combat. The Democrats knew, and hoped the voting public didn’t, that the most they could do with withdraw funding from the Defense Department which would essentially leave our troops naked in the field. No clear thinking politician would dare attach his or her name to such a bill. Only the most committed ideologues would even consider such a thing, and then only because they knew it wouldn’t pass. This makes the promise they made to the voting public a false one, and true to form, they failed which infuriated the far left but not the majority of Democratic voters.
To make matters worse for the Democrats, our troops (aided by the surge of new forces) started winning in Iraq despite the best efforts of the Democrats to convince us otherwise that the war was, in fact, lost. No matter how they proclaimed the statistics were wrong, and that General David Petraeus was a liar (i.e., the “suspension of disbelief” comment by then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton) the facts spoke for themselves. Casualties were down, elections were held, Iraqi troops were taking the field and taking control, and all evidence showed we were winning the war. The Democrats knew they would not be able to win in 2008 on that issue. They had lost credibility promising to end the war, and now that we were winning it, the war rage vote would not be enough.
Enter once more, the economy. It was still at record highs and the Democrats knew that unless something changed dramatically, they might not be able to take the White House or keep their control of Congress. Shortly after January of 2007, Democratic supporters on the blogs began a “whisper” campaign about the economy. This time instead of a frontal assault, the bloggers started reporting that the economy was not sound. It was not “real.” Words like “illusion,” “smoke and mirrors,” “house of cards,” etc. started appearing in the texts and it wasn’t long before these sentiments started finding their way into the mainstream media coverage of economic news.
Not surprising, as the rumors grew and spread, the stock market traders reacted by short-selling financial stocks, driving their prices and perceived values downward. Not long after this started, credit rating agencies like Moodys and Standard & Poores announced that they were lowering the credit rating of investment banks like Bear-Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman-Sachs, and any other bank that traded in mortgage security instruments backed by sub-prime and conventional loans. The decision of the rating agencies was made across the board and did not take into account the fact that most of the mortgage loans were paying.
Once the credit ratings were lowered, the investment banks found themselves in the unenviable position of going from having balanced books with cash reserves to being insolvent overnight. They did the only thing they could do, which was to scramble to sell assets to raise capital. Under the newly reenacted mark-to-market rules, however, the value of the assets had so fallen that it was impossible to raise capital in a timely manner. For Bear-Stearns, this meant a shotgun wedding with our government holding the shotgun, but for Lehman Brothers, there was no relief and it was forced into bankruptcy.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was the second domino to fall, and set off a chain reaction that is still going on Wall Street. Had the government known of the events to follow, it would likely have reversed its decision not to save Lehman Brothers but, as in all things, hindsight is 20-20. The identity of the person that made the decision to allow Lehman Brothers to fail is not known, but it is certain he or she was an employee or officer in the previous administration. As to what happened after Lehman Brothers, we have only to look at our 401K statements and the Dow Jones Industrial Average to answer that.
The final question to answer is the why of it all. To answer that, you simply have to look for the answer to one question: who benefitted? Who is the sole beneficiary to all of this economic chaos and misery? The only beneficiary I can find is the Democratic Party and its political operatives and supporters such as the media. AT the time of the economic collapse in September of 2008, John McCain was ahead in the polls, and the Republican’s “Joe the Plumber” anti-socialism message was beginning to resonate. Add to that the resurrection of the Reverend Wright ads and controversy and Obama was flailing and losing ground. Then, the economy collapsed and this single event followed by the serio-comic response of John McCain and the government as a whole in passing the Trouble Asset Recovery Program, put the Republicans on the mat never to return.
Had it not been for the economic meltdown, John McCain might well have won the presidency and even if he did not, it is relatively certain that the Democrats would not likely be enjoying their hold on absolute power in Congress right now. Now, I’m not saying that the politicians in the Democratic Party intentionally visited this much misery on the country merely to win an election. Politicians, whatever their ideology, go into public service to help people and I’m not yet jaded enough to say otherwise. You may think me a Pollyanna for this belief, but until the evidence to the contrary is more than anecdotal, I remain a true believer. This nobility is reserved solely for elected politicians. However, for every politician you see on stage, there’s an unseen force of a few to thousands of nameless, faceless political operatives and supporters you do not see, and these people will stop at nothing short of criminal behavior to get their candidate elected. It seems that, given the
evidence of this last election cycle, that we can no longer exclude criminal behavior, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle. After all, it was democratic supporters like ACORN and the preppie college students in Ohio that committed countless cases of voter registration and outright voter fraud, and it was democrats that refused to install any credit card security software on their sites resulting in numerous allegations of credit card fraud.
The last item I wish to present is that the Democratic Party is the only party whose membership consists of a core of ideologues that believe no one is entitled to private wealth and that such wealth should be confiscated by the government and redistributed evenly to all citizens regardless of whether they had anything to do with its’ creation in the first place. This constituency would think nothing of wiping out the wealth and retirement savings of millions of American because they do not believe anyone is entitled to private wealth in the first place and that the temporary misery is justified by the liberal utopia they hope to create. It’s like my parents used to tell me as they were spanking me with a paddle, “its for your own good and you’ll thank me for it someday.”
So in conclusion ladies and gentlemen of the Grand Jury, I submit that I have established more than enough evidence to conclude that our free market economy was and IS the victim of the crime of attempted murder and that said crime is ongoing to this day. Now that Obama and the Democrats are the doctors charged with saving this economy, they continue the assault against it every time they open their mouths. It is almost as if, rather than employing heroic measures such as CPR, defibrillation, administering medicines like epinephrine, etc, they are putting a pillow over the face of the economy to hasten demise. Fortunately, they are just as much a failure at that as they have been about everything else thus far because our economy is not dead.
This concludes my presentation to you, the members of my grand jury, and I now charge you to return a True Bill of Indictment for the crime of attempted murder against the following defendants: The United States Governments for the years 2006 to the present, including former President George W. Bush and current President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and its political operatives and supporters from the last election cycle, including the main stream media coalition, and last but not least, the greedy and unscrupulous wall street traders that orchestrated the demolition and devaluation of the financial stocks by short selling and other strategies designed to force stock prices down for their own personal enrichment regardless of the consequences to others. This case is respectfully submitted for your consideration. Thank you for your attention.
