As the politicians pat each other on the back for making the "tough" decision to throw millions of Americans off the welfare rolls, ordinary Americans have to live with the consequences. The reality that the caste system of the U.S. republic was the real origin of a welfare system that deliberately fostered dependency on the part of the poor, is ignored as second-rate scholars re-write the historic record, because the truth that the white community has lived in mortal fear of the minority communities is too delicate a topic to touch on. Instead the myth-makers in Washington, D.C. have chosen to focus on the idea that America is a classless society, even though prior to 1864 the United States was dominated by a classic caste system as segregated as that which prevails in India. The population of the U.S. doesn't realize that when this country permitted the ownership of human slaves, local communities were dominated by a pervasive dread of slave revolts; a dread that came to be associated with the poor, once slavery was abolished and indentured servitude was re-invented.

While a false version of history is passed off as the genuine article, the way the true history is downplayed is by its characterization as "revisionism." But can something be revised when, in the first instance, it is not accurate? The private ownership of slaves has been abolished for over a century now, so the lengths people went to in order to "persuade" their slaves to refrain from trying to run away are largely forgotten, but when all was said and done, the masters of slaves were very deliberate in the fostering of the dependency of their slaves and servants, out of the master's literal fear for his own life, and the lives of his family members. Thus slaves were not taught to read or write, and they were inculcated with larger-than-life images of the ability of the police when it came to pursuing and capturing fugitive slaves. It was a literal crime for enslaved black people to seek freedom in the United States, and no detail was spared as to the dire consequences that would result from any misguided effort on the part of any slave to attain liberation. Additionally, once the powerful impression was made as to the negative, punitive results of slaves trying to escape servitude, the slavemasters sugar-coated their relationship to their slaves by suggesting that the household of the slavemaster was actually a "family," and that slaves were their "children." The reality that this was nonsense, of course, always became apparent when one of the black slaves attempted to actually establish a relationship with one of the slavemaster's actual, biological children.

Modern America is in denial about efforts to handicap the servile classes in the past, because modern America is in denial about the real class divisions that exist in the United States. Now, of course, the impact of past efforts to deliberately suppress the lower classes is coming home to roost, as the descendants of slaves and servants inherit the psychological limitations of their ancestors. We expect liberated slaves to just "pick themselves up by their own bootstraps," as we are told most successful Americans made it, but the reality is that most of the great fortunes of America were not created as a result of a monopoly of genius, but rather because the founder was able to exploit speculative opportunities that were only made available because the political system launched by the American Revolution nullified the claims of the original owners, such as native American indians, or the Loyalists whose holdings were stolen and distributed as booty among "patriots." If the experts don't inform us, we tend to forget that the newly liberated slaves had nothing to work with, to enable them to survive. They had no credit histories, no work record, no nothing. In fact, most of them couldn't even read or write, or do rudimentary math, a condition that existed not because they were not intelligent enough to master these basic skills, but because the dominant society of the slavemasters was intimidated by the prospect of a slave or servant caste that was anything more than docile and obedient.

This may seem like a roundabout way to address the modern welfare system, but the reality is that welfare is not being provided because the politicians are humanitarians. The welfare system is not an act of kindness, it is in fact a prison. However, it is a prison that was designed to address the anger of the underclass by buying it off with cash. The institutions of the republic still recall the basic reality that power in the society of the United States is still used to make people work. And there is an understanding that those who fall through the cracks, who are left out in the cold, might very well act on their anger, resulting in crime. The punitive aspect of the police state implications of the republic have been implemented to their fullest, the U.S. now holding more of its own citizens in penal servitude than any other country in the world; so the obvious solution is to give the most vulnerable members of the underclass WELFARE.

Most Americans are not familiar with the way the U.S. economy is rigged to favor big industries, at the expense of individual taxpayers, starting off with the way money is allocated through the banking system. The Federal Reserve System is a national association of regional financial interests that basically run the nation's money supply in their own best interests, giving credit to themselves while denying it to others whose ambitions they don't approve of. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that those cronies who support the republic get financial support, while anyone who is intent on changing the status quo is confronted with a daily struggle making ends meet. While it is understandable that the descendants of slaves and indentured servants will have no natural affinity with the successors of the slavemasters, the grim reality is that past efforts to suppress the slaves left their descendants in a position whereby they could not compete for employment in the modern labor markets, and the welfare dole was the cheapest and most direct way to avoid trouble from people who really have good reasons for opposing the republic. But then the media has never been truthful about the welfare system... They have consistently portrayed the social services programs of government as the costliest part of its budget, even while an irresponsible Intelligence Community was using its version of the Terror to finance the largest military build-up in history, against a communist opponent that was so structurally unsound that it was always on the verge of implosion.

Without arguing the issue from a partisan position, there is a genuine value to be had from programs that enable human beings to survive. The idea that human beings are born to work, and that those who fail to work for a wage are worthless, suggest that employment is a value all by itself, without any kind of qualifications. We forget that the United States Government deliberately created all kinds of taxes and fees solely for the purpose of forcing the masses to seek employment. Once slavery was outlawed, it didn't mean that there was no work to be done; there have always been masters and servants in the materialistic society introduced into the New World from Europe. The new system simply enabled industries to pay workers a wage, after which industry could ignore the conditions of its employees; and in the process the labor movement was born. The truth that the labor movement did not originate from partisanship is obvious to anyone who recognizes that the earliest demands of workers revolved around issues like safety, age limitations, and the accountability of employers. The trap most Americans fall into, that basically disables their common sense, is the tendency to frame every issue in terms that reflect the influence of the Democratic and Republican political parties. This way, no real debate can be engaged in, because the political parties are careful about observing their symbiotic relationship, whereby they dislike each other, but they have arrived at an arrangement that enables them to share power.

Anyone who is interested in finding out where the real charity cases are, doesn't have to look too far to find them, and it doesn't take too long to realize that the recipients of welfare are not among them. (The eligibility technicians in most welfare offices actually are paid more in salary and benefits than any applicant for welfare, but you won't see that highlighted in any media articles soon). The real deadbeats are not welfare mothers, but Medicare doctors who bill the government for work they didn't do; and high level bureaucrats who take expensive junkets using public property that they subvert for their own use. We are never reminded that many of the agencies of the Federal Government CANNOT BE AUDITED, so that it is impossible to figure out where the money allocated to these agencies is being spent, agencies like the IRS, the Armed Forces, and the Intelligence Community. The fundamental reality that we do not know where the Federal Government is spending its budget now, undermines the high profile efforts of the politicians to balance the budget, because anyone who understands even the first principles of accounting realizes that you cannot balance a budget if you cannot account for all the monies being spent. Inevitably, the whole balanced budget debate is for show, as a distraction for a public that likes to feel that it is involved in the decision making process.

The monies allocated for human services are monies well spent, when compared to the pork barrel favoritism the politicians display when they pass budgets and allocate funds that line the pockets of big business. Charity for the rich is the real catchword, but the information cartels that dominate the media are not interested in news stories that reveal the true dark nature of the government of the republic. The fact that the great majority of Americans in county jails today are there because they were guilty of violating the vehicle code, and they lack the funds to buy their way out of serving jail time, is just not something journalists want to report. It reveals the dark underside of the republic, that was designed by the Founding Fathers to be a police and prison state. The reality that it subsidizes powerful corporate interests, while undermining the ties Americans have with each other as human beings, is just never brought up; especially as the Government tells kids to turn in their parents for "crimes."

As examples of the benefits of political power in the republic, more than $50 million of public funds has been given to the privately owned wineries of California, in order for them to advertise their wines overseas. Ordinarily the costs of advertising would be considered a capital cost, the return in terms of profit being thought of as private property; but what happens when the costs of business are assumed by the Government, that uses public funds in violation of the public trust? Gallo winery alone has received some $24 million since 1986.

In a mere five years, approximately $3.3 BILLION has been spent building forest roads for the benefit of powerful timber interests such as Weyerhauser and Georgia Pacific. Additionally, these interests have been the beneficiaries of lucrative tax breaks, which can make the difference between insolvency and profitability. We are conditioned to think that there is a wall separating private from public interests, but the truth is that the higher you go in the world of corporate power, the more the distinctions between private and public property are blurred, to the benefit of the corporate cartels. Another $250 million of public funds (over a five year period) is currently being spent boosting the profitability of interests like Getty Oil and Pacific Power, allowing them use of public lands at prices that are below the market values, thus in fact stealing public property!

Another $715 million is spent EVERY YEAR funding the so-called "Small Business Administration," (SBA). Despite its misleading name, the SBA and its loan program have helped few, if any, small businesses. Less than 1/2 of 1% of small business proprietors have ever used the SBA or its programs. Additionally, the SBA's lending practices are so slanted to assist the politically-connected, that even the Government itself predicts that the SBA will lose hundreds of millions of dollars from loans that will never be repaid due to the default of the borrowers. The rate of default for the SBA is in fact TEN TIMES greater than the rate of default on loans owed to commercial banks.

Right now millions of Americans are being compelled to work harder because their monthly home electricity bills are up to 50% higher than the gambling casinos and posh Colorado ski resorts that profit from lucrative government subsidies of their electricity costs. Every year the Government spends $410 MILLION of our hard-earned public money providing cheap electric power to large utilities cooperatives, through the antiquated Rural Utilities Service (RUS), and through the Federal Power Marketing Administrations, which sell federal hydropower.

While politicians lament that irresponsible teenagers are costing the Government too much money by getting pregnant and getting on AFDC, they ignore the hand-outs made to Fortune 500 corporations, such as GE, Caterpillar and Xerox. They ignore the fact that public money is spent liberally on grants to pharmaceutical firms doing research and development finding new drugs and treatments for such things as breast cancer, drugs which these firms will then sell for lucrative profits to the very same taxpayers who financed their development! There is not an IOTA of accountability existent in the political system of the republic, and it is not only NOT getting any better, IT IS GETTING WORSE! Ralston Purina gets federal funds to defray the cost of advertising its cereals overseas; General Electric benefits from research grants to develop new high technology products; and Archer-Daniel-Midlands (ADM) grows richer on tax subsidies for ethanol. We all know ADM from their multi-million dollar advertising that accompanies their sponsorship of such esteemed "news" television shows as This Week, (formerly, This Week With David Brinkley), and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. Less known is that ADM was caught red-handed in a recent price-fixing scandal, which appeared to verify the sense that ordinary people feel that the economy is rigged so that the "little people" always seem to lose, even if they cannot put their finger on hard evidence.

The evidence, however, is all around us, such as in the Agriculture Department's "market access program" that gives money to corporations to finance their foreign advertising budgets, corporations like Pillsbury, Tyson Foods, Campbell Soup, Ernest & Julio Gallo, and Dole. (Incidentally, this Dole is the same as in Sanford Dole, the vigilante who aided in the illegal overthrow of the legitimate government of the Kingdom of Hawaii because it enabled his family to profit). Another give-away of public funds can be found in the Commerce Department's advanced technology program, which hands out grants for basic research to help spawn whole new industries. Needless to say, once a new industry is launched due to this program, there never seems to be any gratitude on the part of the recipients of this largesse, who forget the national interest when the profits start rolling in, profits which are immediately "privatized." The so-called Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles has spent $1 BILLION developing affordable vehicles that would get 80 miles to a gallon of fuel, with the lion's share of this going directly to Chrysler, Ford and General Motors; and of course, it's easy to forget that corporations of the scale of automobile manufacturers are part of the "core economy," which benefit from all kinds of special tax laws and loopholes that benefit ONLY THEM.

The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) has been implicated in all kinds of scandals, some of which have the ring of covert operations by the CIA. This is because OPIC is the agency responsible for providing loans and loan guarantees for U.S. companies to invest in the developing nations, like the Third World. The Third World has been the scene of centuries of colonial exploitation, which in this century was camouflaged by the granting of independence to the former colonies once their natural wealth had been deeded to "private" corporations as property the West vowed to protect in its defense against communism. The reality that these schemes and scams were impoverishing tens of millions of people by the illicit removal of their national wealth was allowed to go unnoticed by the international press, who were compromised by the fact that the press itself was owned by the very same cartels. Companies that have been enriched by the Federal Government's OPIC program include Motorola, ITT, Anheuser-Busch, McDonald's, and Coca- Cola. Ironically, Motorola is also at the center of the landmine scandal, on account of the fact that one of the micro chips it manufactures and sells to the communist Chinese Army, has been found in the landmines that litter Third World countries after civil wars that, more often than not, were incited by the Western powers. Trade always comes first, even though the victims are always the most innocent, and the most defenseless; the victims of the landmines largely being children playing around them, and farmers.

One estimate released by the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington, DC "think tank," suggests that the federal budget could be cut in half if hand-outs to big business were stopped. Yet every generation thinks that it invented the wheel, the average American -- as the victim of a school system that teaches him a civic creed that is founded on a false chronology of historical events -- never realizing that American politicians have been giving away the national wealth to corporate interests since the days of the first Congress. Take, for example, the railroads, America's first bona fide incarnation of big business: Thousands of miles of raw public land were literally given away to railroad corporations that had contributed to the political campaigns of the politicians who sponsored the legislative hand-out. Insiders blather about a "return to free markets," but in order to return, there had to be free markets in existence once, which there never have been.

Campaigns to end corporate welfare always sound terrific, and their sponsors always enjoy the celebrity they receive at being perceived of as idealistic, but they know that they are up against forces that are stronger than individual legislators, because the foundation of the republic was deliberately pre-disposed by the system devised by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution of 1787, to SERVE the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the national interest. The national interest is, in fact, an undefined value, for the American people have been left ghettoized in segregated enclaves, forever wary of each other's intentions, largely due to the intrigues of the bureaucracy of the republic.

It's easy to become rich in America, especially if you can afford to hire a battery of high-priced former legislators as lobbyists. Everything is for sale in America, and nothing facilitates a sale better than a complement of attorneys, which not coincidentally, most of the elected officials begin their careers as, before they go on to win elections. The Cato Institute did some research into 13 of the largest corporations that gave generously to the political campaigns of the politicians, "donations" that totaled $6 million, to both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. These same thirteen corporations shared in more than $250 million in government advanced-technology awards over the last three years, giving hard evidence of the fact that campaign contributions are being transferred into government grants. The embezzlement going on now is so refined that the embezzlers feel confident that they can show the public the accounting on it, because it's being passed off as legitimate government programs. How much SHOULD it cost to build a freeway, or a school? We'll never know because the allocation of those contracts is such a closely guarded secret among political insiders -- the knowledge of which can make one rich -- that more effort is spent confusing the issue than clarifying it. The only thing more laughable than the crude ambitions of wanna-be politicians are the pronouncements of theorists about the benefits of a free market system, because there is no free market system! If it were not for the sale of Treasury bills through the deliberately mystifying Federal Reserve System, which is also designed to hide more than it reveals, there would be no economy in the United States at all.

The entire history of the Federal republic is a chronology of its pandering to the interests of the rich and powerful, starting with its very creation, which facilitated the re-payment of bonds to the rich which were issued to finance the American Revolution. Ironically, one of the causes of the Revolution was the intention of American debtors to default on their creditors in London, not a particularly auspicious motivation. The republic was set up by the Founding Fathers to protect their interests, which took the form of vast plantations worked by armies of slaves and servants. The Founding Fathers were, in fact, very outspoken about their contempt for democratic principles, a fact that is lost today in the ocean of sound bytes deployed by the media in its quest to control the American mind. The historic reality, however, is that the republic was designed to act as a police state from the beginning, the president acting as a ceremonial figurehead who was replaced every four years.

Anyone who doubts that the republic of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln -- the corporate attorney -- is a police state, should stop and think for a minute what would happen if, for some reason, the position of the President of the United States was left vacant. Appointments of bureaucrats would not take place, or of judges; decisions would not be made, and executive orders would not be issued. Utter chaos would ensue, for who would the media turn to, to fill its air-time convincing Americans of their patriotic duty to sacrifice their civil liberties for the "benefits" of the Bill of Rights? Most Americans are not even aware of the difference between their actual civil liberties, which they inherited through the operation of custom, and the so-called "civil liberties" bestowed by the Bill of Rights. The subtle difference between a birthright and a privilege goes right over the heads of average Americans, who are handicapped by an education in American schools, where the truth is the greatest casualty. Every day we are barraged with "news" from the White House, and the activities of the "Most Powerful Man on Earth." We are encouraged to take pride in this, while the really mean-spirited bullying that transpires is hidden from public view, with the collusion of the "free press." While the media flatters us with compliments about how advanced we are, the daily news is dominated by such pressing issues as the menu at the White House, or the designer label on the First Lady's gown. Hard news, like the number of homeless Americans who died last night from EXPOSURE, is deliberately shied away from, because it undermines the credibility of the entire power structure of the republic.

The republic always has enough money to build another bridge, or another freeway. It always has the money to pay all those civil servants their salaries, pensions and benefits. Senators and Congressmen don't have to wait to be paid their executive-level salaries, which they can raise at will, as they see fit. The republic also spares no expense when it comes to law enforcement, with the most elaborate police structure in the world, supporting a vast array of secret police who have no other purpose than to monitor and control the morals of individuals. The State of New York has about 50 prisons, and the State of California has about 35, and there is always more money available to build another prison. But let someone suggest that the Government should take some preventative measure, such as build a shelter system for the homeless that SOLVES the homeless crisis, and then all of a sudden the Government is on the verge of bankruptcy, and ALWAYS the alleged cause of this insolvency is the "massive" entitlements programs, such as Social Security or Welfare (AFDC). Giving public funds to AT&T is an investment, but giving public funds to American nationals to ensure their survival is communism. Ironically, the whole reform of the welfare system stinks of totalitarianism far more than is discussed openly. If the private sector cannot supply the jobs for those welfare recipients to apply for, who are forced off the welfare rolls on the timeline specified in the welfare reform legislation, the Government is to invent something for them. The underlying theme is always that anyone receiving income who is not in a "master and servant" relationship, is somehow taking advantage of those who are.

Under communism everyone had a JOB: this was called "total employment," and officially the U.S.S.R. never suffered from an unemployment problem. Everyone had a place where he "belonged," which of course is an idea that has always existed in the U.S. High society has always reacted when parvenu seemed to be over-reaching their "rightful" place in society, and all kinds of glass ceilings were in place to keep a check on things, delimiting boundaries and limits that were only discussed in whispers at country clubs, which were never admitted openly, such as in a court of law.

The problem we face in trying to find solutions to the corruption destroying the republic, is the fact that Americans have been convinced that the republic is the best system of government in the world! The falsity of this is self-evident to anyone who finds himself a prisoner in his own house, because the streets are not safe to walk on. The only solution that has ever faced the American people as to how to handle the corruption of the Federal republic, the news media will not mention on the air, because it involves admitting the fact that the republic suffers from a fatal flaw that was planted in its very core by the Founding Fathers: It is NOT LEGAL. The republic represents a departure from the constitutional system of government that prevailed up until 1776, and only the restoration of the basic principles of justice that existed in the ancient constitution will have the integrity and the vitality to save the United States. Until the day comes when average Americans recognize that they have been deceived by the institutions of the republic, hope will continue to decline, and the freedom of the American people will be denied to them. Until the people can discern the difference between a birthright and a gift, they will be unable to discern the difference between the legitimate institutions of constitutional government, and the illegitimate institutions of the republic that were set up on a single day when the Constitution of 1787 was enacted.

(CNS, 2 June, 1997)