BUT, HOUSTON, WE STILL HAVE A PROBLEM!
Posted on 06/12/2008 6:10:10 AM PDT by ovrtaxt
I have a plan to get the morons in DC to listen to us. I posted it earlier in passing, and it's a simple plan that would take some planning and prep, but it's not difficult. The key is to do it on a massive scale- I'm talking hundreds of thousands of people, probably throgh an email campaign, or getting it promoted through some kind of activist infratructure.
1> Organize a massive drive to DC on a Monday morning. Physically drive your car, truck, or even your fleet of semis (if you have one) into the city. Yes, there will be a HUGE traffic jam, and if we're lucky, it will extend way past the beltway.
2> At 12 noon, wherever you are, put your vehicle into park and shut it off.
3> Issue a demand to Congress to lift all drilling restrictions and refinery contruction roadblocks, and demand legislation funding hundreds of nuke plants. Tax credits for investing in alternative energy research would be nice too.
4>Refuse to leave until this happens. (Bring lots of water and non-perishable food. Coleman stoves would be recommended.)
We would shut that city down IMMEDIATELY.
This is not for the faint of heart. We will lose money and time. It will be hot and very uncomfortable, possibly for days.
But I think it would work.
If hundreds of thousands of us drive into DC, cause a huge traffic jam, and we all shut off our cars at 12 noon on a Monday and just stay there until drilling and refining restrictions are lifted, and new nuke plants are funded, we’ll be heard. They can’t tow that many cars. We’ll shut that place down.
TERM LIMITS, not TERM LIMTS! Must have more coffee...
Gee. I always thought 100,000 people marching on DC with full militia weapons: AR-15, M1a, old Garands, AR-10s lots of Remington 700s. Possibly with horses and horse drawn cannons on the rear. Our DEMANDS: restore the Constitution. The engineering brigade brings wood to build a dias. Others bring the tar and feathers. Congress persons and bureacrats are held in confinement until their cases are disposed of.
Then, I wake up. It was all a just a weird dream. I wake up and go back to work to pay my 55% effective tax rate
I like this idea.
Term Limits seem a lot more complicated than pitchforks and torches, not simpler. By the time the lawyers get done with Term Limits there will be a carbon credit needed for breathing.
BLAME CONGRESS CLOWNS FOR HIGH FUEL PRICES.
Print, and hand out to everyone you know!
The real problem:
Read this and I think you will agree the oil industry has already been Nationalized in the US;
It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They both sported the same ideological pedigree of socialism. “The German and Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer’s goods for his consumption.”
The difference between the systems, wrote Mises, is that the German pattern “maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets.” But in fact the government directs production decisions, curbs entrepreneurship and the labor market, and determines wages and interest rates by central authority. “Market exchange,” says Mises, “is only a sham.”
Mises’s account is confirmed by a remarkable book that appeared in 1939, published by Vanguard Press in New York City (and unfortunately out of print today). It is The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism by Guenter Reimann, then a 35-year old German writer. Through contacts with German business owners, Reimann documented how the “monster machine” of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through onerous regulations, harsh inspections, and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offenses.
“Industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company or individual businessman for the preceding two, three or more years until some error or false entry was found,” explains Reimann. “The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error.”
Reimann quotes from a businessman’s letter: “You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. The worst of it is that they are so ignorant. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’ Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.
“While state representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur,’ followed by a prison sentence. You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain. Everywhere there is a growing undercurrent of bitterness. Everyone has his doubts about the system, unless he is very young, very stupid, or is bound to it by the privileges he enjoys.
“There are terrible times coming. If only I had succeeded in smuggling out $10,000 or even $5,000, I would leave Germany with my family. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews’ (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated. The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen.”
As Mises says, “independent” only in a decorous sense. Under fascism, explains this businessman, the capitalist “must be servile to the representatives of the state” and “must not insist on rights, and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred.” It’s the businessman, characteristically independent, who is “most likely to get into trouble with the Gestapo for having grumbled incautiously.”
“Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party,” recounts Reimann. “The party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these men as ‘enemies of the state’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business licenses. Small shopkeepers and artisans are not to grumble.”
“Officials, trained only to obey orders, have neither the desire, the equipment, nor the vision to modify rules to suit individual situations,” Reimann explains. “The state bureaucrats, therefore, apply these laws rigidly and mechanically, without regard for the vital interests of essential parts of the national economy. Their only incentive to modify the letter of the law is in bribes from businessmen, who for their part use bribery as their only means of obtaining relief from a rigidity which they find crippling.”
Says another businessman: “Each business move has become very complicated and is full of legal traps which the average businessman cannot determine because there are so many new decrees. All of us in business are constantly in fear of being penalized for the violation of some decree or law.”
Business owners, explains another entrepreneur, cannot exist without a “collaborator,” i.e., a “lawyer” with good contacts in the Nazi bureaucracy, one who “knows exactly how far you can circumvent the law.” Nazi officials, explains Reimann, “obtain money for themselves by merely taking it from capitalists who have funds available with which to purchase influence and protection,” paying for their protection “as did the helpless peasants of feudal days.”
“It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory,” laments a factory owner. “Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office.”
Reports another factory owner: “The greater part of the week I don’t see my factory at all. All this time I spend in visiting dozens of government commissions and offices in order to get raw materials I need. Then there are various tax problems to settle and I must have continual conferences and negotiations with the Price Commission. It sometimes seems as if I do nothing but that, and everywhere I go there are more leaders, party secretaries, and commissars to see.”
In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, “practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake.” Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and “we shall take away the freedom still left you.”
In 1933, six years before Reimann’s book, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, made the following entry in his diary on February 21: “It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes. And there’s not a sound from anyone. Everyone’s keeping his head down.”
It is impossible to escape the parallels between Guenter Reimann’s account of doing business under the Nazis and the “compassionate,” “responsible,” and regulated “capitalism” of today’s U.S. economy today. At least the German government was frank enough to give the right name to its system of economic control.
Here is the link for this article:
“Instead of traveling to DC, do the same thing, but in your own area. Were it a mass action, by millions accross the nation, I think you would see some heads turn.” ~ G.Mason
That’s a good idea, too. Those who can’t afford the gas to participate in the D.C. gridlock could have that option.
If enough participate, they can’t arrest and/or fine all of us. They wouldn’t dare - as the majority of Americans would be behind our effort.
If Bush wanted to see his popularity soar in one day’s time, he would come out and say to us, “I hear you America. Since the DemocRATS in Congress have been blocking every legislative attempt we have made, I am directing my aides to draw up the documents by tomorrow and I will sign an executive order instituting a crash program towards energy independence after the order of a Marshall Plan. We will pull out all the stops and do whatever it takes to lift the burden of high utility, food and gasoline costs from the shoulders of the American people.”
Bush! McCainiac! Are you listening?
YOU WILL!
Spent some time in Winooski Pk. (now Colchester?) in the early 60s. Looked it up recently on Google Earth. Boy, has that place changed!
A dream is a wish your heart makes. I like your dream.
BUT, HOUSTON, WE STILL HAVE A PROBLEM!
I would suggest sending to your congressional delegation a drill bit. Nothing expensive or large, just a small drill bit with a one word letter...DRILL!
It isn’t just gasoline. My contract with one of the deregulated local electricity carriers came up for renewal in May. The rate went from 14 to 20 cents a kwa. When I called to ask why so much, the girl said everything was going up and they deserved a raise too. I promise she said this.
I checked a couple other carriers and they were more! Anyway my first bill came, which coincides with full blast summer heat and the bill went from 320 to 610. Inflation is here folks.
Deregulation in Texas has so far been a very bad joke. All it did was add a middleman layer. Idiocy.
The companies that came in after deregulation aren’t building plants or anything. They are just using marketing schemes to get people to jump around. It’s a huge failure for the consumer. It’s like when all the little internet companies popped up reselling ATT lines. Big whoop. And they are dead now anyway.
Perry ought to be real proud.
Here, though I'd block roads oilfield trucks are using. Bad idea, that.
Why clog the whole city? Just block all the off ramps.
I love the idea, but admit to a bit of selfishness...I work there. :-D Mortgage payments, etc.
I like the idea of your ‘block the city’ so I would like to offer an change. At noon put your car in PARK for 5 minutes no matter where you are. Then at 12:30 do it again and again at 1:00, 1:30, 2:00.
This will keep you from being towed or actually preventing an ambulance from getting to the hospital with an injured person.
If you could arrange to do this with a friend and do it side by side it would be more effective yet. There’s lot’s of tricks for people who are too chicken to just sit there. Put the car in PARK, open the hood, get out and go jiggle a wire on the engine. Get back in the car and start it up, get out, close the hood and drive away. Or somewhere during the ‘stall’, get a rag out of the trunk and play with the engine a bit more.
By 3:30 you will have your method down pat and be a professional at jammimg up an intersection. If there was just 100 or 200 people in the whole city doing this you can bet it would be noticed by the city leaders. Then do it again the next day and the next.......
Love the drill bit idea! That is awesome. but because of metal detectors etc, maybe a picture of one?
For my idea, everyone do it in their own city.
Name the day/time - I’m in NH. Any other NH Freepers up for it?
Not to rain on your parade...if someone would put it together, and there is a real prospect of a truly large showing of people I'd be there.
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