"The Dream is Collapsing"

“Who knows whether the other half of our life, in which we think we are awake, is not another sleep a little different from the former, from which we awake when we suppose ourselves asleep? And who doubts that, if we dreamt in company, and the dreams chanced to agree, which is common enough, and if we were always alone when awake, we should believe that matters were reversed? 

In short, as we often dream that we dream, heaping dream upon dream, may it not be that this half of our life, wherein we think ourselves awake, is itself only a dream, on which others are grafted, from which we wake at death….”

Blaise Pascal, Pensees. 

It’s tempting to think that the immensely gifted director Christopher Nolan derived his premise for “Inception” – multi-layered dreams within dreams orchestrated by teams of “extractors” who are nimble in the dark arts of psychological manipulation – from Blaise Pascal’s 17th Century philosophical tract. In any case, there are many points of correspondence between “Inception” and the similarly elaborate exercise in collective delusion and artful deception called the “American Dream.”

At its most accessible level, Nolan's story is about a team of industrial espionage agents, led by a tormented man named Dominic Cobb, who employ shared dreaming technology (originally developed for the military, of course) to steal corporate secrets from the subconscious minds of people while they dream. Cobb and his “extractors” were hired by an Asian corporate mogul named Saito to perform an "inception" – that is, planting an idea in the subconscious mind of Robert Fischer, a man who stood to inherit a vast energy corporation. Fischer would thus be manipulated into breaking up the company; this would be to the benefit of Saito, who owned a rival corporation.

This scheme required the creation of a multi-layered dream “architecture,” and the deep sedation of Fischer in order for the dream state to remain stable long enough to plant the desired suggestion. 

In the dream state, laws of logic and physics don’t operate as they do in the physical world; this is why deep sedation was necessary to keep a target “under” and drive him into a progressively deeper dream state. 

Often the “extractors” would appear in the targeted individual’s dreams, and sometimes one of them would “expose” the other in order to build confidence in the victim and thus gain more intimate access to his subconscious.

Those who invaded Fischer’s mind through shared dreaming could be brought out of the dream state either by being "killed" in the dream (which would wake them up immediately) or through a series of synchronized “kicks." These are sudden, violent jolts – such as driving a car off a cliff, or falling from a building – that cause a dreaming person to awaken involuntarily. Those who don’t respond to the “kicks" may descend into “limbo,” an inaccessibly deep subconscious level in which the individual loses his ability to distinguish dreaming from reality -- until, of course, physical death ensues.

Losing the ability to recognize objective reality is the most acute hazard of working as an "extractor." This is why Cobb and each of his colleagues carries a "totem" -- a tangible object with a distinctive weight and balance that only the owner will recognize. Cobb's totem is a small metal top that, if spun by its waking owner, will topple over. If it continues spinning indefinitely, Cobb will realize that he's dreaming. Cobb's totem, incidentally, is the key to decrypting Nolan's story.

An idea that is "incepted" (that term appears to be a neologism of Nolan's coinage) into a dreaming person's subconscious mind can continue to grow and expand in the individual's waking state. Cobb made this sorrowful discovery after performing an "inception" on his wife Mallorie, a professional colleague who became addicted to living in their shared dream state. He planted in her mind the idea that her real life was actually a dream; that idea persisted in her waking state, eventually leading Mallorie to commit suicide in the futile hope of "waking" up in the dream world she idealized.

"What is the most resilient parasite?" Cobb muses at one point. "Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient -- highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed -- fully understood -- that sticks; right in there [gesturing at his head] somewhere." As he had learned, this can have tragic -- and even fatal -- consequences.  This principle is more than just a clever dramatic device: It is a vivid, tangible, and all-encompassing reality as the Power Elite's "dream architecture" collapses all around us.

The “inception” responsible for the current system of institutionalized delusion was the creation of the Federal Reserve System, the Regime’s official counterfeiting arm. 

The Fed infected the world economy with the idea that wealth can be created ex nihilo by fiat money "dream architects." In the real world, currency -- gold and silver -- were tangible substances with specific characteristics that made them valuable and impossible to counterfeit. 

The pseudo-world created by the Fed, however, is one in which the laws of economics appear to be suspended, meaning that "wealth" and "value" can be conjured into existence simply by emitting more paper, or doing the quivalent in the digital realm.

Creation of a central bank was necessary in order to permit the Regime's "extractor class" slip the shackles of hard currency. This eventually led to FDR's confiscation of gold in 1933, and to the Nixon administration's final repudiation of the gold standard in 1971. 

It was during the reign of FDR, America's first Fascist President-for-Life, that the ruling elite "incepted" the idea of that the federal government could be an indispensable partner in helping citizens achieve the "American Dream." Thus the Regime unveiled the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, was supposedly intended to expand the ranks of home ownership. Through the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Fannie Mae), the government purchased mortgages issued to low-income Americans. Those mortgages, in turn, were bundled into marketable securities and vended to others willing to participate in the shared delusion.

In 1968, amid a torrential outpouring of red ink resulting from the Vietnam War and the Great Society welfare programs, Lyndon Johnson "privatized" Fannie Mae in order to move it “off-budget.” This is possible, once again, because the laws of economics don’t operate in the “reality” created by the Federal Reserve. In 1970, the Nixon administration created a second federally subsidized lender, Freddie Mac, supposedly to compete with Fannie Mae. But like the “extractors” play-acting in Fischer’s subconscious in “Inception,” Fannie and Freddie were part of the same government-created debt cartel, working to prolong and deepen the societal fraud called the residential real estate market.

In 2003, the first “kick” in the housing market occurred when Fannie and Freddie were forced to disclose billions of dollars in misrepresented earnings. This revelation literally caused their stock price to fall off a cliff. Not to worry, insisted the Fed’s dream architects as they injected the market with an even stronger sedative in the form of “liquidity” – that is, inflation. Amid gathering auguries of an impending housing collapse, then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan cut the Prime Rate nearly to zero, while simultaneously urging Americans to refinance their Adjustable Rate Mortgages yet again – when they could only “adjust” in one direction.

Millions of home “owners” – a curious term for people who are merely renting houses from the banks that issued the mortgages, and who can still be dispossessed for delinquent taxes even after paying off the note  – acted on that perfectly insane advice. This set up a second, more violent “kick” – the collapse of the real estate/mortgage refinance bubble in 2007. That kick was a gentle tap compared to the body blow that was delivered in fall 2008, with the bailout of Bear Stearns, the failure of Lehman Brothers, the implosion of AIG, and the nationalization of Fannie and Freddie.

As layer after layer of artfully wrought deception collapsed, the dream architects grabbed the strongest sedative they could find and emptied the syringe: They had the Fed emit trillions of dollars in fiat “money” to indemnify Wall Street’s bad debts, and then began a rampage of “qualitative easing” – another euphemism for inflation – in order to fuel government spending.

The people who orchestrated this deception have been able to ride the “kicks” to safety. In early 2008, Alan Greenspan warned a gathering of Arab financiers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia that they should divest their dollar-based holdings. Bondholders in China, Russia, and elsewhere have been bailed out by the Fed, often by way of corporate cut-outs or through loans to foreign central banks.

Greece and Italy -- in fact, the entire collection of parasitic polities who constitute the "Euro-zone" -- are in the queue for another bailout. The domestic element of the "extractor class" is busily at work, as well, devouring everything within their field of vision -- as even a cursory examination of public employee pensions and benefits will demonstrate. 

In the meantime, despite the best efforts of the dream architects to keep Americans sedated, millions are waking up into a multi-layered nightmare. Rock star Sammy Hagar of the AARP-qualifying supergroup Chickenfoot -- of all the unlikely people -- has provided one of the best capsule descriptions of that nightmare-within-a-nightmare.

 

The band's new single, "Three and a Half Letters (I Need a Job)," takes its lyrics from letters Hagar has received from people desperately looking for work."I just returned from Afghanistan -- spent four years in the military service," writes one of Hagar's correspondents. "I'm 24, strong, and I can't find work in my hometown. I'm married with one beautiful son -- seven months old today. Never had a chance to buy a home. Can't afford the apartment we've been living in. [We're] moving in with Debbie's parents, whose home in in foreclosure. Can you help?"

Beyond using their considerable gifts to publicize the plight of the unemployed, how can Hagar and his colleagues help? It should be acknowledged that Hagar is smarter and more honest than most policy-makers, which admittedly isn't the highest hurdle to jump. As a member of the seminal rock band  Montrose thirty-seven years ago, Hagar wrote a song called “Paper Money” lamenting the end of the gold standard and the economic destruction caused by the Regime’s fraudulent, worthless, paper currency. A generation after composing that protest song, Hagar is now chronicling the human costs attendant to the unraveling of the fiat money system.

Last summer the air was rent with anguished and hypocritical warnings about the ruin that would ensue if the U.S. government were to "default." Actually, the default occurred forty years ago, when Washington sundered the last links binding the dollar to gold. We're now living through the deferred but inevitable consequences of that default. 

The dream is collapsing, and reality is re-asserting itself in spite of the strongest sedatives the Keynesian dream architects can deploy. Historical precedent suggests that they will soon prescribe the "Mallorie Option" -- inducing mass murder-suicide through war on the assumption that this is the only way we can return to the bewitching dreamland of artificial prosperity.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

When Will It Be "Enough"?

Uninvited, unwanted, but there anyway: Hamilton police disrupt a funeral.

Within the space of about a day, New Jersey experienced two public displays of organized intimidation by paramilitary thugs. The first involved an armed assault by black-clad bullies whose conduct was indistinguishable from the criminal street violence of the Nazi SS. The other was merely a public protest by the local chapter of the National Socialist Movement.

The family of Elsie Wenzel, a beloved school lunch lady who died at age 71, gathered for a memorial service at a funeral home in Hamilton (a small town near Trenton) on April 15. Charles Wenzel, one of her grandsons, "had ... something like a seizure," related Elsie's widower, Edward, in an interview with The Trentonian. The family called 911 to summon the paramedics. Unfortunately, if you call the paramedics, the police are part of the package deal, whether they're wanted or not -- and they have an unfailing talent for making matters worse.


When Charles had another convulsion, he committed the unpardonable offense of defiling one of the sanctified bully-boys through physical contact. This constitutes "battery on an officer," and so the offended cop and several of his boyfriends attempted to handcuff Charles while he was lying on the ground receiving medical treatment.


"We didn't call you for this!" exclaimed a witness as several other people, including a granddaughter of the deceased, tried to intervene to protect Charles from the criminal assault. The officers responded by pepper-spraying the mourners and throwing several of them -- including Edward's middle-aged granddaughter -- to the ground. 

One of the officers called in a report that a "riot" was in progress -- "riot" being defined as any situation in which Mundanes loudly criticize the anointed purveyors of consecrated violence for their crimes against innocent people. Apparently the funeral parlor was located near a donut shop, because within seconds at least a dozen police vehicles were on the scene. 





(Courtesy of the Trentonian.)


One of Elsie's sons, who was to be a pallbearer at the funeral, was jumped by "seven or eight" of the armed tax-feeders and thrown to the floor of the funeral parlor, Edward Wenzel reported. Another eyewitness who drove by the scene was alarmed to see police swarming four other prone, helpless men.

By one account, at least a half-dozen of the pallbearers were arrested to sent to the hospital as a result of gang violence by the police. When police attempted to "escort" him from the chapel, Edward Wenzel refused; if they had laid hands on the bereaved elderly widower, an authentic riot might well have ensued. 


A day later in nearby Trenton, a battalion-strength contingent of riot police was on hand to provide "security" during a protest staged at the Statehouse by about fifty members of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), a pathetic little outfit that -- in terms of authenticity -- has the same relationship to the Third Reich that Spinal Tap has to Led Zeppelin. 

As is typical in events of this kind, the NSM nitwits were outnumbered about three-to-one by counter-protesters. Events of this kind are an orgy of overtime for the unionized gendarme, and the April 16 protest was no exception: Every law enforcement agency -- local, state, and federal -- sent a contingent of uniformed trough-swillers to strut and preen in riot gear.

The familiar ritual of neo-Nazi protests reminds me a bit of Voltaire's description of the typical 18th Century Parisian dinner party, where one would experience "the usual unintelligible chatter, witticisms, false rumors, bad reasoning, a little politics, [and] a great deal of slander...." 


Every time neo-Nazi numbskulls conduct a protest, the air will be clotted with the same familiar slogans, the standard assortment of insults will be exchanged, and all of the familiar poses will be struck. 

All of this, I'm convinced, is incidental to the real two-fold purpose of such displays: Allowing the local constabulary to run up overtime, and reinforcing the notion that the police are the valiant protectors of the innocent, rather than the most significant threat to their life, liberty, and property.

It wasn't neo-Nazis of the NSM variety who disrupted Elsie Wenzel's funeral. It would be interesting to find out how many of the paladins of public order who pulled "riot duty" in Trenton on Saturday, April 16 had taken part in the police riot in Hamilton on the previous day. In similar fashion, it's quite likely that nobody who attended Elsie's funeral had ever been the victim of criminal violence apart from that inflicted on them by the Hamilton police. 

Domesticated neo-Nazi groups like the NSM have a way of Bogarting all of the civic outrage wherever they materialize, including outrage more properly directed at the local branch of the Ordnungspolitzei. This is one reason why the Feds are eager to feed and care for groups such as the NSM -- which also act as useful vehicles for federal provocateurs.


The likelihood that the National Socialist Movement -- or any similarly situated neo-Nazi group -- could become a menace to individual liberty and dignity comparable to that posed by the State's punitive priesthood is so small that it couldn't be detected by en electron microscope. Neo-Nazis are almost impossible to find, unless one seeks them out in a few rural habitats in the Northwest and Deep South. The police, by way of contrast, are almost impossible to avoid, and their behavior -- as I've noted before -- increasingly resembles that of an army of occupation. 

In part, this is because many of them are Reservists or Guardsmen who have served in Washington's military occupations abroad. But even those who have not been deployed overseas are being indoctrinated to think of themselves as combatants in constant peril for whom "officer safety" is the paramount consideration. 


To understand the institutional mindset of contemporary law enforcement, it's useful to juxtapose video records of two incidents. The first took place in Iraq’s Camp Bucca prison in 2005:

“Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!” exclaimed an armed thug after one of his comrades hurled a grenade into a prison enclosure. The scene, described by commentator David Kramer as something out of "Schindler's List," struck me as some perverse hybrid of Wounded Knee and “Jackass”: Armed adolescent bullies cackling with juvenile glee as they gun down desperate, defenseless people.

One wonders how many of these murderous mouth-breathers are now employed in domestic law enforcement. And then one wonders how many of these sadists had been employed as police before being called up by the Regime to serve as hired killers overseas. And that thought leads us irresistibly to the second video:



In 2003,  two years before the episode at Iraq's Camp Bucca, riot police in Miami carried out a full-scale military assault — albeit with “non-lethal” weapons — against demonstrators who had assembled to protest a summit meeting promoting the artfully misnamed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

“After last week, no one should call what [Chief John] Timoney runs in Miami a police force,” observed investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill following the event. “It’s a paramilitary group. Thousands of soldiers, dressed in khaki uniforms with full black body armor and gas masks, marching in unison through the streets, banging batons against their shields, chanting, `back… back… back.’ There were armored personnel carriers and helicopters.”

Among the protesters was an attorney named Elizabeth Ritter. She was driven into the streets out of disgust that Miami had been turned into a garrison state. Wearing a modest, professional business suit, she marched in front of Timoney’s stormtroopers carrying a sign that read “Fear Totalitarianism.” As if to vindicate Ritter’s point, some of Timoney’s goons shot Ritter several times in the back and legs with rubber bullets. Ritter crouched down and covered her face with her protest sign — only to be shot again by a rubber bullet, which penetrated the sign and struck her in the forehead.

During the  next morning’s mission briefing,  black-shirted thugs commanded by Sgt. Michael Kallman of the Broward Sheriff’s Office of homeland security enjoyed a hearty laugh as they reviewed footage of the criminal assault on Ritter. This led to Kallman being captured in his own “Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!” moment.

“I don’t know who got her,” chortled Kallman, “but … it went through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head.”

“Can I get a little piece of her red dress?” chimed in one of Kallman’s cretinous underlings from somewhere off-camera.

In a conversation with Major John Brooks, the ranking officer at the briefing, another of the blackshirts showed off a bandana that he had retrieved “from one of the scurrying cockroaches.”

“Oh, cool!” exulted Brooks in a fashion worthy of a twelve-year-old. “This is going in my office forever, and it’s going to bring me some very good memories.”

Despite the fact that Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel confirmed that police had committed criminal assaults during the protests, none of the costumed assailants responsible was punished in any way. In fact, the scenes described above were included in a training video, presumably used to instruct the Schutzstaffel in the proper use of what has come to be known as the “Miami Model” of homeland security.

 The foundation of the "Miami Model" is a doctrine of overwhelming force in the service of "order": The Mundanes are told to submit or be hurt -- or killed. This is the operative principle of every encounter between police and "civilians," which is why every such encounter -- even one incidental to emergency medical treatment at a funeral -- is freighted with incipient police violence.

Hamilton Township, New Jersey -- described by its municipal government as "America's Favorite Hometown" -- is a community of about 100,000 people. It is a reasonably affluent suburb blessed with abundant parks and other amenities -- and blighted by a police force capable of busting up a funeral in a fit of official violence that wasn't that far removed from the behavior of the torch-bearing Cossacks who raided the wedding in Fiddler on the Roof.

Earlier in the drama we had seen how Teyve, the Jewish milkman at the center of the story, was on friendly terms with the police chief. That friendship is savagely thrust aside once the chief's "duty" is made clear to him.

"Orders are orders -- you understand?"  simpered Anatevka's village police chief to Tevye as the troops under his command carried out their pogrom. After all, the chief had been told by his superior, in no uncertain terms, that his job depended on his willingness to carry out orders: "If you don't want to carry out orders, we will get someone else who will." Such people are never in short supply.

We are told that many -- nay, most -- of those employed in police agencies are people of conscience and principle. This is true of several people I know who are thus employed. I sometimes suspect that I've met everybody who fits that description.

For reasons of institutional solidarity -- or, what's much the same thing, conformity achieved through the threat of retaliation -- such worthy and decent police officers never seem to intervene in defense of innocent people being abused by their costumed comrades. In such instances, any effort made to de-escalate a situation involves admonitions to outraged Mundanes that they must "calm down" in the face of criminal violence being inflicted on a friend, loved one, or clearly inoffensive stranger.

As I've pointed out before, a police officer who actually intervenes to prevent criminal violence by a professional associate can expect to be cashiered immediately. The criminal offender himself, by way of contrast,  can expect a lucrative paid vacation while the local police union spares no effort to preserve his job. 

There was a time, not that long ago, when it was possible for Americans to avoid contact with the police, and the police were trained and expected to leave people alone. Now, however, police are permitted and encouraged to behave like packs of lupine predators, eager to exploit any opportunity to inflict themselves on the helpless.


It's tempting to think that at some point some helpless American is going to become our nation's Mohammed Bouazizi, or Khaled Said -- a living (or recently deceased) symbol of resistance to the persistent, unpunished abuse inflicted by the Regime's armed enforcers.

When he was three years old, Mohammad Bouazizi's father died. As the oldest son of an indigent family living in Sidi Bouazid -- a town about 160 miles from the Tunisian capital, Tunis -- Mohammad was responsible to provide for his mother and two sisters. He earned a computer science degree, but found that it was of little use in Tunisia's deeply depressed economy.

For years, Bouazizi managed to eke out a living as an unlicensed street vendor, peddling fruits and vegetables from a pushcart. Like others who carried out commerce without official permission, Bouazizi endured harassment from shakedown artists employed by the State, who in the course of the typical visit would steal the equivalent of seven dollars as a "fine." 

As the song says, talk is cheap, but even nickels add up. Even a single nickel is sorely missed when it's extracted at gunpoint from someone barely managing to earn enough to survive. But the contemptuous, arrogant words emitted by the armed functionary to carries out that theft do damage as well. The cumulative effect of such indignities can be enough to drive a despairing man to do desperate things.

He was driven to fatal despair when a municipal police officer confiscated his merchandise. 

The matter could have been cleared up if the officer had accepted the seven-dollar fine for operating an unlicensed merchant stand. But the sadist insisted on berating Bouazizi, slapping him, spitting in his face, and insulting his dead father. Heartsick with inconsolable despair, the young man set himself on fire. Public outrage over this incident grew into a revolt that eventually unseated the U.S.-supported incumbent dictator.

"What happened to him?" The police "happened" to him.

Khaled Said was a 28-year-old businessman from Alexandria, Egypt. Last June, after Said posted a video he had captured of narcotics officers divvying up the proceeds of a drug bust, he was dragged out of an internet cafe, taken to a nearby police station, and beaten to death. A small bag of hashish of the sort used by police everywhere to plant evidence was stuffed down Said's throat.

News of this atrocity was quickly propagated throughout Egypt, engendering a protest movement that eventually grew into the rebellion at Tahrir Square and the still-unfinished effort to uproot Egypt's deeply entrenched, U.S.-subsidized police state.

In police states of the kind Washington has supported in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the region, people have been willing to endure a great deal of abuse as long as there was some reasonable expectation that they would be able to feed themselves. It's not surprising to see that forbearance evaporate in the heat of the ongoing economic meltdown, which has left many people without the means to feed their families.  

The triggering incidents that set off revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt were episodes of casual, arrogant abuse by police officers who considered themselves to be imperviously clothed in official privilege. Incidents of that kind are becoming more commonplace here in the putative Land of the Free, and the debt-prolonged illusion of prosperity that has long anesthetized public sensitivities is coming to an end.

Once again, it's not difficult to imagine a situation in which someone, somewhere is going to be pushed too far by an officious prig in a government-issued costume, an atrocity will result -- and then all hell will break loose. 

Given the perverse ingenuity police display in arranging opportunities to impart such abuse, this could happen nearly anywhere, at any time. Meanwhile, those of us who belong to the productive class should avail ourselves of every opportunity to share the following message with representatives of the State's coercive caste:

We don't need you.

We don't want you.

We don't respect you.

We won't tolerate you much longer.

Obiter Dicta

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Dum spiro, pugno!

When Tax-Feeders Revolt

What would happen if tax victims, rather than tax-feeders, were to go on strike?

If Madison -- or the capital city of any of Leviathan's other 49 regional administrative units -- were over-run by thousands of productive people who decided that they would no longer consent to be plundered on behalf of unionized government employees, would their revolt be promoted by sympathetic media outlets, and supported by the president and his political machine?

Would self-described populist cable pundit Ed Schultz  be there in person to confer an on-camera benediction to the rebels, describing them as people standing in "solidarity to fight for the middle class"? Would the state governor display restraint and forebearance in dealing with a malodorous mob that laid siege to the capitol for a week, if the throng were composed of people who withheld their taxes, rather government employees withholding their tax-subsidized services (such as they are)?

If this were to happen anywhere in the soyuz, every element of the Regime's punitive apparatus would be mobilized to put down the rebellion, hard and fast. Riot police and National Guard units would be deployed to beat and round up the rebels. I suspect that serious consideration would be made to the use of Predator drones to target those identified as "ringleaders" of the uprising.

If that scenario seems unlikely, consider the action taken by President Washington, at the behest of his despicable Treasury Secretary, to suppress the original taxpayer strike, the Whiskey Rebellion.
 

As James Madison sardonically pointed out, Alexander Hamilton's vision for America was that of a mercantilist state "woven together by tax collectors." His program envisioned creating an alliance between the central government and the bond-holding class, which would create a permanent constituency for ever-higher taxes and ever-increasing government. (In recent decades, unionized government employees have become a huge and powerful element of that constituency as well.)

Hamilton's scheme required the imposition of various excise taxes on the productive population. This in turn led to the rebellion of farmers in western Pennsylvania, who used whiskey as a form of currency. They quite sensibly refused to pay the tax. When Washington dispatched tax collectors to the region, the rebels helpfully outfitted them in the appropriate hot tar and goose feather ensemble. 

 A little more than a decade after Yorktown, George Washington assembled an army to set down the rebellion. 

As Thomas DiLorenzo observes in his valuable book Hamilton's Curse: "The rank-and-file soldiers may have been mostly conscripts, but many of the officers who accompanied Hamilton and Washington to Pennsylvania were from the ranks of the creditor aristocracy in the seaboard cities.... These officers were eager to enforce collection of the whiskey tax so that the value of their government bond holdings could be enhanced and secured."  

The revolt was put down without a shot being fired, and Washington -- who wasn't terribly enthusiastic about the campaign -- left Hamilton in charge, unsupervised. As DiLorenzo observes, this permitted Hamilton to play "the role of Grand Inquisitor" with those who had been taken prisoner. 

The captives, who included elderly veterans of the War for Independence, were dragged through the snow in chains to Philadelphia, where they were confined in jails, stables, and cattle pens to be interrogated by Hamilton and his underlings. The plan was to use what are now called "enhanced interrogation" techniques to compel accusations from some of the Rebels, and confessions from others, thereby building a large show trial that would end in the edifying spectacle of mass executions. 

One of the Treasury Secretary's assistants, a wretch known to history only as General White,  gave standing orders that any prisoner who attempted to escape was subject to summary execution by beheading. 

That order, DiLorenzo points out, "was not overruled by the treasury secretary, who was apparently willing to play judge, jury, and executioner. Indeed, Hamilton ordered local judges to render guilty verdicts against the twenty men who were eventually imprisoned, and he wanted all guilty parties to be hanged." This prompted Washington's intervention. Twelve Whiskey Rebels were prosecuted; two were convicted, and then pardoned. 


All of this happened long before the advent of the Federal Reserve and its terrorist arm, the IRS. Just as significantly, it happened long before the "Bonus Army" was cleared from Washington, D.C. by the U.S. military -- an incident from the last Great Depression that may provide a useful template for dealing with citizen uprisings that will come as the current Greater Depression deepens. 

The peaceful "Bonus Army" protesters were desperate, hungry veterans who had been promised compensation for wages they had lost while serving as conscripts in Wilson's evil and idiotic war. They had suffered the most onerous tax imaginable in the form of state-inflicted servitude. In 1924, Congress had approved a "Bonus" measure to compensate the former draft slaves, but the promised pittance was to be deferred until 1945, by which time it would  have been rendered worthless through inflation. 

As a protest handbill pointed out, "The Republican, Democratic, and Socialist Parties are all united in the fight against payment of the balance due to the veterans of the Bonus." This was hardly the first, or last, time that "Takers" would set aside their party differences to form a united front in a war against the "makers."



Commanding the cavalry that day was Major George S. Patton, who had no compunctions against using the military against civilians involved in "domestic disturbances." In a guide to "Riot Duty" he published a few months later, Patton offered some practical advice to future field commanders called on to put down citizen uprisings. 

 Patton was enthusiastic about the domestic applications of chemical warfare: "The use of gas is paramount…. While tear gas is effective, it should be backed up with vomiting gas.... Although white phosphorous is incendiary, it is useful in forming a screen for the attack of barricades and defended houses."

“Warn newspapers, theaters, and churches that if they encourage the mob, they are guilty of aiding them and that their leaders will be held personally accountable," Patton continued. "Freedom of the press cannot be construed as `license to encourage’ the armed enemies of the United States of America. An armed mob resisting federal troops is an armed enemy. To aid an enemy is TREASON. This may not be the `law,’ but it is fact. When blood starts running, the law stops.”

Perhaps thinking of Andrew Jackson's behavior as self-appointed military dictator of New Orleans during (and, for a while, after) the War of 1812, and anticipating the Cheney-era invention of the concept of "unlawful enemy combatant," Patton urged future military governors to dispose of the nuisance called habeas corpus -- and likewise to dispose of any particularly troublesome "agitator" with extreme prejudice:

“If you have captured a dangerous agitator and some `misguided’ federal judge issues a writ of Habeas Corpus for him, try to see the judge to find out what he is liable to do…. There’s always the danger that the man might attempt to escape. If he does, see that he at least falls out of ranks before you shoot him. To be soft hearted might mean death to your men. After all, WAR IS WAR.”


Patton's instructions are being carried out -- with murderous impact -- by the U.S.-supported and Pentagon-equipped security forces in Bahrain, which hosts the imperial Fifth Fleet. 

 "We are getting shot by American weapons fired by American-trained Bahraini soldiers with American-made tanks,"a medical orderly in Bahrain told Robert Fisk of The Independent of London. The same was true in Egypt prior to Mubarak's belated abdication. Both of those countries have been convulsed by uprisings against deeply corrupt, well-entrenched elites. People throughout that region have endured decades of government-abetted plunder, and endless abuse at the hands of the police states that protect the plunderers. 

The needs of the Empire's global plunderbund prompted the Federal Reserve to engage in a hugely destructive round of "Quantitative Easing" -- that is, officially sanctioned counterfeiting. This has preserved the comforts of corporatist elite, while triggering a food price shock that literally threatened the lives of millions at the periphery of the Empire.

Americans are just now starting to feel price inflation nibbling at their household finances; in places like Egypt, the same inflationary wave is devouring people alive. As I've said before, this is the kind of thing that turns "Mr. Hand" into "Mr. Fist" -- and sends people into the streets. 

When -- not "if," mind you -- similar uprisings occur here in the United States, we will find the "takers" united in solidarity against the "makers." This is not what is happening in Wisconsin, where the tax parasite cartel is tearing the state apart in an effort to preserve its privileged status, at whatever expense to the productive element of the state's population. 

The tax-devouring thugs who have converged on the state capitol in Madison are trying to wrap themselves in the mantle of the hungry, desperate people who defied Mubarak's torturers, and the imponderably courageous people in Bahrain who walked, unarmed and unflinching, into gunfire. Ditching work and pitching a tantrum to demand the preservation of "collective bargaining rights" for over-paid, tax-subsidized functionaries simply isn't the same thing as facing down the pitiless cadres of a quasi-totalitarian police state.

Freedom activists in Cairo demanded an end to martial law, torture, and a one-party dictatorship. Government employees in Wisconsin insist that it's a species of human rights abuse to withhold tax subsidies for Viagra prescriptions -- an actual demand from the teachers' union, which obviously includes more than a few members who have a hard time keeping the lead in the ol' pencil. 

Here are two critical and little-appreciated facts about the tax-feeder revolt in Wisconsin. First: In framing the proposed legislation to eliminate collective bargaining for government employee unions (which shouldn't exist to begin with), Republican Governor Scott Walker carefully exempted unions representing firefighters, police, and the state troopers. Second: Those unions have united in "solidarity" with their comrades in the tax-consuming class. This illustrates that in Wisconsin, as elsewhere, the police consider themselves part of the "who" rather than the "whom" in the "who does what to whom" formula that defines statist politics.

  

This will likely set the pattern for future episodes of this kind: "Conservative" executives will preserve the perquisites of the government functionaries directly involved in official coercion. In Wisconsin, as is the case everywhere else, the miracle of "collective bargaining" has conferred extravagant perks  on the uniformed bullies on which the State's wealth extraction mechanism depends. 

They supplied Mubarak's police; they still supply our own. 

 While police in Madison storm the barricades alongside their fellow revenue hogs, one of their number -- drug enforcement Officer Denise Markham -- is in the fourteenth month of what will eventually be a nearly two-and-a-half-year-long paid vacation. 

 Markham was suspended in June 2009 while the department conducted a leisurely and stressless "internal investigation" which eventually ruled that she had engaged in "overbearing, oppressive or tyrannical conduct," "improper searches," improper handling of "controlled substances," and unlawful seizure of private property (that is, theft).

Instead of facing criminal charges, Markham was allowed to resign on December 31 -- but she will continue to receive "sick leave," vacation, and comp time that continued to accumulate even while she was on paid suspension. According to Madison Police Chief Noble Wray, "this is really the best deal for all parties concerned," given the union-negotiated contract provisions dealing with circumstances of this kind. 

Indeed, the deal cut with Denise Markham is miserly compared to the treatment lavished on Michael Grogan, another Madison cop who was fired after being convicted of disorderly conduct for a December 2004 DUI-related incident. After wrecking his car, Grogan -- who was pants-pissing drunk -- kicked in the door of the first house he found and collapsed in a reeking puddle on the floor. After being shaken awake by strangers the following morning, Grogan drooled out a few incoherent syllables and then staggered out. 

A few weeks later, Grogan was put on a paid vacation that would last for three years. During that time, he would collect nearly $250,000 while he and his police union-provided attorney used every dilatory tactic in their arsenal to forestall final termination until they had wrung every possible penny from the productive public. 

These are typical examples of the kind of "public service" made possible through "collective bargaining." And they are very suitable illustrations of the mind-set of those who wouldn't hesitate to irrigate the gutters with blood in the event that Mundanes ever decide to stage a tax strike.

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 Dum spiro, pugno!