"If the evidence
is correct and no logical errors have been made, a 13th Amendment restricting
lawyers from serving in government was ratified in 1819 and removed from US
Constitution during the tumult of the Civil War. Since the Amendment was never
lawfully repealed, it is still the Law today.
I found a very interesting article that was written in 2016
by Jean-Michel Letennier called Missing
13th Amendment Found: “No Lawyers In Public Office” which explains how
America’s government became unconstitutionally corrupted by the millionaire
lawyers and bankers who make up our government, in violation of the Thirteenth
Amendment.
Having worked at a bank for 18 years, many of those years in
corporate security and as an anti-money laundering analyst, I witnessed the
overthrow of the government in 2000 by the lawyers and bankers. I understand the 2008 financial crisis was a
controlled demolition instigated by lawyers and bankers. When George W. Bush lost the 2000
presidential election, the Bush Crime Family lawyers took the case of Bush v.
Gore to 5 corrupt Republican lawyers on the U.S. Supreme Court who overturned
the will of the American people and installed George W. Bush as president.
Three days later, in a lame duck session the U.S. Senate
passed the Commodities and Futures Modernization Act and was signed into law by
the outgoing (impeached by lawyers) President Bill Clinton. The law was written by lawyers and bankers
which deregulated the derivatives market and insurance industry and opened the
door to massive corruption in the banking and insurance industries. Today there is in excess of $700 trillion in
derivatives trading per day, unregulated and untaxed.
The Federal Reserve Bank’s hundred year charter was due to
expire in 2013 and after President Bill Clinton balanced the budget and paid
down America’s debt to the foreign owned Federal Reserve Bank, the Fed needed a
tax cuts for the rich lawyers and war to plunge America back into debt. Al Gore, who won the 2000 election in spite
of massive fraud by the lawyers in both parties, wasn’t likely to give the Fed it’s
much needed war and tax cuts the central bank wanted therefore extraordinary
measures were taken to ensure W. Bush was president.
Within 9 months of the Bush presidency a massive tax cut was
passed into law followed by the bankers and lawyers funded terrorist attacks of
911 which provided the impetus for endless wars. The Patriot Act had already been written by
the bankers’ lawyers prior to Bush taking office and was passed in congress unanimously in congress
with just one dissenting vote, that of Representative Barbara Lee of
California.
Everything bad thing that has happened in America, from wars
for profit and financial crashes couldn’t have happened if the 13th
Amendment had not been illegally removed from the Constitution and lawyers and
bankers.
And don’t forget that Barack Obama was a “constitutional
lawyer” who received over $300 million dollars in “small” campaign contribution
of $200 dollars or less in pre-paid credit cards. In keeping the “individual” donations under
$200 they were not required to reveal the source of the funds.
The October 2008 collapse of the banking industry occurred
one month before the Presidential election when John McCain was leading Obama
in the polls, so McCain temporarily suspended his campaign effectively handing
Obama the presidency. Obama not only
bailed out the corrupt banks but paid them bonuses and saddled the taxpayers
with the debt. Obama’s healthcare bill
called Obamacare codified insurance industry profits into law.
The British Empire never relinquished control over the
United States after the war for independence and played a large role in the
2000 presidential election and every election since. As a matter of fact, the Russian collusion
hoax was a product of the British spy agencies the MI5 and MI6 in collusion
with the CIA and FBI.
The Brits even threatened to ban President Trump from
Britain because of his support for Brexit, withdrawing the U.K. from the
European Union. So let’s take a look at
this excellent article by Jean-Michel Letennier:
Excerpt:
Missing 13th Amendment Found: “No
Lawyers In Public Office”
The 13th Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States has been altered from its original in order to fool the American public into accepting
a government that is mostly illegally in office. The information contained in the article below contains stunning
revelations that the entire U.S. congress should be deemed illegitimate,
after evidence that a clandestine plot to alter the U.S. Constitution has now
emerged.
Themillenniumreport.com reports:
In the winter of 1983, archival
research expert David Dodge, and former Baltimore police investigator Tom Dunn,
were searching for evidence of
government corruption in public records stored in the Belfast Library on
the coast of Maine.
By chance, they discovered the
library’s oldest authentic copy of the Constitution of the United States
(printed in 1825). Both men were stunned to see this document included a 13th Amendment
that no longer appears on current copies of the Constitution.
Moreover, after studying the
Amendment’s language and historical context,
they realized the principle intent of this “missing” 13th Amendment was to
prohibit lawyers from serving in government. So began a seven year,
nationwide search for the truth surrounding the most bizarre Constitutional
puzzle in American history — the unlawful removal of a ratified Amendment from
the Constitution of the United States.
Since 1983, Dodge and Dunn have
uncovered additional copies of the Constitution with the “missing” 13th
Amendment printed in at least eighteen separate publications by ten different
states and territories over four decades from 1822 to 1860. In June of this
year (1991), Dodge uncovered the
evidence that this missing 13th Amendment had indeed been lawfully ratified by
the state of Virginia and was therefore an authentic Amendment to the American
Constitution.
If the evidence is correct and no
logical errors have been made, a 13th Amendment restricting lawyers from
serving in government was ratified in 1819 and removed from the U.S.
Constitution during the tumult of the Civil War. Since the Amendment was never lawfully repealed, it is still the Law
today. The implications are enormous…
MEANING of the 13th Amendment
The “missing” 13th Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States reads as follows:
“If any citizen of the United
States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility or honour,
or shall without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present,
pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king,
prince, or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United
States, and shall be incapable of
holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them...”
At the first reading, the meaning
of this 13th Amendment (also called the “title of nobility” Amendment) seems
obscure; unimportant. The references to “nobility,” “honour,” “emperor,”
“king,” and “prince,” lead us to dismiss this Amendment as a petty
post-revolution act of spite directed against the British monarchy…
Not so. Consider some evidence of
its historical significance: First,
“titles of nobility” were prohibited in both Article VI of the Articles of
Confederation (1777) and in Article I, Sections 9 and 10 of the Constitution of
the United States (1787);
Second, although already prohibited
by the Constitution, an additional “title of nobility” amendment was proposed
in 1789, again in 1810, and according to Dodge, finally ratified in 1819. Clearly, the founding fathers saw such a
serious threat in “titles of nobility” and “honors” that anyone receiving them
would forfeit their citizenship. Since the government prohibited “titles of
nobility” several times over four decades, and went through the amending
process (even though “titles of nobility” were already prohibited by the
Constitution), it’s obvious that the Amendment carried much more significance
for our founding fathers than is readily apparent today.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
To understand the meaning of this
“missing” 13th Amendment, we must understand its historical context — the era
surrounding the American Revolution. We tend to regard the notion of
“Democracy” as benign, harmless, and politically unremarkable. But at the time
of the American Revolution, King George
III and the other monarchies of Europe saw Democracy as an unnatural, ungodly
ideological threat, every bit as dangerously radical as Communism was once
regarded by modern Western nations.
Just as the 1917 Communist
Revolution in Russia spawned other revolutions around the world, the American Revolution provided an
example and incentive for people all over the world to overthrow their European
monarchies.
Even though the Treaty of Paris
ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, the simple fact of our existence
threatened the monarchies. The United States stood as a heroic role model for
other nations, that inspired them to also struggle against oppressive
monarchies. The French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Polish national uprising
(1794) were in part encouraged by the American Revolution. Though we stood like a beacon of hope for most of the world, the
monarchies regarded the United States as a political typhoid Mary, the
principle source of radical democracy that was destroying monarchies around the
world.
The monarchies must have realized
that if the principle source of that infection could be destroyed, the rest of
the world might avoid the contagion and the monarchies would be saved. Their
survival at stake, the monarchies sought to destroy or subvert the American
system of government. Knowing they couldn’t destroy us militarily, they
resorted to more covert methods of political subversion, employing spies and
secret agents skilled in bribery and legal deception — it was, perhaps, the
first “cold war”. Since governments run
on money, politicians run for money, and money is the usual enticement to
commit treason, much of the monarchy’s counter- revolutionary efforts emanated
from English banks.
DON’T BANK ON IT (Modern Banking
System)
The essence of banking was once
explained by Sir Josiah Stamp, a former president of the Bank of England: “The modern banking system manufactures
money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of
sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking
was conceived in inequity and born in sin… Bankers own the earth. Take
it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick
of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again… Take this great
power away from them, or if you want to continue to be the
slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers
continue to create money and control credit…”
When the first United States Bank
was chartered by Congress in 1790, there were only three state banks in
existence. At one time, banks were prohibited by law in most states because
many of the early settlers were all too familiar with the practices of the
European goldsmith banks. Goldsmith banks were safe-houses used to store
client’s gold. In exchange for the deposited gold, customers were issued notes
(paper money) which were redeemable in gold. The goldsmith bankers quickly succumbed to the temptation to issue
“extra” notes, (unbacked by gold). Why? Because the “extra” notes enriched the
bankers by allowing them to buy property with notes for gold that they did not
own, gold that did not even exist.
Colonists knew that bankers
occasionally printed too much paper money, found themselves over-leveraged, and
caused a “run on the bank”. If the
bankers lacked sufficient gold to meet the demand, the paper money became
worthless and common citizens left holding the paper were ruined. Although
over-leveraged bankers were sometime hung, the bankers continued printing extra
money to increase their fortunes at the expense of the productive members of
society. (The practice continues to this
day, and offers “sweetheart” loans to bank insiders, and even provides the
foundation for deficit spending and the U.S. Federal government’s unbridled
growth.)
PAPER MONEY
If the colonists forgot the lessons
of goldsmith bankers, the American Revolution refreshed their memories. To finance the war, Congress authorized the
printing of continental bills of credit in an amount not to exceed $200,000,000.
The States issued another $200,000,000 in paper notes. Ultimately, the
value of the paper money fell so low that they were soon traded on speculation
from 5000 to 1000 paper bills for one coin.
It’s often suggested that the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against
a paper economy — “No State shall… make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a
tender in Payment of Debts” — was a tool of the wealthy to be worked to
the disadvantage of all others. But only
in a “paper” economy can money reproduce itself and increase the claims of the
wealthy at the expense of the productive.
“Paper money,” said Pelatiah Webster, “polluted the equity of our laws,
turned them into engines of oppression, corrupted the justice of our public
administration, destroyed the fortunes of thousands who had confidence in
it, enervated the trade, husbandry, and manufactures of U.S. country, and went
far to destroy the morality of U.S. people.”
CONSPIRACIES
A few examples of the attempts by
the monarchies and banks that almost succeeded in destroying the United States:
According to the Tennessee Laws
(1715-1820, vol. II, p. 774), in the 1794 Jay Treaty, the United States agreed to pay 600,000 pounds sterling to King George
III, as reparations for the American revolution. The Senate ratified the treaty in secret session and ordered that it
not be published. When Benjamin Franklin’s grandson published it anyway,
the exposure and resulting public uproar so angered the Congress that it passed
the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) so federal judges could prosecute editors
and publishers for reporting the truth about the government.
Since we had won the Revolutionary War, why would U.S. Senators agree
to pay reparations to the loser? And why would they agree to pay 600,000
pounds sterling, eleven years after the war ended? It doesn’t make sense,
especially in light of Senate’s secrecy and later fury over being exposed, unless
we assume U.S. Senators had been bribed to serve the British monarchy and
betray the American people. That’s subversion.
The United States Bank had been opposed by the Jeffersonians from the
beginning, but the Federalists (the pro-monarchy party) won out in its
establishment. The initial capitalization was $10,000,000 — 80% OF WHICH WOULD BE OWNED BY FOREIGN BANKERS.
Since the bank was authorized to lend up to $20,000,000 (double its paid in
capital), it was a profitable deal for
both the government and the bankers since they could lend, and collect interest
on, $10,000,000 that didn’t exist.
However, the European bankers
outfoxed the government and by 1796, the government owed the bank $6,200,000
and was forced to sell its shares. (By
1802, the U.S. government owned no stock in the United States Bank.) The
sheer power of the banks and their ability to influence representative
government by economic manipulation
and outright bribery was exposed in 1811, when the people discovered that
European banking interests owned 80% of the bank.
Congress therefore refused to
renew the bank’s charter. This led to the withdrawal of $7,000,000 in specie by
European investors, which in turn, precipitated an economic recession, and the
War of 1812. That’s destruction.
There are undoubtedly other
examples of the monarchy’s efforts to subvert or destroy the United States;
some are common knowledge, others remain to be disclosed to the public. For
example, David Dodge discovered a book called “2 VA LAW” in the Library of
Congress Law Library. According to Dodge,
“This is an un-catalogued book in the rare book section that reveals a plan to
overthrow the constitutional government by secret agreements engineered by the
lawyers. That is one of the reasons why this Amendment was ratified by
Virginia and the notification was lost in the mail.
There is no public record that this
book exists.” That may sound surprising, but according to The Gazette
(5/10/91), “the Library of Congress has 349,402 un-catalogued rare books and
13.9 million un-catalogued rare manuscripts.” There may be secrets buried in that mass of documents even more astonishing
than a missing Constitutional Amendment.
TITLES OF NOBILITY
In seeking to rule the world and
destroy the United States, bankers committed many crimes. Foremost among these
crimes were fraud, conversion, and plain old theft. To escape prosecution for
their crimes, the bankers did the same thing any career criminal does. They hired and formed alliances with the
best lawyers and judges money could buy. These alliances, originally forged
in Europe (particularly in Great Britain), spread to the colonies, and later
into the newly formed United States of America.
Despite their criminal foundation,
these alliances generated wealth, and ultimately, respectability. Like any
modern member of organized crime, English bankers and lawyers wanted to be admired
as “legitimate businessmen”. As their
criminal fortunes grew so did their usefulness, so the British monarchy
legitimized these thieves by granting them “titles of nobility”.
Historically, the British peerage
system referred to knights as “Squires” and to those who bore the knight’s
shields as “Esquires”. As lances, shields, and physical violence gave way to
the more civilized means of theft, the pen grew mightier (and more profitable)
than the sword, and the clever wielders
of those pens (bankers and lawyers) came to hold titles of nobility. The most
common title was “Esquire” (used, even today, by some lawyers).
INTERNATIONAL BAR ASSOCIATION
In Colonial America, attorneys
trained attorneys but most held no “title of nobility” or “honor”. There was no
requirement that one be a lawyer to hold the position of district attorney,
attorney general, or judge; a citizen’s “counsel of choice” was not restricted
to a lawyer; there were no state or national bar associations. The only organization that certified
lawyers was the International Bar Association (IBA), chartered by the King of
England, headquartered in London, and closely associated with the international
banking system.
Lawyers admitted to the IBA
received the rank “Esquire” — a “title of nobility”. “Esquire” was the
principle title of nobility which the 13th Amendment sought to prohibit from
the United States.
Why? Because the loyalty of
“Esquire” lawyers was suspect. Bankers
and lawyers with an “Esquire” behind their names were agents of the monarchy,
members of an organization whose principle purposes were political, not
economic, and regarded with the same wariness that some people today reserve
for members of the KGB or the CIA.
Article 1, Sect. 9 of the Constitution sought to prohibit the
International Bar Association (or any other agency that granted titles of
nobility) from operating in America. But the Constitution neglected to
specify a penalty, so the prohibition
was ignored, and agents of the monarchy continued to infiltrate and influence
the government (as in the Jay Treaty and the US Bank charter
incidents).
Therefore, a “title of nobility”
amendment that specified a penalty (loss of citizenship) was proposed in 1789,
and again in 1810. The meaning of the amendment is seen in its intent to prohibit
persons having titles of nobility and loyalties to foreign governments and
bankers from voting, holding public office, or using their skills to subvert
the government.
HONOR
The missing Amendment is referred
to as the “title of nobility” Amendment, but the second prohibition against
“honour” (honor), may be more significant.
According to David Dodge, Tom Dunn,
and Webster’s Dictionary, the archaic definition of “honor” (as used when the 13th Amendment was ratified) meant anyone
“obtaining or having an advantage or privilege over another”. A
contemporary example of an “honor” granted to only a few Americans is the
privilege of being a judge: Lawyers
can be judges and exercise the attendant privileges and powers; non-lawyers
cannot.
By prohibiting “honors”, the
missing Amendment prohibits any advantage or privilege that would grant some
citizens an unequal opportunity to achieve or exercise political power. Therefore, the second meaning (intent) of
the 13th Amendment was to ensure political equality among all American
citizens, by prohibiting anyone, even government officials, from claiming or
exercising a special privilege or power (an “honor”) over other citizens.
If this interpretation is correct,
“honor” would be the key concept in the 13th Amendment. Why? Because, while
“titles of nobility” may no longer apply in today’s political system, the concept of “honor” remains relevant.
For example, anyone who had a specific “immunity” from lawsuits which were not
afforded to all citizens, would be enjoying a separate privilege, an “honor”,
and would therefore forfeit his right to vote or hold public office.
Think of the “immunities” from
lawsuits that U.S. judges, lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats currently
enjoy. As another example, think of all the “special interest” legislation the
U.S. government passes: “special interests” are simply euphemisms for “special
privileges” (honors).
WHAT IF? (Implications if Restored)
If the missing 13th Amendment were restored, “special interests” and
“immunities” might be rendered unconstitutional. The prohibition against
“honors” (privileges) would compel the entire government to operate under the
same laws as the citizens of this nation. Without their current personal
immunities (honors), US judges and I.R.S. agents would be unable to abuse
common citizens without fear of legal liability.
If this 13th Amendment were restored, the entire U.S. Government would
have to conduct itself according to the same standards of decency, respect,
law, and liability as the rest of the nation. If this Amendment and the term “honor” were applied today, U.S.
Government’s ability to systematically coerce and abuse the public would be all
but eliminated.
Imagine! A government without special privileges or immunities. How
could we describe it? It would be … almost like … a government … of the people
… by the people … for the people! Imagine: a government … whose members were
truly accountable to the public; a government that could not systematically
exploit its own people! It’s unheard of … it’s never been done before. Not ever
in the entire history of the world…
SIGNIFICANCE OF REMOVAL
To create the present oligarchy (rule by lawyers) which the U.S. now
endures, the lawyers first had to remove the 13th “titles of nobility”
Amendment that might otherwise have kept them in check. In fact, it was not until after the Civil War and
after the disappearance of this 13th Amendment, that American bar associations
began to appear and exercise political power.
Since the unlawful deletion of the 13th Amendment, the newly developing
bar associations began working diligently to create a system wherein lawyers
took on a title of privilege and nobility as “Esquires” and received the
“honor” of offices and positions (like district attorney or judge) that only
they could hold.
By
virtue of these titles, honors, and special privileges, lawyers have assumed
political and economic advantages over the majority of U.S. citizens. Through these privileges, they have nearly established a two-tiered
citizenship in this nation where a majority may vote, but only a minority
(lawyers) may run for political office. This two-tiered citizenship is
clearly contrary to Americans’ political interests, the nation’s economic
welfare, and the Constitution’s egalitarian spirit.
The significance of this missing
13th Amendment and its deletion from the Constitution is this: Since the
amendment was never lawfully nullified, it is still in full force and effect
and is the Law of the land. If public
support could be awakened, this missing Amendment might provide a legal basis
to challenge many existing laws and court decisions previously made by lawyers
who were unconstitutionally elected or appointed to their positions of power;
it might even mean the removal of lawyers from the current US government
system.
AT THE VERY LEAST, THIS MISSING 13TH AMENDMENT DEMONSTRATES THAT TWO
CENTURIES AGO, LAWYERS WERE RECOGNIZED AS ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE AND NATION.
SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE…
We await the inevitable convulsion.
Only two questions remain: Will we fight
to revive our rights? Or, Will we meekly submit as our last remaining rights
expire, surrendered to the courts, and perhaps to a “new world order”?
Yes, “Imagine! A government without special privileges or
immunities. You know, like … a government … of the people … by the people … for
the people! Imagine: a government … whose members were truly accountable to the
public; a government that could not systematically exploit its own people!
The American people have been systematically enslaved by the
foreign owned Federal Reserve Bank and their minions in the U.S. government
since the removal of the Thirteenth Amendment after the war of 1812. It’s interesting that “The United States Bank
had been opposed by the Jeffersonians from the beginning, but the Federalists
(the pro-monarchy party) won out.”
The Federalists still exist today, they call themselves The
Federalist Society and they have provided President Trump with a list of their
approved judges. All of the judges that
Trump has installed are Federalist Society judges and the 5 Supreme Court
Justices who overturned the 2000 election were Federalists.
The lawyers and bankers illegally running the American
government have sold out the American people.
Thomas Jefferson warned the American people of the dangers of a central
bank.
"If
the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their
currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the
people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent
their Fathers conquered.... I believe that banking institutions are
more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.... The issuing power
should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly
belongs."
From SF Weekly:
Excerpt:
The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent
Ronald
Reagan used a recession as an excuse to cut spending on social services ––
like the safety net that existed since the Great Depression. At Christmastime 1982, fed-up religious
leaders called a press conference. The
Rev. Paul Moore, New York City's Episcopal bishop, was furious. Standing next
to Methodist and Catholic bishops, a rabbi and a Muslim, Moore laid into the
source of his ire: President Ronald Reagan.
At the time, there were 36,000 homeless people on New York's streets, a
scene repeated in cities across the country, including San Francisco. But
this new wave of needy was different.
Instead of the single men with drinking problems who'd populated the
hotels and alleys of South of Market after World War II, there were factory and office workers who had lost their jobs in
the recent global recession slumped in doorways next to Vietnam War veterans.
There were women, children, families.
During a speech at the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1981, his first year in office, the new president — who would
use the recession as an excuse to cut taxes and slash government spending to
spark growth, the infamous “Reaganomics” — presented a solution to
homelessness, an issue seen at the time as a temporary problem that would soon
cycle itself away, just as it had several times before.
In classic small-government
fashion, Reagan's fix did not involve government. If only “every church
and synagogue would take in 10 welfare families” each, the president said, the
problem could be weathered until it passed.
It was a truly conservative approach, reminiscent of how homelessness was
addressed in the 19th century.
And it was “absolute balderdash,”
said the Rev. Moore, according to a Dec. 25, 1982 United Press International
wire story picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle. The responsibility for dealing with homelessness wasn't the church's — it
was the state's, the bishop said, just as it had been since the Great
Depression.
“Housing the homeless and feeding
the hungry is the responsibility of the public sector,” he said. “They should
have a permanent policy whereby homeless persons would have a place to
live.” People like then-New York City
Mayor Ed Koch needed to stand up to people like Reagan and demand more help. After all, cities received the bulk of the
money used for social programs like housing and welfare from the federal
government.
“Don't shirk your responsibility,”
said Moore, addressing both the president and mayor. Faced
with a glut of poor people huddled on the streets with nowhere to live and
nowhere to go — many of them war veterans, others unemployed workers
struggling to adapt to a changing labor market that no longer needed their
skills — city leaders in Chicago decided to take action…
To better understand why people are experiencing homelessness today and
why solutions have been so hard to come by, it's worthwhile to look at what put
them there — and why other periods of homelessness in America eventually
ended. Tramps, vagabonds, hobos:
whatever you call them, people without stable living situations have appeared
in waves several times in American history.
During the Revolutionary War, it
was itinerant workers, the “wandering poor” of an agricultural society reliant
on worker mobility. Before the Civil
War, it was unemployed mill workers, dockworkers, and miners, displaced by
business cycles or changes in society caused by the introduction of a rail
line or telegraph station.
After the Civil War, when a credit-fueled railroad boom went bust,
breaking banks and killing jobs — the “Panic of 1873,” capitalism's first major
worldwide economic downturn, known as the “Great Depression” until the
bigger Great Depression in the 1930s — it was freed slaves and veterans, whose
wartime habits of foraging (or sometimes pillaging) the countryside for food
and provisions introduced the words “tramp” and “bum” to the lexicon.
During the Great Depression, with
unemployment at 25 percent and large swaths of agricultural land turned to
literal dust by a combination of drought and over-farming, as many as 5 percent
of Americans were homeless. Almost always, it was temporary. As soon as
the economy recovered, homeless people recovered, too. They went back inside and resumed normal lives. In the meantime,
there was a safety net.
For colonial Americans living under English tradition, the community or
local parish was responsible for poor residents. In the 19th century,
religious and other charitable organizations offered almshouses where lodging
and food were available in return for work. During the Great Depression, with one-quarter of cities offering no
homeless services, responsibility shifted to the federal government, which
provided job training, education, food, and housing.
Thirty-six years after the Rev. Moore called out President Reagan at
Christmastime in 1982, there are now more than 60,000 homeless people in New
York City. That's more per capita
than any other city in America except San Francisco, according to the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development.
By the time Reagan took office, HUD was the main federal agency that
offered housing and other programs aimed at helping poor and working-class
people. And beginning under Reagan but continuing with the next three
presidents, HUD would see its funding reduced. By the time George W. Bush took
office, it had been slashed almost 60 percent.
Reagan — who famously could not recognize Samuel Pierce, his own
HUD secretary, and failed to recognize
and halt a scandal in which HUD money was funneled to Republican consultants
rather than building and repairing low-income-housing — didn't shirk his
responsibility.
He abdicated it, a wholesale abandonment that signaled the near-end of the federal
government's role in managing homelessness and housing policies, a legacy
carried on by every American president since.
“Homelessness has been a persistent
and enduring feature in American history,” wrote retired HUD researcher Walter
Leginski in 2007. “While there have been
temporary lulls, from colonial times forward there has been no period of
American history free of homelessness.” But unlike in other eras, “the
contemporary wave of homelessness has not subsided during good economic times.”
In San Francisco, unemployment stands at a near-record low of 3.1
percent, yet there are officially more than 3,505 people living on the street —
more than at any other time over the past 10 years, including during the
height of the Great Recession.
(PRIOR TO THE SUBPRIME CRISIS, WHEN
20 PERCENT OF PROPERTIES IN FORECLOSURE WERE RENTAL PROPERTIES, MORE THAN 1 MILLION OF THE COUNTRY'S 2.5
MILLION TO 3.5 MILLION HOMELESS WERE EMPLOYED…
Nationally, in 2015, homeless counts found 222,197 homeless households
with at least one child, while the Department of Education reported 1.2 million
homeless children in schools. )
The divestment that began under Reagan can help explain why what
was once a cyclical phenomenon, in tune with the boom-and-bust of the nation's
economy, is now a permanent urban fixture — which, in the years since the subprime meltdown turned swaths of suburbia into
ghost towns, has spread out of cities.
Under Reagan, federal spending on subsidized housing — including
state-owned public housing, in which the poor and working class can live for a
set percentage of what income they have; and housing vouchers, in which the
government helps close the gap between the cost of housing and a person's
ability to pay — dropped from $26
billion to $8 billion, barely enough to maintain the government's existing
stock of public units.
As much a champion of conservatives
as he is nemesis and near-Antichrist for liberals, Reagan's influence is seen
in every tent encampment in San Francisco. “Every park bench in America — everywhere a
homeless person sleeps — should have Ronald Reagan's name on it,” says
Peter Dreier, an urban policy analyst and the director of the Urban and Environmental
Policy Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
But Reagan is not solely to blame. Other American presidents are at
fault — in fact, everyone who has come since. As with reducing greenhouse gas emissions,
other nations around the world have signed onto international treaties that
declare housing a basic human right…
Beginning in the Great Depression,
Americans looked to the federal government for that safety net. And for most of
the 20th century, federal assistance
wasn't only for poor people; it created wealth and gave a foundation for a
middle class. After World War II, eight out of 10 American men were eligible for
no-money-down home loans from the Federal Housing Administration under the G.I.
Bill.
Forty percent of all mortgages issued in 1946 and 1947 went to
veterans. There was clear racial discrimination — white veterans received
more housing mortgages than black veterans, who were subjected to racially motivated
tactics such as redlining. But if the lasting legacy for veterans of
the War on Terror is PTSD,
for their grandfathers coming home victorious from Europe and the Pacific, it
was a house.
Those unable to purchase their own
home could still rely on the government to help house them. Construction of public housing boomed in
America following World War II, and was used by working-class individuals and
families on their way to the middle class. (Mayor Lee lived in public
housing in Seattle; as one of six children raised by a single mother, it's not
inconceivable for someone in that situation today to end up homeless.)
Never perfect, public housing has
been all but orphaned by the government.
Today, there are about 1.2 million units of public housing in the United
States, far less than the U.K. and France, where the state owns 11 percent and
16 percent of the total housing stock, respectively.
In 1976, the year Reagan first ran
for president, the outgoing
administration of President Gerald Ford asked Congress to fund 506,000 new
low-income housing units, including 400,000 rent vouchers to pay for privately
owned housing in the Section 8 program. That was the high-water mark for
federal assistance. Under Reagan, funding for new subsidies dipped below 100,000
units per year…
“If we had provided 500,000 additional low-income units every year
since 1976, we would now have about 14 million families living in federally
assisted low-income housing,” the National Low Income Housing Coalition wrote
in 2002. “But we moved in the opposite direction, and so now there are
still more very-low-income renter households with 'worst case' housing needs
than there are families living in federally subsidized, low-income housing.”
This is strongly felt in San
Francisco, where local government has
adapted to the Reagan-inspired federal exit from housing by handing over
operation of public housing to nonprofit housing providers…
With the federal government's
safety net disappearing, local governments are tasked with filling in the gaps
with far fewer resources — and not just for housing. With Reagan-admiring Republicans in Congress, federal money for other
infrastructure like transportation has vanished, forcing vital regional
resources like BART to turn to local voters to ask for tax increases to fund
routine maintenance.
San Francisco police now spend $18.5 million a year responding to over
50,000 911 calls and other demands for service from the public directly related
to homelessness. This fall, local politicians — including Supervisor Mark
Farrell, a 2019 mayoral hopeful, and state Senate hopeful Supervisor Scott
Wiener — will ask voters to approve a law giving police the ability to clear a
tent encampment within 24 hours.
Reagan, were he alive, would surely approve. He would definitely
recognize the landscape. It's just as he left it.
Reagan is beloved by the Federalist lawyers and bankers who
occupy the government. Many of them
served in the Reagan Administration and many Democrats espouse the same
Federalist religion that has put America on the brink of collapse. From Black Agenda Report:
Excerpt:
The Bankers’ “Power Revolution” -- How the Government Got Shackled by
Debt
There is no reason for the government to borrow trillions from
capitalists – except to enrich the
financial classes and enforce austerity.
“The government is at liberty to spend as needed to meet its budget,
drawing on credit issued by its own central bank.”
The U.S. federal debt has more than
doubled since the 2008 financial crisis, shooting up from $9.4 trillion in
mid-2008 to over $22 trillion in April 2019. The debt is never paid off. The government just keeps paying the
interest on it, and interest rates are rising.
In 2018, the Fed announced
plans to raise rates by 2020 to “normal”
levels — a fed funds target of 3.375 percent — and to sell about $1.5 trillion in federal securities at the rate of $50
billion monthly, further growing the mountain of federal debt on the market. When
the Fed holds government securities, it returns the interest to the government
after deducting its costs; but the private buyers of these securities will
be pocketing the interest, adding to the taxpayers’ bill.
In fact it is the interest, not the
debt itself, that is the problem with a burgeoning federal debt. The principal
just gets rolled over from year to year. But
the interest must be paid to PRIVATE
BONDHOLDERS annually by the taxpayers and constitutes one of the biggest items
in the federal budget.
Currently the Fed’s plans for
“quantitative tightening” are on hold; but assuming it follows through with
them, projections are that by 2027
U.S. taxpayers will owe $1 trillion annually just in interest on the federal
debt. That is enough to fund President Donald Trump’s trillion-dollar
infrastructure plan every year, and it
is a direct transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy investors
holding most of the bonds.
Where will this money come from? Crippling
taxes, wholesale privatization of public assets, and elimination of social
services will not be sufficient to cover the bill.
Bondholder Debt Is Unnecessary
The
irony is that the United States does not need to carry a debt to bondholders at
all. It has been financially sovereign ever since President Franklin D.
Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard domestically in 1933. This was
recognized by Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,
in a 1945 presentation before the American Bar Association titled “Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete.”
“The necessity for government to tax in order to maintain both its
independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments,” he
said, “but it is not true for a national government.” The government was
now at liberty to spend as needed to meet its budget, drawing on credit issued
by its own central bank. It could do this until price inflation indicated a
weakened purchasing power of the currency…
The government could be funded without taxes by drawing on credit from
its own central bank; and since there was no longer a need for gold to cover
the loan, the central bank would not have to borrow. It could just create
the money on its books…
The “Power Revolution” —
Transferring the “Money Power” to the Banks
…Currently the federal government is not allowed to borrow directly
from the Fed and is required to have the money in its account before
spending it. After the dollar went off the gold standard in 1933, Congress could have had the Fed just
print money and lend it to the government, cutting the banks out. But Wall Street lobbied for an amendment to
the Federal Reserve Act, forbidding the Fed to buy bonds directly from the
Treasury as it had done in the past.
The Treasury can borrow from itself
by transferring money from “intragovernmental accounts” — Social Security and
other trust funds that are under the auspices of the Treasury and have a
surplus – but these funds do not include
the Federal Reserve, which can lend to the government only by buying federal
securities from bond dealers…
According to Marriner Eccles,
chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, the prohibition against allowing the government to borrow directly from
its own central bank was written into the Banking Act of 1935 at the behest of those bond dealers that
have an exclusive right to purchase directly from the Fed.
A historical review on the website
of the New York Federal Reserve quotes Eccles as stating , “I think the real reasons for writing the prohibition
into the [Banking Act] … can be traced to certain Government bond dealers
who quite naturally had their eyes on business that might be lost to them if
direct purchasing were permitted.”
“The prohibition against allowing the government to borrow directly
from its own central bank was written into the Banking Act of 1935 at the
behest of those bond dealers.”
The government was required to sell bonds through Wall Street
middlemen, which the Fed could buy only through “open market operations” – purchases
on the private bond market. Open market operations are conducted by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC),
which meets behind closed doors and is dominated by private banker interests.
The FOMC has no obligation to buy the government’s debt and generally does so only when it serves the purposes of the Fed
and the banks…
Feeding Off the Real Economy
That massive Wall Street subsidy
was the subject of testimony by Eccles to the House Committee on Banking and
Currency on March 3-5, 1947. Patman asked Eccles, “Now, since 1935, in order for the Federal Reserve banks to
buy Government bonds, they had to go through a middleman, is that correct?”
Eccles replied in the affirmative.
Patman then launched into a
prophetic warning , stating, “I am opposed to the United States Government,
which possesses the sovereign and exclusive privilege of creating money, paying
private bankers for the use of its own money. … I insist it is absolutely wrong
for this committee to permit this condition to continue and saddle the taxpayers of this Nation with a
burden of debt that they will not be able to liquidate in a hundred years or
two hundred years.”
The truth of that statement is
painfully evident today, when we have a $22 trillion debt that cannot possibly
be repaid. The government just keeps
rolling it over and paying the interest to banks and bondholders, feeding the
“financialized” economy in which money makes money without producing new goods
and services. The financialized
economy has become a parasite feeding off the real economy, driving producers
and workers further and further into debt…
A Model We Can No Longer Afford
Today, the debt-growth model has reached its limits, as even the Bank
for International Settlements, the “central bankers’ bank” in Switzerland, acknowledges.
In its June 2016 annual report, the BIS said that debt levels were too high,
productivity growth was too low, and the room for policy maneuver was too
narrow. “The global economy cannot
afford to rely any longer on the debt-fueled growth model that has brought it
to the current juncture,” the BIS warned .
But the solutions it proposed would
continue the austerity policies long imposed on countries that cannot pay their
debts. It prescribed “prudential, fiscal and, above all, structural policies” —
“structural readjustment.” That means
privatizing public assets, slashing services, and raising taxes, choking off
the very productivity needed to pay the nations’ debts. That approach has repeatedly been tried
and has failed, as witnessed for example in the devastated economy of Greece…
We need a new model, one designed to serve the needs of the public
and the economy rather than to maximize shareholder profits at public expense.
Your damn right we need a new model, one designed to serve
the needs of the public and the economy rather than to maximize shareholder
profits at public expense. But unless we
restore the Thirteenth Amendment this is what we get, a congress is rife with
“special honors” for themselves and their special interests. From WhoWhatWhy:
Excerpt:
POWERFUL DEMOCRAT LIVES LARGE ON CORPORATE CASH
As the new chair of the House Ways
and Means Committee, Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) is being showered with campaign
contributions — more than a half million
dollars in the first quarter of 2019.
Journalist David Daley, who lives
in Neal’s district, reviewed the fundraising and spending reports in a recent
column in the Boston Globe (see link below).
He found contributions from lobbyists and the corporate interests they work
for, like Amazon, GE, Deloitte, Eastman Chemical — and most of those
corporations paid no federal taxes last year.
One donor, H&R Block, saw progress on a longtime legislative goal: banning
the IRS from providing its own online tax preparation system.
Federal Election Commission filings
show that Neal spent over $467,000 in
the first quarter, much of it for big-dollar fundraising events at five-star
restaurants, at extravagant hotels (including a Ritz-Carlton), and on
luxury suites at sporting events and concerts.
Neal is leading the Democrats’
effort to get the Internal Revenue Service to deliver President Donald Trump’s
tax returns to him, as required by law. A
recent news report also notes that Neal has declined to release his own tax
returns.
Speaking of tax returns, who is currently the head of the
IRS?
Excerpt:
Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service: Who Is Charles Rettig?
President Donald Trump has chosen a
Beverly Hills tax attorney to be the next commissioner of the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS). If confirmed by the Senate, Charles “Chuck” Rettig will face the
daunting challenge of implementing the
new $1.5 trillion tax law passed by Republicans last year, despite
Republican-led measures that since 2010 have cut the IRS budget by $900 million
(17%) and reduced its staff by 21,000 (23%).
Rettig will also be responsible for
overseeing the ongoing audit of Trump’s tax returns by the IRS’s Global High
Wealth Industry Group. Rettig once
called scrutiny by the “Wealth Squad,” “the audits from hell that your
grandfather warned you about.”
Rettig’s nomination breaks a
20-year precedent of IRS leaders having backgrounds in business or management,
but not tax. Rettig would succeed John
Koskinen, whose term from December 2013 to November 2017 was marred by false
allegations that the agency had singled out conservative-leaning political
groups for scrutiny.
While congress parties hardy at big-dollar fund raisers at
five-star restaurants and extravagant hotels, how is the average American faring? From Vox.com
Excerpt:
America’s anti-poor tax audits, in one infuriating map
A map from ProPublica shows who the
taxman really inspects.
You would think that the IRS, in an
effort to bring in more money, would focus primarily on auditing wealthy
taxpayers. But as ProPublica’s Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger found in an
incredible, disturbing piece from late last year, recipients of the earned income tax credit (EITC) — one of the US’s
biggest anti-poverty programs, aimed almost exclusively at the working poor —
were twice as likely to be audited as people earning $200,000 to $500,000.
Now, to drive home this inequity,
Kiel and his colleague Hannah Fresques have released a follow-up report,
putting together a map of every county in the US by income tax audit rate. And what they found isn’t surprising, but
nonetheless still appalling.
The darker counties on the map have
higher audit rates — and if you know a bit about US geography, you’ll notice that the audits tend to spike
in areas with large black populations, large Latino populations, or Indian
reservations.
The sociologist Kieran Healy has
joked that most data visualization maps of the US show one of two things:
population density or the percentage of the population that’s black. This is
decidedly one of the latter maps, with
the notable additions of heavily Latino counties in southern Texas and Indian
reservations in South Dakota and Montana.
Indeed, looking at the opposite map
— where audits are less common than
average — versus a county-by-county map of the share of the population that
identifies as white, one notices a certain resemblance: Percent white in 2010, by county..
Kiel and Fresques are working off
of data collected by Kim Bloomquist, a former economist at the IRS, who found,
as Kiel and Fresques put it, that “Because more than a third of all audits are
of EITC recipients, the number of audits in each county is largely a reflection
of how many taxpayers there claimed the credit.” In other words: This is mostly a map of low-income
taxpayers, and consequently, in large measure, a map of black, Latino, and
Native American taxpayers.
The background context for all this is that the IRS has been gutted,
budgetarily, since 2010 through successive cuts to “non-defense
discretionary” spending, a big, wonky term that includes everything from tax
enforcement to the FBI to environmental enforcement to scientific research. This was a remarkably shortsighted policy
decision.
The National Taxpayer Advocate’s
office, a watchdog group in the federal
government, has estimated that every $1 in budget cuts to the IRS costs the
government about $7 in lost revenue, both from increased erroneous payments
and from laxer enforcement of fraud.
Indeed, budget cuts have reduced
audit rates across the board. But
they’ve fallen less for EITC recipients than they have for millionaires or the
near-millionaire wealthy, who have more resources to fight audits. Kiel and
Eisinger found that while audits for EITC recipients fell 36 percent from 2011
to 2017, audits for people earning more than $10 million fell 52 percent. Audits for people making $200,000 to
$5 million fell by more than 70 percent. The budget cuts’ primary effect was to
help the rich get off scot-free while low-income people get audited.
One obvious fix for this would be
to increase the IRS’s budget so it can take enforcement seriously again.
Another would be to instruct the agency to prioritize high earnings with
complex capital income above low-income families claiming EITC so they can
afford basic necessities. Neither is
likely to happen, given who’s in charge of the Senate and the executive branch.
The founding fathers recognized the danger lawyers and
bankers posed to the nation. These
fascist monsters have robbed the American treasury blind. America needs another revolution this time
against the Federalists that have illegally seized control of our country. Restore the Thirteenth Amendment and purge
these treacherous heathens from our country.
