By Mark Luedtke

Dayton’s rulers suffered an historic defeat at the polls Tuesday, May 7. I knew the people of Dayton were fed up with the long time status quo, but I didn’t know it was this bad.

Only 9,869 people voted in the runoff election for mayor. That’s a fantastically low turnout.  According to Wikipedia, the 2011 population estimate for Dayton is 142,148. It’s probably lower now, but that’s the lowest number I could find. Less than seven percent of Dayton citizens selected our mayoral candidates. That means over 93 percent of Dayton’s citizens reject the system. Granted, this analysis does not account for non-voters under the voting age, but even if you subtracted out the underage population, this turnout is still fantastically low. Winner Nan Whaley spent over $100,000 to buy 4,965 votes. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from this farce is the people of Dayton overwhelmingly reject Dayton’s system of rule.

The Dayton Daily News tried to cover up this turnout disaster by focusing on the defeat of incumbent Mayor Leitzell, “City Commissioner Nan Whaley dominated Tuesday’s runoff vote for mayor of Dayton in an election that saw a sitting mayor defeated in a May primary for the first time in at least 50 years.” But this election was about the system, not Leitzell. Before the election, the DDN hinted at the establishment’s problem, “The last time Dayton had a May runoff vote for mayor was 2005, when only 14,465 people voted ­– roughly one-tenth of the city’s population.” Since then, both the population and the turnout percentage have fallen.

This doesn’t surprise me. The people of Dayton have been voting with their feet by leaving the city in droves for 50 years. Dayton’s population loss ranks fifth in the U.S. We’ve lost 20,000 people in the last decade. And we know the problem is taxes. As Dayton’s government steals more of our money, more people leave. Dayton’s 2.25 percent income tax makes everybody 2.25 percent poorer, depressing our economy. College graduates race out of Dayton to get higher paying jobs in vibrant economies in states and cities with lower taxes, especially those with no income tax. Bright people would rather live and work where the government steals less of their money and doesn’t punish productivity.

Dayton’s rulers know this. That’s why they have to grant tax breaks to draw businesses to the region. But the people already here never get a tax break.

Low tax locales tend to have better services, growing art programs and well-maintained infrastructure instead of the disintegrating infrastructure and struggling art community we suffer because we pay exorbitant income taxes to the city and the state. Having no income tax enables wealth creation, which draws people in, improving quality of life. High income taxes push people away, especially the most productive and creative, diminishing quality of life.

Rulers used to claim divine right to rule. U.S. rulers replaced divine right with the “will of the people.” Politicians repeat that mantra with religious reverence. Using a related form, Leitzell commented, “The citizens of Dayton have made their decision and I hope they’re happy with it.” The people have spoken loud and clear. They reject Dayton’s political system and government. If Whaley and candidate A.J. Wagner really care about the will of the people expressed by the overwhelming majority of Daytonians, both will withdraw from the race. The same with candidates for commissioner. But that will never happen because politicians don’t care about the will of the people. They preach that phrase to manipulate us. They care about winning elections so they can control the loot in order to enrich themselves and their cronies. It doesn’t matter if they win two votes to one.

To Leitzell’s credit, his defeat tells us he looted poorly.

The only people motivated to vote in this election were cronies of the candidates. Families, friends, business associates and others who expect to profit if their candidate wins voted. Bureaucrats and city employees who might gain or lose voted. The other 93 percent of Daytonians didn’t vote because no matter who wins, the status quo remains. The income tax remains. The firehouse squandering Dayton’s most valuable property overlooking the river at Main Street and Monument Avenue remains. The public restroom squandering another valuable property overlooking the river at Patterson and Monument remains. The exodus from Dayton continues. The degradation of our great city by government continues.

Terrible turnout is why our rulers put tax levies on the primary ballot. Politicians can energize cronies to vote for new taxes because they will be enriched by them. The other 93 percent, though they will be made poorer by new taxes, know the system is rigged against them so they don’t show up to vote in primaries.

The Founding Fathers famously rejected democracy as majority mob rule. Dayton’s system is even worse. We are ruled by a tiny minority mob of politicians, bureaucrats and cronies for their benefit and our detriment. This is true of every local, state and the federal government in the U.S.

The views and opinions expressed in Conspiracy Theorist are the views and/or opinions of the author and do not reflect the views and/or opinions of the Dayton City Paper or Dayton City Media and are published strictly for entertainment purposes only.

Mark Luedtke is an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Cincinnati and currently works for a Dayton attorney. He can be reached at MarkLuedtke@DaytonCityPaper.com.

 By Mark Luedtke

The City of Dayton issued a record number of speeding tickets in 2012. Excuse me for discussing numbers, but they are astounding. The Dayton Daily News reports, “The number of speeding tickets issued in Dayton increased nearly 1,400 percent to 58,325 since the city added speed cameras to some of its busiest streets two years ago.” Of those, 55,676 were automatically issued by 14 traffic cameras. That means police officers only issued 2,649 tickets. In 2010, before the cameras were installed, officers issued only 3,947 tickets. The total amount collected for camera tickets would be $4.52 million if compliance was 100 percent. The city receives 65 percent of each fine.

For comparison, Springfield, about half Dayton’s population, issued only 6,638 camera tickets. Police Chief Richard Biehl laughs all the way to the bank, but he kept a straight face when he claimed, “The purpose of using red light and speed enforcement cameras is to prevent accidents and save lives. The very presence of the cameras has been proven to change people’s dangerous driving habits. Since the red light cameras were installed in 2003, we have seen a noticeable reduction in light-running accidents at intersections where the cameras are in place, and a similar reduction in accidents citywide. We expect to see further reductions.”

Biehl is a politician like any other – all top bureaucrats must be politicians – so he set up a strawman argument and knocked it down. Nobody would disagree that cameras change people’s behavior. The real question is what is the motivation behind the cameras, and it’s demonstrably not safety.

First, the same behavior change and safety benefit could be achieved if the cameras issued a fraction of the tickets.

Second, if the chief really wanted to increase safety at these intersections, he could post a full time motorcycle cop with a radar gun at each. Nothing slows drivers down like a cop. But the cops couldn’t write 152 tickets a day, and cops cost money, so the city wouldn’t make nearly as much money. And many of the tickets they wrote would be challenged in criminal court. The camera tickets apply to civil, not criminal, court.

Finally, if politicians really cared about safety, they’d privatize the roads since government’s mismanagement of them kills about 40,000 Americans a year.

It’s obvious these cameras are purely for looting the people of Dayton.

A Hamilton County judge realizes this too. According to the Dayton Daily News, Judge Robert Ruehlman wrote in striking down the red light camera ordinance in Elmwood Place, “Elmwood Place is engaged in nothing more than a high-tech game of 3-card Monty. It is a scam that motorists can’t win.” These cameras are a scam. Taxes are unpopular, so politicians use fines to steal revenue to increase their personal standard of living, and then they systemically demonize the people they prey upon and pretend they – the predators – are the good guys.

The only good news on this front is state politicians are considering banning these cameras, but sponsor Ron Maag from Lebanon only wants to ban them because 35 percent of the ticket money goes to an Arizona company. A bipartisan group of Columbus politicians want an Ohio company, like Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS), to make the cameras so they can get crony kickbacks.

PSS is the company that makes the surveillance plane Dayton politicians want to spy on you. The Dayton Daily News reports Biehl tries to fool us by admitting PSS uses a Civil War era camera on the plane, “He showed the crowd sample images taken from a piloted PSS plane during last summer’s test of the technology. In those images, a suspect’s truck was a blurry white rectangle, and a person loading that truck was little more than a speck.” If this contract is approved, the first thing the police will do is upgrade that camera. PSS will replace it with a high resolution camera that will map every freckle on your daughter’s chest while she sunbathes in the backyard. The plan as presented is a scheme to get the nose of the camel into the tent. If that happens, aerial surveillance of Dayton will explode with perverts controlling drones spying on every backyard, bedroom and bathroom.

That’s because, since government encourages and legalizes perversion, perverts are attracted to work for government. Child molesters work for government schools. Molesters work for the Transportation Security Administration. Secret Service agents flock to brothels. Taxpayer funded porn swamps government computers.

Like in the movie Blue Thunder, peeping Toms like Roy Scheider’s character will control these spy systems to spy on your wives, daughters and sons.

This plan stinks of cronyism. Since PSS is local, it will kick money back to Dayton politicians. Spy planes have been around for decades – with better cameras – but even cities with more crime don’t use them. Cronyism is the only logical explanation why Dayton’s rulers want one.

Fortunately the people of Dayton rejected this plan. Let’s hope they force the removal of red light cameras next.

 By Mark Luedtke

Americans were riveted to the spectacle of terrorist bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 15. The athletes who had just finished running 26.2 miles who then rushed into the stands to save the wounded and after that donated blood to save them again in the operating room will go down in history for their heroism.

Government propagandists promoted the first responders, who also responded heroically. The police, EMS and hospital staff who saved so many lives, as they were trained to do, are to be commended for doing a fantastic job under terrible circumstances, but the athletes who had no training and had just finished the race deserve more praise for their heroics than the media gave them.

Propagandists have already pressed the lesson government wants us to learn from this latest spectacular failure of government. The Guardian reports that Tom Brokaw on NBC led the charge, “Everyone has to understand tonight that, beginning tomorrow morning early, there are going to be much tougher security considerations all across the country, and however exhausted we may be by that, we’re going to have to learn to live with them, and get along and go forward and not let them bring us to our knees.” In other words, even though none of us committed this terrorist attack, we must all bend over and take it from government even harder than we were taking it already.

That’s the exact wrong lesson to take from this attack. It’s a knee-jerk, emotional response. Government wants us to respond with emotion. We can’t afford to do that. We must react to these attacks rationally, not irrationally.

The primary lesson we must learn from this attack is the same lesson we should have learned from every previous attack: government cannot protect us. The state, by its very nature, is incapable of protecting us. That’s because the state is a predator and we are its prey. As Murray Rothbard wrote, “The first great lesson to learn about taxation is that taxation is simply robbery. No more and no less. For what is ‘robbery’? Robbery is the taking of a man’s property by the use of violence or the threat thereof, and therefore without the victim’s consent. And yet what else is taxation?” But you don’t have to take Rothbard’s or my word for it. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled, as recently as 1989, that the police have no duty to protect us.

Williams is restating the often-repeated canard that crime is the price we pay for our freedom. That’s wrong. Crime is the price we pay for government aggression. Government theft makes us poorer and traps people in poverty, creating crime. Government aggression and violence divide us and create enemies at home and abroad. Terrorist attacks are blowback from government aggression. Osama bin Laden cited U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War as a motive for 9/11. Fort Hood attacker Major Hasan cited the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The underwear bomber cited blowback for U.S. wars as his motive. In 2010, an Austin man flew his plane into the IRS offices because the IRS had destroyed his life. If police ever catch the Boston Marathon bombers – as of this writing the FBI has two suspects – the bombers will cite blowback for something as motive for the attack. In contrast, freedom creates security.

Another lesson from this attack is all the money government has spent building this police state has nothing to do with preventing terrorism. Since 9/11, government has spent hundreds of billions at least, ostensibly to prevent terrorism. The Boston Marathon was a crown jewel of police state security. Cameras, cops, undercover cops, 400 National Guardsmen and bomb sniffing dogs were everywhere, yet two guys planted bombs under their noses. This raises the specter the attack was an inside job. The government reads every email, tracks every phone call, X-rays cars on the street, gropes airline passengers, videos every street corner, but police can’t stop or catch two terrorists who attacked one of the most heavily monitored and policed events in the world in broad daylight. It’s telling that the pictures of the suspects were taken by private cameras.

It’s tempting to think of the police state as more bumbling than Keystone Kops, but that would imply it’s supposed to protect us. It’s not. The police state is designed to protect government from us. That’s because the government preys on us and it fears we will soon resist because it has ruined us. Government views us as the enemy, not terrorists. Terrorists aid the government by providing the excuse for government to oppress us further.

Another lesson is never trust the government or its propagandists. “High ranking officials” have changed their story so many times during the investigation that it would be comical in another situation. We’ll never know if they catch the real attackers or not. Whether officials lie or are just wrong, we can never trust them. The victims, and all of us, deserve better.

The views and opinions expressed in Conspiracy Theorist are the views and/or opinions of the author and do not reflect the views and/or opinions of the Dayton City Paper or Dayton City Media and are published strictly for entertainment purposes only.

Reach DCP freelance writer Mark Luedtke at MarkLuedtke@daytoncitypaper.com

By Mark Luedtke

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) justifies its existence by scaring people about diseases. The latest scary story is that one in 50 school children suffers from autism. This contradicts an earlier government study claiming one in 88 was autistic. That would be very scary if true, but even government propagandist Associated Press (AP) is skeptical and provides rare insight into the motivations behind the study, “The number is important – government officials look at how common each illness or disorder is when weighing how to spend limited public health funds.” So, if you’re a CDC bureaucrat trying to get a budget increase, grow your staff and obtain a promotion to make yourself wealthier, you commission a study rigged to exaggerate illnesses. If the previous study, drawn from school and medical records, isn’t scary enough, AP describes how to rig a study that is: “The new statistic comes from a national phone survey of more than 95,000 parents in 2011 and 2012. Less than a quarter of the parents contacted agreed to answer questions and it’s likely that those with autistic kids were more interested than other parents in participating in a survey on children’s health, CDC officials said.”

Here’s another way to manipulate the data: “For decades, autism meant kids with severe language, intellectual and social impairments and unusual, repetitious behaviors. But the definition has gradually expanded and now includes milder, related conditions.”

Both numbers are bogus. The common factor of both studies is the focus on school kids. It’s no coincidence that autism is most often diagnosed in children age 8, a few years after they’ve been ripped from their families and locked into government prison-schools. If an honest researcher studied pre-school and home-schooled children, he’d find almost zero autism.

It’s impossible to measure how damaging government schools are. For a hundred thousand years, the children of our ancestors were educated by parents, siblings and others in the extended family and community. Children’s minds are genetically programmed for healthy socialization through this process. Then, two hundred years ago, Prussia’s rulers decided they didn’t like that children were more loyal to their families and communities than the state. Natural socialization made it hard to force them to fight wars of conquest on behalf of the rulers. So, the Prussians invented our modern school system to break the bonds between children and their families and communities and fill the void with obedience to the central authority of the state. American socialists imported that system and made it the law of the land, from the federal government down through state and local school boards.

Don’t take it from me. Retired generals remind us that government schools are still for creating soldiers. This damage to socialization is the root cause of many childhood problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bullying, teenage pregnancy, juvenile crime, mass shootings, as well as most autism diagnoses. And while some children don’t show the damage as much as others, every child is damaged by government schools.

Ten years ago, nobody had heard of the term lockdown associated with schools. It was a term describing when prison guards locked down prisons into cells to prevent riots. You can’t go a week today without hearing about a school lockdown. Government schools are brainwashing children into becoming docile, lifelong prisoners of the state, so the damage gets worse and worse. In one example of how ludicrous this is, the sheriff of Beaver County, Penn. recently locked down all county schools because one student – 19 years old – recorded a bad cover of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” theme song as his voicemail greeting. Police swarmed the young man over the misunderstanding and, after realizing their mistake, pressured him to change his greeting.

Another recent study describes how family dinners overcome this damage, “New research shows that the more frequent these dinners, the better the adolescents fare emotionally, says new research published this week in the Journal of Adolescent Health.” The ramifications are obvious: Government schools damage children. Family interaction mitigates the damage. But the only way to prevent the damage is to keep children out of government schools.

This highlights another of the government’s schemes to isolate children from families: schools seduce children further from families by providing them meals – crappy meals, but meals nevertheless. Our rulers know family meals strengthen healthy family bonds and weaken the state’s hold on children, so the more meals they get children to eat at school, the more they undermine families and solidify state control over children. They’re brainwashing children into believing parents are incapable of providing the basic necessities of life and that they must depend on the state to provide them.

Economist Joseph Salerno explained how school food regulations further damage children and families, “It is estimated that [regulations] will cost $127 million and require 926,000 hours of paperwork to comply with, thus leaving tax-burdened parents with even less money in this stagnant economy to buy the foods that they choose to serve their children as meals and snacks at home.”

Everything about government schools harms children and families.

 

The views and opinions expressed in Conspiracy Theorist are the views and/or opinions of the author and do not reflect the views and/or opinions of the Dayton City Paper or Dayton City Media and are published strictly for entertainment purposes only.

Reach DCP freelance writer Mark Luedtke at MarkLuedtke@daytoncitypaper.com

 By Mark Luedtke

A banking crisis in Cyprus is the latest sudden financial shock the so-called experts never predict, but always tell us are no big deal. It is a big deal, and it’s an indicator of what’s coming to the U.S. on a fantastically larger scale.

For the last three years, the turmoil in Europe has focused on the PIIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. All of these countries have significant sovereign debt problems, and as a result, bond purchasers – mostly big banks – have demanded higher interest rates than those countries could afford to pay. The reasonable thing to do when you can’t pay your bills is to go bankrupt, but if those governments went bankrupt – repudiated their debt – that would force the big European banks that finance those governments to go bankrupt as well. Nobody wanted that, so the European Union decided to bail out these governments by having the European Central Bank print more money to fund the purchase of the bonds at a lower interest rate.

Because Germany has the strongest economy, fiscal situation and banks, it’s in the driver’s seat. Other European nations hate that. Germany forced concessions on those governments, including raising taxes and slowing government growth. Most reports call that austerity, but there are no real cuts in government spending.

One interesting dynamic here is the EU would probably have allowed the governments to go bankrupt if the problem would have stopped there. The bailouts were more about saving the banks than the governments. This exposes the unholy partnership between governments and banks.

The root of the problem is fractional reserve banking. When you put your money in a bank, the bank promises to return your money to you on demand. The only way it can do that is by holding all deposits in a warehouse. But banks don’t do that. They only keep about 10 percent of their deposits as reserves, as allowed by government, thus the name “fractional reserve banking.”

Imagine if you put your furniture in a storage facility with a contract that you could remove your furniture at any time. Imagine if you showed up to obtain your furniture only to find the warehouse had loaned out 90 percent of your furniture at interest. Only 10 percent of your furniture was actually available as required by contract and the warehouse is using your furniture to make more money. This is obviously fraud. You would sue the warehouse for damages and the warehouse would face criminal sanctions as well.

This is how banks operate. Fractional reserve banking is inherently fraudulent. They’re technically bankrupt, but when government creates central banks and cartelizes the banks, legislatures legalize that fraud and technical bankruptcy in return for banks funding government debt. The reason this works for a while is people don’t typically show up and demand all their money at the same time and, unlike furniture, money is fungible. People allow this fraud to continue as long as they are confident the banks will be able to meet withdrawals. But it is inevitable that a trigger will occur and many people will want to withdraw their money at once. That trigger starts a bank run, the bank is exposed as fraudulent and the bank goes bankrupt.

Before the days of central banks, bank runs were limited to individual fraudulent banks. If there was a threat of contagion, a large bank, like J.P. Morgan, would intervene to stop the run. Consequences were localized by market forces. But because governments have organized all banks in the Western world into cartels under central banks and all are fraudulent, a bank run on one can spark a bank run on all. That would crash the economy. That’s why every talking head downplays the significance of the bank run in Cyprus. They do it to keep up people’s confidence in the fraudulent system.

The trigger for this bank run was a deal for a bailout of Cyprus bondholders brokered with the EU by the Cypriot president. The deal called for a tax on deposits in Cyprus banks. Many Russian billionaires keep their money in Cyprus banks and they don’t vote in Europe, so the EU planned to steal their money from their bank deposits to fund the bailout. But they couldn’t put the entire burden on the Russians, so they were going to tax all deposits at progressive rates. It turns out that while people will allow government to steal their money through everyday taxes and counterfeiting money, they would not stand for this naked theft of their deposits. The Cyprus parliament rejected the deal.

But the damage is done. The EU wants to steal people’s money out of their bank accounts. Money is safer stuffed in a mattress. The PIIGS have been experiencing a slow motion bank run – a bank jog – for several years. It will accelerate. And Europe can’t pretend its problems are restricted to the PIIGS anymore.

And the U.S. is in worse shape. Federal deposit insurance can’t stop it. First Europe falls. Then the U.S. falls harder.

 By Mark Luedtke

Huber Heights politicians have a creative plan to steal more money from Huber Heights citizens and enrich themselves and their cronies. In early December, the politicians proposed stealing $10 million to build a music center at I-70 and Ohio State Route 201. The politicians hope the facility will attract restaurants, hotels and more.

Hope.

The people of Huber Heights need ask only one question in order to see through this scam: If this is a good investment, why aren’t the advocates voluntarily risking their own money to build it? The question answers itself. The advocates don’t believe it’s a good investment. It’s too risky and the potential return too low for them to invest their own money.

And they have good reason to believe it’s a bad investment. Advocates point to the $6 million Kroger Aquatic Center as a model for this investment, but that facility only earned $550,000 in revenue and $114,375 in profit last year. That’s an abysmal return on investment. At that rate, it would take 52 years for the facility to pay for itself. It will collapse into dust before then. It earned only $1.32 in profit for each visitor. No investor in his right mind would put his own money into such a terrible project. And the same is true for the proposed music venue.

Ostensibly, to study the idea, Huber Heights politicians allocated $100,000 of other people’s money to do due diligence on the proposal. They appeased citizens by not spending new tax dollars on the study. In other words, instead of stealing more money for the study, they redirected money stolen previously to perform the study. As if that mattered.

A week later, the price of the music venue had nearly doubled to $18 million. Talk about inflation. This doesn’t bode well for the inevitable cost overruns if this boondoggle does get built, but it does illustrate what F.A. Hayek called the fatal conceit of central planners: they have no concept of their own ignorance. All the numbers being thrown out by politicians, bureaucrats and other so-called experts are bogus.

Councilman Mark Campbell claimed the venue would bring in $500,000 profit per year. At that rate, it would take 36 years to pay off the investment. Again, that’s an abysmal return on investment. No sane person would voluntarily invest their own money in that project. That’s why the politicians plan to steal other people’s money to build the facility.

Advancing another economic fallacy, city officials claimed the facility wouldn’t compete with the Fraze, but of course it will. People have neither an infinite amount of money nor time. They prioritize which products and services to purchase. They budget. If they see a more desirable concert in Huber Heights, they might forgo attending a less desirable concert at the Fraze they otherwise would have attended.

In January, the city hired Music and Event Management, Inc. [MEMI] – which manages Riverbend and is owned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra – to rubber stamp their plans. Since the Huber Heights facility is to be modeled after the PNC Pavilion at Riverbend, they picked the company with the most to gain by promoting the plan. I’m sure there’s no conflict of interest or corruption going on here.

Whenever politicians talk about bringing in revenue for the community, they really mean stealing more money from taxpayers to enrich themselves and their cronies. The Huber Heights music venue is no different. The project will most likely be paid for by Tax Increment Financing [TIF funds], which is a buzzword for borrowing against future tax revenues. The politicians plan to transfer the wealth of the citizens of Huber Heights into the pockets of their cronies, local contractors and corporations which might be drawn to the area, who will then put a bunch of that money back into the pockets of the politicians. The new, subsidized business district will draw business away from existing businesses in Huber Heights. If this project goes through, the politicians and their cronies will get richer and everybody else will get poorer.

Legalized theft for personal gain isn’t limited to Huber Heights. That’s the ultimate goal of every government program. For example, local governments are exercising their power of eminent domain to steal people’s property and give it to a company named Enterprise Pipeline to build the ATEX Express Pipeline across Ohio, ultimately linking Texas and Pennsylvania. Needless to say, the people having their land stolen are unhappy, but the Dayton Daily News inadvertently explains the real reason governments are doing this, “While upsetting some residents, the underground pipelines boost revenues for local governments.” It’s all about stealing more money for politicians, bureaucrats and their cronies.

Profit and loss can only be objectively measured through voluntary exchange, but it seems unlikely this project would be profitable if Enterprise had to pay property owners to use their property. That’s why big business hates free markets. Businesses ally with politicians to use the government’s power of coercion against the people to advance the personal interests of both. That’s why government exists.

 By Mark Luedtke

I hate politics. Politics is the art of convincing people to allow one faction to control our stolen money instead of another faction. Regardless of which faction wins, our money gets stolen.

There are two general Big Lies for winning at politics. The first is convincing people who produce less wealth that the people who produce more wealth have stolen it and the government must steal everybody’s money to right that wrong. The second is to convince people some enemy, usually foreign, is going to kill everybody unless the people put their faction in charge of the stolen money. Democrats primarily use the first Big Lie and Republicans primarily use the second, although members of both factions will use either argument, infinite variations or completely different arguments to achieve their ultimate goal of getting rich and enriching their cronies by stealing taxpayers’ money.

Americans tend to believe that the country is fairly evenly divided between these warfare and welfare ideologies. That’s baloney. The two parties, their media propagandists and their plutocrat masters all work together, spending outrageous amounts of our money, to convince us of this imaginary division. If one side gains advantage over the other, our rulers shift the point of public debate to bring people back into a nearly even split so the two parties can continue working together to divide, conquer and loot us.

This is why special interests tend to fund both parties. If you don’t believe me, visit opensecrets.org. But sometimes one special interest becomes ideologically and financially embedded with one party only.

Currently, the Israel lobby has powerful control of the Republican Party and is using it to foment war. The problem for Republicans is Americans are weary of war. We’ve been in a state of perpetual war since 9/11 – which Israeli intelligence agents celebrated – and the result has been horrific. Afghanistan is more unstable than ever after 12 years, billions of dollars and thousands of American casualties. Iraq is worse off than before the US invaded and is devolving into civil war. Americans have suffered loss of blood and treasure. Americans are poorer and less safe. So are Afghans, Iraqis and Pakistanis. The same is true for everybody in the Middle East and North Africa. Now the chaos has spread into sub-Saharan Africa. Al Qaeda affiliates operate across the entire region, sometimes with US support, sometimes against US interests. Billions of people have lost. Only politicians and war profiteering plutocrats have gained. More than any other issue, Mitt Romney’s warmongering enabled President Obama to defeat him last election.

I’m no fan of President Obama. He’s the most destructive president of my lifetime and probably the most destructive since FDR killed 400,000 Americans in WWII, but it’s entertaining to watch him twist Senate Republicans into pretzels over his nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Bombing the World into Submission.

Obama nominated Hagel specifically to beat up Republicans over the Israel lobby, and it’s working. In addition to US politicians and plutocrats, Israel’s warmongers have profited from US aggression in the Middle East and Asia, and as a result, that Israel lobby is reportedly the most powerful lobby in Washington. Obama shrewdly maneuvered Republicans into an unprecedented filibuster of the Secretary of Defense, against a member of their own party, in support of the Israel lobby and against the will of the American people. Republicans look like Medieval fools jumping through hoops to satisfy their Israel lobby king, yet Romney won only 30 percent of the Jewish vote compared to Obama’s 69 percent. Pandering to the Israel lobby is bad for America and bad politics.

Justin Raimondo describes the circus in the Senate committee hearing on Hagel’s nomination, “The climactic moment of this avalanche of slime was when Cruz [R-Texas] turned to the committee, and declared: ‘I don’t know if he has received funds from foreign sources, from extreme sources – directly or indirectly. Just today we discovered speeches that he had not disclosed.’ ‘We don’t know’ how much money came from ‘foreign’ sources and was ‘deposited in his personal bank account in the last five years,’ he said.” That’s like wondering if a man stopped beating his wife.

Hagel is a war hero who volunteered for Vietnam. He’s not controlled by foreign money. The Republican senators are controlled by money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Hagel’s biggest sin is prioritizing US security ahead of Israel’s.

Raimondo described AIPAC’s power after President Obama made demands on the Israeli government, “We are faced, here in this country, with the extraordinary spectacle of a US President confronting a foreign leader with a list of reasonable requests – negotiation in good faith, the abandonment of encroaching ‘settlements,’ an end to the arbitrary humiliations endured by a people under occupation – and the leaders of the opposition are taking the side of the foreign leader.”

Hard-liners in Israel promote the destructive US wars in the Middle East through Republicans. Hopefully Obama will break Israel’s stranglehold on US foreign policy.

The views and opinions expressed in Conspiracy Theorist are the views and/or opinions of the author and do not reflect the views and/or opinions of the Dayton City Paper or Dayton City Media and are published strictly for entertainment purposes only.