"Lovely Poppies" John Bonanno photograph, June 26, 2010

Old Ideas Going Nowhere

"Recruits! Before the sacred servants of God and in sight of this altar, you have sworn loyalty to me. You are still too young to understand the true meaning of what has just been spoken. But be diligent and follow the prescribed regulations and teachings always. You have sworn loyalty to me. That means, children of my Guards, you are now my soldiers. You have given yourselves to me, body and soul. There is for you but one enemy, and he is my enemy. With the current socialist machinations it can happen that I order you to shoot your own relatives, brothers, even parents--may God prevent it--but even then you must obey my order without a murmur."-Kaiser Wilhelm II at the Swearing-in of New Recruits in Potsdam, November 23, 1891, according to the Neisser Zeitung

Congressional reform can only be achieved if measures are taken to prevent any citizen having inordinate influence over the body. No foreign entities should have any influence over Congress. Only citizens should have the ability to petition Congress.

Idea: One may not petition a politician who does not represent the district in which that citizen resides.

Professional Lobbying would become almost prohibitively expensive. 

Idea: Make it a felony crime for a citizen to accept payment from a corporate entity or any other organization to "lobby" Congress.

Lobbying, the influence of Congress by proxy, would disappear.

Idea: Increase the size of Congress. Each representative should represent 50,000 citizens as it was at the founding of the republic. It would cost a lot of money to buy the majority of 6,000 congressmen; it would be even more difficult to keep all those members quiet about special arrangements that may occur.

A much larger Congress would be difficult to buy.

Idea: If Congress wants to pass a law, it must abolish an old one first.

There are more laws in existence than any one person can know or understand. This makes "ignorance of the law" the natural state of any citizen, therefore making him vulnerable to the authorities for crimes of which he is ignorant. We all know the adage "Ignorance of the Law is no excuse." This is unacceptable in a democracy. The garden of Law must be weeded out.

Idea: Choose Congress by lot. It would be a better, more representative group than the bought puppets we watch now.

The farce we call "the electoral process" gives us corporate whores. Congress must represent the people. 

Idea: Make it a felony crime for anyone to "lobby" politicians on behalf of anyone but themselves or their immediate family.

Q: Why is there no inflation despite the deficit spending? 

A: The Fed prints the money, not the government.

The government borrows these fiat dollars from the Fed. There is no way the big banks want to be paid back in inflated dollars, although this would benefit the people who would pay back loans with cheap dollars, therefore, the money in circulation was limited.
In recent decades, until the precipitous collapse of the game in 2008, unlimited money for lending was made available to banks by the Federal Reserve at low interest. This easy money was lent out at hight interest for credit card purchases and exploding mortgages with slight qualification attached.  Actual money supply (which now seems to be a state secret) was not increased, that is, greenbacks were not printed to represent the funny money being loaned out. There were not enough dollars printed to allow the economy to service these loans. The people never had a chance make good on all the money borrowed because the moderate inflation that would have been required for this was intolerable to the banks. Wages actually fell even taking into consideration the limited inflation allowed by the system. The banks preferred the prospect of repossessing properties rather than being paid back in cheap inflated dollars. They also influenced Congress to "reform" bankruptcy law to prevent the average worker from claiming bankruptcy protection in any meaningful way. This march to the neo-feudalism continues.

Idea: Make stockholders personally responsible for the crimes of the entities they own.

The most immediate reform that would save lives and money: abolish all drug laws.
But I know none of these things will happen. The rulers of world would rather plunge it into chaos than lessen themselves. 

War is the greatest of all crimes yet there is no aggressor who does not color his crime with the pretext of justice.-Voltaire

An Insolent Chipmunk's Garbage

Animal Angst

This year has been the very apex of animal devastation in my gardens since I have lived here  in Hiram. That is twenty-six years of gardening.
Deer routinely have entered the vegetable garden despite the use of various repellents. They have utterly destroyed my cabbage, broccoli, fennel, beet, bush bean and carrot crops. I planted two dwarf pear (Keiffer), and three dwarf peach (2 Redhaven 1 Elberta) trees this year that seem particularly attractive to them; they enjoy stripping new leaves and breaking tender branches in the process. I just purchased three semi-dwarf apple (MackIntosh, Liberty, Fuji) , two dwarf plum (Santa Rosa) and another dwarf peach (Bartlett) that need to be planted today but the prospect depresses me. A three year old purple smokebush is browsed regularly, keeping it at a height of less than two feet. Beth's hostas are being munched.
Chipmunks have acquired a taste for the cherry tomatoes growing in pots by the back door. They climb the plants breaking them.  They eat the fruits as they ripen and leave the skins (which they reject) on the back step as a flagrant challenge to human authority.
Groundhogs devastated the strawberries in the spring.
For the first time, birds devoured every last blueberry on six bushes that have yielded well for ten years.
As usual, bears ripped down our bird feeders in the spring and took them into the woods for a leisurely dismantling. There is nothing like a seed snack after a long hibernation.