Media Giants Are Becoming Leftist Tax Targets

By Lowell Ponte

“The Revolution devours its children,” wrote journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan, who lived during the French Revolution. Its terror began by beheading the king and queen, then those accused of plotting against the Revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, and near its end the mobilized mob hysteria guillotined Robespierre himself.

In the fanatic hate of today’s “Resistance” mobilized against President Donald Trump, which has included simulated beheadings, that same “fearful symmetry” is now emerging. Veteran Democratic politicians know it is time to move to the political center and offer realistic compromise solutions, but their core voters were mobilized by hatred against Trump and will accept no compromises. The Democratic Party’s own hate-filled demagoguery has made rational democracy impossible.

The Democrats’ comrades in the new media want leftist candidates to win, but, with delicious irony, starting on the local level such politicians now seem bent on devouring these rich media giants.

Google and its company YouTube gave massive help to Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012 and to Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign in 2016. It has relentlessly biased its media information to the left, most recently this May by identifying the “ideology” of the California Republican Party as “Nazism.”

Now under pressure from its own left-leaning employees, Google has just agreed not to renew its lucrative Artificial Intelligence contract with the Department of Defense. Its slogan used to be “Don’t be evil,” now changed to “Do the right [i.e., the left] thing.”

Walt Disney Company commanded its ABC Television to fire Roseanne Barr, star of the network’s only successful sitcom that was not wholly anti-Trump, after she privately tweeted a regrettable racist statement. But a year earlier Disney had purged veteran star Tim Allen’s “Last Man Standing,” ABC’s second highest-rated (and then only conservative) comedy show, and Allen had made no Politically Incorrect statement at all….except admitting that he went to President Trump’s inauguration. But ABC has not fired Joy Behar of its daytime show “The View” after she said on air that Christians were “mentally ill.”

Disney also owns the far-left sports network ESPN, which only weeks ago gave a new show to radical Keith Olbermann, notorious for his crazed political rants in which he has called President Trump a “Nazi” and worse. ESPN also continues to employ another commentator who has called the President a “white supremacist” on air.

We could go on with examples of unequal treatment favoring leftist views at Wikipedia, Netflix, Apple, the New York Times, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Time Magazine and its companies CNN and TBS, where B-list Canadian comedian Samantha Bee just boosted her tanking viewership by referring to the President’s daughter using a shockingly vulgar word. As the old saying goes, were it not for their double standards, the left would have no standards at all.

Such leftist media giants ignore our cries for fairness and balance as they push global socialist Revolution and try to behead elected conservatives. But now greedy leftist politicians are turning against them to feed the angry mob of welfare recipients who demand more free goodies. Always more.

In liberal Seattle, local leftists running the city government have just imposed a job-killing $275 tax each year per employee on rich local companies, including Amazon and Starbucks – forcing this tax through despite the sterling leftist credentials of these companies. Did these companies really think they would be exempt from the anti-capitalist, pro-socialist Revolution they were promoting? The Revolution sooner or later will confiscate all the money from those who have it, devouring its children.

In Silicon Valley in the San Francisco area, leftist city councils are preparing such confiscatory taxes on Apple in Cupertino, and Google in Mountain View, already targeted in Europe. Other giants such as Netflix in Los Gatos and Facebook in Menlo Park, who tilt in favor of leftist views, doubtless will soon also be tax targets.
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For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468.

For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

Let’s “Tax the Poor” Says Mayor Bloomberg

By Lowell Ponte

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of America’s richest billionaires, now wants to heavily tax poor people.

Such taxes, says Bloomberg, would be a “good thing” for those already in poverty.

Like most self-righteous leftist Progressives, Michael Bloomberg is paternalistically proposing what economists call “Pigovian” taxes, designed not only to enrich government but also to impose social engineering.

He wants to use taxes as back-door regulation to impose his desired social policies, as proposed by English economist Arthur Pigou, who died in 1959.

If poor people are dying from the health effects of smoking or of drinking sugary soda pop, as Bloomberg believes, then they will be able to buy and consume far less of these harmful products if a heavy tax is added to soda’s and tobacco’s price.

Those poor who divert money from paying rent or buying new shoes for their children will continue to buy such things, but government will have lots more money to treat their health problems.

“Two things in life…are absolutely certain. One is death, the other is tax. So you use one to defer the other,” said Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund before which Bloomberg was discussing his plans to tax the poor.

“That’s correct. That is exactly right. Well said,” responded Bloomberg to the globalist audience that showered him with applause. Progressives want the future to be a socialist paradise controlled not by commoners with a right to vote and as individuals to choose what each wants, but by a superior paternalistic elite that decides what is best for everyone and imposes it on them for their own good.

As Mayor of New York City, Bloomberg had no doubt that his peculiar values were to be imposed. Buying a “Big Gulp” soda pop was prohibited. Cigarettes were taxed so heavily that a criminal underground emerged to provide those hooked on nicotine with a cheaper smoking “fix,” and police were diverted from fighting violent crime to enforce this lucrative tax.

Such “Pigovian” taxes were, of course, regressive; they hurt the poor economically far more than the well-to-do. But as “revenue” measures, such taxes could be put into law far more easily than legislation that would require Mayor Bloomberg to prove his biases were scientifically valid as “sin” taxes. Progressives not long ago were dogmatically telling us that dietary fat was hazardous and should be replaced by sugary carbohydrates; they were wrong then and could be wrong now.

Pigovian taxes have already been used to restrict our use of carbon, CFCs, cigarettes, dietary fat, high fructose corn syrup, soda pop, tobacco, alcohol, and much else. Pigovian subsidies are behind tax breaks in so-called “enterprise zones” in economically-disadvantaged neighborhoods; trouble is, to sustain an enterprise zone, government needs to make the zones around it less-than-optimally-friendly to business and enterprise. And Mayor Bloomberg, a notorious gun-grabber, is more than eager to use sky-high Pigovian taxes to limit the sale and ownership of firearms and ammunition.

Would high Pigovian taxes be a “good thing” for the health of the poor? Taxes are a major cause of stress, anxiety, and fear. So, too, is poverty, which such taxes would greatly increase. And such stresses cause heart attacks, cancer, and a thousand other potentially-deadly health risks.

Michael Bloomberg and his authoritarian taxes aimed at the poor are hazardous to the health of millions of Americans. It is frightening to think that Mayor Bloomberg and his arrogant fellow Progressives believe they are superior to, and entitled to impose their lethal values onto, the rest of us.

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For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468.

For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

“Eight More Years!”

by Lowell Ponte

Democracy is supposed to be a peaceful form of change that transfers power from one leader or lawmaker to another not by war, revolution, or assassination, but by society’s mutual agreement.

When Republican candidate Donald Trump in the final 2016 presidential debate said that he would not automatically accept the election’s result, his Democrat rival former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton replied:

“That’s horrifying. Let’s be clear about what he is saying and what it means. He is denigrating – he is talking down our democracy. And I am appalled that someone who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that position…. That is not the way our democracy works.”

But since Mr. Trump’s overwhelming victory – 304 Electoral Votes to only 227 for Clinton – she and her media comrades and other unelected members of the Deep State have claimed that Ms. Clinton won, or should have been declared the true winner of, the 2016 election.

This has turned into more than a rant against President Trump. It has become a relentless attempt to delegitimize his presidency and remove him from office. It has, as many have observed, become on ongoing coup d’etat, a “taking down” of our democracy.

Media create a social contagion of violence, showing children they can gain fame by shooting others, and glorifying celebrities who advocate ways to assassinate President Trump. If the Left cannot get power with ballots, it will use bullets.

This ceaseless hate campaign has partially succeeded. The votes of the people removed majority power from elected Democrats. But the unelected power of politically-appointed judges and bureaucrats has combined with the propaganda power of the dominant liberal hate-Trump media in a “Resistance” to prevent a transfer of governmental power to the choice of the voters.

Although President Trump has achieved much, the anti-democratic tactics used against him have sapped his political capital and impaired his constitutional power to fulfill his campaign promises. Our unelected government is defying and spitting in the face of the voters. This is not the way our democracy is supposed to work.

Democracy delayed is democracy denied. Arrogant leftist stonewalling, obstruction, and collusion have stolen almost two years of the Trump Administration for which Americans voted.

Since the 2016 election, we have learned of Ms. Clinton’s undemocratic secret manipulation of the Democratic Party’s primary process, and of her own and the Democratic National Committee’s collusion through the Russian dossier used to get FISA warrants to spy on Trump activities.

We have learned of the cabal within the President Barack Obama-controlled Department of Justice and FBI that, as Mr. Trump suspected, bugged his campaign communications and planted at least one informant/agent provocateur [who reportedly received at least $800,000 in taxpayer money] among those in his campaign.

We have seen a legal assault on Mr. Trump reminiscent in form and frenzy of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, including a surprise raid to seize Trump’s lawyer’s papers in defiance of client-lawyer confidentiality.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is not investigating a crime, as our legal system requires, but pursuing President Trump in hopes of finding a crime, any crime. The techniques of Mueller’s team of mostly-Democratic partisan donors and operatives are those of England’s Star Chamber and of Tower of London threats of torture to elicit political confessions against the President. This, too, is not how democracy, or justice, are supposed to work.

If and when these anti-democratic leftist furies fail in their effort to undo the 2016 election, voters will rightly ask for justice. How can they reclaim their chosen President’s two stolen years of governing?

The U.S. Constitution has no provision to return two years robbed from a President held political hostage by the opposition party. But voters can and should give President Trump a 60-seat Senate majority and strong House majority this November. His last six years can thus be as liberating for Americans as having eight more years to liberate our republic.
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For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468.
For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

Why Obama’s Iran Deal Got Trumped

By Lowell Ponte

President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate President Barack Obama’s Iran deal, said Mr. Obama – a self-described globalist “citizen of the world” – “is a serious mistake.”

Two former directors of Obama’s National Security Council committed an even larger ethical breach. Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson in a New York Times Op-Ed called on European nations to withdraw their diplomats from Washington, expel U.S. diplomats from their capitals, and respond to any U.S. sanctions for continuing to trade with Iran by imposing sanctions of their own against the United States.

The German weekly Der Spiegel – whose politics echo the Social [i.e., Socialist] Democratic Party (SPD), much as Britain’s Guardian and our New York Times act as propaganda auxiliaries of their nation’s main leftist parties – declared a day later in an editorial that it was “time for Europe to join the Resistance” to President Trump’s America.

“The West as we once knew it no longer exists,” wrote Der Spiegel. “Our relationship to the United States cannot currently be called a friendship and can hardly be referred to as a partnership.”

The immediate reason for such high dudgeon is, of course, money. Germany was doing $6.0 Billion a year with Iran in the late 1970s, saw trade shrivel with the embargo, then watched business rebound to $3.5 Billion in 2017 under Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The European Union was Iran’s third largest trade partner, behind only China and the United Arab Emirates. EU exports to Iran grew by 31.5% and imports grew 83.9% during 2016-17.

Europe has been raking in money from Iran hand over fist, with a French oil company deal worth $4.8 Billion, an Airbus deal for 100 airplanes to Iran worth $18 Billion that otherwise might have gone to Boeing, and so forth. Such short-term riches are much nicer to contemplate than the coming destruction of Europe by nuclear weapons from the world’s leading supporter of terrorism, Iran.

Part of Europe’s short-sighted, selfish mindset is America’s fault, as Craig R. Smith and I analyze in our latest book Money, Morality & The Machine. After World War II we put a nuclear umbrella over Western Europe, saving its nations the cost of national defense against Soviet invasion. They spent this saved money on vote-buying welfare and built quasi-socialist states, which continue to distort their politics and economies. We infantilized these nations dependent on American money and protection.

Germany, of course, was also defeated because of American intervention in World Wars I and II, has had U.S. soldiers stationed on its soil since 1945, and has always quietly resented being bested by what it regards as an inferior people (17% — roughly one in six – of whom, according to the latest U.S. Census, have some German ancestry).

Of those we defeated in WWII, 57% of Japanese and 61% of Italians view America favorably, a 2017 Pew study found, but 62% of Germans view the U.S. unfavorably. As historian Victor Davis Hanson writes, “If German haughtiness works on a dependent Europe, it certainly does not always impress a wary America.” No wonder Der Spiegel recently editorialized: “It’s time to get rid of Donald Trump…a danger to the world.”

Even the left-of-center magazine The Atlantic titled a May 4 article: “The Iran Deal Is Strategically and Morally Absurd,” noting that this non-ratified non-treaty is merely the compromising whim of “America’s first ‘post-Western’ president,” and that Obama’s “paralyzing fear of war” led him to “wishful thinking” about the Middle East. Barack Hussein Obama even “speculated that his nuclear agreement with Tehran ought to allow the Iranians and the Saudis time to learn ‘to share’ the region.”

Instead, Iranian-armed guerillas are establishing a “Shiite Crescent” from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq to Yemen under a corrupt, unstable theocratic dictatorship that believes in an apocalypse destined to bring the global triumph of Islam. Obama rolled out an unsecure JCPOA red carpet to Iranian nuclear weapons, and now tries to prevent Trump from being a new King Leonidas with his 300 Spartans stopping the Persians again at Thermopylae.
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For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468.

For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

The “Fundamental Transformation” of Both Parties

by Lowell Ponte

Hillary Clinton’s latest excuse for losing the 2016 election is that she is a “capitalist” but that “41 percent of Democrats are socialists…”

Sadly, after her closest approach yet to truth, no journalist asked the obvious question: “Ms. Clinton, if you are a capitalist but your party is rapidly becoming socialist, why don’t you resign from the Democratic Party and urge your capitalist supporters to do likewise?”

In the Iowa caucuses, Clinton eked out a razor-thin 49.9% to 49.6% win over self-described socialist independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. His curmudgeonly candor made Sanders a pied piper for jobless Millennials still living rent-free in their parents’ basement, who liked the idea of government paying their way for a lifetime. They pay no taxes, so why not favor a life of Uncle Sam playing permanent Santa Claus?

Clinton said that no one seemed to listen when she described herself as favoring capitalism “with appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability.” They did not hear her promising to raise taxes on corporations that are “disrupting our democracy” by increasing income inequality. They ignored her stated aim in a 2015 debate with Sanders to “save capitalism from itself.”

The very term “capitalist” was popularized by 19th Century socialist foes of private property such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx as a negative term used to argue against those who favor free markets and laissez-faire free enterprise.

Hillary Clinton is a “capitalist” as Marx used the term. She favors crony capitalism in which privileged elitists get rich via government favors. She rules a billion-dollar foundation that demanded kickbacks from those seeking favors from the Secretary of State….favors like a Russian company acquiring 20% of America’s precious uranium reserves while her foundation pocketed from Russian interests at least $145 Million. Her 2016 campaign may have laundered at least $84 Million in suspect campaign contributions.

Clinton echoed President Barack Obama’s statement to business that “You didn’t build that,” that companies owe their success and earnings to government, their de facto senior partner. Clinton and her fellow Progressives enforce their greedy grasp by “appropriate regulation and…accountability.” This is not our Framers’ goal of free enterprise.

The Communist Party USA until 1988 ran its own presidential candidates, using millions of dollars from Moscow. (President Obama’s CIA chief John O. Brennan admitted that he voted Communist in 1976; he is widely suspected of helping orchestrate the Deep State coup attempt against President Donald Trump, and is presently a pundit for MSNBC, a.k.a. Marxist-Socialist NBC.)

But from 1988 until the present, America’s Communist Party urged “voters to support the Democratic Party,” according to the website Marxists.org. So far as I know, no Democratic candidate sought such support, but neither has any Democrat publicly repudiated it – as journalists demand Republicans do whenever extremists endorse them. Is this collusion between the Democratic Party and political radicals once funded and commanded from Russia?

The larger point is that the Democratic Party has now moved so far to the left that even Communists eagerly support its ideology and candidates. Both parties come from the same godless collectivist movement of pseudo-scientific social engineering called Progressivism that advocates not progress towards freedom but a reactionary return to feudalism, elite rulers, and serfdom. The hijacked Democratic Party has become a radical socialist party unworthy of support by anyone who loves individual liberty.

Most of the Republican Party, meanwhile, thanks to President Trump, is moving away from the globalist, collectivist agenda of Progressivism that has ruled both parties since World War II. Mr. Trump is restoring both nationalism and America’s borders. He is returning America to its historic role as an experiment in liberty that unites enterprising, liberty-seeking citizens from around the world in the first “new nation,” a great model of free enterprise for Planet Earth to follow. Progressives in both parties eager to enslave us under global government are furious at Mr. Trump’s success.

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To schedule a fascinating interview with Lowell Ponte – a veteran think tank futurist and former Roving Science & Technology Editor of Reader’s Digest –
contact: Sandy Frazier at 516-735-5468 or email sandy@mystic-art.com.

For a free copy of the White Paper The Secret War – Part II: Weapons of Cash Destruction, contact: David Bradshaw at 602-918-3296 or email him at ideaman@myideafactory.net

Redefining Humankind

By Lowell Ponte

As God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, He told Adam that henceforth “through painful toil….[and] the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.”

Socialists and scientists now declare that a new Eden, a Heaven on Earth, is arriving. All of us can soon live sweat-free on easy fruit from the welfare-state tree at the center of the government’s garden.

Vermont’s self-described socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders would guarantee a government job paying at least $12-15 an hour plus health benefits to anyone in America who “needs or wants one.”

This would do more than cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars annually. It could devastate consumers by prompting millions of minimum wage employees to quit and work instead for the government, which might send the cost of hamburgers and thousands of other items skyrocketing.

Minimum wage employers would be forced to automate, further shrinking the private sector and the traditional ladder to work and achievement. Even more will become dependent on government make-work jobs, and they will vote for the political party of ever-expanding government.

 

In Europe, 156 experts in robotics and Artificial Intelligence have just written a letter to the European Union arguing against EU plans to redefine robots as “electronic persons.”

Their objection, say these experts, is the EU effort to hold robots individually responsible for any harm they do. This would require a costly individual insurance policy for each robot employed, which would greatly increase the cost of replacing human workers with robots.

Unmentioned, as both sides know, is what giving robots the status of “electronic persons” implies. This could give robots a theoretical array of heretofore-human rights. Only days ago, a Japanese robot won 4,000 human votes in the race for mayor in a Tokyo suburb.

The real aim of the European Union, as Craig R. Smith and I explained in our book Money, Morality & The Machine, is to declare robots persons so that they may be individually taxed. This will make it more costly for companies to replace humans; but robots still have the advantages of never getting sick, needing sleep or vacations, going on strike, or loafing.

If robots can do our work by the sweat of their brow, and if something like welfare is available, then, as Rep. Nancy Pelosi says, humans will have the leisure to “become artists,” in the new statist Garden of Eden.

By taxing robots, socialists believe, government would acquire the means to give a free ride to humans displaced in their jobs by robots. We can either enjoy Senator Sanders’ easy-job income, or we can get the Progressive dream of a “Guaranteed Basic Income,” money for nothing. Even some libertarians such as Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, Smith and I wrote, recognize that up to 81 cents of every dollar spent to help the poor in government programs never gets to the poor. A “Guaranteed Basic Income” could cost much less than welfare by eliminating all the government middlemen who make fat livings off social programs.

What happens to human beings in such a New Eden? This lifelong “retirement” turns them into perpetual government dependents, permanent children who never need – nor are allowed – to grow up, become self-sufficient and mature. Imagine a future where all people are self-absorbed, infantile Millennials still living at age 35 in their parents’ basement, watching MSNBC, becoming increasingly narrow-minded in their myopic confirmation bias, and throwing fits when anyone disagrees with them.

This “New Eden” with its socialist and scientific substitutes for God, is not heaven but a serpent-run hell. If you wonder what the future of humanity is worth here, consider how Britain’s National Health Service snuffed out the life of baby Alfie Evans. Robots will have “rights,” but you will not.

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For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468. For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

Welcome to the Class War

by Lowell Ponte

In the Great Class War between the “rich” and the government, whose side are you on?

This week MarketWatch reported that by 2030, “the richest 1%” are on track to “control nearly 66% of the world’s money.” This is approximately $305 Trillion, it reported, based on data from the hard-left British newspaper The Guardian, best-selling French Marxist economist Thomas Piketty, and other sources with comradely views. The activist group Oxfam warns that “just eight billionaires have as much wealth as 3.6 billion people – the poorest half of the world.”

Such words are intended to stoke jealousy and envy behind a mask of compassion and fairness. It is unjust, we are to think, that a utopia of pure equality is being thwarted because wealth is redistributed by capitalists instead of socialists.

In the United States the top 1% pays 45.7% — 2.7 times their “fair share” — of individual income taxes. Under the even-more-Progressive income tax of the new tax law, the top 20% will pay 87% of the total. The bottom 40% will not only pay nothing but also get money from the Earned Income Tax Credit and other special provisions that turn our tax system into a welfare system.

Income taxes account for roughly 37% of U.S. Government revenues, compared with only about 24% in Europe where consumption taxes distribute the burden more broadly. In Sweden they even tax welfare checks, so that everyone helps bear society’s costs.

Does Class Warfare produce a healthy society? No, it produces an attitude that those richer than you deserve to have their money taken away and given to you. Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi – net worth reportedly $40 Million – offer to rob the rich via taxes. But those they polarize increasingly want to rob the hated rich directly, without any self-serving middleman.

(Have you noticed that Democrats favor Hate Crime laws based on race, sex, gender, and almost every other difference between people – except class. Democrats would go out of business overnight if preaching class hatred against the rich became a crime.)

“Wealth” in the world comes in at least two currencies – the coin of money, and the coin of power. Real wealth comes from power, not money. You may own a stack of $100 bills, but the government owns the printing press and can conjure as much money as it wishes out of thin air. Doing so, of course, would destroy the value of your money in an inferno of inflation.

The rich own a fortune in land and fancy homes, say socialist Class Warriors. But do the rich really “own” what they pay others for? Stop paying the de facto rent of whatever property tax the government demands, and their land will soon be taken by the state. Government can also use its eminent domain powers to confiscate property.

Government ultimately “owns” all the land, and “controls” all the money. So who is the real enemy of the people in the Great Class War? Even directly, Uncle Sam owns 47% of all the United States west of Denver – including 89.5% of Nevada, 69.1% of Alaska, 57.4% of Utah, 48.1% of Arizona, and 45.3% of California.

Could Uncle Sam sell some of his almost-limitless property to help the poor? No, socialists will say, because what belongs to Uncle Sam is government’s forever – but what has been earned by the private rich is negotiable. Government is all of us, leftists say. Remember that the next time they charge you $20 to visit one of “your” National Parks.

As President Donald Trump’s clash with the unelected “Deep State” has proven, government is just another selfish special interest. Mr. Trump shows why we need some independent rich people who can afford to fight against gigantic government’s never-ending greed for power. That, of course, is the real reason why socialists hate and make war against the rich.

——————————————————————————————————————————————-For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468.

For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

Cuba After the Castros

By Lowell Ponte

Cuba was once the third most prosperous nation in the Western Hemisphere, before Fidel Castro replaced capitalism with a communist dictatorship that turned it into one of the poorest, with an average monthly salary of $31. Fidel died in 2016 at age 90.

The Castro dynasty ends this week when Fidel’s younger brother, former head of the secret police Raul Castro, retires after 10 years as Cuban President. (He will remain head of the Communist Party.) His hand-picked successor is said to be Miguel Diaz-Canel, who turns 58 this week, a committed Communist whose past is almost unknown to the press.

This is the way most revolutionary dictatorships slide into the dustbin of history. The charismatic founder holds his new government together by invoking what they shared during the revolution. When this leader passes, sometimes a family relative with his last name takes over, but it eventually devolves to a battle to the death between top lieutenants – such as Stalin versus Trotsky – fighting to seize power. Competitors for the love of the people such as Che Guevara are killed or sent abroad to die. After them, only the uncharismatic Yes-Men such as Nikita Khrushchev and Diaz-Canel survive and are left to take charge.

The new Cuban dictator faces difficult challenges. His island survives mostly by free oil from the Communist dictatorship of Venezuela, also a sinking economy kept in power by more than 14,000 Cuban secret police.

An American embargo of sorts remains in place, but Cuba has always been able to trade with Canada, Mexico, and Europe. Its problem is that it has repeatedly failed to pay for goods and thus has terrible credit with many nations. Castro also bet his slave island’s future on becoming a colony of the Communist Soviet empire, which failed and died before he did.

I remember being in Cuba in 1977, doing a piece for the Los Angeles Times. Cuba was Spain’s administrative center in the New World, populated mostly by business-savvy Spaniards from Barcelona. Cuba’s population is white and black, from African slaves imported to do the labor. But it is not brown; Spain exterminated the Native Americans who lived there.

I remember being taken to a showplace school where children studied half a day and burned their hands working at assembling batteries at an adjacent factory the other half – a throwback to child labor that liberal reporters never questioned. The school’s principal was Black, the only non-white I met in any position of power. The liberal media also ignored that white Fidel Castro overthrew a mulatto socialist Cuban President, Fulgencio Batista.

Then as now, ordinary Cubans could not enter resort hotels. I remember the panic on the face of a Communist Bloc apparatchik who began chatting with me in the hotel pool; then when he realized I was American tried frantically to get away from me before anyone noticed.

“We used to watch ‘I Love Lucy’ too,” said my Communist Party guide, “but we saw it differently.” How many Americans knew that when Desi sang “Babalu” he was invoking a deity from African Santeria voodoo religion? I loved embarrassing my guide by asking why he always locked his car in this Workers’ Paradise, or why cigarettes for Cuban domestic consumption carried health warnings…but not cigarettes made for export.

How many Democrats helped the Castros? John F. Kennedy withdrew promised air support, leaving Cuban freedom fighters to be killed or captured at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Giron). Bill and Hillary Clinton violated the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child by sending commandos to snatch Elian Gonzalez so the boy could be returned to Castro as a trophy after his mother died bringing him across shark-filled waters to the United States.

Barack Obama ended wet-foot/dry-foot asylum for Cubans reaching the U.S. as refugees from Communism. Cubans understand the evils of Communism and tend to vote Republican, unlike the millions of other Democrat-voting Latinos Obama allowed to flood illegally into the U.S. We need to learn why so many Cubans were willing to risk their lives by fleeing from the Castros to find economic and personal freedom.
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For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468.

For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

A “Cashless” America Could Soon Be “Gunless”

By Lowell Ponte

The United States is quickly turning “cashless,” buying most things from automobiles to hamburgers via bank loans and credit cards. Americans carry more than a trillion dollars on what should be called “debt cards.” Banks love cashlessness, in which more and more of what we need is not earned or saved, but borrowed for high interest.

Government is even happier with the fast-arriving cashless society. Cash can be hidden, despite your bank being required to spy on you and report any odd financial activity. Government wants every transaction you make to be taxable, trackable, hackable, blockable, and used to empower Big Brother.

Cashlessness in surprising ways gives vast power to government. Days ago, for example, liberal Democrat New York State Comptroller Thomas J. DiNapoli, who controls where the state invests its $209.1 Billion pension fund, sent out a letter. It went to institutions behind our credit cards – Visa, MasterCard, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, American Express, Discover Financial Services, and others.

DiNapoli’s message was about as subtle as a guy wearing a pinstripe suit, black shirt and white tie saying: “You gotta nice place here. Too bad if anything happened to it. But maybe I can provide you some protection.”

DiNapoli suggested that these companies should consider whether gun transactions should be classified with restricted high-risk purchases like pornography, illicit drugs, and cryptocurrencies. “If gun violence continues unabated in society,” he wrote, “public outcry…may grow and create significant financial risk for the company.”

DiNapoli suggested that these companies look into implementing ways to block credit card purchases of firearms, ammunition, and gun accessories. The implied threat was clear: stop extending credit to gun and ammo buyers, or risk having New York State investment money taken away from your bank or credit company because the left wants to ban guns.

The Federal Government has already tried such intimidation, as Craig R. Smith and I explained in our 2014 book Don’t Bank On It! The Unsafe World of 21st Century Banking. President Barack Obama implemented “Operation Choke Point,” which threatened regulatory problems for financial institutions that did not withhold banking and credit services from firearms and ammunition sellers, among others. Such sellers were to be cut off even if they had never been found guilty of any criminal wrongdoing.

This was the naked weaponization of regulatory power to injure or kill ideological targets. Consumer Research analyst Beau Brunson noted that Operation Choke Point “used reputational risk as a tool for bank coercion.” Now so does DiNapoli. With “cashlessness,” when customers have no other way to buy, such nuclear warfare can crush businesses and products.

In August 2017 President Donald Trump stopped Operation Choke Point, but as The Hill wrote, “a program terminated unilaterally can be resumed unilaterally.” On the day Progressive Democrats regain power, this is one of ten thousand kinds of authoritarian force they immediately will reinstall.

Sweden had been enthusiastic about becoming the world’s first “cashless” society. Now they are frightened at the power this gives government – not only their own, but Russia’s should it launch an invasion by hacking, scrambling, or shutting off Sweden’s computer networks as it did Ukraine’s, leaving Swedes helpless, without access to either cash or credit.

If a “cashless” government becomes authoritarian, it can not only monitor and tax everything you buy, but also ban purchases – ranging from foods it deems unhealthful to guns it deems dangerous. Without approval of the beast, you will be denied the ability to buy what you want and need. Purchasing or repairing once-legal firearms can instantly be made impossible.

This authoritarian step-by-step plan makes people depend on credit cards, and on renting things instead of owning them. Then it outlaws cash as something only outlaws use. Then government can control what people are permitted to buy by regulating and intimidating banks and credit card companies. The future will eventually rediscover the Framers’ Constitutional money. We will return to the 5,000-year tradition of precious metal that needs no government or computer to give it value. We will learn again that gold and free are not “four-letter words,” but two words that go together.

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For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468.

For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

California’s Illegal Alien Voting Law IS Secession

By Lowell Ponte

On April 12, 1861, the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumter, igniting a Civil War that before its end killed more than 620,000 Americans.

Mark the date April 1, 2018, April Fool’s Day, as the day Civil War 2.0 began. On that day the State of California began to automatically register illegal aliens to vote who have driver licenses. This new law immunizes illegals against any state criminal penalty for registering and voting.

Leftist scholars say that our states control their voting criteria and can legally register non-citizens to vote in state, county, and local elections. States, including California, however, may not register illegals to vote in federal elections – for Members of Congress, U.S. Senators, or President.

Allowing citizens of other countries vote in California would illegally “dilute” the votes not only of Californians but those of all American citizens by giving foreigners political power in selecting American lawmakers and Presidents. Democrats who collude in such theft of citizen voting rights – letting your vote be cancelled out by a foreigner – should face criminal prosecution under the Conspiracy Against Rights Act (18 USC § 241).

California has one-quarter or more of America’s illegal aliens – as well as one-third of the entire nation’s welfare recipients. With a population more than 40 percent Latino, it has become Mexifornia. The new California motor-voter registration law that took effect April 1st transparently is intended to enfranchise illegals, who vote 2-1 for the ruling Democratic Party, in order to dissolve the American nation into a borderless, bankrupt, bilingual backwater ruled as a colony by a global Progressive government.

Progressive President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s slogan was “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.” In California’s lavish vote-buying welfare state, the top 1 percent of taxpayers earn 24% of the income, but reportedly pay at least 48% of all income taxes. The highest-earning 5,700 Californians reportedly pay upwards of 37% of all state income taxes. This dangerously narrow tax base in the economic near-crash of 2008 caused state tax revenue to plummet by 23%. California cannot yet print its own money.

The greed of California Democrats is without limit. When President Donald Trump passed his tax cut, leading leftist politicians swore that they would increase already-crushing California taxes to “recapture” what the rich saved. Successful people are fleeing with their money from the once-golden state in a “reverse gold rush,” while millions more illegals are flooding in to get welfare checks in what now calls itself a “sanctuary state?”

President Trump is trying to fight his way through a thicket of Democrat-appointed left-wing judges to defund or abolish sanctuary cities and illegal invaders, like the thousands of mostly-Hondurans calling themselves Migrantes en la Lucha, “migrants in the fight,” mobilized to be the next wave to overwhelm the border patrol on Easter weekend, much as the radicals wearing Guy Fawkes masks swept over the British police in the movie V for Vendetta. These are classic radical tactics: either the invaders win, or the police who stop them are accused of anti-human brutality.

Imagine a better alternative. Suppose that President Trump announces today that the new California law has made all future elections unconstitutional and illegal, because foreigners are now allowed to tilt the outcome. Neither he nor the Republican House and Senate will accept the credentials of anyone elected by California (one of 8 states, incidentally, that have more registered voters than voting-age citizens).

Imagine after November’s vote that California’s two Democratic Senators and 53 Congress members (39 of whom are Democrats) are not seated until a new California election purges all illegal aliens and other foreigners from the voter rolls in federal elections. No California presidential votes will be counted in 2020. Imagine the federal government requiring voter I.D.s and declaring it a felony punishable by permanent forfeiture of future U.S. citizenship if a non-citizen votes illegally in any federal election.

California Democrats defied federal law and colluded to let foreigners take control of the U.S. government in Washington, D.C. They started Civil War 2.0 by seceding from the United States and its laws. Now they should lose all political power outside California, which would end any hope that Progressives will ever again rule the United States. Bye Bye, California.
—————————————————————————————————————————————To schedule an interview with Lowell Ponte, a veteran think tank futurist who lives in California, contact: Sandy Frazier at 516-735-5468 or email sandy@mystic-art.com.

For a free copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine, contact: David Bradshaw at 602-918-3296 or email him at ideaman@myideafactory.net