The Communist Origin of the Modern Conservative Movement VI

In the Enron scam Enron sold its debt to subsidiaries to make it appear Enron was making money when it fact it was losing money. This allowed them to sell stock to the public at high prices when the company was bankrupt. Laws should have been made to prevent this from happening again but commie/conservatives don’t want any regulations on corporate thieves. Now two of the biggest corporations in the world Arch Coal and Peabody Coal are using the Enron model to rid themselves of their debts. Each created independent subsidiaries and offloaded their liabilities of over $500 million a peace each to the subsidiaries. Then the subsidiaries were merged the combined liabilities were well over a billion dollars. Next step bankruptcy court where all of the debt could be unloaded. The liabilities were of course the health insurance and pensions of the miners who worked for Arch Coal and Peabody coal. Ninety percent of the miners who will lose their medical benefits and pensions never worked for the subsidiaries, they spent their life lives working for Arch Coal or Peabody coal and the liability for their benefits were off loaded in an effort to defraud them.

Will the bankruptcy court let two biggest corporations in the world defraud the men that created fortunes for the companies? That remains to be seen but in most cases the corporate bandits stuff $100 of millions in their pockets and in campaign contributions to politicians that help them. Welcome to commie/conservatives virtues of selfishness.

The reason taxes have to be raised is pay for Reagan’s tripling of the National Debt and Baby Bush’s unnecessary $3 trillion dollar war for control of Iraq oil. The money is already spent and currently 40% of the so called “spending” is paying interest on the debt Reagan and baby Bush ran up. But for Reagan’s 60% tax cut for the ungodly greedy and Bush war to make the Texas oil billionaires richer the National debt for WWII would have been paid off in the early 1990s. Iraq was under selling the oil cartel and gasoline was selling for 92.9 cents in America in December 2001.

It is a shame but the Reagan/Bush debt has to be paid and 40% of every tax dollar for next 5 decades will be needed to pay it. The cold hard facts are government has one way to pay the Reagan/Bush debt back higher taxes. The National Debt is not quite as high as it was after WWII as a percentage of GNP. Next social security and Medicare are not spending they have dedicated funding sources and have trillions in their trust funds. That is another 40% of the budget that is not spending. That leaves the general fund with 20% to spend for military, to maintain interstate highways and all other need.

The WWII generation did not want to pay 93% taxes to pay for WWII but they believed if you ran the bill up you paid that bill and indeed they did pay their until Reagan’s Voodoo economics tripled it.

When the commie/conservatives talk about cutting spending they are talking about cutting social security and Medicare which are fully funded by independent revenue streams and trust funds. When social security, Medicare, and the 40% debt service are take out the military consumes 80% of that remaining 20% and the come/conservatives are not going to cut the real spending problem which is on the military. The commie/conservatives have no such problem cutting social security and Medicare which are fully funded and can be in no way considered “spending.” The commie/conservatives want a 50% cut in social security phased in over time. Since social security replaces only 40% of pre-retirement income now if the commie/conservatives get their way social security would replace only 20% of pre-retirement in the future this would result in most of retirees being put on Welfare to survive. But if social security can be cut the money can be used to keep taxes on the ungodly artificially low. Taxes have to pay for Reagan’s voodoo economics sooner or later it is not a question of whether to raise the taxes but when. Fantasies are nice and you can imagine pay very low or no taxes but sooner or later harsh reality sets in.

A number of commie/conservatives have signed on to push a new tax system to replace the current income tax system. It is called the “Fair Tax” by its proponents but it is anything but “Fair.” It is a 23% national sales tax. At the time of purchase everyone would pay 23% in taxes.

The “Fair Tax” was conceived much like “Voodoo Economics” a bunch of rich men out on a drunk trying to figure out to get out of paying their taxes. “Never ever underestimate self-interest as a motive.” Do we really want to pay 23% tax on everything you buy? I bought a new car last year that cost $25,000. There is already a 6% title tax on cars in WV so the total tax would be 29%. The 23% “Fair Tax” would add an additional $5,750 to purchase of the car. A month after I bought the car a speeding driver ran a red light at 60 mph demolished the car and then hit me the second time to shove me out of the way so he could run. The car was completely totaled the passenger side was cave in so bad the glove compartment couldn’t be opened to get the registration an insurance information. I had to purchase a second new car in a little over month meaning I would have had to pay the $5,750 Fair Tax again. The car was financed for 5 years meaning I was spending money this year that I would not make for 5 years. This meaning I would be paying my “Fair Tax” 5 years in advance. This would be great for banks and finical institutions because people would be paying 5 years interest on their “Fair Tax.” Just making those two purchases would have cost me $11,500 in taxes or 33% of last year income. My other purchases that year would be taxed at 23% meaning I would pay another $7,130 if I didn’t purchase anything else on credit. Total taxes paid last year would be $18,630, meaning I would have paid 54% of my income in Federal Taxes alone.

Last year my effective tax rate was 9% raising it to 54% is not an improvement.

Of course there are exemptions from the national sales tax just as there are exemptions from the income tax, for instance the purchase of stock are exempt from the 23% national sales tax. The ungodly greedy buy 90% of the stock so of course purchase of stocks are exempted from the National Sales tax. The purchase of stock is not a purchase it is an “investment.”

Beware of rich men bearing “Fair Taxes.”

Here you can clearly see the difference between a “Slogan” and reality the title of the book is a “slogan” but the reality of paying 74% of your wages in taxes is far from fair. Because purchases for consumption may occur in one year but not be consumed in that year. Purchases of cars and houses and other big ticket items result in the consumption tax paid in the year of purchase but the actual consumption of the products may take years. This means the tax rate could vary widely from year to year. It is a simple matter to tax income but taxing consumption is a much more complex issue. The “Fair Tax” the so called consumption tax is not a consumption tax as much as a purchase tax because you can’t tax consumption you can only tax purchases. A tax once levied on “excess wealth” would be replaced with a tax levied on the middle class.

A consumption tax would destroy an economy based on consumption. It would simply price many people out of the market. A house that previously cost $100,000 would now cost a $123,000 and many people would be priced out of buying a house. Banks would require the consumption tax be paid up front as it could not be recovered if the deal went bad and the bank had to resell the house or car. An apartment that rented for $900 a month would rent for $1107 a month. A severe depression would closely follow the implementation of the “Fair Tax.” But the ungodly greedy tax rate will fall to a tiny fraction of what it is now and that is their idea of a “Fair Tax.”

“The Fair Tax” certainly belongs under the topic of “Tax Increases.” I am up to chapter 10 in and it gets worse with every chapter. First there is a dispute as to whether it is a 23% tax or a 30% tax on everything you buy. If you buy something for $100 you pay $23 in value added tax. But in actuality your purchase only cost $77 and the tax was $23. If we divide $23 by $77 to get the actual percentage we find that $23 is actually 30% of $77 purchase not 23%. “Figures don’t lie but liars do figure.” The difference the author tells us is between an inclusive and exclusive tax. If the tax is included in the price product it is an inclusive tax. The value added tax is included in the price of the product while sales tax is an exclusive tax and is added at the cash register to the price. A product that costs a $100 with a 6% sales tax costs a $106 a true 6% tax but a product that costs $77 with $23 is not a 23% tax it is a 30% tax.

Since the cost of taxes is embedded in the price of the product state and local sales tax would apply to the embedded National Sales Tax as well. In Huntington another 7% would be applied to the total purchase including the $23 embedded National Sales Tax 7% of $23 is a $1.61 in additional sales tax. Meaning the National Sales tax would cost the purchaser an additional $24.61 or 32%.

But wait it gets even worse the Congressional Budget Office and two other governments organizations study showed that to replace the current federal government revenue the actual percentage of a National Sales Tax would have to be between 64% and 89%. The reasoning is that food and medicine would have to be exempt from National Sales tax. The author of the book feels that the poverty level rebate is sufficient to cover these purchases. The poverty level rebate is based on number of people in the household and of course every household would get this rebate including billionaires like Bill Gates. The author, Neal Boortz, say not to call the National Sales Tax a “Flat Tax” to call it a progressive tax

The cost of Health Care is now consuming a bigger and bigger portion of family income now as the commie/conservatives push for a National Sales Tax most do not realize the 23% National Sales Tax would raise the cost of health care 23% as soon as it was signed into law. A couple of years ago my wife and I had $90,000 in Medical expenses. I wrecked a bike training for Tri-Athlon and collapsed a lung and separated a shoulder, she had a knee replaced and a few other operations. If The national sales tax was in effect it would have cost a $110 thousand. Do we really want a “Fair Tax” that taxes health care and prescription drugs?

We are currently spending 40% of each tax dollar on interest. How did we get there? Most commie/conservatives would like to blame Obama but the problem starts with the commie/conservatives. Once upon a time Americans believed that if you owed a debt you paid a debt. But the commie/conservatives changed all of that when the first commie/conservative, Reagan, was elected president. The National Debt, as a percentage of GNP, had been paid down by every president since WWII. Reagan however did not continue the tradition of paying the National Debt down instead he tripled the National Debt.

The money to triple National Debt had to be borrowed and that is the problem the interest rate was at a record 15% during the Reagan administration. Reagan used U S Treasury bonds with a 30 year life span to finance his tripling of the National Debt. Even though interest rates would fall to record lows in the next century the U S Treasury Bonds used to finance Reagan’s tripling of the National Debt would pay their 15% interest rate for nearly a quarter of a century after Reagan left office. In fact we are still paying off some of those high interest U S Treasury bonds that were sold during the Reagan administration the last of the Reagan high interest will not be paid off until 2019. Many of these U S Treasury bonds were sold to the social security trust fund and that is why baby Bush wanted to declare them worthless. Once the last of the commie/conservatives high interest bonds are paid off we can expect some relief.

The Reagan debt at high interest led to a large redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the ungodly greedy. These U S Treasury bonds were sold in face values of $10,000 so 90% of them were sold to the ungodly greedy the most of poor or middle class could not tie up $10,000 for thirty years. When interest loans in banks stood at 1% in this century the ungodly greedy continued to receive 15% interest on their U S Treasury bonds. Imagine loaning money to the government at credit card interest rates.

Many people believe that current political environment is a product of the moment and that an election can change everything but the current political environment was over a half century in the making, it is changing but it is changing slowly. In the 60s after the communist had purged the John Birch Society they realized that they were still considered crackpots and radicals and moved the fight on to college campuses. The commie/conservatives realized that they could not convert a critical mass of adults to commie/conservatism so they decided to go after the children in colleges. The college students were like blank pieces of papers and if the commie/conservatives could recruit them first they could program them as they liked. In the 60s huge amounts of money were spent to build beachheads on college campuses. Corporate money poured to college campuses with stipulation that radical right professors were to be hired and as we all know money talks. Conservative organizations were established on college campuses and the war for minds began in earnest.
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“Our elites—the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall Street, and the ones being produced at prestigious universities and business schools---do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to their education they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one. They are petty, timid, and uncreative bureaucrats superbly trained to carry out systems management. They see only piecemeal solutions that will satisfy the corporate structure. They lack the moral and intellectual core. They are able to deny the gravely ill medical coverage to increase company profits as they are to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood soaked dictatorships. The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets. The democratic system, they believe, is a secondary product of the free market—which they slavishly serve.”

From the book “Empire of Illusion” by Chris Hedges
If you want to poison a tree you poison the roots. If you want to poison a civilization you poison the minds of its young. A crop cannot be harvested the day it is planted nor was the commie/corporate investment in college campuses harvested for 20 years. The Koch brother’s investment on college campuses eventually paid off for them but not America.

The political pendulum is now beginning to swing back but change will come slowly one funeral at a time.

“I have looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose and still somehow it’s life illusion I recall I really don’t know life at all.”

Judy Collins

That is true for the vast majority of people. Illusion unlike reality can be custom made to order reality cannot.

A poster on another post had posted a link to an article by Jack Kemp a former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the Bush Senior administration. The article was published in 1996 in the New York Times I don’t know how he dug it up but Commie/conservatives are ideologues who are masters of spinning illusions. The fact that illusion exist alongside reality is troubling but often the illusions eclipse reality. Such is the case with Reagan myth. Many look fondly back on the Reagan years as good years for American but the statistics don’t lie the middle class was in decline and declined further every year Reagan was in office. Of course life got better for a certain class of Americans the ungodly greedy who got 60% tax cuts but the ordinary American social security and Medicare pay roll tax increases more than offset what meager income tax cuts middle class Americans got.

People are more comfortable with the Reagan illusion than the Reagan’s reality. The myth that Reagan tax cuts ended up increasing tax revenues is often repeated but the reality that that Reagan tripled the national debt is ignored. Illusions are often propelled by self-interest. We would all like to see our taxes cut and the illusion of this is the way to increase tax revenue is as flawed thinking as if 52 inch televisions sells for $1,000 if the price could be cut to $200 more 52 inch televisions would be sold producing more profit. The problem is that the production cost is $700.

On Rush Slimbaugh show yesterday he was making war on social security. Slimbaugh hates social security and believes people should work until the day they die. Slimbaugh claimed that social security and other entitlements would cost $30 trillion over the next 10 years and the dedicated revenue streams to fund these entitlements would provide only $2 trillion over that time period. These figures were so far out in right field that they had to be manufactured by a right wing think tank. A few years ago it was projected that if no adjustments were made social security could pay every dollar of benefits through 2042.
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“Social Security has become a welfare program for a bunch of bottom feeders”


Rush Slimbaugh
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This is an indication of the commie/conservative attitude toward social security. The commie/conservatives hope to destroy social security before the ungodly greedy have to pay back the $2.7 trillion owed to social security fund.

The fat drug addict will continue his assault on social security because he knows his taxes on his $10s of millions in income will have to go up.

One of the causes that tax revenues go up according to commie/conservatives when capital gains taxes are cut more stocks and real estate is sold off because taxes are lower. Tax bills move through congress slowly rumors of a capital gains tax cut would serve to suppress sales of stocks and real estate in the year while the tax cut bill is moving through congress as people wait and see whether they will get a tax cut on capital gains. Once the capital gains taxes are cut those who have held onto their assets sell creating a spike that will last long term.

Commie/conservatives point to the Bush Capital gains tax cut of 2003 and the revenue on capital gains going up from $50 billion in 2003 to $103 billion in 2006. Of course the commie/conservatives credit this revenue increase to the capital gains tax cut and ignores the housing bubble that had expanded to the point it would explode the next year. Housing mortgages were being packaged as securities and sold and resold at tremendous profits even though they for the most part were worthless paper. Wall Street became nothing more than a betting parlor that would book any and all bets and call them securities. The banking system would of course collapse in 2007. That is what actual caused most of the increase in capital gains taxes during that period.

There had only been two previous increases in the capital gains tax in the last 50 years, 1969, and 1986. A graph of the of historical revenue generated by capital gains shows what happened prior to the capital gains increase in 1986. It seems capital revenue doubled prior to the raise capital gains taxes. After the capital gains tax raise a record was set for capital gains tax revenue other than the spike caused by the prior fire sale that was caused by the coming tax raise on capital gains.

So in fact we could say a raise in capital gains taxes caused a doubling of capital gains tax revenue.

The Heritage Foundation is commie/conservative propaganda organization. The Heritage Foundation was founded by Joseph Coors, Paul Weyrich, and Edwin Feulner. Coors gave a quarter of million for the Heritage Foundation first year’s budget. Coors is also known to have bought a light cargo plane for Contras to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. Just another rich old man trying to use our government to make himself even richer. Nothing comes out of the Heritage Foundation that is not extremely twisted in an effort to make the ungodly greedy like Coors, richer and destroy the middle class. The Heritage Foundations has no credibility whatsoever, it has one reason to exist and that is to make the rich richer.

In an article written for the “Heritage Foundation” entitled “The Historical Lessons of Lower Tax Rates” the commie/conservative point out how much better life got after the Reagan tax cuts.

The commie/conservatives at Heritage Foundation can’t even get through the first sentence without telling major lies. The hard statistics show that the standard of living for the middle class declined every year Reagan was in office. Working couples worked longer hours and this was the effective end of the stay at home moms. But the standard of living did get better for the top 1/100 of 1% much, much better. But that top 1/100 of 1% is who the Heritage Foundation represents. How can they say it if it is a boldface lie? That is the purpose of propaganda to make lies believable and to use those believable lies to manipulate others. However there was a couple of years out of the last 30 when the middle class standard of living improved and that was when Clinton raised taxes on the ungodly greedy and hard statistics prove this also.

The third sentence is also a lie we know that when Capital Gains taxes were increased during Reagan term, other than the fire sale blip that was caused by rush to beat the tax increase going into effect, a record was set for capital gains tax the next year.

The term the ungodly greedy like to use is to “soak the rich” but nothing could be further from the truth, greed like radioactivity is highly toxic and must be kept under control or it will completely destroy a civilization. Greed is a sickness, a black hole that can never be filled and throughout history many societies have stood idly by and watched as the black hole of greed destroyed everything. America decided in the last century that we would not stand idly by and watch the ungodly greedy destroy America. A tax was levied on “excess greed” to control greed.

The second paragraph starts off with another lie, “periods of higher tax rates are associated with subpar economic growth and subpar revenues.” Clinton raised taxes on the ungodly greedy and balanced the budget and it was an era of outstanding economic growth. Hitler’s theory was if you repeat the lie often enough people will believe it.

The republicans continue their chant for spending cuts but of course not spending cuts for the military. America spends more on our military than all other countries combined. By 2010 America spent more that $700 billion on our military, including the up keep of our nuclear weapons, more than 10 times our nearest competitor, Red China. When it comes to spending cuts the military is our only real choice. If we only spent twice as much as our nearest competitor the deficit would disappear national debt could be paid off in a few years.


We maintain 761 military bases around at a tremendous cost to our society. These bases are maintained to protect the multi-national’s corporate interests in other countries and as a debt collector for those multi-national corporations. At some point we have to realize we can no longer afford to supply a police force for the world.


The Republicans have run America into the ground with military spending, they can’t buy enough million dollar bombs but to paranoid if every dollar we had and every dollar we could borrow from social security trust fund were spent on the military to keep foreigners from killing Americans it would never be enough even if millions died in America for lack of adequate medical care and food.

By 1975 America produced one third of world exports and more than one half of the world’s manufacturing capacity. In 1980 the commie/conservatives came to power and decided to change America from a country of manufacturers to a country of consumers. The commie/conservatives sold America on the illusion that unregulated capitalism and consumerism would replace manufacturing. Working a part time job at Wal-Mart would replace a full time job at a steel mill. America just didn’t decline on its own it was the greed a few that killed America.

The commie/conservative political ideology is simple according to them you just need to unshackle the monster, unfettered greed, and greed will take care of everything. We can clearly see the effect of unfettered greed on our healthcare system. Health Insurance as we know it today was not common until the middle of the last century. The earliest form of health insurance simply replaced lost wages instead of paying for medical expenses because healthcare was affordable. In America healthcare was affordable as groceries or utilities are today. Doctors understood they could simply not charge more than the market could afford to pay but all that changed with the advent of modern day health insurance. Modern day health insurance no longer paid the employee wages when he was sick it paid the medical bills instead. Better yet it paid the doctor directly.

The idea behind health insurance is the same idea behind all insurance systems that only a few are at risk for high medical bills at any one time and the risk is pooled and shared. Fire insurance works the same way people pay $1,000 or so a year for fire insurance if their home burns they collect the insurance company gets rich on the “float” the time between when the money is paid until they have to pay it out in claims. The doctors created some of the first health insurance companies called Blue Cross. This created huge pot of gold for doctors and hospitals, no longer did the doctor look outside to see what kind of car a patient drove to decide how much they would charge, now unfettered greed kicked in they could simply charge what they wanted and they wanted more and more and after they got that they wanted even more. As doctors became the new American millionaires, the CEOs of health insurance companies realized they too could get rich beyond their wildest dreams. Health insurance companies realized that it was not profitable to insurance sick people and took steps to weed the sick out their insurance pool. Employer Health insurance already had a method of weeding out the sick from the insurance. When an employee got a major illness he could no longer work, when he could no longer work he lost his insurance. This would be equivalent to a fire Insurance company canceling your fire insurance once your house caught fire. Fire insurance remains affordable and must pay off on all legitimate fires claims but health insurance systems weeds out most of its bigger liabilities and is completely unaffordable to most people.

Health Insurance is a testament to what greed built. Medicare has an administrative cost of 3% private health insurance has an administrative cost of 26.5% and a good deal of that is spent weeding out the sick to keep from paying their claims.

Imagine having to pay your income tax for the next 30 years this year? To do that you would have to take out a large loan and pay interest on that loan for decades to pay your tax in advance. That is exactly what the “Fair Tax” proposes paying tax now on money you won’t earn until 2043. Not only would you pay the tax in advance you would pay interest on that ta for 30 years. That’s a “fair tax” alright, a rich man’s dream loaning the public money to pay taxes that would not be due for income tax for 30 years.

If you decided to buy a house that cost a $150,000 under the “Fair Tax” plan there would be $45,000 in “Fair Tax” on that purchase. If the $45,000 was borrowed on a 30 year loan the so called “Fair Tax” would cost 34,664 in interest with a 30 year loan at 4.25% interest. The added cost as a direct result of the “Fair Tax” on a home purchased would be an additional $79,664. If the interest was 7.2% the interest alone would be $64,963 for a total cost of the “Fair Tax” and financing your “Fair Tax” would be $104,127. This of course is the result of one purchase under the “Fair Tax.” Your taxes on one purchase would be more double the average yearly income in America. What a dream for the ungodly greedy their tax all but disappear and you would pay twice your yearly income on just one purchase.

“Fair Tax” is just another slogan used to manipulate the public.

By 1999 sixty-nine congressmen and five senators support the “Fair Tax” plan. “The Fair Tax Plan” has been introduced as bill in congress and could become law if passed. The Hitler style slogan “Fair Tax” may put it over the top with the public who will never look beyond the slogan.

A bad court decision in the 1800s declared corporations a person with all the same constitutional rights as if they were a person. When laws were passed to limit the amount of corporate money going to bribe politicians (campaign contributions) the corporations took the case to the Supreme Court and the commie/conservative appointed judges quickly declared that money was free speech and as free speech the bribing of politicians could not be limited.

Psychopaths and corporations share many of the same values. Robert Hare, an expert on psychopaths lists the traits that corporations and psychopaths share.

1) Callous unconcern for the feeling of others:

2) Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships:

3) Reckless disregard for the safety of others:

4) Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning of others:

5) Incapacity to experience guilt:

6) Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior:

There is a bill pending before congress to strip corporations of personhood under the law. Corporations are not people even though there are people employed by corporations; this does not make a corporation a person. A corporation has one reason to exist; to make a profit.

As corporations take more and more control of our government they take more and more control of our daily lives. The current gasoline situation is an indication of just how a corporation can manipulate the price. Price is supposed to be a product of the supply and demand curve. When demand falls price should also fall. In the winter time demand of gasoline is at its lowest point of the year so prices should also be at their lowest point of the year also. But demand for gasoline is lower but prices are at record highs for this time of year. There is of course something else at record highs the oil companies’ CEO salaries.

America exported a record amount of gasoline last year not seen since the early 50s, that right we are exporting record amounts of gasoline. If you want to run prices up monopolies do what they have always done you cut supply to drive price up. We are often told that the reason prices go up in the spring is because of the change over from winter to summer grade but this year we are being told the refineries are already switching to summer grade in midwinter. This is the Enron model when electricity was deregulated in California all of a sudden electricity that had not been a problem before became very scarce blackouts were common. Prices went up 800% and Enron traders were recording laughing about how much damage they were doing to elderly. As soon as deregulations was eliminated the problem disappeared a corporations is a psychopath that wants to make the “biggest profit possible” and the best way to make the biggest profit is to control supply. The Enron traders were also recording telling companies to take their plants down for “maintenance.” When they did the price of electric being traded went through the roof.

This is the same scam being run by the oil companies and no doubt some of those Enron traders now work for the oil monopoly. In America a few oil companies have both a vertical and horizontal monopoly we can regulate them like a utility or use the Anti-trust laws to break them up and restore competition but something must be done.

The oil companies have looked for the demand destruction point, the point prices destroys demand and they know they are close to that point. The solution was not only high prices in the summer but high prices in the winter. As demand for gasoline continues to fall in America supply must be cut to drive prices higher.

Most people understand theft in the terms of context. If you came home and found that your home had been broken into and your television and jewelry stolen you would know that you were dealing with a thief. But if electricity was suddenly “deregulated” in your state and your electric bill went up 8 times you would feel cheated but not realize that you were dealing with a thief. This happened in California and when Enron was caught with its hand in the cookie jar they blamed the few remaining regulations.

The same thing is happen with gasoline in America there is a glut of gasoline as the public is told a gasoline shortage is causing the price to skyrocket record amounts of gasoline are being exported more than was exported than in the early 50s. The oil monopoly knows that to drive price up supply must go down and sending gasoline refined in America to foreign markets.

“The US “is meeting demands for fuels on a worldwide bases” said Thomas Munger, vice president of Fuel Quest. In California electricity was sent out of state as the electricity was shut down in brown outs. The red lights didn’t work the elevators didn’t work. This was done in effort to drive the price of electricity even higher. The burglar and the CEO of Enron and the CEO of the oil companies are all thieves. They have the same mind set. But the difference is the thief can only steal from one person at a time but the CEOs can steal from millions at a time and call the theft good business.

We live in the land of illusion, from movies to television dramas, from big time wrestling to soap operas; Americans are more comfortable with illusion than reality. Is it any wonder that our government began to create illusion for us so we would no longer have to deal with then harsh facts of reality? In the late 70s and early 80s we had double digit inflation. In 1979 the inflation rate was 11.22%. In 1980 inflation rate 13.58% and in 1981 the inflation rate was 10.35%. In just three short years the cost of living went up 35.15%. More than a third of what an American workingman earned went to cover inflation in that time period. Many of the union contracts had cost of living clauses that triggered automatic pay raises tied to the cost of living. If the cost of living went up wages went up. The problem Reagan faced was how to let prices go up and stop wages from going up. The solution was not to solve the inflation problem but to change the way the inflation rate was calculated to create an illusion that inflation was not going up near as quickly as it was.

The cost of living had three major problem areas, housing, energy, and groceries. The cost of actual housing was factor out and replaced with a fictitious figure of how much you would rent your house to yourself and of course you made yourself quite a deal lowering the actual housing cost. Food and energy were considered much too volatile to be included in the inflation calculations so adjustments were made to temper their effect on the cost of living. Next the cost of technology was factored in if your computer had 16K memory and the next computer had 64K memory this was factored in as lowering your cost of living even if only a few owned computers at the time. Government is now in the business of creating illusions to keep wages down while the cost of living increases.