River Cities' Reader Issue 1009 May 2023 Ed Newmann Cartoon - Hunger-Park Parade
Inside this column:
- Scott Stafne's Guest Commentary on Article III Courts
- Border Insecurity Hurting Children Most
- Protection, Education, and Freedom from Debt Slavery
- School Districts Require Parental Vigilance
- Do Not Underestimate Progressive Chaos
America is experiencing a non-organic, deliberate, and highly orchestrated socioeconomic destabilization whether we admit or not. The underlying agenda is to replace America's governance model as a Constitutional Republic to a global Progressive version of Neo-Feudalism, mirroring all its worst aspects and those of Marxism, Fascism, Socialism, Communism, and Monarchism.
Every one of the above is a top-down model of governance with precious few haves and super-majorities of have-nots who answer to a centralized authority that owns and/or controls all resources and means of production in a society.
The notion that Marxism, Socialism, and Communism are “far-left” models, while Fascism and Monarchism are “far-right,” is absurd to its core because there is no discernible differences where it matters – ownership/control of resources and means of production.
It is far more accurate to differentiate governance models according to whether they are top-down or bottom-up. Liberalism, Conservatism, Populism, and Libertarianism are all examples of bottom-up governance models that embrace individual supremacy, private property ownership and control, including control over one's own labor to thrive.
Capitalism is not included because Capitalism is not a governance model; it is an economic one that hasn't meaningfully existed in America in over a century due mostly to excessive governance intervention and corruption. True Capitalism functions through market competition that is unimpeded by larger influences and forces that intentionally corrupt competition for unfair advantage/disadvantage via barriers to the marketplace, such as inequitable regulations, access to capital, and media manipulation. This more appropriately defines Stakeholder Capitalism, which can only be described as a complete bastardization of Capitalism and could not be further from Capitalism's principles of pure competition.
Capitalism and bottom-up governance depend upon the rule of law. America is founded as a Constitutional Republic under rule of law, embracing individual supremacy over group supremacy – group supremacy is critical in top-down models where arbitrary administrative law is the norm.
To this end, the founders established the U.S. Constitution to protect individuals from government interference in our pursuits, enumerating specific authorities to government as a matter of agency on the people's behalf. Without the rule of law, adhered to and enforced equally, chaos ensues culminating in destruction, despair and death across society.
Scott Stafne's Guest Commentary on Article III Courts
Throughout the1960s and '70s, Bettendorf, Iowa, distinguished itself with the service of Albert Stafne as City Attorney. A brilliant and eloquent man, deeply moral and dedicated to the law, Al inspired his oldest son Scott to also pursue a career in law. Scott graduated fourth in his class from the University of Iowa Law School. After working for a law firm in Indiana for several years, Scott earned his Masters of Law and opened his own practice in Washington State, where he has been representing individuals ever since.
After the financial crisis of 2008-2009, underpinned by highly risky investments called derivatives, many in the form of securitized mortgages, the U.S. Treasury and Congress deemed favored banks and financial institutions “too big to fail.” This justified an unjustifiable bailout by taxpayers for these criminals' extreme dereliction and abuse of financial power that has continued unabated and allowed to grow exponentially, creating the looming financial crisis that promises to make 2008-2009 pale by comparison.
Scott's practice has evolved from the 2008-2009 housing travesty, representing homeowners against phantom banks in collusion with government regulators and the courts in a morass of fraudulent claims and foreclosures that have devastated unwitting American families for over a decade. Scott also puts to paper his thoughts and what he has learned in an effort to educate the public on the need-to-know complexities of sinister mortgages securitization schemes to transfer ever more wealth from the 99 percent to the 1 percent.
Scott uniquely challenges the devolution of Article III courts and judges in American jurisprudence with the prevalent use of senior judges who arguably no longer qualify. Part I of the article published on page six of the printed May 2023 edition #1009 was originally written in 2015 and posted on Scott's blog at Academia.edu. Sadly, eight years later, the crisis in the courts Scott writes about is as relevant as ever. Read the full essay at RCReader.com/y/stafne3.
Border Insecurity Hurting Children Most
During a recent congressional hearing held by the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, details rarely reported in the media were revealed, horrifying viewers and shifting perception to the great harm being done to children by our open U.S.-Mexican border policies. In fairness to personnel dealing with this crisis, the gross mismanagement is the result of unprecedented numbers of unaccompanied children for which resources are strained well beyond capacity.
The vast majority of unaccompanied children crossing our Southern border are adolescents (16-17 years old), according to HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) Director Robin Dunn-Marcos. Once these minors turn 18, they are released from ORR's custodial care and disappear into the interior of the United States.
Younger immigrant tweens are not so lucky, often released to unrelated sponsors who are not properly vetted, and only there to claim these children to exploit them as labor for a network of facilities, farms, and work gangs that employ them in direct violation of U.S. labor laws. According to Dunn-Marcos, child [slave] labor has risen 283 percent since 2015.
Wisdom demands refraining from accepting an open border believing it provides a better life for those crossing because that rationale is almost pure fiction after years of relentless abuse of and by the system. Profit lies at the heart of this chaotic tentacle, one of many belonging to a larger agenda to destabilize the U.S.
NGO's' recruitment practices worldwide, cartels' predatory tactics, corrupt services ranging from transportation, legal consulting, documentation, and banking to housing, communications, and, in some cases, employment, gobble up hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars. Contracted child services at the border is the most egregious with almost no accountability, and for whom HHS cannot account for 85,000 unaccompanied children it has processed since 2021. (C-Span.org/video/?527458-1/refugee-resettlement-director-testifies-unaccompanied-children-us-mexico-border)
Whether incompetence or malfeasance, it means either morons or monsters are in charge. After all this time (decades) and epic failure of our 554 elected representatives and the nearly two million bureaucrats they oversee, the necessary overhaul requires leadership, vision, and an iron will. Congress cannot possibly monitor the vast bureaucracy that cannot execute responsibilities as envisioned due to sheer size alone. Which leaves the cold harsh truth that the real reason failure, suffering, insecurity, and instability continues to grow is that we the American people are allowing it with our silent consent and inexhaustible willingness to do nothing. It is unreasonable to think congress can see this done without a measures of magnitude greater participation by we the people.
The media bundles adolescents and near-adult minors with much younger children in almost all its reporting when covering unaccompanied children crossing the border. This deliberately misdirects American perceptions about the plight of children being placed in work environments instead of with families who would otherwise be obliged to at least enroll them in school.
Protection, Education, and Freedom from Debt Slavery
As Cathrine Austin Fitts oft quotes, “A society that refuses to protect its children, deprives them of a decent education, then enslaves them with debt, is a society that will not, cannot survive.” This scenario characterizes 21st Century America to a tee.
Beginning with an incomprehensible childhood immunization schedule that has grown from three vaccines in the 1950s to 73 vaccines today, injected into newborns up to three years of age. If that were not enough, in 2006 a vaccine to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV) in women was developed for cervical cancer that effects less than 1 percent of the U.S. female population (the CDC reports 0.6), yet is recommended for children ages nine to 11, including males.
In 2018, information emerged that the safety and efficacy clinical trials for the HPV vaccine were compromised, similar to the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA injections for COVID. The real travesty of such dereliction in medical science is the long shadow it casts over protocols that comply with rigorous testing standards and deserve our confidence and trust. More can be learned from The HPV Vaccine on Trial by Mary Holland, and TheHighWire.com/videos/exposed-the-hpv-vaccine-highwire-episode-79/.
Most children are enrolled in preschool at ages three through five, then on to kindergarten through grade 12, where most are subjected to a demonstrably deficient K-12 curriculum known as Common Core. This substandard education programming has now failed many students over two decades, especially in math and reading evidenced by dismal national test scores, with no obvious course correction.
NationalReview.com/corner/common-core-has-failed-now-what/
Instead, school districts favor pivoting to Social Emotional Learning (SEL), rumored to be renamed “Living Skills” after the “big takeaway” from a study of 2000 parents was conducted by the Thomas Fordham Institute, which found the parents majorly supported social emotional programming, but didn't like the name. Sel.FordhamInstitute.org/#intro
Common Core has not only deprived too many students of the basics in reading, writing, arithmetic, and science, it has neglected essential cognitive skills such as critical thinking, comparative analysis, logical problem solving, reading (especially fiction), listening, focused attention and memory retention, the absence of which manifests in irrational intolerance of differences, extreme emotionalism, excessive self-absorption, and illogical disconnected conclusions that negatively impact realities.
Add into the mix increased isolation, a toxic dependency on social media, sleep deprivation, it comes as no surprise that the alarming rise in depression, self harm, drug use, gender dysphoria, criminal behavior (vandalism, robbery, violence), and suicide in preadolescence-young adults attest to increasingly chaotic environments that can arrest brain development, resulting in impaired reasoning.
OPB.org/article/2023/04/25/the-truth-about-teens-social-media-and-the-mental-health-crisis/
Jean Piaget described child development as occurring in four stages: (1) Sensorimotor (birth-18/24 months) absorbing information through their senses and learning that objects are still there even if they can't be seen, known as object permanence; (2) Preoperational (two to seven years), understanding that words can mean different things, known as symbolic meaning. Children are intent on themselves and their emotions, and can only focus on one aspect of a problem or situation at a time, known as egocentrism. (3) Concrete operational (seven to 11 years), developing logical thinking and problem solving for things they can physically see, using Conversation, Classification, Seriation, Reversibility, Decentering (focusing on more than one aspect of a problem at the same time), and Transitivity (how things relate to each other); and finally (4) Formal operational (teens-adulthood), More complex cognitive capabilities emerge known as abstract thinking, hypothetical problem-solving, and deductive reasoning (conclusions from information gleaned from one's environment).
Piaget believed that these four cognitive categories always develop (albeit in varying degrees) in this specific order. The volumes of supporting evidence for his theory begs the question: If any of these four stages are disrupted along the cognitive development path, what are the consequences of these disruptions in long-term cognitive capacities?
SimplyPsychology.org/piaget.html
PositivePsychology.com/piaget-stages-theory/
Harvard refers to higher cognitive abilities in children as executive functions that include working memory, mental flexibility, and self control. Developmental achievements include working toward goals, planning, self-regulating behaviors and emotions, and adapting to unexpected situations. Problems with these executive functions present with tantrums, lack of impulse control, disorganization, poor time management, inability to conceive the future, or for achieving independence.
PositivePsychology.com/piaget-stages-theory/
The above cognitive development explanations, if honestly evaluated in terms of social conditions currently evolving, especially after COVID lockdowns and the harm such mitigations caused to children's maturation, including babies and toddlers, perhaps viable course corrections can occur.
School Districts Require Parental Vigilance
Meanwhile, parents and grandparents need to up their game by investigating behind the curtain, looking much deeper into things such as the SEL programming being deployed in PreK, K-12 and college. Learn the lingo being used, in some cases, to circumvent parental oversight and public scrutiny. The myriad new definitions of words, terms, acronyms, and concepts, devised under the radar, matter because such vernacular often has legal ramifications, and/or don't mean what you assume they do. Casel.org/
Familiarize yourselves with your school district's policies for things having seemingly nothing to do with academia or scholastic achievement. Across the country, school districts are quietly implementing gender-transition programs that specifically exclude students' parents from knowing or participating. This trend includes an unusually abusive policy by Linn-Mar Community School District in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, upon the Board's approval of Policy 504.13-R on April 25, 2022, sanctioning the creation of Gender Support Plans for students in secret without the knowledge of their parents, let alone permission for potential medical interference.
Policy 504.13-R additionally allows students to use restrooms, locker rooms, and facilities of the gender they identify with. Teachers and students are required to use students' preferred pronouns or be suspended (teachers can be fired). 504.13-R. is arguably abusive to other students and teachers who don't participate in these administrative gender constructs.
Parents Defending Education (PDE), on behalf of seven of the Linn-Mar District's parents, filed a lawsuit against the Linn-Mar Community School District on August 8, 2022, claiming violations of Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act (FERPA) that protects parents' inalienable rights to raise their children without government or school interference. 2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html
These policies would normally be in direct violation of federal law FERPA that entitles parents to be fully informed on all matters relative to their children, including access to all permanent files kept by the school. Using classic lawfare, the school began storing all information relative to students' gender transition in temporary files not covered by FERPA.
Most kids reach adulthood convinced college is the only path to success in life, so a significant number of them must secure loans to attend. These loans are deeply sinister financial traps that will handicap young adults, some into old age. The Obama Administration nationalized student loans and it has never been more predatory or profitable for the government's financial partners (including the universities and colleges) to encourage this debt slavery, regardless that it financially debilitates many students for decades, well beyond their college experience, depriving them of other pursuits that would otherwise enrich their lives.
Do Not Underestimate Progressive Chaos
I am again reminded that Progressive ideology (not liberalism) encourages social division, whether derived from racial, gender, religious, or income differences, to name only a few. Where none exists, Progressives will create division among groups, regardless of how inane. A good example is the irrational divisiveness currently trending among transgender groups and … whom, exactly? I personally don't know a soul who gives a fig if adults want to change genders. Most would encourage and support such decisions. The objection comes from the potential dismembering of children, or adults behaving in a sexually provocative manner in the presence of children, conduct that otherwise can lead to criminal prosecution. Acceptance of transgenders and rejection of child mutilation are not in the same galaxies.
One thing is for sure: Progressivism eventually becomes regressive until it degrades into something completely oppressive. Progressives sow division because it guarantees absolute control over groups that in turn comprise entire populations. It is a centuries-old war strategy that still works like a charm.
I did not mention politics in the above list of group divisions because politics has a far greater overarching purpose in Progressive ideology. If you remember nothing else, remember this: In Progressive ideology, everything is political. Every social issue, economic problem, religious conflict, governance model – everything is political, and requires a political solution that only a government authority can provide. Sound familiar?
This is precisely why the American constitutional doctrine of individual supremacy must be obliterated, and replaced with the Progressive doctrine of group supremacy in order to keep political division fully operational in managing global populations for the Great Reset (WeForum.org/great-reset).
The Davos devotees are accelerating implementation of the most critical component – centralized digital transacting masquerading as Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The European Union is currently working on its third iteration on its just digital version, the eEuro, in a surprisingly fast-tracked exploration. Its uptake remains to be seen, especially as arbitrary progressive rules governing the eEuro become ever more regressive, eventually incorporating social scoring, not unlike corporate social scoring known as Environmental Social Governance (ESG), predicted by SEC Commission Chair Gary Genzler to attract $130 trillion in global asset investment during recent congressional hearing on the SEC.
C-span.org/video/?527459-1/securities-exchange-commission-oversight-hearing
CentralBanking.com/fintech/cbdc/7958587/digital-euro-could-be-available-via-bank-apps-ecb-says
