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Quote of the Day: Corruption
“The problem is not that the system has become corrupt, but that corruption has become the system.” – Joe Mannix
Today, over 60% of Americans view the Federal government as corrupt. That is up from 44% in 2017, a dramatic rise. We see plenty of evidence of it every day; a two-tiered justice system, laws and government handouts that favor a small elite, casual disregard of statute law by federal officials. Even on local levels, it has become endemic. No one is held responsible for rising crime in our big cities. Even in small-town America, accountability seems absent. Not one person has been fired over the screwups in Uvalde that led to the death of 19 children. Corruption has become the system.
Those within the system refuse to take responsibility for their failures and use it only to enrich themselves. What can be done? The citizens of this country need to force accountability on those within the government. The starting point is the ballot box this November. That is only the starting point. Citizens need to begin appearing at city council meetings, school board meetings, and county commission meetings. They need to make their voices heard and let those running local government know they are watching. They should flood the local media with letters demanding government accountability. They should contact their state and Federal representative and let them know we are watching.
Will it be easy? No. But freedom isn’t free. It comes at the price of toil, sweat, and blood. We have been riding on the accumulated toil, sweat, and blood of past generations for the last 20 years, and that account is tapped out. It is time for us to renew it, and cleanse the corruption in our government. Now is the time to take action, because at present the price will be toil and sweat. But while you can vote yourself into socialism, once there you have to shoot your way out of it.
You do not have to take action. You can do nothing and accept serfdom.
Published in Group Writing
That’s quite the tag.
Showing up at school meetings.musy be effective, as that gets you on a Federal Watchlist.
I expect as people make more noise, their bank accounts will be frozen. They will be shut out. We will.
They have corrupted elections too. I fear all that is left is civil war. First the farmers will protest and be crushed. Farms placed under military control. Then they go door to door to take guns. Then it all falls into chaos.
That is my fear.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/29/my-publisher-canceled-me-in-favor-of-an-activist-who-threatened-my-life/
This is eternal. How can we win when all the people in power cave?
They want to murder us. Americans shooting Americans is coming. They will start it. They will use violence to save their power. Blood is going to be the price I fear we will pay.
I am not being defeatist here. I don’t want this. I want voting to work. I just don’t have faith it will.
As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “The tree of liberty must be renewed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. That is its natural manure.”
I would’ve said 70 years.
I am with you there. I just see it as the last chance to keep the country together. I hope voting works because it is easier than the alternative.
Oh sure. And the logical next step. We will see if Republicans ever again win the White House. I have my doubts/
I share them, but on a brighter note GA, AZ, and WI have improved their voter integrity laws. PA is probably a lost cause but we will see. November will be a test for that. If it goes significantly worse then expected we’ll know that we have to start making alternate arrangements to secure our rights and our liberties.
Not to mention, a man with a long-documented history of official corruption and influence peddling was elected president; while law enforcement worked to hide his crimes (“Russian disinformation”) and the media looked the other way.
Elected . I don’t think that means what it used to mean.
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Wow, Mannix! Haven’t seen that in a long time.
Look you were way worse off during the 1970s. When there was a terrorist bombing every single day for two years straight.
That lead to Reagan and the 80s.
I feel thats much more likely to happen again than a civil war.
Maybe. But, in the 1970s, Democrats did not find the American flag offensive.
No they just burned it at protests of the Viet Nam war.
Since I was there in the 1960s and 1970s – and living in ground zero for the antiwar movement, Ann Arbor, MI – I feel qualified to weigh in on this.
In the 1960s the Democrats were largely pro-American and anti-Communist. They may have been left-wing, but they still firmly believed in the American dream and in the capitalist system. (I know because my father was that kind of Democrat.) They may have wanted what they viewed as its excesses controlled, but they didn’t want it abolished. The antiwar movement was seen as a fringe, possibly run by the Soviets. (True as it turned out, but no one knew that at the time.)
The political violence of the late 1960s and 1970s was also fringe, opposed by most Democrats. It was not part of the mainstream Democrat view. Those burning flags may have voted Democrat, but they did not run the Democrat party. Eugene McCarthy represented the extreme left wing of the Democrat Party. Today he would be exiled from the party due to insufficient leftism and because he was basically honest and not a political grifter. McGovern was also on the left of the party, but not as far left as McCarthy.
McGovern’s run opened the door to those now running the Democrat Party. Because he was so far left mainstream Democrats avoided supporting him. (Although he never admitted it, I suspect my left-wing dad voted for Nixon because he so disliked McGovern’s policies.) Those on the fringe ran his campaign. They also highjacked the party mechanism during the mid and late 1970s. These were Marxists, but they kept it hidden. They also led to the Reagan Democrat phenomena in the 1980s. As they drove the party left, the anti-communist, pro-America Democrats left, as they no longer felt at home in the party. (Not my dad. He continued voting Democrat even as the party moved too far left for his comfort.)
The difference between today and the 1970s is the Weathermen, Symbionese Liberation Army, and similar violent groups were pariahs to those running the Democrats. Today, Antifa and BLM are paramilitary wings of the Democrat Party serving the same function as the KKK did in the 1870s-1920s. Yes, some of the 1960s radicals came from elite families, but when they got caught, they were convicted and did hard time. Or were killed resisting arrest. They did not have the catch-and-release treatment meted to Antifa.
Please flesh this out into a post!
Whenever I get the time. (Anyone got a time dilator handy?)
All government is corrupt in the sense that members pursue their own interests and the further government is from the people they are suppose to work for, the worse the corruption. Some government is necessary. Places have to defend themselves from each other and from foreign interests. So we need police and military and some sort of foreign policy apparatus. Military by its nature is remote from the people they’re defending. We had to form a military to take land then defend it and to defend our borders once we kicked the Brits out. We had designed a good system after the war, and it wasn’t characterized by corruption. When we had to do something important in our Defense, we pulled together folks from different branches and trained them for how we understood the challenge. The problem is all big government becomes corrupt because it is very difficult (impossible really) to make it accountable. The military quickly learned whether it was capable and disciplined enough to win victories and, as a minimum, avoid death. The rest of the federal bureaucracy did not face such tests so just gradually got worse. Now it runs the country for its own benefit. Of course there are key giant companies, and a few politicians. Police were close enough to actually function, but big state bureaucrats took control and are destroying them. It’s the nature of big government. There is no fix. It has to be abolished by citizens, business interests small enough to not be dependent on national corruption or the corruption of state bureaucratic interests. We have forgotten why our system was ground up. Now we have leaders who believe that better trained folks at the center can run us better than ordinary folks. The degree of historical ignorance and knowledge of the contemporary world outside our borders (former borders) is vast and lack of knowledge about who we were and why is destroying us. They do not understand that it will destroy the whole place, even if the Chinese don’t help them.
This is my take of it, though I was 1-9 in the 1970’s.
this feels like 1979 to me, without a Regan on the horizon.
DeSantis. Also, you may not realize how scorned Reagan was in 1979. All the Bien Pesant Republicans treated him like the Never-Trumpers treated Trump. They didn’t come around until after the assassination attempt.
No, I was not aware of much but my Parents voting for him.
I fear Trump and DeSantis will war and it will be devastating.
Carter just lacked understanding, he wasn’t purposefully trying to destroy freedom. These guys sort of know what they’re doing, they just don’t understand where it ends up. The country is too big and complex to be run from the top, but they are too corrupt to learn so will just shrink in numbers as the place collapses. It’s not as if we didn’t have all history, with no exceptions, to tell us where it’s headed. What’s different is the size and complexity of our system and the ignorance of those seeking power. The collapse will be very quick and the distance of the fall unprecedentedly disastrous.
There’s more to that then just this phrase in Jefferson’s writings. In the same letter he seemed to be advocating a revolution every 20 years.
Jefferson, who at the time, was the American minister to France (we call them ambassadors now), also expressed his support for the French Revolution, though not in the same letter where he talked about the tree of liberty. Even when he was recalled to the United States to take on the office of Secretary of State, he continued to express support for that revolution, even as the abuses of it became clear.
Later in life when he was retired from politics, he did express a change in mind, stating that if the French had retained their monarchy adopting a system similar to Britain, the abuses would not have been so bad.
The United States was lucky with their revolution, and that probably colored Jefferson’s attitude towards them. But really, what the French experienced was the rule and what the United States experienced was the exception.
Be careful what you wish for.
In Canada, in some provinces, it was made impossible to enter the type of buildings where certain “public” meetings were being held, unless an individual agreed to being masked up and showing proof of having injected the clot shots into their bloodstreams.
This heavily enforced situation then effectively “de-citizen-ized’ members of the public from exercising their right to speak out about the very excessive “mandates” that were preventing them from entering the buildings and speaking out.
I imagine with Gates gearing up for Big Pandemic Number Two, that could become the situation here.
Even without the draconian pandemic mandates taking over, the people inside the cabal have seen to it that “public” meetings are held at very odd hours. In Lake County, the official county Board of Supervisors meeting is held at 9 Am on Tuesdays. (When most of the public is at work.)
Additionally many “public meetings” have sign in sheets, so you must arrive at the meeting early enough to get a spot on the sign in sheet, should you wish to address the public officials and the public. After you do all that, you find out you are “legally” allowed some three minutes to make your point. (Some individuals have found rules and regs in their state charters that forbid this type of “legal” suppression of free speech.)
One protection that people in Calif have is The Brown Act, which can allow the public to overthrow activities that took place to help establish new regulations for the school district, water district, et al. — if it is found out that major discussions were held in private and not in meetings open to the public.
Of course it still remains difficult to utilize this Act’s provisions, as if meetings are held in private, how do we in the public find out?
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The Left here in Lake County Calif has been carefully taught the many benefits of the 1789 French overthrow of the monarchy and basically nothing about the downside of that “accomplishment.”
Nary a word spent discussing how first those revolting went after the “rich,” some of whom were merely privileged. (Hmm, that word “privileged” seems familiar and right now it is becoming that common pejorative used to slam white people, including “rednecks” and “trailer trash.”)
Not too much later on in France, and history witnessed those who were the revolutionaries being dragged off to be guillotined themselves. In some regions, the primary revolution of 1789 took place, followed by the counter revolution, followed by the counter-counter revolution. Historians have opined that had there been the ability to photograph and film these events, the 12 years of revolt would have been seen to rival the bloodshed of the Third Reich’s holocaust.
All of this set the stage for one Napolepon Bonaparte, who laid vast areas of Europe to waste in his attempt to become a modern day Alexander the Conqueror.
Seawriter – I agree with you……it is corrupt and people are still ok with it. Otherwise, we would see significant changes. Maybe the mid-terms will tell us something new. If not, batten down the hatches and gird your loins………..