Copyright © 1996 By Ray Thomas

WHO IS JOHN GALT?

That is the question that was asked as an agonized scream by those who could not understand why the world was going down hill so fast throughout Ayn Rand's landmark book, Atlas Shrugged. It was in this book (still available in bookstores, usually in the classics, philosophy, or political section) that she introduced the amazing (new?) philosophy of Objectivism as a thread running through an amazingly fascinating fiction story. A story in which John Galt, the inventor of the world's first perpetual motion motor vowed to stop the motor of the world when the company he was working for took the ownership of his invention from him and gave it to the collective they had created.

He succeeded in doing so by the simple act of convincing others whose creative and productive endeavors were being stolen by the looters in society and given to the moochers, whose need became a demand that had to be supplied by those who had the ability to supply it, to go on strike.

Workers claim that without them, the world would stop. They say their muscle is what causes things to be built. But what they seem to forget is that without the creative ideas of the creators and the inventors, and without the work of the producers who actually design the systems their muscles operate,create a society that is dependent on the government for their daily survival. This creates millions of people who will vote to keep the looters in power so they will continue to write checks to the moochers.

It is a fact that there are a lot more poor people than there are rich people, so the looters pander to the poor and set them against the rich. Each poor person has a vote. That's what the moochers are after, so they can stay in power. So the answer to the question: "Who is John Galt?" is this: he is the symbol of the individualist in a collectivist world. Of the creator and the producer in a world full of moochers and looters who want what he earns without having to work and earn it themselves. Collectivism will ultimately rule us if we don't go out of our way to stop those who would force it upon us.

COMMON SENSE

In 1768, Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet entitled: "Common Sense," which woke up a lot of people to the fact that they were being raped by their government, and to the fact that things did not have to be that way. This simple pamphlet did, in fact, lead to the American Revolution and to the creation of the United States of America. With the proviso that I am not promoting armed rebellion, I hope this report has much the same result. To wake people up to the fact that they are being raped by people in their own government in a far worse manner than were the colonists who created this country. That it is not now, as it was not then, the natural way of things. To cause them to take action to change things so they may stop being raped and might cause a return to the Constitutional protections we should have enjoyed from the first.

CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION? YEAH, RIGHT!

You say the Constitution protects you from that? Don't make me laugh! People in our government have been ignoring that august document from the first, when they hastened to make laws similar to the British Admiralty Laws that allowed the British to loot our shipping without much more than the pretense that we were breaking the law. To confiscate (and sell, and keep the money) ship and cargo on the unsupported word of an informer who was often one of the government agents involved in the confiscation, who usually got a cut of the loot. Laws which forced the owners to sue at their own expense to get their property back, and be forced to pay the government's legal costs in the bargain, win or lose. All this without the government even having to prove wrongdoing on the part of the shipper. So what we did was trade one set of crooks for another.

BUT NOT ANY LONGER, RIGHT? WRONG!

Is it still happening today? The answer is an emphatic yes. There are so many ways in which the government at all levels is ignoring the Constitution that I wouldn't even have enough room here to list them, even if I could keep your attention for that long. But I will call your attention to just a few ways in which they're doing it:

• Ex Post Facto Laws: The Constitution, in Article 1, Section IX, paragraph 3, states categorically that: No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed. You can't be any clearer than that, can you (Ex Post Facto was a common term at the time meaning: retroactive)? Has this stopped them? Not in the least. One of the most recent cases of the national government ignoring that provision of the Constitution is Clinton's retroactive tax increase. The one he passed as quickly as he could after becoming president on the promise of no tax increases.

  Another example of the common use of retroactive laws is the Environmental Protection Agency's use of a law that allows them to confiscate the property of people who own property for violating environmental laws on that property. Never mind that these "laws" weren't even in effect at the time they were "broken," and which were broken as much as one hundred years ago. It doesn't matter that the current owner wasn't even born at the time, and he or she did not own the property then. If a bureaucrat decides that environmental laws now on the books were broken as much as 100 years ago, they can confiscate the land and force the current owners to pay big fines.

• Confiscation Laws: Let's look at the very concept of confiscation of property of "lawbreakers" to keep them from enjoying the benefit of their "ill-gotten gains." That this very concept is a violation of the Constitution's insistence that we are innocent until proven guilty need not even be said. But the practice of allowing the government to simply say someone is a lawbreaker and be able to take their property without having to prove them guilty of anything is not only a violation of our Constitution, it is morally wrong.

• RICO Laws: The RICO laws are the bureaucrats' way of extending the old Admiralty Laws that allowed the government to plunder on the high seas onto land so they can now plunder us everywhere. The original intent of the RICO laws was to keep drug dealers from being able to tap their huge fortunes to pay high-powered lawyers who routinely made the Feds look like fools in court. This concept, in itself, is unconstitutional, no matter who it involves. But the laws that originally allowed them to rape the real bad guys are now being used to do the same to honest people for the most trivial of crimes. Example: recently, a man was caught in the act of receiving oral sex from a prostitute in the back seat of what turned out to be a car jointly owned by himself and his ex wife. He and his ex wife lost the car and the courts ruled that her lack of knowledge of the act made no difference. Soon, they'll be confiscating cars for traffic violations (A law that was proposed in Colorado in 1995 would have allowed the police to impound the vehicle of any motorist caught driving, not without insurance, but just without proof of insurance. Fortunately, it did not survive -- this time -- even though it did pass the House Transportation and Energy Committee on an 8-5 vote.). Do you think a $10,000 (or even maybe a $50,000 fine) fine for not having a piece of paper in the car is fair? [Update: Since this was originally written in 1996, it has now become legal for the state to confiscate cars for nonpayment of traffic fines and to do so if the driver is found to be driving without proof of insurance. -RT]
  CRIMINALIZE YOUR ENEMIES

  Actually, I'm taking a big chance in writing this, and my other condemnations of the looters in our government because under RICO, all they have to do if they get enough of me is to claim I am committing a crime -- any crime -- and raid me to confiscate my computers and all my files, never to be seen again outside of their offices. And they don't even have to charge me with a crime in order to do this. All they have to do is claim a crime. Think it can't happen? Think again. It has already happened in Boulder, Colorado, where Federal Marshals broke into a private home and confiscated the computers and all the files belonging to a man who was in the process of exposing the depredations of the Scientology Church -- in a copyright infringement case! A civil case in which a determination of guilt had not even yet been made, and has not yet as this is written (June, 1996). They later gave the computers and files back after he sued, but with the offending files deleted by the Scientology Church, who were in control of the files all during the time they were confiscated.

  This was an unconstitutional act, but did that stop them? And what if the owner of these computers and files had (rightly) pulled a gun (in his own home) to defend himself from what may have been criminals? They'd have shot and killed him as casually as they would swat a fly, and never be bothered by conscience or by law. (They proved that at Ruby Ridge. The criminals who killed Weaver's wife, their son, and their family dog have not only not been charged with a crime, some of them have even been given commendations!) [Update: Lon Horiuchi, the gunman who murdered Weaver's wife, was charged in state court. But the feds got it moved to federal court where it was done away with. -RT]

  A PRACTICE RUN?

  Maybe this was a practice run to determine the degree of opposition from the people they would run into if they did it to others who oppose them? If so, it was a complete success because people not involved personally just didn't seem to care unless, like me, they were already keeping track of the depredations of government agents. The fact that they can get away with these kinds of depredations against the people, and the fact that they would even try it, proves that this government is no longer a lawful government. It is a government of crooks, from the top down.

  Many of the people who carry out these illegal acts don't even realize they are acting illegally. Bill Licatovich, a spokesman for the U. S. Marshals' Service in Washington, when they recently held up a K-Mart and emptied the cash registers of $53,000again in a civil case (Washington Times, April 21, 1996) replied, when asked about the raid: "I'm not going to get into the question of power of government; that's beyond me." Beyond him? It would seem that anybody charged with doing something illegal for the government would at least question the legality of their actions. But apparently most don't know, and many just don't care.

RUSHING HELL WITH A TEACUP FULL OF WATER

That's what it's like trying to keep up with all the cons, scams, schemes, and "programs" the looters in our governments (at all levels) have going at all times, each one designed to take away one more small right on some pretext, slowly tightening the noose until they are in control of our every move. Here are some examples:

• Numbering us: Professor Kurk E. Koch, who has lectured at 100 universities in 65 countries on five continents about the efforts to control us has said: "Each person will have a registered number, without which he will not be allowed to buy or sell -- anyone who refuses to take part in this universal system will have no right to exist."

  Zbigniew Brezhinsky, former National Security Adviser (and certainly no friend to those who just wish to be left alone by their government) wrote in his book, "Between Two Ages," this: "The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities." So one of the first things they want to accomplish is to tie each and every one of us to a single number and force us to use that number in everything we do. In this manner they can, with a few keystrokes, call up a dossier for each of us and know what we've been doing, right up to this minute.

  THE THIRTY YEAR GOVERNMENT PROMISE

  That's why FDR created the Social Security system. I'll bet you thought it was because of his concern for retirees, didn't you? Not even! His purpose was, in addition to getting access to billions of extra dollars without raising taxes, to create that number and require each of us to have it. And later on to be able to use it for universal identification -- the very thing he promised would never happen.

  He promised that number would never be used for general identification. Sure he did. He even printed, right on the card we're all required to obtain, "NOT TO BE USED FOR IDENTIFICATION." But he "forgot" to make a law to back up this promise (surprise, surprise!) and, like most other government promises, this one began to be flagrantly violated about 30 years later (after the people to whom it was made were either dead or senile and others didn't even know about the promise) when they (quietly, with no fanfare and no announcement) took that notation off the Social Security card. Of course, even before this, the looters in our government were working like beavers to build government data bases using that number (before we found out), and were encouraging private businesses and local governments to do likewise so they (the feds) could legally share the information.

• The Privacy Act of 1974 Con: Then in the seventies, when people had begun to tumble to what was going on, they forced Congress to pass the Privacy Act of 1974 which ostensibly prevented the Feds from creating any new data bases based on the SSN. Unfortunately, the law didn't stop local governments and private businesses from using the SSN as an identifier, and there was no other law against it (surprise, surprise!). It has now become the almost universal identifier those opposed to the Social Security system feared in the thirties. The Feds encourage its use by local governments, private enterprise (especially credit reporting agencies), and by utilities (which are usually the only game in town) so they (the Feds) can share the information and add it to their own data bases through the back door, thereby getting around the Privacy Act. (They use databases that were already in existence in 1974/ They just change its use.) It was all a con. I don't have to tell anybody who has been paying the least bit of attention in recent years that you can hardly go to the bathroom any more without somebody demanding your Social Security number.

• National Identification Card: They've tried many ploys over the years to get some kind of a system going that allows them to issue every American a national ID card based on the SSN. One of the most recent is Clinton's National Health Care scam. Since that failed (so far) they're now claiming an immigration crisis (which doesn't exist) and calling for a national ID card to help identify illegal immigrants. [They tacked a measure onto the new Immigration Bill that will force state DMVs to "collect" and print on the face of your driver's license, your Social Security number by the end of 1999. -RT]

  They'll keep on trying as long as we allow them to stay in power, or until they succeed in numbering us all. And with technology what it is today, they can encode a chip in the card to contain all the information there is on each of us, from the earliest records there are, up to right now. We'll be required to produce that card to be able to do anything, possibly including operating a public restroom door, right up to paying taxes. When that day comes the looters will control us -- absolutely.

• Control of the schools: The looters have been working since day one to gain complete control over our children and what is taught them in school, from the earliest age. They know that if you can teach them that collectivism is the best way at an age when they don't have sufficient knowledge to be able to dispute it, they will have, by the time they become adults, been conditioned to be dedicated socialists. I was a conditioned and dedicated liberal in 1958 when I, along with a friend, tried to promote the establishment of an international disaster rescue organization -- with nothing in mind (I thought) except to help people -- that would have to be, by its very definition, a sovereign state. The state would be created through the ratification of its charter by many other sovereign states (as the United Nations was created), and financed through money those states were to give it as well as through charitable donations (Sound familiar? Remember UNESCO?).

  Then my brothers handed me a copy of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," and changed my life forever. Reading this book not only convinced me that socialism (aka: collectivism and altruism) was not only illogical, it was also criminal in that it depended on the looting of the earnings of those who produced new wealth through their endeavors and gave those earnings thus looted to those who do not, or will not earn it themselves, in order to buy their votes and thus stay in power. I thank God our idea was not accepted, although I still believe Jack Kennedy appropriated parts of it when he created the Peace Corps.

• National Education Association: It was in the sixties that they came up with the ploy to create a national teacher's union that would not be, in fact, a union so much as it would be a way for the collectivists to gain control of the school curriculum and be able to con the money out of the public to finance it. It was -- and is -- a collectivist political action group designed to not only make sure collectivism is taught in schools but to control the teachers themselves through their livelihood.

• Conditioning our children: You have but to look at your children's schoolbooks to see that they're being conditioned to be collectivists every day in school. What's more, you can't turn on the television, the radio, or read a (mainstream) newspaper or magazine without being bombarded with collectivist propaganda from all directions.

• Children's rights: One of the cons they're using is to stir up support that will allow them to not only control what our children are taught, but the children themselves. The whole children's rights campaign now raging (in 1996 and beyond) has that as its basic goal. Bureaucrats in the business of taking children away from their parents are very interested in just how many children they can take away from parents because their very funding depends on the number of children they can take.

• Discrediting parents: To discredit parents is one of their number one goals because if the parent has no say in how his or her children are raised, there is no way they can control what they're learning. Gaining control of the kids and getting them out of private schools whose teachings don't adhere to the collectivist line is essential to them.

• Beyond Common Sense: One of their common ploys is to carry a concept to a point where it goes beyond common sense and insist that everybody look at it that way. One example of this is a federal judge in Texas who ruled that: parents "give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school." (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 8, 1996, bottom of the editorial page.) The fact that there is no Constitutional or statutory support for this decision doesn't seem to matter to Judge Melinda Harmon. Nor does it matter that such a ruling goes way beyond common sense. She doesn't care. All she is interested in seems to be the advancement of the Child Protective Services agenda of destroying parental authority in the raising of their children so the government can gain complete control over what is taught them. In this manner, the elitists can condition them to all be good little collectivists without interference from the parents.

• Control of the news media: People who were educated under the auspices of the NEA are now working in, and controlling the news media, both print and television, as well as most of radio, movies, and as many other outlets as they can gain control of. It's not a conspiracy, it is simply that most of the people who are running things have been taught that collectivism, altruism, and socialism are the right way, and this is obvious in the slant they put on the news and in the plots for TV and movies, which vilify the industrialist and deify the "helpless" so as to raise mediocrity to a higher level.

• 98% of media people are liberals: According to their own polls, 98% of media personnel voted for the liberal (read collectivist) candidate, yet they still claim to be objective in their coverage, while they continue to give the news a collectivist spin.

• The Federal Reserve con: One of the most effective things the looters ever did in their efforts to control our every move is to create the Federal Reserve System. This took us off the gold (and later the silver) standard and put us on the "debt standard" where the only backing for the dollar is "the full faith and credit of the United States government," which is really nothing but a bureaucrat's word, and you know what that's worth. There are now millions of people alive who don't even realize that The Fed is not even a part of the government. It is a privately owned banking institution that completely controls our money supply and is, simply, a massive "check-kiting scheme." In the simplest possible check-kiting scheme, you put a rubber check for a large amount, say $20,000, into a new account you start in one bank. Then you go successively to three more banks, starting each new account with a check drawn on the last account. From the fourth bank, you write a check that is deposited in the original account, completing the circle.

  Now you can borrow (real?) money based on a net worth of $20,000 -- which doesn't exist except on paper, and use that money to create more check-kiting schemes, or to invest in other moneymaking scams. This is basically what The Fed does, but on a much larger scale, and in such a complicated way that it is impossible for someone who doesn't know what a check-kiting scheme is, or how it operates, to figure it out. Further, if it's the government doing it, with the full cooperation of the media, it is difficult to stop, even if you know exactly what they're doing and publicize that fact in parts of the media not controlled by the looters.

  Why are they doing it? Simple: in addition to faux profit (unearned profit), to control the currency of a country is to control that country, and The Fed does that. They manipulate it constantly for their own purposes, creating booms and busts, slowdowns and depressions at will. Every time they do, some of their people make (unearned) money. The only rich you should fear are the kind whose only profit comes from this kind of a scam. If you'd like to know about this in more detail, see my Special Report on the subject.

• Ripping off your earnings: When they first proposed a federal income tax they promised that the rate of the tax would never exceed 3% of income and that only the rich would ever have to pay it (read: "loot the rich"). Today, the top tax rate is almost 40% (down from 90% and back up from Reagan's 28%) and they're auditing taxi drivers and waitresses for their tips. For their tips! Combine that with all the other kinds of taxes you're paying under all kinds of names designed to fool you (such as: fees, assessments, fines, user fees, excise fees, value added taxes, sales taxes, tolls, etc.), you're paying more than 50% of your income in taxes. Did you ever wonder why you can no longer raise a family on one income? Why it is now necessary for Mom to work when years ago she could stay at home and raise her children? That's easy: One income is to pay the bills and the other is to pay the taxes.

  You're being taxed in more ways than you could imagine, and most of it is hidden in the higher price you pay for merchandise and services that are taxed before you even enter the picture (The minimum wage is just another tax on the employer that you are required to pay in the form of higher prices for the goods and services that are provided by minimum wage workers.). And the American Revolution that created this country was started over less than a penny tax on a pound of tea.

Continued