The Washington National Cathedral, Not an Ordinary Place of Worship

Photo courtesy of the web

On the highest point of Washington, D.C., Mount Saint Alban, a fourteen-century English Gothic style cathedral stands out – the Washington National Cathedral – with its centerpiece of the high altar, “The Majestus,” designed by sculptor Walker Hancock and carved in stone by Roger Morigi.

Also known as the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the Cathedral’s construction began in 1907 and was finished and consecrated on September 29, 1990, eighty-three years after the initial laying of the foundation stone.

Designed by architects George Frederick Bodley and Henry Vaughn, and completed by architect Philip Herbert Frohman over his fifty year tenure, the cathedral was built and carved by hundreds of stone cutters, wood cutters, metal and glass artists, and other workers who built the great towers, the flying buttresses, the crypt, carved gargoyles, grotesques, pinnacles, finials, angels, and thousands of decorative details.

Some stone cutters and carvers hailed from the same part of Italy, with its rich limestone, a material used by Italian builders for their cities, cathedrals, palazzos, monuments, villas, and tombstones. The stone carvers of the National Cathedral came from small towns in Italy as early as 1890. And they all went to Barre, Vermont.

Roger Morigi, who studied at the Academia di Belle Arte di Brera in Milan, arrived in New York harbor from Genoa in 1927. After years of apprenticeship in Milan, Morigi became Master Carver at the Washington National Cathedral in 1956 where he labored for twenty-three years until his retirement. The last sculpture he carved was Adam. His major pieces are Majestus (the centerpiece of the altar), the statue of the Good Shepherd, and Adam of the west portal.

After Morigi’s retirement, Vincent Palumbo became Master Carver in 1978. Vincent started as the youngest and most inexperienced member of the crew, working with his father, Paul Palumbo. He worked at the Cathedral for “thirty-eight years since he immigrated to the United States from southern Italy in 1961.” (p. 77)

Vincent worked on the figures of Saint Paul and Saint Peter on the Cathedral’s west façade. He spent two years with three other carvers working on scaffolding above the Cathedral’s west entrance carving the Creation tympanum.

Frederick E. Hart created the famous base relief sculpture Ex Nihilo (Out of Nothing) that adorns the tympanum over the main entrance of the cathedral. It depicts “creation of humanity out of the torrential void.” Four life-size males and four females with closed eyes are “emerging from the primordial cloud,” a birth revealing the “majesty of the Divine Will.”

Paul Palumbo carved the keystone of Christ on the Cross, an unusual depiction of a very muscular Christ with oversized arms. Paul Palumbo also carved sculptor Granville Carter’s Archangel Michael statue, located in a niche in the south transept of the Cathedral.

Frank Zic and Roger Morigi worked for almost five years carving forty-four voussoir angels in the south portal and ten years above the south portal carving angels, canopies, and other sculptures.

Unfortunately, the stone carvers’ workshop, stone yard, and studio no longer exist on the Cathedral’s grounds; they have been demolished long time ago.  According to Marjorie Hunt, a folklorist with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the workshop was a veritable “League of Nations,” with carvers from all over Italy, Greece, England, Germany, and the United States.

I met Marjorie Hunt ten years ago at Georgetown University. She had co-produced and co-directed The Stone Carvers, an Oscar-winning documentary about the stone carvers she described in her 1999 book with the same title.

I toured the Cathedral with Marjorie Hunt as a guide but I saw this jewel of architecture through my own eyes. While I understood and admired the carving beauty built for posterity, the intricately sewn needlepoint pillows in the pews, bearing the names of powerful men in Congress and the Supreme Court, struck a strange chord with me.

What is so fascinating and unusual about this Cathedral is the fact that the carvers had complete freedom in choosing pinnacles, corbels, capitals, gargoyles, and grotesques.  The grotesques decorate buttresses supporting the nave.

According to Marjorie Hunt, carvings such as gargoyles, angels, columns, pinnacles, and grotesques intertwine “the world of work” with hilarious moments in time, pranks, jokes, stories, memorable characters, quirks of various carvers, their habits and unusual traits of character, and the carvers’ imagination, using the world around them as inspiration:

-          a scholarly owl , a wild cat, a winged creature, flowers, fish, pumpkins, sunflowers, carvers’ faces, the foreman, the laborer, the engineer, the boss, a golfer’s grip

-          an image of Roger Morigi with his mallet and chisels, with a mushroom cloud above his head and a devil’s tail and horn, signifying his fiery temperament, and a set of golf clubs above his head, a symbol of his extra-curricular passion

-          a pinnacle carving of Roger Morigi with his “beloved golf clubs and the master carver’s eagle eye”

-          Vincent Palumbo, holding an air hammer,  with exaggerated curly hair and moustache

-          one carver on the scaffolding whistles at the passing girls while the next carving depicts the former dean of the Cathedral, Francis B. Sayre Jr., with a horrified expression of shock and disapproval

-          Frank Zic carved himself “dreaming of deer hunting and winning the Maryland lottery,” with a wishbone on his left side and a deer antler on his right” (The Stone Carvers, p. 151)

-          Frank Zic carved Gino Bresciani, the trice retiree, who was preparing for his fourth retirement with “a bag of money over his shoulder and his suitcase in his left hand (p. 152)

-          Malcolm Harlow carved his family on the base of a pinnacle

-          He also carved the caricatures of construction laborers Allen Goodwin and Henry Thomas  – Goodwin with a chain hoist and dolly, Thomas with a cup of coffee, a doughnut, hot dog, and piece of pie

-          Malcolm carved a tribute to all secretaries in a grotesque, with telephone, typewriter, and file cabinet (a grotesque is a gargoyle without a water spout)

-          A pinnacle with columns and Ionic capitals honors the Cathedral sculptor Constantine Seferlis, a Greek

-          Richard Feller, the canon clerk, is depicted with his drafting tools and the mountains from his native West Virginia

-          Ludwig Malisky, a carpenter, is portrayed with his hammer and saw

-          Walter Fleming, the foreman of all Cathedral laborers, is holding a whip wrapped around his head

-          There is even an angel holding an Oscar, honoring  Marjorie and the documentary The Stone Carvers that won an Academy Award in 1985

-          Seferlis carved a hippie, an elephant, a donkey, a lawyer, a television producer, an angry cat ready to pounce, a man riding a stolen pig with a chicken in one hand, and a boy with a broken halo and his hand in a cookie jar

-          Vincent Palumbo carved a good boy with a halo – the two boys were carved at the special request of a Cathedral donor

-          A gargoyle was carved for a dentist, depicting him working on the cavity of a walrus

-          John Guarante carved a lion roaring in anger and pain because his tail was tied in a knot; his ninety-six angels with overlapping wings and praying hands holding a dice with 7 encircle the central tower  (pp. 156-157)

A memorial to Joseph Ratti, who died falling from scaffolding, was designed by sculptor Heinz Warneke and carved by Roger Morigi. There are two uncarved blocks of stone on the north wall of the Cathedral, in the spot where Ratti fell to his death. The statue depicts a stone carver working on an unfinished gargoyle, a tribute to Joseph Ratti, but also a reminder of the dangerous work involved in building the Cathedral.

The keystone of Mary Magdalene and Christ, located on the nave’s vaulted ceiling, is the last carving that Vincent Palumbo and his father worked on together before Paul Palumbo’s death.

The Washington National Cathedral is not just a symbol of Christianity and the house of God; it is a “compendium of life and work experiences, … a collection of texts that bear the imprint of the carvers’ hearts, hands, and minds.” (Marjorie Hunt, The Stone Carvers, p. 163)

It is sad that the Cathedral that bears the name of George Washington and represents our Judeo-Christian nation has been desecrated.  What would the stone carvers, devout Christians - Catholics, Lutherans, and Orthodox – think and feel if they knew that their place of worship they spent almost a century to build with blood, sweat, and tears, has been changed, even for a short moment in history, into a mosque?

 

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2014

 

Democrat Electioneering Day

On Election Day I agreed to pass sample ballots for a couple of hours for the Republican Party. They were having a hard time finding someone to do it - Republicans are generally busy working. How hard could it be sitting down and giving a ballot sample to those who pass by?  It was a gorgeous fall day and I was glad to be outdoors. I would find out soon enough that it was harder than it seemed.

Armed with a small box of papers, I was told to stay behind a certain line, 40 feet from the front door, marked clearly in blue and by several huge signs warning not to cross the electioneering line.

A small unattended box with the name Democrat in big, bold letters was on the grass nearby. About thirty minutes later, a gentleman with a National Education Association (NEA) blue cap and a Mark Warner t-shirt took possession of the box and started giving out Democrat sample ballots.

He seemed oblivious to the Virginia State Board of Elections vote of October 14, 2008, “to ban clothing and hats as well as buttons and other paraphernalia that directly advocate the election or defeat of a specific candidate or issue.”

He was not just giving out ballots; he was walking across the line back and forth, solicitously “helping” the elderly walk to the door even though he kept violating the blue electioneering line. I brought this obvious fact to his attention and to the officials and he told me, quite annoyed, that nothing was illegal as long as he was helping people vote.

This man told me he was a retired reading teacher. Now I fully understand why many students cannot read when they graduate, and defy authority and the law without compunction. For Democrats, the rule of law and civil society are just suggestions.

Car after old and rusty car emblazoned with assorted Democrat/union/ Obama/Biden stickers drove up with voters who did not seem so well-off or particularly healthy – some were in wheelchairs and others moved slowly and painfully with walkers or canes.

These two hours would become an economic voting lesson I would not soon forget. Here were these people, obviously soon to become victims of the rationed and dysfunctional Obamacare and obviously poor, relegated to the same low income status, yet they could not wait to march in and vote joyously for the same status quo that had made them financially poor, unemployed, and on welfare. They rudely dismissed my Republican sample ballots with words such as, “I don’t vote for those crooks that have destroyed our economy and our country.” I was speechless in the face of such economic ignorance.

A couple from Central America, who could still vividly remember the poverty and socialist paradise exploitation they’ve left to come to the freedom of opportunity in America, told me, after they took the Republican ballot, they could not understand why people would vote for socialism.

Did they not learn from history and from the experience of millions of exploited who fled from around the world to come here for a better life, freedom of religion, and a chance to succeed? Apparently not, they are now coming here for the social programs, welfare, and other generous handouts from the hard-working Americans. As long as they vote the “right” way, they remain on the dependent and needy Democrat plantation.

A few well-to-do bureaucrats driving shiny new cars waved me off without a word, turning their noses in disgust, as if I was a malaria-laden mosquito.

I asked the Democrat volunteer why these people who drive up in such rickety cars are voting for Democrats again, for the status quo. He explained that it was a poor district; most people are unemployed, on welfare or disability, thanks to all the Republicans who stalled the Democrats and our wonderful President who tried to help the poor.

I asked him to give me one example of what the President and his party did in a stellar manner that improved the lives of the poor. His answer shocked me, “they sheltered Social Security from the grubby hands of Republicans and increased welfare and food stamp rolls.”

I tried to give him examples of the high unemployment, high inflation, the destruction of the dollar, and the destruction of the best health care system in the world under this administration. He told me that I had no idea what I was talking about, living under communism has warped my mind and thus my ability to properly understand what is going on.

I gave up in disgust and was relieved when my two hours were up – I even forgot my chair. I cannot say it was entirely a waste of my time. It was a reinforcement of what I already knew; the brainwashing of our population and its maintenance on poverty row perennially is a direct result of the warped education they’ve received from the highly inadequate teachers who support Common Core and are dues-paying NEA members.

It was no surprise to me at the end of the evening when all the socialist Congressmen remained in power in Virginia. The densely populated northern Virginia made sure that the Commonwealth maintained its socialist platform.

My Interview with Joy Tiz Show from California

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/joytiz/2014/11/06/communism-comes-to-America
(20 minutes)

Historic Spanish Point

Little Sarasota Bay

On a balmy late October day, the sunny, sparkling white beaches of Siesta Key came into view.  The eight-mile long island off Sarasota with its snow-white quartz sand churned by the force of the emerald ocean into a fine powder is home to miles of canals, tropical vegetation, herons, pelicans, sea gulls, wild parrots, and bottlenose dolphins. The occasional ‘do not feed the alligators’ sign reminds mesmerized travelers that there are more creatures in the surrounding waters than the gentle dolphins and the flying fish.

In 1907 Siesta Key, originally known as Sarasota Key, was renamed by Harry Higel and his partners in the Siesta Land Company, Captain Louis Roberts and E. M. Arbogast. Since there was only access by ferry to the island, the first bridge was built in 1917.

According to archeological discoveries, five thousand years ago people lived in the area now known as the Historic Spanish Point. These early Floridians were avid fishermen who harvested “huge quantities of seafood,” hunted deer and raccoons, lived in thatched huts, and used tools made from shell, bone, and wood. The 30-acre preserve dating from 3000 B.C. to 1000 A.D. contains a burial mound and two middens or shell mounds,  excavated by the Smithsonian and archeologist Ripley Bullen looking for clues of the long-ago inhabitants and their daily lives.

Shell midden

According to museum archeologists, the middens were built by pre-Columbian people during a period called the Late Weeden Island period. Shells and refuse were layered in the sand until the land rose 18 feet above sea level, jutting into the Little Sarasota Bay. One of the shell midden sections is preserved inside a specially constructed building as evidence of Florida’s early inhabitants.

When the Europeans arrived in the 1500s, the Pensacola, the Apalachee, the Timucua, the Ais, the Tecobaga, the Calusa, the Mayaimi, the Jeaga, and the Tequeata made their home in Florida. According to historians, when native people “fell prey to disease and warfare,” Indians from Georgia and Alabama, Seminoles and Miccosukees, moved into the Florida peninsula. (Historic Spanish Point Museum Archives)

As the climate warmed, “most large Ice Age animals became extinct, people became less nomadic and the population grew. These archaic people occupied Historic Spanish Point about 4,000 years ago.” (Museum Archives)

Boat house with Spanish Moss

John and Eliza Webb, with their five children, arrived here in 1867 from Utica and claimed 145 acres under the Federal Homestead Act. Because a Spanish trader had guided them to this elevated land extending into the bay, the Webbs decided to name it “Spanish Point” in his honor. For forty years the Webb family farmed 10 acres of citrus fruit. The Packing House has been restored to its pioneer era.

Citrus fruit was brought originally to Florida by Spanish explorers from Southeast Asia in the 16^th century.  Spanish missionaries gave seeds to the local Indians who planted orange trees around their communities. Groves of wild oranges were found 200 years later on hammock lands in north central Florida. D.D. Dummitt grafted sweet orange branches onto the wild trees, obtaining the now famous Indian River variety.

During its interesting history, hard freezes, pests, and disease, the citrus industry thrived and by 1980 there were more than 690,000 acres in production, making it the leading agricultural crop in Florida with “146 million boxes of oranges and fifty-five million boxes of grapefruit.” (Historic Spanish Point Museum Archives)

The proximity to so much sea water allowed growers to wash oranges covered with mold or fungus. Some fruit was perfect straight from the grove but most needed washing. The original Webb Citrus Packing House was built around 1870.

Mary's Chapel

A tiny white chapel, adjacent to the pioneer cemetery where the Webb family is buried, was built in the middle of the lush tropical jungle walk. Mary’s Chapel was named after Mary Sherrill, a young woman from Kentucky suffering from tuberculosis, who had come to the Webb’s Winter Resort in 1892 in hopes that the warm Florida sun would cure her. She died five weeks later. The New England Conservatory of Music, class of 1891, donated in 1895 the church bell in memory of their former classmate and graduate.

The flora and fauna found both in temperate and tropical climates offer a unique look to the area. Hardwood forests and hammocks cover about 20 percent of Florida. On the hammock trail one can find oaks, pignut hickory, red cedar, hickory, wax myrtle with its aroma of the crushed leaf and fruit and its candle-making wax, and magnolia trees but also tropical cabbage palms and soapberry trees. On the forest floor there are shade-loving plants such as wild coffee, sea-oxeye (along the border of mangroves), saltwort, and white stopper.



Bridge and mangrove

Garden

Branching trees hide insects, songbirds, owls, toads, and epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants such as the butterfly orchid, wild pine, and resurrection fern. Spanish moss, a member of the bromeliad or pineapple family, is an epiphyte that uses trees for support but draws nourishment from the air, the sun, and the rain. Spanish moss literally blankets the area, hanging like nature’s Christmas ornaments.

Mangrove

Red mangroves, found along the seaward edge of the coast, are one of the few trees that can grow and thrive in salt water. Their roots trap silt and eventually build up islands. The black mangroves grow further inland. The white mangroves grow on the highest elevations. The mangroves form a dense habitat that only wildlife can penetrate.

The Gumbo Limbo is a fascinating tree nicknamed the tourist tree because its red bark peels like sunburn.  A large shade tree, the Gumbo Limbo sap is used as a liniment and made into varnish, while the leaves can be brewed as tea.

The bay on the east side of Siesta Key is an estuary, a place where saltwater and freshwater meet. Surrounded by mangroves that prevent shoreline erosion, the rainfall waters mixed with saltwater become a perfect nursery for marine life and wildlife.

Aqueduct surrounded by huge fern

The entire 30-acre Spanish Point preserve with its fern flooded aqueduct, the mangroves, the plantation house, the packing house, the boat shed, Mary’s Church, and the cemetery  are a fascinating walk into the wilderness that used to be Florida, and its rich history. The outdoor museum with the sunken gardens and the pergola are a restful escape from the noisy world into the natural world. The pathways built of seashells crunched underfoot. I got a sense of stepping on history millions of years old.



© Ileana Johnson Paugh 2014
  

Mary's Chapel original bell

"Don't Bank on It" Book Review

“There is something strange about fighting debt by incentivizing more debt.”

-          Jaime Caruana, head of Bank of International Settlements, “the central bank of central banks”

Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s book, “Don’t Bank on It,” should be a required primer for high school and college students who often graduate economically illiterate unless they major in Economics. The average American’s economic literacy would be tremendously augmented by reading this book, written for the average person who is not an investor or a banker.

Smith, the Founder and Chairman of Swiss America Trading Corporation, and Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist, offer sound advice and options for a future that “you could bank on” as well as a lengthy list of risks to Americans’ bank accounts.

The detailed and fascinating history of money and banking, the value of the dollar, its depreciation, and the attractiveness of gold as an alternative to illusory electronic investment that can be hacked overnight and disappear, are laid out carefully and logically.

Touting a cashless society that would eventually deal in electronic entries only, is not so far-fetched. It is a reality that “97 percent of transactions in Stockholm now happen via credit cards, smart phones, checks, and other means of transferring disembodied money that exists almost entirely as flickering digital signals inside computer circuits.” Entire towns in Sweden accept no cash. The risks of hacking from a world away can never be underestimated, potentially “breaking the banks.” (p. 24)

Financial warfare originating from unfriendly nations makes “too big to fail” banks “much too big to fail” by falling prey to full-time hackers. (p. 27)

The firewalls and the gate keepers entrusted with our money may allow the theft of billions of dollars. Cyber financial warfare such as the Stuxnet computer worm can make anybody vulnerable. (p. 32)

Smith and Ponte describe the “financial Pearl Harbor” that occurred in three coordinated assaults aimed at destroying the dollar as the world’s reserve currency:

1.      The 9-11-2001 attack which closed the U.S. exchanges for six days.

2.      “Bear raids” by Arab Sovereign Wealth Funds with $2 trillion (derived from oil profits of $147 per barrel prices in 2007) against companies like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Merrill Lynch, aimed at collapsing them through “naked short selling and manipulation of credit default swaps, both of which were virtually unregulated” (p. 34)

3.      Direct economic attack on the U.S. Treasury to collapse the dollar by “dumping Treasury bonds.” (p. 35)

Smith and Ponte explain how the Pentagon was “war gaming” the possibility of a social breakdown caused by a potential economic collapse. Computer-generated trading in nanoseconds can certainly cause “flash crashes.” And “high-frequency trader interaction with computerized algorithms of large-cap financial institutions is providing opportunities for high-speed, virtually undetectable market manipulation.” (pp. 36-39)

Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia could affect a “flash crash” on Wall Street or an attack on the vulnerable power grid and water supply in order to replace the dollar with a “new gold-backed Russian Ruble and Chinese Yuan/Renminbi during the next U.S. or global panic.” (p. 45)

Smith and Ponte believe that “decentralizing our technologies would make America much less vulnerable to high-tech terrorism and breakdowns.” There is always the possibility of a “Carrington Event,” a solar flare affecting the Earth’s magnetic field with disruptive electromagnetic effects, frying “stock trading computers, banking, crash the Belgium-based SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications,” or the potential of a terrorist Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) from a weather balloon nuclear bomb exploded 110,000 above America. (pp. 40-43)

Smith and Ponte explain that the inflationary history of money and of governments with their “fiat currency” should teach us that money is not a good store of value. Fixing prices, debasing the money, and price controls are also good arguments in favor of gold as store of value.

Because the “magical” fractional reserve banking that the Fed engages in is a Ponzi scheme and should not create a sense of security of our money stored in any bank, Smith and Ponte call it the “Fractured Reserve Banking.” Your bank is a “de facto owner of an unsecured loan or asset you have given it.” (p. 61-65)

Printing money ad nauseam is not something new. Smith and Ponte state that, from the original 13 colonies with 2.4 million people and only $12 million Spanish dollars in circulation, in five years there were $225 million in circulation, the creation of the “federal trough.” (p. 66)

The first Continental dollars issued were worth 1-1.5 silver coins each. By 1779, the inflated Continental was worth 1/24^th of face value in silver dollars.  According to Smith, in 1782 America’s first fractional reserve bank came into being, the Bank of North America, “the depository for all congressional funds.”(pp. 67-68)

In 1791, the Bank of the United States issued millions of dollars in paper money, using only $2 million worth of gold and silver. Hamilton said that our nation had a “scarcity” of gold and silver and, in order to grow, we had to issue paper money. Inflation rose by 72 percent. (p. 70-71)

Jefferson said about the ‘money changers,’ “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” (p. 71)

With the assassination of Republican President William McKinley in 1901, a staunch gold advocate, Progressives took reign under President Teddy Roosevelt. “These Progressives would crucify humankind not upon a cross of gold, as Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan said, but upon a double-cross of paper and fractional-reserve banking,” said Smith. (p. 79)

Smith and Ponte opine that the centralization of banking in America started in December 1914 when 95 percent of the 27,349 banks in existence did not have branches. The dawn of the Fed in 1913, “a new cartel of 12 private central banks,” marked the beginning of politicizing banks. (p. 80-84)

The argument presented at the time that creating the Federal Reserve took politics out of the money supply decisions was preposterous. Minnesota Republican Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh recognized the Federal Reserve Act as the “most gigantic trust on Earth.” Using other people’s money, “They [Fed] know in advance when to create panic to their advantage. They also know when to stop panic.” (pp. 85-86)

In addition to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 “imposed by the new Progressive President Woodrow Wilson,” the 16^th Amendment created the Progressive income tax, taking more from the rich, a recommendation made by Karl Marx in 1848 in his Communist Manifesto as one of the ten ways to destroy capitalism. (p. 88)

Smith describes how President Woodrow Wilson “took the dollar off the classic gold standard by making it more difficult to convert dollars into gold.” FDR issued an Executive Order that confiscated Americans’ bullion gold coins, forcing them to exchange any non-numismatic coins at the rate of $20 per troy ounce. (pp. 94-95)

The 1944 Bretton Woods treaty, pegging the dollar at $35 per troy ounce, gave rise to the World Bank (run by an American) and to the International Monetary Fund (run by a European). (p. 98)

According to Smith and Ponte, the Glass-Steagall Act, which did not allow commercial banks to engage in various investing schemes, was not repealed in 1999.  They explain that “Insured banks are still prohibited from underwriting or dealing in securities. What was repealed in 1999 were the Glass-Steagall provisions that had prohibited commercial banks from being affiliated with investment banks engaged in underwriting and dealing in securities.” This repeal will further endanger the safety of our money. (p. 96)

Beardsley Ruml, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1945, listed federal taxation “as an instrument of fiscal policy to help stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar.” He devised income tax withholding from paychecks which enabled the out-of-control federal spending and thus the weakening of the purchasing power of the dollar through inflation brought on by excessive money printing no longer backed by gold. Before Ruml’s withholding, only seven percent of Americans paid income tax. (p. 99)

Craig Smith expounds on the Progressives’ giveaway of trillions of dollars since the 1970s and how “this political extortion of the banks led to the 2008-near collapse of our economy” and to the current economic situation. (p. 103)

What Smith aptly calls the “Great Unraveling” has cost more than five million people their homes, $5 trillion loss to homeowners when home prices fell by 30 percent, and a forfeiture of $50 trillion in investor equity.

President Carter gave us in 1977 the Community Reinvestment Act which eventually led to forcing banks to give ARM loans to non-credit worthy home buyers in previously red-lined areas, and to the bursting of the mortgage bubble in 2008, all in the name of imposed equality. It was not fair for the rich to be the sole fortunate “winners of life’s lottery.” (p. 110)

The two monster banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, pooled, securitized, and sold mortgages to the tune of $5.4 trillion in 2008 when they were bailed out, said Smith, $1,4 trillion sub-prime. (p. 111)

According to Smith and Ponte, Fannie and Freddie became profitable in 2012, made enough money to pay the required 10 percent to the government, and had money left to pay private investors. However, the Treasury changed the terms such that the 10 percent dividend due to the U.S. Treasury became 100 percent, an act of expropriation not unlike the deal with the Chrysler bankruptcy. (p. 115)

Forcing banks to lend to sub-prime customers restarted in 2013 with the Progressive social engineering of the Obama administration “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” HUD rule. According to Craig Smith, mapping all U.S. neighborhoods by race and publishing ‘geospatial data,’ HUD will find out segregated areas and will force them to change zoning laws to include subsidized housing for low-income and minorities in ‘white suburbs.’ The minorities will include illegal aliens. (p. 131)

Americans will be unable to escape the tax man no matter in what corner of the world they might move to – the arm of the IRS will reach them thanks to a new arm-twisting law, FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which forces foreign banks to report any Americans with accounts over $50,000. Incredibly, 77,000 banks and financial groups abroad have registered to comply.

And if anyone should harbor the erroneous thought that their money is safe in banks, all they have to do is read what happened to the citizens of Cyprus and their bank accounts, when the EU technocrats decided to help themselves to other people’s money who worked hard and saved wisely.

“The bigger a Progressive welfare state becomes, the more of other people’s money it needs to devour. Our politicians have targeted banks, and our accounts in those banks, as pools of wealth they intend to plunder,” explained Craig R. Smith. (p. 153)

Of the 101 million Americans who work full-time, 86 million are employed in the private sector. These Americans own retirement accounts, 401(k(s, IRAs, and other pension funds for a total of $20 trillion. Politicians are trying to figure out how they can tap into this goldmine. Smith describes how a Progressive-proposed “Guaranteed Retirement Account” power grab might seize your savings. The federal government has already “borrowed” $5 trillion from various government programs that were supposed to be safe lock-boxes. And $5 trillion of unfunded Social Security liability accrues each year. (pp. 166-169)

Smith and Ponte quote Keynes on inflation, “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens…” To paraphrase Frederich A. Hayek, inflation is usually engineered by governments for their gain. (p. 171-172)

Even the IMF is after our money in the form of a “one time levy” of ten percent on income earners with “positive net wealth,” Smith explains, that would be households with income of $34,000. (p 173)

Smith and Ponte conclude that it is not out of the realm of possibility that banks and the dollar may cease to exist in the future. Banks are already nationalized via confiscation of property by regulation. Near zero interest rates punish the savers, the retired, and investors in general. The crypto-currency called bitcoin, an attempt to replace the dollar is not “legal tender.” Smith says that it can cause deflation, “an increase in value over time as owners hoard it.” (p. 194)

Will we become a cashless society as the government eliminates the middlemen and becomes America’s bank?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Stop the Coming Civil War" Book Review

In his bestselling book, “Stop the Coming Civil War,” Michael Savage makes a well-documented argument for the multi-faceted war waged by this administration on our borders, language, culture, the U.S. military, the middle class, our health care, civil rights, science, schools, and our allies.

In his opinion, depending on one’s political views, the point of no return has been reached with the NSA spying program, with the release of terrorists from Guantanamo Bay without congressional input, or with the purposeful flood of illegal aliens into the United States.

Because this administration uses so adroitly the politics of race and class warfare, Americans are ever more divided and racially polarized. Consequently, our national security, freedom, and survival are threatened on many fronts.

“Desiring to control us from inception to death, from womb to tomb,” Savage predicts that our nation will eventually “snap” from the controlling pressure exercised on what we do, eat, drink, think, learn, speak, read, and write. (p. 15)

Facing a constant assault on our “borders, language, and culture,” Savage explains that “we’ve become a post-Constitutional society,” in the most perilous position since the 1860s, a “culture of statelessness and corruption.” He compares our nation with a “tinderbox” ready to ignite. In his opinion, the bi-partisan rule from Washington is based on “greed and hunger for power of a crony oligarchy, not the rule of law.” (pp. 16-17)  

Opining that the suspension of the filibuster rule by Harry Reid enabled the dismissal of legal challenges to the (un) Affordable Care Act and the eventual destruction of the best health care system in the world, Savage laments the fact that the rest of America seems to live in peace, unperturbed by “subterranean rumblings” caused by:

-          The fact that health care has become “the industry of the haves-versus-the-have-nots” (p. 20)

-          “Hostile takeover of Americans’ formerly private information” (p. 22)

-          America is losing its position as the world’s superpower (p. 23)

-          Lack of patriotism and nationalism (p. 24)

-          Collapse of the military, the economy, and culture (p. 24)

The “once righteous and heroic America” is replaced “with a leftist government defined by immorality and greed.” (p. 31)

A true patriot and son of a legal immigrant from Russia, Savage wants to put a stop to the corporate debasement of our “most cherished possession: our pride in our country.” (p. 31)

War on Culture, Language, and Borders

Savage describes how the war on our culture, language, and borders evolved from the liberal “humane” enforcement of immigration laws which released criminal aliens on our streets. (p. 28)

Illegal immigrants are not here to chase the American dream, said Savage, they are here to “game the system” and strip hard-working Americans of their wealth and establish a fundamentally transformed America that resembles the hell-hole they’ve escaped. Savage describes the President’s Dreamers as a “living nightmare.” (p. 34)

Savage explains that the war on our culture, on Christians, on women, on men, on children, on minorities, and on the rule of law is expanded to include the introduction of cultural Marxism, a war on morality, allowing and promoting “polymorphous sexuality” and “hedonism.” (p. 40)

Communist professor Herbert Marcuse’s 1960s slogan, “Make love, not war,” has become in our current time, said Savage, “Make love, not money.”

Government dependency, perennial poverty, metro sexuality, and a distrust of strong males are “foundational components of leftist values,” Savage explains.  Neutralizing the male population and disempowering the military assure success of the leftist agenda. (p. 43)

Savage continues, “A strong man is the very emblem of the democratic capitalism’s evil power.” The war on masculinity is thus justified. (p. 47)

Savage enumerates some of the agents that contribute to the degradation of our society: cultural elites, Planned Parenthood, Center for American Progress, Think Progress, FCC, “researchers” policing our newsrooms, and political leftists opposing Christians everywhere.

Even though English is the “official language of the world,” Savage laments politicians who are “too weak-kneed, to make English the official language of the U.S.” (p. 55)

War on the Military

In his opinion, the war on our military is waged by a man who “would speak loudly and carry a limp stick.” Some of Savage’s examples include:

-          VA denying appointments to veterans in dire need of health care

-          Neutering our missile defense and military cuts (p. 64)

-          Firing of generals in wartime, a rare occurrence, Savage said, including those connected to the “Benghazi murders” (pp. 64-71)

-          Appointing “handpicked military officers to second-in-command positions” in order to report on their superiors (p. 72)

-          Lowering physical standards to help women “succeed” in the name of “equality of sexes” (p. 79)

War on the Middle Class

Savage, in his inimitable way of connecting the dots of seemingly unrelated events, compares the current war on the middle class with the capture by the Union forces of New Orleans, a shipping point for Confederate forces who helped them fund the war.  

Savage sees a parallel between the economy of the Civil War and today’s economy. Economics and political power played a very important role in both. Slavery was the “rallying cry” for the Civil War, but economic and political power was the underlying cause. Savage said that five times as many wealthy men were found in the North as had been thirty years earlier. The wealth built in the nineteenth century was based on real manufacturing and trade. Today two thousand plus billionaires have increased their wealth with electronic money creation, not something tangible. (p. 104)

Savage aptly describes the stagnant economy as a “trapdoor economy through which more and more middle class Americans have dropped into poverty.” (p. 87)

This stagnant economy was created by:

-          Zero “stimulus” interest rates set by the Fed and disappearing savings (p. 91)

-          13,000 new regulations

-          Robbing the middle class through taxation to bail out the “biggest and most corrupt banks in the world” (p. 88)

-          Fed’s quantitative easings, “nothing short of robbery,” printing $4 trillion dollars backed by a “hollow full faith and credit” in government, a sort of “Confederate counterfeit money” (pp. 90-93)

Savage explains how seventy percent of U.S. stock market trading is rigged by allowing robots to do high-frequency trading in nanno-seconds, permitting market manipulation and centralization of wealth. (p. 97)

America is now a permanent welfare state and poverty is at an all-time high. Raising the minimum wage will exacerbate poverty and increase welfare recipients, while the winner, JPMorgan Chase, will benefit $560 million by processing Electronic Benefit Transfer cards (p. 102)

The middle class is adversely affected by the excessively printed and devalued dollar and the loss of its role as “reserve currency” and “petro dollar.”

The middle class is plagued by an increasing misery index, a decreasing freedom index, rising food and energy prices, the Pope’s war on free markets and capitalism, and prioritizing climate change politics over job creation.

War on Medicine

Savage talks about the war on medicine, unleashed by Obamacare, a Castro style medicine provided by government-controlled, single payer care like Venezuela. Green Mountain Care in Vermont makes a good example of a single payer system that spends $2 billion a year on health care, the entire tax revenue of the State of Vermont, a behemoth that lawmakers want to repeal. (p. 118)

Savage points out that Obamacare is so ill-conceived, non-generic drugs are not covered. Generic drug prices will go up as demand will go up. When less people will afford generic drugs, pharmacies will go broke. Healthy people will enjoy free annual visits. Sick people with cancer should put their affairs in order. (p. 123)

War on Civil Rights

Savage says that the war on civil rights includes attacks and bans on gun ownership, benefits to illegal aliens, irrelevance of the rule of law because of excessive regulations and executive orders, DOJ’s denial of civil rights to whites, auditing of conservative groups and people such as True the Vote and James O’Keefe, auditing of whistle blowers, and lack of convictions for white collar crimes. (pp. 162-163)

War on Science

The war on science centers on climate change. Savage devotes chapter 8 to the global warming debacle, focusing on some of the individual players in the ongoing deception.

-          Ottmar Edenhofer admitted that “global warming is nothing more than a  political issue” that “undermines the ‘science’ that the left invented to justify global warming” (p. 182)

-          Christina Figueres, “the climate change chief of the U.N.” thinks that China is “the ideal model for government’s role in fighting climate change  (p. 183)

-          Al Gore - Savage calls him “the global warming debate team captain” (p. 184)

Calling the EPA, “the Environmental Pilferage Agency, Savage describes it as one of the most corrupt agencies in modern American history, … its only rival is the IRS.” (p. 188)

The real cost of our climate change policy, Savage says, is the cost of expensive and bankrupt solar and wind energy, animal and bird casualties, huge cost of conversion, subsidies, and damage to human health.

Fracking is a success story. Energy production has been hindered by Obama’s non-approval of the XL Keystone pipeline from Canada.

Savage explains solar flares and volcanic activity in relationship to climate change. The NASA and NOAA reports were described by the MIT scientists as sinking to the level of “hilarious incoherence.” (p. 199)

War on Schools

The war on schools is the war to dumb down our students with the standards of Common Core. Savage talks about “outcome based education” developed in Chicago and the college textbook publishing which has “degenerated into a racket.” (p. 206)

Savage criticizes the fact that “Colleges foster the physical separation of people into racial, ethnic, and cultural groups, a purposeful result.” (p. 211)

At some point, the education bubble of $1 trillion, “thirty-three percent of all ‘subprime student loans’ are more than 90 days overdue,” is going to burst. (p. 212)

Graduates with worthless degrees, “parroting leftist platitudes,” can only find minimum wage jobs for which they are overqualified,” said Savage. (p. 213)

Savage sees the “brick and mortar universities as “debt-ridden gulags of biased, agenda-driven indoctrination.” (p. 213)

Savage believes that schools indoctrinate students into leftist thinking and “separate the youth of our nation from their parents and other Americans who grew up when the Constitution meant something.” (p. 221)

War on Our Allies

The war on our allies chapter explains the “Arab Winter,” the situation in Libya, Syria, Israel, the reality in Ukraine, and how our foreign policy of supporting radical factions in Ukraine that overthrew a duly elected president, has re-ignited the Cold War with Putin’s Russia. Savage succinctly colors the chaotic political situation with a masterful stroke, “We’re seeing American foreign policy at its nadir.” (p. 249)

Savage, a student of history and occasionally a mythological Cassandra, ends his book with incisive advice acquired from experience during his twenty years on radio, in-depth research, scholarly endeavors, 28 books, advanced degrees, a doctorate from Berkeley, and an uncanny ability to see and articulate the truth with clarity in a world drowning in deception and misinformation. “We are the equivalent of the anticommunists who fought Stalin,” he said. (p. 251)

As he sees it, the lines have been drawn in the sand:

-          “The haves against the have-nots”

-          “The illegal aliens against hard-working middle-class families”

-          “Liberals who hate the Second Amendment versus lawful gun owners…”

-           Climate militants against “deniers”

-          “Anti-Christian communist educators against God-fearing families”

-          “Republicans against patriots” (p. 252)

We are becoming global citizens of a global community which is nothing but global communism. “We are becoming the Union of Soviet States of America: the USSA,” Savage warns.

Michael Savage’s book is a documented caveat and a strong plea, a wake-up call to the American people before the 2014 elections, our last chance to right the Ship of State.