50 Mind Blowing Facts About America That Our Founding Fathers Never Would Have Believed

If our Founding Fathers were alive today, what would they think of America?  Surely they would be very proud that the United States stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific and has built some of the most amazing cities that the world has ever seen.  

They would probably be surprised that the country they founded went on to become the greatest economic machine in the history of the world, and they would be absolutely astounded by things like our interstate highway system and the Internet.  However, there are quite a number of things that they would be horrified about as well.  

The fact that over 40 million Americans are dependent on the federal government for their daily food would be deeply disturbing to our founders.  Also, the fact that the U.S. government has accumulated the greatest mountain of debt in human history would be incredibly distressing to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the founders.  But perhaps most of all, our founders would be absolutely disgusted that the land where Americans could once be free to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has become so tightly regulated and controlled that Americans dare not even squeak without the permission of the federal government.

Needless to say, our founders would certainly not understand many of our institutions or many of the advanced technologies that we have today.  But without a doubt they would be able to grasp how far we have fallen as a nation and how far we have strayed from the fundamental principles that they enshrined in our founding documents.  The United States is a much different place today than it was in 1776, and unfortunately many of the changes have been for the worse.

The following are 50 mind blowing facts about modern America that our Founding Fathers never would have believed....

#1 In 2010, not only does the United States have a central bank, but it also runs our economy and issues all of our currency.  The Federal Reserve has devalued the U.S. dollar by over 95 percent since 1913 and it has been used to create the biggest mountain of government debt in the history of the world. 

#2 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that U.S. government agents can legally sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, place a secret GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of you everywhere that you go.

#3 The 50 wealthiest members of Congress saw their collective fortunes increase by 85.1 million dollars to $1.4 billion in 2009.

#4 The U.S. government has accumulated a national debt that is rapidly approaching the 14 trillion dollar mark.

#5 All over the United States, asphalt roads are being ground up and are being replaced with gravel because it is cheaper to maintain.  The state of South Dakota has transformed over 100 miles of asphalt road into gravel over the past year, and 38 out of the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have now turned some of their asphalt roads into gravel roads.

#6 Americans now owe more than $849 billion on student loans, which is more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards.

#7 In 2010, Americans waste an astounding amount of food.  According to a study by the California Integrated Waste Management board, 63 percent of the average supermarket's waste stream is food. When you break that down, it means that each supermarket wastes approximately 3,000 pounds of food each year.

#8 The city of Cleveland plans to sort through curbside trash to ensure that people are actually recycling properly.  If it is discovered that some citizens are not recycling they will be hit with very large fines.

#9 Once upon a time, U.S. industry was the envy of the world.  But since 1979, manufacturing employment in the United States has fallen by 40 percent.

#10 Even though the U.S. population has exploded in size, the number of Americans with manufacturing jobs today is smaller than the number of Americans who were employed in manufacturing in 1950.

#11 Having one out of every eight Americans enrolled in the food stamp program is now considered "the new normal" and Americans continue to drop into poverty in astounding numbers.

#12 One out of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.

#13 A family of four actually has difficulty surviving on an income of $50,000 a year in America in 2010.

#14 Barack Obama is backing a proposal to create a national database that will store the DNA of all individuals who have been arrested, even if they end up not being convicted of a crime.

#15 In 2010, it takes the average unemployed American worker over 8 months to find a job.

#16 The U.S. government has made some parts of Arizona off limits to U.S. citizens because of the threat of violence from Mexican drug smugglers.  The federal government has actually posted signs more than 100 miles north of the Mexican border warning travelers that certain areas are unsafe because of drug and alien smugglers.

#17 One recent survey of last year's college graduates  discovered that 80 percent moved right back home with their parents after graduation.

#18 In one of the very first military commissions held under the Obama administration, a U.S. military judge ruled that confessions obtained by threatening the subject with rape are admissible in court.

#19 The average American worker now pays literally dozens of different kinds of taxes each year.

#20 In recent years the U.S. government has spent $2.6 million tax dollars to study the drinking habits of Chinese prostitutes and $400,000 tax dollars to pay researchers to cruise six bars in Buenos Aires, Argentina to find out why gay men engage in risky sexual behavior when drunk.

#21 Christians are being arrested and thrown in jail in some areas of the United States for quietly passing out Christian literature on public sidewalks.

#22 The Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice has announced that it will begin using cutting edge analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents and will place "potential offenders" in prevention and education programs.

#23 Organic milk is now considered such a national crisis that the FDA has been conducting military style raids on Amish farmers in the state of Pennsylvania.

#24 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently announced that they are considering a crackdown on farm dust.

#25 According to a new CDC report, nearly half of all Americans now use prescription drugs on a regular basis.

#26 Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts says that due to severe budget cuts there are a number of crimes that his department will simply not be able to respond to any longer.  The crimes that the Oakland police will no longer be responding to include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism.

#27 Today, Americans are losing their homes in staggering numbers.  One out of every seven mortgages was delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.

#28 Many of our leading scientists are now calling themselves "transhumanists" and are openly proclaiming that a future where men have fully merged with machines is inevitable.

#29 Americans who spend large amounts of cash are viewed as "potential criminals" by the U.S. government in 2010.

#30 New full body security scanners going into airports all across the United States can actually see through our clothing and produce very clear and very detailed images of our exposed bodies as we walk through them.

#31 The U.S. financial system has become a massive gambling parlor in 2010.  As a result, a horrific derivatives bubble has developed that threatens to destroy our entire economy at any moment.  Nobody knows exactly how big the derivatives bubble is, but low estimates place it at around 600 trillion dollars and high estimates put it at around 1.5 quadrillion dollars.  Once that bubble pops there simply will not be enough money in the entire world to fix it.

#32 The U.S. government is spending an amount of money equivalent to approximately 25.4 percent of GDP this year.

#33 Today, 10,000 people make 30% of the total income in the United States.

#34 A 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation discovered that 250 employees of the Defense Department used credit cards or PayPal to purchase images of children in sexual situations.  However, the investigation also found that the Pentagon investigated only a handful of those cases.

#35 According to a recent poll of Americans between the ages of 44 and 75, 61% said that running out money was their biggest fear. The remaining 39% thought death was scarier.

#36 Approximately 57 percent of Barack Obama's 3.8 trillion dollar budget for 2011 consists of direct payments to individual Americans or is money that is spent on their behalf.

#37 A recent Department of Justice guide for investigators of criminal and extremist groups lists "constitutionalists" and "survivalists" alongside organizations like Al-Qaeda and the Aryan Brotherhood.

#38 The U.S. trade deficit has exploded to nightmarish proportions over the past two decades.  Every single month tens of billions more dollars goes out of the United States than comes into it.  Essentially, the United States is becoming far poorer as a nation each and every month.

#39 Factories are closing in droves across the United States because the American people would rather buy things made in China.

#40 Millions upon millions of good paying middle class jobs are being shipped off to China and they are never coming back.  Meanwhile, U.S. politicians stand by idly and do nothing.

#41 Some analysts now believe that China could become the largest economy in the world by the year 2020.

#42 If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the annual U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of four to five trillion dollars.

#43 According to one recent survey, 28% of all U.S. households have at least one person that is currently searching for a full-time job.

#44 The U.S. dollar continues to rapidly decline in value.  An item that cost $20.00 in 1970 will cost you $112.35 today.  An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 will cost you $440.33 today.

#45 Major international organizations are actually proposing that the United States start considering the adoption of a truly global currency.

#46 Students at a high school in Missouri have built a car that they claim can get up to 450 miles per gallon.  On another note, some of the top energy experts in the world believe that thorium could solve our energy problems and supply very cheap energy for society for hundreds of thousands of years.  But in today's world technologies such as these are endlessly suppressed by the rich and powerful.

#47 One Colorado high school student is seeking an explanation from officials at his school after he was ordered by security guards to remove American flags from his truck because they might make other students at the high school "uncomfortable".

#48 Three California high school students were recently forced to remove their American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo.

#49 Memorial crosses erected along Utah public roads to honor fallen state troopers have been found unconstitutional by a federal appeals court and now must be removed permanently.

#50 One group of high school students made national headlines recently when they revealed that a security guard ordered them to stop singing the national anthem during a visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

Article by The Economic Collapse

WW II Posters Found - What in God's Name Have We Let Happen?

Most of you are too young to recall these posters or even WWII, but they were a part of American history.
 

The statement at the end says it all!

These were our parents and grandparents ~

What in God's name have we let happen?  

Political  correctness happened,

Lack of God's name happened,

Lack of personal responsibility happened,

Lack of personal integrity and honesty happened,

Lack of respect and loyalty to our country happened,

Lack of  being an American happened. 

Did  all of these things die along with common sense?
 

The two enemies of the people are criminals and government. So let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so that the second will not become the legal version of the first. - Thomas Jefferson

Herman Cain: "We the People are STILL in Charge of This Country!" (Video)

Fantastic speech at Southern Republican Leadership Conference by talk radio host Herman Cain; telling Americans to take back the country and vote Obama and his democrats out. 

Great Quote From Ann Coulter About Nancy Pelosi

  “But as long as the nation is obsessed with historic milestones, is no one going to remark on what a great country it is where a mentally retarded woman can become Speaker of the House?”

Victor Hanson on Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is now the final arbiter of all liberal sensitivity. Let me explain.

Liberalism professes radical equality. More recently, it has extended that notion to cultures at large. Just  as all of us are to be ensured parity here, so too those abroad are to be seen as our collective cultural equals.

But logical problems arise with such moral equivalence:  whereas it fiercely attacks any supposed enemies of tolerance at home, it oddly finds all that inconvenient when looking abroad.

Take the idea of diversity. This concept postulates that society is enriched by a mosaic of different religions, races, and ethnic groups—all rightly equal under the law, all somewhat “different” from one another.

Most nations of the world, however, are not very racially diverse. Many see religious or racial unity as a plus—not a drawback. And to the extent they are diverse, most tend to promote one caste over another.  No Saudi wants a salad bowl of intermarriage with Christians and Jews. Few Koreans seem to want more Japanese-Korean or Cambodian-Korean citizens to enrich their culture. The Chinese do not wish to honor their few million Muslim brothers.

And if, for example, a white, brown, or black American were to emigrate to China he would never be completely accepted into Chinese society—even if he were to obtain full citizenship, given that being genuinely Chinese entails a particular Chinese appearance.

Should 12 million Smiths and Joneses cross the southern border into Mexico and obtain amnesty for their illegal entry, they would never be seen as fully “Mexican” citizens. 

Mexicans’ self-identification includes the racial concept of “La Raza,” in which looks likewise are integral to membership in the body politic—perhaps in the manner that Germany at one time defined Germanness as looking the part of the “Volk”.

In short, the most racially and ethnically diverse nation in the world is often self-condemnatory of its supposed shortcomings at home. And yet we are uninterested in applying similar harsh criteria abroad where the cherished concept of diversity either does not exist or is openly opposed.

Multiculturalism Trumps All.
The suggestion that there are Vietnamese racists, Palestinian sexists, or Chinese bigots causes us to pause: Are we being unfairly judgmental or at least unnecessarily insensitive or too intrusive in the business of others?  Yet if we were to call the Dutch, Germans, or British bigots—who are far more liberal in their treatment of women, gays, and minorities than their global counterparts— would we feel somehow less offensive? These offenders, after all, could be stereotyped as representatives of a white, Western and (formerly) Christian culture.

Our ideas about equality are similarly schizophrenic. Consider gender parity. Only in Europe, and some Westernized areas of the Asian world, do women achieve the same sort of legal and social equity that is taken for granted in the U.S. Yet in discussions of, say, the Arab Middle East we are mostly silent when it comes to a gender apartheid that is practiced throughout the Muslim world.

This gulf between the liberal zeal in which we insist on proper gender-neutral vocabulary at home, and the illiberal reluctance to criticize forced female circumcision and the coerced marriages of underage brides abroad is quite inexplicable. Worrying about getting our own house in order while being polite enough not to judge others is one thing;  it’s quite another to magnify our own misdemeanors while downplaying the felonies of others.

Somehow this paradox only intensifies when we examine Israel and its neighbors. On the face of it, Israel is a liberal utopia: women enjoy complete equality. Gays do as well. There are a million Arab citizens of a supposedly Jewish state that vote in free elections that are rare elsewhere in the Middle East.

In Israel an Arab woman enjoys more rights, as they are defined under the law in the West, than she does in an Arab country, where, incidentally, being a resident Jewish woman would entail physical danger.

Racial diversity is apparent on the Israeli street. In contrast again, life in the West Bank or Gaza, by any liberal criteria, is at best 18th-century in comparison: women are often veiled, and routinely denied careers outside he home. Honor killings persist. Open and proud homosexuality can prove a death sentence. Christianity is celebrated mostly in enclaves. 

Apostasy from Islam is near suicidal. In other words, on matters of race, gender, or religious tolerance most of Israel’s enemies should earn condemnation from the Western Left, while Israel in turn should win praise.

Indeed, take the talking points of a Hamas leader and put them into the mouth of a blow-dried leisure-suited Christian preacher on Sunday morning TV, and he would be driven from the pulpit as a dangerous retrograde bigot and sexist.

The problem, of course, for Israel is that, under the doctrine of multiculturalism, its  single  sin of being Western trumps the many sins of it non-Western neighbors. And on the issues themselves, the hypocrisy is most evident: Cypriots were invaded and divided by Turks; their capital Nicosia remains partitioned. Tibet is occupied by the Chinese. Iraqis, Egyptians, and most of the Arab world ethnically cleansed Jews from their cities after the modern Mideast wars of the 1960s and 1970s. The Syrians used ‘disproportionate’ force is leveling the Arab town of Hama. Yet these facts are all ignored, given the self-described victims are now doing the victimizing.

What goes on here? Multiculturalism.
Over the last thirty years, multiculturalism—no foreign culture can be any worse than the West—has trumped almost every aspect of classical liberalism. Multiculturalism at once warps our sense of judgment abroad while preventing us from appreciating the uniquely tolerant nature of a multiracial United States at home.

In reductionist terms, what has transpired is something like the following: In reaction to undeniable racial prejudice and sexual discrimination in our past, white Christian heterosexual males of the West were seen almost exclusively as purveyors of privilege based on rank exploitation. Therefore to the degree that one distanced oneself from that profile—both in physical and cultural terms—one was deemed likewise to be freer from its pathologies and so exempt from Western criticism. For many privileged elites, loud advocacy of mulitculturalism squares the circle of still enjoying the good life that accrues from some 234 years of American freedom and capitalism, with being released of the supposed burdens of past American racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism–and all the other –isms that supposedly gave white males singular privelege.

Yet nowhere in this race/class/gender victimization narrative of the last decades was there any admission that such prejudices are the stuff of all humans. Middle Eastern Muslims imported as many slaves as did North Americans.

Religious and class discrimination in India or Saudi Arabia  today trumps anything in America’s recent past. Japanese and Chinese prove extremely xenophobic, often in blatantly racial terms. Yet  only in the West and the United States do the traditions of  self-criticism work to suppress these unfortunate and innate human tribal passions.

Instead, by demonizing the proverbial white male and the culture he spawned, we granted an unearned exemption to his superficial antithesis: the more supposed distance from this stereotype, the more blanketing the pardon.

It works out like this: so-called people of color abroad have often piggybacked onto the domestic victimization narratives of American women, gays, minorities and non-Christians.  This new foreign “other” then—even if it has suffered no oppression from the United States—enjoys proverbial victim status among many influential Americans. A young Barack Obama, of Kenyan and white parentage, can enjoy federal affirmative action, apparently on the theory that his appearance resembles those of African-Americans whose parents were once slaves and still suffer the wages of such original servitude and later discrimination. An illegal alien can cross the border from Oaxaca, and immediate qualify for consideration as a “Latino”, apparently on the logic that he resembles those who cite decades of racial prejudice. And of course, such consideration works to exempt the other from criticism of even the worst sexual, racial, and religious bigotry A Rev, Wright cannot really be racist, despite deriding Jews, Italians and whites in general—given that his ancestors’ plight and his own appearance put him errantly on the victim side of the ledger.

What are the wages of this new tyranny of multiculturalism?
One, the double standard is untenable. Once we deify multiculturalism, all else becomes subordinate. There is no reason why feminists should object that Muslim immigrants arrange marriages or practice female circumcision inside the U.S. In sum, multiculturalism will eventually discredit liberal feminism and the entire idea of universal racial and religious tolerance.

Two, bigotry abroad will only grow, as others sense that the United States lacks the confidence in its own values to extend its self-critical principles abroad. Already, countries not only smile at the notion that a self-proclaimed liberal United States proves not so brave in its criticism overseas, but also believes, even if in condescending fashion, that non-Westerners enjoy some sort of high moral ground that shields them moral audit.

Three, the contradictions lead to caricature. This was best evidenced last summer in Cairo when President Obama falsely claimed certain historical achievements on the part of Islam—from helping to foster the European Renaissance and Enlightenment to Muslim opposition to Christian inquisitions in Cordoba—all the while delineating Western shortcomings. The problem was not just that even President Obama’s compliant audience in Cairo did not believe all that, but they also earned  certain delight with his strange eagerness to bend the truth on their behalf. Here at home, supporters did not care that their President had fabricated and distorted history; it was his intention to reach out to the other that mattered.

Multiculturalism is a good reminder that when standards are relative, there are no standards at all.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 and the Bradley Prize in 2008.

Obama’s Next Chief of Staff Tied to Radical Muslim Group

The woman who may be Barack Obama’s next chief of staff has ties to radical Muslims, radical leftists, and potentially illegal government propaganda.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s decision not seek re-election all but ensures that Rahm Emanuel will throw his hat in the ring. Emanuel currently serves as chief of staff to President Obama, the man who controls who gets access to the president. Politico.com reports that Rahm has told sources his likely successor is Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s long-term friend and Chicago confidant.

Anyone familiar with Jarrett’s record should be concerned.

To pick but one underreported example, Valerie Jarrett gave the keynote address at the 46th annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) last July. ISNA was an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation’s financing of terrorist organizations, particularly Hamas. ISNA is a byproduct of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that formed the worldview of Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden.

Although Jarrett was the highest-ranking government official at the meeting, she was hardly the only VIP. Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, addressed the same gathering. Stevens is the “Peace Train” folk singer who defended the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie after the latter dared criticize Islam.

Another of the speakers, Imam Warith Deen Umar, has a long history of Islamic extremism. He reportedly hailed the 9/11 hijackers as martyrs, a remark that got him banned from the New York State Department of Corrections, where he served as a chaplain. In another instance, Umar urged Muslims to:

Rise up and fight. And fight them until turmoil is no more and strike terror into their hearts…[T]he kuffar [unbeliever] was not afraid of the Muslims up until a few days ago now they frightened to death. Green alert, red alert, orange alert. The Muslims are praying. They getting on our planes, they may shoot us down. They scared to death. Alhamdulilah. [Thanks be to God.]

Jarrett has kept tight company with ISNA literally since day one of the administration. She invited its president, Ingrid Mattson, to offer a Muslim prayer at Obama’s inauguration and attend a Ramadan dinner. Aaron Klein of WND.com reported, “In June 2009, Obama senior aide Valerie Jarrett invited Mattson to work on the White House Council on Women and Girls, which Jarrett leads. One month later, the Justice Department sponsored an information booth at an ISNA bazaar in Washington, D.C.”

The relationship has continued apace since then. ISNA published the book by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader behind the Ground Zero Mosque. It was originally entitled A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa [conversion] in the Heart of America Post-9/11.

Jarrett’s participation in a conference so filled with radicals shows more than her poor choice of venue. Her keynote speech made clear she was there to recruit ISNA for the administration’s government-sponsored propaganda. According to ISNA’s account of the confab:

She commended ISNA for addressing many critical issues in the convention: “increasing civic engagement and interfaith cooperation, protecting the rights of the disabled and elderly, addressing domestic violence, improving education and health care, expanding renewable energy, and protecting the environment.”

Then she tried to get them involved with the government’s Serve.gov website. The White House website states:

After acknowledging the diligent work and great contribution of Muslim Americans to American society, Jarrett encouraged Muslim Americans to respond to President Obama’s call to service. She asked that they participate in United We Serve this summer, and utilize www.serve.gov to post service projects and find other opportunities.

This is the same project officials in Jarrett’s Office of Public Engagement would attempt to foist on grant recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), asking dozens of “artists” on a conference call to create art that promoted the president’s agenda.

OPE officials, including Jarrett herself, would host a “cultural policy summit” in D.C. last spring, featuring several of Van Jones’ associates, a host of radicals who accuse the CIA of selling crack in black neighborhoods, and the “former International Spokeswoman for the Universal Zulu Nation” (a woman who goes by the name “Rha Goddess”), among a cast of dozens. Sally Kohn, a leftist radical who was present at this and numerous subsequent meetings, confirmed the administration uses far-Left groups to covertly advocate for its agenda.

The ISNA speech appears to be another example of Jarrett reaching out to enlist radical, anti-American extremists in the White House’s cause. Indeed, Jarrett has been the primary source of radicals into the administration.

It was Valerie Jarrett who interviewed former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones. Jarrett gushed to the Netroots Nation conference:

We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him…for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that, and we have all that energy in the White House.

Jarrett lobbied Obama to create the office of Chief Diversity Officer within the FCC, a position filled by Mark Lloyd, an Alinskyite and former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

On the campaign trail, she made sure white staffers listened to the views of Al Sharpton’s racial grievance lobby. She — and both Obamas — are also close friends with Marilyn Katz, an SDS radical who oversaw “security” during the Days of Rage. Two years ago, Katz told the media, “I would probably reject violence as a useful form of revolution.” Probably?

Jarrett is already the de facto chief of staff, if not the de facto president. Last year, Obama toldNew York Times reporter Robert Draper, “I trust her completely…She is family.” Obama empowers Jarrett “to speak for me, particularly when we’re dealing with delicate issues.” When asked, he admitted he runs every decision by her. Jarrett perhaps described her relationship with Barack Obama best: “We have kind of a mind meld.”

To be safe, the administration is floating other names. Former OMB head Peter Orszag was rumored to be on the list, but after he publicly rebuked the president’s tax policy, he would seem an unusual pick. Politico claims Tom Daschle is allegedly being considered, but that hardly seems likely after Obama admitted he “screwed up” after nominating Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services. Another potential nominee is John Podesta, the head of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, which currently employs Van Jones. Podesta, writes the Politico’s Ben Smith, “would represent a change of course.” The more things change….

No matter who holds the position, Jarrett holds the reins of power. Her radicalism is no mistake. It is a perfect reflection of the president’s deepest-held opinions and beliefs.

 

And that should frighten everyone who believes in freedom.

Article by Ben Johnson, FloydReports.com