The Ten Trillion Dollar Survey
http://wethepeoplerule.net/limesurvey/index.php/survey/index/sid/242566/newtest/Y/lang/en
The US government has, time and time again, enacted legislation that transfers trillions of dollars of wealth into the hands of the few, an elite class of persons that meet the definition of nobility, something forbidden by the very Constitution that government powers derive their authority from. If a government claims to represent the people, the laws and appropriations they enact should represent the will of the people and benefit the vast majority of it’s citizens rather than a select few. If a government does not represent it’s citizens it is time for the citizens to represent themselves.
If you have a chance to vote on law and appropriation rather than for a representative of the two party system, would you vote to make the rich, the privileged, richer? Would you vote to go to war to defend the corporate imperial empire? The following survey contains four questions concerning acts of Congress that authorized the transfer of trillions of dollars worth of power and wealth to a few elite CEOs and families of a class of riches, of affluence, unimaginable to the vast majority of us. This survey also contains two questions concerning legislation that approved the funding of acts of war resulting in trillions of dollars to be spent on wars at the human cost of thousands of American Soldier’s lives and the lives of millions of civilians in foreign lands who had nothing to do with any perceived threat to our country, all resulting military industrial complex profits with the lions share of the money ending up in the hands of the same class of people who were granted private ownership of powerful economic instruments by the legislative branch of the US Government.
The purpose of this survey is to illustrate the need, the right, of people to be able to have a vote that counts concerning the laws and appropriations we are to live under and within. Alongside the purpose of advocating for citizen’s right to vote on law and appropriation, we are demonstrating that accurate, safe and secure Internet voting is possible and preferable to the two party false representative system.
The actual survey questions are ‘Yes and No’ written as short as possible, yet links to the actual legislation and an in depth explanation of opposition to those Acts perpetrated in the names of the majority of citizens are written into this text accompanying the Survey. This is an open unscientific survey, the only things being recorded and saved in our data base are your answers to the questions and the IP(Internet Protocal) address you answer the questions from. Yes, the legislation behind these six questions resulted in the transfer of far more than 10 TRILLION DOLLARS in wealth from people who actually work to convert raw natural resources into things we need and provide actual services to others; into the hands of people whose only purpose is to hoard those riches. Please complete this survey and pass it along to others, thank you for your time and consideration.
One: Considering that the Congress, publicly elected officials, are to ‘coin’ control the supply of money as well as regulate commerce according to the US Constitution, do you believe the Federal Reserve Act is unconstitutional and should be repealed? Please read as much as you feel you need to make an informed rational yes or no decision. Directly below this introduction paragraph are several clauses from the US Constitution that relate directly to this question:
Article 1, Section 8,
1: The Congress shall have Power To….
2: To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;
3: To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,
5: To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin,
6: To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
Article 1, Section 9,
8: No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States:
Article 1, Section 10
1: No State shall…or grant any Title of Nobility,
Article 4, Section 4,
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,
A legitimate government cannot serve two masters, those masters being one to serve ‘we the people’, and two serving the interests of the banker, owner investor corporate master class. The Federal Reserve Act of 2013 granted a private group of bankers a nearly unregulated monopoly over our system of exchange of goods and services, the private control over our monetary system. Rather than publicly elected officials controlling this all encompassing economic aspect of life in our country, the Congress ceded our constitutional right to a republican form of government to a privately owned plutocratic rule, meaning rule by the wealthy few. I believe this privatizing of the money supply, the instrument which we of the working class exchange our goods and services, is a deprivation of and an infraction against our constitutionally guaranteed rights. While Article One, Section 8, Clause 2, does give Congress the right to borrow money, it does not give any private group of people the right to a private monopoly over our system of exchange of our goods and services to rake in vast fortunes off the top virtually all transactions of value. The owners of such a device will eventually end up owning everything on their paper. Privatizing the right to print a nations currency, a paper with intrinsic value, a universal trade mechanism and distribute it is nothing less than an unconstitutional grant of nobility. The Congress ceded our rights to the economic sovereignty granted us in the US Constitution and that is the means through which some self intitled persons are able to amass fortunes worth over 100,000 times the entire lifetime earnings of the average working class person. Although the moneyed class dispute and do their best to discredit the following books, even labeling the writers of these books ‘Anti-Semitic’, the following two books explain the reality that the Federal Reserve Act allows a private group of people to print money based upon their own private whims with no unit of value behind it and continue to own the world through this fiat money system: The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, by Mullins, Eustace and Edward Griffin The Creature from Jekyll Island.
Here is the official US Government title and short explanation of the act that was passed in 1913: Federal Reserve Act : Public Law 63-43, 63d Congress, H.R. 7837: An Act to Provide for the Establishment of Federal Reserve Banks, to Furnish an Elastic Currency, to Afford Means of Rediscounting Commercial Paper, to Establish a More Effective Supervision of Banking in the United States, and for Other Purposes
Here are links to the text of the Federal Reserve Act:
http://www.llsdc.org/FRA-LH
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/scribd/?title_id=966&filepath=/files/docs/historical/fr_act/nara-dc_rg011_e005b_pl63-43.pdf
What is the cost of allowing a private elite group of people to own a monopoly over the nation’s monetary system to working class people? In my opinion the entire national debt $21,031,067,004,766 would not exist if not for this unconstitutional granting of the greatest title of nobility ever known to humanity to a small group of greedy people who think they are some how deserving of such an advantage over others. The only period in US history where the issuance of money was based on value, on goods and services provided, was during the US Civil War, at that time the US government issued ‘green back dollars’, here is a Wikipedia article concerning such interest free government issued money rather than money issued by private banks, and by the way, the union won the civil war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenback_(1860s_money) Also here is an article, a GAO report, about how the Federal Reserve and the Bank for International Settlements among other international banks got together and conjured up a few trillion dollars to balance their books. On page 223 there is a sort of a chart or a graph titled: “Figure 27: Five MMIFF SPVs and Approved Financial Institutions for Each”, which divvys up, currency swaps what ever, trillions of dollars of money to 50 banks from several nations based on some heading or categories named after Hadrian, Trajan, Aurelius, Antonius and Nerva, who all were Roman Emperors; so does that not illustrate that these bankers are like kids playing a monopoly board game with our lives, receiving the fat off the land for nothing more than a government sanctioned pyramid scheme? What is the intrinsic verses the tangible value of such a fallacy of human worth? https://www.gao.gov/assets/330/321506.pdf While this GAO report is also related to the results of the TARP Act of 2008, if it were not for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, such people would not be meeting privately to decide to who and how much money they are going to create out of nowhere and give themselves to control regulate and own the entire planet. Therefore while a real universal publicly owned means of exchange of goods and services would benefit all of humanity more equally. Is there still some benefit to having such a trade mechanism even if it is privately owned, in organizing society around greed? The carrot on a stick does seem to inspire some people to work for their masters; therefore instead of being far more that the total national debt, I will put the cost of the Federal Reserve Act at:
Price Tag of about 10 trillion dollars.
Two: In hind sight, although being aware of President Eisenhower’s speech concerning the ‘Military Industrial Complex” at the time, would you have voted for the public funding of the Vietnam war? Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Southeast Asia Resolution, Pub.L. 88–408, 78 Stat. 384, enacted August 10, 1964, gave U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson authorization, without a formal declaration of war by Congress, for the use of conventional military force in Southeast Asia. Was the Vietnam war necessary to protect the people of the United States against the threat of communism or was it just a way for the military industrial complex to make money? In hind site the Vietnam War has cost over a trillion dollars, https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/life_08.html. I think the human cost and the cost in pollution and destruction of nature resulting from the Vietnam war is far greater than the stated cost in dollars. There were 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties and 304,000 wounded out of 2.7 million who served. Then when you consider the number of people from Southeast Asia who died in the war it is a human tragedy of genocidal proportion. Grand total of war deaths due to the war conducted in: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (1954–75), the middle estimate, is 2,450,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties
Price tag 1 trillion+ 2003 US dollars
Three: Would you have voted to remove banking regulations to give privately owned and run banks the right to consolidate and combine commercial lending with investment banking and insurance businesses to gain even more power and wealth? S. 900 (106th): Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, (Pub.L. 106–102, 113 Stat. 1338, enacted November 12, 1999) is an act of the 106th United States Congress (1999–2001). It repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, removing barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies and insurance companies that prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company. With the bipartisan passage of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies were allowed to consolidate. Furthermore, it failed to give to the SEC or any other financial regulatory agency the authority to regulate large investment bank holding companies. The legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. https://www.congress.gov/bill/106th-congress/senate-bill/900
For cost of deregulated banking to the taxpayers and consumers, see troubled asset relief program (TARP) bill for a partial answer. What is the human cost of forcing families out of their homes by repossessing them after abusing them through variable interest mortgage schemes? If the estimate of the value, the cost of this legislation, is based upon the profits taken in as a result of it, by a few bankers and hedge fund operators, it is certain that over a trillion dollars has been transferred from workers to monetary system manipulators as a result of the shameful Gramm–Leach–Bliley (banker deregulation) Act.
Price Tag: over 1 trillion dollars.
Four: Knowing at the time that there was no proven connection between Iraq and the 9-11 attack, that UN weapons inspectors in Iraq found no significant weapons of mass destruction, would you have voted to authorize the tax payer funding of the Iraq war? H.J.Res.114 — 107th Congress (2001-2002) AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ RESOLUTION OF 2002 Passed Senate without amendment (10/11/2002) Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 - Expresses support for the President's efforts to: (1) strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and (2) obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion, and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions. Authorizes the President to use the U.S. armed forces to: (1) defend U.S. national security against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq. Directs the President, prior to or as soon as possible (but no later than 48 hours) after exercising such authority, to make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that: (1) reliance on further diplomatic or peaceful means alone will not achieve the above purposes; and (2) acting pursuant to this joint resolution is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization for use of the armed forces, consistent with requirements of the War Powers Resolution. Requires the President to report to Congress at least every 60 days on matters relevant to this resolution. https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-joint-resolution/114/text
The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest,https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-war-anniversary/iraq-war-costs-u-s-more-than-2-trillion-study-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314 As of June 29, 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Defense casualty website, there were 4,424 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) and 31,952 wounded in action (WIA) as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Also what is the moral cost of somewhere from 110,000 to 1.2 million Iraqi people dying violently as the result of a war obviously undertaken to secure Iraq’s oil for the benefit of international corporations? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Price Tag: Over 2 Trillion Dollars
Five: Since a great number of the 7 million home and business foreclosures and repossessions of the 2008 financial crisis resulted from banks abusing variable interest schemes and other less than ethical practices, would you have then voted to bail out the banks in a way the TARP act did? https://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2015/01/15/foreclosure-filings-drop-by-18-in-2014-hit-lowest-level-since-2006-realtytrac-says/#1c6eb04448e5 H.R. 1424 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) Troubled Asset Relief Program under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. To provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase and insure certain types of troubled assets for the purposes of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system and protecting taxpayers, to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide incentives for energy production and conservation, to extend certain expiring provisions, to provide individual income tax relief, and for other purposes. <<NOTE: Oct. 3, 2008 - [H.R. 1424]>>
https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/house-bill/1424/text
Since the bankers took the 350 billion dollars actually disbursed to the bankers and then the FED and the BIS added about 16 trillion dollars of new money to their books as a result of this situation and legislation giving themselves that much more leverage over natural resources and working class people, all at a time when banks are deregulated so they can combine mortgage lending with investing and insurance business, people of the working class have to compete with this newly created money, see page number 131 which is page 144 on the pdf file counter https://www.gao.gov/assets/330/321506.pdf Taking this into consideration, I would say that the cost of TARP to people who cannot make money appear from thin air is about the value of the newly conjured up money.
Price Tag: 16 Trillion Dollars.
Six: At a time in US history when income inequality between the rich and the poor is as great as it ever has been, would you have voted for an Act to reduce taxes that benefits the extremely rich more than any other economic class such as HR – 1 did? https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality HR - 1 An Act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to titles II and V of the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2018. (Also known as the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” or ‘TCJA’) This bill amends the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) to reduce tax rates and modify policies, credits, and deductions for individuals and businesses. It also establishes an oil and gas leasing program for the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska.
(Unless otherwise specified, provisions referred to in this summary as temporary or as a suspension of an existing provision apply for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2017, and before January 1, 2026.)
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text
http://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-will-trumps-tax-plan-cost
So the lowest estimate to the cost of this tax break for corporations and the wealthy in just the growth of the national debt is 1 trillion dollars. We know that the money created by the banks trickles down and the first level of trickle goes to people that may or may not be able to afford and pay back hundreds of million and even billion dollar low interest loans of the magic money from the Federal Reserve and the banker bail out. Jared Kushner received, loans of — $184 million received from Apollo Global Management in fall 2017, and $325 million from Citigroup in the spring that same year — were received some time after Kushner met with top executives from those companies at the White House. http://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-company-loans-apollo-citigroup-white-house-2018-2 Since this projected increase in national debt results mainly from a 14% tax cut for corporations and more the wealthy, their profits do not result from any contribution to society in the form of goods or services, the 14% debt cost reflects tax on a profit so 1 trillion divided by .14 is about the same as multiplying the one trillion by 7, so the cost of giving a tax break on profits by people who do not contribute to society and only take in profit from owning natural resources, money making instruments and people they pay to work to gain a profit from other people’s labors is somewhere around 7 trillion dollars, in my opinion.
Price Tag: 7 trillion dollars.
In Conclusion: So these 6 Acts of Congress have and will cost people who work for a living somewhere between 10 and 37 trillion dollars give or take a few trillion. Increasing the amount of money has a two fold cost to people who derive their income from the wages of work. Money added to an economic system is going to cause inflation so everything will cost more, the other cost is direct competition with people who obtain this money just from being closer to the source of the money rather than providing and actual service to others. In other words if a banker or a hedge fund operator worth billions happens to want something you have worked and saved your whole life for, guess who will end up with that land or that house or that profitable business or even that girl or boy you wanted to marry? As far as the two wars and the Acts of Congress causing the funding of those wars, in relationship to who collects the majority of the money spent to wage a war, in some cases that information is private because private investment firms such as the Carlyle Group, owned a lot of defense contracting companies and since their stocks were not traded publicly at the time, the salaries and profits are not publicly available even if one of their main customers was the US Government. In 2012, Carlyle completed a $700 million initial public offering and began trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange on May 3, 2012. According to a 2015 ranking called the PEI 300 based on capital raised over the last five years, Carlyle was ranked No. 1 as the largest private equity firm in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carlyle_Group , https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/03/10/10-companies-profiting-most-from-war/1970997/ . Yes, some of the money taken in by defense contractors goes to workers and working class families but none the less when one CEO rakes in and retires with a 172 million dollar package, there is no question that the spoils of publicly financed war are not distributed fairly, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-25/united-technologies-chenevert-leaves-with-172-million-package .
Banking and hedge fund operations are even more profitable than war to individuals who are in the money and in high places of the business of money and ownership. The highest paid bankers on Earth receive between 7 and 28 million dollars in one year, http://www.businessinsider.com/highest-paid-bank-bosses-2017-7 . Hedge fund managers rake in the most money of any individual, the amount of money they pocket, well at least on paper, is out of this world, the top 10 in 2015 start out with poor George Soros who only gained 300 million while on the top of the game, Ken Griffin added 1.7 dollars worth to his personal wealth in one year. https://www.forbes.com/pictures/ghmf45mijd/1-ken-griffin/#65a0186d58b3
The moral of the story is, the only morality that people have in big business and government is increasing their profits and wealth, that is why there is such a large income gap between the rich and the poor. The rich finance the elected officials who make laws to favor the rich and the circle of wealth is completed. The people in elected or are selected to high offices in the United States government are nothing but petite bourgeoisie, meaning they are rather small players in the capitalist game even if they are in charge of creating the rules for the game. I’m not an economist by any means nor do I want to be, yet I did receive passing grades in Introduction to Economy and Engineering Economy. The thing that turned me off about it is within his introductory lecture, the professor stated that the most basic premise behind the meaning of, the study of, economy is ‘infinite need and limited resources’. The very moment he said that, I said to myself in my mind, “infinite greed and limited resources”, so obviously I was not meant to be a banker let alone an economist. The modern economist does not consider the private ownership of the monetary system, there is no money, no job available for an economist who challenges this stalwart arrangement of private wealth and fake free market skulduggery. Even if you consider planning and organizing of any human productive activity to be work, the best planners, the best organizers, the inventors of new products, are not the most well paid individuals in the capitalist system, the most talented people work for the money managers and the investors who own them.
So at last my conclusion to all of this and the reason for the survey. Although revolutions against a tyrannical ruling class such as the French Revolution tend to be violent and messy never attaining lasting equality sought by a ‘crowd’, a collective of workers, revolutionary ideals should be considered at this time in our human history. When the elite class places themselves on a pedestal which deems their individual worth to be thousands of times more than the average citizen, a revolution is inevitable. I believe a mostly peaceful evolution is possible especially in this information age of the Internet. This survey, the on line survey, the six questions, very briefly stated in yes or no fashion, shall illustrate that no average citizen would vote for such Acts of Congress as these six to become the law and accompanying appropriation of funds which are harmful to those common citizens and result in us appearing stupid, mean and hateful to the rest of the world. The point here is throughout history an organized majority is a force to be reckoned with.
This survey is an introduction to my 2018 run for Wisconsin 7th District Representative in the United States Congress. As a Representative I will put a system in place where every registered voter will be able to vote on the laws and appropriations before Congress and I would cast the vote of the majority of the citizens who participate even if I do not agree with their vote. I will accept only ½ of the Representative’s salary and the other half shall go into a non-profit corporation with the purpose of completing and insuring that a system where every citizen in the district can vote on the law and appropriations before congress and the majority vote of those who participate is entered for the 7th District of Wisconsin. If the majority had a meaningful vote on law and appropriation it is certain that these six Acts of Congress that cost us all somewhere between 10 and 37 trillion dollars would not have been made the law of the land. Even the low estimate of 10 trillion is over 30,000 dollars for each man woman and child. The democrats are equally as at fault here as the republicans, they are divisions of the same corporate party. Our quality of life and our very lives will soon depend upon us organizing and voting to put an end to this financial and war mongering tyranny. So please take the time to complete the six question survey. Thank You, Ken Driessen, independent Direct Participatory Democracy Candidate for US Congress.