They’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace

Machine-guns fronting Robbin’ and mAlice

A Knight-to-be another bla’guard

Britannia prostituted is terrible hard*

 

…. and Ireland, like SA, also continues to slide.

_______________________

(* Apologies to AA Milne)

 

The western world’s moral decline can be detected without too much scratching.

 

Tourists flock to Buckingham Palace and are thrilled to have their photos taken with police or household guardsmen. As a national symbol the Palace is awesome.

 

But so were Rome’s symbolic buildings.

 

The only problem was/is that they were/are inaccessible.

 

An inaccessible symbol is a non-symbol.

 

What is even worse is that arms prevented/s intellectual access.

 

Historically all social systems have collapsed because moral decline inevitably sets in; because those in occupation of the national symbols have closed their ears (& minds) to, or the pecking order has obstructed, intelligent communications.

It inevitably follows then that the ‘western’, ‘Christian’, structures will also collapse at some point in time.

Therefore, goes the backsliding argument, why not simply enjoy the benefits regardless of whether those benefits are moral or immoral?

 

The reason why not is that man does not simply evolve, man, in the main, develops him/her self.

(One can quickly become lost in endless reams of psycho-babble, subtle & otherwise, and plenty of historical justifications for maintaining particular standpoints. A typical current example can be found at tompaine.com; A Parable For Our Times, by Bill Moyers. This is a paper that opens with examples of Jesus Christ and closes with comparisons (implied) to popular US figures. It uses outdated, and baseless, historical beliefs & arguments to justify accepting the status quo – so as to justify the minority western position of affluence over the majority enslaved.)

 

Moral decline is relative.

 

Lack of moral incline is in effect moral decline.

 

So is stagnation.

 

oOo

 

Over ten letters (from the writer) to Buckingham Palace dealing with critical global issues, including the wrongful listing of Donald Gordon for Knighthood, global FinServInd frauds, etc. have not been answered. The value of these issues globally exceed Trillions of US Dollars in total; i.e. they are serious, critical, issues, they are not trivial issues.

 

- Telecons to the Palace’s main reception have resulted in connection to automated responses requesting contact details but still nil response.

 

- A trip to Buckingham Palace in January yielded enquiries by the police guard, complete with machine gun, eliciting from the reception that the Queen’s Private Secretary & staff are absent, because the Queen is not present.

“Do you appreciate the seriousness of armed-force presence with intellectual direction being absent?” I politely asked the police guard with machine gun.

“I understand your point sir, but all I can do is relay the information” politely replied the police guard whilst his fingers fiddled with the machine gun.

A Constitutional Monarch is also a private citizen with obligations as anyone else.

Even though this creates conflict it is hard to understand what conflict exists with Monarchy staff such that a communication vacuum is created; and communications ignored.

An ominous picture of evil emanating from a communications vacuum can quickly be conjured. History is full of examples:-

 

- the tenuous peace between opposing soldiers in WWI trenches was broken because General staff ordered snipers to shoot their own men caught in no-man’s land. Peace was purposefully destroyed by war-mongerers, and the world went into turmoil from which it is still trying to extricate itself.

 

- Milner’s malicious manipulations of Kruger purposefully sought conflict; the conflict, the Boer War, was the catalyst for WWI.

 

Guns, within a communications vacuum, are highly dangerous.

 

Psycho-babblists will argue the horse-before-cart, and cart-before-horse, to add confusion with the sole purpose of avoiding responsibilities.

The purpose of this site is not to psycho-babble but to put clear engineering perspective onto defective social/economy/business/finance environments

Engineers put real systems & controls together. Economists do not. Nor do psycho-babblists or other ‘inexact’ scientists.

Whilst there is no doubt that Queen Elizabeth does not seek conflict – it is nonetheless true that the silence (comms vacuum) by Her Majesty’s staff is effectively creating an acceptance of the status quo (defective) – vis: that global fraud & dishonesty is acceptable.

 

With such a communications/intellect vacuum, what then of the Duke of Edinburgh awards – how are these determined? What protections are there from opportunistic manipulators seeking to climb a status ladder; and eventually to buy into a mainstream honour?????

 

The 2006 honours list confirms that KPMG International Chairman Michael Rake is to be knighted for services to the accountancy profession.

 

BUT …………. KPMG have been involved in numerous international irregularities & hiding of scams; KPMG (& Rake) have also remained silent over Donald Gordon’s masterminding of pension & investment fraud scams; of which industry KPMG have been accountants/auditors for many of the fraudulent institutions.

KPMG are on this websites comms list.

 

Auditors (including KPMG) are appointed by legal mandate so as to bring independent assurance of honest practices – KPMG, and ALL other auditors, DID EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE – they purposefully assisted in developing & maintaining fraud scams..

 

On what basis then does Blair’s government justify a recommendation for knighthood for a person (Rake) that is intimately & extensively involved within a company, and a profession, that has complicity with fraudulent financial services institutions & companies???????????.

 

Queen Elizabeth, even in her private capacity, has the right to question recommendations for honours – the more so in light of Blair’s involvement with kick-backs for same.

 

It is also true to say that Queen Elizabeth & her family have all benefited IMMENSELY from my work, but the communications vacuum is blocking awareness of this.

 

It is hard to imagine that Queen Elizabeth would personally sanction an honour for person/s that have failed to act professionally, which knowing omissions have had serious negative consequences for societies collectively.

 

Paul Burrell’s book ‘Royal Duty’ (about his duty with the Queen & Princess Diana) confirms the in-house politicking that is so destructive to the monarchy, and its institutional role.

 

Submissions to the UK’s Metropolitan Police (New Scotland Yard) concerning Donald Gordon’s frauds have also not been replied to. Police power-persons are not holding to the same principles that regular policeman have to.

 

Corporate criminals can buy the police in UK, just as in SA, just as they can buy politicians.

 

A recent documentary on Enron put perspective onto Ronald Reagan’s mistake of having been misled by Ken Lay. Reagan stated (to the effect) that government was the problem in inhibiting growth & development, this statement led to the freeing up (deregulation) of corporate America.

The consequent ever-tightening & spiralling investment scams by Enron’s executives eventually collapsed, proving that, contrary to Reagan, correctly engineered protections (including regulation) are a necessity.

Contrast this to the ever-tightening of spiralling investment scams in the new financial capital, London (see London’s Sunday Times Magazine website, article:– The Golden Gateway, John Arlidge).

 

Newly created financial instruments with obscure names such as bunds, bobls, shaz accelerate the creation of imaginary money and all add to increasing & spiralling destructive Speculative Demand Money (Msp) – it becomes baseless fictitious finances. It is financial prostitution.

 

The difference between Rome-of-old & London-of-new is that whilst Rome’s actual population was 80% enforced-slave, London’s worst off financial-slaves are simply living elsewhere in the world, but still at 80%, and more.

 

(also see paper series: Economists inexact models exactly defective)

 

Has any auditing/accounting firm rung any warning bells?

 

Has KPMG’s Rake transparently rung any warning bells?

 

NO!!!

 

They’ve all wrung numerous balls but NONE have rung any bells (for the warning thereof).

 

How is it then that a Professional Engineer has consistently uncovered massive frauds for many years when the accounting/auditing profession, which is lawfully empowered to do exactly what I have been doing, have not been able to???????????????????????

 

What value can Rake honestly say that he has brought about in comparison????????

He can’t. He’s covered up massive frauds!!!!

But he gets listed for a knighthood.

 

In short auditors/accountants cannot be trusted, they are collectively dishonest BECAUSE each individual within the accounting/auditing profession is dishonest, whether actively or passively – why then should Rake be knighted?

 

INTERNATIONAL AUDITING/ACCOUNTING FIRMS SHOULD BE COMPELLED TO UNBUNDLE – they are a critical part of the global fraud problem.

Despite Osama’s Twin-Towers warning (justifiable?) to the west the financial capital has merely shifted from New York to London.

London, UK in toto, has allowed itself to be used as the centre for a financially powerful minority few to financially enslave the world.

Arlidge’s article also states that it is purely the income from this financial (enslavement) trading that UK’s finances are now in positive balance.

Positive finance balance has been traded against severe Negative moral imbalance – this is a recipe for disaster.

How can UK citizens change this?

Arguing that democracy allows for adequate change is clearly a wrong argument. Twin Towers proves this. Blair’s cash4honours likewise.

The communications vacuum at Buckingham Palace merely adds to the difficulty. (This is not to dump the entire morality issue with the Queen – but she is nonetheless the morality figurehead)

 

The reality is that Fanaticism (understandable) is increasing because the western models are increasing the disparity divide which creates the breeding ground for fanaticism.

It is simply a question of when, where, how another fanatical eruption (eastern) occurs.

And let’s not dump ‘fundamentalism’, and ‘fanaticism, solely onto eastern groups.

 

For anyone to get on a horse and schlep thousand of miles across the channel, across Europe, across the middle east to Jerusalem for a religious barney they have to be fundamentally fundamentalist & fanaticist.

So too Western leaders that push missile buttons.

 

Churches in Ireland, & UK, are very near empty, reflecting that Churches are morally & theologically bankrupt

 

Euroland arguments that open borders allow for greater community & migration is also destructive. Ireland’s stagnation for some 80 years whilst its educated youth migrated elsewhere is a similar circumstance being enforced upon the poorer EU states. Ireland (& UK) did not solve Ireland’s problems then, and they certainly have rejected value-added engineering skills to solve the difficulties that poorer states are facing now.

Ireland thinks it is ‘solving’ its problem by stripping other nations of their skills & resources – but it is an immoral non-solution.

The truth is there are very limited positives, benefits, to a host nation with migration filling new jobs – the creation of the jobs are invariably subservient positions & low paid.

 

BUT, there are a host of negatives.

 

Would you be happy if you were forced into the basement of your own home and compelled to serve those that forced you out?

 

Aspirations (Maslow hierarchy) are destroyed; the spark-of-life is diminished/quenched = impoverished = social problems increase.

 

The social cost of asset stripping from one nation to bolster another is immense – just as robbing Peter to pay Paul.

 

A crazy situation has arisen in which local products are regulated out so as to permit importation of more costly products produced elsewhere. The higher social costs, alone, of greenhouse gasses from vastly increased transportation, because of the destruction of local industry/commerce, is taking effect in multiple ways - diminished national spark-of-life, floods, pollution, etc.

 

Blair’s response (as reported) is not to worry, simply let the scientists solve it. Blair does not understand that scientists, like economists (& politicians), are not systems & controls engineers – scientists are not going to solve it.

Despite Ireland’s statement of significant funding for new R&D to seek new & meaningful solutions for Ireland’s own increasing problems the public sector is blocking reform initiatives because they are locked into boxed thinking.

 

Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern) is now turning to the OECD to assist in unblocking its public sector – simply a spiralling case of ‘physician, heal thy self’ because the OECD is similarly locked into boxed thinking.

Proof? - Has anyone seen any economy that the OECD has engineered to health?

It is suggested in the media that Ireland’s government are hamstrung by the public sector, and by over-regulation, that effectively regulates executive government out of its power.

 

It is understandable that society has sought to protect itself against dishonest executive - the Moriarty report over Haughey’s scams indicates the extent of dishonesty but it doesn’t allude to the full impact that even one dishonest act can have upon a nation‘s well being. And the spin-offs of Haughey’s era are still around.

Regardless of the historical issues the fact remains that no democratic constitution can be used to block honest reform – it is simply the lack of forthrightness of executive that is impeding.

 

And from discussions/correspondences with Irish Ministers it is clear that they are the problem – - they lack understanding that economics as expounded by leading economists is entirely defective;

- they lack courage to engage honestly with those that bring real & significant value solutions.

 

One has to ask whether Ireland’s tagged R&D funding is to be siphoned off into some bogus R&D fronting that covers its true intent, similar as SA’s Finance Minister Manuel did with Billions-of-Rands of tagged R&D payments to his lover.

 

It is also important to put Blair’s era into perspective.

 

Essentially Blair was a charismatic figure that picked up the wave of Thatcher’s developments. John Major had simply ridden the diminishing crest whilst in-fighting destroyed Conservative credibility. Blair has not brought about any significant development – moral decline has increased

 

The reason for Thatcher’s success was primarily because of her ability to apply science principles into economic reality, but with engineering being absent Thatcher’s initiatives were not sustainable in the long term.

These deficiencies, due to the absence of engineering, is evidenced by the collapse of Britannia’s economy infrastructure.

 

Britannia is now surviving solely because of immense amounts of ‘Blood Money’ (Msp, Speculative Demand Money) circulating in the world’s ‘financial’ capital.

Britannia is prostituted by Blair’s government.

Ireland’s Haughey kick-started the Irish economy with blood money from setting up an international finance centre that was (still is) deeply entrenched in fraud scams.

 

The Euroland financial injections are simply blood monies with additional layers hiding its sources.

Ireland’s infrastructure is unsound.

 

It is also mind-boggling to think that Britain, 70 years ago, survived partly because of home-industry armaments manufacture (e.g. Mosquito aircraft), but Britain also cannot now produce its economic counterpart vis: butter.

 

Britain’s government has to flaunt Britannia in the red-light district to prostitute income from the rest of the world simply to survive – and AIDS is rife.

(AIDS = All Investors Defrauded Syndrome).

 

Britannia’s prostitution is overwhelming evidence of Britain’s complete moral decline.

It is why Britain is a legitimate target for people who are suffering from enforced financial enslavement & impoverishment.

Britannia has a constitutional right to speak out, both individually & sovereignly, to oppose its enforced prostitution.

 

Frustrations & anger, closer to home, will also increase because of localised repercussions – one should not lose sight of the fact that the Northern Ireland situation is a pressure relief zone that has deflected potential disruptions from erupting elsewhere in Ireland & UK.

(The St Andrews talks have no lasting substance!)

 

It is unlikely that one can globally achieve an emotive response to London’s Blood Money, just as it is unlikely that people will oppose Blood Diamonds as the latest Leonardo Di Caprio movie hopes to achieve.

 

Further & more importantly, emotive rejection of Money (or Diamonds) does not address the causal problems vis: defective, regulation, systems structures, & controls.

Also note:- the sole reason that diamonds are so expensive is because the Oppenheimers were able to buy legislators & legislation (globally), some 100-odd years ago, for their own ends.

 

This is similar to the circumstance that allows vast quantities of Blood Money to immorally circulate in Britain.

Academic institutions have declined because academics have prostituted themselves – this is abundantly clear from SA’s CHAMSA Economics for Prosperity Conference in Dec 2005 (see Archives for paper on this). And that such dishonesty has come through stems mainly from academic institutions being forced to accept private funding – this ALWAYS comes with pressure, and, clearly, the economist’s sector has succumbed to this pressure and become prostituted.

 

One only has to view the 2006 Economics Nobel Prize lecture (Edmund Phelps) to see that meaningful economy reforms have not been acknowledged. Alternatively stated; the engineering components that have been pioneered, and proven, via this website are not being acknowledged by these economists despite their being fully aware of the groundbreaking & adjudicated developments.

 

(Also consider the mis-application, by economists, of John Nash’s significant work in mathematics modelling, given prominence in A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe – but more on this to follow.)

 

A reform blockage exists in the ‘western’ world because of blanket dishonesty.

Without value-presented being correctly rewarded this blockage is unlikely to be overcome.

Theft of Intellectual Property is another difficulty. There is a belief (false) that information on the internet is free. Putting information onto the internet is simply a cheap, a free, method of registering patent rights. The fact that people are dishonest in not paying royalties for using IP does not imply that internet IP information is free; nor does it imply that IP rights holders have relinquished those rights.

 

If you were to place your suitcase on the platform at Kings Cross Station does that imply everyone has free access to it? Of course not.

Patents Registration is merely a formal recording of IP property; the internet achieves exactly the same purpose & more cheaply & more quickly.

 

It is also wrong for patented developments to be blocked by the rights holders. A fair & speedy process for determining royalties, and ensuring payments to rights holders, would allow developments to be quickly applied for the benefit of societies.

SA, UK, Ireland governments have consistently refused to act honestly with regard the immense value that they have accessed from this website & had presented to them (upon their request, or action).

(This dishonesty also deters whistleblowing, and places whistleblowers in danger - cf China’s human-lab-rats and the whistleblowing doctor that is now hiding in fear of his life – in a region that is renowned for body-parts trade.)

 

Perhaps the real blockage to moral change lies in a generic truth that Jo Moila recently identified from his years-long battles with judicial power-abuses in South Africa’s Constitutional Court & other courts.

Moila identified a generic truth that people who attain real power seem to acquire a concrete belief that those now subordinate to them must adopt a begging attitude.

Osama , and many other enslaved peoples, do not agree that they must beg – they fanatically disagree!!!!! (Jo Moil died a premature & mysterious death c2008, and not investigated by the authorities)

 

As intellect increases there is a decrease (rapid) in subservience.

BUT, as power increases expected subservience also increases (wrongly so).

 

Moral decline is frequently bandied but moral incline is never present – this is a reality which a destructive Globalisation mindset reinforces.

 

How is it that Blair, Ahern, Mbeki are afraid to talk to & engage honestly with an iddy-biddy li’l engineer????

 

Britannia is being touted & prostituted …….. around-the-clock, with machine-guns protecting Robbin’ & mAlice, and bla’guard knights (2Bornot2B), and all whilst changing guards maintain an aura of respectability (false).

 

Chris Addington Pr.Eng.

 

Published on Friday, December 22, 2006 by TomPaine.com

A Parable For Our Times

by Bill Moyers

The Christian story begins simply: A child is given, a son. He grows up to be a teacher, sage, healer and prophet. He gains a large following. To many he is a divine savior; to the rich and powerful he is an enemy. They put him to death in brutal fashion, befitting his humble beginnings in peasant Galilee and his birth in a stall thick with the raw odor of animals.

Toward the end of his life, Jesus preached in the Temple to large crowds, reaching the height of his power. There he told the parable that likely sealed his fate. He said there was a man who created a prosperous vineyard and then rented it to some tenants while he went away on a journey. At harvest time, the owner of vineyard sent a servant to collect a portion from the tenants, but they beat the servant and sent him away empty-handed. Another servant came, and they struck him on the head. Another they killed. Finally, the owner sent his own son to collect the back payments. “They will respect my son,” he thought. But when the tenants saw the son, and knew him to be the heir, they saw their chance to take full possession of the harvest. And so they killed the son, thinking now they would owe nothing from the vineyard to anyone.

The listeners understood the symbolism: God, of course, is the owner of the vineyard, and the vineyard is Israel or the covenant, or, more broadly, the whole creation. It is all that God entrusts to the leaders of his people. And what is in question is their stewardship of this bounty.

In the parable, the “tenants” are the leaders of Israel. They hoard the fruits of the vineyard for themselves, instead of sharing the fruits as the covenant teaches, according to God’s holy purposes. And the holiest of God’s purposes, ancient tradition taught, is helping the poor, and the fatherless, and the widow, and the stranger—all who do not have the resources to live in a manner befitting their dignity as creatures made in God’s image, as children of God.

When he finished the story, Jesus asked the people what the owner of the vineyard will do when he comes back. “He will kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others,” Jesus tells them. In the Gospel of Matthew, the people themselves answered: “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end, and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.”

Political dynasties fall from negligent stewardship. One thinks of the upward redistribution called “tax relief”; of the Iraq invasion sold as critical to the “War on Terror"; of rising poverty, inequality, crime, debt, and foreclosure as America spews its bounty on war and a military so muscle-bound it is like Gulliver. It would be hard to imagine a more catastrophic failure of stewardship, certainly in the biblical sense of helping the poor and allocating resources for the health of society. Once upon a time these errant stewards boasted of restoring a culture of integrity to politics. They became instead an axis of corruption, joining corporate power to political ideology to religious self-righteousness.

•••

The story is told of the devil and a companion walking along the streets. The companion saw a man reach down and pick up the truth from the sidewalk. "You're finished," the companion said to the devil. "I just saw that man pick up the truth from the street, and that means you are finished." The devil smiled and answered, "Don't worry. He's a human, and in 15 minutes he will have turned the truth into a concept and no one will know what it is."

From theories stubbornly followed in defiance of truth on the street comes ruin. Laissez-faire was never a good idea; in practice it is ruinous.

This is the season to recall Walt Whitman. He wrote in Democratic Vistas, around 1870:

The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth. As the human frame, or, indeed, any object in this manifold universe, is best kept together by the simple miracle of its own cohesion, and the necessity, exercise and profit thereof, so a great and varied nationality, occupying millions of square miles, were firmest held and knit by the principle of the safety and endurance of the aggregate of its middling property owners.

How prophetic to see anything like that in the aftermath of the Civil War, in which Whitman had volunteered as a nurse. But in a time of great upheaval, countered by popular mobilization after mobilization, the great poet’s took hold in the people's imagination. Whitman’s liberalism had neither the cultural elitism of those identified with the term on the left, nor the laissez-faire extremism of the free-market “liberals” on the right. Liberalism meant “the safety and endurance of the aggregate of middling property owners.” Its consummation was the New Deal social compact we inherited from five presidents and from substantial voting majorities for a generation after the Great Depression, and the result was the prospect of a fair and just society—a cohesion—that truly made us a democratic people.

Equality is not an objective that can be achieved but it is a goal worth fighting for. A more equal society would bring us closer to the “self-evident truth” of our common humanity. I remember the early 1960s, when for a season one could imagine progress among the races, a nation finally accepting immigrants for their value not only to the economy but to our collective identity, a people sniffing the prospect of progress. One could look at the person who is different in some particular way—skin color, language, religion—without feeling fear. America, so long the exploiter of the black, red, brown, and yellow, was feeling its oats; we were on our way to becoming the land of opportunity, at last. Now inequality—especially between wealth and worker—has opened like an unbridgeable chasm.

Ronald Reagan once described a particular man he knew who was good steward of resources in the biblical sense. “This is a man,” Reagan said, “who in his own business, before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan, before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn’t work. He provided nursing care for the children of mothers who worked in the stores.”

That man was Barry Goldwater, a businessman before he entered politics. It’s incredible how far we have deviated from even the most conservative understanding of social responsibility. For a generation now Goldwater’s children have done everything they could to destroy the social compact between workers and employers, and to discredit, defame, and even destroy anyone who said their course was wrong. Principled conservatism was turned into an ideological caricature whose cardinal tenet was of taxation as a form of theft, or, as the libertarian icon Robert Nozick called it, “force labor.” What has happened to us that such anti-democratic ideas could become a governing theory?

•••

Of course it’s hard to grasp what really motivated this movement. Many of the new conservative elites profess devotion to the needs of ordinary people, in contrast with some of their counterparts a hundred years ago who were often Social Darwinists, and couldn’t have been more convinced that a vast chasm between the rich and poor is the natural state of things. But after 30 years of conservative revival and a dramatic return of the discredited “voodoo economics” of the 1980s under George W. Bush, it’s reasonable to follow the old biblical proverb that says by their fruits you shall know them. By that realistic standard, I think the Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow’s analysis sums it up well: What it’s all about, he simply said, is “the redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful."

I grew up in East Texas, in a county that once had more slaves than any other in Texas. It is impossible to forget that as the slave power grew in the South and King Cotton catapulted the new nation into the global marketplace, the whole politics of the country was infected with a rule of property that did not—indeed could not—distinguish the ownership of things from the ownership of human beings. Drawing from the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, the abolitionists simply said this: the rule of law has become moral anarchy. God’s light clarified that the rule of law had become moral anarchy.

Something was wrong in the very foundation of things, and so the foundation had to be rebuilt on sounder principles. But no mere parchment of words divulged the principles that ultimately preserved the union. They were written in blood—thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dead Americans. And so by untold sacrifice the rule of law was righted to exclude human property. Then, of course, the slave power simply rejected the rule of law and established rule by terror. The feudal south became the fascist south. It did happen here, to answer Sinclair Lewis’s famous riddle of the 1930s.

What is finally at the root of these reactionary forces that have so disturbed the social fabric and threatened to undo the republic? If a $4 billion dollar investment in chattel labor was worth the price of civil war and 600,000 dead in 1860, is it really any wonder that the richest Americans would not suffer for too long a political consensus that pushed their share of national income down by a third, and held it there—about at the level of their counterparts in “socialist” Europe—for a generation? Make no mistake about it, from the days of the American Liberty League in 1936 (the group Franklin Roosevelt had in mind with his crowd-pleasing battle cry, “I welcome their hatred!”) they never gave up on returning to their former glory. They just failed to do it. Ordinary people had powerful institutions and laws on their side that thwarted them—unions, churches, and, yes, government programs that were ratified by large majorities decade after decade.

The scale of the disorder in our national priorities right now is truly staggering; it approaches moral anarchy. Alexander Hamilton, the conservative genius of the financial class, warned this could happen. Speaking to the New York State legislature in 1788, he said:

As riches increase and accumulate in few hands; as luxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature: It is what, neither the honorable member nor myself can correct. It is common misfortune, that awaits our state constitution, as well as others.

Conservatives who revere the founding fathers tend to stress the last point—that there is nothing to be done about this "common misfortune." It is up to the rest of us, who see the founding fathers not as gods but as inspired although flawed human beings—the hand that scribbled "All men are created equal" also stroked the breasts and thighs of a slave woman, whom he considered his property—to take on "the tendency of things " to "depart from the republican standard," and hold our country to its highest, and most humane, ideals.

As stewards of democracy, we, too, have a covenant—with one another.

Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. The center's senior fellow, Lew Daly, was his accomplice in this essay, written exclusively for TomPaine.com.

© 2006 TomPaine.com