Commentary: Do Americans Really Care? (Part One)
#1326c
John W. Ritenbaugh (1932-2023)
Given 11-Jun-16; 11 minutes
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Former President Jimmy Carter and Former Undersecretary of the Treasury under the Reagan Administration, Paul Craig Roberts, adamantly warn that we are no longer a representative democracy, but an oligarchy taken over by thugs, whose evil economic policies have put us into serfdom in our own country. Very few politicians have maintained their integrity under the vile corruption which has eroded and all but destroyed our Constitution, leaving in its place the pathetic conditions, described by Isaiah, in which children are our oppressors and women rule over us. This deplorable situation apparently cannot be corrected by the voting booth, but only through revolution. The President and the Supreme Court know they can roll roughshod over the Constitution because they have gotten away with it before. What neither one of them knows is that God has the ultimate word about everything, always sovereign over time, and will allow the consequences to befall our people for breaking His Holy Law. God is taking away our liberties because of immorality.
transcript:
You and I are caught up in two social movements that I don’t believe we volunteered for. They came into our life unannounced and without fanfare, though we were not truly seeking them out in order to be active in them.
One movement is toward the Kingdom of God and God volunteered us for participation in it by means of His selection of us. Though, as we came to understand, we did volunteer after a sort by choosing to repent and be baptized.
The second movement I am thinking of we didn’t volunteer for in the least. We were literally born into it and without question, because of its influences, we accepted it and willingly became part of it because there was no alternative. This particular movement is diametrically opposite of God's. But from the education God is giving, we are grasping more and more clearly the way things should be, and I ask—now that you are learning—do you still want to be part of the one you were born into? We have that option. We can come out of it. We can leave it, especially when we consider the physical, spiritual, and moral state it is in. This is a question ever before us now. The choices we make are before us seemingly every second of every day.
Do you recall that a few months ago I quoted from a blog post authored by former president Jimmy Carter that America is no longer governed by a representative form of government but by an elite oligarchy that quietly seized control without warfare? It is very interesting that a man of this liberality would admit such a thing, but he did.
You may have never heard of Paul Craig Roberts, and you may not recognize his name. He is known today as an economist, but in the 1980s while still in his early 40s he was selected to be Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. This was a young man on the rise, a man with great potential. He was a key member of the team that planned and helped build the Reagan years to become so economically successful.
Now Mr. Roberts and Mr. Carter have somewhat joined hands in alerting us to a common reality. I said "somewhat" because they come from opposite sides of the political aisle—one a liberal Democrat, the other a very conservative Republican. But 35 years have passed, and now their ideas—some of their thinking—have begun to coalesce, and they have centered on the same basic area. A little bit differently, but yet there are similarities there.
Mr. Roberts is a great deal more fiery and dogmatic in his approach than Mr. Carter, but in the end they are fighting the same battle. Mr. Roberts believes the American people are already a conquered people—conquered from within. He claims we have become a nation of serfs. He calls us the “new serfs” who have become such because our liberties have been stolen through governmental and corporate dictatorship engineered by leaders who mercilessly simply want all the wealth and power for themselves. He wonders, how much more proof do we need than what we are getting every day?
He believes the American people have already had it proved to them they cannot rescue themselves from the political and economic serfdom we are in by means of the voting booth. This is partly because he perceives there are few truly honorable candidates running.
I find this particularly interesting because it fits almost word for word into what God says in His warning to Judah in Isaiah 3:1-5. Let me repeat what God says there as a warning and see if it doesn’t fit what is happening in this nation:
Isaiah 3:1-5 For behold, the Lord, the LORD of hosts, takes away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stock and the store, the whole supply of bread and the whole supply of water; the mighty man and the man of war, the judge and the prophet, and the diviner and the elder; the captain of fifty and the honorable man, the counselor and the skillful artisan, and the expert enchanter. I will give children to be their princes [He means immature people], and babes shall rule over them. The people will be oppressed, every one by another and every one by his neighbor; the child will be insolent toward the elder, and the base toward the honorable.
You aren't hearing this on what I would call the establishment media, but you do hear things of this nature from the conservative newscasters and you almost have to go on the Internet in order to get it.
Do you understand what a serf is? This is kind of interesting. It is a pejorative that has pretty much passed out of usage since colonial times. My Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopedic Dictionary defines it this way: “In feudal times, a person bound in servitude on an estate. It is anyone in servile subjection. A slave.” A serf has an interesting peculiarity. A serf is not bound in jail. He has no bars around him. But since he is bound to an estate, he still has nowhere to turn.
You can understand why Paul Craig Roberts used the term "serf." We are not bound in jail, but we are bound within the United States of America that is governed by an elite oligarchy called the establishment.
He believes the only thing that will free us from our serfdom is revolution. In other words, he is saying the people ought to take to the streets. Why? How has it manifested at this point that he feels we need to have a revolution? Essentially because, he says, the Constitution—that document that protects our rights as a citizen—has been lost. Those corrupt powers in government simply ignore it. That has become a reality. They simply ignore it. Most obviously, the president and the Supreme Court justices.
They have ignored it so often without any real resistance from the voters that they have no fear anybody will seriously challenge them. The real reason no one challenges them—here comes the real answers—is God is taking our liberties away because of our immorality. Who is going to fight Him?
The corrupt politicians are not legally changing the Constitution. Rather these people in office are so lawless they simply ignore what the Constitution directly says and get away with it because nobody is forcefully challenging them.
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