Statue of Liberty National Monument

Emma Lazarus’ Famous Poem

A poem by Emma Lazarus is graven on a tablet

within the pedestal on which the statue stands.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Who will give contemporary United States of America citizens the same welcome? Not an issue? Think again.

Posted in Truth by lancefreeman76 on April 5, 2010

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.

Let’s start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it’s not just the food that’s killing you, it’s the drugs. If you show any sign of life when you’re young, they’ll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you’ll get depressed, so they’ll give you Prozac. If you’re a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you’ll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you’ll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you’ll need Lunesta to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can’t take one. I’ll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you’ll probably be the only American in sight. And you’ll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they’re paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time to get on a plane and rush back to your job.

If you think I’m making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation days by country:

Finland: 44
Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18
USA: 12

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you.

Of course, you don’t have any choice in the matter: the system is designed this way. In most countries in the developed world, higher education is either free or heavily subsidized; in the United States, a university degree can set you back over US$100,000. Thus, you enter the working world with a crushing debt. Forget about taking a year off to travel the world and find yourself – you’ve got to start working or watch your credit rating plummet.

If you’re “lucky,” you might even land a job good enough to qualify you for a home loan. And then you’ll spend half your working life just paying the interest on the loan – welcome to the world of American debt slavery. America has the illusion of great wealth because there’s a lot of “stuff” around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to leave, you can’t, because you’ve got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.

If there was some chance that the country could be changed, there might be reason for hope. But can you honestly look around and conclude that anything is going to change? Where would the change come from? The people? Take a good look at your compatriots: the working class in the United States has been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ass. They’ve got these people so well trained that they’ll take up arms against the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

If the people cannot make a change, how about the media? Not a chance. From Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit. In America, you grow up thinking you’ve got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you don’t think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military spending?

If change can’t come from the people or the media, the only other potential source of change would be the politicians. Unfortunately, the American political process is among the most corrupt in the world. In every country on earth, one expects politicians to take bribes from the rich. But this generally happens in secret, behind the closed doors of their elite clubs. In the United States, this sort of political corruption is done in broad daylight, as part of legal, accepted, standard operating procedure. In the United States, they merely call these bribes campaign donations, political action committees and lobbyists. One can no more expect the politicians to change this system than one can expect a man to take an axe and chop his own legs out from underneath him.

No, the United States of America is not going to change for the better. The only change will be for the worse. And when I say worse, I mean much worse. As we speak, the economic system that sustained the country during the post-war years is collapsing. The United States maxed out its “credit card” sometime in 2008 and now its lenders, starting with China, are in the process of laying the foundations for a new monetary system to replace the Anglo-American “petro-dollar” system. As soon as there is a viable alternative to the US dollar, the greenback will sink like a stone.

While the United States was running up crushing levels of debt, it was also busy shipping its manufacturing jobs and white-collar jobs overseas, and letting its infrastructure fall to pieces. Meanwhile, Asian and European countries were investing in education, infrastructure and raw materials. Even if the United States tried to rebuild a real economy (as opposed to a service/financial economy) do think American workers would ever be able to compete with the workers of China or Europe? Have you ever seen a Japanese or German factory? Have you ever met a Singaporean or Chinese worker?

There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline – essentially a continuation of what’s been happening for the last two decades. Wages will drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico or the Philippines – tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the country is already halfway there).

Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight from the US dollar by creditor nations like China, Japan, Korea and the OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting – something has to give. If either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the present recession look like a walk in the park.

Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let’s face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia – a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You’ve got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You’ve got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You’ve got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you’ve got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is about to become completely unaffordable. And you’ve got guns. Lots of guns. In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to be.

Right now, the government is building fences and walls along its northern and southern borders. Right now, the government is working on a national ID system (soon to be fitted with biometric features). Right now, the government is building a surveillance state so extensive that they will be able to follow your every move, online, in the street and across borders. If you think this is just to protect you from “terrorists,” then you’re sadly mistaken. Once the shit really hits the fan, do you really think you’ll just be able to jump into the old station wagon, drive across the Canadian border and spend the rest of your days fishing and drinking Molson? No, the government is going to lock the place down. They don’t want their tax base escaping. They don’t want their “recruits” escaping. They don’t want YOU escaping.

I am not writing this to scare you. I write this to you as a friend. If you are able to read and understand what I’ve written here, then you are a member of a small minority in the United States. You are a minority in a country that has no place for you.

So what should you do?

You should leave the United States of America.

If you’re young, you’ve got plenty of choices: you can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you’ve already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you’ve got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can’t qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don’t let that stop you – travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the country of your choice.

You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living outside the United States. Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful, free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us happened upon these lives by accident – we tried a year abroad and found that we liked it – others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for good. You’ll find us in Canada, all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most other countries of the globe. Do we miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States? Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.

In closing, I want to remind you of something: unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?

Over at Club Orlov some people left revealing comments on the re-post of this article:

Update: Judging from a lot of the comments, many people seem to think that the rest of the planet might not offer any good places for American former middle class persons to continue to pretend that they are successful. I don’t find this particularly relevant; the life of a refugee is rarely comfortable. Some people even think that the US military is somehow going to be helpful moving forward, (by stealing other countries’ oil, I suppose). I can’t think of an occasion when it was helpful, being incapable of victory and a huge waste of resources. Apparently, to stay in the US is to stay in denial; perhaps that is what it takes to make the continuous psychological trauma of living in this country bearable. The one encouraging sign is that this condition is curable: not a single expat has voiced anything but complete and enthusiastic agreement with this article.

Without Theory No Revolution

Glenn Maresca felt compelled to speak up and I am honored to make his views publicly available. He has a song that relates to this, The Quiet Revolution.

Glenn Maresca writes:

Here we have yet another phony food safety bill, which does NOTHING but grant the FDA massive new police powers without actual policy oversight. And it would do NOTHING to solve the actual problem, the stinking cesspools which call themselves “modern” factory farms, the SOLE source of whatever filth there is in our food supply. We don’t need burdensome new tracing regimes to drive small farmers out of business, we already know exactly where the problem is.

H.R. 2749 would give some FDA administrator (read self-serving corporate lobbyist) the power to dictate what farming practices must and must not be used nationwide (read enforced GMOs, growth hormones, and weird chemicals in our food). How can Congress make sane policy without identifying the specific problem and its source before empowering 10 year criminal sentences and $100,000 fines? It can’t. But only if we stop them from doing it, by speaking out now.

Stop HR 2749 Action Page

This hideously ill-conceived bill (unless you are a chemical food conglomerate) is so terminally vague about what its PURPOSE is, it can only do massive harm and no good whatsoever. Aren’t bills in Congress supposed to start with some kind of preamble, something like, “This is the problem we have identified, and this is what has to be done to fix it and WHY.” No such forethought in HR 2749, just unlimited and unaccountable new police state powers, while President Obama continues to appoint the WORST possible nominees for just about every administrative position.

It’s time to wake up folks. It’s just one corporate power grab hand over fist out there. Not ONE major bill has Congress passed yet since the last election that did ANYTHING to confront the actual real problem. Credit card so-called reform was some kind of sick joke on the American people, rejecting the only provision that actually mattered, constraining usurous interest rates. Has anybody seen any BIG savings on their credit card bills yet? Did we have to ask?

And they TRYING to do the same thing with health care reform, to do nothing to disturb the existing corporate medical industry gravy train. It is ONLY because of the alerts we have done on this already that single payer is actually getting a hearing. What kind of lunacy is it when the plan supported by a majority of the American people is not even allowed in the room? It’s the lunacy that happens when more of us do not speak out more often. And we’ll have another alert on that later in the week.

Stop HR 2749 Action Page

But for today, please speak out against HR 2749. Tell Congress to directly regulate factory farms and them ONLY. That’s all that has to be done. And anything else they do that does NOT do that by definition will only make the problem worse, by punishing those who are NOT huge, filthy, factory farms.

FNORD

For anyone without income, a home or even hope, the collapse has already happened. The number of those people on the ropes certainly seems to be increasing daily.

On the other hand, in this personal sense, you may not experience collapse during your lifetime. Of course that is not what the doom and gloomers say.

I used to be a doom and gloomer, an authentic doomsday freak pointing out the failures of our system and its imminent collapse. I’ve learned to temper my fears simply by living long enough.

However, in a larger more empirical sense, we may ask what exactly constitutes a societal collapse. Here we are asking about the nature of the collapse of the Euro-American Empire indicated by the ongoing disintegration of its global hegemony.

If you are someone who does not want to read social criticism, stop now.

If you are worried about you head exploding when you are presented with new information, stop now.

OK, now that I know you are willing to deal with this, I will continue.

As a first step, we have to acknowledge certain conclusions by Karl Marx. I know he is widely disparaged in the mainstream media, at community colleges nationwide and in state universities structured to provide occupational training in technical fields.

Rest assured, at elite institutions training the nest generation of leaders Karl Marx is read and discussed. The children of the hegemonic elite destined to inherit the reigns of power over 99.5% of the rest us know and study his work.

Well, they do if they actually did the work and didn’t just have their families purchase their degrees with another endowment. But that is another issue.

Sure, Karl Marx gets a bad name because of the abuses of the word ‘communist‘ by authoritarian megalomaniacs. To be honest, the world has never seen an authentic communist system in operation.

Part of the problem is that in the day and age of Karl Marx communication was a problem for those living in rural areas. Most people living today cannot imagine the isolation experienced by those living outside of city limits.

Karl Marx proposed an urban workers’ vanguard party to represent those in the hinter lands. This idea of a vanguard party has been much abused by totalitarian regimes around the world that bear little resemblance to his proposed communal life.

He was spot on in exposing the fatal flaw in capitalism. Bear in mind that Karl Marx thought capitalism was a good thing at the time and a step in the right direction away from the manorial serfdom that was the previous norm.

Anyway, capitalism depends upon continuous growth.

The capitalistic system just does not function as a steady state model.

Growth is required to pay off the interest charged on the debt incurred during the capitalization of industry and business. Without growth, only enough profit is made to pay off the principle.

Karl Marx realized that the earth is finite and possesses limited non-renewable resources. Once capitalism went world-wide it was destined to collapse.

In the time of Karl Marx, world-wide pretty much meant Europe in the predominant narrow ethnocentric view. And there were those of his (and later) generations who just couldn’t wait.

Just like the early Christians who grew impatient with God’s promise to destroy the world and started setting fires to help God out, early adopters of the Communist Manifesto perceived revolution as the fast track to post-capitalism.

That turned out badly for all concerned, both Christians and communists.

Karl Marx merely pointed out that given the requirements of capitalism regarding growth, eventually it would hit the limits of growth. With this realization he predicted the certain collapse of capitalism and projected forward from there, betting on human intelligence to come up with something better.

Of course, he thought he was as smart as anyone and perhaps he was. Anyway, communism was merely his projection into the unknowable future and the actual shape of things to come is totally up for grabs.

It is understandable that capitalists the world over took offense. This became the primary driver for political acrimony and national conflict ever since, at least as far as the general public was concerned.

Anyway, capitalism did hit the wall in the early 1970s. China, the last big holdout market, joined in capitalist expansion and left capitalism with no place else to grow.

A whole slew of events indicate the truth in this. Not only did we see the abandonment of the gold standard in the U.S. and the free floating of the U.S. dollar but we also saw the beginning of the first giant debt bubbles.

I first ran away to the mountains in the 1970s believing the collapse was in motion. I was right about that but wrong about the timing regarding my personal situation in the U.S.

The capitalistic hegemons turned to their own populations and began capitalistically monetizing every aspect of personal life, expanding into spheres of influence long felt to be intrinsically off limits. They did this with the full support of governments indebted to their central banks.

The FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector of the economy merged to form the financial services industry once government regulations that previously prevented this were abandoned. We now live in the era when all biopolitical production falls under capitalist control through the monetization of the once common property of social networks.

Without real growth, growth that is only possible through capitalist expansion into new markets, debt accumulates with no possibility of ever being paid off. The ballooning consumer debt, commercial debt and government debt are merely symptoms of the current crisis of capitalism.

The global debt crisis is a symptom of capitalism reaching the limits of growth.

This largely financial crisis will predictably cause a great deal of needless pain, suffering and death but all by itself is something that the human race as a whole can overcome. History is full of examples of empires falling in part due to the debasement of their currency by corrupt politicians and their financial handlers yet people survived to prosper again.

However, in the effort to extract greater profits by depressing the price of labor through population overshoot to produce a surplus supply of labor, other limits have been quickly approached. Paid labor, after all, originated after the population collapsed during the Great Plague and is part of the foundation of capitalism itself.

History indicates that the loss of productive farm land through extractive agricultural methods and the resulting decrease in productivity, coupled with erosion, also contributed to the collapse of empires. Despite so-called advances in food production, decreasing food value and exploding populations drive us towards a Malthusian Catastrophe of global proportions.

The so-called advances in food production have literally been fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons. Not only that, but civilization itself, especially as we have experienced it, has been literally fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons.

The remaining hydrocarbon reserves are being used by the global hegemonic elite to maintain their positions of privilege and power rather than used to enable a transition to another form of civilization. The U.S. armed forces is the largest user of non-renewable hydrocarbons and it is a safe bet that they will use the last of the extractable reserves maintaining the privilege and power of the global hegemonic elite.

This greatly complicates things.

Empires have fallen due to financial collapse and agricultural collapse but none have faced the exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons. This evokes the specter of peak oil.

All the statistics surrounding peak oil originate from within the oil industry itself. We simply cannot know if peak oil is real or simply a clever ploy to increase profits.

In any event, either actual or engineered scarcity will drive huge profits even higher until it is no longer economically viable to extract hydrocarbons from the earth. People just are not prepared for that and, in fact, the global hegemonic elite works against even the possibility of energy independence.

Then there is the issue of climate change as it seems no longer politically correct to refer to global warming. In the end it does not matter if it was caused by people or not because it is happening and the hegemonic elite refuse to risk their privilege and power to enable meaningful change.

Population overshoot, financial collapse, agricultural collapse, exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons, climate change and the machinations of the global power structure to stay in power creates an environment ripe for rampant deadly new diseases. The next Great Plague is now overdue and the ability to globally respond to it with adequate measures simply degrades by the hour.

Plastic pollution, acidification of the oceans and the collapse of one fishery after another are all further symptoms of an impending global collapse of Biblical proportions. This situation is real and very few are even thinking about preparing for it.

Think about preparing for collapse now.

Do you really want to be dependent on society as it is currently structured?

It seems to me that in order to prepare, concerned people need to be reducing dependence upon the status quo. This is becoming increasingly difficult to do because every effort to disengage from the system will be perceived by the system as an act of rebellion, criminal and terroristic.

I believe some people will survive and a few will continue to live relatively well. But to be able to do so will involve becoming responsible for all aspects of your own life.

It may well be that it will be only the minority who actually does the work to prepare will become the few who survive. And eventually, as the facts of the case become irrefutable and obvious to many more people, the remaining carrying capacity of the planet will not support those who start too late.

As long as the system prevails, you will have access to the Internet. The Internet offers more possibilities for creating income independent of mainstream employment than any brick and mortar opportunity in the world.

Perhaps you should be thinking about creating your own Internet business sooner rather that later. Then you will have a measure of control over timing the collapse, at least as far as your personal life is concerned.

What do you think?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jury nullification is an effective way of countering prosecutorial abuse and limiting the power and intrusiveness of the legislature. The historical records indicate jury nullification played a major role in abolishing slavery, winning women’s suffrage, and the Repeal of Alcohol Prohibition.

Perhaps jury nullification will become the way the war on marijuana ends as happened in the Loren Swift case.

Juries are our last line of defense against the inappropriate use of power by the government.

Sam Smith wrote in What lawyers & judges won’t tell you about juries that according to the Yale Law Journal in 1964, during the first third of the 19th century judges did inform juries of the right, forcing lawyers to argue “the law — its interpretation and validity — to the jury.”

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi noted that “jury nullification is a constitutional right that every individual person who is called for jury duty possesses, and unless we appreciate that right, we will lose it because the courts will take it from us.”

“I think jury nullification is going to be part of the answer regarding states’ rights in future cases,” said former jury foreman Charles Sackett.

Clay S. Conrad wrote the 1998 book Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine, that

Central to the history of trial by jury is the right of jurors to vote “not guilty” if the law is unjust or unjustly applied.

When jurors acquit a factually guilty defendant, we say that the jury “nullified” the law. The Founding Fathers believed that juries in criminal trials had a role to play as the “conscience of the community,” and relied on juries’ “nullifying” to hold the government to the principles of the Constitution.

Yet over the last century and a half, this power of jurors has been derided and ignored by American courts, to the point that today few jurors are aware that an important part of their role is, in the words of the Supreme Court, to “prevent oppression by the government.”

The Words of the Founding Fathers

Jurors should acquit, even against the judge’s instruction…
if exercising their judgement with discretion and honesty
they have a clear conviction the charge of the court is wrong.
– Alexander Hamilton, 1804

It is not only the juror’s right, but his duty to find the verdict
according to his own best understanding, judgement and conscience,
though in direct opposition to the instruction of the court.
–John Adams, 1771

I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man
by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
– Thomas Jefferson, 1789

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made
by men of their choice, if the laws are so voluminous that they
cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood;
if they… undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows
what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow
– James Madison

Find out more at these links:

FNORD

My dad, 84 years old and counting, lifelong salesman, sales manager, sales trainer and independent representative speaks with open disdain about marketers. Yet, when you listen to him talk about his sales process it becomes clear that he takes a straight up marketing approach.

The first thing he does as a “salesman” is to identify companies ready to purchase in commercial volumes. Among marketers this is known as locating a market.

Next he connects with a decision maker and during the interview clarifies what problems they have. Marketers often use polls and questionnaires to discover a market’s needs, wants and desires.

Then, my dad works with one of the companies he represents, or even locates a company he has never represented before, to come up with a solution. Marketers follow the same process and if the solution is an information product either hires an expert, obtains the rights or creates the product themselves.

Finally, he goes back to the prospect company with the solution in hand complete with pricing and delivery information. It also works exactly this way for marketers.

When someone believes they have come up with what they perceive someone else needs, without their input or guidance, they then must attempt to sell it to them in order to regain their investment, personal  power and self esteem. Whenever you start with a product before you have a market you are faced with a sales proposition.

This is why marketing may be approached as a science but all sales initiatives originate in ideologies. I’ve lost count of how many people have approached me with their absolute need to sell something they just dreamed up or discovered in a bargain bin somewhere.

Science observes the natural world and creates mind maps to make sense of it. These scientific ideas never achieve closure and remain open to modification and obsolescence.

We create ideologies as mind maps to which the natural world is abused into conforming. These ideologies arrive as a package deal usually complete with a supportive all-encompassing world view.

The map is not the terrain.

Science knows the history of their mind maps and constantly compares them to the natural world so to modify the mind maps and increase their accuracy. Ideology acts as if their mind maps are the terrain while becoming proactive in manipulating the natural world to conform to the mind maps.

It speaks to the power of ideologies that this distinction between marketing and sales often seems to be the biggest conceptual challenge limiting my students. Indeed, they often insist upon just being delivered an ideology while ironically demanding that it accurately correspond to the natural world.

Offered the appearance of free choice, people seem to prefer ideologies which inevitably conflict with the natural world over science that never arrives at closure and always seems as work in progress. Ironically, successful ideologies often masquerade as science while science then comes under attack as ideology.

The weakness of science is the willingness to consider alternative solutions to real problems. In other words, the reluctance to become an ideology also becomes the weakness of science.

The strength of ideology is the high acceptance it finds for the quick and simple answers it provides to real world problems. Unfortunately, the answers are always wrong, regardless of first impressions or our desires for closure.

This problem manifests when a vendor becomes a consumer. Their consumer training to only accept the quick and easy, cheap and simple, silver bullet one-shot solution betrays them when they wish to provide products and services to consumers.

While consumers feel justified in thinking it is all about them this feeding of the ego sets up business people for failure if they cannot make the adjustment to the other side of the coin. This failure to adjust results in a selling ideology.

While a person’s ideas may be interesting and welcome as long as they are a consumer, once they become a vendor of products and services their ideas become irrelevant. The world is full of great ideas that few care about.

This ego driven need to see personal ideas accepted by other people, through deception, fraud and the threat of harm if need be, meets the definition of ideology. This also describes the underlying methodologies of many mainstream selling techniques.

Ideology and selling lack resilience.

The narrow point of view generated by a consumer perspective holds no more attractiveness to others than any other inflexible ideological opinion. This leads to the failures of businesses and the collapse of empires.

Resilience relies upon both the willingness to competently observe reality regardless of what we wish to see and the ability to modify activities accordingly regardless of how habitualized we may have become to them. A fixed belief in our own correctness, self-righteousness in other words, inevitably leads to both our unhappiness and the unhappiness of others.

That is why I do not accept students as clients who insist they have invented the next best thing, whether it be a business service, a physical device or social idea. They are always wrong and doomed to failure.

If you wish to make money, online or face-to-face, it is enough to start with that desire. When you bring your own preconceptions along you limit your resilience according to the strength of your beliefs.

Accordingly, my first question to you then is not concerning your product but concerning the market you wish to join. Identify a market first and the market will identify a successful product for you.