Local Power

David Camp is a CPA in private practice in Bellingham. He writes Port Watcher for Whatcom Watch.

The global backdrop to our own local dramas is fraying at the seams: nuclear meltdowns, economic refugees hammering at the doors of every advanced nation, rising commodity prices and a federal government that seems capable only of wasting the nation’s wealth and standing on an extravagant, bloated military and utterly corrupt financial complex.

Increasingly, the federal government has become a destructive parasitic entity feeding on the economic health of the nation while its ultra-wealthy sponsors appropriate ever greater shares of the national wealth. Our cardboard emperor has revealed himself to be a cipher, mouthing empty promises while only furthering the interests of his wealthy masters: he is nothing more than a hireling, and a weak and duplicitous one at that.

It is not mysterious why the federal government has systematically attacked and weakened the Constitution at every opportunity: the Constitution is the result of a revolution against the largest empire in the world – it was explicitly written to be anti-imperialist.

The US government cannot expand its imperial apparatus without coming into conflict with the Constitution – and so it breaks it and has done so since Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; Wilson created the first propaganda ministry to promote war; Roosevelt neutered the Supreme Court1 to further his own unconstitutional expansions of federal power; Johnson stole the social security surplus2 to wage an undeclared war which killed millions; and Bush I, II, and Obush abuse the Fourth Amendment to spy on citizen activists in furtherance of their endless wars on a fictitious enemy, the tactic of “terror.”

What does this have to do with the Port of Bellingham? Please oblige me, gentle reader, with your patience, and I will make the connection.

The federal government is no longer a representative Republic. It is an oligarchic entity in which only the wealthy have influence. It costs $40 million to buy a Senatorial sinecure. Who is the lucky winner going to work for but the sponsors who bought him his job? We have no influence on this corrupt entity: our only power as citizens is local.

The federal government with its most recent budget “deal” has sent us this clear signal: there is no money for anything but war and Wall Street. We’re on our own.

So … we had better work diligently as citizens to ensure we have a healthy local economy that will sustain us, because the federal government works only for those who would prey upon us and sell us out to foreigners for another nickel’s profit.

We are fortunate that in our green Whatcom County, we have a benign climate, abundant farmland and fisheries that can, properly organized, produce sufficient food to feed us, a population that is educated and hard-working, and mostly competent local governmental agencies that are close enough to be reachable and responsive.

Another key component that unites us, even in the face of a state capitalist machine expressly designed to divide us from ourselves3 is our love of this place and our desire to maintain and improve it for our children and grandchildren.

The port is an entity that is mandated by law to provide open access to port facilities so that no private interests can monopolize them and to foster economic development in the county. Why then are Port Commissioners supporting the proposed coal dump at Cherry Point, which is monopolistic, adds no value or economic benefit locally other than a small number of low level jobs, severely affects quality of life with almost constant coal trains running through the most populated areas of the county, benefits mostly a few wealthy interests (Goldman Sachs and Warren Buffet), and strips our nation’s strategic coal reserves for a pittance to a foreign power (China) whose economic interests are opposed to ours?

The port should, according to its charter, be supporting local business development, not supporting a development in which county residents bear all the externalities in return for receiving a pittance of employment, and all the profits accrue to a foreign power and New York financiers who have already bankrupted the nation with their predatory Ponzi schemes. It’s a damnable disgrace. §

1. “A switch in time saves nine.” Roosevelt threatened to appoint six more justices to get decisions he wanted and the Court folded, giving him the “Wickard v. Fillburn” judgment, under which a farmer who grew wheat for his own animals, neither selling it nor crossing state lines, was found subject to federal sanction under the Commerce Clause. This constitutionally-abusive decision is the foundation upon which many powers reserved to the States and the People have been illegitimately appropriated by the federal government.

2. The federal government has produced fraudulent financial statements since the Johnson administration: it doesn’t follow the accounting rules it insists we all follow, which require fund accounting. Social Security and Medicare funds should be accounted for separately to general funds. However, to do so would expose an enormous federal deficit (taxes collected don’t even pay for the military and all the boondoggle of federal law enforcement agencies inflicted upon us), and so they include the social security surplus with the general funds and mask the true extent of the deficit caused by war spending and financial bailouts to their wealthy sponsors. I learned of this at an AICPA conference from David M. Walker, Comptroller-General from 1998 to 2008, who refused to certify the financial statements of the federal government because they were fraudulent. In any other organization where its auditor gave such an adverse opinion, the SEC and the IRS would investigate, the CFO and probably the CEO would be fired, and the directors would likely be sued. But since it’s the federal government, grand master of “do as I say, not as I do,” they continue merrily along this criminally corrupt deceit of the American people.

3. I’m referring to the constructed basket of emotional issues (abortion, gay marriage, etc.) and tribal allegiances (liberal vs. conservative; democrat vs. republican; ditto head vs. kossite, etc.) that is drilled into the collective consciousness by the corporate media.