America's Youth vs. Big Government

Not exactly breaking news, but WorldNetDaily (wnd.com) reported this past spring that a 15 year old Xbox Live gamer logged online only to find a message from Microsoft demanding that he change his controversial gamertag, “mpeach obama21.”

When contacted, a Microsoft rep pointed to this clause in their terms of service, which was supposedly violated:

Don’t create a gamertag, profile content, or in-game content that references controversial religious topics, notorious people, organizations, or sensitive current or historical events that may also be considered inappropriate.

“This name is actually, it’s not likeable,” a Microsoft Xbox LIVE spokesman identifying himself as Jordan said. “If you were Obama, what would you feel if you saw this?”

Boo-freaking-hoo.  One can’t help but see this newest example of censorship as political bias.  Take this portion of their terms of service, for example:

Don’t create a gamertag, profile content, or in-game content that other users may be offended by, this includes comments that look, sound like, stand for, hint at, abbreviate, or insinuate any of the following: profane words/phrases, topics or content of a sexual nature, hate speech (including but not limited to racial, ethnic, or religious slurs), illegal drugs / controlled substances, or illegal activities.

There are countless gamertags, which violate this vulgarity policy, that are allowed to be used with seemingly no peep from Microsoft; ghetto_diarhea, azzwort, Floppydonkeydic, FuhQMsft, urmotherslover, sweaty pubes, URGranniesPantys, ilovedix, and probably the most offensive, JesusIsMyCumRag. (all are actual gamertags)

How Microsoft can offer a statement sticking up for the anti-Obama gamertag ban while the tags listed above are allowed to be used certainly raises some eyebrows.  Surely, we are all for freedom of speech, but we do understand that a privately run company can censor their customers as they see fit. When this censorship, however, seems unfairly balanced, it is only right that companies like Microsoft receive criticism.

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Within the past couple of weeks an article was released that does a great job describing the political divide in the United States.  Written by Angelo Codevilla and published in the American Spectator, America’s Ruling Class — and the Perils of Revolution brilliantly explains how we have a “ruling class” in this country that believes they are superior to the rest of the country.  These people feel they deserve the right to decide how others lead their lives.  On the flip side, Codevilla labels the remainder of the country the “country class”.  The “country class” encompasses the majority of Americans who disagree with the big government regime and are not part of the political and intellectual elite.  The battle between these two classes will surely determine the direction of the country.  Our book actually captures much of what Codevilla draws on in his essay, albeit in a much less eloquent manner.  The youth of America truly belong to the “country class” and the “ruling class” of big government Democrats and Republicans, intellectual elites, and mainstream media have determined that they know better than us and have pledged to direct our lives and our behavior through their progressive vision.
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Today is a landmark day for Steve and I, our book is finally available on Amazon.com! It has certainly been a long time coming, but we believe that our hard work and effort (363 sources!) has paid off, as we’ve created something that can help the young people of America as we continue through this economic and political crisis.

We have sent out media packets to various talk radio outlets throughout the country and are hoping to do a media blitz in the months leading up to the November mid-term elections.

Now here’s the part where we ask you to buy our book and to tell your family and friends about how great the concept is   Seriously though, we do truly appreciate your support, and hope that our months of work and hundreds of dollars spent to bring you this book can change a few lives.

You can purchases (and review) America’s Youth vs. Big Government for only $14.95 here

In the days where the government can hide any tax they want inside a 2,000 page piece of legislation, you never know how the next great political activist gets born.  As it turns out, we may have the next Che Guevara on our hands, with Jersey Shore star, Snooki.

Snooki, infamous for her glorious red-orange tan, has recently criticized President Obama’s tanning tax, hidden inside the Orwellian socialized Health Care insurance mandate bill.  The hit MTV show has such a following that her comments were quickly picked up by the mainstream media, such as Politico and DrudgeReport.  She explains why she has resorted to the unreliable method of spray tan:

“I don’t go tanning-tanning anymore because [President] Obama put a 10 percent tax on tanning. … He did that because of us.

A seemingly straight forward statement, but read in between the lines and she’s calling for a revolution!  Let us all march on D.C.!

In all seriousness, she has good reason to be upset.  The government can now tax and regulate anything we put on/in our bodies, and often times they do so by sneaking in a new restriction into a massive bill which has nothing to do with said regulation.

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Remember the time when musicians actually stood for things?  Not like today’s artists, such as Green Day and Incubus, who lambasted the Bush Administration for the wars in the Middle East, who have now gone quiet in criticism of Obama for perpetuating this same wasteful conflict.  Remember when artists celebrated creative individuality as opposed to parroting popular rhetoric, easily accepted by the majority?

One such musician, composer, and individual who proudly marched to the beat of his own drummer was Frank Zappa.  Frank made no apologies to anyone; religious leaders, congress, the average American, feminists, gays, Republicans, Democrats, musicians, and many more.  Pretty much any group whose own special interests were held high upon a pedestal were fair game for Zappa to publicly ostracize.  Not just a musical hero of mine, Frank Zappa embraced individual freedom and fought (sometimes even on Capital Hill) collective group thought; in my eyes his most redeemable qualities.

One such group Zappa disdained above all others were workers unions.  From about the first moment Frank was composing and recording music, unions had been making his life a living hell.  Union representatives for stagehands would threaten to prevent any recording equipment from being switched on until a series of expensive special union fees were met by Zappa.  “I have experienced situations in which union stagehands were paid astonishing amounts of money for doing nothing.  In some instances, they actually degraded the quality of the live shows they were hired to work on.”  The methods that union reps operated on, Zappa said, boarded on “extortion, subjecting touring groups to interpretations of regulations that border on science fiction.”

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Shocker of the year: Band named Gov’t Mule has libertarian roots. Ok, so its almost expected that this southern rock blues band is not flying the flag of socialism, but for a group of guys who have generally kept political issues out of their material, their 2009 release, By a Thread, sheds some light into how they view current American political policy.

One of the hardest working bands in the industry (and one of the best live acts I’ve seen personally), Gov’t Mule hits home their dissatisfaction with current American anti-terrorism policy, the PATRIOT Act.  Mule attacks this horrible piece of legislation in their song ‘Monday Mourning Meltdown’ as “damn deceiving” and lyricist Warren Haynes regrets “believing,” presumably the Act, in the first place.

Indeed, the PATRIOT Act is the single biggest intrusion into our lives and civil liberties infringement in the 21st century.  The government can now legally wiretap your personal phone conversations, enter your home without a warrant, and detain you indefinitely without judicial freedom.  Widely criticized under its Bush-era inception, the PATRIOT Act has since been renewed by President Barack Obama and Democratic majority Federal houses.

The album cover displays the world loosely kept together by a thread, from which a helpless man desperately clings to.  As the world spins towards collective economic collapse, it often feels that if our grip fails, we will fall into the pit of oppression and strife.

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Since I’ve become engulfed in the freedom movement, my liberty senses have been finely attuned to all things which question tyranny.  Whether comments made by people in passing, music, or cinema, I seem to be more receptive to messages which embrace individualism and reject collectivism.

To my pleasure, one of my favorite bands, Spock’s Beard, recently released an album, X, with a great libertarian song, ‘Their Names Escape Me.’  Spock’s Beard is an epic progressive rock band who has been on the music scene for almost two decades.  Their musicianship has always been top notch; blistering guitars, sweeping vocal harmonies, and symphonic arrangements, but their lyrics have always been hit-or-miss.

The Beard’s record label went under before the recording of X and instead of shopping around for a new contract, they decided to take pre-orders from fans for a special edition of the new album while they were recording it.  They used this money to finance the production of their record, and in homage to those who dedicated money to the special edition, Spock’s Beard wrote their names into a song.

Instead of simply dropping some bland names on top of a basic chord progression, they opted for a more creative approach.  The result is ‘Their Names Escape Me,’ which is a Orwellian tale of a dissident being forced to reveal the names of those who have committed treason against the “nation.”

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There is an amazing story that broke this week that I could simply not refrain from discussing here.  Journogate, as we will call it here, has only this week exploded into an embarrassing scandal, truly exposing the unethical journalistic approach of the mainstream media.
Uncovered by Tucker Carlson, whose website dailycaller.com has written extensively on the topic, journogate centers around 400 members of the mainstream media who belonged to a common listserv.  The listserv, journolist, was a shared email list comprised of several hundred journalists, professors, and activists.  As we have come to find out, it was through journolist that the mainsteam media and other intellectual elites met to discuss and plot strategies to enter liberal bias into the media and destroy any sort of counter thought from anyone disagreeing with their agenda. Not exactly the definition of impartial journalistic integrity, is it?

Journolist was created by influential mainstream media member and writer at the Washington Post, Ezra Klein.  Members of journolist included supposed ethical journalists from organizations such as the Washington Post, NPR, Time Magazine, the Guardian, the Baltimore Sun, Columbia Journalism Review, the Nation, and dozens of others.  Together, these agents of progressivism schemed to weave their thought into the minds of readers throughout the country.

In the lead up to the historic presidential election of 2008, one of the most stinging controversies to emerge about Senator Obama was his relationship to the highly racist Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  No matter how hard he tried, Obama could simply not dodge this  “inconvenient truth”.  During debates questions were asked of Obama’s membership of Wright’s church outside Chicago.  Clearly, the public had the right to know why Obama would attend worship at a church with a Reverend who spewed hate and racism from the pulpit.  With no where else to turn, members of the mainstream media and journolist, in particular, came to aid.

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Today I stumbled across an article on the American Spectator’s website, entitled Democrats Renew Their War on America’s Youth, which read almost exactly like a chapter from our book.   Not only does the article focus on the direct perils that not reforming Social Security would have on the young generation, but the rhetoric of the title specifically hits home the importance of the topic.  Social Security reform is directly tied to the future well-being of America’s youth.  The tension in this conflict is palpable.

The author, Philip Klein, mentions in particular the senate race in Nevada, where the stained incumbent, Harry Reid, has attacked budget hawks and proponents of reform to the biggest drain on our economy, Social Security.  According to Klein, Reid is resorting to the “age-old tactic in his bid for re-election: scaring senior citizens.”

Similarly in our book, we write:

Politicians are reluctant to reform Social Security because it could jeopardize the current benefits that boomers are banking on for their retirements.  Therefore, even the mention of reform could be political suicide.  Old people have the highest percentage of voter turnout, because they receive a lot of money from the government at our expense and want to keep that money flowing in.  Our parents are perfectly happy with PAYGO the way it is, simply because they will receive Social Security money shortly, but they are knowingly hanging us, their kids, out to dry.  If young people put political pressure en masse on our representatives, they will be forced to take action.  Our vote counts just as much as that of our parents’.

These two nearly identical opinions are critical when examining the upcoming crisis that we face as the young generation of Americans, that the irresponsibility of generations before us are in direct conflict with our future quality of life.

Social Security is nothing more than the largest Ponzi scheme ever inflicted upon man by the government.  Today’s recipients of Social Security are only collecting benefits that are supplied by the existing workforce, not some account which boomers believe (at the government’s misguidance) that they have been accruing over their careers.  We now are facing a huge flaw in the government mandated pyramid scheme; baby boomers are retiring at record levels, while the amount of workers supporting their retirements is shrinking.

When the first Social Security check was issued to lucky Ida Mae Fuller in 1940, there were 42 people working and paying into the fund for every retiree collecting money.  By 2002 however, that ratio had fallen to 3.4 people working for each person collecting.  The ratio is plummeting every year and will near 2:1 by 2020.

The only solution to ensure that we have any retirement funds available through Social Security is through the creation of private investment accounts.  Instead of all working Americans lumping their money into a giant pile for the reckless government to squander, we need to take individual control over our retirement accounts and cut the Federal Government out of our retirements.  The government has proven incapable to resist spending the supposed Social Security Trust Fund (long plundered), and privatizing Social Security will save us from staring at a pile of worthless IOUs.

We cover this problem in depth in our book, America’s Youth vs. Big Government, and much like the American Spectator’s piece on the topic, we believe that Social Security reform can not be delayed:

Our parents and their generation have knowingly left us with this problem, under the very same precept we have now adopted ourselves: that our politicians are smart and caring enough to make sure that everyone will get a fair slice of their American Dream for retirement.  Who’s to think that our outcome will be any different from what our parents are finding out now?  Our future financial security is not entitled to us, and if we sit back quietly ignoring this issue, our politicians will happily waste our money away.

This is a topic of utmost importance for the future of this country.  It is up to us young Americans to stand up against politicians like Reid, who resist Social Security reform because of political career aspirations, not because of their dedication to us citizens.

A question I am often asked when talking about our book is why and how we decided to write a book.  There is no simple answer to that question.  In fact, it was a culmination of many events that led us to this project.  Some of this is detailed in the preface and introduction to our book, but I thought this would be a good place to give the longer version.

Tim and I were both raised in a middle-class, conservative family in a wealthy suburb of Milwaukee.  The county we lived in is one of the most conservative areas in the state, if not the entire country.  We were taught the essential conservative ideology of a hard work ethic, respect for religion, fiscal restraint, etc.  Unfortunately for us, during our formative years, Clinton was leaving office after his “cigar incident” and Bush was coming in as the new leader.

Not knowing better at the time, we threw our support behind “W”, believing he would embody the true conservative principles we believed in.  The older we became and the more we watched politics, we began to see that Bush was not much different from his predecessor in many regards.  We believed him and the other Republicans when they told us that social security reform was paramount to our country and that the wars in the middle east were necessary because they had weapons of mass destruction.  Again, promises from the campaign were broken as the Republicans governed with little to no input from their constituents.  Debt was piled on and unconstitutional actions such as domestic spying and wiretapping are now legal through a cleverly disguised law known as the Patriot Act.  (On a sidenote: nothing was more hilarious than watching the reaction of the progressive left in Madison while at school in the year 2000.  I still take comfort remembering the scenes of protest and disgust by out of touch professors, administrators, and brain-washed students)

I was living in Hawaii and working for large real estate developer in 2008 when the bottom fell out from our economy.  I saw firsthand the destruction of private wealth and the effect on markets, employers, and employees.  Nearly our entire staff was laid off within a year and the project significantly scaled down.  The Bush administration as well as nearly all of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, fear-mongered the country into bailing out the very banks who so foolishly started the mess in the first place.  I knew that this move was wrong, no matter how much they tried to scare us into believing it was the only way out of a full-blown recession.  The markets needed to correct on their own instead of simply delaying the inevitable sovereign debt crisis.  This last action of the Bush administration and the subsequent blunders of Obama were true turning points in my belief that a large and powerful federal government was an UNNECESSARY EVIL.  I finished up with the  real estate project in July of 2009 and headed back to California.

My funemployment began with a six week trip to Europe to figure out what to do next.  As I hiked through the Alps for two weeks, meeting up with a group of Brits, I was able to engage in many interesting political discussions.  Everyone I talked to was appalled and confused when I told them about Obama’s disingenuous plan to unite.  The Brits, Dutch, Italians, Israelis, Australians, and many others simply could not believe that the world savior was indeed a hoax.  I learned a lot about the politics of other countries during these conversations.  I realized that although our political system is severely flawed today, it was nowhere near the shape of many of the other European-socialist governments.  This was the first time in my life that I truly learned to appreciate the freedoms and civil rights that we in America often take for granted.

Upon the conclusion of my trek in Switzerland, I knew that my immediate destiny would be to tell the story of the amazing liberties that we possess as Americans and, more importantly, what we need to do in order to preserve them.  I dedicated much of the rest of my trip through Italy, France, and Spain to furthering this goal.  By the end of the trip I was convinced that I needed to help the most vulnerable generation maintain its liberty.  The young generation of America faces a long road of unsustainable debt and government takeovers of our once (long ago) free markets, compounding the danger of losing the inalienable rights that we all possess.

Immediately upon return from my trip, I had breakfast with Tim in Ocean Beach.  I remember very clearly the whole meal because I was nervous that he would not think it was a good idea.  There was no way I could take on this project by myself and I needed another liberty-minded, smart person to work with.  Since we were both unemployed and shared the same values, I knew it would work.

After my pitch about the project, emphasizing the part about the uniqueness of the idea- no young person had written a book about the fate of their generation.  Trust me, we searched Amazon for hours to be sure!  Tim immediately liked the idea and agreed that we should continue down the path.  The concept blossomed since that day in October 2009 and by late November, after much research and discussion, we were on our way toward co-authoring a book!