What is the difference between “homesteading” and “seasteading?” For the citizens of the United States, I guess it’s our national debt of about 16,400,000,000,000 dollars. And we have acquired it in less than 200 years. In the 19th and 20th centuries, our D.C. government offered land to develop parts of our country through the passage of various Homestead Acts. We were not the first society to do it. Ironically, the Romans were the first ones to offer land to poor people so they would develop the hinterlands of various backwaters. We all know what happened to Rome.
   Homesteading could be a very tough life. Witness the sod and log huts of our pioneers trying to wrest a living from stump, rock, and sand-infested lands. First, the government hoped that the lifestyle of self-sufficiency and the home preservation of foodstuffs made from roots, seeds, and various wild game would keep the people alive on their dirt floors. Second, the government hoped that the homesteaders would create an economy of certain foodstuffs and crafts so they could be taxed to continue the growth of a society. We have now accomplished that, but in the last half-century we have forgotten to pay our bills from various wars, prescription drug programs, financial speculation, and a Wall Street that makes Las Vegas look like a strip poker table played with thrift store underwear.

Here Comes Seasteading

   Now that the greedy psychopaths who created the $16.4 trillion debt have garnered much of the wealth of the U.S. created by two centuries of hard work of homesteaders and laborers, they want to “seastead” themselves to artificial islands. The object is to keep their money from the tax collector who is holding the credit card slips the psychopaths signed so they could play war and trade beads, tomahawks, and blankets for real property.
  Billionaires have sponsored a San Francisco-based Seasteading Institute where they conspire to create floating city-states to evade taxes of their home countries, avoid/ignore financial regulations, and continue to develop the vulture, raw, unfettered capitalism that has served them so well from Ronald Reagan of General Electric fame. Billionaire Peter Thiel of PayPal is one of the principal backers of the Seasteading Institute, along with other various Silicon Valley billionaires looking for out-of-the-mainstream economic and political models. The organization’s website states the obvious: “All land on Earth is already claimed, making the oceans humanity’s next frontier.” The magazine Mother Jones describes one of the first efforts in seasteading by Ron Paul-type libertarians. They established the Republic of Minerva on an artificial island in the South Pacific, minting their own money from gold coins. Named after the Roman goddess of invention, art, martial arts, and wisdom, the seastead finally pissed off the king of nearby Tonga, who, according to unreliable sources, rented a tugboat, took a few of his guards and a four-piece band, and chased the inhabitants into the sea. The Pacific waves finally ate Minerva.

Goodbye, Republic Of Rose Island
 
 Other seasteads have had varying successes. The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands has occupied tiny islands in the Australian Great Barrier Reef since 2004, but it isn’t trying to avoid taxes and regulations. However, the Republic of Rose Island, founded on an oil platform off Italy in 1967 for tax evasion purposes, was blown up by the Italian Navy in 1968. Those who developed the seastead spoke Esperanto and printed beautiful postage stamps for sale. The Principality of Sealand is based on a World War II platform built six miles off the English coast. It was originally used to assist English and American planes returning from bombing runs over Germany. “Prince” Roy Bates, the ruler of Sealand, still sells royal titles from the seastead formed in 1967. Rumor has it that Wikileaks, the leaking website, has offices there. The smallest seastead so far has been an 8-foot by 30-foot bamboo raft anchored off Jamaica for two years. The Republic of New Atlantis disappeared one night. Maybe the owner didn’t pay his New Atlantis taxes.

Yes, The Richest Country
In The World Is Truly Exceptional!

   We keep hearing from Mitt Romney’s 47 percent that the U.S. is an exceptional country. The politicians and the radio and TV networks owned by huge corporations keep trying to tell us we have “the finest health care in the world.” We do—for the top ten percent who can afford it. We once were third in life expectancy among modern nations. According to the latest research, we are 16th. They don’t advertise the fact that poor illegals now go back to Latin America because they can do better there. These facts don’t seem to bother Mitt’s gang:

1. The bottom 90 percent in the U.S. have not received a raise in 30 years.
2. Our richest 0.1 percent “earn” eight percent of the total U.S. income. In the world of               income inequality, rich Frenchmen are second at 2.8 percent.
3. Twenty percent of our children live in poverty. Great Britain is second among rich                    countries at eight percent.
4. We lead the world in prisoners per 100,000 with 725. Italy is a distant second at 80.
5. Eight percent of our population at any one time is homeless. Italy is second at four                percent.
6. We are 34th in infant mortality among all industrialized countries, yet we spend twice as          much per capita on health care. We are at 17 percent of gross domestic product and              miss covering 60 million—while Great Britain at eight percent covers everybody.
7. The U.S. CEO is paid 460 times what the average worker makes. Canadian CEOs, who             are probably as talented, make 35 times their average worker.
8. We spend over $900 billion per year on our military. China is next at $100 billion.
9. We also lead the civilized world with 4.2 murders per 100,000. France is next at 1.5.
10. Over 55 percent of the Republican Party believes that, contrary to scientific fact,                    the earth may be only 10,000 years old.

A Complex Society Such As Ours Requires More
Money—But “Only The Little People Pay Taxes”

   The Republican Party has succeeded in accomplishing two specific goals: “starving the beast” (the government) and acquiring the major share of U.S. assets. As author Thom Harriman writes, “We have become... a society with only two classes: those who own and those who owe.” Although a complex society requires more public investment than third-world ones, we are paying about the same rate of taxes on our GDP as our grandparents paid on their GDP in 1960. In the meantime, we assumed the role of world cop while fighting two senseless wars and spending half of what the entire world spends on “defense.”
   In eight years, that great budget balancer Ronald Reagan tripled our national debt by spending $2 trillion on rehabilitating WW II battleships and manufacturing enough nuclear weapons to blow up our corner of the universe. George H.W. Bush in just four years of following Reagan’s policies increased the debt to $4 trillion. “Slick Willie” Clinton in his eight years added only $1.6 trillion to the debt while investing in infrastructure such as airports, roads, bridges, social programs for the poor, and that relatively new creation the Internet. Remember the picture of Clinton and VP Al Gore stringing broadband wire through schools? We ranked third in the world in the use of broadband when Clinton left office.

   Then we elected the Great Decider George W. Bush, who in his eight years started two disastrous wars and a drug prescription program to buy middle-class votes, and failed miserably to regulate the Wall Street Casino, where banksters were loaning our money at 1-40 leverage rates. And then he cut taxes and put the wars and programs on the government credit card! Dubya in his eight years added $5 trillion to the national debt, making it $10.6 trillion in 2008. Then he ran from the Oval Office to a shelter in Dallas. Now, four years later, in the age of Barack Obama, our national debt is at $16.4 trillion. But how much of that $5.8 trillion added by Obama really belongs in Dubya’s pocket? Probably as much as $4 trillion.
    In the Republican recession we have had to spend an inordinate amount of money just to keep from going into another Great Depression. A stimulus had to be applied, unemployment had to be paid, extended, and paid again. It will take another decade to recover from Dubya and The Best Congress Money Can Buy—if we ever do. Banksters had to be rescued from their pathological greed. Payroll taxes had to be cut by two percent so poor people and small businesses could survive. When Dubya left office, we had slipped to 16th in the use of broadband. That says it all on his MBA education.

The Crazy Part: This Country Is Loaded With
Dough, But It’s In The Wrong Hands

   We keep hearing from Republican pundits such as George Will, Trash Limbo, and the Fox crowd that we have to drown the government in a bathtub and cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and other programs because the rich can’t pay enough taxes to reduce it. Will said he was surprised that American cars average eleven years old. Where does he keep his head in the sand? The middle-class American consumer hasn’t had a raise in 30 years! So he is going to take out a big loan to buy a new car?  
   Economists and the Republicans don’t seem to understand that Henry Ford was right a hundred years ago when he doubled the wages of his assembly line workers to $5 an hour. When challenged by other employers, Ford had a simple answer: “Who is going to buy my cars?” We still have the superrich and Ph.D. economists in this country too dumb to understand this economic fact. We no longer have a middle class that can consume manufactured goods—and housing—at the same rate as 20th-century consumers. Read some Roman history so you will understand the collapse of an empire. The psychopathic “takers” will never understand that they can’t get by without the “makers.”  
   Remember that a psychopath has these characteristics: ruthlessness, fearlessness, mental toughness, charm, charisma—and a total lack of conscience and empathy, just like any serial killer. The Chinese have a way of taking care of careless billionaire psychopaths. In the last nine years, they have executed 14 of their billionaires for not following regulations. We have more than our share of psychopaths. The day before Enron filed for bankruptcy, the top executives awarded themselves $55 million while their employees’ 401Ks went to zero.
   One psychopath of the last century was John D. Rockefeller. He was the richest man in the world, but each morning he led his family’s breakfast prayer with the plea that God help him “make money.” When Rockefeller learned his competitor J.P. Morgan had died and left an estate of $60 million, he said, “And to think—he wasn’t even rich.” The distributor of dimes spent his last years taking young ladies on rides on his huge estate, squeezing them in interesting places in the back seat as his chauffeur drove endlessly around the circular drives.

It’s Time For Pitchforks

   The quote “The rich are different—they have more money” really applies to today. The top 25 hedge fund managers in the U.S. (remember, hedge funds don’t even make paperclips!) made as much as 685,000 teachers teaching 13 million of our children last year. Apple CEO Tim Cook made $378 million last year, as much as 81,000 of his workers. Tax experts have concluded that the superrich avoid paying $3 trillion in taxes per year by using tax havens (hiding $12 trillion over seas), loopholes, and “special” deductions, manipulating profit reports so more debt is registered in the U.S., and under-reporting income. The rich have redefined ethics and legality through The Best Congress Money Can Buy. If the superrich had started to pay their fair share in 2008, our national debt would now be $1.4 trillion instead of $16.4 trillion. Heck, we’ll spend over $1 trillion just keeping forces in Afghanistan for a year.