Joe Stack Is Sign of the Times

No pitchforks, but expect more airplanes or more likely guns. Everyone wants a just, fair country back, but the black guy didn’t take it.

Ordinary Citizens are Being Driven to the Ground, The Last Flight of Joe Stack

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Joseph Stack, frustrated American, flew his airplane into an Austin, Texas, office building. He was one of the 79 per cent of Americans who have given up on ‘their’ government.

The latest Rasmussen Poll indicates that the vast majority of Americans are convinced that ‘their’ government is totally unresponsive to them, their concerns, and their needs. Rasmussen found that only 21 per cent of the American population agree that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed, and that 21 per cent is comprised of the political class itself and liberals. Rasmussen concludes that the gap between the American population and the politicians who rule them ‘may be as big today as the gap between the colonies and England during the 18th century.’

Indications are that Joseph Stack was sane. Like Palestinians faced with Israeli jet fighters, helicopter gunships, tanks, missiles and poison gas, Stack realized that he was powerless. A suicide attack was the only weapon left to him.

Stack targeted the IRS, the federal agency that had gratuitously ruined him. He flew his airplane into an office building occupied by 200 members of the IRS. This deliberate plan and the written explanation he left behind segregate him from deranged people who randomly shoot up a Post Office or university campus.

The government and its propaganda ministry do not want to call Stack a terrorist.  ’Terrorist’ is a term the government reserves for Muslims who do not like what Israel does to Palestinians and the U.S. government does to Muslim countries.

But Stack experienced the same frustrations and emotions as Muslims who can’t take it any longer and strap on a suicide vest.  

‘Violence,’ Stack wrote, ‘not only is the answer, it is the only answer.’ Stack concluded that nothing short of violence will get the attention of a government that has turned its back on the American people.

Anger is building up. People are beginning to do unusual things. Terry Hoskinsbulldozed his house rather than allow a bank to foreclose on it. The local TV station conducted an online survey and found that 79 per cent of respondents agreed with Hoskins’ action.

Perhaps the turning point was the federal government’s bailout of the investment banks whose reckless misbehavior diminished Americans’ retirement savings for the second time in eight years. Now a former head of the most culpable bank is campaigning to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits in order to pay for the bailout. President Obama has obliged him by creating a ‘deficit commission.’

The ‘deficit commission’ will be used to gut Social Security, just as the private insurance health plan is paid for by cutting $500 billion out of Medicare.

It could not be more clear that government represents the interest groups that finance the election campaigns. …