October 19, 2011 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • Page 19 people who never read anything. The printing press does not turn specially-treated paper into real money. Real money has to represent something – such as gold or silver – before it has any value. Printing zillions of dollars to cover taxpayer-funded jobs that do not produce salable products or vital services will eventually lead to an inflation in which money becomes increasingly worthless. America had this problem after the American Revolution, when Congress printed Continental money that had next to no value. Common people used foreign silver coins or fell back on barter. When a bunch of well-meaning crooks rammed a bill though Congress to pay for all the worthless Continentals at face value, and then sent agents through the countryside to buy them up at 20 cents on the dollar before the farmers heard about it, a second revolution was narrowly averted by a reversion to some semblance of fiscal integrity. Wall Street winners were not long in perpetrating other swindles. Speculation in Indian land protected by treaties got thousands of settlers killed, but since it also got thousands of Indians killed, the flag-waving historians were able to put a heroic face on what would today be called genocide in slow motion. After they were dead, we officially made some of the dead Indians into tragic heroes to make ourselves feel better. Crazy Horse, who was stabbed in the back by a U.S. soldier while resisting what would have been a fatal deportation to Florida, got on a 13-cent U.S. postage stamp. Red Cloud, who briefly defeated the United States in 1868 and was later swindled out of the treaty his victory won, got on a 10-cent stamp. The Germans today have postage stamps with pictures of pacifistic Marxists like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who were murdered by Rightists in the 1920s. The Germans today name high schools after Anne Frank who died of typhus at Belsen. Once the victims are dead, it’s okay for the grandchildren of the killers to say they are sorry, and even to mean it. But it doesn’t make the murders a good thing. Anyone who is honest will point out that make-work jobs for kids who pursued the wrong major in college, at taxpayer expense or the cost of inflation, will only make matters worse. Non-readers or not, we will someday learn that the printing press doesn’t generate wealth. The printing press generates inflation. No jobs should be funded if they involve shuffling paper. If, on the other hand, they involve cleaning up the environment, developing solar or geothermal energy, or producing salable goods, go for them. However, most of these jobs are for skilled-laborers, and no one in America wants to be a skilled laborer. The conundrum continues. Meanwhile, Radio Republicans – people who forget that the Radical Republicans opposed slavery – assert that the whole thing is some sort of “commie” plot. Grow up! Commie plots were once a fact of life, especially during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration when there were 369 known communists in the federal government, and some of them were Soviet agents. This is a fact – though teachers still invoke the McCarthy Era to assert that most of the victims were innocent, when most of the victims were guilty. However, beating up on accused communists today is on a level with blockading Richmond to end slavery or strafing Indian villages to prevent the scalping of Swedish and Japanese tourists visiting the Black Hills. I remember communists when they were very dangerous to America – and very well organized. There is a single letter of difference between Russia and Prussia and that was how the NKVD and the subsequent KGB operated. If you did the job, you got promoted. If you messed up, they left cigarette and a loaded pistol on your desk and told you to do the right thing. I was once introduced to a very obvious U.S. informer spying on the American Indian Movement as “Major Kosterkov of Soviet Army Intelligence.” The informer instantly started to goggle his eyes and crack a sweat. He knew that, if I were really Major Kosterkov, he would never walk out of that room alive. The Indians told him I was really a newspaper reporter and he stopped hyperventilating. Partly on the strength of his performance, I was able to convince these same Indians never to trust the Soviets. I told them to imagine what the worst white people they knew would be like if they were anti-Christian -- and they got the message. The accused “commie” Indians eventually helped the Contras and the CIA get rid of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, for which I have never received a Medal of Freedom, although I deserve one. The Soviet Union was very bad news and killed three times as many people as Hitler – but these poor occupy Wall Street kids are not Soviet agents. They are rocking horse revolutionaries who think tantrums will help them get their way. They let an Egyptian mention Karl Marx at one of their rallies. No Soviet agent would have mentioned Marx at a public gather of supposedly loyal Americans. These kids probably don’t pay Russia’s favorite game, chess, either. We heard from Al Sharpton – not a key to the hearts of the Middle Americans or white working people. The rocking horse revolutionaries don’t want a Marxist takeover; they want jobs. If they get real jobs to help reverse global warming, they can do us a lot of good. If they get worthless jobs by whining, we won’t be taken over by Moscow. We’ll be bought out by Beijing, Tokyo, Berlin, Berlin, Paris, Tel Aviv, and anyplace else where people realize that wages are about production and not “jobs.” There are three schools of thought about the Wall Street protestors who want the one percent of super-rich Americans to stop bribing members of Congress and presidents to do their bidding and keep the other 99 percent of Americans from enjoying a fair share of prosperity. One school of thought is that the protestors are right, and that stock market swindles have taken a huge whack out of the national economy with no returns to ordinary working people, and that the present economic situation of 9.1 percent unemployment is unconscionable when some people’s bonuses exceed other people’s net worth. The second school of thought is that these people are cat’s paws for the Obama administration’s jobs bill. The third is that they are the point men and women of the “commie-Islamic” attempt to take over America and brainwash our children. None of these schools is, I think, correct. But then school is a considerable part of the problem behind the occupy Wall Street movement. The protestors, demographically, appear to be young, white, and college-educated, sometimes with more than one college degree. The core of their protest is that these educations did not automatically lead them into jobs that paid well and allowed them to express themselves and feel good about what they were doing with their lives. Bernie Madoff is a terrible person and deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. He caused better men to commit suicide, one of them his own son, but Madoff is not responsible for the fact that America now has a huge glut of college graduates who cannot find college-level jobs. Martha Stewart did not invent the demographic that half of all white American adults – now mostly college-educated – never read anything. Had they read more, they would have realized that industrial societies do not need more than 20 percent of the citizenry to have achieved higher education, and that this figure tends to be maintained in those European or Asian countries where the economies still work. The dream of every adult obtaining a four-year college degree has led to nightmares at the unemployment office and at the copy shop where 100 resumes go out and none are ever acknowledged. The school systems, ever eager to please the taxpayers, and the politicians of both parties frantically promoted the lie that having every American earn a college degree would somehow lead to national wellbeing even though nobody ever bothered to wonder where all these people were going to find work. Those who cannot pay their student loans because they cannot find jobs take to the streets dancing and singing and beating drums and think they are working for a clear-cut goal when, in fact, they are part of the problem. Mom and Dad should have asked them whether they really wanted to go to college, what they were going to study, and where they expected to land jobs when they graduated. Lockstep thinking – college leads to good-paying jobs where you don’t have to get your hands dirty or take home with a backache – may have been part of the American Dream. Now it’s part of the American Nightmare. Whether the tumult and the shouting help Obama pass the jobs bill is anybody’s guess. The problem, again, is Rocking horse revolutionaries Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: Growing up in Wyckoff, I was fortunate to be coached in sports, as well as supervised on service projects, through school and my church by adults who were generous with their time. One of these coaches and leaders was Committeeman Brian Scanlan. Through my childhood and teenage years, he volunteered his time coaching various sports, and taught us the principles of commitment and hard work. When I was in high school, Mr. Scanlan organized community service projects that included Habitat for Humanity. I am grateful to Mr. Scanlan for creating opportunities that allowed me to contribute to my community at a young age. Through Mr. Scanlan’s efforts, I learned the value of service to our community. Lauren M. Torrisi Wyckoff Dear Editor: Kudos to Wyckoff Township Committeeman Tom Madigan for advocating for immediate tax relief on behalf of the taxpayers of Wyckoff! I am pleased that the Ramapo Indian Hills Board of Education has agreed to use the additional $463,000 in state aid to provide tax relief in the 2012 budget. Tom Madigan and Doug Christie are committed to maintaining a Wyckoff that is affordable for all residents. The Madigan-Christie Republican team supports Senator Michael Doherty’s proposed new “Fair School Funding,” Appreciates Scanlan’s volunteer work which provides funding that is equitable to all students of New Jersey, regardless of whether they reside in urban, suburban, or rural areas. This new funding formula would provide significant tax relief to Wyckoff. The team of Madigan and Christie is focused on keeping our taxes low and maintaining our property values. These tough economic times demand some tough decisions. A balancing act is required to continue to provide a high quality education by retaining the best and the brightest to educate our children, while being fiscally responsible to the taxpayers. Tom Madigan and Doug Christie understand this. I have confidence that the Madigan Christie team has both the interest of our children as well as the taxpayers in mind and they know when to draw the line. Please join me in voting on Nov. 8 for Madigan and Christie. Barbara Murphy Wyckoff Dear Editor: It would seem that good communication skills are playing an ever more important role in politics and public service these days — from the national level down to the local level. There is no better an example of that than Brian Scanlan. Since his election three years ago to the Wyckoff Township Committee, Mr. Scanlan has demonstrated an unprecedented commitment to keep the citizenry informed. I find his well-writ ten and infor mative quar terly e-mail (continued on page 25) Endorsement for Madigan and Christie Scanlan fulfills promise