The Tipping Point – Taking Back America

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
America is at a tipping point. We arrived here through a series of incidents and actions, many unintended.. Our tools for creating the world we know were law and institutions, tools we thought would provide stability and order. Instead we have violence and growing fear.

Growing numbers of Americans now realize that those we trusted have used those tools to enrich themselves. The shock of understanding vies with an overarching sense of outrage. We are faced with the compelling need to change government because of the deceit and unbridled greed of those who used our trust to steal.

Greed is a long-understood human failing. Our institutions were used to deceive us. Those deceptions were created by people we trusted who stood to profit. We know their names and it is a long list including former presidents, the heads of corporations, and leaders from both major parties. This did not happen as a single conspiracy; it happened because when one person comes up with an original way to steal, it will be copied and applied to other circumstances to achieve the same purpose.

As John Judge, special assistant to former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, says a conspiracy means to breath together. These people have bad breath and ambition combined with habits of larceny.

A blow dryer is a small appliance used to dry and style your hair. Dropped into the bathtub of someone you want to eliminate, it is a murder weapon.

Blow-dryers and institutions of all kinds are just tools. These 'leaders' and other individuals entrusted with American's tools are responsible for how those tools were misused. There are many tools we need to rethink. We have been too trusting.

Our monetary system was intended to provide the means for exchange, to securely hold money, and to provide a way to measure what money is worth. It has become a weapon in the war to steal the wealth of people around the world. Fractional banking is a monopoly license to print money, issued by Congress to the Federal Reserve System in 1913. This system has stolen the wealth of five generations, while reorganizing us to make stealing ever easier.

There are alternatives. Read Money, Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender by Thomas H. Greco, Jr., Chelsea Green Publishing, ISBN 9781890132378.)

We have learned that the greed inclined who work their way into power always want more of our wealth and lives. Politicians make a living making sure that Grid Corporations, for instance all the oil companies, Halliburton, Koch Industries, and scores of others keep us passive and paying.

Other Grid Corporations did this with electricity, transportation, for all financial dealings, for insurance, and for all government services including the police and military.

In cooperation with government and aided by the media they have been re-calibrating the police and military to control us when deceit finally fails, which it is now doing. The cows, us, have to stay in the pen.

How they accomplished this redistribution of wealth is an ugly story. It will get uglier.

Those in government, profitably employed by Grid Corporations, knew that we would eventually notice. Like a conman playing the old pea and shell game they used lots to distract us.

In the wake of WWII they terrorized us with the boogie man of Communism; When it seemed we would agree on the need for clean air and water the same corporations used operatives to take over the Environmental Movement, displacing the real Earth Day for the April Oil Day. Flags flew, rhetoric oozed, children were told to hide under their desks in the 50s. Today they are training our children to expect death at their schools at any moment.


Fear = Control.

During Iran – Contra Big Oil began overtly dictating when and where Americans would go to war. Our military slid a little further towards being just a tool for corporate profits. But America's servicemen and women were faithful to what they believed. They believed they were protecting our country.

Behind the facade of greed those responsible know they are lying. That truth seeps past their empty words.

To put off the day of reckoning they found justifications for their actions. We know those justifications by many names. Among them are Communism, Socialism, The True Faith (fill in your favorite), The Free Market, Spreading Democracy, Fighting Terrorism, Straussianism, Progressivism - the list is endless. Some of these are complex sets of ideas that seem logical or idealistic - when reality is ignored. By artfully redefining words like 'is' and 'privatize', those in control can justify anything.

Just slather on lots of rhetoric that evokes emotions but is completely disconnected from what the words mean and you hold those streams of income firmly in place. That is government as it exists today.

We are divided. That was their plan. Using rhetoric and the media they sowed poison and distrust. Many among us are coming to realize that Right and Left are meaningless. That is a long step forward. We need to take more steps in the same direction. Women and men, Black, White, Hispanic, (fill in the blank) straight, gay, young, old; it is the contents of character that really matter.

There are solutions to all the problems; we can find those answers.

Get ready to rethink your ideas, rejecting their games.

Government is just a contractor hired to fix our collective toilet. Government cannot be sovereign: the only sovereignty exists in individuals. As the Declaration says,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -----”

This form of government has not worked.

So here we are today. Now the question is what to do about it.

Government needs to be returned to its original form, with the people deciding how to organize at the most local level. That mandate from the Declaration reads:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

This time we'll do a better job. If the last 200 years was the beta test, it is time to learn from our mistakes and hit the Reboot.

To Reboot, we need to get off the grids they set up to contain and control us; we must focus on local sources for all our needs; we need to strengthen community; we must assert accountability through common law courts since their courts exist just to perpetuate their power.

Freedom: You don't have it until you give it away to everyone.
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Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster is the grand-daughter of Arthur C. Pillsbury Home. AC, as the family calls him, invented the first circuit panorama camera as his senior project at Stanford in 1896 while majoring in Mechanical Engineering. His highly credentialed senior advisor told him not to bother to try building it. Such an approach was impossible. AC built it. It worked. He left college and went to the Yukon, using the camera to record the opening of the mining fields. In 1906 he used the camera to take this photo of the San Francisco and Fire. That disaster, less serious than the one now facing Americans, moved AC to begin a life long work of creating the means for individuals to see the world as it really is. In 1912 he built the first lapse-time camera to save the wildflowers in Yosemite. In 1927 he built the first microscopic motion picture camera to show scientists and all of us the dynamic, living world beyond their scope of vision. That was following in 1929 by the X-ray motion picture camera and the underwater motion picture camera.


She has been studying the market and economics through the filter of politics and anthropology for twenty years. She began her studies because it became clear to her that those in positions of power were much like her grandfather's senior advisor.

Her political blog is at How the NeoCons Stole Freedom.

She is presently working on a book titled, "Climbing Off the Grids to Freedom in One Easy Lesson."