I'm dealing with only 90% of my colon and 5 feet of intestine left while trying to maintain a cheery face/attitude on a everyday basis. Which, I've decided, on most days, I do. At the beginning of my new life I did not realize how grateful I would become for the opportunity to continue living and will see what the Creator has in store for me. * *BTW: shitz* - Just another way of saying crap, (noun), and is used to express anger or frustration or confusion or excitement etc... Take your pick
By then, Daniel had been in Afghanistan two months. It was
July 2012, his third tour of duty and his first with Oogie, his military
working dog. They were leading their platoon on yet another patrol,
clearing a no-name village with maybe 15 houses and one mosque, when
they began taking fire.
“The first thing that went though my mind,” he says, “was, ‘S- -t. My dog’s gonna get shot.’ ”
It was a perfect L-shaped ambush, bullets coming from the front and
the right, the platoon pinned down in a flat, open landscape. Along the
road were shallow trenches, no more than 14 inches deep. Daniel grabbed
Oogie, squeezed him in a hole, then threw himself over his dog.
Daniel with his dog, Oogie
It went against all his Army training. “They tell us it’s better for a
dog to step on a bomb than a US soldier,” he says. The truth is Daniel,
like just about every other dog handler in the armed forces, would
rather take the hit himself.
Five weeks into their training, Daniel and Oogie were inseparable.
They showered together. They went to the bathroom together. When Daniel
ran on the treadmill, Oogie was on the one right next to him, running
along.
That week, Daniel got Oogie’s paw print tattooed on his chest.
“The few times you safeguard your dog are slim compared to what he
does every time you go outside the wire,” Daniel says. “That’s your dog.
The dog saves you and saves your team. You’re walking behind this dog
in known IED hot spots. In a firefight, the dog doesn’t understand.”
Bullets were coming closer now; the enemy had long ago picked up on
how important the dogs were to the Americans, how successful they were
at sniffing out bombs. “I know there were three separate incidents where
they shot at Oogie,” Daniel says. And as he lay on top of his dog, he
stroked him and whispered and kept him calm.
After five minutes, Daniel’s platoon pushed the enemy back and away,
and the first thing Daniel did was get Oogie to shade. “He’s a black
Lab, and it was very hot out,” he says. He strapped two big bags of
saline to Oogie’s shoulders and hydrated him intravenously, then the two
went back out to clear more villages.
“Oogie’s always ready to go,” Daniel says. “He’d hurt himself if I didn’t stop him — he has that much prey drive.”
In September 2012, Daniel and about 18 other soldiers boarded a flight back to North Carolina; their deployment was over.
Waiting on the tarmac were employees from a North Carolina-based
company, K2 Solutions, which had the government contract for the dogs.
Within moments of deplaning, the handlers got to pat their dogs on the
head, say their goodbyes, then watch as the dogs — and all their
equipment, down to their shredded leashes — were boarded on a truck and
driven away.
“It’s a bunch of infantry guys, and no one wants to be the first to
start crying,” Daniel says. “But it didn’t take long. There wasn’t a dry
eye.” Daniel got Oogie’s paw print tattooed on his chest
The only solace these soldiers had was the knowledge that they could
apply to adopt their dogs, and that the passage of Robby’s Law in
November 2000 would protect that right.
More than three years later, Daniel still doesn’t have Oogie. The dog has vanished.
Daniel, who doesn’t want to use his real name because he’s on active
duty, is one of at least 200 military handlers whose dogs were secretly
dumped out to civilians by K2 Solutions in February 2014, a Post
investigation has found.
At least three government workers were also involved and may have taken dogs for themselves.
It’s a scandal that continues to this day, with hundreds of handlers
still searching for their dogs — and the Army, the Pentagon and K2
Solutions covering up what happened, and what may still be happening.
Dumping dogs
On Feb. 10, 2014, one of many adoption events was held on the grounds
of K2 Solutions in Southern Pines, NC. The Army had recently ended its
TEDD (Tactical Explosive Detection Dogs) program, and word quietly got
out that “bomb dogs” would be available to civilians.
Kim Scarborough, 52, a project manager at East Carolina University,
was one of them. “I called my husband and said, ‘K2’s dumping dogs. Do
you mind if I go?’ ”
In quiet, well-manicured Southern Pines, K2 is a glamorous company.
They own huge tracts of land where they covertly train dogs for combat,
counterterrorism and catastrophes that will probably never occur in
North Carolina. K2’s owner, Lane Kjellsen, is a cryptic figure who
claims to be ex-special forces.
The company is privately held. Their website advertises dogs for
sale, but it’s unclear whether they’re former military working dogs. K2
has trained dogs for both the TEDD program and the Marine Corps’ IDD
(Improvised Explosive Device Detector Dog) program, and each canine has
about $75,000 to $100,000 worth of training.
Multiple handlers told The Post that they have called and emailed K2
repeatedly about their dogs, submitting adoption paperwork as they were
instructed to do. Yet they have been given little to no information,
and at times deliberate misdirection, they say. Finding military dogs
isn’t hard: They all have microchips, and the TEDD dogs have serial
numbers tattooed on their ears.
These handlers also say K2 trainers who were with them in Iraq and
Afghanistan told them they should contact K2, or K2 would contact them,
once their dogs were available for adoption.
“When I contacted K2, they were like, ‘She’s gone and adopted out,’ ”
says Brian Kornse, who did three tours of duty and has PTSD. “I got in
contact with them in February of 2014” — the same month K2 was holding
multiple adoption events.
Kornse believes his dog, a black Lab named Fistik, was given to a
former Pentagon employee, Leo Gonnering, who may still have been working
for the government in 2014. A man who left a voicemail for The Post
from “Leo’s phone” said Gonnering “adopted the dog from the Army two
years ago. He and his family have no intention of giving the dog up to
his prior handler.” He named Kornse as the likely handler and has
renamed the dog Mystic.
“I guess I had PTSD before, but I never really noticed till I gave
Fistik up,” Kornse says. “I started having nightmares. I never
experienced that before. She made everything better for me — that’s the
best way I can describe it.”
Other handlers say K2 would tell them information about their dogs
was “privileged” and instruct them to call Lackland Air Force Base in
Texas. Staff at Lackland, they say, would send them right back to K2.
‘I guess I had PTSD before, but I never
really noticed till I gave Fistik up … She made everything better for
me — that’s the best way I can describe it.’ - Brian Kornse said about giving up his dog
“I called K2 in March 2014,” says a handler who asked to remain
anonymous. “I said, ‘Can you please help me find my dog?’ They said,
‘No. Call Lackland.’ ”
This handler sent The Post an email exchange he had with Lackland. He
asked for help, and a Sgt. Tia Jordan replied, “I’m sorry, but we don’t
have any control over TEDD dog adoptions.” Under her signature is her
office: the Military Working Dogs Adoptions and Dispositions Center.
“We got blown up together,” he says of his dog. “Before I was even done with training, I knew I’d try to adopt him.”
After months of obfuscation, many handlers give up, and they believe
that’s what K2, and some in the Army, want. “I have PTSD and traumatic
brain injury,” says Ryan Henderson, who has been searching for his dog,
Satan, since 2014. “There are mornings I wake up with anxiety attacks.
Dealing with normal life is more than I can handle anyway.”
Henderson says K2 told him Satan had been adopted by his second
handler “and they could not give me his information due to privacy
laws.”
He believes there’s a thriving black market for the dogs.
“Ninety dogs adopted out, at the same time, under suspicious
circumstances?” he says. “Subcontractors are literally another layer of
insulation to cover the BS.”
K2’s website offers a standard reply to service members looking for
their dogs: “All of the dogs in the TEDD program belonged to the Army,”
they state. K2 directs handlers to the Army’s Office of the Provost
Marshal General.
At least one staffer from the OPMG, Robert Squires, was at K2’s
adoption event on Feb. 10. Sources who were there tell The Post that
Squires was overseeing it all. He also signed reams of paperwork,
telling adopters that copies would be mailed to them. Ryan Henderson with his dog, Satan
That paperwork was never sent. According to emails obtained by The
Post, both Squires and another OPMG staffer, Richard Vargus, jointly
play dumb.
“Everyone was under the impression that they tried to locate the handlers,” Scarborough says.
Meanwhile, civilians in small North Carolina towns were electrified
by the idea of owning a war dog — the ultimate status symbol — and
several deputized themselves as prime “bomb dog” movers.
“On Feb. 7, I got a call from my dear friend . . . who asked me to
help her with a favor,” Kinston, NC, resident Jean Culbreth wrote on
Facebook on Feb. 19, 2014. “The favor was to place 72 retired
bomb-sniffing dogs in new homes. Well, it’s 10 days later and I am
BEYOND thrilled to say that 92 dogs have been adopted! And with the 11
Ralph and I took for the Lenoir Co. SPCA, I had a part in 103 adoptions
in 10 days. Man, I wish we could do this every week. To all involved:
GREAT JOB.”
When reached for comment, Culbreth hung up.
‘The biggest clusterf@#&’
When Scarborough arrived at K2’s adoption event, she was stunned. “I
called my husband and said, ‘This is the biggest clusterf–k I’ve ever
seen.’ We were a bunch of strangers who responded to Jean’s Facebook
post.”
They had been told 140 dogs would be available, but just 30 were
left. It was only 11 a.m. There were people claiming to be law
enforcement who were not in uniform — and law enforcement was given
first pick.
Some said they planned to contract out the dogs. One of the few
officers in tiny Taylortown, population 1,012, took six dogs. Two men
from Virginia, Dean Henderson and Jamie Solis, rolled up with a box
truck and took 13.
“All of these dogs have PTSD,” Scarborough says. “Squires said that to me.”
None of the people who sought to adopt was vetted. None was asked
what they planned to do with the dogs, or if they were capable of
dealing with a dog with war wounds. None was asked whether they had
small children.
“That was something that really bothered us,” says an ex-K2 employee
who was there that day. He asked not to be identified. “The dog I have,
it took me more than a year to calm her down. She was a TEDD. I wouldn’t
let her be around children.”
He believes no civilian should ever be allowed to adopt a military
working dog. “Civilians don’t understand what these dogs have been
through in war,” he says.
‘That was something that really bothered us … Civilians don’t understand what these dogs have been through in war.’ - an ex-K2 employee
This employee says that during the event, he was “getting dogs out of
the kennel and displaying them to people.” He knew it was wrong. “Too
many civilians were getting dogs that should have gone to handlers. It
wasn’t right.”
He says handlers were calling him constantly, complaining that the
Army and K2 “keep losing my s- -t.” He also says K2 was in collusion
with Army officials. “Squires was there and signing paperwork. He
adopted two TEDD dogs. One was Fistik” — Kornse’s dog. Vargus, he says,
“was the head of the program. He knew what was going on.” Vargus is also
believed to have taken at least two dogs.
This employee says he kept Squires from taking at least one dog. “I
talked to Squires and said, ‘I know this handler wants this dog.’ They
let me take him.”
The Army confirmed to The Post that Vargus was in charge of policy of
the TEDD program, but refused to comment on any involvement he, Squires
or Gonnering had in these adoptions, or dogs they are alleged to have
taken.
“All TEDD adoptions were performed in accordance with the law,” the
Army said in a statement. “The Army will continue to carry out standard
adoptions in accordance with the disposition procedures established by
the law and the Department of Defense.”
Scars of war
Once Scarborough got her dog, Ben, she was directed to a room where
an Army veterinarian was waiting. The dogs were getting five-minute
exams — temperature, teeth checks — before being shunted off K2 grounds.
She was apparently the first civilian the doctor saw that day.
“They got to me and it stops,” she says. “The veterinarian was
clearly very upset. She just stopped doing the exams.” The doctor left
the room, but Scarborough and others could overhear her. Scarborough
believes the veterinarian was on the phone with superiors.
“She was saying, ‘I don’t know what to do. This is not what we normally do.’ She was very disturbed, very distraught.”
After several hours, the veterinarian returned. The dogs remained
muzzled the entire time. “She said she was told, ‘Let it go —
proceed,’ ” Scarborough says. That doctor, Capt. Sarah T. Watkins,
Branch OIC at Fort Bragg, signed Ben’s medical records.
Scarborough was given those along with her dog’s deployment records —
something every handler who spoke with The Post had no idea existed. A
copy obtained by The Post shows that next to each dog’s name and serial
number is the name of their handler, refuting claims by the Army and K2
that tracking down a dog’s handler is too difficult.
Scarborough encountered similar stonewalling when she requested Ben’s military papers.
“There is no ‘official’ Army record since he was technically a
contract dog,” Squires told Scarborough in an email dated July 25, 2014,
“but by regulation he is classified as a Military Working Dog.”
Scarborough realized she had no business adopting Ben.
“It wasn’t till I got home that I said, ‘Oh, my God. I’ve got a bomb
dog that couldn’t make it as a patrol dog and has PTSD.” She says that
on the way home from the K2 adoption event, Ben freaked out when he
heard sirens.
‘I’ve offered $5,000 cash, plus a new German shepherd of their choosing, for his return. I have heard nothing.’ - Army veteran Ryan Henderson
When he hears thunder, or gunfire — Scarborough and her husband live
on a farm where they allow hunting — Ben races through the house and
hides under her husband’s desk, or jumps into bed with her, “shaking
like a leaf.”
Scarborough says she and Ben’s handler got in touch a few days ago
with help from online group Justice for TEDD Handlers, run by Betsy
Hampton, a civilian.
Scarborough says the handler is overwhelmed to have found Ben.
“He said to me, ‘That’s my Ben. That dog saved my life. I owe him.’ I
mean, ladies from the Daughters of the American Revolution have these
dogs,” she says. “If the handler wants Ben, it belongs to him. Period,
the end.”
Handlers don’t typically get that response. Many who have found their
dogs over social media are rebuffed. More than one has been told their
dog ran away, or was hit by a car.
Army veteran Henderson has tracked his dog, Satan, to a family in Chocowinity, NC.
“I’ve offered $5,000 cash, plus a new German shepherd of their
choosing, for his return,” Henderson says. “I have heard nothing. They
refuse to contact me.” Ryan Henderson with his dog, Satan, whom he has been trying to get back since 2014.
Every handler The Post spoke with stressed this point: The dogs are
not just dogs, or “equipment,” as the Army designates them. They are
battle-scarred veterans who have saved lives.
‘Destroy the dogs’
The 13 dogs Dean Henderson and Jamie Solis took from K2 were, in
fact, treated like outdated equipment. On the night of Feb. 10, 2014,
the two men drove up to Currituck Kennels at Mt. Hope in Chester, Va.,
the dogs sliding around the back of their truck the whole way.
“Half of the dogs were on human Prozac and Xanax,” kennel master Greg
Meredith tells The Post. “They were emaciated. They all had PTSD. One
had an injury to his tail from shrapnel.”
The men told Meredith they were ex-Secret Service, had just bought
the dogs for $30,000 each, and had a contract to sell them to the
Panamanian government for twice that amount.
The paperwork given out at K2 that day included a document stating
the adopter could not give a dog away, sell it, or profit from it. “If
they lied to K2 and were planning to sell, they’d be in serious amounts
of s- -t,” says the ex-K2 employee. “That’s illegal. And if K2 knew
about that, that’s even more illegal.”
Seventeen months went by. Meredith had spent nearly $150,000 of his
own money caring for the dogs and was broke. He pressed Henderson for
help.
“Destroy the dogs” was the reply.
Meredith called K2, who sent him to Vargus. He provided The Post with emails between himself, Vargus and Squires.
In a phone call, “Vargus tells me they couldn’t determine who had
ownership at that point — the contractors or DoD,” Meredith says.
Vargus’ office is at the Pentagon, which houses the Department of
Defense.
“He told me he was there when Dean and Jamie picked them up,”
Meredith says. “He knows them. They’re known to him. I said, ‘I’ve been
told these dogs can’t be re-purposed or resold, but Dean and Jamie told
me they paid $30K a piece for these dogs.’ I said, ‘There’s a coverup
going on here.’ ”
Henderson and Solis did not return calls for comment.
‘My best friend’
The handlers, understandably, trust no one. Adam Wopat served for
five years and did two tours. He spent a year in combat with his dog,
Heijn, in Kandahar.
On May 30, 2012, while sweeping a compound with the 4th Infantry
Division, an IED went off. One soldier lost a leg. Another was medevaced
out. Wopat was knocked back and unconscious, and Heijn was blown way
behind him. Adam Wopat with his dog, Heijn
“Once I got up and came to my senses, I realized, ‘Oh, I still have a
dog,’ because he had already returned to me and was laying down next to
me.”
Wopat is crying now. “After we hit our one-month mark of training — it’s like when a son calls you ‘Daddy,’ ” he says.
Last year, Wopat was contacted by a man named John Moreno, who said
he founded an organization called Operation Releash in May 2015 to
reunite veterans with their dogs.
“He told me US Capitol Police had him. He told me they were going to
fly us up on Veterans Day, and to wear a suit and tie,” Wopat recalls.
Moreno said they were going to retire Heijn and re-home him with Wopat.
“On Oct. 19th, the day he told me to call him on his new cellphone, he ceases contact with me,” Wopat says.
Moreno is ex-K2. He most recently worked as executive director of the
Worcester County Humane Society in Maryland, a position he left after
six weeks. “He was not caring for the dogs,” a former colleague tells
The Post.
Moreno confirms Wopat’s version of events. Asked why he disappeared,
Moreno told The Post: “A lot of stuff was going on at the time. I wanted
to be left alone.”
Former Marine Nick Beckham says he knows where his IDD dog, Lucky,
is: Living with K2 CEO Lane Kjellsen in North Carolina. Beckham says he
was tipped off by a K2 employee.
“K2 told me I had the right to adopt if I was the first handler and
the dogs were retired,” Beckham says. “I called K2 and asked for
paperwork. I filled it out and mailed it in and I never heard back. I
emailed again — they never responded.”
Reached Wednesday, Kjellsen admitted many adoption events had taken
place at K2. “Hundreds of dogs were adopted out,” he said. “Let me take
that back. Not hundreds, but more than 100.” K2 CEO Lane Kjellsen (left) adopted former Marine Nick Beckham’s dog, Lucky.
He went on to claim that “K2 had nothing to do with adopting those dogs.”
Asked if he had an IDD dog named Lucky, he said, “Lucky? Is that true? Um . . . I don’t know. I do have a dog named Lucky.”
He then admitted he had sold Lucky to the Marine Corps, and, once
retired, “the Marine Corps repeatedly reached out to the handler and had
no luck. I properly adopted Lucky through normal channels. K2 didn’t
handle any adoption paperwork.”
Kjellsen then suggested the Army was to blame for all the war dogs
who have been wrongly and secretly re-homed, but he refused to give The
Post specifics.
“I would say, ‘Get an official investigation and let me talk,’ ”
Kjellsen says. “I’d tell them what the Army did. I can’t [tell you]. I
need to be subpoenaed.”
Beckham is disconsolate to this day. “Lucky was my first and only dog,” he says. “He was my best friend.”
Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, 74, was arrested late yesterday evening
while exiting a plane at Portland International Airport on his way to
Burns, Ore., a town located 30 miles south of the federally claimed
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the site of a months-long standoff
between freedom-loving Americans and the U.S. government.
Celebrated for standing up to government land-grabs in 2014,
Bundy has been charged with conspiracy to interfere with a federal
officer, an allegation that reportedly stems back to his standoff with
the Bureau of Land Management, which tried stripping him and his family
of land-use rights they spent a century earning. The charges are
identical to those filed against seven protesters (including his son
Ammon Bundy) who occupied the wildlife refuge in protest of government
overreach.
NewsTarget has received exclusive information that
Bundy’s arrest, which was made using facial recognition technology and
TSA goons, may not be isolated, but is in fact the first of many to come
in an effort to silence those who have obtained incriminating
information about the BLM and its unlawful land grabs.
Government uses facial recognition to apprehend libertarian activists
While taking up occupancy of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge,
protesters reportedly gained access to sensitive information stored on
the computers there, revealing sinister plans by the BLM to confiscate
privately owned land with uranium reserves before auctioning it off to
foreign interests that have donated to the Clinton Foundation, according
a source who requested anonymity.
In an effort to suppress this information, the FBI is believed to be
conducting a nationwide warrant roundup of protesters and independent
journalists involved in the recent protests and standoffs against the
federal government. A total of 86 people, including Bundy, are believed
to be on the FBI’s roundup list and could subsequently be arrested for
their “crimes.”
The war on indie journalists and citizen protesters refusing to fall in line with the government’s increasing tyrannical actions is escalating. Radio show host Pete Santilli,
who merely covered the wildlife occupation as a citizen journalist,
never spending a single night at the refuge, was also arrested on felony
conspiracy charges.
When asked about his role at the wildlife refuge occupation, Santilli
replied: “My role is the same here that it was at the Bundy ranch. To
talk about the constitutional implications of what is going on here. The
Constitution cannot be negotiated.”
Constitutional law and human rights attorney John Whitehead wrote
that “the government doesn’t actually believe that 50-year-old Santilli
is an accomplice to any criminal activity. Read between the lines and
you’ll find that what the government is really accusing Santilli of is
employing dangerous speech.
“As court documents indicate, the government is prosecuting Santilli
solely as a reporter of information. In other words, they’re making an
example of him, which is consistent with the government’s ongoing
efforts to intimidate members of the media who portray the government in
a less than favorable light.”
The Obama Administration‘s
notorious crackdown on journalists is part of a large-scale government
effort to use political correctness and accusations of hate speech to
silence First Amendment rights – in turn, attempting to destroy citizen
journalism, the only facet of journalism that remains uncontrolled by
the establishment. Sources include: ZeroHedge.com
The
minimum wage in 1963 was over $15.00 per hour, so why not return to
those rates? Let’s give liberals what they want and raise the minimum
wage to $15.00 per hour and even more! So, how do we do this? Should
Congress just vote to raise the federal minimum wage and let Obama sign
it into law? Of course not, a federal minimum wage is flat out
unconstitutional. There is absolutely no enumerated power in Article 1,
Section 8 of the Constitution which allows Congress to legislate
mandatory wages for employees. Now that I appear to have gone completely bonkers, it’s time to
explain. The minimum wage in 1963, setting aside its
unconstitutionality, was actually $1.25. Adjusted for inflation, that is
$9.49 in 2015 dollars. The current $7.25 minimum wage is equal to 92
cents in 1963 dollars. Inflation has gone out of control, because any
time the federal government wants, it can just print more money. Doing
so automatically devalues all of the rest of the money in circulation.
Your wealth is quite literally stolen from you when more money is
printed. You still have the same number of dollars, but their
purchasing power drops. Take a look at this chart of historic gold prices. Gold: 1792 – 2014
While the United States was on the gold standard, you can see that
the price of gold barely changed from 1792 to 1932, never budging from
the 19-20 dollar range. Gold holds its value fairly solidly over the
course of centuries. In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the United
States off of the gold standard, so paper currency was no longer backed
by anything of tangible value. The federal government
unconstitutionally outlawed the ownership of most gold coins and
bullion, demanding that everyone turn it in to the Federal Reserve for
the current price of $20.67 per ounce. Once the government had a
virtual monopoly on gold after rounding it all up out of private hands,
they arbitrarily set a new price of $35.00 per ounce for gold. It was
magic! Suddenly all of the government’s gold almost doubled in value! Beginning in 1964 the United States began removing silver from our
coins. All of our coins dated 1964 and prior, with a face value of 10
cents or more, were 90% silver. The half dollar coins continued to
contain 40% silver though 1970. The last of the silver was removed from
U.S. coins in 1971. The last driblet of actual value was stripped from
the currency. Sure, the federal government still set a value of $35.00
for an ounce of gold, but they had all of the gold and the people
couldn’t buy it. It was still against the law to own it. At least
having the set value stifled inflation. 1971 got worse! Without a drop of silver left for the people, Richard
Nixon put the final nail in the coffin of the gold standard. After
all, the government can’t inflate money by printing more if they have a
fixed price for gold. Even though people couldn’t buy the gold, printed
money had an artificial value that didn’t waver, because of its pretend
gold backing. Nixon removed the government fixed price on gold,
completely severing any real value from printed money once and for all. If you refer back to the chart of gold prices from 1792 – 2014
you can see the sudden skyrocketing price of gold beginning in 1972.
At first glance it looks fantastic, but other than some gold
certificates that started being legal to buy in 1964, no one had any
gold to sell as the price rose. The price didn’t rise because people
valued gold more. It rose, because the Federal Reserve was printing
more and more money. The value of gold versus any other general
commodities remained the same, but the number of dollars needed to
purchase those commodities rose. Amazingly, in 1975 when the price of gold hit $139.00, seven times
what the Federal Government bought it all for, it became legal to own
gold again. Now gold was for sale, but there was only one major seller:
Uncle Sam. This makes me wonder if there is anything left in Fort
Knox. That’s a question no one can honestly answer and a conspiracy not
worth delving into right now. What does any of this have to do with a $15.00 minimum wage? The
five quarters that made up the $1.25 minimum wage in 1963 were 90%
silver with a 2015 melt value of over $15.00! Reversing all of the
damage the federal government has done to our currency since 1933 would
put a real value back on our money rather than the artificial value the
Federal Reserve places on it. Dropping the minimum wage back to $1.25
per hour and minting our coins from silver again would immediately put
more wealth in the hands of burger flippers than the current $7.25 in
Monopoly money they currently earn. It is always easier to do damage than it is to repair it. Reversing
the direction the government has taken with our currency and going back
onto the gold standard could have some growing pains if deflation were
allowed to happen. It would have to be done relatively slowly and in
managed stages. Deflation can be worse than inflation. As money
becomes more valuable, debts become more of a burden, because wages go
down. We are a nation of people who love our debts. Debt isn’t necessarily
a bad thing. It’s because of our ability to go into debt that we can
afford to put mortgages on houses and cars and pay for them over time.
If you have a debt such as a mortgage, inflation makes it easier for you
to pay over time, because money is less valuable and you have more of
it, and your debt doesn’t inflate with the money. Debts couldn’t remain
static when facing a large deflation or everyone would lose their
properties even as their monetary wealth remains the same. This is why
the deflation would have to be managed to decrease debt at the same
percentage that increased value in money decreases our incomes. Going back onto the gold standard and managing the deflation that
would come along with it, especially with the return of silver coins, is
one solution, but quite frankly it is an unconstitutional one. It
wouldn’t be advisable to repair damage that was done unconstitutionally,
by doing something else unconstitutional. The federal government has
no enumerated power to decrease the debts people owe one another just
because of deflation. There is another solution, which passes
constitutional muster and would take far less time. It could even be
painless. Congress is empowered to coin money. They can also regulate the
value of money. These powers are expressly enumerated in the
Constitution. There are several reasons we can’t change the name of our
money, but we could replace it. If we were to go back onto the gold standard, Congress could print
Dollars 2.0! The gold price could be immediately set to $20.00 per
ounce and all U.S. dollar wealth and debts in existence adjusted
accordingly. It would be perfectly fair, across the board. Liberals
love fair, right? They would also love the fact that there would be no
more billionaires. Even people who hoard gold and other commodities
would remain unaffected. Their wealth would remain intact. The value
of everything would remain the same and it would stay that way. Any
value could be set in stone for an ounce of gold with Dollars 2.0, I
just like $20.00. This rate would drop the current $7.25 minimum wage
down to about 4 cents per hour, but it’s all relative. I think 4 cents
per hour is the perfect minimum wage! Thank you to http://onlygold.com/ for their wonderful chart of historical gold prices! AMP If you enjoyed this blog post, please share on Facebook, Twitter or one of the other choices below! Thank you!
In
1976, Jesse Hardy bought 160 acres of swampland that nobody else wanted. And he
intends to keep it.
EAST OF NAPLES, TURN LEFT
AT THE BUCKET - Once, the land under Jesse Hardy's feet was an underwater reef,
and nobody owned it and nobody wanted it.
Then it became more or
less solid, part of South Florida. To the
east, the Everglades grew drier and drier. To
the west, a town called Naples
crept closer and closer. In the 1970s, developers peddling paradise dug canals,
built roads and carved the swamp into squares of empty promises. Too remote to
be developed, it stayed pretty much abandoned, except for Hardy. Looking for an
escape from Miami,
he bought a chunk of it in 1976 and lived on it in his truck.
It was harsh, unlovely
land, miles from anything, with rocky ground, slash pines, swamp cabbage and
sand gnat swarms so thick he had to hold his breath. No electricity or sewer or
water. Hardy built a shed, then a house. Dug a well. For 30 years, nobody
bothered him. Now they won't leave him alone.
The state wants to buy
Hardy's property for its $8-billion Everglades
restoration project, which, in theory, would flood his land and everything
around it. But first, Hardy has to get out of the way, and he is not inclined
to go.
"They're trying to
get rid of me right here," says Hardy, 69. "This here land was not
worth nothing. I sat here and loved it. It ain't much, but it's been good to
me."
Hardy paid $60,000 for
his 160 acres, now valued for tax purposes at $860,000. The state offered him
$711,725 in 2002. He said no.
It offered him
$1.2-million in 2003. He said no.
$1.5-million? No.
$4.5-million? No. No. No.
"I know I'm fighting
a hell of a big person. I'm fighting the governor of Florida and his Cabinet," Hardy says.
"What they're trying
to do is take all the humans . . . bunch up people like in real close
proximity, get all the people in one damn bunch so they can say, "Don't go
out over there! A chicken'll get ya!'
"They're trying to
stop a way of life."
* * *
Some people say the
Everglades Restoration Plan is the nation's largest, most important ecological
project. Jesse Hardy is not one of those people.
The idea is to tear up
the roads and plug the canals so freshwater flows from Lake
Okeechobee to the ocean like juice spilled on a countertop, giving
habitat back to the panthers and wading birds.
Hardy insists he's not in
the Everglades, and the state can do its
science experiment without his contribution.
"The Everglades is 30 miles east, thataway," he says,
pointing.
His lawyer, Karen
Budd-Falen of Wyoming,
has hired experts to say that his land was never underwater. It has big fat
trees on it. It's no river of grass.
"I think the state
just wants the land," she says. "He's out in the middle of nowhere,
and they don't want anybody out there."
The state would make his
land part of PicayuneStrandStateForest, linking four
reserves that surround it. State officials and environmentalists say his
property is essential. They call it the "hole in the doughnut."
The state has already
bought or taken 1,859 parcels - more than 54,000 acres - between Interstate 75
and U.S. 41. Only the Miccosukee Indians and Hardy are still hanging on. Hardy
is the last remaining homesteader.
"There's nobody
left," Budd-Falen said.
* * *
Although Hardy is famous
and gracious with visitors, he's still sometimes portrayed as a hermit or a
swamp rat. Call him that and he will begin to cuss.
He built the house
himself, drilled the wells himself with a bit he made himself. Ask how he
learned to do these things and he will say, "I got me a book."
Life was pretty crude in
the beginning. He'd wait for a warm day to take a shower. But now he has air
conditioning, reverse osmosis, a washing machine, a cell phone, a satellite
dish. He has solar panels on the roof and a big generator out back.
He reads newspapers and
loyally watches Greta Van Susteren and Hardball. He's showing off his bathroom
- "I don't need no gold-plated plumbing to get me a good shower" -
when a Fox News alert informs him that we could all die any day.
"All they do is talk
about who's going to blow us up next," he says, and then he launches into
an analysis of the situation in the Middle East.
He lives here with a
family friend, Tara Hilton. They've never been romantically involved, but he
took her in when her son was born nine years ago. Hardy raises Tommy as his
son, plays Frisbee and basketball with him, pays for his $45-an-hour tutor,
hangs his crayon art on the walls.
"He never would've
had no chance for no daddy or nothing," Hardy says.
He supports his family
and pays his lawyers with a sizable limestone mining operation. A couple of
hundred trucks run on and off his land every day, hauling $18 profit each.
The pits fill with water
from below the surface, and he stocks them with catfish, bream and turtles. He
wants to run a fish farm here and leave it to Tommy when he's gone. So far,
Tommy won't eat the fish they catch here. He thinks they're pets.
With the money the state
has offered, Hardy could live pretty much wherever he wants. But he's already
there. Girlfriends have told him it's too lonely here. But he has never felt
that way.
"Let me tell you
about being lonely," he says. "You could be in a roomful of people
and be lonely as hell. I've been in Miami
when I was just lonely as hell. Out here, for some reason, I've never been
lonely."
* * *
In April, when Hardy was
in the hospital with prostate cancer, Tara and Tommy went to Tallahassee to plead his case to the governor
and Cabinet.
Tara's voice was shaking, and
Tommy was too shy to say anything at all. So Tara
told the governor about the fish farm they want to build.
"We want to do it so
the people of CollierCounty can bring their
sons and their little girls to come out to fish and play in the dirt," she
said, "and have a place for kids to be kids, because all these places are
disappearing."
She told him how deer
come up to the house windows. And about the wild boar - "a piney wood
rooter" - that came out of the woods and started living under the house.
That made the governor chuckle.
"We're not trying to
stop any projects," she said. "If you would just let us stay and it
floods, we'll swim out and give you the land."
Gov. Jeb Bush asked his
staff to look at ways to work around Hardy, or let him sign away his right to
sue if he ended up treading water.
"I'm just breaking
out in a rash just thinking about this," Bush said. He shook Tommy's hand.
But his staff said
letting Hardy stay won't work. In May, Bush ordered eminent domain proceedings
so the state can force Hardy off.
All the players will sit
down for formal mediation in March - more offers and counteroffers. If that
doesn't work, they'll have a two-day hearing, probably in April. Hardy's
attorneys have also filed suit in federal court. They can't predict how this
will turn out.
"Who knows?"
Budd-Falen said. "But I think a lot of people underestimate Jesse Hardy,
that's for sure."
* * *
There has been a lot of
talk lately about what the land is worth.
"That's a hard
question," Hardy says. "It depends what they're going to let you do
with it. I could put houses, an RV park, make a fortune. Hell, I could have
trailers lined up here to Timbuktu."
But that's not really
what he wants. And he says it's not the point.
"This is mine,"
he says. "This is mine, by God. It's my damn land. It ain't for
sale."
The first time he saw it,
it reminded him of land he would look at through fences as a little boy.
He grew up around Port
St. Joe, where the St. Joe Paper Co. owned almost a million acres. Its paper
mill opened when Hardy was 3, and he hated the mill and the company his whole
life.
He grew up without
electricity on an acre or two in the woods. His mother took in laundry, washed
it in a pot and hung it on a line. She tried to move them away from the mill,
but the stink followed.
"It was a brutal g-
d-- mill," he says. "Mama said it's killin' all of us. The fumes were
so bad she couldn't hang clothes. She'd say that stink is dripping out of the
sky."
The paper company cut
ditches and rights of way and put up fences. Now a realty company, it is still
the largest private landowner in the state. As a kid, Hardy couldn't find land
to hunt or fish. The oysters and clams in St. JosephBay
tasted bad. One day after a storm, he found his swimming hole filled with sand.
He felt small.
"I knew land was
power because I couldn't get to it," he says. "I learned that as a
kid because we couldn't go hunting, we couldn't go fishing or nothing. I've
never had anything."
He left the Panhandle for
the Navy SEALs, where he was disabled in a training jump. When he got out, he
got a real estate license and worked as a property appraiser in Miami. He also made
fishing nets, ran a vegetable stand and worked for the Port Authority.
His 160 acres of swamp
was the first land he ever bought.
"This is all I've
ever owned," he says. "I knew it was power."
Hardy is pitching whole
slices of moldy bread into his fish pond. The big oscars are attacking like
terriers.
"I love
nature," he says. "I've got more environmentalist in my little finger
than they've got."
He's talking about the
state Department of Environmental Protection. And the Florida Wildlife
Federation and the Audubon Society and the South Florida Water Management
District and everyone else who has ganged up to pressure him to sell.
"The
environmentalists, that is our problem," Hardy says. "That's America's
problem.
"I'm not talking
about no scorched-earth policy. What I'm talking about is sense. We're up to
our armpits in alligators because people are just crazy. They're fanatics.
"In the paper today,
there's a story about damn red-cockaded woodpeckers and they're saving them and
going through all kind of hell. People are not running around shooting
red-cockaded woodpeckers. I haven't shot one in 20 or 30 years.
"God, spare me from
the damn environmentalists, 'cause they are the cause of me being in the jam
I'm in."
* * *
Nancy Payton is one of
those damn environmentalists.
To her face, "it's
usually Ms. Payton," she says. She represents the Florida Wildlife
Federation, which supports the restoration plan. She has dealt with Hardy for
years.
She's heard about how
much he loves his land. She's skeptical about that.
"I have a hard time
digesting "I love the land, but I'll sell it off truckload by truckload,'
" she says. "I think it is about the money."
She says his limestone
operation is bad for the environment because his ponds interrupt the way the
land drains. Hardy and his attorney dispute that.
Payton acknowledges that
Hardy has a fan base in Naples.
There's even a folk song about him, The Ballad of Jesse Hardy, which you can
listen to on his Web site,www.jessehardy.com
"He periodically
gets a lot of coverage because he is kind of likable," Payton said.
"There are also people who are a bit exasperated."
Budd-Falen, Hardy's
attorney, grew up on a fifth-generation cattle ranch. She said it can be hard
even for people who love the environment to understand people like Jesse Hardy.
"Sometimes
environmentalists are not about protecting the environment, they're about
stopping use," she says. "Isn't that what the King of Nottingham did
in Robin Hood?"
Hardy acknowledges that
he makes money off his land, although he sends a lot of it to lawyers.
He says he doesn't need
it. He doesn't really want anything except to leave something to Tommy.
"I don't need no
cruises," he says. "I went on some nice long cruises in the
Navy."
He says he fights because
it's in him to fight. But he also says this land is what he has to leave
behind.
"It's for the people
of CollierCounty," he says. "They'll
say, "There's that fish farm that Hardy built, and we're still getting
fish off it.' "
If the state gets the
land, he figures they'll put a fence around it.
He can't stand the
thought of that. Of some little boy on the other side of it, looking in.
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