Life Lessons 2

I want to share some life lessons with you, in part to show how God works in our lives and how corrupt our government has become but also just to share those lessons. The first has to do with poverty as a child and as an adult because they are different because you tend to get different lessons, as you will see. Then I want to share what I learned as middle class over a period of four decades. I actually spent almost 2/3 of my life living as middle class until I got sick.

Child Poverty

When I grew up in poverty, I learned that the middle and upper classes do hold back the poor, especially as children, usually without realizing it. The middle and upper classes are taught, mostly by the educators and media, that poor people are poor because they are lazy and/or stupid, therefore, there is no hope for the poor, in spite of the fact that scientific research proved "CONCLUSIVELY" in 1936 that there is "ABSOLUTELY NO COROLATION" between wealth and intelligence. They CHOOSE to ignore that scientific research, except when it favors them in dealing with the upper class.

The easy proof for this is TV news because all you have to do is watch the really stupid things so many people who are much more wealthy than almost all of you say and do. Some of the stupidest people often have the most money. If you believe those stupid rich people are much more intelligent than you because they have more money than you, then you are probably close to brain dead.

The ONLY thing having more money than someone else proves is that...wait for it...you have more money than them. That is absolutely it, that is the ONLY thing it proves.

Listen, many of the rich were born into wealth, which requires no intelligence at all. God has taught me that most of those who made their own wealth were just in the right place at the right time doing the right thing, which also requires no intelligence.

Why do most people believe this lie?

For the very wealthy upper class trash it is a combination of over inflated egos and it is used to control the people by telling the people, "You inferior people need us to micro manage your lives because we are the natural elites and are intellectually superior to you, therefore, we can do a better job of managing your lives", you know, they should have absolute dictatorial control over you. It is about the power, baby.

Yeah, right, as screwed up as their lives are and I want them managing my life?

No thank you, I can screw up my own life enough without your superior help.

I found that the middle class tend to believe this lie because of a combination of ego and insecurity. You see, the middle and upper classes fear poverty because of what they have been taught to believe about the "horrors of poverty", especially by their ignorant college professors. Therefore, if they believe that people are poor because those people are stupid and/or lazy and they know they themselves are not stupid or lazy, then they don't have to worry about or fear becoming poor. This belief is their security blanket when they don't really need one and it won't do them any good anyway.

What is real poverty, is it the hell your idiot college professors teach you it is?

No, poverty just means you have less money and can buy fewer things. Yes, there were times when we went hungry because we didn't have food but we didn't starve to death and there wasn't the obesity problem you have today. I don't remember seeing one fat poor person when I was a child, not even children. Poverty is not a disease.

Was it fun?

No.

Was it terrifying?

No, we still ran and played as kids just like the middle and upper class kids did and didn't even think about being poor that much. We knew we were poor but so what. I don't remember any emotionally depressed people like you are taught by your all-knowing, all-wise, highly educated, grossly overpaid, natural elite, intellectually superior, college professors who got the right degrees from the right universities. What those geniuses later taught me about poverty in college and via the media, was almost nothing like real life in poverty, nothing.

We didn't just sit around moping about being poor. We dealt with having less money and went on with life and enjoying life as best as we could. Being poor was just part of life to us.

Because of what those genius college professors had been teaching everyone, especially the school teachers, about poverty and poor people being stupid and there being no hope for us, by the time I was in high school, I had been brainwashed to believe there was no hope for me and I couldn't go to college.

Two weeks before I graduated from high school, I just KNEW that my future was that I had two more weeks of high school, my mom had already made an agreement with me that, after I graduated from high school, I got to kick back for two weeks and then I had to get a job, and that I would get a poor man's job working my butt off making very little money, marry a poor woman, have a passel of kids, and spend the rest of my life struggling to take care of them. To me, it was just a fact I would have to deal with the rest of my life.

THAT is what I had been brainwashed to believe was my future by the middle and upper classes and that will do more to hold a poor kid back than anything else. If you brainwash people to take all hope away from them, then they will have no hope, will give up, and not try, especially the young.

I have successfully used that to turn poor kids around by teaching them to believe in themselves and giving them hope and it works.

But God had other plans for me and he started out by teaching me that what those genius college professors were teaching everyone about poor people was a lie, EVERYONE WAS WRONG! I could go to college, I now have a masters degree and I learned in college that better than 90% of people who graduate from college with a degree are not intelligent enough to pass the prerequisite courses in college for the upper level hard science courses I took in college and I thought were easy. In other words, better than 90% of the middle and upper class people in the US and Europe are less intelligent than me and I grew up in poverty. Well, so much for people being poor because they are stupid.

God has also taught me that, if most people believe something, most likely it is wrong.

Think of all of the things you know most people believe and they are wrong. It will surprise you.

Why are poor people really poor?

Because God doesn't give them the opportunities that God gives the middle and upper classes so the poor people work the only jobs they know how to work and get paid a lot less for their work. Basically, they just make less money.

So, why do poor people tend to stay poor, why do the middle class tend to stay middle class, and why do the upper class tend to stay upper class?

Mostly because of what their parents and teachers teach them and believe me, I have studied this for decades. We are trained by our parents and teachers to survive in the class we grow up in so that we best know how to survive in that class, therefore, we tend to stay in that class. The middle class do not know how to do most rich people's jobs, most rich people don't know how to do most middle class people's jobs, and neither know how to do most poor people's jobs, especially not as well as most poor people can do those jobs so we tend to stay in our classes. It has nothing to do with intelligence and my best proof for that is again TV news where you see so many really stupid rich people.

You see, when I was growing up in poverty, my father was in construction and, by the time I was 12, I could caulk cast iron pipe and two stroke 16 penny nails but I didn't know anything about writing a resume or getting a middle to upper class job. I was trained to survive the only way my father knew how to survive and that was in lower class.

The middle class kids were taught to write resumes, how to get middle class jobs, and how to run a mom and pop business.

The upper class kids were all taught to run the big upper class businesses by their parents and the people working for their parents. I regularly read that upper class kids would be taken to work by their fathers who would order an assistant to teach their kid the business.

We tend to stay in the class our parents train us to survive in but some do manage to learn how to survive in an upper level class and break out of their class. Note that people tend to stay in their class but don't always stay in that class further proving the lie about more money meaning you are more intelligent is not true.

If it were true, how could anyone change class?

Did you know that 1/3 of the homeless people in Los Angeles during the 1980s had college degrees with many having Ph.D.s and M.D.s? Why, did they suddenly become stupid after being intelligent enough to get Ph.D.s and M.D.s?

The most important reason for anyone making the money they make is because of opportunity and not intelligence and God provides opportunity. God gives different opportunities to different people to teach and test those people differently.

Please note that nowhere in the Bible does it say that God put us all here to get rich. Jesus even down played wealth in His teachings. What you temporarily own on this planet before you die and give it all back to God doesn't matter to God because God is just loaning it all to you for your brief stay here on Earth anyway. Where you will spend eternity is what is most important with God because that is yours forever.

What the Bible does say is that life is a test and God puts different people through different tests to teach them different things and so different people can contribute to our society and economies differently.

Remember that Jesus said for us to not persecute the poor because the poor are His?

Yeah, Jesus also gives you the poor as part of your test to see how you will treat the poor, which is a very important and telling test for Jesus. Be careful how you treat the poor because the poor are special to Jesus; He said so.

BTW, according to the Bible, many middle and upper class people are failing that test. In being poor as an adult, I have learned the hard way that there are many parasites in the middle and upper classes who love to prey on the poor because the poor can't hire greedy attorneys to defend or protect them and are more vulnerable.

So, how did I become middle class?

First, God put me in college through a round about way but, most importantly, from the time I started college in February 1968 until I got very sick from the virus my lovely upper middle class wife gave me, it is killing me, and God forced me to move back to Alamogordo in August 1998, where everyone knew me when I was poor, I NEVER TOLD ANYONE THAT I GREW UP IN POVERTY so they ALL assumed that, since poor people are "too stupid to go to college" and I was in college, I MUST have grown up middle class and I never told them any differently so THEY ALL TREATED ME MUCH BETTER AND IT OPENED MORE DOORS FOR ME. The difference in treatment by those who thought I grew up in middle class and how those who knew me when I was growing up in poverty is HUGE!

Interestingly, since I have moved back to Alamogordo, EVERYONE who knew me as growing up poor, refuses to even listen to ANYTHING I did as a middle class person because it destroys EVERYTHING THEY WANT TO BELIEVE about poverty and the classes. Therefore, if I say anything about anything I did as middle class, they choose to believe it is a lie because I could not possibly have done as well as them, much less better, after all, I couldn't possibly be as intelligent as them so I couldn't possibly do as well as them. My 50 year high school class reunion was a huge eye opener in that area. I went from 40 years of a lot of respect to two nights of a lot of disrespect, you know, the deja vu thingy and it wasn't nice.

You see, I found out that I did better at living my dreams than almost any of my middle to upper class school mates and I was one of the poorest kids in school in one of the three poorest states in the US. I got to live most of their dreams by being both an athlete and coach in amateur and professional sports at the national and international level AND I did more than my fair share of winning against the middle and upper classes.

"Why, don't you know that isn't possible?"

Here is a little food for thought. Did you know that in the 1850s better than 95% of the people in the US were living in what we today call third world poverty meaning that almost all of your ancestors had to claw their way up out of poverty in the last 200 years? What, did they suddenly get more intelligent?

The ugly truth is that, concerning what I did in life, I am the best kept secret in Alamogordo. No one here has even a clue about the really great things I was able to do in life as middle class. I did my school proud, I did my town proud, and I did my state proud by representing them all really well at the national and international level but they don't even want to know it. What I, poor trailer trash, did with my life, shakes their tree to pieces. After all, if I really did so well and ended up back in poverty because of my illness, then it could happen to them and that terrifies them.

But, I really don't care if they know because God knows and I know what I did in life and that is all that matters to me. I really don't care if anyone on this planet knows what I did.

Interestingly, God rewards me for this attitude by occasionally letting me know that the people I did those things with, through, and to remember all of the butt kicking I did. I have been told by others that the Los Angeles Racing Team I founded and built is a "legend" (their word) in Southern California bicycle racing. God regularly lets me know that those people know what I did.

Me?

The memories are fun but I would just love to once again be able to do things that God has taught me how to do. I really enjoy doing the things God had gifted me with the ability to do but I also have to understand and deal with the fact that God has taken that gift from me so I would do this work for Him...but being able to do those things would still be fun and having done them provides me with some really great memories in my illness and poverty today. Those memories bring a smile to my face on the hardest of days and it reminds me that, with God, nothing is impossible.

I realized a few years ago that, if you could travel back in time and tell that young kid I was in high school that I was going to do just one of the things I have done, he would laugh at you and think you were crazy.

"Why, don't you know that there is no hope for us poor people and we can't do those things?"

We all have different gifts from God at different times in our lives and we need to appreciate the gifts we have when we have them. They are a blessing from God.

Other Lessons

There are other lessons I want to share with you I have learned from returning to poverty as an adult. As you will find out from just a few examples, God put my butt through a real ringer to teach me just how corrupt things have become in our government. It is absolutely amazing how much more corrupt our government has become in just the last 40 years.

There are evil parasites who love to prey on the poor and the government is filled with them. There are some good people in government but there are many evil people, especially at the top, which is why you should never give the government absolute control over you. I will give you some examples of how the government has been able to take advantage of me and steal from me because I am too poor to hire a good attorney and the only attorneys I can get are too lousy to get the job done. Know that these same people have done this to many others also.

Military Disability

When I got out of the Air Force in March 1976, I had a 30% military disability because of an injury I got while working on the flight line. I was told by a VA doctor that I could get that disability starting then or later. There were some things I couldn't do but plenty I could do so I decided to wait until later, if I found I needed the help. I went on, lived a good life and did a lot of things.

After I got the virus, my health was failing, and I moved to Alamogordo, I found I needed the disability I had earned in the military. I applied for the disability, was turned down for really stupid reasons but primarily because the administration and attitude of the VA had changed, my military medical records were in Los Angeles, and I had to get those records here to New Mexico to appeal their decision.

I filed the forms to get the records, heard nothing back, phoned and found out they didn't have any record of my forms (read "we threw them in the trash so you can't get your records so you won't be able to appeal".) I couldn't afford an attorney, they knew it, I kept filing the records request forms, and, by the strangest coincidence, the VA kept showing no record of those forms until my appeal time ran out.

I have been informed that I can never appeal their decision and a few years later found out that my medical records have mysteriously appeared in El Paso just 90 miles south of me when a doctor let it slip that he had reviewed my military medical records.

Listen, I am not the first person they screwed out of my VA benefits because I couldn't afford an attorney. It quickly became very clear that the VA has this crap down to a science and it is a racket. They stole $1,000 a month from me for the rest of my life, which I could really use right now, because of their criminal racket and I have read about and heard of many other cases of the VA stealing benefits from veterans so the administrators and corrupt politicians can stuff that loot in their own pockets at the expense of us vets. They just can't steal enough fast enough.

I went through every avenue I could find and got no help from any of them including the Disabled American Veterans or DAV.

Today, this is a big story because the VA has been denying millions of vets their benefits but it has been going on for decades.

Social Security and Welfare

After I found out I was blacklisted by the US and international cycling governing bodies and I couldn't find work because, as I was informed by 8 different head hunters who would benefit by finding me a job, no one was hiring anyone over 40 at that time, my health was beginning to fail, I went to Human Services in Albuquerque, New Mexico to get financial assistance while I continued to look for work.

What I found out in no uncertain terms is that because I am a white male with a college degree, they would provide me with absolutely no financial assistance. This, my illness, and other things forced me to move to Alamogordo onto family land.

In Alamogordo I briefly got a job as a high school teacher, my health continued to fail, I lost my job, I couldn't find work anywhere because "I was over qualified" (read you are a threat to my job or business), and I started working on getting something started on the Internet so I could take care of myself. I got a few small things going but couldn't get anything big going because, contrary to what the media tell you, it required at least $10,000 seed capital at that time and much more today, to get anything meaningful going on the Internet.

It really does take money to make money. The media loves to tell you about "shoe string" businesses that went big but when you do the homework, those were some might expensive shoe strings.

For years, I struggled making about $500 to $600 per month, sometimes less, but I kept trying and tried different things.

At one time I needed a little financial assistance so decided to try the local Human Services. To my amazement, they were willing to help me but they just flat out told me that, as long as I continued to try to take care of myself, the most they could help me with was a little over $100 per month in food stamps but, if I completely quit trying to take care of myself and gave them complete control of my life, like a good little socialist, they would give me $1,500 a month for doing nothing.

I later found out that, if I had quit trying to take care of myself and gone on complete Welfare support, getting $1,500 a month, I would have gotten the same from Social Security but, because I continued to try to take care of myself, I am now only making $663 on Social Security while illegal aliens, who have not paid a dime in taxes, and kids who never worked or paid taxes get at least $1,500 a month.

They made it very clear that I will be punished for the rest of my life for trying to take care of myself and not being a good little socialist voter slave living on just Welfare.

Listen, if the VA had not screwed me out of my disability pay and Social Security treated me as well as they do illegal aliens, I would be getting at least $2,500 to $3,000 a month but I am only getting $663 a month because of our corrupt government.

School Loans

You are about to find out that the government school loan business is just a racket set up so the government or upper class trash can steal more money from more people more quickly.

Before I got black listed and got sick, I decided to return to college to get my MBA and study law so I could do a better job of managing and marketing my bicycle racing programs. I decided to use school loans to finance going to college because I knew I could easily make a few hundred thousand a year coaching and managing in European pro racing and would have easily been able to pay the loans off within 3 to 5 years and it would have permitted me to better concentrate on my studies to not have to work my way through college.

Just remember, man plans, God laughs and God had some things to teach me so I could teach you.

After I had racked up $50,000 in school loans, I suddenly found out I had been black listed in pro racing so that no one would hire me and I didn't have the seed capital to start up my own pro team.

But, hey, no problem, I had an MBA, had management experience, and could get a job managing other people's businesses, right?

Nope, I registered with 8 different head hunters who would have made a full year's salary by getting me a job by the time it was all over and ALL OF THEM told me that no one was hiring anyone over 40. My MBA was worthless.

But, hey, I went back to work doing blue collar work...but that injury I got in the Air Force suddenly made a big difference. There was a lot I couldn't do and nothing I could do that made any money to pay off those loans but, hey, you could always file deferments to prevent the government from charging you interest on your loans until you got a better paying job.

During this period of time, the government realized I was broke and couldn't hire an attorney so they started screwing me on my school loans.

The first con they did to steal more money from me was to pretend that they had not "found a loan" and had been charging me interest on it and this racket went on for about 3 to 4 years until they finally exhausted all of the different parts of my loan. (The way they had it intentionally set up caused me to have 12 parts to my loan which made the con easy.) Every time they "found a new part to my loan" I had to fill out paperwork for them to stop charging me interest on that part of my loan.

Every time this happened, I would ask them if there were any more parts they had not found and I was still paying interest on. They would pretend to do a search, tell me we had all of the parts under control, and then about 3 to 6 months later I would get another letter telling me they had found a new part they had been charging me interest on.

After they finally got all of the parts together, kind of, sort of, they started another racket. I would file a deferment for that year and then about 3 to 6 months later get a notice that my loan wasn't on deferment and was being charged interest so my loan was getting bigger by the month.

So I would fill out and send in a new deferment they wouldn't get, then they wouldn't get the next one or the next one and etc. It is strange that the mail only traveled well in my direction. Mean while, because they didn't have a toll free phone number to call, I was racking up an increasing phone bill while not making the money to pay it off. Not only was my loan getting bigger but so was my phone bill and I finally realized that they were never going to get any of my deferments and would continue to increase the size of my loan regardless of anything I did because they knew I couldn't afford an attorney to stop them.

"Let's prey on the poor, baby, because they are easy prey." Gee, and I thought the government was supposed to protect the poor.

I had also heard and read from a number of sources that most students who were delinquent on their loans were not filing deferments and I now know why; they keep getting lost in the mail. The students would file the deferments until they realized the government was just throwing them in the trash and charging interest anyway. Then the students would just give up and quit sending in deferments for the government to just throw in the trash.

I decided that what I had to do was 1) find out what was wrong with me and get well so 2) I could get back to work and 3) earn the money to hire an attorney to fix the mess and so I could pay off my loans. Since the government was just going to throw my deferments away and keep growing my loan regardless of what I did, I just let it go to put my time, little money, and declining health and energy into getting well so I could get back to work. I really didn't have a choice with my declining health.

During that time, the state government transferred a part of my loan that had magically grown to $25,000 by itself to the Ford Foundation (federal government- same racket, different name) but didn't remove it from my account so that later they charged the Ford Foundation for that part of my loan again along with another part of my loan. Basically, they cooked the books to steal an easy $25,000 from me and I protested to everyone I could to no avail. Everyone just ignored me because no one regulates their government loan business.

But there is more to this particular racket. There is clearly collusion between the government school loan program and our corrupt universities with them working together to steal as much money as possible from as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

It is only because of the school loan program that universities have been able to raise their tuitions to such astronomical levels. After all, no matter how high the universities raise their tuition, you students can always just borrow the money from the government to pay that tuition and the government really likes the universities to raise their tuitions because then the government can steal more money from the students by charging interest on larger loans.

So by the government making it possible for the universities to keep raising their tuitions to steal more money from the students, the universities keep making it possible for the government to steal more money from the students by charging interest on larger and larger loans.

If the government were not in the student loan business, the universities would be forced to lower their tuition down to where most students could actually work their way through college instead of running up huge loans to spend much of their life, if not all of it, paying off. It's a racket, baby.

Also, I had heard again and again of people who took out a school loan, paid on that loan for 10, 20, or more years, and end up owing the government more than the original loan. This happens all of the time. They die owing the government money so the government gets to steal what they would have left to their children because these are federal loans and the feds get first dibs on a deceased persons wealth. It's a racket, baby.

You have to understand that it is the government who regulates and polices commercial loan businesses to prevent such abuses but NO ONE regulates the government, well, except for the government, which is an extreme conflict of interest. If a commercial company had done what the government loan people are doing every day, everyone would have gone to jail. Believe me, before I got sick, I studied banking in college to get my MBA. What the government is doing would be criminal for you to do.

Basically, because of this, the government should NEVER be in the business of loaning anyone money. NEVER, EVER, EVER borrow money from the government. I learned that one the hard way.

See why God made me poor to learn these lessons so I could teach them to you?

Also, don't be surprised to find out some day that at least 80% to better than 90% of that $1 trillion dollar student loan debt was run up by the government charging interest on loans after throwing away deferments and other cons run by the government. It is probably almost all money created out of thin air by charging students interest on their loans, double charging students, and other scams run by the corrupt government. The government books have been cooked to extremely well done and most of the debt is stolen money. It's a racket, baby.

Neighbors

There are good neighbors who help the poor and there are bad neighbors who prey on the poor.

I have had some good neighbors around here that help me occasionally but I have a number of bad neighbors who cause trouble for me.

One neighbor bragged to other neighbors that she is trying to run me off of my land so she can get the city or county to seize my land and sell it on auction so she can get my land for below market value.

You have to understand that, when the government sells land on auction, it almost always goes for below 20% of market value so the government can quickly move or get rid of the land.

Basically, that woman wants to steal my land. She and her friends have caused me quite a bit of trouble. Over a period of years, they filed more than a dozen false reports with code enforcement, animal control, the country sheriff, and the local police along with breaking two windows and cracking a third window and putting nails under my car tires in my driveway to cause leaks. Nice people.

The trouble is that, even when it is clearly a false report called in, the government employees feel they must at least bully me a little to "grease the squeaky" wheel so those bad people won't complain to their supervisors and have even admitted it. It finally took a good government employee to publically point out that I had been singled out and caused most of it to stop. It turned out that they were not just bullying me.

One game a few of them played here for a few years was to buy land in the poorest neighborhood and then try to drive out the poor so the value of the land would suddenly increase for a quick profit.

Believe me, there are always people who hate and prey on poor people because they know the poor people can't afford to hire an attorney to fight back. These are very evil people.

Interestingly, to show you how God works, there were two women who caused me trouble years ago and, when they confronted me and I told them I was ill, they would always say, "No, you are not sick, you are just lazy and stupid", you know, because I am poor and it justified, in their minds, the trouble they were causing me.

I kept praying for their salvation while they persecuted me and now both of them are very ill. One of them is completely incapacitated and under the watchful eye of her retired husband. There has been an ambulance at her house at least 6 or 8 times in just the last few years.

The other one had to have brain surgery to remove a malignant cancer tumor and can no longer run her business. She has to depend on her ex-husband to run her business for her and has to spend a lot of time out of state with her family, unable to cause me trouble.

Interestingly, over the years, there have been a number of people who caused trouble for me for various reasons and then God would later show me how He was punishing them. And God said, "Be not deceived, your sins will find you out."

There was one man who spread lies about me after I quit racing because of his ego and pride being hurt by me beating him so badly. Years later, I found out from his son that he had suffered brain damage from being hit by a car while riding his bicycle and couldn't even remember that he had raced bikes. He couldn't even remember his racing reputation he tried to salvage by spreading lies about me.

There was a woman who spread lies about me in a church to turn the people in the church against me so they would treat me in a manner so I would leave the church (I was not run out.) Years later I found out that they had found out the truth about her and had literally run her out of church.

My second ex-wife and her slimy attorney legally stole my racing program from me while I was on a road trip so that I had nothing when I got back. She totally screwed up the program because she didn't know what she was doing and ended up running up more than $100,000 in debt before having to junk the program. She stole from me so God stole from her.

God has shown me things like this about a number of people who wronged me and later were not having a good life. "Revenge is mine, saith the Lord" and I have learned God does a much better job of getting that revenge than I could so I just pray for the salvation of the people who wrong me and watch the hand of the Lord work on them. He always does and, right now, I am waiting for the "results" of a few other people who screwed me, you know, like the people who destroyed my coaching career by black listing me, which is a violation of RICO and is called racketeering, a federal felony. And there are a few others I am waiting on, you know, like all of those government people who screwed me. God will take care of it.

Be careful how you treat others because God meant it when He said, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you", including God doing unto you as you did unto others.

God kind of, sort of put me through a little bit of hell to punish me for a few sins and teach me some things, didn't He?

And that isn't all. There is more, some of which I have already shared with you as part of my Christian testimony.

Do you better understand at least some of the reasons and ways God does things and works in our lives?

I could not possibly have learned everything I have by not being poor for at least a while. That is a tough education, believe me. That is why they call it "the school of hard knocks". God wanted me to teach you those things but first He had to teach me those things.

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

You better....

Pray long, pray hard, pray often!!!


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