Working Into the Grave

By Alan Caruba

Believe it or not, there was a time when, if you turned 65 and retired, you could expect to live in reasonable comfort. Social Security covered a portion of your expenses; your savings account yielded a modest amount of interest, and, if you had made investments, stock dividends provided a safety cushion. Not so anymore.

“More Elderly Find They Cannot Afford Not to Work” was a January 21 headline of an article in The Wall Street Journal, noting at one point that an 87-year-old woman who had retired in 2003 was now earning $7.25 an hour, four hours a week, collecting tickets at a movie theatre in my former New Jersey hometown. I had lived there for 62 years.

Thanks to ever-rising property taxes, I sold my home before prices plunged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. I parked the money in an annuity.

I am fortunate that there is no age limit on the ability to write for a living. The writing trade has always been a tough one. The former market for magazine articles is a shrinking pool paying little for one’s labors. Self-published books, particularly fiction, have flooded the marketplace and mainstream publishers rely on older, established authors with a following. As often as not, bestselling non-fiction is written by people who anchor television news or have some other form of celebrity.

As the Wall Street Journal article noted, “In 1981, Social Security paid 52% of the average worker’s pre-retirement earnings, according to the Social Security Administration.” I turn 75 this year and my Social Security is little more than “grocery money.” Interest on my savings account is a joke.

For too many of my fellow senior citizens, not working is not a choice The Wall Street Journal notes that “The unemployment level among Americans 75 and older—measuring the number of people seeking work—is relatively low but twice what it was five years ago. The rate was 5.6% last year…compared with 2.5% in 2006.”

When I was born in 1937 it was in the depths of the Great Depression. I have lived long enough to be swept up along with everyone else in the Great Depression 2.0.

Naively, I and many others of my generation thought the years of economic growth that began in the 1950s would go on forever. We survived a number of investment “bubbles” and predictable, but short-lived recessions, but this one is different. It has been exacerbated by an ever-growing federal government, job-killing “environmental” regulations, and burdened by “entitlement” programs whose cost understandably keep increasing along with the nation’s growing population of older Americans.

“”Federal spending on Social Security and Medicare is rising,” said the Journal article. “both in total dollars and percentage of the budget. Social Security made up 20% of the federal budget in the 2010 fiscal year, up from 13% in 1962. Combined spending on Social Security and Medicare represents 9% of GDP and is projected to grow to 12% in 2035.”

The nation’s debt now equals its Gross Domestic Product. The U.S. is broke and so are Europe’s nations with the exception of Germany. That is simply not sustainable—something the Congressional “super committee” discovered when it punted on any solution to the nation’s fiscal woes.

Part of the problem is the nation’s aging population. No one anticipated that health care would improve to the point of extending people’s life expectancy from 65 in the 1930s to an average of 78 years today. As it is, both my parents lived into their 90s, I have an older brother in his 80s, and a nephew in his late 40s who just became a father again.

We can thank short-sighted “social justice” programs such as Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s appalling “sub-prime mortgage” programs and “bundled assets” that sank banks from sea to shining sea. The U.S. taxpayer has had to bail out these two “government sponsored entities” to the tune of billions and they keep coming back for more.

In the space of just three years, President Obama has increased the nation’s debt by five trillion in horribly misspent, wasted dollars. Since 2010 when control of the House was returned to Republicans, they have fought against pressures to raise taxes that would suck more money out of the economy and have put forth sensible plans to restructure Social Security and Medicare. Naturally, they have been accused of being heartless.

Any senior citizen who votes for Obama or a Democratic Party candidate is putting themself at further risk of having to work until they die or seeing their savings eaten by illness or other rising costs before that occurs.

Editor’s Note: The author’s editorial services site is here.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Auschwitz: Ignoring History, Predicting the Future

The gates of Auscwitz - a Nazi death camp

By Alan Caruba

The late Israeli scholar and diplomat, Abba Eban, (1915-2002) said, “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

Similarly, Winston Churchill said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else.” In Churchill’s case, he was referring to the U.S. reluctance to become involved in another war in Europe, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 changed that overnight. By 1945, along with our allies, the wars in Europe and Asia were over.

Sixty-seven years ago, on January 27, 1945, elements of the Soviet army came upon the Auschwitz concentration camps to discover a Nazi killing machine, one of several such camps created to exploit forced labor and to systematically kill Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, clerics, prisoners of war, and anyone else deemed an enemy of the Nazi state, right down to children and infants.

The Nazis killed people on such a scale that it is almost incomprehensible. It happened within my lifetime and that of many others, some of whom are among the fortunate survivors. And yet, today, the denial of the Holocaust and the millions of other Nazi victims is an article of faith among Arabs in the Middle East and countless others around the world.

A January 25th Agence France-Presse article reported that “One in five young Germans has no idea that Auschwitz was a Nazi death camp, a poll released Wednesday showed, two days ahead of Holocaust memorial day. Although 90 percent of those asked did know it was a concentration camp”, the Stern magazine poll revealed “that Auschwitz meant nothing to 21 percent of 18-29 year olds.”

It is essential that people in their respective nations know their own and other’s histories. A hallmark of the former Soviet regime in Russia was the way it rewrote history and, in George Orwell’s classic “1984”, a work of fiction about communism, there was a Ministry of Truth in which history was rewritten.

In the United States, since around the 1960s, strenuous efforts have been made to alter the teaching of the nation’s history. The Founding Fathers are often portrayed as slaveholders to downplay their devotion to liberty.

Even they knew that slavery was an abomination, but their task was to create a new nation, one dedicated to liberty. The U.S. Constitution was approved by twelve state delegations in 1787, but in 1861, barely 74 years later it would take a Civil War to put an end to slavery and another hundred years to end the exclusion of African Americans from access to their full rights under the Constitution.

Several generations of Americans have passed through our school systems—literally controlled by the federal government after the creation of the Department of Education in 1979 after being transferred from the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, a legacy of Jimmy Carter’s single term. All curriculum taught in the schools comes from the DOE thanks to its control over a national, one-size-fits-all testing system introduced with the “No Child Left Behind” program championed by George W. Bush.

To not know about Auschwitz, whether one is German, American, or any other nationality is a failure on a grand scale because it means that it can be repeated. To not know America’s epic struggle to fulfill its promise of liberty leaves new generations at a disadvantage, as in the case of a fifth of young Germans today, ignorant of their nation’s past.

In today’s world, many worry about the fate of Israel, surrounded by hostile nations and openly threatened by an Iran seeking nuclear weapons. Its independence was declared in 1948, barely three years after the end of World War II. Its first task was to absorb, not only the survivors of the Nazi regime throughout Europe, but those who were forced to flee Arab nations in the wake of the war. Its independence was greeted with the first of several wars against it. The general hostility to Jews that preceded the Holocaust by centuries is a stain on humanity.

So there is cause for concern when one in five young Germans have no idea what went on in Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps.

It is a concern when the Syrian dictatorship has already killed 5,000 of its own people to maintain itself.

It is a concern for Iraq, already falling back into an internal conflict after decades of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the end of the U.S. occupation.

It is a concern for an Iranian dictatorship on the cusp of creating its own nuclear weapons.

It is a concern for Venezuela, held in the grip of Hugo Chavez’s dictatorship, an acolyte of Communist Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

It is a concern for Europeans whose political experiment, the European Union, threatens the financial stability of its member nations with the sole exception of Germany.

It is a concern for Americans who witnessed the unilateral limited nuclear disarmament of the nation and the huge reduction of its military power by the Obama administration, less than the lifetime after the end of World War II.

The world remains a dangerous place. That is the lesson of history.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

SOTU Blah, Blah, Blah

Does Obama Want to Lose? Yes!

By Alan Caruba

It seems like a bizarre notion, but does Barack Obama want to lose the election in November?

I think he does!

One is struck by the way Obama has visibly aged in the job. He may well have grown weary being POTUS.

By any rational standard, one would say he wants a second term, but Obama has always operated in a fantasy world where mere words are supposed to translate into reality. And he has repeatedly talked about being a one-term president.

He is, after all, his own invention; the author of two memoirs of a life that had little achievement to point to other than getting elected first to the Illinois legislature and then to the Senate where he lingered a bare two years before running for president.

I raise the question because Obama seems to be deliberately irritating the very people who are supposed to be his “base”; the hard core liberals, the Hollywood crowd, youth, and unions, among others. His partisanship has put Congress into total gridlock.

When members of the Occupy movement showed up in Washington, D.C., one of them threw a smoke bomb onto the White House lawn. Others who have been camped out in a park there are likely to be tossed out if for no other reason than the place is overrun with rats and has become a public health hazard.

The decision to stop the Keystone pipeline is a deliberate offense to the unions that have contributed millions to his campaign. Why? It pleased the environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. Americans, however, understand the pipeline represented both jobs and oil, two things they deem worth having.

Then there are all the vacations Obama and his family takes. They have one thing in common. They are ostentatiously expensive. Obama or Michelle always seem to be going on vacation or returning from one. The characterization may be unfair, but perception is everything.

Americans are very keen on their military and, of all the government programs Obama could have chosen to trim, he’s had the knives out for the Pentagon since he took office. While a war-weary public was likely pleased when he withdrew troops from Iraq (neither Bush, nor Obama had a choice as the Iraqis made it clear they wanted U.S. troops out), the fact remains that the main news out of Iraq these days are bombings as the Sunni versus Shiite conflict has returned. Afghanistan remains a millstone.

Even in the face of a clear threat, it is unlikely that Obama would respond militarily between now and Election Day. The most likely scenario, however, would be an Israeli decision to strike at Iran before it becomes a full-fledged nuclear threat. It must be said, however, that Obama and other NATO nations have positioned some military assets in the Persian Gulf, but would he pull the trigger? It’s doubtful.

The most obvious problem Obama faces is unemployment. It’s variously set at anywhere from 11% to 20% depending on the part of the nation you’re discussing. It still is far too high everywhere and he gives every impression of being, if not indifferent to it, at least in no hurry to address it. Most certainly none of his programs have reduced it. His alleged “stimulus” was little more than a political slush fund that added billions to the national debt and failed.

Every President is subject to “events” and the likely default of Greece and financial troubles of several European nations are likely to impact the national election as Americans try to sort out what effect it will have here. Obama has already presided over the first downgrade of America’s debt rating and we shall surely be reminded of that in the months ahead.

The other event will be the Supreme Court hearing of the case against Obamacare in March. They may not issue a decision right away or they might issue one just before November 6th.

There are two lines of thought about the forthcoming national election. Past Presidents were relieved to leave office despite its power and prestige. (1) Obama may not like being President and (2) he has concluded that he will be defeated. He gives the impression of not caring about public opinion anymore.

The only people publicly defending him seem to have Attention Deficit Disorder. Either they haven’t paid attention to what a disaster his term has been thus far or they just don’t think it’s his fault.

I think he will go through the motions, but I also think a majority of voters no longer believe a word he says anymore.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Stupid Voters

By Alan Caruba

It’s a comment I hear all the time these days. “The voters are stupid.”

I am not sure that those saying it mean literally that the voters have a low level of intellect or academic achievement, but rather that they mean voters seem prone to making their choices based more on emotion than on a serious examination of the candidate’s qualifications and character.

The best example of this was the 2008 campaign in which a candidate was presented in much the same way companies seek to “brand” their product or service, repeating the same message (Obama’s was hope and change) until it becomes part of the consumers’ decision-making process. It’s why we buy a particular brand of cereal or car. We have come to associate values with it that go beyond the taste or the look.

Barack Obama had served barely two years in the U.S. Senate before he made an unprecedented leap from there to the White House. He was, for all intents and purposes, an unknown quantity with a legislative record—if anyone bothered to check—that was a straight Democratic Party line vote.

In his earlier incarnation as an Illinois legislator, he had voted “present” so many times it was clear he was avoiding taking any position he regarded as politically dangerous; a vote that would come back to haunt him and very few did. The media cooperated in this, avoiding calling attention to anything that might be deemed controversial.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton, whether you liked her or not, was a candidate with a full cart of baggage from her years as the former governor’s and president’s wife, and her years as a U.S. Senator who served, not from Arkansas where she first came to notice, but from New York where liberals thrive. The process of campaigning wore her out and, being the first women to seriously contend to be president, she had even more of a challenge to overcome. Her raw ambition tended to make people afraid of her.

What elected Obama had nothing to do with the slim qualifications he put forth. Few candidates had less to offer. He had never met a payroll. All information regarding his academic records was sealed from view. The press made no effort to ask what passport he had traveled on to Pakistan at one time and did not raise any question about his Social Security number, issued in Connecticut where he had never lived or worked. Famously, he released a “birth certificate” that anyone in Hawaii could attain for the asking, not the “long form” which is deemed credible.

The voters have paid a fearful price for electing Obama; increased unemployment, a huge national debt, a hollowed-out military, billions wasted on “Green” energy, unprotected borders, a Congress in near total gridlock, and a world beyond our shores that perceives an America made weaker by Obama’s three years in office.

I have worked as a public relations counselor for most of my life with earlier years spent as a journalist. I know something about how a product, a service, or an individual is “packaged” to present a positive “image.” What we have all learned since 2008 was that Obama was superbly “packaged” and that the image of an articulate, highly intelligent, well informed candidate was without substance. His inability to speak publicly without a TelePrompter swiftly became a joke.

So, to say that those who voted for him were “stupid” is to misread the new era of politics, one that has more to do with “American Idol” and “Dancing With the Stars” than with the serious selection of the leader of the nation and the free world.

As they say in advertising, voters bought the sizzle, not the steak.

We are seeing this process continue as the Republican candidates vie for votes. The Gingrich “surge” in South Carolina came after he had two successful debates. It is true that Gingrich is a good debater, but the real question is whether he would be a good president. Questions about his character remain.

Gingrich has been comfortable sharing a couch with Nancy Pelosi to advocate the bogus global warming “theory” or taking money from Freddie Mac.. Now he is trying to appear to be a “real” conservative as opposed to Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and the quixotic Ron Paul.

While his judgment on issues has been called into question, Romney’s character never has. There has never been a hint of scandal in his life. In terms of policy, he was the Governor of one of the most liberal states and he did support Romneycare there. Politics is rarely pretty and even New Jersey’s fire-breathing Governor, Chris Christie, has taken some extraordinarily liberal positions and made some questionable appointments.

There might have been a time when Gingrich was, indeed, a bona fide conservative, but his long years in Washington, D.C., have taught him that “to get along you have to go along” In the end, even his colleagues in the House, for reasons of policy and personality, could no longer support him as Speaker.

From the days of Bush41 until the 2010 elections the Republican Party looked so much like the Democratic Party, voters had an increasingly hard time telling them apart. The Tea Party movement changed that. They and the “independents” are going to decide the 2012 elections that are currently making history with endless debates.

The debates are proving to be a succession of sound bites and vitriol between the candidates. They increasingly demonstrate how the mainstream media, the debate sponsors, are visibly seeking to influence the outcome of the election and they demonstrate that many voters are easily swayed by matters that have little to do with actual policies and issues.

There has been less and less substance with each debate.

I fear that too many Republican voters are having too many mood swings, relying on a moment or two from the most recent debate than on a serious examination—I repeat myself—of the candidate’s qualifications and character. Romney is carefully scripted and a tad robotic, but Gingrich could become the GOP nominee simply because he is entertaining.

Without doubt, President Obama and the Democrats are enjoying the Republican free-for-all and, without doubt, they have concluded that the voters are stupid.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

How to Listen to Obama's State of the Union Speech

By Alan Caruba

The Tuesday morning post of the Heritage Foundation’s “Morning Bell” is worth sharing in part. You can read the whole post here.

“Tonight, Americans who tune in to the State of the Union will watch the work of a rhetorical master with a flair for illusion,” says Mike Brownfield. “President Barack Obama will take the to the floor of the Capitol in hopes of laying the groundwork for a political debate on his terms—one where he stands on emotional appeals, populism, and class warfare, not the shaky ground of his crumbling record.”

“And looking right back at him will be the U.S. Senate, which has for the past 1,000 days failed to pass a budget—a total shirking of their fundamental duty to be diligent stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars.”

That about sums up the situation in which voters on both side of the political spectrum, from liberal to conservative, find themselves and for both it is a portrait of failure of spectacular dimensions. Government, as we envision it, is not functioning.

Instead, Americans will have to listen to a great deal of nonsense about “fairness” and Obama’s view that government, as Brownfield warns, “should be the guarantor of equal outcomes and that ‘fairness’ of achievement should be decided by legions of bureaucrats in Washington.”

The Founding Fathers knew that life is not fair and that government can only provide the circumstances under which Americans are provided not happiness, but “the pursuit of happiness” based on a host of factors that include the good luck of being born to good parents, receiving a decent education, and being willing to work hard for a portion of success in life. Even without these factors, many Americans succeed while most just settle.

Joe Wilson, a Republican Representative of South Carolina’s Second District, gained fame at a previous State of the Union speech when in 2009 he shouted out “You lie!” at the president. He has said that “Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.”

That kind of straight talk is rare in politics. Commentators and political pundits are more free to express themselves than politicians and Charles Krauthammer has said that “Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.”

I doubt that Americans want to be equally poor, but that is the end result of Obama’s socialist policies.

Most certainly, a large element of the mainstream press has bought into Obama’s policies and the result is a growing distrust and disdain for it. Fox News’ Brit Hume has said that “Fairness is not an attitude. It’s a professional skill that must be developed and exercised.” It is reflected in Fox’s famed “fair and balanced” motto, though any journalist will tell you it is a very high standard to achieve.

We would do well to keep in mind Lincoln’s advice:

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”

At the heart of Obama’s State of the Union speech will be the direct opposite of the values expressed by Lincoln.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Liberal Lunacy

By Alan Caruba

Conservative commentators read what liberals have to say if only to get a glimpse into their current memes on various topics. It is always daunting because one cannot do this without coming away convinced that they are lunatics, devoid of any sense of history or reality, both of which they routinely invent to defend their opinions.

A recent case in point is New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, whose January 22nd, Sunday commentary was titled “Showtime at the Apollo.” Ms. Dowd has been disappointed with Barack Obama for a long time, but she still struggles to find something laudatory while at the same time revealing just how defective he is.

Call it schizophrenic journalism; a liberal writer for a liberal newspaper who is torn between the party line and what she is forced to witness.

“For eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.” Eight seconds out of three years is not much to cheer. Dowd was referring to Obama’s “seductive imitation” of singer Al Green and a song that begins “I, I’m so in love with you.” Oh, please!

The event was a fund-raiser at the Apollo Theatre in New York’s Harlem. Dowd noted, however, that “Times have been bad and sad, and The One did not turn out to be a messiah, just a mortal politician.” Surely a columnist who has written about politics for so many years had to know that, but the liberal media was and is too busy spinning fantasies about him.

Blame Bush Syndrome

“The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal”, opined Dowd and then immediately destroyed what little credibility she has by saying Obama had been “dragged down by W’s recklessness.”

One might think we were passed the Blame Bush mantra, but what is spectacular is the way Dowd and other liberals ignore the fact that Democrats had been in control of the 103rd Congress since January 3, 2007.

Liberals hate facts. For example, on January 3, 2007, the Dow Jones closed at 12,621.77. The GDP growth for the previous quarter was 3.5%. The unemployment rate was 4.6%. Bush’s economic policies had set a record of 52 straight months of job creation.

Dowd might well have been unaware that George W. Bush had, on seventeen occasions, asked Congress to stop the recklessness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would cause the September 2008 financial collapse based on trillions in “sub-prime mortgages” the two “government sponsored entities” had pressured banks to make. Then they purchased and bundled them into what would become known as “toxic assets” that nearly destroyed the nation’s banking system.

Dowd quoted Obama’s view of the critiques he’s received, when he said that he didn’t go to a lot of Washington parties and that the Washington press corps “just doesn’t feel like I’m in the mix with enough with them”, blaming him for being “cold and aloof.” Obama is cold and aloof. He and the press mix all the time at various White House and other events, but Obama claimed he couldn’t do more because “I’ve got a 13-year-old and 10-year-old daughter.” How lame an excuse is that?

Truman had Margaret. Clinton had Chelsea. Bush-43 had twin girls. Come on!

Anyone with any memory of Obama’s early press conferences can recall what disasters they were the minute he stopped reading from his TelePrompter and tried to answer their questions. He virtually stopped engaging in press conferences after two years.

Referencing a fellow New York Times reporter’s new book, Jodi Kantor’s “The Obamas”, Dowd concludes that the president disdains “the irrational nature of politics.” Well, yes, the failures of Congress are irrational insofar, as a recent report concluded, “Congress ended its least-productive year in modern history after passing 80 bills—fewer than during any other session since year-end records began being kept in 1947.”

Kantor’s book suggests that “they (Barack and Michelle) feel over-assaulted and under-appreciated.”

The obvious conclusion, said Dowd, was that “We disappointed them.” I assume this is irony.

To her credit, Dowd pointed out that “They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics. No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House,” adding that “The Obamas truly feel like victims.”

No, Maureen. The real victims are the millions of Americans out of work, some with mortgages that cost more than their homes are worth, while the price of gas and everything else rises, and their president cannot come up with a better campaign theme than “economic fairness.”

I’d feel sorry for Maureen Dowd and all the other liberal loonies except that it is their political philosophy and programs that have gotten us into this mess.

Feeling sorry for the Obamas is not at the top of my list of political priorities. Listening to them feel sorry for themselves while dining on steak and lobster, vacationing in expensive and exotic places, and demanding that “millionaires and billionaires” should pay more taxes is as pathetic as it gets.

I don’t expect Maureen Dowd and her fellow liberal pundits to stop desperately making excuses for the worst president in the history of the nation. It just reinforces my belief that they are all mentally defective.

© Alan Caruba, 2012